Somewhere

I’m sorry, for me Sofia Coppola’s latest was strictly Nowheresville.  I guess she deserves points for being strict, but she took me nowhere I wanted to go.  As much as I have liked her previous films, this one left me cold, despite glowing endorsements from critics I usually trust and agree with.  The model most frequently cited is Antonioni, and that right there might be the problem.  I’ve never really grooved on him either.  Sure, sure, the emptiness of soul that goes with hollow success.  Who cares?  Stephen Dorff is okay as the hunky if disheveled Hollywood star, too out of it to appreciate the women who throw themselves at him, whose 11-year-old daughter shows up at his suite in the Chateau Marmont.  Elle Fanning is quite charming in the role, and there is some subdued but affectionate byplay between father and daughter.  You’ll know right away if this is your cup of tea.  The first shot is prolonged as most of them are, with a fixed camera that frames two arcs of a racing oval in the desert, where a Ferrari passes through the frame in one direction then passes deeper through the frame in the other, once, twice, thrice, as the seconds tick off.  Get in a staring frame of mind, or give this film a pass.  Nothing of great human interest will pass before your eyes, though it will all be designed within an inch of its life.  (2010, MC-67)

Miracle of Michelle

Is it time to anoint Michelle Williams as the best actress of her generation?  What woman around 30 would you watch with more confidence in her ability to make any character come alive, whether it’s the waif of Wendy and Lucy or the emergency room doctor of Mammoth, not to mention her Oscar nom for Brokeback Mountain?  Here are two more I’ve just seen.

Blue Valentine.  (2010, MC-81)  I couldn’t decide whether the characters in this movie were a mess, or the movie was a mess, but the film’s value lies in the questions it leaves open, your urge to make sense of it after the fact.  Derek Cianfrance channels Cassavettes in a lacerating romantic drama, which flashes back and forth between the end and the beginning of a relationship, from love at first sight to miserable ever after.  Though he is reputed to have worked on the script for 12 years, and had the two stars attached for many years, the writer-director finally went on set and instructed Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling to surprise him.  And they do, and us, and themselves as well.  There are marvelous and revealing moments, but does it all hang together?  The characters are sufficiently complicated that our reactions to them have to be complicated, but some elements seem over-determined.  I was unhappy with the ending on several levels, but credit the film’s commitment to truths of intimate reality rather than wish fulfillment.  It’s definitely an experience, but not for everyone (NC-17 or not).

Meek’s Cutoff.  (2011, MC-85) is also an experience, excruciating in an entirely different way.  In Kelly Reichardt’s film, three covered wagons traverse a trackless sagebrush wilderness on their way to Oregon in 1845.  They’ve hired Meek to guide them and he has led them into a shortcut that goes on forever, as their water runs out and disaster looms on every side.  Though eschewing widescreen panorama, the film does capture tiny human figures lost in a vastness.  We go through most of the film with no close-up view of the characters, with scenes in darkness lit only by lantern or campfire, with mumbled dialogue less audible than the sound of the wind or creaking wagon wheels.  It takes a long time to recognize Michelle Williams hidden in her bonnet, as the woman who takes the lead, first amongst the other women, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan, and eventually among the whole train, as Meek loses all credibility.  Slow moving and unresolved in a way that infuriates many, this too is a film that radiates reality while foiling audience expectation.  You will be rewarded only if you are patient enough.

Winning at failure

I highly recommend Too Big to Fail, the docudrama currently showing on HBO, and was surprised to find other critics somewhat less enthusiastic (MC-67).  Adapted from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name, and directed by Curtis Hanson, this film concisely and comprehensibly gives a day-by-day account of the financial crisis of September 2008, with an astounding cast giving spot-on portrayals of the now all-too-familiar players, starting with William Hurt as Hank Paulsen, Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner, and Paul Giamatti as an uncanny simulacrum of Ben Bernanke.  In the array of asshole bankers are James Woods, Bill Pullman, Tony Shaloub, and other familiar faces easy to recognize and easy to associate with the real characters.  I totally believed that this is how the crisis looked from the inside – perhaps an outside perspective is required for the total picture of the economic meltdown, but as personal drama this was informative and convincing.

On a lesser scale, I found another recent HBO docudrama worthwhile.  Cinema Verité (MC-74) recreates the filming of the Seventies fly-on-the-wall documentary series on PBS, “An American Family,” which may be considered the fount of “reality tv.”  The Loud family willy-nilly became a cultural phenomenon, their lives a topic of controversy on every side.  Made by the American Splendor pair of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, this retrospect is equally adept at negotiating levels of reality, cutting from original documentary into re-creation.  Diane Lane is her reliably marvelous self as Pat Loud, and Tim Robbins is also excellent as Bill.  James Gandolfini is okay as the show’s producer, and the rest of the cast up to snuff.  It’s possible the film does not hold up without one’s own memories of the time portrayed, but the nostalgia is astringent rather than balmy.

I’d been planning to give Albert Brooks another look and Cinema Verité was the perfect lead-in to Real Life (1979), his take on the same phenomenon and startlingly prescient in many ways, despite being more a series of sketches than a real movie.  Brooks plays the obnoxious documentary producer who inserts himself as well as his crew into the lives of a “typical” American family, and is an equal opportunity satirist, mocking himself along with everyone else.  It’s all quite hilarious and biting.

Not quite so biting, and therefore not as great as it might have been is his Defending Your Life (1991).  The set-up is perfect -- Brooks is an advertising man who drives his new BMW off the lot and into an oncoming bus, and wakes up to find himself in Judgment City, an amusingly ordinary purgatory where the newly-dead are tried to see how much they have evolved above fear and whether they have to go back to earth for another crack at becoming a bigger brain.  The neurotic Brooks is not a good candidate to move on, as the key points of his life’s humiliations are reviewed, with Rip Torn not helping much as his defense attorney.  He meets a newly-dead woman whose benign calm makes her certain to move up; Meryl Streep, in an underwritten role, provides enough delight to make this sweetheart plausible.  The many funny complications in the process go mushy in an ending that must have been copped from The Graduate, but despite going soft at the end, this film about heaven is funny as hell.

Poor reviews had so far kept me from one film by Williams classmate and particular favorite of mine, writer-director John Sayles, but I finally caught up with Silver City (2004, MC-47).  The film has its moments, especially with Chris Cooper as a W. clone running for governor of Colorado, and a notable cast that includes Richard Dreyfuss as his Cheneyesque handler and Kris Kristofferson as the robber baron power behind the throne, but the story detours into a questionable murder mystery by an equally questionable investigator in Danny Huston.  Chinatown this ain’t, but I still look forward to more from Sayles.

Calling all docs!

I’m late in doing so, but I really want to call attention to the current season of “Independent Lens” on PBS, which has been presenting a lot of documentaries that I may show at the Clark sometime.  Two I’d just watched on dvd before they turned up on the program.  Waste Land I’ve already written about, and also worthy of recommendation was Marwencol (2010, MC-81).  The odd name denotes an imaginary town peopled by GI Joes and Barbies who enact the WWII scenarios of a man who had his brain damaged in a beating outside a bar.  The town, as 3-D artifact and as reproduced in photos, serves as physical and psychological therapy for Mark Hogancamp, to recreate an identity lost along with most of his personal memories.  His photos are discovered by an art magazine, leading to a New York gallery show, which challenges the creator’s identity in more ways than one.  Inspiring, almost mind-blowing, this is a film that works on many levels.

Another possibility for Clark showing is The Desert of Forbidden Art, which tells an intriguing story of a lone wolf collector of avant-garde painting banned by the Soviets, who created his own museum in unlikely Uzbekistan, in a fascinating mix of exotic themes.  Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child was not bad, but pales next to Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, as spectacularly embodied by Jeffrey Wright (with David Bowie as Warhol).

Off the topic of art, I definitely recommend Bhutto (2010, MC-68), also available on dvd, which focuses on Benazir as legatee of her father as leader of Pakistan, in a dynastic clan that is half-royal, half-democratic.  Twice prime minister, the first woman to lead a Muslim country, and twice deposed by the military, she was assassinated in 2007 when she returned from exile to run once again.  Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she provides an understandable window into an unknowable country, which has emerged as a crucial frenemy of the U.S.

Another PBS documentary series of consistent interest is “American Experience,” and I take particular note of two recent presentations.  Stonewall Uprising (2010, MC-74) is very effective at taking us back to the origins of gay liberation in the “riots” that took place in 1969 when the police raided that Greenwich Village bar once too often, after its Mafia owners failed to pay up, and the gay patrons took the brunt of the assault.  The jaw-dropping footage of official commentary in “educational” films and even on “60 Minutes” offers a crash course in just how far homosexuality has come out of the closet and into the mainstream of American life. 

Similarly we’ve come a long way from the situation of the Freedom Riders (2009, DVD) in Stanley Nelson’s extremely effective documentary about the 1961 bus protests against segregation on interstate transportation.  An interracial group from the Congress on Racial Equality embarked on a peaceful attempt to ride together from Washington to New Orleans, only to meet beatings and burning when they reached Alabama.  After the highly-publicized violence, other riders and the civil rights movement as a whole took up the challenge, escalating the issue until the Kennedys and the federal government were forced to intervene.  While we watch the protestors of the Arab Spring try to rise up against entrenched and illegitimate power, it is salutary to remember that fifty years ago, the situation was not that different in parts of America.

Another documentary for future showing at the Clark, just available from Netflix -- as most of these films are -- is Who Does She Think She Is? (2008), by Pamela Tanner Boll, who made the noteworthy Born into Brothels.  This film looks at a variety of women who persist in their art while raising families and facing all the obstacles to their success.  Though hardly earthshaking, it is genuinely inspiring.

Two more films to mention for completeness’ sake, both of which have their virtues but not my strong endorsement are Barbara Kopple’s latest, Gun Fight (2011) and Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman (2010, MC-81), which dealt respectively with the important issues of gun control and public education reform, but did not tell me anything particularly new or eye-opening, though I tend to support their conclusions.