In Good Company

Paul Weitz follows up the Nick Hornby-adaptation, About a Boy, with another sweetly sentimental comedy, though this time brother Chris shares credit only as producer and not writer-director. He’s got a sure touch with light but not insubstantial material, and is well served by a stellar cast. The reliable Dennis Quaid is a 51-year-old ad salesman for a national sports magazine that is taken over by a giant media conglomerate, which shunts him aside for 26-year-old whizkid Topher Grace. Not only does Dennis have to fire his colleagues and friends, his own status is more and more precarious, as his wife announces her surprisingly late pregnancy while older daughter Scarlett Johannson transfers from SUNY to much more expensive NYU. It only gets worse when Topher and Scarlett meet and fall for each other. Both the corporate takeover and romantic entanglement are well-handled. If the sharp satire goes soft at the end, that’s only fitting since we wouldn’t want to leave any of these most appealing characters unhappy. (2004, HBO/T, n.) *7+* (MC-66, RT-82.)

Filling in

Being a bit of a completist, I have recently been watching justly-neglected films by engaging young directors: A Life Less Ordinary from Danny Boyle, Mr. Jealousy from Noah Baumbach, and She Hate Me from Spike Lee. It’s pretty rare for me to look at films with Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes scores in 20s and 30s, but three in a week indicates how betwixt and between I am at the moment. Each of the three is a mess, yet perversely watchable and instructive.

Millions made me look at Boyle again, and an extremely positive reference by Stephanie Zacharek, the critic (of Salon.com) with whom I agree more than anyone, led me to the big American film he got to make after Trainspotting became a hit. I’m afraid I cannot join her solitary enthusiasm for A Life Less Ordinary (1997), but it does have some appealing aspects -- energy above all. And Ewan MacGregor, whom I am starting to see as a young Cary Grant, always himself but game for any role, from slapstick to musical to drama (he does a bit of everything in this film), is always charming. Cameron Diaz is, to be honest, a little scary to me, with those sculpted cheekbones and all, but does contribute yet more energy. The story is inconsequential on several levels, with him kidnapping her (or vice versa), and a pair of angels played by Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo (you’ve got to be kidding -- but I don’t take the joke), who will be kicked out of heaven if they don’t make the thrown-together couple fall in love. Not a good movie but a fun enough ride.

The Squid and the Whale represents a quantum leap forward for Baumbach after Mr. Jealousy (1998), which has its good points and its bad. The extensive voiceover narration suggests an inadequate adaptation of very personal material, turned into film by means of New Wave recyclings. I’m not going to come down hard on a film that appropriates music from Jules and Jim and visual tricks from Shoot the Piano Player. Eric Stoltz and Annabelle Sciorra are better than all right as the main couple, and Christopher Eigeman is always a welcome satirical presence, but the thirtysomething downtown NY scene has been covered often and better. I enjoyed the self-referential fun, but found that the film went on too long, with several deflating scenes tacked on to the end.

There are also moments of fun in She Hate Me (2004), but Spike Lee’s piling on of topical points makes for the worst film by an admirable director that I have every seen. The uneasy combination of corporate expose and sex comedy is difficult enough but becomes ludicrous, not in a good way, by tossing in Watergate and other bits of Spike’s outrage, which bloats a thin conceit into epic length. While the whole is appalling, there’s enough wit and competence on display to keep one watching, but at the end of 138 minutes, all you can say is, “Wow, that was a piece of shit.”

Triple Features at the Clark

Did you ever sit in the auditorium at the Clark? It’s comfy -- lots of elbow and leg room to stretch out. And a good thing too, since this winter I am inviting audiences to settle in for three long Sunday afternoons of filmwatching, three interconnected programs each day, in a series called “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” So on the final Sunday of the next three months -- if you’ve got the seat for it, have we got a seat for you!

These marathon viewings for the iron-bottomed brigade are intended to add up to more than the sum of the parts, unique opportunities to survey a subject at one sitting. Alternatively, of course, you can pick and choose from the constituent programs, all of which are free admission, as is the museum itself in the off-season. So make a day of it -- visit the galleries, browse the museum shop, walk up Stone Hill, refresh yourself at the cafe, and then settle back in your easy chair for more highly visual viewing.

The first program in the series, on January 29, comprises Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs trilogy: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Blue will screen at 11:00 am, White at 1:30 pm, and Red at 4:00 pm.

Put together over the course of an amazingly productive year in 1993, these three films based on the tricolor of the French Revolution and the corresponding themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity -- addressed from a spiritual and not a political perspective -- were Kieslowski’s swansong to cinema. He withdrew from filmmaking after Red was released to international acclaim, and died in heart surgery little more than a year later, at the age of 54.

Kieslowski emerged from a documentary movement in Poland, eventually moving from tv to film. He broke into international recognition in the late Eighties with The Decalogue, a series for Polish tv, each hour segment jumping off from one of the Ten Commandments. Thereafter, he worked primarily in French, becoming a darling of the art house circuit with The Double Life of Veronique in 1991. Three Colors came next, the culmination of his meteoric career.

The three separate films have different casts of characters, but were put together by a single creative team, from scriptwriter and composer through the crew, except that each has a different cinematographer to highlight the respective colors in a distinctive visual scheme. And each has a luminous French actress to illuminate the emotional tone.

Blue belongs to Juliette Binoche. Losing her husband and daughter, she wants to cut herself free from all human relations, but the music she shared with her composer husband will not let her go, and draws her back to life and connection. Rarely has grief been explored with such tact and sensitivity.

Julie Delpy sets the black comedy of White in motion by humiliating her Polish husband in Paris divorce proceedings. He has to return to Warsaw to get his balls back, and regains equal status with her by making a killing in the new capitalist free-for-all. After being equally hurtful to each other, they love anew.

Irene Jacob was Veronique, and in Red she is Valentine, a sensitive heart-throb of a student and model in Geneva. She hits a dog with her car, and discovers the owner is a misanthropic retired judge played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. Opposites will attract, and the two form an unusual bond of fraternity.

But believe me, few films are less dependent on plot to weave their spell. The Three Colors are a symphonic cascade of sound and shade, incident and reflection, faces and feelings, gestures and acts. Immerse yourself and discover a new way of cinematic knowing.

Enigmatic but never obfuscating, these films demand an unusual quality of attention from viewers, to make all the connections and yet come face to face with the unsolvable puzzle at the center of the story, the mystery of motivation and the accident of destiny in each life.

Nobody could describe his purpose better than Kieslowki himself: “Film is often just business -- I understand that and it’s not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music, and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us, and give people the feeling they are not alone.”

Beyond the nominal tricolor signification of liberty, equality, fraternity, this trilogy meditates on contingency, coincidence, synchronicity. The human situation in a world of chance and choice. In words of one syllable, these films are about life and death, love and fate. Let us ponder together.

This series continues with “Triple Feature: 3 Painters” on February 26: Artemisia at 11:00, Carrington at 1:30, Pollock at 4:00. And concludes with “Triple Feature: 3 Studios” on March 26, which will be a marathon exploration of animation way beyond Disney or Pixar, surveying the work of The National Film Board of Canada, Aardman Animation (of Wallace & Gromit fame), and the Hubley Studios -- Academy Award-winners all.

Syriana

Stephen Gaghan, writer of Soderbergh’s Traffic, gets to direct his own script here, and does well by his globe-spanning, densely-populated story which straddles the line between thriller and documentary. You know it is the product of research, that he has gone to those scenes and met those people, and recorded the dialogue almost verbatim within a fictionalized construct. This to me is a million times more real and effective than Fahrenheit 911, for example, in revealing the global politics and economics of oil and neo-colonialism. George Clooney is the grizzled, paunchy CIA operative who needs to come in out of the heat, before one of his own missles seeks him out. Matt Damon is a go-go energy trader who gets in over his head. Chris Cooper is a CEO engineering a huge oil company merger, and bribing his way to energy concessions in the volatile Middle East. Jeffrey Wright is a lawyer doing due diligence on the merger for rainmaker Christopher Plummer. The fictional Gulf emirate is represented by the dynastic struggle at the top and the unfortunate fate of immigrant oil workers at the bottom. You definitely have to pay attention to pick up the interweaving of plot strands, but huge amounts of information are delivered in passing, along with a “you are there” feel for some of the world’s trouble spots. When it comes to the role of oil in the world’s woe, this film is preaching to the converted in my case; I already believe the bastards of big oil (along with big pharma, as revealed in the vaguely similar Constant Gardener) are behind most of it. And this film strains my credulity less than Michael Moore. To get it, you need to work at it, and I like that in a movie. (2005, AMC in PA, n.) *8* (MC-76, RT-74.)

This is a busy season, of course, and my film viewing lately has been catch as catch can. I watched a couple of documentaries on the building of the Guggenheim in NYC, for a piece I was writing on Frank Lloyd Wright. The 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder brought a re-broadcast of Imagine, and since I’ve been revisiting Sixties musical icons lately, I was quite interested in this rather hagiographic documentary. Another blast from the past was Three Days of the Condor: Sydney Pollack’s 30-year old thriller about the CIA and oil holds up very well, better than most from the so-called golden age of Hollywood independents; the only real problem is that Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway are way too glamorous for their roles -- so much for gritty realism. Realism was the crux of 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom’s recent leap over the barrier between feature films and pornography -- he makes explicit sex engaging and psychologically revealing, but just alternates bedroom with concert scenes, and leaves out the narrative structure that would make it compelling.

The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach’s swift and spare domestic tragicomedy makes its points, but not too many. It is less autobiographical venting than a precise dissection of familiar specimens. The sparing use of music is indicative, never to tug emotions but always pointed. I give it a plus for its portrayal of my old neighborhood of Park Slope. The parents of this disintegrating family are both writers, i.e. utterly self-absorbed. Jeff Daniels as the father is the more pathetic of the two; the film has the grace to feel sorry for him while it eviscerates his pretensions and inconsequentiality. Laura Linney as the mother is slightly more sympathetic, because she is Laura Linney, but is also a monster of obliviousness. The boys, 16-year-old Jesse Eisenberg and 12-year-old Owen Kline, emulate and act out the bad behavior of their parents. Everything is painfully true, woefully funny. As Philip Larkin tells us, “Your mum and dad, they fuck you up.” (2005, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-82, RT-95.)

Murderball

This is certainly a worthy documentary, but did not excite me as it has many. Its virtues may have seemed surprising seen fresh, but coming festooned with lavish praise, made me wonder what the fuss was about. Maybe my enjoyment is held back by medical squeamishness, though the matter-of-factness of its approach to quadriplegia is the film’s salient strength. The film also rolls past most of the cliches of competition stories, to peer into the community of the limbless that lies behind the sport of wheelchair rugby. Well worth watching on a number of levels, this doc did not strike me as an exemplar of the genre, for which public enthusiasm is now rising to meet my own. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-87, RT-97.)

The Triumph of Love

This Marivaux play from 1732 is handsomely mounted in an Italian villa, with sumptuous period costumes and decor. Directed by Claire Peploe and produced by hubby Bernardo Bertolucci, its handheld, jump-cut style, with postmodern flourishes, may have been chosen deliberately or dictated by budget constraints. The disjunction between style and subject strikes some as fresh but does not work for me. I have no idea what the original French may sound like, but this English translation seems rather flat-footed, with none of the poetry that sustains the silliness of a cross-dressing comedy like “As You Like It.” Nonetheless, this a well-acted piece. It makes one wonder where Mira Sorvino has been hanging out since Mighty Aphrodite -- turns out the magna cum laude graduate of Harvard has recently married and had a child, but will be back. Her princess has to seduce every character in the movie and she certainly seduced me. Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw delight as a brother and sister who have both forsworn love philosophically, only to succumb to the miraculous Mira. I didn’t like this as much as the Clark audience for the final “Fellows Favorite” film did, nicely primed by visiting scholar Melissa Hyde’s introduction, but I liked it more than the critical consensus. (2001, dvd@cai, n.) *6* (MC-58, RT-48.)

Speaking of the Fellows’ film series, I didn’t write about last week’s Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time because I didn’t have anything new to say on third viewing. If you haven’t seen it, do so at your earliest convenience (and like all dvds shown at the Clark, it is subsequently borrowable from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown.) And if you have see the film, well then, I don’t have to tell you about the artist who ranks with Christo as my favorite contemporary. Interestingly, Clark Fellow Molly Donovan has done books with both, and her introduction offered valuable context to a large and appreciative audience, and a first look at Goldworthy’s recent installation at the National Gallery in Washington, for which she was curator.

A new group of Clark Fellows will resume this Thursday at 7:30 film series late next semester.

A Face in the Crowd

Before it devolves into a noisy rant, this Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg follow-up to the imperishable On the Waterfront makes some prescient points about the midcentury marriage of media and politics. Andy Griffith debuts as an Arkansas drifter plucked by go-getting college girl Patricia Neal to feature on her radio program, named the same as the film. His calculated folksy charm goes over well and he’s soon on tv. It’s not long till his ability to woo and sway the public attracts the attention of a right-wing cabal of plutocratic politicos. The film breaks down when the character does, but up to that point it is all quite convincing, from the two leads down through an excellent cast that includes Walter Matthau, Anthony Franciosa, and Lee Remick, with walk-ons by the likes of Walter Winchell. Somewhere on the continuum between Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Network, this is not a classic but bears watching. (1957, dvd, r.) *7*

Millions

A holiday heartwarmer is not what you expect from Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later fame, but that’s what he delivers here, from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, frequent collaborator with Michael Winterbottom. Adorable urchin Alex Etel narrates and animates the story, as a 7-year-old who engages in easy conversation with saints in the flesh, asking if they’ve seen his recently dead mother in heaven yet. He’s in his backyard cardboard castle when a satchel of cash is thrown off a passing train. After his 9-year-old brother also sees the fantastical money, as he doesn’t the saints, they are in a quandary what to do with their found treasure. Boyle’s characteristic camera-trickery imbues this charming fairy tale with magic-realist energy, but the boys and the sentiments keep their sweet Nativity spirit. (2005, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-74, RT-88.)