Diary redux

At the moment I’m not into offering objective assessments and assigning numerical ratings, so I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been watching and what I’ve thought about it.

Starting with the best and working my way down, I have to say I was well-pleased with my screening of The Best of Youth at the Clark, both the turnout and the response, but moreover the film itself, which moves up in my estimation, maybe into my Top 25 of all time (though if I were actually to tabulate the list, there might be 50 or more films on it.) The first time through, you are swept along on the surging flood of event and emotion, but upon re-viewing you can see how perfectly constructed the film is. You can, for example, see the seed of the brother’s subsequent history in an early and seemingly casual scene at a dance, where their characters are sketched in quick, sure strokes.

And on second look, it dawns on me that the Caratis, the family whose saga this is, are a close anagram of caritas, and constitute a typology of human caring. Nicola is the sympathetic psychiatrist of course, but “mad... mad... Matteo” (as Giorgia calls him), though feigning indifference and the impassivity of soldier/policeman, has the problem of caring too much, so his only recourse is to blow up or turn away. Older sister Giovanna cares on a social level, first as a crusading public interest advocate and then as a mafia-defying judge, and younger sister Francesca cares on a domestic level -- when first seen she wants to marry both her brothers and winds up doing the next best thing by wedding their friend Carlo, and eventually taking over as matriarch of the family. And of course the mother and father care in their own ways, as schoolteacher and modest entrepreneur.

The Best of Youth is transformative, endlessly involving, like life itself, so sad and yet everything is beautiful. You are put through an emotional wringer, as the hours and years go by, and yet you love it and come out wiser at the end, just as we wish with life itself.

I also happened to re-watch my pick as the best film of the previous year, Vera Drake, and confirmed its power, both in Mike Leigh’s close observation of another family dynamic and its collision with the outside world, and in Imelda Staunton’s supreme performance as Vera, from the smiling bustle of the busy bee, ever helpful, to devastated defendant, to contrite convict, beaten down and stripped of her life for trying to aid others, in unmindful defiance of the law.

Also had a second look at last year’s Grizzly Man, and had a different though still favorable reaction, which suits the protean nature of Werner Herzog’s documentaries. This time Timothy Treadwell’s personality was more in the foreground, from the babytalk he’d use with the bears, to the childhood teddy bear he slept with in his tent in the Alaskan wilds. At first glance I took everyone in the film as a poseur, at second I saw Timmy as the damaged child he was.

A much longer interval, decades in fact, intervened before my second, long-awaited chance to see two early films of Peter Watkins, finally released on dvd. He made Culloden and War Game for the BBC in the mid-60s. I saw them soon after that, in the era of Vietnam, and they have lingered in my mind ever since. (Culloden intertwined in my memory with the similarly unrecoverable Chimes at Midnight of Orson Welles, as having the most effectively anti-war battle scenes I’ve ever seen.) In the footsteps of You Are There, the Walter Cronkite series that first presented historical events in a tv-news format, Watkins essentially invented the docudrama form, and his innovations retain their power, if not their utter surprise. The Battle of Culloden Moor in 1746 was the final defeat of “Bonnie” Prince Charlie and his pretensions to the English throne, and the subsequent Hanoverian “ethnic cleansing” of the Highland clans that had supported him was the most decisive turning point in Scottish history. And yet the military, political, and social fiasco was almost farcical in its haplessness, which the film captures in face-to-face interviews with participants on the battlefield. The narration is spare but absolutely devastating.

It’s a little more insistent in War Game, which lays out the implications of a nuclear strike against Britain in a way that seems quaint from the perspective of the 21st century. Which makes sense since it was made much closer to the Blitz of WWII than to the threats of today. Implicitly it is a piece of “Ban the Bomb” agitprop, which deconstructs the official prognostications of a “clean” nuclear exchange. At the time it was inflammatory enough to be banned from broadcast, though it now seems tame and self-evident despite its low-tech-SFX horrors. I was less impressed by its argument this time, than by its clear debt to the great WWII documentary by Humphrey Jennings, Fires Were Started.

Two recent genre exercises round out my recent miscellaneous viewing. Shaun of the Dead (2004) is an up-to-date British parody/homage to the tradition of zombie films in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. Title actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright collaborated on the script, which they describe as a “rom-zom-com.” The joke is that Shaun and his mate are blokes so out of it that it takes them half the film to realize that their neighborhood of North London is being taken over by the walking dead. Like Adaptation, it treds a fine line by becoming what it parodies, but retains its modest amusement to the end.

Debut writer-director Rian Johnson deserves encouragement if not all the praise he has received for Brick (2006), which transplants hardboiled Hammett/Chandler patter and noir plot twists into a sunny California high school today, San Clemente in fact. That may strike you as revelatory of the hidden dark side of teenage life, or it may just strike you as odd. The trick works up to a point, with effective actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of Mysterious Skin) as the nerd/gumshoe hero, and Lukas Haas (long ago the Amish boy in Witness) as the drug kingpin who operates out of his parents’ panelled basement. But for both these films, unless you are a devotee of the genre being taken off, they are not invested with enough reality to sustain your interest thoughout their running times.