Honeydripper

I don’t know John Sayles personally, though he was a Williams classmate of mine, but I’ve always felt an affiliation with his filmmaking -- he is truly the stand-alone model for the fully independent writer-director. And his heart is always in the right place, while his projects take him around the country and the world to bring back stories that need to be told. Some criticize him for being more literary than cinematic, but in my view, over a thirty-year career he has made a number of very good films and a few superlative ones. Eight Men Out and Lone Star stand out for me as the most fully realized, but I’d tick off more than a handful that are well worth seeking out, and Honeydripper is another. Sayles’ films are not likely to set your pulse racing or your heart to overflowing, but each makes a considered appeal to your mind and conscience. With exiguous financing and a drive to keep telling more stories, his films don’t always have the finish they might, but they are always literate and engaged, with fine acting from a large and diverse cast. In this film, set in Alabama in 1950, the cast is almost all African-American, led by Danny Glover as the proprietor of the juke joint of the title. Filmed on location, as always, the cast is filled out with nonprofessionals for genuine local color. Even some of the featured players are appearing in their first film, including Glover’s beautiful stepdaughter (model Yaya DeCosta, who steps nimbly from the runway into period character) and the itinerant guitar player she falls for (real performer Gary Clark Jr.) Besides capturing the moment when the blues gave way to rock ’n roll, the film gives an authentic rendition of Holiness tent revival preaching, and doesn’t demonize whites while still making clear the realities of the Jim Crow South. There are no real surprises along the way, but this film takes you places you ought to go. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-68.)

Red Road

I blame Lars von Trier for anything that’s wrong with this film -- with his preposterous fixation on redemption through female sexual degradation (cf. Breaking the Waves, one of the rare films I cared about enough to hate). The Dogme 95 strictures are slipping by now, but I still find it an admirable approach to making films -- limited means lead to the largest payoffs. One might call that one of the central lessons of cinema history. The plan here was to have three filmmakers approach the same characters in the same setting and situation with the same actors. Up first was Andrea Arnold, who had won an Oscar for best live action short with Wasp (which is an extra on this dvd, and bumps the disk up to a firm recommendation from me -- with caveats.) She tells the story in a way that is suspenseful and sensual, while remaining quietly observational. Kate Dickie is riveting as a CCTV surveillance monitor for City Eye in Glasgow, the ultimate Rear Window situation, as she sits in front of a bank of monitors, calling up a particular view to pan and zoom on. She’s bereaved and numb, for reasons that emerge very gradually, and I won’t say more than that. There is gritty, underclass supporting work from Tony Curran, Martin Compston (memorable from Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen), and Nathalie Press (excellent as the focus for Wasp, and also memorable from My Summer of Love). Don’t worry, there are subtitles for the Glaswegian accents, and while this film is certainly down and dirty, you might call it Hitchcockian with all the kinks exposed. (2006, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-73.)

Random updates

A miscellaneous week of film-watching began with the highly miscellaneous film, Paris Je T’aime (2006), an international portmanteau film in which some twenty filmmakers take a five-minute look at a specific neighborhood of Paris -- some of the sketches are good, some not so, but they don’t add up to much of anything outside of a quirky travel anthology. If you do love Paris, you will be able to sustain your own interest through the highs and the lows.

Though the Korean film, The Host (2007), was embraced by many as a witty and well-done creature-feature, I couldn’t get into it, and after the first half-hour I wound up fast-fowarding through the rest without finding any reason to stop. I did the same with Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974), which wanted to be wild and transgressive, but proved to be amateurish and cloacal, not at all worthy of its resurrection by the Criterion Collection.

Among 2007 also-rans, We Own the Night was a real mixed bag. An hour into James Gray’s retro crime saga -- with the Russian mob in 1988 Brooklyn set against the police whose insignia proclaim the title -- I thought it might be what The Departed wanted to be, but thereafter it drifted into implausibility and inconsequentiality, despite -- or maybe because of -- a well-done car chase that offered one more twist on The French Connection. The set-up is striking, with Joaquin Phoenix excellent as the manager of a Brooklyn hotspot that fronts for the Russians’ drug-dealing. Unbeknownst to his employers, his father (Robert Duvall) is a police chief and his brother (Mark Wahlberg) the head of narcotics. Even for a black sheep, family loyalties are divided and our boy gets himself into a tight place, but just as the psychological suspense is building, all hell breaks loose and the film races past all believability to a ramshackle conclusion.

Despite the setting in 1987 Bucharest, there is nothing ramshackle about 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (my review here), which is grim but utterly controlled, with a sustained sense of dread in painfully ordinary circumstances, as one student helps another to get an illegal abortion. Though I am not on the current critical bandwagon regarding Romanian film, a second viewing confirms Cristian Mungiu’s film as one of the best, if not the very best of the year. On the other hand, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest was slight but intriguing, in which a host on a provincial television station asks whether there was or was not a revolution in their town in 1989. Did the local crowds pours into the public square before or after 12:08 on that December day, the minute that Ceausescu stepped down and the Communist regime fell? The only guests he can round up to consider the question are an alcoholic high school teacher with suspect revolutionary claims, and a retired Santa Claus impersonator, who’s not sure what all the fuss is about. Most of the film looks like a clumsy public access panel discussion, but the wit is sly and biting.

After being quite taken with my re-viewing of The Heiress (1949) when I showed it to lead off my “Visions of a Gilded Age” film series at the Clark, I was moved to go back and watch Washington Square (1997) again, for the sake of comparison. And I’m glad I showed the version I did, which was more dramatically structured and better acted in every role. I thought I preferred the direction of Agnieska Holland over William Wyler's, but not so. And Olivia de Havilland was much more subtle and convincing than Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ralph Richardson both more imposing and comprehensible than Albert Finney, with literally no comparison between Montgomery Clift and Ben Chaplin. I was also pleasantly surprised by re-viewing The Innocents (1961) in the second slot of the series, which came across well in widescreen, with Deborah Kerr commanding in the central role as the governess losing her mind to ghosts, and director Jack Clayton and cinematographer Freddie Francis providing the chilling Gothic atmospherics.

One more film finally rose to the top after years on my Netflix queue, Joseph Dorman’s 1998 documentary, Arguing the World. If you share my interest in “New York intellectuals” -- the old Partisan Review crowd -- then this is well worth seeing. It goes far beyond a talking-heads summation, and effectively uses archival footage and photos to survey the history of the American Left from the Thirties to the Sixties and into the Nineties. The film follows four disputatious friends from the Trotskyite lunchroom alcove at City College around 1940, through the McCarthy era and the New Left and on to the Reaganite Right. Over the years, the four move from solidarity to various slots on the political spectrum, with Irving Howe remaining committed to Democratic Socialism while Irving Kristol became the godfather of the neo-conservative movement, and Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer staked out positions somewhere in between. The film, however, is gratifyingly more interested in personality than ideology, though the sociology is not scanted.

Wrapping up 2007

Since I watch the vast preponderance of my movies on dvd, my year-end round-up is always delayed by months. Here are my highest rated films of the year, accompanied by their rankings in two critics’ polls, IndieWire and Film Comment. Most of my very best films I have confirmed with a second viewing on dvd after seeing in the theater. All are now available on Netflix, and my reviews can be found by clicking on the title. Please remember that my ratings are unabashedly subjective, with no pretense to objectivity, though some appeal to knowledge and experience.

*8+*
Away from Her. (IW #26, FC #17)
Taxi to the Dark Side. (too late to be listed, despite Oscar for best documentary)
No End in Sight. (IW #47, FC #14)

*8*
Once. (IW #12, FC #32)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. (IW #13, FC #16)
Michael Clayton. (IW #24, FC #13)
Persepolis. (IW #21, FC #22)
The Lives of Others. (IW #34, FC #11)

*8-*
2 Days in Paris.

*7+*
Zodiac. (IW #2, FC #3)
Ratatouille. (IW #20, FC #21)
Lady Chatterley. (IW #27, FC #7)
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. (IW #36, FC #15)
Paprika. (IW #42, FC NR)
Knocked Up. (IW #56, FC #37)
The Bourne Ultimatum. (IW #47, FC #31)
Juno. (IW #97, FC #2)

*7*
There Will Be Blood. (IW #1, FC #2)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. (IW #5, FC #8)
Offside. (IW #10, FC #18)
Private Fears in Public Places. (IW #29, FC #20)
The Savages. (IW #44, FC #28)
Rescue Dawn. (IW #32, FC #48)
The Darjeeling Limited. (IW #23, FC #39)
Enchanted.
Starting Out in the Evening.
Things We Lost in the Fire.

On their lists (in rough descending order), but not on mine (though reviewed on this site): No Country for Old Men, I’m Not There, Syndromes and a Century, Assassination of Jesse James, Killer of Sheep, Black Book, Into the Wild, Bamako, Atonement, Margot at the Wedding, Gone Baby Gone, Superbad, Control, 3:10 to Yuma, In the Valley of Elah, Across the Universe, Southland Tales.

Not seen or still to be seen: Colossal Youth, Eastern Promises, I Don’t Want to Live Alone, The Host, 12:08 to Bucharest ,Grindhouse, Sweeney Todd, We Own the Night.

The Darjeeling Limited

I’m no fan of Wes Anderson -- there’s something offputting to me in trying so hard to look like you’re not trying too hard -- so I was surprised to like this whimsical train trip through India. I suspect the travelogue mitigated the wacky interpersonal dynamics. Of the persons involved I had no great expectations, but Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and especially Adrien Brody turned out to be an involving threesome, as estranged brothers trying to re-bond a year after their father’s sudden death. They go on a capricious spiritual quest concocted by the eldest, visiting various Indian shrines as the train stops. The younger two don’t know that their ultimate destination is a remote monastery, where their mother has become a sister. Anjelica Huston, when we finally see her, lends a welcome weight to the feathery antics of her cinematic sons. The trio are not really plausible as brothers, but I take that as part of the point of this Odd Triple. But as a brother myself, I certainly tuned into their interaction, and found it believable. And Anderson is surprisingly successful in negotiating a transition from madcap to serious, with a sense of purpose somewhere between gawking tourist and dedicated documentarian. He has the taste to emulate Renoir’s The River and to appropriate Satyajit Ray’s music, so I’m inclined to give his quirks a pass on this one. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-67.)

Wall-E

I’m afraid I can’t join Frank Rich and all the rest of the critics on the Wall-E bandwagon, nor share my grown daughter’s enthusiasm. Sure, he’s a cute little cuss -- for a trash compactor. And sure, it’s surprising to see Walt Disney Inc. come out against consumerism. And wow, Pixar can do anything it wants with computer animation, and get away with it through sheer visual splendor. (I gather director Andrew Stanton was previously responsible for Finding Nemo.) I was definitely into the Chaplinesque first half, but when the action/adventure component started to accelerate I just began to tune out. I guess I’m the opposite of the grade school crowd -- what you have to do to maintain their attention loses mine. Nonetheless I grant that this highly-animated animation is something to see, witty and even scathing about humankind’s mania for consumption, with an endearing romance between two robots separated by centuries of technogical development -- as different as 8-track tapes and iPods. I was also a little bothered by the parallels to Battlestar Galactica, and could not keep from thinking of Wall-E as the nicest Cylon of them all -- is he the yet-to-be-revealed 12th model? It would be a fine irony if this turns out to be the biggest grossing film of the year. (2008, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-94.)

Control

The only way I’ve even heard of the post-punk group Joy Division was because I so enjoyed 24 Hour Party People, the Michael Winterbottom/Steve Coogan evocation of the Manchester music scene of thirty years ago. So I didn’t come to this musical biopic with any of the prevalent mystique about the early demise of front man Ian Curtis, but unlike my equally clueless viewing of Last Days, Gus Van Sant’s take on Kurt Cobain’s suicide, this descent into depression and death kept me engaged. The very well-done recreation of Joy Division live carried the film for me. I respect the rock photographer and videomaker Anton Corbijn for avoiding easy psychologizing in his first film, and the widescreen black & white cinematography is lustrous and evocative. He offers more sympathy than diagnosis, but certainly provides the material for the latter. But unless you’re already invested in the myth of Ian Curtis, then he comes across as opaque, despite the brilliant performance of Sam Riley, especially in the musical sequences. Samantha Morton is hardly recognizable as his teenage bride, younger and plumper than one expects, but with her usual ability to invest mousey characters with wells of feeling. The film is based on the widow’s memoir, but offers fair play to the Belgian girlfriend, the other horn of the dilemma on which our Romantic poet hero is gored. Again, not taking sides is a virtue of the film, but also robs it of drama. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-78.)

Rescue Dawn

What’s surprising about this well-done but familiar-seeming POW escape picture is that it shows no signs of its chaotic creation. There was a fascinating article about its making in the New Yorker a couple years back, which suggested that when it comes to cinematic madness in the jungle, Werner Herzog makes Francis Ford Coppola look like a milquetoast. And sure, he starves and tortures his actors, until they willingly chow down on a bowl of maggots or a raw snake, but the story is smoothly told, in a manner befitting a production company called “Top Gun.” Herzog does not quite go Hollywood in a feature remake of his excellent 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, but he does find in his fellow German all the qualities he admires most in Americans, “courage, perseverance, optimism, self-reliance.” Dieter is fiercely loyal to America because the Air Force gave the immigrant the chance to fly, so when he is shot down on his first mission, a covert bombing run into Laos in 1965, he adamantly refuses to renounce his adopted country to secure better treatment when captured, and immediately starts planning his escape. Christian Bale is excellent in portraying the demented joyfulness of Dieter’s survival instincts. He drags an equally excellent Steve Zahn along on his mad slog through the jungle, while a quirky Jeremy Davies refines his continuing portrayal of rational cowardice in extreme situations. One might expect a more overtly oppositional political stance from Herzog, but this conventionally rousing story of heroism is really another of his tales of crazy human encounter with nature in the raw. Alongside Grizzly Man, you could say that sometimes the bear eats you and sometimes you eat the bear (or the snake). (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-77.)

In Bruges

I never would have watched this film except that my son happened to be in Bruges, and I wanted to see what he was seeing in the “most completely medieval city in Europe.” The Flemish setting is beautifully rendered, but the story is about two hit men on the lam, with all the blood-spattering that implies. Despite a reliance on basic gangland movie tropes, this first film from Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is notable for its profane eloquence and wit, along with a perverse Catholicity. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes are all excellent as killers with quirks and sensibilities. I am not of the party who chose Pulp Fiction as the #1 cultural artifact of the first 1000 issues of Entertainment Weekly, and I have next to no interest in the School of Tarantino, but in that spurting vein of cinema, this film did entertain me. Maybe it was the Irish in it. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-67.)

P.S. -- I do not subscribe to the Pauline Kael dictum of seeing a film only once, but I do find it striking how rarely one has significantly different reactions to a given film, except when the viewer has changed significantly in the interim. Though the pure painful/joyful surprise of watching The Diving Bell & the Butterfly unfold was past, upon re-viewing Julian Schnabel’s film confirmed its place for me as one of the very best of 2007.

Next up at the Clark

Visions of a Gilded Age: Film Adaptations of James and Wharton
Saturday Afternoons at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium

Out of the same era and milieu as the American artists featured in the Clark’s summer exhibition, “Like Breath on Glass,” the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton have elicited a wide range of film adaptations, which this series will survey.

July 12: The Heiress. (1949, 115 min.) William Wyler directs this adaptation of Henry James’ Washington Square. Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar for her portrayal of the beset daughter of domineering father Ralph Richardson, who fends off her fortune-seeking suitor Montgomery Clift. Oscars also won for set and costume design, as well as music by Aaron Copland.

July 19: The Innocents. (1961, 85 min.) Deborah Kerr stars in Jack Clayton’s atmospheric and chilling adaptation of the James novella The Turn of the Screw, as the governess on a country estate. The children in her care are haunted by ghosts, or is she the one succumbing to evil visions?

July 26: The Bostonians. (1984, 120 min.) Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve lead a distinguished cast in this classic Merchant-Ivory adaptation of the James novel, set amongst the women’s suffrage movement in 19th century New England.

August 2: Portrait of a Lady. (1996, 142 min.) Jane Campion directs Nicole Kidman as the James heroine Isabel Archer, a spirited and independent American woman abroad, who falls under the sway of worldly Europeans, Barbara Hershey and John Malkovich.

August 9: The Golden Bowl. (2000, 130 min.) Merchant and Ivory are back again, with a sumptuous look at James’ final novel, about a wealthy American played by Nick Nolte who is collecting art in Europe with a plan to build a museum back home. His young wife Uma Thurman becomes entangled with the marriage of his daughter Kate Beckinsale.

August 16: The Age of Innocence. (1993, 138 min.) Martin Scorsese’s direction dazzles in this adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel about New York society in the 1870s. Proper lawyer Daniel Day Lewis is engaged to Winona Ryder, but can barely resist the charms of the scandalous Michelle Pfeiffer.

August 23: The House of Mirth. (2000, 140 min.) In Terence Davies’ stark but sensitive adaptation of the Wharton novel, Gillian Armstrong is the precarious social climber trying to make her way into New York society, at the mercy of ruthless characters like Dan Ackroyd and Laura Linney.

Jeremiah Johnson

It’s nice to see a film from Seventies Hollywood that actually holds up to that era’s reputation as a golden age of sorts. I had fond memories of this, and when I saw it mentioned in recent obituaries for director Sidney Pollack, I moved it up in my Netflix queue and renewed my appreciation for it. Coming on the heels of Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, it certainly represents a high point for the revisionist Western. And coming at the same time as The Candidate, it certainly testifies to Robert Redford’s range and star power, while also presaging his continuing identification with that Rocky Mountain landscape. He plays an ex-soldier looking to escape “civilization” sometime around 1840 by becoming a hunter and trapper in the high mountains. The landscapes are spectacular, and the story has a Thoreauvian appeal -- fronting only the essentials of life -- as well as the usual Indian fighting and loving, which is presented with unusual respect for the Other. While mostly a solitary figure in an immense and unforgiving landscape, Redford has formative encounters with other mountain men, as well as brushes with various Indian tribes and the cavalry. It’s odd for a film under two hours to have an “Overture” and “Intermission,” which suggests this film was meant to be even more epic except for budget constraints. At least Pollack and Redford insisted on shooting not in the studio but on location, which more than makes up for any scrimping they had to do. (1972, dvd, r.) *8-*

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi masterfully adapts her graphic memoirs into a simply but expressively animated film about growing up in Iran under the last years of the Shah and the first years of the Islamic revolution. In adolescence she is exiled to Vienna by her protective, progressive parents, and after she returns to sample life under the mullahs, finally finds a new home in Paris. Boldly graphic in black & white, except for a few scenes in color at Orly Airport in Paris, from which the rest of the film flashes back, the hand-drawn animation is a marvel of economy and effect. The flat, stark, monochrome 2-D imagery achieves three dimensions and more, yielding all sorts of colors and tones. And the very specific story of one brash and passionate girl growing up achieves global and historical significance. We need to know about Iran more than ever, now that it is be positioned as our biggest enemy, and this film is eye-opening in more ways than one, as well as funny and moving. I found it worthwhile to watch both in an American-dubbed version, and in the original French, where the girl is voiced by Chiara Mastroianni and the mother by her real life mother, Catherine Deneuve, and the grandmother by the doyenne of Gallic film, Danielle Darrieux. (2007, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-90.)

The Other Boleyn Girl

Well, the costumes are certainly the best thing about this costume drama. The direction by Justin Chadwick (of the superlative BBC Bleak House) is quite fluent, if emotionally inert. More might have been expected from Peter Morgan, screenwriter for The Queen. Natalie Portman acts her little heart out as Anne Boleyn, evincing no winces but little genuine insight either, while Scarlett Johansson is reliably watchable as her sister Mary, each of them pimped out in turn to by their father and uncle to Henry VIII. As the latter, Eric Bana is no more than a clotheshorse. Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas as the girls’ parents add class to the proceedings, but nothing really adds up. This attempt to find one more angle on an oft-told story sometimes works as eye candy, but seldom as drama. (2008, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-50.)

Charlie Wilson's War

I had one word hovering in mind that kept me from finding this film satisfactory -- “blowback.” The word is never used in the film, which is precisely the problem. We are meant to find Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson admirable despite his peccadilloes -- he’s played by Tom Hanks, after all -- and applaud his crucial support for the mujahedeen and the covert war in Afghanistan, leading to the defeat of the Soviet Army and the fall of Communism. But never is it mentioned that those we supported and empowered were the Taliban and their ally Osama bin Laden, nor that we are now engaged in another war in Afghanistan, against those we enabled with weapons and money. And now we are the arrogant empire being brought to grief by the fierce Afghanis, part of a long line that probably goes back to Alexander the Great. So what kind of hero can this weapons dealer be, and how exhilarated can one get while tabulating the number of Soviet airships blown out of the air by the ground-to-air missiles supplied by the U.S. through the combined offices of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia? This is an admirable triumph of American diplomacy? This good old Texas buttkicking is something to applaud? I think not, so this film has no chance with me. Despite the wit of Aaron Sorkin’s script and the swiftness of Mike Nichols direction. Despite reliably good performances from the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, as well as producer Hanks. I can’t figure out whether the film is meant to be satire or celebration, but its moment certainly passed a while back -- on, say, September 11, 2001, or maybe the day we realized that the mission was anything but accomplished. (2007, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-69.)