Is there a doc in the house?

The protracted conclusion of a book project has left me behind in my movie reviewing, so I will try to catch up with a generalized commentary on the competing virtues of documentary and feature filmmaking.

Two recent films make for a pointed comparison. I watched both with the same companion. After Milk (2008, MC-84), I turned to her and said, “It was okay, but the documentary was better,” referring to the 1984 Oscar-winner The Times of Harvey Milk. After Cadillac Records (2008, MC-65), she said to me, “It was okay, but a documentary would have been better.” Each was based on a true story from the recent past, and one’s view of each was determined by how one weighed the merits of performance vs. authenticity. If you were swept up in Sean Penn’s deservedly celebrated portrayal of Harvey Milk, or smitten by James Franco as his lover, or intrigued by Josh Brolin as his murderer, then you make allowances for the movie-fying of his story. Similarly, if you are mesmerised by Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, or Beyonce as Etta James, or Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the mensch in spite of himself who started the eponymous record company, then you go along with the soapy tv machinations of plot, as it perfunctorily checks off its points. It’s all about how much you lose yourself (and your critical, reality-checking faculties) in the portrayal of the characters.

The director (and budget) makes a difference as well. Gus Van Sant is a gay man who alternates mainstream movies with edgy independent films, and here delivers the commercial goods, albeit with a story that definitely engages him. Darnell Martin is a black woman who has mainly directed tv episodes but every decade or so gets to make a movie she has written. So I am prone to pull for -- or make allowances for -- her more than him. Both films are worth seeing, but I enjoyed Cadillac Records a bit more than Milk, though each would benefit from more documentary veracity and less conventional drama.

A film that dispenses with drama but delivers a documentary “you-are-there” quality is The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966), probably the best of the historical programs for Italian (and French) television to which Roberto Rossellini devoted the last decade-plus of his career, after declaring that cinema was dead. It certainly was the only one I had seen and retained a favorable impression of, and it’s been given singular treatment by the Criterion Collection, who at the same time released an Eclipse boxed set of other Rossellinis, about which I will write more later. All these films have a stagy, pageant-like quality, with characters spouting lines of exposition that might have been copied from a textbook, but in this particular case that style matches the subject exactly. Pageantry was just what the Sun King was after as he consolidated power in absolute monarchy, forcing the aristocracy to live in the opulence of Versailles and bankrupting themselves to keep up with the fashion of high living. So when we endure a long, long shot of Louis consuming a sixteen course meal by himself at a dais, we are in exactly the position of the aristocrats who are obliged to soak in his majesty. (Sofia Coppola had to have seen this before she had Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVIII dining in Marie Antoinette.) And in this case, the nonprofessional actor who portrays the King is perfect in his inadequacy to the role, with all the overwrought glamor serving only as a cover for his fear. Unable to memorize his lines, he was forced to read them off a blackboard, but that averted gaze perfectly conveys both the king’s inadequacies and the indifference of royalty to its inferiors. The lack of performance contributes to the authenticity of the film, an article of faith with directors like Dreyer and Bresson, but rarely proved as well as here.

For the sake of contrast, I will mention a film that is totally about performance and absolutely not about authenticity, and therefore the only one of these I hesitate to recommend. Nathalie (2003, MC-69) was written and directed by Anne Fontaine, but is all about French star power. Fanny Ardant plays a tony Parisian gynecologist who more than suspects her husband, Gerard Depardieu, of cheating on her, and enlists a bargirl-prostitute, Emmannuel Beart, to seduce him and report back on exactly what he does. But who is seducing whom? The answer is oh so French. But it hardly matters. It’s enough to spend the time in the company of Fanny Ardant, who not only has her own enigmatic beauty but also gives me a last tenuous connection to the life and work of Francois Truffaut. Depardieu always inhabits his roles with bearish comfort, and Beart nicely plays on the ambiguity I always feel toward her, attractive and yet scary, those lips too luscious to be anything but poison. I was reminded of Bibi Andersson in Persona for the erotic charge of just talking about sex. This film is of course not in that class (very few are), just a tease instead of a revelation.

Still Life

If you’ve got a thing for Antonioni, you’ll probably fall for Jia Zhang-ke. He expresses feeling -- predominantly of dislocation -- through environment rather than through story or character. The World took place in a Vegas-like Beijing amusement park with reduced-scale models of the world’s great attractions from the Eiffel Tower to the Taj Mahal. Still Life transpires in an old city about to be inundated by the Three Gorges Dam in southern China, largest in the world. Two parallel but unconnected stories detail the quest of a spouse from the North who is searching for the mate that disappeared into this disappearing town. We mutely and slowly follow the searches of the man and woman through a doomed environment of buildings being vacated and demolished by gangs of workmen wielding sledgehammers. Beautifully filmed in HD video, with reference to traditions of Chinese painting and incursions of digital surrealism, this film engages one’s documentary interest in news from the other side of the world, if you have the patience for evocative enigmas without much emotion or event. The amazing landscape of the place and the scope of human displacement overshadow individual involvement with the fate of the characters. Jia is the hottest young Chinese director on the international scene, as evidenced by this film coming in 7th in the IndieWire poll for 2008. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-81.)

Gomorrah

I’d feel less certain of my reaction to this film if it weren’t shared by the three people I watched it with. What is the fuss all about? Compared to The Wire, Matteo Garrone’s film just does not deliver on its promise of revealing the interconnected truth of the culture of organized crime. Juggling loosely linked stories of the Camorra, the Neopolitan equivalent of the Mafia, the film offers no point of access through character, story, or wit. Some moments stand out, but for the most part it is a punishing slog. Grim reality is all well and good, but why not go all the way and offer a documentary framework, rather than placing the story in context just with explanatory aftertitles. As in The Wire, we see street-corner drug-dealing, life in the projects (here a truly bizarre structure), dubious “waste management” practices, container port smuggling and mass death, crime syndicate incursions upon straight business such as couture, feral kids taking on the color of their environment (even underage drivers of huge vehicles), with people getting blown away as an everyday occurrence. What the film didn’t give me was any reason to pay attention or to care. If you have that going in, maybe you will find the movie up to the awards and acclaim it has achieved. (2009, IFC/OD, n.) *6* (MC-86.)

The Passion of Ayn Rand

I stumbled across this little-noticed Showtime movie because DirecTV is offering several months of the channel for free (I see now it’s also on Netflix). With Helen Mirren as Ayn Rand, Peter Fonda as her husband, Eric Stoltz as her acolyte Nathaniel Branden, and Julie Delpy as his wife, on whose book the docudrama is based, the cast was intriguing enough for me to tune in. And it was indeed watchable, if largely uninformative and unrevealing, insufficiently controversial. Personalities come across -- Mirren as Rand in particular -- but motivations are unplumbed, reducing the story of one of the 20th century’s celebrated wackos to cross-currents of sexual jealousy. (1999, Show/T, n. ) *6*

I've Loved You So Long

Opinions may differ, but I found this exploration of a difficult but rewarding relationship between sisters even better than Rachel Getting Married. Kristin Scott Thomas gives a finely-tuned performance that was nearly as scandalously overlooked at awards time as Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky. I’m not getting into plot points, which are perhaps the weakest element of writer-director Philippe Claudel’s debut film. Certainly a good deal of suspense is generated along the way, but the plot mechanism -- who, what, and why dunnit? -- is the least of the film’s virtues. Moody and painterly, its best aspect is the developing relationship between Kristin Scott Thomas, who has been “away” for fifteen years, after a devastating event that is very gradually revealed, and her estranged but formerly close kid sister, a bright young literature professor played by Elsa Zylberstein. Together they dig out a character who has been buried alive by life and death, and reintroduce her to the world, step by tentative step. It’s all slow, quiet, and beautifully judged. Nothing happens, except a light going back on in the soul of a woman. (2008, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-79.)

It’s a relief to have seen a film I felt like talking about. There’s a wave of interesting new releases next week, and I’m working through the IndieWire critics poll (not as diligently as last year) before making my own pronunciamento on the best of 2008. Their #1 (The Flight of the Red Balloon) I’ve already given a lukewarm review. Their #5 (Happy-Go-Lucky) is my #1 so far, till all the votes are counted. Their #6 (Paranoid Park) earns only a shrug from me -- it was okay for a skateboarding murder mystery with arty pretensions, but the way is wide open for me to consider Milk, when I finally catch up with it, as the best Gus Van Sant movie of 2008.

Paranoid Park (2008, MC-83.) fell in a string of films that I lump together under the rubric, “These Kids Today,” about which I have little to say, except to acknowledge the camera-worthiness of the young leads. Another was Hard Candy (2006, MC-58.). Before Juno, Ellen Page was Hayley, a tough and taunting 14-year-old who does a turnabout on an older man who is stalking her. David Slade’s film was gripping in places, but so manipulative that it evaporated in the mind when it was over, except for the lingering image of a star being born. And in this category I include Friday Night Lights, more the current tv series (MC-84.), which I previewed on DirecTV, than the 2004 movie (MC-70), which I watched again after the fact. The film is much more about Texas high school football, and the true story of one season, than the portrait of community that the tv series has opened into (did I mention that the kids are attractive?). It was amusing to see the few carryovers from movie to tv series, most especially Connie Britton as the coach’s wife, who barely gets a line of dialogue in the film but becomes the central figure of the series, in delicious tandem with Kyle Chandler as the coach (Billy Bob Thornton in movie).

There’s another film I cannot rouse myself to review, but will note that I watched, for its possible inclusion in a Rome-themed film series at the Clark. I had hoped that The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) might pair nicely with Roman Holiday, but I couldn’t convince myself of the fit. It was certainly interesting to see Vivien Leigh (well past Blanche Dubois, let alone Scarlett O’Hara, but still magnetically attractive, despite having just been dumped by Laurence Olivier) at the end of her career playing off Warren Beatty (almost believable as an Italian gigolo) at the beginning of his. Also interesting was the transparent autobiographical intent of Tennessee Williams’ novella about an aging queen of the stage retiring to Rome and the boys thereof, with Lotte Lenya in a celebrated role as the procuress. But the actual Rome footage was clearly second unit stuff, with all the interiors done on a Hollywood soundstage, accenting the theatricality of the whole production, along with a lame voiceover. I was happy to watch it but can’t push it on other viewers. I look forward to being more pushy in the future.