The Class (Entre les murs)

It’s time to start mentioning Laurent Cantet among the great directors working today. Winner of the highest award at Cannes last year and rapturously received at the NY Film Festival, this film follows the impressive string of Human Resources (1999), Time Out (2001), and Heading South (2005). Each of his films is tuned into social and economic realities, but with The Class (which might also have been called The Classes, or better yet, the original title, Between the Walls), his quasi-documentary approach yields unassailable truth. Francois Begaudeau wrote a memoir of a year teaching in a Parisian middle school, then worked with Cantet on a script based on his experiences, and finally plays a semi-fictionalized version of himself, over the course of a year with a classroom of real students, though not the original subjects. The other teachers and parents are also “real.” Filming with three HD cameras, Cantet captures the verite of public schooling better than anyone since Frederick Wiseman. But the real amazement is how entertaining and involving the proceedings become; out of the boredom of the classroom a portrait of a volatile multicultural society emerges. There are tensions between the African and Caribbean Blacks, between the Arabs and those who proclaim a French identity, between the academically eager Chinese and the immigration authorities. This pot is bubbling but not melting. No summary of “plot” or character will clue you into the experience of this film, you must take it all in on the fly, like a fly on the wall. My point of comparison would be the superlative fourth season of The Wire, telling the hard truth about the education of marginal youths, without bludgeoning the viewer into despair. (2008, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-92.)

Doubt

While this might have worked as a four-hander declaimed from the stage, as a film it once again underscores the difference (not to say superiority) between cinema and theater. John Patrick Shanley adapts and directs his own Pulitzer-winning play. He does some location shooting at the Bronx parochial school he actually attended in the early 60s, when the story is set, and populates it with additional characters, but the play is dissipated rather than opened-out, and askew camera angles and other stage business highlight the artificiality. What remains are the central performances, and they are quite good. Meryl Streep offers a sly caricature of the rigid old-school nun (she must have had fun doing this back-to-back with her loosey-goosey, aging hippie in Mamma Mia!), and Philip Seymour Hoffman as usual convinces as a Vatican II-era priest who may or may not be a pediphile. Amy Adams radiates innocence as the younger Sister of Charity enlisted in the older nun’s plot to force out the pastor, and Viola Davis is effective in a brief but crucial appearance as the mother of the boy who might have been abused. But in the effort to be open-ended, and provocative of walking-out-of-the-theater disputation, the film fails to find its focus or point. Having just worked with a friend on the story of his parochial school education, I found much of this film intriguing and even funny, but was finally annoyed by its refusal to resolve its themes, its attempt to have it every which way, under cover of its title. (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-68.)

The Reader

This would have been a better film if it tried to do less, had maintained a sharper and narrower focus. Trying to negotiate four time frames within the film, in order to illuminate an unseen fifth, namely the Holocaust, dissipates the drama and overreaches the truth. Of course, Kate Winslet’s opportunity to age prosthetically probably won her the Oscar, but for me she only registered at something like her own age. The film falls apart when she goes from pairing with David Kross as her teenage lover to Ralph Fiennes in the character’s later incarnation, as the haunted lawyer who failed to provide her with an alibi (she was unable to read, so couldn’t have been responsible for a falsified report) when it came out that she had been an SS guard at a concentration camp, subsequently tried for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end, Stephen Daldry’s film (and David Hare’s script from Bernhard Schlick’s novel) offers more exploitation than illumination, relying on prestige rather than honest emotion or clear viewpoint. A stripped-down version would have had a cleaner (though nicely dirty) impact. (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-58.)

Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to critical fave, Old Joy, yields a sad and modest, but beautifully modulated film in the vein of indie neorealism. It plays like an American Umberto D., but instead of a destitute old man and his dog, it tells of a destitute young woman and her dog. Wendy is marvelously inhabited by Michelle Williams, as a waif-like drifter on her way to Alaska, always on the edge of tears but rarely succumbing. She is not headed “Into the Wild” but hoping to get a job at a cannery in Ketchikan. Her car breaks down in a small town in Oregon, and her life proceeds to break down around her. When she desperately tries to shoplift some dogfood for Lucy, played by Reichardt’s own “yellow-gold” mutt, she is collared by an eager-beaver clerk and sent to be booked and fingerprinted. And when she finally posts bail from her rapidly dwindling stake of cash and returns to where Lucy had been tied up, the dog is no longer there. The rest of the brief but deliberately-paced eighty minutes is taken up with Wendy’s increasingly desperate attempts to find Lucy. Without histrionics, an abject story of poverty and loneliness unfolds, with some tender and touching moments but just the slightest glimmer of hope in its denouement. (2008, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-80.)

Elegy

Except for the main character’s name and the title credits, you would hardly imagine this film was adapted from a Philip Roth novel. The situation might be recognizable but the scathingly witty authorial voice is nowhere heard, despite some half-hearted narration. Aging satyr Ben Kingsley teaches at Columbia (in an earlier Roth novel David Kepesh was The Professor of Desire, though in this The Dying Animal) and commentates on culture for public television and highbrow magazines. He has a satisfactory shag-&-run relationship with Patricia Clarkson, but regularly lets young ladies graduate from his classroom to his bedroom. Penelope Cruz proves (understandably) to be more than a passing fancy, however. He turns for advice to his only friend, a Pulitzer-winning poet played by Dennis Hopper, while on the other side he is hounded by resentful son Peter Sarsgaard. With such a cast and such a provenance, this film is certainly watchable but hardly memorable. Without getting all sexist about it, I wonder if a Spanish woman -- Isabel Coixet -- is the ideal director to get across the Rothian worldview? (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-66.)

Synecdoche, New York

Intellectually playful from its clever title forward, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut returns to the obsessive themes and oddball humor of his scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but without a lightening touch from Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry, the proceedings turn rather lugubrious. There’s lots of dark cerebral humor, but the film inevitably ends with the word, “Die.” So being inside Charlie’s head for two hours might be a tad glum, except for the life generated by an exceptional cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a morose, hypochondriac playwright-director from Schenectady, whose artist wife (Catherine Keener) leaves him, taking their daughter, for whom he pines throughout the film. As a consolation, he wins a MacArthur genius grant, which allows him to move to NYC and obtain a huge warehouse where he mounts an insanely elaborate theatrical recreation of his life. He marries the actress who plays his wife (Michelle Williams) and has a surrogate daughter, but cannot recreate the happiness he probably never had. Along the way he dallies with a hot-to-trot box office cashier (Samantha Morton) -- so hot she lives in a house surreally on fire for decades -- who in the course of the years becomes his directorial assistant, whose character winds up being played by Emily Watson in the unending, if never opening, play within the film. Got that? Probably not on the first go, you won’t. And that’s not all, you’ll see Dianne Wiest and Jennifer Jason Leigh and other familiar faces as well. There’s a lot going on here, not all of it fun but most of it bleakly farcical and mind-bending. Even with the aftertaste of ashes, this is my cup of tea. (2008, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-67.)

Pineapple Express

The high concept of a stoner action flick is taken for a ride -- with car chases and gunfire as well as clouds of pot smoke -- by Freaks & Geeks alums, Seth Rogen and James Franco, with director David Gordon Green trying to break out of the sensitive indie ghetto. It’s not entirely unamusing, with the writing and the acting having their moments, but still strikes me as unnecessary. (2008, dvd, n.) *6-* (MC-64.)

Prospecting for the Clark

Here’s a group of films that I watched recently in choosing forthcoming series at the Clark. I’d already nailed down my “Four Japanese Masters” for a series in June, but Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956) remained on my Netflix queue, and it turned out to be new to me. I had it confused with his other famous WWII film, Fires on the Plain (1959), which I didn’t really want to see again, though its images of cannibalism among the defeated Japanese troops have stuck with me since I saw it long ago. The Burmese Harp also deals with the aftermath of Japanese surrender, but in a gentler way. One survivor is nursed back to health in a Buddhist monastery, and rather than return with his unit to Japan, he becomes a monk and stays in Burma to bury all the dead troops that litter the landscape. Looking good on a Criterion Collection DVD, this film was in its day an international hit for its lovely evocation of pacifist sentiment after the carnage of war.

I’ve been taking a break in the middle of re-watching the 26 episodes of The World At War, but continuing to explore the themes of World War II in film (as the world economy careens toward disaster, it’s reassuring to know we’ve come back from much worse devastation). So the confluence of several strands of interest finally got me to watch Open City (1945), which had been on my TiVo playlist for a year and a half. Roberto Rossellini’s film about the Roman resistance in the waning days of the war in Italy, filmed on the spot before the war had ended, is taken to be one of the founts of neorealism. It’s so much a monument that it’s hard to approach it freshly as a film. How well it’s made is almost beside the point of it’s being made at all. Its blend of the real and the cinematic remains a nearly miraculous result of minimal means. If I get to do my film club series on Italian neorealism next fall at the Clark, this is sure to kick it off.

One way that Open City is the mother of all Italian postwar cinema is for making famous Anna Magnani, one of the few professionals in the cast. She also appears in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Momma Roma (1962), almost as if she had survived the earlier film and had the son she was pregnant with at the time. Retrieving him from rustication, after years of supporting him by walking the streets of Rome, Magnani tries to forge a new life in a housing development with her semi-delinquent teenager. Pasolini pulls out all the stops, but the whole does not sustain itself. There are bravura sequences, like two where Magnani walks through the streets of Rome and narrates her story to a succession of street characters who fall in step with her, and stylistic quirks, like the almost Ozu-like frontality with which Magnani and others address the camera. But there was a whole level of symbolic signification that didn’t work for me at all, so the film made no unified impact. There’s a lot of emotion on display in which I did not share.

I filled the last slot in my “Projections of Rome” film series with Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), trivial as a romantic comedy, but eye-popping as a digitally-restored Cinemascope travelogue of Rome. Enough of an innovation in location shooting to win the Oscar for cinematography, it became a surprise hit. In front of the star of the show -- the sights of Rome, seen only occasionally in jarring back-projection -- three unlikely American secretaries (Dorothy Maguire, Jean Peters, and Maggie McNamara--an Audrey Hepburn-lite whose career fizzled) dance in pursuit of the men of their dreams (Clifton Webb, Rossano Brazzi, and Louis Jourdan) and -- surprise! -- meet them altogether in the end, in front of the Trevi Fountain where they made their wishes at the start of the movie, to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing the title tune.

Renewed recommendations

I’ve recently rewatched two favorites, one new and one old, and I’m here to urge you to see them, if you have not. From the get-go, I knew I would want to watch Happy-Go-Lucky again with subtitles, and now that it is out on DVD and I have done so, I feel happy and lucky to confirm it as my pick for best film of 2008. Much of the dialogue is tossed offhandly in accent, so that subtitles add another dimension of marvel at the wit and depth of Mike Leigh’s direction and Sally Hawkins’ inhabitation of the character of Poppy, certainly the performance of the year, a lovely and believably quirky woman, who remains happy even when her luck goes bad, in a world of anger and hurt.

Flirting looks even better than when it was made twenty years ago, as our first glimpse of Thandie Newton, Nicole Kidman, and Naomi Watts. Noah Taylor brings his wry grit to the presumably autobiographical protagonist of writer-director John Duigan’s tale of romance and rebellion in a pair of Australian boarding schools that face each other across a moonlit lake. Specific to 1965 yet universal in appeal, this coming of age story is funny and uncommonly true, and I defy you not to enjoy it.

Let the Right One In

I frequently simulate the moviegoing experience on dvd, by watching previews before the film itself, and I must say the trailers on this disk -- all horror gorefests -- rather put me off the main attraction, to which I was lured by its high ranking (#14) on the IndieWire critics poll for 2008. By the end I was glad to have seen it, despite all the blood, but I’m pretty sure I won’t even look at the forthcoming American remake (and watched this in Swedish with subtitles rather than dubbed in English, which I suspect would have been intolerable). I am neither devotee nor dismisser of vampire films, but this one wasn’t prettified, and was firmly rooted in its Swedish suburban setting. As with Pan’s Labyrinth, I bought into the violence of fantasy for the insight offered into the secret longings of children. The 12-year-olds who play the pale bullied boy and the dark not-a-girl who moves in next door are extremely magnetic and convincingly naturalistic. Tomas Alfredson’s direction is observant and frequently beautiful, with enough wrenching shocks, as well as humor and pathos, to keep one from asking any of the questions that would make the story fall apart. We willingly enter the world of what-if, and care about what happens there, while registering social and psychological realities. (2008, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82.)

Watching the seasons go by

I am a film guy, not a tv guy, but I find some series (usually on dvd) particularly engaging specimens of long-form cinema. This is obvious with European imports like Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Kieslowski’s Decalogue, the Italian Best of Youth, or British literary adaptations such as Bleak House. But they also appear on American screens. I’ve recently pitched the best one now running, Friday Night Lights -- it’s too late to hop into the third season, but go back and start with season one on dvd. Same goes for Mad Men, the other superb ongoing series, now between its second and third seasons.

For the moment I will be missing the episode-to-episode pleasures of the soap opera format, where you get to know the characters so well you live their lives with them. Everybody’s got to have their stories. Two series that I have watched quite devotedly have just ended.

Battlestar Galactica wrapped up the whole series as well as the fourth season, though it will have multiple afterlives. Not a moment too soon; in fact several too late. The show was always an odd mix of the awesome and the awful, frequently bobbing along on hot air, but it did not truly “jump the shark” till the very last hour, in which everything bad about the series was magnified into ludicrousness and I wound up hooting at the screen, an entertaining experience in its own right but not the way for a program to go into that good night. It made me reconsider the hours I had put into watching it, despite the occasional topical gems like the sequence where the polytheistic humans were insurgents and terrorists against the occupying monotheistic Cylons. The characters and dialogue were frequently flatfooted, but at other times gave you something to think about. Critical acclaim brought me to the series late, but having seen it through to the end, I will not add to the chorus of recommendation.

Big Love ended its third season on a resolving note that certainly implies a fourth, and makes me look forward to it. This is not one of the HBO series I take seriously, but do find continuously entertaining, like Entourage or Six Feet Under or Rome. Well written and acted, if overly sudsy, these are characters I have bonded with and I want to see how their lives work out.

The opposite is true for the new Joss Wheedon series, Dollhouse, on which I gave up after a few episodes, despite its lineage from one of my all-time favorites, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy now slots at #3 on my life list, behind Freaks and Geeks, whose one truncated season is a must-see on dvd, all the more so when you’ve seen what Judd Apatow and the gang have gone on to subsequently, redefining movie comedy for the 21st century.

What I would call serious HBO shows, like The Sopranos or Deadwood, also count among the best -- but for me The Wire is #1 forever, without a doubt. If you haven’t been convinced to watch it yet, then nothing I can say at this late date will turn the trick. I will, however, offer a plug for the David Simon-Ed Burns follow-up miniseries, Generation Kill, now on dvd. Spend seven hours with Recon Marines at the tip of the spear driving toward Baghdad, and it will indelibly color your understanding of the American fiasco in Iraq.

So queue any of these up on Netflix for guaranteed viewing pleasure (double your money back -- since two times zero is zero). And get on the bandwagon for Mad Men and Friday Night Lights, while keeping an eye out for the next great tv series.