Mother and Child

This is another comparable film that I preferred to widely-acclaimed The Kids Are All Right.  The main point of comparison is in superlative performances by Annette Bening, but while in the other she retains her glamour in a lifestyle magazine setting, here in Rodrigo Garcia’s film, she strips away vanity in a truly lived-in LA environment.  As with Nine Lives, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and buddy of the three amigos (Cuarón, Del Toro, Inárritu) recruits exceptional actresses and actors to live out his interlocked stories of something like real life.  (Garcia is also responsible for the HBO series In Treatment, which I will have to find my way into at some point.) There is an element of contrivance in the way different story lines finally connect, but the coincidences are more grounded than in Babel and its many modish epigones.  The narrative leaps over major developments to focus on crucial moments of truth and feeling.  Bening plays a difficult, disappointed woman, a physical therapist who yearns for the child she gave up when she got pregnant as a 14-year-old, while she cares for the aging mother who has instructed her in the disenchantments of life.  In parallel, Naomi Watts (in a highly plausible pairing) plays her unknown daughter, who has sealed off the anger of her abandonment in determined independence and devotion to getting ahead as a high-powered lawyer.  They pair off with Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson respectively, as a kindly fellow therapist and the head of a fancy legal firm.  A third strand of the film is anchored by Kerry Washington, as an infertile bakery shop proprietor who is trying to adopt a child while ignoring the ambivalence of her husband.  There are several other representations of the relationship highlighted in the title, which add up to a convincing group portrait, despite some gaps in plausibility.  If you are a mother or were formerly a child, this adoption drama is worth seeing. (2010, MC-64) 

Other side of town

By happenstance, I watched in succession a group of recent films whose Metacritic ratings all fell in the mid- to high-70s, but of which I had decidedly different opinions, here listed from most favorable to least.

From The Town (2010, MC-74), I get the feeling that Ben Affleck looked at the efforts of elders Eastwood, Scorsese, Lumet, and others -- to penetrate the seamy side of his native Boston -- and said, “Hey, I’ll show you what we’re all about.”  Of course he’d already done that in his first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, but I was surprised to find myself won over by this expression of the Beantown crime formula.  I don’t usually go for car chases, but I found one such through the narrow streets of the North End to be hilarious.  Likewise with extended shootouts between cops and robbers, but it’s kind of cute to see one such set in Fenway Park.  The town of the title is Charlestown, a square mile that has in fact produced an amazing number of bank and armored car robbers, and while my knowledge of Boston’s ethnic enclaves is not comprehensive, I found the flavor of this relatively authentic, within its genre limits.  Affleck himself is the leader of one gang, with childhood friend Jeremy Renner as his triggerman.  In the course of one bank heist, they take manager Rebecca Hall hostage, but then release her blindfolded, only to find out she’s a “toonie” – as opposed to “townie” – in their own neighborhood.  Ben tries to check out whether she could have recognized the masked robbers, and soon is falling for her (not a stretch of the imagination with the lovely Ms. Hall).  Don Draper, aka Jon Hamm, leads the FBI investigation, while other welcome faces turn up, such as Chris Cooper for a scene or two as Affleck’s imprisoned father.  Not a cinematic gem, this proved to be an entertaining genre exercise with strong local flavor.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010, MC-79) was reviewed as a documentary to see even if you have no appreciation of the subject.  I don’t, and I did -- but I don’t necessarily advice you to do the same, even if Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern do look beyond showbiz cliché in their portrait of a driven performer’s drive to perform, even well past her sell-by date.  Though I was never able to see behind Rivers’ absurdly nipped-tucked-&-botoxed face to a more sympathetic character behind the mask, one does derive some sense of a will, a way, and a world.  But if you want to spend time in the company of a tough New York Jewish comedienne and provocateur, you’d be better off with Fran Lebovits and Public Speaking.

Soul Kitchen (2010, MC-76) offers just what you expect from Germany – frothy romantic comedy and food porn.  Now I do indeed have great expectations of director Fatih Akin, but this would-be jeu d’esprit is a far cry from Head-On and Edge of Heaven.  I’m inclined to let him have his fun, but I certainly did not join in, and wound up fast-forwarding through the second half.  This film takes his usual inside look at his hometown of Hamburg but does not balance it off with trips to his ancestral Turkey, as his other films do so memorably.  This caper follows a hapless restaurateur trying to appeal to a hip young crowd in a converted factory, while dealing with his journalist girlfriend going off to Shanghai and his ne’er-do-well brother getting out of jail and depending on him for work, along with a madman chef and a yuppie old classmate scheming to buy him out.  This film certainly expresses youthful energy, but for me the romance was vacant and the comedy landed with a dull thud.

On the other hand, I knew I was not going to have much use for Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010, MC-74), but dutifully took a look at what some consider among the best films of the past year.  Very much like another of the same -- Scorsese’s Shutter Island -- I just did not care that much about what is going on inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s head, and wound up fast-forwarding after the first hour of oh-wow dreamscapes.  It’s not so much that I couldn’t figure out what was going on, as I didn’t give a damn about any of it, despite a lot of appealing performers, from Ellen Page to Michael Caine, and some spectacular -- if not special -- effects.

Classic or not?

In the past month or so, I have watched (or re-watched) a lot of films that someone or other has called a classic, and while I don’t have it in me to review each in much detail, I will take the opportunity to pop off on my opinion of whether each film is indeed classic.

We’ll start with an easy one, a film that practically defines the meaning of the word “classic,” and lives up to its billing every time.  Casablanca (1942) is the fruit of the Hollywood studio system at the end of its golden age, plucked at its peak of ripeness.  It seems almost too familiar, without having been seen in ages, and hovered deep in my Netflix queue for a decade.  But one night I happened to flip on TCM just as the opening credits began to roll -- I couldn’t resist, and was transported all over again.  It was indeed an amazing moment of movie perfection, with every element conspiring as Michael Curtiz rushed the film to completion to take advantage of the marketing bonanza of FDR’s Casablanca conference.  As a star of magnetic magnitude, Ingrid Bergman in gauzy close-up is all that, but what startled me was the subtlety and range of Humphrey Bogart’s role-playing, and of course Claude Rains gives one of the great supporting performances, amid a string of pleasingly evocative faces.  It’s a little magic box of a movie.

White Heat (1949) explosively completes the cycle of gangster films at just the point where it blends with film noir.  Cagney returns to complete his classic trilogy of energetically crazy bad guys with family issues, here an Oedipal relationship gone wild, with Ma the only real person in his life.  Raoul Walsh returns with his hurtling direction.  The story mingles the old and the new, the high and the low, characters from Greek tragedy and a big robbery based on the Trojan horse, newfangled police technology like tracking by radio transmitter, and a big ending that is totally metaphoric in a realistic modern setting.  And yet the film is like the last big blow-up of a genre, baroque to the point of unbelievability.  Well done in every particular, it still seems essentially divorced from reality into artifice.  It would take The Godfather to revive the form and infuse it with a convincing new reality.

The Big Clock (1947) is not a classic in my book, but an interesting variant on film noir.  Ray Milland is editor of a true crime magazine in the publishing empire of Charles Laughton, obviously premised on Henry Luce and Time-Life.  Laughton offers an amusingly mannered portrait of a business tyrant, who drives Milland out of his job and into association with the tycoon’s disenchanted mistress.  Skullduggery ensues.  The title references the signature element of the company’s highly stylized building, and indeed set design is one of the strengths of the film.  So is the acting in its own overwrought way, but John Farrow’s direction is nothing special and the story is full of holes.  Perhaps toddler Mia was on the set with her father and her mother Maureen O’Sullivan, who plays Milland’s wife.  Anyway, this film is child’s play, however dark.

Susan Slept Here (1954) is child’s play of a different candy-colored sort, with director Frank Tashlin on his way from cartoons to Jerry Lewis.  This would not have caught my attention if not for a recent boxed feature in the New Yorker film listings, but when it turned up on TCM I recorded it.  I rather enjoyed revisiting the Technicolor world of Fifties romantic comedy, but classic this is not, though it is a stylish take on the “bachelor and bobbysoxer” theme, which has a lot of fun with sexual innuendo between a middle-aged man and a teenage girl, in this case Dick Powell closing out his career and Debbie Reynolds near the start of hers.

For two slots in a film series that I’ll offer at the Clark next summer, called “PraiseSong: African-American Music in the Movies,” I watched and decided between two pairs of would-be classics.  Cabin in the Sky (1943) was the first all-black musical on screen, brought from the stage by Vincente Minnelli in his first film directing job.  Stereotypes abound, starting with “Rochester” as the male lead, but some authentic spirit is maintained, with Ethel Waters as the devoted wife for whom “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe,” and Lena Horne as the sultry songstress who leads Joe astray with “Honey in the Honeycomb,” while emissaries from heaven and hell strive for his soul.  There are also walk-ons by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, so the film certainly represents its period.  Carmen Jones (1954) I ruled out, despite its widescreen Technicolor direction by Otto Preminger, and a magnetic performance by Dorothy Dandridge, because it was too much an operatic construct by Oscar Hammerstein.  The transposition of Bizet’s opera to the African-American South works well enough, but why star Dandridge and Harry Belafonte and not let them sing in their own voices, as Pearl Bailey does get to do?

It was a much closer call between Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988), each of which does justice to the bebop jazz saxophonist at its center, centered on exceptional performances by Dexter Gordon as a fictional amalgam of Lester Young and Bud Powell, and Forest Whittaker as Charlie Parker.  Both films totally respect the music and deserve to be considered classic, if not without flaw.  Bird was darker, both psychologically and visually, and very long, but more homegrown, without the Parisian setting that is a bit of a distraction from my theme.

After watching Five Easy Pieces with the film club, I had the inclination to watch another bit of vintage Jack Nicholson, in The Last Detail (1973), which proved less satisfying.  Hal Ashby’s direction is slipshod in my estimation, but Jack as petty officer “Bad Ass” Buddusky, and Randy Quaid as the young railroaded sailor being escorted from Newport to prison in New Hampshire, carry the film through its stops along the road, in Washington, New York and Boston, whether in Aquarian enclave or whorehouse.  There’s some sense of the period, but little of timeless significance.

Getting down to the bottom of the barrel, I’ve always confused Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) with Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant – which really is a classic -- as Aussie war films, but it turns out I’d never seen this one, which left me rather cold, though it was startling to see Mel Gibson so young.  This seemed too obvious an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Chariots of Fire, and wandered to its preordained battlefield conclusion, which ought to have been horrific but seemed aestheticized.

Another early Jack Nicholson, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) was, however, the absolute pits.  I might have thought that it was merely my inattentiveness that made it seem so bad, but my two viewing companions shared my befuddled exasperation with this portentous nonsense.  So later, for laughs, I had to read them the proclamation by David Thomson (whom I generally find illuminating) that this is “one of the greatest films ever made.”  Not by me, it isn’t.  I’ve never been an Antonioni acolyte, and even less as the years go by, so this one was completely lost on me.

The Kids Are All Right

It would be easy to imagine Lisa Chodolenko’s latest film as intolerable with another cast, but with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Mia Waskowska, it’s a pleasure to watch.  Compared to another recent film with a number of similarities -- Nicole Holocener’s Please Give -- I buck the critical consensus and much prefer NYC over LA in the skewering of liberal pretension and self-delusion.  Nor did I find this as surprisingly good as Chodolenko’s previous SoCal effort, Laurel Canyon.  Still, Annette is astounding and Julianne game as a lesbian couple, whose teenage children seek out their sperm donor father, in the hunky, easy-going person of Ruffalo.  While the actors take the family sitcom beyond its normal limits into realms of truth, the film remains unrealistically insular, too much a design spread in a lifestyle magazine.  If you damp down your expectations, though, this film delivers a fair measure of satisfaction.  (2010, MC-86)  

Restrepo and other docs

Among the hardest to watch but most essential films of the past year was the you-are-there Afghan war documentary Restrepo (2010, MC-85).  Sebastian Junger (who also wrote the companion book, War) and Tim Hetherington accompany a small band of soldiers on a 14-month deployment on a remote mountain top in Afghanistan, the furthest tip of the spear of American power.  The troops build Outpost Restrepo, named for the devil-may-care medic who was among the first casualties of their unit, and then go out into the surrounding valleys, ancient and alien, to win hearts and minds, while being continuously shot at by rarely-seen attackers.  The viewer shares the hard duty intimately, and puts a human face on the abstraction of boots on the ground.  You participate in the boredom of prolonged isolation, mixed with the insane adrenaline rush of being under fire and letting loose with 900 rounds from your M-50.  The small cameras go into battle alongside the soldiers, and also show the daily life of young men together, in a way that verges on the homoerotic and recalls Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.  The film doesn’t tell you how to think about the American presence in Afghanistan, but gives you plenty of grist for the mill of your own thinking.  And the deleted scenes and extended interviews on the DVD supply plenty more, and should not be missed.

I expected more than I got from Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, MC-85), the “prankumentary” by and/or about the famous British street artist Banksy.  Frankly I didn’t get the joke.  The collateral presence of Shepard Fairey makes for an obvious comparison with Beautiful Losers, another film about the graffiti aesthetic, which I found more satisfying.  Controversy still rages over whether this Banksy film is a doc or a con, a setup or a brilliantly witty reversal, in which the filmmaker becomes the subject and vice versa.  To me it’s all much ado about nothing.

On the other hand, I had no expectations for Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2010, MC-73) and did not bother to record its “American Masters” presentation on PBS, but I happened to turn on the TV in the middle of its broadcast and was soon engrossed, so I recorded a rerun and watched it from the beginning.  Peter Raymond and Michele Hozer’s documentary takes a more traditional approach to the piano prodigy than 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (which I will now have to watch again), but with plenty of archival footage and subsequent interviews, it offers a compelling portrait of a strange but engaging genius.

So pleased with Every Little Step, I was moved to watch other terpsichorean documentaries.  The Last Dance (2002, MC-66) is about a collaboration between Pilobolus Dance Theater and Maurice Sendak, an unlikely combination that follows a fascinating joint process of creation.  Sendak is of course a compelling character in his own right (see Tell Them Anything You Want – no, I mean it, you really should see the documentary portrait made by Spike Jonze at the same time he directed the feature adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are), and Pilobolus is an eye-opening improvisational dance group that lasted for more than thirty years as the original dancers became directors and recruited a new troupe of exceptionally lithe and inventive dancers.  Sometime tense, sometimes ecstatic, the collaboration is enthralling to watch, though the concluding passages from the finished piece seemed draggy by comparison.  Sendak is determined to make a piece about the experience of children in the Holocaust, while at least one of the Pilobolus directors wants to make the dance simply about movement.  But through the raw material of the astounding flexibility of the dancers’ bodies, they reach some sort of accord in Mirra Bank’s effective film.

Afterthoughts

Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2010, MC-65) was an afterthought with critics and audiences, but I found it among the better, if not the best, films of the year.  The selkie-based story is reminiscent of John Sayles’ Secret of Roan Inish, though it takes off in a different direction.  The beauty of the Irish seacoast as filmed by Christopher Doyle is almost a sufficient recommendation, but Colin Farrell is excellent in his own right as the fisherman who happens to pull up in his nets a mysterious young woman.  She’s played by Alicja Bachleda, Farrell’s squeeze at the time, and the chemistry between them is palpable.  He’s trying to cope with a history of alcoholism and a young daughter in a motorized wheelchair; she’s on the run from – what?  A nice edge of mystery is maintained, but the thriller denouement seems somewhat misplaced in what is actually an effective character study of a few people and a place.

After referencing it in a review of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I decided to take another look at Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and confirmed the delights of its passage through downtown in the dead of night.  It was really Griffin Dunne’s project, and he is charming as the horny uptown computer specialist, who is lured downtown by the enticements of Rosanna Arquette, only to run through a nightmarish maze of crazy women, on a long night’s journey back to day.  As Marty relates in an interview on the DVD, his beloved long-term project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen through, and out of that disappointment this quick and dirty production reawakened his appetite for making films.  Its edgy off-kilter humor recalls but does not quite come up to The King of Comedy.

After being so impressed with Winter’s Bone, I looked into Debra Granik’s first feature, Down to the Bone (2005, MC-76), and it proved promising but less than fully satisfying.  Vera Farmiga performs well in the central role, of a recovering junkie trying to normalize her life as single mom supermarket checkout clerk in upstate New York.  Apparently the film grew out of a longtime documentary project, and the milieu is well described (how many films are set in a Price Chopper?), but the story seems familiar and unsurprising, with a whiff of nostalgia for the mud.  You get a sense of slumming that you don’t in Winter’s Bone, or for another example, Wendy and Lucy.

Cedric Klapisch strikes me as a middling sort of director, hardly an auteur, but when I saw his Paris (2009, MC-68) showing on Sundance and noticed Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini starring, I decided to record it, and eventually got around to watching in bits and pieces over several nights, not the ideal way to take in a film but not inappropriate for the fragmented style of this Altmanesque ensemble of intersecting types.  Juliette and Fabrice were indeed the best things in the film, she a single mother of three caring for a sick brother, and he a distinguished history professor turned tv-documentary host, who falls for one of his students.  A swirl of characters surrounds them in ways that did not really connect for me, though I never minded watching.