Death of child or parent

Rabbit Hole.  (2010, MC-76)  The best thing I can say about John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of David Lindsay-Abair’s Pulitzer-winning play is that I had no sense of its being a filmed stage piece.  Carefully skirting grief-porn and restraining the wildness of his Hedwig and the Angry Inch persona, Mitchell relies on his actors to reveal emotion through indirection rather than bludgeoning, and leavens the proceedings with unexpected wit.  Aaron Eckhart and especially Nicole Kidman are excellent as a couple whose 4-year-old son was struck and killed by a car eight months before, each flailing to find the coping strategy that will work for him or her, but maybe not for them.  Diane Wiest as Kidman’s mother leads an effective supporting cast.  At a swift 92 minutes, the film does not wallow or browbeat, and while the setting lacks a tangible sense of reality (even in a grocery store aisle), the actors unfold the truth of their characters’ emotions and personalities.  Not exactly a film to lift one’s spirits, it does not punish the viewer but rewards attention.

The Father of My Children.  (2010, MC-76)  It’s no spoiler to say that at midpoint of this film, the father dies and the children grieve, three young daughters, each in her own way, and their mother in hers.  Mia Hansen-Love tells this story with such intimacy that you suspect it happened to her, and the father does turn out to be based on a well-known French film producer.  In the first half of the film his small independent operation comes under increasing pressure from all sides, as he suavely drives around while juggling two cellphones, to spend rushed but quality time with the delightful females of his family.  In the second half his family tries to pick up the pieces of his ruined life, in a film that gives equal weight to joy and sorrow, love and mortality.  It’s lively rather than deathly, and a sleeper on my best of the year list.

More classics or not?

Pardon me while I return for the nonce to my original purpose in writing this filmlog, started on 1-1-00 and put online five years later.  Namely, to keep track of what I’ve been watching and my immediate off-hand evaluation, to forestall the flaws of memory.  So lately I’ve seen or re-seen a lot of films I don’t feel moved to “review” in any meaningful sense, but merely to register my reaction.

First off, in my “Drawn to Portraits” film series at the Clark, Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) lived up to its billing as noir classic though I was struck most by its comic elements, which made me think of The Big Sleep, though Gene Tierney is no Bacall and Dana Andrews hardly a Bogart.  Portrait of Jennie (1948) delivered equally, in the vein of romantic fantasy, with sophisticated visuals and great location shooting in NYC by director William Dieterle, and well-played leads by Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, lovingly produced by her husband, David O. Selznick.  Only Vertigo failed to meet its overblown expectations – what are you thinking of, Sight & Sound critics poll, to vote this second only to Citizen Kane as the best film of all time?  I could name a half-dozen Hitchcocks I think are better (first off – Strangers on a Train).

It was another critics poll -- this for best of past decade -- that drove me to give their #2 choice another chance, in this case David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and I came away equally unconvinced.  I still don’t get it, though the film does showcase Naomi Watts to advantage.  Despite re-viewing, the film continues to make little sense for me, and any atmospheric impression it made quickly evaporated.

Another second look confirmed another less than enthusiastic response.  Naked (1993) remains a strong but unpleasant experience.  I am usually a big fan of Mike Leigh’s kitchen sink dramas, but though David Thewlis is powerful here as a blow-in from Yorkshire to London, where he crashes with an old girlfriend, while abusing her and her roommate and any other woman who happens by, this does not rank with my favorites.  His tirades are compelling in a bitter, bilious, spittle-spewing way, but for me the misogyny was not redeemed by any empathy-extending understanding of the character.  

Pure happenstance led me to re-viewing Wise Blood, John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of the Flannery O’Connor novel, but I recall from long ago a similar reaction of exhilaration and letdown.  Brad Dourif is perfectly squirrelly as Hazel Motes, a GI who returns to the southern town of his hellfire upbringing, and rebels against the Jesus-soaked atmosphere by preaching fanatically the “Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ.”  It’s extremely pungent, but in the end I find the story, like O’Connor herself, too extreme and arbitrary.  But there is a reek of gothic reality and wicked satire along the way.

Also caught on TCM was Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1950), Albert Lewin’s surprisingly literate romantic melodrama set in a technicolor Spanish village, where American émigré songstress Ava Gardner captivates all the men and is in turn captivated by James Mason, the mysterious sailor whose identity is given away in the title.  The movie aspires to myth in a manner that is lush but not totally laughable.

The same might be said of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), which I watched because I was hoping to show a series of Cleopatra films at the Clark, in conjunction with an appearance by bestselling biographer Stacy Schiff, but that fell through.  This fairly lavish production of the G.B. Shaw play features Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh to good effect, but ultimately doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of the spectacle, a problem that may be characteristic of films about the Queen of the Nile.

Mildred Pierce (1945) I watched again to compare Joan Crawford’s performance with Kate Winslet’s, also good but also lost in an unengaging story.  Michael Curtiz’s version adds a murder to spice things up, but the design and the acting, and the implicit social commentary on woman’s lot, are not enough to involve me with a bunch of not-so-interesting characters.  Compare Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas for a more compelling movie about a mother sacrificing all for an ungrateful daughter.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987) was another film I was willing to give a second chance, and it was no hardship to watch Daniel Day Lewis and Juliet Binoche, and director Philip Kaufman’s clever insertion of them into newsreel footage of the Prague Spring uprising, but it does go on and on, the characters remain opaque to me, and I eventually fast forwarded to the end.  Lena Olin, however, caught my eye, so I went back to another film I remember liking more, Enemies, a Love Story (1989).  Paul Mazursky’s adaptation of an Isaac B. Singer novel tells of a Holocaust survivor who finds himself in a vividly-realized 1949 New York, with “wives” in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx.  One is Lena Olin, as electrifying as I remembered, and another is Anjelica Huston, wry and witty with deep submerged pain.  To me there were a few key gaps in motivation and narrative, but the acting and atmosphere carried the day, though I found it hard to forgive Ron Silver in the central role for the actor’s subsequent emergence as a right-wing apologist.

One last note on what’s classic and what’s not:  A while back I made an effort to confront the inflated reputation of Nicholas Ray, an especial favorite of my favorite director, Francois Truffaut.  They Live by Night (1948) got me interested, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell extremely affecting as two hardscrabble kids in love and on the run, in a film that effectively combines social realism and doomed romanticism.  So then I watched On Dangerous Ground (1951), and bought in somewhat to its reputation as a noir classic, intrigued by Robert Ryan as the rough-edged cop and Ida Lupino as the blind woman he investigates and falls for, though I still found something slipshod and unconvincing in Ray’s direction.  Then I went back to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and found the trio of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo iconic but their story once again unconvincing.  Johnny Guitar (1954) is indeed an eye-popping curiosity, a luridly-colored Western with a monumental Joan Crawford as the whore-turned-businesswoman, and Sterling Hayden as the gunslinging title character who wants to protect her against the raging jealousy of Mercedes Cambridge and her pack of vigilantes.  But again I do not see the mythic Freudian depths that some choose to see in Ray’s work.  And in King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days to Peking (1962), I see none of the intimate reality that Ray is purported to bring to his standard epics.  I remember being impressed by the latter as a youth, but Charlton Heston is by now another actor I cannot abide because of his off-screen activities and on-screen impassivity.  I understand that Nick Ray himself is a Bigger Than Life (1956) character in film history, but his films stubbornly do not make much of an impression on me.  Someday I’ll give the highly-esteemed In a Lonely Place (1950) another chance, and catch up with a couple of other Ray films on TCM, but I don’t imagine I’ll come over to Nick in time.

Catching up with film

Once I fall out of the habit of writing about films the day after I see them, they begin to back up, and now I’m stunned to see that I haven’t posted here in more than a month.  So I begin a process of catching up, starting with recent films, now that I have only two more must-sees due on dvd before I close the book on 2010 releases and make my official picks for best of the year.  Between now and then I will also catch up with recommended tv series, documentaries, and another round of “Classic or not?”  I will also have further word on upcoming film series at the Clark, so please keep coming back to Cinema Salon, even though I haven’t given you much to see lately.

White Material.  (2010, MC-81)  Claire Denis’ latest earned the bronze medal, voted third-best of 2010 in Film Comment poll, but strikes me as a film I would have to see again to settle on an opinion about -- but which I have no desire to see again.  As a director, Denis is a refined taste whose films I sometimes get (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and sometimes don’t (The Intruder, this film).  Here she returns to themes of her upbringing in Africa (as in Chocolat), with French settlers driven out in a civil war waged by child soldiers led by a charismatic and progressive young officer.  The ever-interesting Isabelle Huppert, whitest of the white, alien to the dark continent, has only one thought, to save her coffee plantation and its current crop, but forces are unleashed that will consume everything around her within the two days the film covers, in its own roundabout way.  The treatment is elliptical and enigmatic, but the sense of encircling menace is persuasive.  The shock ending adds to, rather than resolves, the puzzlement.

Mother.  (2010, MC-79)  Bong Joon-ho’s latest came in 11^th in that same critics poll (8^th in indieWire).  After The Host and Memories of Murder, the young South Korean is definitely one of the flavors of the month in world cinema, putting his personal stamp on various genres, following that wry creature-feature and offbeat police procedural with this “wrong man” mystery widely described as Hitchcockian, though Bong is even weirder than that chubby old pervert.  When not strange and fascinating, he can be flat-footed as well as deadpan, but this film is made by the performance of Kim Hye-ja as the mother determined to exonerate her dim-bulb grown son, who is accused of murdering a schoolgirl.  The twists of the story sometimes elicit a “Huh, what?” response, but in the end it all hangs together around that central performance.

Two favorite directors I included in my “10 Under 50” film series at the Clark some years back had recent releases that attracted almost no attention, but with which I finally caught up based on the talent involved.

Michael Winterbottom’s Summer in Genoa (known as Genova (MRQE-64) when released in Britain in 2008) is just out on US dvd, probably predicated on Colin Firth’s recent anointing as Best Actor.  He’s good here as the father to two girls, probably 16 and 10, who were with their mother when she was killed in a car accident.  Old college friend Catherine Keener gets him a teaching position in Italy and he feels that getting far away is the best way for the girls and him to cope.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  The film casts a real Don’t Look Now vibe over the narrow alleyways of the medieval city, which are penetrated by Winterbottom’s travel-light style of filmmaking.  With a compelling mix of beauty and risk, the film is flawed mainly by a conclusion that makes the whole thing seem like all wind-up and no pitch.

Similarly ominous but unresolved is Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth (2009, MC-51), which also went nowhere despite the presence of two compelling performers in Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal. They play a well-to-do New York couple who share a fabulous loft apartment with their young daughter and her Filipina nanny.  She’s an emergency room doctor on the night shift, and he’s a computer game designer off to Asia to sign a big contract, so as much as they love their daughter, the girl’s primary relationship is with the lovely nanny, who has left her own two boys back on the islands in order to earn a better life for them in this globalized but fractured world.  Each character in the film suffers in isolation from the others, despite connection by cellphone and distant affection.  Grim and moody to match the maker’s name, with lovely images and haunting music, this film has much to recommend it, but finally fails to satisfy.  The world may be a rigged game, but this film seems a bit rigged as well.

Here are two more films I found more interesting than many did, given a certain affinity going in:

Aaron Katz’s Quiet City (2007, MRQE) is a “mumblecore” enactment of twenty-somethings drifting through the Brooklyn scene.  Having once been a twenty-something drifting through Brooklyn, I was willing to expend attention on a newer version of same.  As is characteristic of this genre, the girl is attractive but not conventionally so, and the guy is a shlub.  Each shot -- some of them lovely -- is held too long, as if trying to protract the proceedings to feature length.  The film would love to be another Before Sunrise, but falls in the middle of the mumblecore pack, among whom only Andrew Bujalski so far emerges as a talent to watch. 

Marco Amenta’s The Sicilian Girl (2010, MC-48) I got into initially for its striking images of the island of my forefathers.  Then I was held by the performance of Veronica D'Agostino as the feisty teenage girl who decides to revenge the deaths of her father and brother by informing on the Mafia, and goes into ineffective witness protection in Rome.  The story follows, perhaps too faithfully, that of a real young woman about whom the director has already made a documentary, and never really goes as deep as you hope it might.    

Catching up with TV

Like Metacritic, I offer a hearty endorsement to Downton Abbey (2011, MC-92), which I did not see when it was broadcast on PBS Masterpiece Theater last winter, but caught up with on dvd (streaming video also available from Netflix).  I simply found it outrageously entertaining, mixing all the pleasures of British heritage productions with a winking wit that managed to collect a host of old clichés into a postmodern soap opera delight.  The seven episodes follow the life of the title character, a massive old pile sure to impress, from the sinking of the Titanic to the start of World War I, brilliantly sketching in the lives of a score of characters upstairs and down.  I don’t know when I have seen a better ensemble of actors, every last one making the most of his or her minutes on screen.  Julian Fellowes wrote Gosford Park and here combines that with Remains of the Day and many a BBC production, but comes up with something that seems totally fresh.  The subsequent revival of Upstairs, Downstairs seemed pallid by comparison.

I hope you are taking in the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights (MC-82), now showing on NBC but already out on dvd, which I previously watched on DirecTV last fall.  If not, you really ought to start with the first season and watch the whole series.  It definitely ranks in my Top 10 of all time.  Yes, it’s nominally about high school football in Texas, but it offers one of the great continuing portraits of a marriage in the coach and his wife, superbly played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, to go with a believable and involving group portrait of a community, intelligent about currents of race and sex and economic reality.  Lots of cute chicks and studs too.  Really, give it a try, it will surprise you.  Though it wandered from its core inspiration into melodrama in the second season, the show reinvented itself in subsequent seasons and ended its five-season run on a perfect series of notes.

In that, it couldn’t be more different from Big Love (MC-85 -- you've got to be kidding!), which utterly fizzled in its finale, spinning further and further into absurdity.  As with another recent HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce (MC-69), at the end I was not just disappointed but wanted back all the time and attention I had invested to that point.  But just when I was thinking about canceling my HBO subscription, the second season of Treme (MC-84) began.  To me, David Simon can do no wrong, with The Wire my all-time favorite tv series, and Generation Kill ranking pretty high too.  This multifaceted look at the music and culture of New Orleans as it tries to come back after Katrina may lack narrative drive, but steeps the viewer in a creative gumbo of diverse characters.  Again the acting is strong across the board, carrying multiple storylines forward in a way that makes one care about each and every one (though Lucia Micarelli most of all).  And for somebody who can’t get enough of Bunk and Lester, it’s great to see Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters again.  And Kim Dickens coming over from FNL, etc. etc.

I’m a latecomer to Men of a Certain Age (MC-86) on TNT, but after my interest was piqued by one new episode, I went back and caught up with the first season on dvd, and am currently watching reruns of the second in preparation for its resumption with new episodes on June 1^st.  I was definitely not among the Everyone who Loves Raymond, so I was not alert to Ray Romano’s new show, but now I have to say that at least I like him.  And even more I like Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula as the guys with whom he hikes, eats lunch, shoots the shit, and negotiates the vicissitudes of midlife.  More affectionate and truthful satire than sitcom, this show presents believably rounded characters in characteristically believable situations of work and family.  Try it, and if you’re at all like me, you will find a pleasant surprise.

Another new show I was slow to see, but now look forward to more of, is The Big C (MC-66), Showtime’s attempt to match the success of Weeds, a show I sampled but decidedly did not get hooked on.  The new series stars Laura Linney, however, and I’ve been half in love with her since You Can Count on Me, so I was inclined to give it a try when I had the opportunity, despite not being drawn by the idea of a comedy about cancer.  And Ms. Linney is indeed a delight, but the whole show is wittier and sharper than I expected, definitely worth catching.