Hugo

At first glance it seems a real departure for Martin Scorsese to adapt an award-winning children’s book in 3-D, a long way from Taxi Driver or Goodfellas.  But from the very first shot, Hugo (2011, MC-83, NFX) establishes itself in the intimate line of the master’s work – it’s Scorsese all over.  We plummet from an aerial view of Paris around 1930 into the Montparnasse train station, zip along the crowded platform between trains, and then sweep up to a large clock and through it, to an extreme close-up of the eyes of a boy looking out.  Then we race with him through the walls and towers of the old building, as he goes about his job of winding all the clocks, spies on the denizens of the station, steals food and other necessaries, and avoids the clutches of the station inspector.  It’s all enormously exhilarating, especially in 3-D.  Then we settle into the story, which even as an adaptation has all the hallmarks of Scorsese’s personal history and obsessions – the young boy on the inside looking out, the love for film history and film preservation, the mechanical magic of movies.  The boy is an orphan whose one relic of his clockmaker father is an automaton found in a museum attic, and his quest is restoring it to working order in order to receive a message from his dead father.  To do so, he steals parts from a toy store in the station, run by a grumpy old man, who turns out to be none other than film pioneer Georges Méliès.  The plot neatly dovetails with his genuine biography, while remaining an effective children’s adventure story.  Asa Butterfield is good as Hugo, but I was less thrilled by Ben Kingsley as Méliès, and by his granddaughter who teams up with Hugo, somehow the 3-D just accentuated the obviousness of their performances.  Sacha Baron Cohen as the station inspector and Helen McGrory as Mrs. Méliès lead a solid supporting cast.  But the film as a whole is a kinetic wonder, which retains a heart of true feeling. 

Getting the trick of Malick

Vats of ink (or pixels) have been spilled in pontificating, pro and con, on maverick filmmaker Terrence Malick’s latest opus, The Tree of Life (2011, MC-85, NFX).  Though most critic polls rank it #1 for the year, there have been some vociferous naysayers, and moviegoers demanding their money back.  My expectations -- based on previous Malick films,all of which I’ve re-watched in the past few months, and widespread critical raptures -- were so high that I was primed for disappointment if I came out of the first viewing anything less than transfigured. 

It turned out pretty close, partly because I was so enraptured with the Clark’s newfound projection and sound capacity, installed for live opera in HD and now available for my screenings, which Tree of Life exploited to maximum advantage.  Now that I’ve watched the film again on a smaller screen, I feel ready to have my own say on the subject.

I am among those who are thrilled by Malick’s inscriptions on the cave wall, his philosophical essays in the language of cinema.  I am happy to read his thoughts through his images, forsaking conventional narrative but ransacking nature, personal experience, and film history for beauty and meaning.  His interrogative -- or slantwise -- voiceover narrations (or overheard voices) are an annoyance to some, but a provocative polyphony to me.  I find him highly intelligible and expressive of deep personal feelings, sensations, and memories.  Others may find his puzzles cold and merely pretty, but to me they are profoundly moving pictures.

Nobody thinks that Malick’s films are just okay.  Either you are entranced, or you consider his work, whatever its merits, an affront against cinematic storytelling.  But even among those who are susceptible to his magic, argument persists over whether this film or that film is a masterpiece, a flawed masterpiece, or just a piece of crap.

Nearly everyone is on board with Badlands (1973, NFX), partly because the storyline is so familiar from other films and TV -- a couple of killer kids on the run -- that you can overlook how strange the approach to that story is.  And then there are Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek at the beginning of stellar careers, just exuding a fresh camera-capturing allure.  That Sheen is a dead ringer for James Dean is no small part of his character Kit, as he tries to make himself a celebrity by shooting his way across the desolate West, with teenage doll Sissy providing the drugstore-magazine narration.  Her lack of meaningful affect, and the eye-popping expanse of Western landscapes, situate the true-crime violence in art-house territory, so everybody gets what they are looking for.  An impressive debut, but not my favorite of Malick’s films.

Days of Heaven (1978, NFX), however, is close.  I’ve found three different occasions to show it in Clark film series.  I think it’s a monumental achievement in a mere 94 minutes.  Though it again relies on a familiar story -- of two lovers conspiring against her husband -- some people find the plot thin, but I find it elemental, just one of the agents in a dense compound.  Some find the actors (Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard) expressionless, but I find their archetypal masks expressive portraits in a wider landscape.  Some find the young girl’s narration tacked on, but I find it a form of demotic philosophy (“There never were a perfect person.”), which is another strong element making the whole combust.  But the visuals, oh my god, the visuals – with the grandeur of the West Texas grasslands caught at magic hour, just glowing with transcendence, and with the up-close details of indifferent but exquisite nature!  Nestor Almendros, cameraman for Truffaut and Rohmer, won the Oscar for cinematography.  I love the sheer sweep of the story, set in 1917, from Chicago ironworks, to amber waves of grain on the prairie, to the river of no escape, and finally the troop trains departing for World War I.  Appropriate to the era, it is almost a silent movie.  When I showed it at the Clark last summer, there was a problem with the speaker set-up and it took me ten minutes to realize that the dialogue track was missing.

Returning after two decades of reclusive disappearance, Malick adapted a James Jones novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line (1998, NFX).  Despite his characteristically aestheticized approach, this turns out to be a highly visceral war movie, with about as clear a picture of a military operation as I’ve ever seen on film.  The approach to battle of each character is individuated, as are the reactions of the captured Japanese at the end of the action.  But the narration is totally de-inviduated, it’s never really clear who is speaking, and the voice frequently does not match the character in the picture.  Like a patchwork quilt of sound, it is meant to express the collective voice of men in combat, but it’s too dense and undifferentiated.  Nonetheless the action sequences are amazingly effective, even when they focus on the tall waving grasses into which the soldiers plunge, just as the three brothers in Tree of Life do, and other signature shots of sublime nature indifferent to man’s scurrying about.  The cast is a lengthy who’s who of acting talent, but none gets to stand out in the ensemble.  Malick is hard on his actors in a variety of ways -- delivering on the morning of the shoot not written dialogue but questions for the character to address, and then in the end leaving most of the performance on the cutting room floor, and even cutting voice free from image -- but they still flock to work with him.  In the end, however, this is the Malick film that might be too much of a good thing.

The one I can’t get enough of is The New World (2005, NFX).  That was one of the first Blu-Ray discs I got to project in full high-def at the Clark, and it had an extended cut of almost three hours, which for me did not drag a minute too long.  I simply love this movie, and if I were still assigning numerical grades to films, this would be a rare *10*.  The sense of discovery, of being transported from one world into another, the strangeness, the disorientation, the wonder – all are made palpable in this historical vision of the clash of civilizations in the wilderness.  The Pocahantas story is familiar, but never so compelling as here, in the enchanting performance of Q’Orianka Kilcher.  Colin Farrell neatly demythologizes Capt. John Smith.  The rest of the acting (much of which is close to dance) is solid, and the set design meticulously real, but the most artful of artisans is cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot Tree of Life.  Much of the narration is meant to be fleetingly intelligible, since a key theme of the film is the difficulty of translation, through words or through the body, English to Indian, Indian to England.  So for me this remains the most rapturously perfect, the transcendent Malick film.

The Tree of Life might be my choice for best film of 2011, but is only middle of the pack among Malick’s films as far as I’m concerned.  Perhaps illogically, a comparison stuck in my mind.  Like a Jackson Pollack painting, this celestial Tree is simultaneously cosmic and deeply, deeply personal.  I was not swept away by the scenes of Sean Penn as the adult Jack O’Brien, an architect among the glassy spires of a modern city (I assume Houston), mourning the long-ago death of his brother and the childhood they shared in 1950s Waco.  But situating a single family’s life in the whole span of existence from the big bang to the big get-together on the further shore, I buy into.  And the sensuous portrayal of a 50s boyhood is so close to the bone, so profoundly memorious, that I watched the film in ecstasies of retrospective reverie.  The three brothers are all convincingly depicted, while Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are superlative as the parents.  Even people who have no patience at all for Malick’s more portentous fusions of evolution and spiritual teleology, acknowledge the touching immediacy of the growing-up scenes.  I was more tolerant than some of the metaphoric conclusion, when all the characters are milling around on the beach, because I saw it less as an obviously religious consolation and more as an aesthetic one, a cinematic mash-up of Fellini’s 8½ and Bergman’s Persona, a pleasant evocation of two of the very best films ever.  Overall, I find The Tree of Life luminous and numinous, offering a sensory apprehension of cosmic connection.

I note that this long-growing Tree seems to have resolved and released something in Malick, so that after finishing five films in forty years, he has almost that many now in various stages of production.  I salute him for making his own thoughts and feelings so watchable, and look forward avidly to watching more.

Go see a doc

To me documentary is the essence of film art.  Even with feature films, I appreciate as they aspire to the condition of documentary, and depreciate as they depart into fabulation, as I call the polar opposite -- Lumière vs. Méliès, actuality vs. theater, from the very beginning of film to this day.  Here are some recent documentaries that support my case for aesthetic merit.

It’s safe to assert that you have never seen anything like The Arbor (2011, MC-88, NFX).  Don’t be fooled by the pastoral title, this is tough stuff.  The Arbor is a street in a council estate (public housing project) in the rough Yorkshire city of Bradford.  Clio Barnard’s artful documentary follows the lives of Andrea Dunbar -- who won a playwriting contest at 15, had several plays produced in London, one adapted into a movie, and died in a pub restroom at the age of 29 – and her three children, by three different fathers, who each have a different response to a childhood of abuse and neglect.  With levels of artifice and reality in constant flux, the film combines oddly effective lip-synching to actual audio recordings of the subjects by actors in stage-like environments, along with playing out scenes from Dunbar’s play, The Arbor, literally on the eponymous street, and even with footage from a 1989 television documentary about her.  If like me you have no familiarity with Dunbar, it will take you a while to figure out what the story is about, until it settles on Dunbar’s grown-up half-Pakistani daughter, mesmerizingly portrayed by Manjinder Virk, who recapitulates her mother’s descent in a frightening collusion of flawed nature and nurture, familial substance abuse and hardscrabble environment.  While highly aestheticized, this unflinching documentary is an eye-opener about the culture of poverty, to slot with Ken Loach or Mike Leigh at their grimmest.

Project Nim (2011, MC-83, NFX) investigates the strange habits of higher primates, especially the subspecies of academics and hippies.  And oh yes, there’s a chimpanzee involved too.  Like a slicker Errol Morris or Werner Herzog, director James Marsh (Oscar winner for Man on Wire) veers from his ostensible subject into the psyches of the strange characters who people his films.  The film tells the life story of Nim Chimpsky, who was kidnapped from his mother back in the 70s and raised by an assortment of variously-motivated humans to learn sign language, and whose life takes on the ups and downs, twists and turns, changes of fortune of a Dickensian hero.  The film plays as a human comedy but a simian tragedy, so each viewer will have his or her own particular mix of amusement and outrage.  Re-enactments and insistent musical cues keep the story moving along, with an illuminating back and forth between archival footage and retrospective interviews, for a rich stew of a story.

Patricio Guzmán makes films that strive obsessively to combat Chile’s amnesia about its recent history, the American-sponsored 1973 coup against Allende that led to Pinochet’s military dictatorship.  In Nostalgia for the Light (2011, MC-85, NFX), he goes to the Atacama Desert, the highest and driest place on earth, perfect for astronomical observatories, as well as preservation of corpses.  Passages of this film are beautifully reminiscent of the cosmic raptures of Tree of Life, though it wasn’t clear to me which were genuine telescopic images and which were enhanced special effects.  Astronomers and archaeologists wax philosophical on the meaning of time, of the signs of the past in the present.  Then Guzmán pivots to the women who still search the desert for the bodies of their “disappeared” loved ones, since the Atacama was also the site of a Pinochet concentration camp.  His narration is awfully insistent upon the parallels, but this is still an eye-opening film.  The DVD includes a number of other short films that amplify and contextualize his impassioned argument about historical memory.

Among the few things I miss since canceling satellite tv service a few months ago are the documentaries on PBS and HBO, but I still manage to catch up with the important films one way or another.  Two that I just checked off my watch list, but do not necessarily urge you to watch are Eames: The Architect and the Painter (2011, MC-63, NFX) and Paradise Lost 3 (2012, MC-85, NFX). 

The former is a moderately interesting but gossipy look at the marriage and creative partnership between Charles and Ray Eames, which is emblematic of a number of aesthetic and gender issues, and crucial to the whole story of postwar American design, but you’d be better off watching their own films, such as Powers of Ten and The World of Franklin and Jefferson, preferably while sitting in one of their chairs. 

The latter completes the story of the “West Memphis 3.” In two previous films, accomplished documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky detailed the process by which three heavy-metal Goth teens were convicted of the “satanic” murders of three young boys.  Partly due to the exposure of questionable evidence and legal procedures in the first two films, the three were recently released after nearly two decades in prison, by the judicial face-saving bargain of pleading guilty (while still protesting their innocence) and being released after time served.  If you’ve seen the first two films, then you’ll appreciate the closure.  If you haven’t, and you can stand the grisly details of both the crime and the punishment, the trilogy is worth looking into.

New directors of 2011

Margin Call  (2011, MC-76, NFX) was quite good, especially as a showcase for actors, but I guess I was expecting too much from it, so J.C. Chandor’s debut film left me with a slight sense of disappointment.  As an inside view of the financial meltdown of 2008, this film does not supersede either Too Big to Fail or Inside Job, in their quite different fashions.  The neat thing, however, is that Chandor’s father worked for Lehmann Brothers right till the end, so the characterizations are based on long personal experience.  And actors like Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, and Jeremy Irons can make the most of that.  Nonetheless, I’m not sure I wound up understanding any of these characters better than I did going in.  The film unfolds over a single long night, which begins with downsized senior risk analyst Tucci being marched out of the office by a security guard, and passing a memory key to a young protégé, with the advice, “Be careful.”  The former rocket scientist quant looks over the data after hours, while others in the office are out partying.  We look from the perspective of the computer monitor as the horror of the numbers begins to dawn in his face.  Thereafter one superior after another is called in, till CEO Irons helicopters in and ruthlessly decides on a strategy for survival that undermines trust in the whole financial sector, which the underlings then have to execute, whatever their personal feelings and fates.  While very watchable, in a Mamet-like manner, this drama of the financially high and mighty falls short of Shakespearian.

Circumstance (2011, MC-65, NFX) is the story of two Iranian teenage girls who can’t keep their hands off each another.  And who can blame them?  They are spectacularly beautiful, and well-acted to boot.  To all intents and purposes this is an Iranian film, though it couldn’t be made or shown there, shot in Lebanon with Iranian ex-pats in the cast, but writer/director Maryam Keshawaraz is a NYU film grad nurtured at Sundance, where this film won the Audience Award last year.  There are a lot of things to like about this film, including the softcore girl-on-girl action, but especially a glance at a vibrant underground of modern society in Iran.  One girl is from a wealthy family, her parents professionals educated in America who returned during the revolution of 1979 out of idealism, and managed to do well for themselves without succumbing to Islamic fundamentalism.  The other girl’s parents were dissident intellectuals who were erased somehow, and now she lives with an uncle and grandmother who are trying to marry her off.  The rich party girl leads her friend into an illicit realm of sex, drugs, music, and banned movies from the West.  Meanwhile her drug addict brother “reforms” into a militant tool of the mullahs, and also has eyes on the girlfriend.  The resolution of this triangle does not quite satisfy, not to the level of Persepolis for example, but there is a lot of worthwhile observation in this promising debut.

The quick and dirty take on Submarine (2011, MC-76, NFX) would be “Rushmore in Swansea, Wales.”  High school misfit tells his story of romance, and of being a hero in his own mind, in self-absorbed but possibly endearing fashion.  Richard Ayoade is a first-time director who is apparently a sitcom star in Britain, and doesn’t do badly, though some of his offbeat stylistic tricks are simply off-beat.  The boy and girl actors are fairly fresh, and so is the setting.  And adult support is offered by Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, and Paddy Considine, all of whom I like a lot and who acquit themselves well here.  So if you haven’t had your fill of quirky adolescent romance, you might submerse yourself in this, but otherwise it’s nothing you need dive into.