Thanks to Images

Though I see well over a hundred of films every year, I don’t go out to a movie theater very often, since I am a stay-at-home cheapskate, happy to see as many films as I can on Blu-ray disk or video streaming from Netflix, for a simple monthly membership, unbroken since June 2000.  The choice of films at Images Cinema in Williamstown usually represents exactly what I intend to see, even if I am typically content to wait a few months to see them at home.  Recently, however, Images offered three films in one week that I couldn’t wait to see.

Though I’ve never really liked any Jean-Luc Godard film after Masculine Feminine (1966), and certainly none since his break with my main man Truffaut, in order to maintain credibility as some sort of expert on film I had to see his latest, which came in at #2 on the Film Comment poll for the Best Film of 2014.  So when Images went out on a limb and showed Goodbye to Language in 3D (MC-75, NFX), I availed myself of the singular opportunity.  And since the primary interest of the film lay in the way it played around with the 3D format, such viewing was essential to any evaluation.  Nonetheless, this Godard will come nowhere near my list of the year’s best.  I did not so much watch the film, as observe myself in the act of watching it, piecing together perception out of visual clues and illusions.  Trying to find a point of reference around which to resolve a coherent visual perception, I often lifted the 3D glasses, but other times I simply reveled in the representational quality of the format.  I think in particular of a lingering shot of a passing ship with the waves of its wake lapping into the foreground.  (I wasn’t sharp enough to witness the effect that several critics mentioned, in the unreadable superimposition as a couple splits, which if you close one eye or the other, resolves into two separate, and separating, images.)  The film did suggest many ways that 3D could be used to good effect outside of action films or animation.  Of the actual content, and of Godard’s intellectual pretensions and hobbyhorses, the less said, the better.  You endure all that for 70 minutes in order to see the occasional amazing image, definitely not to see or hear two unreal characters pontificate, about how the two most interesting ideas are “infinity and zero” (the man) or “no, sex and death” (the woman, who elsewhere announces her purpose in life as “to say ‘no’ and to die.”)  Godard not only dredges up his old Mao obsession, but even attributes a Zhou Enlai quote to him in error.  He long ago claimed the privilege to fool around with film any way he wants, but hasn’t had a genuine new thought in forty years or more.  He’s always congratulating himself on his own cleverness.

After the Godard I went back to the box office, and into the theater again, for the humanistic antithesis and antidote.  A new Dardenne brothers film is an event for me, so I didn’t want to postpone the pleasure, and I truly appreciate Images for showing each as it comes out.  Two Days, One Night (MC-89, NFX) is not their greatest film (my personal favorites are Rosetta and The Kid with a Bike), but it is their most accessible to date, and I urge you to see it at earliest opportunity.  Relatively speaking, they calm down their herky-jerky, on-the-fly style, and they include a well-known actress in the lead.  Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard meshes seamlessly with the Dardennes’ regulars and nonprofessionals, and indeed received another Best Actress nomination.  She’s completely believable as a worker in a Belgian solar panel factory, who is threatened with losing her job when she tries to return from medical leave for depression.  The factory manager has determined that he can function with a crew of sixteen, so he will allow her to return to work only if her fellow workers forego a bonus to cover her wages.  She has one weekend, the time denoted in the title, to try to influence her fellows individually by direct appeal, fearful that without the job her family will lose the house they just moved into from public housing.  The film plays out as a parable of solidarity, without ever speaking the word, and as a demonstration of Jean Renoir’s famous dictum, “There is only one terrible thing, and that is, everyone has his reasons.”  With the breadth of a sociological survey, the Dardennes pose one question, and then observe the disparate answers of their characters, in a way that ratchets up suspense, and then provides a surprising but completely convincing resolution. Eschewing background music as usual, they feature two songs on the car radio, one by Petula Clark (in annoyingly unsubtitled French), and Van Morrison singing “Gloria,” in a music cue that was positively Bressonian.  There are few filmmakers working today with whom I feel more affinity than Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. 

Mike Leigh is right in there with them, and the next attraction at Images was his latest, Mr. Turner (MC-94, NFX), with commentary on the painterly subject from one of the Clark’s own attractions, Michael Cassin.  This was definitely a film that deserved to be seen on the widest possible canvas.  It ran long enough to feel a bit wearying, but I very much look forward to seeing it again at greater leisure.  One thing I’ll be more attentive to is the extent to which it serves as disguised autobiography -- a deep, late-life look at an artist with whom Leigh feels a close identity.  Having confirmed the film’s fidelity to the facts of Turner’s life, as close-mouthed and little-known as portrayed, I’ll relax into scenes whose meanings are fragmented, but eventually form a meaningful mosaic.  But this is judging the film from one’s fatigue at the end, rather than the sense of rapturous immersion with which it begins.  Never has the past felt more palpable in an historical film -- the past when it was present, just how it looked and even how it smelled.  The density of specification offers time travel to Britain two centuries ago.  As played by Timothy Spall, J.M.W. Turner is an enigmatic and rather unappealing character, boorish and boarish, but redeemed by a profound love of light and devotion to the discipline of its capture on a painted surface.  In accord with Mike Leigh’s trademark practice of lengthy rehearsal and character development, all the performances in the film are thoroughly lived-in.  In the vein of Topsy-Turvy, the amazement lies in the detail of the production – locations, sets, costumes – from a director best known for kitchen-sink dramas.  His longtime cinematographer Dick Pope also needs to be singled out for credit.  This is a must-see on a big screen.  

As I review the best films of 2014, I’ve devised a ranking system to reflect the critical consensus, as derived from various critic polls and top ten lists, against which I will posit my own rankings.  These three films come in at #8, #13, and #14 for the year – a pretty impressive week of programming for Images Cinema.  Thanks again to an invaluable community resource.

Pairings

Let’s start with best of these matched pairs.  Force Majeure (MC-87, NFX) was a critical favorite and has much to recommend it, but for me suffers by comparison to a film on the same theme, about a moment of masculine weakness that undermines the trust between a couple.  In this film Ruben Őstland piles on themes as he follows a picture-perfect Swedish family to a posh ski resort in the French Alps, whereas The Loneliest Planet pares the issue to its essence, as a couple hikes in the Caucasus, with only a Georgian guide as witness to their split.  From the title -- enigmatic if you don’t know the legal term, but excessively overt if you do (an act of God or nature that dissolves a contract) – to the admittedly spectacular SFX of an avalanche, amidst so many clashes of gender, class, setting, and character, Force Majeure lays it on too thick, tends to be too much of a good thing.  Still, it’s great to look at, and worth thinking about afterwards, even if its effect was mixed for me.

Dear White People (MC-79, NFX) was a pleasant surprise.  For a paired film I’d point to School Daze, even though DWP writer-director Justin Simien refers to his heroine as more a fan of Ingmar Bergman than Spike Lee.  While Lee deals with cross-currents of color at a historically black college, Simien tackles the same in a historically black dorm at a fictional Ivy League college.  His writing is sharp, and while his first-time direction sometimes overreaches, a solid cast delivers both laughs and ponderable moments.  This is a race movie in the best possible sense.

Two credit lines tell you all you need to know about Get on Up (MC-71, NFX).  First is Chadwick Boseman’s performance as James Brown in this biopic, which seems even more amazing next to his portrayal of Jackie Robinson in 42.  Second is director Tate Taylor, which explains the distaste I had for the style of the film all the way through, since his previous work includes The Help – I don’t even know whether he’s black or white, but he definitely has a Hollywoodized perspective on black culture.  (White, I find out, no surprise there – clearly a Spielberg wannabe.) 

Actually, there’s a third credit line that’s explanatory, producer Mick Jagger.  But much better to watch the other James Brown film he got credit on last year, Alex Gibney’s documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (MC-79, HBO).  The fictionalized version is not just inauthentic, but positively annoying in its try-anything approach, darting around in time, and breaking frame with direct to the camera dialogue.  Every time the music stopped, it made me wince.  Still, either doc or biopic will remind you of the power of Mr. Brown’s influential holy-roller-meets-R&B style of performance. 

It’s been a long time since France was at the forefront of world cinema -- the New Wave is old news, its practitioners all but died out -- but the French “tradition of quality” sometimes reasserts itself.  Here are two films I happened upon through Netflix streaming, which you might find watchable as well.

I took an interest in The French Minister (MC-65, NFX) because of director Bertrand Tavernier, but was surprised to find it a rare comedy by him, rather reminiscent of the British film In the Loop and tv series The Thick of It (precursor to HBO’s Veep).  Apparently it’s adapted from a best-selling graphic novel by an ex-diplomat, based on his experiences in the French foreign ministry in the run-up to the Iraq War.  This is political buffoonery with a Gallic accent, but will be all too familiar in the vacuity of the movers and shakers, told from the perspective of a young speechwriter to the windy aristocrat who rules the Quai d’Orsay with imperious imbecility.

From a few years ago, The Well-Digger’s Daughter (MC-67, NFX) is a Marcel Pagnol re-make by Daniel Auteuil, placid and predictable, but nonetheless pleasurable,.  If you have radiant memories of Provence peasantry and landscape from Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, or from My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle, then you might find yourself, as I did, drawn into this hackneyed tale of a lower class girl who gets in trouble with a bourgeois fly-boy at the start of WWII.  The girl is a pleasure to look at, if not a particularly revealing actress, and Auteuil allows himself to chew the scenery as the crusty old dad.  Something about the light on the landscape, however, made the film irresistible to me.

The same might be said of The Two Faces of January (MC-66, NFX), where the Mediterranean light falls on Athens and Crete.  Hossein Amini’s adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel goes for the Hitchcockian period vibe, and has some success, though the story hardly convinces, fudging key moments.  Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, and Kirsten Dunst all offer magnetic performances, as a steamy triangle entangled in embezzlements and suspicious deaths.  Along with the travelogue pleasures of the cinematography, that’s enough to make this worth a try on Netflix streaming.

Gone Girl (MC-79, NFX) was a would-be thriller that attracted a lot more notice, but I confess my surprise that David Fincher could make a film so ridiculous, sleek as you’d expect but far removed from anything like real life.  The film certainly served as an admirable platform for Rosamund Pike in the title role (Ben Affleck is no more than okay as her beleaguered husband), but Gillian Flynn’s screenplay shows all the problems of a novelist adapting her own work.  What words can get away with, pictures make preposterous, plus there’s the excessive reliance on voiceover narration.  I’d somehow avoided all spoilers about this pop culture phenomenon, aside from the central twist, so I approached it with an open mind, which gradually closed into incredulity and derision.  Which is not to say there was no fun involved, but it was definitely splashing around in the shallow end.  I put this in a category with films like Vertigo and Mulholland Drive – I can’t really see what some people see in them.

We conclude with dueling doppelgangers, a hardy perennial theme of literature and film.  I enjoyed The Double (MC-69, NFX) but found it a chore to watch Enemy (MC-61, NFX).  The Double is adapted from Dostoevsky, directed by Richard Ayoade, and stars Jesse Eisenberg in the dual role.  Enemy is adapted from Saramago, directed by Denis Villeneuve, and stars Jake Gyllenhaal in the dual role.  Both films share a sickly yellow-green palette, but The Double creates an alternate 1984-ish world of drab conformity and amusingly primitive technology, while Enemy tries to make modern Toronto and its suburban high-rises look as unappetizing as possible.  The Double is darkly funny, while Enemy is lugubrious and enigmatic in the extreme.  The ending of The Double fails to convince, or resolve the situation it has artfully set up, but the ending of Enemy is deliberately whacked out, and far from satisfying to me.  The supporting cast of The Double includes Mia Wasikowski as love interest, and Wallace Shawn as the boss of both Eisenbergs, the recessive nerd and the genial con man, along with a host of humorous cameos.  Enemy has Melanie Laurant and Sarah Gadon as the interchangeable women of Gyllenhaal, but gives them far too little to do.

Having gone from pairings to parings, it’s time to move on to a whole new batch of new & noteworthies.