Women on their own

The only unfortunate thing about Something, Anything (MC-72, NFX) is its title, which I find difficult to remember and quite opposite to the film’s effect, which is precise and specific.  Paul Harrill, in his debut as writer and director, reminded me of Fassbinder (particularly Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) in the simple clarity and logic of each shot and scene, telling what is necessary and leaving out what is not.  And he was especially fortunate in his lead actress, Ashley Shelton, who’s quietly magnetic as the centerpiece of the film, a newlywed trying to find meaning and purpose in her life, after a miscarriage.  I simply feel on the same wavelength as this film, with a shared iconography.  I love that in her transition from Peggy to Margaret, she gives up a successful job in Knoxville real estate to become an assistant librarian, that her quest takes her to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where Thomas Merton lived, that her greatest epiphany comes when she goes up in the Smokies to watch fireflies at twilight.  I totally identify with this character’s drive toward simplicity and focus, and the film’s avoidance of so many obvious traps.  Perhaps it won’t connect so directly with you, but I promise you an hour and a half in the company of a lovely young woman of transparent honesty and quiet depth of feeling.

You really can’t beat the variety of landscapes along the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild (MC-76,NFX), from sun-baked desert to snow-covered mountain to deep Northwest rainforest.  And Reese Witherspoon makes good solitary company along the trail, but the director Jean-Marc Vallée is too literal with the explanatory flashbacks, overburdened by the source material of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir.  Laura Dern is good as the deceased mother, and Cheryl’s divorce is plausible enough, but the heroin addiction is a little much.  More mystery would have suited the character and the film.  Nonetheless, this is a trek worth taking.

If Wild is wildly over-determined, then Tracks (MC-78, NFX) may be a bit under-determined, not showing the tracks of the protagonist’s mental processes, but concentrating on the immediate reality of her long solitary camel trek across the Australian desert to the sea.  Robyn Davidson’s originating book was probably a drier affair than Strayed’s, and John Curran’s film follows suit.  But Mia Wasikowska is amply up to the task of supplying subtle subtext to the adventure.  We never quite grasp why she is compelled to this quest, and yet her compulsion adds up, makes sense, without showing all the calculation.

A different sort of lonely trek befalls Oscar-deserving Julianne Moore in Still Alice (MC-72, NFX), struggling (not suffering!) with early-onset dementia.  Effective as a real-life horror story, this film by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland remains rather sanitized as a portrayal of Alzheimer’s, failing to rise definitively above disease-of-the-week melodrama.  One of the coupled directors was deteriorating from ALS as the film was being made, so we can’t fault them for any lack of sympathy or sincerity, but it’s still a stacked deck they’re dealing from.  The trump card is Julianne Moore’s performance, which betrays not a false note as her mind leaves her body behind, the 50-year-old linguistics professor who begins to lose one word, and then all of them but one -- “love.”  Alec Baldwin as husband and Kirsten Stewart as prodigal daughter offer the best support they can, but sugarcoating can’t change where this story is headed.

If you think Mulholland Drive was a great film (and many do), then you might like David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars (MC-67, NFX).  I don’t, and I didn’t -- despite the presence of Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska, who give the proceedings some interest.  The former, an obnoxious Hollywood star who has seen better days, hires the latter as her “chore whore,” and gets more than she bargained for.  And we get more than we care for, of odious celebrities and noxious show business.  Sunny SoCal is dark and decadent, we get it, but the satire is queasy and almost humorless.

Amy Adams stands alone as the only reason to see Big Eyes (MC-62, NFX).  She plays Margaret Keane, the real-life painter of those big-eyed kids so ubiquitous in the Fifties, which her husband Walter presented as his own.  Tim Burton offers a nice pictorial evocation of the period, but allows Christoph Waltz to deliver a cartoonish performance as Walter.  That matched poorly with Adams’ more soulful take on her character, and tilted the story off its axis, made it more a rigged game than the pre-feminist fable it wanted to be.  Burton is amusing in airing his gripes about the differences between critical and popular appeal in art, but watch this only if you find Amy always adorable.

Even though the song says, “No One is Alone,” several women are lost by themselves in Rob Marshall’s adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods (MC-69, NFX), including Anna Kendrick, Meryl Streep, and Emily Blunt.  This live-action mash-up of fairy tales -- including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and others – is from Disney, but not too Disneyfied.  Sondheim’s sharp wit dominates, and the filmed musical provided one relative newbie to his work with a nice taste of his music and lyrics.  More tuned-in viewers might find more fault.

Hillary Swank is a woman ranching alone on the Nebraska Territory prairie in The Homesman (MC-68, NFX), and does a credible job in portraying someone on the verge of becoming an old maid, rejected by one hoped-for suitor as “plain as a tin pail.”  She’s still better off than the three married women driven mad by the hardships of frontier life, whom she contracts to deliver to an asylum back across the river.  She seeks the assistance of an old reprobate played by Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed.  Within the traditional framework of a Western journey, in reverse, the film provides a bleak, but welcome, feminine perspective on the settling of the American frontier.  It takes some turns I couldn’t or wouldn’t follow, but the trip does go places and see things. 

Black power

Now it can be told -- Selma (MC-89, #13, NFX) would have been my pick for “Best Picture.”  As much as I love Boyhood, which is at least as good a film in itself, Selma wins my vote (as did Lincoln) for believably portraying an historical moment of extreme contemporary relevance.  David Oyelowo deserves tremendous credit for seeing himself in the role of MLK, and shepherding this script into production, but Ava DuVernay deserves even more for taking on the task of revising the script and directing the film, after several directors had passed due to shaky financing.  The money finally came from the UK (with Oprah and Brad Pitt pitching in), which may explain why four central roles -- Martin and Coretta, LBJ and George Wallace – were played by Brits.  (Maybe the Academy did not want to honor two films in row that had furriners looking into American race relations.)

It took an African-American woman to keep it real.  Thank goodness this story didn’t wind up in the hands of a Lee Daniels or Tate Taylor.  Rather than one great man as hero, we get a group portrait of a movement, including women as well as the young and the old, at a moment of high drama, leading to three successive attempts by civil rights marchers to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during March 1965.  The film maintains an impressive aura of authenticity.  Oyelowo is a perfect King, and Carmen Ejogo is spot-on as Coretta.  Tom Wilkinson convinces as LBJ, despite little physical similarity, and brings a humanity that refutes those who think the film diminishes his contribution to voting rights.  The supporting actors match up so well with their real-life counterparts that it becomes relatively easy to keep track of the diverse cast of characters.  (Though it helps if you know beforehand the differences between SCLC and SNCC, and other movement arcana.)

The collective heroism of the movement develops from individual acts of courage and conscience, through scenes of strategic deliberation and profound balancing of means and ends, to grand set pieces of confrontation staged on the actual sites.  With the Supreme Court recently gutting key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this film could not come at a better time, to show why such legislation is necessary, even for those who think the only good thing about Obama is that his election proves that “racism is over.”  Voter suppression remains a widespread strategy, and sanctioned police violence against unarmed black citizens goes on and on.  Selma is stirring, timely, and completely believable, even though the filmmakers didn’t have permission to use Dr. King’s actual speeches.  (Excellent extras on the DVD as well.)

Ava DuVernay did not exactly come out of nowhere, as I discovered when I caught up with The Middle of Nowhere (2012, MC-75, NFX).  David Oyelowo has a key supporting role, which is how he connected with her.  But this film belongs to the radiant and effortlessly expressive Emayatzy Corinealdi, who plays a nurse waiting, Penelope-like, for her husband to return from jail.  While he serves his sentence -- with luck, only four years -- she lives a bare existence in Compton, with only her severe mother, plus a single sister with nephew, as company, until her regular bus driver (Oyelowo) draws her out.  This film makes a lot out of a little; a joyful noise out of still, quiet moments; deep meaning out of simple life lived.

It’s worth pointing out that Ms. DuVernay’s two films showcase an emerging cinematographer, Bradford Young, with another good-looking new film to his credit, A Most Violent Year (MC-79, NFX), in which writer-director J. C. Chandor shifts gears from Margin Call and All is Lost, to confirm himself as a filmmaker always worth watching.  Young’s camerawork gives this tale of New York’s underbelly in 1981 a real Godfather glow (and Oyelowo turns up again, as a DA).  Oscar Isaac -- as an immigrant son who has risen in the oil delivery business from driver to salesman to owner (through the expedient of marrying the shady boss’s daughter, Jessica Chastain) – tries to keep within the letter of the law, but lawless forces draw him up to and over the line.  Albert Brooks is excellent as Isaac’s lawyer – go ahead and call him consigliere.  The naturalistic atmosphere of this film is remarkable, in a NYC tradition that runs from On the Waterfront through Serpico.  With Kazan and Lumet, Chandor is in good company indeed.

To circle back to the theme of this round-up, Night Catches Us (2010, MC-65, NFX) depicts a group of Black Panthers in Philadelphia some years after their heyday.  Anthony Mackie returns from prison, and into the orbit of Kerry Washington, the widow of his compatriot shot by the police.  She’s gone to law school and is raising her daughter alone.  (“Bunk” and “Marlo” from The Wire also turn up in the generally excellent cast.)  Though using documentary footage from the 60s, Tanya Hamilton’s promising debut film, set in 1976, takes a thoughtfully domestic look back at the Panthers.

And to give the theme a different perspective, try Girlhood (MC-85, NFX).  Céline Sciamma’s film is about a gang of Parisian girls from African backgrounds, who are powerful indeed.  We first see them playing American football, tackling in full pads, suggesting the sort of gender confusion that the director also explores in Tomboy.  We soon focus on one heartbreakingly-beautiful 15-year-old, played by Karidja Touré.  She is adopted into a trio of tough girls, straightens her dreadlocks and adopts their dress code of denim and leather, as well as their delinquent ways.  The film explores the adolescent quest for identity and the nature of sisterhood, as well as the economic, sexual, and racial constraints of those on the margins.  With this film reminiscent of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, I urge you to mark Ms. Sciamma as a director to follow.