If not a masterwork, Roman Polanski’s latest is a work of mastery, so it adds the pleasures of craft to its thriller scenario. The political conspiracy may not be up to the profundity of Chinatown, but the Hitchcockian motif of the pursued pursuing is handled very neatly. The always-fun-to-watch Ewan McGregor is the unnamed Ghost of the title, brought in to fix the manuscript of memoirs by a former British PM, whose resemblance to Tony Blair is fully intended, though artfully camouflaged in the performance of Pierce Brosnan. Olivia Williams is his Cherie – and excellent in the role. They are holed up in the magnificent beach house of the publisher, who’s got a $10 million advance at stake. With a sterling cast that offers lots of amused recognition – Who is that? Wait, it’s Jim Belushi. Hey look at that, it’s 93-year old Eli Wallach! – there’s one casting against type you’ll either love or hate, Kim Cattrall as Brosnan’s aide and Williams’ rival (Samantha as a starchy Brit!). And for unusual casting, you have to single out the north coast of Germany as a surprisingly convincing Martha’s Vineyard. (Polanski no doubt enjoying the irony that his central character is hiding out in America to avoid international justice, while the director himself hides out in Europe to avoid American justice). This is smoothly made, visually impressive, darkly humorous entertainment -- a deft piece of work from an old master, whether or not he is also a dirty old man. (2010, dvd) *7+* (MC-77)
Sunday, August 29, 2010
The Ghost Writer
Greenberg
Noah Baumbach’s latest is a confession of assholedom. He’s always specialized in difficult people, and sometimes had the winning actors to make them seem passably sympathetic (Laura Linney and Jesse Eisenberg come to mind). Here Ben Stiller’s anxious, beset persona works for the title character, and wrings some bitter humor out of his self-obsessed rants, but earns a bare minimum of sympathy. His emotional victim and potential savior is Greta Gerwig, who has it in her contract, I surmise, that she has to expose her breasts within the first five minutes of any film she’s in, and repeatedly thereafter – with some, this passes for openness and vulnerability. I can see how there are those who are smitten with her, but I find her charms easy to resist, though I register the infatuation of others. Maybe it’s a generational thing, as Greenberg himself opines. There’s definitely some wit and craft in these proceedings -- with good support from Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a nice German Shepherd – but its spirit is bleak at best. A romantic comedy, even one as acerbic and wised-up as this, depends on the appeal of its leads, and here they are equivocal at best. The transplanted New Yorker view of everyday life in real LA locations is another supposed appeal, but did not ingratiate me in particular. I did not loathe Greenberg, as many are bound to do, but I can’t bring myself to recommend it either, as many critics have done. (2010, MC-76)
Riding the omnibus
I’ve built up a big backlog of films about which I have something – if not a lot – to say, so let’s deal with them in one long bus trip, with many stops along the way.
I haven’t been a Leonard Cohen devotee for very long -- just since the tribute documentary, I’m Your Man -- but it was inevitable that I would catch up with Leonard Cohen Live in London (2009). The surprise was that I could crank up my admiration another notch, seeing the man in concert, so humble and giving and pleased to please, with a great group of singers and musicians whom he continually credited, and a croaking but expressive recitation of his words set to music. This modestly but effectively filmed concert works either as an introduction or a remembrance of one of the world’s great towers of song.
The best of recent films I’ve seen lately, but not to the level of firm recommendation, was The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009, MC-69), Werner Herzog’s update of Abel Ferrara’s grisly and not-that-great original. I watched it because of Herzog, but I wouldn’t necessarily have recognized it as his work, though it is certainly directed with a sure hand. Nicholas Cage – in the Harvey Keitel role -- has to be one of the odder stars in film today, but his off-kilter quality is well suited to the role of the good/bad cop going crazy on drugs, first pain prescriptions for a back injury sustained in the line of duty, and then every street drug he can lay his hands on. He serves in the line of laughing megalomaniacs that Herzog has put on screen, from Klaus Kinski on. There are plenty of amusing and startling twists in this drug-dealing thriller, and some sense of locale in post-Katrina New Orleans, which raises it above most films of this ilk.
Not rising above are two other films new to dvd. With its stellar cast, you wonder how The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009, MC-54) could go wrong, but it certainly does in the end. This film wants to be a commentary on military lunacy in the tradition of Catch-22, M.A.S.H., or Three Kings, but doesn’t come close. George Clooney’s charm as a gung-ho psy-war agent, who can kill a goat with his stare, carries you through most of the proceedings, until the story starts to fall apart. Jeff Bridges brings his essential Dudeness to the role of leader of the New Earth Army, a branch of the military that tries to take a New Age approach to warfare. Kevin Spacey brings his reptilian badness to the role of the traitor to the cause, who winds up devising means of torture in Iraq. Just as with The Informant! we have here a jaunty satire undermined both by uncertain tone of direction (Grant Heslov’s in this case) and the inherent seriousness of the subject, which is betrayed by the impulse to entertain in worn-out ways. Aside from a woefully errant third act that departs from the strange-enough nonfiction book of the same name, this film is undermined by the miscasting of Ewan McGregor as the Midwestern schlemiel of a reporter who hooks up with Clooney on an unsanctioned roadtrip into the warzone of Iraq, in instant refutation of my claim that he is always fun to watch.
Another favorite of mine, John Cusack, also tests that claim in Hot Tub Time Machine (2010, MC-63), which would love to be mentioned in the same breath as Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married, but really comes out of the coarsened tradition of recent gross-out humor devoted to guys behaving badly. In some ways it does make a virtue out of the obvious cheesiness of its flashback to Eighties styles and fads. At least Cusack fits in his role, and lends it a little more interest. Rob Corddry brings his familiar wild man persona from The Daily Show, and films I haven’t seen like The Hangover. The rest of the cast is fine, at the level of sketch comedy, but Steve Pink’s film does not rise above its genre in any significant way.
Looking backward, I caught a TCM presentation of Petulia (1968), which did not hold up in retrospect. The glimpses of San Francisco in the heyday of Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia are intriguing, but buried in a rather annoying would-be romance between kooky Julie Christie and baffled George C. Scott, and in the half-absorbed borrowings of director Richard Lester and cinematographer Nicholas Roeg from the time-fracturing style of Alain Resnais, with artiness substituting for any depth of portrayal.
I was intrigued enough by The Lemon Tree to seek out The Syrian Bride (2005, MC-70), an earlier collaboration between Israeli director Eran Riklis and Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass. This film does a good job of making the political personal, in the story of a young Druze woman living in the Golan Heights, whose occupation by Israel is unrecognized by Syria, so when a marriage is arranged with a Syrian sitcom star whom she has never met, she will have to cross a highly-contested no-man’s-land to reach her groom, and will never be able to return to the rest of her family again. Abbass is the older sister who holds the whole family together, while the father is in and out of Israeli jails for his political activities; the eldest brother went to school in Russia, married a Russian doctor, and was written out of the family; and another brother is a shady international dealmaker and ladies’ man. They all congregate for the marriage of the younger daughter. This could have been My Big Fat Syrian Wedding, but remains low-key and truthful, highlighting the bureaucratic and familial absurdities of being an alien in one’s own country.
While presenting my “Spanish Masters of Cinema” series at the Clark, I’ve also been watching films with an eye to future series. Here are several that I will be working into the winter schedule. Peter Greenaway has always been a troublesome director (though I do admire The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Pillow Book), more arty than artful, with a mean misanthropic streak. Pauline Kael nailed him long ago as “a cultural omnivore who eats with his mouth open.” But he has recently returned to his first interest, painting, and made a pair of companion films about Rembrandt. Nightwatching (2007) tells the story behind Rembrandt’s most famous painting, “The Night Watch,” as well as his relations with women, in a series of stagey tableaux and direct-to-the-camera commentary by the characters. Rembrandt is surprisingly well-embodied by Martin Freeman, of the British comedy series, The Office. Rembrandt’s J’accuse (2007) deals with the same subject in a documentary fashion, really an illustrated lecture in which Greenaway explicitly makes the case that the celebrated and controversial painting actually reveals a murder conspiracy, and the dark underbelly of Dutch society. I plan to show them back-to-back for a series tentatively called “Old Master Portraits.”
For another long snowbound afternoon, in a series to be called “Thieves of Beauty,” I will present a “Masterpiece Mystery” from the BBC. Painted Lady (1997) stars Helen Mirren as a once-famous Celtic blues singer, who is rescued from addiction and given sanctuary by an Irish gentleman. She is living in his guesthouse when he is murdered during the theft of some paintings on his estate. To track down the killers, Mirren masquerades as a Polish countess and art collector, to get inside the legitimate and illicit trade in paintings. The first half in particular offers an interesting on-location look at the London art business. The second half is more a thriller devoted to unraveling the identity of the killer, with the ever-watchable Ms. Mirren in various sorts of jeopardy.
I also had the Clark in mind when I watched a documentary called Forever (2006), by Heddy Honigmann, of whom I had never heard, but will watch for in the future. Apparently she’s big on the international festival circuit, but essentially unknown in America. Raised in Peru after her parents fled Hitler, she went to film school in Italy and is now a globe-straddling Dutch citizen. Forever is ostensibly about the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the famous and not-so who are buried there, and the people who visit their graves. But the real subject is a profoundly lovely meditation on life and death, art and immortality – beautifully photographed, cleverly ramified, deeply thoughtful. Finding Honigmann is like discovering another Agnes Varda, and that’s a very good thing.
One last postscript: I was so engrossed by the Sundance documentary series The Staircase that I made a point of tracking down the made-for-tv movie on the same case, The Staircase Murders (2007). It was interesting to see the story told from a completely different perspective, with the fictionalized documentarists included in the frame. Treat Williams gives a compelling interpretation of the defendant Michael Peterson, accused of the murder of his wife, as a narcissistic megalomaniac. While the documentary makes the case that he was wrongly accused and focuses on the children of the blended family who stood resolutely with their father, the Lifetime movie assumes his guilt and looks at the case from the perspective of the dead woman’s daughter, who deserts the united family front. I don’t know whether the tv movie would hold up without the interest generated by the documentary series, which may have been wrong-headed but was so effectively involving, though it does provide an alternative explanation to a complicated and riveting mystery.
Friday, August 06, 2010
The Art of the Steal
Start with the premise that the best documentaries are not “objective” but have a distinct personal point of view, and you can take this one as a lively and engaging screed against the move of the Barnes Foundation’s astounding collection of art (181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picasso’s, and much more.) from suburban Lower Merion to downtown Philadelphia. I would argue against its argument, but defend its expression. Director Don Argott’s view of the situation is partial, to say the least, but it is presented in a provocative and entertaining manner. And the case of the Barnes itself could hardly be more interesting in the diverse and challenging issues it raises, in its nexus of art and money; politics and race; competing personalities, communities, and values. This film does a good job of presenting one side of the story. But don’t come away convinced, until you’ve considered other perspectives, asked the questions this film does not choose to ask. The Barnes controversy is as much a matter of cultic fervor as cultural preemption. (2010, dvd.) *7-* (MC-75)
I’ll be showing this film at the Clark on Saturday, November 6th at 2:00 pm, and I hope to get my brother Chris, former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and current news director of public broadcasting in Philly, to come and provide some journalistic balance.
On the margins
I’ve got another trilogy of marginal films to less-than-recommend, though each of these films proved a little better than I expected. I had put none of the three on my Netflix queue, but each seemed a viable on-demand option when I didn’t have a dvd on hand, and each happened to look at life out on the margins.
The honey that attracted me to The Secret Life of Bees (2008, MC-57) was the pre-Runaways Dakota Fanning, who turned out to be pretty good. The problem is that this movie is really about black women in the Sixties South, so it’s focus on the white girl is really misdirected, though typical of Hollywood
There was plenty to like in The Soloist (2009, MC-61), particularly the duet between Robert Downey Jr. as LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayres, a schizophrenic homeless man he meets on the street, who turns out to be a former Julliard cello prodigy, and becomes the focus of a number of columns and eventually a book, on which the film is based. They definitely keep it real – and astringent -- in a story that threatens at various points to veer into sentimentality. I found director Joe Wright to be less annoying than in his Keira Knightley duo, Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, despite expressionist tangents that annoyed some. The supporting players, including Catherine Keener as Lopez’s ex-wife and current editor, and a scrum of genuine homeless loonies from the mean streets of LA, also keep the story from going too squishy. Another star player is Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, a suitably destabilizing venue for Lopez’s efforts to get Ayres back on track. Yet I wouldn’t say you’ve missed much if you don’t see the film.
The main thing you might miss in Moon (2010, MC-67) is Sam Rockwell’s celebrated dual role as a solitary attendant at an energy extraction base on the lunar surface, who through a glitch in the operation comes face to face with the clone who is meant to replace him. Duncan Jones’s debut film is a refreshing return to high-concept sci-fi, instead of CGI blast-aways, but it reaches for more of an intellectual tingle than it achieves. Perhaps we should refer to Jones, the son of David Bowie, as Ziggy Moondust. His film is an engaging performance, but hardly an exploration of deep space, either out there or in here. As a modest little conundrum, however, this speculative fiction is more than all right, and worth a look for sci-fi fans.
Don't bother
Cinema Salon has become a multi-platform vehicle for sharing my cinematic enthusiasms, but this blog has taken the aspect of consumer advice, so I will offer brief comments on several 2010 films already out on DVD that you might consider seeing, but from which I’ll warn you off, so you can save the time I wasted.
Scorsese and DiCaprio – a talented pair, but no guarantee of a great movie. I’m a fan of both, and liked The Aviator in particular, so I ignored the disparaging reviews and my own lukewarm response to supposed “Best Picture” The Departed, and was willing to give a look to Shutter Island (2010, MC-63). What I wasn’t willing to do was watch it all the way through, fast-forwarding to the conclusion. So I don’t presume to evaluate the film, but simply to report there was little in it for me. As a devotee of classic cinema from Hollywood
Within the rock biopic genre, I have enjoyed a number of films about groups that I never listened to myself, so with some critical prodding I gave The Runaways (2010, MC-65) a chance. Was the Seventies group of that name a breakthrough all-female proto-punk band, or a jailbait marketing ploy? Or both? With Kristen Stewart (who means Adventureland to me and not the Twilight series) evoking Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning breaking out as the baby doll lead singer Cherie Currie (on whose memoir the film is based), under the svengali managing of Michael Shannon, the movie does a pretty good job of exploding “Cherry Bomb” in our faces, but then director Floria Sigismondi does not know where to go with the story except down the tried -- and more tired than true -- road of too-much-too-soon in the world of sex- drugs-and-rock’n’roll.
Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are another talented pair. I’ve followed the former since Bloody Sunday and through United 93 and even into at least one of the Bourne series with Damon, so uninspiring notices did not keep me out of the Green Zone (2010, MC-61). And indeed Greengrass’s style of on-the-fly, you-are-there-in-the-middle-of-a-shitstorm filmmaking did draw me in, until the superhero thriller dynamic took over the proceedings, and all plausibility went out the window. After the film establishes a highly credible picture of Baghdad in the first months after the American invasion, Matt Damon’s “Chief” goes way off the reservation, as he rebels from his assignment to search for nonexistent WMDs to go unraveling the contradictions and fabrications of the American mission. At the same time, the film goes way off track, in morphing from serious political exposé to tiresome first-person-shooter video game. Is blowing shit up a war crime, or is it entertainment? Make up your mind.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
The Maid
This film, which earned Sundance awards and critics voted #33 for 2009, turns out to be quite the home movie. Sebastián Silva shot it in his parents’ home, and gets his younger brother to play his adolescent self, in a story about the two maids with whom he grew up. It’s set in Santiago but could be anywhere in Latin America where “maid culture” is prevalent (cf. Lucrecia Martel’s Argentina). Raquel (Catalina Saavedra, in a deservedly-honored performance) has served in this family for 23 of her 41 years. She’s an indispensable but cranky part of the family. On the brink of exhaustion, she refuses offers from the lady of the house to get more help, and when first a young Peruvian girl and then a tough old bird are brought in anyway, they are quickly dispatched by the scheming Raquel. But she meets her match in Lucy (the other maid in the Silva household), who disarms her with sheer good feeling. There are times when you think this film is going in the direction of boiling cats and crazed revenge, but it always remains rooted in real human behavior and genuine domestic drama. It’s no more a comedy than a thriller. A sardonic humor is always implicit, but subsumed in rather grim psychological and social specificity, and the uplift at the end is modest and well-earned. Silva says that when he showed the finished film to the real Raquel and Lucy, the former laughed and the latter cried all the way through. You may do some of both, or just quietly admire life as it’s really lived. (2009, dvd) *7* (MC-82)
Already I’m arguing with myself over my “Best of 2009” list. When I went to place this Chilean gem on the list, I saw there was really little difference among the foreign films between the recommended and the highly so, aside from the plus I gave the latter in the mood of the moment. The rankings may be idiosyncratic, but the list adds up to an impressive array of world cinema, well worth the effort to find and to watch. To which The Maid must certainly be added.
Do not go gentle...
By pure happenstance, on successive nights I watched two films about Nobel Prize-winning authors who went raging into that good night. Knut Hamsun and Leo Tolstoy were polar opposites in many ways -- as far right and as far left as you can go -- but each was harried (and carried) to his dying day by a long, difficult marriage.
Hamsun is a gripping but alienating pan-Scandinavian production about the Norwegian literary lion who late in life became a notorious supporter of Hitler and Quisling. Swedes are behind the camera and in the title role, a Danish actress plays the wife, and apparently they speak in their respective languages, though I would never know that unless told. Writer-director-cinematographer Jan Troell does not get enough credit as one of the great living masters of film. The inexhaustible Max von Sydow crowns an amazing career with a scary but humane portrait of aging, as the film follows the severe old man from the age of 76 to his death at 92, during which he wants only to be rid of his wife and his life. In the meantime, however, his benighted support of the Nazis leads to a trial for treason after the war and lock-up in a mental institution. Ghita Norby does her level best to make a shrewish Nazi into a sympathetic character, but unavoidably this unhappy marriage does not make for a happy film. Well-done, but not a must-see. (1996, dvd) *6+*
The Last Station may not be a must-see either, but I liked it much more than I was led to believe by some critical dismissals. Writer-director Michael Hoffman adapts Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s last days with verve and authenticity. Christopher Plummer is very good within the limits of Tolstoy’s own role of sage as proto-celebrity. And Helen Mirren – no surprise here – is outstanding as the Countess Sofya, the author’s wife of 48 years, who is in a struggle for his literary legacy (and his love) with the scheming Paul Giamatti, in effect the press agent who runs the worldwide Tolstoyan brand of idealism. He plants James MacAvoy as secretary-spy in the Count’s household at Yasnaya Polyana, who in turn falls for a free-lovin’ gal (charming Kerry Condon) at the nearby Tolstoyan commune, which makes him more sympathetic to the high-strung Countess than he is supposed to be. The white-bearded apostle of nonviolence is forced to deal with the violent emotions of his retinue, and escapes only to his own death. In the end I did feel the film pushed a little too hard, but nothing like the over-the-top excess I expected from some reviews. Along the way, it seemed funny and true, beautiful and moving, a feast of fine acting. (2009, dvd) *7* (MC-76)
Lemon Tree
It’s possible that this parable of Israeli-Palestinian relations could no more deliver a satisfactory resolution than the real situation on which it is based, but the effort of Israeli filmmaker Erin Riklis to look over the Wall is honorable in intent and admirable in achievement. At the center is the performance of Hiam Abbass as the Palestinian woman whose inherited lemon grove is threatened when the Israeli defense minister moves in next door. The grove is deemed a security hazard and scheduled for removal, but the beautiful widow is immovable, and takes the case to the highest court. Meanwhile the defense minister’s wife develops a secret sympathy for the woman on the other side of the fence. The result is an even-handed treatment of a highly contested situation, which can only leave the viewer with difficult mixed feelings. (2008, IFC) *6+* (MC-74)
Unvictorious
For the first half of Invictus, I admired Clint Eastwood’s economical old-master filmmaking, but in the second half the film bogged down in sports movie clichés, about perhaps the most boring, incomprehensible sport in the world, rugby. All the way through, Morgan Freeman is very impressive as Nelson Mandela, and Matt Damon is better than all right as the captain of the Springboks, the rugby team that Mandela, just two years out of prison and beginning his term as president, wants to convert from a symbol of apartheid into a vehicle for national reconciliation and unity, just in time for the 1995 World Cup, being held in South Africa to welcome it back into the international community of nations. If only the film had avoided re-creation of the crucial games (as did the Iranian soccer masterpiece Offside), or just sketched it in as background to characterization (as they do in the marvelous football series, Friday Night Lights), then it would have an interesting story of forgiveness as a political strategy, and the subversion of popular culture into wise governance. Instead, the film offers uplift as cornball as the Victorian poem from which it takes its title. (2009, dvd) *6* (MC-74)
Monday, July 12, 2010
Recommendations from 2009
With my typical six-month delay, I am prepared to render judgment on my favorite films from last year. Herewith I list my choices in rough order of my intensity of response, with links to my original reviews plus rankings from the Film Comment critics poll.
Best of the year: In a come-from-behind victory, for me this year’s laurels go to Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments, which does not appear in the top 50 of the Film Comment poll, perhaps because its release fell between two years. Until the finish line, Jane Campion’s Bright Star (#15) led the pack, confirmed by a second viewing, while it was a second viewing that moved the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (#8) up into this rank, while possibly dropping An Education (#24) into the next.
Outstanding: Domestically, my two choices come from different angles, the wonderfully animated Up (#23) and the quiet but deep American indie, Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo (#50). From abroad, three stand out: Still Walking (#26) from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Summer Hours (#3) from Olivier Assayas, and 35 Shots of Rum (#4) from Claire Denis.
Highly recommended: These run the gamut from the obvious to the hardly-heard-of. Avatar gets no love from super-serious critics, but to me the 3-D was irresistible. Likewise I’m a sucker for George Clooney’s charm and I found Up in the Air (#28) to be a high-flying vehicle. Greg Mottola’s Adventureland (#32) was equally charming. Short on charm but long on power were two imports, Steve McQueen’s Hunger (#42) and the Austrian thriller Revanche (not on list). The leading documentary of the year was Agnes Varda’s The Beaches of Agnes (#9), with other notables including Herb & Dorothy, Food Inc., and Tyson.
Recommended: I’m not as high on The Hurt Locker (#1) as many are, but I would rank another Iraq War-themed film as its equal – The Messenger (#39). For English language films that are not so grim, I’d single out Wes Anderson’s animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (#5), Andrew Bujalski’s up-from-mumblecore Beeswax (#38), Jeff Bridges’ bravura turn in Crazy Heart (NL), and out of the blue, the British soccer film, Damn United (NL). I share most of the critical esteem for a wide variety of foreign films: Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (#2), the Dardennes brothers’ Lorna’s Silence (#10), Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City (#11), Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (#12), and Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (#30). I’d add two that didn’t make the critics’ list for some reason: the César-sweeping Séraphine, and German docudrama The Baader-Meinhof Complex.
Also-rans for me, in the order of their Film Comment rankings, include: The Limits of Control, The Sun, Two Lovers, In the Loop, Tulpan, Public Enemies, Where the Wild Things Are, District 9, and Tokyo Sonata. I found each worth watching, but none would I urge upon you.
There are few films of critical consensus that I haven’t seen yet, and some I have no intention of seeing, such as Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (#7) and von Trier’s Antichrist (#20). A few others were just non-starters for me, but there should be plenty here for you to add to your Netflix queue.
The White Ribbon
As visually beautiful as it is emotionally ugly, Michael Haneke’s latest provocation dazzles the eye in luminous black & white and haunts the mind with its shades of darkness. The film conjures innumerable cinematic associations, but none more so than Village of the Damned. (Ordet and Diabolique are two more that leap to mind, not to mention plenty of Bergman, with pictorial allusions to Millet and August Sander as well.) Here the afflicted village is in Germany just before the start of World War I, a patriarchal society gone grievously wrong, where baron and steward, pastor and doctor, all abuse their power within the family and social structure. The title refers to a symbol like the Scarlet Letter, which the pastor ties to his teenage son and daughter, to remind them of their sins and the purity they have lost. While the men in power indulge their appetites, the mothers and children under their sway are hardly paragons of innocence. Though the film makes it purposefully hard to sort out the large families that constitute the larger family of the self-contained village, or any firm resolution of the mysterious crime spree it suffers, the larger story of male abuse of power and the perverted revenge of its victims comes through clearly enough. The acting of the large ensemble is consistently effective, especially the children, and a mood of quiet domestic horror is sustained throughout. The one sympathetic, though possibly clueless, male character is the teacher, who narrates the film as an older man, while his younger self provides the film’s lighter moments in his courtship of a shy young maid. Haneke’s mission is always to unsettle the audience, but here he offers a lovely visual antidote or counterpoint to his dark vision of human nature. He demands attention but rewards it. (2009, dvd) *7* (MC-82)
WW2 -- the big one
I am no fan of Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark, Mother and Son), but he got through to me a bit with The Sun (2004 --2009 in US -- dvd). For some, he is painterly -- for others, like watching paint dry. Always slow and enigmatic, his films appeal to me less than those of his mentor Tarkovsky. But here he has an interesting subject to examine through his eccentric lens, sort of Downfall in Japan, with Hirohito in the bunker instead of Hitler. At the very end of the war, with the Americans closing in, the Emperor is trapped more by his divine status than by his encircling enemies. A rhapsodizing marine biologist, with a passion for American movies, and busts of Darwin and Lincoln on his desk (Napoleon goes in the drawer once defeat is certain), Sokurov’s Hirohito is a strange but sympathetic character, who almost embraces his humiliation at the hands of MacArthur. He has a comic demeanor reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, with an odd fish-like way of moving his mouth, well-played by Issey Ogata (who was the Japanese computer guru in Yi Yi). Too bad the actor playing MacArthur seems laughable to an American audience. The visuals are also sometimes oddly artificial, but still the film has a cumulative power. *7-* (MC-85)
Snake pits
Largely by happenstance, I recently caught two films on TCM about women in mental institutions. They attracted me as I embark on my third collaboration with Kevin O’Hara -- a book about his thirty years on the psych ward, tentatively titled Inside Bedlam: Memoirs of a Bearded Nurse.
The Snake Pit (1948) offers a surprisingly believable portrayal of madness, and with her performance here, I finally forgive Olivia de Havilland for Melanie Wilkes. Despite the lurid title, Anatole Litvak takes a fairly serious look within the walls of a state mental hospital, with a few effectively expressionistic touches. Therapies like electroshock, ice immersion, and chemical injection are portrayed in an unsensational manner, but the film’s heart belongs to Dr. Freud, whose portrait hangs prominently in the office of the sympathetic psychiatrist played by Leo Genn. Sure, it’s a melodrama characteristic of its era, but this film is something more than a period piece.
Frances (1982), on the other hand, is nothing if not a sensational period piece. The attraction of this biopic is definitely Jessica Lange’s steamy portrayal of Thirties actress Frances Farmer. Is it just me, or is it hot in here? Certainly Jessica as Frances is hotheaded enough, shamelessly over the top, but we don’t end up with any real sense of her character. Much of the period detail, such as her affair with Clifford Odets and sojourn with the Group Theater, is interesting, but when Frances is thrown in the loony bin for deviant behavior, the film goes crazy too, throwing in lobotomy and rape to go with shock treatment.
Monday, July 05, 2010
Everlasting Moments
I don’t know whether to express profound gratitude to the Criterion Collection for promptly issuing Jan Troell’s recent Academy Award nominee for best foreign film -- which immediately becomes my pick for best of the year -- or sputtering rage at the lack of any dvd release of his diptych from the early 70s, The Emigrants and The New Land, by which I could confirm their ranking among my top ten of all-time. Under the current spell of Everlasting Moments, however, gratitude reigns supreme. What a lovely masterpiece! What a summation of the work of a master! Some may find it old-fashioned, slow-paced and quaintly pictorial, but I was breathlessly engaged from start to finish. It’s really a love letter to the camera and the power of seeing, both in its story and its execution. It’s all about light, as perceived by the eye of the lens and of the soul. Within a naturalistic, almost Zola-like, portrayal of a poor urban family in Sweden during the first part of the 20th century, we are offered a celebration of the imaginative power of photography and cinematography. Like Séraphine in its portrait of an historically real poor woman transfigured by the power of visual creation, Everlasting Moments chronicles the efforts of a struggling wife and mother to find her powers of expression while overwhelmed with the care of her ever-growing brood and brutish husband. Maria Heiskanen plays her namesake character with profundity, passion, and humor. The original Maria Larsson was a relative of Troell’s wife, who contributes to the screenplay. In every respect this film is an expression of family love and the power of seeing. I strongly advise you to see for yourself. (2009, dvd) *9* (MC-80)
The Staircase
I was impressed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s Oscar-winning documentary, Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001), but I am late coming to his follow-up, which originally appeared as an 8-part series on Sundance Channel. It’s an omission I’m glad to have rectified, since this is one of those rare elevations of true crime into work of art, on the order of Joe McGinniss’ book Fatal Vision. One has to bracket questions of real guilt and innocence with an understanding of the director’s particular point of view, but with the astounding access he gained, his mastery of cinema verité techniques, and the inherent fascination of the case, the series makes for a riveting 6 hours of real-life legal soap-opera, with all the twists and turns you could ask for, and an aura of lingering enigma, nicely enhanced by an extremely evocative musical score. Lestrade’s viewpoint, culled from 600 hours of footage, is highly persuasive, but after experiencing it, you’d be wise to fact-check other sources on the trial to get an idea of what he omitted. (I found Heather Havrilevsky of Salon.com insightful, as well as Amazon’s “most helpful” comments.) The director’s viewpoint may be partial but is very effective dramaturgically. I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to decide the case based on the film, but found the presentation consistently involving, especially when approached with no prior knowledge of the trial, which apparently ran on CourtTV. I advise going in cold to follow each twist of the tale, so I will offer no spoilers, except to say that the case involves a well-off Durham NC man accused of murdering his wife, while he claims she died from falling down the stairs. Believe me, that’s just for starters. (2004, dvd.) *8*
Channelsurfing
Here are brief comments on some films I happened to watch on TV when I didn’t have a more carefully chosen DVD on hand.
I watched some of Tilda Swinton’s appearance on Charlie Rose (promoting I Am Love, which looks to be pretty good) and in the clips reel there was a great moment from Burn After Reading (2008, MC-63). Since the Coen Brothers are back in my graces after A Serious Man, I thought I’d catch up with one of theirs that I had skipped. Besides Tilda, you’ve got George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins – what could go wrong? But on the other hand, it doesn’t exactly go right either. As so many of the Coens’ films do, this caper falls into the character of love it or leave it. Unlike, say, The Hudsucker Proxy, I’m leaving this one, but with those players it was not a hardship to watch, despite its haphazard relationship with reality. It’s either too wacky or not wacky enough, in its story of bumbling spies and cheating spouses in Washington DC.
I liked Sunshine Cleaning (2009, MC-61) a lot more than the film whose success it was trying so hard to emulate, Little Miss Sunshine -- largely for the reason I watched in the first place, the pairing of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, two of the more appealing actresses out there. Christine Jeff’s film about two sisters starting a crime scene clean-up business showcases them pretty well, and certainly has its moments until it peters out into a pat resolution, touching the usual bases but never really scoring.
The Girl on the Train
Though compelling at times, André Téchiné’s fictionalized backstory to a sensational French media frenzy is finally too disjointed to warrant a recommendation. Emilie Duquenne (who was Rosetta for the Dardennes) is highly watchable as the young woman who fabricates an anti-Semitic attack by a gang of swarthy youths, even though her motivations are difficult to understand. Catherine Deneuve graces the screen -- as she has done for nearly half a century -- as the girl’s mother. Other characters intersect with their story, and the film wanders into their lives as well. Scene by scene, it works well, but in the end seems like bits and pieces rather than cumulatively forceful. The precipitating event (or non-event) is buried deep within the middle of the film, but the meanings circle around the periphery. Perhaps if one were French, the real story would be so well known as to make the film hold together in a way it doesn’t on its own. (2009, dvd.) *6* (MC-68)
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Still Walking
I’m tempted to say that Hirokazu Kore-eda is more Ozu than Ozu, since I happened to watch his latest in tandem with Floating Weeds (1959), which is uncharacteristic late Ozu in that it looks at a traveling theater troupe rather than his typical tight family focus. Here Kore-eda’s focus is equally tight, one day in the life of one family. Gathering at the parents’ home near Yokohama are the grown daughter, with her layabout husband and cute girl and boy, and the fortyish son who is bringing his new wife, a beautiful and charming young widow with a son about the same age as the others. Absent is the elder son, who was supposed to take over his father’s medical practice, but died prematurely in a manner that emerges gradually from the mostly unspoken -- or indirectly expressed – interactions among the family members. The family gathering seems to be the focus of quality world cinema these days. Like Summer Hours last year and A Christmas Tale the year before, Still Walking is among the very best of recent films. It foregrounds exploration of character while remaining deliriously visual – one memorable close-up has the hands of the three children reaching up into the blossoms of a cherry tree. The film’s exceptional beauty came through even when streamed as video on a computer. (Oddly, there is no DVD yet but Netflix does offer it for instant play.) The rituals and habits of familial communication have rarely been more sensitively drawn. Apparently Kore-eda made the film after the death of his parents, to atone for his inattention while they were alive. It is a beautiful testament and testimony, humorous and heart-felt, life-affirming while sharply pointed. (2009, Netflix stream) *8* (MC-89)
Crazy Heart
Are there two more ingratiating and approachable movie stars working today than Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal? Sure, you have your Clooneys and Streeps, but face it, George and Meryl are not in our league. No more than Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn ever were. Without any aura of awe, it’s just a pleasure to spend two hours in the company of Jeff (shambling but equipoised) and Maggie (whose hunched shoulders look awkward one moment and elegant the next). First-time writer-director Scott Cooper does not get in their way, or between them and us. The story is familiar, but in good ways. The presence of Robert Duvall makes explicit the derivation from Tender Mercies, one of my all-time faves. The characters and setting – with an aging country singer getting too old for life on the road in the desert West, and the young woman who may be his salvation – are believably rendered (with a possible exception in the digs of a young single mother writing for a local newspaper). Just when you think you know what well-traveled road the film is about to go down, something surprises you with a twist toward truth. Just as Colin Farrell pops up with a surprising turn as a rising young country singer, Jeff’s one-time protege and now patron. Both do their own singing, creditably, and the original songs have the authentic sound of hardscrabble poetry. Within its compass, this little film does little wrong, and Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance as Bad Blake makes it big. (2009, dvd) *7* (MC-83)
It's not TV, it's HBO -- and AMC!
Following The Wire and Generation Kill, both the best of their kind, with the new HBO series, Treme (2010, MC-87), David Simon continues his mission to immerse us in front-line environments, allowing us gradually to come to a rounded view of a complex situation. Here it’s New Orleans post-Katrina, or more specifically, the Treme district of the city, fount of music in all its local variety. Much of each episode is given over to extended performances, but since music looms so large in the life of all, those performances are also story-telling and character-delineating. As one tangential character sums it up, “Sex is sex. But music, that’s personal.” At the end of the first season of ten episodes, I’m finally getting past thinking of Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters as the beloved “Bunk” and “Lester,” and knowing them as scuffling saxophonist Antoine Batiste and “Indian Chief” Albert Lambreaux. Likewise, other familiar faces inhabit their roles and revolve through the intersecting stories, until they are at one with their characters: Steve Zahn as the flaky but impassioned DJ; Kim Dickens as a chef struggling to revive her restaurant after the flood; Khandi Alexander as Bunk’s -- I mean Antoine’s – ex, who runs a bar and enlists public defender Melissa Leo to track down her brother, who was lost in the penal system during the disaster; John Goodman as Leo’s husband, a novelist and Tulane professor who becomes an internet celebrity for his impassioned YouTube pleas for the restoration of the Big Easy; and last but far from least, Lucia Micarelli as the amazing streetcorner fiddler with the druggy partner. Again, Simon works that permeable membrane between fiction and reality, with many musicians and other New Orleans celebrities appearing as themselves, while exploring the intersections of class and race, history and politics, art and community. For me, David Simon can do no wrong; for you – well, you’ll have to see for yourself.
While Treme represents a comeback for HBO original series, AMC continues its hot streak with a just-completed third stellar season of Breaking Bad (2010, MC-89), leading soon to another of Mad Men. While acknowledging that it will not appeal to all, I highly recommend Vince Gilligan’s series for its intelligent and stylish blend of grisly humor, twisty plotting , great character acting, local color and universal themes. Taking a page from The Sopranos in mixing crime suspense with family drama, Breaking Bad is anchored by the Emmy-winning performance of Bryan Cranston in the role of a high school chemistry in Albuquerque, whose life starts to break bad, taking him down darker and darker paths, as his knowledge alchemizes into a major crystal-meth operation. Aaron Paul also shines as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Bob Odenkirk is fantastic as the sleazy lawyer who enables their criminal operations, and Giancarlo Esposito is steely and persuasive as the third season’s rival drug kingpin. Anna Gunn is also strong as Cranston’s wife, along with great bit players along the way. Continuously surprising, Breaking Bad maintains suspense and suspends judgment in a manner that shocks (and amuses!) while retaining credibility. We sustain some undercurrent of empathy even as our familiar characters become more and more evil. After a second season so tightly plotted that a mysterious scene that appears before the opening credits of the first episode does not get explained till the end of the final episode, this season Gilligan and his writers delighted in painting themselves into corners, and then surprising themselves and us with how they got out, along with daring tangents like a Beckett-flavored playlet with just the two leads and a fly caught in an hermetically sealed lab.
Hannah Takes the Stairs
Though more annoying than endearing, the insulated and self-involved twentysomethings of Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore touchstone do elicit some anthropological amusement across generations, but lack the implicit dimensions of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, for example. I’m not immune to the appeal of Greta Gerwig’s bare breasts, which open and close the film, with other appearances in between, but this is a girl I would avoid in real life. Within 90 minutes she runs through three guys, including Bujalski himself and fellow-director Mark Duplass. Passing through naturalism to narcissism, Swanberg’s do-it-yourself effort does it more for himself than for the audience. (2007, Sund/OD) *5+* (MC-63)
Consumer advice
I’m obliged to offer a consumer’s report on two pieces of product that you might consider taking in. There are reasons to look at each, if that sort of thing suits your taste, but I cannot advise you to watch either. The first I liked more than the less-than-tepid critical consensus, and the second less than generally lukewarm reviews.
Whatever Works. (2009, dvd, MC-45) Woody Allen continues to churn out a film a year, long past the time he had anything new to say. Some people thought he was rejuvenated by making films in Europe, others are glad he is back on the home turf of Manhattan. Apparently, this is a script he wrote thirty years ago for Zero Mostel, but in Larry David he finds the right actor to step into his own well-worn persona of cranky neurotic, which has reduced the likes of Kenneth Branagh to gross caricature. The role meshes with David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” persona in an interesting way, as when two headshots merge into a spooky composite. For once a different old guy lands the sweet young thing. And make no mistake, Evan Rachel Wood is a sweet young thang. More than that, she brings some substance to a role that is the essence of caricature, the brainless Dixie cheerleader who meets cute and falls for the curmudgeonly retired physics professor with an exaggeratedly acerbic outlook on life and death. It’s all very familiar, from the credits to the music, from the setting to the themes, but I found enough in it to enjoy for its modest duration.
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