Drawing a bead on 2012

Working my way back into currency, I will survey a number of recent films in cursory fashion, registering my opinion more than writing a real review.  I’ll simply enumerate my expectations and reactions, what I hoped for and what I got.  As always, I link to Metacritic, so you can sample a range of critical opinion and amplify detail on the film, and to Netflix, for dvd and streaming availability.

The film I was most eager to see, Take This Waltz (2012, MC-68, NFX), fell short of my expectations, which were sky-high considering that Sarah Polley’s first directorial effort, Away From Her, was my favorite feature of 2007; that the film stars Michelle Williams who may be my favorite actress of the moment; and that the title and several songs come from Leonard Cohen, yet another favorite of mine.  Sarah and Michelle deliver nicely, although not their very best, but I think the movie needed more Leonard Cohen, a little more head to go with the heart, a little more spirituality to go with the sex, a little more grounding of romance in social reality.  This romantic triangle is too vague and too on-the-nose at the same time, without achieving a fruitful ambiguity.  It’s so much a woman’s picture, at least in the Sirkian sense, that I may be somewhat disqualified to comment.  Still, I would see it again.

Though Richard Linklater is one of my favorite filmmakers, I wasn’t expecting all that much from his latest, Bernie (2012, MC-75, NFX), assuming it was one of the indie master’s more commercial efforts.  Turns out it’s a damn fine film, with a down home feel that makes it very personal.  In his genre-busting style, Linklater mixes true crime with East Texas small town comedy, just as he mixes actors with real townspeople in a Greek chorus of gossip.  Jack Black is a revelation as a funeral home assistant with a serious people-pleasing demeanor, good at corpse presentation, eulogies and hymns, and comforting widows.  He sings exceptionally well, both at church and in his community theater performance of The Music Man, and he balances flamboyance and smarm to good effect.  He’s the most liked man in town, until he falls in with the most unliked woman, a crotchety rich old widow played by Shirley McClaine (a long way – sigh - from Irma La Douce and my adolescent fixation).  She disappears, but it’s many months before suspicion falls on Bernie, and only because showboat sheriff Matthew McConaghey (in a role for which I forgive him his “sexiest man alive” performances) scents a big score.  This film manages to be both funny and thought-provoking without bustin’ a gut over it.

I approached Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012, MC-82, NFX) in a dutiful frame of mind, knowing it would be long and slow, but that Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the names to conjure with in world cinema.  Despite quibbles about pace and opacity, I’d appreciated his earlier films, Distant and Climates.  This film, however, really grew on me, so much so that I may show it at the Clark.  Nominally a police procedural, literally a search for a murdered body, the film plays as a strange nighttime odyssey by three cars twisting through the desolately beautiful Anatolian steppe, as we gradually come to know the men in the cars -- suspects, police chief, prosecutor, doctor, etc.  On one level, the film is a beautiful cinematographic essay on light at night, either from the moon or headlights or lantern-flame.  But it is also a series of portraits of men under stress, and how they react to a brief vision of feminine loveliness.  The film’s title alludes to Sergio Leone, and Ceylan works that same alteration between widescreen landscapes and faces in extreme close-up.  At the same time, he takes inspiration from Chekhov in the careful, understated unfolding of the drama.  This film turns into quite a thrilling un-thriller.

My expectations for Moonrise Kingdom (2012, MC-82, NFX) were mixed.  I’ve never been a particular fan of Wes Anderson, but so many people were raving about his latest that I was willing to be surprised.  The film is certainly visually accomplished, funny in places, with its winsome heart more or less in the right place, but as usual I found it overdetermined and quirky for the sake of quirk, with caricatures rather than characters, despite actors like Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and more.  The child actors, a boy who runs away from camp and a girl who runs away from home, on a New England island in the 60s, are endearing enough, and competent enough in delivering lines that no child has ever uttered.  But I was not won over.  I remain with those who find Fantastic Mr. Fox the Wes Anderson film for people who don’t like Wes Anderson films, where his cartoon characters are actually cartoons, and realer than the actors he cuts into cardboard with his overwrought style.

As a retro exercise in style, evoking the bleakness of postwar Britain, Terence Davies’ Deep Blue Sea (2012, MC-82, NFX) is effective.  As an involving drama, this adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play lacks staying power.  The always-watchable Rachel Weisz plays a woman who bursts out of a comfortable but deadening marriage to a judge and shacks up with a dashing but unreliable RAF survivor of the Battle of Britain.  It seems like a bad choice, given that the film starts with her suicide attempt, and nothing convinces me that a woman as intelligent as Ms. Weisz would have made it, and kept on making it, no matter how hot her flyboy lover was.  The two men fill their roles adequately, but this is entirely the woman’s picture, mostly alone in a room.  So the story as well as the visuals seem stuck in amber.  I suppose the message is how strong even muted and suppressed passion can be.  The upper lip is stiff to keep from quivering.  But non-Brits may find the drama less than riveting or convincing.  I’m not immune to melodrama, in the literal music-driven sense of a Douglas Sirk film, but this one did not sweep me away, left me on the outside of the woman’s dilemma.

Frankly I steer clear of most Israeli films, not wishing to probe my ambivalences about the Jewish state, but a friend assured me that Footnote (2012, MC-82, NFX) was not a political piece, but an academic comedy.  Sorry, it still wore out its welcome for me.  I found the jaunty music and satiric interpositions off-putting rather than funny.  The rivalry between father and son Talmudic scholars does touch on some sensitive spots of academic and family life, and some scenes build up to powerful realizations, but I felt flogged along through the film, rather than carried along by it.  Though one footnote can remain a scholar’s claim to fame, this one I’m inclined to skip over.

I had two reasons for watching Return (2012, MC-63, NFX).  The director is Liza Johnson, who has taught at Williams, and the star is Linda Cardellini, who was forever endeared to me by Freaks and Geeks.  The film is certainly a professional job for an independently produced effort, with a nice sense of locale, and Ms. Cardellini retains her magnetism, as an army reservist returning from deployment and falling into a near-catatonic state, despite a relatively easy tour of duty in the warzone.  Michael Shannon tones it down as the husband who doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, and John Slattery (of Mad Men) perks up the proceedings as the fellow alcoholic vet who does.  The film achieves a subdued honesty, without grabbing for any great revelation.

Once again, two of the recent films that most exceeded my expectations were documentaries.  Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012, MC-75, NFX) certainly changed my mind about the artist in question, whom I would have been inclined to write off as a masochistic exhibitionist.  Certainly many of her earlier performance pieces involved self-harm, slamming and cutting her naked body, but to cap a recent retrospective at MoMA in which of troupe of performers reenacted some of the less violent of them, the artist took it upon herself to be present for the entire duration of the exhibition, sitting alone on a plain wooden chair in the vast cube of the new MoMA atrium, and inviting visitors to take turns sitting in the chair opposite her.  A simple concept -- difficult, even punishing, in execution -- that unfolded into surprising impact and meaning.  Shamanistic and sacrificial, an exercise in stillness and silence, the performance showed the power of the attentive gaze of another person to unleash emotional revelation.  The camera completes the process by allowing us to gaze into those faces as well, to experience the expressive but unexpressed power of human connection.  Really, you have to see it to believe it.

I’ve been impressed with Kevin MacDonald’s documentaries going back to One Day in September and Touching the Void, but Marley (2012, MC-82, NFX) involved me in its subject even more than I expected.  Though not a concert film, with no song performed all the way through, this biography of Bob Marley revivified my interest in his music, and lately I’ve been listening to little else.  I’d watched other films about Marley, the Wailers, and reggae music, so I was surprised to find the story told in a much fuller and richer context.  This film made Marley seem even more admirable, and his appeal more comprehensible, somehow messianic without immodesty, a global figure of spiritual light, despite the quirky aspects of Rastafarianism.  Through the testimony of himself and others, an impression of his power emerges, and what was lost by his early death from cancer.  I had been unaware of his British father, and came to understand a sort of mixed breed wisdom and appeal, which I also see in Barack Obama, bridging personal divides as well as social.

TV worth watching

Though I gave up DirecTV satellite service many months ago, I have been keeping up with some favorite shows through various providers, watching some with my daughter who still has cable with premium channels, some streaming on Netflix and some on Hulu.  It’s a truism that a sizable number of the best films being made today are television series, and they continue to make up a large portion of my viewing time and pleasure.  Looking back over the past several months, here are the standouts.

AMC continues to set the pace, with the fifth season of Mad Men (MC-88, NFX) living up to expectation, and the first half of the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad (MC-99, NFX) exceeding even high expectations.  By now you know whether you like to get into a retro groove with Mad Men, whether you buy into its premise of Sixties style, but the fifth season delivers its typical entertainment, with some highs and lows, but generally very good.  Breaking Bad, however, just keeps getting better and better, and it will be difficult to wait a year for its conclusion, which cannot help but be devastating.  Vince Gilligan has over the years delivered brilliantly on his premise of “turning Mr. Chips into Scarface,” while delivering single episodes that are imaginatively brilliant and emotionally powerful.  You ought to watch, and must watch from the beginning, not in random episodes.

HBO has definitely ceded the crown for best tv miniseries overall, but still has Game of Thrones (MC-88, NFX) on a pedestal in its second season.  Who knew sword and sorcery stuff could be so telling, faux-medieval dynastic struggle so compelling?  Balancing multiple storylines and a huge cast of characters with amplitude and intelligibility, against the mammoth backdrop of George R. R. Martin’s immense series of novels, this super soap opera delivers empathy and horror, familiarity and shock,  through topnotch acting and production values.  Again, start at the beginning and immerse yourself in a world at first strange and alien, but ultimately revealing of hidden depths.

For me, Boardwalk Empire reveals no hidden depths, and I will watch the beginning of its new season on sufferance, willing to be drawn in by Steve Buscemi and Kelly MacDonald, but likely to tune out.  As I did to The Newsroom, which had a pretty good cast and some moments that conveyed the excitement of the news business, but in which the balance of good and bad in Aaron Sorkin tipped decisively toward the bad in his depiction of women.  (Speaking of bailing out on shows that I once enjoyed, I gave up on The Big C in the middle of its third season; I still like Laura Linney, but the show lurched toward the preposterous once she went into remission.) 

I did watch two new HBO half-hour comedies through their first seasons.  I remain ambivalent about Girls (MC-87, NFX), liking Lena Dunham both as actress and defining sensibility, but finding the other three girls less than captivating and the whole Sex and the City update a little bit squirm-inducing.  I liked Veep (MC-72, NFX) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the title role, but prefer to go back to the source, Armando Ianucci’s original British series, The Thick of It (see below).

Sure to put HBO back in my good graces, the third season of David Simon’s Treme (MC-87, NFX) starts this month, though it is liable to be overshadowed by Showtime’s second season of Homeland (MC-91, NFX), which comes back with a Presidential endorsement as Obama’s favorite show.  If you have the nerves for it, you should catch up with the first season, now out on DVD, and marvel at the performances of Claire Danes as a combustible CIA agent, and Damien Lewis as an American soldier turned Islamic infiltrator.

The trail of Damien Lewis led me to the 2002 BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga (NFX), in which he continues to keep his emotions enigmatic and under wraps as Soames Forsyte, the man of property who wants to control all he surveys, starting with his trophy wife, played by Gina McKee.  Rupert Graves is the nicer Forsyte cousin, Corin Redgrave is his father, and Ioan Gruffudd is the dashing young architect with designs on Soames’ property.  A second season carries the saga into the next generation, but remains integral to the central story.  Well done, old chap, I must say.

Always a sucker for British heritage productions, I found it eminently worthwhile to re-watch on a good-looking dvd the ne plus ultra of Jane Austen adaptations, the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice (IMDB, NFX) with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth heading an impeccable cast.  This I think is the series that raised Masterpiece Theater to more film-like production values, and it’s really worthwhile to see it on a newer, bigger tv to appreciate the detailed depth of field.  It’s a lot more than theater on video, and truer to the book and the period than any other adaptation, with the brightest of Elizabeths and the hunkiest of Darcys pitting their pride and their prejudice against each other.

I knew just enough about the English Civil War to follow, but not enough to quibble with The Devil’s Whore (released on these primmer shores as The Devil’s Mistress, 2008, NFX), a bodice-ripper for sure but one with a rare respect for history, and really an amazing cast, with Dominic West (McNulty of The Wire) as Cromwell and Peter Capaldi (Malcolm Tucker of The Thick of It) as King Charles I, plus Michael Fassbender as a Leveller leader and Andrea Riseborough as his fictional wife, calumniated in the title.  John Simms stands out as a mercenary with a heart of gold, who turns against the men he fought with when they usurp power.

Another British tv series that belatedly became a favorite is Doc Martin (2004-to date, NFX), in which Martin Clunes plays a high-powered London surgeon who develops a phobia about blood and winds up as a GP in a beautiful seaside village in Cornwall, a brilliant and committed doctor with no people skills at all.  With hilarious consistency, he fails to notice what people are saying or feeling, while monitoring their symptoms.  There’s a comic romance, all sorts of familial complications, and a range of townsfolk to keep the proceedings sprightly through 37 episodes so far. 

Netflix temporarily lost streaming rights to Doc Martin while we were right in the middle of watching, so we had to sign up for Hulu to continue, and that turned out to be worth the eight bucks a month.  First off, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert play better on the tv than on the computer.  Then we were able catch up with the fourth season of Parks and Recreation, still one of the sweetest and sharpest of sitcoms, but moreover, Hulu has an exclusive on Armando Iannucci’s unexpurgated foul-mouthed political classic, The Thick of It (2005 to date, MC-90, Hulu).  This British political series takes cursing way beyond Shakespeare, primarily in the fearsome communications director played by Peter Capaldi.  But really the whole cast is great in this antithesis of The West Wing, where the political players talk just as fast, but instead of making coherent policy points, they break new ground in the art of insult and intimidation, much of it so breathtaking and Scots-inflected that you will need to back up and listen to it again.  Once I went through the first three seasons, I went back and re-watched the movie spin-off, In the Loop (2009, NFX), and liked it much more, now that the characters are so familiar.  A fourth season is now underway, exclusively on Hulu though linkable through IMDB, with our old Labor friends out, and the new coalition in power.

Hulu also scores point for its original programming with Up to Speed (2012, IMDB), an offbeat travel program centered around quirky tour guide Speed Levitch.  It happens to be co-produced by Richard Linklater and Alex Lipschultz, my daughter’s boyfriend, so give it a try if you have the chance (I’d start with the last episode of the first six.)  Hulu’s other great resource is movies from The Criterion Collection, including many titles not on DVD.

Last batch of 2011

I have obviously fallen way behind with my film commentary, but not with my viewing.  I need to resume to-the-moment responses, but am weighed down by a huge backlog to weigh in on.  Having finally worked my way through all but a few of the top fifty films in Film Comment’s critics poll, I will soon offer a summary of my own final rankings for 2011.  For now, a few words on a number of them.  To make up for limited detail, I link as usual to Metacritic’s compilation of reviews, and to Netflix listing for DVD or streaming availability, as well as giving the Film Comment ranking.

On the shelf for years, disappearing from theaters in a minute, late to video, Margaret (2011, MC-61, FC#20, NFX) proved well worth the wait, and well worth the two and a half hour running (or slo-mo walking) time.  In fact, I may write at greater length once I’ve seen the three hour director’s cut.  I was eager to catch up with Kenneth Lonergan’s follow-up to You Can Count on Me, one of my favorite films of this millennium, and I was not disappointed.  Anna Paquin is excellent as a Manhattan prep school girl who witnesses - and is deeply involved in – a fatal pedestrian encounter with a bus.  The likes of Alison Janney, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, and Mark Ruffalo make their brief appearances count.  Despite widespread dismissal, I would put this film just below A Separation among my favorites of the past year, sharing an unwillingness to settle into an opinion of a character and assume a firm handle on who’s right and who’s wrong.  The film is, as a character says, “a moral gymnasium,” and the exercise is a good workout.

I have not shared most of the cognoscenti’s enthusiasm for recent Romanian films, and could not watch two that appear on the Film Comment list (#13 Autobiography of Nicolae Ceasusescu unavailable, and #29 Aurora unwatchable), but one I found pretty terrific (in both senses of the word) was Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (2011, MC-81, FC#28, NFX), a romantic triangle remarkable both for its ordinariness and for its scalding honesty.  The actors who play a married couple are really married, and clearly know all about how couples fight.  The man has fallen for their young daughter’s orthodontist, and the emotional fallout is portrayed in extended scenes that offer a slow drip of reality and truth.  Sometimes amusing, sometimes lacerating, this is another film that doesn’t take sides for or against its characters, but unfolds their choices with sympathy and satire.

Aki Kaurismäki’s  Le Havre (2011, MC-82, FC#12, NFX) is a pleasant pastel fable of human solidarity with deadpan wit and political kick.  The dour but playful Finnish director travels to Normandy and pays homage to classic French film, most particularly Children of Paradise.  The female lead, though played by Kaurismäki’s favorite Finnish actress Kati Outinen, is called Arletty.  For a great inside joke, the villain of the piece -- the one member of the harbor’s working class community who does not silently conspire to protect a young African boy escaping a round-up of illegal immigrants and trying to reach his mother in London – is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Antoine Doinel grown up to be a malevolent snitch fifty years after The 400 Blows.  If this tickles you, -- or the Buster Keatonish impassivity of male lead André Wilms, or the terrific canine actor -- you will get a kick out of this film.  Otherwise, it’s strangeness may put you off.  There is a Bressonian severity to the way it is shot, but also a goofy once-upon-a-time quality to its old-fashioned color design.

In Shame (2011, MC-72, FC#21, NFX), Michael Fassbender -- now appearing on screen as everything from Mr. Rochester to Carl Jung, not to mention one of the X-Men -- re-teams with the director who first brought him to my attention, Steve McQueen (in Hunger), and delivers another impressive performance.  He plays a sex-addicted Manhattan yuppie, with an equally damaged sister, played by Carey Mulligan.  She’s a would-be chanteuse and her slo-mo rendition of “New York, New York” in intense prolonged close-up is one of the highlights of this stylish film.  Another is long, long tracking shots along nighttime city streets.  But everything comes down to Fassbender’s character, and he is ferocious and unsparing in his self-hate, naked in more ways than one.  Not for the weak of heart or stomach, and by no means a perfect film, Shame has an undeniable power.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, MC-85, FC#24. NFX) I found well-made but incomprehensible.  I also wondered at the contemporary relevance of this late adaptation of John Le Carré.  It’s so difficult to follow the plots and counterplots that I just gave up on getting it, despite old familiarity with the book and the Alec Guinness tv series.  Nonetheless, Gary Oldman is excellent as Smiley in this remake by Tomas Alfredson, and the rest of the cast is made up of familiar and welcome faces such as Colin Firth and Ciaran Hinds.  The craftsmanship makes this film haunting, if not quite intelligible.  It would take another viewing to make sense of it, but I do not feel moved to give it a second chance.

I have latterly become a fan of Almodóvar but his latest, The Skin I Live In (2011, MC-70, FC#31, NFX), has already evaporated from my mind.  He’s an extremely accomplished filmmaker, can do whatever he wants, but I wonder why he wanted to do this densely-layered genre exercise, with Hitchcockian suspense, mad scientist horror, romantic melodrama, and the kitchen sink.  It sure looks good, as do leads Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya, but the mystery of the doctor and his patient-prisoner is not one that drew me in.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, MC-68, NFX) would have been empty and showy without Tilda Swinton, who is always worth watching, but the film squanders any chance it had to be illuminating about the growing up of a “bad seed” who goes on to a Columbine-like massacre.  Tilda rings a symphony of changes on the mother’s guilt and grief, and the three actors who play the sociopathic boy at different ages look spookily similar, but Lynne Ramsey’s arty, convoluted direction does not redeem the horror of this suburban monster story.

If  I list the foregoing films in declining order of my appraisal, here’s an unnoticed sleeper that I would add somewhere in the middle:  The Music Never Stopped (2011, MC-60, NFX) is a fictionalization of an Oliver Sacks case study about a brain-damaged patient who regains cognitive and affective function though connection to music.  Reliable character actor J.K. Simmons plays the father who reaches out to his estranged and amnesiac son by adopting the music the young man loved before a brain tumor erased his memory.  Lou Taylor Pucci is the Deadhead son, also enamored of Dylan and the whole pantheon of late-Sixties rock.  Julia Ormond is the music therapist (and Sacks-surrogate) who finds the key to reclaim their connection.  Jim Kohlberg’s sincere if not artful film worked for me largely because the music touched off similar sorts of timewarp memories, and the father-son relationship resonated as well.

Also on a more favorable note, I mention two documentaries that I found exceptional.  The Interrupters  (2011, MC-86, FC#26, NFX) is the latest from Steve James, best known for Hoop Dreams and here returning to similar neighborhoods of Chicago to follow several of the title characters, street-level interveners trying to contain the epidemic of urban violence.  If you love The Wire (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), then you will be swept up in the stories of these sharply delineated individuals, who have gone from gangbanging to frontline conflict resolution.  The Loving Story (2011, MC-81, no NFX yet but on HBO) offers the human side of the Supreme Court’s Loving vs. Virginia decision overturning laws against miscegenation.  Richard Loving looks the part of a total redneck, but grew up in a mixed rural community not infected with racism.  Mildred Loving is a tall, lovely, and charming mix of black and Native American.  Though no sort of activists, there could have been no better couple to overturn a monstrous injustice.  It’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance, and applaud their vindication.

What with the election year and all, I’ve been watching a lot of political movies.  Somehow J. Edgar (2011, MC-59, FC#48, NFX) made it on to the Film Comment list, I suppose because Clint Eastwood is now taken to be a grand old man of cinema, though maybe not so much after his bizarre performance at the GOP convention.  It’s not a badly made period film, and Leonardo di Caprio convinces as Hoover, as he he did with Hughes in The Aviator.  But the film’s portrayal is more confused than multi-layered, as is the closeted cross-dressing character; you have to bring your own memories of the malevolent long-time FBI chief to appreciate the significance of the proceedings. 

On my side of the fence, I expected more from George Clooney in The Ides of March (2011, MC-67, NFX), both more nuanced direction and more screentime as an actor.  He’s a Presidential candidate, and Ryan Gosling is his devoted young aide.  With Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as duelling campaign managers, Marisa Tomei as a NYT reporter, and other welcome faces filling out a competent cast, this movie would have been more successful if it were not so “shocked, shocked” at political and personal mendacity, and did not feel the need to descend to melodrama.  They talk about tv series “jumping the shark,” and for me this film went from engrossing to preposterous in one shark-jumping scene.  Not worthless, but a missed opportunity.

Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011, MC-54, NFX) is indeed enough of a reason to watch the film, but director Phyllida Lloyd does not have enough of a point of view to make the story compelling.  Again the viewer has to provide his or her own viewpoint to the subject.  I certainly had my own, and appreciated a review of the relevant facts, developed a sense of the character’s history but not her significance, despite the signposts of her rule.  Is she feminist heroine or political disaster?  Maybe both, but this film doesn’t sort it out.  Nonetheless, it’s an amazing impersonation by the ever-amazing Meryl.  I first saw her doing Shakespeare in the Park in the mid-70s, and she’s never let me down since.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Coriolanus (2011, MC-79, NFX) as modern-dress political parable, about the conflict between aristocratic martial honor and democratic values.  Violent in execution and emotion (borrowing the DP from The Hurt Locker, shooting in Serbia), the film has plenty of power, but limited relevance.  Vanessa Redgrave is his mother and Jessica Chastain his wife, Brian Cox his senatorial advisor, so this Coriolanus has plenty of worthy support, but will never be a successful politician, too rigid, too angry to be consul.  This film of this play is a bludgeon, a military thriller, but effective within its limits.

That leaves as my favorite recent political film, the HBO movie Game Change (2012, MC-75, NFX), in which Juliane Moore gives a performance as Sarah Palin that rivals Meryl as Maggie, offering understanding without whitewash or evisceration.  Based on the bestselling chronicle of the 2008 campaign, this Jay Roach film follows Recount in turning recent politics into intelligent entertainment.  Ed Harris makes for a sympathetic and plausible John McCain and Woody Harrelson stands out as campaign manager Steve Schmidt.  As with everything else in our partisan environment, reaction to this film seems to split along political lines, so I tend to find this film as even-handed and truthful as the ludicrous Grizzly Mom deserves.  Opinions will no doubt vary. 

Going back to some old favorites, I confirmed The Candidate (1972, NFX) as the best political film I’ve ever seen, provocative, funny, and truthful.  Michael Ritchie’s film stars Robert Redford as a California governor’s radical son, who is recruited and co-opted to run for U.S. Senator.  Its jaundiced view of the Hollywoodization of politics not only holds up, but seems remarkably prescient.  Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998, MC-75, NFX) retains interest and amusement, but eventually wears out its welcome.  And the Watergate comedy Dick (1999, MC-65, NFX) remains broadly funny, but its greater distinction is the early pairing of Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, the two outstanding movie actresses of their generation.

Fall films at the Clark

 “OLD MASTERS IN NEW FRAMES”

Free film series with scholarly commentary in Clark auditorium

Thursday evenings at 7:00 starting September 20

"Old Masters in New Frames" pairs highly-esteemed feature films about famous artists with scholarly interlocutors affiliated with the Clark, each of whom will put the another frame around the subject, offering an introduction and/or leading a post-film discussion. 

September 20 Thursday 7pm: Andrei Rublev.  (1966, 205 min, Russian with subtitles)  Andrei Tarkovsky's masterful epic explores not just the life and work of the famous icon painter, but the whole cosmos of late medieval Russia, in a cinematic classic of art, faith, and history.  Steve Satullo, film programmer for the Clark, will introduce the series and the film.  For the convenience of viewers unable to stay late on Thursday, this film will be repeated on Friday 9/21, with Part One at 1:00 pm and Part Two at 3:00 pm.

October 4 Thursday 7pm: The Mill & the Cross.  (2011, 95 min.)  Lech Majewski offers a unique portal -- through special effects and dramatization -- for entering the world of a Pieter Bruegel painting, with the artist himself (played by Rutger Hauer) as guide.  Keith Moxey, Chair of Art History at Barnard College, will provide context and commentary on the film.

October 18 Thursday 7pm: Caravaggio.  (1986, 90 min.)  Derek Jarman's bold experiment in portraiture tells the story of the scandalous Italian Baroque painter, played by Nigel Terry, with his muse and model played by Tilda Swinton.  Michael Cassin, director of the Center for Education in the Visual Arts at the Clark, will tell tales about the painter and his world.

November 1 Thursday 7pm: Edvard Munch.  (1974, 172 min.).   Peter Watkins' brilliant docudrama follows the early life and career of the grim Norwegian painter, showing what led to The Scream.  Jay Clarke, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs for the Clark and author of Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth, will introduce and assess the film.

November 15 Thursday 7pm: Lust for Life.  (1956, 122 min.)  Vincente Minnelli’s adaptation of the Irving Stone novel is an unusually serious Hollywood biopic, imbued with the colors of the art and the life.  Kirk Douglas gives an impassioned performance as Vincent Van Gogh, with Anthony Quinn as Paul Gauguin.  Perspective will be provided by Richard Kendall, Curator at Large for the Clark and author of Van Gogh’s Van Goghs.

The Kid with a Bike

Before I offer my final recommendations on films from 2011, I’ve just seen one that will figure high on my list for 2012, the Dardenne brothers’ superb Kid with a Bike  (2012, MC-87, NFX), which provided an auspicious debut for Cinema Salon at Images, as some members of the film club convened there to watch and discuss the film.  This film may be the most accessible that these Cannes favorites have made yet, true to their neo-neorealist style and themes, but appealing to a wider audience with a fairy tale aspect, shot in summertime, with a beautiful actress, and discrete but effective musical cues. 

The Dardennes have built an internationally-acclaimed career by staying close to their roots, making all their films in their hometown of Seraing, a nondescript factory town in French-speaking Belgium, working cheap in semi-documentary style, with a small and familiar crew, and mostly nonprofessional actors, with a focus on the powerless, such as illegal immigrants and abandoned children.  For Kid with a Bike, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves is an obvious point of reference, as is Truffaut’s 400 Blows, but even more so Rossellini and Bresson, for an idiosyncratic but deeply-imbued Catholicism with a social conscience. 

Le gamin au velo is the story of an 11-year-old boy who is all about velocity, running away, chasing after, swinging from one desperate attachment to another.  Thomas Doret is outstanding as Cyril, the boy abandoned by his father in an institution, who finds a lifeline, indeed a fairy godmother, in the sturdy and understanding arms of Samantha, a hairdresser played to perfection by Cecile de France.  With harsh reality turned into rewarding fable, every detail is specific, not symbolic, but dripping with significance.  This is cinema of heart and mind, as well as eye and hand, an affirmation of kindness and connection in a tough world.

When Cinema Salon film club screenings resume at the Clark, I intend to program a Dardenne brothers double feature, but that probably won’t happen until September, though I may sneak in a screening in June, before the Clark’s summer season is in full swing.

This blog has evolved from immediate comments on films as I view them to more thematic groupings over a longer period.  Aside from a final batch of films derived from the Film Comment list of critical favorites for 2011, I’ve got in the works a mini-essay on campaign films, my François-phile appreciation of Truffaut, and groupings of documentaries, older Hollywood films, and currently-running tv series of note.  So please continue to check back on my stop-and-go progress.

Assessing 2011 critically

I’m still working my way through the best fifty films in the Film Comment critics survey of 2011.  Here’s another batch, in most of which I see some merit, but don’t quite share the general enthusiasm.  My own “definitive” rankings for the year are still a month or two away.

One’s reaction to The Descendants (2011, MC-84, FC#15, NFX) depends on one’s expectations of Alexander Payne.  Judging by his earlier work -- preeminently Election (1999) -- his latest seems soft rather than sharp, more sentimental than acute.  On the other hand, there’s a lot to like here, starting with a charming, subtle, Oscar-worthy performance from George Clooney, and lots of Hawaiian eye candy, not least his 17-year old daughter, well played by Shailene Woodley.  The ukelele music is nice too.  The story is freighted with over-emphasis, not just the mom in a coma and the retrospective revelation of her cheating, but a whole subplot about an old family inheritance of unspoiled oceanfront property on Kauai, whose fate of development or conservation Clooney must decide.  Everything works out the way the audience wants, and that’s a problem for Payne, who usually delivers the pain with cutting humor, but here tugs hearts shamelessly, and goes for tears instead of the dry eye he once showed.  Hawaii is a long way from his hometown Omaha.  The movie is still a pleasant experience in a variety of ways, even if it would have been better less pleasant and more piquant.

I will grant Lars von Trier the quality of being memorably odious, and Melancholia (2011, MC-80, FC#3, NFX) is no exception.  However attractive, even luminous, his filmmaking can be, I find his sensibility repulsive, most obviously his obsessive need to punish beautiful women, even if they are meant to be stand-ins for his own miserable personality.  Here it’s poor Kirsten Dunst who gets the treatment, sinking into gloom on her wedding day, flailing through acts of senseless self-degradation.  Charlotte Gainsbourgh is her more together sister, and the planet named Melancholia is just a tiny red intruder into familiar constellations.  Then it’s months later, Dunst is nearly catatonic with depression, and Gainsbourgh is getting more anxious as the errant planet gets closer, first like another moon in the night sky, and then an overpowering presence that blots out the whole universe.  Meanwhile the Dunst character is more than content to have her despair made cosmic, moon-bathing nude in the encroaching planet’s uncanny reflected light.  I can’t deny that shots, scenes, and performances are compelling, but nonetheless the proceedings strike me as artificial, arbitrary, and antithetical to my own way of thinking.  I would just as soon have forgotten this film immediately after seeing it, but unfortunately many images linger in my mind, despite my rejection of their import.

Though less creepy than one would expect from David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method (2011, MC-76, FC#5, NFX) does have a vein of macabre humor in its depiction of the friendly-becoming-rivalrous relations between Freud and Jung in the years before the First World War.  More an illumination of a cultural moment than a story with a conclusion in mind, the film is surprisingly lovely.  (In an interesting extra on the DVD, Cronenberg takes part in an AFI master class and talks about working with chance, and how the weather just happened to be fantastic when they were shooting by the lake in Zurich and in Vienna.)  Michael Fassbender, who seems to be everywhere suddenly, makes a plausible Jung, and Viggo Mortensen is quite delightful as Freud, but the surprise to me was Keira Knightley as Sabine Spielrein, who was both patient and colleague to the two men and mistress to Jung.  I’ve always found Keira more scary than attractive (and I’ve never quite forgiven her for being totally wrong as Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice), so I tended to find her neurotic freak-outs believable, if overwrought.  And her angularity seemed right for little bit of S&M too.  This film doesn’t bite off more than it can chew, more appetizer than main course, but it’s a tasty little dish.

I did not share the enthusiasm of the Sundance audience or some reviewers for Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011, MC-76, FC#35, NFX), which certainly had some lovely and telling moments, but to me seemed workshopped to no good end.  I grant the appeal of Elizabeth Olsen as the polynomynous heroine, but T. Sean Durkin’s film struck me as forced and unresolved at the same time.  When the rural cult in which Martha (etc.) has taken refuge turns into the something like the Manson Family, she flees to the elegant lakeside vacation home of her estranged sister, though she seems equally morose in both families, and like her the film slips between times and places, unable to sort past from present, dream from reality.  I was initially taken with the portrait of a rural commune with spiritual pretensions, but in the end compared it unfavorably with Vera Farmiga’s more modest and truthful Higher Ground, about being trapped in a community of belief.

I’m not sure I can recommend The Mill and the Cross (2011, MC-80, NFX) to mainstream viewers, but I will definitely be showing this scholarly feature about Brueghel at the Clark sometime soon, in the big-screen, full hi-def that it requires.  Lech Majewski’s film takes us literally inside “The Way to Calvary” painting, through a variety of special effects, with our guide Brueghel himself, as played by Rutger Hauer.  We see visualizations of various scenes from the panoramic canvas.  Almost unnoticed at the center of the web is Christ carrying his cross.  In the foreground, Mary mourns, played by Charlotte Rampling.  To the right Spanish soldiers in red tunics “crucify” a Flemish nonconformist.  Above all, a mill grinds out the wheel of fate, while the miller looks down from afar on the ant-like scurryings below.  Brueghel literally walks through the painting, explaining its vignettes to his patron (Michael York) and to us.  For interested viewers, this is a walk well worth taking.

Postscript:  I don’t usually bother with pipsqueak demolition of Hollywood blockbusters, not watching stuff I know I won’t like, but I can’t avoid it with “Best Picture” nominee The Help (2011, MC-62, NFX), a movie that really bothered me.  I can’t speak about Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller, but I confess that a privileged white girl’s view of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, as transcribed from her maid, is not the sort of perspective I’m likely to be interested in.  But what’s unforgivable to me in Tate Taylor’s film is using actresses such as Sissy Spacek, Alison Janney, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain, and Emma Stone, but never allowing them a truly unforced moment.  Each does what she can within the context of caricature -- Jessica particularly surprising as a white trash bimbo -- but they are all just moving parts in a mechanical construction that wants to turn Gone with the Wind upside down, but only makes visible the artifice inside.  This contraption is claptrap.  Blatantly obvious in execution, it’s more objectionable because it trivializes, rather than humanizes, one of the defining and inspiring moments in American social history.  Medgar Evers did not die to add a frisson of fear to a sorority girl’s book.

A Separation

This Iranian film (2011, MC-95, FC#4, NFX) certainly deserved its Academy Award as best foreign film, and its high critical ratings.  With Kiarostami, Mahkmalbaf, and Panahi in exile or jail, it’s heartening to know that there is still a tradition of bold serious cinema in Iran.  Asghar Farhadi cannily dodged the censors to complete a film of truth, daring, and complexity, as domestic differences escalate into social conflict and near-tragedy.  The wife wants to take advantage of a limited exit visa and leave Iran with her 11-year old daughter, but the husband insists on staying to take care of his father, who is declining into dementia.  Granted neither divorce nor custody, the wife moves in with her parents.  The daughter, who is perpetually caught in the middle (and affectingly portrayed by the director’s own daughter), chooses to stay with her father and to act as go-between.  The family is well-off and secular, but the man hires a poor religious woman to look after his father.  Difficulties ensue, which involve legal proceedings that leave the viewer with ever-shifting perceptions of truth and morality.  It’s an ordinary situation that gathers extraordinary dimension and suspense of judgment.  The film is very foreign to Americans, and yet familiar and intensely engaging, really a model of the moral force of cinematic art.

Leading ladies

Parker Posey, Parker Posey, Parker Posey -- there are three good reasons to watch Broken English (2007, MC-61, NFX), Zoe Cassavetes’ debut bid to join the ranks of independent writer-directors with her father and brother.  Yeah, you could just call it a downbeat Sex & the City, but then there’s Parker.  She’s a thirtysomething Sarah Lawrence grad working in guest relations at a Manhattan hotel, while begging for love with one hand and pushing it away with the other.  The foolish choices of this smart woman include drinking and abuse of prescription drugs, along with generalized social dysfunction.  She should just be a pain in the ass, but Parker makes her face a map of ever-changing emotions, and it’s impossible not to feel with her, as annoying as her character may be.  Ms. Cassavetes lines up an impressive cast, starting with her mother Gena Rowlands, to play -- in a real stretch – the protagonist’s mother.  Reminiscent of minor Sofia Coppola, this film stands on the basis of the central performance, and if you’re going to cop an ending directly from another film, then Before Sunset is a good one to steal from.

Michelle Williams is similarly the best reason to watch My Week with Marilyn (2011, MC-65, NFX).  She offers a highly plausible impersonation of Marilyn Monroe, while somehow remaining her own adorable self.  Kenneth Branagh also makes an amusingly spot-on Laurence Olivier, in this true-ish story of the making of The Princess and the Showgirl in 1956, told from the perspective of the third assistant director, played with freckled awe by Eddie Redmayne.  He becomes Marilyn's keeper and confidante of sorts, and of course falls madly in love, worshipping that goddess of ripe femininity.  Simon Curtis’ film is not a chore to watch, but it never caught fire for me, remaining more truthy than truthful.  Nonethess Michelle as Marilyn is charming.

As is Felicity Jones in Like Crazy (2011, MC-71, NFX), a Sundance audience award winner.  Directed by Drake Doremus, this film is a largely-improvised account of the joys and sorrows of young love.  Anton Yelchen as her male counterpart is appealing too, and together they bring a genuine ache and fire to proceedings that are a bit thin and unconvincing dramatically, carried by pop song montages rather than the authentic playing out of emotions and life choices.  Still I didn’t mind spending time in the company of these young people and their romantic dilemmas.  She’s in LA on a student visa from Britain, when she meets a cute furniture designer, and overstays her visa to spend the summer with him, which prevents her from returning to the U.S. and sets up the kernel of conflict, since neither lover can join the other on native ground.  Will they go their separate ways, or are they truly meant for each other?  For an hour or two, I was willing to see such questions from their youthfully self-important perspectives, reliving the familiar formative experiences of love and loss.  In the moment the emotions loom larger than the fairly flimsy construct does in retrospect, but in the right mood you won’t mind the lovebirds’ company and the feelings they evoke.

Charlize Theron is anything but charming in Young Adult (2011, MC-71, NFX).  She’s the “psychotic prom queen bitch” who returns to her hick hometown in Minnesota, where she sets out to reclaim her high school boyfriend, who is married and newly a father.  She’s gone on to mini-celebrity in the “Minni-Apple,” where she ghostwrites a series of young adult novels, but her home life is a series of drunken one-night stands and neglect of her little handbag pooch.  In town she meets another of her high school classmates, played by Patton Oswalt, whom she had totally ignored back then, but now bonds with over the taste of bourbon.  While she was prom queen, he was beaten and maimed by a gang for being gay, which he wasn’t.  Director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody re-team after Juno, but drain their protagonist of any sweetness and light, leaving a comically discomforting she-devil.  Charlize gets her comeuppance, but thankfully learns no life lessons, in this tart little farce.  Don’t hate her for being beautiful, hate her for her noxious personality.

Varieties of television experience

Recently I’ve been keeping up with the just finished seasons of two satisfying TV series, the second of Downton Abbey on PBS and the third of Justified on FX.  (And now I’m avidly into new seasons of Mad Men on AMC and Game of Thrones on HBO.)

There’s no possibility that you haven’t heard of Downton Abbey (MC-84, NFX, PBS), if you have any interest at all in lavish English heritage productions.  The series is an entirely codified crowd-pleaser, but I’m among the crowd who understands and enjoys the code.  It’s no accident that the show is named for its location setting, and what a stately old pile it is!  And then the clothes!  And even the characters who wear them!  The acting is topnotch across the board.  As for many viewers, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is my favorite – you expect to hate her, but can’t help loving her.  Then there’s Maggie Smith, doing her Maggie Smith thing, but perfectly so -- and so many other characters, upstairs and down.  All a pleasant fantasy, even when aspiring to tragedy, but like a soap opera or telenovela, the proceedings are highly addictive.  The second season is too plot-driven, to the detriment of leisurely character development, but otherwise all a fan of British aristocratic period pieces could ask for. 

Justified (MC-89, NFX) is something quite different, a humorous crime thriller set in Harlan County, a modern day Western transposed to Kentucky, and perhaps the best translation to the screen of Elmore Leonard’s brilliant and inimitably witty writing.  Timothy Olyphant is Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshall who grew up in one of the three dominant criminal families in the hollers, and has now been sent home for his sins, even if his numerous homicides all turn out to be “justified” in the line of duty.  Lots of good acting, lots of action, lots of laughs, a vivid sense of place and character – what’s not to like, as long as you can handle the violence?  Catnip to the ladies, with his cowboy hat. wry smile, and laconic wit, Raylan also has a perverse attachment to the bad guys he pursues.  Hate him or love him, you can’t take your eyes off him, or keep your hands off him.  If you’ve ever enjoyed an Elmore Leonard novel, you ought to give this a try.

Canceling DirecTV satellite service has necessitated slight adjustments in my home viewing habits, so I no longer watch PBS Newshour or Stewart & Colbert while eating dinner each night, but online at odd times.  So lately we’ve been starting the evening by going through whole runs of sitcoms we neglected while they were being broadcast, but now available through Netflix streaming.  I’d finally heard enough recommendations of Parks and Recreation (MC-83, NFX) to give it a try, and now will add my own.  Amy Poehler is excellent, witty and touching, as the local government go-getter in Pawnee, Indiana, who rallies her solid supporting cast for one civic initiative after another.  I particularly like Rashida Jones, but even the off-putting characters endear themselves over time.  It’s all a pleasant blend of the sweet and the tart, the smart and the silly.

When we’d run through the first three seasons of P&R, I took a couple of suggestions from my kids, and wound up enjoying both.  Better Off Ted (2008-09, MC-84, NFX) had a short two-season run on ABC, but I definitely could have watched more of Jay Harrington and Portia de Rossi (even better here than in Arrested Development) as marketing managers in a soulless conglomerate, whose lab keeps turning out products of dubious utility or safety, a parody of modern business that has a lot more bite and sass than you expect, along with an endearing silliness. 

I watched all seven of the six-episode seasons of the British sitcom, The Peep Show (2003-to date, NFX), and am now in the cult that eagerly anticipates the promised eighth season.  I definitely get my daily jollies from Jon & Stephen on Comedy Central, but I don’t know when I’ve laughed at a pair of comics as much as Mitchell and Webb.  They play an odd couple of college chums who find themselves living together years later, Mark a maddeningly uptight and self-loathing credit company employee, Jez a blithely self-delusive free spirit and would-be musician, in a collision of pessimistic introvert and optimistic extrovert, such an antithetical pair of guys, neither of whom ever manages to do the right thing.  The particular delight of this series is the subjective camera angles and voiceover stream of consciousness, so you hear what the characters are thinking as they say or do something quite different.  If you enjoy British comedies of discomfort, such as The Office in the original Ricky Gervais version, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.  If laughter is truly the best medicine, then I prescribe The Peep Show.

And if you can’t get enough of British TV costume dramas, then Bramwell (1995-98, NFX) is also worth a look.  Jemma Redgrave lives up to the acting dynasty from which she came, with the slightest hint of Aunt Vanessa, as a young woman doctor in late Victorian England, who opens her own clinic in the East End of London, while her doctor father continues to practice among the posh.  It is universally acknowledged that the series went seriously off the rails in the fourth season, but for 29 hour-long episodes, it presented interesting characters in authentic situations, with a sometimes grisly truthfulness about medicine in the period.  If not as opulent as some BBC productions, it had an authentic and atmospheric approach to scene and setting.

In a different vein entirely, I conclude this interim survey with mention of two European TV miniseries that were also released as films in the U.S.   I didn’t remember the film version with any special enthusiasm, but with the Criterion Collection release of Ingmar Bergman’s preferred 6-hour televised version of Fanny and Alexander (1982, NFX, Criterion), I was more than ready to revisit the flamboyantly theatrical world of the Ekdahl family at the beginning of the last century, as seen through the eyes of the children named in the title.  A languorous and opulent late-life departure for Bergman, it is also a summation of his autobiographical themes: theater, magic, religion, art, sex, death, terror.  While Bergman in his prime was stark and spare, his swansong is lush and rich in color and emotion.

Mysteries of Lisbon (2011, MC-82, FC#6, NFX) is the final work of Raul Ruiz, a Chilean director who worked mostly in France and adapted this mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese novel for European television, which was then slightly abridged to four-plus hours for theatrical release in the U.S., where it was received with eulogies and critical acclaim (see Film Comment ranking).  This is not really like a BBC adaptation of a Victorian novel, but it does have some of the same pleasures of costume and décor.  It’s a multi-generational saga, set adrift in time, flowing back and forth, with bewildering stories nested within stories, beginning, in what is probably not a coincidence, just as Fanny and Alexander does, with a young boy and his toy theater.  From there it spirals in a way that is barely comprehensible but always captivating.  As long as you are content to be mystified, this is a magical tour worth taking.

The Artist

A charming trifle, yes -- but Best Picture? Best Director? Best Actor? – I don’t know.  The Artist (2011, MC-89, FC#27, NFX) is by no means a charade I wish to unmask, even though those Oscars are more a testament to Harvey Weinstein’s muscle than to any inherent quality of the film.  I liked the movie, relished its respect for film history, its wit and concision, but was not moved by it.  I appreciated the hommage to silent films; found the players appealing – male, female, and canine; and admired the technical polish of the production.  But I took away from it no more than a smile on my face.  So all credit to director Michel Hazanavicius, and to the leads, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, but I’ll look elsewhere for my best of the year awards.  Interesting, the divide in the year’s films, between this and Hugo, with their celebrations of the primal escapist pleasures of cinema, and all those others that deal in contemporary paranoia and anticipated apocalypse.  Those are the moods of the moment in American film, and this film, while nominally French, is Hollywood through and through.  No wonder it was celebrated on Hollywood’s traditional night of self-congratulation.  Still and all, the film is an enjoyable experience, and a fond memory of the films it endeavors to recapture.