Revolutionary Road

This is an okay film that suffers by comparison to two superior works, the Richard Yates novel on which it is based, and the tv series Mad Men, which has claimed that era and milieu as its own. I had high hopes when I heard this film was coming out with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, directed by her husband, Sam Mendes, so I re-read the 1961 novel to whet my appetite. Yates is deservedly known as a writer’s writer, and indeed I was led to him originally by Joe McGinnis, with whom I became friendly after I wrote a rave review of Fatal Vision. So this film preserves most of the novel, except that which makes it a great book -- the writing. Particularly the excruciatingly nuanced accumulation of shame and humiliation deduced from the workings of self-delusion, the mind in subverted communication with the tongue, and the tongue with others, in a cascade of misrepresentation. Beginning with the same scene, the novel presents the snowballing disaster of a community theater performance in a protracted set piece, but the film shows only the curtain coming down to scattered sarcastic comments from the audience. If you know the book, the movie seems skimpy. If you don’t, it’s likely to seem simplistic and unmotivated, however blistering. Likewise if you know Kate and Leo -- and who does not? -- then it’s hard to see them as these resourceless characters, trapped in a cage of their own illusions. They seem bigger than their cramped circumstances, which is just what the Wheelers were not. When I was reading the book, I couldn’t help seeing April in the guise of Betsy of Mad Men -- January Jones, as pretty, fragile, and hard as porcelain. Ms. Winslet simply has too much substance for the role, and no way is Leo pathetic enough to be Frank. Which is not to disparage their performances, but to point to the misconception that dooms this film from its worthy inspiration to its tasteful semi-tragic conclusion. It’s hard to make a great film from a great book. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-69.)

That truism might, at a stretch, apply as well to Killshot (2008, dvd, n.) Elmore Leonard is great within the limits of genre fiction, but maybe not as literature. And certainly he has proven amenable to movie adaptation, from Out of Sight and Get Shorty down through the ranks. This one, however, didn’t make it to theaters but went straight to dvd, despite a noteworthy cast of Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and others, plus director John Madden (of Shakespeare in Love fame). Somebody must have made Harvey Weinstein mad, because worse crap than this shows up in cineplexes every week. I think the key element missing from this adaptation is Leonard’s sly humor. The whole femme-in-jeopardy shtick is competently handled, as a woman witness is stalked by two crazy hitmen. But some crucial element of wit and irony is missing. Nonetheless this dumped film strikes as better, not worse, than average.

Frost/Nixon

Ron Howard’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play is well-played as far as it goes, but as with Milk’s quasi-documentary, it tends more toward the quasi-. All is forgiven for Frank Langella’s portrayal of Nixon, humanizing the bogey man who haunted my youth. I guess it’s a compliment to call Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Frost convincingly fatuous, until the dark night of the soul when he becomes a responsible journalist. It’s rather absurd how the film buys into the mano a mano fantasies of the pair. Once again, the artificiality of a theater piece is unmasked by the unavoidable actuality of film. Nice try, but the need to insert a standard dramatic arc (and eye candy like Rebecca Hall) undermines the veracity of the documentary intent. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-80.)

Rambling round-up

I’ve been laid up for a little longer than expected after a knee operation, so I’ve used some of the leg-up time to catch up with movies on my TiVo playlist, some recorded more than a year ago. There’s none I’d recommend outright, but in the interests of viewer advice, I’ll suggest why you might want to watch any of them.

For cinephiles of my generation or a little older, Antonioni was always a touchstone. I never had a taste for him -- too dour a personality, too grim a viewpoint -- though I could see the appeal of his formal cinematic approach. Back then, L’eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962) struck me as the liveliest of his trilogy looking at fashionable modern alienation between men and women, so when I spotted a chance showing on TCM, I recorded and finally got around to watching it again. Monica Vitti is all that as a vision of romantically troubled blond beauty. Alain Delon is just as pretty as the hyperactive and distractable stock trader, who may or may not meet up with her in the end. The scenes at the Bourse exchange lend a frenetic vitality to what otherwise might sink into vapidity. Antonioni has a sure hand, a steady eye, but a cold and lonely heart.

I recorded Lust for Life (1956) to re-watch for possible showing at the Clark some time, and would not be embarrassed to show it, despite Kirk Douglas’s teeth-gritting, scenery-chewing performance as Van Gogh -- he certainly looks the part of all those self-portraits, though a little louder than the paintings. Just as loud, and colorful, are the widescreen visualizations of director Vincente Minnelli, who clearly favors art over kitsch in his adaptation of the Irving Stone bestseller.

I’ve had several occasions to review the slim pickings of feature films about the American Revolution, and each time I noticed recommendations of the filmed musical 1776 (1972), so I recorded it off TCM and eventually found it to be surprisingly adult in its portrayals and dialogue, set in the Continental Congress leading up to the Declaration of Independence, with songs full of content if not exactly hummable, such as one on the triangle trade of molasses, rum, and slaves. William Daniels is John Adams, Howard da Silva is Ben Franklin, and Ken Howard is Tom Jefferson, in performances more flavorful than you would expect, with impressive sets and costumes, and even some location shooting at Independence Hall. The proceedings do drag a bit, however.

As I was making my way through the top films in the indieWire critics poll for American releases of 2008, I happened to spot #21, The Duchess of Langeais (2006), showing on the Sundance Channel. New Wave veteran Jacques Rivette’s latest won’t make my list of best of year or of his career, but was certainly interesting to watch (MC-74.). This adaptation of a Balzac story set in the 1820s features Jeanne Balibar as the duchess who captivates the wounded Napoleonic general Guillaume Depardieu, and is captivated in return. With manners and conventions barely subduing unruly passions, these two dance around each other until it’s too late for anything but tragedy. What the production lacks in psychological realism, it makes up in elegant formality. Though nowhere near as long and slow as certain Rivette masterpieces, this film doesn’t hurry through its florid emotions and sensational plot, but marinates them in his obsession with theatrical performance, in life as well as on stage.

Because I’m showing Ball of Fire in a Barbara Stanwyck film series at the Clark this summer, I was intrigued when I saw that Howard Hawks later remade it as a musical, A Song is Born (1948), with Virginia Mayo in the Stanwyck role and Danny Kaye subbing for Gary Cooper. As you would expect, it’s not as good. But it’s still good fun, with the “seven dwarves” becoming musicologists instead of lexicographers, and the gang moll instructing them in the ways of jazz instead of slang, and rollicking guest appearances by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Tommy Dorsey.

A more plausible film to show at the Clark sometime might be Age of Consent (1969). I was interested in it as Michael Powell’s all but last film, and also for the promised sight of a teenage Helen Mirren frolicking in the nude both underwater and above. Successful New York painter James Mason decamps to an underpopulated island on the Great Barrier Reef north of Australia, where he encounters child of nature Helen, who inspires him to paint again. There are elements of inappropriate humor and questionable sentimentality, but in its portrayal of an aging painter reinvigorated by a naked young muse, it bears comparison to Rivette’s magnificent La Belle Noiseuse.

While Age of Consent was issued on dvd in tandem with an old Powell-Pressburger favorite of mine, A Matter of Life and Death (1946, aka Stairway to Heaven), the Criterion Collection brought out an earlier production of “The Archers” -- The Small Back Room (1948). Let it be said that any Michael Powell film is worth seeing, but coming after the fevered color dreams of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, this is a look back, to WWII in B&W -- a tense but multivalent story of a bomb disposal specialist, who must contend with a tin foot and a drinking problem, as well as a difficult relationship with a lovely, loving secretary, and a new booby-trap bomb that the Germans have taken to dropping on the English countryside. I watched the film in a fragmented way, but it was not only that that forced me to go back and re-view the beginning to put together all the pieces. It doesn’t blow up in his face, but the film is not among Powell’s best.

The Wrestler

Mickey Rourke is as good as they say in this comeback bid, and so is Marisa Tomei. And director Darren Aronofsky offers a surprisingly self-effacing and empathetic look at a working-class New Jersey environment, where the aging hero and heroine have the exotic but ordinary jobs of professional wrestler and bargirl pole-dancer, good at what they do and heartfelt in it, though well past their prime. It’s all show biz, and these folks are troupers. Got to be, living from performance to performance, within a close and closed-in community. Mickey’s got specs (as well as pecs) and a hearing aid, but is still willing to give his body and soul to his bloody art. Marisa can definitely still shake that thing. The film manages to stand a number of cliches on their heads, without stooping to redemption or resolution. It feels real but doesn’t push it too far. (2008, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-81.)

Tell No One

Guillaume Canet’s French adaptation of an American thriller by Harlen Coben plays like an insanely complicated mash-up of Vertigo and The Fugitive, delivered with the blithe incomprehensibility of The Big Sleep. But like the current American remake of the brilliant British miniseries, State of Play, it tries to incorporate just too much conspiracy and mystification into two hours, though with a cast that makes it well worth watching. How can you quibble with a film that deploys such Francophone pulchritude as Marie-Josee Croze, Kristin Scott Thomas, Marina Hinds, and Nathalie Baye? There’s a pleasing array of male character actors as well, led by Francois Cluzet looking a lot like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. He’s a pediatrician still mourning the murder of his wife eight years previous, a case in which he was the prime suspect, and is again now that two more bodies have been unearthed. This film makes no concession to an audience’s desire to figure out what the hell is going on, but if you stick with it, a lot of kinetic energy covers the implausible gaps in the story. It’s the classic Hitchcock situation of someone pursuing the evildoers while being pursued by the police himself. And while it has a ton of ’splainin’ to do in the final reel, it doesn’t feel like a complete cheat. Generally I look for a French film to do more than out-Hollywood Hollywood, but the result here is fairly satisfying. (2008, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-82.)

Nothing But the Truth [etc.]

Topical subject and notable cast notwithstanding, this Rod Lurie film essentially went straight to video. Kate Beckinsale is a character similar to Judith Miller, the NYTimes reporter who went to jail rather than reveal her source in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. The latter type is played by Vera Farmiga, and the two have some good toe-to-toe scenes. Matt Dillon is the special prosecutor who keeps putting the screws to the reporter so she’ll reveal her source, and Alan Alda is her white-shoe defense attorney. Though Kate is undoubtably more heroic than Judith was, and her prison time harder, she does have her ambiguities, and other views get fair expression. I’m not sure about the fictional displacement of the story to an imaginary Venezuelan assasination attempt and U.S. retribution, nor about the story’s final twist, which is fair but raises as many questions as it answers. But for the most part, this is a cleanly executed political thriller, with a conscience. (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-64.)

To tie up loose ends: I wanted to confirm my assertion about Milk that the documentary was better, so I re-watched The Times of Harvey Milk (1983), and indeed it is so. Not that Gus Van Sant’s film was without value, but in comparison to the Oscar-winning documentary, it strikes me as something unnecessary, like his shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. Of course it’s an important message and reaches a wider audience through the celebrity of Sean Penn’s performance, but most of the story’s impact is lifted directly, and little is added by appending drama to docu-.

Somewhere I read a favorable remark on The Americanization of Emily (1964), so when I saw it coming on TCM, I recorded it. Since the story is about an American serviceman and English servicewoman during World War II, and I am the product of just such a meeting, I got around to watching it quite promptly. I can’t go so far as to recommend the film, but it is an intriguing odd duck indeed. It’s hard to imagine a cynical black comedy about D-Day after we’ve seen Saving Private Ryan, but I suppose writer Paddy Chayefsky was trying to cash in on the then-current bestselling success of Catch-22. James Garner comes across as too nice for the “dog robber” he plays, in the vein of Milo Minderbinder. And Julie Andrews, looking for a change of pace between Mary Poppins and Sound of Music, is too prim and not tart enough, as the driver who is escaping the ethic of courage that took every male in her family and looking for a fling with a certified coward. Director Arthur Hiller does little to liven up the proceedings or fine tune the performances, so the tone is wobbly throughout, while Chayefsky is trying satirically to undercut the glorification of war. The widescreen black & white is reminiscent of then-recent classic The Apartment, but Hiller is not Wilder enough for the job.

Reprise

There’s lots to like about this energetic Norwegian film by Joachim Trier, but I suspect I’m just too old to remain enchanted with the self-dramas of artsy twentysomethings. I respect the homage to classics of the French New Wave like Jules et Jim (in my top five of all time), and it’s cool to see how international cultural artifacts of the ’90s played in Oslo (even though I only know Joy Division, e.g., through its portrayal in several movies ). There were lots of inside references in this story of two friends just out of school, sending off the manuscripts of their first novels, to varying effect, both in fantasy and in reality, which are sometimes hard to sort out. The two friends are appealing, and their cronies fitfully amusing, along with a Bjork-lookalike girlfriend. I was happy enough to go for the ride, but I didn’t catch every twist and turn. And in the end I didn’t care all that much. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-79.)

Vicky Cristinia Barcelona

Thankfully Woody Allen no longer appears in his own films, with touristic footage of European cities filling in for some of his more annoying shtick, but there is still a shallow, nihilistic worldview at work in his films, so when they’re not funny they’re pretty bleak, in a way that is assumed not earned. So everything and everyone is pretty and well-heeled, if ultimately emptied of significance. He doesn’t abuse Scarlett Johansson as badly as in recent films, but still makes her into a pretentious bubblehead. Luckily the other three principals are not so easily moved around like straw people. Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz are pretty hilarious as the hot-blooded artist couple, with whom the post-graduate Americans, Vicky (an effective Rebecca Hall) and Cristina, fall in during their hot Mediterranean summer in Barcelona. There’s an intrusive narration that one wants to take as ironic, but no, really, it’s just that flatfooted -- I wonder if Woody could have sold it in his own voice? In no way a hardship to watch, this film was in no way moving or illuminating. (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-70.)

The Class (Entre les murs)

It’s time to start mentioning Laurent Cantet among the great directors working today. Winner of the highest award at Cannes last year and rapturously received at the NY Film Festival, this film follows the impressive string of Human Resources (1999), Time Out (2001), and Heading South (2005). Each of his films is tuned into social and economic realities, but with The Class (which might also have been called The Classes, or better yet, the original title, Between the Walls), his quasi-documentary approach yields unassailable truth. Francois Begaudeau wrote a memoir of a year teaching in a Parisian middle school, then worked with Cantet on a script based on his experiences, and finally plays a semi-fictionalized version of himself, over the course of a year with a classroom of real students, though not the original subjects. The other teachers and parents are also “real.” Filming with three HD cameras, Cantet captures the verite of public schooling better than anyone since Frederick Wiseman. But the real amazement is how entertaining and involving the proceedings become; out of the boredom of the classroom a portrait of a volatile multicultural society emerges. There are tensions between the African and Caribbean Blacks, between the Arabs and those who proclaim a French identity, between the academically eager Chinese and the immigration authorities. This pot is bubbling but not melting. No summary of “plot” or character will clue you into the experience of this film, you must take it all in on the fly, like a fly on the wall. My point of comparison would be the superlative fourth season of The Wire, telling the hard truth about the education of marginal youths, without bludgeoning the viewer into despair. (2008, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-92.)

Doubt

While this might have worked as a four-hander declaimed from the stage, as a film it once again underscores the difference (not to say superiority) between cinema and theater. John Patrick Shanley adapts and directs his own Pulitzer-winning play. He does some location shooting at the Bronx parochial school he actually attended in the early 60s, when the story is set, and populates it with additional characters, but the play is dissipated rather than opened-out, and askew camera angles and other stage business highlight the artificiality. What remains are the central performances, and they are quite good. Meryl Streep offers a sly caricature of the rigid old-school nun (she must have had fun doing this back-to-back with her loosey-goosey, aging hippie in Mamma Mia!), and Philip Seymour Hoffman as usual convinces as a Vatican II-era priest who may or may not be a pediphile. Amy Adams radiates innocence as the younger Sister of Charity enlisted in the older nun’s plot to force out the pastor, and Viola Davis is effective in a brief but crucial appearance as the mother of the boy who might have been abused. But in the effort to be open-ended, and provocative of walking-out-of-the-theater disputation, the film fails to find its focus or point. Having just worked with a friend on the story of his parochial school education, I found much of this film intriguing and even funny, but was finally annoyed by its refusal to resolve its themes, its attempt to have it every which way, under cover of its title. (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-68.)

The Reader

This would have been a better film if it tried to do less, had maintained a sharper and narrower focus. Trying to negotiate four time frames within the film, in order to illuminate an unseen fifth, namely the Holocaust, dissipates the drama and overreaches the truth. Of course, Kate Winslet’s opportunity to age prosthetically probably won her the Oscar, but for me she only registered at something like her own age. The film falls apart when she goes from pairing with David Kross as her teenage lover to Ralph Fiennes in the character’s later incarnation, as the haunted lawyer who failed to provide her with an alibi (she was unable to read, so couldn’t have been responsible for a falsified report) when it came out that she had been an SS guard at a concentration camp, subsequently tried for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end, Stephen Daldry’s film (and David Hare’s script from Bernhard Schlick’s novel) offers more exploitation than illumination, relying on prestige rather than honest emotion or clear viewpoint. A stripped-down version would have had a cleaner (though nicely dirty) impact. (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-58.)

Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to critical fave, Old Joy, yields a sad and modest, but beautifully modulated film in the vein of indie neorealism. It plays like an American Umberto D., but instead of a destitute old man and his dog, it tells of a destitute young woman and her dog. Wendy is marvelously inhabited by Michelle Williams, as a waif-like drifter on her way to Alaska, always on the edge of tears but rarely succumbing. She is not headed “Into the Wild” but hoping to get a job at a cannery in Ketchikan. Her car breaks down in a small town in Oregon, and her life proceeds to break down around her. When she desperately tries to shoplift some dogfood for Lucy, played by Reichardt’s own “yellow-gold” mutt, she is collared by an eager-beaver clerk and sent to be booked and fingerprinted. And when she finally posts bail from her rapidly dwindling stake of cash and returns to where Lucy had been tied up, the dog is no longer there. The rest of the brief but deliberately-paced eighty minutes is taken up with Wendy’s increasingly desperate attempts to find Lucy. Without histrionics, an abject story of poverty and loneliness unfolds, with some tender and touching moments but just the slightest glimmer of hope in its denouement. (2008, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-80.)

Elegy

Except for the main character’s name and the title credits, you would hardly imagine this film was adapted from a Philip Roth novel. The situation might be recognizable but the scathingly witty authorial voice is nowhere heard, despite some half-hearted narration. Aging satyr Ben Kingsley teaches at Columbia (in an earlier Roth novel David Kepesh was The Professor of Desire, though in this The Dying Animal) and commentates on culture for public television and highbrow magazines. He has a satisfactory shag-&-run relationship with Patricia Clarkson, but regularly lets young ladies graduate from his classroom to his bedroom. Penelope Cruz proves (understandably) to be more than a passing fancy, however. He turns for advice to his only friend, a Pulitzer-winning poet played by Dennis Hopper, while on the other side he is hounded by resentful son Peter Sarsgaard. With such a cast and such a provenance, this film is certainly watchable but hardly memorable. Without getting all sexist about it, I wonder if a Spanish woman -- Isabel Coixet -- is the ideal director to get across the Rothian worldview? (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-66.)

Synecdoche, New York

Intellectually playful from its clever title forward, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut returns to the obsessive themes and oddball humor of his scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but without a lightening touch from Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry, the proceedings turn rather lugubrious. There’s lots of dark cerebral humor, but the film inevitably ends with the word, “Die.” So being inside Charlie’s head for two hours might be a tad glum, except for the life generated by an exceptional cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a morose, hypochondriac playwright-director from Schenectady, whose artist wife (Catherine Keener) leaves him, taking their daughter, for whom he pines throughout the film. As a consolation, he wins a MacArthur genius grant, which allows him to move to NYC and obtain a huge warehouse where he mounts an insanely elaborate theatrical recreation of his life. He marries the actress who plays his wife (Michelle Williams) and has a surrogate daughter, but cannot recreate the happiness he probably never had. Along the way he dallies with a hot-to-trot box office cashier (Samantha Morton) -- so hot she lives in a house surreally on fire for decades -- who in the course of the years becomes his directorial assistant, whose character winds up being played by Emily Watson in the unending, if never opening, play within the film. Got that? Probably not on the first go, you won’t. And that’s not all, you’ll see Dianne Wiest and Jennifer Jason Leigh and other familiar faces as well. There’s a lot going on here, not all of it fun but most of it bleakly farcical and mind-bending. Even with the aftertaste of ashes, this is my cup of tea. (2008, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-67.)

Pineapple Express

The high concept of a stoner action flick is taken for a ride -- with car chases and gunfire as well as clouds of pot smoke -- by Freaks & Geeks alums, Seth Rogen and James Franco, with director David Gordon Green trying to break out of the sensitive indie ghetto. It’s not entirely unamusing, with the writing and the acting having their moments, but still strikes me as unnecessary. (2008, dvd, n.) *6-* (MC-64.)

Prospecting for the Clark

Here’s a group of films that I watched recently in choosing forthcoming series at the Clark. I’d already nailed down my “Four Japanese Masters” for a series in June, but Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956) remained on my Netflix queue, and it turned out to be new to me. I had it confused with his other famous WWII film, Fires on the Plain (1959), which I didn’t really want to see again, though its images of cannibalism among the defeated Japanese troops have stuck with me since I saw it long ago. The Burmese Harp also deals with the aftermath of Japanese surrender, but in a gentler way. One survivor is nursed back to health in a Buddhist monastery, and rather than return with his unit to Japan, he becomes a monk and stays in Burma to bury all the dead troops that litter the landscape. Looking good on a Criterion Collection DVD, this film was in its day an international hit for its lovely evocation of pacifist sentiment after the carnage of war.

I’ve been taking a break in the middle of re-watching the 26 episodes of The World At War, but continuing to explore the themes of World War II in film (as the world economy careens toward disaster, it’s reassuring to know we’ve come back from much worse devastation). So the confluence of several strands of interest finally got me to watch Open City (1945), which had been on my TiVo playlist for a year and a half. Roberto Rossellini’s film about the Roman resistance in the waning days of the war in Italy, filmed on the spot before the war had ended, is taken to be one of the founts of neorealism. It’s so much a monument that it’s hard to approach it freshly as a film. How well it’s made is almost beside the point of it’s being made at all. Its blend of the real and the cinematic remains a nearly miraculous result of minimal means. If I get to do my film club series on Italian neorealism next fall at the Clark, this is sure to kick it off.

One way that Open City is the mother of all Italian postwar cinema is for making famous Anna Magnani, one of the few professionals in the cast. She also appears in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Momma Roma (1962), almost as if she had survived the earlier film and had the son she was pregnant with at the time. Retrieving him from rustication, after years of supporting him by walking the streets of Rome, Magnani tries to forge a new life in a housing development with her semi-delinquent teenager. Pasolini pulls out all the stops, but the whole does not sustain itself. There are bravura sequences, like two where Magnani walks through the streets of Rome and narrates her story to a succession of street characters who fall in step with her, and stylistic quirks, like the almost Ozu-like frontality with which Magnani and others address the camera. But there was a whole level of symbolic signification that didn’t work for me at all, so the film made no unified impact. There’s a lot of emotion on display in which I did not share.

I filled the last slot in my “Projections of Rome” film series with Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), trivial as a romantic comedy, but eye-popping as a digitally-restored Cinemascope travelogue of Rome. Enough of an innovation in location shooting to win the Oscar for cinematography, it became a surprise hit. In front of the star of the show -- the sights of Rome, seen only occasionally in jarring back-projection -- three unlikely American secretaries (Dorothy Maguire, Jean Peters, and Maggie McNamara--an Audrey Hepburn-lite whose career fizzled) dance in pursuit of the men of their dreams (Clifton Webb, Rossano Brazzi, and Louis Jourdan) and -- surprise! -- meet them altogether in the end, in front of the Trevi Fountain where they made their wishes at the start of the movie, to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing the title tune.

Renewed recommendations

I’ve recently rewatched two favorites, one new and one old, and I’m here to urge you to see them, if you have not. From the get-go, I knew I would want to watch Happy-Go-Lucky again with subtitles, and now that it is out on DVD and I have done so, I feel happy and lucky to confirm it as my pick for best film of 2008. Much of the dialogue is tossed offhandly in accent, so that subtitles add another dimension of marvel at the wit and depth of Mike Leigh’s direction and Sally Hawkins’ inhabitation of the character of Poppy, certainly the performance of the year, a lovely and believably quirky woman, who remains happy even when her luck goes bad, in a world of anger and hurt.

Flirting looks even better than when it was made twenty years ago, as our first glimpse of Thandie Newton, Nicole Kidman, and Naomi Watts. Noah Taylor brings his wry grit to the presumably autobiographical protagonist of writer-director John Duigan’s tale of romance and rebellion in a pair of Australian boarding schools that face each other across a moonlit lake. Specific to 1965 yet universal in appeal, this coming of age story is funny and uncommonly true, and I defy you not to enjoy it.

Let the Right One In

I frequently simulate the moviegoing experience on dvd, by watching previews before the film itself, and I must say the trailers on this disk -- all horror gorefests -- rather put me off the main attraction, to which I was lured by its high ranking (#14) on the IndieWire critics poll for 2008. By the end I was glad to have seen it, despite all the blood, but I’m pretty sure I won’t even look at the forthcoming American remake (and watched this in Swedish with subtitles rather than dubbed in English, which I suspect would have been intolerable). I am neither devotee nor dismisser of vampire films, but this one wasn’t prettified, and was firmly rooted in its Swedish suburban setting. As with Pan’s Labyrinth, I bought into the violence of fantasy for the insight offered into the secret longings of children. The 12-year-olds who play the pale bullied boy and the dark not-a-girl who moves in next door are extremely magnetic and convincingly naturalistic. Tomas Alfredson’s direction is observant and frequently beautiful, with enough wrenching shocks, as well as humor and pathos, to keep one from asking any of the questions that would make the story fall apart. We willingly enter the world of what-if, and care about what happens there, while registering social and psychological realities. (2008, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82.)

Watching the seasons go by

I am a film guy, not a tv guy, but I find some series (usually on dvd) particularly engaging specimens of long-form cinema. This is obvious with European imports like Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Kieslowski’s Decalogue, the Italian Best of Youth, or British literary adaptations such as Bleak House. But they also appear on American screens. I’ve recently pitched the best one now running, Friday Night Lights -- it’s too late to hop into the third season, but go back and start with season one on dvd. Same goes for Mad Men, the other superb ongoing series, now between its second and third seasons.

For the moment I will be missing the episode-to-episode pleasures of the soap opera format, where you get to know the characters so well you live their lives with them. Everybody’s got to have their stories. Two series that I have watched quite devotedly have just ended.

Battlestar Galactica wrapped up the whole series as well as the fourth season, though it will have multiple afterlives. Not a moment too soon; in fact several too late. The show was always an odd mix of the awesome and the awful, frequently bobbing along on hot air, but it did not truly “jump the shark” till the very last hour, in which everything bad about the series was magnified into ludicrousness and I wound up hooting at the screen, an entertaining experience in its own right but not the way for a program to go into that good night. It made me reconsider the hours I had put into watching it, despite the occasional topical gems like the sequence where the polytheistic humans were insurgents and terrorists against the occupying monotheistic Cylons. The characters and dialogue were frequently flatfooted, but at other times gave you something to think about. Critical acclaim brought me to the series late, but having seen it through to the end, I will not add to the chorus of recommendation.

Big Love ended its third season on a resolving note that certainly implies a fourth, and makes me look forward to it. This is not one of the HBO series I take seriously, but do find continuously entertaining, like Entourage or Six Feet Under or Rome. Well written and acted, if overly sudsy, these are characters I have bonded with and I want to see how their lives work out.

The opposite is true for the new Joss Wheedon series, Dollhouse, on which I gave up after a few episodes, despite its lineage from one of my all-time favorites, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy now slots at #3 on my life list, behind Freaks and Geeks, whose one truncated season is a must-see on dvd, all the more so when you’ve seen what Judd Apatow and the gang have gone on to subsequently, redefining movie comedy for the 21st century.

What I would call serious HBO shows, like The Sopranos or Deadwood, also count among the best -- but for me The Wire is #1 forever, without a doubt. If you haven’t been convinced to watch it yet, then nothing I can say at this late date will turn the trick. I will, however, offer a plug for the David Simon-Ed Burns follow-up miniseries, Generation Kill, now on dvd. Spend seven hours with Recon Marines at the tip of the spear driving toward Baghdad, and it will indelibly color your understanding of the American fiasco in Iraq.

So queue any of these up on Netflix for guaranteed viewing pleasure (double your money back -- since two times zero is zero). And get on the bandwagon for Mad Men and Friday Night Lights, while keeping an eye out for the next great tv series.

Is there a doc in the house?

The protracted conclusion of a book project has left me behind in my movie reviewing, so I will try to catch up with a generalized commentary on the competing virtues of documentary and feature filmmaking.

Two recent films make for a pointed comparison. I watched both with the same companion. After Milk (2008, MC-84), I turned to her and said, “It was okay, but the documentary was better,” referring to the 1984 Oscar-winner The Times of Harvey Milk. After Cadillac Records (2008, MC-65), she said to me, “It was okay, but a documentary would have been better.” Each was based on a true story from the recent past, and one’s view of each was determined by how one weighed the merits of performance vs. authenticity. If you were swept up in Sean Penn’s deservedly celebrated portrayal of Harvey Milk, or smitten by James Franco as his lover, or intrigued by Josh Brolin as his murderer, then you make allowances for the movie-fying of his story. Similarly, if you are mesmerised by Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, or Beyonce as Etta James, or Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the mensch in spite of himself who started the eponymous record company, then you go along with the soapy tv machinations of plot, as it perfunctorily checks off its points. It’s all about how much you lose yourself (and your critical, reality-checking faculties) in the portrayal of the characters.

The director (and budget) makes a difference as well. Gus Van Sant is a gay man who alternates mainstream movies with edgy independent films, and here delivers the commercial goods, albeit with a story that definitely engages him. Darnell Martin is a black woman who has mainly directed tv episodes but every decade or so gets to make a movie she has written. So I am prone to pull for -- or make allowances for -- her more than him. Both films are worth seeing, but I enjoyed Cadillac Records a bit more than Milk, though each would benefit from more documentary veracity and less conventional drama.

A film that dispenses with drama but delivers a documentary “you-are-there” quality is The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966), probably the best of the historical programs for Italian (and French) television to which Roberto Rossellini devoted the last decade-plus of his career, after declaring that cinema was dead. It certainly was the only one I had seen and retained a favorable impression of, and it’s been given singular treatment by the Criterion Collection, who at the same time released an Eclipse boxed set of other Rossellinis, about which I will write more later. All these films have a stagy, pageant-like quality, with characters spouting lines of exposition that might have been copied from a textbook, but in this particular case that style matches the subject exactly. Pageantry was just what the Sun King was after as he consolidated power in absolute monarchy, forcing the aristocracy to live in the opulence of Versailles and bankrupting themselves to keep up with the fashion of high living. So when we endure a long, long shot of Louis consuming a sixteen course meal by himself at a dais, we are in exactly the position of the aristocrats who are obliged to soak in his majesty. (Sofia Coppola had to have seen this before she had Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVIII dining in Marie Antoinette.) And in this case, the nonprofessional actor who portrays the King is perfect in his inadequacy to the role, with all the overwrought glamor serving only as a cover for his fear. Unable to memorize his lines, he was forced to read them off a blackboard, but that averted gaze perfectly conveys both the king’s inadequacies and the indifference of royalty to its inferiors. The lack of performance contributes to the authenticity of the film, an article of faith with directors like Dreyer and Bresson, but rarely proved as well as here.

For the sake of contrast, I will mention a film that is totally about performance and absolutely not about authenticity, and therefore the only one of these I hesitate to recommend. Nathalie (2003, MC-69) was written and directed by Anne Fontaine, but is all about French star power. Fanny Ardant plays a tony Parisian gynecologist who more than suspects her husband, Gerard Depardieu, of cheating on her, and enlists a bargirl-prostitute, Emmannuel Beart, to seduce him and report back on exactly what he does. But who is seducing whom? The answer is oh so French. But it hardly matters. It’s enough to spend the time in the company of Fanny Ardant, who not only has her own enigmatic beauty but also gives me a last tenuous connection to the life and work of Francois Truffaut. Depardieu always inhabits his roles with bearish comfort, and Beart nicely plays on the ambiguity I always feel toward her, attractive and yet scary, those lips too luscious to be anything but poison. I was reminded of Bibi Andersson in Persona for the erotic charge of just talking about sex. This film is of course not in that class (very few are), just a tease instead of a revelation.