Toronto Movie Guy

Aesthetics and morals

2012-01-27T18:07:00.002-05:00

The most interesting line in the new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy comes almost at the very end, when the unmasked traitor describes his actions as being more an aesthetic decision than a moral one. The thought isn’t explained further (maybe it’s explored at greater length in John le Carre’s original novel, which I haven’t read), but I took it as elegantly summarizing the natural extension of the Cold War super-spy’s endlessly labyrinthine environment. At least as depicted by now in countless films, the definition of “intelligence” was only tenuously linked to verifiable facts; strategic advantage might lie for instance less in obtaining useful information than in confusing the opposition with misinformation, or in obliterating the distinction between the two (assuming such a distinction ever existed). I suppose the positive interpretation of this would be that it was a truly scary time, with the greatest possible stakes, requiring huge strategic finesse, and it’s no wonder if it generated its own twisted structures and ideologies – after all, what doesn’t?

On the other hand, of course, this comes with a legacy of ethical and legal contortions and breaches, the justification for which would have grievously offended the national consciousness if known (Clint Eastwood’s recent J. Edgar muses on related territory). But anyway, the reference to betrayal as an aesthetic decision suggests we might regard all this as a self-contained art form, an elegantly perpetuated system in which the artist’s achievement would be measured by the complexity of his participation in it – a measure for which the complications of double agency would provide a huge, even necessary, advantage. Faithful patriotism would only be the proof of one’s limitations, therefore of one’s failure.

The Human Factor

Of those countless films I mentioned, I think the last one I happened to watch was The Human Factor, Otto Preminger’s last work, made in 1979. It’s not usually regarded as a strong ending for the masterly director, but I found it a fascinating depiction of British spy-craft, depicted as a mixture of drab formality and unacknowledged derangement. Going over to the other side is the ultimate transgression, meriting death, even though the characters dispassionately leak their own intelligence for strategic advantage; the film’s traitor is a more stable embodiment of traditional British virtues than any of his colleagues (he started passing information out of gratitude for the role played by a Communist in getting his wife out of South Africa). Preminger does justice to the subject, capturing the inherent mediocrity of the environment and the people, which of course renders their power all the more disturbing.

I might also mention David Hare’s Page Eight, the closing gala at last year’s film festival, which played soon afterwards on PBS. This one’s set in the present day, but things haven’t changed much – at one point someone mentions how the dreams for a post-Cold War world failed to materialize, and indeed the agency’s busier than ever now (this is also true of course of all government bureaucracies, of any kind, anywhere). The notion here – again not a new one of course – is that America’s conception of its own strategic interests (and in this case, British kow-towing to them) obscures its own core values, but the movie’s too abbreviated to do much with that idea. Still, it very effectively delivers the kind of seasoned, laconic character-play on which the genre depends.

High-placed mole

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy actually delivers a bit less of that, choosing a mode of often-chilly restraint (it’s directed by Tomas Alfredson, best-known for his very creepy, and very wintery vampire film Let the Right One In). The protagonist is George Smiley, a veteran fired from his senior position within the agency (referred to here as the “Circus”) after a mission failure in Hungary. When evidence emerges of a high-placed mole, Smiley - originally under suspicion himself, but now cleansed by his time outside – gets called back to investigate, knowing his target is one of four senior people.

In addition to not reading the book, I haven’t seen the famous British TV adaptation of it, in which Alec Guinness played Smiley. The film is only about a third as long as the series was, obviously allowing much scope for comparing and contrasting the two (a recent issue of Sight and Sound did this quite absorbingly, regardless that I had mostly no idea what the article was going on about). Some reviewers found the picture hard to follow, and I’d hate to be tested on my grasp of every single detail, but overall I thought it was admirably clear, without being heavy-handed about it. The film draws on a fine cast, including Gary Oldman as Smiley and last year’s Oscar winner Colin Firth, without ever feeling like a series of star turns (thus avoiding a common pitfall of the genre – Bill Nighy is great in Page Eight for instance, but so stylized he threatens to become disembodied from everything else). And the tone feels right – atmospheric but not strenuously scenic, stylish but not flashy, capturing the uneasy relationship of the 1970’s to our current age: recognizable in some ways (jackets and ties don’t fundamentally change that much), entirely alien in others (accessing the records of British intelligence appears to be a matter of finding the correct hand-written notebook, stealing it from the file room, and then hoping someone hasn’t torn out the relevant page).

Ineradicable rot

The Sight and Sound article came out behind the picture, calling it a “hugely successful treatment of formidably resistant materials,” but noting it could only hint at le Carre’s “central preoccupation…does the existence of a mole at the centre of the Circus indicate some ineradicable rot in the upper classes – the ruling class, to this day, of England?” Given the current state of England, the question remains relevant, in fact urgent, but in responding to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you wonder whether the nature of the rot, and what it would take to diagnose and treat it, would be best grasped by obsessively turning over this narrow (albeit fascinating) chunk of the past. Well, perhaps the assertion of aesthetic over moral considerations comes as close as any explanation ever could, as a demonstration of embedded decadence. But on the other hand, a society defined entirely by morality would amount to sterile totalitarianism – and has there ever been a ruling class that didn’t ultimately succumb to rot? Maybe betrayal and treachery are inherent to creativity and awareness, and the Cold War spy genre remains fascinating because it’s a particularly stark embodiment of the traps and excesses and confusions we still sense defining our fragile progress through the world.

Champion

2012-01-22T21:40:00.003-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2009)

Tyson (Mike, that is) is a new documentary about the former heavyweight boxing champion. The larger part of the film, directed by James Toback, is simply Tyson talking through his life (no interviewer is seen or heard); supplemented by the usual array of archive footage. There’s no direct input from anyone else. Even the average non-boxing fan, like me, likely has a fairly good sense of Tyson’s general trajectory: astonishing teen phenomenon, winning all his early fights in early-round knockouts and evoking doubt he could ever be beaten, to a brief and reputation-staining celebrity marriage, the shock loss of his title to a presumed journeyman contender and a much more mixed record thereafter, an increasingly turbulent personal life peaking in a three-year sentence for rape, and more ups and downs thereafter. Still only in his forties, he’s aging well; his immaculate clothes, odd Maori-inspired facial tattoo and heavier features mesh now into a monumental but quite serene exoticism. Then he talks, still in that somewhat unformed voice, and it’s a free-for-all: sometimes eloquent and moving, at other times crude and defiant. What kind of inner life it all adds up to, I can’t imagine.

Morally Reprehensible?

Writing in Film Comment, Amy Taubin called the film “morally reprehensible,” focusing in particular on Tyson’s (astonishingly unguarded, to say the least) remarks about Desiree Washington, the young woman he was convicted of raping. Taubin says: “In relation to libel law, not to mention documentary ethics, it doesn’t matter if Tyson believes that he is not guilty of rape, his remarks are still libelous, and Toback bears responsibility for putting them on the screen without either contesting them or offering evidence to support them.”

I don’t know about libel law, but the reference to “documentary ethics” is intriguing. I Googled the term and one of the first things that came up was this: “A good documentary film maker would never interfere with the happenings in front of the camera, a good documentary film maker would need to be like a machine. There are no documentary making robots yet so you have to do your best to impersonate one.” That might sound good, but it’s essentially meaningless; any apparent restraint evidenced by “non-interference” in events would be swept away by the much more complex (and to some extent invisible) choices involved in deciding what to put on screen, in editing, in mixing, etc. In fact, the sense of documentary makers (or journalists) as in some sense “robots” surely rejects the medium’s primary catalytic possibility: simply (robotically) observing and cataloguing the real is merely a variation on the passivity that afflicts us already; it’s the nature of the engagement with it that might spark something useful. To take an extreme but high-profile example, Michael Moore interferes compulsively with events before the camera, to the extent that you end up discounting much of his films’ supposed “facts,” but he does at least set a dialectic in motion (on the other hand, so does listening to the idiots on Fox News).

James Toback

But anyway, by this measure, we might assume Toback functioned at least somewhat like this non-interfering robot, allowing Tyson to mouth off as he saw fit. As for the ethical obligation to contest him – well, isn’t that already implicit in the fact that he was convicted and served three years? Regardless, in the next edition of Film Comment, Taubin got taken down a notch by her own editor, who called the libel-related comments “unsupported,” and apologized to Toback. I’m sure this was the end result of hours of wrangling, and yet you suspect Toback must have been at least a little pleased by the whole thing; better such eloquent antipathy, you suspect, than the usual dispassionate judgments, whether pro or con .

Toback has been making movies for over thirty years now, although often separated by long intervals, but it’s hard to sum him up. His first film Fingers might still be his best; with Harvey Keitel as a gangster’s son and part-time debt collector who dreams of becoming a concert pianist, it’s a highly subjective portrayal of extreme internalized dysfunction, within a world of confusing cultural and social symbols and signs. A few years after, he broadened this sensibility onto a global political stage with Exposed, a unique (and if memory suffices quite brilliant) teaming of Nastassja Kinski and Rudolf Nureyev (I swear I’m not making this up), blending the fashion industry and terrorism. Exposed is seldom seen now, and Toback’s second film Love and Money seems to have disappeared altogether. Since then he’s made odds and ends, usually with some “provocative” element or other; best among them may be the delirious Black and White (which featured Tyson in a supporting role); he also won an Oscar nomination for writing Bugsy, and by all accounts has a good old time gambling and womanizing and being “colourful.”

Mike Tyson makes pretty good sense as a Toback focal object, but it’s hard to rank Tyson as a major addition to his oeuvre, if only because it’s so obviously capitalizing on a found object. In this regard it’s interesting how Toback (who often appears in his own films) stays way out of the way, and doesn’t jazz up the movie too much either (except for some occasionally rather jarring editing experiments).

Loss Of Belief

I was most intrigued by Tyson’s very open emotion about his first trainer, Cus d’Amato, who he credits essentially for all the good things that happened to him (and blames for none of the bad). The tale of this old (white) guy turning round the challenging young Tyson (well established by the age of 12 in drug dealing and assorted crime) sounds like hokey stuff off the Rocky shelf, except it happens to be true. Tyson seems to perceive and lament the loss of this simpler narrative that might have been. “I lost that belief in myself,” he says, “once Cus died”- which is all the more striking when you realize d’Amato died before any of Tyson’s major successes got under way.

But then, at other times, Tyson clearly relishes being able to say (and be heard to say) things like: “I like a woman with massive confidence and then I want to dominate her sexually.” So he’s a contradiction; well, in our smaller way, aren’t we all. One could make various kinds of symbols out of him, or fit him into various theories, and certainly the sport of boxing hasn’t had the same hold on the popular imagination since he packed it in. But ultimately, is he interesting as more than a particularly outlandish manifestation of the tired old case history, of the prodigious talent that burns too strongly and naively and burns itself out? Tyson is probably too opaque a movie to do other than sending us home with the same preconceived impression we had when we came in.

Our moment in time

2012-01-21T11:24:00.003-05:00

Steve McQueen’s Shame is an absorbing contrivance, an adult Steven Spielberg movie substituting orgasms for sentiment. The protagonist is Brandon, in his 30’s, rather coldly attractive, pulling down good money in some kind of boutique New York firm, living in a Manhattan apartment, and almost entirely consumed by sex: online porn, casual hook-ups, prostitutes, solitary masturbation in the company washroom (he says, presumably truthfully, that his longest relationship lasted four months). If he were left alone, this might all be grimly sustainable – we can’t really tell – but he has a sister, who turns up near the start of the film to mess with his routine and his mind. He toys briefly with the idea of a more normal relationship with a co-worker, and when that doesn’t work, cranks up the extremity of his behaviour, as if longing to be judged and sentenced (and redeemed?); the film leaves it unclear how successfully he navigates through this personal hell.

Shame

Shame has been widely praised. Its star Michael Fassbender won the best actor prize at the Venice film festival, and it made the Globe and Mail’s list of the year’s best pictures. In a year-end Globe article (portentously titled Twelve 2011 movies that moved spirit and soul) Joanna Schneller noted some conflicting views of the film, but went on: “I still maintain it’s the film of 2011, because it’s so about this moment in time: the nexus we’re living in of social and sexual freedoms, technology that should but doesn’t always make us feel more connected, and (most of all) unprecedented access to pornography. Believe it or scoff at it, but you should see it.” Well, I’m not sure that believing or scoffing constitutes the universe of available choices, but regardless, I can’t see how Shame is in any meaningful way “about” these matters. The point about technology, for instance, is hard to avoid in any summation of our age, even if most commentaries about it just get tangled up in trying to disentangle the ironies. But wherever that may be leading us, Brandon’s contortions aren’t much of a medium for illuminating it.

Insofar as I can think my way into the head of a sex addict, it seems to me (like all addictions really) it would be a big drain on your time and/or your money. In age-old Hollywood fashion (regardless that it’s actually a British production), Shame skates over both of these – Brandon has no apparent problem financing his high-class call girl budget, and although his job must surely be demanding, he seems to have plenty of time to wander the streets, or sit around looking pained, or suchlike (the movie’s sole concession in this direction is to make a few references to his habitual lateness). Of course, McQueen could easily counter this objection – the movie is about Brandon’s spirit and soul, he might say, not about his calendar. Or he might just say, this movie isn’t about all those other mundane sex addicts, it’s about this unusually privileged one. But that’s why the movie seems to me aligned with mainstream melodrama – whether we’re looking at space aliens or at the contortions of a tiny elite, we’re not looking at a meaningful version of ourselves.

Glee!

That title, Shame, of course, isn’t exactly unironic, and as the film proceeds, McQueen stirs the psychic pot until it threatens to burn your eyelids, including almost hilariously ominous musical underscoring. This sequence includes an impulsive visit to a gay club, which as presented here, comes across as an embodiment of how utterly Brandon’s lost his bearings. Again, true for him perhaps, but it also seems we’re living in a “moment in time” when plenty of people (especially if they’re rich and urban) are happily and functionally bisexual (weirdly, my mind drifted at this point to Woody Allen’s Vicki Cristina Barcelona, which in retrospect started to seem somewhat radical in its relative serenity). A more broadly relevant, or at least constructively thought-provoking movie on the subject, perhaps, might be called Glee, if that title wasn’t taken.

Despite the praise for Fassbender’s performance, which is certainly committed, it seemed to me to rely on a lot of meaningful staring and loaded silences, of the kind that few men – even rich, good-looking ones – could pull off without seeming creepy, or else stunted. A sequence in a bar, where his less sophisticated boss strikes out with his babbling, while Brandon scores without hardly uttering a word, has all the subtlety of a deodorant commercial. Even so, I started by calling the film absorbing, and so it is – it’s often dazzlingly assembled, and McQueen has an immense facility with cinema: sometimes sweeping us up in intricate montage; at other times investing entirely in his actors, leaving the camera to run for five minutes or more. However skeptical you might be about its inherent value, it often feels like you’re watching an important film.

Hunger

Writing at the time, I called McQueen’s first film Hunger – set in Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in the early 80’s – “a remarkable debut.” I noted it was wrenching at times, but said “it also resembles an immense multi-faceted art installation, with numerous points of entry and exit…the film sometimes recalls one of Kubrick’s filmic labyrinths (The Shining or even 2001) but without ever bastardizing the potency of the central human experience. McQueen also brings to this a tough-minded awareness of how the extremes of human suffering and ugliness shimmer with iconographic possibility.” Much of this might broadly apply to the new film too. But as well as everything else, Hunger was a serious work of historical reconstruction, for example putting up a closing series of captions (as would a more conventional film) reminding us of the grim facts. Perhaps the restrictions of that history, and of the prison walls, were vital to McQueen’s success there. Shame is painted on a much broader canvas, but as a result seems stifled, grabbing at ideas and possibilities, affecting a hard shell, but soft and indulged beneath.

The truth is, a much less heralded picture like Jason Reitman’s Young Adult has more to say about this moment in time. As I wrote the other week, that’s hardly an unflawed film, but it has instants of grounded observation surpassing anything in McQueen’s movie, and it evokes how the traditional markers of full maturity are increasingly unattainable now, with arrested development becoming a national condition (actually, this strikes me as a more sophisticated perspective on the mixed blessing of technology than anything in Shame). I’m not saying Shame isn’t worth seeing. But if you’re the kind of person to whom it’s remotely relevant, you’ll be too consumed by other things to see it anyway.

Jacques Demy

2012-01-14T11:49:00.005-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2009)

About six years ago, I wrote here about the French director Jacques Demy, just before the Cinematheque Ontario held a season of his films. They had another one last year, and it actually lured me back to the Cinematheque after several years away (due to perpetual scheduling problems and the considerable consolation of a pretty good DVD collection). In particular, I couldn’t pass up his last film Trois places pour le 26, which I’d never had any opportunity to see before, nor the chance to revisit his version of The Pied Piper (with Jack Wild and John Hurt!), which I recall used to play sometimes on morning TV when I was a kid in Britain, but is never seen now.

Missing Films

The most astonishing thing about the Cinematheque season though was the omission of three of Demy’s films (there are only twelve full-length works in all, plus one made for TV): Lady Oscar, Une chambre en ville and Parking. I only say “astonishing” because the Cinematheque has regularly performed miracles in finding films that virtually all official sources list as inaccessible. The missing Demy movies aren’t that old – they date back to 1979, 1982 and 1985 respectively – but it’s as if they’ve been swallowed up.

I’ve only seen glimpses of them, in the 1995 documentary The World of Jacques Demy (made by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda). Une chambre en ville (a musical set against 1950’s labour strife, featuring Michel Piccoli cutting his own throat in mid-song) looks fascinating. Admittedly, Lady Oscar and Parking look dull and (sad to say) awful respectively, but what good is the age of information and digital transmission if not to facilitate our judging such things for ourselves?

I’ve come to love Demy’s films more and more during these six years. And like Orson Welles, the gaps in the available record come more and more to be part of his identity. Five years ago I quoted David Thomson as follows: “(Demy) does not seem quite possible. Did he really live? Have those wistful, gentle and melodic films been made? Or is he only an ideal director one has dreamed…It may be more comfortable in this age of dread-ridden movies to believe Demy never existed.”

It’s an alluring quotation, if you stop (as the Cinematheque did five years ago) in the early 70’s. To that point, Demy’s career indeed consists mostly of some of the loveliest movies ever made. His first two films, Lola and Bay Of Angels, both filmed in pristine black and white and drawing on the magnetism of Anouk Aimee and Jeanne Moreau respectively, are still as evocative as ever, and then came the preeminent The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. One of my saddest filmic memories is seeing that film at the Carlton during its re-release more than a decade ago, and being stuck behind a group of women who laughed condescendingly through the whole thing. But the memory’s silver lining is that it confirms the project’s audacity, and Demy’s immense skill in rendering it (if sadly not to all of us) so natural. His notion that subjects like the Algerian war (a huge subject in 1964 France of course) and unmarried pregnancy could possibly be addressed – and seriously - through a musical seems no less visionary now, and the film’s craft remains sublime in every way.

Undemanding and Lollipop

After that, with Catherine Deneuve again, he made The Young Girls Of Rochefort, a more conventional musical but almost as successful, flooding the screen with colour and dance and wonderfully conceived interactions, and with Gene Kelly! At this point I should acknowledge that “more conventional” is a relative term in Demy’s case. Even the brightest of the films feature murder, incest, whoring, all kinds of sexuality (not to mention, in his least successful film from those I’ve seen, a pregnant man). Thomson, I now think, places too great a gap between Demy and today’s “dread-ridden” movies, for it’s clear how easily Demy could be drawn into a darker vein. The Pied Piper, for example, is far more rigorous than most fairy tales would be in depicting the horrors of the plague.

Continuing through the chronology, Demy went to Hollywood to make The Model Shop, intending to cast the unknown Harrison Ford but ending up with 2001’s Gary Lockwood. It’s a fascinating, melancholy film, but didn’t do well. Demy returned to France to make Donkey Skin - a rapturous fairy tale, but with a clear sense of gathering disillusionment. The Pied Piper and The Slightly Pregnant Man followed: all the films he made to this point are either available on DVD or (in the case of The Model Shop) turn up quite often on cable. Six years followed before Lady Oscar and that final heavily hit-and-miss decade (he died in 1990).

An article on Demy on the Senses of Cinema website cites Jean-Luc Godard’s assessment of him as juvenile and passé and (re the Hollywood episode) a tragic sell-out, states that his films may appear “undemanding and lollipop” and appears to share a view that the work has “aged poorly.” The article concludes, seemingly rather reluctantly, that he nevertheless belongs among the auteurs if only for his “consistency of vision.” But actually it’s their very inconsistency in large part that renders his work, and the man himself, so fascinating. The beauty of Umbrellas of Cherbourg only becomes more cherishable for its originator’s apparent doubts, preoccupations and bad luck.

Glimpses and Guesswork

Agnes Varda, who also made the part-documentary/part-reenacted Jacquot du Nantes about Demy, must know his soul better than anyone. They were married for some 30 years, working in close proximity to each other, and raising two children. The World of Jacques Demy basically reinforced the Demy of that Thomson quote, presenting his films out of order as if to fuzzy the sense of his downward trajectory. Varda also didn’t mention there that (at least according again to Senses of Cinema) that they broke up for a year or two in the early 80’s. Clearly, her sense of how to tell his story evolved, for in last year’s documentary The Beaches of Agnes she reported for the first time that he died of AIDS, although again without joining the dots further.

It all leaves me far more preoccupied with Jacques Demy than with many directors I know to be objectively even greater. His films are immensely worth fighting for, but I’m not sure we have the story that best makes sense of them. Most of all, until we’re able to see those missing works, we’re relying too much on glimpses and guesswork. But in the meantime, the earlier films’ pleasures are undiminished. Seek them out, and love them, but be aware that yes, he did live, and not undemandingly, not like a lollipop.

(January 2012 update - thanks to the Internet, I've now seen Une chambre en ville (magnificent!) and Lady Oscar (less so). Still waiting to see Parking)

Wenders' dance

2012-01-14T11:36:00.004-05:00

I wrote here a few years ago about the sad decline in the career of German director Wim Wenders. When I was seriously getting into movies in the mid-80’s, his Paris, Texas was the acknowledged benchmark of class – authentically both European and American, sexy and mythic, familiar and unprecedented. He followed this with his angels over Berlin rhapsody, Wings of Desire – even more beloved by some, but in retrospect full of warning signs of an artist seduced by his sense of his own greatness. Since then it’s been twenty years of almost unbroken disappointment. I’m not riding a band wagon here – I was one of very few people who gave a qualified thumbs up to both The Million Dollar Hotel and Don’t Come Knocking. But even I couldn’t rouse myself to a kind word about some of his output, in particular the hectoring Land of Plenty.

Quasi-profundity

Wenders intersperses his fiction films with documentaries, with similarly declining returns. The most significant is the semi-legendary Lightning over Water, a productively ambiguous examination of – in effect – the death of director Nicholas Ray. The most broadly famous though is Buena Vista Social Club, which apart from the inherent worthiness of its service to the long overlooked musicians didn’t excite me much. His documentary on Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo-Ga, is touching in concept but suggests no understanding whatsoever of Ozu’s importance, and exhibits in spades Wenders’ tendency to set himself up as an aphorist-for-hire, shoving aside Ozu in favour of a stream of quasi-profundities which nowadays wouldn’t even make the grade as Tweets. Likewise his documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes, where the term “notebook” seems to be code for the lack of rigour behind the film’s endless blather on the relationship of fashion and film.

This is also perhaps the greatest weakness of Wenders’ new documentary Pina: whenever people say anything, it’s usually some generic insight or personal recollection of the kind you can scrape in layers off any life achievement presentation (Wenders at least acknowledges the limitations of the talking head format, but only by separating sound and image to play the voices over shots of non-talking heads). Happily, this only accounts for a small percentage of the film. The rest is largely sublime.

Pina Bausch

Pina illustrates the work of Pina Bausch, the German choreographer. She and Wenders planned to make a film together in 2009, but then she died of cancer; he put the project on hold before resuming, working closely with many of her dancers and collaborators. My knowledge of dance pretty much stops at Fred Astaire and what you get at the Mirvish shows – I’ve never once been to the ballet for instance – so the following remarks may mainly illustrate my own ignorance. But Pina made me think about the form as I never have before. My (no doubt clichéd and reductive) view of dance tends to emphasize grace and technical precision, but these qualities aren’t particularly prominent in the film. Instead, it communicates the possibilities of dance as narrative, grounded in vibrant emotions, in earth and sand and water, and as diagnosis, fearlessly and with immense resourcefulness circling around the core question of – as someone puts it toward the end – what are we longing for. The dances in Pina often seem thrillingly torn from some larger story, or perhaps from the heart of all stories,

Wenders made the film in 3-D, and it stands with Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Hugo in largely conquering one’s reservations about the format. There are still moments when the extra definition of the foreground comes at the cost of a weirdly flattened background, or when the excess of focal points makes the real seem oddly fake. But for the most part you forget you’re watching any kind of special format, and lose yourself in the play of cinematic and physical invention. Without ever feeling intrusive or over-analytical about it, Wenders allows us to move within the performance, to commune with the performers and the space as Bausch herself as might have done in rehearsal.

The film doesn’t confine itself to the stage though – it takes the dances outside, into the country, but also to the edge of highways, to the underside of train tracks, or into the train carriages. Some of the effects – cutting between different performances of the same dance, for instance – clearly go beyond what was originally on the stage, but in the absence of any knowledge of those originals, it’s impossible to know how much. These devices might easily have seemed like over-reaching, but they seem to me to work, because one imagines Bausch would have wanted her work to be treated as a conversation, and thus to solicit an answer.

Kings of the Road

In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane drew a link between Pina and Wenders’ earlier works, colourfully evoking those as a “volley of unpredictable gestures—solemn or wild, often futile, but not without a streak of comic dignity.” He evokes a moment in Kings of the Road where a man drives his Volkswagen Beetle into a river and “stays in the driver’s seat as the water rises, furiously turning the steering wheel this way and that, as if he still had someplace to go and some hope of getting there.” Lane asks: “Who would have seen the joke, and the horror, more clearly than Pina Bausch?” In Kings of the Road, one of Wenders’ best, once the driver exits the water, he latches on the river bank onto a man who services film projectors, and without even introducing each other they fall into a rhythm, travelling together from one small town movie theatre to another. The picture talks to the necessity of exercising control over one’s trajectory even in drab and barren times, even if only by a form of negation, by rejecting almost all personal possessions and fixed coordinates; it’s one of those films you feel could continue almost indefinitely, gathering further incremental power through continued encounters and variations and adjustments.

Pina can’t quite return Wenders to that rare state, but it’s an achievement that the film even makes you think back to it. “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost,” stands as its final motif, but of course it reminds you of the injunction to ‘dance fools dance’, to lose yourself in misdirected merriment, the better not to notice your descent to hell. Wenders’ recent career has more than its share of such misplaced dancing, making it all the more miraculous that in a film that might have constituted the final surrender, he rediscovers himself. He says now he’s going to make all his movies in 3-D, but that’s hardly the most necessary takeaway. It’s more important that he engage us again in nourishing and unpredictable conversations; if he can simultaneously cut back on the annoying talk, all the better.

Taking off

2012-01-10T10:37:00.004-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2004)

Readers may remember that a few years ago I amused myself by speculating on the directors that might have received a Nobel Prize for cinema, if such an award had been created in 1970. I won’t repeat the whole list here, but the first winner was Jean Renoir, followed by Charles Chaplin and Luis Bunuel. My list ended in 1999, but I’ve gone on adding a name every year, with the four subsequent entrants being Stan Brakhage, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Manuel de Oliveira and Claude Chabrol.

Nobel Prize

In previous years I’d found room on the list for Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, but there aren’t any other obvious contenders for me from the current American cinema. Francis Coppola and Woody Allen might at one time have seemed like sure things, but the fall-off in their work makes me pause. Arthur Penn and John Boorman are worth considering, but I’m not sure their bodies of achievement make it at the very highest level (although Chabrol eventually got there over similar reservations). Spike Lee or Jim Jarmusch might be clear possibilities if either one were to round out the resume with a flat-out masterpiece. Before Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, the Coen Brothers looked like stronger contenders than they do now.

I wonder how many of you, at this point, are wondering about my failure to mention Steven Spielberg. His list of films is nothing short of staggering. Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. and Jurassic Park are all cultural landmarks of one kind or another. Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan won him his Oscars and addressed many concerns about his lack of gravity. Some think that A.I. brilliantly fused his own sensibility with that of the late Stanley Kubrick. Most recently, Minority Report was as accomplished as ever, and although Catch me if you Can was one of his lightest efforts, I think it may have been one of his most subtly meaningful and beguiling. All this in addition to the classic Duel, the much underrated Empire of the Sun, and a fistful of others.

It’s an amazing line-up, and I don’t know why I don’t feel more genuinely enthusiastic about it. I think it’s because – and I’m not trying to throw this out in a flippant way – when I go back through those films I recall one awesome sequence after another, but the emotions attached to them – wonder, love of family, commemoration – don’t seem particularly stimulating. You clap at his films, but you don’t stop and think about them. But I wouldn’t deny that part of this may be a preconception on my part of what art is all about. With the greatest directors, I’d suggest, you feel a measure of respectful striving in every frame. Spielberg’s films feel like they come too easy. Despite his often-extraterrestrial themes, his films remain earthbound; knowing no constraints on his resources, it’s as if he had never had to undergo the sweat and self-examination that might have molded his facility into art.

The Terminal

Spielberg’s new film The Terminal is an odd project. Starring his apparent favourite actor Tom Hanks, it’s the story of an Eastern European who’s stuck for months at JFK airport when a civil war breaks out at home and his visa gets revoked – he can’t go forward, can’t go back. He builds himself a bed near an abandoned gate and puts together a functioning routine of friends, meal arrangements, diversions and good deeds. He also romances a flight attendant played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Set almost entirely inside the airport, the film is surely one of the director’s most regressive in some time. With a disregard for logic and plausibility striking even by Hollywood standards, it feels like an old-time studio movie – to me, the glossy aesthetic has a smell of the mid-60’s about it. This sense is highly bolstered by Zeta-Jones’ role – a poignant, strung-along type such as Shirley MacLaine must have played a dozen times. The film’s themes, such as they are, are utterly shopworn – wonder, love of family, commemoration.

Spielberg’s other skills are somewhat muted here too; I can’t think of a film of his with so little visual panache. At one point I started thinking of the huge set that Jacques Tati built for Playtime. The film ruined Tati financially and almost in every other way, and every frame rings with his wrenching desire to strike a perfect alchemy of the physical and the personal; (paradoxically) to use the biggest set ever as a tool to dissect the minutest compromises of human behaviour. Except for a repeated use of people slipping on freshly mopped floors, Spielberg shows little interest in the space’s possibilities. He said in an interview that he talked his way onto the project after getting the script from Hanks, and it’s as if it appealed to him to act like a director for hire, perhaps channeling the genial but bland stoicism of Hanks’ character. God knows Spielberg’s entitled to do anything he wants, but it will only confirm suspicions that he’s a craftsman rather than an artist.

Carandiru

In 1985, when Steven Spielberg received a much-discussed apparent snub at the Oscars (The Color Purple received nine Oscar nominations; he didn’t get one for directing it), Brazilian director Hector Babenco hit his high-water mark with Kiss Of The Spider Woman, which by winning an Oscar for William Hurt and inspiring a Broadway musical became another cultural tentpole. Babenco briefly became a Hollywood director with the dull Ironweed and the interesting but unadmired At Play in the Fields of The Lord, and then, except for a barely seen 1996 Argentinean film, that was it. He reportedly spent much of the period seriously ill, coming close to death.

His comeback film Carandiru is set in an infamous Brazilian prison (the real Carandiru was destroyed in 2002), watching a cross-section of prisoners through the eyes of a sympathetic doctor. The film is a deftly orchestrated mixture of flashbacks and highs and lows, blended together in a generally fairly genial manner with a persistent emphasis on headline issues such as AIDS prevention and general inmate welfare (Babenco may be thinking of Jean Renoir, as well as classic socially conscious melodramatists like Elia Kazan). Although the place is a pure hell on earth, a fact driven home in particular in the sprawling riot sequence that ends the film, Babenco doesn’t have the feeling for the streets and the squalor, or the cinematic fire, of recent South American films like City Of God. I started thinking that the doctor – beaming his way through one anecdote after another in a pleasant but rather detached manner – was a proxy for Babenco himself; an educated man of impeccable intentions, struggling to capture a world far beyond his normal experience. But it’s one of those films where the rough edges add to the overall interest; the signs of Babenco’s struggles somehow act as a badge of authenticity. Truth is, a few more films like this, even with as many flaws, might push Babenco ahead of Spielberg in the Nobel stakes.

Badly behaved

2012-01-06T11:17:00.004-05:00

In Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a marginally famous Minneapolis-based author of a series of novels for teenagers (her name’s only on the inside; the original creator’s on the cover). The series is coming to an end, she’s blocked on writing the last installment, she’s divorced, and she’s an alcoholic. Receiving an email blast that her now-married high school boyfriend is a new father, she gets it in her head to drive back to her home town of Mercury, where he still lives, and steal him back, on the fuzzy basis that this might provide a kind of rebooting.

Off to St. Albert

I saw the movie on December 22nd, the day before flying out to St. Albert, Alberta for Christmas, and I must say that for a movie that’s not actually about St. Albert, Alberta, it captures the essence of the place especially well (I’m glad I didn’t watch it while I was there – it would just have been too depressing). Some of this is relatively easy stuff – the parade of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut on the way into town. But the movie, written by Diablo Cody, frequently catches you with more subtle observation. When Mavis checks into the hotel, one of the first things she does is to plunk down her laptop on the desk and pull out the extensible USB cord: I’ve done that dozens of times myself, but I don’t remember ever seeing it in a movie before.

The dialogue, also, frequently justifies Cody’s reputation. I loved an exchange where a local woman, who’s secretly admired (maybe even loved) Mavis ever since school, denounces everything about Mercury, saying the people there might as well be dead. For Mavis it’s the right insight at the right time, and her gratitude for it is genuine, but when the woman imagines she might get out, Mavis summarily rejects the idea. It’s not that she’s being consciously cruel (not at that actual moment anyway); it’s that the idea lies so far outside her plausible frame of reference, it’s not even worth considering. In nineteen out of twenty American movies, Mavis would feel an obligation to let the woman down more easily, but that only reflects how seldom America’s increasingly brutal sense of strain finds expression in the cinema.

Hate Crime Guy

Mavis isn’t actually that young an adult – she’s closing in on forty – but the title cleverly evokes how the traditional markers of full maturity are increasingly unattainable now, with arrested development becoming a national condition. In Mercury they imagine she’s got it made, but their sense of the world seems to stop at Minneapolis: they don’t know, as we do – from the film’s opening seconds – that she lives in an unprepossessing apartment in an ugly building, without much of a view. And who has any idea what being “an author” really means?

Everything I’ve described so far is just great, and explains why I liked Young Adult more than any of Reitman’s previous films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air). Even so, its overall success is limited, for various reasons. Mavis is played by Charlize Theron, who’s terrific in the role, but also gorgeous beyond any normal parameters, especially for someone who seemingly abuses herself so badly. Her fixation on the old boyfriend, although ultimately explained in a way that makes more psychological sense than it initially seemed to, is still a major contrivance. And then there’s the third major character, Matt, a guy she runs into at a local dive, and barely remembers even though he had the locker next to hers all through high school, until it clicks that he’s the “hate crime guy,” permanently disabled from being beaten up by a bunch of guys who thought he was gay (which at least got him some minor fame until people found out he wasn’t gay, so that it wasn’t a hate crime anymore); after that she starts coming to his house every night to get hammered, even if (or of course, to some degree, because) he’s the only one telling her the truth about herself. Here too, no problems with Patton Oswalt’s performance, but however distinctively written and played, the character has a sitcom-friendly convenience about him.

Simply Insane

Matt describes his ongoing sexual dysfunction so vividly that when the movie actually throws him a sex scene, you might feel deprived for not getting to see more of the mechanics of how (or whether) it works, in the way of Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in Coming Home. What I mean, more broadly, is that Young Adult ultimately isn’t turbulent enough. The main objection to the film in the reviews I’ve read is that Mavis just isn’t likeable enough to be the focus of a film; conversely, see this as a sign of courage. Roger Ebert, zooming in on her self-description as an alcoholic, says: “civilians (and some of the critics writing about this film) are slow to recognize alcoholism. On the basis of what we see her drinking on the screen, she must be more or less drunk in every scene… alcoholism explains a lot of things: her single status, her disheveled apartment, her current writer's block, her lack of self-knowledge, her denial, her inappropriate behavior. Diablo Cody was wise to include it; without such a context, Mavis would simply be insane.”

Others in turn, quite rightly, took issue with the notion of “simply” being “insane.” And of course, alcoholism doesn’t remotely “explain” someone being single; you might as well reverse the two, and say being single explains alcoholism. The reference to Diablo Cody’s wisdom in including this “explanation” suggests Ebert views a good movie as a kind of exercise in connecting the dots. But that’s only possible if the dots were too easily spaced to begin with. It might have been unfortunate that in recent weeks I’d watched several films by the European director Andrzej Zulawski, all of them studies of extreme behaviour of one kind or another. At their best, you ride along in gorgeous delirium; at their worst, you just wonder what the hell’s going on and count the minutes. I don’t really think Young Adult needed a touch of the Zulawski exactly – that would hardly be true to Mercury, or to St. Albert. But ultimately it’s limited by excessive tidiness. As I mentioned, for more people all the time, being an adult, young or otherwise, isn’t everything it used to be. It’s not just the post-baby boomers, stuck with the bill for their retired parents, but everything that’s coming up behind: the angst across the developed world about youth unemployment and the threat of a lost generation. Maybe we’re reaching the dire point where for many people, living in America (or Canada, or Britain, or Greece…) will “explain” being an alcoholic. We could use some films about that. I mean, badly-behaved ones.

Four current movies

2011-12-31T20:09:00.004-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2007)

Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering is only a partial success, but it’s good to see the director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain working in an ambitious contemporary mode. Jude Law plays an architect, with a bright new office in a seedy part of London that he hopes to redevelop; in the meantime, the firm is a constant target for break-ins. After one incident he follows the perpetrator, a young Bosnian immigrant, to his house, and later makes contact with his mother, played by Juliette Binoche. They begin an affair, made easier by the architect’s strained relationship with his long-time partner (Robin Wright Penn). Emotional and familial challenges crash into economic and legal ones, bound together by a common need, as the title suggests, to break one’s current state, and find a way to re-enter.

I liked the film’s portrayal of the modern British melting pot, and Minghella’s carefully calibrated cauldron of traumas. There’s a real melancholy to this film, and it’s my favourite Law performance to date – the character is so hemmed in by professional and personal woes that the actor barely has a moment when he can merely rely on charm (in contrast, for example, to the recent The Holiday). On the other hand, the film is exceptionally contrived; it often succumbs to excessive glossiness; it’s full of standard “sensitive” dialogue; and there are several dubiously conceived characters (such as the hooker, played by Vera Farmiga, who starts hanging out with Law on his night-time building stakeouts). With a little more spontaneity, or perhaps just serendipity, this all might have coalesced into a fuller overall experience.

Breach

Some of the same caveats could apply to Billy Ray’s Breach. This tells of the capture of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, perhaps the most damaging intelligence traitor of all time, responsible for leaking untold secrets to the Soviet Union. He was also a sharer of Internet pornography (although the raciest thing we see him do in the movie is watching a Catherine Zeta-Jones DVD in his office), a strict doctrinaire Catholic, committed family man and definite right-winger. Such a character certainly seems worthy of a movie, and Chris Cooper is compelling as Hanssen, conveying both the intellect and will that allowed him to rise in the Bureau, and the dark complexity that might have led him astray. Ultimately though the film only tries to connect so many of the dots, leaving much of the mystery intact (the best guess is that it was mainly a matter of ego).

The heart of the film instead is a young operative, played by Ryan Philippe, who’s installed as Hanssen’s assistant with the secret brief of getting the goods on him. As the film presents it, it strains credibility that the Philippe character gets away with so many lucky escapes, increasingly relying on a superficial appeal to the older man’s religious faith to get out of a hole. This is particularly distracting because director Ray’s approach is low-key and functional, eschewing any kind of flash. Ultimately, although the film is more engaging overall than Robert De Niro’s recent The Good Shepherd, it’s less successful in evoking the compromises of a spy’s existence. Overall it’s not at all clear what effect Breach is aiming for.

Days of Glory

“At the 2006 Cannes Film Festival,” says the poster to Days of Glory (Indigenes), “one film was so powerful it changed the course of history.” It’s a reference to French president Jacques Chirac, who saw the film and then authorized the release of long-frozen military pensions to soldiers from France’s former African colonies. The film follows a group of these soldiers in the last year of World War II, doing much of the dirty work in the liberation of France, their official home country but also a foreign and only partly welcoming one. They suffer racism both explicit and subtle, manifested in unequal access to rations and leaves and promotions, to official disregard and cultural insensitivity (in one of the film’s few moments of relative dark humour, they’re herded together to watch a (lousy) ballet performance, which they quickly desert in disgust). Through the film they grasp at strands of hope of attaining fairness, always dashed, in a way that’s ultimately very chilling.

The film, directed by Rachid Bouchareb, was nominated this year for best foreign language film, and its main actors shared the male acting prize at Cannes last year. At times it’s rather too episodic and conventional, but then its point isn’t to remake our view of war, but rather modestly to excavate some of the stories that lie hidden in its folds. As such it’s almost a counterpoint to Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers. That film illustrated the military and political machinery’s hunger for heroes, and the institutional carelessness with which they’re created; Indigenes shows the callous disregard for heroes who don’t fit the prevailing ideology. Even when it seems the war genre has explored every possible nuance and byway of history, Bouchareb’s film is a meaningful further contribution

The Astronaut Farmer

Mark Polish’s The Astronaut Farmer has been widely criticized for wanton implausibility and hokiness, and no surprise. Former Air Force pilot Billy Bob Thornton, living the quiet family life on a Midwest ranch, is increasingly obsessed with space flight, and since the official channels are closed off to him, he sets out to build a rocket in his barn. The FAA, CIA and military all observe him with suspicion, and the locals mostly think he’s crazy, but the support of his wife (Virginia Madsen) and kids never wavers, or rather only enough to facilitate the big climax where he comes back from his lowest ebb to finally triumph (I doubt I really gave anything away there). So it’s implausible for sure, but isn’t the fixation on that point mainly a function of genre convention? When has a conflation of events like that in Babel ever “actually happened”; in what world do people “really behave” like those in The Departed? The issue rather is that an amiable family drama like The Astronaut Farmer is meant to follow different artificialities and clichés. The film seems to me a fairly witty challenge to convention, and rather subtly ambiguous (to me anyway) in its use of familiar mechanics; if you skew your mind just slightly to the left, the film seems at least radical if not anarchist; if the prototypical story of the ordinary guy who won’t give up can be so straight facedly marshaled to such an end, what are we to make of a country that bases much of its political rhetoric on this stuff? Thornton plays along perfectly with the joke, and the great Bruce Dern is in there as well.

Dumb Guys

2011-12-28T07:37:00.003-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2008)

David Ayer’s Street Kings is another LAPD saga, meaning that even though your protagonist is violent and unethical, with a flagrant disregard for what you might quaintly call “the law,” he might still be a better man than the corrupt sleazeballs around him. I say “a better man” because on the evidence of this film the LAPD remains pretty much a male enclave, not that I wish the film had tapped the cliché of the grimly attractive female sidekick. Keanu Reeves is the outrageous central figure, not giving a very rounded performance, but doing well enough at the Dirty Harry thing; he’s surrounded by a colourful but mostly indifferently used cast (including Forest Whitaker, already in heavy post-Oscar slumming, and Hugh Laurie playing Dr. House’s less eloquent cop brother). Ayer’s first film Harsh Times was also familiar stuff, but with a distinctive take on the pain and arrested development underlying sleazy male behaviour. Street Kings is much coarser, and doesn’t have much tonal variation: it’s one of those films where even modest reflection (and one might forget that the original Dirty Harry was quite piercing, but that was the 70’s for you) is squeezed out by brassy momentum. The screenplay (co-written by James Ellroy) is quite ingenious, but as you know, ingenuity is nowadays usually just one step removed from ridiculousness. The movie is definitely entertaining, and I know that counts for a lot.

Caramel

Kind of like I wrote the other week about the Argentinean The Year my Parents went on Vacation, Nadine Labaki’s Caramel is a smooth but straightforward creation that earns significant extra points for anthropological interest. It’s a warm-hearted, colourful chronicle of the lives, loves, ups and downs of four women who work and hang out around a big-city hair salon, the difference being that the salon is in Beirut. If the film is anything to go by (and I wish it was a little more persuasive that it is anything to go by), the foreground of such lives doesn’t look so much different from parallel lives in the West – they dress stylishly, have affairs with married men, worry about getting old, and so on. One of the women appears to be a lesbian, but it’s not probed very much; although there’s much camaraderie between the four, they’re conspicuously less open with each other than they’d likely be in the West (it’s sort of like watching one of those cleaned up Sex and the City episodes, except the cleaner came back for a second pass).

But more intriguing is what we see in the background. There are small compromises, such as frequent power blackouts, baked into the way of life. It’s a place where you can get questioned by the military during a late night talk with your fiancée, and where an unwise reference to Allah might send you to jail; or where a woman can’t book a hotel room for herself and a companion without producing proof of marriage. This is all fascinating, but because the film is so sunnily contrived in obvious ways, you never know whether these elements are being accurately portrayed. In the end, it remains a chick flick, ending on a woman’s overflowing delight in her new stylishly short hairstyle. Never undervalue the power of small steps, it seems to be saying.

Smart People

Street Kings and Caramel, in their different ways, can be (and especially in the first case, should be) criticized for lack of ambition, but it feels like their makers probably brought home most of what they were aiming for. Smart People, directed by Noam Murro, doesn’t meet that test. Sold as a literate comedy, it has Dennis Quaid as a grouchy literature professor, and widower, in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, and Ellen Page as his precocious 17-year-old daughter. Bookish and socially awkward, the two of them live in a self-satisfied bubble, which gets sullied when Quaid’s lay about brother (Thomas Haden Church) moves in for a while. Meanwhile, the professor tries dating again, with a doctor/former student (Sarah Jessica Parker).

The key part of that brief synopsis is the bit about the rarified relationship between the Quaid and Page characters, but it only dawned on me eventually that this was the intention, by virtue of some strenuous labeling dialogue (for example, a drunken Page actually goes up to a random woman in a bar and asks her what it’s like being stupid). The point is that the characters don’t seem, feel or sound smart. Oh, Quaid uses lots of long words in his lectures (the scriptwriter obviously raided a whole shelf of textbooks) and Page wears the worst clothes of any character in any movie since Battlefield Earth, but they never give off an iota of real intellectual energy; most of what they say is grimly and heavy-handedly functional. It’s tough to write and play smart people, but to take some recent examples – The Squid And The Whale and The Savages never left any doubt that its characters were real intellectuals, although of course foible-ridden. The Savages is particularly impressive for not trying to get laughs based on pretentiousness.

Because the central concept of Smart People so clearly fails, the movie ends up like a glue-deprived craft project using tape and spit and anything in sight to hold things tenuously together. The relationships swing from one pole to the other, leaving out entire fields of connective tissue. It communicates its “smartness” through grotesque excesses that aren’t then followed through. Page makes a Christmas dinner from an obscure recipe that she “translated from ancient French” – (1) nothing else about her character suggests she’d take on such a project; (2) if she had, she sure would have mentioned it earlier than the halfway point in the meal; (3) again, if she had, she sure wouldn’t have made it look like school canteen leftovers.

Maybe that sounds like carping, but details matter. I didn’t like Juno as much as most people did, but it flourished in large part because of painstaking attention to detail and character. Page in Smart People is meant to be (presumably in a desperate grasp at idiosyncrasy) a young Republican – the concept goes no further than a superficial reference to Dick Cheney before being dropped for the film’s last hour. If Juno had been a Republican, it would have amounted to something. Anyway, if you watch the film merely as a series of meaningless scenes, it goes by OK.

AMC Watch

Here I’m inaugurating a new and hopefully short-lived feature: Yonge-Dundas AMC Watch. I’ve been going there a fair bit because it works well for where I live, and it’s pretty good technology- and comfort-wise, but I’m finding the audiences there unusually annoying (maybe something about the acoustics causes the chatter, the rustling etc. to carry), and for a new place it feels remarkably drab, with obvious design problems. And I’ve encountered washroom issues on two separate visits so far. Isn’t this meant to be a destination venue, a showcase at the new heart of our modern city? Make it great, AMC! Or else be singled out here again!

(December 2011 update - the AMC never really changed, but I got used to it)

Total refreshment

2011-12-20T12:18:00.003-05:00

Writing unenthusiastically a couple of years ago about Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, I reported how “I started to think there’s something rather insecure about how he casts himself as an eternal superfan, devoting himself to preservation, making documentaries on American and Italian cinema (with British cinema to come) and on Bob Dylan (with George Harrison to come)…it’s getting tiresome how he raves in interviews about B-grade old-timers, people whose influence he ought to have outgrown years ago.” And that was before he made an entertaining but completely inessential documentary about Fran Lebowitz.

Hugo

Well, Scorsese’s new film Hugo – his best in decades - represents the best possible response to this line of criticism. It’s as dazzling a deployment of cutting edge cinematic resources as you’ll ever see; in particular, it’s Scorsese’s first in 3-D. And it uses this to reach all the way back into the history of the medium, to celebrate the pioneer Georges Melies, insisting on his continuing relevance, as a creator in himself and more broadly as one of the first to understand the possibilities of cinema for nurturing dreams and visions. It takes Scorsese’s “superfan” project to an almost perverse extreme perhaps, but it’s as generous and joyous as any film could be. And it’s wonderfully mysterious how such a “big” picture can feel so sweetly intimate, conveying sudden and total refreshment.

Hugo Cabret is an orphaned boy, living inside a Paris train station in the 1930s, under constant threat of detection by the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), especially because of his petty pilfering from the store of an old toy vendor known as Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley). He makes friends with the old man’s granddaughter (Chloe Grace Moretz), showing her a mechanical automaton his father saved from a museum, and which Hugo is trying to repair (hence the stolen parts). I don’t want to give away more than that (although the movie’s plot is hardly its most important aspect), but it’s impossible to write about it (and I don’t think anyone has) without noting that Papa Georges turns out to be Melies, virtually penniless and forgotten by almost everyone, too bitter to remember his past glories; as the children learn about these achievements, Scorsese embeds some of Melies’ work into his own film, as well as recreating in flashback the dream factory of his heyday (made of glass to maximize the light).

Georges Melies

Melies made over 500 short films, from around 1896 to 1913: the best-known is Le voyage dans la lune, with its famous image of a rocket flying into the eye of a moon-face. I watched a few of them about a year ago, and it didn’t take long for a feeling of repetition to set in – his taste was for potted adventure spectacles, with mythical quests, monsters and dancing girls. He was a pioneer of what we now call special effects, for example in snipping out frames to create the illusion of someone suddenly disappearing, and in several of the films I watched, he focused on the glories of industrial production. But Melies wasn’t interested in the camera as a medium for exploring real life and people: he saw cinema as a variation on his past theatrical magic acts. Hugo (very kindly, I thought) suggests his luck changed because of the harder attitudes spawned by World War One, but he would surely have petered out regardless, overtaken by more advanced sensibilities (such as Louis Feuillade, also briefly referenced in the film, who was already making his multipart Fantomas epics as Melies wound down).

The rather poignant futility of Melies’ imaginings makes Scorsese’s elevation of him all the more moving. Hugo has an unusually tactile feeling for a digital epic – the texture is defined by clocks and moving pieces and the process of fixing broken things. Hugo refers to the world as a machine; a comforting analogy because machines don’t come with excess parts, and so we must all fit in there somewhere. But the loss of his father means Hugo doesn’t “work” any more, and of course Melies doesn’t either. Hugo is a grand fantasy, but at its centre it sees life and creativity in practical terms – certainly we must dream, but we also have to diagnose and repair. Scorsese extends the theme with the activity around the station – the inspector ineptly tries to court a flower vendor, paralleling an older man’s constant failure to approach his object of desire (she likes him; her little dog doesn’t). In the end, he suggests, cinema isn’t just about escaping; it contributes, even transforms, these faltering attempts at forging a community.

Artistic refreshment

Scorsese’s goodwill even extends to a tacit endorsement of home viewing (sometimes viewed rather disdainfully by cinephiles): a scene where a film professor sets up a projector to show Le voyage dans la lune in Melies’ living room seems like a precursor of television! And the film made me think of 3-D in a rather different way than I had before. I’m rather skeptical of the technology; at best it’s another set of tools, a different visual convention, rather than any kind of heightened reality. Hugo has the inevitable moments when the foreground seems pointlessly and jarringly pronounced or the background weirdly flat and drained. But overall it works to anchor us within the spaces and the relationships, heightening our sense of the world as components and layers and connections, deepening the texture of Hugo’s quest to define himself within it all.

As I mentioned, from a commercial perspective the film seems almost perverse, or at least a huge leap of faith. We’re a long way from the era when – as it depicts in one scene – two children could be enraptured by a silent Harold Lloyd classic. Moving images are ubiquitous, and frankly, in the form most kids experience them, they’re not special – they’re just pacifiers, junk food. There’s a pedagogic aspect to Hugo for sure – there would have to be, or modern audiences might be largely mystified by it (they might still be). But it’s not pedantic and it’s never merely fuzzily nostalgic. It’s boundlessly optimistic that all of this still matters, can still change lives, or even save them.

In that review of Shutter Island, I said: “I don’t think (Scorsese) has any great insight into people or the world. He’s just really good with the tools of cinema. In his heyday…a mixture of preoccupied times, internal trauma, amazing collaborators and who knows what else led him to some unprecedented achievements. So that’s all over now – well, who doesn’t burn out eventually?” But with Hugo, it’s possible to look back at a film like Shutter Island as Scorsese’s own period of exile in the artistic toy store, now triumphantly at an end.

Favourites of 2011

2011-12-20T12:15:00.001-05:00

I didn’t cover the year’s releases comprehensively enough to be able to comment on what were the “best” films: I spent most of my movie-watching time tracking down European semi-obscurities I’d never seen before (I’m telling you, that Internet contraption is some kind of miracle). But even if I’d seen everything, I’m sure these ten would be high on the list. Happy holidays - see you in 2012!

Another Year (Mike Leigh)
Focusing on a married couple in their sixties and mostly set in and around their house, this is a quietly devastating work I think, perhaps one of the finest validations of Leigh’s worldview and approach. Many scenes unfold as an investigation of sorts, with the grounded central couple tolerating, indulging or motivating their weaker friends and relatives, the psychological balance ever shifting as the conversations zig and zag. It’s not so different from what Leigh’s done before perhaps, but more maturely dynamic than you get from almost anyone else.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese’s new film – his best in decades - is as dazzling a deployment of cutting edge cinematic resources as any movie could be (in particular, it’s his first in 3-D), and uses this to reach all the way back into the history of the medium, to celebrate the pioneer Georges Melies. Unusually tactile-feeling for a digital epic, at its centre it sees life and creativity in practical terms – certainly we must dream, but we also have to diagnose and repair. In the process, Scorsese comprehensively fixes the feeling of drift attaching to his recent work, conveying sudden and total refreshment.

Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino)
Frammartino’s film resolutely refuses the narrative and cinematic conventions that place man at the centre of things. It has no identifiable dialogue – it requires no subtitles – and only one character who receives a close-up. The true star might be a dog, reacting to his master’s absence and to an Easter passion parade by barking at everyone in sight, and then engineering a way to free the goats from their pen – all in one take! By its very existence, the film speaks to the spiritual paucity of hyped-up mainstream cinema.

Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
Set in the 1860’s, this depicts a small group of pioneers heading west, wandering off the main trail after their guide, Stephen Meek, leads them astray. Reichardt’s film is entirely satisfying as a follow-on to and extension of her Wendy and Lucy, confirming her as one of America’s most important filmmakers. There’s not a strained or ill-considered moment in the film; everything conveys a superbly considered weight, all the more remarkable for its extreme economy of means. It carries the most satisfying kind of complexity, flowing from a gloriously intuitive artistic personality, serious and reflective while avoiding strain and pretentiousness in a way that’s simply beyond most directors, even the good ones.

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
The audacity of Melancholia isn’t so much that it imagines the end of the world, but that it almost seems to be longing for it. The film’s first half lays out the emptiness of our structures and devices and rituals; the second suggests we’re so eroded by them, even the pending end of the world can’t galvanize us to reclaim our inner selves. Von Trier bakes his revulsion into the marrow of his film, shooting most events in a radically unsteady hand-held style; at other times, the film is flamboyantly beautiful, illustrating heightened states as if the world had been polished and prettified until its inner energy started to ooze out.

Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz)
A gorgeous climax to Ruiz’s career – he died this year – this is a visually magnificent four hour odyssey, starting when a supposedly orphaned boy sees a woman he takes to be his mother, and tumbling from there through twisting fates and shifting identities, where one story perpetually triggers another. The film feels capable of perpetuating and reinventing itself forever; I’ve seldom felt so completely happy and occupied by a work of fiction. Ruiz’ sense of ease and wry observation here is a delight: his essential serenity doesn’t blunt his inquisitiveness, and the film gradually evokes the formation of a nation and a culture.

Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois)
A group of eight French monks in 1996 Algeria, none of them young, long-established in a disadvantaged village, must decide whether to leave the country after unrest breaks out. The film is certainly suspenseful, in the Hitchcockian sense that we watch much of it with anticipatory dread. But its strength is in Beauvois’ meticulous, gloriously intuitive observation of their lives and his exploration of the seemingly fundamental and yet largely absent question - not just absent from cinema, from the entire public sphere - of what a life, not even an overtly virtuous one, should amount to.

Poetry (Chang-dong Lee)
This Korean film studies an old woman, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, raising a teenage grandson who’s involved in a terrible crime. Its centre holds the brave and challenging idea that escalating Alzheimer’s, although undoubtedly a sentence, may contain some element of liberation, a final opportunity for clarity. Notwithstanding the title, the film is told in prose, not poetry – it’s a careful, attentive character study, and despite the protagonist’s frequent comments about her love of flowers and suchlike, a pretty tough-minded one, depicting a great deal of naked self-interest, particularly in the way the reaction to the crime becomes entirely a matter of defensive logistics.

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar)
Almodóvar’s new film probably isn’t his best but it’s spectacularly Almodóvarian, while occupying somewhat novel territory for him. By any normal measure, the plot (a fairly extreme parable on what constitutes one’s core identity, built around a mad scientist and his creepy experiments) is nuts. But Almodóvar plays it very straight, with such sumptuous conviction that you just about buy it; the very idea of making such a sober movie around this topic, and then pulling it off, is rather stunning in itself. It’s very easy to criticize, on any number of fronts, but I just loved watching the thing.

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
This deadpan counterpoint to the TV show Entourage follows a major Hollywood star, temporarily living in a Los Angeles hotel. He drinks, has lots of sex, passes the time playing computer games and staring into space. The film critiques the societal investment in someone like this: sure, we can find meaning in such a life if we look for it, but why are we bothering? It likely isn’t impactful enough for all tastes, but then if it were more impactful, that would probably only mark it as a product of the machine, rather than being a critique of it.

Nobel prize!

2011-12-17T10:44:00.006-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2009)

Back in 2000 I wrote an article called “Nobel Prize!” and I still think about it more than anything else I wrote that year (sad, no?) so I thought it was time to revisit the concept. I’d been thinking about how there’s no Nobel Prize for cinema, and about how there ought to be, and then I started thinking about who would have won the prize if there were one, and I ended up making up an entire fantasy list of winners.

The exercise needed some ground rules of course. I assumed the first prize was given out in 1970 (of course, the further back you go, the more geniuses you could corral, but it seemed to me that 1970, with art-house cinema at its peak, would have been a good time for the Swedish Academy to come to its senses), and tried as best as I could to think my way back through history, avoid hindsight and consider who would have seemed most deserving at the time (given that I was only 4 in 1970, my sense of this may not be completely accurate).

Since 2000, I’ve added a new recipient to the list every year, on the same day that the real-life prize for literature gets announced. Here’s the complete list.

1970 Jean Renoir
1971 Charles Chaplin
1972 Luis Bunuel
1973 Roberto Rossellini
1974 Alfred Hitchcock
1975 Ingmar Bergman
1976 Akira Kurosawa
1977 Howard Hawks
1978 Federico Fellini
1979 Robert Bresson
1980 Orson Welles
1981 Jean-Luc Godard
1982 Michelangelo Antonioni
1983 Michael Powell
1984 Billy Wilder
1985 Satyajit Ray
1986 Alain Resnais
1987 Andrezj Wajda
1988 Frank Capra
1989 Eric Rohmer
1990 Ousmane Sembene
1991 Wim Wenders
1992 Robert Altman
1993 Theo Angelopoulos
1994 Jacques Rivette
1995 Martin Scorsese
1996 Zhang Yimou
1997 Abbas Kiarostami
1998 Bernardo Bertolucci
1999 Shohei Imamura
2000 Stan Brakhage
2001 Hou Hsiao-hsien
2002 Manoel de Oliveira
2003 Claude Chabrol
2004 Chris Marker
2005 Mike Leigh
2006 Wong Kar-Wai
2007 Raul Ruiz
2008 Agnes Varda

Given the inevitable constraints of such an exercise, the list still looks pretty good to me overall. You’ll note how in the award’s early days, my fictional committee marches one step ahead of the grim reaper, scooping up as many of cinema’s fading giants as possible. Some, like John Ford and Fritz Lang, expire just a year or so before they might have got the nod (Howard Hawks, who died in 1977, made it by the skin of his poor old teeth). American auteurs alternate with art-house masters for the first twenty years (Frank Capra is probably the least profound director on the list, but I feel sentiment would have got the better of the voters on that one), but since then American winners have been much more sparse. The absence of Elia Kazan isn’t due to righteous anger but rather to the fact that I forgot about him until it was too late (if there were actually a committee, I’m sure someone would have reminded me).

There’s a shortage of potential American recipients in the pipeline too, with the prize swinging heavily toward Europe in recent years (a fact precisely mirroring the evolution of the literature award). The last US winner was Stan Brakhage, an experimental filmmaker who worked entirely outside the system: I was rather pleased with how my imaginary Nobelists stirred it up a bit with that one. Cassavetes and Kubrick died too soon. I doubt a consensus will ever form around Spielberg or Eastwood. Woody Allen and Francis Coppola have trailed off too much in recent years. The strongest contenders to come to mind may be David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch and Charles Burnett (all of which to some degree might be regarded as a snubbing of Hollywood). I think Spike Lee is worth thinking about. Others might advocate more strongly for the Coen Brothers. And there’s always Jerry Lewis!

Like the judges of the literature prize, the film committee occasionally makes a choice that might be as much a nod to a region than an individual endorsement – Africa’s Sembene and China’s Zhang for instance. Given how Zhang’s work has lately consisted mostly of pretty but inconsequential digitally powered extravaganzas, it’s clear now the committee moved too quickly on that one. I see Wim Wenders as another mistake – he got the prize too young, and on the brink, it’s now clear, of a calamitous decline in his reputation. The award a few years back to Claude Chabrol might seem generous, but he was the only one of the Nouvelle Vague pioneers still on the outside looking in, and it just felt heartless!

There is of course no shortage of potential recipients, but again in common with the literature prize, it’s likely that future winners will continue the recent trend of being better known to specialists than to the even moderately cultured masses – the days of Fellini and Bergman are no more. Japan’s Nagisa Oshima stands as something of an unrecognized elder statesman, although if the committee wanted to be daring again, they might choose to recognize animation via his countryman Hayao Miyazaki. Werner Herzog and Roman Polanski have both made some Nobel-worthy work, along with a lot of stuff that’s anything but, but the judges are paid to step back and assess the overall contribution. Pedro Almodovar will have to be carefully considered at some point.

Canada has a genuine contender in David Cronenberg, whose reputation is coming on strong now; advocates of Atom Egoyan and Denys Arcand have their money firmly on the wrong horse. And there plainly ought to have been a woman up there long before this year. Apart from the victorious Varda, I’d considered Claire Denis, New Zealand’s Jane Campion, and a less-known French director, Chantal Akerman. But in general we must be wary of being so rarified as to be irrelevant, so the judges must constantly scan the landscape of the last twenty or thirty years, diligently reflecting on the arguments for John Boorman and Peter Weir, building future submissions for Tsai Ming-Liang and Olivier Assayas, scouring the backwaters for monumental artists you and I haven’t even heard of, and just generally hoping it all works out for the greater good.

Of course there’d be little point in instituting a real world Nobel Prize for cinema now. It’s just too late. But if anyone wants to put funding into my little enterprise, allowing the construction of a retroactive bricks and mortar hall of fame and a generous annual cash prize from here on (as well as a modest stipend for the hardworking committee), then I’m easy to get hold of. Otherwise, I’ll plan on letting you know again how it’s going, in 2016 or so.

(Postscript on subsequent additions: 2009 - Francis Coppola; 2010 - Claire Denis; 2011 - Nagisa Oshima)

Complex fermentation

2011-12-16T16:17:00.002-05:00

This is some of what I said about Alexander Payne’s last film, Sideways: “The movie is always thoughtful, but I found it rather too easy to take, bearing aromas not so much of the maturing oak barrel as of the sitcom-office water cooler. OK, I know that was lame, but the film so over-ferments its wine analogies that The Grapes of Wrath plays on TV in one scene. Anyway, for all its articulacy and introspection, I did not come away from the film with many new ideas about this complex fermentation we call life. Payne’s best film still seems to me, by a mile, to be the scintillating Election, a construction of such graceful metaphorical and allusive complexity I can’t imagine anyone taking cheap shots at it.”

The Descendants

Sounds like I was enjoying myself. Amazingly, that was seven years ago; in interviews, Payne himself seems astonished so much time could have gone by. He’s now back though with The Descendants, a favourite for Oscar nominations. The movie is always thoughtful, but I found it rather too easy to take…for all its articulacy and introspection, I did not come away from the film with many new ideas about this complex fermentation we call life. Yep, I’m afraid so. However, the new film doesn’t have any wine analogies, so that’s one kind of progress. I don’t mean to be flippant – the film actually is an advance on Sideways. But measured against the year’s strongest pictures (tune in next week for that), it’s rather too simple. It feels actually like the work of someone who’s far more prolific, and therefore content to coax out modest variations on established territory.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer, and trustee for a long-established arrangement through which he and several dozen extended family members jointly own a huge parcel of gorgeous, undeveloped land. They’re now working to unlock the trust and sell out to a developer, becoming mega-rich in the process, but then Matt’s wife has a boating accident, becoming comatose. His youngest daughter Scottie (aged ten) responds by becoming imaginatively disruptive; his oldest Alexandra (aged seventeen) by threatening to unleash the whole arsenal of possibilities available to a seventeen-year-old. One of these missiles entails telling Matt his wife was having an affair, throwing a bewildered bolt of resentment into his vigil, and prompting him to go in search of the guy (without fully knowing why he wants to).

Making choices

The film’s opening stretch draws heavily on Clooney’s voice over to set up the situation, and I was worried it would feel like an illustrated audio book more than an actual film. But as it settles into its stride, The Descendants is certainly engrossing and beguiling. I was most taken by its subtle exploration of the parameters and responsibilities of family. Some of this is broadly conventional of course – a father finding a way to reconnect with his daughters. But Matt’s so embedded in the island that he can hardly turn a corner without bumping into a cousin; they commiserate about his wife with one breath, lobby for their business interests with the next. In an inspired, perfectly executed concept, Payne throws a friend of Alex’s into the mix – a weirdly serene, lumbering type who ends up accompanying them everywhere (and in one of the film’s best moments, reveals his own recent catastrophic loss). The wife’s affair, of course, throws everything up for reexamination.

A O Scott in The New York Times put it like this: “In most movies the characters are locked into the machinery of narrative like theme park customers strapped into a roller coaster. Their ups and downs are as predetermined as their shrieks of terror and sighs of relief, and the audience goes along for the ride. But the people in this movie seem to move freely within it, making choices and mistakes and aware, at every turn, that things could be different.” It’s a reasonable evocation of the film’s key strength, but I ultimately find myself grading it less highly than Scott does, mainly because that sense of free movement doesn’t ultimately bring the characters, or us the viewers, to a very different destination than might have resulted from a more “predetermined”-feeling film.

Still, there’s a lot to like about it. Payne is certainly capable of inspiration far transcending normal dull craftsmanship; for example, in retrospect, you realize the only moment of unambiguous joy comes in the opening shot, of the wife before her accident. I also found the movie fairly revelatory about Hawaii, which I’ve never been to. Actually, on balance, it’s now probably slightly less likely I’ll ever go there. I’m not sure if Payne would consider that a reasonable response.

Catching up

I also spent some time catching up on some recent movies on cable. It’s pretty easy to set out the strengths and flaws on all these. Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, a drama about a runaway train, has a terrific sense of physicality: it’s very satisfying to immerse oneself in all that tonnage and momentum and friction, and the movie even has more social awareness than most Hollywood product (you can just feel the Occupy Railroad movement waiting to burst out). But at the end of the day, it’s still just a drama about a runaway train; once they catch the thing (hardly a spoiler, I imagine) you’re just standing on the platform with an empty suitcase.

Neil Burger’s Limitless depicts a struggling author stumbling onto a wonder drug which stunningly enhances his mental capacity, taking him virtually overnight from penniless bum to potential Master of the Universe. The film plays entertainingly with the possibilities of the premise; when it hits its articulate, hyper-aware stride, it just pops. But ultimately it fails to articulate the benefits of such powers other than through the traditional trappings of sex, fast cars, pristine apartments (you know, all the stuff the people who made the movie probably build their lives around, even without a wonder drug): the inner life goes almost entirely unexamined.

And then John Carpenter returned, after an even longer absence than Alexander Payne, with The Ward, a period-piece about a group of institutionalized young women locked up in a hyper-creepy hospital wing. It draws effectively on the long iconography of women oppressed by medicine, their self-expression classified as hysteria, but renders it all for nothing with the lamest and most clichéd kind of “surprise” ending (basically the same trick as the current season of Dexter pulled, to cite just one of the recent applications). Ultimately, I did not come away from any of these films with many new ideas about…well, I guess you get the rest…

Dog movie!

2011-12-11T20:54:00.002-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2006)

Taking my task here as seriously as I do, as I write these articles I regularly question my own reactions to movies, sometimes suppressing the truth of my experience if I feel it reflects my own quirks or neuroses more than the film’s inherent effect. In this, as in all things, I am of course fallible and inconsistent (and it’s an impossible and perhaps wrongheaded goal anyway). But in one respect at least I have been quite diligent. To offer merely the most recent piece of evidence, I soberly reviewed the Harrison Ford film Firewall, ensuring that any viewer bearing more than the most modest of expectations would be waved away. And the mark of my dedication is this: I said not a word about Rusty the dog, who livens up a fair sprinkling of scenes, and then seals his star status by playing a pivotal role in how Ford comes out on top. You see, as a dog movie, Firewall is eminently recommendable!

Pasolini (not that one)!

Yes, I have become an irrational aficionado of dogs in films. And for the mushiest of reasons – the effect of my own dog Pasolini, a now seven and a half year old yellow Labrador. Paso was my wife’s idea – I had never owned a dog, and had some misgivings about the prospect, all of which seemed to be borne out in the first few months as our energetic, headstrong puppy terrorized our home and demolished our schedules. But at some point it all fell into place, and it is now difficult to know whether the inviolable routine is primarily his or my own. Certainly I can’t imagine why I would want to spend a day without him –I guess I would gain a couple of extra hours, but then when would I listen to my ipod, and what about the exercise I’d lose, and the threat to my waistline if Paso were not here to claim twenty per cent or so of everything I eat?

Paso is hugely expressive – gentle-spirited and empathetic but also militant about his daily expectations and capable of exerting enormous moral pressure (it’s mainly in the eyes). I expect that on the average day my wife and I come out with at least ten or twelve observations on what he’s up to – how he’s hogging the bed, how peaceful he looks while sleeping, how miserable he looks as we leave the house, and so on. Of course, most of these observations barely change from one day to the next, and if we exhibited such repetitive banality in other areas of our life, we would have driven each other nuts years ago. This, of course, is the essence of being a dog person. And once you have immersed yourself into the dog-owning life to such an extent, you inevitably become susceptible to the entire global network of dogdom, to a potentially destabilizing degree.

Eight Below

All of which is to say that the new Disney movie Eight Below is completely terrific, and that you may comprehensively dismiss that assessment if the above self-portrait means nothing to you. The movie, apparently based (presumably quite loosely) on a true story, is about eight huskies in a remote Antarctica research outpost, who are accidentally left behind for the winter to fend for themselves. While their dedicated handler (played by Paul Walker, a limited actor who’s far more affecting here than he ever will be interacting with humans) torments himself and plots a way back to the camp, the dogs forage for food and nurture each other, exhibiting great intelligence and team spirit without being excessively anthropomorphized.

The film has great scenery, and although it’s quite long for a children’s film (yes, it’s notionally aimed at the kids!) it doesn’t dawdle at all – actually seeming to me overly condensed in certain respects (well, specifically, I would have cut out about twenty minutes of the human stuff and invested that extra time in the dogs). The main thing is this. Through Brokeback Mountain, for instance, although I was completely engaged and not unmoved in a certain sense, I can’t say I ever came close to crying. What can I say; I’m a low-key kind of person. But through Eight Below I spent at least half the movie in a state of looming teariness, breaking down completely in the end. Was this the scenario’s inherent evocative power, or was it all in my constant mental parallels with how Pasolini would possibly fend for himself, should he ever be abandoned in St James’ Park?

Non-Dog Movies

Maybe I should get back now to suppressing my quirks…

Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story tackles Laurence Sterne’s famously unfilmable novel Tristram Shandy in the same way that Karel Reisz and Harold Pinter dealt with the authorial voice in The French Lieutenant’s Woman – it depicts a film crew making a movie of Sterne’s book, using their intrigues and eccentricities to approximate Sterne’s tumbling authorial voice. I haven’t read the book (in common with virtually everyone on the fictional film crew) but it sure feels as if you’re getting some flavour of the experience here. Sterne’s personality though is less relevant than that of star Steve Coogan, who’s much better known in the UK than he is here – the film happily points this out, just as it anticipates just about every observation you might have on any aspect of it. Winterbottom’s amazing versatility has not often left me truly excited, but I can certainly admire the considerable resourcefulness and imagination at work in A Cock and Bull Story – it lasts a mere 91 minutes but crams in enough for a much longer film, without ever feeling merely frenetic. It’s often pretty funny, even if a lot of the comedy comes from straightforward sitcom stuff that – all the meta-intentions aside – just doesn’t feel very elevated.

A Good Woman is a mechanical version of Lady Windermere’s Fan, transposed to 1930’s Amalfi – Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johansson are both miscast, and the film doesn’t even achieve the basics of delivering Oscar Wilde’s surefire epigrams effectively. Only somewhat better is Freedomland, an adaptation of Richard Price’s novel - interesting racially charged material that never takes on much shape.

Heart of Gold, directed by Jonathan Demme, is a recording of a Nashville concert by Neil Young and his highly seasoned band, initially focusing on his new album Prairie Wind before serving up some of the old classics. Young has never seemed so comfortable in his own skin; the music is all great, and the movie is a mellow delight. I’m sure I had a smile on my face through at least half of it, which is better than being in tears. I could go on at greater length, but if you don’t like Neil Young nothing I say will matter a damn, and if you do like him you’ve probably seen the movie already. You know, it’s pretty much the same thing as with the dogs…

Mysteries of power

2011-12-10T07:39:00.002-05:00

Clint Eastwood’s last film Hereafter was perhaps his most underrated, and one of the most meaningful illustrations of his worldview. For decades now, he’s been known for his film-making pragmatism, for getting close enough and moving on: Hereafter implicitly proposed this as a way of coping with the existential questions that tie many of us up in knots. It’s a tale of the supernatural, and by its nature presents some aspect of belief in the beyond as being “real,” but you’ll never see a movie so unenthused by such discoveries. It plants itself in earthly dilemmas and machinations, to an extent you might regard as dawdling, or more constructively as deliberately immersing us in the often arbitrary but inescapable detail of the earthly structures we’ve built for ourselves.

J. Edgar

Eastwood’s new picture J. Edgar continues his remarkable late-career survey of those earthly structures – two films about World War Two, one on Mandela, and now the career of J. Edgar Hoover, legendary leader of the FBI for almost half a century. The outlines of Hoover’s legacy are fairly well-known – he modernized the bureau, achieving a personal degree of (carefully crafted) fame from skirmishes against John Dillinger and other glamorous law-breakers, but became increasingly controversial over the decades, out of step with changing times, but safe in his position if only because of the dirt he’d accumulated on everyone else in power. He never married, but maintained an exceedingly close relationship with his right hand man Clyde Tolson; the two ate virtually all their meals together, took joint vacations and suchlike, but the extent of the physicality in their relationship, if any, remains unknown.

J. Edgar encompasses these key points and others in some two and a quarter hours, alternating between Hoover’s final years, as he dictates his memoirs to a succession of young agents, and some of the key building blocks of his legend, in particular the 1930’s kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. Some reviewers have found it a bit of a slog, for example Rick Groen in The Globe and Mail: “Usually the tautest of directors, Clint Eastwood has gone all slack here, allowing his subject to get completely away from him…despite (Leonardo) DiCaprio’s best efforts, the character never comes alive enough to elicit our sympathy or our disdain. Without that investment, the so-called emotional scenes play out like a dry well.” Groen concludes: “The script tries to make a virtue out of not judging Hoover, asking us to do the job instead. That might be fine, but only if we’re given a reason to care. We aren’t.”

Constructing America

Leaving aside the dubious claim about Eastwood’s customary “tautness,” I think you could pretty much take these comments as a description of the film’s success, rather than an indictment of its failure. The picture, indeed, has a sealed-off, brooding quality, often a sense of incomprehension: it starts by deliberately disorienting us, plunging us into the heart of a narrative as if we’d missed the start of a story already in progress, and regularly skipping connective material that might have been considered crucial. It’s never clear whether Hoover’s major innovations – such as his enthusiasm for finger-printing and other forms of scientific analysis – are driven by unusual insight or by geekiness that happened to get lucky. Likewise, his insistence on sharp suits and a clean-cut appearance make for good PR, but are probably based in neurosis as much as strategy. In part, of course, such uncertainty is just a function of the inherent unreliability of history and reportage, a theme Eastwood explored in Flags of our Fathers and underlines (maybe a bit too emphatically) at the end of J. Edgar.

But his Hoover isn’t just a pawn in another game of distorting mirrors: for better or worse, he’s one of the pivotal figures in the construction of present-day America. As he gets older, he increasingly rails against the threat of a “condition of immorality that surpasses the imagination,” but again, it’s impossible to determine how much coherence underlies this diagnosis. Certainly some of its manifestations – like his obsessive hatred of Martin Luther King – seem unrooted in any rational analysis (the film leaves it open how much it’s based in simple racism). Eastwood doesn’t push the comparison, but this murkiness about the rationality of authority resonates heavily against more recent events, for example the way a barely articulated “war on terror” could have grown to smother all other policy concerns, regardless of the real relative threat: his Hoover isn’t so much a historical anomaly as a grim transitional figure.

Don’t ask, don’t tell

You can even extend that analysis to his personal arrangements with Tolson. As depicted, their life constitutes an application of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” even in private. In his initial job interview, Tolson appears on the edge of flirting, and the movie seems to be suggesting he would have been capable of a more open structure. But Hoover certainly wasn’t. As a young man, the film shows him to be earnest and emotionally unsophisticated, proposing to a co-worker (played by Naomi Watts) after just a handful of dates; when she refuses, he just as happily offers her a position as his personal secretary (where she remains for his entire career). Except for a weird flirtation of sorts with Dorothy Lamour, that might almost constitute the sum of his interest in women. The film suggests his arrangement with Tolson constituted his ungainly, intermittently agonized attempt to reconcile the impossible, and it's quite touching in its portrayal of the two as old men, certainly allowing us to read this as a story of sad lifelong denial (or to adapt the old Woody Allen joke, as a story of Hoover doing to the nation what he couldn’t let himself do to Tolson). But it’s also a precursor of our greater contemporary flexibility in how we think about relationships, or define sexuality, or love, or normality.

DiCaprio, often looking rather like Orson Welles as the older Citizen Kane, conveys Hoover’s heavy soul with great control and restraint; if, as Groen says, he never comes completely alive, well, who knows if he completely was alive. Early on we see him watching FDR’s inauguration parade from his office window, suddenly waving effusively as if insisting on his own place in this event, even imagining himself at its centre. Years later, he watches Nixon’s motorcade from the same spot, but desolately, without any such illusions. Again, it’s an old idea, that one can be much lonelier near (but not near enough) to the centre of power than outside it. But Eastwood takes the notion to an almost cosmic extent, causing us to question whether we know anything at all about the control and direction of the nation, or the morals on which it’s supposedly built. Being Eastwood, he’s very quiet and matter-of-fact about it, but after this and Hereafter, there’s not a whole lot of importance he’s left untouched.

Back to the 50's

2011-12-06T21:49:00.004-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2009)

If we judge only by what we see in movies (not a sound approach towards understanding much of anything, but let’s go with the concept for now), it’s easier to sum up the essence of the 1950’s than of any decade since. The rise of corporate culture; suburbanization; men in grey flannel suits. The substantial dissipation of what independence women gained during WW2, in return for bigger kitchens, Tupperware and modern gadgets. The baby boom. The Cold War and McCarthyism; paranoia; conformity. Sexual repression. Cheating. All waiting to be blown open in the 1960’s.

Revolutionary Road

It’s not solely a backward projection: some of the best movies of that era all but burst under the tension. I’m thinking for example of Douglas Sirk’s films (Written On The Wind, All That Heaven Allows) and the non-musicals of Vincent Minnelli (The Cobweb, Some Came Running). Currently, it’s difficult to find any representation of the 50’s not filtered through this prism. Mad Men is the gorilla, by all accounts sparsely watched, but much cited (and, on at least two shows I’ve seen, easily parodied). It’s almost as difficult to find any review of Sam Mendes’ new film Revolutionary Road that doesn’t mention Mad Men.

Revolutionary Road is based on a novel by Richard Yates, which most reviewers seem to have read (or maybe they’re just good at faking it); I must admit I haven’t. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, married in the early 1950’s, with dreams of being special (for him, living in Paris and finding himself; for her, becoming an actress). A few years later, they’re in the suburbs, where she raises their two children and he treks off to a job he can barely explain, let alone stand. She rekindles the Paris idea: sell up, cross the ocean, she’ll support him while he becomes the man he should be. He goes for it, if more cautiously, and they consume themselves in planning, all the more invigorated by the incomprehension of everyone around them. No question they’ve appropriately diagnosed their malaise, but hasn’t Paris too often represented the abstract, unattainable ideal?

The film is accomplished and engrossing, but limited. Director Sam Mendes is much acclaimed (and won an Oscar for American Beauty) but his approach to cinema seldom seems to me very inspired or intuitive. Revolutionary Road too often feels removed, somewhat academic. The two stars, both often superb elsewhere, here conform to a theatre director’s idea of great cinematic acting. The film’s heart is quite claustrophobic and even repetitive – a great deal of it takes place between the couple, in and around their home – and Mendes can’t find much of a way to vary this material. The film’s last five minutes, which should be tragic and stunning, feel like a collection of accessories trying to hide the blandness of the main outfit.

Unrepresentative character

The movie often feels oddly empty: key settings like their home or Frank’s office don’t possess the layering we’re used to from, again, Mad Men. But at this point the film starts to get interesting despite itself. After all, our fascination with the 50’s isn’t (or shouldn’t be) purely nostalgic. The decade actually was a time of general growth and economic prosperity. Lifeplans and ambitions were better balanced against actual resources. Small things meant more; technology and popular culture hadn’t yet gone crazy and started us all eating at ourselves. Yes, there was repression and misery. Attitudes are better informed now. But then, we’ve bought ourselves an even bigger bag of troubles instead. Is it any surprise if we start fetishizing the era?

Revolutionary Road withholds this easy pleasure. Mendes is nowhere near as accomplished a stylist as Todd Haynes, who produced a much richer take on the period in Far From Heaven (and who perfectly depicted another kind of sterile living in Safe), but he does maintain an effective eerie chill. At least on film, the outlook of Winslet’s April is the easier to understand: without even as much daily diversion as Frank has, and more a prisoner of her biological role, she can’t stand it. But Frank’s relationship to all this is perhaps more complex and intriguing. Todd McCarthy in Variety noted the character “has no latent artistic ambition, despite his wife's belief that he does or should, nor even any sense of careerism.” This, he said, “makes Frank Wheeler a rather equivocal, unrepresentative character.”

As best as I can tell, McCarthy’s bases his acid test for finding Frank “unrepresentative” largely in the more engaged protagonists of Mad Men and in the (very good) 1960 Strangers When We Meet (which starred Kirk Douglas as a frustrated architect). He later labels the 50’s as the “best time to be alive in the United States for the greatest number of people – not for minorities, obviously” and cites a “lifelong hipster friend” who’s assured him “it was all happening in the ‘50’s.” Well, no doubt for some. But I doubt the lives of the silent majority were marked by much “hipster” activity, nor seriously undermined by unfulfilled latent artistic ambition. Frank and April are a relatively affluent couple, with space and money and choices. Poor, hand-to-mouth people couldn’t afford to have Frank and April’s problems. They had their own of course. But maybe those would be unrepresentative.

Our Move to Paris

In the last decade or two, people who had the resources followed through on their equivalent of April’s move to Paris – except they did it by staying put and building monster homes, by loading themselves up with possessions, by changing their lives into a complex series of rituals within which they could get happily fat and complacent. But now we’re finding it doesn’t collectively work out if we all move to Paris that way, and it didn’t make us generally any happier anyway. Most of us know, on some level, we have to learn making do with less. But how do you maintain the equanimity to go back to Nowhereville, day after day, when you’ve become addicted to your idea of the bright lights?

Frank may not be representative of what we hope for, or what we delude ourselves we actually are, but he’s surely more representative of how we survived to this point: by doing our duty, making compromises, and anyway not being that individually special in the first place. The horrible prospect before us is that we were never really meant to be this active, this liberated, to possess this many options, and that economically, environmentally, it’s a slow (until it started to seem frighteningly quick) group suicide. If there’s a current answer for us in movies, it might not lie with the heroes, but with the ones we’ve always dismissed as losers, representing nothing except the fact of being there, somehow quietly getting by.

Three Comedies

2011-11-30T09:51:00.004-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2005)

A few notes on three recent films, all broadly belonging to the comedy category:

Dear Frankie

Dear Frankie, directed by Shona Auerbach, is about a Scottish single mother of a deaf nine-year-old; his father was a louse they left behind somewhere, but the boy thinks he’s at sea, and writes letters to a post office box from which he receives responses penned by the mother. Eventually, events dictate either that she breaks the pretense or that the father somehow appears, so she enlists a stranger to play the part for the day. Of course, all three find their fictionalized structure utterly beguiling, although the film doesn’t resolve itself quite as neatly as you initially expect. It’s also not as sentimental as it might be, it’s not at all funny (although it’s apparently intended to be so in a wistful kind of way) and the basic storyline doesn’t amount to much incident when stretched over the course of a full-length film, so it seems at times that this is the epitome of a movie about next to nothing. It has a couple of saving virtues though. The first is the scrupulous depiction of life in a dead-end milieu at the wrong end of the economic spectrum – a place with such limited horizons that a character can sit on the hill overlooking the dismal looking port and say it’s her favourite sight in the whole world. Second is the performance by Emily Mortimer as the mother – it’s very delicate work, full of small details, and evidencing a superb emotional mobility that contrasts nicely with her slightly gawky features; the film allows her some personal development, but not enough that it becomes mawkish, and this restraint shows up in other ways as well. So the film is fine to watch, but it lacks that streak of wildness or daring that sometimes lifts modest material into the realms of the transcendental.

Melinda and Melinda

Woody Allen’s latest film is his best in a while, and it’s truly disappointing how little that amounts to. It starts with two playwrights bickering over dinner about the relative merits of comedy and tragedy; when a dining companion throws in a sample plotline, each takes it in a different direction to illustrate his thesis, and the film depicts these two directions in parallel plotlines that wrap around each other. In each case, a distraught woman named Melinda, played by Radha Mitchell, unexpectedly turns up at a dinner party, and things go on from there. The tragic story co-stars Chloe Sevigny and Jonny Lee Miller; the comic tale has Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet. As usual, Allen’s ability to attract a fine cast provides his film a major boost.

The problems with Melinda and Melinda are easy enough to set out. The initial thesis is trite – the opposition between the two extremes is unsophisticated, sounding like something Allen might have mulled over at the dawn of his career. In any event, the comic story is only very marginally funnier than the tragic one. Nowadays Allen’s notion of funny is characterized merely by a generalized whininess, and the dialogue has become horrendously lazy – Ferrell, playing an actor, is allowed to repeat four times a lame bit about how his innovative approach to a particular character involved affecting a limp. Conversely, the approach to tragedy is heavily dependent on grim, extended monologues, delivered while staring off into the middle distance.

The movie is entertaining enough scene by scene, and it avoids the sheer clunkiness of several recent Allen movies. It looks handsome too, although Allen’s home territory seems to be shrinking further, down to just a few Manhattan blocks; and of course the characters’ primary occupations and preoccupations never change either. Nowadays Allen seems to set merely incremental challenges for himself, perhaps still thinking of how Ingmar Bergman and his other heroes worked consistently within a superficially narrow aesthetic. But it is hard to deny that his films feel rushed and under-considered. Still, if all others move away, I will be there to the end. And his next film was shot in the UK, which at least gives us the prospect of something fresh (if only because it will be amusing to see how he pulls off his customary trick of making the British actors sound like Allen himself).

Up And Down

Part of the problem with Allen is that he shows no interest in politics, or in the environment, or in social evolution (after 35 years, it struck many critics as notable that a key role in Melinda and Melinda is played by black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor). Not that he ever was, but when he seemed to be alone in mining a particular and relevant emotional territory, it didn’t matter. Nowadays you might wonder why we should care about a director who seems to care so little about us.

The utter decline of the US is lampooned effectively enough by the likes of Jon Stewart and in any amount of online commentary, but we have not seen much effective satire from American cinema lately. For that we must go to other countries, where contemporary fault lines are perhaps debated with less sanctimonious hypocrisy. For an example, see the new Czech film Up And Down, directed by Jan Hrebek, which concentrates in particular on the stresses of the country’s transition to a multicultural society. In the primary plotline, a slightly dim witted security guard tries to cast off his history as a militant soccer hooligan; his wife longs unsuccessfully for a baby, eventually buying a dark-skinned child accidentally acquired by a couple of refugee smugglers. The guard overcomes his initial revulsion and bonds with the child, even standing up to his racist peers, but in the end bad luck, or perhaps inevitable societal gravity, pulls him back down.

The film has several other plotlines exploring related themes – the fragility of progressive liberal intentions when faced with eruptions of violence; the reluctance of the older generation to accept the changing attitudes of the younger; the intertwining of the personal and the political; the visceral appeal of mass brutishness; the way a volatile society generates winners and losers (it also has a cameo appearance by Vaclav Havel, which may be too clear a signal of its ambition). None of this is completely resolved, and the film is not as subtle as it might be, but it doesn’t overplay its cynicism and doesn’t let sheer structure and narrative overwhelm its sensitivity to character; compared to something like, say, Mexico’s Amores Perros, it’s clear that the tone here is more in sorrow than in anger. By virtue of its origins, it has by far the lowest profile of the three films dealt with here, but by any conceivable measure it’s worth twice the other two put together. Not least of all – it’s the funniest.

Wishing for the end

2011-11-30T09:38:00.007-05:00

The audacity of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia isn’t so much that it imagines the end of the world, but that it almost seems to be longing for it. As such it’s perhaps the von Trier movie that helps make sense of many of the others – his work is a stream of eccentrically dark visions and aggressively quirky distractions, often seeming held together more by what we know of the director (depressive, neurotic, obsessed with America despite never having been there) than what we glean from the films themselves. The category of what we (think we) know about von Trier expanded handily earlier this year, at the Cannes film festival. Melancholia was mostly well-received there, and its star Kirsten Dunst won the award for best actress. But this was all overshadowed by a press conference where von Trier went off on an extreme tangent, as follows: “What can I say? I understand Hitler, but I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely. ... He's not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I'm not for the Second World War, and I'm not against Jews.”

Humanity and generosity

The Cannes directors described these remarks as “unacceptable, intolerable and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the festival” and declared von Trier persona non grata. The director apologized, but later said “I can't be sorry for what I said—it's against my nature.” And then he sailed on toward his next controversy (due perhaps to erupt as soon as he releases his next project, reportedly an epic work of pornography). Contrary to the ideals of humanity? Well, in a way of course. But coming from the man whose last film depicted genital self-mutilation, you could as easily interpret it as exemplifying (in all its sloppiness) some kind of ideal, or at least a kind of necessity: how we compensate for whatever’s lacking within us by reaching out, playing games, putting ourselves on display.

Melancholia depicts this through Dunst’s character, Justine, newly-married (Alexander Skarsgard plays her husband) and two hours late to her own reception, an excessive affair held at a golf club owned by her brother in law John (Kiefer Sutherland). She only intermittently connects with the proceedings, at other times wandering off alone, or curling up asleep on her nephew’s bed; she’s affectionate toward her new husband, but lacks any real affinity with him. Her mother (Charlotte Rampling) is cold and cutting; her father (John Hurt) a genial buffoon who’s all but left reality behind. The event limps its way to a failed ending, squandering the attempts of her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) at holding it all together. And yet there’s a fragile beauty to its culmination, where the guests launch fragile, illuminated balloons into the air, floating upward like requests for redemption.

The Earth is evil

The film’s second part, set a day or two later, answers this request by sending the giant planet Melancholia, earlier glimpsed only as a distant star, into our own orbit, possibly fatally. Justine has become virtually catatonically depressed in the wake of the wedding, but as the threat approaches, she becomes eerily calm. “The Earth is evil,” she tells Claire, “we don’t need to grieve for it.” Claire’s rationalism, in contrast, leaves her vulnerable and increasingly ineffective, and her husband’s self-righteous, bottom-line-driven bluster ultimately gives way to astonishing cowardice. Discussing the appropriate mode of behaviour at the end of the world, Claire envisages a glass of wine on the terrace. Justine reacts to the idea with scorn, shooting back why not on the toilet?

The point is fairly clear of course: if the first part of the film didn’t convince us of the emptiness of our structures and devices and rituals (a critique which I suppose might extend to the utility of press conferences as well as of wedding receptions), the second suggests we’re so eroded by them, even the pending end of the world can’t galvanize us to reclaim our inner selves. Von Trier bakes his revulsion into the marrow of his film, shooting most events in a radically unsteady hand-held style: the Varsity, where I saw the movie, explicitly warned patrons of possible motion sickness, which my wife’s experience unfortunately confirms.

But Melancholia is also flamboyantly beautiful at times, opening with a series of intense, slow-motion tableaux (all drawing in various ways on later events), illustrating heightened states as if the world had been polished and prettified until its inner energy started to ooze out. And its attention to its actors goes far beyond mere dyspepsia. I already mentioned Dunst’s performance: I doubt whether anyone again will use her rather blank, crunched-up prettiness to such productive ends (von Trier is oddly successful at directing actresses; Charlotte Gainsbourg and – no joking – Bjork previously won the Cannes award in films of his). But I’m not sure Kiefer Sutherland has ever been better either!

Heightened knowledge

Towards the end, Justine reveals – almost as an aside – that she has a heightened knowledge of things, some of them superficial (instinctively knowing how many beans are in a jar), others awe-inspiring (the absence of any other life in the universe). In the world as we know it, this seems mostly to contribute to her dysfunction; such capacity could only find peace at the end of time and searching. This might be a humane and generous (to coin a phrase) invention by von Trier, casting the self-lacerating darkness of depression as a cruel symptom of being stranded out of time and place…except that the right time and place only occurs at the end of everything.

Which is why I called Melancholia a kind of wish for the end of the world. The film doesn’t aim at realism of course: most obviously, the intruding planet turns up and parks itself on our doorstep, astronomically speaking, with barely an impact on our climate. Except for a few glimpses of Internet searches and throwaway references to what the “scientists” are saying, there’s no sense of the world beyond the house and grounds. The retreat is the most rarified of settings in which to lose oneself, lush and elegant and boundless, reminiscent of numerous other past epics of splendid high art isolation. And although you probably wouldn’t have gleaned this so far, the film’s at least half-way to being the blackest of comedies; there’s an air of Blake Edwards in how Justine systematically grinds down the illusions of her beaming new husband. Surely the whole idea of calling a movie Melancholia is meant to be at least a little funny?

I can’t recommend everyone see the movie (I’m sure many readers will have resolved from the above that it’s the last thing they’d ever see). And yet, I could imagine a person responding to it with tears of gratitude, feeling deeper affinity to it than to almost anything they’d ever seen before.

Canadian versions

2011-11-12T07:43:00.005-05:00

My wife watches the TV drama Covert Affairs, Sundays on Showcase, starring Piper Perabo as (it appears) the only CIA agent who gets any actual assignments. It’s set largely in Washington and sometimes in exotic global locations, but it’s mostly shot here in Toronto, often in my downtown neighbourhood. One episode was set in Paris, and from the look of the exteriors they actually went there too, but then all of a sudden they were close to the Flatiron building. Sometimes they barely seem to try to hide the fact it’s really Toronto, although of course I’m only capable of saying that because I know the city. Filmmakers obviously don’t sign any kind of cartography integrity pledge - New Yorkers for instance have been complaining for years about how movies set in the city make a mockery of the city’s geography. It would no doubt hurt a show like Treme if you suspected its immersion in New Orleans culture were being periodically supplemented by exteriors from anonymous-looking Canadian streets. But for a mostly breezy romp like Covert Affairs, it doesn’t matter at all. The show has a kind of upbeat can-do attitude, like a spy version of The Little Engine that Could. Real places (or for that matter real anything) are just confining, don’t you think? The ability not to care is liberating!

Toronto movies

Watching Covert Affairs in Toronto evokes theatre, the use of cues and signifiers and the power of the imagination to create an illusion of physical space. Living here, you get used to it; you forget many people might be excited to see their home town mentioned just once on the local news, let along having their surroundings endlessly chewed up and reconfigured. When film production was at its peak here, it was hard to be surprised by anything (including on a personal level: one evening I was taking my dog for a walk, trying not to step on the movie cables; I happened to look through a window, and there was Sylvester Stallone). If Chicago suddenly turns out to encompass BCE Place; if future society has modeled itself in part on the Eaton Centre; well, of course. One might have wished for the city to play itself in mainstream movies more often, but on the other hand, how liberating would that have been?

That activity’s died down now, which is why Covert Affairs is so engaging. Actually, if you see the city on the screen nowadays, it probably is playing itself. Rookie Blue and Flashpoint also film in my neighbourhood periodically. I’ve never seen the latter; the former, although set in Toronto, seems too preoccupied with abs and cleavage to know where it is. I’m sure there are other shows too. On the big screen, unfortunately, setting a big movie in Toronto seems only to guarantee a flop. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was meant to be the cult hit to end them all, and it certainly had a somewhat interesting technique, energy and worldview. However, once you’d gleaned this – after the first ten minutes or so – the movie might have been crafted specifically to illustrate the concept of “diminishing returns.” I actually think Michael Cera might make a good protagonist for a film called Diminishing Returns; he sums up something about the void at the centre of contemporary culture, some notion of how the more connected you are, the more you cancel yourself out. The movie name-checked lots of specific Toronto locations (mostly in the West End) but since the movie was primarily set inside a video game, it didn’t carry much weight.

This Movie is Broken

And then you have the staggeringly lamentable case of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, an erotic psychological thriller of sorts, but with no feeling for human behaviour and interaction, revealing the latter-day Egoyan as a hack who can only think in terms of structures and poses. The film thuddingly worked in Toronto landmarks of various kinds, but since nothing in it felt remotely real, you might have imagined it was mostly shot somewhere else (like maybe in a sensory deprivation tank).

My favourite recent Toronto picture of the ones I’ve seen is a much smaller thing, Bruce McDonald’s This Movie is Broken. About half of the film consists of Broken Social Scene playing a free concert at the Harbourfront; McDonald weaves a light but engaging relationship narrative around it. The ending, with its broadening of the apparent canvas, suggests the city as a site of infinite possibilities, embodied by the band through its multiplicity and superb musicianship. McDonald certainly seems here like a Toronto romantic, but since he sets the film against the garbage crisis, he’s not goofy about it.

If there were more Toronto movies like This Movie is Broken – or at least, if I knew about them – maybe I’d go all the time. I’d like to watch more Canadian films, but they always get such lousy reviews, or they get good reviews that feel written almost under duress. The latter applied to last year’s Barney’s Version, which the Star in particular shamelessly gushed over for months. Audiences stayed away with equal enthusiasm. I watched it on cable the other week, and almost found myself wishing for Chloe (no, I’m joking, that could only ever be a joke).

Barney’s Version

You know the problem with it? There’s no “version.” There’s no flavour, no worldview. There’s just this character called Barney. Sometimes he’s abrasive; sometimes he’s impulsive; sometimes this; sometimes that. He gets married to this woman, then that one, then this one. He may have killed someone once; the movie intermittently suggests we’re meant to view this as a big structuring mystery of his life. Eventually he gets old and sick. No doubt in Mordecai Richler’s book, which I haven’t read, this all coalesced into a classic character and a memorable evocation of time and place. But the film is bland and monotonous. It looks ugly. It evokes Montreal so indifferently that it might as well have been shot in Toronto. Paul Giamatti just does his irascible “great actor” thing, showing no sign of being meaningfully directed. As I said, from what’s on the screen, there’s no reason it would have that title. There’s no sense of personal storytelling, of conflicting perceptions (except in the most literal-minded way). There’s no version.

It’s probably a good thing I haven’t read the book – I’m sure the film would seem an even greater abomination if I had. Especially if I lived in Montreal. Anyway, I was about to write that I’m sure we’ll get a great contemporary Toronto film one day, but I’m actually not sure. But we’re way ahead of most cities, if only because the next time someone says in a film “We’ll always have Paris,” he might actually be thinking of us.

Chick movie

2011-11-12T07:38:00.005-05:00

One of the most surreptitiously meaningful moments in the hit comedy Bridesmaids (now out on DVD) comes during a tennis match sequence; it’s a doubles game, and the focus is on the competition between two of the film’s stars, played by Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne. The other two actresses have no dialogue; they’re just space-fillers. But Wiig’s partner, notable only for her grotesque facial expressions, is played by Melanie Hutsell, who was a regular on Saturday Night Live for several years in the early 90’s. Since then, as far as I can tell, she’s had little meaningful film or TV work. Of course, many males must also look back on their SNL years as a never-replicated highpoint, but I don’t think you ever see their subsequent estrangement from the spotlight summed up so starkly and unsentimentally.

Jill Clayburgh

And then the late Jill Clayburgh makes her last screen appearance in the film, as the mother of Wiig’s character. Clayburgh at least has an actual speaking part, but it’s one of those weirdo old person roles, as a fuss-bucket who obsessively attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings even though she’s never taken a drink. Clayburgh enjoyed a brief vogue as a leading star, with best actress Oscar nominations in both 1978 and 1979 (for An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over), but it petered out after a few years; in the context of her last two decades, the Bridesmaids role actually seems like a relative highlight. Again, it’s not that men don’t suffer similar reversals – just look at her Starting Over co-star Burt Reynolds – but if nothing else, it usually takes longer.

These twin reference points help you to appreciate the fragility at the centre of the movie. Wiig’s character Annie is on a downward slide - she lost all her money in a failed bakery venture, can’t pay her rent, her relationships are going nowhere. Her best friend, played by Maya Rudolph, gets engaged, enlisting Annie as matron of honour; she has the enthusiasm for it, but not the skill, and more seriously not the money. In contrast, another member of the wedding party, Helen, a best-friend-come-lately played by Byrne, virtually lives for such events, and has a bottomless supply of money. This can only lead to friction, embarrassment, gross-out screw-ups, and so forth.

Highs and lows

The movie, co-written by Wiig and directed by Paul Feig, ably blends contrasting comic styles and techniques into a pretty sturdy concoction. At times it’s pleasantly distinctive and naturalistic; a flirtation between Annie and a traffic cop doesn’t feel at all like off-the-shelf cuteness. At other times it’s about the high-concept set-pieces – my favourite was the ludicrously excessive wedding shower, where guests ride up to the house on white horses and then receive a Labrador puppy (in a pink beret) as a party favour. Melissa McCarthy, playing the groom’s sister, hangs out in her own surreal universe and wrestles everything within it into submission. Wiig seldom breaks out the scene-hogging qualities she sometimes displays on SNL, meaning that when she does, it makes sense as an expression of a largely stifled inner life momentarily busting loose.

Bridesmaids is good enough, scene to scene, to remind you how much you miss the mature, meaningful, expansive comedies of past decades. It doesn’t get there though, mainly because it doesn’t want to. A comedic classic like The Apartment might be considered almost laughless by contemporary standards, which intertwines with its effectiveness in evoking mood and character. Bridesmaids can’t take the chance of going more than a few minutes without tweaking the audience, and willingly pays the price for that. So for example, it leaves us in no doubt about Annie’s dire financial situation, but doesn’t bother to explain how she scrounges together the money for a trip to Vegas (albeit that she’s the only one of the group sitting in coach). She hits a bottom, and then a worse bottom, and no doubt you feel sorry for her, but you don’t feel her pain. This is probably the right calculation from a commercial perspective, but the movie’s highs might have been much more resonant if it hadn’t sugar-coated its lows. (I also can’t help wishing her passion was something other than baking. Not that there’s anything wrong with baking. But there’s nothing wrong with software development or engineering either.)

Relevance of feminism

It’s remarkable that a comedy built around women is still viewed as something of a novelty, if not a major commercial risk. The movie pounces on the opportunity as if it might never come again, setting out a dire gallery of maleness. The men on view – excepting of course the Irish cop who embodies all hope - are either mind-numbingly bland or ineffective, such as the fiancée, or nastily self-serving. Helen’s marriage is seemingly an emotional wasteland, with a husband who’s always away and two step-kids who ignore her; another of the bridesmaids paints a verbal picture of unbroken grinding misery, verging on abuse really; yet another, a newly-wed, eventually admits the aridity of her supposedly dream relationship. One might have surmised there’s little or nothing here for the male viewer, but the indictment doesn’t really bite very deeply; despite all the bumps, the closing sense of things is to keep persevering and holding on, because as Woody Allen put it, we need the eggs. The movie’s final scene, a coda running under the end credits, depicts McCarthy’s character and her new boyfriend preparing for an erotic experience; the specific details will be a turn-on to virtually no viewer (I assume so anyway), but somehow the scene manages to seem celebratory rather than (or maybe I should say as well as) squirm-inducing. See, there’s a perfect partner for all of us.

The day after seeing the film, I happened to see snippets of a recent interview with Gloria Steinem, touching on such issues as whether feminism is still a relevant concept. Even if that issue were in any sense settled, I suppose we’d keep resurrecting it periodically; sexual difference is probably too alluring and charged a commodity ever to be left alone. Sometimes a movie like Bridesmaids seems astonished anything might ever go right for a modern woman who isn’t a complete sell-out. One’s life experience seems to say this pessimism is overdone, which is partly why the movie can be categorized mostly as a fantasy. But then you think of Hutsell and Clayburgh. Maybe the broader story of their lives is that they put other things above their careers, I don’t know. But that would only take us to other familiar territory, about the difficulty of balancing legitimate professional ambitions and biological determinism.

Cool Miracles

2011-11-12T06:51:00.003-05:00

There was a time when a disproportionate number of the foreign films I saw were by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, just because he made a lot of them, and they were fairly widely released. They’re generally fairly short, concise, deadpan, dealing with down-to-earth situations without a lot of over-emoting; movies you’d ideally watch while wearing sunglasses and smoking cigarettes. I don’t think any of them ever meant a lot to me really, but if you were into art cinema, it’s the kind of thing you got served and therefore ate. Anyway, he’s been much less productive in recent years, and it’s been a long time since I saw a Kaurismaki film. But he’s back with Le Havre, generally praised as one of the best entries at this year’s Cannes festival, and playing now at the Bell Lightbox.

Le Havre

The film revolves around an aging shoe-shine guy, Marcel, in the (as presented here anyway) highly unglamorous French port city, going through a highly minimal life in a highly minimal way, while his wife’s in the hospital with a seemingly incurable disease. Eating his lunch one day, he happens on an African kid, Idrissa, who’s on the run after the cops intercepted the container smuggling him and others into London; Idrissa later follows him home, and Marcel takes his cause on board; to hide him from the authorities and get him to his family.

The movie reminds you (if you needed to be reminded) of how disposable most movies are; of how even major events pass by in an inconsequential, affectless flurry. Marcel has a dog (played by Laika, who gets prominent billing in the opening titles), and when Kaurismaki gives us shots of Laika, which is quite often, he really gives us shots of Laika: usually nicely and fully presented in the middle of the frame, looking blissfully happy. Another example – Marcel’s wife asks him to stay away for two weeks while she’s undergoing her treatment, and then to bring her yellow dress, which she identifies as the one she wore on a particular occasion. Later on he opens her side of the closet, and we see two dresses, the yellow one and just one other one (his side contains just a single suit). Of course it’s a sad summary of their meager circumstances. But still, the yellow dress counts. The point is about the weight of moments and experiences. Sometimes the weight is crushing – we gain a tangible sense of the frustrations and humiliations of Marcel’s way of life (one of the movie’s first shots is of feet passing him by in the train station, none of them wearing anything that would need to be polished). Sometimes, life yields miracles. The tragedy for many of us is that by inoculating ourselves from the former, we fail to understand the latter.

The Weight of Moments

The movie’s not romantic or dreamy though – it’s pragmatic and tough-minded, and as always, Kaurismaki keeps overt displays of emotion to an absurdist minimum. It’s also a tribute to the classic notion of community, where you have the grocer and the baker and the bar owner, and they all realize they’re in it together (even the cop perceives this, regardless that in the past he’s put some of the locals in jail). And although Kaurismaki presents this in extremely localized terms, he also conveys how the community is potentially vast, easily taking on the plight of a lost African kid as its own (the film encompasses a compelling mini-portrait of his dispossessed family, with a grandfather stuck in a refugee centre and his mother living illegally in London, working in a “well-paid” job in a Chinese laundry), and including a mysterious rock icon called “Little Bob” - seemingly playing a version of himself - who lends himself to a “trendy charity concert” on the boy’s behalf. All in all, it’s a great little movie. It’s almost a shame though, because I have so much activity on my movie to-do list already, and now I’m thinking I might have to go back and watch some of those earlier films again.

I always tend to link Kaurismaki in my mind with the American director Jim Jarmusch, who started around the same time and had a quite similar reputation and prominence for a while; in fact, the two men are friends. I recently rewatched two of the films from Jarmusch’s heyday (I’m telling you, that movie to-do list really has no end), and it was a very satisfying exercise. Night on Earth, from 1991, depicts five different cab rides, happening simultaneously in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. The first, with Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands, depicts a casting agent trying to entice the driver into doing a screen test, but finding she prefers her life’s modest parameters to the instability, however lucrative and glamorous, of Hollywood stardom. Nice enough, but a minor irony at best.

Jim Jarmusch

As the film progresses though, Jarmusch subtly and masterfully increases the existential stakes; the second last episode deals with a passenger who dies (although in farcical circumstances) and the final sequence – in Helsinki, with a group of actors from Kaurismaki’s films – incorporates death into its very essence, constructing a character who’s come to be largely defined by it. In retrospect, the film’s scope is considerable, moving from an America where values are often indistinguishable from negotiations, to a Europe where the stakes, if materially smaller and quieter, are better understood. On top of all this, naturally, the film just overflows with Jarmusch’s trademark cool.

And then I rewatched the even more iconic Down by Law, where Tom Waits and John Lurie play two disaffected New Orleans guys, both set up and thrown into jail where they end up sharing a cell. After a while they’re joined by a third cellmate, a wacky Italian played by Roberto Benigni (who’s also in Night by Earth; Jarmusch uses the problematic actor so well that it almost compensates for Life is Beautiful). The three of them escape and wander through the swamps, from which they eventually emerge, with Benigni’s character finding a ridiculously convenient happy ending and the other two ending up at a literal fork in a road, un-signposted and with directions unknown, which nevertheless represents a more coherent life choice than they’ve ever possessed prior to that (of course, while you’re watching it, the movie doesn’t feel at all like a gravitation toward coherence – you only think of that afterwards). Neither Kaurismaki nor Jarmusch makes “realistic” films in the way we usually use the term; on the contrary, beneath their laconic personae, they share a sharp understanding of how supposed realism can just turn into clutter and convention. Strip all that away, and it’s astonishing what you find underneath.

Steps and Limits

2011-11-07T20:23:00.004-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2009)

I saw the famous musical A Chorus Line for the first time when it came here as part of last year’s Mirvish season. It was a proficient enough production, but left me rather cold; even more than with many touring productions, it seemed like a hologram of something stuck in a very different time, attitude and place. Of course I knew the climax would be the iconic “One” (one singular sensation, every little breath she takes…) but I was surprised how flat its impact was. The show is built around auditioning performers, who spill out their vulnerabilities and desires and fears as they try to establish themselves for the director, and I suppose it’s an irony that their pay-off is to become participants in a musical machine that disregards individuality for the sake of immaculate synchronity. Maybe it’s me, but I actually found it a bit depressing.

Every Little Step

Whenever I go to musical theatre, I’m always stunned at the technical skill and control of the performers, and it often crosses my mind how little separates the stars from the utility players. The new documentary Every Little Step reminds us how theatrical glory intertwines with tragedy; for every big break, there are a hundred thwarted dreams, and at least a few agonizingly near misses. The film documents the casting process for the 2006 Broadway Chorus Line revival (which spawned the recent touring production), from the initial open calls (attracting more than 3,000 people), whittled down over more than a year into ever-smaller groups and finally, for some roles, to one-on-one showdowns. It interweaves this with a potted history of the original production, including audio recordings of the original nightlong talk session during which creator Michael Bennett and a group of friends spawned the original concept.

If you have any taste at all for the genre, then Every Little Step is surefire entertainment – with such rich material it couldn’t be otherwise. The directors make pretty good choices overall, but you almost regret it couldn’t have been a multi-part TV series; so many alternative avenues necessarily go unexplored. Still, we should have such problems with every movie. I also found myself reflecting again on how little this kind of Broadway production, with its immense infrastructure and overhead, has in common with the immediacy of small-scale theatre; A Chorus Line may have been born in the everyday dreams and struggles of people low on the ladder, but on this scale (and absent any kind of rethinking for a new generation), what was once truthful within it now becomes the same kind of saccharine as a so-called reality show.

Afterwards, I googled some of the performers highlighted in the film. For all the painstaking selection process, many of them received rather underwhelming reviews, and I’m not sure any of them necessarily went on yet to bigger and better things. The world of Every Little Step might be a more brutal risk-reward arena than any stock market – huge risk, huge reward (viscerally at least), and then when the gig ends, essentially back to zero.

The Limits Of Control

It’s easy to maintain an image of Jim Jarmusch as the coolest enigma among directors, as a less preoccupied David Lynch maybe, but is he more than that? I think he might be, but I need to revisit the earlier films, and I never get round to it. Maybe that makes me a Jarmuschian character. His oeuvre has much deadpan contemplation, multicultural connection, mysterious interplay, hints of the beyond. They are unquestionably intelligent – the western Dead Man, perhaps his best film, might be one of the most fascinating deconstructions of American myths ever made – but it often feels Jarmusch is placing a brake on himself, as if it’s just not worth engaging us past a certain point. If only by implication anyway, his films suggest an extreme malaise in the governing pace and engorged complexity of mainstream culture.

His new film The Limits Of Control follows a contract killer on assignment in Spain, passing from one contact to the next, doing a lot of waiting and watching. The film hasn’t gone down very well with most reviewers, being generally regarded as a succession of pretty pictures and contrived scenes (actors like Tilda Swinton and John Hurt pop up briefly, delivering a few cryptic lines on the abstract nature of reality or suchlike before moving on), building up to nothing much. It’s easy to understand this view, and the film does have a rather academic air about it. Still, in the end it’s possible to see it as one of Jarmusch’s most direct expressions yet of his underlying worldview. That is, the killer’s quest is very symbolic of a challenge to latter-day American imperialism, as if representing a coalition of perceived opposing values (philosophy, contemplation, aesthetic appreciation, uncomplicated eroticism) asserting itself against Bush-era stridency and poison. The use of near magic at the end seems to suggest the untapped, liberating possibility within us, if we just change the conversation.

I have to admit that the above version of it, as it constructed itself in my mind afterwards, is a little more satisfying than the actual viewing experience. But it’s the measure of a major filmmaker that you’re willing to take this more as your limitation than his. I must definitely schedule that personal Jarmusch retrospective, but maybe I’ll just sit in the sun and think a while first, and order an espresso.

Goodbye Solo

In Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, the Senegalese Solo, now driving a cab in North Carolina, is offered $1,000 by William, an aging local guy, to drive him to a nearby windy peak in two weeks’ time, presumably so he can jump off it. This concept is too far outside Solo’s worldview – he tries to befriend William, to learn his troubles, certain he can persuade him out of it. This basic plot is obviously contrived, but the film’s value is in what it adds to the growing body of American cinema on the immigrant experience. Solo’s resourceful optimism guarantees him a foothold on the ladder (there’s a sad contrast with another, much more bewildered-seeming immigrant who cleans at William’s motel), but for now at least may also form his ceiling; at an interview for a flight attendant position, having to deal with the suits behind the desk, he seems lightweight, whereas William’s sadness, isolation, and piled-up skeletons are inherent to his authenticity. But it’s a changing world, with ever-reinforcing and multiplying diversity now occupying the bloodstream even of the red states – for example, Solo is married a Mexican woman - and the movie shows something of the quasi-shadow economy’s complex contours. At the end, Goodbye Solo is more optimistic than not, but leaves no doubt about how much remains to be processed, negotiated and fought over before the current creeping revolution attains its promise.

Scares and Shames

2011-11-07T20:16:00.004-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2007)

I think I make the mistake with Michael Moore of judging his work as though he were a documentarian, whereas he’s really more of a populist performance artist. I thought Bowling For Columbine had an intriguing angle on America’s self-fuelling culture of fear, but I barely got anything new out of Fahrenheit 911, and the messy opportunism turned me off. Nevertheless, it was a huge commercial success (which if the audience I saw it with was anything to go by, consisted entirely of preaching to the converted) and then won an Oscar for best documentary. Which added up to a lot of anticipation for his new film Sicko, focusing on the failings of the US health care system.

Sicko

The premise is again familiar. Some fifty million Americans are uninsured, and for those with some kind of coverage, it’s a hopeless David vs. Goliath struggle against venal insurance companies who pull every trick in the book to avoid ever cutting a cheque, denying treatment for the flimsiest and most bureaucratic of reasons. Consequently, the health and longevity of Americans drifts steadily down compared to the rest of the world, with no hope of redemption in sight from a lobbyist-swamped system. This all compares wretchedly to the single payer systems that operate in Canada, France and the U.K. Even the maligned Cuba, as Moore illustrates in his film’s most notorious stunt, shows more basic decency toward ailing 9/11 rescue workers than the homeland. Bottom line – America should do better.

I wouldn't argue with any of this. Neither would anyone in the film – there’s no one on screen who’s invited to. Although Moore emphasizes the volume of case studies he digested in developing Sicko, he doesn’t seem to have done much real research beyond accumulating a big bag of anecdotes and horror stories. By asking a British doctor how much he makes (it translates to around US$200K) and illustrating the comfortable – but not extravagant – life available on that, he seems to be advocating for more rigorous cost control of medical salaries within a centralized system, but he doesn’t even start to muse on how the transition to such a structure might be effected. And he doesn’t touch at all on the biggest issue of all – that technology, longevity and spiraling expectations places unsustainable strain on the systems of the countries he idolizes. In Canada, for instance, you can plausibly argue that the proportion of public spending siphoned into health care (particularly with so little emphasis on prevention and wellness) is not rational as a strategy for future survival. Even if, patient by patient, it’s the “right thing to do.”

Moore’s best sequence in the film, harking back to what worked well in Columbine, critiques the oppressive cycle of American life, in which debt and fear leave too many people pathetic and compliant, against the galvanizing French tradition of public action and protest. Likewise, the egregious US propaganda against “socialized medicine” would never fly in Britain, which more correctly understands its National Health Service as a triumph of democracy, forged from the ruins of the Second World War; the goodwill of 9/11, by contrast, was squandered on military fiascos and complacent or self-interested policies. You wish Moore would follow these trains of thought more fully. But I don’t think he can: I don’t think he’s got the intellectual goods to go any further, and in any event, for everything that’s staring him in the face, he’s still a patriotic American, and makes sure to pack the film with pointless tributes to the greatness of the country and its people.

If he really confronted the citizenship with the extent of their collective failure, his movie wouldn’t be able to sustain the decent, shambling, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone vital to the Moore persona. So Sicko is as probably as good as it gets from him – interesting in parts, inevitably affecting in others, but frankly not as useful a contribution to serious thinking as any day’s edition of a good newspaper. The fact that people don’t see this, and treat Moore as a serious (if imperfect) contributor to our public debate is merely a function of the same laziness that messes up the big issues in the first place.

1408

On now to different kinds of scary movies. In Mikhael Hafstrom’s 1408, John Cusack is a once-promising author now churning out various guides to America’s haunted hotspots, while believing in ghosts about as much as he does in anything else. He takes on the biggest challenge of them all, to spend a night in room 1408 of a boutique New York hotel, where dozens of people have perished over the years. And you know, it doesn’t work out to be a good night for him.

It’s based on a Stephen King story, and seems essentially like a reworking of The Shining. This prompts a somewhat unfair if inevitable comparison with Stanley Kubrick’s version of that book, which has a structural complexity and thematic intrigue lacking in Hafstrom’s film. 1408 is pretty gripping on its own terms though – it builds well and expertly controls its tone. Cusack is a very good centre, even if his character is conceived in rather clichéd terms, and Samuel L Jackson really nails his small role as the discouraging hotel manager.

Live Free or Die Hard

Maybe the prospect of another Bruce Willis action flick is frightening enough in itself, although Live Free or Die Hard is a return to the site of his greatest successes (I have to say though I’ve never previously heard the first Die Hard praised so consistently as it was by reviewers putting down the new flick). The film is an entertaining yarn, much more solidly written than many action flicks, with a focused, unfussy air about it.

The theme is cyber-terrorism: a group of computer whizzes plans to cripple America’s technology infrastructure, and in the process to empty most of its bank accounts. It’s all intriguingly depicted and, to my inexpert perspective at least, somewhat plausible. The master villain, played by Timothy Olyphant, is a former employee of the department of Homeland Security who fell out with his bosses and now exploits his inside knowledge for evil; better for him to be the exploiter, he says, than some foreigner. In this I couldn’t help detecting an echo of how the economy has been plundered by the Bush elite, all under the umbrella of patriotism and a free market. Willis is known to be a Republican though, so maybe I’m overreaching there. Or maybe it’s that the Bush elite has perfected mendacity in so many forms that almost any cartoon villainy will now suggest an easy metaphor.

Bad connections

2011-11-07T20:09:00.006-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2007)

Barbet Schroeder’s documentary Terror’s Advocate is a rather frustrating movie, at least before you’ve thought about it for a while. It’s centered on Jacques Verges, the infamous French attorney, now in his 80’s, who at various times represented or advised Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot, Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal, and dozens of unsavoury others. In the film’s signature line, he says he’d even represent George W Bush, as long as Bush pleaded guilty. Most of us will agree that even the lowest of the low expect a fair trial, but we’re all defined by the choices we make and the company we keep, and Verges’ compulsive affinity for obvious murderers and despots seems to indicate bottomless personal cynicism or moral corruption. The man himself though seems serene, reasonable (if smug), largely free of any ideological baggage (or at least keeping it well to himself).

Terror’s Advocate

The main exception to that is at the film’s very beginning: Verges calmly explains, as the camera takes us over layers of excavated bones from the mass graves, how the death tolls in the Khmer Rouge genocide have always been overstated. It seems that we’re headed for classic Holocaust denier type territory. But the film never returns to that vein again, leaving his attitudes conspicuously under examined. For example, the treatment of the Barbie trial is mostly limited to an expose of where the money for the defense came from, and then to Verges’ obvious relish at having been a lone defense lawyer going up against 39 prosecutors. His perspective on his client is never probed, and the film never even tells us what the verdict was - a strange omission even if most of us can either remember or guess (answer: life imprisonment). At the end there’s a long series of photos of other Verges clients or connections not previously addressed in the film, many of who look like the basis for potentially more intriguing material than what we’ve actually been watching.

As a narrative, the film is most satisfying early on, setting out how the young Verges got involved with defending Algerian freedom fighters during the final stretch of French colonialism. Most of us will see this as a just cause, and so Verges at this point seems brave and principled – even better, he fell in love with and married the beautiful freedom fighter he was defending. Later on he got drawn into Palestinian issues, which may have led to an association with diehard (and well financed) Nazi sympathizers. For most of the 70’s, he simply disappeared, his whereabouts unknown (most of his acquaintances assumed he was in Cambodia, but the Pol Pot regime denies it). The film’s latter section focuses in most detail on his association with Carlos and other pioneering international terrorists (and another love interest, perhaps platonic though), including some of the first wave of radical Islamists.

Origins Of Terrorism

At times, Verges almost seems lost in an endless network of international intrigue, surveillance, allegations and connections, and Schroeder often fills his frame to bursting with captions and imbedded images (certainly the subtitler couldn’t always think of a way to keep up). The director set out his angle in a recent interview: “I approached the movie as I would have approached a work of fiction. The human material, the characters are so rich, that I had a tendency to approach it like that and not as a documentary piece. It ended up being a movie about the origin of modern terrorism, the history of it.” And so whatever Verges’ personal complicity, he’s primarily a cog in the wheel, maybe even a quasi Forrest Gump who happened to bear witness to one of the defining movements of our times.

It’s possible to be almost nostalgic about a time when the origins of terrorism lay closer to home. The 60’s and 70’s were often turbulent and traumatic, and great malaise set in toward the end of that period - no one would wish to turn the clock back to it – but it now looks like a necessary self-correction (self-flagellation, if you like), which facilitated the booms and renewals of the last two decades. The trouble is of course that we’ve collectively become horribly complacent, to the very brink of implosion. The Iraqi war – a criminally under-motivated endeavour, sold as a grand project of freedom and yet mostly implemented like a second-rate break-in – is a decadence that couldn’t have existed in previous decades (the horror exceeds Vietnam at least in conception if not in (American) body count, not least because Vietnam didn’t have Vietnam to learn from).

Schroeder certainly capitalizes on this historical flavour – his film feels ripe and engaged, radiating relative gusto where (for example) Charles Ferguson’s No End In Sight, an excellent recent dissection of the Iraq mess, must necessarily traffic in desolation. It’s a great subject for this most versatile of directors. Schroeder produced Eric Rohmer’s early films, and even plays the lead role in one of them; later he was associated with Jacques Rivette (and appears in Rivette’s most recent film too). He made quirky documentaries about Idi Amin and talking gorillas, and some provocative fictions, before getting into English language movies with the Mickey Rourke Barfly. He scored an Oscar nomination for Reversal Of Fortune, and then became a mainstream Hollywood director, turning in efficient but mostly boring action vehicles for David Caruso and Sandra Bullock.

I don’t think Schroeder has ever been as accomplished as the French masters he’s worked with, but at this point he represents a unique melting pot of sensibilities and experiences, and Terror’s Advocate might be an almost ideal vehicle for him. If one were overanalyzing the director in terms of his constituent strands, you might almost say that he finds something of the restraint of a Rohmer within this most frenetic of subjects. Instead of walking out of there brandishing easy (but, in terms of the world we inhabit now, largely pointless) condemnations of Verges, we come out with a nagging emptiness. How we choose to fill that is, of course, up to us.

Redacted

Terror’s Advocate eventually seems more relevant to our current climate, and to the war in Iraq in particular, than Brian De Palma’s Redacted, which is actually about the war. The movie’s conceit is that everything it contains is being intermediated –through the video camera of a young soldier, or that of a French documentary crew, through surveillance cameras, or webcams, or so forth. “Isn’t it ironic,” said De Palma recently, “that in order to tell the truth about Iraq, you have to create the truth?” (So much for documentary.) And what is this truth as the film presents it? It’s the cold-blooded, premeditated rape and murder by two soldiers of a young girl and her family, apparently based on a real incident, and yet surely hardly representative of the individual contribution of most soldiers (and not at all of the broader issues, except in the most crassly symbolic sense). It’s all well intentioned I suppose, and there are some effective moments, but it’s mostly stilted and juvenile and just not very useful.

Going Canadian

2011-11-06T21:51:00.003-05:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2009)

I didn’t have any intention of seeing One Week, but a friend and I wanted to see a movie, and since my friend is a great Canadian, I thought this was the way to go: One Week, as one of the advertising pull-quotes has it, is “a love letter to Canada.” Joshua Jackson plays a Toronto teacher in his 20’s, with a fetching fiancée (Liane Balaban) but something missing, suddenly diagnosed with one-in-ten-odds cancer, who can’t face going into treatment; a well-timed chance encounter suggests the perfect delaying tactic – to buy a classic motor bike, and head west.

One Week

He ends up making it all the way to the coast, after photographing every giant dinosaur, photo mosaic and whatnot along the way, ooh-ing and ah-ing at lots of glorious scenery, and scooping in various other well-timed chance encounters; all of which facilitates a better focus on his real priorities and desires than he’s ever had before. Obviously, the movie is a contrivance; it’s consistently handsome and smoothly put together, but it’s the kind of thing where the relative strengths are manifestations of its inherent limitations. If you think about the last few minutes of any episode of Grey’s Anatomy, where the narrator muses about some banal life lesson over a bittersweet montage set to coffeehouse music, and you add in assorted Canadiana, then that’s just about One Week for you.

But you know, it did make me wish I saw more Canadian films, because for all its limitations, I liked the idea of it. I love Canada and have no intention of ever leaving, but I wasn’t born here, and I’ve never lived outside Toronto, so there are big gaps in my cultural appreciation. One Week’s “love letter” aspect comes across pretty well, including a very fetching portrayal of this very city (I guess it helps that everything takes place on the brightest of summer days); whatever the character’s unfulfilled ambitions might be, they’re not the fault of his homeland.

It’s not like I don’t see any Canadian films. I see everything Egoyan, Arcand and Cronenberg do…but the first two almost inevitably disappoint me. I see the occasional smaller film – I liked Ed Gass-Donnelly’s This Beautiful City last year (Young People F***ing, not so much). But I know it’s dabbling. I always muse about spreading myself too thin, cinematically speaking. Maybe I should just retrench and become a flag-bearer for the home front. I’ll nurture that thought for a while and see if it percolates.

One aspect of One Week suggests the possible frustrations of such a path: the squandering of several fine performers in inadequate supporting parts. I’ve seen Fiona Reid and Caroline Cave, who play his mother and sister, many times on stage, and never not been dazzled by them; their use here is pretty insipid (particularly in a clunky set-up toward the end where they just stand there silently looking misty-eyed). If I drew a broader lesson from my own experience, it might be to put my faith in local theatre and treat Canadian cinema merely as an occasional dessert, with all the nutritional limitations that implies.

Pontypool

But there again, I’m extrapolating too much from an unrepresentative sample. The following week, inspired by these thoughts, I went to see Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool, which had already been playing for several weeks. McDonald deserves to be a bigger hero than he is – a proudly Canadian filmmaker who’s consistently pretty successful at getting to do his own thing, in between lots of TV directing work. I have to admit I’ve seen only one or two of his films, and have probably never mentioned him in the ten years I’ve been doing this column.

Well, better late than never. Pontypool is set in a small Ontario town, almost entirely inside a local radio station. Morning DJ Mike Mazzy, a laconic veteran with an urge to be more iconoclastic than the format allows, starts getting more material than he can handle – confused but horrifying reports of people flipping out; mass riots, attacks and worse. The stimulant, it seems, might in some way be the English language itself, rendering the radio station a possible source of contamination.

Speaking French (to the extent the protagonists know any) might be a better protection against such a plague than any assault weapon, from which you can see that McDonald’s film is a witty riff on the cracks in the melting pot. In other countries, the living dead is spawned from a space virus or mad scientists or what have you; in Canada, it’s as if they manifest a crack in our ideals. And even though we never see the besieged town and most of the action happens off-screen, it’s a remarkably evocative portrait of outer circle Ontario.

McDonald’s actors (only a few with speaking parts), especially the lead Stephen McHattie, seem to be having a blast too, and why wouldn’t they? If Joshua Jackson’s travels had brought him into the world of Pontypool, he’d be zombie food within seconds – he’d probably hand out napkins and lie down for them. Sure, Canada’s convivial, and we love that, but what kind of calling card is that for our challenged century? Pontypool is the smaller film by conventional measures, but with much stronger (and sure, more deranged, that’s what I mean) DNA.

Duplicity

Going back to the subject of nutritional limitations, I went to see my first big-budget crowd-pleaser in quite a while, Duplicity, won over by mostly good reviews, by a sudden flurry of interest in writer-director Tony Gilroy (full-blown New Yorker profile, either the stepping stone to glory or the beginning of the end), and not least by Julia Roberts’ radiant appearance on Letterman. All of this outweighed my feeling it might just turn out to be a soulless series of manipulations. So there you go, should have followed my instinct.

Duplicity has Roberts (only slightly less radiant than on Letterman) and Clive Owen (fine, but inherently a lesser star, what’s a man to do) playing former secret service professionals now in the private sector (working for rival Johnson and Johnson type companies, although she’s actually undercover for the other side), looking for a big scam opportunity. It arrives in the form of a secret formula, but how to get through the state-of-the-art security set-ups? And can they trust each other?

Gilroy’s intricate structure is impressively sound overall, and he’s quite an elegant filmmaker at times, but the film has less subtext than his last one, Michael Clayton; it’s all about the reversals and the twists and the mis-directions. Sometimes it’s so immaculate it seems to skirt profundity; it might have got there too if the implied indictment of corporate amorality had hit a little harder, but it’s all too abstract to chime against the headlines. And they visit just about everywhere in the G7 except Canada, so no joy there.

In his own skin

2011-11-06T12:46:00.003-05:00

Pedro Almodóvar has never been one of my favourite filmmakers – the key evidence is that I’ve never felt much impulse to see any of his movies a second time - but it’s hard to resist his escalating status as a cinematic treasure, the Betty White of art cinema (although not quite that old, and a little taller). At his best, his films are gorgeous artifacts of visual and narrative design, scintillatingly alive and curious. The limitation is that you never take much away from them, beyond a general appreciation for life in all its variation. That’s not negligible of course. His early films, made with extremely limited resources, were regarded as scandalous and boundary-pushing, but Almodóvar was a highly attractive and proficient boundary-pusher (maybe my comparison above should have been with Ellen DeGeneres): essentially good-natured, in love with classical melodrama, personally affable, with a near-genius for crafting accessibly twisted narratives (he’s the king of the flashbacks). In 1999 he won the foreign film Oscar for All about my Mother, and won another one a few years later for the screenplay of Talk to Her. He’s now one of the few directors whose name represents a guarantee of sorts.

The Skin I Live In

Of course, that implies a degree of repetition, and Almodóvar represents an extreme case study in recycling. Writing in Slate recently after rewatching all his films, June Thomas said: “Experiencing the Almodóvar filmography is like stepping into one of those endlessly repeating M.C. Escher paintings. Some motifs recur so frequently that I feared for my sanity. You know how, in police procedurals, the cops search a conspiracy-crazed suspect’s home and find the walls obsessively covered in newspaper clippings and photographs? That was me, totting up the number of movies in which Almodóvar characters use aliases (12), visit pharmacies (4), or keep unusual pets (3).” It’s all part of his appeal of course, evoking the old days when the great European auteurs were also brand names. Woody Allen occupies a similar kind of spot on the American spectrum, although the two have little in common otherwise (Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem aside).

Almodóvar’s new film The Skin I Live In probably isn’t his best – unlike Thomas, I have no desire to go back and figure out where in the spectrum it should fall (she put it ninth out of the eighteen he’s made) – but it’s spectacularly Almodóvarian, while occupying somewhat novel territory for him. The nature of the new territory might be viewed as a bit unambitiously pulpy though – it’s the mad scientist, carrying out unethical experiments in his creepy castle (for this purpose, a wonderful looking villa in Toledo). Antonio Banderas (who made his name in Almodóvar’s earlier movies, but hadn’t worked with him for the past two decades) plays the gifted surgeon, and the movie starts off with a kick-ass iconic puzzle – he keeps a gorgeous young woman locked up in an upstairs room, wearing a figure-hugging body stocking (I guess that might count in the “unusual pets” category?). Early on, we figure out he’s operated on her, giving her the face of his dead wife, but who is she? Is she actually the wife, having somehow survived the disfiguring tragedy that officially killed her? Is she his daughter, who was grievously traumatized after witnessing her mother’s death? I wish I could tell you, just because I’d like to see how the explanation actually looks when you write it down. But that would be a spoiler among spoilers.

Maintaining identity

By any normal measure, the plot is nuts. But Almodóvar plays it very straight, with such sumptuous conviction that you just about buy it. The material is potentially lurid to say the least, but the tone is sober – Thomas based her mid-range ranking on finding the tone “unusually dour” with an absence of light relief. That’s true enough – I think the light relief would be in what goes through your head as you watch it. But the idea of making such a straight-faced movie around this topic, and then pulling it off, is rather stunning in itself. At one point, we learn the doctor’s housekeeper is actually his mother – her wealthy employers at the time couldn’t have their own child, so she gave then her illegitimate son to raise – and that her acknowledged son, a sleazeball who had an affair with the doctor’s deceased wife, is actually his brother. In previous Almodóvar movies, such revelations would be at the heart of the matter, but here it’s just a throwaway. The serious point, perhaps, is that we can either allow ourselves to be defined by past traumas and compromises, or we can focus on what’s true and lasting (the movie ends rather wistfully and sweetly, on a poignant reunion of sorts). The Skin I Live In is certainly a fairly extreme parable on what constitutes one’s core identity (although, again, discretion prevents me from expanding further).

The movie is very easy to criticize, on any number of fronts. But I feel less inclined to pick at it than I normally do at Almodóvar’s films, because…I may as well come clean, I just loved watching the thing. Next thing you know, I’ll be tuning into Hot in Cleveland.

The Illusionist

Jacques Tati is one of my favourite filmmakers, although he was only able to make six full-length films during his life. Sylvain Chomet, who previously made The Triplets of Bellville, took one of Tati’s old script ideas and used it as the basis of his animated film The Illusionist: it came out last year and is now on DVD and cable. The storyline follows a down-on-his-luck French magician, animated to resemble Tati himself, who comes to try his luck in Scotland; after he performs in a Highland village, a young woman latches onto him and accompanies him to Edinburgh, where they end up living in a cheap hotel. It’s a peculiar little film, because while the character looks like Tati and one can imagine him in many of the situations, Chomet’s overall approach doesn’t evoke Tati at all. Films like Playtime and Mon Oncle constantly evoke a sense of being stranded: in one way or another, his people have lost the thread of modernity and its innovations and rhythms. The films avoid easy identification or pay-offs, using very few close-ups and uniquely unconventional pacing. This only vaguely applies to The Illusionist – it’s certainly slow and low-key by the standards of a Pixar film say, but the effect is much more conventionally sentimental than the master would ever have allowed himself to be. It’s unclear why one would labour so lovingly and painstakingly to resurrect the ghost of Tati, and then force him to occupy skin that’s plainly not his own.

De Niro's Project

2011-10-30T14:27:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2005)

So I’ll admit it, I’m unnaturally obsessed with Robert De Niro. I think I’ve written at least five times over the years about his career, most recently just a few months ago when I briefly reviewed Meet the Fockers. My thoughts at that time were perhaps excessively coloured by his then-recent Saturday Night Live appearance, which was pretty dire. But now Hide and Seek has me thinking about him all over again.

Why Do It?

Most reviews of Hide and Seek ponder on the same question: Why did De Niro do it? Bizarrely, he said in a recent interview that he wanted to work with director John Polson because he liked the performances in Polson’s previous film, Swimfan. But he’s never been particularly articulate in explaining himself. And I found myself thinking about Peter Sellers, and how by all accounts he stunned the makers of the 1967 would-be Bond spoof Casino Royale by deciding to play it straight. Tired of funny accents and make-up, he wanted to be like Cary Grant (or the simplified popular conception of Grant), to dazzle by being his suave self. But there was nothing Grant-like there – there was only a dull void (which, years later, Sellers finally understood and tapped into with Being There). The recent HBO movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers depicts this episode fairly successfully, although that film as a whole is far too choppy and hyperactive to be particularly illuminating.

It seems more and more that De Niro is drawn to a similar project, to rely on an inner essence, to function through nuanced but understated old-fashioned presence, rather than to make the great nervy leaps of earlier in his career. Note that he’s also recently sold himself to an American Express ad campaign, which is all about him as craggy New York icon. If you think about it a certain way, it’s as grand an experiment as anything he’s ever carried out. And since it’s brought him by far the greatest commercial success of his entire career, it can’t be counted a total failure. But it does feel that the experiment has gone on far too long, and that the run of easy entertainments could be alternated with more idiosyncratic work (a pattern evident in Al Pacino’s recent career). Maybe it’s for that reason that he recently accepted a small role in the independent film The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although early reviews suggest that project didn’t amount to very much.

Hide and Seek

If many critics are as preoccupied as I am by this, it’s only because of the magnitude of what De Niro accomplished early on. It’s hard to overestimate the accomplishment of his great run with Martin Scorsese. Not that the work didn’t have a distinctly mannered quality – the legend of his immersion in his characters was always a bit overstated. Whatever people may have thought they were responding to, it looks distinctly stylized now, but it’s a stylization rooted in a real understanding of neurosis and suppressed violence and intertwining light and dark, and apparently in some authentic personal demons. Of course, now we see the mechanism more clearly because everyone impersonates it (not least of all the man himself in the Analyze This movies). De Niro’s performances stand up nevertheless. But maybe he simply couldn’t absorb the demands of such extreme work indefinitely. The King of Comedy was his fifth film with Scorsese within ten years, and now we see with hindsight that it never got any better than that for him.

This year he’s directing for only the second time. Maybe that will prove itself a productive avenue for him. As for Hide and Seek, well, it could be worse. De Niro plays a psychologist who moves his young daughter from Manhattan to upstate New York after his wife kills herself. It’s meant to help the girl get over the trauma, but instead she acquires an “imaginary friend” called Charlie and gets rapidly creepier, parading around like Wednesday Addams. This is yet another of those “meta” movies, like Identity and Open Your Eyes and The Machinist and countless others, where you’re eventually forced to reinterpret much of what’s gone before as having been a dream or a parallel world or a fantasy in a damaged brain. God. I’m tired of that genre. I will admit that I didn’t foresee the revelation here, although that tells you more about how dumb I am than about the movie’s skill. When it comes, it’s revealed in an unusually maladroit fashion, and from then on it’s all standard stuff.

The set-up has distinct similarities to The Shining, which of course doesn’t work to Hide and Seek’s advantage one bit. The movie’s main quality is a low-key rustic contemplativeness, although maybe there I’m being too kind to what in fact is merely an overwhelming lack of rigour. But De Niro is quietly effective as the withdrawn, low-key father. At one point he accepts a bag of preserves from a neighbour and comments on the contents. It’s as normal a thing as he’s ever done, and for that reason struck me as utterly surreal.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Given what I said about The King of Comedy, it’s interesting how Sean Penn’s performance in Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon carries echoes of De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin. Penn’s character, set in 1974, initially seems like a tragi-comic misfit - he tries to make it as an office furniture salesman and to reunite with his estranged wife, and his ineffectiveness is mostly amusing, but always with an ominous edge. Some scenes – like his ill-fated attempt to get a business development loan – could seem almost like direct transcriptions of De Niro’s oblivious hounding of Jerry Lewis. As events turn against him, he becomes unhinged, leading to his cooking up the scheme of the film’s title.

The film has some interesting elements – Penn’s sense of social justice, focusing on a mixed bag of issues from racial prejudice to excessive retail mark-ups, is fascinatingly original - but it always feels rather insular and distant, failing to imbue its precision with much passion. It’s much more intelligent and ambitious than Hide and Seek, but the sad truth is that even though it’s ten minutes shorter than that film, it feels considerably longer. The main attraction, of course, is Penn, who is as resourceful as ever. But the role is inherently a minor one for him. And then recently I’ve seen him in the trailer for Sydney Pollack’s forthcoming film The Interpreter, in which he plays a cop protecting Nicole Kidman as a UN employee caught up in some kind of peril. In the trailer Penn looks solid and dependable, but it’s clearly not a project of the kind he usually does. He’s the closest thing we have now to what De Niro used to be, he’s in his mid-40’s, and he has his Oscar. Should we fear for his artistic future?

James Bond

2011-10-30T11:09:00.003-04:00

I don’t remember a time when I hadn’t heard of James Bond. I was born in the UK in the mid-60’s, when access to movies was of course constrained. Christmas was a big thing on TV there (that’s right, on all three channels) and there was always a Bond film at the centre of the schedule. I don’t think I was allowed to see them for a while though, and I recall being confused about who, or maybe what, this “James Bond” actually was. I think I knew he’d been played by different actors – at that point Sean Connery and Roger Moore swirled just about equally in the public consciousness - but I may have intuited from this that a James Bond was a generic job title, like a Lumber Jack, albeit probably more exciting (I don’t know though, lumberjacks would probably have seemed pretty cool too, if I’d ever heard of them). I vaguely remember seeing promos for some of the movies and not really understanding them – they bore so little resemblance to the drab, juvenile things I was used to watching.

Bond through the years

In the early 80’s, I remember going to a double bill of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker in a fleapit cinema. I think I enjoyed the former a lot, but was a bit bored by the latter, and I didn’t think much of Roger Moore (you can see this isn’t one of those articles where I venture out on a narrow limb). But Bond movies were unquestioned events – this was post Star Wars, but still before the age of the blockbuster as we now suffer through it – and from then on I went to them all, without thinking too much about it. I liked the short-lived Timothy Dalton era more than most people did, but I found several of the Pierce Brosnan entries unspeakably boring. And of course I caught up on the earlier Connery movies along the way. I know people regard those as the gold standard, but I’ve often thought that if they’re less dumb than what came subsequently, it’s mainly because they hadn’t had time to get there yet.

I suppose the most telling thing is that it’s been years since I had any desire to revisit a Bond film (the only one I’ve occasionally thought of watching again is George Lazenby’s one failed shot at it, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I remember relatively fondly, probably because of that very failure). I’ve written here before about the wonderful moment on the DVD of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, where the old master praises For Your Eyes Only for its “cinematic writing,” an assessment seemingly only explicable by assuming Bresson had hardly ever seen a mainstream action movie, and was able to view it with a purity of spirit denied the rest of us. Lacking that purity myself, even this rarest of blurbs didn’t tempt me back to Bond.

The only exception is that in 2008 I watched Never Say Never Again, Connery’s 1983 return to the role, which was made outside the mainstream series. I’d remembered it as a grittier, more character-driven exercise, but it didn’t seem that way now; it was hokey and horribly dated, radiating a low expectation of its audience. Maybe the disappointment was all the greater because, again like most people, I did admire the 2006 Casino Royale reboot. In my review here, I said Daniel Craig’s Bond was “scarily intense, physical, and complex,” noting “there’s surely never been a Bond movie where the protagonist is so notably scratched, bloodied, belittled, horribly tortured and brutalized.”

Indifferent returns

“So of all things,” I said, “I occasionally found myself thinking of The Passion of The Christ, in that the committed sadism almost seems to be leaking someone’s underlying neurosis. Maybe it’s just expiation for so many decades of bad Bond movies. Either way, the film is unusually literate…grounded in plausible motivations, and anchored by underlying emotion.” Reading that again now, it sounds like I was a sure thing to return for the follow-up, Quantum of Solace. But actually, Casino Royale broke my streak of seeing Bond in the cinema. Maybe re-watching Never Say Never Again recast its achievements in a more mediocre light, reminding me it still represented a poor cumulative return on the time invested.

I mean, who cares about those qualities I listed? Maybe at some point, if you were there, Bond embodied something about Englishness, about the contradictions of the Empire with its mixture of external pomp and inner rot. Maybe the films – with their M and Q and Moneypenny and Pussy Galore and Blofeld and the rest – allowed the pleasures of contemporary mythology in an era before every other film was based on a Marvel comic. And once upon a time, I guess action sequences with boats and planes and spaceships were actually special events, no matter how thick the blue lines around the actors. And respectable titillation wasn’t as easy to come by either (or quasi-respectable; many of the Bond actresses found it an easy springboard into a subsequent career in cheap exploitation work). And since there was a time when even the performer of the theme song was a news-making choice, and the closing credits ended by telling you James Bond would return in (insert title), the sense of a unique event touched every part of the artifice. Even the producer’s name – Albert R Broccoli – sounded like something you had to be in on (it’s good for you!). But that was then!

Quantum of Solace

I didn’t end up seeing Quantum of Solace until the other week, on TV. And I was right the first time. As if acquiring ideas above its station after Casino Royale, the series engaged a director not primarily known for action, Marc Forster of Monster’s Ball. It was a disastrous choice: Forster proved incapable of or unwilling to deliver clarity of plot or action, rendering the movie incomprehensible at times and pretentious at others. Craig barely registers in the role this time, submerged by a grim revenge plot and an utter lack of humour. The movie basically trashes most of what might have made the Bond formula worthwhile, inserting nothing in its place. Ironically, despite everything I just said, it came as close as anything could have done to making me fleetingly nostalgic to revisit the real deal again.

But it soon passed. They’re now gearing up for Bond 23, as it’s currently labeled, doubling down on the great director stakes by hiring Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, with Javier Bardem reportedly playing the villain. Those collaborators seem smart enough to avoid a Forster-fashion screw-up, but perhaps too smart not to over think some aspect or other of it. Actually, now I think of it, it’s also true that as long as I’ve been aware of Bond movies, people have been complaining about them; they’re as persistent and enduring a disappointment as the weather. If they were always pristinely perfect, they couldn’t possibly have lasted this long.

Fashion Piece

2011-10-23T20:14:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2009)

For the last ten years at least, except when professional requirements or extremes of heat demand otherwise, I’ve almost invariably worn the same thing: a long-sleeved black T-shirt, jeans, and a black jacket. I feel comfortable in this outfit, and the repetition eliminates any possibility of my making a bad clothing purchase. People sometimes tease me a bit on the lack of variation, but the way I look isn’t particularly striking in a big city like this. It gets more attention when I go home to Wales though - my young cousin recently said I looked like Dr. Who. This literally isn’t true, but suggests that once you break out of the sweater/open-necked shirt paradigm, one eccentric’s pretty much the same as another.

The September Issue

I suppose that even by thinking consciously about what I wear, even if the nature of the thought never changes, I do in some sense apply a fashion consciousness to myself; it’s obvious enough that many men simply don’t. But I’ve never had any interest in fashion or style beyond that. A Wikipedia article cites the opinion that “fashion is a group of people bouncing ideas off of one another, like any other form of art,” and there’s no doubt those ideas sometimes coalesce into aesthetic greatness, aligned with major societal or other change: the swinging sixties revolution is one I often wish I’d experienced (for numerous reasons). But whatever “ideas” drive the industry now are surely incremental at best. The fashion documentary I best remember is Wim Wenders’ Notebook on Cities and Clothes from twenty years ago, which focused on the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto: it caught the relentless pace of the business pretty well, and Wenders was on to something in his musing about the parallels between the then-new digital technology and Yamamoto’s work, but didn’t take it anywhere too challenging.

The new documentary The September Issue, a behind the scenes look at the workings of Vogue magazine (focusing on the September 2007 edition, the biggest in its history), doesn’t spend much time musing on what it’s all about: by its very existence, it assumes our buy-in. I liked the movie more than I thought I would, simply because it does a pretty good job at evoking the sense of a workplace - something not that common in documentaries (reality-show distortions aside). It may be Vogue, but it’s still just a few floors in a high-rise building, and it functions on repetition and gruntwork more than abstract glamour. As in many environments, you get the sense of endless meetings, usually involving more people than strictly necessary, most of whom change their minds on a dime based on the views of who’s in charge. Contrary to what one might expect from The Devil Wears Prada and suchlike, it doesn’t even seem that stylish – most of the female staff seem to wear just any old thing.

Wintour/Coddington

As most reviewers have pointed out, the film’s primary entertainment comes from the dynamic between legendary editor Anna Wintour – who seems to be focusing mainly on making it through the movie unscathed, and certainly succeeds – and senior creative director Grace Coddington, a former model, now a veteran who’s seen it all and still has the best ideas. Several people in the film, including Coddington, recount how Wintour, earlier than anyone else, saw how celebrity and fashion would cross-pollinate; she put actresses on the cover before her competitors thought of it. But surely this is mixed progress at best, pulling fashion further in the direction of sheer disposability. Near the end of the film, Wintour says “fashion’s not about looking back, it’s always about looking forward,” and it shows in her constant insistence on something new, on avoiding repetition, but beyond that there’s never a sense of what aesthetic principles she’s applying.

With more time for reflection, she’d surely amend that statement anyway, because even I can see how fashion consistently revisits and renews past ideas and trends (this was explicit in the Wenders film, which showed Yamamoto consistently scouring old photographs for inspiration). Coddington seems more aware of this, spawning most of the magazine’s more elaborately staged and posed and accessorized – and objectively beautiful – photo shoots. The September issue’s cover girl is actress Sienna Miller, who no one involved frankly seems that excited about, and whose Rome photo shoot appears to leave everyone underwhelmed. The smartly laconic Coddington keeps her distance there, while doggedly delivering most of the issue’s actual high points (despite Wintour persistently scrapping some of her best work). The women have been working together for decades, and seem to have their mutual territory pretty well staked out, but it’s not clear whether they’re even lukewarm friends.

The Point Of It All

At the end, this leaves you with considerable affection for the institution and its ways. As with all documentaries, you keep thinking of other things it might profitably have covered, but hey, gotta look forward, no point looking back. I enjoyed the glimpses of Wintour’s strategic get-together with a group of retailers, at which one of the group asks if she can’t help with them with their supply chain problems. Nonplussed by the question’s sheer practicality, she deflects it into an abstraction on designers spreading themselves too thin, ending with a cryptic “less is more.” It’s one of the few moments that speaks to the consumer, the great unknown in all this; it’s virtually apocryphal that no normal people buy anything you see in the fashion magazines, and why would they, when an actress will be pilloried for being seen twice in the same outfit? It’s all fluffy fun of course as long as one’s just taking shots at over-exposed actresses, but one has to question an industry whose basic operating principles are so in conflict with notions of conservation, sustainability and rectitude.

I know the images in Vogue in a sense provide an escape from everyday calculations, but the problem is there’s increasingly nothing that isn’t an escape – the news is trashier, people’s grasp on their own finances and entitlements is frothier, political discourse is increasingly disconnected. If fashion were really useful, it would provide a form of counterpoint to all of this, and I know there are individual designers who work more ethically and provocatively, but on the whole, the industry just seems like an airheaded cheerleader for everything that’s gone wrong. And for all her immense focus and staying power, Wintour’s surely been a contributor to this slow decline. Through my own approach to this of course, I figured out the new paradigm some time ago..you know, I might even throw my hat in the ring for her job when she finally moves on.

Levels of reality

2011-10-23T16:57:00.004-04:00

Writing about Christopher Nolan’s Inception last year, I said this: “… the fact of it being about dreams, ultimately, is arbitrary. With a few tweaks to the set-up, it could have been about parallel worlds, or a computer-generated matrix, or a fantasy taking place in the mind of a madman.” This came to mind recently as I watched, for the first time, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 World on a Wire, which has strong thematic similarities with Nolan’s film, and just about no other similarities with it whatsoever.

World on a Wire

Fassbinder’s film is set around a corporate “Simulacron” project, a computer-generated environment based closely on our own, but susceptible to manipulation of all kinds; it’s primarily intended as a purely scientific exercise for the common good, but rapidly becomes subject to potential misuse by a steel corporation seeking to improve its forecasts of future demand. The technology’s chief developer dies in mysterious circumstances; his unenthusiastic successor, Stiller, is plagued by odd events, such as a security chief who vanishes into thin air in front of his eyes, and who no one else then claims to remember. Even from the little I’ve said so far, genre fans could probably guess the direction of things: what if this is all a creation within another Simulacron, directed by a further level of reality up above?

World on a Wire was made for TV, and largely disappeared from view for a long time (the 1999 Hollywood flop The 13th Floor was based on the same material); it resurfaced last year, and is now on DVD. It received an enthusiastic welcome back, based in particular on being so clearly, as The New York Times put it: “an artifact of its moment. The clothes, the cars and the furniture are richly, even extravagantly, redolent of the Euro-’70s, as is the anxious tremor of political and sexual unease that vibrates (along with a sinister, Muzak-y score) underneath the opulent surface.” Even the most visionary science fiction, of course, betrays the aesthetic limitations of when it was created – try counting the number of movies in which the pilots of galaxy-spanning spaceships stare at poky little LED computer screens. As if anticipating this, Fassbinder as noted makes little attempt to disguise that this is 70’s Germany; the main indicia of “futurism” consist of items we’d now call (and maybe even then would have called) tacky – dig those orange telephones!

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

You might think this would limit the film’s impact, but actually it’s the opposite – the specificity is a guarantee of emotional investment; whereas Inception exists on generalized paranoia having little to do with real dreams, let alone one’s real waking life, World on a Wire is firmly rooted in the grim grind of trying to hack your way through a drab adulthood. Many of the characters are basically awful, smarmy hacks, trapped in their ugly niches. The Simulacron is an awesome game-changing technology, but also a largely redundant duplicate of what’s already known. In one scene, Stiller programs a duplicate of his boss into there, except that he has him at the centre of a goofy song-and-dance routine. It’s very cute, but obviously hardly indicative of top-flight scientific focus. In a couple of scenes, the film shows us a bar where the performer vamps and mimes to old Dietrich songs – a more low-grade application of the Simulacron concept, but also summing up how the country remains trapped in ancient ideology and iconography.

I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned Fassbinder in this space, but if so, it’s not because of lack of familiarity with him. When I was first seriously exploring movies in the UK in the early 80’s, he was one of the most easily accessible European directors, both in cinemas and on TV. A lot of this was due to sheer productivity – his career lasted only some sixteen years, from 1966 to 1982 (he died of a drug overdose, aged just 37), but in that time he generated over forty titles. I saw a good chunk of them back then (the most famous include The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Merchant of Four Seasons and Fear Eats The Soul), but I confess I’ve rarely gone back to them since. Fassbinder was a prodigious chronicler of his time and place, excavating multiple strands of hypocrisy, corruption and predatory behaviour, but also enormously tender at times; he loved and sometimes reveled in melodrama and kitsch, but could also be piercingly analytical and abstract. Whereas watching, say, Eric Rohmer (someone else I discovered around the same time, who’s been a much more consistent presence in my viewing since then) requires an acquired technique, watching Fassbinder feels more like an exercise in jumping on and not falling off, despite the beast’s constant efforts to throw you. Anyway, I think I encountered most of his films before I had the capacity to hold on to much of anything, and was consequently a bit overwhelmed.

Call to action

I might do better with Fassbinder now though. I’d also recently watched, more or less through random selection, his 1981 film Lola; it’s probably not generally ranked among his best, but I found it quite stunning. Largely set in the unpromising-sounding milieu of post-war building permits and reconstruction projects, it depicts the worlds of official deal-making and propriety and of underground vice merging and then intertwining, not so much anticipating a new Germany as one that learns how to lie more effectively about itself. The film has a remarkable dream-like quality at times, suggesting the country’s difficulty in pulling itself into some kind of modernity, or even reality.

A scene in Lola depicts an official buying a television in a stab at being more tuned-in, to be confronted with the reality of having just one channel, which doesn’t even start up until 8 pm. The Simulacron sounds like the other end of the technological spectrum, and yet in Fassbinder’s vision of it, it feels constricted in much the same way, like crumbs falling from a table you can sense or dream about, but were born too soon to access. One of the most surprising things about World on a Wire is its relatively optimistic ending, although it’s an optimism that depends on keeping us in the dark about a lot of things. Fassbinder was no denier of progress; anyone who worked that feverishly would have to have been an optimist of some kind. But comparing World on a Wire to Inception (or any of its high-concept big-budget cousins) underlines the vapidity of what passes today as visionary. Even if we were programmed from up above, we couldn’t be much more passive and ineffectual in the face of our escalating problems. If being aware of that possibility is good for anything, it ought to be as a call to action, not as a further excuse for veg-out fantasy. But maybe all we ever really wanted to achieve within our level of reality was to put those wretched 70’s fashions behind us.

Major League

2011-10-16T06:07:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2009)

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about professional sports. I’ve been to a few games, mostly just for the experience. Hockey to me is just a monotone blur. I can grasp basketball marginally better (I guess it’s easier to follow a ball than a puck), but my appreciation remains entirely superficial. Sorry for succumbing to a cliché, but the two baseball games I attended remain the longest two weeks I ever daydreamed through. I was never a sports fan as a child in the UK either, but soccer’s relative flow, simplicity and integration chime more with me than (as I see it) the fragmented, weirdly arbitrary rhythms of North American team sports.

Sports Machine

Still, to each his own. The more objectively interesting question is whether the huge sports machine is at this point a net benefit. I mean, it’s a rallying point, a focus for conversation and camaraderie, a generator of economic activity (although I don’t know to what extent it actually generates new wealth rather than drastically reallocating it). But even true believers seem to think something got lost under the enormous weight of money, corporatization, mediatization, standardization. Really, if the whole major league infrastructure vanished into thin air, and had to be replaced with something more organic and simple and community-based, would anyone miss the old machine after a year or two?

More and more, I see celebrity gossip and scandal-of-the-day reporting and, yes, sports as potentially insidious, soaking up our (mostly limited) capacities for engagement, diluting our inclination for action, blunting our capacity of how the whole sorry ship is drifting off course. My purpose here isn’t to argue for a drab and joyless world; indeed, I wonder how much genuine pleasure we take from much of what preoccupies us. I mean, from what I’m told, being a big-time sports fan is time-consuming, potentially very expensive, and if you subscribe to the whole accompanying beer/chips/burgers culture, not much good for your health. The keepers of the faith might say, well, it’s no worse than sitting round watching movies, but to me that depends on the movies, and why you watch them. I’ll come back to that.

Sugar

Whatever one thinks of all this, major-league sports deserves some grudging, logistical admiration for the immense dynasties and structures and secular cathedrals built upon essentially banal activity. The new film Sugar begins in the Dominican Republic, within a local feeder organization for the Kansas City Knights (which I understand to be fictional, but you’d never know it). There’s little work or opportunity otherwise; these scouting centres create local heroes, with the possibility of huge wealth at the end of the road. At the same time, they’re ruthless, littering the landscape with any number of men who got a step or two up the ladder, but no further.

Miguel Santos, nicknamed Sugar, makes it onto the first step, into training in Arizona, and then onto the next, to a minor league team in Iowa, where he’s billeted on a farm with an elderly couple. Sugar speaks no English; he’s a strange representative for “America’s pastime,” even more so for supposed heartland centres like Iowa or Kansas. But that’s what it takes to feed the beast. The film expertly milks the situation’s inherent comedy: Sugar and his equally bemused fellow recruits eat French toast every day, because that’s the only thing they know how to order in English, and then he complains on the phone home that American food is really sweet. Gradually he finds his feet, picks up more English, makes moves on local girls, starts sensing the possibility of triumph. Meanwhile, other prospects lose their game and get sent home, sealing off the dream forever.

I won’t go further, but this is an engaging film. The co-writers and directors, Anna Fleck and Ryan Boden, previously made Half Nelson, about the relationship between a drug-addicted teacher and one of his pupils. It was less compelling to me than to many reviewers, but still had many virtues, such as Ryan Gosling’s resourceful performance (for which he won an Oscar nomination), and the intriguing attempt to portray his malaise as a response to thwarted liberal idealism. Sugar follows that film’s low-key, observational approach, but the geographic and thematic canvas is quite a bit wider. It’s more conventional in some ways: there’s not much that strikes you as distinctive about its technique or the perspective on the material. The virtues belong more to what I think of as cinema’s anthropological aspect: even if the view it portrays isn’t entirely accurate or balanced, the window is still valuable and provocative, and leaves your engagement with the world a little fuller when you go out than when you went in. This, I submit, could not be said for parking yourself before whatever’s on TSN tonight.

False Promise

The film can’t possibly resolve the overhanging question – is all of this for better or for worse? The system flows money into a poor country (although based on some numbers floated in the movie, it sounds like the Dominicans might do well to receive 10% of what a homegrown college prospect gets), and it does create possibilities. But most of it turns out a false promise, leaving a trail of disruption – people end up somewhere they wouldn’t be, away from the people they’d be with, carrying the weight of squandered possibilities. But then, better to have loved and lost…

Fleck and Boden don’t overstate the point, but the film evokes debates about whether foreign aid, no matter how well intentioned, tends to create structures of dependency, pushing away any possibility of self-sufficiency: Sugar’s sending money home to his family is a recurring image here. But these debates can’t help seeming theoretical when you look at the gaping needs. I know a man who says he supports 31 people back home in Zimbabwe. 31! And I’m not talking about someone who makes bank-chief money; I’m not even sure it’s bank-teller money.

Zimbabwe may be an extreme example, but when you focus on that kind of thing, the global economy is less about the mythical melting pot than about strange and inherently sad displacements. Sugar provides snapshots of how it’s possible to live, very basically and functionally, in the US shadow economy, barely ever needing a word of English, as long as you don’t hit anyone’s official radar. And ultimately, those shadow economies do more to support the frail communities back home than the unreliable dreams of the big time. If you ask me, major-league doesn’t do a whole lot for them, and I’m not sure it ultimately does a whole lot for any of us.

Downward assessments

2011-10-15T14:49:00.003-04:00

I was writing last week about my satisfying recent run of movies, and then right after sending off that article I went to see George Clooney’s The Ides of March, which broke the streak. And not even in a close-run decision. The Ides of March is so deficient it might make you reassess everything you’ve previously believed (albeit not very deeply) about Clooney’s supposed taste and intelligence – it’s the work of a shallow, artistically lazy thinker and filmmaker.

The Ides of March

It’s a drama about modern-day American politics, depicting the climactic stages of the Democratic primary season, with two remaining candidates going right to the wire. Clooney plays Governor Mike Morris, the great progressive hope. His opponent, the colourless Senator Pullman, holds some tactical advantages in the remaining states, but also seems like a weaker candidate against the Republicans in the long run. Ryan Gosling plays Morris’ hotshot young press agent, Stephen Myers; Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are the opposing campaign managers. The plot turns on Myers’ naiveté and susceptibility to manipulation, and also on something he finds out about Morris; depending on his motivations, he might either do everything possible to bury the information, or use it to his advantage.

The film is largely based on a play, and feels like it – it’s mostly a series of men talking in rooms, without any sense of pace and atmosphere and context. The communications and social media revolution barely seems to have registered on Clooney: the candidates receive a ridiculously low volume of calls and messages, one key plot turn depends on the hokey device of a character accidentally answering someone else’s phone, and the climax asks you to believe Morris would respond to a call at the climactic point of a pivotal choreographed media event. Of course, just about every movie relies to some extent on such conventions and short-cuts, but because The Ides of March exudes such belief in its own importance and topicality, these kids TV-level devices are particularly grating.

Defects Galore

The defects in the raw material are compounded by dramatic ineptitude. For instance, much depends on a heated showdown between the Hoffman and Gosling characters. The film depicts some of this before cutting to the next scene, leading you to assume the conversation is essentially over; later on though, we discover it took a further twist, and that Myers’ motivations have completely changed as a result. Since we never see the exchanges that signify this turnaround, his subsequent actions feel abstract as a result, carrying none of the intended dramatic weight. One assumes, correctly or not, either that Clooney and his collaborators couldn’t adequately dramatize the scene, or that Gosling couldn’t play it effectively; it has the sense of trying to mask a problem (Gosling’s sky-high reputation has to take a hit after the financial disappointment of both this film and of Drive, a much smarter use of his recessive qualities).

Even if the film worked as a narrative, it would be useless as political commentary. It never grapples with ideas, beyond the sound-bites we hear in Morris’ speeches. The gap between the idealism and glitz on the surface of politics and the venal manipulations and compromises beneath isn’t a trivial issue of course; indeed, the preeminence of process over substance, the embedded intellectual vacuity, is one of the greatest impediments to crafting a global conversation equal to our challenges. But The Ides of March seems to assume we don’t yet know this, that we’re all as idealistic as Myers supposedly starts out as being. That’s irritating enough, but the film then compounds it by making the secret about Morris as clunky and unimaginative as it possibly could have been. Such scandals are part of the scene, no question, but they’re not central to the diagnosis of why politics is failing so wretchedly. The film contains nothing that you could usefully apply in interpreting Obama’s current plight, for instance.

I also agree with Anthony Lane in The New Yorker that the movie is “full of great actors, but not enough people.” He contrasts it with Michael Ritchie’s 1972 film The Candidate, a film which remains much more informative than Clooney’s dead-on-arrival epistle, and infinitely classier, but also more “scruffy (and) alive.” The Ides of March truly feels as if the notably productive Clooney had only a certain amount of money, time and personal engagement to invest in it, limiting his demands on himself and others accordingly. This works – more often than not - for a filmmaker like Clint Eastwood, where the style reflects a recurring pragmatic worldview. But it means Clooney’s film carries about as much lasting impact as a cable channel filler segment.

George Harrison

I’ve written before about the oddity of Martin Scorsese, often regarded as one of the greatest American directors, being happy to spend so much time and effort constructing tributes to his musical and filmic heroes (not to mention Fran Lebowitz!). It’s an endearing trait of course, but the more he does it, and the less interesting his own films become, you can’t help reassessing his overall stature too. Still, his Bob Dylan documentary of a few years back was completely engrossing, the Lebowitz portrait was more than pleasant, and his examinations of American and Italian cinema were very evocative at times.

His latest work in this vein is George Harrison: Living in the Material World – a three and a half hour telling of the “quiet Beatle’s” life and influence, currently playing on HBO Canada. As the title suggests, the film places much emphasis on the interplay of Harrison’s spirituality – his interest in meditation, in chanting, in his garden, in preparing to die a good death once the time came – and his huge fame and stature, with the accompanying material advantages, enormous connections and entanglements, and frequent temptations. Scorsese takes a largely impressionistic approach, providing enough basic biographical data to keep us on track, but otherwise coaxing us to feel Harrison rather than necessarily learn about him. The strategy works well for the much-covered Beatles period, but less so for the subsequent years; even allowing for the choice of approach and the time constraint, there’s an awful lot missing - for instance, an uneducated viewer might come away thinking Harrison hardly recorded anything again after his All Things Must Pass album, excepting his Traveling Wilburys side project.

Still, it can’t be all bad if you perceive three and a half hours as being a time constraint. And obviously, Scorsese didn’t conceive his film as one-stop shopping: it’s a point of entry into an enormous multi-faceted myth. It’s a valuable contribution, and even if you tend to wish Scorsese would pull his gaze away from other people’s windows, there’s no doubt he’s among the best at explaining what he sees inside the room. In contrast, I wouldn’t trust the director of The Ides of March to describe my own living room to me in a way I could recognize.

More Summer Movies

2011-10-09T18:58:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2004)

Mopping up some summer movies I haven’t covered already.

The Village

M. Night Shyamalan’s wonder boy reputation took a big hit with his latest film, widely derided as the occasion when the magic deserted him. It’s about an isolated village, apparently in the 19th century, where unseen creatures, lurking in the surrounding woods, threaten the bucolic lifestyle. The village elders have negotiated an uneasy truce with these creatures, but there are signs that it’s breaking down. And what to do when people start getting sick, and the only medicine is in the much feared ‘towns” on the far side of the woods? William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver are among the elders; Joaquin Phoenix and a new actress Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter, and the best thing in the movie) are among the youths.

I thought Shyamalan’s last film Signs was absolutely horrible – pretentious, arrogant, self-regarding. So The Village, by being merely slow and silly, actually represents something of an upturn in my view. The all-important “twist” is predictable in general if not specific terms, and isn’t very effectively dramatized in any event (the final scenes made me think in a certain way of Blazing Saddles, which can’t have been the intention). But Shyamalan’s portrayal of the town, with its genial but spartan philosophy, is at least fairly cohesive, and the movie does have the odd point of aesthetic interest – displaced evocations of fairy tales, the oddly evasive way in which Hurt is shot throughout. Basically, it’s the same thing you’ve seen a million times – one day a guy’s over praised, the next it swings too far the other way. Average it all out, and Shyamalan is a talented filmmaker with too big an ego and too few worthwhile ideas.

Festival Express

Previously unseen footage of Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead and The Band makes this documentary a fun viewing experience; when I saw it, several members of the audience were having too much fun, whistling and shouting out encouragement at Joplin in particular. The footage comes from a series of 1970 rock festivals that played Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary, traveling between destinations on a chartered CN train. The musicians partied it up big time, at one point running out of booze and forcing an unplanned stop in Saskatoon to restock. It was evident early on that the whole affair would be a financial disaster, and this seems to have liberated everyone involved, pushing everyone into cheerfully fatalistic excess. This is one of the rare films that’s actually too short – at 90 minutes (including a lot of contemporary talking head stuff) you don’t see that much of the performers, but the technical quality is surprisingly good, and it’s an instant entry in the must-see annals of rock cinema (maybe just behind Woodstock and The Last Waltz).

Maria Full of Grace

Joshua Marston’s scrupulous account of a young Colombian woman pulled into the drug trade as a mule (carrying cocaine-filled pellets inside her stomach on a flight to New York) is sociologically fascinating, rivetingly depicting the details of how such things happen. The film presents these events cleanly, in a bright, confident lighting style that largely avoids genre clichés, and the main actress is compelling. Aesthetically it’s a bit less interesting, with the slogan “It’s what’s inside that counts,” prominently displayed on a wall in the closing scene, capping off a series of connections on internalizing: she swallows drugs; she’s carrying a baby; she’s full of grace; ultimately her personal strength and sense of purpose allows her to transcend the limits of her situation. It’s a bit too idealistic and well, American, in how it gravitates toward individual boosterism.

The Manchurian Candidate

Jonathan Demme’s return to form (you could say he’s been drifting ever since The Silence of the Lambs in 1991) stamps a sense of directorial authority from the very start, and never lets go. His remake of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 classic about a plot to subvert the US presidency through mind control is sometimes knowingly anachronistic (it’s been a long time since we saw a political convention where the vice presidential nominee was in any doubt), and the details of the conspiracy sometimes bog down a bit, but the mood is perfectly sustained and Demme weaves in a mesmerizing collection of asides on disintegrating society and the escalating cynicism of politics. With a perfect cast (led by Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep), the movie is unquestionably a gleeful contrivance, but with unusual resonance and attention to detail.

A Home At The End Of The World

Michael Mayer’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel tracks a couple of boyhood friends who follow each other from suburban Cleveland to New York and beyond; one is promiscuously gay, the other isn’t, and their relationship keeps evolving and shifting, avoiding easy categories. The film is exceptionally genial, with enjoyable if soft-centered performances from Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn and Sissy Spacek, but the longer it goes on, the more its liberalism and fluid view of motivation start seeming like its sole raison d’etre; and while the life styles and structures on view may be unconventional, the dialogue and film craft certainly aren’t. I was surprised how much it got to me at times though.

Collateral

Michael Mann’s thriller is a little disappointing because, well, it’s Michael Mann. Heat and The Insider were two of the best American films of the 90’s, but Collateral is clearly a genre piece, albeit polished until it dazzles. The best is at the very start, as LA cab driver Jamie Foxx talks to passenger Jada Pinkett Smith – the frame gleams, and there’s an early hint of the kind of synthesis (simultaneously perfectly grounded and yet consciously mythic) that sustained the other films. Then Tom Cruise enters the scene, as a hitman who commandeers Foxx’s cab to drive him between a series of hits. Both actors are excellent, the interplay between them strikes fascinating cadences, and the film is consistently creative in plotting and presentation. But its efficiency as a thriller ultimately works against its effectiveness as anything else.

Garden State

Zach Braff, from TV’s Scrubs, wrote and directed this innocuous comedy, and stars in it as an actor who comes back home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral; he meets up with old pals, falls in love, all on the way to the usual life lessons. The film’ received much praise, but I found it completely tedious. The potentially funny bits are almost all reminiscent of funnier bits in the recent Napoleon Dynamite; the characters all speak either in non-sequiturs or clichés; and it doesn’t even have much of a sense of place. At this point in film history, such stuff is so very very familiar.

Inner Adjustments

2011-10-08T14:47:00.002-04:00

For most of the time I’ve been writing this column, I was averaging two or three trips a week to the movie theater, sometimes even more, driven by the notion that if a new film had any virtue at all, then I needed to scoop it up now. This affliction – and that’s really the word for it – mysteriously cleared up last year, and now I only go once a week at the most (it’s only a relative cleansing – I still average a film a day at home). If a movie’s merely entertaining, or proficient, or “good of its type,” then it can wait for next year’s cable (assuming it retains any residual appeal by then). Sure, it’s probably superior to see a film on the big screen, but then it’s also probably superior to eat all your meals at Canoe. In a life that demands compromise, it’s not hard to sacrifice the purist viewing experience for the sake of avoiding the demands of getting there and back, and possibly of up with annoying people, and of course of spending a lot more money.

Movie of the week

In simple terms, the test for the weekly movie selection is two-fold: will it give my wife and me something interesting to discuss over dinner afterwards, and does it stimulate me enough that I can write 1,100 words or so about it. More broadly, will it give me something I can use in life – an insight, a perspective, an understanding, a sense of joy? Bad movies sometimes meet this test as effectively as good ones – it can be very informative and constructive to mull over why something ambitious and intelligent didn’t work – and in the past I carried low expectations into many movies, but now I feel I was mostly a tool of the marketing machine there. I don’t want to be giving any more just-about-what-I-expected shrugs on the way out. From here on, if it’s a disappointment, it’s going to hurt a little.

The last three weeks, I saw Contagion and Drive and Moneyball, all of which easily met the test. Drive is the most provocative as an aesthetic object; Contagion provides the best rocket fuel for riffing on aspects of the real world. Moneyball is the least of them – it’s the one where I was straining the most to fill up the space here (without resorting to the obvious fillers of reviewing Brad Pitt’s career and suchlike) – but it doesn’t have a dull or overly dumb moment, so no problem there either. This past week, I saw Poetry, which makes me realize that in going to see the likes of Contagion and Drive and Moneyball, I’ve merely redefined the nature of my submissiveness rather than eradicating it. Maybe, in saying that, I’m exhibiting a propensity to undervalue the familiar and privilege the relatively exotic, for Poetry (playing at the Bell Lightbox) is a film from South Korea: it would be easy to buy into some unformed notion of Asian refinement and mysticism, contrasted with inherent American crassness. That wouldn’t be well-founded, but the three movies – however respectful of creative sensibilities – are big investments, with big stars and big expectations; the circumstances of their production demand that they conquer a big chunk of the public’s awareness (Drive seems to have failed at this).

Poetry

But our lives are generally small, for lack of a better word; the difference between happiness and misery, or virtue and depravity, or whatever set of oppositions you want to use, often lies in the faintest of nuances, in adjustments you might not register even as they act to change your course. Illuminating these is awfully difficult – perhaps the height of achievement in the cinema – because the attempt can so easily become crass or reductive, as in the endless contrivances about the “triumph of the human spirit.” And besides, there’s no law that dictates the best practitioners of cinematic technique are the smartest commentators about the human condition (Contagion’s Steven Soderbergh seems unusually frank about acknowledging this in interviews). But then, the audiences don’t care anyway. Nothing about our society encourages reflecting on such things, or indeed on anything at all. Our economy, or what’s left of it, depends on collective dumbness (in fulfilling our role as “confident” debt-ridden consumers, for instance), and on a fearful, chronic lack of empathy and of feeling for complexity (it will always be to the shame of our city that Rob Ford was able to get elected).

Poetry, directed by Chang-dong Lee, is entirely aware of the limitations – and occasional outright repulsiveness - of normal life, and without being at all idealistic or fanciful, it reflects on the practicalities of one old woman’s transcendence. At its centre is the brave and challenging idea that escalating Alzheimer’s, although undoubtedly a sentence, may contain some element of liberation, a final opportunity for clarity. The woman, Mija, raises her teenage grandson, managing to appear perpetually “chic” on a low budget. After her doctor detects her condition, she impulsively registers in a poetry class, but she struggles to fulfill her assignment to write a poem. Then she discovers that her grandson and his friends collectively raped, repeatedly, a girl in their school, and the girl killed herself because of it. The school collaborates with the other boys’ parents in suppressing this, trying to buy the silence of the girl’s family. Mija’s horror at the boy’s actions coupled with his apparent complete lack of remorse for or even acknowledgment of their consequences, and her initially barren attempts to feel her way into the poetic truth of things, eventually coalesce into personally meaningful action, although the film doesn’t tell us everything about the form it takes, or where it leaves her afterwards.

Practical beauty

Notwithstanding the title, the film is told in prose, not poetry – it’s a careful, attentive character study. Despite Mija’s frequent comments about her love of flowers and suchlike, the film is pretty tough-minded, depicting a great deal of naked self-interest, particularly in the way the reaction to the crime becomes entirely a matter of defensive logistics. Mija initially seems largely incapable of engaging with the world as it is (much about her suggests a profound lifelong desire to differentiate herself from her surroundings, but without ever figuring out how to implement that), at one point chiding a man whose bawdy humour she considers a form of crime against the essence of poetry, but she ultimately learns beauty and redemption must be practical commodities, with a traceable impact.

Or at least, for her they must be – the film doesn’t moralize or generalize. No two of us follow the same path; we all seek a slightly different synthesis of our inner and outer worlds. Assuming, that is, we realize such a synthesis is even attainable (or that we even perceive we have an inner world). Through its brilliant attentiveness to possibilities, Poetry surely holds the capacity of changing lives.

Miserable failure

2011-10-02T20:17:00.004-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2008)

Is there any easier way to fill space, time, arguments, nightmares, than to get onto the presidency of George W. Bush? “Failure” hardly seems like the right word, carrying as it does the implication that some form of “success” might at least have been possible. Has there ever been anyone in such high office who so begged the question of why he wanted the job in the first place? He doesn’t seem to relish the pure process and possibility, like Clinton did. He’s never seemed guided by any unshakeable Reagan-ish principles or qualities. It’s not that he sought the job after decades of gradually ascending public service, like his father. I don’t think there’s a better explanation than the clichéd one, that he was born in a milieu where the presidency presented itself in much the same way as you and I might set our sights on an office promotion.

Bush Doesn’t Care

Bush’s view of America is forged in contradiction. He obviously believes (albeit that it’s a complacent, unexamined belief) in the country’s essential endurability and flexibility; he believes that good government generally stays out of the way (remember all that mush at the beginning of his first term about the “CEO President”?) But then after 9/11, rather than choosing to cast Al Qaeda as sordid criminals, he extrapolated a single wretched event into an epoch-defining “War on Terror,” on the premise that radical Islam posed a more substantive and immediate threat to the life of the average American (and there are 300 million or so of them, remember) than anything else. Accept that starting point (and it’s easy to forget how many did, for a year or two), and everything else follows – a foolish war based on willfully joining vaguely connected dots and on grandiose theories neurotically forged in meeting rooms; wanton disregard for basic values and rights; an utter lack of focus on all other wants and needs (New Orleans being only the most visible example).

Kanye West had it half right when he said Bush doesn’t care about black people. I don’t think he cares about anyone, not in any way that matters. I don’t think he’s smart enough to care; I don’t think his concept of the job presents that as a flaw or an absence. There’s never been any sense that he view himself as the ultimate custodian of, to say it again, 300 million people. He knows only process, politics. He must surely be the most reactive President in history – I can’t remember the last time he proposed anything even mildly interesting or diagnostic and then followed through on it (by contrast the list of claims and supposed ambitions – from his straight-faced labeling of himself as a “good steward” of the environment, to announcing a target date for a manned mission to Mars – is endless, like a kid’s musings on what he might be when he grows up). There’s little inherent dignity to the man.

W

No doubt he’s sincere in his religious faith, but I’ve never really believed, despite his rote appointment of right-wing zealots to every available position, that he’s fired up by the right wing agenda. I’m pro choice, but I understand the repugnance of pro-lifers: of course if life begins at conception, then nothing could be more offensive than abortion to God’s plan, and to the spiritual health of the country forged within it. But to feel that anger you need, again, to care. Whether it’s Supreme Court appointments or tax cuts, Bush doles it out with weary resignation, as if some small part of him yearned to cut loose and find his inner liberal. It’s certainly possible, if you screen out all else, to view him in sorrow rather than anger. But then you remember the consequences of his fecklessness. I don’t believe all the ills of our time are directly his fault, but it’s controvertible that virtually every decision he’s ever made might as well have been designed to undermine our collective fragile balance.

I wrote the other week about how Bill Maher’s Religulous, a scatter-shot expose of why all religious believers are nuts, just didn’t seem to me very relevant to what should be on our minds right now. It’s satisfying, in a way, to say much the same thing about Oliver Stone’s W. The film is careful and quite accomplished in its way, but remarkably lacking in impact. This is good, if it’s an advance notice of how easy it’ll be to forget about the man, but then we would have found that out in a few months anyway. But isn’t Bush’s presidency a phenomenon from which an artist should extract something potent? If we merely forget, how will we learn?

By mentioning Bush’s father only in passing, I may have omitted a key piece of this puzzle, that his political career, and his grotesque handling of endeavours such as the Iraq war, needs to be read in the context of an Oedipal narrative with the first President Bush – that his parents always expected more of his younger brother Jeb, and that he feels driven to avenge his father’s loss to Clinton at the end of his first term (a loss attributed in this theory to failing to take out Saddam Hussein at the end of early 90’s Gulf War). Well, I just don’t know. Stone’s movie certainly sees that as The Key, contriving numerous (mostly dull and repetitive) encounters marked by the older Bush’s disappointment and reserve. At times, it’s easy to forget we’re watching a movie about the Presidency – it could be any narrative of a guy fighting for self-actualization, and discovering nothing’s ever enough.

Sorrow Over Anger

Coupled with Stone’s own loss of fire (as with his last film World Trade Center, this only intermittently feels like the work of the man who made JFK and Natural Born Killers), the chosen approach conveys a consistent melancholy. The film inter-cuts highlights of Bush’s halting progress from silver-spoon idiot to ultimate power, with scenes from the Presidency itself, mostly focusing on the discussions leading to the decision to invade Iraq, and on the initial realization that it wasn’t going to work out as they hoped. Stone weaves in various classic Bush misspeakings along the way. Josh Brolin is a pretty good (but again, not very interesting) Bush; the other actors span the gamut from near savage (Thandie Newton’s evisceration of Condoleezza Rice) to barely being there at all (Scott Glenn’s weirdly affectless Donald Rumsfeld). James Cromwell as a blandly authoritative Bush senior is the most disappointingly knee-jerk casting.

I think the film should have been way more colourful, messy, contradictory, and flagrantly offensive, But then maybe it wouldn’t matter: you’d always end up reviewing the man more than the movie. Except that the movie, at worst, would only represent a couple of squandered hours. The man embodies a much greater loss than that.

Working out the numbers

2011-10-02T11:00:00.002-04:00

Bennett Miller’s Moneyball is a highly enjoyable movie, and a sure crowd-pleaser (as long as the crowd can process a creation with lots of talk, no violence, no sex, and barely any profanity). It portrays the real-life story of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beame, trying to put together a competitive 2002 season against teams outspending him on payroll by four to one; unable to entice the best players, he starts reexamining that whole notion of “the best,” concluding he can build a winning team out of players rejected or at least undervalued by all the other teams. This generates a lousy start to the season, followed by a remarkable turnaround, although – and this is hardly a spoiler – not the kind of fairy tale level of remarkable that would have them winning the World Series. In fact, the ending is influenced much more by a sense of compromise and personal limits than of triumph.

Insiders vs. outsiders

The film is based on Michael Lewis’ influential 2003 book. I didn’t read it, but Wikipedia summarizes some of the themes like this: “insiders vs. outsiders (established traditionalists vs. upstart proponents of sabermetrics (that is, a statistical driven approach), the democratization of information causing a flattening of hierarchies, and the ruthless drive for efficiency that capitalism demands.” Only the first of these is particularly evident in the film, played largely for comic effect as Beame dismisses the conventional wisdom of his ancient-looking scouting team – for example, they write off one prospect in part because he has an ugly girlfriend, thus denoting a lack of confidence – in favour of cold hard facts: who cares if a particular player has a funny stance, or fades in the second half of the game, as long as he reliably delivers a proportionate share of what it takes to win the necessary percentage of games?

This tells you, of course, that Moneyball is really about underdogs, one of those emblematic sports movies where it doesn’t matter if you like or even understand the game: I can testify to this because I wouldn’t watch baseball if it was the last distraction remaining on earth (now there’s an idea for a horror flick). It’s a particularly admirable achievement in this case because the movie necessarily focuses so much on the specific nuts and bolts. You suspect a lot of the credit goes to co-writer Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for a similar feat last year with The Social Network: I wrote here that “I don’t know if any film has ever conjured up as much excitement from reams of incomprehensible programming talk.” Moneyball is aiming to be pleasant more than exciting, but otherwise it’s a comparable achievement, as far as that aspect of it goes.

Demands of capitalism

As I mentioned though, this means the film doesn’t spend much time on the “democratization of information causing a flattening of hierarchies” (often, I suspect, something that’s written about more than it’s actually evidenced), and the “ruthless drive for efficiency that capitalism demands.” Admittedly, you can’t blame a Hollywood picture for turning its back on such heavy themes. Still, it means it’s pretty easy to forget the film as soon as it’s over. The breakdown of the old industrial model might be one of the most significant themes of our time – business just doesn’t seem to need as many people as it once did to generate growth and profits (worse, the profitability is largely based on not having them), and since consumers and governments are tapped out, no one knows how to create enough of those well-paying non-geeky geographically-dispersed jobs.

Moneyball isn’t inherently about that issue of course, but it does embody something of the tension between advancing knowledge and its human cost. As the movie depicts him, Beame is highly ambivalent about baseball: he’s devoted much of his life to it, but he doesn’t actually watch the games, and is obviously unsentimental about its traditions. This makes him a perfect person to lead the revolution, but at the same time, you could view him as an unwitting tool of owners trying to get a job done at bargain basement prices. Even if his methods worked perfectly – which they don’t; he’s remained with the team for the subsequent decade without topping the achievements of 2002 – where would it ultimately lead? If there’s no more romance and sense of individual greatness, then how does anything ever really get better?

Money Never Sleeps

The movie’s original director was Steven Soderbergh, who reportedly had something more analytical in mind: for instance, his version would have featured interviews with real-life people (it’s a bit of a shame to think we might have missed out on a sports movie with the ambiance of Soderbergh’s current film Contagion). Bennett Miller, whose only previous film was Capote, doesn’t seem like such an ambitious thinker, but having settled on his strategy, he sees it through more than smoothly. I may have left it late in the review to address the most salient fact for many viewers, that Brad Pitt plays Billy Beame, and well enough that they’re saying he might even get an Oscar for it. It’s classic old-time movie acting, of the kind that seems easy but undoubtedly isn’t; Pitt creates a rounded character without any of the mannerisms, emotional props or narrative contrivances that often seem to signal award-worthy performances. One scene, where he places a series of rapid-fire calls to other general managers, trying to move multiple pieces so that a player he wants becomes available, is a free-wheeling classic, even evoking Cary Grant and Howard Hawks.

Jonah Hill plays the economics graduate who originally turns Beame onto this new way of things, and then becomes his assistant. He doesn’t have to do much more than follow Pitt around and respond to him in a small voice, but it’s enough. The film really doesn’t have a dull moment, and given that the topic is baseball, I suppose that must be even higher praise than it sounds like.

Another money movie: a few days before watching Moneyball, I caught up with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel from last year, Money Never Sleeps. This is an odd creation for sure, trying to tap the old magic of Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko character (as the movie begins, getting out of jail after eight years) while grappling with new paradigms and uncertainties; it’s a glitzy but lumpy amalgam, sometimes shrewdly illustrating how complicated things actually work, at other times succumbing to absurd melodrama. It’s not so much that it bites off more than it can chew; it chews a bit, swallows a bit, leaves you confused about how much it bit off in the first place. But for a film grappling with something as imperfect and frightening as the capital markets, maybe that’s how it should be.

Lost in Lynch

2011-09-25T17:27:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2007)

David Lynch’s Inland Empire opened here, at the College Street Royal, more than four months after it appeared in New York, a very long gap for such an esteemed American auteur. But for once, it’s not clear we can blame the usual odd machinations of studios and distributors, because Lynch is distributing the film himself – according to one article he’s even handpicking the theatres. A while back there were stories about him sitting in an armchair alongside a Los Angeles freeway, to promote the film’s Oscar chances. And he recently published a book on transcendental meditation, which seemed to strike most reviewers as surprisingly airy.

On DavidLynch.com

If you go onto www.davidlynch.com, the first thing you see is an ad for David Lynch Signature Cup Gourmet Coffee (it’s 100% organic); the site also has short films, art work, animation, an extensive online store, and a live webcam to a birdfeeder incorporating a “disk of sorrow” designed to keep away marauding squirrels. A caption tells us that this section “is currently under re-development and will return in the fall of 2004” – I guess Lynch hasn’t been keeping on top of that. Sum all of this up, and it’s clear that his preoccupations are pretty widely spread. Which makes it no surprise that it’s been six years since Mulholland Drive. What’s more surprising is how little Inland Empire adds to the achievement of that earlier work.

I liked Mulholland Drive a lot the first time I saw it, then I went back a second time and loved it. In my initial review, I wrote: “the crux of the movie seems to me to be the narcissism and self-absorption at the heart of Hollywood – the image making and self-positioning. If this seems a rather old-fashioned theme, more suited for a Hollywood that’s largely been lost – well, that’s what Lynch gives us here, a faded, seedy milieu where artistry takes second place to staying on the right side of gangsters.” Ultimately, I thought Lynch “captured the complexities of something real and significant while still indulging his considerable idiosyncrasies to the hilt.”

Well, Inland Empire is also about Hollywood, and also centered on an actress, played this time by Laura Dern. This time there’s a greater focus on the filmmaking process itself, with Jeremy Irons playing the director of Dern’s film. For a while, this central plot proceeds in a relatively linear fashion, but then it becomes unclear whether certain sequences belong to the film within a film, or whether they’re dreams, or delusions, or part of an alternative reality. Around the edges there are intrusions of even stranger visions, most notoriously scenes of human-sized rabbits in a dingy room, delivering deadpan lines to the accompaniment of an occasional laugh track.

Codes and Readings

Lynch of course has an unparalleled activity to evoke menace and lurking threats, and to create a sense of some underlying coherence no matter how the films’ raw elements dispute that. Inland Empire, shot on digital video with an often-grainy image quality, is suffused in this tone. The title, although it’s no more capable than anything else in the film of being precisely explained, nevertheless seems perfect, suggesting both claustrophobia and grandeur. The film sustains its project over three hours, suggesting an almost limitless capacity for further revelation, or confusion, the two being much the same in this case.

The rabbits might be the litmus test for categorizing responses to the movie: what the hell is that all about? Eye magazine even highlighted the question on its cover. Lynch himself is about as tough an interview as there is on this kind of thing (the book Lynch on Lynch is almost hilariously unproductive at times). Michael Atkinson in Sight And Sound suggests that the “surest way to find disappointment in Lynch’s Byzantine, exhaustive howl is to hunt for codes and readings, while ignoring the sensual textures of life in the under lit corridors of his imaginary space.” Putting it more bluntly, he adds: “Inland Empire appears to be a film that exists for itself and for its maker, not necessarily for us.”

This may be the inevitable extension of where Lynch has been headed all along (although not necessarily the end point!) But personally I think Mulholland Drive, even if it now seems like more of a transitional work, was more satisfying in its applicability to “us,” although I realize that may seem merely a symptom of unwillingness to accede to the new film’s ethos. Atkinson notes correctly that Inland Empire, even though it seems in some sense to be about a woman’s psyche, shows no signs of traditional psychology: this (and the greater abstraction of its evocation of Hollywood) seems like the key leap from Mulholland Drive. But although this may evidence greater artistic audacity, it also seems almost sadistic at times (I wondered once or twice whether too much of Lynch’s instinct didn’t rest in the basic thrill of taking the initially elegant Dern and converting her into a battered whore).

Nastassia Kinski!

But if you go back to the beginning of this article, it’s plain that Lynch is progressively less a film director, and more – in himself - an evolving work of multimedia performance art, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone watching Inland Empire in isolation from some sense of the man behind it (his antics seem designed to ensure that no one will). Lynch may be a weirdo, but he’s also plainly in touch with his inner child (even if that inner brat is an uncomfortably close cousin to the mutant offspring in Eraserhead). There’s a wryness about Inland Empire that acts as a hedge against possibly taking it too seriously, and you feel Lynch’s delight in stories, or fragments of stories.

In a scene where Dern appears to be suffering an agonizing death, she crawls to lie among some down and outers in an alley, receiving some token sympathy and acknowledgment before their conversation moves on, largely ignoring the pitiful bleeding woman in their midst, evoking an entirely different movie than the one we’ve been watching. One element of the story we listen to – a pet monkey – turns up in a final scene, along with Nastassia Kinski, sitting on a couch, and a bunch of dancing girls: it seems less like the final scene of the movie than we’ve been watching than, perhaps, the opening of an entirely different one.

And of course, the tantalizing use of Kinski (along with earlier brief cameos by recognizable figures like William H. Macy and Mary Steenburgen) hardly seems like the choice of someone who’s given up on conventional tweaking of the audience. I found this ending remarkably peppy and hopeful, and although Lynch seems to be saying he’s given up on using film (rather than digital video) and on trying to make conventional cinema, I’m not sure what else can possibly lie for him in this direction. I hope to see him back from the inland, perhaps bringing Nastassia Kinski with him, while leaving the monkey (and much else besides) to hang out with the squirrels on the outskirts of the disk of sorrow.

Behind the wheel

2011-09-25T16:59:00.003-04:00

If I were a movie director, I don’t think I’d spend much time tracking lovingly across polished hoods, or indulging in the romance of the open road. I don’t even drive any more, and the only two kinds of car I can identify with certainty are the Mini and the Beetle. Still, you’d have to go out of your way not to have affection for some car-centric movies. My favourite, in my movie kindergarten years, used to be Walter Hill’s The Driver, although I haven’t revisited it for many years now. At the time I hadn’t seen much, if any, of the European cinema – Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai in particular - that influenced the film’s minimalism (the driver isn’t named; he has virtually no personal life, and so forth), but I responded to the polished abstraction, and in particular to Bruce Dern as the edge-of-crazy cop obsessed with catching the driver. I could still recite almost verbatim a monologue he has about reading the sports pages as a daily education in winners versus losers. Of course, I couldn’t do it anything like Dern could.

The Driver

The Driver seemed stylish at the time, but I expect it would just be a rusty old jalopy compared to Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film Drive. Not that there’s any explicit connection between the two, but the similarity in the titles and the protagonists – two virtuoso, nameless getaway drivers – makes Hill’s film an unavoidable reference point. But much as I adored The Driver, the comparison (again, subject to possible faulty recollection on my part) instantly works to the new film’s benefit. Hill’s work was terse and self-contained, requiring your submission to its mood and iconography. Drive is more extravagantly experimental, like a splashy art installation that seduces you into endlessly speculating and arguing about it afterwards. It works terrifically as a thriller too, but one of the Hollywood websites reported it scored surprisingly low scores in audience exit polls, compared to the enthusiasm of critics (it even won the best director prize at Cannes). I suppose it’s because for those who’d expect a movie called Drive to be a close cousin to, say, The Fast and the Furious, Refn’s film might seem like a pain in the behind; where a conventional movie might move seamlessly from A to B to C, Drive keeps on staring at A, and dreaming of B, before suddenly beating C into a bloody pulp and then landing on D.

I don’t mean to be facetious, for instance, in saying that the most suspenseful aspect of the film, by and large, comes in wondering whether the driver, played by Ryan Gosling, is going to say or do anything; time and again, it pushes the cliché of the strong, silent protagonist to the point of absurdity. But as it goes on, you realize Refn is having fun with the device: at one point he reveals Gosling’s impassivity as a staring game he’s playing with a kid, and in the closing moments it works to taunt us about whether the driver is even alive. In another scene, after the driver commits a shocking, out-of-nowhere act of violence in a strip joint, a group of girls who witnessed the scene just keep on sitting there, utterly motionless and unmoved. Taken literally, you’d have to assume they were drugged, but of course you can’t take it literally; it’s an aesthetic device, in part a joke, and also maybe some kind of evocation of the psychic toll of life lived on the fringes.

Silence and violence

The violence, in contrast, really is startling; for a while you assume the driver lives entirely by his wits, and then suddenly he’s threatening to beat up women and emotionlessly doing much worse to men (Refn doubles down on this line of provocation by casting Albert Brooks - you know, the lovable master of low-key comic observation – as the coldly brutal crime boss; it works a treat). Almost as startling are the extremely bold, distinctive songs on the soundtrack: in no sense “background music,” they reminded me of the 80’s heyday of Giorgio Moroder, when movies like American Gigolo and Cat People and Top Gun simply yielded on occasion to synthesized aural assault. Even a small detail like Drive’s opening credits, displayed on the screen in a pink cursive script, demands to be noticed; no doubt to be luxuriated in for its boldness, but perhaps at the same time to be quietly mocked. I mean, pink?

The bottom line, to repeat a phrase I used last week, is that Drive forges an unusually potent conversation with the viewer, constantly turning in on itself, insisting on its own artificiality – and when it does deliver genre requirements, almost knowingly overdoing it. The film doesn’t have much in the way of social relevance – anything resembling the “real” world is kept at a distance; the only clear view we get of a cop’s uniform is when the driver wears one early in the film for his daytime movie stunt-driving job. In that same scene, he perfectly executes a rollover of the car he’s driving, an early deconstruction of the usual car chase bread and butter that warns us against succumbing to such patented thrills thereafter. Actually, although Drive has a fair bit of driving, it’s often just that, the driver driving: I wouldn’t classify it as a great car chase movie in the way of Ronin or Bullitt, although Refn does enough of that stuff to show us he’s capable of it. It feels instead that he wanted his film to evoke a seducer who eschews the usual moves and erogenous zones.

Observing nothing

I should save some space to indicate the film’s plot, because it does indeed have one – the driver develops a sympathy for a young mother and son living in his building; her husband is released from jail and tries to move on, but he’s still in debt to some people who threaten to hurt his family unless he pulls off a job for them. The driver decides to help him out, but it goes horribly wrong, and he’s forced to become more involved. In addition to Gosling and Brooks, both excellent (although I think the articles calling Gosling the new Steve McQueen and suchlike are over-extrapolating, from the evidence available to date), the cast includes Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston and Ron Perlman. Actually, the actors I’ve mentioned, plus the boy who plays Mulligan’s kid, probably account for ninety-five per cent of the film’s dialogue between them; the movie doesn’t spend much time on diversions. Except that is, when the diversion becomes the journey, which is a characteristic of art.

Emotional truth

2011-09-18T20:05:00.004-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2007)

Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale was a pleasant surprise a couple of years ago - a marked contrast with his earlier, conventionally quirky movies, his humdrum writing work with Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic) and thin humour pieces for The New Yorker. It had strongly autobiographical roots – the set-up of two New York writers whose marriage is breaking up, and the two boys caught in the middle, apparently paralleled Baumbach’s own teenage experience. The film had lots of funny lines, but also sustained a uniquely dour, rather squirmy quality, shot through with denial and displacement and self-loathing – the ending provided only the most minimal degree of closure. At the time I wrote: “It’s a most distinctive and subtly weighty work, but with the feeling of a one-off, although I hope I’m wrong.”

Margot at the Wedding

Baumbach’s new film Margot at the Wedding seems like a calculated attempt to capitalize on that momentum (and perhaps on the sudden availability of financing) – a film that he thought rather than felt his way into. Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a New York-based writer who goes upstate for the wedding of her sister Pauline, who she’s barely talked to for years. Pauline’s fiancée is basically a waste of space, but they have good sex and it works for them somehow. Margot’s teenage son is there too; another writer she’s been sleeping with lives close by; her almost estranged husband makes a brief appearance; and there’s a scary group of rednecks living next door.

Film Comment summed it up this way: “…in this movie, as in his others, Baumbach refrains from judging his indelibly drawn characters and remains dedicated, above all, to the emotional truth of his material.” Now, Film Comment is a very good magazine, but I have a feeling (a) that they praise many movies in these same general terms, for respecting the old Renoir “every man has his reasons” thing, and (b) they seldom met a movie about a New York intellectual that they didn’t like.

For me it’s not so much the dedication to emotional truth – lots of movies have that, in their own blinkered way (emotional truth, after all, can often be a pretty banal commodity), and when your characters are conceived as a bunch of privileged screw-ups, it’s hard to know what’s plausibly true and what isn’t. What I most liked about Margot at the Wedding, I guess, is the volatility of it all. The Film Comment article points out how Margot praises her son’s new sunglasses at the start, poking at him for not wearing them enough; then when he puts them on at the end, she criticizes what they do to his face. He just shrugs it off, and you feel that in five minutes’ time she might as easily adopt yet another position on it. It reminded me a bit of John Cassavetes – love as an endless dance, unable to thrive without conflict, display and reinvention.

Everything Is Dysfunctional

It’s much coarser than Cassavetes ever was though. Rex Reed, a different kind of New York critic, called it “92 minutes of screaming, pouting, weeping and vomiting in an ugly home-movie style that could set movies back decades…there is nothing funny about a movie in which absolutely everything is dysfunctional regardless of age or gender.” I’ll spare you the specific examples he cites to support that point, because taken out of context, they sound pretty indefensible. But context is everything, and it seems to me there’s significant artistry and wit in how Baumbach’s dialogue consistently pirouettes and swerves and rears up: a movie where everything is dysfunctional (even nature looks like a flop here, said another critic) should count as some kind of achievement, no?

It’s a real tightrope though, depending heavily on good actors. Kidman keeps it all together pretty well, and the more naturally talented and facile Jennifer Jason Leigh is very good as Pauline. She recently married Noah Baumbach; hence her best part in years. It makes some questionable demands on her, but I guess theirs is a marriage that commendably refrains from judging.

For all its qualities, it does feel rather academic. The title is supposedly an allusion to Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach, but that only brings to mind the greater gracefulness and overall coherence of Rohmer’s scenarios. I don’t know why Baumbach even wanted to evoke Rohmer though – he seems to be after something more primal and turbulent. His adults, compared to their teenage offspring, are nosily regressing, whereas Rohmer’s tend more to philosophically calcify. Rohmer of course is French. Oh, and when Rohmer calls a movie Pauline at the Beach, Pauline spends a lot of time at the beach. Forgive me the mild spoiler, but Margot never gets to the wedding. See, even the title is dysfunctional!

Love In The Time Of Cholera is an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ famous novel (which I haven’t read), about a young man who falls indelibly in love, and then for virtually his whole life must watch his beloved living with another man; in the meantime, he conquers over six hundred women (all chronicled in a notebook) while retaining a concept of emotional fidelity, even virginity. It’s adapted by Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for writing The Pianist – Harwood doesn’t go in for pirouetting and swerving, and director Mike Newell isn’t in the mood to add any of his own.

Time Of Cholera

What we get is a pretty mausoleum of a film, almost hilariously soppy and stilted at times. Everything’s sensitive and poised, nasty plot elements like cholera are kept discreetly on the sidelines, and it has all the scenery and soft-core eroticism you’d expect, but it doesn’t make any sense. I agree with critics who find the main character, played by Javier Bardem, more creepy than anything else, and Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno doesn’t convey anything capable of this long hold on his passion. I fell asleep several times, and could have indulged myself in that vein a while longer.

But, I ask myself, is it dedicated to the emotional truth of the material? Well, maybe, in the sense that it devotes itself to Bardem’s delusional trudge through life and ultimately concludes it was all worthwhile. But shouldn’t we be declaring the death of such chocolate box filmmaking (and by the way, is there any excuse, in our sophisticated multicultural age, to resort to the hoary old device of filming a Spanish speaking story, with mostly Spanish actors, in the English language)? What if Love In The Time Of Cholera were filmed in a Noah Baumbach style, with some turmoil and randomness and authentic period dirt? What if a 50-year obsession, refracted through obsessive girl chasing, were actually presented as a phenomenon of dysfunctional psychology, with pain and rage and contradiction? That might not be true to Marquez’ novel I suppose, but at least it might feel like a project belonging to this century rather than the one before last.

Communicable diseases

2011-09-18T15:07:00.003-04:00

I happened to see Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion on September 10th, and then wrote this article mostly on the morning of the 11th, with the 9/11 memorials playing on TV. It’s a productive juxtaposition. 9/11 is the preeminent modern example of a swerve into the previously unimaginable, completely changing the economic and geopolitical narrative of the subsequent decade from what it might have been otherwise. As the coverage demonstrates, one can submit to it as an event beyond analysis and normal commentary, or else appropriate it as the basis for a thousand ideological pretexts and thought experiments. Soderbergh’s film takes a comparable, but even more terrifying premise. It starts with a cough, belonging to a corporate executive on her way home from a business trip and feeling lousy; a day later, she’s dead. Similar outbreaks take place in Hong Kong, in China, one victim rapidly triggering others. The Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization tune in; so does the blogosphere. Within a week, tens of millions of fatalities are predicted, with accompanying mass societal upheaval and economic chaos.

Contagion

This is of course a staggeringly rich starting point – a hundred filmmakers might take it from there, with minimal overlap in what they made of it. Actually, Soderbergh himself, given his versatile productivity, might be capable of those hundred different movies. On this occasion though, he chose to emphasize sleek, slick storytelling, underlining the linkage to the disaster movie genre by deploying an almost excessively notable cast (three Oscar-winning actresses – Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard - as well as Matt Damon, Jude Law and others). This works exceptionally well – the film is compelling from beginning to end. It marshals a mind-boggling array of characters, locations and situations without ever diluting the seriousness of the premise or succumbing to hollow action movie momentum. And of course, it’s endlessly thought-provoking, and seemingly informative about matters such as disease containment protocols.

The problem – although it doesn’t feel like a big one while you’re watching it – is that, not for the first time with Soderbergh, you miss the wildness and revelation that characterizes art rather than instruction. Just as his Ocean’s Eleven series carried the illusion of fun rather than the real thing, Contagion so successfully assumes the form and content of something that’s freaking us out that you may need to step back afterwards to realize it actually didn’t. The film opens the box, neatly lays out its contents, then closes it back up again; the closing sequence, looping back to the beginning, emphasizes the movie’s construction as a movie rather than real-world possibilities and consequences. There are certainly loose ends in the storytelling, but they don’t carry any particular ominousness.

Network

The prior week, I’d rewatched Sidney Lumet’s 1976 Network, still regarded of course as a classic. The film remains remarkably relevant, although maybe it’s largely that ever since the TV business was created, it’s been in the process of lowering its standards. Lumet had a lot in common with Soderbergh – they’re both versatile, eclectic, socially conscious, with an impressive roster of hits and some notable flops. Network isn’t showy – it has a stripped-down, unfussy aesthetic; the point is that the erosion of our presumed values is happening in plain sight, as a consequence of deliberate corporate engineering. But many of its details – like the prime time hour built around a fringe radical group and their weekly crimes - are deliberately absurd, even if reality TV and other advances might be striving hard to make them less so. And Paddy Chayefsky’s writing is remarkably florid and ornate, full of actor-friendly speeches delivered both on-air (by Peter Finch’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any more” newscaster) and off- (by William Holden’s “I have primal doubts” executive); their performances and others are this close to sailing over the top. The point is that Network, for all its establishment credentials, always exhibits the exhilaration of performance, of testing its own limits; if you assume no risk of falling, how do you hope to fly?

Contagion doesn’t attempt to strike up that kind of implied conversation with the viewer. Soderbergh has always liked low-key, unfussy actors like Damon and George Clooney, and just about everyone in the film adheres to that playbook. It feels like an act of witness rather than engagement, with many of the elisions and omissions in the narrative contributing to that sense. For example, at one point we see riots breaking out, stores being looted; brawling in the streets and people getting murdered in their homes. Later on, the film depicts people lining up for food packages, which run out long before the line does, precipitating more spontaneous violence. You expect the film to extend this portrayal of looming anarchy, but instead it largely drops it; it seems that society is stabilized, or claws its way through, but we have no feeling for how that happens. Similarly, someone mentions the danger of eroding confidence precipitating a run on the banks; based on the degree of disruption depicted, the country (the world?) must be plunged into depression, but Soderbergh doesn’t pursue that strand either.

Current threats

But then, even if the film were a ten-part mini-series, it would still be easy to identify omissions in the treatment of such a sprawling topic. You could hypothesize, even, that these omissions are central to the point, that the totality of such an event will always get away from us; no matter how diligent our scrutiny of it, some of that scrutiny will be focused in the wrong place. The reaction to 9/11 exposed the incongruities (some would say perversions) in our political calculus – the risk of losing lives to terrorism is seemingly worth eradicating whatever the cost; other, much more tangible and immediate risks, aren’t worth addressing at all. Some lives lost must never be forgotten; others, sacrificed with no more culpability but with less visibility, aren’t worth noting even at the time. You might get angry at it, but most people, if they register such things at all, probably just get weary.

This often seems to characterize the reaction to the major Western contagion of our time – economic insecurity, unemployment and hardship. Measured by the basic criterion of whether a country adequately functions for the people who constitute it, it’s a disaster, but one that can always be shoved from the headlines by splashier threats. The London riots and Greek demonstrations show what seems obvious – that some people might at least temporarily break under the strain. But for now those are exceptions to an oddly suppressed, undeveloped narrative. Maybe, as in Contagion, things will turn around, and many of the current traumas will be shoved back in the box without the rest of us ever knowing they existed. Or maybe we don’t understand the incubation period and the degree of communicability of what we’ve hatched.

Noble Like a Fox

2011-09-11T06:02:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2009)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about vegetarianism. I don’t have a basic moral objection to eating meat, but I’m disgusted by the global food industry: a depraved cross-border monstrosity functioning on pain and poverty. It’s too difficult to stick to meat from humanely treated sources, so I ought to bypass the whole thing. But then, as Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in a recent New Yorker article:

"it could be argued that even a vegetarian diet falls short.. some of the animals that suffer most from the factory-farm system aren’t the ones that end up on the table. Most dairy cows spend their lives in sheds, where they are milked two or three times a day by machine. Many develop chronic udder infections. Laying chickens are kept in cages, jammed in so tightly that they don’t have room to spread their wings. To prevent them from cannibalizing one another, their beaks are trimmed with a hot blade. When their production begins to decline, they are starved for a week or two to reset their biological clocks."

The Pain Of Animals

I don’t want to make this my life’s cause, and anyway I’m gloomy about the virtue of individual action when compared to the vastness of what we’re dealing with, so I just keep moving lamely along. I haven’t eaten fast food in years, but I do for example buy processed meat at the St Laurence market, so I know it’s a thin line at best. What I really want, I guess, is for global government to acknowledge the viciousness of what surrounds us, and to start fighting back. I mean, this lousy food we eat demeans us as humans, making us fat and unhealthy, distorting the health care system, paying mediocre wages, thus being probably the single biggest contributor to the creation of a permanent underclass, wrapping itself in shiny images of nourishment while crapping on every value we’re meant to hold. Here’s Kolbert again:

"Intuitively, we all know that animals feel pain. (This, presumably, is why we spend so much money on vet bills.) “No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face,” (Jonathan Safran) Foer observes (in his new book Eating Animals). And yet, he notes, we routinely eat fish that have been killed in this way, as well as chickens who have been dragged through the stunner and pigs who have been electrocuted and cows who have had bolts shot into their heads. (In many cases, the cows are not quite killed by the bolts, and so remain conscious as they are skinned and dismembered.)"

Talking of vet bills, our 11-year-old Labrador retriever Pasolini had to have a leg amputated recently, and is now going through chemotherapy. It’s been a wretched thing to have to do to such a good and gentle creature, but Pasolini clearly isn’t ready to give up on life; through all his ordeal, he’s never skipped a meal, and he’s remained almost consistently bright-eyed, engaged, and quirky. I am not exaggerating when I say he’s an inspiration every day, and an education. There’s no point denying this all costs us a very significant amount of money, but we think it’s worth it even if assessed in purely utilitarian terms (which of course isn’t actually how we do assess it). Still, I’m preoccupied by the injustice of a world where the demonstrable value of Paso’s life, wellbeing and pain avoidance so outrageously exceeds that of the animals Kolbert writes about. But then, it’s no different from the grim mathematics we apply to humanity; even within our own country, let alone in our devaluing of global suffering.

Fabulous Mr. Fox

All of which may not strike anyone, least of all Wes Anderson himself, as a suitable introduction to his film Fabulous Mr. Fox, based on a story by Roald Dahl. The eponymous fox retired years earlier from stealing chickens, making a living as a newspaper columnist, but as the film begins is straining to recapture the old excitement. Acquiring a new home, in a tree overlooking three mega-farms, he springs back into action, bringing the wrath of the farmers down upon him, and on the whole surrounding community of badgers, rabbits, and so on.

Anderson shot the film using a stop-motion technique, using three-dimensional models painstakingly posed to create movement. In close-up, the models are remarkably detailed; in long shot they often look merely like silly plastic figures. George Clooney provides Fox’s voice, applied to superbly Clooneyesque dialogue: a scheming rascal who uses words like ‘existential’ and is frank about the limits of being a wild animal. The very specifically imagined society around him (I don’t know how much of this comes from Dahl’s original book) encompasses lawyers and schools (where they carry out science experiments and sports teams) and real estate agents. However, chickens and beagles (and, in a more noble vein, wolves) seem merely to be voiceless animals, while the humans are dumb and reactive, each living on a limited diet and seemingly possessing just a few mostly repulsive character traits. Yet they’re the ones in possession of the governing infrastructure, albeit with a more dynamic back and forth than we have in our own reality (the antagonists exchange ransom notes and responses, for instance).

As you see, this is a dizzying filmic universe, increasingly coherent on its own terms, but not at all on anyone else’s. I’ve never been Wes Anderson’s biggest fan (the last two, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, left me almost completely cold) but his familiar filmic vocabulary – chapter headings, a stark use of close-ups alternating with a “figures in a landscape” approach to framing elsewhere, a certain laconic terseness in the dialogue and avoidance of over-emoting, left-field musical choices – works like a dream when applied to such a peculiar, textured fantasy. Using Americans (also including Meryl Streep and Bill Murray) to voice all the animals and British actors to voice the humans even succeeds, weirdly, in evoking the lost promise of the new world rising against the aging empire.

Integrity Of An Ecosystem

The film avoids cartoon anthropomorphism. Fox is clearly a fox, relishing his skill in killing chickens with a single bite, and as I said, fatalistic about the specifics of his animalism. Obviously the film is not in any sense “realistic,” but to go back to where I started, the painstaking care behind it shimmers with respect not just for an artistic idea but for the integrity of an ecosystem, however quirkily imagined. I don’t think the free-living foxes and the badgers and the rats – let alone the factory-farmed cows and chickens – carry quite as much psychological and organizational complexity as in Anderson’s dreamy imagining, but if we lived as if they might, or at least as if they deserved the possibility of it, it would take us somewhere so much better.

Company Men

2011-09-10T22:59:00.003-04:00

We’re perpetually short of films that try to engage with the specific turmoil of these times, which makes last year’s The Company Men worthy of interest (after a low-key commercial release, it’s now on DVD and on-demand). Ben Affleck plays Bobby Walker, a full-of-himself sales executive for a stagnant conglomerate whose job gets swept away in a wave of cuts; he assumes he’ll land somewhere else within weeks, but there’s nothing out there, and he gradually faces up to the need to dismantle his debt-financed life. An equally over-stretched colleague played by Chris Cooper doesn’t even have relative youth on his side, and fares even worse. Further up the ladder, one of the company’s figureheads (Tommy Lee Jones) laments the bottom-line-driven calculations behind this human destruction, therefore sealing his own eventual fate; but he at least has resources.

$160K a year

The film is set a couple of years ago, but nothing has happened since then to make it any less relevant. The actual extent of that relevance, unfortunately, is ultimately less than you’d probably hope for. Writer-director John Wells has mainly worked in network TV, and the film feels like it; it skips along too smoothly for its own good. Conversations that in real life would extend over hours get squeezed into a few snappy lines; characters intercept each other with an improbable grasp of their mutual location and timing; one of the characters is having an improbable affair with the human resources queen who ends up firing him. On top of that, the movie’s pitched too high up the scale for optimum resonance. Even Bobby, the most lowly of the three, is making some $160,000 a year; Jones’ character is so loaded that his wife can drop $16,000 on a table and inquire into the availability of the corporate jet for a casual weekend trip.

Still, this might make you reflect how seldom you glean any actual numbers from contemporary movies, and having the information here makes Bobby’s situation much more provocatively tangible. His $160K a year finances a dreamy looking house, a Porsche lease, fees at a high-end golf club, and as far as we can tell no sense of restraint or consumerist self-denial whatsoever: in other words, pretty much what the standard ideology tells us we’re all aspiring to. But when the money stops flowing – and, just as pertinently, when the access to debt dries up – it all becomes unmanageable with shocking speed (unfortunately, the movie is fuzzier than it might be about timelines - another typical Hollywoodism). If this dream life is only tenuously accessible even at that salary level, then it’s sustainably maintainable only by a tiny minority, which raises the question of why we allow such damaging illusions to retain their prominence in our national conversation. In a nice perspective, Bobby’s brother in law, a down-to-earth contractor played by Kevin Costner, seems shocked he might even be offered $80,000 a year, half his former package.

Executive compensation

The movie contrasts this with a different kind of number talk in the corporate offices; the CEO is fixated on achieving a certain stock price level for the sake of a big merger deal, and because investing to grow the company’s revenue and basic performance won’t get it there any time soon, he inflates the bottom line by laying off employees (there’s little sense that any of these employees might be contributing anything that would actually be missed). No doubt this basic narrative has played out plenty of times in the real world, but The Company Men’s treatment is too cursory to provide much insight into it. It’s common to note how the relative magnitude of executive pay has increased in the last few decades, creating a remarkably privileged and pampered echelon of leaders (an even smaller sub-group of the tiny minority I mentioned above). Apologists for this will say exceptional individuals require exceptional motivations, and that these rewards reflect their contribution to generating wealth for stakeholders. It’s obvious though that many executives get fabulously rich whether investors do well or not, and that the justifications for these practices make no psychological sense (if someone wouldn’t give their all to earn $5 million, then why should you indulge their grandiosity by paying them $50 million?) One could make a good movie out of the deranged practices of compensation consultants, but I’m not sure anyone would believe it.

In yet another predictable touch, Bobby becomes a better person as a result of his experiences, reconnecting with his family, and rediscovering something elemental about himself by taking on some carpentry work for his brother in law. Not that this isn’t a plausible train of events, but it’s a soft take on the trauma that often flows from economic hardship, not least because plenty of families are still waiting for the upbeat ending The Company Men provides.

Internal consciousness

I think it’s possible to argue the general dumbing down of culture and public discourse is particularly regrettable in an era of hardship. The recent attention to the place of libraries in our city cast a light on those institutions as a refuge from difficult home conditions, as access to technology and knowledge and possibility. Many of us were turned off by Doug Ford’s snide comments about Margaret Atwood, but they only emphasized how you can become notable and powerful without ever stepping out of your limited, empathy-free intellectual comfort zone. If society lets us down, maybe the external pain can at least partly be fought by an expansion of internal consciousness. I know, that probably sounds idealistic, if not plain stupid. But even if a perfect set of solutions could be devised and implemented tomorrow, it would still take years to get everything back in shape. It’s not enough just to hope and wait. In the meantime, if life means anything, can’t we at least try to be smarter and deeper and better?

As I mentioned, The Company Men ultimately hints at a way back, through a fusion of rediscovering lost strengths and values and a realignment of personal and financial goals. I didn’t mention that the film is set against the shipbuilding industry, just about the most imposing possible example of an old-fashioned, blue-collar occupation, a symbol of a country that used to make things; in its last shot, it pans across a desolate industrial landscape, evoking the hundreds of workers who would have been seen there in better days, and perhaps hinting at the possibility of their return. Once again though, the film’s analysis of how this might be achieved is so superficial that this last scene might seem like pure cynical opportunism. On the whole, I guess you might give the movie some points for good intentions, but that alone won’t do much to create either jobs or elevated consciousness.

Checkmate!

2011-09-04T17:34:00.005-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2005)

When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, I briefly decided (who now knows why) that I’d like to be into chess, At that point I knew the rules, but had no particular affinity for the game. Like everyone else I found Bobby Fischer fascinating, and I always knew the name of the reigning world champion, but that was it. Eagerly embracing geekdom, I bought a couple of chess books and started studying. A few days later I decided it was too dull, and (like my earlier day-long interest in stamp collecting) that was the end of it. A few years later I bought a mini chess computer, thinking it would entertain me on road trips and the like, but I instantly tired of that too. I gave it to my brother, who used it for years afterwards.

Tiny Fragment

So I am not a chess player, and in a way it’s aligned with my not being drawn to poetry or to arts and crafts or to watching the sunset or even to lovingly working my way through the DVD extras on a particular film. I’m not someone who’s drawn to honing a tiny fragment of the universe – I’d rather sweep up a broad swathe of experience, even if only superficially. Chess is particularly problematic for me in this regard – a closed system operating under arbitrary rules; no doubt capable of stretching to its limits the human capacity for strategic imagination, but not in a way that ultimately feeds back into the world beyond the board - or at least not very efficiently. Fischer, a genius on the chessboard but increasingly dysfunctional everywhere else, seems like a particularly compelling symbol of its hermeticism.

The new documentary Game Over: Kasparov And The Machine, directed by Vikram Jayanti, tells the story of the 1997 match between Garry Kasparov, at that time the world champion and the highest-ranked player of all time, and the IBM Deep Blue computer. This was a rematch of a 1996 contest, which Kasparov won. In 1997 he started out with great panache and won the opening game. But he lost the second game, drew the next three, and then by all accounts collapsed completely in the sixth and final game, giving the win to the computer. The film has extended access to Kasparov, shown mooning five years later around the locations of the original match, and to the IBM technicians who programmed Deep Blue, and it jazzes up its fairly sober material with images of the famous "Turk", a supposed chess-playing automaton from the 1800's, and (oddly) through a whispered voice-over, presumably intended to lend events a conspiratorial air.

Beginning Again

The film has a rather melancholy air about it, particularly in how it depicts Kasparov's response to his defeat - from this evidence, he seems to have become a desolate figure casting around for a way to begin again. He lost his world title in 2000, then we see him at a cheesy-looking European tournament, then in a 2002 rematch against his old foe Anatoly Karpov, who ends up getting the better of him. These stretches strangely reminded me of the latter stretch of Scorsese’s The Color of Money, after Paul Newman has been humiliated by a young hustler and goes back out on the road to rediscover his sense of himself. But whereas Newman permanently reimmerses himself in pool, Kasparov seems increasingly aware of the world beyond the chessboard. It was no surprise when he recently retired from competitive chess, saying he wants to devote his energies to opposing Russian president Putin, whom he calls a fascist and a dictator.

Given the bias I set out, this of course seems to me like a positive outcome because of all the areas of human activity, chess seems to me like one where we might willingly accept the intervention of machine intelligence to break the spell. But the movie doesn't see it that way - the title "Game Over" is sorrowful rather than triumphant, and the reference to "The Machine" casts Deep Blue as the emblem of an overpowering industrial complex. Kasparov was particularly rattled by the second game, where the computer threw him off at one point by refusing the offer of a pawn sacrifice, and then made a mistake at the end (although Kasparov only became aware of it after he’d resigned). Kasparov regarded these moves as so quintessentially human that he assumed there was additional input into the machine’s decisions (a hidden team of grandmasters perhaps). The movie plays it in between, insinuating through montage and juxtaposition that there might be something to the claims, but going no further.

Casino Evening

While I was writing this article I went to a "casino evening" at work at which we played roulette and blackjack with fake money. For the same reasons again, I couldn't get into it (although at least now I know something about the structure of the roulette table, which may help with the occasional movie) and after a while I just sat on the sidelines and talked to whomever came along. I told them about my reservations and they said that I was being selective in my enthusiasms and that there was no difference in submitting to a movie for two hours. It seems to me that they may be right if the film is a purely commercial project that aspires to nothing beyond sending the audience home with a general feeling of satisfaction, but that they substantially undervalue the return on time invested in other kinds of cinema.

Game Over provides a few things to mull over, but itself often seems as closed off as a game of chess. It seems to aspire to move in the direction of The Corporation, to expose corporate excess (like that film by the way, it counts as a Canadian production). Kasparov claims that the match marked a turning point in the public awareness of corporate power, and fostered a heightened sense of responsibility, which seems a little egotistical to me. Some of his pique may lie in his failure to realize at the outset how much greater IBM's upside was than his. He was paid $700,000, but the company's stock rose some 15% in the wake of Deep Blue's victory, and the film estimates that the company made hundreds of millions out of it in one way or another. There was no remaining upside to allowing Kasparov a rematch, so the research was soon curtailed and the computer mothballed.

One of the film's commentators compares this to landing on the moon and then turning right round and returning home without having done anything, but for this analogy to be persuasive we'd need a better sense than the movie provides of the collateral benefits for mankind of continuing to master the game. Lacking that, Game Over often conveys a mere generalized depression, like the product of a kid who's remained at the board for too long and vaguely feels something is passing him by.

The old-timer Oscars

2011-09-04T05:49:00.003-04:00

On the eve of all the film festival glitz, it seems timely to turn to a frothier topic than usual. I don’t want to talk about the festival itself though – what could I possibly add to the existing volume of chatter? – so I’ll take the next best route and talk about the Oscars. Except that I’ll talk about Oscars that aren’t really noticed – the ones they give out to old timers. Usually, of course, these are esteemed figures who somehow failed to win in the main event, like Peter O’Toole or Lauren Bacall. Sometimes they go to people who’ve already won, presumably on the basis that once wasn’t enough; when they picked out Elia Kazan a few years back, it must have been on the basis that twice wasn’t enough.

I really liked it when they used to present these “honorary awards” as part of the main show, but I can see why they switched a few years back to doing it at a separate dinner event (condensed into barely a minute of subsequent highlights during the big show itself) – it slowed things down, and must often have seemed mystifying to the younger demographic. By all accounts, the honorary dinner is a good event, freed from the demands of prime-time pacing (to the extent the Oscars adhere to that anyway) and full of happy reminiscence. And by decoupling this aspect of things from the main event, the Oscar people felt able to increase the number of awards, from one or two to three or four a year. Last year these included Jean-Luc Godard, a stunning choice, as if they were indulging in my old game of forging a Nobel Prize for cinema. Godard didn’t show up to receive it, but he didn’t reject it either, which seems like the right balance.

Oprah!

This year’s receipients, announced in advance a few weeks back, are substantially less exciting. The first goes to Dick Smith, a make-up artist who won in 1984 for Amadeus and is reportedly known as the “godfather of make-up” (he even worked on The Godfather!) I’m sure it’s deserved, but unless you have a passion for make-up (and if I did have, I likely wouldn’t admit it) it’s hard to get too excited about it.

The second is the “Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award,” handed out every few years for outstanding contributions to humanitarian efforts. It’s been given thirty-three times over the years, and the list of recipients mostly breaks down either between producers and other industry big-shots, or else megastars like Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope (also Charlton Heston, perhaps not primarily remembered as a “humanitarian” exactly). That’s right, it’s easier to be a world-class philanthropist if you’re grossly overpaid and fawned over. This train of thought acquired greater momentum when Oprah Winfrey was announced as this year’s winner. No doubt she’s a humanitarian, but as many pointed out, the woman barely has anything to do with cinema (if they wanted to stretch the mandate, why not go all the way and award it to Nelson Mandela, given how he was played in a movie by Morgan Freeman and all?) The Academy president defended the decision in these terms: “We have a lot of people who are TV people who have made movies. It doesn't matter that they do other things. She is definitely one of us. What really counts is her contribution to humanity.”

James Earl Jones

I do wish Winfrey’s “contribution to humanity” more tangibly outdid her contribution to narcissism and terminal distraction. Still, that’s easier to take than this year’s third choice, James Earl Jones. It says a lot that even the Academy’s news release was reduced to citing his work in Conan the Barbarian, Field of Dreams and Coming to America, as well as his voice work in Star Wars and The Lion King; he did receive one Oscar nomination, for The Great White Hope in 1970, but hasn’t come close since then to doing anything award-worthy. In other words, Jones’ film career consists largely of embellishing the edges of things, seldom contributing a complex performance. This was also somewhat true of last year’s winner, Eli Wallach, but Wallach’s filmography overflows with colour and relish and quirkiness; Jones’ film career merely evokes the steady rhythm of easy pay cheques offered and received.

One online commentator mentioned Liv Ullmann, Donald Sutherland, Gena Rowlands, Alan Alda and Doris Day as more deserving recipients – I’m not sure about Alda, whose work in cinema is minor-league next to what he did in TV, but the other suggestions are unarguable; as would be Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Max von Sydow and Albert Finney. Perhaps Jones deserves a bit of extra consideration for fighting his way up during an unfriendly era for black actors. But a better way to spread the wealth in that direction would have been to recognize Melvin van Peebles, who directed the groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in the early 70’s.

Maybe next year?

It’s also a shame the Academy didn’t follow-up on their Godard move by recognizing another of the great foreign directors, such as Alain Resnais, or Godard’s New Wave compatriot Jacques Rivette. If I’d been writing this article a couple of years ago, I would have referred to compatriots in the plural, and gone on to include Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, but they both died. The honorary awards are prone to that of course, reminding you of the joke about how the title of “World’s oldest person” must be jinxed because the recipients never seem to live for very long afterwards. Arthur Penn passed away recently before the Academy could get to him, and they only reached Robert Altman with a few years to spare. Following a morbid train of thought, 81-year-old Paul Mazursky (who made Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and An Unmarried Woman) would be a worthy winner, and it might not be too early to reach out to David Lynch or Brian de Palma. Or our own David Cronenberg! But then, since Cronenberg remains more productively active than anyone else mentioned in this paragraph, there’s still hope he might win one by himself.

Well, it’s a silly thing to spend time on of course, but much as you might try to be a serious-minded film enthusiast – and I swear, I usually try pretty hard – it’s hard not to get pulled into the accompanying infrastructure of list-making and ratings and comparison: as I write, the Internet is already gearing up with predictions for next year’s Oscars (I mean, it’s barely more than six months away). That’s all fine to a point, but predicting whether people like Melissa Leo go home with an Oscar or not seems like the very essence of a lightweight pursuit. Musing on the possibility of an award for Agnes Varda – now that’s serious!

Growing in New York

2011-08-26T19:00:00.005-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2005)

Chris Terrio’s Heights is a minor film – nothing about it could ever have merited any particular attention. But it’s surprising how much pleasure one can sometimes extract from such quarters. The film focuses on a group of mostly privileged New Yorkers through a single day, during which (of course) some of their lives radically change. Elizabeth Banks is a struggling photographer a month away from getting married to her lawyer boyfriend (James Marsden). Her mother is a famous actor-director (Glenn Close) with major diva tendencies and problems in her own marriage. Meanwhile, a Vanity Fair writer works on a profile of a famous, and famously unpleasant, photographer, and a young actor auditions for Close while seeming to have something on his mind.

Lack Of Definition

The general theme is the difficulty of finding contentment and meaningful self-definition in contemporary society, which is the theme of many middlebrow movies, and not handled here with any great panache. The film has a generally cool, sculptured quality that sometimes seems to indicate a lack of intuition on Terrio’s part. For example, it becomes clear that Banks is meant to embody a particularly self-interested, closed-off kind of New York woman, someone so self-absorbed that she habitually can’t be bothered to ask for people’s names, but this has to be gleaned merely from what other people say about her, since Banks comes over simply as a nice if understandably preoccupied woman. The plotting is odd too. Of course, it’s contrived and coincidence-laden in the way these things often are, but even allowing for that, it’s peculiar how the secret life of Banks’ fiancée is exposed almost simultaneously from two different directions. And then the very nature of that secret life, which I won’t reveal here, may strike people as hokey, old-fashioned stuff.

The film expresses its theme through such devices as Close’s frequent recourse to Shakespearean and other quotation, expressing her basic emotional inadequacy and lack of empathy, and through Banks’ photography, viewed here as a means of putting up a barrier between herself and real life. This finds an echo in the unseen but much mentioned megastar photographer who sleeps with all his models and seems to use the lens as a means of control and wanton self-gratification (but then the portrayal of two problematic photographers seems like another odd duplication). The movie has an amusing sideline in somewhat bemused supporting characters quirkily grappling with their circumstances. Prime among these is George Segal as a rabbi who meets with the engaged couple, using a series of banal props and questions to steer through the issue of inter-faith marriage.

An aside - at a party at her mother’s house, Banks meets a man with a bizarre accent that he eventually identifies as being Welsh. I know something about Welsh accents and this came as a big surprise to me – I thought he was Scandinavian. It appears though that the actor Andrew Howard may indeed be Welsh, so I’m not sure what says about my own radar. Anyway, this man comes to embody all the spirit and daring and creativity that’s missing from Banks’ life. I guess it’s a Dylan Thomas allusion, although it’s true – just about any Welsh guy will do that for you.

Merchant Ivory

Heights is a Merchant Ivory production, and there’s some poignancy in the fact that Ismail Merchant died a few weeks ago. The partnership lost a bit of its luster since the heyday of A Room With A View and Howards End, but continued to be a byword for refinement and taste. I have seen just about all the films, but I’m not sure there’s a single one I’ve seen twice; the films are easy pleasures, never suggesting mysteries or complexities demanding further investigation. Consequently, I prefer the relative failures like A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, in which structural and thematic oddities allow a somewhat more interactive (albeit rather perplexed) viewing experience.

In a recent appreciation of Merchant, actor Simon Callow referred to the early Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah as “perfectly (exemplifying) the territory they made their own: the negotiation between cultures. It would be only a small overstatement to say that every film they have ever made could have as its epigraph E. M. Forster’s great phrase ‘Only Connect’.” But this connection all too often seemed like a matter of basic juxtaposition rather than meaningful investigation. Their last film Le Divorce, was certainly pleasant, but took its cultural analysis no further than swooning over French women’s love of scarves.

Merchant Ivory tried to delve into New York before, with the failed adaptation of Tama Janowicz’s Slaves Of New York. It’s probably useful that they contracted out the job to Terrio this time, but it’s also rather odd that they returned to the same territory. Except that New York, of course, continues to exert a magical pull. Close posits at one point that whereas it’s six degrees of separation everywhere else, it’s only two degrees in New York. This is a bit rich in a movie confined to such a narrow social spectrum, not to mention that the two degrees reflect narrative contrivance rather than any inherent miracle of accessibility. But still, the myth persists, and Heights plunges head first into it, depicting art galleries, the Vanity Fair offices, swanky parties, spectacular views from apartment roofs, and so on.

Still, this all seems rooted in a genuine sense of human curiosity. And the movie has no shortage of amusing small touches and lines. Not the least of these is the appearance by Segal, who I think might be the least appreciated of veteran actors. His work in Blume And Love, California Split, Loving and other 70’s films remains a marvel of regular-guy complexity, and even though he’s long slipped into minor roles, he pulls them off with a uniquely quirky, shambling kind of timing. His appearance in Heights struck me as a considerable treat.

Saving Face

Alice Wu’s Saving Face is another small film centered on contemporary New York relationships. Set in the Asian American community, it shows a successful young doctor beset by marriage pressure from her widowed mother, who doesn’t realize the daughter is gay. And then the mother gets pregnant by a man she refuses to name. Scandal and complication ensue. This is a much more vibrant, zippy creation than Heights, in a more consistently comic vein, and the characters jump warmly off the screen. It reaches an inevitably liberal, inclusive outcome, but only at the cost (again) of huge contrivance, and huge changes of attitude by numerous characters. Unlike Heights, this doesn’t seem to evidence any serious investigative intent – it’s just bulldozing to a happy ending. The film earns much goodwill just through its existence, and the actors are most beguiling, but it’s just too darn small to really care.

Conquered by the apes

2011-08-26T11:39:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid, Planet of the Apes loomed pretty large. The five films were on TV frequently, and there was also a series. It only lasted a single season, but I remember it quite well; I think for a while it was a staple of British daytime TV. Everyone always recalls Charlton Heston and the final shot of the first film, where it’s revealed that the alien planet ruled by talking apes is actually Earth in the future, but that doesn’t represent the totality of the Apes concept. The movies form a narrative loop – the end of the first sequel sends two of the apes back in time to the present day, and subsequent movies show how they provide the origin for an evolutionary wave that will first challenge and then topple mankind. It’s a grandly epic concept, but in practice meant a lot of murky skirmishing and of having to listen to Roddy McDowall in an ape mask (and if memory serves, the quality of the make-up effects fell off a lot as the series went on). Anyway, you didn’t need to be a major league Darwinologist to conclude the whole thing was nuts, and after Jaws and Star Wars changed things a few years later, the Apes films were about as exciting as faded old board games, apparently confirmed by Tim Burton’s failed attempt at kick-starting the concept ten years ago.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

It’s interesting that the new version of the story, Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, opened a few weeks after Project Nim, the documentary about the 1970’s attempt to educate a chimpanzee in human sign language. As I wrote here a few weeks ago, Nim remains a potent symbol because he embodies the continuing duality of our views on animals: identifiable enough to be subjected to such a project, but different enough to be discarded when it didn’t work out. The early stages of the new Apes film could almost be a fictional version of Nim’s story – James Franco plays a research scientist for a bottom-line driven corporation, using chimpanzees in clinical trials for anti-Alzheimer’s and related applications; when the axe suddenly falls on the whole program, he takes home a baby from a treatment-enhanced mother. Caesar, as they name him, progresses along a learning curve far exceeding that of any human baby, but just like Nim, the cuteness falls away as he gets older, and he eventually gets into trouble, finding himself locked up in a hellish ape facility. Unlike the other downtrodden inmates of course, he has the resources to fight back.

Although all of this is obviously highly simplified and condensed, it’s probably as sane an origin story for the Planet of the Apes myth as one could ever devise (obviously that’s not the same as saying it actually is sane). The movie moves along cleanly and sympathetically, building in a satisfying dose of spectacle and scope for visceral identification, always feeling like a bit more than a calculated action machine. It cleverly explains not only why the apes gain strength, but also why the humans almost simultaneously succumb to catastrophic weakness; the path to more films is triumphantly well-lit at the end.

Limitations of the apes

At times it’s easy to say the digital work looks a bit artificial (I generally found the baby Caesar more fake-looking than the adult), but if you can remind yourself there was a time when you were impressed merely by Roddy McDowall in a mask, then you get past it. Some found Franco a low-key protagonist, but then he’s not really the protagonist at all, but rather a privileged witness to momentous events. It’s not particularly brutal or bloody, which might be viewed as limiting the impact, but on the other hand allows it a somewhat more cerebral tone than it might have had. In many ways, you might respond to it less as a film than as a logistical project, where you can admire the design and execution even if it’s hardly relevant to your own life.

That’s the limitation of the picture I suppose – that even with the head start Project Nim provides it, it doesn’t carry any great moral or thematic charge. The film’s reflection on scientific ethics doesn’t go much beyond the notion that, well, mistreating apes is bad, particularly when that’s propelled by a particularly unashamed focus on bottom-line profits. It doesn’t construct a very deep or complex universe – until the home stretch, it really only has a handful of significant characters and locations. As I mentioned, it neatly plants the seeds that’ll grow to choke off humanity’s major head start, but this means it limits its capacity for broader metaphorical impact. I mean, global finances, debt crises, unemployment burdens and un-faced environmental wretchedness provide a plausible basis for predicting the tottering of our species (if not quite its surrender to any other species, except perhaps for the ants), but there’s no hint of that in Wyatt’s film: the rise of the planet of the apes takes place very specifically in middle-class San Francisco, and frankly, it appears they can largely take the blame for it (particularly the British guy in their midst). It’s surprising because, you know, it’s not really Republican territory.

Just a movie

In the end, there’s something broadly comforting about the film; however enveloping the narrative might be for as long as it lasts, it’s very plainly just a movie. Since I imagine a large percentage of viewers will ultimately find themselves rooting for the apes rather than the humans, it may provide the sense of moral cleansing, of allowing us the illusion of carrying a rounded perspective on our excesses (there was a similar reversal at the heart of Avatar, popularly regarded not just as a big movie but also an important one). But again, this only makes it easy not to think about more imminent threats. Like the viral-based experiments it depicts, it pumps its audience with a manageable dose of malignancy, thus inoculating them from more violent infestations. That is, fantasizing about the threat of the apes is much easier than fully tuning into the stuff that’s actually happening (including, with dark irony, their severely endangered status).

The film isn’t particularly sensitive to spoilers – there’s not much chance I guess that a movie called Rise of the Planet of the Apes would fail to deliver any actual rising. The final scenes suggest the possibility of what we might call a two-state solution – for now at least, the apes’ interest is in attaining freedom and dignity, not world domination (based on what’s depicted in the film, it’s unlikely they could even process that concept). But obviously the sequel won’t have them stopping there – there’s not much chance a franchise built around the “Planet of the Apes” concept will have them settling for less than, well, the planet. It’s hard to predict whether that’ll evoke horror or resignation.

Fighting Back

2011-08-21T12:54:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2009)

I completely agree with the praise for Mickey Rourke’s performance in The Wrestler. I can’t remember a film that so consistently and fully conveyed an actor’s heavy, weary topography; by its end you start to ache and shiver in sympathy. He plays Randy “the Ram” Robinson, a professional wrestler some twenty years past his best days, but still grinding, in sparsely attended makeshift arenas and promotional events, supplementing his income at a local grocery store. With his marriage long evaporated and virtually estranged from his daughter, his only vaguely meaningful relationship is with a stripper (Marisa Tomei), herself still going long after it made sense (if it ever did), but she strains to see him as much more than a customer.

Mickey Rourke

Rourke, of course, brings to this a back story easily capable of being seen as paralleling the character’s (whether or not it really does is another matter – down-and-out in Hollwood terms is only relative penury after all). He was one of the 80’s hottest actors, if not in box office terms, at least in his ability to capture the imagination of the more provocative directors. He worked for Coppola, Nicolas Roeg, Michael Cimino, Barbet Schroeder. This petered out in the early 90’s (Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man seems to have been the main point of no return), and Rourke’s visibility became increasingly confined to tabloid reports of brawls and failed relationships and eccentric attachments to ugly little dogs. In recent years he’s had a few decent supporting parts (Domino, Sin City) and now finally found a director (Darren Aronofsky) willing to roll the dice big on him, although reportedly for little or no salary.

It’s only in its scale, perhaps, that Rourke’s narrative of feast and famine differs from hundreds of thousands of lives lived. It’s impossible to visit a small town without unearthing at least one whatever-happened-to narrative of the high school sports star and stud who never got much going after that. The financial bust may throw countless others into this narrative – fat times evaporating, never to be quite reclaimed in the same way. Aronofsky generally manages to evoke this universality while avoiding overt symbolism. One exception, contrasting Rourke’s humiliated but stoic walk to his new deli counter job with the past glories of his entrance into the ring, is witty enough to pass muster.

In scenes like this Rourke shows off a surprising nimbleness (even in his heyday, his dominant mode was dour/belligerent, with a hint of wounded). But his primary lot here is to suffer. Aronofsky stages several wrestling matches, and if that’s not Rourke himself being pounded and smacked and jumped on and torn open and pierced with a staple gun, then it’s real hard to tell. The authenticity of his suffering is really the film’s biggest single idea, and it makes sense when Tomei’s character mentions The Passion Of The Christ, another drama that beat up its protagonist for the best part of two hours. I was not a fan of Mel Gibson’s horrid film, seeing it mainly as a neurotic expression of its creator’s self-loathing. No such thoughts occur in The Wrestler, which somehow manages to map virtually every inch of Rourke’s flesh without seeming homoerotic or gloating.

Darren Aronofsky

That’s partly, again, because it’s all so plainly just a job. The film contributes some honorable anthropological insight in matter-of-factly showing the wrestlers’ pre-match negotiations on who’s going to do what to whom (thoughts arise that it could only possibly be a job for someone with a definite masochistic streak, but the film doesn’t go there). Aronofsky moves breezily through this – the film might not sound overtly commercial, but its pacing and packaging certainly owe more to a mainstream sensibility than to, say, self-defined cultural examinations such as The Secret Of The Grain. It’s still a canny move for the young filmmaker. He came to prominence with the super-smart low-budget Pi, and then made the traumatic Requiem For A Dream and the muddled, mostly derided The Fountain. He’s been mentioned, as most young directors are now, as a candidate to direct a superhero movie, maybe Robocop. Taken on its own terms, it’s a career many would kill for, but still, not very substantial in the overall cinematic scheme of things, and certainly not suggesting much artistic progression. The Wrestler is the kind of house extension that returns 100% on the investment.

Some of its elements are conventional, such as the overall relationship with Tomei and that with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), but not off-puttingly so. Tomei’s character, as I mentioned, is a parallel example of competing with the youngsters. The film has several scenes of her nightly humiliation, sometimes openly derided as an old woman, at others just rejected. Tomei has undergone her own travails, her Oscar for My Cousin Vinny often held up as one of the all-time silliest outcomes. But she plugged away and got a second nomination for In The Bedroom; after Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, she may now be cornering the market on middle-aged nudity. She’s great in the role, but Aronofsky doesn’t seem much interested in the character beyond the comparison with, and what she represents for, Randy. Wood’s character has even less independent life, beyond a mild suggestion that she may be a lesbian.

Ongoing Possibilities

The bull-headedly fatalistic ending shares something with Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino - in each, an old man embraces a point of no return. Gran Torino is more cartoonish in some ways, and certainly more conventional in its use of an established star image, but ultimately more audacious I think. One wishes The Wrestler resonated a little more, that it was about more than the man himself. The downside of Aronofsky’s respect for Rourke is that he almost squeezes all the fun out of the exercise (which, again, is why it’s so delightful when the actor gets to loosen up in that deli sequence). Quentin Tarantino’s revival of overlooked icons has been hit and miss (Travolta and to a lesser degree Robert Forster owe him a ton, but he couldn’t do much for David Carradine) and you wonder whether The Wrestler will really suggest to other filmmakers the ongoing possibilities in Rourke, more than it confirms the squandering of the old ones.

You can perhaps tell that my enthusiasm for the film, although genuine, is a little more respectful than I’d like; I don’t think it’s the kind of work that gets reactions tumbling out of you. But maybe this too is appropriate: if we reacted more robustly to Randy’s story, maybe that could only be at the cost of betraying his story’s very narrow, if unusually gaudy, parameters.

Jean Renoir

2011-08-19T18:31:00.003-04:00

Jean Renoir was one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. He was born in 1894, the son of painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, and started making films in the silent era, blossoming in the 1930’s with a remarkable series of eloquent, socially conscious works. La grande illusion, made in 1937, still stands as one of the finest pictures about war, and La regle du jeu, from 1939, has occasionally jostled with Citizen Kane for the crown of best film ever made. In the 1940’s, Renoir worked in the US for a decade or so, before a glorious return to Europe in the 1950’s. He made his last film in 1970, and died in 1979.

Renoir in America

Compared to some other great directors, it’s more difficult to convey anything of Renoir’s achievements in just a few sentences (even while allowing how such attempts are always hopelessly reductive). He’s often cited for the following observation in La regle du jeu: “There's one thing, do you see, that's terrifying in this world, and this is that every man has his reasons.” Actually, people often just cite those last five words, emphasizing Renoir’s good humour and empathy; the full quotation, of course, is much darker, acknowledging how society is a network of threats as well as of possibilities (one of his last pictures was a variation on the Jekyll and Hyde story). Renoir’s films often overflow with character and incident and interconnection, with a sense of delight and engagement that never becomes merely pictorial or indulgent. There’s nothing shrill or over-emphatic in his work; he coaxes out meaning rather than imposing it. The depth of his work, I find, tends to grow on you over time - again, even more than for any great director.

Renoir’s five American films, if not his very best, may form an obvious starting point for the uninitiated, and I recently rewatched two of these. The Southerner (for which Renoir received his only directing Oscar nomination, losing to Billy Wilder for The Lost Weekend) was made in 1945. It’s the story of Tucker, a poor farmer and his family, breaking away from the big local employer to make it on his own on an abandoned patch of land, keeping on going despite heartbreaking setbacks. Where La regle du jeu took place within an intricately established set of social and moral codes, The Southerner examines a country still being formed; when the aristocrats hunt in the former film, it’s mere ritual, but in the latter it’s for their basic survival. Already though, the sparse community has accumulated a store of myths and ideologies; the old grandmother constantly recalls how things were even tougher in her own younger days, and Tucker is constantly tempted by his best friend to join him on the factory floor, where he’d earn the unimaginable sum of $7 a day. Most instructive is the character of Devers, a prospering farmer on the adjacent plot of land; he despises Tucker on sight, deriding him as someone with ideas above his station, even though Devers fought his way up in much the same way. Later on it comes out that Devers wanted the land for himself, and Tucker’s intervention is blocking his dreams of greater capitalist achievement. Looked at now, you see an omen there of how profoundly America’s vision of itself as the land of achievement would be poisoned by vested interests and a calcified sense of entitlement.

Renoir in America

For now though, the film is primarily optimistic, allowing a truce between the two antagonists on the basis of a shared interest in catching a local catfish, and finding unambiguous nobility in the belief of the next season being better than the last. At the same time, the ending acknowledges the farmer’s dependence on those confining factories for the plough and the rifle and much else that fuels the dream. Every man has his reasons, and in such a time and place, they’re rendered particularly stark.

A couple of years later, Renoir made the lesser-known The Woman on the Beach, a very strange and rather lonely piece. It’s essentially a triangle of desire, constructed around a troubled coast guard (Robert Ryan), a great artist who’s now blinded (Charles Bickford) and the artist’s wife, a self-described “tramp” who severed her husband’s optic nerve with a bottle during a drunken fight. In The Southerner, Renoir immersed himself brilliantly into a culture far removed from his own, but The Woman on the Beach starts with a weird, turbulent dream sequence and plays out in a largely deserted, almost abstract environment, owing relatively little to naturalism. The closing stretch feels as much like a dramatized psychology manual as a cinematic narrative, but up to then it’s remarkably spare and haunting, a film noir carved out of sand and loss.

The River

The River, made in 1951, forms a bridge of sorts between the American-set films and the subsequent return to Europe. It’s also in English, but set in India, and it was Renoir’s first film in colour. It’s a simple story of an English family; the father owns a factory and the mother essentially has one child after another; the oldest girl develops a crush on a military officer who comes to stay next door. India’s majestic complexity and serenity (at least as depicted here; the film doesn’t claim to be sociologically all-inclusive) interacts with the girl’s growing uncertainty about her place in the world to form a gorgeously rich meditation on the journey toward self-understanding and acceptance. As I mentioned, The Woman on the Beach deploys dreams to dramatize inner fractures; when The River uses fantasy, it’s an illustration of the multiplicity of possibility and the capacity for self-invention.

At other times, the film is surprisingly raw: a father muses out loud – not unkindly – that maybe it would be better if his Anglo-Indian daughter had never been born (she matter-of-factly observes simply that she was born) and later – when a young boy is killed by a snake – opines that maybe it’s not so bad if the occasional child escapes submitting to the restrictions of adulthood. Such statements, of course, would conventionally be viewed as “incorrect” if not reprehensible, but in The River we understand them as being rooted in a deep humanity, expressing itself by searching the boundaries of things.

Freedom is vital to Renoir’s cinema. La grande illusion is about escape from confinement, and in one of his last films he revisited the prison camp through a protagonist who won’t stop escaping. The closing scenes of his final film, Le petit theatre de Jean Renoir, have a town coming together to celebrate an unconventional domestic arrangement. But he’s always aware of the inherent limits of such freedom, and of those of the frail humans who seek to attain it. If you look to cinema to inform and enrich your ideas on how to live and love and think, Renoir’s films are a necessary destination.

Learning and laughing

2011-08-12T12:35:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2009)

It sometimes seems every other movie has some kind of alternative reality take – parallel universes, perceived realities that turn out to be dreams, people revealed as ghosts. But that well is becoming very shallow I think, whereas our more mundane alternative realities – the ones we invent through our misunderstandings and limitations – are infinitely fascinating. That’s in part a gloomy statement – the sad misapprehension of what’s a reasonably attainable and “good” lifestyle, and what’s a reasonable way of structuring the finances on that, just keeps knocking the ground from under people, with no end in sight. But there’s obvious comedy, even if often dark, in how we’re able to convince ourselves of all kinds of dubious notions – on what to wear, how to love, how to express ourselves – that vast category of bumbling human quasi-progress that ends in the bewildered question: What was I thinking?

What Was I Thinking?

As a bit of a space cadet, I’ve racked up plenty of those. For years I complained about my collars being too tight, never thinking of changing up a size until someone pointed it out to me. I’ve spent weeks and months on personal projects of various kinds, which now seem (if I stumble across them at the bottom of the closet or suchlike) as deranged episodes of prolonged possession by some god of banality. Just about every day, since I’m not that smooth or generally talkative, something comes out of my mouth sub optimally, but mostly now I just move on from it. I’ve avoided the bigger traps – like getting married to someone flagrantly unsuitable – but we all know such achievements involve more luck than skill. Actually, what doesn’t? We all have our favourite gurus or role models, people whose upward progress through life seems to us to prove something about our own untapped capacity, but I figure that’s merely focusing on the high end of a chaotic bell curve. A whole bunch of people start the race, many doing much the same thing initially; increments of skill and luck dictate the few who penetrate the winners circle, but if we could run the race all over again, it’d probably all turn out differently. I’m not saying we can’t make a difference in our lives; on the contrary, the harder it gets to engineer our desired outcomes, all the more reason for trying to diagnose what we can influence, for figuring out our own form of sustainable contentment, and then doing it.

Humpday

That’s a rather roundabout way into Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, but I think the film is really about the joys and perils of the human (especially the male) capacity for talking oneself into just about anything. It’s about two college buddies, suddenly reunited when one of them returns from foreign travels; the other, now married, is more of a white picket fence type (much as he resists that characterization). During a drunken evening, the local amateur art-porn festival - “Humpfest” – comes up in conversation, leading to the notion that no porn could be more artistic than two straight guys having sex for the first time on camera. Once the concept’s out there, it won’t go away, and the film’s marketing doesn’t hide the fact the two buddies make it to a hotel room. What happens then, of course, cannot be revealed here.

It is, no question, a small movie, shot in around ten days on a very low budget, with only a few locations and speaking parts, and an improvisatory style. But it’s also as big a movie as you should possibly need, because it taps one of cinema’s happiest miracles; how there’s always something new to be said about the human comedy. The obvious question in this case is what’s really driving them. Are all straight men secretly bisexual, however deeply hidden? Once committed, do they just keep going mainly out of sheer stubbornness and competitiveness (as a modern variation on bull-headed male power games)? Is this very ambiguity maybe the main thing, providing to otherwise stupid decisions the status of boundary-breaking performance art? When they talk about all of this, are they saying what they mean, or tapping into easy clichés and received notions? Is it even possible for anyone to navigate the difference? Would guys who were less superficially intelligent, less facile in supposedly explaining their motivations and perspectives, ever tie themselves into such a knot?

That last point connects the film with the brilliant Eric Rohmer, who for over forty years has been chronicling the pitfalls and limitations of articulacy, although of course the basic premise isn’t so very Rohmer-like. Humpday is a funny movie too, just in the unforced way in which spirited guys are funny when they flail around, and hey, isn’t it all just a big comedy anyway when you think about it? You roll easily with the premise, and while some elements seem more questionable, the very fact that you engage with it on such a forensic level – without simply saying, well, that would never happen - seals its overall success. And the ending, while appropriately wrapping up the immediate situation, leaves plenty of broader loose ends, because, you know, that’s just the way most things are.

Funny People

Judd Apatow’s Funny People, by contrast, is a big movie, with big stars and all the trimmings. Adam Sandler plays (very well) a big star comedian, not unlike himself except (one supposes) nastier and lonelier, which has him poised for self-reassessment when he’s diagnosed as potentially terminally ill. Seth Rogen plays his assistant, and a motley group stretching from Eminem to James Taylor show up as themselves. So needless to say it’s another inside showbiz movie, as if that wasn’t already the most over-examined milieu in American cinema (Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened, from last year, is an example of a film that’s impeccably made and seemingly quite true to its subject, but which to you and me is basically beyond pointless).

But Apatow demonstrates surprising scope and seriousness of purpose: the film is generally funny because they are, indeed, funny people, but as the old cliché puts it, comedy is hard (it’s dying that’s easy), and there’s a lot of that in the mix. Since I’m throwing out high-flying praise today, it somewhat reminds me of Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy – perhaps the best-ever examination of the discipline’s mechanics. Of course, that’s a very generous comparison for many reasons, not least because Funny People flirts with darker overtones without really embracing them – Scorsese broadened his film into a broader (and quite far-sighted) critique of media-dominated social discourse, whereas there’s no sign Apatow ever reads anything more than the entertainment section. But at least his movie suggests he can learn, maybe big-time.

Last Tango in Paris

2011-08-12T00:43:00.003-04:00

The cover of my DVD copy of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris calls the film “as scandalous as it is scintillating” and goes on like this: “He (Brando) is a 45-year-old American living in Paris, haunted by his wife’s suicide. She (Maria Schneider) is a 20-year-old Parisian beauty engaged to a young filmmaker. Though nameless to each other, these tortured souls come together to satisfy their sexual cravings in an apartment as bare as their dark, tragic lives.” Which I think is pretty much how people usually sum up Last Tango. But watching the film again recently after a seven-year gap, it struck me how unequal that is to the thrilling experience it provides.

Maria Schneider

If nothing else, that description seems to promise a much more straightforward creation than Bertolucci actually delivers. The two certainly have sex (some of it famously provocative in conception, although somewhat less so in what’s actually shown on screen), but not as much as they talk, and seldom in what you could call normal conversations; often they exchange sheer streams of consciousness, not even always in the same language, at one point abandoning language altogether and exulting in a stream of nonsense sounds. Her engagement to the young filmmaker, although she seems to be planning to go through with it, arises on a whim, and it’s barely clear whether their relationship would exist in the absence of a camera. It’s not precise I think to say he’s haunted by his wife’s suicide – it’s too recent to belong to the past in the way that term implies: it’s rather that her suicide is the redefining event on which all his short-term actions are necessarily based, whether as ways of assimilating it or of denying it.

Maria Schneider died recently, and the obituaries reported she had a difficult life, deeply regretting her participation in Bertolucci’s film and the director’s treatment of her: she called him “more of a gangster than a movie director” and said he and Brando “completely manipulated” her. You can see this on the screen I think, and the sense of bearing witness to an abuse may cause the viewer something of an ethical dilemma. Her presence in the film (“performance” doesn’t quite seem like the right word) has often been patronized, if not ridiculed, but I don’t know how the film could be any more effective with anyone else in the role: unwittingly or not, she provides the compelling spectacle of a woman whose personal instincts are simply overwhelmed, forcing her to grab at points of coherence even as they melt away before her.

Marlon Brando

Still, Last Tango in Paris isn’t primarily her film of course, not by a long way. It’s astonishing that Brando made the picture in the year after The Godfather (but before it revitalized his legend with its huge success). He’s great in that film of course, but still relies on an accent and make-up and actorly tricks: it lays the groundwork for the undemanding cartoonish contributions he made to most of his later movies. In Last Tango he plays a man slightly younger than himself, conscious of aging and of gaining weight, but still ravishingly handsome and charismatic. Bits of his past history evoke Brando’s own life and films, but for the last five years he’s been living with his wife in the rundown hotel she owned. This sense of exile and stagnation suggests he might as plausibly be liberated as haunted by her loss, even if it’s a necessarily bumpy and non-linear liberation. And it’s the sense of the liberation as that of Marlon Brando himself, undergoing his own last artistic tango, which primarily shapes the film’s impact now.

He’s simply astonishing in the film, demonstrating an almost unimaginable resourcefulness and unpredictability. I doubt the character is entirely coherent in psychological terms, but he’s coherent as Brando, as an actor, as a somewhat discredited force grasping at a trauma as a means of reorientation. Many of the scenes feel rather like acting class exercises; I don’t mean at all that they feel contrived or stilted, but rather that they carry a sense of surrendering to an abstraction as a way of better finding oneself. And for all the film’s earthiness, it feels plugged into higher powers. When we first see Brando, bellowing with agony in the street, the camera swoops down on him from above, as if God were deciding to invest all his creative force in this one vessel; his initial connection with the girl has the distinct sense of supernatural predestination about it

Bernardo Bertolucci

The miracle of the film is that it’s nevertheless as enveloping as a story, with a beginning, middle and end (an ending that plays effectively into the psychological mystery, even if it’s primarily another improvisational flourish). The more one knows of Bertolucci, of course, the richer it seems. He was just 32 when he made Last Tango, after a series of remarkable early films. He tried something not dissimilar a few years after it, with La Luna, starring Jill Clayburgh as an opera singer drawn after her husband’s death into an incestuous relationship with her drug-addicted teenage son. In many ways, La Luna is even more dazzlingly executed than Last Tango – I don’t think it contains a single scene not marked by some near-miracle of composition or framing – and Bertolucci goes even further in rendering every step immaculately strange, crafting astonishing relationships and behavior, exploring the impossible grandness of a life lived as though it were art.

But the film was mostly viewed as a failure – it was too easy to see it as merely excessive and rather sordid, and Clayburgh couldn’t possibly ventilate its centre in the way of a Brando. After Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man – another fascinating but perhaps overly fragmented work – the director was quiet for six years before reemerging with The Last Emperor. He won an Oscar for it, but his subsequent films, although always immaculate and surprising in at least some sense, have mostly been assessed as disappointments. My favourite is his 1998 Besieged, another story of “tortured souls” and “sexual cravings,” with Bertolucci’s mastery of the camera and his sensitivity to design and human movement and the connections between things creating something constantly alluring. When I saw his 2003 film The Dreamers, I made a note that it could almost be interpreted as a sad parable on the perils of loving film too much; whether or not that’s right, he hasn’t made a picture since.

Still, Bertolucci’s body of work is one of the most valuable in modern cinema, and Last Tango in Paris is one of the great fusions of actor and director; scintillating beyond doubt, and sure, perhaps even scandalous, if it’s scandalous to have left such a challenging mark on film history.

Reds

2011-08-07T16:44:00.003-04:00

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2006)

Warren Beatty has acted in only 22 films, and in only 8 in the last 30 years. Arguably half the list consists of mostly forgotten oddities; he’s had an abidingly odd affinity for fluffy comedies. He’s done nothing since the flop Town & Country in 2001, and apart from a dalliance with the David Carradine role in Kill Bill, there’s barely been any suggestion that he might do anything, except for the implausible but persistent rumours of political ambition. His box office power is certainly gone now, but despite all the evidence to the contrary, it’s hard to give up on the prospect that even at 70, he might pull off something remarkable almost out of nowhere, just as he unleashed the feisty Bulworth in 1998. It’s because the handful of films that endure – Bonnie And Clyde, Shampoo, The Parallax View and a few others – are so abidingly resonant, and although Beatty’s official role in those differs, he’s clearly always more than an actor for hire, always densely woven into the fabric.

Rundown On Reds

Today though I thought I'd write about Reds, which seems to be getting some attention lately. This is Beatty’s 1981 epic about journalist John Reed, who witnessed the Russian revolution first-hand and wrote Ten Days That Shook The World. Reds chronicles these events, as well as Reed’s romance with fellow journalist Louise Bryant, played by Diane Keaton. Jack Nicholson plays Eugene O’Neill, who had an affair with Bryant, and Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for playing Emma Goldman. Beatty won four nominations – acting, directing, writing, producing – for it; this was the second film in a row on which he’d done that (the first was Heaven Can Wait), an achievement no one has ever replicated. Reds won him an Oscar for directing, although I think it was generally regarded as one of those Oscars based in a sense of obligation rather than passion.

Reds is primarily remembered as an achievement in audacity and business savvy rather than artistic virtue – it’s the movie where Beatty convinced Paramount to put up $40 million to make a movie about Communists. It didn’t do particularly well financially, and its epic length (200 minutes) may continue to limit the likelihood of people sitting through it on cable. I did watch it again recently though. And then a recent issue of Vanity Fair had a long article about the film, extracted from a forthcoming book on Beatty by Peter Biskind. Beatty is the subject of a disproportionate number of books by reputable critics – David Thomson wrote one too.

Biskind says that Reds today “still seems as fresh as the moment it was released – this despite the fact that the lure of the idealism it dramatizes seems even more alien today than it did in 1981, given the current cynicism about politics.” The lure of the actors is central to this magnetism: “The intensity between Beatty and Keaton is tangible on-screen and gives the film its heart.” Roger Ebert called the film a Dr Zhivago for the thinking man, and that’s apt, although the man in question needn’t be that deep a thinker. Beatty and Keaton are dripping with old style glamour, and many of their scenes are shaded with Beatty’s penchant for light comedy. In one scene for example, Keaton stands outside the kitchen door passing on important information, and he’s on the other side messing up the kitchen with his inept attempts to make a meal. Beatty is regularly accused of narcissism, and Reds would have to be a prime exhibit for that allegation.

Willingness To Gamble

The film’s most interesting formal device is the use of the so-called witnesses – real-life interviews with elderly contemporaries of Reed and Bryant interspersed with the action – they include Adela Rogers St. John, Henry Miller, George Jessel and many more. Beatty doesn’t really use the witnesses to support his depiction of events, but rather to illustrate its limitations – their recollections falter, they contradict each other, they go off on tangents, forming a tumble of human frailty. Without seeing the interview footage that wasn’t used, it’s difficult to know how exploitative Beatty’s use of the veterans might be. What’s interesting to me is how the witnesses’ apparent purpose doesn’t seem to have influenced Beatty’s approach to the narrative itself, which he tells in a linear old-Hollywood fashion, devoid of any chaos or intimations of authorial uncertainty.

In the Vanity Fair article, Beatty says: “Reds marked the end of something, in the subject matter and the willingness to gamble…Reds is a political movie. It begins with politics and it ends with politics.” But actually, literally, it begins with Diane Keaton and ends with her, after Reed’s death. It constantly mixes personal and political travails to an extent that leaves it quite unclear what Beatty regards as the greatest tragedy. In the latter stretches, Reed is trapped inside Russia and Bryant embarks on a long and hazardous journey to find him. The troubles of these two little people shouldn’t amount to a hill of beans against the bigger picture, but as in so many movies, the final confirmation of their bond almost seems to mitigate the crumbling of the greater vision. The film is fairly good at dramatizing the squabbling that consumes the emergent American left, and the crushing bureaucracy that instantly takes hold in Russia, but again presents these primarily as matters of frustrated ambition and wounded pride and petty self-preservation and so forth.

Work Of A Marxist

Thomson says, “Reds is still a fascinating picture with passages of greatness – but it never seems the work of a Marxist.” That might be considered a facetious criticism under the circumstances. Except that we've just had Syriana and Good Night, And Good Luck and other movies that if not actually seeming Marxist, are certainly more consistently ideological than Reds ever contemplates. It seems to me actually that Beatty’s comment about Reds marking the end of something makes most sense in purely personal terms, in that he never marshaled his talents on such a scale again. And it’s not so inconceivable that he might confuse a self-diagnosis as a national prescription – he’s been a celebrity longer than many of us have been alive, and even now, his name regularly comes up as a semi-plausible Presidential candidate, despite a total absence of credentials other than, of course, the vague appeal of a counterbalance to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

None of this diminishes the film’s uniqueness, or the remarkableness of its existence. But I recently wrote about how I came out of V For Vendetta – a much less interesting film – seething with anger against our current state of things. Reds surely ought to provoke something similar, but settles for poignancy and regret. Presumably this is a true gauge of Beatty’s view of things, which probably only confirms the limits of his potential as a politician.