Fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2005)

First actually, some late summer movies I didn’t already write about. Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm was indeed an oddly grim enterprise, cluttered looking and claustrophobic, carrying a rather fussy and obsessive air. This turned off many critics, but I rather liked the sense of Gilliam’s tetchiness and skepticism interacting with potentially merely fanciful material. John Singleton’s Four Brothers is a mixture of gritty blue-collar local colour crossed with ingratiating violent excess. After this and Shaft, Singleton’s status as a black pioneer (the first to win an Oscar nomination for directing, for Boyz ‘N the Hood) seems well and truly dissipated, although the film is undoubtedly entertaining in its swaggering way. The Constant Gardener, one of the year’s most highly praised films, had dazzling technique, but seemed to me awfully reliant on contrivance, and its sensual pleasures probably served to blunt its political impact. And I finally saw The Wedding Crashers toward the end of its run. It starts off great, with a near-inspired sex-and-revelry montage, but becomes increasingly plodding, ending up barely sentient.

I also went back to see Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, the only film this year that I thought demanded an almost immediate second visit. I wrote a few months ago that it “rapidly exhausts your powers of absorption on first viewing.” The revisit rendered the film’s structural intricacies considerably less daunting, allowing its human delicacy, particularly as enacted by the several fine leading actresses, to come to the fore.

Lord of War is a fascinating chronicle of a big-time arts dealer – one of those Hollywood movies that thrills you with its overall prowess, and its ability to grapple so confidently with complex subject matter, even as you regret its conventionality in a host of ways; it certainly doesn’t soften the edges of Nicolas Cage’s amoral protagonist as much as you might have feared. Pretty Persuasion, about nasty goings-on in a California high school, has all kinds of appealingly sleazy ideas, but persistently weak execution. Given its shameless adherence to formula, Lasse Hallstrom’s An Unfinished Life entertained me much more than should have been possible. I generally find Hallstrom’s films dreary and shallow, but Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman, making even the lamest line sound like mulled wine, held me captive. Flightplan looked from the trailer like a hi-tech, super-mystifying version of Hitchcock’s Lady Vanishes, but didn’t turn out that way; it engaged in some conventional if generally effective yarn-spinning before taking off into overkill, with only Jodie Foster’s anxious centre to keep it visible from the earth.

Some more film festival movies I caught up with later.

Jean-Marc Vallee’s C.R.A.Z.Y.is Canada’s nominee for this year’s foreign film Oscar, and hopes are building up that it can replicate The Barbarian Invasions’ recent success there. It certainly has a shot, but given what we know of the Oscars, is this necessarily a sign of highest-level achievement? Vallee’s film, the chronicle of a boy growing up from the early 60’s to the mid-80’s, is packed with colour and incident; it’s imaginative and well sustained, with a great sense of time and place, and an admirable taste for sexual ambiguity. But the strenuousness evident in the title (which consists of the initials of the boy and his five brothers) also winds through the film, most egregiously in a dubious Jesus parallel (the boy is born on Christmas day, seems to have healing powers, etc.) but also in the somewhat neurotic pacing. Still, it’s certainly a superior example of the wacky family nostalgia genre.

Shane Black was the hot scriptwriter of Lethal Weapon and The Long Kiss Goodbye; apparently tired of such hackwork, he disappeared for a long while and is now back as the writer-director of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which melds his tired old action territory with something more quirky and (in a cozy Hollywood kind of way) experimental. Robert Downey Jr (highly resourceful and magnetic as always) is a petty criminal who comes to Hollywood for a screen test and gets drawn into a complex murder plot. The dialogue is flashy and glib (for instance, the characters frequently correct one another’s grammar) and Downey’s voice over continuously acknowledges the artifice of what we’re watching – a device that’s pleasantly diverting and occasionally even stimulating at times, but only emphasizes the dispensability of the core plot. It all has a distinct air of smart-ass-ism, and I doubt that Black is headed anywhere that Tarantino hasn’t been already, but that’s still more satisfying than where he used to be.

Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale is a marked contrast with his earlier, conventionally quirky movies, and comes as a surprise after his humdrum writing work with Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic) and his thin humour pieces for The New Yorker. This seems to reflect the new film’s autobiographical roots – the set-up of two New York writers whose marriage is breaking up, and the two boys caught in the middle, apparently parallels Baumbach’s own teenage experience. The film has lots of funny lines, but also sustains a uniquely dour, rather squirmy quality, shot through with denial and displacement and self-loathing – the ending provides only the most minimal degree of closure. It’s a most distinctive and subtly weighty work, but with the feeling of a one-off, although I hope I’m wrong. 

Shopgirl is the adaptation of Steve Martin’s novella, written by and starring Martin and directed by Anand Tucker. Claire Danes plays the Saks Fifth Avenue worker caught between Martin’s computer millionaire and a grungy unsophisticate played by Jason Schwartzmann; she’s the best she’s ever been, and is virtually solely responsible for whatever nuance the film seems to have. Otherwise it’s wistful to the point of invisibility, carrying an unmerited notion of itself as a universal fable. Martin’s humour is largely absent, to be replaced by, well, nothing really.

Capote recreates Truman Capote’s writing of In Cold Blood, his famous “non-fiction novel” about a brutal Kansas murder in 1960; the writing stretched over years, and the end result transformed the writer’s reputation, but left him so drained that he never completed another full-length work. Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent as Capote, and the film is extremely subtle in depicting both his initial confident manipulation of his own image, and the degree to which this biter is ultimately bitten by the weight of the project and of his own complicity in the fate of the two accused men. I admired the film a lot, but I must admit to not finding it particularly engrossing at times – its economy and restraint engender a slight feeling of monotony, and I’m not sure that someone who lacked a basic preexisting sense of Capote would know at all what to make of it.

Much more next time

 

Alec and Jim's excellent adventure

I would never have guessed I’d spend so much time listening to Alec Baldwin. The decline in his film career didn’t seem like a great reason for regret at the time, and there was ample apparent reason to dismiss him as an undisciplined boor. Actually, you still sometimes wonder about that, but Baldwin has at the very least demonstrated engaging relish at the possibilities available to him, and a skill at cracking them open. He’s introduced movies on TCM and radio broadcasts from the New York Philharmonic, been politically active, and launched a very enjoyable podcast, where the menu might be Rosie O’Donnell one week, an expert on the New York prison system the next (I listened to every single episode). He’s now taken that format to MSNBC, more or less unaltered except for the pictures. Also in the last year, he acted on Broadway in Orphans (where the behind the scenes conflicts helped to maintain the darker side of the persona) and in one of the year’s most highly regarded films, Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. And then there’s 30 Rock, seemingly endless appearances on Letterman and SNL, oh, and a new baby daughter.

Seduced and Abandoned

All of this constitutes an obvious danger though – when there’s so much Alec Baldwin around, how much would you pay for the chance to see him again? He good naturedly puts this question at the centre of the new HBO documentary Seduced and Abandoned, directed by James Toback (whose last project was Tyson). Toback and Baldwin evolve a proposal for a sexually charged drama set against the Iraq war, which they provisionally call Last Tango in Tikrit, with Baldwin and Neve Campbell lined up as stars; they then take off to the 2012 Cannes festival in search of the required $15 to $18 million budget. It rapidly becomes clear that the money guys don’t see the appeal of the project: two of them say exactly the same thing, that they could maybe be talked into $4 to $5 million at the most. Others propose changes of location for the sake of tapping other pots of money, or changing various aspects of the package, such as Baldwin (now perceived as a TV actor) or Campbell (yesterday’s news) or both. Along the way, the pair hangs out with a grand selection of classic directors, a varied bunch of actors, and some seriously rich people who could finance such a movie as a rounding error in their accounts (but of course, would rather not).

It’s a very entertaining creation, merging lots of good interactions and storytelling with immaculately chosen reference points from old movies; Toback and Baldwin make a highly appealing double act. The title alerts you to the underlying direction of the adventure, that cinema almost never lives up to its promise. At the outset, it quotes Orson Welles about spending 95% of his time running round in search of money, and 5% actually making films (which, thinking over Welles’ career, might actually understate the former number); and then once you get past that, there’s a pervasive sense that the 5% isn’t as scintillating as it used to be, that contemporary technologies and sensibilities have all but sucked the artistic soul out of it.

Last Tango in Paris/Tikrit

Looked at one way, it’s rather surprising how easily Seduced and Abandoned goes down. Toback certainly sublimates his creative personality here – there’s not much sign of the one-of-a-kind nerviness that powers such films as Fingers and Exposed (and even less of Toback’s own personal legend, encompassing just about every kind of addiction and compulsive behaviour known to science). But maybe this is exactly the point – that there’s almost no remaining room for that kind of character. This isn’t all about loss of nerve and vision by decision-makers. When he appeared on Baldwin’s podcast, Toback told a remarkable story about how, in the early 80’s, he persuaded a studio boss to put up the company money for Exposed only by personally paying him $2 million under the table; probably not the kind of governance that characterizes a sustainable business model. And Toback and Baldwin aren’t giving their prospective investors much to go on. Last Tango in Tikrit is barely more than a concept, apparently in no way nailed down as to form or style or content: of course, this works well as an engine for their adventures through Cannes, but it’s reasonable to ask: why would anyone realistically say yes to them?

The film avoids then becoming a mere screed at the avaricious ways of the financiers, spending just as much time charting a broader shift in film culture. The four directors interviewed – Bertolucci (whose Last Tango in Paris provides a particularly apt reference point for the film’s themes of cinematic bliss and pain), Coppola, Scorsese and Polanski – are all exemplars of accessible art cinema, their bodies of work overflowing with astonishing, indelible feats of composition, acting and revelation. Ryan Gosling (somewhat surprisingly) best sums up the difference when he describes much filmmaking now as a lifeless process of starting with a wide shot and moving mechanically in for the close-ups, progressively sapping whatever creative energy might have existed at the outset. Baldwin contrasts the confidence of Allen, happily letting actors change his scripts as they see fit, with directors of much less accomplishment who insist on sticking exactly to what’s on the page. The underlying dilution in character and confidence seems plain, reflecting the greater significance of big-budget films as corporate investments of strictly calculated risk. It’s worth noting though that this devolution isn’t just a story of cinema – you could chart much the same thing in politics, business, and perhaps most other areas of human accomplishment.

Resemblance to Death

 But of course, for whatever reason, the ins and outs of cinema seem to receive disproportionate attention. And the film ultimately works its way to a metaphysical meditation on this attraction, citing Norman Mailer’s claim that “Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long.” This leads to a series of reflections on one’s readiness to die, and to an ending that puts a facet of Mailer’s observation into action. More broadly though, Seduced and Abandoned lacks the sense of confrontation and full-blooded on-the-edge commitment that the writer seems to have had in mind, making the citation seem a bit opportunistic. Actually, the whole project has a similar catch-as-catch-can quality about it – presumably the only reason the interviewees include Diane Kruger, for instance, is that she was available.

But on this occasion, the somewhat ramshackle quality works. If you can’t make Last Tango in Tikrit, you can have more fun pretending to make it than in doing most other things in life, in conducting life itself as a creative act. In the end, despite the failure of the immediate goal, the seduction counts for more than the abandonment; you could easily imagine the two of them heading off on another adventure, whether it be to charm Rosie O’Donnell together, or to reform the New York prison system.

March movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2008)

Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side won this year’s Oscar for best documentary. The taxi belonged to a young Afghan man, picked up in 2002 and taken to be questioned at Bagram prison; six days later he was dead. The “dark side” alludes to a Dick Cheney quote, a few days after 9/11, foreseeing how the pursuit of evil would require loosening the moral gloves. As we now know, this brought us the war in Iraq (superbly dissected in another Oscar nominee, No End in Sight), Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, torture in all but name, and a profound erosion in America’s moral status. The Bush administration, like a mantra, cites six and a half years without a terrorist attack as the justification for all things – one of the most corrupt and careless cause-and-effect analyses imaginable.

Taxi to the Dark Side

Gibney’s film sets out the atrocities in meticulous, almost painful detail, drawing on interviews with former detainees, soldiers, and numerous informed observers, and a wealth of photographic and documentary evidence. It shows the wretched ripple effects of Bush/Cheney contempt for the Geneva Convention, arrogant disregard for the supposed enemy, and sloppy definition of meaningful “intelligence.” Gibney’s focus is deliberately and rigorously narrow – he doesn’t critique the war as such, and avoids tangents (although some, such as the glimpse of 24’s dunder-headed glorifying of terrorism, must have been tempting to pursue further). Obviously, I’m in a group that’s pre-disposed to lap up such an expose, and I suppose Gibney could have done a little more to provide “balance” – assuming there’s anyone alive who can argue the other side of this stuff in more than sloganeering terms. But as I’ve said before, given recent and ongoing US atrocities, balance is no virtue.

Definitely Maybe  - a Valentine’s Day release actually, but I got to it late – struck many critics as a cut above the usual romantic comedy, and I think that’s right, although I don’t know how big a gap “a cut” would be – a few more smiles, a few less cringes. Ryan Reynolds (pleasantly bland) is Abigail Breslin’s father, and tells her the story of how he met her mother, although with names changed to prolong the suspense; she (and we) follow him through almost two hours of entanglements, with three women taking turns at being the one, then not, then the one again. Once you get past the contrived set-up, it rolls along smoothly. Reynolds starts off as a volunteer for the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, and this backdrop meshes quite well with the theme of youthful idealism yielding to realism/disappointment. It never seems like much more than a gimmick though.

In many ways my favourite sequence was the opening credit sequence, where Reynolds plugs in his earphones and strolls through a world of soundlessly flapping lips and unperceived annoyances and threats – right away we sense both the allure of progress and its under acknowledged dehumanization. But this isn’t a movie of big ideas. And watching the 1936 Libeled Lady a few days later underlined Definitely Maybe’s lack of energy and snap and sheer engagement. The characters all treat each other so tentatively, almost sexlessly.

 

Funny Games

Michael Haneke has remade his 1997 film Funny Games, in English instead of German, but otherwise with almost Xerox-quality precision, and no one can quite figure out why. The original was deliberately unpleasant to watch, with its story of a well-to-do family terrorized by two chilling fiends; coming at the peak of Tarantino mania it could at least half-plausibly claim to be commenting on the genre rather than creatively glorifying in it (although it did at least enough of the latter to sow some plausible ambiguity). Haneke has made some great films in the last ten years, and he’s a fascinating if rather forbidding figure. He’s also as articulate as hell, and with Funny Games he’s created almost the ultimate Dean Martin to his intellectual Jerry Lewis, an artistic straw man he can bounce pronouncements off forever. And now he’s produced a remake, extending the Rorschachian potential almost ad infinitum. I don’t think people are biting quite as much this time, and they shouldn’t – the film is pristinely made, like all his work, but it’s not worthy of a great filmmaker. It is conceptually interesting…up to a point. I could certainly get a full column out of it. But given that we’re defined by the choices we make, I won’t try.

The Bank Job, directed by Roger Donaldson, isn’t as conceptually interesting, and I’d find it hard to say much at all about it without resorting to blatant padding. But it’s always good viewing. Based on the true story of a somewhat mysterious early 70’s London robbery, it posits that a shadowy government branch set up the heist – using real small-time criminals unaware of their strings being pulled - to retrieve some compromising photos of the Queen’s sister from a Malcolm X-like villain’s safe deposit box. Also in the mix – dirty cops, a porn king, and various other powerful figures with something to hide. It gets convoluted, and I’m not sure by what sleight of hand it justifies its ending; Donaldson’s tight handling provides good momentum, but limits the wider resonance. A good cast (if not quite as good as the endlessly flavourful ensembles that seemed to come together so easily in 60’s British cinema) brings a lot to the table. 

Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is a rather beautiful enigma, another in his series of intimate, formally challenging examinations of urban youth. The central figure here is a Portland teenager who accidentally causes the death of a railway security guard; the possibility of being caught becomes the weightiest plank in his unfocused, wandering sensibility. That sounds like usual alienated teen stuff, but Van Sant is extremely successful here at avoiding cliché and confounding any easy reading. Paranoid Park is the city’s main skateboard park - a scary destination that however allows the possibility of sheer abstraction. The film could be seen as a series of poses, but I think it would repay multiple viewings; the thematic, psychological and aesthetic choices are continually fascinating.  

David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels is an engrossing film too, but I take the message to be merely this: if you’re stuck in nothingville USA and you’re older than say twenty-five, it’s basically all over. It follows that among the film’s multiple plots, the most refreshing is the teenage romance, even if it’s another case of a quirky attractive woman making it way easier for the shy male protagonist than I or any of my contemporaries can ever remember being the case.

Continuing his downward trajectory since his excellent debut George Washington, Green juggles his small-town plot threads with some good observation, but allows too much actorly excess, and too much lurid plot development. Like some of the other movies mentioned above, it feels rather like a make-work project. Try to choose something necessary.

Trouble at sea

I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who spent part of Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips thinking back to Airport ’77. That’s the one where the plane ends up underwater after a bungled hijacking, and the US Navy has to pull it up before the air runs out; put another way, it’s a first half of low-energy melodrama, and a second half of majestic hardware, and director Jerry Jameson seems much more engaged during the second half. Comparing Captain Phillips to such an old-timer concoction might seem like comparing an iPhone app to a kindergarten art project, but if the technology has changed, the barely-examined certainty of American supremacy hasn’t.

Captain Phillips

Captain Phillips does allow some cracks in that armour. In an early scene, Phillips has a conversation with his wife about how things used to be easier, and I imagine any NRA viewer of the film would see it as a prime negative argument for freer gun-toting: if Phillips and his crew had been better armed in the first place, he or she might say, then they’d never have been such relatively easy prey for four Somali hijackers in a flimsy boat, but with four awesome machine guns. But this only serves to emphasize American goodwill – for all its power and capacity, it’s a benevolent force, until that benevolence is abused. After that, the abusers can’t hope to run or hide.

The film is based on a real event (and so of course has attracted all the usual tedious complaints about factual inaccuracies), occurring in 2009. It’s an awesome creation; it’s been a long time since I spent so much of a film on the figurative edge of my seat. Greengrass is a master orchestrator of modern cinema – seemingly subject to no physical or technical constraints; as facile with the big stuff as a Ridley Scott, and as attuned to human intimacy as the documentarian he used to be. The film shows up some of the weaknesses I wrote about the other week in Gravity, reminding you how everything in cinema is a choice. Like Gravity’s Alfonso Cuaron, Greengrass could have decorated his film with wise-cracking quasi-superheroes, fantasy conversations, and agonized back stories about past traumas, but he sticks to an appealingly no-crap approach.

Tom Hanks

His lead actor Tom Hanks is perfectly with the program, recovering immaculately from the rare misstep of Cloud Atlas. I admit I don’t tend to think of Hanks as one of the very greatest American actors, but then you look at a film like this and ask, well, who could have done any better? You might argue that Phillips’ character barely emerges, that the part increasingly becomes an exercise in pure suffering, but that seems to be the point, that such an extreme situation contorts even a capable professional into a twisted version of himself. Hanks’ virtuosic, moving final scene allows us to feel the full force of what’s the man been enduring, and again confirms Greengrass’ odd delicacy.

Back though to that overriding caveat. The film does spend a little time on the backstory of the Somalis – sketching the sense of an impoverished, warlord-ruled hellhole which may allow some young men just two effective options: piracy or death. But this counts for little in the overall fabric of the film. After Phillips leaves his home, he turns up in the port of Oman to take command, and the film provides awesome, Burtunsky-like shots of what seems like miles of storage containers and the attendant infrastructure. It’s a stunning encapsulation of the mechanics of globalization, distilled further in the shots of the ship – a crew of just twenty people to safeguard a rich concentration of commerce (and, we’re told, some food aid). When the crew first learns of the pirate threat, they react to it (in one of the film’s blackly wittier touches) as a violation of union rules. In conjunction with that opening exchange between Phillips and his wife, there’s something plainly out of whack in the negotiation of man and machine society.

Ultimately though, the film happily surrenders to one of the most pernicious symptoms of this imbalance. The aftermath of 9/11 made deliriously clear our demented official calculus of human value – it’s worth spending any amount of resources to fight the theoretical threat of lives being extinguished by terrorism or other high-profile intrusion, but not worth investing a fraction of that in addressing the real issues that limit and destroy people every day: poverty, hunger, lack of mobility and opportunity. Once Phillips becomes a hostage, in danger of being transported to the Somali mainland, he enters that privileged zone where no amount of money and resources is too great to ensure his safe return. No doubt in part it’s a reflection of political calculations outweighing the individual notional value of the individual at its centre. But the end result is always the same. The more time and money gets diverted into such escapades, the less there is for the grimmer stuff of life; daily interaction gets more threadbare and desperate, increasing the collective capitulation to vested interests, including the great wheels of international commerce, and so increasing the likelihood of desperate people resorting to desperate actions, which just keeps the whole thing going.

Paul Greengrass

Looking at it that way, Hanks’ highly empathy-inducing final scene also soothes the way to settle in as suckers: when we see the humanity of this man so closely and fully, how can we doubt that all of this was justified, and will be justified again for future excellent military adventures? The implied alternative, that Phillips might have been sacrificed out of necessity, might seem horribly callous. But America tolerates millions of its people stuck in versions of living deaths every day. At the very least, I’d suggest, the film settles too easily for the attractions of the small story that lie within the bigger one.

It’s not the first time Greengrass’ work has prompted this kind of reaction. In 2006 he made United 93, a depiction of what may have happened on one of the 9/11 planes. At the time he called it a kind of Rorschach test, an inkblot, that you hold up and people project their hopes and fears and fantasies onto…(confirming) the reality of hard choices, the extraordinary human courage to face hard choices and how difficult hard choices are when there are no good outcomes.” But even that choice of words, and the very choice of material, confirmed the film as a tribute to American exceptionalism. Captain Phillips, similarly, avoids the dumb moves you’d see from lesser filmmakers, and might even seem moderately brave in that respect, but still, the big picture poses little challenge to the status quo.

Female power

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2004)

The hot new spot in my downtown neighborhood is called Laide, an externally unprepossessing space housing a cool restaurant/bar. It’s a good place to hang out, with quality food and pleasant if slightly imprecise service. Laide’s design gimmick, if that’s the way to look at it, is built around sex – some erotic statues by the entrance, and vintage porn flicks projected on the wall (the night I was there, some time after midnight, they dumped the old stuff and started playing the Paris Hilton tape). From what I could see, very few if any of the patrons were actually watching the porn, and people who talk about having been to Laide generally don’t mention it. The badge of cool, I think, demands exactly that – to place oneself in a position to be (if we were nerds) titillated or (if we were prudes) offended, and then barely even to notice.

Town Bloody Hall

Laide would seem to me a perfectly plausible location for a first or second date, although the standard dating manuals, with their strategic relationship-building flowcharts and complex algorithms for calculating do’s and don’ts, would surely advise against it. Long insulated from dating considerations, I am genuinely uncertain how much of the prevailing wisdom in these matters has any real-life application, at least in a liberal, seen-it-all, Lavalife-friendly Western city. Certainly I’m not naive enough to think that everything between men and women has been equalized, although it seems likely to me that at least part of the remaining disparity might be subject to mutual agreement – albeit one in which it’s unclear how much of that agreement is lightly coerced by historical, cultural and biological determinism.

I recently rewatched the classic documentary Town Bloody Hall, which records a memorable, headline-forming debate on feminism that took place at New York’s town hall in 1971. Norman Mailer moderated a panel including Germaine Greer and Diana Trilling (with Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan and others in the audience). It’s still a rollickingly entertaining spectacle, although much of the way in which it’s entertaining (often involving Mailer being heckled, or blasting out outrageous statements) comes at the cost of a considered exploration of the issues.

The film transmits a distinct sense of accelerating female empowerment, but one grappling with multiple indices of oppression and belittlement. There’s a strong feeling of discomfort with the easy slogans of the liberation movement – Jacqueline Ceballos, at the time the president of the National Organization for Women, opens the debate with a laundry list of demands and goals, and then is never heard from again. Greer strikes more of a chord, not just for the audience but for the ages, with her vision of a more flexible, pluralistic movement. Mailer seems for the most part to be in tune with this, but occasionally shows severe limitations – such as in his claim that if a man doesn’t occasionally hit a woman, she’s caused him violence by denying him a necessary outlet. The film is very much a record of a specific time and place – such an event now would probably be an academic, sparsely attended yawner. This seems to me a case of at least one step forward.

The Stepford Wives

But also one back, because any debate on sexual politics nowadays is likely to be far more superficial than that in Town Bloody Hall. Take for example the shower of opinion pieces that accompanied Frank Oz’s remake of The Stepford Wives. The plot here is straightforward – a young couple and their kids, fleeing a career meltdown, move to a gated Connecticut community where all is beautiful and the wives are serenely compliant, to the point of idiocy. It turns out they’re all programmed to fulfill their nerdy husbands’ fantasies, and the heroine (played here by Nicole Kidman) is next in line for the treatment.

I can no longer recall much about the 1975 original, but I believe the tone was of a composed, precise chilliness. I searched the web for commentary on how that film might reflect the feminist waves of its time, but without finding much. Here’s one review I came across: “Little more than a knockoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Stepford Wives makes one tragic mistake: The women in town actually seem more interesting after their transformation than before it, when they come across as whiny and petulant, and little else.”

Which, obviously written by a male, might seem to unwittingly endorse the preconceptions that drive the Stepford males’ project. Anyway, the new film is an odd creation. Directed by Frank Oz and written by Paul Rudnick, it’s for the most part a comedy, partly a send-up of the original, partly a satire on...well, I’m not exactly sure what, and there lies the problem. The film doesn’t reinvent the concept of the Stepford wives in a modern idiom – as in the original, they’re all frilly dresses and Martha Stewart values. The men, hanging out in the Stepford Men’s Association, wear club jackets, smoke big cigars, and engage in radio-controlled car duels. I seriously question how relevant this will seem to Toronto audiences.

Stepford Husbands

The Stepford men are a narrow social sub-group – geeks who happened to be married to high-performing women and got tired of living in their shadows. This seems to be more about power than about sex – an interpretation supported by the film’s throwing in a gay couple and even a former champion terrier, transformed now into a mechanical echo of its former self. But this plight (a mere blip on the vast spectrum of power inequalities) doesn’t seem like a very compelling basis for social commentary. In the end, somewhat remarkably, the film comes up with a plot twist (not in the original) that goes some way to explaining the movie and justifying it on its own terms. But only at the cost of rendering everything we’ve seen the result of a single warped psyche, thus making it easy to write it all off.

I don’t want to dump on the film completely – in fact I might even give it a mild thumbs up for the wacky trilogy of Kidman, Bette Midler and Roger Bart, who – mocking everything around them  - share the film’s most engaging scenes. At 93 minutes, it’s a colourful, zippy concoction. But on top of everything I mentioned, the ending (apparently extensively reshot) is clumsy and poorly handled, leaving a distinctly flat taste in your mouth. It’s meant to be an affirmation of feminine individuality, but I don’t think too many female viewers will feel a bloodrush of identification. 

Despite all this, the fact that the film looks as if it ought to harbour some kind of meaning gives it some currency as a cultural focal point – and there would certainly have been even more attention paid to it if it hadn’t been generally poorly received. But this only raises questions about those who determine our cultural focal points. I doubt the film could sustain too many conversations at Laide, even if it were projected right on the wall.

Bad times

It often feels now that we’ve created a world incapable of being governed for any notion of the collective good. Individuals and even organizations remain capable of generating wonders, but our societal clumps – whether cities, provinces, countries, continents – just keep failing, often with startling abandon. The only reason the crisis isn’t more obvious is surely that it’s too extreme for our comprehension; it seems impossible that this dazzling network of wonders we’ve constructed for ourselves could be so fragile. The toxic combination of ballooning inequalities, perversely unbalanced social contracts, grim environmental deficits, the chronic distraction and superficiality of the citizenship, and leadership hypocrisy so fluent and all-encompassing it needs to be marked by some new term: all of this increasingly resembles a mechanism that can only be powered by forcing more and more people (the poor, unwanted excess, in effect) into a pit of the living dead.  The recent fiscal fiasco in the United States was notable for the grotesquerie of its details, but the basic scenario of underlying pus and blood bursting out into the open, temporarily stemmed only by pushing on a soiled bandage that will only deepen the underlying infection, is all but universally recurring now.

A Touch of Sin

The US gun epidemic demonstrates the all-but-obvious: that such incoherence will keep breeding more trouble - and, short-lived hand-wringing aside, mass acceptance of its presence. Jia Zhang-ke’s masterly new Chinese film A Touch of Sin, currently playing at the Bell Lightbox, causes us to reflect on the horrible if not terminal implications of viewing violence as inevitable; even as ethical – or at least, not plainly less ethical than all that surrounds it. Of course, this is in a certain sense one of the more over-explored subjects in cinema, embodied by all those ridiculous studies of the inner lives of serial killers, assassins, and the like. At times, Jia’s film has the startlingly brutal and bloodily stylized moments that form the basic grammar of that grim genre, but it redeploys them not as periods, leading nowhere except into their own sick entrails, but rather as question marks, profoundly probing the environment that gave rise to them. In an interview, Jia put it like this: “I do believe that every instance of violence that I’m talking about has in the background injustice that’s suffered by these people. They have no language to express their anger, so they end up treating violence with violence.”

The film consists of four loosely-connected episodes, each a story of systemic injustice ending in personal tragedy. In the first, a man seethes at the corruption that sees the profits of recently denationalized industries flowing to an elite few, rather than for the public good; his efforts get him beaten up and ridiculed, so he takes other action. In the second, a compulsive traveler makes one of his periodic returns to his home village before setting off again; we ultimately learn how he makes his living. The third has a young woman, emotionally or physically mistreated by her lover, his wife, and by clients at the all-night sauna where she works, eventually forcing her to defend herself. The young man in the final, quietest story drifts through a series of jobs until the cumulative mistreatment and compromise forces him too into a bleak response.

Overwhelming pessimism

Summed up in that way, the film may sound like a grind, but in Jia’s hands, it’s constantly visually ravishing, filled with remarkable compositions, often contrasting the country’s imposing physical presence with the faltering human attempts to master it, or alighting on small moments of beauty and mystery. It doesn’t feel hopeless necessarily – not as long as the basic everyday social fabric perseveres. But it’s also aware that the non-elite subsists on little more than relative scraps from the table. This is Jia again: “There’s suddenly an overwhelming sense of pessimism towards the current Chinese situation. In my past films, I’ve portrayed the various changes pertinent in Chinese society, but within this process of change there was always a notion that with these changes, life could bring upon itself certain resolutions to its problems. But now we see resources are being more and more held by a smaller margin of people and there’s less and less movement for progress for everyone else.”

This pessimism confers a certain nobility on the quotidian interactions of those people excluded from the elite. People still worry about not “losing face” in the eyes of others; the most likely way to get from A to B may be simply to wave at a passing truck and hop into the back; for every area of modernization, there’s another that hasn’t changed for decades. But these social rituals becomes as circumscribed as the travels of caged birds. In the second story, the protagonist’s older brother, taking seriously his familial responsibilities, sets out a full accounting of the net proceeds from their mother’s recent birthday celebration, and its division between the family members (right down to the left-over cigarettes). We already know however that the amounts involved are dwarfed by what’s been generated from the wanderer’s illegitimate activities: virtue doesn’t stand a chance, any more so than (in one of the loveliest scenes) a young prostitute’s attempt to rebalance her moral ledger through the Buddhist practice of releasing captive fish back into the water.

The World

Jia’s comments about his growing pessimism seem to be rooted in clear-eyed realism. His strongest work prior to this, the 2004 film The World, was also often melancholy, and was particularly attuned toward the forces driving women toward merely superficial advancement, ornamentation or even prostitution. But compared to A Touch of Sin, it contained much deeper veins of humour, even using occasional cartoon inserts that through their peppy excess underlined the characters’ inertia (and, as a secondary theme, the mixed blessing of their reliance on cellphones, which isn’t a major factor in the new work). His personal journey in that ten-year gap, seemingly disinclined even to passingly enjoy the trivial offsets of our progress, tracks the calcifying of expectations about what the modern Chinese revolution might realistically achieve.

It’s uncannily mirrored in the West, for instance in how the recovery from the economic problems in 2008 belongs almost entirely to the super-rich (who, nevertheless, persist in portraying themselves as hamstrung by the ills of government regulation, taxes and so on); it sometimes seems like a miracle that this hasn’t unleashed greater physical anger and attempted redress. This makes A Touch of Sin doubly remarkable, as a film that’s both gloriously specific about its own environment, and disturbingly productive as a springboard to contemplating our own.

Nightmares and dreams

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2007)

This is David Poland’s reaction to Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part II: “I never did respect Roth's work.  Now, if he and I crossed paths, I would refuse to shake his hand.  I would extinguish the fire if he was burning, using something quicker than urine, but I'm not sure that I wouldn't consider it karmic payback for him.”

Sometimes I think I need to power up my own style. Roth is kind of an easy target though. It’d be more satisfyingly perverse to get verbally medieval on the perpetrators of Shrek III. But I guess I just lack those hormones, because I can’t recall any movie sending me into such a hissy fit. So, I would shake Roth’s hand for sure. I wouldn’t kiss his hand though, if there’s any kind of line there.

I quite liked the first Hostel, which I thought worked fairly viably as an allegory of bull-headed American imperialism trampling all over the world and getting its come-uppance. Not to mention that it was genuinely nerve jangling. The sequel isn’t as effective in either regard. Once again, the premise is a group of American backpackers boozing and screwing their way across Europe, lured off track to a remote Slovakian town, where it turns out they’re destined as raw meat for international high-rollers who get their kicks from torture and killing. This time the victims are girls rather than guys - a predictable switch that merely aligns the movie more drably with the age-hold women in terror genre.

The other main change is that we’re shown more of the perpetrators – a real off-putting bunch, all of whom I’d guess vote Republican. In Roth’s wittiest move, the client we see most of is played by Roger Bart, a campy presence in The Producers and Desperate Housewives; the casting doesn’t really come off though. Otherwise, there’s much of the same stuff we saw in the first film, some entertaining parodying of the importance of contracts in business, a few really nasty images, including the one that set Poland off, and another turn-the-tables finale that although well executed, doesn’t pack much of a punch. And not much to think about afterwards. It comes with the “Quentin Tarantino presents” opening title and is certainly a less self-conscious example of the grindhouse mentality than Tarantino’s own Death Proof, but that’s not really a compliment, merely an observation.

The Golden Door

Emanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo, released here as The Golden Door, is a film of modest but satisfying revelations. In the early twentieth century, a poor Sicilian farmer decides to take his family to the New World in America (partly influenced by postcards that depict money growing on trees, and vegetables as big as people). The film is in three parts: the start of their journey in Sicily; the fraught sea crossing; and then, on arrival, the crushing, insensitive bureaucracy of Ellis Island.

The last section is the most gripping, meticulously setting out innumerable humiliating rituals (presumably historically accurate). Viewed against current American paranoia about border security and illegal immigration, this section stands as a persuasive implied criticism of the country’s disrespect for its own heritage. Much of what comes before feels largely familiar, but Crialese has a knack for arresting images that capture the family’s extreme disorientation.

The film’s main narrative flourish comes through a character played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, a woman of uncertain past traveling alone; articulate in English and alert to nuances (at times implausibly modern), she’s ideally equipped for a new life, but forced into compromise by the sexual politics of the time.  It’s hard to make sense of the character, but I think that’s deliberate – she embodies a complexity that the Sicilians (almost totally unschooled in abstract thought, it seems to me) can’t grasp, and yet intuitively know to be a necessary resource for their successful evolution. 

Brand upon the Brain

Brand upon the Brain is perhaps the most accessible entertainment so far from the wacky Winnipeg auteur Guy Maddin, although it doesn’t sound like it if you list the ingredients. It has no dialogue, telling the story through a combination of intertitles and an eccentric voice over read by Isabella Rossellini, and is shot in grainy, beat-up looking black and white. The plot involves a man called Guy Maddin who comes back to the lighthouse (and former orphanage) where he spent his childhood, unleashing a flood of memories of the olden days: suffice to say he didn’t come from a normal background. It’s a flurry of paranoia, voyeurism, sexual displacement, cross-dressing, devil-worship and penny-dreadful monster-movie stuff, drenched in Oedipal implications.

Maddin’s movie, like all his work, is only superficially kooky and primitive. This is as intricately crafted a film as you’ll see all year: the flow of images never takes a break, and the narrative is equally as breathless. It’s very true to the general spirit of silent movies (a period of cinema history that Maddin reveres), but very modern both in some of the imagery (such as the casual use of nudity) and the complexity of the underlying layerings. I haven’t generally been all that enthralled by Maddin’s work (frankly, with several of them I couldn’t even figure out why I was meant to give a damn), but the traumatic whimsy of Brand upon the Brain really pushed my buttons.

                                                Paprika

It worked pretty well that I went right from Guy Maddin’s film to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, another remarkable fantasy. This is a work of anime, with visuals that alternately evoke both kindergarten cuteness and sleek, techno-savvy sexiness, and it’s vaguely reminiscent of David Lynch’s Inland Empire, if Lynch had inhaled several cases of bubble gum and decided to embrace primary colours. A futuristic dream-monitoring device has been stolen from a research facility, placing the boundary between dream and reality in jeopardy. Paprika, the dreamland alter ego of one of the female scientists, gets on the case, along with a visually varied group of collaborators.

Paprika fits comfortably into the apparently bottomless well of meta-movies that constantly challenge their own reality, but it’s too bouncy to succumb to that genre’s frequent self-importance. Given the current state of digital technology it’s probably no longer accurate to say that such a film – despite its parade of wondrous creations – could only have been rendered through animation, but as you watch it you realize the frequently rather depressing heaviness of big-budget attempts at fantastic realism.

It also has a nice, unforced angle on the frequently evoked parallel between dreams and cinema – of all the preoccupied cops in movies, this has the first one I can recall whose angst is rooted in having chosen law enforcement over film-making – and a warm-hearted approach toward the human heart (if you think the guy in Knocked Up got the girl against heavy odds, you should see what plays out here). I don’t watch a lot of Japanese anime – if memory serves, it’s only been Steamboy and a couple of Miyazaki movies this decade – but I have to admit, every time I go there, it’s worth the trip.

Difficult people

The TIFF Lightbox is currently showing a season of films by Claire Denis, one of the most thrilling of current filmmakers. In the program notes, Brad Deane ably evokes the unique impact of her work: “Marked by an intimate sensuality that contrasts with her often harsh subject matter, Denis' films are made up of fragments constantly coalescing and dispersing, creating a visceral ‘in the moment’ experience that renders her characters uncannily familiar even as their motives and drives often remain mysterious. The extraordinary proximity Denis creates between her characters and the audience allows us to slowly, almost intuitively understand their struggles, pains, difficulties and desires.”

Claire Denis

Perhaps the work that most pushes this approach to the extreme is The Intruder, one of the few films in recent years that I watched again within days of my first viewing. Even the second time round, it doesn’t come close to being “explicable” in the normal sense – some elements are surely fantasy, or else expressions of an inner state, but they’re not easily coded as such; Denis holds inner and outer geographies in stunning, almost humbling alignment. Others of her films, like Vendredi soir and 35 Rhums, are easier to absorb, but no less impressive for how she illuminates a small, unremarkable piece of the world and makes it thrillingly sensuous, without any sense of force or excess.

Her 2001 film Trouble Every Day illustrated how Denis’ methods might as effectively be applied to explore a heart of darkness. It’s a tale of two people afflicted by a kind of contemporary vampirism, as alert as ever to alternate possibilities and pathways, but in this case using that sensitivity to intensify the trauma at its centre. The title hints at her audacity – it’s almost offhand, as if bemoaning one’s everyday lot (the irritating days, for instance, when one gets covered in blood from tearing one’s victim apart): it’s the quotidian resonance that makes the film so disturbing and powerful.

Bastards

Her latest film Bastards, also playing at the Lightbox, returns to bleak material: it’s a contemporary film noir, constructed from classic raw materials. The opening stretch alone encompasses heavy rain; a man lying dead; a young girl walking naked in the street; a tough sea captain who comes home to sort out the mess; a desolately beautiful woman who becomes his lover, although she’s already linked to the powerful man who’s somehow in the background of all this mayhem. Many reviewers found the film overly confusing and obscure, but a few secondary plot points aside, I didn’t find it so; actually, if anything, I might judge it to be too tightly wound to carry the impact of Denis’ very greatest works.

Having said that, it’s another indelible creation: certainly one of the most fascinating and spiritually gripping films I’ve seen this year. Denis cites William Faulkner’s book Sanctuary as a major influence: I’m not familiar with that material, but I kept thinking in various ways (as did others) of Polanski’s Chinatown, another story of local politics (although in Bastards it’s personal and commercial – focusing on a bankrupt family business – rather than municipal) and of sexual transgression that crosses the ultimate taboos, with another protagonist in a dangerous liaison; another story too where the nature and capacity of the power at the centre only gradually reveals itself.

It’s a loose comparison though, and one of the major points of difference lies in contrasting Jack Nicholson’s scrappy Gittes to Vincent Lindon’s Marco, the returning voyager in Bastards. In very short order, Marco leaves his job, sells most of his possessions, cashes in his life insurance, seemingly following an intuitive journey toward self-immolation, even as the details of what and why he’s doing remain unclear to him. Lindon has all the craggy resonance of a classic outsider, but Denis doesn’t overplay the character’s existential momentum – he isn’t a quasi-ethereal figure like Alain Delon in Le Samourai, but a man who admits to numerous limitations, and who gets snapped at by the daughter who lives with his ex-wife. Likewise, his lover Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni) seems perpetually weighed down and haunted by the compromises that have defined her life. As always with Denis, the film is enormously ventilated by the keenness of her observations – even if in this case they’re as often horrifying (day to day items put to grotesque use) as they are illuminating (details of bankruptcy law, or the extremely precise inventorying of Marco’s possessions – his expensive white shirts, his watch, his classic car, his smartphone).

In that same essay, Deane says: “As the increasing unity of our globalized era ironically augments the fracturing of our identities and the fragmenting of our experiences, Denis reminds us of our inescapable nearness to one another through the shared language of the body — a nearness that, whether it be reassuring or unsettling, compels us to confront our own longings and desires, our own personal states of exile, rather than pass judgment on those of others”. That last point is explicit in the movie, when Raphaelle explicitly tells Marco she doesn’t judge his actions (implicitly asking for a similar courtesy), and film writers in general often hold up such reticence to “pass judgment” as a sublime virtue among artists, but I’m not sure why that’s the case: aren’t there plenty of situations, personal as well as political, where principled, informed opposition should count for more than a wholly-headed tolerance?

Withholding judgment

In any event, the last scene of Bastards poses an extreme test of our ability to withhold judgment, and of this reading of her work, as Denis forces us up close against the events at the centre of the plot, destroying any capacity we might have had to regard these matters as abstractions. We’ve earlier seen that one of the men involved is capable of loving his son, but that’s merely the indulgence you find even in monsters; maybe even the way they reassure themselves that the evil they commit elsewhere is justified in the grand calculus. It seems appropriate and even necessary to judge, but at the same time, to Deane’s point, Denis all but dares us not to fantasize ourselves into that scene, and thus to indict ourselves.

There’s a similar provocation in one of the film’s most shocking moments, when the camera travels down the naked girl’s body, an image that travels in seconds from being potentially or actually erotic to traumatic, as we register the damage done to her. Moments like these sum up Denis’ immense power as a filmmaker – forcing us into contradictory impressions and reactions, into constantly reassessing what’s before us and thus in some way ourselves. It would be remarkable enough if she confined her power to a single genre or a narrow line of enquiry, but her interests and affinities seem almost boundless. Only for one of the greatest of filmmakers would a film as richly controlled and allusive as Bastards seem like a relatively second-level work.

Stage and Screen

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2006)

So I was lucky enough to go to the stage Lord of the Rings recently. I put it that way because it’s a major cultural event and I know lots of people would love to be able to see it. And a feeling of privileged access is at the heart of theatre. If I try to recall my most thrilling artistic experiences, it’s likely that as many come from the theatre as from film – usually on occasions when I was very close to the stage, able to watch every flicker of expression and drop of spit, utterly enveloped in the mix of rampant illusion and overwhelming specificity. Then if I try to recall my worst artistic experiences, a fair number of them involve sitting in not-so-good seats, fighting off sleep as some lumbering, airless spectacle goes through the motions. Don’t get me started again on Cats. 

Lord of the Rings

Once the unenthusiastic reviews came out, and I kept reading about its monster length, I actually started to dread LOTR. As we walked to the theatre our legs must have been resisting us, because the curtain was already up when we arrived – I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. Eventually we got to our seats, and by the end of the first act I definitely thought my expectations would be surpassed. A little bit of that mythical silly name mumbo jumbo goes a long way with me, but the play seemed to be moving through it fairly fluently, the first act has a fairly jaunty musical number, and even by the standards of big budget productions, I found myself captivated by the stage craft. Time and again, the setting would utterly transform itself (no wonder they took so many previews to get it all down pat) and I’d think: how the hell did they manage that? I could definitely have used an instant replay. And the first act has a finale with a dragon which, although a little hokey, certainly delivers the big-budget goods.

And that’s as good as it gets. The remaining two acts get weighed down in endless exposition, repetitive action, boring songs (a shame they passed on the challenge of finding a rhyme for Bilbo Baggins), and diminishing variations on what had initially grabbed me. The production has a huge cast, but they’re all swamped – sad to say, Brent Carver is particularly lost under Gandalf’s beard. To the end, Lord of the Rings never quite gives up the ghost (again, where did all those sunflowers at the end come from?), but the immense talent and application seems wasted. For it never comes close to answering this one key question: what the hell was the point?

Brick

Well, to make money of course, and to prove it could be done, and because everyone loves a challenge, and maybe it was even someone’s childhood dream, although if so it obviously took Peter Jackson to shake that dream loose. None of which is quite enough. It’s philosophically somewhat interesting too to know that the chicken crossed the road because it was there, but nothing much is gained by observing the journey.

You can’t assess Lord of the Rings, inevitably, without thinking about the reported $26 million budget. The play is much more significant as a capital investment than it is as art, and it’s probably best contemplated in the abstract as a “Quirky way to blow $26 million,” rather than as something consciously aesthetic. If you look on it as a matrix of human and logistical choreography, without worrying about the purpose of all that, it’s perhaps rather wonderful. Some people will be susceptible to that mindset. But the closing shouts of “Bravo” from the man behind me sounded awfully isolated.

A few days later I saw the new film Brick, directed by Rian Johnson. Brick is almost the ultimate example of a film powered by a single inspired idea. It is this: make a classic film noir, with all the hard-bitten dialogue and world-weary attitudes and femmes fatale and complicated plotting – really, the entire package – but set it all among high school kids. And I’m talking about playing it straight – not about a campy Bugsy Malone-type exercise. Brick may actually be the most focused, single-minded example of the genre in recent years.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the protagonist, a senior following the trail of his missing girlfriend, and among other things he takes more beatings than almost anyone I’ve ever seen outside a boxing movie. Also prominent in the scheme is a menacing drug dealer played by Lukas Haas, who runs a local crime ring from his basement, from which he sometimes emerges to be pampered with cereal and juice by his mother. Most of the film’s laughs come from such incongruities with adults, but that doesn’t add up to a large number. And it’s rather miraculous how such an extremely stylized film seems to constitute a valid expression of the turbulent questing adolescent psyche – it never pushes the conceit so far that they don’t all still seem like flailing vulnerable crazy kids. The movie’s sparse, plaintive mood is highly effective in this regard.

For all that I can’t say I really enjoyed watching Brick that much – it’s a bit repetitive, and too abstract to develop much dramatic tension. And I have to come clean – a lot of the time, I just couldn’t follow what was meant to be happening. That’s famously true of The Big Sleep too of course, but that film had a somewhat richer fabric overall (oh, and Bogart and Bacall). But I do admire it, because it has the feeling of a film rooted deep in someone’s psyche, executed with immense fidelity to a vision, and tolerating almost no concessions.

Sophie Scholl: The Last Days

Sophie Scholl was only 21 when she was caught in 1943 distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in a Munich university. She was interrogated, sentenced to death and guillotined. Marc Rothemund’s film about these events (which was nominated for this year’s foreign film Oscar), based on the actual transcripts, is sober and meticulous, sticking very close to the actual events with little sense of the world beyond. Julia Jentsch’s portrayal of Sophie is similarly unshowy, but it’s extremely effective at conveying Sophie’s sheer inability to process this experience – her consistent grace seems like part heroism and part bewilderment, although the film subtly maps her gathering maturity.

The movie has a few conventional ploys, such as her interrogator’s sympathy for her and – seeming most contrived perhaps – the way her defense at her trial seems to provoke a silent awakening among the Nazi functionaries in the audience. That trial by the way is a hysterical sham that may make your blood boil. But overall Rothemund depicts this human tragedy as fully as one would want, constituting an appropriately measured tribute to Sophie without ever coming close to a hagiography. Her story has apparently been filmed a couple of times before, but this may be a necessary project every generation or so.

Above the Earth

As Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity begins, two astronauts – Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) – are carrying out a mission at the Hubble telescope, respectively luxuriating in and trying to cope with the absence of normal physicality, the contrast between their phenomenally rarified perspective on the Earth and the more mundanely challenging task at hand. The chatter with Mission Control is easy and bucolic, suddenly hardening when they get a warning about approaching space debris. Chaos hits, and immediately it’s all about survival – with no other survivors, a ruined craft, and a declining oxygen supply.

In for a penny

I saw the film in the most expansive (and expensive) available format – IMAX 3-D – on the basis that with this kind of spectacle, it’s in for a penny, in for a pound. It’s worth it: 3-D has come a long way in the last few years, and Gravity is a sensuously immersive experience, giving you the feeling of privileged vigilance over, if not participation in, astonishing events. Cuaron has been talking in interviews about the various technological breakthroughs required in making the film: you occasionally get the impression of a cinema released from all constraints (according those of scientific accuracy, according to expert commentators), limited only by the capacity of dreams and imagination to keep flowing without faltering. The effect is all the more impressive for the times when Cuaron very specifically emphasizes, in contrast, the existence of the apparatus: subjective points of view from inside a space helmet, or water landing on the lens.

Fragility is baked into the story too. The interiors of the vessels – presumably realistically – exhibit the kind of old-fashioned technology design that all but evokes the rotary phone, along with bygone-era instruction manuals. It’s impossible not to reflect on the miracle of the original Apollo moon landings – carried out, it’s sometimes said, on the basis of less computing power than we can now carry round in our pockets – and on the tragedy that (insofar as we can see right now) man’s engagement with space looks more like a story of the past than one of the future. At various moments you feel the hard physical presence of hand rails and wheels and tethers: again, essentially primitive indicia of industrial society, in this context connoting both the limitations of human progress and a vaguely comforting form of continuity. The title itself has a similar duality, as the movie is less “about” gravity than its absence.

How tiny we are

These aspects of the film are easy to praise, expressed throughout in startlingly beautiful images (I don’t think I’ll ever forget a moment when Stone/Bullock, having just removed her suit and replenished her oxygen, simply allows herself to float and be renewed – an unforced evocation of something elemental). I find it a bit harder to assess other aspects of its relative achievements though. Peter Howell in the Star puts it this way: “Beyond sheer entertainment value — and there’s plenty of that — the film’s deeper meaning is profound appreciation of just how tiny we are in the vastness of the universe and how connected we are to the Earth’s embrace.”

This may indeed express Cuaron’s underlying intentions, but as deeper meanings go, it’s not much of one: our tininess in the vastness of the universe and reliance on the earth are, for lack of a better word, obvious, and whether one appreciates these matters profoundly or superficially doesn’t seem likely to make much difference to anything once the picture’s over. Howell goes on to add that “Cuarón is out to inspire us and make us believe in miracles,” but this is merely the intention of every other Hollywood movie from Rocky to The Blind Side, and frankly, you could well argue that for a country in such a deranged current state, it’s the height of bourgeois decadence to be swooning over such unrepresentative wonders.

That might seem like a trite series of objections to something that’s perhaps intended to inspire a wordless, inchoate awe, but it would be easy for mainstream cinema to be no more than a rush to build the biggest and the brightest, trying to dazzle us with images of Vegas so that we forget where we actually live. It seems to me a shame that Gravity has so little to offer as a study of people, especially given the unique situation in which it places them. Clooney’s presence seems to me especially problematic: he plays Kowalski as an unshakably optimistic, wise-cracking, but super-capable veteran, whose demeanour doesn’t crack even at his darkest moments. Such behaviour is a plausible reaction to extreme stress of course, especially among such experienced operators, but as presented here, it’s about the least interesting psychological course that could possibly have been followed.

Conjuring the sublime

Bullock’s character, on the other hand, comes with plenty of baggage – a daughter who died at the age of four, leaving her an emotional shell, and thoughts of whom occupy her heavily as she faces her own mortality. As presented here, the device seems like little more than a manipulation, albeit not as much of one as the film’s hoariest scene, which relies on giving physical space to Stone’s oxygen-deprived imaginings. It’s possible the banality of such devices is somewhat deliberate, as a kind of expression of ordinary human un-remarkableness in the most extreme of circumstances; even in the midst of unprecedented sensations and sights, we can’t hope to transform our basic matter in all its messiness, only to direct it as best we can (the opposite, really, of Howell’s interpretation about having us believe in miracles). But even if that’s the intention, Cuaron makes it much less interesting than it should be.

Liam Lacey, in his Globe and Mail review, remarks how there’s “something conceptually pure about a drama that pits one individual against a hostile environment,” but then ends up somewhere close to Howell, describing how the film “intimates mystery and profundity, with that mixture of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime.” There’s an irony there: in one of the most famous expressions of that tradition, Wordsworth evokes the blessed mood in which “the heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened.” In Gravity, you might say, the lightening of the world’s weight is (somewhat literally) the problem – the desire to return to it, to invert the usual direction of the sublime, becomes the driving force. This might mean Lacey has things the wrong way round, or might indicate how Gravity ultimately occupies a thematic space whose coordinates are as hard to pin down as passing shards.