Battle of the actresses

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2002)

This week we have films featuring three of my favourite actresses, all in good form and making up to some extent for the flaws or limitations of the films themselves.

Human Nature

Being John Malkovich was greatly admired a few years ago, and I enjoyed watching it, but I always felt I was missing something. I didn’t write a review of it – couldn’t think of anything to say. Now the film’s writer, Charlie Kaufman, has written Human Nature, which has the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative bounds. Tim Robbins plays a scientist who marries Patricia Arquette, a social outcast because of a major body hair problem. Hiking in the woods, they encounter Rhys Ifans, who was taken into the woods as a child by his deranged father and has grown up ape-like. Robbins abandons his experiments with mice (he’s trying to teach them table manners) and sets out to civilize the wild man.

Human Nature, like Malkovich, is a film of enormous invention. Truth is, it would have been more effective with less invention. To the very end, it concocts twists and reversals and crazy concepts, which means it never gets close to dullness, but it’s like a girl who teases you to the point where you decide to transfer your affections to someone else. The film usually seems to be about the malevolent effects of civilization – how it quashes our better natures – but it also hints cynically that we may not have a better nature. You wish for a more consistent perspective, even if a more limited one.

The film’s funniest moments come from an inspired silliness. Robbins’ notion of civilization is about a hundred years out of date – he trains Ifans how to behave at the opera, how to sit by the fire like a country gentleman, and so forth (making for visual tableaux reminiscent of the best moments in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums). But this just illustrates the film’s broader incoherence, since Robbins doesn’t generally behave in a way consistent with these anachronistic notions, and the vague depiction of “the real world” dulls our sense of the (presumed) injustice that’s being done to Ifans. There’s a certain flabbiness to the concept too – the Arquette and Ifans characters are both variations on the same narrow theme, and the fourth major character, a conniving woman who poses as a French seductress to win over Robbins, makes very little sense.

The movie couldn’t be as affecting as it is if not for its actors. Robbins is rather bland, but Ifans has a crazy grandeur about him. Readers may remember that I went to school with him in North Wales. I often find him a bit strained on the screen, but maybe I have too much of a sense of the man. On this occasion, his messy, abstracted persona is exactly what the character needs.

As for Patricia Arquette – she’s often very touching. She’s frequently naked in the film, and her sturdy voluptuousness has an appropriately primitive air about it. She strikes me as an actress who needs strong direction – when that’s lacking, she seems to drift and recede (see for example her work in Matthew Broderick’s Infinity). That almost happens here too from time to time, but in a film that’s purportedly about the quashing of instinct, it’s not such a bad thing.

Murder by Numbers

Murder by Numbers has a much more concentrated and in part familiar view of human nature. It’s the Leopold-Loeb story all over again – two smart-ass teenagers team up to commit the perfect murder, complete with a trail of clues that will lead the police to the wrong suspect. Except, of course, that the detective is smarter than they had any reason to expect.

She’s played by Sandra Bullock, which seems like proof of a soft centre. Surprisingly, Bullock is the primary savior of this largely conventional film. Her character is hard-edged, stubborn, cynical – none of that is new, but the movie takes her into territory that’s unusually raw and fragile and sexually explicit. At such times, it’s pleasingly reminiscent of Clint Eastwood vehicles like The Gauntlet or Tightrope, cranking the genre wheels while exploring the edges of its star image. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t take this half as far as it might have done, but it’s intriguing while it lasts.

The film’s director Barbet Schroeder last directed the low budget Our Lady of the Assassins, about a middle-aged writer observing a child assassin on the streets of Medellin, Colombia. That was an extremely bleak, nihilistic work, consisting for long stretches of little but desolate wandering punctuated by random killing. It sometimes seemed contrived, but you couldn’t easily shake it off. It’s a rather ridiculous distance from that chilling depiction of murderous youth to the teenage melodrama of Murder by Numbers. They say history occurs first as tragedy and then repeats itself as farce – maybe movie careers sometimes take the same form. But at least Schroeder is too much of a pro not to make a smooth film, although even that much seems in doubt during the rickety, cliff-hanging climax.

Triumph of Love

I suppose Triumph of Love, Claire Peploe’s adaptation of a 17^th century play by Marivaux, is the most commercially marginal of these three projects. The film doesn’t really try to have it any other way. Set on a sumptuous country estate, it involves a princess who dresses as a male to win the heart of the man she loves – a man who views the princess as a mortal enemy. She also wins the heart of her beloved’s guardian, a famous philosopher who immediately sees through her disguise, and the guardian’s sister, who doesn’t.
 

The movie isn’t really ingratiating enough to be a popular success – it’s fairly repetitive and narrow, and Peploe follows her own idiosyncratic instincts, sometimes emphasizing the theatrical aspects, sometimes over-emphasizing the cinematic. But it’s an entertaining romp, and the final scenes are particularly sweet. In a cast that includes British heavyweights Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw, it’s especially commendable that Mira Sorvino as the princess is the film’s single greatest charm. Sorvino was hot for a couple of years after she won her slightly generous Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite, but a series of bad pictures put paid to that. She’s not the most technically compelling actress, but when she’s cast properly she has a combination of intelligence and winsomeness that I find very appealing (Lulu on the Bridge is probably my favourite of her performances).

This week’s winner – Mira Sorvino! Next time – battle of the movie caterers.

 

A new discovery

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2002)

John Cassavetes made intensely personal films with a recognizable style, and he put himself on the line for his art. He turned down a lot of commercial work, allegedly including the Barbra Streisand A Star is Born. But at the end of his career, he needed money, and accepted an offer from his friend Peter Falk to take over the troubled production Big Trouble (a farce co-starring Alan Arkin, about an insurance salesman who gets caught up in a wacky fraud scheme). According to Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, he worked hard on it for a year, but the film was edited in ways he didn’t agree with (he said the only scene that reflected his wishes was a scene in which Arkin gags on Falk’s sardine-flavoured liquer). After that, Cassavetes became too ill to work any more, so Big Trouble weirdly stands as his last work.

Cassavetes antennae

I finally got to see it the other day. Priding myself on my Cassavetes antennae (I’ve seen Love Streams maybe five times and most of his others at least twice), I was convinced I’d sniff out some subtleties, some hidden personal touches. But the movie really is as bland as everyone says. In a few scenes, bits of behaviour are allowed to run unusually long, or there’s a particular deadpan feel to the camera work, or there’s a peculiar moroseness. I think I felt Cassavetes behind the camera at those moments, shrugging and thinking what-the-hell and letting it go a certain way. But for most of the time, he perfectly sublimated his instincts, which is presumably what he was hired to do.

Still, just the knowledge of who was behind the camera made Big Trouble far more engrossing than an off-the-shelf comedy with a lesser pedigree. It pays to know your directors. Now, a recent film presented me with a very different problem. Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is 93 years old. The Internet Movie Database lists his first film as being made in 1931. There are some big gaps in his career – nothing between 1942 and 1956. But he’s sure making up for it now – he’s made a film every year since 1990, and has another at this year’s Cannes festival.

Let me emphasize what I just said – de Oliveira is 93 years old and he’s making a movie a year. We may be in an aging society, but it’s still generally regarded as “wonderful for his age” if a 93-year-old can even string a coherent sentence together. So de Oliveira is a miracle indeed. But are the films any good? It’s hard to know – because it’s hard to get to see them. To my knowledge, they’re never shown here except at the film festival – and it’s never worked out for me to see any of them there. So the recent commercial release of his I’m Going Home marks my introduction to him.

I’m Going Home

It’s fair to assume a 93-year-old director would have established his creative personality by now. I’m Going Home feels like a summing-up; it feels self-referential. From such an aged filmmaker, it’s hard not to read the title as a metaphor for the end of a broader journey. The film supports that interpretation. Michel Piccoli stars as an esteemed actor whose wife, daughter and son-in-law are killed in a car accident. We don’t witness his grief directly – the film takes place mainly three months after the tragedy, as he goes about his life. He discusses new projects, reads the paper in his local café, buys new shoes, plays with his grandson, eventually accepts a new film (the director of which is played by John Malkovich). This is all presented in a very simple, elegant manner – often viewed through a window or from a distance. Liam Lacey in The Globe and Mail summed it up this way: “The film’s point is, as W H Auden wrote of Breughel’s portrait of Icarus tumbling from the sky while farmers kept ploughing their fields, that the superficial business of life rolls on, while personal catastrophes happen mostly at the periphery.”

I think that is indeed the film’s point, more or less. But I was taken by Lacey’s rather strenuous importing of the Auden/Breughel reference to make his point. Lacey doesn’t indicate in the article whether he’s seen any of de Oliveira’s other work, so it’s tempting to think he hasn’t, and rather like me, he’s rather lost for a frame of reference. As such, one is drawn to read the film through whatever off-the-shelf artistic framework is handy. At various times the film’s style might remind the viewer of Angelopoulos or Chantal Akerman or Jacques Rivette or Antonioni. But maybe all I mean is that it has a manner we recognize as distinctively European and associated with a taste for restraint and ambiguity and elegant characterization (the casting of Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve and Malkovich is archetypally arthouse too). The film feels inherently ethical – Piccoli uses that word in turning down a lame-sounding action series – and the measured, poised style avoids any possible sensationalism or cheap gratification.

Familiarity

Among the many things I wish I knew about de Oliveira is how deep his sense of humour goes. Near the end of I’m Going Home, Piccoli accepts a part in an adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses. He plays a character much younger than himself, and fails completely to make his French accent sound even remotely Irish – I found the whole thing extremely funny. The fact that Malkovich seems generally pleased with the performance, correcting words or mispronunciations here and there while letting much else go by, makes it even funnier. More broadly, de Oliveira appears to use this cultural absurdity to drive home the incoherence or absence at the centre of Piccoli’s life. This is reinforced by the way de Oliveira presents the film-making process – the action takes place off screen while the camera stares unblinkingly at Malkovich, watching, correcting, occasionally reacting.

The Carlton is to be praised (actually, barely a week goes by when the Carlton’s not worth praising for something or other) for bringing us this film. Still, seen in isolation from de Oliveira’s other work, it can hardly avoid seeming like something of a curio. At various points, we may feel that our ability to engage with it gathers strength and then recedes, but we can have little confidence in these quivering assessments. Familiarity counts for so much in cinema – so much so that a broken-backed formulaic work like Big Trouble may carry as much resonance and impact as an objectively much finer work.

Affluence threatened

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2002)

I’ve often planned to count up the number of positive reviews I’ve written over the years (six years now, believe it or not) versus the number of negative ones. It’s not a high priority, which is why it never gets done. It’d probably only be depressing anyway – too many pans and caveats. I truly wish I only wrote good reviews, if only because presumably it would mean I was only seeing good movies. In recent years, I’ve become better at avoiding the true stinkers, but I don’t get bowled over as often as I wish. Maybe it’s just me – maybe I need a diet, more vitamins or something.

Fight Club

The bad reviews I wish I hadn’t written because it would mean I hadn’t wasted time seeing the movie – that’s one thing. But if any of this kept me up at night (and it doesn’t, but if it did) it would be the thought of the bad reviews I wish I hadn’t written because I now think I got it wrong. A few months ago I changed my mind big time on Pulp Fiction, and I felt honor-bound to write about that (it consumed half my article on The Shipping News – my mind wanders sometimes). At the same time, I started thinking again about my review of Fight Club – a movie I was quite nasty about. It felt somehow logical that a liking for Pulp Fiction would be largely correlated with a liking for Fight Club, meaning I might have another major recanting job to do.

So I got round to rewatching it a couple of months ago, and was relieved that I didn’t really feel obliged to do any recanting at all. At best, I’d soften my review a bit. I think my original vitriol was as much directed at the excesses of local critics than at the film itself. Fight Club is skillful, but its constant criticism of our dubious values and deficient self-actualization quickly becomes repetitive and murky, and (unlike Pulp Fiction) the film gradually becomes almost entirely consumed by plot mechanics. I didn’t dislike the final twist as much the second time though – I was better able to step back and take it metaphorically (although the ending still doesn’t seem to me to mesh very well with the more immediate social satire at the start of the film). And the visual style and imagination are admirable – it’s quite a compendium of ideas and images and moods. But it still doesn’t do a lot for me.

Panic Room

Fight Club director David Fincher has now followed it with Panic Room, a thriller with Jodie Foster. Panic Room is nowhere near as ambitious as Fight Club was. It’s set almost entirely inside a single house – a huge New York brownstone where newly divorced Jodie Foster moves with her teenage daughter. The house contains a “panic room” – a virtually impenetrable stronghold in which the owners can hide in the event of a home invasion. On the first night in residence, Foster wakes up to find strangers in the house, and she and the kid bolt into the panic room. The problem is, the previous inhabitant left several million dollars hidden in there – which means the thieves are determined to get in.

This entails numerous twists and turns: the men try various ways of luring the women out; Foster and the girl try to contact the outside world; the daughter gets sick and Foster has to leave the room to retrieve her medicine. Foster’s ex-husband calls by and promptly gets beaten by the invaders. It’s all efficiently executed. In particular, Fincher magnificently exploits the contours of the house, constructing numerous seemingly unbroken camera movements that travel effortlessly through the interior space (although by now these look like a Fincher “staple” – Fight Club had several such effects).

There’s a pattern emerging in Fincher’s work. Se7en was a highly creative thriller that claimed to see only wretchedness in the world. He followed it with The Game, an almost equally creative film that wallowed happily in its rich protagonist’s milieu. Then came Fight Club, seemingly a repudiation of the complacency of the film that preceded it. Now comes Panic Room, and Fincher’s comfortable again with the trappings of great wealth. His social conscience seems like a suit of clothes, slipped on and off at will, and already seeming a little threadbare even when it’s on. Although I will say that I saw Se7en lately again as well, and that film still seems almost as darkly insinuating and chilling as it did the first time.

By myself

Admittedly, some writers do see more to Panic Room than I do. Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that the film is “not so much scary as endlessly worrying; the movie was designed, propitiously, to suck in all the insecurities that you can imagine, and a few that you can’t.” Which makes it sound like an extension of the Fight Club agenda. But the premise depends so completely on wealth and privilege that most viewers’ identification with it (and the extent of its disturbing effect on them) will be strictly superficial.

I doubt I’m giving much away by saying that the protagonists of Panic Room survive the ordeal (with such films it’s not a matter of whether, but merely of how). And in the end Foster and the kid lounge on a bench in Central Park, reading the ads for other attractive Manhattan properties (albeit smaller ones). I searched hard for some irony there, but it sure looks like a straightforward image of affluence and order restored, subject to only minor modification.

Finally, thinking again about those virtuoso Fincher camera movements, digital technology has really killed much of the magic of the mobile camera. Effects like Hitchcock’s dizzying plunge into the clocktower in Vertigo, or Antonioni’s glide through the window at the end of The Passenger – they’re child’s play now. But those shots had a physical immediacy (if only because you could feel the work that went into them) that no amount of computer-generated flourish can equal.
 

Another favourite example of mine is from The Band Wagon – the unbroken tracking shot of Fred Astaire as he glides along the railway platform singing “By Myself.” There’s a beautifully intuitive marriage of style and content there – it’s as appropriately eloquent as you could possibly wish for. And within a film of deep and consistent richness. It’d be great to review new movies as passionately as you’d review Vertigo and The Passenger and The Band Wagon, but that’s just not being earned.

Five films

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2002)

Did you realize that most weeks, six or seven movies open in Toronto? Even if only one or two of those were worth seeing, it’d be pretty hard work. Most weeks I go at least twice, and I always feel I’m missing out on something. But lately I crammed in a few more than usual (long weekends are a blessing). So here’s a departure from the norm: capsule reviews of no less than five recent movies.

Death to Smoochy

A satire of children’s television, with Robin Williams as an embittered, fired kiddie TV host vowing to get even with the good-natured guy in a rhino costume (played by Edward Norton) who now fills his time slot. The movie doesn’t go much further than the concept – there’s no particular satiric point to it, and it doesn’t come close to the kind of territory that would make it memorable on its own terms. The big set pieces – like Norton’s inadvertent appearance before a Nazi rally – are all either reminiscent of other, better films, or else indifferently executed, or often both. And this is one of those movies where the bad guys suddenly turn nice, men and women who hated each other fall in love, and the world turns out almost as pleasant as a Barney song. The film should have been at least twice as convinced of its own nastiness. Still, it’s appealingly put together in a brash, hermetic kind of way, and if the obscenities aren’t half as creative as in a Kevin Smith movie, the odd one still gets an easy laugh.

Festival in Cannes

Henry Jaglom has made a string of small-budget, intimate, intriguing but somewhat rambling movies (detractors consider them whiny and trivial). He also deserves some appreciation from movie-lovers for his steady championing of Orson Welles – although you’d be hard-pressed to see much direct Wellesian influence in his own work. Jaglom fans (and I’m one) should be delighted with this new film, and others will find it a pleasant time-killer. A tale of deal-making (both financial and of the heart) during the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, the movie is a bit more focused than usual for the director – the long philosophical exchanges and direct-to-camera talking heads are sidelined here. But the movie feels like his – sometimes strident actors like Ron Silver are coaxed into the director’s distinctive style of leisurely, amiable naturalism. The plot seems to run out of steam toward the end, but maybe that’s Jaglom’s comment on the sustainability of such a crazy industry. With more than 12 films in the last 20 years though, he’s obviously not being treated too badly by the financial fates, and indeed has the taste not to bite the hands that feed him.

L.I.E.

The title stands for the Long Island Expressway, a grim stretch of highway saved from anonymity only by its high celebrity death count. In the faceless surrounding neighborhoods, a teenage boy negotiates ambiguous relationships with his wealthy but possibly corrupt father, his sexually ambivalent friend and the jovial local pedophile (an intriguing characterization by Brian Cox). This is mildly daring material, declining to pass obvious judgment on its numerous flawed characters, suggesting that this cold face of American life may demand a severe reassessment of conventional morality. Ultimately though, it wraps up rather too neatly (how many films have this fault I wonder?) – and it may not be too much more at heart than an oblique manifesto for better-integrated families and communities (the end of the film could be read as a mere sweeping away of deviancy). The film is sternly crafted and always engrossing, although it’s never as intellectually bracing as it intends, and the frequent symbolic return to the highway seems more limiting than liberating.

Suspicious River

Canadian director Lynne Stopkewich’s follow-up to Kissed screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2000 and opened in the UK long ago – it finally creeps out onto a single screen at the Carlton. How could we treat our own filmmakers so badly? It’s a good movie and deserves to be seen. The story of a small-town motel receptionist who prostitutes herself to the guests initially seems rather thin and monotonous (and it takes a while to appreciate the subtlety of Molly Parker’s performance), but gradually expands into more complex, gripping territory. A subplot about a little girl who observes her parents’ unhappy marriage holds the surprising key to the film. Its last twenty minutes almost have the feel of Mulholland Drive about them – life and death, fantasy and reality intertwine disquietingly, and it’s not clear exactly where the film ends up. That’s not a complaint though – the film feels intuitively right, coaxed from a troubled but defiant psyche that alternates between idealism and pessimism about female sexuality. It occasionally carries an almost zombie-like quality, perfectly capturing the deadening contours of the small town. Kissed received more recognition and praise, but I found Suspicious River more deeply felt and compelling overall. Admittedly I’m overpraising it a bit here, but that’s just my token attempt to remedy the way the film’s been treated.

Last Orders

The best of the films covered here is Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of a Graham Swift novel, about three aging drinking buddies (Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings) mourning the death of a fourth (Michael Caine). With the dead man’s son, they spend the day driving his ashes to the seaside, to be scattered off the end of the pier. Around this journey, the film blends in an astonishing array of flashbacks to various parts of their lives. It could hardly look and feel more authentically drab and desolate – there’s very little misplaced romanticism or nostalgia here – and yet it gradually takes on the expansive, limitless feel of a Bertolucci film. The film skillfully finds moments of hope, of extreme possibilities squandered (Caine remarks that only Courtenay seems satisfied with his lot in life – he’s an undertaker), of faith and longing. It allows us both to feel the impact of those moments and to appreciate that they don’t amount to much from sixty or seventy years on earth. A similar duality applies to the film’s conclusion – Caine’s passing allows a long-delayed renewal for two of the other characters, but we’re not drawn to overestimate what that might amount to at this late stage. The actors are all great to watch, and I think this film will grow in one’s memory.

And I saw Panic Room too! But more on that next time.

 

The human spirit

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2002)

I was writing the other week about how director Jacques Rivette has challenged normal notions of how long a movie should be. Soon after that I went to the Cinematheque Ontario on a Sunday afternoon for a five-and-a-half hour screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s France Tour Detour Deux Enfants (actually a series of twelve half-hour TV programs, shown here in one block). I’m often surprised how few people seem aware of the Cinematheque – it really is one of Toronto’s artistic jewels. I go there maybe thirty or forty times a year, but it should be way more often (life involves tough choices). I get a bit irritated by fair-weather film festival attendees who make a big deal for that one week in September of avoiding the commercial and seeking out rare films, while ignoring the Cinematheque for the rest of the year.

Five and a half hours!

I envy anyone who can watch a five and a half hour movie with the same concentration I can apply for ninety minutes. I nodded off at least three times; I was almost as preoccupied with spacing out my candy as with the film itself. And of course, that big a chunk of time couldn’t help but screw up the other things you’d normally do with your day. Still, it was a sublime experience. The film itself is endlessly fascinating and provocative. Of course that’s partly a function of the possibilities allowed by so much time, but the length itself, quite separate from the content, forms an intertwined yet somehow distinct experience. Maybe it’s partly self-aggrandizement – you’re impressed at your own resolve and fortitude. But it’s also purer than that.

I’m usually skeptical about the common claim that a particular feel-good hit represents the “triumph of the human spirit.” Part of my skepticism is that for such movies (A Beautiful Mind is one of the most recent) the feel-good dosage goes down all too easily – the film itself involves little suffering or striving. The ultimate “triumph” of the human spirit usually seems muted to me because we were spared the pain or full complexity of the earlier obstacles. I doubt anyone’s ever reviewed a Godard movie in such terms, yet the “lighter” moments of France Tour Detour seem more liberating and more meaningful than any number of standard happy endings, because of the encyclopedic context from which they emerge.

Of course, I’m not saying a film’s value always increases in proportion to its length (at this point we can all insert our own bloated examples of why that wouldn’t work). And I’m not saying either that its emotional impact necessarily depends on how difficult it is. Without being particularly long or particularly difficult to watch, the current film Monster’s Ball seems to me to illustrate a triumph of the human spirit quite well. Again, I’m not sure anyone has described it in those terms. It’s certainly been praised though – Roger Ebert called it the best film of 2001. That’s going a little far, although not as far as his citations of Eve’s Bayou and Dark City in previous years. But it’s a moving, enveloping film that earns its happy ending in sweat and blood that you can smell and taste.

Monster’s Ball

It’s basically the story of an unlikely relationship between a prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) and the widow (Halle Berry) of a man he escorted on death row; set in a small Southern town. These are small-scale lives, moving between home and work and the local diner; sons unthinkingly follow the career paths of their fathers (and, as shown in a witty juxtaposition, even adopt the same sexual position with the same local prostitute); casual racism’s still part of the fabric.

Like several recent movies, Monster’s Ball owes an awful lot to its actors. Halle Berry deserved the Oscar for Best Actress for this performance. The moment when she initiates sex with Thornton is shocking in the intensity of its emotion and in the completely unexpected way it tears open her grief and loneliness. And Thornton is almost as amazing. He starts out almost as a dead man walking, embodying racist attitudes and family hatred that he doesn’t really feel deeply, but doesn’t think of questioning. By the end of the movie, he’s worked his way to real tenderness. The characterizations are so good that they almost break loose from the rest of the movie, into some transcendent, psychologically acute bubble.

The film is distinctly marred though by excessive melodrama and schematicism in its plotting. In its first half, both characters are visited by Job-like misfortune; they both lose a son, she loses her husband, they both all but lose their souls. It’s too much, although I’m not suggesting this is unconscious. I suppose the film aims to place itself on the edge of Biblical tragedy, and then to claw back through the sensitivity and imagination of its artistry. Somewhat incredibly, it largely succeeds in this.

Judgments of racism

When the two get together, the film narrows its focus, allowing the numerous seeds sown in the first half to come to fruition. This allows the film’s essential softness to come to the fore, which is a mixed blessing – for example, Thornton’s developing friendship with a black man he scorned at the start seems too easy a symbol of his inner transformation. That friendship also strikes of calculation – as if the filmmakers were worried that the audience would suspect the motives of a white man who sleeps with a black woman, unless it were clear that he gets on with other black people as well.

It’s amazing to reflect how few films depict a sexual relationship between a white man and a black woman – so few that to some the images inherently convey paternalism and exploitation. Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail, for reasons I found a little bizarre, accused Monster’s Ball of coming close to racism. This judgment, as he frames it, seems to depend less on what’s in the film than on a preconceived opinion on what constitutes acceptable rules of engagement across colour lines. Monster’s Ball certainly supports a debate on that point, but I don’t think it’s diminished by it.
 

I can report that Monster’s Ball has a happy ending, something that seemed highly in question throughout the movie. It’s tinged by impermanence, but as the film ends, the characters have something workable in place. It definitely wouldn’t have been a surprise if the film had ended in gloom – the fact that it doesn’t is a relief, a minor joy, and seems frankly like a matter of optimism on the part of its makers. So there’s your triumph of the human spirit. Monster’s Ball is flawed for sure, but it’s one of the rare movies that scores the double – worthy of both the multiplex and the Cinematheque.

Iris' defeat

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2002)

Alzheimer’s disease is tragic whenever it strikes, and I doubt many of us can watch a film on the subject without descending into morose speculation about our own futures. My grandmother had it, and my only personal consolation is that I was probably too young to appreciate the full extent of what had happened to her. Ronald Reagan is probably the most famous current sufferer, but his family and the media have been discreet in not telling or showing us too much of his condition. The one I always think about is Rita Hayworth – one of the most beautiful women who ever appeared on the screen. She was no more than 60, and could have achieved much more.

An awful reckoning

It’s a long time since I started on article on such a personal note, and it’s not necessarily a tribute to Iris, the film that prompts this beginning. If the movie were better, I would want to write about the movie. Since it is what it is, I find myself thinking more about the disease.

A few months ago I quoted a writer who criticized the movie Ali for not depicting Ali’s Parkinson’s disease – he called the impairment of the champion’s unique gifts of movement and speech “a reckoning that might have come out of Greek tragedy.” I wrote that I didn’t see how a depiction of this period of Ali’s life could have avoided morose irony and reductive metaphor, falling far short of Greek tragedy. I now feel even more confident in this judgment, because Iris has a very similar “reckoning,” and the film’s impact is almost exactly as I anticipated.

I’ve never read any of Iris Murdoch’s work, although I feel I’ve always known about her. But like many others I assume, my view of her now has been largely defined by her Alzheimer’s. It’s a shame it’s that way, but her husband John Bayley’s memoir of her decline has been hard to avoid. In addition to Bayley’s book, there’s been at least one widely reviewed biography of Murdoch, not to mention numerous articles and obituaries that attended her death and the run-up to the new film. These articles all discuss her youthful promiscuity, her charisma and intellect and interest in ethics and morals. But most of all they discuss her Alzheimer’s.

Dimming the light

The film’ success or failure probably depends on your reaction to its one major structural decision. It intertwines the young Iris, meeting Bayley at Oxford, embarking on a relationship with him despite continuing to sleep with other men; and the old, long-married couple as her disease takes hold and eventually consumes her. The contrast heightens our sense of the ultimate tragedy, and as I mentioned already, there’s an obvious irony in the dimming by Alzheimer’s of an intellect as vibrant and forceful as Murdoch’s.

But the film shows us nothing at all of her creative prime. There’s a scene of the young Iris spellbinding a dinner group with her wit and verbal agility, and a fascinating one of the old Iris and Bayley in the supermarket, chattering away in an idiom that’s simultaneously brilliant and batty. We see her delivering a speech on the importance of education. But we never learn anything tangible about her books or her ideas. We see her working on her last novel, but the film makes so much of her difficulties in concentrating that it’s frankly incredible, on the basis of what’s shown, that she could ever have completed it. (In reality, and as shown in the film, by the time the book was published she couldn’t recognize it as her own work, and reviewers noted a distinct decline in clarity and quality.)

Such deficiencies are common of course in films that purport to portray genius – A Beautiful Mind is another recent example where we must take Nash’s brilliance largely on faith. But that film has a more obvious populist intent, not least because it leads toward personal triumph rather than defeat. Iris takes an approach that seems much more reductive and unsatisfying. It’s quite a short film, lasting just an hour and a half, and yet still feels rather protracted and repetitive. Occasionally the juxtaposition of the young and the old Iris produces some frisson or grace note. But the artistic point is usually obscure.

Indeed, the structure does more to reveal Bayley than Iris. In one scene, lying in bed beside her, he rages against her for her promiscuity. Even though she’s far beyond comprehension, she moves closer, as though to comfort him. It’s a striking moment, and the effect of it is certainly deeper for the numerous earlier scenes of the young Bayley just watching her, time and time again, as ego or life force or sheer delight lead her desires temporarily away from him.

Sop to sentimentality

The film owes a lot to its actors – hence the Oscar nominations for Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as the old and young Iris, and the win for Jim Broadbent as the old Bayley. It also owes a lot to the art and set directors who constructed the eye-poppingly messy house of the couple’s later years. But in the end, it’s no more or less moving than its subject. I didn’t like the midway twist of A Beautiful Mind (in which we learn that some of what we’ve seen to that point has been a product of Nash’s imagination, and therefore realize the depth of his self-delusion) as much as many people did. But I couldn’t help thinking that Iris needed something like that – some kind of cinematic springboard, even if one in danger of seeming over-facile.

Early on in the progress of the disease, Bayley speculates for the doctor that maybe Iris hasn’t left language behind, maybe there’s still meaning in her behaviour that they must try harder to locate. Nothing in the movie supports that hypothesis, and I don’t suppose studies of Alzheimer’s would bear him out. And yet, the film would have benefited had it surrendered to that idea, even for a few minutes. Even if it were merely a sop to sentimentality, I wish that one of those scenes of Murdoch just existing, her lights having long dimmed, could have zoomed in through her eyes via some kind of digital technology flourish, flowed down the optic nerve and tumbled into the cerebral cortex, where we’d find intact her memory and analytical power and wordplay and books not yet written. Sure, it’s a “grass is greener”-type thing to say: if the film had done just as I suggested, maybe I would have criticized it for losing its nerve. But as the movie stands now, I rather wonder why anyone wanted to make it at all.  

December movies #2

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2007)

The Royal cinema on College West reopened in mid-December, complete with picketing projectionists and the Toronto premiere of Reginald Harkema’s Monkey Warfare, a highly appealing little movie (lasting just 75 minutes and appearing to have the budget of the average wedding video). Don McKellar and Tracy Wright play a jaded couple, one-time revolutionaries of sorts, now living rather aridly in Parkdale, making money mostly by scavenging (aided with a sweet rent deal from an inattentive landlord). When a young drug dealer (Nadia Litz) comes on the scene the balance shifts, in some ways for the better, in others not. Harkema perfectly catches the grungy lifestyle, and evokes the earlier, funnier Jean-Luc Godard through his use of jump cuts, graphics and suchlike; the movie conveys an authentic hankering for the thrill of making some kind of stand, and for how heavy life can be without it. It ends rather abruptly though, leaving you wishing he could have extended his examination further, although in the circumstances it’s easy to believe he just ran out of money.

The Good German

Steven Soderbergh seems to be in a position now where he could whip up money to make just about anything, and his new film The Good German is one of his periodic “conceptual” projects, the concept in this case being a modern-day movie made in the style of something from the 40’s (apparently to the point of using old cameras). This stars George Clooney (certainly the best available choice) as a military investigator in post-war Berlin, trying to untangle a complicated plot involving femme fatale Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire as a scheming driver. Nothing about the film strikes radically new narrative or thematic ground, so on the face of it the payoff would merely be to craft a viewing experience with a sixty-year-old feel to it, but I’m not sure what value one could ever really put on that. Not to mention that (to my thinking at least) Soderbergh confuses the premise through a very modern use of language and violence.

Still, the film does a good job of crafting an old-fashioned Big Sleep kind of complexity, along with multiple moral shadings, although it tends to make you wish for the zippiness of a Howard Hawks (The Good German is quite laborious and monotone). The final scene does bring a contemporary note of reckoning to a Casablanca-style set-up, and I will say overall it left with me a more compelling aftertaste than I might have expected at the time. Still, overall it’s a film that might have been designed just to be lost in the shuffle.

The Good Shepherd

It’s only near the end, when we see the preparations for a family wedding intercut with the build-up to the bride’s demise, that the ambition of Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd becomes completely clear. Matt Damon plays this film’s Michael Corleone, but the institution here is the CIA and its wartime precursor, which he joins with the same patriotic optimism that caused Al Pacino to enlist in The Godfather. He rises in the organization, but the original values become abstracted and distant, the difference between the good and the bad guys becomes tenuous and shifting, his connection to his family almost disintegrates, and in the end he’s responsible for terrible acts, but on he goes, dead inside, a virtual automaton.

Unfortunately, The Good Shepherd is far less dynamic than The Godfather, with none of its flair for accessible yet nuanced storytelling; De Niro is more of an assembler than a real director. The cast is impressive (Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, De Niro himself and many others, surrounding the minimalist Damon), but it feels too often that we’re merely watching a parade of cameos. Most problematic is De Niro’s failure (despite the movie’s 160 minute length) to communicate the real geopolitical implications of the CIA’s growing reach; we seldom feel the raw power that comes to lie at Damon’s fingertips, and it’s a mere guess what it does to his psyche. The film ends up unequal to its subject in almost every respect, clinging to superficial devices and images when it should have been complex and upsetting.

Two Fantasies

Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is one of last year’s most distinctive and compelling films (and if you remember my ten best list from a few weeks ago, that’s saying a lot). It’s set in Spain in 1944, in an outpost where fascist soldiers stake out a group of forest-dwelling rebels. The evil captain summons his pregnant wife to stay with him, and she brings along her 11 year old daughter from a previous marriage, a girl named Ofelia who is quickly introduced into a magical underworld of fairies and fauns and strange creatures, which may or may not be a creation of her imagination, and in which she may or may not be the reincarnation of a princess who fled centuries earlier to the world of men. The film is superbly visualized, expertly constructed, and completely mesmerizing; it's satisfying both as a muscular adult fairy tale and as a serious minded (if enjoyably lurid) depiction of the fascist psyche. It’s both highly specific and illuminating, and at the same time timeless and universal (one suspects that a greater knowledge of the time and place and surrounding culture would open up almost boundless resonances). Del Toro’s previous films (including Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone) have been a bit too conceptual and genre-bound for my own taste, but Pan’s Labyrinth has a rare assurance.
 

The following day I saw Steven Shainberg’s Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which occasionally struck me as a variation on del Toro’s film, except that the mistreated girl is now famous photographer Arbus in her formative 50’s housewife phase, and instead of the magical underworld the film conjures up a weird upstairs neighbour who leads her into a personal awakening. This is a man covered in hair, played by Robert Downey Jr., who has connections with a whole network of physically distinctive people of the kind who would come to populate much of Arbus’ work. As the film’s title and the opening credits make clear, this is all invention, and I’m not sure it’s particularly flattering to Arbus: at times she seems like no more than a flighty sensualist. At best, the concept does no more than vaguely explain her affinity for certain types, but this doesn’t take us very far toward understanding the rigours of her very distinctive aesthetic approach. On its own terms though, Fur is surprisingly beguiling, and quite sensitive and provocative on a scene-by-scene level. It’s best taken, I think, as a wacky fantasy that – despite the lack of any overt supernatural presence – might actually have less to do with the real world than Pan’s Labyrinth.

Best of 2007

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2007)

Here are my favourite ten films released in Toronto this year. It was a pretty good year, although this list didn’t come together quite as easily as last year’s – the last two choices below might easily change tomorrow, and then again the day after that. Apologies to any masterpieces released in the last few days of the year. Happy New Year!

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (Cristian Mungiu)

Mungiu’s remarkable film won the top prize at Cannes, and would likely deserve the Oscar. It’s about a young Romanian student who helps her roommate obtain an abortion, and I can’t recall a film that illustrates certain aspects of this procedure more clearly.  The film is realistic, and realistically depressing, an anthropological eye-opener, and afterwards I kept mulling over its endless subtleties: the theme of physical and existential (and in particular for women, biological) confinement; its immense technical smarts, producing one breathtaking piece of execution after another. This is probably my favourite of the films included here – I wouldn’t have wanted to change a frame.

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes)

As deliberate a head-scratcher as anyone’s come up with recently, this is a meditation on the life of Bob Dylan, represented by six different actors playing different versions (or evocations) of the man at different points in his life (or different extrapolations of his myth), poetically intertwined and juxtaposed. It’s quite stunningly achieved, executed with enormous panache – it’s immensely visually and tonally varied (from pseudo documentary to utter poetic association), a constant tumble of allusion and connection. Sometimes it’s a bit gimmicky of course, but even when you don’t understand some of Haynes’ choices they’re intriguingly executed and thematically provocative within the overall scheme.

Inland Empire (David Lynch)

I didn’t give Lynch’s reworking of Mulholland Drive that glowing a review at the time, but of all these films, it’s the one I most wanted to see again quickly. 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. Focusing on the intertwined inner and outer realities of an actress played by Laura Dern, it 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. Still, I’m not sure what else can possibly lie for Lynch in this direction.

Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran)

Running almost three hours, this French version of the D. H. Lawrence novel is an extremely detailed observation of the frustrated Connie’s sexual and emotional awakening, via an increasingly passionate affair with the gamekeeper on her disabled husband’s vast estate. This is very much a woman’s story, and has been criticized in some quarters for what might be seen as wishy-washy romanticism (and in others for overlooking Lawrence’s social consciousness). But if you submit to Ferran’s sometimes-quirky perspective, and to the mesmerizingly detailed performance by lead actress Marina Hands (who also won the top French award), it’s extremely satisfying.

Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)

Eastwood’s second Iwo Jima film of last year opened here in January, focusing on the Japanese soldiers hopelessly assigned to defend that wretched island. Much more stark and pained than its predecessor Flags of our Fathers, it drives home how Flags – for all its apparent respect toward American heartland values – exposes the machinations of a puffed-up, corrupt empire. It has its weaknesses, but it’s a film of great eloquence and weight, establishing the arrogance of the very concepts of winning and losing in war.

No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson)

This highly impactful documentary sets out some of the colossal errors, largely rooted in arrogance and complacency you can’t even process, behind the current mess in Iraq. Inevitably, most of the culpable parties declined to be interviewed – the main exception, who at least deserves points for being game, confirms everything you ever suspected about the cloistered indifference of the decision-making process. Much as the war continues to be debated and analyzed, Ferguson’s film reminds us that full mass recognition of the venality of what’s been visited upon us is yet to be achieved.

Offside (Jafar Panahi)

Like Iranian director Panahi’s earlier film The Circle, Offside is about the treatment of women, focusing here on their exclusion from soccer stadiums: the official explanation is that this protects them from the cursing and excesses of the excited males, but of course that’s merely rationalization. Presented almost in real time, the film is mesmerizing, and extremely subtle. Again as in The Circle, the focus on the women doesn’t preclude awareness that such an ideology traps both sexes, and there’s much humanity in the guards’ treatment of their captives. The film isn’t didactic – there’s some (albeit bleak) comedy in many of the exchanges, and the most compelling argument for change is contained simply in the energy, eloquence and commitment of the women themselves.

Ratatouille (Brad Bird)

This animated film about Remy, a French rat with a passion for gourmet cooking, is a staggering visual achievement, sending its unconstrained camera on journeys of impossibly intricate choreography: Remy is simply one of the all-time triumphs of anthropomorphism – immensely sympathetic, but always very plainly a rat. Most of all, apart from doing a stellar job of promoting the merits of good, natural food, it’s transcendent in its insistence that artistic achievement can spring from the least likely of sources. In this regard, Ratatouille is a perfect marriage of form and content – for doubters like me, it’s not quite as miraculous as a dreamy meal cooked up by a rodent, but it’s in the ballpark.

Control (Anton Corbijn)

This is about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who killed himself in 1980 at the age of 23, on the eve of the band’s first trip to the US. Directed by Corbijn (a renowned rock photographer who knew Curtis well) in pristine black and white, this is a deliberately downbeat but highly skilled telling; you’ve probably never seen a rock biopic so immune to the thrill of performing and all that goes with it. It allows us a general sense of Curtis’ inspirations and frustrations, but it’s ineffably mysterious, with a sullied, thwarted hope at its centre.
 

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

This won the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and is a most worthy entry in Germany’s continuing dissection of its taxing past century. Set in 1984 East Germany, a stiff-necked Stasi (secret police) officer is given a surveillance assignment, to uncover the suspected subversive activities of a notable playwright and his girlfriend, an esteemed actress. The complications that follow make for a fascinating narrative, loaded with significant moral and political weight. The film depicts a ruling system that’s totally lost its ideological bearings, serving only to crush or warp everyone within it, although it’s also about the power of art in a totalitarian state.

Christmas movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2007)

Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal is a superbly potent, gripping entertainment, but never so potent or gripping that you forget you’re watching a blatant melodrama. Cate Blanchett is a new, pretty teacher at a rough-edged London school who crosses madly over the line, having an affair with a 15-year-old boy. She’s caught by a sour-faced, unfulfilled older teacher played by Judi Dench, who imagines herself a potential lover and soulmate. There’s no possibility of a good outcome, and the film is as concentrated as an acid drip feed, crafting extremely memorable characters and confrontations with barely an excess frame or syllable. The casting, of course, is the key. Dench is winning most of the praise, but good as she is, I never really thought she surpassed the basic simplicity of her character’s conception. Blanchett on the other hand is a complete wonder, transcendently embodying a thrilling network of neurosis and impulses and desires. The film always seems capably of shifting onto a more challenging thematic level, but never actually makes the leap – the conventional final scene is particularly disappointing. Still, for those too squeamish to sit through Hostel, this is good edge of the seat stuff.

Children of Men

The real scandal of our times, of course, is in how the news media continues to occupy us with such passing melodramas while the overarching issue, the only one really, comes into focus only in fits and starts, still failing to grab any meaningful policy traction. I’m talking about climate change, the environment, the sustainability of the whole damn thing, and it’s only the thinnest of silver linings that the issue seems somewhat more central to the political debate than it did a year ago. If you spend as much time as I do fantasizing gloomily about where this is all leading, then Children of Men may be (or looked at another way, absolutely may not be) a can’t miss film. This is a stunning imagining of where we might get to in a mere twenty years – a world recognizably our own, with some technological advancement, but catastrophic overall decline otherwise. It exists at a slight tangent to our real nightmares, for the premise here is an infertile world, where the youngest living person is 18, and life is merely a prolonged deathwatch, trying to hang onto some kind of functioning society while collapsing hopelessly upon itself, morally and financially and culturally.

The film, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, is superbly well conceived and directed – the attention to detail is stunning, and Cuaron’s control of his medium is masterly. Its limitation is that once this is all established, the focus of the narrative sometimes feels a little too narrow: Clive Owen plays a now-cynical former idealist who finds himself safeguarding the only pregnant woman in the world, and has to protect her from an insurgent group who want to use her baby for their own ends. In large part it’s a chase thriller, with some stock characters and set-ups, although all searingly well executed. The film’s lasting impact is pretty much all established in its first third, and there’s a bit of a sense of letdown as that becomes clear, but still, what a dynamite piece of work overall,

The Painted Veil

In a very different vein, John Curran’s The Painted Veil is a delicate, moving adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel, about a scientist husband who cruelly drags his unfaithful wife into a remote cholera zone in 1920’s China. The film is quite a throwback, charting the shifts in their relationship against a highly pictorial backdrop and some old-fashioned personal dangers. Edward Norton and Naomi Watts are both perfectly in tune with the material, and the film gains resonance both from the heightened current sense of China (depicted here at the point where foreign intervention is becoming less welcome) and from how the underlying arc of the wife’s personal journey remains oddly recognizable (if the stuff I read in woman’s magazines is anything to go by). The movie wins sympathy for sheer optimism: as if such a project, released in the same week as the other films in this article, could possibly carve out space for itself.

Curse of the Golden Flower is the new film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou, another immense historical spectacle in the vein of his Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Golden Flower centres on a powerful 10^th century emperor (Chow Yun-Fat), his beautiful wife (Gong Li) and three fine sons; the empire initially seems impregnable, until the strains and machinations within the family spawn an unravelling. It struck me that House of Flying Daggers, for all its scope, had only four speaking parts of any consequence, and Golden Flower has only about twice that many; these are unusually concentrated, sparse centres for such apparent epics, but with monumental ripples, embodied in the thousands of soldiers and serfs who populate the film, herded into vast configurations (often just to get killed of course) at the behest of their rulers. This makes for glorious tableaux (even if much of it must be digitally created) but it’s sometimes a little disquieting how Zhang’s recent films mirror the feudalism they portray, swooning over the travails of the rulers with all else being mere cinematic cannon fodder (although I suppose this is no more than the classic approach to tragedy). If you can get past that, the new film is always gripping, with a mild sense of perversity lying beneath its overwhelmingly scenic surface, and some of the set-pieces, particularly the climactic battle, are among Zhang’s most accomplished creations yet.

Perfume

The first notable release of the new year was Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, based on a novel by Patrick Syskind, which chronicles the fanciful tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born into extreme poverty in eighteenth century Paris, with no advantages other than an acutely developed sense of smell. Quickly surpassing the limits of the perfumer’s art (Dustin Hoffman plays his mentor), he becomes obsessed with finding better techniques to capture odours, but his interest focuses on the smell of women, and the demands of his project lead him into serial murder. The film is most engrossing early on, when Tykwer uses his facility with montage (he’s best known for Run Lola Run) to evoke the world through Grenouille’s nose, but for much of the time we’re merely watching the unfolding of a clever but somewhat hollow narrative, which becomes increasingly divorced from any compelling period flavour or psychological interest. The movie does have a striking finale, and the way it films some of the women is genuinely sensual and adoring, if you manage to look past the grim role of the female in the whole creation. It’s enjoyable enough overall, but no one who sees it will particularly remember six months from now.

Fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2007)

James Mangold’s remake of 3.10 to Yuma, with Christian Bale as a one-legged farmer trying to escort the outlaw Russell Crowe to a prison train against impossible odds, is enjoyable enough, but festooned with limitations. It’s most disappointing at the very end, when Mangold tries to pull off two kinds of twists – one psychological/existential, the other narrative. Both fail, for different reasons. A Sergio Leone, say, could have pulled off the former, and would have had the good judgment to torpedo the latter. Of course, if Leone had made it, the film would have been an hour longer too, but might still have seemed shorter than Mangold’s. Anyway, no matter what you prize about the Western genre, this movie isn’t very effective at tapping it.

I don’t remember much of anything now about Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, but if it’s a mental void, it’s a fond one. The Farrelly Brothers’ remake takes the classic premise – about a man who falls in love with another woman on his honeymoon – and plods through it in the most formulaic and soulless manner possible. It’s peppered of course with the usual Farrelly Brothers’ gross-out stuff, but even that hardly has an impact any more. My conscience is clear on this: a few years ago when everyone raved about There’s Something about Mary, and its makers were being fawned over in the serious magazines, I yawned about the movie in these very pages. Now everyone’s moved on to Judd Apatow. Well, I don’t much like his stuff either.

And I increasingly don’t like Wes Anderson’s. The Darjeeling Limited (actually, his movies generally lose me right at the title) is about three brothers on a “spiritual journey” in India, to rekindle their relationship and perhaps find their mother, who’s ensconced in a convent. Anderson’s familiar style, defined through distinctive fonts, bright colours, slow pans, action staged at right angles to the camera, and sundry affectations, has the effect of draining the flavour from everything he looks at; his India is just another source of gimmicks and bric-a-brac, presented without a shred of real engagement or integrity. Anderson’s self-regard seeps off the screen; you can virtually feel his drool on you.

In the Shadow of the Moon evokes the Apollo moon missions through the testimony of the surviving astronauts (excluding the reclusive Neil Armstrong) and the of-course stunning archival footage. It’s fascinating, naturally, and one could easily have wished it to be longer: with the focus so much on the individual bravery of those nine men, there’s little consideration of the underlying science or logistics, or the surrounding politics. But at the end, when one of them takes a shot at the current preoccupation with gas prices in lieu of sensitivity to the planet’s challenges, the basic point is lunar-clear: the “giant leap for mankind” has dwindled into a sad series of furtive sidesteps.

No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, is an even more impactful documentary, setting out some of the colossal errors, largely rooted in arrogance and complacency you can’t even process, behind the current mess in Iraq. Inevitably, most of the culpable parties declined to be interviewed – the main exception, who at least deserves points for being game, confirms everything you ever suspected about the cloistered indifference of the decision-making process. Other interviewees, describing how the Bush Administration again and again placed ideology and fantasy above all else, are often close to tears. Much as the war continues to be debated and analyzed, Ferguson’s film reminds us that full mass recognition of the venality of what’s been visited upon us is yet to be achieved.

Richard Shephard’s The Hunting Party metaphorically evokes the Iraq war: it’s a big but shady concept, ineptly executed. Set in Bosnia in 2000, and based (somewhat shakily it seems) on a true story, it depicts three journalists on a crackpot enterprise to interview, and perhaps even capture, an evasive war criminal; Richard Gere and Terrence Howard (both as dull as hell) are the lead actors. Nothing about the film really works. It seems to be aspiring to be a blackly comic, allusive romp, but is blandly made and inauthentic-feeling in all respects. It holds irritating pretentions to be educating us about shady American foreign policy (again!), and loftily teases us on what’s wholly or partly invented. Regardless, you just won’t give a damn.

Peter Berg’s The Kingdom isn’t annoying, but merely uninteresting. A group of FBI agents fly into Saudi Arabia after a huge explosion in a US compound. Dodging local customs and assassins in equal measure, they do the CSI thing for a while, and then the frenetic action thing for a while longer. Movies (and TV for that matter) are so adept now at delivering gritty, multi-layered, handheld-camera mayhem that you just find yourself yawning at spectacles that might have dazzled even fifteen years ago; there’s nothing new here, and any five minutes of Syriana (for example) was more provocative and intellectually charged than The Kingdom in its entirety. The actors, including Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, generally seem like actors.

Robert Benton, who won Oscars for Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart, is in his mid-70’s now, and Feast of Love is plainly the work of an old man (that’s a glass-half-full kind of assessment). Set in Portland, it weaves six or seven core characters into an amiable, sometimes poignant story of personal ups and downs; Morgan Freeman is at the centre as a, uh, amiable philosophy professor, and Greg Kinnear is a,  well, amiable coffee shop owner who’s desperately unlucky in love. Kinnear embodies the film’s strengths and weaknesses: it’s unusually sharp in positioning his “nice guy” quality as self-absorbed cluelessness, but ultimately backs off and allows him too lucky a break. The portrayals of lesbians, and of young people generally, are distinctly idealistic, as if Benton had never encountered the former, and last touched base with the latter in the 60’s. There’s some surprisingly fearless nudity in the movie, but no erotic charge (the subplot about a porn movie might as well have turned on a candy floss smuggling ring). But easy as it is to take shots at all this, it’s warm and decent and I liked it. 

Another old man’s film, Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball, made a blink-and-you-missed-it visit to the Royal. It’s a semi-coherent melodrama about a young female architect renovating a remote Irish cottage, and falling into her crazy neighbours’ hormone- and voodoo-fueled orbit. It’s possible to see how this might have carried a pretty strong feminist charge in Fay Weldon’s novel, but nothing really coalesces here. Roeg works in some of his old techniques and themes, but it’s a little bit like watching Bjorn Borg reduced to fiddling around on the ping-pong table. Donald Sutherland, from the director’s classic Don’t Look Now, contributes a mystifying two-scene cameo. Still, if you’re well disposed toward Roeg (and readers may recall I devoted a whole article to him a few months ago), the movie can’t help being enjoyable.