Strange places

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2003)

Four movies from four very different and (to varying degrees) odd places

Whale Rider

Whale Rider, a film from New Zealand directed by Niki Caro, won the audience-voted people’s choice award at last year’s Toronto film festival. The most recent preceding winners were Life is Beautiful, American Beauty, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Amelie. It’s an unquestionably prestigious lineage, and a revealing one as to what kind of movie strikes the “people” as special: three out of the four were foreign films that achieved unusual acclaim through the accessibility and “universal” quality of their storytelling. Whale Rider falls directly into that category too: it shows us a self-contained culture following unfamiliar rules, but uses narrative and visual strategies that are solidly familiar and comfortable.

It’s about a young Maori girl, being brought up by her grandparents in a remote village; her mother and twin brother died in childbirth and her father is largely absent. Preoccupied by the community’s spiritual decline, her grandfather instructs the local boys in Maori myths and cultural traditions – key among them the search for the contemporary equivalent of an ancestor who rode in on a whale, heralding the community’s rebirth. Although the girl has more affinity for these traditions than any of the boys do, the grandfather chauvinistically excludes her from the group.

The film reminded me at several points of the recent Inuit film Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner, but not in a way that’s really complimentary to Whale Rider. Atanarjuat is much more difficult to watch, and not as much “fun,” but the unfamiliarity of its approach to storytelling seems to reflect the cultural tradition that’s central to the film. Whale Rider talks a lot about the uniqueness of the community it depicts, and that’s evident in the sense that (for example) they dress a bit differently and follow unfamiliar rituals, but the film’s relationship to this activity often seems like that of the tourist or sightseer.

Still, it achieves real grandeur in its closing passages, where the whales come into view and events attain the mythical pay-off that’s been broadly obvious from the start. Unfortunately, budget constraints (or so I assume) leave much of the key imagery off screen, and anyway the feel-good factor outweighs everything else. In terms of emotional impact, it’s basically like watching Bend it Like Beckham again.

Hollywood Homicide

Ron Shelton’s Hollywood Homicide has Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett as two LA cops who, like just about everyone else in Hollywood, really want to be something else. Ford moonlights as a real estate agent and Hartnett as an actor. They’re also both being investigated by Internal Affairs, which makes the film a close relative to Shelton’s last film Dark Blue, which just came out a few months ago. But where Dark Blue was angry and chronic, Hollywood Homicide is a breeze. In Shelton’s hands though, that doesn’t seem like a complete capitulation to the demands of summer box-office and bigger stars; rather, it seems like his commentary on Hollywood, the place and the attitude, and how it barely accommodates seriousness.

To this end, he gets Ford to relax more than he has in years, and constructs the movie as meticulously as a work of major intellect, while devoting it almost entirely to diversion and subversion. It’s a shame he didn’t have a larger final thematic pay-off up his sleeve, but his picture achieves more than you’d think likely from the raw materials. The reviews were mostly mediocre though, and the poor box office results make this another installment in the dimming of Ford’s long run at the top. But if he’s in as genial a mood as the movie suggests, he shouldn’t care too much.

The Safety of Objects

In The Safety of Objects, Rose Troche takes on a place even stranger than than Hollywood – suburbia. The film tracks four families, all evoked in the opening credits as benumbed, almost faceless figures; like game pieces carved in some synthetic material with a marble-like glaze. All four have major-league traumas of course, and as the title suggests, they all cope with these problems via various forms of displacement. Maybe the most striking is the pre-teenager who has a love affair – emotional and, insofar as such a thing is possible, physical – with one of his sister’s dolls. The movie also has Glenn Close as a woman whose son is in a coma after a car accident; she tries to redeem her relationship with her traumatized daughter by trying to win the girl an SUV in an endurance contest.

The material is a bit overwrought at times, and Troche’s direction is pitched to match, and yet the movie is highly effective, and finally moving. The structure sounds somewhat conventional, and the ending – with its flashback revelations, epiphanies and points of resolution – isn’t particularly radical in concept. But the movie illuminates its characters without becoming servant to them; it maintains a pervasive strangeness and sense of perversity. So that in the final scene, where the families all sit in the garden together on a fine summer day, it feels less like closure than like a mildly demented bulletin from an only superficially familiar galaxy.

The Wild Dogs

Finally a Canadian movie, Thom Fitzgerald’s The Wild Dogs. In many ways, it’s the most self-indulgent and even amateurish of the four – a loose scrapbook of odds and ends set in Budapest where a Canadian pornographer (played by Fitzgerald himself) comes in search of new women, but instead finds a social conscience. He hangs out with a British embassy official on the one hand and with various beggars and lowlifes on the other; meanwhile, the city streets are overrun by (we’re told) over 200,000 wild dogs, who generate various other plotlines.

The Wild Dogs can be faulted in so many different ways I don’t know where to start, but the overwhelming problem is a willful, solipsistic obscurity and perversity which doesn’t consistently seem like artistry. Despite that, it may actually be my favourite of the four films mentioned here. The raw elements are fascinating, and the movie ultimately comes to resemble a troubled, rough-edged sculpture where the personal and the political fuse into a semi-recognizable dream landscape.

It’s reminiscent at various times of Kusturica, Fellini, Egoyan, and often of Ken Loach, whose social conscience forms the movie’s last word. Actually, I would have preferred if the movie didn’t end on quite such a preachy note (with a montage of pictures of the disadvantaged kids Fitzgerald meets along the way) – it makes for a rather callow final note. Still, the bottom line: not a bad summer at the movies!

In love with movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2003)

I’ve written before about critic David Thomson, whose Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (first published in 1975) had a huge impact on me when I was growing up; I probably read the whole thing ten times over. I couldn’t believe someone could engage with cinema as fluently as Thomson seemed to. Even now, he influences my perception of filmmakers. If not for Thomson I’m sure I wouldn’t think as highly of Dreyer or Rivette (or Angie Dickinson for that matter) and I wouldn’t be as hard on Ford or Fellini.

It probably helped that Thomson was pretty close to what I fancied I might become – a young British guy from modest origins, engaged on a process of giddy, tireless discovery. He writes about the early 60s in London with his best friend, “busy charting the past of the medium we loved” and describes for illustration a week (one week!) in 1961 when they saw Les 400 coups, L’Avventura, Senso, Dark Victory, A Taste of Honey…and nine other films! Since no filmographies were available, they compiled their own, using the library of the British Film Institute. It almost makes you wish that we might lose much of cinema history, so we could have the thrill of excavating it all over again.

David Thomson

Thomson revised his book in 1994, and I eagerly purchased it. It was a huge disappointment – an obvious rush job, with flaccid updates pasted forlornly on top of the peerless original essays. He updated it again last year, and this time I haven’t bothered buying the book. The reviews seemed to confirm that Thomson, now a longtime resident of San Francisco, had become a lazy stylist, either unaware of or indifferent to the contemporary cutting-edge.

A recent issue of Film Comment carried a review of the book by Kent Jones. It’s a wonderfully written review that made me admire Jones almost as much as I once did Thomson. And Jones nails something in Thomson that had put me off, even though I think this too is something I absorbed into my own approach to cinema – a pervasive air of disappointment, if not disdain. Jones thinks Thomson expected too much of movies, and his love “turned cold because they didn’t deliver everything he expected of them when he was young.” Jones offers his prescription: “If you fall for the idea that cinema is any more or less powerful than any other art form, that movies are anything other than aesthetic objects that exist in reality, then you’re fooling yourself.” True enough, except if it were that simple, why would Jones spend so much of his own life writing about cinema?

The Movie Network recently screened a documentary called Cinemania, about five hardcore film buffs in New York. They mostly live on welfare or disability, skimping on meals, spending day after day after day engaged in an intricately planned swirl around the city, from one screening to the next (scheduling bathroom breaks is a major ongoing issue). None of the five have significant careers or, as far as one can see, meaningful relationships. I must admit I watched it with an air of snotty superiority.

Illusion of control

Saddest of all, although not really surprising, is that the five have relatively little to say about the movies themselves. One guy’s obsession is with memorizing running times. Another merely rattles off which stars he likes, and which he doesn’t. For this, they tie their lives into a knot?

Of course, we can’t pick and choose our obsessions. But cinema seems particularly susceptible to this kind of hopeless immersion. I always imagine it’s something to do with the grandeur of the experience – alone in the dark, visually and aurally overpowered, your senses and perceptions guided in a way you don’t even register. No matter how often you do it, it’s like a laboratory that never yields up its secrets. It’s an utterly passive experience, and yet the activity on the screen avoids the emptiness that (unless you have a real problem) eventually accrues to most other time-killing activity.

With the DVD boom, more and more viewers are conquering, or at least radically amending, this passivity. Extras, alternative endings, commentary tracks, features that allow you to reedit part of the movie – it all serves to make the film less a fixed artifact than a somewhat provisional item that can be endlessly probed and adjusted. In a recent New York Times magazine article, Terence Rafferty suggested the dangers of these developments: “The more ‘interactive’ we allow our experience of art – any art – to become – the less likely it is that future generations will appreciate the necessity of art at all. Interactivity is an illusion of control, but understanding a work of art requires a suspension of that illusion, a provisional surrender to someone else’s vision. To put it as simply as possible: If you have to be in total control of every experience, art is not for you. Life probably isn’t either. Hey, where’s the alternative ending?”

Alternative ending

Fine, but Rafferty’s examples are mostly the likes of X-Men, Lord of the Rings and E.T. Not to diminish those films, but does it really matter how much enthusiasts play around with them? How profound is the artistic experience to begin with? And for viewers who might have a tendency to end up like the geeks in Cinemania, isn’t this healthier – a way of avoiding complete submissiveness, of hanging onto some iota of self-determination?

Well, yes and no. Either way, you’re still spending too much time on a single movie. My problem with the DVD extras isn’t their impact on the artistic experience, but the underlying arrogance of the assumption that anyone should care that much (an arrogance that’s amply justified of course, judging by the format’s popularity). Rafferty’s “illusion of control” is a pale illusion indeed, if you exercise that power by spending twenty hours of your life, and fifty or sixty bucks, on last year’s sensation.

Still, whether it’s for the reasons Rafferty sets out, or whether because the movies used to be better, or because of a shift in the heavens, being in love with the movies isn’t what it used to be. It’s hard to imagine too many future film buffs retracing David Thomson’s arc from infatuation to disappointment, because they would never have shared his high to begin with. When Thomson was rushing around London cramming in movies, he was a geek no doubt, but he was also a pioneer. Today, he’d just be a geek. When art becomes too available, it runs the risk of conversion into kitsch. Maybe Thomson moved to the States, new technology came along, filmographies became as available as ice cream, and after a certain point, whether or not he still needed movies, it felt like they no longer needed him.

Shapes and spellings

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2003)

As Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things starts, a woman stands in front of a sculpture of a nude male that she intends to deface – the figleaf, clumsily imposed after the artist’s death to satisfy someone’s sense of decency, offends her artistic sensibility. The attendant approaches; they strike up a conversation. He doesn’t talk her out of defacing the statue, but he gets a date out of the encounter, and then a relationship. And then she motivates him to lose weight, and to get a better haircut, and even a nose job. He feels great, but his two best friends watch the changes in him with suspicion.

LaBute’s debut was the acerbic The Company of Men. He followed it up with Your Friends and Neighbours, at which point he already had a reputation as a savage, disillusioned observer of contemporary relationships. I found the first film witty and only a little overrated, but the second seemed to me a pointless ‘plague on all your houses’ routine. LaBute then made two films from other people’s screenplays – Nurse Betty and Possession – both of which extended his range but achieved no particular impact. However, by now he was maintaining a dual career in the theater, where his work, distilled and stripped-down, revealed no softening. The Shape of Things began as a play, and the new film has the original four-person cast from London and New York (Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd as the couple; Gretchen Mol and Fred Weller as the friends).

The Shape of Things

It’s hard to discuss the film without giving away the ending, which I don’t want to do, so suffice to say that it’s about the twisted motives that shape human interaction, and it’s also about the perverse demands of art and creation. The revelation, delivered in a formal setting, looks like it would have been an effective piece of theater, and the movie doesn’t really try to disguise its origins. It’s divided into clearly demarcated scenes, with much of the key action happening off screen, and it’s lit as clearly and crisply as a stage, or a laboratory.

That said though, this is a film, and the way we apprehend LaBute’s theme surely shifts accordingly. Although I found it interesting, it seemed to me there’s an in-built redundancy here. Cinema always manipulates character and spectator alike – it’s always artifice masquerading as truth. The same is true in theater of course, but the manipulation of the spectator isn’t as complete, and the illusion of reality isn’t as gripping – the audience member participates more consciously in the creation of an imaginary space. In cinema, a revelation of deception is just another day at the office.

Which is why, rather weirdly, The Shape of Things is a cousin to The Matrix and Identity and that whole genre of “meta” movies I wrote about a few weeks ago. Things are not what they seem – a discovery that may or may not pack a philosophical punch. If, as I do, you go through life with the basic assumption that you’re always missing something, then it’s hard to be impressed with a film that merely confirms your suspicions and self-doubt.

Not that LaBute’s film, taken scene by scene, isn’t intriguing. But it lacks much spontaneity (perhaps inevitable given his and the actors’ familiarity with the material); it always feels that we’re being pushed along. Weisz’ performance, which is key to the success of the premise, sums up the tone: it’s interesting, not without nuance, but fearlessly efficient – the effect is more like a schoolteacher than a creator. Unexpectedly, Gretchen Mol creates the most intriguing character, simply because she’s the most recognizably vulnerable and tentative.

Spellbound

Still, The Shape of Things is a film of ideas, and even if you doubt how many dimensions its shape of things really has, you feel provoked and engaged. But LaBute’s film hasn’t been as well received as Jeff Blitz’ Spellbound, which was nominated this year for a best documentary Oscar. The film’s first hour introduces us to eight diverse children who are all headed for the national Spelling Bee championship in Washington; the last half-hour gives us the drama of the contest itself.

It’s an inherently appealing premise, and Blitz delivers it effectively. Still, the movie annoyed me more and more as it went along, because it’s less a paean to the Spelling Bee than to the greatness of the United States. The contest, as presented here, serves primarily as a stirring symbol of American diversity – proof that the humble and the privileged alike can stand shoulder to shoulder on the road to greatness. One of the fathers, a prosperous Indian immigrant, shows off the showcase home he built for himself, and says that America’s the only country in the world where you can achieve anything you want through hard work; the film makes variations on this same point time and time again.

At the same time, Spellbound does expose something of America’s complacent underbelly. One of the girls is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who doesn’t speak English, and his employer tells the camera about how he’s one of the good Mexicans, proving they’re not all lazy and unreliable. One of the Indian kids has a teacher who speaks about how she’s always delighted to have Indian children in her class because they have such a good work ethic. I suppose these views have some kind of grounding in the speakers’ direct experience, but they show how the melting pot only melts so far. The most intriguing child to me, named Anna, is the most striking exception to both nurture- and nature-based theories. She’s a rather solemn kid with blue-collar parents that she compares to Archie and Edith Bunker, and seems to be growing up almost in her own self-contained space, demonstrating little of her parents’ direct influence.

Ideologically driven

The movie acknowledges lightly that the Spelling Bee may be creaky, nerdy, not the most relevant event in the whole world, but this seems simply like a ploy of anticipating criticism, the better to brush it aside. It’s an American Institution – who could carp? Well, actually, given the current shape of things, it’s tempting to see it as a manifestation of the country’s penchant for getting its priorities spectacularly wrong. This is obviously an ideologically driven criticism, but then the most striking thing about Spellbound is that it’s such an ideologically driven movie. The more I think about it, the more I think I’d like to deface it.

For the birds

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2003)

I didn’t register one shot in F. Gary Gray’s remake of The Italian Job that seemed computer-generated. I know they’re there – for all I know, as pervasive as in X2 or Matrix Reloaded, but it doesn’t feel like it. This doesn’t mean that the film strives for realism exactly; just that its conception of the unreal is drawn a little tighter than we often see nowadays. The film’s iconic image – of souped-up Minis whizzing around Los Angeles – seems to sum up this intent: the cars are too plain cute and quirky to serve as the vessel for a calculating Hollywood machine.

Matrix Reloaded

Talking of which, a few belated words about Matrix Reloaded, which is indeed a calculating machine. Not a brainless one – there’s hardly a moment in the film that doesn’t feel deeply considered. But lightning didn’t strike twice. Strictly in the context of the film’s own universe, the sequel may hold some minor revelations, but that’s about it.

I enjoyed the fight between Keanu Reeves and the dozens of Hugo Weaving clones – I thought that was quite a dazzling creation (albeit too stylized). But the much-heralded chase on the freeway turned out to be vastly overdone, and much of the film felt surprisingly dour, as though the success of the first film constituted a prison rather than a liberation. With all the years of build-up about the Wachowski Brothers and their secretive mega-opus, I guess it had never occurred to anyone that they would have invested all the good ideas they had into the first film. Oh well, you live and learn.

The Italian Job is a happier event. I don’t remember the British original at all, but it’s fondly remembered for its chase sequences and (especially in Britain) for the Michael Caine line: “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.” In the new version, Mark Wahlberg plays the leader of a motley gang that pulls off an intricate gold heist in Venice. The celebrations are cut abruptly short when gang member Edward Norton holds up the others, takes all the gold for himself and leaves them for dead. But they survive, except for Donald Sutherland, and a year later they track down Norton in LA where, with the help of Sutherland’s daughter Charlize Theron, they plan to take everything back.

The Italian Job

It’s the kind of action film that makes you appreciate the intricate choreography behind the illusion of seamlessness. The movie has just enough psychology not to seem soulless and utterly disposable, but not so much that a preoccupation with weightier affairs will seep into our enjoyment. At the end Norton meets what seems to be a rather horrible fate, but the movie presents it with a backdrop of jaunty music, as though he were off to a holiday camp. You register the reality of it, but lightly. And yet, The Italian Job avoids the smirky tone of something like Ocean’s Eleven, where the cast seemed to be having too good a time with each other to worry about the audience. And to prove just how radical a genre film it is, it avoids two major staples – the love scene between the hero and heroine, and the contrived twist ending where the villain returns from the dead or suchlike (I was especially surprised at the latter show of restraint).

I was in the middle of writing this article, and I’d drafted the following paragraph:

• It seems to me that an increasing number of star actors, capable of challenging and interesting work, choose to lose themselves in roles that surely can’t stretch them. Edward Norton, one of the most talented actors of his generation, is completely wasted in the villain’s role. Wearing a droopy moustache and ratty haircut, he’s a mean-spirited character with no redeeming features, with few scenes that go beyond the strictly functional. It’s truly hard to see what the appeal of the role was for him. Other than the money of course. Norton’s increasing capitulation to this kind of work (see also The Score) seems like a potent symbol of how the notion of being a serious actor has deteriorated. Robert de Niro has been on the same trail for a few years now, but at least he was artistically pure for the first fifteen years or so.

But then I read an article that claimed Norton was forced to do the movie because of a contractual commitment dating back to his debut, Primal Fear, and he only took the job grudgingly. Which, assuming that’s true, struck me as a useful lesson in the pitfalls of presuming to discern anyone’s motives for doing what they do. But either way, The Italian Job would be a somewhat better sell-out vehicle than most of them.

Winged Migration

The documentary Winged Migration is an entirely different kind of technical achievement. Director Jacques Perrin and a vast team spent four years filming birds all over the world (the closing credits basically read like a world atlas) – concentrating on migratory birds and their routes. The footage is, in a word, astonishing, capturing so many birds from so many angles and perspectives that it’s as if the world had become a camera, casting aside normal technical constraints.

The film’s in-built irony is that by getting closer to the birds than perhaps any film ever made, it communicates eloquently the proper role of mankind: to leave them alone. Humans appear only sparsely in the film, most often destructively, as poachers or hunters (the scene of a soaring aerial shot suddenly interrupted by gunfire and a sharp fall to earth is surely more shocking than anything in this year’s action/suspense crop), otherwise as merely superfluous. The film doesn’t try to anthropomorphize the birds, but anyone who watches the film will be convinced that they possess an emotional landscape similar at least in its outlines to our own. At various moments they appear pensive, frightened, engaged, content – you name it.

Maybe the movie suffers a little bit from its very breadth. At numerous times, I would have been content to spend more time with a particular sequence, but it always moves on quickly to another place, as if itself constantly seized by the need to move on. Much as you marvel at the mystery, you yearn to understand better. At one point, for example, the narrator says that the young birds memorize landmarks during their maiden migratory voyage, to help them retrace the journey. But it wasn’t clear to me whether that was meant as a literal statement that’s been in some way scientifically demonstrated, or whether it’s poetic licence.

Whatever the answer, that voice-over narration (which is fortunately used sparsely) is the film’s major flaw, along with some very lame songs (ditto). However, even these flaws have a silver lining: they help underline how humans can sometimes be crasser than birds would ever be.

Not The Matrix

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2003)

In most theatres it’s currently all The Matrix Reloaded all the time. But here are three worthy alternatives, by three new (or newish) directors.

People I Know

People I Know is more like a notebook of ideas and impressions than a finished, fully though out film, although I’m not necessarily saying that as a criticism. The film depicts a veteran New York publicist who’s on his last legs both professionally and personally, pulling together a benefit for an obscure cause. He hopes to unite the three pillars of media and cultural influence: an Al Sharpton-like minister and rabble-rouser, a powerful businessman from the Jewish establishment, and a tanned member of Hollywood royalty. By the time he pulls it off, it’s revealed as a hollow ambition, an empty flexing of muscles that don’t really exist (the people come not for him or his cause, but because of their own calculations). Intertwined with all this, and emphasizing the movie’s theme of paranoid impotence, is a murder that’s revealed as a conspiracy, perhaps involving some of these same pillars. A poster for Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, plainly visible behind Pacino in several scenes, signals part of the film’s intent at least.

It also signals the film’s weakness, for People I Know has none of the control and assurance of Pakula’s film. Director Dan Algrant (whose only previous film was Naked in New York) lets scenes run on too long; his visual style is pretty mundane; he doesn’t really pull it all together; and he doesn’t seem able to rein in the full-flight Pacino (as a hardcore Pacino fan, this doesn’t bother me too much, but objectively it’s probably not ideal). And yet, as I write this, it’s the first film this year that I’m seriously contemplating paying to see for a second time. It’s one of those movies where chaos proves more stimulating than coherence could ever be; where meaning seems to exist in the gaps. The theme of idealism reduced to mere hustle isn’t new, but Pacino (whose fatigue in some scenes is truly chilling) makes it poignant. The idea of mysterious cabals and circles (exemplified here by an opium den located in the bland surroundings of a Wall Street high rise) is even more familiar, but when will that ever be old hat?

People I Know was shot a couple of years ago, and sat on the shelf for a while (reportedly, it was the inflight movie last year on an Italian airline). It originally contained a shot of the World Trade Center, now removed. For a movie that aims to have its finger on some kind of contemporary pulse, I think the delay is noticeable. The movie already seems warmed over, desolate in a way that far exceeds any possible intention. But that’s a rather unusual quality for a movie now; enough so to amount to a recognizable political statement.

City of Ghosts

Conspiracy theories also lurk in the background of City of Ghosts, Matt Dillon’s directorial and writing debut. He stars in it as a scam artist who flees from the FBI after the collapse of the insurance fraud he’s been fronting, and turns up in Cambodia in search of his mentor (James Caan). In a way seemingly meant to evoke a Casablanca-like mélange of colourful characters, the film throws in a love interest (Natascha McElhone), an eccentric bar owner (Gerard Depardieu) and a shady operator (Stellan Skarsgard), among others. Actually, it all seems pretty random after a while.

The movie is apparently the first to have been shot in Cambodia for decades, but I can’t truly say it feels significantly more imposing than the usual combination of studio backlot and location footage. This is partly because Dillon doesn’t seem to have much of an eye, and partly because no matter how real it looks, it doesn’t feel real, what with all the Westerners, and the lack of much of a sense of local culture, politics etc. The underlying theory seem to be that if you set a movie in Cambodia, meaning and nuance will just flow from the screen – which struck me as a bit patronizing.

For all of that, the movie did grow on me. It’s very much like People I Know, and John Malkovich’s The Dancer Upstairs too, in how a languid pacing (which may well be a sign of directorial timidity) ends up creating its own quirky reality (Dillon’s intention was probably pretty close to Robert Duvall’s in the recent Assassination Tango – to play at making a run-of-the-mill exotic thriller while simultaneously subverting it). City of Ghosts ends up being another intricate subterfuge – one with far less inherent resonance than People I Know – but it doesn’t seem imprisoned by genre momentum. And Dillon saves the best until last – after the movie’s essentially over, he allows himself a lengthy digression, following the local cyclo driver who’s helped his character along the way. For a while, the movie seems to have broken free of any commercial calculation, and to be merely existing and observing – and it’s so guileless that it’s actually exciting.

Blue Car

Karen Moncrieff’s directorial debut, Blue Car, stars the wonderful young actress Agnes Bruckner as a troubled teenager who finds escape in writing poetry, and in particular in her relationship with the poetry teacher, played by David Strathairn. One day he comforts her after the death of her sister and she tries to turn it into a romantic embrace; he recoils, and after that is wary around her, as he must be. But when they’re both in Florida for a poetry competition, he’s far less reticent.

The most unnerving aspect of Strathairn’s character is his complacent belief in his own virtue. When he makes his move on her he keeps asking over and over if she’s OK, and although she’s obviously lying when she says yes, his asking the question fulfils in his own mind any duty of care he might have. Even more than his physical violation of her, it’s the revelation of shallowness that’s so striking. Part of his mystique in her eyes has been the file he carries everywhere with him, supposedly containing his novel in progress, but this too turns out to be a sham. This is all obviously a bit of a contrivance – a contemporary story that relies this much on poetry would have to be a contrivance – but it works.

At times, Blue Car is a bit clichéd and predictable, and it’s resolutely a “small” movie, dealing with intimate concerns and changes. Moncrieff’s film isn’t as ambitious as either Algrant’s or Dillon’s, but it’s the most controlled, and probably the most successful overall in attaining its chosen mandate.

Heroes

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2003)

I wish I’d liked the X-Men sequel, X2, more than I did, because people make it sound both cool and smart. Here’s A. O. Scott in The New York Times: “One of the best things about the great old Marvel comic books – aside from their graphic flair and their strenuously exaggerated ideas of human anatomy – was the way they dramatized adolescent disaffection on an apocalyptic scale, connecting the private alienation of their heroes (and readers) with the primal struggle between good and evil. More than most film adaptations of comics, Bryan Singer’s film X-Men and its new episode, X2, try to honor both the allegorical grandiosity of their source and the moods and anxieties of the superpower-endowed individuals who inhabit its universe. The mutants from whose ranks the X-Men emerge are both a persecuted minority and a tribe of lonely children, shunned and feared by the ordinary humans who surround them.

Too old?

I keep thinking I should give up on writing about this kind of movie altogether, because I worry I’m not in tune enough with their ambitions, their nuances, their audiences, with anything about them. But I keep coming back, maybe out of unshakeable faith that I can forge my own psychic connection with the genre, maybe out of stubbornness and a kind of vanity. I’m 37, and I guess  I think of myself as a youngish 37 (who doesn’t?), but there’s no question that I’m not a kid. At 37, you should be past the point of being impressed by sheer spectacle and concept – shouldn’t you? That seems true to me when I write it, but I guess I don’t know why. What does it matter – who’s keeping score?

My problem is exactly that – I live as though someone is keeping score. I’ve written before about how my propensity for cramming in movies blunts the ability to savour any particular one. And I guess I tend to think of myself (to adapt Orson Welles’ metaphor) as a big Christmas tree, where every day has to constitute an additional decoration of some kind. For the time I spend watching a movie, “entertainment value” doesn’t tend to justify the investment (the precious commodity here being the time more than the money). So I’m usually ambivalent about big mainstream movies, but I end up going anyway, because the reviews usually sway me and, hell, because I enjoy the damn things once I stop agonizing about them.

X2

That’s me at 37. But it’s not as if I’ve never been grabbed by comic book culture. I remember, back in Wales, buying my first American comic books. They were usually crammed any which way into an inconspicuous corner of the store, afterthoughts to the homegrown product. I have no idea what the distribution setup was, but I could never find two issues in sequence. This hampered much engagement with their plotlines, but actually enhanced their status as sheer artifact. And I remember being especially fascinated by the reader mail – by its sheer depth of engagement. British comics, obviously, had nothing like this.

The novelty died off pretty quickly though. As a young adult I sometimes went into comic book stores, intrigued by the idea of them and perhaps a little jealous of the people who really got the subculture (Kevin Smith’s movies make them look like the best damn place anyone could be), but the reality merely bored me. I loved the idea of the Batman franchise – to reconnect with the darkness of the character, to reclaim his popular image from the camp TV show – but the movies were generally a bit of an ordeal, except maybe the Pfeiffer/DeVito second installment.

X2 might have seemed like one of the dumber franchises, just on the empirical basis that believing in ten or twelve superheroes, all with different superpowers, requires approximately ten times the suspension of disbelief required to believe in one of them. Maybe it doesn’t work that way. Anyway, the movie doesn’t feel too dumb. The director, Bryan Singer, made The Usual Suspects and Public Access, and he approaches the movie with a persuasive feel for character and overall coherence. The film never seems camped up, or preoccupied by special effects. The cast includes Shakespeareans Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Brian Cox – the three of whom seem to me to influence the overall tone more than the younger cast members – and Oscar-winners Halle Berry and Anna Paquin.

There’s that metaphor

And then there’s that allegorical grandiosity Scott talked about. Sometimes this is intriguing, even touching. Take the scene when Iceman comes out to his parents about his superpowers, and the family talk that follows sounds like a conversation about being gay, or taking drugs, or any other occasion when elders try, not too successfully, to say the right thing while covering up intuitive revulsion. Iceman has a tentative romance with Paquin’s Rouge, but her kiss and touch are deadly, entailing a sweet but embarrassed chastity. Actually, the movie barely has anything “heroic” for Paquin to do, and she thus best embodies the film’s potential for placing character over narrative.

But on the whole, I can’t see that the film’s deeper ambitions are realized. A metaphor isn’t inherently revealing – sometimes you just register the point and move on, none the wiser for it. X2 is full of points that you register as potentially, but not actually, illuminating. And by this point, the reader may be jumping up and down, declaring: fine, but is it entertaining? Well, there’s too much going on for the movie ever to be dull. But Singer’s seriousness of purpose comes at the expense of the zip and panache that Sam Raimi brought to Spider-Man (as for the other key contemporary reference point, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, X2 doesn’t aim for that kind of pictorial impact.

I must admit too that I found the number of characters rather overwhelming. There’s not an actor in the film who doesn’t feel like a guest star (I wasn’t doing a count of course, but it sure felt to me as if Cox, as one of the bad guys, had more dialogue than any of the heroes). And the final set piece in Cox’s underground headquarters seemed to go on and on. Maybe I registered such disappointments a little more keenly than I would have with a movie that aimed for less in the first place. But I guess that if I really “got” the X-Men, then I’d be writing a completely different review. Funny I should feel guilty about not succumbing more readily to a piece of popular culture – that’s the power of the mainstream machine for you. But I’ll get past it; I’ll cut out this kind of movie pretty soon now. But not yet, because The Matrix Reloaded is already out, and then comes Ang Lee’s The Hulk…

Stan Brakhage

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2004)

I’ve been writing in this space for over six years now, and I don’t think I’ve ever said a word about short films. I’ve written only a few times about documentaries, and never at all about experimental non-narrative cinema. And there’s hardly a critic in the country that could criticize me for this. Even for those of us who feel the limitations of watching one narrative film after the next, it’s difficult to cast off the paradigm. It’s too enveloping, too stridently present in our culture. We’re so aware of the money involved, the infrastructure, the dominant conception of the director as artist, that any other way of dealing with film seems like dabbling.

Happy accidents

And yet, some of my most memorable film-watching experiences from the past few years fell outside that mould. They’re often happy accidents. In a small town in the northern Netherlands last year, we wandered into the local museum out of curiosity and were transfixed by a particular exhibition. Unfortunately I didn’t make a note of the artist’s name, but she killed herself in New York several years ago. In one of the several film loops on display, she covered a female model in feathers, then had her roll around in the ocean, like some weird sea creature washed onto the shore. It was inexplicable, odd, captivating. Two years ago, the Gillian Wearing exhibit in Chicago was as fascinating. The Tate galleries in London and Liverpool have never failed to offer something unique and unprecedented (it’s sadly clear from all this that for me, visiting art galleries is an activity mainly confined to vacations). And I recall other encounters, all overtly less “complex” than the logistics entailed in a Hollywood film, yet so precise and brave as to occupy an indelible space in the memory.

A few years ago in the Cinematheque Ontario brochure, James Quandt described a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’ Nouvelle vague where a maid moves through a darkened house lighting a series of rooms. “The lighting sequence,” he said, “is worth more than the rest of the decade’s commercial cinema put together.” At the time, this struck me as a hilarious overstatement. Just drop him down on a desert island with nothing but movies for company, I thought, and we’ll see whether he chooses the two minutes of lamp lighting over the thousands of hours of commercial cinema. But hyperbole aside, I find the contention rather beguiling. Could a single sequence somehow capture something about cinema that would render everything else obsolete? And if so, what would it be? Is there some undiscovered equation of camera placement and lighting and editing (or lack thereof) and subject that amounts to an E=mc2 of cinema? If so, where did it come from – does God have a conception of cinema? And even if it exists, why wouldn’t we just memorize the lamp-lighting sequence and replay it in our heads? What is it that cinema demands of us?

Seeing with one’s own eyes

I was thinking along these lines primarily because I recently bought the Criterion Collection’s DVD By Brakhage, which contains 26 films by independent filmmaker Stan Brakhage. At this point your mind may rush to imagine a multi-disc extravaganza, like the complete Alien collection, requiring a week of viewing. Well, the total viewing time for these 26 films is just a bit over four hours. Brakhage’s audio commentaries – and this is the only DVD I own where I consider those an indispensable element of the package – might add another couple of hours on to that. The longest film on the set is 74 minutes long; the shortest lasts 9 seconds.

At the time of writing I’m not halfway through the set, because I’ve been deliberately rationing myself – watching one a week at the most, maybe watching it again, listening to the commentary, making notes. It’s an enthralling experience, which threatens to make my mainstream film viewing seem passive and lumbering by comparison. Brakhage generally worked alone, with tiny budgets. The films have no conventional narratives and no sound, but they have subject matter. His early Wedlock House: an Intercourse has brief shots of himself and his first wife making love, smoking, arguing. It’s an unsettling composition of shadow and eerie angles that almost anticipates David Lynch. The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes films human autopsies, certainly recognizable as such, and yet becoming utterly strange and abstract – the film is a considerable challenge to one’s sense of one’s own substance.

But these are actually among Brakhage’s more conventional works. He uses jittery handheld cameras, applies scratches and paint directly onto film, imposes images over others. This is from Fred Camper’s liner notes. “Many of the techniques Brakhage developed or refined…can be seen as part of a larger exploration of human subjectivity in all its varieties. He answers the idea that photography is the impersonal recorder of ‘reality’ with the notion that reality itself is inseparable from human consciousness…Lovers of Brakhage’s work have found, in fact, that it can constitute a kind of eye-training, a way of helping one see the world more imaginatively in a variety of situations, ranging from moments of intense emotional crisis…to sitting, bored, in an airport.”

The Wold Shadow

In commentary to The Wold Shadow, he describes how a clearing in the woods struck him a certain way, and he set out a camera to try and capture it. He set up a transparent surface in front of the lens on which he started painting, and the film, which started as a relatively straightforward image, ends up examining pieces of paint in extreme close-up. It’s as if any image, pursued to the end, might reveal the secrets of its own creation; although at the same time we know the secret is Brakhage’s imposition. Brakhage describes the film as something of a wrong turn: he set out to find “the god of the forest” and ended up making a “documentary on the history of painting.” Camper says: “Brakhage was a master of filming human subjectivity, but every moment that appears to valorize the affections, the moods, is balanced by a sense that the work itself is in danger of coming apart, that its beauty and unity is fragile, that its making acknowledges its own destruction…Brakhage offers this alternative (to our normal limited way of thinking): that each of us can become an inner explorer, continually pushing toward some new frontier of consciousness.

For all my current excitement with Brakhage’s films, I doubt that this marks a seismic shift in the shape of my film watching. The conventional pleasures of mainstream cinema are just too firmly established. But I almost wish I were at a point where I’d be happy to give up the whole of Hollywood cinema for my Stan Brakhage DVD. Plus, of course, Vertigo, Rio Bravo, The King of Comedy and a few dozen others…

Con games

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2003)

James Mangold’s career path seems clear – every film he directs is less interesting than the one before: Heavy, Copland, Girl Interrupted, Kate and Leopold and now Identity. If you looked at those five films, and didn’t know who made them, I doubt you’d ever suspect a connection – it’s a true challenge for the auteur theory. But the last two films have at least one obvious thing in common: the guy seems too good for this material.

Identity

Kate and Leopold – the Meg Ryan/Hugh Jackman comedy about a nobleman who’s transported from the last century into modern-day Manhattan – sums it up. The premise is obviously dumb, but if you get past that, it allows a swooning feminine fantasy about old-fashioned love – about men who cook dinner for you and respect your honour and who are so attractive that no one would question your giving it all up for them. Jackman was up to the task of embodying all this, but the movie always seemed to be holding back, to be dawdling, fussing over practicalities. OK, Max Ophuls isn’t around anymore, but still, how could you give a movie like that to an essentially rational director – one who’s never shown any sign of losing his head?

Identity raises a similar issue of directorial miscasting. It’s a nutty, overweight movie that might have paid off if a passionate flake had made it. It’s a dark and stormy night, and a motley group of strangers ends up at a low-grade hotel. One of them gets knocked off, then another. It seems clear who the culprit is, but then he’s killed too. And then they start to die in ways that no one could possibly have planned…

At this point I was genuinely intrigued by the movie, because I couldn’t imagine how it’d ever explain all this. Well, I won’t give away the surprise, but suffice to say it’s a big cheat – a variation on the “it was all a dream” technique of stepping outside the plot and redefining the parameters of everything you’ve been watching. Yes, another one of those.

Meta movies

You can’t get away from these movies now: The Matrix (the apex of the form), Open your Eyes and its remake Vanilla Sky, The Others. M. Night Shyamalan seems to be building an entire career on such films. I bought into the admiration for The Sixth Sense. But Unbreakable was severely silly, and Signs was an exercise of such pretentious self-regard that I actually ended up actively hating the director for a while. And yet, plenty of people thought it a great movie, even an important one.

Given the sheer volumes, there must be something about these times that makes such devices particularly appealing and resonant. Maybe it’s the natural expression of spiritual beliefs in an age when organized religion is generally less appealing – just the idea of there being something beyond all this is so necessary that it barely matters what that something is. Maybe it’s a reflection of our ironic distance and self-reflection – we’re so distrusting of the surface of anything that we’re suckers for anarchic reinterpretation. Maybe it’s a measure of a spreading dissociative quality in our thinking. Intellectual pursuits are for the elite, so let them sweat away at the linear narratives; let them struggle over their psychological motivations and thematic structures – the rest of us zigzag and bop and weave.

The Matrix supported all of those explanations, and others, and the coming sequels will probably extend its scope further. But Identity has nothing beyond the thing itself. It’s inept as drama, because once the revelation has been logged, there’s no possible reason to care about some of the remaining plot strands. And like many of its cousins, the revelation hardly amounts to anything more than bookkeeping. So now we know the secret – and the way that’s enriched our lives from where we were two hours earlier is…what?

Confidence

Opening the same day as Identity, James Foley’s Confidence represents a more earthbound paradigm. Edward Burns plays a con man who puts together a big job for local crime boss Dustin Hoffman; Andy Garcia and Rachel Weisz are in the cast too. No less than Identity, the movie has twists and turns and people not being who you thought they were and events not being what they seem. The difference is that in Confidence, this is nothing to do with other levels of reality or suchlike – it’s all a reflection of master con men at work.

Although this is a more organic form of plotting, such moves generally end up seeming just about as abstract as the likes of Identity. The con always proceeds more impeccably than anything you ever observe in the real world. The con artist perfectly anticipates his victims’ reactions – even when they think they’ve got the upper hand on him, they’re mainly playing out a narrative that will ultimately lead right where he wants it. It’s an inherently cold, dehumanizing genre – Ocean’s Eleven, a recent exemplar, might be the least viscerally engaging hit movie of the last few years.

Ironically (or perhaps necessarily), the genre is populated by colourful characters – Hoffman in Confidence being the latest addition to the gallery of eccentric rogues. These people often seem too volatile and impulsive to justify the con artist’s confidence in how they’ll behave. Confidence seems to delight in human diversity and possibility on one level, but in substance it oozes contempt, because no matter who they are, whatever their achievements and possibilities are, they’ll always end up right where the artist wants them.

That’s not a bad metaphor for a certain deterministic view of the world, of course. David Mamet, no intellectual lightweight, keeps returning to such material, yet each of his efforts in the genre seems less like his work than the last. I think directors frequently imagine they can transcend the form, only to find the structure heavier than they’d anticipated. Neil Jordan, in the recent The Good Thief, did fairly well at avoiding this trap, although his movie seemed to me less distinctive than it did to others.

Still, Confidence is probably a better film than Identity overall. Foley (who also directed Glengarry Glen Ross) is a pro director. The film requires a certain volume of flashbacks and other trickery, but it avoids the visual gimmickry that overwhelms Mangold.

Low comedy

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2003)

I like the idea of taking the elements of low comedy – toilet humour, doubles entendres, and so forth – and raising them to the level of art. In recent years, the Farrelly brothers attracted a fair bit of critical approval, particularly for There’s Something About Mary (I didn’t get it). And some serious critics held American Pie in very high regard (I can just about see that). But if you really want to talk about this, I’d start with Blake Edwards. At one time, I thought Edwards was one of the best American directors of his time. Nowadays, I’d say he’s better than most people realize, but that isn’t quite the same thing. Most people acknowledge the gentle charm of Breakfast at Tiffany’s or the surprising rawness of Days of Wine and Roses. And the Pink Panther movies were big business in their day, although I’m not sure they got enough attention for their formal rigour – a quality which admittedly fell off sharply later in the series.

Blake Edwards

Remember how, after Peter Sellers died, Edwards put together a whole film (Trail of the Pink Panther) out of discarded material and new linking bits, after which he made Curse of… with a new lead character, and later again Son of… with Roberto Benigni. Some see this as merely desperate, but it seems to me to go beyond that, into what might be regarded as a pseudo-scientific examination of desperation, of the repetition and patterning that’s always marked his comedy. But I acknowledge that I could be giving him too much credit here – after all, at the same (declining) stage in his career, he recycled Victor/Victoria into a not-particularly-successful Broadway musical.

His two masterpieces (OK, that’s a relative term too) are 10 and S.O.B., two brittle and often bitter examinations of aging in Hollywood. In Bo Derek, 10 had Edwards’ best ever gimmick, and Dudley Moore temporarily caught the popular imagination, but the movie is consistently rueful, if not depressing, and it captures a certain type of self-indulgent maleness very well. S.O.B. was ever darker – notionally a wacky farce, populated almost entirely by old, unhappy people. Julie Andrews baring her breasts provided another (although not quite as compelling) audience-grabber, but the heart of the film was William Holden as a director who’d sold his soul almost completely, and yet managed to retain a notion of gritty integrity that somehow hung intact through the movie. It’s yet another wonderful Edwards ambiguity – almost the ultimate biting of the hand that fed him.

Peter Segal, director of the new comedy Anger Management, is no Blake Edwards. Specifically, his film has no visual style at all, and no attitude. And very few good lines. I think I only laughed at some silly euphemisms for sexual activity, but that just tells you something about me. This is a typically ill-considered, barely controlled Hollywood package, seemingly built around a single concept: that Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson would be in the same movie. Which is not a bad concept, but it doesn’t take you very far either.

Anger Management

The surprise is that much of the movie’s interest would come not from Nicholson, but from Sandler. But to address Nicholson first – the movie is obviously a conscious relaxation for him, after The Pledge and About Schmidt. Critics praised him (excessively, in my view) for how he kept his usual mannerisms under wraps in Schmidt, but here he lets them all tumble out. You name your favourite Nicholson moment – it’s evoked here at some point. Somehow it all manages to seem more weighty and respectable than Robert de Niro’s recent exercises in self-parody, but that’s yet another relative assessment. Presumably the whole thing carries the significance for Nicholson of a trip to the Oscars; sprawled out in his front row seat, mugging for the camera and getting treated like a king.

It’s hard to think of an actor being handed a greater gift than Sandler was with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. The movie had almost no purpose other than to rehabilitate Sandler; to show how his shtick masked his warmth and complexity. The whole movie, more or less, served as a visualization of Sandler’s passive-aggressive confusion. At the time, I didn’t really know what to make of it – it was obviously accomplished, but on some level seemed just nutty.

But now, Anger Management finally proves the success of Anderson’s film, because Sandler just doesn’t seem the same to me anymore. He plays a nervous executive assistant, put-upon and under-rewarded at work, stifled in his relationship with girlfriend Marisa Tomei by various hang-ups. A stupid misunderstanding with a flight attendant gets him sentenced to anger management therapy. Nicholson plays the doctor who, of course, is crazier than the patient. He leads Sandler through various supposedly therapeutic misadventures, winding up with a splashy finale in Yankee Stadium (with guest star Rudolph Giuliani).

Saved by Sandler

The joke is that Sandler doesn’t need anger management, but he sure needs something. Nicholson’s misaligned treatments, stamping all over every aspect of Sandler’s life, only makes him angrier, thus prolonging the sentence and digging him a deeper hole. It’s a conventional tale of escalating disaster, but Sandler never seemed to me like merely the suffering fool. He avoids the over the top outbursts of his pre-Punch Drunk persona, all but embodying the straight man to Nicholson’s antics. The much remarked upon “sweetness” of Anderson’s film is back too. But most interesting is the ambiguity he projects regarding his true mental state – a quality that frequently suggests there’s more to the movie than meets the eye.

As it turns out, there sort of is – an ending that attempts to put another twist on everything we’ve seen. It’s utterly feeble – the ultimate proof of the film’s vacuousness. The only other thing of interest is the movie’s faint attempt to tap into contemporary paranoia – it has a few references to these being “difficult times,” and the Yankee Stadium climax, with that guest star, certainly comes across as an exercise in reassurance. The movie could easily have extended this line of inquiry, setting up Sandler as a funnel for contemporary jitteriness, but that’s more than it has in mind.

In fact, the film’s ultimately the most complacent kind of backslap to the audience – the kind of movie that assumes that if the cast is having fun, then so will we. Another assumption it makes: there can’t be any better entertainment than watching celebrities goofing around, so just about every supporting role is filled by a “name” – Heather Graham, Woody Harrelson, John Turturro. It’s like watching a particularly demeaning episode of Celebrity Fear Factor.

Still, it’s the kind of movie that at least has interesting flaws, and then there’s Sandler. It’s maybe a quarter of the way to being an intelligent dumb comedy.

An off week

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2003)

Three new movies to write about this week, all exciting prospects that turned out to be disappointments.

Assassination Tango

Robert Duvall wrote and directed Assassination Tango, and stars in it as a New York hit man sent on a job to Argentina. Cooling his heels for a few weeks, he becomes enchanted by the local tango bars, especially a young dancer played by Luciana Pedrazi, who is Duvall’s offscreen girlfriend. This is just one of the ways in which the film seems like a vanity project. Duvall’s last film behind the camera, The Apostle, was rambling and untidy, but had a persuasive sense of sociological investigation mixed in with some genuine mystery. Assassination Tango employs the same semi-documentary feel, but the film has nothing to reveal – it’s not scrupulous enough to tell us very much about the tango, and the surrounding plot is just run of the mill. Duvall himself gives a self-indulgent, off-putting performance, apparently trying to evoke a John Cassavetes-like volatility. Indeed, this film has been compared in some quarters to Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Well, Cassavetes’ name still seems to crop up regularly as a reference point in movie reviews, and the best I can say is – I can recall occasions when the comparison was even less justified than it is here. But not by a whole lot.

In Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon, Frances McDormand plays a free-spirited LA record producer whose buttoned-up son (Christian Bale) comes to stay for a while with his scholarly girlfriend (Kate Beckinsale). While Bale’s at work in a local hospital, Beckinsale tries to stay in her room and work on her dissertation, but gradually spends more and more time hanging out downstairs, where McDormand and her much younger rock musician lover are making an album (or, just as often, doing the sex and drugs thing). I’m not sure the general theme – reversal of generational expectations – is so far removed from an episode of Family Ties; the movie certainly consistently fails to establish much distinctive territory for itself.

Laurel Canyon

In the weeks before its release, I kept running into profiles of Frances McDormand (including in such prestigious publications as The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine), all of which made a lot out of her topless scenes in Laurel Canyon, and of the general notion of this respected middle-aged actress playing a loose hippie type. Predictably, she’s been singled out for praise in every review of the film. But it seems to me by now that this is basically what McDormand does, just like Clint Eastwood does what he does. With her mix of flintiness, relish, vulnerability, engagement, provocation, not-too-obvious sexiness – she almost embodies what most critics look for in a movie. The ultimate symbol of this is that Joel Coen, half of perhaps the most critically admired post-Scorsese filmmaking team, fell in love with McDormand and married her.

Anyway, I can’t see that McDormand does anything very interesting in the movie, which may be a happy impression if it means we’re now past the point where the idea of middle-aged sexuality is inherently fascinating. I was more intrigued by Natascha McElhone, who plays a colleague of Bale’s at the hospital. McElhone’s wide eyes and broad features verge of caricature (although I’m not sure of what) and in this film she adopts a foreign accent (Israeli, I think she said) that makes her seem even more disconnected from reality. But she and Bale have a long conversation in a parking lot that’s sexy, unexpected, and astonishing in its range of moods and implications. For at least that long, Cholodenko seems to be tapping into a potentially rich vein. But then it’s back to more dreary late night stuff in hotel rooms, and the movie just trails away, although it does have a moderately diverting final scene.

Talking of dreary late night stuff, this year’s Oscars were surprisingly un-dreary, and didn’t even run that late. More importantly, the list of winners was too good to be imaginable: Roman Polanski, Adrien Brody, Pedro Almodovar, Bowling for Columbine, Spirited Away, Eminem’s win for best song. These all seemed to assert the ascendancy of a new majority far less likely to be swayed by the mediocre calculations and prejudices that we’re told habitually influence the results of these things. (By the way, I came out on top of my office pool again, although only in a year of so many surprises could 6 out of 12 have been a winning score).

A few categories slightly failed to keep pace with the wave of change, such as the best picture Oscar for Chicago and the foreign language film award to Nowhere in Africa. I doubt whether anyone thinks this German entry is truly the best of the year, but the convoluted process for determining the nominees doesn’t always allow quality to rise to the top. Nowhere in Africa may have been a respectable choice from among the five nominees they ended up with. That aside though, it’s a safe middlebrow kind of movie.

Nowhere in Africa

It’s a cousin to Polanski’s The Pianist in that it depicts a Jewish family (husband and wife and young daughter) that takes a route to survival (to Kenya), and the portrayal of their struggle seeks to inform our perspective on the Holocaust. In this case though, the film’s situation is more self-contained; the horrors in Europe occasionally intrude, but for the most part you watch the movie as an extended anecdote that could be taking place almost any time. Of course, this is partly the point, to convey Africa’s unique identity – and the film does that quite well. But that’s not a particularly bracing artistic achievement.

The film’s most intriguing element is the portrayal of the mother, initially a reluctant visitor to Africa, who quickly tires of her husband, has at least one affair, is seen lustily initiating sex on several occasions, and in the end grows to love the country more than he does. She’s the only character who seems to spill beyond the frame.

Unfortunately, the film is told primarily through the girl’s eyes, and thus generally follows a simpler course, missing potential themes all over the place. For example, it makes little of the fact that these refugees, with no experience working the land, can fairly easily find a job as farm supervisors, to be addressed as “bwana” and lord it over dozens of locals. I’m not saying the film specifically needed to be anti-colonial, but it’s hard now to watch a work about Africa’s past that appears to lack awareness of its present.

And then I saw Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief, and I was disappointed in that too. Maybe it’s not them – maybe it’s me. Well, I don’t really think so…