2002 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Four

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2002)

This is the fourth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Kedma (Amos Gitai)

Gitai’s latest exploration of Israeli history is much more successful than last year’s Eden, although that’s largely a result of visceral pleasures: his one-take approach to battle scenes, for example, is almost unmatched (and I include polished films like Saving Private Ryan). Actually starting with a virtuoso single take, aboard a ship bringing a group of refugees to Israel, the film follows some of the group as they evade British soldiers and then travel toward a kibbutz, encountering Arab resistance on the way. The film is extremely similar in tone and style to Gitai’s earlier work Kippur: well-staged action alternates with debate and soul-searching, and the dialogue can seem very forced at times. In general though, Kedma effectively sets out the contradictions at the heart of modern Israel, never more so than in an anguished closing monologue (“I think that Israel isn’t a Jewish country anymore”) on how Jews are pushed to violence (Jewish history is “a history imposed by goyim”). And the film inevitably gains power from its foreshadowing of current conflicts. “We’ll remain here in spite of you,” shouts an old Arab at the Jews who stole his donkey in the course of their journey, “like a wall…we’ll be hungry, we’ll be in rags. But we’ll defy you.”

In America (Jim Sheridan)

An Irish couple and their two daughters settle illegally in New York (fortunate enough to find a large vacant apartment on their first day). They live on a shoestring, always haunted by the recent accidental death of their young son. For all of their troubles, New York remains a largely mystical atmosphere, especially with the mysteriously charismatic black painter living downstairs, and there are suggestions of celestial forces weaving through their lives (aren’t there always?) The print shown at the festival qualifies “In America” as a working title – maybe the final title should be “In Dreams,” because this sentimental romanticizing of poverty doesn’t seem to have much to do with real life as I’ve ever seen it. Ambling along as these anecdotal kinds of films always do, it has the occasional good scene, but the grander ambitions fall flat. Key among these is a concept of the father as closed-off and distant, so unable to engage with life that at one point his daughter accuses him of being an impostor; but it doesn’t come across, maybe because actor Paddy Considine seems even more stilted than the character he’s playing. It adds up to a vastly derivative project, teetering under the layers of uplifting mysticism that Sheridan has it carry.

Secretary (Steven Shainberg)

Shainberg’s debut film, about the sado-masochistic relationship between a bottled-up lawyer and the disturbed young woman who comes to work for him, could be seen merely as a catalogue of kinky ideas, and perhaps can’t be seen as much more than that. So the value judgment all depends how you respond to the movie’s extremely accommodating attitude. Personally, I liked it nearly all the way along, with doubts really only arising over the ending, which casts the final state of the relationship in rather conventional terms. In particular, the final shot, in which she stares straight into the camera, daring us to judge her, is too strenuous a statement of feminist credentials. That’s nearly the only unsatisfying shot of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who seems to have figured out every nuance of her character. James Spader initially seems to be playing his part more conventionally and superficially, but this is but one of many ways in which the film’s deftness might initially be underrated. Some of the weirdest (which I guess equals the best) ideas are almost thrown away, which must be a sign of confidence. The film has already opened commercially since the festival, and it’s taken some knocks for its exploitation aspects; your enjoyment of the movie should be pretty closely correlated with your tolerance for the premise.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)

Miyazaki’s feature-length animated film has also opened commercially since the festival (where it played as Miyazaki’s Spirited Away). It’s the biggest hit of all time in Japan, and in the recent Sight and Sound poll it received three votes as one of the best ten films of all time. I’m no anime connoisseur, and this film’s veins of cuteness, occasional visual flatness, and general weirdness could confirm one’s prejudices – if you ignored the genuinely unique, seemingly otherworldly imagination on display here. It’s about a young girl who wanders with her parents onto what they think is an abandoned theme park – the parents find and eat some food that changes them into pigs, and she finds herself working in a bathhouse for the spiritual world. Miyazaki has worked out every detail of the environment: the film has eye-popping spirits, and explanations of the water-pumping system; boys that turn into flying dragons, and railway systems that aren’t what they used to be. This has its serious undertones – the festival brochure cites “the strength and insight of innocence…the disintegration of religious faith and other forms of spirituality.” But I question whether the film’s mysticism and theme of belief in oneself are inherently that profound. The magic is in Miyazaki’s almost disturbingly uncategorizable creativity, and a visual style that perfectly expresses both the simplicity and complexity of his sensibility. I enjoyed Spirited Away as much as an animated film I’ve ever seen.

The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s latest film initially resembles a piece of baroque science fiction – a man gets beaten up, is declared dead, comes back to life but without any memory of who he is, and establishes a meagre living for himself, including a mild romance with a Salvation Army worker. As he becomes more secure in his new identity, the film becomes looser and more discursive – and, for me, distinctly less interesting. Much of the second half consists of musical performances by a Salvation Army band that he coaxes onto a more popular style – they’re nice enough songs, but it’s indicative of a somewhat flabby movie. One of the picture’s abiding pleasures is its cinematography – especially in the early stretches, containing some of the most vivid colour compositions since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Sadly, the film seems to tone this down as it progresses, perhaps as another reflection of his escalating normalization. And although the Festival brochure promised “one of the great performances by a dog on screen,” the dog too fades away as the movie goes on. The film starts off as one of Kaurismaki’s most muscular and striking works and ends up seeming run-of-the-mill for him – it adds up to a highly watchable but disappointing effort.

2002 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Three

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2002)

This is the third of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Ten Minutes Older: the Cello (Bernardo Bertolucci, Claire Denis, Mike Figgis, Jean-Luc Godard, Jiri Menzel, Michael Radford, Volker Schlondorff, Istvan Szabo)

A film consisting of eight short segments by eight famous directors. Like most previous exercises along these lines, it’s a disappointment, evidencing little inherent reason for existing. The segments all deal in some way with the “phenomenon of time,” but this vague mandate isn’t enough to lend the project much coherence. The best are probably Bertolucci’s – an elegant glide through episodes in the life of an immigrant – and Godard’s: working in the kind of collage-form he’s used on many other occasions, he expands the scope and emotional resonance of his segment beyond what the others achieve. Radford comes in a surprising third, using an old-hat science fiction premise but at least investing his sequence with good design and mild panache. As for the rest: Figgis uses the same four-screen/one-take technique he used in Time Code – nothing new ensues. Menzel juxtaposes scenes from the life of a Czech actor, achieving only mild poignancy (although I note that this sequence made the woman beside me cry). Szabo’s is a well-handled but basically mediocre one-take melodrama about how quickly a life falls apart. Denis’ segment is all talk. Schlondorff’s juxtaposes a banal voice-over with a banal series of images – the only distinction being that the sound and image are banal in quite different ways. For all its philosophizing, the film’s main contribution to the study of time is to raise the question of how such a film can seem to last so much longer than it actually does.

Julie Walking Home (Agnieszka Holland)

Holland’s film is about the fragility of both the secular and the spiritual; about how slight shifts in the equilibrium cause calamitous shocks. It’s not really that distinctive a theme, especially when presented in what is by now her familiarly overwrought style (see for example her last film The Third Miracle). Miranda Otto and William Fichtner are common-law spouses whose happiness is torn apart by his one night stand – then their son is diagnosed with cancer. She takes him to Poland in search of a famous faith healer who falls in love with her. Much about the picture – the mix of accents, locations, tone and ideas – has the feel of something pulled together to satisfy a committee of competing interests, although the competition may all dwell within Holland’s own sensibility. Her film has excellent moments (Otto is especially striking, almost frightening, in her seductress mode) but it becomes increasingly clear that the film has nowhere in particular to go. Like the birds to which it returns as a motif, it merely circles, before choosing a resting point that may be either arbitrary or deliberate (a distinction that may matter to the bird, but not to the onlooker).

Lilja 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson)

Swedish prodigy Moodysson show here that he can work in a much darker register than his first two films, Show me Love and Together. The film tracks a miserable three months in the life of a 16-year-old Russian girl, who’s left alone when her mother skips with her boyfriend to the States. With no source of income, she slides easily into prostitution: the film is especially strong on depicting the near-inevitability of this fate for women in dire circumstances. When she finally meets an apparently nice guy who says he’ll find her a job in Sweden, he turns out to be a procurer of child whores. It’s gloomy subject matter, with almost every scene yielding some new tragedy or squalor. The young actress Oksana Akinshina is disconcertingly unemotive through most of it. But the film is ceaselessly perceptive and sensitive, without ever becoming sentimental, not even when it depicts her visions of the over-dosed friend she left behind, now sporting angels’ wings. The film was one of my favourites of the festival – not as artistically imposing as Talk to her or Dolls, but bringing a strong individual voice to a work of diligent anthropology.

Marie Jo and Her Two Loves (Robert Guediguian)

Every year, the festival selects one director for its retrospective spotlight feature. Guediguian, this year’s choice, sets all his films (the best known is Marius and Jeanette) in working-class Marseilles, and generally works with the same actors – his work thrives on intimate recognition. His latest is no exception. It’s the story of a woman simultaneously in love with her husband and another, finding that the weight of her love carries an inverse correlation to that of her happiness. “I only feel at peace when I make love,” she says, “otherwise I suffer.” The movie portrays this state adeptly, and is equally good at depicting the loneliness of being the man she’s not currently with. Guediguian paces things deliberately (some would certainly say slowly), spending much time on the details of their jobs and on inconsequential moments. He achieves the authenticity for which he aims, but can’t dispel a sense of familiarity (whether measured against his own previous work or that of others who’ve explored this territory). Towards the end, Marie Jo’s daughter erupts at her parents in idealistic disgust, and you realize how muted the film has generally seemed prior to that point. And while it seems clear that the director might profit from expanding his range, the swirling tragedy of this film’s final image isn’t a particularly effective step in that direction.

La ville est tranquille (Robert Guediguian)

The spotlight on Guediguian also included this film from 2000 – perhaps his most ambitious and most successful. A social epic along the lines of John Sayles or Robert Altman’s films, it weaves together some grim and often heart-rending stories of people trying to get by. A woman who works at the fish market prostitutes herself to buy drugs for her addicted daughter; a laid-off dockworker tries to make it as a cab driver but sinks into financial troubles; a black man is released from prison. Right-wing politics percolate in the background. The director’s at full strength here; intently focused on his characters, allowing us to feel the quiet desperation that mainly defines their lives (the muted quality of Marie Jo is more successful here because we understand it as a reflection of demands and pain that defy words), tracking occasional eruptions of joy and hope, of pain and despair. The film has a slight penchant for melodrama, which threatens to disrupt the verisimilitude, and the hopeful final image seems a little idealistic, but Guediguian doesn’t pretend there are easy answers for any of this, and his film as a whole seems wise and balanced.

2002 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Two

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2002)

This is the second of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

All or Nothing (Mike Leigh)

Leigh’s last film Topsy Turvy was an unexpected departure for the master of low-income British angst, and a complete success. The new film, back on familiar territory, inevitably looks like treading water by comparison. It’s loosely structured around three miserable families in a drab London housing complex – they drink or eat too much, or lose themselves in sexual role-playing, or in random anger, or superficial good spirits, or just in all-consuming inertia. Timothy Spall plays a cab driver, trapped in his own misery, avoiding all responsibility. Sensing himself on the verge of disappearing completely, he finally breaks out, resulting in a series of scenes that, if a little over-emphatic, almost rank with Leigh’s best work. That plot strand arrives at a generally happy ending, but Leigh lets the other two stories drop completely; in cinema as in life, he seems to be saying, positive outcomes are largely a matter of chance. Like every Leigh film, All or Nothing is crammed with fine moments that shine a passing spotlight on a secondary character, anchoring the film in the world beyond the frame. But it has a more muted tone than most of his work, making less overt use of comedy, and most viewers will find it less insinuating than something like Secrets and Lies.

Too Young to Die (Park Jin-Pyo)

This Korean film has a simple purpose – to celebrate the love of a man and a woman. This is out of the ordinary only because the couple are in their 70s, and they have a lot of sex. It shouldn’t be a surprise that older people can do it multiple times a week, sometimes a day (the man helpfully marks each session off on his calendar so we can follow along), but if it wasn’t a surprise the film presumably wouldn’t exist. It’s somewhere between documentary and fiction – seeming to have a script, but played by a real life couple who aren’t professional actors. Objectively, it’s a pretty voyeuristic project (the film shows the sex in some detail), but it doesn’t feel that way, mainly because the couple (especially him) are so happy to show themselves off. For the sake of balance, the picture shows a few rough patches, such as a spat about her staying out too late with her friends. But if it was ever in doubt that the movie takes a sentimental view of its subjects, then the incredibly sappy closing song would wipe it away. Almost incidentally, you notice that their living conditions are pretty meagre, and there’s the odd reminder of cultural differences (when he wants to make her a chicken dinner, he buys a live bird and slaughters it in the yard) but these observations come only intermittently, amid the calculated universal appeal.

Auto Focus (Paul Schrader)

Schrader (who made American Gigolo and one of my all-time guilty pleasures, the remake of Cat People) ought to be the ideal director to film the story of Bob Crane, the genial stay of Hogan’s Heroes who became obsessed with sex and pornography as his career declined. Auto Focus tells the story efficiently and intriguingly, but it doesn’t particularly look like a Schrader film; it doesn’t seem interested in plumbing the depths of Crane’s soul, and the echoes of Bresson that used to mark Schrader’s work are just a memory here. In a way, Schrader should be praised for his self-effacement. He certainly captures both the bounce and optimism of Crane’s rise to fame in the 60’s, married to his college sweetheart with no darker secrets than a few racy magazines hidden in the garage, and the tackiness of his decline in the 70’s. But this isn’t a chronicle of the age like Boogie Nights – it’s a rather hermetic story of one sad figure, and in telling it so straight, Schrader risks our indifference. Willem Dafoe is rather one-dimensional as the hedonist who led Crane astray, and Greg Kinnear’s performance in the lead role sums up the picture – wholly convincing as the nice guy, but generally just too convivial and straightforward to be particularly interesting. There are many good moments though – his meltdown on the set of Celebrity Cooks, hosted by Bruno Gerussi, is especially well caught.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce)

Noyce used to make provocative little Australian films, but in recent years he’s been the anonymous general behind such epics as Clear and Present Danger and Silver. This film marks a home-coming: it’s about three half-Aboriginal girls in 1931, sent 1,800 miles from their home to a special school for “half-castes.” The film makes it clear that there were many such “shadow children,” and has a chilling scene where Kenneth Branagh, as the leader of the cleansing program, explains the official philosophy on the matter. The children escape and set off to walk the vast distance home. Most of the film is devoted to their journey and how they evade the state’s efforts to catch up with them – including a veteran tracker played by David Gulpilil, who starred thirty years ago in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. The film is gripping, and evokes suitable anger at what the children endured. But maybe Noyce has become too efficient a storyteller – you feel very little of the passage of time, or the incredible distance they covered, or of their hunger or thirst. This is one of the rare films that’s actually too short – we feel short-changed on the bigger picture of Australia at the time, the visceral experience of the journey, and the story’s potentially mythic underpinnings. The evocation of Walkabout reminds you how that and other movies found real grandeur in the desert.

Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako)

Mauritanian director Sissako’s film is suffused in ambivalence about Africa – he celebrates its beauty and mystery, but constantly returns to images of departure and escape (or more frequently, failed attempts at departure) and thoughts of a different life. The film is loosely structured, and the exact meaning of what we’re watching isn’t always clear – the most recognizable plot strand involves a young boy serving as apprentice to an aging electrician, accompanying him from job to job. Initially the film may seem opaque, but you adjust to its rhythm. It’s crammed with gorgeous images, such as the electrician and the boy hooking up a light bulb to an outlet and then carrying it into the desert for what seems like miles. It’s a dream-like Africa, encompassing desert and city and village and the water’s edge – parameters that hold the characters in place even as their parched spirits tell them to move on. The old man remembers a friend who offered him the chance to leave; finally the friend went without him, never to be seen again. “Maybe that’s what weighs on my heart,” he says: it’s the skill at depicting this weight through images that makes Waiting for Happiness such an eloquent work.

2002 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part One

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2002)

This is the first of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Ararat (Atom Egoyan)

Egoyan’s opening gala presentation certainly doesn’t seem like the work of a great filmmaker; it evokes instead a disgruntled academic translating his theories onto celluloid. Set in present-day Toronto, it examines the continuing spiritual and emotional impact of Turkey’s massacre of Armenians in 1915. Characters include a director (Charles Aznavour) who’s making a film on the subject, an art history professor (Arsinee Khanjian) who’s a consultant on the picture, and her troubled son. Ararat doesn’t purport to present the objective truth of what happened in 1915, and acknowledges that there are problems in the historical record; it dwells on the difficulties of sustaining memory and remembrance. That aspect of Egoyan’s film is fairly interesting, but it’s filtered through some very cumbersome emotional set-ups and bizarre artistic decisions (for example, much of the film consists of a labored dialogue between the son and an overbearing customs officer played by Christopher Plummer). The messiness isn’t without consolations, but it makes for a distinctly dutiful, visually undistinguished viewing experience. The use of the film within the film, including a gala premiere at the Elgin, seems like mere navel-gazing, but then Egoyan doesn’t exhibit much sense of the real world – you’d think from Ararat that 1915 was the number one conversation topic in our city.

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar)

Almodovar has mastered the art of making outlandish narratives seem as natural and graceful as a dance. His new film, in which dance is actually woven prominently into the design, revolves around two men, both in love with (wait for it) women in comas. One (who, in typical Almodovar fashion, thinks of himself as being more gay than straight) sees this state as an enhancement rather than an impediment; the other is understandably more ambivalent. Events build to a shocking violation that Almodovar somehow manages to render smooth and understandable. He has the old-fashioned virtue of liking his characters – his benevolence is almost boundless, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness. But this is as beguiling a movie as he’s made (even after the clear artistic advances of Live Flesh and All About my Mother). It shifts gears and perspectives with imperceptible ease, sliding forwards and backwards in time in a way that makes most narratives of that type seem highly self-conscious. It’s poised and consistently beautiful, even if the broader insights (the title sets out the main message – the importance of communication) don’t amount to much.

10 (Abbas Kiarostami)

It’s always in question whether Western viewers appreciate the work of an Iranian director like Kiarostami too much through our own prism (reflecting our own morals, ethics, aesthetic tradition, sexual politics, received notions about Iran). This may be especially tempting with his new film 10 (not a remake, obviously, of the Blake Edwards semi-classic), which consists solely of ten one-take scenes of a divorced woman, driving in her car with various passengers. In the first scene, her young son lambasts her as a bad, stupid mother; shortly afterwards she picks up a whore who scoffs at her moralistic questions. Later on in the film, the son again criticizes her for various things, but by then she takes it much more in stride. In the later scenes she counsels a distraught woman not to depend so much on just one person, and advises another to loosen her veil (which in such a physically controlled film generates considerable visual excitement). As the film progresses, the increasing use of cross-cutting between characters seems to reflect a growing sense of security and engagement on her part. The film thus appears to be primarily an illustration of a woman’s growing sense of self-determination as she adjusts to life on her own, but I suspect it may be subtler than a single viewing can appreciate. Intriguing as 10 is, I think many Kiarostami fans may miss the broader canvases of his earlier work.

Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Luis Pepe)

In 2000, director Terry Gilliam finally rolled film on his long-cherished adaptation of Don Quixote. The project came with an unrealistic budget, inadequate rehearsal and preparation time, looming chaos, and memories of his 1989 over-budget fiasco The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (which earned him a reputation as an undisciplined enfant terrible, not overcome by subsequent relatively saner projects such as The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys). The first day saw a freak storm that instantly threw the schedule into disarray. By the end of the first week, lead actor Jean Rochefort was in the hands of his doctors with a herniated disk. The film struggled on through a sixth day before collapsing completely, sending millions of dollars and Gilliam’s dreams down the tubes. Miraculously, Fulton and Pepe had cameras rolling on the whole thing, resulting in one of the most vivid portrayals of filmmaking ever made. Gilliam starts off somewhat enamoured of his own legend (“Without a battle, maybe I don’t know exactly how to approach it”); when on the first day he asks how they’re doing for time and the response is “Bad,” Gilliam reflexively snaps back “Good.” His childish giggle when something goes well is infectious. But as disaster engulfs the project he seems overwhelmed, almost paralyzed. His Don Quixote film, from what we see of it, would probably have ended up much like Munchhausen – a treat for Gilliam fans, mainly a curio for anyone else; the fact that we’ve been denied that film, but given Lost in La Mancha instead, probably isn’t a bad trade-off.

Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach)

At the age of 66, Loach is working faster than ever, alternating missions into unfamiliar territory (Spain in Land and Freedom, Los Angeles in Bread and Roses, one of his least successful efforts) with projects on home ground (or at least Scotland, which is close enough). Sweet Sixteen doesn’t have much new about it, but it’s expertly handled; no one captures the aspirations (or profanity) of the British under-privileged as expertly as Loach. It follows a boy gravitating from selling smuggled cigarettes to upward mobility in the local drug syndicate, all before turning 16. He dreams of seeing his imprisoned mother free and clean, but sees no irony in getting her there on the backs of junkies. Actually, irony isn’t really one of Loach’s standard tools (compared say to skillful tub-thumping) although the situation provides it in abundance (“I used to watch my dad do this,” says a young pusher nostalgically, as he cuts the heroin). Loach’s biggest weakness, for me, is his propensity for gangster figures and their attendant melodrama. Still, this is a consistently gripping, moving work.

Seven current movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2002)

Last week I wrote about the difficulties of getting one’s money’s worth out of a DVD collection, given that the new movies keep on coming. Here’s more evidence: seven mini-reviews (count em!)

Happy Times

Readers may remember an article, a few years ago, in which I put together a fictional list of directors that might have won the Nobel Prize for cinema, if such a thing existed. My 1996 winner was China’s Zhang Yimou, a choice that now makes my imaginary committee look severely impulsive. Since then, Zhang has made various small-scale films that bear the limitations of trying to work within the Chinese State system, and he’s seemed increasingly sentimental. His latest marks a further regression, back to the emotional values and overall sophistication of, well, the silent era. A bachelor in his 50s sets out to get married, but instead ends up taking care of a blind girl who’s been mistreated for most of her life. Having lied about his resources and status, he creates a series of illusions to hide the truth from her. The movie’s main point of distinction is its highly contingent happy ending. It’s not that the film’s bad exactly – it’s just awfully minor and unambitious. I might not have minded it at all, if I hadn’t kept kicking myself for letting my Nobel jurists lose their heads over his earlier work.

Sunshine State

John Sayles’ cross-section of small-town Florida life seems less accomplished than earlier films of his like Limbo, Lone Star or City of Hope, which executed similarly ambitious exercises in Alaska, Texas and New Jersey respectively. Having said that, Sayles seems on this evidence to consider Florida a less accomplished place – a blandly low-input and low-return would-be paradise where sterile design destroys all sense of history, place and community. The film follows four or five main plot strands, although nothing tops the brief glimpses of a local dignitary’s compulsive suicide attempts. The film peters out more than it actually ends, but that seems like Sayles’ final comment on the state – where he sealed off his Alaskan movie Limbo with a grand metaphysical flourish, he lets his Florida movie fizzle and dissipate. Sunshine State also contains a hearty dollop of what seems pretty much like standard melodrama; it’s always been Sayles’ oddity that he insists on his integrity as an independent filmmaker, who then makes movies the greater part of which could fit quite comfortably into the mainstream.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

A bit fat box-office hit, which does as much as any bland action blockbuster to show how undemanding audiences can be. I didn’t register a single original joke or observation in this compendium of clichés and platitudes about the travails of an ethnic family (you’ve seen the same thing done with Jewish weddings, and Italian weddings, and gay weddings…) Familiar Toronto locations (subbing for Chicago) and faces make it even less convincing for local audiences. Nothing in the movie is quite right – lead actor John Corbett overdoes the laid-back charm, and lead actress and writer Nia Vardalos overdoes her initial frumpiness and thereafter underdoes whatever quality is supposed to have snared Corbett. And after plodding through the build-up to the wedding, the event itself is over almost before it’s begun. Maybe if I were Greek it would have seemed like a masterpiece of observation, although I have a Greek friend, and she sure doesn’t act that way.

The Believer

At the time of writing I haven’t actually seen the end of this film. With no more than ten minutes to go, the Varsity projector broke down and they couldn’t get it back up. Still, I saw enough to know that The Believer is a near-must see. An astonishing creation about a Jew who embraces Nazism, the film is the most articulate of the year, and one of the most subtly perverse: the character’s escalating violence and radicalism coexist with a longing to reimmerse himself in Judaism. Ryan Gosling gives a fine, fiery performance in the title role. The film is sometimes too cluttered, and events take place on such a melodramatic scale that they threaten to swamp the character, but the worst never happens (not up to the last ten minutes anyway).

Signs

It’s a hit, and some think that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is the next Spielberg, but I found this film dreary, shallow, and unremittingly pretentious. Its central notion about faith and predestination is inherently no more than earnest in a first-year philosophy student kind of way, but Shyamalan’s genius is to set this against the backdrop of an alien invasion of Earth, thus ensuring goofiness just one notch short of Edward D. Wood. And the sillier the thing gets, the more seriously it seems to take itself. Mel Gibson’s solemnity fits right in with the prevailing gravity. As for the Spielberg comparison, I’m not among the greatest aficionados of Minority Report, but that film outclasses this one by every worthwhile criterion. By the end of this preachy, self-regarding farrago, I started to dislike Shyamalan personally.

Blood Work

Clint Eastwood’s new film, on the other hand, is a model of self-effacement. This thriller about a retired cop who investigates a woman’s murder (while carrying her donated heart in his chest) has a pretty intricate plot, but lets it unwind with so little emphasis and elaboration that you could almost miss it. This lets some potentially interesting elements go floating away, but leaves behind something most intriguing – a tersely written and shot procedural that nevertheless feels like a character piece. The trouble is that the characters are distinctly sleepy. As recent Eastwood movies go, Blood Work is more unified than Absolute Power or True Crime, although the zest of James Woods in the latter would have given the new film a welcome shot in the arm.
 

Possession

Another inherently odd project – a literary detective story contrasting a modern-day love story between two academics (Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow), and the object of their investigation: a 19^th century romance between two poets. The film is directed by the normally acerbic Neil LaBute, and often seems like a change of pace for its own sake – it takes considerable pleasure in the eccentricity of British high-cultural circles, which seems here as deviously political as the white-collar slaying ground LaBute depicted in In the Company of Men. Perhaps appropriately, most of the film consists of elements that are interesting mainly in theory. It has its moments of grace, but never overcomes – and indeed apparently welcomes – a pervasive diffident quality.

Cinema bites

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2002)

The wonder of cinema is that it’s still a wonder to us. Virtually as long as the medium’s existed, directors have tested the limits of its storytelling conventions, but the conventions remain intact, and so the limits continue to be tested. Of course, like everything else, it’s more knowing now. For all his huge intellect, Jean-Luc Godard’s 60’s and 70’s experiments and meditations seem to carry a rush of pure puckish joy that’s missing from, say, Mike Figgis’ Time Code. One could organize quite a debating session on the proposition of whether or not cinema should be taken seriously. Maybe, to bend a movie title, we should view it as hopeless but not serious.

Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh, I mentioned the other week, works at a startling pace. In the last five years he’s released Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic (for which he won an Oscar) and Ocean’s Eleven. That’s an impressive line-up in such a short time, although it’s not easy to determine Soderbergh’s creative personality from it. He makes vivid, lively films, full of incident, attuned to their settings, and ably showcasing their actors. That may seem like superficial praise, but maybe not, for Soderbergh’s interest in surfaces may be worth just about any other director’s interest in depth.

Erin Brockovich is one of the most skillful star vehicles in memory, and looks as though everything else in it was calibrated for the sole purpose of showcasing Julia Roberts. Ocean’s Eleven had no discernible purpose other than bringing together an eclectic bunch of big name actors (the scene at the end, where the camera pans across most of the cast standing contentedly in a row looking over Vegas, seems to me to sum it up). The film clearly does not “work” as satisfying rounded entertainment, but the project has a sense of itself that almost fuels you.

His new film Full Frontal is intended as a quick, low-budget diversion from this run of success (and it precedes his big-budget science fiction film Solaris, due out in November). It has another amazing cast. Roberts plays a magazine writer carrying out an extended interview with up-and-coming actor Blair Underwood. Or rather, that’s what happens in a film within the film; they actually play actors. He’s having an affair with a frustrated executive (Catherine Keener) whose marriage to magazine journalist David Hyde-Pierce is breaking down. Keener’s sister is a massage therapist (Mary McCormack) who has an unsatisfying encounter with a film producer (David Duchovny) while pursuing a cyber-romance with a theater director (Enrico Colantoni) who’s directing a bizarre production about young Hitler starring an egotistical actor (Nicky Katt).

Attempts to connect

Soderbergh says his movies aren’t about surfaces, but rather about our attempts to connect (I have a feeling that lots of directors give something like this as a standard answer). You can see this for sure in his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, but since then the theme is only evident in glimpses. Full Frontal embraces it more fully – almost every scene depicts some kind of failure to engage; whether intellectual, emotional, spiritual or artistic. But this seems like an inevitable result of a movie that thrives on chaos, that feels as though it set its characters in almost random motion and then sat back to see what would happen.

That lackadaisical quality is central to Soderbergh’s intent here. He says: “You look at that Godard period of ’59 to ’67, and you admire his ability to sketch. And I think you can get too caught up in this idea that every movie you make has to be a mural. And I really felt like I’d been doing that, and I felt like I needed to afford myself the opportunity to sketch – where things aren’t, you know, so weighted by expectation or budget. It’s not that I view the movie as incidental. It’s just I liked the idea of having the freedom to write with the camera, in a way. And in an environment that seems safe, because of the scale of the project and the way it would be made. It’s a fun way to work; it’s an interesting way to work. It’s sort of an irresponsible way to work if you’re doing a movie on any other scale than this.”

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times dismissed the movie this way: “Just because something is grainy doesn’t mean it’s cooler. Just because it’s shot in 18 days with a hand-held camera that cost $4,000 doesn’t mean it’s more creative. Just because it’s a neo-Godardian deconstruction of cinematic reality doesn’t mean it’s more interesting. And just because it has an erotic title doesn’t mean it’s sexy.” All of which is self-evident (and to digress slightly, just because Dowd’s column has a hot reputation and a Pulitzer Price doesn’t mean it’s always good either). But there’s little evidence that Soderbergh believes any of these straw-man assertions. His faith seems more elemental than that. He believes in the inherent fascination of cinema – that raw ingredients need be subject only to the simplest of recipes to produce something sustaining. Depending how you look at it, this may either be a low or a high expectation of the audience.

Cinematic meaning

Most critics find Full Frontal confusing and arid. But the film is stuffed with intriguing scenes of conflicting expectations, self-delusion, lifestyle corrections and compromises. Sometimes it attempts to tap genuine emotion and frustration; sometimes it just plays at it. In general, the moments when it’s explicitly about filmmaking seem to me its least successful in that they only allow narrow readings. The rest of the movie is wildly discursive and evasive – the absurdity of the Hitler play rehearsals; some low comedy involving a dog overdosing on hash brownies; one-liners galore.
 

On a couple of occasions, Terence Stamp’s character from The Limey wanders through the movie – the intention being apparently to suggest that the action in both films takes place side by side. Which succeeds in suggesting the immense fluidity of cinema; how it takes only a brief allusion or connection to open up a whole new world of cinematic meaning. The problem is that this can easily become a process of mere recognition – you make the connection, and where does that leave you? It’s as if we’re expected to be excited by the fact that a guy can form sentences, regardless that they don’t tell us anything interesting. We’ve all seen so many films that we think we’re way beyond that. And yet those who know cinema best – Soderbergh, Godard, Figgis – are often the most fascinated by the raw material. Personally, I don’t think the rest of us know as much as we think. Could Full Frontal possibly be ahead of its time?

My DVD collection

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2002)

Given my obvious enthusiasm for movies, it’s often been surprising to people that I haven’t built up an extensive video collection. Fact is, I never saw the point – there’s always too much new stuff to watch. Initially, I approached DVDs in the same way. But I’m gradually breaking down. Since I bought a DVD player about a year and a half ago, I’ve built up a collection of 43 years. I know this is peanuts by the standards of hardcore library builders – but since I never meant to buy any at all, it seems like a lot to me.

The first DVD I purchased was Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. I kept reading about the Criterion Collection and its pristine restorations and fascinating extras, and it had been a long time since I’d seen Grand Illusion, so I bought it as an experiment. Shortly after that, I bought Eyes Wide Shut, tempted by some kind of $10-off deal. I didn’t even think I liked Eyes Wide Shut, but I had a feeling it would repay further study (as it did). Soon after that, my wife gave me a Kubrick boxed set for Christmas. I’ve written before about how this opened my eyes to a director about whom I’d generally been lukewarm.

Taking inventory

Since then the collection has evolved in an idiosyncratic way that doesn’t yet represent the breadth of my taste, although it’s getting there. In addition to eight films by Stanley Kubrick, the 43 films contain three Cocteau, three Dreyer, four Rivette, two Bertolucci, two Herzog and two Spike Lee. It has a number of staples – Welles’ Citizen Kane, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part One (haven’t got round to Part Two yet), Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Tati’s Playtime, Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. With time there will surely be more than one Hawks (Rio Bravo), one Antonioni (L’Avventura) and one Hitchcock (The Birds). And I can’t imagine going too long without acquiring some Bresson, Cassavetes, and – unfortunately – all too many others.

Some of my favourite contemporary American films are in there too – Magnolia, Heat, Nashville. And I bought George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, of which I had excellent twenty-year-old memories – fully confirmed on rewatching. There’s also one film I wish I didn’t have – Lewis Teague’s Cujo. This was given to me as a gift, and I have no idea why. I think maybe the people saw The Shining on my DVD shelf and figured I was a Stephen King fan. I’m not saying Cujo is an altogether bad movie, but when I look at my alphabetized DVD shelf, casting my eye lovingly across the titles, it stands out as grotesquely as a porno flick. I’d like to move it to a different shelf, but that seems silly, so it just stays there.

None of this means that my original hypothesis was false. I’m still too occupied watching new stuff. Here’s the shameful statistic – as of today, I haven’t yet watched 12 out of the 43 disks. And there’s not a single one that I’ve watched twice. I’m confident that I’ll remedy this…but then I’ll probably buy more disks as well and the backlog will just accumulate. And how often would you need to watch a disk to really justify the economic investment – four, five times? This is exactly the kind of logic that successfully dissuaded me from buying videos. But it doesn’t seem as off-putting for disks.

Where’s the Pasolini?

That’s partly a feeling, based on analogizing to my experience with music cassettes versus CDs, that the videos would merely have crumbled slowly to dust on the shelf whereas the DVDs will last to the end of time. The visual appeal of the disks themselves and of their packaging undoubtedly helps. But I fear the sad truth is that having taken the first step, I just can’t stop now. If I never bought another DVD, the arbitrary point at which I cut off my collection would always gnaw at me. I mean, I’ve at least got to have Ugetsu Monogatari in there. And how can I have The Birds and not Vertigo. And shouldn’t there be at least one Godard, one Pasolini (we named our dog after him for Pete’s sake), one Fassbinder? And wouldn’t it be great to have a pristine version of The Band Wagon? At this point, getting to 100 films will be a cinch.

My impression is that much of the non-mainstream material available on DVD was never available on video, although I never really looked. I’ve written before at my amazement that the Rivette material is available. His are almost the only DVDs that I bought without previously having seen the films – I’d never had the opportunity to watch Joan of Arc or The Gang of Four or Secret Defense. After chasing down Rivette movies for years, it’s a huge thrill to me to have those titles just sitting at home, to watch whenever I like. I’d love to watch all those films again right now, if I didn’t have all this other stuff to catch up on.

My DVD collection has reinforced one thing I already knew about myself – it really is about the joy of watching the movie. I don’t think I’ve tapped even 2% of the bonus materials contained on these disks. I’ve listened to not one second of the voice-over commentaries. I’ve watched a few trailers, some deleted scenes (most interestingly on the Bamboozled disk), some oddities like Tippi Hedren’s screen test on The Birds disk. But this stuff quickly bores me. I guess I’ve never felt time was best spent in getting to know a particular movie in minute detail, when instead you could be exploring the uncharted area of a whole new film.

Staying at home

So what does this all mean? Well, I’ve always thought that the intangible nature of movie watching makes it slightly dissatisfying as a hobby. All you have is the memory. I think that’s why movie fans often seem to be into list-making, and maintaining scrapbooks, and otherwise giving their ethereal experiences some solid existence. Having a video or DVD collection fits right in with that, and now I’m there with all the other movie geeks. Secondly, if I’m ever banished to a desert island with nothing but a TV and a DVD player, I’m well on the way to making the sentence a little more palatable. And thirdly, I may yet live up to the possibilities of the investment I’ve made in my DVD shelf. The week I write this, eight new movies open in Toronto. I’m only going to one of them. Given how I just got this new disk of Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast, I don’t have the time…

(November 2015 update – well, that’s even more of a nostalgia read than usual. It all exploded from there: for example, I ended up with fifteen Ozu films, twenty-one Godards, and so forth. But then it died down, and I’ve hardly added to the collection at all in the past few years. Things moved on again!)

Doing it right

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2002)

Well into the new film Tadpole, the 15-year-old protagonist makes a move on his 40-something stepmother, played by Sigourney Weaver. When I saw the film, a man in the audience who’d so far been sitting quietly exploded in disgust: “Filthy pervert,” he spat out. Well, everyone has to draw the line somewhere, but that seemed to me a fairly arbitrary place to do it. Remember how Woody Allen answered the question of whether sex is dirty by saying it is if you do it right. Tadpole doesn’t seem very dirty, which in this case is a sign it’s not doing it right (with due apologies to the sensibility of the offended gentleman, whom I assume would dissent from this view).

Tadpole

It’s an American movie, set in New York’s Upper East Side, but it seems to wish it were French. The 15-year-old (nicely played by Aaron Sanford) is a Voltaire buff who speaks French whenever circumstances allow, and the approach of a civilized, quizzical attitude to mildly transgressive material evokes French directors like Truffaut and Malle.

A couple of days before I saw Tadpole, I was watching Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee at the Cinematheque – another film in which a middle-aged protagonist flirts with a teenager. I guess you could call that character a filthy pervert too, but Rohmer’s always been excellent at allowing his characters’ delusions about themselves to condition the audience’s sense of them. Anyway, nothing much happens in Rohmer’s film, physically speaking, and I doubt that many would think it dirty, but it’s quintessentially French. Tadpole’s instincts are a little broader and coarser than Rohmer’s (aren’t everyone’s?), but I think in many ways director Gary Winick would be delighted if his movie left the same kind of after-effect.

On the other hand, I recall that in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves, Rohmer was the recipient of Gene Hackman’s put-down about how watching his films is like watching paint dry. Delicacy is a tricky business. Tadpole lasts only 77 minutes – short enough to threaten its very commercial viability. Even at that length, the movie seems rather repetitive and occasionally strained. It does convey a certain intellectual prowess, but whereas in Rohmer’s movies the erudition is seeped into the celluloid, in Tadpole it seems like something pasted on. For example, the film contains “chapter headings,” taken mostly if not entirely from Voltaire I think, along the lines of: “Reason consists of always seeing things as they are,” and “If we don’t find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new.” These all seemed to me either too obvious or else completely inscrutable.

Most puzzling of all, the movie has no ending. In Claire’s Knee, the ending serves as proof of Rohmer’s discernment. Tadpole reaches its inevitable decision point, and then fizzles completely. I said Tadpole doesn’t seem very dirty, but there’s one exception – the title itself – with its vague connotations of reproductive biology and vague double-entendre. Ultimately though, it’s the word’s squelchy immaturity that seems most relevant.

I should say that the movie seems American in one way at least – the vague sense of Wes Anderson around the edges. I’m gradually concluding that the director of Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums is the most influential figure of his generation. At one point Sanford, finding out that Elvis had a teenage Elvis crush, makes himself a pair of fake sideburns out of dog hair. There’s a deadpan incongruity to the incident that seems inescapably Andersonian now.

Never Again

 I didn’t mean to suggest by the way that dirty equals good, although I do have a sneaking affection for the Carry On series (Benny Hill never did much for me though). If that were in doubt, there’s a bizarre new project called Never Again, which filters some of the raunchiest material in memory through the medium of…uh…esteemed actress Jill Clayburgh. In particular, she has one extended scene with a sex toy that…well, you’d have to see it for yourself. Or rather, you should take my word for it that you don’t need to see it for yourself.

Clayburgh plays a 54-year-old divorcee who hasn’t had sex in a decade and is desperate to turn that around. Jeffrey Tambor is a guy in the same boat, on such a sexual losing streak that he thinks he might be homosexual. They meet at a gay bar, start having hot sex while insisting they’ll avoid love. But hey, it ain’t so easy.

I swear I don’t have anything against 54-year-old people having sex (I hope to be in that situation myself one day). And Never Again’s unabashed randiness is a distinct improvement over the dreary pseudo-philosophizing of the recent vastly overpraised Innocence. But the movie feels fake and artificial, stuffed with elements you could basically have ticked off a checklist (Clayburgh’s college-age daughter catching them in the act; the life-threatening accident that befalls one of the two; the background chatter of Clayburgh’s like-minded group of friends). Although Michael McKean’s performance as a transsexual prostitute is beyond anyone’s imagination, even after you’ve seen it.

The film seems to think itself brave and daring, but that’s just another way of being evasive. It never shows us what the relationship consists of – we get the ups and downs and the sex, but none of the necessary stuff in between. And it has an extremely programmatic view of human relationships; would anyone analyze himself as being gay if he didn’t feel it? Maybe in your 50s you lose touch with yourself more than I can currently anticipate. Tambor is only marginally persuasive, but Clayburgh actually turns in a fine performance. Which in the circumstances may be even more impressive than her achievement in An Unmarried Woman.

Intimacy

Last year, there was a fair bit of hubbub about a film called Intimacy, which supposedly represents a step forward in straightforwardly depicting adult sexuality. I say supposedly because I haven’t seen it – it wasn’t at last year’s festival and it hasn’t opened commercially here. Apparently no distributor was interested in it (the video/DVD release must be imminent). I don’t want to over-analyze one economic decision, but it seems that English-language movies are still doing everything possible with the subject of sex, except staring at it straight on.

Foreign movies avoid this – take for example the recent Israeli film Late Marriage. But on the whole, whether you’re 15 and doing it with a 40-year-old or whether you’re a hot-blooded 54-year-old doing it with a contemporary, you’re not likely to find much of a mirror in the movies. However, if you’re a 54-year-old male who’s had some work done, doing it with a 25-year-old model in a soft-focus world….

Hollow package

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2002)

Although I couldn’t make the slightest guess about the recipients of next year’s Oscars, I think I already know what the year’s most overrated film will be. Not that everyone’s fallen for Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition. Stephanie Zacharek’s review on Salon.com, for instance, could hardly have been more disinterested (“Over and over again, Mendes confuses gracefulness with tastefulness: He loads up on the latter, not realizing that a great movie is a kind of dance, not a perfectly executed dinner party”). But the consensus is that the film is a major event, a front runner for next year’s awards, an example of Hollywood craftsmanship at its finest.

Oscars beget Oscars

This partly tells us that Oscars are expected to beget Oscars – Mendes won for his debut film American Beauty, and Perdition has two former Best Actors – Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. I dealt with American Beauty in this space at the time of the 1999 film festival, where it won the people’s choice award. I wrote a complimentary review of it, which with hindsight was a bit of an autopilot job – the pace of the festival gets to you after a while. But I didn’t list it among my favourite films of the festival, and I was never sure I really understood what was so hot about it. I meant to go back a second time and reconsider, but it’s never seemed like a good enough use of two hours. Since then, the film’s dwindled in my memory.

I’m sure about Road to Perdition though – sure that it’s a good looking package with nothing inside. For sure, it’s “well made” in the way we understand that term: you feel that everyone involved went about their business as though repainting the Sistine Chapel. The problem is in the inherent quality of the material. Road to Perdition is thin, trashy stuff, but belaboring under the notion that it’s floating free of the pulp in which it was born, that artistry and sensitivity have provided it a cushion of air.

Hanks (who’s duller here than he’s ever been) plays a hired gun for crime boss Newman (effortlessly charismatic, just as I’m sure he is when fast asleep). Hanks hides his occupation beneath a respectable wife-and-two-children veneer (Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the wife, wasted in a bizarrely blank role, although her casting suggests a personal history wilder than anything the movie wants to explore). Curious about his father’s occupation, the oldest kid hides in the back of the car one night and witnesses a hit. Hanks assures Newman there’s nothing to fear, but Newman’s son doesn’t trust him, and shoots dead Leigh and the youngest boy. Hanks and the surviving kid take off, pursued by the mob.

With integrity

From then on it’s an odyssey of narrow escapes, double-crosses and showdowns. The film’s claim to significance lies in two intertwined strands. First, this supposedly isn’t a film that glorifies violence or uses it unthinkingly – rather, it’s a film that understands violence and its effect on those that commit it. A recent dubiously kiss-ass New York Times profile of Mendes summed this up as such: “Mendes cast Tom Hanks against type as a gangster, but he is a bad guy on a heroic mission to avenge his wife and child’s murder, and his acts of violence are understandable. He is a religious man, and his acts of killing carry the weight of sin. This makes him sympathetic and allows Mendes to approach the theme of violence with integrity.”

Ah, integrity. I read that sentence several times, wondering what it means, before concluding it means next to nothing. David Edelstein in Slate dismissed the film, evoking Charles Bronson and calling it “a by-the-numbers vigilante flick that comes with a handy anti-violence message – delivered with perfect timing, after the bad guys have been blown away.” That seems right to me.

But the movie is unusually restrained about rubbing our noses in gore – the killings mostly happen off-screen. In the closing stretch, the voice-over tells us that Hanks’ driving ambition has been to save his son from such an intimate relationship with death. The staging of the final scenes is deliberately otherworldly, as though the characters had slipped to an anteroom of the next life to await Judgment. But gimme a break. We’ve already had a vastly disproportionate number of would-be serious movies about hit men, each of which comes packaged with some dutiful soundbites from its director about how (unlike all those other hit men movies) it digs deeper, revealing a chiller truth that evaded us among the gleeful massacres of its predecessors.

Mendes may deserve some meagre credit for avoiding bloodshed, but it only makes his movie look like something that’s been pre-edited for airline viewing. At the end of the day, this is the same old crap that Hollywood’s been peddling for seventy years, and it would have taken more than an unusually tasteful lighting design to hide that.

Fatherhood

The film’s second claim to significance lies in its musings on fatherhood. Here’s The New York Times again: “Though death pervades Perdition, the mounting tragedies have an oddly salutary effect; aligned against common enemies, Hanks and his son are drawn closer together. It’s a brilliant stroke of audience manipulation. ‘This is a very forgiving movie toward fathers,” Mendes admits. ‘As a child, I never really felt I knew my father. His life was a secret to me. It’s no coincidence that Road to Perdition is about a son who’s brought close to his father when he finds out the secret about him.’”
 

And Hanks is Newman’s symbolic son, and must build a relationship with his own son, who in terms of emotional intelligence may be the real father, and you can stir in more of the same. But this is all even more trivial than the film’s commentary on violence. The movie sets out the theme (for example, in a scene of Hanks and Newman wordlessly playing a piano duet together) but can’t make us feel it. Its stately rhythm denies human truth at every turn. There’s no time to feel the grief at the death of the wife and younger brother, no time to explore the depth of the boy’s guilt. Even the supposed key element – the growing relationship between Hanks and the kid – remains opaque.

I’ve been quoting here from the negative reviews, but there are plenty of positive ones to offset them. As I say, Road to Perdition has a handsome surface. But to quote the tagline from American Beauty: Look closer.