The Baader-Meinhof Complex(9/20/2009)
It’s no secret that many people view the Best Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards as a mess. Between the country by country submission process, the process of selecting a shortlist, and the process of choosing five final films, there are a ton of roadblocks in which snubs can occur. This was made particularly clear in 2007, when important films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days were ignored in favor of off the radar oddities like Beaufort, Katyń, and 12. Many also complained about the 2008 lineup, but if you think about it they really stepped up that year. Among the nominees were the Palm D’or winner The Class, critical favorite and future Criterion-laureate Revanche, the wildly creative animated documentary Waltz With Bashir, and Departures, a film whose victory baffled many but which got solid reviews once people finally got a chance to see it. Really, that’s what the category’s major problem is, its dealing with movies which few people have actually had a chance to see and which have had no ability to get buzz stateside. That’s probably the problem that The Baader-Meinhof Complex had when its nomination baffled many. Had it had the stateside released then which it is now finally getting it might have been less of a shock.
The film tells the true story of the RAF, that’s not the Royal Air Force, it’s the Red Army Faction; a group of disillusioned youths who turned to violence in an attempt to cause social change in late sixties Germany. The group could probably be equated to The Weathermen, except that they were more violent and more active than that American group. In short, these were left wing domestic terrorists who reaped havoc throughout Germany for about a decade, and that’s a topic that needs to be approached carefully.
The title refers to RAF members Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), who became the group’s most famous members. However, the movie does not necessarily focus on either of them and they do not appear to be bilateral leaders of the organization. Rather, this is an ensemble film about an organization that appears to have been somewhat loosely organized. Baader is the member who more closely lives up to what one would expect from an RAF member, he’s young, angry and political. The kind of person who’d normally just wear a Che Guevara T-Shirt but who instead ended up taking arms and emulating him. Meinhof is a bit more intriguing. She began her career as a respected left wing journalist, but finally came to sympathize and ultimately sacrifice everything in order to join the group.
These young people are raging against a lot of things around them, particularly the ongoing war in Vietnam (for which the United States has been using bases in Germany), the treatment of Palestine by Israel, and the general belief that corporations have been controlling everything. They come to the conclusion that to do nothing in the face of all this would be as much of a sin as the conformity the previous generation showed in the face of Nazism. That’s what drove them philosophically, additionally; they were living in a time of worldwide counterculture which is something the film shows very well. The film has a number of montages (perhaps too many) that really drive home the environment which bread this organization and why so many of the youth in Germany came to sympathize with them.
The group’s build is rather interesting as there is a fascinating gender equality to the Baader Meinhoff group. Three of the most important RAF members (Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), and Meinhof), are women and many of them act as aggressively as the men. Do not expect Baader and Meinhof to be some kind of Bonnie and Clyde style lovers in crime. This is the late 60s and the group practices free love, a fact that does not amuse their Palestinian colleagues as evidenced by a scene where they went to a terrorist training camp and gained the reputation of being screw-ups among their peers in the terror business.
Of course, amidst all the 60s clothing and rock music, one must face the fact that these people were killers. Perhaps they were idealistic and well intentioned killers, but killers none the less. That’s what makes this subject matter so challenging; terrorist are probably the least popular people in the world today and with good reason, how do you make these characters sympathetic enough to follow without glorifying them or whitewashing their less savory aspects. This is perhaps not unlike the challenges posed by making a serious film about gangs and organized crime, but magnified by the political elements. To deal with this Edel has chosen to make this a straightforward film about historical events told with meticulous detail and research. Stefan Aust’s book was clearly important to this production for far more than its catchy title, one feels like Edel was interested as much in making an accessible illustrated historical record as he was in telling a cinematic story.
The history here is interesting enough for such a treatment, but it’s also the movies Achilles Heel. The material is never dry, but because this is trying to be so accurate there are developments that go against the nature of film storytelling; important characters emerge in the final act and events occur that seem separate from the main narrative thrust and in general it affair seems a bit unfocused. One wonders if this would be perfected if Edel had been willing to composite a few characters and simplify elements. Quentin Tarentino lovingly asserted in the finale of Inglorious Basterds that film is a stronger force than history, and while I certainly am not recommending that The Baader Meinhof Complex needed to take any departures as radical as Tarentino did, I do think Edel probably should have taken his duties as a film maker a little more seriously than his duties as a historian. Still, the way the film steadfastly presents history in a way that is cinematically compelling if not narratively clan, does make for a very interesting film.
***1/2 out of Four.
Brüno(7/11/2009)
At times, I can’t help but feel depressed when I look at the box office numbers for soulless cookie-cutter blockbusters like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. There was a time when movies like The Godfather, The Exorcist, and The Graduate could become not only sleeper hits but outright cultural phenomenons. Adjusted for inflation all of those movies are within the all time box office top twenty. Now it seems like the only way to gain such cultural prominence is to have Madison Avenue flock people like sheep towards highly calculated products filled with shiny objects. It would be easy to dismiss these audience trends as the result of an ever more stupid society, but that’s perhaps a bit too pessimistic. The more likely explanation is the much talked about separation of pop culture into various niches, thus leaving no one project able to gain a mass audience. Why am I talking about this? Because one of the more refreshing exceptions to this trend was Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 satire Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Say what you will about the movie, but there is no denying that it is perhaps the best tribute to word of mouth, creative marketing, and genuine cultural adventurousness since the 1999 sleeper success The Blair Witch Project. I had a few issues with Borat, but these reservations were overpowered by the satisfaction of seeing something so original and unmarked-tested make $261,572,744.
Borat was a smart film that was completely willing to piss off, marginalize, and alienate its audience; I liked that a lot. Unfortunately, I think it also wasn’t as consistent as I perhaps would have liked it to be. A couple of the sketches in it like the Rodeo and the religious revival were great examples of dead on satire, but there were also some sketches felt like missed opportunities. For example, his interviews with Bob Barr and his trip to a confederate antique store were both rife for biting satire but instead they devolved into cheap physical comedy. Such inconsistency is perhaps to be expected from films like this which rely so heavily on improvised interactions with unknowing participants. Going into Cohen’s new film, Brüno, I hoped that he would have honed his act to perfection and delivered a film that was all killer and no filler.
The Brüno character was first introduced on Cohen’s HBO series “Da Ali G Show.” The character can bluntly be described as a flaming fruit. He embodies every stereotype people can possibly have about homosexuals: he’s sexually promiscuous, he’s effeminate, and he takes the fashion world seriously. He makes Liberace look like J. Edgar Hoover (okay, bad example). It’s a character that would be highly offensive to real life homosexuals if it was meant to be an authentic reflection of their community, but that’s not what he’s trying to do here, rather his goal is to make his victims really uncomfortable. The other major characteristic of the Brüno character is that he is astonishingly stupid and has no conception of reality. He’s someone who’s probably never read a single book unrelated to fashion and celebrity gossip. For example, his only understanding of Adolf Hitler is that he’s Austria’s biggest celebrity; everything else about him is incidental.
While the supposed goal of the “documentary” that the Borat character was making was to learn about America and apply the lessons to his home country, all Brüno is trying to do with his cross country travels is become a celebrity. It’s quickly established that he has no talent as an actor, so he quickly tries his hand at some of the stupider tactics used to gain exposure in the twenty-first century like adopting African babies, making sex tapes, and insincerely taking up a social cause. As you can probably tell, celebrity culture is a big target here. In fact Cohen probably achieves more to expose celebrity obsession than he does to expose the film’s more talked about target of homophobia. Particularly telling is a bit where Cohen is auditioning various parents who wish to involve their babies in a photo shoot. Brüno asks if they are willing to have their children in all sorts of outlandish and sometimes dangerous situations, and they all agree to everything he wants to put the children through, one even agrees to subject their baby to liposuction. One cannot help but wonder what dementia would lead these people to place their children’s fifteen minutes of fame out of the way before they can even walk.
Of course the homophobia angle is their too, but this is where Cohen begins falling into some of the traps he fell into on Borat. Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is the interview he was somehow able to get with Ron Paul (who should seriously fire his publicist). Rather than getting Paul to hang himself with his own words, as he did during the best moments of “Da Ali G Show,” he chooses to never even conduct the interview. Instead he lures him into a waiting room, drops his pants and tries to seduce Paul who proceeds to do what any reasonable person would do: he runs out of the room. Frankly, I think this might be the lamest gag Cohen has ever done in any of his projects. He does nothing to strike at Paul’s political positions (incidentally he’s one of the few Republicans who supports gay rights), he just pulls a sub-Ashton Kutcher prank. His work heretofore has succeeded largely because he focused on exposing what people are willing to say in front of very large cameras with the full knowledge that what they say may be aired in some capacity. As such his resorting to the use of hidden cameras here is particularly disappointing.
Another missed opportunity is an interview he gets with one of those crazy church people who thinks he needs to “reform” gay people. Done right this could have been the centerpiece of the movie, but it really amounts to little more than a framing device in the final cut. Bill Maher was able to get a much better interview out of one of these assholes in his documentary Religulous. Another missed opportunity was his interaction with a Fred Phelps protest which amounted to little more than him running passed them in S&M gear, a prank that resulted in a real interaction would have been preferable.
It should also be noted that this has some really graphic sexual material. The film opens with a gay sex scene that is so over the top that it makes the wrestling scene from Borat look positively puritanical. Hell, it even makes the puppet sex scene from Team America: World Police look subtle. Then there was a scene at a swingers club which featured unsimulated sex. The penetration was concealed by large censor boxes, but there was still it was clear what was going on and the scene ended with a long altercation with a dominatrix. How this material avoided an NC-17 rating I do not know. In fact I’m going to be very angry if the MPAA gives another Ang Lee or Atom Egoyan drama that stigmatizing rating after this. A lot of the sexual material on display seems to mainly be there to shock the prudes in the audience, and I don’t have a problem with that goal. It reminds me a bit of the controversy baiting elements that surrealists like Salvatore Dali and Luis Buñuel would add to their work to shock the bourgeois sensibilities of their audience. It’s oddly refreshing to see a mainstream movie that’s pushing the boundaries of sex instead of violence.
There are definitely highlights to Brüno that are better than anything in Borat: I’m thinking in particular of the baby interviews, an interview with an actual terrorist, a climactic scene in front of a crowd of really scary looking rednecks, and best of all a focus test of an absolutely bizarre television pilot. However, the film does not always reach these heights. In fact there are many more outright bombs here then there were in Borat, which oddly proved to be the more consistent of the two films. Also the plot that connects everything here is pretty much an inferior retread of the plot Borat used. So obviously this completely failed to live up to my dream of a Cohen film that was all killer and no filler. Still there is plenty to admire about Cohen’s work here. I think part of the problem is that the exposure he got from Borat hurt some of his opportunities. I can’t help but think that this would have been the better of the two projects if he had made it first. In spite of the problems I’m still going to recommend this film for the bits that worked. And let’s face it, even though we’ve seen Cohen’s work once before, his shtick is still fresher than 90% of mainstream comedies.
*** out of four
Che(1/16/2009)
There are few figures in history as controversial as Ernesto “Che” Guevara. To many people his face is the representation of revolution and radical left wing reform, others see him as nothing more than a communist who helped build a regime that is under American embargo to this day. Alberto Korda’s photo of the revolutionary has been emblazed on millions of T-shirts, I don’t think the people wearing these shirts are interested in celebrating communism anymore than someone wearing a Thomas Jafferson shirt is celebrating slavery; rather they are celebrating Guevara as a well intentioned visionary. I’ve never owned one of these shirts, nor have I seen anyone wearing one since the Clinton administration, but I can respect the sentiment. I’m not sure if Steven Soderbergh has ever owned one of these shirts, but I do know that Soderbergh’s new film about the Argentine revolutionary makes for compelling drama.
When I first heard about this project it was being sold as a pair of separate films called The Argentine and Guerrilla. This changed when it was delivered to the Cannes film festival as one long film simply titled Che. After it received mixed festival reviews, the film has been on a distribution roller coaster; the studio that finally picked it up, IFC films, still doesn’t seem dedicated to the idea of releasing it as either one film or two and they still aren’t sure whether they want to call the parts by their original names or as simply Part 1 and Part 2. Luckily, they had enough confidence in the project to release the film in my market in the deluxe roadshow presentation, and this is the format I saw it in.
The film ran four hours and twenty three minutes and featured a fifteen minute intermission as well as an overture and an entr’acte. The ticket cost me fifteen dollars, but that’s exactly what this theater would normally charge for two films, so I guess that’s fair enough. The film even came with a full color program, which is a nice bonus but has little in it except for the movie’s credits (which, in the roadshow tradition, are omitted from the film’s print). An essay or two would have gone a long way to increase the value of this souvenir, but it was essentially free so I can’t complain.
The two movie in one concept has been experimented with recently by filmmakers like Quentin Tarentino and Clint Eastwood to various degrees of success. Tarentino’s Kill Bill series, despite its chronological jumping, was undoubtedly one story split into two (the fact that one had more action than the other was incidental). On the other end of the spectrum, the Iwo Jima films that Clint Eastwood released in 2006 were entirely separate films linked only by setting and mood. The Che films lay somewhere between the two. Though they’re being released as one film, I think they would both hold up as standalone films. Though the Che character in the second act is certainly the same character seen in the first act, the two films take place in fairly disconnected periods in his life.
The first part focuses almost entirely on the Cuban revolution from beginning to end. There are maybe five minutes of screen time dedicated to pre-invasion material. The film also flashes forward to Guevara’s 1964 diplomatic trip to New York, but this ultimately acts less as a part of the story than as a medium to listen to his philosophies and better understand his motivations. The second part the film is about Guevara’s guerrilla war in Bolivia and is even more strictly focused. The fact that each film maintains such laser-sighted focus on its respective war gives the film a certain purity, but can also be one of it’s a double edged sword. We only see Guevara when he’s at war, never at peace. The film skips over the five year period between the two wars, including his marriage to Aleida March which is briefly mentioned only in dialogue (March is a seen as a member of his army in part one). Because we see almost nothing of Guevara’s personal life, or doing much of anything other than Guerrilla warfare, he’s not a particularly relatable character and the viewer is oddly distanced from him. I might go so far as to say this is a pair of war films first and a biopic second, especially during part one.
Part of why Guevara seems like such a distant character throughout the film is that Soderbergh maintains an incredible objectivity throughout the film. He has an almost fly on the wall approach to the events of the revolution and the viewer is left to judge Guevara by his own actions and words. Soderbergh almost never editorializes and hardly a line is spent on exposition. Of course the most controversial period in Guevara’s life, his running of the Cabaña Fortress, is completely skipped over and Soderbergh does not get too deep into the implications of Guevara’s ideology. But all this isn’t really the point; I don’t think Soderbergh cares if Cuba or Boliva are turned into “communist paradises.” What’s important is that Guevara himself deeply believes in his own cause and will sacrifice himself to see it through. If nothing else, he’s a man of good intentions, he never sought to profit from his actions and he never seems interested in gaining power. He’s a man who genuinely believes that what he’s doing is right for the people of Latin America, though he was probably naïve to trust the likes of Fidel Castro.
The first part appears to have used the brunt of the film’s budget, and it features significantly more combat sequences. There are a number of skirmishes seen, but this isn’t Saving Private Ryan. The fighting is small scale and guerrilla-style, very reminiscent of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Soderbergh does not dwell on action sequences; in fact Guevara spends significantly more time recruiting peasants and training soldiers than he does throwing around Molotov cocktails. It all leads up to the battle of Santa Clara, which is about twenty well crafted minutes of urban combat. While this is hardly mainstream filmmaking, it is exciting and relatively accessible.
The second part is more personal, smaller in scale, slower, and likely to be more divisive. During this half the film’s aspect ratio narrows down from 2.35:1 to 1.85:1, and this makes sense given the significantly altered tones of the first two halve. While Part One was a triumphant victory, part two is about Guevara’s tragic downfall in the jungles of Bolivia. As such the second part is, appropriately, sort of a downer and the tone does nothing to alleviate the tragedy. There’s very little action in this second part, and while part one was hardly a laugh riot it was a lot more entertaining about this. I’m not sure if this movie really benefits from the roadshow presentation in that the film gets slower and less entertaining after around three and a half hours of sitting in a movie theater. But the movie does rebound somewhere around the sixth act (second film, third act), there’s a great battle in the jungle and the final moments of Guevara’s life are really well handled. This half actually reminded me of Gus Van Sant’s recent output in that you’re slowly watching someone going toward an inevitable outcome, yet you stick with him in sickness and in health.
One lens through which this second half can be viewed is an allegorical one; because, oddly, Guevara acts a lot more like George W. Bush than Barack Obama. At one point in Part One, Guevara reads off a Tolstoy quote which establishes that victory in battle is largely related to the motivation of the forces. In Cuba he was able to motivate the people in a big way; they were interested in and receptive to communism. That was the right place to spread his ideology, Boliva wasn’t. Guevara assumes that the Bolivian people will accept any ideology for the simple fact that they are oppressed, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case, they mostly just see him as a dangerous troublemaker. Bush made the same mistake when he assumed that the Iraqi people would view Americans as liberators and accept democracy simply because Saddam Hussein was a dictator. I don’t want to oversell this angle, it probably wasn’t intentional and it’s not a perfect allegory (the CIA were probably just as big a factor in his defeat), but this is there for people like me to see.
One complaint I could have is that, while Guevara himself is fairly distant from the viewer, everyone else is completely unimportant. Historical figures certainly show up, they’re almost named one by one in an early scene; they’re all basically gears in Guevara’s army. Even Fidel Castro almost seems like a minor side character. All this is magnified further in Part Two which, according to the program, had 92 credited roles but a whole lot of them might as well be credited as Guerrilla Soldier #12. All in all, Guevara is the character at the center of the whole thing, and he’s the only character played by a name actor: Benicio del Toro. Del Toro is great throughout the film, he doesn’t go through some kind of wild Oscar-bait transformation, rather he does everything he can to sell the audience on Guevara’s passion. It seems like he’s doing everything he can to capture that look that’s in Guevara’s eyes in that famous photograph.
On the film’s technical side, it’s straight up awesome. That “Peter Andrews” cinematography is really good here. I said before that the film reminded me of The Wind That Shakes the Barely, and that’s largely because of the way Soderbergh places the small scale fighting amidst green Cuban scenery (though it had to be shot in Mexico, stupid embargo). “Andrews” shoots this scenery beautifully while maintaining a gritty look, it’s a tough balancing act but it’s pulled off really well. In contrast, the flash-forwards are filmed in high contrast black and white, it’s grainy and looks like a picture from an old television broadcast. Perhaps through this contrast of vivid color and grainy monochrome Soderbergh is trying to suggest that Guevara was more alive during the revolution then he was while building Castro’s Cuba. The cinematography in Part 2 is quite different, the camerawork is more handheld and the colors are more desaturated. There’s no balance between beautifully shot scenery and gritty warfare in this half, it’s all gritty. Aurally, both films really shine, gunshots really pop and explosions are crisp; it really feels like you’re in a war. The film also avoids any musical manipulation, the latin music here is good but not intended to do anything other than augment the setting.
With Che, Soderbergh has presented us with a paradox. He’s given us two war films about the same person, neither of them is as great without the other, yet watching them back to back also has its drawbacks. As a history of a man’s life, the project is incomplete in spite of its extreme length, which leads me to believe that these truly are two film in spite of the roadshow presentation. The roadshow was a nice convenience for me as it meant I didn’t have to make two trips, but if you can only see them as separate films it’s probably just as well. Either way this isn’t a project to be missed, it’s the best war film since Letters From Iwo Jima and the most daring biopic since I’m Not There. It’s also Soderbergh’s best work since Traffic and in spite of its flaws this is still one of the best movies released this year.
**** out of Four
DVD Catch Up: Chop Shop(1/2/2008)
As an amateur critic, I’m deprived a lot of things that my professional colleagues have access to, namely paychecks and advanced screenings. But another thing I miss out on is the film festival experience, the chance to hike out to places like Telluride and Toronto to watch small movies for hours on end, and to get a feel for what filmmakers who are more than a little bit outside of the Hollywood mainstream are doing. Of course I could just hike out to places like Cannes on my own… but the aforementioned lack of paychecks tends to get in the way of that. But, while I’ve never been to the Sundance film festival, I do get the Sundance channel on my cable service, and that’s where I discovered a beautiful little film called Man Push Cart.
Man Push Cart was a very small film set on the streets of New York; it followed an Iranian immigrant working out of a vending cart as he simply tried to make ends meet. It was a very good meditation on the American Dream. Man Push Cart introduced (a few) audiences to a very talented director named Ramin Bahrani, a man who is now one of the most promising talents in the independent film world. Earlier this year Bahrani released his second film, another slice of life about someone trying to survive in an unsavory area of New York called Chop Shop.
The film follows Ale (Alejandro Polanco), a pre-adolescent orphan working at and living in the attic of a seedy Chop Shop in Queens. Ale has never gone to school, with no intention of being scooped up by child protective services his only means of survival is a life of (very) petty crime. He first works at the Chop Shop, but his criminal activity escalates throughout the film to include the sale of bootleg DVDs to theft. One day he learns that his sixteen year old sister Izzy (Isamar Gonzales) is going to come live with him in the Chop Shop attic. Once they reunite Ale tells her of an opportunity he has to buy a vending van, an object that could change their lives.
Bahrani clearly takes inspiration from the Italian neorealists with his approach to filmmaking. He shows the stark realities of poor areas with stark, documentary-like filmmaking in real locations and from the use of non-actors. The grainy photography that categorized the movement back in the day has been replaced by sharp digital photography. I’ve come to admire the video-like look of some digital photography, it’s not pretty but it has the ability to see the world the way the human eye does, it’s stark, untouched, un-calculated; it’s the perfect medium for something that’s as gritty as the material here.
The non-actors are also pretty good here, in that way non actors can be. Alejandro Polanco is consistently articulate and believable in his role as a street urchin, Isamar Gonzales isn’t quite as good as his sister, but she doesn’t hurt the film at all. Ahmad Razvi, who played the lead character in Man Push Cart, has a supporting role here. Razvi is a very good screen presence and it’s nice to see him getting more work (these two films are his only credited roles). A kid named Carlos Zapata plays Ale’s friend and fellow street kid.
Chop Shop is a sad film, but it isn’t depressing. The world Ale lives in is a very unpleasant place for a kid to be in, but it doesn’t dwell on his misery, rather it’s about his struggle to improve his life through day to day work and saving. It’s another meditation on the American Dream from Ramin Bahrani, and I can’t wait to see what this man makes next.
***1/2 out of Four
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button(12/27/2008)
After sixteen years, David Fincher still has one of the best track records in all of cinema. With Fight Club and Se7en he more than secured his place in film history, and even his lesser works like The Game and Panic Room are extremely well made and more or less do what they set out to do. I had some issues with last year’s Zodiac (mostly the fault of the script), but it was so amazingly ambitious and well directed that it still managed to secure a place on my year end top ten list. In fact Fincher’s latest film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, shows that Zodiac was the beginning of a great new page in the filmmaker’s career.
The opens with a rather unusual prologue about a blind clockmaker who, out of grief for his son killed in the First World War, built a clock for the New Orleans train station that would tick backwards in (metaphorical) hope that time would go backwards and bring back the fallen soldiers. The day the war ends, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) is born “under unusual circumstances.” The baby boy is a brittle infant with wrinkled skin, a doctor who examines him say that if he didn’t know any better he would say the child was an old man at the end of his years. The boy’s father panics and abandons him on the steps of a nursing home, there he’s found and raised by an orderly named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) who tells everyone that Benjamin is her nephew. It soon becomes apparent that as Benjamin grows in age, mentality and in stature, he is in fact becoming younger in appearance and vitality. Somewhere around age ten he meets Daisy (played by Elle Fanning at this age and later by Cate Blanchett) the daughter of one of the home’s inhabitants. They’re technically the same age but Benjamin looks significantly older then she does, all the same they fall in love at first sight. The film continues to chronicle Benjamin Button’s life from birth to death.
The film, loosely based on an obscure short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, seems to be a meditation on the phrase “youth is wasted on the young.” I’ve never been a fan of that phrase; the comeback I’ve developed to it is “retirement is wasted on the old.” Button’s childhood is never that great, he’s forced to live in a retirement home and is never really able to play with other children except Daisy. His old age isn’t great either, it would seem that the grass isn’t very green on either side of that fence. The truly good days of Benjamin’s life are the portions where he’s about 20 to 60, or rather 60 to 20, that’s the period where he’s physically and mentally able to truly enjoy life. One can tell why this view of life would appeal to 46 year old David Fincher, 47 year old Brad Pitt, and even to F. Scott Fitzgerald who was 25 when he wrote the story. Although it is likely a depressing thought for the 63 year old screenwriter.
Between this film and Zodiac, one can definitely and evolution in Fincher as an auteur. In Fincher’s pantheon, the film definitely has a close kinship with Zodiac. Both films cover a much larger scope then Fincher’s previous work which mostly consisted of stories told over the course of a few days or in a case of Fight Club maybe a year. Zodiac followed a criminal investigation over the course of about a decade, but this new film chronicles a man’s life a full eighty years. Like that film, this is sort of a story that kind of sits there existing. It’s characters do not have clear motivations that are accomplished by the end as one would see from a conventional seminar formulated screenplay. The challenge with such a story structure is that everything that the film shows needs to be pretty interesting, and sure enough it is.
First and foremost this film confirms beyond any shadow of a doubt that David Fincher is an absolute master of his craft, not that anyone really doubted that to begin with. Like all of Fincher’s previous work, this film manages to tell its story with keen technological proficiency and inventive devices that keep the film energetic and fresh throughout it’s rather long run running time. Fincher has never been one to shy away from going using visually impressive set-pieces in order to further the story. A great example of this is a scene from Zodiac where time passage is shown by the newspaper headline scrolling across the walls, or another such scene were the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge is shown at a rapid pace. The same kind of trick is present in The Curious case of Benjamin Button as well. There’s a really nice scene where an event’s probability of happening is outlined as a series of coincidences, a montage that helps to destroy possible criticism about the random nature of the event. There’s also a really exceptional montage later in the movie, one of the best such montages I’ve ever seen to show the passage of time. These are the kind of special touches you get to expect from a David Fincher film. It’s also got a sea battle which is really, really, really top of the line.
One thing here that’s very different from Fincher’s previous work is its tone and subject matter. Fincher has long been known for really dark, gritty, R-rated movies like Fight Club and Se7en. No one in this film gets his fingers crushed into a door and there’s not a single head-in-a-box either. In fact there’s a sense of whimsy to the film that may feel more at home in a Spielberg film then a Fincher movie. This could have been a very bad thing, but Fincher never allows it to be. Whimsy is something that can quickly derail a movie if it isn’t earned; you really need to care about a story or else whimsy will just seem manipulative and lame. This never occurs here, all of the film’s whimsy is earned. From the strange prologue, through a running gag about lightning, to the haunting final shot, I think this completely manages to live up to all the “magic” so many Spielberg wannabes miss the mark on.
Technologically speaking, every element of the film is top of the line. Claudio Miranda’s cinematography is straight up amazing, Alexandre Desplat provides a very appropriate score, and Donald Graham Burt’s production design is out of this world extraordinary. But the thing that makes this movie really stand out is the makeup and the visual effects that were used to make Benjamin Button the backward aging freak that he is. As a child/geezer, Button is played by a variety of stand-ins with names like Peter Donald Badalamenti, Robert Towers, and Tom Everett. What’s amazing is that I have no idea what point in the film Fincher stopped using stand-ins and started using Brad Pitt, the makeup is that seamless. This is simply the best aging makeup/technology I’ve ever seen. All of these amazing effects are there to serve the story, and it’s really nice to see a character drama being a medium for amazing special effects rather than some sort of comic book movie (not that there’s anything wrong with those).
Brad Pitt does everything he can to work through all the makeup, I think he does everything he needs to do for the role, but this isn’t really an actor centric movie and it doesn’t really lend itself to the really impressive kind of acting you’re going to see in something like Doubt. Benjamin Button is a fairly stoic character, one who’s forced to mature early and he doesn’t really emote greatly throughout the film. Blanchet doesn’t really have a whole lot to do either. Taraji P. Henson really stands out in the movie because she has a character that’s a bit easier to love then the more tortured leads.
The movie reminds me a whole lot of Stanley Kubrick’s massively underrated masterpiece Barry Lyndon. The two films couldn’t be more different in tone, pacing, or style; but the underlying film is pretty similar. Both films chronicle the entire life of their title characters, for adventurous youths to domestic middle age, all the way to an old age in which the character’s problems finally catch up with them. They’re not individual stories so much as meditations about what the grand sum of a life can be. It’s a movie which will suck you in and have you transfixed on the cinema screen for its entire 159 minute runtime as long as you’re ready to take the ride.
**** out of Four
Changeling(12/11/2008)
Many people have hostile reactions to the Academy Awards and their many mistakes, but I’ve always defended them. They provide a nice summation to a year of film, and more importantly it helps a lot of good “prestige movies” get made every year. However, one thing I don’t like about them is the effect they can occasionally have on critics when they want to lobby for certain pet films; actually that’s not so bad, but it is a problem when they start lobbying against perfectly decent movies that they don’t want to win. I frankly suspect that this is what happened with Clint Eastwood recent film Changeling. In the context of the Cannes Film Festival the film received some pretty good marks, but once it was released in Oscar season critics suddenly turned on it, it currently sits at “rotten” on the tomatometer.
Why the sudden change of heart? Frankly I suspect it was because of the same kind of anti-lobbying I was talking about earlier, that critics are trying to keep the film from getting to much Oscar buzz because they don’t see it at Oscar worthy. Well, they’re right, this shouldn’t win the Oscar. It’s not very deep, and it’s not very original, but I don’t see what would drive anyone to go so far as to call it bad unless they have completely unreasonable standards.
Set in 1920s Los Angeles, the film tells the true story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mother working as a calling board operator. One night she has to leave her son alone for a night so she can work an extra shift, and when she gets home he’s gone. She runs to the police who are initially uninterested, but eventually they launch an investigation. After many sleepless nights, Collins is finally called and told that the police have found her son. She arrives at the train station only to see that the child they have found is not her son. The police refuse to take no for an answer and assume that the stress of the situation has driven her crazy. Collins embarks on a quest to right this wrong, but finds herself blocked by a wall of corruption in the LAPD.
What first strikes the viewer about the film is its beautiful art direction and set design. The film has a very elaborate period setting; there are dozens of 1920s costumes, cars and streetcars all over the place. The period L.A. on display here is large and alive, and it’s packed with all sorts of old-timey props, it’s a setting very reminiscent of Curtis Hanson’s excellent L.A. Confidential. The sets her are almost too good; they’re so detailed that they can sometimes be a distraction. Surprisingly, this reminded me a lot of another festival favorite, The Wackness. That film was so obsessively hell bent on reminding people what 1994 was like that it felt sort of false, all those pop culture references wouldn’t have jumped out at those characters in those two hours of life as aggressively as the filmmakers would have you believe. Like that film, Changeling veers dangerously close to letting obsessive period detail over power the story, especially in the first act. Eventually though, I settled into the world of the film, and this stopped being a problem.
Angelina Jolie has had an interesting career in that she’s the only woman in Hollywood who could be called an action star, what with her roles in movies like Tomb Raider and Wanted, but she can also hold her own in prestige pictures. Male stars frequently do the same, but when actresses do their slumming it’s usually more in the vein of romantic comedies. Because she so frequently stars in movies that target fourteen year old boys as their key demographic, between that and tabloid stuff it can be easy to not take Jolie seriously, but this is a mistake. When given good material like this Jolie can be a fine actress. Here she gives the kind of old school, movie star performance that we don’t see so often anymore, she seems to be channeling someone like Ingrid Bergman or Joan Crawford in her work here. She has a lot of big emotional scenes with a lot of yelling and crying, a very juicy part for someone looking to show off, on that easily could have been done over the top. However, Jolie is very good at doing these kinds of big moments without going too far and she usually stops just short of overacting.
Last year Jolie reestablished her acting chops with the Michael Winterbottom film A Mighty Heart, where she played Marianne Pearle. Interestingly, her character here is also a woman desperately seeking a missing family member. The two characters are quite similar, they both possess a great inner strength and their both absolutely determined. The difference is that this strength emerges in separate environments; one lives today and the other lives in the 1920s, where strength like this in a woman is scoffed at. If nothing else, Changeling is an excellent portrait of what it was like to be a woman in the bad old days. When Collins tries desperately to explain the situation to the police she’s dismissed as an irrational woman. They also try to paint her as some kind of slut, trying to shirk personal responsibility in order to live a swinging single lifestyle. Eventually the police get to the bottom of the situation simply because they’re more willing to listen to a twelve year old boy as a witness then to a fully grown woman.
The film also has a great supporting cast. John Malkovich has a really nice turn as Gustav Briegleb, a radio minister who wants to help Collins out as part of his larger campaign against corruption in the LAPD. Many films have good villains, but this one has two. Jason Butler Harner plays a psychotic man related to the case, and does so very interestingly, but the antagonist that really leaves an impression is a horrifically corrupt police Captain played by Jeffrey Donovan. There are also a number of child actors in the film who all perform very well for their ages.
Unfortunately, the film is marred by a drawn out third act complete with multiple false endings. It felt like Eastwood simply couldn’t decided what moment to end his film on, and he just kept on going through the history of the case and the life of Christine Collins. Does this ruin the movie? No, not to me anyway. I’m not the type of person who’s going to let twenty imperfect minutes ruin the preceding two hours of solid cinema. I’d maybe have more of a problem if this ending material was outright bad, but it’s not, it’s just kind of excessive.
Changeling is a fine piece of old fashioned cinema. It takes a great yarn, one that would be hard to believe if it wasn’t based on a true story, and tells it very well. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and it isn’t any kind of masterpiece. It is however a solid effort. I can understand critics not getting to jazzed up about it, but I highly suspect the motive of those who outright dismiss it for minor flaws, especially if they praised last year’s far more muddled film of similar subject matter Gone Baby Gone. That movie was Mystic River lite. With Changeling, Eastwood has shown exactly how much better he could have made that film.
*** out of four
Body of Lies(10/10/2008)
He often doesn’t get quite the respect or reverence he deserves, but Ridley Scott is one of the most important directors of the last thirty years. One of the first directors to be given the promotion from advertising director to feature film director, Scott brought a new level of polish to the screen, raising the bar on cinematic production values. This is a fairly unpretentious accomplishment, but it’s every bit as important as the accomplishments of people like Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch, or Werner Herzog. Scott’s mastery of cinema production values is his greatest strength, no movie has better sets, special effects, photography, or set pieces than a Ridley Scott movie, and he’s still a cut above all his competitors.
However, I must say that a number of the movies Scott has made during this decade haven’t been as good as they should have been. When Scott made Gladiator in 2000, it looked like he was making a major comeback, but since then I frankly think that he’s been playing it a little too safe. His first post-Gladiator project, Hannibal was awful, I blame Thomas Harris’s horrible novel for that one, and since he made the excellent Black Hawk Down right after it Scott still seemed like he was on the right track. Then he made Matchstick Men which I think is an underrated gem, but after that the trouble started. Kingdom of Heaven was passable, but not anywhere as good as it could have been, partly because of Orlando Bloom’s lackluster screen presence and partly because of a compromised theatrical cut. At least Scott learned his lesson from that and never casted Orlando Bloom again… or anyone else who isn’t Russell Crowe. I didn’t even see A Good Year, and American Gangster was good, but again not anywhere near as good as something with that pedigree should have been. Now Scott has made another film, and this one was about the American war on terror, now that didn’t sound like something that would be playing it safe.
The film centers around Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio), a CIA agent on the ground in the Middle East. He takes orders from Edward Hoffman (Russell Crowe), a middle aged CIA member who claims to be an expert on the region but who gives his orders over the phone from his suburban household. After a botched operation on the ground in Iraq, Ferris is sent to Amman, Jordan to track down a terrorist leader who is the likely perpetrator. There he teams up with the local intelligence agency lead by a man named Hani Salaam (Mark Strong), who demands only one thing: that Ferris never lies to him. They devise a plan to infiltrate a terrorist safe house by conditioning a member of the organization to their side.
I don’t need to tell anyone how much 9/11 and the war on terror had affected our society. When the wars in the Middle East began, it was a great opportunity for filmmakers to use their craft to either make statements about our society or at least have a dramatic situation to depict. The movie that was probably best able to utilize the geopolitical situation was probably Stephen Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, a film that had the patience to honestly describe the full complexities of the Middle East’s affect on America and America’s effect on the Middle East. Three years later, Syriana remains the gold standard for this genre, unfortunately most of the movies related to Iraq or the broader war on terror since then have not lived up to their potential. Many of them fall prey to peachiness, as was the case with Rendition, others are just too busy being angry to act as good narratives, as was the case with Redacted. These movies are overbearing and don’t work, but at least they’re trying to do something, on the other end of the spectrum there’s last year’s retarded action film The Kingdom, which exploited the war on terror in order to film a number of explosions and justified it with meaningless pseudo-moralizing in the last fifteen minutes. Body of Lies never reduces itself to the level of that stinker, but by the end it doesn’t seem to have much more on its mind.
This movie does not have a message, it doesn’t clarify the Middle East, and it isn’t a well reasoned drama. In fact Kingdom of Heaven, a movie about the 12th century crusades, probably had more to day about the modern Middle East then this does. All right, that’s an overstatement; there are a few ideas on the surface about the effect of decision making by people removed from the realities of the region, but it’s clear to me that this is not why Ridley Scott made this movie. This is a spy thriller pure and simple that happens to deal with the current conflicts. The film makes me wonder what all those cold war spy movies must have felt like while the cold war was actually going on. Like most of my generation I don’t remember much of the Cold War, and I wonder if the way I watched a Bond movie like From Russia With Love would be different if the Russians actually posed a nuclear threat. Of course a lot of those movies usually sidestepped their political implication by making the real bad guys separate criminals like SPECTRE or some sort of rouge general, there’s no such separation in The Kingdom or Body of Lies, the villains are Islamic terrorists with only superficial differences from Osama Bin Laden. Similarly exploitative undertones also killed off a lot of the fun that could have been had from movies like the new Rambo and Blood Diamond. Frankly, I’m not comfortable with simplistic action movies being made against the backdrop of the serious problems in the Middle East.
Of course this all would have been a lot more forgivable if I thought Body of Lies worked better as a straight up thriller. The movie’s fractured act structure prevents the stakes from really raising to high before the movie moves on to other things, and the ending is really anti-climactic. Also the action is mostly front loaded, in the first act there is a pretty big shootout, and an awesome car chase involving a helicopter. After that though, the movie becomes more of a cloak and dagger affair.
Ridley Scott’s direction is as slick as ever, and the dialogue is also quite good. Russell Crowe gives a pretty fun performance; it’s certainly fun watching him talk on one of those cell phone microphones that dangle down on a wire anyway. Di Caprio is also perfectly functional as the film’s hero, although I could have done without the vaguely southern accent he’s trying to do. The one who steals the show here is Mark Strong, who is really bringing his A-game as the head of Jordanian intelligence.
It should really be noted that this movie coasts along as far as it possibly can with great production values, star power, and good dialogue. But all this can only take it so far, Scott manages to maintain a certain level of dignity through the whole affair, but it can’t make up for the movie’s general pointlessness. It’s never as stupid as The Kingdom, but I don’t think it will be much more memorable either. Scott can do a lot better than this and I think he needs to think a little less commercially with the projects he chooses, as can the rest of this cast. Body of Lies is ultimately a movie unworthy of its pedigree, a real missed opportunity.
**1/2 out of Four
Blindness(10/3/2008)
One of the great pleasures of watching a lot of movies is the ability to spot new talent and watch it emerge over the course of a career. Every critic, film buff, and industry watcher wants to feel the way Martin Scorsese did in 1967 when he came out of Who’s That Knocking at My Door and proclaimed Martin Scorsese one of the great new talents of his generation. For me, and many others, Fernando Meirelles’ City of God seemed like the start of a great director’s career. City of God was a bold and brilliant film that show the presence of a true cinematic genius behind the camera, a natural talent who had a Scorsese-esque ability to choose just the right trick to make every shot work to its fullest potential. It seemed like there was no place to go except down from that modern classic, but his follow-up The Constant Gardener did not disappoint. Mierelles showed no signs of a sophomore slump, with that film he had shown real maturity and toned down some of City of God’s virtuosity to fit that very different film. Expectations were high for Mierelles’ third film, Blindness, which could solidify Mierelles as the great talent of our time if it lived up to his first two films. Unfortunately, Blindness isn’t as great as his previous films; in many ways it feels like the sophomore slump he somehow avoided with The Constant Gardener.
The film opens with a man (Yusuke Iseya) stopping his car in the middle of the road and telling the good Samaritans who stop to help him that he suddenly went blind while driving down the road. He eventually finds his way to an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who can find no explanation for his sudden blindness. The next day, that eye doctor tells his wife (Julianne Moore) that he too is suddenly blind. It’s quickly decided that this blindness is the result of a spreading contagion and the government decides to quarantine everybody afflicted. The blind are brought into a detention facility and told to fend for themselves with no assistance from anyone with sight. The Julianne Moore character never loses her sight but decides to stay by her husband’s side in the quarantine just the same. The facility is undersupplied and unsupported, the blind quickly grow restless particularly a man in Ward 3 (Gael García Bernal) who shows no interest in cooperating with the people trying to make the place better.
The key problem with Blindness is simply that it is really depressing and unpleasant to sit through, which wouldn’t be a problem if it had a really strong story or a really profound message, but it has neither. The trailers don’t tell you this, but most of the movie isn’t set in the wider society dealing with this crisis, more than half of it is spent in a dark, dank, disgusting prison. The people are stuffed in like sardines, and the government isn’t even trying to help improve conditions. Painfully, the situation looks disturbingly similar to what happened to the people stuck in the New Orleans Superdome during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The difference is those people were stuck for about a week, and the people in the film are there for months on end with no end in sight and even less outside assistance. This allegory gives the sequence some degree of power, but at the same time there’s only so much of this abuse an audience can take. These scenes seem to go on forever, eventually the film moves on from this hellhole into some of its more impressive sequences in the last twenty minutes, but by then it’s too little too late. I only wish more of the film had taken place in the city than in that horrible prison.
The film’s central message is that society falls apart when it has to face a major crisis situation, but this is hardly a unique or original message. The story bears a very close resemblance to “Lord of the Flies,” and brings very little new to the table. This is made worse by the fact that we’ve seen a lot of movies like this recently; some titles that come to mind include Children of Men, 28 Days Later, War of the Worlds, and The Happening, in fact The Happening would have probably been a lot like this if it hadn’t been completely inept.
The characters here all fit the same cliché types you’d find in a Hollywood disaster film: You’ve got the leader type in the woman who can see, you’ve got the wide old man in a character played by Danny Glover, you’ve got the hooker with a heart of gold that everyone judges at first but come to respect, you’ve got the kid who’s only there to quietly sit around and up the stakes for the larger group, and you’ve got the unbalanced crazy guy and his henchmen there to act as villains for the group. That’s really the root problem with the movie, deep down it’s just a Hollywood genre movie the ones listed above, it just doesn’t want to admit it. The end result is a movie that’s the worst of both worlds; it’s no more profound or well told than the average disaster movie, yet it’s an extremely depressing, claustrophobic, and unpleasant experience to sit through.
What saves the movie from being a real disaster is some very good acting and production values. The acting in particular has a knack for making the viewer almost forget just how cliché a lot of these characters are. I took issue with the way Julianne Moore portrayed her character early in the film, particularly the airheaded moments when she put herself in jeopardy for no reason, but as the film progressed her performance really grew on me. Moore and her character hold a quiet dignity and strength that really felt like one of the few things that was able to rise above this hellish world that Mierelles managed to create. Mark Ruffalo also played her husband in a very well done, naturalistic way. Gael Garcia Bernal is also very strong as the scenery chewing villain of the piece.
The production qualities are also quite good, particularly the art direction which conveys a really desolate mess of a post-apocalypse in the last few scenes and effectively makes the quarantine facility look every bit as awful as Meirelles seems to want it to be. The cinematography is also pretty interesting. The blind characters describe their condition as an extreme whiteness, like “swimming through milk.” To match this Meirelles took a bold step and seemed to turn the white light on the set up to eleven, leaving the visuals of the movie completely washed out in whiteness for large portions of the film. I’m not sure that this really adds a whole lot to the movie, he would have had to take this a lot further if his goal was to make the audience completely empathize with the blind people on screen, but I don’t think it really hurts the movie much either. It’s an interesting decision that makes the movie unique if nothing else.
The movie does have a number of very good scenes, in fact very few of them fall flat, the problem is that they don’t gel together into a greater whole… at all. Fernando Meirelles has made two great films so far, and I’m sure he’ll make great films in the future, but this one straight up doesn’t work. There are elements here to respect, but the movie is unlikable in many ways. This was a nice try, but a disappointing failure nonetheless.
** out of four
Burn After Reading(9/12/2008)
Like many other people, I really love the Coen Brother’s darker sensibilities. Blood Simple, Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country for Old Men are favorites of mine; they’re great movies that tell dark stories while keeping a certain quirkiness to their tone, but without winking too noticeably at the audience. When the Coen Brothers make more straightforward comedies however, my taste in them tends to be a bit more hit or miss. I love The Big Lebowski as much as the next guy, but projects like Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and The Hudsucker Proxy never really worked for me. Part of my distate for these movies comes from the way they were transparently borrowing from older movies and putting their own riff on them, additionally the teaming of John Goodman, John Turturro, and Steve Buscemi got a bit grating after a few films, and some of the broader comedy and fourth wall breaks were not to my tastes. The Coen’s new movie, Burn After Reading, is very much of their comedic cannon but it’s darker than a lot of them, and it does away with some of their more annoying traits.
The movie begins with a veteran CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) being told he will be demoted because of a drinking problem, outraged by this he quits and storms out. Later he tells his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), that he plans to write his memoirs which he says may be “explosive.” Katie, who’s been having an affair with a U.S. Marshall named Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), is thinks his decision to quit his job is foolish and begins planning a divorce in secret. Katie’s lawyers try to steal Osbourne’s financial files, but in doing so a CD containing the rough draft of his memoir is lost in the locker room of a health club and is found by a personal trainer named Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) who shows it to another employee named Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand). Linda, who desperately wants money so she can afford multiple plastic surgeries, comes up with a plan to use the CD to blackmail Osbourne into giving them fifty thousand dollars.
The catch to all of this is that all of these people are really, really, stupid. The information on the CD at the center of all this isn’t very valuable, the CIA director calls the incident “no biggie,” yet they all plot and scheme about it like it’s a vital component of national security that’s worth all the trouble they put into it. At the center of all their troubles is ego, Osbourne has a big enough ego to think anyone cares about his memoirs, Chad and Linda are egotistical to think they know how to effectively blackmail somebody, and Harry is egotistical enough to think the government is after him.
If I were to compare Burn After Reading to any prior movie in the Coen brother’s cannon it would probably be Fargo, in fact both movies have the same basic message at their core: that one shouldn’t let greed push you into the dark side, odds are you aren’t prepared for the consequences. Frances McDormand is by far the least sympathetic of the bunch, she is motivated purely by greed and manipulates those around her to do most of her dirty work. She is in many ways similar to William H. Macy’s character from Fargo, in that she is trying to behave like a criminal but doesn’t know what she’s doing and this results in a disastrous situation.
The Coen brothers’ films are always set in a very specific time and place which affects the very texture of the film on a very deep level. The place isn’t as important here but the time is. The film is set in Washington D.C. during the present day. If any other filmmakers had set their film in the present it wouldn’t be noteworthy, but its something the Coens rarely do. For all intents and purposes this is the first Coen brothers film to take place in the 21st century. This isn’t just a default choice for the Coens, it’s a deliberate decision. The reason they set it in the present is that this story is very deeply about modern paranoia and about government secrecy.
The most comical of the characters here, by far, is Brad Pitt’s character, a personal trainer so naïve and perky that his every motion is hilarious. This character is completely clueless and easily manipulated by the Frances McDormand’s character, one almost feels sorry for him getting dragged into her crazy scheme. Malkovich is also great here, his character is a little bit like his famous self portrayal in Being John Malkovich in that he seems frustratingly confused through the whole thing. Clooney is also an interesting presence in the movie, his work isn’t quite as stellar as Pitt, McDormand, or Malkovich, but he holds his own.
This is a very funny movie, but it’s not as madcap or breezy as some of its trailers make it look. The humor will come as no surprise to anyone even slightly familiar to the Coen brother’s work, most of the humor comes from the dialog and the deadpan deliveries of the actors. There are some very funny one-liners, but most of them are more effective because of their context and their delivery than they are in isolation. That said there is a dark edge to the whole affair, some of the situations the character are in are rather dire, and is also some gallows humor on display. It isn’t half as dark as No Country For Old Men, or even Fargo, but one should be aware that this movie doesn’t try to appeal to a mass audience.
The movie really has everything you’d expect from a Coen Brothers comedy; laughs, laid back performances, and sudden bursts of violence mixed with comedy. In fact it has almost too much of what one would expect from a Coen brothers movie, in many ways it’s a holding pattern. If you had hoped the Coens had entered a new phase in their career with No Country For Old Men that would extend to their next project you’ll be disappointed by this film. What’s more, the film’s similarities to their other comedies draw comparisons to those other projects and it looks worse in comparison.
Burn After Reading is not on the same level as No Country For Old Men or Fargo for that matter. It’s a second tier Coen Brothers movie. That said, it’s also a very funny movie with fun performances and a nice quirky little story. In other words, if anyone else had made this it wouldn’t have been much of a disappointment, because this is a good movie, it just isn’t profound or wildly original. The movie is worth seeing, even if it isn’t the best thing the coens have made I still enjoyed the ride.
***1/2
DVD Catch-up: Cassandra’s Dream(6/24/2008)
Woody Allen is, at this point less of a director than he is a cinematic institution, the second longest running one after the James Bond series. Every time a Woody Allen movie comes out one has a fairly good idea of what to expect, even when he seems to deliberately hit one into left field. Few Woody Allen movies went as far into left field as 2005’s Match Point, a film that did feel like the work of the same auteur but was in no way a comedic work. His 2006 follow up, Scoop, made it seem like moving his location to Europe would be the only permanent change to Allen’s style. However his latest film, Cassandra’s Dream, is clearly a return to the subject matter and tone that made Match Point such a surprise.
The film is set again set in London and begins with two brothers buying a boat they intend to name Cassandra’s Dream. One of the brothers, Ian (Ewan McGregor), has been working at his father’s restaurant for years, but plans to eventually leave when he has enough to invest in a California hotel chain. The other brother, Terry (Collin Farrell), works at a mechanic’s shop and has serious problems with gambling, alcoholism, and pill popping. Terry eventually finds himself over his head in gambling debt and Ian finds himself needing money fast in order to woo an actress he met named Angela (Hayley Atwell). In order to solve these problems the two go to their rich uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), but what he asks for in return is more than either bargained for.
Before I get into the pros and cons of the movie itself, allow me to vent about the Weinstein Companies botched distribution of the film. Woody Allen is supposed to put out one movie for every calendar year, that’s a sacred tradition, and Allen himself has lived up to his end of the bargain since 1982. Cassandra’s Dream was done early enough to have premiered at a festival in June of 2007, but for some greed inspired reason the Weinstein Company (kings of overly patient release schedules) held its American release until January of 2008. Thankfully, another distributor called On Pictures released the film in October of 2007 in Spain, so it could technically be considered a 2007 movie, but for all practical purposes the Weinstein’s screwed up an important tradition and should be punished for it, which is why I waited for the DVD release to see the movie.
Ultimately, Cassandra’s Dream has a very simple structure. It establishes two characters, puts them in an extreme situation and compares how the two characters react to it. The characters are not simple necessarily, but they aren’t wildly complex either and they develop in very predictable ways. The whole movie is rather predictable really, that’s just the nature of this type of morality play. When I say these things are simple it’s not necessarily a slight so much as a description.
This simple story is simply told as well. Woody Allen’s minimalist visual style is as evident as ever here. Reportedly this is the first Woody Allen film to include a score mixed in stereo; that should give you a clue as to how much Allen ever cares to innovate technologically. Of course as with every Allen film one shouldn’t mistake his lack of technical ambition as a lack of technical skill. Like Allen’s other films the technical elements here are all completely competent, just very simple.
Collin Farrell and Ewan McGregor are probably the film’s biggest problems. Neither is distractingly bad, but one gets the feeling that they may have been miscast. Throughout the film I began to think the movie would have been better served if they had switched roles, if Farrell were to be the aspiring playboy and had McGregor been the blue collar worker with flaws but a good heart. Tom Wilkinson also didn’t particularly impress me, it feels like he agreed to the small but vital part on a whim and sort of phoned it in on the set.
Cassandra’s Dream is a perfectly watchable and moderately interesting drama, though I was unsatisfied by its ending and looking back there was nothing really extraordinary about it at all. This probably represents what mid-range Woody Allen may look like in this new era of his career. In other words Cassandra’s Dream is to Match Point as Everyone Says I Love You is to Hannah and Her Sisters.
*** out of Four
