Antichrist(11/13/2009)
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and while it did not win the Palme D’or, its screening at that festival will be talked about long after the premier screening of the film that did win (Michael Hanake’s The White Ribbon) has long been forgotten. Von Trier has long been known as a provocateur but even those familiar with his work must not have known what hit them when, without warning, they were confronted by a film that so suddenly assaulted them with extreme images whose purpose were not entirely clear at first glance. Polarized reviews and detailed analysis began pouring out and stories of the film’s hostile press conferences in which Lars Von Trier acted as an amused ringmaster added to the mystique of the film. Some called it misogynistic, some called it deeply spiritual, some called it schlock, others called it profound art. The whole affair harkened back to an age when film artists like Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir would deliberately shock their audience to the point where they nearly riot. As I far away from southern France when this was going on, I could do nothing but read story after story. I normally avoid plot details to movies before seeing them, but in this case I couldn’t help but read the many spoilers about what it was that had horrified a number of respected critics. Even though I’m generally not a huge fan of Lars Von Trier, all this hoopla tantalized me to the point where I hungered for the day when this thing would come to my city so I could weigh in on this international debate about a film which, love it or hate, has undeniably sparked more thought than most films ever will.
The film has only two speaking roles, that of a man and a woman who are played by Willem DaFoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg respectively. In the film’s prologue, the man and the woman (who are unnamed) are seen making passionate love, unaware that a tragedy is about to occur as their young child walks toward an open window. The boy falls and dies, plunging the two into a grief that is as intense as the joy they experienced in that opening scene. In fact intense emotions are a running theme that will be taken to an absurd extreme in the film’s climax. As the woman wallows in pain, the man (who is a therapist) decides that he will psychologically treat the woman himself. His goal is to discover what it is that the woman fears the most, and this quest leads him to Eden, a forest where the family had once stayed at so that the woman would have time to write her thesis on the subject of Gynocide (the study of witch burning and other such extreme forms of misogyny). Once they arrive at Eden their relationship becomes a rollercoaster of emotions, ranging from passionate lust to deep resentment and other strange things begin to occur; animals like a deer, a raven, and most memorably a fox, begin to appear who behave in ways that are decidedly unnatural and it becomes clear that this woman has a much deeper fear of this forest than the man initially realized.
Lars Von Trier has been a frustrating filmmaker for me. On one hand I can appreciate that he is a man capable of presenting his films in ways that are visually innovative, and I also think he’s excellent at directing actors and actresses, but all too often this talent seems wasted on scripts in which characters behave in illogical ways that are contrary to my perception of reality. Authority figures in his films are moustache twirlingly intolerant, the women in his films are often confused children in need of guidance, and all of this is in service of stories that just don’t make a whole lot of sense. Most of these are criticisms that could be lobbed against Antichrist, which would lead one to believe that this movie would be torturous to me, but that’s not the case. In fact, I think this is the best work that Lars Von Trier has ever done. The film’s extreme nature (symbolic or otherwise) seems to make a lot of the usual Von Trierisms make a lot more sense; these characters inhabit an esoteric realm and this makes the film beholden only to its own internal logic and not to the real world.
Perhaps one of the root problems with a lot of Von Trier’s previous work was his association with the Dogme 95 movement. I’m not completely opposed to Dogme, it’s produced some pretty good movies, but I’m not sure it was really the right mode for Von Trier, which I suppose was probably his own conclusion as evidenced by the fact that he’s only ever made one bonified Dogme film his entire career in spite of the fact that he was sort of the movement’s poster-boy. In fact Antichrist actively goes against all ten of that movement’s famous rules; though most of the camerawork is hand-held, the lush cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle features a look that is heavily filtered and stylized. Take the first scene for example, which is filmed on a set (breaking Dogme rule one), uses non-diegetic opera music (breaking rule two), has non-handheld camera (rule three), is in high contrast black and white (rule four), requires optical work (rule five), ends in a moment of superficial violence (rule six), is in service of what could be called a horror movie (rule eight), is in widescreen (rule nine), and comes after a very large credit belonging to the director (rule ten), oh and arguments could definitely be made that the whole film is temporally and geographically alienated (rule seven).
So what we have here is a film that employs a degree of stylization unseen in Lars Von Trier’s work for a very long time, it harkens back to his early wunderkind days of films like The Element of Crime or Europa. But the Lars Von Trier work I’d most readily compare this film to is probably his unfinished project for Danish television called “The Kingdom.” Like that work, this seems to tell a story against a spiritual/supernatural backdrop the nature of which is hard to really place a finger on, and like that work this is not afraid to provide the viewer with disturbing images that one is not expecting.
Speaking of those disturbing images, they are probably the most polarizing element of the film. You’ve probably heard about this already, but there is some really extreme violence in this film and if you are someone who’s squeamish about such material, you should probably look elsewhere. In the film’s defense, though the violence is very graphic and disturbing, there isn’t really a large quantity of it. The movie’s reputation is earned mainly from two isolated scenes that come pretty late in the film and these shots aren’t much bloodier than the unrated versions of some of the more extreme horror films. What makes the material here so shocking isn’t necessarily how much is shown so much as the twisted ideas behind what is going on. The most infamous image (it involves a scissors) is a brief shot that doesn’t have a whole lot of blood, but the idea of the action itself is very disturbing. In this case I probably benefited from having read spoilers as this allowed me to mentally prepare for what was coming, the images that inhabited my mind from having read about the material proved a lot more disturbing than the actual images ever could have been. This is a luxury that the Cannes audience did not have, and this probably explains why the film has been better received in subsequent festival screenings.
The two actors who are in the center of all this chaos, Willem DaFoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, do excellent work. Gainsbourg has the unenviable task of displaying extreme emotions without going over the top. When her character begins shouting and screaming it easily could have come off as ridiculous, but Gainsbourg makes it work. She has a physically taxing role and is clearly putting a lot into her craft. Dafoe has a slightly less challenging role, but that shouldn’t diminish his accomplishments. He gives a more subtle performance for a more subtle role, he internalizes more of his emotions and his character can be almost as violent as Gainsbourg’s albeit in a more passive-aggressive way.
The film has so much symbolism and is made in such unconventional ways that it can at times feel like a puzzle demanding the viewer to discover its meaning. There are a number of art house movies that do this, but what perhaps makes this so special it that it actually works pretty well as a thriller even if you’re not interested in connecting the film’s thematic dots. I’m a bit hesitant to call this a horror film, because this doesn’t really operate like a “mere” genre film, but it does achieve most of the goals that horror films try to achieve. It establishes an atmosphere of dread early on, the tension rises steadily throughout and there is a profound sense of evil throughout which must be directly confronted towards the end. In fact, when looked at as a thriller, the film has a lot in common with The Shining. Like that Kubrick film, this is set in an isolated area from which escape is difficult, this location is haunted by forces that are never explained and only show themselves in occasionally, and in the ending the forces manipulate one of the family members into trying to kill the other. Of course the violent images also link the film with the horror genre, but the images which I found more creepy were the mysterious animals which showed up at times as well as the moments in which limbs and bodies come out of the ground to turn the environment into a Bosch-like hellscape.
But to simply say that this works as a thriller is a cop-out, the themes and symbolism here clearly invites close analysis, and I’m not too proud to admit that I’m not going to be able to explain everything on display here after only one sitting. I’m at a bit of a disadvantage with this one because almost every interpretation of it is either religious or feminist, and those are both disciplines I’ve never had a whole lot of patience for. I’m going to avoid tackling the feminist/antifeminist material, but I’ll take a stab at a religious interpretation, this will involve spoilers. The movie itself is a bit of a paradox as its title derives from a character of the book of Revelation (the final book of the bible) while it’s principle location of Eden is derived from the book of Genesis (the first book of the bible). What’s more Eden is a place you leave, not a place you enter, so perhaps what we’re witnessing is the bible in reverse. Man and woman are cast into Eden instead of out of it, and rather than being paradise it’s a hell. As man was created first and woman second, here woman is destroyed second and man first. So what’s the original sin? Chaos and murder, and the animals labeled the three beggars are the voice of temptation leading the characters toward it, woman first and then man. So, what’s the antichrist? Evidence would seem to suggest that it was the child killed in the first scene, note the positions of his arms as he falls, also the deformity of his feet. This would make Gainsborg’s character the mother of the antichrist, but what’s the polar opposite of a virgin? The answer to that might have something to do with the scene with the scissors.
Is that an airtight theory? Hell no. In fact that interpretation has more holes in it than Swiss cheese, but I think it touches on one mode of watching the film. One could probably sit and theorize about it for ages, it’s a bit like Cries and Whispers era Bergman in the way it forces long contemplation in order to find meaning in its stark imagery and bleak subject matter. It may end up being one of those movies like Mullholland Dr or A Tale of Two Sisters that have people watching them a million times in order to post elaborate theories on the internet. Whatever. The meaning of life may or may not be encoded into this thing, but what really matters is that it’s made with the utmost conviction, it’s beautifully crafted, and it’s consistently compelling and thought-provoking. That’s great cinema whether or not it functions as a definitive statement about the fall of man.
**** out of Four
DVD Catch-Up: Goodbye Solo(10/24/2009)
You may have never heard of Ramin Bahrani, but his films are among the most important movies coming out of the United States today. Bahrani has made three films now and while none of them have come close to penetrating the mainstream, all of them have an aura of something new and special. His distinct style clearly owes a lot to the Italian Neo-Realist movement (some have glibly called his style neo-neo-realism), as each film depicts a character struggling to survive in poverty and he extensively uses non actors in order to make everything as authentic as possible. I discovered his first film, Man Push Cart, on the Sundance Channel and was immediately transfixed by the travails of the central character as he tried desperately to make ends meet on the streets of New York. His follow up, Chop Shop, also depicted a side of the big apple which has heretofore gone unnoticed by the general public and the world seemed all the more tragic because it was a child placed at the center of the film. My opinion of both of these films has only grown upon reflection and I was certainly excited to see what Bahrani would show us next. His newest film, Goodbye Solo, shifts locations from New York to North Carolina but this does nothing to diminish the newest fascinating slice of life from this important filmmaker.
The film opens in a taxi cab driven by Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), a Senegalese immigrant with a young family who aspires to become a flight attendant and leave behind his cab. In the back seat of the car is William (Red West), a grumpy old man who’s become very depressed and disillusioned as of late. William has made a proposition to Solo, in a few weeks he wants to be driven out to an area landmark called the Blowing Rock, he doesn’t want a return trip. Solo asks if William plans to jump off this rock but receives no answer. After Solo accepts a hundred dollar deposit for this grim task he decides to try befriending William in hopes of eventually dissuading him from his suicidal plans, but William may be beyond saving at this point.
While Bahrani’s first two films were squarely focused on a single character, this one focuses on a pair of them. Solo, like the immigrants in the first two films, is trying to slowly build a life for himself through tedious day to day work. Unlike the other two, he’s got a family of sort including a step daughter. The other major character is William, who’s played by veteran bit player Red West, though if this were a mainstream film he probably would have been played by someone like Nick Nolte. He’s a gruff old man who doesn’t speak a lot and who isn’t willing to wear his heart on his sleeve. William always resists Solo’s attempts to help him, but one gets a sense of growing respect between the two. This relationship could have easily turned into a saccharine weep-fest were the story placed in the wrong hands, but Bahrani does a very careful tightrope walk and makes the story real rather than contrived.
A big part of the appeal in Bahrani’s films is the way they let you eavesdrop into the lives of people you normally don’t have contact with. Chop Shop was particularly good at this; it was set in the middle of Queens but felt like it was set in a foreign country. Goodbye Solo does not maintain this same sense of foreignness, but it does feel like it’s peaking into a part of the country that isn’t always fun to think about. Bahrani has never ended on an overwhelmingly unhappy note, and each one of them has been more hopeful than the last. The ending of Goodbye Solo is particularly strong in the way it manages to balance hope and melancholy through a few well chosen images.
Writing this, I consistently find myself referring back to Bahrani’s previous work and comparing. Such is the nature of the man’s oeuvre, in a particularly auteurist way he’s managed to make statements in individual films that are magnified by their place in a larger body of work. These are some of the best films about the American immigrant experience that I’ve ever seen and in bringing the techniques of Italian neo-realism into the 21st century, Bahrani has crafted a unique style that has only improved over the course of three films. I’m dying to know where Bahrani goes from here, until then we have a trilogy of excellent films to admire.
**** out of Four
Inglourious Basterds(8/21/2009)
Right now, Quentin Tarentino is operating on a level which few filmmakers can come close to. For almost two decades he’s been a leading figure in the world of cinema and in all that time he’s never quit refining his unique style, every film he’s put out has only served to prove just how much of a natural eye for cinema he has. His first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, are undisputed classics of the crime genre. His 1997 film Jackie Brown may not have pleased those looking for carnage, but it revealed a degree of maturity that may not have been readily apparent in his earlier work. After a relatively long hiatus he reemerged in 2004 to deliver Kill Bill, a film of the utmost craftsmanship whose first half proved Tarentino’s proficiency at action filmmaking and whose second half revealed layers of pathos which may not have been apparent at first. Then there’s Death Proof, the film featured as the second half of the Grindhouse double feature he put together with friend Robert Rodriguez. This film was not widely loved upon its release, but I stand by it. It certainly will never be looked at as one of Tarentino’s major works, but I think its unique narrative structure and razor sharp dialogue will be better appreciated by those who give it a second look. But amidst all of this activity there was always the prospect of his legendary World War 2 project, a film which he had been working on as far back as that post-Jackie Brown hiatus. The script he’d been working on began to take on legendary proportions and after more than a decade the movie has finally emerged complete with its deliberately misspelled title: Inglourious Basterds.
Set in a World War 2 that would be more recognizable to an Id Software designer than a historian, this film tells a pair of stories that are fated to collide in its final sequence. The first story is that of a French Jew named Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) whose family is killed by a ruthless Nazi tasked with hunting down Jews hiding out in occupied territory. After four years she has adopted the name Emmanuelle Mimieux and begun managing a movie theater in the middle of Paris. After meeting a German war hero named Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), her theater is chosen as the new venue for the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film about Zoller’s exploits. The other storyline is that of the titular commando unit which is composed entirely of revenge seeking Jewish American soldiers but led by the southern born and supposedly part Apache Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who claims that he is “in the killin’ Nazi bidness, and… bidness is a-boomin’.” This premiere is quickly revealed to be a hotspot for high ranking Nazi officers. So the “Basterds,” aided by an SAS agent played by Michael Fassbender, decide to target the place for an attack; but Shosanna has plans of her own.
You may not have noticed it amidst all the trouble Lars Von Trier was causing, but when Inglourious Basterds debuted at the Cannes Film Festival it was pretty divisive. I think that’s going to be the case for a lot of Tarentino’s films for a while, possibly for the rest of his career. In the directors own words in a GQ profile by Alex Pappademas “I’m not a nice-guy artist. When my movies come out, they draw a line in the sand.” Tarentino’s style has basically become its own monster and those who don’t like it will probably not like his films; he stopped making movies for “everyone” a long time ago. Those who do appreciate his artistry however will be rewarded in droves by his recent work and especially what he does with this latest film.
I found myself oddly excited by this film’s opening credit sequence, I say oddly because those credits are just large white letters over a black background. That may not seem like much but I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen such simple opening credits projected onto a big screen. This is the kind of credit sequence that people seem to have lost patience for a long time ago. Today, if there even is an opening credit sequence in a mainstream film it’s almost always either on top of the opening scene or at least accompanied by some other kind of added stimuli. These minimalist credits pretty perfectly establish the kind of courage and patience that Tarentino will use throughout the film and the scene that follows theme, a tense conversation between a vicious Nazi (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer (Denis Menochet), embodies the attitude. In the hands of any other filmmaker this scene would have been a five minute throwaway, in Tarentino’s hands the conversation is a fifteen minute epic that builds upon itself until it finally pays off to heartbreaking effect. One suspects that the influence of Sergio Leone is at play in this, and many other long scenes like it, which build up for longer than one would expect only to be resolved through fast bursts of action.
We live in a time when screenplays are all too often written to exacting formulas and rules. The scene I described above is most definitely not within these rules and if someone with less clout had tried to submit it he would have quickly been shot down by a Hollywood reader unable to process such creativity. As the boldly two-act Death Proof proves, Tarentino has never been one to follow rules, and he breaks them with joyous abandon throughout Inglourious Basterds. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of short sighted reviews complaining about the film’s length, and I’ve got news for them: this movie is a minute shorter than both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and I didn’t hear anyone bitching about their run times back in the day. Granted, I’m sure most of these critics will claim that they are complaining about pacing rather than the actual running time, but frankly I’m getting more than a little sick of this lazy shorthand that has gotten out of control among critics as of late. Roger Ebert’s adage that “no good movie can be too long, and no bad movie is short enough” comes to mind. To me, if the material on hand is all gold I can watch it for hours on end. Nine out of ten times, if a movie is “too long” one should probably answer why it isn’t worth watching for as long as it runs rather than why it runs as long as it does.
I can understand why this pacing may come as a bit of a surprise to those who had their expectations shaped by Harvey Weinstein’s deceptive advertising campaign which makes this look like some kind of hyper-violent movie that mainly consists of Brad Pitt murdering Nazis. First of all, Brad Pitt is not the main star of the film; he’s just one part of a larger ensemble. In fact I’d be willing to bet that he has less screen time than some of the less known actors. This also isn’t an action film, there are no scenes of open warfare and the violence that is here is graphic but brief. Of course this kind of false advertising has been a staple of Tarentino’s career. Despite their blood soaked reputations, neither Pulp Fiction nor Reservoir Dogs really had much onscreen violence at all. People were similarly disappointed when Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Death Proof weren’t the action-packed blood baths they had been lead to expect. In general, Tarentino is not the carnage-meister that the public seems to think he is, and this film is no exception. Those looking for savage pleasures will probably leave disappointed, but hopefully there will be others who leave happy they witnessed something much grander than the low brow thrills they were promised.
As I just mentioned, Brad Pitt is not this film’s star, but when he is onscreen he makes for a very enjoyable presence. He goes all out in his depiction of a violent redneck hell-bent to kill Nazis. Those disappointed that Pitt isn’t a bigger part of the film can take solace in the fact that the rest of this ensemble more than matches his work. Perhaps the performance that most surprised me was that of Mélanie Laurent, a French actress whose previous work was unknown to me. Laurent has the always tricky role of a character forced to conform to a society they inwardly despise. Throughout the film she has a lot of banter with Daniel Brühl, a Nazi who’s clearly attracted to her. Brühl has perhaps an even trickier role because, while he’s a loyal Nazi, he seems like a genuinely nice guy and you suspect that in another life these two might have made a good couple. Both of these actors must perform in both French and German (more on that later), and another actor forced to contend with the language barrier is Michael Fassbender who plays a stiff upper lip Brit who must speak German in order to infiltrate Nazi circles. As for the titular “Basterds,” not many of them were given enough screen time to stand out. I’m sure that many will pick on the performance of Hostel director Eli Roth and Tarentino’s decision to cast him. My answer to this criticism is the same response I have to those who complained about Tarentino’s own cameos in previous movies (and the various M. Night Shyamalan cameos for that matter): that the only reason they are so bothered by their performance is that you know them as a director, if Eli Roth had just been some dude from central casting no one would have even bothered to comment on his performance, because either way he had very little screen time.
The performance that really deserves special attention is that of Christoph Waltz, who has created one of the greatest villains of recent memory. Like many characters here, Waltz must perform in multiple languages (English, French, and German), and no matter what tongue he’s using he comes off like a snake. Making a Nazi come off as evil is easy, too easy, which is why Tarentino does more with the character. This is a character that starts out interesting and only reveals himself to be even more of a devious enigma the more you get to know him. Tarentino could have given Waltz some sort of sadistic weapon or some kind of eye patch or something stupid like that, but instead he simply makes this man a dangerously intelligent and unpredictable opponent with a very strange interpretation of Nazi ideology. At one point he gives a dark speech comparing Germans to hawks and Jews to rats which is right up there with other famous Tarentino speeches like Samuel L. Jackson’s Ezekiel rant, Christopher Walken’s watch speech and Dennis Hopper’s True Romance speech about the Italian lineage. Waltz has already won a well deserved award from the Cannes Film Festival for this award and he also deserves Oscar consideration.
I just mentioned that a number of the characters here perform in German or French, and indeed a good two thirds of this film plays out in foreign languages with subtitles. Ninety nine percent of the time I’d unequivocally support such authenticity in linguistics, but here I’m a bit more on the fence. The only problem I have with the scenes in French and German is that I can’t help but feel like they’re robbing us of precious minutes of dialogue written by one of the English language’s greatest word smiths. Make no mistake, the subtitled dialogue is damn good; one can definitely tell that those scenes have been written with flare, but it just isn’t quite the same as hearing Tarentino lines spoken in the language they were written in. Then again, even the English material is relatively restrained stylistically and adheres more to the work he did on Kill Bill than Death Proof or Pulp Fiction; this probably isn’t going to be the goldmine of quotable lines that other Tarentino movies have been and I think that’s deliberate. In general I do think that having these lines subtitled rather than spoken in English is made necessary both thematically and by the plotline. As the film goes on, communication amongst people speaking foreign languages becomes very important to the film.
Oh, and as for historical accuracy, forget about it. Tarentino claimed to have spent much of his post Jackie Brown hiatus doing historical research for this movie, which had led me to fear he had finally grown up and was planning to make a “normal” movie. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, in fact I suspect that most of this research consisted of watching The Dirty Dozen a thousand times. This movie is set in World War 2 but is not about it, it’s really about something that Tarentino knows significantly more about than history: Film. Let me backtrack on that just a little, I’m sure there is a certain degree to accuracy to the minutia of the movie. The uniforms, weapons, and locations are probably authentic and a certain understanding of history does enhance a lot of the details in the movie, but ultimately the war here represents cinematic imagination rather than reality every bit as much as the criminal underworld of Pulp Fiction was a figment of Tarentio’s imagination rather than a document of any real crime syndicate.
When dealing with Nazis, most films rightfully examine the massive damage they did both during the Holocaust and on the battlefields of the war. But Tarentino seems significantly more concerned with what the Nazis did to the German film industry. It’s mentioned in the film that Hitler’s Germany was largely responsible for the demise of the unmatched Weimar era film industry. The filmmakers that weren’t driven out for being “decadent Jew Intellectuals” would only stay to find their talents wasted on idiotic propaganda films. Is this the greatest sin of the Third Reich? Probably not, and to most of the world it wasn’t worth punishing. So, who better than Tarentino to give cinema its much deserved revenge, something he does with the utmost skill during the films finale which can only be described as “wild.” To Tarentino cinema (and by extension art) is a significantly stronger force than Nazis, than Hitler, than history itself, and nowhere has he so vividly (and literally) expressed this than with Inglourious Basterds.
**** out of Four
In the Loop(8/7/2009)
Television is a medium that has become increasingly important in the last ten years; shows like “The Wire,” “Mad Men,” and “The Shield” have lead to a great renaissance in the format of serialized storytelling. However the world of television reaches beyond networks like HBO, AMC, and FX (and even beyond those over the air networks that people seem to like). Like the cinema, material is produced for television all over the world, particularly in the UK whose domestic television industry has launched the careers of major talent like Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, and Hugh Laurie. However, while the basic format for cinema is almost identical the world over, the norms of televised content seem to vary in ways that can be confounding. Every time I’ve tried to get into a much buzzed British program I’m confounded by their cheap film stock, but even more so by their short season (excuse me, “series”) lengths and limited runs. What they call a program I call a miniseries, what’s the point of getting into a show if it’s just going to end after six to twelve short episodes? For those reasons I’ve mainly stuck to television shows that don’t use barbaric horizontal credit sequences, and it seems like the majority of my fellow vertical credit loving Americans do the same. Perhaps that is why the new feature film In the Loop is currently playing in select American theaters even though the UK television series it’s based on, “The Thick of It,” is nowhere to be found in Region 1.
Though the film is largely an ensemble piece, the lead character is probably Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), the minister for international development. This is a man who seems to mean well for the most part, but he has a Biden-esque habit of saying stupid things in public. The gaffe that really gets him in trouble is when he’s asked about a possible Anglo-American incursion into the Middle East (the film never comes out and says it, but this is obviously meant to represent Iraq), the best answer he can come up with is that war is a “not unforeseeable” possibility. This clumsy and ambiguous wording results in an angry tongue lashing from the Prime Minister’s Communications Director Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), but the statement is picked up by American war hawks like Linton Barwick (David Rasche), a State Department crony who has little interest in “the facts” and who gives out friendly smiles while ruthlessly manipulating violent overseas events. However, in spite of the way his statements sound Foster is not in favor of the war (at least in theory) and because of this he is seen as a potential ally to those trying to oppose the war at the highest levels like American Undersecretary Mimi Kennedy and a gruff Military General (James Gandolfini) who doesn’t feel the war is winnable. After another embarrassing fumble of wording, Foster and a young advisor named Toby (Chris Addison) find themselves flying off to Washington D.C. to take part in the debate.
In general, this movie is a little bit like “The West Wing,” but with less optimism and more swearing. It shows the behind the scenes grind of politics, but does so on a much less appetizing level. The President and the Prime Minister are never seen or named in the movie; this is about people in the middle-management of government in the midst of what is probably the most exciting thing that will ever happen in their careers. They might have beliefs and ideas of their own, but they mostly just have to do what their bosses tell them to do in order to keep their jobs, all the real decisions are made by people well above their pay grades. In this sense the film is a lot like Ricky Gervais’ famous Brit-sitcom “The Office,” except in a business with higher stakes than a paper company; it also shares that series’ vérité visual style.
Probably the greatest pleasure of In the Loop is its dialogue, written by team who wrote for the TV series, and delivered with conviction by a talented cast. Normally the sight of five writers in the credits should be a turn off, but in this case I suspect the team was there simply to fill the movie with great jokes and witty lines rather than to mess with the story. The film rarely seems like it adds unnecessary scenes in order to accommodate a funny set-pieces, it sticks strictly to the story it wants to tell and finds humor in the proceedings rather than looking for it elsewhere. The fact that they are able to turn this television comedy style into a real narrative arc is perhaps the scripts greatest triumph. At first you feel like you’re just watching it for the satirical dialogue, but the tension does ramp up in the third act and you really do start to get excited about the outcome as people on both sides of the pond mobilize to decide whether or not this war happens.
The actor blessed with the most consistently funny character is Peter Capaldi whose character is a profane angry boss character who frequently throws out threats like “Just fucking do it! Otherwise you’ll find yourself in some medieval war zone in the Caucasus with your arse in the air, trying to persuade a group of men in balaclavas that sustained sexual violence is not the fucking way forward!” He reminded me a lot of both of Ari Gould, the similarly quick speaking and dismissive agent played by Jeremy Piven on the HBO series “Entourage,” and of the curse spewing executive played by Tom Cruise in the film Tropic Thunder. This is an endlessly amusing character type that might have originated with Kevin Spacey’s part in the Hollywood satire Swimming with Sharks. The similarities may have been unintentional, but I find it very funny that a government communications director would have the same personality type as these Hollywood types who avoid all pleasantries in order to get their way at all costs. Most of the other characters are less over the top than Capaldi’s, but most of them are given some moment where they find themselves on top and are able to chew out one of their co-workers. Even an idiot like Tom Hollander’s character finds and opportunity to do so when his advisor arrives late to a meeting and he milks the opportunity to its fullest.
There’s a certain nihilistic streak to the whole film, no matter what the characters do there’s really no stopping this war from happening; the decision’s been made and the check has been cashed. Those who try to stop the inevitable are only putting their livelihoods on the line in vain, though most of them cave before it comes to that. Perhaps the best thing that can come from this is a certain empathy for the people who are in the middle of the insanity that politics can be at some time, after all they’re only human too and you should maybe cut them a little slack when they take a while to fix your wall.
What may be the film’s one problem is that it came way too late. Imagine how awesome this would have been if it had come out in 2003, right when this kind of decision making was going on in Washington and London. That’s probably a completely unreasonable expectation, after all one can only get a real look at what went into that fateful decision in retrospect, but then again this is a movie that people are comparing to the immortal Dr. Strangelove, and Stanley Kubrick didn’t wait until after a nuclear war started to make that film. Still, no matter when this came out there’s no denying that this is a very funny, smart, and insightful film. They had me at funny.
**** 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
The Wrestler(1/9/2009)
If someone ever writes a book called “Things That Aren’t Respectable” they’d probably have to devote an entire chapter to professional wrestling. I’ve had nothing but contempt for this “sport” and I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a wrestling match in its entirety because of it. But like all entertainment mediums, the world of wrestling is filled with genuine human interest stories about wash-ups, has-beens, and those who never made it. Those who dream of being in the WWE may have some strange priorities but are their failures any less tragic then the failures of those who aspire to be boxers, actors, or rock stars? The new Darren Aronofsky film, The Wrestler, is about one of these sob stories; it’s a film that does what I thought was impossible, it made me care about a pro-wrestler.
The film is a character study about Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), who was a major star of pro wrestling during the 80s but who has fallen a long long way since. Now Robinson, in his 50s, is living in a trailer park but still wrestling in low rent matches in seedy New Jersey venues. His one escape outside of the wrestling ring is the time he spends at a local strip club where he’s befriended a lap dancer named Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). After a really hard match, Robinson collapses in the locker room. Doctors tell him he’s had a heart attack and that another match could easily kill him. This puts Robinson at an impasse in life, he doesn’t have any real job skills and he yearns for the rush of the fight. Cassidy suggests he contact his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), but he doesn’t know if she’s going to be interested in talking to him. Meanwhile, Robinson’s fight promoter is trying to arrange a rematch between Robinson and his old “rival” the Ayatollah, a fight Robinson is tempted to agree to, but which could jeopardize his very life.
The Wrestler is a film that comes at an important point in the career of its director, Darren Aronofsky. Aronofsky came to prominence with the visually aggressive independent films Pi and Requiem For a Dream; but his last film, The Fountain, was seen by many as a misfire. That film was an incredibly ambitious sci-fi epic, but its small scale new age aesthetic ultimately felt cold and pretentious. With The Wrestler Aronofsky has made the perfect film to recover from an ambitious failure like that: a small scale, down to earth independent film with a minimum of the camera tricks that were beginning to define his style. This is a film about people, not themes or technical devices, and it’s a lot warmer than anything he’s made before. And yet, the film still explores the themes that Aronofsky has explored throughout his body of work: Addiction, obsession, and the pursuit of unattainable dreams.
Aronofsky shoots the wrestling matches here a lot better than the WWE does. Like all the best boxing films the camera here goes into the ring, which allows for something a lot more intense than a filmed live event. Some of this footage is surprisingly graphic, particularly on “hardcore” match in which the wrestlers fight using weapons like broken glass, barbed wire, and most disgustingly a staple gun. The fact that fights like this are going on is very disturbing to me, but it’s all fake right? Well it is and it isn’t. The fights are certainly fixed; the wrestlers decide who will win ahead of time. They are also probably doing everything they can to soften they’re blows, but there are dangers, especially in these small venues that clearly don’t have the same safety standards as the WWE. For instance, during the film’s first fight Randy cuts himself on the forehead with a razor in order to achieve a blood effect after a blow from his opponent. Then there’s the aforementioned “hardcore” fight; all those painful implements are used to hurt the fighters, for real, in a scene that far more vicious and disturbing than anything I’ve seen in a slasher film.
The violence in that “hardcore” scene is not gratuitous; in fact it plays directly into the character’s health problems, his motivation, and a Jesus analogy that runs through the film. Shortly before that fight the Marisa Tomei character recommends Mel Gibson’s high budget snuff film The Passion of the Christ, pointing out something along the lines of “they throw everything they have at him but he never gave up.” Of course that bloody violence in that “hardcore” fight is not unlike the floggings which are in Mel Gibson’s film, but to what end? The point of the biblical passion story is that Jesus suffered for a greater purpose; to save souls or something (my lack of religious inclination is probably showing). Randy “The Ram” Robinson certainly isn’t trying to save anyone’s soul; he’s suffering to entertain whatever sadistic audience apparently wants to see this.
At least that’s what he thinks he’s doing, but his real motivation is something darker, something he never admits to himself: he’s addicted, not to narcotics (though he does have a drug problem), but to fame. His addiction to fame is every bit as self destructive as the addictions Aronofsky depicted in Requiem for a Dream. This addiction has left Randy every bit as obsessed as the protagonist of Aronofsky’s debut film Pi, but he’s not obsessed with math, he’s obsessed with recapturing his glory days. This obsession has ruined his family life, led him to abuse the more conventional drug of steroids, and most importantly kept him wrestling long past his prime even after there are major health reproductions for doing so.
The film’s soundtrack will probably be remembered for the self titled Bruce Springsteen folk song that’s already getting Oscar buzz, and that’s a pretty decent thing to be remembered for, but it isn’t what most of the soundtrack is like. The majority of the film’s music comes from bands like Quiet Riot, Ratt, and Mötley Crüe; that’s right 80s hair metal. This is not cool music but it’s been chosen wisely for this film because it’s exactly the kind of thing Randy would listen to. First of all this music is gaudy, commercial, unsophisticated and very masculine; all things that are also emblematic of pro-wrestling. Secondly, the fact that Randy listens to it fits in perfectly with the character’s obsession with recapturing the 80s. This is a man who didn’t grow out of this music with everyone else, in fact he gives an entire speech about how “that pussy Cobain” ruined it. His beef isn’t really with Kurt Cobain, it’s with a culture that moved on and left him behind.
Of course Randy isn’t the only one expounding on the virtues of Ratt in that scene, he finds an unlikely musical ally in Marrisa Tomei’s character. Tomei is about twelve years younger than Rourke, more importantly she’s a very attractive stripper while he’s an “old broken down piece of meat.” At first it would seem to strain credibility that she would want to pursue a relationship with him, but it quickly becomes apparent that the two characters are really quite similar. Cassidy is not a stripper simply because Aronofsky wants to shoot topless scenes. She’s a stripper because that is in many ways the female equivalent of Randy’s profession. Both are performers in seedy and disreputable stage venues, both put their bodies on display as part of that pursuit, and both are getting a bit too old of their chosen vocation. The difference is that Tomei’s character is not addicted to her job; unlike Randy she hasn’t tied her identity to her onstage character, which is why she ultimately doesn’t understand how strong the urges driving Randy are.
I’m not overly familiar with the work Mickey Rourke did before he left Hollywood to pursue a boxing career in the early 90s. I’d seen him in the Robert Rodriguez’ film Sin City where he played likable lug of a character, but there wasn’t much there to prepare me for his work here. Much has already been written about Mickey Rourke’s amazing performance, and I’m going to try not to dwell on it too much simply because the film deserves better than to be overshadowed by its star. Suffice it to say that Rourke really does live up to most of the hype that surrounds his work. This isn’t a theatrical performance like Daniel Day-Lewis’ work in last year’s There Will Be Blood; rather it is a performance that builds a character through careful strokes and subtle decisions. Interestingly, Rourke has much the same challenge that Anne Hathaway has in this year’s Rachel Getting Married. Both actors have character who are not particularly lovable and warm people, both do things that make want to dislike them, and yet you sort of have to be with them in their suffering.
The rest of the cast is solid, but occasionally seems to be rushing to catch up with Rourke. Tomei is not in quite the same position to show off her acting chops as some of her co-stars, she doesn’t have a big scene and her character doesn’t have as many broad characteristics as Rourkes. Still, through her work she maintains a certain dignity throughout the film that transcends what could have easily been a conventional “hooker with a heart of gold” side character. Evan Rachel Wood has a smaller role than Tomei’s but it requires a lot more out of her. She has a scene where she really needs to react to her father in a very direct, very angry way which is broader than anything her co-stars are asked to do. This could be seen as easier or more challenging depending on your perspective. Either way she handles the scene as well as can be expected and more or less acquits herself.
Darren Aronofsky’s visual style here is very different form his earlier films, which were a lot more technical. There are no fast cuts or obvious visual motifs in The Wrestler, its visual style is a lot more conventional and at first glance it doesn’t look like a Darren Aronofsky film at all. This is for the best; firstly because Aronofsky’s old style had probably been taken as far as it needed to beforehand and secondly because this slice of life filmmaking better fits this film which tackles its themes in more subtle ways. It was a wise reinvention; I was worried about Aronofsky after the failure of The Fountain, but this film solidifies his place among the best auteurs of his generation.
Do not be scared away by the film’s wrestling subject matter, that’s not really what it’s about. If you dismiss the film for this you’ll be missing out on one of the best character studies we’ve seen in a long time. This is a very smart, but modest drama, one whose greatness sneaks up on you only after you’ve left the theater. It’s a film that deserves to be taken seriously and it’s much more than a showcase for Mickey Rourke’s acting comeback.
**** out if 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
Doubt(12/222/2008)
I grew up raised in the Catholic Church. It was a very nice welcoming place. Masses were long and boring, held in a large kind of spooky cathedral and led by a dude in an elaborate robe, but everyone was pretty nice. I’m no longer religious, but the church had nothing to do with this, my experience was far removed from the usual catholic reputation of conflicted, guilt-ridden, and brooding people. The church I grew up in was a lot different from the way Catholicism was at the beginning of the century. The new film, Doubt, is partly about the struggles that occurred at mid century which shaped the church into the welcoming thing it is today. It’s also about the child abuse scandal that dogs the church to this day. More importantly it is about a woman, who in the depths of her heart is struggling with the faith she has lived with for decades.
The film is written and directed by John Patrick Shanley and based on his own Pulitzer Prize winning play. Set in New York circa 1964, the film is about activities in a catholic school. The principle of this school is a nun named Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) who lives up to the ruler slapping reputation of nuns at catholic schools. As a principle she’s mean, controlling and unapproachable, very much a member of the old school of Catholicism. The priest of the dioceses is Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), someone of the new school of friendlier Catholicism. Aloysius is clearly not fond of Flynn, but she hold back from openly criticizing him because she respects the hierarchies of the church. A young and naïve nun named Sister James (Amy Adams) begins to notice Flynn holding an oddly close relationship with the school’s first African American pupil (Joseph Foster), Aloysius begins to suspect Flynn is behaving abusively.
This is certainly not a film intended to show off the technical proficiency of the filmmakers. The camera work is consistently competent, and Roger Deakin’s cinematography is quite crisp, but this is a theater adaption through and through. The stage version was set up to be a piece with only four characters, while the film mostly follows suit, it is opened up a bit. There are plenty of extras in the school; there are scenes of the characters interacting with students and scenes of the characters interacting with other clergy members. The characters occasionally go outside, but at the end of the day this is very much a story where a few characters have very long conversations with each other. Still, they adapt this for the screen about as well as they can, they don’t pull silly stunts in order to make it cinematic but they expand it enough to be its own entity.
I think what makes the film so special is that it challenges you to like someone who’s not likable, and hate someone who is likable. It would have been so easy for John Patrick Shanley to write a story where the potentially abusive priest were a staunch traditionalist and harsh disciplinarian, and the nun standing up to him was likable, friendly and reform minded woman who you really wanted to cheer for. Shanley doesn’t take this easy and conventional route. Instead he’s set up a morality tale that forces the viewer to come to grips with which character they relate to and more importantly why they relate to them. Your opinion of the characters will change by the end, then change back, and maybe change again.
The major roles here have been filled by top Hollywood talent, and at the head of it all is Meryl Streep. Streep hasn’t been working on this level for a while; she’s been doing a lot of less prestigious work lately. She has a big challenge here in that it is essential that she makes the audience relate to her character, but the convent lifestyle is not exactly the easiest one to relate to. She needs to exhibit a lot of material through simple looks and line deliveries, all while trying desperately to behave with the kind of restraint and dignity that her character would demand. Streep exhibits a great amount of personal strength on her character’s behalf and does it through the simple authority of her line deliveries.
Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone else doing this role as well as Streep does here. She has a reputation of taking a new accent with every role, and this is no exception. Here she has the slightest Bronx accent, it’s the type of thing 99% of actresses wouldn’t have bothered with, but it really changes a lot about the character. It explains why the local parish is so important, and it generally gives the viewer a better idea of where she came from in life. I think this is a tremendous performance that’s been perfectly balanced throughout the film.
Going up against Streep is Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who also has a difficult balancing act. He needs to control his every look and motion, every line delivery. He has to sell himself as an innocent man, while allowing the possibility of his character’s guilt to still be there, but ever so slightly. Viola Davis has been getting a lot of huge marks for her role as the mother of the potentially abused child. She only really has one longish scene, but she still leaves a big impression. If anyone is a weak link here it’s Amy Adams. Adams is quickly becoming typecast into naïve bubbly roles, and this isn’t a lot different from what she’s done elsewhere. I wouldn’t go so far as to call her poor, but she isn’t working on the same level as the other three performers.
These actors are working with an excellent script that features awesome dialogue. The characters here, especially Aloysius, talk in way that’s a tad formal, but still conversational. Basically, these are people that would never dream of using slang, but they’re still just talking to each other. Despite all the formality, there’s still some really snappy dialogue on display here. Aloysius speaks with strong, really well crafted sentences and argues with complete confidence. There is a surprising amount of humor in the script given the subject matter, Shanley plays around a lot with the fact that these are nuns we’re dealing with, but they’re still human, and when they’re planning out the school activities like it’s a day at the job. Pay close attention to the first and last lines, I think a lot of the film’s meaning can be grasped from these two moments.
I must also say that the movie is marred by a horrible trailer which gives way too much away. I can’t blame the movie for bad marketing though. John Patrick Shanley has written a great play here, I can totally see why it won a Pulitzer. Everything I liked about the film version almost certainly comes from that play and the way it’s performed by these actors. Everything else is perfectly competent, but not amazing. So, what we’ve got here is a great play being performed greatly with production that, if nothing else, usually stays out of the way.
**** out of Four
Rachel Getting Married(10/23/2008)
Politicians are always talking about family values, whatever that really means. There are dozens of movies about the supposed strength of families, about parents losing all control to protect children, about families coming together in desperate situations. Of course most of this is nonsense, when the chips are down blood usually isn’t as thick as most of these movies will have you believe. Sometimes, there are going to be people you dislike, and happening to have the same parents as them isn’t always going to change that. Rachel Getting Married is not a movie about “family values,” it isn’t idealized and it isn’t pretty. It is, however, an incredibly honest movie; one that I think anyone can relate to on some level.
Despite the title, the film’s central character is a woman name Kym (Anne Hathaway). As the film begins Kym is leaving a rehab facility, seemingly for the first time in a while. She’s going to be with her family for a week or so in order to attend her sister’s wedding. Her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) seems excited to see her at first, so does her father Paul (Bill Irwin). But Kym seems to start wearing out her welcome real quick, it becomes increasingly clear that the family holds more animosity toward Kym then they let on because of all the things she put them through while she was a drug addict. As the weekend goes on the tensions continue to rise, and one begins to wonder if this family is ever going to come back together.
One has to keep in mind, that this is a film that’s very much about its characters and the way they interact, it is less story driven than most films. This is a film about an aftermath, about people living with the consequences of things that happened before the movie has started. The plot description I’ve given is probably frustratingly vague; it had to be because Rachel Getting Married can potentially be a hard film to talk about without spoiling the experience. A big part of why the film works so well is the way it slowly lets the audience in on this family’s troubled history over the course of the film, but not discussing some of this material makes it hard to really discuss the characters, and their various perspectives and motives. I’m definitely not going to give anything away, but I will tell you that the film’s first act is not what it appears. Jenny Lumet’s screenplay drops a bombshell on the audience about a third of the way into the movie which changes everything, forces the audience to rethink all the preceding scenes and fully clarifies everything that’s been going on between the characters. This is not a plot twist of the M. Night Shyamalan kind, it doesn’t change the plot, but rather it changes things on a personal level, and it changes the audience’s perception of this family’s dynamic.
The film was directed by Jonathan Demme, who’s probably best known as the filmmaker who brought us The Silence of the Lambs. That Oscar winning film is not particularly representative of Demme’s body of work; his heart seems to be in independent filmmaking and in the world of low budget documentaries. Demme is a filmmaker who seems to have a “one for them and one for me” mentality, making studio thrillers like The Truth About Charlie and The Manchurian Candidate (2004) between documentaries like The Agronomist and concert films like Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Rachel Getting Married is clearly one for the independent side of his cannon.
The film is shot entirely on handheld digital cameras and I’m sure this was done for stylistic rather than budgetary reasons. The film looks almost like a home movie, albeit one that is made very professionally, and this gives the viewer a subliminal sense that they are like one of the people in the crowd attending the wedding. Bear in mind though, that this is an exercise in narrative Cinéma vérité, not mockumentary. The camera is only supposed to look handheld, and one is not meant to think any actual character is filming everything. The visual style is reminiscent of the Dogme 95 films that were going on in the last decade, except without the strict “rules” or the general whiff of pretension surrounding that movement.
Anne Hathaway was an actress who I hadn’t had much exposure to until now. Aside from her relatively small role in Brokeback Mountain, I hadn’t seen a single one of her movies. This performance, however, was a revelation; I’ll definitely be watching her work more closely from now on. In the film Hathaway almost has to play two roles, as both the scarred Kym who has a profound sense of guilt about her past behavior, and the public Kym who uses sarcasm as a façade to block her more vulnerable side. Rosemarie DeWitt also has a lot of work here; her character is just as complex as Kym in that she is torn about her feelings toward her sister. Bill Irwin has a smaller role than either of them, but he’s also important and he’s also really good in the role.
The film also excels at a form of acting that isn’t often appreciated: extras. The whole movie is filled with bit or non-speaking parts that are vital to the film’s success. Frequently the film requires the whole wedding party to perform at the same time in order to create a mood. There’s a good example of this early on when the family and friends of the betrothed are going around and giving a toast to the couple, each giving appropriate tributes to the two. There’s a really nice jovial feeling in the room, then Kym stands up and instead of focusing strictly on the soon to be wed couple she starts giving an update of her own condition. Quickly the mood in the room changes and awkward looks come over all the extras, the sense of discomfort is palpable. This type of wide raging ensemble work is a big part of what makes this movie work. The film’s excellent ensemble, vérité style, and down to earth dialogue bring an amazing degree of reality to the whole movie. The whole thing really does feel like a real wedding, it hasn’t been Hollywooded up at all.
The film’s trailer is clearly trying to make this look like the next Juno or Little Miss Sunshine, but that’s wishful thinking on the studio’s part, this is probably not going to cross over into the public as easily as those two did and it’s not really that similar to either of them. Kym does have a somewhat Juno like attitude every once in a while, but that’s only 10% of the time, and it’s very clearly a defense mechanism rather than her real personality. It’s even less like Little Miss Sunshine, in fact the two movie are almost exact opposites; LMS is about a family that seems dysfunctional but comes together when the chips are down, while Rachel Getting Married is about a family that seems perfectly cordial but which actually has deep tensions. Instead I’d liken it to last year’s independent hit Once, except without the whimsy.
Rachel Getting Married is an amazing piece of work, one of Jonathan Demme’s absolute best. There’s something almost voyeuristic in how the film works, the whole affair feels so real that the viewer really thinks he’s wandered into the wedding preparations for a family you don’t really know, but soon will. There are no easy answers here, the film knows that these people’s problems aren’t going to be solved over the course of a mere weekend, and by the end you wonder if they’ll ever be solved. The movie is ultimately about forgiveness, or lack thereof. All of the characters need to find out whether they are truly willing to forgive Kym for her past, most of all herself.
**** out of Four
Vicky Cristina Barcelona(9/7/2008)
It’s no secret that Woody Allen is a remarkably prolific director; it’s something that Stanley Kubrick used to envy him for. It’s almost a law of physics that there will be a Woody Allen movie for every calendar year and he shows no signs of slowing down. When people think of Woody Allen movies they usually think of his “nebbish” character going around New York, dealing with relationships, and having intellectual discussions about life, then making fun of said conversations. The movies are still pretty much the same in this decade except Allen’s mostly been staying behind the camera and he’s now working in Europe instead of New York. The tour of Europe that Allen started with Match Point four years ago has mostly been good for him and his newest film, Vicky Christina Barcelona, will probably be remembered not only as the height of his European period; in fact it’s the best movie he’s made in at least fifteen years.
The film follows two young American women as they spend a summer in Barcelona. The first, Vicky (Rebecca Hall), is a straight-laced grad student who’s engaged to a promising businessman (Chris Messina) back home. The other is Cristiana (Scarlet Johansson), a self-styled free spirit who aspires to be an artist, though she has not chosen a medium to express herself with. When the two attend an art expedition they meet a somewhat eccentric Spanish artist named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) who within minutes of meeting them invites them out to spend a weekend at his estate in Oviedo with the clear intention of bedding them. Vicky is not impressed but Cristina is intrigued by the notion of spontaneously running with an artist, Cristina wins out and they take the side trip. Over the course of the weekend Vicky and Juan form a bond, but it is with Cristina that he eventually starts a long term relationship. This relationship works quite well, but then his crazy ex-wife María Elena (Penélope Cruz) enters the picture which may or may not throw a monkey wrench into the gears of their relationship.
Most Woody Allen movies use satire to explore greater human themes; the themes explored in Vicky Christina Barcelona are youthful soul searching, culture clashes, and self destructive relationships. The first of these themes seems to be a surprising topic to be brought up by a director over seventy, but it’s also one that rings true. Vicky is a character who has her whole life mapped out in a very dispassionate but sensible way, but she lacks a certain passion. Cristina is the opposite, she’s spontaneous and open minded but in many ways naïve and without direction. Both are using this Barcelona trip as a means to find themselves and both will try to live with the other’s philosophy. The catch is, no one really “finds” themselves by running around Eurpoe, hell most people never “find” themselves, and Allen knows that the live of these two women aren’t going to be redefined over the course of a summer. That’s not to say that either are static characters, but their development is evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Woody Allen really opened up opportunities for himself when he realized that there were plenty of pretentious intellectuals living outside of New York who were just as rife for satire. The Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz characters seem like the prototypical southern Europeans: they ooze confidence, open-mindedness, creativity, and fiery passion. The catch is, most real Spaniards don’t really cat like this, and they probably represent the whole of their culture about as accurately as Woody Allen’s persona represents New York. This type of heightened behavior is used to point out the differences between the two American leads and the people who enter their lives; it’s also the source of most of the movie’s comedy. Bardem’s frank sexual advances are quite funny, especially in the way the two women react to it, and Cruz’s wild anger is another comical element.
The third and probably most important theme is that of self destructive relationships. Life with these two crazy artists is interesting, wild, and fun, but I it doesn’t make for a stable relationship and it’s no way to live for more than a few months. The Bardem and Cruz characters are people who thrive on pure passion, but long term relationships need a lot more than that. The relationships Vicky and Cristina form with Juan Antonio are satisfying but there’s no future in them and they’ll eventually end up like Juan Antonio’s highly destructive relationship with María Elena. In this way the film reminded me in many ways of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, another film about an American who spends a long stretch of time with a pair of crazy hyper-sexual Europeans only to ultimately be driven away back to the comfort of a simpler life.
However, this is no love letter to monogamous stability either; the couple who are hosting Vicky and Cristina in Barcelona are held up late in the film as an example of a safe and stable relationship that is devoid of passion, and ultimately leading toward boredom and infidelity. It would seem that this is the kind of future in Vicky’s future if she marries the fiancé she choose because he was merely nice and was pleasant and had career prospects. So in many ways our heroines face a catch-22, the catch-22 faced by everyone looking for love: choosing passion can be messy and choosing stability denies people of true happiness. This is in many ways a fairly cynical take on relationships hidden beneath the surface of this seemingly light hearted film, which is a big part of why the film works so well, there’s real complexity to be found in a movie that plays as quality adult entertainment.
A major factor in the film’s success lays in the cast; this is an excellent example of a small cast where everyone seems to have just the right chemistry. Scarlett Johansson is an actress that can be hit or miss, but she works quite well here. Cristina is a character whose naiveté could have easily been very annoying, but Johansson manages to avoid this by avoiding any girlishness in the character, instead of coming off like a schoolgirl she manages to come off as a genuine free-spirit. Rebecca Hall, has the straight-man role here which would seem to be easier but it isn’t, she has some of the more thankless Woody Allen dialogue to deal with and she pulls it off quite well. Javier Bardem has a role that’s the exact opposite of his Oscar winning role in No Country For Old Men, in that film he had to be an emotionless sociopath but here he needs to be a wildly passionate artist. Of the four leads he’s probably the least noteworthy, but he still holds up his end of the ensemble. The real standout is Penelope Cruz, an actress who’s had a lot of trouble with English language roles in the past. Cruz does have a lot of Spanish dialogue here, but most of her lines are in English (at least when Juan Antonio has his way), and she pulls it off by letting her character not have the best grasp of the language either. This is the same trick Jackie Chan learned to use in the Rush Hour films, he built his character as someone who doesn’t speak perfect English and his accent seemed a lot more natural. That’s hardly the most important thing about her work here, she has a character that has even more raw passion than Juan Antonio, yet she keeps from looking like a complete lunatic while shouting at people.
It was recently announced that Woody Allen will be returning to New York to film his next project, presumably ending his European era. When I first heard this it seemed like a good sign, but now that I’ve seen this I realize how the change of location has helped freshen up Allen’s style. Woody Allen is such a prolific guy that it’s way too easy to take his work for granted, it’s easy to compare his latest movies to other Woody Allen movies and have them fall short when they should be comparing them to other romantic comedies playing now, with those standards it becomes clear just how much of a treasure the guy is. But his work here is above and beyond the call of duty even for Woody Allen, it lives up not only to other romantic comedy but also up to some of Allen’s own best work.
**** out of four
