Hits and Errors

The Ghost Writer

2010-03-14T18:29:00.010-04:00

To listen to a Podcast of this review: http://zyx.podbean.com/category/podcast/

Once upon a time director Roman Polanski was acclaimed for his films, but these days it’s his Michael Jackson-like personal life that captures the most attention. The final cut of his latest movie, The Ghost Writer, was completed at his chalet in Switzerland where Polanski is under house arrest, facing possible extradition for a raping a 13 year old girl more than three decades ago. You can’t watch this film without feeling the pressure of that electronic tag and the film maker’s torment.

The Ghost Writer is a political thriller set in post-Bush America, but it’s mostly about Brits. The main character is, in fact, a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) who is hired to perform emergency surgery on the ponderous memoir of a former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). In drilling down through the non-smoldering rubble of Lang’s autobiography, the ghost stumbles across layers of extra-legal shenanigans during the Iraq war. To ghost or to become an investigative journalist, that is the question, and therein lies the film’s dramatic, ever shuffling coil.

Ghost Writer is an elegant, slow-build story painted in minimalist shades of rain and shadow, more Hitchcock than Polanski. This film has none of the sudden, shockingly cruel violence seen in some other Polanski films like Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, although it does have its fair share of genuinely creepy treachery, venom and malice. Each of the main characters is perfectly and glaringly camouflaged by English decorum, revealing themselves only through the occasional flare of idiosyncrasy or Mamet-like bursts of dialog. Lang and his gang have many dirty little secrets, surprisingly few of which are sexual and several of which are not so little.

McGregor’s ghost has no name in this movie, perhaps to establish his bona fides. Although he hates Adam Lang, he accepts an absurdly large contract to ghost the former PM’s memoirs because, well, it’s absurdly large. But, of course, there’s always a catch, and this film makes a cottage industry of them.

For starters, the man who wrote the original manuscript, the prior ghost, is dead. His manuscript is now kept in a locked file cabinet at Lang’s chic fortress and when our ghost tries to spirit it away, a sophisticated security system all but pulls up the draw bridge. If this is what happens over a book, it’s hard to imagine what top secret protections must be like. But McGregor is so well grounded and balanced as an actor that he takes all this monkey business in stride, raising only the slightest of eyebrows. He does a nice job of bringing the audience along with him as he reluctantly connects all the dots.

Brosnan, on the other hand, doesn’t ever get inside Lang’s skin, let alone under ours. He has the look of authority down cold, to be sure, and the arrogance and brittle weariness of the privileged. But beyond a 1000 watt Tony Blair-style smile, all he really does is strut and fret. It’s hard to say whether this is intended as savage caricature or it’s simply the best he could muster. The most interesting thing about this man is his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), a coldly charming Machiavellian princess with a seemingly infinite number of sharp-edges. Her close encounters with our ghost and various non-ghosts are some of the film’s most electric moments.

And so it goes. Polanski set his film in the US but couldn’t actually film here because he’d be arrested. Instead, he created the places he wanted cinematically, local tourism boards be damned. The seascapes and dunes, the restless grey waves under a slightly darker shade of sky, were filmed on the German North Sea and digitally windowed into a set built in Berlin. There’s something disturbing in knowing that what we take for the real deal is completely made up, and that this can be done so convincingly.

The Ghost Writer shows us that our society works the same way except the goal isn’t entertainment but political and economic control, and the product isn’t a movie, it’s history. Polanski has given us an exile’s black Valentine, a stiletto of rage at the high crimes committed in the name of freedom by government, business and the gentle folks in the Intelligence community. In the end, we’re left with the chill of the restless grey waves and the trackless dunes, and not much else.

Overall rating: Good, not great -- 3.5 stars out of 5

Story: Engaging but slow. Not much new in this suspense thriller about corruption at the highest levels, but the film is elegantly crafted and that makes it different. These aesthetics also apply to the conspiracy theory genre and such films as All the President’s Men, State of Play, JFK, Capitalism: A Love Story and Manchurian Candidate.

Plusses: McGregor and Williams are excellent; you never want them to stop. Many implausible plot points are smoothed over by sharp dialog delivered in British accents and beautiful, minimalist cinematography. Fine cameo by 90+ year old Eli Wallach.

Minuses: A dawdling plot with a musical score that is way too jaunty for the subject – but at least it provides respite from the film’s resolutely monotonous tone.

Crazy Heart

2010-02-18T22:01:00.002-05:00

Starring Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Directed by Scott Cooper. 112 minutes. Rated R.

You’d think an actor with Jeff Bridges’ talent and range would have won an Oscar by now. But winning an Academy Award includes being a good Hollywood citizen, and Bridges has made a cause out of subverting everything that Movietown holds dear. Until his portrayal of the country musician Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, that is.

This film, Bridges’ 73^rd, lands somewhere between the second half of Walk the Line, the fall and rise of Johnny Cash biopic, and George Clooney’s corporate Boomer coming of age story, Up in the Air. It’s got the full line of Jeff Bridges gritty, troubled accoutrement but it’s lighter weight and warmer. Think of it as the movie equivalent of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline or discovering featherless bipeds on Mars. I think there’s a good chance that Crazy Heart may finally give the Academy a good excuse to honor the least celebrated major actor of his generation.

Although he was born Hollywood royalty, the son of Sea Hunt’s Lloyd Bridges and brother of Beau, Jeff Bridges didn’t seem to want that role. From the get-go he seemed committed to stunting his career growth by playing quirky characters like The Dude in The Big Lebowski or nasty ones like Jack Kelson in American Heart. Bridges’ performances are often stunning and complex, but he usually forgets to even wave in the direction of a Hollywood ending. That’s considered heresy in Beverley Hills if done too many times, with too little box office, and Bridges has rarely done anything else.

Crazy Hear is about an aging music legend universally loved and admired by everyone except himself. By the time we catch up with him in the opening credits, Bad Blake is a scruffy, sullen man driving an ancient Chevy Suburban through a desolate, seemingly endless landscape. He looks like he’s been heading for the horizon line for decades without a pit stop, the top button of his jeans unbuttoned to give this fat man and his belly more face time. He’s long ago left himself for road kill but just can’t seem to stay put.

Bad was once a top shelf entertainer, but now, pushing 60, he hasn’t written a song in years and he’s working the bottom of the country music food chain, trying to stay alive. He gets so sloppy drunk before his shows in the lounge areas of bowling alleys and kicker bars that you don’t think he’ll ever make it to the microphone; and when he does, you fear he’ll say something crude or insulting.

But Bad turns out to be not so bad. He comes alive when he’s singing for the audience and even seems to enjoy doing requests. His fans eat up his words like blue comfort food, all these variations on the Ur country song of never quite getting it right for very long in life or love. Bad’s got a wounded heart, not a crazy one, and he’s made a career out of it, but not a life.

Then along comes Jane Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a 30 something local reporter who wants to interview Mr. Blake. Gyllenhaal has the wonderfully casual feline grace of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, liquid eyes large and wondering: how in the hell am I ever going to get out of this rut I’m in, but mouth giving no clues. Despite the difference in age and hygiene between Jane and Bad, there’s real chemistry between them. And like all people who are in love or hoping to be, they do their best to make the puzzle pieces fit even when they don’t.

And so it goes.

There are two entertaining sub-plots. Robert Duval (The Godfather, et.al.) plays Wayne, who is either Bad’s father and/or his AA sponsor, a tough love kind of guy, one of the few invulnerable to Bad’s charm. Approaching age 80, Duval can’t reach as far or as fast as he once did but he’s still a treat to watch.

Colin Farrell (The New World) plays Tommy Sweet, the next generation of country music star. He’s made his name and fortune singing Bad’s songs but Blake resents the way Tommy has made his original hardscrabble lyrics sound sweet and light. Like Jane, Tommy is free and clear of the myriad warts and tics afflicting Bad and this makes its plot point. But, like much of the story, this feels forced and artificial.

Crazy Heart may not be Jeff Bridges best film but it is the arguably the most tender-hearted and audience pleasing, as close to mainstream as this career iconoclast is ever likely to get. I’ll bet the farm that he wins Best Actor on March 7. It’s also possible that Bad Blake may become the iconic hero for this decade, the way Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate) was for the ‘60’s and James Dean’s Jim Stark (Rebel Without a Cause) was for the ‘50’s. Our beat-up nation sorely needs a mulligan right now, and Bad Blake just might be the ticket.

The Lovely Bones

2010-02-12T16:27:00.001-05:00

Bones are not usually considered lovely, except maybe by orthopedists and dinosaur hunters. But there are certainly times when we humans know something deep in our bones, things that escape the notice of our squishier, chattier hearts, brains and guts. Director Peter Jackson’s new film, The Lovely Bones, gets inside the marrow of life, the stuff spawning all the other stuff, the hard-wired love and fear.

The film is based on Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel of the same name. It’s about Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a teenage girl who is murdered by her creepy-yet-plausibly -respectable-serial-killer-neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), and the impact this crime has on her family and friends. The movie is set in the relative innocence of 1970’s suburban Pennsylvania, a time before children’s pictures began to appear on milk cartons and tabloid journalism met cable TV.

The celebrated director of King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy has added muscle and verve to Sebold’s meditative story, and horror. Jackson is at the top of his game when he’s channeling his inner Stephen King, luring us into darker realms of human experience, and this is quite the opposite of Sebold’s transcendent book. It’s still a powerful story but this marriage of such opposite sensibilities and styles seems destined to disappoint fans of both the director and the author.

Still, there are many memorable, disturbing scenes in this film. When Harvey is about to kill Susie, the action cuts to the young girl running silently through the inside of what looks like her family’s home. But there’s no trace of anyone there now, it’s an archeological ruin, everything stained and faded under a haze of milky white, the graffiti of eternity. The artful special effects here muffle the impact of Susie’s death, one of the reasons the film is rated PG-13 rather than R. Like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, Susie stays in the movie and helps to make things work out as much as anyone can from behind the looking glass, as much as people’s lives can work out after a senseless murder.

Susie’s dad, Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg), once a thoroughly amiable CPA, slowly goes rogue after his daughter’s death, stalking every man he suspects of killing his daughter. Abigail, Susie’s attentive mom (Rachel Weisz), gradually disappears from herself and then everyone else. But while Susie’s parents are falling apart, her younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) begins to blossom, out now from under her big sister’s shadow. Life goes on, even if we don’t want it to, just as it stops even if we don’t want it to, and the film does a good job of choreographing the unpredictable steps of this dance.

Even in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar, I think it’s fair to say that Peter Jackson is still the King Kong of lyrical special effects, Matisse to Jimmy’s Picasso. In one of Bones most graphic scenes, Harvey is shown in his bathtub some time after the murder, so still, the lighting so cold, he might be dead. We cut to blood on a porcelain sink, an image sharp enough to be a police forensic photo but lurid and painterly. The camera lingers like a butterfly, silent and unconcerned, then flits over a muddy pair of shoes, a knife, a darkly stained shirt, the vocabulary of the unspeakable.

At the other end of the emotional scale, there’s Susie in a kind of a pre-heaven staging area where she pops up periodically. In Sebold’s book pre-heaven is the Zen version of Albert Brook’s Defending Your Life, a place where Susie learns to evolve past the concerns and interests of her life, all life, the thousand unnatural shocks we are all heir to. In Jackson’s film, pre-heaven is a depicted as a kind of mobile wafting above a Flower Child’s crib, a continuous loop of cuddly and coo.

Some may welcome the succor this sweetness provides as antidote to murder most foul. But, even for talented people like Jackson, sometimes less is not only more, it’s what saves an otherwise powerful movie from seeming silly.

Saoirse Ronan, who looks like the girl on the cover of the Blind Faith album, is appealing as Susie but seems superficial, no Scarlet Johansson in Horse Whisperer she. Of course it’s possible that she was exceptionally at good conveying the teen as tabula rasa, a life eternally budded and unblossomed. I hope she gets another feature role where she doesn’t have to compete with so many special effects.

The Road

2010-02-01T11:05:00.003-05:00

There are no yellow bricks on director John Hillcoat’s new movie The Road, and no rainbows at the end of it either. It’s an after-our-civilization-has-finally-gone-and-blown-itself-up movie, a deliberately not entertaining Mad Max or Water World. Let’s call it a grim, gritty flick stained stark and bleak with fear. But if you can hang in there long enough (not easy), there’s a meditation on love, too.

The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, is not your standard issue post-apocalyptic revenge fantasy. There are no avenging angels come to settle the score with wayward humans, neither tight-lipped ones wearing shades like in Book of Eli or quirky, loose-lipped ones like in the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men. It’s too late for all that cosmic accounting, you'd best forget about salvation for the human race; we’re toast.

Viggo Mortensen stars as the Man, the father of a nine year old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the Boy. Both miss the Woman (Charlize Theron), wife and mother respectively, who mysteriously disappeared the night the sky turned the color of a blood orange and the world became ash shrouded and sunless, eerily and ubiquitously like Lower Manhattan the day after the World Trade Towers fell. Those few that survived are too stunned to ask why and too desperate to give in to despair.

Meaning may be dead, but life goes on. The movie chronicles the furtive, nomadic efforts of the Man and the Boy scrambling to survive. Their life consists of hunting for food all the time while guarding against being hunted by other people. The Man morphs into a trampoline of survivalist nerve endings, on high alert 24/7. He is quick to assume that a very old, gimpy man they encounter (Robert Duval) is going to kill them and steal their meager belongings. But the Boy begs his father to give the man some of their food, which he eventually does. And so it goes, the story of human history.

Pretty bleak stuff. The Man and the Boy are sustained by their affection for each other and the stubborn belief that the Woman is out there somewhere, waiting for them and not Godot. They aren’t much different than most of us, only most us of still have our creature comforts to keep us warm.

The Young Victoria

2010-02-01T10:52:00.004-05:00

During the Great Depression of the 1930’s Hollywood movies delivered emotional justice to a nation brutalized by Wall Street shenanigans. Films like The Public Enemy, starring Jimmy Cagney as a snappy gangster and Jean Harlow as his snazzy girlfriend, were glamorous revenge fantasies, sticking it to the Man. Frank Capra films, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, worked the other side of the street, serving up patriotic-flavored redemption fantasies about simple, decent people (like Jimmy Stewart) triumphing over the corrupt political system.

The recently released British film, The Young Victoria, gives us a little of both at the same time. Like Blind Side, Precious, Julie and Julia and Invictus, this film is part of cinema’s Stimulus Package of heroic tales that prove that anyone can do anything, however formidable the obstacles. All they have to do is be honest, work hard and believe in themselves. It’s intended as triage, a jolt of reassuring can-do.

Emily Blunt (My Summer of Love, The Devil Wears Prada) plays young Victoria, the sole heir-in-waiting to the throne of England. She’s a spirited, thoughtful young girl who has been taught to behave like an old lady by her mother (Miranda Richardson), The Dutchess of Kent. Victoria is not even allowed to walk down stairs by herself, part of a scheme to keep her weak so that the Dutchess and her fuming, feral consort, Sir John Conroy, can rule England as regents.

This Byzantine power play and its dust devils of palace intrigue are, of course, staples of the heavy drama section of the Western canon. But French Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee manages to keep it light, almost frothy, while still hewing to the historical record. He sketches his story with quick, sure strokes: Victoria, finally wriggling free of her regent’s claws, learns to rule an empire, falls in love with her soul mate Prince Albert (Rupert Friend) and sets about revitalizing stuffy old England beyond the palace walls.

It’s a sweet natured, easy to follow story with no ambiguity about who’s wearing the white hats, history as hygienic, Top 40 entertainment. If this sounds dull and predictable, that’s because it is. But the heart doesn’t need creativity, just connection with real needs, and this is where the film succeeds (though perhaps not royally).

In actual fact, Victoria was a revolutionary leader with a tender heart. She took revenge on the ruthless system that had oppressed her by reforming it, making it care more about people and less about power. All this without spilling a drop of blood on the Persian carpeting, blue or otherwise.

Victoria, the queen, must have been a bit red in tooth and claw like every ruler but Victoria, the movie, gives us the night off from Machiavellian jousting. It does a nice job of tweaking the veil of hopeless about what passes for government these days, and that’s at least a place to start around the gyre again.

Up in the Air

2010-01-15T21:37:00.001-05:00

Many of the women I know stop breathing for an instant when George Clooney’s name comes up. He’s a classic ladies man in that gravelly-voiced, smooth-talking Clark Gable way, engaging and unattainable at the same time.

Many men are also smitten by Clooney, although they usually don’t stop breathing. He’s a classic man’s man in the Clark Gable style, a likeable rogue with a Teflon heart.

I get it but I really don’t get it. I know that Clooney wrote and directed Good Night and Good Luck, the powerful, spot-on, 2005 film about political courage during the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. But the guy always seemed like an empty suit to me, albeit one that is impeccably tailored and pressed. In movies like Syriana, Burn After Reading and Solaris he seems more a personality type than an actor, a demographic niche identified by focus groups, Tom Cruise, not Sean Penn.

All this changed when I saw Up in the Air in which Clooney delivers a nuanced, comic and truly moving performance. Was he always this good and I missed it, or is this something new? Doesn’t matter: I’m smitten now, too.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who travels around the country firing people. He’s the Music Man of termination, a sunny, inspirational hatchet man who prides himself on being professional (some would say clinically detached) with those about to be dispatched. If a terminee says she’s going to jump off a bridge, that’s not his problem; catching the next flight out is. Writer/director Jason Reitman takes the time to capture the pain and humiliation of people being unceremoniously thrown off the corporate bus, a poignant reminder of the millions who have lost their job since the financial meltdown.

Bingham is, of course, the kinder, gentler face of cold-blooded corporate masters who are even less interested in him than he is in his clients. His main squeeze outside work is amassing the cards and awards that open doors to higher status privileges for road warriors like him. His dream is to accrue the 10 million miles of air travel it takes to earn an elite card that has been by attained by only three other people in the history of the world. This is a natural for him because he feels more at home at 35,000 feet in the company of strangers than he does at home with himself.

The plot begins to bubble when Ryan meets a fellow business nomad named Alex (Vera Farmiga), a woman who tells him in so many words that she’s exactly like him except with a vagina. Can’t hope for much more than that. For perhaps the first time in his life, Ryan feels that he can be himself with someone, and it’s quite moving to see the valves of his heart flutter open a bit, revealing but then quickly covering up unexpected depths. It’s similar to what Bill Murray’s character did in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation but Clooney is more emotionally exposed. His heart is an uncirculated coin, never worn down in the commerce of life, unspent but also undamaged. He’s touchingly open to the possibility of love, not disillusioned beyond repair.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s company hires Natalie (Anna Kendrick), an edgy, cocksure young woman with a degree in psychology, who thinks people can be fired through teleconferencing. She’s the next big thing in impersonal HR, Bingham’s terminator. The big boss, Craig (Jason Bateman), smooth and removed like Bingham but domesticated, sends Ryan and Natalie out on the road together to field test the idea.

And so it goes. Jason Reitman’s film delivers a higher than average quality in-flight entertainment meal. I generally don’t like films that feel too carefully weighed and measured, audience tested, but I enjoyed this one because it was smart about it and moved deftly through its story. Up in the Air liberates Ryan’s inner Tom Hanks/Jimmy Stewart everyman, the part’s that’s gone missing from post-modern American life. It’s an easy watching reminder that our success as human beings is not based on what we do or what we have but who we are.

Avatar

2010-01-02T05:44:00.003-05:00

Ding-dong, the flat old movie screen is dead. So sayeth writer/director James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, the first feature ever filmed in High Definition 3D. No question, it nails the 3rd D, adding unprecedented depth to scenes. Unfortunately, it also shrinks its plot and characters to 1D, a departure from the darkly, richly layered films for which Cameron is justly celebrated: Terminator, Aliens, Abyss and Titanic.

Avatar is a cinematic platypus, improbable but fun to watch. It feels like Lord of the Rings in spirit and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain in concept with a story line somewhere between Last Samurai and Pocahontas. There’s more fantasy in Avatar than previous Cameron films and less sci-fi, more beating heart, less fevered chase. The looming apocalypse typically hogging center stage in Cameron films has been replaced by the magic of life. The Terminator has become Tinkerbelle.

JC conceived and built HD 3D technology for this film, his first since Titanic 10 years ago. In his hands it’s digital silly putty and the film bursts with the excitement of pure play. There are, for example, a seemingly endless supply of gigantic flying lizards colored like Japanese kites that serve as transit for the locals and mysterious sea polyp-like creatures that seem to swim in the air, quietly radiating benign intelligence. All this and much, much more keeps coming at you all the time from every possible angle, Pixar on steroids, basically.

Of course, IMAX has long delivered this kind of cinematic wow with the overwhelming force of its size and sound, and some truly amazing camera work. Ditto innovative CGI films such as Jurassic Park and King Kong. But HD 3D does something new: it comes right off the screen, seemingly close enough to touch. At times, it really made me feel like I was part of the movie. The characters and landscapes have a palpable gravity to them, more real and surreal at the same time, another small step towards holograms. Trippy, without ingesting any psychedelics. We can only hope that this powerful technology doesn’t fall into the hands of advertising executives or terrorists.

Oh, and then there’s a story, too. It goes something like this: a twenty-something Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a likable, mid-22^nd Century paraplegic, signs up for a mission on the planet Pandora. He meets a young Na’vi woman with big, round Smurf eyes and cat-like features named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). She takes him under her wing, teaching him her people’s ways, and they fall in love. Meanwhile, Jake’s employer, an intergalactic mining corporation, is using his reconnaissance to blast and bulldoze the Na'vi off land which sits atop a rare mineral worth zillions back on earth.

And so it goes. The Na’vi live in peaceful, Native American-like harmony with their planet, a tropical paradise where nature is sacred and healing. The military people and their corporate masters are either shallow and cunning or mean spirited and cunning. They seem to live only to make obscene profit and bash the Na’vi. It’s a message you can’t miss even if you’re watching in 2D.

Near the end of the film, the Na’vi flee the advancing armies, gathering around a huge tree with drooping branches, entwining their hands with exposed root tendrils. It’s a kind of organic Internet link connecting them with each other and their planet. They chant and sway together, one people, one body, one planet, a Live Aid concert with set design by Apocalyto. In connecting this way, they start events in motion which ultimately rout the bad guys and save Pandora from destruction.

It’s a hokey but powerfully moving scene because it says something that Al Gore et.al. feel but cannot convey: Human beings are unconscious Terminators and we’ve got to wake up.

I hope that this scene becomes the Woodstock moment of the early 21^st Century, what Richie Haven’s Freedom was to the ‘60’s generation, a direction home.

It might work, given the film’s world-wide release and the star power of its messenger. Think about it: a guy who loves blowing stuff up and scaring us to death has morphed into a prince of peace, a sensitive poet of life’s miracles and wonders. If Cameron can make this transformation, rebalancing the earth’s overheated atmosphere should be a piece of cake. Maybe love will conquer all, after all, and that’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.

A Serious Man

2009-11-27T05:03:00.003-05:00

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, and Richard Kind. 105 minutes.

A Serious Man was filmed in St. Louis Park, Minnesota where the Coens’ grew up in the Fifties. This black comedy is their most personal movie to date, the least ultra-violent and the most Jewish.

There’s a five minute Hassidic-flavored fable before the opening credits, a cinematic Rosetta Stone, done entirely in the mother tongue. Both loving and mocking, the vignette is set in 19^th century Eastern Europe and is basically a slow dance between the dreamy transcendence of Marc Chagall paintings and the unrelenting terror of dybbuks. A period piece made with Day-Glo exclamation marks. Call it a DNA sample drawn from memories of Jewish life in the shtetls where the industrial revolution never happened and pogroms and poverty did. Could it be that the Coens’ are coming out of the post-modern closet and revealing themselves as Jewish storytellers? It’s arguably the most surreal and shocking thing they’ve ever done.

Fast forward three generations to 1950’s America. The advert for the movie says it all: the protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), is fiddleless on the roof of his suburban tract home, TV aerial like a sail above his head, Noah searching the horizon for dry land. His body bristles with Stallonean grit but it’s oozing Rick Moranis from the gills, an unlikely hero in service of a hopelessly lost cause, a truly serious man. He’s Tevye dropped in the middle of Eisenhower’s America. Like red-shoed Dorothy in Emerald City, he’s a stranger in a very strange land, never quite at home. Gopnik’s wife and brother also have this quality, still wearing the psychological packing materials from the previous generation’s trek across the ocean to the Goldina Medina, America.

He’s a bit of an odd ball but easy to like, this Gopnik, a physics professor at a local college, a person who trusts mathematical equations to tell him when the sun is coming up rather than looking out the window. Stuhlbarg, who was the hedge fund consultant in the black comedy Cold Souls, plays him as the fruit of the tree of Jewish manhood: intelligent and unrelentingly fair, polite and helpful to everyone, even when attacked. A mensch. But there’s something off about the guy. He comes across both as comically inept like Nicholas Cage in the Coens’ Raising Arizona (1987) and virtuously inept like Billy Bob Thornton in the brothers’ 2001 film, The Man Who Wasn’t There.

And so it goes.

Like the aging hippie in The Big Lebowski who calls himself The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Gopnik pays a big price for not melting into the pot. He endures an endless series of bizarre things, all of them painful, as he gets wised up. His wife decides to leave him for another man (played with perfect pitch by Fred Melamed as an unctuous conniver). His brilliant, nutty brother (Richard Kind) has a criminal streak (Kind also plays a similar character on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm). A student tries to bribe Gopnik to get a passing grade, and when he’s turned down, sabotages his teacher’s tenure review.

There are some truly funny moments in all this but there’s never any emotional pay-off for all the nasty stuff Gopnik goes through. The movie ends in the middle of nowhere as if the film makers just got tired of beating him up. It’s hard to fathom why the Coens’ made Gopnik likeable but don’t seem to like him themselves.

Near the end of the film, as the exhausted, cornered Gopnik teeters on the brink of finally accepting the bribe, we see him in his physics classroom covering a blackboard as big as a racquetball court with an elaborate proof of the uncertainty principle. He ends by telling the class that he’s just proved that nothing exists but that, in the end, doesn’t mean anything either.

The brothers are spot on in depicting the superficiality of lower middle class tract home life and the not-so-quiet desperation of its denizens, the feints and ululations of emptiness and alienation. Here they have returned to the scene of the crime in this film, the other side of the emotional tracks from Leave it to Beaver, closer to Revolutionary Road, laying bare the roots of the murderous glee of Fargo and the utter bleakness of No Country for Old Men.

The film ends with the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, a song that shows up frequently in the movie, almost a character for the role it plays in liberating Gopnik’s son from his parents’ world and, surprisingly, linking him to his Eastern European forebears. Quoth the Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies/ and all the joy within you dies/ don’t you want somebody to love?”

Well, sure. But in the Coens’ world love seems to be just another shell game, and personal integrity never quite antes up.

Amelia

2009-11-04T11:00:00.001-05:00

Starring Hilary Swank, Richard Gere; Directed by Mira Nair; 111 minutes

There are two pioneering women crossing the Atlantic Ocean in this film. One is the title character, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), a Kansas native, the first woman to fly across the pond. The other is Mira Nair, the film’s director (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding), the first Indian woman to make a movie about Americans.

Earhart made her historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, about a year after Charles Lindbergh’s epochal jaunt. America fell head over heels in love with her, just the way it had with gallant, modest Lindbergh, and she became an instant inspiration to millions, a mythic swan soaring above the horizon lines of cash and class, the festering scabs of World War One.

The funny thing is that she did it as a passenger in a plane with two others, not as a solo pilot like Lindbergh, but never mind. America was hungry for a “Lady Lindy” and Amelia filled the bill. The film takes care to show us that flying was Earhart’s one true and only real love and setting aviation records her deepest passion.

There have been umpteen biopics about Earhart, a charmed, reckless, ultimately self-destructive person who died young (like James Dean and Michael Jackson) and who still has star power after she’s shuffled off the mortal coil. Amelia is the BBC version of this classic America tale: the exuberance of fearless, questing youth translated into the tragic, cold fire of Laurence of Arabia, more shadow than light. That said, Nair has made a lovely, overstuffed sofa of a film in the Merchant Ivory style, every frame brimming with opulence and comfort. Even minor characters are beautifully dressed, their clothing like supple architecture. Voiceovers of the actual words Earhart wrote and spoke about her flying experience add human feeling, even magic, to what is typically AOK. A nice touch.

Hilary Swank plays Earhart with a homespun elegance. She’s willful without ever being strident, sounding British even without an accent. An undeclared feminist just after women had won the right to vote, Earhart famously gave her husband a written note at their wedding ceremony freeing him, and herself, from living by medieval codes of faithfulness. She was a force of nature as certain and silent as the capillaries moving blood through vital organs, needing neither permission nor forgiveness.

Swank is 10 years into a career that began with a breathtaking, gender-bending performance in Boys Don’t Cry, for which she won the first of her two Academy Awards (the other was for Million Dollar Baby). The challenge of playing Earhart was to stay strictly within a narrow personality while somehow acting like there were no boundaries at all. A finely calibrated performance.

Richard Gere plays Amelia’s husband, George Putnam, the PR maven behind Earhart’s commercial success. He initially saw her as a heroic spokesperson for the inchoate air travel industry. He also knew a brand when he saw one, and used her to sell books and air travel products. A meal ticket, in other words. But Putnam, although a couple of decades Amelia’s senior, also fell in love with her, and kept proposing until she agreed to marry him.

Gere plays Putnam with a genteel, faintly patrician FDR-style accent, a welcome variation on the classy but commercially crass character he played in Chicago (and a hike from his nimble, nuanced work in An Officer and a Gentleman). It’s a role that doesn’t call for very much beyond absolute devotion to the heroine. Like Stanley Tucci playing Julia Child’s husband in “Julie/Julia,” what’s needed are male cups deliberately not runneth over at a female party. Still, quite a serviceable supporting role (both).

Earhart’s relationship with Putnam is complicated by her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), an aviation pioneer about Amelia’s age (and father of writer Gore Vidal). Some of Earhart’s biographers think that Gene was the love of her life although she ultimately chose to be with Putnam; they also talk about Earhart’s close relationships with her sister (who called her ‘Meelie’) and mother, and Putnam’s two offspring from his first marriage, her stepsons. None of this is in the film, hard to fathom from a director whose previous films showed a talent for slowly revealing underlying layers of emotion, some not so pretty. The price of a ticket west across the Atlantic?

Capitalism: A Love Story

2009-10-23T23:06:00.001-04:00

Capitalism: A Love Story is a connect-the-dots expose of the Wall Street players who conspired to invent credit default swaps and then used them to conduct a cruel financial war against regular people like you and me. It’s an engaging if uneven piece of cinematic activism. Think of it as An Inconvenient Truth with Michael Moore in the Al Gore role, Huffington Post not Washington Post, Woody Allen merged with Ralph Nader.

MM is the clown prince of documentary film making and America’s self-appointed social conscience. He’s a provocateur, this fat, goofy-looking guy, a man more wedded to the emotional truth than facts, the left’s Rush Limbaugh.

The film’s title echoes Enemies: A Love Story, director Paul Mazursky’s story about a Holocaust survivor’s doomed struggle to love again after the Nazi horror show. While Capitalism is just as bleak and angry in places as Enemies, as haunted by brutality, it’s also full of humor, compassion and optimism. It is arguably MM’s best film to date.

There’s a kind of murder mystery at the heart of Capitalism, an almost gleeful dissection of how the economic meltdown happened and who’s to blame. In one Super-Size Me type sequence, pictures of top shelf Goldman Sachs execs are laid out like cards on a Vegas gaming table, circles and arrows showing how these folks got each other rich at taxpayer expense. The facts are not new but laughing about the absurdity of the situation is.

Like The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s pioneering documentary, Capitalism keeps drilling down into the bedrock of things. Morris’s film actually helped to free an innocent man sent to death row for a murder he did not commit. Moore’s film will probably not trundle any more Bernie Madoff’s off to jail but, then again, President Obama has already told us to just move on.

By my count, capitalism is defined as an “evil” half a dozen times in the movie, including twice by different priests and once by a bishop, authorities on the subject. Moore himself uses the word “revolution” at least three times during the film, although it’s not clear if he invokes Lenin or the Beatles. Either way, his goal is to foment political action and he uses many different tactics to get the job done.

The Merry Prankster routines were my personal favorite, Yippie-like stunts worthy of ‘60’s anti-Wall Street activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. LOL stuff like wrapping the perimeter of AIG’s headquarters in crime scene tape. Or showing up with a big canvas bag at Bank of America, all innocent and cuddly, come to take our taxpayer bailout money back.

MM works hard to humanize the stats we hear about foreclosures and unemployment by interviewing people suffering the consequences of the financial meltdown. Much of this takes place in Moore’s hometown, Flint, Michigan, one of GM’s many former factory towns. This community had already been devastated before the meltdown back when the plant closed, the American Dream baited and switched. There are some touching scenes with MM and his father surveying the elder Moore’s former worksite, now a pitted, featureless place with all traces of the factory, its workers and Main Street unfathomably and irretrievably gone.

In one of the film’s most remarkable moments, we see a disabled worker and his family being evicted from their home. Like millions of others, they gullibly gobbled up a variable mortgage thinking it was a bargain and ended up drowning in rising payments. Dead broke, no place to go, the man says he understands how people could get a gun and go postal. But, he adds quickly, it won’t be me. In other words, he’s mad as hell but willing to take it some more. Other interviewees echo his bewildered, neutered anger. And so, sad to say, do most of us. Does anyone really know what to do next? Does our government? Does the free market?

Well, Michael Moore does. For him capitalism is a monster on the once shining hill of American democracy, and it’s gotta go before it kills us and the planet earth. Sure, the message is hyperbolic and the messenger suspect, but so is a $700 billion bailout of the financial elite that created the meltdown in the first place. One thing seems clear: our nation’s financial crisis is part of a much more serious default in our democratic system of checks and balances. Capitalism is a contemporary version of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, rousing us citizens from our political slumber to fight for our rights and America’s health and moral integrity. We push the snooze bar at our peril.

NOTE: If this subject interests you but MM does not, I have heard good things about (but not seen) a more traditional documentary, American Casino.

The Informant!

2009-10-10T13:56:00.003-04:00

Movies that use an exclamation point in their title are usually about average people pulling off amazing things, like the soccer movie Goal!, or something so far over-the-top as to be laughable, like Airplane! The Informant!, director Steven Soderbergh’s new film, is both at the same time. That’s very unusual and may qualify for an exclamation point all in itself.

The Informant! is based on the true story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), President of Archer Daniels Midland’s BioProducts Division, one of the profit centers of a $62 billion food processing behemoth. Basically, it’s a big-time corporate scam dressed up as a farce, with a twist that would bring tears to the eyes of Gordon Gekko, the “Greed is good” guy in Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street.

Whitacre is the film’s hero and its goat, a truly odd duck. A former biochemist in his late 30’s, he is likable and smart as Damon plays him, a seemingly harmless energizer bunny of a man eager to please all those he’ll meet on his way to the tippity top of the food chain. The Eagle Scout in him turns whistleblower for the FBI when he finds himself as a player in an ADM inspired price-fixing conspiracy. But this scout also owns a loopy Machiavellian Merit Badge, and that’s the reason he rats out his buddies, not ethics. He sees it as an easy way to clear out the competition for the top spot at ADM! And while all this is going on, right under the nose of the FBI, he decides to skim some scam for himself.

Way too strange to be true. Whitacre reminds me of John Nash (Russell Crowe) in “A Beautiful Mind,” a self-deluded/ chemically imbalanced man clever enough to make up stories that make his delusions seem real to himself and his peers. Even though we movie watchers eventually figure out what he’s up to, we never really get much of a sense of what Whitacre is feeling about anything. There doesn’t appear to be an emotional there there. For all we know, Whitacre was a genetically engineered executive grown in a secret ADM lab and dropped into a suit, a poster boy for the Science Geeks Association.

Much of the movie is about Whitacre wearing a wire and walking one. He shuttles back and forth between meeting with ADM’s top dogs and meeting with his FBI handlers, always the same earnest person, always plausible even when spinning stories from thin air. Soderbergh documents this dance in an almost documentary style, using very tight, grainy shots and flat lightning. It felt like the director had taken a cinematic Alka Seltzer after all that eye candy in his boffo box office films, Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13.

The talented Mr. Damon gained 30 pounds for this role, shedding his normally lean and hungry look to become stocky and stiff-jointed. He doesn’t walk so much as float like a Macy’s parade balloon, head always slightly ahead of his body, his legs trailing along behind. I found it amazing that the man who played the sleek, lethal secret agent Jason Bourne in the Bourne Identity, was also this porked up little guy with the aviator glasses and a milquetoast mustache.

Although Damon’s Whitacre is not as fully realized as Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk or Meryl Streep’s Julia Childs, it’s still a great performance and worth seeing. We can only hope that the intelligence, agility and vulnerability of Damon’s riveting performance in “Good Will Hunting” finds more fertile scripts in the future. Has there ever been an actor that can look so clean and bright no matter how deep the do-do?

The ADM guys running the scam are all overweight lightweights, jocular, dull and cold-blooded like Tony Soprano’s posse. But Soderbergh denies his scammers the frosted hair and goofy nicknames, the reverence for Mother, which makes movie thugs seem ridiculous and less scary. He strips them down to the bare wiring, these hallow, stuffed men panting after the Grail.

Marvin Hamlisch’s Tin Pan Alleyesque musical score does its best to prod us into seeing the Keystone Cops nuttiness of this scam and Whitacre’s even nuttier efforts to exploit it. But it just isn’t funny. Worse, it doesn’t seem sad either. It felt like Erin Brockovitch (2000), Soderbergh’s first big box office success, with all the anger and moral outrage washed out.

I left the theater feeling dazed and confused. But that is how I often feel when thinking about credit-default swaps, Enron, junk bonds, et.al. How do people like Whitacre and the price fixers get away with their scams for so long? And why have we taxpayers continued to give ADM billions in annual subsidies even after the company has been convicted of rigging the game? Isn’t anyone watching the store?

The Informant! lets us feel what it’s like to be inside the erratic, disturbed heart pulsing at the center of ADM’s world, the same world we live in too. Maybe the exclamation point in the title is a cry for help.

Inglorious Basterds

2009-09-29T08:19:00.004-04:00

Quentin Tarantino was 31 in 1994 when his film Pulp Fiction was nominated for three Academy Awards and he was anointed the Wunderkind of American cinema. Like fellow writer/director/actor Wunderkinds Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) and Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), Tarantino invented a new, audaciously hip visual story telling language. And like them, he seems to have lost his groove, and his box office, after early success.

Inglorious Basterds is something of a comeback film for Tarantino after his sojourn in the world of high concept, high fashion violence in the Kill Bill films (2003-4). It’s an ambitious, alternative history of World War Two, a more down to earth revenge saga in love with film history. The movie is driven as much by style as by story, a real treat for the eye even when the plot boils over and characters morph into caricature.

There’s much to like in this film. The opening scenes, set in rural, Nazi-occupied France, are beautiful and calm, and very unTarantino-like. Enter Colonel Hans Landa (the tri-lingual German actor Christoph Waltz) who is paying a visit to a farm in search of a Jewish family he believes is hiding in the basement there.

We’ve all seen this horrible set-up enough to know where it goes. But Tarantino makes Landa genuinely gracious, an almost New Age Nazi man, who treats his farmer/victim like a mensch. Still, Landa is a Nazi and Tarantino is fascinated by violence. What’s different is that the inevitable Quentintine fury of beautifully choreographed bullets eviscerates only wood, not human beings. We do not see any murders, perhaps a first in a Tarantino film.

While the gun smoke still lingers over the farm house like a toxic sunset, Landa sees a young woman running away from the slaughter into an open field. But rather than using his pistol, he smiles cryptically, choosing to let her go. It left this viewer wondering what the heck Landa was up to. It was the high point of the movie for me, and I was literally on the edge of my seat.

We meet the young escapee, Shoshanna Dreyfus (played by the French actress Melanie Laurent), several years later as the owner of a small movie theater in Paris. Tarantino films her on a tall wooden ladder, dreamily changing the letters of a movie title on the marquee. The muted theater lights barely make a dent in the inky, empty street. It was quite a touching scene, a fragile moment of hope amid war rendered with great simplicity and power.

In conventional war movies, this is where the heroine meets her true love. Here Shoshanna meets Private Fredrich Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a young German solider who has become a celebrity for killing hundreds of Americans. There’s no way Shoshanna will be attracted to the handsome, smitten Fredrich because, well, he’s a Nazi. Undeterred, in an effort to win her heart, Zoller persuades none other than Josef Goebbels, the brains behind Hitler, to use Shoshanna’s theater for the premiere of a movie he’s produced about Zoller’s exploits, with the young hero starring as himself.

It’s an offer she dare not refuse and even Hitler eventually piles on to the planned festivities, his entourage of ghastly thugs in tow.

This is where the movie started to unravel and spiral out of control. By putting all his sappily stereotyped Nazi big shots in Shoshanna’s theater at one time, Tarantino gives her a shot at avenging her family’s murder. They deserve it, of course, but this set-up is too ridiculous to believe. It’s like the scene in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service where ten different people come into the room one after another, toppers on top of toppers. And Tarantino adds even another layer to this already overloaded scene: a cadre of 12 Jewish-American soldiers who have their own plan to kill the Nazi high command.

These are the eponymous Basterds, guys who look like they’re waiting for the express bus back to Long Island after a day’s work in Midtown. But the formerly nice Jewish boys have been transformed by the horrors of genocide. They are like John Goodman’s para-military Jew, Walter, in the Cohn Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, both laughable and lethal. One of them, called the Bear Jew (Eli Roth), kills German soldiers with a baseball bat, probably a Martin Scorsese model. They creep us out even as we root for them to succeed, which probably says more about us than it does about them. Jewish mothers are advised not to take any of this personally.

And so it goes. Quentin Tarantino is himself an inglorious basterd, an ironic Hollywood
bad boy with a real passion for subverting societal (and cinematic) conventions. He wears this title as a badge of honor and believes it gives him the license to do pretty much anything to shock, dazzle or amaze us, or gross us out entirely. Personally, I wish QT’s films weren’t so hyped up on Darwinian adrenalin, the kill or be killed call of our animal nature. But then he wouldn’t be Quentin Tarantino, he’d be Stanley Kubrick.

District 9 (2009)

2009-08-30T23:43:00.000-04:00

Starring: Sharlto Copely, Jason Cope. Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.
Produced by Key Creatives. 112 minutes. MPAA “R’ rating. Parent’s Advisory for profanity, violence and gore, and frightening/intense scenes.

The extraterrestrials in the sci-fi film District 9 are taken captive by the South African army without a fight and incarcerated in squalid refuge camps in Johannesburg. The locals call the extraterrestrials Prawns but, cinematically, they are more like gefilte fish. All Prawns are slender and tall with wide shoulders and fetching wasp waists like the robots in I Robot. They have veil-like tentacles over their mouth, same as the bad boy in Predator, and they speak a clickier, less guttural dialect of Klingon. Their skin is horny and plaited like the Ninja Turtles and they have hooves like the aliens in Contact.

The one really unique thing about Prawns is that they roll over so quickly. Their name caries more than whiff of terms like Kaffir and Sami, toxic slang full of the triumphalist racial fear and loathing that fueled apartheid, the slave trade, colonialism, genocide, holocausts of every size and shape. These visitors from another world are treated with the thwackingly punitive disdain that non-humans deserve in a zero sum game for dominance of planet Earth.

Humans neutralize the Prawns in District 9 because they are understandably afraid of a civilization that has mastered interplanetary travel. We know in our bones that human history is the story of stronger nations conquering weaker ones, and that conquest is usually driven by an advanced technology of some kind, iron over bronze, wheel over foot, guns over swords. Prawns are a trophy species, something in a cage to amuse and distract people from their troubles, another feather in the cap that humans believe is the crown of creation.

But Prawns still must earn their keep like everyone else on planet Earth, and their novel alien biology makes them cash cows, rare commodities which can be easily converted to a handsome profit. The aliens’ claw-like hands are hacked off, for example, and sold as a kind of power bar. There’s also a thriving trade among sexual adventurers drawn to the flame of alien bordellos. But this stuff is chump change compared to figuring out how to operate the cache of rifle-like Prawn weapons that have been captured, gizmos with the kick of the Ghostbusters’ nuclear-powered backpacks but painted like boogie boards.

Director Blomkamp’s film is high-spirited but gory like RoboCop but nicely balanced by dollops of crisp, CNN-style news reportage, also like RoboCop. The film really works as an R-rated, entertaining sci-fi/action/comedy/thriller/moral fable.

A field agent named Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our hero, a bureaucrat quirky enough to be likable. He is the lead government employee tasked with moving 1.8 million Prawns to a new camp, District 10. The real motive in this operation is to disrupt any guerilla activities in the planning stages, and Wikus finds plenty of ingenious weapons systems made from spare parts including an elaborate computer network. The plot hinges on his accidentally ingesting the fruit of a jerry rigged chemistry lab, a very nasty black liquid, and then physically beginning to morph into a Prawn.

Life is never easy for cross-genome dressers. The humans in Wikus’ life, including his wife, toss him overboard pretty fast and the Prawns don’t trust him either. But Wikus can at least live as an outlaw among the Prawns and buy cat food (a Prawn delicacy) from the Nigerian warlords who are the aliens’ commercial brokers with the outside world. Pretty quickly, Wikus discovers that Prawns care about their friends and children and hate being bullied by police but go along with it to avoid further trouble.
In other words, accoutrement aside, the Prawns have a certain sensitivity that we recognize as being human and the humans who control the Prawns’ act with an insensitivity that can only be called alien.

Suffice it to say, like Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement, Wikus becomes more sympathetic to the Prawns as he experiences the cruelty inflicted on him as a non-human with alien parts. So does the viewer. The mind reels, the heart convulses, somehow history slogs on. When will we ever learn?

Back in the day, there were three reasons why extraterrestrials would pop by the Earth: to destroy humans (War of the Worlds, et.al), enslave us (The Matrix) or to help us grow up (The Day the Earth Stood Still, et.al). The aliens in District 9 aren’t monsters, missionaries or messiahs. The Prawns are strangers in a strange land but it’s the humans that are truly strange, and really scary. Scarier still, we are the only ones with the power to save us from ourselves.

Julie/Julia

2009-08-21T06:36:00.006-04:00

Starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, StanleyTucci, Chris Messina.

Written and directed by Nora Ephron.

Produced by Columbia Pictures. 123 minutes.

Meryl Streep is the Venus of Willendorf of actors. The Paleolithic Venus is all bloated boobs and belly, a faceless fertility goddess, Eve as her own eternal garden. With Streep’s Venus, it's her heart and head that are fecund, a primal soul imagining the possible human.

In early films like Sophie’s Choice and Bridges of Madison County, her characters conveyed a sweet, enduring sadness about their lives and the grinding down of all flesh to dust. In recent flicks like The Devil Wears Prada and Doubt, Streep plays embittered characters, sharp-edged, manipulative people, nasty. Her range as an actor is amazing, the more so because she seems to consume the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to as a kind of food savored in all its forms. Who could possibly replace her? wondered my film friend Suzy recently. Good question. Dunno. Keira Knightly, perhaps. Kate Winslet? Stay tuned ...

In her latest movie, Julie & Julia, Streep plays Julia Child, the American chef, author and TV personality, who mid-wifed the arrival of French cuisine into mainstream American kitchens. The Julia portion of the film is basically a sweetened up biopic set in 1950’s Paris and New York during McCarthyism's mid-career witch hunts. It tracks Julia Child's evolution from bored matron to the diva of culinary arts.

Streep plays Julia as the physically awkward, slightly masculine woman she was, Terry Jones of Monty Python in drag, Lucy’s loopiness without the art. But there’s another Julia under all fuss and flutter: well-mannered and endearing, as stolid and resolute as Winston Churchill. She’s a truly odd duck and Streep played the role for its inherent comedy while never losing touch with the essential Julia. Not MS's best performance, but it must have been fun for someone so disciplined to let herself go so over-the-top.

In one scene early in the film, we see Julia, running on empty as a diplomat’s wife in Paris, decide to give French cooking a try. Improbably, she ends up in all-male, professional level class at the Cordon Blue. And there she crudely hacks away at onions while male colleagues in chic white chef’s coats slice them in a blur of fearless artistry.

Soon thereafter we see Julia at her kitchen table slicing onions. The pile must have been three feet high. The redolence of the onion mountain is so powerful that when Julia’s husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) comes in the door his hands fly up to his eyes as if he’s been shot, and he flees with just the slightest nod of his head and wave of the white flag of his hand. Julia returns a spousal wave of her own and resumes her quest of proper cutting technique, overriding nature’s call to her tear ducts, the obligation of wifely companionship. Soon, in similar fashion, there will be scientific cooking experiments to conduct and a 700 page cook book to write and sell

The onion scene is played for its inherent comedy, both actors maintaining their formal reserve even when under attack by powerful imagined chemical irritants. It's funny because we've all been there but end up blind with tears; it's notable for the raw power of acting skill not brought into play here. But it also succeeds in letting the audience know that Julia has an inner strength we didn’t see before, true staying power in adversity. Her little wave also says bye-bye to the decision to play a minor role in her own life. Thus begins the story of Julia’s ascent.

But Julia Child isn’t the only main character of this film. There’s also Julie’s story, a second (also true) narrative cleverly entwined with the Julia's. It’s about a young, attractive. thoroughly modern woman, Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams), who fends off a feeling of hopelessness in the post-9.11 world by making a commitment to whip up each and every one of the 500+ recipes in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days. With unflagging encouragement from her editor husband Eric (Chris Messina), she blogs daily about her project, often quite openly, and wins a bunch of fans. Ultimately, she almost loses her husband in the process of landing a big book contract but it all comes out OK.

Julie’s path to success neatly parallels Julia’s and script writer/director Nora Ephron has fun cutting back and forth between the two stories, showing us how much women have changed in the last half century, and how much they are still the same. Yadda, yadda. It’s done mainly with clothing and the Internet, but also plenty of cute depictions of emotional meltdowns. Quick, wry cuts keep the characters and the audience from slipping beneath the surface of occasionally troubled waters in both eras. I think women may find this stuff funnier than men. Personally, I was amused by seeing Paul and Eric settle warmly into the role of the guy in the ballet troupe who lifts the prima ballerina when needed and otherwise acts as her silent, supportive pivot.

Ephron cast the blog as Julie’s best friend and uses it to serve up still bubbling, often half-baked portions of the wannabe chef’s inner life. I think this narrative device, which Ephron has employed in slightly different forms in Sleepless in Seattle and You'’ve Got Mail, adds a quirky fizz to romantic comedy story lines that might otherwise be too silly or conventional to succeed. This viewer generally likes Ephron because she is a really funny, insightful observer of people, especially when they are in love with someone or something. She certainly knows how to entertain. But I can’t help but wonder what the writer of When Harry Met Sally would have come up with in Julie/Julia if she’d throttled back on the funny girl stuff a little more often.

Bruno

2009-08-11T15:29:00.000-04:00

BRUNO
Starring Sasha Baron Cohen. Directed by Larry Charles. Produced by Everyman Pictures. 81 minutes

Sasha Baron Cohen is the Ur-comic: equal parts tummler, provocateur and saboteur. Hard to say at this point whether he’s a satiric genius with Swiftian chops or just another wacked out love child of the Monty Python gang. His latest movie, Bruno, seems to fall into another category altogether. It’s more an experience in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word than entertainment. Yes, it’s really funny in places, but mostly not ha-ha funny, and nowhere near the runaway romp of his first flick, the groundbreaking Borat. Still, if you like your humor raw and outrageous, chock full of jokes about penises and the human body’s various fluids, gases and secretions, this movie is for you. Mix one part Austin Powers with two parts Marquis de Sade and a twist of bromance and you’re almost there.

Bruno is the story of a gay, German fashionista in resolute pursuit of celebrity. There’s something prissy even imperious about the eponymous Bruno, a comic exaggeration of the flamboyant narcissism of real fashionistas. It would have been an inspired choice except fashionistas don’t leave much for a comic to send up.

To complicate the comic equation further, Cohen has made Bruno a sadist, one of those archetypal Germanic practitioners of the new cruelty. He’s an S+M artist using other people’s pain as his palette, and he’s just not a likable fellow. Mike Meyers made this kind of character funny on Saturday Night Live but he was extremely careful to be charming and silly when he was being cruel, letting us in on the joke. Adam Sandler is also cruel and self-absorbed in Funny People but his occasional glint of self-awareness keeps us in the game. In Bruno, Cohen has eliminated the Keatonesque innocence he used so effectively in Borat, almost as if he is deliberately raising the comic bar for himself. The film veers pretty close to Andy Kaufman’s wrestling routine at times, that twilight zoned place where comedy becomes performance art and starts prying up the floor boards of our societal and sexual conventions even as we stand on them – and then keeps hitting us over the head with them.

Cohen used exactly the same Candid Camera-style strategy in both of his films. He embodies an extreme comic character and somehow makes him seem like a plausible denizen of a crazy world not quite our own. He then has this character do, say or want something slightly aberrant from real people and films their reactions. The results, as you’d expect, are sometimes embarrassing or ha-ha funny. But Sasha Cohen is not a benign, avuncular student of human nature like Allen Funt. He is a satirist who delights in rubbing our faces in the droppings of our sacred cows. Some of what he does is disturbing.

There’s one scene early in the film where Bruno repeatedly rams some Rube Goldberg contraption on a pulley into his dwarf partner’s butt hole. While certainly surreal enough to be comedy, the scene was more strange and cruel than funny. The really funny part (still not ha-ha) was how directly and frankly this kind of sexual act is presented in the film. It felt like Discovery Channel meets reality TV, nothing hidden or forbidden. Is this perhaps our culture’s final revenge on the Puritans, our inching ever closer to the tribal rites of A Clockwork Orange?

That said, I really liked the scene where Bruno’s penis (aided and abetted by special effects) is yoyo’d around his groin with the easy precision of a circus act and ends by speaking through its urethral opening. I’d never seen a penis do tricks before or heard one talk, although the male organ is well known for having its own mind. Maybe it was quoting Augie March, the Saul Bellow character who said, “I want, I want, I want.” (or was that from the Dangling Man?) The utterly unselfconscious freedom of this scene felt really liberating. I laughed out loud because there’s a tension between the tectonic plates of the body and the mind, and laughter is the earthquake that keeps them from breaking apart entirely.

I had another LOL experience when Bruno, attempting to become a celeb by embracing a high profile charity cause, flies to Israel to make peace in the Middle East. He actually succeeds in getting a Palestinian citizen and an Israeli citizen to hold hands and sing the moral equivalent of kumbayah. The really not funny ha-ha thing about this scene is that Bruno’s preposterous peace mission is about as successful as the efforts of myriad high-ranking officials over the last 60 years.

In the end, Bruno is not a good film, and Sasha Cohen is not trying to teach us to reclaim the power of singing and holding hands that has been lost since the Civil Rights movement went out of business. The man is a comic, not a sage, but he takes no prisoners, and that makes him an interesting guy to watch.

Public Enemies

2009-07-07T09:36:00.000-04:00

“Public Enemies,” the new Michael Mann film, is about the legendary bank robber John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp, and the fatal game of cat and mouse he plays with Melvin Purvis, an FBI man played by Christian Bale. I thought it was a rather pedestrian reenactment of America’s dark love affair with glamorous gangsters and their breezy but doomed fleecing of the conventional world. It felt like “Bonnie and Clyde” drained of appealing characters, wit and verve. Pretty standard stuff, played sotto voce by Depp, perhaps as Frank Stella and the Minimalists played off Jackson Pollack and the Abstract Expressionists.

That said, every once in a while I felt tendrils of soulful meditation on the why and wherefore of Dillinger and the Great Depression which spawned him, something like the narrator’s voice in Terrance Malick’s “Thin Red Line.” What drives a person like Dillinger to a life of extreme crime and what makes non-criminals so fascinated him and others like him (such as Al Capone), even to the point of making them culture heroes and matinee idols? But no. Director Mann never committed to sustained musings about the mysteries of human nature, let alone our species’ place in nature. That would have made this film too Art House and killed Box Office (or at least held it hostage).

Still, there is plenty of art in this flick. I liked the low-angle shots of desolate, Hopperesque buildings plastered like monuments against unblinking blue skies. That one crazy orchid-colored baby carriage whipping through a chaotic street scene was a riff, perhaps, on Eisenstein’s “Potemkin.” And what was going on with Dillinger disguising himself in wimpy mustache, granny glasses and straw boater, a dead-ringer for James Joyce? Another kind of outlaw in not-quite-post-Puritanical America?

Perhaps. But in the end, this is a cautionary tale. Dillinger famously robbed banks because that’s where the money was. What’s left unsaid is that it wasn’t anywhere else.

Millions of hard working Americans had lost their jobs, homes and savings in the financial collapse of 1929. They had also lost their confidence in a financial system which had nodded and winked at extreme margin trading and other instruments of under-secured investment. No one in government had been watching the store and those most responsible for the crash seemed to get off with a slap on the hand. People were hungry, humiliated and angry. The banks at the center of every community in the nation were the smiling corpse of a deeply flawed financial and governmental system, a daily reminder of conquest and cruelty.

John Dillinger, like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, became a kind of avenging angel, punishing the banks in ways that the government could not. He violated their integrity with his guerilla attacks and made banks feel worried about their future, insecure, diminished. Through Dillinger and his outlaw confreres, the banking system began to feel some of the same kind of pain that the average person was feeling. It was, to be sure, a brutal form of justice which also hurt and killed innocent people. Never a good thing. But in the absence of effective, reasoned correctives, human society demands that something be done, and this was how it came down. I suppose it makes for interesting drama with all its relentless pursuit and duels to the death. But it certainly isn’t the best way to foster a healthy nation.

State of Play

2009-06-03T11:21:00.001-04:00

“The Truth? You can’t handle the truth.” That’s what Marine Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) snarls at Lieutenant Danny Kaffey (Tom Cruise) in “A Few Good Men.” Jessep’s viperous arrogance makes him hateful but, in the end, he is right. The truth is that that he ordered a Code Red, the murder of a sub-par soldier to safeguard his unit’s espirit de corps. It is definitely not something we can handle.

“State of Play” is a perfect storm of similar truths in politics. I went seeking a film with the heft and passion of “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 Hoffman-Redford film chronicling Bernstein and Woodward’s exposure of the Watergate break-ins which eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as president. But what I got was something closer to a top 40 version of same: investigative journalism all dressed up as a mildly quirky, entertaining detective story that just happens to be about political corruption.

The film starts with a pretty young woman throwing herself in front of an on-coming DC Metro train during rush hour. The media pile on to an official police statement that it’s a suicide. But an aging, curmudgeonly ace reporter at the Washington Post, Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), sniffs foul play. He spends the rest of the film sifting through clues that eventually lead him, quite accidentally, to expose a quasi-military take over of the United States. I’m not sure, given the current state of our nation, why anyone would want to stage a coup and take on all that debt. Especially since they could get all the money, power and influence they could ever want just by gaming the banking system or the electric grid. Who knows, maybe they intended it as a mercy killing.

McAffrey is a Columbo-type character, all rumpled and seemingly out to lunch, who has the occasional Zen moment that pierces the opaque heart of plot darkness. Crowe lumbers through this movie like an amiable circus bear, impervious to the barriers of protocol and intimidation, surprisingly gentle despite his bulk.

He’s an old-fashioned man’s man in the John Wayne tradition, Crowe is. Like the heavyweight champion Jim Braddock he portrayed in Ron Howard’s sappy but affecting “Cinderella Man,” he’s a guy who likes to fight; taking a punch only makes it more interesting. In this film he plays against his type and never actually hits anyone, which is refreshing even as I involuntarily flinch every time he lifts his hand. He’s basically a gladiator without a sword in this film, an honest guy in a dishonest world who has to do dishonest things from time to time to keep the idea of honesty alive for himself and. who knows, Western civilization. This is Bogie’s old haunt, the cleft in the rock where Norman Rockwellesque ideas about community take shelter from Kafkaesque ideas about an arch, godless universe. Crowe pulls this trick off fairly well, notching up the non-violent cop character he played in “American Gangster.” Gotta love his new found plowshares.

Ben Affleck plays a popular US congressman, Stephen Collins, who was having an affair with the woman who was killed by the metro at the beginning of the film. Cal and Stephen are former college roommates and still best buddies. Much of the truth we can’t handle either starts or ends here. The story works despite another embarrassing performance by Ben in his quest to become a serious actor. The guy looks like he just rolled off the assembly line at U.S. Robotics, every facial gesture and movement technically accurate but somehow creepy. It was the same in “Hollywoodland,” where he portrayed George Reeves, early TV’s Superman. Maybe he’s taking his cues from “Barry Lyndon,” Stanley Kubric’s lavish, perverse exercise in taking the motion out of motion pictures.

Of all the Ben Affleck films I’ve seen, I liked him best in ”Good Will Hunting” with alternating doses of wise guy swagger and frightened kid vulnerability. There were odd, welcome little flashes of this guy from Southie in “State,” but I didn’t think they worked for US Congressman. It seemed to me that Ben was over his head, trying too hard to touch bottom.

Helen Mirren plays Cameron Lynne, Cal’s boss at the Washington Post, with the gravitas of the captain of the Titanic. She knows that the Internet and Google will soon sink the Post and most newspapers, and doesn’t quite know how to fight back without lowering the paper’s standards. This was also a truth I did not want to handle.

The Post, after all, was the paper that courageously pursued Richard Nixon and his henchmen through the snares and thickets of Watergate, backing brash, inexperienced young reporters against high-level government officials. Watergate would still just be a swanky address on the Potomac without the Post.

While this film certainly nods in the direction of these Fifth Estate giants, it’s about newshounds, not crusaders for justice. I suppose it’s a sign of the times that our heroes are not outraged, personally or morally, by the high-level crimes they expose. In the end, they are just doing their job: digging up what’s hidden and pantingly plopping it down at our feet. Alas, this strikes me as the most damaging coup of all.

The Great Buck Howard

2009-04-21T21:48:00.001-04:00

There’s a scene in “Being John Malkovich” where every character in a crowded restaurant has John Malkovich’s face: the maitre’d, all the diners, male and female, the wait staff. Even the lounge lizard draped seductively across the piano wears the Malkovichian puss. I took it as a surreal montage of one man’s ability to shape-shift right in plain sight.

“The Great Buck Howard” is also a spoof built around John Malkovich but this one shrinks the vast array of characters in Malkovich’s range and pours them into one rather shallow vessel, the aging mentalist Buck Howard.

Buck is an entertainment dinosaur relentlessly stalking his audience in the faded former vaudeville theaters of small market cities. He is driven by the need to drink a daily dose of love from his remaining fans although he seems dismissive of those few individuals who shower him with their admiration. Without apparent friends or family, this hallow-eyed man crafts his decades old illusions with the unvarying solemnity of Levitical rites. He might be offering up sacrifices to the unseen forces which give him his ESP-like powers, the source of his belief that he is, in fact, great. He assiduously filters out anything, like half-empty theaters in seldom remembered towns, which might cast doubt over this self-talk, his greatest illusion.

The honorific ‘great’ was bestowed on Buck by Johnny Carson during the late host’s reign as the Pope of early late night television. Buck, a 61 time guest on the show, never caught a whiff of the ironic patina Carson lacquered onto the title. Was he so dazzled by the glow of the Hollywood Grail plopped onto his lap that he really believed he possessed powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men? Or did Johnny just affirm what he alone had always known?

Decades after his 15 minutes of fame, Buck still believes what everyone else takes as a goof. He never stops talking about the new killer illusion he’s working on, his ticket back to the mountain top. It certainly appears like he’s whistling a happy tune while Godot dallies. But, in the end, Buck actually delivers his grand illusion with surprising results.

I liked this modestly entertaining film best when it broke through its downbeat, deadpan, put-on style and revealed the man behind the wizard behind the curtain. There are several scenes where the serio-comic Buck completes one of his stage illusions and then seamlessly steps out of the carapace of his act like a cicada molting its shell. He stands before us all gooey and unformed, a crooked boyish smile snaking across his face as he says “Isn’t that wild?” as if he can’t believe the amazing thing that has just happened. It is his personal fountain of youth, a magical place covered up and forgotten, like the Mayan temples swallowed whole by the tropical jungle. This was a great piece of acting because it revealed a touching and forgotten part of Buck without ever breaking the film’s scuffling, kitschy tone.

Watching this great actor strut and fret on the constrained stage of the illusionist's personality was a special treat. He played the role like a jazz trumpeter, muting down his sensitivity, intelligence and explosiveness to play a simpler song. He still hits all his notes -- Buck is fragile and tough, polite and nasty, cunning and slightly retarded – but it’s all done in miniature, pianissimo. There are no Sunday school polite, extremely smart serial killers lurking here, no dangerous liaisons, no lines of fire. Buck Howard may be testy, pompous and self-absorbed but he is not Ted Bundy. He's just there to entertain us and himself, and happy are we for the comic relief.

Duplicity

2009-04-09T06:55:00.001-04:00

This is an M.C. Escher kind of flick: your mind fits the pieces together a certain way and then there’s an ah-ha moment where another set of pieces appears unbidden out of nowhere. “Duplicity” uses a similar strategy to spin, tangle and resolve a middling, mish-mosh of a tale about two CIA agents who quit the service to make some real money by stealing the formula for curing baldness. No question the film delivers on its title. This viewer felt strapped into a kayak slicing deftly through the rapids of what’s what? and who’s who? until my internal compass got washed overboard, true north and all.

Our protagonists, played by Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, are street smart, terminally suspicious former agents. After the requisite turf pissing contests, they notice that they are perfect fencing partners in the art of barbed repartee, the prelude to a kiss in the action/adventure genre. There are some intelligent, sharp-edged exchanges between them that evoked Tracey and Hepburn. This was arguably the high point of the film for me, although Julia was leaden in her role, not sleek, and the chemistry with Clive seemed scripted, not stirred.

Eventually, the agents fall in love as madly as two people can who suspect that the other one is just gaming them for some unknown objective. Mistrust and/or ambition tear them apart, and then longing and/or exhaustion bring them back together. The thought crossed my mind that maybe they are both being conned as part of a larger game that neither of them knows about. Or maybe that’s just what director Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”) wants us to think. And so it goes.

On the one hand, it’s comforting to know that secret agents are as vulnerable and bumbling as the rest of us in the clandestine affairs of the heart. On the other hand, it’s a little scary to know that those who once defended our nation from the bad guys are pretty easily tripped up by their own emotions. Where’s James Bond when we really need him? Nothing fazed Bond, not men with gold fingers or women with pussy galore. He lived in an aura of chic, technological invincibility, never shaken or stirred by fear or love. “Duplicity” is a kind of white flag waved at the Bond era and its triumphalist mythology. Alas, them days is gone.

The premise that secret agents jump from a team fighting for the survival of Western civilization to one seeking to make obscene profits by growing hair on busy streets is, I hope, absurd and sad enough to qualify as satire. Paul Giamatti, who plays the CEO of the company with the new product, does a fine caricature of an exuberantly amoral CEO, a glib, well-dressed huckster like Adam Eckhardt in “Thank You for Not Smoking.” Giamatti’s character is almost sexually aroused about the idea of making a killing on a product that (like all previous baldness cures) won’t actually work. But he’s most passionate about sticking it to his arch corporate rival (played with understated intensity by the always excellent Tom Wilkinson) whom he fears will get to market with the same product before he does. And so it goes.

I think part of the problem with “Duplicity” was that it wasn’t sure whether it was a social satire or a spy story or a love story, so it tried to be all three at once and didn’t have the narrative chops to keep it all in focus. It wasn’t the games within games that got me, or the duplicity either. It just wasn’t done very well. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into and this was soup. I am left somehow knowing that the world will not end in a bang or a whimper but in duplicity. Of course, if it’s done well, we won’t even know it happened.

The Miracle of Grain

2009-04-01T20:04:00.000-04:00

Columbia Pictures founder Harry Cohn did not manage his studio by the seat of his pants. No one ever saw him fly by them either. But legend has it that his tushee was the decider on whether to release a movie. Too cheeky a response meant no go.

The Secret of Grain, a 2007 film written and directed by Abdel Kechiche, got a five cheek rating from me, which means I bailed at the 60 minute mark with 90 still on the clock. Many critics, including the usually reliable Roger Ebert, have hailed this film as a gem, however flawed. For me, the story telling was fatally flawed and, sorry, but I don’t see a gem.

That said, I very much liked the idea of seeing a heartfelt story about the trials of being a Muslim of North African origin in contemporary France (Kechiche’s family is from Tunisia). We Americans don’t get much about the humanity of Islamic people these days, let alone sympathetic portrayals of their struggle to live. It was a welcome respite from the ubiquitous post-9/11 jihadist cartoon characters who bedevil our society since the Russians got capitalism.

The hero of the story is Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), a North African immigrant to France. Early on, he is laid off from his construction job of 35 years because he is not productive enough for his profit-driven bosses.

We sense Beiji is crushed by his loss but there’s no place on his beautifully sad, deeply lined face for any more suffering to register. We get that he will continue to stoically endure but the game’s over for him even though the final out has not been recorded. I felt sympathy for Beiji and all immigrants swimming upstream in an alien culture.

At this point, the plot stopped moving forward and slipped into a long series of slow, low-impact, overly long takes. The director made a choice to let the story unfold randomly and organically as life does and I get that. It’s one of the things that I love about deeply personal, hand-made films. But sometimes, as with Grain, I get lost with this technique and lose the emotional pulse of the story, never a good thing. And, suddenly, there I was at 2.5 cheeks and numbing out.

I hoped for renewed engagement when the focus finally shifted to Slimane’s extended family. Surprisingly, the patriarch of the clan isn’t at the center of their world. Mostly, he’s not there, almost as if he was already dead, a respected memory. He does not join dozens of family members gathering at his ex-wife’s house for the matriarch’s legendary couscous, perhaps the only Tunisian custom which has survived the family’s assimilation. This dish is kvelled over by all the adults at the table in the same way that Jews wax poetic about mom’s brisket or chicken soup, love you can eat, the last refuge of those caught in the ebb tide between cultures.

Food has given us a lot of great films like The Big Night, Mostly Marta and Babette’s Feast. Even not so great food-based films like Tortilla Soup work because they dish up the comforts of hearth and home, and how can you miss with that?

Well, for starters, by using a hand-held camera for 15-20 minutes without a break. This odd, extended ultra-close up technique at the couscous lovefest gave the director a way to make us feel physically present at the meal, no question about that. But he left me embedded there without making me feel like a guest. I felt lost again, unable to understand who was who and how things fit together, and why I should care.

The Secret of Grain had jumped with both feet from its stark, singular focus on Slimane to a boisterous multi-generational family dinner scene. It felt like a tropical rain storm dropping suddenly from a leaden sky with astonishing force, a refreshing change at first which quickly flooded the streets. And this is when I gave up and left the theater.

Sounds cranky, I know, but that was my experience. By contrast, take Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, for example. This was also a meandering tale with a cast of dozens of extended family members and friends. Demme, also like Kechiche, puts viewers in the extremely up-close and personal mode too many times, often around food. But it wasn’t long before I found his technique engaging and never quite got there with Kechiche.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Demme quickly got his viewers involved with the main characters and their dramatic conflicts. When he used ultra close-ups, they were part of a creative mixture of shots and set-ups, and the editing had a crisp rhythm which gave shape to the blur of so many quick impressions.

Kechiche has said that he admires Yasujiro Ozu, the great Japanese director who made a series of elegant black and white films in the 40’s and 50’s (Early Summer, Late Autumn, et.al) about the impact of modernity on a traditional family. I can see where Kechiche works similarly sympathetic emotional territory in his film, and his deliberately spare, low-drama style of story telling also echoes Ozu.

But I don‘t think this guy is as skilled an artist, and he doesn’t use his cinematic tools as effectively. Ozu’s films are a series full of beautiful, strategically composed shots, each designed to awaken or refresh the viewer’s perceptual palette and to guide him or her into the emotional content of the next scene. The Secret of Grain just isn’t built this way, not for me, anyway.

While stuff certainly happens in Grain, and some of it’s great, for me there never was a substantive dramatic there there. In some ways this film felt like the work of a gifted grad student at NYU film school, perhaps a little too in love with what he’s shot to make cuts that would make the film more accessible. Look, he’s an artist, and he needs to do what he is compelled to do. That’s what enriches cinema and the world. I just don’t think Grain was very good film making.

Knowing

2009-03-29T09:10:00.003-04:00

The film Knowing is about precognition of terrible events, but not, alas, its own production. Hollywood has packaged director Alex Proyas’ new offering as a sci-fi film because stuff happens that cannot be explained by science. But the only real sci-fi bona fides this film can claim are the coat tails of the director’s 2004 box office bonanza, I, Robot (2004). Knowing is more of a thriller/mystery/drama/action picture with some sci-fi window dressing, a showcase for yet another of Nicholas Cage’s earnest, iconic performances. I find it creepy to witness another episode in Nicky’s serial murder of the talent, agile freshness and promise he showed in films like When Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. What a loss; he was a great actor.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … science fiction films relied on the viewer’s imagination more than traditional story telling elements like character development and plausible plots. That’s one of the things that made them uniquely compelling to the initiated and pathetic escapism to those who didn’t have the chops to get off-world on their own. Contemporary sci-fi takes the sigh out of science fiction by doing all the imagining for the viewer. Chalk it up to the wow factor of computer generated special effects. Yes, some of this stuff is truly awesome (and the plane crash in Knowing is truly spectacular) but I find it upsetting that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on making hi-def spectacles out of horrible explosions and crashes. What is this hunger for catastrophic destruction that brings hordes of people to mediocre films like Knowing? Actors have become props, mere set-ups, for the special effects that are the true stars in these films. That’s the most sci-fi thing about them, and the scariest.

Back in the day, the best pre-special effects sci-fi films, like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952), used the arrival of superior alien intelligence on earth as a foil to prod our species along the evolutionary gyre. Kubric’s 2001 (1968) flipped the idea by taking human beings off-world in search of alien intelligence. The story in these superb films and their progeny [Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator (1984) to name a few] is built by laying high entertainment value over a fully realized alternative world which quietly meditates on the quirks and perks of our species. How and whether we’ll survive evolution’s crap shoot is the unspoken subtext.

Knowing is a different breed entirely, part of a recent run of guilt-free apocalyptic movies where the earth dies but it’s not our fault. Yes, our cavalier abuse of mother earth has mucked up the ecosystem pretty good but ultimately it won’t be the smoking gun of global immolation and human extinction.Old Sol’s erratic behavior is the bad guy in Knowing, not greenhouse gases. Could happen, of course. That's the bad news. The good news is that we can go back to polluting as much as we want because, hey, the really big decisions are made in another galaxy, far, far away.

Two Lovers

2009-03-24T22:33:00.005-04:00

30 something Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is trudging along the crowded sidewalks of Brighton Beach, delivering dry cleaning from his family’s store. Then, astride a pier by the bay, he suddenly climbs over the railing and drops into the sea, plummeting downward with express elevator speed. Hitting bottom, he bounces back up toward the glint of surface light. He scurries away from the people who pull him out of the water, shoulders hunched like gargoyle wings. He reminded me of furtive, haunted Peter Lorre but also John Belusi, the samurai stunt pilot. I wasn’t sure what to think.

As the film unfolds, we learn that the force which drove Leonard off the pier, ironically and tragically, is rooted in the good life his Holocaust-surviving parents have worked so hard to tee up for him. He lives with them now in film time because he’s recovering after “hurting himself” (there are puncture wound scars on his forearms) after his fiancee ended their relationship.

Ruth, Leonard’s mother (the ever classy Isabella Rossellini), is the archetypal Jewish mom: a hygiene queen, totally devoted to her son but also compulsively nosey. She’s the kind of gal who gets down on her knees to look under Leonard’s door to see what he’s up to at night, just for his own good. Reuben, his father (Moni Moshonov), is a gentle, sweet natured man who gently and sweetly wheedles Leonard every day to come into the family business and finally make something of himself.

Leonard loves his parents and is nice enough to gently deflect their ceaseless meddling in his affairs rather than tell them to take a hike. But, to be fair, he doesn’t take it upon himself to take a hike either. His truth is that he doesn’t want to be where he is but doesn’t know where else to go. He is an eternal stranger in lands that are all too familiar.

And so the stage is set for this suicidal but reasonably nice Jewish boy from Brighton to meet Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a nice Jewish girl from the ‘hood. She’s pleasing enough to the eye but doesn’t turn him on. Still, here’s a woman of child-bearing age from a well-off family who is attracted to him and, perhaps more importantly, is not his mother. Unfortunately, she is also officially pre-approved by his parents and this automatically fogs the window of any real feelings Leonard might have for her.

Enter salvation: a silky blond shiksa named Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who just happens to live almost next door. Unfussy, easy going, non-judgmental, Michelle is the perfect antidote for the over-determined, hot house world of Jewish material world ambition. She’s the moral equivalent of olam ha ba, the promised messianic world where Jews finally get to kick back and enjoy themselves like everyone else.

Poor love starved Leonard dives into the promise of happily ever after with Michelle in the same way he jumped over the side of the pier, a lost soul seeking wholeness through losing the pieces of himself that don‘t play nicely together. But Michelle thinks of him as a brother, not a lover, and she clings to her love for Ron (Elias Koteas), a married man who doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave his wife for Michelle.

Suffice it to say that the plot works itself out with some bright spots along the way. Paltrow plays Michelle with remarkable sensual ease, beautiful inside and out, as they say.She’s fun to watch, and I think that will hold up even for non-Jewish men and women.

Phoenix’s best scene is with Michelle at a crowded dance club. While she gyrates obliviously, arms raised above her head, he buries his face in her hair, inhaling her with an animal intensity right up there with Brando’s “Stella” from A Streetcar named Desire.Truly great acting.

Films like Marty, Rebel Without a Cause and Lost in Yonkers, among many others, reenact the struggles of sons or daughters to get free of the rules and regs of well-meaning but over-protective parents. Some, like The Graduate, do it with wit, others, like The Chosen, do it with soul. This film, written and directed by James Gray (We Own the Night, Little Odessa), does it with leftovers, making little new of old hash.

Happy Go Lucky

2009-03-13T08:32:00.004-04:00

Happy Go Lucky bursts onto the screen, elbowing the credits to the side. It opens with tracking shots of a long-skirted young woman riding a bicycle through labyrinthine contemporary London, her eyes bouncing off the built environment like a sliver of sunlight in a dark forest. She’s an adult experiencing the child's pure delight of balancing on rolling wheels, the terrestrial creature’s close encounter with flight.

Still in the credits, the woman parks her bike, runs an errand and returns to find her bike boosted. After peering quizzically up street and down, as most of us would, her lower lip cantilevers out to the right and the first of a series of self-amused wisecracks bubble out of her mouth. If she feels sad or angry at having her bike ripped off, we never know it. It’s not clear whether she does either. Some Alice in Wonderland process kicks in for her, draining gravity from trouble so it seems absurd or inconsequential. She literally skips away from the scene of the crime as if she is still astride the now phantom two wheeler.

Her name is Pauline but everyone calls her Poppy. She inhabits the psychological realm somewhere north of Eliza Doolittle’s winning cheek and south of Mary Poppins’ logical positivism, wardrobe courtesy of Annie Hall. In the ‘60’s she would have been Georgy Girl or a flower child dancing in the moon shadows. Here she’s a 30 year old primary school teacher, played by the excellent Sally Hawkins, who comes across as a more tomboyish Ann Hathaway with her appealing, wide-eyed effervescence.

Outside school, Poppy has a very cheeky but affectionate relationship with almost everyone, but her connection with Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), her roommate, is built on firmer foundations of understanding and trust. (Initially, I thought Zoe, who is about Poppy’s age but looks older, was Poppy’s mother) Poppy’s defiantly acerbic sister and another female friend studying to be a lawyer round out Poppy’s inner circle. The gals are all single and in varying stages of coping with that. Except for Poppy, none are fulfilled in their work. As a group, they’re tight in the way the boys were in Diner, townies who have lost the will to move on but not yet the dream.

The camera right floats in the middle of the action during the several Ya-Ya Sisterhood scenes early in the film. It feels almost like a documentary about female bonding. I felt a bit voyeuristic, like I wasn’t supposed to be there, but thought that women would probably love these scenes. My wife Myrna told me that she thought it looked like a man trying to show what womens' intimacy was like. You’d think Mars would already know that about Venus. My favorite segment was where the ladies dissolve repeatedly in hysterical laughter while comparing the size, shape and appeal of each other’s breasts. To be honest, it had never occurred to me before that tits were funny. It’s a life changing experience to be sure, but here, at last, I think modernity has gone too far.

In the classroom Poppy has a real enthusiasm for educating her students and a talent for getting down with them. This is where she lives most fully, the boundaries between adult and child vanishing into freedom. One scene has her strutting around her class room in a home-made chicken mask, flapping her wings and crowing, reveling in the activity well beyond the statute of limitations for even playful adults. For Poppy the lessons about how the world works are really lessons in how to be happy in the world. She transforms the most mundane instruction, such as the commuting distances for migratory birds, into odes to wonder and joy. And what an ode her performance is to teachers, those dedicated, creative, loving folks who teach our young people to be human beings!

Ultimately, alas, Poppy encounters people who aren’t so happy go lucky. The film pivots on a scene when she sees one of her students angrily wrestling another boy to the ground. Here, for the first time in the film, Poppy is not able to bubble, charm or fix this bump in the grind of human existence, the indelible rites of competition, jealousy and anger.

Mike Leigh’s narrative arc for the subsequent education of Ms. Poppy was a tush-squirmer for me. There’s something about his diffusive, almost watery style that kept me from engaging enough to suspend disbelief. That said, the scenes with her driving instructor (Eddie Marson), alternately a raging lunatic and a buttoned-down Brit, were quite vivid, both Monty Python funny and Taxi Driver scary. I was truly on edge, dreading that this lovely, totally harmless woman-child would be savagely attacked and/or brutalized by this man.

Ditto Poppy’s attempts, in a back alley way after midnight, to reach out to a very large, verbally dexterous and vaguely dangerous homeless man (Trevor Cooper, who looked to me like Stanley Kubric doing a spoof on Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

In the end, Mike Leigh takes pains to make the medicine go gently down poor Poppy’s throat. She learns that she can’t make everyone happy and doesn’t have to. And, lo, a very nice guy shows up who adores her just the way she is. The film ends with a beautiful aerial zoom out of Poppy and Zoe in a row boat on a summer lake. Poppy is talking to her new beau on her cell phone, giggly and squealing as ever, a silly Zen master of the eternal moment no matter what form it takes.

I've Loved You For So Long

2009-02-28T04:11:00.003-05:00

I’ve not loved Kristin Scott Thomas at all, really, until this film. She’s not my type, this English-born actress with the poised, class-advantaged, British sang froid. Prior to this film, I thought of her as a kind of pure bred Weimar, elegant head and carriage, clean lines, lean flanks, but not someone I’d want in my house. Miraculously, in I've Loved You So Long, she makes me feel great sympathy for essentially the same traits that repulsed me in Horse Whisperer. I applaud Ms. Scott Thomas for having the courage to strip off her star glow and show us what a truly stressed, aging woman really looks. Subsequently, I netflixed Angels and Insects, and experienced yet another dimension of her talent and heart (great flick).

In ILYFSL, KST plays Juliette Fontaine, a middle-aged woman who reappears in her younger sister Lea’s (Elsa Zylberstein) life after an unexplained fifteen year absence. The film is about Juliette’s slow, awkward, tormented dance of reengagement with the world - - and the self - - she left behind. It also chronicles how the two sisters, once so close, come to know each other again after life has separated them for so long.

Writer/ director Philippe Claudel plods and dawdles his way through tricky emotional terrain but I left the film feeling moved by this dark, tender and ultimately touching melodrama. The film’s focus is narrow, Juliette and Lea are the only characters with any dimension, but it reaches deep if you allow it to.

I won’t say more about the story but can’t resist making a couple of comparisons. Although ILYFSL is set in a well-to-do British household and community, it looks and feels a little like Million Dollar Baby with its stripped down sets, guarded personalities and mean streets. Many post-modern Victorian dramas, such as Remains of the Day, are downbeat and dark but ILYFSL’s extreme palette pushes the genre out of it’s bleak house comfort zone into a new and exciting place. The edginess and existential unease of our era has penetrated, lo, even unto storied British reserve.

KST’s Juliette has some of the wary defensiveness of Kevin Bacon’s Walter in The Woodsman and some of the inner torment of Meryl Streep’s Sophie in Sophie’s Choice.
That is to say that there are no happy feet in this flick. Although, to be fair, there is the occasional warm bubble of amusement above the flinty pain.

In the end, the film succeeded in carrying me into, arguably, the thorniest stretch of the existential briar patch: How does one live with, and not deny or rationalize, the consequences of hurting others? And, more to the point with Juliette, how does one forgive oneself and open one’s heart to life again?

These are not the kind of questions likely to pop up on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in America, India or anywhere else. But the idea of using a life line to call a friend, loved one or relation usually at least shifts the burden we carry, and somehow makes the load lighter.

The International

2009-02-22T18:01:00.002-05:00

I’ve been impressed with the imagination and technical bravura of the three films I’ve seen by Tom Tykwer, the German writer/director: Run Lola Run (1999), The Princess and the Warrior (2000), and Heaven (2002). So when I found out that he had directed The International, I forgot the strong fughedaboutit feeling I had after seeing the unattributed theatrical trailer and zipped over to my local cineplex.

I’m not sorry I saw the film, but if I were Relativity Media, the production company of
record, I’d deep six it immediately. At least then The International would have the
distinction of being associated with other DOA films by talented directors such as Michael Cimino's Heaven’s Gate, Elaine May's Ishtar and Robert Altman's Quintet.

International feels like the love child of the Mission Impossible franchise and Erin Brockovitch, an action-packed, globe-trotting thriller which puts a stop to the ruthless, amoral, greed-grabbing schemes of impeccably dressed corporate bad guys, and brings them to justice. Here the bad guys (chief honcho played by the excellent Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen) are the financial elite. Seems they’ve grown bored with earning obscene profits on mortgages and their stealth derivatives.Now they are into selling game-changing military technology to third world insurgents. All they ask in return is to run the country’s economy. It’s a kind of customer service program. An economy,after all, is really too complicated and troublesome a thing for a government to manage very effectively, anyway. These things are always best left to trusted professionals. Sounds vaguely familiar. And, yeah, we could use a good movie about the sheriff bringing the law to the wild west of financial shenanigans. Especially since real life agents of justice don’t seem willing to pull the trigger. But The International just doesn’t get the job done. Oddly, the excellent cast, including an Interpol agent played by Clive Owen, a Manhattan Assistant DA played by Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl’s world-weary military affairs advisor, all seem to just miss being convincing in their roles. You have to wonder what happened to transform Tom Tykwer from an innovative, soulful maker of films to the guy responsible for this uninspired mess.

Maybe it's just being new in Hollywood. Big money means big pressure to generate return on investment. And that often means starting with a proven money making franchise concept like Mission Impossible or James Bond and just changing the bad guys and the locations. Perhaps Tom Tykwer fell into this trap. Same thing happened to Christopher Nolan, the British writer/director who made two vibrant, breathtakingly innovative films, Following (1998) and Momento (2000), before making it to Hollywood.

Watching his 2002 film, Insomnia, starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams, I kept waiting for flashes of his former genius but, alas, they were few. It didn’t seem like Nolan's movie. Why strap such creative talent into a formulaic harness when almost any director could produce the same work? To be fair, Nolan’s Dark Knight (2008) breathed new life into the Batman franchise, so maybe it just takes some time for foreign-born talent to find its American audience way and navigate through the Hollywood labyrinth. So maybe there is still hope that we’ll see more great, original films from the talented Mr. Tykwer. We need more of his original films which, unlike Nolan’s, are searching after something like truthfulness and integrity in a crazy, corrupt world.

Rachel Getting Married

2009-02-20T20:20:00.005-05:00

Director Jonathan Demme has made a great, grainy, hand-held film. It’s about a Connecticut family, the Buchman’s, upper-middle class folks truly having a good ole time preparing for daughter Rachel’s wedding (Rosemarie DeWitt plays the title role). Patriarch Paul (Bill Irwin) and his second wife Carol (the estimable Anna Deavere Smith) are light on their feet, convivial, amused and amusing, very comfortable inside their own skin. Then frenetic, mordant daughter Kym (Ann Hathaway) shows up on a weekend pass from rehab and tries to push her sister out of the spotlight with increasingly bizarre, petulant, shameless and destructive theatrics. It’s pretty tough to watch at times, this sad, desperate, relentless competition with a more mature and accomplished sibling.

Like the Ice Storm, also set in Connecticut, the tension between the family members is linked to a terrible car accident. As Rachel unfolds we see how this event wounded them all emotionally, either muting or mutating the love they once shared. Kym’s homecoming (Rachel still lives there) rips the screws off the lid they’ve all put on their grief. Rachel and Kym’s biological mother (Debra Winger) also comes to the wedding and brings another dimension of fear-filled, tormented love into the mix. Stuff leaks out all over the place. Everyone except Kym tries their best to keep up the façade of normalcy. Ultimately, enough stuff is spewed, vented, shrieked and crashed so that the weight they all carry lifts ever so slightly. By the end, there’s the faintest glimmer of hope that at least some of them can start to move on.

Tough stuff, but pretty standard for the homecoming genre. Think about Celebration (1998), for example, with its revelations of the father’s sexual abuse of his young sons. Or Margot at the Wedding (2007), where the night before one of two sisters gets married the girls stay up late shredding every memory, exposing family secrets.

Demme’s film enriches the genre by adding real love stories to the angstfest. The film traipses over a lush carpeting of soulful music with a refreshing informality to unpack a sweet, almost gooey love between Rachel and her jazz musician husband, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpestory). I didn’t quite understand the whys and wherefores of their love but the newly weds manifested it abundantly and whole-heartedly. It was at least a plausible if unarticulated love, and certainly a welcome refuge from the film’s main course of people feeling unloved, confused, ashamed and mighty pissed off.

We are grateful to the director for his kindness and sense of narrative balance. Which is to say that the film definitely draws blood and spits bile but does not eat its children. In fact, it gives serious screen time to real affection, admiration, loyalty and creativity (as above). Ultimately, when the sturm und drang has finally subsided and the wedding is over, it’s the human kindness I remember most. And lucky are we who can take this feeling to our own homes and hearts.

The other surprise in this flick is the love story between the sisters Rachel and Kym.
There are several scenes that show how intimately they know each other and, despite some really rough patches, how much affection they share. I wish I felt that close to someone. I thought Kym’s acting out at the pre-wedding was at least partly motivated by jealousy for Sidney, an infantile rage at losing primacy in her sister’s heart, perhaps knowing she’d have to assume more responsibility for herself in future, a scary prospect.

All the actors mentioned above do a great job. Ann Hathaway gives a stunning performance as the triple threat Kym: drugged-out drama queen, bratty young sister (definitely single digits) and well-bred, well-read, vivacious young woman. She's a clear, bright star. Can't wait for her next film. Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel is also spectacular as the film's heroine and perhaps the only evolved individual in the mix. She is gracious and loving to Kym after the wild child has done everything in her power to ruin Rachel’s wedding day. Inspiring and profound.

Speaking of sibling rivalry -- Kym pushed a lot of my buttons, too. She reminded me of my little brother, Alan, who invariably weaseled himself into the middle of my circle of friends. He held forth until he’d charmed everyone with seemingly inexhaustible cuteness. Kym also evoked my middle brother Lee (I am the oldest). He was the kind of guy who once got into a brawl at my birthday party just as cake was being served and had to be taken to the hospital, leaving only blood stains and tearless vows of revenge behind.

Back in the day, ever the doting, surrogate parent, I forgave my brothers for grabbing attention and importance away from me. I had everything going for me; they needed it much more than I did. I realized late in the game that I had given away the farm without much benefit to myself. At some point I was saddened and hurt to realize that my love and what I took as sacrifice for my brothers had not been not perceived as such. The infrequent times we saw each other as 20 and 30 somethings seldom went more than an hour or two before some old wound was inadvertently tricked off and the more combustible aspects of ancient, still festering hurts and wrongs paraded onto the stage. It was awful stuff, painful and ridiculous, and I never found a satisfying way to either work through it or steer around it. At some point, I guess we all decided to just stop doing the dance.

I am not close with either of my brothers these days. I wish I knew how to fix whatever is broken but have concluded, sadly, that it is beyond my poor powers. I miss them and don’t miss them as people, but they are my brothers and we share things no one else does. That’s one of the basic strands of love’s DNA, even though it alone may not be enough to sustain a relationship. Or maybe it’s the wrong kind of common experience, too toxic, tainted. I console myself with the remote possibility of a quirky, funny, earnest and touching reconciliation a la David Lynch’s Straight Story. Maybe something will work out later on.

Bashir's Waltz

2009-02-17T13:02:00.014-05:00

Bashir’s Waltz is an animated film by the Israeli writer/director Ari Forman about Israel’s first Lebanon war in 1982 and the infamous massacres in the Palestinian refuge camps, Sabra and Shatila. The story is told like a documentary built on a dozen or so interviews conducted by Ari Forman’s with his former army buddies.

It’s a disarming approach. The animation is not sophisticated and clever like Pixar’s or starkly primitive like Persepolis. It’s more like a graphic novel with twitchy, South Park-type movement added from time to time. The individual images are rendered sparely but artfully, even soulfully, capturing the essence of a personality, the mood and sensual ambience of a place and time. It’s a very unusual approach because it’s obviously animated but at the same time feels and sounds like a documentary. It takes a few beats for the mind to decide how seriously to take this film. And that’s one of the things that makes Bashir’s Waltz so effective a cinematic poultice for old, still painful wounds: animation gets more easily under the radar of the conscious mind and has a better chance of reaching the deep, dark and scary stuff locked safely away in the unconscious.

For Israelis, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila are about as dark as it gets short of the Holocaust. Before the founding of Israel is 1948, the Jewish people were a nation without a nation state for almost 2,000 years. Relentlessly pogrommed, cruelly bounced out of every nation in Europe, Jews managed to survive by clinging fiercely to the hope of redemption. Next year in Jerusalem, for most, was the dream of creating a modern Jewish state in Israel. But for Jews redemption also meant being ‘a light unto the nations. ‘Among other things, that meant creating a society with an unwavering commitment to social justice and never, ever, oppressing weaker people as we were oppressed for so very long.

Sabra and Shatila signaled something entirely different and unthinkable: Jews were the same as everybody else. While the Israeli Defense Forces did not themselves kill any civilians in the two Palestinian refugee camps, they did allow Lebanese Phalangist militiamen to enter. The Phalangists, who had been trained and partly supplied by the Israelis, had a long history of animosity with the Palestinians. When these Lebanese soldiers murdered 300-3,000 Palestinian civilians (the number is still contested but not the crime) world opinion put the smoking gun solely in Jewish hands.

Israeli’s Kahan Commission investigated the event and concluded that Ariel Sharon, head of Israel’s Defense Ministry at the time, bore personal responsibility for "ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge" and for "not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed." Sharon resigned but the shameful, shattering memory of these events continues. It’s the Israelis’ Abu Ghraib or My Lai, a body blow to the nation’s heart, heritage and legacy.

Forman’s film opens at a bar with an old friend of Ari’s telling him about a recurring nightmare he has of being chased by 26 vicious dogs. The men take it as a metaphor for their army experiences in Lebanon and realize that they’ve both completely blanked out that period of their life. Resolved to remember lost things, Ari embarks on a quest to interview old army buddies.

Characters d

I don’t remember ever seeing Israeli soldiers humanized (or mocked, depending on your point of view). That seems courageous. Israel has been operating in 9.11 mode since the day it was born 60 years ago when Arab forces rejected the UN vote creating the Jewish state and attacked it. Things have only gotten worse. The IDF is widely perceived to be the reason Israel’s four million Jews have not been pushed into the sea, as the Islamic nationalists like to say, by its 80 million presumably hostile Arab neighbors. Could be. But deconstructing the myth of military heroism is a good start towards building a healthier society and a stronger nation.

Milk

2009-02-15T06:45:00.003-05:00

I am amazed by Sean Penn’s performance as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to win an elected office in the United States. Astonished, really. He embodies in movement, posture and tone Milk’s gayness, frankly and convincingly, in all its tender, raunchy and exuberant moods. Penn’s Milk is a complex and contradictory character, very human and very quirky, basically just like the rest of us if a bit more joyfully and fearlessly over the top.

The film also does a good job of capturing the spirit of the drug-tripping, music-grooving, world-changing, justice-seeking, truth-telling, power-to-the-people 60’s revolution as it spilled over into the daily lives of average people in the 1970’s. Hard to believe that there was a time not so long ago when progressive social change was de rigeur. A lot of old barriers were trashed and swept away during that time, or at least moved aside: sexism, racism, ageism, bias against people with disabilities. Big corporations were actually hauled into court and fined for irresponsible dumping of toxic wastes, prejudicial hiring and lending practices, etc. As crazy and chaotic as it sometimes felt, it was very inspiring to be part of positive change. I felt proud to be an American. This film helps to remind us of the values that seem to have been lost on the long strange trip we’ve been on for the last eight years. That’s another reason to see it.

Milk is a breakthrough film for the gay community, a full-blooded affirmation of the GLBT lifestyle after the more careful genre pioneers Brokeback Mountain and Chuck and Buck. But this is not a breakthrough film for Penn. He’s one of the very few actors in the known world who has not slipped into a bankable and talent squelching stereotype. While many great actors like Al Pacino, Richard Burton and Marlon Brando had magical screen presence, they were always, fundamentally, playing themselves dressed up in different costumes for different eras, with the occasional accent thrown in for better or worse. And that was fine, really, because these actors are just so much fun to watch and their gifts are so large and generous.

But Sean Penn is in another dimension. Somehow, he manages to erase a higher percentage of his celebrity than others, get over his brand and his ego and pour himself into the body, blood and brains of his role. Not an easy thing to do. Of course, many fine actors physically immerse themselves in the world of the character they are going to play. Think of Frank Langella spending hours at Nixon’s home in preparation for his role in Frost/Nixon. Or, a variation on this theme, Robert Deniro gaining 70 pounds to play Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. All astonishing stuff, and lucky are we to be able to see these kinds of kinetic performances. But there are, inevitably, some fingerprints of the actor’s trade in the film on even the best of these performances, some endlessly rehearsed professional form or flourish. Not a bad thing, just a flutter of the membrane between real life and acting.

Penn has these set pieces, too, but I don’t mind as much when he ripples the veil of the illusion of the story because his range is so vast and his performances are so heartfelt and compelling. Think about the different roles he’s played recently: Jimmy Markum, a macho ex-con, in Mystic River; Sam Dawson, a mentally retarded man who fight for custody of his 7-year-old daughter, in I Am Sam; Emmet Ray, a Depression era jazz guitarist, in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Low Down.

Hard to imagine where he goes from here. There’s a rumor he’s playing the role of Larry Fine in a 2009 release of The Three Stooges! There are times in history when wise men must play the fool.

Revolutionary Road

2009-02-14T13:17:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time, Kate Winslet was a rosy-cheeked girl in love soaring like a human para sail over the prow of the Titanic. The ecstatic furling of her dress, the wind shooting through her legs, she was the pin-up girl for the irrationally exuberant '90's where thrill was the navigational instrument of choice, consequences be damned.

In Revolutionary Road she's back on board another Titanic of sorts called the post-WWII American Dream. She plays April Wheeler, a woman who trades in her dream of being an actress for the role of being a wife, mother and community member in the 'burbs. She gets into the wardrobe part of it, being perfectly turned-out and made-up for every occasion. She even gets dolled up for breakfast and bed, never the same outfit twice. But just never gets any really good lines. None of her roles hold very much interest for her and she grows increasingly estranged from herself and her ever amiable and largely bullet proof husband, Frank Wheeler, played with puckish cunning by Leonardo DiCaprio (who played her love interest in Titanic). April is the dark queen of the American Dream, a hotter version of June Allison and Harriet Nelson, a David Lynch pinned down girl. Which is to say that when her ruby red slippers are finally clicked out, there's literally no place like home.

This is a tragic tale for April and the women of the Fifties' generation. The scene where April is dutifully washing dishes while weeping her heart out in despair reminded me of my own mother carefully ironing handkerchiefs and socks while threatening to kill herself by driving her car into a tree. It seemed ridiculous to me at the time, not sad like it does now, because I knew my mother had far too much respect for things to ever intentionally damage one, especially one as expensive as a car. Besides, if she really wanted to die, all she had to do was scratch the car and my father would kill her.

Like hundreds of millions of women --and men -- my mother and April Wheeler bought the American Dream package on faith, happily trading talent and creativity for lounging by the pool casually gossiping or smoking cigarettes while reading glossy fashion magazines. But there doesn't seem to be much opportunity for April to express herself on issues of the day or especially the unwelcome suspicion that her own piece of the Dream is terminally vapid and doomed to crash into something sooner or later.

Winslet gives a brilliant, subtle performance, letting her rage and bitterness seep through her perfect carapace without ever once smudging her make up. DiCaprio's character goes through a similar process, shape shifting into his role in the business world. He catches a few breaks and ends up OK but without apparent conscience or scruples. And here we all are today.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-02-14T13:08:00.003-05:00

I went to see this movie with my wife Myrna and walked out a half hour later after a child has his eyes burned out with molten metal. This was done to make him into a more profitable beggar. It was part of a primitive capitalist enterprise run by a couple of otherwise nice guys who befriend homeless kids only to exploit them in cruel but not sexual ways. A few minutes earlier, a child had escaped an elevated latrine he's trapped in by jumping through the bottom and into a very deep pool of doo-doo. Covered head to toe in glue-like excrement, his stink miraculously parts a dense crowd thronging around a visiting film star. And so it goes for heavy handed plot drivers and even heavier social commentary.

Director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Train Spotting) is the grand master of high-impact, heavy-handed films assault films that also carry serious social messages. I like his verve but I find his films hard to watch. He's made an odd genre marriage: MTV hooking up with the action thriller genre to pay a visit to the long vanished social conscience films of Stanley Kramer and Sidney Lumet. He may have invented a new genre, perhaps a new cinematic syntax. Maybe it’s how we should be communicating in such a complex, interconnected, boundary stradling, wired world.

In the first 30 minutes of Slumdog the director uses a bright cinematic palette and very fluid, expressive camera work to chronicle the violence and abuse routinely inflicted on helpless children. Our introduction to the main characters, Jamal, Salim and Latika, is a very up-close and cringeful experience of the poverty of their lives. Never one to let the audience get too comfortable, Mr. Boyle jerks his story line 20 years ahead in time when Jamal is a contestant on the Indian franchise for “Who Wants To Be a MiIlionaire?” where he is quite graphically tortured for answering too many questions correctly. Then we zip back to childhood again and forward to points in between. It’s exciting enough but by the time the molten lead is poured, I’d had it with this very dark Dickensian fable and its slumdog-eat-slumdog capitalism. Aren't we getting a belly full of this kind of stuff every day now in the current financial meltdown? Gimme a break and lemme out of here.

A few weeks later I gave the film another try because Elizabeth, a film friend whose opinion I respect, told me that the movie changed gears after the scenes described above and became very compelling. I went without Myrna this time because she's very sensitive to all manner of violence and I sometimes don't stay with tougher films when we go to see them together.

Turns out, Elizabeth was right. I ended up enjoying the film and was shocked to discover that it turned out to be a love story. I got interested in Jamal and Latika’s impossible quest to be together, eventually triumphing against the powerful and nasty forces keeping them apart. I won’t get into the plot machinations because they are inordinately silly. But the funny thing is that they work if you take this fable on its own terms. Frankly, I was grateful to find any human warmth and kindness at all in this film after my initial clsoe enounter. Love triumphs uber alles is not a bad message to take out of the Cineplex, especially after being beaten up with powerful cinematic techniques.

Then out of nowhere, the credits rolling, the entire cast is putting on Michael Jackson moves in an alley. No more poverty and third world despair for this crew. Bring on cool, sexy and, well, joyful. It looked like West Side Story, Indian style. I wish Danny Boyle hadn’t saved it for a closing riff. Perhaps the time will come when Bollywood trumps Hollywood once and for all. There are more things, Horatio, in heaven and earth than your producers can dream of.

Frost/Nixon

2009-02-13T15:34:00.006-05:00

NIXON, THE ARCHETYPAL VILLAIN

For my generation, Richard Nixon is the moral equivalent of a bad traffic accident. We stare into the bloody mess looking for entrails and oracles, hoping against all reason for final answers to the obvious but unproven crimes and violations of Nixon’s imperial presidency. We loved to hate this man, and many of us (veiled disclosure) still do. His oddly tormented body language and clownish face perpetually in 5 o’clock shadow, his artificial gravitas, all added up a savage caricature of responsible adult behavior, better even than Dan Akyrod’s riff. Somehow Tricky Dick seemed to invite us to use him as a tackling dummy to bash the validity and import our own parents’ values. To his credit, he could take the hit, this grotesque love child of the American rags to riches story that we were all force fed as kids. In dissecting the American Dream as college students, and exposing the places where there was no living flesh on the bone, Nixon was our unwitting whetstone and inspiration. We could always count on him for that.

A NEW TAKE ON TRICKY DICK

Frost/Nixon connects all these dots, faithful to the workmanlike approach of its first incarnation as a New York City stage play. The film chronicles the famous series of four interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977, three years after he resigned the presidency in a cloud of suspicion and shame. For Frost, a glib talk show host recently exiled to Australia after his NY show tanked, it was his ticket to a huge audience and a shot at returning to the big time. For Nixon, exiled to his California compound after his disgrace, it was a chance to redeem his presidency by showcasing his many legitimate achievements such as initiating nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviet Union and opening diplomatic relations with China.

HOW IT GOES

Screen (and play) writer Peter Morgan lays the tale out as a kind of prize fight with the two combatants and their entourage discussing strategy, doing pre-event workouts and rooting their guy on from separate green rooms during the videotaping, suffering body blows when he does. This narrative spine is judiciously intercut with mocdoc interviews with the supporting players on both sides, Kevin Bacon is Nixon’s corner man and Oliver Platt is Frost’s political conscience. They both do a good job in these small supporting roles.

Director Ron Howard brings a bit more restraint and a bit less over-the-top Hollywood stuff to his series of moving films retelling American history from the point of view of the little people who made our country great (Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, et.al). Keep up the good work, Ron.

THE PLAYERS

Frank Langella portrays Nixon as a man with a sly playfulness and a baleful inferiority complex. Like Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Langella performs the impossible feat of making me feel some compassion for Tricky Dick - - and for this I will never forgive either one of them, or Peter Morgan. I've forgiven Oliver Stone because I know he hated Nixon as much as anyone and his film's portrait of Nixon the little man walking in very big shoes seemed revelatory and transcendent, a spiritual breakthrough. Gotta love that.

Frost, as played by Michael Sheen, is the archetypal facile, telegenic showman. Tony Blair on steroids. Frost, unlike Blair, is entirely about the buzz. He has so little interest in the content of interviews, or Nixon’s agenda to redeem himself through them, that he does not even discuss the issues with the aides he’s hired explicitly for that purpose. Nixon, of course, knows exactly what he wants to achieve and where Frost is vulnerable. In the first interview Frost naively gives Nixon far more latitude than he should and quickly loses control of the show. Sheen doesn't do passive very convincingly in these scenes. The movie loses credibility traction here but we certainly get the point.

The tussle for air time slowly works itself out in subsequent interviews, with Frost at last rising to the intellectual and moral challenge of confronting Nixon about his role in Watergate. I haven't watched the actual interviews for 30 years, and am curious how much Peter Morgan based his play on the actual play-by-play.

There’s a fine dramatic moment near the end of the film in which Nixon, driven by Frost’s now relentless, impassioned questioning, is teetering on the brink of disclosure. Langella gets the posture just right, the shoulder hunched, the head alert and held high at an awkward angle, the mouth and eyes a stream of nuances from pride to utter desolation. This alone was worth the ticket, truly amazing work (but not Oscar material in my opinion).

STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Seems to me that Nixon’s abuse of power and trampling of legality (“If the president does it," he apparently once said, "it’s legal.”) is the mother of all subsequent extra-legal shenanigans like Regan's Iran-Contra scams and the Bush gang’s cynically manipulating our country into an unnecessary war. This is not to mention the covert engineering of the current financial meltdown, of course, which will prove to be the longest lasting legacy of the reign of the barbarian kings -- and the most damaging. For this checks and balances-destroying trend over the last 40 years, we can thank Richard Nixon.

MEA CULPA

I came to this film hoping to expiate the various demons I associate with Tricky Dick. But the film didn’t deliver anything like that (just as Oliver Stone’s W. didn’t deliver a catharsis about George Bush either). While Langella’s Nixon has a few moments where the castle walls crumble and he reveals some degree of pain and shame for his illegal acts, it doesn’t satisfy the need I still feel for justice and accountability. We needed that from the Nixon team in order to restore the checks and balances of our system of government. What we got was a simulacrum, not the clear, crisp corrective that was needed. As a result, the problem continued to spiral out of control until we get to the Bush administration, which did things in the name of executive privilege that might even have troubled Nixon.

The Wrestler (with optional Pi Prelude)

2009-02-11T09:34:00.007-05:00

Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film, Pi, scared and disturbed me. So much so that I avoided seeing his 2000 film, Requiem for a Dream, and why I figured I’d pass on his new film, The Wrestler. But the preview seemed engaging and my daughter Ania liked it, so I girded my loins and gave it a try.

FIRST, ABOUT Pi (or skip down a few #'s to the comments on The Wrestler)
The story is about the obsessive, constantly ramped-up quest of a computer whiz to find God in the numerology of the Torah. Maximillian Cohen, the film’s whiz, is not your typical seeker of truth. He acts like he’s locked in a grudge match with infinity. Most of the movie is about him ratcheting up his computing power to crack through the mysterious membrane that separates human beings from understanding the universe. Dozens of razor sharp jump cuts and ultra-close ups later, Cohen actually plants an advanced chip in his head. And thus are Icarus’ cyberbrains fried and he ends up living in a human body with a different form of intelligence ... which is where The Wrestler begins, more or less.

DISCLOSURE
As a recovering seeker of ultimate knowledge, I have answered the call to go beyond the biological senses to a more meaningful dimension of experience. Pi reminded me how self-referential such a quest can be, and how far out one can get. At the same time, being in this zone was arguably the most exciting time of my life. Everything that happened (or didn’t) resonated with several simultaneous levels of meaning. The world rippled when I moved. Pi, I feared, had the power to awaken my mystical yearnings from their slumbers, and I secretly want that to happen on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays after 3:30 in the PM, unless it's a good day for golf.

ARONOFSKY
He's David Lynch edgy, Kubric vivid with a pinch of Werner Herzog Gotterdamerung. Pi was arguably the most intensely exhilarating and bruising cinematic experience I have ever had, or want to have.

THE WRESTLER
Mickey Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a 50-something professional wrestler still the king of the ring after all these years. Wrestling is his one and only calling and the arena, where men smash knees into each other's groins, is the one place on earth where he feels truly loved. Go figure.

Unlike the weaselly, hyper-cerebral Max (the Pi guy mentioned above), Randy is robust, calm and fundamentally likable. Even though he’s something of a golden oldie on the wrestling circuit, he never lords it over his fellow actor-athletes. Neither does he back down from the physical abuse inflicted by guys half his age, even when it involves having staples shot at close range into chest, face and back. Randy sometimes ramps up the drama by inflicting bloody wounds on himself.

Some of this is not pretty to watch but The Ram maintains a certain dignity in wrestling’s crude circus ecosystem. He never seems to tire of his scripted triumphs over sadistic, death to America-spouting giants wearing Osama Bin Ladin get-ups. That’s partly because he always wins, and who doesn't like that. It's also partly that he’s cast as a hero in an era sorely lacking in same, and that he has the privilege of acting out our collective need for the simple justice that’s been missing from contemporary society for some time now.

But Randy’s real triumph, pushing 60 years of age, is still being in the game at all. His battle royale is against the demons of aging and decrepitude which have long ago sent his peers into rehab or car sales. His quest is to stay forever young and vital; the body yearns for immortality as the mind yearns for God.

ANOTHER DISCLOSURE
I identify with not knowing when to quit, having recently started playing in a softball league after three decades out of the game. It’s very cool to be reawakening muscle memory from my youth and playing a game I once truly loved. I find myself talking a lot about my softball adventures to friends and strangers alike. I am surprised that I can still play the game and at times I must sound (ugh) a little boastful to be 60 and still mixing it up credibly with guys in their 20’s. No very serious injuries so far (but basketball is another story we’ll save for another time). I regret having missed so many seasons of team sports joy, but then I was never a joiner of teams, clubs or organizations or someone who found enjoyment in them when I was involved. I have always loved being a player but I lack the gene for being a comfortable, integral part of groups. Perhaps like Randy the Ram ...

CLOSING THOUGHTS ON THE WRESTLER
Even fake wrestling is a bruising impact sport, pro football without pads of any kind and with ordinary objects like chairs and staple guns turned into weapons. Randy stays in the game thanks to a very high pain threshold and a rainbow coalition of steroids, pain killers and uppers. He sacrifices everything to stay in wrestling, including his health and his relationship with his daughter and former wife. Feeling mortality closing in on him, he makes a long over due and touching but bungled attempt to reconnect with his estranged daughter. And he almost connects with an aging stripper/hooker (played by an earnest and still appealing Marissa Tomei) who is also looking for a way out of her own addiction to using her body to get love from strangers. There seems to be some shared spark between them, these two good-hearted, used-up performers, knowing it’s time for a second act but not quite sure they have what it takes to live off stage as themselves.

The Reader

2009-02-05T06:27:00.014-05:00

In The Reader, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp worker, Hanna Schmitz, struggling to keep an air tight lid on her role in the Nazi horror show. She resumes her life after the war by getting an anonymous job as a street car conductor in Berlin. And she works at her job as if the fate of the world depended on her taking tickets and keeping litter off the floor. Multiply this kind of commitment to work, order and cleanliness by millions of people and it's no wonder Germans thought they were the Master Race. Who could compete with that? But it's also no wonder they lost the war. Who can keep that up for long without cutting off blood flow to vital organs like the heart?

Hanna is tormented and driven, friendless, before starting a love affair with an underage boy, Michael Berg. His tender readings to her of classic works from the Western cannon, both great and small, help to thaw her painfully frozen humanity. Hanna herself is illiterate, hence the title, another shameful secret she is careful to hide. Winslet plays this tormented role with the white hot intensity of a religious zealot seeking salvation while believing that she doesn't deserve it at all. Truly amazing.

Ralph Fiennes plays Hanna's lover boy as an adult. Now a barrister, he is divorced and seems to wander around clueless under a dark cloud which we assume has something to do with having lost touch with Hanna, his first love, and the civilized life and culture of his nation before the barbarians torched and trampeled it all. Ultimately, Hanna and Michael reconnect again and, among other events, he helps the former Nazi cog with her self-initiated project of learning to read.

It's a moving, redemptive glimmer in a unrelentingly bleak film. I respect Stephen Daldry, the film maker, for not giving us a happy ending or even a good cry. This film left an acrid, charred taste in my mouth and that seems about right. WWII was a nightmarishly barbaric. We all think that means the Holocaust, and it does, but it also means Hiroshima and Dresden. Both sides were guilty of extreme crimes against humanity. Somehow love reaches through this mess and enables us to live again. Gee, I dunno, wouldn't it be better if we just stayed a little more conscious and didn't have to go through this kind of horror show again and again? Maybe we should take a vow to become makers of history, rather than just readers. Towards that end, this film should be required viewing for all the big bank CEO's and hedge fund managers who have gotten irresponsibly rich by playing fast and loose with the rules -- and all those who looked the other way because they were also getting (proportionately) rich.