Julie/Julia

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

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.