I've Loved You For So Long

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.