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"There is always the fear that a wonder of the world can’t live up to expectations. Not so." - Lauren Bacall, 1924 - 2014
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Unbroken
Aside from a thirst for competition, winning and losing, what elite distance runners often have in common is their tolerance for pain. And it is this tolerance that second-time director Angelina Jolie returns to again and again, over and over, time after time, in her cinematic rendition of the plight of real-life Louis Zamperini (played by Jack O’Connell). I have always thought of Zamperini as an Olympic athlete, running the 5000 meters in 1936 at Berlin, finishing eighth but tearing off his final lap so fast – in 56 seconds – it prompted Hitler to request a meet and greet with him. Of course, Zamperini was much more, a second lieutenant in the Air Force during WWII where a plane his plane crash-landed in the Pacific, stranding him and two others on a life raft for 47 days before he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and forced into torturous interment for the remainder of the conflict.
To put this extraordinary tale into context, Jolie, working in conjunction with an all-star squadron of screenwriters (Richard LaGravanese, William Nicholson, and Joel & Ethan Coen), provides several early-film flashbacks to account for Zamperini's past. She re-creates the Olympic race while also showing how running allowed him to emerge from a youthful shell of directionless vice and being picked on by bullies in passages evoking traditional Sports Movie blarney, a tone “Unbroken” emulates even as its content becomes more and more vicious. It sort of wants to unsettle but it mostly wants to inspire, and so the screenplay offers fortune cookie wisdom like the repeated mantra, “If you can take it, you can make it.” As in, if you can tolerate the pain, you can live to fight another day, reducing an otherwise remarkable story to wishy-washy wisdom.
As Louis wastes away on the raft in starkly rendered passages that are the film’s highlight, he makes a classic plea deal with God that should he emerge from these waters alive he will devote his life to the Lord and Savior. He gets out of those waters alive, sure enough, but once he is placed in shackles as an “enemy of Japan”, he must still adhere to his deal with the Man above, right? Thus, this version of his story essentially transforms into “The Passion of Louie.”
The POW camp is lorded over by Mutsuhiro Watanabe, “The Bird”, an infamous figure in Japanese history but one allowed no dimension on screen. In Laura Hillenbrand’s book on which the film is based, a Japanese camp accountant claimed that torturing prisoners aroused in “The Bird” a sadistic sexual delight. And the performance by Japanese pop star Miyavi, which is mostly one-note belligerence, does offer hints at this sexual sadism, though Jolie, perhaps thinking of holiday box office, is unwilling to take that fork in the road. She doesn't want to mute her hero's heroism, and so she frames even the most dire moments so handsomely that they stand in strange contrast to the terror occurring within them. Zamperini is lit less like Brando in "Apocalypse Now" than Heston in "The Ten Commandments."
She is also unwilling to show life as a POW of Japan as anything beyond a ceaseless pageant of excessive torture. There is no attempt to gain information from the Americans or to barter their lives. They are just vessels for brutal abuse, and the film overly fixates on the abuse of Zamperini, moving everyone else aside as he takes the cause of all his brothers-in-chains upon his shoulders, rendered quite literally in the sequence where he is forced to hold a wooden board aloft for over half-an-hour. Who does that remind you of? We are told of the perils of envisioning our sports stars as heroes and yet “Unbroken” goes one better (worse) by imagining Louis Zamperini as a Christ-figure.
To Jolie's credit, she does not simply follow the broad outline of his existence by handing out details like pieces of cheese in a foregone biopic maze so prone to theatrical release this time of year. Instead she marshals a few biographical details into a surprisingly lean movie that gives strict focus to a specific period of his life. Yet she still miscalculates, drawing that lean movie out to two hours and seventeen minutes and stripping away every ounce of her protagonist's characterization until all that's left is a symbolic pillar made to endure punishment to deliver his countrymen from bondage.
To put this extraordinary tale into context, Jolie, working in conjunction with an all-star squadron of screenwriters (Richard LaGravanese, William Nicholson, and Joel & Ethan Coen), provides several early-film flashbacks to account for Zamperini's past. She re-creates the Olympic race while also showing how running allowed him to emerge from a youthful shell of directionless vice and being picked on by bullies in passages evoking traditional Sports Movie blarney, a tone “Unbroken” emulates even as its content becomes more and more vicious. It sort of wants to unsettle but it mostly wants to inspire, and so the screenplay offers fortune cookie wisdom like the repeated mantra, “If you can take it, you can make it.” As in, if you can tolerate the pain, you can live to fight another day, reducing an otherwise remarkable story to wishy-washy wisdom.
As Louis wastes away on the raft in starkly rendered passages that are the film’s highlight, he makes a classic plea deal with God that should he emerge from these waters alive he will devote his life to the Lord and Savior. He gets out of those waters alive, sure enough, but once he is placed in shackles as an “enemy of Japan”, he must still adhere to his deal with the Man above, right? Thus, this version of his story essentially transforms into “The Passion of Louie.”
The POW camp is lorded over by Mutsuhiro Watanabe, “The Bird”, an infamous figure in Japanese history but one allowed no dimension on screen. In Laura Hillenbrand’s book on which the film is based, a Japanese camp accountant claimed that torturing prisoners aroused in “The Bird” a sadistic sexual delight. And the performance by Japanese pop star Miyavi, which is mostly one-note belligerence, does offer hints at this sexual sadism, though Jolie, perhaps thinking of holiday box office, is unwilling to take that fork in the road. She doesn't want to mute her hero's heroism, and so she frames even the most dire moments so handsomely that they stand in strange contrast to the terror occurring within them. Zamperini is lit less like Brando in "Apocalypse Now" than Heston in "The Ten Commandments."
She is also unwilling to show life as a POW of Japan as anything beyond a ceaseless pageant of excessive torture. There is no attempt to gain information from the Americans or to barter their lives. They are just vessels for brutal abuse, and the film overly fixates on the abuse of Zamperini, moving everyone else aside as he takes the cause of all his brothers-in-chains upon his shoulders, rendered quite literally in the sequence where he is forced to hold a wooden board aloft for over half-an-hour. Who does that remind you of? We are told of the perils of envisioning our sports stars as heroes and yet “Unbroken” goes one better (worse) by imagining Louis Zamperini as a Christ-figure.
To Jolie's credit, she does not simply follow the broad outline of his existence by handing out details like pieces of cheese in a foregone biopic maze so prone to theatrical release this time of year. Instead she marshals a few biographical details into a surprisingly lean movie that gives strict focus to a specific period of his life. Yet she still miscalculates, drawing that lean movie out to two hours and seventeen minutes and stripping away every ounce of her protagonist's characterization until all that's left is a symbolic pillar made to endure punishment to deliver his countrymen from bondage.
Monday, December 29, 2014
American Sniper
"American Sniper" opens with a moment of intensely rendered drama when Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), Navy SEAL extraordinaire, is stricken with an immense heat-of-the-battle decision, to shoot or not to shoot a mother and child potentially on the verge of taking the lives of his comrades-in-fatigues. The film brings us right up to "Yes!" or "No!" and then......flashes back to the beginning of his story. This is a traditional thriller device and one that seems tailor-made to trigger a tidy all-American action-adventure. After all, the real-life Chris Kyle, as the ads ceaselessly bill, was the most lethal sniper in United States military history, one with 160 confirmed kills that directly correlated to an $80,000 bounty put on his head by Iraqi enemies. He was nicknamed "The Legend" on account of his exploits. Yet just as that nickname is employed onscreen not as mere militaristic braggadocio but as a skewering of mythologizing in the midst of events still taking place, the opening sequence plays as a purposeful feint toward a traditional thriller before opting for something more illuminatingly introspective.
Clint Eastwood directed the film and while there are several notable battle sequences set in Iraq, these are never the film's strict focus. He, in tandem with writer James Dean Hall (adapting from Kyle's book of the same name), transform "American Sniper" into a patient character study, one that traverses almost nauseatingly familiar ground while nonetheless enlightening specifically because of its resistance to elucidating the war-going experience. The 84 year old auteur's preferred leisurely un-auteurist sorta style allows the theoretically rote introductory moments of Kyle's boyhood with a father demanding ferocious obedience giving way to a pre-military existence as a rodeo rider, a "cowboy" as if he were a latter day John Wayne Green Beret, to effectively encompass a structured life giving way to one of aimlessness.
It is not until he heeds Uncle Sam's request in the wake of the twin bombing of African US embassies in 1998 (a sly dig at the reactionary mentality) that his life gains genuine traction, both within the naval ranks and on the homefront, where he eventually marries Taya (Sienna Miller). Their meet cute at a bar is a fairly moldy concept, yet still rings true in how the actress believably communicates in but a few moments her search for something tangible in a wandering life. Kyle recognizes and embraces it. And then 9/11 happens and he goes to war.
"American Sniper" deftly portrays how the military both builds Kyle up in the very real brotherhood he forms and tears him down in the psychological toils of war. It does not, however, resort to blatant speechifying to make these points, simply letting events accumulate until he is internally hurtling out of control. Nor does it seek to openly politicize. The only examination of the Iraq war from a national perspective is a palpably naive one wherein Kyle wants to serve and protect America because it's America and America is The Greatest Country In The World. Slowly, quietly, that viewpoint is stripped away, and, perhaps without him making the conscious realization, he finds himself accepting extended duty to protect and avenge the friends he has made more than to defend the honor of his country. "They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it," as Eric Bana said in the exemplary "Black Hawk Down", though, to its immense credit, "American Sniper" doesn't even need to say it.
“Tell me why you do it. I want to understand.” This is what Taya demands of Chris in a late sequence because she wants to know why he keeps sending himself off to harm’s way in spite of his family, and why he is so shut off and closed down from the world around him. And despite her putting the question to him so pointedly, he doesn’t give an answer. Not because he doesn’t have an answer, necessarily, but because he can’t articulate it. What can you possibly say to get someone who hasn’t lived through it to understand it? And this marks "American Sniper" as an outlier. It's not quite a recruiting film but it’s also not quite anti-war. It says everything by saying nothing. War movies, often rendered by those who have never been to war, so often seek to denounce it or exalt it or explain it. Eastwood has no intention of doing any of these things.
Cooper is a revelation in the lead role. Under the shepherding of David O. Russell he tapped into a distinct and marvelously entertaining manic energy for back-to-back powerhouse turns in "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." Here, however, he takes that manic energy and purposely represses it so that by the end he is practically bubbling over with a mental strain that he cannot (not will not - cannot) define. In one harrowing scene he has arrived home from war only to avoid his family and take up residence at a barstool. Taya calls him. He admits where he is. She expresses distress. Why wouldn't he just come home. "I guess," he replies, "I just needed a minute." And in that single line reading and in that single bit of actorly affectation, Cooper conveys the toll a serious military life takes. Though we empathize with it, we can't understand it. "What is it about?" I sense people craving to ask in the wake of this film. That's just the thing - we'll never really know what it's about.
Clint Eastwood directed the film and while there are several notable battle sequences set in Iraq, these are never the film's strict focus. He, in tandem with writer James Dean Hall (adapting from Kyle's book of the same name), transform "American Sniper" into a patient character study, one that traverses almost nauseatingly familiar ground while nonetheless enlightening specifically because of its resistance to elucidating the war-going experience. The 84 year old auteur's preferred leisurely un-auteurist sorta style allows the theoretically rote introductory moments of Kyle's boyhood with a father demanding ferocious obedience giving way to a pre-military existence as a rodeo rider, a "cowboy" as if he were a latter day John Wayne Green Beret, to effectively encompass a structured life giving way to one of aimlessness.
It is not until he heeds Uncle Sam's request in the wake of the twin bombing of African US embassies in 1998 (a sly dig at the reactionary mentality) that his life gains genuine traction, both within the naval ranks and on the homefront, where he eventually marries Taya (Sienna Miller). Their meet cute at a bar is a fairly moldy concept, yet still rings true in how the actress believably communicates in but a few moments her search for something tangible in a wandering life. Kyle recognizes and embraces it. And then 9/11 happens and he goes to war.
"American Sniper" deftly portrays how the military both builds Kyle up in the very real brotherhood he forms and tears him down in the psychological toils of war. It does not, however, resort to blatant speechifying to make these points, simply letting events accumulate until he is internally hurtling out of control. Nor does it seek to openly politicize. The only examination of the Iraq war from a national perspective is a palpably naive one wherein Kyle wants to serve and protect America because it's America and America is The Greatest Country In The World. Slowly, quietly, that viewpoint is stripped away, and, perhaps without him making the conscious realization, he finds himself accepting extended duty to protect and avenge the friends he has made more than to defend the honor of his country. "They won't understand that it's about the men next to you, and that's it," as Eric Bana said in the exemplary "Black Hawk Down", though, to its immense credit, "American Sniper" doesn't even need to say it.
“Tell me why you do it. I want to understand.” This is what Taya demands of Chris in a late sequence because she wants to know why he keeps sending himself off to harm’s way in spite of his family, and why he is so shut off and closed down from the world around him. And despite her putting the question to him so pointedly, he doesn’t give an answer. Not because he doesn’t have an answer, necessarily, but because he can’t articulate it. What can you possibly say to get someone who hasn’t lived through it to understand it? And this marks "American Sniper" as an outlier. It's not quite a recruiting film but it’s also not quite anti-war. It says everything by saying nothing. War movies, often rendered by those who have never been to war, so often seek to denounce it or exalt it or explain it. Eastwood has no intention of doing any of these things.
Cooper is a revelation in the lead role. Under the shepherding of David O. Russell he tapped into a distinct and marvelously entertaining manic energy for back-to-back powerhouse turns in "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." Here, however, he takes that manic energy and purposely represses it so that by the end he is practically bubbling over with a mental strain that he cannot (not will not - cannot) define. In one harrowing scene he has arrived home from war only to avoid his family and take up residence at a barstool. Taya calls him. He admits where he is. She expresses distress. Why wouldn't he just come home. "I guess," he replies, "I just needed a minute." And in that single line reading and in that single bit of actorly affectation, Cooper conveys the toll a serious military life takes. Though we empathize with it, we can't understand it. "What is it about?" I sense people craving to ask in the wake of this film. That's just the thing - we'll never really know what it's about.
Friday, December 26, 2014
Thursday, December 25, 2014
Christmas Day
-"Hell of a time to be workin'."
-"What do you want for Christmas?"
-"My two front teeth."
-"May your wish be granted."
Just remember, dear friends and loyal readers, wherever you are this Christmas and however grand of a time you may be having, somewhere, likely in an exotic European locale, thieves, mercenaries, even madmen, are plotting heists and getting into car chases to chop vital briefcases off unlucky blokes' wrists.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Jingle Bell Rocks
The opening sequence of "Jingle Bell Rocks" finds its director and human through-line, Mitchell Kezin, entering an expansive record store and digging through racks and crates of Christmas music compact discs and vinyl records, audibly fawning over particular discoveries like someone from "High Fidelity" stumbling across a trove of "original, not rereleased – underlined – Frank Zappa albums." In that moment it doesn't feel to wrong worry that the ensuing ninety minute documentary will simply focus on collectible minutiae with a music snob's bent. And really, what could be worse than someone being snobbish about the sonic dreck that is Perry Como crooning "Do You Hear What I Hear?"
"Jingle Bell Rocks", however, resists a memorabilia fetish and a dive down the rabbit hole of kitsch, a dive which would have been so easy considering the plethora of tacky crap passing for most of Christmas music. That, in fact, is one of the very ideas which Kezin sets out to refute. Sure, he spends a few minutes here and there on bum offerings like "Santa Came On A Nuclear Missile", but even that is intended to demonstrate a specific time and place and how an otherwise disposable holiday tune can actually bear the brunt of history. No, his goal is to look past the Xmas Mall Muzak and illustrate that a long-suspicious genre is an off-the-beaten-path goldmine.
The film addresses several of the more mainstream melodic eccentricities, such as Run D.M.C.'s legendary "Christmas In Hollis", which includes a quickie interview with Run (i.e. Joseph Simmons) himself who makes every writer feel like a useless pustule when he claims to have written the whole thing in seven minutes while eating eggs. Yet the film offers many more rarefied gems, some by name, some just appearing here and there on the omnipresent soundtrack, such as Reuben Anderson's remarkable Calypso-flavored "Christmas Time Again" which I have been playing non-stop this December.
Kezin relays his own auspicious introduction to the majesty of Christmas music - specifically a Nat King Cole song called "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot". And seeing him recount this story, the emotion in his voice and in his expression become palpable, and you realize just how personal this documentary is for its auteur. To be sure, his intimacy with the material brings "Jingle Bell Rocks" to the edge of pathos - like Charlie Brown if he didn't have Snoopy for levity - and it is occasionally inflicted with the same sort of sentimentality possessed by the songs it seeks to denounce. Yet the overriding intent is so true that it renders these faults a wash.
It's not simply the idea of the season's music that he is attempting to rescue but the idea of the secular holiday itself as something beyond the billion percent off sales, lame office parties and Santas at the mall. He sees Christmas as a connector to our past, and as one interviewee astutely observes, "There's nothing like music for evoking memories of the past."
"Jingle Bell Rocks", however, resists a memorabilia fetish and a dive down the rabbit hole of kitsch, a dive which would have been so easy considering the plethora of tacky crap passing for most of Christmas music. That, in fact, is one of the very ideas which Kezin sets out to refute. Sure, he spends a few minutes here and there on bum offerings like "Santa Came On A Nuclear Missile", but even that is intended to demonstrate a specific time and place and how an otherwise disposable holiday tune can actually bear the brunt of history. No, his goal is to look past the Xmas Mall Muzak and illustrate that a long-suspicious genre is an off-the-beaten-path goldmine.
The film addresses several of the more mainstream melodic eccentricities, such as Run D.M.C.'s legendary "Christmas In Hollis", which includes a quickie interview with Run (i.e. Joseph Simmons) himself who makes every writer feel like a useless pustule when he claims to have written the whole thing in seven minutes while eating eggs. Yet the film offers many more rarefied gems, some by name, some just appearing here and there on the omnipresent soundtrack, such as Reuben Anderson's remarkable Calypso-flavored "Christmas Time Again" which I have been playing non-stop this December.
Kezin relays his own auspicious introduction to the majesty of Christmas music - specifically a Nat King Cole song called "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot". And seeing him recount this story, the emotion in his voice and in his expression become palpable, and you realize just how personal this documentary is for its auteur. To be sure, his intimacy with the material brings "Jingle Bell Rocks" to the edge of pathos - like Charlie Brown if he didn't have Snoopy for levity - and it is occasionally inflicted with the same sort of sentimentality possessed by the songs it seeks to denounce. Yet the overriding intent is so true that it renders these faults a wash.
It's not simply the idea of the season's music that he is attempting to rescue but the idea of the secular holiday itself as something beyond the billion percent off sales, lame office parties and Santas at the mall. He sees Christmas as a connector to our past, and as one interviewee astutely observes, "There's nothing like music for evoking memories of the past."
Monday, December 22, 2014
The Imitation Game
"The Imitation Game", penned by Graham Moore, was a part of Hollywood's infamous Black List, an annual tabulating of the industry's most notorious unproduced screenplays, and it's just this sort of screenplay that calls into question the Black List's whole vetting process. It is based on Andrew Hodges book titled, expositorily, "Alan Turing: An Enigma", the English mathematician who helped break the Nazis' unbreakable Enigma code in the midst of WWII. As such, Morten Tyldum's filmed version of this biography theoretically seeks to solve the enigma of Turing himself only to essentially water down all the real man's complexities that genuinely made him an enigma. It's an indefatigably paint-by-numbers biopic packed with ceaseless components of scene construction ripped straight from a Robert McKee screenwriting class.
If the main character is threatened with being fired, rest assured, his colleagues will threaten to quit, as if Alan Turing momentarily becomes Rudy Ruettiger. If the code is to be broken, and duh, it is, rest assured, it will happen in the immediate aftermath of an "A Ha!" Moment when a female character played by a deserves-so-much-better-than-this Tuppance Middleton is brought in for a single scene solely to expectedly deliver the "unexpected" turning point. Artists can master form, as Mr. McKee likes to harangue, but if the form the artist is mastering is assembly line banality then all you're left with is movie-going bread and water.
Actors have long been tasked with adding flavor to these sorts of milquetoast productions and "The Imitation Game" is no different as Benedict Cumberbatch - playing Turing - and Keira Knightley - as his primary code-breaking ally Joan Clarke - recently reaped SAG nominations for their exemplary professional performances of fine technical merit because I suspect their fellow industry men and women saw this movie and thought to themselves, "Christ, I've been stuck in a blasé biopic too. I know how hard that it is." Thus, despite the role's psychological limitations, Cumberbatch throws himself into it with physical abandon, convincingly affecting the speech and gait and attitude of a man whose social skills are, at best, insanely awkward, though he is discernibly brilliant in spite of himself. And though Knightley is primarily called upon to react to his alternate foundering and intellect, she manages to credibly carve out a markedly intelligent woman in a male-dominated society.
The film is told in flashback, beginning in 1951 in advance of Turing being charged with gross indecency for homosexual acts and being prescribed hormone pills to secrete the gay out of him because, you know, science and all. This is crucial because it makes Turing’s homosexuality the framing device and if it's the framing device then it is made to hover over the entire film. Yet it is only touched upon, never explored. To cover he proposes to Joan and she accepts, yet their relationship in the movie often feels as counterfeit as their sham engagement. "I had my suspicions," she says when he tells her the truth but……when did she? Why did she? The movie never says. The movie never shows. The movie barely has the bare minimum of psychological insight. His sexual proclivity is simply a badge.
This is a Weinstein Company production and we all know how those Weinsteins like their awards and awards often don't reward risks and so the film pitches it right down the middle. Yet if you look carefully, all throughout, lurking around the edges, occasionally peering through the fogged up windows, is another movie, a more emboldened one seeking to be less a story of codebreaking than a character study of the closeted gay man breaking that code. Instead we're left with a striking cutout in a tweed coat, and what could have been insightful and cutting winds up eliciting the an atmospheric aura comparable to Joan Clarke's cache of warm, familiar and very, very reserved cardigans.
If the main character is threatened with being fired, rest assured, his colleagues will threaten to quit, as if Alan Turing momentarily becomes Rudy Ruettiger. If the code is to be broken, and duh, it is, rest assured, it will happen in the immediate aftermath of an "A Ha!" Moment when a female character played by a deserves-so-much-better-than-this Tuppance Middleton is brought in for a single scene solely to expectedly deliver the "unexpected" turning point. Artists can master form, as Mr. McKee likes to harangue, but if the form the artist is mastering is assembly line banality then all you're left with is movie-going bread and water.
Actors have long been tasked with adding flavor to these sorts of milquetoast productions and "The Imitation Game" is no different as Benedict Cumberbatch - playing Turing - and Keira Knightley - as his primary code-breaking ally Joan Clarke - recently reaped SAG nominations for their exemplary professional performances of fine technical merit because I suspect their fellow industry men and women saw this movie and thought to themselves, "Christ, I've been stuck in a blasé biopic too. I know how hard that it is." Thus, despite the role's psychological limitations, Cumberbatch throws himself into it with physical abandon, convincingly affecting the speech and gait and attitude of a man whose social skills are, at best, insanely awkward, though he is discernibly brilliant in spite of himself. And though Knightley is primarily called upon to react to his alternate foundering and intellect, she manages to credibly carve out a markedly intelligent woman in a male-dominated society.
The film is told in flashback, beginning in 1951 in advance of Turing being charged with gross indecency for homosexual acts and being prescribed hormone pills to secrete the gay out of him because, you know, science and all. This is crucial because it makes Turing’s homosexuality the framing device and if it's the framing device then it is made to hover over the entire film. Yet it is only touched upon, never explored. To cover he proposes to Joan and she accepts, yet their relationship in the movie often feels as counterfeit as their sham engagement. "I had my suspicions," she says when he tells her the truth but……when did she? Why did she? The movie never says. The movie never shows. The movie barely has the bare minimum of psychological insight. His sexual proclivity is simply a badge.
This is a Weinstein Company production and we all know how those Weinsteins like their awards and awards often don't reward risks and so the film pitches it right down the middle. Yet if you look carefully, all throughout, lurking around the edges, occasionally peering through the fogged up windows, is another movie, a more emboldened one seeking to be less a story of codebreaking than a character study of the closeted gay man breaking that code. Instead we're left with a striking cutout in a tweed coat, and what could have been insightful and cutting winds up eliciting the an atmospheric aura comparable to Joan Clarke's cache of warm, familiar and very, very reserved cardigans.
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Santa Monica Pier Mystérieux
I like to imagine alternate histories. I like to imagine George Washington living now and becoming the world's greatest craft brewer. I like to imagine the Aztecs whooping some Cortés ass. I like to imagine Colt McCoy's futile throwaway pass in the waning moments of the 2009 Big 12 Championsip Game not hitting that godforsaken railing. I like to imagine Little Boots playing the London Olympics Closing Ceremonies instead of the Spice Girls. I like to imagine Sofia Coppola winning the Best Director Oscar for 2003 and all the Peter Jackson fanatics in hobbit costumes looking at their TV screens bewildered while all the Sofia-ites toast their Sofia Blanc de Blanc and crank Jesus & Mary Chain.
But what I really like to imagine is Rose Dewitt Bukater & Jack Dawson living now rather than then and becoming the world's most prominent electronica duo.
And their first album cover would look like this...
But what I really like to imagine is Rose Dewitt Bukater & Jack Dawson living now rather than then and becoming the world's most prominent electronica duo.
And their first album cover would look like this...
Friday, December 19, 2014
Movies Lost Way Before Terrorists Won
"One could even argue that there’s an element of karmic payback at work here for all the greed and carelessness and calculated idiocy of Hollywood – as they have sown, so also shall they reap, or whatever. Except what, exactly, have they reaped? I guess the titans of America’s culture industry, which is about the only area of manufacturing where we still rule the world, have been revealed as stupid and calculating and driven by fear, as chickenshits who can’t even successfully pretend to believe in the value of their own products. We should have known that already, but maybe the reminder is useful." - Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Two Days, One Night
The Brothers Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc, long purveyors of altruistic narratives with implicit belief in the importance of community, have typically preferred casting non-actors as a way to augment both their patented naturalism and socialist leanings. In "Two Days, One Night", however, they take a hardy gamble, opting for an Oscar-winner and legit movie star in the form of Marion Cotillard to play the lead. It's a choice that, consciously or unconciously, informs their incredible and incredibly frank film, one in which the gradually fostered passion of this particular individual eventually eclipses the collective.
Having just emerged from the shell of a staggering depression, Cotillard's Sandra learns the manager at a solar panel factory where she works has offered her sixteen co-workers the option of either electing to keep her on or letting her go to get their hands on a monetary bonus. Unsurprisingly, they choose the bonus. Sandra pleads for a new vote, and when it is agreed to in the time of two days and one night, she is forced to politick to retain her position. The script, as you might surmise, weaves it so that she heads straight for Judgment Day with eight voting for and eight voting against. Perhaps this premise is a tad contrived, but that's not so much a flaw as a means to an end, not so much forgivable as intrinsically forgiven. And besides, the ginormous swells of emotions it subsequently unleashes are entirely true because of its refusal to aesthetically go slumming for them and because of its even-handed approach to the material.
Set in an industrial Belgian town, there are obvious overtones to the fraught European economic situation of recent years, but "Two Days One Night" succeeds so grandly because it does not revolve around a cause so much as a person. Or, more precisely, people. The Dardennes' camera follows Sandra docu-style from person to person, encouraged by a husband (Fabrizio Rongione) who transcends The Supportive Spouse archetype because the screenplay subtly captures how he must maintain his own shit while helping to keep his wife from losing hers.
Though the scenes of Sandra crusading are brief, each character she encounters is deftly portrayed as a whole human being rather than some symbolic obstacle. They generally understand her plight, save for a couple, and make it clear they didn't vote against her but for the bonus, stuck between goodwill and survival. "Put yourself in my shoes," she says. And they do. But they also ask, whether directly or not, to put herself in their shoes. And she does. Right and wrong aren't blurred so much as they bleed into one another, indistinguishable, evoking a society where any decision made is liable to harm someone aside from the unseen suits who are guiding these faux-morality plays from on high. "I'm not mad at you," she says to those who refuse to change their vote, and you know she's not. You know.
You know because of Marion Cotillard, the finest female performance in a film this year, one in which she personifies weariness by educing tortured bags under her eyes and allowing her inherent allure to fall away in a physical mixture of perspiration that seems to strain all the luster from her omnipresent bright-colored halter tops. It's like she's perpetually just woken up from a sweat-stained nightmare. Rather than a Silkwood or Joan of Arc or someone trying to "change the world", she's simply hanging on to the ledge of existence by her fingernails, and wondering whether or not she should let go. She's more reluctant than determined, more resigned than desperate, getting through on account of a fragile resolve that consistently threatens to crumble. She doesn't want pity, truly, yet Cotillard's mannerisms and her refusal to make eye contact conjures up a beaten-down aura communicating the embarrassment from the pity she engenders nonetheless.
In one moment of extreme lament, when "Needles and Pins" by Petula Clark appears on the car radio, Sandra's husband turns the stero off. She turns it right back on. "You thought the song was too depressing for me?" she asks, and then she smiles. And Cotillard doesn't overdo it. It's not a show-me-your-teeth smile and she doesn't clap and sing along. It's not damn-the-man triumph. She just takes in the momentary hard-won evanescent bliss, and every one of these triumphs, each one a bit bigger than the last, gradually accumulate until she seizes on them and takes possession of herself. In the end, her job doesn't define her, she does, and her final moment, walking away from the camera, another grin waltzing across those sorrowful lips, is a wordless hymn of exultation.
Having just emerged from the shell of a staggering depression, Cotillard's Sandra learns the manager at a solar panel factory where she works has offered her sixteen co-workers the option of either electing to keep her on or letting her go to get their hands on a monetary bonus. Unsurprisingly, they choose the bonus. Sandra pleads for a new vote, and when it is agreed to in the time of two days and one night, she is forced to politick to retain her position. The script, as you might surmise, weaves it so that she heads straight for Judgment Day with eight voting for and eight voting against. Perhaps this premise is a tad contrived, but that's not so much a flaw as a means to an end, not so much forgivable as intrinsically forgiven. And besides, the ginormous swells of emotions it subsequently unleashes are entirely true because of its refusal to aesthetically go slumming for them and because of its even-handed approach to the material.
Set in an industrial Belgian town, there are obvious overtones to the fraught European economic situation of recent years, but "Two Days One Night" succeeds so grandly because it does not revolve around a cause so much as a person. Or, more precisely, people. The Dardennes' camera follows Sandra docu-style from person to person, encouraged by a husband (Fabrizio Rongione) who transcends The Supportive Spouse archetype because the screenplay subtly captures how he must maintain his own shit while helping to keep his wife from losing hers.
Though the scenes of Sandra crusading are brief, each character she encounters is deftly portrayed as a whole human being rather than some symbolic obstacle. They generally understand her plight, save for a couple, and make it clear they didn't vote against her but for the bonus, stuck between goodwill and survival. "Put yourself in my shoes," she says. And they do. But they also ask, whether directly or not, to put herself in their shoes. And she does. Right and wrong aren't blurred so much as they bleed into one another, indistinguishable, evoking a society where any decision made is liable to harm someone aside from the unseen suits who are guiding these faux-morality plays from on high. "I'm not mad at you," she says to those who refuse to change their vote, and you know she's not. You know.
You know because of Marion Cotillard, the finest female performance in a film this year, one in which she personifies weariness by educing tortured bags under her eyes and allowing her inherent allure to fall away in a physical mixture of perspiration that seems to strain all the luster from her omnipresent bright-colored halter tops. It's like she's perpetually just woken up from a sweat-stained nightmare. Rather than a Silkwood or Joan of Arc or someone trying to "change the world", she's simply hanging on to the ledge of existence by her fingernails, and wondering whether or not she should let go. She's more reluctant than determined, more resigned than desperate, getting through on account of a fragile resolve that consistently threatens to crumble. She doesn't want pity, truly, yet Cotillard's mannerisms and her refusal to make eye contact conjures up a beaten-down aura communicating the embarrassment from the pity she engenders nonetheless.
In one moment of extreme lament, when "Needles and Pins" by Petula Clark appears on the car radio, Sandra's husband turns the stero off. She turns it right back on. "You thought the song was too depressing for me?" she asks, and then she smiles. And Cotillard doesn't overdo it. It's not a show-me-your-teeth smile and she doesn't clap and sing along. It's not damn-the-man triumph. She just takes in the momentary hard-won evanescent bliss, and every one of these triumphs, each one a bit bigger than the last, gradually accumulate until she seizes on them and takes possession of herself. In the end, her job doesn't define her, she does, and her final moment, walking away from the camera, another grin waltzing across those sorrowful lips, is a wordless hymn of exultation.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Force Majeure
Family photos have long struck this reviewer as disingenuous. They seem so contrived, so designed to get fathers and mothers and sons and daughters done up in clothes they would never wear and to sit or stand or uncomfortably, inauthentically kneel and to obey literal barked commands of "smile!" rather than simply allowing those smiles to form of their own volition. The family photo was the Facebook photo before Facebook. SEE HOW HAPPY WE ARE?! Not for nothing then does "Force Majeure", director Ruben Östlund austered Swedish drama chock full of uneasy laughs, open with images of its obligatory family of four posing for portrait to reassure themselves that, dammit, they really are happy.
That portrait takes place on a mountainside vista amidst the pristine French Alps at a luxury ski resort where Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) have brought their adolescent son and daughter because the whole purpose of a luxury ski resort is to forget your troubles and kick up powder. The artificiality of the entire excursion is slyly underlined by the resort's "controlled" avalanches, employed to keep the handsome trails properly groomed. Eventually, however, as the family sits down for a scenic meal at an outdoor restaurant, one of those "controlled" avalanches, mirroring the force majeure of the title, becomes a little un-controlled and the story kicks into gear.
As clouds of snow billow down where they sit, Tomas pulls a Costanza - that is, when George Costanza of "Seinfeld" realized the hamburgers at the little kid's birthday caught on fire and he un-heroically fled, leaving everyone, women and children and birthday clowns, behind. The avalanche of "Force Majeure" doesn't really get out of control, it just appears to, and yet it still allows a pulling back of the curtain on Tomas's real inner nature. He abandons his wife and kids, tucking tail and running, and then comes sauntering back like nothing happened.
"Relationships that start under intense circumstances," Annie Porter once observed, "they never last." The same could be said of relationships that suddenly face intense circumstances, such as your spouse running for his life rather than laying down his for the kids. This telling reaction rattles Ebba. At first, she bottles it up, until she has a couple glasses of wine at which point she can't help but mention it, telling their friends, also staying at the resort, whether they want to hear it or not. And each time she does, Tomas denies her version of events. He doesn't remember fleeing as she reached for and covered her kids. Ah, but he should know better than anyone this is the iPhone age, and in the iPhone age there can be no "Rashomon."
"Force Majeure" quickly, and thankfully, casts aside its he said/she said predicament to mine for richer territory within the male psyche and the dynamics of relationships. As Tomas, Bah Kuhnke comes equipped with a kind of vacancy in his eyes, as if he's been detached from this marital union since the cake got sliced, and when Ebba confronts him on his cowardice, he retreats to watch TV with his daughter, like a little kid who never really grew up no matter how money he (obviously) makes.
One of the eeriest passages of the year finds Tomas and his mountain-manish brother (Kristofer Hivju) reclining after a day on the slopes and an attractive lady bringing him a beer at the behest of her just-as-attractive friend. Tomas puffs out his chest. Except, as it happens, the just-as-attractive friend meant for that beer to go to someone else and awkardness ensues and then a showing of feathers in lieu of an actual fight when a couple fellas intervene, and to see the ego of a couple dudes get so publically shattered and how pitifully they react painfully exposes the male ego for the giant bag of wind it really is.
Not that the film forsakes Ebba. Not at all. As aloof and unconnected as her husband seems, her pain and confusion comes across far more immediate and appreciable. She has drinks with a friend (Clara Wettergren) who expressly talks of her open marriage in spite of their kids. Ebba can't square with this notion. Isn't marriage supposed to be monogamous? Isn't that in the vows? She keeps going back to it and her friend dismisses these ideas of one sexual partner for the rest of your life like she's just lost a game of drunken backgammon. This, we're made to wonder, is what we have to look forward to with everlasting love?
"Force Majeure's" arty, mysterial conclusion takes place aboard a bus as it ferrys a gaggle of tourists, including our main characters, down the winding, twisting mountains in a sequence that is awe-inspiring in its queasiness and simply-rendered terror. It's as stomach-churning as anything in "Gravity", the way Östlund plants those snow-capped peaks right in our faces in the window to make it seem as if we all might go tumbling down them together. And this slow-moving rollercoaster taken in conjunction with the subsequent scene seem, in their own way, to epitomize the very notion of marriage as one chock full of potential calamities that must be narrowly averted.
Happily ever after cedes the roadway to an uncertain forward march.
That portrait takes place on a mountainside vista amidst the pristine French Alps at a luxury ski resort where Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) have brought their adolescent son and daughter because the whole purpose of a luxury ski resort is to forget your troubles and kick up powder. The artificiality of the entire excursion is slyly underlined by the resort's "controlled" avalanches, employed to keep the handsome trails properly groomed. Eventually, however, as the family sits down for a scenic meal at an outdoor restaurant, one of those "controlled" avalanches, mirroring the force majeure of the title, becomes a little un-controlled and the story kicks into gear.
As clouds of snow billow down where they sit, Tomas pulls a Costanza - that is, when George Costanza of "Seinfeld" realized the hamburgers at the little kid's birthday caught on fire and he un-heroically fled, leaving everyone, women and children and birthday clowns, behind. The avalanche of "Force Majeure" doesn't really get out of control, it just appears to, and yet it still allows a pulling back of the curtain on Tomas's real inner nature. He abandons his wife and kids, tucking tail and running, and then comes sauntering back like nothing happened.
"Relationships that start under intense circumstances," Annie Porter once observed, "they never last." The same could be said of relationships that suddenly face intense circumstances, such as your spouse running for his life rather than laying down his for the kids. This telling reaction rattles Ebba. At first, she bottles it up, until she has a couple glasses of wine at which point she can't help but mention it, telling their friends, also staying at the resort, whether they want to hear it or not. And each time she does, Tomas denies her version of events. He doesn't remember fleeing as she reached for and covered her kids. Ah, but he should know better than anyone this is the iPhone age, and in the iPhone age there can be no "Rashomon."
"Force Majeure" quickly, and thankfully, casts aside its he said/she said predicament to mine for richer territory within the male psyche and the dynamics of relationships. As Tomas, Bah Kuhnke comes equipped with a kind of vacancy in his eyes, as if he's been detached from this marital union since the cake got sliced, and when Ebba confronts him on his cowardice, he retreats to watch TV with his daughter, like a little kid who never really grew up no matter how money he (obviously) makes.
One of the eeriest passages of the year finds Tomas and his mountain-manish brother (Kristofer Hivju) reclining after a day on the slopes and an attractive lady bringing him a beer at the behest of her just-as-attractive friend. Tomas puffs out his chest. Except, as it happens, the just-as-attractive friend meant for that beer to go to someone else and awkardness ensues and then a showing of feathers in lieu of an actual fight when a couple fellas intervene, and to see the ego of a couple dudes get so publically shattered and how pitifully they react painfully exposes the male ego for the giant bag of wind it really is.
Not that the film forsakes Ebba. Not at all. As aloof and unconnected as her husband seems, her pain and confusion comes across far more immediate and appreciable. She has drinks with a friend (Clara Wettergren) who expressly talks of her open marriage in spite of their kids. Ebba can't square with this notion. Isn't marriage supposed to be monogamous? Isn't that in the vows? She keeps going back to it and her friend dismisses these ideas of one sexual partner for the rest of your life like she's just lost a game of drunken backgammon. This, we're made to wonder, is what we have to look forward to with everlasting love?
"Force Majeure's" arty, mysterial conclusion takes place aboard a bus as it ferrys a gaggle of tourists, including our main characters, down the winding, twisting mountains in a sequence that is awe-inspiring in its queasiness and simply-rendered terror. It's as stomach-churning as anything in "Gravity", the way Östlund plants those snow-capped peaks right in our faces in the window to make it seem as if we all might go tumbling down them together. And this slow-moving rollercoaster taken in conjunction with the subsequent scene seem, in their own way, to epitomize the very notion of marriage as one chock full of potential calamities that must be narrowly averted.
Happily ever after cedes the roadway to an uncertain forward march.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Wild
Staring down the barrel of a three month, eleven-hundred mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) endeavors to simply strap on her elephantine backpack, sprawled out on the floor with its full weight pinning her down. It is, of course, a moment of palpable physicality in which director Jean-Marc Vallée fluently communicates the arduousness of his character's almost reckless desire to test her mettle. It is also, however, a 210D Nylon metaphor for Cheryl's whole existence, one woman's struggle to get out from under the weight of all the crap that is her life. If it's a blunt metaphor, it's a no less apt one, and blunt metaphors are permissible in films where the protagonist is made to rip off her own toenail. She is going into the wild, yes, but more than that she is going into the wild as a means to go mentally into her past.
Adapted by author Nick Hornby, "Wild" communicates its main character's adventure not as a linear journey stretching from the unbearable heat of the Mojave to the wintry peaks of the Sierra Nevada, but as one hopping back and forth in time in Cheryl's life. The flashbacks paint a portrait of a woman who has, more or less, lived two lives already by the age of 26, one as a Tracy Flick-ish wunderkind motivated by a mother (Laura Dern, a winning performance that believably conjures a loving free-spirit) who has fled an abusive husband to make a new life and one as a Vanessa Lutz-ish bad girl driven to the edge of self-destruction when her mother passes away from cancer. Ruining her marriage to a man who clearly still loves her but also knows it's in his best interest to get distance, her life devolved into the requisite bacchanal of drugs, booze and sex.
Admittedly these present/past episodes seem a bit too tidy in their construction to truly invoke the film's title. "There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what," Cheryl sermonizes in voiceover even though the film spends its entire two hours illustrating exactly what leads to what, what makes one thing happen and not another. If, say, she hitches a ride then the guy giving her a ride will turn on the car radio and if he turns on the car radio then it will immediately cue up a song that immediately cues up a flashback to some long-ago incident that allows for another blatant filling in of another one of our protagonist's blanks.
Yet simultaneously these repeated intrusions of what brought her to the trailhead fit seamlessly by evoking how anyone's most notable companion on a solo quest is him or herself and when left in the company of yourself for so long you can't help but pour over every celebration, failure or regret. It's funny, isn't it, how journeys into the ostensible unknown dredge up things we know too damn well.
If the film is noticeably light on hair-raising action-adventure exploits despite its material, it is hefty on the physical vulnerability Cheryl is forced to experience in a generally unaccompanied environment. Otherwise good-hearted male hikers she encounters along the way jocularly anoint her the "Queen of the PCT" because of the many helping hands she receives, from other backpackers, park rangers, etc. They say it good-heartedly but that doesn’t fail to mask the underlying obliviousness. They make a point to explain they receive no such generosity while failing to grasp that a lone woman in the wilderness means every encounter with the opposite sex comes cloaked in uneasiness and potential full-on fear. That nothing happens can perhaps be attributed to her gradually mounting emotional fortitude, or her to pure luck, but the omnipresent idea of menace nevertheless remains palpable.
Certainly this raises the notion of Cheryl's non-recreational walk as one of self-flagellation as much as spiritual rejuvenation. When she loses her hiking boots and ducts tapes sandals to her feet and presses forward there is a discernible attitude of I Deserve This. "Fuck you, bitch!" she screams at her departed footwear, even though she's really yelling it at herself. As an actress, Reese Witherspoon is generally viewed as one of the queens of the rom com (which makes the label "Queen of the PCT" all the more acerbic), a ferocious ball of perky energy. Here she unplugs, deftly playing someone who is exhausted, drained of all power, and even before she sets off on her odyssey. She simply seems tired – tired of walking this trail, tired of living this life, tired of standing in these shoes. This is decidedly at odds with the sort of character that usually inhabits these kinds of Jack London adventurer tales. There is a moment when a fellow hiker she briefly meets references training and the look Witherspoon lets play on her face reveals that "training" for her was not merely an afterthought but never thought about.
Cheryl Strayed is woefully ill-prepared, out of her element, resistant to myth-making. And no matter how many times she turns to the collected works of Emily Dickinson for inspiration, she is not in the throes of a quest to "find herself" but to shake free of who she is. She, to quote Bruce Springsteen who himself is momentarily referenced in the film, walks a thousand miles to slip her skin.
Adapted by author Nick Hornby, "Wild" communicates its main character's adventure not as a linear journey stretching from the unbearable heat of the Mojave to the wintry peaks of the Sierra Nevada, but as one hopping back and forth in time in Cheryl's life. The flashbacks paint a portrait of a woman who has, more or less, lived two lives already by the age of 26, one as a Tracy Flick-ish wunderkind motivated by a mother (Laura Dern, a winning performance that believably conjures a loving free-spirit) who has fled an abusive husband to make a new life and one as a Vanessa Lutz-ish bad girl driven to the edge of self-destruction when her mother passes away from cancer. Ruining her marriage to a man who clearly still loves her but also knows it's in his best interest to get distance, her life devolved into the requisite bacchanal of drugs, booze and sex.
Admittedly these present/past episodes seem a bit too tidy in their construction to truly invoke the film's title. "There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what," Cheryl sermonizes in voiceover even though the film spends its entire two hours illustrating exactly what leads to what, what makes one thing happen and not another. If, say, she hitches a ride then the guy giving her a ride will turn on the car radio and if he turns on the car radio then it will immediately cue up a song that immediately cues up a flashback to some long-ago incident that allows for another blatant filling in of another one of our protagonist's blanks.
Yet simultaneously these repeated intrusions of what brought her to the trailhead fit seamlessly by evoking how anyone's most notable companion on a solo quest is him or herself and when left in the company of yourself for so long you can't help but pour over every celebration, failure or regret. It's funny, isn't it, how journeys into the ostensible unknown dredge up things we know too damn well.
If the film is noticeably light on hair-raising action-adventure exploits despite its material, it is hefty on the physical vulnerability Cheryl is forced to experience in a generally unaccompanied environment. Otherwise good-hearted male hikers she encounters along the way jocularly anoint her the "Queen of the PCT" because of the many helping hands she receives, from other backpackers, park rangers, etc. They say it good-heartedly but that doesn’t fail to mask the underlying obliviousness. They make a point to explain they receive no such generosity while failing to grasp that a lone woman in the wilderness means every encounter with the opposite sex comes cloaked in uneasiness and potential full-on fear. That nothing happens can perhaps be attributed to her gradually mounting emotional fortitude, or her to pure luck, but the omnipresent idea of menace nevertheless remains palpable.
Certainly this raises the notion of Cheryl's non-recreational walk as one of self-flagellation as much as spiritual rejuvenation. When she loses her hiking boots and ducts tapes sandals to her feet and presses forward there is a discernible attitude of I Deserve This. "Fuck you, bitch!" she screams at her departed footwear, even though she's really yelling it at herself. As an actress, Reese Witherspoon is generally viewed as one of the queens of the rom com (which makes the label "Queen of the PCT" all the more acerbic), a ferocious ball of perky energy. Here she unplugs, deftly playing someone who is exhausted, drained of all power, and even before she sets off on her odyssey. She simply seems tired – tired of walking this trail, tired of living this life, tired of standing in these shoes. This is decidedly at odds with the sort of character that usually inhabits these kinds of Jack London adventurer tales. There is a moment when a fellow hiker she briefly meets references training and the look Witherspoon lets play on her face reveals that "training" for her was not merely an afterthought but never thought about.
Cheryl Strayed is woefully ill-prepared, out of her element, resistant to myth-making. And no matter how many times she turns to the collected works of Emily Dickinson for inspiration, she is not in the throes of a quest to "find herself" but to shake free of who she is. She, to quote Bruce Springsteen who himself is momentarily referenced in the film, walks a thousand miles to slip her skin.
Monday, December 15, 2014
Inherent Vice
If "The Master", Paul Thomas Anderson's ginormous puzzle of God-knows-whatism, pertinently established a prevalent theme, it was that its auteur had become The Master of the engimatic cinematic behemoth. Mr. Anderson's run times are colossal, his themes plunge to unknowable depths, his films demand incessant re-watches (has there been a modern-day director whose work so often elicits the comment "I can't wait to watch it again"?) and even then it can be a Herculean struggle to make heads or tails of what's going on. "Inherent Vice", however, while copying the length of PTA's predecessors, is nowhere near as psychologically impenetrable. Oh, it's confusing, definitely, but that's simply on account of an intentional runaway plot. Grasping its innumerable parts is not as consequential as drinking in its refreshingly slack vibe.
The film's kaleidoscopic story is seen through the tinted glasses of Doc Sportello, played by that most physically present of actors, Joaquin Phoenix, with a Lennon-ish mane, a feelin'-groovy strut and a voice that suggests a mellow if firm belief in brotherly love, even if that belief is not always reciprocated. He is a 40's gumshoe re-imagined as a late 60's beatnik trying to keep on keepin' on at the dawn of the 70's, Philip Marlowe if Philip Marlowe preferred bare feet to Florsheims and liked his cannabis anywhere, night or day, rather than his brandy in a glass.
Doc is approached by his ex, the marvelously named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katerine Waterston), like Cerie Xerox crossed with Michelle Phillips. Her current squeeze, a real estate magnate of some renown (Eric Roberts), a none-too-subtle harbinger of greed and excess, has disappeared and she winsomely asks if Doc might help. He agrees to snoop, but less as a sucker lured by a femme fatale than a guy who simply wants to remain right-on for the gal he still adores. That's a critical delination, marking the film as a noir colored in kodachrome as opposed to stern black & white.
"Inherent Vice" is based on a 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon which I have not read, but which seems saddled with a permanent disclaimer of "Unfilmable." And if that's true, it seems at least possible that someone like P.T. Anderson would take such a disclaimer as a personal challenge. His finished product is leisurely and long, even though it feels entirely present in its individual moments, of which there are so, so many. It's akin to a two-and-a-half hour shaggy dog story. If P.T. closes a door, he opens a window. If he closes a window, he opens a portal to some other dimension. At one point, when conducting an "interview", Doc jots down in his notebook "something Spanish." That's essentially the language of the tale being communicated: something Spanish.
It's an able-bodied proposition in keeping everything straight, the names and places, the comings and goings, the vanishings and re-appearances. Martin Short, I'm reasonably certain, wearing a plum suit that makes him look like a deposed emperor, was merely a hallucination from the halluconigen wafting off the screen. That character couldn't have been real. I don't even remember how he factored into the story, which theoretically rules this critic out of order but then watching this film unfold is like being one of the mafiosos in "True Romance" listening to Floyd try and give directions. Who the hell knows? We'll get there when we get there. Jena Malone's one-scene walk-off is sheer magnificence but I'm not sure where it fits either.
Well, maybe I am. She's an ex-heroin addict who's cleaned up in the name of her baby girl and though she summons Doc because she needs him to track down her husband who's also gone missing (and who's played by Owen Wilson with an air that suggests he showed up in the middle of filming and just said "Cast me"). She makes time for a mind-bending monologue with a sunflower coffee cup about her past, present and future, illustrating the delicate line between the counter-culture and the squares. It's blending, and when it's gone, it'll be gone, and it's why the real pre-eminent relationship of the film isn't so much Doc & Shasta as Doc & Detective Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen.
He's played by Josh Brolin with a severe buzzcut and a deadpan gloom denoting a belief that the world is fucked and that vile hippie scum did the fucking. He can't stand Doc and seems eternally out to get him, and yet needs him as an informant much like Doc relies on him for information. They're in this together, like it or not. In the most hysterical sequence in a film this year Doc hallucinates a late-night commercial starring "Bigfoot" in the role of precisely the sort of vile bohemian he despises. Brolin's impeccable monotone makes every flower-power aphorism ring with a hilarity Ron Burgundy could never hope to match. It's also emblematic of the whole film, not just its laconic wit but the way these dueling aspects of America - Dude and Groovy, Man - have run headlong into one another.
We know which one eventually wins, yet whereas anger has so often spilled from the pen of Paul Thomas Anderson, this one is coated in a warmth foreign to the rest of its auteur's oeuvre. Not even in "Punch Drunk Love", a film which felt studious in its glow whereas the glow of "Inherent Vice" feels innate. The characters may mock one another but the film doesn't mock the characters. It's a judge-free zone, observational, and uproarious, and even romantic. It may capture the dying embers of a more free-thinking era, but it doesn't seek to bitterly deconstruct it so much as plaintively wave goodbye.
The film's kaleidoscopic story is seen through the tinted glasses of Doc Sportello, played by that most physically present of actors, Joaquin Phoenix, with a Lennon-ish mane, a feelin'-groovy strut and a voice that suggests a mellow if firm belief in brotherly love, even if that belief is not always reciprocated. He is a 40's gumshoe re-imagined as a late 60's beatnik trying to keep on keepin' on at the dawn of the 70's, Philip Marlowe if Philip Marlowe preferred bare feet to Florsheims and liked his cannabis anywhere, night or day, rather than his brandy in a glass.
Doc is approached by his ex, the marvelously named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katerine Waterston), like Cerie Xerox crossed with Michelle Phillips. Her current squeeze, a real estate magnate of some renown (Eric Roberts), a none-too-subtle harbinger of greed and excess, has disappeared and she winsomely asks if Doc might help. He agrees to snoop, but less as a sucker lured by a femme fatale than a guy who simply wants to remain right-on for the gal he still adores. That's a critical delination, marking the film as a noir colored in kodachrome as opposed to stern black & white.
"Inherent Vice" is based on a 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon which I have not read, but which seems saddled with a permanent disclaimer of "Unfilmable." And if that's true, it seems at least possible that someone like P.T. Anderson would take such a disclaimer as a personal challenge. His finished product is leisurely and long, even though it feels entirely present in its individual moments, of which there are so, so many. It's akin to a two-and-a-half hour shaggy dog story. If P.T. closes a door, he opens a window. If he closes a window, he opens a portal to some other dimension. At one point, when conducting an "interview", Doc jots down in his notebook "something Spanish." That's essentially the language of the tale being communicated: something Spanish.
It's an able-bodied proposition in keeping everything straight, the names and places, the comings and goings, the vanishings and re-appearances. Martin Short, I'm reasonably certain, wearing a plum suit that makes him look like a deposed emperor, was merely a hallucination from the halluconigen wafting off the screen. That character couldn't have been real. I don't even remember how he factored into the story, which theoretically rules this critic out of order but then watching this film unfold is like being one of the mafiosos in "True Romance" listening to Floyd try and give directions. Who the hell knows? We'll get there when we get there. Jena Malone's one-scene walk-off is sheer magnificence but I'm not sure where it fits either.
Well, maybe I am. She's an ex-heroin addict who's cleaned up in the name of her baby girl and though she summons Doc because she needs him to track down her husband who's also gone missing (and who's played by Owen Wilson with an air that suggests he showed up in the middle of filming and just said "Cast me"). She makes time for a mind-bending monologue with a sunflower coffee cup about her past, present and future, illustrating the delicate line between the counter-culture and the squares. It's blending, and when it's gone, it'll be gone, and it's why the real pre-eminent relationship of the film isn't so much Doc & Shasta as Doc & Detective Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen.
He's played by Josh Brolin with a severe buzzcut and a deadpan gloom denoting a belief that the world is fucked and that vile hippie scum did the fucking. He can't stand Doc and seems eternally out to get him, and yet needs him as an informant much like Doc relies on him for information. They're in this together, like it or not. In the most hysterical sequence in a film this year Doc hallucinates a late-night commercial starring "Bigfoot" in the role of precisely the sort of vile bohemian he despises. Brolin's impeccable monotone makes every flower-power aphorism ring with a hilarity Ron Burgundy could never hope to match. It's also emblematic of the whole film, not just its laconic wit but the way these dueling aspects of America - Dude and Groovy, Man - have run headlong into one another.
We know which one eventually wins, yet whereas anger has so often spilled from the pen of Paul Thomas Anderson, this one is coated in a warmth foreign to the rest of its auteur's oeuvre. Not even in "Punch Drunk Love", a film which felt studious in its glow whereas the glow of "Inherent Vice" feels innate. The characters may mock one another but the film doesn't mock the characters. It's a judge-free zone, observational, and uproarious, and even romantic. It may capture the dying embers of a more free-thinking era, but it doesn't seek to bitterly deconstruct it so much as plaintively wave goodbye.
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Friday, December 12, 2014
Friday's Old Fashioned: It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
The first time I watched the holiday staple "It's A Wonderful Life" in totality, its infamous ending, nowadays just a Youtube search away, hit me like the last verse of Springsteen's "Racing in the Street" (in the gut, and then in the gut again). I'd heard the line "Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings", like, 500 times but until you hear an oft-repated cinematic chestnut in its full context you often aren't actually hearing it. I'd never heard it until then, and when I did, my heart leapt as my eyes watered. God, it was glorious. It was also 1999. I was young and foolish and idealistic. Now I'm old and an idiot and my idealism is long gone and I, like so many others, wonder if this conclusion is merely a fruit basket of bunkum. Every year when NBC fires up its once-a-night showing and Jimmy Stewart comes to and the snow starts to fall I can't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, he'll reach that You Are Now In Bedford Falls sign and about-face and run all the way to - ah hell, I dunno, Apple River? I mean, otherwise isn't he just Truman Burbank without the soundstage?
I thought of all this in June when I was in Denison, Iowa and standing outside the W.A. McHenry House where Donna Reed's Academy Award is on display. She earned that Oscar for her greatest role, Alma Burke in "From Here To Eternity", but, rest assured, the street signs in that little town don't bear the words "From Here To Eternity." They bear the words "It's A Wonderful Life." There's a reason they bus people to the Donna Reed Theatre there every December to see Frank Capra's classic and not the other one even though it too has a relation to the month of December. And that's because the 1946 Christmastime favorite ultimately opts for a gauzy, sentimental belief in barbecues & ball games (coinage: Neil McCauley) America whereas "From Here To Eternity" finds her (and Deborah Kerr) staring off into the great unknown.
That ending and its jolly glow, as many a revisionist piece has lobbyed since its release, clouds the film's dark, raging heart. After all, George Bailey may have a wife and kids and a house but, shit, he wanted to see the world. He wanted to get out of Bedford Falls and have adventures. He wanted to live like a hero, like his brother, but he never did. Christopher Nolan may have employed the Dylan Thomas poem for his recent "Interstellar", but I feel as if "It's A Wonderful Life" and its protagonist's meltdown is a better example of its verbiage: "And you, my father, there on the sad height / Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray / Do not go gentle into that good night." Rest assured, George isn't about to go gently. He's about to hurl himself off that bridge.
Of course, that's simply surface level. If you want to get more meta you could take the reading of Mark Harris's from his recent book "Five Came Back" in which he ties the plight of George Bailey directly to the film's auteur, and how Frank Capra felt marginalized and slighted in Hollywood after returning from WWII. Thus, he made parable for himself about himself, granting himself victory in the end. Ye gods. Even that reading, however, ties back to the furious anger rollicking on the edge of so many frames of this Yuletide classic. Capra was as pissed as George Bailey at the place he called home, lashing out in his own sentimentalized way, and so angered with its at-the-time lukewarm reception he, more or less, gave up on making movies. He'd had it.
The end, when George comes back around after a case of celestial intervention to realize what he truly has is set to that old NYE staple "Auld Lang Syne." To this day, I can't get over how melancholy that song makes me feel, and that melancholia goes hand-in-hand not only with December 31st but the entire holiday season. I suppose this is tied to going home, seeing old friends and memories of Christmas past springing up like so many twinkling lights strung on rooftops. You remember not just where you're from but who you were, where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do, who you wanted to be, and you hear the echoes of that old dude from "It's A Wonderful Life" admonishing George in a refrain so ancient but so true....."Youth is wasted on the wrong people."
It's funny, in that long-ago hoopla regarding film colorization, "It's A Wonderful Life" was one of the movies that found itself under threat of alteration. I don't mean to suggest Capra's film should have been colorized, not at all, because that's sacrilege, but to merely wonder about a properly black & white "It's A Wonderful Life" until that final scene. Think of another stone-cold classic, "The Wizard of Oz", and the way it used monochrome and Technicolor, the former to represent dreary old Kansas and the latter to represent a magical faraway land. Yes, yes, sure, sure, there's no place like home and all that, but as acclaimed author Terry McMillan once noted: "the land of Oz wasn't such a bad place to be stuck in. It beat the farm in Kansas."
What if the first two hours and ten minutes of Capra's classic chronicled all its regret, anguish and self-pity in haunting black & white and then, when fate is reversed and George's will to live is returned, it suddenly gives way to color? Would it not work in some bastardized way to also bastardize the very myth it embodies? These are things, the movie is telling us, that create "a wonderful life" - spouse, children, hearth, home, card table flush with cash. Ah, but if these things don't create "a wonderful life", what then? So you look around, you say a toast, you sing "Auld Lang Syne", you choose to believe with all your might, and hope and pray the fantasy doesn't crumble.
I thought of all this in June when I was in Denison, Iowa and standing outside the W.A. McHenry House where Donna Reed's Academy Award is on display. She earned that Oscar for her greatest role, Alma Burke in "From Here To Eternity", but, rest assured, the street signs in that little town don't bear the words "From Here To Eternity." They bear the words "It's A Wonderful Life." There's a reason they bus people to the Donna Reed Theatre there every December to see Frank Capra's classic and not the other one even though it too has a relation to the month of December. And that's because the 1946 Christmastime favorite ultimately opts for a gauzy, sentimental belief in barbecues & ball games (coinage: Neil McCauley) America whereas "From Here To Eternity" finds her (and Deborah Kerr) staring off into the great unknown.
That ending and its jolly glow, as many a revisionist piece has lobbyed since its release, clouds the film's dark, raging heart. After all, George Bailey may have a wife and kids and a house but, shit, he wanted to see the world. He wanted to get out of Bedford Falls and have adventures. He wanted to live like a hero, like his brother, but he never did. Christopher Nolan may have employed the Dylan Thomas poem for his recent "Interstellar", but I feel as if "It's A Wonderful Life" and its protagonist's meltdown is a better example of its verbiage: "And you, my father, there on the sad height / Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray / Do not go gentle into that good night." Rest assured, George isn't about to go gently. He's about to hurl himself off that bridge.
Of course, that's simply surface level. If you want to get more meta you could take the reading of Mark Harris's from his recent book "Five Came Back" in which he ties the plight of George Bailey directly to the film's auteur, and how Frank Capra felt marginalized and slighted in Hollywood after returning from WWII. Thus, he made parable for himself about himself, granting himself victory in the end. Ye gods. Even that reading, however, ties back to the furious anger rollicking on the edge of so many frames of this Yuletide classic. Capra was as pissed as George Bailey at the place he called home, lashing out in his own sentimentalized way, and so angered with its at-the-time lukewarm reception he, more or less, gave up on making movies. He'd had it.
The end, when George comes back around after a case of celestial intervention to realize what he truly has is set to that old NYE staple "Auld Lang Syne." To this day, I can't get over how melancholy that song makes me feel, and that melancholia goes hand-in-hand not only with December 31st but the entire holiday season. I suppose this is tied to going home, seeing old friends and memories of Christmas past springing up like so many twinkling lights strung on rooftops. You remember not just where you're from but who you were, where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do, who you wanted to be, and you hear the echoes of that old dude from "It's A Wonderful Life" admonishing George in a refrain so ancient but so true....."Youth is wasted on the wrong people."
It's funny, in that long-ago hoopla regarding film colorization, "It's A Wonderful Life" was one of the movies that found itself under threat of alteration. I don't mean to suggest Capra's film should have been colorized, not at all, because that's sacrilege, but to merely wonder about a properly black & white "It's A Wonderful Life" until that final scene. Think of another stone-cold classic, "The Wizard of Oz", and the way it used monochrome and Technicolor, the former to represent dreary old Kansas and the latter to represent a magical faraway land. Yes, yes, sure, sure, there's no place like home and all that, but as acclaimed author Terry McMillan once noted: "the land of Oz wasn't such a bad place to be stuck in. It beat the farm in Kansas."
What if the first two hours and ten minutes of Capra's classic chronicled all its regret, anguish and self-pity in haunting black & white and then, when fate is reversed and George's will to live is returned, it suddenly gives way to color? Would it not work in some bastardized way to also bastardize the very myth it embodies? These are things, the movie is telling us, that create "a wonderful life" - spouse, children, hearth, home, card table flush with cash. Ah, but if these things don't create "a wonderful life", what then? So you look around, you say a toast, you sing "Auld Lang Syne", you choose to believe with all your might, and hope and pray the fantasy doesn't crumble.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
It Takes One To Know One
There's that indelible moment in "High Fidelity" when John Cusack's Rob Gordon has a come-to-Jesus talk with Bruce Springsteen in his mind. It's indelible because it so implicitly captures the relationship so many Springsteen-fanatics have with our idol, and how we turn to his music (and, by extension, him) for advice, companionship, reassurance, affirmation of joy, condolences in sorrow, etc. Of course, the film actually got to cast the real Bruce Springsteen, which was a coup and just totally awesome and as authentic as it was tongue-in-cheek, but it was more a metaphorical embodiment of that relationship than realistic. Which brings me to "Wild."
That's the one where Reese Witherspoon is playing Cheryl Strayed and she's on, like, a 47 billion mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, through the desert and into the Sierra Nevadas and so on and so forth. She's got a backpack that's, like, as big as Andre the Giant strapped on and her boots are too small and her toenails keep falling off. Shit's real, man. And then she comes to this rushing river and the only way across is a rudimentary log bridge and, you know, she's got the pack and the bad boots and success here is not a given. She focuses. She steadies herself. Yet, she still needs a little something extra, a little reassurance, a little guiding light. She says, out loud and to herself since no one is with her, "Come on, Bruce. Stay with me."
I was flabbergasted, yet not quite sure I'd heard her right. Did she say, "'Come on, Bruce?'" I thought to myself. "'Stay with me?' As in, Bruce Springsteen, stay with me? Like I do in certain situations? Did that really just happen?" Then, she makes it across the water triumphantly (spoiler alert!) and as she does, the soundtrack picks up with Bruce's (miraculous) "Tougher Than the Rest" already in progress, as if it's been playing in her head along, because it was, and now the film is allowing us all the way into her private mental moment, her own council with The Boss.
That. That's my relationship to Bruce Springsteen. Fourteen years ago last month I was in the midst of moving from Des Moines to Phoenix. It was early November and I set out a sunny morning from my hotel in Oklahoma City bound for Albequerque. The sun was out. It was cold but it was nice. Then in the Texas panhandle, it struck. That is, a snowstorm. A walloping snowstorm. This was some serious shit. It was blinding. I could barely see ten feet in front of my car. Traffic was crawling. Cars were all over the side of the road and in the ditch. Semis were upturned on the freeway. Amarillo was miles and miles away which was where I needed to get to to get off this road. It seemed at least semi-possible that I might die in a ditch. In Texas. Heaven help me, to die in Texas. That's not how I envisioned it. So I put on a Bruce Springsteen CD. I cranked it. "Come on, Bruce," I said out loud and to myself since no one was with me as I literally patted my dashboard above the stereo. "Stay with me."
From one fanatic to another, Cheryl Strayed, I salute you.
That's the one where Reese Witherspoon is playing Cheryl Strayed and she's on, like, a 47 billion mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, through the desert and into the Sierra Nevadas and so on and so forth. She's got a backpack that's, like, as big as Andre the Giant strapped on and her boots are too small and her toenails keep falling off. Shit's real, man. And then she comes to this rushing river and the only way across is a rudimentary log bridge and, you know, she's got the pack and the bad boots and success here is not a given. She focuses. She steadies herself. Yet, she still needs a little something extra, a little reassurance, a little guiding light. She says, out loud and to herself since no one is with her, "Come on, Bruce. Stay with me."
I was flabbergasted, yet not quite sure I'd heard her right. Did she say, "'Come on, Bruce?'" I thought to myself. "'Stay with me?' As in, Bruce Springsteen, stay with me? Like I do in certain situations? Did that really just happen?" Then, she makes it across the water triumphantly (spoiler alert!) and as she does, the soundtrack picks up with Bruce's (miraculous) "Tougher Than the Rest" already in progress, as if it's been playing in her head along, because it was, and now the film is allowing us all the way into her private mental moment, her own council with The Boss.
That. That's my relationship to Bruce Springsteen. Fourteen years ago last month I was in the midst of moving from Des Moines to Phoenix. It was early November and I set out a sunny morning from my hotel in Oklahoma City bound for Albequerque. The sun was out. It was cold but it was nice. Then in the Texas panhandle, it struck. That is, a snowstorm. A walloping snowstorm. This was some serious shit. It was blinding. I could barely see ten feet in front of my car. Traffic was crawling. Cars were all over the side of the road and in the ditch. Semis were upturned on the freeway. Amarillo was miles and miles away which was where I needed to get to to get off this road. It seemed at least semi-possible that I might die in a ditch. In Texas. Heaven help me, to die in Texas. That's not how I envisioned it. So I put on a Bruce Springsteen CD. I cranked it. "Come on, Bruce," I said out loud and to myself since no one was with me as I literally patted my dashboard above the stereo. "Stay with me."
From one fanatic to another, Cheryl Strayed, I salute you.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
The Totally Official Cinema Romantico Love Actually Power Rankings
We here at Cinema Romantico have been so engrossed in viewing and contemplating end-of-the-year awards contenders, as well as "awards contenders", that there comes a point when we simply need to sit the hell down, take a breath and drink some seasonally festive rum punch in film form. By which, of course, we mean "Love Actually." You know "Love Actually." That oddly controversial English confection that half of critic's America thinks is as swell and aw-shucks and golly-gee as the Coca-Cola™ Polar Bears and that the other half of critic's America thinks is an unholy lie because DON'T YOU KNOW THAT POLAR BEARS ARE FREAKING CARNIVORES AND REALLY, REALLY MEAN AND THOSE STUPID COMMERCIALS ARE ALL JUST LIES???!!!
We here at Cinema Romantico tend to side with the first faction - which we kinda covered last year - because we here at Cinema Romantico tend to believe Sara Thomas is a cinematic saint. So in that spirit....
We here at Cinema Romantico tend to side with the first faction - which we kinda covered last year - because we here at Cinema Romantico tend to believe Sara Thomas is a cinematic saint. So in that spirit....
The Totally Official Cinema Romantico Love Actually Power Rankings
135. Natalie's parents calling her "plumpy". I mean, really. I mean, seriously. Her own dad calls her "plumpy." And look at him there. He's not actually not-portly, if you know what I mean. Screw that guy. Screw all of them. Adopt a new family, Natalie.
8. If you've never come home after a long day of work and just danced your ass off, well, you're missing out. I recommend this song. Not that I do this regularly.
7. "It's a felt tip pin."
6. Going for a walk down by the river while listening to Dido when you feel blue? We've all been there, dude. Don't lie.
5. Mr. Bean to the rescue. #RealHero
4. That guy? That guy doesn't need evidential proof. Because that guy? That guy you can tell - you can tell - believes in true love.
3. "We need Kate. And we need Leo. And we need them now."
2. To the people who claim "Love Actually" is emotionally dishonest I have three simple words: Emma fucking Thompson.
1. Keira Knightley's Hat. But this goes without saying.
135. Natalie's parents calling her "plumpy". I mean, really. I mean, seriously. Her own dad calls her "plumpy." And look at him there. He's not actually not-portly, if you know what I mean. Screw that guy. Screw all of them. Adopt a new family, Natalie.
10. It's called "being a rock star."
9. "I can't believe you still listen to Joni Mitchell." - "I love her. And true love lasts a lifetime."
8. If you've never come home after a long day of work and just danced your ass off, well, you're missing out. I recommend this song. Not that I do this regularly.
7. "It's a felt tip pin."
6. Going for a walk down by the river while listening to Dido when you feel blue? We've all been there, dude. Don't lie.
5. Mr. Bean to the rescue. #RealHero
4. That guy? That guy doesn't need evidential proof. Because that guy? That guy you can tell - you can tell - believes in true love.
3. "We need Kate. And we need Leo. And we need them now."
2. To the people who claim "Love Actually" is emotionally dishonest I have three simple words: Emma fucking Thompson.
1. Keira Knightley's Hat. But this goes without saying.
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
Nightcrawler
Though writer/director Dan Gilroy's "Nightcrawler" is a supremely vicious satire with hardly an ounce of altruism to be found, it comes equipped with moments of genuine auteurist awe, scenes and shots so rapturous they seem to be scored by James Newton Howard with a celestial harp. That's troubling, however, because these scenes and shots often demonstrate the absolute barrel's bottom of human heartlessness. Still, they unconsciously pull at our emotional drawstrings because even if "Nightcrawler" functions as a blood-drawing farce, like "Network" for the CNN era, and even if it acts as an examination of a beaming, synergizing sociopath, it is, above all, about how in this day and age we view existence through the prism of the screen. And that screen allows for untold amounts of manipulation behind the scenes that is employed to leave us looking up at it in alternate wonder and terror.
Jake Gyllenhaal is the perspicuously named Lou Bloom, wandering an illicit L.A. by night like a depraved Ulysses, and the first physical detail you might notice is his hair, lengthy in the back and coated with a hair product that ostentatiously evokes the slime he is. Exclusively Internet learned, and creepily talking like a middle manager who devoutly believes in Ryan Bingham's "What's In Your Backpack?" speech, he is a prototypical American looking for a way, any way, to strike it rich. He's also, you know, off his rocker, to use technical lingo, and when he stumbles into the disreputable industry of filming real-life tragedy to pawn the footage for a hefty fee, he becomes a thriving if sordid nightcrawling entrepreneur.
He acquires an employee, Rick (Riz Ahmed), homeless, desperate, willing to be strung along to certain doom. He acquires a nightcrawling rival, Loder, played by Bill Paxton in a piece of pitch-perfect casting that finds the formidable character actor with his own greasy hair, swilling cheap coffee and talking Paxton-y trash. He acquires an ally, Nina, the "vampire shift" televison producer who pays big bucks for lurid images to lead the morning newscasts she eternally wants written in blood, and is played by a magnetic Rene Russo as batshit without being ballistic. There's is strictly a business partnership, even when it comes to sex, which is alluded to but never seen, and business, as they say, booms.
As he must, Lou keeps pushing his luck, and consequently "Nightcrawler" veers toward and eventually spills over into outright Thriller territory involving a home invasion gone wrong, drugs, shootouts, and, oh yes, a car chase. Except, exactly! It's turned into a thriller because it's a thriller that Lou himself is making, heinously manipulating those around him to bend real life to bend to the story in his warped mind while offering life coach-esque monologues about the necessity of properly "framing" it all. And when he plants himself and poor Rick in the midst of that obligatory third-act car chase, he continues to film, he continues looking through that screen, no matter the danger. Reality and the reality seen through his screen (and that we see through our screen) becomes indistinguishable. He needs his end. So does the film.
Granted, the film might have done better to end four, five minutes earlier with a freeze-frame and a climactic kiss (you'll know it when you see it - trust me), but it also thankfully does not abandon its seriously effed up principles. It stays on point. It leaves you feeling scuzzy and fearing the legitimacy of anything you see. Then you go home or get on the bus and read a review of it on a portable screen.
Jake Gyllenhaal is the perspicuously named Lou Bloom, wandering an illicit L.A. by night like a depraved Ulysses, and the first physical detail you might notice is his hair, lengthy in the back and coated with a hair product that ostentatiously evokes the slime he is. Exclusively Internet learned, and creepily talking like a middle manager who devoutly believes in Ryan Bingham's "What's In Your Backpack?" speech, he is a prototypical American looking for a way, any way, to strike it rich. He's also, you know, off his rocker, to use technical lingo, and when he stumbles into the disreputable industry of filming real-life tragedy to pawn the footage for a hefty fee, he becomes a thriving if sordid nightcrawling entrepreneur.
He acquires an employee, Rick (Riz Ahmed), homeless, desperate, willing to be strung along to certain doom. He acquires a nightcrawling rival, Loder, played by Bill Paxton in a piece of pitch-perfect casting that finds the formidable character actor with his own greasy hair, swilling cheap coffee and talking Paxton-y trash. He acquires an ally, Nina, the "vampire shift" televison producer who pays big bucks for lurid images to lead the morning newscasts she eternally wants written in blood, and is played by a magnetic Rene Russo as batshit without being ballistic. There's is strictly a business partnership, even when it comes to sex, which is alluded to but never seen, and business, as they say, booms.
As he must, Lou keeps pushing his luck, and consequently "Nightcrawler" veers toward and eventually spills over into outright Thriller territory involving a home invasion gone wrong, drugs, shootouts, and, oh yes, a car chase. Except, exactly! It's turned into a thriller because it's a thriller that Lou himself is making, heinously manipulating those around him to bend real life to bend to the story in his warped mind while offering life coach-esque monologues about the necessity of properly "framing" it all. And when he plants himself and poor Rick in the midst of that obligatory third-act car chase, he continues to film, he continues looking through that screen, no matter the danger. Reality and the reality seen through his screen (and that we see through our screen) becomes indistinguishable. He needs his end. So does the film.
Granted, the film might have done better to end four, five minutes earlier with a freeze-frame and a climactic kiss (you'll know it when you see it - trust me), but it also thankfully does not abandon its seriously effed up principles. It stays on point. It leaves you feeling scuzzy and fearing the legitimacy of anything you see. Then you go home or get on the bus and read a review of it on a portable screen.
Monday, December 08, 2014
The Homesman
"The Homesman" opens with what appears to be an old-school courtin'. Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), a New Yorker who has journeyed west to a small frontier town in the Nebraska territory, is paid a visit by Bob Giffen (Evan Jones). One might be obliged to label Ms. Cuddy a "spinster" but one might be even more obliged to label Mr. Giffen an "obtuse yokel". She speaks with, you know, grammar and he speaks as if his words are ill-fittedly spilling out the sides of his mouth. After supper, she plays piano and he falls asleep. He then pulls a block of cheese out of his pocket and offers her some. She reciprocates with a marriage proposal. He acquires the eyes of a sewer rat and declines. After all, she's "plain" and "bossy", never mind that he's a dunce carrying around cheese. And it's hard not to feel awful for Mary Bee. Not because he turned her down, mind you, nor even because he reduces her to moronic stereotypes, necessarily, but because she felt compelled to ask. Because she's a woman and a woman has to be married, right, and so, well, might as well ask this guy.
The film was directed and co-written by Swank's co-star, Tommy Lee Jones, whose choice of roles, infamous gruffness and face like a craggy rock worn by the wind has always seemed to embody a recognizable sense of masculinity. His character, George Briggs, first glimpsed in long-johns with soot on that rocky face after being rousted from a home that's not his comes across like a definitive old coot, a 19th century caveman. His character may have deserted the army but he still seems John Wayne-approved. Then again, John Wayne was always the hero, and even if his heroism was, occasionally, rendered partly cloudy, he would never let himself be the fall guy. Jones, on the other hand, in his very own film, makes himself the butt of the joke.
It's not that "The Homesman" is a piece of advocacy for feminism, per se, so much as it is a rejection of male chauvinism, a glorious revisionist piece. Jones' borrows the framework and the wide-open vistas of so many old westerns and then uses the genre and its tendency toward misogyny against itself, a fierce and deliberate mea culpa. Hell, it's as self-aware in its intentions as "Birdman", brilliantly wielding its fine cast with a cognizant wink-wink shove. James Spader turns up as a comically boorish hotel proprietor; Meryl Streep appears as a glowing beacon, a den mother to young women everywhere; and Hailee Steinfeld, who's always seemed a bit like a Swank-in-training, shows up as a Swank-in-training.
The narrative revolves around three women in the town (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter) who have been driven to the point of psychosis on account of god-awful personal turmoil. The community, and specifically their husbands, have essentially given up on them and decided to ferry them across the Missouri River and into Iowa to a home for the mentally ill. Naturally, the husbands, oafs the lot of 'em, admit they are not up for such an undertaking, and Mary Bee volunteers in their stead. At first, the men scoff. Then, when she calls them out, they acquiesce. Still, it's a harsh land, filled with mean weather and movie indians, and so when she happens upon George in the midst of a hanging and saves his sorry buckskins, she enlists his help. For a little cash, of course.
Swank and Jones forge a superbly dry rapport, moderate buddies at the horses' reigns, a (much, much) funnier "Wagons East" as they deal with a typical list of interruptions for this sort of journey. Until something happens, that is, and that something not only turns the film on its head but threatens to break an axle and send "The Homesman" skidding off course into something less problematically conventional than frustratingly dude-centric.
In the moment, that argument seems genuine. In the moment, I had these thoughts myself. But the film has an acutely and wonderfully weird sense of intelligence and purpose, turning George Briggs into an avenging, if humorless, angel, a cowboy seeking to right the wrong of all those cowboy chauvinist pigs of so many movies past. There are few sequences in a 2014 movie as haunting as his stoic, one-man extermination of a deluxe hotel in the middle of nowhere that becomes the black-humored personification of every overbearing asshole who thought inalienable rights didn't pertain to women.
The end, though, is where the film arrives triumphantly at the station by purposely going off the rails, stripping its main character of all knowledge obtained, and sending the woman the film persuasively argues can hang with any of these masculine blockheads symbolically floating away into oblivion. The Duke would have approved. That's why it's so astonishing; that's why it cuts like a knife.
The film was directed and co-written by Swank's co-star, Tommy Lee Jones, whose choice of roles, infamous gruffness and face like a craggy rock worn by the wind has always seemed to embody a recognizable sense of masculinity. His character, George Briggs, first glimpsed in long-johns with soot on that rocky face after being rousted from a home that's not his comes across like a definitive old coot, a 19th century caveman. His character may have deserted the army but he still seems John Wayne-approved. Then again, John Wayne was always the hero, and even if his heroism was, occasionally, rendered partly cloudy, he would never let himself be the fall guy. Jones, on the other hand, in his very own film, makes himself the butt of the joke.
It's not that "The Homesman" is a piece of advocacy for feminism, per se, so much as it is a rejection of male chauvinism, a glorious revisionist piece. Jones' borrows the framework and the wide-open vistas of so many old westerns and then uses the genre and its tendency toward misogyny against itself, a fierce and deliberate mea culpa. Hell, it's as self-aware in its intentions as "Birdman", brilliantly wielding its fine cast with a cognizant wink-wink shove. James Spader turns up as a comically boorish hotel proprietor; Meryl Streep appears as a glowing beacon, a den mother to young women everywhere; and Hailee Steinfeld, who's always seemed a bit like a Swank-in-training, shows up as a Swank-in-training.
The narrative revolves around three women in the town (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter) who have been driven to the point of psychosis on account of god-awful personal turmoil. The community, and specifically their husbands, have essentially given up on them and decided to ferry them across the Missouri River and into Iowa to a home for the mentally ill. Naturally, the husbands, oafs the lot of 'em, admit they are not up for such an undertaking, and Mary Bee volunteers in their stead. At first, the men scoff. Then, when she calls them out, they acquiesce. Still, it's a harsh land, filled with mean weather and movie indians, and so when she happens upon George in the midst of a hanging and saves his sorry buckskins, she enlists his help. For a little cash, of course.
Swank and Jones forge a superbly dry rapport, moderate buddies at the horses' reigns, a (much, much) funnier "Wagons East" as they deal with a typical list of interruptions for this sort of journey. Until something happens, that is, and that something not only turns the film on its head but threatens to break an axle and send "The Homesman" skidding off course into something less problematically conventional than frustratingly dude-centric.
In the moment, that argument seems genuine. In the moment, I had these thoughts myself. But the film has an acutely and wonderfully weird sense of intelligence and purpose, turning George Briggs into an avenging, if humorless, angel, a cowboy seeking to right the wrong of all those cowboy chauvinist pigs of so many movies past. There are few sequences in a 2014 movie as haunting as his stoic, one-man extermination of a deluxe hotel in the middle of nowhere that becomes the black-humored personification of every overbearing asshole who thought inalienable rights didn't pertain to women.
The end, though, is where the film arrives triumphantly at the station by purposely going off the rails, stripping its main character of all knowledge obtained, and sending the woman the film persuasively argues can hang with any of these masculine blockheads symbolically floating away into oblivion. The Duke would have approved. That's why it's so astonishing; that's why it cuts like a knife.
Friday, December 05, 2014
Friday's Old Fashioned: Raintree County (1957)
The title of director Edward Dmytryk's lavish Technicolor opus quite literally refers to the Indiana county in which it's set, yet more so it refers to the mythical tree said to have sprouted somewhere in the back country of the Hoosier State against every environmental odd purported to hold the meaning of life. Yes, the meaning of life. It's that kind of a film, you see, one striving to answer the universe's grand mysteries and doing so by deluging the screen with symbolism. Nothing is exactly what it is because everything is meant to resemble something else, something bigger, something richer, something having to do with......life. It is nearly three hours long and chock full of luminous supergiant silver screen stars, yet it is overstuffed, too long, too distant, a folly. Hmmmmmm. Perhaps it sums up life after all?
Its focus is a love triangle between the wondrously named John Wickliff Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift), a northern abolitionist, who seems ready and willing to marry Nell Gaither (Eva Marie Saint). After all, as his father not so subtly declares, marriage is about your beloved but it's also about region. Okay, then, that's a tasty recipe for true love if I've ever heard one. Alas, into Shawnessy's free-thinking world parades Susanna Drake. She is played by Liz Taylor, and so despite being played by Ms. Marie Saint, poor Nell Gaither never stands a chance.
Then again, Susanna Drake doesn't stand a chance either, and she doesn't stand a chance because if John Wickliff Shawnessey is a full-fledged Yankee, she's a straight-up southern belle, born and raised down on the bayou. As such, their relationship is less, you know, a relationship than an emblem of North & South, a series of politically-charged disagreements in spite of their affection. Eventually, upon realizing her bloodline can potentially (likely) be traced to the slave her father took as a concubine, well, hells bells, she breaks down and goes insane. It's not her insanity, of course, but an insanity meant to summarize secession, and these absolutely endless representations of drawn battle lines in lieu of genuine characterization turns the entire affair into melodramatic mush.
"Raintree County" has perhaps become more known for its off camera story than the one relayed on it - that is, Clift's god-awful car wreck in the midst of filming that almost physically killed him (and kind of did emotionally) and left him with a permanently scarred face. You can see the transformation in certain scenes even he and the filmmakers attempted to hide it, and it merely adds the level of regret for what could have been. When you have stars this grand, why go to such lengths to bury their immense electricity beneath gargantuan lampshades of allegory?
There is a scene much earlier, before Susanna goes bonkers and before war erupts and before everything goes to hell in a hand basket when our two still in-love movie stars - er, characters - are aboard a paddlewheel boat bound for the mouth of the mighty Mississippi. And golly gee, you just wish Monty & Liz - er, their characters - could stay on that boat forever, and ride it into a million more sunsets, and avoid all the horrible unrest to come. Alas, 'tis not to be. Life, man. It's f***ing bulls***.
Its focus is a love triangle between the wondrously named John Wickliff Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift), a northern abolitionist, who seems ready and willing to marry Nell Gaither (Eva Marie Saint). After all, as his father not so subtly declares, marriage is about your beloved but it's also about region. Okay, then, that's a tasty recipe for true love if I've ever heard one. Alas, into Shawnessy's free-thinking world parades Susanna Drake. She is played by Liz Taylor, and so despite being played by Ms. Marie Saint, poor Nell Gaither never stands a chance.
Then again, Susanna Drake doesn't stand a chance either, and she doesn't stand a chance because if John Wickliff Shawnessey is a full-fledged Yankee, she's a straight-up southern belle, born and raised down on the bayou. As such, their relationship is less, you know, a relationship than an emblem of North & South, a series of politically-charged disagreements in spite of their affection. Eventually, upon realizing her bloodline can potentially (likely) be traced to the slave her father took as a concubine, well, hells bells, she breaks down and goes insane. It's not her insanity, of course, but an insanity meant to summarize secession, and these absolutely endless representations of drawn battle lines in lieu of genuine characterization turns the entire affair into melodramatic mush.
"Raintree County" has perhaps become more known for its off camera story than the one relayed on it - that is, Clift's god-awful car wreck in the midst of filming that almost physically killed him (and kind of did emotionally) and left him with a permanently scarred face. You can see the transformation in certain scenes even he and the filmmakers attempted to hide it, and it merely adds the level of regret for what could have been. When you have stars this grand, why go to such lengths to bury their immense electricity beneath gargantuan lampshades of allegory?
There is a scene much earlier, before Susanna goes bonkers and before war erupts and before everything goes to hell in a hand basket when our two still in-love movie stars - er, characters - are aboard a paddlewheel boat bound for the mouth of the mighty Mississippi. And golly gee, you just wish Monty & Liz - er, their characters - could stay on that boat forever, and ride it into a million more sunsets, and avoid all the horrible unrest to come. Alas, 'tis not to be. Life, man. It's f***ing bulls***.
Thursday, December 04, 2014
White Bird in a Blizzard
In a year when megawatt talent Shailene Woodley has already convincingly gone dystopian and brought a beloved youth adult novel heroine to life where else was there for her to go but back to the 80's in a Gregg Araki-styled DeLorean? And even if she was born in 1991, and even if "White Bird in a Blizzard" often feels more like a Hal Hartley film in the haze of Kurt Cobain's suicide than a frivolous yet poignant John Hughes affair, Shailene still knows how to wear a Depeche Mode t-shirt and strike a disaffected pose. In fact, her disaffected pose while picking at a pint of ice cream in the film's earliest going is The Disaffected Pose of the Year.
That pose happens immediately after Woodley's Kat Connor learns her mother, Eve (Eva Green), has been reported missing by her father, Brock (Christopher Meloni), a man who acts and speaks like he's persistently inside a library. He seems shell-shocked by his bride's disappearance, as if he expects her never to return, whereas his daughter seems, well, disaffected by her mom's disappearance, as if she expects her to come loping back in any old time. Or maybe not. Maybe she doesn't care if her mom ever returns because maybe she thought her mom was a straight-up b-word.
"White Bird in a Blizzard" settles in for the long con, setting itself up as a mystery, seemingly a murder mystery, the longer that Eve remains a gone girl. Yet the the pace reflects no urgency in solving it, reflecting Kat's, well, disaffection about whether or not it's ever solved. She seems more wrapped up in her sexual awakening, sleeping with her kinda, sorta boyfriend across the street who suddenly does seem quite so hot for her and sleeping with the much-older if nonetheless frisky detective (Thomas Jane) who is convinced Kat's dad is guilty of a crime.
The ultimate resolution to the mystery, intended to represent stifling of sexuality, is so laughable that when it is revealed a particular character literally laughs, long and hard. I was literally laughing too. That mystery, however, is merely the misdirection, the distraction from the real story, centering around Kat's slog toward maturation, and how it happens through what almost feels like a seance through flashback with her manipulative, spiteful mother.
There are moments when Green seems like anything but a suburban housewife. I mean, the sight of Eva Green making meatloaf is about as believable as the thought of Stefani Germanotta eating Doritos. But then, that's right. She's an unhappy outcast, not at home in her home, much too large for this life, trapped, a white bird, a white bird trapped in a blizzard. And it's not so much that Kat finds love for her mother as a recognition for how her mother must have felt, and the understanding that she must not allow herself to fall victim to the same fate.
That pose happens immediately after Woodley's Kat Connor learns her mother, Eve (Eva Green), has been reported missing by her father, Brock (Christopher Meloni), a man who acts and speaks like he's persistently inside a library. He seems shell-shocked by his bride's disappearance, as if he expects her never to return, whereas his daughter seems, well, disaffected by her mom's disappearance, as if she expects her to come loping back in any old time. Or maybe not. Maybe she doesn't care if her mom ever returns because maybe she thought her mom was a straight-up b-word.
"White Bird in a Blizzard" settles in for the long con, setting itself up as a mystery, seemingly a murder mystery, the longer that Eve remains a gone girl. Yet the the pace reflects no urgency in solving it, reflecting Kat's, well, disaffection about whether or not it's ever solved. She seems more wrapped up in her sexual awakening, sleeping with her kinda, sorta boyfriend across the street who suddenly does seem quite so hot for her and sleeping with the much-older if nonetheless frisky detective (Thomas Jane) who is convinced Kat's dad is guilty of a crime.
The ultimate resolution to the mystery, intended to represent stifling of sexuality, is so laughable that when it is revealed a particular character literally laughs, long and hard. I was literally laughing too. That mystery, however, is merely the misdirection, the distraction from the real story, centering around Kat's slog toward maturation, and how it happens through what almost feels like a seance through flashback with her manipulative, spiteful mother.
There are moments when Green seems like anything but a suburban housewife. I mean, the sight of Eva Green making meatloaf is about as believable as the thought of Stefani Germanotta eating Doritos. But then, that's right. She's an unhappy outcast, not at home in her home, much too large for this life, trapped, a white bird, a white bird trapped in a blizzard. And it's not so much that Kat finds love for her mother as a recognition for how her mother must have felt, and the understanding that she must not allow herself to fall victim to the same fate.
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
Foxcatcher
Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) may be an Olympic wrestler, Gold Medalist in 1984 at Los Angeles, but he is also crippingly anti-social and an amateur athlete (read: poor). So after practice one day he returns to his sludgy apartment and chows down on Ramen Noodles at his shabby dining room table while looking at his wall, adorned, so to speak, with a framed dime-store re-creation of Leutze's immortal "Washington Crossing the Delaware", a staring contest between a detatched athlete and the grand myth of the country he supposedly represents. It is an exquisite micrososm of "Foxcatcher", the fact-based story of an eccentric billionaire, John du Pont, and his strange, strained relationship with two wrestlers over a decade. It works best as an unsettling look into the male psyche, but director Bennett Miller also tries to turn it into an overarching commentary on America.
Ostensibly "Foxcatcher" is a sports movie but all the rah-rah, sis-boom-bah typically associated with the genre has been noticeably siphoned out. Instead its tone and atmosphere feels like that room in your parents' house with the really expensive furniture and fireplace that was off limits for you and your rowdy friends, and even if you don't know the extensive details of the true-life tale, it is easy to detect that tragedy awaits rather than triumph. The wrestling, in fact, could have been anything, and the film slyly suggests that it was, seeing as how du Pont spends as much money on army tanks as he does on singlets. It's an ancient idea but a no less true one - that is, a millionaire x infinity filling the colossal void of his otherwise privileged existence with all the money that privilege can buy. He has no friends so he simply enlists some in the form of elite athletes, luring Mark to his sprawling Pennsylvania estate called Foxcatcher Farms where he has erected a regal wrestling facility from his holy shit! fortune of gunpowder and chemicals. There Mark can train in style, and du Pont can glom onto his "tutor".
Steve Carrell assumes the part of du Pont by fashioning his hook with archetypal Academy bait in the form of a significant nose job, a hunched back, schluffy gait and a creepy accent suggesting a man who spends most of his time cooped up inside his own head. It is, by all accounts, a fine embodiment of du Pont, yet it can't help but evoke perhaps Carrell's most infamous creation - office manager Michael Scott. This isn't to say that bits of Carrell's Michael Scott repertoire seep into the performance, not at all, but that his presence in each role allows their similarities to stand out. Both men are oblivious egotists, frightened of women, friendless, seemingly beholden to a severe case of Oedipus Complex. A sequence in which du Pont pathetically poses as a legit wrestling coach in front of his unimpressed, wheelchair bound mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is no more squeamish than Michael Scott trying to break dance on a booze cruise to display "leadership".
Tatum equals Carrell's turn with a just-as-intense performance, though less dependent on physical forgery. He convincingly cultivates an ultra-muscled gait and authenticates an inward drive, the perfect pent-up hull to which an affluent barnacle like du Pont can attach himself. Off the mat he is marooned by isolation, succintly summarized in a quick sequence where he sits by himself in his car, shoveling fast food into his mouth. The Loneliness of the Olympic Wrestler. It's a second-and-a-half that will break your heart. And these issues are only compounded around his brother, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow '84 Gold Medalist.
Dave, in fact, emerges as "Foxcatcher's" most critical and compelling character, undergoing the most significant change despite being more rock solid in who he is than the static principal duo. He is a devout competitor but also a genial family man with two kids and a loving wife (Sienna Miller, the most beautiful woman in the world vanishing into a Dollar Store wardrobe). He refuses overtures to re-locate to Foxcatcher Farms at his brother's behest because he refuses to uproot his family. Until, of course, the price that du Pont pitches is right because even good samaritans need to buy groceries. The scenes in which Dave is made to bow to du Pont despite du Pont's glaring vainglory and wealth-protected ignorance are nauseating, and Ruffalo plays this reluctance for all its worth.
To be certain, what we are shown is not the whole story. Psychiatric issues and more led to du Pont's downfall, topics the film does not really broach, and his relationship to Dave must have amounted to more because otherwise why would he stay? Even money isn't enough to keep a well-reasoned man around a gun-toting loony tune. Miller is not fudging the facts, however, he's merely leaving out pertinent information to sculpt his story the way he wants, painting a morality play with Foxcatcher Farms as the mammoth canvas. Dave stands in for Apple Pie & Chevy Truck America while du Point represents Wine Cellar and Goldman Sachs America, and Mark is the America that got lost off track somewhere in the middle.
That allegory gets pushed too hard, but that doesn't mean "Foxcatcher" fails to work. As an intimate, immediate, intense, and ultimately ill-fated tale of the three men, it is occasionally extraordinary. And when du Pont earnestly tells Mark that his friends call him "Eagle - or Golden Eagle", everything we need to know about America ceding its land of liberty to filthy rich imbeciles is on the screen.
Ostensibly "Foxcatcher" is a sports movie but all the rah-rah, sis-boom-bah typically associated with the genre has been noticeably siphoned out. Instead its tone and atmosphere feels like that room in your parents' house with the really expensive furniture and fireplace that was off limits for you and your rowdy friends, and even if you don't know the extensive details of the true-life tale, it is easy to detect that tragedy awaits rather than triumph. The wrestling, in fact, could have been anything, and the film slyly suggests that it was, seeing as how du Pont spends as much money on army tanks as he does on singlets. It's an ancient idea but a no less true one - that is, a millionaire x infinity filling the colossal void of his otherwise privileged existence with all the money that privilege can buy. He has no friends so he simply enlists some in the form of elite athletes, luring Mark to his sprawling Pennsylvania estate called Foxcatcher Farms where he has erected a regal wrestling facility from his holy shit! fortune of gunpowder and chemicals. There Mark can train in style, and du Pont can glom onto his "tutor".
Steve Carrell assumes the part of du Pont by fashioning his hook with archetypal Academy bait in the form of a significant nose job, a hunched back, schluffy gait and a creepy accent suggesting a man who spends most of his time cooped up inside his own head. It is, by all accounts, a fine embodiment of du Pont, yet it can't help but evoke perhaps Carrell's most infamous creation - office manager Michael Scott. This isn't to say that bits of Carrell's Michael Scott repertoire seep into the performance, not at all, but that his presence in each role allows their similarities to stand out. Both men are oblivious egotists, frightened of women, friendless, seemingly beholden to a severe case of Oedipus Complex. A sequence in which du Pont pathetically poses as a legit wrestling coach in front of his unimpressed, wheelchair bound mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is no more squeamish than Michael Scott trying to break dance on a booze cruise to display "leadership".
Tatum equals Carrell's turn with a just-as-intense performance, though less dependent on physical forgery. He convincingly cultivates an ultra-muscled gait and authenticates an inward drive, the perfect pent-up hull to which an affluent barnacle like du Pont can attach himself. Off the mat he is marooned by isolation, succintly summarized in a quick sequence where he sits by himself in his car, shoveling fast food into his mouth. The Loneliness of the Olympic Wrestler. It's a second-and-a-half that will break your heart. And these issues are only compounded around his brother, Dave (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow '84 Gold Medalist.
Dave, in fact, emerges as "Foxcatcher's" most critical and compelling character, undergoing the most significant change despite being more rock solid in who he is than the static principal duo. He is a devout competitor but also a genial family man with two kids and a loving wife (Sienna Miller, the most beautiful woman in the world vanishing into a Dollar Store wardrobe). He refuses overtures to re-locate to Foxcatcher Farms at his brother's behest because he refuses to uproot his family. Until, of course, the price that du Pont pitches is right because even good samaritans need to buy groceries. The scenes in which Dave is made to bow to du Pont despite du Pont's glaring vainglory and wealth-protected ignorance are nauseating, and Ruffalo plays this reluctance for all its worth.
To be certain, what we are shown is not the whole story. Psychiatric issues and more led to du Pont's downfall, topics the film does not really broach, and his relationship to Dave must have amounted to more because otherwise why would he stay? Even money isn't enough to keep a well-reasoned man around a gun-toting loony tune. Miller is not fudging the facts, however, he's merely leaving out pertinent information to sculpt his story the way he wants, painting a morality play with Foxcatcher Farms as the mammoth canvas. Dave stands in for Apple Pie & Chevy Truck America while du Point represents Wine Cellar and Goldman Sachs America, and Mark is the America that got lost off track somewhere in the middle.
That allegory gets pushed too hard, but that doesn't mean "Foxcatcher" fails to work. As an intimate, immediate, intense, and ultimately ill-fated tale of the three men, it is occasionally extraordinary. And when du Pont earnestly tells Mark that his friends call him "Eagle - or Golden Eagle", everything we need to know about America ceding its land of liberty to filthy rich imbeciles is on the screen.
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