Dissecting a Scene: Walk the Line

You might have heard about “A Star is Born.” It’s doing pretty well at the box office. People seem to like it. We will discuss that movie, certainly, but that’s for next week. This is this week. And seeing “A Star is Born” got me to thinking about “Walk the Line.” The former is better than the latter, not least because it does not have to stick to a straight, t-crossing biopic outline, though that is neither nor there. The former’s best scene is probably an onstage duet between its female and male singers and the latter’s best scene is an onstage duet between its male and female singers. Let’s discuss the latter.

Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) is married with three kids but blue. June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) is married to a stock car driver but she is blue too. June misses Johnny, but won’t really say it. Johnny misses June, and he will say it. He does say it, tracking her down and asking her to go out on tour with him. She acquiesces. And the next scene opens with June opening for Johnny before announcing the name of the guy everyone has come to see and stepping away from the microphone. Johnny enters from downstage, which is where the camera is positioned.

He adjusts his mic.

He makes his patented plainspoken introduction: “Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”

And then he turns to his right, visually beckoning June, though the look is less master of ceremonies than a come on.

So June saunters in, her arms flapping.

She takes the mic right next to Johnny’s. Not behind or off to the side, mind you, but right next to his. This is not his song; this is their song.

And then James Mangold cuts to a wide shot from in front of the stage to show the full band. And I suppose the rules of cinema might dictate an establishing shot, showing us the complete lay of the land. But this is the only shot in the whole scene from within the crowd. And this scene is not about the crowd. It is about them — Johnny and June.

A shot looking up at Johnny from the foot of the stage as he kicks off the first verse.

As he does, Witherspoon, as she does throughout, has June meet Johnny’s eyes with an indelible expression, one that seems to be saying, “Ok, boy, show me watcha you got.” Like every performance of this song on each stop of the tour is another chance for him to show her.

So he does. That’s not just a duet face; that’s a face of challenge-accepting provocation.

And that, of course, comes through in the song’s lyrics, which their performance turns inside out. “I’m not the one you want,” he sings. “I’m not the one you need.” When, in fact, he means precisely the opposite, which he makes clear with that flirtatious smirk.

She knows it too. And that is why Witherspoon has June receive it with a smile-

-that explodes into a laugh. He met her challenge.

And because he did, her chiming in on the second part of the first verse comes across like a harmonizing acknowledgment of the challenge being met.

And Phoenix throws his head back, reveling in the back and forth.

He re-meets her eyes.

And then the camera cuts back to June as she sings along on “Whether you are right or wrong.” And while Cinema Romantico did not have Random Awards back in those days, if it had, the facial expression of the year would have gone to Witherspoon with this double expressive punch on “Wrong.”

And Phoenix receives that expression with one that is basically sex with his eyes, as fierce a juxtaposition as you’re ever gonna get since he’s roaring the chorus. “It ain’t me babe.”

That’s so hot they’ve gotta cool it down, breaking for the musical interlude, stepping back from the microphones.

But then quickly returning.

They tear into the second verse.

Still looking at each other like they were.

But in the space of just a second or two, Phoenix noticeably lets that suggestive smirk dissolve.

It dissolves because the camera switches to his point-of-view, looking out toward the crowd, where his family sits. And notice how Mangold frames this shot — with June fuzzily but conspicuously on the right edge, unintentionally inserting herself into the family dynamic.

Now Johnny looking’s real hard at them, the weight of what he’s singing — “You say you’re looking for someone / who will promise never to part” — reverberating within.

And Johnny’s dad (Robert Patrick), never his son’s biggest fan, sensing that his son is looking toward his wife (Ginnifer Goodwin), looks toward her too, as if adding his own disapproval to his son’s sudden self-doubt will drive the nail in his punk kid’s coffin.

Which is why as that same shot plays out, Johnny’s right shoulder suddenly blurs his pops from the frame, like he’s telling his pops to take a hike and selfishly ignoring his own pangs of what he knows to be true.

Which is why, when the movie cuts back to Johnny, as he sings the line “someone to close his eyes for you”, he does just that, literally. Except, of course, that he is no longer looking at his wife, as these two parts of the frame in lockstep go to show. He is looking at June. He is closing his eyes on his own wife for June. Yikes.

And June and Johnny bellow it again: “It ain’t me babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me babe.”

Which, of course, means, as Johnny’s wife assuredly knows, watching in the shot that ends the scene, with June right there, blurry but lurking, threatening to take her place, really means the opposite. It’s you, babe. Oh, it’s defintely you.

Imagining Post-Show Sitcom Characters in Movies

Esteemed New York Times film critic A.O. Scott would, based on the above Tweet, appear to have seen “Beautiful Boy”, the new film co-starring Steve Carell and Amy Ryan, former co-stars of NBC’s “The Office.” What Mr. Scott thought of the movie is, in the context of this post, irrelevant. No, we are merely interested in the thought that crossed his so-called shallow mind. We say “so-called” because, well, that thought would have crossed Cinema Romantico’s mind too. This blog loves Amy Ryan; this blog loved Amy Ryan on “The Office”; this blog loved Amy Ryan and Steve Carell together on “The Office”; this blog sometimes wonders what happened to their “Office” characters. In fact, that’s what I told my friend Rory when he texted me Scott’s Tweet early one morning last week. And Rory, one of Cinema Romantico’s most loyal frustrated followers, knowing full well this blog’s predilection for the inane, immediately made a fabulous pitch – that is, a blog post about the lives of sitcom people post-show. Hold the phone.

In concocting this post, however, we have decided to honor the spirit of both “Beautiful Boy” and Scott’s tweet. That is to say, we will not simply be positing movie ideas based on actual sitcom characters. No, we will be positing movies featuring actors that played certain sitcom characters, eliciting the sensation that these characters we love do still exist in some sort of artistic, mystical in-between.

A few ideas:

Steve Hytner. While Bryan Cranston’s turn as Tim Whatley, “dentist to the stars”, presaged his leap to stardom, and while even Debra Messing parlayed her two episode stint as the immortal Beth Lookner into “Will & Grace”, Hytner, as hack comic, thorn-in-Jerry’s-side Kenny Bania, had no such luck post-“Seinfeld.” In the show’s ersatz reunion on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, Bania briefly appeared, lamenting that he could not find work in the post-2008 economy, to which Jerry replied “You weren’t working in the good economy”, which seemed to emblemize both Bania and Hytner. But now it’s an era where Netflix is giving every other comic a special. So what if Hytner got a special? Even if he wasn’t Bania we would all detect Bania in the special’s ether anyway, raising the deeper questions, so to speak, about “stuff you don’t have to think about” when everybody else is Woke.

James Avery. The late, indelible Avery was the MVP of NBC’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, as comical as he was commanding, as exasperated at the eponymous Fresh Prince’s antics as he was earnest in giving The Fresh Prince guidance. He loomed large in my childhood. And earlier this summer, stumbling upon a “Fresh Prince” re-run on some channel some night, there was a passing reference to Avery’s Philip Banks, appointed to the bench in Season 3, perhaps one day winding up on the Supreme Court. It stopped my heart. I could not stop envisioning a Supreme Court where Philip Banks sat next to Sonia Sotomayor. Oh, what a wonderful world it would be. And if, in that wonderful world, Avery were still with us, we would craft a movie where a brief scene visiting the (once) hallowed halls of the Supreme Court would catch a glimpse of Avery in the black robe, coolly, fairly, firmly laying down the law.

Chris Eigeman/A.J. Langer. There are infinite reasons My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife is the only one for me. Mid-chief amongst these is the two of us being among the roughly 77 people total who watched ABC’s late-90s sitcom “It’s Like, You Know” before it was shuttered after a year and a half. That it was my second favorite sitcom of all-time pertains to its creator, Peter Mehlman, being a “Seinfeld” scribe, yes, but also to Chris Eigeman, who would be George Clooney in Cinema Romantico’s Hollywood, starring, giving him a weekly vehicle to act incomparably dry as a starchy New Yorker re-located against his will to Los Angeles. What was more, his Will They/Won’t They was carried out with A.J. Langer, playing Lauren Woods, the masseuse/process server, whose askew cadence and purposeful aloofness improbably played off Eigeman’s patented pithiness in such a way as to give their Will They/Won’t They truth because she always seemed to dance around his wavelength rather than totally tune into it. That the series was axed just as their relationship seemed on the brink of a big turn seemed poetic, leaving them to float in the un-televised ether. Neither Eigeman nor Langer has acted a ton since, which saddens me because two impeccable talents deserve more. And so I dream of a dom-com (domestic comedy) where Eigeman and Langer play married characters just, like, you know, living life, but in Ohio, from whence Lauren Woods came, suggesting that she and Arthur found happy-ish ever after.

Jane Curtin/Susan Saint James. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I don’t want this to be a “Book Club”-ish comedy, even though “Book Club” is in my Netflix queue and I really want to see it. I want this to be a movie with two parallel tracks, Curtin like Patricia Clarkson in “Cairo Time” and Saint James like Margo Martindale in “Paris, je t'aime”, going through the motions even as they spiritually sense something is amiss. Because sometimes, when you think you're all by yourself, you are.

Mark Linn-Baker. Larry Appleton of “Perfect Strangers” landed a job at the fictional Chicago Chronicle in Season 3. And though his hours, per sitcom contrivance, never really matched up to a journalist’s, and though, per sitcom contrivance, you never saw him ferreting out leads outside the office, you knew he took his job seriously. But what if Linn-Baker turned up in some current Hollywood director’s ode to the power of the news in a bit part, down there in the T*ump rally press pen, dutifully taking notes, reporting exactly what he sees and not what Bozo the Spray Tan Clown tweets? Couldn’t we think, if only for a moment, that after the Chicago Chronicle, like the Chicago Tribune, was gobbled up by Tronc and Appleton was subsequently pressured into taking an early buyout, he persevered. And if he failed to become Bob Woodward, so what? He became someone whose name you don’t know but whose work you intrinsically appreciate nonetheless. (Bronson Pinchot will appear in the next Harmony Korine film as a natty captain of a Garbage Barge.)

Robia Scott. As a mere recent “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” bandwagon jumper, having only watched the first three seasons this year, at the rightful behest of My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife who was a stone cold original Buffy fan, I was extremely late to the Jenny Calendar party. And like any favorite TV show leaves you wanting more of certain characters (Alton Benes?), I always wanted more Jenny Calendar. Scott (billed then as Robia LaMorte) gave a performance that initially exuded such lightness only to then exude such desperation, born of the desire to hold onto the joy which we realize was not necessarily innate but earned, and intrinsically evokes the idea that our teachers contain, to quote the god-awful line of Rose DeWitt Bukater, “an ocean of secrets.” Scott’s IMDb profile over the last decade is, sadly, pretty sparse, and so I imagine her appearing in some indie, in the role of, say, a social studies teacher, just for a few scenes, a la Alicia Silverstone in “Terri”, giving all us Buffy loyalists and latecomers, a reason to distrust what we already know to be true and just believe our eyes.

Rachel Bloom / Vella Lovell / Gabrielle Ruiz. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, part comedy, part musical, is still on the air, granted, with one season remaining. But one of my absolute favorite developments of the past season was the unlikely troika of Rebecca, Heather, and Valencia becoming fast gal pals, conveyed in their aces, modish, Spice Girls-ish ditty “Friendtopia.” I’d like to imagine Bloom, Lovell, and Ruiz riffing on “Spice World” after the show ends but then, Rachel Bloom is smarter than me. I have no pitch. Give her some cash, Hollywood, and let her figure out the rest.

The Land of Steady Habits

Among several Connecticut state nicknames, “The Land of Steady Habits” is, it seems, open to several interpretations, some ironic, some sincere. As the title for her Netflix released film, mirroring the moniker of Ted Thompson’s book on which it is based, director Nicole Holofcener sees these steady habits less as any kind of politics or piety than consequences of suburban stasis – you know, commuting, big box shopping, and self-medicating stemming directly from the first two. It is these habits that Anders Hill (Ben Mendelsohn) both willingly and reluctantly accrues, moving into a condo in upscale suburban Connecticut after leaving his finance job for vague reasons and abandoning his marriage to Helene (Edie Falco) for ridiculous reasons he later articulates with a rueful laugh. Ostensibly he’s suffering a mid-life crisis, though he suffers it, frankly, less than meanders through it, like a guy trying it on for size. Indeed, that’s what Anders seems to be doing in the opening scene set conspicuously inside a Bed, Bath & Beyond, where he stands before several bright white shelves of towels before backing up and turning right as the camera pulls back, leaving him to confront a second, barely different bright white shelf of towels stretching beyond the purview of the camera, like a modern-day Tower of Babel, confusing everyone below.

This sort of suburban ennui is not new to film, of course, but Holofcener refrains from skewering it, evoked in a scene where Anders winds up in bed with Barbara (Connie Britton), a woman he’s sort of started seeing, and notices a self-help book on her nightstand titled Live Your Best Life Today that he can’t help but mock. Upon doing so, however, Barbara, refreshingly allowed self-possession, Holofcener’s female characters always are, she puts him in his place, illustrating how “The Land of Steady Habits” accepts this life languor and attempts to deal with it at face value, turning a potentially smug moment upside down. It also, however, lays bare Ander’s penchant for saying the wrong thing, not out of malice and not out of obliviousness but some sort of nonchalant defeatism that seems to leave him emotionally numb.

This is not to excuse the character, and Mendelsohn does not excuse him, improbably playing the part as if he’s standing outside of himself, seeing his own behavior in real time and just shrugging. When he’s in conversations, he can’t wait to get out of them, brazenly flouting eye contact, even in his first date with Barbara where he sits at the table looking left and right as if in hopes someone else will bail him out of talking. Not that he’d want to talk to that person either. At a Christmas party, in explaining why he retired from his job, he leaves the room even as he’s still talking, not trailing off but just disappearing, pulling the plug even as he’s still going. If moments like this make it hard to believe such an evasive mumble-mouth was ever a Wall Street mover and shaker, one moment shows you the old Anders, where, still paying the mortgage on Helene’s home, he refuses to sell to his ex-wife’s fiancé even though he can no longer afford it. Mendelsohn hones his gaze and his smile virtually sprouts fangs in declining the deal, a convincing show of macho force.

In another movie, this detail might have been the narrative bomb, set to detonate at just the right moment. Instead it gets diffused rather quietly, less about any kind of narrative payoff than an evocation of the way in which all the characters, like Anders walking out on his wife only to keep insinuating his way back into her orbit, are tied to one another whether they like it or not, and often in unique ways. Anders’s son, Preston (Thomas Mann), out of college and struggling to shift into gear for the next stage of his life, is given the cold shoulder by his parents as a means to teach him a lesson only to find help from his mom’s best friend. His mom’s best friend’s son Charlie (Charlie Tahan), meanwhile, gives his parents the cold shoulder, leaning on Anders instead, the two unlikely kindred souls suggesting a slacker version of the relationship of Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Tavi Gevinson from Holofcener’s “Enough Said.”

Both Preston and Charlie exist as reflections of Anders, and in their agreeably dueling drollness, the performances of Mann and Tahan support this very idea, their respective characters meet harsh life complications with something like a shrug. Neither character’s storyline, however, quite comes home. Preston’s drinking problem is more a contrivance, highlighted by his taking a job as liquor deliveryman, which fails to elevate the pointedness of that joke in any meaningful way. Charlie, meanwhile, suffers a grave fate that feels less his own than a catharsis, of sorts, for Anders, brought home in a Christmas Eve dinner where relative to what happened the argument and mini-brawl feel, frankly, pat. So does the epilogue, which tries to both tie a bow on things and leave it open, leaving the movie a little at loggerheads, approximating Anders in a way, backing out of the room and making a clean getaway even as it is still going.

Mandy

After a hard day logging in The Shadow Mountains of the Mojave, Red (Nicolas Cage) returns to his frontier abode to find his wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) drawing at her easel and proceeds to tell her an Erik Estrada knock knock joke. Indeed, if the soundtrack’s omnipresent synths and the blood red visuals evoking heavy metal album cover art don’t clue you in, this joke is here to tell you the time – it’s 1983. Ah, but don’t presume this is some nostalgia trip. No, if anything, “Mandy”, not so much directed and co-written by Panos Cosmatos as divined by black magic, is an acid trip, even if you haven’t dropped any, evoked in a sequence where Red and Mandy lie in bed discussing their favorite planets. Cosmatos imagines their bedroom as a roofless planetarium where they are bathed in the shifting lights of the cosmos, which Cosmatos eventually cuts to all on its own, reveling in its colorful splendor. And despite the movie’s ensuing repulsive bloodshed, this shot, more than any Pure Flix production ever could, makes you believe, agnostic or not, just for a second, in a Biblical firmament.

This indelible sequence epitomizes the overall pictorial majesty, where Cosmatos intends not just to visually convey the story but blow your mind. Terrifying close encounters flicker in and out like an arthouse haunted house and during a dinnertime conversation between our two lovers Red, both the person and the color, gradually dissolve from the frame, leaving merely Mandy, coated in a chilly blue, underscoring the foreboding nature of her words. Even the pauses between psychedelic palettes are meant to grab your attention, like when the heinous Children of the New Dawn cult is summoning demons with a mystical conch. As they wait, one cult member, evoking Jake Busey’s own cultish fiend in “Contact” (an obscure reference that “Mandy” demands), rolls his automatic car window up and down, up and down, nothing big perhaps but part of the whole everything-is-a-little-weird fabric.

The Children of the New Dawn are lorded over by Jeremiah Sand, played by Linus Roache with hair like Khan and sad-sloped eyes like Jeffrey Tambor in “The Death of Stalin”, a performance that pulls the immaculate trick of being both jaw-droppingly wicked and easily laughed at, and immediately renders Tarantino’s forthcoming Manson movie as no longer required. Sand vaguely references some sort of ascension, but it quickly becomes clear he lords over his charges less with bold promises than some kind of rocket fuel hallucinogen, outlined in a sequence after they have kidnapped Mandy. In an unbroken shot, Sand orates his faux-magisterial motivation, charismatically holding us in the palm of his hand, until it gradually becomes clear he’s totally full of it. Mandy knows it too, which Cosmatos initially communicates to us by the way he has her face metaphysically blend with Sand’s as he speaks, only to have her face vanish again, like he’s trying to acquire her soul and she ain’t having it. Nope, because when he’s finished, she laughs, she laughs at him hard, like the Laker Girls laughing at Kit Ramsey (an obscure reference that “Mandy” demands).

This leads her to death, which leads to Red’s revenge as he works his way through demons and men and women, one by one. The violent retribution evokes innumerable Cage works, but if so many of those other efforts have tonally failed to rise to its leading man’s patented bug-eyed, frenzied level, hanging him out to dry, making him appear comical and dooming him to memes when, in fact, he’s committed to the product more than the movie itself would ever dare to be, Cosmatos crafts a tone to match Cage’s. When Bill Duke makes a cameo in a part that may as well be his “Predator” character in an alternate dimension to explain exactly what’s going on, the operatic busted lip aggravation in Cage’s grimace as he listens harmonizes so precisely with the bananas lyricism of Duke’s words that Cage, for once, looks right at home in his movie rather than a crazed interloper.

Cage’s resplendent mania is what prevents the back half of “Mandy”, a relentless series of death, from becoming, despite oft-painterly innovation, like a chainsaw duet, from devolving into mere revenge porn. It also prevents the movie from straying too far into cynicism. An early moment finds Red at the wheel of his car, listening to Ronald Reagan’s famous Evil Empire speech before switching it off. This is the movie disregarding the values the 40th President claims Americans cherish before proceeding to take those values to the woodshed, not just through Red’s violent avenging and Sand’s repulsive insanity but in “Mandy” eventually mocking its own sense of mysticism. The latter is most gloriously evinced in the haunting conclusion where Red, his face splattered in blood, seems to see Mandy riding in the passenger’s seat of his car, a hallucination turning every Dream Lover movie scene inside-out. If it seems to lay bare the firmament as mere gas and dust, it is nevertheless still so eerily beautiful as to be uplifting.

Life: In 3 Acts

tfw you’re on vacation

tfw your vacation is winding down

tfw vacation is over

An Early Autumn Siesta

Oops! My bad! Apologies, loyal frustrated followers! I mixed up screenshots! This is supposed to be a Going on Vacation post, not a Glowering and Drinking Scotch While America Burns post! But it’s so hard these days to keep a smiley face amidst 2018’s cruel, never-ending civic and political burlesque. Yes, yes, I know, as a lyrical scholar once observed, the fire’s always been burning since the world’s been turning. But damn, you’d think after 4.543 billion years that maybe we would have figured out how to douse the flames a little bit rather than just fan them, which I do not mean as a Flake-ish Call for Civility™but a furious lament at the mind-bending inability (unwillingness) of so many to simply acknowledge what’s right. In such an environment, day-to-day escape, which is so necessary, so valuable, has become so difficult. To get away you must go away. And we will.

We are getting the hell out, of America for a brief respite, and we are getting the hell out of our blogging interface for a little while too. We have been behind on our movie-watching all year, and we plan to catch up, for the most part, to the best of our ability, over the final few months of 2018. But that requires taking time away and getting our mind right. As such, Cinema Romantico will be shuttered for the first half of October to recharge the blogging batteries and gear up for the awards seasons crescendo, as well as the festive Hallmark Christmas Movie season, never mind the culmination to 2018 itself which will no doubt be the most thunderous conclusion of all.

keira knightley catches up on the news

The Wife

“The Wife” opens one morning with celebrated author Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) taking a call at his Connecticut home from the Nobel Committee. But before receiving the expected, jubilant news, Joe asks if his wife (Glenn Close) can get on the other extension. She does, and as the Nobel Committee member explains that Joe has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, director Björn Runge cuts back and forth between Joe and Jean, husband and wife, as Joe bursts with false modesty and Joan seems to recede within herself. If these cuts come across pedestrian, they quietly evoke “The Wife’s” emergent question regarding the precise genesis of this literary goldmine, though it is reduced to a puzzle locking overtly into place rather than a peeling back of so many tantalizing psychological layers. They also evoke the movie’s preference for the close-up, usually of Close, whose facial expressions frequently, brilliantly embody so many conflicting emotions that you half-suspect the narrative obviousness stemmed from a fear that the actor’s stellar poker face would leave her character’s motivation a secret for the ages.

I should back up. “The Wife” does not quite begin with Joe getting a phone call from Stockholm. No, it begins with Joe worrying about whether he will get a call from Stockholm and, foreshadowing his gluttonous predilections, eating in bed, for which Joan scolds him. After winning, he and Joan hop up and down on the bed a la little kids before she climbs down and insists they get on with getting ready for a long day of ceremonial congratulations. She is, in other words, his caretaker, looking after him like a mother might look after a child, which Pryce plays straight to, evincing a distracted, irritable air even in his most composed moments, even if he is basically quoting his own performance in “Listen Up Philip.” Joe tramples over everyone, including his son David (Max Irons), a would-be writer who spends the whole movie dolefully trying to get notes on his latest story, less a character than the doleful trigger of a story bomb waiting to explode at just the right moment.

All this suggests a domestic drama, with Joan in the role of long suffering wife, which is not my term but hers, telling Joe in no uncertain terms that she does not want to be thanked in his acceptance speech because she does not want to be viewed as a victim. It’s a cliché, sure, but one that Joan understands, and that the movie does too, deliberately raising it at the beginning to turn it on its head, remonstrating against the myth of the blustery male ego automatically equating to male genius, laying him bare as a vainglorious old white guy in moment when he pitifully trots out a James Joyce line to lure a comely photographer (Karin Franz Körlof).

Rather, however, than confronting this myth head on, the movie comes at it through a mystery, one given rise by an unfortunately named author, Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater). He essentially accosts Joe and Joan on their flight to Stockholm, an exquisite sequence in which, exhibiting the character’s comical disregard for personal space, he cuts the frame in half by pushing in so close to the married couple that he’s right in Joan’s face, prompting her to look anywhere but at him, Close’s scrunched lips practically exuding a “Can you believe this guy?” He is not so much interested in becoming Joe’s biographer, as Joe himself claims, as fishing for secret information on the Nobel winner, all of which will become evident when he takes Joan out for a drink in Stockholm.

Though the eventual blow-out between Joan and Joe is solid, these cocktails between Joan and Bone is the best scene in the movie. If Bone, like David, is merely a device, he nevertheless becomes something more via Slater’s performance, a pitch-perfect piece of casting, wielding his Cheshire grin of a voice and a churlish, raised eyebrow grin to feign empathy as a means to try and get her to admit that she, not Joe, wrote all those lauded books. The camera’s proximity here feels like its own invasion of privacy, trying to get her to cough something up, which she both does and doesn’t, her entire air a revelatory tease as if she takes delight in reeling this preening sucker in and then shutting him down.

The reality of this charge, meanwhile, is gradually laid out in flashbacks several decades earlier, showing how Joan and Joe met, the latter her literature instructor at a college. The movie might have command of the long-suffering wife cliché but has no such self-awareness when characters broach literary criticisms like heavy-handedness, as demonstrated by these flashbacks. They evoke a TV serial, not so much exposition dumps as thematically correlating so neatly to whatever present moment precipitates their recounting that they fail to work on their own dramatic level, just cookie crumbs on our way to a predetermined destination, rendered with such little flair that the supposed love affair between Joan and Joe plays like artifice rather than amour.

Then again, as young Joan, Annie Starke, Close’s daughter, mirrors her mother’s emotional withholding. As labored as these past events are portrayed in answering the central mystery of Who Wrote It?, Why Did She Do It? never feels as cut and dried as you might assume. And Close takes that baton in the present to keep us at arm’s remove, teasing but never confessing, not even at the end, though I’d swear, in the wake of one last big fat deus ex machina, her smile seems to suggest she has been set free.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Ronin Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

The third and final car chase featured in John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin” is a ferocious affair in which the pursued and the pursuant zoom through the streets of Paris before eventually speeding against traffic. Frankenheimer toggles between close-ups of the characters’ reactions, point-of-view shots looking through the car windows at incoming traffic, and exterior shots of the cars’ evasive tactics and deft maneuvers. But Frankenheimer does not strictly limit this scene to the two cars in question. No, after the pursed and the pursuant have moved on, Frankenheimer frequently lingers over the damage left in their wake, cars crashing into each other, fireballs kicking up, even a car-carrying trailer getting slammed into and having one of its automobile hauls fly off the truck’s headrack and crash to the ground. There is, in other words, a world outside of “Ronin”, one not really explored, because it shouldn’t be, but glimpsed, felt.

It is also glimpsed in the beginning when most of the movie’s band of professional mercenaries first meet up in a Parisian bistro. Larry is already there, drinking and smoking, and Dierdre, the ringleader, arrives and then masquerades as a bartender, pouring an adult beverage for Vincent, who arrives not long after her. Sam arrives last, evoking his m.o. And so they all stand there, acting like they aren’t who they are, refraining from getting right down to the gritty-gritty because Frankenheimer has purposely placed a few patrons in the bistro that the Ronin are waiting on to clear out. A patron like this one…

If I had hundred and twenty-five thousand preeminent takeaways from my first trip to Paris last year, perhaps the pre-preeminent takeaway, aside from cheese, was café culture. Reader, I cherished café culture. Sitting at a café, sipping at my libation of choice, watching the world go by, letting time, worthless time, slip away, made my heart full. Nowhere, not even the movie theater, have I ever found a place that so impeccably matches my everyday air as every Parisian café I visited. The first time I sat at one, even though I did not necessarily know exactly where I was within the city’s geography, I felt right at home. Then again, I was on vacation. It is easy to bask when you are on holiday. I assume if I lived in Paris that I would not always bask in a café; sometimes, no doubt, I would lament. And that is why I love this extra so much. She could have just sat there, doing nothing more than clocking the hourly rate for a French extra. But she didn’t. She acted. She made a conscious choice to play this nameless patron a certain way. She lamented.

What’s more, in this particular frame, both she and Jean Reno’s Vincent seem to be lamenting, each of their gazes fixed downward in that way you do when some sort of existential question has left you  searching your soul for a doubtlessly non-existent answer. If extras are so often meant merely as, shall we say, bodily filler, existing simply to occupy space, forgotten even as they stand (sit) in plain sight, in this shot, the extra and the character rest, for one beautiful instant, on the same plain. In “Ronin”, may the movie gods bless it, everyone, line of dialogue or not, has something to lament.

Pour one out for the extra.

Some Drivel On...Ronin

John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin” was released into theaters 20 years ago this week, an anniversary nobody but Cinema Romantico is likely to celebrate. But then, likely nobody but me has forced his Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife to take pictures of himself on the staircase of the Rue Drevet in Paris, trying (failing) to re-create a shot from the film’s opening scene (see below). “Ronin” holds a special place in my heart. At the dawn of my cinephilia I still considered cinema predominantly in terms of narrative. I enjoyed films beyond their story aspects, absolutely, but I did not have the toolbox, to borrow a term employed by “Ronin’s” main character, to contextualize such enjoyment. And even if “Ronin” contains a narrative, it is deliberately enigmatic, an excuse not just to string together exemplary exercises in action but to provide a canvas demonstrating control of mood and tone, an aesthetic celebration held by a grim party-planner, where omnipresent yellow Gitanes become emblems of ennui, the imperceptible but impeccable costume design are all earth tones, and even a trip to the South of France is recounted in muted color.

The story, in which a group of professional mercenaries attempt to acquire a mysterious case, is just as unembellished, underlined by the crew’s ringleader Dierdre (Natascha McElhone) explaining the mission upon convening her Ronin in a drab Parisian warehouse. “There are some people who have something we require,” McElhone says in the manner of someone telling you she’s about to turn in for the night, “and we want you to get it from them.” It’s the best line reading in show, and illustrative of the oft-dry dialogue, including myriad pithy wisecracks proffered by Robert DeNiro, whose performance alternates between scowl and smirk.

Sure, there are myriad double and triple crosses to keep the whole thing spinning, but these are more about putting pressure on the worldview of the movie’s main character Sam (DeNiro), no doubt short for samurai, which the opening titles refer to, explaining that Samurais whose masters were killed wandered the land as swords-for-hire – “Such men were called: Ronin.” He might well be a sword for hire, but he’s got principals, or, perhaps more accurately, a code. He’s got a code of preparedness, outlined in the film’s sterling opening sequence, breathlessly relying on mere camera movement, editing, music, and DeNiro’s under-acting to evince a man scoping out the place where he’s supposed to meet the rest of his crew, accounting for every possibility that might go wrong before he enters.

Ah, but enter he does and all throughout there is a push and pull between his covering all the angles and a dash for cash. Consider the tunnel weapons-buying sequence where Sam refuses to go in the foreboding passage. What movie hero wouldn’t run in guns blazing? “I’m getting paid to go,” Vincent (Jean Reno). “It’s that simple.” Not to Sam, however, who hangs back, defying, in a sense, his contract. A later scene finds Jean-Pierre (Michael Lonsdale), a friend of Vincent’s called upon at a dire moment, telling the old story of the 47 Ronin as a (perhaps too blatant) means to try and put Sam’s motivation under the microscope. “There is something outside yourself that has to be served,” explains Jean-Pierre. “And when that need is gone, when belief has died, what are you?” Throughout Sam suggests he might well be something more, though this idea is often limited to the smallest behavioral flourishes, and when he finally gives words to his motivation, the line remains coy, and is recited off camera, maintaining the movie’s understated ethos.

In re-considering “Ronin” for its 20th, I kept thinking about its parallels to Melville’s “Le Samourai.” And in thinking about those parallels, I read as much about “Le Samourai” as I did about “Ronin.” And in reading about “Le Samourai”, I found myself pouring over Senses of Cinema’s citation heavy piece on Melville’s film. And one of the citations was taken from Simon Field’s book about Japanese filmmaker Suzuki Seijun and his influential Yakuza films. “The traditional yakuza hero,” went the citation, “was a critic of a kind, a critic of modern society, a rebel who preferred the ancient warrior code as adopted by gangsters to the cynicism of modern Progress. But he had to pay for his rebellion by dying.” That Sam does not die correlates less to him being the main character than ultimately being a character apart from the traditional yakuza hero, re-wiring his code not as rebellion but as serving something outside himself. If this idea failed to register with me in 1998, it resonates whole-heartedly in 2018. That might be a nod to topicality, but it also evokes how while film itself is finite, films remain alive through our eyes. For 20 years I have been inspired by the glorious cinephilic (sic) kick “Ronin” provides; watching it anew, I just found “Ronin” inspiring.