Next Week
You may remember that I mentioned Lucky You and The Hoax in my Things to Do post last week. You may also recall that neither of those films were discussed this week. No need really. With Lucky You I was hoping to spotlight to a little seen movie by a director I respect. Then I actually watched it. I can understand why certain bad movies, like, I don’t know Transformers, were made. It’s unfortunate but things like Transformers are always going to be profitable, no matter how souless or boring they are, and I imagine Michael Bay increased his bank account by several zeroes to participate. Lucky You isn’t as bad as Transformers, and it means well, but meaning well is usually the most boring kind of bad movie. This is the kind of movie that is so boring you wonder how the director could muster the enthusiasm required to spend several months shooting it.
Essentially Lucky You is a warmer, fuzzier The Color of Money in the poker world. The Color of Money didn’t need to be warmer or fuzzier, and it didn’t need Eric Bana at his blandest (saying something) or Drew Barrymore at her most obnoxious (REALLY saying something.) Robert Duvall does as much as he can. Curtis Hanson’s magic touch with material that should suck (In Her Shoes) fails him here. Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys one two punch will ensure his work a look see from now on, but this one’s a bummer.
The Hoax isn’t being deprived of a full review because I didn’t like it, in fact, the new Richard Gere movie is almost exactly what I hoped it would be: light on its feet, not too pompous and charming, the majority of that charm deriving from Gere’s work and his chemistry with a characteristically appealing Alfred Molina. This is the best that director Lasse Hallstrom has been in years, primarily because he doesn’t seem to be humping Oscar’s leg this time out. Hallstrom’s telling a story again, and slight as it may feel, he tells it well. The Hoax isn’t getting the full post treatment because I just said everything I really needed to say about it. Anything else would be me writing to read myself write, and I’m doing plenty of that anyway.
So what about next week?
On the DVD front: Waitress, Tom Petty: Runnin’ Down a Dream, Shooter, Johnny To’s Election, maybe the original Diabolique.
The theatre front: Not sure, pickings are slim in my neighborhood this week. I’m checking out No Country for Old Men again, may see Lars and the Real Girl or The Darjeeling Limited, but those are a drive away and still in the maybe stage (I’m iffy on both of them anyway). The good news is that my area has finally announced Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution for the following week and I’ve been looking forward to that one.
Anyone here catch Southland Tales? Is it as bad as it sounds?
The Mist (2007)
The first act of Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s (enough possessives there?) The Mist gets it. This portion of the film, like good Twilight Zone, like the first third of Spielberg’s underrated War of the Worlds, understands that nothing is scarier than quiet. The storm leaves, the mist approaches, and we watch every little awkward expositional piece snap into place for the inevitable nightmare with a smile on our faces. I generally hate crowds, but this is a good film to see with a crowd, to recreate that huddled together to hear something scary vibe. To reaffirm the illusion that you’re stuck right with the characters in that little grocery store when someone discovers that a possibly really big octopus is hiding in the supernaturally photogenic mist (which is really fog, but John Carpenter beat King to the punch.)
I was enjoying this first act so much that I dreaded the inevitable reveal of the monster(s). This can be a buzz kill, particularly in our new school horror films, hard won mood dissipated over a few cheap CG beasties. I warn you. The beasties are cheap, and are definitely CG, but the The Mist, for the better part of another hour, continues to effectively mine the Monsters are Due on Maple Street vibe of a bunch of types slowly falling apart as the outward menace relentlessly presses in. Yes “types”, there’s not one recognizable human being in all of The Mist, and, with the exception of Marcia Gay Harden’s stale psychotic religious lady bit (a religious lady must have really screwed King over sometime in his young life, as he seems incapable of not including a damning portrait of one in his work) I didn’t care. This movie brought me back to my pre-teen days of reading Stephen King in my little bedroom.
There has been talk that Darabont, formerly of the more good natured King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (one overrated, one barely watchable, I’ll let you guess which is which) has changed King’s open ending to something a little nastier. He has, and this is a stumbling block. I don’t mind the ending itself, but Darabont mucks up the staging; seeming a little too self-consciously “bad”, a sunny director’s attempt to break free from his reputation. Darabont is too proud of his ending and overplays it, lingering where a few quick cuts would have sufficed. I won’t spoil the surprise but imagine the ending of Night of the Living Dead as restaged by a trying to slum Frank Capra and you’ve got an idea of what you’re in for.
That’s why The Mist doesn’t ultimately stick. Romero’s film has true outrage. Carpenter’s The Thing (an obvious influence) is colored by a fuck it cynicism. Even Serling, as overbearing as his messages could be, seemed to be truly haunted by his visions. On the page, The Mist transcended its derivations by the sheer pulp force of the writing. Darabont, good intentions and fun aside, doesn’t quite escape the trying to be good for you sandbox.
★★★
Talk to Me (2007)
Talk to Me is one of those “two men who don’t understand one another get together and do something unexpectedly important” pictures. One of them is wild and flamboyant, in touch with his inner id. Except id is inconsistent and undisciplined. This man has a chip on his shoulder. The other man is the more Felixy of the odd couple. He’s got discipline and consistence in spades, but doesn’t ever put himself out there. He doesn’t take risks. If the two men never meet, they may or may not live perfectly adequate, maybe even successful lives, combine the two and you have the legendary stuff that sentimental movie biographies are made of.
The two men of Talk to Me, a well crafted film by the talented Kasi Lemmons, are Petey Green (Don Cheadle) and Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Petey Green is a self-destructive ex-convict who fancies himself a DJ, Hughes is a promising exec at a small radio station that happens to come upon Green while visiting his brother in prison. Hughes is understandably reluctant at first to entertain Green’s proposition that they put his prison show on the actual airwaves. But Green wins him over. And Hughes wins Green over.
We know how these films work, and we know, true story or not, how each act is going to play out. Films this reliant on formula are usually only as good as their performers. Talk to Me happens to have two of the most electric performers in the movies today. Don Cheadle is solid, and more interesting than most in their better work, but disappointingly predictable; the rabid, bite you at any moment electricity of his role in Out of Sight is needed but missing. Maybe it’s the script. The film, also disappointingly, keeps Green’s supposedly honest, inflammatory broadcasts (keep in mind this is a black man at the height of the Civil Rights Movement) on the backburner. The first third or so of Talk to Me, which details Green’s attempts to get on the radio, has a loosey goosey irrelevant catch as catch can charm. Then Martin Luther King Jr. dies and the film gets a case of the Very Special Episodes.
Ejiofor is superb. Playing the straight laced supposedly white washed black man, he’s the REAL wild card of Talk to Me, with a heat, a simmering confusion of the bullshit, the hypocrisy, the racism on both sides, that powers even the more mundane stretches of the script. It all comes together in a scene where Hughes, after a half an hour of Green’s swaggering bullshit, invites Green down to a poolhall to negotiate. Hughes turns the tables on Green, and he turns the tables on the audience as well. This scene says more about the class and race issues of the time than any four more obvious documentary inserts possibly could.
Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson (this woman is too good not to break out), Vondie Curtis-Hall, and Martin Sheen round out and color the film in appealing ways. The radio station where Hughes and, eventually, Green work is one of those lived in slightly idealized places of only in the movie eccentrics that you wish you could hang out in in actuality. Talk to Me isn’t perfect, it’s too schematic and reverent, but the scheme very rarely goes down this good. Lemmons’ affection for the material, and her actors, is contagious.
★★★
No Country for Old Men (2007)
*This post discusses, to a certain extent, the ending of the film.
Anyone who goes to the movies as often as many of us do carries around, consciously or sub-consciously, an image of a “perfect movie.” Like addicts looking for their next fix, movie obsessives see, talk and write about virtually everything, and hope for the next film that perfectly, or nearly perfectly captures their inner idea of whatever kind of movie they happen to be seeing. I came across one of those films in 2004 in Sideways, a film that I loved intially and have continued to carry around since. Sideways is my idea of a perfect human comedy. I find every performance, every scene, every bit, to be graceful, warm, intelligent, and supremely moving. I came upon another of those films last year in Pan’s Labyrinth. If you’re really, really lucky, you get one maybe once a year, maybe one every other year.
This year that film is No Country for Old Men. This is the film that I hope for every time I walk into a thriller. The film, like many great films, feels inevitable. It seems that Tommy Lee Jones was always meant to play Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a variation on the creaky, no bullshit persona that Jones has been perfecting for the better part of twenty five years. It seems that Josh Brolin, always a badass, authoritative presence, was meant to embody Llewelyn Moss, a character that utilizes everything that Brolin brings to a film when he’s on. Brolin, like Jones, seems like he would be comfortable in another era of movies, which is another way of saying that he actually looks like a man. He keys into Moss’s desperation but still manages to be charismatic, likable even, without shortcoming the self-absorption of the character.
I can’t say that I guessed that Javier Bardem was meant to play a villain as iconic as Anton Chigurh, but I’m happy to be surprised. Bardem’s irrepressible charisma lightens what could be a problematic part. Chigurh isn’t a character but a Grand Literary Idea, and that can be impossible for even the swiftest of actors. Bardem is the Grim Reaper, the Typhoid Mary of the kind of apathy fueled corruption that is slowly eroding the society that Sheriff Bell may have not treasured (the film isn’t that sentimental) but at least understood.
Finally, the film feels inevitable for the Coen Brothers, who after some great films, some uneven films, and one bad one (I’m talking about O Brother, yes, I feel comfortable admitting I hate that well shot, God awful redneck boonie movie) have now made their best film. No Country for Old Men is based on a novel by the beloved Cormac McCarthy, but it feels as if it has always been in the back of the brothers’ heads, the film that has fueled their other tales of greed, death and corruption. Some have implied that No Country is the first Coen Brothers film to discard the snarky bullshit, but I disagree. Their brilliant Blood Simple (my favorite of the Coens films before this one) while playful, has a mournful quality. Fargo and the underappreciated The Man Who Wasn’t There may have that deadpan, vaguely postmodern thing going on, but they also deal in a bewilderment, an existential despair, that comes to the forefront in their new film.
I recently watched Melville’s Le Samourai for the first time. What is there to say about that film? It’s perfect. It elevates a very familiar story to the level of art in the precise brilliance of its execution. A similar thought occured to me as I was watching the long scene in the beginning of No Country for Old Men as Moss investigates the bizarre blood bath that he’s discovered while hunting. The scene plays much longer than most thrillers have accustomed us to expect, and is a nearly overpowering achievement in pure film craft. The scene, at the risk of overusing the word, is perfect.
If No Country for Old Men was merely a chase film between Moss and Chigurh, with Bell making an obligatory third act appearance similar to McDormand’s in Fargo, then the film would still be the best I’ve seen all year. The third act though, as you’ve no doubt heard, strives for something else entirely. We suddenly realize that the story we’re seeing is just another of Bell’s lost stories of inexplicable meanness and sadness, yet another reason why the lines of his face seem to cut so much deeper than anyone else, yet another reason why his eyes, while alive, seem to droop down to his chin. No Country for Old Men begins as a thriller and ends as an elusive ghost story. A mourning for something the characters don’t entirely understand to be missing to begin with.
As gracefully as the Coens handle the third act sigh that occurs in place of a climax, it’s the final scene between Chigurh and Moss’s wife, Carla Jean (Kelly McDonald) that elevates No Country for Old Men into the realm of shattering masterpiece. In this scene we realize that even Chigurh has a certain honor, actually more honor than Llewelyn, and that the final death would have been entirely avoidable. Chigurh’s line to Carla Jean, something along the lines of “He could have saved you but he chose to use you to save himself” is the stuff of nightmares. The next image, of Chigurh checking his boots, has the quiet, unlanced dread of the ending of the original The Vanishing. This image, more than many even good movies before it, drives home the price of greed, the cost of selling yourself to the highest bidder.
★★★★
Your Humble Writer Wishes You Well Wishes…
I’m afraid Thanksgiving will be taking a bit of a toll on my contributions to Bowen’s Cinematic for the remainder of the week. Consider this your permission to live a balanced and fulfilling life, at least for a few days. Happy Thanksgiving fellow movie obsessives (or people bored at work). Hope you return next week, where I will guarantee (maybe, perhaps) posts of:
No Country for Old Men, The Mist, Talk to Me, The Hoax, and maybe Lucky You.
My family will be over so I’m sure that there will be plenty of re-watching of random things as well. My little brother, for one, needs to see Zodiac. I schooled him on Ratatouille last night, or, more accurately, he schooled himself, I feel asleep at the dangerous hour of 9:30.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
Forgive the obviousness, there’s probably a thousand other blogs singing the praises of Planes, Trains & Automobiles this very moment. While I can’t comment on the status of John Hughes’ film across the country, I can say that it was a stable in my house around this time of the year growing up, much like the barely watchable A Christmas Story on Christmas. Yes, I said barely watchable, and maybe we’ll get into that next month and further afford you the opportunity to further accuse me of casual critic heartlessness.
I was always tempted to be a bit of a critical Scrooge with Planes, Trains & Automobiles too. Maybe it’s the natural urge to reject something that your parents like so much, but something about the movie has always seemed so square, and, as an adult, I think I can pinpoint the problem with a little more accuracy. The film is, like most John Hughes movies before he realized it was more profitable to devise never ending methods to kick bad guys in the crotch, trying to teach you a VERY SPECIAL LESSON.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a buddy movie, but points are always scored in one direction, and that’s on Steve Martin. The film continually feels the need to remind us what a closed off prick he is. John Candy, while more open and feeling, is just as self-absorbed and unaware in other areas (such as the bathroom, or the bed.) But, like many films that want to teach us a VERY SPECIAL LESSON, the back and forth is never really acknowledged. Steve Martin needs to get his head out of his ass, so it’s his actions that are held under continued scrutiny. Candy is our messenger, and his mistakes (which are considerable in places, think of the car) are ok. Martin is the jerk for not understanding that Candy screws up because he’s lovable and misunderstood.
This is my vague resistence to Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and the reason I swallow just a little when a friend or family member insists to me that it’s a great movie. I nod “sure” and move on, don’t want to be impolite. The film is pleasant enough, and funny in places, and utilizes the F word admirably well for a Holiday movie, but Planes remains too tethered to it’s message to get into anything too messy or recognizably human. By Holiday movie standards, Planes, Trains & Automobiles rates a solid “pretty good”, but by movie movie standards, merely “ok”.
Or would, except that Planes, Trains & Automobiles happens to feature John Candy in his best performance. Why did this man never find a film that truly “gets” him? That captures the grace, the charm, the self-loathing disguised as modesty (complete with distinctive chuckle employed to distract anyone who comes too close), the bravery? John Candy is a Chaplin hero who never found his Chaplin. Why does a blunt intstrument like Adam Sandler get a Paul Thomas Anderson while Candy could only hope for a John Hughes or a Chris Columbus?
Because of John Candy, and his chemistry with an also very effective Steve Martin, there are two moments in Planes, Trains & Automobiles that are so poignant that I nearly change the channel. You probably know at least one of them, and that’s the ending (very reminiscent of Chaplin) where we discover that the John Candy character isn’t a constant traveler by choice, it’s by necessity, his ridiculously oversized trunk his only home. The plot point is, typical to Hughes, delivered with a sledge hammer, but you don’t care. The sight of Candy by himself, a look of stubborn optimism regardless of the circumstances, of chivalry, of resignation, is enough. The movie is worth everything for this one image, and this movie happens to have two of them.
The other, which you probably also remember, is about half way through the film, and it verbalizes everything we instinctively love about John Candy to begin with. Martin and Candy are in a motel room, and Candy has just spilled beer all over the bed they are to share. This is after a bathroom incident that would disgust anyone much less Mr. Executive. Martin finally loses it, let’s Candy have it, and Candy responds with a simple, blunt speech that temporarily elevates the movie into the realm of classic. Candy isn’t just good here, he’s great, but it’s not that Oscar or badass great, it’s great because it so aggressively, openly sentimental, exposed. This is a scene about a man, without the slightest hint of posturing or ulterior motives, asking for help, and fighting for the last bit of self-worth he has.
In these two scenes, Planes, Trains & Automobiles touches on the very thing that a Holiday movie should be about to begin with: our common struggle not to lose ourselves. It is also, by far, the best thing John Hughes has ever been associated with, and don’t dare bring up the dreadful The Breakfast Club, we’ll deal with that after A Christmas Story.
★★★
Beowulf (2007)
For about thirty minutes, Beowulf is exactly what you secretly hope it to be: swaggering, absurd, atmospheric, over the top, a burly big budget macho cover of just about every horror and sword and sandal cliche in the playbook. The pleasures are fleeting though, and soon give way to a schizophrenic film that seems to be aiming for about ten different things at once, and missing on all ten counts. Is the film an exploration of the dark heart that lies in every man, particularly great men? Is it a political intrigue film, detailing the jostling of power and ruffling of feathers that occur when an outsider is brought in? Is the film about the sexual hypocrisy of the time? Or the religious hypocrisy? Sadly, Beowulf is all of those things, and none of those things.
The film does have moments, and the reason that you should maybe see Beowulf despite my reservations is Grendel. Let’s talk about Grendel. Grendel, as performed by professional hipster curiosity Crispin Glover, is a legitimately memorable movie monster. Tortured, charred, cancerous, with a hyper sensitive ear drum that beats like a tell-tale tumor, Grendel is the broken heart of Beowulf. Some have compared this take on Grendel to the Gollum of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, and that comparison isn’t entirely unfair to either party, though to me Grendel bears a greater resemblance to the Frankenstein monster: both born of self-absorption, both just as flippantly discarded, and both denied the kind of basic understanding of their existence that we take for granted. This lack of understanding is channeled, rather inconveniently for the citizens of Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) kingdom, into destructive, all consuming rage. Cue Beowulf (Ray Winstone), the only warrior who can stop the beast.
So, yes, Beowulf is a mishmash, but it does have moments of true fly by the seat of your pants kineticism, the kind of stuff that hasn’t graced a Zemeckis film since his underrated Death Becomes Her. The film also has Angelina Jolie in the first film since Pushing Tin (not kidding) that has any idea what to do with her. After killing Grendel (disappointingly soon), Beowulf must confront the creature’s mother, a water demon (it’s true form is seen in eerily elusive reflections) who morphs into Jolie at her fleshiest for both Beowulf’s and our benefit. Their big scene is largely one absurd phallic double entendre after another, but it underlines what’s right about this movie when it isn’t suffocating under all the the extraneous hugger mugger: it’s GLORIOUSLY absurd. GLORIOUSLY reveling in big, grand emotions like self-loathing or, in this sequence, the kind of pure, overheated lust that you probably haven’t felt since you were thirteen and looking at your English teacher in a certain way.
Oh, what the big directors of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s could’ve done with this creature. Picture Angelina Jolie in a Kim Novak role in a (good) Hitchcock movie. Or working with Otto Preminger in his down and dirty noir period, or with Nicolas Roeg, or with the Godard of Contempt, or anything from the French New Wave. Jolie has the presence, and even the talent, for such a filmography, but she’s been ridiculously squandered so far. Are there no American directors with even the slightest hint of erotic imagination? The answer is apparently no, which leaves Jolie stranded in either bloodless sell out B pictures, or pompous Oscar prestige films. Her entrance here, a golden carmel kissed siren with cloved feet and a snake’s tail, seemingly floating out of the water, leaves one hoping that other directors will get the idea.
Unfortunately, Ms. Jolie returns to the sidelines after a too short sequence with Beowulf, and it’s back to the half-formed subplots. A character who looks and sounds a lot like John Malkovich doubts Beowulf then makes peace and gives him his sword (this is actually before the Jolie scene but who cares). Beowulf inherits bedly rights to the Queen who looks and sounds a little like Robin Wright Penn. Beowulf trades a few “what is it to be a moral, manly man” pensees with his second in command Brendan Gleeson, etc. Another problem with Zemeckis’s aim here is the technology. No matter how much Zemeckis may insist to the contrary, the animation here is weird, and I have a hard time giving a damn whether a marionette who looks a little like Ray Winstone gives in to his inner bad boy or not.
Eventually a dragon, another bastard child of sexual gluttony, arrives, and the film unleashes another hellfire sequence that can best be appreciated on a big screen with those nifty 3-D goggles. The film then calms down for an ending that briefly connects all of the other half baked dots that made the second act so slow to begin with. I did like the final image, a number that recalls Polanski’s Macbeth in its implication of continued bloodshed, but it’s too little too late.
★★½
Jindabyne (2007)
A young woman driving along a lonely road in the middle of the day is stopped and killed by an older man who’s purpose and identity remain a mystery. A couple (Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney) try their damndest to keep past hurt and a meddling mother from eating their relationship alive. A young boy experiments in death with a friend who’s family knows their own heartbreak. The wounds of these various characters fester (in the titular Australian town) until a shocking act of self-absorption brings everything to the breaking point.
Which is another way of saying that Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne is another of those domestic hell movies that earn respectable reviews because nothing’s really wrong with them except for the fact that you don’t care. Everything in Jindabyne feels too mapped out, too finely calculated to elicit maximum human nature is icky underneath the plastic surface dread. Even Linney and Byrne, who are both fine, feel too familiar. How often is Linney asked to play this same frustrated, intelligent woman who finds herself at a certain, blah, blah, blah. Linney is a wonderful, beautiful, intuitive actress, but she needs to find something soon that resists the urge to cast her as all of Womankind’s frustrations with that species that shall be known as Man. Byrne fares mildly better for the simple reason that you don’t see him as often.
Lawrence’s film is based on the Raymond Carver story “So Much Water So Close to Home”, and the difference between the two is a lesson in over thinking something that already works just fine. Want Carver? Watch Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Want a simmering, unspoken domestic tragedy? Watch Todd Field’s blunter, but considerably more effective In the Bedroom. Want to a great 2007 Laura Linney performance? See The Savages. Jindabyne is not a bad movie, it’s a perfectly ok movie you’ll respect while watching and forget a week later.
★★½
American Gangster (2007)
Many directors would be lucky to have a picture like American Gangster under their belt. The film is, as typical with Ridley Scott, masterfully shot and orchestrated. This is a big, sprawling, satisfying tough guy movie. American Gangster is a cool flick, entertaining, and it’s a testament to the film that I already want to watch it again; particularly any moments with scene stealer Josh Brolin as Det. Trupo, a laughably obvious, corrupt glutton who hasn’t been fired yet because it would probably entail too much paper pushing.
That said, American Gangster, also like much of Scott’s work, feels distant. Scott has a background in advertising and photography and you feel that. Empathy doesn’t seem to be the man’s strong suit. Alien and Blade Runner are both considerable achievements, but they feel like a professor’s doctorate on the mechanics of their genres, not impassioned films that their creator HAD to make. American Gangster feels like Scott said, “Yeah, I haven’t made a gangster movie yet. Recreating 1970s Manhattan might be fun.”
And as impressive as that recreation may be, it has the subtlety of a wax museum exhibit. Scott’s 1970s inner city America, like many directors’ take on the decade, feels fetishy and not entirely authentic. The TVs play nothing but Vietnam updates, the streets are grimy, but PERFECTLY grimy. The detectives and the hoods look good, but too good, like the Mod Squad as re-envisioned by a certified Oscar nominated genius filmmaker. You may find yourself following suit and reacting in a similarly detached way: oh, that was a powerful scene, oh Washington exhibits quite a bit of menace here, etc. American Gangster doesn’t get under your skin and a film about a man smuggling heroin in the caskets of dead American soldiers should get under your skin.
Brian DePalma’s Scarface is too often mistaken for a great movie, but there’s no denying that it has a certain bugfuck gotta do it now or never insanity that’s impossible to forget. American Gangster, based on a fascinating true story, essentially has no point of view at all. I’m not really buying the point of view that has troubled some: that Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian are championing Frank Lucas’s (Washington) actions simply because he’s black and it represents a certain ironic affirmative action in a very lethal profession. The film has plenty of evidence that could be used in favor of that theory, but I don’t sense that Scott gives a damn one way or the other. He’s making Scarface without the fevered bloodlust, Heat without the existential despair, or Serpico without the impassioned outrage. Scott, as usual, is interested in a thoroughly researched, emotionally mute, time travel piece.
There are moments though, and the thing is phenemonally entertaining. Just as Scott is Scott, Washington and Crowe are Washington and Crowe. I would’ve liked a few more surprises from them, but they deliver “cool”, authoratative work that I’ll appeciate even more after a few beers while watching it the fifth time on TBS and boring my friends with a long winded something about what rarities Washington and Crowe truly are. One scene does stick though, Denzel, after lecturing his gang about the need to lie low, dares, once, to wear a gaudy coat as a gesture to his clueless wife, who bought it for him. This is the gesture, this one slip, that signals Denzel’s demise. For once, Scott briefly tunes into the human cost of long, protracted, merciless warfare.
★★★
Crazy Love (2007)
A bit of old fashioned perversity probably lies under many relationships, but few are as intensely nuts as the sixteen year courtship between Linda Riss and Burt Pugach. Their story begins as a How We Met that your parents may have bored you with as a child, and seemingly ends in something out of a Vincent Price movie. This isn’t the ending though, Pugach tries and tries again, oblivious to obsession, to a wife he already had, to complete psychosis. Pugach may be a monster, but he’s a monster that essentially got things exactly as he wanted. He exemplifies self-absorbtion masked as boundless love. He’s also Exhibit A in “try, try again.”
Crazy Love has a few annoyances, some of the music and visual cues are too self-conscious, too “look how WEIRD we are” in a John Waters kind of way, but the film is haunting in it’s refusal to editorialize. Crazy Love buys into the mania of it’s two leads, and from them a surprisingly universal tale emerges: of ruin, of need, of settling, of a happiness that springs from resignation, from accepting how certain things will never be.
Certain things will never be though, because Burt has arranged them to never be. The film seems to essentially view the ultimate wedding of Burt and Linda as happy in an ironic way, but one can’t help but feel that it’s a happy ending only for Burt, and that Burt has successfully engineered Linda’s downfall so she’ll be in his league. One of the reporters in the film calls Burt the “worst husband since Joey Buttafuoco” and the judgement comes as a relief, finally!, a bit of common sense. Then one of his friends, who’s been speaking on Pugach’s behalf throughout the picture, reasserts the old maxim that “even Hitler had friends.”
Some will see Crazy Love as romantic, as reaffirmation that anyone can have anyone so long as they pay goons to disfigure the object of their affection, but I saw it as something more troubling. Crazy Love is evidence of the extreme force and persuasion of personality, that you can get away with anything if you have balls enough to want to. We see the Pugachs tells their story, and watch them watching one another, and watch them as Burt gets into trouble yet again for another bit of irregular persuasion and we see that Crazy Love is ultimately about the self-delusion that is necessary to weather one crippling disappointment after another. Linda found a kind of happiness, and she eventually found a husband, but she had to adjust her expectations of life. Burt never had to, and probably never will, such is how things go.
★★★½
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