Bee Movie (2007)
Last week, Roger Ebert wrote that Autumn 2007 is such a good season for movies that even one of the slasher films (P2) is pretty good. I would like to borrow that line of logic: Autumn 2007 is such a good season for movies that even an animated film targeted for children and not created by PIXAR is actually pretty good. Bee Movie is one of those films I would have never seen unless to appease someone else, but I’m glad I did, it’s delightful. More importantly, Bee Movie is the kind of delightful that isn’t trying to sell you Mountain Dew or action figures every ten minutes.
Bee Movie is, as I’m sure you know by now, a project of Jerry Seinfeld’s. Seinfeld co-wrote and co-produced and also lends his voice to the film’s protoganist, Barry B. Benson, a bee approaching graduation who’s having difficulty deciding what he wants to do with his life. Plenty of adolescent humans face a similar terror every year, but Barry’s problem may cause a few humans to re-evaluate and appreciate their position: when Barry chooses a job he’s stuck with it for the rest of his life, whether it be stirring honey, or keeping the honey from dripping over. The bees who fly outside the hive to pollinate the flowers are the jocks of this world, and like human jocks, they are blessed with a genetic luck that’s beyond choice. Barry could live with that occupation but he’s, unfortunately, an adventurer in a honey stirrer’s body. Then he meets Vanessa Bloom (Renee Zelwegger) and his confusion, already approaching a tipping point, goes topsy turvey.
So yes, Seinfeld has brought us a remake of The Graduate with bees, complete with a quote of that film’s famous scene of Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) floating idly in his swimming pool. Then a funny thing happens, just as you sit back and figure you’ve gotten the whole thing figured out, Bee Movie changes gears radically. No fair ruining the film’s appealingly loosey goosey plot points, but the film is essentially three short films loosely tied together through our confused little hero. One of the primary charms of Bee Movie is that it’s totally in tune with how children play, how children can change a story at a whim and follow a totally unrelated digression no matter how silly. Bee Movie is silly, and I mean that as a compliment.
★★½
Plans and a Policy Change at Bowen’s Cinematic.
A reader suggested a week ago that I “star” things. I initially resisted this impulse, but I, after seeking consultation from a few other readers, have decided to give it a try. Four stars will be the best, one the worst, which is the most traditional use of the little asterisks. To give a rough basis for comparison, I have starred everything that appears on the immediate page, all archive stuff will remain unstarred. You’ll note that almost all of the front page films have a generous amount of stars. What can I say? It’s been a wonderful week or two at the movies. I flirted with giving two other movies four stars, but decided against it. I want the four star rating to really mean something, and that means the occasional tough choice.
I will probably do a Best of 2007, and the star thing may not, in the end, be a totally accurate indicator of how that list will wind up. Time changes most all things, including opinions, and I have to go with what I think at the time. Hope you enjoy the ratings, and tell your friends. At the very least it will afford me another illusion of power.
Now, on to the fun stuff, next week’s agenda. I feel safe promising you looks at American Gangster, Bee Movie, Jindabyne, and Crazy Love. I’m thinking that a wild card may pop up somewhere in there too, maybe The Darjeeling Limited, maybe Lust, Caution. We’ll see. Meanwhile, hope you guys have a wonderful week.
P.S. I may have something tomorrow too. You never know with me. I can be a rascal.
Virginia Film Festival: Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Sidney Lumet is obviously known primarily for his New York crime films (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Prince of the City, etc.) but something that runs through nearly all of his work, including other masterpieces such as The Verdict, or 12 Angry Men, is a generosity of spirit that is rare in any filmmaker, particularly American, particularly now. Lumet’s films take their time, his style is unfussy. Lumet lingers on the small moments between the bursts of profanity or violence, subtly insisting on the humanity of his characters, regardless of their actions. Look at the very long phone conversation between Al Pacino and his lover Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon, very few filmmakers would have let that scene go on so long, and they would’ve been cutting one of the best scenes of the movie in the process.
Sidney Lumet’s last picture, Find Me Guilty, signaled a minor return to critical favor. Again, the film is refreshingly deliberate, humane, funny, disciplined, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Vin Diesel was miscast as the lead. I have no beef with Diesel, I recognize that he’s talented, but he’s too young for the part, and I never could quite suspend my disbelief. Alex Rocco is terrific in the movie though, and there’s several really good, typical to Lumet scenes, particularly an almost love scene between Diesel and Annabella Sciorra in his jail cell.
There’s nothing minor about Lumet’s new film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. This is that rare film that comes along hopefully at least once a year (last year it was Pan’s Labyrinth) where your over-tuned critic/snob faculties shut down almost immediately. Lumet grabs you by your collar, or, if you’re me, your sweater and says “we’re going for a ride, leave the all the other bullshit behind.” Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is the work of a major craftsman who’s at the height of his mojo; assured, confident, masterful, very nearly flawless, a perfect genre film that morphs into a spot on examination of the death of an American family.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is notably meaner and nastier than the typical Lumet picture. It recalls the snakes of another Lumet classic,Network, only devoid of the conscience that William Holden at least partially represented in that film. Tellingly, the two most sympathetic characters in this new film are both women, and one is killed early on, and the other is marginalized as a sexual object and casually discarded. The characters of Devil are all dublicitous, or weak, or both, and this brings about a suspense that recalls Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, if everyone is bad then anyone can win. There’s no good guy here to ensure for us that the film will turn out a certain way. This is the Godless world of a very classic noir-crime film.
How interesting then that very little of the movie actually details the planning or execution of the robbery that powers the film. The plan is introduced early on, and the specifics are glossed over. This is primarily because the architect of the plan, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is as uninterested in the specifics as we are. That’s Hank’s (Ethan Hawke) job, and Andy is so blunt and merciless with Hank that we feel that a sort of blackmail is taking place. Andy and Hank are brothers, and Andy, like many older brothers, is elusive and bossy, reveling in a command that’s more illusory than actual.
Many crime films, especially of the David Mamet variety, revel in the notion that no character is what they seem to be, and that every character acts different with every other character. That is also true of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, but it’s not in the service of the crime portion of the story. The characters, particularly Andy, alter their behavior with each other as people do in real life, they put on guises that the social situation at hand demands. Watch Andy with Hank. Then consider the surprisingly tender post-coital scene between Andy and his wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei) that occurs near the beginning of the film.
Then consider the sex between them that jarringly opens the film. Then watch how Andy is around his father, Charles (Albert Finney), and how effortlessly he slides from self-loathing and insecurity to viciousness. Then pay attention to the scene between Andy and Gina that immediately follows in the car on the way home. It’s possibly the greatest scene in the movie, and the kind of scene, like the phone conversation in Dog Day Afternoon, that a lesser director may have cut for the sake of momentum. All of this is, again, a testament to the Lumet humanity that pervades even the more relentless of his pictures.
One could go on and on in this fashion. Marisa Tomei’s Gina, while largely played as a more vulnerable sex kitten, seems to actually be a statement on how men look at women that are as disarmingly attractive as she is. Tomei is not in the film much, but she’s in two of the most memorable scenes, the one already mentioned above, and another one, where it’s established just how far her concern for Andy reaches. Lumet plays our obsession with surface against us here, no way a woman who looks like Tomei could actually be interested in a man who looks like Hoffman for legitimate reasons right? Right? Maybe not, but maybe.
I went on a little bit about Philip Seymour Hoffman in my last post about his other starring role this year, The Savages. I had guilty knowledge when I proclaimed him the most exciting American actor in movies. I had seen The Savages, but I had also seen this film already, and Hoffman’s work in these two films is one of the most amazing one-two punches I’ve ever seen from an actor. Most are lucky to create characters like Andy and Jon in their entire career, much less the same year. Hank is a more malignant creation, but he’s a villain, like some of the Cagney characters, that you are tempted to cry for.
I rarely buy Ethan Hawke in anything, but he pulls off the most thankless part here in his best performance. Hawke’s Hank is the twitchy, cowardly, nervous character that most of these types of movies require to keep their engines turning, and Hawke plays a wonderful variation of it. I usually think of Ethan Hawke as too self-consciously “actorly”, but here he bravely plays a complete mess of a moron, a person who gets shit on by every other member of the cast.
Albert Finney’s portrayal of Charles is equally unforgiving: strong, minimal, and terrifying. Finney is really beginning to show his age, and Lumet concentrates on the crinkles and crags in his face. This is a portrait of the benevolent old man as a thin mask of need, of vulnerability, and, when provoked, of boundless vengeance.
When a director as famous as Sidney Lumet makes a film this good, it’s tempting to give him most of the credit behind the screen, but it should also be said that newcomer Kelly Masterson has made a striking debut with the film’s screenplay. I look forward to future work from him.*
A month or so ago, I said I was tempted to call The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford a masterpiece, but would wait and let the years decide. I’ll take the bait this time, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a masterpiece.
★★★★
*Yes, this passage has been changed around a bit. K. Masterson understands men so well because he is, in fact, a guy. I couldn’t find much on him at the time, and I made an assumption based on the name, my apologies.
Virginia Film Festival: The Savages (2007)
I was a little weary of The Savages at first. It opens with a gaggle of old ladies dancing in slow-mo, and I thought we may be in a for a long slog through hip indie ticks posturing as dialed down real world pain tedium. In the following scene, we see a man writing a message of protest in his own shit. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins deals in this kind of tonal discombobulation throughout the entire film. One gag seems lifted from the Little Miss Sunshine school of faux uplift, the next has the delirious casual truth cynicism of The Simpsons at it’s most wicked, or the sharp, unforgiving human insight of an Alexander Payne film (who did executive produce).
Jenkins’ film concerns two siblings, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Wendy (Laura Linney) who come together after an unspecified (based on their reactions to one another it’s been a while) amount of time to deal with the fecal writer in question, who happens to be their father, Lenny (Philip Bosco, terrific). We learn that Lenny is demented, and that something has to be done with him after his living situation suddenly collapses.
The siblings are both frustrated writers, both romantically constipated, and are both nursing wounds from their dad that Jenkins keeps tantalizingly vague. The father has returned but he really hasn’t, and Jenkins never compromises on this particularity; the father is gone, but still needs to be cared for. Jon is blunt, distant, matter of fact. Wendy is the same, but not as comfortable admitting it, she wants to be a good person, but she wants to be a good person who’s rid of this man.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is possibly the most exciting American actor working in movies. There’s no remove, no visible technique, and there’s a force to Hoffman that contradicts his doughy exterior. He’s pure, coiled, unchecked masculine need. A man playing men often cursed with just enough intelligence to ensure that he continually knows how little he measures up. Here’s the surprise though, Hoffman’s characters, in spite of all that, are still cool. Like Paul Giamatti’s Harvey Pekar, Hoffman’s characters speak for something that many of us feel but don’t have a voice to express, and it’s this expression, this representation of tattered need, that lends Hoffman’s characters their dignity.
Linney, playing a character every bit as fucked up as Hoffman, is also every bit his match here, the female embodiment of everything I just wrote about Hoffman. Casting two powerhouse actors as siblings can sometimes be dicey, we may catch them trying to one up one another, but Jon and Wendy compliment one another as siblings in a way that feels real, the natural one upsmanship goes with the territory. Old grudges and disappointments don’t resurface here in long winded, show-offy monologues, they peak out from the past like sharks, and quickly duck back into the water again. Jenkins has made a film in which all of the really big stuff happens off screen: abuse, disappointment, resentment. This film is about the mop up in between the big blow outs.
The Savages is Tamara Jenkins’ second film, her first being Slums of Beverly Hills, and they both share a compulsion to chase really devastating scenes with goofy, seventh grade girl non sequiturs. Slums had a real humdinger where Carl Reiner revels in his brother Alan Arkin’s poverty, right in front of Arkin’s little girls. It’s a marvelous, mean piece of truth telling, and Jenkins dissipates the tension with a disappointingly over the top payoff. Jenkins is on surer footing with The Savages, but she does lose herself a bit in the end.
Jenkins’ problem is noble: she likes her characters too much, she doesn’t want to leave them hanging. In all likelihood, that would be the best thing for her art. We’re supposed to feel hope for these characters, and I don’t mind that, but things don’t wrap up, they never do, and I don’t believe the emotional leap that Hoffman makes in the end. Maybe in a few years but not now. Sometimes we want our truth straight, without any chasers, without the ending that tells us everything is ok. It’s not a deal breaker though, because otherwise Jenkins has made a raw, quick film of startling, implosive impact.
★★★½
Into the Wild (2007)
Casting aside all modern conveniences and living off the grid is one of the more alluring daydreams of American youth, particularly in a go go go society that seemingly has everything down to the next bus stop mapped out for us over the next sixty years. Throwing it all away is a romantic notion, particularly when you’re a college student, it’s late at night and an attractive little thing is asking you what you plan to do with yourself, suddenly you’re an adventurer and you’re casting aside the whims of consumerist, greedy American society.
I was afraid of Into the Wild. Sean Penn is a brilliant blunt instrument of an actor, and his last film behind the camera, The Pledge, was an intense, impressive piece of work, but Into the Wild had the potential to nurture every element in Penn that has been offputting for the last few years, including his work in Mystic River. I was afraid Penn would be too focused on being the great American Artist to consider the story rationally, and would deliver a bit of rich liberal guilt porn that decries a society that loses a Christopher McCandless, and conveniently overlooks the self-absorption and self-righteousness that is inherent in the young man as well.
Except Penn hasn’t made that movie. Maybe he’s too saavy an artist to fall that far into the rabbit hole, maybe the material inspired him to dig deep, either way (or neither way) Penn’s Into the Wild is a beautiful, rapt, free form piece of near expressionism. But it’s not naive or dewy. Penn’s greatest achievement here is a balancing of a nearly impossible tone. The film sympathizes with McCandless, understands him, but doesn’t totally buy into him. McCandless (embodied by Emile Hirsch in a performance as tricky in front of the camera as Penn’s is behind) interacts with a great many people in the film, and we see the same barely checked resignation in nearly all of their faces. They recognize the pain and the revolt, but there’s also fear, they were able to put away their childish things in time (maybe) but will McCandless? Most of us know the outcome of the story before we get to the theatre, and Penn knows we know. A palpable dread hangs over the entire film, especially the second half. This is a coming of age awakening story where the awakening doesn’t occur until the death bed.
Further complicating matters is the fact that McCandless’s desperate actions (burning his IDs, donating all his money and abandoning his family to hit the road) do initially benefit his life. McCandless meets a variety of people and experiences a variety of things that he would have looked back on fondly had he survived. His problem was excess, and pride. Like the society he criticized, like the parents he left without any thought as to the pain his departure would inflict. Penn avoids the easy way out even here, because McCandless’s fleeing is shown to have an affect on his parents (William Hurt and Marica Gay Harden) that is not entirely negative. McCandless was right to think them hypocritical and closed off, and his absence punctures that.
Penn’s film, like the character, is gloriously unshackeled, free from the tethers of the three act form that is supposed to dictate most movies. Most road movies feel like an excuse to crank the greatest hits over a montage of driving around, this one truly follows it’s character, and revels in the joy of the initial freedom (which, of course, makes the comedown that much worse.) Penn’s film is roomy and generous; with a quiet visual poetry that feels like Terrence Malick only imbued with a greater sense of urgency and restlessness.
All of the performances are wonderful, but I would like to take the time to second the popular notion that Hal Holbrook steals the end of the movie. Holbrook is normally the baddie, a movie’s black heart, but here he’s the accumulating, unavoidable love that McCandless is wrongfully trying to free himself from. McCandless claims to want to find a more honest life, free from all the typical artifice (and this is partially quite valid) but what he really wants is a life free of the messiness that goes with being human. The other people in McCandless’s life (among them Catherine Keener and Vince Vaughn) see this and trust that he will snap out of it. Holbrook, better acquainted with life’s fragility, has no such patience. Their final scene together is a heartbreaker.
Into the Wild is easily Sean Penn’s best movie as a filmmaker so far, and it renews my interest in his films in front of the camera as well. One can’t make a movie this strong, this introspective, without looking at themselves at least accidentally as well. See this one if you haven’t already, it’s one of the best films of the year, and this is shaping up to be one hell of a year.
★★★½
Virginia Film Festival: Honeydripper (2007)
Long time reader and longer time friend Travis Bjorklund has been kind enough to grace our site with a review that apathy, poverty and general laziness have prevented me from attending to myself. Be nice and maybe he’ll come back again sometime soon, perhaps to contribute to our next little theme party. -Chuck Bowen
Director, writer, and editor John Sayles has been involved in a lot of wise, successful, lived-in films over his thirty-year career. In every one of his movies I’ve seen, whether great or merely average, Sayles takes pains to carefully put down roots in an organic, evocative setting. The great ones, like the armadillo-fried western Lone Star or the smoky baseball picture Eight Men Out, are lush with unstylized period detail and nuanced performances. For years, Sayles has told his stories with a unique and convincing American voice, which is what makes his latest film such a great surprise.
Honeydripper is set in the booze-and-cotton-fueled town of Harmony, Alabama in 1950. Danny Glover, doing a minor variation on his usual world-weary screen persona, plays Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis, and old piano player turned failing bar owner. His optimistic best friend Maceo (the great Charles Dutton, also mustering business as usual), pious and loyal wife Delilah, and caricature-of-beauty-and-modesty step-daughter China Doll complete the unlucky family of the Honeydripper Lounge. In a last-ditch effort to save the lounge, Tyrone puts his reservations about this new-fangled guitar music aside and hires the radio star Guitar Sam to headline his club on Saturday night.
Sayles’ script contrives for Tyrone to jump through every possible hoop to ensure that the audience knows that everything, (everything!) is riding on this one gig with Guitar Sam: his wife’s faith, his daughter’s future, his own life, the Honeydripper, and possibly music itself. When Guitar Sam is a no-show, Tyrone bribes the evil white sheriff to release a naive, dew-eyed vagrant (Gary Clark, Jr.) with an electric guitar, who stands-in for the radio legend at the last minute. Even a mystical, blind, seemingly all-knowing street musician (Keb’ Mo’) who inexplicably haunts the movie is betting on Tyrone’s comeuppance.
Considering the epic stakes for this concert, I was hoping Sayles would pull it all together in a sweaty, stomping orgy of blues. Instead, I was treated to a sanitary, sensible display of guitar wizardry that quietly got my feet tapping. The actors playing the Honeydripper Lounge’s choreographed patrons seemed likewise unmoved. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The climax is a piece with the rest of the film: safe and unsexy; detached.
Of course safe, unsexy, and detached could describe almost any of John Sayles’ lesser films, and even some of his better ones. In Honeydripper, however, I didn’t believe a frame of it. As Southern as a nervous grad-school production of A Streetcar Named Desire at NYU, the picture doesn’t have a shred of authenticity. I didn’t believe in the hermetically sealed hobo costumes or the pristine sets, like a Disneyland version of the segregated South, with even the dust painted-on. I didn’t believe awe-shucks Sonny’s raggedy contraption of an electric guitar, or Tyrone’s and Maceo’s studied awe at the device’s gadgetry. Finally, I didn’t believe the film’s half-cocked shots at deeper meaning: the wailing of the tent preacher, the sliding guitar of the wizened, blind streetplayer, the stagy flashbacks-cum-ham-handed foreshadowings.
It’s too bad, too, because Honeydripper has its moments: some funny dialogue, a couple hard-ass lines, good songs, and a crackerjack scene in the cotton fields. These moments take place in a vacuum though; they’re practically non sequiturs. It’s not enough. Honeydripper remains sterile and uncompelling, the polar opposite of the music it so clearly admires.
Film festival notes: This film was introduced by the writer, director, and editor of Honeydripper, John Sayles, the producer Maggie Renzi (Sayles’ longtime romantic companion), and the actor Sean Patrick Thomas, all of whom participated in a discussion about the film after its conclusion. While I enjoyed listening to them banter on, they merely reinforced what I found false about the film. The most pertinent quote was from Sayles himself:
“Many of the actors told me that [the shoot] was the first time they’d been below the Mason-Dixon line .”
The evidence of this is all over the celluloid. The rest of the crowd was all unadulterated praise, though, which made me feel like a party-pooper. -Travis Bjorklund
★★
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Gone Baby Gone is, as the title partially suggests, another “our collective mistrust, guilt and secret hatred as crystallized by the disappearance of an innocent” picture. This one is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who inspired another entry in the genre, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. You’ve no doubt heard that Ben Affleck served as director and co-screenwriter of Gone Baby Gone, and, if you havent seen the film yet, or read some of the positive notices, you can probably be forgiven for assuming this film is a desperate vanity project, or, best case, merely forgettable.
Gone Baby Gone is a memorable, confident picture and refreshingly lacks the lifeless “Great American Director” self-importance that killed Mystic River. Affleck has made a tasty little detective story with a strong moral outrage that sticks. Most private eye pictures (and I say this as a fan of the genre) revel in the anti-social cool of their protagonist. The PI has been fucked over several times in the past and he knows the score, and the films are usually about him lording his street smarts (whether he knows the full story or not) over every other character in the movie.
Gone Baby Gone is about that initial fucking over that sours the PI to begin with, and it’s about struggling to maintain a sense of balance and optimism in an environment that discourages such ambitions. Some have mumbled “too young” in regards to Casey Affleck’s Patrick Kenzie, but that is precisely the point. He IS too young, but the film’s course of events probably ensure that he will one day be giving some other young do gooder the advice that Ed Harris (doing a particularly effective variation of his thing) and his partner (nice to see you back John Ashton) give him here. Kenzie is a tricky part, it’s tempting to make him an insufferable bore, but luckily both Afflecks understand that to navigate this world, optimism or not, you still to have some inner savage.
Affleck the director acknowledges this in a wonderful scene near the beginning when Affleck the actor and his partner, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, regrettably marginalized) begin to look into the case of a young neighborhood girl that has gone missing. They stop by a bar that the mother (Amy Ryan) is known to frequent, well, frequently. They immediately find something the cops have missed. Someone begins to talk, and a few other someones in the bar begin to resent this. Ben Affleck stages the scene with authority and surprising quicksilver viciousness. Most surprising is Casey Affleck, his Kenzie isn’t the pretty boy his looks may lead one to believe. He’s an emotionally stewed pit bull, and he’ll snap at someone twice his size, and be the first to pull a gun.
Emotionally stewed, constipated, tortured, none of that would do Amy Ryan’s performance justice. Ryan’s Helene McCready is one of the more lived in creations of bottom dweller desperation and self-loathing that I’ve seen in the movies. It’s exhilaratingly unsentimental work. McCready is the sort of the casual monster that is much more dangerous than the barroom thuggery that Patrick fruitlessly confronts; McCready represents something more insidious, and impossible to supress. MCready’s casual obscenity, her unflagging sense of reckless, unsubstantiated entitlement, her self-absorption, her fleeting moments of clarity, it’s all remarkably realized by Ryan. Many films have acknowledged the chicken and egg business of broken homes, or abusive, unstable families; but most are unable to avoid sanctimony as gracefully as Ryan and Affleck do here.
The naivete that goes with attempting to interrupt the endless cycle of people screwing one another over is the ultimate punchline of Gone Baby Gone. The film has a broken heart, and it drives it home in an ending so powerful you forget for a few hours how deeply absurd it actually is. The film depends on a few unlikely realizations that recall some of the last act convolutions of Mystic River, and Affleck’s film gets vague just when it should be snapping into focus. Affleck hasn’t made a great film, but he’s made a good one, a genre film with snap and conscience, a requiem for giving a damn.
★★★
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