Private Fears in Public Places (2007)
Legendary French filmmaker Alain Resnais is one of those directors who is perceived as being masterful and “good for you” and, as a result, has been ignored by me. I’m not championing this viewpoint, but there it is. I’ve read Hiroshima Mon Amour’s DVD box probably a dozen times and have yet to take it out. The rest of Resnais’s work is even less familiar to me. He was always one of the Men of Film that I was always going to catch up with.
I finally caught a Resnais film, Private Fears in Public Places, the 84 year old director’s most recent, and one of the most acclaimed of last year. Truthfully, if I had been paying more attention to my Netflix queue, I probably wouldn’t have seen it this soon. But I wasn’t, so I did. And I’m glad that that oversight forced me to correct a larger one. The first thing that should be said about Private Fears is that it’s not some crusty “brilliant” movie that puts you to sleep in 20 minutes. It’s alive, romantic, and spry, an elder master showing the kids how it’s done.
Like most people in their twenties who see more movies in a week than most see in a month, I normally have an aversion to American romantic comedies. Most, which are generally labeled as “chick flicks” are desperate sexist parables that might as well carry a MATE! MATE! MATE! sign outside the theatre lobby. The films generally portray women as mindless nobodies who will remain nobodies until the perfect bland, hunky guy fucks them into true being, and, of course, marries them. Their life is to find a man to be subservient to, and these are supposed to be for women? Most romances seem to be deathly afraid of melancholy that doesn’t entail wolfing a pint of ice cream with your best girlfriend. True melancholy, the kind that most people wear like a transparent shawl, is rarely touched upon in American romances.
That shawl envelopes Private Fears in Public Places, which plays, and I know the big critics would kill me if they read me, like a blending of Love, Actually and the Alan Rudolph of Choose Me. Like those films, Private Fears is a roundelay, here involving six people who are intertangled in ways they don’t fully comprehend, and their sometimes desperate lunges at romantic fulfillment. The film doesn’t dry hump you like the last half of Love, Actually with climax after cloying climax, and it doesn’t wear its kookiness on its sleeve like Rudolph tends to, the film simply is. Resnais understands that someone can be unhappy without comprising their dignity and that they can be unhappy BECAUSE they don’t compromise their dignity. Resnais’ conviction in this simple observation is refreshing, and ensures that little actually happens in Private Fears in Public Places, but the little that does happen means everything.
Resnais, like Altman, brings with his age the best of both worlds: the wisdom and confidence of his experience and the hunger and pure cinema intoxication of a man much younger. The film, even if it were nothing else, is a remarkable, enjoyable bit of visual craft. Private Fears is set in the Paris of its inhabitants’ dreams: otherworldly, perfect, like a postcard or a fairy tale. Resnais’ camera always seems to be exactly where it should be, the work is exuberant without showing off. There’s an extended scene, really a breakup scene, that is shot from the ceiling of the apartment, and while you praise the technique, you can’t help but note that it’s the loneliest, most desolate way to film the scene. Resnais also has a habit of framing his characters in transparent cages, a succinct, unpretentious metaphor for the reason we see these kinds of movies to begin with, and the reason we should celebrate them when they’re this good.
★★★½
A Not too Terribly Thought Out Look at The Landlord. (1970)
The Landlord’s reputation as one of Hal Ashby’s best is very valid. All of the things I like about Ashby are present and accounted for here: the beautiful, loose editing and cinematography (though Kael is right about the editing being a tad “showoff”). The fly by night one thing leads to another but not in that three act way plotting, the performances (Beau Bridges’ has never been better, Diana Sands is heartbreaking and tough), etc, etc. The Landlord also largely lacks that thing that sometimes tempts me to resist Ashby: a whimsy, a willed flakiness (it pops up most in his most famous picture Harold and Maude).
I think it has something to do with the racial tension of The Landlord, Ashby doesn’t get gooey on the subject like he did with the Vietnam War in Coming Home, Ashby (along with screenwriter Bill Gunn) stays tough and unsentimental. The film walks a tightrope of genres and emotions that most movies screw up: the racial tension picture, the disoriented, privileged twenty-something white guy picture, the coming of age romance, the film handles all of these moods exceptionally. The Beau Bridges character means well, and he thinks he’s tolerant, but the film never excuses him for simply “meaning well”, he’s a naive ass and Ashby and Gunn never forget it.
The black characters, the tenants of Bridges’ building, don’t warm to him by Act three so we can feel good walking out of the theatre: they find him just as bewildering and offputting as they did in the beginning. Bridges’ parents, which is the closest the movie comes to caricature, don’t accept Bridges’ ambition by the end, they still find it ridiculous, and the poignance of the film lies in the fact that it IS ridiculous. A white boy guilt thing that’s just as self-motivated, and more self-deceiving, as anything his rich bitch parents do. The Landlord, when you get down to it, is a grittier, more honest, just plain out better version of The Graduate, without the God awful all things to all people fairy tale that constitutes the latter film’s third act.
I haven’t gotten to why I really like The Landlord, and why I always forgive Ashby films, despite their indulgences. The intimacy. Ashby sells the ironic connection between characters that shouldn’t connect better than any filmmaker I can recall as I type this. There are moments, in all of his films, of tender, beautiful regard between his characters. Erotic, electric little moments that remind you what this medium can be all about. The Landlord has plenty of them: Bridges and his girlfriend’s fingers intertwining as he tells her something she doesn’t want to hear, a moment of post-coital, lonely cuddling between two characters, the way another character touches her husband as she confesses infidelity.
The movie also happens to be pretty funny, with shockingly blunt dialogue. So when, exactly, should we expect the Criterion DVD?
Turner Classic Movies Kicks Some Ass.
Last night TCM premiered the wonderful documentary Martin Scorsese Presents, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, followed by a Lewton marathon that was on too late for my having to work the next morning self. Tonight, TCM is playing Hal Ashby’s first film The Landlord, unseen by me, and many of my generation, because it has not been issued on DVD and is relatively hard to get a hold of on VHS.
To commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, TCM is having a Charles Burnett marathon on Monday, January 21, kicking off with the just released supposed (I would know for myself if the damn thing would ever move beyond “Very Long Wait” on my queue) 1977 masterpiece Killer of Sheep at 8 pm.
I’ll be there. Will you?
The Girl Next Door (2007)
What to do with The Girl Next Door? The film is an unusually brutal (and effective) genre picture, adapted from the novel of the same name by controversial author Jack Ketchum. The critics will be able to write it off, it has enough shortcomings (some of the acting and writing), but it shouldn’t be written off, the film has a savage power that I’ve rarely encountered in a horror picture (or any other for that matter). Stephen King has called The Girl Next Door the most unsettling American horror film since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and he’s not exaggerating.
A man walks out of an office building in the middle of the city and heads down the street. Another older man, who would appear to be literally living on the streets, passes him and collapses a few feet away in an intersection. The man bends over and tries to save the older person. It would appear that he has some success in doing this and he sees the older man taken away in an ambulance. The man goes home, he’s clearly doing well, and sits down with a drink and looks at a picture that he’s had for some time. He begins to tell us a story.
So far, so Stand By Me, and for twenty minutes of so The Girl Next Door appears to be an inadequate cover of that film. We’re in the 1950s, we’re watching young boys play and trade bad dialogue and deal with their obvious fear of the opposite sex in the usual ways, and…but are they dealing with their fear of opposite sex in the usual ways? The opening feels off. Like many low budget horror pictures, it’s hard to tell whether the surreal stiffness is intentional or not. 1950s America is normally approached by the movies in one of two ways: as nostalgic utopia or as nostalgic utopia as hypocritical mask of unspeakable corruption. One guess as to where we’re going here.
Slowly though The Girl Next Door finds it’s footing, and, having seen the entire film, I think it’s fair to say that director Gregory Wilson’s execution in the beginning is at least partially purposeful, he’s seducing us, tricking us into putting our Jaded Horror Filmgoer hats on, and then, then…well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, the subgenre of “torture ______” has been too popular, too significant for it not to. Someone had to eventually go and make the Bonnie and Clyde of those films, a film that challenges and punishes us for allowing human suffering to be turned into a game show. The Girl Next Door is that film.
Two young girls move into the neighborhood after losing their parents in an accident. They are to live with their aunt now, who has several boys of her own. Our protagonist, the young version of the man we met in the beginning, is accustomed to visiting Aunt Ruth (Blanche Baker) and the boys. And he’s immediately taken with the older of the two girls, Meg (Blythe Auffarth). Ruth doesn’t seem to like Meg too much, and she has an uncomfortable way of letting Meg know that. She punishes Meg, doesn’t let her eat because (according to Ruth) she’s getting too fat. The boys tickle Meg, and touch her in a way that’s inappropriate. Meg slaps one of them. Ruth responds by beating the younger sister. Then the boys and Ruth begin playing truth telling games with Meg in the basement, games that develop with remarkable speed and cruelty. Our protagonist is appalled, tries to tell his mom…but can’t. He tries to tell his dad….but can’t. He continues to visit the house, to check on the games, and things keep getting worse and worse and worse and, as viewers, we’re stuck, along for the ride.
Have you ever read Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, a short story in which a woman is murdered in a city neighborhood and no one does anything? The Girl Next Door has the same unblinking relentlessness. Many will hate this film, will resent what it’s doing to them, but Wilson plays fair. The film, visually, is tamer than most R-rated slasher movies. But Wilson isn’t staging a gory, cathartic exhibition, he’s watching a family bind together to torture and demean a young girl and he’s appalled. How novel. I confess. I almost turned this DVD off several times. This is 90 minutes that feels like two and half months and there’s no way out, and no real payback for the Aunt and her children. By the end of the film, other neighborhood boys and girls are watching, joining in the fun, and NO ONE does anything to stop it.
I can’t imagine watching The Girl Next Door again, but the film should (maybe) be seen once. Our cages should be rattled like this occasionally. I’ve read a few responses to this film on the web, some people called the movie “absurd” and “pointless”. The “absurd” issue is not entirely untrue, more context of the dynamics of Ruth and her household would have probably helped, but I can’t imagine how someone could watch the film and disregard it entirely. And one question for those who call The Girl Next Door pointless, if the man hadn’t seen Meg die all those years ago, would he have stopped to help the older man in the street?
★★★
Rants.
That whimsy is difficult to achieve in a movie is obvious, and also a massive, insulting understatement. It’s next to God damn impossible, particularly in our MySpace, four cell phone society. Filmmakers rarely even bother striving for whimsy, making any movie is a enough of an opportunity to show your nuts, much less a film with fairies, goblins, ghosts, etc., much much less a film that involves said creatures chasing after a personified star for varied reasons that aren’t worth recounting. That’s what Stardust is though (no fairies, or goblins I’m afraid, but lots of ghosts and witches) and it works. It’s not a classic, but the film flies, primarily because the love story between Tristan (Charlie Cox) and the star in question (Claire Danes) is believable and surprisingly poignant. Some had a hard time believing that director Matthew Vaughn was following his brutal gangster picture, Layer Cake with this, but that works in an unexpected way. Vaughn doesn’t try too hard, his experience with Cake and the overrated Guy Ritchie pictures has left him hesitant to peddle the sentimentality, and so he doesn’t. And, as a result, you actually believe the world of Stardust.
I also believed the world of Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Tykwer conjures a fascinating eighteenth century Paris of almost laughable, Dickensian rot, and the story itself starts strongly, following a young man (Ben Whishaw, more recently of I’m Not There) and his animalistic sense of smell as he works his way out of a brutal tannery and into the shop of a once revered perfumer (Dustin Hoffman). Whishaw is our lead, but he and Tykwer are so committed to the story’s idea of him as a blunt cipher that the supporting actors are forced to do the heavy lifting. That’s fine while Hoffman is the supporter, but the film shifts halfway through, and takes Whishaw to a small town of supposedly splendid scents that, in his desperation to find a perfume that satisfies his advanced abilities, turns him into some sort of hybrid of Jack the Ripper and Dr. Frankenstein. The supporting actor of this half is Alan Rickman, usually more than able to elevate his material, but here he’s left without too much to do. It’s all Whishaw, Whishaw, Whishaw, and soon you find that you don’t much give a hoot whether he’s caught, finds his perfume, or jumps of a picturesque cliff. In terms of raw, surface craft, this is one of Tykwer’s most impressive pictures, but it’s all in the service of a boring shaggy dog story, with an ending that hints at satire that seems to be just out of reach.
The satire of Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War is front and center. The film is an entry in a genre I rarely care for, the Not that Significant, Self-Absorbed Deviate Learns the Value of Life and Improves It in Some Way and That’s Why We’re Making this Movie genre (I swear, it appears in Wikepedia just like that) but War has a boozy, free floating charm that it never entirely compromises. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script and he’s masterful when he reins in the overwriting and the outrage and simply tells a story (see the underrated The American President or the even more underrated television show Sports Night). Sorkin is in control of his faculties here, perhaps too much control; the film should be even boozier, druggier, angrier and more aggressive. There should be more scenes like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s first, where he tells a superior to fuck off and breaks their window with a wrench. There should be more Philip Seymour Hoffman period. Can we approve some sort of grant that allows him to triple his already prodigious output? Hoffman is to War, what Kathy Bates was to Nichols’ Primary Colors, he’s the showstopper, the scene stealer, the charismatic, unattractive, blunt misfit in a group of stars who lends the picture an element of danger. Hoffman compensates for Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts’ just fine but overly self-congratulatory performances. The film also has a happy ending that’s refreshingly not that happy, and it seems to me to be one of the more convincing pictures about the secret handshake operations of global governing.
Stardust: ★★★
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer: ★★
Charlie Wilson’s War: ★★★
Best of 2007
10.
Black Snake Moan
Your love of Craig Brewer’s second film will depend on how much you buy its tonal U-turn half way through, some felt cheated out of a good old fashioned Tennessee Williams B movie Southern sleazefest. I think the film’s transformation is ballsy; it deepens and expands the picture in a way that Tarantino has been unwilling to do since Jackie Brown. Black Snake Moan is Samuel L. Jackson’s best work since JB, and Christina Ricci’s best work period, she manages to humanize a virtually unplayable Madonna/whore/ fetish role. The film eventually becomes a story of unwavering love as an answer to unmanageable, inexplicable anxiety, and I bought it wholesale.
9. Away From Her
Actress Sarah Polley stepped behind the camera and made the directorial debut of the year with Away From Her, an adaptation of the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”. This film is that rare thing: an honest, graceful weepie, a work of intimidating maturity from any filmmaker much less one so young. Everyone is talking about Julie Christie’s work, and they should be, but the success of the film hinges on Gordon Pinsent. Away from Her is HIS story, HIS movie, and his gradual acceptance of his new situation, and feeling that this may be just a teensy weensy bit of poetic justice, is romantic and heartbreaking.
8. Black Book/ Lust, Caution
I usually find the critics who hide forty movies in their Best of Lists to be indulgent and annoying, but I couldn’t help doing it just this once. Black Book and Lust, Caution are both contemp covers of the age old screwing someone you hate but you might actually love but you might still hate for the good of the government tale. Black Book is a thrilling adventure with a surprising anti-war after taste. Lust, Caution is a more obsessive tale of bedroom politics. Together they cover the gambit of the story’s potential, and carry Hitchcock’s Notorious into the new millennium. Together they also contain the two strongest female performances of the year in Carice van Houten and Wei Tang’s sexy, star making portraits of the irrepressible will to survive.
7. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
I enjoyed Burton’s revamp of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but Sweeney Todd is the true return to form that Burton fans have been waiting for since his career best Ed Wood thirteen years ago. Todd may be an adaptation of another’s work, but it feels like pure, unhinged Burton, the true gothic that’s been driving his films all along. Unlike some certain past Burton films, Todd is a bloody, bitter, enraged work that doesn’t feel the need to dilute with half-assed satire, this thing stings and offers no apologies.
6. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Possibly Sidney Lumet’s most purely entertaining film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is streamlined and focused in a way that Lumet films rarely are. Lumet’s classics are (in a good way) more humane and meandering, Devil is a black heist aftermath noir with good actors rivaling their career best work. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney gave us the most fascinating, stylized, uncomfortable family of 2007.
5. I’m Not There
I normally don’t go for the super duper art house stuff, call me a philistine but there you go. I normally find those films to be just as false as Hollywood’s only self-congratulatory and boring. Not I’m Not There though, this film rocked me in a primal, existential way that I still can’t quite articulate. This is the brilliant Todd Haynes’ best work, a passionate, lonely, fleeting look at the intangible little somethings that fill in our lives. Yeah, it’s also about Bob Dylan, but the universality of the film is going to stun you, as is the cast, which includes a traditionally underrated Richard Gere.
4. Zodiac
In year where half a dozen of America’s best filmmakers made their best film, David Fincher rose above the dated Gen X chic of his prior work to make a timeless masterpiece about the universal urge to explain the boogeyman away. Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhaal lead a top to bottom terrific cast.
The ending is a stunner.
3. The Host
I forgot, The Host is just a monster movie. Then why does the film nearly bring me to tears every time I re-watch it? The Host is an uncompromising dark comedy about a family that tries and tries to overcome their personal limitations when faced with an unimaginable tragedy. And they just can’t. And director Joon-ho Bong plays our hopes and expectations against us again and again. The Host is an amazing tightrope of a film, a film that crosses every imaginable genre boundary without the slightest hint of strain. The monster is terrifying. The little girl is brave and charismatic. This is just a plain and simple great fucking movie.
2. No Country for Old Men
Yes, it IS that good. No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brother’s best film, is also about the boogeyman, only this time it’s us, and our apathetic refusal to save the society that’s slipping through our fingers. I know, I know, that sounds like a slog, but the Coens are more interested in entertaining than preaching. They’re too hardwired into the meat and potatoes mechanics of the thriller to make a boring movie. Javier Bardem, as the personification of the payback that’s coming down the pike, is one of the iconic human monsters of the American cinema.
1. There Will Be Blood
Again, I feel the need to preface: it IS that damn good. The year of 2007 seemed to be the year when our best filmmakers faced the anxiety of our current period (and I’m not talking about the Iraq movies) in a variety of original and disarming ways. The cinemas were bleak last year, and one of my friends, before a midnight show of this picture, said “why aren’t any of the good movies fun?”
I laughed her off, but I shouldn’t. It’s a good point, depending on your perspective. I happen to think bleak movies ARE fun. If I have one wish for 2008 though, it’s that Hollywood come closer to producing some of the great comedies of yesteryear without the bullet proof snark that seems to come with the territory these days. Unlikely I know. Hollywood doesn’t seem to be able to do light and frothy anymore, all of our wits are too cynical. Alexander Payne has it in him, and it’s about time we hear from him again anyway.
Of the bleak cinema of 2007, There Will Be Blood was the least compromising, the most nightmarish, the confirmation of our darkest fears of consumption and betrayal. The film marked a staggering leap forward for its filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who was already one of the most daring and interesting directors working, and it showcased one of our best actors, Daniel Day Lewis, in an unforgettable vaudeville of cunning, animal, cluelessness, hunger, and pitiful loneliness. The final line of the picture is unforgettably simple and direct: “I am finished.” Anderson certainly isn’t.
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
I’ve decided to pull a Charles Foster Kane and end BC’s tribute to Paul Thomas Anderson with a review by the returning Travis Bjorklund. This series needed a little sour to my sweet, and Travis is more than willing to fill the bill. For my opinion, reverse basically everything that follows.
What do you say about your favorite living filmmaker’s most trivial work? This P.T. Anderson picture is an intimate one, with no grand ambitions. Punch-Drunk Love, aptly titled, is about the redemptive power of love, and how love can be inexplicable even to those involved. Though memorable sporadically and beautiful consistently, Anderson never pulls it all together.
It’s essentially a story pastiche, with the major subplots seem only shoehorned in because Anderson thought it would be fun to put them in a movie. As you watch the film, you can see the gears in Anderson ’s head turning:
I heard about this guy who earned millions of cheap air miles from buying pudding…I’d love to put that in a movie. You know, the movies never deal fairly with regular people who dial sex hotlines…I’d love to put that in a movie. Adam Sandler has such great dramatic potential…I’d love to put that in a movie. I’ve never been to Hawaii …
Punch-Drunk Love is the story of Barry Egan, a lonely and frustrated but otherwise nice guy. He has seven overbearing sisters and a struggling business. He vents his frustrations in violent bursts of property destruction. The role of Barry was written for Adam Sandler, and it’s an emasculated twist on the persona Sandler has adopted throughout his career. Considering P.T. Anderson’s penchant for getting career-best work out of actors, it’s no great surprise that Sandler has never given a better performance (For me, that’s not saying much: I don’t share Anderson ’s affinity for the actor). Sandler rocks and paces and tenses his jaw through the movie in a way that adequately displays Barry’s the pent-up potential energy.
Barry begins the story hapless and alone, but quickly meets Lena (Emily Watson) and the two fall crazily, inexplicably in love. Lena, though represented prettily by Watson, is merely a character sketch and exists only to move Barry’s character forward. In fact, Anderson here contrives to reduce all the characters except for Barry to sketch. It’s a perverse move from a filmmaker who has made realistic and interesting characterization his stock and trade. And it is almost certainly a contrivance: Anderson, knowing he has fascinating, well-hewn characters down flat, decided to focus on other things.
Thankfully, those other things mostly deliver: sumptuous use of wide screen to convey loneliness; exploration of visual and aural representation of feelings like frustration, helplessness, passion, being overwhelmed, and love; pregnant atmosphere. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. By the time Barry, empowered by love, takes control of his life and reaches his full potential, most of Anderson ’s machinations have been revealed as smoke and mirrors. While some seem merely pointless, others are confusing: what’s the meaning of the opening car crash, which plays practically like a non sequitur, or the broken harmonium? Most of the time I admire Anderson ’s refusal to explain or contextualize the events of his films, but, in this case, they just feels like filler.
This is a strange, singular, little movie, lazily written and tightly directed. Unfortunately, as Anderson himself said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, “It all starts with the writing.”
★★½
Magnolia (1999)
The Paul Thomas Anderson detractors that I’ve met usually present Magnolia as Exhibit A in the “the man is overrated, indulgent and overly precious” line of thinking. And I admit it freely; Magnolia is going to be a hurdle for you if you’re not into the mojo that Anderson is usually working. The film is unruly and indulgent; accentuating everything that could have brought Boogie Nights to a crashing halt at any given moment. The restrained Anderson of Hard Eight has left the building entirely for Magnolia and the midnight carnival Anderson of the Alfred Molina scene of Boogie Nights has taken over. Magnolia is Anderson’s longest picture, clocking in at just less than 190 minutes, and an editor of even the slightest seasoning could have probably found a way to shave sixty of those minutes.
There is wonderful material to be found here, and Anderson’s technique is an even more assured and bravura humanist hybrid of Altman, Scorsese, etc, etc, but there’s really nothing here that wasn’t explored in Boogie Nights. I think Anderson just had more material in this line that he wanted to get off his chest, and maybe he wanted to do it divorced of potentially alienating subject matter such as the porn industry. If I’m recalling correctly, Anderson said at the time that he was looking to break the traditional three act structure that dominates most mainstream storytelling, and that he tried to structure Magnolia like an album. Magnolia isn’t Inciting Incident-Conflict-Climax; it’s a long roundelay that climaxes three times, about once every hour. The ambition is interesting but it feels like too much, Anderson tries too hard, and things are spelled out too much. A zoom in on a painting containing the phrase “yes that happened” (or something to that effect) illustrates Anderson’s strain and self-consciousness.
The stories don’t mesh as organically and effortlessly here as they did in Nights either, and, as a result, the film feels redundant. I imagine that the redundance is at least partially intentional, Anderson’s riff on life’s cyclical nature and the ways we wrong one another in the exact same way we were wronged ourselves, particularly within our own family. Again, it feels like Anderson is justifying himself, underlining, underlining, underlining. The Tom Cruise episode is strange and moving, and the script has wisely built the actor’s ticks into the part, but the scene between Cruise and Robards toward the end is endless. The romance between John C. Reilly and Melora Walters is one of the strongest elements of the film, but Anderson burdens even that with a ridiculous street prophet scenario that was wisely shortened from the original script.
Magnolia is still a small price to pay for the kind of mammoth ambition that Anderson displays both here and in Boogie Nights. You’ll notice that I’ve given the film a three and a half star rating, despite having spent the majority of the post discussing its shortcomings. The film still has a blunt power, is still original, and still exhibits a filmmaking fever that should be encouraged and treasured. There is, for both better and worse, enough fervor and soul for ten pictures in Magnolia. Many have compared the film to Short Cuts, but I’ve always found that a bit lazy, the films are on opposite ends of the bar tonally. Altman’s film is subtle and naturalistic, Anderson’s is operatic in all senses of the word, including soap.
Making pictures of any kind, despite how much we sometimes bitch, requires courage. It takes courage to put yourself on the line and tell a story that many will see, and that faces rejection or outright embarrassment. Paul Thomas Anderson is considerably talented, but he’s also even more courageous than most. His films aren’t bashful or cloaked in irony. His films are sad and wounded, and I think it was this quality that drew me to Anderson’s films, particularly Magnolia, to begin with. I was a twenty when Magnolia was released, a sophomore in college. I saw the film four times and thought it to be one of the greatest I’d ever seen. I don’t still believe that, but I’ll always be grateful to Anderson for Magnolia, regardless of its faults.
★★★½
Boogie Nights (1997)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights is a young filmmaker’s film in the best sense of the phrase: caution is totally thrown to the wind, but it’s thrown to the wind by someone with a clue as to where the wind might actually take it. The film is stuffed with incident, but everything feels strangely essential. This is the kind of movie that inspires critics (or maybe just me) to pile on the adjectives: funny, exuberant, depressing, original, derivative, insane, stupid, sentimental, and, for a picture set on the fringes of the porn industry, surprisingly chaste. Boogie Nights was the film of 1997. And it was also one of the films of the 1990s.
If Hard Eight saw Anderson using the noir as a platform for something more personal, then Boogie Nights sees him riffing on a rise and fall structure normally reserved for gangster pictures. We know the groundwork for this kind of film by heart: we open with a desperate or ambitious hero, the hero discovers a talent that doesn’t really jive with polite society, the hero emerges a major success on the strength of said talent, the hero crashes in a rage of gluttony and ego.
Anderson uses this structure to tackle the rise and fall of the porn industry, but he’s about as interested in that as he is the duel between religion and oil that drives There Will Be Blood. Boogie Nights, like Hard Eight, like everything else in the Anderson filmography, is concerned with the rise and fall of family. In the case of Boogie Nights, it’s a surrogate family that lives in and around the porn industry, which here functions as a sort of island of lost toys. The characters that populate the film’s universe may be the single greatest achievement of Boogie Nights. They are gripping and unpredictable, broad and soap-operatic, but still jarringly human, succumbing to weakness at the most inopportune times. You feel like anything can happen, and Anderson is masterful with tone: a comedic subplot can turn fatally serious on a dime and a subplot that you’re just sure is going to shit can suddenly blossom into something hopeful and romantic.
The result is a coked up, feverish Altman picture only cut with a visual style that leans on Scorsese and early De Palma and laced with a flakey humor that’s purely Anderson. Anderson doesn’t try to hide his influences either; the justifiably praised opening scene of Boogie Nights practically shouts them from the rafters. The opening, a four or five minute tracking shot from outside the streets into the night club where Eddie works, is a delirious achievement, and very directly, self-consciously, recalls the similar scene in Goodfellas. The scene also has a simpler function: to introduce the audience to as many of the sprawling story’s characters as quickly as possible.
And again, it’s the characters that truly matter here. I’m not going to list them all, I’d be here another thousand words, but two need to be mentioned, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) and Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), the father and son of Boogie Nights. The juice here comes from canny casting, both are talented actors who tend to not live up to their potential for reasons that I could only speculate. At this point in his career, Wahlberg had been surprisingly terrific in the teeny bopper Fatal Attraction retread Fear, and Boogie Nights was an expansion of that. Eddie Adams is young, imbalanced, vulnerable, and Wahlberg is electric, particularly in a brutal argument with his mother early on that drives the rest of the film. I also like the early scene between Adams and a lover, she praises his cock and he tells her (though he’s really telling himself) that “everyone’s got one thing”. The dialogue is forced here, Anderson strains for poetry a bit, but the scene roots you in Eddie’s damage, and carries you through the darker, more challenging passages of the film.
Reynolds has always been underrated. I know the film is (rightly) praised, but does anyone really talk about the performances in Deliverance? Reynolds imbued that role with more than your usual tough guy stuff, there’s a simmering authority, a rage that’s channeled into sharp humor until really pushed, and then, well then he lets you have it. I’ll never forget the moment in Deliverance where he kills the woodsman with a bow and arrow. Watch the look on Reynolds’ face, the ease with the bow. This guy was BORN for this. Reynolds, after years of Cop and Halfs, got that rage, that humor, that aloof, that pure unchecked male id, back for Boogie Nights. The relationship between Reynolds and Wahlberg, two under thought of actors of opposite generations just going for it, is riveting and poignant. It also informs the moving finale, where the problem child Eddie, having long been known as Dirk, has the reconciliation that he never dared imagine with his actual family.
Ok, let’s list: Don Cheadle. Luis Guzman. Ricky Jay. Alfred Molina. William H. Macy. John C. Reilly. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Philip Baker Hall (he gets the funniest line of the film, watch for it, it involves lollipops). Melora Walters. Thomas Jane. Heather Graham. Julianne Moore. All of the actors are given great, intimate, desperate stories and scenes, and they all knock them out of the stratosphere. Boogie Nights is a beautiful, flawed, undeniably human second movie.
★★★★
Hard Eight (1996)
The movies have always loved the casinos. Casinos are endless sources of mystery and intrigue, of potential danger and romance. Everything most movies promise us in the first place. What did Godard say? All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, or something to that effect. Casinos usually have plenty of girls, guns, and every other vice that a film or person could crave. Hard Eight, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first picture, shot when he was 24 (!), is a chamber piece, set in and around the casinos, that largely concerns three characters, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), John (John C. Reilly) and, a little later, Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow).
These characters make their livings off of the casinos, living the lives of sailors on land, but the interesting thing about the picture is how little of it is actually set in the casino. Anderson is interested more in the motel rooms, the cars, the phone booths, the little bits in between the more glamorous, photogenic playrooms. A cynic could say that the film was low budget and that this strategy is cheaper. The cynic would be right, and I would imagine that that did inform the film, but this fringe thing applies to the larger budget Anderson films too. Over the course of five films, Anderson has worked in a variety of genres, but his obsession has been constant: to take an established genre and use it as a way to splinter into the exploration of the nature of the (usually surrogate) family unit.
That’s in retrospect of course, no one knew what Hard Eight meant, or least meant in the grand scheme of its creator’s preoccupations, when it was released to little fanfare in 1996. The pleasure of Hard Eight is that it works in more than just a Spot the Hints of Greatness to Come kinda way. The film is terrific in its own right: surprising, original and quite moving. This is one of Anderson’s most restrained pictures, the emotions here are closer to the vest than every other Anderson film with the exception of his new one, but they ARE there, and that’s a bit of a shock for this kind of movie. Hard Eight promises you a Grifters type noir, and Anderson proves that he can play that game too when he wants, but he isn’t satisfied with that. He pushes deeper and strives for something emotionally fuller without going maudlin, and that’s the achivement of his debut film.
The most intriguing mystery of Hard Eight is Philip Baker Hall’s great, lined, broken poker face. Hall reminds me of one of those mysterious old men of a French crime movie, one of the guys that has to lead one last robbery, blah, blah. Sydney’s last robbery days are behind him though, and now he’s concerned with boring day to day living. Boring day to day living and John that is, a fairly dim bulb who, after rightful initial suspicion, takes to him as instant father figure, or, in Clementine’s words, like a puppy to his owner. John orders the same drinks as Sydney, tries to dress like Syndey, and fruitlessly tries to approximate Sydney’s unfakable world weary badassery.
After the characters are established in terrific (if occasionally mannered) hard Mametish dialogue, the film essentially turns into a black comic spoof of the Son Bringing Home a Friend the Father doesn’t approve of. This friend is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) and he wears his crass entitlement the way Sydney wears his melancholy Man of a Past Era. The two instantly clash, and their meeting might be one of the sharpest scenes to still grace an Anderson film. Jimmy tells Sydney that he runs security in one of the nearby casinos, Sydney, in perfect underplayed timing, asks him if he’s responsible for the parking lot. Jimmy politely, defensively, corrects Sydney, but you can tell that he’s saving something for later.
Jimmy’s ultimate reprisal is unexpected and necessary for the structure of Hard Eight. Unexpected because Sydney has just worked through another complication, and we feel that it may be about time for the picture to close, necessary because Jackson’s thug is a needed shot of dangerous comic adrenaline. Anderson has always been a tinkerier with tone, and Jimmy shakes the film from the sad introspection of the second act. We need a bit of the live wire of Vegas and Jackson gives us precisely that, and the performance seems to me to be a precursor to Jackson’s hilarious, terrifying, underappreciated career best work in Jackie Brown.
Jimmy finally catches Sydney off guard and calls him on his hypocrisy, and the scene is shocking because Jimmy deflates many of the notions we’ve had about Sydney ourselves. Jimmy reduces Sydney to being just another hood who think’s he’s above it all, and we, after indulging in John’s hero worship, can’t help but see Jimmy’s point and understand his resentment. Jimmy is also key in revealing Sydney’s true nature, and this development elevates Hard Eight to something more than just a well turned genre film. When we reach the film’s beautiful final scene, we don’t look at Sydney as just another cool hood character, we see him as a terrified, reserved human being, tucking the messiness away for who knows how many more years.
★★★½
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