Starting Out in the Evening (2007)
Coming of age stories can certainly be comforting, we’d all like to believe that a super lay or a chance meeting with someone older, established or famous (or a super lay with someone older, established or famous) will filter the confusion out of our lives and send us ready and willing toward whatever may be next. Coming of age pictures generally portray life as a light-switch that only requires a flicking from off to on, no wavering, nothing, when you’re on, you’re on, and everything’s a okay. The movies rarely acknowledge that our lives have a habit of going up and down, side to side, one day you’re winning, one day you’re losing, another day you’re winning again, another day you’re losing yet again. One day you’re over your young life crisis, while yet another day you find yourself racing straight into your mid-life crisis: drinking coffee and wondering why you watched all those coming of age movies. It has a disappointing third act, but The Graduate is a coming of age film that ends on a moving, and honestly unsettling note, sure, we’re here, but what the fuck now?
There’s all kinds of coming of age stories of course, the sexual experience with the older person, the infatuation with something (or someone) that (or who) turns out to be shit and representative of our childish delusions, the teacher who fights the system and imparts discipline in students everyone else has given up on, as well as the one about the strange, possibly sexually confused (if the genders are aligned correctly) relationship that can unexpectedly arise between an older, faded, past his prime writer and a young, precocious, energetic student who reveres the faded, past his prime writer. We know how these stories work: the student imparts a new sense of life to the teacher, while the teacher nurtures within the student a newfound discipline and sense of life’s fragility. I don’t remember much of Finding Forrester, but that was a recent example of this later type of coming of age picture. Wonder Boys would be another, but that was a wonderful movie because it had a sense of the genre’s necessities, and while it didn’t discard them, it admirably tweaked them and sent them scurrying in unexpectedly anarchic directions. Wonder Boys had a sense of humor, of play, and, most important, a sense of humanity.
Normally these pictures’ rigid devotion to formula causes them to forsake common sense. Starting Out in the Evening is the most joyless kind of formula picture, a self-conscious, self-righteous formula picture that knows the clichés, tries to transcend them, but has no idea what else to offer in place of the predictable pleasures. The director, Andrew Wagner, doesn’t supply the usual bombast, there’s no grand fight the system climax, and the conversations between the teacher/writer (Frank Langella) and the student (Lauren Ambrose) have a refreshingly true ring, they talk like two people who may have actually read a few books as opposed to watching movies about people who read books. This picture, no doubt, begins promisingly, but it’s dry and lifeless, and a subplot with the teacher’s daughter (Lili Taylor), meant to, in case we miss it, further highlight his self-absorption and emotional cowardice, goes nowhere; it’s dead weight in a picture that’s already perilously close to sinking. You may also find the film’s one note, pro-life, seize the day hammering exhausting, and perhaps even a little offensive.
Starting Out in the Evening is a failure of empathy as well as imagination, uncomfortably judgmental of its protagonist, the teacher, here called Leonard Schiller (the name is appropriate, pictures featured of Langella in his youth recall a young Leonard Cohen). The student, here called Heather Wolfe (more appropriate than the film apparently knows) repeatedly harangues Schiller for abandoning the passion of his earlier novels in favor of something colder, more considered and political. Schiller explains to Wolfe that those early books were written in one part of his life, the later books in another. That, God forbid, made sense to me.
We call it change, but these kinds of movies are usually only interested in promoting a change that leaves a thoughtless, shallow smile on your face as you leave the theatre, a true consideration of the ramifications of life’s choices is rarely on the menu. Later in the picture, the teacher’s daughter’s boyfriend (Adrian Lester) tells the daughter that he loves Schiller’s later work, it’s brilliant, “about something” (a sentiment that’s usually mocked as the height of deluded pretension in these kinds of pictures) and I perked up. Would Starting Out in the Evening dare imagine a scenario in which the young, green, bullying, faintly psychotic student isn’t armed with the most valid opinion? (Keep in mind the word opinion, the film doesn’t, her appraisal of Schiller’s work is to be accepted no questions asked, while everyone surrounding her, all older, all possibly more knowledgeable, are elitist fatheads. The girl’s own elitism, which she boasts of at one point, is never contested.) The answer is no, the Lester character is meant to be a jerk, another testament to Schiller’s head-up-his-own-assedness.
Starting Out in the Evening is well-performed, particularly by Langella, who brings an unsentimental humanity to his role that is quite endearing (he does wonders with the line “you’ve brought an old man some excitement”), and the final image (implying that change is something that, refreshingly, arrives bit by bit) works, but it’s not enough, the film is youth pandering claptrap, encouraging the newer generation’s (of which I’m a part) egotistical belief that they are of the most value, and that the old guys need to duck out of the way of their all encompassing brilliance. The picture is also probably critic pandering claptrap as well, one of those formula pictures dressed up in just enough literacy to be taken as “indy.” Don’t feel guilty if you find yourself bored watching Starting Out in the Evening, it is, in fact, boring.
★★
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Or director Monte Hellman attempts to elevate the cross-country film to the level of existential art. Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1970s race picture paced like an Antonioni film: every scene drawn out to the point of surreality, every line of dialogue punctuated with pregnant longing, doubt, and despair. Two-Lane Blacktop is more about movies than Antonioni’s work, it would certainly appear to be about Easy Rider, it’s about drinking Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle outside in the most photographically macho way imaginable, it’s about the myths of the old west and self-discovery (or lack thereof). The picture is also about ennui and the erosion of confidence in your native country. Hellman skirts absurdity, but ultimately gets away with stuffing all that into his race picture because he doesn’t ever play the part of outraged schoolmarm. Two-Lane Blacktop has a more original, less judgmental, blitzed humane one thing after another sense of humor about it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green were admirers.
The picture, because it is so casual, is really the movie Easy Rider tried so hard to be: a document of fade, of pent up rootlessness channeled into a distracting obsession. Easy Rider, despite moments (particularly with Jack Nicholson), was never the picture so many made it out to be at the time; it’s too full of itself, too pandering and sloppy. Two-Lane Blacktop is dryer, less accommodating, more elusive and probably just as stupid, but you won’t care: it’s a have your cake and eat it too picture: a question and reaffirmation of the American myth in equal measures. The film is, unquestionably, more for the guys; a man’s idea of how remaining unfulfilled and unrealized should hopefully look should you find yourself unfulfilled and unrealized. Two-Lane Blacktop, sadly, also represents something else entirely to the contemporary viewer: a fantasy of driving cross country with only a few dollars to your name; such an activity would max out even fat credit cards these days, providing you haven’t maxed out your fat credit cards already.
The picture is spacey, tranquil and loose, and as such it may take a few minutes to get into its headspace. It took me about twenty before the slow, emotionally textured groove began to captivate me, though the picture gets better and better as it proceeds along anyway. We initially meet three characters: symbolically referred to in the credits as Driver (James Taylor), Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and Girl (Laurie Bird) and in the film itself pointedly not referred to at all. They race their 55 Chevy, and in between they flirt and eat and drink and look for other races. The connective tissue that we’ve come to expect between scenes has been removed here, events arrive with little to no build: the girl, for instance, first appears (in a wonderful shot) in a window in the background of a cafe where the boys are eating. She slips into their Chevy and sits in the back waiting for them, the boys get in the car with her and drive away, no one seeming to have too many questions, except the girl, once, wondering why she always has to sit in the back.
Just as we assume we have the entirety of Two-Lane Blacktop figured out, and sink into our couches and savor the photography, particularly Hellman’s master shots (the images of the cars moving restlessly across the screen are especially majestic) and accept that nothing will be allowed to rupture the picture’s chic 1970s thing, along comes the Warren Oates character, referred to in the credits as G.T.O, because, well, he drives a beautiful G.T.O. We discover that the boys have been following him across at least two states, and that G.T.O. has had about enough. He picks up a hitchhiker and pulls into a gas station a few moments later. The boys catch up and, in an extended roundelay between boys, the girl, and G.T.O, that comprises possibly the picture’s best scene, a bet is finally made. They are to mail their pink slips to D.C.; first one there waits for the other one to catch up with their other newly acquired car.
The bits and pieces of Two-Lane Blacktop slowly stack up on top of one another (the hard boiled eggs, the stealing of the plates, the charge of a new challenge) and eventually we come to realize that we’re watching a great movie: a funny-flakey-haunting creation, a work of loss and disillusionment that sticks because it doesn’t seem to be sticking at all. That is the key to the picture’s subjective/objective mastery of tone: it emulates, glorifies but ultimately pities the numbing passivity of its characters. Wilson and Taylor (both the people you’re thinking they are) are surprisingly rich presences: similar looking, confident and broken: playing the musicians’ mystique to their advantage.
Oates is the true performance of the picture though, and its emotional wallop. Seemingly blessed with a differently colored V-neck sweater for every occasion, Oates is initially established as the intimidating opponent, an older man schooled in the ways of the nomad lifestyle, only to be revealed as the loneliest and most eager to impress: he’s the boys’ ghost of Christmas future, a man eaten and chattering away, continually picking up increasingly disinterested hitchhikers in a quest to slow the dissipation of his soul. His last line is a heartbreaker: “those satisfactions are permanent”. There’s someone in the car with him at the time but it’s clear that he’s, as always, talking to himself. G.T.O.’s at least partially right though, as the satisfactions of Two-Lane Blacktop are unlikely to fade anytime soon. To take a cue from the film’s abrupt, chilling ending, I think it appropriate that I don’t continue on much longer about it. See Two-Lane Blacktop, if you haven’t already.
★★★★
Inside (2007)
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside is a beautiful junk painting of your worst nightmares, probably the most potent exploitation of unyielding, inexplicable violation that I’ve seen since Takashi Miike’s Audition. Like Miike at his more unhinged (and Audition isn’t it) Bustillo and Maury announce their total lack of regard for all notions of good taste and restraint with their opening image: a severe car accident as seen and experienced by an unborn child. One moment the child is soothed by his mother’s loving (if still somewhat alarming) words, the next he’s jolted and throttled, blood rising and floating from the inside.
The pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) and her unborn child do manage to survive, but Sarah’s husband isn’t as fortunate. Sarah, her face plastered in distinctly French movie blood, looks over at her husband and wails. Four months later, it’s Christmas Eve and Sarah’s doctor informs her that she’s to give birth the following day and advises that she go home and relax in that cool, condescending manner with which doctors, or people who know you’ve recently lost someone, speak so fluently. Sarah’s employer and mother separately beg her to spend Christmas with them, but Sarah, confused, bitter, lonely, demurs and returns to her home to spend Christmas Eve alone. Sarah, inevitably of course, comes to regret that decision when a strange woman (Béatrice Dall, unforgettable), referred to simply in the credits as “la femme”, knocks on Sarah’s door in the black of the night and asks to be let in. Sarah, seeing only a dark shadow, and not as stupid as many in these types of pictures, tells the woman to scram, but this femme isn’t so easily dissuaded. Soon it’s unavoidably evident that the woman has come for Sarah’s child, and she doesn’t intend to leave without it.
Inside’s opening act is superb; a stylish, slow-burn emotional penetration that seemingly plays every one of your primal campfire fears against you: the inexplicable stranger, the dark, dank lonely night, the policemen who come and go to little avail, the dreams of your child revolting inside you. Sarah’s home is distinctly stylish; a movie place of dread; of unspoken, hellish domestic resentment, lit in such pale dusky yellows as to suggest a warm, humid womb itself. The title is, needless to say, multi-tiered in meaning. La femme wants to get inside, inside, inside, and nothing will stop her multiple invasions of Sarah’s taken for granted boundaries: her peace, her house, and ultimately her pregnant body. Bustillo and Maury exploit and extend Sarah’s sudden, burning revulsion and panic with masterful craftsmanship: la femme is equal parts specter (of guilt and bourgeoisie complacency and entitlement), butcher, psychotic and unstoppable culmination of every mother, or human’s worst nightmare. Bustillo and Maury, unlike virtually everyone else working the genre these days, aren’t afraid of being labeled tasteless or psychotic, they want to hammer your pressure points, and they don’t intend to play fair.
The film is surreally, shockingly, grandly, unbelievably, absurdly violent. Inside, because it’s horror and French, has been likened to Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, but that picture blew its load on gory pyrotechnics that had nothing to do with theme or atmosphere. That film was an unintentionally laughable, boring cartoon, with a twist ending that only further highlighted its pointlessness. Inside is, and this is the confusion of it, subjective and exploitive in equal measures. As accomplished as the picture is, it still exudes a problematic carny freak show “look at that!” vibe that borders on inhuman. The film is more original than many slasher pictures, but it’s still rooted in movies above all else. Rear Window? Check. Blood Simple? Check. Wait Until Dark? Check. Every gross horror movie ever made? Check. Woman finally saying fuck it and going all Ripley on us whether it makes sense or not? Check.
The male (probably young) filmmakers get these women, and portray their insecurity, rage, and psychosis with surprisingly fluid ease (until the end, where the Ripley factor kicks in, and we suffer the obligatory “someone’s dead, no they’re not” fake out) but the very male filmmakers also seem to be at a distance that might be inevitable with such a loaded, unavoidably female subject. These guys think this is gross, a woman would think it’s tragic (and gross). The references to the French riots of 2005 hint at a subtext of class resentment that the picture doesn’t seem too interested in capitalizing on, it’s a red herring, a sketch of the boogeyman’s origin that doesn’t really inform the film much one way or the other (though it does season the ultimate punch line). The body invasion of Inside lacks the self body-bewildering kick of an early Cronenberg film because the second and third acts are too indulgently disgusting: Bustillo and Maury don’t have enough faith in their final assault; they threaten to turn it into yet another exhibit in the Grand Guignol theatre of well lit cruelty.
Inside is still a notable, stunning piece of genre filmmaking. (There’s a brilliant, non-violent moment near the beginning where Sarah discovers, via just developed photographs, that la femme has known her for some time.) The violence, before it goes haywire, is ghastly and remarkably apt thematically. The tides of blood flow and spurt and explode, and hauntingly confirm and underline a terrified young woman’s mental implosions. The worst has finally arrived. The film treads uneasily towards High Tension farce near the end but reins it in for a devastating final image that threatens to sink into moral quicksand. Perversion and chaos have stolen life and motherhood and then just as strangely handed them right back, in a Grimm’s fairy tale finale that the filmmakers, in their audacity, seem to believe is a happy one. The ending reveals the filmmakers to possibly be more in touch with their inner woman than we initially assumed, though the horror lies in which woman they appear to be in touch with.
★★★½
On Dangerous Ground (1952)
Director Nicholas Ray was known for imbuing his thrillers with an almost naive, sad-eyed desperation, and that suits his romantic chase noir, On Dangerous Ground, to a tee. The picture depends upon clichés that were old hat before the talkies, but it transcends them, primarily because we’re more accustomed to encountering them in a romantic melodrama that might more closely resemble Marty than a nastier thriller centering on the hunt for a young girl’s killer. The policeman on the hunt, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) sees himself through the killer’s sister’s (Ida Lupino) blind eyes and calls himself out on a life that’s been dominated by cynicism and recklessness. We don’t roll our eyes at the second act pathos, nor the Lupino martyr, we’re instead thrown for a loop, wondering what the hell is going on.
It helps that Ray and Ryan are nearly unrivaled in this sort of business. Ray’s pictures aren’t calculated, but raw, almost uncomfortably melancholy and self-conscious. In a Lonely Place is another picture that starts down a familiar path (Hollywood screenwriter, murder, etc.) only to end on a devastating note of miscommunication and un-purged rage. There’s also, of course, Rebel without a Cause, a picture that never annoys from overexposure, if only because it’s authentically unforgettable, a nightmare exploration of the chasm between the generations (just as In a Lonely Place was exploring the un-crossable differences between the genders). On Dangerous Ground has similar conviction in itself, and Wilson ranks as another refreshingly understated, poignant Ray creation. The first three scenes tell us all: one cop hugs his wife, one cop watches TV with his family, Wilson examines pictures of suspects at the dinner table alone. Too bad the picture feels the need, in the first act, to repeatedly remind us of Wilson’s disillusion with needless dialogue, but even this doesn’t irritate, it contributes to the broad, dreamy vibe of the picture, to its big, broken, bleeding heart.
Ray could’ve gotten all of that out of a mediocre actor (and has) but Robert Ryan appears, in all of the pictures I’ve seen at least, to be incapable of giving of a false or boring performance. Ryan can be terrifying even in pictures that aren’t in his league (check his work in the otherwise just ok Crossfire or Clash by Night, both of which can be found in TCM Noirs Vol.2) but when the film manages to be even somewhat up to him the results can be extraordinary, such as The Set-Up, The Naked Spur, the iconic The Wild Bunch, or even here. Ryan, like many of my favorite leading men, has a fascinating, flexible contradiction about himself, he’s scary, badass, childish, noble, buffoonish all, possibly, at once, and can adjust the ingredients seemingly without effort depending upon the part. Wilson is, like the Bogart character in Place, of the not entirely sane school of broken idealists, needing a saint, someone who can in good faith just plain shut up for a while and deal with it, to purify his potentially lethal spiritual toxicity.
On Dangerous Ground follows a traditional three act structure, but the proportions are unusual and further contribute to the surreal discombobulation of the film, while also managing to further dry out the sentimentality. The film is approximately eighty minutes long, thirty of those are devoted to act one, a chase that has little bearing on the official plot (though it organically fleshes out the Wilson character). By minute thirty-five, Wilson has been summoned to another town (to escape problems sprung from his violent practices) to solve a murder. At this point we settle in, expecting twenty minutes or so of fish out of water plotting, the usual no bullshit cop in strange town burlesque, only to have a townsperson spring into a building in the middle of Wilson’s introduction to the prominent townspeople to announce that he’s seen the killer fleeing. Wilson teams up with the father (Ward Bond, very effective) and the remaining forty-five minutes largely constitute this second chase, with the accelerated romance with Lupino, who isn’t, despite first billing, introduced until about minute forty, as a sideline. The film toys with the formula admirably, and embodies what screenwriters preach of underlining character with action.
My only real regret of On Dangerous Ground is that it doesn’t take full advantage of the possible explosions that could be savored from a Robert Ryan-Ida Lupino collaboration. Lupino has proved herself in other roles to be very much Ryan’s equal, but here she’s saddled with an uninteresting male fantasy. Ray exhausts his imagination with the strange pacing, and his empathy with the Wilson character. It’s hard to fault On Dangerous Ground too much though, it’s an original picture with a fantastic lead performance, a clear, hard, amazing visual style, a haunting Bernard Herrman score, and a good as can be expected secondary performance. You don’t roll your eyes at the final kiss, it’s, despite the shortcuts, earned.
★★★½
Masculin Feminin (1966)
A portrait of confusion and aimless wannabe existential despair masked as a battle of the sexes tragicomedy, Jean-Luc Godard’s justifiably adored Masculin Féminin is a picture from 1960s France that 2000s U.S. could sorely use. Sadly, none of us seem to have the nerve or curiosity to pull it off. Godard had already made several legendary pictures (Breathless, Contempt and Le Petit soldat among them) but Masculin Féminin, while not necessarily better, feels more inclusive, Godard seemingly just as willing to question himself as everything else around him. This picture stars Jean-Pierre Léaud, of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, and Léaud appears to bring with him a bit of that feisty but more genteel spirit that characterizes the Truffaut collaborations. This picture has the vibe of Truffaut and Godard bringing out the best in one another, though with Godard that could be tongue in cheek, I don’t pretend to know (hence the chicken shit qualifiers). Masculin Féminin is a humane, bitter, contradictory, full picture, which is appropriate considering the subject: a group of undefined twenty-somethings, flitting from one interest, pursuit, or life defining quest to another.
The children of Godard’s film are looking for something or anything that feels sound and lacks in condescension, bitterness, falsehood; something tangible that hopefully safely avoids the hypocrisy of their parents. These children, most immediately and prevailingly, find the opposite sex, a mystery they can conveniently prescribe all of their other mysteries onto. Paul (Léaud), a would be revolutionary who chafes at organized government and work, and all the other ways society controls the common man, finds that his true concern is getting the beautiful, aloof, Madeleine (Chantal Goya), who couldn’t be more his opposite, and who doesn’t care enough about his wannabe politics to even feign interest, into the sack.
As most people of that age terrified of intimacy have a habit of doing, the characters of Masculin Féminin favor talk above all else, turning sex into verbal gunplay, cross-examining one another for astoundingly long, unbroken shots that reveal the friction between young people of differing genders as strongly as any picture I’ve ever seen. The girls tease and elude and hide behind words with dimensions they don’t entirely understand, the guys crouch behind bravado borrowed from American and French pulp films (Paul continually tries to perfect Belmondo’s cigarette lighting technique). Paul talks to Madeleine, about love, existence, pop culture (of which he tries to be contemptuous) and science (there’s a wonderful episode late in the picture that somehow manages to illustrate the mysteries of life with mashed potatoes). Paul talks to his friend Robert (Michel Debord) about Madeleine and sex in general. Madeleine talks to her friends about Paul, sex, and music as she strives to be a pop singer. One of the girls may be in love with Paul. Robert may be in love with that same girl.
Masculin Féminin lends itself structurally to its confused heroes, repeating words and images over and over in only slightly differing contexts, underlining the often rootless one thing after another, entirely self-contained, episodes of their lives. The film is divided into fifteen chapters, punctuated with numbers, prose and gunshots, but that doesn’t feel as deliberately intrusive as devices in other Godard films; it’s perfectly, naturally of a piece, every sketch a little life that begins and dies in and of itself, that fuels these characters’ gotta know and feel everything right now urgency.
This picture probably contributed more than a bit to the variety of youth in headlights films that would be made in America later, but most of those pictures stole the wrong things or missed the point, buying into their protagonists too much or not enough, becoming exercises in cool that celebrated ennui or sentimentality above all else. Godard’s triumph is that this picture is everything equally, simultaneously: naïve, insincere, cynical, starry-eyed, fatalistic, all possibly within seconds of one another. Godard’s syntax and capturing in amber a particular society would be enough to qualify it as a masterpiece alone, but it’s his surprising empathy and compassion (again, I think) that elevates the film to absolute, can’t miss classic. Paul, Madeleine and the gang are more than placeholders for Godard’s grand points: they hurt, ache and reach out in scenes of unforgettable connection.
A moment between Paul and Madeleine in bed, touching one another’s faces skittishly, is vulnerable and deliriously romantic, as is the scene where they watch a film (supposedly, according to Criterion, a parody of Bergman’s The Silence) leaning into one another. These moments set the stakes for Godard’s condemnation of checking out, and the filmmaker seems to understand here that the heartstrings are the best entry point for change. Godard’s youths are flowing with ambition and yearning, but they don’t MEAN anything, and this acknowledgment is the picture’s ultimate poignance, a portrait of young folks struggling and striving to bob their heads above the waves of consumerism that are drowning them, but really wanting to take part and benefit from said consumerism themselves. Godard’s infatuation with hot young things of little intellectual curiosity is at its most honest here, a candid reveal that a man can want to mean something and still fall for a wonderful body.
The characters’ endless self-comment and absorption play perfectly into Godard’s gifts for games and hall of mirrors symbolism and refraction, even his beloved American noirs are employed to startling effect here: lurid episodes that occasionally, inexplicably intrude upon the characters’ pontificating with shocking, hilarious ease, before going out again like a match: the unease of the youth personified as their cinematic addictions and getaways.
I needed this picture. You need this picture and, if you’ve already seen it, see it again. Masculin Féminin may have been about the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, a reaction to France at the time, but it could just as easily be about the children of MySpace and Youtube. Sadly, though, the children of today may be more in line with Madeleine than Paul, leaving out the Marx entirely in favor of the Coca-Cola, only wanting to be the next Carrie Underwood instead of the Beatles or Bob Dylan. Masculin Féminin captures something that is more urgent than ever: a generation lost and numbed into submission by everything and nothing. The ending is typically Godardian in its perversion: a major character dies off screen, flippantly, after recognizing his/her own self-righteousness. The police question the remaining characters, whose final words are “I don’t know.” Admitting that is a start.
★★★★
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Writer-star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a bit more ambitious than the previous Judd Apatow produced or directed odes to unflagging pop-culture enthralled young male self-absorption. The prior films were charged with a bracing, seemingly free form geeks have inherited the world id driven obscenity, laced with an articulation that is at once ironic and celebratory. The heroes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad were the good guys, but they weren’t the PG/PG-13 eunuchs of the 1980s movies getting boxer shorts pulled up their asses by the privileged bullies, they embodied ferocious, empowered, unchecked fuck you will, until, and this is the problem, the pandering sets in, the “we don’t really mean it or want to offend anyone especially the ladies” third act u-turn that finds everyone hooking and growing up on cue, common sense be damned.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has no such third act turn-around, the film is slower and (just a shade) more reflective from the get go. This may be the first of this current wave of Apatow productions that can be accused of self-consciousness, recognizing the last minute efforts of the heroes of Knocked Up and Superbad to be unconvincing. This film has at its center a more sentimental, wounded hero, a man-child who requires more than a five minute montage of images near the end to figure things out. The picture attempts to dramatize Segel’s in and out, some days good, some days bad road to recovery, after being discarded by the titular woman (Kristen Bell, bland).
The usual stereotypes are all accounted for (shrill ambitious woman, obnoxious, more successful new beau, stoner, confidant) but their dimensions aren’t as pat as the prior films. Marshall has a surprising compassion; the characters are largely good, open, looking for connection. It’s this unexpected, across the board fairness that has critics, ridiculously, likening the picture to the work of Preston Sturges.
The film is also, unfortunately, the slowest of the pictures we’ve mentioned. Segel and Stoller were right to question the conventions of the prior films, but in revising those clichés they muted the wild man party camaraderie that gave the earlier pictures their bite, it’s a gremlins movie without the gremlins. The reliable company players, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, etc. are all bland and inert here, their comic impulses adrift. This film takes too much of its mood from the tranquil Hawaiian waters that serve as the backdrop: this picture is truly about as interesting as watching someone else on vacation. Segel and Stoller have made the Apatow third act somewhat more palatable but in doing so they’ve neglected the first two acts entirely, leaving nothing to distract from the please marry and procreate at the appropriate age woman’s picture formula that remains despite their best intentions. The film mistakes striving for maturity for maturity, lacking the characterizations to justify such a slow tempo. Forgetting Sarah Marshall may, ironically, play worse with the folks who are determined to defend it.
The picture still has its moments, primarily because Segel, always the strangest of the Apatow boys to begin with (he suggests Jim Carrey in an earlier Apatow effort, the underrated The Cable Guy) is an appealingly lumpy, unconventional (even for Apatow) leading man. Unlike that force of nature Seth Rogen, or Hill, Segel doesn’t bless his character Peter with confidence in his own obsessions, which include an ambition to stage a more autobiographical than he knows puppet musical of Dracula. The film’s one legitimately original moment takes off from this admirably bizarre conceit: the girl of redemption and second chances (Mila Kunis, more appealing than expected, but has nothing to work with) sets Peter up, without his knowing, to sing a song from his unfinished project. Peter isn’t sure of course, he isn’t sure of anything other than his need to glob onto another woman, but he takes the stage, and wins over the drunk, impatient patrons of the bar with a song of surprising conviction (he even does the sub-Transylvanian thing) that briefly takes over the movie. Peter sheds his self-loathing fully, convincingly, and it’s a wonderful moment.
There are a few other moments that threaten to jump the tracks of formula as well. Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow, Sarah’s new rock star beau, is almost completely unoriginal, save an unexpected kinship with Peter. Peter and Aldous find themselves surfing together, and Peter, unable to deny it any longer, exclaims “God, you’re cool.” It’s a disarming, poignant scene; an emotionally naked moment that the filmmakers refuse to capitalize on.
Moments such as these prove we should be harder on Apatow and his talented camp of hooligans. These guys are too promising to be wasting their and our time replicating the same clichéd rubbish over and over again. The audiences’ taking it doesn’t surprise me, but the critics’ refusal to call foul is disappointing. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is better than most any mainstream young person romantic comedy that will probably come out in the near future, but what’s that saying exactly? It’s time to change the criterion by which we judge these men, time to up the ante, because, at this point, the Apatow guys are treading closer and closer to dangerous waters, to making the sorts of movies they would’ve ridiculed before they were famous.
★★½
In Bruges (2008)
We’ve seen so many bad hitman movies, either of the junk videogame (take your pick) or boring, self-conscious pretend its a metaphor for something to disguise its emptiness variety (Road to Perdition) that it’s forgivable that audiences would greet In Bruges, the writing-directing debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, with hesitation. In Bruges has the appearance of yet another of those pulp pictures in denial, a film that mistakes under-known location and stars for something higher than the usual business. We expect suffocating art-direction, reaching, false, over-literate dialogue, we expect to be lulled to sleep, with even worse self-gratifying conversation over dinner to follow.
In Bruges, thankfully, plays those frustrations against the audience, reaching for the next, providing we haven’t gotten there already, level of post-modernism: the post-modernist post-modernist thriller, the B movie that scores points on the B movie that pretends to score points on the B movie in hopes of being an A movie. The picture isn’t really about anything, and it has a rigid cross the T’s, dot the i’s irony that tips one off to McDonagh’s theatre background, but it’s also appealingly woolly and squirrelly, you know where it’s ultimately going, but you never know where each individual divorced from the narrative scene is headed. McDonagh takes several stock in the genre moments (the meet cute, the jealous boyfriend, the hit, the final standoff) and shakes them up and lets them loose in directions that are wilder and less polite than usual. In Bruges, in short, reminds you of why you fell for genre movies to begin with, before the inevitable repetition born of seeing too many of them set in.
The film concerns two hitmen of the traditional contrast: Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is older, experienced, worn down, respectful, doughier; Ray (Colin Farrell) is young, inexperienced, electric, sexy, buzzing all over the place. The two have just completed a job that has given them unexpected trouble and, at their boss Harry’s (Ralph Fiennes) insistence, have fled to Bruges (in Belgium) where they are to lie low until Harry contacts them. Ken, distrusting of what the Bruges trip may or may not mean, takes the city in stride and appreciates what’s in front of him while it’s in front of him; Ray, a canny gloss on Farrell’s backstage infamy, is an impatient wild man with an open disdain for Bruges, for quiet, for anything that doesn’t involve forward movement toward a buzz or a lay (he’s, to borrow Woody Allen’s reasoning from Annie Hall, a shark, only of the party variety).
The pair’s bickering, over tourism, drinking, and fucking, constitutes the entirety of the picture’s first act, and a large portion of the second: its an Odd Couple scenario, a gifted writer’s opportunity to, in addition to the genre tweaking listed above, riff on the glib self-congratulation that can be a part of sight seeing, or seeing an art film that primarily concerns itself with sight seeing. We’ve be down the bad guy ironically concerned with frivolous things highway before (Tarantino has made it practically kabuki by now) but McDonagh’s dialogue has a non-sequitur strangeness that’s intensely enjoyable, and the performances are terrific.
Brendan Gleeson is ideal for the kind of tonal tightropes that McDonagh has him walk here; as he’s a contradiction of the best sense himself. Gleeson is big, intimidating, a “tough guy” with a jolting vulnerability that’s informed by a precise intelligence and awareness. Gleeson imbues In Bruges with a pathos that, surprisingly (and this is a testament to the picture’s mood ring tonal durability) doesn’t overwhelm it; his big, open face softens and grounds the picture.
Farrell, a good actor who continually traps himself playing troubled artists’ idea of the Icon, is revelatory here: the fleeting charge of his supporting performance in Minority Report topped and sustained for the entirety of this picture. Farrell’s Ray is trickier than initial appearances may reveal: he’s entrusted to carry both the film’s “morality” and comic charge, no mean feat, but Farrell lets go, it’s a rare self-amused performance that’s audience inclusive. Farrell zigzags his eyes, twists himself in knots, punches people out, and dares everyone, including us, to reign him in. It’s a testament to McDonagh and Farell’s will that Ray, above it all, remains likable.
The picture’s final third is the only portion that carries a whiff of obligation. The Harry character, while funny and well timed by Fiennes, is derivative, warmed over Ben Kingsley from Sexy Beast. McDonagh’s imagination also disappointingly fails him, after initial promise, in the girl department. Ray’s relationship with a sexy drug dealer, Chloë (Clémence Poésy), is, at first, reckless and subversive of the usual googly eyes enchantment (they bring out the worst in each other as opposed to the expected opposite) but, by the end, the girl is just the girl, wincing at the appropriate moments. One expects something to happen with this young lady with the quick fingers and aloof come hither smile: a betrayal, a violent defense, a desertion, anything, but McDonagh doesn’t commit, the picture goes a little soft and tries life affirmation on for size instead, perhaps, like Ray, to atone for the horrible act of violence that occurs early in the picture.
Truthfully though, sentimentality might just be the ultimate subversion here, hard to tell with this corkscrew of a picture. I’m trying to be polite and not reveal too much, but the Farrell character would be the villain in most films, and you may feel guilty for cheering his survival a few hours after the lights have gone up and you’ve had time to consider what he actually did. I can’t tell if McDonagh has managed a supremely moral or just the opposite feat with that, but I applaud the ambition and discomfort. In Bruges is, essentially, just a trick, but it’s a memorable trick, an occasionally nasty movie with a little moxie.
★★★½
Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007)
The glib title is, mercifully, the hardest lump to swallow in Wristcutters: A Love Story, a picture that doesn’t so much evade the Sundance Toys-R-Us “independent” film ingredients (willfully eclectic cast, audience pandering coming of age road movie scenario) as slightly transcend them. These characters aren’t showy about their unhappiness: they drink cheap beer, shoot pool, and work grungy jobs, with little hope of ever turning another corner. They could kill themselves of course, and one would be tempted to consider these indulgent still kinda youths a suicide risk, except they already thought of that. The characters of Wristcutters have all successfully “offed” themselves, and the punishment turns out to be yet another level of thankless not quite middle class hell, an afterlife that, in the words of the star, Zia (Patrick Fugit) is “just slightly shittier than everything before.”
The writer-director, Goran Dukic, apparently understanding that novelty concept afterlife movies don’t normally work (usually a stream of increasingly tiring heavenly puns capped with a self-righteous happy ending), and that coming of age youthster pictures are even more hazardous, finds a careful balance between low comedy and a despair that’s really a gentle befuddlement. We never remotely believe that Zia is detached enough to have actually offed himself, the act feels entirely too heavy for the story that follows, but the picture’s sidestepping of that never really becomes an issue. The film has an early Jim Jarmusch/ Jonathan Demme vibe: affection for its characters, as well as a poignant understanding of its own slightness. We root for Wristcutters.
Or more accurately we root for the three characters the film has to put to the road: Zia, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) and Eugene (Shea Wigham). Zia is looking to find an ex, Mikal is convinced she wound up in the New Jersey karma turnpike wasteland by mistake, and Eugene is trying to get laid. This is the first Fugit picture I’ve seen since Almost Famous, and he proves here, unlike Kate Hudson, that he may not be a one notable performance deal. Fugit has the uncalculated emotional deflation and ironic sex appeal of a young Bud Cort. Like Cort, Fugit glamorizes and satirizes movie character misery in equal measure; you buy his unoriginal problems without feeling stupid in the morning.
Sossamon, winning in the better than it’s thought to be A Knights Tale, has the flakey-hot intelligence of Winona Ryder in the 1980s; an ability, like Fugit, to renew canned clichés and emotions. You want these two to get together (if you thought Fugit was going to get with the ex, you don’t care enough about movies to read my site) because they sell the melting of one another’s mutual self-containment with a minimum of effort; there’s no grand scene or contrivance to shove their affection down our throats, its just, simply, beautifully, there.
Wigham and Tom Waits ensure that Wristcutters meets its weird quotient, but they work. Wigham takes a potentially problem part, “the foreigner”, and scores a few strange comic bulls-eyes, his attempted seduction of Sossamon so shameless and disgusting that you can’t help but root for him. It’s also a shame that Waits doesn’t find more film work that interests him, because he’s a truly original presence in movies: a hipster poet badass with the primal rasp of a great movie monster (his delirious Renfield is a highlight of Coppola’s also underrated Dracula), though Waits might disrupt the consistency of Wristcutters’ vision: its hard to believe that any world with him as a guardian angel can be all that bad.
It’s also testament to the picture’s charm that I not only accepted the ending, but encouraged it: a normally irritating reversal of woes that, for once, ends on the correct beat, resisting the urge to cheapen the emotion with a few more scenes of tidying up. We don’t know what happens to Zia exactly, but a beautiful woman is smiling at him, and, for the moment, that is more than enough.
★★★
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
Another of Luis Buñuel’s elegant outrages, a picture brimming with a tangible warm bathwater rage, Diary of a Chambermaid was Buñuel’s first collaboration with screenwriter Jean Claude-Carrière, who would go on to write or co-write all of the director’s late period French masterpieces, including Belle de jour, The Phantom of Liberty, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Of all those pictures, Diary is the least obviously strange and challenging, adhering to a more or less conventional narrative from minute one, in which we follow a train from Paris to a grand country house, to minute ninety-eight, where a fascist revolution is cheered as it gains prominence in a troubled country, all to the ignorance or encouragement (or both) of the majority of the characters, who are, typical to Buñuel, beholden to sex, money and general self-absorption over any and all else.
Our entry-way to said grand country house is Céléstine (Jeanne Moreau), a maid from Paris who, it is immediately apparent, is accustomed to nicer things than the typical help. Céléstine wears perfume, which arouses the suspicion of the shrewish lady of the house, Madame Monteil, who is, at the expense of relationships with her husband and her father, fanatically devoted to the pricey knick knacks that clutter every corner of the home. The economy with which Buñuel establishes the inner workings of the Monteil home is masterful: the Madame looks Céléstine’s clothes over and, sighing, tells her it’s obvious she’s from Paris. A moment later another servant tells her the same thing, only with palpable awe, the difference between the classes crystallized in two lines of dialogue.
And so the picture proceeds, in a series of sketches that trace the shifting dynamics of the Monteil household as informed by the powerful, aloof, self-contained new presence of Céléstine, who remains, for the entirety of Diary, a purposeful cipher, an enigma. As with Belle de jour (an even stronger picture, probably because it plays so readily to Buñuel’s amusements) the sexually potent woman is a measure of the skeletons and obsessions of all the other (primarily male) characters. Madame Monteil’s father (Jean Ozenne) is perhaps the most moving, and his notable scene with Céléstine could have just as easily occurred in Belle: the father asks Céléstine if he can call her Marie. She obliges. The father asks if she will put on a pair of little black boots. Céléstine again obliges, and the father watches in ecstatic longing as she walks around the room for him. The scene, as with many in Buñuel’s canon, is a marvel of tone: satirical, creepy, and heartbreaking in equal measures, supplying Ozenne with the most emotionally accessible role in the picture. The father is a member of the much maligned upper-crust who checked out long ago, enslaved by his fantasies. Ozenne’s character illustrates Buñuel’s brilliance and humanity: the filmmaker was never satisfied to score cheap points from one side of the room. Buñuel’s pictures, instead, have an empathy that deepens the pathos as well as the shock.
There are several other scenes in Diary of a Chambermaid that are just as wonderful and impossible to forget. Madame Monteil’s husband (a thuggish, fascinating Michel Piccoli), having given up on sleeping with Céléstine, and once again rebuffed by his frigid wife, sets his sights on a lowly laundry woman, Marianne (Muni). The woman, grasping Monteil’s intentions, allows herself to quickly cry, before being tugged away out of audience sight into a nearby barn. The moment has the rapt primal horror of a great silent film. So does the image of a murdered girl that happens late in the picture, and, on the most obvious level, embodies the price of the corruption and apathy that’s festering in the Monteil home. That may sound too cool, too academic, but the image of the girl’s legs: exposed, the snails she was collecting earlier crawling over the pale skin, is anything but.
These charged moments and images establish Diary of a Chambermaid to firmly belong amongst the other Buñuel pictures, and, if you’re unaccustomed with the man’s work, this may be the place to start. Diary provides the other pictures with context, a base for the filmmaker’s preoccupations and curiosities. All of the later Carrière collaborations are bolder, even more accomplished pictures, but that’s more a comment on the high stock of the Buñuel filmography than Diary’s merit. The picture has an atmosphere of dread; of defeat and unease unencumbered by boring directorial editorializing, that is rare in most (particularly American) films. Robert Altman’s work is an exception, and if you’re interested in a mainstream American picture that has that mood I’d check Altman’s The Gingerbread Man. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret also has this elusive light rot, and the ending, a terrifying triumph of evil amongst the common citizens’ preoccupation with banal things, is eerily similar to Diary’s.
And Diary of course also has Jeanne Moreau, a film legend who wields her gifts of beauty, intelligence, calculation and mystery to considerable effect for Buñuel. One glance at Moreau’s Céléstine explains why a weak or strong man might waste the world away attempting to possess her. Toward the end we think we may have figured Céléstine at least partially out, having heard of the little girl’s murder, she attempts to expose the killer by seducing the confession out of him and, later, even supplying evidence that didn’t actually exist. Céléstine’s concern is never explained, though perhaps she’s attempting to do something noble for the same reason that characters in many of Woody Allen’s later pictures do something monstrous, to see if the act can succeed, and be survived and tolerated. Buñuel’s answer is as cynical (though funnier) as Allen’s. Proven wrong, Céléstine retreats to her new good fortune, destined to one day be the old man with the strange boots.
★★★★
They Live (1988)
No we haven’t, excluding the Allen picture, stumbled into another thirty days of horror, but They Live was on television the other night, and though it has been written about endlessly by other enthusiasts, I watch no questions asked when that picture is playing, regardless of what DVDs may be stacked in the corners of the room. I briefly mentioned the film over at Joe’s place the other day, but wasn’t going to write about it for fear that my readers think me possessed of some tunnel vision.
I’ll risk it. They Live may, along with Big Trouble in Little China, be John Carpenter’s most purely pleasurable picture, seemingly less interested in pressing its effect upon the audience than most of Carpenter’s work. The film is flakey and loose; wearing its frustration bluntly on its sleeve, blessed with a total absence of self-consciousness, effectively reflecting the personality that Carpenter exudes in his generally appealing, self-effacing interviews.
And this may be what the current political war pictures are missing, a feel for the everyday as well as a punk cover screw the critics outrage. Filmmakers concerning themselves with Iraq seem less interested in making a great Iraq movie than being the director of a great Iraq movie, ego divorcing them from any immediacy of feeling, we generally feel as if we’re just sitting through another disingenuous politician’s platform, and critics wonder why we skip the pictures! My readers have convinced me that I was probably too kind on Stop-Loss recently, I essentially reviewed the first act, only to shut my eyes and ears of everything that followed, but that picture signaled, in the beginning, a bit of hope for the current coming home movie. Peirce at least had conviction and, dare we get a little maudlin, heart which needn’t be encased in quotation marks.
If Stop-Loss has conviction, They Live has conviction in its lack of conviction, the thing has a flip despair. Carpenter’s pictures, with few exceptions, normally receive shitty notices, and this seems to free the director to take on a vaguely political B picture without any illusions as to how it will ultimately be received. The “message” is front and center, in your face, a gifted amateur’s outrage. Ridiculous looking skeletons have taken over Earth, aligned with the government, and are assuring our complacency through a solid middle class lifestyle, which is why it falls upon the bums on the edge of town to save the world, primarily because they haven’t been cut in on the deal; aided by a cheap pair of sunglasses that exposes the aliens, as well as their subliminal messages which include SLEEP, MARRY, and CONSUME, they seek to set matters straight.
The film has an undeniably quaint those were the good old days (in genre cinema) quality, but there is an inspired black joke that Carpenter should’ve further played up, that the difference between the aliens’ reign and our own is negligible, the stakes non-existent. Our heroes, Roddy Piper and Keith David, are intent to free the human race from enslavement, but we never understand why the victory matters, which is to say that it doesn’t matter, except to establish to which victor goes the spoils, which will never be Rowdy Roddy Piper or Keith David or anyone of their social standing anyway. Their plight is bitter, not particularly well-intentioned, and pointless. They Live captures American indifference in a more honest and memorable fashion than any five Jarheads.
Some have expressed disappointment in the stunt casting of Rowdy Roddy, but that’s essential to the film’s junk ennui vibe. Some have suggested that this would have been an ideal collaboration with Carpenter’s favorite leading man, Kurt Russell, and while I generally make it my practice to encourage casting Russell in anything, he would be too flexible, too commanding, too just plain good, of an actor for the part. They Live needs a square, clunky hero, with just enough self-awareness to be in on the joke, and that’s precisely what Piper supplies. His delivery of the film’s oft quoted “kick ass and chew bubble gum” line is labored, and perfect; a construction worker seizing the end of the world as ultimate opportunity to blow away bankers whom he (probably) would’ve killed even if they were human. Russell’s approach would’ve been too outright satirical (a bit like his funnier than the movie deserves role in Overboard) and would’ve elevated the film a bit too much out of the muck.
Casting Russell would’ve also denied us just a bit of the primal charge of the film’s most famous scene, where David and Piper beat the unholy shit out of each other, for no other reason than neither of them have anything else to do. Many have commented on the scene’s comic effect, that it goes on so long that it crosses the divide from funny to tedious to funny again (and I couldn’t help but notice parallels between it and Cronenberg’s vicious bathhouse scene in Eastern Promises, any college students reading are welcome to that term paper), but the scene also firmly belongs thematically, tapping into an emasculated poor beefy guy rage that Fight Club doesn’t satirize nearly as well as people claim. Carpenter’s picture has a Samuel Fuller outrage from the economical pits of pulp thing going on, and I bet if Fuller had made the exact same picture it would enjoy considerably higher critical regard.
The ending is broad, tasteless and perhaps the closest the picture comes to being legitimately brilliant. The world is saved, but you’re still left fucking an alien. The sunglasses revealed, more than anything, to be a pain in the ass.
★★★½
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