Clean (2004)
The initial suspense of Clean lies not in whether its protagonist, Emily (Maggie Cheung), a once promising rock something or another, will shake the grips of heroin addiction, but in the genre itself. One can’t help but wonder whether the picture will compromise its lean integrity and become another grim, purposeless, self-congratulatory slog like nearly every other picture that concerns drug addicts and the (on again off again) struggle they normally face trying to achieve the titular state. Clean is, remarkably though, the ideal title for Olivier Assayas’ picture, referring not only to Emily but to the filmmaker’s astoundingly matter of fact approach. Assayas stands outside and inside the junkie rehab genre at once, examining it like one might a caged bear, with both curiosity and a welcome generosity of spirit. Assayas would appear to view this genre as a puzzle: how do we find the actual humanity of a tragedy or hardship that countless folks face everyday? How do we clear the hurdle of cliché?
The solution is to snip the clichés out like dead branches; quickly, fearlessly, with no apology or self-consciousness. Clean is pointedly devoid of all the scenes one expects from the genre, devoid, in fact, of many of the scenes one expects from any drama. We’re spared tearful reunions or separations, we’re largely spared Emily’s physical torment, we’re spared the death of a pivotal character, an even more pivotal reconciliation is implied but never shown, etc.; scenes end mid-tempo, unfulfilled, the plot floating and wandering like the central character. Clean doesn’t assume the position of a removed, drunken third party telling someone a story at a bar, desperate to move or impress; the picture is Emily: playing its emotions close to its vest, shuffling from one day to the next with completion and maintenance of a basic pride being the hopeful, up-front goals.
Assayas boils everything down to the existential essential without compromising the gravity or pathos of the subject matter in the service of some art-house wank; he earns our trust, and this trust allows the moments to have an anxiety that isn’t real but relatable, the picture is both more universal and more specific at once. Clean manages to be both the most aesthetically beautiful junkie picture I’ve ever seen as well as possibly the most moving without that being a contradiction in terms. Make no mistake, Clean is a movie first and most, still about real problems in a way that only movies are, especially European movies, but the picture is a sublime balancing act, the best of every world.
Maggie Cheung, captivating in a number of Wong-Kar Wai pictures, is startling here as Emily, consciously playing her beauty and poise, normally the bridges that keep us from buying an actor in such a role (ask Charlize Theron or Halle Berry), against our expectations here. Her Emily is vibrant, stunning, self-absorbed, a creature of infinite shells of bullshit who may or may not have an actual, vested interest in finding her humanity. Emily eludes in her apparent lack of elusion, her “straight forwardness” just another device for self-explanation and rationalization, whether she consciously knows it or not. Emily, in an astute observation of behavior on the part of the film, never lies, but pay attention to how she never lies.
Nick Nolte, as Emily’s father-in-law and de facto guardian of her child, etches one of those subtle, volcanic portraits of normalcy and dignity on the brink of falling into the abyss that only a famous weirdo can with such committed lack of irony; the husk of that unmistakable voice, the creases and wrinkles in that deep, large head, the faded lion’s mane of hair, are all used to unforgettable effect; the machismo of Nolte’s past parts inform the role and lend it originality and texture, this is clearly a man used to victory and control learning how to face loss on the fly: he’s, and the film never does our work for us, much more like Emily than either he or Emily know. The picture takes a cue from these rich performances and never stokes the fires of melodrama, these characters never oppose one another as many other films have conditioned us to expect, they instead oppose themselves in front of one another, and discover a common bind that goes on to color the picture’s earned, open-ended final image.
Clean is an accomplishment, a mood film that’s deeper and more moving the further it slips into your memory, perhaps because it manages, so gracefully, to feel half-remembered already.
★★★★
The Orphanage (2007)
Of the various chambers that exist in the manor that is the horror genre, the haunted house picture may be the picture that’s most encouraging of that potentially exhilarating, disconcerting wedding of appealing cinematic surfaces (think of the smooth, deep, ironically beautiful cinematography that characterizes The Innocents) with the dank emotional textures that constitute our everyday fears. Of all the possibilities the horror genre offers, the haunted house picture is perhaps the ripest metaphorically, which is saying something. We know that haunted house pictures, or stories of the supernatural in general, deal with the fear of dying, with fear of the dark, of change and moving on, with deep buried skeletons in the closet, but they’re usually just as concerned with the breakdown of the family unit; the fear, not of the skeletons, but of the necessity to face the judgment and pent-up emotional heat of our family once said skeletons are revealed; the fear of discovering your relatives, not as your relatives, but as flawed beings with their own agendas and damage.
The Orphanage is clearly, undeniably, indebted to many of the usual suspects of the haunted house genre, particularly those that concern themselves with the fragile mental state of young-middle-aged women such as the aforementioned The Innocents or The Others; but this film has an emotional intensity that transcends the puzzle-box tropes (the red herrings, the bumps in the night, the doubts of sanity) that dominate some of the modern movies; this picture is beautiful, but it doesn’t have a vice directorial grip, there’s an empathy here. New director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez have invested an old genre (that I love) with a tang of real passion and undoing; you watch the picture less for the punch-line and more out of a legitimate, rare, fevered concern for the protagonist. Bayona has unavoidably been compared to Guillermo Del Toro (who serves as “presenter” here) and that’s partially valid, but it’s a mark of the picture’s generous, human appeal that Pedro Almodóvar just as easily came to mind. The Orphanage, like much of Almodóvar’s work, is concerned with women first and foremost: their fears, their burdens, their reservoirs of strength and pain.
The Orphanage has you from the title; it’s an uneasy word, signaling an uncomfortable reality of injustice and partial breakdown. We don’t like the word under the cheeriest of contexts (providing there are any) much less as the title of a horror picture. The film opens, as many of these pictures have a habit of opening, in the past. Children are playing a game outside of the orphanage, which is appropriately, diabolically grand, elaborate and beautiful; the ideal breeding ground for ill will and wrong doing. An adult watches the children play from inside, and informs a caller that Laura has not yet learned that she is to leave the orphanage.
The image fades and we are then introduced to the adult Laura (Belén Rueda), the implications of that past day left hanging as one of many question marks that soon follow. Laura has returned to reopen the orphanage, accompanied by her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and child, Simón (Roger Príncep). Bayona has a young filmmaker’s fun (as well as a talented filmmaker’s flair for) taunting us with the various clicks and uh-ohs that traditionally comprise the first act of these pictures. A social worker with sad, bug-eyed glasses (Montserrat Carulla) appears, projecting all around strangeness as well as a disturbingly specific knowledge of Simón’s background; Simón, already socially troubled and drawn toward the imaginary, tells Laura of new invisible friends that bear a disturbing resemblance to Laura’s own childhood peers, they also have a disconcerting habit of leaving very real footprints behind. Simón, in one of the more unnerving bits in the film, even leaves seashells behind so his new friends can find their way back…
It would be unfair to discuss the picture’s plot any further, but I will say that these films hinge on their ending as much as any other genre in the business. The Others is a luscious, scary ghost story with a fine Nicole Kidman performance (perhaps her best) but the ending was disappointingly derivative of another recent scare picture, and I guessed it before the half-way mark. The Haunting’s implication that poor Eleanor would forever be among the house’s many tortured spirits is satisfyingly eerie and circular, and helped put that film (as well as the book) over to legendary status. The ultimate resolution of The Orphanage is far-flung, but it’s also a simple, ghastly doozy. Bayona almost squanders the force of it with an epilogue that’s leftover Pan’s Labyrinth, but that’s splitting hair.
Rueda (The Sea Inside) is a beautiful, expressive actress and she invests Laura with a survivor’s guilt and distance that deepens the themes of the genre without editorializing or killing their livelihood. Laura is a woman, a possibly failed, self-loathing protector, not another princess ripe for murder. Carulla is frightening in a bit that skirts cliché to lend the picture its quiet, admirably gray moral longing. Geraldine Chaplin appears, in a bit that resembles Poltergeist in conception but (thankfully) not execution (that picture relied on effect after effect for affect). The Orphanage sketches Chaplin in green light, and lets you do the rest, that haunted, piercing face another indelible portrait of the fade that powers all of these pictures and that eventually comes to consume everyone.
The Orphanage isn’t a classic, it’s ultimately more about past genre films than anything else, but it’s a visually magnificent, rewarding picture, and Bayona already, refreshingly, understands that the dark can’t rival what you’re faced with when you catch your reflection unexpectedly, whether it be during the day or at night.
★★★½
Mon oncle (1958)
Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle (the second in the Monsieur Hulot series) is one of those pictures that reaffirms how underutilized the comedy picture generally is, especially nowadays. The comedy (along with the horror film) seems to be seen as a genre to cut your teeth on before moving on to more “important” pictures, tossed off to the little guys when there should be room reserved for our masters. We should know by now that the comedy and the horror picture are two of the hardest genres to realize, as well as two of the richest and most malleable: the two genres most willing to lend themselves to subtexts that can be heavy, or maudlin or self-congratulatory in other genres.
Mon oncle is a tonal wonder, a film that appears to be light, airy and inconsequential, but slowly works its hooks into you without your knowing. The films all too often these days announce their effect from the outset, a program might as well appear in the lobby announcing the evening’s intentions; “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Haggis wishes to present to you a story of racial strife and hope” or “tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gondry wishes to present to you a story of incoherent whimsy and self-consciousness.” If you haven’t read or seen much of Tati’s Hulot series (I’m a novice myself), you can be forgiven for assuming you have Mon oncle figured out, particularly after the stylish/cute opening scene that follows a group of dogs from the cramped, cluttered, more rambunctiously alive city to the stylized, stiflingly chic home of the family of a higher-up in the plastics industry. One dog gets beyond the gates while the others don’t; a blunt but more succinct summation of the classes than Haggis has yet to offer.
The family is comprised of a puffy, proud wife, the puffier, prouder plastics executive, and a boy who appears to be over it all (he longs, as many people in these types of pictures have a habit of longing, for something more tangible and real, a bit of mischief to jar all that overwhelming pride in purposeless accomplishment). Left to their own devices, this family would be assured a place of tranquil suburban convenience that fosters a certain kind of new age modern lobotomy, chic ritual at the expense of anything messy or imaginative. But that is not to be, Monsieur Hulot, the uncle of the title (whom the director plays himself) occasionally drops by to shake the family out of their domestic stupor. Hulot is a stranded misfit, clad in coat and pipe, (suggesting Sherlock Holmes by way of Peter Sellers, though purposefully lacking the personality of either) that lives a life, like the Tramp, or even Boudu, totally devoid of any structure or self-consciousness. Hulot isn’t contemptuous of his surroundings as Boudu was; he, like the Tramp, projects an aura of mystification with the world around him, always one, two, a hundred steps behind.
Tati’s primary interest here would appear to be the character’s homes and how they contrast and comment on their inhabitants. Hulot’s apartment, established in a classic bit, appears to have been designed by a hyper, over-imaginative child: doors, stairs and ramps appear for their own dream sake divorced from any practical purpose. The exterior of Hulot’s home is a silent marvel, a design that (poignantly) reaffirms the beautiful, common textures and rituals of our lives. The family’s house is one of those 2001 competence at the expense of personality nightmares crossed with the board game “Mouse Trap”; the family spends as much time shifting from room to room (each of which having to be allowed to fulfill its maximum capacity for use) as Hulot does climbing his stairs, but they carry on with a joyless, sad manner of manufactured obligation that chokes the love of process away; this family’s having coffee before they’ve adequately set the dinner table for the dinner they barely remember eating.
Mon oncle has a dreamy, slow start, but the jokes accumulate like a snowball down a hill, and soon you find yourself overwhelmed with Tati’s layered, restrained, seemingly free-form framing, his world falls apart with a smirk and a sure hand. A party sequence, near the middle of the picture, is one of the most impressively sustained bits of comic dementia I’ve ever seen, managing to turn a series of ridiculously elaborate walkways (all to protect the non-existent garden) into something elusive, unshakable and distinctly menacing. Hulot is to meet the family’s neighbor, in the hope that he settle down and stay out of everyone’s way, but he quickly gets distracted with the boy and a plant, while the rest of the family and guests find themselves grappling with an already troublesome fountain (the mother only keeps it on for guests, who slip in and out with maddening frequency) that has broken. Business transactions are had, banalities are exchanged, all as tables, snacks and chairs are moved from one end of the yard to another, and all in accordance with those damn walkways. Tati ratchets the tension, and you slowly realize that he’s effectively squeezed you from laughter to an authentic discomfort: the stifling, formal hypocrisy of the upper class has become a rounded, authentic, original vision of hell.
Mon oncle is overlong, and Tati’s technique here ultimately inspires more exhaustion than elation (though one imagines this is also purposeful) but the film is justifiably revered, and ends on an unexpectedly devastating implication. We’re conditioned by Chaplin to expect this type of picture to go for the tear ducts at the end, to mourn the little guy swallowed by society, but Tati sends his Hulot on his way toward another setting to fumble (the father’s plan finally taking hold) and the film, surprisingly, views this as a positive. The father, at odds with his little boy throughout much of the picture, is finally allowed a moment of grace and mischief that’s unobstructed by the inattentive, bumbling uncle. Hulot’s dreaminess ultimately revealed to be as insidious a form of self-delusion as the house and all its baffling gadgetry.
★★★★
Iron Man (2008)
The human element of a superhero film, particularly the human element of the initial entry in a prospective series (the “origin story”), usually represents the vegetables we have to rid our plate of before getting to the dessert. We watch our normally flat heroes go through the usual paces that sometimes wouldn’t look too out of place in Dawson’s Creek (or whatever the youth show de jour may be), all in the hope that the filmmaker, when he finally gets to why we’re all packed in the theatre to begin with, will wow us with a grand bit of what have you, or, if we’re really lucky, a sublime note of visual poetry.
Iron Man, oddly, and to a certain extent, blessedly, has the opposite problem; for about an hour, the picture, chronicling the normally tedious details of how our everyman becomes a superman, is alive and just a little eccentric; for awhile, the lead, Robert Downey, Jr., walks away with the picture in just the manner the trailer implied. Downey infects Iron Man’s wavelength, its editing even, and lends the picture an aura of drunk, self-loathing, screwball tea-time debauchery that feels practically revelatory for such a normally rigid, spontaneity-free genre. Downey’s Tony Stark, rich, handsome, confident, charismatic, intelligent, isn’t some softie with canned pathos; he’s a superman before being interfered with in a divine manner. The film’s initial wit lies in its reversal of our expectations of the usual mythos. Stark, to become a hero, must inherit a weakness, a humanity that brings him back to the realm of other humans, as opposed to a strength that shoots him up and above all others. Tony Stark couldn’t be a more fitting creation for our turn up the Ipod as the world goes to Hell times; Stark, to find his heart, must first nearly have it blown out of his chest.
It may sound like I’m pouring it on, but Iron Man isn’t too shy with its redemptive theme, the picture is a 1950s atomic paranoia fantasy (the villain even gets to proclaim that “no one’s gonna stand in my way”), crossed with an 1980s gee whiz kids film (Explorers perhaps) multiplied by a healthy dose of the current trend of smothering, impersonal action pictures. Iron Man, tellingly, details the development of the suit with more grace than the development of Stark’s conscience, which snaps on (like one of those lights we spoke of earlier in the week) abruptly at just the right moment, muting Stark’s personality in the process. The picture was directed by the gifted Jon Favreau, the actor who debuted as filmmaker with the small, human, very underrated Made, followed it with the overrated Elf, and then followed that with the also underrated Zathura, a gentle picture that had a memorably surreal storybook beauty about it, informed by a surprisingly convincing current of familial resentment and pain.
Favreau’s pictures are generous and lacking in ego, just the sort of thing the big summer movie business needs. Favreau, working with Downey, tries his best to shake things up in Iron Man, but, after a first hour that pumps us up for an anarchic, funny, reverent but not too reverent superhero picture, perhaps the MASH of the 200 million dollar product placement Happy Meal movies, he can’t help but succumb to the grinding repetition of the requirements of the genre. Favreau’s big robot beats aren’t lacking in awe (Favreau, even at his most audience conscious, is mercifully incapable of Michael Bay’s pornographic impersonality) but the scenes steal and distract from Favreau’s strengths; just as he and Downey convince you that Stark is worth giving a damn about, he goes and turns into a Transformer.
Iron Man has moments though, moments that take it beyond many of the pictures in the genre, and occasionally remind you why you truck out every year with your junk food and brave the lines and the heat for the newest “big thing.” The first action scene in the picture, when Iron Man is still scraps and must escape a cave in Afghanistan, is logical, personal, terrifying, and, for once in one of these pictures, has a bit of context. Iron Man, bent, leaking, screwed up, a walking discarded junk heap of the dead, personifies Stark’s bruised entitlement and startling naiveté. This metal creature is, at first, a haunting creation: he wastes the insurgents with a flame thrower and, for a few minutes, pumps the picture with melancholy, vengeance and relevance.
Two scenes involving Tony’s damaged heart also momentarily imbue the picture with something close to feeling. The first is a figurative love scene between Stark and his long suffering assistant Pepper Potts (a very beautiful, poignant Gwyneth Paltrow), the second is just the opposite: a moment of grand, closed door, pop betrayal that dissolves the minute we cut back to the big bad metal monsters. No robot could be scarier than the bizarre, unlikely sight of Jeff Bridges appearing as a poisonous surrogate father figure, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers and special effects wizards from trying. Iron Man must, of course, have an evil antagonist, a twin sprung from the same well of dubious creation, and so he does, resulting in a fat, kind of goofy looking thing that could be said to be a joke on the Republican “more is better” philosophy but probably isn’t. In 1978, people were assured that they’d believe a man could fly, but would it hurt nowadays for us to be asked believe something besides, or at least in addition to, that? Iron Man needs less iron and more man.
★★★
His Kind of Woman (1951)
His Kind of Woman is one of those old-school nonsense pictures that Hollywood no longer seems capable of producing without an accompanying shot of self-congratulation; every light little thing now comes packaged with a twinkle in the stars’ eye to assure everyone that they know they’re above it and most assuredly don’t MEAN it, which diminishes the fun by half (an exact figure). That was my issue with the later Steven Soderbergh Danny Ocean pictures, Soderbergh’s fear of being mistaken for a mere entertainer was palpable, and led to the assumption that an incoherent trifle would be less of an offense to the Great Filmmakers’ Code of Conduct than an enjoyable one.
I’m not as far off track as it may appear, His Kind of Woman is, like the Danny Ocean movies (either past or present), an excuse to transport several stars and character actors to a beautiful setting and stage a series of flirtations, near death escapes and exchanges of sideways movie-star banter, all under the flimsiest pretense of some larger story, which, in this case, has something to do with a deported gangster’s efforts to get back into the States and enjoy his illegally gotten gains. The gangster sets up an on again/off again gambler, Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum, who should’ve just been called Robert Mitchum from picture to picture, no writer could invent a name more apt for that man) to take the fall so he can make off with Milner’s identity and get back on U.S. soil. That’s the plot, and it doesn’t kick in for real until about the ninetieth minute. Milner’s in the dark for the majority of the picture, knowing only that he’s to take a fat paycheck and hang out and absorb the pleasures of the island until someone steers him in the right, or any, direction. There has to be self-satire in there somewhere.
His Kind of Woman, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Richard Fleischer (credited to John Farrow, though Fleischer evidently re-shot most of it) also boasts Vincent Price in a generous, charismatic, humorously unconvincing turn as a famous actor; Charles McGraw (memorable in Fleischer’s significantly tighter The Narrow Margin) as a baddie ; Jane Russell’s breasts as the chief love interest, Tim Holt as a supposedly drunk, late night bearer of exposition, and, why not?, Raymond Burr as the gangster pulling the strings.
The film rests on Mitchum’s no, I really, truly, don’t give a shit charisma (Otto Preminger exploited that apathy to effective, perverse extremes in the Hughes produced Angel Face) as well as the other stars’ game for anything spirit. The picture is never thrilling, rarely truly funny (though it has a few lines that snap) but everything taken together has an unruly appeal that is intensely pleasurable to experience and look back upon later. Films where stars are clearly having fun aren’t always fun themselves, but this is an exception. The chief appeal of His Kind of Woman lies in its determination to follow its characters’ whims with no regard to the constraints and requirements of the genre, allowing for human little moments of tenderness, cleverness, and sensuality. This picture has conviction in something more important, in this case, than story: a lolly-gagging, roundabout, distinctly Hollywood utopia of movie stars screwing around. This is a truly escapist picture, and you won’t find yourself whispering that word under your breath as if you’re in confession: the film wears it proud, and so should you.
★★★
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