Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Our friend Travis seems to be refining his style to the point of near haiku…and I dig it.-CB
It must be hard making yourself standout in the Independent film market. The way I see it, there are two types of independents: the Quirky Indie and the Oscar Indie. The Quirky Indie has a weird, precious main character, a cast of equally eccentric but less important second bananas, and plenty of “quotable” dialogue (”honest to blog?!”).
The Quirky Indie always constructs some version of reality that may at first seem insightful but does not hold up to scrutiny. Even the best Quirky Indie often feels like a contrivance that you have to turn part of your brain off to fully enjoy. That part of your brain is the bullshit detector.
If you know anything about the plot of Lars and the Real Girl, you know it’s a Quirky Indie. It’s got the weird characters. It’s an obvious construction. Every breathy word, every “subtle” facial tick, every endearing eccentricity: it all means something. And don’t you forget it.
Then again, the movie sneaks up on you: It’s pretty funny. The denouement is pulled off nicely. It cuts to black at just the right moment. And, most critically, Ryan Gosling, as Lars, plays it straight.
Lars and the Real Girl is the story of a hyper-shy kid in his late twenties who feels he can’t connect with anyone, particularly women. But then Lars orders a sex doll and starts treating it like his real girlfriend. Crazy, right? Crazy. Lars’ family and the rest of the small town in which he lives grudgingly accept this extraordinary and worrying behavior. Lars talks to the doll. He makes food for the doll. He takes the doll to church. He constructs an elaborate biography and personality for the doll.
I’ll admit it: by the end of the movie, I’d largely bought the central conceit and invested myself in the mystery of the movie (essentially: why did this happen and how will it end?) despite myself. There’s plenty to quibble about. But this is not reality. Just turn off your bullshit detector and enjoy it.
★★½
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
Virginia Film Festival: Honeydripper (2007)
Long time reader and longer time friend Travis Bjorklund has been kind enough to grace our site with a review that apathy, poverty and general laziness have prevented me from attending to myself. Be nice and maybe he’ll come back again sometime soon, perhaps to contribute to our next little theme party. -Chuck Bowen
Director, writer, and editor John Sayles has been involved in a lot of wise, successful, lived-in films over his thirty-year career. In every one of his movies I’ve seen, whether great or merely average, Sayles takes pains to carefully put down roots in an organic, evocative setting. The great ones, like the armadillo-fried western Lone Star or the smoky baseball picture Eight Men Out, are lush with unstylized period detail and nuanced performances. For years, Sayles has told his stories with a unique and convincing American voice, which is what makes his latest film such a great surprise.
Honeydripper is set in the booze-and-cotton-fueled town of Harmony, Alabama in 1950. Danny Glover, doing a minor variation on his usual world-weary screen persona, plays Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis, and old piano player turned failing bar owner. His optimistic best friend Maceo (the great Charles Dutton, also mustering business as usual), pious and loyal wife Delilah, and caricature-of-beauty-and-modesty step-daughter China Doll complete the unlucky family of the Honeydripper Lounge. In a last-ditch effort to save the lounge, Tyrone puts his reservations about this new-fangled guitar music aside and hires the radio star Guitar Sam to headline his club on Saturday night.
Sayles’ script contrives for Tyrone to jump through every possible hoop to ensure that the audience knows that everything, (everything!) is riding on this one gig with Guitar Sam: his wife’s faith, his daughter’s future, his own life, the Honeydripper, and possibly music itself. When Guitar Sam is a no-show, Tyrone bribes the evil white sheriff to release a naive, dew-eyed vagrant (Gary Clark, Jr.) with an electric guitar, who stands-in for the radio legend at the last minute. Even a mystical, blind, seemingly all-knowing street musician (Keb’ Mo’) who inexplicably haunts the movie is betting on Tyrone’s comeuppance.
Considering the epic stakes for this concert, I was hoping Sayles would pull it all together in a sweaty, stomping orgy of blues. Instead, I was treated to a sanitary, sensible display of guitar wizardry that quietly got my feet tapping. The actors playing the Honeydripper Lounge’s choreographed patrons seemed likewise unmoved. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The climax is a piece with the rest of the film: safe and unsexy; detached.
Of course safe, unsexy, and detached could describe almost any of John Sayles’ lesser films, and even some of his better ones. In Honeydripper, however, I didn’t believe a frame of it. As Southern as a nervous grad-school production of A Streetcar Named Desire at NYU, the picture doesn’t have a shred of authenticity. I didn’t believe in the hermetically sealed hobo costumes or the pristine sets, like a Disneyland version of the segregated South, with even the dust painted-on. I didn’t believe awe-shucks Sonny’s raggedy contraption of an electric guitar, or Tyrone’s and Maceo’s studied awe at the device’s gadgetry. Finally, I didn’t believe the film’s half-cocked shots at deeper meaning: the wailing of the tent preacher, the sliding guitar of the wizened, blind streetplayer, the stagy flashbacks-cum-ham-handed foreshadowings.
It’s too bad, too, because Honeydripper has its moments: some funny dialogue, a couple hard-ass lines, good songs, and a crackerjack scene in the cotton fields. These moments take place in a vacuum though; they’re practically non sequiturs. It’s not enough. Honeydripper remains sterile and uncompelling, the polar opposite of the music it so clearly admires.
Film festival notes: This film was introduced by the writer, director, and editor of Honeydripper, John Sayles, the producer Maggie Renzi (Sayles’ longtime romantic companion), and the actor Sean Patrick Thomas, all of whom participated in a discussion about the film after its conclusion. While I enjoyed listening to them banter on, they merely reinforced what I found false about the film. The most pertinent quote was from Sayles himself:
“Many of the actors told me that [the shoot] was the first time they’d been below the Mason-Dixon line .”
The evidence of this is all over the celluloid. The rest of the crowd was all unadulterated praise, though, which made me feel like a party-pooper. -Travis Bjorklund
★★
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