Real Life (1979)
Albert Brooks’ twenty years ahead of its time satire of our unattainable, inexplicable quest to imbue our entertainment with “reality”; to reproduce real life that’s blessed with sense, perspective and general watchability. That all of these elements are elusive and contradictory seems to always be beside the point. Reality television, in its current incarnation, is largely a blatantly false soap opera, catering not to our need for reality but to our obsessive drive to experience the most outwardly, obviously voyeuristic sensation that we possibly can, devoid of any distracting elements such as craftsmanship and story; the windows of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, without the killer and (unfortunately) without Grace Kelly.
Real Life isn’t targeting the spectators of reality television though (reality tv had yet to become a fashion statement). This picture instead concerns the ego of a wannabe creator of the sport: a filmmaker played (using his name) by Mr. Brooks himself. Real Life, Brooks’ first as director, has that not quite tangible tang that is always both the best and worst quality of an Albert Brooks film. Real Life, like the hero of Brooks’ Defending Your Life, doesn’t push its reason for being far enough-every joke (most of which are promising) hangs in the air, unfulfilled. This lack of fulfillment is disappointing but it is also precisely this lacking that gives a Brooks movie its charge. The tempo of Brooks’ pictures is original and true-and uncompromisingly reflects the self-loathing temperament of their filmmaker. This is why Modern Romance remains Brooks’ overall masterpiece-that picture picks up joke after un-punched joke too, only to eventually arrive at a cumulative effect that is unexpectedly heartbreaking- a major (in its minor key) movie of inner despair’s toll on basic human interaction-on the self-denial of the damn thing called love.
There’s always a POP moment in a Brooks movie though, at least the goods ones, that brings the entire picture together. In Modern Romance it was Brooks’ appeal to his woman, his assurance that, yes, he’s insane, but he’s devoted to her in a way that sanity prohibits (the picture, particularly for us fellow neurotics, is quite, legitimately, romantic). In Real Life, it’s also a moment near the end-when Brooks, after one setback and failure after another, caves in a fit of desperation and egomania. Brooks gets on his knees, and begs, begs, pleas for another shot at his failed attempt to capture an average American family, just as they normally would be (after countless intrusions).
The little things you wished Brooks had pushed farther up until this point: the attempt to sleep with the wife in order to save her marriage (have to see it to understand it); the racism, elitism and resentment batted back and forth between Brooks and a black colleague; the inner disintegration of the family (including a subtle Charles Grodin): all come to inform that final Brooks meltdown at the end; where he offers, after many promises of integrity, to splice just about any popular film into his real entertainment. Brooks has already sung for the public, has already played the literal clown, now, reduced to nothing, he faces the lowest of the low dark side of his manipulative, diseased effort to capture something “real”. This scene, and the ending this outburst triggers, is a major, unsettling, comedy moment, worth, like Modern Romance, all of the half starts that have occurred before. Here’s hoping that Albert Brooks, who has appeared to have succumbed to bitterness in his last few films, rediscovers his blistering black comic humanity of the unsaid, particularly in a world where Real Life’s finale is now just another thing on Fox, a taking off point for Meet the Baios, perhaps.
★★★
Mr. Jealousy (1997)
Noah Baumbach was there for me at a time when he was very much needed. I discovered Baumbach’s first two pictures, Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, when I was eighteen, a freshman in college, living with a roommate I detested, and working through all the other self-indulgent things young people generally find themselves working through. Baumbach didn’t invent anything with either of these pictures, but he achieved something almost as admirable, he redeemed a genre that’s generally a sitcom: grasping clichés we (especially young men) have to live with and turning them into something palpable and moving. These two pictures owe the usual debts to prior movies that most talented young person’s films have a habit of owing to (French New Wave, Woody Allen) but there’s a current of insecurity in Baumbach’s early films that’s specific to the last few generations, and justifies his playing in a familiar sandbox.
The insecurity being the kind that’s brought on by an aimlessness triggered by a surfeit of options, the illusion that we’re all “unique” and meant to amount to something more impressive or noble than living a life as a normal person (Wes Anderson recruited Baumbach as collaborator on the script for The Life Aquatic, which is appropriate as Anderson captures this youth-fueled discombobulation too, only in a more heightened European by way of Hal Ashby sense, Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first film, most especially taps this). This illusion can be paralyzing, and while waiting, we find that we’re pushing thirty, forty, and still haven’t really done anything. We pass this or that girl up, possibly because she didn’t promise the specific adventure we had in mind when telling our love story to ourselves, or perhaps we turn down certain jobs or certain cities because we fear they might interfere with an airy outline of a job or opportunity that might happen should we might, might, might, maybe go to grad school, or raise money to make a film, or perhaps persuade a publisher that our collection of short stories is the next generation defining masterpiece.
Mr. Jealousy, Baumbach’s second film, isn’t as strong as Kicking and Screaming, it’s “minor Baumbach” to paraphrase an oft-quoted (around here anyway) character from Squid, but it’s a charming picture, self-conscious (Baumbach seems to include certain references, such as to Sunrise or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, more out of eagerness to prove he’s seen them than in the service of any dramatic or comedic effect) but confident in its slightness. The picture is about an insecure man, now 31, called Lester Grimm (Eric Stoltz), who is currently taking a break from harboring dreams of being a great writer. He’s teaching (of course), hanging out with friends, most prominently Vince (Carlos Jacott, a scene stealer) and dating. A narrator (Baumbach), who will pop in and out throughout the picture, explains to us, briefly, Lester’s dating history, which is, logically and unavoidably, a chicken and egg extension of his general self-loathing. Lester always believes girls are cheating on him, is always convinced he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with, thus effectively ensuring that they always cheat on him, and that he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with. Lester is not oblivious to this self-fulfilling irony, but his awareness is of no use to him beyond further self-justification.
Lester soon meets, through Vince and his fiancée (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Ramona (Annabella Sciorra). Ramona appears to be ready made for Lester (as they always initially), she’s beautiful, works in a museum (encouraging an interest in culture and the arts that compliments Lester’s film buffery) and has a certain endearing clumsiness. Ramona is a woman of the movies, a woman blessed with a man’s ideal looks and approachability, with just enough eccentricity to be interesting without irritating (Baumbach wouldn’t be too generous with his women, really, until Margot). Lester has the usual issues, but he’s managing, courting inner growth, until Ramona reveals that she used to date Dashiell Frank (Chris Eigeman), an acclaimed writer their age who has been heralded by critics as “the voice of his generation.” Lester, after a few episodes that manage to be more convincing than they’d sound if I were to recall them to you, decides to join Frank’s group therapy, which, in a nice touch, is led by director, actor and film-historian patriarch Peter Bogdanovich (I wish he’d act more, he has an instantly credible onscreen elder-statesman sanity that is only rivaled by fellow director Sydney Pollack).
This is a promising situation for farce, and I’d be curious to see what the present day Baumbach, with the searing death-ray barbs of Squid and Margot, would do with it. The ultimate problem and (simultaneous) chief appeal of Mr. Jealousy is that it does nothing with the situation. This frustrates because part of us senses that Baumbach has a New Age screwball comedy in him, a neo-ironic picture that emulates the distant past pictures in wit but otherwise invents its own specific to present society rules; for once, perhaps, a modern screwball picture that wouldn’t feel like a tour through a condemned factory (a problem with a few of the Coens’ attempts at screwball, and it looked like it was a problem with Leatherheads).
This dead-end has its happy surprises though, it lends Mr. Jealousy an unexpected warmth and leisure; it’s refreshing to see a modern comedy so uninterested in actually making you LAUGH OUT LOUD. The picture is talky, and awkward, but you never fault it, the awkwardness, in fact, ultimately contributes to the picture’s truthfulness and ungainly empathy with its hero. It doesn’t hurt either that Eric Stoltz is terrific, Lester is probably his surest, most charismatic performance; and Eigeman, playing a purposeful cliché (he’s that maddening asshole who writes a best-seller by 25 and rues his inability to cat around with more discrimination) is nearly as good. Lester and Dashiell become unexpected friends, and my other regret of Mr. Jealousy is that it doesn’t pursue this avenue more aggressively. Lester’s romance with Romana is sweet, but bland. Baumbach is nothing if not self-aware enough, read in film criticism enough, to grasp that undefined women are a common thread in many young men’s films, and he seeks to address that, but he would have been better advised to stick to another cliché of the young writer, “write what you know”.
The ending finds Lester having finally written something he’s proud of, a play that’s (surprise, surprise) based on the events we’ve just seen. Lester, apparently more confident in himself, sees Ramona one more time, and the picture assures us of the usual ending (though it doesn’t show it) but I wanted to know where Lester exactly stood with Dashiell, they have a final toe to toe reckoning themselves, but they both seem unable to understand that they may be the true font of one another’s hopes and ambitions, which could, perhaps, might, maybe, might, perhaps yield a play about a book about a man writing a play about a man who finally realizes just to plain, simple, fucking, drop it and be.
★★★
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.
★★★
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.
★★★
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
It’s my understanding, after thirty seconds of cursory research, that Warner Brothers gave director Joe Dante the keys to the kingdom for The New Batch. Dante wasn’t interested in another gremlins movie, the studio tried to proceed without him, nothing went anywhere, so they granted him the right to do whatever he wished with the property. The result is probably the most anarchic picture Joe Dante has ever made. The original Gremlins is a witty, surprisingly vicious mating of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and every monster movie Dante has ever seen. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is lighter, more self-aware (the outright horror dialed down), and even more insane. The pretense of human feeling, that leftover E.T. pathos that executive producer Spielberg always seems to instill (even, most ridiculously, in Transformers) has been dropped, any conventional three act structure discarded.
The New Batch sets itself a daunting task: to sustain the delirious, deranged cotton candy high of the first film at its best for the entire running time. This Dante picture, made at the height of an earlier wave of blockbuster testosterone fever, could cynically be reduced to the formula that was on all ambitious studio execs at the time. Dante had essentially given Warner Brothers Die Hard with Gremlins, or, more accurately, a tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. Or, even more accurately, an affectionate tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. The trick that Dante pulls in picture after picture is an affectionate, silly, satirical vibe that somehow manages tonal coherence. The New Batch fully plays to Dante’s strengths, a seemingly never ending trip-wire invention laced with an intoxicating love of movies that many don’t take too seriously.
One could draw parallels between The New Batch and Batman Returns, which seems to have been made under similar “the first for you, the second for me” circumstances, but the truth is, while the Burton films have an admirable personality that’s lacking in most expensive filmmaking, they don’t age that well. The New Batch mostly holds, melding a surreal, bent, soul consuming work environment that could have informed Office Space with a mischievous post-modern sensibility that precedes Tarantino’s later films by more than a decade. The picture even sports Christopher Lee before it was cool to cast Christopher Lee in anything beyond Hammer films.
The film, again like Batman Returns, seems to be an excuse for the filmmaker to unload all of the bric-a-brac that had probably been accumulating at the back of his mind for years. A likeable Trump daydream embodied by John Glover appears (though Dante’s goodwill doesn’t serve him here, Glover’s stoned Santa portrayal doesn’t jive with the cooperate hell the film has implied he created, the character should have closer resembled Glover’s shark in Scrooged); as well as a washed-up horror show host (Robert Prosky), harboring dreams of respectability, who lands a key interview with the talking “Brain” Gremlin (voiced, of course, by Tony Randall); we also get a spider gremlin; a bat gremlin (yes, the film elicits a laugh from a Batman parody); an electro-gremlin, and a starlet gremlin that is actually, and this is no mean feat, the ugliest of all the gremlins.
The film has the pleasure of a pinball machine, with Dante’s various hazards and inventions banging off one another in a series of vignettes of surprisingly even quality. It’s a testament to Dante’s mojo that he even ends his so-called children’s film on a triumphant note of bestiality without somehow compromising the overall good will of the endeavor.
I miss Joe Dante. He recently directed a doesn’t quite suck as much as the all others episode of Masters of Horror (though I didn’t see his second episode), and before that, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (that subtitle having the similarly inane on purpose ring of The New Batch), which, truthfully, I never caught either. Pauline Kael wrote, in a review of The Howling, that Dante seemed to be equal parts talent, amateur, style and flake. That’s precisely why his films are so engaging, he’s a talent with a child’s awe of genres many artists feel beneath them, capable of spinning his daydreams into an Americana rhapsody of monster-mania. Dante, similar to many of his characters, would seem to be an idealist from a past world, and I’m hoping that he hasn’t quite been swallowed yet. The horror film needs him. The comedy needs him. The bloated blockbusters could even use his teasing again, perhaps a third Gremlins, which I guess nowadays would be called something along the lines of G3. If anyone could make that idea tolerable it would be Joe Dante.
★★★½
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
If there’s a disappointment to be found in the first two acts of Intolerable Cruelty, the Coen Brothers’ most misunderstood picture, it’s that the filmmakers chose so staid a subject to satirize as the divorce proceeding. That was old hat in the times of Sturges and Lubitsch, what about what those legends didn’t have? Reality television, diet fads, political correctness, tabloid worship, computers that serve as willful cocoon, etc, etc. Ethan and Joel Coen have a mastery of words that rivals the great writers of the 1930s and 1940s, but, as in The Hudsucker Proxy, they’re too preoccupied here with commenting on what has come before. The Coens can do the wax museum tour like no one in the business, but why settle for that when there’s so much else that remains to be properly lacerated?
For its ambitions though, Intolerable Cruelty is successful and considerably underrated. The film sets its tone, an anarchic mix of the swift and the intentionally leaden, in the opening minutes. Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush, destined to work with the Coens), a successful daytime soap producer, returns home and, after a bit of back and forth, discovers that his wife has just finished boffing the Pool Man. Hint #1: the pool man is an old friend of the wife’s. Hint #2, Donovan doesn’t have a pool. The pool man apologizes to Donovan for “porking” his wife, while the wife sticks Donovan in the ass with his Emmy and flees the scene, knocking into Donovan’s car on the way out which, in turn, causes the sound system to resume playing the Simon and Garfunkle song that opens the film.
Intolerable Cruelty demonstrates this sort of play through out, much of the humor is sharp and set at a “what did they just say” lightening pace that rivals the iconic old school comedies, only punctuated with a modern banality, such as Cedric the Entertainer’s continued promise to “nail your ass.” I think it’s this dissonance that frustrated audiences of most camps: the critical elite thought the Coen Brothers had gone crass and mainstream; the mainstream, poised for an effortless Clooney-Zeta-Jones meet cute, didn’t know what the hell they had stumbled into. This also proved a problem for the Coens’ follow-up picture, a remake of The Ladykillers, that, while not as successful as Intolerable Cruelty, does have its merits, including the best Tom Hanks performance since, I don’t know, Turner and Hooch?
This film works similar wonders on Catherine Zeta-Jones. Jones is a talented, charismatic actress, but most movies can’t handle her; she’s too beautiful and otherworldly to convince in the sorts of “ordinary” roles that usually win awards, while the superstar roles, the roles that used to make legends out of the Rita Hayworths and the Lana Turners, don’t really exist anymore. Jones has never been more startlingly beautiful than she is here; she truly lives up to the cliché of a star who glows, radiating that perfect contemptuous sexual movie heat that Hitchcock would have adored. Comedies normally don’t play fair in the battle of sexes, one usually appears to be unquestionably superior to the other, but Jones holds every bit of her own against that considerable Coen regular, George Clooney.
And there are very few stars working today who seem to understand their effect on movies and moviegoers as intimately as Clooney. Tabloids, in their incessant desperation, have successfully stolen the lesser stars’ mystique. Stars spend too much time convincing the world that they too are plagued with the average man’s tedium, while the average man spends much too much time convincing himself that he too is blessed with the average star’s presence (how many Who Wants to Be a Fill in the Blank are there?). The line has blurred, I want my movie stars to be Gods again, and George Clooney continues to fight that good fight. I don’t hear what George Clooney has eaten for breakfast, I don’t hear about George Clooney’s illegitimate step-aliens, the man simply knocks off the occasionally obligatory I’m just a guy doing what I do bit of faux modesty and cleverness while keeping the work up and good.
The key to Clooney, and the reason everyone seems so desperate to call him Cary Grant, is that, like Grant, he’s that rare breed of sexy movie star who feels comfortable looking totally ridiculous. Not many can pull off the suave, broken romantic badass of Out of Sight. Fewer still have the boony Clark Gable burlesque of O Brother, Where Art Thou? in them, and much fewer still can pull off both. Clooney’s work in Intolerable Cruelty presents us both sides of the Clooney equator in one film. Miles Massey is a charming, fast-talking shark, a divorce attorney of course, but he’s also a bit of a romantic bozo, dropping his briefcase at the first sight of Marylin (Jones) and immediately exposing himself to her in the exact same way that he knows her previous fallen men have. Miles is stupid, canny, sharp and, eventually, quite endearing.
Can we please retire the “Coens don’t ever peek from behind their icy wall of intellectual condescension to engage the heart” logline for good please? No Country for Old Men wasn’t the first film to venture into the realms of the human either, all of their films (particularly the marvelous, under seen The Man Who Wasn’t There) are full-blooded and passionate in their own way, usually some sort of existential exploration of our role in life. Intolerable Cruelty is a slighter work, but there are scenes even here that stick, and that’s because, ultimately, the Coens mean the love story between Miles and Marylin. When Miles, heartbroken, turns to Marylin, and says “And all of that last night, meant nothing?”, this isn’t brushed off with a post-modern smirk, its a jarringly honest dramatic beat. People who accuse the Coen Brothers of hiding behind irony are missing the point, the films are really requiems for sincerity; a sincerity that, they clearly believe, has gone extinct.
You may have noticed the phrase “the first two acts” near the beginning of this post. The third act of Intolerable Cruelty is a mild problem. The film whimpers when it should roar, turning into a more traditional Coen brothers picture seemingly for no other reason than exhaustion of ideas, the “let’s take turns hiring a hit man” bit doesn’t feel tonally right. Tonal malleability is a Coen brothers’ trademark, but the experiment doesn’t quite play here, you hope for the brothers to more rigidly follow the screwball framework and trump it by the confidence of execution, not evasion. It’s a testament to the messy, anything goes charm of the picture though that even the not quite right stuff yields something memorable: the huge, sad-eyed Wheezy Joe, who lingers as one of the Coens’ more haunting criminal oddballs (he gets a hell of an exit too). Imagine what Wheezy Joe could do if he found the right film.
★★★
Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s decision to cast Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman as sisters in Margot at the Wedding, his new absurdist farce of unyielding cruelty, was an inspired one. Kidman’s Margot is seemingly confident, accomplished and impressive; Leigh’s Pauline, beautiful as she is, appears withheld and destined to be seen as forever insubstantial by comparison; uncomfortable with her accomplishments, her surroundings and, of course, within her own skin. The sisters’ contrast is pointed and immediate: we fear Margot, we fear for Pauline. We want to take Pauline up in our hands and whisk her away to a place that better appreciates her airy fragility. We watch these sisters awkwardly embrace and recognize that they are meant to hurt one another, repeatedly, in strange, unending domestic skirmishes that eventually add up to full-blown, life poisoning warfare.
Nicole Kidman is a stunning presence, one of the few of the current actresses who exude that un-Earthly, Valhalla grace that used to define the stars of yesteryear. That grace, for Kidman anyway, usually seems to come at the price of a self-consciousness that’s stifling and dull. Even her awful comedies feel bloodless and inorganic, as if she spoke to Meryl Streep’s agent and got the ok before deigning to mix it up for the cheap seats. It’s a pity too, because some of Kidman’s work is legitimately exciting; at her best she has an undeniable, tethered heat; unsurprisingly it’s her villains or barely hinged characters that fully register: Dead Calm, To Die For, and even the appealingly ludicrous Malice. Plop Kidman down in an Oscar wannabe and she’s aloof and false; adrift in good intentions.
Baumbach breaks Kidman’s shell in Margot at the Wedding, her best work since The Others. Kidman doesn’t look like a beautiful woman straining to play a normal person here as she has in many of her past films; this picture is cannier than that. Kidman’s Margot instead looks like a beautiful woman who used to be an incredibly beautiful woman, and now has to settle for being just a beautiful woman possessed with an incomparable intelligence that she wields like a broad sword, smattering anyone who dare exhibit more than a passing affection for (or slight insight of) her.
That most anyone would kill to have the looks or talent of the current Margot is, of course, never considered. Margot is only focused on Margot or, more precisely, everything that has ever failed or disappointed Margot. How Margot registers to others somehow manages to be of both the smallest and largest importance, a contradiction that drives everyone, herself included, very nearly mad. Pauline sums it up, as everyone in this film has a habit of doing, perfectly, succinctly, savagely: “It’s tempting to fuck around with a guy nowadays because we aren’t as attractive as we used to be.”
This sort of dialogue (which, truthfully, I paraphrased) is probably the reason some people reject Noah Baumbach, as well as the reason a lot of people rejected Margot at the Wedding. There’s seemingly no subtext to Baumbach’s laser-beam cynicism: all of the characters say exactly what they think as soon as they think it and in the most artfully composed way that they could possibly say it. That’s missing the point. The lack of subtext in Baumbach’s work, especially this and his previous picture, The Squid and the Whale, is the subtext; Baumbach’s characters admit their and their friend’s failures in the supposed service of honesty and self-help, but the true function is self-justification. Most people blanket their insecurities and bitterness in an AM radio stream of bland pleasantries and half-compliments. Margot, Pauline, and even Pauline’s fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black, not bad), are too sharp for that, they let loose in an opposite, equally contrived blast of rapid-fire “honesty” that masks a pleading affection.
Margot at the Wedding is imperfect but remarkable; overpowering, daring, and nearly surreal in its cynicism. Baumbach could almost be said to be conjuring the sensibility of Luis Buñuel in his apparent disdain for the rigid banality of the traditional “everybody gets together for a wedding and heals” picture. Baumbach’s Margot is, to a certain extent, just as false as those sorts of pictures, but on the opposite end of the usual spectrum. This is the wedding get together of your worst Art movie fueled nightmares: everyone says the wrong thing, everyone turns out to be a cheat, and everyone goes home worse than they were before they left. It’s telling that the one character in Margot that could be said to be an unambiguously decent person enters the picture late, and exits early.
But, ultimately and most importantly, Margot isn’t a monster. She’s a bit like Daniel Plainview, a more famous so-called “monster” from 2007. As in the Anderson film, there are clues in Margot for anyone who wishes to go looking. Pay attention to the conversation Margot has with her son Claude (Zane Pais, wonderful) in the beginning of the film about his sunglasses and watch how that episode pays off toward the end of the film. Watch how Margot handles a seemingly innocent question at her book reading (a scene that actually has odd parallels with Plainview’s church scene). Watch how Margot reaches, and reaches, and reaches, and then recoils upon receiving what she asked for time and time again. Margot’s end is more truthful and ambitious than The Squid and the Whale’s more conventional non-ending; no one comes of age here, no one truly connects, but they still hope to, and that, for the moment, will have to count as a happy ending, at least until Noah Baumbach, in his ballsy, broken curiosity, can come to terms with whatever domestic demon it is that continues to haunt him.
★★★½
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
I’m a frustrating (to those with stronger beliefs anyway) middle-grounder in the Wes Anderson is brilliant/overrated/or just over debate. Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, both now over a decade old, should be filed away in the canon under Comedies, Great. Both are lean, strong, frequently hilarious tales of that terrified pupa stage that the American male seems to enter somewhere in early (to middle to late) twenties before accepting that he IS a man, and that disappointment isn’t a valid excuse to forego all the other things, such as friendship, sex and eating, that life entails. Bottle Rocket and, especially, Rushmore are about the collapse of a frequently male dollhouse, and the period of mourning that has a habit of setting in after that collapse.
The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic are impeccably crafted pictures that anyone would be proud to have been a part of, but they are more problematic, and redundant of Anderson’s first two films. The art for art’s sake hyper-staged decor fits Rushmore, that was Max’s refuge, but it seems to be present in Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic so they can be said to look neat. While The Life Aquatic remains a step in the right direction from the self-conscious, please love me desperation of The Royal Tenenbaums, its refusal to break free from Anderson’s frequently more anal-retentive form is actually more irritating than Tenenbaums, if only because the subject matter more readily begs for a bracing break from form: Bill Murray as a wayward sea adventurer! Hell…oh.
And so now we have The Darjeeling Limited, which sounded, on paper and in the trailers, like Anderson wandering further down a forest he shouldn’t have been heading for in the first place. In theory Darjeeling has everything the Anderson satirist needs to paint a damning portrait of acclaimed auteur head-up-his-own-assedness. Young, privileged, vaguely artsy protagonists with daddy issues? Check. Groovy art-directed vehicle or home that serves as principle setting for grappling with said issues? Check. Overwhelming, masturbatory attention devoted to heroes’ shoes, journals, and various other apparatus just as whatever it is they may do for a living goes virtually unmentioned? Check. Precious, faux-literary title? Check! Check!
Wrong. Wrong. The Darjeeling Limited is easily Wes Anderson’s best picture since Rushmore. The artifice that divides people so has been mercifully stripped down, but also has, more importantly, been re-contextualized: Anderson’s famed mise-en-scene again (poignantly) reflects the characters’ inability to abandon the moony, college freshman romanticism to which all real life pales by comparison. Anderson immediately sets the stakes with the short that (and always should have) immediately precedes the film, Hotel Chevalier, which follows twelve minutes in the life of Jack (Jason Schwartzman) as he waits for his on again, off again, on again love (Natalie Portman) to reappear in the plush hotel room that he has evidently been hiding out in for awhile. He cleans himself up, he turns on some music, he draws her bubble bath, and when she arrives they engage in one of the strongest, most beautiful scenes Anderson has ever staged.
Anderson’s frequently used pan, the one that very consciously clues you in to the movement of the camera as it glides from the left to right side of the room, is employed here, but it has never felt as vibrant, as necessary. That pan is time itself, and the characters, after all is done, have nothing left but to look out at the Paris that awaits them on the other side of the room. Hotel Chevalier has something that I haven’t seen in Anderson since Rushmore: authentic desperation. Desperation laced with an intoxicating love for the movies: imagine the lovers of Breathless infected with the wounded lonely boy sensibility of Harold and Maude and you have a general idea.
The Darjeeling Limited retains the shorter film’s air of longing, opening on a frantic, misleading chase to the titular train. A businessman (Bill Murray) just misses out, while Jack’s brother, Peter (Adrien Brody) slimmer, younger, less encumbered by life’s shit, manages to hop aboard at the last possible minute, accompanied, as one might expect, by coming of age slow-motion and a tune that I will probably buy after seeing the film. This opening moment is spry and engaging but it, like Hotel Chevalier, comes with an intangible aftertaste of loneliness. Perhaps Murray’s businessman wasn’t just trying to catch The Darjeeling Limited, but The Darjeeling Limited as well, only to be left behind, out of sight, out of mind, while we follow similar adventures that are only of concern to Jack, Peter, and their oldest brother, Francis (Owen Wilson). There’s no room for a never-ending cast of characters in The Darjeeling Limited; the film is, like the best moments of The Life Aquatic, spare, eccentric and unapologetically introverted.
The film is also, lest we forget, funny. Anderson has, with co-writers Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, re-found that flakey, non-sequiturious humor that powers his best moments. The dialogue here is sharp and pared down; rife with bitter double, triple and quadruple meanings. Anderson doesn’t ladle on the exposition here as he did in Tenenbaums, he trusts us to find our way. Anderson extends this trust to his three actors too, who look nothing like brothers (that would appear to be part of the joke) but nonetheless paint a convincing, mysterious portrait of three people who love and hate each other in ratios they haven’t quite figured out yet themselves.
Brody and Schwartzman are frequently impressive, even if the material falters, but Wilson’s return to form here is a happy surprise. Wilson’s Francis is, intentionally or not, undeniably reminiscent of his Dignan from Bottle Rocket. Francis has Dignan’s stubborn self-delusion in the face of defeat as well as his need to hold all the cards in a situation that may not even have cards to begin with. Wilson’s age is beginning to catch up with him, and it may free him from his too carefully cultivated surfer-Zen hipster thing. We see Francis in a series of bandages (resembling a biker mummy) from the neck up for the majority of the film, but a flashback (which is, itself, a marvel of timing and design) shows him fully de-bandaged and reveals Francis, jarringly, to look no less damaged. Francis is a plastic man of denial, and Wilson taps into that beautifully, intuitively.
What a wonderful picture The Darjeeling Limited is, it’s one of those movies that tempts one to abandon all pretense of a proper review and simply point out the scenes they like and why they like them. I found the revelation of the truth of Francis’s accident to be particularly brilliant: a key moment treated as a wounded throwaway. Or the picture’s climax: a potentially been there, done that “I finally found Mommy and the secret of life” scene re-staged as a bitter, elusive disappointment. The Darjeeling Limited is a marvel of implication, of fleeting, floating, easily missed answers and contradictions. The film is a superb physical comedy, a tour through all the Anderson ticks that ends at a place of grace and understanding. The pat answers of The Royal Tenenbaums have been washed away and replaced by a simpler, more truthful, consolation: life is always a partial, dependable disappointment, so just get on the damn train and go.
★★★½
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