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
Being There (1979)
Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) watches TV and waits for the maid Louise to bring him his breakfast. Louise enters and tells him that the man of the house has died. Chance pauses, and comments on the weather. Louise, aghast, asks Chance if that is all he has to say. A moment later she embraces him, and, tenderly, says something to the effect of “Of course, it is.”
Chance, having no legal claim on the residence, is tossed out by a couple of lawyers and forced to find a new way in life. He is hit by a car, luckily the car of very wealthy, powerful man, Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas). Benjamin’s wife, Eve (Shirley MacLaine) gives Chance a ride to their house to get fixed up and offers him a drink on the way. Eve asks Chance for his name as he chokes on his first sip of liquor, suddenly “Chance the Gardener” has become Chauncey Gardener, and it would seem that Chauncey Gardener is a wizard of financial practices, just the kind of wizard the President of the United States needs…even though Chance the Gardener would appear to be illiterate.
This scenario could be from a Frank Capra movie of the 1940s, or a John Landis movie of the 1980s. Instead Being There is, to everyone’s benefit, a Hal Ashby movie of the 1970s. The film is obviously a satire, of our self-absorption, of our insecure need to buy whatever’s being sold just so long as the salesman looks right, and of our rush to believe generic, comforting, meaningless promises. In short, Being There is the perfect film to revisit during the primaries, a time when our country speaks vanilla vagueries as a second language.
The most notable aspect of Being There is, as usual with Ashby, the tone. I’m not quite sure how to quantify what Ashby brings to any given film, but there is an elusive, tender electricity to his films that has been under-acknowledged. Let’s try to pin it down. This film works as bitter, sad satire, but is also very moving and strange without compromising the satire. Ashby, unlike many satirists in film, doesn’t sacrifice humanity for the sake of a theme, satire or not, humanity IS the theme, as it almost always is with an Ashby picture.
Many of Being There’s best scenes would probably be cut by another director. Watch the scene when Eve tries to seduce Chance. The naughty wife trying to screw the hapless hero is a staple of the Misunderstood Stupid Guy genre, but Ashby’s version is goofier and more vulnerable: heightened and real at the same time. Chance has no idea what Eve is offering him, and tells her that he likes to watch. He’s referring to watching television, but she takes him to mean something else entirely, leading to image of memorable loneliness and disconnect: Eve masturbates on the floor while Chance obliviously imitates an elaborate position on the program he’s watching.
Or watch how Ashby and screenwriter Jerzy Kosinski handle the Benjamin Rand character. Most films would play off of the character’s greed over and over again, but Rand, who is dying, is allowed a moment of grace and understanding. Rand’s doctor, who’s always been suspicious, figures out that Chauncey is merely a Chance, and approaches Rand on his death bed. Yes, Rand has elevated Chance because he tells the old man what he’s always wanted to hear (nothing) but we see in this scene that a certain longing also motivates him. Douglas, who is terrific, gets a line here that’s almost too much for this kind of film; he tells the doctor that knowing Chance has made him feel better about dying. What can the doctor possibly say to a confession like that?
None of these scenes soften the impact of Ashby and Kozinski’s rage though, which culminates in a devastating final image that ups the stakes considerably. Are all lives spent following meaningless, random, idiotic catch phrases? Are even the swiftest thinkers slaves to chic? Are even the super sacred things accident or happenstance? Is the film’s final line: “Life is a state of mind” meant as consolation or damnation? And what of Peter Sellers’ uncompromising work as Chance? I would be tempted to call the character poignant, the performance heartbreaking, but maybe that’s what I want to see just as a financial whatevermayhaveyou is what Rand needed to see. The idea of a total cipher is too unbearable and alien to imagine, and when we don’t understand something, well, then we decide to make it something we DO understand, like, oh I don’t know, how we may or may not use religion to rationalize something beyond our ability to rationalize.
Being There isn’t perfect. At 130 minutes, it’s thirty minutes too long, and Ashby’s pace is too deliberate, funereal. The film should be faster and more anarchic, like some of the earlier Ashby pictures, but the passion, the curiosity, the anger of Being There will stick with you. Just as the image of Chance watching his television as refuge from the surrounding confusion will stick with you.
★★★½
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
Smiley Face (2007)
Smiley Face is refreshingly disinterested in pleasing me, the viewer. That always pleases me. Smiley Face stars Anna Faris, and isn’t a sequel to Scary Movie, another sign of possible good things to come. The film was also directed by Greg Araki, who’s coming off a major career redefining best with the child abuse film Mysterious Skin. Again, so far, so good. Faris plays Jane F. (last name never supplied), a stoner who accidentally eats a shit load of pot cup cakes and has to go on a journey to pay a bill and talk a drug dealer (an amusing Adam Brody) out of confiscating her furniture; particularly her huge, expensive bed, the source of her lack of fundage to begin with. Hijinks and cameos ensue, justifying little of the opening promise.
I think it’s because I’m tired of stoner movies. The humor, the structure, and the result of these films are almost always the same. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle earned mild points by putting its heroes on a quest to get stoned, as opposed to going on a quest stoned (yes, that counts as subversion in this genre.) Otherwise, I’m afraid I just don’t care, the adventures are almost always too over the top and self-congratulatory, and you know exactly where you are twenty minutes into any of these films. To call most of these movies one joke is to be kind, to assume that “damn, she’s really stoned” rates as a single joke. Filmmakers need to dial these things back a little. Smiley Face, for example, shouldn’t turn into a bunch of madness about stealing the Communist Manifesto, it should instead actually stick with the idea of trying to pay a bill ridiculously stoned.
Anna Faris is wonderful, committed; she dives in and never tells you she’s above the material, though she is. Someone, somewhere, please stop underrating this talented actress, and give her something that she can really do something with. Araki would appear to be blowing off steam after the darkness of Skin, and I don’t begrudge him that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll enjoy his movie. The funniest line of the film is “I’m taking a shit.” I just saved you a Netflix envelope.
★★
Private Fears in Public Places (2007)
Legendary French filmmaker Alain Resnais is one of those directors who is perceived as being masterful and “good for you” and, as a result, has been ignored by me. I’m not championing this viewpoint, but there it is. I’ve read Hiroshima Mon Amour’s DVD box probably a dozen times and have yet to take it out. The rest of Resnais’s work is even less familiar to me. He was always one of the Men of Film that I was always going to catch up with.
I finally caught a Resnais film, Private Fears in Public Places, the 84 year old director’s most recent, and one of the most acclaimed of last year. Truthfully, if I had been paying more attention to my Netflix queue, I probably wouldn’t have seen it this soon. But I wasn’t, so I did. And I’m glad that that oversight forced me to correct a larger one. The first thing that should be said about Private Fears is that it’s not some crusty “brilliant” movie that puts you to sleep in 20 minutes. It’s alive, romantic, and spry, an elder master showing the kids how it’s done.
Like most people in their twenties who see more movies in a week than most see in a month, I normally have an aversion to American romantic comedies. Most, which are generally labeled as “chick flicks” are desperate sexist parables that might as well carry a MATE! MATE! MATE! sign outside the theatre lobby. The films generally portray women as mindless nobodies who will remain nobodies until the perfect bland, hunky guy fucks them into true being, and, of course, marries them. Their life is to find a man to be subservient to, and these are supposed to be for women? Most romances seem to be deathly afraid of melancholy that doesn’t entail wolfing a pint of ice cream with your best girlfriend. True melancholy, the kind that most people wear like a transparent shawl, is rarely touched upon in American romances.
That shawl envelopes Private Fears in Public Places, which plays, and I know the big critics would kill me if they read me, like a blending of Love, Actually and the Alan Rudolph of Choose Me. Like those films, Private Fears is a roundelay, here involving six people who are intertangled in ways they don’t fully comprehend, and their sometimes desperate lunges at romantic fulfillment. The film doesn’t dry hump you like the last half of Love, Actually with climax after cloying climax, and it doesn’t wear its kookiness on its sleeve like Rudolph tends to, the film simply is. Resnais understands that someone can be unhappy without comprising their dignity and that they can be unhappy BECAUSE they don’t compromise their dignity. Resnais’ conviction in this simple observation is refreshing, and ensures that little actually happens in Private Fears in Public Places, but the little that does happen means everything.
Resnais, like Altman, brings with his age the best of both worlds: the wisdom and confidence of his experience and the hunger and pure cinema intoxication of a man much younger. The film, even if it were nothing else, is a remarkable, enjoyable bit of visual craft. Private Fears is set in the Paris of its inhabitants’ dreams: otherworldly, perfect, like a postcard or a fairy tale. Resnais’ camera always seems to be exactly where it should be, the work is exuberant without showing off. There’s an extended scene, really a breakup scene, that is shot from the ceiling of the apartment, and while you praise the technique, you can’t help but note that it’s the loneliest, most desolate way to film the scene. Resnais also has a habit of framing his characters in transparent cages, a succinct, unpretentious metaphor for the reason we see these kinds of movies to begin with, and the reason we should celebrate them when they’re this good.
★★★½
A Not too Terribly Thought Out Look at The Landlord. (1970)
The Landlord’s reputation as one of Hal Ashby’s best is very valid. All of the things I like about Ashby are present and accounted for here: the beautiful, loose editing and cinematography (though Kael is right about the editing being a tad “showoff”). The fly by night one thing leads to another but not in that three act way plotting, the performances (Beau Bridges’ has never been better, Diana Sands is heartbreaking and tough), etc, etc. The Landlord also largely lacks that thing that sometimes tempts me to resist Ashby: a whimsy, a willed flakiness (it pops up most in his most famous picture Harold and Maude).
I think it has something to do with the racial tension of The Landlord, Ashby doesn’t get gooey on the subject like he did with the Vietnam War in Coming Home, Ashby (along with screenwriter Bill Gunn) stays tough and unsentimental. The film walks a tightrope of genres and emotions that most movies screw up: the racial tension picture, the disoriented, privileged twenty-something white guy picture, the coming of age romance, the film handles all of these moods exceptionally. The Beau Bridges character means well, and he thinks he’s tolerant, but the film never excuses him for simply “meaning well”, he’s a naive ass and Ashby and Gunn never forget it.
The black characters, the tenants of Bridges’ building, don’t warm to him by Act three so we can feel good walking out of the theatre: they find him just as bewildering and offputting as they did in the beginning. Bridges’ parents, which is the closest the movie comes to caricature, don’t accept Bridges’ ambition by the end, they still find it ridiculous, and the poignance of the film lies in the fact that it IS ridiculous. A white boy guilt thing that’s just as self-motivated, and more self-deceiving, as anything his rich bitch parents do. The Landlord, when you get down to it, is a grittier, more honest, just plain out better version of The Graduate, without the God awful all things to all people fairy tale that constitutes the latter film’s third act.
I haven’t gotten to why I really like The Landlord, and why I always forgive Ashby films, despite their indulgences. The intimacy. Ashby sells the ironic connection between characters that shouldn’t connect better than any filmmaker I can recall as I type this. There are moments, in all of his films, of tender, beautiful regard between his characters. Erotic, electric little moments that remind you what this medium can be all about. The Landlord has plenty of them: Bridges and his girlfriend’s fingers intertwining as he tells her something she doesn’t want to hear, a moment of post-coital, lonely cuddling between two characters, the way another character touches her husband as she confesses infidelity.
The movie also happens to be pretty funny, with shockingly blunt dialogue. So when, exactly, should we expect the Criterion DVD?
Juno (2007)
Juno (Ellen Page) loses her virginity to her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera) in an opening scene of surprising tenderness. Evidently they weren’t too careful, as Juno soon finds herself pregnant, and looking for parents to take the child she knows she’s not equipped to raise. She tells her parents, (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, both sharp in small roles) and they react with understanding and good humor, a reaction that I’m sure many accidentally impregnated teens pray their parents will have as they consider how to best break the news.
Taken as a fantasy in which babies are nothing more than a roommate with a nine month lease, Juno largely works. The pregnancy is, barring the occasional scene, the macguffin. The film isn’t interested in the pregnancy’s affect on Juno’s parents, or Paulie, or Paulie’s parents (who are curiously sidelined, I’m assuming they never know to begin with), it is merely a means to inspiring an intelligent, insecure, relentlessly self-aware girl to recognize that she isn’t Queen of the World, and that her humor, which she uses as a bludgeon, can be off putting and mean. Like many young people of both genders, Juno can be as casually awful as the people she thinks she’s protecting herself against. This realization is the movie. I actually had a bit of a hard time accepting that, because the film, regardless of what you’ve heard, is not a farce. The film is ambitious and serious enough to expect a bit of owning up on the part of director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody in regards to the unborn child. Like Juno herself, Juno is a young person’s movie, created by young people, it’s insecure and unsure of itself, and that’s both the best and worst thing about the movie.
Worst for the reason I just described, best because the film’s rambuctiousness is surprisingly human. Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner portray the adoptive parents to be, and, of course, they are rich and live a certain facade that the arrival of a child threatens to crumble. But their crumbling is the best part of the movie, and that’s because Cody, when she’s not striving to be the hippest thirty year old screenwriter in the room, has surprising imagination. Garner is immediately expected to be the shrill harpy of the duo, but her character is more, and less, than that. Self-awareness is not, refreshingly, reserved for just the under twenty set in Juno. Garner catches the fear, the resentment in her husband’s looks, and the heartbreaker is that she agrees with his assessment of her.
Bateman and, especially, Garner needed this movie. I’ve never thought Garner had the stuff to be a movie star, and honestly I still don’t. But she has the stuff of an actress, at least here. Garner might be the best performance in the film, and this is a film where the performances unquestionably deliver. Bateman’s a bit of the opposite, he’s definitely a star, but I was never sure if he was quite an actor. As Bateman reemerged into feature films, it seemed to me that his very appealing Michael Bluth might be the only note he had in him. Juno doesn’t really refute this suspicion, but it illustrates a darker, subtler, less sentimental key* of that note.
Which brings us to Juno herself, and her maybe/maybe not mate, Paulie. Ellen Page was terrific in the unwatchably sanctimonious Hard Candy a few years prior, and her work here is similar. Like Bateman she’s unsentimental and even more committed. Yes, Juno is armed with a never ending arsenal of annoying MySpace double speak, but the film acknowledges it for the stunt that it is. Have you folks ever actually read a MySpace profile? The self-justifying through obscure musical, filmic and literary name dropping, the cross breeding of insults into something you can barely understand, there are plenty of little women like this running around, sure, it’s stylized, but, guys, that’s what we at least sometimes go to the movies for. Cody does try too hard though, and will hopefully realize that a little goes a long way, and that her less explicable jokes are more effective (there’s a Woody Allen reference early in the film that slayed me.)
Cera is Cody, Reitman, and Page’s secret weapon, the redemption of the snark. He’s the cost of Juno’s bullshit, the jarringly raw nerve young man who’s even more lived in than Page. Like his Arrested Development alum, Bateman, Cera was in danger of boring me. I get it. Cera does his thing extremely well, but I get it. Well I don’t get it, or at least I haven’t had enough yet. Cera, again like Bateman, doesn’t stretch so much as refine and slightly re-contextualize. Cera’s work is simple and poignant, the personification of the unmasked adoration that Juno believes to be out of her reach.
Reitman could’ve laid off a little on the self-congratulatory sound track, but he’s learned a bit from his first film, the overrated, have it both ways Thank You for Smoking. This film is just as blunt, but it moves and shakes more comfortably, more organically, than Smoking. Juno is a bit of a pain in the ass, but you really can’t help but at least partially like the damn thing.
*I know nothing about musical notes.
★★★
Nobody’s Fool (1994)
The idea was to take a look at Steve Buscemi’s Interview this morning, but my brothers are currently over for the Holidays and a probing look at celebrity was not on their agenda. I didn’t press too hard though, I’m hoping to take at least one of them to I’m Not There in the coming days. We’ll save the good will for that.
All was forgotten and forgiven anyway when Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool was found only about ten minutes in playing on HBO last night. I’ve always loved this film, and remember seeing it and Shallow Grave in the same night as a freshman in high school. I think the Brady Bunch movie was big that weekend, but I was watching Paul Newman’s Sully hobble around Bath County, getting into a series of mildly coming of age adventures with his son (Dylan Walsh), his on again off again boss (Bruce Willis, one of his sharpest little performances), his on again off again landlord (Jessica Tandy) and several others. I fell in love immediately, and, if I recall correctly, this was the first time I looked at Paul Newman and saw him as more than one of my father’s leading men. This was one of my leading men too, this is one of OUR leading men, a man of rare, deep, but unsentimental humanity.
Of course, there’s a bit of fantasy to be indulged in here, there was in the Richard Russo novel too. We all wish we could be as charming about not fulfilling life’s obligations and fantasies as Newman’s Sully. The performance and the film idealize this a little, the idea of not having a job, being totally free, and shambling from one little episode to the next. Benton, along with Russo, who helped him on the script, don’t totally bail out though, the tug between the idealized and the raw is what lends the film a slightly topsy turvy, loopy power, you’re laughing and then a moment later you realize that wasn’t so funny. The Dylan Walsh character, who isn’t half as charismatic as the dad who abandoned him (Walsh knows this, and that makes it all the worse), continually blindsides Sully, and us, with references to his wrongdoing. Sully doesn’t usually reply, and that’s part of the charm, he never evades his sentence, he’s cast himself as the no good absentee father, and he’s determined to see the part through and not rob his son of the hatred he’s entitled to have.
Why aren’t there more films like Nobody’s Fool? Films that toss the three act structure aside and simply BE. Sideways is such a film. So is Wonder Boys. Nobody’s Fool is one of those films that’s so generous of spirit that you put away your critic’s cap and forgive it of its flaws, of which there are admittedly a few. Robert Benton (who directed Kramer vs. Kramer as well as co-writing Bonnie and Clyde for Pete’s sake) sometimes doesn’t quite trust us to be sufficiently moved, he applies the music a little too liberally in places. Things occassionally fit in their coming of age slot a little too neatly, the characters should be a little messier.
But these are minor issues. Sully is, along with Fast Eddie, Hud, and a few others, one of Paul Newman’s greatest creations. Benton also, refreshingly, gets small towns, understands how they can be suffocating and comforting in the same measure. Benton gets the pleasures of knowing everyone who eats in the cafe for breakfast, or the wonderful informalities of traditionally red tapeish affairs (I love that Sully is let out of jail to be a pall bearer.) The film skirts Mayberry tedium because it never plays the small town tropes as vaudeville, and the pain that Sully’s self-absorption has caused is never entirely forgotten.
I have to also confess that Nobody’s Fool rings a particularly personal bell for me as well. Sully reminds me just a little bit of my father, who has a habit of being everywhere and nowhere at once. I’ve spent many days in my youth going from place to place with my father and talking and eating and hearing stories and getting into little episodes. The final image of Nobody’s Fool is particularly moving and completely earned: Sully propping what’s left of his body up, a bit of rest fleetingly granted.
★★★½
Waitress (2007)
I give writer-director-co-star Adrienne Shelly this, her Waitress is weird and has conviction in itself. No post modern stuff here, Shelly wants you to fully feel for Jenna (Kerri Russell), the waitress who’s brilliant with pies but a little haphazard in her dealings with men, including her husband (Jeremy Sisto), and the new doctor (Nathan Fillion). One of these guys is a manipulative, controlling lout, the other is a sign post for a better life. I give you one guess which is which. If you guess wrong you may actually enjoy the movie.
The primary problem with Waitress, and it has a few, is that it’s as indecisive as the titular character. You can’t get a handle on the film, and to a certain extent I admire that, but here it ultimately cancels itself out. You essentially think you’re in for a goofy little romantic comedy, but the film keeps pulling the rug out from under that. The Jeremy Sisto scenes are the strongest in the movie, but they don’t belong in this movie, they’re too grim and realistic for a film that largely aspires to be a cartoon. It should be said though that Sisto, an underrated actor, is effective.
The film isn’t very funny even when it’s trying to be though. Waitress is another of those condescending Hollywood versions of a “small town” movie, where everyone talks like an ironically articulate hill billy, and the “quirk” is layed on to the point of suffocation. Shelly is taking a risk here, if you’re going to play the stylized dialogue game, then you better be a virtuoso, you better be a Preston Sturges, or a David Mamet, or a Quentin Tarantino, or a Billy Wilder (and he had a few rough patches too). Otherwise, you’re better advised to eavesdrop while writing.
The film also has a bad habit of squandering good will just as its beginning to build up a little with indulgent, annoying little visual ticks. There’s a scene between Fillion and Russell, about a half hour in, where they kiss by mutual accident. The film was beginning to get me, I admired that we didn’t spend another hour beating around this particular bush. What does Shelly do? She kills it with an obnoxious, cliched, jokey 180 degree pan that deflates the charm of the scene.
Waitress finally, mildly, finds its footing in the last half hour. Shelly commits to staging a coming of age melodrama and pars away most of the other indulgences. Jenna has a baby, and as tired as I am of that particular development, Shelly catches something genuine here. She finds that brief respite that a child can hold for someone, and her point of view is surprisingly tough. I imagine that Waitress’s third act is the movie Shelly wanted to make, and it took her ninety some half baked pages to get there. The final image of the film is lovely, moving, and earned, the first time in the entire film that Shelly really brings off the whimsy she’s been trying too hard for.
Look ladies, I understand why you go to these types of films, men fantasize about finding an understanding someone too, but your standards should be higher. Older folks like to mourn the passing of good cinema, and that’s largely nostalgic crap, with the exception of one genre: the witty, urbane romantic comedy. We have no exceptional filmmakers in this field currently working. Rent Ernst Lubitsch classics like The Shop Around the Corner or the even better Trouble in Paradise. Rent Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, or, even though it barely applies to the current discussion, Unfaithfully Yours. See what a really charming, romantic film can be. And hold our current filmmakers to these standards. You should hold your men to these standards too, but that’s none of my business.
★★
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
