Cassandra’s Dream (2008)
It has been a few weeks since I watched Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream, and I didn’t take notes, so please forgive me if I forget which esteemed thinkers were dropped in the name of self-justification; in the service of apologizing for a continued interest in B-movie tropes (Match Point made an in-joke of this tendency). I have a continued interest in B-movie tropes myself, and I probably even share with Allen a certain shame of this preoccupation, but one either has to embrace one’s loves or move on-something we thought Allen had grappled with thirty years ago. Allen’s frequent world, a Godless, corrupt place where amorality reigns and love is illusory, used to be an exhilarating tonic to the false, sun-up platitudes of most mainstream pictures. Woody Allen used to be bracing and frank; he used to be one of sharpest, most virtuosic, just simply funny, deflators of pretense working in the cinema.
Then Allen decided he was supposed to grow (and visually he has), and he, for the most part, became embarrassed of his wild-id. Match Point was heralded as a comeback, and it has a force-but it’s a remake of a not bad but rigged picture that hasn’t held up that well (Crimes and Misdemeanors). Match Point is a more successful picture than Crimes and Misdemeanors, because Allen’s head was at least partially in his crotch while making it, but it’s, thematically, the same-indulging in Allen fashion parade cynicism. Match Point is still novel though-it’s shockingly erotic (Allen again playing your preconceptions of his films against you), with a clever, nasty twist-ending. The performances vary somewhat, but Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Mathew Goode are terrific-shifty, funny, entitled, and greedy, with hair-trigger timing. Match Point is, above everything-a good time, a black exhilaration; Woody Allen perhaps acknowledging his sour-puss predictability and having a little fun with it-indulging his inner Fatal Attraction (without that movie’s loathsome cowardice).
Cassandra’s Dream is consciously similar to Match Point. There’s the same inevitable fatalism, the same fixation on rot in high places, the same noir trappings. But the juice has been dried out-Cassandra’s Dream could be Match Point as jerky. The dialogue is plastic and expository (Myers and Goode covered that up in Match Point, though Johansson had less luck), and the scenes that one expects in these type of films, the scenes that carry the primary dramatic thrust (the murder scenes), have been pointedly omitted. This is not a failure of Allen’s, but clearly part of the design. Cassandra’s Dream isn’t interested in “thrilling” but in reveling in the same state of twitchy, blossoming guilt that faced Martin Landau in Misdemeanors.
The problem is that Allen would appear to have nothing interesting left to say about guilt-he’s returned to the territory, not out of throbbing concern, but out of neurotic habit. (Guilt is to Allen what The Sorrow and the Pity was to Alvy Singer.) And there’s nothing at stake-Allen’s pessimism tips us off and numbs us from the start-there’s no shock-no slow-dawning horror. (This picture plays like a reaction to Match Point in more ways than one-one can’t help but feel that Allen thought he got his hands too dirty in that picture. It wasn’t high-brow and clean enough for him. Too many dirty thrills-the violence is too immediate and personal-too sickening.) The crime here is a proposition made by a corrupt uncle to his two nephews; that, if carried out, will bail all three of them out of their potential financial ruin. The uncle is Tom Wilkinson; the nephews are Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor. The casting is the reason to see the movie.
Farrell and McGregor aren’t given roles here as substantial as Myers and Goode, but they are nearly as effective, and Allen, wisely, casts counter to our instincts. This gimmick is about the only thing going on in the movie. Farrell is the brother crippled by guilt: he senses their souls’ erosion as they buy into Wilkinson’s chilling self-serving rational. Farrell’s suffering here plays as the other side of his work in In Bruges. Farrell, stranded in most pictures prior to 2008, is beginning to find roles that exploit his contradictory-cocksure-inner-fire. Prior movies couldn’t get past Farrell’s looks-they tried to elevate him to Movie God, only to largely render themselves (and him) forgettable. These new roles also take into account the fact that Farrell is not a very large man, and poignantly exploit that. Farrell twitches and bends and moves franticly back and forth-conveying the weight of something pushing him further and further in. Farrell tests McGregor’s character here, tempting McGregor to consider a direction he didn’t think he had in him, and Farrell’s vulnerability lends the film a hint of that sickening horror that Allen seems desperate to avoid. Farrell makes McGregor, who’s also as good as I’ve seen in years, even better.
Allen’s approach isn’t entirely bogus-the flip, offhand presentation of the murder-for-hire is chilling, and puts us on McGregor’s business-just-business wavelength. The picture’s contrary, elusive stubbornness does have a certain pull-the ending is also a major intentional anti-climax, and, while you feel cheated, there’s a certain random forgettable they-were-just-two-more-guys-with-a-plan hopelessness to it that authentically haunts. But how many times are we supposed to enjoy drinking from this well? Has Allen totally forgotten the happy surprise of the finale of Hannah and Her Sisters? Or, more recently, the wounded, delicate Sweet and Lowdown, the best picture Allen’s made in the last ten years? Cassandra’s Dream is another faux-tragedy, but the real tragedy is watching a Master filmmaker underrate himself.
★★½
The Visitor (2008)
There may be, over the summer, people who ask about The Visitor at parties. These people will ask if I’ve seen it, and I’ll say I have, and I’ll voice some hesitance about the picture. These people may respond with a slightly deflated look that may, temporarily, spiritually reduce my height by a few feet. (It’s happened before.) The Visitor is a modest human story that currently populates a few theatres amidst countless stories of monsters destroying cities. The monster pictures generally teach us, and seek to teach us, nothing. The human stories normally have a lesson to impart or at least work out. About half-way through The Visitor, just as the picture is really settling into its social services groove, I thought, as I tend to during these sorts of pictures-Why can’t a human story seek to teach us nothing? Few films are truly profound; and the uncluttered exploration of day to day existence is a truer, more reliable, port to profundity anyway. The little pictures, in their way, tend to suffer from the same preoccupation as the summer monster movies: more, more, more.
The Visitor is a blend of two increasingly shopworn subgenres; both stemming from a certain privileged-white-man’s guilt: the why can’t I, for once, be the good guy to a race besides my own (?) factor. When, and how, can I shed this inherited guilt and injustice (like a snake’s skin) and be copasetic with the rest of the world? Without any true change or sacrifice, of course, that would be yucky and kinda hard. (These films always go to great pains to establish that the white guy in question’s pocketbook won’t suffer, whatever may happen, his quasi-retirement will remain unperturbed.) The first genre is the genre that Paul Haggis has recently trademarked: the several-races-thrown-into-the-same-mix-over-a-common-glaring-injustice-watch-how-everyone-learns-to-eat-their-own-porridge film. The second is the lonely-bitter-old-man-reaches-out-again film.
I have no use for the Paul Haggis type picture, and we’ve discussed that in the past, so let’s push that to the corner and leave it alone, I’m sure there’s many other posts that are happy to get into yet it again. I’m a sucker for the lonely-old-man film: it’s a set of clichés that rarely fails to stir me. The notion of crossing normally unfathomable gaps such as age or race to arrive at something resembling grace is just too irresistible. Alexander Payne made a hell of a run with it a few years ago with About Schmidt (it was a canny reworking-he avoided many of the pitfalls by keeping the youthful rejuvenator of emotions off-screen). Sofia Coppola made a fine film of it with Lost in Translation-which was a crossbreed too, a blend of the old man film and the Brief Encounter abbreviated love picture. Andrew Wagner botched the genre, and wasted a lovely Frank Langella performance, with the bullying Starting Out in the Evening.
The Visitor is, thankfully, much better than Starting Out in the Evening or the Paul Haggis type movies. Writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) is also an actor, and he shows a courtesy for his characters that wrings a certain quality out of even the most unconvincing scenes. The opening act-in which we primarily follow Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) as he goes about a life that strives for dignity at the expense of everything else-is actually rather beautiful in a typically indie dialed down way. Make no mistake, McCarthy is manipulative, and his touch, really, isn’t much lighter than that of a director of big-budget tearjerkers. McCarthy plays that card that many directors self-conscious of the clichés of the life affirming picture play: they underplay. Every scene is turned half a notch lower than you’d expect; to strive for greater “reality”, to disguise that most of the scenes have a very un-spontaneous, “worked out” feel. McCarthy is checking his list like anyone else: dead wife; unfinished, useless job; fear of intimacy, unbelievably open new friends, etc.
But McCarthy does something early on that moved me, and had me rooting for his picture. Vale has a conference to attend in New York City (he lives in Connecticut) and he returns to his apartment that he’s owned for many years without actually occupying. Vale discovers two squatters: Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), who have been living in his apartment, based on a misunderstanding (maybe), for a few months. It quickly becomes evident that they have nowhere to go. The couple apologizes and leaves. Walter considers, and follows them down to the street corner. He asks if they have a place to stay, they assure him, half-heartedly, that they do. Walter looks them over and considers again…and the picture cuts directly to the couple returning to stay in apartment. McCarthy omits Walter’s inviting the couple to return. This may have been an accident, for all we know that bit of film was damaged, but this simple device exudes an incredible generosity. Walter, a shy, painfully self-conscious man, wouldn’t want to be seen asking these two people to stay. And so McCarthy spares him that.
I wish that McCarthy had been satisfied with his story of a man bonding with a family of illegal immigrants and learning to play their drums (a reaction to his deceased wife, which is also handled gracefully). I wish that McCarthy had been satisfied with his story of Walter falling for Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass). But no, the picture has to ensure that we understand it’s a reaction to 9/11, and the subsequent immigration paranoia that has followed. We already knew that, and we already understood the stakes, but McCarthy has to have his hero throw a tantrum at an officer just to further ensure that we miss nothing. That Walter would never do that, of course, means nothing. The thesis governs all, I’m afraid.
I still don’t want to try too hard to dissuade you from seeing The Visitor though. Jenkins is wonderful, full, and it’s a charge to see a great character actor treated with such reverence. Jenkins imbues The Visitor with subtlety and observation: watch how he leans up from the drum as if being caught mid-masturbation, watch how he buttons and unbuttons his jacket when threatened, like an adult safety blanket. Watch his tentative chemistry with Abbass, who is also beautiful and moving. Watch how they lie in bed together, their fingers clasping in a specific, true, earned, way. These moments are the true civics lesson, the unifier, perhaps our only probable hope. The literal civics lesson is just a distraction.
★★½
Clean (2004)
The initial suspense of Clean lies not in whether its protagonist, Emily (Maggie Cheung), a once promising rock something or another, will shake the grips of heroin addiction, but in the genre itself. One can’t help but wonder whether the picture will compromise its lean integrity and become another grim, purposeless, self-congratulatory slog like nearly every other picture that concerns drug addicts and the (on again off again) struggle they normally face trying to achieve the titular state. Clean is, remarkably though, the ideal title for Olivier Assayas’ picture, referring not only to Emily but to the filmmaker’s astoundingly matter of fact approach. Assayas stands outside and inside the junkie rehab genre at once, examining it like one might a caged bear, with both curiosity and a welcome generosity of spirit. Assayas would appear to view this genre as a puzzle: how do we find the actual humanity of a tragedy or hardship that countless folks face everyday? How do we clear the hurdle of cliché?
The solution is to snip the clichés out like dead branches; quickly, fearlessly, with no apology or self-consciousness. Clean is pointedly devoid of all the scenes one expects from the genre, devoid, in fact, of many of the scenes one expects from any drama. We’re spared tearful reunions or separations, we’re largely spared Emily’s physical torment, we’re spared the death of a pivotal character, an even more pivotal reconciliation is implied but never shown, etc.; scenes end mid-tempo, unfulfilled, the plot floating and wandering like the central character. Clean doesn’t assume the position of a removed, drunken third party telling someone a story at a bar, desperate to move or impress; the picture is Emily: playing its emotions close to its vest, shuffling from one day to the next with completion and maintenance of a basic pride being the hopeful, up-front goals.
Assayas boils everything down to the existential essential without compromising the gravity or pathos of the subject matter in the service of some art-house wank; he earns our trust, and this trust allows the moments to have an anxiety that isn’t real but relatable, the picture is both more universal and more specific at once. Clean manages to be both the most aesthetically beautiful junkie picture I’ve ever seen as well as possibly the most moving without that being a contradiction in terms. Make no mistake, Clean is a movie first and most, still about real problems in a way that only movies are, especially European movies, but the picture is a sublime balancing act, the best of every world.
Maggie Cheung, captivating in a number of Wong-Kar Wai pictures, is startling here as Emily, consciously playing her beauty and poise, normally the bridges that keep us from buying an actor in such a role (ask Charlize Theron or Halle Berry), against our expectations here. Her Emily is vibrant, stunning, self-absorbed, a creature of infinite shells of bullshit who may or may not have an actual, vested interest in finding her humanity. Emily eludes in her apparent lack of elusion, her “straight forwardness” just another device for self-explanation and rationalization, whether she consciously knows it or not. Emily, in an astute observation of behavior on the part of the film, never lies, but pay attention to how she never lies.
Nick Nolte, as Emily’s father-in-law and de facto guardian of her child, etches one of those subtle, volcanic portraits of normalcy and dignity on the brink of falling into the abyss that only a famous weirdo can with such committed lack of irony; the husk of that unmistakable voice, the creases and wrinkles in that deep, large head, the faded lion’s mane of hair, are all used to unforgettable effect; the machismo of Nolte’s past parts inform the role and lend it originality and texture, this is clearly a man used to victory and control learning how to face loss on the fly: he’s, and the film never does our work for us, much more like Emily than either he or Emily know. The picture takes a cue from these rich performances and never stokes the fires of melodrama, these characters never oppose one another as many other films have conditioned us to expect, they instead oppose themselves in front of one another, and discover a common bind that goes on to color the picture’s earned, open-ended final image.
Clean is an accomplishment, a mood film that’s deeper and more moving the further it slips into your memory, perhaps because it manages, so gracefully, to feel half-remembered already.
★★★★
Starting Out in the Evening (2007)
Coming of age stories can certainly be comforting, we’d all like to believe that a super lay or a chance meeting with someone older, established or famous (or a super lay with someone older, established or famous) will filter the confusion out of our lives and send us ready and willing toward whatever may be next. Coming of age pictures generally portray life as a light-switch that only requires a flicking from off to on, no wavering, nothing, when you’re on, you’re on, and everything’s a okay. The movies rarely acknowledge that our lives have a habit of going up and down, side to side, one day you’re winning, one day you’re losing, another day you’re winning again, another day you’re losing yet again. One day you’re over your young life crisis, while yet another day you find yourself racing straight into your mid-life crisis: drinking coffee and wondering why you watched all those coming of age movies. It has a disappointing third act, but The Graduate is a coming of age film that ends on a moving, and honestly unsettling note, sure, we’re here, but what the fuck now?
There’s all kinds of coming of age stories of course, the sexual experience with the older person, the infatuation with something (or someone) that (or who) turns out to be shit and representative of our childish delusions, the teacher who fights the system and imparts discipline in students everyone else has given up on, as well as the one about the strange, possibly sexually confused (if the genders are aligned correctly) relationship that can unexpectedly arise between an older, faded, past his prime writer and a young, precocious, energetic student who reveres the faded, past his prime writer. We know how these stories work: the student imparts a new sense of life to the teacher, while the teacher nurtures within the student a newfound discipline and sense of life’s fragility. I don’t remember much of Finding Forrester, but that was a recent example of this later type of coming of age picture. Wonder Boys would be another, but that was a wonderful movie because it had a sense of the genre’s necessities, and while it didn’t discard them, it admirably tweaked them and sent them scurrying in unexpectedly anarchic directions. Wonder Boys had a sense of humor, of play, and, most important, a sense of humanity.
Normally these pictures’ rigid devotion to formula causes them to forsake common sense. Starting Out in the Evening is the most joyless kind of formula picture, a self-conscious, self-righteous formula picture that knows the clichés, tries to transcend them, but has no idea what else to offer in place of the predictable pleasures. The director, Andrew Wagner, doesn’t supply the usual bombast, there’s no grand fight the system climax, and the conversations between the teacher/writer (Frank Langella) and the student (Lauren Ambrose) have a refreshingly true ring, they talk like two people who may have actually read a few books as opposed to watching movies about people who read books. This picture, no doubt, begins promisingly, but it’s dry and lifeless, and a subplot with the teacher’s daughter (Lili Taylor), meant to, in case we miss it, further highlight his self-absorption and emotional cowardice, goes nowhere; it’s dead weight in a picture that’s already perilously close to sinking. You may also find the film’s one note, pro-life, seize the day hammering exhausting, and perhaps even a little offensive.
Starting Out in the Evening is a failure of empathy as well as imagination, uncomfortably judgmental of its protagonist, the teacher, here called Leonard Schiller (the name is appropriate, pictures featured of Langella in his youth recall a young Leonard Cohen). The student, here called Heather Wolfe (more appropriate than the film apparently knows) repeatedly harangues Schiller for abandoning the passion of his earlier novels in favor of something colder, more considered and political. Schiller explains to Wolfe that those early books were written in one part of his life, the later books in another. That, God forbid, made sense to me.
We call it change, but these kinds of movies are usually only interested in promoting a change that leaves a thoughtless, shallow smile on your face as you leave the theatre, a true consideration of the ramifications of life’s choices is rarely on the menu. Later in the picture, the teacher’s daughter’s boyfriend (Adrian Lester) tells the daughter that he loves Schiller’s later work, it’s brilliant, “about something” (a sentiment that’s usually mocked as the height of deluded pretension in these kinds of pictures) and I perked up. Would Starting Out in the Evening dare imagine a scenario in which the young, green, bullying, faintly psychotic student isn’t armed with the most valid opinion? (Keep in mind the word opinion, the film doesn’t, her appraisal of Schiller’s work is to be accepted no questions asked, while everyone surrounding her, all older, all possibly more knowledgeable, are elitist fatheads. The girl’s own elitism, which she boasts of at one point, is never contested.) The answer is no, the Lester character is meant to be a jerk, another testament to Schiller’s head-up-his-own-assedness.
Starting Out in the Evening is well-performed, particularly by Langella, who brings an unsentimental humanity to his role that is quite endearing (he does wonders with the line “you’ve brought an old man some excitement”), and the final image (implying that change is something that, refreshingly, arrives bit by bit) works, but it’s not enough, the film is youth pandering claptrap, encouraging the newer generation’s (of which I’m a part) egotistical belief that they are of the most value, and that the old guys need to duck out of the way of their all encompassing brilliance. The picture is also probably critic pandering claptrap as well, one of those formula pictures dressed up in just enough literacy to be taken as “indy.” Don’t feel guilty if you find yourself bored watching Starting Out in the Evening, it is, in fact, boring.
★★
On Dangerous Ground (1952)
Director Nicholas Ray was known for imbuing his thrillers with an almost naive, sad-eyed desperation, and that suits his romantic chase noir, On Dangerous Ground, to a tee. The picture depends upon clichés that were old hat before the talkies, but it transcends them, primarily because we’re more accustomed to encountering them in a romantic melodrama that might more closely resemble Marty than a nastier thriller centering on the hunt for a young girl’s killer. The policeman on the hunt, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) sees himself through the killer’s sister’s (Ida Lupino) blind eyes and calls himself out on a life that’s been dominated by cynicism and recklessness. We don’t roll our eyes at the second act pathos, nor the Lupino martyr, we’re instead thrown for a loop, wondering what the hell is going on.
It helps that Ray and Ryan are nearly unrivaled in this sort of business. Ray’s pictures aren’t calculated, but raw, almost uncomfortably melancholy and self-conscious. In a Lonely Place is another picture that starts down a familiar path (Hollywood screenwriter, murder, etc.) only to end on a devastating note of miscommunication and un-purged rage. There’s also, of course, Rebel without a Cause, a picture that never annoys from overexposure, if only because it’s authentically unforgettable, a nightmare exploration of the chasm between the generations (just as In a Lonely Place was exploring the un-crossable differences between the genders). On Dangerous Ground has similar conviction in itself, and Wilson ranks as another refreshingly understated, poignant Ray creation. The first three scenes tell us all: one cop hugs his wife, one cop watches TV with his family, Wilson examines pictures of suspects at the dinner table alone. Too bad the picture feels the need, in the first act, to repeatedly remind us of Wilson’s disillusion with needless dialogue, but even this doesn’t irritate, it contributes to the broad, dreamy vibe of the picture, to its big, broken, bleeding heart.
Ray could’ve gotten all of that out of a mediocre actor (and has) but Robert Ryan appears, in all of the pictures I’ve seen at least, to be incapable of giving of a false or boring performance. Ryan can be terrifying even in pictures that aren’t in his league (check his work in the otherwise just ok Crossfire or Clash by Night, both of which can be found in TCM Noirs Vol.2) but when the film manages to be even somewhat up to him the results can be extraordinary, such as The Set-Up, The Naked Spur, the iconic The Wild Bunch, or even here. Ryan, like many of my favorite leading men, has a fascinating, flexible contradiction about himself, he’s scary, badass, childish, noble, buffoonish all, possibly, at once, and can adjust the ingredients seemingly without effort depending upon the part. Wilson is, like the Bogart character in Place, of the not entirely sane school of broken idealists, needing a saint, someone who can in good faith just plain shut up for a while and deal with it, to purify his potentially lethal spiritual toxicity.
On Dangerous Ground follows a traditional three act structure, but the proportions are unusual and further contribute to the surreal discombobulation of the film, while also managing to further dry out the sentimentality. The film is approximately eighty minutes long, thirty of those are devoted to act one, a chase that has little bearing on the official plot (though it organically fleshes out the Wilson character). By minute thirty-five, Wilson has been summoned to another town (to escape problems sprung from his violent practices) to solve a murder. At this point we settle in, expecting twenty minutes or so of fish out of water plotting, the usual no bullshit cop in strange town burlesque, only to have a townsperson spring into a building in the middle of Wilson’s introduction to the prominent townspeople to announce that he’s seen the killer fleeing. Wilson teams up with the father (Ward Bond, very effective) and the remaining forty-five minutes largely constitute this second chase, with the accelerated romance with Lupino, who isn’t, despite first billing, introduced until about minute forty, as a sideline. The film toys with the formula admirably, and embodies what screenwriters preach of underlining character with action.
My only real regret of On Dangerous Ground is that it doesn’t take full advantage of the possible explosions that could be savored from a Robert Ryan-Ida Lupino collaboration. Lupino has proved herself in other roles to be very much Ryan’s equal, but here she’s saddled with an uninteresting male fantasy. Ray exhausts his imagination with the strange pacing, and his empathy with the Wilson character. It’s hard to fault On Dangerous Ground too much though, it’s an original picture with a fantastic lead performance, a clear, hard, amazing visual style, a haunting Bernard Herrman score, and a good as can be expected secondary performance. You don’t roll your eyes at the final kiss, it’s, despite the shortcuts, earned.
★★★½
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
Another Woman (1988)
An outstanding director’s misfire can be a bit like a relationship that has suddenly lost footing: everything you admire about that person becomes grating, an unintentional self-parody. As I watched a character casually expound on the latest Brecht production she caught over a glass of wine with long lost friends in Woody Allen’s Another Woman, I wondered, “Do people drink beer in Woody Allen movies?” Actually that’s unfair, a character drinks beer in that very scene, but do Woody Allen characters eat that pizza that supposed to be so good in New York? Do they shit? Do they screw? Do they read a, gulp, best seller, even behind doors that are safely locked so their friends couldn’t possibly uncover the truth? Maybe that’s why marriages are always disintegrating in Allen’s pictures: the people seek Brecht connoisseurs only to find that they’ve married Michael Crichton fans.
Another Woman aspires to address emotional cowardice, but it’s really about Allen’s ongoing fear of anything that could be interpreted as common or middle class, his occasional joyless atonement for making people laugh. The film concerns an intelligent, intimidating, successful upper crust intellectual named Marion Post (Gena Rowlands) who recently turned fifty, and, while renting a loft to start her latest book, begins to overhear the patients of the psychiatrist in the neighboring apartment. One patient in particular fires Marion’s imagination, a pregnant young lady called Hope (Mia Farrow) who speaks of her woes with a terror and confusion that has remained unknown to Marion her entire life. Marion is polished, urbane, never saying the wrong thing (depending upon your definition of wrong) and utterly miserable. Memories flood back to Marion, family members magically appear to essentially tell her they hate her and, for once, Marion finds herself vulnerable, regretful and human.
Many critics have compared Another Woman, positively, to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and, while that comparison is unavoidable, Allen wouldn’t really get his Wild Strawberries right for another ten years with the underrated Deconstructing Harry. Harry is alive, and profane, playing to Allen’s authentic inner torment and surreal wild comedy. Another Woman is insecure and self-conscious, hypocritical even, as terrified of anything messy as its protagonist. The picture desperately needs contrast, instead it has Allen’s relentless, one note plea for Major Artist status: control and contrivance masquerading as brilliance.
This film has its moments though, and the one misery after another hammering eventually wears you down. The casting was a canny move on Allen’s part, it’s jarring to see Rowlands, normally so sensual, embodying such a suffocating character, she’s terrific in an unsentimental, tightly coiled performance, we feel the waste of life. Gene Hackman, as a would be lover who got away, is too forceful of an actor to submit to the repression; the second to final scene of the film, revealing how Rowlands and Hackman became close, achieves the electric longing the entire picture has been laboring for. Sandy Dennis, as a friend who has always privately resented Marion, is even harder to forget, she’s bravely, embarrassingly raw.
As with most Allen films, the picture is beautiful and meticulously crafted (it was shot by Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist) but that only highlights the fact that we’re essentially stuck in an occasionally moving tour through a very pretty wax museum.
★★½
Stop-Loss (2008)
Stop-Loss, regardless of whatever else needs to be said, has a terrific first act. Director Kimberly Peirce captures an intangible, free floating battle scarred anxiety that’s legitimate and fully felt. Peirce, as a few other critics have also noted, has a knack for wrestling a certain compromised caged animal masculinity on the screen. The Iraq veterans of Stop-Loss return to America after an ambush, and find themselves doing anything to purge that restless trigger fever that’s ping ponging within them like a ricocheting bullet. They fire guns, get hammered, get laid, and wake up the next morning without the slightest hint as to what to do next.
Peirce’s previous film was Boys Don’t Cry, and that picture had a staggering intensity, detailing a senseless, awful murder, but Peirce, and this is the mark of a major artist, didn’t let her outrage trump her empathy; her killers were allowed to be broken and confused, the killing feeling less about the victim than about some sort of blood passage that no one on either side understood. Boys Don’t Cry is an emotionally rounded, stunning picture, in league with the great true-life murder accounts, within spitting distance of In Cold Blood. Stop-Loss, at its best, details a similar, almost as convincing, emotional dislocation.
Peirce doesn’t hold the momentum in this new picture though, after about a half an hour, the titular inciting incident kicks in and brings with it a familiar formula; a melodrama that hits all the usual marks of the frustrated soldier without a cause. Brandon (Ryan Phillipe) learns that he is to return to Iraq after completing his contract anyway due to a stop-loss clause that allows for the military to extend soldiers’ contracts in a time of war. Brandon is accomplished, good looking, certainly “All American” but something snaps in him. He argues that, officially, we’re not in a time of war. The argument escalates with frightening speed, and Brandon soon finds himself on the lam, considering crossing the border to evade duty and as well as returning to the possibility that he might kill more innocent people in the name of said duty.
So, yes, Stop-Loss turns into a road picture, as well as a veteran coming to terms with the war picture, though the film both to its benefit and detriment, turns out to be less about the Iraq war than War in general. The film hinges on a conflict that’s admirably gray. Brandon’s actions are understandable, to a point, but they are also self-absorbed, and Peirce doesn’t let us forget that. Brandon’s actions take a toll on his fellow soldiers, most notably Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who feel as lost as he does and need their friend, their leader’s, support. Brandon argues that the stop-loss clause is a backdoor draft, but that comparison isn’t fair, the clause is, after all, in the contract he willingly signed.
There’s never really much doubt how the film is going to end, but Peirce’s first act builds considerable good will, and she’s too canny to ever totally squander it; the speech laden war picture clichés are side stepped (occasionally) in appealingly live wire ways. One of my favorite moments in the film, and probably one of the most truthful to pop up in this wave of Iraq pictures, happens about half-way in. Brandon is getting loaded at a dive with Steve’s girlfriend, who’s driving him to speak to a senator, and, as he’s about to launch into one of those self-righteous indignant speeches of which characters in these movies have a habit of launching into, she cuts him off, and says, simply, “let’s just get drunk.” There is nothing in In the Valley of Elah to rival those words.
There is nothing in any of the Iraq films that I’ve seen that rivals Brandon’s encounter in with Rico (Victor Rasuk), a soldier nursing severe injuries from the opening ambush who still maintains an air of (perhaps blind) let’s go over there and fuck them up patriotism. Rico does curls with his remaining arm, and sniffs the air for the beautiful woman he can tell Brandon has brought with him. Rasuk was memorable in Lords of Dogtown, but his practicality and optimism are devastating here, and has the odd effect of further discrediting our hero, who, after this episode, feels like a self-pitying prick. One of Rasuk’s final lines, about getting killed so his family can obtain legal residence in the U.S., should feel editorial, but there’s no shaking off his gleeful matter of fact delusion.
Stop-Loss’s biggest problem may be that Peirce has seemingly chosen the least interesting soldier in the squad to focus on. Phillipe is fine, delivering perhaps his strongest, most convincing lead performance after floundering in Breach last year, but it’s his friends that continue to haunt. Tommy and Steve are clichés (one is the unquestioning straight arrow, the other an alcoholic with a relationship and stability problem) but Tatum and Levitt, like Rasuk, get under the skin and play against expectations: they are quieter, livelier, more self-loathing and screwed up than the movies usually allow them to be. After two pictures it’s clear that Peirce is marvelous with actors, and she’s equally confident playing in the usually vanilla true life wannabe profound sandbox, she finds the humanity in old notes and conventions, and shakes them up and reminds us why we listened to them so much to begin with. Stop-Loss is a minor, messy, admirable, appealing movie; an old-fashioned curiosity of war picture that has the good manners to be an engaging story.
★★★
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
As a moderate in the Paul Haggis is brilliant/awful debate (Crash is a watchable white liberal guilt cartoon, no more, no less), I feel I should point out a scene that occurs early on in In the Valley of Elah that perfectly encapsulates why his detractors resent the acclaim. The film’s opening is appealingly curt: Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) wakes to a telephone call informing him that his son, whom he didn’t even know had returned from Iraq, has been missing for a few days, and has a few days more until he’s considered AWOL. Hank, in even fewer words than you’d expect from a Jones character, catches his wife (Susan Sarandon) up, and is just as quickly out the door to see what the hell is going on. He may have snuck in a cup of coffee, I don’t remember.
The opening is sparse and mysterious, and, as always, Jones’ minimalist brilliance supplies notes that no dialogue could artfully convey. But that, of course, doesn’t stop Haggis from trying. Hank looks his truck over and pulls into an auto store and asks for something. The auto-man finds the part in question, rings it up and hands it to Hank. Hank asks the auto-man if he’s sure this part will work. The auto-man responds to the affirmative, adding something to the effect of “Sometimes you have to trust someone other than yourself, Hank.”
FALSE! Maybe I’m getting to be a bit of a crank about these sorts of things, but this is exactly the sort of audience insulting, made for TV exposition that drives Haggis’ critics nuts. We don’t need it, Jones’ performance has already clued us in to his tight-assedness, and, just in case it hasn’t, his wife soon throws it back in Hank’s face anyway, in an argument that occurs when they discover that their son has actually been murdered not far from the base. We don’t need to be told twice, we don’t, really, need to be told once, but Sarandon’s accusation at least rings true, old resentment bubbling up at a time of major duress. And before we leave this point behind, let’s face something else; it’s not unreasonable to question an auto-man, that’s just common-fucking-sense.
The rest of In the Valley of Elah is just as you’d expect from a film that features three Oscar Winners in front of the camera and one behind: painless, obvious, and relatively forgettable. Haggis has learned a few tricks since Crash, the dialogue is less self-conscious, and the film plays against our expectations of the standard murder-mystery procedural in a few canny ways. The revelation of the murderer makes sense, too much sense really, so much sense in fact that its a bit of an admirable anti-climax: Hank goes stomping for answers and the answers, as they most likely actually would, turn out to mean pretty much jack-shit. For once, Haggis is making a point with action. The film is slow, humorless and thinks its way too good for you, but it gets better as it moves along, and it is worth seeing once for Jones’ performance. Jones again proves that he’s one of our sharpest under players; imbuing even the clumsiest of scenes with grace and truth.
I think it may be time to introduce the notion that Paul Haggis may be the M. Night Shyamalan of social-conscience pictures. They both have that contrived cross your Ts, dot your Is method of revisiting a supposedly minor (but obviously major) early scene in a film to reaffirm a final point. Crash most certainly qualifies; that boy’s life being spared by the blanks only to be mistaken by the child as an invincibility cloak is a payoff that could very literally grace one of Shyamalan’s fantasies. Haggis and Shyamalan are both also very clearly entertainers who are letting a grander desire to be “important” stifle their creative energy. And they both, whether people wish to admit it or not, still have potential. As the platitude too banal even for their films goes: only time will tell.
★★½
Short Cuts (1993)
I remember watching Short Cuts for the first time in 1994 or whenever the picture was available on video, as the idea of seeing this film in the theatre would’ve been unthinkable in the area I grew up in. I had just discovered the film’s director, Robert Altman, the year before with his The Player, which I adored. At the time I’m sure I didn’t quite grasp all of The Player, I was twelve, but the film had (and still has) a heady sexual danger, as well as a cynicism, that greatly appealed to me. Come to think of it, reading the critics’ reactions to The Player’s opening shot may have, in fact, been my introduction to the notion of a tracking shot.
But I digress, I eventually rented the Short Cuts video at the store my family frequented and, three hours and change later, proclaimed the film to be “pretentious” and a “disappointment”. Yeah, I was that arrogant. As brilliant as The Player still is, it has a tangible thriller spine that a twelve year old can latch onto. Short Cuts, of course, does not. I labeled Short Cuts pretentious, but that was an insecure twelve year old wannabe academic’s way of saying that he found it boring. I re-watched the picture a few years later in college, with several more Altman films under my belt, and recognized that I was, indeed, an idiot, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.
And now, having bought the film’s essential Criterion DVD a few months ago, and finding myself under the weather and with sufficient time to appropriately digest, I re-watched Short Cuts again. The film, like many of Altman’s films, is a force; which is ironic because that word is misleading to Altman’s approach. Short Cuts, like Nashville or even the final moments of The Player, sneaks up on you with seemingly banal details that slowly accumulate to become something quite tragic or significant. It’s this accumulation, this emotional disruption as conveyed by fleeting understatement, that has people sometimes calling Altman naturalistic in approach.
Just as others have written, Short Cuts isn’t a naturalistic film though; the coincidences, the intersections, even the characters’ occupations, are unusual and stylized. Raymond Carver’s stories, which served as the inspiration for the script by Frank Barhydt and Altman, were usually spare, isolated sketches of casual despair. Altman has taken those sketches into his confident old hands and criss-crossed them into a big, bursting, seemingly free-form soap opera.
And it’s the soap opera that lends Short Cuts the somewhat conventional spine that eluded me as a child; that frees Altman to stage individual moments of potent truth telling, or at least the potent truth telling of movies. As skillfully as Altman underplays, and as subtly and gracefully as he weaves characters’ agendas and neuroses into casual conversation, Short Cuts is still truthful only in a way that fans of movies or literature wish life to be. Real life, of course, is even more mysterious, not to mention considerably less interesting (assuming something can be more mysterious and less interesting at the same time), than the largely elusive happiness of Short Cuts. We all have resentments, insecurities and family squabbles, but we rarely live lives as cathartic as the characters that populate many of Altman’s films. As devastating as many of the moments of Short Cuts are, those characters are still lucky: they have Robert Altman and Raymond Carver as chroniclers handy to imbue their lives with meaning, or at least a fascinating lack of meaning.
The film is set in Los Angeles present day, opening with a series of extended, spontaneous God’s eye traveling shots that instantly establish the film’s loose, spanning perspective. We are to spend a few long days in the lives of twenty or so different characters, some of which are related, some of which aren’t, some of which turn out to be related in ways of which only we, as the audience, are allowed to understand.
There is a TV man and his wife (Bruce Davison and Andie McDowell) whose child is hit by a car but appears to be ok, for now. There is a baker (Lyle Lovette) who is compelled to exact a very misplaced revenge. There is a wife (Madeline Stowe) who entertains herself with her policeman husband’s feeble lies designed to mask his infidelity. There are friends (Robert Downey, Jr. and Chris Penn) with bubbling sexist resentments. There are fisherman (Fred Ward, Huey Lewis, and Buck Henry) who find something inappropriate but continue to fish anyway. There is another couple (Julianne Moore and Mathew Modine) who are haunted by a past infidelity only to drown it in an inexplicable all night party with people they barely know. And, perhaps my favorite, there’s a couple (Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin) who know they’re no damn good for one another or probably period, but decide to go down with one another anyway. Somewhere in there I also forgot the tale of a jazz singer (Annie Ross) and her daughter (Lori Singer) a seemingly casual story of familial miscommunication that ends in heartbreak. Not to mention the TV man’s father, embodied with perfect self-delusional sleaze by Jack Lemmon, who actually has my favorite moment in the film: a defeated, cowardly, painfully long exit that brings to mind Joseph Cotton’s bitter final walk in Citizen Kane.
Notice I didn’t bother to look up the various names that the script assigns the various actors. Not really necessary. These characters are archetypes; a certain malaise nurturing lifestyle is the real character of Altman’s film. And I’m stalling, writing myself in circles, erasing one largely useless passage of summary or redundant critique after another.
Truthfully, I don’t know why Short Cuts is so good, so lastingly amazing, but it is. I watched the film from start to finish a few days ago, and then ate dinner and started the damn thing again, and that is something I rarely do these days in my effort to see every notable current and classic film that I’ve yet to see. The film is a warm embrace that only a cynic could stage with such convincing, humane conviction. Altman’s distrust of platitudes ultimately renders him their greatest salesman. I usually don’t believe the disparate characters linked through a natural upheaval device, but the earthquake that finally unites the oddballs of Short Cuts is wrenching, and perfectly of a piece tonally with the Carver source material. I particularly love Waits’ and Tomlin’s reactions: drinking, they embrace “the big one” that will send them out of this world together, the earthquake stops, and they just as instantly resume the private party that’s just lost its possible major significance to just another day.
★★★★
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