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.
★★★★
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)
Jerry (Benicio Del Toro) lives in what appears to be a one room dormitory with a sink and a lover that, for all we see, may have died the night before. Jerry shows up for his very committed best friend, Brian’s (David Duchovny) funeral wearing a suit that was clearly cut for him when he was a different size. Jerry tucks cigarettes behind his ear and when he smokes them he clutches them until they reach the butt, the smoke wafting beautifully between his fingers and tortured face. Jerry has a habit of calling friends out on their mistakes with a little “mwaw mwaw” sound that he most likely borrowed from a game show that ran during his youth. Jerry is also a heroin addict and, in relapse, he asks for a Snickers bars and ice cream to sooth his Hellish return to proper consciousness. If you had to be a heroin addict, you’d want to be Jerry. Hell, if you’re hung-over, you’d still want to be Jerry, to look half as mysteriously, glamorously ravaged as Jerry at his worst.
People have called Benicio Del Toro’s work in Things We Lost in the Fire brilliant, and the performance is, undoubtedly, quite an achievement. But is it the sort of achievement this particular picture desperately needs? Del Toro gives the viewer all sorts of bits and pieces to chew on, the little slipping on the woman’s white glove ticks that people respond to because they can be identified so confidently as “acting”. As memorable as Del Toro’s portrayal of Jerry is, it still represents a bit of treading water for the actor. Note the word “glamorous” above, how glamorous should an unstable heroin addict be? Things We Lost in the Fire, as its Book of the Month club title indicates, is a self-improvement Oscar fantasy. We wish the Jerry’s of the world were this likable, and we wish that we could help them, while compromising our own lives as little as possible.
Del Toro’s Jerry is fascinating and alive but he doesn’t feel like a fascinating and alive drug addict. This is the film that could use a shitting of the pants. Allan Loeb’s rigid and unwavering screenplay has no room for that sort of thing though, he’s too busy stating his theme (which is repeated three times at the end in case you went to the bathroom for, I don’t know, 110 minutes). Susanne Bier’s direction only further highlights the script’s obviousness, this thing needs to be played loose and dingly dangly, Bier instead cuts many of the major scenes into a series of close-ups, with characters staring into space for prolonged moments as the score does an instrumental number that all but broadcasts SERIOUS.
Normally I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to review Fire, you get what you pay for after all, but the film continues to show frustrating signs of promise only to dash them time and again. Jerry eventually accepts an offer from Audrey, Brian’s widow, (Halle Berry) to stay with her and her two children in a joint effort to stitch together a few threads of their lives. Jerry and Audrey have a palpable sexual tension, and for a moment my hopes rose; as a love story that blossoms in one the more inappropriate situations imaginable, this picture had a chance. I normally don’t buy Berry in her bids for award winning actress, but she fares surprisingly well here and with material that’s considerably weaker than Del Toro’s. On the page Audrey is a noble suffering wife, but Berry imbues the part with a ripe, ambiguous sexuality that she didn’t manage in her over-praised performance in Monster’s Ball. Audrey and Jerry look one another over, with varying degrees of hate, arousal and distrust, and for a few moments I forgot which picture I was watching.
Bier and Loeb soon reminded me, and so the film remains stuck, never to diverge too far from the message, never to acknowledge that the characters might, for a moment, be fallible, or (perish the thought!) unlikable. The Audrey/Jerry story remains safe and the children remain photogenic and largely untroubled. Even a less controversial but appealing friendship that Jerry develops with Audrey’s neighbor Howard (John Carroll Lynch), is cut distressingly short.
And what of everyone’s immediate taking to Jerry anyway? The dangers of choosing a drug addict you barely directly know as a surrogate friend, husband or father is never elaborated upon much either, nor is the guilt that could arise from immediately grasping on to someone else in the wake of another’s death. As in most films that deal with drug or mental abuse, Jerry’s problem is just a means to a dramatic short-cut, a healing that would probably, outside of fantasy, be safer to seek elsewhere. There’s no room for any inconvenient feeling or messiness in Things We Lost in the Fire, it wants us to simply “take the good with the bad.” This film could use quite a bit more of both.
★★½
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
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
The story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) is one of those occasional, jarring proofs that The Man Upstairs or whatever cosmic force you subscribe to can have you absolutely whenever he wants. One day Jean-Dominique is a charismatic editor of Elle magazine with some of the most beautiful women in the world at his call; the next he’s a vegetable: every body part having betrayed him with the exception of his eyes, and he loses one of those early on in a moment of surprising, forceful discomfort. The doctors tell Bauby that he’s suffered some sort of rare stroke and that he’ll be fixed up soon, but that vague, ominous “soon” becomes more and more elusive, and it’s soon clear to Bauby that this new organic tomb is to be his lot in life. The mysterious stroke, in perhaps its most perverse move, has spared Bauby’s mind. His hungers and his intelligence remain aggressively, stubbornly alive, never again to be quenched.
This is the true story that inspired Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the memoir of the same name by Bauby. Yes. Bauby wrote the book in the above condition, aided by some very dedicated nurses and aides who read the alphabet aloud to Bauby until he signaled the correct letter with a blink of his remaining eye. The letters added up to words, and the words added up to sentences which eventually yielded the source material that drives the film. This was Bauby’s one way out, a guided tour for others of the private Hell in which he spent the remainder of his life. The book (according to the movie) was received with rave reviews.
Except The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a tour through Hell. It begins that way. Schnabel, in one of the more stunning bits of tee-total directorial empathy I’ve ever seen, chains us to Bauby’s eye and, for the first thirty minutes or so, rarely cheats. We see what Bauby sees, and we don’t see what Bauby doesn’t see. We share his disorientation and misery: professionals flit in and out with various banal comforts, and fresh embarrassments. Women of staggering beauty pop up from both the deep well of Bauby’s memories and in the actual room, both equally unattainable. One of the beauties invents the method of communication in which Bauby will write his book, and he promptly tells her that he wants to die. She scolds him for his selfishness and storms out, only to re-emerge a little later to apologize.
Several moments later, Bauby has decided to abandon self-pity, and this is where the film shakes off its limited perspective, and becomes surprisingly erotic and romantic. The highest compliment I can pay Schnabel, and there are several compliments to be paid for his performance here, is that he’s made a film that isn’t overly beholden to taste. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a dead from the waist down disease of the week picture. The film is tender, intimate and refreshingly horny. The film doesn’t condescend to Bauby or to us; it takes his position and SEIZES it. There’s a moment, late in the film, where Bauby’s ex-wife takes him and their children to the beach, and she reads to him. Bauby notices her fleshy, beautiful legs hiding under the book and the dress. It’s a scene worthy of the casual reading room longing of a Rohmer picture.
It’s also a testament to Schnabel’s film, and Ronald Harwood’s script, that the newfound tragedy doesn’t immediately discount the fact that Bauby was, in his previous life, a bit of a self-absorbed, disreputable hound that had a habit of forgetting his family. Bauby left his wife for another woman, but the wife comes to see him anyway, still very clearly in love with him. The up to this moment absent lover calls late in the film, and the wife has to act as the go between. Bauby tells his wife to tell the lover that he waits for her to come every day. He may be paralyzed and he may long for her, but I, in that position, may have waited until my nurse returned to make that particular proclamation. The film is rich with showy, you are there technique, but this is the truly great scene in the movie, pulling you in four or five different directions at once, and still managing to be deliriously romantic.
I sometimes, as an American, resent the convenient Americans Are Boobs philosophy that seems to govern World Cinema thinking. But I must give the various other filmmaking countries one thing: the cliche that most America filmmakers don’t know shit about sex in film. Most of the great American filmmakers seem resigned to ignore the act altogether: think of the Coen Brothers, or Anderson, or Scorsese, or Spielberg, or most Soderbergh (though Out of Sight is still one of the most erotic American films of the past ten years, against admittedly little competition, and Soderbergh borrowed his best sex scene from a Brit.) Consider what The Diving Bell and the Butterfly could’ve been in many Americans’ hands: a respectful, asexual Triumph of the Human spirit movie. Very few things are less triumphant in the movies than a Triumph of the Human spirit movie. The Diving Bell acknowledges Bauby’s remarkable strength of spirit without softening him. Schnabel, once a photographer himself, understands that most great people are intensely in their own headspace: in other words, to be great you have to probably be a bit of an asshole.
We have Valentine’s Day coming up, and I, as a fervently single male under thirty, strongly recommend that you lucky people take your mates to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you’re new in the relationship, you’ll look cultured and worldy, and if you’re old in the relationship, the film will re-affirm the fact that you should devour one another as much, as passionately, and as often as humanly possible. How can you get any more life-affirming than that?
★★★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
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