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
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Our friend Travis seems to be refining his style to the point of near haiku…and I dig it.-CB
It must be hard making yourself standout in the Independent film market. The way I see it, there are two types of independents: the Quirky Indie and the Oscar Indie. The Quirky Indie has a weird, precious main character, a cast of equally eccentric but less important second bananas, and plenty of “quotable” dialogue (”honest to blog?!”).
The Quirky Indie always constructs some version of reality that may at first seem insightful but does not hold up to scrutiny. Even the best Quirky Indie often feels like a contrivance that you have to turn part of your brain off to fully enjoy. That part of your brain is the bullshit detector.
If you know anything about the plot of Lars and the Real Girl, you know it’s a Quirky Indie. It’s got the weird characters. It’s an obvious construction. Every breathy word, every “subtle” facial tick, every endearing eccentricity: it all means something. And don’t you forget it.
Then again, the movie sneaks up on you: It’s pretty funny. The denouement is pulled off nicely. It cuts to black at just the right moment. And, most critically, Ryan Gosling, as Lars, plays it straight.
Lars and the Real Girl is the story of a hyper-shy kid in his late twenties who feels he can’t connect with anyone, particularly women. But then Lars orders a sex doll and starts treating it like his real girlfriend. Crazy, right? Crazy. Lars’ family and the rest of the small town in which he lives grudgingly accept this extraordinary and worrying behavior. Lars talks to the doll. He makes food for the doll. He takes the doll to church. He constructs an elaborate biography and personality for the doll.
I’ll admit it: by the end of the movie, I’d largely bought the central conceit and invested myself in the mystery of the movie (essentially: why did this happen and how will it end?) despite myself. There’s plenty to quibble about. But this is not reality. Just turn off your bullshit detector and enjoy it.
★★½
Private Fears in Public Places (2007)
Legendary French filmmaker Alain Resnais is one of those directors who is perceived as being masterful and “good for you” and, as a result, has been ignored by me. I’m not championing this viewpoint, but there it is. I’ve read Hiroshima Mon Amour’s DVD box probably a dozen times and have yet to take it out. The rest of Resnais’s work is even less familiar to me. He was always one of the Men of Film that I was always going to catch up with.
I finally caught a Resnais film, Private Fears in Public Places, the 84 year old director’s most recent, and one of the most acclaimed of last year. Truthfully, if I had been paying more attention to my Netflix queue, I probably wouldn’t have seen it this soon. But I wasn’t, so I did. And I’m glad that that oversight forced me to correct a larger one. The first thing that should be said about Private Fears is that it’s not some crusty “brilliant” movie that puts you to sleep in 20 minutes. It’s alive, romantic, and spry, an elder master showing the kids how it’s done.
Like most people in their twenties who see more movies in a week than most see in a month, I normally have an aversion to American romantic comedies. Most, which are generally labeled as “chick flicks” are desperate sexist parables that might as well carry a MATE! MATE! MATE! sign outside the theatre lobby. The films generally portray women as mindless nobodies who will remain nobodies until the perfect bland, hunky guy fucks them into true being, and, of course, marries them. Their life is to find a man to be subservient to, and these are supposed to be for women? Most romances seem to be deathly afraid of melancholy that doesn’t entail wolfing a pint of ice cream with your best girlfriend. True melancholy, the kind that most people wear like a transparent shawl, is rarely touched upon in American romances.
That shawl envelopes Private Fears in Public Places, which plays, and I know the big critics would kill me if they read me, like a blending of Love, Actually and the Alan Rudolph of Choose Me. Like those films, Private Fears is a roundelay, here involving six people who are intertangled in ways they don’t fully comprehend, and their sometimes desperate lunges at romantic fulfillment. The film doesn’t dry hump you like the last half of Love, Actually with climax after cloying climax, and it doesn’t wear its kookiness on its sleeve like Rudolph tends to, the film simply is. Resnais understands that someone can be unhappy without comprising their dignity and that they can be unhappy BECAUSE they don’t compromise their dignity. Resnais’ conviction in this simple observation is refreshing, and ensures that little actually happens in Private Fears in Public Places, but the little that does happen means everything.
Resnais, like Altman, brings with his age the best of both worlds: the wisdom and confidence of his experience and the hunger and pure cinema intoxication of a man much younger. The film, even if it were nothing else, is a remarkable, enjoyable bit of visual craft. Private Fears is set in the Paris of its inhabitants’ dreams: otherworldly, perfect, like a postcard or a fairy tale. Resnais’ camera always seems to be exactly where it should be, the work is exuberant without showing off. There’s an extended scene, really a breakup scene, that is shot from the ceiling of the apartment, and while you praise the technique, you can’t help but note that it’s the loneliest, most desolate way to film the scene. Resnais also has a habit of framing his characters in transparent cages, a succinct, unpretentious metaphor for the reason we see these kinds of movies to begin with, and the reason we should celebrate them when they’re this good.
★★★½
A Not too Terribly Thought Out Look at The Landlord. (1970)
The Landlord’s reputation as one of Hal Ashby’s best is very valid. All of the things I like about Ashby are present and accounted for here: the beautiful, loose editing and cinematography (though Kael is right about the editing being a tad “showoff”). The fly by night one thing leads to another but not in that three act way plotting, the performances (Beau Bridges’ has never been better, Diana Sands is heartbreaking and tough), etc, etc. The Landlord also largely lacks that thing that sometimes tempts me to resist Ashby: a whimsy, a willed flakiness (it pops up most in his most famous picture Harold and Maude).
I think it has something to do with the racial tension of The Landlord, Ashby doesn’t get gooey on the subject like he did with the Vietnam War in Coming Home, Ashby (along with screenwriter Bill Gunn) stays tough and unsentimental. The film walks a tightrope of genres and emotions that most movies screw up: the racial tension picture, the disoriented, privileged twenty-something white guy picture, the coming of age romance, the film handles all of these moods exceptionally. The Beau Bridges character means well, and he thinks he’s tolerant, but the film never excuses him for simply “meaning well”, he’s a naive ass and Ashby and Gunn never forget it.
The black characters, the tenants of Bridges’ building, don’t warm to him by Act three so we can feel good walking out of the theatre: they find him just as bewildering and offputting as they did in the beginning. Bridges’ parents, which is the closest the movie comes to caricature, don’t accept Bridges’ ambition by the end, they still find it ridiculous, and the poignance of the film lies in the fact that it IS ridiculous. A white boy guilt thing that’s just as self-motivated, and more self-deceiving, as anything his rich bitch parents do. The Landlord, when you get down to it, is a grittier, more honest, just plain out better version of The Graduate, without the God awful all things to all people fairy tale that constitutes the latter film’s third act.
I haven’t gotten to why I really like The Landlord, and why I always forgive Ashby films, despite their indulgences. The intimacy. Ashby sells the ironic connection between characters that shouldn’t connect better than any filmmaker I can recall as I type this. There are moments, in all of his films, of tender, beautiful regard between his characters. Erotic, electric little moments that remind you what this medium can be all about. The Landlord has plenty of them: Bridges and his girlfriend’s fingers intertwining as he tells her something she doesn’t want to hear, a moment of post-coital, lonely cuddling between two characters, the way another character touches her husband as she confesses infidelity.
The movie also happens to be pretty funny, with shockingly blunt dialogue. So when, exactly, should we expect the Criterion DVD?
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
I’ve decided to pull a Charles Foster Kane and end BC’s tribute to Paul Thomas Anderson with a review by the returning Travis Bjorklund. This series needed a little sour to my sweet, and Travis is more than willing to fill the bill. For my opinion, reverse basically everything that follows.
What do you say about your favorite living filmmaker’s most trivial work? This P.T. Anderson picture is an intimate one, with no grand ambitions. Punch-Drunk Love, aptly titled, is about the redemptive power of love, and how love can be inexplicable even to those involved. Though memorable sporadically and beautiful consistently, Anderson never pulls it all together.
It’s essentially a story pastiche, with the major subplots seem only shoehorned in because Anderson thought it would be fun to put them in a movie. As you watch the film, you can see the gears in Anderson ’s head turning:
I heard about this guy who earned millions of cheap air miles from buying pudding…I’d love to put that in a movie. You know, the movies never deal fairly with regular people who dial sex hotlines…I’d love to put that in a movie. Adam Sandler has such great dramatic potential…I’d love to put that in a movie. I’ve never been to Hawaii …
Punch-Drunk Love is the story of Barry Egan, a lonely and frustrated but otherwise nice guy. He has seven overbearing sisters and a struggling business. He vents his frustrations in violent bursts of property destruction. The role of Barry was written for Adam Sandler, and it’s an emasculated twist on the persona Sandler has adopted throughout his career. Considering P.T. Anderson’s penchant for getting career-best work out of actors, it’s no great surprise that Sandler has never given a better performance (For me, that’s not saying much: I don’t share Anderson ’s affinity for the actor). Sandler rocks and paces and tenses his jaw through the movie in a way that adequately displays Barry’s the pent-up potential energy.
Barry begins the story hapless and alone, but quickly meets Lena (Emily Watson) and the two fall crazily, inexplicably in love. Lena, though represented prettily by Watson, is merely a character sketch and exists only to move Barry’s character forward. In fact, Anderson here contrives to reduce all the characters except for Barry to sketch. It’s a perverse move from a filmmaker who has made realistic and interesting characterization his stock and trade. And it is almost certainly a contrivance: Anderson, knowing he has fascinating, well-hewn characters down flat, decided to focus on other things.
Thankfully, those other things mostly deliver: sumptuous use of wide screen to convey loneliness; exploration of visual and aural representation of feelings like frustration, helplessness, passion, being overwhelmed, and love; pregnant atmosphere. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. By the time Barry, empowered by love, takes control of his life and reaches his full potential, most of Anderson ’s machinations have been revealed as smoke and mirrors. While some seem merely pointless, others are confusing: what’s the meaning of the opening car crash, which plays practically like a non sequitur, or the broken harmonium? Most of the time I admire Anderson ’s refusal to explain or contextualize the events of his films, but, in this case, they just feels like filler.
This is a strange, singular, little movie, lazily written and tightly directed. Unfortunately, as Anderson himself said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, “It all starts with the writing.”
★★½
Magnolia (1999)
The Paul Thomas Anderson detractors that I’ve met usually present Magnolia as Exhibit A in the “the man is overrated, indulgent and overly precious” line of thinking. And I admit it freely; Magnolia is going to be a hurdle for you if you’re not into the mojo that Anderson is usually working. The film is unruly and indulgent; accentuating everything that could have brought Boogie Nights to a crashing halt at any given moment. The restrained Anderson of Hard Eight has left the building entirely for Magnolia and the midnight carnival Anderson of the Alfred Molina scene of Boogie Nights has taken over. Magnolia is Anderson’s longest picture, clocking in at just less than 190 minutes, and an editor of even the slightest seasoning could have probably found a way to shave sixty of those minutes.
There is wonderful material to be found here, and Anderson’s technique is an even more assured and bravura humanist hybrid of Altman, Scorsese, etc, etc, but there’s really nothing here that wasn’t explored in Boogie Nights. I think Anderson just had more material in this line that he wanted to get off his chest, and maybe he wanted to do it divorced of potentially alienating subject matter such as the porn industry. If I’m recalling correctly, Anderson said at the time that he was looking to break the traditional three act structure that dominates most mainstream storytelling, and that he tried to structure Magnolia like an album. Magnolia isn’t Inciting Incident-Conflict-Climax; it’s a long roundelay that climaxes three times, about once every hour. The ambition is interesting but it feels like too much, Anderson tries too hard, and things are spelled out too much. A zoom in on a painting containing the phrase “yes that happened” (or something to that effect) illustrates Anderson’s strain and self-consciousness.
The stories don’t mesh as organically and effortlessly here as they did in Nights either, and, as a result, the film feels redundant. I imagine that the redundance is at least partially intentional, Anderson’s riff on life’s cyclical nature and the ways we wrong one another in the exact same way we were wronged ourselves, particularly within our own family. Again, it feels like Anderson is justifying himself, underlining, underlining, underlining. The Tom Cruise episode is strange and moving, and the script has wisely built the actor’s ticks into the part, but the scene between Cruise and Robards toward the end is endless. The romance between John C. Reilly and Melora Walters is one of the strongest elements of the film, but Anderson burdens even that with a ridiculous street prophet scenario that was wisely shortened from the original script.
Magnolia is still a small price to pay for the kind of mammoth ambition that Anderson displays both here and in Boogie Nights. You’ll notice that I’ve given the film a three and a half star rating, despite having spent the majority of the post discussing its shortcomings. The film still has a blunt power, is still original, and still exhibits a filmmaking fever that should be encouraged and treasured. There is, for both better and worse, enough fervor and soul for ten pictures in Magnolia. Many have compared the film to Short Cuts, but I’ve always found that a bit lazy, the films are on opposite ends of the bar tonally. Altman’s film is subtle and naturalistic, Anderson’s is operatic in all senses of the word, including soap.
Making pictures of any kind, despite how much we sometimes bitch, requires courage. It takes courage to put yourself on the line and tell a story that many will see, and that faces rejection or outright embarrassment. Paul Thomas Anderson is considerably talented, but he’s also even more courageous than most. His films aren’t bashful or cloaked in irony. His films are sad and wounded, and I think it was this quality that drew me to Anderson’s films, particularly Magnolia, to begin with. I was a twenty when Magnolia was released, a sophomore in college. I saw the film four times and thought it to be one of the greatest I’d ever seen. I don’t still believe that, but I’ll always be grateful to Anderson for Magnolia, regardless of its faults.
★★★½
Boogie Nights (1997)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights is a young filmmaker’s film in the best sense of the phrase: caution is totally thrown to the wind, but it’s thrown to the wind by someone with a clue as to where the wind might actually take it. The film is stuffed with incident, but everything feels strangely essential. This is the kind of movie that inspires critics (or maybe just me) to pile on the adjectives: funny, exuberant, depressing, original, derivative, insane, stupid, sentimental, and, for a picture set on the fringes of the porn industry, surprisingly chaste. Boogie Nights was the film of 1997. And it was also one of the films of the 1990s.
If Hard Eight saw Anderson using the noir as a platform for something more personal, then Boogie Nights sees him riffing on a rise and fall structure normally reserved for gangster pictures. We know the groundwork for this kind of film by heart: we open with a desperate or ambitious hero, the hero discovers a talent that doesn’t really jive with polite society, the hero emerges a major success on the strength of said talent, the hero crashes in a rage of gluttony and ego.
Anderson uses this structure to tackle the rise and fall of the porn industry, but he’s about as interested in that as he is the duel between religion and oil that drives There Will Be Blood. Boogie Nights, like Hard Eight, like everything else in the Anderson filmography, is concerned with the rise and fall of family. In the case of Boogie Nights, it’s a surrogate family that lives in and around the porn industry, which here functions as a sort of island of lost toys. The characters that populate the film’s universe may be the single greatest achievement of Boogie Nights. They are gripping and unpredictable, broad and soap-operatic, but still jarringly human, succumbing to weakness at the most inopportune times. You feel like anything can happen, and Anderson is masterful with tone: a comedic subplot can turn fatally serious on a dime and a subplot that you’re just sure is going to shit can suddenly blossom into something hopeful and romantic.
The result is a coked up, feverish Altman picture only cut with a visual style that leans on Scorsese and early De Palma and laced with a flakey humor that’s purely Anderson. Anderson doesn’t try to hide his influences either; the justifiably praised opening scene of Boogie Nights practically shouts them from the rafters. The opening, a four or five minute tracking shot from outside the streets into the night club where Eddie works, is a delirious achievement, and very directly, self-consciously, recalls the similar scene in Goodfellas. The scene also has a simpler function: to introduce the audience to as many of the sprawling story’s characters as quickly as possible.
And again, it’s the characters that truly matter here. I’m not going to list them all, I’d be here another thousand words, but two need to be mentioned, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) and Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), the father and son of Boogie Nights. The juice here comes from canny casting, both are talented actors who tend to not live up to their potential for reasons that I could only speculate. At this point in his career, Wahlberg had been surprisingly terrific in the teeny bopper Fatal Attraction retread Fear, and Boogie Nights was an expansion of that. Eddie Adams is young, imbalanced, vulnerable, and Wahlberg is electric, particularly in a brutal argument with his mother early on that drives the rest of the film. I also like the early scene between Adams and a lover, she praises his cock and he tells her (though he’s really telling himself) that “everyone’s got one thing”. The dialogue is forced here, Anderson strains for poetry a bit, but the scene roots you in Eddie’s damage, and carries you through the darker, more challenging passages of the film.
Reynolds has always been underrated. I know the film is (rightly) praised, but does anyone really talk about the performances in Deliverance? Reynolds imbued that role with more than your usual tough guy stuff, there’s a simmering authority, a rage that’s channeled into sharp humor until really pushed, and then, well then he lets you have it. I’ll never forget the moment in Deliverance where he kills the woodsman with a bow and arrow. Watch the look on Reynolds’ face, the ease with the bow. This guy was BORN for this. Reynolds, after years of Cop and Halfs, got that rage, that humor, that aloof, that pure unchecked male id, back for Boogie Nights. The relationship between Reynolds and Wahlberg, two under thought of actors of opposite generations just going for it, is riveting and poignant. It also informs the moving finale, where the problem child Eddie, having long been known as Dirk, has the reconciliation that he never dared imagine with his actual family.
Ok, let’s list: Don Cheadle. Luis Guzman. Ricky Jay. Alfred Molina. William H. Macy. John C. Reilly. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Philip Baker Hall (he gets the funniest line of the film, watch for it, it involves lollipops). Melora Walters. Thomas Jane. Heather Graham. Julianne Moore. All of the actors are given great, intimate, desperate stories and scenes, and they all knock them out of the stratosphere. Boogie Nights is a beautiful, flawed, undeniably human second movie.
★★★★
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