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.
★★★★
Hard Eight (1996)
The movies have always loved the casinos. Casinos are endless sources of mystery and intrigue, of potential danger and romance. Everything most movies promise us in the first place. What did Godard say? All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, or something to that effect. Casinos usually have plenty of girls, guns, and every other vice that a film or person could crave. Hard Eight, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first picture, shot when he was 24 (!), is a chamber piece, set in and around the casinos, that largely concerns three characters, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), John (John C. Reilly) and, a little later, Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow).
These characters make their livings off of the casinos, living the lives of sailors on land, but the interesting thing about the picture is how little of it is actually set in the casino. Anderson is interested more in the motel rooms, the cars, the phone booths, the little bits in between the more glamorous, photogenic playrooms. A cynic could say that the film was low budget and that this strategy is cheaper. The cynic would be right, and I would imagine that that did inform the film, but this fringe thing applies to the larger budget Anderson films too. Over the course of five films, Anderson has worked in a variety of genres, but his obsession has been constant: to take an established genre and use it as a way to splinter into the exploration of the nature of the (usually surrogate) family unit.
That’s in retrospect of course, no one knew what Hard Eight meant, or least meant in the grand scheme of its creator’s preoccupations, when it was released to little fanfare in 1996. The pleasure of Hard Eight is that it works in more than just a Spot the Hints of Greatness to Come kinda way. The film is terrific in its own right: surprising, original and quite moving. This is one of Anderson’s most restrained pictures, the emotions here are closer to the vest than every other Anderson film with the exception of his new one, but they ARE there, and that’s a bit of a shock for this kind of movie. Hard Eight promises you a Grifters type noir, and Anderson proves that he can play that game too when he wants, but he isn’t satisfied with that. He pushes deeper and strives for something emotionally fuller without going maudlin, and that’s the achivement of his debut film.
The most intriguing mystery of Hard Eight is Philip Baker Hall’s great, lined, broken poker face. Hall reminds me of one of those mysterious old men of a French crime movie, one of the guys that has to lead one last robbery, blah, blah. Sydney’s last robbery days are behind him though, and now he’s concerned with boring day to day living. Boring day to day living and John that is, a fairly dim bulb who, after rightful initial suspicion, takes to him as instant father figure, or, in Clementine’s words, like a puppy to his owner. John orders the same drinks as Sydney, tries to dress like Syndey, and fruitlessly tries to approximate Sydney’s unfakable world weary badassery.
After the characters are established in terrific (if occasionally mannered) hard Mametish dialogue, the film essentially turns into a black comic spoof of the Son Bringing Home a Friend the Father doesn’t approve of. This friend is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) and he wears his crass entitlement the way Sydney wears his melancholy Man of a Past Era. The two instantly clash, and their meeting might be one of the sharpest scenes to still grace an Anderson film. Jimmy tells Sydney that he runs security in one of the nearby casinos, Sydney, in perfect underplayed timing, asks him if he’s responsible for the parking lot. Jimmy politely, defensively, corrects Sydney, but you can tell that he’s saving something for later.
Jimmy’s ultimate reprisal is unexpected and necessary for the structure of Hard Eight. Unexpected because Sydney has just worked through another complication, and we feel that it may be about time for the picture to close, necessary because Jackson’s thug is a needed shot of dangerous comic adrenaline. Anderson has always been a tinkerier with tone, and Jimmy shakes the film from the sad introspection of the second act. We need a bit of the live wire of Vegas and Jackson gives us precisely that, and the performance seems to me to be a precursor to Jackson’s hilarious, terrifying, underappreciated career best work in Jackie Brown.
Jimmy finally catches Sydney off guard and calls him on his hypocrisy, and the scene is shocking because Jimmy deflates many of the notions we’ve had about Sydney ourselves. Jimmy reduces Sydney to being just another hood who think’s he’s above it all, and we, after indulging in John’s hero worship, can’t help but see Jimmy’s point and understand his resentment. Jimmy is also key in revealing Sydney’s true nature, and this development elevates Hard Eight to something more than just a well turned genre film. When we reach the film’s beautiful final scene, we don’t look at Sydney as just another cool hood character, we see him as a terrified, reserved human being, tucking the messiness away for who knows how many more years.
★★★½
Black Book (2007)
Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a beautiful young Jewish woman, is on the run from the Nazis. It’s the Netherlands in the 1940s. She’s, basically by accident, joined a resistance group. By careless chance, a few of the group’s members, her de facto friends, have been captured. It so happens that Stein has met the man in charge of the region’s Gestapo. His name is Muntze (Sebastian Koch) and he’s taken a shine to Rachel, who’s known to him as Ellis de Vries. Like many a conflicted heroine before her, Rachel must infiltrate Muntze’s heart, and bed, in the fleeting hope that her friends can be saved, particularly before even more ruthless Nazi underlings can get to them.
The film is Black Book. The director is the Paul Verhoeven, returning after a long absence. If I recall correctly, the story theory people say that there are, once you boil everything down to its essence, only seven basic stories. I think the confused young woman in peril bedding an enemy superior against her wishes should be added as the eighth. It combines many elements of the other seven, but has any specific story been of more use to a filmmaker? The classic template is Notorious, and Ang Lee just made his best film, Lust, Caution, using the same scenario. Lee laced his Notorious cover with a bit of the obsession of Last Tango in Paris; and finally caught the movie that he seemed to be chasing for at least a decade. I was expecting Verhoeven to get all Basic Instinct on us and unleash a violent story of erotic bedroom gymnastics and purplish dialogue accompanied by even purplier score.
Verhoeven has and hasn’t made that film. Black Book is surprisingly, for him anyway, restrained in the sex and violence department. The story has, dare I say it, brought out the humanitarian in the filmmaker. Maybe it’s van Houten, one of the most startlingly beautiful women I’ve seen in a recent picture. Verhoeven has clearly fallen for his leading lady and that’s not particularly unusual, he falls for all of his leading ladies, but he doesn’t fetishize van Houten. He’s rooting for her, he respects her, and he clearly mourns the more outrageous and cruel things that happen to her over the course of the film. The trademark Verhoeven perversity serves him in a different fashion here; it dries out the potential schmaltz of the Wounded Survivor of a Historical Tragedy movie. Verhoeven is too much of a natural born filmmaker to bog things down in sanctimony. He wants to bare the tits and spill the blood as much as he ever did. But for once he sees the human cost involved in his spectacle. He hasn’t made his best film in Black Book, his masterpiece is still Robocop, but he’s easily made his best since then, a major comeback that erases the memory of the unforgivably boring Hollow Man.
The refreshing trick of Black Book is that it actually doesn’t commit to the story I just described, as over the top as the film can be, logic has more bearing here that you’d expect. The film isn’t a drawn out game of how long will it take Muntze to figure out who Rachel actually is. He’s fingered her (pun fully intended) by the time they’ve made love for the second time. The film doesn’t forget that a man in his position is, you know, probably fairly intelligent. Muntze doesn’t just let every single hot spy into his bed without so much as a question. He holds a gun to her, calls her on a coincidence, and before long, he’s holding her perfectly sculpted breasts again. Welcome to the return of the good Paul Verhoeven movie.
Koch, superb in The Lives of Others, and van Houten are invaluable here. I wrote a few paragraphs ago that van Houten is one of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in the movies. She’s also a sharp, charismatic actress, handling tones that turn on a dime with the ease of a seasoned pro. The most important thing though, is that you like her, root for her, and van Houten seems to sense this, because she doesn’t bend over backwards trying to appeal to your sympathies. van Houten’s performance is brave, commanding and unsentimental. Rachel is a survivor. As simple as that, this is a tough young woman, a warrior who happens to look like something too stunning, too naughty, to even appear in your inner fantasies.
Koch is playing the opposite of his character in Others here. Or is he? Black Book is more ambitious than you initially assume. The film is, first and foremost, melodrama, but the third act is a shockingly convincing anti-war film, evil is among all of us, even the fallen, even the victimized, and things can change on a whim. Nothing new for the war film of course, but Verhoeven handles the theme gently and with ease. No self-congratulatory story killing pontificating here, a major character’s death is handled briskly, matter of factly, and that haunted me more than anything to appear in the many Iraq movies that I largely didn’t see. Verhoeven has refound himself, he’s ALIVE again. The women make him hard again, the violence revs him up again, but, for once, and this is promising, he’s scared of the horrors he unleashes.
★★★½
There Will Be Blood (2007)
There’s a tendency in people to believe that most great movies are impenetrable, that they contain a series of elusive codes and symbols that need to be poured over and deciphered. The film buffs relish this of course, but this belief may turn the more casual filmgoer off, believing a supposed Great Movie to be more trouble than it’s worth. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is certainly such a movie. Many will try to figure it out, many will write well intentioned college papers, but the most confounding thing about Anderson’s new film may be how up front it actually is. The film is stripped down, blunt, brutal, as single minded in its pursuit as its protagonist, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis.)
There Will Be Blood may be, at just over 150 minutes, one of Anderson’s longest pictures, but it’s his leanest work since his debut, Hard Eight. There Will Be Blood isn’t Citizen Kane, it isn’t The Treasure of the Sierre Madre (which I said after reading the script six months ago), it’s a classically structured horror film: concerned with one very disturbed man, who over and over tries to reach out to the society he doesn’t understand, and over and over fails. Whether or not he ultimately breaks through the cocoon of his own dementia is the central conflict, the drive of the film, symbolized, if you must, by the continuing explosions of the substance of his trade, oil.
It would also be tempting to write that There Will Be Blood is about The Twin Evils of Our Country, as personified by Plainview and his conflict with an opportunistic young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). But, again, I don’t think the film is truly interested in this pursuit. Watch how the film opens, and watch how the film closes, it is stubbornly, resolutely, about Daniel Plainview, no more, no less. Listen to Plainview’s final words, they are meant to be taken literally. By the end of the picture, Plainview’s conflict has been decidedly resolved, and his final words reflect that. While we’re talking about what There Will Be Blood is most assuredly NOT, let’s take a moment to note what Plainview is not, and that’s a monster. I’m stunned by the lack of empathy that even perceptive writers have shown in regards to this character. Plainview does monstrous things over the course of the film, no doubt, but he is not a monster. Plainview reaches out to people at least three or four times over the course of the picture, but it’s in his way, his language.
The film bears a bit of resemblance, strangely, to Kubrick’s flawed The Shining. That film WAS about the evil of man, and that was its limitation and mild undoing. Anderson, always a humanist, keeps things personal, intimate. The Andersonian dialogue and homage rich visuals have been starkly pared down, but Anderson’s true overriding obsession remains: the distance between fathers and sons, and the usually uncrossable bridge that exists between the generations. The final scene between Plainview and his surrogate son, H.W. (Barry Del Sherman) seems to me to be the scene that has been powering ever film that Anderson has ever made. Anderson has dug deep within himself to create There Will Be Blood; it’s a relentless, obsessive film about the relentless, obsessive pursuit of unattainable things. There Will Be Blood has been compared to Malick and Kubrick, but it doesn’t have their chic aloof, this is a film that hits hard in a sickening, funny, primal way.
I’ve never seen anything like Daniel Day Lewis’s Plainview (the characters’ names certainly invite a little of that bong water analysis that I just decried). The Huston comparisons are apt, but Huston never had the monstrous need, a determination to purge all vulnerability, that Plainview exhibits here and that actually makes him more fit for organized religion than Sunday. Watch how Plainview sleeps, or how he twists away from crowds like a wounded insect. Watch Plainview’s one moment with one of the little Sunday girls. To call Plainview an outright monster would be to deny the tragedy of There Will Be Blood, and the film is most assuredly a tragedy.
Do you know why I love this movie? And Paul Thomas Anderson’s films in general for that matter? Because they fucking go for it. There Will Be Blood is brilliant, muscular filmmaking, and would be a great movie regardless of how it ended, but it’s the ending that moves the film into the realms of the biggies. Anderson, Lewis, and Dano (who’s just as strong going head to head with one of our great actors in one of his best performances) just plain fucking go for it in the final scene. The film is a tone poem, a huge boil waiting to be lanced, and my oh my how these men lance it. They push into total chaos, of true bugfuck madness, and push and push, and push risking laughter, risking ludicrousness. Anderson has a taste for symmetry and the final scene is everything that the ominous, slow build opening is not, the ending is what Plainview has needed all along, a punch line that recalls the end of Taxi Driver. At the end we’re led to believe that Plainview has obtained the clarity his last name implies, and it couldn’t matter less.
★★★★
I’m Not There (2007)
Anyone who writes about movies in any way has, at one time or another, probably had an imaginary review tucked away before they even see the film in question. Maybe parallel reviews, one a rave, one a pan, one a bit of both, and then they see the film and match the result to the most appropriate of the two or three phantom templates. I walked into Todd Haynes’ sorta Bob Dylan exploration, I’m Not There, with the idea that I would probably write a polite little three or three and half star thing where I mention the beautiful craftsmanship, the brave performances (Cate Blanchett has gotten all the attention, but all of the Dylans are extraordinary in their own way) and leave it at that, having seen the film primarily for the fact that I want my Best of to be as complete as possible.
I’m Not There demolishes this attitude. The film demolishes everything really: the biographical format, past and present tense, the nature of identity, etc, etc. The film recalls Natural Born Killers in that it’s a total explosion of form. I’m Not There is thrilling, obsessive id, a film that needed to be made by its creator. The film is defiantly, confidently art house, but it lends the term credibility again. The film isn’t so much about the unknowability of Bob Dylan, as it is about unknowability period, how personality is defined more by atmosphere than we’d ever care to admit.
I’m Not There also simply makes the music movie thrilling again. The music explodes out of the film in torrents of inexpressible need and exhilaration. The film had me, about fifteen minutes in, as we see Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) play “Tombstone Blues” with a bunch of old bluesman on a porch somewhere in the legendary, ultra photogenic South. This is what other music films, in their cloying obligation to be all things to all PG people, have usually missed: the pure, intangible, salty necessity to play music with strangers somewhere in a place you barely recognize.
The film manages something else: it questions the mystique of Dylan, the self-important lack of self-importance, and totally buys into it at the same time. I’m Not There could almost be said to be structured as a chase film, with Dylan, in his various personifications, on the continued run from people who wish to explain and contextualize him. Reporters, lovers, anyone. I’ll confess: I think the Dylan of the 1960s and 1970s, is, obvious brilliance notwithstanding, an insufferably pretentious ass. The music rocks and works just like everyone says it does, but the cryptic double speak of Dylan’s interviews has always driven me a little batshit. The film, in its loyalty to this aspect of Dylan, becomes tedious for portions of the second half; we’re drunk on Haynes’ extraordinary skill and hung-over on Dylan’s poetry in equal measure. The film is exhausting and I was about to write it off as a stunt that’s not quite the sum of its intentionally desperate parts.
Then all of the strands, the Woody Guthrie, the Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), the Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), the Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), the Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), the de facto narrator Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) reach an existential crescendo of despair that overwhelmed me. The title track kicks in and the scope of Haynes’ intentions crystallizes in one of the more emotionally cathartic and shattering things to be seen in a film of 2007. This what is what David Lynch achieved in Mulholland Dr. and didn’t quite bring off in his even more ambitious but troubled Inland Empire: a gut punch of primal need, a portrait of a person or persons so lost in themselves that they are incapable of any connection with another human being. The characters’ devotion to their craft is the connection and possible salvation, and the film is honest in refusing to hint at whether this may or may not be enough. That is the hauntingly elusive answer of I’m Not There.
The film needs to be seen several times to be properly digested. It’s dense and live wire. Unhinged, reckless and extraordinary. I’m Not There may even be a movie that I see and hate the next time I see it, but I will always be grateful to Haynes for the experience I initially had. For all its indulgences and warts, I’m Not There is one of the ultimate artist films, one the ultimate chaos of the 1960s-1970s films and one of the ultimate time travel Fellini pictures all rolled into one big, bursting, unwieldy package. In short, Haynes has made one of the absolutely unmissable movies of the year.
★★★★
Interview (2007)
The opening of Steve Buscemi’s Interview is as curt and direct as the film’s protagonists pretend to be. Pierre (Buscemi), a fallen political journalist, whines to his damaged brother about a puff piece he’s being forced to do on the new star de jour, Katya (Sienna Miller). Katya practices her lines for an amusingly awful gig on a Dawson’s Creek wannabe with her co-star. Katya remembers, an hour after the fact, that she’s to meet a journalist to promote her new, to quote Pierre, “slasher film”. Pierre and Katya meet at the restaurant, disastrously, and leave separately a few moments later. Then something happens, and Katya and Pierre find themselves killing a few bottles of wine and bourbon and scotch together in Katya’s absurdly glamorous loft, and the interview proper begins.
Buscemi, remaking a film by director Theo van Gogh, has made a film in which two very fractured, insecure people meet and proceed, for the next eighty minutes and change, to personify everything that the other fears that society actually thinks of them. Pierre plays on Katya’s need to be seen as something other than sexy tabloid fodder, and Katya continually rubs in that, regardless of her importance in the grand scheme, she’s more important to most people than Pierre’s political grandstanding.
Pierre is sharper and more manipulative than Katya intially grasps, and Katya is even more aware of her every gesture, the stretch of the back, the purr of a seemingly insignificant detail, than even Pierre initially thinks. Katya appears to be the most cliched of movie stars, she wears her entitlement like she’s embarrassed about it, but, of course, she’s not. This second element, the actual expectation of the privilege, is not the hidden thing she’s fakes or conceals. The hidden thing is that there is NO hidden thing. Katya isn’t an onion, she’s an everlasting gobbstopper, one flavor morphs into another and then morphs back into the first flavor again. It’s all true, and all false.
Interview isn’t a bitter, misogynist fantasy though, Pierre’s hypocrisy and hall of mirrors evasion is just as apparent, and possibly more insidious, because he has the shield of self-righteousness. Pierre is the one we instinctively root for (unless you’re a movie star yourself, and if you are and reading this I’d love a blurb) and he plays his unattractiveness, his honed intelligence and indignity, the exact same way Katya plays the opposite qualities. Put these two in the same room together and you have a metaphor for about ninety percent of what is wrong with this country. These two are channeling the simmering hatred and frustrations of an entire country but we can’t help but really wonder if they’ll fuck.
Look, I know all this sounds like a college thesis wank, and that, to a certain extent, is impossible to escape. Buscemi and Miller, onscreen together nearly the entire time, are the reason to see the film. They breathe life into the platitudes I just described, and turn every nightmarish verbal reversal into something vicious, erotic, dazzling. Miller has been the almost Next Big Thing for a few years now, and it’s sad that it finally happened in a film five people (including me) saw. She’s brilliant, one of the best performances of either gender in the entire year. Her Katya may very well be one of the definitive portraits of the Actress. Miller has always been a beautiful woman, but she seems for the first time to be in total command of her appearance. She, like the character, continues to bamboozle us, to play our assumptions of the Actress against us. Her voice is even different here, huskier than you expect, hungrier, but that just may be another of Her Things, an instrument of distraction, but maybe the fact that you expect it to be a distraction is the actual distraction.
Buscemi is just as good, but not as surprising, as he’s been providing definitive portraits of the self-loathing loser for the better part of twenty years. The surprise with Buscemi may lie in his directorial performance here, and I say that as someone who loved his debut, Trees Lounge. Buscemi, as well as anyone I can recall, trumps the limitations of the one set chamber play, and really makes the thing sing. The film never feels static or stagy; it’s electric, humming with the characters’ desires. This may have been what James Toback was after in his silly, laughably self-absorbed Two Girls and Guy.
Interview doesn’t go wrong until the end, where it mistakenly provides a Victor to cap off the night’s proceedings. There are a couple of reversals before the end that work just fine, but I didn’t believe the final few minutes, they’re too cathartic. We shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily; we should leave the theatre bewildered.
I’m going to go on record, though, and say that film and theatre students most assuredly should NOT see Interview. Buscemi and Miller make this sort of battle of the sexes as really about something else thing look too easy, it could inspire too many dangerously banal imitators. Scratch that, I’ll risk it. All film and theatre students should see Interview, if only for the chance it inspires at least one of them to make another like it.
★★★½
Nobody’s Fool (1994)
The idea was to take a look at Steve Buscemi’s Interview this morning, but my brothers are currently over for the Holidays and a probing look at celebrity was not on their agenda. I didn’t press too hard though, I’m hoping to take at least one of them to I’m Not There in the coming days. We’ll save the good will for that.
All was forgotten and forgiven anyway when Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool was found only about ten minutes in playing on HBO last night. I’ve always loved this film, and remember seeing it and Shallow Grave in the same night as a freshman in high school. I think the Brady Bunch movie was big that weekend, but I was watching Paul Newman’s Sully hobble around Bath County, getting into a series of mildly coming of age adventures with his son (Dylan Walsh), his on again off again boss (Bruce Willis, one of his sharpest little performances), his on again off again landlord (Jessica Tandy) and several others. I fell in love immediately, and, if I recall correctly, this was the first time I looked at Paul Newman and saw him as more than one of my father’s leading men. This was one of my leading men too, this is one of OUR leading men, a man of rare, deep, but unsentimental humanity.
Of course, there’s a bit of fantasy to be indulged in here, there was in the Richard Russo novel too. We all wish we could be as charming about not fulfilling life’s obligations and fantasies as Newman’s Sully. The performance and the film idealize this a little, the idea of not having a job, being totally free, and shambling from one little episode to the next. Benton, along with Russo, who helped him on the script, don’t totally bail out though, the tug between the idealized and the raw is what lends the film a slightly topsy turvy, loopy power, you’re laughing and then a moment later you realize that wasn’t so funny. The Dylan Walsh character, who isn’t half as charismatic as the dad who abandoned him (Walsh knows this, and that makes it all the worse), continually blindsides Sully, and us, with references to his wrongdoing. Sully doesn’t usually reply, and that’s part of the charm, he never evades his sentence, he’s cast himself as the no good absentee father, and he’s determined to see the part through and not rob his son of the hatred he’s entitled to have.
Why aren’t there more films like Nobody’s Fool? Films that toss the three act structure aside and simply BE. Sideways is such a film. So is Wonder Boys. Nobody’s Fool is one of those films that’s so generous of spirit that you put away your critic’s cap and forgive it of its flaws, of which there are admittedly a few. Robert Benton (who directed Kramer vs. Kramer as well as co-writing Bonnie and Clyde for Pete’s sake) sometimes doesn’t quite trust us to be sufficiently moved, he applies the music a little too liberally in places. Things occassionally fit in their coming of age slot a little too neatly, the characters should be a little messier.
But these are minor issues. Sully is, along with Fast Eddie, Hud, and a few others, one of Paul Newman’s greatest creations. Benton also, refreshingly, gets small towns, understands how they can be suffocating and comforting in the same measure. Benton gets the pleasures of knowing everyone who eats in the cafe for breakfast, or the wonderful informalities of traditionally red tapeish affairs (I love that Sully is let out of jail to be a pall bearer.) The film skirts Mayberry tedium because it never plays the small town tropes as vaudeville, and the pain that Sully’s self-absorption has caused is never entirely forgotten.
I have to also confess that Nobody’s Fool rings a particularly personal bell for me as well. Sully reminds me just a little bit of my father, who has a habit of being everywhere and nowhere at once. I’ve spent many days in my youth going from place to place with my father and talking and eating and hearing stories and getting into little episodes. The final image of Nobody’s Fool is particularly moving and completely earned: Sully propping what’s left of his body up, a bit of rest fleetingly granted.
★★★½
Lust, Caution (2007)
Or, a gifted director finally crystallizes the pet obsession of his fifteen year filmography and no one gives a shit. Ang Lee, the director of Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (no one mentions Hulk, though thematically it fits, which may have been the problem) has with, Lust, Caution returned to China with a story of espionage and passion that bares more than a passing resemblance, like several other recent thrillers, to Hitchcock’s Notorious. How refreshing it is then that a director actually EXPANDS on the Master’s thriller, and delivers a sharp, ripe film of devastating poignance.
We immediately know we’re in a more urgent Ang Lee movie as the camera sweeps over four ladies in the midst of a game of mahjong. The camera is quick and desperate, trying to keep up with the waves of unspoken things that hang in the room. A gentleman enters soon after, and the pregnant tension increases exponentially. You may accuse Lust, Caution of many things, but you won’t find it lacking in pregnant tension.
Which I think has been the problem for some people. You either get into these long slow burns, moments that are extended until the breaking point and then extended a few moments longer, or you don’t. When a director is this in his mojo, and has as much control over his medium as Lee does here, I say go for it. The film’s look, the sound, the mood, everything is lush and elegant.
And the story itself couldn’t be older. We open in Shangai 1944 on a beautiful young woman, Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), a student who falls in with a mysterious political figure whom she’s meant to expose so that an amateur team of would be revolutionaries can assassinate him. That figure is Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who is supposedly torturing information out of the resistance to Japan’s occupation of China. We flash back to the young girl, and to how she was recruited into the effort, and how she conspired to meet Mr. Yee.
The film is a remarkable work of empathy. Lee seduces us into buying into Chi’s view point. We see Shanghai as she would, a sensual place of mystery and danger. We also see Mr. Yee as she would, a charismatic, older shadow who promises (primarily sexual) experiences that have eluded her up to this point. The first hour or so is foreplay. We build. Build. Build. Mr. Yee takes Chi to a tailor to help him with a new suit. That becomes dinner. She invites him in for tea (where her party awaits to kill him) he looks her over…and declines. This is the ripe sexual danger of the old school thrillers, and Lee, at times a bit too cautious for his own good, is in peak form here. He plays with you, and…
…Chi’s little girl bubble bursts in a shocking, vicious anti-climax. Yee finally consumates both of their desires, and his brutish way with her will stick with you. Yee is reasserting his masculinity, the ground he feels he’s losing with Chi, but he’s also not sure of her. He suspects something, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that he, especially that first time, is trying to fuck her to death. And she, of course, finds that she likes it. Watch how Yee is with her after that first time, and how he turns an offering of a coat into a thinly veiled proclamation of whoredom. The other trysts, which earned the film an NC-17, are even more powerful. These two want each other so bad, are so confused with yearning and duplicity and all of the other things that are closing in on them from outside, that they want to fuck THROUGH one another, to find some new cleansing communication that can perhaps be a signal of escape.
Of course, Chi’s loyalties become confused. But do Yee’s? This is where Lee has saved his final black joke, taking it further than Hitchcock ever dared, painting Lee’s most convincing portait of society as toxic suppresser of our hidden values. Leung, a long time star and collaborator of Kar Wai Wong’s, is at his career best here. Mysterious. Pained. Animal. And just plain fucking movie star cool. Wei Tang, in her first picture, is even better in a more ambitious, demanding part. Something tells me that time will be kind to Lust, Caution and that a critical re-evaluation will take place. This movie is too accomplished and forceful.
★★★★
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