Romance and Cigarettes (2007)
Over the weekend I revisited Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz; primarily because I had just mentioned it in the Scheider piece and remembered that I hadn’t seen it in a LONG time. I wanted to ensure I wasn’t talking out of my ass, and I wasn’t, Scheider remains superb and the film, like Fosse’s Cabaret, manages a striking tone: dark and bubbly, almost giddy at first: in the mindset of the hero all the way, but with a gradual slide that reveals the hero’s perspective to be quite fallible, the giddiness stripped away to reveal a pitiful waste of life. I then popped in John Turturro’s long delayed Romance and Cigarettes, and found that I had accidentally planned an ideal double feature.
Someone said this, and I don’t know who, but we need to bring movies back a bit from the realm of the literal. David Lynch is certainly fighting the good fight, but we need more troops. There is a place for stripped down reality in films, of course, but we need to understand that there is more room for the fantastic too, and I don’t mean more horror and science-fiction (though good members of those genres are always welcome). I mean films that utilize the inherent benefits of the medium more, that explore the mindset of our heroes with less interest in what “actually happens” in favor of a greater interest in something more surreal and, ultimately, just as true. Most movies, even the acclaimed movies, aren’t anything like life anyway, so why let that hang-up fetter the imagination of our greatest filmmakers?
Turturro’s imagination certainly isn’t fettered in Romance and Cigarettes; this is a ballsy, swing for the back row picture. The film should be disjointed and absurd; insufferably self-absorbed and artificial, but it isn’t, and there’s one reason: Turturro has conviction in his film, there’s no last minute pull-out to appeal to less adventurous audience’s tastes, no apology, he follows his impulses to the very end.
The characters of Romance and Cigarettes don’t talk as people in real life; they talk as the dime store novelists of our dreams: overflowing with the kind of awkward, poetic obscenity that we wish could conjure at a second’s notice. Fantasies appear and disappear at whim, symbols are abundant and disarmingly obvious, and, best of all, popular songs are always available at the slightest provocation to vent the intangible disappointments that plague us. Turturro taps into the primal appeal of the musical that seems to elude many modern practitioners of the form: the release. Camera pyrotechnics are beside the point, it’s the emotions that should be blunt and in the foreground, everything else will follow.
I’m also happy to report that James Gandolfini has finally found a post-Tony Soprano part that suits his vicious Teddy Bear contradictions, that tweaks and refines his image in equal measure. Gandolfini hasn’t been this good in a movie since his brilliant bit in the best scene of True Romance, where he explains to a dizzy, battered Patricia Arquette the history of his induction into killing for money. It’s a chilling bit of work, but, like all the great movie sociopaths, Gandolfini remains undeniably appealing, or if not appealing, at least a little vulnerable, we’re ashamed of ourselves for (sort of) liking this guy.
Gandolfini plays Nick Murder (a wink at Tony?) a heavy, sad, ironic lothario whose infidelity is discovered by his wife, Kitty (Susan Sarandon, terrific) within minutes of the opening of the picture. The couple, still clearly very much in love, trade movie barbs with savage gusto, but it’s soon obvious that Nick isn’t going to be forgiven anytime soon. Nick isn’t even sure if he should be forgiven, being that he still hasn’t managed to quit his insatiable other woman, Tula (Kate Winslet). Nick and Kitty’s separate, desperate wanderings comprise the majority of what follows in Romance and Cigarettes: Kitty tries to find Tula to exact revenge; Nick tries to shake Tula and be the family man that he wishes he could be.
There’s a bit of macho idealization going on here, with two attractive women battling it out over a man who wouldn’t look out of place under a bridge, but the sheer force of the piece holds it together. Romance and Cigarettes isn’t a thinly veiled appeal for the right to screw around, it’s tender and melancholy, a pop art collage of surprising weight. By the end, the cost of Nick’s self-absorption has undeniably been acknowledged, particularly in his final encounter with Tula by the water.
Tula has been, up until this moment, one of Winslet’s gaudiest and most outsized creations, a coarse burlesque of a wife’s worst nightmare of the “other woman.” Winslet’s work is striking throughout, but it doesn’t become one of her best until this final scene. Nick finally ends it with Tula, and she gasps and falls into the water: singing as she sinks. The image of this fallen young women is beautiful and haunting, like something out of a good silent film that Tim Burton never got to make, and as “truthful” as any hundred more subtle scenes.
Some of you are going to watch Romance and Cigarettes, or have watched it, and think me absolutely nuts. It’s that kind of picture: squirrelly, impossible to pin down, and infuriating for those who don’t want to play along. Normally this would be my spot to rant about how unjust it is that such a good movie sat around for so long, but, in this case, I’m not surprised. It’s too bad though, because we need more movies this messy, this human, this willing to be patched and imperfect. These kinds of pictures can be awful, but, at their best, they can also be the kinds of pictures you think about when you shave in the morning. Watch Romance and Cigarettes, All That Jazz, and The Fountain close together over a weekend, and see if that following Monday isn’t just a bit different from the Monday before it.
★★★½
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Apparently 2007 is the year in which Hollywood set out to shut general malcontents like myself up and release a career summing masterpiece once every three weeks on the dot. Faithful readers, you probably think me a whore, or easily pleased. Not the case, at least I don’t think. Since writing for my little site though, the films have just happened to be, generally, pretty damn good. Come to think of it, maybe I should take some credit for that. I’m more than happy to assume some sort advisorial position on any film in which the producer would have me.
And so now we have Tim Burton, and his reworking of the famed production Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In terms of comparing one production to the other, I’m afraid I’ll be of little service. My familiarity with the source material is limited to the knowledge that the stage had two levels. I also knew of Sweeney’s preoccupation with ventilating people’s throats and of a certain Mrs. Lovett who happened to have a practical and sound business solution to all the bodies piling around.
I do know, however, that Burton has made a wonderful film: robust, lean, vicious, extraordinary. Burton may have been leasing his talents in the service of another’s vision, but what arrives on the screen seems to be vintage Burton, only tempered with a refreshing, newfound discipline. Sweeney Todd is pitch black demonic outrage, undiluted by the John Waters Light satire that has aged some of Burton’s earlier work. Sweeney Todd, as embodied by Johnny Depp, gets to finally indulge in what was truly meant to be Edward Scissorhands’ vocation: cut the living shit out of the fat, the pretentious, the comfortable, the false.
One would think that a film like Sweeney Todd would be an excuse for an eccentric like Depp to really cut lose and chew the scenery. Not so. Depp’s thing has always been his unpredictability, but even that, obviously, can be predictable and comfortable after awhile. Depp senses this and withdraws, his Todd is aloof, barely tangible, barely a character really. The film is starkly unsentimental in his complete, total insanity. The notion that Todd will be a classically wronged character is abandoned early on when he slits the first total innocent’s throat, and gleefully sends them tumbling down to Mrs. Lovett’s oven. Todd only asserts himself in cold blooded murder, and in delivering ironically beautiful ballads that don’t seem to belong in the film…until you begin to actually take in the lyrics. Depp’s voice clearly wasn’t built for musicals, but that’s precisely the point: the barber Todd isn’t built, or meant, for anything.
Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) seems to think she’s built for Todd, and this becomes the most unusual and surprisingly moving unrequited love story in the Burton cannon. Carter has been criticized in certain circles for this performance, but I think she’s terrific: the perfect human embodiment of the sort of distorted gothic China doll that Burton almost always strives for. She may actually be why Sweeney Todd is so effective; right in the center of all the constricted brutality lays a perfectly sweet little romance between a cannibal and a mass murderer. Lovett’s appeal to Todd’s romantic side, “By the Sea”, stays with you as you walk out of the theatre.
So does Ed Sanders’ Toby, a little boy caught in the middle of Todd’s warfare with London, Lovett, and a barber named Pirelli (Sasha Baron Cohen.) Sanders has a dazzling number himself, “Not While I’m Around”, that manages to go for the heartstrings without being cloying or compromising the decay of the rest of the Burton production. Cohen’s Pirelli is also a near showstopper, confirming the Sellers comparison to be quite apt indeed.
But I seem to be writing in circles here, listing like a ticker tape the various things I enjoyed about Burton’s film. Sweeney Todd hit me in way I can’t quite articulate. Todd, again like many films this year, feels like the picture the director in question has been marching toward his entire career. The film is an intense, emotional, bloody, very bloody, intangibly brilliant filet mignon of a gothic musical, and a major return to form for a director I used to revere.
★★★★
Day Nine: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
The musical that most people watch around this time of year is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but, excluding the Meat Loaf number and Tim Curry’s performance, I always found that film to be better in theory than reality. Phantom of the Paradise is that reality, a pop culture blender imbued through and through with director Brian De Palma’s pure cinematic fervor.
You may exhaust yourself trying to play the game of spot the reference. Here’s a head start: The Phantom of the Opera (clearly), Faust (also pretty clear being that the film, typical of its super reflexive nature, works it into the plot), The Picture of Dorian Gray (tied to Faust in an amusingly ludicrous way), Edgar Allan Poe, German Expressionism, Glam Rock, The Twilight Zone, Folk, The Beach Boys, Psycho, etc.
Those were the things I caught watching it myself, I read a few reviews after watching the film and they mentioned others, but I will be fair and not include those here. The most remarkable thing about Phantom of the Paradise is that these references don’t bog it down. The film is a lean, hellfire 88 minutes, and the references fuse and compliment one another in ways that mark De Palma as a swifter and more inventive screenwriter than is generally acknowledged.
The film’s more contemporary at the time musical numbers may be dated, but De Palma’s central black theme is as ageless as a certain someone’s portrait: our infinite moral and artistic flexibility in the pursuit of fame and money. De Palma’s film isn’t weighted down by this though, its a joke, and its underlined by how many people in the film are revealed to have made a Faustian pact (at least three characters, and there aren’t too many more characters in the movie.)
The Faustian pacts ultimately bring our three characters down though, because one of them, Swan (Paul Williams, who also wrote the music, and is very effective here), has an ego too large to properly protect his contract with Satan. It’s hidden along with other records and documents helpfully labeled: Contract. Our hero, Winslow Leach (William Finley), now the Phantom, finds it and turns the tables in a garish climax that’s a comment on garish climaxes, but is still a garish climax in its own right.
The third character is Phoenix (Jessica Harper, from another genre milestone, Suspiria) and she is the object of Swan and the Phantom’s rivalry. Swan seems more interested in her as an instrument to torment the Phantom, and the Phantom is the sort of perpetually hung up artistic putz who thinks she’s the only one to sing his music. Phoenix sells out too, gets hooked by Swan on various drugs, and becomes the embodiment of everything the Phantom loathes, though he doesn’t ever seem to realize it.
De Palma’s techinique can sometimes drown the story he’s chosen to tell (though that’s the point most of the time), but Phantom of the Paradise is the kind of reflexive hall of mirrors that perfectly suits his masturbatory, speed demon cineast tendencies. The film is one of De Palma’s fastest and surest, and works confidently as musical, slapstick comedy, post modern art, and, at times as a straight piece of intense operatic melodrama. It’s also, and this is important, not afraid to be a little silly. It’s a Brechtian Mel Brooks horror film, which, in short, means its a classic Brian De Palma film.
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