The Orphanage (2007)
Of the various chambers that exist in the manor that is the horror genre, the haunted house picture may be the picture that’s most encouraging of that potentially exhilarating, disconcerting wedding of appealing cinematic surfaces (think of the smooth, deep, ironically beautiful cinematography that characterizes The Innocents) with the dank emotional textures that constitute our everyday fears. Of all the possibilities the horror genre offers, the haunted house picture is perhaps the ripest metaphorically, which is saying something. We know that haunted house pictures, or stories of the supernatural in general, deal with the fear of dying, with fear of the dark, of change and moving on, with deep buried skeletons in the closet, but they’re usually just as concerned with the breakdown of the family unit; the fear, not of the skeletons, but of the necessity to face the judgment and pent-up emotional heat of our family once said skeletons are revealed; the fear of discovering your relatives, not as your relatives, but as flawed beings with their own agendas and damage.
The Orphanage is clearly, undeniably, indebted to many of the usual suspects of the haunted house genre, particularly those that concern themselves with the fragile mental state of young-middle-aged women such as the aforementioned The Innocents or The Others; but this film has an emotional intensity that transcends the puzzle-box tropes (the red herrings, the bumps in the night, the doubts of sanity) that dominate some of the modern movies; this picture is beautiful, but it doesn’t have a vice directorial grip, there’s an empathy here. New director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez have invested an old genre (that I love) with a tang of real passion and undoing; you watch the picture less for the punch-line and more out of a legitimate, rare, fevered concern for the protagonist. Bayona has unavoidably been compared to Guillermo Del Toro (who serves as “presenter” here) and that’s partially valid, but it’s a mark of the picture’s generous, human appeal that Pedro Almodóvar just as easily came to mind. The Orphanage, like much of Almodóvar’s work, is concerned with women first and foremost: their fears, their burdens, their reservoirs of strength and pain.
The Orphanage has you from the title; it’s an uneasy word, signaling an uncomfortable reality of injustice and partial breakdown. We don’t like the word under the cheeriest of contexts (providing there are any) much less as the title of a horror picture. The film opens, as many of these pictures have a habit of opening, in the past. Children are playing a game outside of the orphanage, which is appropriately, diabolically grand, elaborate and beautiful; the ideal breeding ground for ill will and wrong doing. An adult watches the children play from inside, and informs a caller that Laura has not yet learned that she is to leave the orphanage.
The image fades and we are then introduced to the adult Laura (Belén Rueda), the implications of that past day left hanging as one of many question marks that soon follow. Laura has returned to reopen the orphanage, accompanied by her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) and child, Simón (Roger Príncep). Bayona has a young filmmaker’s fun (as well as a talented filmmaker’s flair for) taunting us with the various clicks and uh-ohs that traditionally comprise the first act of these pictures. A social worker with sad, bug-eyed glasses (Montserrat Carulla) appears, projecting all around strangeness as well as a disturbingly specific knowledge of Simón’s background; Simón, already socially troubled and drawn toward the imaginary, tells Laura of new invisible friends that bear a disturbing resemblance to Laura’s own childhood peers, they also have a disconcerting habit of leaving very real footprints behind. Simón, in one of the more unnerving bits in the film, even leaves seashells behind so his new friends can find their way back…
It would be unfair to discuss the picture’s plot any further, but I will say that these films hinge on their ending as much as any other genre in the business. The Others is a luscious, scary ghost story with a fine Nicole Kidman performance (perhaps her best) but the ending was disappointingly derivative of another recent scare picture, and I guessed it before the half-way mark. The Haunting’s implication that poor Eleanor would forever be among the house’s many tortured spirits is satisfyingly eerie and circular, and helped put that film (as well as the book) over to legendary status. The ultimate resolution of The Orphanage is far-flung, but it’s also a simple, ghastly doozy. Bayona almost squanders the force of it with an epilogue that’s leftover Pan’s Labyrinth, but that’s splitting hair.
Rueda (The Sea Inside) is a beautiful, expressive actress and she invests Laura with a survivor’s guilt and distance that deepens the themes of the genre without editorializing or killing their livelihood. Laura is a woman, a possibly failed, self-loathing protector, not another princess ripe for murder. Carulla is frightening in a bit that skirts cliché to lend the picture its quiet, admirably gray moral longing. Geraldine Chaplin appears, in a bit that resembles Poltergeist in conception but (thankfully) not execution (that picture relied on effect after effect for affect). The Orphanage sketches Chaplin in green light, and lets you do the rest, that haunted, piercing face another indelible portrait of the fade that powers all of these pictures and that eventually comes to consume everyone.
The Orphanage isn’t a classic, it’s ultimately more about past genre films than anything else, but it’s a visually magnificent, rewarding picture, and Bayona already, refreshingly, understands that the dark can’t rival what you’re faced with when you catch your reflection unexpectedly, whether it be during the day or at night.
★★★½
Starting Out in the Evening (2007)
Coming of age stories can certainly be comforting, we’d all like to believe that a super lay or a chance meeting with someone older, established or famous (or a super lay with someone older, established or famous) will filter the confusion out of our lives and send us ready and willing toward whatever may be next. Coming of age pictures generally portray life as a light-switch that only requires a flicking from off to on, no wavering, nothing, when you’re on, you’re on, and everything’s a okay. The movies rarely acknowledge that our lives have a habit of going up and down, side to side, one day you’re winning, one day you’re losing, another day you’re winning again, another day you’re losing yet again. One day you’re over your young life crisis, while yet another day you find yourself racing straight into your mid-life crisis: drinking coffee and wondering why you watched all those coming of age movies. It has a disappointing third act, but The Graduate is a coming of age film that ends on a moving, and honestly unsettling note, sure, we’re here, but what the fuck now?
There’s all kinds of coming of age stories of course, the sexual experience with the older person, the infatuation with something (or someone) that (or who) turns out to be shit and representative of our childish delusions, the teacher who fights the system and imparts discipline in students everyone else has given up on, as well as the one about the strange, possibly sexually confused (if the genders are aligned correctly) relationship that can unexpectedly arise between an older, faded, past his prime writer and a young, precocious, energetic student who reveres the faded, past his prime writer. We know how these stories work: the student imparts a new sense of life to the teacher, while the teacher nurtures within the student a newfound discipline and sense of life’s fragility. I don’t remember much of Finding Forrester, but that was a recent example of this later type of coming of age picture. Wonder Boys would be another, but that was a wonderful movie because it had a sense of the genre’s necessities, and while it didn’t discard them, it admirably tweaked them and sent them scurrying in unexpectedly anarchic directions. Wonder Boys had a sense of humor, of play, and, most important, a sense of humanity.
Normally these pictures’ rigid devotion to formula causes them to forsake common sense. Starting Out in the Evening is the most joyless kind of formula picture, a self-conscious, self-righteous formula picture that knows the clichés, tries to transcend them, but has no idea what else to offer in place of the predictable pleasures. The director, Andrew Wagner, doesn’t supply the usual bombast, there’s no grand fight the system climax, and the conversations between the teacher/writer (Frank Langella) and the student (Lauren Ambrose) have a refreshingly true ring, they talk like two people who may have actually read a few books as opposed to watching movies about people who read books. This picture, no doubt, begins promisingly, but it’s dry and lifeless, and a subplot with the teacher’s daughter (Lili Taylor), meant to, in case we miss it, further highlight his self-absorption and emotional cowardice, goes nowhere; it’s dead weight in a picture that’s already perilously close to sinking. You may also find the film’s one note, pro-life, seize the day hammering exhausting, and perhaps even a little offensive.
Starting Out in the Evening is a failure of empathy as well as imagination, uncomfortably judgmental of its protagonist, the teacher, here called Leonard Schiller (the name is appropriate, pictures featured of Langella in his youth recall a young Leonard Cohen). The student, here called Heather Wolfe (more appropriate than the film apparently knows) repeatedly harangues Schiller for abandoning the passion of his earlier novels in favor of something colder, more considered and political. Schiller explains to Wolfe that those early books were written in one part of his life, the later books in another. That, God forbid, made sense to me.
We call it change, but these kinds of movies are usually only interested in promoting a change that leaves a thoughtless, shallow smile on your face as you leave the theatre, a true consideration of the ramifications of life’s choices is rarely on the menu. Later in the picture, the teacher’s daughter’s boyfriend (Adrian Lester) tells the daughter that he loves Schiller’s later work, it’s brilliant, “about something” (a sentiment that’s usually mocked as the height of deluded pretension in these kinds of pictures) and I perked up. Would Starting Out in the Evening dare imagine a scenario in which the young, green, bullying, faintly psychotic student isn’t armed with the most valid opinion? (Keep in mind the word opinion, the film doesn’t, her appraisal of Schiller’s work is to be accepted no questions asked, while everyone surrounding her, all older, all possibly more knowledgeable, are elitist fatheads. The girl’s own elitism, which she boasts of at one point, is never contested.) The answer is no, the Lester character is meant to be a jerk, another testament to Schiller’s head-up-his-own-assedness.
Starting Out in the Evening is well-performed, particularly by Langella, who brings an unsentimental humanity to his role that is quite endearing (he does wonders with the line “you’ve brought an old man some excitement”), and the final image (implying that change is something that, refreshingly, arrives bit by bit) works, but it’s not enough, the film is youth pandering claptrap, encouraging the newer generation’s (of which I’m a part) egotistical belief that they are of the most value, and that the old guys need to duck out of the way of their all encompassing brilliance. The picture is also probably critic pandering claptrap as well, one of those formula pictures dressed up in just enough literacy to be taken as “indy.” Don’t feel guilty if you find yourself bored watching Starting Out in the Evening, it is, in fact, boring.
★★
Inside (2007)
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s Inside is a beautiful junk painting of your worst nightmares, probably the most potent exploitation of unyielding, inexplicable violation that I’ve seen since Takashi Miike’s Audition. Like Miike at his more unhinged (and Audition isn’t it) Bustillo and Maury announce their total lack of regard for all notions of good taste and restraint with their opening image: a severe car accident as seen and experienced by an unborn child. One moment the child is soothed by his mother’s loving (if still somewhat alarming) words, the next he’s jolted and throttled, blood rising and floating from the inside.
The pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) and her unborn child do manage to survive, but Sarah’s husband isn’t as fortunate. Sarah, her face plastered in distinctly French movie blood, looks over at her husband and wails. Four months later, it’s Christmas Eve and Sarah’s doctor informs her that she’s to give birth the following day and advises that she go home and relax in that cool, condescending manner with which doctors, or people who know you’ve recently lost someone, speak so fluently. Sarah’s employer and mother separately beg her to spend Christmas with them, but Sarah, confused, bitter, lonely, demurs and returns to her home to spend Christmas Eve alone. Sarah, inevitably of course, comes to regret that decision when a strange woman (Béatrice Dall, unforgettable), referred to simply in the credits as “la femme”, knocks on Sarah’s door in the black of the night and asks to be let in. Sarah, seeing only a dark shadow, and not as stupid as many in these types of pictures, tells the woman to scram, but this femme isn’t so easily dissuaded. Soon it’s unavoidably evident that the woman has come for Sarah’s child, and she doesn’t intend to leave without it.
Inside’s opening act is superb; a stylish, slow-burn emotional penetration that seemingly plays every one of your primal campfire fears against you: the inexplicable stranger, the dark, dank lonely night, the policemen who come and go to little avail, the dreams of your child revolting inside you. Sarah’s home is distinctly stylish; a movie place of dread; of unspoken, hellish domestic resentment, lit in such pale dusky yellows as to suggest a warm, humid womb itself. The title is, needless to say, multi-tiered in meaning. La femme wants to get inside, inside, inside, and nothing will stop her multiple invasions of Sarah’s taken for granted boundaries: her peace, her house, and ultimately her pregnant body. Bustillo and Maury exploit and extend Sarah’s sudden, burning revulsion and panic with masterful craftsmanship: la femme is equal parts specter (of guilt and bourgeoisie complacency and entitlement), butcher, psychotic and unstoppable culmination of every mother, or human’s worst nightmare. Bustillo and Maury, unlike virtually everyone else working the genre these days, aren’t afraid of being labeled tasteless or psychotic, they want to hammer your pressure points, and they don’t intend to play fair.
The film is surreally, shockingly, grandly, unbelievably, absurdly violent. Inside, because it’s horror and French, has been likened to Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, but that picture blew its load on gory pyrotechnics that had nothing to do with theme or atmosphere. That film was an unintentionally laughable, boring cartoon, with a twist ending that only further highlighted its pointlessness. Inside is, and this is the confusion of it, subjective and exploitive in equal measures. As accomplished as the picture is, it still exudes a problematic carny freak show “look at that!” vibe that borders on inhuman. The film is more original than many slasher pictures, but it’s still rooted in movies above all else. Rear Window? Check. Blood Simple? Check. Wait Until Dark? Check. Every gross horror movie ever made? Check. Woman finally saying fuck it and going all Ripley on us whether it makes sense or not? Check.
The male (probably young) filmmakers get these women, and portray their insecurity, rage, and psychosis with surprisingly fluid ease (until the end, where the Ripley factor kicks in, and we suffer the obligatory “someone’s dead, no they’re not” fake out) but the very male filmmakers also seem to be at a distance that might be inevitable with such a loaded, unavoidably female subject. These guys think this is gross, a woman would think it’s tragic (and gross). The references to the French riots of 2005 hint at a subtext of class resentment that the picture doesn’t seem too interested in capitalizing on, it’s a red herring, a sketch of the boogeyman’s origin that doesn’t really inform the film much one way or the other (though it does season the ultimate punch line). The body invasion of Inside lacks the self body-bewildering kick of an early Cronenberg film because the second and third acts are too indulgently disgusting: Bustillo and Maury don’t have enough faith in their final assault; they threaten to turn it into yet another exhibit in the Grand Guignol theatre of well lit cruelty.
Inside is still a notable, stunning piece of genre filmmaking. (There’s a brilliant, non-violent moment near the beginning where Sarah discovers, via just developed photographs, that la femme has known her for some time.) The violence, before it goes haywire, is ghastly and remarkably apt thematically. The tides of blood flow and spurt and explode, and hauntingly confirm and underline a terrified young woman’s mental implosions. The worst has finally arrived. The film treads uneasily towards High Tension farce near the end but reins it in for a devastating final image that threatens to sink into moral quicksand. Perversion and chaos have stolen life and motherhood and then just as strangely handed them right back, in a Grimm’s fairy tale finale that the filmmakers, in their audacity, seem to believe is a happy one. The ending reveals the filmmakers to possibly be more in touch with their inner woman than we initially assumed, though the horror lies in which woman they appear to be in touch with.
★★★½
Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007)
The glib title is, mercifully, the hardest lump to swallow in Wristcutters: A Love Story, a picture that doesn’t so much evade the Sundance Toys-R-Us “independent” film ingredients (willfully eclectic cast, audience pandering coming of age road movie scenario) as slightly transcend them. These characters aren’t showy about their unhappiness: they drink cheap beer, shoot pool, and work grungy jobs, with little hope of ever turning another corner. They could kill themselves of course, and one would be tempted to consider these indulgent still kinda youths a suicide risk, except they already thought of that. The characters of Wristcutters have all successfully “offed” themselves, and the punishment turns out to be yet another level of thankless not quite middle class hell, an afterlife that, in the words of the star, Zia (Patrick Fugit) is “just slightly shittier than everything before.”
The writer-director, Goran Dukic, apparently understanding that novelty concept afterlife movies don’t normally work (usually a stream of increasingly tiring heavenly puns capped with a self-righteous happy ending), and that coming of age youthster pictures are even more hazardous, finds a careful balance between low comedy and a despair that’s really a gentle befuddlement. We never remotely believe that Zia is detached enough to have actually offed himself, the act feels entirely too heavy for the story that follows, but the picture’s sidestepping of that never really becomes an issue. The film has an early Jim Jarmusch/ Jonathan Demme vibe: affection for its characters, as well as a poignant understanding of its own slightness. We root for Wristcutters.
Or more accurately we root for the three characters the film has to put to the road: Zia, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) and Eugene (Shea Wigham). Zia is looking to find an ex, Mikal is convinced she wound up in the New Jersey karma turnpike wasteland by mistake, and Eugene is trying to get laid. This is the first Fugit picture I’ve seen since Almost Famous, and he proves here, unlike Kate Hudson, that he may not be a one notable performance deal. Fugit has the uncalculated emotional deflation and ironic sex appeal of a young Bud Cort. Like Cort, Fugit glamorizes and satirizes movie character misery in equal measure; you buy his unoriginal problems without feeling stupid in the morning.
Sossamon, winning in the better than it’s thought to be A Knights Tale, has the flakey-hot intelligence of Winona Ryder in the 1980s; an ability, like Fugit, to renew canned clichés and emotions. You want these two to get together (if you thought Fugit was going to get with the ex, you don’t care enough about movies to read my site) because they sell the melting of one another’s mutual self-containment with a minimum of effort; there’s no grand scene or contrivance to shove their affection down our throats, its just, simply, beautifully, there.
Wigham and Tom Waits ensure that Wristcutters meets its weird quotient, but they work. Wigham takes a potentially problem part, “the foreigner”, and scores a few strange comic bulls-eyes, his attempted seduction of Sossamon so shameless and disgusting that you can’t help but root for him. It’s also a shame that Waits doesn’t find more film work that interests him, because he’s a truly original presence in movies: a hipster poet badass with the primal rasp of a great movie monster (his delirious Renfield is a highlight of Coppola’s also underrated Dracula), though Waits might disrupt the consistency of Wristcutters’ vision: its hard to believe that any world with him as a guardian angel can be all that bad.
It’s also testament to the picture’s charm that I not only accepted the ending, but encouraged it: a normally irritating reversal of woes that, for once, ends on the correct beat, resisting the urge to cheapen the emotion with a few more scenes of tidying up. We don’t know what happens to Zia exactly, but a beautiful woman is smiling at him, and, for the moment, that is more than enough.
★★★
Confessions of a Superhero (2007)
My only exposure to Confessions of a Superhero prior to watching it were a few glimpses of a few stills that showed a very tortured looking individual laying on a couch that may have been in a shrink’s office. Perhaps I should note that he was laying on a couch in a shrink’s office dressed as Superman, laying there, sprawled out, as if his costume were the most natural thing in the world, the only topic in fact, that wasn’t under consideration as he unburdened himself to an imaginary counselor. From this image I assumed Confessions of a Superhero to be a lark, probably mildly condescending, at best a not as good King of Kong.
I’m happy to admit that I’m mistaken; the inner torture that that image implies is respected and taken at face value. Confessions of a Superhero takes a subject that invites mockery and instead examines it with an empathy that ultimately becomes quite poignant. The film concerns superheroes for hire, people who populate the landmarks of Hollywood Blvd. dressed as iconic stars and movie characters, taking pictures for tips that are to carry them until they are, against considerable odds, “discovered” by a filmmaker. That they nurture this hope dressed as the most famous of the famous must be extra bittersweet, closer than ever to the life they are meant to be denied.
The film concerns four of these would be celebrities: The Hulk (Joseph McQueen) who took a bus to L.A. and immediately found himself camping in the mountains to evade the Rodney King riots; Superman (Christopher Dennis), who claims he’s the son of actress Sandy Dennis despite her family’s denial; Wonder Woman (Jennifer Gerht) perhaps the most clichéd of the bunch, a prom Queen from a small town in Tennessee with silver screen dreams; and, perhaps most interesting, Batman (Maxwell Allen), a troubled man with a mild George Clooney resemblance who may or may not have a criminal past more fitting a noir than a superhero movie.
We’re immediately struck, particularly with Batman and Superman, who appear to have a friendship, by how closely these people resemble their alter egos. Dennis is the most obsessive and, oddly, the most functional of the bunch, seemingly inheriting his character’s ceaseless optimism. He has a small apartment that serves as little more than a shrine to the Man of Steel, especially Christopher Reeve’s incarnation, who he does undoubtedly resemble. Though Margot Kidder isn’t lying when she says that it wouldn’t hurt some of these Supermen to go to the gym a few times a week, Dennis looks like Superman from the neck up and a Superman pencil from the neck down. Dennis has a longtime girlfriend who’s studying to be psychologist, and she’s the first to acknowledge the irony of their coupling.
Allen does indeed look a bit like George Clooney, or at least the kind of rough and tumble Clooney that could appear in a Frank Stallone film. Allen has a charisma, admittedly driven by possible insanity, that exudes a certain fascination, confessing to past murders as if they were unpaid parking tickets. Like Batman, Allen has anger issues, and doesn’t handle fans who forget to tip for his services very well. People like Batman are a threat to this street profession, as well as eventual ironic savior.
Wonder Woman is nursing a broken heart, having married someone she met a few weeks prior who shockingly turns out not to know her very well. Like many people who marry for thrill or novelty, the man appears to find Wonder Woman a lot more exciting on the street than in his home, and a certain bitterness and remoteness sets in. Wonder Woman suffers at home and through auditions, on the constant search for that safe feeling of understanding that eluded her in Tennessee and continues to elude her in L.A.
As moving as all of these people are, I found the Hulk’s impression to be the most lasting. McQueen describes the riots, his past homelessness and his promising gig in a Justin Lin film with an equal careful optimism. McQueen appears to be both the least and most guarded of the bunch: his huge angry costume seemingly mocking his open, vulnerable face.
I wonder how much the director, Mathew Ogens, shaped the material that he spent two years shooting here. All of the people, after hardship, don’t so much face a happy ending as a promising one, or at least promising enough to live to dress up another day. I hope the optimistic tides are legitimate and have lasted. It’s a mark of Ogens work that one leaves Confessions of a Superhero wondering such things. As absurd as these super-people can appear to be, we ultimately admire their courage.
★★★
Southland Tales (2007)
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is largely every bit as tedious as you’ve probably heard. The film is so self-absorbed, so convoluted, so indulgent, so insecure yet self-congratulatory in the same measure, so stubbornly unwavering in its determination to name check seemingly every writer that Kelly has ever read, that you just want to wash your hands of the damn thing. The dialogue is arch and self-aware; the intentional and unintentional awfulness impossible to discern. Yet, fleeting passages of Southland Tales have a haunting power, and there’s an originality to Kelly’s ambition. Kelly has crafted a bloated future shock thriller where everyone essentially battles for control of the internet as the world crumbles around them.
There’s a certain skewed brilliance to the notion, and the film’s infuriating delivery of that notion is occasionally on the money. The vague story of Southland Tales has been shattered and filtered through a seemingly endless current of distraction: internet, music videos, talk shows, drugs, sci-fi, bad cop shows, etc. Seemingly every actor that appears in the film is a wrestler, or TV show or Saturday Night Live veteran (I think at this point SNL and regular TV can safely count as separate institutions) and that’s not accidental, everything about life has been reduced to the trivial, the convoluted, and the overwrought in Southland Tales; society is suffocating under the weight of the countless meaningless methods of supposedly delivering truth, meaning or stimulation. At its best Southland Tales captures the fuck it despair of the new generation, and for that alone, shouldn’t be ignored. The film may be, in its own surly, contrary way, an Iraq film we could actually use.
Admittedly, it would be a teenager’s Iraq protest film, a self-involved, self-glorifying rebel yell that really serves no purpose other than to make a little noise. But what noise Kelly makes when his ideas sporadically take hold! I love the Miranda Richardson character, the wife (I think, whenever I describe plot in this post, always insert the qualifier, I think) of a political wannabe who seems to be capable of watching the majority of the movie from a fortified media room somewhere in Los Angeles, though it’s a sign of Kelly’s misplaced confidence that she doesn’t occasionally change the channel. I love the little nuggets of broad, manic cynicism that occupy the fringes of the film; such as the Hustler sponsorship of the military or an advertisement that boasts, to my knowledge, the first doggy style coupling between two oversized SUVs to be featured in all of American film.
I also admire the brazen pointlessness of the film’s narrative. At least two principle characters have amnesia, and both of them (remember, I think) have doubles who somehow crossed the space time continuum to blah, blah, blah, a similar conceit was actually handled with more finesse in the seventy minute Futurama movie but we’ll forgive it that. I love the Rock and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s screenplay (which, far as I can tell, is the screenplay to Southland Tales itself, retitled The Power) and the way the Rock goes about trying to describe his convoluted scenario that he’s clearly rehearsed, right down to how many decimal points go into a figure that really has nothing to do with the story. Sarah Michelle Gellar even repeats that figure under her breath along with him, possibly aroused at the thought of co-writing a sci-fi action film with the Rock.
But, as women have a habit of doing in paranoid men’s sci-fi fantasies; Gellar’s actually trying to set up the poor Rock, who’s essentially playing himself. The Rock is married to a relative of an important politician that several groups hope to discredit, all so they can resume control USIDENT, which basically controls the internet. That one needs a visa to drive across a state line seems to be of concern to no one. That gas has basically run out, replaced by something that punches holes in that space-time thingy, also seems to be the cause of little worry. News of the currently raging third World War is little more than filler for the Spike Channel. Perhaps everyone is too busy watching Gellar’s TV show, which addresses such pressing issues of the moment as crime, poverty and teen horniness.
It’s as blunt and alienating as it sounds, Kelly has footage of Kiss Me Deadly playing in the back of a scene, but it’s really Repo Man, another sci-fi descendent of that classic noir, that he should be name checking. Then again, Southland Tales really has all of the name checking that it, or I, can stand. Kelly, perhaps realizing to a certain extent how people were going to take this, has loaded the film with an impenetrable, indefensible tangent of double speak that appears to be almost entirely lifted from the prose of past writers he admires, especially Philip K. Dick, all serving no other apparent purpose than to prove that Kelly, whether you hate the movie or not, is at least well read.
Southland Tales is probably the disaster that the director of Donnie Darko needed to make. I was around Darko’s target age when that film was released, and was initially quite taken with Kelly’s mix of Twilight Zone and self-pity; but time and getting older have not been kind to that debut picture. I don’t dislike Donnie Darko, but it’s a clunky, unconvincing movie that I never really feel the need to revisit. Southland Tales is even more distractingly full of itself, but perhaps it’s the embarrassment that Kelly needed to ground his promising talent. Southland Tales, ultimately, is more of a wannabe statement than an actual statement, but it has a bit of the crazed fervor that powers the great movies as well as the follies, and it’s for that that I can’t quite bring myself to hate it. The movies need more missteps like it, if for no other reason than I can only devote so many words to Big Momma’s House.
★★
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
As a moderate in the Paul Haggis is brilliant/awful debate (Crash is a watchable white liberal guilt cartoon, no more, no less), I feel I should point out a scene that occurs early on in In the Valley of Elah that perfectly encapsulates why his detractors resent the acclaim. The film’s opening is appealingly curt: Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) wakes to a telephone call informing him that his son, whom he didn’t even know had returned from Iraq, has been missing for a few days, and has a few days more until he’s considered AWOL. Hank, in even fewer words than you’d expect from a Jones character, catches his wife (Susan Sarandon) up, and is just as quickly out the door to see what the hell is going on. He may have snuck in a cup of coffee, I don’t remember.
The opening is sparse and mysterious, and, as always, Jones’ minimalist brilliance supplies notes that no dialogue could artfully convey. But that, of course, doesn’t stop Haggis from trying. Hank looks his truck over and pulls into an auto store and asks for something. The auto-man finds the part in question, rings it up and hands it to Hank. Hank asks the auto-man if he’s sure this part will work. The auto-man responds to the affirmative, adding something to the effect of “Sometimes you have to trust someone other than yourself, Hank.”
FALSE! Maybe I’m getting to be a bit of a crank about these sorts of things, but this is exactly the sort of audience insulting, made for TV exposition that drives Haggis’ critics nuts. We don’t need it, Jones’ performance has already clued us in to his tight-assedness, and, just in case it hasn’t, his wife soon throws it back in Hank’s face anyway, in an argument that occurs when they discover that their son has actually been murdered not far from the base. We don’t need to be told twice, we don’t, really, need to be told once, but Sarandon’s accusation at least rings true, old resentment bubbling up at a time of major duress. And before we leave this point behind, let’s face something else; it’s not unreasonable to question an auto-man, that’s just common-fucking-sense.
The rest of In the Valley of Elah is just as you’d expect from a film that features three Oscar Winners in front of the camera and one behind: painless, obvious, and relatively forgettable. Haggis has learned a few tricks since Crash, the dialogue is less self-conscious, and the film plays against our expectations of the standard murder-mystery procedural in a few canny ways. The revelation of the murderer makes sense, too much sense really, so much sense in fact that its a bit of an admirable anti-climax: Hank goes stomping for answers and the answers, as they most likely actually would, turn out to mean pretty much jack-shit. For once, Haggis is making a point with action. The film is slow, humorless and thinks its way too good for you, but it gets better as it moves along, and it is worth seeing once for Jones’ performance. Jones again proves that he’s one of our sharpest under players; imbuing even the clumsiest of scenes with grace and truth.
I think it may be time to introduce the notion that Paul Haggis may be the M. Night Shyamalan of social-conscience pictures. They both have that contrived cross your Ts, dot your Is method of revisiting a supposedly minor (but obviously major) early scene in a film to reaffirm a final point. Crash most certainly qualifies; that boy’s life being spared by the blanks only to be mistaken by the child as an invincibility cloak is a payoff that could very literally grace one of Shyamalan’s fantasies. Haggis and Shyamalan are both also very clearly entertainers who are letting a grander desire to be “important” stifle their creative energy. And they both, whether people wish to admit it or not, still have potential. As the platitude too banal even for their films goes: only time will tell.
★★½
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)
Jerry (Benicio Del Toro) lives in what appears to be a one room dormitory with a sink and a lover that, for all we see, may have died the night before. Jerry shows up for his very committed best friend, Brian’s (David Duchovny) funeral wearing a suit that was clearly cut for him when he was a different size. Jerry tucks cigarettes behind his ear and when he smokes them he clutches them until they reach the butt, the smoke wafting beautifully between his fingers and tortured face. Jerry has a habit of calling friends out on their mistakes with a little “mwaw mwaw” sound that he most likely borrowed from a game show that ran during his youth. Jerry is also a heroin addict and, in relapse, he asks for a Snickers bars and ice cream to sooth his Hellish return to proper consciousness. If you had to be a heroin addict, you’d want to be Jerry. Hell, if you’re hung-over, you’d still want to be Jerry, to look half as mysteriously, glamorously ravaged as Jerry at his worst.
People have called Benicio Del Toro’s work in Things We Lost in the Fire brilliant, and the performance is, undoubtedly, quite an achievement. But is it the sort of achievement this particular picture desperately needs? Del Toro gives the viewer all sorts of bits and pieces to chew on, the little slipping on the woman’s white glove ticks that people respond to because they can be identified so confidently as “acting”. As memorable as Del Toro’s portrayal of Jerry is, it still represents a bit of treading water for the actor. Note the word “glamorous” above, how glamorous should an unstable heroin addict be? Things We Lost in the Fire, as its Book of the Month club title indicates, is a self-improvement Oscar fantasy. We wish the Jerry’s of the world were this likable, and we wish that we could help them, while compromising our own lives as little as possible.
Del Toro’s Jerry is fascinating and alive but he doesn’t feel like a fascinating and alive drug addict. This is the film that could use a shitting of the pants. Allan Loeb’s rigid and unwavering screenplay has no room for that sort of thing though, he’s too busy stating his theme (which is repeated three times at the end in case you went to the bathroom for, I don’t know, 110 minutes). Susanne Bier’s direction only further highlights the script’s obviousness, this thing needs to be played loose and dingly dangly, Bier instead cuts many of the major scenes into a series of close-ups, with characters staring into space for prolonged moments as the score does an instrumental number that all but broadcasts SERIOUS.
Normally I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to review Fire, you get what you pay for after all, but the film continues to show frustrating signs of promise only to dash them time and again. Jerry eventually accepts an offer from Audrey, Brian’s widow, (Halle Berry) to stay with her and her two children in a joint effort to stitch together a few threads of their lives. Jerry and Audrey have a palpable sexual tension, and for a moment my hopes rose; as a love story that blossoms in one the more inappropriate situations imaginable, this picture had a chance. I normally don’t buy Berry in her bids for award winning actress, but she fares surprisingly well here and with material that’s considerably weaker than Del Toro’s. On the page Audrey is a noble suffering wife, but Berry imbues the part with a ripe, ambiguous sexuality that she didn’t manage in her over-praised performance in Monster’s Ball. Audrey and Jerry look one another over, with varying degrees of hate, arousal and distrust, and for a few moments I forgot which picture I was watching.
Bier and Loeb soon reminded me, and so the film remains stuck, never to diverge too far from the message, never to acknowledge that the characters might, for a moment, be fallible, or (perish the thought!) unlikable. The Audrey/Jerry story remains safe and the children remain photogenic and largely untroubled. Even a less controversial but appealing friendship that Jerry develops with Audrey’s neighbor Howard (John Carroll Lynch), is cut distressingly short.
And what of everyone’s immediate taking to Jerry anyway? The dangers of choosing a drug addict you barely directly know as a surrogate friend, husband or father is never elaborated upon much either, nor is the guilt that could arise from immediately grasping on to someone else in the wake of another’s death. As in most films that deal with drug or mental abuse, Jerry’s problem is just a means to a dramatic short-cut, a healing that would probably, outside of fantasy, be safer to seek elsewhere. There’s no room for any inconvenient feeling or messiness in Things We Lost in the Fire, it wants us to simply “take the good with the bad.” This film could use quite a bit more of both.
★★½
Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s decision to cast Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman as sisters in Margot at the Wedding, his new absurdist farce of unyielding cruelty, was an inspired one. Kidman’s Margot is seemingly confident, accomplished and impressive; Leigh’s Pauline, beautiful as she is, appears withheld and destined to be seen as forever insubstantial by comparison; uncomfortable with her accomplishments, her surroundings and, of course, within her own skin. The sisters’ contrast is pointed and immediate: we fear Margot, we fear for Pauline. We want to take Pauline up in our hands and whisk her away to a place that better appreciates her airy fragility. We watch these sisters awkwardly embrace and recognize that they are meant to hurt one another, repeatedly, in strange, unending domestic skirmishes that eventually add up to full-blown, life poisoning warfare.
Nicole Kidman is a stunning presence, one of the few of the current actresses who exude that un-Earthly, Valhalla grace that used to define the stars of yesteryear. That grace, for Kidman anyway, usually seems to come at the price of a self-consciousness that’s stifling and dull. Even her awful comedies feel bloodless and inorganic, as if she spoke to Meryl Streep’s agent and got the ok before deigning to mix it up for the cheap seats. It’s a pity too, because some of Kidman’s work is legitimately exciting; at her best she has an undeniable, tethered heat; unsurprisingly it’s her villains or barely hinged characters that fully register: Dead Calm, To Die For, and even the appealingly ludicrous Malice. Plop Kidman down in an Oscar wannabe and she’s aloof and false; adrift in good intentions.
Baumbach breaks Kidman’s shell in Margot at the Wedding, her best work since The Others. Kidman doesn’t look like a beautiful woman straining to play a normal person here as she has in many of her past films; this picture is cannier than that. Kidman’s Margot instead looks like a beautiful woman who used to be an incredibly beautiful woman, and now has to settle for being just a beautiful woman possessed with an incomparable intelligence that she wields like a broad sword, smattering anyone who dare exhibit more than a passing affection for (or slight insight of) her.
That most anyone would kill to have the looks or talent of the current Margot is, of course, never considered. Margot is only focused on Margot or, more precisely, everything that has ever failed or disappointed Margot. How Margot registers to others somehow manages to be of both the smallest and largest importance, a contradiction that drives everyone, herself included, very nearly mad. Pauline sums it up, as everyone in this film has a habit of doing, perfectly, succinctly, savagely: “It’s tempting to fuck around with a guy nowadays because we aren’t as attractive as we used to be.”
This sort of dialogue (which, truthfully, I paraphrased) is probably the reason some people reject Noah Baumbach, as well as the reason a lot of people rejected Margot at the Wedding. There’s seemingly no subtext to Baumbach’s laser-beam cynicism: all of the characters say exactly what they think as soon as they think it and in the most artfully composed way that they could possibly say it. That’s missing the point. The lack of subtext in Baumbach’s work, especially this and his previous picture, The Squid and the Whale, is the subtext; Baumbach’s characters admit their and their friend’s failures in the supposed service of honesty and self-help, but the true function is self-justification. Most people blanket their insecurities and bitterness in an AM radio stream of bland pleasantries and half-compliments. Margot, Pauline, and even Pauline’s fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black, not bad), are too sharp for that, they let loose in an opposite, equally contrived blast of rapid-fire “honesty” that masks a pleading affection.
Margot at the Wedding is imperfect but remarkable; overpowering, daring, and nearly surreal in its cynicism. Baumbach could almost be said to be conjuring the sensibility of Luis Buñuel in his apparent disdain for the rigid banality of the traditional “everybody gets together for a wedding and heals” picture. Baumbach’s Margot is, to a certain extent, just as false as those sorts of pictures, but on the opposite end of the usual spectrum. This is the wedding get together of your worst Art movie fueled nightmares: everyone says the wrong thing, everyone turns out to be a cheat, and everyone goes home worse than they were before they left. It’s telling that the one character in Margot that could be said to be an unambiguously decent person enters the picture late, and exits early.
But, ultimately and most importantly, Margot isn’t a monster. She’s a bit like Daniel Plainview, a more famous so-called “monster” from 2007. As in the Anderson film, there are clues in Margot for anyone who wishes to go looking. Pay attention to the conversation Margot has with her son Claude (Zane Pais, wonderful) in the beginning of the film about his sunglasses and watch how that episode pays off toward the end of the film. Watch how Margot handles a seemingly innocent question at her book reading (a scene that actually has odd parallels with Plainview’s church scene). Watch how Margot reaches, and reaches, and reaches, and then recoils upon receiving what she asked for time and time again. Margot’s end is more truthful and ambitious than The Squid and the Whale’s more conventional non-ending; no one comes of age here, no one truly connects, but they still hope to, and that, for the moment, will have to count as a happy ending, at least until Noah Baumbach, in his ballsy, broken curiosity, can come to terms with whatever domestic demon it is that continues to haunt him.
★★★½
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
I’m a frustrating (to those with stronger beliefs anyway) middle-grounder in the Wes Anderson is brilliant/overrated/or just over debate. Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, both now over a decade old, should be filed away in the canon under Comedies, Great. Both are lean, strong, frequently hilarious tales of that terrified pupa stage that the American male seems to enter somewhere in early (to middle to late) twenties before accepting that he IS a man, and that disappointment isn’t a valid excuse to forego all the other things, such as friendship, sex and eating, that life entails. Bottle Rocket and, especially, Rushmore are about the collapse of a frequently male dollhouse, and the period of mourning that has a habit of setting in after that collapse.
The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic are impeccably crafted pictures that anyone would be proud to have been a part of, but they are more problematic, and redundant of Anderson’s first two films. The art for art’s sake hyper-staged decor fits Rushmore, that was Max’s refuge, but it seems to be present in Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic so they can be said to look neat. While The Life Aquatic remains a step in the right direction from the self-conscious, please love me desperation of The Royal Tenenbaums, its refusal to break free from Anderson’s frequently more anal-retentive form is actually more irritating than Tenenbaums, if only because the subject matter more readily begs for a bracing break from form: Bill Murray as a wayward sea adventurer! Hell…oh.
And so now we have The Darjeeling Limited, which sounded, on paper and in the trailers, like Anderson wandering further down a forest he shouldn’t have been heading for in the first place. In theory Darjeeling has everything the Anderson satirist needs to paint a damning portrait of acclaimed auteur head-up-his-own-assedness. Young, privileged, vaguely artsy protagonists with daddy issues? Check. Groovy art-directed vehicle or home that serves as principle setting for grappling with said issues? Check. Overwhelming, masturbatory attention devoted to heroes’ shoes, journals, and various other apparatus just as whatever it is they may do for a living goes virtually unmentioned? Check. Precious, faux-literary title? Check! Check!
Wrong. Wrong. The Darjeeling Limited is easily Wes Anderson’s best picture since Rushmore. The artifice that divides people so has been mercifully stripped down, but also has, more importantly, been re-contextualized: Anderson’s famed mise-en-scene again (poignantly) reflects the characters’ inability to abandon the moony, college freshman romanticism to which all real life pales by comparison. Anderson immediately sets the stakes with the short that (and always should have) immediately precedes the film, Hotel Chevalier, which follows twelve minutes in the life of Jack (Jason Schwartzman) as he waits for his on again, off again, on again love (Natalie Portman) to reappear in the plush hotel room that he has evidently been hiding out in for awhile. He cleans himself up, he turns on some music, he draws her bubble bath, and when she arrives they engage in one of the strongest, most beautiful scenes Anderson has ever staged.
Anderson’s frequently used pan, the one that very consciously clues you in to the movement of the camera as it glides from the left to right side of the room, is employed here, but it has never felt as vibrant, as necessary. That pan is time itself, and the characters, after all is done, have nothing left but to look out at the Paris that awaits them on the other side of the room. Hotel Chevalier has something that I haven’t seen in Anderson since Rushmore: authentic desperation. Desperation laced with an intoxicating love for the movies: imagine the lovers of Breathless infected with the wounded lonely boy sensibility of Harold and Maude and you have a general idea.
The Darjeeling Limited retains the shorter film’s air of longing, opening on a frantic, misleading chase to the titular train. A businessman (Bill Murray) just misses out, while Jack’s brother, Peter (Adrien Brody) slimmer, younger, less encumbered by life’s shit, manages to hop aboard at the last possible minute, accompanied, as one might expect, by coming of age slow-motion and a tune that I will probably buy after seeing the film. This opening moment is spry and engaging but it, like Hotel Chevalier, comes with an intangible aftertaste of loneliness. Perhaps Murray’s businessman wasn’t just trying to catch The Darjeeling Limited, but The Darjeeling Limited as well, only to be left behind, out of sight, out of mind, while we follow similar adventures that are only of concern to Jack, Peter, and their oldest brother, Francis (Owen Wilson). There’s no room for a never-ending cast of characters in The Darjeeling Limited; the film is, like the best moments of The Life Aquatic, spare, eccentric and unapologetically introverted.
The film is also, lest we forget, funny. Anderson has, with co-writers Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, re-found that flakey, non-sequiturious humor that powers his best moments. The dialogue here is sharp and pared down; rife with bitter double, triple and quadruple meanings. Anderson doesn’t ladle on the exposition here as he did in Tenenbaums, he trusts us to find our way. Anderson extends this trust to his three actors too, who look nothing like brothers (that would appear to be part of the joke) but nonetheless paint a convincing, mysterious portrait of three people who love and hate each other in ratios they haven’t quite figured out yet themselves.
Brody and Schwartzman are frequently impressive, even if the material falters, but Wilson’s return to form here is a happy surprise. Wilson’s Francis is, intentionally or not, undeniably reminiscent of his Dignan from Bottle Rocket. Francis has Dignan’s stubborn self-delusion in the face of defeat as well as his need to hold all the cards in a situation that may not even have cards to begin with. Wilson’s age is beginning to catch up with him, and it may free him from his too carefully cultivated surfer-Zen hipster thing. We see Francis in a series of bandages (resembling a biker mummy) from the neck up for the majority of the film, but a flashback (which is, itself, a marvel of timing and design) shows him fully de-bandaged and reveals Francis, jarringly, to look no less damaged. Francis is a plastic man of denial, and Wilson taps into that beautifully, intuitively.
What a wonderful picture The Darjeeling Limited is, it’s one of those movies that tempts one to abandon all pretense of a proper review and simply point out the scenes they like and why they like them. I found the revelation of the truth of Francis’s accident to be particularly brilliant: a key moment treated as a wounded throwaway. Or the picture’s climax: a potentially been there, done that “I finally found Mommy and the secret of life” scene re-staged as a bitter, elusive disappointment. The Darjeeling Limited is a marvel of implication, of fleeting, floating, easily missed answers and contradictions. The film is a superb physical comedy, a tour through all the Anderson ticks that ends at a place of grace and understanding. The pat answers of The Royal Tenenbaums have been washed away and replaced by a simpler, more truthful, consolation: life is always a partial, dependable disappointment, so just get on the damn train and go.
★★★½
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