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
Death Proof: Extended and Unrated (2007)
This post assumes you’ve seen Death Proof. Plot is discussed.
You’ll note that the phrasing found on the box of the Death Proof DVD never once uses the often irresponsibly applied words “director’s cut” to sell the film. Death Proof, which originally appeared as Quentin Tarantino’s 85 minute half of the double- feature/experiment Grindhouse, has been lengthened by about twenty minutes, and the changes, while largely subtle, have significantly improved the picture. If this isn’t Tarantino’s preferred cut of the film, then it damn well should be.
But I’m not going to use Death Proof’s alterations as an excuse to revise my opinion of the film, truthfully, my view was probably subject to revision anyway. I enjoyed Grindhouse in the theatre, but faithful readers will remember that I found Death Proof to be a hedging of bets: bad-boy, have your post-modern cake and eat it too posturing that was too chicken shit to simply commit to the disreputable genre at hand.
Many applauded Tarantino’s newest narrative gambit, which essentially divided the film into two long acts, but I found that to be perverse in a way that wasn’t exhilarating at all: two prolonged, banal acts of exposition (typically found in slasher films) for the price of one. At the time of Grindhouse, I believed that the bravest thing that Tarantino could’ve done was to simply give us what he’d promised us: a damn horror movie. A slasher film with Kurt Russell directed by Quentin Tarantino should be more fun than 80 odd minutes of (with a few exceptions) boring actresses trading various not up too par bon mots. As his detractors have said, the famed Tarantino dialogue was beginning to sound an awful lot like the wannabes.
I missed the point.
Death Proof is a savage battle of the sexes horror comedy as well as a surprisingly sensual past versus present shocker. Tarantino has made the most erotic horror picture in immediate memory. The film takes the sexist resentment that lurks under most slasher pictures and throws it back in our faces. Upon original viewing, I found the first group of girls (Sydney Poitier, Jordon Ladd, Vanessa Ferlito) to be intolerably self-absorbed and shallow. Their girl-girl confidence was clearly a put-on, and ripe for the intervention of the big bad wolf of the piece, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell). The brilliance of the first half is that (admit it) you’re nearly rooting for Russell’s Stuntman. But we should ask ourselves guys, why do we hate this first set of girls? Because they’ve adopted the cavalier fuck first ask questions never attitude that is normally reserved for men in the movies. And look for the savagery that clearly lurks in the emasculated men on the sidelines, watch as the Eli Roth character talks of pouring a few more shots “down these bitches’ throats.”
While the film may put us in the odd position of vaguely rooting for Mike at first (at least until Tarantino pulls the rug out in a murder scene of tone shattering cruelty), Death Proof isn’t perverse wish-fulfillment, it’s a farce of female objectification, the exact sort that typically occurs in filmmakers, fanboys or other delayed adolescents. Watch how Tarantino’s camera soaks in Poiter’s fleshy derriere or her long limbs in the rain illuminated by her billboard in the background, or watch the way Rose McGowan (in the best performance other than Russell’s to be found here) leans into Mike’s car and nearly purrs. This is the dance between the girls and the geek, the haves and the have-nots, just as much as De Palma’s Carrie. It’s a testament to Tarantino’s fluency with the genre that he’s managed to stage a film in which both the haves and the have-nots win.
And what about Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike? My only regret with the part is that it isn’t larger; I was always, even when I had issues with the film, enthusiastic about this performance. Russell is a tough guy, but he’s always been a tough guy of seemingly boundless comic wit and invention. The key may be his voice; it’s softer than you expect: poignant even, it doesn’t jive with his rough around the edges good looks. Kurt Russell manages to personify John Wayne, the Prom King, and the sardonic best friend who never actually gets the girl simultaneously. Tarantino, a clear fan, has written a part in Stuntman Mike that manages to capitalize on ALL of that. I love how Mike, even when he’s got the charm turned on, can’t help but let out the barely contained rage that drives him to do what he does. Watch how the girls always get his name wrong, and watch how each correction is just a little closer to sounding like the kind of guy who would splatter someone on the highway just for the fun of it.
If Tarantino’s dialogue has gone soft and indulgent in recent years (and it has, starting with Kill Bill Vol. 2) then his eye as a director has become disciplined and more impressive in each subsequent picture. I love the rough-hewn vibrant heat that Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction give off, but they, visually, are stagier affairs. Jackie Brown (possibly my favorite Tarantino film) maintains the grit, but the camera work is more fluid and beautiful (the film has my favorite murder sequence in the Tarantino canon so far: Jackson’s killing of Chris Tucker, framed in an elegant long shot that’s showy but essential to character: we, in one shot, get Jackson’s casual, animal immorality). Kill Bill Vol. 1, a genre defining masterpiece, and Kill Bill Vol. 2, fascinating but uneven, took Tarantino even further visually and revealed him to be a crack action director in the bargain.
This brings us back to Death Proof, which sees Tarantino, as a pure visual artist, at the height of his powers. I’ve read the Death Proof screenplay and, on paper, it’s, well, it’s a colossal disappointment, particularly when you consider the past characters that Tarantino has created. On the screen though, Tarantino’s aim becomes clearer (what we’ve already discussed about sexism, blah, blah) and the once tiresome dialogue and awkward performances punctuate a growing, masterfully sustained tension of sexually charged dread. The opening fifty minutes of Death Proof prove, beyond any doubt, that Tarantino can own the horror genre any day he damn well pleases.
And then the film releases itself, and Mike walks away the victor, having come whether the ladies were interested in him coming or not. A cop, who fans of the director will recognize as Earl MacGraw (Michael Parks), contemplates going off the grid to prove that Mike intentionally killed those girls even though every bit of evidence indicates to the contrary. In a funny genre wink, MacGraw says fuck it and elects to follow NASCAR as usual.
Of course it doesn’t matter, because Stuntman Mike gets cocky and wanders over into a different genre altogether, a high-octane car-chase movie that doesn’t as readily tolerate him. The girls of this half are a truly empowered, (the girls of the first half were all pretense, these ladies are the real thing) appealing bunch. Zoë Bell may not be an actress, but she’s charming. Rosario Dawson brings timing, and yes, even a bit (just a bit) of pathos to the role, and I’m GUARANTEEING you that the beautiful Mary Elizabeth Winstead was hired because of her resemblance to Meg Tilly circa Psycho II. Tracie Thoms is the super-duper verbal firebrand of the bunch, and while I wish we’d gone in a direction that less resembles Tarantino’s collaborations with Samuel L. Jackson, I’ll live with it, if, for nothing else, because it’s a relief from the MySpace-cell phone chitter-chatter of the prior segment (more of that past/present stuff, Mike’s a pure old school TV, no CGI, no cell phone, no diet man.)
In short, Stuntman Mike’s descension upon these girls feels like a true intrusion, you want his ass to be kicked, and it is kicked, in a prolonged car chase of giddy, explosive, pure cinema joy. The ending of the film was another original problem of mine, I felt that Tarantino should’ve played harder and darker, but, upon re-watching, I actually found this tone more unsettling: the murder of Mike, who’s been reduced to a victim more pathetic than anyone in either half of the film, is treated casually, as a throw away joke even. These young movie freaks are driven to kill at the drop of a hat (though I guess attempted vehicular homicide might rate a tad higher than carelessness with head apparel on the offense-o-meter).
As thrilling as Death Proof can be at its best, I feel now that Tarantino, with this and two Kill Bills has completed his essay on the films he loves so much more than most people (myself included). It’s time to wed the newfound visual gamesmanship with the emotional urgency of the first three films, and to discard the crutch that is the devotion to obscure movies of yesteryear. After the hall-of-mirrors reflexiveness of the last few films, that would be the most shocking thing Tarantino could do: daring someone to give a shit, daring someone to accept something that hasn’t been (however expertly) pre-digested.
★★★½
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
We Own the Night (2007)
We Own the Night opens on a somber collection of photographs that would be right at home in the opening credits of a 1970s Sidney Lumet film. From there, writer-director James Gray cuts, jarringly, to a very deliberate shot of Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) walking down the hallway of a loft he has tucked away in the down town club he manages. At the end of that hallway lies a living room, and in that living room lies the luscious Amada (Eva Mendes). Bobby steals a bit of carnal respite before being called back to the front of the club to settle the sort of dispute that is obviously very usual-usual for him. We catch tantalizing glimpses of the sexy girls, the bartenders, and the clearly very dangerous clientele that frequents the place. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” tells us it’s the 1980s, and a subtitle reinforces that just in case we missed it.
A few moments later, Bobby and Amada make their way to a celebration being held on the other side of town in honor of Capt. Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) who’s, I think, receiving a promotion. Presiding over the ceremony is Deputy Chief Albert Grusinsky (Robert Duvall), Joseph’s father and boss. The Grusinskys spot Bobby and quickly pull him away for a moment. It turns out that Bobby is Joseph’s brother and the long lost member of the Grusinsky family. The Grusinskys need Bobby’s help, a frequenter of the club is one of the deadliest drug runners in Brooklyn. Bobby, drunk, high on weed and vague self-loathing, tells his family to take a hike. Bobby feels a closer familial connection to Marat Buzhayev (Moni Moshonov) an older man who runs the club Bobby manages. The old man always happens to be related to the drug runner that Joseph and Albert hope to corner.
For about forty-five minutes, We Own the Night is tasty pulp, as breathless and obsessive as it sounds, and refreshingly old-fashioned. In a time of countless, ceaseless shaky-cam “excitement”, it’s nice to see a filmmaker who takes his time and actually builds a little steam before blowing the top off. That old fashion that I speak of also extends to the film’s look: lush and beautiful, the Brooklyn streets shot with the kind of painter’s eye that the David Cronenberg of Eastern Promises could appreciate.
We Own the Night comes down with a bad case of the “importants” about half-way through though, and the vitality seeps right out of the picture. The film primes you for a conflict between Bobby and Joseph, and between Bobby’s real and surrogate family, only to resolve that in a matter of minutes. The film primes you for one of Phoenix’s more interesting performances in years (where has the raw live-wire from Parenthood and To Die For gone?) only to revert to another one of his noble numbers that wins lots of nominations and little else.
Joaquin Phoenix is one of the strongest actors of his generation, but lately he’s been suffering from the same ennui tinged discombobulation that plagued Johnny Depp in the early 1990s before Ed Wood showed up. Bobby starts out a sexy, dangerous, kind of sluggish presence only to fall right in line when the you know what hits the fan. He’s ideal, upright, and dull as a damn fence post. Gray’s script is more consistent with the Duvall and Wahlberg roles, they’re dull from the very beginning.
I’m not going to dissuade you from seeing We Own the Night once, the film works when Gray isn’t smothering it with well meaning profundity. Gray turns out to be a virtuoso with violence, his gunplay is alive and terrifying in a way that the characters never quite manage. The best sequence, a claustrophobic highway ambush in the rain shot almost entirely from inside a character’s car, has the possibility of becoming classic, and proves that Gray has the stuff of a great filmmaker, when he isn’t going out of his way to prove he’s a great filmmaker.
★★½
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
The story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) is one of those occasional, jarring proofs that The Man Upstairs or whatever cosmic force you subscribe to can have you absolutely whenever he wants. One day Jean-Dominique is a charismatic editor of Elle magazine with some of the most beautiful women in the world at his call; the next he’s a vegetable: every body part having betrayed him with the exception of his eyes, and he loses one of those early on in a moment of surprising, forceful discomfort. The doctors tell Bauby that he’s suffered some sort of rare stroke and that he’ll be fixed up soon, but that vague, ominous “soon” becomes more and more elusive, and it’s soon clear to Bauby that this new organic tomb is to be his lot in life. The mysterious stroke, in perhaps its most perverse move, has spared Bauby’s mind. His hungers and his intelligence remain aggressively, stubbornly alive, never again to be quenched.
This is the true story that inspired Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the memoir of the same name by Bauby. Yes. Bauby wrote the book in the above condition, aided by some very dedicated nurses and aides who read the alphabet aloud to Bauby until he signaled the correct letter with a blink of his remaining eye. The letters added up to words, and the words added up to sentences which eventually yielded the source material that drives the film. This was Bauby’s one way out, a guided tour for others of the private Hell in which he spent the remainder of his life. The book (according to the movie) was received with rave reviews.
Except The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a tour through Hell. It begins that way. Schnabel, in one of the more stunning bits of tee-total directorial empathy I’ve ever seen, chains us to Bauby’s eye and, for the first thirty minutes or so, rarely cheats. We see what Bauby sees, and we don’t see what Bauby doesn’t see. We share his disorientation and misery: professionals flit in and out with various banal comforts, and fresh embarrassments. Women of staggering beauty pop up from both the deep well of Bauby’s memories and in the actual room, both equally unattainable. One of the beauties invents the method of communication in which Bauby will write his book, and he promptly tells her that he wants to die. She scolds him for his selfishness and storms out, only to re-emerge a little later to apologize.
Several moments later, Bauby has decided to abandon self-pity, and this is where the film shakes off its limited perspective, and becomes surprisingly erotic and romantic. The highest compliment I can pay Schnabel, and there are several compliments to be paid for his performance here, is that he’s made a film that isn’t overly beholden to taste. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly isn’t a dead from the waist down disease of the week picture. The film is tender, intimate and refreshingly horny. The film doesn’t condescend to Bauby or to us; it takes his position and SEIZES it. There’s a moment, late in the film, where Bauby’s ex-wife takes him and their children to the beach, and she reads to him. Bauby notices her fleshy, beautiful legs hiding under the book and the dress. It’s a scene worthy of the casual reading room longing of a Rohmer picture.
It’s also a testament to Schnabel’s film, and Ronald Harwood’s script, that the newfound tragedy doesn’t immediately discount the fact that Bauby was, in his previous life, a bit of a self-absorbed, disreputable hound that had a habit of forgetting his family. Bauby left his wife for another woman, but the wife comes to see him anyway, still very clearly in love with him. The up to this moment absent lover calls late in the film, and the wife has to act as the go between. Bauby tells his wife to tell the lover that he waits for her to come every day. He may be paralyzed and he may long for her, but I, in that position, may have waited until my nurse returned to make that particular proclamation. The film is rich with showy, you are there technique, but this is the truly great scene in the movie, pulling you in four or five different directions at once, and still managing to be deliriously romantic.
I sometimes, as an American, resent the convenient Americans Are Boobs philosophy that seems to govern World Cinema thinking. But I must give the various other filmmaking countries one thing: the cliche that most America filmmakers don’t know shit about sex in film. Most of the great American filmmakers seem resigned to ignore the act altogether: think of the Coen Brothers, or Anderson, or Scorsese, or Spielberg, or most Soderbergh (though Out of Sight is still one of the most erotic American films of the past ten years, against admittedly little competition, and Soderbergh borrowed his best sex scene from a Brit.) Consider what The Diving Bell and the Butterfly could’ve been in many Americans’ hands: a respectful, asexual Triumph of the Human spirit movie. Very few things are less triumphant in the movies than a Triumph of the Human spirit movie. The Diving Bell acknowledges Bauby’s remarkable strength of spirit without softening him. Schnabel, once a photographer himself, understands that most great people are intensely in their own headspace: in other words, to be great you have to probably be a bit of an asshole.
We have Valentine’s Day coming up, and I, as a fervently single male under thirty, strongly recommend that you lucky people take your mates to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you’re new in the relationship, you’ll look cultured and worldy, and if you’re old in the relationship, the film will re-affirm the fact that you should devour one another as much, as passionately, and as often as humanly possible. How can you get any more life-affirming than that?
★★★½
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
If Werner Herzog speaks of “ecstatic truth”, then let it be said that Chuck Bowen speaks of “inner absurdity”. We all need some of it, or something in general to relieve us of thoughts of taking out the trash, getting our oil changed, or making sure that the Wheat Thins we’re about to eat aren’t stale. We need a bit of inner absurdity to mull over as we drink our first cup of coffee at work, or take our first meeting of the day, or to distract us from the fact that a date the previous night didn’t go too well, or that our marriage may not be what it used to be. We need something really God damn frivolous and stupid to pursue and consume us.
Those people who don’t have something, and there are more than a few, are to be pitied, regardless of financial success or sexual prowess. Or at least that’s what I tell myself, perhaps in an act of self-delusion. Let’s just say that, as someone who spends several hours a week watching movies, discussing them, and writing about a few of them at a time when I probably should be working, I had no trouble accepting that two men could spend hours, and travel thousands of miles, to ensure that they top one another for the highest known score on the iconic arcade machine Donkey Kong.
Billy Mitchell is the first man and reigning champion of the game since 1984, when he effortlessly stomped the supposed master, Steve Sanders, who was revealed to be lying about his ability. Steve’s highest score is something in the 200,000s, Billy tops it to the tune of 850,000 points. The early photos of the event, featured in Life, show Billy to be the personification of the cliche of the typical gawky gamer: pale, underfed, thrilled at the fame that a normally laughed off addiction is affording him. The King of Kong’s opening scenes are succinct and thrilling, and prepare us for an American Splendor style examination of the impassioned geek. But the joy of The King of Kong is how it plays us every bit as confidently as Billy.
Fast forward to a few years ago, and to Billy as an altogether different kind of man. He’s the famed geek made good, the sorta sexy Geek: George Lucas reborn as the lead singer of Journey who sells used cars on the side. Billy’s confidence and style have grown over the years, nurtured by the Kong victory. He’s a successful businessman, running a lucrative Buffalo wings sauce company. He’s married to the sort of amply endowed young lady that I’m sure was just a whiff of fevered imagination in those all night soda and arcade sessions of his teens. But most importantly, he’s still the world record holder in Donkey Kong.
Enter Steve Wiebe, who’s set up in the film as Billy’s polar opposite. Steve was your garden variety acceptable American teen: sharp, decent looking, and capable in sports. We notice immediately though that Steve, like Billy, doesn’t neatly fit our country’s convenient peg of expectation. Billy’s ironic geek vengeance: socially sharper and more conniving than you’d expect. Steve, the one who’s supposed to be all Aw shucks charm and confidence, is sensitive and insecure; broken by one adult disappointment after another. Steve is unemployed when we meet him, and playing Mr. Mom to a house of several kids and a wife who seems to be in a state of perpetual irritation with him. Even Steve’s friends, who speak of him highly, seem to be hiding something: they speak of him almost as you’d speak of someone who’s sick or dying. They mean well, but they, like Steve himself, have written him off. Steve, in his hopelessness, looks up the Donkey Kong record and sets out to beat it.
I’ve described roughly the first twenty minutes of The King of Kong, and if you think I’m projecting pathos for the sake of punching up my own writing, you are mistaken. The film starts out as a lark, but becomes something surprisingly tender and moving. Even Mitchell, who is ultimately cast as the villain, is vulnerable and human, willing to stoop to low, pathetic means to guard his precious score like a bird’s egg. We learn that Mitchell essentially has the score keeper’s association in his pocket and can seemingly bend the standards and rules of the existing record at his will. The Ref means well but comes off as a clueless goat in awe of Billy, and a protege of Mitchell’s, a pasty little toad called Brian Kuh, withholds from Steve crucial evidence of Mitchell’s one-upsmanship, evidence that, I might add, wasn’t deemed acceptable when it could have helped Steve.
I did just write “pasty little toad”, a phrase notably lacking in something I try to imbue in all of my reviews: empathy. And I’ve been looking forward to typing the phrase since finishing the film last night. The King of Kong, which sounds absurd on paper and in theory, whips you into a surprising, anticipatory fever. Steve beats the record early on, and Billy screws him over. Steve beats the record again, and again it’s discounted. Finally, a showdown is scheduled, a showdown that will determine which score is to go into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Steve travels some three thousand miles to play, and we wait as the stubborn, insecure, unreachable Billy remains largely off-screen, with only Steve Sanders (whose since become Billy’s closest friend) to act as spokesperson and preserver of Billy’s image. We wait, and wait, and we laugh when director Seth Gordon plugs the 1980s howler “You’re the Best Around” from The Karate Kid. It’s a testament to Gordon that we aren’t laughing AT these guys, we’re laughing at the fact that this story has truly morphed into a real life Karate Kid, only one in which we’re actively rooting for the more Johnnyish of the competitors. The Geek, for once, is the holder of all the cards.
The showdown? Be prepared. The film has a No Country for Old Men ending, elusive and disappointing. But is it exactly? Regardless of who you’re rooting for, the geeks have undoubtedly inherited the Earth, if for only 80 glorious minutes.
★★★½
Death Sentence (2007)
Director James Wan (of Saw and Dead Silence) can never be accused of taking his time. The foreboding uh-ohs of his newest, Death Sentence, come fast and furious. We open on home videos of a family cuddling and bonding in a way that never happens outside of The Wonder Years. The dad (Kevin Bacon) talks about the future with his Promising Son. The dad has an Ironic For This Genre occupation (risk assessment) where he one day carelessly remarks that all things make sense in the world. That last one was a major, major UH-OH.
A few minutes later, the father and son are driving around in the city where they run out of gas and have to stop by Thunderdome to refill. The son’s throat is slit, and Bacon’s world is thrown topsy-turvey, and a typically careless legal system has nothing but jargon and compromise to offer. The catch here is that Bacon successfully offs the scum in question by about minute twenty. The scum happened to be the brother of even bigger scum though, and Bacon soon finds himself collar deep in urban warfare.
No one who thinks seriously about movies seems to like the Saw movies, but I admired the ingenuity of the first picture. James Wan and his writer Leigh Whannell managed to make a not quite competent Seven rip-off for a million bucks and ten days of shooting time, and got their feet in the door of industry in the process. The result may be questionable, but to have accomplished that at all is a bit of a feat. Dead Silence, their second picture released earlier in 2007, had an admirable Universal Horror fetish going on and little else.
Death Sentence, Wan’s third picture, and first without Whannell, works on its own terms. Yes, the script is absurd. Yes, Wan is still a show-off, turning every other scene into an elaborate CG assisted pan through some inanimate object (he’s still riffing on Fincher, without any of the finesse or much of the ambition.) Yes, the film is lit in such a way as to make The Crow look subtle. But the film has a blunt power, and that’s because Wan has an actor who can dive into the genre without compromising himself or looking sheepish.
Kevin Bacon is consistently underrated, and I think it’s because he’s too convincing exploring that coiled, bitter fuck you intensity that he does so well. There’s nothing self-conscious, or actorly about an angry, scary Kevin Bacon character: he’s angry, he’s scary, and he’ll blow your head off when provoked. He’s polishing a gun, not a mantel piece, and his work has consistently elevated films that would otherwise be forgettable. Check out his psycho in The River Wild if you haven’t already. The film plays things way too safe, but Bacon, Streep and Strathairn are a testament to what good acting can do for a just ok picture. Also watch Bacon’s work in Mystic River. He was the only of the three traumatized characters NOT to get awards recognition, and he was the only one I actually believed.
And you believe Bacon here when he morphs from accountant to Travis Bickle Rambo at the drop of a hat. You believe his indestructability because you find it impossible to believe that a man that enraged would allow himself to die. That’s absurd of course, but that’s the kind of logic you need to enjoy Death Sentence, and I did enjoy Death Sentence. Wan also, after three pictures, finally pulls off a legitimately exciting, suspenseful set piece. It begins when the gang spots Bacon and pursues him on foot through a crowded neighborhood, and ends in a brutal battle on a multi-level parking garage. Bacon soon finds himself shaving his head and ending the feud because Wan can’t resist cramming in a Taxi Driver rip-off. The film, after countless bloodless thrillers, is refreshingly nasty, with a still hypocritical but more convincing than you’d expect anti-revenge tang.
★★★
Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Our friend Travis seems to be refining his style to the point of near haiku…and I dig it.-CB
It must be hard making yourself standout in the Independent film market. The way I see it, there are two types of independents: the Quirky Indie and the Oscar Indie. The Quirky Indie has a weird, precious main character, a cast of equally eccentric but less important second bananas, and plenty of “quotable” dialogue (”honest to blog?!”).
The Quirky Indie always constructs some version of reality that may at first seem insightful but does not hold up to scrutiny. Even the best Quirky Indie often feels like a contrivance that you have to turn part of your brain off to fully enjoy. That part of your brain is the bullshit detector.
If you know anything about the plot of Lars and the Real Girl, you know it’s a Quirky Indie. It’s got the weird characters. It’s an obvious construction. Every breathy word, every “subtle” facial tick, every endearing eccentricity: it all means something. And don’t you forget it.
Then again, the movie sneaks up on you: It’s pretty funny. The denouement is pulled off nicely. It cuts to black at just the right moment. And, most critically, Ryan Gosling, as Lars, plays it straight.
Lars and the Real Girl is the story of a hyper-shy kid in his late twenties who feels he can’t connect with anyone, particularly women. But then Lars orders a sex doll and starts treating it like his real girlfriend. Crazy, right? Crazy. Lars’ family and the rest of the small town in which he lives grudgingly accept this extraordinary and worrying behavior. Lars talks to the doll. He makes food for the doll. He takes the doll to church. He constructs an elaborate biography and personality for the doll.
I’ll admit it: by the end of the movie, I’d largely bought the central conceit and invested myself in the mystery of the movie (essentially: why did this happen and how will it end?) despite myself. There’s plenty to quibble about. But this is not reality. Just turn off your bullshit detector and enjoy it.
★★½
Smiley Face (2007)
Smiley Face is refreshingly disinterested in pleasing me, the viewer. That always pleases me. Smiley Face stars Anna Faris, and isn’t a sequel to Scary Movie, another sign of possible good things to come. The film was also directed by Greg Araki, who’s coming off a major career redefining best with the child abuse film Mysterious Skin. Again, so far, so good. Faris plays Jane F. (last name never supplied), a stoner who accidentally eats a shit load of pot cup cakes and has to go on a journey to pay a bill and talk a drug dealer (an amusing Adam Brody) out of confiscating her furniture; particularly her huge, expensive bed, the source of her lack of fundage to begin with. Hijinks and cameos ensue, justifying little of the opening promise.
I think it’s because I’m tired of stoner movies. The humor, the structure, and the result of these films are almost always the same. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle earned mild points by putting its heroes on a quest to get stoned, as opposed to going on a quest stoned (yes, that counts as subversion in this genre.) Otherwise, I’m afraid I just don’t care, the adventures are almost always too over the top and self-congratulatory, and you know exactly where you are twenty minutes into any of these films. To call most of these movies one joke is to be kind, to assume that “damn, she’s really stoned” rates as a single joke. Filmmakers need to dial these things back a little. Smiley Face, for example, shouldn’t turn into a bunch of madness about stealing the Communist Manifesto, it should instead actually stick with the idea of trying to pay a bill ridiculously stoned.
Anna Faris is wonderful, committed; she dives in and never tells you she’s above the material, though she is. Someone, somewhere, please stop underrating this talented actress, and give her something that she can really do something with. Araki would appear to be blowing off steam after the darkness of Skin, and I don’t begrudge him that, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll enjoy his movie. The funniest line of the film is “I’m taking a shit.” I just saved you a Netflix envelope.
★★
Private Fears in Public Places (2007)
Legendary French filmmaker Alain Resnais is one of those directors who is perceived as being masterful and “good for you” and, as a result, has been ignored by me. I’m not championing this viewpoint, but there it is. I’ve read Hiroshima Mon Amour’s DVD box probably a dozen times and have yet to take it out. The rest of Resnais’s work is even less familiar to me. He was always one of the Men of Film that I was always going to catch up with.
I finally caught a Resnais film, Private Fears in Public Places, the 84 year old director’s most recent, and one of the most acclaimed of last year. Truthfully, if I had been paying more attention to my Netflix queue, I probably wouldn’t have seen it this soon. But I wasn’t, so I did. And I’m glad that that oversight forced me to correct a larger one. The first thing that should be said about Private Fears is that it’s not some crusty “brilliant” movie that puts you to sleep in 20 minutes. It’s alive, romantic, and spry, an elder master showing the kids how it’s done.
Like most people in their twenties who see more movies in a week than most see in a month, I normally have an aversion to American romantic comedies. Most, which are generally labeled as “chick flicks” are desperate sexist parables that might as well carry a MATE! MATE! MATE! sign outside the theatre lobby. The films generally portray women as mindless nobodies who will remain nobodies until the perfect bland, hunky guy fucks them into true being, and, of course, marries them. Their life is to find a man to be subservient to, and these are supposed to be for women? Most romances seem to be deathly afraid of melancholy that doesn’t entail wolfing a pint of ice cream with your best girlfriend. True melancholy, the kind that most people wear like a transparent shawl, is rarely touched upon in American romances.
That shawl envelopes Private Fears in Public Places, which plays, and I know the big critics would kill me if they read me, like a blending of Love, Actually and the Alan Rudolph of Choose Me. Like those films, Private Fears is a roundelay, here involving six people who are intertangled in ways they don’t fully comprehend, and their sometimes desperate lunges at romantic fulfillment. The film doesn’t dry hump you like the last half of Love, Actually with climax after cloying climax, and it doesn’t wear its kookiness on its sleeve like Rudolph tends to, the film simply is. Resnais understands that someone can be unhappy without comprising their dignity and that they can be unhappy BECAUSE they don’t compromise their dignity. Resnais’ conviction in this simple observation is refreshing, and ensures that little actually happens in Private Fears in Public Places, but the little that does happen means everything.
Resnais, like Altman, brings with his age the best of both worlds: the wisdom and confidence of his experience and the hunger and pure cinema intoxication of a man much younger. The film, even if it were nothing else, is a remarkable, enjoyable bit of visual craft. Private Fears is set in the Paris of its inhabitants’ dreams: otherworldly, perfect, like a postcard or a fairy tale. Resnais’ camera always seems to be exactly where it should be, the work is exuberant without showing off. There’s an extended scene, really a breakup scene, that is shot from the ceiling of the apartment, and while you praise the technique, you can’t help but note that it’s the loneliest, most desolate way to film the scene. Resnais also has a habit of framing his characters in transparent cages, a succinct, unpretentious metaphor for the reason we see these kinds of movies to begin with, and the reason we should celebrate them when they’re this good.
★★★½
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