New York Film Festival 2007, Post 4

This is my final post on the 45^th New York Film Festival, which was a stellar showcase of new and established talent.   As noted earlier, Eric Rohmer may have screened his last film at the festival.  Another octogenarian, Sidney Lumet, screened a powerful new film, ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,’ that will likely not be his last film, judging by the vitality of the filmmaker and his love of the filmmaking process. ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ is Lumet at his finest.  He has made a film that is so searingly unsentimental, you wonder how it ever got made (note: he’s Sidney Lumet). 

The seeming ordinariness of the New York setting (Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Westchester County) and the starkness of the story makes for a tense rollercoaster ride of a film.  The film’s cast, populated by New York theatre veterans (including Oscar winners Marisa Tomei and Philip Seymour Hoffman), is outstanding and the scenes demonstrate the heavy rehearsal process for which Lumet is famous. The story, which involves a botched heist of a mom-and-pop jewelry store in Westchester, set up by brothers Andy and Hank Hanson, played respectively by Hoffman and Ethan Hawke (in a performance of a down-and-outer that is gripping to watch), is tightly unfolded in cut-backs with titles showing the sequence of events.  That Andy and Hank set out to rob their parent’s jewelry store is a deeper issue, and the ultimate reason for the caper, concocted by Andy, is quietly revealed through his visits to a high-rise Manhattan drug den run by an androgynous, kimono-wearing dealer who looks like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust.  Hoffman’s portrayal of a controller at a Manhattan real estate firm who has been embezzling funds, only to hear of a pending I.R.S. audit, gives the film its taut timeline.  He has four days to come up with the cash to cover the funds he’s illegally withdrawn.  His life is such a shambles, with an unstable wife, played brilliantly by Tomei, who benefits only minimally from his corrupt dealings and finds herself in an illicit relationship with Hank (revealed in the opening scene). 

The heist that is botched is almost laughable.  Brian F. O’Byrne is hired by Hank to pull all the jewels and cash out of the store, after it opens, and run to the getaway car.  Only in the minute prior to the actual act does Hank learn that his stick-up man actually does have a gun.  The next scene is obvious: Hank’s mother exchanges shots with him and he is blown through the front window of the store.  Hank clumsily drives away and has to back-pedal on the whole scene.  The mother, played by Rosemary Harris, is finally terminated from her life support, while Hoffman plays the older son, struggling to maintain his composure as his botched caper melts down and his employer discovers his transgressions.   Meanwhile, Hank struggles with the inevitable retribution from the wife of his slain accomplice, who enlists her heavy brother, played chillingly by Michael Shannon,  to shake down Hank for $10,000.  The two brothers, finally brought together by their final showdowns, agree to make a last-ditch stand to pay off the blackmail and get out of town Hawke’s Hank is a study in contrast; the “cuter” younger brother who is beyond on his child-support payments and is reviled by both his ex-wife and his daughter. Hawke’s performance as Hank is reminiscent of his bravura embodiment of Eddie, the Hollywood down-and-outer in David Rabe’s ‘Hurlyburly,’ which he played with searing force in a New York production in 2006. The father figure at the crux of the story is played by Albert Finney, whose gruff character hides the deeper secrets of his upwardly-mobile jeweler. 

This is not Finney’s finest outing, by any means, and he seems oddly out of synch with the rest of this first-rate cast.   His scene with Hoffman, played in the family’s outdoor patio, is fiery, and is one of many cut-backs that Lumet uses to piece together linear jumps and round out the narrative.  This keyhole effect is put to excellent use in a film that has a loose, on-the-fly improvisational feel to it.  Indeed, Lumet later discussed at the Q&A that some of the film’s sharpest moments came from improvised gems (notably, Andy asking Hank if “we’re cool now” during the shoot-out in the drug den). When Finney finally succumbs to deeper suspicions as to the motives behind the killer, he delves deeper into the darker side of his family and himself.  An old Lower East Side jewel thief/fence provides him with the damning evidence of his eldest son’s machinations.   

‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ is a day-time noir at its finest (Scorcese’s ‘The Departed’ is similar in this regard, although its night-time scenes are spectacular), with the ticking clock accelerating the lead characters’ downward spiral.  The use of New York locations that are at once realistic as they are active in the story – and the use of time and space – is another marvel.  You are sweating in your seat, feeling as implicated as anyone on screen, with impending doom around you (and, knowing how far it is from a crowded Manhattan to a major airport, feeling trapped). At the Q&A, Lumet was positive beaming at the success of the film, from a location standpoint, as well as its proof that high-definition filmmaking has arrived.  The film was shot entirely in HD, which Lumet discussed at length, stating that – as a filmmaker – he only has to use 2 energy sources (electric and thermal) instead of 3 (electric, thermal, and chemical) in order to produce his work. 

Lumet’s boyish glee at having simplified the production and post-production process was something to see; he was ever the independent, sounding as if he had beaten the studios and physics altogether at having used the latest digital filmmaking techniques.  He talked about his legendary rehearsal process, which takes several weeks (in the case of ‘Devil,’ it was about 30 days).  He was naturally deferential toward his cast, which he felt had captured the spirit of the film intensely.  He was also delighted at having created a noirish thriller in which, he said, “not a single redeemable character graces the screen.”  

‘Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project,” was a Saturday night highlight of the festival.  Jon Landis’ valentine to the 81-year-old master of put-down humor is not to be missed.  Screened by HBO during December, 2007 and on DVD, the film captures Rickles as a surviving monument to American entertainment in the post-war era.  Rickles is a ubiquitous bit player in films that range from ‘Run Silent, Run Deep’ to ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ (Landis was a gofer on the set of ‘Kelly’s Heroes,’ where he first met Rickles) and his comic act has endured a Las Vegas that has few surviving links to its heyday as the nightclub capital of the world.  Indeed, Landis captures the demolition of the Stardust Hotel on film, site of one of Rickles’ latest gigs. Rickles’ fans and fellow travelers appear onscreen, from Bob Saget to Clint Eastwood to Richard Lewis to, hilariously, Robert DeNiro. 

Landis has so much fun putting together an explication of how Don Rickles became such a beloved figure in an industry that thrives on back-stabbing, the infectious laughter spills over.  Bob Newhart describes the seemingly incongruous friendship that he and Rickles have had (footage of he, Rickles, and their wives vacationing rolls under his dry recounts), and Joan Rivers appears in her Versailles-like apartment to detail her reminiscences of the early Rickles.   Despite some of the cornier elements of Rickles’ schtick, his act (captured in 2006) is still in top shape.  He appears on-camera for a good portion of the 89 minutes, delivering skewering imitations of everyone from his wife (whom he met while she was working for a Hollywood agency in the ‘60s) to Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable, with whom he worked on ‘Run Silent, Run Deep’ (he says that Lancaster wanted him to “study submarines, understand what it means,” which he eye-rollingly ignored; Rickles engineered a gag in Gable’s trailer that involved him prancing around nude with another actor).   

Vintage footage is everywhere in ‘Mr. Warmth;’ from an early Regis Philbin interview with Rickles (when Philbin was working in San Diego) to the predictable Dean Martin roasts and, most hilariously, a Johnny Carson walk-on to the set of ‘C.P.O. Sharkey’ (public disclosure: I was a huge fan of this short-lived series) in 1977, after Rickles had damaged one of Carson’s desk props.   Paeans to Rickles abound; from Sarah Silverman to Penn Jillette to Steve Lawrence (who describes what the Vegas scene was like in the ‘60s, and how the business became a victim of its own success) and Keely Smith.   ‘Mr. Warmth’ is perhaps the best historical review of the Las Vegas showbiz experience ever produced.  Rickles, by all counts, is the survivor.  Low-light shots of him being assisted to and from the stage are endearing; he is the last clown left standing, and his generosity of spirit could fill many films.   

At the Q&A, Landis exhaustingly described the scenes that were cut or deleted, and this should make for a DVD out-take reel and then some.  Rickles was magnanimous in his appearance; he wanted the party to continue all night (house management called the show around midnight).  He begged Regis, in attendance, to come on stage.  Fittingly, one of the questioners from the audience was an old high-school buddy of Rickles, who still works the Florida nightclub scene.   

One of the real gems of the festival, ‘The Flight of the Red Balloon,’ is a touching tribute to ‘The Red Balloon’ in present-day Paris. Juliette Binoche’s Suzanne, a single mother with a son, balances her work as an actress in a puppetry theater, a landlord with an irresponsible tenant, and as mother to a daughter living in Brussels is an amazing character study.  Director Hsiao-hsien Hou creates a Paris that is so stunning it does not seem real.  Its eternal nature is emphasized by the ever-present red balloon, which frames a number of key scenes, and floats away in an arching shot at the film’s conclusion.   

Closing night at the festival was the screening of ‘Persepolis,’ a stunning autobiographical work by Marjane Satrapi, which is an animated story of her life as an Iranian woman driven back and forth over three decades of strife in her country.  As personal a film as has ever closed the festival, its ability to touch subjects not in regular discussion in the U.S. is remarkable.  The young woman’s life prior to the Islamic Revolution, her alienated schooling in Vienna, and return to Tehran casts a long shadow on the terror of the Iran-Iraq war and the extremism that continues.  Satrapi’s film benefits from excellent voice work, including that of Catherine Deneuve (she was at the curtain call for the film). 

New York Film Festival 2007, Post 3

 The 45^th New York Film Festival was host to two very poignant political films that we saw –  Ed Pincus and Lucia Smalls’ ‘’The Axe in the Attic,’ a brilliant verite documentary on the post-Katrina diaspora, and ‘Redacted,’ the Brian de Palma pseudo-documentary set in war-torn Iraq.   

‘Ax in the Attic’ was screened on the first weekend of the festival, and was very poorly attended at the screening we saw.  Most of the audience consisted of stalwarts of the New York documentary community, and the house seemed to be barely half-full.  That was a shame.  This film not only heralded the triumphant return to documentary filmmaking for Ed Pincus,  whose 1965 documentary ‘Black Natchez’ (which was screened at the 1966 New York Film Festival) is a pioneering work of political documentary filmmaking (and will be released, finally, on DVD in the coming year), but also captured a different side of the experience than the phenomenal Spike Lee documentary project, ‘When the Levees Broke.’  The Pincus-Small film is a very tightly woven piece, running just under two hours, that is both a comic road movie of two stereotypical northeastern liberal documentarians in the bayou, as well as a searing indictment of our nation’s infrastructure – both human and political.   

‘The Axe in the Attic’ begins with Lucia Small explaining how stunned she was at the Katrina disaster; she started videotaping her t.v. screen, and finally got around to calling Pincus to join her on a road trip to capture the suffering of those displaced by the storm. Their visits to refugee camps (displaced persons camps, perhaps more appropriately) in Alabama and Louisiana are heart-wrenching, and their visits to a family in Pittsburgh, who experienced their first snow, and another family in Austin, Texas, capture the fractured nature of the post-Katrina experience: no one knows whether there will be a place to return to in the future. Pincus and Small are back-and-forth throughout the film regarding the ethics of “getting involved” with the events and the people they film, including Small’s conscience battle over giving money to a refugee camp victim.  The two make for an unlikely documentary couple that could become a parody reality show, particularly given the colorful characters they document (one fellow is filmed on the site of his former trailer, along with his former wife, who is also suffering from the storm).  Pincus and Small are comic in their dialogue amongst each other; their decision to turn the camera on themselves is a rare, bold move and it pits them in the story of northeasterners trying to connect with fellow countrymen who are, in effect, without a country.     Lucia and Ed’s arguments are at the crux of the documentarian’s struggle to remain neutral in any story.  This becomes impossible in ‘The Axe in the Attic:’ the filming that the two conduct over a six-month period is heroic. 

Unlike ‘When the Levees Broke,’ the effect of ‘The Axe in the Attic’ is raw and live.  Lee’s masterpiece, with a much larger budget, and the benefit of a Terence Blanchard score, seems slick and polished by comparison.  Yet, the effect of that work is obvious: there are no words for what the pictures captured describe.  Here, there is no obvious conclusion.  Are the filmmakers inserting themselves into lives, challenging the fragile balance of a destroyed landscape, or are they creating a document that is paramount to democracy itself?  As Spike Lee said in an interview last year, his goal was to create an unending series of follow-ups, similar to Michael Apted’s ‘7 Up’ chronicle, of the post-Katrina situation.  The reason here, is clear: there are untold thousands of stories from Katrina that will help tell the story of this tragedy and Pincus and Small are, in essence, the troubled conscience of a nation that watched, helplessly, as the pictures rolled into CNN and onto their t.v. screens. 

The Lower 9^th Ward is pictured as a no-man’s land that is the place to which some of Pincus and Smalls’ subjects return, and a political battleground, in which local activists prevent homes from demolition while trying to fend for themselves.   The overwhelming sense of despair amidst a Faulkneresque setting of con men and wayward types is potent.  The duo have great subjects for their film and they also have the good fortune to capture some jaw-dropping moments, including the visit to a FEMA center in Texas that later disavows any knowledge of the visit by the claimants. 

Video footage shot by some of the victims is included, and this is user-generated content of the most valuable sort: rare footage of a disaster and the hopeless reactions of the locals.  Horrors are recounted on-camera, too, and there is enough displacement that the viewer feels – with no sense of comfort – the pain and loss embodied by Katrina’s wrath and the government’s sheer negligence. The film concludes with a postlude of where the subjects are today; some having returned to New Orleans, most others sure never to return. Looming, always, in the background of the film is the Bush administration’s pathetic response to a tragedy that, while always feared in the Gulf region, created a replay loop of the 1927 flood, which sent many blacks north to points, including Chicago (Chicago blues, if not born from this flood, was certainly informed heavily by it). 

Subjects, white and black, rage at the government’s criminal negligence, in a way that places the viewer inside the context of a road trip, and not in a political cycle.  New Orleans was the linchpin of our success in the War of 1812, with Andrew Jackson emerging victorious and, finally, securing our nation from foreign invaders.  That New Orleans should languish as a place “to which we can no longer go” is a sign of 21^st century American rot and defeat; a strong counterpart to both 20^th-century American “can-do” spirit and a sign that our treasure is wasted in another hell-hole (Iraq) and not spent with any purpose in our own land.      

Speaking of Iraq, Brian de Palma has overcome the ‘Black Dahlia’ disaster of 2006 in making a strong comeback bid. The always provocative de Palma has never been without some back-story, and ‘Redacted’ played at the festival with the background of broadcast blowhards shouting (in tinny voices) whispers of “treason,” whether they bothered to see the film or not (Bob Dole, then running for president in 1996, decried a film that he hadn’t seen; in that case, if was ‘Trainspotting,’ for those keeping score). 

More people have heard of the ruckus created by this film, or seen the IFC video that had made the online video rounds, in which De Palma gets into a shouting match during a New York Film Festival director’s talk session with Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles over the issue of the film’s final scene, in which still photos of Iraq atrocities are “redacted” with black ink marks over victim’s faces.  This clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNWXgM9F70) is brilliant theater; pitting de Palma, presumably, in an artiste’s spat with Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment,  ‘Redacted’ is a brilliantly subversive film that plays off the current war’s ironic circumstance as the most-photographed and most-videotaped conflict that, simultaneously, is the most silenced war.  This irony is brilliantly cross-cut between the various uses of video in this war, from U.S. military internal footage to embedded journalists footage, to Iraqi news footage, French documentary footage, Al-Qaeda “insurgent” online video postings of terrorist acts against American troops, and online video rants (most notably from a “teenage” woman whose tattooed, silhouetted figure frames her barely coherent rant). 

The U.S. Marine Corp platoon’s documentarian, Pvt. Salazar, is a cherubic figure who utters the film’s richest ironic joke: that he enlisted as a way to get into film school.  His “thesis film” includes shots of his cut-up mates reading (a West Virginian aesthete who reads John O’Hara’s ‘Appointment in Samarrah’ as a way to acclimate himself with the territory he is supposedly defending); playing cards; fighting, and being dressed down by their commanding officer. The film sets its action in the Samarah region, following a platoon that has just learned that its tour has been indefinitely extended, and shows the individual soldiers already melting.  The boredom captured in the checkpoint missions and the quotidian back-and0forth in the village is numbing.  The crux of the film is a rape of a 15-year-old girl and the subsequent murder of her family members that is captured on film.  This scene is bookended by security camera footage that captures the proponent’s desperate dialogue to justify the actions and then cover them up. One of the most chilling moments of the film is the iChat session between the ultimate whistle-blower of the platoon, Maloney, and his presumably Marine veteran father.  His father order shim to quash any mention of the actions, saying “we don’t need another Abu Ghraib here.”  The de Palma film casts Iraq as a  failed ‘Appointment in Samaraah’ and an extended riff on the 2004 expose of the Abu Ghraib prison: abuse, torture and inhumanity without any purpose is the way of semi-existence in Iraq.     The inquiry that follows the atrocity is perfunctory, at best, and sums up the Bush administration’s laissez-faire “stuff happens” attitude to incompetence, indifference, and outright brutality on the part of ill-trained, over-stretched, and overwrought U.S. troops.   

De Palma’s coup de grace in ‘Redacted’ is showing Pvt. Salazar setting up a direct-address shot on a tripod, only to have the camera capture his own capture, at the hands of masked figures swooping him into a van.  Salazar later dies, literally, for his art, as the insurgents videotape the be-heading of Salazar, in Shakespearean form.  Salazar’s camera is later commandeered by his mates who, as a drunken tribute to their fallen comrade, turn the camera on each other.  The instigator of the rape, Reno Flake, is captured on tape essentially confessing to his crimes by virtue of his family’s lawless streak. He is later shown in a videotape of his interrogation, which finally convicts him. The cast of ‘Redacted’ is fantastic; this is very tight ensemble acting in a picture that deserves greater review (its box-office receipts are staggeringly low). 

EPILOGUE: That Ed Pincus, who is a well-known figure to us film-student types, should return after almost 30 years to the documentary front-lines is a sign of a trend both positive and troubling: that a 69-year-old former leading lion in documentary filmmaking should be forced to get off his couch – and not a 27-year-old, as Pincus was in 1965 – to tell a story that is one of the great American tragedies of our time is both laudable and laughable.  Where are today’s up-and-coming verite filmmakers?  And what will it take to get them to express themselves (other than on YouTube)? Pincus literally left the documentary scene after, ironically, being terrorized by a disturbed subject of ‘Black Natchez,’ a civil rights worker who threatened him and, later, murdered Allard Lowenstein, U.S. Congressman, in his Manhattan office.  After years as a successful recluse, establishing a flower and bulb farm in Vermont with his wife, Pincus returned to the filmmaking fold.   Pincus confessed to me after the film that he had only been in New Orleans once previously, while making ‘Black Natchez’ (obviously a mad-cap weekend that did not include interviewing subjects for a film…), and he seemed to suggest, in several ways, that we would be seeing and hearing more from him soon.