2009 Award Season Posts

Revolutionary Road

Middle-class ennui is probably more uniquely American than apple pie. It informs generations of writers, and the adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel into a major release – the first post-‘Titanic’ pairing of Leo Decaprio and Kate Winslet – is a triumph of unsentimental filmmaking. Sam Mendes, Winslet’s husband, directs this tale of April and Frank Wheeler, played by Winslet and Decaprio, who are the envy of their mid-1950’s neighborhood, which is wrought with hyper-conformity and the main characters’ overblown sense of themselves.

The film, despite creating the stultifying atmosphere of the ‘Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’ era, runs up against a book that obviously doesn’t like its subjects or their milieu. The opening scene, in which April bombs in a local production of ‘The Petrified Forest,’ sees the couple fighting on the side of the road about what April’s acting aspirations mean, as well as his own career. This is post-war suburban America in its own Chevrolet klieg-light setting.

The Wheelers, feeling trapped, seek release from oppressive suburbia by alighting for Paris. Their announced plan lands like a Communist plot amongst their peers, who can’t figure out why or how they think they deserve such an escape.

Their neighbors, played superbly by David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn, convey their envy of the Wheelers, who seem to embody the cool confidence that befits a resident of Revolutionary Road. They are as paranoid a group as anything that Rod Serling must have imagined during this period.

Kathy Bates steals the film with her portrayal of the upwardly-mobile busy-body real estate agent Helen Givings, who is shocked to hear that her favorite clients are about to burst her balloon. Scenes in which she introduces her disturbed son, John (played brilliantly by Michael Shannon, who was just awarded an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor), to April and Frank, in hopes of “normalizing” him, are amusingly uncomfortable. John’s rage against the Wheelers and his parents convey the only “true” moments in the film, which are operatic to a fault, and show the brittle translation of the book.

The success of the film is in its performances. The one notable exception (Decaprio) is only symptomatic of the underlying material. Leo is at once perfectly cast and altogether wrong for his role, which must hold up the burdens of his father, and his own yearning soul. Frank finds himself slaving in the company that his father served, and is hard-pressed to resist the office floozy (played brilliantly by Zoe Kazan, who starred in ‘The Seagull’ on Broadway, opposite Peter Saargsgard and Kristen Scott-Thomas when the film opened) while he succumbs to the boss man of his dreams, played with exceptional economy by Jay O. Sanders (who is another New York theater stalwart). Frank’s doubts are best conveyed by scenes in which Mendes depicts impending doom, such as the amazing beach scene, in which Frank may as well have been a Soviet paranoid citizen of, say, Romania in the same period, where the level of Cold War conformity is so oppressive that there is no narrative structure beyond suggestion.

Decaprio’s Frank Wheeler cannot escape the actor’s matinee-idol confidence; he is too outwardly symptomatic of the U.S. that “wins” (see Decaprio’s portrayal of Frank Albinder in ‘Catch Me if You Can’ to view an actor struggling against false hopes in post-war America) to convey a conflicted character. Frank Wheeler is well-matched in his mate, though: there is a strong chemistry between Decaprio and Winslet that bears second viewing. They play their individual and coupled roles so perfectly that the denouement is anticlimactic — yet, he is the one most lacking in this film, permanently flanked by the shadow of Gregory Peck’s ‘Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.’

The supporting cast is brilliant. There won’t be enough kudos to go around for this cast, unfortunately. Harbour’s lust-filled scene with Winslet at the local jazz joint is as evocative of an era as anything every filmed (you’d have to go back to ‘The Seven-Year Itch’ to find anything as truthful). Richard Easton is a masterful exclamation point on the entire period in the film’s final scene. The veteran West End and Broadway actor is a face and presence that exceed the frames he’s given.

Ultimately, the film runs up against what are obviously difficult-to-translate passages and despite filming in one of the inspirations for Yates’ bile – Darien, Connecticut, for starters – the Kodachrome tones don’t quite hold up to the arch qualities that would have truly defined the day. We just can’t handle the truth of this work and, given the times in which we now live, we can’t hold a candle to the pain that these characters must endure.

Mendes must be recognized for the strength of his translation. He has a gift for conveying American idioms, and has a cast that would make most producers give up a limb.

That ‘Revolutionary Road,’ one of several late-20th century literary works that were long considered unfilmmable (remember, ‘The Moviegoer,’ from Walker Evans, and ‘The Ginger Man, ‘from J.P. Dunleavy, have yet to be faithfully committed to the screen), has been brought to bear with the laudable treatment it has received, is a miracle.

At the Q&A – which included Baker, Harbour, Winslet, Mendes, Decaprio, Shannon, and Kazan – the talk extended to how the film could be made without completely dragging the audience down. That this screening (the week after Thanksgiving) was well-timed said something about how this film will ultimately be seen. Winslet’s character bears the brunt of the hopes and fears of the ‘Revolutionary Road’ crowd – she does this with as much aplomb as could be expected, but still fails to deliver something that would be poignant to a 2008/2009 crowd. Shattered dreams are a dime a dozen; Vietnam and a host of other ills are so far from these characters’ late-‘50s lives that the emptiness of their vision is forgiven.

Let us view it in the film in this regard. And hope that another version (Canadian, perhaps?) is someday in the offing.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The triumph of ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ is so caught up in Hollywood that it can easily blur the more poetic aspects of the work.

While poring through ‘The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald’ and other tomes to find the original source for this film, the futility of this effort must yield to a greater side of the studio and independent producer in 2008/2009: tenacity.

If ‘There Will Be Blood’ is any indication, the P.T. Anderson “adaptation” of the Sinclair Lewis story ‘Oil’ works on a level that should be an easy jumping-off point for this film. ‘Button’ is as much the Kathy Kennedy/Frank Marshall juggernaut at work as any other fulcrum: the story of the making of this film would fill a 2-hour (Laurent Bouzerau) insider DVD as anything one would see on the big screen. To add, this was a 15-year effort.

And, given the evolution of technology, that is a beautiful thing.

For ‘Button’ is a testament to adapting to the visual reality as much as the everyday 5-minute pitch reality.

Though, to be sure, Brad Pitt and Cait Blanchett (as close to the parody pitch duo Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis in Altman’s ‘The Player’) are not the stuff of any average wannabe’s dreams, but they make this story hum. And, if anyone doubts the real-world Hollywood aspects of this tome, note that Julia Ormond (yes, the once-ascendant Michael Ovitz protégé of the mid-90s who previously starred opposite Pitt in the 1994 flopper ‘Legends of the Fall’) sits patiently as the daughter of Blanchett in the Hurricane Katrina-threatened New Orleans of 2005, as a hospital visitor. Yep – you can’t write this stuff; it works magically on its own.

‘Button’ depicts New Orleans in such colorful regard – with Benjamin Button as a growing/descending character – that the post-World War II scenes (in which Pitt and Blanchett reconnect and forge a loving marriage) are glorious for the 21st-century review of what made America great: the care-free ability to review one’s dreams without being destroyed or trapped. Benjamin Button’s youthful aging speaks to the American Dream (and Ponce de Leon) with a visual quiver of tricks: the special effects are so much a part of the narrative, much of it accompanied by voice-over, that the story cannot be ripped from its delivery. Scenes of the “old-man” Benjamin on the church stage, or his transformation into the (gorgeously) younger Benjamin, are part of what is an epic love story. This is a “different” Hollywood work, with the lyricism of a Faulkneresque tone and a massive-budget SFX team.

‘Button’ is brilliantly directed by David Fincher, whose sweeping works – particularly the recent ‘Zodiac,’ which is as much a valentine to San Francisco as it is an unearthing of the dark side of San Francisco’s hippy dream – are well-suited to his panorama. To re-cap, ‘Button’ tells the tale of the titular character, who ages backward, a son of the New Orleans of voodoo and American gumbo – as much a reflection of the 20th-century American experience as any other character (that the script was written by ‘Forrest Gump’ writer Eric Roth has been a strong talking point in Hollywood).

After the Q&A, I spoke with producer Cean Chaffin, who discussed her work with Fincher on ‘Zodiac’ and ‘Button’ (she has also worked with him on ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Panic Room’). The ‘Button’ production was captured with the JVC Viper camera, which has as powerful a low-light digital acquisition block as any on the market. Chaffin is as much a part of ‘Button’ as any crew member; the continuity and the overall visual direction owes as much to the narrative look as anything. This film, to me, marks a watershed in sophisticated VFX production for a sophisticated story. That memory and redemption play a role in this film is well-crafted by the stars and supporting cast; Pitt and Blanchett are pictured in every way imaginable (and, yes, Pitt’s “body actors” are due their credit as anyone else).

After the film, Kathy Kennedy was electric in her discussion of the production’s history; her producing and life partner, Marshall, was smiling and supportive. They have created a work that is a great artistic triumph, and one hopes that they realize the monetary return on this effort. Given their tremendous career success, one can’t imagine anything otherwise. Kennedy was very open in her response to the look-and-feel of the film; she disclosed that she is working on Spielberg’s ‘Tintin’ project, which is enough of a difficult adaptation/transformation as anything she unveiled in ‘Button.’

We must clearly acknowledge that ‘Button’ has crossed a bridge that the Zemeckis films ‘Roger Rabbit’ and ‘Forrest Gump’ crossed in the late-‘80s and early-‘90s (and, yes, he has a direct link to Kennedy/Marshall): Hollywood’s finest producers can turn long-tail gold out of complex stories with the complement of stunning and groundbreaking technical supervision.

Finally, the directorial choice to include Katrina in this film is an epitaph for the America that once believed it would never age, nor would its ideals ever be destroyed. The final shot conveys an epochal Mother Nature that has as much to do with Benjamin’s life as the outward world does (and more so, as we know). It is Benjamin’s remarkable story that makes us believe that we can re-write history. Our own history, that is.

Frost/Nixon

There are few meteoric Broadway plays that have been so quickly turned around, with as strong a screen adaptation result, as ‘Frost/Nixon.’ We saw the Broadway production in 2007, with the same cast, and were stunned to see that the Brian Grazer/Ron Howard film was as spot-on as the stage production.

We saw a November 15th (2008) screening at the DGA Theater in Manhattan, and were able to capture a film in the post-Bush era with a clear light as to the true Cold War paranoia of the protagonists. I use the plural here, because anyone who saw the original broadcasts of the David Frost-Richard Nixon interviews in 1977 will recall how perilous the times were. Frost was on a limb, and Nixon was barely clinging to one. The combination of these two characters – both real and imagined – only reflects the brilliance of the Peter Morgan play and screenplay.

Frank Lagella makes Nixon even more profound a character in the film than he did on stage, which is really saying something. Anyone who saw him on stage can easily recall how commanding and how hollow the presence of Richard M. Nixon was, without caricature (the ghost of Dan Ackroyd fades). The Michael Sheen portrayal of Frost was equally impressive. H e managed to choreograph the staff of Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt with a commanding spark that was as much ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Lear’ without kowtowing to celebrity worship.

The Ron Howard touch is strongly at work in ‘Frost/Nixon.’ ‘By that, I mean that history is rendered as poetically as an American can write his own country’s fate on film. Howard has conveyed one of the most intense moments in American history – ‘Apollo 13’ – while conveying real drama (will those astronauts make it back?) and has portrayed one of the most accomplished American geniuses, John Nash, in ‘A Brilliant Mind,’ with pathos and reverence. What he does with ‘Frost/Nixon’ is a snap-shot of history with true detail to the characters. He makes a film out of dire historic necessity (two “celebrities” in desperate need of each other).

As the screening was co-sponsored by the WGA, Peter Morgan was the man in the spotlight at the Q&A. That this was a Saturday night screening meant that the crowd was even more intrigued as to the human struggle required to bring a great story, and a play at that, to the big screen. Morgan was more than up to the task of rendering the conflicts in his personal and professional life with regard to the job. He talked about his work on the ‘The Queen,’ and how he hadn’t been paid for so long for that job that the ‘Frost/Nixon’ gig was just another possibility in his life.

The Morgan stories were worth the trip to the W. 57th Street locale on a cold, damp evening. He discussed the contradictions in the characters; how he approached the adaptation, and also mentioned his upcoming Tony Blair project. We were lucky enough to speak with him afterward, for about 30 minutes, on how the play was so wonderfully extended, and how the actual San Clemente scenes actually made for grand theater in the film. He recalled the scenes that Howard shot that made for even greater effect on film (namely, the famous late-night conversation between Nixon and Frost, invented for the play). The “conversation” scene, he divulged, was actually shot live, on two separate sets, with Howard mediating as an early-20th-century version of a live t.v. director. Howard walked by just as we were discussing this, and he sheepishly confessed that he felt that it might have gotten out of control (the result was brilliant, and no one who knew otherwise would have suspected that the filming was done this way). He said that he felt as if he was a ‘50s director in this film, to which I said that he had at least some inkling of what that took (Opie Griffith, anyone?).

Morgan’s next work will be much anticipated, given the current political climate. That one writer could so strongly capture transatlantic zeitgeist in the past decade is remarkable. This man needs an award (of a higher paycheck).

The supporting cast of ‘Frost/Nixon’ is outstanding. Toby Jones, who must win the Alec Guinness Award for human transformation in 2008 (he portrayed Karl Rove in ‘W.’), plays Swifty Lazar so well that you’re not sure if you’re looking at a hologram or the real thing. Rebecca Hall plays Caroline Cushing, Frost’s girlfriend, so smoothly that you don’t wince at the ‘70s settings at all. Kevin Bacon’s Jack Brennan is brilliant (and somehow wincingly recalls Bacon’s debut in ‘Animal House’).

The most memorable answer to any Q&A question was Ron Howard’s recount of “where he was” when Nixon resigned.  He told the story of waiting in New York’s LaGuardia Airport with Anson Williams (who played Potsy Webber to his Richie Cunningham in the t.v. sitcom ‘Happy Days’) when Nixon appeared on t.v. to announce his resignation.  He and Williams walked over to a bar that was surrounded by t.v.-watches, and they viewed the historic moment with a crowd of strangers.  When the moment ended, everyone looked at Williams and Howard (who were en route to a Boston autograph-signing gig at a department store, prior to the second season of their show) and were too stunned to react to the rising celebrities in their midst.  Similarly, Howard recounted, he and Williams just sat jaw-dropped on the plane for the entire flight to Boston.  The story somehow captured the entire essence of what he and Morgan had created on screen.

The effect of ‘Frost/Nixon’ is a time capsule of celebrity culture nipping at political power, and its contrast to today (can you imagine Larry King taking on George W. Bush?) is striking.

W.

The last days of the Bush administration were witness to an Oliver Stone film that is a classic American parable: the striving son, eager to overcome his father’s powerful presence. This is the stuff of great literature, and yet it is rendered to its American essence with a figure so giddily pitiable, as portrayed by Josh Brolin, that it deserves its own award category: best performance of a character inspired by a true idiot.

Stone’s film is much more brilliant than its box-office returns or its reviews would portray. Then again, this is the story of his career. ‘World Trade Center’ and ‘Salvador’ were strokes of contemporary genius (with, respectively, Nicholas Cage and James Wood pulling off great performances) that were little recognized in their time, and hopefully won’t sustain that level of neglect. So it is with ‘W.’

The Brolin portrayal of the George W. Bush character is buffeted by great performances all around – from Richard Dreyfus’ Dick Cheney to Jeffrey Wright’s Colin Powell and Thandie Newton’s head-shaking Condie Rice, as well as the great James Cromwell’s George H.W. Bush – and this sets an easy stage for the emergence of the W. persona – a politician who is as reluctant and befuddled as any in American history.

The tragic-comic flair of the character owes as much to the Brolin study of a president who eats with his mouth open, scratches his head at every given second, and twitches at the mere thought that his father is watching over him as anything else. It is a sympathetic portrayal, ultimately, which only makes us sadder for our post-Bush predicament. The recurring nightmare sequence of the W. character, dressed in Texas Rangers baseball garb in an empty stadium chasing a deep fly ball in right field is daunting: we are somehow the character and the spectator, fearing that the orb will overcome the defender.

The chronology, from the ‘Axis of Evil’ speech to the post-Iraq/pre-re-election period, and the early Bush years, is a masterful stew of a character study that has more to do with grandiose, fictionalized reality than the stuff of statesmanship. The W. character is a real person, to be sure; an American fuck-up who fails upward given the power of his family and his erect posture. He is a boy-king, with no sense of others. That he lives in the stark backwaters of Texas for most of his life has as much to do with his perceived rage against his father’s patrician bearing as anything else. ‘W.’ depicts a protagonist who is the walking untreated, in a comical turn. We could not swallow the story otherwise.

The film is a character actor’s dream: everyone from Rod Corddry (as Ari Fleischer) to Noah Wyle (as Don Evans) shows up. Bruce McGill’s George Tenet and Scott Glenn‘s Donald Rumsfeld are worthy of one-man shows.

The 129-minute film moves at a rapid pace, if only because we are so familiar with the hagiography that we want to see how it is assembled and treated. It does not disappoint. In the same year that ‘Harold and Kumar Escape from Guatanamo’ portrayed Bush in somewhat fanciful terms, the Stone film ‘W.’ is connected in similar tissue: the son who is at once Prince Hal and Richard III, with manners yet to learn.

New York Film Festival, 2008

 

 2008 New York Film Festival

 

The 46^th New York Film Festival was a perfectly timed reflection of the current mood in New York: diminished.  Shunted into the majestic (yet ill-equipped) Ziegfeld theatre, the setting was shameful – throwing hundreds of ticket-holders onto W. 54^th Street (forced to look into the forlorn windows of the soon-to-be-acquired Wachovia Securities).  We were stuck in line, in a light drizzle, for our only screenings at the Ziegfeld (save for my attending closing night’s screening of ‘The Wrestler’ at Avery Fisher Hall).  But, what a thrill these turned out to be.  Two of the best films of the festival – ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ and ‘Wendy and Lucy’ – were perfectly juxtaposed, and they told the story of what it means to be alive on Planet Earth in 2008 (and, yes, who is going up and who is going down). 

 

Mike Leigh’s ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ was another masterpiece from the bard of English working class cinema, who has shown so many times at the NYFF that it is hard to count (we have seen virtually all of his screenings at the festival – from ‘Naked’ to ‘Topsy Turvy’).  Leigh’s latest was screened to an adoring audience who marveled at Sally Hawkins’ portrayal of the lead character, Poppy Cross, whose carefree London existence as a schoolteacher who shares a flat with her friend/girlfriend, Suzy, is a gem of improvisation.  In the Q&A, Leigh and Hawkins discussed how they improvised various scenes and character traits, including the invention of Poppy’s name. 

 

The film is more of a meditation on life in its randomness, borne out by Poppy’s unbound joy at living itself.  She is only called out once on this seemingly dopey life philosophy, as it is suggested that she tries to make everyone happy all the time.  Her response is the antidote to a world in which consumerism and “keeping up” are rotting the soul of earth’s inhabitants: “well, it wouldn’t hurt, would it?”  The happy-go-lucky character is a schoolteacher whose obvious skill with young children meets its match in a child psychologist, played by Jack MacGeachin, who is receptive to everything Poppy is (as well as her availability).  Leigh’s common themes (bohemians living happy while fighting the encroachingly unhappy strivers) are played out poetically, largely as the camera fixes on a Polly who is a muse and teacher of life for those watching her very real-time chronicle of daily existence in London.  Poppy’s brother (the stand-in for Leigh’s suburban dolt) chafes as his shrewish, expectant wife forces him to forego videogame playing for an evening while hosting Poppy and her friend.

 

Nowhere is Poppy’s soulfulness more evident than her encounter one evening with a homeless, deranged man (played by Stanley Townsend) whose frightening presence is tempered by Poppy’s benevolent approach.  Poppy’s dialogue with her driving teacher, Scott (played by Leigh regular Eddie Marsan) are highlights of the film.  Poppy’s decision to learn driving is as logical as any other decision she makes – which is to say that her intuition guides her into the next phase of her life, in a quasi-Buddhist version of modern living.  Her free spirit, and her unconscious sexuality, make for a stew that Scott cannot resist nor tolerate. 

 

Leigh sets his character in a flat that is the antithesis of the brilliant Mike Newell film ‘Notting Hill’ (the Hugh Grant-Julia Roberts classic) – a wonderful place on the edge of nowhere that has all the desirable qualities of the BoBo 21^st century person looking to achieve their next phase in life (for New Yorkers: see South Brooklyn). 

 

The performances, as is usual with Leigh, are all first-rate (keep in mind that his casts are unusually high in Oscar nominations and, as with Imelda Staunton in ‘Vera Drake,‘ Oscar winners).  Given the current mood in Hollywood (post-WGA strike; pre-SGA strike), the Poppy Cross character crosses a line between sheer Hollywood Golden Age fantasy and kitchen-sink realism.  Sally Hawkins simply must win the Oscar for a performance that is so physically nuanced and held together with such tenacity (mind you, she always appears as someone you know, or knew, in life – her sincerity with this much invented character is extraordinary) that she commands the screen completely.

 

I would not be spoiling this film for anyone who sees it to say that Sally’s exchanges with Scott in the end are beyond hilarious.  Firstly, as anyone who has driven in central London in the past ten years knows, a student driver there must be the most nervous creature imaginable.  The site of Poppy as she takes the wheel, and in the passenger seat, give us a roller-coaster ride through life itself.

 

‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ was a great treat at the Ziegfeld, and Leigh’s mastery of the Q&A was also hysterical.  He opened by reminding the audience that he always admires the questions of a NYFF audience (including the reference to the questioner who – after the 1993 screening of ‘Naked’ – asked what the lead character would have done 30 minutes after the movie’s narrative ended).  Though no such similar questions appeared, Leigh gave ample time to Hawkins to discuss her shaping of the character.  While Leigh would eschew such schmaltzy pronouncements as “a star is born,” the audience wouldn’t have disagreed.  Sally Hawkins is here to stay.

 

 

Wendy and Lucy

 

 

The second film in our NYFF 2008 double feature was the stark Kelly Reichardt film, ‘Wendy and Lucy,’ which features the incredibly captivating Michelle Williams.  That the star is best known today for her status as widow of Heath Ledger provides the impetus for seeing a performer who is using her life experience at peak level.  The bleak Pacific Northwest landscape of the film, set in the present, features Williams as a young woman escaping her life in the South, and pushing onward to Alaska with some dim hope of securing work on a fishing rig.  Her faithful dog Lucy in tow, Wendy is as anonymous and undomesticated as her pet.  Driving aimlessly toward her half-hearted destination, Wendy sleeps in her 1980s vintage car, and is caught shoplifting while Lucy is tied up outside the store.  She spends the rest of the film searching for, and finding, her beloved Lucy.

 

The wayward Wendy is as real a portrait of American youth today as we’ve seen on screen.  Reichardt captures a bleak landscape that features Wendy trapped.

The film unfolds like a slow-moving one-act play – its 80-minute length is almost reminiscent of a silent feature, which is what this film resembles.  Wendy has a Chaplinesque/Keatonesque quality to her face; Reichardt’s close-ups of Williams capture the despair and the fear in a character who is running away, but seems desperate beyond measure. 

 

Character actors abound, from the always reliable Will Patton, who plays the garage owner who tries to shake down Wendy, to the wonderful Will Dalton, whose security guard is a surrogate father figure for Wendy.

 

Reichardt gets the most out of her Oregon setting, which seems like a land that time forgot.  At the Q&A, she and Williams discussed how they came to work on the project.  Williams, dressed in a white dress, radiated a forlorn, and courageous demeanor.  One could not help think how bittersweet this gem of a performance was for her; eight months after the tragic death of her ex-husband. 

 

The film was preceded by a Chinese short, ‘Cry Me a River,’ by Jia Zhangke, which tells the story of a reunion of post-Tiananmen Square students with their teacher, on the occasion of his birthday.  The prosperous young Chinese (one of whom has had his company listed on the Hang-seng exchange) are a sharp contrast to the U.S. of ‘Wendy and Lucy,’ which seems to be heading backwards, aimlessly.  Zhangke does communicate a sense of longing in his students, who head down-river, not fully knowing where they’re headed, and longing for a romantic past.  The fact that this film was screened 12 days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers only added to the timely sense of place.

 

 

The Wrestler

 

The graphic realism in Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Wrestler’ is a welcome relief to the reality-show culture in which the first decade of the 21^st-century is steeped.  That the film heralds the return of Mickey Rourke, 1980s bad-boy, is another triumph in a film that is somehow sentimental in its keyhole view into the life of a down-and-out professional wrestler.

 

The irony in the film is that there is nothing “fake” about Randy “the Ram” Robinson, despite the fact that he has false hair extensions, a stage name (Ramzinski is his surname), and probably more body work than most models.  The gritty trailer-park existence of the protagonist is a back-drop for a modern-day ‘Rocky’ (which is a revelation to see today).  Aronofsky seems to drop us back into a period – the 1970s – where filmmaking had chutzpah and the kind of balls that rejected Potemkin village fakery.  If you were a bum, you were a bum (even Rocky Balboa had no illusions – well, at least in his initial fantastic burst onto the scene).  The Ram is reminded everywhere of his past – he even plays an old cartridge videogame in his licensed, faded-pixel self performs his famous “Ram Jam,” where he stands on the ropes and leaps onto his prostrate opponent.

 

Rourke, since his motorcycle accident, has mostly down-and-outers, but his appearance as the tragic Randy is heroic.  Forced to take odd jobs, he has an outburst at a supermarket deli counter when a fan recognizes him.  This scene, as with other difficult public outbursts, is so well-shot and performed; it has an almost operatic quality. 

 

Indeed, ‘The Wrestler’ is somewhat of an anachronistic, operatic production: separated into several acts, with moments of high-pitched drama and incredible, shrieking angst.  Randy’s ingénues are his daughter, played by the radiant Evan Rachel Wood, and his friend Cassidy, a stripper played with intense pathos by Marisa Tomei.  As Stephanie, Randy’s daughter, Evan Rachel Wood is a sympathetic figure who cannot understand her father’s fate, but seems hopeful that she can provide some guidance.  She is the only “real” person in Randy’s life, and he seems to recognize this, despite being wedded to his stage persona.

 

As Cassidy, Tomei is spectacular and – as anyone who saw her in last year’s NYFF entry, ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,’ can attest – not shy about her body.  While not wanting to fraternize with her favorite patron, Cassidy is as lost as Randy, and seemingly as entrenched in her performing career as he is.  Their interactions make for some of the most intense scenes on the American screen this year, and not merely for their seedy setting.

 

Aronofsky chooses some of the grittier parts of the Garden State for the film’s settings (one hilarious scene has Randy being welcomed, in hard-core style, by a denizen of Rahway), and his lighting (as with his other films) conveys some sort of perpetual twilight.  The affection with which Aronofsky unfolds the story demonstrates nostalgia for the boyhood fantasy wrestling heroes of an earlier, pre-Internet era.  Randy is constantly reminded of his status (“my brother had a poster of you”) as a faded icon, but he revels in it.  There is a touch of German Expressionism in this film that makes one think of how a Pabst or Lang might have treated this material.  Aronofsky has similarly poetic, if outwardly unsympathetic, views toward the people in his films. 

 

The film’s insights into the wrestling profession are part of the charm of Robinson’s character.  He sets up the scene with other wrestlers, who show great deference, and takes a younger wrestler under his wing.  The gruesome aspects of the trade, including a scene in which Randy inserts small razor blades into his taped hands and arms, are highlighted.  Not for the faint of heart or stomach is this film; one scene shows abuse with a staple-gun (an agreed-upon prop by Randy and his opponent). 

 

Randy ultimately triumphs in his comeback, despite briefly succumbing to a bad heart.  He has made his peace in life, and he will live or die in the ring. 

 

Epilogue:  I ran into Gregg Bello (a high school friend), who plays the wrestling promoter Larry Cohen, after the film.  He noted that the film had taken off after winning the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival this year, and that the award had caught them all off-guard.  Bello has appeared in all of Aronofsky’s films, and it will be interesting to see how the Golden Globes and Oscars treat this film.  With a massive cultural sea change underway in America, Aronofsky’s vision may find a much more receptive audience for his daring work.

New York Film Festival 2008

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.   

New York Film Festival 2007, Post 2

 As I stated in my earlier post, I wanted to post some reviews of earlier films at this year’s 45^th New York Film Festival. 

One of these is ‘Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon, or ‘The Romance of Astrea and Celadon,’ by the 87-year-old Eric Rohmer.  Rohmer’s adaptation of the book by Honore d’Urfe (which many of us read in high school) is incredibly gorgeous; this early-17^th century imagination of “what life was like in the 5^th century” is as close to an idyll on screen as you may ever see.  The shepherd Celadon flirts with another girl at a dance, devastating his love, the shepherdess Astree.  Her dismay breaks his poetic heart, and he washes himself down-river, only to be awakened by the daughters of a Druid priest.   He gradually is coaxed out of his melancholy and reunites with his love, all while living in self-imposed exile and dedicating his misery to his love.   The film’s stylized acting and scenery may not be everyone’s idea of an evening or afternoon at the movies, but this is a real gem in what may be Rohmer’s last film. 

Another adaptation of a well-known book, Ira Sachs’ ‘Married Life,’ shared a different level of stylization from Rohmer’s film, setting what is a very English story in late-1940’s Seattle.  The book, ‘Five Roundabouts to Heaven,’ was written by John Bingham, who was John Le Carre’s mentor at MI5, and later became the model for the Le Carre character Smiley.  Sachs’ adaptation is so incredibly forced, and his period touches overblown (why is it that every music supervisor working in the industry today has to ensure that characters are listening to music on their car radios that would never have been played on radio, let alone actually listened to by its characters?), like the hot boogie-woogie music and late-deco clothes and interiors that almost threaten to swallow the performances. 

Great screen talent goes wasted here, as Pierce Brosnan plays the narrator and friend, Richard, of Chris Cooper’s Harry Allen, who is having an affair with young war-widow Kay, played by Rachel McAdams.  The long-suffering wife of Harry, Pat, played by Patricia Clarkson (who said, at the Q&A, that she has played so many period movie wives that she practically has “whale-bone corset” woven into her frame) is reduced to a stock character.  Essentially, what is an English story is unsuccessfully transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, with none of the charm, wit, and dash that would bring out the characters’ sly interior motives. I found it hilarious that Patricia Clarkson confessed that she took the job mainly to work with Pierce Brosnan, as that was certainly our draw for seeing the film.  Anyone who has caught Brosnan’s work in recent years, particularly in films such as ‘Matador,’ ‘The Tailor of Panama,’ and his masterful remake of ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’ will not be disappointed by his seductive turn as a womanizer who can still be a true “friend.”    

Chris Cooper does not particularly shine here; no fault of his own, given the direction and the character he plays, which is wrong for his intense delivery.  It is hard to see an actor who is so inherently combustible play a slow-burning, spiraling (again, very British) character of this sort.  His performance is reminiscent of Dennis Quaid in the soppy ‘Far From Heaven,’ in which a strong type is made to play a 1950’s suburban husband and father (who, in that film, is secretly homosexual).  ‘Far From Heaven,’ directed by Todd Haynes, imagines that the post-war middle-class striving family has more than a few skeletons in its closet and stretches credulity to make extreme points about the status quo.  With ‘Married Life,’ another revisionist work by Ira Sachs seeks to, in this case unsuccessfully, comment on (his mother’s) milieu through the distorted lens of a quintessentially British story.  I would like to see a moratorium placed on gay American film directors making hackneyed commentaries on how “everyone lived” in America before the Stonewall riots.  If they should choose to do this, they should at least watch the excellent ‘Mad Men’ series on the AMC cable network (created by the very gay Matthew Weiner, of ‘Sopranos’ fame, who has no problem unsentimentally showing life as it was in 1960 New York). 

On another plane altogether, the Romanian film ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,’ received its first U.S. screening at the festival.  The harrowing tale, set in the latter days of the Ceaucescu regime, details characters Otilia and Gabita trying to carry out an illegal abortion in a hotel room in an undisclosed Romanian city (the film was actually shot in Bucharest).  The tension that is established in the opening scene carries throughout, as time plays a crucial role in determining how the characters escape detection by the police, and their friends and families.  Abortion was outlawed in Romania for most of Ceaucescu’s regime, and setting the film just prior to the dictator’s downfall in 1989 makes for an even more compelling environment of paranoia and repression.   

Anamaria Marinca, who plays Otilia, displays the frightened lead character as a revolutionary, aiding her best friend and college roommate, Gabita, played by Laura Vasiliu, without sentiment.  She is able to balance her relationship with boyfriend Adi, and his family in a manner that requires her to suppress real emotion while, at the same time, betraying herself constantly.  She seems to be the only person who understands the real import of her surroundings; deft, defiant, and loyal to a fault.  The backyard abortionist who cons the two girls in the hotel room epitomizes the Soviet system, in which lawlessness is only buffeted by brutality. 

This harrowing scene is book-ended by Otilia having sex with the abortionist, as part of the underground bargain, and Gabita’s anxiety over the procedure.  The use of natural light, and the feeling of eternal darkness are wonderfully captured by director Cristian Mungiu, who conveys the reality of persistent suffering Twenty years after the film’s setting, Romania is now perhaps best known as a center for “runaway” Hollywood productions, and success as a back-office for European I.T. services.  Having visited Romania in 1998 – when the Romanian lei was on the verge of collapse, and prior to the country’s entry into the European Union – I can attest that the tone of Mungiu’s film resonates strongly with a country searching for identity and trust in any kind of future.  He has made as powerful a portrait of life under Soviet dictatorship as we may ever see, and the film’s award of the Palmes d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival may herald a new wave of Romanian filmmakers, not least of which is Mungiu himself. 

Mungiu’s capture of a birthday party scene, at which Otilia visits his boyfriends’ parent’s apartment, is masterful, with off-camera dialogue woven into the title character’s claustrophobic place at the table.  The silence of the public Romania is contrasted with wildly outspoken views at the dinner table.   Mungiu and Marinca appeared at the film’s Q&A, and Mungiu explained the setting for the film, with the background of a rampant black-market and grey-market economy, rampant poverty, and official silence.  The abortion sub-text, he explained, was both literal (estimates are that illegal abortions caused more than 500,000 deaths) and figurative (Ceaucescu wanted a large country of “soldiers” to fight for his regime).  He also noted that, in Europe, only Poland today has outlawed abortion.   We will be hearing more from him in coming years.

In another look back to the 1980s, with strong contemporary resonance, Ridley Scott’s “definitive” director’s final cut of the seminal ‘Blade Runner’ was screened at this festival, and it is worth seeing on the big screen. 

While Warner Bros. has been flogging its tireless restoration work and its 5-disc DVD (available in standard definition, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray) set due out for the holidays (that’s right, count ‘em, 5 discs – original theatrical film, working print, 1992 restoration of the film, 2007 “definitive” cut, and a documentary disc, all packaged in a replica of the briefcase carried by Harrison Ford’s character, Rick Deckard)), the brilliant colors, sound re-mix, and effects work make this as timeless a piece of cinematic art as any work in the past 30 years.  ‘Blade Runner’ could be released today without hesitation and, yet, may only reach the same number of people who saw the original film.  It needs to be seen, heard, and felt from the best big screen experience that one can find.  The Ziegfeld in New York is showing it now, and it is showing in L.A. as well.  It you want to truly understand what all the fuss was about (I dare say that many people today are more familiar with endless screenings, and YouTube postings, of the infamous Apple ‘1984’ commercial, which Scott directed and borrowed liberally from his then-current ‘Blade Runner’), go see this on the big screen.   

I will make two more posts from the festival, including the closing night film, in the coming days.

Happy moviegoing!

New York Film Festival 2007, Post 1

Many people have asked me over the years to write semi-regular film reviews, given my background as a film critic/historian.

Well, now I’ve finally decided to start such a dialogue, with comments and reviews on recent films.

This year’s New York Film Festival has motivated me to comment on a number of films that have yet to reach wide release.  The 45th edition of what has become, to me, a “cineaste’s Olympics,” the New York Film Festival has never been more communal.  This year’s festival has moved its screnings to the fabulous Rose Cinemas in the Time Warner Center, itself a fabulous centerpiece of the never-ending renaissance of Manhattan.  As Alice Tully Hall, the Lincoln Center concert hall that has been the perennial venue for the festival, is under renovation, the Rose Hall, on the 5th floor of the Time Warner Center, has stood in very well.  This means that there is more elbow-rubbing with the general crowd (Willem Dafoe is all over the place, although I don’t believe he has a film showing in the fest) than at Alice Tully, and a greater overall buzz.

The films this year have been better than in the past six or seven years, ending what seems like a long drought of “must-see” films. 

This evening, we saw Noah Baumbach’s ‘Margot at the Wedding,’ which is an overt homage to Eric Rohmer’s classic ‘Pauline at the Beach’ (one of the lead characters, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s wonderfully ditzy sister to the eponymous character, is named Pauline).  This is a very personal film, shot in handheld cinema verite style, with numerous jarring cuts, that focuses on Nicole Kidman’s Margot heading to the family home to essentially disrupt the pending wedding of her sister to a ne’er-do-well played by the ruthlessly scene-stealing Jack Black.  The film’s keyhole effects are balanced by the lighter comedy that is played out amongst the parents and children.  Baumbach combines elements of Lars von Trier’s ‘Anniversary’ and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s own (excellent) film, ‘The Anniversary Party’ in a film that witnesses Margot’s destructive interactions with her oddly estranged husband (John Turturro), her lover-cum-collaborator (Ciarin Hind), and her family. 

Baumbach coaxes amazing performances from the mostly unknown cast of teenagers playing the children of untethered and boundary-less artistes.  His setting, a rambling country house in the Hamptons, has touches of Chekhov (in a hilarious scene, Jack Black cuts down a cherished tree, with less-than-successful results), and easily pulls in the viewer.  The tensions and slightly passive-aggressive behaviors of all involved are somehow comfortably resolved throughout, and Baumbach creates a wistfully sentimental, and somewhat anachronistic, setting (Margot’s son, in one touching scene, sings ‘Sunday Girl’ into an old Realistic tape recorder, which most likely belonged to Margot).  The music, hairstyles, and dress all seem to point to a late-’70s/early ’80s milieu, where writers and their freewheeling kin are part of a world away from a different kind of madness (despite a passing nod to recent events, a passing parade/Iraq war protest late in the film that mirrors the growing clash within the family).

Baumbach has a firm directorial hand on a film that is paced breezily and effortlessly.  Many decisions and moments, however, seem to be scotch-taped into conversations, inserting further cues to the narrative without real motivation.  Margot’s character seems to erode as she becomes distanced by events that she can no longer control (and it is revealed that she has used her family, her sister in particular, as lurid fodder for her short stories and novels).  Her final wanton act, putting her son on a bus to Vermont to spend the summer with his father, is complemented by her leaving her purse and sweater behind as she sprints to board the bus.  Baumbach’s diaristic touches are genuine, and are not blasted by voice-overs or bombastic music score.  The music that is played throughout is natural, and emanates from the character’s moods. 

 The festival has several other masterpieces, including the Coen Brothers’ ‘No Country for Old Men, ‘ which is an adaption of a Cormac McCarthy novel about a West Texas bounty hunter and the people who get in his way.  Though not their best work by far, ‘No Country’ is as fresh a film as anything on the American scene today, and finds the Coens still combining beautiful cinematography (Roger Deakins films a gorgeous New Mexico landscape as the Texas setting), rip-saw editing, and cheeky cartoon imagery into a story that is breathtaking, even in some of its less articulate moments.  The Javier Bardem character will doubtless become a cult classic icon of sadistic irony.  His portrayal of a seemingly psychotic, yet oddly philosophical, killer is wonderfully juxtaposed by Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff character, who provides the setting for the story and is the moral underpinning of a Texas that has always been wild, but is about to get completely out of control (money, drugs, and illegal immigration all mixing into a story that very quickly explains the meaning behind the film’s title).  This may be Tommy Lee Jones’ finest performance, and in a long line of lawmen roles, it is his most poetic.  His exchange with Barry Corbin, who plays his wheel-chair bound father, toward the end of the film reveals a man who is helpless to stop the madness ahead of him, and mindful of his place in society as the last line of three generations of country sheriffs.  The cast is, as with all Coen films, first-rate, yielding brilliant performances from Kelly McDonald, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, and Garret Dillahunt. 

We saw ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ on opening night of the festival and, yes, it is a masterpiece.  This is an infectiously touching, and humorous, look at three brothers’ attempts to reconnect in a strange world (India) that, in the end, is able to absorb their discordant egos and reassemble their common humanity.  Their ability to selflessly save two of three downing boys while traversing the Indian countrsyide is quintessentially American; a passing nod to Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia saving a Bedouin who is “fated” to die in the desert.  Only three “lost” American souls in India could seek to save strangers while fighting amongst themselves. 

Director Wes Anderson, he of ‘Rushmore,’ ‘Life Aquatic,’ and ‘Royal Tennenbaums’ fame (not to mention a very cheeky American Express commercial), has homages to many films in ‘Darjeeling,’ but he seems most in love with cinema itself.  His playful camera, brilliant use of stop-motion and vintage music (again, the Kinks and other English ’60s and ’70s gems) are part of a non-stop ride to the quirkiest family reunion ever filmed.   The film is blissfully, and blessfully, short (unlike his other features) and will become a heavily-referenced work, not just for its cast (the unlikely trio of Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson), but for its brilliant use of setting and its dry wit.  Only Anderson could have Bill Murray dressed as a 1950’s businessman make a non-speaking cameo, while revealing Anjelica Huston as the main characters’ mother, a free-spirited Catholic missionary in the middle of India. 

The above represent the better-known films at the festival so far (I will post some capsule thoughts on some of the others).  I will try to write some fuller reviews of some of the less ballyhooed films (which, hopefully, will be playing near you soon).

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