the phantom country

"So much of life scares the shit out of me, and it’s reflected in this movie": Joe Carnahan and Frank Grillo on The Grey

2012-01-26T09:18:00.011-05:00

A plane crashes in Alaska. The survivors are left to fend against merciless cold, hunger, and unusually hostile wildlife. This is a story of manly men in a manly place, bearded men without women, fire-lit bloody faces sticky with snow, and man-eating wolves. Resourcefulness, persistence and solidarity are their only hope for survival. But survival itself seems unlikely.

After many years of torture-laden horror films that encourage audience delight in their characters’ mortal terror, there’s something refreshingly noble in The Gray’s insistence on depicting the ways in which fear works on the psyche with a certain rugged empathy. It’s a bracing film of fast violence and existential angst, from that initial plane crash to the first wolf attack, from the crossing of a gorge along a flimsy improvised cable to the final alpha-on-alpha showdown.

Filming in Smithers, B.C., director/co-writer Joe Carnahan, finally making good on the promise of his 2002 film Narc, immerses us in the frigid milieu and ramps up tension through the pulling in and out of sound and disorienting shifts between tight and wide shots. Carnahan may prove to be that rare thing in contemporary movies: a devoted genre filmmaker, inventive but not ironic.

Carnahan’s enthusiasm for his work in certainly infectious. I spoke with both he and actor Frank Grillo last week in a Toronto hotel about the film’s themes, their process, and working with Liam Neeson, The Grey’s smartly cast star. Carnahan and Grillo are old friends. They finish each other’s sentences. Honestly, I didn’t have to do much. Most I just sat back and enjoyed the wine they kindly offered.

JB: From the outset The Grey works nicely as a visceral thriller. Then there came a point where I realized that this entire movie is going to be about facing death, preparing for death.

Joe Carnahan: When did that occur to you?

JB: Maybe it was that campfire scene where the guys are huddled round, talking about faith. I thought that if Ingmar Bergman made action films without any women in them they might look something like this.

[Carnahan gets up]

JC: Brother, that’s one of the highest compliments anybody’s ever paid me.

[Knuckle taps all around]

JB: [to Grillo] This also has much to do with the way your character develops. As we get to know these guys we see how each deals with fear differently. And gradually we start to understand that Diaz’s gut response to the terrifying situation he’s in is to act like an asshole.

Frank Grillo: Right. Angry. Very angry. It’s the way that I dealt with fear for a long time. Bluster, you know? As men, these are issues that we deal with on a daily basis. I’ve said this before and people laugh, but it’s tough to be a man in this world. We grow up with that phrase: “Be a man.” My father used to say that to me whenever I was afraid of something. But what does that mean? I’m afraid. But what does that mean? I’m afraid. Who do I tell?

JC: From a very early age we’re meant to stifle that. But you know what? So much of life scares the shit out of me, and it’s reflected in this movie. What these guys are dealing with is real.

FG: Death.

JC: Neeson says it in that campfire scene: “What’s wrong with being afraid? I’m scared shitless.”

FG: And I say to him, “That’s ’cause you’re a punk.” I went and stayed in some prisons in New York to prepare for the movie. I felt like Diaz was a guy who had his own creed, this thing that he lived by. The prison thing, where it’s about respect. If you’re afraid in jail, you’re a punk. And you’re going to get punked. It’s a survival mechanism. That’s all that Diaz is going on. As soon as he’s called on it, as soon as he realizes that these guys are going to save his life, it turned him around.

JB: I haven’t read the source material. How much of this meditation on the fear of death was in the short story?

JC: What was great about the short story was that it was an introduction to what the world could be. The prose style is very punchy, staccato. It took me four and a half years of revisiting it to get where we got with the script. Which was great. There was never a deadline. So time passed and you have this little epiphanies that life brings you and very slowly you find little things you can add. The process was like sculpture. Just working away at it, shaping it.

JB: It’s tempting to place The Grey in the tradition of Howard Hawks, but in Hawks’ films guys don’t really lose their cool. In The Grey just about everybody loses their cool.

JC: It’s more like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, except that the characters are simply clinging to life. But, brother, evoking Hawks in any way with regards to this movie, I mean, put that on the fuckin’ poster!

FG: It’s interesting to consider this in light of this terrible tragedy that just happened with the Mediterranean cruise ship. Not just the captain, but all the officers jumped ship! They were afraid to die. They didn’t care about who was still on the ship. So I’m thinking to myself, Wow, those storybook endings about heroic men—it doesn’t always happen that way.

JC: And it’s not like these guys were stranded in the middle of the North Atlantic. They could see the shore! That’s a level of cowardice that, well, God help me if I ever experience that.

FG: But, you know what? You don’t know. You just don’t know.

JC: But dude, did you hear about this Mark Wahlberg quote?

FG: He said that if he were on the flight from Boston on 9/11 things would have panned out differently, that he would have killed the terrorists and landed the plane safely. It’s that hubris of a guy who’s read too many action movie scripts.

JC: In retrospect we’re all heroic geniuses.

FG: We’re more afraid to be killed than we are to die. Dying doesn’t seem so bad. Being killed is awful.

JC: There’s some part of us that eventually makes peace with the fact that we’re not going to be here forever. To be killed is to have death imposed on you.

FG: And there’s pain involved.

JC: And there’s pain.

JB: But it’s also easier, right? If someone kills you then you don’t have time to come to terms.

JC: Right. You’re not left with your final thoughts. That’s why I wanted to put that first death scene in The Grey, the guy bleeding to death, the one Liam presides over. Because a lot of people are killed in movies, but not a lot of people die.

FG: You’re watching him die.

JC: It’s a moment where a guy shakes loose this mortal coil, and that’s that, man.

FG: In combat, in serious situations like that, friends have to watch other friends die. I thought Badge did a beautiful job of dying, of conveying that, that...

JC: Something just slipping away.

FG: Yeah.

JC: Yeah.

JB: Frank, you were signed on long before production, right?

FG: Joe just called me and said “Don’t take a job in January. I don’t care what your agents say, you’re doing this job.” Which is risky. I’m a working guy, a blue collar actor. But the advance notice afforded me time to work things out very thoroughly. I was a pain in the ass, constantly emailing and calling Joe with ideas.

JC: But also, what are you right now, brother, like, 170?

FG: 165.

JC: He was up to almost 200 pounds. He built himself up, preparing himself for this film. That’s the level of engagement I knew I’d get from Frank.

FG: But I could barely keep up with Liam Neeson. 58 years old, this guy never stopped.

JB: And he looks like a wolf.

JC: He looks like a wolf!

FG: Doesn’t he look like a wolf?

JB: After doing this project do you guys feel a little closer to knowing how to meet your maker gracefully?

JC: I think so, brother. If there’s any kind of pacification that can arise from an experience like this it’s hopefully the presence of mind to believe that whatever you hold in your heart, that’s what’s going to shepherd you through.

FG: I have three sons. I don’t mind dying, but I just want it to be pleasant. I want to know my boys are okay. I don’t want to be taken from the Earth in an instant and not have the time to do it in a way that would be beautiful.

JC: That’s great, brother, because as we sit back and admire this horrific plane crash we just put on screen we both got to get on a fuckin’ plane tomorrow!

[Both laugh]

Running into each other: Carancho

2012-01-23T15:50:00.002-05:00

Here’s a screwball pairing you probably never imagined: ambulance chaser meets ambulance driver. He’s an older, weary looking type who lost his license and now works for a firm that rips off accident victims. She’s a young, pretty but numb-looking type who works as a paramedic to supplement her income as a doctor and buoy her burgeoning drug habit. These two inhabit a contemporary Buenos Aires where corruption surrounding insurance companies has reached an appalling low and crack-ups are staged. It’s a grimy labyrinth of a city and these two lonely, grime-covered people are desperate to survive it with some splinter of integrity left intact. He gets the shit kicked out of him more than once. She has to deal with patients who wake up on gurneys in the ER and start beating the shit out of each other. Both look like they could really use some sleep. They’re not going to get much. Carancho, the latest film from Pablo Trapero, is very much a neo-noir.

Sosa, the sleazy lawyer (“carancho” is Spanish for vulture), is played by Ricardo Darín, rumpled star of such globally popular Argentine pictures as The Secret in Their Eyes, The Aura, Nine Queens and The Son of the Bride. Luján, the junky doctor with the somnambulistic bedside manner, is played by Martina Gusman, Trapero’s wife and star of his previous films Lion’s Den and Born and Bred. Both give engrossingly detailed performances, highlighted in Carancho’s early scenes, which are composed almost exclusively of unnervingly tight close-ups (the first wide turns up somewhere after the eight-minute mark). Trapero puts the study back in character study. At times his attention to nuance comes at the expense of the bigger picture—tone is masterfully invoked but momentum becomes an issue. I confess that this is the first I’ve seen of Trapero’s work since Crane World, his knockout 1999 feature debut, and one of my favourite films of the last fifteen years or so. Oddly enough, as different as the slick, formalist, genre-friendly Carancho is from the episodic, shaggy, very funny, black and white Crane World, they share an enormously appealing emphasis on work, on how people go about their daily business. Trapero is clearly a filmmaker deserving of more attention—including mine!

Haywire: Learnin' the tropes

2012-01-19T09:41:00.006-05:00

Haywire reunites director Steven Soderbergh with screenwriter Lem Dobbs. Though not as revelatory or formally engaged as The Limey, the pair’s 1999 sleeper, which marked a comeback for its star, Terrence Stamp, Haywire is nevertheless, like The Limey, a smart, playful vamp on old tropes: lone wolf hired muscle takes a gig that turns out to be a double-cross; she becomes a loose end; corrupt former employer now seeks to eliminate her... you know the tune. Like The Limey, Haywire is also a film unusually concerned with geographical coherence, thus we get chase scenes that work up quite a sweat ensuring that we understand exactly how we got onto the fourth floor of this particular building or down that particular alleyway—there’s even a pair of demonstrative scenes in which our heroine, Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), carefully consults a covert GPS device. Soderbergh, as always, operating as his own cinematographer, knows that one of the problems with modern action flicks is that they’re disorienting in all the wrong ways. In a film that’s all about escape, pursuit, concealment and ambush, identification is dependent on knowing where the hell we are.

That sense of where-we-are also applies to genre, and Soderbergh, though always looking for a novel twist, has a knack for letting us know just what kind of movie we’re watching: a thriller, in this case, with the emphasis on thrills, but a thriller that doesn’t insult your intelligence. While the sequences involving operations or surveillance play out in cool but propulsive montages set to David Holmes’ lightly funkified suspense score—part In a Silent Way/Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, part Shaft, part post-rock—the actual fight scenes are relatively light on cuts, feature no music whatsoever, and look pretty painful in their awkwardness. Random objects are creatively appropriated as weapons. Furniture does not always break, and such little insertions of realism add a pleasing layer of ouchiness. Yet other details, such as the tumbleweed that tumbles by during a final scene between Mallory and her new employer (Michael Douglas), allude to a certain detached sense of irreverence guiding this project.

Soderbergh has attracted his customary diverse range of acting talent, mostly recognizable stars with a little something extra to catch us off guard: Antonio Banderas with a beard, Ewan McGregor with a bad haircut (and a half-assed accent), Bill Paxton as a moustached military-fiction-writing dad. Everyone seems to be having the right amount of fun. As for the tough, terse, well-built, largely expression-free Carano, well, lets just say she’s a mixed martial arts star first and actor second. I confess that I caught myself wondering now and then whether Asia Argento was too busy. Or Michelle Rodriguez. But Carano’s gung ho/no bullshit attitude, her obvious ability to do at least some of her own stunts and her lack of over-psychologizing function fairly well in what is above all a movie meant to move, to function, to divert. “You shouldn’t think of her as a woman,” says the baddie who betrayed her. “That would be a mistake.” Indeed, Mallory is a firecracker, a killing machine with a moral compass. I guess she has feelings too. Maybe we’ll get to explore them in the sequel.

Sympathy for the sadist, and other dubious teenage readings of A Clockwork Orange

2012-01-16T11:40:00.008-05:00

As a teenage boy I suppose I was impressed by the artful brutalism of it, the audacious juxtaposition of music and image, the home invasions, gang rapes and vicious beatings set to show tunes and classical favourites. When you’re young you need dystopias, and A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel, more than delivered, replete with its own jive talk, ugly furniture, outfits and wigs. It re-legitimized milk-drinking for the bad kids. It also fed juvenile homophobic suspicions that parents were zombies, authority figures were buffoons, and social workers just wanted to get down your pants. It wasn’t that hard to identify with Alex. Sure, he murdered the cat lady, but he didn’t mean it. Kubrick facilitated Alex’s palatability by excising the novel’s pedophilia and making all of Alex’s victims unbelievably irritating, cartoons practically waiting to be victims. Still, I find it interesting that the prison chaplain is the sole voice of reason: “When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.” (Burgess was a lapsed Catholic.)

Then there was Malcolm McDowell, a bold, intelligent actor, whose Alex is so memorable, so savage yet shamelessly sympathetic, that the role kind of haunted him, a bit like Norman Bates did for Anthony Perkins. In those early scenes of Alex and his droogs prowling city and country for the old ultraviolence, McDowell never blinks. It’s a way to assert his unflinching lust, this sadist with a soft spot for Beethoven. Which makes it that much more chilling when Alex goes to prison and gets plugged into the experimental fast-tracked rehabilitation program where they feed him drugs and force him to watch nasty movies all afternoon with his eyelids held open by metal insect legs. The result of this new crime-crushing tactic? A generation of ex-cons who get nauseous whenever confronted with bullies, young men incapable of intimate contact with the opposite sex. Once released from the pen Alex is anything but “ready for love.”

Which brings us to the third act and its chain of dramatic ironies, which possess a certain satisfying symmetry. Going back to A Clockwork Orange for the first time since my teens it was these final sequences that I realized I’d forgotten. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well they unfurl, despite the film’s stiff satire on disciplinary systems and wobbly warnings about the malleability of the mind and the persistence of aberrant urges. Whether any of this works as social commentary remains debatable. Kubrick was genuinely horrified by the copy-cat killings and avoided these themes in the future, leaving them to Michael Haneke—who would run into a whole other set of problems with his own Funny Games.

Whack-a-mole

2012-01-14T12:46:00.005-05:00

The year is 1973, the milieu British secret service. Someone, we’re told, is a mole, a rotten apple—a red one. Retired master spook George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is charged with smoking him out. But how? Everyone has secrets. Everyone is compromised. Everyone looks a little shifty. The world, in fact, looks shifty. If you were to layer every frame of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy atop one another and shine a light through you’d get a palimpsest of grimy wallpaper, gloomy skies, nervous sweat, hairpieces and funeral parlour suits. Smiley’s bifocals rhyme with all those dirty windows, desk lamps and dull reflective surfaces of creaky old lifts with steel walls. You’d get a blur of European cities in multiple shades of shabby. This War isn’t just Cold; it’s also crepuscular, analogue and ramshackle.

Directed with a born voyeur’s gaze by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) from a ruthlessly taut script by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor, Tinker Tailor thrives on atmosphere. It needs to. Because of you haven’t read John Le Carré’s source novel or seen the original 1979 UK miniseries—shit, maybe even if you have—following the tangled threads of this adaptation, which clocks in at just over two hours but could easily have been six, can be a challenge. Smiley’s no great help here as he tends to say little. One of the things necessarily lost in this truncated narrative is a fuller sense of Smiley’s own psychic wounds. But there’s something to be said for this kind of bracing, at times baffling, concision. The film is claustrophobic and never less than intriguing. And the new emphasis on the characters’ sexual proclivities is quite welcome, and beautifully handled by the stellar cast, Colin Firth especially.

Which isn’t to say that we don’t get a few clichés thrown in. “Trust no one,” “Things aren’t always what they seem”: people actually say this stuff in Tinker Tailor. But the unsaid is often what’s most compelling in this morally murky, mystery-saturated thriller. Besides Oldman and Firth, the others actors who work wonders with misdirection and withholding include Toby Jones, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Ciarán Hinds and an especially pretty Tom Hardy—probably the year’s best gallery of guilt-ridden faces.

"Repression is interesting": David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method

2012-01-11T10:46:00.014-05:00

It may not first seem it, but this drama about the origins of psychoanalysis, adapted by Christopher Hampton from his own play, finds its ideal interpreter in David Cronenberg, who has, after all, forged his career by studying the beast within, and has always conveyed a special knowingness about the myriad ways in which the primitive bristles and burns at the spinal-psychic base of the bourgeoise. Tracing encounters between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his acolyte, and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), Jung’s patient and mistress and, finally, an accomplished psychoanalyst in her own right, A Dangerous Method, which opens wide across Canada this weekend, is the story of a precarious new science’s difficult development, a love affair, and a friendship fraught with conflicting expectations. It’s also about doubt, the persistence of superstition, family, clothes, gardens, interior design, shop talk, facial hair, and correspondence.

The tone is eloquent, ironic, restrained, at times epistolary. Manners matter, yet taboo triumphs. Lives are condensed in such a way that movements become dreamlike. There are numerous brilliant, often very funny hard cuts between scenes that, though time has passed, almost make us feel Jung is walking from one scene that reveals his unresolved sexual urges to another in which his wife has just given birth. The performances are each beautifully calibrated and contained, and Fassbender—whose superb, erotically charged work is far better rewarded here than it was in Shame—is especially compelling in his transmission of the delicate balance of Jung’s repressed desires, colossal ambitions, and nervous urge toward the esoteric, perhaps as a way of coping with irreconcilable needs.

I spoke with Cronenberg last month about the film. We had but a brief window of time, yet he was, as always, generous, articulate and witty.

JB: For me, an especially memorable moment in your body of work is the opening scene of The Brood, a scene that, however unconventional or sinister the treatment being administered in it may be, could be read as suspicious of psychotherapy. Before this project came to you, did you feel any particular unease with psychoanalysis?

David Cronenberg: [Laughs] No. No particular wariness. I think every really interesting thing we create has a potential downside or dangerous aspect. Obviously, this movie is called A Dangerous Method, and it was considered so in its time because it was revolutionary, subversive and volatile. Freud was attacked for it. As he said when he came to America on the boat: “Don’t they realize we’re bringing them the plague?” [Laughs] He was acknowledging the fact that this new therapy was tricky. Things could have unforeseeable repercussions. In The Brood I’m just exaggerating that. It was never meant as a blanket critique of psychotherapy.

JB: I recall something David Lynch wrote once about trying out psychoanalysis. He came in, sat down and immediately asked the doctor if treatment would effect his creativity. The doctor said yes. Lynch said thanks, got up, and left. Do you feel there’s something in psychoanalysis that’s detrimental to creativity?

DC: I think it depends on what kind of artist you are. And what kind of therapist. Some psychotherapists who have writers or directors as clients like to get screenwriting credits.

[Both laugh.]

DC: Its true. The therapist who said that to Lynch was probably feeling his oats, wanting to feel the power of analysis. But, you know, Woody Allen’s been in analysis for 40 years and he’s still pretty productive, so it really depends on the parties involved, how they interact. That’s one of the interesting things about analysis, it created a new kind of relationship. And it could be a complex, very difficult one. The boundaries always shift, because they’re contingent on the specific personalities of both analyst and patient. That’s why it can’t really be called a hard science, though Freud desperately wanted it to be. Hard science implies that an experiment can be repeated anywhere so long as you replicate the conditions. With human beings you can’t do this. We’re too slippery.

JB: Over the course of A Dangerous Method, Sabina Spielrein arguably emerges as an example of psychoanalysis’ capacity for self-betterment.

DC: Yes. As she says to Jung, “You cured me with his method.” Meaning Freud’s talking cure. The boundaries of psychoanalysis weren’t known—they were still inventing it. So you have to give Otto Gross a little credit here. He was a proto-hippy, questioning everything, and he was saying, “How do we know having sex with your patient is a bad thing?”

[Both laugh.]

DC: It was a legitimate question. “What if it turns out to be a useful component of this new therapy we’re inventing?” Of course, now it’s illegal. But Gross really changed Jung’s way of thinking. He shook him out of his bourgeois patterns, and Jung was forever after an advocate of polygamy. He lived that way. He had a wife, but he also had a mistress for the rest of his life. It seemed to work for him. I don’t know about his wife, though she too became a psychoanalyst and didn’t leave him and was very productive. So who’s to say that, even as a patient who became a lover, Sabina was in fact victimized? As it turns out, she was no victim. She was their intellectual equal and went on to have her own career.

JB: Something I find especially intriguing about the film is the way that Jung and Spielrein seem to cross paths while on what are essentially reverse trajectories, the former moving from groundedness to deep disquiet, the latter from hysteria to groundedness. They share a peculiar kind of love story I think...

DC: That’s exactly right. A very good point...

JB: Which makes me think that there are actually a surprising number of love stories in your work. The Dead Zone, The Fly and Dead Ringers are constructed to some degree around people falling in love. Crash and History of Violence prominently feature long-term love that needs to be renegotiated.

DC: When I was a kid I read a book called The Allegory of Love, by C.S. Lewis, which suggested that romantic love was a relatively recent literary invention, that it had never existed in ancient Roman or Greek literature or art. Whatever you want to call it, it does seem to be a very powerful force. And yes, I think it’s in almost all my movies, though it’s not often acknowledged, perhaps because it’s very subtle.

JB: I think there’s an interesting piece of writing to be done on the subject.

DC: Well, you could do it.

JB: I’m going to look into that! ...In the meantime, I’m interested in the question of restraint in A Dangerous Method. Most of your films depict catalytic events that allow some level of chaos to unfurl, but here—as in History of Violence, and perhaps Spider—taboo or heretical urges are only allowed to manifest in very particular safe zones. In this case, the zones of therapy or secret sex.

DC: Repression is interesting. In Freud’s formula civilization is repression. For me, each movie is a unique creature and tells you what it needs. In this case what it needed was control, because the era that psychoanalysis came out of was one of great control. You see it in the Belvedere Gardens, so beautiful yet so manicured—the boundaries were unmistakable. It was an era in which everyone knew his place. There was not a lot of fluidity. A lot of stability, but not much spontaneity. So the tone of the movie comes from the characters and the era, even the clothes, the high, stiff collars, and so on. Hysteria, we might say, was a spontaneous outcry against this general repression. Particularly of women.

JB: I enjoyed the film’s many almost subliminal elements that invoke this air of psychic unease. I think of the zig-zag floors, for example.

DC: Much of which was taken from photographs of the era. Both Christopher Hampton and I felt that the more accurate we could be, the more neutral, without tilting things one way or the other, the more revealing it would be.

JB: This is, obviously, an unusually talky movie. Much drama emerges through things spoken. That must be exhilarating in its own, quiet way, to be able to craft a story in which the subconscious can be articulated without much contrivance.

DC: That was one of the attractions, absolutely. A lot of people say, “Wasn’t it too talky? Too theatrical?” But it was a screenplay before it was a play, and even there, the characters talked a lot. It was called The Talking Cure. I liked that. I think Christopher was worried that I might want to cut back on that for so-called cinematic reasons, but I assured him that that was what makes this script great. A face talking is the thing that we photograph most as directors. To me that’s not theatrical—it’s the essence of cinema. If you have a great face saying great things, you have a movie.

Memory lane to Lund

2012-01-10T10:58:00.012-05:00

Coming after Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and The Seventh Seal (1957), Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (also ’57) was the product of someone who’d fully arrived as an internationally acclaimed auteur. In terms of gravity it splits the difference between Smiles, a sex comedy of the highest order, and Seal, a medieval existential ensemble drama about futility and death; like the latter, it’s a road movie through which numerous supporting characters pass while our protagonist, septuagenarian professor Isak Borg (legendary Swedish director Victor Sjöström), travels to Lund for an honorary degree and along the way reviews his life’s regrets. The film, appearing not too long after Akira Kurosawa’s beloved and not dissimilarly themed Ikiru (1952), instantly became one of Bergman’s most beloved works.

I’ve been a Bergmaniac since my teens and must confess that Strawberries has never even cracked my top ten (bearing in mind that Bergman directed over 60 films). There are memorable dream sequences—the sun-blasted houses with their butcher paper curtains; the carriage carrying the coffin carrying the professor; the professor’s wife being ravished in the woods—but none as memorable or imaginative as dream sequences in several other Bergmans. The long flashback section at the summer house is a little boring (or anyway as boring as any sequence featuring both the delicious Bibi Andersson and the delectable Gunnel Lindblom can be). And those two self-serious young men in ultra-short shorts that the professor picks up are more annoying than anything else.

On the other hand, there’s the ingenious notion of having Marianne, the professor’s daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin, of the incredibly sensual mouth and quiet, captivating intelligence), tag along for the ride after having temporarily left her husband Evald (Gunnar Björnstrand). One of the film’s strongest sequences is the flashback to the moment Marianne confesses to Evald that she’s pregnant and intends to keep the baby; Evald tells her if she does they’re through; the last cut is brilliantly, brutally timed. There’s that endearing rural gas jockey (Max Von Sydow) who reveres the professor so much he won’t accept remittance for topping up his tank. “There are things that can’t be paid back,” he says. “Not even with gas.” And there is, of course, Sjöström, so relaxed yet so vulnerable, so elegant and somehow chilly. His performance is reason enough to see Wild Strawberries. That and those final two close-ups (courtesy of Gunnar Fischer in one of his last Bergmans) of Sjöström's tired, pale face, which, seemingly effortlessly, convey the sense of a whole life having passed before it, and the possibility of finding peace with that life’s drawing to a close.

Making headlines: Errol Morris' Tabloid

2012-01-04T14:05:00.004-05:00

In 1977 Joyce McKinney, a 28 year-old model and former Miss Wyoming, journeyed to England on a mission of love. With apparently unlimited funds at her disposal and fearing possible violence, she’d hired a pilot and a couple of body guards to accompany her, but in the end her dutiful old buddy Keith May was her sole accomplice as, depending on who you believe, she either kidnapped or liberated Kirk Anderson, the dumpy 21 year-old Mormon missionary Joyce claimed was brainwashed by his church. Kirk was her fiancé, she says, and the love of her life. However willing or unwilling Kirk was, he wound up shackled to a bed in a cottage in the Devon countryside, a bed upon which Joyce, by her own testimony, administered three days of hot, therapeutic sex, just enough to temporarily bring Kirk back to his senses, but not enough to prevent his returning to the Church of Latter Day Saints and ultimately declaring in a courtroom that Joyce raped him. Rape? This made no sense whatsoever to our ever-cheerful, practical-minded anti-heroine. How can a woman possibly rape a man? Joyce asks. “It’s like putting a marshmallow in a parking meter.”

Sex, religion, abduction, bondage, a feisty, sexy, sly subject oozing with natural showmanship and sporting a delectable Southern accent: “Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon” was perfect tabloid material. And perfect material for Errol Morris’ latest film, Tabloid. Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) has made a career of interrogating the sensational, but with McKinney it turns out that very little prodding was needed. Morris spent a single day in 2010 interviewing the still vivacious McKinney about the scandal and walked away with documentary gold. There’s this refrain that clings to every Morris project, something about how he looks down on his subjects or even wants to humiliate them, but I don’t buy it for a minute. Watching Tabloid again in preparation for this review it seemed to me that Morris was, if anything, completely seduced by McKinney. Like the many who did her bidding as she orchestrated the entire drama and media circus in the UK, Morris became a slave of sorts. How could you not? McKinney’s story, complete with ridiculous disguises and daring escapes, is just too good (to be true?), even with all her absurd allegations and bits of bawdy-folksy wisdom. McKinney is no fool. She says she was placed in a school for gifted kids because she had an IQ of 168, and, as with everything she says, you kind of believe her. The film’s most compelling question: does she believe herself?

In keeping with the titular theme, Morris smacks the screen over and over with gaudy, zippy, superimposed headlines, sometimes as a way of efficiently letting us know about contradicting facts (KIDNAPPED flashes over McKinney’s face as she claims Anderson’s consensual accompaniment to the love shack), sometimes just to emphasize certain favourite words of his subjects. (Peter Tory, reporter for the Daily Express, the tabloid who opted to print McKinney’s version of the events, clearly has a predilection for the term “spread-eagled,” which he employs whenever he refers to Anderson’s captivity.) And Morris keeps the dizzyingly entertaining Tabloid peppy and propulsive by jumping back and forth between McKinney and his handful of other smartly selected subjects: Tory, salty rival tabloid photog Kent Gavin, Salt Lake City radio host and ex-Mormon Troy Williams, still-horny-for-Joyce hired pilot Jackson Shaw, and one Dr. Hong, a Korean genetic scientist who supplies crucial commentary on Tabloid’s wonderfully WTF?! denouement, in which we find out about McKinney’s descent into agoraphobic reclusion and batshit home video making in the 1980s and her return to the public eye in the 2000s following the death and eventual rebirth of her beloved Booger, a canine so extraordinary he could answer the phone and retrieve beverages from the refrigerator.

2011: the year in movies

2011-12-31T18:01:00.027-05:00

How do we make sense of the past? What paths does memory take en route to truth, trauma or transcendence? What patterns emerge? Many of my favourite films of 2011, listed below in no particular order (though the first is first for a reason), respond to this question by contrasting the unfathomably vast with the infinitesimal, deep history with willful amnesia, the beginning and end of everything with the harrowing loss of a single life. (Or a single mind.)

Nostalgia for the Light
The central location of Patricio Guzmán’s essay film is Chile’s Atacama Desert, the most arid region on Earth, home to two of the world’s most powerful telescopes, a place where mothers and widows of the disappeared scour the desert floor for trace remains of loved ones while astronomers search the outer reaches of the universe for ancient signs of life. Like many of Guzmán’s earlier films (The Battle of Chile, Salvador Allende), the film interrogates his home country’s selective erasure of unresolved past horrors while waxing nostalgic about its old collective fascination with the wonders of the night sky. Nostalgia For the Light is eloquent, inventive, rigorous, tender, curious and immensely humane.

The Tree of Life
Wildly ambitious (and thus, appropriately, divisive and awkward), Terrence Malick’s latest (a perfect compliment to Guzmán’s—and a perfect corrective to the largely superficial but similarly personal-versus-total-apocalypse narrative of Melancholia) pushes his large canvas/whispered epiphany aesthetic into ever more rippling, impression-flecked terrain, juxtaposing scattered moments of revelation, joy and pain from the childhoods of three Texan boys with nothing less than the origins of life on Earth. The imagery is breathtaking, its arrangement inspired, dictated by its own internal psychic rhythms. The final, mystical sequence is somewhat dubious, but I wouldn’t excise a second of The Tree of Life if it meant dismantling any crucial element in this rare marriage of the spectacular with the personal.

Take Shelter
On that note, Jeff Nichol’s follow-up to Shotgun Stories, his impressive debut, follows the mental collapse of an Ohio labourer and family man (embodied with singular, shambling unease by Michael Shannon) whose knowledge of his possible schizophrenia has him no less convinced that he may be a prophet of the End Times. Set against a all-too recognizable contemporary landscape of economic worries and catastrophic weather, Take Shelter at once speaks broadly to our moment and remains a character study. Like Tree of Life it takes risks and as a result features a problematic finale; like Tree of Life it features a truly remarkable supporting performance from Jessica Chastain in a very difficult matriarchal role.

White Material, Of Gods and Men
Claire Denis’ return to Cameroon finds the formidable Isabelle Huppert refusing to abandon her coffee plantation despite the escalation of a surrounding civil war. Xavier Beauvois’ latest, based on real events, chronicles the final days of a group of Trappist monks who resolve to remain in Algeria during the outbreak of its 1996 civil war. Both films convey a sophisticated sense of the foggy ethics of post-colonial relations and of one’s sense of belonging somewhere; both use music (courtesy of Tindersticks and chanting actors, respectively) to achieve sublime moments of lyricism. White Material is insightful, savage and sinisterly seductive, though one might argue that it, like several other titles on this list, features a clumsy ending, which transitions rather abruptly into the mythic, dragging its heroine along with it.

Le Havre
The intermingling of Europeans and Africans is also very much at the heart of Aki Kaurismäki’s most recent deadpan delight, which, set in the titular French port city, finds an aging shoeshiner helping an African boy with no documents find a safe place to rest and safe passage to London, where he hopes to be reunited with family members that are in an only marginally more secure social position. Le Harve is beautifully—and, typically, idiosyncratically—crafted, with great narrative economy, dry wit, masterful compositions and numerous affectionate homages to French cinema to balance its dour diagnosis of French xenophobia.

Meek’s Cutoff
The fear of the Other is also key to Kelly Reichardt’s most recent work, by far her most industrious yet. It’s a western, albeit one with iconoclastic attention to the everyday chores and struggles of homesteaders lost in 1860s Oregon. The film’s handful of desperate families are led astray by a charismatic frontiersman and are ultimately confronted with the possibility that the dreaded Indian captive they’re traveling with (the magnificently stoic Ron Rondeaux) may be their sole hope for survival. Understated, blending classicism with quietude, and featuring yet another engrossing slow-burn of a performance from Michelle Williams, Meek’s Cutoff ensures Reichardt’s place within the finest American filmmakers of cinema’s second century. Will she continue to branch out into a grander scale of production or retreat into the familiar small? I look forward to whatever she does, either way.

Certified Copy
Another filmmaker in transition: Abbas Kiarostami strays from his native Iran to make a film with a French star (Juliette Binoche, brilliant) and an English opera singer in Italy; the result is very much a Kiarostami film, riddled with a utterly compelling balance of ambiguity and complex emotional/philosophical truths—which says a lot about what we may have reduced to being an exclusively Iranian, Middle Eastern or Third World approach to cinematic storytelling. An author on tour in Tuscany takes a drive with an antique store owner. They discuss the notion of how we place value on the real thing versus the fake, or originals versus copies, of how we invest things with authenticity, and soon we’re unsure about the reality of the relationship we’re watching develop. Did they just meet, or are they in fact an estranged couple? All that matters is the immense resonance of their ongoing questions, grievances and longings, a dialogue with echoes of both Last Year at Marienbad and Before Sunset.

Margaret
While Certified Copy mines a marriage for questions of how to make sense of the messy lives of its disparate halves, Kenneth Lonergan’s legally troubled, long-gestating and long-awaited (yet appallingly neglected) follow-up to the beloved You Can Count On Me examines the awakening of a young woman’s sense of existential responsibility. A horrific accident following an essentially innocent exchange of glances between Anna Paquin’s college student and Mark Ruffalo’s MTA bus driver prompts a complicated series of events involving familial dysfunction, litigation, mourning and arduous self-realization. Intricate and novel-like, Margaret is a film which would probably appear on more Best Of lists if more people (critics included) had actually seen it. It’s a meal of a movie, and deserves far more attention.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Into the Abyss
This pair of documentaries from the one and only Werner Herzog touch on numerous themes running through this list, most especially the modern as viewed against the ancient-mysterious and the balancing of crime with punishment in a violent world lacking moral guidance. Cave of Forgotten Dreams takes us into France’s Chauvet Cave and offers glimpses of the artistic soul already alive and well in Stone Age man; Into the Abyss ushers us into the US penal system to examine the lives of incarcerated young men whose abysmally meaningless crimes of murder are met with cold-blooded state-sanctioned murder. In both of these films Herzog’s focus remains firmly on people—souls, if you will—who provide us with illuminating, strange and diverse testaments to the irrepressible drive to survive, create and look ever-forward. Not a bad way to finish off a tumultuous year.

Beating a dead horse

2011-12-22T12:42:00.007-05:00

Millions of horses died in the Great War. The image of those enormous and elegant, muscular and lithe bodies collapsing, terrified, cut up, scattered, tangled in wire, rotting across muddy European plains alongside the unfathomable numbers of human dead and dying is a very powerful, poignant one. It isn’t difficult to understand how storytellers would be drawn to it. I haven’t read Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel, so I can’t attest as to whether or not it works on its own, but as adapted for the screen by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, adapted into something that doesn’t feel much like a children’s movie (except that it feels naive and oversimplified), and adapted in such a manner that the horse is no longer the centre of the story (and instead fills that centre with corny stock characters), War Horse is astonishingly hollow, simultaneously mechanical and sentimental, faux-innocent, and thus secretly cynical. In short, it brings out the worst in Steven Spielberg, whose direction of actors has never been more leaden (he gets what I can only hope will be the worst, most strained and artificial performance the normally great Peter Mullan will ever give), whose camerawork has never felt more thoughtlessly money-coated (he seems to need a crane just to shoot inserts), and aesthetically droopy (there’s a closing day-for-dusk shot that has to be seen to believe how ugly it is). It may be the nadir of Spielberg regular John Williams’ long career of composing wildly over-animated scores; every time anyone so much as smirks it’s like E.T.’s flying past the moon.

Perhaps Spielberg felt that War Horse would be a return to past glories; after tackling Normandy, he could now sink his teeth into the Somme (from the Holocaust to The War of Worlds, nothing seems to charge the elder Spielberg’s batteries like colossal, senseless death counts). Indeed, Joey, the thoroughbred-turned-plow horse-turned-war horse, becomes something of a Private Ryan. Everything stops, literally, to tend to him. Brits and Germans meet in the middle of a corpse-strewn battlefield and band together to rescue Joey from a lonesome, slow demise. A field doctor stops attending to a glut of agonized wounded soldiers just to help Joey. At some point, the magical aura surrounding this horse and the way it prompts everyone to ignore all else becomes, arguably, kind of offensive.

It doesn’t help that the horse is just, you know, a horse. There’s nothing all that cinematic about him. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński have no special way of rendering him charismatic. I adore horses, but just sticking one in front of a camera doesn’t make me instantly teary-eyed; the fact is, their allure, the particular nature of their features, isn’t easily captured on film... But really, I’m just struggling to make sense of why War Horse is such a dud. I think rather than generalize or theorize I should just say that this is one of those pictures where, scene-by-scene, over the course of its grueling runtime, you’re sort of baffled by all the small, wrote, bad choices that slowly accumulate: the lame comic relief (a goose), the forced emotions, the speechy dialogue. Spielberg, so much more at home with lighter material (E.T., Catch Me If You Can), has gone to war once more, and this time he really got creamed.

The music of the mechanics of the investigation

2011-12-20T12:55:00.007-05:00

A man, recently humiliated for making unsubstantiated accusations against a public figure, is brought to a remote, frozen corner of Northern Sweden, an island of vast manors inhabited by the aging members of an industrial dynasty, some of them one-time Nazis, few of whom talk to each other anymore. The man has been asked by one of the family elders to research his memoir, but the real purpose of the research seems to be to discover what happened to a 16-year-old niece who vanished back in 1966.

As the man gets deeper into his increasingly precarious task (many within the family aren’t nice to him; one even shoots at him) he hires a young woman as an assistant—the same young woman who did an extremely thorough background check on the man for the family elder. Turns out they make a great team: he’s cool but affable, ruggedly handsome in his heavy knits, a sort of old school gumshoe type of investigative reporter, good with legwork and making contacts; she’s withdrawn and socially handicapped, a genius with data processing (she may even have a photographic memory) and swift with acts of necessary roughness, diminutive, with a pale, orphan-child face, multiple piercings and tatts, and, at times, an invincible mohawk. (How does her hair stay so vertical after wearing a motorcycle helmet?) The film they’re in has little time for conventional character development, so our rapid registering of their peculiar, quiet chemistry is important. The characters are embodied by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, whose performances, defined by such distinct choices in body language, appear effortless, or rather, all about attending to the task at hand. And that’s the sensibility driving The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in a nutshell: telling a story one task at a time; process, procedure, efficiency.

The hiring of director David Fincher for the English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s pulpy, often tawdry international bestseller is inspired. Very few filmmakers could simultaneously manage a production of this scale and bring to it such personal, unfussy finesse. Early scenes snow us with exposition and flashbacks, yet we get everything we need to, and even if we don’t it’s all quite compelling. There’s a great deal of ordinary work up on screen: googling, highlighting documents, scanning photos, thumbing through files, and all of it clips along like the tip-tapping of a crash cymbal. The mystery at the heart of this is genuinely interesting, the resolution pretty satisfying, but what animates The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the music of the mechanics of the investigation itself.

Fincher’s work underwent a seismic breakthrough with 2007’s Zodiac—a mystery that doesn’t even have a resolution!—and this new film takes its cues from that film, as well as 2010’s The Social Network. All these films are on the long side, all of them crammed with plot, all of them hugely dependent on pace, rhythm, dynamics, adrenaline. Dragon Tattoo isn’t the deepest thing Fincher’s made (its serial killer’s gimmicky showmanship mirrors one of the corniest/most shamelessly lurid elements of 1995’s Se7en) by it’s as engrossing as his best work. Even after two-and-a-half exhausting hours, I found myself eager to come back and see what Fincher and his cohorts do with the next installment of the trilogy.

Higher Ground: between God and a hard place

2011-12-16T13:36:00.008-05:00

This thing we’ve been calling the culture wars has in recent years aggregated at least one mighty bipartisan ethic: ambivalence is bad for you and your country; tolerance is a slippery slope; agnosticism is for wimps; which side are you on? (Just as an aside: How strange it feels to be posting this review so soon after learning of the death of God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens.) Yet betweenness is a fundamental part of life; we are ever moving from one place or one absolute to another, most often learning the most we’ll ever learn while on route. Betweenness is what story is made of.

All this is just my way of contextualizing my strong feelings for the closing note struck by Higher Ground—something about which I feel no ambivalence at all. The directorial debut of Vera Farmiga, who also stars, is about living with religious values that remain fixed while one’s life remains insistently fluid. The movie is elegant, intelligent, sensual, and a little uneven—a few truly bum notes stand out against a predominantly careful and wise series of choices. But its closing moments sweep the central character up into a scene of un-showy yet immense bravery and still manage to leave us without firm resolution, and that absence is itself something meaningful.

Farmiga plays Corrine, who, having already conveyed a deep curiosity about Jesus as a child and having survived a potentially catastrophic accident with herself, her husband and her infant child miraculously intact, becomes in adult life a member of some radical New Testament community nestled somewhere in rural New York. Based on Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir This Dark World, Higher Ground begins with extended scenes depicting key moments in Corrine’s youth before catching up with her in the present, a time of great tumult: Corrine’s best friend (Dagmara Dominczyk), a vivacious, raven-haired fellow believer who has no problem leading a fulfilling erotic existence under God, becomes terrifyingly, senselessly ill; Corrine’s fierce intellect becomes increasingly unsatisfied by the gender codes of her sect and the pastor whom she admires yet resents; and Corrine’s unhappiness with her marriage to her high school sweetheart Ethan (Joshua Leonard) is about to overwhelm her normally unbreakable composure.

Despite the repression, despite moments of alarming, sudden violence, there are no clearly marked villains in Higher Ground, and Corrine’s heroism is a quiet one, rooted mainly in her refusal to shut out the voices of desire or doubt or the longings of the spirit. Farmiga depicts the religious community with both affection and frustration, at times celebrating the camaraderie, at others reeling from its enforced naiveté. Her approach only goes astray in the few moments where she tries to slip fantasies into Corrine’s waking life, and the story itself only feels awkward in a few scenes dealing with Corrine’s immediate family, such as the one involving her sister and a big bag of blow. As for her work as an actor in Higher Ground, I can’t say that Farmiga ever gets it anything but right. Her lack of judgement as a director carried over into her performance, so we see Corrine fully surrendered to the ecstasies of worship, mothering and fighting for her dignity in equal parts. The last seven or eight years has found Farmiga emerging as an interesting actress under the direction of Minghella and Scorsese, but we may just be seeing her at her very best here, taking on both roles, and directing herself.

It's a Wonderful Life: cold comforts

2011-12-14T12:44:00.007-05:00

Grudging altruism, ceaseless compromise, half-measures, a natural talent for holding down the fort, unfulfilled longings that, more harrowingly, perhaps never really could have been fulfilled: all of these things, accumulating over half a lifetime, drove George Bailey to get stinko, drive into an old tree, then stumble toward that snow-caked bridge over which he planned to tumble into the oblivion of river below. Suicide is painless when you’ve never once tasted what you truly craved, when the walls close in. And, for the third time in the movie, George does fall into the water. (Am I the only one that sees Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart makes the plunge, over and over, first for his brother, then into the hidden pool, and then into the river?) Only it’s to save a man from drowning, not to drown himself—yet again, George is a slave to self-sacrifice. That the drowning man is really a trickster guardian angel who proves to George that he’s well-friended, even beloved, that his town would be a nastier place (though one with a far more bustling night life) without him, doesn’t entirely remove the ache of it all, the fact that George Bailey still never got the hell out of Bedford Falls. And I think this is one of the enduring things about It’s a Wonderful Life: the magical consolation that ends the movie is, in the long run, in the years we imagine to come, only marginally consoling. Life will probably not get much easier for George Bailey. But, like some poor soul from Beckett, he’ll go on.

I’m only slightly embarrassed that I’d never seen It’s a Wonderful Life until last night. Everyone I know has seen it on TV; I don’t watch TV. But anyway what’s especially interesting about the movie is the way it actually seems designed/destined to be watched long after its making. It was a box office disappointment in its day, won none of its Oscars, and only became a holiday broadcast staple in the 1970s. It’s a movie about everything that leads us up to our worst moments, the long march of our pasts and the hard work of accepting cold comforts. The movie was always meant to be a classic, which means to be loved sometime in the future, when everyone involved was dead or dying and nostalgia has wrapped itself tightly round the movie’s breast. The sad truth: apparently George Bailey really is worth more to us dead than alive. Though while the screen is alight, he is, somehow, alive. And, as it turns out, he’s in a pretty wonderful movie.

Unholy in Toledo: The Skin I Live In

2011-12-12T14:08:00.008-05:00

Let’s be clear about something: the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is both emblematic and entirely cheeky with regards to this filmmaker’s singular body of work. There are no laws where Almodóvar’s characters’ desires are concerned—at least none that can’t be broken in the spirit of audacity, subversion, showing off, or compulsive plot-twisting—just an immaculately crafted blur of reptile-brain urge and wild ambition, a confusion of longing, desperation, memory and gender.

His latest film, an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Tarantula, plunges into some as yet uncharted (by Almodóvar at least) and especially unsettling territory, with the innovative, fabulously resourceful and seriously messed up plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, back with the writer/director who made his name for the first time in two decades) plumbing the unexplored depths of posthuman sciences in his efforts to restore order to his shattered family. There’s a beautiful young woman sequestered and constantly monitored in his rural Toledo home and laboratory. She’s both a captive, stolen away from a whole other life, and something invented. The mad doctor is, in a sense, building himself a new wife. He is attempting to recover a dead life. Most interestingly, his endeavour is driven by the conviction that all that makes us who we are is infinitely malleable once we start to tinker with the outside. The external, he believes, determines the external. And to be sure, in Almodóvar, surfaces really do matter.

Given such a premise, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is often extremely creepy. It’s also perhaps a little too cool and clean and clinical, too bogglingly plotty and over-calculated to truly love, but the highly composed grand design has things to ponder, revisit and re-admire. (Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar makes movies that even when flawed are tough to truly exhaust.) The source material aside, the obvious model for this macabre tale of obsession, isolation and transformation is the great 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju, who also made a movie about an abattoir that has to be seen to be believed, or has to be seen to know how much you probably wish you didn’t see it. Most Almodóvar has very clear roots in earlier, beloved, canonical films, but this one doesn’t accentuate homage with much warmth, and there are only a few fits of his characteristic humour. (One highly memorable and totally appalling example of this includes an uneasy reunion between Redgard’s assistant and some guy in a tiger costume.)

I feel like I keep wanting to warn you all about what The Skin I Live In lacks, but the truth is that despite all that I was still totally engaged with it, and some months after first seeing it, I’m easily lured into thinking about it, drawn into conversations about it. It’s fleshy, prompts goosebumps, and gets under the skin.

My Week with Marilyn: Some like it lukewarm

2011-11-18T01:40:00.004-05:00

My Week with Marilyn is based on memoirs by filmmaker Colin Clark, reflecting on how in 1956, when Clark was 23, he broke into the British film industry via a combination of family connections, utter inoffensiveness and minimal persistence, and how his maiden voyage as third assistant director brought him into close proximity with not only Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh but also Marilyn Monroe, who took a shine to Clark for a little while and sort of broke his tender heart before moving on to other projects, other hearts, other nervous breakdowns. The film, directed by veteran TV-movie helmer Simon Curtis, is very pretty and tasteful, very nicely recreates period and milieu, and is all but devoid of stakes. When Michelle Williams’ Marilyn turns those soft, lovely, spellbinding, mostly unblinking eyes on Eddie Redmayne’s Colin it’s as though the rest of the world could disintegrate in an agonizing atomic catastrophe and it wouldn’t matter. Actually, nothing much matters here. No hidden depths behind those eyes are plumbed, our hero comes of age while remaining a total cypher, life goes on. But hey, Colin Clark went skinny-dipping with a sex goddess! So high-fives all around, boys.

Best thing about the film: Kenneth Branagh plays Olivier, which is to say that Branagh has been cast in the role he’s been casting himself in since the very beginning of his career. Worst thing about the film: Adrian Hodges’ screenplay gives each of the supporting characters overwritten monologues where they suddenly and implausibly confess their insecurities and speak aloud every drop of subtext. (Perhaps this comes directly from Clark’s memoir; I haven’t read it.) The somewhat interesting result of these best and worst things is that you get a scene where Branagh/Olivier articulates all of Branagh/Olivier’s anxieties about aging and failing to reach all of Branagh/Olivier’s goals, which inevitably prompts one to consider how far apart the careers of Branagh and Oliver finally are. Yet in an odd way, Branagh’s humbling portrayal of Olivier and its weird merging of Branagh and Olivier gives me a new respect for Branagh, who may finally have severed himself from the quixotic ambition to be Olivier, not by directing Thor, but by saying “Fuck it all” and actually, openly embodying his idol in this pretty mediocre movie. Good for him. Makes me genuinely curious what he’ll do next.

Le Havre: waylaid in Normandy

2011-11-15T16:58:00.008-05:00

Two shoeshiners, one French (André Wilms), the other a Vietnamese pretending to be Chinese (Quoc Dung Nguyen), stand together, scanning the passage of feet along the station floor, seeking to ply their trade. A man, his mouth like a hatchet wound, his hand cuffed to a suitcase, presents his right loafer for service, but soon he’s spotted by some other, equally suspicious-looking men. He runs, they chase, there’s gunfire. Another one bites the dust. The shoeshiners don’t even sigh. Clearly, it’s a dangerous world, one fraught with real, nasty, morally repugnant crimes... as well as crimes of a far more ambiguous nature.

Marcel Marx, the French shoeshiner, has been around; he once was a bohemian in Paris, or so he says, but now ekes out a humble but contented existence and comes home every night to a devoted wife and a very cute dog. Soon the wife will be hospitalized with cancer and in her place will appear an African boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), whose clandestine journey by shipping container to the UK got interrupted and is now on the run in this forgotten French port city. Marcel can do nothing about his beloved’s illness but at least he can try to help the boy from harm’s way and secure his safe passage to London, where his mom works illegally in a Chinese laundry (but at least she works). Steering clear of the authorities, the enigmatic and ever-present Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) especially, and shelling out for human smuggling costs won’t be easy, but our aging hero is determined and, just as importantly, unafraid to ask for help. “I’m not alone,” says Marcel. “I have friends.”

In his return to France (he made La Vie de Bohème there in 1992), Finnish wrier/director Aki Kaurismäki didn’t come alone either; he brought along Kati Outinen, star of eight previous Kaurismäkis and thus a sort of talisman, to play Marcel’s dear Arletty (named after the star of France’s beloved Les enfants du paradis), and bring a boldness and assurance to the film’s more problematic role. (Arletty’s wifely devotion, her refusal to even admit that she’s dying so that she can keep ironing Marcel’s clothes, cooking Marcel’s meals and managing Marcel’s paltry finances for as long as possible, can be a little hard to take; Le Havre’s Marxist cred is pretty impeccable, its feminist cred not so much.)

Both a love letter to French cinema and a letter bomb addressed to France’s xenophobic immigration policy makers, Le Havre, named for the Normandy city in which it’s set (which also happens to be the penultimate stop made by the sailors in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante), brings Kaurismäki’s ongoing exploration of working class solidarity back to foreign shores, resulting in one of his finest, most affectionate, and probably most crowd-pleasing films. To be sure, Le Havre feels like a summation rather than any sort of renovation of Kaurismäki’s 30-year career, examining familiar themes and tropes—yep, there’s a rock and roll show, this one featuring the vocal stylings of Little Bob—and firmly grounding itself in that distinctive deadpan-melodrama, Bresson-does-Buster Keaton approach that filmgoers will recognize as Kaurismäki’s trademark. Yet for all that, the film feels very much alive, engaged and enraged, full of ragged but persistent hope, less resting on laurels than shaking them back to life. And in the truly remarkable scenes that find Kaurismäki's camera calmly fixing itself upon the faces of the (often real-life) undocumented foreigners, imposing nothing, we sense that no matter how persistently mannered this filmmaker's approach may be, he remains alert to the world, and allows his subjects their dignity, their chance to simply be present for his camera and for all of us around the world watching their faces, and hopefully wondering about their fate.

Melancholia: bad vibes all over

2011-11-14T18:37:00.008-05:00

Birds tumble softly from the ether; a woman gazes at her hands as they give off sparks; a horse collapses to the ground like an old barn; a woman clutching a child sinks deeper into a darkened golf course; a bride sinks into the surface of a stream or trudges through forest only to be snared by roots. All of this unfolds in extremely slow slow-motion, as though some collective will is urging time to a standstill. And you can see why. The end is nigh. Mind you, it’ll take a while to actually get there.

Had I, for whatever reason, had to exit the theatre after the prologue of Melancholia, an astonishing, kind of devastating sequence heavily indebted to more masters of contemporary photo-based art than you could squueze into a year at ICP, set to the romantic bombast of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, I would surely have thought I’d seen the first ten minutes of some rapturous masterpiece. But I stayed, or rather stuck it out, and remembered I was in Lars Land, a place where flights of genius are undermined by lengthy digressions imbued with didacticism, smugness, cynicism and sadomasochistic projections of the author’s disorders onto the opposite sex.

Lars von Trier: maker of some unforgettable images, brilliant conceptualist, shit storyteller. I think I’ve done the image bit, so let’s get to Lars the conceptualist. Melancholia has two parts, two sisters, two disasters. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) shows up two hours later for her insanely lavish wedding reception at a castle. Once she arrives things just get worse: mom (Charlotte Rampling) delivers the most withering wedding speech in history before locking herself in the bathroom and Justine slips ever deeper into debilitating depression. She can barely make it through the night, though disappearing for long spells, telling off her boss and jumping some nervous stranger’s bones seems to help. By dawn, the damage is unrepairable, the marriage still-born. The groom ultimately leaves without her.

After the wedding Claire (Charlotte Rampling) determines to take care of Justine, who’s now verging on catatonic—there’s a painful scene where Claire simply can’t get Justine to step into a hot bath... and that bath looks pretty nice! Claire becomes increasingly preoccupied with the news that a planet called Melancholia has been hiding behind the sun and now seems to be on a collision course with Earth. As apocalypse looms, Claire, quite understandably, becomes hysterical, while Claire's husband (Kiefer Sutherland) turns out to be of no help and Justine is increasingly becalmed and not nice to her at all.

As I summarize all this I realize how much I admire the raw ideas behind Melancholia, the balance of it, that juxtaposition of the individual crisis with the infinite that makes it the nihilist cousin to The Tree of Life. As I think through my experience of Melancholia I have to admit that it was definitely made by someone who really, really gets depression. The problems all come in the way we meander through the story without pace or punctuation, the way we’re meant to bask in the ostensibly clever portraits of one-dimensional or only semi-coherent characters who are mostly just assholes. Everyone, generally, is cruel, though the men tend to be weaklings while the women at least have a certain integrity—and, as with so much von Trier (see Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, et cetera), that integrity is what ensures their doom. So we watch and we wait for von Trier to do whatever it takes to twist his plots into awkward, sometimes plain stupid knots so as to completely screw over his heroine (though Dogville, it must be said, attempted to reverse this somewhat by allowing its heroine a climatic revenge). We worry, we do indeed feel the burgeoning unease, something von Trier is indeed highly skilled at inducing, and we wait. And the waiting can be tedious.

Fight Club: We got the beats

2011-11-12T14:24:00.005-05:00

Our unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) holds a position that could only have emerged in the late 20th century: he’s something called a recall coordinator, which basically means he negotiates the degree to which products have to annoy, maim or kill buyers before the manufacturer actually has to do something about it. It’s a brilliant occupation for the protagonist of a film that’s aged so well that its time is still coming into being. The first rule of Fight Club (1999) is, however macho/obnoxious/show-offy it may seem, don’t underestimate Fight Club.

Off the top, our young Narrator’s already reached an advanced state of yuppie zombification; his insomnia renders everything “a copy of a copy of a copy,” debilitating sleeplessness being an apt response to a world conspiring to keep one simultaneously lulled from disruptive critical thinking and excited by the possibility of perpetual shopping. Then Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a salesman of soap—"the yardstick of civilization"—and projectionist of family films into which he slips big dicks. He has silly spiky hair, dresses like a trailer park pimp, and waxes anti-establishment philosophy; he’s also handsome and sculpted and wants to get physical with Narrator, prompting what we might deem an ultra-masculine friendship, gay romance, or a solipsism so overpowering as to induce prolonged hallucinations. These guys start their titular club in basements and backstreets and it grows or catches until all over America men are denouncing their identities, pounding the shit out of each other, and waiting for cues to launch spectacular acts of terrorism.

So Fight Club’s trajectory is itself novel: boy meets girl; boy meets boy; boys fight (for fun/self-betterment); second boy steals girl; first boy finds himself; everything goes bananas. The film didn’t initially “perform,” but it established director David Fincher as a masterful, if over-eager, manipulator of industrial light and magic: the walk-in IKEA catalogue, the camera’s vertiginous swoops, the fantasy air collision all feel a little overbearing and Roger Rabbity. But who else could have told this unruly, audacious story with such vigour? In its perverse depiction of mental illness, leading up to its big twist, this adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s eponymous novel is actually an outstanding adaptation of Philip K. Dick, the oft-adapted, rarely apprehended author whose schizophrenia imbued so much of his science fiction. Fight Club suggests that schizophrenia might be the natural result of prolonged exposure to late capitalism. And I almost believe it.

Senna: Life in overdrive

2011-11-11T15:19:00.004-05:00

Though it rather daringly confines its visual trajectory to nothing but archival footage—most of which feature its hero, Brazilian racing superstar Ayrton Senna, traversing tracks the world round at dizzying speeds—it could hardly be said that Senna simply goes around in circles. Its narrative, which skims the surface of Senna’s personal life in favour of his professional one, is burnished down to its mythical contours, rendering Senna’s meteoric rise to World Champion and tragic death at 34 in a mid-race crack-up as an Icarus tale, not one of hubris exactly—Senna spoke with great humility about his gift and his sense of debt to the god who endowed him with it—but of a deep faith in speed and glory that transcends reason. One memorable interview clip finds Senna describing a major turning point in his career arriving when he found himself behind the wheel and feeling as though he was no longer conscious. But this yearning for ecstasy was balanced by a fierce intellect, one trained to make split-second risk assessments. Senna was a champion because he was ruthless on the track, and his record for accidents was nearly as exceptional as his winning streak. Some thought him reckless, but the thrill of his greatest feats are undeniable: he won the Brazil Grand Prix with his car stuck in sixth gear for multiple laps; his fingers had to be pried from the wheel afterward.

Senna the film, now available on DVD, directed by Asif Kapadia, edited by Chris King and Gregers Sall, and written by Manish Pandey, understands very well that adrenaline is key to its appeal, whether the audience is full of racing enthusiasts, those who crave a solid sports documentary, or those who are simply drawn to high-stakes stories of ambition. Things move fast, excitement accumulates, and we’re often treated to views of the action from Senna’s on-board camera. But it should be said that this need for speed ultimately obscures everything else, and the absence of talking heads makes it tough to distinguish between the various commentators we hear speaking almost constantly on the soundtrack. So by the time Senna is over, you might feel as though you missed a great deal in the blur.

Immortals: It's all Greek to Tarsem

2011-11-10T15:50:00.006-05:00

Set in 1228 BC, Immortals tells the story of how a fierce peasant with an unlimited gym pass rose up against and ultimately defeated a sadistic warmonger with a lot of help from body-buttered Aryan deities. Apparently it’s all based on Greek myths, though departures from the source material are conspicuous and most often really dumb. One could argue that director Tarsem Dhandwar Singh (the artist formerly known as Tarsem Singh, or plain old Tarsem—his name just keeps getting longer) is very much in his element; he clearly prefers the god’s eye view whenever possible and finds countless opportunities here to have his actors strike poses modeled after the cover paintings of fantasy novels.

Theseus is bulgingly embodied by future Superman Henry Cavill, while his antagonist, King Hyperion, is played by Mickey Rourke, who seems to be channeling Brando in Apocalypse Now, what with his croaky voice muttering out from the gloom, his munching of chestnuts, the crumbs stuck in his scraggily beard, and his looming over a basin of water as he interviews an unfortunate minion. The two first meet when Hyperion, just like Thulsa Doom in Conan, slaughters mom before Theseus’ eyes. “Witness hell,” says Hyperion, whose route to mega-evil was earlier explained as the result of his despair over the death of his entire family during a plague. The gods did nothing to save them, he complains, so why bother with faith?

Turns out Hyperion’s got a point, because the gods can actually intervene when the mood strikes them, and in fact do so several times throughout Immortals, whose multiple dues ex machinas add up to an apologia for fundamentalists and constitute a defense for all those who choose to interpret religious texts literally. An odd sort of suspense, or perhaps anti-suspense, is at work here: no matter how heroic or resourceful Theseus and his friends are made out to be none of it really matters because every time they’re in big trouble the gods just swoop down and take care of business, climaxing in a cage match with some butt-ugly titans that involves a lot of exploding heads and makes no sense whatsoever. So the protracted third act is especially dull, and it doesn’t help that Steven Dorff’s horny thief—the closest thing to an actual character in the movie—gets swallowed up at the top of it in a horde of baddies.

From Dusk Till Dawn: Revisiting Rodriguez's revenants 15 years on

2011-11-09T20:12:00.007-05:00

The mayhem actually starts before we catch up with the Gecko brothers. That Richie (Quentin Tarantino) busted Seth (George Clooney) out of jail, that the pair robbed a bank, took a hostage and left a sizable body count in their wake is, rather remarkably, all back story, preceding the opening scenes depicting the infiltration of a roadside liquor retailer that results in more pointless carnage, including the roasting alive of the proprietor (very nicely played by a young John Hawkes). Richie is shot through the hand during the firefight; the bullet leaves a hole the size of a carrot stick—some sort of perverse stigmata for this sadist, serial rapist and compulsive murderer—which he bandages with duct tape. To think, all Richie wanted was a road map.

Richie and Seth eventually manage to get south of the border by smuggling themselves in an RV driven by a pastor and widower (Harvey Keitel) weathering a crisis of faith by taking a road trip with his kids (one of whom is Juliette Lewis, who’s casting in this sort of thing was pretty much de rigueur back in 1996). The whole gang winds up in a biker bar called the Titty Twister (though I prefer the name given in the DVD’s Spanish subtitles: “Fiesta de tetas”) where Selma Hayek performs a dance in a bikini with a big snake that’s almost stupefying in its hotness and everyone turns out to be Aztec vampires, a breed of revenant that’s unusually easy to dismember and impale. It takes an hour to get to the vampire stuff, but from then on, rest assured, it’s a solid 40 minutes of bang-bang, crunch, tear, stab, shred, splatter.

The movie was directed with much enthusiasm and little flair by Robert Rodriguez, but its script came courtesy of the young Tarantino, who seems to have been galvanized by the genre fusion and the opportunity to toss elements of everything from Peckinpah to Graham Greene into the blender. There’s not a lot of the sort of verbal fireworks we find in top-grade Tarantino, the ostensible portrait of Mexico could just as easily be one of West Texas, and some of the special effects are kind of lame and superfluous, but the superb cast and relentless cartoony action sequences ensure that the movie’s entertainment value remains reasonably high.

To fuse and refuse: The Fly at 25

2011-10-26T17:39:00.008-04:00

Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)

Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.

Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.

Are we not men?: Listening for answers in Island of Lost Souls and Kuroneko

2011-10-24T14:42:00.012-04:00

From its opening apparition of a derelict ship emerging from a fog to its magnificent climactic images of beast-men rising up to exact revenge on their self-proclaimed creator, Island of Lost Souls (1932), photographed by Karl Struss—who won the first Oscar for his enduringly haunting work on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929)—is a feast of spectacle that veers between the seductive and the grotesque. Beautifully wrought visions of land, sea and laboratory intermingle with close-ups of fire-lit faces and feline hands both delicate and claw-like, desperate to feel the warmth of a very confused castaway whose sexual desire is unknowingly drawing him closer to bestiality.

But the image that lingers with me most after watching the film, late on a chilly October night, is modest in comparison: that of a single, very hairy, pointed ear. What makes this image so memorable for me is that not only is it the first sign that something terribly strange is transpiring—a foreshadowing elegantly echoed more than 50 years later in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)—but it is also a sort of mute instruction for all of us watching: listen. Among the shrewder choices made by director Erle C. Kenton and/or his collaborators in post-production was that of using Arthur Johnston and Sigmund Krumgold’s musical score, wonderful as it is, very sparingly. The film’s celebrated atmospherics are perfected by the absence of music to soften the agonized cries of those titular souls subjected to ongoing torture in the bluntly dubbed “House of Pain.” Those cries help make Island of Lost Souls a genuinely horrific horror movie. It was those cries I kept hearing as I tried to fall asleep.

The story, for those who don’t know, comes from H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, adapted here by Philip Wylie and Waldemar Young. It follows the ship-wrecked Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) as he’s rescued and then abandoned by a drunken sea captain on an island without a name, where mad scientist Moreau (the gloriously go-for-broke Charles Laughton) has been vivisecting his way through the animal kingdom in search of the genes that he believes urges all animals to ascend to the traits of man. Moreau lives surrounded by mutants—one played by Bela Lugosi—mostly very hairy humanoids who wear pants and rally round campfires nightly to chant out the dictates of their patriarchal, neo-colonialist master. But there is also one Lota (Kathleen Burke), the “Panther Woman,” whom Moreau, presumably unable to mate with her himself, hopes to pimp out and toss into his muddying gene pool with Parker.

It’s unlikely Island of Lost Souls would have been made just a couple of years later when the Production Code was more strictly enforced, though the film’s explicit exploration of evolutionary mayhem and trans-species lust still managed to get it banned in the UK for 25 years. These days torture has somehow been domesticated as screen “entertainment,” but Moreau’s distinctive shadow still looms over the imagination. Wells’ Moreau had to move his experiments off the grid and away from prying eyes; today he’d more likely be enjoying a brilliant career in bio-mechanics, a visionary helping to shape our post-human future. The real horror has, it seems, already started to come true.

Criterion’s exceptionally well-compiled release features their freakiest menu since Videodrome (1983); interviews with the guys from Devo, who incorporated Island into the band’s conceptual framework and helped immortalize the line, “Are we not men?”; an interview with David J. Skal regarding Wells in Hollywood; yet another excellent, bouncy, info-crammed audio commentary from Golden Age horror historian Gregory Mank; and, perhaps most fascinating, an interview with Richard Stanley, co-scenarist and original director of the infamous 1996 Island adaptation with Marlon Brando.

Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), which Criterion released last week, is set during the Sengoku period, a time of seemingly endless war. The film begins with a horde of starved samurai entering a very modest abode inhabited by two women, the mother (Nobuko Otowa) and wife (Kei Sato) of a young man (Kichiemon Nakamura) who was conscripted into the army of a local warlord. The samurai consume all available food, rape the women and set their home on fire before disappearing into the grove from which they emerged.

The brutality of this sequence—not unlike many sequences in Island of Lost Souls—is intensified greatly by what is absent from the soundtrack. There is no dialogue whatsoever for the first ten minutes of Kuroneko, but the glances exchanged by the women and the invaders prompt you to steel yourself, and the image, manifesting only moments later, of the women’s bodies as they lay in the ashes of what was once their home—their cadavers soon approached by some rather curious cats—is both chilling and possessive of a spectral beauty that will return throughout the course of this elegant, unsettling ghost story riddled with vicious revenge and perverse reversals.

Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) scared the bejesus out of me when I saw Criterion’s release of it some years back, and Kuroneko wields a similar primal power, much of it deriving from carefully crafted details: a house that seems like a theatre of mist designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the kimono who’s outer diaphanous layer resembles the wings of a fly; the peculiar use of slow-motion or the breath that hangs in the frigid air. The script was founded on a Japanese folktale, yet it holds extra resonance due to Shindo’s class-conscious subtext. The film’s influence can be found everywhere in more recent Japanese horror films, though it received a negligent release in North America in its day. Metro Cinema screened it back in August and Criterion’s deluxe treatment should secure it the much wider audience it deserves. See it when it’s dark out. But listen carefully, too.

The Guard: a wee winner from the other McDonagh

2011-10-20T17:03:00.008-04:00

“I can’t tell if you’re really motherfucking dumb,” says FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to Galway Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), “or really motherfucking smart.” Perhaps a little too on the nose, this line, but it’s handled exceedingly well, coming at the tail of a fuss-free, beautifully written and realized little scene somewhere in the first third of writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard. Just two cops from very different backgrounds nestled in a car, at night, traversing the lonesome and weatherbeaten Irish countryside and sussing each other out. Well, okay, it’s really only Everett that does any detectible sussing, since Boyle never seems to be working too hard at anything.

On the surface, the corpulent, middle-aged Boyle seems the epitome of cynicism, laziness and corruption. (An opening scene I’ll refrain from spoiling wastes no time in establishing Boyle’s ethical negligence.) He is also a regular fountain of racist slurs, delivering one after another in airtight deadpan directly to his new-in-town African-American colleague from their very first exchange on. He tells tall tales, solicits prostitutes and is not adverse to appropriating evidence. Yet he seems to be be listening carefully to things, and is often one step ahead of everyone else. Which is to say that Boyle is a bit like Colombo meets the Bad Lieutenant. He goes out of his way to make it easy to underestimate him, but maintains a most peculiar, and perhaps uniquely Gaelic, sense of personal integrity.

McDonagh is the brother of Martin McDonagh, who wrote and directed the beloved black comedy In Bruges, which also featured Gleeson prominently. The Guard is looser and has less overt thematic gravity than In Bruges, and, initially at least, seems to ascribe to an ever more aggressively audacious brand of humour—a punk little brother of a movie from the punk little brother of an established playwright and filmmaker. But I like The Guard better. Perhaps it surprised me more. Perhaps it gave itself more room to make discoveries about its all-too-easily dismissable antihero. It’s intricate murder mystery/international drug trafficking plot gives it a nice anchor, but this crime-based framework—which supplies the terrific British character actor Mark Strong with another great little role as an absurdly philosophical bad guy—is essentially a beard for a highly irreverent character study.

The Guard also has its perfectly selected unlikely buddy leads going for it. Gleeson was born to embody precisely this kind of shrugged-off complexity, and Cheadle brings so much more texture and alertness to his role than most actors would deem necessary. He understands that he’s at once the audience’s surrogate, intermittently offended and genuinely uncertain as to what to make of Gleeson, and a unique character with his own understated backstory and reasons for being where he is, doing the things he’s doing. Why after all these years Cheadle isn’t a full-on American movie star I’ll never understand.

Things fall apart: The cinema of Henri-George Clouzot at TIFF Bell Lightbox

2011-10-14T10:20:00.006-04:00

It’s commonplace to describe Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) as one of cinema’s great pessimists, so brimming with rot, despair and entropy are his films—but what makes Clouzot’s pessimism great? Perhaps it’s a matter of conviction. Some within the Nouvelle Vague characterized his films as sterile and immaculate, efficient, without life or discovery, but such accusations sound an awful lot like mistaking classical rigour for lack of engagement or inspiration. His films functioned as well-oiled machines precisely because they described the inescapable machinery of fatalism; inevitability was crucial to their moral theses. But within their strategies lies a mine field of erotic curiosities, odd detail and dark playfulness—the inevitable can’t seem inevitable while it’s unfolding; only in retrospect. Thus second and third and fourth viewings of Le Corbeau (1943), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955)—of which you can read much more here—retain their peculiar suspense. Clouzot’s camera fully attends to the latter film’s unlucky co-heroine (played by the director’s unlucky wife, who would perish from the same ailment as her character); its deep interest is as unmistakable as it is useless. Her fate is sealed.

Clouzot’s films literally made his actors ill; he drugged them to sleep or plunged them into miniature lakes of crude oil, creating his cinema’s single-most summarizing image and giving each of his leads a case of conjunctivitis. Machinery broke down during production and sets collapsed. The resonant doom of his best films seems to have wreaked a certain havoc on its participants in some Faustian exchange for its gloomy power. Hopefully no such bad luck with befall those of you with the good luck to see Clouzot’s films during TIFF Cinematheque’s The Wages of Fear: The Cinema of Henri-Georges Clouzot, which runs at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox until November 29, 2011. The retrospective includes all his Clouzot’s films save Retour à la Vie (1949), as well as Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (2009)—of which you can read more about here. Run, do not walk, to catch these films—just take care to look both ways before you cross the street.

Gunnin' down a dream

2011-10-12T13:15:00.004-04:00

Machine Gun Preacher attempts to tell the story of how real-life Pennsylvania hillbilly bad-ass Sam Childers got out of jail, became disgruntled by his former-stripper wife’s religious conversion—“bitch found Jesus,” as Sam puts it—and hit rick bottom. He bullied his family, hung out in bars where sleeves are frowned upon, robbed and assaulted some dealers, ingested buckets of drugs and alcohol, and stabbed a hitchhiker multiple times before tossing him out of his car. Then Sam himself finds Jesus, gets sober, turns suspiciously nice, gets into roofing, and builds his own church where folks listen to shitty music and Sam’s improvised sermons. Sam also goes to Uganda and Sudan, where he builds an orphanage in the middle of a war zone and occasionally takes up arms and wreaks bloody vengeance upon the Lord’s Resistance Army. He spends a fair amount of the film’s last third or so desperately trying to raise funds back home to buy a new truck for the orphanage, and I’m thinking, Dude, you could probably get some decent cash for a couple of those RPGs...

Not that that was the first such question I found myself asking while watching Machine Gun Preacher. The film, written by Jason Keller and directed by Marc Forster, who isn’t especially good with crafting spatially coherent action sequences—or, for that matter, spatially coherent garden parties—strains to impose a through-line on Childers’ larger-than-life endeavours but builds neither a strong narrative arc nor a persuasive study in unlikely redemption and radical altruism. Though presumably well-intentioned, the filmmakers—I refer not only to Keller and Forster but also executive producer/star Gerard Butler—seem stumped by the very questions that Childers’ thorny biography demands reckoned with, questions, for example, about the mightily messianic hubris involved in trying to clean up someone else’s civil war. Instead, the film offers a precariously sentimentalized depiction of child soldiers, a very thin portrait of what must be a near-impossible marriage, and eight varieties of bluster from Butler, including shaking, eye-bulging, and sweating. Childers is without a doubt one hell of a character. Probably too much of a character for this kind of plodding Hollywood treatment.

When you're this big, they call you Mister (with a little persuasion, anyway)

2011-10-10T12:28:00.007-04:00

It’s the middle of the night in the middle-1960s, and a handsome black stranger materializes in some backwater on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line right around the time a wealthy white industrialist is murdered. The scene seems set for a drama in which the undereducated but quietly noble negro escapes being chewed up in the wheels of injustice with the help of, say, a crusading white lawyer charged with the task of convincing the townsfolk to look past their racist presumptions. But In the Heat of the Night (1967), based on the first of John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs novels, does something much more interesting: it makes the black stranger a well-paid, nattily dressed homicide detective from Philly whose innocence is swiftly established and who winds up cracking the case the local crackers couldn’t. It was an ingenious reversal of expectations, with Mister Tibbs elegantly embodied by Sidney Poitier, probably the only actor who could have pulled it off. The film is screening at Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend, following Poitier’s Thursday night speaking engagement at the Jube.

It is no slight to say that In the Heat of the Night—one of Canadian director Norman Jewison’s earliest feature credits and still among his best—plays out like a very good cop show elevated by sociological innovation. (That’s why the film was eventually made into a cop show.) The murder mystery is something of a MacGuffin, making room for richer themes of tolerance, respect, professionalism, alpha-male competitiveness and the painfully protracted spread of the Civil Rights Movement. We keep watching not so much to find out whodunnit as to see how the unflappable Tibbs will finally find his way out of Sparta, Mississippi and make something like peace with its ornery, lonesome police chief Bill Gillespie. Gillespie’s played by Rod Steiger, who chews gum as a way to hold off from chewing up all the scenery—mastication keeps Steiger from shouting all the time, though this too becomes overly indicative and irritating in its way. Steiger won an Oscar for this part, despite the fact that Poitier’s cool approach—not to mention that of Warren Oates as a bumbling patrolman—seems to offer such a seductive, more intriguing alternative to Steiger’s bullishness in nearly every scene.

Historical significance and varying performance styles aside, I think that much of what keeps In the Heat of the Night fresh and worthy of repeat visits has to do with the many wonderful details that pepper the film: the plastic Jesus on Oates’ dashboard; the Dr. Pepper sliding between a young woman’s ample breasts as she lingers naked by her kitchen window; the masking tape repairs on an old vinyl-upholstered chair; or the positioning of the corpse discovered on a Sparta side street. The dead man lays on the ground like he was in middle of trying out a new dance—let’s call it the doggie paddle. There’s also sensitive editing from future director Hal Ashby, inventive shooting from Haskell Wexler, scoring from Quincy Jones, and a title tune sung by Ray Charles, an especially inspired choice to ease us into the picture. If Charles couldn’t get Americans of every colour to root for a black hero, no one could.

The Ides of March: All primary colours; no shades to be found

2011-10-06T12:44:00.007-04:00

Based on Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which was loosely based on the 2004 Democratic primary campaign of Howard Dean, The Ides of March concerns a young press secretary’s education in the sort of compromise, corruption and throat-cutting that the weary sages tell us is essential to getting ahead in politics. But Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) has it both ways—he’s simultaneously idealistic and shrewd—so when push comes to shove his fangs push their way out of his baby gums and he proves to be the all-too apt pupil of his immediate superior (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the opposition’s poacher (Paul Giamatti), the manipulative journalist (Marisa Tomei) he thought was his pal and, of course, the charismatic candidate he works for, Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (director and co-scripter George Clooney), who mostly stays in the film’s margins until its final act, until then entering the foreground only for a highly conspicuous, strategically placed scene of intimacy between he and his true-blue wife.

Much of the pleasure to be had in The Ides of March emerges from the initial buzz of the promise of victory emanating from Morris’ camp, of which Meyers is the behind-the-scenes star. A couple of beautifully realized scenes find Meyers flirting with a smart, lovely intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood). Clooney has assembled a magnificent cast and, with the help of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, he crafts some superb flights of ping-pong dialogue in carefully composed close-ups. For much of the first half, there’s a slightly exposition-heavy quality to the dialogue that feels weirdly stagey yet gradually makes sense as you start to glean just how much of what we’re hearing and seeing is illusory or fundamentally full of shit. And herein lies the film’s weakness: it is precisely as cynical as you’d expect a movie about US politics from Clooney and his regular producer/collaborator Grant Heslov to be, while lacking in any specific or especially poignant revelations. Everything is tweaked to play neatly into the narrative schema, including an unexpected death that constitutes the limpest sort of plot twist (the reason it’s unexpected is because there’s no good reason to expect it). Clooney is a fine directorial talent, but the material—occasionally clever but never wise—is finally more shallow than it clearly wants to be. Still, worth checking out if you’re curious.

Terri: You're a big boy now

2011-10-03T17:15:00.008-04:00

Terri’s eponymous hero is a rotund teen living in some warm, semi-rural place with only an uncle who tends to wander around in a medicinal fog for a guardian. With his wavy locks and formidable neck, Terri cuts something of a Wildean profile, but whatever air of sophistication such qualities might generate is undercut by his calm refusal to engage in social or academic life. He wears Crocs and socks and old school pajamas everywhere—less out of resignation, he claims, than for sheer comfort. He’s exiled from the school gymnasium for declining to participate. He observes other teens going about their activities with the same anthropological distance and wonder he brings to his new habit of murdering mice so as to witness the feeding habits of local birds of prey. He’s also regularly late or absent for class, a casual transgression that inadvertently becomes a route out of his troublesome solitude, because cutting class means going to the principal’s office, and Terri’s principal, Mr. Fitzgerald, takes a special interest in Terri.

Fitzgerald is a middle-aged married man, but both his stagey manner of asserting authority and his calculated attempts to “reach out”—by aiding and abetting Terri’s class cutting through regular appointments; by offering snacks and high-fives and peppering their consultations with an earnestly intoned “Dude...”—render him less a teacher or father figure than an overgrown peer or passive-aggressively needy big brother. Fitzgerald is played by John C. Reilly, and if you start watching Terri and find yourself feeling unsure whether or not it’s supposed to be a comedy, Reilly doesn’t seem to have any such doubts. He’s understatedly goofy, unflatteringly lit and very funny, as well as oddly sweet and lived-in. Reilly is often cast in the supporting bit as that guy that the central character slowly becomes friends with. It’s because it’s hard not to want to become friends with John C. Reilly.

Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, a young actor with obvious talent but, equally important in a character study such as this, he simply has a marvelously expressive face and body that, however outsized, conveys inner depths even when doing almost nothing. Walking through the woods in his PJs, Wysocki’s Terri could almost be walking through a dream, and there are moments where director Azazel Jacobs’ keen eye for low-key, ordinary strangeness pleasingly heightens that feeling. But as it goes along it becomes clear that Terri, scripted by Patrick Dewitt from a story by Dewitt and Jacobs, is firmly grounded in reality, its depiction of idiotic bullying, misguided cries for help, exploratory sadism, peculiar alliances between unlikely friends, horny fumblings in home economics, and nights spent in the shed getting wasted on stolen whiskey and uncle’s meds and making awkward attempts as sexual posturing all resonate deeply with my experience of high school at least. This is a film that’s attuned to the pains of alienation without wallowing in despair—yet neither does it offer bullshit uplift. It merely suggests that, if we stay alert, there is almost always some chance for each and every one of us to connect.

TIFF '11: Take us to the river

2011-09-17T11:55:00.002-04:00

Gentle yet spry, shot on especially murky but not unpleasantly hued video in the Sertão region of Northeastern Brazil, from which many aspects of its narrative were derived, Swirl (Girimunho), the feature debut of directors Clarissa Campolina Helvécio Marins Jr., opens with images of bodies moving in dark streets to polyrhythmic drums and spirited singing, and it ends with a reedy, mischievous voice speaking to us softly over the image the film’s octogenarian protagonist (the source of that voice) standing some distance away from the camera, knee-deep in a river under soft daylight. In between is much diegetic music—characters play guitar and trumpet and sing improvised songs about what they’re doing in the moment, and later there’ll be a big band taking a small stage, with insanely gorgeous dancing girls in micro-skirts—serene memories of youthful love, a haunting, some travel, and the singularly lovely vision of a dead man’s clothes adrift in rippling water. “Time doesn’t stop,” Batsu explains to her granddaughter. “It’s us who stop.” Or do we? Batsu’s husband has passed on yet she hears noises in his workshop when no one is there to make them. She initially tries to persuade her husband’s ghost to let her be, with words, and perhaps her old pistol, but when these tactics fail she packs his tools and clothes in a suitcase and searches for a rightful resting place. Swirl is an unassuming work that generates all its charisma from the people it depicts, but elderly Batsu’s adorable demeanor and curious platitudes conceal lingering questions about how to proceed through life, even in its latter stages. The film is about finding one’s own rites of passage, seeking out ways of saying goodbye when one doesn’t weep—vivacious Batsu one made a pact with her husband that neither would ever cry—and granting peace to both the living and the dead.

TIFF '11: Fueron con dios

2011-09-16T11:50:00.004-04:00

The 1917 Mexican Constitution featured a number of severe restrictions against demonstrations of faith. The opening scene of The Last Cristeros, which consists of only voice-over and a black screen, gives us the rundown—one year imprisonment for ringing a church bell, for example—and efficiently provides all the context needed to comprehend or at least intuit all that follows, even if you’re unfamiliar with post-Revolutionary Mexican politics. The government’s war against the Cristeros—those who took up arms to defend their right to worship—officially ended in 1929, but the film takes us into the mid-1930s, following a small group of hold-outs as they make their way across gorgeous, arid and unforgiving northern terrains, where the occasional bullet comes seemingly out of nowhere, where nights are long and cold and food and water in short supply, and doubts blossom.

Directed by Matias Meyer and co-scripted with Israel Cárdenas, who co-directed the tender and memorable Cochochi, The Last Cristeros is a beautifully photographed and edited modern-Mexican take on the anti-western (if the term suits). Not unlike Meek’s Cutoff, it depicts an arduous journey through wilderness where danger looms quietly and everyday tasks are depicted with great accuracy and empathy. But the film also recalls Of Gods and Men, in that this is a story, peppered with many songs and prayers, about spiritual integrity and acts of bravery in a situation where such acts have arguably lost all practical purpose. Meyer’s Cristeros, their faces deeply lined under massive sombreros (some of the actors are actually descendants of Cristeros), clearly have no chance of making any difference in Mexico with regards to religious intolerance. And it’s equally clear that they will not survive. Which is why the last scene is so poignant—this isn’t The Wild Bunch; isn’t going to end in thrilling slaughter, so instead opts for a final moment of tranquility, the Cristeros in Christ-like loin cloths, in the face of looming death. The film is one of only two Mexican films at TIFF this year, and a major highlight of my Festival thus far.

TIFF '11: The sound of silence

2011-09-15T15:31:00.004-04:00

Islands, Stefano Chiantini’s third feature, stars Asia Argento as Martina, a woman living on a small, ruggedly beautiful Italian island, a woman so traumatized by loss that she’s resolved to stop speaking and devote herself to caring for bees and an old priest who’s suffered a stroke. Martina is most often clad in baggy pants and boots, a shapeless old ski jacket, and a plaid shirt. Quite a different ensemble than the foxy little dress and six-inch black heels Argento wore to the premiere screening of Islands at the Toronto International Film Festival last night. Islands tracks the convergence of Martina, the priest, and an undocumented foreign labourer who winds up getting stranded on the island and helping take care of the old man, as well as fend off the old man’s sister, who seems fiercely protective of his welfare mainly so she and her husband can get in on the inheritance. Anyway, the three central characters form an archipelago of sorts, and of course Martina and the foreigner, each damaged in their way, gradually move toward romance while facing nominal resistance. Islands has some captivating images of stark landscape and stark interiors, but the illegal immigrant angle is basically incidental and the love story exceedingly familiar. In all seriousness, you almost have to admire how utterly lacking in subtext this film is (especially considering the central character is mute): the sister’s husband actually comes out and states their ulterior motive; Martina fondles photos of some child clearly absent and achingly missed; Martina pulls her nightshirt tight to her breasts before bed, the foreigner having re-awakened her sexual longings; the foreigner sucks honey from Martina’s fingers; and, big-big-big foreshadowing with this one, the foreigner echoes that bit in L’atalante about dunking your head in water to see the ones you love (might Martina have lost someone to the sea?). Yes, Islands is a triumph of exacting story editing. Anyway, it was a perfectly tasteful way to pass a couple of hours on a Wednesday night at TIFF, the point by which everyone is totally fucking exhausted. During the Q&A after the screening someone asked Argento about playing a mute (“It was a relief. Most of the time you have to learn all that dreadful dialogue. It’s so long.”) and about why Martina doesn’t speak. “I tend to remember the great silences in my life,” she replied. “I find that silence is very sexy.” As people shuffled out of the theatre I tried going up to Argento and not saying a single word. Didn’t seem to work.

TIFF '11: The roles we play

2011-09-14T15:51:00.004-04:00

In the last few years I’ve been able to interview Werner Herzog several times in connection with his Toronto International Film Festival premieres, and as much as I enjoy these experiences—Herzog is nothing if not entertaining company—our conversations, if you can call them that, along with his public appearances, have made me increasingly suspicious: Has the filmmaker become too much of a showman? Has his schtick become too wrote, his eccentricities token, a put-on, an extension of the sort of too-recognizably Herzogian branding that threatens to over-burden films like My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, converting them into a sort of check list? When I speak to him I feel less like he’s responding to my questions than he’s launching almost randomly into his prepared anecdotes, which are part of his hard-sell. (“Herzog always delivers!”) But I’ve just seen Into the Abyss, his new film about two inmates in Texas—one on death row, one serving a sentence that wouldn’t see him up for parole for another 40 years—and the families of those inmates victims. It has no trademark Herzog voice-over, and features no exotic landscapes (unless you consider rural Texas to be exotic). And watching it I realize that, while Herzog the public figure may seem less than engaged with an honest and open exchange, Herzog the filmmaker is in fact more invested in people at this point in his career than at any other. In Encounters at the End of the World he was as interested in the people who filter down to the bottom of the world as he was in the Antarctic undersea strangeness. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams he was as curious about the scientists at work in the Chauvet Cave as he was in the cave’s astounding Stone Age art. Into the Abyss is an extraordinary film precisely because of Herzog’s faith in his subjects, all of them struggling to come to terms with different kinds of murder, to supply the film with its wonder and meaning. He listens exceedingly well. He provokes, he seeks out quirk at every chance, but he also exudes real compassion without flamboyant sentiment.

On a somewhat similar note, Alps, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, which had its TIFF premiere to some very enthusiastic fans last night, echoes Dogtooth, its predecessor, in its obsession with role-playing and heavily constructed modes of behaviour: the film is about a group of people who rent themselves out as surrogates to people who have lost a loved one, pretending to be the dearly departed for as long as it takes to get over the loss. Of course, it’s kooky and formalist as all hell. It’s also fascinating, and surprisingly poignant. A potential point of contention for some will lay in the fact that while the flat performance style of Dogtooth was contained within a cloistered family unit, Alps opens up the canvas to the rest of the world—and it turns out that everyone else acts like that too. But this filmmaker, so drawn to intricate, rule-laden systems and the process of how they inevitably break down, is not as schematic as the oppressive patriarchal figures he creates. As rigorously Bressonian as his films’ now apparently de rigueur performance style is, there is still room for spontaneity. There are moments when his protagonist—beautifully played by Aggeliki Papoulia—becomes so immersed in the people she’s temporarily resurrecting that emotional or guttural responses break up, or rather transcend her deadpan. There are real people with real feelings in Alps—it’s just that they’re placed in situations that interrogate the very notion of how feelings are expressed.

TIFF '11: We we came from

2011-09-13T11:40:00.005-04:00

My first report from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival is coming shamefully late. My only excuse is that I’ve been traveling, sort of all over the place—Tijuana, San Diego, Denver—and not every stop was strictly voluntary. Yet this sense of steady movement was not inappropriate for what constituted one of yesterday’s highlights, the Mavericks session at the Princess of Wales Theatre that included the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys, followed by an onstage discussion between programmer Thom Powers, Demme and Young, whose endearingly dry humour and utterly relaxed demeanor charmed the hell out of everybody.

Neil Young Journeys is both a concert movie and a road movie. It shifts between pleasingly unfussy coverage of Young’s pair of recent solo performances at Massey Hall—just a few blocks away from the Princess—and Young’s journey in a Crown Victoria from Omemee (“...a town in North Ontario...”), where he spent part of his childhood, to Toronto for the show. Along the way are amusing recollections of youth, like the one about the kid named Goof who gave Young a nickel to eat tar or tell an old lady she had a fat ass, some very pretty scenery, and Young’s confession that, despite his career-long obsession with maximum sound quality, the car is still his preferred place to listen to music.

No car stereo has anything on the sound system at the Princess however, which Young tweaked so that we listened to Journeys at 96 kilohertz—the first time in history a film was exhibited so thunderously. Given his subject, Demme most often smartly opts to hold images a long while rather than try to impose excitement through a lot of needless cutting. So we get extended shots of Young’s little beak of an upper lip perched on the edge of his harmonica and the tear in the pinch of his beat-up white fedora, or, just as memorably, Young’s face as seen through a psychedelically lit gob of spit clinging to his microphone micro-cam. The songs were mainly culled from Young recent Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise and from his breakthrough period of 40 years ago. Young’s murder ballad ‘Down By the River’ ends with a wonderfully spooky and hushed “There is no reason for you to hide...” There’s a stirring rendition of ‘After the Gold Rush’ performed on pump organ and harmonica, and an industrial-strength ‘Ohio’ on a Les Paul. The show ends with a terrifically feedback-operatic ‘Walk With Me.’ But among the newer material the song that made the biggest impression on me was ‘You Never Call’—a song that cries out to be covered by Willie Nelson—in which Young repeats a line that evokes death as “the ultimate vacation with no back pain,” and spots a dead friend’s car in the parking lot outside a hockey game.

The onstage Q&A was a little too brief. It featured a very funny story from Demme about how he and Young first met, the happy revelation that Young is writing a memoir, and one-too-many old schoolchums in the audience who just wanted to say hi. Still, the atmosphere was palpably affectionate, imbued with the feeling that each of us has a road of differing lengths behind us, and we were all of us sharing a very memorable stop.

Riding for the feeling: Road to Nowhere

2011-09-05T11:51:00.006-04:00

Road to Nowhere begins with an unidentified man pushing a DVD-R—the words “Road to Nowhere” written on its face—into a laptop. “Velma was always my window into the story,” the man says, and as the disc begins to play, we see a woman—Velma?—seated on a bed, blow-drying her nails. The body of the laptop constitutes a “window” all its own, until the camera pushes in and the window falls away, and the woman on the bed is suddenly compelled to blow-dry her face, as though some arctic chill was overtaking her. The image of her doing this holds for a long while, virtually static, but oddly riveting—she’s preparing for something. Soon a man drives up to the woman’s house, and enters; soon we hear a shot; soon after that the woman departs. She drives the man’s car to a lake, where, in another initially serene moment, a Piper Cherokee falls from the sky and crashes into the water.

What’s going on? What sort of movie is this? Neither question is easily answered. Road to Nowhere, written by Steven Gaydos, is a movie about the making of a movie about a blog about a real crime, one involving suicide, murder and money, and whose facts remain elusive. It’s about a filmmaker (Tygh Runyan), teasingly named Mitchell Haven, entranced by an beautiful inexperienced actress (Shannyn Sossamon) who may or may not be connected to the woman she’s been contracted to play. (“I don’t act,” she tells him. “That’s perfect,” he replies.) Drenched in mystery, blurring demarkations between what’s rehearsed, what’s improvised, and what’s genuine, it’s about how illusion overtakes all attempts to capture the real, and contains enough stories-within-stories to make it more Paul Auster than any of Auster’s movies. In some ways it’s also a tribute to actress and photogrpaher Laurie BIrd, who gave such arresting, indelible, troubling performances in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974), who Hellman fell in love with, and who killed herself in 1979 at the age of 25. Road to Nowhere is Hellman’s first movie in over 20 years and, after a single, delightfully baffled viewing, I’m already willing to call it one of his best. It’s now available on DVD and blu-ray from Entertainment One.

Comparisons to Mulholland Drive are inevitable and useful too, given the movie industry milieu, the unresolved enigmas, and the implication that role-playing is both inherently dangerous and quite possibly a wayward route to revelation. But Road to Nowhere, shot in mostly in North Carolina, is more a chamber piece, and also less coy with regards to its knowingness about Hollywood and the spell cast over filmmakers by the work of those who came before them. There’s also a marvelous a cappella performance in a bar from Bonnie Pointer, and a subtextual running commentary about the allure of new digital technology and how it further complicates the ontologies of filmmaking. Road to Nowhere is, in short, very rich, smart, utterly puzzling, hypnotic, and easy on the eyes and ears. I can’t wait to see it again. I don’t know that I’ll be able to make any more sense of its plot afterwards.

Dreaming of deep history

2011-09-03T18:15:00.006-04:00

A landslide hermetically sealed what would become known as the Chauvet Cave some 20,000 years ago, preserving its contents in a sort of natural time capsule. Among these contents are paintings which carbon dating tells us are roughly 32,000 years old—by far the oldest works of art in the world. The cave was discovered in 1994 when explorers found air shafts along its nearby cliffs. Because of the delicate atmospheric conditions needed to maintain the integrity of its contents, access to Chauvet has been restricted to a handful of scientists, with very few exceptions. It is our great fortune that one of those exceptions was made for Werner Herzog and his skeleton crew.

It is difficult to put into words why so much in Cave of Forgotten Dreams is so immensely moving. Obviously, that we’re seeing manmade images of such unfathomable vintage is itself deeply impressive, but the sophistication of the paintings goes far beyond crude representation: they elegantly envelop the undulations of the cave’s walls; they convey decidedly personal impressions of the beasts they depict, and sometimes imply movement through repetition; one image of a cave lion is drawn with a single, six-foot-long brush stroke. The genuine artfulness of these paintings prompted Herzog to make his film not merely a document of some extraordinary discovery, but to use it as a platform for speculating on the dreams of its Stone Age authors, whom he imagines as envisioning “the landscape as operatic event,” and whom he aligns with both the German Romanticists and cinema’s forefathers.

One of the most remarkable works Herzog encounters is a palimpsest, with one layer being painted some 5,000 years after the first. In a sense, Herzog’s film is another layer to this collaboration that stretches across millennia, evoking a poetry and sensuality unique to its form, and making the most relevant use of 3D technology I’ve ever seen. Organ and cello music heighten our sense of having entered an ancient cathedral. Spotlights from the crew’s headlamps move like fireflies across stone and stalagmites and the places where calcites have rendered the cave floor into a rink of glistening wax. In the most spellbinding passages, Herzog’s informative, characteristically eccentric running voice-over falls silent, leaving only Ernst Reijseger's haunting score on the soundtrack, and his light panels move across the paintings like a caress, echoing the torches held by those who came before. The result is a feeling of intense intimacy.

There’s more, of course, to Cave of Forgotten Dreams than just the cave itself. As with Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog is also very interested in the people who have gathered from many places and disciplines to work in and around Chauvet. Most memorably, he speaks with a scientist and former circus juggler who confesses that during his initial visits to Chauvet he had alarmingly vivid dreams of lions every night and needed time away from the cave to recover. It’s one of those things you might imagine the mischievous Herzog scripting for his subject, but the truth is that, after seeing this film, it’s actually hard to imagine spending time in Chauvet and not being haunted by primordial visions, by things lodged deep in the psyche, rarely awakened, and beyond language. Do see this movie.

Rivers to the ocean: The Complete Jean Vigo

2011-08-30T09:23:00.018-04:00

I keep thinking of that most cherished scene from L’Atalante (1934)—one of the most beautiful movies ever made—the one that forms a bridge between the middle and last parts. The young lovers have separated; the man is miserable. He recalls something the woman told him just after they were wed, that in her village they say that if you dunk your head underwater you will see the face of your beloved. So the man climbs up on the deck of the barge of which he’s skipper and plunges headlong into the wintry-cold canal. And there, below the water’s surface, the villagers’ promise manifests in visions of the woman, all in white, dancing, smiling, a luminous pearl in the liquescent gloom. And it strikes me that this scene invokes the promise of the movies: we submerge ourselves in the dark, hoping to find something like consolation, or excitement, or enlightenment, in the apparitions hovering before us.

A romantic analogy, obviously, but such notions creep up on you when you immerse yourself in the work of Jean Vigo, who died at 29 after having only completed four films, who received scant love while alive but whose posthumous acclaim has found him heralded as the French cinema’s patron saint, a genuine martyr, having literally been killed by filmmaking, his fragile health unable to withstand the bone-chilling location work necessary to complete his masterpiece. I first saw L’Atalante on my birthday, at the Anthology Film Archives, during my first visit to New York. It put me in some kind of a trace. I seemed to be walking on sea legs afterwards, and much of what had just passed before my eyes lingered only as a spectral blur. Thankfully, Criterion has now released The Complete Jean Vigo, and I’m now able to think a little more lucidly about L’Atalante’s singular lyricism, and its echoes in everything else Vigo managed to make during his too-short career.

One of the first examples of what would later be called the essay film, Vigo and co-director Boris Kaufman’s 23-minute À propos de Nice (1930)—the city where Vigo had spent time recovering from tuberculosis, and where he met his wife—is restlessly inventive and irreverent, as much under the spell of Un chien andalou (1929) as it was the fashion for “city films.” It features sail boats, wandering crowds and people lazing in the sun (their clothing changing or suddenly, delightfully, vanishing), car races and can-can dancers (Vigo himself among them), edited in a manner that’s both elegant and mischievous, enthralled by Nice and critical of Nice. It also features gorgeous arial photography, foreshadowing the distinctive gaze from above that would return in each subsequent Vigo.

‘Taris’ (1931), a commissioned, nine-minute documentary on swimming champion Jean Taris, is surprisingly charming and extraordinarily sensual, with images of Taris’ torso twisting below the water’s surface. A final sequence finds him diving in reverse before suddenly appearing in a suit and walking (via superimposition) back into the waves.

A major influence on numerous celebrated films, among them The 400 Blows (1959), Zéro de conduite (1933) is a 44-minute narrative film about the increasingly exhilarating bouts of trouble that a group of boys get into at a provincial boarding school. This ode to childhood disobedience—laying the groundwork for the adult anarchism Vigo ascribed to—makes a cine-poetry of spasms of rebellion, building to an unforgettable climax in which the students declare war on their masters, arming themselves with pillows and converting their dormitory into a battleground strewn with feathers.

Finally, L’Atalante, sadly, Vigo’s sole feature-length work, tells the story of a woman who weds the skipper of a barge. She’s never been outside her village, and though marriage promises to show her the world, she soon realizes that it will mostly be seen only in passing. For the man, this marriage seems to represent a compromise between domesticity and freedom. Vigo conveys their troubled yet passionate romance through a delicate mise-en-scène, flowing with languorous lateral movement, haunting images of water and fog, displays of bizarre objects gathered from around the world, scenes of remarkable, touching intimacy of the sort still rare in movies, and abundant earthy humour in the form of Le père Jules (the great Michel Simon, of Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning), the bumbling old sea dog who often steals the show with his rants, accordion playing, and one-man wrestling matches.

Closed circuit: You Are Here

2011-08-24T10:47:00.005-04:00

A lecturer (R.D. Reid) stands before a projected image of rolling waves. He should like to instruct us in serenity and solitude. He warns us against the perils of allowing our eyes to follow the red dot darting across the screen, emanating from his laser pointer. The threat of the red dot isn’t specified, but the lecturer’s warning, stated at the very start of You Are Here, Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn’s feature debut, serves as a reminder that there may still be something dangerous about taking instruction, submitting to direction, or simply watching a movie.

Such deliberately vague portent clings to every new realm of activity introduced in You Are Here: the discovery made by a bunch of people named Alan (not a typo) of a door where there should not be a door; the control centre where dispatchers give directions to individuals walking the city streets, emissaries whose trajectories are without apparent purpose save the avoidance of convergence; the prisoner (Anand Rajaram) who has pages of Chinese script shoved under the door and must then consult a voluminous text entitled What To Do If They Shove Chinese Writing Under The Door; the abandoned things appropriated by a self-appointed archivist (Tracy Wright), each containing recorded information, in varying formats, that may or may not add up to anything yet compel her to provide them with a home.

Each realm of activity, or thought experiment, constitutes a plastic component of You Are Here’s ornate circuitry—which is itself the film’s protagonist. At times this circuitry hints at a critique of technology’s promise to track and organize every last item in the world for posterity; at others it alludes to forms of interconnectivity that can only be understood once the individual (ie: one of those emissaries told not to interact with the other emissaries) rebels agains the dominant hegemony. Which is to say that You Are Here is playful, enigmatic and very cerebral. If the larger meaning strikes you as elusive, then you’ve just about got the point.

Press materials and clippings about the film keep invoking Jorge Luis Borges (though, given the film’s interest in found things and urban geography, I think Paul Auster is a more apt literary allusion) and Charlie Kaufman (though, given the film’s preoccupation with interlocking structures, I think Christopher Nolan is a more apt cinematic allusion), but such comparisons should come with one major caveat: each of these artists are storytellers (yes, Borges included), as engaged with narrative and character, with form and meaning, as they are with metaphor. You Are Here is fun, smart, inventive, and enjoyably puzzling—to be sure, I recommend it—it’s also pretty cold, and satisfies itself above all through the realization and careful arrangement of its concepts.

You Are Here is now playing at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox. It opens at Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Monday.

Best-made plans: Criterion does The Killing

2011-08-22T13:57:00.009-04:00

The title of The Killing (1956) describes what, in one sense of the word, its characters hope to make, yet, in the more literal sense, it’s what they wind up unexpectedly doing a whole lot of once the machinery of their elegantly planned heist goes awry. This was Stanley Kubrick’s third feature, made when he was just 28. It should be seen as his proper arrival, the first film so charged with the particular brand of irony and almost singular rendering of architectural space that would come to define the director’s signature. Though hardly indicative of the towering and exacting displays of ambition to come—see Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001 (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), et al—The Killing is also nimble and fleet and yielding of cinematic pleasure in a way that Kubrick would never quite replicate. It features camerawork from the great Lucien Ballard and dialogue from hard-boiled author Jim Thompson—the source material is Lionel White’s Clean Break—and a dream cast of actors that read like a film noir rogue’s gallery: Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., Vince Edwards, Coleen Gray, and the unmistakable Timothy Carey. The Killing is now available on a great-looking DVD and blu-ray from Criterion.

Career criminal Johnny Clay (Hayden) has already done a five-year stretch, so he figures if he’s going to risk getting caught again it better be for a whopping payday. Two million, split between a small crew, about fits the bill, so Clay assembles a team consisting of a sniper (Carey), a betting window teller (Cook), a cop (Ted de Corsica), a bartender (Joe Sawyer) and—best of all—a wrestler (Kola Kwariani), who at one point actually has his shirt ripped off before he starts to kick ass, to rob a busy race track. Part of what’s meant to make the plan so effective is that no one player in the operation is able to fully see the whole, but this reduction of a larger machine to its individual parts is also part of what causes it to malfunction. The teller’s younger wife (Windsor) tells her boyfriend (Edwards) about the plan and the boyfriend figures to get in on the take; the sniper loses his patience with a parking lot attendant and fellow veteran (James Edwards), lets fire a racist slur, and is eventually fired at himself.

Moving back and forth chronologically—tellingly, the film was an inspiration for the young Quentin Tarantino—we see parts of the plan play out from different perspective; narrated by an anonymous voice who sounds a little too much like he’s narrating a trailer, it’s as though we’re medical students tracking the paths of a cancer. The cynical masterstroke in all this can be traced to the manner in which Kubrick manipulates the viewer’s emotional connections: by The Killing’s brilliantly staged finale, we’re confronted with the fact that we’re far more invested in the fate of a suitcase full of cash than we are in the lives of several characters. Everything, finally, is grist for the mill. As Clay memorably puts it, inadvertently foreshadowing the general shrugging attitude toward human endeavour in so much later Kurbick, “What’s the difference?”

The supplements on Criterion’s release are terrific, especially the interview with Robert Polito, author of the excellent Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, concerning Thompson’s relationship with Kubrick. (Among Polito’s most interesting insights are the connections he draws between Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Nabokov’s Lolita, which Kubrick would soon adapt.) But the obvious supplementary highlight on The Killing is Kubrick’s preceding feature, Killer’s Kiss (1955), also a strong, moody noir about a not very good boxer and a girl in trouble, which memorably features scenes of casual voyeurism, lusty television viewing, underwear fondling, more bad voice-over, and a long, messy, dirty fight involving an axe, a spear, and about a hundred mannequins in various states of assembly. It was also shot by Kubrick, who had by then wound down his career as a photographer for Look, and his memorable, seemingly spontaneous street imagery conveys a curiosity about the world that would rarely resurface in his later work.

Conan the Barbarian: bludgeoning the classics

2011-08-19T11:41:00.009-04:00

Steel versus sorcery, self-reliance versus hegemony, cold brutality versus hot sadism: there’s plenty of dramatic conflict inherent in Robert E. Howard’s oft-revived and re-tooled Conan tales, yet the only discernible conflict in director Marcus Nispel’s new Conan the Barbarian concerns the battle between the forces of inspiration and those of crass cynicism. The latter triumphs utterly.

Neither spectacularly awful not awfully spectacular, this new Conan makes good on none of its promises nor builds any momentum. A protracted prologue (with narration from Morgan Freeman!), which follows our titular barbarian from the womb (I mean this literally) through to childhood trauma, attempts to infuse the story with some psychology yet fails to produce a Conan half as compelling as Schwarzenegger’s far more single-minded embodiment. Once adult Conan (Jason Momoa, sneering with conviction and plenty buff, though he’d surely look more at home jumping off the top rope than fencing with sand demons) sets upon on his quest to avenge his father’s gruesome death, the film shifts into a steady and mind-numbing series of fight sequences, none of which are very imaginative nor support a coherent set of rules regarding the magical powers of its baddies.

John Milius’ 1982 Conan the Barbarian was an economical fantasy that thoughtfully embraced the savagery of its milieu and made its hero an emblem for its director’s anti-authoritarian, neo-anarchist beliefs and its singularly self-adoring star’s superman self-image. It also featured a wonderfully seductive villain in wigged James Earl Jones, was extremely entertaining and well-structured (the script came from Milius and Oliver Stone), and functioned as an interesting foil to Apocalypse Now (which was scripted by Milius and features a similar trajectory and virtually identical climax).

With its somewhat different narrative thrust (“arc” is too dynamic a term... come to think of it so is “thrust”), the new Conan can’t exactly be called a remake (despite echoes of the earlier film in the score and some of the choreography), but neither can anyone familiar with Milius’ film help but compare the two. The only things to recommend it are supporting performances from Ron Perlman and Conan’s martyred dad and Rose McGowan as the goth sorceress daughter of Conan’s adversary. Her inevitable demise during one of the film’s umpteen endings is almost a disappointment, but hardly enough to invoke “the lamentations of the women.”

Waiting for Katelbach: Criterion in a Cul-de-sac

2011-08-15T12:24:00.010-04:00

Cul-de-sac (1966) opens with the stark image of a road bisecting a flat landscape and a car’s slow approach. Slow because it’s not being driven but rather pushed by Dickie (Lionel Stander), a loud, shirtless, ogre-like, middle-aged gangster with one arm shoved into a sling. Dickie’s Hitler-moustached, comparatively diminutive cohort, Albie (Jack McGowran), sits up front, quietly nursing a gut wound. They’ve somehow wound up at what looks like the very ends of the earth, following the telephone wires under the assumption that they must surely lead someplace worth going to. Echoing the dynamics of some of the director’s early short films (‘Two Men and a Wardrobe,’ ‘The Fat and the Lean’), the pair resembles some variation on Beckett’s tramps; indeed, they are waiting, not for Godot, but for the mysterious and equally elusive Mr. Katelbach to come and rescue them from perdition.

As the tide rises and threatens to swallow the car, Dickie finally discovers a looming sign of salvation straight out of myth: an 11th-century castle, the one, it turns out where Rob Roy was written, inhabited only by the nervous, pedantic, bald-headed George (Donald Pleasance) and the much younger, very attractive and frequently naked Teresa (Françoise Dorléac), the two of them married less than ten months and living out here with many chickens, a well-stocked wine cellar, a room full of George’s bad paintings of Teresa, and a fridge containing about 900 eggs. Dickie invades the castle, devours many eggs and bottles of wine with the table manners of a grizzly bear, and immediately asserts himself as a sort of paternal authority figure; George and Teresa comply with his demands, even when he poses no immediate threat (though one of the film’s most entertaining sequences finds Teresa responding to a surprise visit from friends by suddenly ordering Dickie around like he’s their butler; she calls him “James”). A very weird sort of improvised family unit falls into place, prompting a surprising intimacy between the two men, who get stinko and touchy-feely with each other, and discuss life and women. At one point George even shaves Dickie.

This essentially sums up Cul-de-sac’s premise: one odd couple meets another in a cold, vast, isolated setting. What unfolds is a film that snakes seamlessly between comedy, thriller, siege drama, horror, and social critique, all of it truly inspired and amounting to what is probably the most sui generis project of Roman Polanski’s career. Yet, scripted by Polanski and his long-time collaborator Gérard Brach, the film never feels indulgent or aimless. Every scene pulls us deeper into something. Everything moves toward its end.

I first saw Cul-de-sac when I was maybe 16, and it somehow came to emblematize something very seductive about the European 1960s for me. So, like a lot of people, I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time, and Criterion’s DVD/blu-ray release rewards patience. The film, shot in black and white (and countless shades of grey) by Gilbert Taylor, is riddled with haunting images, alternating between hot sunlight and gloom, and Criterion’s transfer is suitably gorgeous. The disc also features a terrific documentary about the film’s arduous production and a vintage British television program featuring a fascinating and comprehensive interview with Polanski just as he was enjoying his first taste of global renown.

In a Better World: Oh, the humane-ity

2011-08-13T14:23:00.006-04:00

Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is a Swedish doctor working at a Sudanese refugee camp where he treats the victims of a sadistic warlord. Kids like him; they always chase after his truck when he drives away at the end of the day. But one day the warlord comes by for treatment and Anton lets him in the camp and the kids stop cheerfully chasing his truck. Should Anton treat patients without regard for their diabolical actions, or should he let the locals take their revenge on the ugly prick, who anyway just looks really, really evil?

Anton’s estranged wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm) is a doctor too, but she works and lives in an idyllic Danish town with their kids, one of whom, Elias (Markus Rygaard), gets bullied a lot. But Elias makes pals with new kid Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen), who’s determined to retaliate against all bullies, big and small, with some serious ass-whoopin’. Christian’s mom is dead and dad largely absent, and you know what that means. Kid’s got a bad attitude. It’s just a matter of time before that ass-whoopin’ turns potentially deadly, and an innocent jogger and her jogging daughter get caught in the crossfire and nearly blown up. Revenge, it turns out, is problematic.

I have always imagined Susanne Bier as a very nice person, someone who probably pays careful attention to current events and shops at farmers markets. But artists overwhelmingly driven by social consciousness and concern for their fellow human are tricky animals. They tend to forget that the stories that touch us are formed in the guts and sooner or later wiggle free of strategies; that believable characters don’t conform to the dictates of careful dramaturgy; that didactisism and tidy moral equations tend to have the opposite of their desired effect. (Though they sure can scoop up Oscars!) Working once more with screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, Bier’s latest is a pretty shameless piece of white-Euro-hand-wringing in which nothing escapes the author’s determination to say Something Important About the World and still make nice in the end, however improbably. Bier, whose previous films include After the Wedding and Brothers, has obvious craft and talent; she can sometimes create marvelous moments with her actors; but in this case, she’s forcing everything so much your teeth will ache.

The Future is Now!: So think positive!

2011-08-12T12:35:00.006-04:00

Who is the Man of Today? Someone “pessemistic and practical,” says he. A “libertarian,” says another. Someone who just needs a few days wholly devoted to rediscovering the sense of wonder that stubbornly continues to exist in our troubled world, says the Woman of Tomorrow, who then promptly sets about fascilatating that rediscovery, through poetry readings, drinks with anarchists and helicopter tours of the Chrystler Building and the Great Wall of China, followed by meetings with several renowned optimists in North America and Europe. Man of Today met Woman of Tomorrow while the latter was doing a video street survey, asking strangers what their biggest fears are. (My favourite answer was “mystery moisture,” that phenomenon that occurs when you’re just walking along and you get hit by a drop of liquid of no apparent origin.) Woman is impressed by Man’s resolute I-do-no-harm, nor-do-I-give-a-shit-about-others attitutde. Man is impressed by Woman’s perky attractiveness. The adventure begins.

Alain de Botton

This fateful encounter between Woman and Man forms the foudnation of Gary Burns and Jim Brown’s The Future is Now!, a sort of fantasy date-a-thon that takes its cues from Nicole Védrès 1949 film La vie commence demain, in which two people with similarly conflicting sensibilities meet and swap ideas with French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Agache, Jean Rostand, Le Corbusier, Pablo Picasso and André Gide. Burns and Brown’s cast of big-brained conversationalists are a little less famous but also a little more diverse in background, they include Toronto poet Christian Bök, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, artist Marlene Dumas, philosopher Alain de Botton and novelist Rivka Galchen (whose Atmospheric Distrubances was one of the best debuts of the last decade). Oh, and the ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre. The tone and format feels somewhat akin to Richard Linklater’s talkier films (Waking Life espeically) and, to a lesser extent, Mindwalk, that slightly goofy movie where Liv Ullman, John Heard and Sam Waterston just walk around and talk about ultruism.

Burns and Brown previousy collaborated on the terrific Radiant City, which took a similarly irreverent approach to the documentary format in its exploraiton of Calgary’s apocalytic urban sprawl. The Future is Now! is also somehow a very Calgarian movie, in that it feels like the work of artists who are enormously frustrated with their hometown’s rabid conservatism yet come to terms with it not through attacking it but rather through giving certain dominant conservative attitudes a plausible, intelligent voice. Man of Today isn’t one to easily buy into liberal idealism, and thus makes a nice foil to Woman of Tomorrow’s incessant cheerfulness (she’s played by Liane Balaban). Man is played by bald-headed Quebecois Paul Ahmarani, who is nothing if not persistent. The film is full of reaction shots that find him doing this “I’m dubious” face, which made me laugh out loud nearly every time. I found myself occasionally wishing Burns and Brown had allowed their Man character to have a little more, well, character, but the truth is that both Man and Woman’s cipher-like personas fit neatly into the film’s conciet, which essentially takes the premise for a children’s movie and grafts it onto a film for grown-ups. I think it’s a lot of fun. But maybe I’m a natural optimist.

Meek's Cutoff: Looking for a place to settle down

2011-08-03T15:20:00.010-04:00

Our orientation is stitched into the canvas that appears in place of a traditional title card: Oregon, 1845. A small wagon train carrying three families and their hirsute, tasseled dandy of a guide traverses a landscape that undulates off in every which direction with little to recommend one route over the other. Crossing rivers and moving down hills is arduous and slow. In a memorable, inexplicably moving early scene, a pregnant woman chases her errant bonnet, hooked by the wind, as it snakes across the cracked earth. Daily chores, such as cooking, washing clothes, scrubbing dishes, and repairing cartwheels, are most often undertaken in silence. One image of travel gives way to the next in a dissolve so slow it’s like time has fallen asleep. The first word expressed by any of the characters isn’t spoken aloud (it daren’t be; not yet) but carved into a dead tree: LOST.

Which is about the best one-word summation one could find to characterize the films of Kelly Reichardt, one of the finest, most distinctive, most resourceful contemporary American filmmakers. A sense of having lost one’s way presses up against the margins of her earlier features, River of Grass, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Here, in Meek’s Cutoff, her most elaborate and ambitious production, her most dramatic narrative, her first period piece, and a western of sorts, one seen mainly through the eyes of women who have little say in their destinies, that sense of being lost drives the entire film, in so much as you can call the film “driven.” Sparely scripted, like Reichardt’s previous two features, by Oregon author Jonathan Raymond, its momentum is quiet, its tensions simmer a long while, its dangers are clearly mortal but most often latent, waiting. There’s much at stake, but its desperation is conveyed judiciously. It’s a gorgeously coloured, immersive film, pierced through with the sort of historical detail rarely highlighted, and with political undercurrents that imbue it with a timelessness.

The hopeful settlers are moving through the Oregon High Desert. As the film begins the group already suspects that their guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) may not know where he’s going. Meek, with his Father Christmas beard, his little pipe and buckskin outfit, likes to hold court with tales of adventure and his intimate connection to the land, but not everyone is convinced, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) perhaps least of all. Gender roles are clearly defined, but at night Emily whispers with her older, level-headed husband Soloman (Will Patton) about their plight. Their water supply is dwindling, and what food they can prepare is low on nourishment, particularly for the pregnant Glory White (Shirley Henderson).

Their unease is exacerbated with the appearance of a lone, half-naked Indian (Rod Rondeaux) with an oddly handsome face and a scar on his shoulder, who the men capture. There is debate about whether to kill him immediately or keep him around in the hope that he might lead them to water. The group is genuinely afraid--“They don’t think the way we do,” says one of the women, “it’s a documented fact”--but pragmatism wins out. Some of the film’s most interesting passages find Emily negotiating with the nameless Indian with whom no one shares a language. These scenes aren’t intended to render Emily as some sort of preternatural angel of tolerance; her motives are perfectly selfish, but her nonetheless courageous actions hold the promise of some deeper understanding of this feared Other.

Williams gives an even richer performance here than she did in Wendy and Lucy. A sequence filmed in long shot, in which Emily sees the Indian, drops her armload of kindling, and walks back to camp to fire an alarm shot from her cumbersome rifle, buzzes with a protracted, transfixing struggle between panic and clear-headedness. Greenwood, Patton, Henderson, Rondeaux also give nuanced performances peppered with thoughtful distinctions, though two of the younger actors, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, become annoying; they seem to be working too hard to generate drama, while Reichardt’s approach often hangs back from the actors, rewarding subtlety and the ability to maintain tension over long takes.

Reichardt filmed Meek’s Cutoff in the now-rarely used 1.33 aspect ratio, which mirrors the square-framed point-of-view granted to the women through their bonnets, or any of the group while they gaze at the passing landscape through the upside-down U of the wagons. Great pains have been taken to convey this story with as much fidelity to the real experience as possible; even Jeff Grace’s score feels like an extension of breath, the wind in the grass, and the soft clang of things dangling from the wagons. Such touches may seem slight on their own, but taken as a whole they form the ingredients for a rare work that transports us fully into not only a place but a mood, culminating in what is easily one of the best films you’ll see this year.

Fortune and sons: High and Low

2011-08-02T14:38:00.007-04:00

The English title given to Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 epic yet bracing kidnapping thriller and corporate critique is not accurate--he original translates as Heaven and Hell--but it’s better, or in any case appropriate on so many levels as to excuse its liberties. The film’s brilliantly rendered settings, from a shoe manufacturing executive’s deluxe, air-conditioned, ultra-Westernized mansion that looks down on Yokohama, to the industrial city’s dank, smoggy bed of low-lying refuse; from the cramped toilet of a bullet train speeding across a bridge to the anonymous grassy knoll far below to which briefcases of ransom money are tossed, High and Low shifts vertiginously between altitudes and class. Kurosawa himself was straddling “high” and “low” culture; he had previously adapted Shakespeare, Gorky and Dostoyevsky, was now working with considerably less elevated literary material: King’s Ransom, one of American author Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series of thrillers. And not one of the better ones.

Dramatic dichotomies abound in High and Low, right down to its stunning black and white (with one audacious exception) photography. Kurosawa was now three years into working with his own production company and was coming off a string of some of his finest and most enduringly popular middle-period films (Yojimbo among them); working hard to utilize the widescreen aspect ratio in as imaginative and fluent a manner possible, he had begun to forge what would become the signature camera style of the remainder of his career. He was at the top of his game, and could make such bold transitions with complete confidence. High and Low is one of his very best modern-dress films, and is now available on a gorgeous-looking, well-supplemented new blu-ray and DVD reissue from the Criterion Collection.

High and Low hits the ground running, with high tensions and thorny moral conundrums unfurling in its first scenes. Just as Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune, moustached, still terse and bullying, but with his characteristic bluster largely tucked into designer suits) is about to stake everything he owns--and he owns a lot--into clandestinely buying up shares so he can stage a take-over of the shoe company he works for, he gets a phone call that draws everything to a halt. His son has been kidnapped, and the ransom is very high. (Say goodbye to that corporate coup.) But soon his son enters the room--they kidnapped his chauffer’s kid by accident! Does Gondo still pay the enormous sum, even for a child that’s not his own? Is it worth throwing away his chance at advancement--perhaps throwing away everything? The immediate drama that unfolds, involving negotiations, elaborate arrangements and police involvement, is engrossing. And only about half of the movie. High and Low just keeps careening into different directions, and all the while it comments on Japan’s adoption of ruthless capitalism and peculiar ambivalence toward foreign influence.

Certified Copy: Stranger things have happened

2011-07-29T10:33:00.009-04:00

An English writer (William Shimell) arrives late for his own book launch in Arezzo, Tuscany. The book (like the film we're watching) is called Certified Copy. It seems primarily concerned with art history, and its proposal, from what we can gather (the content of the writer's lecture is deliberately overshadowed by whispers and gestures exchanged between a woman in the audience and her son), addresses the slippery nature of authenticity and the inherent value of copies, or reproductions. It’s a subject at least as old as the essays of Walter Benjamin, yet technology has marched furiously ahead in such directions as to keep it from ever becoming dated. The writer is perhaps 50; he’s tall, thin and handsome, chilly yet charismatic; he has a dry sense of humour and a healthy contrarian streak; he seems the antithesis of an academic while writing on subjects that are commonly the stock and trade of the academy. (Could the model for this character be Geoff Dyer?)

The woman having such trouble concentrating on the writer’s lecture (Juliette Binoche) is French but lives in Arezzo, where she runs an antique shop. She seems only slightly younger than the writer, and is very attractive, endearingly nervous, seductive yet moody; she’s alternately flirtatious and argumentative, intelligent yet capable of emotional impulsiveness. She’s purchased multiple copies of Certified Copy for the writer to sign—that is, to certify. Her mischievous adolescent son (Adrian Moore) notes that she seems very drawn to the writer, even while she expresses serious doubts about the validity of his book’s thesis. The day after the lecture, the writer arrives at the woman’s shop and they go for a drive. (This is where you stop reading should you want to enter the film’s second half without a net.) They find themselves in Lucignano, a medieval village where people go to get married, and it’s here, in a moment of transformation so elegant, subtle and carefully graded, that the writer and the woman, who seemed in every way strangers, undergo a drama of re-marriage. A café proprietor assumes they’re a couple, and so a couple is what they become, the parents to the woman’s son, 15 years married, though apparently living apart.

How we shifted from one sort of relationship to another is fascinating and mysterious (though a second viewing reveals certain hints in the film’s first half regarding what will transpire in the second), yet once that shift occurs there’s nothing vague or under-nourished about the ways in which the writer and the woman express their frustrations, argue, reminisce or negotiate their disparate needs as a married couple. In fact, for a film so draped in ambiguity, Certified Copy boasts one of the most resonant and deeply moving—and at times very amusing—portraits of marriage I’ve came upon in a very long while. This is partly due to the precision and unobtrusiveness of the director’s hand, and partly to the seeming transparency of the acting. Shimell is an opera singer and has never acted before, and he seems all the better for it, giving a convincingly re-active performance. Binoche seems to have immersed herself fully into the role (she’s joked that she was merely playing herself); she’s unapologetic about her contradictions; she’s an actress who understands her craft so thoroughly that her craft has merged completely with her being. There are moments in this film that make a strong case for Binoche as one of the finest living masters of the close-up; there is so much going on when the camera isolates her, and none of it feels forced.

Certified Copy is Abbas Kiarostami’s first dramatic feature made outside of his native Iran. It’s both easily recognizable as a Kiarostami film (the layers of performance especially) and as a European art film. Certain points of reference will quickly announce themselves to the cinephiles in the audience—the premise recalls Voyage to Italy and Last Year in Marienbad, while the temporal structure (the writer has to make an evening train), the emotional build, and the final moments recall Before Sunset—yet Certified Copy feels like the epitome of an organically developed story, something that emerged fluidly from a stray notion that must have initially seemed an improbable idea for a film. In that sense, we can locate within Certified Copy a sort of talisman: amongst all the mirrors, the various spoken languages and the inadequate translations that so clearly contribute to the film’s themes, there is also a small part played by none other than Jean-Claude Carrière, who co-authored the scripts for the latter films of Luis Buñuel (so many of them founded in something illogical, yet nonetheless comment brilliantly on human behaviour). Carrière shows up to give a little marital advice to the writer, and you wonder if in some non-verbal way he was also present as a reminder to Binoche, Shimell, and Kiarostami that strange things happen every day. That people fall in love and try to forge lives together is only one of them.