Stuck in the sleeping car

Let’s say you were busy getting settled in your seat during the opening moments of The Railway Man, in which Eric Lomax (Colin Firth) is lying on the floor, muttering some eerie rhyme to himself. This would mean that, for you, the film would begin, more or less, with Eric meeting Patti (Nicole Kidman) on a train. It’s all rather comforting at this point: the Technicolor tones of the cinematography, the two attractive stars sharing a table as the landscape passes between them, swapping travel routes as a way of making love. How old-fashioned! There’s even mention of Brief Encounter. Firth almost looks like Robert Donat in that moustache. Perhaps the rail-riding lovers-in-waiting are playing a variation on North by Northwest. Though the truth is that Eric is far too tormented to be Cary Grant, and Patti, a nurse, will come to more closely resemble Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound, the single-minded woman determined to heal her damaged man. But Bergman had a personality and authority. She liked liverwurst. And she was in a movie that, however artificial, even silly, had gravitas. All The Railway Man has is gravity, and that gravity comes entirely from the source material, not from this awkwardly structured, numbingly somber piece of prestige cinema.

My reservations are in no way meant to make light of the suffering of the real Eric Lomax, an engineer who served the British Army in the war, was taken prisoner and tortured, and who never recovered his psychic health until his spouse made his recovery her mission, and until Lomax went back to Southeast Asia to confront his chief tormentor and, amazingly, wound up becoming his tormentor’s friend. That last part, the confrontation that turned into reconciliation that turned into camaraderie, deserves a smart, lucid, searching movie, yet this entire development, the most extraordinary chapter in an extraordinary story, is barely even touched on here. It’s all but reduced to a closing title card.

At first it seems like Patti might be out protagonist. While tight-lipped Eric is going semi-catatonic or lunging at strangers with a box-cutter, Patti is relentlessly questioning Eric’s wartime buddy (Stellan Skarsgård) about what really happened. “Wherever there’s been a war there are nurses like me to put people back together,” she declares. We know Patti’s something of a bossy pants from the very start of their romance—right after their first kiss she’s already giving Eric the moustache ultimatum. But whatever promise Patti had of turning into a real and active character quickly dissolves under the film’s poorly handled flashbacks, which are spread out as evenly and indiscriminately as David Hirschfelder’s overly busy, obtrusive score. Why is Kidman even in this thing? Firth at least gets to flail and be agonized, though the character’s lack of texture and the film’s lack of curiosity does no favours to Firth or anyone else. Lomax died in 2012, but his memoir is still in print. 

               

Closed marriage: Eyes Wide Shut

I hadn’t seen Eyes Wide Shut (1999) since it opened, though in the years since—the years that found me stumbling into criticism—countless friends and colleagues have urged me to revisit the film, Stanley Kubrick’s last and, on the surface, least obviously “Kubrickian.” Films have a way of changing on us while we’re off doing other things, and indeed, coming back to Eyes Wide Shut after 12 years—on the occasion of Warner’s new Stanley Kubrick: Limited Edition Collection blu-ray box—yielded a tremendous amount of interesting detail that I’d either not noticed the first time around or had forgotten. Yet my overall response was exactly the same: Eyes Wide Shut is a fascinating failure, more fun to think about or argue over than to actually sit through, though you’ve really got to sit through it to think or argue about it.

Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, or Dream Story, Eyes Wide Shut—its title evoking both the wilful blindness of marital complacency and the dream state—is a story of re-marriage in which the apparently harmonious coexistence of Bill and Alice, a handsome upper class couple (real-life handsome upper class couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), is disrupted by Alice’s confession of erotic fantasies involving a naval officer. Just as Alice completes her confession, Doctor Bill, now thoroughly tormented, gets called away to attend to the death of an elderly patient. While paying his respects, Bill becomes audience to a second, equally disorienting confession, this one coming from the deceased’s daughter, who explains that she’s always been in love with Bill. Bill flees, eventually finding himself at a jazz club where an old friend plays piano. The friend accidentally lets slip that he’s playing another gig that same night for some clandestine masquerade/sex party and, having learned the password needed to gain entry (Fidelio, or “fidelity”), Bill rents a costume from some pervert who whores out his teenage daughter and attends the event, which seems to be organized by a wealthy cult—the same cult from The 7th Victim (1943)?—and proves more dangerous than he’d anticipated.

Brimming with blemish-free, perfectly groomed, fresh-from-the-gym naked bodies and a parade of women who inexplicably can’t keep their hands off Cruise, Eyes Wide Shut, at times like David Lynch without the flights of imagination, at others like Roman Polanski without the genuine perversity, is not a very sexy movie. It cautions us to the potentially mortal dangers of sexual adventure, dangers that Bill evades partly through the seemingly clairvoyant protective powers of Alice, who, for example, calls Bill on his mobile just as he’s about to engage a prostitute, prompting him to abort the arrangement. The next day Bill finds out that the prostitute is HIV positive; moments later he buys a newspaper bearing the headline LUCKY TO BE ALIVE. Similarly, while Bill’s at the sex party Alice has a dream that nearly parallels his experience, something which, along with the film’s curiously artificial-looking Manhattan, its cryptic coincidences and pervasive use of blue gels and Christmas lights, alludes to the source material’s dreamlike quality without quite ever fully surrendering to it.

There’s something uncertain about the tone of Eyes Wide Shut, and this, along with a preposterously flabby script by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael—a script that finds nearly every question followed by someone repeating the question back to the questioner—and the pause-laden, alternately stiff, strained, or distracted performances from Cruise and, far more surprisingly, Kidman, renders the film turgid and tiring and over two-and-a-half hours long. Not even his champions would characterize Kubrick as a director especially sensitive to eros or love, and one suspects he may have hoped that having a real couple, a celebrity couple, together onscreen would carry its own special charge. But Cruise and Kidman, who divorced in 2001, seem strangely awkward, comfortable with each other’s bodies but not with each other’s presence, and reveal nothing of the particular nature of their relationship—other than, perhaps, this rigid unease—through Bill and Alice. Whatever brought them together or tore them apart, they kept it to themselves.

Rabbit Hole: Group therapy

Rabbit Hole begins eight months after affluent suburban New Yorkers Becca (Nicole Kidman, also the film’s producer) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) lost their four-year-old Danny to a car accident, so the more flamboyant displays of grief have receded, and the couple is now entrenched in establishing a new status quo, grudgingly accepting, or at least pretending to accept, that life somehow goes on. Because the object of loss is already absent, our story, adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own play, can focus more closely on the mid- to long-term effects of Danny’s death on his parents’ marriage. While Becca appears determined to assume control of the situation and coolly goes about redistributing Danny’s things, Howie gets up nights to watch home movies and resolves to continue with group therapy, even after Becca dismisses some fellow grieving parents’ attempt to find consolation in religious thinking (a scene that’s probably devastating for the couple on the receiving end, but is unnervingly amusing for the rest of us). Their sex life has evaporated and shows no sign or return, despite Howie’s plying of Becca with back rubs and Al Green. The question swiftly arises as to whether or not Becca and Howie’s relationship can endure such a catastrophic rupture.

Soon Becca is stalking a teenage boy (I initially thought, and sort of hoped, that it was because the boy looked like the teenaged version of Danny, but the truth is slightly less neurotic) while Howie enters into a precarious friendship with someone from group (Sandra Oh). These relationships, not extramarital exactly, but rather extra-domestic, seem designed to imbue both characters with intricate psychologies, and the performances, from Kidman especially, who’s always so good with these sorts of icy emotional renegades, are richly layered. Nonetheless, the writing leaves the couple in general, and Howie in particular, feeling more like sketches than full characters, their vagueness exacerbated by the film’s broadly conceived design elements, the almost uniformly drab grays and beiges of the couple’s clothing and home décor, or details like the art photos of empty cavities of buildings mounted on their otherwise sparely adorned living room walls.

Thankfully Rabbit Hole is festooned with a supporting cast who supply such colour and funk so as to set Becca and Howie’s ostentatiously muted realm into relief. Oh injects some terrific deadpan comedy, sometimes without saying a word—just catch the look on her face when, having smoked a bowl before group one night, she tries not to crack up over another man’s catalogue of miseries. It’s also nice to see Giancarlo Esposito turn up as the musical dad to Becca’s unborn niece, even if he barely gets to speak. But the biggest acting treat comes from Diane Wiest as Becca’s mom Nat, who so desperately wants to comfort her daughter but is most often pushed away. In her worn-out old sweaters, Nat clearly lives somewhere on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum from Becca and Howie (not to mention from Gina, Wiest’s wonderful recurring character on HBO’s In Treatment) but Wiest wisely eschews from “playing” Nat’s class, just as director John Cameron Mitchell eschews from over-emphasizing it. Wiest instead relishes in Nat’s earthiness and middling ability to disguise her true emotions, even when she’s deliberately trying to keep potentially spiky moments cheerful, as in the scene where Becca’s sister Izzy is celebrating her birthday in a bowling alley and Becca gives her a fancy set of towels instead of something that might acknowledge Izzy’s advanced pregnancy. Even the way Wiest lets out this forced-excited little “Aw!” when the gift is unwrapped—like a little burp accidentally let loose in public—before suddenly retreating, provides her scenes in Rabbit Hole with such texture, warmth, and a welcome untidiness. It goes to show how sometimes the investments a film makes in its background can make so much richer all that passes in its foreground.

2000s: the decade in horror

What is horror? Something that invokes unease? Repulsion? What does it require? Surely not the supernatural, since so many horror films are grounded in realism and concern real-life horrors, and so many of the best ones are drenched in ambiguity. Is it something to do with how the past clings to us as we try to move forward in life? Something to do with death perhaps—though there are things worse than death. Let’s agree that horror films trade in some form of violence, though psychological or spiritual violence frequently trumps physical violence, which has the potential to just leave us numb or queasy, like a roller coaster ride.

Session 9

The genre seems to shift with every generation. What do the 2000s say about the way we fear and tremble today? Do we need graphic torture to keep us awake through the night? I confess that I can’t get too worked up over novel approaches to bodily desecration for its own sake. Torture cinema is certainly horrifying, but it’s also fundamentally boring. Like a dose of dysentery. The more I look over this list of my favourite horror films of our dwindling decade, the more I see how many endure for pretty much the same reasons the great horror films of the 30s and 40s or of the 60s and 70s endure. They strike a balance between unnerving mystery and a guttural, creeping certainty about something repellant. Something waits for us in the shadows. Something irrational, yet possibly real. Some shard of nightmare that lingers with us when we wake. Something common sense urges us to avoid. Yet we go to the movie anyway.

The Others

The Others (2001) leaned heavily on a hundred-year-old template, yet where the film finally lands is a brilliant twist on The Turn of the Screw. It was also the film that convinced me of Nicole Kidman’s talents. I’d found her too icy to be the sensual leading lady previous roles pitched her as, but playing this stern mother charged with protecting her two weirdly-diseased children in an enormous, apparently haunted house, she was both convincing and transfixing. The film found a strong companion piece in The Orphanage (07), also from a Spanish director, also featuring a woman, a house, and a past demanding to be acknowledged. And Belén Rueda carried that film just as boldly as Kidman did hers. It was a little cornier as I recall, yet there are things in it I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Birth

Speaking of Kidman, I’d propose that one of the most haunting horror films of the 2000s may have suffered critically, and maybe commercially, for not being regarded as horror at all. It’s only in the final moments of Birth (04), when Kidman’s heroine, shattered by her uncertainty over the case of the little boy who claimed to be her dead husband, that its generic status is confirmed. I missed it when it first appeared and only caught up with it later on DVD—and only after I’d devoured Warner’s Val Lewton box set, which greatly informed my reading of the film, which deserves to be considered among the finest works of Luis Buñuel’s old collaborator, the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

The Descent

Speaking of birth, the birthing/cavern imagery in The Descent (05) made for some of the most potent meta-body horror of the decade. As it became more fantastical, aspects of the film were perhaps a little too conventional, and too silly, to maintain suspension of disbelief, but this story about an all-girl spelunking trip was at the same time too effective an exploitation of claustrophobia, both external and internal, to be written off.

The Ring

I’m tempted to include the deeply creepy, if, again, sometimes very silly The Ring (02) on this list. I only hesitate because I can’t quite call Gore Verbinski’s US remake any sort of significant revision of the Japanese original (1998)—except perhaps for whatever fresh resonance it generates from Naomi Watts’ central performance, which offers some vivid emotional variation we just don’t get from Nakano Matsushima. But I’d rather champion something else from Japan altogether. Séance (00), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fresh, inventive adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, is perhaps the finest example of the director’s unique, hushed horror aesthetic, drizzled with guilt.

The Devil's Backbone

The Devil’s Backbone (01) or Pan’s Labyrinth (06)? Both films involve children, both concern the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and both were made by the immensely talented Guillermo Del Toro, who hails from Mexico but makes most of his best films, these two included, in Spain. I’ll choose the former, a ghost story, if only because it’s a purer example of the genre, and because the conceit of the unexploded bomb in the courtyard is one of the most inspired pregnant objects in recent film.

Spider

Session 9 (01), featuring a riveting central performance from Scottish actor Peter Mullan, gets my vote for best haunted house of the decade. Okay, it’s actually an asylum, not a house, but this is the movie’s bravura premise, which finds a small group of labourers pulling the asbestos out of the Danvers State Mental Hospital, a decrepit old shell of a building, and combines two of the best foundations for horror: the phantasmagoric and the looming threat of mental illness. The film is nearly as good as David Cronenberg’s Spider (02), adapted from Patrick McGrath. It’s also about the vaporous frontiers between lucidity and madness, between victim and predator, and also a bloody good showcase for a tremendous British acting talent, in this case Ralph Fiennes.

Let the Right One In

Equating the discomforts of lycanthropy with those of puberty, Canada’s own Ginger Snaps (00) was undoubtedly a superb, inventive application of a familiar monster mythology into an adolescent context. But I have to say I was even more impressed by Let the Right One In (08), which took a similar tack with vampires but accentuated its tale with greater specificity of location, period, mood and art direction. It’s just a weirder movie in all the right ways, less generic yet still hugely entertaining, going even deeper into questions about gender, development, and the vertiginous sexual confusion of childhood.

Pontypool

Can I make it up to Canada by declaring Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (08) as easily the smartest, most deliriously bizarre spin on the zombie movie of the decade? It takes William Burroughs’ notion of the word as virus and runs with it like a screaming, foaming at the mouth maniac. Admittedly, it finally struggles hard to make complete sense, but it generates so many interesting questions along the way that coherence seems of secondary importance. It also the confines of a small town radio station and the deep, dark Ontario winter into a cocktail of serious chills.

Drag Me to Hell

I had a lot of fun with Drag Me to Hell (09), Sam Raimi’s return to horror after a long season of super hero hi-jinx—though like Raimi’s Spiderman movies this feels very much the product of comic books, specifically of the EC variety. A pretty, somewhat conceited girl just wants to manage a bank, but she gets stuck with a witch’s curse she can’t shake off, while Raimi sticks us with a surprise finale that left everyone in the theatre where I saw it reeling. Nothing, however, freaked the shit out of any big crowd I sat among like Paranormal Activity (07/09). Orin Peli’s demonic home movie horror is crude as all hell—it’s supposed to be—but its this very sense of the real, which it firmly held onto until its very stupid final moment, that imbued it with a feeling of campfire tale terror that’s so difficult to work over modern audiences with. Utterly reliant on contemporary technology, the movie is arguably designed for our age, yet more than anything else I’ve written about here it utilizes the most old-fashioned, if not primordial tricks in the book. It also hit number one at the box office last weekend. Go figure.

Queasy, Cruel, Comic: Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding is a movie that, above all else, turns on the delicious discomforts of recognition. Recognition of self in family, family in self, and, just as importantly, the lack of any recognition altogether. Discomfort is of course rarely all that delicious in real life, but when sculpted into taut, tense, witty scenarios by writer/director Noah Baumbach, and embodied by the superlative casts he and Douglas Aibel assemble, it can frequently reach queasy, effervescent heights of comic wonder.

The movie begins with successful novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) wiggling through a corridor on a train leaving her comfort zone of New York City for some island near Long Island. That our titular heroine starts her story in a state of disequilibrium is made complete by the rather ingenious way in which she’s introduced to us: mistaking him for her own teenage son Claude (Zane Pais), she sits beside a complete stranger. Her failure to recognize the hapless, approval-seeking Claude speaks volumes about Margot’s difficulties with and resistance to motherhood, as it does about the sort of humour that Margot at the Wedding runs on. As with Baumbach’s break-out hit The Squid & the Whale, laughs escape from our recognizing the dynamics of dysfunctional families, if not, crucially for the sake of comic surprise, the particularities of the family in question, confirming Tolstoy’s famous line about how all unhappy families are different.

A defining factor in Baumbach’s dissection of family is his emphatic interest in giving his adults very adult stories and his kids stories focused around their eager ambition to penetrate the banal mysteries of adult life. Adults and kids intermingle without having to compromise the overall tone of the movie, which hums along, fuelled by need, injury and the distribution of emotional collateral. With child in tow, though conspicuously sans husband, Margot ostensibly arrives on the quiet island to attend and support the marriage of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to tubby, nervy ex-rocker Malcolm (Jack Black), who she met only recently. Once enveloped by the affluent, small community Margot and Claude are confronted with scenes of sexual and fraternal manipulation and expectation, and in these scenes their disparate age groups become irrelevant. Insecurity becomes an equal opportunity threat to all involved.

Squaring off against sea, shrubs, childhood mementos and a lonely, bare tree, under overcast east coast light rendered with muted beauty by ace cinematographer Harris Savides, Margot and Pauline’s interaction forms a consistent centre to this movie that handles story in the loosest terms it can get away with. Things don’t progress a whole lot in Margot at the Wedding, but the static nature of the drama is engagingly offset by how terrifically funny it all is –and its funny because we keep discovering more and more about how these wildly antagonistic sisters operate. And its hard to imagine this relationship playing as well as it does without one of the most inspired strokes of casting in recent memory.

Kidman and Leigh as sisters still strikes me as an utterly bizarre, unlikely choice, the former actor distinguished by her elegance, taste and understatement, the latter by her ballsy, go-for-broke, sometimes deeply mannered performances. My first thought was: this movie’s not big enough for the two of them. My second was: that’s goddamned brilliant! They’re both so good, so mutually attuned to Baumbach’s style while coming to it from very different sensibilities, that they dangle side by side from this family tree with inspired incongruity: Margot the privately grotesque star of the family, Pauline the more sympathetic, if hopelessly lost black sheep. And when you throw the added wild card of Black into the mix, playing a character that no one, his fiancée included, seems entirely comfortable with, you’ve pretty much sealed the deal as far as comic tension is concerned.

The cruelty that constitutes the stock in trade of Margot never really gets shaken off. Thankfully. But that Margot is such a compulsive bitch most of the time makes her role in the family all the more compelling to work through. Its not just this movie that needs Margot to function, her family needs her too, as a way to reflect back their own weaknesses and conflicted feelings with success as defined by the outside world. And, as jarring as the final gesture made in Margot at the Wedding is, it displays a remarkable flicker of optimism in this mostly nasty, mostly pleasingly shapeless world Baumbach’s created. Out of nowhere, the movie seems to be telling us that we never know when our deeper moral impulses might just leap out, yank us by the lapels, and force us to live up to something better than our conditions promise.