Shit his dad says

The title of the source material, a memoir by poet and playwright Nick Flynn, is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The title of the movie, scripted and directed by Paul Weitz, is Being Flynn. I don’t know about you, but this discrepancy in tone already gave me pause—would this adaptation suck all the bite from the book and replace it with middlebrow Hollywood bullshit? The good news is: not really. Being Flynn exudes polished, pedestrian, professional directorial style, but its heart’s in the right place, by which I mean a tough-minded, tough-love kind of place. This is the story about a boy trying to become a man while living in the dual-shadow of a suicided mother and a long-absent, crazy motherfucker of a father who returns to this boy’s life when he shows up one night looking for a bed at the homeless shelter where the boy works. Too late, obviously, to make up for lost time—the boy’s now in his 20s—but just in time to challenge the boy’s undigested notions about maybe-kinda becoming a writer. Jonathan Flynn never published a word in his life, yet even as a going-on-elderly homeless drunken babbler, he remains convinced of his innate literary genius. And of his son Nick’s inheritance of this genius.

So yes, like many a memoir this is also the story of a writer discovering his craft. Thankfully, rather than spending time watching the writer try to write, Being Flynn focuses on the experiences that engender literary insight. Nick (Paul Dano) is uneasy with any career path that might make explicit his creative desire, so, following his father’s oft-stated and, as it turns out, ironic dictum that “we are put on this earth to help other people,” he works night shifts trying to give a modicum of comfort to the city’s downtrodden. The movie’s depiction of life at the shelter gets a surprising number of things right, partially through casting the likes of Lily Taylor, Wes Studi and Eddie Rouse as Nick’s more experienced colleagues, partially through Weitz’s uncondescending framing of the shelter’s clients.

Nick may be Being Flynn’s protagonist but its star performance is unquestionably Robert De Niro’s Jonathan. The movie wisely capitalizes on De Niro’s iconic status, rendering Jonathan as a variation on Travis Bickle some 30-odd years after Taxi Driver. Not just because Jonathan’s last job was driving cab, but because, like Travis, Jonathan regards himself as possessing some rarefied, god-like view of mankind in all its frailty, a view that allows him to go on manic, fevered rants against homosexuals, women and racial minorities. Neither Weitz nor De Niro strain to ingratiate Jonathan to us, understanding that it’s up to Nick to figure out how to come to terms with his father’s less palatable attitudes. And without resorting to mere camp, De Niro has an awful lot of fun with Jonathan, singing “You Are MEE-eee!” to his son from his skinny cot or throwing a tantrum while wearing a makeshift toga. And Jonathan does have things to teach his son about what it means to be a writer. The key midpoint scene involves Jonathan calling his son on the fact that he’s working at the shelter to gather material. Nick, horrified, denies this. Indeed, it isn’t the whole truth, but, make no mistake, it is a truth, and the proof is in Flynn’s book and in this flawed but very worthwhile movie.

Caught in the devil's bargain: Taking Woodstock

Would-be interior designer and might-be abstract painter Elliot Tiechberg (Demetri Martin) gets starved out of New York City at the start of a very un-groovy summer of ’69. He heads back to the Catskills, where his folks run a fleabag motel and self-described resort that even at eight bucks a night can’t draw customers. Though he’s in his mid-30s Elliot looks younger. Though he’s secretly a less than straight arrow under his polyester suits he looks sufficiently trustworthy to his elders, or at least those who aren’t openly anti-Semitic. Elliot’s the youngest-ever president of the local chamber of commerce, a thankless gig whose greatest benefit is a free pass when it comes to getting permits approved. But permits and sheer desperation are all Elliot needs to help grease the wheels of history and ensure that Woodstock happens after the festival gets booted out of its original location. Elliot’s acting as middleman between the locals and the organizers also saves his family’s business and gives him an opportunity to finally break away from a vicious circle of codependence and repression. So everybody wins. At least until Altamont comes in December and bums the whole universe out.

Taking Woodstock is based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber. I’ve been wondering why his name was altered here to sound more explicitly Jewish. I can only assume it has something to do with justifying the wildly over-the-top characterization of his mom Sonia (Imelda Staunton, no holds barred), whose knee-highs, horn-rimmed goggles, incessant nagging and permanent lunge make her the most extreme overbearing Jewish matriarch the movies have seen in years. It may very well be an accurate portrait of this most unlikely midwife of one of the hippy generation’s crowning achievements, but it also makes for some broad and rather uneven comedy, which is not the strong suit of director Ang Lee, who along with his screenwriter/producer James Schamus was probably more attracted to the story’s mixture of sexual awakening and dissection of a pivotal moment in American culture. You could say Taking Woodstock is a little Brokeback and a little Ice Storm, but you wouldn’t quite do justice to the film’s own distinctions—or to the richer rewards of Brokeback Mountain or The Ice Storm, both of them movies with more focus, insight and emotional punch.

Better to just say that Taking Woodstock is a reasonably good time, with some nice details, lots of nudity, heady nostalgia, more than a handful of freak flag clichés and a paucity of actual music, the idea being that those who in attendance who actually heard the bands were in the minority. Elliot never quite gets near the stage but he does strike up an alliance with amiable neighbour Eugene Levy, get some solid advice from a ass-kicking transvestite played by Liev Schreiber, crawl into a boogie van for a pleasantly touchy-feely acid trip with Paul Dano, and tumbles out of the closet and into bed with a hippy hunk who is quite possibly the only guy who went to Woodstock that actually likes Judy Garland records. There’s not a heap of narrative dynamics here, but like Titanic we all know how it’s going to end anyway. A psychedelic cascade of split-screen effects followed by one massive, mud-splattered hangover.

There Will Be Blood: Paul Thomas Anderson's geyser of black and sticky dreams

Epic in scale and theme while intimate in cast, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, the writer/director’s fifth and finest feature, is something fiery and looming, controlled and eccentric, and fully deserving of the superlatives it continues to attract. Based, rather tenuously, on prolific muckraker Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, the film zeroes in from the start on a single, fascinating figure whom it will monitor for the entirety of its mesmerizing two-and-a-half-hours, one Daniel Plainview, a capitalist of fearsome, tireless ambition and great daring, seeking power for its own sake, setting upon a thrilling trajectory that will inevitably lead back to a hollow center.

Set at the dawn of the 20th century, the shape of the still virginal American frontier in There Will Be Blood is being dictated by pretty much the same forces that will dominate American life at the dawn on the next: oil and religion. Perhaps we should add family into the mix. Rest assured the film’s title foreshadows the spilling of blood, but the place from which it springs is a wounded psyche where genuine blood ties are sorrowfully lacking in this tale of obscurely formed and violently broken families.

The opening scenes are precariously compelling. Plainview, solitary, with everything still ahead of him, is found burrowing deep into the earth, carving the first niche in his tunnel to hell. Ostensibly mining for silver, he strikes black gold. Soon after he’s seen working his first derrick where a fatal injury to a co-labourer makes Plainview the unexpected father to an orphaned infant. Years after that, we encounter Plainview the established oilman, his little boy H.W. beside him in dark suit and parted hair, the quiet, attentive partner in his father’s estimable enterprise.

The extensive sequence that yields these developments sucks us into the tale with raw, muscular physicality, virtually no dialogue, and music provided by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, alternately drawing tension to a single unnerving point or creating an ominous insectile flurry of activity with low strings. Rarely are so many components so much of a piece, the space and texture evoked in the production design by Jack Fisk (Days of Heaven) beautifully lining Anderson’s catalogue of striking images: the exploding geyser that blasts H.W.’s hearing away, the vast puddle of crude that reflects the desert sky, which itself represents the limit of Plainview’s potential wealth. While the barren landscape on display in There Will Be Blood might seem to limit Anderson’s palate, the film never falls short on arresting spectacle.

The dramatic core takes hold with the coming of Paul Sunday, a goat farmer’s son who approaches Plainview one night to announce the discovery of oil on his father’s otherwise worthless hardscrabble. Plainview offers a trifling up front and Paul thence vanishes for the rest of the movie, only to be replaced by his far more imposing twin brother Eli once Plainview arrives on their land under false pretences. Plainview acquires the property for a song, but Eli, whose aspirations are to become a charismatic preacher and founder of The Church of the Third Revelation, has Plainview’s number. A line is drawn in the sand between these opponents, one representing business, the other religion, each eventually needing to align however uneasily with the other.

Both Paul and Eli are played by the terrifically unlikely star Paul Dano, who made a distinct impression as the nihilistic teen in Little Miss Sunshine. He has a girlish manner that props up the considerable rage he generates here as a slight, chinless youth easily underestimated. His Eli is a talented performer, shaking the arthritis from an old lady’s shriveled hands and tossing invisible Satan out on his ass before an admiring rural congregation. He works himself into impressive fits of hysteria, which will pay off intriguingly in the film’s bravura –if somewhat overcooked– finale.

But the film belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis, lording over the proceedings as the brilliant and monstrous Plainview. I can’t come up with another actor who could do quite what Day-Lewis has done here. Larger than life, yet so very tangible a presence, his Plainview has a sparkle of the dreamer in his eye, and a lovingly protected ruthlessness that only fully falls away when he no longer has anyone left to convince, when accident and destiny determine his absolute loneliness. (Among these determining circumstances is the arrival of a mysterious half-brother, marvelously played by Kevin J. O’Connor with the weathered calm of a weary chameleon.)

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Day-Lewis’ performance lies in his voice, its folksy oratorical nuances marked by an overt homage to the memorable modulations of John Huston. And like Noah Cross, Huston’s wondrously evil cameo in Chinatown, Day-Lewis’ Plainview has tethered himself like some mad proprietor to a natural resource. His hubris writ-large is a symbol of American arrogance, avarice and a sort of appalling beauty, a personality so grand and weirdly inviting, even as it festers the basest of needs. If anyone can sell our earth’s riches to us as though he invented it in his basement workshop, it’s this guy. And for the duration of There Will Be Blood, we are his stunned, happily bamboozled customers.