Off the rails

English director Joe Wright can marshall the teeming forces that constitute the cinematic apparatus on the grandest of scales with a tremendous fluidity. And, boy, nobody knows it better than him. If there was ever any chance of the cameras simply bearing witness to a shift in thought, atmosphere or emotion in his new adaption of Anna Karenina, Wright has done a painstaking job of ensuring that any such event was quashed under a behemoth of elaborate tracking shots, movable décor and razzle dazzle choreography. Not a whole lot of slipping elegantly between the internal musings of various characters here. Doesn’t sound much like Tolstoy does it? I suspect fidelity to the source material was not high on Wright’s priority list.

This Anna has a big design concept at its core, though the execution of this concept is hardly consistent. All the world’s a stage—until it isn’t. The first several scenes of this spin on Tolstoy’s sprawling, multi-character tale of marital infidelities and class angst in 19th century Russia are confined entirely to a baroque theatre, with Anna (Keira Knightley) arriving in Moscow to help rescue her brother’s damaged marriage and soon after becomes inexplicably entranced with the young military officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The way Wright shifts from scene to scene by using toy trains, fake snow and sweeping gestures is undeniably virtuosic and increasingly tedious. If there is any real tension, sexual or otherwise, between Knightley and Taylor-Johnson, it gets lost in all the swirling, swooping and cutting. But, hey, they look great in those costumes, and Taylor-Johnson’s blue eyes really pop when underlined by that blonde moustache.

Some interesting casting: Jude Law plays Anna’s ultra-reserved husband, a government official. I guess someone figured it was Law’s turn to get cuckolded for once, and the actor does some impressive work here, invoking a mixture of repressed pain and rage doing internal battle with a desire to be forgiving and above it all. Elsewhere we find a very interesting, clearly devoted young actor named Domhnall Gleeson playing Tolstoy’s other protagonist Levin, the young man who flees affluence to join the workers in the fields and admire nature in all its ferocity and splendour. Gleeson’s nicely complimented by the Swedish beauty Alicia Vikander, who plays Kitty, the girl of Levin’s dreams who initially turns him away in favour of Vronsky. For some reason these actors have much stronger, subtler scenes than those shared by the stars. Do Wright and playwright Tom Stoppard, the film’s scenarist, simply believe in true love between the young and innocent while disbelieving in the operatic lust and longings indulged in by the slightly older cheaters and manipulators? I suspect that this contrast has more to do with Wright’s knee-jerk response to drama, already more than evident in earlier films like Pride and Prejudice and Atonement: the bigger the stakes, the more you got to dress it up!

I applaud chances taken with form and I have nothing against a little flamboyance, but the endless directorial flaunting in Anna just doesn’t connect to the material in any sort of sustainably interesting way. Heartless pizazz doesn’t make for much catharsis, and even the merciless wheels of a train can’t conjure much feeling for the fate of poor Anna K. 

    

Making amendments

It’s tilted Lincoln, which makes it sound like a bio-pic, but this newest Steven Spielberg film, written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner and based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 bestseller Team of Rivals, does something far more interesting and timely than condense a great life into cinematic bullet points. Lincoln dramatizes the build-up in Washington to the end of the Civil War and the House of Representatives’ vote over the 13^th Amendment, which would abolish slavery. So it’s perhaps best to describe this as a political procedural, a portrait of the democratic process during a pivotal moment in American history.

Of course it’s also a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in his final months, played here by Daniel Day-Lewis, the Anglo-Irishman who’s made something of a career of embodying larger than life emblems of American masculinity (see The Last of the Mohicans, Gangs of New York, There Will Be Blood). A refreshing shift away from the terror and bombast of Bill the Butcher of Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is more Peter Fonda than John Huston, gentle in gesture and reedy in voice, prone to unhurried anecdotes, mischievous uncle jokes and deceptively sly parables, the Colombo of presidents, content to play things relaxed and unthreatening, until the moment comes to show a firm hand and a clear, determined vision. Day-Lewis is well complimented by Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, who swings from near-hysteria to charisma and control, David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward, a man charged with realizing and finessing some of Lincoln’s thornier ambitions, and Tommy Lee Jones as Republican congressional leader and outspoken abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, ornery but articulate, formidable in congress, an author of inspired public insults with two old fried eggs for eyes.

Kushner’s taken a wildly complex, multi-character political narrative and given it a shrewd structure, though he could have lost some peripheral threads, such as one involving Lincoln’s eldest son, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the superfluous denouement. Kushner’s given his characters some wonderfully eloquent jabs and big, obvious speeches that aren’t inordinately showy. He’s also written some absolutely deadly expository dialogue, yet thankfully John Williams, that most ham-fisted of composers, largely refrains from underscoring all of this dialogue with the sort of soaring schmaltz one might be bracing for. Maybe he was following his old pal Spielberg’s lead, since Lincoln generally finds the director working in a pleasingly reserved mode.  He seems to understand that what’s gripping and fascinating about this story requires and rewards our careful attention; to beat us over the head with the gravity of every scene would only distract from the delight of the details.

For all its flaws, Lincoln feels like the important historical epic it strives to be. And while it’s fundamentally an ensemble picture, I can’t really bear any grudges against the film for orbiting around Lincoln, who’s certainly the closest thing here to a genuine hero. But please don’t bear any grudges against me if I confess that I’d love to see the same story told from the perspective of the three stooges—played by John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson and a zesty, porky, moustachioed James Spader— Seward hires to persuade fence-sitting voters by any means (more or less) legally necessary. Such hedonistic hucksters can also hold history’s dice. And they’re a hell of a lot of fun to explore a few months in 1865 America with. 

    

The body, in Time

It begins with a slow push-in through a smudgy service station window on men sitting low, conversing, eating round a small table, their voices muffled. Maybe it’s only hindsight that renders this scene conspiratorial. As it closes we hear distant thunder, which feels like a prompt for this metaphysical road movie police procedural to begin. Thunder is also a calling card of sorts for Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey’s most internationally renown contemporary filmmaker (Distant, Climates, Three Monkeys) and a guy who never met an ominous weather system he didn’t like.

A police convoy traverses the countryside of the film’s titular peninsula, the cars carrying men looking for a dead body. An entire scene plays out in extra-wide shot, the undulating dusky landscape and tiny figures in it a fine example of the film’s painterly beauty. Dryly comical small talk about yogurt and prostate trouble nearly recalls Tarantino (as does the grizzled senior cop’s ring tone: the theme from Love Story), but all the while the camera favours the ostensible killer sandwiched in the backseat, looking drowsy, an anxious, underfed animal. He can’t remember where the corpse is, claims he was drunk when he buried it. We surmise that it’s going to be a long night. Indeed, it’s going to be a long movie (157 minutes worth), but one in which something’s always happening, one that deftly lures you into its rhythms.

The officials on this search form a diverse crew of masculine types and an impressive gallery of moustaches. With his thinning hair and lanky form, the pensive doctor, Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), invokes certain figures from Tarkovsky films, most especially when we hear his thoughts as he stands before a windswept field, while the prosecutor, Nusret (Taner Birsel), is a husky, middle-aged, olive-skinned Clark Gable. Cemal and Nusret’s conversations are among Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s most captivating detours. At one point Nusret tells the story of a woman who prophesied precisely the date of her own death. He wants to know if Cemal, a man of science, can explain her morbid foresight. This topic is dropped and returned to several times, building itself along the way, constituting one of many incomplete parables in this film whose title suggests that storytelling itself is one of its themes.

When the body is finally found it almost feels incidental. Its grave is shallow. An ear pokes up from the dirt like driftwood, as though listening for something (perhaps the echo of frenzied ants from Blue Velvet, which featured an analogous dead man’s ear discovered in a field). The men huddle round the body, the prosecutor dictates a report. The body is clumsily rolled up in a carpet when they realize no one brought a body bag. This entire sequence is darkly funny and surprisingly entertaining. But once the search is wrapped and the men enter the village where the victim lived and where an autopsy will take place, things somehow become more mysterious rather than less. The accumulation of facts only compounds the enigmas surrounding the murder, raising as many philosophical questions as it does legal ones. Like the body, those questions emerge inconspicuously, in their own good time. They leave us not merely puzzled, but pierced by the feeling that so much of life is like this, existing in that broad terrain between the known and the unknown.

Waxing La Moustache

General Emiliano Zapata and his fateful moustache

Have you ever encountered a book that seems created especially for you? I don’t mean a book that’s simply very good—the book I’m thinking about doesn’t need to be the best thing you’ve ever read. Rather, I’m talking about something that radiates déjà vu upon contact, something seemingly plucked from your subconscious.

I think it would be fair to say I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with moustaches. I won’t attempt to analyze it unduly. I do not habitually wear a moustache. I find it difficult to grow a very convincing one. But they interest me. Perhaps as the embodiment of male vanity and affectation, perhaps as the insignia of some occult brotherly union that transcends age, culture, and fashion. I certainly underwent that life-altering experience so many of us experience as small children, that fateful day when your normally moustache-emblazoned father suddenly emerges from a steam-filled washroom with his upper lip freshly stripped of hair. He stands before you and your family, perhaps sheepishly awaiting validation, and you find yourself frozen, prickled by the whiskers of the uncanny, wondering who is this strange, pale-faced man masquerading as your father? It’s a trauma we shrug off and laugh about, yet never quite get over.

Did Emmanuel Carrère endure the moustacheless father experience? Did he fear the moustacheless impostor? Does he himself wear a moustache, or, as they’re sometimes referred to in 19th century literature, moustaches? I have no idea. (I’ve seen a few images of him on the internet, all of them sans moustache.) Curiously, we have the same birthday, along with John Cassavetes, whom I’ve also never seen with a moustache. In any case, despite the fact that he’s made films, written a book about Philip K. Dick (of course!), and another about Werner Herzog (talk about memorable moustaches!), I’d never heard of Carrère until just weeks ago, when I was digging through a box of abandoned books on the street near my house and discovered a copy of Carrère’s 1986 novel La Moustache. I recalled having heard of a film of the same name coming out a few years ago, and thinking I should really watch that. Turns out it was adapted and directed by Carrère himself from his own novel. I understand it costars Emmanuelle Devos, who I find terribly appealing. But I still haven’t watched it yet. I’m just not ready.

Werner Herzog once wore a lovely moustache

John Cassavettes, to my knowledge, did not wear a moustache

“What would you say if I shaved off my moustache?” La Moustache begins with our hero asking his beloved spouse Agnes this innocuous question. He’s in the bath, contentedly enacting his long-practiced grooming ritual. “It was the only time he had left for meditation, self-knowledge, and the spiritual world…” Our hero has worn a moustache his entire adult life. He’s been married five years. He’s an average, middle-class French guy—this is the mid-1980s, so moustaches have not yet entered their current, unfortunate phase of being identified with kitsch, considered the exclusive facial décor of cops, cowboys, gay guys, or Mexicans—so his whimsical suggestion is loaded with consequence. He’s going to look different. Perhaps people will laugh at him. But what the hell?

He shaves it off while Agnes runs an errand. She returns, and he’s cheerfully prepared himself for whatever response his naked lip garners. He doesn’t expect no response. Agnes seems completely oblivious. Is she toying with him? They go to visit their best friends. They too seem not to notice. Did Agnes clandestinely warn them in advance? This conspiracy of silence continues, following our hero all the way home, all the way to bed. He confronts Agnes, but even after the mounting tension doesn’t expect what she has to tell him: that he never had a moustache. At this early stage, La Moustache has already descended into nightmare, one that reverses the childhood scenario described earlier, one akin to tales of metamorphosis from Kafka or Gogol or, more recently, Kobo Abe, whose novels include one about a guy who finds cauliflower growing on his legs. One no less unnerving for its absurdity.

He quickly found the smaller bag they used for the bathroom waste can, picked out cotton swabs, two Tampaxes, an old tube of toothpaste, another one for skin lotion, and some used razor blades. And there it was, his hair. Lots of it, but scattered all over, not exactly as he’d hoped. He’d imagined a nice compact tuft, something like a moustache, holding together all by itself. He gathered as much of it as possible and collected it in the palm of his hand. When he’d amassed a little mound, less than he thought he shaved off, he went back upstairs. He entered the room without a sound, his cupped hand outstretched. Sitting down on the bed next to Agnes, who was apparently asleep, he switched on the night-table lamp. She moaned softly. Then, since he was shaking her shoulders, she blinked open her eyes and grimaced when she saw his open palm thrust in her face.
“And this,” he said harshly, “what do you call this?”

Our hero cradles the remains of his moustache as through it were intact, independent, soul-bearing, his proof that something now lost, dissembled, waiting to merge with nature, once existed, this formerly integral piece of him that no one recalls. (This scene has its echo in the film The Man Who Wasn’t There, when Billy Bob Thornton’s barber reverently resolves to take the day’s mass of cut hair and bury it behind the shop, as though it constituted a dearly departed.) I don’t want to spoil too much of where La Moustache goes, but there is the suggestion that there’s something inherently hazardous to one’s identity in grooming, in clipping away at our extremities, which, once vanquished from body, may vanish from memory too. And if a moustache could just disappear as though it never existed, what might follow? “One should always hold on to everything, never overlook the slightest bit of evidence,” our hero muses, recalling an animist tribe in Java who once collected their fingernail clippings, excrement, and hair, “everything that was a part of them and that would allow them to enter the gates of paradise in one whole and unmutilated piece.”

Emmanuel Carrère

Of course, the real warning in La Moustache might be against growing a moustache at all. Perhaps when I next see my father I should ask not who he might become without his moustache, but whether the moustache hides another, unknown person altogether.