Best of 2014: The Immigrant

Melodrama and mood piece, character(s) study and historical, James Gray’s The Immigrant presents us with types that turn into richly complex individuals and narrative tropes that transform into peculiar tales possessing both the broad strokes of myth and miniature movements of lived experience.

Set in New York in the early 1920s, the film introduces us to Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) just as she and her sister Magda arrive at Ellis Island after a gruelling journey from their Polish homeland. Magda is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Ewa is labeled a “woman of low morals” for unspecified events rumoured to have taken place en route from Europe, and the sisters are unceremoniously separated. Magda cannot escape mandatory quarantine, but Ewa evades deportation thanks to a shady saviour by the name of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix). Bruno tells Ewa he works with an immigrant assistance organization; he actually manages a basement burlesque show and pimps out his performers, whom he houses in cramped apartments filled with yellowing lace and dappled mirrors. Ewa and Bruno’s relationship is driven by exploitation and childish ardour, desperation and stubborn optimism, or mere stubbornness, or the stubbornness that emerges out of a need to survive and to negotiate what exactly is survival.

The Immigrant’s third central character, an illusionist dubbed Orlando (Jeremy Renner), doesn’t enter the picture until its midpoint. In a film refreshingly devoid of irony, there’s something fascinating about the fact that the only man in the movie who doesn’t seem full of shit is the one who fools people for a living. Orlando is Bruno’s cousin, both sons of immigrants. They are old rivals, which feeds into what promises to become a love triangle, though this plot twist too is subverted.

Written by Gray and Richard Menello, The Immigrant is heavy on incident but grounded in character and performance. Cotillard has never been better, using languages and cadences to convey varying levels of deceit and desire. Renner, moustachioed and magnetic, echoes the grace and charismatic duplicity of James Cagney. Phoenix, in his fourth collaboration with Gray (following The Yards, Two Lovers and We Own the Night), is tremendously vulnerable without being ingratiating. His Bruno is a scoundrel, but he’s also struggling to make sense of the nagging compassion swelling in him. As the film moves toward its conclusion he somehow emerges as the most transformed and even tragic figure. This is one of the film’s masterstrokes, the way glimmers of moral fortitude are passed from one character to another.

                               

This one goes to 11

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Cinematic refuge, at your service

The film infolds in a comically elaborate nesting structure: the bulk of its story is told in flashback within flashback within flashback. It’s a way of making us conscious of how much memory and imagination have had their way with what we’re promised by the man known only as Author (Tom Wilkinson in one layer, Jude Law in another) is exacting in its fidelity to the true story. It’s also a way of emphasizing the distinctive balance between realism and artifice that Wes Anderson has been carefully cultivating over the last two decades. An elegy for a lost world that closely resembles but is not exactly our own—nostalgia for something that never was—The Grand Budapest Hotel might be the most perfect expression of that balance yet. 

Inspired by the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), much of the action is set in the 1930s, in the titular alpine hotel, itself nested in the fictional Zubrowka, a central European republic gradually sliding under the control of a thuggish foreign power à la Nazi Germany. Dark times loom, yet at the Grand Budapest all efforts are made to stall time, to maintain a rarified air. Its dandyish proprietor, M. Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), is especially devoted to his elderly wealthy female guests, whom he ensures are pampered in every way, including erotically, a duty he happily takes on himself. Over the course of the film Gustave will take the adolescent Middle Eastern refugee lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori) under his wing. The plot quickly thickens: one of Gustave’s cherished clients dies, leaving him an invaluable painting, stoking the ire of her ingrate sociopath son (Adrien Brody). Gustave is accused of murder, is actually guilty of theft, sort of, is imprisoned, breaks out of prison, goes on the lam and is forced to prove his innocence. All the while he and Zero become the closest of allies. “We’re brothers,” says Zero during a pivotal scene, echoing a key themes of nearly every Anderson movie. 

Colour-coordinated pageantry, over-abundant signage and streaming lateral movement through constructed sets in real places provide constant pleasure. The film is a stunning gallery of moustaches, from Zero’s penciled-on to what looks like a charcoal-drawn medieval gate framing Jeff Goldblum’s lovely mouth. The tone is madcap, mannered, an irreverent ode to effeminate men and sexual ambivalence, always rushing along at silent comedy speed, a hurried walk propelled by anxiety and terror yet tempered by a hilariously scrupulous formality. The low-affect performances from a cast teeming with beloved actors, many of them Anderson vets (Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton and Harvey Keitel, to name a few), are uniformly sublime, Fiennes most of all. (Why does this guy not do more comedy?) 

The Grand Budapest Hotel keeps us aware always of the brutality and doom blackening its margins by working strenuously to downplay it—an approach more poignant than any direct or ostentatiously emotive alternative. A destination in its own right, as opposed an upscale crash-pad, the hotel is a refuge, a place where the linens are always crisp and the flowers fresh. Everything in this film is a form of refuge from hardship, conflict, loneliness: a lovingly sculpted pastry, a thoughtfully arranged room, a beautifully designed ski-chase sequence, a job well-executed and acknowledged as such, a proscenium that encases all the action, behaviour and opulence and never falls away. The elegant handmade craftsmanship of Anderson and his collaborators is here, at your service, in even the darkest hours. 

             

Rhapsodie bohémien

Aki Kaurismäki wanted to adapt Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème since first reading it in the ’70s, but it would be another 15 years before the Finnish filmmaker could realize his dream in the only city that could possibly host Murger’s iconic narrative. Except that it couldn’t. Paris was no longer the Paris of 1851, or even 1951. Café culture was a memory. So Kaurismäki moved his crew to the southern suburb of Malakoff, which held traces of his dimmer, more decrepit vision of the city of light. He shot in sterling black and white, which leaves more room to dream, and has a way of blurring our sense of time. La vie de bohème (1992) is one of Kaurismäki’s most transporting and wondrous works, characteristically economical and deadpan, yet brimming with emotion and drama, with fatalism, snap decisions, love at first sight, and hastily forged alliances. It’s funny, inventive, occasionally absurd, peppered with deus ex machina yet tragic, devoted to an idea of life, art and romance that leaves no room for failure, even when failure is inevitable. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

The cast is a dream. Matti Pellonpää plays Rodolfo, an Albanian painter, and Kari Väänänen is Schaunard, an Irish composer of vaudevillian musique concrete. (These Fins knew not a lick of the French and thus learned their lines phonetically.) André Wilms is the logorrhetic writer Marcel Marx, a character Wilms would revisit in Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011). Evelyne Didi plays Mimi, who loves Rodolfo but finds it hard to bear his endemic poverty. (And it should be said that, in just a few scenes, Kaurismäki and his collaborators do more to dignify and deepen the women in this chronicle of male-centric bohemian life than every Beat Generation movie combined.) Jean-Pierre Léaud, beloved star of so much early Truffaut and Godard, plays Rodolfo’s affluent patron, an impulsive art collector who materializes like a gruff angel at just the right moments. There are cameos from directors Sam Fuller, whose Pick-up on South Street (1953) is alluded to during a pickpocketing scene, and Louis Malle, playing a diner who takes pity on Rodolfo after said pocket has been picked. The film also features Laika, a dog, in the role of Baudelaire, also a dog. Which is to say that a dog plays a dog, one named after a poet and contemporary of Murger’s. He does a marvellous job.

La vie de bohème seems timeless, yet part of its charm derives from its precise sense of place, one where shadows are many and long, where the wallpaper’s peeling in every garret and berets are worn without irony, where a two-headed trout smiles upon the foundation of a friendship, where the wipers of a three-wheeled car wipe in time to Little Willie John when lovers reunite. Magic and squalor are close neighbours in this world, as they were in the production: when Kaurismäki couldn’t afford to shoot a farewell scene in the Gare d'Austerlitz, he found an aluminium garage door and projected light on it through a stencil cut to resemble the windows of a moving train. And real-life concerns creep into the fantasy. Typically for Kaurismäki, immigrant communities, outsiders and the poor stick together without making a big deal of it. Solidarity is as much a matter of survival as sentiment. But it can’t save these bohemians from their destinies. Nor has it saved Kaurismäki from the brutalities of film financing. In the first ten years of his career he made 12 features. In the last ten, he’s made two. C’est la vie? Here’s hoping that the prospects for this one-of-a-kind filmmaker aren’t as dismal as they were for Rodolfo, Schaunard, Mimi or Marcel. 

                            

The enigmatic hero (and the moustached buddy) that made Peter O'Toole a star

A snuffed-out match turns into a blazing desert floor. Later, a large-scale slaughter involving a great many scimitars will be dwarfed by a Maurice Jarre score and a sprawling landscape and cloaked in eddies of dust. “Big things have small beginnings,” says Claude Rains’ memorably cynical Arab Bureau Chief, but really, very little is small about Lawrence of Arabia (1962), David Lean’s epic that aspired to chronicle the high adventures and devastating disappointments of military officer T. E. Lawrence in Arabia during World War I, his allegiances caught between his rather awful Great Britain and his adopted brothers within the Arab Revolt against the Turks.

I say “aspired,” because any dozen of the restored version’s 228 minutes exudes a preference for myth over historical fact. Which doesn’t exactly mean a whitewash—even if there’s something uneasy about seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi in brown-face. The film does not pander, nor is it disrespectful. Let’s suppose that back in the day Lawrence made filmgoers all over the West think about what it might mean to be an Arab, at least for a few hours. It’s just that grandiosity has a way of quashing nuance, even in performances from actors as abundantly charismatic as Omar Sharif and the late, great Peter O’Toole, in whose memory Edmonton's Metro Cinema has scheduled a string of Lawrence screenings. I’d argue that this is far from O’Toole’s finest or most interesting screen-work—for that try The Ruling Class (1972) or The Stunt Man (1980)—but it was the one that made him a star, which one can’t but think was something O’Toole was always meant to be.

If you haven’t seen Lawrence before, the biggest screen imaginable is definitely the way to experience it—to watch it at home is merely to study it. And don’t be put off by the runtime, which is suitably as vast as the deserts that our hero, the director and his brilliant cinematographer (Freddie Young) obviously love. Duration is key to entering the world of this film, to getting just a hint of the time it really takes to travel across formidable distances on a camel’s back, or to identify a figure approaching from miles away, a dark blur quivering along a seemingly liquid horizon. But so is sound, which for so much of Lawrence’s time in the desert is reserved to a limited palate. “The desert is an ocean,” Lawrence says at one point, quoting the Koran, and moments later you can see those tents sway and hear them creak like masts on a galleon.

But let’s get back to O’Toole. He is indeed the star, but I think his Lawrence is meant to remain a mystery. The film opens in flashback, with his death, and with characters describing him as poet, scholar, exhibitionist, or barmy. In the middle of the film a man on motorbike calls out, “Who are you?” to Lawrence from across the Suez Canal. He doesn’t seem to know how to answer. And by now his baby blues are framed by the flowing white robes of another culture. The real Lawrence was famously ambiguous with regards to his sexuality, but I believe O’Toole the most here when he’s with Sharif’s Sherif Ali. Their meet-cute involves murder, but the film gives them plenty of time to make up and become great pals. I recently heard a radio interview in which O’Toole fondly recalled nights spent drinking and gambling away small fortunes with Sharif. It sounded like genuine love to me, from one bon vivant to another, and whether or not that love was meant to translate into something other than platonic on-screen doesn’t seem to matter much. What matters is that it still reads as real, even when surrounded by so much expensive movie splendour. That alone makes Lawrence worth seeing. 

                           

Conversations with Cloud

Before Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) even meets the operating system with whom he’ll fall hopelessly in love, he is already living in a world with no touching. He spends his days with a device in his ear that responds to his voice commands, reading his email to him, or playing some melancholy song when the mood hits. He speaks to his desktop at work, where he composes “personal” letters for consumers without time or energy to express sentiment. He has few friends with whom he rarely makes physical contact. He plays video games, interactive holograms that engulf his spacious hi-rise apartment and require only that he speak and make gestures in the air—the near-future is a field day for germaphobes. Mostly, we see Theodore walk through Los Angeles (or rather, Shanghai, the film’s ingenious stand-in for L.A.-to-come), hands in his pockets, chin tucked, conversing with the cloud.

Her is Spike Jonze’s fourth feature and his first solo script credit. It brims with wonder and wistful loneliness. Sweet and gentle, handsome in his dapper shirts and caterpillar moustache, apparently quite talented at his job, Theodore seems lovable yet feels achingly unloved—he’s in the midst of a protracted divorce. We see him go on a blind date that ends badly. Perhaps all he needs is to stop limiting himself to… well, people. The kind with bodies. Someone you can hold close. Someone who eats, snores, dances, caresses, shits, breathes, kisses. Someone forced to choose to be in one place and not another. Theodore needs Samantha, a voice in his head whenever he wants one there, a disembodied other who sorts through his files, organizes his agenda, laughs at his jokes, listens to his woes, even moans with pleasure when he wants to have sex that feels like more than masturbation. Samantha has personality, opinions and feelings. She has an alluring, husky voice (Scarlett Johansson’s, in fact). Like the ad says, what Theodore has purchased is “not just an operating system. It’s a consciousness.” But who’s programming that consciousness? Does Theodore and Samantha’s relationship really place each party on equal footing? Or is this a matter of taking love’s projection to a whole other level, one where you shape your companion into whatever you want? Theodore says he loves Samantha because she isn’t just one thing, but when is someone so many things that they may as well be nothing? In so many places they may as well be nowhere? Her is a complicated love story, asking potent questions about choice and intimacy. The problem is that Her is also science fiction.

Phoenix gives a rich, heartfelt performance, instantly helping us to feel completely transported into this world Jonze renders in soft glows, warm oranges, and soothing quietude. Essentially, Theodore lives in a climate-controlled cocoon. And this is indicative of what proves to be the major shortcomings in an otherwise remarkable film. Nothing in Her seems fully thought-through. Jonze’s near-future is a world without garbage, without homeless people, without visible contamination, despite the fact that people are consuming more energy than ever before—just think about the room-filling hologram. Everyone’s trim, well-dressed, well-behaved, and lives amidst tasteful décor. Even the market where Theodore buys his produce looks like an art gallery. Her is not only post-human but, apparently, post-capitalist, because who would make an operating system that doesn’t try to sell you stuff, that doesn’t just do what you want, that might get annoyed when you don’t pay attention to it and decide to abandon you, leaving you without access to your work files, photos, games, mail or social media? This isn’t just me nitpicking—if you’re coming to commit to telling a story whose novelty and resonance is wholly dependent on exploring the ever-changing role of technology in our lives, it is incumbent upon you to consider the consequences of that technology. I fear that Jonze has himself projected an ideal upon Samantha—and yes, this ideal includes her ultimate unattainability, since heartache is endemic to Jonze’s favored mode of storytelling. He’s blinkered himself, completely forgotten to set his story in a world that people who aren’t rich and never have to step out of realms of tailored luxury can recognize.

See Her. It’s a truly special film, one that generates a lot of thought and feeling. But it’s also limited by the pampered dreaming of its maker, and too selective a reflection of our age.