A family ripped apart

First a prelude. In some cabin in some woods some goofy looking guy (American genre-indie auteur Larry Fessenden) reaches orgasm atop a pretty, bored-looking lady. He showers. She gets butchered. He’s next. A quick dose of sex and violence—a taste of what’s to come. And, before we get too comfortable, some reassurance for the freaks that You’re Next is indeed a horror film.

Us non-freaks will be more reassured by what immediately follows this prelude: character development! An affluent older couple, their four adult offspring and the romantic partners of said offspring converge at a cottage for the couple’s 35^th anniversary. The whole family so rarely gets together—thankfully, since most of them can’t stand each other, brothers Crispian (AJ Bowen) and Drake (Joe Swanberg) most especially. The reunion’s freighted with potential disasters. Mom (Barbara Crampton) is a sweet-natured, heavily medicated bag of nerves; taciturn littlest brother Felix (Nicholas Tucci) turns up with a rigorously unfriendly girlfriend named Zee (Wendy Glenn); eager-to-please Aimee (Amy Seimetz) brings her vaguely foreign-looking “intellectual filmmaker” boyfriend (Ti West) to sup with her extremely white, not terribly intellectual clan. And here’s a portentous bit of exposition: Dad (Rob Bowen) has just retired from a lucrative gig doing marketing for a defense contractor. So the specter of violence is already in the air when, just as the family launch into their first full-on squabble around the dinner table, a trio of assailants in animal masks—manifestations of the family members pent-up rage?—suddenly place the house under siege. An arrow flies through the window. It is somehow appropriate that the first one to bite it is the suspicious filmmaker.

The choice to set-up You’re Next as a family reunion is perversely clever. The idea of witnessing your own family’s endangerment, injury or slaughter is genuinely horrifying; the fact that most of the family members half-hate each other only makes their bond that much more realistic. Understandably, everyone immediately falls apart or goes numb. The only one who seems at all capable of taking control of the situation is the one who initially seemed easiest to write off. Erin (Sharni Vinson), a literature major and Crispian’s cute young Australian girlfriend—and, ahem, former student—turns out to be more than graceful under fire. She’s good at making weapons out of household objects. She’s our final girl, an outsider and protectress, and ultimately the one with whom we identify and root for.

Prolific director Adam Wingard’s latest is actually a couple of years old already—it debuted at TIFF 2011—but it’s worth the wait. Well, mostly. Simon Barrett, who also scripted Wingard’s A Horrible Way to Die, has written about 66% of an exceptionally smart and effective genre film. It’s only once the initial disorientation wears off and we begin to realize the motives behind this seemingly senseless violence that things start to get a little dumb and deflating, leading up to a hokey-jokey ending. But maybe 66% is good enough? Working with an excellent ensemble cast, half of which are also laudable independent filmmakers—besides Fessenden, Swanberg, West and Seimetz are all directors—Wingard is in full control of the film’s ominous atmospherics and delicate tonal shifts—he knows just when to let the humour override the horror, and vice versa. You’re Next is easy to recommend but hard to completely love, falling just short of something really good. Of course, the way Wingard cranks out films, there’s good reason to hope the next one will be brilliant. 

               

The colour of no money

A series of sea changes in class position have made Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) blue. Or is her rattled state symptomatic of something more fundamentally flawed in her psyche? Maybe it’s just early dementia? We see her nattering away to a fellow passenger in first-class; traumatized and narcissistic, she has a serious handicap when it comes to over-sharing. But Jasmine needs to share—the bad thoughts creep up when she’s all alone—and it seems anyone will do. She was not so long ago filthy rich. By the rather devastating end of Blue Jasmine, she’s mostly just filthy.

This is the work of the serious Woody, which is a good Woody in that seriousness can bring out a focus and discernment sometimes lacking in Allen’s recent comedies. Woody on the economy might sound like a dubious tag, but Blue Jasmine is pretty smart, if cynical by default, about the pitfalls of privilege and the ways that desires for class ascension corrupt everyone. As the film begins, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco. She’s hopeless, penniless and needs to crash at the modest home of her cashier sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Jasmine is self-absorbed and snobby, and Ginger seems set up as her salt-of-the-earth, pure-hearted foil, but Allen isn’t one to sentimentalize any class, so as the plot thickens Ginger will also spy an opportunity to better herself, however slightly, in the arms of a much classier man than her current beau, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), and stoops to deception—both of Chili and herself—to accelerate the new romance. The Ginger subplot may seem predictable, but it also feels alive, thanks in part to the nuance and urgency brought to it by Hawkins and Cannavale, and by Andrew Dice Clay giving a shockingly strong performance, and Louis C.K., who’s wonderful, not emphatically funny but a welcome breath of fresh air at the film’s musty midpoint. He’s one of those actors who should be working with Allen as much as possible.

As is Alec Baldwin, very funny in an incoherent role in To Rome With Love and very slimy here as Hal, Jasmine’s ex, a Bernie Madoff-type whose imprisonment for running a Ponzi scheme leaves Jasmine—who may or may not have been onto him—broke and humiliated. “I sign everything,” Jasmine claims. “I’m very trusting.” Hal was a millionaire, a philanthropist and serial philanderer—we see him chatting up a nipply confection at what seems like an otherwise deadly boring party full of rich old people during one of Blue Jasmine’s many flashbacks. The line separating past and present in this film is diaphanous. For Jasmine, as her confusion burgeons, it occasionally dissolves altogether. At times the camera itself (Vicky Christina Barcelona’s Javier Aguirresarobe returns as Allen’s cinematographer) seems to float, disembodied, in time with Jasmine’s spells of dislocation. That these fugues finally work as well as they do are a testament to Blanchett’s daringness, collaborative intuition and clarity of choices. Amazingly, Allen claims to have not seen her in Liv Ullman’s 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—amazing because Blanche Dubois is so obviously a template for Jasmine, whose mind keeps escaping to some idealized past. She too is always relying on the kindness of strangers, and is usually lying as a way of soliciting that kindness—a recipe for small, personal tragedies of the sort that Allen, however old-fashioned his sensibility may remain, is still very good at evoking. 

                   

Playing for keeps

There was a long stretch, particularly after the empty whiz-bang bravura of Panic Room (2002), when I felt instinctively leery of anything directed by David Fincher. This attitude changed completely with Zodiac (2007), one of the great American films so far this century; Zodiac made me reconsider everything of Fincher’s, both before and after. So along comes Criterion’s new DVD and Blu-ray release of The Game (1997), and I’m very interested, even though I remember feeling underwhelmed by the film upon its debut. It remains in my estimation a work that’s far from Fincher’s most accomplished, either in terms of his command of craft or thematic heft. It isn’t the most serious or elegant or arresting of Fincher’s movies, but it is immensely intriguing—the set-up is the best piece of this puzzle—entertaining, and possesses several elements that bounce nicely against those in Fincher’s other films, right from those opening home movies, which feature eerie ghost faces from the past and flicker with the promise of something vaguely sinister, looking forward to the haunting flashbacks in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011).

The Game’s protagonist is the obscenely affluent, cold-hearted, megalomaniac, controlling, toxically lonesome investment banker Nicholas Van Orton, played by Michael Douglas, by then the Hollywood embodiment of white American wealth and guilt—and Van Orton’s secretary’s grooming is conspicuously similar to that of Alex, Douglas’ femme fatale in Fatal Attraction (1987). For his 48^th birthday Van Orton’s long-estranged little brother (Sean Penn) gives him a gift certificate for some mystery service rendered by a company called CRS. They promise their clients an undefined but singular experience, the fulfillment of desires you didn’t even know you had, some sort of adventure full of revitalizing thrills—the promise of the movies, in other words, but delivered as something overwhelming and experiential. Van Orton only knows his game has started when he finds clowns in his driveway and the TV news starts speaking directly to him. Soon he’s running from guard dogs, going through a lot of monogrammed shirts, having unnerving encounters with a clumsy but very attractive waitress with an aversion to panties (Canada’s own Deborah Kara Unger), escaping from drowning cabs, and watching his offshore accounts become suddenly, inexplicably drained. Suddenly everything that happens in the world is happening to him. Whether intentional or not, one of the ironies of The Game is that while its meant to humble the nasty, self-absorbed and insulated Van Orton, it actually only accentuates the feeling that he really is the center of the universe.

 

Parts of The Game feel too fussed over; there’s more incident than feels necessary, too many cutaways, too much overly indicative atonal piano-tinkle scoring, and too many low-angle shots of Van Orton’s car. Indeed, in the audio commentary accompanying Criterion’s disc, Fincher confesses that parts of the film are much cuttier than he would have liked. But there’s no denying that the film clips along: it is a veritable suspense machine. It’s easy to imagine Hitchcock being attracted to this material. It’s like a Wrong Man movie except that the hero is unmistakably the Right Man, the target of so much mega-financed, vertiginous mischief. There’s a darkness under all this—Van Orton’s father was 48 when he suicided, and it seems possible that Van Orton may follow in dad’s footsteps—but that darkness evaporates under the cheerful glow of the film’s risible but not inappropriate resolution. Van Orton is offered a fresh, if far more modest proposition in The Game’s closing scene. We leave Van Orton in a moment in decision, starting over, newly shaken awake, ready for a future of tantalizing uncertainty. And we leave Fincher on the verge of a period of uncertainty with regards to his career path, still some years away from mastering his own destiny. 

To be assembled posthumously: The Windmill Movie on DVD

Richard P. Rogers was born into East Coast WASP privilege and most of its accompanying neuroses. His people summered in the Hamptons. They sent him to Dalton and Harvard to make something of himself. But Rogers became an experimental and documentary filmmaker—a filmmaker’s filmmaker, marginal and respected. He also became a beloved educator at SUNY Purchase. His familial legacy left him with pangs of unease regarding his inability to accumulate wealth and a facility with small talk and tennis. He was simultaneously envious of his more successful (ie: rich and famous) peers and so hopelessly rebellious there was no way he could ever have followed their paths. Most scandalously, he fell for Jewish girls, and eventually, while dying from cancer, even married one, the esteemed Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, with whom he’d shared decades-long romance marked by long absences and affairs with other women—Rogers was an unlikely yet prodigious Don Juan. He died in 2001 at the age of 56.

Rogers was undoubtedly a man of many curious and contradictory qualities, but those listed above are the ones that linger with me after seeing The Windmill Movie (2009). It’s a strange and fascinating artifact: a memoir by proxy, an 80-minute essay constructed from some 200 hours of material shot or collected by Rogers with the vague intention of being either a self-portrait or a critique of the culture that spawned him. Maybe, inevitably, both. It was produced by Meiselas and David Grubin, and directed, edited and written by Alexander Olch, a student of Rogers with a somewhat similar background and a sense of kinship strong enough to encourage Olch to compose narration in Rogers’ voice. Watching The Windmill Movie, you can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all designed this way, if only unconsciously. Keep in mind: though you may not have heard of him, Rogers was a prolific, hard-working, at times very personal filmmaker—not a dilettante. So if he never finished his Windmill, even when diagnosed with a terminal illness, it might be that he never truly planned to. It’s someone else’s Movie now, someone else’s portrait, though still suitably subjective, poetic, uneven, uncertain, and shot through with lust, indecision, and existential doubt. It’s available this week on DVD from Zeitgeist.

Remarkable images reappear throughout The Windmill Movie, as though circling Rogers’ psyche. Hands at a garden party, the corner of a sail brushing reeds, pretty young bronzed thighs on bicycles or beach blankets: one of the possible themes of Rogers’ project was summertime, the feeling that important things happen in this seemingly most leisurely of seasons. Rogers recalls being taken to the beach as a child and falling in love with other people’s mothers. He reflects on his own mother, abandoned by his father. She appears before his camera, in old age, wearing a wig, at one point shoveling dirt into a car. You imagine her sharing cocktails with reclusive socialite Edie Beale, made famous in the Maysle Brothers’ Grey Gardens (75) and a Hamptons neighbour.

Olch’s assembly is respectful, but not too respectful. He doesn’t flatter Rogers. He understands the perils in making a film about a filmmaker struggling to make a film about a dead filmmaker struggling to make a film, and thus grounds The Windmill Movie in specific memories and encounters, successes and failures. Some of Olch’s additions don’t entirely work. Rogers’ old friend, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn shows up, reads aloud some of Rogers’ musings, and finally feels underused, present mostly as a talisman. But for the most part Olch finds ways to honour his subject while establishing his own voice. There’s little in The Windmill Movie to indicate Rogers’ accomplishments as a filmmaker (nor is this film the place for it), but thankfully Zeitgeist has included two really wonderful shorts by Rogers: ‘Elephants: Fragments of an Argument’ (73) and ‘226-1690’ (84), which chronicles a year in Rogers’ life via views from his New York apartment window and messages left on his answering machine.

Robin Hood: Sowing the seeds of pseudo socialism in a not terribly merry old England

In these times of economic uncertainty it’s reassuring to know that way back in days of yore really good-looking men and women of courage, honesty, and sound grooming stood up against simpering pansy monarchs and really ugly Frenchmen and shot razor-sharp kindling through their ugly-ass necks in the hope of installing some primitive form of socialism in a largely grubby agrarian world. Or maybe it’s supposed to be primitive libertarianism. I mean, who likes taxes? And get a load of all those arrows! The arrow budget for Robin Hood was probably larger than the entire budget for some actual armed revolutions, but what, did you think this was a Ken Loach film?

Helmed by Ridley Scott, written by sledgehammer screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and starring Scott’s favoured gladiator and co-producer Russell Crowe, this Robin Hood goes back to the roots of the legend, I guess, with His Majesty’s archer Robin Longstride (Crowe, fierce, rugged, kind of bland) coming home from the Crusades to an England in chaos, with a new, really dumb king (Oscar Isaac, shouty, pouty, grating) trying to bleed his citizenry for a few more goblet studs and a two-timing royal advisor pal (Mark Strong, pleasingly evil) quietly trying to sneak the French over for a major invasion. Robin heads to Nottingham to deliver a dead man’s sword to his dad (Max von Sydow, having a hoot playing older and frailer than he really is) and winds up impersonating the dead man so as to assure that the land stays in the family once dad dies and his lovely daughter-in-law Marian (Cate Blanchett, trying her darndest) is left on her own, a proto-feminist about eight centuries too early to get what’s rightfully hers. Screwball flirtations bubble up between Robin and his faux-bride, the taxmen come to pillage and destroy, the Frenchies are crossing the Channel, and the rest is history as semi-comprehensible battle sequences, rife with careening crane shots. And arrows.

Okay, actually the rest involves cartloads of exposition you’ll never quite piece together, completely unnecessary flashbacks to Robin's misremembered childhood, cornball dialogue, big speeches rife with empty rhetoric, and Scott and company’s best attempt at re-doing the storming of the beach in Normandy from Saving Private Ryan. Only fitfully diverting, this adventure epic is far too bloated to be as rousing as it wants to be. Scott’s an old hand with managing elaborate set pieces, but the results don’t feel inspired this time out. His brother Tony always gets dissed for being the lesser, more vulgar director, but, you know what, stupid as it was, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 was a lot more fun.

A gentle push: Charlie Bartlett

An actual person resembling the titular teenage hero of Charlie Bartlett probably doesn’t exist and never could. Amiable, politically gifted, and imminently resourceful –by which I mean stinking rich– Charlie (Anton Yelchin) is the reincarnation of Ferris Bueller for a generation of kids even more image-conscious and choked by ideologies of consumerism and control than that of Bueller’s Reagan era preppies. Kicked out of several private schools, Charlie goes to public school and, devising an admirably clever scheme to accumulate hordes of prescription drugs, becomes a pusher of Prozac and Ritalin to classmates of every faction. He also turns the school’s boy’s room into a therapist’s office, offering an ear, a shoulder, and instant meds to all at cut-rate prices. And Charlie likes his work, because above all, Charlie just wants to be liked.

I don’t really mind that Charlie himself is such an artificial character. The situations he engineers are pretty fun, and the improbable scope of his powers of persuasion and appeal to the masses thanks to his pharmaceutical operation implies a sly commentary on the loathsome hypocrisies of American drug culture: the pills Charlie pedals are legal, but just as formidable as the illegal ones commonly sought by teens. He also in his daydream world has one of the most charming teen movie moms in recent memory (the lovely Hope Davis), an endearingly clueless, well-dressed tippler too far removed from everyday life to really know how what a normal parent is supposed to do.

What I find more problematic is how wildly unrealistic everything else is in Charlie Bartlett, namely the risibly innocent high schoolers that so easily band together for whatever cause, who all treat Charlie like a God, who (save Tyler Hilton’s appealing bully-for-hire with a sensitive side) each fall into some lame stereotype, who seem universally oblivious to the fact that Charlie’s advice is mostly based on common sense. Charlie’s peers are mostly just a backdrop to a air-brushed fantasy of teen life that could have packed a little more of a comic edge if injected with a dose of real risk, something absent even in the film’s quickie but blandly maudlin suicide attempt scene. It also goes on way too long and ends with one of those singing in the auditorium finales that make any self-respecting teenager gag. Still, the highlights are still more winsome than the vast majority of comedies out there right now.