The still point

There are artists—they exist in all media, but most obviously in those that involve performance and duration—that heighten our awareness to the passage of time to the point where the veneer of civilized time/idiot time/drudgery-time/channel-surfing time falls away completely and you feel your own organs at work, the thoughts of those around you, and the breath of every leaf on every tree. The Serbian, New York-based performance artist Marina Abramović holds a place on that list of artists, which might include Andrei Tarkovsky, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Jorge Luis Borges. But those artists work in cinema, photography and literature respectively. Abramović is a performance artist, and Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, Matthew Akers’ documentary on Abramović’s recent MoMA Retrospective (in which she hired 30 young artists to re-perform her earlier work) and new work of the same name, is partly about legitimizing performance as a serious form. It isn’t theatre, it isn’t sculpture (though one could argue that it’s kinda both) and there’s nothing you can buy; it’s people doing stuff, stuff that at a glance might seem absurd, silly, self-absorbed or merely provocative. But, in the case of Abramović’s work, a glance won’t suffice. You need to be present, to pass time. (What else did you come for?) Or you can watch Akers’ film, which, made very much from the inside of the work, very unapologetically from the inside of Abramović’s carefully cultivated mythology, goes a long way toward getting a sense of being there.

From Relation in Space, 1976

After spending much of her career working and living in a marginal sort of way (the retrospective includes the van that she lived in for years with her former partner and collaborator Ulay, with whom she performed a piece entitled Lovers, in which she and he walked the entire Great Wall of China so to meet in the middle—and then broke up!), Abramović reached a point where legitimacy became important. “I’m 63,” she says early in the film, “I don’t want to be alternative anymore.” I think she got her wish. 

From The Artist is Present, 2010

During the 700 hours she spent sitting in a chair staring at people in MoMA’s atrium in 2010 (she sat, without ever getting up, every hour that the museum was open for three months, her body a mountain, her face a porous wall radiating emotion, agony and rapt interest), an estimated 750,000 visitors sat with her. What is some ways could be read as a self-portrait or an aestheticized stunt (so much of Abramović’s work has pushed the limits of, and brutally punished, her body) actually functions as a mirror—The Artist is Present is about the audience. They are half the piece, the key to its revolving symbiosis. And it is, or was, or seems to be as captured in this film, an overwhelmingly moving experience. Art can be this: presence, an invitation, a reflection, a way of being still, of feeling your entire life happen all at once, of sensing everything (as in Borges’ ‘The Aleph’), there, in a public space, with people watching, as this crazy, courageous, hungry, radiantly charismatic woman sits before you and lets it all be. 

Arachnid redundant

Coming to your friendly neighbourhood multiplex a mere five years after the termination of the successful Sam Raimi-helmed trilogy, this reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, while sporting a new star (Andrew Garfield), new origin story, new villain and new director (a guy named, I kid you not, Marc Webb), feels above all overwhelmingly unnecessary. It also feels about 136 minutes long—which it is. Yet again we get one of these superhero movies that feels obliged to include the protagonist’s origin story, the development of his social conscience, the introduction of a love interest, the introduction of a villain, the villain’s origin story, the villain’s plot to destroy New York/the US/the planet, and the villain’s undoing, all in one five-act mega-movie—the exact opposite of the experience of reading a fleet, diverting comic book. Though it has its moments of energy and excitement, The Amazing Spider-Man is ultimately an exhausting experience, one of diminishing returns, simultaneously over-stuffed with incident and far too compressed to satisfyingly resolve half of the narrative threads it spins.

The element that’s always struck me as novel about Spider-Man was the fact that before becoming a superhero Peter Parker was basically an ordinary, somewhat nerdy teenager, a character most comic readers could easily identify with. This Spider-Man, written by a trio of scenarists led by James Vanderbilt (whose wildly variable filmography includes Darkness Falls and Zodiac), divests Peter of any such quotidian roots. Peter’s background is indeed more Amazing: before he disappeared Peter’s dad (Campbell Scott) was involved is some secret project to splice various genes to “create a world without weakness.” By the time that Peter, a talented photographer and, we soon realize, a scientific genius, becomes a high school senior he discovers dad’s hidden files and tracks down Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), dad’s old partner, who just happens to be the mentor of Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), the girl Peter’s in love with. Such Amazing coincidences abound: Gwen’s dad (Dennis Leary) just happens to be the Chief of Police, and, in a risibly contrived rehash of that already risible turning point in the Spider-Man legend, Peter’s Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) is accidentally killed by the very convenience store robber Peter failed to apprehend about 30 seconds earlier. (Vanderbilt and company refrain from regurgitating the “With great power…” line.) Peter discovers his superpowers after he sneaks into Connors’ high security laboratory (the words “BIOCABLE DEVELOPMENT UNIT” appear ominously beside the door) and gets bitten by that fateful radioactive arachnid.

Garfield’s fine so long as he refrains from excess emoting (see Never Let Me Go for a preview). Stone is a welcome presence, and not only because of her thigh-highlighting outfits. Neither looks much like a teenager, but we are in the realm of myth here. Not mythical enough however to forgive James Horner’s overbearing score or such silly, extraneous detours such as the bit where, despite the evacuation of Manhattan, city workers unite to help Spider-Man more easily access stuff to attach his webs to. Or to keep us from wondering why the Lizard (née Connors) decides to set up his laboratory in a sewer. Though, oddly enough, Spidey’s nemesis is finally the movie’s most sympathetic character, a sort of simplified version of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Connors’ ingestion of a super-serum gives him back his missing arm and grants him the strength of ten men, but in return makes him crazy, turns him into a lizard and takes away his penis. Talk about cold(-blooded) comforts.

"It’s just this dance. It’s not forever. It’s going to change": A conversation with Sarah Polley

Named after Leonard Cohen’s exquisite homage to the poet Federico García Lorca, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, the acclaimed actress’ second feature as writer/director, is in many regards the inverse of Away From Her, her debut, trading wintry places and care facilities for sweltering summer heat and urban cafés, somber earth tones for shimmering drunken fruit punch hues, a couple in their 60s and married for decades for one in their 20s and only just slipping into those first years of familiarity (and, perhaps, stagnation). Both films are equally distinguished by Polley’s preternatural insight into the nature of trust, lust, dependency, secrets, and the thorny complications of long-term love. It’s been noted that the events chronicled in Take This Waltz, which is basically a love triangle, mirror events in Polley’s own life. This may be the case, yet the result is hardly a mushy confession; lived experience only texturizes and at times actually lightens (unbearably) the film’s unnerving truthiness. For all the right reasons it is probably not a good date movie.

Which isn’t to say that Take This Waltz isn’t problematic in its execution. Michelle Williams’ Margot, a married copywriter drawn to another man, is captivating, a sponge. Her every hesitation brims with wildly varied urges; we never lose track of where she is emotionally. Yet her scenes with Luke Kirby, the artist and rickshaw driver she falls for, lack chemistry, their first exchanges feel especially forced, while those with Seth Rogen, so endearing and sympathetic as her husband, an author of cookbooks containing recipes for nothing but chicken (read: comfort food embodied!), are intermittently undone by Polley’s determination to impose a sense of well-developed intimacy. (Though there is something rather ingenious about the couple’s ritual of whispering sweet nothings to each other that sassily describe torture and murder.)  

Still, I can’t emphasize this enough: no matter how many reservations or accusations of bum notes one can lob at Take This Waltz it is nonetheless decidedly adult, wordlessly articulate, sexy, sweet, brutal and very much alive—an extraordinary film about the vagaries of desire, which is to say, something extremely rare. The last act in particular, which is both the fulfillment of a promise and the exhaustion of a longing, is haunting and brilliant in its conclusions. (Or lack there of.) I admire this film far more than I do many others that have far fewer flaws. Also: it is a heartfelt, if geographically confused, love letter to Toronto.

I was late for my interview with Polley at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. My flight was delayed and my taxi stuck in late afternoon traffic, but Polley waited for me. I was flustered; she was gracious, relaxed and responsive: an ideal interviewee. We spoke only a short while yet I think we managed to cover a great deal.

JB: Did you have a lot of ideas after Away From Her? Was it difficult to decide which idea to run with?

Sarah Polley: There were several things I’d started. This was the one I was enjoying the most. It felt like the one I could learn most from as a filmmaker. It would allow me more freedom to explore with the camera and the actors than I’d had on Away From Her. A second film feels like an opportunity to do what you really want to do, as opposed to what you think you should do.

JB: Films about romance often focus on how the lovers are meant to be together. So they’re to some degree about destiny. But Take This Waltz is very much about desire. Desire is a central character, a foil, something greater than the individuals.

SP: I wanted to explore the theme of life having a gap in it. Of emptiness. Of the way we use desire to fill that gap. I wanted to envelop the audience in that feeling of the beginning of desire, when the world’s popping in Technicolor and everything seems new and brimming with possibility—the possibility of reinventing yourself. From there we can follow desire through its natural life cycle and see what happens.

JB: I found your exploration of those feelings very resonant, very real, but I also sensed a very deliberate use of artifice, the punched up colours, or the idea that the object of one’s desire, though found in another city, might live right across the street.

SP: I definitely wanted the world to feel believable but then at moments have this fairy tale quality. This extends to the depiction of Toronto. That’s Toronto in the movie, but it’s also a somewhat idealized Toronto. I romanticize the city. It doesn’t actually look the way I see it. I wanted it to be a little too vibrant, a little too colourful. I didn’t want to be shy about injecting moments with coincidence or magic, of having a dance happen in the middle of a very messy human story.

JB: At what point did the Leonard Cohen song come to you?

SP: Right at the beginning. I was listening to it so often. There’s something about its circular nature. I found it so beautiful and romantic and sad. I wanted the film to capture that same tone.

JB: It’s a song I adore. I almost find it hard to listen to. One of the things I love about it is that it feels particularly unresolved, partly because of the waltz time, partly because the lyrics whisk us through these baroque scenarios yet never seem to land anywhere.

SP: Exactly. It almost feels like it could go forever. The song kind of tangles itself up in the same way that I like to imagine the characters do with each other.

JB: I think of how both the song and the film end, with this idea that the waltz is “all that there is.” Being in motion, being between things. We leave Margot feeling like she’s still between things.

SP: Absolutely. Perhaps she’s a little more at ease with being between things, but that feeling of emptiness has followed her. And there’s something about the title: ‘Take This Waltz.’ It’s just this dance. It’s not forever. It’s going to change, to mutate. But you go with it anyway because those are some of the greatest moments in life, when you just go with somebody, surrender.

JB: I was also fascinated by your repeated use of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’ Is it me, or does this very different song not allude to the film’s most devastating piece of subtext?

SP: Absolutely. To me that song addresses what the film is about completely. One thing replaces another, but it’s not necessarily better, and it too will be temporary.

JB: This sense of being caught between things works its way into several aspects of the film. Being a recovering alcoholic, like Sarah Silverman’s character, means that you’re sort of always between drinks. Margot and Lou’s home seems perpetually between renovations.

SP: Matthew Davies, the production designer, was responsible for a lot of that. He really made that house feel like something in progress. You could see the layers of different families who’d lived there. He also brought a lot of the heat to the film. He made those rooms feel sweaty. There’s always a sheen in the paint or a shiny wallpaper. Every material he put in that house exudes heat. But yes, our discomfort with feeling between things was something I wanted to film to embody. Everybody was playing with that, including Lea Carlson, our wardrobe designer. She would sometimes dress Margot like an adolescent, as though she’s still going through this in-between phase.

JB: One thing about being an artist that some people find hard to fathom is the fact that your whole career keeps you between things. Most of your time is spent between one project and the next. Is that something that gives you anxiety?

SP: Professionally, I love being between things. I don’t love it in the rest of my life. Being between things professionally means you’re always trying to make things happen, but during those gaps you don’t always have to be doing it, which is also great. I love making films, but I also love just thinking about making films. And I love sleeping through the night, which you’re generally not able to do when you’re making a film.

JB: Are you at all interested in directing yourself as an actor?

SP: I don’t think so. Not unless I get way better as a director and way better as an actor. I’m so amazed that anyone can do both things simultaneously. Maybe one day I’ll try it, though I worry it could be miserable. I enjoy directing and acting so much, but I feel like doing them at the same time would compromise both experiences.

JB: I ask because I’m every now and then struck by how certain actors wind up doing their best work when directing themselves. Off the top of my head, I think of, let’s say, Clint Eastwood or John Cassavetes as actors who might be best when directing themselves.

SP: Now that’s actually inspiring. I never considered that. As you said that I suddenly had this flash of what it might be like to do exactly what you want to do and not have to worry about someone else’s opinion. That could actually be really fun.

JB: Perhaps if it was a very low-stakes project with a small crew, something you could take a lot of time with.

SP: Ooh. I love that idea. It’s weird. That’s the first time that’s ever sounded attractive to me. The idea of feeling less inhibited, not trying to please anybody. 

JB: Alright, then. Now I want to see Sarah Polley direct Sarah Polley.

SP: [Laughs] I’ll have to think about it. 

"If you were to go to Carthage today and get in line at Sam’s barbecue, you might find someone telling you how Bernie should have done it": Richard Linklater on Bernie, gossip, death and Texas

Richard Linklater’s fourteenth feature chronicles the strange but true tale of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the young man who arrived in Carthage, Texas with some neatly pressed shirts and pants, a smart little moustache, a gift for politeness and a mortuary degree, and Mrs. Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), the crabby, extremely wealthy old widow loathed by everyone in town. Bernie and Mrs. Nugent became close companions, so close that, despite Bernie’s apparent homosexuality, many wondered if their relationship didn’t include a sexual component. But that relationship became increasingly oppressive for Bernie, and one day in 1997 Bernie shot and killed Mrs. Nugent, hiding her body in a freezer. No one discovered her for nine months.

Inspired by Skip Hollandsworth’s 1998 Texas Monthly profile of the case, which much of the film quotes directly (Hollandsworth is credited as co-scenarist), Bernie comfortably hovers somewhere between semi-staged documentary and true crime feature. It’s a black comedy and place study narrated by a chorus of townsfolk (the cast mixes actual Carthagians and hired actors, including a very funny Matthew McConaughey) speaking direct-to-camera from front stoops or greasy spoons or seated before farm equipment. Their Bernie is a Robin Hood figure, killing the rich and donating to the town: murder as a benevolent act. “He had the ability to make the world seem kind,” one of the locals says. Linklater, a Texan himself, exudes affection for his subjects and their things (check out the attention to detail in the set dressing, ie: the horse painting lampshade on Scrappy Holmes’ desk). Told from the inside out, Bernie neither condescends nor soft-pedals, and seems ever-fascinated by its own incongruities and enigmas.

Richard Linklater 

I’d never spoke to Linklater before but found him just as friendly and easygoing as I’d always assumed he’d be from watching his films, some of which feature an occasional director’s cameo. He appears in Bernie as a deadbeat dad engaged in one of those weird contests where you have to keep your hands on a car for as long as possible. 

JB: I realize that the film is called Bernie, but I was really struck by how beautifully it works as a portrait of a community.

Richard Linklater: When Shirley first read the script she said to me, “Really, it’s the gossips’ movie.” I laughed. To some degree that’s true, because it’s seen through their eyes.

JB: That’s just it. The film refrains from psychoanalyzing Bernie. It offers little about his roots. It doesn’t try to get inside his head. Instead you build your portrait as much as possible from the perceptions of the Carthagians. You let them author your Bernie.

RL: We’ll never know what really happened between Bernie and Mrs. Nugent, but we do know the effect their relationship had on Carthage. It always seemed like the most interesting choice to hear these multiple voices testify to how the events reverberated through the community. Such events are more poignant in a small town, because everyone really does know each other. Small town gossip has this unanimity to it: Bernie was the nicest guy in town and Mrs. Nugent was the meanest bitch. Life is high school. Ultimately you are what everybody says you are. If you were to go to Carthage today and get in line at Sam’s barbecue, you might find someone telling you how Bernie should have done it—without getting caught.

JB: For all the movies that have been made in Texas, I feel like very few have paid close attention to a sense of place, to how it really feels to live there. I think of The Whole Shootin’ Match...

RL: [Laughs] Speaking of Sonny Carl Davis! You know Sonny Carl is in Bernie, right?

JB: I had no idea.

RL: He’s the guy with the map of Texas.

JB: Holy shit. I didn’t recognize him.

RL: Well, it has been 34 years since Whole Shootin’ Match. He’s a real character. I’m glad I finally got to work with him. He’s one of a handful of actors that I mixed in with the, quote-unquote, real people.

JB: One of the really intriguing things about this whole story is the way the theme of disguise and the denial of death weaves its way through Bernie’s vocation and right into his crime.

RL: Even in death we disguise ourselves. There’s that telling line from the opening scene, where Bernie’s demonstrating his craft: “You don’t want him to look unhappy to be there.” Put a little smile on the dead man’s face, you know? [Laughs] I heard that from a lady who dresses the dead as her job. She was our consultant, giving me some pointers. I thought it was hilarious. I don’t think she thought it was funny.

JB: The casting of Jack Black struck me as really inspired. He’s very funny as Bernie, but he also has this quality, this very particular pathos, that feels both native to the character and distinctly Jack Black.

RL: I’m so proud of Jack’s work here. When you’re funny no one thinks you’re a good actor, but the truth is Jack’s a great actor. And a great singer. And both skills are required for this part. It’s hard to think of other actors who could bring all these things, the right kind of charm. Jack has this ingratiating element; he wants to be liked. But then there’s this tinge somewhere in Jack that’s a little off. This edge. That edge itself is funny. It’s forever intriguing. That’s what makes him a movie star.  

JB: You’ve been carrying around this idea since 1998. Did your concept of the film change a lot over the years?

RL: Not much. All I did the whole time was think about the tone, and that was beneficial. Everything clicked when we met the actual Bernie. I had been writing to him for years, but when Jack and I got to visit him in prison and spend some serious time, it kind of confirmed my hunches about Bernie. He truly did seem like the nicest guy who did this one horrible act. To me, that was the story. He’s not a psychopath, so the question arises as to whether any of us, under the right circumstances, could be driven to kill somebody. 

JB: The scene where Bernie pulls the trigger really isn’t especially dramatic. It’s just this moment where the barrier between fantasy and action becomes so slim.

RL: And it’s so easy with certain weapons. It happens in a flash.

JB: Have you given any thought to whether you’d like to be buried or cremated? Would you like someone like Bernie to prepare your remains for your grieving loved ones?

RL: [Laughs] That’s a great question. You’re first person to ask me that! I’ve spent all these years thinking about the death industry and you’re the only person to ask me that question. So I’ll tell you honestly, because you deserve it: I will in no way let the death industry get close to me when I die! [Laughs] I’ve been researching this and there’s this thing called green burial. You die, they put you in a biodegradable stack, bury you vertically so you don’t take up much room and you immediately return to the soil. You don’t kill a bunch of roots. They just throw you out in the woods, really. It’s the least you do can do and it only costs about $200. Not $10,000. The idea of putting all these fluids in your body and going through all this rigmarole to act like you’re not dead is just crazy. It’s a horrible industry, really. So expensive. They treat the bodies like shit. There are these companies where you go to the funeral home and then they ship the bodies to Mexico immediately because it’s $75 cheaper. It’s ridiculous.

JB: I know. This whole idea that you can buy a casket that will keep worms off your body for an extra hundred years. At some point, when the people that loved you and even all your grandchildren have all died, you know, maybe it’s time to finally let go. I’ve always liked the idea of cremation, though I hadn’t really thought about the pollution aspect.

RL: That’s an issue. And it’s expensive because of the fire and because they still do all these things to treat the body beforehand. Mind you, they make you think you have to do so many things but if you check the books there’s actually very little that you’re obligated to do, legally.

JB: Well, I hope that neither you nor your loved ones will have to be thinking about your death rites for a very long time. 

RL: Thanks, but we all get there sooner or later. Thinking about it’s not so bad. 

One of our khaki scouts is missing

Wes Anderon’s Moonrise Kingdom, co-written with Roman Coppola, is set in September 1965, on the New England coastal island of Penzance. An oracular figure (Bob Balaban) provides a smattering of direct-to-camera details about the island’s history before warning of a great storm that will batter Penzance before our story ends. The storm he refers to is a perfectly literal meteorological phenomenon, but he may just as well be referring to the tempestuous love affair—between two 12-year-olds—already underway as our story begins.

Bespectacled orphan and decorated Khaki Scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) flees camp one morning, prompting his Scout Leader (Edward Norton) to organize a search in tandem with the island’s sole police officer (Bruce Willis). Sam arranges to rendezvous with Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), the eldest daughter of unhappily married lawyers (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), whose distinctive make-up anticipates the visage of Lana Del Rey. Sam, with his survival kit, and Suzy, with her yellow suitcase, cat in a basket, library books, binoculars, portable record player and beloved Françoise Hardy LP—at one point the couple takes an inventory, a variation on Anderson’s favourite activity, the visual list—set out to make it on their own in some hidden cove, pubescent lovers on the run in a world more bucolic but just as cloistered as that of Gerardo Naranjo’s similarly premised I’m Gonna Explode!

The kids are never annoyingly ingratiating; flat delivery is clearly the default here and works beautifully. Their stabs at adult stoicism are simultaneously funny and sincere. “Was he a good dog?” Suzy asks of a terrier accidentally killed during a melee with some fellow scouts. “Who’s to say?” replies Sam in his best Hemingway Jr. “But he didn’t deserve to die.” Likewise the more experienced and creatively, often ingeniously adult cast, among them Jason Schwartzman and  Harvey Keitel with a Civil War moustache, exude far more than their characters express openly, leaving the A-story in the kids’ capable hands while filling the margins with an almost palpable sense of melancholy.

Capitalizing on the design-everything imperative of his animated film The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson makes every home a dollhouse, observed through tours that allow the camera to slide vertically and horizontally through walls and floors; every landscape a storybook spread, sometimes misted over to resemble old postcards, with objects looking like toys when seen from a certain distance. His use of music is typically winsome, with Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra working as a theme for kids dreaming of adult seriousness and the songs of Hank Williams becoming the theme for adults whose lives seem rife with regret and resignation. With great playfulness and narrative concision, Moonrise Kingdom weaves artifice and emotional gravity into a beautiful fable about being, to the core of one’s being, truly, hopelessly love-struck.