Pictureland

Pina

2012-01-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

You may not have heard of Pina Bausch before seeing Wim Wenders' Academy-Award-nominated documentary, Pina. Even after seeing the film, you will be in posession of virtually no biographical information about the German dancer and choreographer, not even her surname. None-the-less, what becomes quite clear throughout the 103 loving, bracing minutes of Pina is what an extraordinary influence Ms. Bausch had on seemingly everyone with whom she worked.

The members of her Tantztheater Wuppertal company, as diverse in age as is in nationality, speak of her in near-mystical terms. "I'm not interested in how my dancers move. I'm interested in what moves them," she once said. By all accounts offered by her dancers in the documentary, Pina was able to see in them and elicit from them their best, often with a minimum of direction. "Be more crazy," she implored one member of her company; "keep searching," was her ambiguous instruction to another. This left the latter dancer at a complete loss, but as often comes across in the the brief anecdotes offered in Pina, a dancer found a way to their better self. Unfortunately, the conversation, such as it was, ended abruptly.

Wim Wenders was planning a film with Pina Bausch, when she died on June 30, 2009, apparently days after a cancer diagnosis and just a matter of weeks before filming was to commence. He immediately cancelled the film, but was convinced by the dancers of Tanztheater to turn the planned collaboration into an homage. It would be a chance for all, dancers and director alike, to offer a goodbye to Pina that her sudden death seemed to have made impossible.

We get one of our few looks at the woman herself as Pina begins. She's on stage, a lean, darkly-clad figure, saying "Fruhling...Sommer...Herbst...Winter...Fruhling....," representing the seasons with a series of contained, sometimes playful gestures. Cut to her company as they weave onto the stage, all dressed semi-formally, a kind of chorus line of the four seasons, expressed not with kicks but those same movements of arms, hands, even fingers. It might be something of a funeral march, but it seems a quietly joyous one, something between the now established traditions of modern dance and the ebullience of a New Orleans funeral.

What follows is a long, if not full-blown performance of Bausch's staging of Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). The stage is covered by a thick, neat square of peat on which the dance is played out. It seems both modern and ancient at once. The movements are violent, percussive, inward not outward. Watching the female dancers, working in simple, neutral, slip-like garments, smudged with earth, it would seem that they must be rendering themselves black and blue as elbows are ruthlessly driven back toward their abdomens as the music gains a grim momentum. At the same time, the pervasiveness of the earth, the peat, hearken back to the inspiration of the rite (at least as imagined by Stravinsky and others), a pagan ritual that speaks to a relationship, even a slightly sinister obligation to the land. It's apparent why Bausch's 1975 conception of the ballet has enjoyed such a long and successful life of its own. The performance also gets Wenders' Pina off to a galvanizing start.

We see portions of three more of Bausch's most celebrated pieces during Pina. These are introduced by and interspersed with dancers from the company, presented in a kind of portrait confessional. Each looks into the camera (or not) in their way, some quite earnest, others less serious, and offers in voice-over their remembrance of or tribute to Pina. Her first name is evoked as exclusively as is the the absolute influence Bausch exercised on their dancing and lives.

If there's a criticism to be made of Pina as it extends beyond 90 and 100 minutes, it's in the ever-so-slightly take a number aspect of the portrait/confessions. But if a fault, it's noble one, allowing seemingly everyone in the company to offer their tribute. What that thread of Wenders' film may lack in imagination, it's well balanced, not only by the four Pina Bausch pieces we see in which a particular dancer might be featured, but by the manner in which the director and company leave the conventional performance space and go out into the city and countryside beyond.

The city is Wuppertal, Germany. We see the dancers in parks, at roadsides, within cooly modern interiors, amidst industrial settings or in a dank tunnel, in movements expressing trust, longing, despair, love, an attempt at transcendent flight. In one such episode, a male dancer emerges at the top of a dusty slope over a vast mining pit. His restless, abortive movements continue along the what appear's a cliff's edge. Bookending their "Season's March" at the outset of Pina, the entire company is seen strolling along the cliff side near film's end. More whimsically, in one of the sequences shot in a factory compound, a female dancer, she of the great mop of black curls (Cristiana Morganti, I believe), practically screams "This is veal," before moving in repeated circles en pointe, demonstrating one of those beautiful dance movements that as ever play havoc with joints and turn skin to raw meat. I can't help thinking that the dancer might well have screamed, "This is Darren Aronofsky with wit," before proceeding to dance with the veal stuffed into her slippers.

The most memorable exterior scenes occur, appropriately enough, in a part of the city that moves. This the colorful Wuppertal Schwebebahn (Wuppertal floating tram) which snakes over the city and its river. In Pina's most playful sequence, one of the male dancer's, Andrey Berezin, sits at the back of a car. Mr. Berezin posesses a stern, wolfish countenance. In this scene, he just happens to have large pair of pointed ears (that look like they were appropriated from the set of Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life) pasted to the sides of his head. He wears a quizzical expression...perhaps one of a man trying to not look conspicuous while sporting cartoonish ears. A women gets on the tram car with what appears to be a large pillow. Every movement - dropping the pillow, stamping it down, plopping it down on a seat - is accompanied by comically explosive sound from the woman, who's face is buried during the entirety of the scene in her own formidable head of hair (again, perhaps, Ms. Morganti).

The Schwebebahn scenes are brought all the more to vivid life by Wenders' decision to shoot in 3D. Frustrated by the inadequacy of standard film in capturing an art form which so operates in and exploits three-dimensional space, Wenders has created one of the great arguments for the viability 3D film with Pina. The Schwebebahn pulls out of a station and seemingly right into the movie theater. During the first "Seasons March," the dancers can be seen on either side of a diaphanous curtain, giving the audience not only a view to both sides but the tantalizing illusion of its folds at one's fingertips. During a performance of Bausch's Vollmond, a piece during which the stage is partially flooded by water cascading from above, it's surprising not to find one's self drenched from the profusion of drops of water that bounce off the stage and a gigantic boulder in its midst. As I sat watching all the great dancing that is projected in 3D during Pina, I wondered if Powell and Pressburger - so fond of dance and determined to combine film with other forms of art - were somewhere, smiling at all this. Or perhaps green with envy; a brilliant, green technicolor envy.

Perhaps the most telling thing that can be said about any manager, any general, administrator, choreographer and dance company artistic director...any leader of people, is how well their charges perform not while they are present, shouting orders or looking on with a critical eye. The most telling thing might well be what occurs in their absence. If you see Pina, you'll know little of where she came from, what sort of romantic life she might have led, even what drove her to the world of dance in the first place. But to see the members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performing her enduring choreography and hear the near-litany of tributes they lovingly, earnestly offer, you do, in a sense, leave knowing the most important thing there is to know about Pina Bausch. It's abundantly clear with what consuming passion she approached her work and art, as well as the life-transforming inspiration that was visited upon seemingly all who were fortunate enough to work with her.

See Pina by all means. See it in 3D if you can.

tanzt, tanzt sonst sind wir verloren

A Dangerous Method

2012-01-23T14:01:00.000-08:00

In glancing at a few reviews prior to seeing A Dangerous Method, I recall one that noted audiences finding the film "too talky." While this seems tantamount to finding The Artist a tad too silent, it does point out the difficultly facing David Cronenberg and his accomplished screenwriter, Christopher Hampton (adapting his 2002 play, The Talking Cure, based on the novel by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: the story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein). Just how do you create something cinematic about the early days of psychoanalysis and a few of its leading figures? Do you attempt to flesh out these extremely complex historical figures and do justice to most of the intellectual issues with which they grappled, at the risk of producing something that is too...well, clinical? Or do you go the more florid, Ken Russel route with these august personages? Freudomania, anyone?

A kind of middle ground is achieved,which goes back to Mr. Kerr's decision to include Russian Sabina Spielrein amongst the two giants in the history of psychology. Beyond the fact that Ms.Spielrein may have been a significant source of inspiration to both Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud, her inclusion in the source novel as well Mr. Cronenberg's film, gives the story some needed motion and intensity. Without her, A Dangerous Method might not have seemed so dangerous after all, even lapsing into an epistolary enterprise, as it sometimes does. But Spielrein (Keira Knightly) does show up at the Burgholzi mental hospital in Zurich in which Jung (Michael Fassbender) is employed, first as a deeply troubled patient and later as a promising medical student. Eventually, the reserved Jung crosses lines of both matrimony and professionalism by embarking on a romantic relationship with Spielrein, a torrid and even ass-smacking affair. This certainly brings the doctor and the film to life. How closely all of this adheres to the lives of the real principals, I don't presume to know.

The challenging role of Sabina Spielrein falls to Keira Knightly. When at rest, Ms. Knightly's is a lovely, strikingly contoured face. But the mouth and jaw, in moments of girlish exuberance, open and extend themselves into unselfconscious extremes. You know: happiness, excitement; that sort of thing. So in the throes of psychosis is Sabina when she arrives at the Burgholzi mental hospital that she can barely get out her words; in analysis with Dr. Jung, she expectorates them as much as speaks them. At such moments, tortured expanses for Sabina between thought and utterance as she tries to expel words with painful associations, Ms. Knightly seems on the verge of dislocating her jaw from the rest of her skull. It's a brave performance that teeters toward the ridiculous without ever falling in upon itself. The Russian accent might waver, but she never seems to lose her sense of the complex character.

Mr. Cronenberg actually keeps the ass-smacking (some sort or riding crop it would appear is the sexcessory in question) to a minimum in the brief scenes when Jung and Spielrein give way to their passions. During her analysis, Sabina admits to her considerable shame that while physically punished as a child her reaction was one of arousal, not revulsion. One of the points of diversion for Jung and Freud (Viggo Mortensen), as their relationship devolves from devoted son and father (Freud refers to Jung at one juncture as "My son and heir") to something more akin to willful, boundary-pushing child and intransigent parent, is the elder's "...obsession with sexuality, his insistence on interpreting every symptom in sexual terms," as Jung notes with frustration after his first visit to Vienna. Oh, that Freud - sex, sex, sex. But as Sabina says to Jung after his first visit with Freud, "In my case, of course, he'd have been right." "But there must be more than one hinge into the universe," replies Jung.

For Jung, as rendered by Hampton and brought to chilly life by Fassbender, there are clearly other hinges. He seems as seduced by Sabina's fierce intelligence and psychological insight as by any aspect of her physicality. When the two give into their attraction, it happens according to their sharply contrasting personalities. It is Sabina who first kisses Jung, putting a hand at the back of his neck and drawing him into a passionate embrace. After the kiss, Jung barely moves or betrays emotion, saying, "It's generally thought to be the man who should take the initiative." After a bit of pressure-releasing shop talk, Sabina points across the street to No. 7 Schonleinstrasse and says "If you ever want to take the initiative, I live in that building, there, in the bay window."

As with his reaction to the kiss, the clearly-bottled intensity on his face when striking Sabina from behind (...this is another thing. Another thing in another country. With me I want you to be ferocious....I want you to punish me," she tells him in typically direct fashion) or the fact that his shirt and tie never come off during their first sexual encounter, Jung's emotional aperture is clearly narrower than his Russian patient, student and lover. The trim figure of Fassbender's Jung possesses an unmistakable reserve. We see this in his carefully measured steps or even the brief intervals in which he is out in the beautiful sailboat purchased for him by his wife, Emma (Sarah Gadon) - "The boat you always wanted. With red sails." - gliding across very placid waters of Lake Zurich, the boat never seen quite in full sale an apt parallel to Herr Doktor's usual calm. None-the-less, both Hampton and Fassbender have created something more complex than a meek, emotionless clinician. The blue eyes look out steadily from behind the wire frames. And much this Jung is averse to conflict with Freud or tumult runaway passion, he walks steadily unto the psychic breach when he deems it necessary or inevitable.

Jung's propriety is challenged not only by Sabina, but by a patient referred to him by his mentor. Working in a second straight film with David Cronenberg a bearded Vincent Cassel plays Dr. Otto Gross. "...a most brilliant, but erratic character," as Freud refers to him. The rutting, drug-gobbling Gross seems the embodiment of that part of the psyche Freud would later label the id. "If there's one thing I've learned in my short life, it's this: never repress anything!" Gross says to Jung during their first session together, which occurs not with the patient on a chair or couch, but roaming around Jung's office picking up whatever catches his attention. When Jung later expresses his unease about Gross to Sabina, she asks, "Do you mean you doubt your power to convince him?" "Worse than that: I'm afraid of his power to convince me." Jung answers.

Unlike his role as the homosexually-respressed Russian gangster in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Mr. Cassel gets to play a character here who certainly knows what he wants and isn't shy about expressing or pursuing it.

A Dangerous Method marks the third straight collaboration between David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen. One might say that the two are in a state of diminishing returns from A History of Violence to Eastern Promises to their current effort. But if the slope is tilting downward, the angle is not steep. Behind his own beard, the ever-versatile Mortensen well nigh disappears into his evocation of Sigmund Freud. Whether it's just the facial hear, or perhaps some preparatory eating, he's slightly rounder of face than we're used to seeing him, puffing away at cigars. This Freud is a race and class conscious man whose sensitivities and droll nature are encapsulated in his response to Jung, who wonders why it matters, with the numerous obstacles facing the nascent movement of psychoanalysis that all of its Vienna practitioners (as Freud had pointed out) are Jewish: "I don't see what difference that makes." "That, if I may say so, is an exquisitely Protestant remark."

It's just a cigar, okay? Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud
in A Dangerous Method.

Most of these encounters, whether Jung and Spielrien, or Freud and Jung, are shot by Cronenberg and his cinematographer Peter Suschitzky in deep focus. It's an appropriate visual analog for the frequent two-party give and take of the "talking cure" and playing out the A Dangerous Method's key relationships. Occasionally, this occurs Persona-style, with one face in profile while another directly in the camera's line of sight, without the relative bombast of countenaces being literally cheek by jowl, as was the case with Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in the Bergman film.

Eventually, Jung and Freud fall out over more than the latter's fixation with sex - "I think Freud's obsession with sex probably has a great deal to do with the fact that he never gets any," observes Gross, rather an expert on getting some, to Jung, during one of their provocative conversations. There are the matters of race and class, those that tend to preoccupy people, unlike Jung, who don't have theirs held against them. It is implied that Freud is thrown by Jung's beautiful home, bought by his rich wife, who also purchases a first-class stateroom for him when the two men sail for a psychoanalytical congress in America. As they board their ship, Jung says "I go this way," meaning toward his pricey accommodation, an obvious symbol the growing rift between the men. Freud regards Jung as he walks away with what could generously be termed a frown. As for race, Freud states the case most pointedly to Sabina, while she studies in Vienna, two years after Jung has ended their relationship: "I'm afraid your idea of a mystical union with a blond Siegfried was inevitably doomed. Put not your trust in Aryans. We're Jews, my dear Miss Spielrein; and Jews we will always be."

There is also what Freud refers to as Jung's "second-rate mysticism and self-aggrandizing shamanism." Freud confines himself to the probity of reason of reason and science. Jung seeks out his "other hinges," his "uncharted territory." The final conversation between Jung and Spielrein occurs in 1913, the latter married and a doctor in her own right. Emma Jung, meeting Sabina for the first time, expresses her fear that her husband is heading for a nervous breakdown, never having recovered from his break with Freud. By his own admission, Jung has been having apocalyptic dreams, an avalanche which turns "...into blood. The blood of Europe." Of course, World War I was at hand.

Jung's dark period was to continue. He wrote of his strange voices and visions in journals, even inducing hallucinations because he deemed them worthwhile. These writings over a sixteen-year-period he transcribed into what became known as his "Red Book." It's one of the many aspects of these extraordinary people that bears a level of examination hardly possible in a four-hour film, much less one of well shy of two hours. But Mr. Cronenberg, aided by his actors (at the risk of triggering of troubling, if not apocalyptic visions, the part of Sabina Spielrein was apparently written with Julia Roberts in mind; let your Mary Reilly flashbacks commence....), has delivered an arresting 99 minutes. It's not without ideas, A Dangerous Method. Among them, there is the implicit reminder that bearing great insight into human frailty in no way exempts one from such weakness. And perhaps, behind two very famous men stood a woman whose life and works deserves a closer look.

As contrasted with a very worthwhile film like The Tree of Life, one that addresses its large themes with equally large (if rather too concrete) answers, there's something to be said for a film like A Dangerous Method. While getting to know its principals, it seems worthwhile to broach complex ideas, expose relationships not so contradictory as often thought. All of this a beginning or a continuation of a process, not a tidy and possibly artificial conclusion. Go forth and continue to think about these ideas and these people. All rather suitable to psychoanalysis, the subject matter at hand, don't you think? I mean, how do you feel about that?

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The Ides of March

2012-01-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

"As Ohio goes, so goes America." This the pronouncement from a political commentator in George Clooney's latest film, The Ides of March. The setting for the Ides of March is the Ohio Democratic presidential primary. It's an appropriate enough place to set a political thriller, Ohio being one of those proverbial battleground states, as the political pundits like to remind us. The state usually does figure large in primaries and general elections. Just ask John Kerry, whose presidential aspirations found their graveyard in Ohio in 2004.

The Ides of March is based on the play Farragut North, by Beau Willimon. The playwright was apparently a staffer on another 2004 campaign, that of Howard Dean, which fizzled out after a big showing in Iowa. In adapting Willimon's play, Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov have added the character of presidential candidate and standing governor, Mike Morris (Clooney). Morris is something of a compendium of recent Democratic front runners. After all of The Ides of March's revelations are out of the bag, Clooney's character seems a combination of 2008 presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John Edwards. In this difficult post-honeymoon phase for the current president, the Obama parallels are particularly strong, especially the ubiquitous presence of stylized Morris campaign posters which are clearly patterned after Shepard Fairey's iconic Obama "Hope" poster. Of course, the ghost of Clinton also looms, as it will over any promising Democrat who's gifted with charisma, superior intelligence, the common touch, and a near-tragic inability to keep his zipper fastened.

Much of the action (and a good bit of the filming) occur in Cincinnati, familiar territory for Clooney. His father Nick was a long-time television show host and news anchor in the Queen City. The elder Clooney also knows something about bruising political battles, having lost a difficult 2004 contest for the 4th Congressional District of Kentucky, just across the Ohio River. His father's experience as a talk and game show host influenced George Clooney's first film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in it's shifting stages and backdrops, an appropriate expression of the fanciful story based on the memoir cum novel by Chuck Barris. There's just a touch of that here, in the film's first scene when campaign adviser Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) is testing the audio system in an empty theater prior to a debate and a moderator's desk rises from beneath stage level, as if by magic. Clooney's second film, Good Night and Good Luck, also gets a nod from an early scene that cuts to pianist performing "We'll Meet Again," just as the action in Good Night And Good Luck was occasionally interspersed with tunes played by a jazz combo fronted by Dianne Reeves.

It's not great liberal hope Mike Morris but political wunderkind Stephen Meyers who serves as The Ides of March main character. "I've worked on more campaigns than more people have by the time their 40," says Stephen to New York Times reporter Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei), Gosling, as ever delivering his lines in an accent that sounds like Canada by way of Brooklyn. "My braintrust," as the governor refers to him, Meyers is reminiscent of then-Clinton-advisor George Stephanopoulos, ableit with added charm and movie star looks. All of that "...and you've got the best media mind in the country. All the reporters love you." This last bit of praise added by rival campaign mastermind Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) as he tries to woo the talented Meyers to the campaign of Morris' chief rival for the Democratic nomination.

Gosling's still youthful face is something of an innocent mask. He has often played a young man more simple or at least less corrupt than the world about him, in films such as The Notebook, Lars and the Real Girl, Blue Valentine and the recent Drive. Of course, leading the charge of a presidential campaign is no place for the innocent. When Stephen says "I'll do or say anything if I believe in it, but I have to believe in the cause," he's expressing the priorities of many a would-be-righteous candidate or campaign manager, ideals outstripped by the necessity of first assuming power. But there is still the longing for someone, something in which to believe. Here perhaps the strongest hangover felt by many liberals who essentially summoned their rusty idealism and said once more unto the breach, regarding Barak Obama as The One. Challenged by the cynical Times reporter, Stephen declares without a hint of irony, "He's the only one who's going to make a difference in people's lives." "I don't have to play dirty anymore, I've got Morris," he later says to the cunning Duffy, accentuating his point by slamming his hand down on the bar where they two men are meeting in secret.

The attempt by Duffy to lure Stephen to the rival campaign is just one in a series of Byzantine turns of plot in The Ides of March so strange as to perhaps be true. Having agreed to the ill-advised meeting with the enemy, the savvy Meyers eventually finds himself a pawn moved and stalked by the rival campaign managers. Those opposing managers, Tom Duffy and Paul Zara (in charge of the Morris campaign) are just two of the roles that make up the actors smorgasbord which is "Ides." Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman play the rivals, two actors who conveniently have the look of overworked men who too often resort to the vending machine or fast food drive-thru windows. Call it method eating. These are roles sharply drawn by Clooney and Heslov, played by the actors seasoned and wily as the campaign masterminds they're portraying.

While the big story of the primary and the larger campaign plays out, the national stage is lent some media realism with cameos by the likes of Charlie Rose and Rachel Maddow. However, director Clooney has his focus on the individual struggles. The camera often holds characters in intense close-up, as with glimpses of Morris and his wife, Cindy (Jennifer Ehle) together. These brief scenes would seem to reveal a relationship in which the pleasure of intimacy between two, well-matched, intelligent people has not been lost. After many years of marriage, away from the required amity of television cameras, they two seem to like each other. This adds another corrosive twinge to the film's ultimate revelation.

The driven Meyers slows down long enough to notice the attention and allure of Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a "lowly intern" who happens to be the daughter of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. After complaining, "...they put us into a motel on the other side of the river," she points out that they (the interns and other campaign foot soldiers) do have a better bar. "You ought to stop by one night and have a drink with the worker bees," she adds to an unusually discomfited Meyers (he can't remember her name).

Driven and smart though he may be, our Stephen is, in fact, composed of fallible flesh and blood. He breaks the rule of which he reminds his boss in The Ides of March climactic scene: "...you can start a war, you can lie, you can cheat, you can bankrupt the country, but you can't fuck the interns, they'll get you for that."

The illicit coupling between lowly intern and big man on campaign campus does take place. But Molly is carrying far more profound secrets than a fling with Stephen. Mr. Meyers, for his part, finds himself in trouble not over his choice of bedmate, but for falling into the trap of the meeting with the head of the rival camp, Tom Duffy. When the news of their meeting is leaked, the wunderkind finds himself for a time a man without a campaign.

When Meyers is fired by Paul Zara for meeting with Duffy, he responds not like a careerist who sees great opportunities being lost, but like a lover scorned. We had seen him previously distracted by the sight of Morris on television while he and the lovely Molly were in flagrante delicto. Meyer's temporary reversal is but the first in a series of major plot twists, with which The Ides of March explodes into something both quite credible but a little too familiar.

Clooney and Gosling, about 20 years apart in real life as in The Ides of March, are like two handsome stops on a political descent of man. For Clooney's Mike Morris, the good looks and charisma persist, but the mask is beginning to betray some weariness. More significantly, there is a kind of metaphysical stoop of the shoulders, the accumulated burden of years of compromise and ideals petrified. Both actors are quite good here.

The unpalatable compromise for Mike Morris is what it will take to collect the delegates of Senator Mark Thompson (a perfectly unctuous Jeffrey Wright). Thompson is out of the race, but knows his delegates are gold to both Morris and his rival. Whoever collects the delegates will win the nomination, however Ohio goes, demonstrating the difference in intelligence that often exists between those who read teleprompters on network news broadcasts and those who run major political campaigns. There are battles and there are wars. Men like Zara and Duffy, like one of their real-world models, Karl Rove, are paid to know the difference.

Clooney has said that he was interested in a story in that examines that point at which that you make that "trade off...that deal." Usually, it would seem, that point is reached slowly and without any telling drama, more a matter of gradual erosion than some single overthrow of long-cherished ideals. Of course, such gradual erosions are not the readiest of materials for political thrillers. None-the-less, The Ides of March might have proven a more enduring work if Mr. Clooney and his co-writer Grant Heslov had trusted their audience enough to show Mike Morris finally making that compromise, as it is usually made, for simple, craven political expediency, to get elected. As it is, the candidate essentially has a pistol barrel to his head, much as he had loaded the gun himself.

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The Artist

2011-12-31T17:02:00.000-08:00

George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), not so long ago a movie star, finds himself an anonymous figure in a crowd filling the lobby after an afternoon matinee, a talkie entitled "Guardian Angel", starring America's newest cinematic sweetheart, Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo). Poor George, as ever in the company of his loyal Jack Russel Terrier, is like a defrocked priest milling about this cathedral of the motion picture. Young people in the crowd pass Valentin by, oblivious to his fame as a star of silent cinema. Finally, an older woman smiles in recognition. George returns the smile, one of significantly of lower wattage than those he beamed during his heyday, but still enough to signify his gratitude at the acknowledgement. But no, he quickly realizes, the woman isn't responding to him, but the adorable pooch in his arms. After she expresses her admiration, George says, "If only he could talk!"

No need to worry about the cute dog, but much of The Artist, directed by Frenchman Michel Hazanavicius, finds George Valentin struggling, his fortunes sadly parallel to the depression economy of the United States, post-October, 1929. The transition from silent films to talkies in the late-1920's and early-30's may not have been particularly hard on the dog acting community, but it was hell on many of the human contingent who had made names for themselves in silent cinema. Numerous actors, even directors, because they would not or could not work in the talking pictures, found careers cut abruptly short.

It was partly a matter of acting style. "People are sick to death of those actors who mug to make themselves understood," says Peppy a little too sanguinely (she would quickly regret the remark) to a reporter on the eve of breakthrough as a leading lady, "Beauty Spot." Of course, it was also a matter of voices which didn't translate to the new style, those somehow grating or marked by a foreign accent deemed too much for the American market. Ultimately, George Valentin was probably doomed on both counts. The irony and one of the great pleasures of The Artist is that director Hazanavicius is able to employ two foreign-born actors to play the American actors at the center of this story.

To the degree to which they are known at all in this country, director Hazanavicius and his star Jean Dujardin are recognizable as the names and face behind the two French "OSS 117" spy send-ups. The Argentine-born Berenice Bejo, who happens to be the director's wife, also starred in the first of the two films, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. Clearly, in making The Artist, all had love and not lampoon on their minds

The sea change in the world of film from silents to talkies provides a particularly poignant setting for Hazanavicius to tell his story as another variation on A Star is Born. As it usually goes, it's the young woman, Peppy Miller who's the up-and-comer, while George Valentin is the fading star who finds the world moving forward without him. The respective trajectories of the two performers is treated with visual symbolism in a lovely stairway sequence, in which the two meet in Kinograph Studios. George is, of course, going down, while Peppy, after stopping to attentively speak to her idol, springs upward to join two men waiting for her ("Toys," she says dismissively, after George glances up at Peppy's fair-haired retinue).

Ms. Bejo, slight of frame and prominent of dark eyes, wears well her period frocks and chapeaux, much as she ably evinces both Peppy's offhand charisma and the depth of feeling she demonstrates for Valentin and the dying era he represents.

However taken, The Artist is curious title for Mr. Hazanavicius' film. It sounds either vague or strident, but fortunately is neither. The writer/director might be a great admirer of silent films, but if he set out to make a more simplistic statement of a lesser age succeeded a greater one, he wisely tempered his approach.

As seen at the onset of The Artist, both on screen in "A Russian Affair" and afterward hamming it up for an appreciate crowed and media, George Valentin is a vain actor who does plenty of mugging. We see him as he leaves his requisite mansion, giving a wave to a much larger than life portrait of himself on the wall. Valentin will later hide behind the mantle of artistic integrity when he refuses to make the transition to talkies, instead sinking much of his fortune (the rest is taken by the stock market crash) into another silent film in which both acts and directs, "Tears of Love." But clearly, our hero is no great artist; this is no Keaton, no Chaplin. Like Shakespeare's Richard II, he seems to find a soul only after he's usurped and made to reflect on his identity. Before adversity hits, George is more from Douglas Fairbanks mould, or from that of his relative namesake, Rudolph Valentino. Valentino, the "Latin Lover," avoided the dilemma of talkies by dying suddenly at the age of 31 in 1926, sending legions of his fans into mourning.

Dujardin's is a handsome, trumpeting face. The movie star smile is beamed with effortlessness. And he does have ample opportunity to do plenty of the mugging to which Peppy refers (his role as OSS 117 is also rich with such possibilities), with little distinction between film and reality while success is his. But as Valetin's fortunes change, we see the nuance of which that face is capable.

Valetin's potboiler films are produced at the aforementioned Kinograph studios, one of the subtle and not-so-subtle (a weary Peppy, early in her reign as a leading lady says to her attendants "I want to be alone," Garbo's immortal line from Grand Hotel) allusions to film and film history which crop up in The Artist. The Kinograph studio boss, Al Zimmer, is played John Goodman. Ignoring his considerable vocal skills, of which the Cohen Brothers have taken advantage in several of their films, Goodman is a natural as a silent actor with his expressive face and frame-filling physique.

As Clifton, Valentin's extremely loyal chauffeur and assistant, James Cromwell brings a hawkish gravity to his role, adding to the poignancy of his employer's decline. We see the two men in Valentin's small apartment after he's had to vacate his mansion. Clifton prepares their extremely modest foodstuffs with a formality befitting a far more elegant repast. "How long since I've paid you, Clifton, George asks. "One year, sir," is the answer. George then fires Clifton so me might find actual paying employment. Clifton initially waits by the curb with the car like a loyal dog waiting for command. He eventually leaves, but is never far away. The chauffeur is essentially the human companion to Valetin's Jack Russell. As for the pooch, the presence of adorable animals in film, like cute children, can fast become cloying. But the talent and charm of Uggie, the Jack Russell in question, can be denied by only the most resolutely opposed to actors of such considerable fur. The dog is good.

For your consideration...Uggie.

The Artist's varied score is by Ludovic Bource. Ranging from solo piano to swelling orchestral pieces, it dances its way through several decades of Hollywood musical history; touches of French lyricism keep the step pleasingly light. The one occasion when the soundtrack varies from the purely instrumental coincides with a montage that depicts Peppy's ascension to stardom (and by implication, the primacy of the talking picture). The charming, tinny voice we hear singing "Pennies From Heaven" sounds like the ghost of Blossom Dearie, but it's actually Rose "Chee-Chee" Murphy.

Mr. Bource gets to take out the orchestra and open up the throttle to accompany what is The Artist's most imaginative sequence, one that might well be entitled, "The Nightmare of Sound." So it must have seemed for many silent film actors. Valentin is in his dressing room and knocks over a bottle on a makeup table. Aside from the film's score, this is the first sound we hear in The Artist. Much to his surprise, George hears it as well. Another bottle, same result. Even the Jack Russell chimes in with a bark. Now alarmed, the actor steps outside onto the studio lot. Chorus girls pass and assault him with cackling laughter. More chorus girls and more laughter. Valentin is the only thing in this world that does not produce sound; he still can't talk. Finally, a feather drops from the sky and hits the ground to the sound of a bomb explosion.

An earlier scene, also in Valentin's dressing room, is emblematic of The Artist at its loving, graceful best. The starstruck Peppy sneaks into her idol's room to leave a note. When she sees Valentin's top hat and tails hung on a coat rack, she can't resist a touch. While not as inventive perhaps as "The Nightmare of Sound," what follows is so perfectly filmed and handled with such finesse by Ms. Bejo, that a simply cheeky episode becomes something much more deeply expressed. With her arm curled into the right arm of the jacket and around her waist, it's an embrace not only of Peppy's idol, or the man George Valentin, but a beautiful symbol of an ardor for the movies in general. The image of the empty formal attire will later find a melancholy echo when a destitute George looks wistfully at a tuxedo in a shop window, as the reflection of his head is superimposed atop the jacket.

The grace and perspective that Michel Hazanavicius brings to The Artist are evident from the film's first scene. It begins, as any director might, with the silent film in which George Valentin is starring, "A Russian Affair" (typical of the assembly line films that the silent star is making; we later see Valentin and Miller working in film entitled, "A German Affair"). But then the literal perspective changes, pulling away from the film within a film to the interior of the movie palace in which the screening is taking place (Sid Grauman's Million Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles was used for this sequence; the beautiful Bradbury Building, just across Broadway, was used for the Kinograph stairway scene). The camera looks back to the formally dressed men and women packing the theater for the film's premier. Before moving behind the screen to the waiting stars and studio head, our view is a canted shot down and from one side of the auditorium, almost as if we're seated in a side box. We see the film on the screen framed by the ornate proscenium, before which is the stage and orchestra providing its accompaniment. We're made aware not only the film being projected, but the overall spectacle of the experience.

The Artist captures not simply the end of one movie-making era giving way to another, but a period in which the art form had the world in its thrall. Silent films were going the way of history. So too was the ritual of going to the movies at its most grand. As the U.S. economy crashed, the great movie palaces were no longer built. In the decades that followed, particularly after a surge in attendance after World War II, many would be demolished as television and other forms of entertainment made their claim upon our time.

The motion picture seems in no threat of extinction, much as our attention is drawn to smaller and smaller screens (the exception to the trend being our larger and larger televisions). There is also the matter of the increasing recording, projection and (amazingly expensive) storage of digital films. Given the ever-fluid state of technology and all the forms of distraction that clamor for our attention, it's hard to know if we're at a similar crossroads in terms of how we see films and what they might be. With that uncertainty at least in mind, one regards a film such as The Artist, one that celebrates not only film history but its continuity in such a graceful manner...with....as George Valentin says in the only words we hear him utter, "With pleasure."

The Descendants

2011-12-12T13:19:00.000-08:00

It should spoil no one's surprise to learn that Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), the wife and mother in The Descendants, is destined to die at some point in the film. Her family is one of the groups of descendants to which the title of Alexander Payne's latest feature refers. Elizabeth is seen conscious only briefly before the opening credits, happily buffeted by sea spray and wind as a passenger in a power boat. Even if you haven't seen the trailer for The Descendants, there's something slightly haunting about the close-up of the contented woman as she's carried across the water.

Sure enough, as the voice-over of her husband Matt King (George Clooney) tells us as the film commences, Elizabeth was ejected from the boat, struck in the head and rendered comatose. He's informed early on that there's no hope of recovery and must break the news to his daughters Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller) as well as family and friends. This is somewhat new territory for the husband and father, as Clooney is made to explain the in the leaden voice-over, which wraps up mercifully early in The Descendants, once it's none-too-subtle expository dump is completed. "I'm the back-up parent," he says. Looking at his motionless wife and speaking of a marriage in which considerable emotional drift has occurred while he was frequently absorbed with work as a lawyer and the trusteeship of a his vast family inheritance (these the other descendants), he also declaims, "If you're doing this to get my attention, it's working." The same could be said to Alexander Payne: if you were hoping to make my eyes roll before the theater seat beneath me was warm, mission accomplished.

We're given indications that the two King daughters had begun to flounder even before the crisis of their mother's accident. The younger Scottie acts out at school and insults a classmate, while the teenage Alexandra is already away at boarding school on the Big Island. When her father shows up to collect her one evening after lights out, Alexandra is not in her room, but out at a nearby beach with a fellow giggling delinquent, feeling, as they say, no pain.

Matt brings his daughter back to their Honolulu home to share with her the grim news about her mother. After some morning sparring between father and alienated daughter, the backup parent finally breaks the news while Alexandra swims in the family's pool, whose collection of fallen leaves she had disdainfully noted. What follows tells you almost everything you need to know about The Descendants. Upon hearing the news, the young woman submerges to give vent to her breaking emotions. This, of course, is nothing new. It's something of a tradition, the underwater camera (or sometimes a camera poised above the water) capturing a character's wonderment, rage, or - in perhaps the most famous example, our disaffected young friend Benjamin in The Graduate - emotionally nullifying escape from tiresome parties above. However, the execution of this shot in The Descendants is so faultless that it trumps the lack of originality. A good measure of the thanks goes to young Shailene Woodley, so raw and vulnerable in that watery baring of soul. An assist goes to famous underwater photographer Don King, who was brought in to shoot the scene.

Shailene Woodley as Alexandra
in The Descendants.

Ms. Woodley's performance is certainly strong enough to merit the hype and growing number of award nominations that are coming her way. The same can be said for her film father, George Clooney. Working beneath a much fuller head of hair than we've seen in some time, a wavy sweep of salt and pepper, Clooney gives a typically committed performance. If you have seen him work for many years, going back as far perhaps as his five years on the television show ER, you will observe few of the mannerisms or vocal inflections by which might normally recognize him. As the salt in his hair has gained ground on the pepper, he's grown as an actor. He's a movie star who commits to character, without much concern for vanity.

Mr. Clooney is more than solid as the film's center. Just don't ask the poor man to do all the heavy lifting. The voice-over which opens the film is reminiscent of the same work he was called upon to do in Jason Reitman's Up In The Air. In both cases, the device hammers away, doing more harm than good. The actor's voice was put to better and exclusive use as the vulpine narrator in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Try running in sandals and see how cool you look. George Clooney in The Descendants.

As with a couple of other Payne features, About Schmidt and Sideways, The Descendants features its own bumpy odyssey. In this case, it is Matt King heading off to the Island of Kauai to track down the real estate agent with whom his wife was having an affair. The busy lawyer was oblivious to the infidelity before his wife's accident. After he retrieves Alexandra from boarding school, Matt finds out the source of much of her anger is his daughter's discovery of the affair. Once the beans are spilled to the clueless father and husband, he's sent running around the corner to friends for confirmation. As the discomfited lawyer says, as it were, in his opening statement to us, "My friends think just because I live in Hawaii I live in paradise...Our families are just as screwed up. Our heartaches are just as painful." What Matt's awkward run also reveals, in choppy, almost comically-abbreviated strides, is that it's really hard to run in sandals and maintain one's dignity. Payne seems to revel in such moments; Election, in particular, has a high squirm factor. The director, in his predilection for these awkward passages works a fine line between a kind of candor and even compassion for our common weaknesses and fetishizing them for effect.

Matt's journey to find the philandering real estate agent so he can confront the man and inform him of his wife's imminent death is a lonely trek only in spirit. His girls are in tow, as is the platonic, highly dude-ish friend of Alexandra, Sid. "I'll be a lot more civil with him around," warns Alexandra, at a point at which the father seems at a loss to reach either of his daughters. The relationship of the elder daughter and father is one of the few strands of plot in the story written by Payne and two other screenwriters, based on the novel of Kaui Hart Hemmings, whose entire path isn't immediately apparent at first glance. The obvious direction would have been to keep the parent and rebellious teen at odds, only to reunite tearfully at story's end. Instead, Alexandra, who clearly has more issues with her mother than father, becomes a kind of co-conspirator as Matt seeks out his wife's lover.

Not only the location of vacationing real estate agents from Oahu, Kauai is also the island on which the King family inheritance stands, 25,000 acres of verdant paradise, as yet untouched by the modern world. Unfortunately, due to something called the rule against perpetuities, the family trust over which Matt has final say, will expire in seven years, causing the land to revert to the state unless first sold. While a couple of Matt's many cousins oppose any sale and the development which will inevitably follow, most of the family, considerably less well-to-do than their lawyer cousin, are eager to sell the land to one of two developers in the running and collect their cash. During their time on the island, we see the family pull up in a jeep and look down upon some of the vast King family tract, including an idyllic white crescent of beach.

The looming sense of this paradise lost does emotionally tie the inheritance storyline to that of the dying wife and mother. But its a fairly tenuous connection. Much as Payne and his crew demonstrate an attention and sensitivity to the Hawaiian context - the soundtrack's largely "slack-key" island tunes seem particularly well chosen - Matt's ultimate decision about the dispensation of of the family land, admirable though it might be, seems mainly a device for those of us in the audience feel better about The Descendants main character as well as ourselves. "Even though we’re haole as shit and go to private schools and clubs and can’t even speak pidgin, let alone Hawaiian, we still carry Hawaiian blood, and we’re still tied to this land. And our children are tied to this land," he says to a few gathered cousins (one of whom is played by Beau Bridges, looking very much at home in a Hawaiian shirt and shoulder length hair). It also seems a speech directed at potential Oscar voters and is consistent with Payne's much too tidy conclusion to all the story's strife.

Before Matt's family unit coalesces a little too easily and is last seen sharing a blanket on the family coach, hunkered down to watch March of the Penguins, the story provides a bit of trademark Payne awkwardness. While the family is on Kauai, Matt encounters Brian Speer (the other man) as the two pass each other jogging on a beach one morning. Ultimately, Matt and his eldest daughter show up unannounced at the Speer's vacation bugalow. While the clever Alexandra keeps Speer's kindly wife busy, Matt confronts his wife's lover. To the credit of Payne and his other script writers, this scene goes in a couple of unpredictable directions, which seems consistent with the situation. Who knows how they're going to react until they're face to face with someone who has slept with their partner? The two men don't come to blows, much as Matt does give vent to some anger. When he and his daughter are taking their leave of Mrs. Speer, Matt turns their fairly formal embrace into something that is perhaps the films's best expression of his chaotic swirl of emotions, forcibly kissing her on the lips. With all the raw emotions played out in the Descendants, the kiss is perhaps its hardest moment to watch.

The Descendants is certainly well-crafted from start to finish. Unfortunately, you can watch the trailer and pretty well know the experience you're going to have before you ever see the film. Contrived though it may be, The Descendants is ultimately affecting. We see the struggling Matt King undergo the ridiculous but quite credible fit of anger in which he spews all his pent up frustration at his silent, comatose wife. But there is the tearful goodbye as well. When he says, "Goodbye, Elizabeth. Goodbye, my love, my friend, my pain, my joy. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye," the words don't really seem his or anybody who's not reading from a greeting card. But Clooney, so completely in the moment, makes it work.

Amid so much utterly disposable product crowding the multiplexes, it's hard to take The Descendants too much to task. There's something to be said for intelligence, cultural sensitivity and craft, even when marshaled toward such a predictable result. But as our friends in the mainstream media begin to compile their top ten lists for 2011 and The Descendants frequently gets mentioned, I can't help wondering, is this really the best we can do? Imperfect though they may be, I'd rather devote my attention to scrappy 2011 underdogs like Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff or Evan Clodell's impressive debut, Bellflower. Or for something more mainstream that grapples with life and death, frankly, Jonathan Levine's 50/50 seems more worthwhile than Alexander Payne's latest effort.

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Like Crazy

2011-11-17T15:43:00.001-08:00

"What are we gonna do after we graduate?" Well, yes. Welcome, young lovers, to the first in an increasingly challenging set of existential conundrums, as you leave the anything-is-still-possible world of college and set out into the rather more limiting world beyond. The beneath the covers question is posed by Jacob (Anton Yelchin) to his British girlfriend Anna (Felicity Jones), as the two face each other in bed, a blanket thrown over them like a common skin, prime bits of their actual young flesh visible and hinted at.

Like Crazy suggests the intoxication of young love but concerns itself mainly with the sobering impediments to romance that fill the adult world like so much bulky, ill-placed furniture with which one collides in the night. Young Jacob is actually a designer of furniture. His first major present to Anna is a wooden writing chair which bears an inscription on its seat bottom from which the film's title is drawn. The two meet in a college class taken by Anna in which Jacob is a teaching assistant. As the semester ends, they exchange only meaningful glances, but Anna leaves a lengthy note on the windshield of Jacob's white Saturn that details her growing infatuation and concludes with the post script, "Please don't think I'm a nutcase." Jacob thinks no such thing. He calls Anna, who rushes her mother off the phone to take his call. The romance begins in earnest in a coffee shop, in a brief scene which has a kind of awkward perfection about it. The two nervously begin their courtship like two musicians trying to duet, adept and eager, but struggling to find the same key.

Alas, the inevitable musical montage follows, with scenes of bumper cars, toes in the sand and whatnot. This the sort of thing which is supposed to carry the narrative forward and demonstrate the swoony rush of young love. But after the charming, halting realism of the previous scene, the montage sets Like Crazy back a bit, if only briefly. It's as if director Drake Doremus' film has been invaded by a lesser, more obvious romance. It's a regression that besets Mr. Doremus at interludes throughout Like Crazy, as if he doesn't trust what he's got. So we see an overhead time lapse shot of the couple's bed, the change in body positions and clothes demonstrating the passage of time through Anna and Jacob's first expiring-student-visa-be-damned summer together; a shot of Anna at Heathrow after parting with Jacob, motionless as hours worth of travelers zoom around her like bees in a hive; that sort of thing. There is, at least a judicious economy to these bridging sequences. It's also an indication of Doremus' relative subtlety that the first, most romantic montage occurs not to the accompaniment of insistent pop, but solo piano.

The flouting of the expiration of the student visa creates the major barrier to the progress of Anna and Jacob's relationship. When she tries to return to America, Anna finds out that our friends in Homeland Security have little sense of humor in these matters, even for such an English rose as she. She's been banned from the country. Jacob rushes around the airport brandishing a bouquet of flowers like some ineffectual lance. But there's no rescuing or even coming face to face with his damsel, who's put back on a plane and returned to Britain. And here, the challenge for the young couple really begins.

Even when Jacob is convinced to travel to England and make with Anna the most legally emphatic of commitments, the heartless U.S. authorities will not budge. Before that disappointment, and certainly after, we see the two growing apart, separated as they are by the thousands of miles, an ocean and their respective cultures. There is also the matter of trying to establish careers. Anna works as an assistant at a London magazine, where she works for sympathetic boss, Liz (Finola Hughes), while Jacob designs minimalistic wooden furniture in California.

Felicity Jones as Anna.

It is Jacob who most seems most affected by the separations. This not simply a matter of letting his clean-shaven face be lined by a delicate, reddish moustache and goatee during their first period apart, making him look a minor personage in a Dutch painting. At some point after the setback at the airport when Anna is rebuffed by Homeland Security, Jacob's assistant in his furniture business, Sam (Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone), becomes a live-in assistant. Jacob might lack the fortitude or even the depth of feeling to make the difficult relationship work, but Anna ultimately strays as well when the situation looks hopeless, coupling with a neighbor, Simon (Charlie Bewley), an arrangement that Jacob had jealously (and hypocritically) anticipated. The other man and woman seem devoted to Jacob and Anna for their part, and get the worst of the vicissitudes of the film's central relationship.

21st-century technology plays its part to both unify and divide; consistent with the tone of Like Crazy, it's more the latter. With smart phones at hand or attached like vital organs, words can be exchanged between Anna's London bedroom and the Los Angeles dancefloor where Jacob finds himself at the same moment. But the texts and broken conversations, along with accumulating voice mail messages, serve mainly to remind the pair of the distance between them. When Jacob is in London with Anna, he checks for texts from Sam in California and vice versa. Anna texts Jacob back in L.A. while an increasingly smitten Simon stands feet away. So it goes for the on-again, off-again couple, technology offering the dubious ability to be both present and not present at once, an apt manifestation of their lover's quandary.

The other man, the other woman.
Charlie Bewley and Jenifer Lawrence in Like Crazy.

Like Crazy's screenplay is credited to director Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones, though much of the naturalistic dialog is apparently the product of improvisation between Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones. The story by Doremus and Jones, when not interrupted by montage, carries its young actors through a series of all-too-believable relationship ebbs and flows. This occurs not simply as a result of separation, but just as strikingly when the Anna and Jacob are together. There is the mournful air of a visit to Catalina just before Anna is due to return to England, a simple conversation about whether to get a meal while wandering aimlessly through an open-air market in London which becomes a quagmire and their most heated exchange within the cramped quarters of Anna's kitchen, some of those text messages on Jacob's phone a catalyst to the fight. It's not always enjoyable to watch, but there's an integrity to the story and situations, enhanced by the give and take of Jones and Yelchin, both good in non-glamorous performances. Mr. Doremus' shooting with hand-held digital cameras also keeps the visuals as real as the words, emotions ans situations.

Anton Yelchin as Jacob.

Like Crazy does not delve, as its title might lead one to believe, into the dizzying realm of amour fou. Nor does it depict a more stalwart love, unshaken, even strengthened by its trials, the sort union which Shakespeare referred to as an "ever-fixed mark" in his 116th sonnet. Unusually, for a film whose lovers are still so young, Like Crazy focuses on that oft-trying middle ground between the rush of love first expressed and the nebulous region of ever after.

"I don't feel young," says Anna to Liz, when her boss offers her the chance to write the magazine's blog, stating they could use a fresh, young voice. By the time that Anna and Jacob have undergone the several separations, splits and reunions to which we are witness in Like Crazy, they do seem to have aged before our eyes. The flesh is still young, but the spirits and ideals have taken a beating. They seem, like young soldiers back from the wars, somehow older than their years. This is expressed not just in dialog, but in the weariness with which it is ultimately spoken. Anna returns at last to Jacob in California. He offers to join her when she says she's going to freshen up with a shower. She agrees. The proposal and acceptance seem weighted more with obligation than passion. The expression, or lack thereof, on Anna's face when they embrace in the shower speaks to a kind of last shot of The Graduate, "what do we do now" sort of blankness. The immortal beginning of sonnet 116 reads, "Let not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments...." As Like Crazy wisely demonstrates, the most daunting stage of young love might just be the point at which impediments fall away and it's just she and him and the rest of their lives.

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

2011-11-09T15:25:00.000-08:00

Some twenty years after his death, it's still difficult to separate Serge Gainsbourg's outsize public persona from his music. Even casual fans, be they real or the precocious protagonists of films like Youth and Revolt and the recent Submarine, tend to use the playing of Gainsbourg tunes, their conspicuous appreciation of the chain-smoking Frenchman, as shortcuts to cool. Such fans, who might enjoy a spin of pop classics like "Bonnie and Clyde" or "Ford Mustang," probably don't realize the breadth of Gainsbourg's musical output. Starting within the fairly polite parameters of the French chanson - a tradition that he didn't take for a spin on the dance floor so much as hustle out into a dark, rain-glistening alley and have his way with - the man born Lucien Ginsburg went on to compose some of the pop/rock tunes for which he is best known, to work in jazz, calypso, funk, reggae, electronica and seemingly every genre known to man. This in addition to writing the soundtracks for more than 40 films, while directing and acting in few as well.

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life makes little attempt to separate the legend from the facts of the man and his music. Apparently, writer/director Joann Sfar had little interest in a standard biopic any more than he was interested in the facts of Gainsbourg's life. If the point has not been made emphaticlly enough by the time the credits are ready to roll in "Gainsbourg," there is a quote from the director, making it quite clear, "Gainsbourg transcends reality. I much prefer his lies to his truths."

Forty-year-old Joann Sfar is a prolific and oft-awarded French comic artist and comic book creator. By all accounts, he's also a Serge Gainsbourg fanatic. Sfar moved from Cannes to Paris in 1991, apparently with the express purpose of meeting the French icon. Unfortunately, he arrived three months late. Somehow, the fanatic had missed the national news of Gainsbourg's death. He had written an entire comic book about his idol, the original of which he put in the family mailbox, never to receive a response. Twenty years later and obviously much better established, he sent a sketchbook of film ideas to the Gainsbourg family. They responded warmly to Sfar's ideas and approved the project.

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is the first film written and directed by Sfar (he has since made a film version of his comic, The Rabbi's Cat). It's certainly informed both by his artistic point of view and his naked fandom of Gainsbourg. As for the latter, when you read interviews with the director, he touches upon the singer's affair with Brigitte Bardot with the same sort of gleeful pride evinced by Gainsbourg's father, Joseph (Razvan Vasilescu) in the film. What's not to love about the less-than-handsome son of Russian Jewish emigrants achieving stardom, saying anything he wants and bedding some of the great beauties of his time, if you're a Jewish kid growing up in France in the 70's and 80's? Gainsbourg himself probably wouldn't object to a story of his life based largely upon his fantasies and half-truths. Unfortunately, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, despite some lively moments and a great turn from Eric Elmosnino in the lead, stalls somewhere between musical, conventional biopic and its moments of animated and fantasy invention.

Cavorting as it does through some of the singer's greatest hits and numerous of his most resounding causes celebre, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life resembles another recent film about a notorious Frenchman going about his work in the 1960's and 70's, Jacques Mesrine. In the first of two films about the criminal and frequent prison escapee, Mesrine: Killer Instinct, viewers are rushed through a theme park of Mesrine's early career, as if all we need to see are the law-defying highlights. Fortunately, the overly-eager pacing was slowed to something slightly more illuminating in the second film, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1. One might well leave Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life thinking at least a second film is in order.

Even with the presence of giant puppets imposing themselves on the action, the main detour here from convention, the most suspect move on the part of Sfar in his approach to Gainsbourg's story is one of pacing. Any storyteller must decide when to compress and elongate time, here applying the temporal breaks and there judiciously hitting the gas. Unfortunately, Sfar drives the story like a kid very much behind the wheel for the first time and perhaps one out for a joyride after quickly downing a six pack.

The relative salad days from the early-60's through early-70's feel rushed through. This the period which saw the release of many of Gainsbourg's great singles and culminated with the concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson in 1971. Before that dash through the 60's, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life begins, logically enough, with its subjects's childhood. But here, the film seems to lag before it really gets started.

What seems a disproportionate amount of time is devoted to Gainsbourg's Parisian childhood. We see the assured young Lucien at art school in Montmartre, turning his head to ogle a nude model while the teacher tries to keep his attention directed more primly forward on a subject more in keeping with his age. Lucien, clad in black short pants and turtleneck, a kind of bohemian schoolboy chic, practically seduces the model later and accompanies her to a cafe. There they encounter the music hall legend, Frehel, whom young Gainsbourg apparently prefers to the great Piaf. The two singers would have in common a blazing, self-destructive arc through their respective eras. When the boy tells Frehel, "I know one of your songs, she hums a few notes of a tune familiar to many children in France. "Later," says Lucien, meaning her career. "The one I know is Coke (La Coco)." This a tune that touches upon the benefits of cocaine, while also devoting a verse to an incident in which the singer recounts a bit of tipsy foolishness in which she plunged a dagger into the heart of her pimp, before her friends, "like a silly tart." "That's no song for a boy!, " exclaims Frehel, clearly more amused than disturbed. "But I'm wiser than my years," replies Lucien, this seemingly as much for the benefit of those of us in the audience as a charmed old Frehel. Our young hero, perched on the bar, before which his skinny legs dangle in (of course) black socks, favors us with a robust rendition of the song, along with Frehel, the comely model and even a few musicians who join in. Oh Lucien, you little scamp.

Sfar, it would seem, dwells in the childhood of the man who would become Gainsbourg to give us all the psychological insight we need to move forward. The film's first scene has Lucien sitting next to a girl, the two alone on a beach. "May I put your hand in mine?," he asks. "No, you're too ugly," says the little girl matter-of-factly, before getting up and walking away. Already a stoic, Lucien takes up a cigarette butt and has a smoke. Had Sfar decided to begin his story in utero, one can only assume a tiny cigarette would been evident, dangling from embryonic lips.

Though his was not a particularly observant family, the young Gainsbourg was apparently strongly influenced by the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II and their demand that all Jews wear those notorious yellow badges with the Star of David. We see Lucien reporting to be the first to get his badge, part of a life-long pattern of flaunting, like his physical appearance, anything about his persona that might be deemed untoward, before the world can beat him to it.

The Nazi's, of course, undertook all manner of ghoulish caricature and fabrication in their campaign against the Jews. We see one such example, when Lucien walks down a darkened street. He sees a Nazi propaganda poster in a window, in which a Jew is portrayed (to these modern American eyes, at least) as some sort of cockroach-cum-Mr. Potato Head, all giant head, jug ears and hook nose, with tiny dangling arms. This being the imaginative 40's Parisian realm of Joann Sfar, the dread figure comes to life, emerging from the poster to trail Lucien down the street, like a runaway balloon from a hateful parade. This also being the young Gainsbourg of Sfar's fairy tale, the boy and ballooned head forge a kind of friendship, the hero as always embracing his outsider status and whatever caricature the world might thrust upon him.

While Lucien is attending a rural boarding school where he gains popularity amongst other boys with his knowledge of and skill at rendering the naked female form, word comes of a Nazi visit. The lad is hustled out into the countryside, where he is kept company by his giant friend. This, frankly, has the feel of warmed-over Maurice Sendak, the boy and the beastie propped up against a tree together. But young Gainsbourg refines the appropriated figure, turning the ill-intended Monsieur Pomme de Terre into a creature called La Guele (The Face). It's an evolution Lucien demonstrates to his sister with a page-flipping comic of his own creation. The adult Gainsbourg sometimes refers to his beak-nosed alter ego as Professor Flipus.

La Guele/Professor Flipus

To those who have seen Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, both the look of La Guele, as well as sweeping, slightly sinister movements will look familiar. The effects team from Pan's Labyrinth was hired for "Gainsbourg," as was actor Doug Jones, who portrayed the "Fauno" in del Toro's 2005 film. La Guele is essentially the adult Gainsbourg's cajoling id, encouraging bad habits but also pushing him - sometimes literally - to make bold moves, be they for the sake of career or (especially) toward the conquest of women.

Quite an impressive procession of women there were for Serge Gainsbourg: Greco, Bardot, Birkin, etc. Much as Sfar seems to experience a vicarious, historical thrill from his idol's womanizing, particularly the brief affair with Bardot, there is the recurring issue of pacing. One moment, he's a young married man, fairly diffident in response to the beckoning of famous chanteuse and bohemian Juliette Greco. In seemingly no time, he's nonchalantly receiving the bombshell Bardot at his artist's apartment.

The sequence with Bardot is one of the instances where Jfar's idea of "Gainsbourg" as being at least part musical film really comes to life. Laetitia Cotsa, given the formidable task of filling the shoes, not to mention the brassiere of Brigitte Bardot, exudes ample sexiness. We see her bare back as she stretches from beneath the covers in Gainsbourg's bed one morning after. "Are there any croissants?" she wonders. Sadly, there are none, but Serge has been busy while she slept, doing more than just chain smoking Gauloises and drinking whiskey, habits to which the ash tray and bottle on his piano attest. He's written three songs. They perform one together, "Comic Strip," Costa's Bardot flouncing around the piano, providing the song's trademark verse endings, "Shebam! Pow! Blop! Wiiizz!" It's a charming sequence, though not exactly a bold new approach to the musical. For that, one might refer back to Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (as long as you don't mind an angelic Bjork getting put through the grinder of the film's plot).

Another of the songs, presumably in addition to "Bonnie and Clyde," composed during the highly-productive night that Bardot spends with Gainsbourg is the notorious "Je t'aime...moi non plus." This in response to Bardot's request for a love song. Of course, "Je t'aime" is by no means a conventional love song. The film shows Gainsbourg and Bardot falling out over the possible release of the erotically-charged duet, which the composer eventually recorded with Jane Birkin and released early in 1969. The Bardot version wasn't released until 1986. Predictably enough, Sfar's film focuses on the controversy Gainsbourg and the record company knew would accompany the release of the song in which the couple sing, murmur and moan their way to sexual satisfaction.

What is lost - the director seemingly focused on the audacity and titillation of "Je T'aime" much as most of the predictable public response - is what a great song it is. Gainsbourg's and Birkin's voices loll over a hypnotic bed of Wurlitzer organ, not only speaking of and sighing in response to their sexual congress, but addressing the hopelessness of physical love. The song title itself, which translates "I love you...me neither," speaks to a contradiction that generally gets lost in all the excitement. Unfortunately, it's a complexity and level of artistic appreciation for which the enthusiastic fan Sfar seems to lack interest.

Gainsbourg: A Historic Life often moves from one such notorious episode to another, presupposing the audience has enough knowledge of Gainsbourg's public life to fill in the blanks. There is the meeting of Gainsbourg and a young France Gall, prior to his writing "Les Sucettes" ("Lollipops"; take a half second to guess at the double entendre) for her; the hubbub around the release "Je T'aime;" the recording of a controversial reggae version of "La Marseillaise." One late-career episode of controversy over which Sfar ellides is Gainsbourg's 1984 recording with then-twelve-year-old daughter Charlotte, "Lemon Incest" ("Inceste de Citron").

Charlotte Gainsbourg was actually slated to play her father in the film before deciding better of it, an incestuous bit of casting of which the old man would have no doubt approved. However, the most felicitous thing about this otherwise flawed version of Gainsbourg's life is the casting of Eric Elmosnino. Beyond his striking likeness of Gainsbourg, Elmosino adeptly conveys both the small-statured swagger as well as simmering self-loathing beneath the cool demeanor.

The Jamaican recording session - which included members of Bob Marley's band; the reggae legend was later infuriated to find that Gainsbourg had his wife singing salacious lyrics - is typical of Sfar's sometimes dubious, sometimes surprisingly unimaginative mise en scene. Neither the studio setting nor the happy, nodding reggae folk seem particularly credible. Similarly, the Parisian 60's and 70's settings, interior and exterior, involve neither a strong period evocation nor anything terribly interesting in their stead. Some of the Paris locations were apparently picked for their proximity to scenes in one of Sfar's favorite films, An American in Paris.

With Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, Sfar has said that he's essentially projecting his own obsessions as much as the factual particulars of Serge Gainsbourg's life. Unfortunately, those obsessions are not particularly original. The presence of La Guele actually does work more often than not. There's also an amusing scene in which Gainsbourg wakes up to find that he's sharing the Parisian flat of polymath and early advocate Boris Vian with the singing group, The Freres Jacques (Le Quatour), who just happen to be in full costume. They later perform Gainsbourg's "Le Poinconneur des Lilas" on stage.

The puppets and costumed figures are not standard biopic fare, but somehow more would seem to be expected from a visual artist. Beyond the attention-grabbing presence of the giant head, La Guele and the antic Freres Jacques, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is neither as bold as its subject nor mindful enough of his music. One need only recall the first three films of another visual artist turned filmmaker, Julian Schnabel, all biopics of a kind - Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - to begin to appreciate the possibilities of one artist doing justice to another on screen. Even better, watch Francois Girard's 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould to see an original film treatment that adapts itself to a brilliant, enigmatic subject.

Eric Elmosino as Serge Gainsbourg

You're likely to leave Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life with one or more of Serge Gainsbourg's great tunes in your head and hungry for more of his music. You might also desire another film, a better film, to do the music, the man and his singular life justice.

The man himself

Young Adult

2011-11-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

"Low hanging fruit," complains Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt) to visiting home town girl - or visiting "psychotic prom queen bitch," depending on your point of view - Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), as the two go about their sparring, if not unlikely friendship in Young Adult, the second collaboration of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody. This after their wildly successful Juno in 2007.

Mavis, going through something of a pre-midlife crisis, has returned to her old stomping grounds of Mercury, Minnesota to reclaim former boyfriend Buddy Slade. Never mind that Buddy is by all accounts a happily married man, or that his first child has recently appeared on the scene. In fact, it's the arrival of her old flame's baby, whose picture Mavis retrieves from her e-mail in box one day during a bout of writerly procrastination that ultimately inspires Mavis to jump in her Mini Cooper and speed out of Minneapolis in favor of her hometown, a place Mavis regards with the same level of warmth she reserves for most everything and everyone in her curdled existence.

I happened to see Young Adult recently at a surprise screening at the Music Box Theater in Chicago. This apparently part of a series of "pop-up" screenings for Young Adult, eschewing the normal fall festival circuit. Co-star Patton Oswalt took the stage, and after a bit of well-received imprompteau standup to the enthusiastic Saturday night crowd, introduced director Jason Reitman. Reitman, in turn, asked for a warm welcome for local girl made good, "Diablo Motherfuckin' Cody." Oh yes, I'm afraid, he did. Mr. Reitman then proceeded to say that he was sorry if anyone had come expecting Juno, because the film we were about to see was not it.

Actually, if marginally successful young adult writer Mavis Gary is not fellow Minnesotan Juno MacGuff about 15 years on, embittered by the experience of trying to make her way beyond the hermetically precious world set out in Juno to an inevitably disappointing existence beyond, she could certainly be her soul sister. Or perhaps her wicked if amusing aunt. Mavis definitely shares Juno's taste for soda in large quantity. During Young Adult's first scene and once later in the film, we see Mavis lustily sucking face with a two liter of the diet variety. There is also the same snarky wit, the one thing that Ms. Cody seems to execute with unqualified success.

But, the trouble with traveling, as Emerson said, is that you take yourself with you. Mavis can speed away from the big city as fast as she will in her Mini Cooper, lip syncing to Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" over and over, but once she arrives at her Mercury, Minnesota hotel, she's faced with the same old Mavis, however pretty and model thin she might still be. The same can be said for her creator. Ms. Cody has moved from the colorfully rendered world of Juno to the seemingly darker territory of Mavis' life crisis, but neither of these films have a great deal to do with the reality outside the movie house.

Amidst the kitsch of Tic-Tac's and its protagonist's hamburger telephone, Juno passed teen pregnancy off as something about as serious as a pesky case of acne. That film succeeded to the degree it did largely on the strength of Ellen Page's ability to express the Juno's snark as well as her wide-eyed humanity. She also had Ms. Cody feeding her some pretty sharp dialog while surrounded by a strong and likable cast. It was something of a dreamworld with an indie rock soundtrack, but not without its moments of intelligent fun.

Beyond its ironic title, Young Adult means to take us into a harsher, more adult world. But neither Mavis' warped quest nor the location where it plays out have a much more to do with reality than Juno. For what it's worth, the main characters' hoodies have changed colors like a 70's mood ring, from Green (Juno) to beige and sometimes black (Mavis).

Young Adult will probably be viewed by many as a kind of unflinching character study with moments of black humor. The latter might be true, but neither the character nor her actions make enough sense to be really taken seriously. There are plenty of edges to Mavis, sharp as Ms. Theron's cheekbones, but little else. And while a fair amount of traffic on Google or Facebook at any moment is probably devoted to people driven by loneliness, boredom or morbid curiosity, checking up on an old flame, even the most desperate are not going to drop what they're doing and head back to the home town to wrest the former boyfriend or girlfriend from their spouse and recently born infant.

A real character study of Mavis would probably stay in "The Mineapple," as a couple of Mercury residents still refer to the state's metropolis, much to the eye-rolling derision of Mavis. The well observed first few scenes offer a limited promise in that regard. We see Mavis asleep in her Hello Kitty sweatshirt while a reality show blares obliviously on a nearby television. Once awake, she shuffles into the kitchen and takes a few robust gulps of diet soda straight from the bottle. Looking very much the victim of a hangover, Mavis stands in her kitchen, the previous night's makeup fading toward the macabre. She remembers something and reaches under her sweatshirt to remove falsies, which involves a slightly painful peel, the objects having become a little too attached to her breasts over night. Later, as she tries to print the picture of Buddy's baby, she realizes her one of her toner cartridges is empty, we see our dainty heroine dribble a stream of saliva into the cartridge to get the job done. None of this to be confused with 21st-century anthropology, but there's an amusing candor to these details, which seems a good case of the Ms.Cody writing what she knows.

Alas, we don't stick around in the Twin Cities, but get to ride shotgun on Mavis' road to nowhere, or at least Mercury, to Ms. Gary pretty much one in the same. This ill-advised mission - and Mavis might as well be swirling above Mercury, skywriting SURRENDER BUDDY with a broomstick - is really the stuff of farce or black comedy. And that is not necessarily a bad idea. Skewering our culturally sacred institutions of marriage and parenthood would be as bold as it is rich with possibility.

There are moments when Young Adult wiggles its toes in that generally off-limits pool. After Mavis and Matt's first meeting upon her return to Mercury, during which many rounds from the bar are downed before they go their separate, if unsteady ways, Mavis reveals her master plan to Matt. When he tries to dampen her enthusiasm by mentioning that "I'm pretty sure that he's married with a kid on the way," Mavis responds. "It's here. I'm cool with it. I mean, I've got baggage too." The statement is bookended by Mavis' final appeal to Buddy, "We can go to the city like we always planned." "Mavis, I'm a married man." "I know. We can beat this thing together."

Oh, for the courage or ability to really jump into that pool. Unfortunately, Cody and Reitman seem to lack both. That's a shame, because in Charlize Theron, the writer and director have the actress to pull it off. Of the nominations or awards that might come the way of Young Adult this upcoming Oscar season, Ms. Theron actually deserves consideration, playing a monster of a more everyday sort. The fleeting expression on Mavis' face when regarding Buddy's child at his front door, the slightest movement of nose and squinting of eyes, still manages to scream disdain.

Mavis seems all too ready to launch an assault on overly-precious notions of babies and parenthood. Perhaps she would like to steal Buddy away and have children with him, but Cody's sketchy characterization makes any such speculation difficult. In the midst of her climactic meltdown on the Slade's front lawn, seemingly the entire town, including her parents in attendance, as if at an intervention, Mavis does state that she once carried Buddy's child only to miscarry. But at that moment, she's freely appropriating not only Matt's words (just as most the writing we see her do consists of overheard bits of conversation from teenagers in fast food restaurants woven with threads from her Buddy delusion) but his problems below the waist. Mavis seems much more the type to consume than nurture her young at the first sign of difficulty. During a reluctant, pre-meltdown visit to her childhood home, Mavis' mother (Jill Eikenberry) tries to dissuade her daughter from pursuing Buddy. "That baby of his is just charming," she says, the implication obvious. "Have you seen it? Up close?" Mavis responds.

As for the location of these shenanigans, as Juno might say, Mercury, Minnesota is essentially Anyblandhometown, USA. Mavis drives down the main drag one of her first evenings, looking out on the endless string of franchise bars and restaurants with disappointed scorn, as if she (and Ms. Cody by extension) is the first person to note and find displeasure with the trend. She went back to Mercury, Minnesota, and her city was gone. There is a fleeting, promising glimpse of a hybrid Pizza/Taco Bell/KFC, prompting me to hope that Das Racist's "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" might break into the soundtrack. But that would have been rather obvious, I suppose. And not in keeping with Mavis' decidedly retro inclinations in Young Adult.

Mavis finds some music presumably more to her taste when she enters The Village Saloon her first evening in town. It seems as close to a dive still left in Mercury. As she walks in, The Replacements' "Achin' To Be" plays on the bar's juke box. While this is a welcome nod to Minnesota's greatest musical sons, it seems unlikely, Paul Westerberg's voice emanating from the speakers in one of the state's old man bars. Even less likely in such a venue that the next song would be The Lemonheads "It's a Shame About Ray," as is the case in Young Adult. "Remember the 90's?!" Mavis later exclaims to Buddy. The bar operates in the same reality as that magical Mini Cooper, which repeatedly plays Teenage Fanclub not on an iPod or even CD player, but via a mix tape. Go to the Mini site, build your own car, try to make one with a cassette player and let me know how that works for you.

The initial boozy high school reunion between Mavis and Matt takes place after she claims a stool at the bar in The Village Saloon. Matt reminds her that the two had adjoining lockers back in the day. The egocentric Mavis remembers neither that fact nor even the existence of Matt while reluctantly drawn into conversation. Finally, the right association clicks into place, "You're the hate crime guy," she says, with some hint of a smile, finally placing the hobbled Matt in the human race. The hate crime was a high school beating of Matt by rampaging jocks who mistook him for gay, leaving him somewhat mangled both of left leg and penis.

The central relationship of Young Adult turns out to not Mavis and Buddy, but Mavis and Matt, the former antipodean high school figures. Matt operates not only as the kindly if sarcastic conscience to Mavis, but as the story's safety valve, lest the hell-bent Mavis take us somewhere truly dangerous. As Matt, Patton Oswalt fares well enough bringing life to what could easily be more plot device than character. The exchanges between Mavis and Matt do have their moments, as when he responds to hearing her plan to win back Buddy, "I would keep all of this to yourself. I would...I would find a therapist," he counsels, eliciting a rare laugh from Mavis. Otherwise, Oswalt is made to deliver tension clearing set-up lines like, "I'm a fat geek. I know what a zombie is."

Implausible as is the entire story line, Mavis' quest is taken to a kind of logical, mortifying extreme, the aforementioned meltdown in front of the Slade's home. But Young Adult has yet a couple of more strange turns to take. Mavis goes, full of self-loathing and remorse, to the only place left in Mercury where she has an audience. There is consummation between she and Matt, the popular girl and the geek from high school hooking up at last. The is probably meant to be a bold and humane move, but really just amounts to more awkward implausibility. At least the scene ends realistically, with Mavis - repeating a move we saw her make with another unwanted partner - extricating herself from beneath Matt's flabby arm and slinking away.

Mavis slinks only as far as the kitchen, where Young Adult's strangest and least believable conversation takes place. Matt's sister, Sandra (Collette Wolf), who like Matt, gazed on Mavis from afar in high school to little notice, offers an unexpected pep talk. She convinces Mavis that her remorse, her unusual slide back toward humanity, is all wrong. Everyone in Mercury is ugly and stupid. Mavis is still beautiful and great. And won't she take her back to "The Minneapple" with her? While one might revert to old roles in the presence of acquaintances from high school (or just family, for that matter), neither Sandra nor this scene have more than a tenuous connection to reality. It's not real, it's not particularly funny. Like much of Young Adult there is just a strange, unsatisfying grasping after tone.

None-the-less, Mavis is given a reprieve on despair and returns to a comfortably scornful state of mind until she checks out of the hotel and sees her banged-up Mini, the victim of a long night's drinking and indifferent job of parking. All of this brings to mind Mr. Reitman's Up in the Air (2009). Up in the Air seemed such a work of its time. So much about the film was right in execution but lacking it its would-be profundity. Highlighting the pain afflicting many in the country then, as now, the film showed considerable sympathy for the newly-unemployed while telling the story of Ryan Bingham, a man resolutely unattached, who none-the less tried to perform his role as a "corporate downsizer" with professionalism. As with Young Adult, Up in the Air is like two separate films, neither eliciting a commitment from writer or director. There's a strong whiff of exploitation to Reitman's decision to utilize real people a second time in the film, as they explain how their families keep them going. All very nice and sincere, but it has little to do with what occurs in the film at that point. As for Ryan Bingham, he's given his moralistic comeuppance and is left staring blankly at an airport departure board. But then there are the last words we hear Clooney utter as Bingham: "The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over." Huh? I'm still waiting for someone to explain that bit of second rate poetry to me, or how it might relate to the supposed arc of the film's character.

In the end, Young Adult is every bit as muddled than Up in the Air. One is taken on a dark ride, given a few mordant good laughs, ultimately made to shake their head at poor Mavis Gary and walk away thinking some sort of edgy cinematic experience has been had (I would love to have five dollars for every time the word edgy will be too generously utilized in future reviews in which Young Adult is given an undeserving pass).

Reitman and Cody are like two high school kids who want to strike their pose of rebellion and still be voted homecoming king and queen when all is said and done. Young Adult might well enhance their popularity. But as for the efforts to produce something dark and daring, they're not rebels without a cause so much as - and here we return to the words of Mr. Westerberg - rebels without a clue.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-11-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

"How far are we?"
"From what?"
"Yesterday."

That exchange between sisters Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) and Lucy (Sarah Paulson) determines that the former is one day and some 300 miles removed from the place she fled, somewhere in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. Martha's story to Lucy is that she has left a boyfriend who lied to her, after disappearing from contact for nearly two years. The truth is that she has left what can safely be described as a cult, much as the effects on her psyche have come along for the ride and will continue to make themselves known during a troubled stay at the vacation home of Lucy and her architect husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy).

One of many strengths of Martha Marcy May Marlene, a memorable first feature from writer/director Sean Durkin, is how un-cult-like the rural farm of Patrick (John Hawkes) and his followers is at first look made to seem, just as benevolent and accepting as it might to any new recruit or lost soul. Most of the story in Martha Marcy May Marlene takes place after Martha has managed to steal away from the complex early one morning, flee and hide in neighboring woods and finally make a faltering call to her sister from a nearby town. Perhaps the only flaw in the carefully woven fabric of the film's story is Martha's escape, found as she is by one of the cult's young men, Watts (Brady Corbet) while scarfing a meal in a town cafe after her early morning flight. After a brief conversation, the simple questions and actions - Watts takes up the meal that Martha has abruptly stopped eating - underlined with menace, the young man allows Martha to stay in town on her own and wait the many hours it necessarily would have taken Lucy to show up. As we later learn, the cult leader, Patrick, has more than a passing interest in keep "my favorite" nearby and quiet.

The story of Martha Marcy May Marlene goes forward from Martha's arrival at the sprawling lakeside home of her sister and brother-in-law (they were married while she was incommunicado), through a series of flashbacks that flow seamlessly from the younger sister's sudden, uneasy presence in the house and lives of the older sister and British husband. Some prosaic moment - cooking, cleaning, jumping into the lake - triggers a specific memory of Martha's stay at the rural base of the cult. It's a common enough thing in film these days, stories told partially or largely in flashback. But like so much about the storytelling and photography here, Mr. Durkin displays a grace which belies his limited experience as a writer and director of feature films.

The flashbacks parallel Martha's growing discomfort and ultimate trauma at what occurs in the group in which the slight figure of the middle-aged Patrick clearly looms large. There are at first the slightly jarring aspects of life with the group, all of the young women sleeping on mattresses placed on the floor of a common room, sharing clothes which are hung unceremoniously upon a couple of metal coat racks, being made to wait for meals until the men have first eaten. Then there is the matter of the common work. When Martha admits to her lack of sewing skills, she's told, "Don't worry, we'll find your your role. It's always takes people time to find their role in a new family." This one of the group's standby scripts, which Martha finds herself later repeating verbatim to a yet another girl who has come into their midst.

While increasingly chilling vignettes of cult life emerge in Martha's flashbacks, we see her struggle at what passes for normalcy in her sister's world. When encouraged to go for a swim, she sheds all of her clothing and jumps into the lake to swim naked until called back by her chagrined sister. During one of many evenings of fitful sleep, Martha walks quietly into her sister's room and lays down on an open bit of mattress while Lucy and Ted are having sex in the same bed. The couple are, of course, more than a little taken aback. Finally, Martha is made to say "That's not normal, it's private," repeating the words of her exasperated sister, as if learning, or re-learning the concept of privacy. Brief scenes of cult life show its mainly young members not only sleeping but having sex with no regard to other bodies similarly occupied close by.

Martha's attempt to join her sister and brother-in-law in bed says much, not only about her state of mind, but the knotty relationship between the sisters. Lucy doesn't kick Martha out of bed (a grumbling Ted gets to spend the night on the couch), but compassion fatigue is clearly setting in.

We know only that the sisters lost their parents while relatively young. Martha was forced to live with an aunt while Lucy was away at college. Even the fairly callous Ted acknowledges that life with Aunt Dora must have been unpleasant. Lucy expresses guilt that she didn't do more for her sister at the time. Clearly, both sisters have been stunted by their shared experience, much as they have reacted to it differently. For Lucy, there is the veneer of her safe, well-to-do existence, which hardly hides the emotional chill beneath. In Martha's case, the cost of her outward seeking for purpose, affirmation - "I am a teacher and a leader and you just never let me be that! she yells at a dumbfounded Lucy during one of their more heated exchanges, repeating words with which Patrick had plied her - and unconditional love have left Martha even more damaged. Mr. Durkin's script reveals Lucy as neither yuppie shrew nor saint. There is instead an obvious, though frustrated love tempered with the limits of her own compassion. Sarah Paulson is made to paint with rather muted colors in playing Lucy, but her performance is hardly less vivid the film's more emotional or charismatic turns.

The sinister charisma is provided by John Hawkes as Patrick At first look, the role of the cult leader might seem just a variation on Mr. Hawkes searing work in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone. Hawkes' appearance was actually more Manson-like as Teardrop in Granik's Ozarks-set film, distinguished as he was by a shaggy beard, cryptic facial markings and dead eyes. Both characters operate with a mesmerizing kind of control, but Patrick's approach, especially with young women in the group is to come on gentle, with a mixture of fatherly acceptance and mysterious sexuality. Gone is the lower register growl with which Hawkes voiced Teardrop. Here, the voice is gentler, but the menace lurks. You might well believe Martha when she assures her sister that the fictional boyfriend whom she left never hit her; such is Patrick's control that he seems never to have to resort to violence himself. But there is also the matter of each young woman's initiation into the cult, the "special night" as Martha's friend Zoe assures her. The special night is essentially the group's euphemism for rape, involving as it does a young woman being put into a white robe, drugged and eventually taken from behind by Patrick. Martha endures this and later guides a newer member, Sarah, through the process. It's a testament to Mr. Hawkes' skill that Patrick is such a distinct character, not only from his previous work, but from the likes of other guitar-strumming figures like Manson and David Koresh. Look also (or again) at his work in Me and You and Everyone We Know, playing such a different kind of man, and you begin to get a sense of John Hawkes' range.

As Martha's flashbacks grow more disturbing, so do some of the group's activities take on an eerie familiarity to that of the Manson Family. As one nighttime scene begins, a large, clearly well-appointed home is seen in middle distance. A few young people start to appear in the foreground. They begin to throw pebbles, or perhaps, nuts or cones from trees on to the roof and at the windows of the house to distract the owner as they approach the residence. As is the case writer/director Durkin's slow build of many scenes, we're not sure if this is past or present. The tension is heightened by the fact that Martha by this time in the film, in a moment of weakness, has called the cult to check on her friend, Zoe. When we hear (and later see) the protocol used by the cult when answering the phone, all women using the name Marlene, the last name in the film's title is explained. Upon meeting Martha, as he does with all the young women, Patrick gave her a new name, Marcy May, this just a part of the process of breaking down the identity.

As the kids approach the house and someone with fair hair can be seen in the interior of the house, we don't know at first if that figure is perhaps Lucy and this the cult coming back for Martha. We have by this time seen Martha plagued by mystery sounds on the roof of her sister's house during her jittery attempts at sleep. The first home invasion ends with no harm, just a few item a stolen and the owner toyed with, moved about the house and at last view drawn to a treadmill that has been turned on. A second break-in is even more the Mansonesque "creepy-crawl," Martha being made to sneak through a window, and let Patrick and others in. The owner catches them this time and an extremely tense conversation follows as the unlucky man tries to adopt the right tone to get the group out of his house. When violence comes, it's not from Patrick but from Katie (Maria Dizzia), something of an elder female in the group, the wielding of a knife shocking not only because the carefully built tension has been quickly broken, but because the woman's fairly blank demeanor to this time.

Katie's actions are particularly redolent of the Manson women, minus the infernal courtroom sniggering. As Manson "family" member Patricia Krenwinkel said, speaking of the Tate-LaBianca murders to Diane Sawyer in a 1994 interview, "And at that point, I felt so dead inside it didn't really matter." Martha is not dead inside and finds herself more shaken by the incident than anyone else present. She's finally confronted by Patrick who breaks in on her in a bathroom, pushes her against a wall but then comforts her, with bits of cobbled philosophy, "Death is the most beautiful part of life...fear creates total awareness...and awareness is a form of love. That's Nirvana...death is pure love."

Much as she accepts the comfort, Martha can't digest the crazy logic. She might be a seeker, but she's obviously not a fool. Martha is forced to flee, but to what? One of the undercurrents of Durkin's story, as subtle as much of his direction, carries one to the conclusion that it's not only a personal void that leads young people to go looking for love and acceptance in some very wrong places; there's a cultural void as well. Ted might dismiss all of Martha's behavior as "fucking insane," but some of her questions and critiques hit a little too close to the house beautiful, as when she wonders why just two people need such a big house, or is bold enough to point out the inherent emptiness of a materialistic existence. She might be parroting phrases she's acquired from Patrick or someone else, but we all come by our words and ideas from without. Unlike the cult members and the two representatives of supposed sanity in the film, Martha asks questions. It's an admirable quality if not necessarily a recipe for contentment. Or even sanity.

Beyond the presence of John Hawkes, Martha Marcy May Marlene, like Winter's Bone is also something of a coming out party for a young actress. Writer/director Sean Durkin certainly gives Elizabeth Olsen every chance to succeed. His script and direction sometimes require only simple actions from Olsen which tell us much about her state of mind, barely touching eggs with a fork when she first sits down to eat with Lucy and Ted (she's not used to eating in the presence of men) or curling into a fetal position on a bed in her sister's home shortly after her arrival, laying on top of the bedspread without bothering to get beneath the covers. The relatively short takes probably help as well; Ms. Olsen might be asked to carry the tune of the story, but never for too long at once. But as the title suggests, this is a movie squarely about Martha and her splintered identity. Just as is the case with Martha, there's ultimately no place for Elizabeth Olsen to hide. Hers might not be a great performance, but it seems at most every point compelling and true.

"Do you ever have that feeling where you can't tell if something is a memory or if it's something you dreamed?," Martha asks her sister during one of their disconnected conversations. Lucy, sadly, and is often the case, can provide no empathy for her troubled sister, much as her sympathy restlessly seeks a way in. Martha Marcy May Marlene is ultimately a very personal story. The troubled Martha will have to go it alone. And as the funny double negative goes, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. But it's not so funny in Martha's case. It's a reality that unites memory, dreams and waking life alike. The film ends in an abrupt, perfect moment of ambiguity, giving the audience an almost palpable sense of the uncertainty faced by its young heroine. The feeling of unease is likely to follow one out of the theater. Even after that passes, Martha Marcy May Marlene will likely deserve long-term consideration like few American films released this year.

50/50

2011-10-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

There's really no subject more fearful than stage four back cancer. Actually...technically...there is no such disease. This does not stop Kyle (Seth Rogen) from using his friend Adam's recent cancer diagnosis to try to score chicks for them both. Kyle divulges the "back cancer" to a bookstore clerk, playing the sensitive friend to help his friend, "the little guy over there in the cap," purchase self-help books. This wins Kyle a date with the clerk. But before more ill-gotten nookie can be had, the date is interrupted when Kyle sees Adam's girlfriend, Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) getting friendly with a another man at a gallery show while his ill friend lays forlornly on his couch waiting for her. As identified by Kyle, Rachael is another Big C in Adam's life. While not exactly a paragon of selfless friendship, Kyle is at least loyal and a rare source of candor. The friend and soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend are just two dubious parts of Adam's very shaky support system, as he faces a battle with a malignant tumor growing along his spine in 50/50.

One can only hope that screenwriter Will Reiser had a more reliable network of support when dealing with his own cancer. Reiser was diagnosed with malignant schwannoma at the ageof 24. It’s the same rare form of the disease that afflicts Adam in 50/50, the ungainly nomenclature only a part of the surprise ofhis diagnosis when he is tested because of recurring back pain. Of course, it’s the cancer itself which is the difficult thing tocomprehend. Adam has to stop his doctor,who’s speaking into a micro tape recorder with the dispassionate speed of aradio announcer running through a list of commodity prices, when he hears theword malignant. After the doctor repeatsthe feared word and delineates the grim prognosis, Adam's perspective toward the physician goes out of focus and ensuing words are reduced to formless sound; both constitute a kind of shocked perceptive static. When he can speak, it is still from disbelief. "I don't smoke. I don't drink. I recycle., " he says.

While 50/50 is not strictly Reiser's story, it's informed by his experience in mainly the best of ways, particularly with the hospital sequences. This ranges from the bewilderment of facing the end of one's existence while dealing with doctors, nurses and technicians for whom your potentially terminal disease is but another case, another day at the office, to the juxtaposition of prosaic and downright funny moments amidst the most profound of struggles. The humor is often provided by Kyle, as when he provides typically unfiltered commentary when Adam decides to stay one step ahead of his chemotherapy and cut his hair before it falls out. The hair, as it turns out, was no great loss, as Adam was already suffering with a regrettable sensitive boy haircut, this part of a somewhat meek, nail-biting persona (we see him early on refuse to jog through an empty intersection against a "don't walk" signal while a female jogger strides past him without a second thought) that finds more of an edge in its adversity.

Adam does find some consolation with chemotherapy buddies, Alan and Mitch (felicitously casting here, with Phillip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer). "C'mon, get high with us, man!" implores the 80-ish Alan, offering Adam some of his wife's pot macaroons. The normally sober Adam relents. The montage in which he leaves chemotherapy and walks out of the hospital, blissfully stoned, is one of the film's best. Adam laughs while walking by the would-be inspiration of a cancer ward mural and then encounters an orderly pushing a gurney that bears not a patient, but a corpse in a body bag. It's a moment in which most mainstream films would have their character scared straight back to sobriety. Adam walks a few steps with an ambivalent look on his face until he's clear of the gurney. Then he begins to giggle. There's a lot of 50/50's spirit in that moment. It's not a matter of disrespect at the sanctity of life (or dying), just an honest acknowledgement of the absurdity that often lurks in unexpected places along the way .

Gordon-Levitt, a pliable, intuitive actor, plays the full gamut of emotions Adam is made to experience without ever trying too hard to sell any of them. This is as true of his typically polite, low-key personality as it is of the veritable primal scream he delivers from the seat of Kyle's car, finally going off on his friend and expressing all the pent up anger and fear on the eve of surgery which is essentially do or die.

Will Reiser not only fought the same cancer that besets Adam in 50/50, but also had a Seth-Rogen-type friend whose ability to find the humor in his situation was apparently a source of great light amid the darkness. In fact, he had Seth Rogen himself as a friend, the two having met on the set of Da Ali G Show. One can't help wonder if Rogen's shortcomings as a friend have been amplified slightly for the sake of the film version of the friends' story. One would hope that Rogen never kept Reiser, weak from chemotherapy, up late for the hope of bedding women they picked up, as Kyle does to Adam in 50/50, but who knows. Certainly, Reiser's script overreaches itself is when it feels the need to telegraph Kyle's virtue as a friend. Adam is more than a little surprised to find one of those self-help books in his friend's house, complete with underlinings and annotations. He should be surprised, it's not a realistic touch. The minor revelation, which mirrors the arc of Rogen's character in Knocked Up, at first joking off the responsibilities of impending parenthood, before dutifully hitting the pregnancy books, is hardly necessary. Childish egocentrism aside, Kyle's loyalty to and love for Adam had been well enough established by the time the book is found.

However real to life, Kyle is another chance for Rogen to play the wisecracking man child. He may have little else in him, but the actor (and producer here) continues to wear it well. His irreverence, along with the developing relationship between Adam and his feckless therapist, Katherine (Anna Kendrick) provide 50/50 with a necessary buoyancy to counteract the weight of the Adam's struggle with the dread disease. Ultimately, as Seth Rogen, Seth Rogen is winningly Rogen-like.

Some of Kyle's most humorous broadsides occur at the expense of Adam's girlfriend, Rachael. This is especially the case after she is found out cozying up to the odd, Jesus-like figure at the gallery show at which Kyle photographs her in the act with his cell phone camera. She might not deserve the caustic appellation Kyle hurls at her (at the expense of his offended date with the woman from the book store), but the struggling painter is not going to score high on the balloting for girlfriend of the year either. As Rachael, Bryce Dallas Howard is given a capacity for empathy roughly consistent with her China doll beauty. Kyle gets to have his fun when the girlfriend is caught in her deception. Adam too gets his moment of revenge when telling Rachael to "get the fuck off my porch," when she attempts a later reconciliation. However, when Adam and Kyle subsequently go about a ritualistic destruction of one of Rachael's less-than-inspiring canvases with everything from projectiles to fire, a sequence in which director Jonathan Levin even resorts to a gleeful split screen, Rachael seems to have become the embodiment of cancer, stage four malignant girlfriend, excised, fortunately, more easily than that tumor growing along Adam's spine. Meanwhile, 50/50 has temporarily, as the English say, lost the plot.

Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt exorcising one of the Big C's in 50/50. If only getting rid of cancer were this easy.

There's no such lack of subtlety in the two other relationships that play out with Adam and the women in his life. As a therapist, Adam draws the fresh-faced Katherine, whom Anna Kendrick referred to in a recent interview as "...what I lovingly referred to on set as the worst therapist in the world." She at first seems just another almost laughably inept member of Adam's would-be support system. Still working on her doctorate, Adam is but her third patient. As with Natalie Keener in Up In The Air, the therapist is a young woman whose intelligence surpasses her life experience. In both films, Kendrick navigates that awkward gap in a brittle but sympathetic fashion.

Adam would seem to prefer that his mother (Anjelica Huston) stay out of the picture all together, so intent does she seem to act like...well, a mother. Huston is another sure bit of casting, a bundle of frustration and repressed affection. One of 50/50's great strengths is the fleshing out of this relationship. We see a weary Adam ignore a call from his mother on his cell phone, only to hear his land line ring a few moments later. She also embarrasses her son at a doctor's office visit, taking issue with a nurse and complaining at the temperature. Oh, mom. But Adam is also reminded by Katherine, able finally to transcend psychology textbook bromides as a rapport develops between the two, that his mother has "a husband who can't talk to her and a son who won't." She continues, not without a sly smile, "Doesn't that make you kind of a dick.."

The natural, well-observed and sometimes prickly course of these two relationships help 50/50 build considerable emotional momentum. After that scream in Kyle's car after his first very memorable few hundred yards of driving, Adam finally utilizes the private cell phone number Katherine had earlier given him, that simple exchange one of many difficult and often funny negotiations the two make in the progression from hopeless therapist and possibly dying patient to something more deeply satisfying. It's simple, tender, but powerful conversation. Gordon-Levitt and Kendrick play it to near-perfection and could hardly be more likable. The crescendo follows shortly thereafter as Adam is prepared for surgery the next morning. Panic sets as the anesthesia is administered but fortunately the other woman in Adam's life is right where she needs to be. Only the most hard of heart will be unaffected by this particular mother and child reunion.

Aside from the story of one man's struggle with cancer, what 50/50 wisely demonstrates is how most of us react to tragedies without by gauging them against our personal universes within. Rare is the person who can set aside their own emotions and be exactly what another person needs in a time of crisis. Adam has no such saintly figure on which to rely, much as he comes to know how much his mother and friend love him, just how much they can be counted on. Faced with a host of inept consolers, the main, growing light in his dark tunnel is the relationship developing with Katherine, if he can live long enough to explore it.

On the strength of Levitt's performance, with a story that avoids veering into sentimentality or grimness, 50/50 is easily the feel-good cancer film of the year. You'll laugh. You'll probably cry. I'm quite serious. Even more serious than stage four back cancer.

Drive

2011-10-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

The laconic hero of Drive is not just a man without a name, the lonely fellow is a man without a decade. "The Driver" (Ryan Gosling) sports an anachronistic white satin jacket through much of Drive, which is announced in titles whose pink script is consciously reminiscent of those of Risky Business. Only The Driver's first getaway car, a late model Chevy Impala, ties him to the present . "The most popular car in California," announces Shannon (Bryan Cranston), the mechanic who sets up the young man with the souped-up getaway vehicle for the first job we see The Driver perform with icy precision.

The first action sequence during which Gosling's mysterious character is wheel man for two robbers gets Drive off to a bracing, promising start. Before the Impala starts roaring along the streets and ducking into underpasses of nighttime Los Angeles, before The Driver pulls on his taut, leather gloves and inserts a trademark toothpick into his mouth, the job is set up in rare burst of dialog from the protagonist: "...hundred thousand streets in this city, you don't need to know the route. You give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window. Those five minutes, I'm yours. Minute either side, we're on our own." Those words spoken in a spartan room in which a map of Los Angeles is spread on the bed, constitute The Driver's business code. His terms are met during the film's first job, but just barely.

By the time the second robber jumps into the Impala, the police are on the way. An inevitable chase ensues. Everyone is on their game at this point, driver, actor and director alike. It's good, brisk, well-executed chase sequence, as The Driver eludes the police on the ground and in the air, by quickly darting behind a truck and later hiding beneath an elevated highway to conceal himself from a helicopter, the action informed by a police radio in The Driver's car. And at this point, director Nicolas Winding Refn seems to know what he's about. All the better that this crisp action take place in Los Angeles by night. There is a darkness to the L.A. Basin much more than a literal quality, a lack of sunlight. It often seems to speak to an existential vacuum, a loneliness that howls as ruthlessly as a Santa Anna wind. If the Lizard King got nothing else right, he pegged Los Angeles: it is a city of night. Drive's early scenes give us some sense of the loneliness of both person and place.

What's more than a little incongruous in this early action is Drive's soundtrack. The song we hear during the opening credits, "Nightcall," by French musician Kavinsky certainly sets the tone. It's one carried on consistently by a sampling of fairly obscure synth. pop and similar music composed for the film by Cliff Martinez. With the soundtrack, as with the titles and that satin jacket, Mr. Refn's taste betrays him and the story he's trying to tell. One can't help but wonder if the music is intended ironically at at times. However, interviews with the director reveal him to be anything but an ironic man. He is, admittedly, a child of the 1980's. Hence, the the titles appropriated from Risky Business, all the jarring synth. pop and that white jacket. In opening his 1980's time capsule, Refn retrieved a few tokens of the decade best left buried. We should perhaps be grateful that the Members Only jacket with its trademark passants does not make a cameo appearance.

There's plenty of synth-driven music from the early 1980's that could have better accompanied such a story, whether used ironically or not. Whither New Order (or even better, stretching back into the late-70's, their darker forerunner, Joy Division) or The Cure? Beyond those obvious choices, it was a decade rich with music that spoke of doomed love often delivered in a bouncing, deceptively melodic package. All of this might seem beyond the point, this dwelling on The Driver's silly jacket or the film's curious musical signposts, but it speaks to the director's inability to reconcile very contradictory elements of the story and production design. Refn cites influences as disparate as John Hughes to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the fairly tales of the Brothers Grimm to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name characters from his spaghetti westerns. All well and good, but you have to make those influences coalesce. This is where Drive fails.

That's a shame, because in Gosling, Refn has something of an Alain Delon for our time. All apologies to the redoubtable Mr. Delon, who still draws air. The French actor worked his way from criminal to cop through a few collaborations with Jean Pierre Melville, most notably and perhaps iconically in Le Samourai. The two actors share sharp features, blue eyes and the presence to communicate a character without saying a great deal. Mr. Gosling is certainly given little to work with in the way of dialog in Drive; apparently he and Refn whittled his utterances down to a minimal essence. And yet, both the innocence and coiled potential for violence come across credibly. Gosling manages this like few of his generation can. It's a shame he's not given a better, ahem...vehicle for his considerable talent.

This sort of thing done right. Alain Delon in Le Samourai.

The problems with Drive are not just matters of soundtrack and wardrobe. The would-be romance between The Driver and Irene (Carey Mulligan) seems to belong to another film. Irene, raising her son down the hall from The Driver while the boy's father completes a prison sentence, is even more of a cipher than our friend in the satin jacket with the scorpion on the back. It's certainly possible to present a romance in which very little is said, as with Wong Kar-wai's swoony, languid In The Mood. There, it's almost all a matter of suggestion and mood. With Drive, he's the strong, silent type and she's embodiment of purity that must be saved. Sadly, there's little more to Irene. Mulligan is largely wasted, but at least she's given more to do than Christina Hendricks, who doesn't get to say much of anything before she's slapped around and finds herself on the wrong end of a confrontation with a shotgun.

It's a man's world: Carey Mulligan and Christina Hendricks given not a lot to do in Drive.

Drive fares better where Hossein Amini's script is given room to breathe and some of the the supporting cast are able to lend Drive much needed grit and weight. As is often the case, the forces of evil produce more interesting characters. The dark side here is led by two money men and gangsters, Nino (Ron Perlman) and Bernie (Albert Brooks). Brooks is a bit of a revelation as Bernie. The generally comedic actor and filmmaker has made minor digressions from his self-constructed neurotic type before, but nothing quite like this. Both Bernie and Nino are somewhat wearied, middle-aged gangsters and probably like to think themselves beyond the dirty work of their trade. But when The Driver agrees to help Irene's husband, only recently out of jail, rob a pawn shop to appease thugs who had protected him in prison, the job goes predictably wrong. The Driver and Blanche (the Hendricks character) barely escape after Irene's husband is gunned down. They have unwittingly stolen a million dollars that belongs to East Coast mafia. This is going to reflect badly on the West Coast boys unless they can reclaim the money and silence everyone involved. Bernie has to get hands and blades on. Murderously wielding an antique straight razor or sizable knife turns out to be a rich and heretofore untapped region of Albert Brooks' acting ability. Who knew?

Shannon's relationship with The Driver is an ambiguous mix of employer, father figure and pimp. The garage owner and would-be (the operative words in his loser's existence) NASCAR crew chief came by his limp when a past transaction with Nino did not end well. He convinces Bernie to front money to purchase a race car with which he expects The Driver to carry them all to glory, but the heist gone wrong destroys the plan and dooms him as well. The chattery Shannon is Drive's richest character. Cranston plays him with relish.

In both title and premise, Drive invites obvious comparisons to Walter Hill's 1978 film, The Driver, another story about a mysterious wheel man for hire, going about his business in Los Angeles by night. Drive actually compares favorably to The Driver. But then, The Driver is not a very good film (much as Walter Hill clearly knew his way around a car chase). Despite the substantial talents brought to bear, or squandered, as the case may be, Drive is kids' stuff.

One would do better to watch those Man With No Name Eastwood films directed by Sergio Leone, or any of the cooly elegant cops and robbers films of Jean Pierre Melville. Mr. Refn might do well to watch Takeshi Kitano's Fireworks (Hana-bi) from 1997. Kitano, a man of many talents, manages in Fireworks combine elements of a highly violent Yakuza film, a tender love story, deadpan humor and his own paintings into something vastly more coherent and original than Drive manages to accomplish. It may be partly a matter of taste. It's also a matter of having the rare talent to combine seemingly irreconcilable elements into something that works as a whole.

As for Gosling and his Driver, he's not a fairy tale character in the latter stages of Drive so much as another 80's staple: the unstoppable killing machine. This reminiscent of how Michael Mann's more accomplished Collateral, also set largely in Los Angeles by night, comes off the rails in its last reel when the hitman played by Tom Cruise becomes a force that little short of a bazooka can equalize. To dispatch Nino, The Driver first disguises himself in a prosthetic mask stolen from a film set on which he had been employed. By the time he sneaks on the set, that satin jacket which The Driver obviously has no intention of discarding is almost comically soiled with blood and perhaps the odd bit of dried viscera. Be as efficient as you will with your killing, it's difficult to participate in a shotgun shootout in close quarters, stomp in a man's skull and pummel some other creep in the dressing room of strip club and keep white clothing spotless. After ramming Nino's car a couple of times, he chases him down to a nearby Pacific beach. As The Driver stalks Nino across the beach and into the waves - Nino's fate like a gentle baptism relative to the other acts of vengeance - he looks the bastard child of some 80's slasher film monster. Perhaps that bit of the decade seeped into Nicolas Wind Refn's subconscious as well.

Even after being fairly gutted by Bernie during Drive's final showdown between the forces of good and evil, there's no stopping this violent emissary and protector of innocence. We see Bernie shove a sizable blade into The Driver's abdomen, but the shadow play on the pavement below shows the hero somehow prevailing yet again. He leaves the dirty money and the crumpled Bernie in the parking lot and drives off to some far horizon. Godspeed Driver. May you find peace, a better soundtrack and a very understanding dry cleaner.

The Guard

2011-09-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

If there was ever a time that theatrical movie trailers were made in such a way as to be considered an art of their own, that era seems to have gone the way of the handwritten letter. Or the letter, for that matter. If you've seen the trailer for The Guard, you've heard its main character, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) spout the likes of, "I thought only black lads were drug dealers...and Mexicans." That decided bit of political incorrectness spoken to visiting FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), who happens to be a black man. Later, while the two are discussing Everett's privileged upbringing back in the states, "You know, summer in the Hamptons, skiing in Aspen," Gerry lobs back, "I thought black people couldn't ski...or is that swimming?" The unconventional sergeant had earlier explained away his behavior at the briefing where he first met Everett, "I'm Irish sir, racism is part of my culture." Of course, you must imagine all these statements accented with a brogue on the part of Gleeson as thick as peat. The trailer makes all of this look like a bad Irish-American version of 48 Hours. It's hard to know what to make of Gerry. As he and the FBI agent are driving down one of those narrow Irish roads one evening, Wendell, frustrated by yet again by Gerry's offhand manner, says, "I can't tell if you're really motherfucking dumb, or really motherfucking smart." Fortunately, both Gerry and The Guard are really are not so easily categorized; something, as it turns out, much more motherfucking unpredictable.

The welcome presence of Gleeson, along with the profane, fairly cracked parallel universe of The Guard, are more than a little reminiscent of In Bruges. That film also was also preceded by a hopeless trailer. Irish hit men in quaint old Bruges! And hookers! And a dwarf!! The two-plus minute jumble of images and dialog grave In Bruges the promise of one of the more mind-bogglingly stupid films of all time. However, if you have seen Martin McDonough's 2008 film, you know that to be anything but the case. In Bruges, with it's admixture of violence, soulfulness and conversations strange but yet somehow true, was one of the more original films widely distributed in recent years.

Well, the McDonough boys are back at it. This time, it's Martin's brother, John Michael McDonough writing and directing The Guard and providing Mr. Gleeson with another rich role. On this occasion, Gleeson plays someone on the right side of the law, but that blue line gets stretched mighty thin at times. The mood is set quite early as a car careens down a road in Gerry's jurisdiction. A few lads are blaring music (as it turns out, part of varied score by Calexico, that runs from Morricone-like Spaghetti Western flourishes to the swaggering guitar rock and rap of the opening sequence) and drinking, resulting in the predictable weave down the road. We see Gerry's fleshy, phlegmatic countenance as the car zooms through his field of vision. There's only a slight change of expression when we and the sergeant hear the crash a moment later. Gerry calmly arrives at the accident scene and goes through the motions of checking a couple of the strewn bodies for a pulse. Clearly, no one has survived the wreck. He then reaches into the pocket of one of the unfortunate young men and pulls of a small bag of drugs. After stating, "I don't think yer mammy would be too pleased about that now," tosses the bag to the side of the road. But it's not simply the noble gesture it first appears. The sergeant, as we find out, has a taste for drugs himself. He places a tab of acid on his tongue and for just a split second, the image of a smiley face appears on the screen. "It's a beautiful fuckin' day, " says Sergeant Gerry Boyle. Welcome to the world of The Guard. Those looking for a more genteel art house experience might want to check out The Hedgehog, playing down the hall in theater five....

What brings Sergeant Gerry and Agent Everett together at that contentious briefing is the incursion into Galway of a drug ring seeking a port at which they can land a ship loaded with cocaine. Gerry, like the other local police in attendance, sees the mug shots of the trio of thugs leading the invasion. The three hoodlums, two Irishmen and an Englishman, look appropriately dubious, but these are not quite your average representatives of the drug trade. We first see them driving by night, having a discussion about their favorite philosopher. Liam, he of the most comedically disheveled mug shot and the admitted sociopath of the group, puts forth Nietzsche as his choice. But this is the strange, verbally rich world of The Guard and these are some decidedly bookish criminals; the mere dropping of the German philosopher's name will not do. He's challenged by the eldest of the crew, Francis (Liam Cunningham), who sits in the back seat with a tome and accompanying book light, to produce a good quotation. The best the poor sociopath can do is "What doesn't kill us...", but he's shouted down for coming up with a line everyone knows. Only later in the conversation, after the lineage of Bertrand Russell is settled, does he come up something to satisfying the tough crowd: "You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass." That's a good one, admit his fellow criminals. Indeed.

Some unlikely lads. The bookish bad guys in The Guard.

The dialog in The Guard, whether spoken between the cops, the drug traffickers, or volleyed between the criminal element and law enforcement - again, an amusingly fine line here - frequently crackles with the energy of conversation in Tarrantino films with the added benefit of a good literary education.

The film's bookish tendencies are also shown off in the first exchange between Gerry and his dying mother (an excellent Finnula Flanagan). She's a resident in some sort of elder care or hospice facility. A terse conversation between Gerry and the director makes clear enough the good woman's fate before Gerry goes outside to join his mother on a bench. She's reading the Goncharov novel, Oblomov, whose cover is briefly flashed on the screen. After giving his mother a flask, which we can only assume is full of Irish whiskey, the two briefly discuss Russian literature. Gerry doesn't care for the Russians, as they take too long getting to the point. What about Dostoevsky? asks his mother. "He's the worst offender," replies Gerry. He does own that Gogol is alright.

Much as it might please the liberal arts majors in the crowd, all of this name dropping would be to no effect or worse, clangingly pretentious, if these intellectual markers didn't just help indicate character but were somehow supposed to instantly define them and the movie as something literate and worthwhile. What McDonough manages to get across with economy is that these are people with inner lives, smart enough to appreciate or even dismiss Russian literature. So it goes with the subject of the impending death of Gerry's mother. Perhaps too irreverent for some, the Irish are able to execute their dance with mortality with more candor and humor than most. A bracing mixture of the sacred and profane run through Gerry and the film, yet another thing in common with In Bruges.

Each of these films by the McDonough brothers also has its little person. There is the aforementioned dwarf who's part of that highly memorable, drug-fueled scene and conversation in the midst of In Bruges. With The Guard, it's a child...of sorts. Young Eugene Moloney (Michael Og Lane) is first seen near a crime scene on a pink bike with training wheels, a scruffy dog tethered to the back. Boy and dog merely drift across the screen; it's unclear who's pulling whom. Eugene is more Shakespearean fool than child, demonstrating an uncanny knack for appearing at key places and times, always with something strange to say. His garish motley comes in the form of one track suit or another, mirroring the color fields and backdrops before which Gerry often appears, or in which he's once bathed (while playing a cops and robbers video game), all of this incongruous color adding to the film's slightly surreal undercurrent.

Perhaps The Guard's best stealth joke comes first from Eugene. The nattily dressed Agent Everett is having no luck at all canvassing the area around Connemara, his efforts hampered by the fact that a)he's an outsider, b)he's black and c)he doesn't speak Gaelic in an area in which many of the residents do. Eugene has no such inhibitions when the two meet near a football pitch. When the agent tells him he's from the FBI, the kid asks "From the Behavioral Sciences Division?!" Agent Everett says that, no, he's with narcotics. Both man and sort-of-child evince their disappointment. The dead-pan is later echoed by Gerry's mother, who asks the same question about the visiting agent when Gerry is telling her about the case. As if the Behavioral Sciences Division holds a special, sexy cache among the Irish. One of many touches of the absurd that McDonough weaves into his script.

One might desire more for the nimble Cheadle than playing straight man to Gleeson, but it's a minor grievance to take with The Guard. Cheadle, as ever, fares well with what he's given. Ultimately, both the friction between Agent Everett and Sergeant Boyle, as well as the eventual respect seem credible for the sometimes profane candor that emanates from McDonough's script and is made to sing, if not harmonize, by the two men. Gleeson and Cheadle are good together because they don't easily fall into some buddy routine. And this is, after all, The Guard, not 48 Hours: Port of Call, Connemara. It was apparently a role written for Brendan Gleeson. Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a man replete with contradiction. Gleeson fills them out as fully as he does as the uniform he dons with such spaghetti-western-backed ceremony.

Sergeant Gerry Boyle and a friend discussing ice cream headaches, the meaning of "Ode to Billy Joe, " and lesser matters of life and death in The Guard.

Midnight in Paris

2011-09-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

He must be stopped! I realize that he's old, diminutive and myopic (boy, is he myopic), but don't be fooled! He keeps rampaging through Western Civilization. For decades, he roamed the streets of New York (mainly Manhattan, mind you). It was believed that he couldn't survive out of his native habitat, but then he somehow crossed the Atlantic and was let loose on London and English culture. The results, for the most part, were not pretty. He crashed briefly through the streets of Barcelona. And now, I am sorry to report, he has landed in Paris. And it gets worse. His damage has taken on a new dimension; it's no longer just spatial, it's temporal. Woody Allen is delving into the past to divest long-dead artists - fortunately, he has little concern for anyone else - of their ability to sound even remotely human. If this is allowed to continue, before you know it the Renaissance will be here and everyone will sound completely ridiculous.

So yes, Wood Allen is in Paris. Actually, like his stand-in, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), in Midnight in Paris, Woody has returned to The City of Light. The French capital was one the locations of his 1996 feature, Everyone Says I Love You. Even with the strange experience of Julia Roberts bursting into song (sort of) and characters taking flight, that film seems vastly more relevant to life on earth than this last, lamentable offering from the writer/director.

Owen Wilson is reunited with Rachel McAdams in Midnight in Paris. The two enjoyed a fairly endearing courtship in Wedding Crashers. Here, not so much. They play a couple on a French vacation with the parents of Inez (McAdams). He's a Hollywood hack screenwriter and she...well, she likes to shop. Mr. Wilson does surprisingly well as Allen's stand-in; he's at least given some complexity with which to work. Ms. McAdams sees her brown hair dyed blonde and is allowed just enough intelligence to appreciate the brilliance of the men in her life, especially Paul (Michael Sheen) a friend whom the couple meet in a Parisian restaurant. Paul seems to be an expert on virtually every subject, be it the history and architecture of Versailles, French wine, or the life of Rodin. He even corrects a tour guide (played by the fairly striking first lady of France, Carla Bruni) lecturing on the sculptor. "He's a pseudo-intellectual," groans Gil in the couple's hotel room. This an old battle cry from Allen. Sheen in his beard looks the ghost of Tony Roberts and seems a composite of blowhard pedants from various Allen films. The writer/director has become a Dr. Frankenstein, crudely stitching together pieces of his own past creations and coming up with something increasingly, shriekingly inhuman.

Despite the presence of the know-it-all Paul, Gil is besotted with Paris. He says he can imagine himself walking along the left bank, with a baguette under his arm, stopping in the Cafe Flore to scribble away at this novel. Really, Gil? Woody? Guidebooks on London can often be judged by how quickly they trundle out Dr. Johnson's "When a man is tired of London" quote. Similarly, the originality (or desperate lack thereof) of any book or film about Paris is likely determined by how soon the old Hemingway chestnut, "Paris is a moveable feast" gets paraded on stage. Poor Gil doesn't get a half dozen sentences into his first voice-over before the moveable feast allusion creaks out on its rusty axle. If Gil weren't such a plain, checked-shirt-wearing plain dresser in the Woody Allen mode, there's really no reason that he shouldn't sport a beret through Midnight in Paris.

Even more than present day Paris, by day or night, come rain or come shine, the amiable lunkhead Gil dreams most of Paris of the 1920's, hotbed of many of his artistic heroes. His dreams come true one night when Inez decides to go dancing with Paul and his wife, while Gil chooses to walk home alone. He gets lost and finally settles on the stairs in front of a building. A nearby church bell tolls the midnight hour and a beaut of a Puegot Landaulet rolls to a stop before him. Some merrymakers insist he join them and off they go. Where? To a party raging in 1920's Paris.

Understandably confused, Gil doesn't realize what is taking place at first glance.  But that trim fellow at the piano with the receding hair line singing "Let's Do It," he looks strangely like the composer of the tune himself, Cole Porter. This suspicion is confirmed by a fellow American, a little spitfire with corkscrew curls from Alabama by the name of Zelda. In short order, she introduces her husband, a fellow writer, Scott.   What a coincidence, mutters Gil.  "But where am I," he finally has to ask.   It's party for Jean Cocteau, explains Scott.

From here, the name dropping and appearance of artistic heroes of the stunned time traveler (and presumably Woody) follow in profusion. Gil hops into a convertible with Scott and Zelda, not to mention his new pals, the Porters, and they repair to a bar where pontificating in simple, declarative sentences in a corner booth is none other than Ernest Hemingway. Allen's re-animated Hemingway sounds like the writer's late-career writing, which is to say charicature of himself, someone scoring honorable mention in the annual Hemingway imitation competition.  Occasionally Papa gets to sound like something like the human being the writer might have been, but mainly he's a humorless gas bag.  It's difficult to know whether Allen's clumsy script inspired Corey Stoll to play the literary icon for laughs or reverently straight, but it doesn't really work either way.

There are moments in Midnight in Paris when's Allen's flimsy conceit amounts to more than a roll call of great artists uttering leaden dialog amidst some mercifully distracting mise-en-scene. Most notably, there is Adrian Brody's appearance as Salvador Dali. This characterization, thanks to Brody and Allen, is an oasis of wit in a desert of reductionism. Here, genuine laughter, as Brody exclaims as the devilishly-smiling, self-promoting artist, "Dali!" Salvador is also rather preoccupied with a rhinoceros, as is his wont. While Pender! and Dali! are having their genial tete a tete, in strolls Man Ray and Luis Buñuel. The bewildered Gil explains his plight to the very open minded trio and Man Ray thinks it makes perfect sense, this being displaced in time. "I know, but you're surrealists, " says Gil.

Dali! Adrian Brody providing some desperately needed comic relief amidst all the comedy in Midnight in Paris.

The surrealist joke, while not exactly comedy gold, is unique accomplishment among Allen's dead on arrival attempts at humor in Midnight in Paris. Adriana points out to Gil that he had been cutting a rug with Djuna Barnes at a party. "No wonder she wanted to lead!, says Gil. You see, because Djuna Barnes was bisexual. Get it! And when the Landaulet pulls up one evening, the mysterious presence who beckons from the dark interior of the car introduces himself as Thomas Stearns Eliot. "T.S. Eliot!" exclaims Gil, lest we not make the connection. Then somewhat faintly as the car pulls off for the 20's, "Where I come from, people measure out their life in coke spoons." Oh Woody, stop it! You're killing me! A drug joke as hilarious as it is timely! And on his second meeting with the confused-looking Luis Buñuel, Gil tells him, “I’ve got an idea for a movie for you. A bunch of people come to a dinner party but when they try to leave … they can’t.” Buñuel responds, “I don’t get it. Why can’t they leave?” There were few murmurs of recognition to Buñuel's name in either of the screenings of the film I attended. Virtually no one seemed to get the reference to the dinner party scene in his Exterminating Angel. But that's the beauty of a really lame joke - it's lost on absolutely no one. The great director for his part is as mystified as the audience, Allen's Buñuel more somnambulist than surrealist. And lucky him.

Meanwhile, back in, uh...reality, Gil's wife and in-laws are growing impatient with his behavior. Inez's parents, John and Helen (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) are every bit as recycled as most of the supposedly real 21st-century characters in Midnight in Paris, congealed versions of the more kindly in-laws from Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona. As with those two films, the father is involved in international business. I'm quite sure that Woody Allen knows as much about international business as I know about folk dancing traditions in the Balkans; which is to say, nothing. John makes perfunctory defenses of the tea party while Helen is twice made to squawk, "Cheap is cheap!" Ms. Kennedy often has the expression of someone beginning what promises to be a long relationship with a kidney stone. In a sense, these non-characters mark a kind of dire achievement for Woody Allen. He's taken what is already a broad type of character, the monied, crass American abroad, and somehow made them even more slight. I'm reminded of a college party I attended that was fueled largely by a keg of Bush Lite. Bush Lite? I thought. How do you take something that is already without substance and make it make it lighter still? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John and Helen.

Bush Lite: Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy in Midnight in Paris.

Gil is far too intoxicated with his nocturnal adventures around 1920's Paris to worry about his heinous 2000's family. Not only is he fairly tripping over every great artist of the time and having his novel read by Gertrude Stein, but he's made the acquaintance of an exceedingly lovely woman, Adriana. She's the mistress of Picasso, former paramour to both Modigliani and Georges Bracque and pursued by Hemingway. "You take art groupie to a whole new level!," exclaims Gil. Well, yes. The less we say about Woody Allen's treatment of women in his films these days, the better. Ms. Cotillard manages to animate Adriana into something vaguely real, impressive in that most all the stilted dialog she's given involves some simple-minded appreciation of Gil or his work, bursts of nostalgia, or the anecdote she shares about how she and a roommate once hired a working girl from Pigalle to teach them all of the tricks of her trade. Cotillard's is one of a handful of respectable turns lost amid the pretty wreckage of Midnight in Paris. The same can be said for Kathy Bates, presiding grandly as Gertrude Stein.

So, Gil idealizes Paris of the 1920's.  Mais non! says Adriana - it's the Belle Epoque for her.  As the two stroll about some version of Gil's fantasy Paris, a horse drawn coach pulls up near them and, of course, the two are invited aboard.   First stop? - the Fin de siecle Maxim's restaurant of Adriana's dreams. And how does one follow such a dinner? Adriana knows just the place - The Moulin Rouge. This would seem to be the 19th-century equivalent of having your girlfriend suggest an outing to the strip club, but wouldn't we all enjoy a visit to the Moulin Rouge? Who knows what interesting people we might find!

Amidst all the can-canning at the famously windmilled night spot, Adriana spots a small, solitary figure, rather grave looking in his suit, behind the neatly trimmed beard and eye glasses. Yes, it's Toulouse-Lautrec. He looks lonely, thinks Adriana, they should join him.  Of course, the artist bids them sit down, having Marion Cotillard on your arm proving a handy thing in any dimension. Before much conversation can take place, up strolls Paul Gaughin and Edgar Degas! The artists in Midnight in Paris, like stereotypical women to the bathroom, move in packs, all the better for identification, if not protection.   In no time, the rather louche-looking Gaughin starts making eyes at Adriana.   Degas seems happy just to be out of the house.

And isn't it wonderful to be in the Belle Epoque?! Well, actually, Gaughin and Degas think the Italian Renaissance was really the place to be. Adriana is unconvinced.  When she steps aside with Gil, Adriana states her intention to remain in the 1890's. Gil responds, "I'm having an insight now.  It's a minor one." Yes, it is a minor one.  Gil has realized that this looking back, this "golden age thinking," as the pompous Paul had declaimed at Versailles, is a trap.  But there was little need to telegraph the point; Allen's threadbare 78 of a theme had already begun to skip on the old victrola.  There's nothing wrong with this Philosophy for Dummies, it's a nice enough message: fight the strong tug of nostalgia, the tendency to always look back for some golden age and live in the present.  The problem is that Allen's idea of a brave return to reality is having the awful in-laws and shrewish wife conveniently exit stage left, leaving Gil to wander Paris by 21st-century night. He's not long alone.  On a bridge over the Seine his first evening as a new bachelor, he encounters the woman, Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) he had twice met working in an antique stall, a 20-something beauty (most of the humble workers Gil encounters, tour guides and shop attendants, look like they have stepped from the pages of Paris Vogue into slightly more practical clothing; what a city!) who just happens to fancy Cole Porter. And Gil, of course. Rain begins to fall on cue, but Gabrielle doesn't mind. She like Gil, loves to walk in the rain. Ah, Reality. Tres, tres bien.

This is execrable stuff in a very shiny wrapping paper. The mere cavalcade of personages amidst the handsome production design has proven enough for most to give a pass to Midnight in Paris. But simply hearing the names of famous artists uttered and recognizing them does not really constitute an artistic experience or intellectual work. Nor does their presentation constitute a good film. It doesn't even amount to good pastiche. Like the slightly superior Vicky Christina Barcelona, this is little more than a wet dream on the part of the director, no less so because a younger, more handsome actor stands his proxy. It's a level of self indulgence which should not be encouraged.

Woody Allen wrote a facetious Vicky Christina Barcelona diary for the Guardian in 2009. It is arguably the most entertaining thing he's done in years. You can find it here. To some degree, it's classic Allen schtick, but it also reminds one of a time when, among all the post-vaudeville, there was also wit, intelligence, even a bit of self-awareness in his work. There's a rare moment of the latter in Midnight in Paris when Gil and the fetching Adriana are strolling around Paris one of his enchanted evenings. Gil, of course, is beside himself, extolling his very idealized version of the city. "I keep forgetting you're a tourist," says Adriana. "That's putting it mildly," admits Gil. Midnight in Paris won't tell you much more about the French capital than you could learn at Epcot Center. The only insight it provides on life, nostalgia and the human condition relates mainly to the guy in the horned-rimmed glasses; it's nothing we don't already know. If Woody Allen wants to be a tourist, that's his business. But let's not confuse this with art, or even good entertainment.

Chapter One. He adored Paris. He idolized it all out of proportion. Eh uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion....Uh, no, let me start this over....

Terri

2011-08-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

Roaming the arid hills somewhere around Los Angeles, about a million miles from the stylized emotional teenage landscapes of John Hughes and those of his 21st-century descendants, we find the unlikely figure of Terri (Jacob Wysocki). Whether loping about, sitting reluctantly in class, or attending to his uncle James, who seems to be in the early, unpredictable stages of Alzheimer's, Terri goes stolidly about his routine bedecked in one pair of pajamas or another.  "They're just comfortable on me," he explains to Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), his high school principal. That statement, in spirit as much as specifics, encapsulates Terri's attitude to an unpleasant fate:  it's not rebellion so much as acceptance.

Unfortunately, Terri's unique fashion sense and record of tardiness and absence do not find acceptance with Mr. Fitzgerald.  Terri is summoned to the office and takes his place among the high school misfits, all regarded with sardonic detachment by the principal's hacking Cerberus, Ms. Hamish (Mary Anne McGarry). Poor Ms. Hamish looks and sounds to be a-knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door, a snap diagnosis which is later borne out.  She, like many of the adults in the high school world of Terri, seems more than a little out of date.

With Mr. Fitzgerald, there is something in the more timeless manner of high school principals.   As played by Mr. Reilly, there is the usual catalog of administrative flourishes: the stern look accompanied by intimidating tilt of head, the dramatic silence or judicious use of raised voice.   All of this performance against a backdrop of thumtacked paperwork and motivational posters.  This sort of flawed everyman is a perfect fit for Reilly and he hardly misses a beat. He might be the nominal head of the school, but Reilly, as ever, conveys the unsure boy in man's clothing, the principal's own sense of disbelief at times that the one-time high school fuckup is now in charge of the place.

Among the principal's first pronouncements to Terri, there is the inevitable dichotomy in which struggling leaders, espeically the quixotic employed in public schools, often have to trade:  “Every year there are two groups of kids that stand out here … there’s the good-hearted kids and there’s the bad-hearted kids.”   Typical of Mr. Fitzgerald's less-than-watertight philosophy, he touches all five fingers while delineating the moral map of the student body, pinky and thumb representing the good and bad extremes.

Mr. Fitzgerald assures our comfortably-clad friend that he sees him as one of the good-hearted kids, but Terri comes to realize that this is merely one of the bluffs with which the principal operates, the real dichotomy being kids who make the principal's life more difficult and kids that don't. Terri initially responds well to Mr. Fitzgerald's attention, the principal setting aside every Monday morning for the two to spend time together.  This until Terri realizes that he's simply getting the the same treatment bestowed upon the school's misfits, whether it's the fat kid in the pajamas, the kid in the wheelchair or Chad (Bridger Zadina), a darkly puckish boy who's wont to pull his hair out of the scalp from the root, when not up to greater mischief.  That kid, even Mr. Fitzgerald owns, belongs in a category of his own.

In a lesser film, the relationship of Terri and Mr. Fitzgerald would also tend toward either end of a familiar dichotomy: the defiant kid v. clueless authority figure (see The Breakfast Club), or one of facile buddyship.  Instead, it's Terri - actually open enough despite his disappointments - challenging Mr. Fitzgerald and gradually granting his trust, while the principal is forced to offer more than his standby platitudes. One such instance occurs when Terri is upset to find out that Mr. Fitzgerald initially sees him as little more than little more than a misfit, much as he is seen by his classmates: "I'm treated like a monster because that's what I am to them. This morning they asked if I suck on my own breasts." The principal then produces a photo album which he assures Terri he's never shown anyone before. In it, we see pictures of the young Fitzgerald, shirtless, his face and torso awash with acne.  He too was a monster.  This brings the pair closer until Chad reveals to Terri, while the two loners are enjoying something of a bristly bonding experience of their own at Terri's house, that he got the "I've never shown this to anyone" line as well.  This is another major setback on the road to an unlikely friendship on the part of student and principal, and also causes the biggest meltdown we see on the part of Terri when the truth is revealed to him, cutting short an obvious enough feel good episode with Chad.

What this story, conceived by director Azazel Jacobs and Patrick Dewitt and written by the latter, most defty avoids is the increasingly rampant trend of high school revisionism in which teenagers are imbued with wit and sophistication unlikely in someone twice their age, even in enjoyable enough films like Rushmore or Easy A. In the 1980's we went back to win the Vietnam War; in the 21st century writers are going back to conquer high school.

Terri does offers a unique story. But despite his unusual living situation, girth and wardrobe (or lack thereof), Terri is allowed to be a real teenage boy. This in contrast to the more formal dress and pretensions of protagonists from the likes of Rushmore to the more recent Submarine. Terri might be more outwardly sensitive than the average kid at his high school, but there's no sign of extraordinary intelligence or style. We seem him reading Gulliver's Travels, but it seems as likely an assigment of an English class as any sort of refined feel for literature. And like many an adolescent boy, he fancies the pretty blonde girl; the one he sees on the athletic field, in locker-lined corridor, or in home economics; she's the very distant object of his longing.

When the girl, Heather (Olivia Crocicchia) allows a boy - the appropriately dubbed Dirty Jack - to finger her in the Home Economics class and they are caught in flagrante delicto, she's quickly on an express elevator down to a level on the high school caste system even below that of fat kid in pajamas. This allows Terri to save her from transfer to another school by interceding with his fellow dude (an appellation the principal dispenses as clumsily as a slightly mysterious foreign currency) Mr. Fitzgerald and offer Heather kindness at a time when virtually no one in the school is inclined to do so.

Even more than the ill-fated Ms. Hamish, home ec. teacher Mrs. Vick would seem to belong to another era. Perhaps this is in the anachronistic nature of Home Economics. And who knows - maybe there are still phys. ed. teachers who torment overweight kids with rope climbs they can never make, all the while spouting inspirational bromides of their own. But when Terri is subjected to such treatment it, tells us nothing about him or his life at school that we haven't already seen or can't easily imagine.

They gym class episode is unusual in a story in which so little plays out predictably, especially its complex (which is to say real) relationships. This is certainly true of Terri and his Uncle James (Creed Bratton of "Office" fame). It's unclear when and how Terri came to live with his uncle. And we can only assume that the relationship we see during the course of the film, affected as it is by the sometimes clouded mental state of the uncle, is a muted form of their long-term relationship. It tends to occur between the extremes of sentimentality and having Uncle James haunt his nephew's life like a demented ogre. Neither is the case.

Terri's dealings with his uncle demonstrate not only complexity in their relationship but in Terri himself. We see this when Terri is instructed to plant mouse traps in the attic. He does so with reluctance and we see the pained expression on his face while he lies in bed and hears the traps snap in the night. This Terri the sensitive soul. But when he disposes of the mice in a wooded area near their house, be becomes fascinated by their disappearance by day's end from a log on which the carcasses had been placed. Suddenly, as Terri looks on in wide-eyed wonder, any compunction about killing the mice is gone. He's amazed to see a falcon alight on the log and quickly fly away with one of his furry victims. More cheddar is acquired, more mice trapped, in hope of seeing the aloof bird of prey again. The experiment is cut short when Uncle James wonders why cheese has begun to appear on the shopping list even after the attic mice have been dispatched. Terri is forced to reveal the scene and nature of the crime, the reality of which causes his uncle to express disgust at his actions.

Both the slightly gleeful disbelief we see from Jacob Wysocki at the swooping of the falcon as well as the shame that quickly descends upon the young man at the disapproval of his uncle are among the few emotional departures we see from the otherwise phlegmatic Terri. Director Jacobs shrewdly cuts these reactions short. It's not that Wysocki demonstrates great range, but he's so quietly compelling through most of Terri that these rare outbursts have a built in power by the very nature of their contrast. Despite all the good supporting work, Jacob Wysocki is called upon to carry the film, and he does so.

Yet another instance of nuance from both Wysocki and Jacobs occurs with Terri's burgeoning frienship with the pretty outcast, Heather. I saw the trailer for the film and groaned at the implication that Terri would actually get the girl. It really doesn't work that way in high school or life thereafter. Fortunately, Azazel Jacobs had something far more interesting in mind. Heather expresses an interest in coming to Terri's house, presumably to get a firsthand look at his often out of it Uncle James. Terri is thrilled. An interesting, quite ambiguous moment takes place when Terri comes home some hours prior to the planned date and finds his uncle looking better and clearly more lucid than he's been in ages. Terri smiles when his uncle explains that he's having a good day and wants to take advantage of it with further reading. What's not entirely clear is whether Terri is pleased or disappointed. If it's Heather's morbid curiosity at the state of his uncle that is her main incentive for coming to his house, will the date be spoiled if there is no such spectacle? The scene is brief and the ambiguity fleeting.

Heather does pay her visit, but not before the ever hungry for attention, I-rebel-before-an-audience-therefore- I-am-Chad barges in. What follows, the teenager's long night's journey into day, is Terri's centerpiece. Over the course of the evening, Terri, Heather and Chad indulge in that most dangerous of adolescent behavior. It's not the consumption of alcohol, taking of drugs or ill-advised removal of clothing, although versions of all those things take place. As the drugs and drink have their effect, the three kids make themselves vulnerable. It's a long, often awkward sequence. The essence these scenes, if not the exact dialog and details, have the ring of truth about them. The quiet aftermath is as significant as the lack of predictable fireworks as the action sorts itself out.

Director and writer Azazel Jacobs hasn't exactly arrived in the mainstream with Terri, but he has stepped on to a larger stage. He's done so successfully and, it would appear, with sensibilities intact. This more than can be said for the Duplass brothers attempt to graduate to the big time from their Mumble Core beginnings with the muddled Cyrus. Terri is yet another movie about a high school outsider, but it bears little resemblence to most American films on the subject. Jacobs possesses an affinity for both characters and places messy and real. With the latter, it's the warm jumble of interior spaces common to his films, including Terri and his previous features, The GoodTimesKid and Momma's Man, domestic archaeolgies so rich with the sediment of lives lived that could hardly be replicated, even by the most talented of art directors.

In terms of character, Terri is another in the growing gallery of Azazel Jacobs scraping their way along. They might exist beyond the scope of mainstream society, but that's simply a fact, not a token to be flaunted by their creator. Jacobs depicts the lives of his fringe characters with an authority and attention to detail reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch. And dignity; there's that as well. The final shot of Terri, at which point very little has been resolved in the lives of its characters, reminded me of another final shot of a film that centers on a young person noted for their too-abundant flesh, Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl. Fat Girl's main character sports an ambiguous and slightly shocking smile on her face at film's end, this subsequent to some very unpleasant business, to say the least. That particular smile seemed to issue as much from the provocative director as it did from the character assigned to wear it. In the case of Terri, he's allowed a subtle upturn of mouth amidst a diffused wave of sunlight that seems his alone. Terri, both the film and the young man, survive their rigors and exit with dignity intact. No small accomplishment, whether the the arena is high school or the art house.

The Trip

2011-07-12T21:07:00.000-07:00

“We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." That bit of wisdom from Steinbeck's Travels With Charley not only speaks to the exciting, open-ended potential of travel, it also serves as a cautionary statement. Plan all you like, the best and worst moments of your trip are just going to happen. This applies as much to the likes of you and me as we take a modest excursion as it does to celebrities who decide to hit the road and document the experience for the entertainment if not benefit of their fellow man. If you are such a luminary, a star even, and you set out upon the proverbial open road, the results just HAVE to be delightfully interesting, don't they? Well....

If you have ever seen The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour - 60 minutes remarkably devoid of magic and mystery - you know that even a group of people among the most magnetic in the world to an audience of its time can be rendered dull if not insufferable from too vague a notion of a wacky experience, too flimsy an attempt to manufacture spontaneity.

Based upon its premise, The Trip would seem to be rife with the potential for similarly cricket-chirping expanses of screen time. The film is based on a BBC 2 series of the same name whose six episodes ran late in 2010. The series was pared down to the 107 minutes of the film version by director Michael Winterbottom. It reunites the director with actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon from Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Winterbottom's 2005 attempt to film the challenging Laurence Sterne novel. Perhaps the least satisfying aspect of "Tristram Shandy" was its epilogue, which found Coogan and Brydon sitting in a soundstage, just "riffing" as it were. Unfortunately, either the actors or their director over-estimated their ability to be funny on command. Whether it is in some ways a treatment of Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," or just a continuation of the improvisational approach of "Tristram Shandy," The Trip manages to succeed precisely where its predecessor failed.

The set-up for The Trip is that Coogan has been hired by The Observer to travel to some of Northern England's finest inns and restaurant and sample their fancy cuisine. His considerably younger American girlfriend, Mischa (Margo Stilley) - admittedly more the foodie than he - was to accompany the actor until she decided to return to America and declare a break in their relationship. This leaves Coogan to scramble for a travel companion. The opening credits of The Trip play out as Coogan rings Brydon and asks him if he's up for the journey. Such is the candor between the two men that Coogan makes no attempt to hide the fact that Brydon is neither his first choice for co-pilot, nor second or third. None-the-less, the good natured Welshman agrees to abandon his wife and child for a week and the boys head up the M1 in a Range Rover.

The scene might change, from the various restaurants and inns - six in all with imposing names like L'Enclume, Holbeck Ghyll and Hipping Hall - but the two men quickly fall into a set formula of low-grade acrimony puncuated but moments of grudging affection. Brydon is the family man and successful mainstream entertainer, a positively inveterate provider of impersonations, like them or not. He has the mutable if not rubbery face of a character actor. Coogan, with his full roster of ex-wife, child and young girlfriend, is the Peter Pan, albeit a rather grumpy one. As an actor, he has eschewed obvious career choices - "I don't work with mainstream directors, I work with auteurs," he pompously declares to his traveling companion at one point. But he's also slightly haunted by his most successful mainstream creation (mainly in Britain), the character of Alan Partridge. Coogan is made to be at once scornful and jealous of Brydon's success (Coogan did actually help Brydon get a leg up in England and it's now Brydon who enjoys greater popularity in the U.K.). With his wavy, longish, graying hair, he looks a bit the Edwardian or late-Victorian dandy or man of letters in sensible 21st century clothing.

The Trip presents at least a version of the two men and their relationship, Brydon launching into one impersonation or another at the least provocation and Coogan alternately rolling his eyes and unable to resist providing a competing take, as when Brydon demonstrates his Michael Caine and the deepening gradations in the actors Cockney over the decades due to cigars and drink, while Coogan insists that the impersonation needs to be more nasal. The Caine-off occurs early on and is reprised later for the sake of an audience of two women, Coogan's assistant and an attractive Spanish photographer. The not always convivial relationship between the two men - by all accounts they are occasional colleagues more than friends - is emphasized both for the series and the film, as is evident by the publicity photos for both.

An exchange between Coogan and Brydon at the ruins of Bolton Abbey encapsulates the Frick and Frack nature of the pair's relationship, at least for the sake of The Trip. Brydon launches into a dramatic oration of Wordsworth's poem "Bolton Abbey," while Coogan looks on with an expression that warms only slightly from a scowl to one of martyred patience. Brydon finishes by saying "Sir Ian McKellen." One of the comedic undercurrents of The Trip is that the Brydon sometimes finds it necessary to name the actor he's impersonating.

Coogan: "Is that why you went to bed early last night so you could learn that poem?"

Brydon: "Yes!" Mission Accomplished.

Coogan: "What would have been really nice is if you had gotten up this morning, if you had learned that poem - which I appreciate although it was meant to intimidate me - if you had gotten up this morning and said the poem in your own voice and meant the words."

Brydon: "I chose a voice to suit the mood. I felt Sir Ian, coming as he does from Bolton, would be perfectly suited."

Coogan: "It's a different Bolton, Rob. A different Bolton."

Brydon: "It's the same word."

As ever, Coogan is both dismissive of Brydon's accomplishments, but can't help trying to crowd ahead of them. During the same post-oration exchange, Coogan chides Brydon, "You weren't interested in Wordsworth before we went on this trip...or Bolton Abbey....I liked Bolton Abbey before you liked Bolton Abbey."

While Brydon sets forth the first lines of Wordsworth's poem - "From Bolton's old monastic tower/The bells ring loud with gladsome power" - we are treated to dramatic shots of the ruined priory and adjacent graveyard lit by beams of daybreak sun breaking through the morning haze. The splendors of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria, natural and man-made, are captured to maximum effect by cinematographer Ben Smithard. At one of the natural wonders, Gordale Scar in North Yorkshire, the supercilious Coogan gets some comeuppance. As the two men turn the corner of a walking path, the famous ravine is suddenly before them. Brydon, for once, is rendered speechless by the scene, but Coogan won't shut up about the geological origins of the area's unique makeup. When admiration has been duly paid by both men, Coogan decides to go climbing, leaving the more cautious Brydon behind, the latter offering a parental "be careful." Coogan ascends to the top of the ravine, a shelf of massive limestone boulders, from where he contemplates the Yorkshire landscape about him. Of all the stage-managed scenes of exterior rumination on the part of Coogan in The Trip, this peaceful moment seems the most genuine. This only adds bite to the irony that follows. Coogan is joined by an older man. When routine greetings and remarks on the general beauty of the area are swapped, the stranger begins to wax pedantic in the manner in which Coogan had beleaguered Brydon only minutes before. It's a sad thing, a man so full of information and desperate to dispense it to a disinterested world; all the more so when one recognizes oneself in the bombast coming from some other blowhard (Writer's note - I am sometimes that man and it frightens me).

As for the panoply of haute cuisine, it finds an appreciative if not terribly knowledgable audience in the two actors. At The Trip's first stop, The Inn at Whitewell (Lancashire), Coogan appraises his tomato soup thusly, "Well...it tastes of tomatoes." Well, yes. The lads later approve of a bottle of premier cru wine brought to their table, because...premier means first, which of course is good. They don't fare quite as well in deciphering the "cru." Perhaps the best episode of culinary irreverence occurs at the aforementioned L'Enclume when an appetizer of manioc leaf liquor topped with ginger whisky fizz arrives. Coogan raises an intrigued eyebrow and Brydon, in typical mock eloquence says, "It tastes of a childhood garden." "Well, it's got a bit of alcohol on it. It tastes....Was there a lot of alcohol your garden as a child? I'm sorry Rob." This Coogan's deadpan reply. He then likens the consistency of the conconction to snot (BUT, it tastes great!"), Brydon imagines that Ray Winstone "has couged it up" and the boys are off with competing phlegmy Ray Winstone impersonations, one of the more inspired bits of mimicry in The Trip.

Coogan and Brydon enjoying a bit of Ray Winstone in The Trip.

In pitching the idea of The Trip to Coogan, Winterbottom apparently said that he wanted a continuation of th the improvisational approach utilized in "Tristram Shandy" with more substance. It was a good impulse on the part of the director. But for all the mention of Wordsworth and Coleridge, for all the regional beauty and culinary flair on display, one of the more oblique pleasures of The Trip is the mens' sometimes dumb if not blatantly childish appreciation of the food, landscape and history they are made to regard.

The more obvious pleasures of The Trip tend to occur when the two men relax a bit from the extremes of their personalities (or at least their characters) and laugh with each other. This is the case with the "Ray Winstone's snot" parlay, as well as a conversation that finds them imagining a rousing costume drama in the moutainous terrain through which they're driving - "Gentlemen, to bed! For we rise at daybreak...or 9:30...ish....But now to bed!...UNLESS you are one of those people, like me, who finds it very hard to get off after he's eaten cheese...." There is also the unexpected advocacy on the part of Coogan for ABBA's "The Winner Takes It All." This results in the inevitable assumption of Swedish accents until Coogan realizes that they've crossed the border into Germany. He then notes that he sounds like the Nazi officer in the first scene of Inglorious Bastards and a couple of hilarious if politically incorrect quips follow.

For it's many high points, it might have been a better "Trip." As counterpoint to all the laughs and celebrity impersonations, Winterbottom telegraphs some very obvious moments of pensiveness. All such interludes belong to Coogan and seem as orchestrated as the planned humorous clash of personalities between he and Brydon. During the journey north, this invariably occurs outdoors, as Coogan speaks to Mischa in New York, his son in London, or is just a man alone in the windswept landscape (sometimes it's just a matter of trying to find cell phone reception, as when he climbs a hill in rather forbidding weather).

The all-too-obvious point is that Coogan, despite a more youthful lifestyle, despite the young American girlfriend and the fact that there seems to be an attractive woman for him to bed at most every stop on The Trip...the aloof Coogan is a lonely soul longing for something he probably can't even define. Fair enough, whether it's true of the character, the actor, or both. But too frequently, as with the film's last scene that finds him back in his swank flat, essentially bent over with despair, while Brydon is seen happily back in the bosom of his family, Winterbottom overshoots pathos and skids well into the off-putting realm of bathos. Both in final scene several earlier with Coogan out alone in nature, the director is not helped by Michael Nyman's score of plaintive solo piano, which is not likely show up on a compilation of the prolific film composer's finest work.

Michael Winterbottom's best decision with The Trip was reuniting Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, while giving them just structure to allow them to play off the circumstances and each other. There may not be the substance for which the director was striving, but there are plenty of laughs. The best of them just seem to happen, as much despite as because of the set-ups. So it goes with a good trip.

Submarine

2011-07-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

A coming of age film, it would seem, according to the quickly hardening 21st-century mold, involves a precocious outsider who's able to tell his or her story with all fluidity and style of a novelist. All of this backed up by a perfectly modulated soundtrack of indie rock or nuggets plucked with the utmost discretion from the rock and roll past.

Submarine makes no bones about being anything else but a coming of age film. The fact is practically announced in a title card of sorts in which protagonist Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) proclaims that what follows is his biopic. He also reminds his American audience of the existence of Wales, notes a couple of famous countrymen and women - Tom Jones, of course; Katherine Zeta Jones - and thanks us for never invading his country. Later, somewhere between first heartbreak and post-hearbreak, young Oliver even uses the term, saying, "I'm not sure if I've come of age." What is surprising about Submarine is how disctinctly first time writer/director Richard Ayoade works within the limiting genre, adapting the novel of Joe Dunthorne.

We join the 15-year-old Oliver late in his secondary school career, a period more to be survived than enjoyed for the likes of our hero. His suit of dark clothing is at least explained away by the British school requirement for dress conformity. However, much as the film is set in the 1980's, it seems a fair assumption that those, like Oliver, who carried a briefcase, were a small and ill-used minority.

Oliver is seen with a nearly catatonic expression on his face, sitting in a classroom, while in voice-over, he professes a fondness for taking himself to a happier place, as imagining the unbearable grief on the part of his schoomates at his untimely passing. This teenage morbidity is, of course, nothing new. But as is the satisfying pattern in Submarine, what's so funny or affecting is how imaginatively the tune is played. Also, the degree to which it is taken in this particular case: there is not only uncontrollable weeping on the part of comely schoogirls, but an entire nation is thrown into mourning; then a resurrection - Oliver removes the hood from a cloak and calmy tells shocked onlookers to ask no questions, but assume that his powers are greater than ever.

It's not all schoolroom fantasy and indifference for Oliver. There is a couple of rows to his left, perched in the back row in one of his classes, one Jordana Bevin (Yasmin Page), the object of his affection and target of his incipient lust. Oliver is the sort of young man who seems to think no problem beyond a carefully drawn list or crisply worded note. Losing his virginity looms large at the top of a mental version of the former. Ms. Paige, with her broad cheekbones and bobbed hair looks a younger, attenuated Dawn French. The only fault Oliver can find with her is a bit of eczema about the neck and hands. He doesn't seem concerned about her slight inclination toward pyromania.

Oliver is able to make inroads with Jordana when they find not a common enemy, but a common victim. This a heavy-set girl at their school, Zoe. He's surprised to see the usually detached Jordana amused by a group of kids playing keep away with Zoe's bag. Lloyd doesn't approve, but states he "can't let principles stand in the way of progress." The episode ends, predictably, in Zoe's humiliation. It's bad enough that she leaves school. A guilt-ridden Lloyd, who we later learn once kissed Zoe outside a school dance, writes her a couple of self-help pamphlets. Jordana somehow intercepts the pamphlets and blackmails Oliver. But it's an unexpectedly pleasant form of blackmail which entails the two kissing beneath a bridge while Jordan takes Polaroids. This not to hurt Oliver or further antagonize Zoe, but to get back at her ex. So go the bitter intrigues of secondary school.

Beneath all its contrivance and comedy, the occasional sheen of preciousness, Submarine gets a lot right about adolescence. There is Oliver, obviously no stranger to being the butt of jokes, all too quick to join the harassment of Zoe. With the seemingly aloof Jordana, we find out that her toughness is, as is so often the case with teenagers, just a desperate form of bravado, an armor for that tender, developing ego. It's a tough, decidedly un-politically-correct world, where betraying real emotion of any kind is considered "gay."

When Oliver defends Jordana's honor while getting beaten up by her considerably larger ex-boyfriend, he doesn't completely win hear heart. But the thaw begins. Two weeks of courtship ensues. Despite Jordana's distaste for any place or ritual that bears the slightest whiff of romance, this doesn't stop Mr. Ayoade from indulging in some swoony scenes of Oliver and Jordana careening and cavorting about Swansea in novelty sunglasses, sparklers issuing sparks from their bicycles, fireworks exploding their approval in the sky. Nor does it stop a film-within-the film Super 8 made by Oliver, documenting the heady fortnight.

The indulgence is understandable, given how good the grainy Super 8 and the film as a whole are made to look. Ayoade and his cinematographer Erik Wilson have not done anything original here, but they have demonstrated some skill in the dreamy, consistent look of Submarine, a sort of 1970's cinematic sfumato. This may have something to do with the natural light utilised throughout, both for the interior and exterior shooting. It also may have something to do with the climate and muted sunshine of Swansea. But mainly, Ayoade, who is open in his admiration for American films of the late-60's and 1970's, seems to know what he wanted and executed it very well.

Aside from winning Jordana and losing his virginity, the other major issue in Oliver's life is the frigid state of his parents' marriage. Dad (Noah Taylor) is a depressive marine biologist. It's more than understandable why Oliver's uptight mother (Sally Hawkins) is dissatisfied and looking toward their neighbor and her former flame, Graham Purvis, a new age motivational speaker. Mr. Taylor is all too effective as the hangdog Lloyd Tate. His beard and pallor make him look much more than his 41 years; he looks positively unwell. But at least the sad Lloyd gets enough room in the story to emerge into three dimensions. The same can't be said for Jill Tate, whom Sally Hawkins rightly referred to in an interivew as "this ball of tension." Working within the narrow confines of the decent but uptight Jill set out by Mr. Ayoade's script, Ms. Hawkins performance is a rather twitchy one and not one of her best.

Providing comedy and pathos in equal measure is the ever-versatile Paddy Cosidine as Graham Purvis. Cosidine sports what I quickly starting referring to as "the cosmic mullet." Typical of Grahams's wisdom, that a bored Jill receives while sitting in on one of his lectures: "Light is probably the most important gift we have from the universe. And if you ask any intelligent bloody writer...like Professor Hawking or anybody of that ilk...he could talk to you, for...I don't know....a year, just about bloody light. We don't want to be in the dark, being fiddled with." Profound stuff, indeed. With his rainbow emblazoned van and leather pants, he's a caricature waiting to happen, but Cosidine plays the "ninja," (as Oliver refers to him; during one brief scene, we see Graham's girlfriend go down on him while he indulges in a few martial arts moves with his hands) with admirable sincerity.

Paddy Considine elucidating the "Purvis Method"

Numerous comparisons have been made between Submarine and another stylised coming-of-ager, Rushmore, but they seem just a bit facile and short-sighted. Beyond a similarity in framing to Wes Anderson's first feature, Submarine would seem to owe a far stronger debt to Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude. Craig Roberts could actually be a Welsh cousin to But Cort's Harold. They both have the same dark bowls of hair with bangs swept to one side, a tendency to dilate their equally dark eyes. There is also a penchant on the part of both young men for black clothing.

It's not surprising that Richard Ayoade lists Harold and Maude as a major influence among those films of the late-60's and 1970's for which he professes such admiration. He manages to capture both the seductive look of the period along with the undertow of melancholy that often accompanied those films. It will be interesting to see if he's the sort of artist who can take his influences and run with them. Submarine is a deliberate but impressive first step.

Like Harold and Maude, the action in Submarine is also unified by its music, a set of songs from a singer/songwriter. With the former, it was obviously the memorable tunes of Cat Stevens. Submarine has its evocative new but old-sounding ballads provided by Arctic Monkeys' front man Alex Turner. The songs are introduced by way of a mix tape that Oliver receives from his father when Lloyd Tate finds out his son is dating. Typical of the somber elder Tate, the tape includes not only love songs, but selections for the inevitable heartbreak as well. When he and Jordana are on the outs, Oliver flips the tape to the side entitled "despondency." This is not Mr. Turner's first experience unifying present music with past sounds. Aside from his very successful work with the Arctic Monkeys, he collaborated in 2007 with Miles Kane and James Ford on The Last Shadow Puppets, songs that demonstrate not only the influence of Scott Walker and early Bowie, but marry surprisingly well Mr. Turner's gatling gun delivery with the spaghetti-western-type sweep of Ennio Morricone on certain of the tunes.

Here's an example of Turner's work for Submarine, as well as some lovely images of he cavorting Oliver and Jordana.

The Tree of Life

2011-07-10T13:08:00.000-07:00

Life, the universe and everything. It's tempting to appropriate the title of the third of Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker" novels toward the end of finding something big enough to do justice to Terrence Malick's fifth feature, The Tree of Life. Of course, Adams' titles and books were full of whimsy and irony. Both the great strength and dragging limitation of The Tree of Life is its absolute sincerity.

Apparently first conceived as film called Q after his great Days of Heaven, this latest film from the writer/director is at least partially the fruition of that ambitious origins of life on Earth project. For good and bad, The Tree of Life has the look and bursting at the seams feel of something that has been worked on and worked over for decades.

There is here all one usually finds in Malick. There is the spare dialog which occurs often in the form of whispery statements, an evolution from the relatively conventional female voice-overs in Badlands and Days of Heaven to the internal monologues or meditations of The Thin Red Line and The New World. Here the utterances are somewhere between the latter and outright conversations with God. There is the continued dwelling in the past. Perhaps this is a way for Mr. Malick to illuminate the present by refracting it through that past. Perhaps it's a more simple, self-indulgent penchant for nostalgia. Throughout his films and most powerfully in The Tree of Life, there is a sense of paradise lost, of happiness, even bliss having been at one's fingertips, before slipping away. Like much of what we see in The Tree of Life, it's a heady mix of the Biblical and the personal. Whatever the case, it's a resonant theme and perhaps the world's oldest. How many of us fail to live contentedly in the present, feel that real happiness has somehow just eluded us, some key moment not recognized, some important past decision gotten wrong? The visual poetry that often reflects Mr. Malick's feeling for the natural world unfurled so memorably in his previous four films is again on display throughout The Tree of Life. Also, in the words of a slightly lesser poet, everything is beautiful. This applies not only to Malick's obvious sensitivity to the natural world, but to inanimate objects therein, to cars, households, furniture and dress. It also applies to the actors he employs. It's hard to find a lead actor in any of his five features who's not striking in one way or another. The main justification for Richard Gere's presence in the great Days of Heaven would seem to be his cheekbones. Beyond the million dollar bone structure, Gere sports a scarf and more than passable suit through a good portion of Days of Heaven. Whether laboring in a Chicago steel mill or working a farm in the Texas panhandle, Gere cuts a rather dashing figure for a impecunious drifter.

The Tree of Life positively teems with beauty. The leads are typically handsome, particularly Jessica Chastain, going about her motherly rounds in a series of simple, elegant dresses draped perfectly over her dancer's frame. It's true of the households and most every object they contain, however simple. And, of course, it's the case with that natural of world of the film's Texas setting. There's much consideration of the caress of trees in full bloom by some impetuous wind, the accompanying rustle of leaves. Light diffused through curtains and playing on the walls, the sort of luminous evanescence that seems a haunting, gentle signal from another world when you descry it. Mallick's gaze misses little of such things. Water from a garden hose gurgling over the lips and down a shin to wash away stray blades of grass on Mrs. Obrien's leg. A field of sunflowers, a crowded composition of the plants standing uncanny and alert. Even the one birth we see from Mrs. O'Brien (Chastain) has the mother and all attending her clad impeccably in white. She's allowed a mute scream, but there's nary an indication of blood or placenta. I believe Mr. Malick knows the facts of life. It's an aesthetic choice. One could spend days cataloging the beauty in The Tree of Life.

While the feeling of paradise lost is not new to Malick films, in the case of The Tree of Life, that obscure object of temporal desire is not so obscure. It is a lost brother and son. After some fleeting glances of the Obrien's life in 1950's Waco, we see bad news delivered to the parents some years ahead. Mrs. Obrien reads a telegram in an impeccably decorated mid-century home, her husband takes a phone call adjacent to a roaring, shining plane on an airfield. There's no explicit revelation, but the nature of the news is clear enough. The couple, so different in personality, respond in a similar manner, as if each has taken a blow to the solar plexus.

The death of R.L, one of the younger Obrien boys haunts the oldest, Jack, into his adult life. We're sent ahead to an unprecedented place in a Terrence Malick film, the relative present. There we find an obviously discontented Jack (Sean Penn), an architect residing in yet another almost hermetically modern dwelling. He seems no more happily paired that his parents; there's a telling shot of his attractive wife or partner sitting on the opposite side of their bed; their backs are turned to one another. The older Jack seems to wander through his day at loose ends. "The world's gone to the dogs," he says, in one of the few lines of audible dialog Penn is allowed. There are flashbacks to his youth. In phone conversation with his father, he apologizes for a careless remark about R.L., and admits, "I think about him every day."

Mr. Malick then interrupts this regularly scheduled program of familial strife and longing for the creation of the world. Really. There are blades of celestial light. There is a big bang of sorts. We see the fiery, volcanic creation of our Earth right up to the time of the dinosaurs. As if heralding the minor theme of sibling rivalry, the mid-50's Cain and Able travails of Jack and R.L., there is even a strange encounter when a parasaurolopus lies apparently injured in a stream bed. A troodon spots the vulnerable creature, trots across the water and then holds the defenseless dinosaur's head down before releasing it and running off. Ultimately there is a shot from the vantage point of outer space of what may well be a meteor strike, signaling the end of the dinosaurs.

Make of it what you will, the roughly quarter hour sequence is, typical for Malick, visually rich. This we can attribute to the director's sensibilities (e.g., no CGI) and a collaboration with veteran special effects craftsman Douglas Trumball. Mr. Trumball worked, most famously perhaps, with Stanley Kubrick on "2001." That link, along with The Tree of Life's cosmic scope and often booming score has led to many comparisons between the two films, despite how emotionally disparate are the two stories and directors.

Occasionally, as the world is taking shape amongst all the fire and crashing of waves, the music gives way to sotto voce existential questions and statements. These emanate mainly from a grieving Mrs. Obrien, as when she is heard to say, "We cry to you. My soul. My son. Hear us." While regarding all of this, it would seem that audiences too are involved in their own questioning, those of a why or what nature. Or, it would seem, that most simple and profound of existential queries: Huh?

The Tree of Life begins with a title card that bears an excerpt from the book of Job “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” More from the same Old Testament book is later heard during the funeral of R.L. This the apparent justification for all the creation to which we are witness, as well as an answer to Mrs. O'Brien and all the mournful souls through the ages, with their questions like "Where were you?" or "How could you let this happen." Unfortunately, this casts the creator of the world in the position of grouchy parent, reminding his or her ingrate children about all that has been done to lay the foundation of their lives, to which they seem to be clueless. Mr. Malick's seriousness of purpose, his sincerity seem nearly as admirable has his visual instincts are unimpeachable. And much as his might be a broad spirituality, transcending any narrow Christianity to something even in an enlightened Judeo-Christian tradition, it's still a creaky old model to those who don't choose to interpret the world in such a manner. More to the point, as intellectually ambitious as this film wants to be, it tries to fit itself into a belief system which is antithetical to intellecual inquiry; it hits the wall where real questioning has to stop and faith begins.

However, there is considerable value in provoking thought and debate, even if you choose to reject the over-arching vision in The Tree of Life. More problematic is how Malick's cosmology fails to meld to any satisfactory degree with the story of Jack O'Brien and his family. That meteor strike at the end of the creation sequence seques to a pregnant Mrs O'Brien in 1950's Waco. The creation of the universe down to the creation of one soul. It's one of the director's attempts to converge the cosmic and personal narratives.

It might be an Eden of sorts, the O'Brien's early family life, but the placid waters mirroring all the beauty about them are made to roil. The tempest comes mainly, though not exclusively, in the form of Mr. O'Brien. The father is something of a Brahm's blaring Great Santini, much as he seems to long for more of an emotional connection with his boys. His "Do you love your father?" or "Give your father a hug," with which he sometimes casts at Jack and his younger sons come as more commands from a safe distance than vulnerable pleas for affection. Sadly, the responses come dutifully in kind. Mr. O'Brien is an exacting man of frustrated aspirations and his family often suffers his anger. This may not be Pitt's best acting, but he certainly looks the archetype he's meant to inhabit, with his somewhat severe crew cut, often resolutely extended lower lip and handsome face showing the eclipse of the years and toll of failed ambitions.

As for Mrs. O'Brien, early in The Tree of Life, we hear her say something she was taught during her Catholic schooling, "There are two ways in life: the way of nature and the way of grace. It's a dichotomy that seems to apply to the couple as well as the tug of war within their eldest son. Jessica Chastain does well to convey the considerable emotion she gets across as the wife and mother; it is, perhaps, rather more difficult to embody grace than nature. Mrs. Obrien is an ethereal presence, almost child-like and happily conspiratorial with her boys at times when she enjoys the absence of her husband's harsh authority.

Through the many happy and troubling moments that we witness, the impeccable images and mise-en-scene so typical of Malick's films are due in part to the good work of production designer Jack Fisk and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.

The great strength of the Tree of Life is the family story, specifically the travails of Jack and his brothers. The film's strongest performances might well be those of Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan as the O'Brien boys, particularly McCracken as the jug-eared, wary Jack.

The redoubtable Sean Penn struggles more with his adult version of Jack. While the preponderance of time post-creation is judiciously spent on the family life in 1950's Waco and Jack's difficult entry into adolescence, there are brief returns to both the blades of light that began the creation sequence and to wanderings of the adult Jack. These wanderings go from the emotional to the literal, with Jack seen stepping unsurely about a desert landscape. Penn has a face that bespeaks its share of turmoil. He's always been able to act powerfully without dialog - witness the lifeless eyes of Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking. Unfortunately, he's given too vague a sense of direction by Terrence Malick and seems the most underutilized member of the cast.

Beyond it's obvious and abundant beauty, the thing which The Tree of Life would seem to offer, distinct within Malick's work, is its sense of reconciliation. This is certainly true of the film's climax, where the adult Jack does actually "fall down and seem to understand all things," as his father had once predicted they all would. He brings together the disparate souls from his past, family members and neighbors alike, most of all, the desperately missed son and younger brother, R.L. All of this while the Berlioz Requiem, with its army of clarion brass, complete with chanted "Amen's," resounds. This coming together on a sand bar, occuring as it does in some other world, past, present or just dreamt of, does finally tie together Malick's family story and grand cosmology. I'm not sure that the writer/director really provides any ideas big enough to fill the vast space that he's circumscribed, but this crescendo is not without its impact.

More satisfying still is the earlier reconciliation, that of the adolescent Jack with himself and the world about him. The "way of nature and the way of grace" conflict plays out. Jack whispers, "Father, mother, always you wrestle inside me. Always you will." The boy's troubles come not only from strife with his father, but from the first stirrings of sexuality and disturbing sights that jostle him. These include the sight of a boy with a disturbingly patchy head of hair (this occurs while neighborhood boys play and exact their minor havoc on windows and some unfortunate amphibians; Malick acutely captures both the innocence and lurking menace in the sometimes explosive gatherings of young men). During a trip downtown with his mother, Jack is also haunted by the herky-jerky gait of a man passing them on the street and the sight of a few convicts who seem not only criminal, but insane (the kindly Mrs. O'Brien still offers one of them a drink of water).

There has been violence running through all of Terrence Malick's films, a thematic contradiction to the beautiful language of his work. But here, particularly in Jack's struggles, there seems a more direct confrontation of beauty and ugliness than ever before. Jack rebels not only from his father, but from his mother. He goes through the underwear drawer of a neighbor women, steals a slip, runs out and ultimately buries it in panic. Ultimately, he bullies his younger brother to the point that he shoots R.L.'s finger with a b.b. gun.

The air gun incident is like a storm that dries the air and clears the sky. Jack and his younger brother join hands after the violence of the incident. Echoing his stern father, Jack gives his brother an opportunity to strike him in the face. The younger brother feints a couple of blows but then smiles. All, for a time at least, is well. Similarly, during another boyish scrum, we see Jack place his hand on the back of the neighborhood boy scarred and left with patchy hair on the back of his head from a house fire. That laying on of his child's hand is in some ways a statement writ as large as the film's culmination on that heavenly sandbar. It's a profound realization that he need not fear becoming the scarred boy, or the man with cerebral palsy he encountered on a Waco street, because he is them. Here, seemingly, the inspiration from or kinship with Whitman's Song of Myself , that has been noted by more than a few, "In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.” It's a big-hearted moment whose power lies in the brevity and simplicity of the image.

Such images of warmth and acceptance, along with those of the spectral play of light on walls, over the tops of houses, the chorus of trees of grass and so many others, would seem the parts of The Tree of Life most likely to endure. No one seems to capture these fleeting, transcendent little lifetimes like Terrence Malick. While it's not a statement the director seems consciously to make, it is none-the-less presented with abundant clarity in The Tree of Life: the devil may reside in the details, but it's often the place where heaven can be found as well.

Thor

2011-06-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

One divine hammer. Chris Hemsworth as Thor.

God as my witness, I really thought they were called the Frostchilds. This, just part of the problem when numerous cast members are called upon to speak in a English accent, whether they happen to hail from England or not. As it turns out, the enemies of Asgard and their King Odin (Anthony Hopkins) are, in fact, the Frost Giants.   Shame, really.   Instead of sounding like the patricians of a snowy realm, the bad guys find themselves with a label redolent of some forgettable Canadian Football League squad.  There's just not going to be any winning that way.  It's one of many shortcomings of this film version of Thor, feebly helmed by Kenneth Branagh. What we have here, in addition to a failure to communicate, is some very watered down Norse Mythology.

Burdened as they are by a silly name, the Frost Giants still prove pesky in their way, breaking into the palace just as Odin is about to vacate the thrown for his brawny, rather too sure of himself son, Thor. One son's acension to the throne, we later find out, occurs to the chagrin of the other son, Loki. Such considerations are overshadowed by the incursion of the the Frost Giants, after the coveted Casket of Ancient Winters.   Yes, the Casket of Ancient Winters.  The Giants are not successful, but their brazen party crashing incites the new king, who is ready to wield that big hammer of his. Odin counsels restraint, but testosterone prevails, sending Thor, his friend Sif, brother Loki and the Warriors Three (sort of Thor's mythological backing band) to the frigid environs of Jotunheim to kick some Frost Giant ass. Hmm...a callow scion taking his countrymen to distant land to make an ill-advised, preemptive strike - sound at all familiar, good people of America?   The Asgardians, by the way, seem to have hired the architect of New York's Trump Tower to design their palace; which is to say, lots of gold, not so much imagination.

Don't you just love what they've done with the Kodak Theatre!

As these things tend to go, Thor's attack on the Frost Giants proves a fiasco. He's rescued at the last moment by Odin, with the weary, aggrieved air of a parent called to the police station in the middle of the night to retrieve a dumbass kid. But this is no average family, after all. Odin realizes that Thor is in no way ready to assume the leadership of Asgard. He strips his son of his title, divests him of his hammer and banishes him from Asgard, sending him skittering down a wormhole to that inter-galactic Ellis Island in the American Southwest, New Mexico. There poor Thor falls right into the path of scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and her scientifically tricked out recreational vehicle. Prowling around the New Mexico desert with Jane is her mentor, Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) and her goofy assistant, Darcy (Kat Dennings).

The lives of Thor and Jane intersect quite literally, when Thor falls into the path of the scientist's vehicle. An awkward romance and some fish out of water comedy (some of which actually works) ensues. While this is happening in New Mexico, the reptilian Loki (who finds out that he's the adopted son of Laufey, leader of the Frost Giants) connives with the enemies of Asgard to let them run amok in his adoptive home and steal the Casket of Ancient Winters. Weary Odin, so stressed out by all of these proceedings - the foolish, banished son on one had, the adopted, embittered son on the other - falls into a protective "Odinsleep," sort of a coma with high production values.

Loki slips down to New Mexico to tell Odin that their father has actually died and, much as I would like to help you, bro, rules are rules, and there's nothing to be done about ending your exile. However, when the Warriors Three manage to sneak down to Earth and give Thor the real story, Loki then feels the need to do away with his attention-grabbing brother once and for all. He sends down a fearsome, seemingly indestructible metallic monster called "The Destroyer." to dispatch Thor at last. The Destroyer? you might wonder. With all the loopy, vaguely Norse nomenclature floating around Thor, The Destroyer was the best they could do? Why not just call it The Ass Kicker? The Beater Upper? Big Scary Metal Man? This lack of imagination, at least, can be laid at the door of the Marvel Comics people, who took up the Thor story in the 1960's.

Thor's hammer, given the far richer name of Mjolnir, gets hurled to Earth after him. The mighty hammer and it's attendant crater are swooped upon by S.H.I.E.L.D, one of the least menacing of super secret, dark-suited group of government agents you're likely to see on film. Thor fights his way into their enclosure only to find that he can't liberate Mjolnir from the stubborn New Mexico ground or from the Sheldians. The hammer, as it turns out, has a sword-in-the-stone-like worthiness requirement. (the Exacalibur legend also has an analogue in Norse Mythology). Thor needs to learn both humility and selflessness before good old Mjolnir comes flying back to him. His seeming suicide mission in taking on The Destroyer proves to be an indication that the beefy fellow might just be ready to lead his people back in Asgard. Unfortunately, going home means the end of a budding romance between he and a swooning Jane. The destruction of the Bifrost Bridge during a climactic life and death battle between Thor and Lokie - the same inter-galactic causeway across which the Asgardians inexplicably clatter on horseback - means no return to Earth for Thor, ending forever hopes of seeing Jane again. Or at least until the sequel; whichever comes first.

A few unexpected laughs aside, this Thor has numerous sins for which to answer. Most damningly, there is the rendering almost colorless three interesting actors who head up the Earthly contingent. Stellan Skarsgard is the only one of the trio we first see in the R.V. who gets out of this mess alive, and he with barely a pulse. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist proved just how smart and charming Kat Dennings could be. We see only the slightest hint of that here. As for Lady Natalie, well, that return to terra firma from the heights of Oscar glory can be a bumpy one. This might not be her Snow Dogs, but she has never appeared more forgettable on screen. It doesn't help that the script gives her such verbal gold as "Oh. My. God.," or "That's a good look for you," when appreciating Thor's impressive physique once he has reassumed his Asgardian raiment. Get thee to an intelligent indie film apace, Natalie! I haven't seen Hesher and can't say how she fares there.

The pleasant surprise here is Chris Hemsworth as Thor. The former Aussie soap opera star seems out of his depth in the early scences, a wink and misplaced confidence giving him the air of some smug, latter-day country music star. But as we later find out, Hemsworth does possess actual charisma and a wee bit of range; he was merely acting unappealing when called upon to do so. Through those early scenes, he seems to labor with uncurling his Australian accent into something passably, vaguely English. But as Thor finds himself in the Earthly desert so does Hemsworth settle confidently into the role. He's got the appeal, the physique and deep register voice around which a franchise could be built. Compare the easy authority of his utterances to the rasping of Christian Bale as Batman, making the Caped Crusader sound like he's been smoking three packs a day since he was a teenager.

Mr. Bale's unconvincing throatiness aside, the two Batman films on which he and Christopher Nolan have collaborated, as with the first two Spiderman films, proved that comic book adaptation and intelligent film need not be mutually exclusive entitites. Kenneth Branagh has spoken of all sorts of lofty goals for this particular adaption, among them reducing the larger than life story to an appreciably human scale. That happens too little, far to late in Thor. In the rote, sometimes incomprehensible CGI sequences (especially the early conflict between Thor, his small band and the Frost Giants), there seems no directorial hand, that of Branagh or anyone else. The fact that Thor has pretty much tripled its $150 million budget in revenue means that he may live to direct another day, the film's success giving his career a bump in the same manner that Iron Man improved Jon Favreau's fortunes. A sequel, The Avengers, is already in the works.

Thor merchandise now available.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2011-05-03T08:32:00.000-07:00

It seems more a matter of Uncle Boonmee, who welcomes his past loved ones. But that hardly matters. Thai writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film has its origin in a 1983 book entitled A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives, apparently inspired by a man named Boonmee who approached the abbot of the Buddhist temple in Weerasethakul's home town and made convincing claims about being able to rememeber past lives while meditating. What was to be a fairly straightforward biographical film became a multi-platform art project called The Primitive. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the final installment in the project. It's more coda than crescendo, and a quiet one at that; imagine The Beatles and George Martin having stuck with the original ending to "A Day in the Life," four of them humming in E-major, instead of having the chord struck on four keyboards at once.

"Uncle Boonme's" mysteries begin with its first scene. It's twilight. The place is presumably a remote location in Thailand. The time period is even more indeterminate. While a crepuscular chorus of insects is in full swing, a few figures are seen through dense foliage. Nearby is tethered a water buffalo. The animal is seen in relative close-up, though emersed in shadow. As it turns it's oblong, somewhat pointed head, it's hard to make out the ears from the horizonatal set of its horns. As the head moves and contours are revealed through the shadow, there is the slightest hint of the human about it. Finally, it pulls it's rope free without much diffuculty and wanders off. A man, perhaps the father of the group previously seen, eventually gives unhurried pursuit. He finds the buffalo deep in the brush, gently tugs on the rope and there seems agreement between man and beast that it's time to return. Is the man Uncle Boonmee? Perhaps from a past life? Is he the water buffalo? Your guess, gentle reader, is as good as mine.

That scene, like so many in "Uncle Boonmee," is decidedly prosaic, slow-developing and more or less mesmerizing. However, not quite all is munane here. That first episode ends not with the man and his water buffalo, but with a figure standing nearby in the forest. The figure is so dark as to be invisible. Only its eyes give a sense of presence and height.   The eyes, almost comically round and bright, also clearly indicate that presence as something otherworldly.   As "Uncle Boonmee" drifts along, we'll see numerous of these dark figures, lurking, walking along, even jumping between tree tops.   One even shows up for dinner.   The figures might be some sort of emissaries from beyond, appearing when a living thing is about to die, but not even that is entirely clear.

As critics attempt to apply description to "Uncle Boonmee" with all the effectiveness of some carnival attendee trying to toss rings over the narrow mouths of milk jugs, one word that recurs is nonlinear. For the most part, that word is as much a misnomer as the film's title is slippery. With a couple of notable exceptions, once we proceed from the opening scene with the lazy rebellion of the water buffalo, this narrative, mysterious though it may be, does move forward in a straight line.

Boonmee's sister, Jen, arrives at his farm in Thailand's Isan province with her nephew, Tong. Nothing seems terribly amiss as Boonmee and Jen catch up on each other's lives in one of the film's many long takes. We do find out that Boonmee has a kidney illness and subsquently see him administered a crude form of dialysis, but so gentle are these people and the rhythms of their lives, it's hard to believe death will encroach upon the story. There are scenes almost static, as Boonmee, Jen and his workers tend tamarind trees, wander about, sit down and enjoy a taste of his bees' honey. "Chewey as bubble gum," says Jen of the honey, finding it especially refreshing after an afternoon's exertions, walking made more difficult by a club right foot. Honey seems an apt substance for this story, both in taste and gentle flow.

During one of their conversations, Boonmee says he believes his condition a result of his karma, having "killed too many commies." And insects, he later adds, a good Buddhist. Jen assures him that it is his intentions that mattered most in both instances. The killing to which Boonmee refers is apparently an August 1965 assault by the Thai military against Communists in and around the village of Nabua.

The director has stated that he didn't want to make a political film. He certainly has not done so in any overt way. Beyond allusion to the 1965 incident, there two other instances in which the military is not so much a minor theme as an ambiguous presence. Most strikingly, there is a sequence in which Boonmee recounts a dream shortly before dying. He speaks of a dark age in which soldiers capture people and destroy them by projecting their images into the future. While this is recounted in Boonmee's typical soft tones, we see a kind of slideshow of still images. One of the dark-haired, red-eyed creatures is present. We see young men, dressed in Western fashion, jeans and t-shirts, throwing rocks, in stances of scorn and agression, presumably directed at our hirsute friend. Then images redolent of Abu Ghraib, young men in fatigues and the hairy figure with a rope around it's neck, ultimately a group shot with some of the young men smiling for the camera.

"Uncle Boonmee" is an intentional mix of styles according to Weerasethakul. Each of the film's six reels with its own feel, among them "old cinema," "costume drama" and "documentary style." One can only assume that the dream sequence is the latter. The series of still pictures are the most striking stylistic departure from the general flow of "Uncle Boonmee," but still fit the detached, slightly haunting mood that prevails throughout.

The other major departure from the story of Uncle Boonmee comes without any obvious thread to the story. A palanquin carries a veiled princess through the jungle. There is a brief touching of hands between the princess and one of the carriers. When they arrive at a secluded pond, the princess looks into the water and her relfection changes from a face disfigured to one of impeccable, youthful beauty. However, neither that nor a brief, but intense embrace with her attendant convince her that she is anything but ugly. Once left alone, a voice assures her from the midst of the water. This, as we find out, is a catfish. A very special catfish. Once the fish's affirmmations are complete, the princess steps into the water, begins to remove her jewelry as an offering (to the guru fish or simply the water we do not know at this point) and begins to float on her back. And then her body begins to jerk and...is this the "costume drama" portion of the program? If so, I clearly haven't been watching enough Masterpiece Theater. The most remarkable thing about the scene is not the strange congress between woman and fish, but how straight the scene is played. I had no idea why this was occuring, how it related to the central story, but I was transfixed. And nary a soul at the screening I attended betrayed any amusement. The act complete, we have any underwater perspective as a tail fin swishes through the water and the discarded jewelry sits at the sandy bottom. I was reminded of the Thomas Hardy poem, "Convergence of the Twain," with it's similar glimpse of baubles discarded beneath the waves, "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

Though he doesn't look a dying man when we first see him - no one we see demonstrates what one might construe as vitality; perhaps it's the heat - Boonmee seems to know his days are numbered. This belief is reinforced when he, Jen and Tong dine outdoors one evening. First, Boonmee's dead wife, Huay, begins to materialize next to Tong. The young man, reasonably enough, stands up and backs away from the specter. But neither Boonmee nor Jen are especially shocked. Before long, one of the dark figures with the Lite-Brite eyes appears and walks slowly to their table. This, we find out is Boonsong, late son of Boonmee. "You've let your hair grow out," says Jan, acknowledging in one of the film's few moments of understated humor what we're all wondering, audience and dinner guests alike. Boonsong explains that his spirit has mated with a monkey ghost. Asked and answered. Sort of.

Boonsong eventually wanders back amongst his hairy brethren. But Huay sticks around and assumes three-dimensional form. It's hard to say if she's fully flesh and blood, but she's real enough to accept an embrace from Boonmee as the two sit on his bed. Huay is generally a silent observer, as when we see her watch Jen sleeping one morning. She does break her silence to comfort Boonmee, when he worries about not being able to find her after death. "Ghosts aren't attached to places, but to people," she assures him. What is clear about Huay, at least in retrospect, is that she has reappeared to conduct Boonmee to his death.

Without fanfare of any kind, consistent with all occurs in "Uncle Boonmee," Huay, Jan, Tong and Boonmee set out through the jungle one night. The mysterious creatures, Boonsong presumably among them, follow in their manner. The four cross some very forbidding terrain in the dark and arrive at a cave. A flashlight searches the contours of the cave walls, a few primitive drawings are seen and the air of mystery is heightened. Boonmee says he feels like he's back in the womb. Nothing occurs until morning, when we see Huay and Boonmee together. Huay removes the tube connected to the port in Boonmee's abdomen. Fluid runs out of the ill man and meanders through the sand. It's hard to say what exactly the fluid is, but it seems the very essence of Boonmee.

Guess who's coming to dinner? One of many such creatures lurking in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Perhaps the most profound occrence in "Uncle Boonmee" is not the graceful depiction of its title character's demise, nor the funeral which follows. Jen and young female friend are in a hotel so bland it seems a kind of purgatory. They're sorting through offerings made at the funeral. Tong appears at the door in the saffron orange robe of a monk. This scene is particularly thick in its mysteries. Why is Tong dressed and shorn like a monk? Is it signifcant that he changes into a very Western looking pair of jeans and a t-shirt? Why does Jen not want him to see an image on the black and white television? And why, most enigmatically of all, do Tong and Jen look back as they're leaving the room and see doubles of themselves still watching the television? This profound film ends with Jen and Tong sitting in restaurant-cum-karaoke bar of all places, while a pop song - "Acrophobia," by the Thai band Penguin Villa - plays. This seems neither abitrary nor glib. It seems a matter of continuity and acceptance, about the convergence of seeming opposites. And it's kind of beautiful.

"Uncle Boonmee" nonchalantly walks a tightrope over a vast pit of disaster. So very much could go wrong with this film and so little does. Fortunately, this story embraces the absurd and the otherworldly as gently and gracefully as Boonmee and family welcome back dead loved ones to their table, even if one happens to look like a raven-haired, demonically red-eyed Sasquatch. It's okay, go with it. Watch Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and it will be frequently unclear what's happening, why it's happening or what in the world might transpire next. What's also clear through most every scene is that Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an artist. Like many a worthwhile artist, he addresses fundamental issues or questions from a point of view so unique, it seems like he wandered in from another world himself, sans the glowing red eyes. Actually, he doesn't even do anything so obvious as ask questions. Mysteries are presented. The conclusions, should you choose to draw any, are up to you

Jane Eyre

2011-04-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

"What's your tale of woe? All governesses have their tale of woe." If you're at all familiar with Jane Eyre, you know that she's got a doozy. But when the stern Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) asks this of his relatively new governess, she downplays her woeful backstory. One of the great strengths of this latest Jane Eyre, written by Moira Buffini and directed by Cary Fukunaga, is that it too downplays some of the Gothic excess inherent in Charlotte Bronte's novel. This allows for a better focus on one of the great heroines of 19th-century literature, who sometimes is lost amidst the privation and suffering of her youth and the dramatic goings-on at Thornfield Hall - you know, the brooding guy with the crazy wife in the attic.

All the better that Jane be played by Mia Wasikowska. The lovely young actress (The Kids Are Alright, Alice in Wonderland) has had her hair dyed red and been rendered more plain to play the role of Jane. Charlotte Bronte's heroine is fascinating for her complexity, particularly given her age. There is the obvious intelligence, candor, fortitude and individualism. But there is also a sense of propriety that is fairly unique to someone who clearly desires a fuller, not more provincial life experience. Any conspicuous sense of morality is so often a prim and pretty covering thrown over a rather dreary table. This is a young woman who can make morality exciting. Altogether, it's a complexity, a richness of character that you wouldn't expect to easily cohere in someone forty years old, much less someone on the tender side of twenty. Ms. Wasikowska manages to evince it all. All of that, and as Rochester says, "You have rather the look of another world about you.” One of the many feats to which Mia Wasikowska is more than equal.

This Jane Eyre also manages to rescue Mr. Rochester from the refuse heap of literary bad boys, a collection to which the Bronte sisters have at added at least a couple of illustrious corpses. The bilious fellow can easily drift into charicature, but there's no such danger with Moira Buffini's sympathetic rendering of the master of Thornfield, together with Michael Fassbender's intense but focused portrayal. We need to believe not only Rochester's severity, but the kernel of humanity and healthy passion that Jane reaches. As with his performance as Bobby Sands in Hunger, Mr. Fassbender's gleaming blue eyes would seem to indicate a fire within.

Fassbender might be well disposed to these extreme types, but watch also his work in Fishtank.   There's something ultimately louche in the seductive charm of his Connor in Andrea Arnold's 2009 film, bedding the confused girl to whom he was providing some deserpately needed fatherly warmth.   But for all that, his bad behavior was all the more ugly for how average he seemed.   Bookended with the Irish hunger striker and haunted fellow from the north of England, it shows some range.

It's interesting that director Fukunaga has said that he actually wanted to play up some of the more Gothic elements of the story, some of the spookiness. Fortunately, where this occurs, it's more a matter of mood than circumstance. There is a sooty blast from a fireplace when the young Jane (Amelia Clarkson) is locked in a room at Gateshead by her abusive aunt (Sally Hawkins).   Later, after the difficult years at Lowood School, during her early days as governess at Thornfield, a restless, melancholy Jane goes out for a walk. All is forbidding outside the great house:  fog drifts into the scene as if on cue, there is the requisite abrupt disturbance of some ominous bird, complete with screech and flapping of wings (that one certainly got me) and finally an encounter with a mysterious man and his rearing horse, which throws its rider.   The dark man on the dark steed is, of course, Mr. Rochester.

Beyond the occasional nod to the supernatural, there is little more than the occasional bump in the night on the part of the wretched Bertha, Rochester's first wife. Even her somewhat vampiric attack on her visiting brother, Roger, is treated with restraint. We (and Jane) see only the frightening and bloody aftermath, followed by a few forboding knocks from a behind a nearby wall. The episode is rife with possibilites of excess which are judiciously avoided. A good part of the credit belongs also to the script of Moira Buffini. This version begins with Jane's flight from Thornfield and is told mainly in flashback. The flashbacks are long enough to create a sense of continuity, but the breaking up of Bronte's narrative keeps the darker, potentially hysterical elements of the story from gaining too much momentum.

The belching fireplace, the screeching bird, poor young Jane made to stand on the "pedestal of infamy" at Lowood School...all well and Gothic good. Less so the purgatory which finds Jane aided and ultimately pursued by the dour St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell), during which she frequently hears her name whispered by wind about her. It would have been only slightly sillier had the wind cried Mary.

Much more significant than any of the Gothic trappings Mr. Fukunaga tries to emphasize is the moorland landscape of north central England that he and cinematographer Adriano Goldman capture so beautifully.

Much of this occurs as the film begins with Jane's flight from Thornfield. There is the rain darkened knot of branches outside her window, the lonely crossroads at which carriage tracks converge and finally the inland sea of grass, bracken and the crumbly, iridescent soil of the moors at which Jane has her moment of greatest despair. Rarely has this wild, otherworldly part of England been so powerfully evoked. Just as rare is a demonstration of hard it must have been to simply walk from one point to another through such an area without aid of a path. So it is with Jane as she slogs through the long, coarse grass while the rain pelts her mercilessly.

Restrained though the touch may be, this is still a tempest of a story. But all involved have managed to fasten the shutters long enough so we can focus on the extraordinary young woman who lends her name to the enterprise. Not to mention the classic romance which is in no way diminshed by its greater than usual credibility. If you groan at the thought of another Jane Eyre, this might be a good place to return to the story. If you have always been a fan, be grateful that the baton has been picked up by such sure hands.

Source Code

2011-04-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

I think we knew The Bean was magical. To the unitiated, the reflective sculpture more formally known as Cloud Gate, designed by Anish Kapoor for Chicago's Millennium Park, figures prominently in Duncan Jones' Source Code. The film begins with two converging aerial perspectives of the city. One glides in from Lake Michigan over an empty harbor, the elegant buildings of downtown looking slightly blanched, echoing the vegetation of early spring. The relatively new Chicago park gets further star treatment when Frank Gehry's pedestrian bridge is photographed flatteringly from above, looking a snaking, metallic riverbed. Interspersed with these shots are those of a commuter train speeding into the city. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) awakens on the train in a very agitated state, despite the presence of a lovely young woman (Michelle Monaghan) sitting before him who seems quite warmly disposed toward the jumpy man. The last thing he remembers was piloting an army helicopter in Afghanistan. Now he's on a train zooming toward Chicago in the body of a man he doesn't recognize. Even worse, the train is about to explode. The silver lining for Colter is that he's pretty much dead already.

The explosion, an unconvincing bit of CGI, occurs as the commuter train passes a freight train near the campus of IIT on the south side of the city. The barely passable special effects are at least partially explained away by the fact that we have seen only the simulation of an explosion. After the blast, poor Colter (as if the name weren't curse enough) gets sucked through a wormhole, is witness to a kind of life before his eyes sort of montage, the aforementioned Bean among the images, and then back to reality. Or a kind of reality.

Like the Sam Bell character in Duncan Jones' first film, Moon, Colter is at first unaware of the very nature of his existence. This is a fact that serves his employers well. What he finds out is that that very capusule into which is strapped is just a mental projection. What is real, when the video screen inside his imaginary capsule is working, is the soothing voice and blue eyes of Collen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). It's her job to keep sending Colter back to the commuter train so he can find evidence of another explosion which hasn't yet occured, a dirty bomb in an unknown vehicle bound for the center of the metropolis. So, once more unto the breach in the space-time continuum dear friends.

As one might expect, Colter grows aggrieved at this routine, being fired into a parallel universe and then exploded back to reality. Who wouldn't, really. He's able to determine the location of the bomb on the doomed commuter train, but like any good military man, he demands to know his location and the nature of his mission before subjected to yet more weird science in the name of national security. The generally benevolent Captain Goodwin is only able to parcel out what bits of information her superiors think their subject needs to know. Finally,the head of the Source Code project is called upon to give Colter a proper explanation of what's happening.

This would be Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright). The slightly mad doctor at first demurs because it might be too much for an average mortal to comprehend. The basic notion is that every brain leaves a sort of electromagnetic afterglow for eight minutes. Into those lingering minutes is shot the good captain, partially because he has a similar body type to his host. Really? Was zodiac sign not a consideration as well? As Rutledge tries to explain the science behind the Source Code - "It's uh... quantum mechanics, parabola calculus. It's uh...it's...it's very complicated." - we realize, uh... the less said, the better. "Not time travel, but time reassingment," he finally states with a slightly sinister, voila! sort of breathiness of voice through a bushy goatee. With his crutch and delusions of grandeur, Wright's Dr. Rutledge seems a small-time Richard III. Now is the winter of our war on terror made glorious summer by this code of source. Wright seems to be playing a type of heavy more than a particular character. Neither Wright's Dr. Rutledge nor fuzzy science are the strong point here.

Left to our imagination is how the last eight minute afterglow of the dearly departed host on the train are able to be utililzed a seemingly unlimited number of times by our brave pilot. There is also the matter of just how Colter is able to be fired back into parallel reality of the unexploded commuter train or what exactly (beyond being blown up) causes him to be yanked back through the worm hole.

Dubious though the scientific framework may be, some of the story's details do demonstrate some logic and imagination. The capsule in which we first see Colter Stevens is actually not so far removed from the metal box in which his truncated body is maintained. The implication would seem to be that he has subconsciously absorbed his physical surroundings into his mental projections, just as external stimulation sometimes seeps into our dreams.

To its credit, Source Code also skewers 21st-century paranoia about terrorist attacks more than it exploits the fear. The repeated visits to the commuter train diminish the shock value of the event, much as Captain Stevens learns to regard each person in his rail sleek, spacious rail car (I'm not complaining, but MY Metra car never looks like that) as real people, not just figures in a simulation. When Dr. Rutledge speaks of the "War on Terror," the term sounds as hollow and government-produced as it should. There is also the instance of Colter all-too-quickly focusing on a man of seeming Middle Eastern descent as he's trying to determine the identity of the bomber. Colter is wrong and another point about our reaction to crisis is made without being belabored.

Despite the infusion of a bigger budget - or perhaps because of it - Source Code is neither as fresh nor as good as Duncan Jones first feature, Moon. What Mr. Jones has gotten right in both cases is the need personalize, to bring down to a human scale what are essentially outlandish stories. We'll take the trip, however strange, if there is a character about whom we care in the midst of all the chaos acting always consistent in a manner with whom he or she is. It's a simple enough idea that too quickly gets lost when the plot goes swirling in one odd direction or another.

Moon also had the advantage of Sam Rockwell - several Sam Rockwells as it turned out - at its center. It's hard to imagine that film working nearly so well without his strange authority. Jake Gyllenhaal doesn't bring anything quite so interesting to Captain Colter Stevens, but he does bring enough to make it work. Poor guy - he can't find peace in any dimension, as was the case in Donnie Dark. He looks a bit like Donnie grown older, a little more ascetic with his sharp features accentuated all the more by closely cropped hair. It's a face that registers both alarm and happiness with considerable amplitude, the large eyes and dark, ample eyebrows shaped like parentheses but acting like exclamation points. The film's optimistic take on a future altered for the better by tinkering with the past and Gyllenhaal's sympathetic Captain Stevens more than make up for Source Code's shaky science fiction.

Certified Copy

2011-04-12T17:27:00.000-07:00

There are all manner of interesting ideas put forth and never fully explored in Abbas Kiarostami's first "Western," which is to say his first film shot in the West, outside of Iran. There is writer James Miller (William Shimell) presenting his book Copie Conforme, a supposed meditation on the value of art, be it copy or original. As Miller and an apparent fan, an unnamed antiques dealer played by Juliette Binoche, head off in her car for the Tuscan village of Lucignano, the dialog about art eventually gives way to an increasingly rancorous discussion about relationships. Here, seemingly, is the writer/director's most slippery of notions about the certified copy. The man and woman are mistaken for husband and wife by a matron of a Lucignano restaurant. They decide to play along. But so impassioned do they become in their roles, so heated becomes their discussion, that one begins to think they might be a couple married for 15 years after all. Perhaps the pretending to be strangers was the game, the copy.

What most films critics have missed in lining up to laud Certified Copy is the possibility that they have witnessed something that is only a simulacrum of a good film. If you put a formidable actress and an acclaimed director together to present a story that at least touches upon lofty subjects like art, reality and love, it has to be good right?

The Binoche character (credited simply as "Elle"), shows up late with her son to the book talk given by Miller. She speaks to the writer's agent, leaves a note with him and then departs with her restless boy. Miller later appears at her antiques store. It's not clear why the writer has done so, but whatever she wrote in that note clearly did the trick. It's the first of many fairly naked contrivances on the part of Kiarostami; but at this point, the slightly prickly non-chemistry of the two, the air of uncertainty that prevails seems enough to merit playing along.

As "She" drives Miller through Arezzo and into the Tuscan countryside, they discuss the subject matter of his book. Miller's premise is that the copy of a work of art is as valuable or as valid as the supposed original. The Mona Lisa, after all, is simply "a copy of the beauty of Lisa del Giocondo." Well, yes. Unfortunately, there's no one in the car - certainly not "She" who gets to make little more than an emotional, knee-jerk reaction to Miller's theories - to say something like, "Sure, that's true. But isn't that true for every painting, every book, every piece of music ever conceived? No work of art is created in a vacuum. But isn't one of the things that defines a work of art is that - despite its perhaps obvious inspirations - it is, in fact, a creation that has never quite existed before?" That's but one of many possible salvos in a discussion that could well bleed into conceptual art and any number of related topics. But that's all rather more than Mr. Kiarostami, or Mr. Miller by extension, have in mind.

The conversation continues as Miller autographs copies of the book for the Binoche character. He extends his flimsy thesis to human beings: “It might be said that we are only the DNA replicas of our ancestors.” Again, a bold-sounding statement that really doesn't say much of anything. What is becoming clear at this juncture of Certified Copy is that personalities and arguments are breaking down along cliched gender lines. She is feeling, believing in art as in love. He's more analytical, unfeeling, emotionally stunted. Actually, Miller and his ideas just seem facile, which is a result of Mr. Kiarostami's poor attempt at creation of a genuine character. Miller owns that perhaps he has just written Copie Conforme to convince himself of his own ideas. The dialog between the two (mainly his) as they motor toward Lucignano is little better than the sort of pseudo intellectual cant that has plagued many a Woody Allen film.

It's in Lucignano, after the fateful encounter at the trattoria, that the two begin to behave as husband and wife. One doesn't buy this, as apparently did David Denby of The New Yorker because "we accept it as a possible new mating ritual among the hyper-educated." No, we don't go along for that reason. That would just be stupid. But there seems hope at this juncture this something interesting might still transpire. Also because Mr. Kiarostami has earned some trust. And if you're like me, you would follow Juliette Binoche through hell. Or even Euro Disney.

During a conversation in that Lucignano restaurant, the film has a high point of sorts, or at least a last glimmer of promise before it all starts coming apart. "She" asks Miller where he got the idea for his book. The writer explains that he was in the Piazza della Signoria one day when he saw a woman talking to her boy near the Michelangelo David. This is pertinent in the context of the film and Miller's work, because the David which stands in the piazza is a copy of the original, which is housed in the nearby Accademia (both in Florence). As Miller explains the significance of the encounter, seeing the mother near the copy of David, struggling with her son, we see Binoche grow more serious and then finally shed one of those significant, single tears. She says, "I wasn't well in those days." Miller only then realizes that the mother of whom he has been speaking is the woman sitting opposite him.

With that, we seem to be getting somewhere, close to something real. Kiarostami has finally struck a note which doesn't seem out of tune. Unfortunately, the moment passes and Certified Copy really begins to lose its way.

It's almost inexplicable that Miller would play along with the charade of being married, given how relatively aloof he has held himself to the moment of being mistaken for his companion's husband. And little which happens after the game begins suggests that he's enjoying the role playing. Not long into the apparent charade, the pair are at a Lucignano museum in which the Binoche character wants to show him a picture long thought original but more recently proven a fake. This, it would seem, is right up Mr. Miller's alley. But he betrays not the least enthusiasm. When a young couple just married, having photos taken in the museum, try to include our would-be man and wife, it practically takes a gun to Miller's temple to get him to him to participate.

If you're going to take a story in a fanciful direction, be it science fiction, horror, or whatever else, the farther out you take matters from the real and everyday, the more important there be a logical center from which everything is so delicately cast. There is very little consistent about James Miller's behavior or William's Shimell's acting once Mr. Kiarostami sets his flawed story-telling mechanism in motion.

After the museum the pair stop in another restaurant. The Binoche character excuses herself. We then have a mirror's persepctive as she applies lipstick, hangs a couple of festive red earrings. It's an effective shot, largely due to Binoche's presence, the anticipation she's able to suggest with these prosaic rituals.   Clearly, our Elle is hoping that the day's journey is taking a turn for the romantic.   She's hoping for some recognition of her beauty, some warmth. Boy, is she out of luck.   And, as it happens, so are we, stuck in the restaurant like stranded souls at an adjacent table while a painful scene unfolds.

By the time "She" returns, the writer has apparently suffered a precipitous drop in blood sugar. His wine is awful, he can't get the waiter's attention...he seems to need a binky and a nap.  As Miller sits at the table, running through a range of negative emotions, it's as if the director or some poor assistant is holding up cards just off camera that read:    ANGER!...PETULANCE!... IMPATIENCE!...UNDERWEAR WAY TOO TIGHT!!. The unfortunate result is like bad theater, or worse, bad jazz.

Oh honey, he's not worth it. La Binoche in Certified Copy.

Mr. Shimell, apparently one of Britain's more accomplished operatic baritones, holds his own with the great Binoche through the early going of Certified Copy. He demonstrates a calm presence of his own, and even flashes of understated charisma. But as Miller's behavior is called upon to be almost arbitrary, Mr. Shimell clearly lacks the skill to fill in the gaps in his writer/director's elliptical dialog and direction. So, he huffs and dilates his eyes. A lot. Poor man. Poor Elle. Poor us.

Interpret Certified Copy how you will - strangers playing at long-married couple trying to rekindle their romance, or just that same actual couple. It doesn't matter. Mr. Kiarostami seems out of his element in more ways than one. This dialog-heavy exercise is beyond him. Neither version is convincing, and given that what we're watching is probably a matter of pretend, it seems particularly without any weight in the end. Any long term-relationship is going to be marked by seemingly out of the blue flashes of anger or hurt, reactions out of all proportion to something seemingly innocuous when old grievances, old wounds, are pricked. This happens. What's real and what's not in the context of a realationship or a work of art, what even constitutes reality...these are profound subjects. Certifed Copy demonstrates neither the courage nor grace to do them justice.

When Juliette Binoche stammers, "Ja-Ja-James," lying on a bed in a Lucignano hotel, there are few more moving things you are likely to see or hear emanating from a movie screen this year. The significance of the stammer was earlier established. She and James find themselves in the hotel when the former says it was where they spent their honeymoon.  They're allowed to revisit the room by a conveniently accomodating desk clerk. She lies on the bed, he stands, keeps his distance and ultimately reminds her that he has a train to catch at nine o'clock.

Binoche is a wonder. As she rolls slightly on the bed as the last sad act of this play wimpers toward its conclusion, she seems to have transformed herself into that woman 15 years younger.  So it appears as we catch glimpses of her face in Luca Bigazzi's dazzling, chiaroscuro shooting of the scene. If not for Binoche, the whole thing would have spun out of control much sooner and much more disastrously.

Certified Copy, despite its flirtation with big ideas, turns out to be a frustratingly blank slate. The curious thing is all the profundity that critics and viewers have projected onto that slate. Whether this means there's an unquenched hunger out there for films that grapple with the fundamental issues of life, love and art - beyond, of course, the mysteries of the universe which have been explicated by the Twilight films - or there's a simpler, more expedient desire at work to go through the motions without really having to think too hard....I can't say. Despite all the hubbub around Abbas Kiarostami's current film, I don't imagine many people will remember it in ten years. If you have seen his Taste of Cherry, you're not likely to ever forget its climax. Certified Copy does have its brief, shimmering moments, due in large part to the photography of Luca Bigazzi and the brilliance of Juliette Binoche. But for the most part, sadly, this one is fool's gold.

Win Win

2011-04-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

Mike Flaherty jogs along one morning in a hooded sweatshirt and cotton sweat pants. In terms of style and wear, the ensemble looks like it could be from Mike's high school or college days, culled from the depths of the closet for a mid-life resolution of weight loss and fitness. The camera follows his slow progress along a path as two other joggers with sleeker gear and more elastic strides, separate, pass and leave him behind. Paul Giamatti, as Mike Flaherty, round of face and figure, stops and looks toward his athletic betters as only Giamett can: a veritable mound of pathos.

Lest we think this an overrection to being passed on a rural jogging path, we soon find out that that the man is struggling to keep up in more significant ways. The "PIONEERS" emblazoned on the gold hooded sweatshirt he wears while jogging is the name of the high school wrestling team that he coaches with Stephen (Jeffrey Tambor). The Pioneers are a pretty scrawny bunch whose efforts on the mats mainly help to improve the records high school teams they face. Wrestlers and coaches seem well matched, if only in their fecklessness.

Mike, a small-town New Jersey lawyer, shares a modest professional building with Stephen. Their building's boiler clanks and bangs in such an ominous manner as to suggest an explosion is iminent. Stephen's suggestion? Instead of an expensive furnace replacement, buying some plastic to put over their legal files stacked haphazardly in the basement. It's a course of action with which our man Mike readily agrees, given the perilous state of his professional and personal finances. It's likely one of many stop-gap measures he has been taking to keep his family and business above water.

Mike represents an elderly man, Leo (Burt Young), who's in the early stages of dementia. Since there is no one to take care of him, the state of New Jersey wants to put Leo in a rest home, despite the fact that he has plenty of money and wants to stay in his own home. And here we have the situation of the basically good man tempted to do the wrong thing when faced with a crisis. Mike gives in to the temptation. He assures the court that he can function as Leo's guardian - the implication being that he will take care of Leo as he lives in his own home. Instead, Mike takes the $1500 a month comission for being Leo's guardian and parks him in a rest home.

Mike's plan works for only a short time until a complication arrives in the form of Kyle, Leo's grandson. Kyle, still of high school age, has fled his home in Ohio, where his troubled mother is in rehab. Mike allows Kyle a visit with his grandfather, assures him that the court dictated Leo's living situation and packs him off back to Ohio. Except Kyle doesn't go. Mike and his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan), reluctantly take in Kyle until they can reach his mother.

Kyle is played by newcomer Alex Shaffer. Director McCarthy auditioned boys for wrestling skills first and acting ability second and it was probably a wise move. The fluid moves of a skilled wrestler might be harder to pull off than the limited expressive range to which so many teenage boys confine themselves. Mr. Shaffer, whose short, dark hair is altered to a bleachy mop for the role of Kyle, is a former state champion wrestler in New Jersey (McCarthy is a former high school wrestler himself). His skill certainly lends a welcome authenticity to the wrestling sequences, much as he brings an athlete's focus and assurance to his acting.

The strength of Mr. McCarthy's first three films has been the quality of their characterization. Perhaps this has something to do with nearly 20 years of work as a film and television actor (Both he and Amy Ryan acted in The Wire). Whether informed by that experience or not, he writes not just shiny crescents of characters, but those fully rounded with dark sides included. He has also chosen his leads very judiciously. Peter Dinklage and Richard Jenkins were excellent in The Station Agent and The Visitor, respectivley. Paul Giamatti is certainly no exception here. Win Win is not only built around the Mike Flagerty's moral dilemma, it's grounded by Giamatti's rumpled, ample humanity.

Resistance is futile. Bobby Cannavale as Terry Delfino in Win Win.

McCarthy vet Bobby Cannavale is also on hand as Mike Flaherty's best friend, Terry. As with The Station Agent, Cannavale plays a puppy dog of a character in Win Win. Instead of the irrreperssible hot dog vendor he played in McCarthy's first film, he's aged with his characters, now a divorced man, by his own admission going a bit crazy, sitting around his tony condo playing Wii golf or surveilling his ex-wife, whom he imagines immersed in some sort of porn film existence with the contractor he hired to build the house he's vacated (he seems particularly obsessed with the usurper's tool belt). Desperate for distraction, he lobbies Mike for an assistant coaching position. As he makes his case he says, "I'm fun. There's no denying that." Applied to both Terry and Bobby Cannavale, it's a true enough statement.

The writer/director's feel for character has extended beyond the men at the center of his three films.   In The Station Agent, Patricia Clarkson (and to a lesser degree, Michelle Williams) is given a role every bit as rich as that of lead Peter Dinklage. Much the same can be said for the wife and mother of the Syrian immigrant that Richard Jenkins' Walter Vale tries to help in The Visitor. With Win Win, it's Mike Flaherty's wife, Jackie, as played by Amy Ryan.

Early in the film both she and her mother hector Mike about taking on the guardianship of Leo.   In a lesser film, Jackie might be little more than that, the nemesis of a hen-pecked husband who's just looking for a little peace.  With Win Win, we find out that her fierceness is backed up by an almost endless reservoir of sympathy. She turns out to be the moral center of the family and in Amy Ryan's hands she might be the film's most sympathetic character.   This is someone you want on your side, a Jersey girl of whom the state can actually be proud.

There is, however, a disturbing if perfectly logical affection for Bon Jovi. As Jackie and Kyle talk on one occasion and compare tattoos, she explains that the JBJ on her ankle is an homage to the band's namesake. McCarthy follows the exchange with a blast of Bon Jovi's "Have a Nice Day."  For the musically sensitive among us, the closing credits cleanse the palate with a new song by The National, "Think You Can Wait."

Kyle turns out to be something of a teenage ronin, wandering into town and practically carrying the lowly Pioneers on his back. When coach Mike sees Kyle's prowess on the mats and finds out that he was a state champion back in Ohio, he's all too happy to enroll Kyle at the school. With his almost automatic win each time out and the inspiration he provides to the team, they actually win a wrestling meet. Kyle's protege, Stemler (David Thompson), perhaps gangliest of the Pioneers, seals the victory, not with a rousing pin, but by avoiding too disastrous a loss. So, for a time, all is well.

Enter the troubled mother, Cindy (Melanie Lynskey). She appears in town unannounced and expresses a desire to take both Kyle and her father, Leo, back home to Ohio. Kyle has clearly had his fill of his mother's broken promises and wants nothing more to do with her. Any pretense of humility is quickly dropped, and it's soon clear that Cindy wants the care of her father only so she can get to his money. The problem for all concerned is that her lawyer makes her aware of Mike's wrongdoing. The major shortcoming of Win Win is the role of Cindy, both Ms. Lynskey's miscasting in the role and the relatively graceful exit she makes just as all seems lost.

Mike makes an impassioned speech to Kyle before his state quarterfinal match, "Remember, this is your place! This is your place! You control it! Remember?" This not only to inspire Kyle, but to help him put his mother temporarily out of his mind. And then, to the story's credit, Kyle goes out and responds like a teenage boy probably would in the midst of that emotional tumult.

In each of Thomas McCarthy's films, men are drawn out of themselves (this mainly the case with The Station Agent and The Visitor), or made to face who they are. Of course, there's contrivance involved. Such is the case with any story. But McCarthy's stories and characters resonate in a way that much higher concept work - Black Swan and Certified Copy come quickly to mind as recent examples - do not. The tone is relatively upbeat at the conclusion of Win Win. But like all of writer/director's main characters to this point, there's not so much a happy ending as a point of greater awareness. In the case of Mike Flaherty, it's a realization that humility and hard work, not a financial short-cut, is the answer to his problem.

McCarthy has essentially said that he considers this his most accessible film, the one to please the most people. Here's hoping he gets the audience he deserves.