Archive for the ‘1997’ Category

8.

Friday, March 12th, 2010

I saw L.A. Confidential in my home town theatre when I was maybe seventeen. I wasn’t that versed in noir at that point, I had seen a few of the obvious – Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Touch of Evil – but hadn’t gotten into the nitty-gritty yet, and I’m really still doing that now. I remember seeing it with my older younger brother, and both of us loving it, particularly the juicy/literate tough guy patter, the performances of Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Danny DeVito, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell (everyone really, even future TV-pretty boy Simon Baker makes an impression in a brief bit), and the well-staged, occasionally startling bursts of gunplay. I’ve revisited L.A. Confidential several times throughout the years but it had been awhile, and I wanted to see if my few years of writing and more serially watching movies had changed my view of it. The answer is: a bit.

Co-writer (with Brian Helgeland)/ director Curtis Hanson has always been a clever maker of B-movies such as The Bedroom Window, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild; he’s sturdy, professional, unpretentious, and his pictures are well-paced and well-staged. The relief of a Curtis Hanson movie is the knowledge that the filmmaker knows what he’s making and, while he isn’t condescending, he isn’t laboring to pump his genre pictures with pregnant, half-assed meanings (anything Bryan Singer has made since The Usual Suspects, for example; The Dark Knight, for another). But professionalism has its price, and that price is personality. You watch L.A. Confidential, and wonder how someone could make a movie out of Ellroy this cut-and-dry. L.A. Confidential is a mystery without any mystery, and the characters, who’re supposed to be trapped and resentful and tormented, are pretty obvious types, marching dutifully to the third act finish-line, which is, in this case, the biggest insult of the picture.

I never liked the happy ending, which has investigators Ed Exley (Pearce) and Bud White (Crowe), saving the day from a corrupt administrator (Cromwell) who is using his position to take over the criminal empire that has been scattered after its Big Kingpin’s imprisonment. One sees Cromwell coming a mile away, because a. you know his “dirty side of the law” speeches to Exley have to have a pay-off, and b. because there isn’t really anyone else to be the bad guy. The reveal of Cromwell’s true loyalties is a show-stopper though (and still shocking), and the business with “Rollo Tomasi” has a wonderful dime-store pulp irony – it could have come from a particularly shrewd 1940s thriller.

But the problem is that the kind of material Hanson is playing with here isn’t meant to be so straight-forward, even in the times when the good guy did ostensibly win (the underrated Hanson picture In Her Shoes is the kind of usually soft/sentimental material that benefits from his clarity). Noir (which L.A. Confidential isn’t, exactly) traffics in the horror movie idea that we are all guilty, that we’re waiting for the thing that reveals us to be the animals that we’re barely disguising. Noirs have blurry, intangible evil at their sidelines that might leave a little residue. I have voiced a number of doubts with Nolan’s Dark Knight over the last few years, and the picture is wildly undisciplined and over-explicit, but those are the trade-offs of obsession. Nolan isn’t a clean, nice, considerate professional. He aims all over the place, and while the results can be maddening, certain things stick. Dark Knight isn’t, technically, as “good” a movie as L.A. Confidential (and, I still prefer L.A. Confidential) but it comes closer to the spirit of noir and of Ellroy: which is that, the more you find out, the more you know you don’t know. Gotham has this hidden rot that stays with you; Hanson’s 1950s L.A., which is ripe for those implications, doesn’t. You truly feel at the end of L.A. Confidential that all of the bad guys are dead. (Though there are individual moments that reach their full potential, such as Exley’s manipulation of a group of black kidnapers, or Spacey’s flirtation with a groupie at a sound stage.)

That said, if L.A. Confidential is, ultimately, a polished studio product, then it is the way to have your polished studio products. The script still snaps; the pace is a model of one-incident-propelling-another storytelling; the performances are all essentially perfect, both individually and collectively (as a coherent ensemble); the shootouts are crackerjack; and the 1950s L.A. setting (courtesy of, among others, ace cinematographer Dante Spinotti) is the surreal movie factory of our dreams. One would be tempted to wish that Hanson had Nolan’s obsessive drive; or that Nolan had Hanson’s common sense and basic filmmaking coherence, but those qualities seem to be rare in the same person – one has to take an interesting director for the good and the bad.

Posted in 1997, Crime, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Mr. Jealousy (1997)

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

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Noah Baumbach was there for me at a time when he was very much needed. I discovered Baumbach’s first two pictures, Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, when I was eighteen, a freshman in college, living with a roommate I detested, and working through all the other self-indulgent things young people generally find themselves working through. Baumbach didn’t invent anything with either of these pictures, but he achieved something almost as admirable, he redeemed a genre that’s generally a sitcom: grasping clichés we (especially young men) have to live with and turning them into something palpable and moving. These two pictures owe the usual debts to prior movies that most talented young person’s films have a habit of owing to (French New Wave, Woody Allen) but there’s a current of insecurity in Baumbach’s early films that’s specific to the last few generations, and justifies his playing in a familiar sandbox.

The insecurity being the kind that’s brought on by an aimlessness triggered by a surfeit of options, the illusion that we’re all “unique” and meant to amount to something more impressive or noble than living a life as a normal person (Wes Anderson recruited Baumbach as collaborator on the script for The Life Aquatic, which is appropriate as Anderson captures this youth-fueled discombobulation too, only in a more heightened European by way of Hal Ashby sense, Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first film, most especially taps this). This illusion can be paralyzing, and while waiting, we find that we’re pushing thirty, forty, and still haven’t really done anything. We pass this or that girl up, possibly because she didn’t promise the specific adventure we had in mind when telling our love story to ourselves, or perhaps we turn down certain jobs or certain cities because we fear they might interfere with an airy outline of a job or opportunity that might happen should we might, might, might, maybe go to grad school, or raise money to make a film, or perhaps persuade a publisher that our collection of short stories is the next generation defining masterpiece.

Mr. Jealousy, Baumbach’s second film, isn’t as strong as Kicking and Screaming, it’s “minor Baumbach” to paraphrase an oft-quoted (around here anyway) character from Squid, but it’s a charming picture, self-conscious (Baumbach seems to include certain references, such as to Sunrise or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, more out of eagerness to prove he’s seen them than in the service of any dramatic or comedic effect) but confident in its slightness. The picture is about an insecure man, now 31, called Lester Grimm (Eric Stoltz), who is currently taking a break from harboring dreams of being a great writer. He’s teaching (of course), hanging out with friends, most prominently Vince (Carlos Jacott, a scene stealer) and dating. A narrator (Baumbach), who will pop in and out throughout the picture, explains to us, briefly, Lester’s dating history, which is, logically and unavoidably, a chicken and egg extension of his general self-loathing. Lester always believes girls are cheating on him, is always convinced he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with, thus effectively ensuring that they always cheat on him, and that he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with. Lester is not oblivious to this self-fulfilling irony, but his awareness is of no use to him beyond further self-justification.

Lester soon meets, through Vince and his fiancée (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Ramona (Annabella Sciorra). Ramona appears to be ready made for Lester (as they always initially), she’s beautiful, works in a museum (encouraging an interest in culture and the arts that compliments Lester’s film buffery) and has a certain endearing clumsiness. Ramona is a woman of the movies, a woman blessed with a man’s ideal looks and approachability, with just enough eccentricity to be interesting without irritating (Baumbach wouldn’t be too generous with his women, really, until Margot). Lester has the usual issues, but he’s managing, courting inner growth, until Ramona reveals that she used to date Dashiell Frank (Chris Eigeman), an acclaimed writer their age who has been heralded by critics as “the voice of his generation.” Lester, after a few episodes that manage to be more convincing than they’d sound if I were to recall them to you, decides to join Frank’s group therapy, which, in a nice touch, is led by director, actor and film-historian patriarch Peter Bogdanovich (I wish he’d act more, he has an instantly credible onscreen elder-statesman sanity that is only rivaled by fellow director Sydney Pollack).

This is a promising situation for farce, and I’d be curious to see what the present day Baumbach, with the searing death-ray barbs of Squid and Margot, would do with it. The ultimate problem and (simultaneous) chief appeal of Mr. Jealousy is that it does nothing with the situation. This frustrates because part of us senses that Baumbach has a New Age screwball comedy in him, a neo-ironic picture that emulates the distant past pictures in wit but otherwise invents its own specific to present society rules; for once, perhaps, a modern screwball picture that wouldn’t feel like a tour through a condemned factory (a problem with a few of the Coens’ attempts at screwball, and it looked like it was a problem with Leatherheads).

This dead-end has its happy surprises though, it lends Mr. Jealousy an unexpected warmth and leisure; it’s refreshing to see a modern comedy so uninterested in actually making you LAUGH OUT LOUD. The picture is talky, and awkward, but you never fault it, the awkwardness, in fact, ultimately contributes to the picture’s truthfulness and ungainly empathy with its hero. It doesn’t hurt either that Eric Stoltz is terrific, Lester is probably his surest, most charismatic performance; and Eigeman, playing a purposeful cliché (he’s that maddening asshole who writes a best-seller by 25 and rues his inability to cat around with more discrimination) is nearly as good. Lester and Dashiell become unexpected friends, and my other regret of Mr. Jealousy is that it doesn’t pursue this avenue more aggressively. Lester’s romance with Romana is sweet, but bland. Baumbach is nothing if not self-aware enough, read in film criticism enough, to grasp that undefined women are a common thread in many young men’s films, and he seeks to address that, but he would have been better advised to stick to another cliché of the young writer, “write what you know”.

The ending finds Lester having finally written something he’s proud of, a play that’s (surprise, surprise) based on the events we’ve just seen. Lester, apparently more confident in himself, sees Ramona one more time, and the picture assures us of the usual ending (though it doesn’t show it) but I wanted to know where Lester exactly stood with Dashiell, they have a final toe to toe reckoning themselves, but they both seem unable to understand that they may be the true font of one another’s hopes and ambitions, which could, perhaps, might, maybe, might, perhaps yield a play about a book about a man writing a play about a man who finally realizes just to plain, simple, fucking, drop it and be.

★★★

Posted in 1997, Comedy, Reviews | 5 Comments »

Boogie Nights (1997)

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights is a young filmmaker’s film in the best sense of the phrase: caution is totally thrown to the wind, but it’s thrown to the wind by someone with a clue as to where the wind might actually take it. The film is stuffed with incident, but everything feels strangely essential. This is the kind of movie that inspires critics (or maybe just me) to pile on the adjectives: funny, exuberant, depressing, original, derivative, insane, stupid, sentimental, and, for a picture set on the fringes of the porn industry, surprisingly chaste. Boogie Nights was the film of 1997. And it was also one of the films of the 1990s.

If Hard Eight saw Anderson using the noir as a platform for something more personal, then Boogie Nights sees him riffing on a rise and fall structure normally reserved for gangster pictures. We know the groundwork for this kind of film by heart: we open with a desperate or ambitious hero, the hero discovers a talent that doesn’t really jive with polite society, the hero emerges a major success on the strength of said talent, the hero crashes in a rage of gluttony and ego.

Anderson uses this structure to tackle the rise and fall of the porn industry, but he’s about as interested in that as he is the duel between religion and oil that drives There Will Be Blood. Boogie Nights, like Hard Eight, like everything else in the Anderson filmography, is concerned with the rise and fall of family. In the case of Boogie Nights, it’s a surrogate family that lives in and around the porn industry, which here functions as a sort of island of lost toys. The characters that populate the film’s universe may be the single greatest achievement of Boogie Nights. They are gripping and unpredictable, broad and soap-operatic, but still jarringly human, succumbing to weakness at the most inopportune times. You feel like anything can happen, and Anderson is masterful with tone: a comedic subplot can turn fatally serious on a dime and a subplot that you’re just sure is going to shit can suddenly blossom into something hopeful and romantic.

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The result is a coked up, feverish Altman picture only cut with a visual style that leans on Scorsese and early De Palma and laced with a flakey humor that’s purely Anderson. Anderson doesn’t try to hide his influences either; the justifiably praised opening scene of Boogie Nights practically shouts them from the rafters. The opening, a four or five minute tracking shot from outside the streets into the night club where Eddie works, is a delirious achievement, and very directly, self-consciously, recalls the similar scene in Goodfellas. The scene also has a simpler function: to introduce the audience to as many of the sprawling story’s characters as quickly as possible.

And again, it’s the characters that truly matter here. I’m not going to list them all, I’d be here another thousand words, but two need to be mentioned, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) and Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), the father and son of Boogie Nights. The juice here comes from canny casting, both are talented actors who tend to not live up to their potential for reasons that I could only speculate. At this point in his career, Wahlberg had been surprisingly terrific in the teeny bopper Fatal Attraction retread Fear, and Boogie Nights was an expansion of that. Eddie Adams is young, imbalanced, vulnerable, and Wahlberg is electric, particularly in a brutal argument with his mother early on that drives the rest of the film. I also like the early scene between Adams and a lover, she praises his cock and he tells her (though he’s really telling himself) that “everyone’s got one thing”. The dialogue is forced here, Anderson strains for poetry a bit, but the scene roots you in Eddie’s damage, and carries you through the darker, more challenging passages of the film.

Reynolds has always been underrated. I know the film is (rightly) praised, but does anyone really talk about the performances in Deliverance? Reynolds imbued that role with more than your usual tough guy stuff, there’s a simmering authority, a rage that’s channeled into sharp humor until really pushed, and then, well then he lets you have it. I’ll never forget the moment in Deliverance where he kills the woodsman with a bow and arrow. Watch the look on Reynolds’ face, the ease with the bow. This guy was BORN for this. Reynolds, after years of Cop and Halfs, got that rage, that humor, that aloof, that pure unchecked male id, back for Boogie Nights. The relationship between Reynolds and Wahlberg, two under thought of actors of opposite generations just going for it, is riveting and poignant. It also informs the moving finale, where the problem child Eddie, having long been known as Dirk, has the reconciliation that he never dared imagine with his actual family.

Ok, let’s list: Don Cheadle. Luis Guzman. Ricky Jay. Alfred Molina. William H. Macy. John C. Reilly. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Philip Baker Hall (he gets the funniest line of the film, watch for it, it involves lollipops). Melora Walters. Thomas Jane. Heather Graham. Julianne Moore. All of the actors are given great, intimate, desperate stories and scenes, and they all knock them out of the stratosphere. Boogie Nights is a beautiful, flawed, undeniably human second movie.

★★★★

Posted in 1997, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »