Archive for July, 2009

Orphan (2009)

Friday, July 31st, 2009

orphanposterMajor plot points, including the “twist”, revealed.

Fear is like sex, our reactions to both are personal and revealing, and we tend to get defensive and glib when discussing horror movies (and certainly sex). That vulnerability is at least one, though probably four or five, of the reasons why the horror movie is always in the ghetto, never extended the kind of benefit of the doubt that something like the noxious Observe and Report was recently granted, unless the picture in question is made by someone who has already been socially (critically) sanctified as a major voice in movies. The recent dead movies would’ve been rightfully panned if it was anyone other than Romero. The Shining, without Kubrick’s name, would probably be more commonly called on its problems. The new Chan-Wook Park picture, Thirst, is receiving strong reviews almost before anyone has actually seen it. Critics are laughing at last week’s Orphan because it’s directed by a Jaume Collet-Serra, best known for remaking House of Wax a few years ago, and because of various plot absurdities, most especially a big reveal regarding the evil orphan’s identity. But Park’s Oldboy, widely (over) acclaimed, has an ending every bit as absurd, and, while more showy and violent (these pictures, to be accepted, have to be very consciously, flamboyantly ostentatious in their debauchery – we have to be told what to respond to, or otherwise that diminishes the chic) doesn’t go as deep as Orphan, a picture that would be treated more fairly if it was French or Korean.

Let’s get the easy out of the way: I’ve seen the adoption process fairly close-up, and yes, to say that the filmmakers take a few shortcuts is a gross understatement, with the couple, Kate and John Coleman (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard), apparently adopting the troubled, mysteriously Russian Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) as one would choose a pet at the kennel, or pick up a half-dozen donuts on the way to work. And Orphan is ridiculous in a number of other ways typical to the slasher picture that aren’t worth recalling here. But nitpicks could be made of almost any horror picture; we don’t go to them for neo-real portraits of human process – we go for dream logic, for something that cuts at a more subterranean truth, and Orphan is the most emotionally committed, fascinatingly screwed American horror movie since The Devil’s Rejects, and even that cued us for some sort of subversion, our guard was up. Orphan is a wolf in slasher’s clothing.

Orphan has a satirical intensity; and it seizes on something that’s current, that gives it more point than just another retread. The picture uses the bad kid as a springboard into a more contemporary child mania, the child as over-scheduled accessory, the child as completer, the child as something you get on the eve of your 31st birthday to cement adulthood, the child as the next, hipper, little version of you. Esther’s impression: her accent (which slips around), her appearance, are a joke Collet-Serra and screenwriter David Johnson keep us conscious of. Esther is an open refute to all of the clichés and self-delusions that your children are “better”, that they “wouldn’t do that” and points are scored throughout the movie, particularly on John, the dolt husband taken to logical farce extremes. Sarsgaard is usually a sharp, wily performer, but here he dials his charisma down, he dulls his senses to play toward our, particularly women’s, worst fears of the husband as someone loved drifting away, partially from apathy, and partially in response to a past wrong they refuse to forgive.

Orphan is chiefly concerned with Kate; this is a horror picture unusually in tune with women. Kate lost a child (her third) and fell into an alcoholic daze that caused an accident in their pond that made her second child, Max (Aryana Engineer) deaf; and the picture is a circular nightmare of that act, a picture that must end at the lake so that Kate can either move on or succumb to her guilt. Orphan plays on that fear we have that we secretly don’t deserve to be forgiven of our indiscretions – that we’ve set a karmic force loose that’s meant to swallow us. This very intimate fear taken with the free-floating sociological satire (the aforementioned child as accessory, the idea of the new child as “other woman” who splits the intimacy of the marriage, the fear of your children as hopelessly lost in a world of cruelty you can’t explain or shield, the self-righteousness of parents, etc, etc) is head-spinning.

The picture has the usual delivered-on-cue gore, unsettling in its unusual conviction (Collet-Serra has an eye, partially taken from the not so dissimilarly themed A.I., and he even pulls off a rarity – there’s one elegant fake scare) but the moments I remember are closer, more casually heartbreaking. There are a number of scenes that deliver: the opening dream scene, which plugs us into Kate’s remorseful, inadequate misery; an eerie, beautiful early moment between Kate and Max, in which the third child’s death is explained as a story through sign language; the sex scene between Kate and John, where he takes her from behind, and Kate, needy, hungry for attention, turns and kisses him again on the face before she falls back to the countertop – to be interrupted by Esther. There’s Esther blithely destroying Kate’s one comfort, the white roses that were her one piece of her immediately dead child. (Farmiga’s reaction here is the best moment in the movie.) There’s Esther, now a vengeful wraith, stabbing a major character to death on the kitchen floor. There’s the moment of Max’s rapt terror and confusion when Esther pulls the car out of park to frame Kate for being off the wagon. And there’s Daniel’s (Jimmy Bennett) displacement from his father. Orphan is funny, but not really in the laugh-out-loud sense. It’s a horror-comedy, but funny in the way the child eating her parents in Night of the Living Dead was funny: our worst fears of social/domestic decay revealed to be far worse than we pitifully imagined.

This could be a theoretical jerk if it weren’t for Farmiga, who gives a vulnerable, trembling, shocking performance; she gives this tawdry/tacky/gaudy material what it needs – a core of ferocious, desperate love. (The movie, despite its ambitions, would be nothing without her.) Farmiga has been in the business of making an impression despite the role for sometime now, and here she’s given just enough to really run with it, she refuses to just cash a Warner Bros/Dark Castle paycheck – she gives Orphan a primal, mother lioness pull, and she let’s you follow along, she enriches and fulfills the picture’s relentless domestic inversion. Farmiga breathes the final third, which is almost entirely the kind of children-in-jeopardy scenes that tend to enrage people, through with a larger point – she elevates the exploitation to get at the anxieties that fueled the clichés to begin with.

We need to discuss one scene in particular, and in order to cover it adequately I need to reveal the twist that the marketing is using to arouse interest in the picture. Esther isn’t a nine year old Russian girl, but a thirty-three year old Estonian (I think) dwarf with a disease that causes her to look permanently nine; she pulls an orphan scam on families with fathers with whom she’s taken a sexual interest. It makes considerably less literal sense than the adoption scenes that made no sense to begin with, but it carries a brilliant hook of parody: the children we treat as adults, as ourselves, the children we allow to dress sexually provocative even while pre-teen (though Esther, in a funny early joke, doesn’t allow Kate, who feigns to be understanding and empathetic to “difference”, make her over; Esther preferring her mode of gothic voodoo doll), the child who we secretly suspect is usurping us in our mate’s eyes, turns out to be exactly that, it has a superlative emotional logic, and it leads into a scene that is subversive and tonally risky. Her plan revealed to the audience, Esther sheds her “girl” outfit in favor of something that could perhaps be described as “vampire hooker” and tries to seduce John, who’s gotten drunk. We’ve been cued to suspect pedophiliac/associatively incestuous designs on John’s part already (he holds his looks on Esther just a touch long, and he turns on Kate, and, to a lesser extent, the other children, far too fast) and this scene is the puncturing of that subtext, a black comic, bold, tasteless skewering of every horror convention, “the other woman”, the typical “I was drunk” as excuse for infidelity, the notion of the daughter/father bond, and God knows what else. The PC police will detest Orphan, but perhaps they would do well to remember that our deep fears, the ones that sometimes tempt us to check our lover’s cell phone history, or look in on our children’s rooms, don’t play by those rules.

Posted in 2009, Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »

The Hurt Locker (2009)

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

the_hurt_lockerKathryn Bigelow’s best movies – Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days – have a druggy/sensual pop snap. Bigelow has a gift for plopping you right into her characters’ mindsets – you see even objects as they see them. There’s an alluring, propulsive tactility to the movies of the best action directors, you sense the value of every single part of every single visual beat, and every element locks together with a rhythm that’s exhilarating in its precision and logic – the trick is to have the instinct for allowing the pace to become character. Bigelow’s rhythms could be the narrator of her movies, and probably are, everything is alive, honest, kicky – there’s no self-conscience justification, the purity of Bigelow’s technique is the justification; there’s fetish side-by-side with an empathy of the fetish. The colliding waves of Point Break, always about to swallow the surfers, link logically (or as logically as they can) with the attacks on the banks, because we understand the addictive hold, and beauty, of both – we understand how these psyched-up boneheads are pumping themselves farther and farther from any tangible point of return. Her lauded subjective tracking shots (and there’s an amazing foot-chase in Point Break) is more than just hot-dogging, though that would be enough to put Bigelow at the head of the pack, it’s a straight attempt to become someone else – to use movies as the momentarily cathartic, freeing force that Bigelow’s characters find elsewhere. Like the usual suspects of this sort of picture: Hitchcock or the Powell of Peeping Tom, or De Palma (we keep using the same names because there aren’t many who try or care), Bigelow is working in the cinema of viewer implication, but there’s no righteous hand-slapping; she’s too charged up on her own powers. Strange Days would seem to be the movie that most directly plays to Bigelow’s strengths, but it’s too on the nose literal, and her other pictures are great action movies that need the qualifier “action”, because the scripts are youth-pandering macho claptrap that hold her back… just.this.much.

Bigelow’s new picture, The Hurt Locker, has a mostly lean, muscular script that stays out of her way, and it’s a war picture, which frees both the director and the genre (it’s also an addiction movie). (The script was written by journalist Mark Boal, who traveled with a similar EOD team – a bomb squad.) Bigelow’s staging, almost all physical with soldiers sweating and whispering and shouting over traps that could go off or be remotely detonated any time (anyone can be an insurgent) with any incidental variable a possible death sentence, redeems the war movie. We see a number of war movies, now the current Iraq war, but the specifics are usually a MacGuffin, and we try to rouse ourselves to give a damn, to see the platitudes as anything else in an attempt to be mindful of what real men and women are actually living through. And there were moments in the underrated Stop-Loss, with jittery, loud cuts of men firing guns and getting loud and loaded, that I thought delivered something worth seeing/hearing: the rootless energy of channeling aggression on demand for so long you forget how not to – it brought the waste home more clearly than most of the Coming Home plot could ever hope to (and that movie wasn’t much good to begin with). Bigelow, an action director in her bones, doesn’t need that containment, and she recognizes that she doesn’t want it either. There are images in The Hurt Locker that are among the most vivid of all war movies: a terrifyingly rickety device, that looks and functions as a backyard wagon, wobbling along the rocks; a soldier, clad in a suit that looks ready for space, pacing toward something that could eat him in nearly anything; a cab driver’s face, wrongfully threatened, as the demands become more and more violent – the mirror seemingly contorting his eyes in demonic rage; the rise and slow fall of rocks and debris as the first explosion strikes – briefly frozen in the sort of ironically beautiful monument to destruction that Ridley Scott must have been aiming for in his silly, incoherent Gladiator carnage.

Bigelow makes an anti-war movie by not making an anti-war movie; she indulges the potential narcotic pull of aggression, both real and simulated, to its fullest, and then allows us to see what that unchecked indulgence does. There is an inevitable dark comedy to a picture that’s so intense – we’re watching soldiers turn situations that surpass most men’s nightmares into routine. The Hurt Locker is also unintentionally turning the ridiculous more-more of most action movies on its head; the natural tempo of this picture is enough to power any four desperate, over-cut blockbusters. There’s a potential trapdoor in this type of picture, which is eighty percent climax – that we’re worn down and begin to resent the manipulation of even a gifted director, and that’s, of course, thematically apt for a picture about men as death-defying adrenaline junkies. The Hurt Locker doesn’t go to pains to attribute the soldiers’ hollowed state to war, it allows that these men may have the temperament to be drawn to war, and that the war (may) completes and exasperates their self-destructive tendencies (a regular theme to Bigelow, people are saying that she’s grown here because she’s chosen a somewhat real-life catalyst; she has grown, but not necessarily for that reason).

This picture is very clearly directed; it would be easy to spend everything on Bigelow and overlook the actors, but that would be unfair. The Hurt Locker, again like Stop-Loss, has some unusually vivid performances. We are primarily in three heads: the cowboy/leader James (Jeremy Renner), the voice of reason Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and the nervous, tentative Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), caught between the two stronger personalities, the one who normally dies in these pictures. Yes, everyone is a type; The Hurt Locker is still a genre movie (funny how uncomfortable critics are with that phrase unless it’s derogatory) and everyone here understands that a picture this fevered doesn’t need a lot of playing out – we don’t need the reactions rubbed in our faces. There’s the danger of the familiar white/black thing between James and Sanborn, but that, with the exception of any iffy late scene, never crystallizes. Sanborn, understandably, authentically resents James’ showboating; to degrees that will linger after the picture is over; there’s a moment in the barracks, drunk, late, where we presume its time to kiss and make up, that’s as scary as anything in the desolate village. The twist here, and its greatly needed, is that Sanborn is every bit as sand and danger warped as James, only with a differing sense of self-preservation. James sees the profession as release, as ultimate acknowledgment of the governing uncertainty (and hypocrisy of the illusion of stability) of life – the final knowing that we’re in someone else’s, or nothing’s, hands – and this outlook plays directly into Bigelow’s triggery chaos – this is agonizing, but the boiling down to the existential is also, for James, oddly beautiful. (This is so clear it’s banal, but he’s the Swayze character from Point Break, or the Paxton character from Near Dark, or any one of half-dozen other examples in Bigelow’s work). For Sanborn, James’ outlook is indulgence of a personal whim (this picture is Bigelow’s best because it doesn’t as clearly choose sides – the others always favored the showboats) and to him it, probably, also has something to do with casual white-boy privilege.

There are some shaky, formula scenes that threaten the movie with that too-explicit quality we expect from these pictures. There’s the opening quote, which dulls the surprise of the picture, and a desk doctor with exactly the fate you expect. There’s the last scene between James and Frank, which doesn’t feel right, it softens things. And the brief scenes toward the end on States soil are even worse, particularly some lines between a character and his child – these have a written quality, the character, macho-instinct, wouldn’t say them, and wouldn’t need to, and the wife, all willowy-need, and from a popular TV show, is a soldier-boy fantasy of the little woman back home: we’re too aware of the contrast we’re supposed to register. But The Hurt Locker transcends all of that, and finishes strong, with a pumped-up return to eventual end that’s, eerily, seen as a happy ending – as completion.

Posted in 2009, Action, Drama, Reviews | 6 Comments »

Summer Hours (2009)

Friday, July 24th, 2009

summer_hours_ver2If you have any nostalgic tendencies at all, but not quite enough, then you feel a certain pang of guilt when you throw a greeting card away, particularly if you just recently received it. (I pointlessly store them for a year or two.) This tendency, which has something to do with how we get ourselves tangled up with possessions as signifiers of emotional connection, as symbols of something we usually don’t entirely understand, fuels, to a much stronger degree, Olivier Assayas’ new picture Summer Hours. If a greeting card can bind us up even just a bit, then how do the larger contradictions reverberate?

Summer Hours is bound to sound, no matter how careful the critic, heavier and more laborious than it actually is. It’s light, graceful – a moving painting, only without the self-consciousness we associate with pictures described that way (such as Malick, or the Kubrick of Barry Lyndon). The picture is so fleet and energetic that it’s destined to be underestimated by people not on its wavelength (my brother, in and out, described it as “people hanging out”, he didn’t understand my stunned look over the credits). Assayas has been in this territory before, which is a structure of rituals, meetings, typical, partially tedious, frustrating (to the characters) punctuated with the occasional joy that is so surprising and unexpected it overwhelms us. In short – Assayas, in Summer Hours as well as in prior pictures like Late August, Early September and Clean, puts us in a current more closely resembling non-movie life. Assayas has a gift for the day-to-day – the flow of the casual that eventually gives way to something larger, without shortchanging or over-emphasizing the casual; he bothers with, surprise, surprise, niceties such as subtext, which seems to be out of favor even in our perceived contemporary masterpieces. (A masterpiece these days being a picture that posits one rigid thesis – jack-hammering it through your head for, most likely, the better part of three hours. This unappealing phenomenon is easily explained – everyone, seeking to be an auteur, emulates Scorsese and Kubrick. A Renoir or an Altman or a Truffaut, or even a more modest talent like a Mazursky or the Kershner of Loving, isn’t as easy to readily identify).

Summer Hours opens with children running down the hill of a French countryside – the sort that outsiders drunk on French movies might yearn for in their dreams. The children approach a gathering, which we soon understand is the celebration of the 75th birthday of the home’s commanding, elegant, still-beautiful owner, Hélène (Edith Scob, of Eyes without a Face). Her children, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), and Frédéric (Charles Berling) and their others and offspring are with her outside, and they engage in the sort of eager, obliging, somewhat contrived conversation that’s familiar to anyone with any experience with any kind of family get-together – the kind of conversation that intends more than means. Soon Hélène takes Frédéric aside, and tells him how the house, the property, and her belongings, which are considerable and historic (she is connected, a bit bitterly/mysteriously, to a once prominent artist) will be sold upon her death. And in a few minutes we have our general bearings: into a world heartbreakingly taken for granted by its occupants – which could be said for almost any middle/upper class family.

Is it taken for granted? Assayas doesn’t resolve so easily. Summer Hours is that rarity – a picture with a kind of tough empathy, which comes from Assayas’ refusal to boil things down to love (or a shortage/compromise of), which is practically unheard of in a picture about death/art. We’re conditioned to mourn death, to grasp at things the dead have left behind, and, in movies, monsters are usually made of the people who wish to move on, and to do something with the remains of the dead. These pictures; and I’ve cried at more than one of them, tend to treat us like children – they epitomize the notion of the funeral as being strictly for the survivors. Death is normally containable in these pictures, at the end we get over it and use it as a device with which to move on – these pictures denying the intangible residue and ebb-n-flow of life and death; they’re just coming of age fantasies. (Forrest Gump is particularly inhuman in how many people it’s willing to kill off to falsely educate us.) Summer Hours looks at the eventual survivors (after Hélène passes in a brutal ellipse): the siblings, squarely, evenly – so evenly in fact that you find yourself, against your romantic impulses, erring on the side of those who wish to move on.

The picture has a contradictory charge: we’re cued to admire the beauty of the country, the art, and of Assayas’ technique itself, but a doubt unusual for this type of picture is cast. In a magnificent image that completes the entire movie, a sketch is held up to its subject – and we react in ways that don’t entirely click: the subject, a landscape, dwarfs the sketch, yet we admire the beauty of the sketch, and are pulled into the consciousness of the person who created it. We’re feeling the admirable passion of the artist – an extension of Frédéric’s not-quite-tangible-even-to-him desire to keep the house, despite the need of his siblings, who have drifted from France; and, we also feel the puniness of the sketch, the puniness of everything man-made to understand the ultimate/inevitable passing that is still entirely mystifying. And that mystification/terror, which is grand and existential, is brought into more intimate terms and equated with our obligation to love family members, communities, which we no longer quite understand. We lose that willful acceptance somewhere in our teens (usually) and it never quite returns – our interests for our parents bind up somewhere with the self-interests that we partially loathe ourselves for having. Summer Hours is so haunting, because it doesn’t stage a predictable protest against erosion of family, art, life, country; it sees that erosion as inevitable inner representations of the larger mystery of death; Assayas’ picture, perhaps not quite even intentionally, celebrates the bravery and foolishness of art in equal measure, which is completed again by the final moment – a young character’s first grasp of what she’s about to lose, which is more than the house – she’s losing taking life in uncomplicated stride – which is amazing and awful.

Posted in 2009, Drama, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Moon (2009)

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

moon-science-fiction-movie-poster-artwork-sam-rockwellMy concern with Sam Rockwell is that he turns to franchising his tricks/ticks before he gets that role that really taps his abilities. As with any other (successful) character actor, Rockwell, of course, has to have readily identifiable characteristics of personality, he’s usually the cocky-shifty, ironically sexy squirrel, with a restless physical energy more revealing than he intends (we know who he actually is in Matchstick Men before the picture does, that, and that structure we’ve seen before, and before, before). That physical confidence, that voice that always sounds hungover, opens Rockwell – he’s a subtle, out-there, unusually pleasurable actor to watch – he can sell you on the most tired hokum, because his in-the-moment delivery is truthful, and stylized (stars give you style, actors give you truth, character actors, at their best, give you both) regardless of the context. This is why the cinema-fanatics justifiably love Rockwell. They get the movie star without the perceived foolishness of falling for the movie star. General audiences love him, perhaps unknowingly, because he’s cute and he can give any boring line anything – and because he can make a cad charming without sentimentalizing him.

As astronaut Sam Bell, nearing completion of a solitary three year energy-harvesting stint (the particulars are unimportant) on the, and in, Moon, Rockwell may have his most straight-forward, conventional role, and it’s a rare lead (though he also headlined last year’s forgettable/tame Choke). And we can sense his pent-up twitchiness – he’s like a rare, elusive animal captured and backed into a corner. Rockwell is ideal for the sort of role, the way James Caan, another live-wire eccentric (only more conventionally macho), was ideal for Misery. They’re both confined, literally, and also figuratively – by the normalcy of their roles – forced to plow head on and connect without the convenience of elusion. Caan succeeded, marvelously, in Misery, and Rockwell gives one of his strongest performances in Moon – he keys in on the most appealing part of the material – its contained simplicity -and supports it without ego, and that willing discipline allows us to sympathize with his space-man without us feeling had (again his principle appeal).

As his computer companion, GERTY (a knowing wink at you-know-who) Kevin Spacey connects in a similar fashion. There’s a possibly unintentional/poignant subtext to the Rockwell/Spacey relationship – Spacey is one of those character actors who drifted in the way that disappoints us, in the way that we fear for actors such as Rockwell as they knock on fame’s door: the actor becomes slicker, the instinct giving way to calculation. It’s funny to have Spacey as a computer – because his best performances hinge on your suspicion that he’s not quite human anyway – a suspicion nurtured by that (in Moon – disembodied) unmistakably buttery, marvelously condescending voice. Spacey pulled a wonderful reversal in L.A. Confidential – still his best performance – he led you past the snake to the human, without doing injustice to the snake (Spacey’s death scene in Confidential is his single best moment of movie acting). And so the idea of these two creatures nurturing one another in a typically desolate sci-fi space station is unexpectedly wry and apt and the director Duncan Jones has the mercy and common sense not to oversell it – he’s in sync with Rockwell and Spacey’s mojo – two lonely weirdos afloat.

I enjoyed almost all of Moon, though some seem to be disappointed; apparently feeling that the premise promises a 2001 or a Tarkovski without holding up its end of the bargain. Those comparisons are unavoidable, we’re in undeniably similar terrain, but I admire Moon for not fitting in as either action-disguised-as-sci-fi (virtually every summer movie every year) or as existential mindbender. Moon is an intimate genre short story, conventional in the same filling/satisfying way as a good chocolate chip cookie. Do you fault the cookie for not being a cake?

Posted in 2009, Reviews, Sci-Fi | 7 Comments »

Whatever Works (2009)

Monday, July 13th, 2009

whatever_worksWhatever Works, a spookily/unintentionally apropos title for Woody Allen’s latest picture – which, with another director’s name attached, could be a viciously astute parody of everything his detractors have found off-putting in his work: the elitism, the chauvinism, the tunnel vision, etc. These qualities were abundant in the movies Allen made when he was still a relevant artist, but there was self-doubt, usually channeled as a score-leveling electricity – a grappling with and examination of these tendencies. Looking back, the beginning of the end may have been Deconstructing Harry, half a good movie, where Allen compares himself to Phillip Roth and excuses himself for the personal indiscretions with which we are familiar. Roth’s as merciless with himself as he famously is with everyone else, but at the end of Harry, Allen, in one of the worst passages of his career, took the liberty of absolving himself through his art.

And from that point on, with some exceptions, it seems that the inner struggle of Woody Allen has ceased – and the ugliness has taken over. This was less obvious when Allen was competent with dramatics, but recently he seems incapable, or, more likely, disinterested, in establishing anything that can be mistaken as a convincing reality. In Whatever Works, which is an old-man’s vaudeville staged as contemporary sitcom, characters don’t talk to one another, they talk at each other, at us, and Allen elides staging the most taken for granted information, so a character can more awkwardly/obviously summarize in the following scene. Allen no longer shows the bridging or erosion of a relationship – a once strength of his – he now has two characters meet, normally in the kind of whatever works two-shot that Kevin Smith was once ridiculed for, and exchange stunted, expository dialogue that would be laughed out of a typical straight-to-DVD genre movie. Everyone is a place card for Allen’s beyond-stale thematic beating off (the pointlessness of life, the transience of affection) and predictable verbal beats.

I’ve read defenses of Allen, some convincing, that dismiss the above issues as missing the point, and justify them as Brechtian devices to reflect Allen’s big life-as-cosmic-flatulence preoccupation: but those ideas were more vivid when Allen was capable of dramatizing what that desperation was stamping out: in Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen’s surrogate tries to kill himself and it plays as near-slapstick and as something unexpectedly gratifying and moving. Allen doesn’t have that second part in him anymore, and he’s clumsy with the first. His surrogate in Whatever Works, called Boris, and played by Larry David of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, tries to kill himself a few times as well, and it just lies there – like an unfunny joke from a superior at work you pretend not to hear. Every joke lies there.

The new movie is another variation of one of Allen’s go-to scenarios: the poor old intellectual coerced, against his will of course, into fucking some class and snobbery into an attractive decades-younger rube who we’re invited to mock until she sufficiently parrots the intellectual’s clichéd fatalistic nonsense. It (kinda) worked in Mighty Aphrodite, because Allen, even if he ultimately chickened out, still had the instinct and generosity to score points both ways -in that movie we shared in his prudish henpecked fantasy, and we sympathized with the fantasy as embodied by Mira Sorvino in a vibrant, lovely-flake performance. Whatever Works is just the wacko side screaming. Allen’s movies only have one real friction these days: watching the discomfort of usually A-list actors who clearly don’t understand the dialogue they’re reciting. That’s partially unfair – the words are unwieldy and ridiculous as casual chatter – they’re impossible to fake, and so all we register these days is the actors’ clear, poignant reverence and eagerness – to work with a fading master. It’s like watching most wet teenagers perform Shakespeare, only without the original beauty.

Larry David’s blunt, irritating inability to humor anyone is funny and occasionally more in Curb – he punctures pretenses of tolerance the way Sacha Baron Cohen sometimes does – and without the cloying, ugly self-congratulation and hypocrisy. The idea of David as an Allen stand-in is, on paper, too good to be true; both, at their best, are dismantling overlapping platitudes. And too good to be true it is, David’s not an actor, and he knows that, in his own material he pulls back and lets us come to him – he doesn’t oversell. But Allen’s new flattened, mega-broad comedy of caricature doesn’t allow for that – David’s almost literally down our throats – and so the limitations show – David can’t transcend or fill-in the way Cusack or Branagh or, hell, even Jason Biggs, could. David, at his best, is no pretense, no visible/intentional art. Allen was once similarly inclined, but is now nothing but pretense – and that shucks David of his strengths. I’ve never responded to Evan Rachel Wood the way some have – she’s beautiful, but usually mannered, and I’ve considered the jury to still be out. As the leggy cracker, Melodie, who beds (presumably – Allen’s pictures have grown asexual even for him) Boris, Wood somehow comes out, it feels as if she sensed the absurdity and just went with it – and out goes the showy affectations – here, she makes a joke of the affectations with which she’s burdened. Wood doesn’t give the performance that Sorvino did in the earlier picture – that would be impossible in the new role anyway – but she clicks.

The first half of the picture – all Boris barking as Melodie strives to cancel herself out, with his friends (Michael McKean and Conleth Hill, both wonderful, particularly the latter) strangely approving (no one challenges an Allen stand-in anymore), is appalling: torture porn for the elderly art-house comedy set. The second half is technically even worse – but it branches out into several more stereotypes, and mercifully sidelines Boris, allowing another cracker, Melodie’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) – to, weakly, voice our disgust. Clarkson, a talented actress asleep her last several performances, is alive here – and she and Wood feel right together, their bad jokes spark off one another – there’s a gleeful conspiratorial empathy between them – they are us as we consider leaving the theatre before the end. Several other performers, most notably Ed Begley Jr., also eventually pop up – so that the New York elite can stage a mass cleansing of Red State ignorance; all of the Southerners are reborn as enlightened, unlocked artists. And Melodie and Boris are, of course, switched around and given more suitable mates, the latter, after deriding the possibility of a happy ending to us in the beginning, meeting the new love of his life after nearly killing her with another failed suicide attempt. She’s instantly drawn to Boris’s cynicism and despair and snobbishness. Of course. Whatever Works, possibly his worst movie, is the stuff of early-Allen scorn.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Reviews | 4 Comments »

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

confessions_of_a_shopaholicBy title, ads, and conventional wisdom, Confessions of a Shopaholic is another monstrous rom-com where money and possession come at the expense of all common sense and human decency. The woman must possess the purse and the shoes and be, in turn, possessed by the rich hunk – all to maintain a certain circular status quo of tuning out. (Sex and the City: The Movie being one of the more odious examples of this pattern that I’ve seen.) But something simple happens with this new picture: the most immediate object of pursuit is not possession, not the hunk, but of paying off a ceaseless accumulation of debts, and that one substitution allows the picture a welcome responsibility and humanity as well as an obvious, unlabored, topicality. Of course the purse and the hunk must eventually follow, but the Shopaholic in question, played by Isla Fisher, isn’t defined by them, she’s an insecure, beautiful, young, slight woman – the stereotypical small town city-dweller wannabe – who craves respect as a writer – with this craving materializing in materials for her the way it may in food or drink or drugs for other people. The hunk can wait until she figures herself out by herself.

“Responsibility” is the last thing we expect or want from a good comedy – we’re usually after something that satirizes yet indulges in our more absurd/shameful whimsies; and Confessions of a Shopaholic still manages that – it’s a fizzy, swift little thing – because of the chemistry between director P.J. Hogan and Fisher. Hogan has a knack for this kind of movie; he has, in pictures like Muriel’s Wedding and My Best Friend’s Wedding, shown a flair for slapstick that gives way to heartbreak without either canceling the other out. Muriel used ABBA as an anthem of independence and longing without giving into absurdity, and Friend’s had that wonderful/stupid sing-along mid-way through that lingers long after most of the rest of the movie – Hogan didn’t have the game cast in Friend’s that he does Shopaholic. Julia Roberts is undoubtedly a movie-star, she has a guarded, old-school-aloof-magnetism that’s refreshing in the eager-to-please-we’re-average-people-too new-school Youtube celebrity generation, but the down side is that Roberts doesn’t give you anything to cling to – that serves her, and us, in pictures like Erin Brockovich, where that calculation can dry out the sentimentality, but it hurts her, and us, in pictures like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Notting Hill, where we need sentimentality, we need to feel that this woman needs, by implication, our support. We don’t feel Julia needs us, and so we don’t really care, particularly when we have someone like Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend’s Wedding, whose willing to lay it all out (a little too showily – she got it better in the first Charlie’s Angels) and risk looking like a fool.

Isla Fisher goes further than Diaz in either of those pictures, and she makes it look easier – she has a shot at being the actress that critics, desperate for ironic-originality, keep accusing Anna Faris of being (and I’ve fallen into that trap more than once myself) – she reverses her sexiness – her curves and vibrant hair and naughty-girl voice – and uses it not as bid for idol but as confirmation of her every-dayness, she’s as baffled by herself, and by everyone else, as we are by her bafflement. Fisher has a vocal trick of emphasizing an unexpected word in her punch-lines, she doesn’t follow the typical broad-rom-com rules, she plays equally broad, but in a slightly skewed direction. She seems authentically kinda-deranged, and her lack of self-consciousness wins her your affection. Fisher stole the show in The Wedding Crashers; she turned a player’s-worst-nightmare (the one night stand that won’t go away) into a fantasy of the sexy girl who immediately wants you – without shortchanging the charge/danger of the one night stand fantasy. In Shopaholic, Fisher underlines the need without cheating us of the slapstick stylization – she and Hogan stage a few pratfalls here that are, a. actually funny; and b. further our identification with this creature that refuses to be too good to be true.

And Hogan, as he has in prior pictures (including his underrated Peter Pan), extends his generosity beyond his leading lady, the excellent supporting cast – John Goodman, Joan Cusack, John Lithgow, Hugh Dancy, Wendy Malick, Kristen Scott Thomas, Julie Hagerty, Lynn Redgrave, and, especially, Krysten Ritter as Fisher’s best friend – are allowed a grace nearly unheard of in this genre these days. You watch this picture, the same in plot as hundreds of other movies, and you wonder why so many have to be so impersonal and cruel; this is a movie you can show your daughter without fear of reprisal, in the form of erosion of taste and self-identity. Many snobs, probably trying to justify enjoying something called Confessions of a Shopaholic, will label it a “guilty pleasure”, but their guilt is their problem. Not yours or mine.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Reviews | 3 Comments »

Two Lovers (2009)

Monday, July 6th, 2009

two-lovers-posterIt’s a shame that Joaquin Phoenix pulled his unfunny meta-stunt when he did (now as instantly forgotten as everything else in the daily pop cult assault that is our lives) because it overshadowed the too-brief release of Two Lovers, which features one of his very best performances. Phoenix is an odd duck, a presence that can really register in the right piece, and really not in the wrong one. His appearance, billed as Leaf, in Parenthood was mature and haunting, and he gave To Die For a soul that it didn’t earn – jarring the otherwise glib tone. But Phoenix can be mannered and remote in the wrong role: his bad guy was pathetically overshadowed by the beefy Russell Crowe in Gladiator, that was the point, but it didn’t help. And roles in pictures such as Quills tap into a similar disoriented weird-for-weird’s sake that swims in circles.

Phoenix is at his best when the role allows a certain wounded-glamour – why he clicked as Johnny Cash, and in the various pictures of James Gray: The Yards, We Own the Night, and now Two Lovers. As with many other filmmaker-star collaborators, Gray and Phoenix seem to play to one another’s best and worst instincts simultaneously, but their moments of connection justify the floundering. Phoenix’s meta-sub-Borat-Kauffman stuff played so desperate because it felt like a calculated grab at the irony that is so fashionable in the media these days: the “we don’t mean it” syndrome determined to prove that nothing matters beyond a quote around a quote. Phoenix’s work is admirable because it doesn’t fit into that hive-think (he lends even a role as flamboyantly strange as his in U-Turn a bit of feeling) – he’s a jangled, anxious coil, a handsome man strangely handsome in a way that can be movie good looking without having to strike some showy pose in a bid for empathy. Phoenix doesn’t lord his charisma over us, or beg for fatuous pity.

And Leonard, the probably mentally unbalanced kinda-arrested development case at the center of Two Lovers, plays into Phoenix’s abilities. The role could be laughable egotist-director fantasy: a man of limited means and ability torn between two troubled/beautiful women (Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw), but Phoenix and Gray take it beyond that. Two Lovers doesn’t reveal itself to be a dream, but we certainly don’t take it literally – the New York of this picture is the mood-colored New York of movie addicts, and Leonard is a man-boy, sometimes shy, sometimes startlingly confident, fantasizing, contemplating the traditionally opposing poles of expectation and reward: stability/Parents (Shaw) and sex/risk/excitement/Something Else (Paltrow). The entire picture could be an inner reverie over a drink while looking out the window, a moment apart from a party celebrating an engagement the husband-to-be barely remembers getting himself into.

I was afraid of a Marty pathos – the kind of picture that spends its running time assuring us how Everyday and Miserable everyone is. Phoenix, Shaw, Paltrow, and Isabella Rosselini and Moni Moshonov and Elias Koteas, are too forceful for that, too alive in their own private schemes. And Gray is too intensely vibrant a visual moralist – Two Lovers is a lush, beautiful movie/movie, a refreshingly old-fashioned rare bird unafraid to risk rep with its undisguised concern with stability, connection, with how human beings stylize how they relate to one another. Gray is getting more confident with every picture. The Yards and We Own the Night started strongly but deflated at eerily similar points, turning comfy/pat (the downside to Gray’s sensibility), but there were powerful moments that tapped into the characters roiling confusions and needs: particularly the justifiably applauded highway assault, drenched in biblical rain, in Night. Gray has a flair for action anyway, uncharacteristically patient, he builds and builds, and, as you get your bearings, blows things to pieces in close, long, intimate takes. Gray’s action actually (and this is novel) furthers the characters’ heightened states, and he can make you giddy with how firmly he manipulates typical tropes. You don’t resent Gray’s clichés as you would another director, because you feel as if he almost needs those clichés to contain his jangly/electric/despairing/giddy currents.

Two Lovers, taking off from Dostoevsky’s White Nights, is free of gunplay or much plot apparatus – and that serves the Gray who’s unconvincing as a straightforward dramatist. Long stretches of Two Lovers fulfill the promise of moments such as that highway sequence or the attempted hospital hit in The Yards. This picture is, thank God, a romance without bad guys; Gray doesn’t score points off the instantly for-granted, mundane, too-eager-to-commit Shaw, or the high-maintenance, self-absorbed, somewhat ignorant Paltrow. Gray’s rhythms approximate the consciousness of the basically mutually lonely three, and this allows the iconographic, unreal New York to be more moving than we traditionally expect – it reflects these characters’ (conditioned by movies and music and second-hand aspirations/rebellions) choked, confused, overlapping desires.

Two Lovers is more subversive than Gray’s prior movies – those pictures started intense/felt and turned conventional, here Gray follows the conventions but laces them with the uprooted turmoil that evaporated in the later acts of the other movies. On the surface, Two Lovers ends as you’d expect, in the happy ending that you’d expect – only with an acknowledged mutually-delusional contract of settling. Woody Allen movies usually end in a similar way, but they, especially now, never bother to show what the characters are losing – they’re packaged in rigged cynicism that bites itself, and you, over and over with no surprise. Moments in Two Lovers, such as a hypnotic group-date in a dance club (this is the equivalent of the highway scene, with longing in place of fear) or the literally amazing first kiss between Phoenix and Shaw, firmly establish what’s at stake, what’s lost, and what never existed.

Posted in 2009, Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »