A Journal of Film

Space to Breathe: The Secret World of Arrietty (Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2010)

2012-02-21T22:23:00.002-08:00

Based on Mary Norton’s classic children’s book The Borrowers and adapted for the screen by the great Hayao Miyazaki, the latest film from Studio Ghibli*, The Secret World of Arrietty, is a delight, offering its viewers a gentle sweetness tinged with the slight ache of melancholy.

After sitting through the energetic trailers for coming children’s films, all advertised as being in 3D and all featuring glossy, computer-generated characters aping for the camera and up to all kinds of hilarity-inducing shenanigans, the first frames of the 2D, beautifully drawn Arrietty came with such a mildness and such a tender, self-effacing beauty that those initial moments were something like stepping out of a car full of excited, screaming children, closing the door on the riot, and walking out onto the grass of a cool-warm spring day – the raucous sounds shut off, and the hum of the bumblebee going about his business and the rustle of leaf on tree enveloping me instead. Except in this case, in stepping out of the noisy car, my children are quietly with me. We don’t have to speak to each other – we can be in the stillness together, perhaps stooping to look at a flower or pausing mid-step to let the breeze tickle our faces.

Of course, all of my family members do laugh at many of the broad jokes and shenanigans of a Kung Fu Panda or a Megamind, but we also love what Arrietty gives us and perhaps we need it more these days.

A Studio Ghibli film always provides something of an alternative pace and a new perspective, and Arrietty gives no less nourishing a provision. Those familiar with the source material will know that Arrietty is the only daughter of Pod and Homily and that the three are “borrowers,” little people who live secretly near or in the houses of the big people, the human “beans,” as the borrowers call them. These borrowers take, or, rather, borrow with dignity, only what they need from the humans and do everything they can to remain unknown, aware that even kindly humans can be terribly dangerous. The film opens as Arrietty is allowed to go with her father on her first borrowing mission—for tissue and a bit of sugar—and we are introduced to the borrowers’ secretly carried out life business and to Arrietty’s keen curiosity and zest for adventure.

The main tension of the film is, of course, not difficult to predict: the borrowers need to remain hidden, but an eager young borrower resists that need, and the question becomes not “Will the borrowers be discovered?” but “What will happen when they are?” While this tension carries the story ably along, we are, throughout, nonetheless allowed to rest and to breathe deeply in this world; we are given the time to be fully immersed in its beauty and gentle pathos, without being hustled along by a barrage of gags.

And my children loved Arrietty’s small adventures: her first trip to the vast kitchen; her practice in scaling a cupboard with fishhook and line; her ginger, then confident, steps across the line of high nails, her encounter with a hungry crow.

And my older daughter was particularly taken by the film’s use of sound. She turned to me at one point, with delighted eyes, saying, “Listen! The clock – it’s how Arrietty hears it.” And it was. Small sounds like the soft tick-tocking that the humans hear – or do not hear at all – registered as loud bangs, bongs, rattles, rustles, gurgles, and rushes to the borrowers and by extension to us, viewers and hearers on their journeys with them.

The central tension, the small adventures, the wonderful sounds – all of these things entranced me as much as they did my children, but it was other small but rich elements of the film that have made it even more lastingly resonant for me:

Arrietty’s father, a taciturn but clearly kind and loving man, who bears the burden of a sorrow, of a history, or perhaps of an uneasy future, a burden that is never fully told;

the human boy of the house, who labors too much for breath when he runs and who yearns, but never explicitly so, for his absent parents;

and the last moments of the film that aren’t quite a happily ever after.

These things, so full of quiet pathos, flow as an undercurrent to the gentle rhythm of the story and leave me in thoughtfulness.

There is not in this film the neat tidiness, where loose ends are tucked away, where all sadness is banished forever. The borrowers’ lives will not be substantially different; they are borrowers, and they will always have to scrabble in some way for their subsistence, their little, precious existence, never quite free from fear of the big people.

The film, to be sure, did not make my children sad in the least; their lighted faces and happy skips out of the cinema would deny that, but its story, while a magical fiction about little people, strikes a true chord like the best fairy tales do, reflecting back to me a something that is the real beauty, real vibrancy, and real pain of life.

*Studio Ghibli is the Japanese studio of such marvelous films as My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and Ponyo, and others.

A Place "spacious and strange": Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy

2012-02-08T01:00:00.000-08:00

In the puzzlement and bewilderment of mind in which I found myself after watching Abbas Kiarostami's 2010 film, Certified Copy, I began thinking of essayist and novelist Pico Iyer’s recent piece in the LA Times, “The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence.” In it, Iyer considers our position “in the privileged world” where we “have access to more information than we know what to do with” and where we manage that information by reducing it to “a sound bite or a bumper sticker,” bits and pieces that are easily categorized, easily managed. As much as Iyer admires the short pithiness of Hemingway sentence, he offers for our consideration the complexity of a long sentence, that complexity as a protest and counter to our reductionist tendencies. The long sentence, that --

“collection of clauses that is so many chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory and imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions . . . and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying 'Open wider' so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).”

As Iyer imagines this “long and winding sentence” as a sort of antidote for these times when “we’ve got speed and shortness up the wazoo” and where we manage information rather than reflect on the nuanced significances of it, I think Kiarostami’s worlds –as I’ve experienced them so far in Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, and now, Certified Copy—worlds created on the screen rather than on the page, offer a similar antidote. All of these films resist “trite conclusions,” easy “reductionism,” and “either/or” ideas. None of these films offer a traditional plot; they feel long, wending their ways as meandering streams with no decisive signs to tell us whether we are wending—as we go with them—north, south, east, or west. We are left to ourselves in a way to fill in the gaps as we can or as we will, to look for small signs or subtle patterns, to puzzle over contradictions or ambiguity.

Certified Copy is not without signs and patterns, and we are invited, even, to see in the contradictions a particular sign and a particular pattern though I think, in the end, I cannot say for sure if I’ve delineated the pattern, correctly read the sign. The title—the most obvious sign in the text—first tempts us to say, “this is what the film is about.” But what does it mean and to what does it refer? Within that title is contradiction, a contradiction the film explores, overturns, and further complicates on its winding way. A “certified copy” is a reproduction, duplicate, or imitation of an original thing – perhaps a document, perhaps a piece of art, perhaps something else—a reproduction that has been declared authentic and complete, saying, “this thing is exactly like the original.” The question is, how can a copy of anything be certified? How can it be authentic and complete if it isn’t the thing itself? But we might also ask, if a copy looks exactly like its original, why do we need the original? What value does the original hold? What value does the copy hold? How can we tell? Who decides?

While these questions might seem to be best suited for a philosophical and ontological or art-related treatise or lecture, Kiarostami playfully explores in his film these questions by way of duplicated and duplicating images and characters, unresolved conversations, and a key relationship, a relationship that within itself is a mystery, a contradiction, something that parallels the central contradiction of the film.

The films opens with what perhaps may seem to be the very lecture suited to the subject: a British writer, James Miller (William Shimell), who has just published a book entitled Certified Copy, has come to Italy to promote its Italian translation, and he speaks to a gathered group about his book’s subject, a subject centering on the claim that a copy of a work of art has the value of its original.

Several things distract us from attending to his lecture, however, and the distractions, the invasions, invite us into the subject by way of other, less direct, avenues: during the lecture a woman—whom we come to know as Elle, a Frenchwoman (Juliet Binoche) —and her sullen pre-teen son come late to the lecture, disrupting our concentration. While at first, we feel annoyed, trying to listen to the lecture but being drawn into watching the woman, we must stop to consider that Kiarostami wants that concentration to be disrupted; the camera focuses not on Miller, but on the woman and her son, the woman whispering to her son and trying to appease his clear distaste for being there and the woman whispering for unknown reasons to the man next to her and to the woman behind her. She and her son leave before the lecture is finished, and, in a further distraction, Miller’s own phone rings; he briefly apologizes but makes no hesitation to answer the call and talk for a moment –he himself has interrupted his lecture.

What we are to make of the distractions exactly, I can’t say, but we are clearly led away from the lecture – the straightforward point by point presentation – and forced to look in another direction, and not just one other direction, but many other directions, as if to say, we cannot really get at this thing this way; we’re going to have to try to come at it elliptically, perhaps more slyly and playfully. A lecture won’t do it, not for us.

A similar scene, centering on an explanation and a distraction from that explanation, is repeated later when Elle, who becomes companion to James for the majority of the film, takes James to see a piece of art thought to be an original for many years but discovered to be a copy. As a copy it nonetheless resides in the art museum and when Elle and James stand before it, a tour guide comes along to explain the painting’s origins to his group. Elle and James listen, the multi-lingual Elle translating the Italian into English for James. But her translation is no translation for us; it merely distracts us from the content of the tour guide’s description as we watch James and Elle themselves. And James, himself, wanders away midway through, uninterested; “I’ve seen others like it,” he says. And so while we have had another chance here at a sort of straightforward discourse about a copy, a certified copy, if you will, Kiarostami keeps us from engaging in that explanation; we remain with James and Elle, a pair whose relationship, from its beginning stages, confuses and intrigues us and leads us, perhaps, into a more elusive and more human reflection on the meanings and contradictions present within the notion of a “certified copy.”

Throughout the film, their relationship, its exact nature, constantly elides our grasp. As the film opens, it seems clear that Elle and James are strangers; she’s come to buy books and listen to writers. James interests her particularly, and she buys several of his books so that she may give signed copies as gifts—and her son teases her about her interest. Elle offers to spend the day with James, and when he accepts, their initial interactions play like those of two strangers. But later, a shift occurs, and their relationship is reinterpreted for us as something with a long and intimate history, a marriage, in fact. Later yet, when we seem to have settled on an identify for them as a married couple, James acts as if he has no memory of certain key moments and places in their married history, moments and places anyone would remember. Befuddlement sets in when we try to reconcile these varying versions of their relationship; are they strangers or are they husband and wife? Is their relationship real, or is it only a play at something real? The film teases us; we long to know which is which; we yearn to reconcile what we have seen with something coherent, something of one piece.

But in that longing to know, our desire to discover if the relationship is authentic, we must ask, why does the answer matter? Why must we know? After all, this is only a film; these are actors playing parts, and Kiarostami, I believe, repeatedly draws our attention to this fact, with camera angles that give us artificial or awkward views, or at least, angles that are uncommon, not the sort we are used to. I am reminded, for example, of several moments in which Elle, looks directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall. At one point, she is alone, gazing in a mirror, applying lipstick and choosing earrings; in another moment, she is speaking directly to James, but looking directly at us. It’s uncomfortable; we are aware of the artificiality of the situation, of the fact that “we are watching a film.”

But somehow, we still want to know. We still want to know the mystery of James and Elle’s relationship. Elle herself, played so beautifully and naturally as she is by Binoche, we want to receive at face value. How can we do anything else in the moment, for example, when James, relating a story of a woman and her son, brings Elle to tears? Throughout his narrative, she becomes more and more rigid, her eyes speak their vulnerability, and we know that she is moved by some deep and painful emotion. But even as we are moved by her emotion, we are checked again moments later by some subtle element that belies the reality of the situation. James himself seems throughout to be playing at a part, rather than inhabiting a person. His role is perhaps intentionally played as such, that is, not quite naturally, by William Shimell, but intentional or not, his character brings us again to our questions about authenticity, to our discomfort with a suspected artificiality, to our desire to know what is real and what isn’t.

The film repeatedly and throughout plays with our sense of the real and the artificial, the genuine and the copy. We see our characters time and again in mirrors or in and through reflections.

Even the very multiplicity of languages in the film – English, French, Italian – switching from one to another, often mid-conversation –reminds us that a translation of a thing is only an estimate of the original thing. Language gets at something but does not equal the thing itself. In one scene, Elle engages in conversation with a French couple visiting Italy, asking them to describe their feelings about a fountain’s statue in the village center; she leads them to James and asks the woman to repeat what she’d said. The woman offers an answer, but Elle is dissatisfied, reminding her, “no, that isn’t what you said before.” In the end, we are not sure what the woman said; Elle heard her say one thing, the woman says she misheard her – and we never discover the original thought, for Elle and the woman wander off, talking out of our ear shot. Again, we long to know—though this stranger’s thought can’t really matter to our story—what is authentic: what was it she said at first?

Early on in the film, as James and Elle drive to their day’s destination, Elle describes her sister Marie, to James, admiring her sister’s capacity for loving costume jewelry; to Marie, Elle says, “fake jewelry is just as good as the real thing . . . She’s a simple person . . . there’s no difference between copy and original.” James responds, “She’s lucky; I wish I could be more like her.. . . I wrote my book partly to convince myself of my own idea. [But] she seems to believe in the idea simply and naturally.” He cannot do what she does, he says, because “there’s nothing simple about being simple.” If we, as viewers, were like Marie, I suppose, discovering the exact nature of James and Elle’s relationship, discovering the difference between the copy and the original throughout the film, wouldn’t matter; we could simply embrace what we see in the moment, taking it for itself, not worrying about the difference between seeming and being. But we are revealed as more like James, discovering that being simple is not so simple. We want to know because we want to know how to assign value; we want to know how to feel about one thing over another.

Can anyone, really, be as simple as Marie? Is Marie, even, as simple as Elle describes her? Throughout the film, our perceptions of a thing or a person or a sentence are constantly overturned or turned inside out until we are left with irreconcilable complexity. And the film invites us to respond, to ask, How do I respond to a complexity like this, to this sort of conundrum?

Iyer says, that the long and winding sentence can give us “depth, the nuances – ‘the gaps.’” He writes that a sentence that resists our either/or tendencies and that “has room for certainty and doubt at once” both remedies the soundbites of our age and gives us something we long for, perhaps without knowing it: mystery and a place that feels as “spacious and strange as life itself.”

I encourage my English 101 students, when they approach dense texts and when they need to say something in response to those dense text, to embrace what John Keats described as “negative capability,” that is, the capacity or ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats, of course, wasn’t promoting throwing aside facts or reason, and I certainly do not wish my students to do so, but he was implying that when we have the ability to resist panic in the face of uncertainty, to remain calm when confronted by mystery, we then have the ability to dive into the complexity, to see a thing from delightfully multiple angles. When we can embrace complexity without panic, I think it is then that we can relish the “gaps” and the “nuance” that Iyer describes.

Kiarostami’s film, which draws me into a place "spacious and strange" and which challenges me to the same negative capability I urge my students to practice, still evades me. I cannot here comprehend its spiraling multiplicities. I cannot reduce it to a simple thing. But in the end, I want to embrace its thorniness, its resistance to neat categories, and to let it offer unexpected resonances, as it continues to sit in my mind.

“Men and bits of paper”: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

2012-01-07T19:30:00.000-08:00

Words have a way of haunting me. That is, particular phrases I’ve read over the years linger on the edge of my consciousness, hinting at things that seem bigger than the words themselves. And I don’t always remember where I read a phrase; I’m not sure I remember, even, the exact phrase itself; I remember two words, perhaps, and the rest, the context, slides out of my reach – the feeling only and those two words sit with me. “Sordid remains” are two such words; I think it was “the sordid remains” that I read; “the sordid remains of breakfast,” I think. The context, I know, of those words was British, a Dorothy Sayers novel, maybe? In my mind, those words paint me this picture: a plain, London woman walks home in the late, dim afternoon and arriving, alone, to her flat sees her breakfast dishes still resting on the table, bits of hardened egg, crumbs of toast, a cloudy glass – and she feels the heaviness of her lonely life, the pointlessness of it; the small efforts of the morning to feed her body are left over, left out, drying in the shallow air, sad things telling her her story.

A.S. Byatt, in her introduction, as editor, to The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, describes her experience in attempting to assemble stories that are “English.” She worked to abandon any pre-conceived notions of what an “English” sort of story is and simply read widely from any author who might be described as English and choose anything that felt to her like "art," anything that “startled” or “satisfied” or “excited” her. And she found, when she had finished selecting those sorts of stories, that threads of what might be called “English,” emerged. One thread, in particular, is what she notes Henry James called, “the solidity of specification” and what Byatt herself calls “the evocation of the concrete” and, alternatively, “the thinginess of things.” The narrative that drives these “English” stories—following this thread of “thinginess”—depends on a specific thing, an object within the narrative; in one story, for example, the action circles, farcically, around a pair of trousers; in another story, a ghost story, around sheets and blankets on a bed; in another, a patterned quilt; and yet another, false teeth. In each of these stories, the things -- ordinary things -- move the story. Or rather, the characters’ actions and feelings revolve around these things, and the things are both only themselves but absolutely, something else: the things are symbols or indicators of another thing that is less solid—a feeling, a mood, a crisis, a relationship. But solidity of the things is so heavy and so detailed that the stories evade lofty philosophical heights and create, instead, something both more elliptical and more concrete: an idea revolving in a shadowy orbit around a rocky planet.

I think, perhaps, that solidity – that thinginess of things – is what I love so much about British literature. It is, so often, like the stolid, red face of an unromantic Yorkshire village pub owner (the one I imagine in Herriot's tales), who dares me to presume any presence of sentiment in him, and I daren’t presume. I know he will give me a piece of rough bread and a bit of cheese when I come to him hungry, but he’ll ignore me if I thank him. If he says anything at all, he might say, gruffly, dismissively, “It’s nowt but a bit of bread.” So I keep quiet, I’ll eat my bread and cheese, and be fed with that nowt.

“The sordid remains of a breakfast” means nothing, but it speaks to me, in its solidity, of some mood, some idea that are firmly distinct, but symbolic without presuming to be such. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film made up of solid objects, objects both only themselves and also something else. The objects of the film tell the mood, tell the characters, and tell the story.

These are some of the objects:

-two porcelain bulldogs, draped in the British flags;

-a square-framed painting;

-a one-winged owl, stuffed, on a wall;

-a padded room of a sickly orange color;

-chess pieces with faces taped roughly onto them;

-untied shoes and feet forced into them;

-a cigarette lighter, “To George, with love, Ann”;

-a drop of sweat on the café table;

-coded number messages spitting from a furiously clicking machine;

-a cigarette packet, broken neatly in half;

-a file elevator, slowly moving, up and down with its piles of folders;

-a small wedge in a door;

-an orange note on the briefcase;

-a hand slightly shaking, clutching quietly, once, on a banister.

The objects are so solid, so specific that they defy sentiment and philosophizing. They are the story, but they will not move on their own – I must tell their story, though I fear to tell it above a whisper, lest my Yorkshire publican glare at me and refuse me my pint. But what whispered story do I see in their solid thinginess?

In these things is the story of the desperate end of a group that has lost its way and wonders uneasily, unconsciously if it ever knew the way in the first place. Here is the story of a busy, secretive world, in love with its own busyness, in love with its own secrets – now suspecting that the secrets have lost their value, that the busyness is merely a vain scrabbling. It is the story of a power that was once a greater power, now jockeying for a place between those who will, certainly, casually bump it aside. It is the story of men – and some women – who find themselves actors in something that was once beheld as a glorious war between the good and the bad but is now only a kind of sickly bickering, leaving poisonous gases, leaving unsung bodies -- not heroes -- in its wake.

Though the objects tell the story, the film is not without a traditional arc; it is, in fact, a spy story where the protagonist, George Smiley (Gary Oldman), discovers there is a mole at the center of British intelligence, and he must track him down and expose him. There is, therefore, the conflict of a traditional story, with the tension building as Smiley works in tunneling after the mole, uncovering piece by piece of information, keeping us in ever tighter suspense and weaving an atmosphere of paranoia. It is a suppressed sort of suspense though and a heavy, rather than taut, paranoia: suspense and paranoia built more by mood than by plot, more by uneasy looks than by new reveals of information.

And Smiley, methodical, cautious, stoic, almost ghostlike in the vacuum of his personality, is not our typical hero. An aging, graying man who is physically quiet, whose face is non-descript. You would meet him and forget him or pass him on the street without noticing him. He is no aggressive and glamorous James Bond, coolly wooing women or exploding into violent action. Instead, he is the sort of person in the car who watches while others bat at the angrily buzzing and trapped bee, and calmly, unnoticed, opens the window at just the right moment, letting the bee fly out. There is not even the excitement of a bee sting. The buzzing simply subsides.

Smiley, then, as our given hero, defies us, and his person indicates the kind of spy movie that this is. The plot is complex, the relationships intricate and subtle – and we can keep up if we pay attention—but the stillness of Smiley, the underlying suspicion we have because of him, that the machinations of plot and plotting are an intellectual puzzle that must be muddled through but will bring no triumph or even catharsis in the end. Smiley will tunnel, inexorably and thoroughly, until he finds the mole, we suspect, but what, exactly, will the discovery give us or give him? What will the discovery, in fact, reveal?

In the end, this isn’t a movie that thrills us with its pace so much as it crushes us with the weight of its objects. Even the characters themselves – played subtly and superbly by the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Tom Hardy, and Ciaran Hinds – seem like so many objects, pieces on a chessboard, being played by forces long out of their control. Perhaps though, the tragedy this story tells is that, in the end, the inanimate objects in the story have more weight and consequence than the men who speak and move; they are men following in a tradition that has collapsed, following in a winding path that leads to no end and offers no heroes. They know – we see the knowledge in their faces, and in particular in Smiley’s face – just how rotten the structure is and just how inconsequential their lives are, and yet they continue to move and be moved because they know nothing else and know how to do nothing else; they continue shifting in positions, assigning and re-assigning empty power.

Is this a particularly British movie? An old-fashioned dinosaur of a thing that evokes only a nauseating kind of nostalgia for the grimy, smoky days of a 1970’s London at the tail-end of the Cold War era? Is it, merely, a history lesson? John le Carre penned his novel in 1974; to what purpose has Tomas Alfredson given us the movie now? It is a story that is of a particular time and of a particular culture. But I find – like the best British stories, with their solid particular objects – that the film is widely resonant because of its specificity. If it is about the decay and disillusionment of a particular power, of particular men, in a particular time, and if it is about the grinding on of a particular government machine that does not know how to stop though it will soon destroy itself if it continues to run, it might also be about decay and disillusionment and the grinding on of failing institutions in the here and now, in my here and now. I will not be so indecent and brash as to connect the dots, as to make this particular object, this film, into a metaphor. But it contains in itself something that will sit in my mind, powerfully, as sordid, haunting remains.

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight

Investing form with lucid stillness

Turning shadow into transient beauty

With slow rotation suggesting permanence

Nor darkness to purify the soul

Emptying the sensual with deprivation

Cleansing affection from the temporal.

Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air, the torpid

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,

Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

--From "Burnt Norton" by T. S. Eliot

"'Twill be a storm": Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011)

2011-11-23T15:51:00.000-08:00

“This tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else / Save what beats there.” (King Lear 3.4.12-14)

There’s something in the air this year. Or maybe something, as Lars von Trier would have it in his most recent film, Melancholia, hurtling towards our planet, bent on destruction. Or maybe something, as Jeff Nichols would have it in Take Shelter, in the rain, sickly yellowish and oily. Or maybe it’s not anything external at all, neither air nor destructive orb nor sickly rain - but rather, something more like Lear’s tempest in mind.

Indeed, Melancholia, Take Shelter, and King Lear each use external, literal storms as analogs for mental disruption and turmoil, and, on a deeper level, for states of existential crisis.

If there is "nothing new under the sun,” perhaps I should not be surprised that the film I saw last night and the one I saw last week, Take Shelter and Melancholia respectively, remind me of Shakespeare’s great tragic play of the early 17th century with its doubling of chaos within and chaos without. But other critically well-received films this year, while they do not have the same doubling, also evidence a fear and unease, a mood that surely says something about the way we are all feeling about the state of things in our world: Margin Call with panic and corruption in the financial world; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with its return to the paranoia of the Cold War days; Drive with its lonely, violent anti-hero; Contagion with its fear of sudden, uncontrollable disease and death; The Ides of March with its corruption of the political system; Meek’s Cutoff with its dislocation of space and traditional structures; and even Rise of the Planet of the Apes with the downfall of the human race. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe every year has this sort of crop of gloomy films, and I’ve noticed it only now because I happened to watch Melancholia and Take Shelter back to back.

Whatever the case, I left the cinema last night after seeing Take Shelter, and the same oppressive spirit of a few days ago, relative to Melancholia, weighed upon me again. The driving rain on my windshield seemed ominous; I did not have the sense I usually have when I drive in my rainy home state, that sense of triumphant cozy comfort within, barring all damp wet from without. No, this time, my car didn’t seem such a happy, peaceful shelter. Like Take Shelter’s main character, Curtis (Michael Shannon), I needed something more than the ordinary to keep out the storm. While Curtis suffers from what seems to be exclusively personal hallucinations, paranoia, and nightmares - mental disorders born of his genes more than anything else - I still could not help but see myself and feel my own fears in Curtis.

We are introduced to Curtis’s nightmares in the very opening scenes of the film; in fact, we are thrust, without knowing our location at first, directly into one of his nightmares, a storm. His nightmares and his hallucinations contain similar elements throughout the film: a storm builds or rages; the sky and clouds and even the birds shift into phantasmagoric shapes; rain pours down as an oily substance; Curtis must save his vulnerable, deaf daughter from the storm or from shadowy figures who come to snatch her; people he trusts behave strangely, threateningly; he must exert great physical effort to withstand the assaults or to act as savior in the midst of the assaults.

Throughout the film, from scene to scene, we are often not quite sure of what we are seeing, from moment to moment - are we in one of Curtis’s nightmares? Is he awake but hallucinating? And he himself suffers from the same disorientation; he doesn’t know how to distinguish between his horrific visions and the reality. At least twice during the film, as he gazes at the sky, he mutters, “Is anyone seeing this?” And we’re not ever quite sure. Some of his visions or nightmares seem to be, clearly, nightmares; we understand at some point, “Ah, this one is just another nightmare.” But we are kept, nonetheless, in a state of disorienting unease. In the beginning of the film, a real, but mild rain storm, fills the sky, and we see Curtis’s wife Samantha (the marvelous Jessica Chastain) teach their daughter the sign for “storm” as they gaze out the rain-glazed window together. Real things without are linked almost indistinguishably to the disorder within Curtis’s mind.

As the film goes on and Curtis continues to struggle - his fears about his sanity increasing, his behavior increasingly bizarre and unaccountable to his family - we begin to see, at least, we think we begin to see, the real things, the real fears that have triggered Curtis’s nightmares, and it is in understanding and sympathizing with these fears that Curtis takes shape, not as someone who is merely an individual suffering from some mental disease (though it may be that, too), but as someone who represents the responses to more universal fears.

In spite of the intensity of some of Curtis’s nightmares, the film builds our understanding of Curtis’s world and his fears very slowly, with small clues. It is a film unafraid of demanding patience and unafraid of lingering shots, and Curtis is a man of few words, whose silence we often long to break, especially given the turmoil that we know lies beneath. We come to understand his daughter’s deafness and isolation, and we see his desire to protect her; as he sits by her bed at night, we feel his fear for her. We come to see a possible disunion between Curtis and Samantha’s family, when Samatha’s father comments, accusingly, over a Sunday afternoon meal, “We didn’t see you in church again this morning, Curtis.” We come to understand something of the precarious economic situation, both of the family and of the community. Samantha sews pillows and other handmade items and sells them each Saturday, not, we sense, because she loves to sew, but because their family needs the extra money; we see her carefully stowing the money away in a tin, notably, not depositing the money at the bank. We come to understand that Curtis fears repeating the sins of his parents, particularly his mother's; he fears for his daughter a repetition of his own childhood, and he fears what he has inherited.

All of these fears while utterly believable and unique in terms of this film and in terms of this character, are also uneasily universal, and they seem particularly resonant with the general unrest of our times, the unemployment and economic depression, the obsession with parenting and fears about raising our children just perfectly, the fears that we’ve inherited political and economic structures from those that have gone before us that will collapse in disarray.

And so when Curtis begins to give in to his nightmares, acting according to those visions as truths - when he takes out a risky loan, when jeopardizes his job, when he begins spending money on things that are not conceivably practical, when his behavior seems to put a hope for his daughter’s healing at risk - the tension is almost unbearable. His giving into his visions seem only to bring his fears to life more quickly, and we long for him to stop, to just be reasonable, to, at the very least, speak openly to someone about those fears – and so, we hope, to exorcise them. You are only creating more quickly, we want to say, what it is that you fear most.

Curtis understands the dangerous implications of his hallucinatory visions and dreams; he understands that they can be only irrational things, but he is still compelled by those visions, unable to resist them, and even while we fear what he may do – where will his visions lead? what will they tell him next? – we also understand that he is driven by a desire to protect his family and that all of his actions, though spurred by his fearful visions, are motivated by his love for his wife and daughter. And so we look on in horror and sympathy, waiting for a crisis.

When the crisis comes, it is not quite what we expect, and thus, I was held, riveted, unable to predict the outcome. At the crux of the crisis is Curtis and his little family; his visions, his mental disorder, as we expect, stand between him and any continuing and healthy relationship with them. In one particular moment, we can almost feel the agony of his mind as he looks at Samantha, not daring to do as she asks, because her request goes against every fiber of his desire, against the conviction that he must protect her and their daughter. He feels sure he is right; he knows it – but Samantha cannot follow him in his conviction. The dilemma brings him to such a peak of intensity that we see him visibly, slightly shaking, bringing the whole of Michael Shannon’s beautifully understated and spellbinding performance to the height of its forcibly suppressed energy.

Just how the crisis resolves - or explodes - I cannot say without spoiling the ending. But even without explicitly discussing the ending, I might still ask, what is this film? What is it about? At the halfway point, I wondered – is this to be a crushingly convincing portrait of a mind losing its bearings? That alone, because of the performances and carefully constructed story, would be enough. But even at the halfway point, I could not shake the resonances of Curtis’s fears relative to myself and our times. The shadowy figures of Curtis’s dreams reminded me of zombies, those living-dead, the living-flesh eating monsters of the horror genre which are not intended to produce merely feelings of horror but to reflect something about the disorder of the modern world we live in. And I do believe Take Shelter is something akin to the best of the horror genre, which immerses us in a fantasy world and tells us something about our real world, about our deepest fears.

King Lear’s Fool – standing in a long line of truth tellers who live on the fringe and can thus see more clearly than anyone else – says of the storm, the setting of Lear’s downfall, “This cold night will turn us all fools and madmen” (3.4.77-8). And when we understand the play, we understand that the madman is not really the fool; it is not he who is the one out of touch. We understand that it is only through devastating madness that Lear begins to see the truth about himself and about the world.

In Melancholia Justine (Kirsten Dunst), the anti-social depressive, becomes the visionary and the artist, the one in whom the ordinary, rational folk might take shelter and find comfort when everything around collapses. In Take Shelter, Curtis is the madman, the one alienates himself by his mental state and his behavior from the normal society around him. Whether, by the end, Curtis is still just a frightening madman or a kind of Shakespearean wise fool, I think only each viewer can decide. Curtis’s state, his visions, will speak truthfully to you about our world or they will seem only like foolishness.

For my part, in considering this film, the last lines of King Lear - when the king is dead, Cordelia is dead, and all is brokenness – resonate both clearly and truthfully, reflecting the fearful spirit of our times:

“The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne most; we that are young

Shall never see so much nor live so long.” (5.3.329-33)

Something Rotten in the State of Things: Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)

2011-11-18T16:19:00.000-08:00

Albrecht Durer’s engraving, Melencolia I, is surely a reference point, if not the inspiration, for Lars von Trier’s latest film, Melancholia, though the film title also refers to a planet of the same name on a possible collision course with earth and further refers, more elliptically, to the disorder, melancholia, that malaise of the spirit, so difficult to define, to diagnose, to cure.

Durer’s engraving at once embraces the mythic epic and the individual, an engraving that might indicate some kind of terrestrial apocalypse even as it indicates personal failure and stagnation. In the scene, the alchemist sits slumped, head in one hand, other hand idly holding his tool. Above him, the sands of an hourglass have nearly run out, the scales are tipping, the bell may soon toll; he is passive in the face of these things. Having given up, perhaps, the pursuit of gold or wisdom, he merely sits, seeming to wait for an end. Is the light out over the sea a promise of a new dawn or of something else? Interpretations of the many details of Durer’s piece abound, but I am nonetheless tempted to tie the art to von Trier’s film. Like Durer, he makes Melancholia preside over all though for von Trier, it is a shining planet looming towards earth as much as it is a suffocating mood slowing enveloping the characters.

But von Trier, does more, I believe than merely reference Durer; his film alludes again and again to other artists, to other works of art. In so doing, he deliberately celebrates art, specifically, painterly art, as that medium that can express what the purely rational, scientific mind cannot see or express.

The film opens with an overture of sorts, previewing for us what is to come by way of impressionistic, surreal snapshots or tableaux: painterly, barely still-slightly moving, images of the characters we are about to meet, images of the fate about to overtake them.

The woman we are to come to know as Justine (Kirsten Dunst) appears in this overture first, her face a kind of gruesome mask as dead birds fall slowly around her to the ground

It is a face, a scene, recalling, perhaps, Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, Dante's Beatrice who rests in the contemplation of her own death, with the bird as a messenger of that death, the sundial shadowing out the fleeting time.

The overture continues, and we see a huge sundial on still, deserted grounds with neat, sharp-shadowed hedges, a scene recalling a surrealist painting, a cool Magritte, maybe.

Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow appears,filling the screen, and turns ashy and burns,

artist and ash recalling another of Brueghel’s paintings, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which Icarus, waxed wings melted by the sun, falls, small and unnoticed, to his death.

We see also a window seat, foregrounded by arched columns in a house interior - a scene reminiscent of paintings of the annunciation

- but through the window in von Trier's scene, something is burning. The room is empty; there is no Virgin Mary, no angel bringing a lily and announcing redemption.

Instead, in another scene, Justine floats, attired in a bridal gown and holding funereal lilies, an echo of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia.

In other scenes, Justine touches a storm

or walks with feet entangled.

And the woman we are to come to know as Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), clutches child, glides, sinks in slow footsteps, wading through a golf green.

Interspersed among these images is a view of the earth and the planet Melancholia from space, moving together in a slow dangerous dance,

until finally, at the overture’s end, the earth glides smoothly into the larger planet, dissolving quietly to a puff of powder.

And that is the beginning. It’s all very, very grand.

The film situates itself in the center of the artistic tradition, referencing what came before, both recreating it and destroying it. I, too, am Art, it seems to say; I, too, follow in this tradition.

So, I am pushed to ask, at the film’s outset, whether it is what it claims to be.

But how, even at the film’s end, am I to answer that claim? The subjectivity that is as inherent in the artistic process as it is in the judging of a piece art defeats a definitive answer. I suspect von Trier knows I will be defeated, too; but he will still push me to say whether I believe his film is Art, and to engage with it, I must try to answer.

We might try on a few definitions of art, by way of beginning, at least, the conversation. Jeanette Winterson, in her essay, “Imagination and Reality,” says, “Art is a reflection of an unseen, complex reality - art sees beyond the window frame.” Art, she says, rejects “money culture” and with it the dubious thing called monetary value, and instead works according to "its own currency," producing a window to something, to some value or truth that is at once much more real and much less definable than money.

Von Trier, in this film, referencing the art that has come before him along the way, reaches for that kind of complex, unseen reality by way of his own artistic, filmic metaphor. The central metaphor of his film - a gigantic planet called Melancholia on a destructive course towards earth - seems, at first, too obvious to be anything more than melodrama. It is an almost obscene sort of memento mori that originates in a depressive state of mind: we’re headed towards destruction and death; we are all going to die. See? Just look at that planet.

But the film, with its allusions and direct references to art (allusions and references I am not at all sure I am seeing or naming properly) and with its cast of characters, with its development of two particular characters, two sisters, elides my grasp in many ways, dancing around the obvious metaphor, daring me to try, if I might, to make all of the elements fit neatly, daring me to categorize it all, as I might be inclined to do, as self-important melodrama.

But I find, just as melancholia - the mood disorder - cannot be managed, cannot be easily contained or cured, this film, too, will not allow me to manage it by a simple one-to-one metaphor, will not allow me to dismiss it as grandiose melodrama.

If I cannot dismiss it, I must engage with its details, and so let's examine a few. After the overture, the film is split into two parts: "Part I: Justine" and "Part II: Claire." We might say that these two parts, the two sisters, represent two kinds of opposing responses in the face of an impending doom though it is not so easy, by the end, to characterize them, not so easy to make the pairing mean something as simple as a dichotomy.

Justine we might call intuitive sister, the one who sees or understands something that others don’t. On her wedding day, she is beset by a strange despondency, a malaise we do not understand and do not see at first. She disconnects from everyone - smiling but not really smiling, smiling as she flees from the presence of others and submerges herself in a long bath - Ophelia-like - smiling as she flees out over the grounds, away by herself to look at the sky. She is increasingly cold to those around her, and thus difficult for us as viewers to love, difficult to understand and sympathize with as Part I goes on. And her sister, Claire, watches her, urges her to participate, but Claire cannot control Justine or help her.

From what does Justine’s depression and alienation stem? What does Justine know that causes her depression? The crashing planet of the overture looms over Part I for us, but does Justine know about this planet? No explicit references to it are made in Part I, and we begin to doubt what the overture means even as that overture’s mood still affects what we see. We are not sure what Justine knows; we are not sure what we know.

We are tempted, by the end, to pair Justine’s melancholia with the planet Melancholia, each signifying something related to death, disaster, hopelessness. The one is indefinable, dangerous, and uncontrollable, the other, though definable, a literal planet, is also uncontrollable and dangerous.

Additionally, given the references to art throughout the film and also given Justine’s profession, in which she has been working in advertising but aspires to the arts, we might also be tempted to pair Justine with the artistic imagination, if a thwarted and depressed one. We might say she understands something about the world not by articulating a fully fleshed notion but by embodying emotion, fleshing out dread, affecting those around her.

But I am uneasy with those neat characterizations of Justine. She still eludes me.

Claire, the focus of Part II, is perhaps the more accessible figure. While Justine’s affliction is impenetrable and difficult to grasp, making her difficult to sympathize with, Claire is more transparent. She even voices twice in the movie her feelings about Justine: “Sometimes I hate you so much.” And we know how she feels. Justine may know something, but that knowledge distances her from us and from others, isolating her. Claire is also easier to access simply because it is clear, in Part II, that the characters on screen know about and are responding to the threatening planet; there is, in fact, a planet that seems to be on a path towards earth, and we understand Claire in terms of her knowledge of that. And Claire is much different than Justine. While afraid of Melancholia, Claire has not given in to doom in the nihilistic way that Justine seems to. Claire cooks meatloaf to coax Justine to eat, she tries to make Justine bathe, she saddles her horse and makes Justine go out riding with her.

Claire stands, in a way, between two kinds of being (and here is where the earlier suggested possibility of a dichotomy between the sisters breaks down): her sister, who has given in to her intuition of doom, and Claire's husband, John (Keifer Sutherland), who is certain that science assures against that doom. Claire is connected to both people - she wants to believe her husband but fears that her sister is right. And so she negotiates between the two of them, both ideologically and personally, trying to make peace on both sides while she fights down her own unease.

We are very much with her in both her hopes and her fears. While we’ve seen the overture of destruction, we still cannot be sure that that vision has depicted the characters’ actual fate; it is, perhaps, only an artistic impression. The planet is there; all three characters stand and gaze at it.

But whether it will hit . . . who has that answer? Do we trust the artistic vision of the beginning and the irrationality surety of Justine, or do we trust the assurances of John and his claims to science?

Will it be a spoiler to say what does happen? Would I spoil it to tell you? The film begins at the ending, or so it seems, but in my own experience of the film, over the course of its story, I lost my bearings; I did not know what I knew. Following beside Claire, I was not sure; I only felt with her, apprehensive and unsure.

I think I can say, while still avoiding spoilers, that Justine, though she is the melancholic, is the one who becomes a sort of alchemist in the end, believing for Claire that gold can be made, rejecting John's science and embracing a more spiritual sort of science, putting her nihilism to good use. Though she has embraced melancholy and isolation and offers cutting unkindnessness increasingly throughout the film, she is, in the end, the only shelter for those nearest her.

Is it too much to say that von Trier identifies himself with Justine, the melancholy visionary? Someone who, like Justine, sees himself as isolated in some way from others, but still seeing - or being willing to see - something the rest of us don't? If that is, in fact, von Trier's vision of himself, it is, indeed, grandiose, melodramatic.

But whatever von Trier's idea of himself, I have not him, but the film before me, so I must consider it on its own. What can I say now, that it is? What does it do? It does not mirror our ordinary reality; that is certain. It does want to be, I think, Winterson's “view beyond the window frame,” something that, as art does, shows us the world from a new, unfamiliar angle. The film's vision is a depressing one, but art often is. The best art often makes us uncomfortable or nervous; it provokes. Art is not, as Dorothy Allison says in her essay, “This Is Our World,” “polite, secret, coded, or timid.”

Still, even with Winterson's and Allison's handy definitions, I am not sure how to answer von Trier's placement of himself within artistic tradition. I think, in the end, I can only try to articulate what my experience of his piece has been, to try to say what it has left with me.

The film says something to me about the inevitability of death - as well as the disorder of our world - and it asks me to consider what my answer is to that death and disorder. I do not think about death often; I am not often - maybe I have never been - truly depressed about this world. I do not have a skull on my desk, as literati of another time used to do, that physical thing reminding them of their fate.

Indeed, I am preserved, as most Americans, I guess, from those visible and near signs of death. Scenes of devastation on my computer screen or running across my TV in the news do not really seem real; at least, I do not often think of them as indicators of my own coming death. And I am happy, comfortable in mind, most of the time.

I think von Trier’s film might act as something both more visionary and surreal but also more vivid and real than the reminders of death or disorder I see on the TV or the internet. Art has the power of defamiliarization - the power to make the familiar unfamlliar, thus making the familiar new, more real, more present. It shows me what I think I know in a new way, showing me I did not know it as well as I thought I did.

But I did not walk away from the film feeling as if I had been impacted in that way. I appreciated the technical skill, the layers of meaning, the intellectual questions and problems, but nothing about it truly hit me at the gut level. I understood Justine's, and particularly Claire’s, turmoil, without really feeling it myself. The film, by its end, had not moved me.

Still, in the small hours of the next morning, I woke up, suddenly; the wind was whistling and moaning around the house; the power went out; I was left in utter darkness, the dark clouds blocking out light of stars or moon. Power outages, when I was a girl, used to be fun - an opportunity for flashlights and candles, exciting flickering shadows, a game of hide and seek, perhaps. Now, I am a practical adult, and power outages serve only to annoy me; I wait impatiently for normal life to resume so that I can get on with things But that dark early morning after seeing Melancholia, the power out, I felt only fear; everything was strange and unfamiliar, hideous and disordered somehow. I could not get scenes from the film to leave my head. The fear, surely, wasn’t rational, but as I lay there, fighting that ridiculous fear, it did not seem so ridiculous - and the darkness seemed to mean a real Melancholia, a thing that would soon crush me and everything in the world. And I felt completely alone.

I woke in the morning and the sense of horror, the fear and the mood were gone, or very nearly. For the film, with the intervening night resting on it, had left its impression on me, its unsettling presence hovering at the edges of my mind. And there it remains.

I do not love it, and I cannot say whether Melancholia should join Millais’s Ophelia, Durer’s Melencolia, Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow, and all the other art that has endured down through the years. But I do know, that I cannot myself dismiss it so easily. In the end, I feel for myself, with the film, something of that indefinable, irrational, unscientific thing called melancholy - that mood that comprehends some doom, or that comprehends something wrong, something rotten, in the state of things.

Fractured States: Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011)

2011-11-12T16:13:00.000-08:00

It was about halfway through the movie, when a scene dissolved yet again into a flashback, into a scene in the spare but unkempt rooms of the isolated farmhouse where commune-cult leader, Patrick (John Hawkes) keeps his “family,” that I realized, pit in my stomach, just how effectively filmmaker Sean Durkin builds a sense of helpless dread in his debut feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene. And the dread, while heightened sometimes to an almost unbearable pitch in the commune scenes, is never quite absent from any scene, even those in which the protagonist, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), has escaped from the commune, damaged and confused, and is living with her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law, Ted (Hugh Dancy). For the film works to immerse us in Martha’s damage, a damage that, while physical, is most insidious at the mental level.

From the opening scenes, we understand Martha’s disorientation – she has run from the commune and has called her sister for help, but she struggles to tell her sister what she needs; her disjointed sentences and her confusion about place and time indicate just how far she has fallen into some other world, a world that cannot comprehend the ordinary, matter-of-fact questions her sister offers. We sense that she desperately wants to escape but also is desperately afraid to leave the life in which she has been immersed. The film’s title indicates this fractured identity: Martha is her birth name – the name her sister calls her; Marcy May is the name she is given by Patrick; Marlene is the name she and the other women all take on if the world outside the commune happens to intrude. And it is that conflict of identities – that mentally confused state that is the core and one of the biggest strengths of this film, which, on the whole, does not live up to its potential.

While the film effectively places us inside Martha’s disorientation – seamless shifts from past and present and elegant dissolves between Lucy and Ted’s house and the commune life indicate that Martha is increasingly unable to distinguish between time and place, memory and imagination and present – I could not quite understand nor even ultimately sympathize with Martha herself. We are meant, I realize, not to understand her completely, and Lucy’s experience of Martha’s mute blankness and of Martha’s insistence upon her own health mirrors our own experience with Martha: we cannot see into her fully and understand what, exactly, she is thinking or feeling at every given moment. But the film does also give us a good deal of her experiences and of her mental state – we see the disturbing life of the commune, the suave presence of Patrick, his absolute invasion into her physical and mental life – and we are meant to understand or feel with her quite deeply in some ways. My failure to fully sympathize with her by the end – even if I could still feel the dread and paranoia she experiences – has to do, I believe, with what the story leaves out.

It is clear that especially the young women of the commune have come there because they have been damaged or neglected in some way in the past; they are vulnerable. It’s clear we are meant to understand that they give into and even embrace Patrick’s abuses of them because they want to believe he offers them some kind of stability and love that they have not felt before, that he offers some kind of community in which they are made to feel valuable, needed. We know, when Patrick tells Martha, “But you are special” or “you are my favorite,” he’s said that to all of the women and that each believes he’s said those things only to her.

But the film gives us no real insight into Martha’s past, no insight that helps us understand exactly why Patrick would hold such sway over the women, Martha in particular. We know that Martha’s mother died when she was young, that her father was absent, that she lived with a crotchety sort of aunt by herself while her sister Lucy was away. We know that there is some difficult history between Lucy and Martha, that Lucy feels some guilt over not caring better for her younger sister, that Martha blames Lucy for that lack. But are these things enough to make Martha so gullible, so open to the life of the commune, which we never see from any kind of idyllic perspective?

There are just two moments which showed me why Martha might possibly be drawn in: in one scene Martha has just experienced her horribly disturbing initiation into the commune, and she and the woman to whom she’s closest, Zoe, are lying snuggled in the common sleeping area. Martha is clearly hurt and confused, and Zoe is trying to comfort her; Zoe’s words - her reasons - are patently ridiculous, clearly echoes of the shallow rhetoric that justifies the commune’s life - and Zoe’s words don’t seem to impact Martha much – but when Zoe smiles joyfully at her, snuggles in closer, and presses her nose gently against Martha’s, Martha can only smile joyfully back. The two are like little girls, close sisters who share a common life, common pains, common loves. In this moment of companionship, I can see that it was, perhaps, the promise of being truly close to another person, close to a community of people, that Martha wanted – not because she, particularly, wanted it, but because we all, I think, long for close community with others.

In the other scene, the group is sitting together on the ground, listening to each other play music. Patrick takes the guitar and sings a song for the group, one, he says, that is for Martha, or rather, for Marcy May. It is a lovely song, and we can see Martha’s face change and become luminous as he plays. The song is for her alone, and that song, more than Patrick’s words “you are special,” might convince any unwary person that the community might be a place she can belong, truly, be loved for herself. Music - song-writing, in its implied intimacy - does, I think, hold a peculiar power.

But those two scenes in themselves or taken together are not enough for me to understand the why – even a nebulous emotional why – of Martha’s journey, Martha’s seduction. We don’t know enough about Martha to understand how she could be so deeply naïve and vulnerable, and the commune itself shows nothing of itself that is really idyllic or lovely - the moment with Zoe was the only warmly communal one that I could see.

There is the suggestion that Martha is perhaps fleeing from the shallow materialism of a consumerist society – she explodes in one moment against the wealth of her sister and brother-in-law, berating them for the essential selfishness of their life, and the pair are, indeed, portrayed as being among the rich and privileged who see nothing wrong with living such a luxurious, essentially self-centered life. But Martha’s explosion seems to be coming more from the persistent remnants of Patrick’s apparent indoctrination (we never see any convincing moments of indoctrination) rather than from any deep and organic beliefs of her own. And if the film is trying to demonstrate Lucy and Ted’s life as appallingly consumerist so that we might see the appeal of the commune, with its claims to cooperative living, healthy poverty, and sustainability, then it fails. Lucy and Ted may be rich, but they are not at all unsympathetic characters and their lifestyle, while surely sheltered from the griefs of the have-nots to some extent, is not so excessive as to be despicably extreme. If it is, we don’t see it. We see only, that they are wealthy and pursuing their own lives, and we see that when Martha comes into it, they disrupt their own easy life out of real care for her. Ted is, understandably, less sympathetic, but Lucy shows nothing but care for Martha, a desire to disrupt her life for Martha. Indeed, if I sympathize with anyone in the film, it is Lucy, who wants to reach her sister but doesn’t know how.

The commune, on the other hand, if we are to imagine it as Martha was seeing it for the first time, seems pretty bleak, whatever its claims to cooperative sustainability. We jump almost immediately and exclusively into the disturbing and potentially violent life of the commune - Patrick claims Martha's body very early on, and the threat of his physical power hangs over her. On the farm itself, there is no garden – we see Martha and the others beginning to plant a very bedraggled looking one at one point – there are no farm animals. The outbuildings appear to have no purpose. From the outside, what about it might look like some kind of answer? Where is the appeal? The appeal, it seems, lies only in Patrick’s rhetoric, which, again, we don’t get much of. He certainly has a charm and a charisma – and he is played subtly and creepily by the great John Hawkes - and I do not fault the performance. But those qualities alone don’t seem enough to win over someone not already enmeshed in commune life. So we are left with Martha alone, that something in her past made her vulnerable enough to embrace the unseen pleasures of the commune and the charm of the brief initial interactions with Patrick. And I just don’t believe it. I don’t see the draw of the commune or Martha's need for it, and therefore, Martha’s entire journey, even after she escapes the commune, is problematically difficult to see.

Even as I cannot fault Hawkes's performance though, I cannot fault any other performance of the film either; everyone is astoundingly good. If the film’s biggest strength – by way of editing and camera work - is placing me within the fracturing mind of one person, that strength is also dependent on Elizabeth Olsen’s performance. As much as I do not believe in the character arc for her, I do believe in her. She embodies her character in each moment – subtly showing us her shifting emotions; as the film moves so frequently back and forth through time, she moves with it, and we know when she is by small and yet powerfully communicative changes in face and body language.

As strong as the performances are, as deft the camerawork, as beautiful the cinematography, and as carefully unrelenting the mood of dread, I cannot fully embrace this film. I am happy, generally, to embrace the elliptical, to embrace films that give me hints of things – I prefer a film not to spell out its message. But I do need to hear the film speaking about something - like Martha Marcy May, herself, the film is blurred in its purpose, fractured. It does offer me a convincing portrait of a mind that has been invaded, disrupted, but it does not tell me anything convincing about an individual, human journey towards that invasion; it does not tell me anything convincing about a cult-commune; it does not show me why someone might join one; it does not offer a compelling critique of any modern social malaise; it does not offer me a deep portrait of a broken family (something I thought Lucy’s relationship with Martha promised). In short, I do not know what the film wants to say. And so, in spite of the skill involved at so many levels, I’m not sure I can say the truly brutal nature of so much of it – especially the brutality of one man against vulnerable women – is worth it. The brutality is more suggested than explicit, but it is nonetheless painful in the extreme, and I’m not sure why I needed to live through it.

The Power and Weakness of Fiction: The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985)

2011-11-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

** Some spoilers ahead for both The Purple Rose of Cairo and Midnight in Paris **

"If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie," says Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Happy endings. Beautiful people. Beautiful people who fall in love, who say all the right things, who have plenty of money – those are things Cecilia (Mia Farrow) in Allen’s earlier film The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) goes to see when she goes to the movies. For Cecilia’s own life in New Jersey in the 1930’s doesn’t offer her much to speak of in the way of luxury, love, beauty, or wit. Her husband spends his days with the fellas, making a game of throwing rocks at walls instead of scrabbling for what little work there is to be found, and he spends his nights belittling Cecilia, beating her when he’s irritated, and taking her money out of her hands for himself. Cecilia spends her days as a waitress, daydreaming about the films she’s seen,

about the films she will escape into when she gets off work and before she has to go home to her husband; the cinema is a refuge, the place where she might, momentarily, forget the life she leads and immerse herself into a more beautiful life. Cecilia becomes particularly captivated by a new film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and she goes to see it over and over again, memorizing every line, every inch of footage. One evening, however, the film changes – it goes off script: a minor character, Tom Baxter, walks off the screen.

He’s noticed Cecilia, and he’s in love with her. And she’s not just dreaming; it’s not that the she’s become so immersed in the film that Tom’s exit from the film seems real only to her – it is real: the character from the screen really loves her and really wants to - and somehow can - leave the world of the film to be with her.

What follows is utter delight to anyone who has been enchanted by any fictional world and who has wished - believed for a moment, even - that that world is real. For isn’t it true, that when we are immersed in a good story, there is no need to force a suspension of disbelief? The disbelief simply disappears and belief takes its place, unaided by volitional force. Yes, that belief may be a matter of seconds, but it’s there – we do, truly, believe what we are seeing on the screen or what we are reading in a book or what we are seeing on the stage. There are no little black marks on a page representing character and story, there are no actors playing characters and saying lines, only real people living naturally, speaking spontaneously. Signifier and signified are one. Here, in this film, Woody Allen plays joyfully - and yes, mischievously - with our desires for a fictional world, with our dips into belief in those other worlds.

Allen is a savvy creator of his own fiction, of course, and he teases our awareness of the layers and levels of the film - the meta-ness, the story upon story, of the film within a film, two films of the same name – the one we watch and the one we watch the characters watch. Story circling story circling story. Tom Baxter’s exit from one story, his story, his exit from the film within the film, causes all sorts of problems, both for the film he’s in and for the world outside that film – his exit halts that film’s story (even while it drives forward the bigger film we are watching). Tom is a minor character in his film, but he is nonetheless needed to move its plot forward; the rest of the characters must wait for him to return before they can get on with the script – they are stuck, for the time being, drinking pre-dinner cocktails in a drawing room. And Tom’s refusal to follow his plotted story, his entry into the real world (*ahem*, Cecila’s world, not ours – not the real real world), also disrupts the cinema’s schedule – the proprietor can’t continue the film, but he can’t show another one either. Likewise, the lives of the producers and screenwriters back in Hollywood are thrown into chaos; other Tom Baxters living in other reels in other cinemas begin walking off their screens, too; Gil Shepherd, the actor who plays Tom Baxter, rushes to New Jersey, worried about his image and career. Tom Baxter must be stopped – the fictional must not intrude so on the real; it just won’t do.

Tom Baxter though, has found freedom and love – he’s a little naïve, of course, he knows only what’s been written for him in the script; worldly knowledge is not his forte, and his backstory is a little sketchy. His talents, too, and his wealth are good only for the film’s world, not Cecilia’s world – he has only his personality, his bonhomie, and his love for Cecilia to offer. He finds all his failings out but thinks he still, in himself –whatever that may be—is enough. He thinks perhaps he can push beyond the bounds of the character written for him, grow beyond it, past the actor who played him, past the screenwriter who wrote him.

But, tempted as we might be to think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when we watch Tom try to manuveur around the script written for him, it is Cecilia’s dilemma, not Tom’s, that is really at the heart of this film. And since Cecilia is the protagonist, her dilemma is ours, too; it’s the one with which we identify. Cecilia is swept along by Tom Baxter – he’s handsome, he dashing, he’s brave, he’s kind, he loves her – he’s like no man she’s encountered before. She longs for what he has to offer. And so herein lies the dilemma: can she really have what she longs for? Can this fictional world offer her real things?

It has been said that Woody Allen’s best work is behind him, that his films in later years have been, in large part, disappointing. His very latest though, Midnight in Paris, many have said is a return to form; here, they say, is the Allen we know and love. Midnight in Paris is, indeed, a delight in so many ways; like The Purple Rose of Cairo, it blurs the line between the real and the fictional, it puts the world of historical and literary imagination on the screen. Midnight in Paris’s protagonist, Gil (Owen Wilson), a struggling novelist, finds time and space collapsed, and he visits the Paris of the 20’s, the Paris of Hemingway, of Dali, of the Fitzgeralds, Cole Porter, Luis Bunuel, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso – the time he’d dreamed of as ideal, beautiful, invigorating.

Gil is caught up in and captivated by that world of the 20’s; it is exactly the world of his idealized and nostalgic imagination, but Woody Allen doesn’t allow his character to remain comfortably in that nostalgia for the past. Gil discovers something about the way nostalgia operates, something about the danger of idealizing the past, of thinking an earlier time in history must have been better. And so, in the end, Gil leaves the 1920’s and embraces his 21^st century life. At least, a sort of 21^st century life. For while Allen disrupts his character’s idealized vision of the past, he does not disrupt all of his ideals, most notably his idealization of Paris (and, we must note, Parisian women). The film ends with a Gil who is finally happy – in part because though he parts with his visions of the past, he is still handed the Paris of his dreams, the woman of his dreams. It is a 21^st century Paris, but it is still a Paris that has very little in common with anything associated with darkness or pain or depression. It is a happy postcard Paris made for lovers that Allen gives to Gil and to his viewers. It is, in fact, a Hollywood ending.

So in spite of my love for being swept up into a fictional world, Midnight in Paris left me with something wanting; Gil could, perhaps, stay up on the screen in his ideal Paris, but I had to leave my seat, and Gil’s life left no real resonance with me.

Midnight in Paris and The Purple Rose of Cairo might be considered companion pieces, for Allen is asking similar questions, playing with similar human desires in both. Both are in love with the fictional in some sense; both play joyfully in the fictional world; both query the boundaries and overlap between fact and fiction. Where Midnight in Paris left me feeling hollow, however, The Purple Rose of Cairo left me with something that went much deeper. Its ending offers a real answer to Cecilia’s dilemma about the line between fact and fiction, about the power of the fictional to save her from the hardness and difficulty of her life - poor as she is, loveless as she is, powerless as she is. The answer in Purple Rose is bitter – and Cecilia discovers, in the end, what we guess she knew all along. And she sits in the cinema and watches the screen and weeps as Fred and Ginger – that beautiful pair – dance and sing and fall in love. Her ending isn't a Hollywood ending.

But what The Purple Rose of Cairo manages to do is celebrate story-telling, fiction, imagination, and cinema even while it also manages to say something to me about real life – about the difficulty and pain of it. And the beautiful, bittersweet combination of those two things is what makes The Purple Rose of Cairo a story I’ll love to immerse myself in, over and over again. Cecilia and I, you see, are very much alike.

Two Quick Reviews: Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and The Dead (1987)

2011-10-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

Rabbit Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002)

This film is almost unbearable; in part because I can’t say to myself, “It’s only a movie.” Yes, it is a kind of heroic journey, and the heroes, three little "half-caste" aboriginal Australian girls, one of them particularly smart and determined, gain what they set out to achieve. But lying wordlessly beneath the one journey based on a true story are the countless untold true stories of those children, ripped from parents’ arms, who do not triumph over the odds. And much of the horror lies not just in the fact that parents and children are separated, but that the separations are so coolly calculated, calculations bolstered and protected by the government appointed "Chief Protector of Aborigines" and his unwavering belief, “it is for their good.”

Individual heroism is often turned, in films, into a showcase, and that showcasing lapses inevitably into a blind sentimentality that overshadows a bigger problem that affects a large group. But this film, while celebrating the achievement of the protagonists, isn’t, at its core, a celebration at all. It is a generation’s heartbreak.

The Dead (John Huston, 1987)

What an odd film. Based on James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead” from his short story collection, Dubliners, the movie is, essentially, a Christmas dinner party. The tagline on imdb, “A vast, merry, and uncommon tale of love,” doesn’t really work at all. The tagline is far too perky, for one thing – and there is none of the Christmas party atmosphere of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander; it hasn’t that sort of florid robustness. This dinner party has a kind of gentle regret, a weariness, or maybe just a quietness, resting over the whole affair, but it is not a chilly party all the same. If there’s weariness, it is a kind touched by the warm bonds among a group of old friends, companions, family members. There is a mother, embarrassed of her drunken son (an embarrassment everyone overlooks, the drunkenness overlooked, too); there are the spinster sister hostesses feeling their lengthening years but still beaming with benevolence on their guests and becoming sweetly tearful when they are toasted; there is another old woman – once a singer – who offers a song in her aging voice and receives only kind accolades from the other guests, though everyone knows her voice is not what it was; there is dancing, a love poem recitation, a piano performance; there is a husband and wife who move mostly apart from one another among the other guests while the husband remains conscious of his wife at every moment, puzzling over something about her, we feel.

Is this film an “uncommon tale of love”? Perhaps it is more that than it is “vast and merry” though this film’s story cannot be contained by the phrase “a love story” either – it is, perhaps, a story about the remembrances of love stories, of youth gone by, of winter softly settling down on those who are still living warmly but know they soon will die. Yes, an odd film that is shy about saying straight out what it is thinking. I think, perhaps, I loved it.

A Lavish Essential: Senna (2010)

2011-10-07T18:04:00.000-07:00

I admit it. Before last night, I knew little about Formula 1 racing and even less than that about Aryton Senna, the Brazilian superstar driver, who blazed onto the racing scene and into the hearts of the Brazilian people in 1984. And frankly, I didn't think I wanted to know anything about Formula 1 or about the drivers in that world.

But the wonderful thing about filmmaking at its best is that it has the power to usher you, your mind and tingling senses, into unfamiliar worlds; it can introduce you to people, to places, to cultures you would never otherwise encounter. And it has been through great films that my life has thus been enriched in the most unexpected ways.

Senna, a new documentary directed by Asif Kapadia and detailing the career of Formula 1 racer Aryton Senna, is just such a film. Knowing relatively nothing of Formula 1 racing didn't matter, for from the opening moments of the film, I was swept headlong into the excitement, speed, daring - and yes, joy - of the sport. And, more significantly perhaps, I fell in love with this driver, this Senna. His love for the sport, his drive, his ambition, his endearingly expressive face and body, immediately caught me up into that racing world I had previously cared to know nothing about.

The film is extraordinary as a documentary. Unlike so many films in that category, there are no talking heads, no people telling me what to think and how to feel about the sport, about Senna himself: Senna depends exclusively upon archival footage, television footage and some footage from Senna's family's home videos. The effect of the dependence upon the archives is that the film avoids nostalgia and builds, instead, real heart and warmth, solely derived from the scenes playing out before me. And while all films using archival footage are edited and pieced together for a particular impact and story, I never felt that I was being manipulated into feeling something; I felt I could make my own conclusions about this man and about this sport.

Also unique to this documentary is the sensory experience it offered me in theater. Many documentaries don't need a big screen viewing. This one was simply wonderful on the big screen. With its footage from cameras situated right inside Senna's car, I, as a viewer, sat right inside the terrifying and exhilarating speed and movement of the race.

I purposefully did not read about Senna before seeing the film, so while I knew, intuitively, how the film would end, I did not know the exact circumstances, and for that last half hour of the film (a beautifully paced half hour), I was on the edge of my seat, filled with dread and terrible anticipation. The end, when it came, was moving and cathartic in a way I'd never have anticipated a film about racing would be for me, and the very last piece of footage, without giving it away, was, quite simply, perfect, delivered to me in beautiful closure, a tribute to Senna and to his deep love for racing.

Ultimately, the film captures the way Senna himself captured racing fans' hearts and it lovingly depicts the intense adoration the otherwise impoverished and despairing people of Brazil had for the man, their national hero. There' s a kind of glorious extravagance in the way that a people can so embrace a man and his incredible skill in a sport, even when they themselves are living in such terrible circumstances.

Their love, I think, reflects the need we have as humans to hold onto something beyond the day to day necessities of living and grubbing, to find sheer joy in something that is an end in itself, something that benefits us only on the emotional or spiritual or aesthetic level. Senna reminded me that our sport, our play, the deep investment and love we can put into these things is anything but trivial; it fulfills a deeply human need to lavish love on something that does not seem necessary, that does not feed or clothe our bodies; it feeds something much less definable but just as essential.

Top 100 Films, a Personal List: 2011 edition

2011-09-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

Every year at the end of the summer and with the beginning of autumn, Filmspotting forum members each offer up their 100 favorite films of all time; those personal lists are then tallied and compiled and a joint list is created, a list that we hope reflects our collective tastes in film.

I always look forward, not only to making my own personal list of films, but to seeing the various and diverse films that other film lovers choose. There might be a great deal of overlap between two particular lists or none at all, and there is joy in seeing both the overlap - sharing with another person the same deep love for the same film - and there is joy in seeing the diversity - seeing that a film I would never choose for myself nonetheless speaks meaningfully to someone else.

It has been in interacting with forum members over the years, discussing, analyzing, and enjoying films together, that my own tastes, I believe, have been stretched and made more complex. While many of the films on my list are those I discovered on my own or in growing up with my particular family, there are also now films on my list that I would never have found on my own, without the Filmspotting forum. My list, then, as it has evolved over the last couple of years, is deeply personal to me - I do not pretend to be any kind of authority, saying that these films are, objectively, the best films ever made - but it also reflects, maybe even in ways I am unaware of, something communal; it in some sense reflects the community of film lovers on the Filmspotting forum that I have grown to love.

So thank-you, to all of you, for these years of discussion and invigorating argument and for providing and being a community of friends I never expected to find.

And now, on to my list:

100. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)

99. Memories of Murder (Jooh-ho Bong, 2003)

98. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

97. Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)

96. The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921

95. Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995)

94. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

93. Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996)

92. Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989)

91. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard, 1990)

90. The School of Rock (Richard Linklater, 2003)

89. Best in Show (Christopher Guest, 2000)

88. A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest, 2003)

87. Howard’s End (James Ivory, 1992)

86. Airplane! (Jim Abrahams and Jim Zucker, 1980)

85. If . . . . (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)

84. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

83. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

82. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

81. Brothers (Susanne Bier, 2004)

80. Cry, the Beloved Country (Darrell Roodt, 1995)

79. The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991)

78. After the Wedding (Susanne Bier, 2006)

77. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hsiaio-hsien Hou, 2007)

76. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressbuger, 1944)

75. My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

74. Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1993)

73. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

72. Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981)

71. Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1997)

70. All or Nothing (Mike Leigh, 2002)

69. A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966)

68. Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)

67. United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)

66. Another Year (Mike Leigh, 2010)

65. My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

64. Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)

63. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)

62. A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985)

61. Volver (Pedro Almodovar, 2006)

60. Shuan of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004)

59. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

58. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

57. Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

56. A Letter to Three Wives (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1949)

55. Le samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)

54. Angel at my Table (Jane Campion, 1990)

53. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

52. Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, 1961)

51. The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda, 2008)

50. Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

49. Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)

48. Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953)

47. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

46. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

45. In the Bedroom (Todd Field, 2001)

44. Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)

43. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

42. Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda, 1962)

41. Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

40. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

39. The General (Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1926)

38. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)

37. The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962)

36. Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

35. Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980)

34. Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)

33. The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)

32. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)

31. Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964)

30. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)

29. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

28. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

27. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

26. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)

25. Solyaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

24. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

23. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)

22. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

21. Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)

20. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

19. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)

"'Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking Nerf herder.'
'Who's scruffy-looking?'"

18. Crimes and Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1989)

"If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie."

17. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

"Why would a man leave his apartment three times on a rainy night with a suitcase and come back three times?"

16. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders 1987)

"Tell me of the men, women, and children who will look for me - me, their storyteller, their bard, their choirmaster - because they need me more than anything in the world."

15. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

"I'm sorry, but I thought I better hit you before he did. He's in better shape than I am."

14. Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999)

13. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)

"If you're his friend, you can talk to him whenever you want. Just close your eyes and call him."

12. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

"You're gonna need a bigger boat."

11. The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)

"'Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...' ''Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.'"

10. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959)

"Doinel, if your paper is first today, it's because I've decided to give the results beginning with the worst."

9. Waiting for Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996)

"People say, 'You must have been the class clown.' And I say, 'No, I wasn't. But I sat next to the class clown, and I studied him.'"

8. All about Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

"I'll admit I may have seen better days, but I'm still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut."

7. Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

"At this moment, I didn't feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub."

6. Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950)

"Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it."

5. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

"This is your receipt for your husband... and this is my receipt for your receipt."

4. A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935)

"And now, on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor."

3. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

"Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Meaow. Here Jonesy."

2. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952)

"If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes us feel as though our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'. Bless you all."

1. It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

"I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Colosseum. Then, I'm comin' back here to go to college and see what they know. And then I'm gonna build things. I'm gonna build airfields, I'm gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high, I'm gonna build bridges a mile long..."

New this year:
All or Nothing
Another Year
The Beaches of Agnes
Brothers
A Canterbury Tale
Cleo from 5 to 7
The Gleaners and I
Meek’s Cutoff
Scenes from a Marriage
Spirit of the Beehive
Stardust Memories
Tokyo Story

Dropped:
The Passion of Joan of Arc*
Talk to Her*
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington*
Vertigo*
The Third Man+
The Red Shoes+
A Hard Day’s Night*
The Lives of Others+
Harold and Maude*
*needs a re-watch
+just not feeling as much an emotional connection to this this year

Decades:
1920's - 2
1930's - 5
1940's - 7
1950's - 14
1960's - 12
1970's - 10
1980's - 15
1990's - 15
2000's – 18
2010’s – 2

Directors with 2 or more films:
Bergman - 5
Hitchcock – 5

Guest – 3
Leigh - 3
Varda – 3

Allen – 2
Bier - 2
Campion – 2
Cukor – 2
Ford - 2
Herzog – 2
Ivory - 2
Kieslowski – 2
Mankiewicz - 2
Powell - 2
Spielberg - 2

Noir by way of Maron: Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950)

2011-08-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

Comedian Marc Maron, on his brilliant WTF podcast, has a gift for exposing the raw, the dark, and the hidden, for hitting on personal fears, failures, and neuroses with his guests, perhaps in great part because he himself seems so willing (some grumpy skeptics might say too self-obsessively willing) to discuss and analyze his own weaknesses with his guests and his listening public.

Todd Hanson, one of the original writers of The Onion, spoke with Maron in detail about the day (and the aftermath of that day) he tried to commit suicide (an attempt that Hanson’s doctors said should have worked); Conan O’Brien shared personal insecurities in a way that was real and unexpected for someone so much in the public spotlight; and in a more recent interview, actress-comedian Aubrey Plaza (Funny People, Parks and Recreation) told Maron about the stress-related stroke she’d experienced at 20 and admitted that her deadpan, non-committal persona – something she was projecting even during the interview – was a cover or protection from desperate internal fears. Maron is, perhaps, primarily interested in the fact that the best comedy most often comes out of a well of fear, anger, sadness, dysfunction, out of, in short, deeply messed up people. But I believe fans of Maron’s comedy and those of who have discovered Maron’s podcast, possibly by way of the New York Times write up about him, love Maron, not because he and the comedians he interviews are so much different or so much more messed up than we are, but because Maron faces - honestly - failings and fears and neuroses that are, very simply, human, and common in some way to us all even, even if most of us don’t use comedy to deal those weaknesses.

Humphrey Bogart, or affectionately, Bogie, with such roles as he has in The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, and even The African Queen, offers us a kind of parallel to the dark side of humanity that Maron explores and exposes with his comedy and his interviews. Bogie’s roles as Sam Spade, Rick, Philip Marlowe, and Charlie Allnut, respectively, from those films above, offer us leading men who are quite dark in various ways.

Each of them is more or less tough, anti-social or alienated, wry or drily witty, world-weary, cynical. Bogart perfectly fits these roles, and while I’ve always thought Bogart had an odd, rather ugly face, with his sagging checks, high creased forehead, and thin wet lips, somehow his characters and his own personality make him, undeniably, one of the best romantic leading men of all time.

Each character, though often dark, has an unmistakable, winning quality, a charisma, something that emanates equally, surely, from Bogie himself as much as the character, and something that draws us, as willing participants into the character’s darkness. Film noir, literally, “black film,” describes a group of films from the 40’s and 50’s – including The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep – that generally “reflected the resultant tensions and insecurities of the time period” and demonstrated attitudes of “[f]ear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia.” The films contain anti-heroes rather than heroes, and these characters might be described as ”violent, misogynistic, [and] hard-boiled,” and throughout the films there is often a “strong undercurrent of moral conflict [and] purposelessness . . There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs” (http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html). With actors such as the magnetic Bogie as anti-hero, film noir becomes all the more compelling if often uncomfortable because we are drawn into the blackness and we come to see it from the inside out.

It is possibly odd to connect Maron’s comedy with film noir, odd to connect comedy and tragedy, but there can be a very thin line between the two (indeed, most of us are familiar with the idea that “comedy equals tragedy plus time”). It strikes me that Maron often looks blackness in the face and embraces it with his comedy in order to make it knowable, manageable, maybe even redeemable, and film noir, likewise, looks blackness in the face by giving us a protagonist, whom we ought to find repellent, but who is, instead, magnetic, someone for whom we root, someone with whom we sympathize. Both Maron’s comedy and much of film noir acknowledge, expose, and draw us into the experience of real human darkness and we come, I think, to see something of ourselves there, a vision that’s rather disconcerting.

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Bogart as Dixon Steele and Gloria Grahame as Laurel Gray,

offers just such a disconcerting vision, and it is Bogart in probably one of his darkest roles. While the film also offers a critique of the Hollywood film industry, portraying it as an industry that’s more interested in money, youth, and celebrity than artistic integrity, it is the film’s psychological aspects that I am most interested in here.

Bogart’s Dixon Steele is a well-known, but lately unsuccessful, screenwriter, and we are, in the very first two scenes introduced to his violent, short temper, a temper that is also well-known to anyone who knows “Dix.” The first scenes are interesting for a couple of reasons: first, the introduction to Dix’s temper is a bit obvious, not at all subtle. When he moves very quickly from arguing to using his fists on an arrogant but not completely offensive director, another patron of the restaurant comments, “There goes Dix again.” A clunky way to inform the audience of Dix’s history. The clunkiness of this worked to distance me (perhaps simply because I am a film viewer from the 21^st century) from the film at first, and so at that point, metaphorically speaking, I sat back a little skeptically: “Right, then, you’re going to have to work to convince me now that you can be more complex and dark than that.” It did. More on that later.

As second point of interest, in these first scenes, we see Dix’s clear sympathy for those Hollywood has left behind, here in the restaurant, Dix sides with a once famous, brilliant actor who has turned into an alcoholic and something of a fool. Dix stands up for him when he is refused service, and Dix’s clear love, respect, and sympathy for his actor friend are genuinely moving; the emotional depth subtly evident in the friendship between the men here hints that the stagey fight with the director will not overshadow what the film has to offer.

At this point in the story, Dix’s motivations for defending his friend seem fairly clear: the actor is his friend; Dix is angry that fickle Hollywood has so quickly abandoned a person it once idolized. But as the film goes on, the nature of Dix’s temper and the motivations for all his actions seem less and less traceable. In the case of his actor friend, we never doubt that he does love his friend, but we begin to suspect that that love might be mixed with a kind of recognition, the idea that his broken friend is a being not so far removed from himself. And Dix’s eruptions into rage are both less predictable and more weighty: less predictable because Dix takes on complexity as we begin to see more of him and more weighty because we begin to care more and more about Dix and about the characters who we see love him.

But I should go back a bit to the action that sets the central plotline in motion. In the beginning, Dix is offered the opportunity to write a screenplay based on a piece of pop fiction. Dix sneers at the book – “I won’t work on something I don’t like” – but decides to consider writing the screenplay anyway, getting around reading the book himself by asking the restaurant’s coat check girl, Mildred, home with him so that she might give him a synopsis of the book. She goes home with him, explains the plot and then leaves; in its entire, it is a scene where we see his clear contempt for her and the book and we see his delightfully witty sarcasm (all completely lost, of course, on the naïve Mildred).

Next morning, Dix is awakened early by a police officer friend, who informs him that Mildred was found dead – murdered – and Dix must go in for questioning. Dix is let go on lack of evidence, but the police, even Dix’s friend, clearly, still suspect him, and more uncomfortably, so do we. Or rather, we’re not sure whether to suspect him or not.

At this point, he’s won us over; his deadpan, witty repartees and sarcasm; his dry Bogie charm; his apparent unconcern are magnetic, delightful, hilarious. But. We recognize, for all that charm, a man contained, difficult to read. He is wholly, apparently, unemotional upon hearing of Mildred’s murder, and as his police officer friend, says of Dix in their war days, “It’s hard to tell how Dix feels about anything. None of us could ever tell.” It is that mixture of containment, that barrier Dix places between the world and himself and that possible capability to erupt at any moment into brutal violence that makes us increasingly uneasy; we are drawn to him, but we cannot really read him, and where we might have thought him innocent of the murder at first (though contemptuous of Mildred, he didn't seem unkind to the point of violence), we become less sure of when Dix is joking or serious, less sure if how just how far his containment of himself extends. For his jokes extend to the discussion of the murder case, and when Dix sets up a scene with his policeman friend and wife in order to demonstrate how the murder might have been done, it's difficult to tell if Dix is truly gruesomely relishing the imagined murder or if he is only sarcastically playing into his policeman friend's suspicions of him.

The more we see of Dix, the more we know that he is both a master of control and a man whose rage might disrupt that control at any moment.

In the midst of the continuing plotline to discover evidence about the murder, Dix meets his new neighbor, Laurel Gray. Even in the first moment of their meeting, an unspoken moment, in which their eyes meet as Dix takes Mildred to his apartment, we know that Dix has met his match.

Miss Gray’s still, cool, direct, knowing gaze stands in stark contrast to Mildred’s giddy naïvete - Grahame is the perfect co-lead with Bogart. One of the great joys of film noir is the crackling dialogue between the leading man and leading woman – there is a quick bantering wit in the screwball comedies, too, but the wit in film noir, as here, reigned in by but slyly working around the Hays Code has an invigoratingly dark edge, laced with double entendre, electric sexual tension, and subtext. Bogie and Grahame here, sizzling up the screen, rival the best of Bogie and Bacall.

Laurel Gray herself, unlike most of the other characters, is wholly unintimidated by Dix in the beginning, and it is her lack of fear, her cool confidence that makes her such a good match for him. We want to believe with Laurel, that there is, truly, nothing to fear, that Dix has a dark side that can be managed or changed if he has someone who will both love him and stand up to him. But Dix and Laurel’s relationship is tinged for us as viewers, from the beginning, by our real unease with Dix, an unease that only grows and that Laurel comes to share. Dix tells Laurel in one of their first conversations, “I’ve been looking for someone for a long time . . . and now I know your name, where you live” – a statement that could be innocently and genuinely spoken by someone smitten but on the lips of Dix feels dangerous, even if we are still charmed by him. The dark undertone of this statement is later echoed after Dix and Laurel are together, and he tells her, again, we suspect only half-jokingly, “You go when I tell you to go - and not before.”

But still, we hope, that Dix and Laurel’s relationship, will prove to be Dix’s lasting redemption, that his fatal flaw –whatever it truly is, wherever it stems from –will be vanquished at last. But the power of the manic pixie dream girl, the moralizing influence of the angel in the house, the love of a good woman – those are not the happy, easy, and ultimately unsatisfying answers with which this film settles. Though one character tells Laurel, “Dix needs you,” and we believe, too, he does, that he has, indeed, found in Laurel his match, that in her he might find true companionship rather than the combative isolation he’s build around himself, the problem is that Laurel cannot truly cure him. She might be his muse, for he begins writing again, with joy, when he meets her,

and they are kindred spirits, but she is only human herself, not a miracle worker who can transform the warp of Dix’s soul.

We want to believe that Dix can change, that the litany of aggravated assault cases the police have on their records about him are things of the past; we’ve come to love him, be charmed by him, sympathize with him. We want to excuse his violent temper as artistic temperament – we even wonder if his friend and agent is right - that he wouldn't be the same wit, the same brilliant writer without that darkness: “You don't want normal. You knew he was dynamite. He has to explode sometimes . . . If you want him, you’ve got to take it all.” The question the film leaves to Laurel and to us up until the final moments, where the answer is made devastatingly plain, is whether Dix really is as dangerous a piece of dynamite as indicated by his past and if so, whether anyone can make a home with that dynamite.

Much of the film’s genius lies in the way it plays on our desires and hopes for Dix, the way it plays on our guesses about him, our fears about him; up until the last moments, we don't know whether or not he murdered Mildred, we do not truly know – or we don’t want to admit –exactly how far he will go into the dark, relative to Laurel. Director Nicholas Ray shot two endings to the film – both endings, as common with film noir, are black, but one is blacker. I will not give away which ending Ray chose, but by the time we get to that ending, Dix’s specific actions – just how far he goes – do not really matter. Dix’s tragedy has been opened wide to us, and we cannot get away from it any longer.

Characters, variously, throughout the film say of Dix, “He’s a sick man . . . there’s something wrong with him”; “There’s something strange about him”; “Dix doesn’t act like a normal person.” But categorizing him as separate from others – as abnormal, as wrong in the head – isn’t, ultimately, what the film decides about him and we can’t decide it either. We’ve come too close to him, loved him too much for that. We know he is, certainly, not heartless - he is capable of true love and friendship - and he has wit, charisma, and artistic integrity, possibly genius. But it is those endearing things about him that make his besetting flaw all the more tragic, and Dix, in the end, while unique as an individual is, we know, even in that darkest place, fully, tragically human, nothing more or less.

Sometimes, with Marc Maron, we can laugh in the midst of that dark tragedy - using that tragedy to create something good - but sometimes, with Dix, we must acknowledge the suffocating alienation of our own fatal flaws. And that is the crushingly honest, lonely place to which this film brings us, and it is what makes this film as piercingly relevant in 2011 as Maron's dark, honest comedy.

"And the sons of God shouted for joy": Terrence Malick's Tree of Life

2011-07-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

Jessica Chastain, who plays the mother in Terrence Malick’s Palme d'Or winning Tree of Life, called the film, a “visual poem” recently on the Guardian’s podcast. And that’s about right, for the film follows no classic narrative structure; it’s more stream of consciousness meditation than story. And I guess it’s the poetic, non-linear quality of the film that has left many audience members baffled and even a little angry, and has prompted articles like this one in The New York Times: “Walking in and Walking Right Back Out of ‘The Tree of Life’”. In the screening I attended, the two young men sitting behind us, after 30 minutes of shuffling in their seats and only half-suppressing sigh and groans, stumped out of the theater with a “This is stupid.” Not the film “starring Brad Pitt” I’m guessing they were probably expecting.

I suppose I was able to go into the film a little more prepared than those two young men, having watched Malick’s other films, Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World, and fortunately knowing, then, something more about Malick’s sensibilities. I’d also heard that the film “challenges” and “tests” its audiences, and it did help to be ready for that kind of experience. And while I confess that the 17-minute section near the beginning of the film--in which Malick imagines the beginning of the universe--and we see not characters but explosions, amoeba, and dinosaurs--did test me a little and while the entire film challenged my ability to understand what Malick wanted to say at each moment, I never wanted to leave; on the contrary, Malick, I think by the sheer weight the beauty on the screen, held me pinned to my seat, often in a kind of rapture.

In a few transcendent moments in my life, I have been moved unexpectedly to tears by a beautiful painting or sunset or by a strain of sweet music. This film has that power. Throughout, I was carried along by waves of sensation; I was frequently in the clutch of threatening tears without really knowing why. In a classic film or story, you sense the climax coming; you know, usually, when to reach into your pocket or purse for a tissue to sniffle into. Here, I could not predict that moment, those moments. And I could not understand the why’s of the emotion that did overtake me. Was it just the startling impact of the cascading images of beauty? Was the film tapping into some deep longings or memories or questions buried in my subconscious? Probably, yes, to all of that. Still, pinpointing the reasons would be impossible and, I think, not, ultimately, what I want. While the film asks deeply profound and existential questions and so ought to be examined on the intellectual level, it is also a film that exists, like music, like dancing, like a painting, equally, if not more so, at the emotional level.

I read a piece a long while ago in The New Yorker featuring the genius pianist and then teenage prodigy, Evgeny Kissin, and the interviewer/writer reflected on the way that Kissin seemed to use words awkwardly, almost with embarrassment during the interview – he could not express himself well. But when he sat down to play, he was utterly free, eloquent, powerful and graceful; his hands, the keyboard, were the components of his language. Perhaps, since that article, Kissin has become more adept in giving interviews, but I rather like the idea that his primary language, his heart language, if you will, can voiced only through the piano. Terrence Malick is a notoriously shy filmmaker; he will not give interviews, and he did not appear at Cannes to receive his award. Perhaps he feels, and I do feel, that his films speak for themselves and they bear his unmistakable personal stamp, his voice. The Tree of Life is no exception; it is fully eloquent, but experiencing it is like being immersed in another form of communication, one that reaches not just the intellect but the emotions.

But all this discussion has been very subjective, hasn’t it? What is the film about, anyway? How about some concrete detail? Yes, hmmm. Because this film touches on such an emotional level, the concrete is difficult. I could tell you about Michelangelo’s Pietà if you've not seen it; before I went to Rome, I myself saw pictures of it, and it was described to me by an art historian – I could grasp what she said about the color, form, and detail of work – but until I saw it myself in St. Peter’s Basilica, I had no comprehension at all of its beauty, heartbreak, and power. This film is like that. You need to experience it to know it. And while all films communicate via imagery and so cannot ever be really translated to words, or to my particular words here, Malick’s films, and this one, too, demonstrate fully just how complex and untranslatable the language of film is.

In spite of the inadequacy of words, however, I want to try to respond somehow, in the best way I can, in words, to some of the details of The Tree of Life. Filmmaker Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and soon, Looper) on the /Filmcast recently said that it’s difficult to talk about the film “without sounding pretentious and awful,” and I fear I’ve already stepped into the pretentious and awful category, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I plow on. It’s the sort of film that makes you want to say something back to it.

I did worry, before I saw the film, that it itself would be too grand, too over-reaching, too ambitious to succeed. What filmmaker can make a film about the beginning of the world, of life and not seem pretentious? Stanley Kubrick attempted it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and most film critics seem to think he succeeded, but well, he’s Kubrick, and do we really need another film like that? Malick has proved that we do, I think, and if The Tree of Life equals 2001 in its ambition, it surpasses it in beauty and warmth. The Tree of Life is about life, the universe and everything, and it does have a very long sequence without human characters, but, unlike 2001, it is firmly grounded in one particular family, one particular person, and because we feel a strong connection throughout to this person, Jack, played by Sean Penn but also played, more particularly and powerfully, by the young first-time actor, Hunter McCracken, the vastness of the universal, indeed, the universe, takes on poignant significance. I cared about the beginnings of the universe, as Malick has imagined it, because I cared about Jack; Malick beautifully connects to two, the abstract and the particular.

But on to some of the particulars. The film jumps easily through time and space, but its “present,” if I might call it such, is with Sean Penn, the older Jack, a clearly financially successful man in his late 40’s who appears to be either haunted or emotionally dead or both, and he moves through the space of his cold glass-and-steel city world as if submerged, isolated from the world and the others around him. Nothing is explicit, but the older Jack is in crisis. It is clearly an existential crisis, related to the problem of suffering in the world, specifically the suffering of his own family, in the face of the death, some years previous, of his younger brother, a death which came in the brother’s very young adulthood. This grief opens the film and colors and interprets in some sense all that we see after it. We see the news of the death broken to Jack’s mother and then to his father. We see the unbearable weight of grief on both of them and the hollow non-answers of the platitudes those around them offer, relative to the death.

Also framing the film, as a sort of pairing to the grief and death, are two themes: one, appearing on the screen, as a quotation from the book of Job, part of God’s answer to Job’s suffering at the end of that book—“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (38:4, 7)--and the other, in a voiceover from Jack’s mother—“There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.” The film, thus, at its heart, shows suffering and brokenness, and then asks why and explores how we might live in a suffering world, a world that is at once breath-taking in its beauty and horrifying in the ugliness both without and within. For Malick does not just turn the lens outward and make Jack ask, "why has this thing been done to me?" We also see Jack in falls from grace, boyish in character though they are, and he must also ask, "why do I inflict pain on others?" How may we be healed from both? Is healing possible?

It is through the lens of the older Jack’s memory, that we return with him to his life as a young boy, a boy looking and moving towards manhood, and to his life with his two younger brothers and with his father and his mother. It is this section of the film, with Jack and his family, that the film is most particular and for me, most poignantly powerful. The most linearity occurs in these sections though the film is always impressionistic in its storytelling. This impressionistic character of the lives depicted beautifully captures what memory is like, especially memories of childhood, fleeting but vivid and intense fragments that shape so powerfully one’s sense of personal identity and worldview. The specific memories as they are so seamlessly cut together pursue both the question of suffering and the question of how to live, following grace or following nature.

We see Jack observing the way his mother—grace—moves through the world and the way his father—nature— moves through it, the mother (played by the sublime Jessica Chastain) embracing beauty, tenderness, kindness love, herself a part of the graceful natural beauty of the world;

the father (played by Brad Pitt) doggedly following the path of material success, clearly loving—or longing to love—his boys, but giving them rules, laws, and discipline more than spontaneous affection. He is a deeply flawed man, flaws that Jack sees and hates.

And so Jack has these two models before him, but he soon finds that living is not so simple as following the beautiful model his mother offers; his own self and desires intrude, and in a few deftly sketched scenes, we see Jack falling from that grace, willfully and almost gleefully inflicting pain on his brother or throwing rocks through a window, breaking the glass simply for destruction’s sake. His guilt after these things weighs on him, and in a voiceover, an echo of Romans 7 where Paul outlines his internal struggle between righteousness and evil, Jack says, “What I want to do, I can't do. I do what I hate.” Jack, then, participates in and creates pain, in opposition to what he knows, fully, is right. He is thus culpable in some way in regards to the suffering of the world, and in a key moment in the film, he recognizes aloud—an exemplary moment in which I think we understand that the older Jack is interpreting the life of his younger self—that he is more like his father, as troubled as that relationship with him is, than his mother. Trouble within.

The trouble without takes not just the form of his brother’s death, of his father’s harshness, but also the form of the world's scars: the neighbor boy whose head bears a patch of baldness, a burn from a vicious house fire; the man who limps with handicap across the street as the boys stare; the haggard prisoners, at a stop in the town; the man with epilepsy, in a fit on a lawn. Malick, through the beauty and light of the film, still peppers the world with these figures of suffering or brokenness, and like the vividness of a childhood memory, they cannot be shaken.

What answer does Malick give to the questions of the film? To Jack's crisis? Does the grown-up Jack find redemption? Malick, does give an answer, though not, I think, a definitive answer, and in spite of the biblical (and also Roman Catholic) references, I do not believe that the film is specifically tied to the redemption Christianity offers. The clearest moment of redemption comes when, in a kind of pulling of the pieces of his memories of his family together at the end of the film, the older Jack imagines a reunion on a beach with his family--his father, mother, dead brother, younger brother--a demonstration, perhaps, of the belief that death does not end the possibility of healing, of forgiveness, of redemption, of new life. And while this scene verges for me on the sentimental, it does not overshadow, ultimately, the beauty and impressionistic subtlety of the rest of the film. I think Malick’s answer to suffering, guilt, and brokenness relates to new life, to creation, to grace covering over and transforming nature. The long sequence in the film of the beginnings of the world says that new life underpins even this suffering present life, and that powerful beginning continues on through the births and even the deaths of Jack’s particular family. Among the many breath-taking images or sequences from this film that will stay with me is one in particular – Jack’s birth. His boyish form begins in the sea, under the water, and he swims or moves upward until we see his mother in the hospital, surrounded and bathed in white – a baby, Jack, is born. The wonder and love and joy of that moment is transcendent. In it, the beginning is contained, and “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”

I cannot tell to whom to recommend this film. One’s response to it will be purely personal; you will love it, or it will not work for you, and I can’t predict which it will be. It may glue you to your seat, or you may itch to leave. Even if, however, you cannot embrace its themes and loose narrative, it, surely, is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen; and I can recommend it fully to anyone on the strength of just that. It’s a theater experience quite unlike any other.

"Once Upon a Time": The Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice, 1973

2011-04-09T23:13:00.000-07:00

I think I held my breath for most of this film. Every moment, from the opening scene to each subsequent beat, was so perfectly constructed, so beautiful, I could not believe it could sustain itself, could not believe it would not stumble at some point. But it didn’t – and when it was over, I was left with that sort of ecstasy you experience when you’ve just stood in front of a master work of art and a Something that is transcendent intrudes into your life.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what this film means though I know it is rich in metaphor and symbolism and reading a bit about the historical context tells me it is speaking to the political situation in Spain at the time. But it’s not one of those films that needs to be understood fully in order to feel you are being immersed into its world. The film tells its viewers – or perhaps I should say, participants - from the beginning that it is a fable or fairy tale, beginning with the words on the screen, "Once upon a time" and so invites us to read its metaphors, but the fable world feels so real, that like the best fables, it doesn’t seem like a fable at all.

The storytelling is stripped down to its barest form – it is richly full of visual cues and contains very little dialogue - and yet somehow all the structure of a story is there, from set-up to denoument. And each character is made rounded and full with sure, spare strokes – we know the father, wrapped in his own life and private, philosophical thoughts about bees and hives; the mother, so distant and also wrapped in her own thoughts and in another love; and the two children, the older and rather cruelly mischievous Teresa, and the younger Ana, whose dark eyes are pools of still, grave sadness, and, for one or two brief, dazzling moments, sheer innocent delight. The family lives together in their big house, but the rooms and long corridors feel as bare as the storytelling, and the people in the house seem never to be together, each isolated from the other – a metaphor for something that I feel but do not yet understand.

The film opens as a travelling picture show comes to town, and the villagers gather to watch Frankenstein, and in it that horrifying monster who carries with him such pathos.

And here, in these moments of watching the way a film, the way a moment in a film, a character in a film, captivates and takes hold of the imagination of our young protagonist, Ana, is where I began holding my breath. All the joy of film, of art, of imagination, of the way our experiences of film and art can be such deeply personal experiences, uniquely tuned to who we are as individuals is here in these first moments and carried delicately and deftly all the way into the final moments. I don’t think the film is about the experience of film, primarily, but I could not help but see the joy and power of film here.

Along with its subtle, rich storytelling, The Spirit of the Beehive is one of the most visually beautiful films I’ve seen. Frame after frame of perfectly composed, perfectly lit shots – the interiors, the close-ups, and the exteriors with the wide expanses of bare land and hills, all individually stunning and all united around visual themes, colors. As I sit and write, I can see shot after shot in my mind’s eye, each holding a kind of visceral and emotional depth that I feel even if I, again, don’t always understand: the crushed, oozing mushroom; the ridges of tilled land Ana’s feet run and stumble over to get to the lone, abandoned building; the yellow honey-combed panes of the windows in the family’s home; Ana’s face mirrored in the pond with the sorrowful face of the monster fuzzily in the background; the long, winding road and a single bicycle trailing away on it; Teresa playing and jumping over and through the flames of a fire while Ana watches from the edges of the light; Ana’s foot pressing into a large footprint.

This is one of those films that has been, dimly, on the edges of my consciousness as something I "should see sometime." When I began it, I realized there would be no “should” about it – it is all desire and answered delight. It's a film that deserves more specific querying and close analysis, but for now, I'm content just to bask in its emotional, visual richness.

Never Let Me Go - a film by Mark Romanek

2011-02-09T23:25:00.000-08:00

**SPOILERS**

A thin young woman lies on an operating table in a stark room, lit with bright cool lights. A respirator hangs from her mouth, and the doctors busy themselves around her open abdomen. The beeping of the monitor connected to the woman is the only sound. The beeping begins to go fast, and then faster, faster, but the doctors continue on, unhurried, never glancing at the face of the woman on the table - there is not the usual half-panic, hurry, and concern one might expect in an operating room with such hectic beeping. The beeping rises and rises until the individual tones merge into one line of sound. Still, the doctors and nurses move deliberately, efficiently, unhurriedly. A red organ is carefully lifted from the body; the ventilator is taken from the unresponsive lips. The doctors and nurses leave, no backward glances, and the woman is left on the table, alone, her body gouged and open, helpless, pathetic, undignified.

This scene, this image of the woman, of the lonely body on the table is at the center of Never Let Me Go, a film about the inevitability of death, the loneliness of death, the starkness of death, the frailty of the dying and the dead, and the selfishness and lack of compassion of the living. Heavy stuff indeed. But somehow, this film is simply beautiful, one of the most beautiful films, in fact, that I’ve seen this past year. And in spite of the heavy weight of the subject matter, in the quiet center of the film, there is no reaching for grand philosophical statements about life and death. There is only an unassuming poignance and resonance.

The film’s story centers on three young people who grow up without parents, cloistered behind the walls of a school called Hailsham, growing up to serve a purpose from which there seems to be no escape. Their marrow of their lives, when they reach adulthood, is to be given in service of others - and they have no choice in the matter. They were born for the purpose.

In a traditional Hollywood film, we might expect our young heroes, beautiful as they are and centered in the story as they are, to find escape, to fight their way to the freedom to live as they wish. But this film is not a traditional film. Where we expect a rise to some kind catharsis, even if that catharsis is a raging, fiery one of death, we get only a quietness. It’s a film of anti-catharsis in a way, if there can be such a thing.

It’s a film the undermines our expectations for what a conventional film should do at so many turns - but instead of giving us shocking twists away from convention, we instead get simple, gentle turns in other directions, turns that, if we have been paying attention, we could have seen coming, but perhaps we might see clearly only in retrospect.

From early on in the film, our three young people, as children, are caught in a kind of love triangle, and while our sympathies are with the sweet, thoughtful girl called Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and the boy she’s interested in, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) (and there is a beautifully built series of moments, depicting the shy childhood romance between Kathy and Tommy), we watch with Kathy, as her friend Ruth (Keira Knightley), woos and wins Tommy. It is a puzzlement - Kathy and Tommy seemed made for each other. But our expectations are thwarted. And they are thwarted again when we take, in the film, a leap in time: the children have grown, Tommy and Ruth are still together, Kathy still watches, quietly, from the outside.

We are thwarted still further when a break between Ruth and Tommy yet later does not result in Tommy and Kathy finding one another - the film simply goes on in its quiet way, the characters moving through life, giving in to it, letting it carry them. And even later in the film, after our three have gone separate ways, when they find a way, by chance, to meet with each other, meeting on a beautiful, isolated beach, Ruth, in a gesture of guilt and admission of jealousy and unrightful previous possession, does not reclaim Tommy, but gives him up, gives him to Kathy. But the scene does not offer the catharsis we might expect; it is instead a strange anticlimax, falling well after where the normal climax would come, an anticlimax that intentionally undercuts all our expectations for what a romance in film is “supposed to be” - instead of giving us a love affair, it brings us only the offer of a love affair - but an offer that we know, and the characters know, is an offer that comes too late.

We do not get the rushing together of the lovers into each other’s arms after years of painful separation as we might get in a conventional film; we get only years of calm acceptance and then quietness in the face of Ruth’s confession. Kathy’s response is silence, and then a “it’s too late, Ruth.” And it is. Tommy and Kathy have a few moments of tenderness together, but we know Tommy has no time. We’ve just seen him, before Ruth’s confession, on the beach in the midst of an excited exploration of an abandoned boat, clutching his side - and we know the inevitable is not far off. A love affair, if there will be one, will be only as quiet and staid as is the reception of Ruth's statement.

So the catharisis that could possibly have come earlier in the story cannot come now at this point in the film. And the film is intentional in that. Instead of catharsis, we have, instead, two people, who have quietly loved each other, but long ago gave each other up, two people who have a few small moments together at, essentially, their deathbeds. And this, I think, is exactly what the film is about. Death in life. And the ways that we simply carry on, carry on with the life we have, without fighting, until death.

There is a slim hope of a possible deferral of their deaths, but it is a hope we know that is born of fragile wishes and ignorance - and, Kathy, at least, is careful in her hope - careful in hope throughout the whole film. She hopes, but she tempers her hope always - they know that they will die, and very soon. Kathy has no real illusions, and so, because we are primarily following her, neither do we - nor should we, if we are wise - as viewers.

In the scene in which this hope for Tommy and Kathy will be answered, once and for all, a scene which we might normally view with suspense, there is only an uneasiness and dread - poignance - but still, deep unease. And I believe the film gives us all the subtle hints we need up until this point of hope to know that this scene - where Tommy hopes to prove a reason for a deferral - will not bring any real suspension of or hiatus from the march towards death.

We see our first hint towards that stark truth when we see the Madame, the sort of superintendent of Hailsham, at the school for the very first time when Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy are still children. The Madame arrives in a car and walks up the steps through the curious children - walking with a look of distance, distaste, possibly, on her face - and we see one action in which she lifts her bag up so that she will not touch the children. And then we know just how what she - and by extension the outside world - considers these children to be, inhuman, Other. We have the hint there that there is no real hope for any sympathy, for true deferral for these children.

There is another hint towards this truth in a moment in a cafe when Tommy, Ruth, and Kathy have their first contact with the outside world, a moment when the idea of and hope for a deferral for lovers is first broached. A deferral for lovers. Surely, there will be that . . . ? Our three are with another couple who is in love and desperate, desperate for some hope. We see the painful expectation on the faces of other couple, their belief in a rumor about a deferral, as they eagerly ask our Hailsham three for confirmation of the rumor. But then the crushing fact comes that the Hailsham children have never heard of such a thing. In that scene, in that moment, the rumors about deferrals, all the stories of hope, are crushed, if not explicitly, then implicitly. If there is not a deferral for lovers, for the sake of this sacred thing called love, who will be spared? And this cold knowledge adds to the dread, the knowledge we have as viewers that these characters we are following will die in exactly the way that all the others have died. Simply because we are following their story makes no difference - they are our characters, but the fact that we love them doesn’t matter. They will die exactly as planned.

And so in the scene in which Tommy and Kathy, together, hope for life, we have been given all the hints we need, to know, at least subconsciously, that hope is useless. We have seen enough, felt enough, to know that this is not a story that will have a happy ending, not a story that will demonstrate the triumph of the human spirit, the fighting against the machine, the fighting face of the odds. No, the scene only confirms what we have known, surely, all along, death will come as has been planned, at the time it has been planned, and the characters will accept it in the same way that we've seen them accept everything, submitting to what they have been made for.

It is a film that builds its tragedy slowly, and without histrionics and wild gestures and, beautifully, without convention. It simply gains in heaviness by simple additions of weighted, small moments.

But the idea of life in death, of the inevitability of life in death is not the only idea in the film. The film is also about the actions of the soon-to-be-dead living towards the dying, towards the dead. We see that action with the doctors who have removed the organ from the young woman and left her coldly on the table, but we also see it in our main characters. As Ruth is languishing, sick and ill, in the hospital, Kathy comes to see her, to tell her that she and Tommy will try to apply for a deferral of their fate.

We see in that scene the stark contrast between a woman who is in the very grasp of death, who has no hope, no love left, and a woman who has a few more years before death comes to claim her, a woman who has a very small something to hope for - and the second woman, the one with the hope, leaves the other to her loneliness, without, that we can see, regret. And in spite of the love we have built up for Kathy, we see in her a coldness towards Ruth’s plight that comes from her own concern with herself, from her own slim hope that she might be able to extend her life - for just a little while. She does not fight against her ultimate fate, but the extension, oh, the extension, she will reach for that if it's there, over the dying, helpless form of her friend.

And there in that scene, in that capsule - the one woman dying, the other woman still alive and wrapped in her own hopes - the horrible truth is that our characters are just the same as those who have destined them to their fate, for our characters can be as cruel in their small hope to live just a few years more as those who take life from them.

So this film is indeed, about death, about the inevitability of death, about our fragile lives - but it also about the horror of the ways in which we scramble over one another in order to beg Death for a moment more of life.

This is a film that will resonate for a long time to come - because of its loveliness, its devastation. It's a film of understatement and interiority - and so utterly, cooly beautiful in the execution of those two things. The film is so much about what is not said, so much about undercurrent. It’s constructed in such a way that it undercuts what we might expect, but it undercuts those expectations in very quiet ways, so quietly and beautifully, in fact, that we don’t even realize perhaps, until long after we’ve left our cinema seats, what it has done.

35 Rhums - a film by Claire Denis

2011-01-14T15:19:00.000-08:00

Something is off about many of the synopses I’ve read for this film:

Imdb: "The relationship between a father and daughter is complicated by the arrival of a handsome young man."

Netflix: "This heartfelt slice-of-life drama by filmmaker Claire Denis tells the story of widower Lionel (Alex Descas), a train driver, and his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop). The two spend most of their time together, but change is in the cards. A neighbor (Grégoire Colin) becomes attracted to Josephine, a family friend retires and Lionel tries to maintain a friendship with his ex-girlfriend (Nicole Dogue)."

Metacritic: "A widowed conductor, looking forward to retirement, lives with his grown daughter in a Paris suburb. When a neighbor starts to show interest in his "little girl", the conductor tries to adjust."

None of the synopses are “wrong” so to speak, but I think trying, with a series of brief words, to make explicit what is deeply implicit in the film does a certain injustice to the film’s story, if "story" is what it should be called. It is a film, in so many ways, in which nothing really happens, and all of the above synopses seem to be trying to explain the film in terms of “what happens.” Part of the problem with those synopses, unless you are already a fan of the director, is that they fail to stir up any kind of interest because “what happens” sounds, well, pretty boring, right? I couldn’t help but be reminded, with those synopses, of the Seinfeld episode, “The Comeback,” in which Elaine, rents a film, with a title, clearly inspired by art-house cinema, called The Pain and the Yearning, and the film’s description is “An old woman experiences pain and yearning.” 35 Rhums might sound, if you try to describe it, very much like The Pain and the Yearning. And if you try to describe it with any kind of enthusiasm to your friends, they’ll perhaps think a) your life must be very dull indeed, b) you are a film snob who has lost touch with reality, or c) you are trying to be a film snob and not fooling anybody.

35 Rhums, I think, defies any succinctly worded description; it must be experienced on its own terms and in its own time. But if one is willing to do that –let the film be what it is – the reward is immense. I admit, when I first sat down to watch it, I had to make a conscious effort to relax into the pace of the film. During the first several minutes – watching train tracks run and weave, watching a man smoking a cigarette, watching the tracks again, from day into night – I knew I would have to re-set my internal film metronome; the pacing and storytelling of this would be much different than the film I had seen most previously, Star Trek, every scene of which urged me to BE EXCITED. (And Star Trek was, actually, a lot of fun. )

After having said 35 Rhums is not a film that submits easily to words, I guess I’m going to have the audacity now to try to write about it. I expect I’ll fail in many ways, but I want to try nonetheless because the experience of the film was such an extraordinary one, and I want to try to respond in some way. I had a halting conversation afterwards with the friend I was with – we both began sentences and finished them lamely and then sat in silence. And then tried to speak again. However much we failed, though, to express ourselves and our thoughts, our silences were peaceful somehow, not awkward. That may say more about our friendship, which is a close one, than about the film, but I think it does say something about the film, too, which had nestled its way somehow into our experience of being for that evening.

But I haven’t said much about the film itself yet. As the synopses indicate, it is, indeed, about a father and a daughter who live together in an apartment in Paris or on the outskirts of Paris, certainly not the Paris of films we usually see, but one that is contained by the bounds of the rather small lives this father, Lionel, a train driver, and his daughter, Josephine, a student. And so what we see is relative to their day-to-day life – their apartment, the train tracks, a favorite bar/café, a classroom, a neighbor’s apartment. The film beautifully, in small ways and with very few words, builds our conception of the relationship between the two and of the significance of each to the other – the buying of a rice cooker, the cooking and sharing of a meal, the fetching of slippers, the listening to the sounds of each other going about some household task – we don’t need to be told that these two, in their quiet rhythm of life in the apartment, are deeply at home with one another.

Their bond and the satisfaction of that bond is set against three other characters in the film who live, in contrast, in a kind of isolation and loneliness:

Gabrielle, a neighbor, who drives a taxi by day, who seems cheery and kind, but who is alone when at home, and though she seems to have known Lionel and Josephine for a significant amount of time, cannot quite break into the bond they share, though clearly she longs to;

Noe, another neighbor, a young man, who lives alone in his dead parents’ apartment, and whom we first meet when he comes home, hears music coming from Lionel and Josephine’s apartment, and begins to move towards their door, but backs away and continues up the stairs, stumbling over a bike before he enters he own dark, untidy apartment;

and last, Rene, a co-worker of Lionel’s, forced into retirement, and even while surrounded by his well-wishing co-workers giving their loving farewell gifts, cannot quite hide his loneliness and despair. Each of these three are alone, and while they live, continuing on the track set before them, they seem to go doggedly, without purpose.

Lionel and Josephine’s relationship alone is what perhaps keeps them from the same lonely isolation and purposelessness. Lionel’s job is a job, that’s all; he seems to genuinely care for his fellow workers, but one doesn’t sense anything deeper in the relationships beyond the general camaraderie that comes from sharing a particular job’s world. Josephine appears to be a diligent student; she speaks intelligently and with some interest in the classroom; she plays soccer; she has a job - but as with Lionel, these activities don’t seem to bring her any particular purpose or joy. Josephine might be Noe, had both, instead of one, of her parents died; Lionel might be Rene if he did not have Josephine. Their love for and care for each other is a gravitational center to which they can always, and do, return. But Josephine is a young woman at the beginning of life and Lionel is closing in on the end of his, and it’s clear, the film says to us, that they cannot remain indefinitely in this circle of quiet warmth that they are to each other – and they are both conscious of this.

Noe’s and Josephine’s attraction to one another is one indicator of the inevitable break between Lionel and Josephine that must happen at some point. And I love the way the film sets up this tension among the three characters, a tension that is both immediate – in the sense that the three must interact with each other in social situations – and far-reaching because it indicates something deeper, something that must eventually change between the father and daughter.

Noe is an odd character. While I felt at home with Lionel and Josephine – though both are to some extent inscrutable, not least because they speak so little – Noe’s presence brings an unease to the film, both because of who he is personally and because of what his presence indicates for Lionel and Josephine. The unease stems partly from physical space of his apartment – uncared for and untidy, old couches and bits of trash on the floor – he doesn’t seem to belong there. He never has milk; he doesn’t know where his aspirin is and when he’s asked for some, he shuffles for it aimlessly among the random items on his shelf. He leaves his window open when he leaves for a few days, and Lionel must go up and shut it when it begins to bang in the wind at night. Noe’s apartment stands in another contrast to the neat, if small and rather spare, space where Lionel and Josephine live. Their space clearly belongs to them in the way that a home belongs to people who love each other – the home is cared for because they care for each other and that space is an extension of themselves, for each other. Noe would never paint his walls as Josephine has done to hers.

And yet, Noe is not, in the end, a character one mistrusts – he is directionless and alone, and who he is builds our unease, but he is certainly not a threat because of who he is personally – the threat that he is comes primarily from his potential in breaking up what has been a close party of two. The film delicately moves us back and forth between an unease with Noe and an attraction for Noe (and he is decidedly attractive), a back and forth that surely mirrors Josephine’s own feelings. One scene perfectly captures this back and forth – a scene in which Lionel, Josephine, Noe, and Gabrielle are all together – “together as a family again” as Gabrielle says at one point with a forced brightness and longing – Noe kisses Josephine, and she kisses him back, but then pushes him away; but when he begins to leave – as if accepting her rejection - she pulls him back to her, and they sit down together, at an awkward distance, against a wall. The scene is beautifully understated – the feeling and drama runs almost entirely beneath the surface, but it says so much about the primary tension in the film. With Josephine, we feel it’s so difficult to know what to want – we want Noe for her, and yet we do not want her to leave the solid warmth and security of the relationship with her father. We know what she is leaving – we do not know, quite, what she is moving towards. We know, only, that she will need to move soon.

The film builds so slowly and with such small moments (indeed, it didn't feel as if it was even building at all), I was not quite prepared for the emotional impact of the end. To say it held emotional impact is strange, however, because nothing really happens - nothing specifically on screen, that is. The genius of the film is such that it was able to overwhelm me at the end by virtue of the small moments that had come before and to make me weep when that “nothing” of the end happened – when Lionel’s friend plays the piano and I hear the sounds of a party in the background, when Lionel drinks his 35 shots, and when Lionel takes the rice cooker out of the package from which it had never been removed. Those nothings were, beautifully, everything.

Prologue to the Prologue: In Which I Talk to Myself:

2010-12-08T15:06:00.000-08:00

(Note: These next three posts (a prologue to the prologue, a prologue, and a review of Adaptation) were originally written for the Filmspotting forum. On the forum once a month, those who would like to, participate in what we call "The Movie Dictator Club." Each person dictates a film to another person to watch - the dictatee must watch the film and report back with some thoughts about the film. I was assigned Adaptation for July's dictator club - I put off writing and put off writing until I finally published my write-up, two months later, in September. The prologues reflect my problems in getting started in writing - and interestingly, the film, Adaptation, dovetailed beautifully with my writer's block.)

[Kaufmann]:"To begin... To begin... How to start?
I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin.
Okay, so I need to establish the themes.
Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin."

Me: [Yes, how to begin? Hmmm, . . . hangnail, there – ooo, like that shot of the jagged skin on the finger of Kaufmann in the movie – yes, yes, there’s something about that shot that captures an essential part of the movie, I think . . . ]

Me: [Ok, but talk about that image later maybe. Here goes:]

There’s something infinitely comforting . . .

Me: [“infinitely”? no, that won’t work, pretentious – less is more. Ok, go again.]

There’s something comforting about Charlie Kaufmann’s neuroses and self-doubt as I sit here trying to write about Adaptation.

Me: [wait, should I say “Charlie Kaufmann” or “the Charlie Kaufmann character”? Does it matter? Yes, . . . but that question is part of what the movie’s about isn’t it? Errr, ok, get to that later. Maybe. Go.]

There’s something comforting about the self-doubt, the ordinariness, the neuroses, the paralysis of the character of Charlie Kaufmann as I sit here trying to write about Adaptation . . .

Me: [I think Aoife’s crying. Should I go check? . . . I’ve [i]gotta [/i]get this write-up done. This was a July assignment, Melissa, July. You slacker.]

[Kaufmann]: "If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn't fat I would be happier . . ."

Me: [Heh, both true. Go.]

There’s something comforting about the self-doubt, the ordinariness, the neuroses, the paralysis of the character of Charlie Kaufmann as I sit here trying to write about Adaptation – he couldn’t begin, I don’t know how to begin. He was afraid of being cliché: "My life is a walking cliché."
I’m afraid of being cliché, of being boring. A little bit afraid of being so almost every time I speak, write, post something online, on the boards, on Facebook, wherever. Of course, Kaufmann - both the character and the man – has much less reason to doubt his writerly abilities and wit than I do, but he, the character at least, acts the way I feel when I’m supposed to be creating something, especially writing something . . .

Me: [Yes, she is crying. Dang. When am I going to get back to this?]

[6 hours later . . .]

Me: [Where was I? Errrgh. [/re-reads]

Me: [Sigh. This is stupid. What am I trying to be, Kaufmann? Heh, very funny, just write already. Edit out the edits. Go, go, go.]

Prologue: In Which I Indulge and Write about Myself, Not the Movie

2010-12-08T15:05:00.001-08:00

There’s something comforting about the self-doubt, the ordinariness, the neuroses, the paralysis of the character of Charlie Kaufman as I sit here trying to write about Adaptation – he couldn’t begin, I don’t know how to begin. He was afraid of being cliché, I’m afraid of being cliché, of being boring, of being a cheap imitation of someone else. A little bit afraid of being so almost every time I speak, write, even post something online, on the film forum, on Facebook, on Twitter (there’s some real paralysis there), wherever. Of course, Kaufman - both the character and the man – has less reason to doubt his writerly abilities and wit than I do, but he, the character at least, acts and thinks the way I feel and often think when I’m supposed to be creating something, especially writing something. The hesitations and falterings, the bursts of words that seem profound and perfect at first but then quickly reveal themselves to be what they are, shallow, pretentious, imitative, and stupid. On the forum I can’t compete with the quick, omniscient wit of a member like pixote or the dry, confidence of an sdedalus (long-time forum member) or the fluid, wonderful charm of a worm@work (another long-time forum member) or any others of all the amazing Filmspotters. And I guess I don’t want to, compete with them, that is. I’m quite happy to admire. Mostly, it bothers me that I can’t compete with myself, my best work - hmmm, the stuff I wrote in grad school, I guess that would be? A very long time ago. Where is it now, anyway? Moldering away somewhere in a box in our garage? So I’m haunted by that old stuff, paralyzed in trying to write new stuff ‘cause it’ll never be as good or interesting or original. (If it ever was.) And yet, on I go. I will force myself to write about this film, Adaptation, because I loved it, because I love films in general and love to think about films – and because writing forces me to think more deeply than I would otherwise. I say that to my writing students, and I believe it. I believe with E. M. Forster that “I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.” So I’d better try to see what I say about this thing. Here goes: (see next post)

Adaptation (Spike Jones, 2002)

2010-12-08T13:29:00.001-08:00

**CAUTION: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD**

Adaptation: In Which There Either Is or Isn’t

Why am I here? How did I get here?

Adaptation is now the last in the line of Kaufman films I’ve seen. I suppose I shouldn’t call them “Kaufman films” – they’re Gondry/Kaufman, Jonze/Kaufman, and only one Kaufman/Kaufman – but the themes and ideas are so similar in all four films, it’s difficult for me to focus on the directors over Kaufman’s screenplays. And with the exception of Eternal Sunshine, which I first saw some years ago, I’ve seen Synecdoche, Malkovich, and Adaptation in pretty quick succession, in that order, relatively recently. So in some ways, it may be difficult for me to stop the urge to trace the similar threads in all the films as I try to write about just Adaptation here, but I’ll indulge just a little here and there. The images and quote above is part of one thread that runs through all the films (though maybe more obliquely in Eternal Sunshine), I think - those often asked, so very human questions coupled with the main character’s sense (but also the side characters’) of being out of place, uncomfortable in, and out of sync with his own body and mind. We’re “All trapped in our own bodies, in moments in history,” he writes – he feels trapped rather than at home. After the brilliant opening voiceover by Nicholas Cage as Charlie Kaufman (the film had me, absolutely, from those opening moments), highlighting the character’s discomfort and frustration with his own body and mind -

- Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. . . . Fat ass. I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. . . . Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it's my brain chemistry. Maybe that's what's wrong with me. Bad chemistry. All my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring synapses. I need to get help for that. But I'll still be ugly though. Nothing's gonna change that –

- we move fairly quickly to the set of Being John Malkvovich, where Charlie feels out-of-place and uncomfortable though it’s one place of all places he should probably feel most comfortable, in a set built to a design of, essentially, his very own. If my sympathies weren’t with Charlie, the character, that is, in the voiceover, they certainly are now in this scene in the beginning:

And then later in the film on the same set, Charlie attempts to be friendly, confident, and nonchalant,

but is effectively rebuffed by the blank looks from Cusack and Keener and by his own insecurities surging beneath the surface.

So painful and absolutely identifiable even from the opening moments. Doesn’t matter if I’m not a famous screenwriter, I know all too well those same humiliating kinds of moments. In places, with people in/with which I ought to feel at home, I still say to myself, “Be confident, be yourself, be friendly” – then, ha! Internal mortification and misery with myself. My only desire is to get away, get away, get away:

And so the film has begun. With Charlie feeling alone and on the outside. And when the film turns in, and turns in, and, wonderfully, turns in again on itself so that I don’t know what is real world and what is film world, who is character and who is real person, what is fiction or fantasy and what is reality, Charlie, as that utterly sympathetic character, remains the core of the film experience. From the very beginning, with the words “screenplay by Charlie and Donald Kaufmann,” I know, because there is no Donald Kaufman, that I am entering a world where classic conventions are being overturned – those conventions that direct me as a viewer as to how and when I should suspend my disbelief are upended. The boundaries aren’t the same boundaries anymore if I can’t take even the credits at face value. And yet still, this Charlie Kaufman character, played by Cage, is a steady emotional core – I’m on the journey with him. Really with him.

The film constantly draws attention to itself as a film, as a thing that is, or once was, a process of creation – a few recurring phrases spoken by different characters at different times come to mind at once:
“Laroche is a fun character” and “Who’s going to play me?”

The Laroche line demonstrates that real people are made into “characters” in the film (and in films in general), made smaller – caricatured – made larger – made into something that may or may not reflect the real person at all.
The “who’s going to play me line” reflects something of the same thing, and more. It draws attention to Meryl Streep playing Susan Orlean, Chris Cooper as John Laroche, Brian Cox as Robert McKee, and, of course, Nicholas Cage as Charlie . . . and Donald.

And in Donald’s presence throughout, I am kept, as a viewer, on unsure footing, in a state of unease about the boundaries of the film. Streep and Cooper are playing just one real life person each. Cage is playing one real life person and one fictional person – what does it mean? Does Donald represent something? Maybe he, with Charlie the twin brother, represents the two real halves of Charlie Kaufman the real person in some way? Is Donald even real in the world of the film, or is he in the film maybe a figment of Charlie’s neurotic imagination? A split personality maybe? When Charlie calls home at the end of the film, at the scene of the accident, he says only, “Mom?” And she doesn’t say, “Is this Charlie or Donald?” She assumes it’s Charlie. So is there no real Donald? Was Donald’s screenplay actually Charlie’s? The film leaves those questions essentially unanswered, and ultimately, I didn’t really care whether I knew the answers or not - though I like asking them anyway. Even if the questions are unanswered, both Charlie and Donald, whether one person or two, are absolutely sympathetic – the one insecure and neurotic and probably brilliant as an artist, the other confident and charming and probably fairly generic as an artist.

The interplay between Charlie and Donald is some of my favorite stuff in the film. Charlie both winces at Donald’s attempts at screenwriting, a screenplay rife with Hollywood clichés and happy mediocrity, and looks on enviously at the happiness and freedom Donald finds in his writing and in his life.
The contrast between the two men is wonderful: Charlie, a successful screenwriter, awkward socially, unhappy and tortured by paralysis, brought on by insecurities, insecurities related both to his writing and to his relationships with women;

Donald, unsuccessful from a career-related perspective, but charming socially - moving at ease on the Being John Malkovich set and apparently unselfconsciously befriending Catherine Keener as well as becoming involved with Caroline, the make-up girl – he is happy and secure in himself as a writer of typical Hollywood fare (even though he cheerily bows to Charlie’s genius) and in his relationships with women.

Donald is, perhaps(?), the kind of person I think most of us want to be; Charlie is, perhaps, the person we most often are(?).

Another theme of the movie that runs throughout all the Kaufman movies I’ve seen is the theme of what I’ll perhaps call solipsism, and, ultimately, an awareness of that solipsism (Charlie identifies his own screenplay as solipsistic) and the attempt to deal with it. This solipsism and, especially, the awareness of it, is most exemplified in Charlie, but there’s a telling scene featuring Streep as Susan Orlean and Cooper as John Laroche that beautifully captures the idea, too:
Orlean is riding with Laroche in his van, ostensibly interviewing him, notebook in hand. Instead of writing down Laroche’s words, Orlean writes about her own reactions to what she is experiencing: Laroche says one thing, and Orlean writes down something else – her own interpretation of and thoughts about Laroche.

She can’t, at this point in the film (or ever perhaps?), really see or care much about anyone but herself. It’s much easier to say, “Laroche is a fun character” and leave it at that – though she seems uncomfortable with that particular designation by others - than to truly engage with him as a real person. Her written words are things that keep Laroche contained, keep him in that purely professional space, keep him away from her personally.

Charlie does the same thing – he is absorbed in himself, and his written words are things that contain, encapsulate others - on a much larger scale. His task as a screenwriter is to adapt a screenplay from Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief. He wants to write about orchids or even about Orlean, but his repeated attempts fail, and he finds that instead of writing about something else or someone else in a real way,
“I’ve written myself into my screenplay. It’s narcissitic, solipsistic. . . . Because I’m fat and I suck.”

Instead of writing a screenplay about a real other, he’s found he cannot write about anything except himself. He spends hours dreaming about who Orleans is, and he creates images of her for himself, relative to himself:

so that when he has the opportunity to meet her, he simply cannot go through with it:

The very idea of getting outside his own head is terrifying even though he knows he should, and he’s weighed down by the guilt and failure of not really engaging with others.

There is a longing in the film, for all the characters, I think, to somehow get outside of their own heads and bodies and be truly connected with someone else or with something else – to find a way to be passionate about someone or something outside of themselves. There is the sense that the three most central characters – Charlie, Orlean, and Laroche – want to find a way to get away from themselves – the selves they are so tired of - but also to, perhaps, find themselves more truly, by being in a real relationship with something or someone outside of themselves. The question of the movie is, in part, whether that relationship is possible. They are, all three, lonely characters. Donald is the only character in the film – one that has no real life counter-part – who knows who he is and is happy with himself but is not obsessed with himself either; he has easy, happy relationships with others.

Orlean is alone even in her marriage:

Laroche is alone, having killed his mother and being left by his wife:

Charlie is alone, trying to find empty comfort in his sexual fantasies – born of his own imaginings, not out of real relationship.

He murmurs under his breath at one point when he is in the room with Donald, “You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything more lonely than that?”

Charlie writes, “It is the journey of evolution, adaptation, the journey we all take, the journey that unites each and every one of us. Darwin writes that we all come from the very first single cell organism. Yet here I am, and there’s Laroche, and there’s Orlean, and there’s the ghost orchid.”
And so there is the sense that all living things are united even while there is a terrible loneliness. And with the loneliness, while there should be adaptation, change, survival, there is only this heartache and this sense of standing still, this paralysis, so that the characters want to go back, not forward, and start over:
Orlean, with the dead or dying Laroche in her arms says,

“It’s over. Everything’s over. I want my life back. . . . . I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.”

Part of the question of the film whether adaptation is really taking place at all-
Charlie remains stuck in his writing – his failed adaptation – until Donald takes over. But then the question is, is what the film becomes something new or merely more of the same? For it does become, in the last 30 minutes, something that follows all the clichés of a Hollywood genre –
with drugs,

a kidnapping and guns,

a chase,

a violent death

or two,

the central character who has an epiphany about himself,

the central character who finds love.

Charlie’s screenplay, the film itself ends by following McKee’s 10 commandments after all

. . . with a few small exceptions.

But in the end, as we see Charlie, happy at last, and saying, “I know how to finish the script now,” I come back to the same kind of question about whether Charlie is a Charlie with a split personality or Charlie is just Charlie who has a twin brother named Donald, because here’s the thing: I don’t think I really care and I don’t think the movie wants me to care whether Kaufman has succeeded in truly adapting, in changing, in producing something brand new and in being something new.
What matters, I think, are two things:
Charlie’s made a connection – one that feels real – with someone who loves him

And he’s succeeded in creating something that is whole, that is complete, “conclusive,” that feels right, and he can say, “I like this. This is good.”

He knows it: he is a creator of some thing, and it is good.

I think it’s pretty good, too. But I don’t know if that really matters.

Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995)

2010-12-03T10:08:00.000-08:00

**SPOILERS**

I had seen this film before but only once and at least 12 years ago. The impact of the film then was pretty devastating – the scene when Matthew Poncelet is executed, intercut as it is with scenes of the Walter and Hope killings – has haunted me all these years, and I admit I felt some trepidation in revisiting it now; I wasn’t sure I wanted those images refreshed in my mind. I was curious, however, to see if my memory would match a renewed viewing of the film. I remember thinking then that one thing I most appreciated about the film was that though it was what we might call an issue-driven film, I didn’t feel pushed or manipulated towards one conclusion or the other. I very much dislike issue films – I hate being preached to and mostly, I hate the fact the issue films often overwhelm the story and the characters.

This film though, absolutely, holds up; the characters and the story are vivid and central, and while it is a film about capital punishment, while it does push the idea that the use of capital punishment seems mostly to be driven by politicians who want to be re-elected, while it does push the idea that capital punishment is meted out only to those who can’t afford high-powered lawyers so that the poor are at a disadvantage, ultimately, the film raises a question or questions (namely, I think, “if a murderer is a human being, is it just or satisfying to take that human’s life?”) that it doesn’t presume to answer in an absolute way.

Matthew Poncelet, played brilliantly by Sean Penn (and I’m not really a big Penn fan), is not presented as merely an innocent from a disadvantaged background who has been taken advantage of by the system– yes, he came from a poor family, yes, he was mostly without a loving father, but the film doesn’t really offer those things as a justification or even reason for his crime. It doesn’t give a reason, in fact, for his crime, and as Sister Helen Prejean (played, also humanely and delicately, by Susan Sarandon) discovers, Poncelet gives us and her very little to love in himself (though she is determined to do so because of her conviction that he is a human being who can be loved, who can be redeemed). He spews racism and misogyny; he is callous, it seems, to the suffering of the victims’ families (even in the end when he apologizes to the families, it’s not clear what his motivations are – is he truly sorry or is he just afraid of death?). He is, truly, repellent, and the film highlights rather than hides from this fact. I still have the image in my mind of Poncelet’s heavy, hooded eyelids,

and I have to shudder.

The film also faces, head-on, the grief and devastation of Walter and Hope’s respective parents. The structure of the film works wonderfully in this respect as the first part of the story dwells only with Poncelet and Sister Helen, the development of their relationship, and then Sister Helen is brought up short when the parents ask her why she has not bothered to hear their side of the story. The scenes in which she visits the parents, sees pictures of the young Walter and young Hope, hears about their life hopes and dreams, and sees the emptiness of the grief-stricken homes are absolutely moving, and the anger of the parents is completely sympathetic, never heavy-handed. The film will not/does not excuse or justify the murders.

The scene of Poncelet’s execution, too, is powerful and beautifully done, if horrifying, on several levels: Poncelet, at this point, has become a human being for us – a human being who has committed a horrifying crime, but still a human being, not a monster, (a term for Poncelet used throughout the film by the parents and by politicians – a term which helps, the film implies, to justify his execution), a frightened human being who has, just moments before, shown us his love for his family (there’s a beautiful scene in which Poncelet spends his last hours with his mother and brothers – they don’t really know what to say to each other, but they clearly love each other) and shown us the tears and emotion and fear he has kept from seeing until now. The execution scene, though, does not allow us to feel only sympathy for Poncelet – as I said earlier, it’s intercut with images of the murders of Walter and Hope, murders we have not seen in full until now, and as Poncelet dies, ghostly reflections of Walter and Hope shimmer on the glass which the separates the execution room from the viewing room, where the parents sit, hoping for some kind of relief from their burden.

The film does, ultimately, come down on the side of anti-capital punishment – Poncelet’s death is, again, not the death of a monster but of human being and we see that the parents do not really get any relief from Poncelet’s execution. Walter’s father’s struggle, in particular, speaks to this when at the end, we see him watching from the side at Poncelet’s funeral and speaking with Sister Helen – still longing for some kind of resolution, still angry, but not knowing how to find peace: “I don’t know why I’m here,” he says. And we see that the grief of the parents has not been lessened but grief generally has only increased as a new grief is given to another set of human beings: Poncelet’s family – his brothers and his mother.

In sum, I have to say that this was still a difficult film to watch – but it’s difficult for good reasons – I didn’t feel I was told what to think and I felt the reality of each of the characters, so well-acted, and their respective struggles.

The Iron Giant - A Film by Brad Bird (1999)

2010-11-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

**SPOILERS**

I was eager to watch this film as I’d not seen it before, and as I had been convinced by a number of people I trust that it was worth my while. I admit to a bit of a disappointed “oh” when I first began the film; I think because I am so accustomed to the glossy Pixar look that this animation felt outdated. BUT I soon found myself swept up into this magical story, and I rather reveled in the relative simplicity of the animation than otherwise.

I suppose the film is not without its stock characters and near-clichés – the spunky little kid (bullied at school) as the main character; the struggling, doing-her-best, but sympathetic single mother; the artist (a beatnik) on the fringe of society with pearls of wisdom to offer (“you are who you choose to be”) and a heart of gold, ahead of his time (he drinks espresso) and willing to think outside the box; the unimaginative, egoistic, bullying government man – but all of these characters were somehow fresh enough, fun enough, within this story to make me forget they were or could be clichés.

The story itself is well-told and it captured me, and there are any number of especially effective or poignant moments. The opening is great: a “meteor” flashing past the screen, past the Sputnik satellite (a nice move that immediately orients me to the era), hurtling towards earth – cut to a lone fisherman on a raging sea, unable to see the lighthouse – then a light that is not the lighthouse, but our first introduction to the Iron Giant – the terror of the fisherman – then cut to a red dawn and a peaceful seaside town just waking up and a small boy cycling through town towards a place that just says “Diner.” We follow him inside and in the scene that follows we are introduced to (most of) the main characters and themes of the film.

There are some really wonderful moments, too, between the boy Hogarth and the giant. I loved this one:

There is something irresistibly sweet about the giant crashing ungracefully to the ground in order to sit across from Hogarth (it’s a moment that delighted my then 5-year-old daughter, too – and convinced her, finally, that the giant was “a nice giant”).

The film also brilliantly, but not heavy-handedly, sets the stage in terms of the atmosphere of the times – the paranoia about foreigners, about Sputnik, about being spied on, about the nuclear threat – and atmosphere that produces the strike first, think later mentality that precipitates the crisis for the giant and (because the giant only arms itself when threatened) for the people themselves. I loved the scene in the classroom in which the students have to watch an appallingly perky, cheery film about what to do in case of an “Atomic Holocaust”:

Some things did feel heavy-handed about the film, particularly, the government/military people – the general, for example, apparently likes killing (he’s got animal heads on his walls and an animal rug on the floor – these things contrast with the scene in the forest when the hunters kill a beautiful deer and the giant learns about the horror of death) and he probably thinks of himself as a grand cowboy in the Wild West (he’s watching a show with a shooting cowboy racing across the screen).

But ultimately, the heart of the film is the relationship of the giant and boy coupled with the awakening (self) consciousness (and conscience) of the giant. The rather trite phrase “you are who you choose to be” gains a beautiful freshness at the climax of the film when the giant gently pushes the Hogarth away and chooses to be “Superman,” instead of “Atomo,” zooming up to stop the nuclear bomb with his own body and so sacrificing himself. It sounds bland on paper, but the sacrifice of the giant was incredibly moving. Overall, just a captivating, wonderful film I’m eager to recommend as I know it’s one that has passed under the radar for so many people.