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Reviews
Miss Julie (2014)
How to Kill Strindberg
Liv Ullman gets just about everything wrong in her slow, heavy, inert adaptation of "Miss Julie." The play needs white hot intensity; she kills its momentum with portentous silences. It needs the claustrophobia of its kitchen setting; she dissipates this by "opening it up" as you're supposedly required to do when filming plays, taking it down corridors and outdoors. It needs an atmosphere of raucous midsummer revelry right outside the windows, with the revelers at one point invading the kitchen; she lets us hear them, briefly, but otherwise the three characters seem to be the last people on earth. Instead of merry folk dancing, which provides an ironic counterpoint in the original, we get a string trio playing tasteful Schubert adagios. Jessica Chastain is well cast and, when allowed to come to life, very good, as is Samantha Morton, but Colin Farrell is misdirected; his Jean ("John" in this version) lacks the charm and sardonic humor that would make the character compelling. For no good reason the play is relocated to Ireland, a setting Ullmann makes no use of. (I guess it's to justify the actors' brogues.) Strindberg sets a clock going right from the start, so that the proceedings carry tremendous urgency; Ullman drains all the tension out of it so it plods drearily. The worst thing you can do in adapting any work is drape it in the deadening mantle of a "classic." There's nice decor, costumes and cinematography to gaze at, but don't let this be your introduction to Strindberg's electrifying play.
Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
Promising debut, wasted potential
This finally opened in Spain; I've been waiting to see it because of personal interest in the topic. I found it riveting to watch but in the end a letdown.
There's a great movie to be made from this material -- a young woman escaping from a cult and trying to adjust to the outside world again -- but MMMM is finally too much of a mood piece to really face its subject. Yes, it's spooky, works up lots of dread, plays expertly with the audience's perceptions and fears. Yes, its moving back and forth between its two time periods is clever, smooth, and only confusing when it means to be. And it's mostly very well acted and beautifully shot. But people do recover from being in cults, and the movie just doesn't seem interested in either acknowledging this or exploring it.
By far the weakest aspect of the film is the relationship Martha has with her sister and brother-in-law, who are both painted as well-meaning but finally callow, clueless yuppie stereotypes. And the movie insists so strongly on Martha's never opening up that it basically shoots itself in the foot dramatically. Martha also comes off in this sequence as a real pill, which makes it hard to care about her. Her sister Lucy's half-hearted attempts to figure out what her problem is -- where she's been for two years -- kill any interest in Lucy as a character, too. The house-by-the-lake story, half the movie, takes a long time to get to square one, and never moves beyond it to consider the patience, generosity and love required in the process of healing a family member from a cult experience. That would have made for some strong drama, too, and given the story someplace to go.
You have to be grateful to MMMM for not going the obvious places where a Hollywood thriller would try to take the story, but there are some pretty gaping believability problems concerning Martha's escape. An early scene in a restaurant is a huge mistake in these terms, especially once we know how far the cult has gone in pursuit of its own survival. That scene (when it comes) is probably a mistake too; an exploration of what keeps people in cults doesn't need to go into Manson territory to be convincing. What the film does best is create the closed-off, minutely controlled world of the cult; John Hawkes' quietly menacing performance as their charismatic leader has a lot to do with this. If only the rest of the film were as convincing.
See it for Hawkes' and Elizabeth Olsen's performances and for the skillful cinematography and editing. And Sean Durkin is young; he's got some maturing to do as a writer, but he's likely got some amazing films in his future.
Beginners (2010)
What a waste!
A great premise -- a 75 year old widower coming out of the closet -- and a great actor, Christopher Plummer, in the role -- what could go wrong? Ewan MacGregor, as Plummer's son, manages a decent American accent, and the scenes between them suggest what the movie could have been if Mike Mills had put their evolving relationship at the center. Instead, the main story follows MacGregor (who needs to choose better scripts or we'll forget "Shallow Grave" ever existed) in the years after his father's death, telling us over and over how sad he is, how incapable of commitment, how much he loves his dog (who speaks in subtitles), and how sad he is again, as he bonds, un-bonds and re-bonds with a pretty French actress as vapid as he is, all to sad, pretty piano music. (On its own, the soundtrack's great.) Plummer livens things up when the film flashes back to him, but it's criminal that such a wonderful actor and performance have to take second fiddle to the vacuous self-pity of the leads. Mills is a perfect example of a filmmaker who uses jumbled chronology to hide the fact that he hasn't worked out the story he wants to tell. Instead of the incisive, intelligent comedy of gender, sexuality and family relations it could have been, ""Beginners" is an interminable, cutesy mope fest. Avoid.
Agora (2009)
Would that it were better!
After four tightly focused, intimately scaled films, Alejandro Amenábar has taken on a wildly ambitious project in "Agora", a historical epic encompassing the destruction of the library at Alexandria; confrontation between pagans, Christians, Jews and one vocal non-believer; themes of intolerance, fanaticism, mob rule, intellectual inquiry and freedom; and a cosmic perspective that expresses itself in the farthest shots possible, i.e., from space. It's a worthy project with fine intentions, but Amenábar has unfortunately jumped in way over his head.
There's been lots of criticism of the historical gaffes in the film, but the real problem is that there should be more of them. A film like "Gladiator" works by playing fast and loose with history and creating a strong story and a strong central protagonist to carry us along. Amenábar undoubtedly meant well by centering his story on the historical figure of the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, a free-thinking woman with no interest in romantic attachments. But in Rachel Weisz's performance she comes off aloof and distant, without a trace of the charm that would allow us to believe three men could be hopelessly smitten with her. Those three men are the real protagonists here, and most of the film's most powerful scenes don't involve Hypatia at all. She's peripheral to most of the action, commenting on it rather than driving it. So the film, for all its admirable advocacy of reason over fanaticism, feels dramatically hollow.
This is a shame, because the film has been unfairly pegged as an attack on Christianity. It's true that it shows that religion -- and, importantly, others -- at their worst and most destructive, but it's far more nuanced than a simplistic attack. The three male protagonists all are, or become, Christians over the course of the story, each for a different reason, and the final scene demonstrates, with devastating intensity, one character's realization of the most truly Christian action he can take. The film's plea for tolerance and coexistence, laid out early in Hypatia's classroom, is honorable and coherent, and takes on considerable force as Amenábar shows, in excruciating detail, the spiraling violence resulting from adherents of all three of Alexandria's religious groups taking revenge upon each other.
Most pertinent, politically speaking, is the film's portrayal of how the more moderate Christians, those in political and ecclesiastical power, yield to the fanatical, black-robed sect that comes to dominate Alexandria. They're meant to suggest the Taliban, but you could read in any populist, extremist group that's ever been appeased by those who should know better.
Hypatia's voyage of scientific discovery, though, is slow going and inevitably obvious. We're almost two millenia ahead of her, so watching her catch up to the heliocentric view of the solar system and the eccentricity of orbits is like watching a replay of a game you've already seen. These discoveries, though theoretically blasphemous, never become the lynch-pin of the plot. Her confrontation scenes with the authorities are too brief to carry the dramatic weight needed to turn her into a Galileo or a Saint Joan of the sciences. Passion is implied in Weisz's performance, but the film doesn't catch us up in her wonder or in any desperate need to protect and disseminate her discoveries. She keeps toiling away in her primitive lab while all hell breaks loose in the streets outside. Guess which place is more interesting.
Historical epics create problems for themselves when they try to cleave too closely to what they consider history. But the farther back you go, the less likely you are to find sources that correspond to the painstaking, ostensibly objective discipline of historical inquiry as we know it. The ancient writers (and Gospel-writers) were writing down hearsay and often consciously creating myths. Filmmakers should take a hint. Amenábar's departures from history aren't too many but too few. If he'd gone more shamelessly Hollywood and created a compelling, spirited, witty heroine, and given her suitors a little bit of hope, he might have successfully mythologized Alexandria for our age, and pulled off a sword-and-sandal epic with a refreshingly critical eye toward religion.
As it is, he bit off more than he knows how to chew. It doesn't help that the editing is choppy and abrupt, that the music apes the "Gladiator" soundtrack, and that the dialogue, translated from a Spanish script, can't decide whether to sound anachronistically modern or stiltedly "classic." "Agora" has laudable ambitions (and beautiful visuals). Would that it were better!
A Serious Man (2009)
You don't have to be Jewish
This is the real return to form we've been waiting for from the Coens. ("No Country..." was more Cormac McCarthy than Coen, and "Burn After Reading" was fun but finally empty.) Revisiting the Jewish Midwest of their adolescence and examining their identity, even with tongue in cheek, has resulted in a film that's poetic and thoughtful as well as hilarious. The Job-inspired story goes continually over the top, the characters are spot-on caricatures, and the script and cinematography are continuously clever, surprising and delightful. Michael Stuhlbarg is wonderful as the protagonist, a slighter, less assertive Albert Brooks, his face a constant barometer of the chaos and suffering he's subjected to. The ending comes unexpectedly but in retrospect it's just right. There's obviously a lot here that Jewish viewers will get and appreciate more than non-Jews, but the period detail (despite a few goofs) delivers a lot of smiles of recognition for anyone who was around then. This is the best movie the Coens have done since the underrated "Man Who Wasn't There."
The Hurt Locker (2008)
Gripping despite inaccuracies
This film is being taken to task here by Iraq veterans, who point out everything it gets wrong. One of my students, also a vet, did so without having seen it -- he can't stand war movies for that very reason. I've seen enough of them so that even while watching, and despite the authentic-looking hand-held cinematography, I could guess the movie was at some remove from nuts and bolts reality, like most.
Overlook that, however, and it's still a dramatically powerful tale of conflict and bonding between the three men of the crew. All three leads are excellent, with Jeremy Renner standing out as the obsessed bomb defusing expert. The scenes of neutralizing the bombs, while casing the area for anyone ready to remotely detonate them, accurate or not, are fiercely suspenseful exercises in making viewers bite their nails. (Scenes about defusing bombs always work, no matter how hokey. There was even a good one on the old "M*A*S*H" series.)
I think the film gets something else right, too, though I realize as a non-vet I'm going out on a limb. From the start, we experience these characters as strangers in a strange and hostile land, aware that they're to some extent engendering hatred and thus more danger. Renner says after one Iraqi is wrestled to the ground: "If he wasn't an insurgent, he is now." The sense of fear and panic pervades every scene away from the military compound.
It's a bit overlong; the missions grow repetitive. Perhaps it could have done without the obviously far-fetched subplot in which Renner goes off alone at night on a mission of his own. Yet the brief, non-explosive coda to that adventure, a few scenes later, is stunning, driving home the point that no matter how well-intentioned, Renner's character only thinks he knows and understands the place where he's serving. That makes sense in terms of the film's conclusion, where we see the real reason why he's there.
In sum: see it for the intensity of the acting and the suspense, and as a non-politicized critique of the war. Unless of course you're a vet, in which case you're excused. (More than one of you will hopefully do what Oliver Stone did with "Platoon" someday and set the record straight.)
Looking for Eric (2009)
Wonderful
The last Ken Loach film I saw was "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" which was a disappointingly simplistic historical epic. He's best when he drops the partisan politics and focuses on the lives of ordinary, flawed people trying to live their lives in harsh working class environments, and he's back to that here, in this tale of a Manchester postman whose life and family are in bad disrepair. The Loach film "Looking for Eric" reminded me most of is "Raining Stones": both seem comparatively light for quite a while, gritty and realistic (and wonderfully foul-mouthed) but also very funny, almost in a "Full Monty" mode. And then a huge shock that we should have been expecting suddenly raises the stakes and our emotional involvement. "Eric" differs from "Stones" in finding a more upbeat finale, by way of a climactic confrontation that must be seen to be believed. Throughout, the football fan camaraderie provides Loach with an infectious and fun way to make his point about friendship and community. Best of all is the rapport between the two Erics, protagonist Eric Bishop and real life Man U. footballer Eric Carmona, who appears as himself. His role in the plot is much the same as Humphrey Bogart's in Woody Allen's "Play It Again, Sam", but the context here raises the gimmick to something far more urgent and finally moving. Highly recommended.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Fine but no "Fargo"
"No Country for Old Men" has so much of what the Coen Brothers at their best are about -- minutely calibrated suspense, sudden jolting violence, an unerring eye for quirky Americana, every frame and sequence and sound effect precise and just right -- that it takes a while after the film is over to put your finger on what's missing: the Coens. They've been too doggedly faithful to Cormac McCarthy's vision, and it's a vision that is finally less interesting than their own.
McCarthy is, at bottom, a deeply conservative writer. In novel after novel he paints a man's world where a man's gotta be a man and walk through the valley of death and face Evil with a capital E. The bleak, biblical language and laconic dialog elevate what is essentially pulp, and the problem with "No Country..." as a novel is he seemed to realize this two thirds of the way through and trash a perfectly good thriller setup as if it were something beneath him. The Coens follow in his footsteps, and to their credit the final section of the film makes the best of the derailed story; it's beautifully crafted and even moving. But one wonders what they might have done with the material had they let the story play out as it should have -- i.e., not suddenly killing off the protagonist off screen and giving over to the Sheriff's elegiac musings (though Tommy Lee Jones gives them fine voice).
The Coens have also created more interesting baddies than Anton Chigurh, who in the end is a cipher, another of McCarthy's stilted Embodiments of Evil. Javier Bardem has an amazing physical presence, which the Coens exploit wonderfully, but his English has a ways to go before his delivery can be as expressive as his face. He's finally only scary in a bogeyman sort of way, without the human complexity of a really compelling baddie. The movie inherits from the book the need to mythologize him into an invincible force, but it doesn't wash; there doesn't seem to be any reason why Josh Brolin's character, or even Woody Harrelson's, shouldn't be able to contend with him.
Once upon a time the Coens made "Fargo", which was everything this film is and more. There, they followed their own vision and offset the greed and blood with human sweetness and stupidity. William H. Macy's descent into the underworld was as close to true tragedy as anything portrayed in American film, and it was funny, too. Cormac McCarthy could learn a thing or two from the Coens.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Bombastic but empty
"There Will Be Blood" is impressive on some levels. Set pieces such as the oil well fire are handled with eerie, remote precision and weird alienating music that bring Kubrick to mind. In fact the chilliness and sudden, jolting brutality of the movie are very late Kubrick. Still, great an actor as Daniel Day Lewis is, his character here is revealed right away -- greedy, egotistical, unstoppable -- and never grows or deviates, so the role is not a vehicle for a great performance. Day Lewis delivers an all-stops-out, bug-eyed, mannered, finally monotonous performance. It's the centerpiece of a film that finally seems uninterested in exploring human or social issues, preferring to go grandiose on us and trumping up (it's apparently not in the book) a metaphysical duel to the death between Day Lewis' oilman and Paul Dano's preacher (another over-the-top performance). It finally rings hollow, schematic, humorless, lifeless. This is a film made with amazing skill and care and control, but like the late Kubrick films you're left wondering why. One hopes that Paul Thomas Anderson isn't turning into the kind of hermetic obsessive Kubrick became, losing touch with humanity and making ponderous films about abstractions. So unlike "Boogie Nights"!
The film is dedicated to the late Robert Altman. Perhaps Anderson should have viewed Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" again. There's an exploration of American capitalist greed that makes "There Will Be Blood" feel...bloodless.
Das Leben der Anderen (2006)
Long live tragedy!
When everybody calls a movie "the movie of the year", "an instant classic", etc., you suspect hype. This time it's not hype. It's heartening to see people respond so strongly to a film that's simply deep and true and doesn't sugar-coat its message. I think audiences are responding to something we don't get enough of at the movies: tragedy.
The debased word "tragedy" gets attached these days to anything sad -- in newspaper headlines about teenagers killed in drunk driving accidents, for example. As a result it's easy to forget that tragedy is really a way of seeing, of apprehending the deepest, most painful truths about ourselves, especially when this self-knowledge comes too late to save us. Oedipus, King Lear, Hedda Gabler...through suffering they see the truth about their lives, and take us on a journey that makes us question ours.
Every once in a while a character in a movie takes us on that journey and reaches this kind of tragic self-awareness. Bogart at the end of "High Sierra". Kevin Spacey's character at the end of "American Beauty". More than one character in "The Lives of Others" attains this sort of tragic vision, and the amazing thing about this superb film is how quietly it happens -- since all of the characters are under surveillance, can't talk to each other except in code, can't show any outward signs. This is a triumph of narrative and of acting.
It's about the East German experience and you probably couldn't find a better way to understand that experience (if you don't know anyone who was there) than seeing this film. ("Goodbye Lenin" got the cultural trappings but couldn't make up its mind whether to be a satirical farce or a sentimental drama and subsequently failed as both.) But the totalitarian setting really serves to throw into sharp relief the film's deeper concerns, about the consequences of our betrayals (of ourselves and of others); and about how human empathy and decency can find a way to operate in our lives, no matter what system we have to operate within.
There's no CGI, no jumbled chronology, no easy dichotomy of good and bad. Just an intricate, absorbing and absolutely true story (in the sense that "fiction is a lie that tells the truth"). Just excellent acting and directing, not a word or movement wasted. And hard-won, quiet redemption that because of the system's restraints comes too late to avert tragedy. The way redemption happens in real life, not in bathetic spectacles like "Crash". Deep down, audiences are responding to truth, which is something we're all starved for.
Munich (2005)
Magnificent (mild spoilers perhaps)
I didn't catch "Munich" on release, partly because all the stirred-up controversy over its political stance turned me off. I'm glad I've caught up with it, though, and recommend it to anybody skeptical about Spielberg, as I've often been. This is by far the best thing he's ever done, intelligent, dispassionate, clear-eyed about the moral ambiguities of its subject. I admired "Schindler's List" in a lot of ways but it turned so Capra-corny by the end and forced its protagonist to abandon his more interesting amorality and become a two-dimensional saint. "Saving Private Ryan" was a visually powerful war movie married to a conventional war movie script and with a tacked-on, totally unconvincing moral. (I wondered why Matt Damon didn't just grab his crotch and say "Earn THIS.")
In "Munich", though, for the first time there's absolutely no surrender to sentimentality or easy platitudes. A lot of this has to do with Tony Kushner's script. He says in the "making of" DVD extra that he doesn't think of himself as a screenwriter. He should reconsider. Screen forces him to cut back on the baroque verbiage of his stage plays, and he brings a subtlety and sharp dialectical intelligence to what could easily have been a simplistic and partisan thriller.
It's far from an anti-Israel movie. Spielberg and Kushner caught a lot of flak for simply asking good questions about Israeli policy. The policy in question, vengeful hunting down of terrorists and their mentors, is awfully close to the "permanent war" Bush, Blair and their ilk have advocated in the "War on Terror" and which is likely to have the same result -- more, not fewer, terrorists. Spielberg at no point condemns the Israeli response to the Munich massacre, but through his actors (all superb) points up the intense conflicts it engenders within each of the participants in the hunt. None of these characters emerge as right or wrong by the end; their varied human feelings about their mission meld into a polyphonic chorus of conviction and righteousness on the one hand, doubt and unease on the other.
Also, quite wonderfully, the film questions the idea of homeland, for anybody. The scene in the Athens "safe house", which separatists and nationalists from many corners of the world have to share, implies the danger and absurdity of ethnic and religious territorial claims -- again, without shoving the message down our throats with an easy answer. The word "home" echoes recurrently in the film, most powerfully in the final scene. It lingers as a troubling reminder of the claims all nations make upon those who serve them and of the price paid in serving them -- that sometimes you can never go home again, or must redefine what "home" means in the first place (as Avner, the protagonist, finally seems capable of doing). And the final shot of the film quietly but unmistakably deepens the film's fundamental question: what does anybody have to show for the deaths of a few terrorists? What will we, finally, have to show for al Ghraib and Guantanamo?
Frankly, I never thought Spielberg capable of anything this complex, thoughtful or measured. (Those who found it dull should just rent "Raiders of the Lost Ark".) May he put Indiana Jones behind him once and for all and continue to demonstrate that, in addition to being a master of light and magic, he's also learned to think.
Crash (2004)
Invisible Hand
Finally caught up with this. Because of the multiracial LA theme I was dreading another "Grand Canyon" (for my money one of the most unintentionally hilarious movies ever made): earnest and self-congratulatory, a salve for the love-me-I'm-a-liberal soul. "Crash" is a far better film than "Grand Canyon" but ultimately stoops to the same beatitudes.
"Crash" does have some powerful scenes and well drawn characters, who are refreshingly neither good nor bad but struggling to be human in a hostile environment. It taps into something important (which goes beyond racism): how hard it is to be free of hate and distrust, how they poison us all. But any realism the film pretends to is undercut by the tidiness of the plotting, which is as mechanical as any slamming-door French farce. The script is TOO well constructed. Every character shows his or her racist side; then, within twenty four hours, each is handed a chance at redemption, which they predictably take. Only Matt Dillon really struggles with it, and that's more the actor than the script, and only one main character goes in the opposite direction. If life were like this movie, Mohammad Atta would have, as a dying gesture, helped a little girl in the WTC find the exit door.
Some say this is a very Christian movie, and they're right in that it's redemption mad and there's an invisible hand (God or Paul Haggis) pulling off miracles right and left. It's too bad "Crash" doesn't have the nerve to hold off on the easy resolutions, and the soothingly ethereal choral music. It's too bad a film with such an important subject couldn't serve it up straight, without the transcendence. The solemn spirituality of films like "Crash" is false comfort.
Grizzly Man (2005)
Herzog didn't get the joke
Werner Herzog shouldn't have directed this movie. Errol Morris should have. At times Herzog seems to be trying out the Morris method (put your subject in front of the camera and let them talk) but he can't resist his own explanations, which are almost as ludicrous and funny as Timothy Treadwell's rants and declarations of love for foxes and bears.
Treadwell was a distinctly American kind of nut, the product of alienation, Utopian yearnings, showbiz fixations and substance abuse. Morris would have known how to fill in the cultural context Herzog pretty much missed in his heavy handed narration. The limit is the aerial shot of the jumbled ice blocks in the glacier which Herzog sees as Treadwell's soul. Come on now, isn't that just a wee bit Teutonic? It's still a fascinating movie, though. Treadwell's bear footage is amazing, and his self-revelation on camera is unsettling, heartbreaking, painful to watch. And Richard Thompson's music is predictably gorgeous.