Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

"Ulp!" fiction

Movie opens with Tim Roth sitting in a diner telling Amanda Plummer the story of a man who walked into a bank. Hands a cellphone to a bank teller; voice tells teller man's daughter is held hostage and will die unless teller gives up money. Roth and Plummer then exchange endearments, pull out guns to announce a stickup. Blackout: guitar on soundtrack while titles in bright red and yellow crawl up the screen.

Welcome to the world of Pulp Fiction, one of the more memorable American films of 1994. Five were nominated for Best Picture Oscars last year: Four Weddings and a Funeral (lightweight); The Shawshank Redemption (pretentious); Quiz Show (plodding); Forrest Gump (simpleminded). Of the five Pulp stands out for being Not Nice, an aggressive, in-your-face ride through the fairly tangled mind of one Quentin Tarantino.

Shoplifters ( Manbiki Kazoku, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018)

Family business

Hirokazu Kore-eda's film begins with as unremarkable an opening as possible: a father and his son enter a grocery split up to walk down separate aisles. Only father and son keep throwing each other sidelong glances and hand signals; only son does a little finger twiddle that we'll see from time to time; only when a clerk working nearby glances at son father walks up to block the clerk's view while son drops several packets of instant ramen in his backpack. Graceful bit of choreography made casual by long practice, understated yet captivating in its intricacy.

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy)

Above the Law

There's a point in Tom McCarthy's new film where brand new Boston Globe editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) insists that the target isn't a few bad priests, or even the powerful cardinal shielding said priests. "We're going after the system," he informs his newsmen. It's one of the picture's more quietly powerful moments in the way it yanks us back, from considering the process of writing a series of news articles to the broader perspective: exposure of both a venerable American city and an ancient multinational organization, caught in an act of unholy collaboration.

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

And while we're at it my preferred version of what Room was trying to do:

Family guy

Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth starts off in possibly the only way it can possibly start: with a father coming home.

About the quietest, most quotidian beginning to a film that you can imagine, and that's on purpose. Father coming home, the house he comes home to large, with an expansive garden complete with pool and a high fence surrounding the property, but otherwise--nothing remarkable. 

The Revenant (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)

Bear necessity

Got to admit: not a big fan of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Thought his first feature Amores Perros was a third good movie, a third fairly entertaining episode of The Twilight Zone, a third implausible drama (a homeless hit man?) connected in time by a wincingly violent vehicular collision; thought 21 Grams was more of the same (three stories linked by car accident) only set in the United States; thought Babel was an unholy mess with an accidental shooting as connecting event, its narrative strands scattered all over the world. 

Biutiful was an interesting recalibration--instead of several stories united by an incident we have several situations--one more lurid than the next--united by one man's involvement in all of 'em. If Biutiful doesn't quite succeed either it isn't actor Javier Bardem's fault (he gives a tremendous performance despite the fact that he's dying and seeing dead people) but Inarritu's compulsive need to add and adorn and amplify and assault till you want to throw up your hands and say "Back off!"

The Winner of the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture

Bird man

In time for Oscar Weekend, my own little piece about the Academy Award winner for Outstanding Picture--

William Wellman's 1927 epic Wings won in 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's very first awarding ceremony, and you can see the thinking behind the choice: it's a boxoffice hit that capitalized on the aviator craze (Lindbergh had just crossed the Atlantic); it's big in terms of scope (furious aerial dogfights and sprawling ground battles) and emotional scale (Patriotic sacrifice! Love triangles! Brotherly love!).

Nebraska (Alexander Payne)

Dern good

If Alexander Payne's Nebraska were made up only of  the footage featuring all the small towns and empty landscape passed along the way, shot in stark black and white, I'd call it a great film, easy. The transitional sequences play onscreen the way the transitional passages played on the pages of War and Peace (if Tolstoy had left out all the fighting and set it in rural America)--a cumulative panorama of endless grass, straight-ruled blacktop, rusted stop signs and decayed storefronts, an epic poem as expansive if not more so than the foregrounded drama. 

And the black and white photography is essential--in color all that empty space surrounding all that dilapidated clapboard would feel so oppressively real the film cannot possibly succeed as a comedy (you see a pedestrian shuffle down a sidewalk, but so seldom that on the rare occasion he or she stands out like a diamond in a coal seam). Black and white helps stylized the bleakness, locate it a remove away from grim reality, allow enough aesthetic distance to appreciate the rust and cracked concrete as poetic rather than realistic detail. 

As a wordless movement through nearly a third of the continent's width (roughly eight hundred and fifty miles, from Billings, MT to Lincoln, NE) you can't find a less pretentious, more eloquent testament to the size and scale of this vast nation, in stark contrast to the relative meanness of its citizens' hardscrabble lives, a contrast so disproportionate it's dizzying. The film I imagine would play in an endless loop in some public space where people can sit down, watch a while, munch popcorn or slurp soda or noisily make love in the rearmost seats, leave, maybe come back to watch (or make love) some more. 

Meanwhile Payne has decided to water down this great work with people, acting out a script intended to be a comedy.

As scripts go (this one by Bob Nelson) it's not bad, the first Payne ever directed where he had no hand in the writing himself, but which so thoroughly plays as his brand of comedy it's hard to see the difference (the character of Woody Grant, perhaps? Or Woody's unnamed former love, played by Angela McEwan?). Woody (Bruce Dern) believes he has won a million dollars in prize money, and is determined to travel nearly a thousand miles to collect; his family tries but fails to talk him out of it, and looks to his son David (Will Forte) to act as driver, companion, and guardian. David agrees, hoping to spend some quality time with his father and--hopefully--keep his father out of trouble.

The film succeeds largely in terms of poetic imagery: again and again Payne  shoots Dern in full-frontal close-up, his white hair like an aureole round the head--if this were a religious film, you would be forgiven for mistaking Dern's Woody as some obscure patron saint of the American Great Plains. 

Then again, who's to say this isn't a religious film, with Woody as Payne's holy fool sent on a mission to separate true believers from foolish skeptics? Among the believers count David, his brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk), Woody's wife Kate (a funny June Squibb), and the aforementioned McEwan; skeptics include David's dim cousins Cole and Bart (Devin Ratray and Tim Driscoll), and an unsettlingly assertive Stacy Keach as Woody's old friend Ed Peagram. The believers are sorely tested, the skeptics are--well, not exactly brought low, but Payne is careful to write and shoot them as sniggering hicks who drool greedily at the prospect of knowing someone with a million bucks, despite David's warnings of a scam (Ed gently reminds Woody of money owed him, while the cousins are, well, more physically insistent). If we were to think this a religious film (and who's to say it isn't?), Payne makes it clear who has a shot at reaching heaven, who deserves to broil in hell.

It's the film's strength and limitation, I think--it has the energy and force of a faith-based film (Hail Woody!), along with said film's simplistic thinking (the world divided into two types and two types only). Keach at least has some unruly energy to him, a bit of the bottled danger you once sensed when he played Frank James in Walter Hill's The Long Riders--you chuckle, but at a respectful distance. The cousins and their family on the other hand could be zoo animals kept in cages clearly labeled and ringed with railings, behind which we can safely point and howl in delight.

As the film's icon Dern is a magnificent cinema subject, with his rimless glasses (a symbol of guileless helplessness) and old-geezer plaid (aren't saints clad in humble robes?). When he has everyone's--including the camera's--attention he freezes, allowing us to better admire the geography of his face (the crags and hollows of nose and cheek, the lush northern forest of snowy hair); when everyone's attention is elsewhere, he makes like a miracle and moves--before you know it, he's out on the street, making his slow yet stubborn way to Lincoln to collect his winnings. It's a slyly comic, star-making role, the kind that grants many a Hollywood veteran his second wind (and, though it's hardly relevant to me, his strongest Oscar nomination to date), and Dern is more than up to it--he's been playing psychopaths and eccentrics for decades, practically his entire career, and having for once been offered a role this juicy his hunger has been honed to the point that it's indistinguishable from Woody's. 

Woody probably has many literary antecedents, anyone  from Jack and his precious Beanstalk to Prince Mishkin, but what I had in mind was Isaac Bashevis Singer's Gimpel the Fool. Everyone took advantage of Gimpel but by story's end Singer grants us a privileged peek into Gimpel's mind, and against expectations, his heart is not filled with resentment and hate: "I heard a great deal, many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference can it make?" Gimpel's way of thinking not only transcends the wrong done to him, it renders any idea of being wronged irrelevant--he has other priorities, other things to look forward to. So it is with Woody, if not with an equivalent force or moral clarity--he can't let skeptics slow him down; he has better things to do.

First published in Businessworld, 2.20.14

The Hunt (Jagten, Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

.

Don't stand so close to me

Wasn't a big fan of Thomas Vinterberg's breakout feature The Celebration (Festen, 1998), often considered the first film produced under the Dogme 95 guidelines. Thought the film--about a dinner party thrown by an obscenely rich family that goes on for far too long and leads to embarrassing revelations involving rape and incest--a darkly funny setup that degenerates into a grotesque cartoon (which pretty much sums up the modus operandi of most Doggie-style filmmakers). Vinterberg wants to say profound things about the corrupting influence of family and other social institutions but instead ends up with an incomprehensible, unbelievable comedy sketch, before which he seems to have pulled down his zipper and urinated.

No such problems with the first half of Vinterberg's latest, The Hunt (Jagten, 2012--a 2014 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film, not that that's of any particular importance to me, personally) where he sketches a modest little Danish village, and for protagonist the modest Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen). Lucas' life is far from perfect--he's divorced, his wife has custody of his child, he's a teacher forced to work in a kindergarten because his school closed; that said, the children love him and he in turn seems to genuinely care for them, can effortlessly talk to them at their level.

Then one of the children named Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) mentions seeing Lucas' 'private parts,' and he finds himself suspended from his duties.

Vinterberg works out in thorough detail the procedure by which the whole community comes to respond to Klara's story, and to Lucas' perceived crime. You can't help but believe in the impassive solidity of the wall former friends and neighbors throw up around him; you can't help but believe the desperation with which he tries to reach out, and is repeatedly rebuffed. You even understand the motivations driving both sides: the townsfolk want to safeguard their own--are all the more fierce because they feel they have somehow failed in this regard--yet Lucas has a house here, somehow has to live here. Protect the children--it's an imperative a parent doesn't even have to think about following; on the other hand, I've talked to and dealt with sex offenders and for all their problems and all the horrifying things they have done, can't help but feel they deserve some measure of respect, of dignity, of justice. This may be Denmark and you may be reading their dialogue in English subtitles, but the whole situation and its harrowing downward spiral could be happening here, now--anywhere you have children, and around your children, predators. 

Most interesting decision on Vinterberg's part is to make Lucas clearly innocent. This isn't some exploration about the impossibility of objective truth a la John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, or the Kurosawa classic Rashomon; the director means to capture onscreen the way a community can band together and decide to consistently, comprehensively do the wrong thing. As for Klara, she isn't exactly lying--for some reason she has conflated her crush on him with the nude picture of a man her elder brother showed her as a prank--but there is no malice in her, no malevolence, and hence no doubt in everyone's mind that she's telling the truth; when she recants her story ("I've done something stupid," she admits) the adults don't even blink--they're sure she's just blanking out the episode, it's so traumatic. 

Can't emphasize enough how crucial Mikkelsen's performance is to this film. He has to convince us of the kind nature of the man in his brief opening scenes at the kindergarten. He has to undergo the various emotional phases of the wronged victim--from incredulity to outrage to betrayed hurt to sullen ingrown suffering. He has to retain one's sympathies even as he shoves his girlfriend Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), one of the few adults left who believe him, out the door. And he has to do all this with his face gradually freezing into a mask, as he realizes just how isolated he is.

The film starts to derail about the time (skip this paragraph if you plan to see the picture) the case against Lucas derails; up to this point the story has been all too hideously real, the characters apparently driven by life itself. When Lucas starts venturing out again and insisting on his right to resume his position as a member of the community, I begin to see Vinterberg's hand forcing the situation. If I like Lucas were accused of child molestation I wouldn't even try rejoining them, I'd simply get the hell out, and consider myself lucky to have escaped. I know what'll happen if I try otherwise--just had a taste of it firsthand, earlier in the picture; anything else seems more like plot contrivance than inevitable psychology. 

Which is a pity. The style Vinterberg debuted so famously in Festen--the handheld camera, the washed-out color palette, the low-level lighting and total lack of ambient soundtrack beyond whatever happens to be playing onscreen--seemed so mannered in that earlier work, a talented novice's attempt at neorealism. Here the same style seems effortless, earned; it emphasizes without any undue fuss that this is what life looks like, this is how life is. When the film starts straying from realism into Christlike suffering and redemption, said style seems to mock the solemnity of the proceedings. It's as if Vinterberg's eye were chiding his brain: "We know how things truly are, no matter what silly scenarios you might think up; without lifting a finger or batting a lash we'll undermine your argument, show it for the hollow construct it really is."

First published in Businessworld, 2.13.14

Hooray for Hollywood! (the infamous Snow White and Rob Lowe video)

We doan need to watch no stinkin Awards show; we need only watch this.

Arguably the highest, most glorious point in Oscar history--the very epitome of artistic Hollywood achievement and good taste. 

The moment poor Eileen Bowman opens her mouth as Snow White (possibly the most irritating of all Disney characters) the number drops straight down the toilet bowl and starts spinning; her chirpy whine (you have to work to acquire a voice like that) playing delicately on the eardrum like an icepick.

Love her foray into the audience. Always found the smiles on Oscar night plastic--here they look positively quickset, and cracking under the hard sun. Caught poor Dustin Hoffman (is that him? video's so blurry) doing his best Benjamin Braddock grin ("I want to say just one word to you, just one word: Plastics"). 

Bowman goes back onstage, then babbles a bit Norma-Desmond style before going into a Tropicana-style nightclub number complete with dancing coconut drinks and tango.

They wheel out a few of the living dead--Dorothy Lamour, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Vincent Price, Coral Browne. Always happy to see these people, though I wonder if they were happy to be seen in this.

Then the host (Merv Griffith) delivers the zinger: "Isn't it exciting Snow? Isn't it thrilling? It gets better." Look of disbelief on Bowman's face. "Meet your blind date--Rob Lowe!"

He steps onstage, takes a mike, and the moment he opens his mouth--oh yes, it got much much better, a stretched out, agonizing rendition of "Proud Mary." The dancing coconut drinks come back and kick the energy level so high the nightclub tables themselves get up and start dancing. 

Pause; you wonder if the number's over. A drumroll--apparently not! Cut to the audience, where Gregory Hines looks as if he's asking himself "can I stop bending over now?"

They come to the Grauman's Chinese Theater number, and as Lowe and Bowman pull aside the sliding flats, you swear you could hear the strains of "Springtime for Hitler" play for a moment.

Pfft. Brooks can only wish he achieved something as tasteless; compared to this, he's fucking Vincente Minnelli. A high-kicking chorus line of theater ushers and usherettes follows, then Snow White appears center stage with a crown of stars planted in her hair, wearing a huge diaphanous gown studded with lightbulbs that recalls the abdomen of the Queen Mother in Aliens. They do a dramatic reprise of "Hooray for Hollywood."

The stairs close on this monstrosity, we see at the apex of the stairs a doorway done Chinese Theater style, the door opens, and out steps--Lily Tomlin?

But why not Tomlin? She steps down and for the first time in lord knows how long gives us a dose of sarcastic sanity. "I told them I'd be thrilled to do the Oscars if they could just come up with an entrance," she begins. "Think of it, more than a billion and a half people just watched that!" Funny, only she's temporarily upstaged by a final bit of madness--a man crawling head-down the stairs, flinging shoes offstage. "What," you wonder--"are loose footwear forbidden? After all that just transpired, unworn shoes onstage are in bad taste?!"

"I knew it was going to happen one day--the whole planet has gone Hollywood," she continues. "Welcome to the shoe!"

Oh yes. Makes one almost want to watch the upcoming shoe.

Almost. 

I'm ready for my cigarette now, Mr. DeMille.

2.24.13

Oscar hoo-hah: Black Swan and True Grit

About as far as I'm willing to go with these glorified Golden Doorstops--a pair of articles:

With a side of ham

Joel and Ethan Coen's movies are such regulars now and greeted with so much anticipation it's almost impossible not to feel let-down or bewildered or defensive or have some kind of startled reaction when you do finally watch the finished product--in this case, a second adaptation of Charles Portis' 1968 novel of the same name.

It's the Coen's most straightforward work yet--a story told simply and faithfully, with minimum snickering and little sideways commentary on the stupidity of the various characters. There's also little of the Coen's usual visual pyrotechnics, or their narrative tricks, or the little side jokes they like to insert into their pictures (one of my favorite being their claim that O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) was based on Homer's The Odyssey (it's about as faithful an adaptation as Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) was of George Orwell's 1984--in effect, very loosely).

It tells the story of one Mattie Foster (part-Filipino actress Hailee Steinfeld), whose father was shot by one of his workers, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Mattie hires Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges, in a role first played by John Wayne in 1969) to hunt Chaney down; a Texas Ranger by the name of LaBeouf (Matt Dillon) later joins the oddball posse.

The Henry Hathaway version was a vehicle for The Duke, and it worked; Wayne won his first and only golden doorstop for Best Actor. The Coens in actually reading the Portis novel (there's doubt that they ever cracked open a volume of The Odyssey) give the narrative reins back to Mattie, where it belongs, and this version benefits from her sepia-tinted reading--like hearing a scratchy audio recording of the last remaining survivor of the Civil War.

That's the key to enjoying this film, I think--the novel's leisurely, singular voice. You get some indications of it in Hathaway's film, mostly from Kim Darby (Wayne, of course, was Wayne--rambling, easygoing, indisputably sui generis), but the Coens turn it into a symphony of Southern voices, from LeBeouf's Texas drawl to Mattie's rural Arkansas, with the old Mattie's voice coming out clearest. It's the voice of a true Presbyterian, whose language is spoken with the precision of a speaker long practiced in the rhythm and intonations of the Old Testament, and whose syntax seems to grow out of a 19^th century translation of the Hebrew text. More than the sets or the clothes or Roger Deakin's magnificent cinematography, Mattie's old-school style of talking drives home the remoteness of the time period from which she speaks.

That syntax is also key to Mattie's character. Hailee Steinfeld plays her not as an angry child wishing revenge for the death of her father or as some smart-aleck prodigy flexing her hyperintelligent muscles but as a rural bible-thumper, steeped in the morality of Abraham and Moses, demanding an eye for an eye--no more, no less--and implacable in her determination to accomplish this, come what may. Mattie's frankly unsettling will is what sets her apart from the rest; she's aware of this and anyone who comes into contact with her is quickly made aware of this; Cogburn is at first amused by it, then gradually learns to respect it; LeBeouf is initially affronted, then gradually attracted. Character is all in this particular Coen film (the brothers often allow their actors to slip into caricature), and from this sense of character comes much of the film's comedy, warmth, and eventual high drama.

Yes, the film is told straight; no, this isn't the first time the Coens have tried playing it straight. They did it once before, and once before they have reaped Oscar gold, with a crucial difference: No Country for Old Men, from Cormac McCarthy's novel, feels almost top-heavy with its gloomy tone and endless meditations on mortality and meaninglessness (that's not entirely the Coen's fault; McCarthy's novel has this heaped high and just about falling over); Portis seems to acknowledge the violence and bleakness of his characters' lives without denying them the near-defiant humor that sustains them through all that hardscrabble. The Coens bring that tone, bleakness and dry wit and all, to the big screen, and locates most of it in Steinfeld's performance and Elizabeth Marvel's (as the forty year old Mattie) voiceover.

Jeff Bridges to his credit plays Cogburn with no hint of fear or intimidation; given that he has more to play with than Wayne did opposite his Mattie, he manages to step up admirably, and make of himself a suitable foil, drunken long-windedness and all. Damon is amusing as the vain LeBeouf; and Brolin as Chaney eventually reveals himself to be a weak-willed slug whose main faults are his bad luck and lack of self-control.

I'd mentioned Deakin's camerawork. He'd done westerns before, capturing the vast horizons of the Texas-Mexico border, but this film is set in Arkansas (or as close to Arkansas as the brothers could manage) and it's full of grasslands, high hills, and chilly winter forests--a somewhat unexpected but still distinctive, still memorable look.

The climactic rescue is fascinating--much closer to the book, definitely, but (please skip the rest of the paragraph if you plan to see the film) Cogburn's long ride to take the injured Mattie to safety has the stylized, fairy-tale nightmare feel of the latter half of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955)--why, I'm not sure. Partly I think it's cementing the link between Mattie and Cogburn; partly it's establishing Cogburn's stature in Mattie's fevered mind--he's saving her life, and he's already killed a horse to do so. It sets up the mournful tone of the final sequences and it adds to the film's magnified feel. Which brings us to the final irony in this film made by filmmakers known for their sense of irony--in doing their most straightforward work, the Coens may have taken their surest shot yet, and possibly hit the bulls' eye.

First published in Businessworld, 2.24.11

Release your inner swan!

YES! FOR 24.99 PLUS TAX AND DELIVERY YOU CAN OWN YOUR VERY OWN COPY OF DARREN ARONOFSKY'S THE BLACK SWAN! GUARANTEED TO HAVE YOU PULLING ON A TUTU AND SPROUTING YOUR OWN FEATHERS OR YOUR MONEY BACK! Results may vary; do not watch while operating heavy machinery; do not take alcohol or other controlled substances while viewing; may cause hallucinations, skin rash, and extreme eye redness. Pretty much the impression Aronofsky's latest slasher gave me when I saw it on the big screen.

Oh, it isn't a serial-killer movie? Could have fooled me. Aronofsky's everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach to filmmaking has him swinging the aforementioned plumbing fixture over his head in a threatening manner from the very start; the camera plunges forward and we see dewy-fresh, virginal Nina Sayer (Natalie Portman's), every pore in gigantic close-up, and already you note (that's her entire face stretched all over the big screen, how can you not fail to note?) that she's trembling, sweat popping out on her forehead, capillaries swelling across the whites of her eyeballs (a little sex might go a long way to relaxing her, you think, and of course Aronofsky reads your mind and makes you thoroughly regret that stray idea). We are talking grab-the-straitjacket-get-me-25-cc-Thorazine-stet-bugout-crazy here, and she hasn't even really started to crack up; that comes later.

Not even talking about the movie's real crazy: Barbara Hershey as Nina's mother Erica Sayer is an unholy mashup of Rosalind Russell's Rose Hovick and Faye Dunaway's Joan Crawford, only instead of wielding wire hangers this stage mother flashes nail scissors. In perhaps the movie's one truly frightening scene, Hershey spots ugly scratch marks on Portman's shoulder, accuses her of causing them with her overlong fingernails, snatches Portman's hand, picks up a pair of nail scissors, and to the refrain of Portman's anguished gasps starts snipping away--far too closely cut, of course. Fade to black, a rare moment of restraint on Aronofsky's part, though hardly original (Roman Polanski did a similar flinch-inducing scene in his 1965 film Repulsion, from which Aronofsky stole a mere truckload of ideas).

Yes, the plot--there is one, though again, you could have fooled me. Nina's been picked to play the Swan Queen in brilliant ballet director Thomas Leroy's new production of Swan Lake, his choice over aging prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), who hysterically accuses poor Nina of sleeping with the director, then promptly does a high jete in front of an onrushing car. Beth spends the rest of the picture recovering from her shattered limbs in a hospital, when she isn't popping up here and there in an attempt (hysterical, of course) to scare Nina to death.

But that's just the menace of the old; Nina's feels even more threatened by the new, represented by Lila (Mila Kunis), an equally young, equally promising ballerina from San Francisco who apparently isn't as sexually repressed, who manages to get along with the other dancers better, who apparently is sleeping with Thomas. Then there's the suggestion that Nina's having hallucinations, that she's cracking under the strain, that she is literally turning into a swan, complete with red eyes, black feathers, and goose-pimply skin. Michael Powell meet David Cronenberg; let's have naked lunch sometime.

There's been much talk and praise for Portman in this picture, that she trained to do most of her ballet steps herself. Wonderful dedication but in my book largely misplaced, since Aronofsky with every frame makes sure we don't notice her dancing so much as we notice her eye-twitching, lip-smacking, scenery-chewing intensity. Perhaps the movie's most impressive effect is Aronofsky having Portman stay over-the-top lunatic for a full hundred minutes, to the point that when the skin on her bare shoulder starts to sprout feathers, you don't even bat an eye; you've been rendered numb to that effect, no matter how well done, about twenty minutes before (that said, there was one unintended result: her goose-pimply shoulder so resembles the gleaming sheen of a Chinese restaurant's roasted goose-skin it made my mouth water--a little hoisin sauce on the side and I might have dove straight at the big screen).

Hershey's Erica doesn't help; she's a fright wig and kitchen knife shy of stalking her apartment rooms, calling out "Nina? Nina?" Aronofsky in his 2000 picture Requiem for a Dream proved he can take some of the finest actresses out there--Ellen Burstyn, who was wonderful in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) and even James Gray's The Yards (1999)--and reduce them to a screaming, throbbing, shrieking pile of shameless exhibitionism. He takes the hint of menace Ryder suggested in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993)--that superb scene where she approaches her husband like a vampire its prey--and draws out a full-blown psychopath stalker, complete with nail-file dagger and the magic ability to pop out at the most inconvenient moments. Only Vincent Cassel as Thomas seems to have escaped Aronofsky's clutches, walking insouciantly away with the picture tucked firmly in his pocket (Thomas has great fun tormenting Nina, not to mention getting to squeeze her pork buns).

I'm tempted to call Aronofsky a destroyer of careers, only he seems to have revived Mickey Rourke's (again)--his The Wrestler (2008) for all its excesses is his most relatively restrained, and hence most easily likable. Rourke displays a mileage no amount of makeup can simulate, and there's a magnificence to his doomed trajectory that even Aronofsky can't seem to spoil, no matter how hard he tries (virgins scared of sex on the other hand only make me giggle).

Might as well put out the fairly well-known fact that Aronofsky's director of photography Matthew Libatique is a Filipino-American, and what I've seen of his work in Aronofsky's films it's impressive--he's not afraid to work with digital special effects, and while the results might not totally redeem the digitized nature of the effects (to be honest I really can't think of a cinematographer or filmmaker able to do this), you can see the attempt to bring lyricism to a binary-based viewpoint. I did love his work when little or no digital effects are involved--the dark, claustrophobic look of Spike Lee's Inside Man (2005) comes to mind--and wish I could appreciate more, but Aronofsky has this tendency to cut the life out of the footage he works with. Difficult to appreciate camerawork when the editing snips everything into visual mush.

I mentioned Cronenberg; I mentioned Polanski; I really should mention Michael Powell, only the incongruity of naming him in the same breath as Aronofsky keeps laying me low with fits of laughter. Cronenberg knows how to film horror; he does so with the calm thoroughness of a pornographer shooting a couple's genitals--you want the camera steady and lighting clinically bright, to capture all the details. More, you want the tone of dispassionate professionalism, the better to freak your audience out with. His films are like his onscreen bedside manner (Cronenberg has played surgeons before): scalpel upraised, gray eyes looking straight at you, calm voice murmuring "This won't hurt a bit." It's the incongruity between his reassuring manner and the less-than-reassuring images that Aronofsky needs, badly.

I mentioned Polanski's Repulsion as a direct influence--Polanski was smart enough to know that it's difficult to create a sense of encroaching insanity when your heroine's life is too busy (too many people watching), so he isolated his in an apartment, where she could crack up at her leisure. It's a masterpiece of its kind, though I thought Polanski did himself one better with Rosemary's Baby (1968) where the heroine is confined or limited not by some kind of arbitrary schizophrenia but by the swelling fact of her pregnancy--her increasing paranoia and sense of isolation enhanced not by a self-enforced isolation, but by deliberate conspiracy, or her suspicions of one. If Aronofsky wanted to suggest madness he needed not more shrieks, but more silence.

Finally, Michael Powell's The Red Shoes (1948). Brilliant ballet movie--not just the filmmaking, but the way it captures a ballet company's group dynamics (the camaraderie, the backstage love affairs, the tantrums and petty jealousies). In his staging of the eponymous ballet Powell gets at the delirium great art can sometimes induce, the stage bursting its boundaries to become something more than a stage, the ballet taking flight to become something more than a ballet. In his direction of Moira Shearer's Vicky he gets under her skin (without being so all-out literal as to actually dive subcutaneously) and shows us what both the aforementioned delirium and the prospect of life with the man she loves mean to her, exactly. When she's confronted with a decision to make (Anton Walbrook's Boris Lermontov at her side, whispering; "Sorrow will pass, believe me; life is so unimportant. And from now onwards, you will dance like nobody ever before!") you know enough to realize just what she's going through, just what she's giving up if she chooses one over the other. You're in her shoes, in effect, the anguish tearing you apart.

Again, what Aronofsky needs--not so much the morphing effects of ballet (roasted gooseskin!), but its allure, its capacity for transcendence, such that you understand how an artist is tempted to sacrifice his or her life on this particular altar, to this particular god. Black Swan is fun, I enjoyed it; I laughed throughout much of it. Can't say I respect it though, and I certainly don't consider it a work of art.

First published in Businessworld, 2.24.11

Mortal (Mario O'Hara, 1975)

 Mortal [VHS] 

Watching Shutter Island, I was reminded of this, O'Hara's debut feature. My thoughts on the film (and on a certain Ron Howard movie) written for Menzone Magazine back in March 27, 2002: 

A Beautiful Lie

With the recent brouhaha over A Beautiful Mind--the autobiographical drama on mathematical genius John Nash, whose frontrunner position at the 2002 Oscar race was almost (but not quite) derailed by doubts about its authenticity--the question comes to mind: how true should a true story be? How much of the facts can you distort, modify, create out of whole cloth? Should one follow the truth, or at least approximate it, run parallel to it, ignore it altogether? And what is the truth anyway, while we're asking...?

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)

Phallus envy

Yes it is; that's what it's all about, really. You think not? Let me put it this way--

In 1997 James Cameron won the Best Director statuette for his two hundred million dollar superproduction Titanic--went up to the stage, thanked a few people, raised his gold-plated phallus symbol high in the air and declared “king of the world!” And he was right to feel that way--the movie still had to win Best Picture, earn a few hundred million more dollars to become the biggest boxoffice hit in history.

Fast forward to 2010. Cameron is again nominated, again for the biggest boxoffice hit in history, the quarter-billion-dollar Avatar. Against him this time, however, is ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, for her far smaller (a mere fifteen million dollars) Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker--probably the first time a divorced couple competed against each other for the prize, and only the fourth time ever a woman was nominated.

You could read the writing on the wall when the presenter strode onstage--Barbra Streisand, who has been nominated and won everything in sight except the award in question (come to think of it she has never even nominated). When she pulled out the card to read she remarked: “It's about time!” Cheers and adulation. Bigelow's, apparently, were bigger and hairier than Cameron's, and the proof was the gold-plated John Thomas she held in her slim hands.

People remark on how Cameron has created “a spectacular new world beyond our imagination,” how he “pushes every boundary for his vision.” All I see is a quarter billion dollars that could have funded sixteen pictures the size of Hurt Locker, spent instead on the manufacture of a shiny new paint brush (basically a phallus with hair at one end)--a brush that, in my book, Cameron hasn't even fully mastered.

Bigelow on the other hand deals mainly with the humdrum real world, only in her hands the world is hardly humdrum--it vibrates with menace. Bigelow's style here may evoke the Paul Greengrass school of action filmmaking--all shaky-cam, with ADHD editing--but when Guy Pearce in a brief walk-on cameo walks cautiously down the railroad track in his Kevlar-and-blast-plating-clad bomb suit with what seems like the entire Iraqi community watching, the filmmaker that comes to mind isn't Greengrass but Costa-Gavras, the political firebrand who in films like Z (1969) and State of Siege (1972) employed cinema-verite techniques to thrilling ends. You have the same immediacy, the same “you-are-there” gut feel--the shots of different people staring silently evokes the point of view of a man desperately trying to cover everyone from every direction, knowing it's impossible yet doing his level best anyway. Bigelow veers away from Costa-Gavras when the bomb actually detonates, opting for surreal details such as the earth leaping as if atop a pounded drum, the bomb suit falling forward in dreamy slow-motion (you can't help but notice that the hardened acrylic/polycarbonate laminated visor is spattered from the inside with blood).

I'm not equating Bigelow with Costa-Gavras; the latter wears his leftist politics proudly on his sleeve (and unlike Cameron, he doesn't seem to feel the need to overcompensate for any shortcomings), whereas you often wonder if Bigelow has any politics, even in this movie. It's pro-military in the sense that the soldiers rarely do anything less than heroic; it's anti-military in the sense that Bigelow seems to be trying undercut the main character's machismo by equating his wildman antics to that of a drug addict--but even then, one wonders. The picture is perhaps too thrilling, its seven setpieces (each a bomb or situation of increasing complexity and lethality) too effectively drive out rational thought in favor of the idea that at any moment, at any time, and for any reason, the person you happen to identify with most closely (Staff Sgt. William James, played with live-wire panache by Jeremy Renner) may be wiped off the face of the Earth (Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le salaire de la peur (Wages of Fear, 1953) anyone?).

The explosive climaxes in this picture are thuddingly real--no gasoline flames, only smoke and flying debris and a huge thump! as if a giant hand had shoved you hard in the chest. The bombs are often thoroughly phallic--huge cylinders impassive in their lethality; Sgt. James' struggle to master them is basically a pissing contest among Alpha males, his way of saying to the Iraqi bombmakers “mine are bigger and hairier than yours.”

Then there's the question of psychological realism--Sgt. James could not have become a veteran EOD (Explosives Ordnance Disposal) officer by being such a cowboy. As several actual members of the unit have noted, a vast majority of bomb disposal operations are carried out by robots--a man doing otherwise is either quickly demoted (for deviating from standard procedure), or blown to little pieces. A living, breathing Sgt. James shouldn't exist--he is , in effect, a walking contradiction. Renner does manage to invest his officer, implausibilities and all, with a charisma that helps sell the man to the audience, but that's Bigelow advancing her movie through style and sheer momentum rather than solid characterization. What style, though--easily some of the best of the year.

If Bigelow's is the biggest and the hairiest--if Bigelow is this year's 'Cock of the Walk'--allow me to point you back to the year 1949, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Small Back Room. Talk of twisted bomb disposal experts, Powell and Pressburger's World War II film has David Farrar, who possessed the most impressive pair of brows in all of cinema, tormenting himself for the loss of his leg (he wears a prosthetic); meantime the Nazis have been dropping strange black cylinders all over the countryside, killing people (children especially) when they pick up the devices. Eventually Farrar in his self-hating trajectory will encounter one of these cylinders, and may the hairiest, most potent phallus win.

Powell and Pressburger use realism with just that much dash of stylization to present their story; unlike Bigelow, their hero is a fully formed character--contradictory at times, but when all pieces are assembled, fully coherent. He makes sense, he makes you care for him despite his monstrous self-pity, and when he puts his life on the line on the sands of Chesil Beach, hands locked in mortal struggle with yet another of the Nazi black cylinders (the most sinister of the phalli yet mentioned), you may perhaps for the first time find yourself dwelling on the full significance of the word “breathless.” Highly recommended (and available on DVD), though Bigelow's The Hurt Locker isn't a bad alternative--in fact, the two would make for an interesting double feature. As for Cameron's oversized turkey--I'd be glad to tell him what he can do with the three decidedly minor gold-plated phalli he won last March 7, only this is a family-oriented newspaper. 

First published in Businessworld, 3.18.10

82nd Academy Awards to Feature 10 Best Pictures and What I Think of That

82nd Academy Awards to Feature 10 Best Picture Nominees

82nd Academy Awards® to Feature 10 Best Picture Nominees

Beverly Hills, CA (June 24, 2009) — The 82nd Academy Awards, which will be presented on March 7, 2010, will have 10 feature films vying in the Best Picture category, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis announced today (June 24) at a press conference in Beverly Hills.

“After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year,” said Ganis. “The final outcome, of course, will be the same – one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009.”

For more than a decade during the Academy’s earlier years, the Best Picture category welcomed more than five films; for nine years there were 10 nominees. The 16th Academy Awards (1943) was the last year to include a field of that size; “Casablanca” was named Best Picture. (In 1931/32, there were eight nominees and in 1934 and 1935 there were 12 nominees.)

Currently, the Academy is presenting a bicoastal screening series showcasing the 10 Best Picture nominees of 1939, arguably one of Hollywood’s greatest film years. Best Picture nominees of that year include such diverse classics as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach,” “The Wizard of Oz” and Best Picture winner “Gone with the Wind.”

“Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize,” commented Ganis. “I can’t wait to see what that list of ten looks like when the nominees are announced in February.”

The 82nd Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Tuesday, February 2. The Oscar® ceremony honoring films for 2009 will again take place at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center® in Hollywood, and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network.


Eh.

And the loser is --

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's that time of the year again.

2009 Oscar nominees

Some notes:

Mildly surprised they didn't nominate Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for a dozen statuettes--it dabbles in current events, it has the heft and pretentiousness (with a message sufficiently grabled that voters might think it's a pro-civil rights, anti-terrorism cautionary/inspirational tale), and a beloved dead actor's final performance to capture the nostalgia vote, and best of all, it's a boxoffice winner. Hell, film and statue deserve each other; neither has a sense of humor or of shame, both are free of the taint and stench of art, or of artists striving for greatness.

I'd written about David Fincher's Benjamin Button already. Suffice to say, I think Button with a script by Gump-ish writer Eric Roth is populist enough, with a wistful enough message ("nothing lasts") that the voters thought it Oscar-worthy. They're apparently too thickheaded to suss out the film's true theme, the majestic passage of time, and the enduring variety of the world and its seasons.

Have not seen Gus Van Sant's Milk (but will, this weekend). Yes, he's done conventional work (Good Will Hunting, and To Die For) same time he's done more interesting fare (Elephant; the Psycho remake (what can I say? Don't knock it till you've seen it, especially screened side-by-side with the original)), so I for one remain hopeful that it was nominated by mistake, and that there's more to it than its ostensibly liberal (if nevertheless important) message.

As for Slumdog Millionaire, my position is this: why waste perfectly good money watching some tourist of a Brit filmmaker steal story ideas from his Indian betters? Slumdog's entertaining, and especially in the scenes of the pickpocket ring it has a gruesome energy (So why is the man and his minions picking up homeless kids? The answer makes one think of an episode of Tales from the Crypt or Masters of Horror series (not so much that it doesn't happen--apparently it does--but that Boyle insists on filming it in a pulp-horror manner). But--fantastic premises (a street kid as finalist in a million-dollar TV game show)? Outrageous coincidences (kid and his love interest keep bumping into each other with little trouble in Mumbai, a city of over thirteen million people)? There's nothing here we haven't seen done before, and done better, in the films of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy, and many others.

As for shamelessly melodramatic climaxes, the one employed here implies a hundred and eighty degree turnaround on the part of a major character. I know, I know plausibility is not the picture's strong suit, nor was it meant to be, but said character is consistent, was dramatically plausible, despite everything; it would have been easy to rewrite him to follow his true, piratical yet generous, nature.

Give me instead the equally shameless yet to my mind far more effective climax to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, even if Eastwood does for a few grating moments croak the words to his own song. Slumdog's ending just drops in out of nowhere; Gran Torino's (a lovely act of theatrics and mindfuck psychology) is carefully prepared from the film's earliest scenes, feels true to the character he plays, and is still courageous in its outlandish convictions. Fact is, I wonder why didn't the Academy nominate Eastwood's film? It's the kind of high-quality soap Hollywood used to be good at churning out in its olden days, with a generous dose of politically incorrect humor (leavened with unspoken sensitivity) tossed in for flavoring, and it's Eastwood's cleanest, simplest, least pretentious film in years.

Do the Academy voters feel they have to be serious now? Do they feel they have standards to keep, artistic merit to reward and uphold? From where I'm sitting, they have no standards; the Oscars are a whorefest, a badly dressed one at that, long and dull and totally pointless (the career statue they gave Robert Altman is a capstone insult to the career of a great artist, the competition statue they gave Martin Scorsese a consolation insult to an artist still growing and developing and working in so many interesting ways). Altman and Scorsese are too tactful as human beings to tell the Academy where they can really stick their goldplated doorstops; I for one wished they were not so gracious.

Diving Bell and Butterfly, Comrade X, Force of Evil, Sunrise

Le Schaphrande et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) has got to be one of the best films last year. I vividly remember Schnabel's Before Night Falls (2000) (aside from being what I felt was the finest performance Javier Bardem's ever given (still feel the same way), it was an unforgettably lyrical film); with this Schnabel if anything proves that he is one of the most graceful filmmakers alive (his free-floating, off-the-cuff camerawork recalls early Polanski, particularly Noz w wodzie (Knife in the Water, 1962)). The point-of-view shots are amazing, as much for what they obscure (out-of-focus filaments suggest wayward eyelashes; watery distortion indicate tears) as for what they reveal (when a pretty woman comes up close, his gaze invariably falls upon her cleavage); even the way he segueways from first person to memory to third person to fantasy is brilliant.
Love the in-jokes--a bit from Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and a snatch of Lolita (1962). What's not to like?

Some critics have complained of the claustrophobic quality of the storytelling, but who wants yet another standard-issue disease-of-the-week flick? Schnabel fits form to Jean-Do Bauby's (Matthieu Amalric) straitened circumstances, his restless intelligence (represented by a constantly agitated eye) unable to escape the cyclopean point of view except through memory or fantasy (the point is driven horrifically home when the doctor declares his other eye 'problematic' and recommends that it be 'occluded'--and we watch, every bit as helpless as the desperately pleading Jean-Do, when the recommendation is carried out).
Is there a place in the world for such personal cinema, such specialized, interiorized stories? But Jean-Do's story isn't as extraordinary as we might like to think: consider the depth of the gap between one person and another, the way we constantly struggle to hear, or make ourselves heard, and our constant failure at perfect communication (which we continue to strive to do, nevertheless). Jean-Do's story resonates because it's our dilemma, mutiplied a hundredfold; in his case he has the stubborness and energy and yes, selfishness to overcome his hurdles, to call out to us one more time in the form of an extraordinary book. Which Schnabel has transformed into an equally extraordinary film.
Comrade X (1940) is maybe not better than Ninotchka (1939) but can it, well, actually hold its own? Vidor is not Lubitsch--i'd hate to even begin to compare the two--but if Vidor doesn't have The Touch, his comedy (very possibly made to cash in on the success of the earlier flick) has more teeth; fact is, the prison and execution-squad sequence comes across as a black-comedy version of something Graham Greene might have written, set in South America. Plus I doubt if Lubitsch has done much in the way of action sequences: here, Vidor throws in a vigorous chase involving a battalion of dancing tanks (how did they do that--remote-control models?) that's a real delight (think Spielberg in 1941 mode, only really set in 1941).

And then there's Lamarr, who's definitely no Garbo; if anything, I think she's even more desireable. Garbo's a beauty, of that there's no doubt, but it's a Teutonic kind of beauty, heavy-spirited and unattainable. Lamarr has a sweet sensuality you can to walk up to and touch, with just enough hint of European mystery to make that walk forward feel daring, dangerous even.

So there're rumors she and Gable didn't get along--so what? I'm not noticing the lack of chemistry; all I can see is Lamarr heedlessly planting kisses on Gable's chiseled mug every five minutes, and thinking I'd love to shove that guy aside and take his place, I really would.

Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948) is, in every sense of the word, awesome. It's set in a great city of steel and stone (Manhattan, of course), only there's a weirdly comic mismatch because crawling all over this tremendous construct are flawed, tiny creatures, eking out a living. Joe Morse's (John Garfield) relationship with his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez) is a case in point--they're constantly bickering, but Garfield can't help keeping an eye out for the man, nevertheless. Is Joe the evil brazenly declared in the title? Maybe, but what about his concern for his brother? Is Leo evil? He has principles, but he's basically running an illegal business. How about Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts)? He comes closest to personifying pure evil, but even he has his Achilles' heel, in the form of Edna (Marie Windsor), who has eyes for Joe.

Polonsky takes an eloquent script (by Ira Wolfert based on his novel (with additions by Polonsky)) and fashions a terrific noir from it: grey, drab on-location exteriors match equally drab interiors; when danger lurks, it's high-angle shots and expressive shadows; when danger steps out in the open it's all quick cuts and abrupt, point-of-view shots. Polonsky (this is his debut as a director) orchestrates all with a confidence and elegance Martin Scorsese can't help but admire.

Then there's the finale, which can only be described as something out of Dante, a descent into a hell if not exactly frozen over, just a few degrees short of it. Joe climbs down past massive structures and vertiginously steep staircases to end at a desolate beach, where he faces the basic fact of his life thus far, and realizes what he must do in response. A great film, absolutely.

And finally (with thanks to Dave Kehr for pointing it out), this brilliant review of Murnau's Sunrise. It's critics like these (okay, maybe not a critic--but what's he doing putting forth on this subject, anyway?) that make me so optimistic about the future of cinema.

Some thoughts: maverick opinions are not of themselves valueless--actually, I think all opinions are equally of value (or are equally valueless); what adds substance and authority to an opinion is the thinking that brought the writer to that opinion, and O'Neill's way of thinking is, to put it politely, not exactly reasoned, logical, or even well informed. If instead of just noting the film's high reputation he showed some understanding of why the film's so highly regarded, then proceeded to show why such regard was flawed, why, he may have something.

It's not as if it's a perfect film, after all. Many sequences are justly famed (the tracking shot that reveals The Woman From the City; the tram sequence (Murnau, shooting through the tram windows which somehow refract the images of the surrounding forest just so, manages to give the trip a floating, dreamlike feel); the gigantic sets of the city). The story is simple, even for silent films, even for Murnau--Man, Woman, other Woman, basically--but Murnau takes advantage of Hollywood's considerable resources to create a mostly reality-based (if hugely exaggerated and stylized) vision.

Maybe my biggest problem with the picture are the subtitles. They're obvious and hokey, even for the time, even compared to Griffith's (and Griffith could be unbelievably sentimental); worse, Murnau went on to animate his titles. The effect is not unsimilar to underlining what's already obvious, highlighting it with three different color markers, then sprinkling all with glitter; if anything, I suspect the sense of over-the-top melodrama one has of the film comes largely from the titles.

Don 't get me wrong, I love the film; it's just not my favorite Murnau (that would be Faust (1924), with its opening image of a magnificent bat-winged Emil Jannings, looming over a volcano (that image has influenced films as diverse as Disney's Fantasia (1940), Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Ridley Scott's Legend (1985)), its passages of Faust flying over blasted landscapes (inspiration for some of the finest passages of John Boorman's Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977), and its final heartbreaking sequence of the beautiful Camilla Horn, struggling to survive a winter storm with her bastard child).

Still. Not a big fan of the Oscars or of its organizers, but even they and their running media dogs should know better than to nip at the long-dead hand that, if it isn't exactly feeding them now, did much to create the reputation of quality they enjoy (and have almost entirely failed to uphold) today. Shame on them--on Cameron Diaz too, incidentally, for involving herself in such cheap shots (she should grovel on used razor blades for a chance to star in a film anywhere near as great as Sunrise).

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007)

For your viewing penance

Joe Wright's Atonement isn't half so bad; for at least most of the running time, it's a dandy, sumptuous adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel about a young girl (Briony Tallis, played by Saoirse Ronan), her lies, and their devastating effect on the lives of two young lovers (Robby Turner and Cecilia Tallis, respectively played by James McAvoy and Kiera Knightley). Along the way Wright brings Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey's talents to bear, and manages to evoke a world of half-lit rooms and overcast landscapes; if the sun ever does break through (as it does in a lengthy four-minute shot, in Dunkirk), it's to bathe the characters in the warm glow of a coal fire, a dying one, meant partly to symbolize the lovers' dimmed hopes for a happy life, partly to express the Allies' slim chances for survival, partly to suggest the fading might of the British empire.

3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, 2007)

Keep it simple, stupid.

On the Gold Doorstop awards show or whatever that was held recently: enjoyed the Coens' No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and Jason Reitman's Juno as easy entertainments that are not in any way substantial (much less great), thought Joe Wright's Atonement terrible (especially that syrupy ending), and felt that Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis was by far the best animated film last year, and no slick and shiny movie about cooking rodents is going to convince me otherwise. Overall, the Oscars were a keen disappointment--I had hoped the writer's strike would extend long enough to force the show to cancel, much like the Golden Globes.

Ah well, moving on. The picture at hand's story began with something Elmore Leonard wrote in 1953 for Dime Western Magazine titled "Three-Ten to Yuma," a taut little thriller where a deputy marshal escorts a captured stagecoach robber to a train headed for a prison in Yuma. Leonard didn't put much into the story--it's simply the clash between an every day Joe (Dan Evans, played by Van Heflin) and a celebrity criminal (Ben Wade, played by Glenn Ford), and any questions about why they do what they do and what's going on inside their heads are left unanswered--or rather, to our imagination. Leonard reportedly was not a fan of Daves' film, mainly because it attempted to explain the characters' motivations, how Evans' (now a rancher) cattle were dying, and in desperate need for two hundred dollars to save them.

I wonder what Leonard thinks of James Mangold's 2007 remake. Mangold (Heavy (1995), Copland (1997)) is an arthouse film director turned mainstream who's nevertheless always strove to do things a little different, and whose emphasis has always been on character portraiture more than narrative momentum (Heavy in particular was, I thought, aptly named), and who's often pulled critically received performances from the most unlikely of actors (shiny gold doorstops for Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted (1999) and Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line (2005)). To say Mangold and Leonard are a poor fit is, I think, an understatement; where Leonard is content to keep his hero's motivations a mystery, Mangold demands a past history to construct the detailed performances he's known for; hence, I assume, the probing into Evans' (here played by Christian Bale) past, and the added curlicues of motivation given to him (a wooden leg from the Civil War that clunks noisily across rooms and gives way at crucial moments, for example, and a villainous banker who holds the deed to the ranch and orders the burning of Evans' barn).

Actionwise Mangold delivers--perhaps overdelivers. An Apache attack; an escape from sadistic miners; an entire town paid to kill the lawmen and help Wade (played with insouciant gusto by Russell Crowe) escape--Mangold enjoys a budget here he's never had before, and it's possible all that money's gone to his head. Which would have been all good if Mangold were a master at conveying spatial relationships and coherent motion--which he's not; when Wade kills a bounty hunter (played with leathery grit by a dried-out Peter Fonda) the body is tossed off a cliff that appears out of nowhere; when Wade and Evans and friends escape through a mine tunnel we're not sure if they're running forward into a new tunnel or backwards, out where they came from. Mangold does best at the climactic gunfight, where the whole town--implausibly--is roped in to shoot Evans, but that only serves to remind the viewer of similar gunfights staged by Sergio Leone in Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, 1966) and C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968), where the pair of heroes brave a gauntlet of snipers. Leone puts poetry and grandeur into his sequences while Mangold has to settle for mere complexity--beautifully lit by the gold light of a setting sun, thanks to cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, but otherwise uninspiring.

Which is all a far cry from Daves' version. Leonard may not have approved, but Daves' film, I submit, captures the leanness and intimacy and scale (or lack of) of the original story. Where Mangold's picture bristles with all kinds of extraneous characters--barn burners, bankers, railroad officials, bounty hunters, mining officials, unscrupulous townsfolk--Daves' is mostly a background of distant figures that add definition and depth to what is essentially a two-character chamber piece, a battle of wills between Evans and Wade. It's all in the camerawork, I submit, done with the help of Charles Lawton, Jr.; without fuss, without color, Daves and Lawton evoke a hardscrabble West of petty burglaries and inglorious killings, of rural inventiveness and caution pitted against criminal cunning and courage; in the film's latter half Wade and Evans are confined to a room, and Daves and Lawton makes you constantly conscious of the spatial limits of the room (positions are assumed (Wade in bed, Evans in a corner), distances (to the door, to the windows, to a gun) measured and wearily watched; heads poke into the door or out the windows on occasion, making you want to cry out "For God's sake don't do that, you'll get shot!").

Yes, Daves' film bears striking similarities to Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952), only here the villain is introduced early on, and we come to know him intimately, to have good reason to fear him (he's not just a deadly shot and a ruthless killer, he's a charmer with a powerful, charismatic personality); here villain and hero are confined to a small space, and you watch them bring each other to a slow but inevitable boil.

Might as well add that while Mangold's picture is impeccably cast, Russell Crowe is no Glenn Ford (you feel that Ford could whip Crowe with just his little pinkie) and that Christian Bale may be a tremendous actor, but fails to improve on the caught-in-the-headlights bug-eyed quality of Van Heflin's performance. Mangold's version--a tribute, as he himself has admitted--is a complex reworking of what essentially was simple perfection; you can't improve on perfection, of course, you can at best mar it a little. Or a lot.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/29/08)