My take on the 5 best picture nominees, 2009

We all know the Oscars’ real raison d’etre: publicity generation for mostly middlebrow
“prestige pictures”.   The nominees are never really the best films of the year, are they?  
That said, it’s still a great tradition, one that no one who loves movies can entirely ignore.  

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

F. Scott Fitzgerald never expected his short story about a man who ages backwards to
meet celluloid like this.   I quite liked it, actually.   David Fincher knows how to make a
movie (see “Zodiac”), though there are some problems here: midway through there’s a
sequence about the nature of chance and fate that seems lifted wholesale from the
opening of “Magnolia”.   Another minefield: the film is by the screenwriter who did “Forest
Gump”, Eric Roth.   His subject is life and death, and though one worries that he actually
enjoys those banal sound-bites peppering his scripts, at his best he gives us honestly
moving moments, of which there are many here.   My favorites take place in the still of the
night in an elegant Russian hotel.   While guests and staff sleep, Benjamin meets each
night in the lobby with Tilda Swinton.   They repair into the kitchen to talk deep into the
night, or to the elegant dining room to share a secret meal.   There’s a wonderful sense of
ordinary time suspended.   Oh, and the movie’s got Cate Blanchett too, who kills me
every time out.  

“Slumdog Millionaire”

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it.   But I didn’t love, it if I’m honest.   Danny Boyle’s film set
in Mumbai is kinetic and colorful, and I like the kid who plays the lead.   Boyle is a brilliant
wielder of every aspect of film language, but he doesn’t permit the viewer any will of their
own.   It’s too slick, too pat for my taste.    

“Milk”

This biopic is as conventional as Gus Van Sant gets.   It’s a worthy film, if never quite
transcendent.   The recreation of 70’s San Francisco brought back memories for me (we
lived out there while my dad was on sabbatical, in ’77 I think it was; Milk was
assassinated in ‘78).   Such intelligent acting from Sean Penn—his range seems quite
limitless.   By the way, the 1984 documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” is essential
viewing.      

“Frost/Nixon”

Aside from the performances, it’s valuable for illustrating a key idea of film theory: the
“secret power” of the close-up (as Balazs put it), which creates its own sets of meaning.  
And though a Nixon supporter complains in the film about the close-up’s “reductive
power”, the way it simplifies, the fact is that when the final Frost interview goes out on
TV the truth is there for all to see: it’s in the eyes of Frank Langella as Nixon, the sweat
on his upper lip.   Whatever his words might have been, the close-up told the real story.    

“The Reader”

A few years ago Kate Winslett guest-starred on an episode of “Extras”, Ricky Gervais’
wickedly satiric sitcom about celebrity: playing a twisted version of herself shooting a
Holocaust movie, she confides to an astonished extra on the set who has commended
her for using her profile to keep the memory alive, “God, I’m not doing it for that…no, I’m
doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed
an Oscar.”   Brilliant!   I really want her to win best actress on Sunday, not least for being
willing to do a scene like that, which is now of course doubly ironic.  

In “The Reader” Winslett stars as a woman with secrets in late 50s Germany; she
initiates a teen into sex while he initiates her into literature (it is her idea that he read to
her).   Though problematic and at times clumsy, “The Reader” is the nominee that most
stimulated me to think about its ideas, including the mind-boggler that non-evil people
abetted the Holocaust.   You could debate whether that’s even a valid proposition, but it’s
conducive to critical thought to ponder whether ordinary Germans who went along were
so different from us, for whom making a living and getting through day-to-day life tends
to trump morals in all kinds of small or large ways that we learn to live with. And then
there’s a wordless sequence where the young man visits Auschwitz: it is a quietly
devastating scene, but you could argue that of course footage of the camps can’t help
but be devastating, and furthermore that to use it to give a movie gravitas—maybe even
to help you win awards—is exploitive and maybe even obscene.   I think that would be to
miss the point in this case: this film needed to take us there, as if to say, remember what
we’re talking about when we talk about the Holocaust.   To see the negation of the life
force in contrast to how alive the woman with secrets once made him feel.

- Feb 18, 2009

Waltz With Bashir

From Israel comes this searing, melancholy animated documentary about filmmaker Ari Folman’s quest to retrieve his lost memory of the invasion of Lebanon, which he took part in as a young Israeli soldier in the early 80s.   All he has is a recurring vision: young men rising out of the sea naked and putting on their uniforms.   He sets out to hunt down the fellows who served alongside him, in the hope that hearing their stories might restore to him his own.  

A picture emerges of kids having rather a good time at first occupying and abusing a foreign land, until the occupants of that land turn the tables and visit bloody death upon them.   And these were just kids: Folman with his machine gun was about the same age I was when I was knocking about at Biddle Hall.   Imagine at that age being cast into a situation where the face of death is brought so close that you can smell its breath.  

The film builds to the notorious massacre at Sabra and Shatila, names that ring out to those who know about the history of Palestinian suffering.   These were Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut where the Israeli army allowed in a Christian militia enraged by the recent assassination of their leader, Bashir Gemayel.   The militia proceeded to line up and gun down women and children, old people and young men, while the Israeli army, with Folman in its ranks, waited in the wings.   The next day when soldiers entered to survey the carnage, corpses came up to their waists.  
 
As I say, “Waltz with Bashir” is an animated film, and a visually stunning one (though at the end we are made to see actual footage of the aftermath of the massacre).   There’s an obvious issue with animation when it comes to documentary: it forgoes photography’s ability to record reality.   This movie is a visionary experience, but is that something we really want from a “non-fiction” film, one dealing in “reality”?   I would counter that “Waltz With Bashir” is a work of art, not a Chomsky essay.   It wants to make us feel at least as much as it wants to impart information.   Would one look to "Guernica" for facts about the Spanish Civil War?   Only animation can convey the hallucinatory experience of the war for these men, or the recurring nightmares and fragmentary visions that it left them.   The film is really as much an essay on the trickiness of memory as it is a documentary.    

This one's up for best Foreign Language film.

Rating: *****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Feb 6, 2009  

Top Ten, 2008

I saw 49 new releases this year, and yet there were still tons of interesting things I missed (pesky day job!), some of which surely would have landed on this list.   (For example, one of my favorite things I saw this year was David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” on DVD, which definitely would have been on my 2007 Top 10 had I not missed its theatrical run.)   Here, then, are my 10 favorites out of what I managed to see in ‘08.      

1.   "Forever"
Heddy Honigmann’s film about the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris is not just my favorite picture of 2008: it joins the ranks of my all-time favorites.   An extraordinary film about life, death and art.   The artists who rest at Père-Lachaise are dust, but when their art sings through us—we who live, who yet feel joy and sorrow—that’s eternity.   What did I learn from this movie?   To paraphrase the late coach Jimmy Valvano, I learned that death takes the physical body, but it can’t touch the heart, the mind, the soul.   Those things go on forever.    

2.   "Rachel Getting Married"
“Rachel” is unlike anything Jonathan Demme’s done before, and yet it’s still recognizably his: there’s the celebration of music and community we treasure in his concert films like “Stop Making Sense”, as well as that film’s subtext of interracial celebration.   I didn’t know from Anne Hathaway before I saw this, but she’s as real as the day is long as a young woman struggling to live with having done something while stoned that she can never, ever make up for.   Why do we go to the movies, except looking for all these moments of euphoria, heartbreak, truth, beauty?   Hoping to be surprised.    

3.   "The Visitor"
Thomas McCarthy’s film about immigration is not an allegory.   By which I mean to say that its characters are people, not symbols, and its political points flow from their story, not the other way around.   A heartbreaking, humanizing picture.

4.   "Synecdoche, New York"
What is the relationship of life and art?   Surrealist screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has a go at directing, while Philip Seymour Hoffman brings the soul as a hypochondriac theater director driven to stage a perpetual reenactment of his life inside a cavernous warehouse, which over the decades gradually fills with a brick-by-brick replica of his home city of Schenectady, populated by actors playing himself and the other people in his life.   I don’t pretend to know what this is about, really, except that it’s to do with death and loneliness and mental illness and intimacy and the drive to paint one’s masterpiece.   For all I know it could all be an Alzheimer’s dream on his deathbed.   And maybe it has something to do with the words I heard the poet William Stanley Merwin say on the radio just the other day: “Memory is essential to what we are…what we think of as the present really is the past.   It’s made out of the past…they flow into each other in ways that we can’t predict and that we discover in dreams.”  

5.   "Happy-Go-Lucky"
People will always remember this one by saying “Sally Hawkins was so great in that.”   She is Poppy; she is a happy person.   Laughter and tension all at once as the film explores the pros and cons of not taking life seriously.   Well, that and the pleasures of hearing regular Londoners talk.    

6.   "Elegy"
Based on the novel “The Dying Animal” by Philip Roth, “Elegy” is true to Roth’s vision for his characters: the brutal truth of death, shot through with the moments when they felt most alive.

7.   "Jellyfish"
From Tel Aviv, stories of stifled desire, desperation, separation and connectedness.   Watch closely: there is magic around the edges of everyday life.

8.   "Persepolis"
A graceful adaptation to the screen of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel about coming of age out of a childhood in the late 70’s in Tehran.   The hand-drawn animation allows her a visual expressiveness that captures not just what happened, but how it felt.

9.   "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly"
“Being completely wheelchaired does not stop my mind from roaming the universe,” Arthur C. Clarke once said.   Likewise, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s mind compensated for his “locked-in syndrome” by generating visions spun from his explorations in literature, poetry, film, history.   Julian Schnabel’s filmmaking reflects his painter’s eye.  

10.   "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson"
A fascinating, invigorating documentary.   He was no hero, just a problematic, gifted writer who ended up squandering much of his gift, but who was able for a time to capture the American chaos in all its fear, loathing and violence.   Any portrait of Thompson has also to be a portrait of America in the 60s and 70s.   Maybe the film will get people looking at the work again, which at its best was funny, high-voltage, honest, savage, sensitive; like the disturbing Ralph Steadman drawings that illustrated his pages, his vision showed what “professional” journalism couldn’t: the spiritual sickness that lay just underneath the surface of the mainstream culture of his time.   (He saw through the counterculture just as clearly.)   His hatred for Nixon was pure.    

Honorable mentions: Milk, Young at Heart, Tell No One, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Dark Knight

Happy-Go-Lucky

I always enjoy seeing the results of Mike Leigh’s process: he sculpts his characters beginning months before shooting in an intense collaboration with the actors, who during shooting sometimes don’t know what’s going to happen next until it happens.   Like all his work, “Happy-Go-Lucky” is an episodic slice of life, a droll picture of English social relations in a specific time, yet he’s clearly going in a different direction after "Vera Drake".   There’s a lot of color in his palette this time, for one thing.   His latest creation is a real character, alright: an unsinkable primary school teacher called Poppy, whom we meet in the midst of her happy life. She’s brought to life by Sally Hawkins in a breakthrough role, her smile toothy and goofy, her eyes squinting with mirth.   Though she’s no longer a kid at 30, the fun-loving, flirty Poppy still hasn’t started taking life seriously at all, exasperating people who do with her non-stop cheeky joking.   In that respect her character seems to have been influenced by Ricky Gervais’ David Brent (which is interesting because Gervais has acknowledged the influence of Leigh’s 70’s TV work like “Abigail’s Party”).   We meet her best friend/roommate (Alexis Zegerman) and her sister (Kate O’Flynn).   If you enjoy hearing regular Londoners talk, you’ll enjoy this movie.   (And it’s not just the accent, is it—it’s also the funny way they have of putting things).  

Even as we laugh, though, there’s a current of tension running through the film: Poppy interacts in a trusting, friendly way with strangers in a way most adults wouldn’t, and we’re often on edge waiting for it to get her in trouble.   One of the things the film asks is, how nice can a person get away with being in this world?   There’s a marvelous extended scene in which she encounters an erratic, schizophrenic homeless fellow in a deserted area at night.   We keep expecting him to assault her at any moment, while she’s thinking only of getting on his wavelength.   A lot of the film takes place inside the car of her powder keg of a driving instructor (Eddie Marsan), who is simultaneously attracted and annoyed by her, and who simmers with rage about modern multicultural London (the children of whom populate Poppy’s classroom).   She’s finally crossed paths with an utterly humorless person.   We eventually get to see just how troubled he really is, yet like Poppy, Leigh’s cinema empathizes with all: we can see that the sense of control and pride he gets from his job is the one thing that allows him to function in a society in which he feels deeply powerless.  

Rating: ****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

 - Nov 19, 2008   

"Elegy" and "Ghost Town"

"Elegy"

Written by Nicholas Meyer and directed by Isabel Coixet, “Elegy” is based on the novel “The Dying Animal” by Philip Roth, and connoisseurs will recognize the litany of Roth’s themes instantly: age and youth, men and women, sex and death.   “The biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age”, says the narrator, David Kepesh, one of Roth’s signature creations, played here by Ben Kingsley.   He teaches a class on Barthes, owns a framed letter of Kafka, knows painting and architecture.   This is the story of what happens when he targets one of his beautiful young students to woo (Penélope Cruz, with her soft Spanish accent).   He does this every year, but this time it’s different: he’s besotted.   Meanwhile, Kepesh’s grown son (Peter Sarsgaard) still seeths over his father’s abandonment of him and his mother, and an affecting Dennis Hopper plays the prof’s best friend on the faculty (and fellow aging womanizer).

As Kepesh, Kingsley gives us a portrait of the archetypal faithless intellectual male, the type who before achieving prominence was homely, awkward.   It’s all conjecture, but his sundry trysts suggest to me a wounded background; it’s this that saves him from being despicable.   As an aesthete he takes great pleasure in beauty, be it found in art or in women, but in a way the subject of “Elegy” is the blindness of the male gaze, especially when it comes to women.   Hopper puts it succinctly: “Beautiful women are invisible—we never see the person.”   Patricia Clarkson, playing Kepesh’s lover of his own generation, confides in him the scary fact of her life: soon, she knows, men won’t really see her at all.   And though we know the hard facts of death and disease are one of Philip Roth’s subjects, it still comes as a surprise the way they arrive in this movie.   “Elegy” is true to his vision for his characters: brutal truth yet shot through with the moments they felt most alive.      

Rating: ****

"Ghost Town"

After momentarily dying while on the operating table, a misanthropic dentist (Ricky Gervais) is able to see the ghosts of people who have unfinished business here on earth, such as Greg Kinnear, who conscripts Ricky to keep his widow (Téa Leoni) away from another man.   Contemporary Hollywood rom-com is the one genre I can’t stick at any price, but as Ricky Gervais is one of my comedy heroes, I had to check out this attempt to introduce him to the American masses.   In fact the film is driven by an interesting contrast between the exigencies of formulaic, mainstream rom-com and the sly wit and irony of the kind of comedy Gervais was getting up to on “The Office” and “Extras”.   He didn’t auteur this, but still we get some signature Gervais: that pathetic overbite that I hadn’t seen since the David Brent days (Brent being the “seedy boss” character he originated on the original British version of “The Office”, and which Steve Carell now plays so drolly in the American version), the foot-in-mouth comment riding in over a burbling giggle, even the inventive way he plays with his hair in the mirror before a date.   Téa Leoni makes a fetchingly offbeat romantic interest, intelligent, with a laugh that occasionally erupts into a snort.   Those who complain that it’s not edgy should understand that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is one of Gervais’ favorite films.   He cherishes classic Hollywood, and “Ghost Town” is a slight but moving and classy entry in that tradition.

Rating: ***

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

- Oct 15, 2008