United 93

With each step of his film about the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, British director Paul Greengrass faced a minefield.   He couldn’t allow reverence to paralyze him; on the other hand, the project couldn’t smack even slightly of Hollywood.   A documentary style proves to be the key—no stars, handheld cameras and the feel of real time--allowing him to step with grace past these hazards.   It honors the departed by never sensationalizing or sentimentalizing, and by keeping the focus on them, not the acting or directing.   Observe how Greengrass allows us to sit for a moment in the cockpit before the plane takes off with the two pilots who will be executed when the hijackers make their move.   One mentions looking forward to a family vacation in London.   And how to handle those famous words, “Let’s roll”, seared into the public consciousness?   Deliver them with neither a hint of Bruce Willis nor swell of orchestration.  

As events unfold, the film cross-cuts from a military air traffic control center, where some of the actual staffers who were on the job on 9/11 play themselves, to doomed flight 93 sitting on the runway, taxiing, and lifting off.   After the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon, we leave behind the world outside of flight 93 forever.   The last minutes of this film -- passengers ramming the drink cart into the cockpit door, the Pennsylvania ground swinging madly into the horizon -- rank with the most intense pieces of filmmaking I’ve seen; they had the young women seated next to me sobbing, others gasping.

“United 93” offers no analysis, is not a parable or allegory, furthers no one’s agenda.   It simply puts us on that plane, rendering a specific situation with devastating emotional truth (and I can speak to its veracity only on that level).   These are everyday people –  young and old, anonymous to one another, loved by ones not present -- who did not want to die.   Essential viewing, though perhaps we cannot be said to be “entertained” by a film as deeply serious as this one, or even feel that we’ve sidestepped completely the irony of lauding its intensity. 

- May 12, 2006

Brick

We know high school can be murder; “Brick” illustrates that metaphor by staging a classic film noir there, conjuring the spirits of Bogie and the rest into teen bodies.   Perhaps the most cleverly conceived noir since Philip Marlowe woke up to face the 1970s in Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” this stylish debut feature from director/writer/editor Rian Johnson manages to sustain an interestingly contradictory tone.   On the one hand it’s witty and non-realist (after all, since when do modern teens speak and behave like characters out of Raymond Chandler?); on the other, it’s neither parody nor joke.   Johnson seems to have intuited that the film could only work if it’s not winking at us.   It asks of us a suspension of disbelief equal to that we would bring to, say, a musical.      

Thus the dark urban milieu of classic noir transmutes into a California high school.   When bespectacled Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) discovers the murdered body of his missing ex-girlfriend, the young sleuth put his backside on the line to solve the crime.   Revolving around a stolen brick of heroin, the case propels him into the underground world of teen crime.   Brendan’s in the great Marlowe/Spade tradition: not really part of any clique, he’s a loner.   Sizing up situations and people with unerring instinct, he’s respected and trusted, even by those who’d like to off him, for his quickness on his feet and for being a straight shooter in a crooked world.    

The film is choc-a-bloc with signifiers and codes from teen culture, films, and vintage detective and gangster fiction.   It’s knowing about high school culture: when Brendan is informed that a classmate was spotted eating lunch at a table other than the usual clique’s, he recognizes this clue immediately as being of some moment.   There’re stylistic nods to Lynch, and the assistant vice principal is none other than Richard Roundtree, a.k.a. 70s black action hero Shaft.   There’s an interesting tension in the characters’ identities: they’re emblems at once of teen culture (“the brain”, “the jock”) and of mythic noir (“the femme fatale”).   I especially liked Megan Good as an amoral drama club girl who’s sporting a costume from a different musical every time we see her.  

Lucas Haas plays “the Pin”, boss of teen crime.   Hobbling with a cane, the Pin’s pained walk seems inimical to youth.   When his mom finds him and a few other boys in the kitchen, with kidnapped Brendan in tow, she cheerfully asks whether they wouldn’t like a nice glass of orange juice.   I love that she has no idea that her frail son presides over a crime ring from his little office in the basement.   Adults are almost entirely absent in the world of this film; when one appears it has this kind of comic effect.    

If “Brick” doesn’t hit the “Chinatown” height of pathos it aims for, there’s still plenty to admire in its swinging for the fences.   We want the language in noir to zip, zing, and sting, and it gets that.   Its labyrinthine plot is part of the fun of the genre, as everyone who’s ever gotten happily lost in “The Big Sleep” can attest.   And the actors play it utterly straight, putting their hearts into it.    

- Apr 26, 2006

"Inside Man", "Thank You for Smoking", and "Tsotsi"

"Inside Man"

Spike Lee’s heist film is the latest chapter in his ongoing chronicle of New York City, but it’s one you can flip past.   Driven by justice rather than lucre, a master thief (Clive Owen) seizes hostages at a bank which was founded on dirty deals with the Nazis.   Denzel Washington is a hostage negotiator shaded with moral ambiguity.   None of these characters is particularly memorable, although Jodie Foster registers as a fixer for the powerful named Ms. White, a sleek blonde in cream outfits.

Teeming with life, Lee’s fiery pictures at their best capture the city’s vitality and contagious anger, its noise and heat.   (My favorite Lee film is still “Crooklyn”, a warm and funny yet unblinking look at family life in 1970s Brooklyn.)   In this film, little is done with the idea of the melting pot held hostage aside from knowing nods to post-9/11 racial profiling. And while some of the dialogue stings (“When there’s blood on the streets, buy property”), other lines are tired genre clichés (“Respect is the ultimate currency”).   We expect greatness or disaster from Spike Lee, not a solidly crafted mediocrity like this.

"Thank You for Smoking"

This dark satire about an amoral spin-doctor for Big Tobacco doesn’t compromise, but neither does it go quite far enough.   Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, a wolfish PR man who dreams up a campaign to market ciggies by hiring Hollywood to script stories showing smoking stars, thus inciting the militant wing of the public health movement to promise to assassinate him.   Meanwhile, a do-gooder senator threatens congressional hearings on affixing the skull and crossbones to packs of coffin nails.

Spinning deadly rubbish into gold, so gifted with gab that he can convince a cancer survivor that the patient has no better friend than Big Tobacco, Nick’s tapped into the zeitgeist.   Since the narration by Nick encourages identification with him, there’s a sly tension between the film’s satire and its own tweaking of P.C. sensibilities.   Kudos for ignoring the formulaic character arc calling for the antihero to grow a soul, but in the end the film is smart rather than brilliant, sporadically very funny but not quite as sharp or wicked as its reputation.  
 
"Tsotsi"

Tsotsi, a young leader of a tiny crew of ragamuffin thugs in Johannesburg, carjacks a wealthy woman and discovers her baby in the backseat.   Forcing a young mother next door in the shantytown to feed and help care for the child, the brutalized and brutal youth learns of the fragility and sacredness of life.   This year’s Oscar winner for best foreign language film, “Tsotsi” is an affecting story of the class divide in modern South Africa, where impoverished kids sleep in stacked sections of pipe.   Staying with me are the eyes of the young shantytown mother, angry and scared under duress, later seeing through Tsotsi to a decent nature that never had a chance. 

- Apr 10, 2006

Neil Young: Heart of Gold

Neil Young cut his most recent record, “Prairie Wind”, after being diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.   Jonathan Demme’s concert film, "Heart of Gold", thus captures a performance charged with deep significance for the old contrarian, one of rock’s more uncompromising, eccentric, and irascible characters, who even 30 years ago was considered part of rock’s Old Guard.   Shot at Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium, Young presents his very personal new songs, plus an encore of classics.   It’s a night for his gentle country-inflected folk-rock side, for songs contemplating loved ones and mortality.  

Demme’s Talking Heads concert film, 1984’s joyous “Stop Making Sense,” offered such a powerful metaphor of fellowship of men and women, black and white, that any band that fails to embody that vision has always struck me as impoverished and vaguely suspect (with obvious implications for my politics).   In this film Neil is surrounded by musicians who’re old friends and family (his longtime wife Pegi sings backup) and a diverse extended community that includes the Memphis Horns and The Fisk University Jubilee Singers.   His primary foil is the great Emmylou Harris; though her once raven tresses are now a striking silver, she’s still a silvery-voiced beauty.    

Demme’s camera captures smiling faces that you wouldn’t be able to see from the cheap seats (such as the ones I had when I saw Young in concert in 2003), and glances that say more than words -- from husband to wife, friend to friend, musician to musician.   And it captures moments -- of surprise, of joy, of being knocked out by what someone else is doing.   Demme’s floating eye finds the ideal angle to view the action.   We sense a point of view, an empathic cinematic intelligence translating Young’s emotional intent into cinema.   Thus is Demme able to share with us his very personal experience of the show.  

Though Young is capable of writing a line as perfect in its imagery as “Every junkie’s like a setting sun” (from 1972’s “The Needle and the Damage Done”, which he performs in this film), his writing is often purposely artless.   In a way this approach is admirable.   It’s as if he’s saying, “If the sentiment is from my heart then I’m just going to say it straight out, not dress it up in metaphor.   If it’s clichéd, I’m not bothered.”   Accordingly, at their worst his songs can be frightfully banal.  

But when he’s on, few can put words and music together with more magic.   Sitting at the piano, backed by a gospel choir and shot in tight profile, he sings a new song so gorgeous that it positively left me on the floor.   “When God made me,” Neil asks, “was He thinking about my country/Or the color of my skin?/Was he thinking about my religion/And the way I worshipped Him?/Did he create just me in his image/Or every living thing?/Did He think there was only one way/To be close to Him?/Did He give us the gift of love/To say who we could choose?”

This film glows with a rare warmth.   Of course it’s of most interest to those who’ve been along on the often bumpy ride with Neil.   It’s a ride that the old rebel isn’t quite ready to see end anytime soon.   “It’s a long road behind me,” he sings.   “And a long road ahead.”

- Mar 28, 2006

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

“Very British, wasn’t it?” I overheard a bloke comment on the way out of a theatre showing this latest from director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (the duo responsible for gems such as “24 Hour Party People” and “Butterfly Kiss”).   The extent to which you’ll enjoy this comedy is in direct proportion to the extent to which you consider my fellow cineaste’s observation to be high praise.   “Tristram” employs mockumentary and breaking-the-third-wall approaches to tell the story of a flummoxed film crew working, lounging, and moving through the rooms of a grand old country manor as they strive to breathe life into Laurence Sterne’s essentially unfilmmable, playfully experimental Enlightenment-era novel, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” (published in nine volumes from 1759-1767).   Steve Coogan, who’s been cast   as Tristram, is well-known in England for his portrayal of vapid talk show host Alan Partridge; in “Tristram,” as in Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” he slyly plays himself as a bloke who can’t quite hide his self-interest, insecurity, lack of knowledge of what he’s talking about, and general shabbiness of character.   I haven’t read Sterne’s novel (and in this I am in the company of Coogan, whose occasional doomed efforts to have a run at the book are a recurring joke).   To Coogan’s chagrin, the book was so very “postmodern” before its time that Tristram’s not even been born by the end of it (to compensate they’ve given Coogan the role of Tristram’s father as well).   Further threatening his status as star of the film is his mate Rob Brydon, who’s been cast as Tristram’s uncle; Brydon plays himself as an earnest nice guy, vaguely childlike, who’s quite unable to dissemble a la Coogan.   One of the film’s chief pleasures is the spot-on timing and improvisatory feel of the banter between these two good comedians as they worry over, say, whose costume shoes have higher platforms.   Each enjoys commenting on the other’s illusions and pretensions.     One of the few people in the film not playing herself is the Afro-Brit actress Naomie Harris, so fetching in her winter cap as a production assistant who is a film buff.   I was stirred powerfully when, to a roomful of cast and crew lamenting the paucity of troops in their film’s staging of the battle of Namur of 1695 (viewing the rushes, one actor exclaims, “I’m leading an army of tens!”), Harris evokes the austerity of the battle scenes in Bresson’s “Lancelot Du Lac”.   Ah, she even gives the proper French title!   The entire room get that “What’s she on about?” look in their eyes with which we film devotees are sadly intimate.       “Tristram” is anything but a typical period piece.   It’s not for everyone, but fun for connoisseurs of irony and sarcasm, those cornerstones of British comedy.

- Mar 12, 2006