The Constant Gardener

In this British thriller, Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a reserved bureaucrat with the British High Commission in Kenya who is most content when puttering about in his garden.   The plot follows Quayle’s whirlwind investigation into the corporate murder of his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), an outspoken Oxfam campaigner.   He first encounters her when she confronts him at a High Commission Q&A session (“High Commission” is the title the British give to an embassy in a commonwealth nation).   She peppers him with tough questions about British foreign policy, which the other journalists find sufficiently outrageous to clear the room of all but her and him.   This is the start of an unlikely friendship and before long she is his pregnant wife.   As the spontaneous Tessa, who abandoned a wealthy background to live and work with the African poor, Weisz radiates a steely nurturance and is intimidated by no one.

One of Tessa’s causes is the scourge of HIV/AIDS, and thus her nemeses are the for-profit drug companies such as KDH, who whom the High Commission is working to conduct trials of a HIV/AIDS treatment called Dipraxsyn.   KDH sees Africa as a potentially huge market to control and exploit.   Tessa has a tendency to point out that it is in KDH’s interest to increase demand for their drug (the more sick Africans, the more demand), thereby driving up the company’s stock price.   She’s sure there’s a conspiracy to fix the Dipraxsyn trials in order to secure a patent sooner rather than later.   (KDH is meant to stand for real world for-profit drug companies such as GlaxoSmithKline; we’ve seen the headlines about their efforts to enforce their patent rights and keep low-cost generics out of the world’s poor countries.)    

Qualye is quintessentially British, which is to say, not a typical thriller hero (James Bond notwithstanding).   As played in a marvelously internalized performance by Fiennes, he contains his emotions, remaining polite even when obviously corrupt Kenyan authorities laugh in his face.   Haunted by guilt for having believed the lies of an anonymous tipster who cast aspersions on Tessa’s fidelity, he redeems himself by finally showing feeling as he is forced to come into contact with the human beings behind the words and statistics of High Commission reports.

“The Constant Gardener” is a very good, even artful, thriller, edited as tightly as a drum.   It makes one work a bit to keep up.   It is refreshingly adult, with an ambiguity not often found in American thrillers.   That said, it doesn’t re-invent the wheel.   The standard devices are present and accounted for, up to and including the old standby whereby the baddies have invalidated our hero’s passport.   Even its globetrotting (from Kenya, the action moves to London and Germany, then back to Sudan) feels a bit familiar after ‘Bourne Supremacy’.    

Still, for those who feel that film must do more than merely entertain, there’s a lot to like here.   Also, a film about the expendability of poor black life carries extra resonance in light of recent events in the Southeast states of the richest country in the world.   “Gardener” was directed by Fernando Meirelles, who made “City of God”, and based on the John Le Carre novel.  

- Sep 11, 2005  

Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” documents the short life and tragic death of Timothy Treadwell, a troubled young man whose mission to protect the grizzlies of Alaska ended abruptly in 2003 when a bear devoured him and his girlfriend Amie.   By spending 13 seasons camping in the grizzly sanctuary, Treadwell had escaped his myriad problems in a human world in which he could never find a place.   Though he knew better, he habitually and stupidly crowded the bears, as if to prove that they accepted him as one of their own, which behavior led to his death.    

Herzog has found a kindred spirit in Treadwell, who in his mad reckless passion for his vision was willing to risk being consumed (though Treadwell made rather literal what remained metaphoric for Herzog).   Indeed, Herzog may feel that “there but for fortune go I” in the sense that it’s remarkable that no one was seriously hurt or even killed in the making of his “Fitzcarraldo”, in which he decided that rather than use special effects to depict it, he would actually pull a steamboat over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle.   (Incidentally, Herzog’s narration makes a sly reference to the parallels between Treadwell and Klaus Kinski, the brilliant but volatile actor with whom his cinema is inextricably linked).    

What fascinates Herzog is that Treadwell was, in his way, a filmmaker and an actor.   He fashioned himself the star of the video footage he shot on his forays into the bear sanctuary, and much of “Grizzly Man” is comprised of this material.   Herzog is basically an editor of the Treadwell tapes here, and in that capacity and as narrator, Herzog the clear-eyed German engages in an honest, frank dialogue with the emotional American.   Though as a filmmaker he treasures the wonderful images Treadwell captured, Herzog is a critic of Treadwell’s philosophy, particularly his tendency to sentimentalize and anthropomorphize wild animals.   Rarely does a documentarian state so explicitly of his subject, “Here is where I agree and here is where I disagree”.  

By painting a complex portrait of a man too self-contradictory to be easily judged, Herzog has made Treadwell into one of cinema’s unforgettable characters, thereby ironically fulfilling what was, in a way, one of Treadwell’s goals.   A deeply angry man under his child-friendly exterior, Treadwell was both an innocent and a drug addict; a man possessed of a mighty lust for life who felt most alive when riding the edge of death.   He was at once utterly sincere and a shrewd constructer of myth and image; was acting a role for the camera at the same time he revealed to it his innermost feelings.  

Though Treadwell faked a lot in his life, his love for animals was real; you can feel it coming off the screen.   He was a quintessential American character, wild and free; and he lived to remind us that without vigilance we stand a very real chance of allowing those precious qualities to be lost.   “Grizzly Man” is the first film in some time which I’ve seen fit to garland with the accolade of   “essential viewing”.

- Sep 4, 2005  

Junebug

This debut feature from Phil Morrison is a timely and stylistically quirky comedy/drama which has much to say about the contemporary U.S. cultural divide.   “Junebug” is about the visit of Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicagoan who owns a gallery showcasing “outsider” art, to the boyhood home in North Carolina of her new husband George.   Their relationship is primarily physical; they know virtually nothing about each other’s values.   The new couple stay at George’s parents’ place; also living at the house is George’s younger brother Johnny (Benjamin McKenzie of TV’s teen soap opera “The O.C.”), and his very pregnant wife Ashley (Amy Adams), a wide-eyed innocent given to incessant stream-of-unconsciousness gibber.   A rural idiot savant whose bizarre artworks Madeleine adores happens to live nearby; for Madeleine the main motivation for the trip is to convince him to exhibit at her gallery in Chicago. The ensuing culture-shock and clash of values between Madeleine and the North Carolinians is the subject of the film, and in mainstream hands this fish-out-of-water scenario could easily have been fodder for a sort of broad sitcom.   Instead, “Junebug” subtly avoids stereotypes, revealing in these ordinary North Carolinians surprising qualities, unsuspected interests, unexpected insights.   Madeleine does not condescend to the Southerners.   Though occasionally bemused by them, she regards them as equal (albeit curious) specimens.   This is just as well, as their detectors for elitism are exquisitely attuned.   Madeleine speaks with an international, British-sounding cadence which signifies both her otherness and her intelligence, qualities which George’s mother finds especially threatening.   Amusingly, those very same qualities of Madeleine’s compel the simple Ashley to idolize her. Of the sets of opposites in U.S. culture that the film examines (e.g., North/South, urban/rural, sophisticated/provincial), perhaps the most salient is secular/religious.   There’s a stunning scene at a church dinner in which the pastor cajoles George into singing for the assembled, like he used to.   Up to this point George, with his devilish grin, has seemed definitively worldly.   We’re as stunned as Madeleine when he rises and sings a hymn, utterly sincerely and with great depth of feeling.   Even a rather militant partisan of secularism such as myself can’t help but be moved.   Madeleine’s expression as she watches her new husband sing is priceless and unreadable: it could be horror, or amazement, or wonder at who this guy is that she’s married.   When the assembled bow their heads in prayer, she looks ahead with mouth hanging open, studying them.   She wouldn’t think to participate, not because she objects but because it simply wouldn’t occur to do her to do so.   Admirably, “Junebug” does not necessarily take a side in the culture war.   As someone who has, I maintain that it’s correct to be distressed at the number of our countrymen and women for whom the Enlightenment apparently never happened.   At the same time, “Junebug” reminds us that it’s worth remembering that we don’t necessarily have them all figured out, and that not all of their values are necessarily distasteful.

- Aug 28, 2005  

Saraband

At age 87, Bergman returns with “Saraband”, which was shot on digital video for Swedish television in 2003 and is now receiving theatrical release in the U.S.   It’s a sequel to 1973’s “Scenes From a Marriage”, which if I’m not mistaken is a favorite of certain habitués of this site.   Bergman was the first director with whom I fell in love when I began to study film back around ’90.   He showed me what film could be at its very highest level, awakening in me a hunger for complexity, intensity and intelligence.   From him I learned that at its best, film must be relentlessly honest.   His work represented a good faith effort to grapple with truths about the human condition and its sorrows and joys, always with a bittersweet cognizance of our mortality.   Onward in my studies, I moved on to romances with other directors.   Still, one doesn’t forget one’s first love.   To this day, of all the masters it is Bergman’s work that I find most deeply satisfying.   

It’s been probably 14 or so years since I saw “Scenes” and actually I don’t think I’ve ever seen the complete work (it was originally a five hour series for Swedish television and was then edited into a feature of nearly three hours; I saw the feature, if I recall correctly).   However, I still remember it as a touchstone experience for one just awakening to film’s potential.   You’ll of course recall that “Scenes” chronicled the tumultuous marriage of Marianne (Liv Ullman) and the older Johan (Erland Josephson).  

As “Saraband” opens, Marianne, now in her mid-60s, is planning to visit Johan, now in his mid-80s, at his country home.   They haven’t been face-to-face since they divorced in the early 1970s at the end of “Scenes”.   Johan’s son Henrik, who is nearly Marianne’s age, lives down the way with his daughter Karin, a gifted young cellist.   Marianne finds all three still grieving the death a few years back of Anna, beloved wife to Henrik and mother to Karin.   The dynamic of father and son is cold and cruel, that of father and daughter deeply inappropriate.

As much as he is criticized for the emotional brutality of his films, I’ve always found Bergman’s work to be tremendously compassionate regarding our failings, and deeply cherishing of those brief, precious moments when we find shelter from the storm.   Towards the end of Marianne’s visit, Johan finds that he can’t sleep.   Tormented, he cries out.   Perhaps in the night he is most acutely aware of the black bird drawing ever more nigh his doorstep.   From the guest room, Marianne calls him to her bed and, lying next to each other again after all those years, they find some solace from the impending final night.  

Until I saw “Saraband” I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed Bergman.   How good to see Liv Ullman again at 65, wise and non-judgmental as Marianne and as an actress.   How good to hear once again the stark Bach chamber music over the titles, always a Bergman hallmark.   His work still makes nearly everything else seem to represent a failure of nerve, as though it is content to wallow in the superficial and shallow where he would strip the matter bare to its heart.

- Aug 21, 2005  

Broken Flowers

This latest film from Jim Jarmusch stars Bill Murray.   One thing about Bill Murray is that everyone likes him, from the hipsters who enjoy his work with cool directors such as Jarmusch, Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, to the connoisseurs of broad guy-movie fare such as “Stripes” and “Caddyshack”.   His appeal transcends race and gender, as well.   His persona turns out to be an excellent fit for Jarmusch’s wryly observational style, so that though it’s a “Bill Murray movie”, “Flowers” remains unmistakably a Jarmusch film.  

Murray plays Don Johnston (with the “t”: fun with names is a motif), an “over-the-hill Don Juan”, as his current girlfriend calls him as she’s walking out the door (she’s twenty years younger and played by the great Julie Delpy in what amounts to a cameo).   Don’s made a bundle in computers though he exhibits no outward manifestations of wealth.   One morning a letter drops through his door slot from an anonymous ex-flame informing him that he has a teenage son and that said son is on his way to visit him.   His neighbor and best friend Winston persuades Don to draw up a list of the women who could conceivably be the mother and pay them a visit, to learn as much as he can before his son arrives.   Winston promises to watch Don’s house should his son arrive while he’s on his journey.  

Murray’s expressive face conveys a tremendous amount wordlessly, particularly in his interactions with youth (or lack thereof).   On a bus, Don observes two young women cooing over a thrilling young man seated in the back.   Based only on Murray’s look and Jarmusch’s montage, I ascribed to Don an inner monologue: “That young man was me, once upon a time.   In fact, he could very well be my son on his way to visit me”.   In any event, the young man is on an adventure, about to create new memories, whilst Don is being “borne back ceaselessly into the past”, as Fitzgerald would have it.   In another scene, Don, seated in an airport terminal, observes a young stewardess working on a crossword puzzle.   She’s clearly stymied and on the verge of asking him for help with a clue, but hesitates.   There’s no doubt that in another era Don would’ve spoken to her.   Now he says nothing.  

“Broken Flowers” is a showcase for the talents of aging actresses for whom Hollywood can’t always find a role.   There’s the always brilliant Tilda Swinton, here with her British accent disengaged; Francis Conroy of “Six Feet Under”; Jessica Lange; and even Sharon Stone, who I’ve never thought was particularly good before but who is perfectly cast here.   Though Don never stayed in touch with any of them and has never been able to sustain a relationship, evidence is provided that he cared deeply for them in a moving (and again largely wordless) scene set in a graveyard.  

There are some big laughs in “Broken Flowers” but the film is ultimately as sad as it is funny.   It’s an elegiac mystery, haunted by the past.   You don’t quite know what to make of when it’s over.   Then over ensuing days it quietly takes up residence in your consciousness.

- Aug 14, 2005