Skyfall

 

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

--Alfred Lord Tennyson

These words are recited by Judi Dench’s M as a pointed retort to a committee confronting her with the idea that her time has passed as head of MI6.  This is “Skyfall,” the 23^rd James Bond movie for Eon Productions, the company created by Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and even as M says these words the old boy himself--played now by Daniel Craig--roars towards her on a motorcycle, hoping to thwart an attack.  Earlier in the film we'd seen him come back from the dead, where she'd left him.  His hands shake now when he holds a gun.  Craig’s soulful mug is grizzled, a palooka who’s taken lots of punches.

Seeing as how it's James Bond’s 50^th anniversary, I should admit that I’m a lapsed Bond fan.  The series captivated my imagination in the early 80s in the first flush of adolescence.  I vividly recall a first hormonal viewing of “The Spy Who Loved Me” aboard a cruise ship, in a dimmed lounge where I was enveloped by that swirling credit sequence and the Carly Simon theme song (“Nobody does it better...”), and afterwards stepping out onto the deck blinking in the afternoon sun, feverish.  One of my favorite tapes in 1983, when I was 12, collected all the theme songs up to the then-current one, “Octopussy” (“You’re an All Time High,” in case you’d forgotten). 

The same year, '83, we eagerly want to see “Never Say Never Again.”  It'd kicked up a stir because it wasn’t produced by Eon Productions, and--more importantly--because it featured the return of Sean Connery.  As a kid I preferred Roger Moore, an opinion which gave my friend’s dad paroxysms.  This was the same friend with whom I used to play The Spy Game, our self-invented role-playing game ranging over yards and woods, our imaginary scenarios based in no small part on the action we’d seen in James Bond movies. 

With adulthood I slipped off track: I didn’t see a single Bond through the Dalton and Brosnan years.  Thus it’d been awhile when I got reacquainted with the series with “Casino Royale” in 2006.  With “Skyfall” we’re now three films into the darker, tougher Daniel Craig reboot.  Judi Dench has been playing M since 1995, but in other ways we’ve been starting from scratch.  We hadn’t even had a Q, the gadget man.  “Skyfall” introduces a droll one in Ben Whishaw: bespectacled, pimply and young, looking like the kind of fellow who still wears a scarf his mother knitted him so he could look like Dr. Who.  (Karolyn found him sexier than Craig, a view I appreciated as a bespectacled man myself.)  And what of Miss Moneypenny, you ask?  Well, you’ll have to see.    

The story’s pretty straightforward.  In pursuit of parties unknown, the film takes us from the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul to a nighttime Shanghai to the glowing, floating casinos of Maucau before settling down in the United Kingdom.  Someone bent on hurting M is “outing” MI6 agents.  “Think on your sins,” blares the hacker’s scrawl across her laptop.  And M has sacrificed people she cares about, might even have loved--including Bond himself--for tactical reasons.  But then, so has Bond.  The ground is strewn with bodies in their wake.  Yet there’s no guilt or sentiment about the hard choices made.  

Sam Mendes directs this time, and the writing team is Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and former Chicago playwright John Logan.  Mendes has said his strategy was to go back to Ian Fleming’s novels rather than to look at the movies.  The result is that the filmmakers have maintained quite a tricky balance.  On the one hand they realize, wisely, that we want James Bond to remain always a cartoon fantasy on some level.  But they’ve also bet that it might be interesting to give it some pathos as well.  It worked in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” and it works here. 

Rounding out the A-list cast is Naomie Harris as a field agent, Albert Finney as the caretaker of Skyfall (Bond’s childhood manor in Scotland), and Ralph Fiennes as an up-and coming MI6 man with whom Bond and M find themselves at loggerheads.  Playing perhaps the key figure in any Bond movie--the villain--we have Javier Bardem. 

It’s shot by the poetic cinematographer Roger Deakins (the Coen Brothers, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).  Eschewing the shaky-cam that’s become the standard grammar in action movies, he seems to have approached each setpiece as a challenge: how can I make this as visually interesting as possible?  There is a hand-to-hand fight on the darkened, deserted upper floor of a Shanghai skyscraper with Bond and his foe silhouetted against the city’s pulsing, neon billboards that fill the night with color and wiggling whips, all refracted and reflected off the many glass facets.     

You could argue about which of the Bond films are really great movies.  And that’s just what the ace team who put together this film has tried to make.  I think what we get is...a pretty strong Bond entry.  Even at times a moving one, with themes of aging and mortality if you want them, and honing into sharper relief than ever the theme of modernity vs. tradition that was always an engine of the series.  It doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before, but it does it well.     

Perhaps that’s how we should rate a Bond movie: by how well it spins each of the genre’s elements. 

 

So, you’ve got to kick things off with an absolutely preposterous action sequence, with stunts so wild they make your face hurt from grinning.  We get that here, with a motorcycle chase through Istanbul's Grand Bazaar that climaxes with some really extraordinary business involving a hurtling train and a backhoe.  It’s got just enough physicality to clear the shoals of the cartoony. 

Next up should come the credit sequence, riffing with a wink on the movie’s iconography and themes.  It should be surreal and kaleidoscopic, over a big theme song belted out by a huge pop star.  Here we get an eye-popping underwater motif, and Adele sings the hell out of a not particularly memorable song. 

And what of that iconic Bond theme music?  David Arnold described so perfectly its “bebop-swing vibe coupled with that vicious, dark, distorted electric guitar, definitely an instrument of rock 'n' roll.  It represented everything about the character you would want: it was cocky, swaggering, confident, dark, dangerous, suggestive, sexy, unstoppable.”  When it finally surfaces out of the score here, it’s exhilarating.  I remember how “Never Say Never Again” felt like it had a hole in it since the producers did not have the rights to that music.  (And speaking of icons--spoiler alert!--we applaud when the silver-gray Aston Martin appears.) 

And what of the Bond girls?  It must be recorded that bikinis are pretty thin on the ground here, a disappointment.  That said, in her role as a kept woman, Berenice Marlohe is stunning in her slinky red dress.  We first encounter her on that floating Macau casino.  Marlohe is terrific in the scene as a watched woman who must appear to seduce Bond while suppressing how terrified she is of the villain.  She does it with her eyes and with a trembling lip, conveying worlds about what the villain is capable of.  Those eyes haunt me in a later scene when she’s bound and gagged and the villain forces Bond to take turns trying to shoot a shot glass off her head.  She'd put her hope in Bond's hands to save her.  He lets her down.  There's nothing heroic about this moment.  (In fact, he seems more upset later when the Aston Martin gets blown up.) 

And what of the villain, always crucial to a Bond picture?  Javier Bardem gives an interesting performance as a sort of fallen angel, a one-time star MI6 agent now presiding over an island ghost town.  His hatred for M is just the flip side of love.  He's homosexual, but in a nice touch his advances on a bound Bond fail to scandalize him (much to the villain's chagrin).  Bardem gives the character some psychological realism while still making him larger-than-life, as a proper Bond baddie should be, even imbuing him with a hint of the tragic.  It's in keeping with what Mendes and crew have accomplished with "Skyfall": walking a line between a fantasy of heroic hearts and a real world where heroics sink or swim in a sea of gray.     

 

Rating: ***1/2

--November 20, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

"Argo" and "Rhino Season"

Within a week we saw two movies revolving around the Islamic Revolution, the moment in 1979 when the Iranian people gave the boot to the Shah, a much-hated, U.S.-backed oppressive bastard.  The harvest was arguably even worse: the Ayatollah Khomeini, a popular, U.S.-bucking oppressive bastard.  It was interesting to see one take on events from a Western, Hollywood perspective (Ben Affleck’s “Argo”) and another from an Iranian one (Bahman Gobadi’s “Rhino Season,” which we caught at the 48^th Chicago International Film Festival). 

Rhino Season

This grueling, starkly beautiful Turkish drama tells the true story of Iranian poet Sahel Farzan (veteran actor Behrouz Vossoughi), thrown in prison in the wake of the Islamic Revolution for writing “anti-regime poetry.”  Monica Belluci plays his lover Mina, a daughter of privilege.  (There was a strong correlation between class and a secular, Western lifestyle: in their happy pre-revolution days, Sahel and Mina look very “seventies.”)  Mina’s disturbed driver (Yilmaz Erdogan) is madly in love with her, and during the score-settling that follows the revolution, this spurned, jealous man becomes a hidden interrogator, taking advantage of the revolution to separate the lovers in prison (and of a hooded conjugal visit to rape Mina). 

Behrouz Vossoughi's haunted eyes express regret beyond words, as does the score.  Dampening her natural gorgeousness in haggard sadness, Belluci performs with quiet dignity as Mina.  One might say that covering up Belluci’s gorgeous body in the chador is itself a crime, emblematic of all that was wrong with this revolution.  (In one scene, devout women undress her, mocking her viciously all the while as a whore.) 

Freed after decades, Sahel journeys to Istanbul.  He gazes up at the house on the sea where Mina has built a life with the family that flowered from the rape, including a daughter who has grown up to be a reluctant prostitute (Beren Saat).  It’s a life that even includes a complicated relationship with the driver, now grey.  Still, she never forgot Sahel, though told he was dead: whereas once she covered her cell in calligraphy, etching his words into the walls, now she tattoos his words onto people’s bodies.

Presented by Martin Scorsese, this is striking, deeply-felt filmmaking from Bahman Gobadi.  It grasps for a visual equivalent for that aspect of poetry that will always confound political hacks of all stripes: the way it speaks in images and metaphors.  Poetry is "political” only in the sense that it is a personal expression of the human heart…a yearning for freedom and love.  (At times we hear a woman’s voice reads Farzan’s poems).  Turtles fall from the sky while Saleh is left exposed to winter in a desolate courtyard.  He finds peace in shimmering underwater shots, even in the eye of torture.  Gobadi’s palette is wintry, his camera crawling against walls, gazing through rain-streaked windshields to create compositions of dramatic perspective. 

Rating: ***1/2

Key to ratings:

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

Argo

This thriller is the true story of a CIA agent’s (Ben Affleck) so-crazy-it-just-might-work plot to shepherd six U.S. foreign-service workers out of Iran in the wake of the Islamic revolution by having them pretend to be a film crew shooting a non-existent sci-fi movie ("Argo," inspired by the agent’s son's love for "Star Wars").  Affleck’s boy is about the same age as I would have been at the time.  Hollywood becomes an emblem of America's childlike view of the world, reflecting our fantasy view of ourselves as the universe’s good guys, but also of something truly great: this is the only land, after all, that could create a “Star Wars."  Hollywood, the dream factory, may be uniquely American, but it tickles something universal, for good or ill.  Even the guards think the posters for “Argo” are pretty cool.

A mainstream American picture that understands the world is a rarity, and Affleck gets the nuances, whether of U.S./Iran relations or movie politics in Hollywood.  The casting is top, including funny turns by Alan Arkin as a gruff veteran producer and John Goodman as the makeup guy roped in to make the “movie,” as well as Bryan Cranston as Affleck’s boss.  (The only choice that didn’t quite ring true for me, actually, is Affleck himself as the hero.)  The filmmakers have done an excellent job of making these people not only look but feel like they exist in the seventies.        

When he lets the tension grow out of a situation, Affleck is an excellent thriller director.  The opening sequence here, where protestors storm the U.S. embassy, is a nail-biter.  To watch it is to be thrown into the situation.  Sometimes, though, he gilds the lily, as in a scene where everything hinges on a suspicious guard's phone call to Arkin and Goodman and they’re kept from crossing the set as the phone rings.  Still, this is the kind of riveting night at the movies we’re always hoping for but of which we don't get enough.  You want to cheer, if only because as a traveler you know how hard it is to run the gauntlet at airports…even without fake passports.

Rating: ***1/2

--October 24, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

The Master

When we think of cult leaders we think of, say, Charles Manson.  But masters come in many guises.  Marx was one, in his way, to cite a name a little closer to home for me.  Cults, too, come in many forms.  A gang is perhaps a form of cult.  A political organization could be one.  They attract a certain type of lost soul; they supply a family.  (Manson called his group a "family.")

The cult portrayed in Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, "The Master," is of a more benign order, maybe.  The violence it does is mainly to the psyche.  Called "The Cause," it has a self-help patina and, as you've probably heard, it's based rather closely on Scientology.  But I think Scientology per se interests Anderson only as a jumping-off point to explore something universal and core: the age-old master/servant relationship, the human need for some sort of master.

More than any major filmmaker, Anderson delights in leaving you not knowing what to make of his work.  "The Master" is a curious, frustrating, exhilarating picture.  I can say I was never bored.  In fact, it kept my stomach in a state of nearly constant knots.  From scene to scene, what's at stake is nothing less than the soul of his characters.

It’s the story of Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a Navy man at the conclusion of World War II.  He's an alcoholic and an obsessive poon hound.  He's probably got PTSD.  Drifting from job to job (department store portrait photographer, field hand), he favors a mind-blowing regimen of rocket-fuel and paint-thinner cocktails.  As played by Phoenix, Freddie’s mug is a twisted rictus of pain.  Glowering, sneering, grimacing, cackling, he contorts his face and body like something out of a Bacon painting.  He's an animal. 

And he's got a broken heart.  We see flashbacks to the days when he courted a far younger woman (Madison Beaty), for whom he might have been a master. 

One night Freddie impulsively hops aboard an outbound ship, just because it looks festive.  The ship is commandeered by one Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-styled renaissance man (scientist, author, engineer, philosopher).  The passengers are followers of the Cause, the movement led by Dodd.  Its teachings are made up of the most remarkable inanities about tapping into past lives going back "trillions" of years.  

Warm but firm, Dodd embraces Freddie.  Almost immediately they form a deep, contentious bond (over Freddie's satanic brews, for one).  Freddie would seem to be a perfect recruit.  He’s reached a point in his life where he needs a master--or maybe it's better to say a teacher--as we all do at some point.  However, he remains in many ways untamable: a wild animal.  Will he remain his own man?

The Cause's "processing" is powerful therapy.  Dodd asks basic questions again and again, until Freddie changes his answers, or just their inflection.  "What is your name?" Softly:"Freddie Quell."  "What is your name?"  A little louder: "Freddie Quell." "Do your past failures bother you?" "No."  "Do your past failures bother you?" "No."  "Do your past failures bother you?"  "Yes."  He breaks down Freddie’s psyche.  Processing is about confronting honestly the hardest truths about  yourself.     

Full of the convert's zeal, Freddie kicks anyone's ass who expresses an opinion that the Cause might be any less than revealed truth, or that the emperor has no clothes.  Though Dodd calls Freddie "naughty" for these outbursts, he himself explodes when challenged publically. 

The movie can trance you out.  There's a long sequence, unspooling hypnotically (with Radiohead guitar player Johnny Greenwood's wall-to-wall score underneath), that intercuts an exercise where Dodd challenges Freddie not to react to insults from his son-in-law (Rami Malek), who can't stand Freddie because Dodd’s daughter, his wife, (Ambyr Childers) is hot for Freddie.  Anderson intercuts this with scenes in which Dodd commands Freddie to walk across a room, again and again, from wall to window, laying his hands on them and describing what he feels, over and over from morning to night.  “Again!” he calls from the dining room.  When Dodd decides it's enough, he abruptly calls it off.  

Amy Adams plays Lancaster's wide-eyed, slightly Stepford wife.  Quiet in public, in private she's steely, the queen behind the throne, the fire beneath his ass.  We get just quick glimpses of the psycho-sexual dynamics of their private life, but it seems pretty clear that she's dominant in that realm.  She's torn about Freddie, wanting to help him while also believing he'll be the undoing of the Cause because "he doesn't want to get better."     

Anderson, 42, deals in powder kegs, in men who are demented, full of rage.  He writes such juicy leads.  As an acting showcase, "The Master" is a lot of fun.  Let two great actors go as Anderson does and the results are going to be fascinating.  I was riveted just watching Hoffman and Phoenix react to what the other was doing in the moment.  

There's a moment I can't forget.  At a book release party, Laura Dern, playing a devoted follower, draws Dodd aside and innocently questions him about a point in the new text.  Doesn’t it directly contradict one of his past teachings? she wonders.  Dodd bursts out in a mirthless laugh, like a dam breaking.  Just for a second he allows himself to guffaw at his own colossal edifice of bullshit.  It's a chortle that says, "Yeah, well, I mean...it's ALL completely fucking arbitrary!!"  There's hysteria in it, and desperation, and contempt.  But it passes quickly, and then he barks at her, startling her.  

The contradictions mount.  This is a film of major performances that is too full of wild cards to be traditional Oscar bait.  It's a big-budget picture (and just plain big--shot in 70mm, though I had to be content with seeing it in 35).  Those things usually turn about as quickly and nimbly as a cruise ship.  Yet here there's a sense of improvisatory play.  When the big cameras were down, they brought in a page of Victorian porn and had Adams read it straight into a handheld, as though she were reading it to Freddie.  

And so what we're left with is the performances and some bravura filmmaking, like a surreal scene where we see a room from Freddie’s point of view: Lancaster Dodd is jovially holding forth.  He's the life of the party, drinking and singing a bawdy song.  All of the women, including the seniors, are naked.  There’s a fight in a department store where the camera dances and feints with the combatants in a balletic tracking shot.

It's utterly cinematic, while at the same time feeling like nothing so much as one of those opaque New Yorker short stories that you never quite forget, even it leaves you puzzling, "What was all that about?" 

Rating: ***1/2

--October 10, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

Beasts of the Southern Wild

"Your biology is related to the biology of plants and animals; they too share the life energies – what we might term 'body wisdom,' in contrast to mental wisdom. When you move deeper in dream, when you move into the sphere of the permanent energies of your body, your mental wisdom is gradually extinguished, body wisdom (as it were) rises, and you experience the collective order of dream, where the imagery is identical to the imagery of myth. And since some of these images have not been allowed to play a role in your life, you come into relation with them in surprise." --Joseph Campbell

"It's not only my dreams.  My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well...And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about.  It's as simple as that...this might be the inner chronicle of what we are." --Werner Herzog

Hushpuppy would understand instinctively what Campbell was talking about.  Rockin' rough and tough with her Afro puff, she's an intrepid little girl who lives down along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, down in the bayou below the levee.  Locals call it "the Bathtub."  She has a keen sense of herself as a creature in the natural order: she tells us so in a voiceover.  In America most of us live with a great deal of abstraction between us and nature, the physical world, wildness.  Hushpuppy is in harmony with it.  She puts her head to a pig's chest and we hear its heart beating.  As portrayed by tiny Quvenzhane Wallis, she's my favorite hero of the year so far.   

Her irascible daddy, Wink (Dwight Henry), lives around the way in a trailer balanced atop pilings above sea level.  He spears whole chickens and chucks them on the grill that's jerry-rigged outside his window.  He can go missing for days on end, then turn up wandering dazedly in a clearing in a hospital gown.  He’s an alcoholic, and a rage-aholic.  And he’s dying.  

Her mother is missing.  Maybe, Hushpuppy imagines, she lives in the lighthouse out on the horizon across the sea.  Left to fend for herself, Hushpuppy opens up a tin and boils cat-food stew in a big pot.  

Les Blank's documentaries about Cajun Country told of communities made up of the descendants of runaway slaves and pirates, and the Bathtub seems like it could be such a place.  It’s a real community, rare in contemporary America.  They live off the grid, by their own rules.  The lifestyle is celebratory, joyous, but there's a dark side: drink is as much scourge as it is liberator.  They are free, but it's the flip side of having nothing.  Still, there's a communal ethos: when the day's haul of crab comes in, it's dumped out on the table and shared with great festive gusto.  

From her teacher Hushpuppy learns about aurochs, giant hell-boars now extinct.  When the news arrives that a storm of biblical proportions is heading for the Bathtub, she imagines the fearsome beasts thawing from an iceberg and thundering their way towards her across the continents.  The people of the Bathtub stubbornly refuse to desert.  They'll fight any outsider who tries to evacuate them.  When the Bathtub floods, Hushpuppy and her daddy sail the seas, as the heroes of a fable should.  He teaches her to fish with her hands.         

These people have not been sentimentalized.  Fiercely protective of Hushpuppy on the one hand, Wink is a difficult, thorny man, a force of nature.  She has to learn to be strong enough to face this volatile, loud, irrational force.  Nature can be dangerous.    

This intersection of a levee, a hurricane, and poor people has caused some viewers to get hung up on this as a political parable.  It's an environmental fable, if anything.  But what director Benh Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar have actually given us an ecstatic sensory experience, and an emotional wrecking ball as well.  It makes us see the world through Hushpuppy’s eyes so thoroughly that by the time we get to a clinic on the mainland, it's the clinic’s antiseptic walls, its right angles, that seem strange.   

As for young Ms. Wallis's performance, she gives us much more than just a cute little firecracker.  She's called upon to exhibit an almost preternatural sense of her place in the natural order, and as an actor she understands this on an unspoken level.  By the end, she is a very, very small being who radiates something huge.  Courage, for one thing.  The life energies shoot through her, and through this film.   

It’s just real elemental stuff, a film pitched at the level of myth and human history.  Its images honor film's ongoing "inner chronicle of what we are," as Herzog would have it, or the "collective order of dream," as Campbell might.  And almost alone amongst contemporary films, it gave me images with which I came into relation in surprise.     

Rating: ****

--August 2, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

To Rome With Love

Woody Allen's latest European-city ensemble piece is a bit of a comedown after "Midnight In Paris" and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."  It’s a light sex comedy, a handful of watchable and agreeably amusing stories mainly to do with love.  It asks of us nothing but that we feel the same slight bemusement towards its characters that Allen does. 

And yet I still found many pleasures in it.  The sun-kissed images glow.  Having just explored Rome myself for the first time last year, I found being taken back to the Eternal City pleasurable in and of itself.  The movie intertwines with your own memories and experiences--of, say, climbing Michelangelo's steps to Capitol Hill.  Hey, there's Piazza Navona, Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps.  And isn't that the market where I’d pick up fruit in the morning? 

The term "Ozymandias melancholia," coined by one of the characters, perfectly sums up the mood this picture is going for.  In Allen’s films, time bends and fantasy and reality blend easily, just as in Rome the modern coexists with the ruins of ancient glory.  But whereas with "Midnight in Paris" he seemed somehow to tap into the essence of the city, and the magical conceit flowed from it, here he uses Rome mainly just as a backdrop.      

I enjoyed the radiant Italian actress Alessandra Mastronardi as the newlywed bride of a hapless young man (Alessandro Tiberi).  They're a small-town couple just off the train, ready to begin a new life in the big city.  She gets lost looking for a place to get her hair done.  Just when her head starts to nod in despair, she looks up to discover that the piazza has become a movie set.  All of her favorite Italian movie stars are there (including her unlikely heartthrob Antonio Albanese, rotund and bald).  Meanwhile, a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) appears at her husband’s hotel room door unbidden.  He ends up awkwardly yoked to her when his uptight big-city relatives barge in on them and assume she’s his new wife.

 Meanwhile, an architect (Alec Baldwin) who's made his name designing shopping malls strolls down a side street and comes upon an idealistic young architecture student (Jesse Eisenberg), who happens to be living with girlfriend Greta Gerwig in the very apartment in which Baldwin lived when he studied in Rome as a young man.  Ellen Page plays Gerwig's friend, a failed actress who arrives in town, making Eisenberg all hot and bothered with her adventurousness and her pseudo-intellectualisms.  As critic Ben Kenigsberg has noted, Baldwin counsels his younger self just like Bogie counseling Woody in “Play It Again, Sam.”

 

Elsewhere, an American (Alison Pill) falls in love with a young Roman (Flavio Parenti).  We meet her parents, Woody Allen and Judy Davis, on the plane to Rome.  I laughed at just about every scene Woody was in, from the first moment we see him (being neurotic, naturally, during turbulence).  He's playing an opera director at the end of a career long on loony ideas, short on public or critical éclat.  The film gets comic mileage from his temperamental differences with his daughter's suitor, who turns out to be a radical who feels keenly the exploitation of the working man.  When Woody overhears the young man's father (tenor Fabio Armiliato), a mortician by trade, singing in the shower, he listens in awe: here is one last shot at glory!  The joke is that Fabio, like most of us, can only sing in the shower. 

Meanwhile, an everyday Roman (Roberto Benigni, a sight gag even when he's just standing still) steps out his front door and finds himself mobbed by paparazzi.  What’s he done to become famous?  Nothing!  He’s famous just for being famous. 

The film is unhurried.  The length and steadiness of the camera’s gaze itself becomes droll.  It's a hallmark of Allen's recent style to hold an actor in close-up during a revelatory or epiphanous moment, as if the more he lets time play across the image, the more the moment’s magic or truth will reveal itself.  Sometimes it works.  There's a long close-up on Baldwin at the moment Page’s character breaks his younger self's heart.  So many emotions flit across his face.  The downside to this approach is that even the best jokes are overelaborated.  This farce runs out of fizz before it's over.  Still, I enjoyed dreaming these light dreams with these characters.

Rating: ***

--July 11, 2012

Key to ratings:

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