Moonrise Kingdom

I had a smile on my face pretty much continuously while watching Wes Anderson's new film, "Moonrise Kingdom."  Every shot is visually witty.  But then, Anderson is the very definition of an auteur: every frame of his films is an expression of his personality.  With this movie he's fully his quirky self, giving people who like him a lot to like and people who don't a lot to be annoyed about.  This is the best way to proceed, it seems to me.  

Orson Welles famously described the set of "Citizen Kane" as "the greatest train set a boy could ever have," and I imagine Anderson gets the same kick on his set.  Choreographed and art-directed down to the last detail, his imagery is immediately recognizable, like looking at life-size miniatures.  (One sometimes gets the feeling that he conceives of his characters as dolls he can move around his mise-en-scene.)  It can be surreal: I think of the tree house perched precariously in the sky at the top of a spindly tree trunk.  The tone is dry and wry, whimsical and deadpan. 

He proceeds by feeling more than by intellect, the way all artists must.  He picks the music for his movies in a way that makes emotional sense (at least to me), even if it has no literal connection to the action.  Here we get Benjamin Britten's "A Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra," cued to an extraordinary opening tracking shot, one of Anderson's trademark cross-section windows onto a world.  There's also a lot of Hank Williams.  (As usual with an Anderson picture, I walked out feeling like I must snatch up the soundtrack.)  

The island of New Penzance in 1965, where "Moonrise Kingdom" is set, is a land out of a storybook.  This is fitting, because Anderson, who co-wrote with Roman Coppola, has said that he conceived of the movie as something that his young heroine, 12-year-old bookworm Suzy (Kara Hayward), could put in her suitcase along with her other fantasy books.  She's packed her bags to run away with fellow 12-year-old Sam (Jared Gilman).  They are in love. 

The kids look around and they know immediately what they don't want to be like: the sad adults in their lives, especially as Suzy views them, watching her mom's assignations through her binoculars with local cop Bruce Willis.  Her parents, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, are both attorneys; they refer to each other as "counselor."  They do love each other, they do love the kids, and yet the family's come apart.  No one is to blame, exactly, yet they have to face it: their best has not been enough.  

Suzy sees a kindred spirit in the bespectacled, precocious Sam.  A "Khaki scout," he is never without his Davy Crockett coonskin cap, and he is an expert on all things to do with surviving in the wilderness.  He can row, fish, set up camp.  He is also an orphan.  She sees in him a fellow misunderstood "troubled child."  (Suzy shows him a pamphlet she found on the top of her refrigerator: "Coping With The Very Troubled Child."  This bit is personal: Anderson says he found the same pamphlet on top of the fridge when he was a kid.) 

The Khaki Scout camp (Camp Ivanhoe) is conceived of in terms of Fort Apache: think of a cavalry scene from a John Wayne movie, but with children.  Edward Norton is the scout master, intrepid and earnest, if hapless.  Harvey Keitel appears late in the film as his hero, a grizzled Khaki scout General.  Jason Schwartzman has an amusing turn as a slightly shady junior officer, who will marry the kids in exchange for a tennis ball can full of nickels.  The great Tilda Swinton, one-time underground film muse, is also on hand as "Social Services."  She reckons there's nothing wrong with Sam some shock therapy wouldn't fix.     

Spotting the influences on "Moonrise Kingdom" is fun.  There's a bit of "Peter Pan": when Suzy reads Sam and the other runaway scouts a bedtime story, it's Wendy and the lost boys.  When the kids huddle together it reminded me of my days playing an orphan in a community theater production of "Oliver" (another story about a little orphan boy).  The kids speak in a drolly precocious way that sometimes reminded me of classic "Peanuts," Charlie Brown, Linus and the gang.  And I saw a bit of Nicholas Roeg's "Walkabout" and even Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" in the way Anderson shoots a girl and a boy at the edge of nowhere, living out a fantasy of an existence without adult authority.  And this is just scratching the surface.  There's Godard and Truffaut...    

Children are the ideal protagonists for a filmmaker who never lost his sense of wonder.  But while it's a film about children, it's not really for them: it's as an adult audience that we find Suzy and Sam funny, precisely because they've yet to develop the adult habit of dissembling.  They're comically earnest in the way that only adolescents can be.  Suzy has a strikingly direct, penetrating gaze.    

As Suzy and Sam, Hayward and Gilman are direct and natural.  Crucially, they are not embarrassed.  They are given a first-kiss scene.  After a dip, they dance in their underwear by the sea to a French pop 45 played on her battery-operated record player.  Suzy in particular is right on the cusp of nascent sexuality, and if Anderson is not afraid to make us feel a bit of the anxiety her parents feel about that, Suzy herself feels none.

   

There's usually theater in Anderson's movies, and here it's a community production of "Noye's Fludde" (Noah's flood), staged at a church, with music by none other than...Benjamin Britten.  (We've been told by Bob Balaban's narrator that a Biblical flood is coming.)  But then, Anderson's movies retain the feel of a play put on for the grown-ups.  It's fun to see him get movie stars to behave like a community troupe.  Everybody in the film seems to have had a great time making the movie: you can feel it on the screen.  Bill Murray, of course, is the perfect ingredient to spike Anderson's films: he keeps the whimsy from becoming arch or twee.  

(P.S. If you stick around for the closing credits, you get to hear Alexandre Desplat's original score given a fascinating "Young Person's"-style breakdown, narrated by young Sam.)  

Rating: ****1/2

--June 7, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

The Cabin In The Woods

 Part of the fun of this horror/comedy picture (and I debated which genre to place on the weightier side of that slash) is not so much discovering its "secret" as it is teasing out the levels on which it's about the whole idea of watching.  At first we have what seem to be two unrelated story-lines.  We open on an everyday, mundane water-cooler chat between two middle-aged office workers (Bradley Whitford and the great Richard Jenkins).  Cut to a group of stock horror movie teenagers--the athlete, the fool, the scholar, the "virgin", the "whore"--gearing up for a stock horror movie situation: a few fun days in...well, a cabin in the woods.  Is the cabin out in the middle of nowhere?  You bet it is.  Do they meet a poxy old guy on the way up who leaves the air fetid with foreboding?  Of course they do. 

The in-your-face titles fill the screen startlingly, interrupting a scene "Funny Games"-style, a nod that tips you off to what the movie is going to try to do: rib the audience for its bloodlust and enact the bloody ritual at the same time.  And it is a ritual to go to a horror movie: that's the point.  While this movie cannot be as shattering as the Michael Haneke picture, the fact that it will actually be seen by the target audience makes its critique perhaps even more subversive.  

Once at the cabin, the kids must of course explore the basement.  It's all part of the ritual, you know.  The find a jumble of Pandora's boxes: a sinister Rubik's cube-like puzzle, spooky porcelain dolls, a murdered mountain girl’s dusty journal, etc.   

  

I will leave you to discover the connection between that opening scene and what develops, but let's just say it involves puppet masters, and none moreso than the guys behind the camera, writer Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard.  They've been craftily playing with genre elements ever since their days on "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", a show that'll always have a special place in my heart.  The puppet-master metaphor actually suits Whedon's dialogue, which if it has a weakness it's that it sometimes feels like it's emanating not from the mouths of individuals so much as it's been placed their by the puppet-master, Whedon. 

That said, the script is as quick and quippy as you’d expect.  What you won't be expecting are the nasty jolts.  There's an interesting sphere where Whedon's and Quentin Tarantino's concerns overlap, but the gore here crosses over into the grindhouse territory we associate with Tarantino or his friend Eli Roth.  

Whedon and Goddard let the metaphors (and the meta fun) fly.  There is a surprise star turn by a famous actress playing a "Director".  (Nudge, nudge).  And the movie ends with a bravura, hilarious sequence which it would be a crime to spoil, but let's just say they bet big on the basic premise that they can make us laugh and jump at the same time, and they cash it all in.  (They do miss a trick or two along the way: the kids find a two-way mirror, which would make a nifty metaphor for the movie screen if anything was ever done with it, which it isn't.)  

In "The Cabin In the Woods", the teenage blood being spilled is for us, the horror movie audience: we're the hungry gods who must be appeased.    

We haven't forgotten those days of sleepovers, when sitting on the floor watching R-rated horror and eating pizza seemed to be about as good as life got.  Neither have the people who made this movie.  

Rating: ***1/2

--April 26, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

The Kid With A Bike

Watching this simple yet riveting Belgian film, I noticed that I hadn't sat with such a rapt audience in some time.  I think it's because it's told with such tremendous urgency by the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc.  There isn't a dead scene in it.  As much as any thriller, it keeps your adrenaline pumping. 

It's a little story about forgiveness and a young boy, Cyril (Thomas Doret).  Already ditched by his father (Jeremie Renier from "L'Enfant") in a boarding school, he refuses to believe it when the man simply disappears one day.  He argues to school officers that surely his dad would have at least left behind his cherished bicycle, the one thing in the world that he can call his own, that gives him some sense of agency and freedom.  

Fleeing from those officials, he plunges blindly into a doctor's waiting room in his old neighborhood and literally pulls a woman, Samantha (Cecile De France) into the frame--and into the film, and into his life--with a crash.  As the men try to pry him loose, he clasps to her for dear life.  The woman's response is telling.  She does not try to wrench herself free.  She is not particularly ruffled.  She merely says this: You can hold me, just not so tightly.  

She takes him in.  The Dardennes have a good feel for life--work and play--in this working-class "estate" (neighborhood).  Looking for a father figure, Cyril is taken under the wing of a neighborhood ruffian (Fabrizio Rongione), and we're left waiting for the other shoe to drop.   

There is so much pain and shame in not being wanted; as Cyril young Thomas Doret wears a sullen, stubborn frown sheilding a coiled ball of hurt.  When it breaks, it lashes startlingly.  (There is no score to the film, but that makes the spare bursts of music that break free in these moments--stabs of Beethoven's Emperor concerto--even more striking and expressive.)  It is a remarkable performance, raw, natural, reminding us how keenly children feel.  

As Samantha, Cecile de France manages to suggest a woman who's had a life that has made her the person we see before us: kind but no pushover, she has a tough core.  And yet she is endlessly patient with Cyril.  We never do find out why this woman should be so prepared to love and forgive this boy--to love him even when he's impossible to like, even when he hurts her--and yet we believe it every step of the way.      

"He never got enough love" is the sarcastic cliche about at-risk youth who end up hurting people.  As we watch this boy stumble and flail, we see that there's hard truth behind that oft-mocked sentiment.  Cyril has found someone who will accept the love he has to give--and maybe that's all Samantha ever wanted, as well--but it's learning to accept her love that is the hardest thing.   

No one shouts about redemption in "The Kid With a Bike".  They just get it on with it, rolling forward, letting the past recede behind them. 

Rating: ****

--April 17, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

In Darkness

This Polish production tells the true story of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), who when we meet him is a petty criminal taking advantage of the social breakdown under Nazi occupation.  There's a bit of nightmare imagery from early in the film that stays with me: Socha and his partner in crime are beating a getaway through the woods after burgling a house.  As they run they look to the side: running parallel to them some distance away is a group of naked, terrified women being chased by gleeful, whooping Nazi soldiers with machine guns.  The women's skin is pale grey, ghostly in the twilight woods. 

This sense of a world thrown over to the sheer pleasure of absolute, arbitrary power, the fun of fascism--of sadism--has been perhaps captured truly on film only by Pasolini's "Salo", a film that happens to be almost unwatchable (as it should be).  In "In Darkness" casual murder is always in the background, while everyday people go about their everyday lives.  At heart, though, the film is the story of the ties that bind even admist a world turned upside down.  

Socha works in the sewers, and one night when the Germans are having a field day liquidating the Jewish ghetto he finds himself swept beneath the streets along with people scrambling for shelter.  Initially spotting a great profit opportunity--he'll shelter them for cash--the real-life Socha ended up keeping them alive for 14 months in the sewer, at great peril to himself and his family.  (In the film he has a "friend," a Polish army officer who keeps himself closer than an enemy, whose ear misses no slip, whose eye is an antenna for anything suspicious.)  Today Socha is recognized as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations". 

If you've seen Andrzej Wajda's "Kanal" (1956), you know the buried-alive experience of being stuck in Polish sewers.  The atmosphere is dank, clammy, claustrophobic; you're down there with the rats.  Director Agnieszka Holland's frames are as leached of natural light as they are pregnant with tension.  When the camera comes up to the surface and palette goes wintry, you might find your eyes have to readjust.  A child's red boots cuts the palette, but in a way rather too redolent of the similar technique Spielberg used in "Schindler's List".

As Socha, Robert Wieckiewicz begins by exuding the crude gusto and cheer of an infantile man who doesn't think about much beyond satisfying his animal needs.  His performance goes on to convey the dawning in Socha: the less he acts out of self-interest, the more human he becomes.  Ah well, the Jews killed Christ, Socha shrugs to his wife early in the film as she washes him in a basin.  Well, so was Mother Mary a Jew, replies his ruddy wife, and the apostles and even Christ himself.  Jesus was a Jew?, asks Socha, surprised.  

Throughout the film the people in the sewer are allowed to be human, not noble victims.  They squabble for food, they cheat, they desert, they screw.  A few stories stick out.  One of the girls, a sister, runs away and ends up in a concentration camp, where she rather likes it better.  A square-jawed, tough man (Benno Furmann) ventures outside the sewers on a mission to infiltrate the camp and bring her out.  Mainly, however, these refugees nurture the flame of the life-force under circumstances you'd think would drive you insane.  (Some it does.)  I think of the image of the woman becoming naked and bathing in the run-off from a flood.  Furmann's character encounters her and they share a fervid embrace. 

"In Darkness" is well made and watchable.  Unlike something like "Salo", though, after you watch it, all you've done is seen another movie.  This is not to say it is without effect: by the end you want to bolt from your seat, out into the fresh air.  Still, it is possible to go on with your evening, and even to go to dinner. 

(There was a jarring note at the screening I attended: a woman cackled from behind me when the Russian liberators roll in and Socha is able to proclaim proudly to onlookers, as his charges make their squinty-eyed emergence from the darkness, "These are my Jews!")  

The value of this film is to tell the story of what a handful of people had to endure.  (Curiously, though, for a film that takes that it as its project to show the specifity of experience--and for such a long movie--we never feel like we quite get to know them.)  And it recognizes an accidental yet real hero, Leopold Socha.  The film does well to remind us that his sort of heroism is just as surely a part of human nature as is our seemingly bottomless capacity to inflict pain.  That capacity is noted in an end title that "In Darkness" takes as its epigram: "As if we need God to punish each other."

  

Rating: ***1/2

--March 8, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

Pina 3D

Not since something like "Kurosawa's Dreams" have I had such an exhilarating sensation at a film of experiencing a waking dream.  I guess "Pina 3D" is a documentary but it's really more of a poem by Wim Wenders. You're watching performances of pieces by the late choreographer Pina Bausch, staged in all kinds of striking indoor and outdoor settings.  Not being a student of dance I didn't know what to expect, but this was visceral, primal, funny.  The 3D gives you such a tactile feeling of being near these bodies, and an almost out-of-body feeling of moving through these spaces. Bausch died recently; from the interior monologues of the dancers you get an idea of what a transformative figure she was in their lives.

 

There's vaudeville in her work, and Brecht and Beckett.  Several times we revisit the progress of a procession planting deliberate, cadenced steps, their arm movements precise, emphatic, their faces expressing the joy of being alive and moving.  When in the end we see them from a distance and in profile, dressed in primary colors and moving along the edge of a ridge,  it reminded me of the end of "8½" and the great pageant of life.

  

In one piece we watch generations trade off, children, adults, seniors, each taking their turn on the floor.

  

Bausch's dance is dirty, literally: in the opening number dancers charge across a dirt-strewn stage, their ropy, sinewy bodies and flimsy garments becoming streaked with dirt.  Raw  meat, raw women's eyes, imploring, telegraphing fear and need as urgent as a junkie's for a fix.  When the men and the women finally come together there is a sexual frisson.

  

The stakes are as high as possible in Bausch's work: this is life and death.  Dance is the life force.  "Dance, dance or we are lost," said Pina. 

  

Rating: ****

--February 17, 2012

Key to ratings:

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