"The Descendants" and "A Separation"

Here are two films that refuse to render anyone a stereotype.  And in that refusal they give us moments when we see ourselves in people whom we might at first not even like.  Nobody is only who they seem to be on first impression.  As it happens, both are about dysfunctional families; both feature teenage daughters and train their eye on very specific though rather disparate places: Hawaii and Tehran. 

The Descendants

I always enjoy George Clooney.  I like the way he undercuts his leading-man good looks with a sense of humor about himself.  Here he plays Matt, an at-sea father of two girls, a teenager, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and a prepubescent, Scottie (Amara Miller), who's suddenly rendered a single dad when a boating accident leaves his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) in a coma.  The live on The Big Island.  The film gives us a feel for what it's like "living in paradise" as a local, not a tourist.  The men really do wear Hawaiian shirts (or, I suppose, just "shirts" over there, same as French onion soup is just "onion soup" in Paris).  Hopping between the islands seems like a more-or-less everyday part of life. 

Descended from a Hawaiian queen and a wealthy banker, Matt and his cousins are the trustees of a huge parcel of gorgeous land on one of the smaller islands.  Modern times force them to orchestrate a sell-off.  Various corporate outfits come a-courting. 

Clooney is moving here, and in a way I've haven't seen him be before.  Matt is bobbing on a sea of emotion that suddenly becomes a maelstrom, and that is because of a blindsiding revelation: shortly after the doctors tell him there's nothing they can do to bring Elizabeth back, he learns--and from Alexandra--that she had been cheating on him.  She'd planned to leave him.  The extraordinary thing is he decides that everyone who loved her should have a chance to say goodbye...including the guy with whom she was having an affair.  With family in tow, Matt sets off to track him down.

The scene where he says goodbye to Elizabeth felt very personal to me.  I won't tell you what he says to her, except to say that I heard in his conflicted words the things that, with the benefit of years and hindsight, I would have liked to have said to my ex if I'd ever had a chance to say goodbye.  (She's not dead, she just ran off with another guy.  So I guess it's not really the same, is it?)

Director Alexander Payne and Clooney aren't afraid to allow Matt to be an asshole at times, which is to say, to be human.  That's what I like about Payne's work: he cuts the heartfelt and the sentimental with the crass, the sweet with the tart.  There is always a moment or two in his films when you're brought up short by how pungently real he keeps it.  The result is that the moments of sentiment also feel honest, and earned.  In the past he sometimes hasn't gotten the contrast quite right, with the result that the whole thing felt a bit curdled.  While "The Descendants" is not as funny as some of his past work, to my taste he gets the tone right here.    

The revelation here is Shailene Woodley.  At first impression she appears to be a don't-give-a-shit, sullen, drug-and-drink-sodden drip: in other words, a good, typical American teenager.  But she turns out to have a real head on her shoulders.  She's so resourceful: she knows exactly what to do in situations where the middle-aged man is at sea.  Turns out they need her, and she surprises herself by how much she ends up, if not exactly needing, then at least tolerating them.  And from a teenager, that's about as true an expression of love as you're going to get.  

I like the scene where dad doesn't even know where to begin when young Scottie reveals that, during a visit to one of her little friend's house, her friend had tuned the TV to porn.  She didn't see any of it; still, he's stammering when Alexandra jumps in: your friend is a twat who's just going to turn out to be a methhead and get used by a bunch of stupid boys.  You can see dad in the background wavering, as if to say, well, I mean, come on, that's a little...but it's too late, Alexandra is off.  Repeat after me, she says to her sister: she's a twat.  The little girl runs off yelling "twat, twat, twat". 

Alexandra's constantly-in-tow boyfriend, Sid (played just right by Nick Krause), who at first blush seems to be a snide little asshole of the "bro" persuasion, turns out to be a really good kid.  I like the way he starts calling Clooney "boss". 

And then there is Robert Forster as Elizabeth's father.  On first impression he is gruff, homophobic, hostile, offensive.  But then his wife is led into the room; we observe that she is lost to Alzheimer's, and how patiently he attends to her.  And in the hospital, the family cracks the door and watches this man, this man who in his hurt has been hurtful to them, hover over his daughter.  She is dying, as per her wish not to be kept alive in a vegetative state.  Whispering, he gently lays a kiss upon her forehead, once again the loving, proud father saying goodbye to his little girl. 

We never know what someone else is going through, to what challenges they are called upon to rise, what they do for other people, what love and care they show when no one's looking.  Whatever preconceived image or shorthand notion we have in our head of someone else, it is always incomplete. 

There's a terrific wordless scene at the end.  They're just sitting around watching "March of the Penguins", but I think it says a lot about family and about how far they've all come.  When you come to a place where you can accept other people for what they are, that's growing up, isn't it?  One of the themes of "The Descendants" is how carelessly moderns treat beauty, the past, their own heritage.  We sense that these people will be treating each other with more care from now on.   

Rating: ***1/2

Key to ratings:

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

A Separation

Here's a story from director Asghar Farhadi about life in today's Tehran.  It begins as  a story about a couple who have what you might call irreconcilable differences.  The wife, Simin (Leila Hatami), wants a divorce, not because her husband, Nader (Peyman Moadi), is a bad man--on the contrary, he's modern, more or less secular, and views a woman as his equal--but because she wants to raise their teenage daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), outside of Iran.  He refuses to leave because he must care for his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who has Alzheimer's.  The judge refuses to grant the divorce.

Like "The Descendants", this is a film about a famly torn asunder and a teenage girl caught in the middle, but "A Separation" takes place (and was itself made) in a culture that is in many ways the inverse of ours.  Sarina Farhadi can't go about in an itsy-bitsy bikini like Shailene Woodley, nor is it available to her (or for that matter even thinkable to her) to tell her parents to go fuck off.  One of the themes of "The Descendants" is that very American lack of respect for authority--rather a healthy aspect of American culture in my view, certainly the feature that distinguishes the aspects of our culture I like the most from those I like the least--but the Muslim culture we see here seems to carry rather an implied question for American audiences: when does a sort of generalized lack of respect carry over into lack of respect for yourself?  

Nader hires a devout woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), to care for his father; she has a hotheaded fundamentalist husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), who's always in some kind of a scrape with his creditors.  Razieh always has her little girl in tow, and her expressions provide some of the movie's most heartbreaking moments.  It turns out Razieh is pregnant, though it's hard to tell because of the garments in which she's draped.  

In a moment of justifiable anger everything changes: the usually gentle Nader has an altercation with Razieh.  Suddenly both legal and physical threats loom, with the secular couple on one side (though not exactly brought together) and the devout couple on the other.

The charges leveled against Nader are very, very serious.  Here again we get a look at the Iranian judicial system, which seems to consist of a judge who can barely be bothered to look up from his books listening as both sides plead their case.  (Of course, the idea of an impersonal bureaucracy will not be altogether foreign to American viewers).   

"A Separation" is on one level about class.  As in this country, there is a strong correlation between religion, education and class.  If anything, Nader seems conscious that he not use privilege and class bias against these poor religious people: at many points he actually goes out of his way to give his accusers, Razieh and Hodjat, a break.  

And as in any culture, religious fundamentalists are scary, because irrational people are dangerous.  Hodjat seems quite capable of hurting Nader and even his family in his quest for justice.  When he shows up wielding a Koran at Termeh's school and insists that her teacher, a witness in the case, swear on it, it is a matter that no one takes lightly.  And Hodjat finally gets the judge's attention when, frustrated that the man refuses to automatically rule in his favor, he answers the judge's suggestion that he calm down by suggesting to the judge that he'd better pray to God.  Now he has the judge's full attention: for the first time he looks up and directly into Hodjat's eyes.  That was a serious thing to say, and an insulting one.  He immediately orders Hodjat be thrown in the clink. 

But even Hodjat is not a caricature.  At one point Nader suspects that Razieh's loss was actually suffered at her husband's hands.  Maybe it was.  He's certainly shown a propensity for violence and a self-destructive streak.  But when Hodjat asks him, Why do you people always think we beat our wives as though they are animals?, you can see in his eyes that he is genuinely wounded.

 

Farhadi gives us imagery that emphasizes everyone's apartness.  People are often divided in the image by a door frame or window panels.  He stages an early scene in the apartment so that the camera moves constantly through the space; while Simin and Nader are constantly in motion, they are never together.  It's like a ballet.  Termeh watches from her desk; she can see everyone through the windows, gazing across the central courtyard the apartment wraps around. 

And the way Farhadi stages the altercation is also subtle.  He shows us enough so we can see that something happened, but he does not show us all of it.  What really happened is in play.  Who's at fault?  Everybody and nobody. 

We recognize that kind of situation.  At a time when Israel prepares to bomb Iran at least partly in our name, it's especially important that American audiences see "A Separation", which does not validate the view you came in with but shakes you up, makes you feel what these people feel, and shows you that one truth that all good art ultimately reflects: things are nothing if not complicated.

Rating: ****1/2

--February 10, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Here's an engrossing Cold War spy thriller for adults.  If Bond is the fantasy, here is the prosaic reality.  It has a very British way of respecting its audience's intelligence.  I'm not going to say much about the plot because (1) especially in a movie like this, it's better for you to discover that for yourself; (2) you’re not really going to be able to follow all of it anyway (I couldn't); and (3) I’d argue that the plot is not really what the film is about. 

Instead it is an elegy on betrayal and trust, both personal and geopolitical, which expresses those themes through character, and none moreso than that of George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman in a haunted, quiet performance that is still resonating with me.  So many thrillers define a character by one trait (if that), but the people in "Tinker Tailor" are real human beings, down to the bit parts.  Very quickly you get an idea of who these people are, thanks to the writing and deft work from the cream of the British acting crop.    

Adapted by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan from a John Le Carre novel I haven't read, suffice it to say that "Tinker Tailor" focuses on a handful of men who run MI6, the foreign relations branch of British intelligence.  Seated around the table are Toby Jones, Ciarin Hinds, John Hurt, David Dencik and Colin Firth, this last of whom is a bit too aware that he has the dashing looks and charisma Smiley lacks.  We see that MI6 is  a close-knit outfit, a kinship, though rife with all the rivalries that are the flip side of intimacy: as much rivals as colleagues, the men have an Oxbridge way of cutting on each other.  (There is perhaps some English class-system stuff going on here as well, though I'm not versed enough in the niceties of accent and argot to pick up on it.)

Smiley is right-hand man to the boss, Control (John Hurt).  Though at the beginning the two of them are forced out of MI6 by the government, when secret allegations arise that one of the members of their star chamber is a double agent for the Russians, the government decides that Smiley is the perfect man to conduct the secret investigation. 

Also at play in the story is Tom Hardy as a young spy who has fallen in love with a woman (Amanda Fairbank-Hynes) mixed up with an easterner that MI6 has had its eye on.  Hardy doesn't want to end up with the regrets he sees in the older men: he's ready to chuck it all in for her.  He can see that a man like Smiley has ended up, essentially, alone.

Smiley's method seems to be: "Say little, do little."  He is comfortable with silence.  He knows that other people are not, that they will often say more than they intend just to fill it.  Life has been such for him that he has no real attitude towards it except a kind of acceptance, though there's something just slightly wry, ironic about the cast of his mouth.  He is steely under his facade of utter calm.  Oldman lets the shadow of regret play around his features.  The film feels haunted because Smiley is: he knows that his wife, whom we never see, has betrayed him with another man.  Still, he gives no outward indication that he even suspects this most intimate of betrayals.  Smiley is the epitome of "stiff upper lip," and in fact the film sometimes seems to be a meditation on the British character.         

He is a man who has sustained much, though only in one scene does he show it, where he tells the story of his harrowing meeting with “Carla”--evidently some Russian agent of legendary mendacity--over scotch.  You see in his eyes how deeply rattled, even haunted, he was by the encounter.  

Smiley goes calling on a former colleague (Mark Strong) who is in a sort of witness protection progam for spies, having assumed the identity of a rural schoolteacher.  Smiley does not advance on his former colleague right away.  In fact, he stands at a distance for some time with his back turned, looking out over a pond, allowing himself to be seen.  The "teacher" spies him and understands the implication of the visit.  He turns to a young boy, an outsider like himself whom he's taken under his wing.  Look at that man, he says to the boy.  Who do you suppose he is?  Why does he stand with his back turned to us?  Does he not like us?  Even to this man, Smiley is an enigma.      

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema keeps the images deeply focused, everything sharp and clear in a world where nothing is.   The look and feel of the early 70s is nicely evoked, showing how the counterculture was absorbed even into the MI6: the hairstyles, the sideburns, the clothes, an easygoing manner about sex.

There are no real climaxes here.  Tomas Alfredson directs in a style that favors elision and portent.  He knows how to sustain tension, particularly in a scene where a young agent (Benedict Cumberbatch) attempts to smuggle a file for Smiley from under the noses of the agency.  Still, if you're looking for big action set-pieces, this is not the film for you (though it will stay with you long after you've forgotten those).  There are no heroes, no heroics in this spy story.  These are grown men in the real world.

But I’d also argue that the plot is not really what the film is about. 

Rating: **** 

--January 30, 2012
 
Key to ratings:

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

Shame

Musing about "sex addiction," Stephen Merchant once wondered, can you be addicted to something you never actually get?  If so, he said, then boy am I!  I hear you, Merch.  

I had a friend at an old job who liked to go through "The Sun-Times" in the lunchroom and pronounce his views on the subject of each article.  One afternoon there was an article about sex addiction.  He lowered the paper.  Look, he proclaimed skeptically, if that's an addiction, then every man is addicted!  (Not sure why he left the ladies out of his formulation.)  And I guess that's the crux: at what point do you cross the line separating libido from addiction? 

Perhaps when it becomes a problem in your life.  Shot by director Steve McQueen (with whom he made the unforgettable "Hunger") so that he often looks like an embalmed corpse, Michael Fassbender's character in "Shame", Brandon, is able to hide his addiction behind a facade of New York success.  He's good-looking and great with women (so long as they're strangers), his bearing not so much suave or smooth as respectful and charming.  He makes eyes at a pretty young woman on the subway and she flushes with fantasies about what it would be like if he followed her off the the train.  (If I tried that out, I'd get "What are you looking at, you bug-eyed, bespectacled, high-forehead, crooked-nose little freak?").  A lifestyle of porn, hookers, compulsive wanking and sex with strangers: this all worked for him, until it didn't.  What precipitates the collapse?  The arrival of his sister, Sissy, played by Carey Mulliigan. 

What deeply damaged, self-destructive people, this brother and sister, not that McQueen judges them.  Brandon outwardly seems to resent the hell out of Sissy, the way she's a slob, the way she can't sort out her life.  But we begin to see that what he can't abide is the intensity of the strange bond between them.  We gather that they must have survived a monstrous childhood by turning to each other.  (There are scars up and down her arm where she's cut herself).  Her expressions of intimacy cross the line into the slightly off, and seem to make him quite nervous: she doesn't bother to cover her nakedness from him at one point; at another she crawls into bed and snuggles up to him.  What it is, is he loves her, and love is the one thing he can't bear.  Brandon gets through life precisely by not making any connections, and here she comes, dredging up the past.  In one scene he drives her from his room in a sudden outburst so startling that it surely took a year or two off my life.   

A would-be sex scene between Brandon and a co-worker rings true.  They had had one date where they had a real rapport, though he has, for once, been awkward and halting.  When she undresses it's not like how one of his prostitutes does it.  She's a little embarrassed, laughing at her own attempt to be sexy, a little self-conscious but aroused and encouraging, reacting to his touch with real arousal, having fun.  It is very human.  It's also the only scene in the movie that even comes close to being arousing--"Shame" makes you feel like having sex about as much as "Requiem for a Dream" makes you feel like shooting up a big syringe full of smack--and yet it's the one time in the film that Brandon can't get aroused.  She is kind and understanding about it, but in his frustration he treats her coldly.  It is a painful moment.

There is another shot that stays with me: a close-up of Brandon's anguished face during a pile-up with two women.  It's twisted into a scarifying grimace.  At a moment that should be bliss, the depth of sadness in his eyes is bottomless.  It's a silent scream.  In "Shame" sex is not the life force: it's a death trip, a reach for oblivion. 

I also won't forget the scene where Fassbender and his hapless, clumsy boss, who always strikes out with the ladies, go to see Sissy sing.  She sings "New York, New York" in a sustained, heartbreaking close-up.  (And New York is very much a character in the film).  When she comes to sit with them afterwards, the boss immediately senses in Mulligan a woman who for once is not put off by his flailing lines, and who might probably even sleep with him.  Even though it's nothing to do with him--they're all adults--Brandon is clearly disturbed that his boss is about to score with his sister.  We're as uncomfortable as he is.

And so "Shame" stays with you--you'll still be thinking about it days later--and yet by the end, I was as numb as the hero.  There were moments when I was meant to be devastated and, quite honestly, I couldn't feel a thing.  We watch a descent, but we can't go there too.  It's so smartly acted: Fassbender makes himself naked here, not just physically but emotionally as well.  And yet I found "Young Adult" a much more devastating film about a human being's collapse, Charlize Theron's vulnerability much more human and sad.  In draining all color out of Fassbender's face, McQueen has also drained the film, giving it all the pallor, texture and warmth of snow-dusted ice on a frozen lake.  This is no doubt intentional: even the walls of Brandon's apartment are white, and, without giving too much away, it's partly for that reason that a scene very near the end does hit home: when Brandon makes a terrible discovery, the red everywhere is a violent, shocking contrast to the blanched pallette to which we've become accustomed.  In this scene, at least, anguish and love finally crack through the ice. 

Rating: *** 

--January 25, 2012
 
Key to ratings:

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

The Artist

When was the last time a feature-length silent movie got released?  One thinks of Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie" in 1976, and there is the work of Guy Maddin.  But Maddin's films are more about using the silent style as a mode or surreal language in which to paint his own very personal, askew visions.  "The Artist" is a straighforward silent film, a comedy set in the same era as "Singin' In the Rain", which is to say the end of an era.  It has a score meant to invoke the effect of a live orchestra accompaniment.  It's in black & white.  It has intertitles.  It begins in 1927, the year of the release of "The Jazz Singer", and on the eve of revolution: the advent of sound.  It features a delight of a performance by Jean Dujardin (brilliantly invoking Gene Kelly) as matinee idol George Valentin.  How expressive the faces had to be then.  Dujardin shows how an actor could convey different characters just by varying the slant of an eyebrow: a shifty, mustachioed villain or a dashing swashbuckler.  

The film adopts as its story that of "A Star Is Born", the 1937 version of which featured a star, Janet Gaynor (she of Murnau's rapturous "Sunrise"), who had herself actually lived the transition from the silents to the talkies.  Valentin can't make that leap (and it's not until the end that one of the main reasons why is revealed), and finds himself on the scrapheap of history.  At the same time a young woman with dreams of being a star (Berenice Bejo) stumbles into the spotlight and enchants the country.  Valentin becomes a bit of mentor for her.  Her star rises as his descends.    

What's really disarming about the approach of director Michel Hazinavicius and his cast is that they've pulled this off without any trace--not even a hint--of irony.  "The Artist" is affectionate.  If this is meta--and it is--then it's meta of the sweetest kind.  It actually gets many of its laughs from the antics of a cute little Jack Russell terrier, Valentin's companion and big screen co-star.  (The dog steals the show).  It has the guts to play straight a scene where the little dog actually goes scampering off to find a policeman during a moment of crisis, barking at the shooing officer until he takes the hint.  You can either become impatient and grumble that all of this would maybe be amusing if you were, say, 100 years old, or you can embrace it.  I come down enthusiastically in the latter camp.     

 

I got such a kick out of Berenice Bejo as Peppy, the star who is born.  You'd need just the right "it-girl" girl to nail this part, and Bejo is spot-on.  In one sad, sweet scene Peppy performs a mime with Valentin's jacket on a hat-stand, putting her own arm through the sleeve so that the empty suit seems to carress her.  Penelope Ann Miller does a spot-on homage to Jean Hagan and her turn in "Singin' in the Rain" as an obtusely recalcitrant star dragged heels-dug-in into the talkie era: she even looks like Hagan.  James Cromwell is fun as Valentin's loyal valet.  John Goodman is on hand as a blustering producer.  Malcolm McDowell has a brief cameo where he really does embody the type who might have turned up on a Mack Sennet or Charlie Chaplin set. 

While watching the film I kept thinking of a class I took last year with the Filmspotting boys, Matty "Ballgame" Robinson and Adam Kempenaar, "Hollywood Reflected: Movies About Movies", in which we screened both "Singin' in the Rain" and the 1937 "A Star is Born."  It's as if the writers and director of "The Artist" were sitting in on the class.  You've got so many of the themes of which they sung: a girl and a dream, success, identity shifts, the business, the way Hollywood chews you up and spits you out.  And there's the extra wrinkle that this is a French production, so we're getting Hollywood as reflected through a Gallic prism.  But then the French have always been about reawakening Americans to our own film roots.  

As we stand on the precipe of great technological changes in film in our own era, as movies seek new boundaries to open up (or new gimmicks to exploit, it often seems to me), what else will be left on the scrapheap of history?  If the appreciative audience with which a I saw "The Artist" is any indication, what's gone is never truly lost.  Technological revolutions don't change anything fundamental: people in 2012 still go to the movies for the same reasons they did in 1927.  Just in recent years I've seen audiences queue up to see the restored "Metropolis", Fritz Lang's 1927 epic, and cheer at the end.  You could perhaps argue that movies got more adult, more complex and rich, as the years went on (though I wouldn't want to demarcate things too strictly: D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin were certainly as emotionally and thematically complex as any film artists).  And yet the important thing they do never really changed.  "The Artist" is set in a time when movies made people happy.  And we find, watching a film like this, that they still do.    

Rating: **** 

-- January 13, 2012

Key to ratings:

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

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Caught two biggies last week, each of which as it happens fetishizes high-tech gadgetry.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol  

 Cracking stuff.  This is such a filmic film.  What I mean by that is that “M:I-GP” is all about the experience that only a movie can give you, qualitatively different than a novel or a play.  Big-scale stuff that demands a big screen (the effect will not be the same on TV), it’s full of color and movement and sound and it zings you around through space.  You’re right there with Tom Cruise as he clings to the outside of Dubai’s tallest building, attempting to scale it with only the aid of electro-magnet gloves (one of which short-circuits, of course), at one point running down it in a dead-drop race with gravity until pulled out into the sky, swinging through the air by a bungee-like rope.  Reportedly Cruisey actually did a lot of this himself, sans CGI, and the result is viscerally vertigious.  You’ve got stunts, fights, chases on foot and car, and a globe-trotting hunt to stop a madman from unleashing nuclear war.  There’s an ingenious sequence where Cruisey (playing badass secret agent Ethan Hunt) and his team infiltrate the Kremlin via a portable invisible screen on which they back-project an image of the hallway so the security guard can’t see what they’re up to. 

Director Brad Bird comes out of animation (“The Incredibles”), and here he brings a comic, comic-book touch.  In the non-action moments--say, when he’s required to sit around having a beer and cracking jokes--Cruisey seems even more than usual these days to be having trouble behaving like he’s convincingly a native Earth creature.  (I know, I should talk).  This is actually the first “M:I” film I’ve seen, but if they came to me for consultation I’d tell ‘em to stick with this current team.  They’ve got charisma.  There’s computer guy Simon Pegg, always a pleasure, finally getting to be in the sort of picture to which he paid homage in “Hot Fuzz”; Paula Patton as a tough, gorgeous agent, mouth-watering when she goes undercover in a gown; and Jeremy Renner as a non-plussed intel guy with a secret.  The banter between Renner and Peggi is nice and dry, funny and underplayed, as the latter describes his reasonable proposals for Renner (you’ll just drop down this shaft; never mind the whirring propeller blades at the bottom: at the last second you’ll just activate this levitation suit you’ll be wearing under your clothes).  “Ghost Protocol”, then: high-octane, preposterous stuff, it quenches your action jones. 

While watching this film I couldn’t help but think about Karl Pilkington’s latest movie idea:

Rating: **** 

Key to ratings:

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

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This is a strong movie.  The question everybody’s asking is, is it better than the Swedish film?  I’d rather judge it as its own thing, but you can’t really help comparing the two, can you?  As for Steig Larsson’s books, I’ve only read this first one in the trilogy: my imagination wasn’t quite as captured as everyone else’s.  Solid pulp, I thought, but distinguished not by much vivid or memorable prose.  What couldn’t be denied is that Lisbeth Salander is a great character, a great creation.  Still, I didn’t feel like Larsson had humanized the characters enough for me to need to see their next adventures.  I thought the Swedish film a solid dramatization of the book, and in particular I didn't think anybody could play Lisbeth better than Noomi Rapace.  Still, you get the idea: I wasn’t exactly burning to read or watch on.  I guess the best compliment I can pay to Fincher’s movie is that it sparks my interest enough to make me want to pick up the two remaining volumes and to look forward to what he will do with them as movies.  (To his credit, Fincher proceeds as though most people don’t know how the mystery told in “Dragon Tattoo” turns out—the mystery of a missing girl, presumed murdered on an island 40 years ago—even though the books were massive, massive hits.  I guess he had no choice.) 

Daniel Craig is well cast here as an old-school investigative journalist of courage and integrity, but he’s not the real star, of course.  Lisbeth Salander is the character that really captured everybody’s imagination, the brilliant badass investigator and hacker, a feral, perhaps slightly autistic, punk-rock Goth girl with enough 'tude to kill everyone in Sweden, but who one senses is essentially gentle until provoked.  Rooney Mara is very good at conveying someone who has been the victim of unspeakable abuse but who absolutely refuses to be a victim.  (Among other things, "Dragon Tattoo" can be thought of as a revenge movie).  Mara is perhaps a bit harder to buy in the role than Rapace, but that only gives the character more of a sense that her look is her armor, shielding something perhaps more vulnerable.  It's a distancing mechanism a bit more urgent because it covers something more tender or raw.

One of the things I admire about the book and the movie is that, for all its themes of sexual violence and rape and sexual abuse, it is pro-sex: Lisbeth is very physical: she likes sex despite all she’s endured.  Perhaps this is part of her refusal to be a victim.  Mara has a petite body, curvy and feminine underneath her androgynous baggy clothes.  The material has a fundamentally healthy attitude towards sexuality which makes an interesting counterpoise to the sick attitudes on display in its bevy of Nazis and rapists and religious fanatics and woman-haters. 

(By all accounts a fiery leftist in his native Sweden, the late Larrson also wove a fantasy through the narrative of a takedown of corporate criminals to complement his theme of violence and hatred against women.) 

  If one can’t avoid comparing the American version with the Swedish, when it comes to direction and storytelling you’ve got to give it to Fincher over Oplev.  He tells the story with more verve.  His film is a sustained feat of parallel editing, the art of toggling between stories to suggest that they’re going on at the same time, in skilled hands one of the main cinematic tools for constructing suspense.  No one wields it more excruciatingly than Fincher.  You could also look at the scene of the attempted subway mugging of Lisbeth to see the difference between the two films: in the original I remember just a kind of standard scuffle.  As staged by Fincher it becomes a bravura sequence of movement, action and cutting, a fight up an escalator and a sliding getaway down.  It contains a great moment for Rooney: when she abruptly roars in the face of her attacker, we’re stunned too.  She’s like a wild animal cornered, a Cobra baring her fangs.    

The writing by Steven Zaillian is tight; they’ve edited the material within an inch of its life, leaving in basically the same parts of the book as the Swedish film (although if I’m remembering the original correctly, the American film has conflated a couple characters, sisters, in a way that plays with the identity of the missing girl in a rather fundamental way, without, somehow, making much of a difference at all.)      

The film is also about the interplay of Fincher’s wintry imagery and Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose’s pulsing electronic music.  The opening credit sequence is absolute dynamite, an industrial version of Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song” sung by Karen O over molten blue-black imagery, human forms being born in pain out of this primordial sea of liquid metal and fire.

Rating: **** 

--January 4, 2012

Key to ratings:

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