Top 10, 2011

1.        Certified Copy 

What separates the "real" from the pretender?  And if you pretend for long enough, don't you become "real" in some way?  The borders between the real and the simulacrum are in play in Abbas Kiarostami's deeply moving “Certified Copy”, my favorite film of the year.  It's a man and a woman, he an art critic, she an antique shopkeeper, talking over the course of one sometimes harrowing Tuscan afternoon.  Gradually something very curious happens: there is a shift, a morphing in their relationship until at certain point you feel like, "Right, what's going on here?"  This is perhaps the most surreal film I know of that operates utterly in a realistic style.  But that’s not what floors me about it, not why it was the most moving film of the year for me.  It’s because it is two intelligent people speaking, without dogma, trying very hard to get to something real, to the heart of the matter.  In the end nothing is settled, except that all you can be is who you "really" are.  And that has to be enough, and is.  

This was one of only two pictures this year I felt strongly enough about to go back to the theater and see again.  And the other was… 

2.         The Tree of Life

A boy’s life in 50s Texas, while elsewhere in the universe, explosions are creating new galaxies.  When held up against the birth of time and the farthest reaches of the universe, an individual life and death is at once put into perspective, and at the same time shown as something that, in its way, is just as exultant, epochal, and full of wonder.  This is filmmaking that is as free as I’ve always hoped it could be, an unspooling ribbon of time.

3.         Midnight in Paris

For everyone who's ever read “A Moveable Feast” and thought, right, Paris in the 20s: that was the time and place for me.  Woody Allen had me right from the opening montage, which gave me the uncanny sense that my own memories and mind's-eye views of Paris were being projected onto the screen. There's been a bit of backlash against this one recently on the grounds that Allen doesn't do much more with the concept of an American whisked away into the world of the Lost Generation every night at midnight than drop names and sketch sketches.  But the cameos are witty, and Allen has managed to do something truly remarkable: to get down on film something that is in the air in Paris, something to do with history and memory, romance and magic, and the tone for this fantasy is just right for capturing something so elusive: evervescent and light.  An homage to a Paris that is as much a state of mind as anything, and a reminder that the Golden Age is in us. 

4.         Drive

Ryan Gosling as a stunt man by day, getaway driver by night.  "Drive" is pulsating, electric, cheesy, sleek, ultraviolent.  Movie magpie art: Winding Refn snatches up shiny bits that caught his eye from movies of the past and weaves his own thing out of it, dense with pop allusions.  Riveting supporting work from Albert Brooks and Bryan Cranston. 

5.         Melancholia

A storehouse of the most unforgettable images of the year, and the truest movie I’ve ever seen about depression and its crippling downsward spiral, as embodied in the gorgeous body and wicked-smart performance of Kirsten Dunst, as well as by planet Melancholia on its collision course with Earth.  No one who’s had any experience with depression will scoff at that all-ameliorating metaphor.  I won't forget a nude Dunst serenely bathing in the moonlight of planet Melancholia, come to annihilate all.    

 6.         Hugo

This story about a boy who meets George Melies is a joyful homage to early moviemaking from Martin Scorsese, than whom cinema has no more devoted, loving preserver and keeper of the flame.  When he includes footage from early film in "Hugo" (not just Melies, but the Lumiere brothers, Porter, Harold Lloyd), it's as if he's saying to us, the modern audience: we must treat early film with care, it is a precious treasure, and here, I want to show you why: because it is alive.  His first children’s film, and one of his most personal. 

 7.         Mysteries of Lisbon   

The first four-and-a-half hour film I’ve ever seen at the theater.  The passage of time becomes part of the experience.  Though playful Brechtian touches are interwoven throughout, this is a more straightforward narrative than other films I've seen by Raul Ruiz, who died this year.  An orphan, a noble-woman, a priest, a highwayman, one level of story atop another.  You move through one layer until a character begins to tell a story and you drop down into the next level, burrowing deeper and deeper into the web of interlinking stories and identities, never getting lost.  Of its many, may moments, there is never a dull one.   

 8.         The Trip

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play sly versions of themselves in my favorite comedy of the year, Michael Winterbottom’s lastest amalgam of documentary and fiction.  Banter and verbal volleys fly as our boys tour the restaurant inns of Northern England, from the one-upmanship as to who does the best Michael Caine to Coogan's sadly funny exegesis on the brilliance of Abba's "The Winner Takes It All".  The film becomes surprisingly poignant.     

9.         Tabloid

Sex!  Mormons!  Bondage!  Kidnapping!  Another fascinating, funny documentary from Errol Morris, who as always is concerned with notions of "the truth," but amused more than ever here by its strangeness.  In Joyce McKinney he found a character no fiction writer would dare invent.  It makes me think of something I once overheard Christopher Hitchens say at a conference: "The truth never lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between". 

10.       Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives

In rural Thailand a spirit returns in the shape of a big hairy Yeti to sit and visit with only mildly disconcerted relatives.  A little snapper fish performs cunnilingus on a woman in a woodland pond below a waterfall.  People watch as they become disembodied from their own bodies and step away from themselves.  Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (or "Joe" as he was known when he studied in Chicago) gives us an acceptance of many levels of existence at once. 

 Honorable mentions:

Terri, Meek's Cutoff, Life, above all, Young Adult, Bridesmaids

 -- December 22, 2011

Hugo

Martin Scorsese can never be impersonal, and this delightful, good-hearted picture, his first childen's film, is no exception: it is a movie about movies.  It's Scorsese's first foray into 3D as well.  I was curious to see what America's greatest living filmmaker (I was going to put that in quotes, but then I thought, no, let it stand) would bring to the 3D experience (or gimmick, if you want).  

Hugo, played by the vivid-eyed Asa Butterfield, is an orphan who lives in the clockworks of a train station in early 30s Paris.  He winds the clocks and spies on the shopkeepers and regulars who populate the station.  It's quite a little community, rendered in rich detail, as is 30s Paris, often glimpsed at night: sometimes you catch a glimpse of the spire and towers of Notre Dame in the background.  

Hugo shoplifts food when he can, as well as spare parts from a stern, bitter toy-shopkeeper (Ben Kingsley).  He hopes to use the parts to fix his broken automaton, a clockwork man discovered by his late father (Jude Law), a museum curator.  The ingenious machine was made to write something, his father knew...but what?  Fixing it was their common project before his death.  They were always stymied by its heart-shaped lock, and Hugo is forever hoping to find the key that will unlock its mystery.  In this quest he is helped by his new friend, the shopkeeper's bookish, spunky goddaughter, Isabelle (the ebullient Chloe Grace Moretz, who played the lethal pre-pubescent in "Kick-Ass").  Grace Moretz pulls off the English accent so well that I forgot she is American (the characters are French, of course, but as in so many American productions an English accent is used to denote foreignness.)

As for the toy shop owner, I was going to say that he is a man with "a secret past," but I don't think it's any secret by now to reveal that he turns out to be an all-but-forgotten George Melies, the great man of early film, though his identity remains a secret to Hugo and Isabelle.  Hugo becomes drawn into his world after Melies catches him stealing parts and confiscates his notebook, which contains his father's drawings and notes on the automaton.  They work out a deal where Hugo will work in the shop until it is determined that he has paid his debt.  He meets the bitter man's wife (Helen McCrory) and god-daughter Isabelle, who loves to go to the library and introduces him to a librarian (the great Christopher Lee, Dracula in those old Hammer Productions pictures), a vaguely magical figure who directs the kid detectives to a crucial book on film history.  It's author magically appears, played by Michael Stuhlberg. 

Hugo must at all times stay one step ahead of the Station Inspector, forever on the lookout for scamps.  Sacha Baron Cohen gives my favorite comic performance of the year, all puffed-up zealotry and comic menace when chasing the boy or dealing with the malfunctions of the frame mechanism on his leg, wounded in WWI, but reduced to shy stammering in the face of kind Liselle (Emily Mortimer), the flower lady of whom he is a secret admirer.  Some of the physical comedy and manic chases might remind you of Malle's "Zasie Dans Le Metro" or even the M. Hulot films. 

By the way, word of warning to my hordes of acid-dropping readers (and you know who you are): you don't want to be on LSD for the moment when Scorsese gives us a close-up of Baron Cohen and then his head, several-stories-tall, slowly emerges from the screen until he seems to be putting his nose right up to yours.  Or maybe you do.

I was actually just thinking of Scorsese last week because I'd attended a special showing of 1978's "The Last Waltz": it's a film I watch at least once a year on video, but I'd never seen it on the big screen.  As always I got a kick out of his persona as interviewer: the rapid-fire speech, the comic intensity.  That was the era when he was making essential films, movies that defined their times.  "Hugo" doesn't, and that's okay: the very greatest artists have a moment when they somehow both evoke and sum up their time, and then they carry on, making a life, making new things--some of them great--though never again being quite so in touch with the zeitgeist.  By then it's somebody else's turn, you know. 

Anyway, I've been at the theater for each new Scorsese picture, year in and year out, since "Goodfellas" in 1990.  Some I've liked more than others, but "Hugo" may be the first Martin Scorsese picture that could be described as "wonderful".  Probably because it's the first to be told from the point of view of a child, usually more the purview of someone like Spielberg.   

And of course as a student of film I've long been interested in George Melies.  In film texts he's almost always discussed in relation to those other pioneers of early film, the Lumiere Brothers: they used the new medium to record reality, while Melies used it to produce striking fantasies.  It's the dichotomy, we are taught, that still defines film aesthetics to this day: realism vs. special effects.  

In "Hugo" we get to see the iconic 1895 footage by the Lumiere brothers: the train arriving at the station, the workers leaving the factory.  We also see real and recreated moments from Melies films like "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), with its iconic image of the man in the moon with a rocket ship in his eye.  Quite sly sleight-of-hand on Scorsese's part, to get the asses of modern audiences into the seats with the promise of the most cutting-edge modern technology and special effects, and then have them marvelling at films made in the turn of the century.  I couldn't help but wonder what Melies would think if he was somehow able to see "Hugo" in the state-of-the-art theater in which I was sitting.  I've got to think his mind would have been blown. 

  

Scorsese uses 3D to give a modern audience the sense of wonder that greeted early film audiences.  Fish float before your eyes (Melies shot through an aquarium placed in front of the camera to get the effect).  His studio, made of glass to let in the light, is strikingly rendered, a beautiful crystal palace.  When the kids sneak into the movies, Harold Lloyd's "Safety Last" is showing.  They gasp at Lloyd dangling from the hand of the clocktower; later Hugo will do the same, and we gasp.  And Scorsese stages his own "train coming into the station" moment that is violent enough--and, in 3D, immediate enough--to have me, if not throwing up my hands just like viewers of that 1895 Lumiere film, at least rearing back in my seat.

The best way to experience "Hugo" is to see it on a massive screen with surround sound, because Scorsese puts you inside the clockworks, into its crawlspaces and passageways, and you can see up and down through its grated iron tiers and hear the gears ticking behind you and around you.  You are suspended along with the kids when they climb down to wind the clock that dangles from the station roof.  There's an echo of "Vertigo" in a chase to the top of the clock tower where the camera looks straight down; I was kind of hoping Scorsese would give us a 3D version of Hitchcock's simultaneous zoom-in and pull out, but he doesn't.  He knows Hitch did his shot that way for a reason.     

The good script by John Logan, from the book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznick, sounds a good theme for the children watching: happiness comes from finding your purpose and then doing what you do.  It's so simple, and yet adult viewers know something the children in the audience can't: there's nothing simple about it.  So the film manages to package some existentialist ideas in a way kids can think about, another neat trick.

I remember the time years ago when my cousin Matt, a fellow film buff, brought over an actual reel of celluloid of Melies' "A Trip to The Moon" to show my sister and me.  I have no idea where he got it.  He threaded it into the projector and we darkened the lights, lay down on the floor and turned our eyes to the screen.  I remember the sound of the projector whirring.  It captivated, just as it had in 1902: a dream being dreamed in the daytime.

 

Rating: ****

-- December 6, 2011

Key to ratings:

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

Melancholia

Von Trier returns!  While it’s true that “Melancholia” is Lars Von Trier’s film “about” depression and his struggle with it, if I had to say what it’s “about” I’d say it is about his love for paintings, for Caravaggio and Brueghel and John Everett Millais.  He recreates Millais’ “Ophelia”, one of my favorites as well, with Kristen Dunst in wedding dress in the water.  Late in the film he gives us a nude Dunst happily lying in a moonlit clearing in the woods by the water: she is a strikingly gorgeous Venus, bathing in the ghostly “moonlight” of planet Melancholia as it gets closer and closer on its collision course with Earth.  The film, then, is “about” Von Trier’s love of the naked human female form, the eternal feminine, the inspiration for artists throughout the history of mankind.     

This is one of the first films I saw after coming home from three weeks in Italy.  In a world that is saturated with images and which pimps their power (can it be a coincidence that Dunst’s character (Justine) is in advertising?), we can become desensitized to the power of images.  As I strolled through the world’s great art museums, churches and palaces, looking at the paintings I felt that power recharged, experienced again my capacity to be filled up with their strange mystery. 

 

“Melancholia” has the same effect.  There is an extraordinary prologue, beautiful, wordless: as if in a dream we see visions foreshadowing what is to come.  A horse falls.  A woman makes her way towards us through a forest in slow motion as a boy whittles in the foreground.  I love to see that, love to see a director putting a truly personal vision, straight from his dreams or the inside of his head, onto the screen.  It's what the film-going life is all about to me.  Gorgeous classical music builds; you might say that the film is “about” Von Trier’s love of beautiful music.  

There’s a quick scene in a little octagonal room with shelves displaying propped-open coffee-table books.  In a flurry of fury Justine pulls down the books that are up and replaces them with her own choices, propped open to make a display.  We get a quick montage of the paintings picked, and they turn out to be ones that resonate with me as well: a Brueghel wintry landscape, Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holeferness, another Breughel where everybody's laid out next to a self-carving pig.  A few I just saw in person in Italy. 

So “Melancholia” is a thing of great beauty, but it is also the truest invocation of depression I've ever seen.  On his grand rural estate, a castle next to the water replete with golf course and horses, Keifer Sutherland, the husband of Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), has thrown a huge wedding party for Justine at great personal expense (as he never tires of pointing out).  (It's fun on a meta level to watch Sutherland do this picture: what could be more culturally apposite to a Lars Von Trier movie than, say, “24”?  As planet Melancholia looms larger and larger, you kept waiting for Jack Bauer to save the world).

 

We watch as Justine in her wedding dress and her groom (Alexander Skarsgard) arrive at the castle, two hours late.  (Chapter 1 of the film is entitled “Justine”).  They have a great playful rapport; they seem very much in love.  (They’ve been goofing around with the stretch limo, each taking a turn at the wheel when the driver admits he can’t negotiate the windy path to the castle.)  Justine seems happy, alternately giddy and serene, just as a bride should be on her big day.  But Claire and her husband eye her suspiciously.  Gradually we begin to see that her smile is a bit of “fake it till you make it”.  We watch as she succumbs to the gradual, inexorable pull of distraction and self-sabotage, the odd lethargy, that we recognize as depression.  In thrall to its centrifugal force, the pull of its undertow, she begins to behave bizarrely: everyone’s been waiting for me for hours now, and yet I must take a bath right this second.    

In the reception hall her groom raises a toast to his bride.  It is shy, heartfelt, deeply loving.  And yet he can feel her drifting away.  In private, desperate, he gives her a gift: a snapshot of an apple grove he has just bought for them, their land.  Imagine yourself sitting under a tree here, he tells her.  Keep this picture with you always.  Then whenever you feel sad you can look at it and it will make you happy.  She tells him she’ll keep it with her always, but you can see in her eyes: the idea fills her with nothing but emptiness.  She is vacant.  He has no idea what a dark place she’s in, how deep is her need to do something he can’t forgive.  Why?  She probably couldn’t say.  A moment later she rises and distractedly leaves the room.  He looks down; she has left the photo behind on the couch.     

Back at the party, her asshole boss at the ad agency (Stellan Skarsgard) introduces her to some kid (Brady Corbet) he has hired expressly to get a tag-line out of the recalcitrant Justine for their new ad campaign.  He promises her he will fire him if he doesn’t get the tag-line out of her by the end of the evening.  We meet her father (John Hurt, always a pleasure), an amiable rake.  He is divorced from Justine’s mother (Charlotte Rampling), ice-blooded, dead-eyed, proclaiming to all the assembled wedding guests her loathing of marriage.  It’s great casting.  Rampling’s eyes and Dunst’s go together: you believe them as mother and daughter. 

 

By the end of Chapter 1, Melancholia has blotted a star out of the sky.  In Chapter 2, entitled “Claire”, it’s headed right at us. 

As a writer, Von Trier often gives us people conceived as an allegorical “type”.  (Basically he’s saying to his actors: I conceived this, now it’s up to you to make it flesh and blood.)  Claire is the nurturing mother, to her little boy and, really, to Justine herself.  She is petrified of planet Melancholia.  Sutherland is “the man of science” with his telescope who regards Melancholia as a thing of awesome beauty, to be observed with wonder from afar, but which can’t actually hurt them.  He reassures Claire that there’s no way Melancholia will collide with Earth.  

For all his reputation for torturing women in his films, Von Trier gets extraordinary performances from women.  Kirsten Dunst is a revelation here.  Von Trier’s dialogue can sound stagey when put in the mouths of Americans, a people he arguably doesn’t really “get”; the quintessentially American Dunst’s great gift, however, is that it is quite impossible for her to sound unnatural.  She gives such a smart performance here, nailing depression perfectly, particularly when she’s in its full grip in the days following the disastrous wedding, when she’s wrecked her life: the inertia, the way she can barely lift herself into the bath or out of a cab.  She and Von Trier make it more complex than “she’s just sick”: Justine also just has a really dark streak, believing firmly that “life on earth is evil”.        

And Charlotte Gainsbourg is the perfect actress for Von Trier.  A striking woman, her not-quite-identifiable, English/pan-European accent is a perfect fit for his line readings.   

Some may scoff at the metaphor of depression as a planet that immolates everything in its path and wipes out the Earth as too obvious, but not anyone who's every actually suffered from it.  Not anyone who’s felt the intractable pull of depression’s gravitational field.  Von Trier and Dunst have captured how the sufferer from depression welcomes oblivion, almost looks forward to the event that will end everything…and the way there is something actually a bit brutal about the way the cataclysm never actually comes, the way life just proceeds inexorably on its day to day course.   

If you're an artist, though, that sense of yearning for oblivion--of wanting to obliterate everything--is in constant struggle with the impulse to create.  Indeed, this friction is probably the spark of all art.   

Von Trier was in a bad place when he gave us “Antichrist", a place full of pain.  It was a film of great beauty but also of almost unbearable pain, though the impish, mischievous Brechtian sense of humor was still there.  He was reportedly in a good place when he made “Melancholia” (ironically enough).  He will always be the gleeful provocateur, delighting in pulling the rug out from under us.  But it was only when he was able to finally get to a place where he was happy that he was able to give us what is perhaps his finest work of art yet. 

(Though I’ve heard that "Melancholia" is available “on demand”, you must see it on a huge screen with a huge sound system…for the full impact of the images and the music, the overwhelming crescendo of the emotional and sensory experience.) 

Rating: *****

-- November 16, 2011

Key to ratings:

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

Drive

The new De Niro?  It might as well be Ryan Gosling.  It's in the eyes.  As a professional getaway driver in the ultraviolent new "Drive", Gosling makes a mere shift of the eyeballs telegraph danger in a way that I've only ever seen De Niro do.  His character is a man of few words, but the eyes communicate volumes.  They don’t look you up and down so much as they fix you.  They see right through you, see into your soul to who you really are.  They stare.  They don't blink until you have fucked off, and then they track you until they are satisfied that you have fucked off properly.  There is the play of foreshadow in them, as if they foresee the time when you will meet further on up the road, at which time it will be necessary for him to stomp your head in.  This is the kind of part that actors chomp at the bit to play--their Travis Bickle--and Gosling brings the real stuff to it.  

Those eyes only soften, the face become boyish, sweet, when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan).  A solitary man, he meets this girl and her young son and falls in love.  But when her jailbird husband (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison, the very skills that allow him to protect her from extorting gangsters from her husband's past—his capacity for ultraviolence--are those that make it impossible for them to be together.      

Winding Refn gave us the unforgettable "Bronson", brutal, stylish, and a film in which he gave Tom Hardy his Bickle role.  “Drive” is also brutal, stylish...and riveting.  If you want something that's gonna have your heart pounding in your ears, your veins humming with adrenaline, check this out.  There’s a cracking getaway sequence at the beginning.  The Driver has advised the crooks who've contracted with him to be their driver that he will give them exactly five minutes to do the job and get out.  A second after that, he walks.  Refn Winding ratchets up the tension when one of the thieves fails to materialize from the warehouse as the clock ticks and we can hear police sirens in the distance.  Once the chase starts, he puts us in that front seat.  We're thinking along with Gosling (and he's always thinking): which way now?  He's got his police radio and a ballgame going simultaneously, unflappable, a toothpick in his mouth.  He never speaks to his passengers.    

A driver-movie/noir homage, "Drive" is derivative as hell.  Its subject is a solitary urban criminal professional very much in the mode of Alain Delon in "Le Samourai".  You could point to 70s films like Sarafian's "Vanishing Point" and Walter Hill’s “The Driver”.  But then film is a magpie art: you take what you find that you love and you create your own thing out of it.  The deepest impression stamped on this palimpsest of a picture, though, is "Taxi Driver" (though with the sense of irony quite absent), a strata running through not just the final acts where the Driver as avenging angel metes out ultraviolence, but also in scenes when he's just just getting to know Irene.  He has a goofy, vacant, flat affect which puts us in mind of De Niro's coffee-shop date with Cybill Shepherd.  And there's a direct "Taxi Driver" connection: Albert Brooks.  The role he plays here couldn't be further from the nice, nerdy campaign worker he played in that film.  He's blood-chilling here as a real hard-on, whose hardbitten-small-business-owner act lets his prey drop their guard just long enough for him to pounce.  He runs a pizza joint as a front with his gangster partner, played by Ron Perlman, whose "Hellboy" mug (there's no other word for that visage) is just as impressive without any prosthesis.  There's a shot in which we see that profile in silhouette; the contours of the face itself are poignant.      

Winding Refn's handling of spatial relationships in a scene in an elevator makes for a really extraordinary piece of cinema.  There are three people on the elevator: the Driver, the girl and a guy the Driver knows to be a gangster who at any moment will draw his gun.  All hell is about to break loose, we know.  But before it does, the Driver pulls Carey into the corner of the elevator--and into a separate frame--for a slow-motion kiss.  As soon as they fall into that separate frame it’s as if the frame separates them from the gangster; so long as they are there it suspends them, in time and space, for as long as the kiss lasts.     

And Brian Cranston, wow.  I mean to say, who could have predicted that the dad off of "Malcolm In The Middle" would be doing the kind of work he's been doing lately?  Here's he's a kind of cut-rate pimp/mentor to the Driver, a small-time exploiter.  He owns the garage where the Driver works as a mechanic and he secures him work as a stunt driver for the movies.  He's always got some kind of hustle.  He wants the gangsters to invest in the kid as a racecar driver.  He is a craven, limping, sniveling man who's only ever had one kind of luck: bad.  The Driver is either too good-natured or too naïve to know that he’s being pimped, or maybe he just doesn’t care.  Cranston is able to invest the character with a kind of tragedy. 

Even the small parts are well-observed.  Christina Hendricks, almost unrecognizable from "Mad Men", doesn’t have a big part here as a sort of female prop for the gangsters with an agenda of her own, but just in the way she carries herself she conveys what kind of life this character has led, that she's three miles of bad road.

Winding Refn presents this material as metaphysical fact.  He is instinctually existential.  There's no back story.  The Driver just exists, we don't know how.  He's just "the Driver," no name.  Like life itself, there is no point: it just is, and it just keeps coming, and he takes as it comes.  

The violence in "Drive" is cathartic on some elemental level: it triggers something in our lizard brains.  The electronic music throbs.  If I recall correctly, the theme actually contains lines like, "He's a real hero" or “He’s a real human being.”  I might have preferred a bit more irony--I think this guy really is a model of chivalry to Winding Refn--but that absolute lack of distance is precisely the reason his art is so strong.  What we get here is direct, unmediated.  Still, I can't help but wish him a bit more of a sidelong glance into the abyss in the future.  Only then can he leap that gulf that separates a "Death Wish" from a "Taxi Driver".

Rating: ****

-- October 5, 2011

Key to ratings:

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

"The Help" and "Contagion"

The Help

[warning: *spoilers spoilers spoilers*]

Based on Kathryn Stockett's novel, "The Help" contains some scenes of tremendous emotional power and very painful truth, and others that seem to exist to pop a Lifetime-movie bow on top of the story.  It gives us two brave characters: a young, slightly unconventional white woman named Skeeter (Emma Stone) and a middle-aged black maid, Abilene (Viola Davis) who risks everything in the Jackson, Mississippi of 1962 when she agrees to tell Skeeter her story.  Skeeter is an aspiring writer, and she has an idea for a book: let's hear from the people who are invisible, whose stories we never get to hear.  And the question is, does the movie itself do justice to those stories, those lives?  I don't think it does, but there are still reasons so see this.

What interests Skeeter is the dynamic whereby black women raise white women like herself and her friends: love them, give them their sense of self-esteem--give them everything, really--and then these women grow up to become the boss, and by the time they're 20 they're as callous as their parents.  Alone amongst her social set, Skeeter was never willing or able to make that leap.  She enlists Abilene and, eventually, sassy Minny (Octavia Spencer).       

Also alone amongst her group of well-to-do girlfriends, led by Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), Skeeter is more interested in a career as a writer than in finding a man and being a housewife.  She find herself more and more at odds with Hilly, who, in the first stirrings of the civil rights era, has decided that it's not sanitary to allow the help to use the family toilet: she numbers each piece of toilet paper, and she leads a public movement to get all her friends to build adjacent bathrooms--outhouses, really--for the blacks. 

It's such a weird dynamic: you need to have a black around to do all the things you don't want to do yourself, but at the same time you view them as unclean things.  Dirty, and yet they are not only allowed but expected to have intimate relations with your children.  (At one point a white baby strokes Abilene's cheeks as if in wonder at her dark skin, and then tells her, "You're my real mommy.")  Moving through their stately manors and plantation porches, these southern gentry are a bit like the aristocracy in Europe at the moment when their historical age is coming to an end.  The past and the present co-exist, one atop the other in constant interplay.  The landscape is still that of the slave era: there are swooping aerial shots of the sweeping cotton fields.  (Skeeter calls her editor in New York and we glimpse a whole other world, a bit of the world of "Mad Men"). 

The performances make the film.  It's brilliantly cast.  Viola Davis conveys so much with her eyes, the way they go flat when the white women engage in humiliating talk while she serves them.  As the villain of the piece, Bryce Dallas Howard conveys a kind of smiling cruelty all the more sinister for springing from an ideology of gentility and propriety.  (Speaking of films about race relations in America, I really liked her in "Manderlay", Lars Von Trier's provocation (and a film at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from "The Help"); I'll never forget the scene where the camera keeps pulling away from the naked Howard as she writhes while touching herself, sinking to the bottom of a sea of chiaroscuro, lost in the depths, the throes of her own awakened sexuality). 

Jessica Chastain plays a sweet ditz not to the manor born, who has been elevated to the social level of Skeeter's peers by marrying a man in that circle; she instinctively treats Minny as a human being.  As for Emma Stone, I hadn't seen her in anything else but by the end of this I was smitten.  I like the way her smile causes her eyes to shut.  I also really liked Allison Janney as Skeeter's mother, a respected pillar of the community, basically good-hearted and wise, but afflicted with cowardice and a concern for social standing that leads to a heartbreaking scene where she fires the family's elderly maid, Constantine, to save face with the luncheoning Daughters of the American Revolution when Constantine's daughter refuses to use the back door.  The eyes of Janney as she banishes Constantine plead silently, as all those years of love and service are repaid with betrayal.  

What comes through is the sense of one indignity, one humiliation after another.  I think of the scene where Abilene and all the other African-Americans are thrown off the bus in the wake of what turns out to have been the assassination of Medgar Evers.  She is forced to rush home through the bad part of town in the night, and at one point she falls.  To see this solid, dignified woman slip and fall in the mud is truly painful.  And there is a scene near the end where Hilly forces her weak-willed friend to fire Abilene.  Abilene finally summons the courage to talk back to a white woman, her voice shaking with the effort of flouting everything she's ever been taught.  It is an exhilarating moment.  And she concludes her remarks by saying something that struck me.  Instead of calling her persecutor every name in the book, she says, simply, "Ain't you tired, Miss Hilly?  Ain't you tired?"  This moment seemed to me so evocative of the strategy of the civil rights movement, its "satyagraha": it alerted white people to the psychic cost to themselves of their own racism.  With moments of truth and bravery like that, it's too bad that the picture so often goes places that are not true to the animating idea of showing the pain of these women's lives (including a lot of comic business involving a pie with a secret ingredient that Minny tricks Hilly into eating).    

Rating: ***

Key to ratings:

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

Contagion 

[warning: *spoilers spoilers spoilers*]

This is Soderbergh, so you go in with the basic expectation of high-quality filmmaking.  (In an auteurist-flummoxing career, that's perhaps the one thing you can expect going in.)  I've followed him ever since I saw "Sex, Lies and Videotape" at the theater in 1989, which seemed at the time to define a new movement of American independent film.  He has worked in many styles since then: he makes star-studded entertainments like the Ocean pictures, where he's having a laugh with his movie-star friends.  Then he makes experimental films, sometimes yielding fascinating results ("The Girlfriend Experience" starring Sasha Grey, a porn star who digs Jean-Luc Godard).  (I realize after writing that line that I've just described my ideal girlfriend.  Only kidding, folks!!).  And then there are the ones that have meant the most to me, works like "The Limey" and "Out of Sight": genre pictures, but such expressive, lyrical ones, more or less mainstream but steeped in the boundary-defying spirit of 70s cinema.  They're also unexpected fonts of emotion. 

"Contagion" finds him in "Traffic" mode: multiple narratives, ensemble movie-star cast.  What we have here are scenes from an epidemic of a new plague, an unknown, lethal, incurable virus, but what it's really about is human intelligence versus hysteria and irrationality.  (Whenever someone coughed, it reminded me of the lunchroom in my old office and the lady who, like an augur of old, would comment portentously with every hack heard, "That was the outbreak. "  And in fact the movie does make you self-conscious about touching your face.)

Gwyneth Paltrow picks up the bug in Hong Kong.  She brings it back home, to her children and hubby Matt Damon.  It spreads exponentially.  Jennifer Ehle is a doctor trying to invent a cure, Marion Cotillard is handling the outbreak in rural China when she is forced to put human faces to her statistics.  Kate Winslet is an agent trying to stem the tide, working under the auspices of Laurence Fishburne.  Jude Law plays a conspiracy-theorist blogger railing against government.  One gets the impression that each story strand has been tightly edited, that there was enough material here to make a series.  It would be interesting to see how it would work as a TV series, given that amount of time. 

Leaving the theater, my verdict was that "Contagion" was absorbing, adult, non-exploitative, but never riveting, filmmaking.  Perhaps Soderberh hasn't quite dramatized this material sufficiently, I thought.  For a thriller, there's something bloodless and detached about it.  The performances are all quite understated as well.  But over the days it stayed with me.  That's when I know that a film has gotten under my skin, when I'm still thinking about it days later.  I think it was the very plausibility of it that struck me, the way it chonicled societal breakdown as desperation and paranoia strike deep.  For another thing, without giving away too much, "Contagion" is quite willing to break Hollywood taboos about who can and cannot be stricken down.  And finally, I saw it right around the 10th anniversay of 9/11 and it seemed to resonate with that on a number of levels.  

In the end it's a very hopeful picture.  Faced with something intractable, we needn't fall apart: we can pull together and, with our intelligence, sort it out.  We see selfishness and opportunism and profiteering in this movie, but much more sacrifice and selflessness.  In the final scene Damon stages a personal prom in the living room for his teenage daughter and her boyfriend.  As she puts on U2's "All I Want Is You" and awaits her boyfriend, Damon sits in the next room looking at pictures of his wife on his phone.  As the girl and her boyfriend dance, Damon finally gets to mourn what's been lost: not just this person whom he loved, but his image of her as well.  (Without giving too much away, it turned out she wasn't who he thought she was.)  They are survivors, and life goes on.  Even if no individual scene rocked me on my foundations, "Contagion" haunts me still.  

 Rating: ****

-- September 22, 2011

Key to ratings:

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