Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows--Part 2

“Our brains evolved to ‘expect’ stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought.  Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.  Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values.  Today we seek movies, novels and 'news stories' that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable.  Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adveraries who just lay out ‘the facts of the case’." – Drew Westen, What Happened to Obama's Passion?

I have a particulary blinkered perspective to bring to this review: this is the first Harry Potter movie I’ve ever seen.  (A friend of mine who hasn't seen them either has proposed a Potter marathon; I'm up for it, mainly as a way of spending time with her.)  I guess the timing of it all was off for me.  If the books had come out when I was a kid, I know I'd have absolutely loved 'em.  (Harry is bespectacled and British, two traits that would've endeared him to my nerdy youth.)  Or if I'd had children myself, I can imagine us reading them together.  Actually in the 90s I did have a young stepdaughter, and I did in fact read the first book to her.  I’d act out all characters in a bid to amuse her: I recall a road trip in the late 90s where I declaimed chapters out to the car from the passenger seat.  (She’ll be 21 this month.  Hard to believe.)  When Hagrid appeared in this latest movie there was a bit of frisson there for me: I really got into doing him.  Anyway, I get that for many people these books/films are markers of the passage of time, stories they grew up with or that they shared with their kids as they grew up. 

As much as I'd enjoyed my brief encounters with the stories, when my step-daughter's mother handed me my walking papers and told me to go fuck myself at the end of the last century I didn’t really feel compelled to keep up with them on my own.  The last contact I had with Harry Potter was at one of our triennial family reunions when I was enlisted to read the then-current volume to my cousin’s children for their bedtime story.  It was fun acting out the characters again after not having seen them for many years. 

At the risk of sounding like a Muggle, though, over the years it was slightly disconcerting to observe the number of other adults hefting the current tome on the train.  A lot has been written about the series' ascendancy in the wake of 9/11, how these stories offered a mass way of processing the events of the day.  Sometimes there is the implication that part of the appeal of the Potter books/films was that they offered a vision of a world where good and evil was very black and white.  That's exactly the sort of thing that didn't appeal to me: real life is nothing but endless shades of grey, regardless of what my man Christopher Hitchens has to say, and I hungered for a reflection of that complexity in art.  (When it came to the pop-culture zeitgeist in those years, "The Sopranos" was my idea of where it was at.)  To be sure, one end of the spectrum shades into the pure black of evil (the perpetrators of 9/11 are a good example, true, though for some reason I'm thinking here also of the Manson murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate), but it doesn't make for good art or commentary to go around pretending that the spectrum doesn't exist, that evil is some sort of existential condition.  (As a man of literature, Christopher knows this very well, he just tends to forget it when working himself up into one of his exhilarating, elegant froths). 

Actually, though, I suspect that the implication that the Harry Potter world is black-and-white does it a disservice.  I give you some recent comments from the great Ralph Fiennes, reflecting on playing Lord Voldemort now that it's all over.  They actually illustrate my point above very well.  "How 'evil' is Lord Voldemort?  He’s a demonic spirit.  He’s a satanic force.  Young Voldemort was an orphan and denied any kind of parental affection or love, so he’s been an isolated figure from a very young age...But I always think there has to be the possibility of good in someone, too.  It might have been eroded, repressed, suppressed, or somehow distorted within him after he was really damaged...Some actors enjoy signaling the evil in characters called 'bad guys,' but you want to be a human being first of all.  Everyone has the potential to be corrupted.  Everyone."   

So, on to the movie.  I don't really know what's going on here.  They're hunting some sort of magical objects called "horcruxes" (thanks for the spelling, Wikipedia).  Sometimes Lord Voldemort is able to enter Harry's mind and freak him out.  It's all building toward a final apocalyptic battle and a showdown between Harry and Voldemort.  Harry accepts that the harvest may very well be his own death.  

As an Anglophile, I get a kick out of the Britishness of it.  ("Mad" is always to be preferred over "crazy," innit?)  Go to IMDB and scroll down the list of the complete cast and you'll see that it'd be easier to name the great British actors who aren't in it.  I mean to say, look at whom we've got: John Hurt, always a pleasure to watch.  Representatives of the Mike Leigh company like Jim Broadbent and David Thewlis.  Gary Oldman and Maggie Smith.  Emma Thompson for about two minutes.  I could have done with a lot more of the sly Helena Bonham Carter, whose patently kooky take on villainny elevates everything she's in.  Alan Rickman gives one of the most interesting performances as Professor Snape, who seems to be one of the most complex--even tragic--characters.  Then we have the excellent Warwick Davis, star of the upcoming Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant joint, "Life's Too Short".  (Love watching him interact with Karl Pilkington on the YouTubes.)  

As for the three "kids," Daniel Radcliffe plays Harry with conviction and intensity, though it seems to me without a lot of charisma.  He conveys the distinct impression here of a man who has had quite enough guff and does not intend to stand for any more of it.  (I imagine if you've followed the series since he was little you'll get a bit of a jolt when Radcliffe pulls off his shirt to reveal a hairy chest.)  Rupert Grint as Ron doesn't have much to do here, though he does get to snog a bit with Emma Watson as the brave Hermione. 

The movie actually put me in mind of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books we dug when we were kids.  Remember those?  I'm thinking of the one where you're exploring a mountain, sort of a Matterhorn with an inner world of caves and sheer drop-offs, maybe an abominable snowman.  Make the wrong choice and you’re a goner.  Make the right choice and you fly out on the back of a dragon, as Harry, Ron and Hermione do in this movie.

In the end the film was pretty much exactly what I expected.  I don't mean that pejoratively, exactly: as with any other genre, when I go to a fantasy film I expressly want to be run through the litany of that story type.  At the same time, with any movie I always hope to be surprised as well on some level.  The only really arresting sequence for me was the one in which the trio attempts to breach security at Gringotts (thanks for the name, Internet), the wizard counting house.  As we moved down that long hall where the little goblin fellas weigh and count coins, I felt the surreal tingle of peering into an alternate reality.  As for the rest, the climactic battle--the seige of Hogwarts--is rousingly mounted by director David Yates, and the struggle-to-the-death between Harry and Voldemort was "exciting" enough as they careened around the outskirts of Hogwarts, though the dueling magic wands business felt a bit anticlimactic.

And so they did a really good job with this movie.  As spectacular as the special effects are, though, I hope they aren't as inventive as the imagery kids have conjured up in their imaginations.  For the series' great legacy is to have sparked the wonder of reading in a whole generation the way, say, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" or "Through The Looking Glass" or "The Wind In The Willows" did for me.  And though it was never really my thing, I do understand what it means to have a series that gets you through.  I need a little Wodehouse at bedtime, myself.  And I know that our favorite fantasies don't just get us through a troubled world: they allow us to enter another one.  Tapping into the mythic structure, quenching the thirst for the story type we humans are wired to crave, J.K. Rowling stoked the wonderful ability of children to believe in things that don't exist in this world.  

Rating: ***1/2

-- September 12, 2011

Key to ratings:

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

Tabloid

    

Here's the latest from Errol Morris, one of the foremost documentarians of our time.  He's given us, among others, "The Thin Blue Line," which freed a man wrongly convicted of murder and got the guilty man locked up; the deeply moving "Gates of Heaven," which only seemed to be about pet cemeteries (its real subject, in Roger Ebert’s words, was “the central mystery of life”) and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control," which we took my young stepdaughter to see more than a decade ago.  (It turned out to work quite well as a kid's movie.)  A few years ago he gave us a portrait of Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara (the fascinating "Fog of War").  That's all well and good, but now he brings us a story that has the kind of stuff people are really interested in: sex and bad behavior.

I knew nothing about Joyce McKinney when I went into the picture.  Her story is one of the most bizaare you're likely to hear, and it just keeps getting weirder.  Joyce herself is one of the funniest, saddest characters I've encountered in movies in recent memory.  When we first meet her, in footage from the early 80s, she looks like a princess.  That's fitting: she seems to imagine herself as a princess in a fairy tale.  She's even reading from a storybook, her own manuscript telling in her own words the tale that had so delighted Britain just a few years earlier: how the princess met her Prince Charming, only to have him spirited away from her by dark forces.  The young Joyce exudes sweet innocence with her farm-girl accent; at the same time she glows with a kind of warm, sleepy, sated sexuality.  Then we see talking-head interviews with the Joyce of today, a woman of 60 who still exhibits the same spirit and smile. 

As a young beauty queen (a former Miss Wyoming World) McKinney landed in Salt Lake City and, for some inexplicable reason, fell in love virtually at first sight with an unassuming, heavyset Mormon missionary called Kirk Anderson.  What did it for her, in her memorable phrase, was his "clean skin".  (Anderson refused to participate with this film).  When the church removed him to England, she hired a pilot and, along with some male hangers-on, tracked him down.  (Joyce was always in the company of men who were obsessed with her to the same extent that she only had eyes for Kirk). 

What happens next depends on to whose story you believe.  According to Joyce, Kirk went away with her willingly.  They repaired to a cottage in Devon.  She admits that she tied him to the bed, having read that a little bondage is the way to dispel psychological impotence. 

(Morris interviews an ex-member/whistleblower on the sexual repression of the Mormon church: he discusses, among other things, the "chastity suits" they make you wear.  In fact one of McKinney's issues with this film is that it doesn't focus much more on the Mormons as a “cult”; she has plenty to say on the church’s evils, such as inculcating people with guilt and shame about the God-given pleasures of sex.  It strikes me that as an avowed Christian she’s on rather shaky ground here.)  

In her narrative they proceeded to have three wonderful days of sex and food and togetherness.  The other story, the one trumpeted in the tabloids throughout Britain in 1977, is that she kidnapped him with the aid of chloroform, hired heavies and a very real-looking fake gun, "CHAINED" him to a bed "SPREAD EAGLED" and raped him for three days.  (Morris blows these words and others up onto the screen into huge, tabloid headlines.  Film theorist James Monaco has written that cinema "raises fundamental questions about the relationship of life and art, reality and language," and it strikes me that this movie offers a full course on that idea.) 

The fact that the "victim" here was a man makes the accusations of kidnapping and rape not exactly funny, perhaps, but...unusual.  The question arises of whether it's even possible for a woman to rape a man.  Joyce thinks rather not (she has a brilliant line which I shall let you discover for yourself).  I am inclined to agree with her, if I’m honest.

After a brief pre-trial tenure in Epsom prison, the star of “the Mormon sex in chains case," the “Case of the Manacled Mormon," proceeded to cut a swath through late-70s celebrity culture in Britain, briefly outshining even the hottest movie stars of the time.  Keith Moon was photographed giving her a smacker.  The tabloids began looking into her background; The Daily Mirror dug up photos documenting what seemed to be a past life as a S&M hooker (forgeries, she claims).  There ensued a sort of competing-narratives war with Britain's other best-selling tabloid, The Daily Express, each telling different versions of her story.  

    (The movie is also about the ruthlessly aggressive tabloid culture in England.  It had the good fortune to be released at the time of the shuttering of "News of the World" and the phone-hacking scandal exposing the cozy relationship between Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp/News International and the top of Britain's government and police force.  Not to mention in the wake of the Casey Anthony verdict, the ultimate tabloid case.  This story is of course exponentially lighter in tone than all of that)

As it happens, McKinney never finished writing her story herself, and now Errol Morris has done his version.  He is a great storyteller.  This movie is not investigative journalism: Morris is not interested in "getting to the bottom” of McKinney’s story.  He's interested in the mystery of the narrative, in reflecting it in as many facets as possible.  After all, as I once heard Christopher Hitchens put it, "The truth never lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between."  

The competing narratives are one of the fascinating things about the movie.  Actually, it's now spilled off-screen.  The subject of the story isn't being quiet.  McKinney has her own idea about what kind of story this is, and she wants to tell it her way.  She for one does not see the humor in it.  This is not a sex comedy to her, it’s "tragic and intellectual".  McKinney is in many ways the perfect Morris subject; his films are always about obsession on some level.  (Filmmaking itself is obsessive.)  The problem is that the man who trades in ironies has finally met a woman quite without any sense of irony whatsoever.  She can claim, in all sincerity, to have never wanted anything more from life than a "little Leave-It-to-Beaver house with a white picket fence."  (Among other thing, the film is a fount of great lines.)

To Morris’ bemusement, she's apparently been attending more festival screenings of the film than he himself has, decrying the film and trying to get her side of the story out.  She says she intends to sue.  [Check out the video of her appearance at a New York screening.  I admire how at no point does Morris try to silence her.  Note her maniacal laugh at the end.]

      It would be wrong to understate the extent to which McKinney is herself an actress, so to speak.  She loved assuming new identities with her main partner in crime (a fellow called Keith May, now deceased), dressing up with him as an Indian couple, or even a pair of nuns, eluding arrest and obtaining fake passports to get back into the U.S.  She's a very shrewd manipulator, but never a malign one.  You can see it in the photos from the time: that radiant smile.  There's never a trace of shame.  She's got Bettie Page's ability to exude such pleasure in being naked that even the S&M shots that turn up never really seem tawdry.  

 I like how Morris doesn't condescend to tabloids.  You can tell that he actually gets a kick out of them.  He invigorates the movie with that same pulpy, exploitive quality, both in its look and in the way it tells its story.  "I am no different than any of the men in this story," he's said: obsessed with Joyce.  There is a bit of a feeling of taking glee in a situation in which someone may have been hurt, but I suppose that’s part of what people enjoy about tabloids themselves.  (You have to be completely non-moralistic to enjoy them; I suppose at some level there's still vestiges of a tut-tutting leftist in me who believes that the masses would be much better off if they were picking up, say, Chomsky pamphlets on the way out of Jewel instead of these rags.) 

 

Re-reading Roger Ebert’s review of Morris’ “Gates of Heaven”, it struck me how relevant it was to my thinking about this film.  "Heaven" is one of Ebert’s favorite movies, a film about pet cemeteries and the bond between animals and humans (often eccentric ones).  He writes that “Heaven” became “a litmus test for audiences, who cannot decide if it is serious or satirical, funny or sad, sympathetic or mocking.”  Much the same is true here.  The audience I was with laughed long and hard, and so did I at times.  However, some other words from Ebert’s review of “Heaven” speak to me:     

“The signs on the pet markers are eloquent in their way.  ‘I knew love; I knew this dog.’ ‘Dog is God spelled backwards.’  ‘For saving my life.’  At the end of the film, having laughed earlier, we find ourselves silent. These animal lovers are expressing the deepest of human needs, for love and companionship.”

When asked late in the film if she still loves Kirk to this day, McKinney replies, tears welling up in her eyes, that she still does and that she always will.  That much I believe is true.  The part I wasn't laughing at. 

   

And hey, she loves dogs, too.  I didn't even touch on the pit-bull cloning.  That I will leave you to discover for yourself.  (I told you the story just kept getting wierder.) 

Rating: **** 

-- July 17, 2011

 
Key to ratings:

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

The Trip

In 2006 I wrote about Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the pair we follow on “The Trip”, thusly: 

“Steve Coogan…is well-known in England for his portrayal of vapid talk show host Alan Partridge; in [‘Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story’], as in Jarmusch’s ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’, he slyly plays himself as a bloke who can’t quite hide his self-interest, insecurity, lack of knowledge of what he’s talking about, and general shabbiness of character…”

“Brydon plays himself as an earnest nice guy, vaguely childlike, who’s quite unable to dissemble a la Coogan.  One of the film’s chief pleasures is the spot-on timing and improvisatory feel of the banter between these two good comedians as they worry over, say, whose costume shoes have higher platforms.  Each enjoys commenting on the other’s illusions and pretensions.”    

Their new comedy “The Trip”, in which Coogan somewhat begrudingly invites Brydon along on a week-long tour of Northern England and its restaurants, which he's reviewing for a magazine, is essentially an entire film comprised of that banter, whether on the road to the next village or sitting across from each other at a table over good food and drink.  The extent to which you enjoy the film will be the extent to which you find that banter funny.  I love it, myself, though I must say that by the end the film had just begun to shade for me into the point where I began to share their annoyance with each other.  That's probably the point.   

Having begun life as a BBC series, "The Trip" was cut to make this feature for U.S. release.  It reunites the pair with “Shandy” and "24 Hour Party People" director Michael Winterbottom.   I expected it to be shot like a mockumentary but it’s actually very elegantly filmed.  Leaving just a sliver of horizon at the top, Winterbottom fills the frame with screen-high views of the pastures and meadows of Northern England, using a lens that puts the rolling hills and dales right on the plane of the frame.  The pair visits some of the striking features of this land where Coleridge and Wordsworth trod: the limestone pavements, an ancient churchyard.  The interiors of the inns are beautifully shot as well.

While they eat a lot of succulent food—scallops and lamb in particular—neither is particularly a foodie (“Tomato-y” and “soupy” is the verdict on a bowl of tomato soup). 

The dynamic is very much as described above, Brydon breaking into impressions at the smallest provocation (and, really, with no provocation at all), Coogan skeptical and a bit perplexed that (1) Brydon's not embarrassed and (2) that people seems to lap his stuff up.  Brydon for his part is quite incapable of embarrassment, because he' s completely free of pretense.  He is happy to be middlebrow, happy to make ordinary people laugh and to be an ordinary family man living an ordinary life.  (His claim to fame in England is apparently his “little man in a box” voice).  He is head-over-heels in love with his wife and baby daughter.  He cheerfully absorbs Coogan's put-downs, my favorite of which was his slam, which I will leave to you to discover, of Brydon after Brydon recites passages from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.  (The setting more than once inspires him to poetic flights of fancy). 

Coogan, meanwhile, holds forth on the subject of how he should by all rights be getting the parts that are instead going to Michael Sheen (e.g., Tony Blair, David Frost).  

Here is a man who has thought deeply about the complex dialectic between writer and singer that makes Abba’s “The Winner Takes It All” so brilliant.  His treatise on the subject is a little gem of sad hilarity.  

The scene in which Coogan one-ups Brydon’s Michael Caine is already a classic: after Brydon regales Coogan with a pretty damn good Caine, Coogan takes him to school, absolutely nailing one Caine mannerism after another until you see the difference between a good ear and an uncanny one. 

I also laughed hard at the scene in which they compete while driving to see who has the greater octave range. 

“The Trip” is self-reflexive on a lot of levels.  Winterbottom is exactly the sort of art-house auteur with whom Coogan at one point professes to only work.  (Meanwhile, his secret desire to be in mainstream Hollywood movies manifests itself in in a funny dream sequence in which Ben Stiller lists all the A-list Hollywood directors who are dying to work with him.)  And "The Trip" is itself the kind of movie that he tells his agent he's tired of being in. 

Unexpectedly, it becomes a movie about aging and human connection.  The fact that Coogan is 44 years old and not where he wants to be in his career or his life is played for laughs, but there's a lot of pathos there as well.  The idea was to take his girlfriend on the trip, but she’s back in America—they’re kind of on hiatus.  Coogan is sincere when he says he loves her, but they’re drifting more and more apart.  He scrambles to the top of hill and dale, trying to get a signal so he can call her.  He stumbles into a lot of casual sex as well.  Women make themselves available to him at every turn--a hotel staffer, a magazine photographer.  Drugs, too, if he chose to partake.  But it doesn’t make him happy. 

Apart from Larry David, rarely has a comedian crafted a public persona so shabby and pathetic, or allowed himself to be the butt of the joke for as long as Coogan has.  Brydon pities him, if anything.  He’d like to draw him into the world of human contact, but Coogan must always withdraw.  I won’t forget the cross-cutting at the end between Brydon, cozily and happily reunited with his family, and Coogan, alone in his empty flat overlooking London.  With “The Trip”, Coogan adds another funny, sad, honest chapter to an ongoing portrait of an empty, world-weary man.

Rating: ***1/2

-- June 30, 2011

 
Key to ratings:

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

Super 8

With this picture Steven Spielberg, who produced, seems to anoint J.J. Abrams, who wrote and directed, as his heir.  For Abrams it’s got to represent a childhood dream come true.  The movie’s about a band of friends on the cusp of pubescence who are making a Super 8 zombie movie in a rural Ohio town in 1979.  Oddly, our young lead (Joel Courtney) is not the director, as might be expected of an Abrams surrogate; instead he’s the makeup man. 

At midnight the kids sneak out to shoot a scene at the train station.  As they’re filming, a train appears on the horizon.  The keep the camera rolling as it roars past, but suddenly a truck appears on the opposite horizon, veering onto the tracks and speeding directly at the train.  In the next instant the very world seems to come screaming apart around the kids in a crash apocalyptically staged by Abrams.  Odd things begin to happen around town in the wake of the crash.  Dogs and electronics go missing.  The military rolls in and shady officers thwart Joel’s dad, a local cop, in his attempts to investigate.  What was unleashed when that train derailed?  Could the secret have been captured on their footage?    

You can tick off the Spielberg tropes: kids left to sort things out in the face of the obtuse adults who wield power over their lives.  Havoc unleashed in that very model of order, the suburbs.  Government agents conspiring.  And, crucially, the heart: young Elle Fanning plays the female lead in the movie the kids are making, startling them with what a natural actress she is, and the relationship between her and Joel, who has a crush on her, is really sweet.  This budding first relationship takes place, as does all of the movie, in the wake of Joel’s mother’s death in an accident at the factory where she worked and his going through the process of letting her go.  (Their dads have an intractable hatred for each other for reasons we don’t learn until later).  The movie is imbued with the Spieilberg worldview, which acknowledges that cruel things happen in the world but which never quite looses its innocence, the conviction that human beings are basically good-hearted and intelligent.   

I like Abrams.  If anybody could be the new Spielberg, at least in his big-budget, sci-fi mode, it’s him.  (I certainly don’t foresee him cracking apart on the dire shoals of Shyamalan).  “Super 8” is basically an amalgam of “Jaws”, “Close Encounters”, “ET”, “The Goonies”, “Poltergeist” and many more.  It wants to be the kind of movie that I loved when I was the age of the kids in the movie: Spielberg-produced summer popcorn flicks like “Gremlins,” and Abrams does display skills he no doubt learned at the master’s knee.  He’s got the knack for visual storytelling, the talent for conveying a tremendous amount of information in one shot.  He knows where to put the camera to convey that an object is pregnant with ominous significance. 

But as it proceeds the movie falls prey to Spielberg’s weakness as well, which I noticed even as a kid: that sense of enervation that seemed to settle over his special-effects productions, a numbing feeling generated by all that frantic activity, the interminably soaring score trying to lift something that’s flailing, a sense of a massive budget being deployed to no impactful end. 

It seems to me there’s two audiences for this.  On the one hand it’s people around the age of the kids in this movie, who are not likely to have seen a lot of the things it’s based on.  For them it’ll have plenty of thrills and chills.  On the other it’s adults like me who grew up on this stuff and want to have the experience evoked.  They will have fun even as they wish that the material was stronger, that Abrams had pulled off a little better the trick of paying homage while also keeping things from feeling formulaic.  For example, there are scenes in which an unseen malevolence menaces first a gas station and then a guy in a cherry picker: these scenes played out ­exactly the way I thought they would.            

Still, “Super 8” is a personal project for Abrams, and so was watching it for me, in a lot of ways.  I’m from a rural Ohio town myself (albeit a university town rather than a factory one), and I used to direct Super 8 movies when I was around the age of the kids in this movie.  When they stage a zombie kill for their production it reminded me of a shot we filmed of an ax murder.  My pal, in a wig belonging to my mom, sticks his head out a window.  Cut to an overhead shot (we’d popped the wig onto the Styrofoam head on which it perched when not in use and substituted that for my friend’s head): down comes the ax and lops it off!  My cousins had a camera, too: I remember shooting a film in their basement.  In fact, the kid in this movie who’s in charge of pyro, with his backpack cache of fireworks, put me in mind of my cousin when he was that age.    

The finished Super 8 zombie movie is fun, too; it’s shown over the end credits.  You can see glimpses of an inchoate talent there.  It does seem like the kind of thing a kid might make who’s going to grow up to be a director.  A kid not unlike J.J. Abrams.

Rating: ***  

-- June 23, 2011
 
Key to ratings:

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

Certified Copy

“You play the loving woman, I play the faithful man…”
--Bruce Springsteen, “Brilliant Disguise”

 “There's nothing more cinematic than the sight of a man and a woman talking at 3 a.m. in the dark night of the soul.”
--attributed to Andrew Sarris

This is the first film this year that I’ve had to go back and see a second time at the theater.  It’s Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature made outside of Iran, and he’s got something really fascinating here, something of tremendous emotional power.  It felt very personal to me, as though I were watching the stages of my own failed marriage reflected in the single afternoon that two people spend walking around a little Tuscan village, seeming to morph from strangers into an old married couple before our eyes.

An Englishman named James (William Shimell) has come to Arezzo, Tuscany to talk about his controversial new book, which argues that a good copy of a painting or a sculpture is no less a “real” work of art than the original, if it gives just as much pleasure (and he believes that pleasure is the point of life).  He strikes me as a wise man, wearing lightly his wealth of interesting ideas about art and life.  He meets a Frenchwoman (Binoche), the proprietor of a local shop full of artifacts, sculpture and the like.  She had briefly attended his lecture, and while she bought multiple copies of his book, she makes it clear that his thesis annoys her.  Nonetheless, she is thrilled (and nervous) to be hosting him.

She drives him out to see a little town called Luciagno.  They stop for a cup of coffee.  Now, for some time their conversation has carried overtones which seem just slightly off for banter amongst strangers.  As James steps out to take a call, their elderly hostess strikes up an amusing discussion with Binoche about her “husband.”  Binoche rolls with it, and when her conversation with James resumes we watch, disoriented, as they take on the roles of a married couple who’ve just marked their 15th anniversary, fighting like only people do for whom love itself is at stake.  Are they role-playing?  Part of our disorientation comes from just how intense Binoche is.  No way is she playing a game.  It’s too “real”.  (But of course this is itself just an illusion created by a brilliant actress.)

To what extent do a couple play roles with each other?  James, hungry and fed up with the contentious Binoche, gives himself over to a snit at a trattoria.  The first time I saw it I found that scene curious.  It seems to be the only time in the picture when Shimell (in real life an opera baritone), so natural throughout the rest of the picture, seemed visibly to be acting (that is to say, role-playing).  Seeing it again, it occurred to me that perhaps Kiarostami gave him that direction, as a way to keep the audience guessing.  In any case, I saw myself in James’s peak of pique.  At one point Binoche tells him that she knows he hates her, and maybe in that moment he does.  But later, as he watches her sit down on some steps and rub her sore feet, I recognized that moment, too.  I knew what he was feeling then: remorse, compassion…and love.
 
“Certified Copy” is a film bursting with ideas and feeling.  It’s about the interplay and fluidity, in art and life, of perception, identity, mortality, reproduction, time.  Throughout the movie we see people and things reflected on “screens” such as mirrors and windshields.  If, like James and Binoche in this movie, we would go looking for the original, the “real you” in that hall of mirrors, it is because we know that the original is the one that contains the heart, the heart that—once upon a time, and still—we love.

 
Rating: ***** 

 
Key to ratings:

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

- June 21, 2011