Lessons of Darkness

Oh So Tardy

With the New York Film Festival's press screenings in full swing, I've been very bad about getting my recent reviews up on this here blog. Nonetheless, this post should rectify that failing, as it contains my last TEN published reviews. Some are of films showing at the NYFF, some are of recent theatrical releases, a few are of upcoming films, and one - The Puppetmaster - is my long-delayed new contribution to Slant magazine's 100 Essential Films feature.

FYI - To help navigate this wealth of reading material, I've used asterisks to denote positive write-ups.

NYFF Films:
The Squid and the Whale (Slant magazine)*
Paradise Now (Slant magazine)*
Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (Slant magazine)
The Hidden Blade (Slant magazine)*

Upcoming Films:
The Matador (Slant magazine)
The War Within (Slant magazine)*
Never Been Thawed (Slant magazine)

Recent Releases:
Roll Bounce (Slant magazine)*
Separate Lies (filmcritic.com)

A Revisited Classic:
The Puppetmaster (Slant magazine)*

And in case those didn't satisfy your criticism cravings, I've also got seven new capsule reviews posted below for many (generally good) films, including The Child, Oliver Twist, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

L'Enfant (2005): A

As with Rosetta and The Son (the latter of which has grown on me tremendously since my original, somewhat critical, review), Belgian auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s L'Enfant (aka The Child) is another rigorously austere masterpiece infused with intense humanism. The Dardennes’ documentary-influenced stylistic trademarks (watchful hand-held cinematography positioned behind characters, drab on-location sets, no musical punctuation) are once again deftly employed in service of a tale of painful salvation, this time concerning a petty thief named Bruno (Jérémie Renier) and the moral and spiritual crisis that accompanies his decision to sell his newborn son Jimmy on the black market behind the back of the kid’s mother Sonia (Déborah François). What ensues is pathetic, heartrending, and uplifting, as the Dardenne brothers perfectly calibrate every magnificently observant sequence – including a third-act chase that’s as taut as anything committed to film this year – for maximum emotional devastation. Their narrative’s superficial simplicity belies a complex, underlying intertwining of guilt, shame, desperation, accountability, and maturation. And as the film’s wayward juvenile, in a final, tearful embrace, achieves manhood by accepting responsibility for his actions, L'Enfant achieves a sublime state of transcendent catharsis.

(2005 New York Film Festival)

Oliver Twist (2005): B

There’s not much to say about Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist other than that it faithfully reproduces Charles Dickens’ novel without markedly improving upon David Lean’s lush 1948 version. Beginning with a woodcut opening credit sequence transforming into a live-action scene, Polanski’s film captures the grimy, unforgiving nastiness of a Victorian London in which maltreated young orphans – beaten for wanting a bit more gruel, and denigrated for having no parents – dream of familial stability while being driven to careers as pickpockets. Polanski’s frame is bursting with cockeyed angles which mirror his myriad characters’ varying motivations (and movement up and down the social ladder), but there’s something drearily straightforward about his presentation of Oliver’s (Barney Clark) escape from a prison-like orphanage, stint working with the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden) for the nefarious Fagin (Ben Kingsley, in a performance that fails to transcend the character’s inherent anti-Semitic construction), and eventual ascension out of the gutter. Technically accomplished and frequently engaging, there’s nonetheless no burning passion or urgency in Polanski’s Oliver Twist, an unnecessary and conservative adaptation that feels innocuous when it should be, per Dickens’ source material, bleak and menacing.

Breakfast on Pluto (2005): B-

Fantabulous transvestite Patrick “Kitten” Brady (Cillian Murphy) haphazardly drifts through the ‘60s and ‘70s in Neil Jordan’s magic surrealism-tinged fable Breakfast on Pluto, a peculiar concoction made up of The Crying Game’s gender-bending and The Butcher Boy’s period realism. Kitten’s escapades serve as a filter for Jordan’s examination of the era’s political and social upheaval, a narrative device that might have been more successful if his vignette-heavy narrative weren’t so gratingly jaunty – like the two talking robins who bookend the story, the film frequently emits an all-too-cute bounciness – and if Kitten weren’t portrayed by Murphy as a flighty, cavalier ditz with a laughably breathy voice and an ignorance to the larger realities engulfing her rather ho-hum life. The film links personal and national struggles for identity via Kitten’s search for her birth mother, an odyssey whose fun is largely attributable to stellar supporting performances from Jordan regulars Stephen Rea (as one of Kitten’s many lovers) and Liam Neeson (as her hometown priest). However, despite its sometimes-delectable whimsy, Breakfast on Pluto’s uneasy marriage between down-in-the-muck naturalism and capricious fantasy – a dichotomy embodied by the cross-dressing Kitten – winds up being only moderately satisfying.

(2005 New York Film Festival)

Bubble (2005): B-

The first of six upcoming hi-def movies from Steven Soderbergh (all of which will be simultaneously released by HDNet films in theaters, on TV, and on DVD), Bubble is a far cry from Full Frontal, the director’s previous (awful) collaboration with screenwriter Coleman Hough. Set in small town Ohio and populated by a cast of nonprofessional actors, this frequently bewitching whodunit – about the murder of a doll factory’s newest employee – creates the beguiling impression of a world slightly, dangerously askew even as it sporadically assumes a condescending stance toward its low-income locale (characterized by banal donut shops, fluorescent lit-factory floors, and wood-paneled mobile homes). At the heart of this bizarre little story is Martha (Debbie Doebereiner), a roly-poly middle-aged woman whose friendship with young co-worker Kyle (Dustin James Ashley) is threatened by the arrival of somewhat aloof single-mom Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins), leading to a crime and investigation that Soderbergh slyly unfurls in ambiguous, multiple-interpretation fashion. Was the killer compelled by the divine command of the Lord, or by the unshakable allure of a paycheck? To the creepily efficient film’s credit, even the chorus of onlooking dead-eyed dolls refuses to burst Bubble’s central mystery.

(2005 New York Film Festival)

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005): A-

Chronicling the nightlong odyssey of ulcerous alcoholic Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) during which he journeys back and forth between Bucharest hospitals hoping to be cured of various fatal ailments, Cristi Puiu’s stunning The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a prolonged, uncomfortable experience akin to sitting in a foreboding doctor’s office waiting room with a group of doomed patients. Positing a medical community beset by bureaucratic coldness, the film offers up snide practitioners who act inconvenienced by having to minister to the unwell, and one seriously sick man who, shuffled from one purgatorial ER hellhole to another, is forced to suffer endless indignities. With extended takes creating the impression that events are unfolding in real-time, Puiu’s conscientiously observed drama perspicaciously examines the Romanian medical care establishment, attitudes toward the ill and elderly, and societal (and individual) moral responsibility, and is only slightly undermined by a tad too much unrealistic pessimism – Lazarescu (his first name a variation on Lazarus) is treated so nastily by every medical worker he meets, one half expects his desecrated corpse to be literally dumped in the gutter by story’s conclusion. Yet through his blisteringly unsentimental (and at times bleakly funny) depiction of a profession in which selfishness, laziness, and apathetic disinterest breed abusive neglect, Puiu’s film nonetheless possesses a raw, focused outrage that’s difficult to shake.

(2005 New York Film Festival)

Beyond the Rocks (1922): B

Thought forever lost, Sam Woods’ 1922 melodrama Beyond the Rocks was recently discovered in a Netherlands museum with only two minutes of footage found to be beyond repair. Restored and screened at this year’s 43rd New York Film Festival, this unique piece of silent cinema is notable for pairing two of the era’s biggest stars, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, as young lovers separated by marital circumstances. As befitting the period in which it was made, Woods’ entertainingly soapy production is completely dated and often ridiculous, such as a scene in which the unhappily married Theodora (Swanson) idiotically slips off an Alps cliff, or a sequence in which her cuckolded millionaire husband (Robert Bolder) – off on an African archaeological dig after discovering his wife’s feelings for the dashing young Lord Bracondale (Valentino) – unearths an archaic Egyptian document which, conveniently, outlines proper punishment for adulterous women. Narrative preposterousness aside, however, the film is still a ravishing example of the incandescent grandeur of Swanson and Valentino, whose mute performances are wondrously expressive, affecting and larger-than-life despite the still-infant medium’s technical limitations.

(2005 New York Film Festival)

Where the Truth Lies (2005): C+

Atom Egoyan attempts to expose the seedy underbelly of glamorous 1950s showbiz with Where the Truth Lies, somehow not realizing that few still retain any illusions about their matinee idols’ moral spotlessness. Pill-popping Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and sex fiend Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) are a Martin and Lewis-style tag-team who, twenty-odd years after their union’s sudden dissolution, are forced to relive an ugly episode involving a murdered hotel employee (Rachel Blanchard) by an intrepid reporter named Karen (Alison Lohman) who’s writing a tell-all about their careers in part because of her lifelong infatuation with the duo. Egoyan’s loose, snazzy direction helps generate an appropriate atmosphere of profligate sleaziness, and Bacon and Firth radiate a believable blend of public megawatt charm and behind-closed-doors sordidness. Yet because of Lohman’s false, tone-deaf performance – in which a descent into disreputable lesbianism is only one roofie away – and a clunky, flashback-heavy narrative in which the shockingly pedestrian truth is buried in the flimsiest of mysteries, the film turns out to be more superficial Rat Pack-ish razzle dazzle than gritty Raymond Chandler-esque whodunit.

Good Luck

In my final pre-New York Film Festival post, I've got a wide variety of reviews, from this past weekend's French sex farce Cote D'Azur to this coming's weekend's Just Like Heaven, The Thing About My Folks, and Everything is Illuminated. Yet my most gushing comments are reserved for this year's NYFF Opening Night selection, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. As you'll see from the below review, I think it's one of the year's finest American films.

Coming soon:
Good Night, and Good Luck (Slant magazine)
Protocols of Zion (Slant magazine)

This weekend:
Just Like Heaven (Slant magazine)
Everything is Illuminated (Slant magazine)
The Thing About My Folks (Slant magazine)

Already in theaters:
Cote D'Azur (Slant magazine)

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005): C

Ecumenical courtroom debates about the existence of God and the Devil take center stage in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a pedantic supernatural hybrid of Inherit the Wind and Audrey Rose in which a priest is tried for causing the death of the titular college student during a Catholic rite to rid her of tormenting demons. Was Emily’s tragic demise the result of untreated epileptic psychosis, as argued by lead prosecutor Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott)? Or rather, was she forced to injure and starve herself by evil spirits who sought her out because she was “hyper-sensitive” to the netherworld, a hypothesis put forth by promotion-hungry defense lawyer Erin Bruner (Laura Linney)? The answer provided by Scott Derrickson’s preposterous anti-science horror story, unsurprisingly, is the latter, as despite his film’s wishy-washy attempts to pander to both sides of the issue, we’re clearly meant to believe that Emily – and, once she took the case, Bruner as well – were directly in Satan’s crosshairs.

With Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) charged with negligent homicide for 19-year-old Emily’s post-exorcism expiration, stupefying legal proceedings commence in which religion is put on trial and Emily’s own story – of her terrifying hallucinations, bizarre body contortions, and otherworldly wails and foreign language-peppered rants – is recounted in grimy-looking flashbacks. Its narrative divided between real-time attorney conjecture about paranormal phenomena as well as flashbacks for J-horror-inspired scares, the film fails on both counts, proving overly infatuated with tiresome special effects-enhanced screams on one stigmata-inflicted hand, and an utter lack of respect for both religious and secular viewpoints on the other. Confronted with one of the defense team’s spiritual “experts” (Shohreh Aghdashloo), Thomas argues that the testimony should be disallowed because it’s “silly.” It’s an assessment that also applies to this entire mystical movie-length episode of Law and Order.