Lessons of Darkness

Let the Right One In (2008): B+

Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In transports vampire legend to the realm of tween romance, melding genres with a haunting poignancy that’s mildly undercut by a script that, during its last act, bounces around like a jeep on a dirt road. Alfredson doesn’t shy away from supernatural lore (sunlight and stakes to the heart are fatal, blood-suckers must be invited across thresholds) but his prime concern is the way that vampires’ undead condition leads to the same type of isolation and loneliness also felt by unpopular adolescents. Thus, when picked-on Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) meets gaunt 12-year-old vampire Eli (unnerving, doe-eyed Lina Leandersson) outside his dreary, snow-coated apartment complex, their bond is immediate, born out of frustration, longing and hunger – hers for blood (which the mystery man with whom she lives attempts to acquire via the murder of innocents), and his for the power to combat a vicious school bully. Anderson’s chilly, pensive aesthetic exudes fairy tale melancholy, comprised equally of ethereal serenity and mundane realism, the latter of which extends to a group of grim adults whose fates are eventually intertwined with Eli’s. These peripheral characters serve basic narrative purposes (specifically, to create opportunities for carnage), yet while their presence expands the film’s portrait of frosty Nordic misery and alienation, it doesn’t do so in any appreciably affecting way. Ultimately, they’re just dull distractions from the central, disturbed romance whose main contribution is a bit of ridiculousness involving a horde of cats. Still, despite these needless narrative detours and a few indie-style affectations (most notably the assertively emotive score, which mucks up the otherwise eerie sound design), Let the Right One In has a gloomy poeticism wrought from arresting supernatural imagery – none more potent than an underwater shot during the public pool finale – as well as striking close-ups that give empathetic consideration to forlorn Oskar and Eli, two kids desperate for a warm, compassionate embrace in an environment frozen to the bone.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking

These reviews might have served a more practical purpose for moviegoers had I posted them on Friday. But, alas, I was too busy writing reviews that day - thanks to two unscreened-for-critics releases - to get them up on time. My apologies, thus to High School Musical fans, though fortunately, the only positive write-up of the bunch is for Slumdog Millionaire, and that doesn't come out for a few weeks.

Now Playing:

High School Musical 3: Senior Year (Slant magazine)

Pride and Glory (Slant magazine)

Saw V (Slant magazine)

Passengers (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:

Slumdog Millionaire (Slant magazine)

My Name is Bruce (Slant magazine)

The Dukes (Slant magazine)

I Can't Think Straight (Slant magazine)

Nixon (1995): A-

Oliver Stone has both Brezhnev and Kissinger state, on separate occasions, that Richard Nixon’s tale is a tragedy, and his Nixon certainly assumes an empathetic position on its disgraced presidential subject. This does not, however, mean that it’s a particularly kind portrait, as Stone’s epic – charting the 40^th commander-in-chief’s childhood, early career, and Oval Office tenure from his own warped perspective – depicts the confluence of forces that shaped Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) not in order to absolve him, but merely to comprehend what drove him to such ignominious lengths. What the writer/director comes up with is a litany of internal and external stimuli: his Quaker mother’s stern belief in strength above all other virtues (including happiness); his aspirations to be a Lincoln-esque uniter; his lifelong bitter resentment at being unpopular and bullied; and the way those feelings fostered a persecution complex so deep it drove him to see JFK as his light-dark counterpoint (and personal tormentor), the world as out to get him, and himself – via intermittent references to himself in the third person – as America’s, and the world’s, nucleus. Stone’s predilection for the grandiose is in ample evidence, from a shot of CIA chief Richard Helms (Sam Waterston) with all-black devil eyes (in a scene reinserted into the new director’s cut), to a pre-resignation Nixon disproving his earlier statement that men don’t cry while praying alongside Kissinger (Paul Sorvino). Yet the filmmaker’s deftness at evoking theme and sentiment through editorial montages within individual dramatic scenes reaches an apotheosis here. Stone employs breathtaking cutaways during conversations (so that a shot of a character speaking will be interrupted by a fleeting, silent shot of them flashing genuine emotion), constant camera tricks, different film stocks, and flashbacks and archival footage to create a multilayered, invigorating psychological account of a president consumed by bile and obsessed with legacy. Even as it teeters on the edge of (and, on a couple of occasions, tips over into) overblown extravagance, Nixon is an imposing model of cinematic storytelling forms, cemented by an all-star cast led by Hopkins’ tour-de-force titular performance – nailing Nixon’s mannerisms, body language and consuming loneliness and anger – as a man beautifully described by Watergate perp E. Howard Hunt (Ed Harris) as “the darkness reaching out for the darkness.”

24 City (2008): B+

Modern China’s gradual shift from collectivism to free-market economics forms the backbone of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, a beguiling documentary/fiction hybrid in which the Still Life director examines the transition of munitions manufacturing plant 420, located in Southwest China’s Chengdu city, into a futuristic complex for commercial and residential businesses as well as apartment high-rises. Zhang’s camera wanders through the empty floors and corridors of 420 with a bemused, distant somberness reminiscent of Antonioni, capturing a sense of detachment from the past that extends to its nine interviews with former workers. The catch is that five of these chats are scripted, having been constructed by Zhangke from real testimonies, a method that isn’t always as seamless as the director would like it to be but nonetheless furthers the presiding mood of internal and external disconnection. 24 City folds reality and make-believe into one, most strikingly during an interview with a middle-aged beauty – stymied, by fate’s unpredictable hand, from marrying – whose nickname, “Little Bird,” stems from her resemblance to actress Joan Chen, which makes sense considering that she’s played by the actress. Frustratingly, Zhangke’s performers aren’t as compelling as his authentic subjects, but the complexity of his postmodernist formal gambit nonetheless gets at something pressing: not simply the intertwined relationship between people and environment, and the inescapable influence of before on now, but also – via its TV-doc interview cinematography, its use of pop songs, and its references to movies – the way in which our relationship to history is deeply filtered through pop culture fiction.

(2008 New York Film Festival)

Synecdoche, New York (2008): A-

Synecdoche, New York may commence with the drab realism of an Arthur Miller play – such as, say, Death of a Salesman, the production being staged by perpetually glum regional-theater playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – but since this is the directorial debut of mad genius screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, the film soon reveals its true nature as a vortex of meta-psychoanalysis that extends outward from its mopey Kaufman-proxy protagonist to encapsulate humanity at large. An exhilarating authorial confession of loneliness, regret, misery, fear of death and illness, self-doubt, time, space and all other concerns under the moon and stars, it’s the story of man wracked by external pustules and internal maladies. Limited its aims most certainly are not, a sad-sack fictionalized profile that takes a leap down the rabbit hole and morphs – like all of Kaufman’s scripts, a point articulated by Caden’s early, knowing question, “Why do I always make it so complicated?” – into a morosely self-aware funhouse of foibles, hang-ups and the (potentially futile) search for comprehension of one’s inherently twisted, contradictory nature through artistic invention.

Obsessed with decay (his own, his career’s, his marriage’s), hypochondriac Caden is left by his successful painter wife Adele (a physically and emotionally disheveled Catherine Keener), who absconds to Berlin with their daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein). This abandonment is, for the always glass-half-empty Caden, both a case of worst fears realized and self-fulfilling prophecy. And almost instantaneously, it instigates a descent into chronology-obliterating solipsistic madness in which Caden – the beneficiary of a financially lucrative MacArthur grant – rents a zeppelin-sized warehouse and, while Adele is away (for a week? A year?) begins staging a play about his life that grows into a play about everyone’s life, with the set itself expanding into a miniature metropolis whose buildings and people are constantly being fictionally duplicated. Starting with Sammy (the great Tom Noonan), a man who’s been stalking Caden and is then hired to play him in the show, doppelgängers (and doppelgängers of doppelgängers) soon proliferate, as do edifices, with warehouses built within warehouses and Caden’s real-life abodes reconstructed as performance venues, a spiraling sequence of repetitions akin to the infinite doubling effect produced when two mirrors face each other.

It’s Kaufman’s uncompromisingly dreary 8 ½, replete with a bevy of romantic interests led by a box office clerk who lives in a perpetually on-fire house (the winningly flirty Samantha Morton), a fetching, smitten leading lady (Michelle Williams) as well as, in the film’s typically head-spinning circular fashion, the actresses hired to play those women. Scored to Jon Brion’s agonizingly tender musical theme, which exudes desolate melancholy over things (love, bodies, opportunities) destroyed by time, Synecdoche, New York – its titular locale’s name a reference to a thing that stands in for a larger whole – is a magnificently sprawling puzzle of a Kaufman self-portrait, an uninhibited navel-gazing work of relentless wry glumness. Yet if the film’s general absence of tonal modulation and oppressively bleak aesthetic underscore how responsible Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) were for providing prior Kaufman efforts with their light, effervescent touches, its dour, intricate struggle with issues of identity, art, and personal/professional satisfaction nonetheless feels like the “brutal truth” Caden is striving for through his own burgeoning, comprehensive opus.

The same holds true for Hoffman’s performance, a one-note expression of miasmatic neurosis that begins as a fairly conventional fictional conceit, but eventually locates an honesty – about lack of certainty, about confused desire, about the enlivening and deadening consequences of everyday and artistic narcissism – that’s acutely raw and severe. Synecdoche, New York may be epitomized by an early scene of Caden intently investigating his own bloody stool, a gaze into an ugly abyss of anxieties and phobias, and it’s unabashedly indulgent narrative ultimately leads to nothing less than a (somehow simultaneously literal and figurative) apocalypse that’s still not enough to quell its protagonist’s desire for creative self-analytic reinvention. Yet Kaufman’s meta-meta mind-boggler is, ultimately, far more heady and haunting than maddeningly egocentric, typified by an elderly Caden’s conversation with a dying, adult Olive (Robin Weigert), during which her demand that he admit to a phony homosexual affair lands with an overly scripted thud that’s redeemed, with piercing poignancy, by the subsequently mournful image of one of her flower tattoos falling, withered, from her lifeless arm.

Smiley Face (2007): C

There’s exactly one brilliant scene in Smiley Face, in which Ana Farris’ insanely stoned Jane ruminates, with hilariously authentic scattered-train-of-thought, on her fondness for lasagna. The rest of Greg Araki’s film, however, is not only a limp, unfunny time-waster, but it seems barely familiar with the actual experience of being high, indulging in one sequence after another characterized by Farris acting less like a habitual pothead than like a teetotaler attempting to imagine what such a stoner might be like. This can’t fully be pinned on Farris, who does as much as is humanly possible with her one-note role, offering up myriad, semi-charming variations of slack-jawed, heavy-lidded spaciness. Rather, it’s Araki who’s to blame, his script a series of broad, cartoony, sub-Cheech and Chong predicaments – revolving around Jane’s attempts, after scarfing down a plate full of pot cupcakes, to procure money to pay off her dealer – full of chases, coincidences and kooky goings-on that rarely elicit even a half-hearted smile. Smiley Face’s narrative is dimwitted in the wrong way, proceeding with next to no internal logic – for instance, if the supposedly sharp Jane is blotto to the point of being virtually brain-dead, her every decision an example of Looney Tunes nonsense, why hasn’t she just passed out? – and, worse still, too resolutely shallow and trivial to develop its (hinted at, but undeveloped) suggestion that Jane’s drug habit is symptomatic of some larger cultural malaise. Reconfirming his auteurist proclivities, Araki ends things with a Godard shout-out, but by that point, who cares about such smarty-pants gestures? If a pot comedy isn’t funny and/or true, as this one generally is not, it’s by and large worthless.

President Pain

So, did you see W. this weekend? Or Max Payne? If you saw either, you were probably disappointed. Or, at least, I certainly was.

Out Now:

W. (Slant magazine)

Max Payne (Slant magazine)

Filth and Wisdom (Cinematical)

Catch-Up

Well, despite my best intentions, this blog hasn't had a proper review-link update in two weeks. And I've got no excuse, except to say that I've been crazy busy writing.

Anyway, of this latest batch of critiques, particular attention should be paid to The Wrestler, Tokyo Sonata and, um, not The Secret Life of Bees. Because it's just such a brutal, brutal film.

Now Playing:

Body of Lies (Slant magazine)

City of Ember (Slant magazine)

Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Slant magazine)

RocknRolla (Slant magazine)

The Express (Slant magazine)

The Pleasure of Being Robbed (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:

The Secret Life of Bees (Slant magazine)

NYFF:

The Wrestler (Slant magazine)

Tokyo Sonata (Slant magazine)

DVD:

Le Doulos - Criterion Collection (Slant magazine)

Le Deuxième Souffle - Criterion Collection (Slant magazine)

Changeling (2008): C-

There are three or four movies competing for attention within Changeling, and unfortunately for Clint Eastwood, they’re all equally dreadful melodramatic drivel. In his worst directorial outing since 1999’s True Crime, Eastwood delivers something close to a parody of an Oscar-baiting period picture, establishing a faux-prestigious tone for this “true story” about a 1920s single mother whose son is kidnapped and, when he’s located months later, turns out to be not her son. J. Michael Straczynski’s clip-ready script is a tale of both child and female abuse, as gaunt Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), upon contending that the returned boy isn’t her flesh and blood, comes up against a raft of monstrous misogynistic caricatures led by dismissive captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) and the nasty chief of the psych ward that Christine is eventually sent to after the LAPD – trying to avoid further negative press – grows weary of her nay-saying. A righteous anti-police-corruption pastor (John Malkovich) and a giggly, loose-limbed serial killer also find their way into Changeling, which overstuffs itself with sensationalized narrative rubbish that Eastwood shoots with oppressively decorous, corny stateliness epitomized by a slow-motion shot of cigarette ash landing (with a titanic thud) upon a table. The broad, crude construction of most every peripheral character is matched by the Swiss cheese nature of the film’s plot, so that Eastwood’s attempts to comment on culturally entrenched sexism get lost amidst hoary flashbacks, dull procedural machinations, and B-movie hysterics. These reach a crescendo once Christine is confined to the mental institution, an embarrassing sequence involving evil physicians who make Nurse Ratched look timid, Amy Ryan’s benevolent, foul-mouthed hooker and Christine getting a hackneyed last-second reprieve from electroshock therapy. Amidst the statuette-craving histrionics, Jolie valiantly attempts to suffuse Christine with the powerless heartache, frustration and fury of a grieving mother wronged. Yet between Eastwood’s overbearing direction, his story’s leaden moralizing and clunky logic, and his procession of ever-lamer would-be endings, Jolie’s performance ultimately succumbs to mannered routine, no less self-consciously affected and hollow than the proceedings as a whole.

(2008 New York Film Festival)

Che (2008): C+

Che, Steven Soderbergh’s epic (or, at least, epically long) biopic of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s victorious revolutionary exploits in Cuba and later, fatal failure to replicate that triumph in Bolivia, is akin to a lovely butterfly trapped under glass. In effect two complementary 131-minute features wedded together, Soderbergh’s latest is a strikingly constructed, handsomely digitally-filmed museum display piece, one that immerses itself in the moment-to-moment details of Che’s contrasting campaigns, while at the same time frustrates immersion into Che’s psyche, depicting the rebel icon with such dry, alien detachment – in which his trademark facial hair, hat, cigars, and boots remain his most recognizable attributes – that any stabs at profound understanding prove futile. Part one is the more impressively composed half, its 2.35:1 aspect ratio and rich, verdant color palette expressing the optimistic hope and possibility of Che’s (Benicio Del Toro) communist activities alongside Fidel Castro, and its deft cross-cutting between 1956-1959 Cuba and Che’s 1964 U.N. appearance (shot in grainy black-and-white) lending some ideological context to the primary jungle-set proceedings. Especially during this opening segment, Soderbergh’s editing is dexterous, supple during quiet moments (such as when an audio clip from a broadcast interview accompanies sights of Che greeting new comrades) and sharp during the story’s many, crisply orchestrated firefights.

Yet while the director craftily jumps back and forth in time, he nonetheless avoids deeply investigating his protagonist’s motivations, a decision which keeps Che from devolving into simplistic pop psychology pap, but ultimately at the expense of plumbing any trenchant depths. As the Argentinean doctor-turned-revolutionary, Del Toro exhibits a stern countenance that expresses the weight of Che’s responsibility and the firmness of his conviction in a handful of snapshots, such as him staring at Fidel in 1956 on the boat to Cuba, or sitting alone in a kitchen in 1964, a fist against his forehead. However, as it segues to its 1967 Bolivia-set second half (shot in more constricting 1.85:1 with jumpier handheld cinematography and harsher whites), the film remains at once tightly affixed to Che and yet doggedly outside him – the reason Che is even in Bolivia is barely sketched – so that Del Toro’s physically imposing performance soon comes to resemble a Madame Tussaud wax statue, an approximation of life devoid of heart and soul. The same fate eventually befalls Che as a whole, its engrossing-in-the-moment drama staged with mechanical efficiency that, when coupled with its refusal to engage in meaningful analysis, keeps things chilly and remote. The result is a marathon portrait with all the insight of a Guevera t-shirt, failing, except in very small flashes, to ever actually express its subject’s intellectual or emotional passion.

(2008 New York Film Festival)