Lessons of Darkness

Boarding Gate (2008): A-

A B-movie that self-reflexively distills genre tropes (and their consequent pleasures) to their lean, potent essence, Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate has a convoluted thriller plot to ignore (or, rather, to get lost in), a frazzled, frantic aesthetic to adore, and a lead performance from Asia Argento to get hot and bothered over. As in demonlover (which, five years after my dismissive initial assessment, now seems less a confused muddle than a bold, sleek original), Assayas here revisits his favorite obsessions: espionage, intrigue, sex, betrayal, escape, reinvention, and love and exploitation in a globalized modern world that brings people and cultures together and yet also fosters individual detachment. The director’s story hinges, initially, on former corporate prostitute-cum-spy Sandra’s (Asia Argento) reunion with her pimp-lover Miles (Michael Madsen). This culminates in an extended dance-of-death in Miles’ chilly, sterile apartment that’s defined by cinematographic framing concocted with an eye toward alienation, Assayas’ digital images rife with reflections in cold, shiny surfaces that repel rather than invite. Sandra and Miles’ rapport is predicated on role-playing – which echoes the film’s own pretense of being a straightforward genre piece rather than an oblique, avant-garde riff on such entertainments – and once their relationship violently ends, Sandra is thrust into a constant state of motion, with her fleeing Paris for Hong Kong to seek out a new identity, then revenge, and finally a glimpse of the betrayer she thought had loved her. Assayas prizes energized, sensual momentum and mood over lucidity, his latest fundamentally a series of scenes where eliciting a visceral, unadulterated, immediate emotional response takes precedence over narrative logic. It’s a modus operandi aided by the director’s fluid, lustrous camerawork, which glides, dips and soars with giddy electricity, as well as by his persistent, subtle depiction of cross-cultural communication as simultaneously binding and isolating. Boarding Gate experimentally channels its adoration of Hollywood pulp into something invigoratingly abstract (heck, even Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon randomly shows up to yell in Cantonese), which is also a way of describing the peerlessly scuzzy, scintillating Argento, here melding a raft of contradictory, often-ludicrous poses – cooing vixen and mumbling junkie; proficient killer and bewildered victim; crotch-rubbing skank and forlorn romantic – in a tour-de-force of force-of-nature erotic badassery.

A Measly Two

Only a couple of links for this Sunday night, with more to come by the end of the week, when I'll have seen (among others) Doubt, Revolutionary Road, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...

Now Playing:

Four Christmases (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:

Cadillac Records (Slant magazine)

Frost/Nixon (2008): C

As with The Queen, screenwriter Peter Morgan once again pits a Michael Sheen underdog against a titanic adversary in Frost/Nixon, Sheen in this case embodying playboy cream puff British talk-show host David Frost, and his nemesis being Tricky Dick (Frank Langella), whom Frost famously interviewed over several months in 1977. Adapting his own play, Morgan posits this showdown as David vs. Goliath, and the two as similar figurative boxers fighting for credibility, respect, and a return to the limelight, a dynamic clearly established by the numerous characters who bluntly articulate these very points. In terms of condescending narrative handholding, Frost/Nixon has no 2008 rival, as Morgan’s script and Ron Howard’s direction maniacally avoid anything like subtext or visual storytelling, their tale’s every argument made painfully plain by dialogue – much of it coming from framing-device, faux-documentary hindsight interviews with the main players – that demonstrates a devotion to telling rather than showing. This modus operandi is so zealously applied that one soon feels borderline insulted by the general lack of respect for audience intelligence, a feeling that culminates during the momentous close-up of Nixon immediately after he admits to having made presidential mistakes and let down the American public.

It’s a moment that finds Langella silently expressing layered emotions, only to then be immediately followed by anti-Nixon author James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) overtly describing said emotions in detail before Howard cuts back to Nixon’s countenance just so we can again see what Rockwell just told us we should. Langella’s performance is bone-deep and compelling but the film’s conception of the disgraced commander-in-chief only amounts to a sketchy variation of that proffered by Nixon, and its depiction of Frost stresses his superficiality not because it’s necessarily accurate but because it better serves the little guy-big guy conflict. Even given the plot’s talky, static nature, Howard awkwardly aims for bigness via self-conscious zooms, camera pans, and narrative beats better suited for one of his tentpole efforts. The gracelessness of his direction, however, is in keeping with Frost/Nixon’s simplistic obviousness, which goes hand-in-hand with its ill-defined point-of-view, a fact most strikingly epitomized by a final close-up that strains for the emotional complexity of the Frost interviews’ climax but – aside from granting Nixon great empathy – merely highlights how little of note Howard and Morgan have to say about their subject.

A Christmas Tale (2008): B+

The cinema of Arnaud Desplechin is a literary one, insofar as his sprawling, multi-character, usually family-oriented films seek a richness, complexity, and scope reminiscent of grand novels. A Christmas Tale is no different, a drama about the holiday gathering of the Vuillard family that’s at once quite confined in terms of focus, and yet wide-ranging with regards to both its narrative concerns and emotions. Co-written with Emmanuel Bourdieu (with whom the director also collaborated on Esther Kahn), Desplechin’s opus is, in terms of basic subject matter, rather conventional, as it’s a star-studded Christmas saga in which a fractured family reunites under the shadow of their matriarch’s impending death. Junon (Catherine Deneuve) is dying of a rare cancer that can only be treated through a painful (and potentially lethal) bone marrow transplant from a matching donor, of which she has two: her grandson Paul (Emile Berling), recently out of a psych hospital after a breakdown, and her middle child Henri (Mathieu Amalric), a reckless, selfish prick estranged from the family for six years thanks to a decree by his elder sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny). Their gathering rekindles old tensions as well as sparks a few new ones, which also come to involve younger brother Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), his wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni), cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto), and dad Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), a bevy of characters whose motivations and feelings for each other are intricate and contradictory, sometimes to the point of obscurity. Such mild inscrutability is occasionally trying, yet the cumulative effect of Desplechin’s plotting – in which myriad sentiments and relationships are tied up like a Christmas present bow – is to force constant, pressing engagement with his story. As such, A Christmas Tale’s expansive stew of physical and psychological illness, death, betrayal, longing, religion, and ritual ultimately proves invigoratingly lush, a work of outsized ambition that, enlivened by Desplechin’s deft melding of the grand and the intimate, leaves one feeling, as all Christmas films should, pleasurably stuffed.

Adam Resurrected (2008): C

Adam Resurrected has a slackness that makes one think Paul Schrader had to actively try to maintain interest in his project during production. Penned not by the celebrated writer/director but by Noah Stollman (adapting Yoram Kaniuk’s controversial Israeli novel), Schrader’s film is beleaguered by a general dearth of energy, despite being an eccentric time-hopping saga about a popular German cabaret clown named Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum) who’s shipped to the concentration camps and, later, finds himself the star attraction of a psychiatric institute for Holocaust survivors located in the Israeli desert. Stein had been forced, during his stay in the camps, to act like a pooch by Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe), a trauma subsequently suppressed until the arrival at the institute of a young boy who thinks himself a canine. It’s a convenient development that simplistically lays the groundwork for the titular rebirth, though it’s no more awkward than the incessant symbolism (such as Adam’s ability to bleed on cue, without apparent injury) that Schrader’s apathetic camerawork turns dully literal. Despite a heavy accent that tends to fluctuate, Goldblum’s performance is initially a delight, yet never manages to convey the roiling inner tumult that Adams masks with showman flair, and his scenes with Dafoe outline the material’s themes with sledgehammer subtlety. There are a few beautiful shots scattered throughout, such as Adam playing violin for campmates, including his wife and young daughter, on their way to the gas chamber, but they’re ultimately overshadowed by a raft of misbegotten ones (including Dafoe’s first post-Last Temptation of Christ return to the burning bush), leaving the Cat People director’s latest something of a dog.

Australia (2008): C

Australia is a deliberate throwback to David Lean-esque historical romantic epics, replete with classic Hollywood’s favorite bigoted trope: the mystical dark-skinned native. Baz Luhrmann’s bloated saga tells the cusp-of-WWII tale of prim-and-proper English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), who journeys to Australia to visit her husband’s cattle ranch Faraway Downs, finds him dead, and winds up teaming with a stud named The Drover (Hugh Jackman) to keep the business alive by driving a herd of cattle across the Outback to nab a lucrative military contract. Sarah and The Drover are clichéd opposites who inevitably attract in ways so perfunctory one need not even bother reciting them, with their initially contentious, then passionate, rapport set against a widescreen backdrop of the gorgeously barren Aussie wastelands and – during the CG-heavy, sub-Pearl Harbor third act – bloody chaos of the Japanese army’s February 1942 attack on the northern port city of Darwin. Luhrmann’s trademark exaggerated flamboyance is glimpsed in Jackman’s introductory scene and a subsequent Loony Tunes-esque close-up of Kidman reacting to a kangaroo’s murder. Such moments, however, are astonishingly few and far between, as the story – which also involves a dastardly villain named Fletcher (David Wenham, lacking only a mustache to twirl) who wants to take control of Faraway Downs – otherwise dutifully goes through the sweeping-swoony motions.

The same can be said for both Kidman and Jackman, the former doing a rote cold-prig-warms-up routine and the latter stuck playing the gruff, emotionally reticent hunk (with the ripped physique to match). Were that all Australia amounted to, it would be a dull and predictable, but hardly appalling, entry in the wannabe-Gone with the Wind subgenre. But Luhrmann, intent on saying something oh-so-important, goes the extra mile and pivots the entire film around Sarah and The Drover’s surrogate-parent relationship with Nullah (Brandon Walters), a disenfranchised aboriginal boy whose scary-exotic witch doctor grandfather King George (David Gulpilil) is suspected of killing Sarah’s husband and who has mentored the boy in the ways of spiritual magic. And by spiritual magic, I mean in-harmony-with-nature superpowers that allow Nullah to communicate with distant people through song and, even more impressively, to raise his arms up like Merlin and somehow stop a stampeding herd of cattle before they knock him off a cliff. Between these numinous abilities and his habit of spouting platitudes in cutie-pie broken English, Nullah is an insufferable and offensively racist creation, and his presence – as well as repeated Wizard of Oz references employed because, well, Australia is known as Oz, and there’s some underlying theme about home and, um, Oz ends in z just like Baz? – inevitably, irrevocably reduces Australia to grade-A old-tyme claptrap.

Milk (2008): B

Gus Van Sant’s squarest work since Finding Forrester, Milk turns out to be that rare, heartfelt biopic disinterested in egregious chronological compression or psychological reductiveness. Gone is the avant-garde experimentation that characterized much of Van Sant’s previous decade, here replaced by an uncomplicated – if nonetheless finely crafted – aesthetic that conventionally and empathetically considers its trailblazing subject’s final eight years, during which he (Sean Penn) became disillusioned with his mundane 9-to-5 NYC existence and, in 1972, moved to San Francisco’s burgeoning gay mecca, the Castro District, in search of a greater purpose. His subsequent campaigns for public office – culminating in his successful 1977 run for City Supervisor, making him the country’s first openly gay elected official – forms the nucleus of Van Sant’s film, a saga whose only excessive embellishment is an operatic Danny Elfman score that italicizes the true story’s importance. Otherwise, save for a few auteurist from-behind tracking shots (including a late one that eerily echoes Elephant), Van Sant mostly sticks to the facts, a tack that mercifully keeps the proceedings (aided by some expertly integrated archival news clips) from devolving into self-righteous mawkishness. Penn’s performance similarly avoids cheap awards-baiting theatrics; his flamboyant mannerisms and earnest proclamations of belief are infused with a respectful humanism, with the actor consistently striving for accuracy and honesty rather than saintly lionization. The same largely holds true for the rest of the supporting cast’s turns, including a rather unbearable one by Diego Luna as Milk’s insecure, clingy, unstable boyfriend Jack. From its loving portrait of 1970s San Francisco (its outrageous fashions treated nonchalantly and its story free of the usual period-music montages) to its even-handed treatment of Milk’s assassin, city government colleague Dan White (Josh Brolin), Milk engenders engagement through unfussy directness, a quality that also allows its piercing present-day parallels – Milk’s repeated calls for “hope,” and his fight against a California proposition aimed at criminalizing homosexuality – to resonate with the force of a ten-ton hammer.

Linkage Light

'Tis the season for sitting through dreary star-studded awards contenders. Meh.

Still, this week's real dud isn't an Oscar hopeful but, instead, the tweener vampire romance hordes of moviegoers apparently just wasted their cash on.

Out Now:

Twilight (Slant magazine)

Bolt (Slant magazine)

We Are Wizards (Slant magazine)

Special (Slant magazine)

The Visitor (2008): C+

Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor is a character study drowning in liberal guilt, equal parts social-message movie and in-depth portrait of a figuratively dying man’s rebirth. Connecticut professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a despondent walking corpse whose life is shaken by his discovery that – for reasons left absurdly oblique – a Muslim couple, Syrian Tariq (Haaz Sleiman) and Senegalese Zainab (Danai Gurira), are residing in his seldom-used Manhattan apartment. McCarthy’s attentive direction takes great pains to convey Walter’s detachment by lingering on him staring out of windows or at street performers, the widower’s sad disposition slowly dissolving once he allows the strangers to stay in his place and, soon afterwards, he begins taking drum lessons from Tariq. When the young Syrian is arrested and thrown into a Queens detention center for illegal immigrants, The Visitor begins modestly sermonizing about the supposed unjustness of current domestic immigration policy, albeit from the perspective not of Tariq (whose future is actually at stake) but of Walter. Such a point of view openly reveals McCarthy’s chief subject matter to be liberal Caucasians’ shame and remorse over illegal immigration rather than America’s complex post-9/11 relations with its foreign-born population. And as a result, his visual political signifiers (such as a “Support Our Troops” banner hanging on a highway overpass) merely feel like topical window dressing for the facile – if, at least with regards to Jenkins, soulfully performed – story of a man learning, from one family’s deportation-facilitated disintegration, to stop being a worthless mope and live again.

Quantum of Solace (2008): C

There goes the reboot. Picking up where its predecessor left off in terms of plot but not skillfulness, Quantum of Solace squanders most of the potential generated by 2006’s Casino Royale, providing a brisk, grim story that might as well have been called Monotony of Tone. Tormented by the death of lover-betrayer Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), 007 (Daniel Craig) goes in search of the culpable criminal organization, an undertaking that M (Judi Dench) fears is driven by revenge but which Bond claims is merely the relevant mission at hand. While Bond’s brutal demeanor implies that his motives are indeed personal, the one-noteness of his brooding fuzzes-up any serious scrutiny of, or emotional interest in, the super-spy, whose impenetrable, leaden grimacing quickly turns him into a bore. Whereas Craig’s previous, superb outing as Bond mixed battering-ram ruthlessness with a necessary measure of that old signature suaveness and charm, here only the former exists, which fits with the character’s grieving disposition yet drains him of the engaging nuance that helped elevate Casino Royale over its Pierce Brosnan-headlined precursors, a situation largely caused by a script that fails to properly dramatize his sorrow in even modestly absorbing ways.

Unsure of how nasty to make Bond (sometimes he murders, sometimes he’s just framed for murder) or, for that matter, even how to provide him with a clearly delineated arc, the film doesn’t so much develop character as simply have its star maintain a granite-stern expression throughout his derring-do. Speaking of which, Quantum of Solace supplies the series’ requisite centerpieces with borderline incompetence thanks to a director, Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland faux-teur Marc Forster, who wouldn’t know how to helm action if Steven Spielberg were standing next to him offering pointers. Save for a rope-hanging scuffle and a shot of Bond flipping a motorcycle with one hand, rarely have Bond’s physical exploits been more blandly envisioned or incoherently shot, with Forster failing to stage his fights and chases with any visual lucidity or thrilling flair and, worse still, regularly lacing them with pretension (such as a silent gunfight scored to Tosca). Consequently, these sequences are of a piece with glowering Bond, his new adversary – a wimpy, featureless businessman (Matthew Amalric) whose underwhelming diabolical scheme is to (gasp!) seize control of Bolivia’s water utilities – and, by extension, the film in general: dispiritingly drab and disposable.