Lessons of Darkness

Forty Shades of Blue (2005): B+

As with his debut The Delta, writer/director Ira Sachs’ Forty Shades of Blue proves preoccupied with characters who are both socially and emotionally estranged from their Southern surroundings. Sachs’ reserved film details the morose travails of Laura (Dina Korzun), the Russian-born girlfriend of record producer Alan James (Rip Torn), a lousy father to Laura’s young son as well as to his bitter adult offspring Michael (Northern Exposure’s Darren Burrows), recently returned home to escape his own crumbling marriage. Because Laura’s unhappy relationship with Alan provides her with the wealth and comfort she didn’t have in her native land, she suffers her misery without complaints, and Sachs conveys the range of sadness felt by all three characters (whose relationships eventually intertwine in predictably messy fashion) through measured takes, patient pacing, and supple editing. Images of Korzun’s stylishly dressed blond beauty sticking out in her Memphis environs speak to the film’s fixation on isolation, and though Sachs’s writing often posits only sparse motivations for these lonely people’s behavior, the prickly emotions coursing throughout Forty Shades of Blue – supplied less by Torn and Burrows (too showy and blunt, respectively) than by the magnificent Korzun in a performance of internalized anguish – are nonetheless enough to sustain its sometimes-murky melodrama.

Brokeback Mountain (2005): C+

Despite the ever-swelling chorus of effusive praise being sung for Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s mainstream “gay cowboy” romance turns out to be as regressively conservative as it is trailblazing same-sex cinema. Written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (based on Annie Proulx’s acclaimed The New Yorker short story), this quite traditional tale of love torn asunder by inflexible societal forces charts the doomed affair between Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), two cowpokes in 1960s Wyoming who find clandestine bliss together while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain, but who are eventually driven apart by societal expectations to marry, have kids, and live a hetero life. Occasionally poignant despite its telegraphed pathos, it’s a melancholy portrait of inhibited passion bolstered by a quartet of honest, emotionally raw performances. Yet as aesthetically stilted and subdued as Ennis and Jack are sexually repressed, Lee’s film is also regularly sabotaged by its glossy, superficial construction and its disheartening failure to conceive of homosexual relations as anything other than tragic.

As with his unjustly maligned Hulk (as well as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Brokeback Mountain finds Lee focusing on the corrosive ramifications of suppressing – as well as expressing – forbidden impulses. Positing a conflict between appearance and reality, Ennis and Jack find themselves confined by their preordained roles as rough-and-tumble Marlboro Men, and though their initial amorous coupling is a burst of previously unknown (or denied) urges, the film is primarily concerned with the consequences of stifling those unruly inclinations under a façade of acceptable heterosexuality. As cast by Lee, the duo’s ensuing relationship – comprised primarily of periodic returns to Brokeback under the wife-deceiving guise of “fishing trips” – vainly strives for epic grandeur via a combination of stripped-down storytelling simplicity, pretentiously majestic cinematography and Lee’s deconstruction of the macho cowboy archetype. Yet problematically, there’s no correlation between Brokeback’s turbulent narrative content and sterile visual formalism, with Brokeback’s wild environment (a place symbolizing freedom) unimaginatively depicted without a hint of the unruly, unfettered ferocity (save for Ennis’ embarrassing run-in with a bear) that governs Jack and Ennis’ pulse-pounding desires.

With a reticent posture and deep-throated Sling Blade drawl, Ledger gets at Ennis’ inelegant internalization of his feelings even as his performance exhibits Oscar-baiting affectation, and he’s ably matched by Gyllenhaal’s embodiment of the outgoing Jack and Michelle Williams’ sterling, nuanced portrayal of Ennis’ cuckolded wife Alma. Unfortunately, however, an inescapable sense of unadventurous (and close-minded) timidity permeates the mildly stirring proceedings. Apparently convinced of its own pioneering import, Lee’s stolid film instead seems to mainly prove that Hollywood still isn’t fully capable of dealing with homosexuality in anything other than tragic terms, relegating gay ardor to a realm of unrequited misery where joy and contentment are merely fleeting (and ultimately unattainable) illusions. To be sure, the sight of marquee male stars engaging in spit-lubed sex is a landmark step towards greater acceptance of alternate lifestyles (the final scenes in which Ledger and Gyllenhaal pretend to be middle-aged are, alas, merely landmark examples of bad make-up). Yet ultimately, any number of this year’s recent international and independent offerings (including, among others, the recent Breakfast on Pluto and Transamerica) deal with similarly chaotic sexual identity issues in a more forthright, complex, and – most importantly – more dramatically engaging manner than this stodgy ill-fated saga of Romeo & Romeo.

King Kong (2005): C+

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

“It was beauty killed the beast,” said movie director Carl Denham at the conclusion of 1933’s King Kong, and one might say that it’s unbridled love – for that very same cinematic ape adventure – that ultimately does in Peter Jackson’s ultra-mega-deluxe holiday season remake. A spectacle of CGI pageantry and tender interspecies romance, Jackson’s reworking of the seminal fantasy film is clearly a passion project for the Lord of the Rings auteur, a chance to pay homage to his favorite childhood movie by bringing it into the 21st century with all the grand computerized razzle-dazzle he can muster. And yet that very same enthusiasm is ultimately what keeps this newfangled Kong from achieving the dizzying skyscraper-scale heights to which it so clearly aspires. Thrilling yet bloated, technically impressive yet emotionally remote, it’s a preordained blockbuster that astounds the eye but leaves the heart cold, an often-marvelous example of dynamic epic filmmaking that nonetheless proves more exhausting than endearing.

Aware that its second- and third-act rollercoaster set pieces will keep audiences from departing their seats, Jackson’s 187-minute Kong spends its first indulgent hour tediously establishing its Depression-era characters: craven moviemaker Carl Denham (a hammy Jack Black), playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), and down-on-her-luck vaudeville comedienne Ann Darrow (a luminous Naomi Watts). Swollen and protracted to the point of painfulness, this long-winded introductory set-up is the section most in need of serious trimming. Yet things kick into gear once the trio reach their mythical destination of Skull Island, where they encounter (objectionably stereotypical) dark-skinned savage natives and – after Ann is kidnapped and used as the centerpiece of a ritualistic sacrifice – all manner of prehistoric beasts, including fearsome creepy-crawly critters, hungry dinosaurs and, of course, Kong himself (embodied by Andy Serkis, à la Gollum, with a mixture of agile power and plush toy sensitivity).

Though a brontosaurus stampede is the film’s biggest set-piece stumble, Kong’s battle with three T-Rex-ish behemoths is an awesome sight to behold, and it’s there – as well as during the climactic Kong-vs.-warplane scuffle atop the Empire State Building – that this Kong comes closest to approximating the original’s aura of majestic wonder. Detrimentally, however, Jackson diminishes his supernaturally-sized primate’s ferociousness, reimagining him as an overly mushy monster who not only doesn’t eat innocent bystanders as in the 1933 version (instead, he just tosses them off-screen) but also becomes cowed by Darrow’s motherly reprimands after getting overly excited by her lame slapstick comedy antics. And worse, by dialing down the giant gorilla’s inherent, primordial animalism, Kong – fitfully extraordinary yet largely lackluster – consequently sabotages its central Darrow-Kong amour, squelching the relationship’s dangerous sexual undertones and, as a result, transforming it into something akin to puppy (or should I say monkey?) love.

The New World (2005): A

Terrence Malick goes four-for-four with The New World, his latest unqualified masterwork (following Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line) about Europeans’ arrival on the American continent in 1607. A sumptuous tone poem of epic emotional proportions, Malick’s latest in many ways structurally evokes 1998’s Line, with which it shares not only countless breathtaking images – including pastures with high grass waving gently in the wind, sunlight twinkling through a forest’s lush canopy, and crouched warriors rushing toward unholy combat – but also an affection for, and lyrical attunement to, the mysterious, life-giving power of the natural world. A tale of diametric conflicts in which destruction and creation, constriction and freedom, become symbiotically knotted, Malick’s cinematic reimagining of the primitive Native American nation’s initiation into modernity exhibits a realism seemingly so free of artifice and guile that, although the director’s trademarks are visible from the opening sight of petals flowing on the tranquil surface of a cascading river, it nevertheless feels less like a manipulative man-made construction than like a piece of organically produced art.

That rare filmmaker whose work truly warrants the label “spiritual,” Malick finds myriad ways of modestly conveying the world’s, and man’s, kindness and cruelty, two opposing forces that form the crux of The New World’s central, ill-fated romance between insubordinate soldier John Smith (Colin Farrell) and native princess Pocahontas (newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher). Malick’s vision of this crucial historical turning point is at once intrinsically tied up in, and unconcerned with, factual accuracy, using the momentous landing of European explorers (led by Christopher Plummer’s Captain Newport) as the foundation for his rumination on the relationship between ruin and renewal that colored the country’s 17th century origins. The foreigners’ appearance is at once the beginning of an end (for the natives’ tranquil society, somewhat over-idealized as being unsullied by negative human impulses like greed and deceit) and the beginning of a beginning (for the soon-to-be English colony and, subsequently, the U.S.), a state of flux mirrored by Smith’s budding relationship with Pocahontas, which leads to disgraced banishment for both (from their respective tribes) and yet ultimately concludes with a spark of personal rebirth.

Crafted with editorial ellipses that subtly amplify the weight of their tender, playful passion, Smith and Pocahontas’ evolving courtship becomes a symbolic reflection of the larger (contentious) frontier exploration and discovery taking place around them. And Malick binds both his personal and national sagas of progress to the movement of the natural world itself via ethereal imagery of running water, wind-rocked meadows, and flocks of birds soaring in twisting rhythm. All is inextricably linked in The New World’s romantically humanistic mise-en-scène, comprised of Emmanuel Lubezki’s gorgeously contemplative cinematography, James Horner’s rapturous score, and an enveloping sound design (comprised of rustling tree branches, crashing waves and chirping birds). As in his past films, Malick’s storytelling is a model of visual exposition, his script’s ruminative narration (spoken by numerous unidentified characters, and always coming across as interior monologues) employed as an expressive underline rather than a descriptive device. Truly breathtaking are the graceful, informal brushstrokes (such as a crazy-eyed soldier’s camera-addressing, spittle-spewing tirade) used to create his depictions of longing, separation, and madness. And yet although an impressionistic filmmaker for whom tone, rhythm and the interplay between light and dark are as important as plot coherence, Malick’s narrative nonetheless moves along with surprising chronological clarity.

Both Farrell and Kilcher complement Malick’s ethereal, sensory-sensitive direction, using their rough and lithe physicality, respectively, to silently articulate their psychological and emotional conditions. Kilcher in particular is a marvel, a serene beauty who communicates with a come-hither sway of her hips (an act in accord with the tall grass surrounding her) the ecstasy of unfettered independence, and, with a piercingly forthright glance, the grief wrought from amorous deception. Yet the uniformly transfixing performances are often peripheral components of Malick’s achingly affecting aesthetic, which time and again radiates a sense of unions and fissures through seemingly offhand images, whether it be natives placing painted handprints over their bare-chested brethren’s hearts (a display of communal kinship contrasted with Farrell’s enclosing suit of armor) or Pocahontas learning English with letter blocks (a scene followed by her arm-raised corporeal dialogue with mother Earth). The New World shrewdly portrays Western Europeans’ entry with ambivalence, refusing to neither wholeheartedly celebrate nor vilify the ramifications of their burgeoning colony but, rather, to view it as part and parcel of a world in which invention often necessitates demolition.

Collisions between man and nature, civilization and primitivism – both familiar Malick preoccupations – are the film’s lifeblood, and thus its shifting perspectives never disorient because they all ultimately point toward the same portrait of unavoidable social and interpersonal confrontation. Having been deserted by Smith, schooled to be an Englishwoman named “Rebecca,” and married to a kindhearted settler named John Rolfe (Christian Bale), Pocahontas is invited to have an audience with the English King and Queen, and here Malick’s illustration of man’s misguided refusal to seek harmony with nature achieves a state of poetic splendor. Decked out in confining frippery, Pocahontas respectfully bows to His Majesty in an ornate receiving room but finds herself drawn to, and identifying with, a caged fox, and Malick – in perhaps the most brilliant juxtaposition in a film defined by them – cuts to a perplexed fellow Native American (Wes Studi) examining the castle garden’s meticulously manicured trees. Both stunning images of man’s foolish desire to control and reshape nature, The New World finds tragedy in civilization’s estrangement from its environment. And yet as the liberation and resurrection signifiers which emblazon the film’s conclusion also fittingly confirm, only through devastation can there be rejuvenation.

Match Point (2005): C+

Heralded at this year’s Cannes Film Festival as Woody Allen’s return to form, Match Point instead turns out to be merely a dull, slightly objectionable rehash of Crimes and Misdemeanors whose novelty stems primarily from being set in London rather than Manhattan. Aside from foreign accents and slightly different scenery – though not that different, as the sight of tree-canopied UK row houses immediately recalls the Upper West Side – Allen’s latest is a very, very serious drama about a tennis instructor (and former pro player) named Chris (an artfully egotistical Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) who falls into a convenient marriage with the daughter (Emily Mortimer) of a wealthy businessman but finds himself unable to resist the invitingly luscious lips of his brother-in-law’s fiancé Nola (the fetching Scarlett Johansson). The push-pull between Chris’ soul-sapping marriage and erotic extramarital affair forms the crux of Allen’s somewhat engaging but well-worn amorality play, in which ideas of noble and naughty behavior turn out to be inconsequential human constructs in a world governed by the whimsical hand of fate. [Spoiler Alert] At least, such is the excuse for Match Point’s coolly photographed portrait of deadly deceit-gone-unpunished, which purports to reveal the callous unfairness of the world but merely succeeds in indulging in the filmmaker’s all-too-often unpleasant feminine stereotypes, where women are either dull, nagging wives or young, carnal harpies who stridently demand commitment and loyalty. Had Woody infused the film with a scathing dose of black humor, such pedantry might have been saved from its sluggishness. As it is, however, Match Point is merely a dreary regurgitation of prior (better) Allen efforts dressed up in a stolid British suit.

The Award-Season Crunch

My posting tardiness as of late has largely been due to the avalanche of films being released in December, all of which I'm required to see and consider for my upcoming End-of-Year lists for Slant magazine and The Village Voice. Nonetheless, here's a new batch of reviews for recent and upcoming cinematic fare, much of which is - surprise surprise! - lousy.

Coming Soon:

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Slant magazine)
The Producers (2005) (Slant magazine)
The World's Fastest Indian (Slant magazine)
The Family Stone (Slant magazine)

Out Now:

Aeon Flux (Slant magazine)
The Boys of Baraka (Slant magazine)
39 Pounds of Love (Slant magazine)
I Love Your Work (Slant magazine)

My review of Mick Garris' Masters of Horror episode:

"Chocolate" (Slant magazine)

For some positivity, check out my below reviews of Greg McLean's terrifying Wolf Creek, Greg Araki's magnificent Mysterious Skin and Werner Herzog's docs The White Diamond and Wheel of Time.

Rent (2005): C

It’s difficult to watch Rent and not constantly think of Team America: World Police’s satiric song “Everyone has AIDS,” since nearly everyone in Jonathan Larson’s early ‘90s Manhattan-set musical reworking of La Bohème really does have AIDS. Unfortunately, the memory of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s goofy marionettes singing about disease is the most entertaining thing about the new film version of the Pulitzer and Tony award-winning show, which manages to hit some high notes thanks to Larson’s still-vibrant and infectious tunes but is constantly dragged down into mediocrity by Chris Columbus’ dreary, rhythm-challenged direction. To be fair, Columbus – who never met a blah framing composition he didn’t love – adapts his material for the screen far better than Susan Stroman does with the upcoming The Producers. And a few numbers (primarily the showstopping “La Vie Boheme”) have a boisterous verve. However, despite some energetic performances from its cast – most of whom (with the exception of Rosario Dawson as stripper Mimi and Tracie Thoms as Joanne) originated their roles on stage – Rent feels not only dramatically laborious (especially with regards to its HIV call-to-arms and anti-establishment, pro-art attitudes) but dated, just as its musical numbers remain (with a few exceptions) embarrassing examples of why guitar-driven rock has no place in a big, boisterous Broadway musical.

Wolf Creek (2005): A

Raw, nasty and unnerving as hell, Wolf Creek faithfully and fearlessly assumes the grisly mantle of seminal genre classics The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, an austere descent into inexplicable, unbridled mayhem devoid of the shallow, suspense-sapping gimmickry (this means you, High Tension and Identity) of contemporary Hollywood horror. Proudly modeled after Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven’s groundbreaking ‘70s classics without partaking in the wink-wink, tongue-in-cheek citations that characterized Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, Greg McLean’s debut is as tough and rotten as a week-old roadkill’s leathery carcass, a piece of menacing cinematic brutality that generates terror not simply via wanton bloodshed (though, to be sure, there’s no dearth of nastiness) but also through an ominous atmosphere of otherworldly dislocation. A “based on a true story” account of three young tourists driving across the Australian Outback who find themselves preyed upon by a merciless primal fiend, the film utilizes its arid Western Australian setting to craft a diametric conflict between the modern and the ancient, a clash in which those hailing from civilized society have little chance of survival when pitted against the awesome power of the primeval natural world.

Alternately soaked in sun-bleached shades and impenetrable blacks, Wolf Creek commences as the carefree travelogue of three twenty-somethings concerned only with youthful revelry, a happy-go-lucky state of mind that ill-prepares them for the overwhelming intensity of Oz’s empty, isolating countryside, a rugged no-man’s-land ostensibly untouched by biological or cultural evolution. McLean’s cinematography juxtaposes the expansive blue sky and endless hardscrabble soil with extreme close-ups of his increasingly harried protagonists, creating an unsettling visual dissonance that’s further complemented by his employment of lens flares and threateningly fuzzy lights. When Ben (Nathan Phillips), Kristy (Kestie Morassi) and Liz (Cassandra Magrath) arrive for a hike at Wolf Creek Crater – an enormous spherical indentation caused by a meteor – it’s as if they’ve stepped off the edge of the Earth or, rather, journeyed back to some prehistoric past governed by a severe brand of Darwinian law. And thus as soon as the travelers’ watches and car engine cease functioning upon reaching the middle of the vast Australian nowhere, it’s as if an angry mother nature (or some alien entity) has chosen to reassert its dominion over humanity.

Mortal danger comes in the form of Mick (John Jarratt), a hillbilly hunter whose superficial kindness and altruism toward the stranded trio gives way to irrational, unspeakable cruelty shortly after the Sydney-born Ben – in an act of patronizing condescension toward his rural countryman – makes a Crocodile Dundee crack. Driven by an inexplicable bloodlust, Mick seems sculpted from the harsh Outback bedrock, a force of evil so divorced from enlightened ideals that he merely expresses puzzled incomprehension at the concept of “freedom” when Ben comments that Mick must enjoy the autonomy of his nomadic desert life. Exhibiting none of the serial killer clichés that have reduced the genre into a dilapidated funhouse of cartoonish boogeymen, Mick is a maniac of terribly real proportions, his sadistic deeds exuding a frighteningly believable viciousness. Determined to amplify suspense by eliciting sympathy for his characters, McLean opts for lackadaisical palling around over too-cute hipster banter while having them consistently respond to their situation with reasonable desperation rather than blind stupidity. One actually feels for these innocent victims, and as a result, when Mick begins turning the gruesome screws on his captives with techniques like a Vietnam-era method of preventing prisoner escapes, Wolf Creek reaches an apex of wince-inducing terror unparalleled in recent horror cinema.