Lessons of Darkness

Post-Thanks Feast

Into the awards-season typhoon I now eagerly go, so no chit-chat - here's this week's new stuff, including my contribution to Time Out New York's Best Movies of the Decade poll and my thoughts on Disney's The Princess and the Frog.

The TONY Top 50 Movies of the Decade, and my ballot

Out Now:
The Princess and the Frog (Slant magazine)
Planet 51 (Time Out New York)
Old Dogs (Slant magazine)
Until the Light Takes Us (Slant magazine)

Dynamic Duo

Ok, well, these two new articles probably aren't exactly "dynamic," but it's Friday, and I'm tired, and that's the first title that came to mind. Nonetheless, here's this week's new published stuff, aside from the reviews of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and The Road that appear directly below this post.

The Sandbox: Voicing Celebrity Concerns (IFC News)

Out Now:
The War on Kids (Time Out New York)

The Road (2009): B+

Whereas Cormac McCarthy is an author to whom cynicism comes easy, director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) is a filmmaker whose doubt about mankind’s capacity for good comes laced with a tinge of humanistic hopefulness. And while McCarthy’s curt, hard prose best reflects his worldview’s bleakness, Hillcoat’s direction of the novelist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road captures, with assuredness and sincerity, both the compassionate as well as the cold found in McCarthy’s tale about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) traversing a post-apocalyptic American wasteland. In adapting the Oprah-celebrated book, Hillcoat (working with screenwriter Joe Penhall) hews closely to the letter, which concerns his hobo vagabond protagonists – filthy, dressed in ragged coats and shoes, hauling their scavenged goods in a rickety shopping cart – avoiding cannibalistic marauders, thieves, and the equally dangerous wet and chill of a world burned to a char years earlier by a mysterious, all-consuming fire. For those familiar with McCarthy’s tome, there are no narrative surprises to be found along the film’s journey, only diligent recreations of the story’s unhurried, relatively uneventful incidents.

Yet whereas the written Road was a remote affair punctuated by a climax of clunky, deflated pathos, this cinematic version is a nearly exact opposite with regards to both thematic and emotional resonance. Hillcoat’s periodic flashbacks to Mortensen’s father and his wife (Charlize Theron), scenes marked by a fixation on both hands and offhand details (a screen door closing; an empty, swaying hammock), have a warm tactility that’s almost unbearable when contrasted with his ashen, world-gone-sour panoramas of the debris-strewn topography. The director’s supple, telling juxtapositions of piercing close-ups and ominous images of the vast, desolate CG-ified environs create heightened tension between interior and exterior spaces. Moreover, his cast’s performances radiate the fear, longing, and desperation that felt at a remove in McCarthy’s novel. Via quiet glances and intimate gestures and embraces unsullied by expressive chitchat, Mortensen and newcomer Smit-McPhee express the intrinsically entwined needs of father and child, the way in which parental actions teach morality far more than words do, and the necessity of casting aside said morality in service of protection and survival.

Here as in The Proposition, Hillcoat’s gritty, slightly unreal-looking landscapes capture a sense of the natural world’s horrifying beauty (or is it beautiful horror?), of the capacity for both violence and kindness – sometimes at the same moment – in both man and his milieu. Beholden as it is to its downward-sloping source material, The Road can’t fully overcome its one-note construction. However, in the boy confirming and reconfirming that he and his father are “good guys” (terms used, on the father’s part, to establish a moral order within a void), or of the boy rebuking his father’s attempt to claim the sole weight of responsibility, Hillcoat’s film captures the raw, frantic, heartbreaking human dimension that felt overly interiorized and muffled in McCarthy’s book. A story not just of indestructible parental commitment but the extremes to which that devotion will drive one, it’s a cinematic adaptation at once faithful and superior to its source material, a severe ode to the depths of fatherly love whose heart lies in Mortensen’s tremulous eyes, where misery, benevolence, hope and madness all seem to simultaneously cohabitate.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009): B

Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans partakes in loopiness often enough to make one wish its rote policier concerns were shunted even further into the background. Sharing a title with, but none of the tortured spiritual wrestling found in, Abel Ferrara’s 1992 masterpiece, Herzog sets his tale in a chalkboard-gray post-Katrina Big Easy whose disarray speaks generally to humanity’s capacity for iniquity and, specifically, to the insanity of newly promoted lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage). Terence is a dirty cop introduced stealing nude photos of a fellow officer’s wife, and who’s prone to partake in whatever illicit substances (pot, coke, crack, heroin) he can procure. Herzog’s story (written by William M. Finkelstein) revolves around Terrence’s investigation into the execution of a drug-runner’s family, but it soon spirals out in free-flowing ways to include Terence’s junkie prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes), crime boss Big Fate (Xzibit), bookie Ned (Brad Dourif), partner Stevie (Val Kilmer) and other assorted weirdoes. All of them, however, seem downright straight-edged compared to Cage’s antihero, a narcotized loose cannon whose amorality is epitomized by an early assault on a frisky couple in a nightclub parking lot that ends with Terence smoking crack with, molesting and receiving a handjob from the woman while he forces the boyfriend, at gunpoint, to watch. With sloped shoulders and a stilted gait (symptoms of a back injury and his corruptness), speech that sporadically takes on bizarre accents, and a face that careens violently between unhinged grimaces and explosions of maniacal laughter, Cage turns Terence into a prototypical Herzog (by way of Klaus Kinski) embodiment of human animalism and psychosis. Terence’s depraved lunacy is New Orleans’ and, in turn, is occasionally Herzog’s as well, with the director – seemingly bored by his material’s more traditional passages – periodically tearing apart conventions via bonkers interludes in which he peeks at a traffic accident through the mouth of a roadside crocodile, or indulges in twitchy, upturned close-ups of iguanas while Cage, in the background, stares off into the distance or grins crazily at the camera. Given its shaggy, kooky, bleakly comic portrait of personal and social decay, Port of Call New Orleans consistently feels like an exercise in Herzogian farting-around, which may not result in a coherent whole but nonetheless delivers bursts of random, inspired madness.

Fitfully Fantastic

A busy week ahead, as awards-season films start screening for press. In the meantime, though, here are links to five reviews, only two of which have something nice to say.

Out Now:
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Slant magazine)
Red Cliff (Slant magazine)
Pirate Radio (Slant magazine)
Staten Island (Slant magazine)
Fix (Slant magazine)

2012 (2009): D

2012 may be the dimmest, most clichéd, most simultaneously maudlin and callous big-ticket film of the year, a dunderheaded end-of-the-world special-effects extravaganza that stands as the defining entrant in, and the nadir of, the disaster porn genre. Roland Emmerich’s epic slab of cinematic compost concerns the planet’s destruction in 2012, the date that the Mayans predicted such a cataclysm would take place. Thanks to some Indian research studies, do-gooder geologist Adrian (Chiwetel Ejiofor) learns of Earth’s impending fate and counsels his pragmatic (i.e. cretinous) boss Carl (Oliver Platt) as well as the noble President (Danny Glover) that the world will soon cease to exist thanks to solar flares, an overheating planet core, and massive earthquakes and tidal waves. While Adrian and Carl bicker over whether to inform the populace at large about the coming events, science fiction writer Jackson (John Cusack) – whose book, wouldntchaknow, is being read by Adrian – reunites with his estranged wife and two kids while trying to escape an exploding Yellowstone National Park and a California crumbling and sliding into the sea. Along the way, Emmerich pulls out all the moldy, idiotic dramatic tropes he can muster (fathers mending fences with, and saying goodbye to, sons; altruists facing tsunami deaths head-on; sacrificial acts of heroism; global landmarks getting smashed to pieces; etc.) without even pretending to plausibly dramatize them.

2012’s scripting is so lame that it makes the director’s prior works of moronic national monument destruction (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) look like the collected works of Chaucer in comparison. Emmerichs’s spectacle is meant to be Big Dumb Fun, but its excessiveness – which would have been perfect for 2009’s chosen techno-craze, 3D – isn’t exhilarating as much as embarrassingly campy, a series of do-or-die scenarios that have little tether to reality in a narrative or visual sense, and seem designed only to further the director’s favored unreal digitized aesthetic. Clocking in at a borderline-insulting 158 minutes, the film is emotionally manipulative about its in-dire-straits protagonists’ fates to an egregious extent. And yet despite an affected interest in human survival, goodness and selflessness, it exploits panoramas of mass death for horrifying kicks to the point that the action proves downright heartless, and its syrupy bathos disingenuous and maddening. Still, considering its corniness, inanity, and wrongness – which extends to the story’s celebration of bad sci-fi as a moral exemplar and its contention that crisis can cure familial tensions and (in a laughable subplot) kids’ bedwetting – 2012 does manage, from catastrophic start to Noah’s Ark finale, to be accidentally uproarious, though its efforts to be the archetypal disaster film are so thoroughly achieved that one can only hope the genocidal genre has now reached its own end date.

A Serious Man (2009): B+

The title of the Coen Bros.’ A Serious Man is both ironic and not, as the filmmaking duo’s latest is a borderline-farce about a 1967 Midwestern Jewish family’s disintegration that slowly reveals layers of ever-graver fatalism. Of a thematic piece with their prior No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, the Coens’ tale concerns physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a put-upon man whose wife is leaving him for a pretentious bon vivant (a fantastic Fred Melamed), whose student is attempting to bribe/blackmail him for a better grade, and whose brother (Richard Kind) is locked away in his bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst. Larry searches for answers to his problems in reason but, as evidenced by a blackboard overwhelmed by an Uncertainty Principle equation, comes up with nothing. Thus, he turns to the temple, where a trio of rabbis afford him no greater enlightenment, blathering on about a beautiful parking lot or recounting a parable about a goy who received a seemingly divine message from God inscribed on the inside of his teeth. As Larry navigates his insular Jewish suburban community, all he discovers is pitiless randomness – or, as suggested by a Jewish folklore prologue in which a woman in a shtetl kills a man (Fyvush Finkel) she believes to be a dybbuk (i.e. demon), is his misery an act of carefully orchestrated cultural payback from a God angry at past transgressions? The Coens’ latest isn’t drawn in one-to-one cause-effect lines, its obliqueness lending suspense and interpretative depth to the Job-like suffering of Larry, which might also simply be the byproduct of – and elucidate a lesson about – small personal moral transgressions snowballing into catastrophe. “Don’t you need somebody to love?” croons Jefferson Airplane in the radio earplugs of Larry’s pot-smoking son (Aaron Wolff), and the question lingers in the air like a taunt throughout A Serious Man, a portrait of cruel inevitability at once universal and rooted in a specific Jewish tradition, imbued with dry humor and genuine pathos, and defined by a nimbleness, wit and mystery that demands to be taken seriously.

The White Ribbon (2009): C+

Michael Haneke tones down the admonitory audience haranguing with his Palme d'Or-winning The White Ribbon, a welcome relief that nonetheless doesn’t salvage the film from being another of the Funny Games auteur’s unpersuasively rigid portraits of man’s venality. In the small Austrian agricultural village of Eichwald in the years preceding WWI, a place where church and farming are the dominate spheres of life, a spate of crimes – a doctor is injured when his horse is tripped by a mysterious wire; the local Baron’s son is tortured, as is a mentally handicapped child; a barn fire is set – casts a pall over the tight-knit community. Shooting in strikingly flat digital black-and-white, Haneke keeps most of these terrible events off-screen while focusing his gaze on the townsfolk, a quietly horrific bunch made up of domineering, abusive, child-molesting parents and packs of suspicious kids straight out of Village of the Damned. The only signs of goodness amidst the vast cruelty and depravity on display comes via a schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) and the young nanny (Leonie Benesch) whom he courts, and in his depiction of their love, Haneke exhibits, for the first time in years, genuine empathy for humanity. Their romance, however, can’t counter the increasingly inescapable fact that The White Ribbon is, for all its monochromatic aesthetic splendor, formal meticulousness, and period setting, simply the latest Haneke censure of the bourgeoisie, whose decorous exteriors mask ugly malice. Once it’s convincingly suggested [spoiler alert] that the town’s youth are to blame, their actions a response to the culture of suffering fostered by their guardian adults, Haneke’s tale reveals its true hand as one about “the return of the repressed.” Not content to leave his material abstract, however, the director also – via the schoolteacher’s intro narration that the story might “clarify some things that happened later in our country” – implicitly positions his film as an explanation for the origins of National Socialism, a tack at once moderately reductive (despite a valid point about the consequences of Germanic authoritarianism) and unconvincingly argued by The White Ribbon’s evocative but largely one-note people-are-creeps time capsule.

The 47th New York Film Festival

Paranormal Activity (2009): C

On the evidence of Paranormal Activity, ten years is how long filmmakers must wait before blatantly ripping off cult classics. Oren Peli’s super-low-budget film is a shameless domestic variation on The Blair Witch Project, not only in its use of faux-verité documentary footage for a ghost story but with regards to its actual finale, which has the embarrassing gall to actually end [minor spoiler alert] with its camera tipped over on its side. The bump-in-the-night action focuses on Micah (Micah Sloat) and girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherson), a grating couple whose lives are upended by the arrival in their home of a seemingly malevolent specter that’s been haunting Katie since childhood. Micah’s response is to yell at the spirit, buy a camera and document the proceedings, which Katie naturally bristles at but allows because, well, there has to be footage for the audience to watch. While the supernatural spookiness initially amounts to little more than a few scary noises emanating from downstairs in the wee hours of the morning, things soon spiral into more overtly creepy realms. A recurring shot of the couple’s nighttime bedroom – with the focus always on an open doorway – lends the action a sense of inescapable doom. Yet otherwise, this is the same old thing dressed up in very slightly different clothes, right down to mundane character bickering, the halfhearted stabs at creating a mythological context for the otherworldly events, and the inevitable letdown of a climax that can’t possibly live up to the film’s preceding suggestions of unholy terror.

The Messenger (2009): B+

Staying out of an actor’s way is a considerable directorial skill, and one that Oren Moverman exhibits with assurance throughout The Messenger, the tale of a decorated Iraqi war hero named Will (Ben Foster) who, upon returning to the States, is assigned to spend his last three months of active duty alongside old pro Tony (Woody Harrelson) notifying families of their enlisted relatives’ deaths. Aside from his use of heavy metal to further suggest Will’s roiling inner state, Moverman uses an impressive amount of restraint in dramatizing his scenario, which finds Will and Tony slowly forming a bond – and, in the process, finding a means of expressing their twisted feelings of guilt, shame, grief and longing – while carrying out their arduous task. That Will eventually falls for, and tentatively attempts to woo, a single mother named Olivia (Samantha Morton) who’s notified by the duo of her husband’s death does, initially, reek of screenwriting contrivance. Yet Moverman’s scripting is subdued and emotionally authentic, and Foster and Morton – especially in a kitchen-set conversation, shot in one unbroken take, that finds both performers nimbly modulating, and vacillating between, conflicting emotions – prove more than capable of keeping the narrative strand honest. Harrelson too takes what originally seems a caricatured role (hardass warhorse breaking in the new guy) and makes him believably multifaceted, a man whose professional regret, personal demons, and miserable military responsibility (enduring the tears and blows of grieving parents and wives) have conspired to leave him a cracked, if not wholly broken, man. The Messenger conveys the lingering damage wrought by conflict but, more than that, a universal need for stability and comfort, and if its ending carries with it a whiff of Hollywood hopefulness, it’s a mood that, following on the heels of its humanist portrait of suffering and surviving, nonetheless seems well-earned.