Lessons of Darkness

Sherlock Holmes (2009): A-

Like a jaunty, boozy, fisticuffing night spent at a nineteenth-century cockney brothel, Sherlock Holmes rocks and rambles, steams and swings, bounces and blazes with the type of electricity it wasn’t clear director Guy Ritchie was capable of generating. Kickstarted by a jangly old world-new world score that oozes breathless verve, Ritchie’s vision of the renowned sleuth is in fact an assured reinvention, imagining Holmes as a frazzled mastermind with theatrical flair, martial arts skills and a voluminous intellect that he naturally employs in the service of mystery-solving. Ritchie’s film opens with a fleet-footed race through the dark, grimy London streets and catacombs to arrive at a black magic ceremony orchestrated by murderous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), whom Holmes and trusty sidekick Dr. Watson (Jude Law) – a voice of good sense and, thus, the bickering foil to loose-cannon Sherlock – ably foil. This success, however, is only a beginning in Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg’s live-wire script, which proceeds to briskly map out not only its protagonists’ siblings-soulmates relationship but also tease out the true nefariousness afoot, which revolves around the executed Lord Blackwood’s apparent rise from the grave and subsequent plot to use the dark arts to seize control of jolly old England and, thereafter, the world.

Aided by Philippe Rousselot’s evocative cinematography, Ritchie shoots London like a grubby nascent metropolis escaping psychic and Satanic superstitions to be reborn, violently and unhappily, as a mecca of industrialized modernity. That tension is at the heart of Holmes’ battle with Blackwood, the former a champion of deductive reasoning and science and the latter an embodiment of the otherworldly. Yet cannier still is the way that Ritchie weaves such historical-transition undercurrents into the very fabric of Holmes, from an early gag involving a palm-reader informing Watson of his future with his fiancé (Kelly Reilly) to a finale staged atop the under-construction Tower Bridge, a striking symbol of the shifting tides upon which the film so swiftly rides. Nonetheless, this holiday season franchise-initiator is first and foremost predicated on a blockbuster blend of comedy, sexiness and action, and in that vein the director – after a decade spent failing to fulfill the promise of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – is also up to the challenge. From an extended apartment-to-street-to-shipyard brawl with a French behemoth to two beautifully composed sequences in which we become privy to Holmes’ astute mental assessment of, and plans to take down, an adversary – moments shot in slow-mo and narrated by the detective – the film is whiplash quick and twice as exciting.

Ritchie provides the energized stewardship while his cast – benefiting from characterizations and dialogue that crackle – deliver the sensuality and humor. Strong’s silky-deep voice brings menace to Blackwood and, as Holmes’ former paramour and expert conniver Irene Adler, Rachel McAdams mix-and-matches toughness, vulnerability and calculating deception with swoon-worthy aplomb. Law, meanwhile, seems positively enlivened by Watson’s perpetually vexed (and secretly smitten) attitude toward his partner as well as his acidic rat-a-tat banter with Downey Jr. As for the star himself, Holmes proves an even more delicious role than his seemingly tailor-made Iron Man gig. The Baker Street sleuth’s unparalleled mind affords Downey plentiful opportunities to milk smarty-pants arrogance for laughs, and the character’s newfound combat competence presents numerous chances for physical intrepidness. Yet it’s ultimately Downey Jr.’s idiosyncratic conception of Holmes – brilliant in a fidgety, socially retarded, mad genius sort of way, and rough-and-tumble in a manner that prizes brains over actual brawn – that brings the material to life. Downy exudes lively, muscular magnetism and more than a dash of debonair charm but isn’t afraid to make his hero foppish or foolish. In the actor (as well as Ritchie’s) hands, he’s a modernized Holmes both faithful to his origins and vigorously unique, an ahead-of-his-time icon here resurrected, fittingly and thrillingly, for the modern age.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009): C

Boundless creativity can be a shortcoming if not channeled properly, a fact proven by The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus as it barrels from one extravagantly whimsical set piece to another. Terry Gilliam has never been a director prone to inhibition, and that’s increasingly become both his blessing and curse as a filmmaker, with the latter holding more true of his latest. His first original screenplay since Brazil, the film concerns immortal magic man Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plumber) who, while travelling around modern London in a Howl’s Moving Castle-ish stage-vehicle-home contraption with his assistant Anton (Andrew Garfield) and 16-year-old daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), both continues his age-old battle with the Devil (Tom Waits) and hooks up with a seemingly resurrected amnesiac named Tony (Heath Ledger). As Ledger died during production, Gilliam enlists the help of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Collin Farrell to play Tony when he enters into the Imaginarium, a portal into Parnassus’ mind where dreams and nightmares come to life. It’s a deftly executed workaround, but one that doesn’t improve the proceedings’ helter-skelter messiness. Actors race about, make exaggerated faces, and confuse nervous, anxious mannerisms for quirky idiosyncrasy, all while Gilliam frantically but unsuccessfully attempts to fashion an actual story – something about the Devil coming for Valentina on her 16th birthday if Parnassus can’t best him in a wager over collected souls – out of slapdash, seemingly improvised sequences awash in uneven CG effects. Lionizing the power of the imagination as an ultimate ideal, Parnassus feels like a collection of ideas in search of a sturdy framework or at least a passing connection to reality. As it is, the film feels like a patchwork quilt of prior Gilliam elements from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King and especially The Brothers Grimm, right down to Ledger’s overcooked gonzo turn.

The Big Almost-Finale

There are a few more notable things to be posted here in the final days of 2009, but this is the last big link collection of the year. Enjoy!

The Sandbox: The Year's Most Cinematic Games (IFC News)

Out Now:
Avatar (Slant magazine)
It's Complicated (Time Out New York)
Invictus (Slant magazine)
Crazy Heart (Slant magazine)
The Slammin' Salmon (Slant magazine)

2009: Year in Film

Another year, another superb (if I do say so myself) end-of-year feature over at Slant, where for the first time ever we compiled a composite Top 25 list. As I write in the intro to the piece, this was a pretty excellent year for film, provided you could find the good stuff amidst the usual multiplex blockbuster garbage.

2009: Year in Film (Slant magazine)

indieWIRE: Annual Critics Survey 2009

For the fourth straight year, I was fortunate enough to be asked to participate in indieWIRE's annual film critics poll. The poll results, as well as my ballot, can be found at the below links.

indieWIRE Annual Critics Survey 2009

My criticWIRE page, with 2009 Survey ballot

Revanche (2009): A-

An unbearably taut, slow-simmering noir transposed to the vast countryside and its patient, drawn-out rhythms, Revanche (translation: Revenge) would – at least for its first two-thirds, plot-wise – be a rather standard-issue B-movie were it not for writer/director Götz Spielmann’s entrancing investigation of character, motivation and fate. In a story whose convenient coincidences would reek save for an unpretentious mood of Greek tragic inevitability, grim ex-con and Vienna brothel employee Alex (Johannes Krisch) is having a clandestine affair with one of the establishment’s call girls, Ukrainian beauty Tamara (Irina Potapenko). To escape their oily, thuggish employer (not to mention act out some dim-witted hero-savior fantasy), Alex decides to don a mask, wield an unloaded pistol and rob a local bank. It’s a foolhardy plan, leading to a murder and resulting in his absconding to his grandfather’s rural farm, where the next-door neighbors are a cop named Robert (Andreas Lust) who is connected to Alex’s crime, and Robert’s wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss). As Alex becomes consumed with thoughts of revenge against Robert, the cop and his wife’s relationship increasingly splinters under the weight of anxiety, resentment and anger, and Spielmann allows this downward-spiral similarity to unfold less like a clunky narrative parallel than as an example of a cycle of misery that’s ensnared kindred souls. The writer/director favors compositions wrought with planar schisms, quick pans from one on-screen figure to another previously out of the frame, and shots which linger on a setting for a moment after its inhabitants have departed, an aesthetic design which poignantly expresses characters’ anguished loneliness. As Revanche settles into its second half, in which Alex and Susanne embark on a romantic affair of twisted, dueling need, a moral lesson begins to emerge regarding the viability of attaining emotional satisfaction or true justice from vengeance. In lesser hands, the story’s climactic commentary on its titular concern would come off didactically, yet Spielmann deftly refuses to inflate his conclusion into an overarching statement about human behavior. Instead, he confines his focus so diligently to Alex and company’s particular circumstances that – bolstered by Krisch’s subtly modulated evocation of longing, despair and blind desperation – the film resonates with sledgehammer impact as a mournful portrait of (as conveyed by its rock-into-a-pond opening image) the irreconcilable ripple-effects that can stem from a single tranquility-shattering act.

A Single Man (2009): C

With A Single Man, renowned fashion designer Tom Ford does what he knows – shoot in an immaculately beautiful, excessively chic style that’s fit for a men’s cologne commercial. The trouble is that his film, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel, has a plot and characters rather than just pretty surfaces to gussy up with all manner of cinematographic embellishments, and thus requires more than incessant slow-motion and escalating orchestral music to pass as serious drama. From a black-and-white flashback in which two romantically involved men pose on a wind-swept rock outcropping as if the subjects of a magazine ad for khakis, to a sequence in which heartbroken and closeted professor George (Colin Firth) is hit on at a gas station by an impossibly good-looking Spanish hunk, Ford’s film places superficial appearances over story or thematic depth at every turn. True, his material – about George’s efforts, in ‘60s L.A., to cope with the death of his lover (Matthew Goode) – is concerned with issues of truths concealed underneath manicured exteriors, yet there’s rarely a moment when Ford’s directorial affectations feel inherently tied to his tale’s underlying concerns, most of which wind up openly articulated by George during a classroom lecture on the nature of minority invisibility. A fantastic Firth taps deep reservoirs of grief and remorse and Julianne Moore, as the gaudy, wayward mess of a best friend who pines for George, brings a sloppy charm and style to the neat-and-tidy proceedings. Yet Ford so thoroughly favors self-conscious aesthetics over interior and interpersonal dynamics that A Single Man resonates as more demo reel than actual narrative feature.

The Sun (2009): B+

Impeccably formalized but rife with dissonance, The Sun charts the last days in the rule of Japanese emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata). The third entry in Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Men of Power” series, this haunting portrait of the vanquished WWII Japanese leader is another of the Russian Ark auteur’s strange, beguiling ruminations on mortality and power, here revolving around the nearly otherworldly uneasiness that surrounds Hirohito and his doting underlings on the eve of his 1945 meeting-cum-surrender to General Douglas MacArthur (Robert Dawson). Sokurov’s film sidesteps deep inquiry into the global historical events at play in favor of fixating rigidly on Hirohito’s inner life. The action is confined to a series of static, eerily tranquil sequences in which Hirohito – in rooms whose silence is broken up only by ominously discordant buzzing and humming that suggest the sound of a monumental machine grinding toward an inevitable, unpleasant death – is dressed, studies marine biology, writes poetry, flips through a photo album and, in the film’s one unhinged expressionistic moment, dreams of Tokyo’s firebombing as a nightmare of flying fish. There’s more than a whiff of Tarkovsky (a director Sokurov favors, and is often compared to) as well as Kubrick to these unsettling proceedings, though if the material is beset by grave melancholy, humor also sporadically materializes to push the atmosphere toward mesmeric disorder. Throughout, Hirohito’s inability (as well as that of those around him) to fully grasp the historic moment of transition taking place – both in terms of Japan’s notions of dominant-culture identity and the idea of the emperor’s supposed status as a deity rather than a man – is persistent and disconcerting, the film infused with a sense of political and psychological fracturing. In Ogata’s masterfully mannered performance, his eyes cast into thousand-mile-stares, his comportment unnaturally stiff and yet dignified, and his mouth slightly open and often silently mouthing incomprehensible mutterings, The Sun brings both humanity and borderline-alien peculiarity to its examination of tectonic internal and external changes. It finds beauty, madness and outright bizarreness in the sight of a lost, slightly freakish man attempting to understand his altering reality, and enact his own rebirth from god to man, while trapped in a disorienting fugue.

Everybody’s Fine (2009): D

The once-great Robert De Niro plummets to new lows with Everybody’s Fine, a story about listening, understanding, forgiving and other mushy platitudes that begins as merely intolerable and ends up borderline-reprehensible. In this remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 Italian original, De Niro is Frank, a widower who decides, when his four kids cancel their plans to visit for the holidays, to visit them instead, despite that pesky heart condition that requires regular medication and rest. At his various destinations, Frank finds either no one home or rude, uncaring brats (played perfunctorily by Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore) who treat him like an annoyance while putting up phony cheery façades to please a paterfamilias who, it turns out, was actually something of a demanding prick. If you think everyone is going to learn something by the end of this drivel, you’re darn tootin', but not before writer/director Kirk Jones has thoroughly reduced his lead to the butt of countless demeaning, look-at-the-clueless-senior-citizen jokes. Frank doesn’t know how to hit a golf ball! Frank doesn’t realize his suitcase can be wheeled with a handle! Frank doesn’t know how to use chopsticks, and is such a fuddy-duddy that he takes souvenir snapshots (with a film, not digital, camera) of a giant flat-screen TV! Repeatedly hammering home that Frank is a goofy old fogey is Everybody’s Fine’s primary, turgid means of humor. Yet it’s the film’s bathos (replete with saccharine pop songs and a general faux-folksy atmosphere) that reeks most pungently, from Frank’s visions of his kids as young children – culminating in a painfully corny around-the-picnic-table hallucination – to a climactic death handled in such a shamelessly and callously manipulative way that the wannabe feel-good film elicits waves of yuletide resentment and fury.

Lake Tahoe (2009): B+

Duck Season director Fernando Eimbcke continues to refine his signature style – long, static takes, rhythmic (and often transitional) cuts to black, silence pregnant with both humor and sorrow – with Lake Tahoe, another tale of a boy abandoned by adults. That narrative similarity, however, isn’t immediately apparent from Eimbcke’s set-up, which begins by following teenage Juan (Diego Cataño) as he attempts to locate a part needed to fix the car he just smashed into a light pole. This odyssey is framed in geometrically immaculate master shots of the boy set against looming environments and structures, though this visual distance doesn’t preclude emotional attachment, as the filmmaker milks his compositions for both arid humor and humanistic tenderness. During the course of his day, Juan comes into contact with a number of amusing eccentrics, from a garage owner who makes Juan quietly wait while he and his dog eat cereal at the kitchen table, to a young mother named Lucia (Daniela Valentine) who attempts to recruit Juan as a babysitter. Still, Eimbcke’s Jarmusch-ian comedy is laced with something stronger, and as Lake Tahoe lackadaisically (if purposefully) progresses, a strain of melancholy wrought from loss and longing emerges. It’s a shift that sneaks up on the viewer but one that’s nonetheless earned by the film’s empathetic attentiveness to character and, specifically, to Juan’s drifting search for a means of coping with death and the newfound responsibilities it entails. Eimbcke’s wry portraits (including a would-be mechanic kid obsessed with Bruce Lee) have a winsome soulfulness that help the action avoid condescension, and his imagery is often indelible, from a slow zoom into a bathroom where only a mother’s cigarette-wielding hand is visible from behind the tub’s curtain, to a tender, beautiful close-up of Lucia singing and bopping along to her radio’s feisty pop song.