Lessons of Darkness

I Am Love (2010): C

With more than a drop of Visconti and Sirk in its veins, I Am Love fervently revels in overwrought romanticism. Luca Guadagnino’s film focuses on the wealthy Italian Recchi clan, whose lives are seemingly altered by the decision of aging patriarch Edoardo Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti) to bequeath his industrial empire to not only son Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) but also, surprisingly, grandson Edoardo Jr. (Flavio Parenti). This decision implies a forthcoming power struggle and family fracturing that never quite materializes, since Guadagnino’s story is most interested in Tancredi’s Russian-born wife Emma (Tilda Swinton), who soon develops a taste for Jr.’s chef friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). An early sequence of expressionistic cross-cutting between fashionable Emma walking the streets of Milan and upwards-angled shots of the city’s looming architectural structures establishes a suitably swoony operatic mood that peaks with a scene – shot in gorgeous, wordless close-ups – in which Emma’s senses (and heart) are aroused by her eating Antonio’s succulent prawns. Alas, writer/director Guadagnino doesn’t know when to quit, so thoroughly indulging in baroque aesthetic gestures (especially with regards to the intrusive, overcooked score) that the film becomes a flamboyant caricature of itself, most notably during an outdoors love scene between Emma and Antonio that’s inundated with so many ludicrous close-ups of lips on flesh, blooming flowers and swaying grass that the atmosphere of irrepressible passion curdles via excessive affectation. Compounding matters is that Emma’s attraction to Antonio – based as it is only on carnal impulses – isn’t really love at all but, rather, in-the-moment (and, specifically, in-the-movies) sexual desire. Though Swinton radiates regal intensity and desperation, the film’s portrait of love as an equally enlivening and destructive force comes by means of a phony third-act tragedy that reeks of clunky authorial manipulation. Ultimately, though, I Am Love’s failure is less one of contrived storytelling than merely pretentious style.

The Killer Inside Me (2010): C+

Translating a novel’s first-person narrative to the screen is a tricky task Michael Winterbottom isn’t up to with The Killer Inside Me. Based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp classic about a small-town West Texas deputy sheriff named Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) with a penchant for cold-blooded brutality, Winterbottom’s adaptation does its best to approximate the perspective of its source material, sticking closely to Lou throughout and embellishing his story with the character’s inner-musing narration. Both of these prove reasonable methods of duplicating the psycho’s POV, yet unlike Thompson’s tome, which was wholly steeped in Lou’s twisted headspace, Winterbottom’s film radiates none of the chilly amorality and warped passions and compulsions of its lunatic cop. Shot with a stylishness that’s far too clean, professional and static for material that craves an atmosphere of hothouse viciousness barely suppressed beneath a veneer of cordial civility, it’s a saga that’s skillful but aloof, unable to truly burrow into and reflect its protagonist’s psychosexual madness.

Employing blooming whites that suggest the ominous negative space inside Lou, and frequently cutting to flashbacks in ways that are proficient but lack a sense of memory as the root cause of feverish compulsion, Winterbottom stewards The Killer Inside Me with a detachment at odds with his tale’s fixation on Lou’s interior state. Lou’s reign of terror is instigated by an assignment to run local prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba, a bit too nice-girl sexy for the role) out of town. It’s a mission he quickly warps to his own vengeful ends, embarking on an S&M-tinged affair with Joyce – replete with belt-whippings that mirror childhood bedroom experiences – while simultaneously helping set up a blackmail scheme involving Elmer (Jay R. Ferguson), the son of local business magnate Chester Conway (Ned Beatty). Elmer is in love with Joyce, and Lou agrees to help facilitate a payoff from Chester to Joyce so she’ll leave town, cash that Lou and Joyce plan to enjoy after secretly running off together. Or so Lou says, right up until the moment – motivated by homicidal urges, and a desire to punish Chester for killing his brother years earlier – that he pounds Joyce’s face into a bloody pulp and then guns down Elmer, an act of fist-pounding murder that, staged with prolonged bluntness, conveys the outwardly genial character’s rampaging psychosis.

Aside from a later, similar instance of horrifying physical punishment, however, The Killer Inside Me never gets close enough to Lou to truly capture a sense of his sadistic sex-and-violence impulses. Winterbottom’s calm, composed direction is the primary culprit for this shortcoming, but Affleck’s performance also shoulders some blame, the actor’s glassy-eyed remoteness rarely implying the torment that Lou describes as being stuck with one foot planted on either side of the fence, and “all I can do is wait until I split, right down the middle.” Though Affleck nails the few moments in which Lou exposes his true self through quick, devious smiles, his performance is too superficial to consistently sell the man’s fractious duality. A superb supporting cast (including Elias Koteas as a labor union bigwig on to Lou’s lethal scheming, Tom Bower as Lou’s loyal boozehound sheriff boss, and Beatty as the town’s construction industrialist) provides the right type of oil-slick slimy color that such a dirt-and-grime crime story craves. Yet compounding Affleck’s disingenuous turn is Kate Hudson, who, as Lou’s loyal girlfriend Amy, communicates devotion and decency with excessive affectation, her bedroom come-ons and emotional distress devoid of authenticity. Like the film as a whole, she strikes poses rather than expresses true, roiling emotion.

Splice (2010): B-

A twisted science-run-amok horror film that doubles as a cautionary tale about parental devotion (and, perhaps also, a role-reversal take on the abortion debate), Splice follows superstar geneticist couple Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) as they disobey their employers’ orders and create an animal-human hybrid. The result is a being Elsa dubs Dren (Delphine Chanéac), which begins life as a two-legged tadpole-like thingee and slowly develops into a four-limbed feminine combination of person, fish, reptile and fowl. More than faint traces of David Cronenberg’s DNA can be found throughout director Vincenzo Natali’s (Cube) latest, given its fascination with mutated flesh and suppressed desires, the latter coming in the form of Elsa’s underlying motherly reasons for wanting to create Dren in the first place. In keeping with his central gender-bending creation, Natali smartly exploits traditional male-female relationship dynamics for modestly pitched tension. Though he’s not immune to indulging in juvenile gross-out goriness, said moments generally get the job done, as do the performances by Brody (morally conflicted yet spineless) and Polley (hard-assed but pitiful). Splice’s action eventually devolves into stock suspense scenarios involving nighttime chases and nasty killshots, but such a turn for the mundane doesn’t negate the preceding, metaphorically sturdy B-movie thrills, nor the awesome hilarity of witnessing a former Best Actor Oscar-winner literally get into his monstrous work.

Quick Hits

Before posting some new reviews, here are links to a few recent pieces, including my write-up of the annual Human Rights Watch Festival, for The Village Voice.

Coming Soon:
Cyrus (Slant magazine)

Out Now:
Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema (The Village Voice)

Giving Voice to the Cause, the Rallying Cry of Human Rights Watch (The Village Voice)

Winter’s Bone (2010): A-

 An achingly authentic, hard-bitten portrait of survivalist determination and familial sacrifice, Winter’s Bone employs a conventional Amerindie template – cold, rural locale, parental and socio-economic tensions, plaintive soundtrack songs and evocative landscape cinematography – without ever feeling stale, forced or phony. In Missouri’s Ozarks, 17-year-old Ree (stunning newcomer Jennifer Lawrence) is informed that her crank-cooking father leveraged the family residence for bail and, if he doesn’t get himself to court, she, her younger brother and sister, and her mentally unstable mom will be out of house and home. Director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) captures not only her milieu but Ree’s role as mother/provider to her siblings in quick, poignant intro snapshots of backyard trampoline jumping and laundry chores, setting a somber but never egregiously sentimental tone which carries through once the narrative proper commences. Upon learning about the mess her MIA father Jessup has gotten the family into, Ree sets about trying to find the man, an endeavor stymied by Jessup’s former drug-making acquaintances who are decidedly uninformative, partly because Jessup has gotten himself into some sort of mysterious trouble, and partly because Ree – having the temerity to carry herself as a strong-willed, no-nonsense independent woman – defies the region’s ingrained male-dominated power hierarchy.

To those she questions, Ree’s being a woman is almost as galling as her actual desire to find her father, yet while Winter’s Bone (based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell) certainly celebrates its protagonist’s fearless, selfless gumption – her investigation driven by a need to maintain security for, and custody of, her dependant brother and sister – the film is anything but a sexism-is-bad screed. Deeply familiar with her milieu, Granik posits Ree’s hardships as simply the byproducts of the way things are in her particular scrap of rural nowhereland, where money is sparse and men (and their subservient female cronies) treat women as second-class beings. In lesser hands, Ree’s quest from druggie shanty to cattle auction to nightmarish barn would be fodder for moralistic exploitation-cinema claptrap, but Granik refrains from either over-uglifying or glossing up her material; where exclamation points might have been, the film merely shrugs at horror, resigned as it is to this little-seen sub-world’s poverty, need and twisted codes of conduct. Michael McDonough’s cinematography neither lingers grotesquely nor turns a blind eye to the grunginess of the area or its inhabitants, allowing ugliness and beauty to appear as they may, untethered to didactic message-making.

Ree and her clan are as tied to their lot in life as their dogs are chained up in the yard, but in Ree’s refusal to yield to inflexible bondsman, repugnant relatives, and self-interested sheriffs, hope nonetheless slowly blooms. Still, optimism, whenever earned, comes in short bursts, and always laced with an undercurrent of unease born from the realization that lives like these proceed as if on a tightrope, and must thus be navigated with great care. Ree’s journey reunites her with mean uncle Teardrop (a magnificent John Hawkes) as well as ultimately entails [spoiler alert] her taking a pound of flesh from her father as both reimbursement for past crimes and down-payment on future stability, a sequence of chainsaws, handshakes and heartache that brings to the fore the near-impossible weight of absentee-parent sorrow and emotional-psychological suffering that besets Ree. As Teardrop, whose wiry frame, drawn face and scraggly goatee suggest a man dying from the inside (and not just from his smokes and coke), Hawkes conveys regret and bitterness with guileless naturalism, highlighted by a final exchange that suggests both redemption and acquiescence to fate in oblique glances. Ultimately, though, Winter’s Bone belongs to Lawrence, whose performance – effortlessly balancing rugged rawhide toughness, single-minded altruism, and emotional vulnerability – proves this eloquently understated film’s simultaneously sorrowful and heartening soul.

Remember Me?

This blog hasn't been updated in weeks due to an influx of work from various places, much of which can be found via the links below. Hopefully, more content will on the way shortly, including my thoughts on Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me and some retro-reviews of Minority Report and Army of Darkness.

Out Now:
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (The Village Voice)
Shrek Forever After (Slant magazine)
Micmacs (Slant magazine)
Agora (Time Out New York)
Kites (Time Out New York)
The Living Wake (The Village Voice)
After the Cup (The Village Voice)
Letters to Juliet (Slant magazine)
Just Wright (Slant magazine)
Holy Rollers (Slant magazine)
TiMER (Slant magazine)
OSS 117: Lost in Rio (Paste magazine)

Coming Soon:
Get Him to the Greek (Slant magazine)
Finding Bliss (Time Out New York)
Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders (Slant magazine)

Games:
Red Dead Redemption (The House Next Door)
Alan Wake (The House Next Door)

PLUS, an interview with Micmacs director Jean-Pierre Jeunet:

Jean-Pierre Jeunet Builds a Better Mousetrap (IFC News)