Lessons of Darkness

All Good Things (2010): C

Capturing the Friedmans documentarian Andrew Jarecki segues into reality-based fiction with All Good Things, the based-on-real-events tale of a NYC real-estate tycoon heir’s rebellion against his father, his marriage, and then the apparent cover-up of the murder of his wife. Filling in back-story with staged home movies that creepily echo Friedmans’ footage, Jarecki’s fascination with dysfunctional family dynamics and the difficulty of ascertaining truth about thoughts and deeds continues via the saga of David Marks (Ryan Gosling), who – still suffering from seeing his beloved mother commit suicide when he was a boy – refuses to join father Sanford’s (Frank Langella) family biz, instead choosing in the early ‘70s to date, and then tie the knot with, Katie McCarthy (Kirsten Dunst). Theirs is a blissful union initially spent smoking pot and running a Vermont health food store (“All Good Things”), a reverie that soon crumbles under the weight of parental pressures, mental illness, Katie’s desire to go to med school, and a pregnancy that’s unwanted by one of the two expectant parents. Just after its midway point, All Good Things dips into true-crime territory, with Katie – desperate for a divorce – disappearing and David fleeing, in 2000, for Texas, where he takes up cross-dressing and forms a friendship with an elderly man (Philip Baker Hall) whom [spoiler alert] he kills in supposed self-defense. It’s a tawdry tale of wealth, expectations, resentment and psychosis that Jarecki frames with distracting witness-stand testimony from David, and chops up through crosscutting and abrupt edits. These stylistic choices, which often resemble documentary techniques, clearly reflect the unknown aspects of the actual events portrayed. Yet as with David – who, despite a committed performance by Gosling and a standard psychological portrait tendered by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling’s script, proves to be a man whose deranged impulses and motives remain a mystery – the overall effect of these aesthetic devices is to leave the action mired in a hazy remove, with the film proffering merely tantalizing speculation from afar rather than up-close-and-personal character and thematic insights.

The American (2010): B

If you’re going to imitate, you may as well imitate the best, a fact embraced by Anton Corbijn, whose The American is – in terms of tone, character and fatalism – an American rendition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s seminal existential Euro-noirs. Jack (George Clooney) is an assassin defined by a ritualistic code of conduct that, at story’s start, he’s already broken by vacationing in the snowy mountains with a lover. When his cover is blown and pursuing Swedes ambush him, Jack is forced to murder, and then – in a decision whose motivation remains ambiguous, and which will haunt him from that point forward – he shoots his paramour (Irina Björklund) in the back. A handler (Johan Leysen) facilitates Jack’s flight to a small Italian village, where he’s given a job to construct a high-powered rifle for another killer (Thekla Reuten), and despite re-embracing solitude (including shirtless push-ups and sit-ups) and his efficient craftsman profession, he also again opens his heart, this time to an Italian prostitute (Violante Placido) whose purse alarmingly contains a revolver. Whether within confining indoor spaces or set against the imposing rural Italian landscape, Jack is framed by director Corbijn at a constant remove from his environment, thereby heightening the mood of patient, chilly alienation. That atmosphere is a pose directly modeled after Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, just as Clooney’s silent, suffering performance is a direct ancestor of Alain Delon’s ultra-cool gangster turns. A distinct lack of heart-pounding suspense proves an unavoidable shortcoming for these thriller-ish proceedings. Yet aside from a leaden subplot involving Jack’s relationship with a local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), The American’s replication is reverential and spot-on, from the self-disgust and resignation of Clooney’s glances at his new lover – infused with the fear of potentially having to end their affair as he did his last – to a finale that, unlike most of Hollywood’s so-called noirs, recognizes that, in this genre, a desire to change is the same thing as a desire to die.

The Kids Are All Right (2010): C-

A long-form sitcom overly pleased with its own progressiveness, The Kids Are All Right charts the difficulties that arise when the kids of a lesbian couple seek out their sperm-donor father. Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a gay Oscar and Felix, and after almost two decades, their marriage has lost a spark (not even the man-on-man porn they watch together gets them hot and bothered!). Curious about the guy who helped conceive them, the couple’s kids – college-bound Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and rebellious Laser (Josh Hutcherson) – locate donor daddy Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a free-spirit lothario who runs an organic restaurant and whose appearance throws the family for a loop. Joni and Laser’s reasons for reuniting with Paul speak to their sexual maturation (in Joni’s case) and desire for a father figure (in Laser’s case), all while practical button-upped Nic frets over Paul usurping her alpha-dog authority and hippie-dippie Jules screws Paul behind Nic’s back. Oh, what neat-and-tidy complications plaguing these San Francisco clichés! Nic drinks too much and starts fights, and Jules deals with a stupidly grinning Hispanic gardener employee who knows about her adulterous ways, scenarios that writer/director Lisa Cholodenko milks for Everybody Loves Raymond-grade humor. Predictably, lifeless wittiness gives way to broad bathos, with everyone eventually growing closer through familial upheaval. Throughout, Cholodenko’s plotting is so formulaic, her cast’s performances are so blandly competent, and her humor is so wannabe-racy (Benning: “I want your advice like I want a dick up my ass!”) that the film can barely mask its middlebrow pandering to liberal sensibilities. Self-congratulation oozes out of The Kids Are All Right’s portrait of a lesbian household that’s just like everyone else’s, though in a sense, it is, what with these stock characters proving to be just like the intolerable two-dimensional caricatures on your average half-hour CBS comedy.

Amer (2010): C

Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani know their giallos, but Amer is little more than affected homage, a work that duplicates the style and hothouse psychosexual passions of its ‘70s predecessors with such self-consciousness that little unsettling emotion emerges. There’s no conventional story per se, as Cattet and Forzani’s tale offers up a triptych of incidents in the life of a brunette – first as a small girl in her parents’ house, where she finds a timepiece (owned by her witch grandmother) that seems to animate her dead grandfather, then as an adolescent besieged by sexualized advances at a seaside town, and finally as a grown woman in a remote, desolate manor house. These sequences are awash in the aesthetic signatures of giallos: close-ups of eyes, gloved hands, hair, mouths, crotches, sweating skin, and bodies in ecstasy and in direct contact with heavily symbolic elements (thorns, water, blades, etc.), images which are drenched in deep, lurid blue, red and green color filters. The film’s cornucopia of visual devices (split screens are also prevalent) are executed with grace and precision, and they do manage to express a sense of carnal mania, and of the protagonist’s pleasurable and painful passions. Yet they do so only in the abstract, as a lack of any compelling narrative, character or thematic substance ultimately leaves the proceedings feeling like a technically impressive but remote exercise in conceptual period-piece genre imitation.

Make-Out with Violence (2010): C-

Make-Out with Violence plays like a faux-Wes Anderson remake of The Virgin Suicides, if Kirsten Dunst’s ethereal beauty had turned into a zombie – or, perhaps more accurately, the film feels like the work of a Donnie Darko fan intent on crafting his very own Deadly Friend. Either way, those descriptions are infinitely more flattering than the reality of the Deagol Brothers’ directorial debut, a dreadfully pretentious genre-bender about the pain of unrequited love. During the summer after high school graduation, beloved Wendy (Shellie Marie Shartzer) goes missing, thus shaking the earth under the feet of twin brothers Patrick (Eric Lehning) – who had a major crush on Wendy – and Carol (Cody DeVos), who desires Wendy’s best friend Addy (Leah High). Out in the woods one day, a zombified Wendy is discovered by Carol and his younger brother Beetle (Brett Miller), and transported to the empty home of another friend, where she’s fawned over with creepy adoration by Patrick, all while Carol awkwardly attempts to woo Addy. Shartzer’s impersonation of a living dead girl, all backbreaking postures and clumsy limbs, is unsettling, but the rest of the Deagol Brothers’ film is largely insufferable, an amalgamation of photocopied elements that itself lacks any trace of serious thought or sincere emotion, what with its drama wrapped up in precious two-bit lyricism. Quirky narration from Beetle, random on-screen text and a fondness for elegiac ‘80s tunes typify Make-Out with Violence, which – through stilted dialogue and look-at-me sunset sequences fit for a cruddy music video – assumes such an affected air of longing and sorrow that those emotions never materialize.

Marwencol (2010): B

Thanks to a vicious beating outside a bar by five men, Mark Hogencamp suffered such brain damage that he lost part of his memory and, temporarily, all his motor skills. As part of his rehabilitation from this devastating incident, Hogencamp took up art and began creating Marwencol, a 1/6th-scale model WWII Belgian town in his backyard, which he then populated with dolls based on himself, friends and acquaintances. Jeff Malmberg’s documentary about Hogencamp’s artistic endeavor may be aesthetically rough around the edges but it nonetheless offers an empathetic view on a stunningly unique figure. Marwencol functions not simply as a diversion for Hogencamp – who creates elaborate fictions for his doll alter ego and the town’s inhabitants, all of whom he photographs – but also as a means of therapy, an elaborate fantasy world where he can both reflect, and reimagine, the trauma of his attack and its ensuing emotional, physical and psychological fallout. Hogencamp’s alcoholism, his cross-dressing desires (which led to his being beaten), his fear of being hurt, his fury at those who assaulted him, and his longing for now-lost memories (of a former marriage, of sex, and of childhood) are all made manifest through his Marwencol soap opera’s time machines, Nazi torture sessions and love triangles. In an unexpected twist, Hogencamp’s work eventually makes him something of a Greenwich Village art-world mini-star, a development also mirrored in his Marwencol storyline. Yet throughout, the handicapped man remains something of a mystery, and with major questions left unaddressed or unanswered (what happened to his marriage? Why did he become an alcoholic? Why the fascination with WWII?), the film proves to be a portrait – of life refracted through art refracted through life – that remains a tad too far outside its outsider-art subject.

The Home Stretch

Before the final year-end crush begins (three weeks to go!), here's a new collection of links.

First, I was recently profiled in the Fairfiled County Weekly: The Community Critic

Out Now (Slant magazine):
The King's Speech (Slant magazine)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (Slant magazine)
The Next Three Days (Slant magazine)
Unstoppable (Slant magazine)
The Nutcracker in 3D (Slant magazine)
Heartless (Slant magazine)
Skyline (Slant magazine)
Four Lions (Slant magazine)
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Slant magazine)
Monsters (Slant magazine)
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (Slant magazine)
Cool It (Slant magazine)

Out Now (Village Voice):
Kawasaki's Rose (Village Voice)
The Legend of Pale Male (Village Voice)
Con Artist (Village Voice)
Saw 3D (Village Voice)
NY Export: Jazz Opus (Village Voice)
Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story (Village Voice)
Violet Tendencies (Village Voice)
Jolene (Village Voice)

Out Now (Time Out New York):
Nothing Personal (Time Out New York)
Today's Special (Time Out New York)
Inhale (Time Out New York)

Games:
Call of Duty: Black Ops (Slant magazine)

Black Swan (2010): B

Despite a shift from the squared circle to the ballet stage, Black Swan functions as a direct companion piece to The Wrestler, delivering as it does another portrait by director Darren Aronofsky of self-mutilation carried out in service of a personal/professional dream, and one told via corresponding sequences, final image and Dardennes-inspired cinematography. Rather than Mickey Rourke’s over-the-hill grappler, the artist/athlete in question here is Nina (Natalie Portman), an aspiring soloist with Lincoln Center’s ballet company who finds herself going over the edge while striving for, and then struggling to maintain, the lead role in director Thomas’ (Vincent Cassel) new production of Swan Lake. An intrusive stage-mommy dearest (Barbara Hershey) has warped Nina’s sense of self, but as suggested by the almost-inaudible sound of cackling laughter over the film’s title card – a sound that will reappear as Nina’s craziness escalates – it also seems that something deeper inside Nina, something more primal and unhinged, has begun to push her over the edge. An opening dream sequence of Nina performing the prologue from Swan Lake, in which her innocent white swan is accosted by the monstrously feathered sorcerer Von Rothbart, lays the groundwork for what’s to come: a slow descent into hallucinatory madness in which Nina’s life begins to take on the form of the very Tchaikovsky ballet she’s rehearsing.

As Swan Lake concerns the white swan’s tragic suicide after having her love stolen away by her evil twin, the Black Swan, Nina’s journey is inevitably accompanied by a dark doppelganger: brash new company member Lilly (Mila Kunis), whose wing tattoos make plain her apparent role as Nina’s tormentor. Alas, even with Aronofsky’s incessant mirror imagery and twirling camerawork, Nina’s intensifying visions – of a bloody shoulder wound that seems to be sprouting feathers (or is it just the byproduct of her self-destructive scratching habit?); and of Lilly’s surreptitious scheming and her habit of morphing into a nightmare version of Nina herself – prove doggedly literal. For all its misdirections and supposed confusion, Black Swan can be a rather obvious bird. Nina nabs the ballet’s lead role by convincing Thomas that she can be not only the delicate white swan but also the fierce, uninhibited black swan by rejecting his sexual advances with a vicious bite of his lips. It’s the first of many moments in which Aronofsky posits Nina’s mania as a partial byproduct of her sexual repression/awakening, an undercurrent also promoted by her lesbian attraction/repulsion to Lilly, which (because of the film’s incessant twinning) is really a desire that speaks to Nina’s feelings about herself.

The film’s lack of depth isn’t as problematic as a lack of subtlety that somewhat drains the proceedings of the mysterious hysteria that should be its calling card. Still, if not the equal of Suspiria or Repulsion, similar portraits of hothouse feminine sexuality and psychosis, nor of obvious ancestor The Red Shoes, Black Swan remains a consistently gripping bit of operatic lunacy, and one elevated by a lead performance of intensely focused disintegration and regeneration by Natalie Portman. Her smile always threatening to devolve into tears, Portman’s Nina is a magnetic focal point even though, like Rourke’s wrestler, she’s also a fairly standard (artist-in-free-fall) archetype. A similar familiarity is found in Aronofsky’s style, which like The Wrestler favors behind-the-head tracking shots that create intimacy with his protagonist, and a fixation – in scenes of Nina’s mom chopping her daughters fingernails off, or of a trainer cracking Nina’s toes and ankles – on the corporeal cost of Nina’s work. There’s a nagging sense that Black Swan would have been better served by going even further off the deep end, both narratively and psychologically. Nonetheless, Aronofsky’s rigorous fascination with the bodily sacrifices required to achieve cherished objectives is, as in his prior work, expressed via captivating milieu-specific details – such as Nina’s heavily symbolic destruction and then reconstitution of her dance slippers – and, finally, an empathetic mood of weary emotional and spiritual desperation.

Tangled (2010): B-

The legend of Rapunzel gets a snarky, modernized CG update with Tangled, Disney’s 50^th animated feature, in which the flaxen-haired princess (Mandy Moore) escapes captivity with the help of dashing rapscallion thief Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi). Stolen as an infant from her royal parents by Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy), Rapunzel has been tricked by this new “mom” into staying locked away in her tower home, where the witch can horde the healing and fountain-of-youth powers afforded by Rapunzel’s lengthy magic locks. Dreams of escape – and, specifically, witnessing the flight of hundreds of floating lanterns that the king and queen release each year (in the hope of finding their daughter) – ignite the feisty Rapunzel’s heart, and when Flynn appears in her secluded home, the girl takes advantage of this opportunity to finally break free of confinement. Their subsequent adventure involves amusingly cute animals (a regal soldier’s horse who spars with Flynn; Rapunzel’s chameleon sidekick), vigorous chase sequences and ho-hum musical numbers, as well as messages about seizing the day and the mutability of life goals. Since this is a Disney effort, happily-ever-afters are destined to be fulfilled, albeit in this case over such a lackluster maternal villain that said triumph barely resonates. The film differentiates itself from its tiara-ed predecessors with somewhat awkward sarcastic humor rife with contemporary exclamations, as well as via bouncy, vibrant 3D computer-generated animation that resembles DreamWorks’ most recent CG works, and ably updates the genre’s aesthetic template for the new millennium. Mechanically hitting its prescribed notes while borrowing liberally from its predecessors (especially Snow White and Beauty and the Beast), yet generally devoid of the regressive gender dynamics that plague most of those films, Tangled may not break any new ground, but for better and worse, it’s the most inoffensive Princess affair to date.

Lourdes (2010): A-

“Is God all-powerful or good?” a man asks a priest midway through Lourdes, though Jessica Hausner’s stunning film offers up two more alternatives – is He neither or, like man himself, is he fickle and cruel? Such questions permeate this aesthetically and tonally controlled knockout, which focuses on Christine (Sylvie Testud), a young woman paralyzed from the neck down because of multiple sclerosis who’s on a retreat with other pilgrims to visit the many holy healing sites in Lourdes, France. Christine’s soft, placid face masks anger over her illness and jealousy toward the young nurses who shoot her pitying glances and jovially talk about their nights out, and her belief in the restorative powers of the places she visits seems wan at best, thus putting her somewhat at odds with the priest who preaches God’s love and the throngs of physically and mentally impaired individuals who flock to the sites in search of salvation. Writer/director Hausner opens her tale with an on-high shot of a cafeteria that slowly descends to the characters’ eye level, a visualization of man, not God’s, primacy in earthly affairs that winds up encapsulating the remainder of the film, which proceeds to subtly yet stingingly critique not simply the notion of faith but those who both promote and embrace it.

There’s a sense of censure to a confessional sequence in which a man of the cloth proclaims that when God’s benevolence doesn’t manifest itself through external healing, it does so through internal enlightenment (how conveniently vague!). That critical tone is also directed at the background prattle from two women whose pathetic desire to believe in tall tales of divine cures is married to a decidedly un-Christian resentment at Christine when, after a random day’s outing, she suddenly gains the ability to move and walk. Has she been healed by Christ? Or is it, as her doctors claim, just a temporary remission of her medical condition? Courtesy of Testud’s magnificently restrained performance, full of understated shifts of the eyes and head that convey complex emotional depths, Christine’s transformation from seemingly polite wallflower to self-absorbed center of attention remains sly and beguiling. Lourdes’ second half segues into bitter black comedy, detailing the disingenuousness of priests and parishioners via both the nakedly envious, spiteful reactions to Christine’s “miracle” and Christine’s own decision to treat this turn of events as merely God’s way of saying she deserves to flirt and dance with a handsome gentleman. All the while, the innocent and suffering merely suffer further, their undeserved sorrow, loneliness and pain exacerbated by the incessant hot air about divine love that, from sacred bath to hallowed church, never materializes.