Lessons of Darkness

Biutiful (2010): C

Biutiful’s title is misspelled in part to call attention to itself, in a manner not unlike the direction of helmer Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Despite having severed ties with longtime screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga, the 21 Grams and Babel auteur evolves only ever-so-slightly with his latest, which is told in chronological rather than fractured order but otherwise once again focuses on three intertwined narrative strands and drenches itself in ungodly miserablism. Iñárritu’s Spain-set story focuses on Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a father of two whose problems are legion: he works as the middleman between a Chinese sweatshop making knockoff purses and bootleg CDs and the illegal immigrant African street vendors that sell them; he has an addict-whore estranged wife (Maricel Álvarez) who’s sleeping with his brother (Eduard Fernández); he can see dead people, and makes money helping the deceased peacefully cross over; and thanks to cancer, he only has two months to live. Uxbal is at once the exploiter and the exploited in his life, and his burdens are so numerous and over-the-top that exploitation also proves a charge to be leveled at Iñárritu. Drowning in an attention-craving eclectic sound mix, shot (as usual) with color filters that accentuate his destitute environments’ seedy pallor, and awash in lyrical symbolic flourishes (butterflies, ants, smokestacks), Iñárritu’s film gussies up and wallows in its protagonist’s suffering, which soon becomes inhumanely dreadful from all angles.

The director’s fetishistic fixation on physical, physiological and spiritual pain is often in poor taste (see: Uxbal and his son’s kindred pants-wetting). Yet what makes it even more unseemly is that the material also occasionally exudes authentic empathy for its anguished characters. From an early dinner table scene in which Uxbal scolds his young son (Guillermo Estrella) about stuffing his mouth too full of food, to a final goodbye between father and daughter (Hanaa Bouchaib), Biutiful considers its subjects’ agony with compassion. And Bardem, although forced to endure excessive Passion of the Christ-level torment, nonetheless delivers a nuanced, multilayered performance that locates conflicted emotional truths in the film’s (few) quieter moments. Focusing solely on Uxbal’s attempts to set his wayward life right before dying might have resulted in a poignant portrait of despair, courage, guilt and devotion. Instead, however, Iñárritu mucks around with superfluous subplots – one involving the Chinese sweatshop owner’s sexual relationship with a co-worker, the other concerning a Senegalese worker’s wife who comes to stay at Uxbal’s home – whose sole purpose is to up the awfulness quotient while reflecting the themes at play in Uxbal’s parental abandonment-rooted tale. The result is a punishingly contrived and deterministic saga, albeit one whose moments of genuine pathos suggest that if he would stop self-consciously striving to make a Great Film, Iñárritu might be capable of making a great one.

Blue Valentine (2010): B-

Magnificent performances elevate mundane Cassavetes-esque material in Blue Valentine, a simultaneous portrait of a marriage’s undoing and inception. Charting the day-of-disintegration for jack-of-no-trades Dean (Ryan Gosling) and nurse Cindy (Michelle Williams), as well as flashing back to their initial courtship, Derek Cianfrance’s film boasts a pair of lead turns to swoon over, with Gosling and Williams exhibiting such a guileless rapport across a wide spectrum of circumstances – tentative love, overjoyed passion, and then fear, resentment and disgust – that one wishes said situations weren’t so rote. Williams in particular is a marvel – during a centerpiece sequence in which Dean and Cindy leave their young daughter with her grandfather so they can spend the night at a cheesy sex motel (and, specifically, a room decorated to look like the “future”), Williams, shot in painful eyes-closed close-ups during combative sex, conveys a piercing sense of despair, need and confusion. Alas, while their emotions are intimately raw, the characters themselves are rather standard-issue, and in the case of Gosling – spied at one point riding a NYC bus wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a ukulele– come across as borderline indie clichés. Unlike Tuesday, After Christmas, a similar and superior study of marital disintegration, Cianfrance’s scenarios afford his performers considerable breathing room but little dramatic substance. Dean and Cindy’s gripes about each other are two-dimensional and overtly articulated (she tells him he’s a child who won’t grow up; he freaks out over Cindy’s unexpected run-in with the high school boyfriend who fathered her child), and the film’s actual incidents play less like complex snapshots of a couple coming together and apart than cursory pieces of a feature-length montage. Throughout, Williams and Gosling find opportunities to transcend their formulaic confines, exuding a potent sense of in-the-moment rage, terror, and despondence. Nonetheless, Blue Valentine too often remains a surface-oriented affair.

Another Year (2010): B+

After an ever-so-slight reprieve with Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh returns to full-fledged miserablism with Another Year. Schematically split into seasonal segments – and beginning with Spring so that funereal Winter might naturally conclude the grim proceedings – Leigh’s latest concerns a cheery couple, geological engineer Tom (Jim Broadbent) and counselor Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and their recurring get-togethers with a series of despondent friends. Those include Tom’s longtime pal Ken (Peter Wight), an overweight gluttonous drunk, and Gerri’s co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville), a staggering mess of a boozehound whose barely concealed depression over being unmarried and adrift bursts forth after too much wine. Leigh’s attention to character detail and interpersonal dynamics is as astute as ever, and his social critique is harshly even-handed, censuring both the judgmental middle-class Tom and Gerri as well as their pathetic working-class mates. Moreover, while his score can be a bit precious (what with its sad flute and guitar-plucking), his story, within individual scenes of confession and confrontation – peaking with a moment in which Mary, who not-so-secretly pines for Gerri’s son Joe (Oliver Maltman), is devastated when introduced to Joe’s bubbly new girlfriend – build awkward tension and unbearable anxiety until they’re about ready to explode. In the sight of Tom and Gerri tending to their farming allotment, Leigh conveys the amount of care and attention necessary to maintain a marriage, friendships and family, though Another Year’s primary concern is capturing a bone-deep sense of Mary, Ken, and Tom’s widowed brother Ronnie’s (David Bradley) desolation, all of them lonely and lost souls whose unhappiness is magnified by the juxtaposing presence of Tom and Gerri’s stable union. At times so intensely dramatized and rigorously visualized as to border on the oppressive, Leigh’s film doesn’t break new ground so much as till familiar soil to potent effect, with Manville’s magnetic supporting turn as Mary – all twitchy mannerisms masking soul-crushing need, yearning and desperation – epitomizing the material’s fretful, frantic despair.

The Illusionist (2010): B

Working from an original script by the late Jacques Tati, Sylvain Chomet follows up The Triplets of Belleville with The Illusionist, the somber tale of an aging French magician and the young girl with whom he strikes up an unlikely friendship. Traveling about 1950s Europe performing low-rent gigs in theaters, pubs and anywhere else that will take him (now that rock n’ roll has seized the cultural imagination), the reserved Illusionist (Jean-Claude Donda) finds his solitary life’s routine interrupted when, in Scotland, his work enchants a woman (Eilidh Rankin) who decides, without asking, to tag along with him on his journeys. Their bond slowly develops from hesitant to affectionate, though Chomet – as in the sight of the girl somewhat pushily asking her elder caretaker to buy her a new dress – infuses their dynamic with a prickly undercurrent of selfishness (on the girl’s part) and coldness (on the Illusionist’s part). Chomet’s animation, full of slender human figures who move with languorous grace and environments crafted with inviting hues and soft angular lines, is striking in both its expressionistic beauty and, since there’s next-to-no spoken dialogue, deft visual storytelling. Unlike with Belleville, however, those unique aesthetics are in service of a downbeat film in which the hopeful wonder of magic – and, concurrently, childhood – is shown to be an unsustainable fantasy. Chomet delivers a fair share of self-conscious and underwhelming Tati-style whimsy, culminating with the Illusionist (whose tall frame and gray hair mark him as a Tati stand-in) stumbling into a movie theater playing Mon Oncle. Yet the film ultimately finds itself quite a ways away from comedy, and be it via two peripheral performers’ devolution into destitution, or a finale of heartbreaking abandonment (of tricks, dreams, loved ones and the past), The Illusionist’s rending, if slight, saga proves mired in an adult sense of melancholic loneliness and loss.

Somewhere (2010): B

Somewhere opens with the sight of movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his black Ferrari around and around a circular track – a visual encapsulation of his repetitive go-nowhere life, as well as of writer/director Sophia Coppola’s habitual return to favored themes and imagery. In this companion piece to Lost in Translation, Johnny spends his days and nights in a surreal celebrity fugue, being shuttled to and from PR events notable for their unreal absurdity (at a press conference, he’s asked about “post-modern colonialism” and his workout habits), stumbling home to find parties going on at his apartment, and being constantly confronted with half-nude women eager to spend the night. Though the film eventually has Johnny reach an introspective epiphany after caring for his eleven-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) – whose adoration for her father is mixed with disdain for his womanizing ways – Coppola isn’t after a sturdy narrative arc as much as snapshots of high-life ennui, all of which revolve around the unfulfilled Johnny’s alienation from others, the world and himself. Somewhere is akin to a collage that hammers home the same points with diminishing returns, but it’s also a sumptuously stylish and moderately affecting mood piece, as when Johnny passively watches twins perform choreographed pole-dance routines in his bedroom (during the first, he can barely stay awake; during the second, he mistakes one girl for the other). Coppola’s framing conveys an underlying sense of Johnny’s dissonant detachment from his transient hotel-limo-airport environments, and thus sets an atmosphere of soul-crushing languor even while her film – as with a centerpiece zoom into Johnny’s face encased in plaster that symbolizes his isolated condition – proves content to merely restate its points in increasingly obvious ways.

Slant Magazine's Best of 2010: Film

Despite the usual critical complaints about the lameness of this year's cinematic offerings (most of which pertained to mainstream Hollywood's underwhelming output), I thought 2010 was particularly strong, especially - as I note in my intro to Slant's end-of-year piece - for female lead peformances and documentaries.

Best of 2010: Film (Slant magazine)

Almost There

Since my last few reviews of 2010 have yet to be published, this link collection is the second-to-last of the year; my final round-up, which will include thoughts on True Grit and Little Fockers, should arrive next week.

Out Now:
The Fighter (Slant magazine)
TRON: Legacy (Slant magazine)
The Tourist (Slant magazine)
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Slant magazine)
Barney's Version (Slant magazine)
Alien Girl (Village Voice)
Bhutto (Village Voice)
You Won't Miss Me (Time Out New York)

Games:
Splatterhouse (Slant magazine)

The Father of My Children (2010): B

The Father of My Children plays like two separate but related films grafted together, and though it segues smoothly from one to the other, there’s nonetheless a frustrating inconsistency to Mia Hansen-Løve’s drama. Her story’s opening half focuses on Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), husband to Sylvia (Chiara Caselli), father to three loving daughters, and a movie producer whose career is just about kaput. Mired in debt and incapable of fulfilling his obligations, Grégoire’s professional life is on the verge of imploding, and Hansen-Løve beautifully balances her portrait of the film industry’s inner workings and Grégoire’s mounting anxiety over impending catastrophes with snapshots of Grégoire with his clan, at home and on getaways, that enrich the film’s character-study depth. Whereas this initial section – in which Grégoire struggles to manage his business’ money problems while suppressing his fears from his wife and kids – draws one in both empathetically and suspensefully, an abrupt midway-point incident thrusts The Father of My Children down a more scattershot path, one in which the act of grieving and recovery takes center stage. Now intently concerned with Sylvia and her eldest daughter Clémence (Alice de Lencquesaing), Hansen-Løve’s tale delivers a combination of revelations, confrontations and mundane events. While that stew accurately reflects how life proceeds in the wake of tragedy – sometimes consumed with misery, sometimes dominated by the ho-hum – the film never quite manages to achieve a suitable focus, leaving its earnest, sensitive depiction of mourning and survival feeling undernourished.

TRON (1982): C-

While fantasy films all require some suspension of disbelief, they’re nonetheless required to operate logically within their conceit’s framework. That’s a rule ignored by TRON, which sets up a premise – a computer programmer gets beamed into a computer, where he discovers an Orwellian world populated by people-like programs – that seems to make up its rules as it goes along. In Steven Lisberger’s 1982 cult classic, disgraced computer whiz Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), in an attempt to prove that his former boss Dillinger (David Warner) achieved power by stealing his video game ideas, gets sucked into the mainframe of Master Control, an evil Big Brother program bent on global domination. What follows is a Wizard of Oz-style fable in which Flynn finds himself battling malevolent computer programs in a blue-green digital realm of pixilated cities and deserts, yet it’s a fantasy so divorced from any fundamental understanding of computers that it requires wholesale brain-shutdown. Master Control exhibits sentient emotion (at one point, he says he’s “disappointed” in Dillinger), once in the computer Flynn teams up with a sovereign program TRON (Bruce Boxleitner) who resembles his human “user,” and then the hero fights other Space Invaders-style enemies with glowing discs and light cycles while, at one point, healing himself by drinking “energy” water. In a computer. Wha? No doubt TRON was prescient in suggesting computers as a shared universe into which we literally enter and inhabit, but in its literal form, the story plays like a nonsensical fairy tale from an age that didn’t understand almost anything about technology, thus relegating it to embarrassing artifact. More problematic still, the film is simply a dreadful bore in terms of pacing (sluggish), character (one-dimensional), pioneering CG effects (crude) and action (pitiful), a tale so sloppily written and clumsily staged that its plot is driven more by clichéd adventure-film dictates than by basic cause-effect relationships. Without the rosy filter of nostalgia, it’s a virtually unwatchable virtual-reality saga.

Rabbit Hole (2010): C

Rabbit Hole is filled with the anger and inconsolable grief of parents who’ve lost a young child, messy emotions that never manage to disrupt the phony tidiness of John Cameron Mitchell’s carefully arranged drama. An about-face from his prior Shortbus, Mitchell’s film – written by David Lindsay Abaire, based on his Pulitzer-winning play – picks up with Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) eight months after the death of their four-year-old son, a tragedy that isn’t announced so much as allowed to creep out in small increments amidst frosty familial exchanges, spousal discussions, and support-group meetings. Unable to cope with what’s occurred, the two are slowly drifting apart – Becca struggles to mask resentment over her wayward sister’s pregnancy and wants to remove all traces of her child from her home, while Howie is frustrated with Becca’s emotional and sexual detachment and clings tightly to mementos (refrigerator-posted paintings, an iPhone video) of his dead son. Mitchell’s direction is understated and empathetic, allowing room for his characters to bellow and wail, as well as shrink into silence and empty spaces. And Becca and Howie’s stressed dynamic carries with it a sense of a happier past now unavailable to them, with Kidman and Eckhart often mitigating showboating histrionics in favor of quiet portraits of sorrow, resentment and powerlessness. Nonetheless, Rabbit Hole is far too spic-and-span orderly for its own good, notably in its providing Becca and Howie with respective secret friends who speak to their needs: Howie finds a possible romantic outlet via a pot-fueled relationship with a fellow griever (Sandra Oh), and Becca confronts her child’s absence by befriending the teen who ran him over, Jason (Miles Teller). Coupled with the overarching fact that every word, gesture and act resounds with not-so-subtle import, these straightforward parallels feel like transparent writerly devices, and also extend to Becca’s anger at, and disbelief in, God, a lack of faith ultimately and conveniently resolved via the titular parallel universe-themed comic book by Jason. Like the final scene of measured, painful hope, a third-act speech by Becca’s mom (Diane Wiest) – in which a parent’s mournful anguish is likened to a brick in one’s pocket – recognizes the simple truth that tragedies linger, and are at best merely survived. One wishes more of this self-consciously schematic film carried similar weight.