Movie Reviews + Musings
April 16th, 2010
The first film completed by Merchant Ivory Productions since the death of producer Ismail Merchant in 2005, The City of Your Final Destination is the latest work from director James Ivory. Based on the Peter Cameron novel, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the motion picture, which opens today, stars Norma Aleandro, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney.
Jeremy Sheldon reveals “Cinema’s Invisible Art” in Granta.
The debut film from director Duncan Ward, Boogie Woogie boasts a massive ensemble cast — Gillian Anderson, Alan Cumming, Heather Graham, Danny Huston, Christopher Lee, Joanna Lumley, Charlotte Rampling, Amanda Seyfried, and Stellan Skarsgård, et al. Based on the novel by Danny Moynihan, who also wrote the script, Boogie Woogie will be released in North America beginning April 23.
Steven Zeitchik at the L.A. Times blog, 24 Frames, muses “If you thought ‘Bad Lieutenant’ was nutty…”
One Film Wonder: An acclaimed soprano of the first half of the twentieth century, Jarmila Novotná appeared in only one film which was a not a musical, based on a musical theme or cast her in a singing role. Born in Prague in 1907, Novotná debuted at the city’s opera house in 1925, before embarking on a singing career throughout Europe. During the 1930s, while based in Berlin and Vienna, she starred in a succession of music-based films. Novotná began a 16-year reign in 1940 at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera.
In 1948, following a 12-year gap since her last film, Novotná starred in her only non-singing, non-musical role in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search. She portrayed Hannah Malik, a Czech concentration camp survivor, who seeks the son she been separated from in post-World War II Germany. Starring Montgomery Clift as a G.I. helping the young Czech boy (Ivan Jandl) locate Malik, The Search, which was filmed on-location in war-ravaged German cites, was a critical and audience favorite. Following The Search, she appeared in 1951’s The Great Caruso and made a number of television appearances during the decade. Novotná retired from her singing career in 1956 and died in New York City in 1994.
A Single Man
True Loves Leaves A Trace
April 12th, 2010
The plaintive violins and robust trombones in the last four measures of Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, his final symphony, a symphony of one unbreakable movement, surge and undulate until a conclusion — described by musical theorist Arnold Whittall as “triumphantly abrupt” – in which the music not as much ends but ceases into lingering nothingness.
Everyone has a soundtrack for grief. That is mine. But that’s in the abstract. In reality, we likely don’t want to hear a thing while we mourn, we don’t wish to be reminded of the loss by a melody. George Falconer – the newly single man of Christopher Isherwood’s evocative novel and Tom Ford’s touching debut motion picture – can’t pick up an album in his Los Angeles home without freezing from the instantaneously heartbreaking memory of Jim. It’s November 1962, and only eight months have passed since the death of his partner of 16 years on a snowy Colorado road. He puts the album down; there are no revolutions for the phonograph yet. At the most recent weekly dinner with his longtime friend Charley — a fellow expatriate and the woman who consoled him on the evening he received the tragic news — George (Colin Firth) resolves to abide by an early New Year’s Resolution to simply “let go of the past.” So when he dances, he moves to the present. George and Charley gyrate in her opulent living room to Green Onions, released in August of 1962 and therefore debuting after his partner’s death so there’s no chance the song can provoke the past.
Still, George mourns. He finds himself prying his body out of bed in the morning. Unenthused, as his feet hit the floor, he falls into the routine of readying himself for teaching college literature. An Englishman, with a home on the West Coast for close to a quarter century, the sartorially splendid George armors himself with professorial effect. He has become, in the past months, a mannequin of tearless grief, and cloaked despondency inside. At the college, he walks across campus with a colleague (Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace), engaged in a conversation but only peripherally as he focuses on the alluring bodies of two toned student tennis players. George has become a match of intellect versus sensation, a battle between the temporal and the everlasting. In his classroom, he lets the class prattle on about the themes of immortality in Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan as he remains distracted by, well, everything. One student, Kenny, who remains quiet during the discussion, intrigues George (and unknowingly comforts him) when after class he confides in George that he’s naturally uncertain, befuddled by the past, present and future. Kenny (portrayed very nicely by Nicholas Hoult, who’s grown into a young actor of significance since his About a Boy appearance) is earnest and grasping but not desperate or clingy. His genuine discombobulation parallels George’s palpable sense of upheaval.
Jim remains a potent presence throughout the film. In flashback, Matthew Goode is warm, generous and gorgeous as Jim. Goode, who was so majestic in the sadly little-seen The Lookout and so misused in the bombastic Watchmen, is technically remarkable with his true accent undetectable in his American one. But what makes Goode such a strong actor is his effortless versatility. He’s endowed with the dashing good looks to play heartthrobs and possesses the talent to play darker, more complex characters. In A Single Man, despite a supporting role, he conveys the depth of devotion he felt for George, and makes one fully realize how much these men loved each other.
Photographed in cool light and swathed in diffuse colors, A Single Man is filmed at times as though through a finely shrouded gauze. The secluded, tree-shaded, open-floor planned modern home that George now shares with no one is accentuated with rosewood and teak. There’s a tenderness and consideration to the visual style Ford gives this tinted California, and his graceful direction – where he combines the perpetual-sunset veneer with emotionally meaningful moments — is highlighted by a brief encounter. On the way to Charley’s for dinner, George stops at a liquor store and literally bumps into Carlos, by all appearances a hustler. The brief role is played by Jon Kortajarena, a Spanish model with cheekbones like the edges of a hollowed out butternut squash, in a fine film debut. Shot with a dramatic backdrop, the scene doesn’t play out as expected and the kind, sweet vibe of the sequence is significant given its brevity.
Once he arrives for supper and cocktails, and makes it through her hallway of orange plants which is less a foyer than a grove, George and the gregarious Charley engage in the easy banter and simultaneously unrestrained personal condemnations of confidants. Verbal jabs, both those planned and those unintentionally landed and instantly apologized for, can be shared and absorbed between really good, seasoned friends. Julianne Moore, a marmalade minx decidedly less frumpy than her novel counterpart but no less sad, emotes her self pity with a forced laugh and an impeccably unforced English accent. She and Firth engage in illuminating abreactions and the script by Ford and co-writer David Scearce here crackles with witty, charged and substantial dialogue.
Later that same night, at the same bar where he first met Jim, but now a far different watering hole two decades on, George runs into Kenny for a drink. Kenny, who doesn’t know anything specifically about George’s loss, wonders if his teacher has learned anything from life’s experiences. George thinks, perhaps he hasn’t, and that he’s just become “sillier and sillier” It is in these scenes where Firth allows George, without forced alterations to the character, to let down his guard, even more so than he’d imagine with Charley. Vitally, Firth connects us to George’s attempts at catharsis. Both the novel and the film poignantly convey the common experience of mourning. We all fear death, and are connected by our collective dread at its inexorable presence and its irreversible legacy. But our grief is ours, alone.
April 2nd, 2010
Oscilloscope Laboratories today releases The Thorn in the Heart, a familial documentary from Michel Gondry.
Melissa Silverstein of Women & Hollywood notes that Generation Kill director Susanna White “makes her feature film directing debut at 49,” and links to several stories regarding the director of Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, including The Times’ Jeff Dawson’s feature on “Britain’s own Kathryn Bigelow.”
Layer Cake and Stardust director Matthew Vaughn will Kick-Ass in North America, beginning April 16.
Ryan Little of the Washington City Paper presents “No Preciousness, No Waiting: A Chat with The Exploding Girl’s Zoe Kazan.”
One Film Wonder: The only principal cast member of the film M*A*S*H to reprise his role on the television show, Gary Burghoff has appeared in only 5 feature films — and none since 1995 — before withdrawing from Hollywood.
Three years before appearing in the Oscar-winning satirical masterpiece, Burghoff originated the title role in 1967’s off-Broadway musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. (Incidentally, Bob Balaban played Linus.) In 1972, he then began a seven-season stint as the beloved Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly before leaving the series in 1979 with an Emmy Award in tow. During the 1970s Burghoff had also become a game show mainstay. After a 20-year hiatus from motion pictures since 1971’s B.S. I Love You, he appeared in 1991’s Doubles, starred in the roles of Fleck and Lady Esmerelda and co-directed 1992’s Small Kill, and acted in 1995’s Behind the Waterfall. Burghoff is an established songwriter, jazz drummer and painter of wildlife motifs.
Police, Adjective
The Here and Noun
March 31st, 2010
In his two infuriatingly good feature films, Corneliu Porumboiu prefers a docile camera to capture his ostensibly inconspicuous images. Associated with the Romanian New Wave, he films quietly, from the corners of ordinary living rooms and unremarkable kitchens. He placidly observes hallways and office spaces as though the camera had been placed in position, and left unattended. His movies utilize very few pans. It’s a stationary glimpse, a seemingly still life view, incrementally gaining momentum and meaning as one scene is laid upon another. In 2007’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, he told the slowly developing tale of the owner of a public-access television station commemorating the 16th anniversary of the fall of the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime by hosting a call-in retrospective. Eyewitnesses, both in the studio and at home, debate the genesis of the revolution in their eastern Romanian city. The camera remains as rigid as a palace soldier as the film climaxes with a flurry of animated, contentious and contradictory panelists and callers. Interestingly, unlike his longer works, Porumboiu’s entertaining 39-minute short film, 2004’s Liviu’s Dream, about a small-time criminal wannabe with an ever-increasing portfolio of schemes and personal dilemmas, roams rooftops and bedsits with a spirited, energetic liveliness. At feature length, his films become more sedate, methodical, and existential. Each is exasperating in its own way, yet both reward patience.
His latest project – the contemplative Police, Adjective – begins unobtrusively with an older teen trailed by a young man through the dissipating morning haze of a succession of Budapest streets. Like the shadow, the camera keeps its distance during the uneventful quotidian journey. As with 12:08 East of Bucharest, there’s a detached quality to the opening scenes as the film unhurriedly unfolds without immediate dramatic consequence. The cop, a newlywed named Cristi, played by the earthy and unaffected Dragos Bucur, is a diligent but unambitious police officer in his mid-20s. Based on a tip that the kid has a narcotics connection in his family, Cristi has been following the youth as he goes about his unspectacular routine: he walks to school, chats with a couple of friends after classes, smokes a joint in a playground with them, then heads home. Cristi tails the lad like this as days become a week. (Porumboiu and his longtime collaborative cinematographer, Marius Panduru, effectively concoct stakeouts where not much happens; the camera spends most of its time focused on the hunter rather than the quarry.) The conscientious but bored Cristi files daily reports, in his grey office, which smack of tedium.
With time to think during the long, quiet hours on the street, Cristi realizes the rationale for tailing the kid is flawed. The vibe he’s picking up from his bosses is that busting the kid will force him to rat out an older brother, an unseen trafficker who darts in and out of the country undetected. Cristi begins to doubt whether the student knows anything of value and questions the snitch’s motivation. And he fears that his immediate superior will tire of this fruitless pursuit, but won’t condone a larger operation focusing on the sibling. Instead, his boss may just order the easy bust.
Cristi expresses his qualms to a higher up he can trust, but this mentor can only empathize and counsel; he can’t override Cristi’s superior’s wishes. The scene gains its effectiveness from the camera shooting the two almost exclusively in profile, with both men in the frame in an office longer than it is wide. The conversation is informal but pointed, especially after Cristi shares the view that the kid shouldn’t be condemned to years of incarceration for so little. (Clearly, Romanian drug laws appear harsh enough towards even modest personal use that Doug Benson and Brian Posehn won’t be touring there in the near future.) Cristi is cautioned, not for the last time, to carry out the law, not interpret it.
Porumboiu extracts significance from the more mundane daily moments as Cristi’s frustration grows. Hunched over a soup bowl at his kitchen table, wearing the same vest he’ll throw on four days in a row, Cristi breaks off a piece of bread and swirls it around his full plate as though he’s searching for clues, or perhaps just clarity. Cristi may appear to be an unsophisticated, beat cop who wasn’t formally educated – his wife corrects the grammar in his reports – but his ambivalence and moral uncertainty define him as a scholar.
As in 12:08 East of Bucharest, Police, Adjective culminates in a tense match of wills. In the previous film it was broadcast over the airways; here the showdown is private but fraught with more exacting consequences. The final sequence pits Cristi against his supercilious superior, Anghelache, portrayed by the impressive Vlad Ivanov – who cast such a chilling pall in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. In a well-written scene filmed mostly from the back of the superior’s sizable office, the arrogant Anghelache methodically parses Cristi’s arguments in favor of abandoning the case against the teen. As with so many clever intellectual bullies, Anghelache purposely culls any rationale from his hypotheses which would weaken his stance. The deliberate scene, where voices are rarely raised, draws its intensity from the unwavering, minimally-edited camera and the juxtaposition to the film’s earlier, dominant focus on Cristi’s almost meditative internal struggle. Police, Adjective contains less humor and less cheekiness than 12:08 East of Bucharest, but in place of those characteristics Porumboiu creates moods rife for reflection. But perhaps given the somewhat glacial pace, many of the questions are not specifically raised by the film but by a viewer prone to rumination. In the end, Police, Adjective gives a guy time to think.
March 6th, 2010
The only nominee for this year’s Academy Award for Animated Feature Film still awaiting wide release in North America, The Secret of Kells, from the directing duo of Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, will begin trickling into theaters beginning March 12.
The Baltimore Sun’s Chris Kaltenbach is “Getting back to Mo’Nique’s Baltimore roots.”
A box office boffo throughout mainland Europe and a bit of a film festival sensation stateside, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens in the UK on March 12 and in the United States a week later. Based on the posthumously best selling novels by Stieg Larsson, the detective thriller is directed by Niels Arden Oplev and stars Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace. The predictably inevitable Hollywood remake is in the works.
In his weekly The Forgotten column at The Auteurs, David Cairns is “trousering the ghost” with an appealingly florid tale about a distinctly eccentric slice of British comic surrealism, 1980’s Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.
One Film Wonder: Dalton Trumbo was an accomplished screenwriter and novelist who became one of Hollywood’s most appreciated writers in the first half of the 1940s with a succession of successful screenplays, including Kitty Foyle and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. In 1947, at a career apex, Trumbo was compelled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress. Trumbo refused to answer questions; subsequently, he was convicted of contempt of Congress and jailed for 11 months in 1950.
Following his release, Trumbo and his family moved to Mexico, where he continued to write screenplays during the decade, but never with his name in the credits. He used no less than six nom de plumes between 1950 and 1958. One of those pseudonyms, Ian McLellan Hunter — an actual writer of indistinct films in the 1940s and television thereafter — received the Oscar for Best Writing of a Motion Picture for Roman Holiday in the spring of 1954. The pseudonym used for 1956’s The Brave One — Robert Rich, which was simply the name of a relative of the film’s producers — won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Story. When the baneful blacklist abated, Trumbo returned to penning credited screenplays, including Spartacus and Exodus.
(Trumbo was presented with his Oscar for The Brave One in May 1975. A ceremony to honor Trumbo with his Academy Award for Roman Holiday was held in May 1993; Trumbo died in September 1976.)
In 1971, Trumbo directed his only film, Johnny Got His Gun, which was based on his 1939 pacifistic novel about a profoundly wounded WWI solider. Starring Timothy Bottoms, Jason Robards and Donald Sutherland – and including trivia-intriguing performances by David Soul and Tony Geary – the film is claustrophobic, powerful, and indelible. The 1972 Cannes Film Festival jury bestowed two awards on the movie which quickly secured cult status. Johnny Got His Gun underwent a renaissance of interest in 1989 when footage from the film was utilized heavily in Metallica’s first ever video for “One” from the …And Justice for All album.
Looking for Eric
Special Delivery
February 28th, 2010
On March 31, 1995, at a jam-packed, flashbulb-popping press conference, the beguilingly gifted Eric Cantona addressed the gathered throng. Earlier in the day, an appeals court had reduced his sentence to community service for the assault charge arising from the striker’s infamous kung-fu kick of a racist Crystal Palace supporter in January of that year.
“When seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.”
And with a simple “Thank you very much” following that single enigmatic sentence, the Manchester United legend stood up from his seat and left his advisors, journalists and world football to ponder what the hell he might have meant as he waited out a planet-wide ban from football through September 1995 by learning the trumpet.
Fittingly, in “Looking for Eric,” the latest film from the outstanding Ken Loach, Cantona becomes the mentoring guide through the existential crisis of Eric Bishop, a middle aged Manchester postman and divorcee enveloped by incapacitating depression. His two teenaged sons defy him. While his oldest, adult daughter adores him, a favor she asks forces him to confront the heady mixture of feelings he has towards the wife he cowardly left decades before. “It doesn’t really matter anymore,” his ex-wife Lilly says wearily. Eric would rather Lilly detested him than simply suffer him with indifference. Overwhelmed with regret and self-loathing, Bishop has become adrift from his family, friends and co-workers. He barely has the energy or interest to roll a spliff. But when he does, the illusory Cantona appears in Bishop’s snug bedroom, which is a shrine to the footballing enigma dominated by the iconic poster of the triumphant Cantona, with his signature upturned collar, striking an imperious stance in the moment after his immaculate goal versus Sunderland in 1996. Together, the two Erics open a trunk of mementos Bishop kept closed securely at the foot of his bed and begin the process of helping Bishop recover himself.
The film contains many of Loach’s familiar themes. Vulnerability hounds the protagonist whose natural steel has become dented. As in “Raining Stones” and “My Name is Joe,” a well-meaning working class person is sucked into trouble not entirely of their making and seemingly beyond their immediate control. (Bishop’s eldest son is the instigator.) Loach and Paul Laverty, his regular screenwriter for the past fourteen years and seven films, still imbue the story with the recognizable ebbs and flows of ordinary life while never pandering to patronizing tones. “Looking for Eric” teems with the real-life combination of humor and pathos. And the first steps of a second chance with Lilly are handled truthfully and sincerely. Like “Riff-Raff,” the film also masterfully creates a Greek chorus of a sort, with genuine camaraderie among Bishop’s fellow postal workers who are a likable blend of personalities and viewpoints.
The camerawork is furnished by another Loach stalwart, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, a superb technician at jimmying emotion into the cramped hallways, bedrooms, and kitchen of Bishop’s home. An Oscar nominee for his work on “The Hurt Locker,” Ackroyd excels in the ambiance of confinement, where space is suffocating and intimate.
As with the vast majority of Loach’s movies, the film is centered on a beautiful central performance, and Steve Evets is a revelation as Eric Bishop. Possessing a sunken cheeked, craggy face, he handles the darker moments with absorbing sadness as his facial features are marked with shadows like looming clouds. But Evets illustrates Bishop’s passion and enthusiasm with equal depth. He exhibits great zeal, especially when he recalls the first night he met Lilly at a dance contest 30 years before. And he’s a defiant, protective dad. It’s a believable, complex portrayal. In a stellar debut film performance, Stephanie Bishop gives the present-day Lilly grace and strength. The cast of workmates are a jovial, animated, and opinionated collection, especially John Henshaw as Meatballs, his closest friend, who habitually buys self-help books so Bishop’s mates can assist their friend during his trying time. (A visualization exercise where a half dozen of his work pals imagine themselves as Sammy Davis, Jr., Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Frank Sinatra and Cantona is a comic free-for-all.)
Retired since 1997, the 43-year-old Cantona in his post-football life has become, simply put, one of the coolest dudes on the planet. And he’s emerging as a notable presence as an actor; Cantona was quite good as the dashing, pretentious director in 2008’s “French Film.” In “Looking for Eric,” he’s funny, charming, sexy, and wise. (He’s also only seen when Bishop is alone.) The imaginary Cantona follows Bishop on his rounds and keeps him company during his soul searching; the two actors develop an engaging relationship. (Cantona even divulges that his most cherished moment in football was a pass, not a goal.) There’s sweetness to several of their scenes, especially when Cantona spouts proverbs in French, only for Bishop to exclaim exasperation at the English translation. Seagulls, indeed.
The film culminates with a rousing “Operation Cantona” spearheaded by Meatballs and coach loads of supporters which is anything but a fishing expedition. “Looking for Eric” is as close to a feel-good movie as Loach has made but still retains the integrity and authenticity which makes his films so powerful and clarifying.
January 31st, 2010
Infidelity and vengeance intersect at the core of Malcolm Venville’s debut feature-film, “44 Inch Chest.” Expanding this weekend to New York, Washington D.C. and additional California venues, with more openings in the coming months, the film is written by the “Sexy Beast” screenwriting duo Louis Mellis and David Scinto. “44 Inch Chest” reunites “Sexy Beast” co-stars Ray Winstone and Ian McShane in a cast which includes John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Joanne Whalley, Stephen Dillane, and Melvil Poupaud. Steven Berkoff makes an appearance in a part which, undoubtedly, will not be spooky in the slightest.
Bob Grimm of Tucson Weekly believes “Jesus needs to step in and stop all these lame biblical films.”
Exploring themes of family and identity, the documentary “Off and Running” from director Nicole Opper has been crisscrossing North America at festival screenings for almost a year. Subtitled “An American Coming of Age Story,” the film focuses on a Brooklyn family with an inquisitive, adoptive teenaged daughter.
Dunno Y . . . Na Jaane Kyun promises Bollywood’s first gay kiss, reports The Times.
One Film Wonder: One of the most illustrious acting teachers of the 20th century, whose students are a roster of Hollywood’s greatest movie icons — James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, et al.– Lee Strasberg appeared in only 8 films as a credited cast member during a film career spanning 44 years. A foremost exponent of “Method Acting,” he co-founded the Group Theatre in 1931 and became director of the Actors Studio in 1951. In 1974, at the age of 73, he played Hyman Roth in “The Godfather: Part II” and received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. Following his unexpected success, he made several films in the decade, including “…And Justice for All,” “Boardwalk,” and “Going in Style.” But Strasberg’s delicate performance as the intelligent and honor bound Roth resonates most strongly, especially as he counsels Michael Corleone, played by former student Al Pacino, that “this is the business we’ve chosen.”
Up in the Air & Invictus
Grounded for Life
January 22nd, 2010
“Up in the Air” is a timely film. Interspersed with the plight of a narcissistic hired-to-fire frequent flyer named Ryan Bingham are sobering portraits of actual folks discarded during this current economic maelstrom. The movie also has a timeless quality. Based on Walter Kim’s 2001 novel, the crisply clever screenplay by director Jason Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner addresses universal themes which bubble up when one re-evaluates life’s priorities as a cog in the capricious corporate rat race. Reitman’s third feature — following “Thank You for Smoking” and “Juno” — is a contemporary and classic story told with smarts and deft comedy, both light and dark. He makes films which may be a bit too varnished – with protagonists whose slick dialogue obfuscates as well as entertains – but they are confident and observant projects while perhaps not as penetrating or poignant as they first appear.
Bingham (George Clooney) works for a company, Career Transition Counseling, which is hired by businesses too scared to do their own firing. It’s his dream job; Bingham is, eerily, perfectly suited psychologically to his profession; he has an almost Zen-like ability to sit serenely across the table from the crushed and wounded. (Withering outbursts are delivered by both professional actors, and non-actors who lost their jobs in the recession and were hired by Reitman for these roles.) Bingham appears to have a personality which can experience the wrenching angst without taking it onboard; he’s like an emotional Sky Miles loofah.
A bachelor in his 40s, he loves his itinerant life. Bingham dashes through a pampered life soaking up daily thanks at ticket counters and checkout desks. Contrary to the vast majority of sane individuals, he adores airports. He logs 322 days on the road and “43 miserable days at home” in an Omaha apartment so antiseptically unscathed it appears to be inhabited by the world’s dullest monk. During one of his Admirals Club layovers, he meets a fellow addicted business traveler, played by Vera Farmiga. They engage in a high-stakes card game, flinging credit cards and reward cards of ever increasing status in a sassy and flirtatious riposte. They’re turned on by this elite game of Snap. Farmiga plays Alex Goran with bravado reminiscent of Rosalind Russell.
But perhaps this is apropos as Clooney is as close as we have in modern American film to the Hollywood star of the 1940s and 1950s; he’s like William Holden, but with more sincerity. With charming crow’s feet creasing his face with every rakish smile, Clooney is so consummately good looking that he appears to have a full mouth even though his upper lip has the slim definition of a cigarette case. In a year when he’s produced outstanding work – the wicked comic mania of Lyn Cassady in the unfairly maligned “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and crafty voiceover work as the titular “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – his performance as Ryan Bingham rounds off the decade in style.
The tranquility of Bingham’s nomadic modus vivendi – which could be dubbed “Ryan Air” — is jettisoned by the influence of a tightly-wound upstart named Natalie Keener (the commendable Anna Kendrick), who impresses her CTC bosses with a radical company overhaul combining cost cutting with modern technology. A recent Ivy League graduate, Natalie has devised a business plan with the painfully forced amalgamation of the words global and local: “Glocal.” This means that the firings will be done remotely from Nebraska. Desperate and defiant, Ryan takes Natalie along on a road trip. Natalie’s presence initiates in Ryan a slowly gestating process of reassessment. (In a nice touch, it’s not Natalie’s example which directly leads to Ryan’s contemplation.) He begins to think about relationships and family. He ponders the hollowness of his life and a facile side gig as a motivational speaker. The treatment of his predicament is believable and bolstered by Clooney’s strong bearing, even if, at times, the scenes, especially during a visit to his hometown for his sister’s wedding, feel cursory. As his protégé, of a sort, Kendrick delivers a nicely nuanced performance. Natalie is driven professionally, but retains a likable innocence, admitting to Ryan and Alex during a confessional conversation in an airport terminal that she desires the type of man who the “only thing he loves more than me is his Golden Lab.” But the character of Natalie is too young to be sympathetic. Feeling sorry for her, especially in this economy, doesn’t seem appropriate. And the film bears the smooth sheen of a James L. Brooks film. “Up in the Air” is worth checking out even if Reitman fashions a movie whose title could very well sum up a viewer’s ambiguity.
“Invictus” is a solid film from the prodigious Clint Eastwood mounted on a stunning central performance from Morgan Freeman. The story scans the brief time between Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on February 11, 1990, to the summer of 1995, when South Africa won the Rugby World Cup. The vast majority of the film covers the even more narrow period between Mandela’s inauguration as president in May 1994 to the final match in June 1995. The new leader envisions South Africa’s hosting of the illustrious sporting event as an invaluable component towards the “reconciliation” of the new “Rainbow Nation.” Eastwood quickly captures the simultaneous moods of expectancy and trepidation in a land of fractious race relations. Into this unenviable, volatile cauldron, Mandela steps with graceful determination.
The film is firmly centered on the phenomenal performance by Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Freeman avoids caricature, which would have been occurred if he’d adopted Mandela’s distinctive, pinched speaking voice. Instead he provides the audience with an experience more impressive and profound than mimicry. It’s not an impersonation, it’s an embodiment. His Mandela, as appears to be the case in actuality, is strong and humble. Freeman portrays Mandela as regal but approachable, opinionated but free of haughtiness. He is inspirational and influential but not dominating, let alone domineering. Mandela gains esteem from both supporters and opponents through the sincere melding of actions and words. (One of the films best sequences chronicles how Mandela appeals to a newly created South African sports council to support the Spingboks, the national rugby side historically symbolic of the apartheid system. To attest to the cultural resistance, in June 1994, black South Africans avidly cheered for England in a match held in South Africa.) When he utters “Forgiveness liberates the soul” to a revolutionary comrade in his integrated security detail, it doesn’t sound like new age twaddle but as a reasoned belief bred by 27 imprisoned years, years counseled by the words of the poem by the late 19th century poet William Earnest Henley which Mandela kept on a scrap of paper during his incarceration and from which the film takes its title. “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul,” the poem concludes. As presented by Freeman, the extraordinary Mandela does not come across as a mythic figure. Instead he exemplifies an honorable, heroic everyman. (As befitting a self-effacing everyman, he is fallible: the film hints at the difficulties that the father of a country faces in his own family life.)
For a sports film, the thrilling match reenactments are well constructed. Matt Damon bulks up admirably to authentically play Francois Pienaar, the triumphant South African captain whose own father initially despises and mocks Mandela. Damon, looking nothing like his pudgy pencil pusher in “The Informant!,” compliments Freeman in a decidedly secondary, but crucial role. The script by Anthony Peckham from John Carlin’s non-fiction account avoids cliché. The soundtrack, however, is not so lucky. In several instances, a scene is undercut by a hideous pop song. But the soundtrack is the only contentious element in a proficient motion picture propelled by a history lesson modern and eternal.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Going Underground
January 12th, 2010
The colors burst onto the screen like a splendid, sunkissed autumn afternoon. From the first moments of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novella, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” glows with the majestic tones of fall, those infinitesimal delineations of oranges, yellows, reds and browns. The original illustrations in Dahl’s book by Donald Chaffin were straightforward and understated while the artwork was re-imagined by Quentin Blake as delicate pictures like faded watercolors. Anderson and director of photography Tristan Oliver – the cinematographer on the splendid stop-motion “Chicken Run” and “Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” – have draped the tale in a decidedly more rugged, vibrant and vivid palette. The animation of this hand-made country life is gorgeous, robust and deep. Cider glistens with honeycomb effervescence. The faces of the menagerie of anthropomorphic animals twinkle with perception. Whiskers sway softly in the wind. Visually, the film is a marvel.
The superb style binds a fast paced adventure. Mr. Fox is a smooth talking canine, stealing chickens, turkeys and cider from the region’s three most powerful farmers –Boggs, Bunce and Bean – even though the thefts feed his vanity, not mouths, and he has already promised his wife that he has ceased his filching ways. As voiced by the velvety-toned George Clooney, Mr. Fox is sly and resourceful, and as persuasive as a barker. He’s a tad too sure and a half-step ahead of danger. The farmers’ collective revenge exacted by terrible tractors and a cider flood uproots not only his family, but forces the entire animal population to become bunkered in an underground warren from which the fantastic one vows to free them.
In the midst of this upheaval, the animal characters are familiar Anderson personalities; a collection of complicated, delicate, hesitant and proud souls. Even the confident, titular fox is momentarily conflicted. (Included in a large ensemble of voices are Bill Murray as the agitated Badger, Mr. Fox’s attorney, and an almost unrecognizable Willem Dafoe as the scurrilous Rat.) Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach pepper the script with constantly clever and funny moments. In a comic highlight, Owen Wilson delivers, in his delicious, inimitable twang, a witty cameo as Coach Skip explaining the wild cricket-baseball hybrid known as Whack Bat. But the film is unafraid to be poignant as well. Anderson continues to explore his recurrent theme of dissection, the subterranean world here peeled back like the hull of the Belafonte in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” In “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” he burrows deeper still into lives rich and untidy. Jason Schwartzman brings a vulnerable and perturbed flavor to Ash, Mr. and Mrs. Fox’s insecure adolescent son who is intimidated by the presence of his no-effort, over-achieving cousin, Kristofferson. And the film contains perhaps the tenderest scene in an Anderson film yet when Fox and his long-suffering (even in fox years) wife engage in a moving and honest dialogue about their relationship on a thin platform in front of a shimmering waterfall. As they stand before the brilliant sheet of water, Mrs. Fox, voiced by Meryl Streep, releases a bitter truth which pricks his self-assurance and swipes at his swagger: “I love you too, but I shouldn’t have married you.”
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is an intrepid physical and emotional experience with a great escape by motorcycle ending, as you might expect from an Anderson flick, with a quirky dance right out of a Charlie Brown special. Like Spike Jonze a few months ago with “Where the Wild Things Are,” Anderson is a dynamic director who risked adapting a hallowed author’s children’s book and succeeded in making a remarkable film which retains his artistic sensibility while beautifully complimenting the original source