March 14: The Ides of March (2011 -- George Clooney)

★★★

I kept thinking of Sidney Lumet while I was watching The Ides of March.  I think the combination of political commitment, institutional corruption, firm handling of film mechanics and a willingness to look at a character or situation hard to see a taint, all these conjure Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network and, more recently, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  But Ides of March isn’t in a league with these films; their echoes only sound here.

This film’s visual language is standard issue.  There are a lot of capable images and some capable camera movement with nothing bravura or new, which is fine for a film that looks more at content and character than at story-telling itself.  Clooney is very capable indeed at this.

But such a movie needs strong acting and a strong story if it’s to be a message film, and I didn’t find either here.  I continue to be unimpressed with Ryan Gosling performances, and his portrayal of the campaign aide is the weak link at the center of the film.  For Ides of March to work, we need to identify with that character, feel his commitment to an ideal at the beginning and sense his slide into disillusionment until we understand the shell he becomes at the end.  But Gosling isn’t able to connect with us or take us on that trip.  Instead, his character’s arc feel s like a series of stages with time connections but without emotional links: Now-I’m-Idealistic, Now-I’m-Frustrated, Now-I’m-Cynical.  It feels like Gosling is striking a series of poses as Ides of March proceeds rather than showing us the glide path as Stephen develops from optimist to cynic.   I don’t know enough about film-making to be able to say whether that’s a failing of Clooney as director or Gosling as actor, but given what Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are able to do with their much smaller roles, I think Gosling has to bear a lot of the responsibility.

This story, too, has so much contrivance that you’re eventually taken out of the film and you lose interest in its concerns.  And it’s not only melodramatic moments like the one when we discover Molly has had a thing with the Governor; the script has to add abortion to the mix.  And even that has to be one-upped by the suicide.  Midway though, Stephen asks Ida for help, saying they’re friends, only to be rebuffed; by the end, Ida needs him and uses the same line.  These types of contrivance don’t make this film engaging or effective but take us out of it and diminish our interest.

Despite all these reservations, I find Ides of March sincere, and I like work that at least tries to get at current issues through art.  The movie is the personal voyage of a character whose idealism is ruined, but it's also a politically-committed film, and I’m glad to see someone looking at this important aspect of our political system dramatically.  I wish Sidney Lumet were still with us to be able to handle the issue with more aplomb, but at least someone is trying.

March 11: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011 -- Rupert Wyatt)

★★★

I don’t get all the fuss about this film.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a good, by-the-numbers, sci-fi/action movie that is all plot-driven.  Characters are stereotypes, and the action goes exactly where you expect it to go.  The acting is wooden (as you would expect),  and the filmmaking itself mostly unexciting but for a  few images of things like those of apes jumping though plate glass windows from the inside out or them surrounding the evil business manager in an amphitheater-shaped atrium.  

There was some talk about Andy Serkis’ performance in the motion-capture generated imagery, but I didn’t find his acting compelling either, perhaps because nothing else in the film is.  He definitely doesn’t carry it the way, say, Dustin Hoffman does Elephant Man, a performance I've heard Serkis' compared to. In fact, I found Serkis’ performance to be closer to pantomime than acting.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is good, fun, well-done escapism with many sentimental tones.  And that’s enough to warrant watching it without laying on unjustified acclaim.

March 9: Army of Shadows/L'armée des ombres (1969 -- Jean Pierre Melville)

March 4: The Fall (2006 -- Tarsem Singh)

★★★

I was in in a city northeast of Mumbai 15 years ago.  The city was hot and crowded, but on top of a hill, I wandered into a palace cemetery with the usual collection of ruined mausoleums.  There were few people there in the relative cool, and the quiet was soothed further by a man playing a stringed instrument.  Sitting beside a small mausoleum, the musician told me that the deceased had left a bequest that would pay for a musician to play at this tomb……forever.  I was touched by what must have been the deceased’s love for art, that he would devote the proceeds of a lifetime’s work to something as ephemeral as music, and that his love of art had reached out beyond his own death to give me that little pleasure on that afternoon.

I remembered this experience after I watched Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.  There’s the obvious Indian connection, but this film is also one man’s passion for art – cinema, in this case --  that is so great he put a big part of his own fortune into this single work.   And you can tell The Fall is the singular vision of an individual: There is little of Hollywood film language here, and the images simply overpower the narrative.  These images are ravishing, from Pacific atolls to Himalayan lakes and  Indian Palaces with  Balinese kecak performance.  The glory of the film is its images, and The Fall celebrates them throughout.  It reminds me of the 1937 Snow White, a movie that is so driven by the love of the images that its animation can produce that the narrative becomes a thin excuse to go from one wonderful set of visuals to another.  The same is true here.

That’s not to say that The Fall lacks typical characters or that the characters lack a narrative arc.  Roy deals with his depression throughout the narrative frame of the hospital, and he and  Alexandria build a relationship that is important to both of them in that context, too.  And the film has some thematic content as it plays with the relationship between the narrative frame and the events in Roy’s story – actors have different roles in the frame and the story, like the actors do in The Wizard of Oz, and characters and events in the frame affect the narrative of the story.  In fact, the characters and actions of the story become the language that Roy and Alexandria eventually use to talk to each other.  And the characters here are also moving.  You especially feel sympathy for Alexandria, through whose perspective we see the events of the movie.  She experiences drama that is more intense than most children experience, and her life is anything but simple.  Language is a barrier for her, her migrant-worker parents face discrimination, and she herself will return to work in the orchards where she’s previously fallen and broken her arm.  Cinema, story-telling, will provide her with much of the little pleasure she will have.

Yet despite these compelling cinematic elements, The Fall keeps returning to its colorful, striking images.  A spectacular red tent on wheels is dragged through an alpine desert by hundreds of slaves; a giant square of white fabric with a large red blotch stands out against a bright background, creating an image like a Rothko on a wall; and a captive runs through a cinematic maze constructed out of shots from an ancient observatory.  These are the parts of The Fall that resonate after the film ends.

It’s easy to see how someone could think of this film as a vanity project.  Singh is a wealthy man, and he comes from a music video background that makes him more skilled at visuals than at directing actors or creating compelling stories.  But The Fall is an instance of beauty created out of one man’s love of art. It comes from the same impulse as the music that is still being played in that Indian cemetery thanks to the bequest of an art lover.

March 3: Léon Morin, Priest (1961 -- Jean Pierre Melville)

★★★★

February 24: Wise Blood (1979 -- John Huston)

★★★★

In a Macon teacup, mix Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic flair with John Huston’s unrelenting existentialism and you get Wise Blood, a small, American New Wave jewel.  A lot of people think this is flawed film, but it seems tight and consistent to me.  I think Huston chooses the Landlady at the end of the film as his directorial voice, and when she says, “The world’s an empty place,”  she expresses the central  truth that the characters in the movie have to cope with.  This is not the catholic Flannery O’Connor’s film; it’s John Huston’s.  And God doesn’t usually have a role in a Huston film.

Man struggles hard in these movies, but there’s little redemption or reward waiting a Huston hero.  Sam Spade’s statue turns out to be a sham in Maltese Falcon, the surviving miners watch their gold dust blow away at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the drunk diplomat is killed in Under the Volcano, and Marilyn departs in The Misfits……and all after so much love, creativity, investment and fierce struggle.  Hazel Motes is another in this line of Huston characters who strive mightily only to face a defeat which comes not from a character flaw but from the reality of a haphazard, empty universe.  Hazel yearns for redemption but sees that the people and institutions who claim to have access to it are dishonest or simple.  And in the end, even his solitary quest for righteousness fails because there is no higher authority to appease. 

There’s no god in Wise Blood, as Asa Hawks and daughter Sabbath have long ago figured out.  We see them hawking Jesus using the same techniques as the guy selling potato peelers at the beginning of the film; Asa even fakes having tried self-mutilation as a way to redemption, for if there’s no redemption to be had, there’s no point in suffering for it.  This is the lesson that Hazel learns at the end of the film when he is blind, wrapped in barbed wire and unable to walk, delivered at last into the hands of a woman he doesn’t want to marry, the Landlady.  She, of course, knows there’s nothing else, and her abiding concern is not to face the emptiness alone. 

Lily, too, is more interested in relationships than god, so when Hazel gets too intense in his quest for righteousness, she abandons him and returns to her relationship with Asa.  And another corrupt preacher, Hoover Shoates, recognizes a good gimmick when he sees one, so  he steals Hazel’s ideas and applies his sales skills in hawking the new religion.  Shoates and Hawks are two of a kind – both know there’s no god or redemption, but they make their living by cynically exploiting others’ desire for it. 

In addition to the charlatans hawking salvation, Wise Blood provides a lonely simpleton.  Enoch Emory is an engaging youth, but one who has mental problems.  This hapless boy spends the film not trying to make contact with god but just trying to make contact with other human beings, all of whom reject him.  It’s from him that the film gets its name because Enoch affirms that he knows things because of his “wise blood,” but as we last see him alone on a bench in a gorilla suit, his final comment is about trying to be friendly yet being rejected.  Neither connectedness nor redemption is to be found in this film about the wise blood of a lonely fool.

It’s conceptual base notwithstanding, there are still some problems with this film.  The stiff delivery of lines and the overwritten quality of the dialog may reference the original material, but those elements don’t make Wise Blood a more engaging film.  And some complain about the blending of the 40s and the 70s in the film, though I find that provides the movie a less specific reference and doesn’t impact my enjoyment of the it.

This is a film to return to when, still today, the hypocrisy of religious discourse starts to grate.  At such a time, it’s comforting to sit down with a movie whose main character maintains, “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

February 23: A Dangerous Method (2011 -- David Cronenberg)

★★★