March 16: Network (1976 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

Network is such a prescient film that it’s almost eerie to watch it today, and it’s been prophetic throughout the 35 years since it was made.  These decades have seen the decline of news departments, the growth of conglomerates that swallow and then squeeze networks, and an increase in “personality” news. More striking still from today’s perspective is the rise of media that thrives on stoking anger—you have only to think of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity—and the blossoming of reality TV.  Paddy Chayefsky’s script couldn’t anticipate the way media has changed because of technological innovation that opened the door for cable and the internet, but in 1976, Network already saw that that the media was going to become all entertainment all the time. With anger as it's main attraction.

Beyond its vision for the media itself, Network also talks about what will happen to media consumers.  Max is old school –married with friends, family, integrity and a long career.  In Network, he’s having problems in life, but he deals with them directly by having his winter/spring romance with Diana and negotiating the terms of his marriage with his wife.  His is a real life.  The new media person, the character of Diana, is one who doesn’t experience life directly but instead lives through the media she loves.  Diana has several former marriages, she doesn’t connect on a personal level, she lacks integrity, and she’s abrupt in sex.  All these characteristics show how she has trouble with real people and real emotions.  In fact, although Network seems a little on-the-nose in describing her as trying to turn her life into a series of TV program plots, that is how she lives.  Throughout her brief sex scene, she talks about ratings, and to talk with her about their relationship, Max has to talk about possible plot lines.  Perhaps because Network is so heavy-handed and affected with this observation, it rings somewhat hollow today, but as we watched Newt Gingrich in the 2012 Iowa Republican primary go from first to last as a result of negative campaign advertising on TV, a movie like this one does make you pause and wonder how much we’re inscribed by the media around us.


Network is unquestionably of its time, as New Hollywood as any movie you’ll see.  It’s earnest, advocative, and critical.  Lumet goes beyond the ideas, though, by getting strong performances, especially from William Holden and Peter Finch.  Robert Duvall, though sometimes too over-the-top, still brings a cinematic intensity to his role engages.  The weak acting in this film is, unfortunately, at the center—Faye Dunaway as Diana.  A lot of the dialog here is stagy and theatrical, and even Holden and Duvall sometimes have to work to keep the language from taking us out of the movie.  Dunaway doesn’t have the chops to do that though, and scenes like the one where she bustles into her office giving orders are more painful than anything else.


That reservation aside, this is an eye-opening movie.  It transcends its 70s topicality and manages to pull off social satire while making a surprisingly accurate critique of public media.  I remember rewatching Brazil ten years ago and being surprised at how it anticipated the Bush administration’s creating the Department of Homeland Security and increasing governmental powers in order to "combat terrorism"; rewatching Network today, when anger is entertainment, I had the same feeling of eerie amazement.

March 15: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

After watching Clooney’s The Ides of March, I decided to go back to Sidney Lumet, who I kept thinking of as I was watching the Clooney film.  Now I’m not sure how I made that connection.  Maybe because I went back to Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and remembered Philip Seymour Hoffman in both.

That was about the only connection.  Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a masterful film with great acting, pitch-perfect direction, a rich script and stakes.  Major stakes.  And heart.  It’s thriller about a heist, but it’s also a deep family-relationship film and a wide-cast character study.  This film is a wonderful cinema experience.

There’s a dark taint in the heart of the main character, Andy, though we only see the symptoms of the darkness for the first two-thirds of the film.  Andy manipulates his younger brother Hank, playing him like a puppet, and he patronizes a high-end drug dealer who provides him heroin and a place to use it, a Manhattan version of a Chinese opium den.  Andy also steals from his company, fails as a husband, and plans the robbery of his parents’ small jewelry store that triggers the downward spiral of the film.  And we come to realize that his relationship problems and fixer personality have roots in his past as the responsible older brother.  Before the Devil Knows has a deep, complex script that balances all these elements of this one character, and Hoffman delivers an intense portrait of the man who is holding all these pressures under control, barely managing to keep them in check, while the movie plot slowly intensifies the pressure from each one.  And as the pressure increases, we feel its intensification each time Hoffman inhales a deep breath or shifts his large frame awkwardly.  His is a great performance in an able script.

Andy’s younger brother, Hank, has almost as much complexity.  Played by Ethan Hawke, Hank is the failure of the family-- nervous, unreliable, weak and unable assume responsibility.  He has married a strong woman who’s divorced him, and even his daughter pushes him around.  Always seeking security, Hank is having an affair with Andy’s wife because she makes him feel good, and his fear of doing the jewelry store robbery leads him to count on Bobby, who bungles it.  The rich depth of the script here, too, even shows us how this the family history of Andy and Hank have led them to who they are in the film.  If older brother Andy’s calm but increasingly desperate attempts at fixing the situation create some of the tension here, the spoiled Hank’s frazzle as he copes with every new turn creates complementary stress.  The audience can only watch with bated breath as the stakes get ever higher for these two brothers who are still acting though their childhood roles.

I like Albert Finney as the father in this film, too, and I find his character adds even more depth to the portrait of the family and suspense to the story.  Lumet was already an old man himself when he directed this last film, and the detail to Finney shows the insight of an older director.  The settings that Finney works in, whether suburban dining room or Towncar, feel dead-on for an elderly man, and Lumet gives Finney the freedom to create Charles as a hurting, angry, inarticulate widower who feels like he might have been a failure as a father.  With his pants hiked up too high and his shirt tail tucked firmly in, Charles brings as much tension to the screen as his sons do, tension that continues to ramp up as the plot reveals more and more details of the taint within the family and the way it’s produced the evolving situation of the characters.

As Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead builds to a crescendo and past, you sit watching masterful performances masterfully woven into a thriller that’s also the psychological portrait of a family.  With so much skill, judgment and artistry at work, this is a mature film that sets a very high standard.

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)

★★★★