August 1: Traffic (2000 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★★

Traffic came out the same year as Erin Brockovich, but its style is the anti-Erin alternative.  Erin Brockovich uses enhanced mimetic visuals and a transparent Hollywood cinematic style, but Traffic calls attention to its filmic elements in every frame.  It’s as though Soderbergh set out to make both a Bazinian and a Brechtian film in the same year.

From its opening, Traffic insistently calls attention to its cinematic elements.  An impossible yellow tint fills the wobbly, handheld frame as Javier and Manolo intercept a drug shipment in the desert of Tijuana, and the film goes on to alternate between three tints: yellow in Mexico; blue in the chilly corridors of East Coast authority and the homes of the authorities; and a rich, natural color in California.  This tinting suggests the lighting that Soderbergh had recently used in Grey’s Anatomy, but the highlights in the frame here are often burned out while the camera varies between steady and unsteady.  Also, occasional bravura blocking and editing segues from one plot line to the other, as when the camera turns from following Helena’s car to pick up Javier as he walks into bar on the same street.  Soderbergh uses no such attention-getting flourishes in Erin Brockovich.

There’s a clear purpose behind some of these meta-cinematic elements.  While Erin Brockovich tells the story of one woman’s struggle and follows this single character mimetically through its length, the subject in Traffic is much more general: drug use and its effects.  Traffic is a film of ideas, an analysis of drugs in the US, than it is the story of an individual, so the distancing that Soderbergh’s technique creates is appropriate here in a way it wouldn’t have been in the Brockovich story.  In addition to the distancing, the overt techniques help the film communicate better.  Traffic looks at drugs in three realms – Mexican distribution, the US government’s war on drugs, and American smugglers who distribute it – and Soderbergh color-codes each of these areas to help the audience keep the stories separate and reasonably clear.  And the hand-held camera gives a feeling of immediacy. 

Soderbergh also does an impressive job of handling a sprawling cast of characters to give breadth to his analysis of his subject.  Like Altman or PT Anderson or even Jean Renoir, Soderbergh finds depth, complexity, tragedy and smiles as his many characters deal with their respective roles in the drug trade.  Some characters are destroyed by their contact with drugs (Manolo, Salazar, Ray), some are damaged (Erika, Ana, Robert), and some flourish (Javier, Helena, Montel), but whatever their role or outcome, they’re all connected.  The achievement of this fine film is the range and detail of its description of its subject.

And all the while, many of the things I like most about Soderbergh are on display here.  He once again gets excellent performances out of his actors.  Michael Douglas plays the naïve politician/out-of-touch father well, and Erika Christensen all but outdoes him as the daughter who is slipping into a drug habit.  Catherine Zeta_Jones gives a complex performance that ranges from helplessness to confidence.  And Benicio del Toro dominates the screen as powerful giant who nonetheless seems vulnerable whenever he’s in front of us.  Seeing his performance here, it’s no surprise Soderbergh wanted to work with him again on Che.  And there’s a return role for Albert Finney here, too, albeit a minor one. 

Soderbergh’s fluidity and economy are also on display in Traffic.  From his rhythmic editing to the smoothness (or roughness) of his camera movement, Soderbergh continually engages viewers in the film.  For the most part, Soderbergh’s economical editing keep the film moving quickly.  In one POV shot, Erika sees an exit sign at a park, and a couple of shots later, we see her running down a small road.  At another point, Javier and Manolo are tasked with bringing in Francisco.  We soon see Javier walking into a gay bar where we find Francisco drinking, and after that, we find Javier and Manolo delivering a bound Francisco to Salazar.  Even Salazar asks how they accomplished the task that quickly, perhaps a wink at what the audience is thinking.  But Soderbergh can use such editing economy well to give us the facts we need without dwelling on  too much detail that slows the film down.

That said, there are a few plot points that suffer from too-economic editing.  I’m still unclear on how Manolo is betrayed, and I still don’t understand how he came to be handcuffed in the car with Javier.  I need a little more information there.  And unrelated to economy, I find the story a little more upbeat that I expected.  The bad guys are punished here, and there’s a faint glow of redemption on the horizon for the Wakefields.  Tijuana gets its ball field, Helena has a much better idea of how to live, and Montel continues his fight against the drug trade.  While not exactly a happy ending, the conclusion of Traffic is much happier than I might have expected.

But those small quibbles aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this film.  And on the Criterion blu-ray release, there are some excellent extras on the technical side of how it was made.

July 30: Erin Brockovich (2000 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★★
This film has aged very well, and watching it, I once again felt like I was in the hands of a director who was in absolute control of everything I saw on the screen.  Julia Roberts’ clothes, make-up and hair tell as much about her character as her acting and dialog do, and every detail of the mise-en-scène makes a major contribution to the sense of the place and the stakes in the film.  Soderbergh’s locations and sets always seem more important to his films than the settings of most filmmakers because his always seem to carry a lot of the important information.  In Erin Brockovich, the dingy little Jensen house tells as much about the family life there as the script does.  Details like its above-ground kids pool indicate a lower middle class family striving to provide for the kids but also show the way PG&E’s behavior is subtly undermining the efforts of the family.  Nearly every detail on a Steven Soderbergh screen carries this level of signification.  A Soderbergh mise-en-scène isn’t only appropriate; it develops the meaning in the film.

Having recently seen Magic Mike, I couldn’t help but notice the light in Erin Brockovich, too.  Whether in the run-down areas of LA or the empty desert around Hinkley, there’s often a muted yellow cast that’s warm and highlights the settings.  And at places from  Pamela Duncan’s home and Masry’s office to a local bar or the hot, cinderblock assembly room, the light is never harsh.  We can see every element of furnishing, every facial expression and every wrinkle in fabric.  The lighting works hand-in-hand with the sets.

And I like Soderbergh’s narrative economy.  There are parts a bit long and a bit too on-the nose in Erin Brockovich – when Matt communicates his acceptance of his mother’s helping the people of Hinkley by offering to get her breakfast, the scene goes on a bit too long, for example – but Soderbergh generally keeps his action moving forward quickly.  I especially like the way he uses sound bridges between scene cuts because they move me into the next scene’s action before I even see what’s happening.

Many people have noted that Soderbergh gets great performances out of his actors, and that talent is on ample display here.  Julia Roberts is far better than I remembered her in this role, playing a range of emotions (and winning an Oscar); the minor characters do equally outstanding jobs with their pain, grief and anger.  And the camera lingering on the faces of these characters in the soft light tells us even more of their backgrounds and struggles as they seem completely unaware of the cameras and mikes that were undoubtedly around them.  Soderbergh gets strong, naturalistic performances out of all these actors, both professional and non-professional actors.

And though the film isn’t even-handed about the PG&E controversy, it isn’t shrill either because the evil of the utility isn't the only focus of the film. Brockovich’s humanity informs all aspects of her life, and her dealing with the corrupt utility is just one of the arenas the film follows her into.  And we certainly see the flaws of the Brockovich’s side, too: Masry lacks backbone and wants to limit his exposure to the case, and Erin becomes obsessed with the case and ignores her family and relationships.  This isn’t a strident, anti-business propaganda piece.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking recently of a film class I took back in the 70s and of reading Andre Bazin.  I thought of Bazin’s cinema preferences a lot in respect to this and other Soderbergh works, and I think M. Cahiers would have loved this film.  Erin Brockovich is all about mise-en-scène and what you see on the screen.  The editing, though fluid and efficient, never calls attention to itself, nor does the dialog or acting.  Throughout his career, Soderbergh moves easily from one film language to another, and Erin Brockovich shows how thoroughly he can control this one.

July 29: Gray's Anatomy (1996 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★
The strength of this film is Spaulding Gray and his storytelling.  Gray is witty, intelligent, wry and engaging.  He’s doesn’t act terribly over-the-top the way today’s cable communicators do, but he has enough variety in his voice to keep what is basically an 80-minute monologue from getting boring.  The tale of his retina pucker here is fun because it not only leads him to outrageous corners in search of a cure – Philippine faith healer, macrobiotic doctor – but it gives a chance for his intelligence to shine, as when he mentions Oedipus,  psychology and his mother.  There’s hardly a place in the monologue where interest can flag.

Soderbergh’s contribution to the film isn’t what I might have expected.  There’s not a lot a originality in his transforming Gray’s performance into film; instead, Soderbergh avails himself of mostly cinematic elements analogous to those available to theatrical director.  We get colored gel lights, silhouettes, moving backdrops and chairs, spotlights, and backlighting.  In the sweat lodge, there’s some dry ice smoke, too.  More cinematically, Soderbergh occasionally uses focus to direct our attention and some interesting cuts.  The one element he adds to the monologue is the use of documentary interviews shot in infrared of people who’d had had accidents affecting their eyes.  Some of those stories are so affecting that he clearly doesn’t need visuals to amplify them.  There’s also some engagement of the interviewees and Gray’s story because they people reflect on some of the points in Gray’s monologue.

Overall, this is a fun, engaging film thanks to Gray’s work.  There’s not a great deal of Soderbergh cinematic insight in it.

July 28: Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012 -- Benh Zeitlin)

★★★★

I was pleasantly surprised by this Sundance fav, especially after my experience with Ballast.  Beasts of the Southern Wild is not only creative and rich in the local color we’re used to finding in indies, but it’s also engaging.  It drags in a few places like the hurricane detention center, but for the most part, we’re interested throughout in who Hushpuppy is and what is going to happen to her. 

That said, the story isn’t the focus here.  Beasts is mythopoesis, a world come to life from the imagination of its heroine and rendered in affective imagery from a life of poverty.  From its first person narration through the things we see, this film shows us the world as its six-year-old lead understands and imagines it.  Her mind puts together vicious boars with legends of prehistoric beasts to create world-destroying  aurochs, and then she embellishes the tale with fear that global warming will break the beasts from their frozen stasis and unleash them on the world again. She sees a boat made out of a pick-up truck bed and a shelter with spikes coming out the roof to protect the survivors of the inundation.  A party is a blaze of color and fireworks, and when Hushpuppy decides she has to see her mother, she swims out to sea since that’s where her father said that her mother had gone.  There’s all the magical realism of Garcia Marquez here, interpreted effectively into film.

And as in Marquez, the reality that underlies the magic is not happy.  Hushpuppy lives in intimacy with the physicality of a hard  life -- its dirt, its gore, its heartbeat.  Her father is dying, her community is being destroyed, and she’s in desperate need of her mother.  Although far too young to deal with such terrible conditions, Hushpuppy persists until she finds her mother, confirmed by the legend-fulfilling act of frying alligator, and comes to the painful realization that the woman can never fulfill the maternal role Hushpuppy has wanted for her.  With this wisdom, Hushpuppy returns to her village, faces down the vicious aurochs, gives succor to her dying father, and leads the villagers on to what is probably another promised land.  Beasts is the mythopoeic creation of a new myth, perhaps one that’s real or perhaps one that’s imagined.  That doesn’t matter to a six-year-old.

Beasts of the Southern Wild has flaws of pacing, acting and script, but it is powerful portrayal of a young girl’s imaginative mind making sense of her world and overcoming the obstacles she encounters.  That portrayal alone makes this one of the more interesting films of the year.

July 18: Ballast (2008 -- Lance Hammer)

★★
A lot of the praise for this film is completely deserved.  It really is beautiful, from the brown symmetry of rows of cotton plant stubs to the purple and grey color palate of the cheap artificial lighting.  Even dark interiors managed to provide a line of highlight so we can make out the characters’ faces.  And there’s a very strong sense of local color, too.  Good American indy film is unexcelled when it comes to burrowing into a community the filmmaker knows well and showing us the truth of that community, and here we see the struggle of life in the Mississippi Delta, the loneliness and the few resources its people have.  We’re taken to the crack house, the convenience store and the impoverished interiors people live in.  Ballast is a deep look into a community we don’t often see.  This film has a community truth that the larger indy, Winter’s Bone, tried to have, but while latter managed only to seem contrived, Ballast feels authentic.

However, the pervasive monotony of this film makes it a long, boring experience.  For all the insight the film offers, Lance Hammer’s direction offers us too little cinema to engage us.  Over the 96 minutes of the film, the vast majority of the scenes are short, 30-45 second snips.  Such short takes can be good for variety in a film, but a feature film of them feels like a very long ping pong point.  Perhaps as a function of this directorial choice, the dialog in each scene is limited, too — 2-4 lines most of the time.  The repeatedly short takes and dialog snippets don’t sink the film right away because the cinematography and atmosphere are so interesting, but I was checking to see how much more of the movie I had left by the time I got to fifty minutes.  Perhaps these directing choices were compelled by the use of nonprofessional actors who weren’t really up to the challenge.  In particular, Micheal Smith, Sr. as Lawrence couldn’t engage the camera, so perhaps Hammer chose to keep the scenes short to minimize the dramatic burden.

For all its good points, Ballast isn’t a film I’ll want to sit through again.  Its strong points included, the main insight I take away from this movie is the importance of the range of elements that moves good cinema.

July 14: Shallow Grave (1994 -- Danny Boyle)

★★★★
It’s the visuals that strike you from the very opening of Shallow Grave.  The film cuts rapidly among a series of interviews of potential housemates, and we see primary-colored walls and furnishings as MTV style cuts create the story of the interviews and establish the characters: Alex, the over-the-top extrovert; David, the very bland accountant, and Juliet, the young doctor.  And the film continues throughout with this striking editing, like the scene after Alex and Juliet have gone shopping and are celebrating in the apartment, and great images, many of which are noir-influenced like the shafts of stabbing into the attic.  Shallow Grave is a film in love with look, and it’s so creative that that aspect alone would make it worthwhile.

But it goes beyond the look into a tone that it clearly owes to the first Coen Bros feature, Blood Simple.  Coen Bros films often look evil right in the eye, see it in an everyday vocabulary, and fail to understand it.  Coen Bros evil is horrible, implacable and utterly immoral, the evil that Flannery O’Connor saw through her Catholic lens, and Danny Boyle draws from this version of evil in Shallow Grave.  We see the graphically-beautiful death by drug overdose of Hugo, the horrible violence that the two gang members visit on rivals, and the grisly dismemberments that our own accountant undertakes.  And if the link to Blood Simple isn’t clear from the tone, it’s impossible to ignore the clear parallel between the scene of Alex being pinned to the floor with a knife through his shoulder and the scene in Blood Simple when Abby nails Visser’s hand to the window sill with a knife.

But despite the clear link between Shallow Grave and Blood Simple, the two are going at different things.  While the Coens have a philosophical bent and look at the nature of good and evil, Boyle is more interested in personalities and in film noir.  After the roommates decide early in the movie to keep the money, their personalities and relationships begin to diverge.  Inhibitions gone, David becomes a violent murderer, and Juliet morphs into a femme fatale who walks away with the money after bringing down the two men.  Alex alone rolls with the punches , remaining the trickster, willing to break social mores from the beginning of the film to the end.  And like a typical trickster, he sneaks away with something a victory. This isn’t a philosophical movie but rather one about personalities.

After watching this film, I’m still not sure what to make of Danny Boyle as an auteur filmmaker.  His output is eclectic, varying from this to Sunshine to Slumdog Millionaire, but I have trouble seeing cohesion in his work the same way I sense it in Soderbergh’s, for example.  Steven Soderbergh works in a wide range of genres and budgets, but I’m always aware of an intellectual engagement with his material, an unfailing sense of film language, and an effort to reach for something a little unique.  In Danny Boyle, though, I feel like he’s doing what he’s hired for, bringing some technique and embellishment to each project but not projecting a distinct approach to his film.  It’s the same sense I get from Ridley Scott’s work, much of which I enjoy despite not seeing a particular view of the world in it.

But auteur or not, Boyles created not only a visual treat, but a fun narrative ride in this first film.

July 8: Where Do We Go Now?/Et maintenant on va où? (2011 -- Nadine Labaki)

★★★★

This film is a mix of a lot of unexpected and mostly incongruent elements.  It’s partly drama, with intense scenes of family and sectarian conflict.  There’s a lot of comedy, too, as the women sabotage the village’s news-bearing TV, import blonde prostitutes, fake religious miracles and bake drug-laced cookies in an effort to distract the men from religious conflict.  And Where Do We Go Now is also willing to occasionally break out into song and dance music numbers like those from Dancer in the Dark.

But only after all of this is blended together does the real impact of Where Do We Go Now – the profound intransigence of religious conflict and the severity of the suffering of the women caught in it.  Though they have to live together, the men and women of the village constantly dig at each other with little affronts to religion and culture, and every small dig risks escalating into civil war in the village.  And these provocations aimed at each other’s religious beliefs and dress are mean and have little humor in them.  Such conditions are certainly eye-opening to those of us who live in more pluralistic cultures where religion is generally secondary to making a living and getting along for the civil good.  Where Do We Go Now does a great job of showing what such riven environments look like from the inside.

It also shows the pain of women in such a split patriarchy.  The village cemetery is divided between Muslims and Christians, but it’s filled with the young men of both religions; the film opens with a musical number as the women head out to clean the graves of their lost husbands and sons.  Where Do We Go Now brings the accumulated pain of the cemetery into focus when one woman loses her youngest and is scared to tell the men of her own family for fear of igniting a round of recriminatory violence.  And there is a scene of a woman wounding her own son with a gun in order to prevent him from being involved in sectarian violence.  Not even romantic love can overcome the divide in this village as a trans-religious attraction falls victim to the religious strife.  As though all this suffering weren’t enough, the women finally resort to changing their faiths to the opposite religion, a move sanctioned by the religious leaders of the village, in order to prevent the men in their families from fighting with those of the other religion.  It’s heart-rending to see women who’d proudly worn or not worn scarves all their lives suddenly renounce a lifetime of religious observance.

Good world cinema takes us into a culture we have no other window into, and that’s exactly what Where Do We Go Now does.  Its mix of genres is interesting, perhaps drawing on cinema tradition I’m not familiar with.  But the real contribution here is the way the film takes us inside the minds of the religious conflict in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East.  Comedy may lighten the message a little, but the insight is real and heavy.