May 14: Restrepo (2010 -- Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger)

★★★★★

After watching Which Way is the Front from Here?, I decided to revist Restrepo to see if I liked as much as I thought I did and to see if some of the ideas in the recent documentary were, in fact, relevant to this film.  I did, and they were.

Restrepo is going to transcend many of the Iraq/Afganistan documentaries because it’s less about the specifics of the war than it is about the men pulling the trigger on the front lines.  This film isn't a critique of the rationale or conduct of the wars, and it isn't about the wars’ futility or the corruption of our nation’s profiteers.  Instead, Hetherington’s sympathy and his affection for his subjects – dwelt on in Which Way is the Front from Here? – create a compelling portrait of a group of young soldiers living together under unrelenting, life-threatening stress as the camera takes us through their moments of intense fighting and times of mundane work and play.  And this interspersed with moments of candid reflection, both in a studio setting as well as at OP Restrepo.

The candid moments are touching, as when the guys play guitars, work out, wrestle or recall growing up in a
protected environment.  They express honestly, in front of the camera, their anxieties about a patrol or activity before the camera heads out with them onto a hillside or village.  Their enemies are remote; the Americans don’t see their opponents’ eyes when they shoot at them, and incoming fire comes from far away. They respond to it with long-range weapons.   Death is only beside you in the OP, and the only blood you actually see is that of your fellow soldiers.  It’s a grim, hard, tense world.

With Hetherington and Junger embedded in 503^rd, Restrepo only shows us what the company sees.  Like the soldiers, viewers see nothing of the lives of the Afghans, and we watch powerlessly as military leaders talk to the Afghans like they are less than human.  One officer tells the local leadership to forget all the abuse that occurred under the leadership of the former officer, as though a slate of evident maltreatment could be wiped clean with a few glib phrases.  We see the fear on the face of another local who is suspected of Taliban alliance and, another time, we hear an officer apologize to a man after American forces have killed several members of his family, women and children.  His apology -- that we killed a lot of bad guys and that he’s sorry the man’s family was also killed -- underscores the dehumanizing gulf that exists between the local population and the men of the 503^rd, and  the situation bodes badly for America’s winning the hearts and minds of the locals.  But honestly, what else could the young officer say or do? 

Restrepo is mostly a vivid portrait of the comradeship that emerges between men at war, and the strength of the film is the tender, detailed soldier’s life that emerges.  But it’s also about war itself, the way postcard scenery is a field of battle and the way absurdities make bitter sense.  And it's for this amalgam that the film will last.

April 29: From Up on Poppy Hill/Kokuriko-zaka kara (2011 -- Gorō Miyazaki)

★★★★★

This film has lots of what I like to see when go to a Studio Ghibli project.  I enjoy the lush visuals, the somewhat stilted characters, the unlikely narrative, and the Japanese cuteness.  At Ghibli, these elements always seem to come together to create something that’s deeply fleshed out, internally consistent as well as absolutely unique and absorbing.  To watch From Up on Poppy Hill is to enter into an aesthetic space that exists only in this particular film, and while you’re there, you give yourself to its complete world with its own imaginative rules.  The what-if atmosphere is warm and tender, not only arising from the rich imagery of the port, the gardens and the clubhouse, but also from the adolescent fantasy that informs the movie.  From Up on Poppy Hill has hard-working teens, gallant teens striving against obtuse adults, teens consumed with the excitement of learning, and teens dealing with romantic awakenings.  And all of this to a nostalgic soundtrack that harkens back to accessible 60s jazz and some pop.  The film is a satisfying immersion in a deeply imagined and rendered world.

It’s not hard to imagine an element of meta-signification in the film either.  Aside from the teen romance that is fraught with complication, From Up on Poppy Hill deals with the tension between the past and now.  The baroque clubhouse is facing demolition to make way for the new era that the 1964 Tokyo Olympics will usher in, but heroes Umi and Shun have a vision for the restoration of the old building, partly gleaned from the beauty of the renovated boarding house she helps run.  The film calls for preserving the past as we move into the future.  This is the same approach that director Gorō Miyazaki takes in making this film.  The son of Ghibli master Hayao Miyazaki, Gorō builds on the achievement of his father rather than abandoning the Ghibli approach to go in a different direction.  The rich visuals and intensity of imagination he brings here extend the approach to anime that his father has developed, and Gorō even has his father Hayao as a scriptwriter, ensuring that From Up on Poppy Hill builds on this tradition.  And Gorō succeeds convincingly  from up on his own Poppy Hill  by following  in the footsteps of those who worked before him in this absorbing film about respecting tradition. 

April 27: Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (2013 -- Sebastian Junger)

★★
I found this documentary to be disappointing.  The great strength here is that we see lots of Tim Hetherington’s work, both video and stills, and the work is dynamic, personal, loving and warm.  Hetherington says early on that his interest is the humanity that survives in war, and we see this humanity in war photo after war photo and in the behind-the-scenes video we watch of Hetherington at work with his subjects.  He likes the people he photographs.

But Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? stumbles when Hetherington isn’t onscreen.  Junger intimates a different motivation for each different theater Hetherington works in.  He says that Hetherington  wants to show war by photographing its effects in Liberia, but he also says Hetherington is interested in the soldiers’ posturing to get keyed up.  Later, it’s male bonding that interests Hetherington in Afghanistan.  And in the six-year period the photographer stayed in Liberia after the war, his interest is……well, Junger doesn’t say at all.  We're not sure why Hetherington decided to leave Liberia, and we don't know why he wanted to go to Afganistan.  Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? moves from one idea about Hetherington’s work to another, leaving us with a series of touching, compelling moments, but it ultimately fails to give us a core to help us understand this artist who worked as a photojournalist.  In fact, it doesn’t even try.

It’s hard to leave this film without an appreciation of Hetherington’s work since we get to enjoy so much of it.  However, as a documentary, Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? disappoints because we can’t learn more of the aesthetic behind Hetherington's work or of what motivated it.  The important takeaway from the film is that we lost a talented documentarian when Hetherington was killed in Libya, and that counts for something anyway.

April 25: Lawrence of Arabia (1962 -- David Lean)

★★★★★

April 21: Brief Encounter (1945 -- David Lean)

★★★★★

April 18: Blithe Spirit (1945 -- David Lean)

★★

Blithe Spirit must rank among the most trivial of David Lean’s work, and it’s safe to guess that it’s not Noel Coward’s star achievement either.  This film takes the interest in spiritualism, already gently mocked in the character of Sylvia in This Happy Breed, and turns it into the butt of full scale wit.  Exaggerated characters strike poses and engage in repartee, but overall the film lacks punch or insight.   Or, for that matter, originality.  Blithe Spirit putters along like a stylized, commercial theatrical production, telegraphing its next plot turn well in advance.

Lean doesn’t rise above this material either.  Sight gags and double exposures work to create some interest, but Lean’s editing acumen and Ronald Neame’s cinematographic touch are largely absent here.  There’s even a continuity problem as the driver and passenger in a car inexplicably switch places at one cut.  There is some nice use of color palette in the Technicolor – Elvira’s green complements the colors of the first séance, and Ruth’s subdued orange blend nicely with her room – but there’s little to distinguish the color scales here from those in other Technicolor productions of the time.

As my friend Lou says, this film lacks spirit.

April 16: This Happy Breed (1944 -- David Lean)

★★★★

No sophomore slump here.  David Lean’s second collaboration with Noel Coward (and Ronald Neame) again pairs good character study with the cinematic to describe bedrock England.  This Happy Breed follows a middle class family though the two decades between WW I and WW II, showing the domestic values that underlie what is quintessentially English and the factors that stress them.

A lot of the characters in This Happy Breed recall those from In Which We Serve, and when the characters don’t obviously correspond, their qualities look familiar.  From the film’s opening panorama of London that slowly zooms in on a middle class neighborhood with gardens uniformly filling each identical back yard, the British affection for horticulture almost becomes a metaphor for the British character.  “We do things slow in this country,” Frank tells the impetuous leftist Sam, who will later become his stolidly middle-class son-in-law.  Steady, calm, and methodical with an eye to the future, -- these are the qualities of a good gardener and a good Brit.  Like the Chief of In Which We Serve, Frank tends his garden and his family conservatively, adjusting to whatever immediate crises arise so that he can get back to his happy equilibrium.

But This Happy Breed shows us that the British conservative isn't rigid because the British heart prods the conservative to adapt.  Ethel shows this dynamic the most clearly when she rejects her daughter Queenie because of the girl’s socially shameful behavior and her undermining the marriage of another woman.  Celia Johnson’s hardworking, determined Ethel vows never to speak to her daughter again for these social transgressions, but when the occasion for their reunion comes, the mother’s heart can’t hold out against her conservative values, and mother and daughter are reunited.  There’s a similar reunion between Queenie and Billy, the very decent suitor she has previously rejected as boring.  Billy has been diligently working his way up the ranks to be able to afford marriage while Vi has been learning that red dresses and the Charleston aren't what she really wants.  After their divergent paths, the two are able to embrace middle class, married bliss by the time the film ends.

There are other echoes of In Which We Serve in this film, too.  We again have an crabby, elderly, female in-law residing in the house, Ethel’s mother, and she’s continually bickering with a younger woman, Ethel’s sister Sylvia.  And the stolid middle class life in this film is punctuated by the same events as the middle class life In Which We Serve, a wedding and a Christmas celebration with paper decorations.  Both of these two Lean/Coward collaborations show the British middle class as stolid but open to change as compelling family needs dictate.

This Happy Breed doesn't have the sudden cinematic flourishes like the opening of In Which We Serve or the editing dazzle we see in some scenes in that film, but there are moments of cinematic pleasure here.  The opening with the London cityscape that ends in the garden of a single home has its thrill while it's also telling us that we’re seeing the story of but one little family among many.  And without a line that says, “This is the story of a family.”  Lean, and perhaps Coward, trust cinema enough at this point that they don't need expository dialog.  Another scene adapts theater technique to the screen.  The scene opens with Ethel’s mother and Sylvia listening to some upbeat jazz when they are interrupted by Vi with the bad news of Reg's death.  The peppy music continues unabated on the soundtrack while the two burst into tears and flee the room, creating an ironic emotional counterpoint.  The music continues while Vi goes to the garden to tell Frank and Ethel of their loss, but the camera stays in the room, motionless as always, with the jazz going.  Frank and Ethel reenter the room some moments later, clearly devastated, but the music continues at the same volume and the camera continues its static gaze.  It’s not hard to see this exact staging in a theatrical production, but it works well on film, too.

The cinematography makes the boldest film statement of This Happy Breed.  We know it’s Technicolor from the credits and from more traditional uses of the process like we see in the ranks of brightly dressed soldiers marching in the parade with red accents on their uniforms.  But most of the film uses Technicolor in an unusual way to create rich, muted brown and grey hues, from the drab wallpaper to the drab upholstery to the drab clothes.  The film can show color --  it does so in the Christmas decorations and in Queenie’s dance sequence – but Technicolor here only reinforces the drabness of the family’s environment, which is an appropriate corollary to the family’s conservative values.  There’s nothing too extravagant in behavior, values or décor with this middle class, British family.

This Happy Breed is a solid film that gives an insightful reading of bedrock British values.  Because of the film’s clear sympathy with the characters it portrays, it doesn't idealize, patronize or satirize.  By staying in the realm of drama as much as it does, This Happy Breed gives us a perspective on a certain segment of British society between the two wars.