Neutered

Janet McTeer trying to convince Glenn Close to quit trying.

There is almost nothing to be said about such an inert piece of pandering Oscar-bait like Albert Nobbs (2011).  I can see the development meeting:  "We don't need a story or characters!  Glenn Close is dressed as a guy!  She's old now, so she's not pretty any more, and she's guaranteed to get an Oscar nomination!  We'll shove it out during award season and nobody realize it's completely empty and dull!"

This is a clear demonstration that a famous actor need only stutter, put on a clubfoot or dress as the opposite gender to get an Oscar nomination.  Why do I say that?  Because Close made the mistake of putting herself side-by-side with a lesser-known actor, Janet McTeer, who is also in male drag and mops the floor with Close.  Close's concept of a woman acting like a man is to hold very, very still so as not to wiggle anything.  McTeer adopts a bold swagger and mashes Close's amateurish work into the dirt.

And to be clear, Ms. McTeer is a very attractive woman.  She just hasn't been a lazy, self-congratulating Hollywood actor for 30 years, so she hasn't learned how to put on a complicated make-up or add some lines to a screenplay or take a title as executive producer so she can pretend she's really acting.  McTeer just shows up, does her work and kicks Glenn Close's butt.  Rent the movie if you must, but fast forward to McTeer and skip the rest, unless you have persistent insomnia.

Think you got troubles?

Five Minutes of Heaven (2009) might be an interesting companion piece to Invictus, dealing as it does with reconciliation after a history of violence. Where Invictus is on the grand scale, Five Minutes is a chamber piece, with only two real characters.

The film falls into three distinct "chunks." The first part depicts an actual act of violence during the Troubles in Belfast. If you really want to see a film about this episode, see Bloody Sunday directed by Paul Greengrass, and also starring James Nesbitt. The opening sequence of street violence in Five Minutes is well-executed, but not groundbreaking.

The second sequence, which revolves around a planned televised meeting between the killer and the younger brother of the victim, who witnessed the killing as a child, sounded at first as if it wanted to be a play--two men in a room, having a confrontation, probably primarily in words. And then Five Minutes demonstrated something that film does that theater can't do as well. It shows a confrontation that didn't happen. Liam Neeson plays the former killer, who has been released from prison and is now engaged in various acts of public healing, and clearly carries the guilt of his acts. James Nesbitt is the younger brother, who plans to revenge his brother on television by stabbing Liam Neeson. (The enjoyment of that constitutes Nesbitt's "five minutes of heaven.") But then, after considerable well-executed suspense as to whether the encounter will happen, Nesbitt walks away. This sequence boasts some bravura use of the wide lens and a video aesthetic to convey a sense of actuality.

The third act is perplexing but the most plausible. They do at last meet in a strange, thwarted yet violent confrontation that, in time, exorcises Nesbitt's ghosts.

The revelation here is Nesbitt, who is brilliant in a role 180 degrees from his peacemaker role in Bloody Sunday. Neeson is required to play straight man to him, and given that his presence in the film was probably the factor that assured its distribution, if not actual production, his self-effacing work is admirable. Similarly admirable is the lack of pat conclusions, except that the experience in Northern Ireland has lessons in every place where young man are recruited to enforce group differences through violence.

The film is accused of failing as a document about the Troubles, but that is not its intention. It is a character study, specifically about healing from a terrible hurt, and as such, given two superb performances, it is a small gem.

Real jaws

It is time to stop arguing about whether Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran (1934) is an accurate depiction of life on the Western Isles in the early 1930's. It's not, and it wasn't meant to be. Although Flaherty is one of the founding fathers of film documentary, his practices and aims are utterly at odds with the documentary movement's mainstream today.

Flaherty was a film poet as surely as John Ford or F.W. Murnau. (Some call Griffith a poet, but he was a Victorian novelist.) His poetry was built on the stuff of real life, but it was not intended to reproduce real life, but distill its essence. The people of the Western Isles didn't live quite as starkly as the film shows, but in comparison with the way the rest of us live, the ruggedness of eking an existence out of this harsh environment is clear. Which brings the joys of home and hearth into even starker relief.

The excerpt above illustrates just how intimately the people of Aran live with the natural world. It brings life and takes it, and Flaherty's use of long lens blurs the great distances and puts small, fragile man into greater proximity with the dangerous world than perhaps he was in real life. So, the cinematography's tools are used to make a point, much of the action is staged, and modern objects and tools are banned from the camera's view. The larger point is served, and what we see is not lies, but the truth edited into poetry. (You'll notice that the sound is all post-synched, with varying success. I don't think Flaherty cared much about the soundtrack, he was such a creature of silent film. But the powerful score is an important first for him, and he commissioned a first rate score from Virgil Thomson for Louisiana Story in 1948.)

What I didn't expect about the film is that 34 minutes or so in, it turns into one of the all-time great shark movies, better in ways than Jaws. For one thing, you don't see the shark coming. In fact, you can't even recognize it when you first see it, as it hovers just below the surface of rippling waves. Then the small boy who has first spotted it recognizes what it is, and then we do. And it is big. Really big. And it is swimming along with its mouth open, ready to indiscriminately swallow whatever comes into its range. There is no malice from this shark, just hunger.

And then these crazy Irishmen go out to get it. Talk about needing a bigger boat! Their boat is about the same length as the shark, and the combined weight of the fisherman is probably the same as the fish. If you have a friend who doesn't think they would like 1930's docs, show them this shark hunt, and see if this isn't some of the most exciting film footage ever.

As I've learned with Nanook of the North and the power it exerts over the young students of my film classes, Flaherty still weaves his magic, bumpy editing and abrupt transitions and all, and draws the audience into his exotic worlds, through the power of image upon image.

Coverage

An Everlasting Piece (2000) has the vague whiff of a film produced for tax reasons. It is hard to imagine that it aroused passion in anyone, other than its screenwriter-star, Barry McEvoy, who based it on incidents in his father's life. Director Barry Levinson continues to vie for "Most Erratic Track Record as a Director." Has anyone in our era made such fine films and such bombs side by side? Diner and Sphere? Avalon (a personal favorite) and Man of the Year (unwatchable)? Wag the Dog and Toys (one of the worst EVER)? Let me know if you can think of anyone else who works at such extremes. And some of his most celebrated work (Rain Man) isn't all that good, while lesser-known films (Young Sherlock Holmes) have their rewards.

One can see the attraction of the material for Levinson-- the protagonists are two man-boys (or is it boyos?) who stumble over a business opportunity which puts them in opposition to the prevailing authorities. As a Catholic and Protestant working together, they arouse suspicion both from the British military and the IRA, both of whom are potential antagonists and, as it turns out, potential customers.

But the two parts of the film--baldness and armed religious conflict--never gel into a cohesive unity, and come apart like a toupee whose sticky tape has worn out. And the inherent grimness of the setting edge the film into tastelessness, into which it falls on a fairly regular basis. Not to mention the Anglo-Irish propensity for scenes of redundant squabbling--don't we all have enough pointless arguments in our lives to not have to put up with them in real life? And there seems to be an assumption that, given much of the audience will be Irish, they will necessarily be drunk; therefore important plot points must be pronounced three times in a row very slowly. I'm not kidding. The idea that the two wig salesman will shave their heads to demonstrate the quality of their hair pieces is repeated THREE TIMES IN A ROW SLOWLY.

Or maybe it was just that the editor was drunk.

Based on a true story

The historical epic is an established film genre, although scarcely a popular one in its own right. (I'm not talking about things like Dr. Zhivago or Gone With The Wind which use historic events merely as a backdrop for cheesy romantic melodrama. I mean films which attempt to actually explain and interpret history, like the million-megaton bomb Reds.) Film is not built to do history very well. Significant historical events incorporate so many diverse elements, politics, economics, social conditions, cultures, geography, etc., etc., that film, with its natural drive for narrative, and especially visual narrative, rarely helps anyone understand the causes and meanings of history.

(Similarly, epic biographies rarely work on film, because truly significant lives are not stories or novels, but anthologies of stories. Too many films, like Chaplin or The Aviator, are too eager to get too many stories in, rather than deciding on a simple, telling story. It's the difference between the compelling Motorcycle Diaries, an adventure of Ernesto Guavera before he became the famous "Che" and the overblown Che by Steven Soderbergh, a 5-hour epic that tries to tell Everything You Need To Know About Che.)

I must have seen at least a dozen films about armed conflict in Ireland, including Michael Collins, The Crying Game, The Rising of the Moon, The Informer, The Plough and the Stars, Hidden Agenda, Shake Hands With The Devil...the list goes on. So I began watching The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) with a little trepidation about sitting through some more historical medicine that would be good for me, but not taste very good.

It was a pleasure to be so wrong. Not only was the film clear (a huge accomplishment in any film about Irish politics) and even-handed (no straight-up heroes or villains, just people caught on different sides of a regrettable conflict), but beautiful to look at. The visuals seem to be more "caught" than composed, yet they are balanced and telling. Evidently director Ken Loach does not storyboard or use focus marks, but eschews faux-documentary shaky-cam. His operators just have a knack for identifying where the heart of the scene is taking place.

You can read attacks on the film's historical accuracy. But that would be like complaining about the historical details in Henry IV, Part 2. Because Loach and screenwriter Laverty have done just what Shakespeare did, and personified an historical divide into believable individual characters. At the beginning, when the Irish are involved in a revolution against England, activist brother pulls doctor brother into the conflict. Then, when the English craftily transform the war from a revolution against them into a civil war among the Irish, the activist brother becomes defender of the new status quo, while the doctor maintains his revolutionary stance. In the end, one must kill the other. Shakespearean, like I said. And like Shakespeare, there is a marvelous foretaste as one of the brothers must execute a traitor within their midst whom he has known since childhood. No propaganda, no mounds of background historical exposition and explanation--just a tale of brothers caught in history's jaws.

So, in a lighthearted vain, does the principal character in Taking Woodstock (2009) find himself amid history, albeit pop culture history, and albeit an event he helped set in motion. And again, the real story is not Woodstock, to which destination the principal character never actually arrives, although he invited the festival to his town. It is a story of a young man separating from his parents and being accepted by them for his individual abilities and accomplishment. Being a gentle character, unable to abandon his difficult and unhappy parents, as his siblings have apparently done, the film shares his gentle character and humor; it goes most off course when it engages in the kind of vaudeville that found a home in the nearby Catskills.

Without the family story, there really is not much else other than a loving recreation of the spirit and ethos of the event, at least as it has been reported by the participants. There is no other conflict or drama, although in actuality, the production of the Woodstock Festival with riddled with dramatic and difficult events. Again, the filmmakers recognized that the subject was too large for any film, much less a low-budget film to get its arms around, and focused on a simple coming-of-age tale. This is the Woodstock movie you can show your grandma if she doesn't mind a bare bosom or schpeckel or two.

And you haven't lived until you see Liev Schreiber in drag.