"When I go to the movies, I don't want to think. I just want to be taken out of myself," I hear. And I think there will be many, many years to not think when you're dead. Mindless entertainment makes me restless and bored, and too much of it physically nauseates me, especially since it's often built on lies. Shoot me, but I like a movie or a play to actually be about something more than bringing me 100 minutes closer to my death.
Broken Circle Breakdown (2013-USA) is a tough and a tough-minded movie. At first sight, it is exhiliaratingly free-sprited and wild, about the careless romance between a sometime phlegmatic Flemish bluegrass musician (he and his pals sing in perfect American English) and a whilring dervish of a tattoo artist, a romance interrupted by pregnancy. That pregnancy brings joy, then heartache, all reflected through the music in a way that recalls the Irish film Once more than the structure a conventional stage musical. Tough as that all becomes, the film then ventures into darker areas than you ever thought -- not pessimism or morbidity, but the absolute truth about the way married people can talk to each other and the stupid unthought things they can say. And the pain that becomes more poignant as there is little or no time to take back the words.
This clip gives you some small sense of how the music plays with and against the image and just how good Belgians can be singing country music. (Well, Flemish people anyway-- I'm prejudiced, as the Lockharts purportedly emigrated from Flanders to Scotland...) By the way, the end of this clip is by no means the hardest part of this movie.
But if you like to be challenged, if you appreciate the echo of real life instead of the recycled BS of our commercial myth-machines, you will like this film. Downer as it is -- and I wept through the last four minutes of the film -- I felt better for having seen it.
One side note: the most unbelievable thing about this movie is that it has been adapted from a play by the playwright and the film's director. I cannot see the fingerprints of theater anywhere in this movie-- not in the scenes, the language, the structure, the performances, the music, nothing. I've never seen the whiff of the footlights so thoroughly eradicated in any other such adaptation.
So often actors think that good acting is theater acting. Meryl Streep, formerly a fine artist, is spiralling down into a maelstrom of twitches, sniffs, shrugs and counter-intuitive line readings, trying desperately to help the poor crippled script across the street, when in fact plays like DOUBT and AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY need no such help, and in fact are marred by Streep's determined eccentricity.
Irene still remembers she loves Craig
She could take a lesson from the clear-eyed, economical and completely true performance of James Cromwell in Still Mine (2012), a film that is Canadian not only in terms of financial resources, but has the kind of unpretentiousness, directness and plain common sense one associates with Canadians.
Based on a true story, it tells of a farmer in his 80s who sees his wife sinking into dementia or worse and decides a smaller, more manageable house for them to live on, on his own property, using wood from timber he owns himself. The "A story" as they say in television is about Craig's legal battle to build his house his own way, despite laws and regulations designed to protect the unknowing from the unscrupulous, but in this case, barring a man from living his life his own way on his own land on his own terms. But that A-story is driven by the B-story, the fierce cleaving-together of this unsentimental, but very-much-in-love couple as she drifts away from him. Fans of independent film might be reminded of Away From Her or the more light-hearted The Castle. But this film has a clear-sky clarity like the New Brunswick skies it was shot under.
And at the heart of that clarity is the model performance of James Cromwell, playing his first leading role in his early 70s. Never once do you catch him "acting." There is no big speech, no big moment in this movie; just a lot of real true human behavior (something you could also say about Broken Circle Breakdown).
Cromwell reminds me of Spencer Tracy here, and his acting is, if anything, even more invisible. It doesn't get fake-folksy, nor fake-eloquent, but treads that narrow in-between ground of smart but not over-educated people talking about what they truly know. When Cromwell as Craig Morrison tells what his father, a shipwright, taught him about wood and about building --well, he never uses the word "spiritual" or "soul" but there is a profound, mystical religious quality about Craig's faith in what he has learned and what he can do that links him both to the earth and to the dozens of generations before him. It is a master class.
There's nothing wrong with stupid movies in their place and time. But you can't live on marshmallow, and if you'd like some good strong fibre of human life in your movie diet, check out these films.
I don't have many observations to record about the chilly, dark spy picture Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). It seems to be less of a film, and more of a simulation of the experience of being a spy. Nothing is stated outright, nothing is explained, no one is identified, no one reveals their thinking. If anyone has feelings, you won't hear about it.
Even better, screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have dispensed with those two popular crutches of the modern spy film. First, the voice-over of the protagonist, explaining the arcane non-verbal transactions going on. You know the thing, "Sturgess gave me a glance that could only mean one thing" blah, blah, blah. Second, the big explanation at the end, "You see, Collins, I knew as soon as I saw Verdoux wearing the ring, that Operation Fuzzball was going to be scrubbed, because..." Clearly, the writers and director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) decided to have respect for the audience and challenge them to lean forward and come to the film, instead of being overwhelmed by it, as in a Bond or Bourne film.
The story is often referred to as "complex", but it's not so much complex as it is sub-contextual. Here is a very visual film -- the soundtrack by itself would tell you almost nothing-- the very opposite of a standard spy film, which is all explaining and a couple of gunshots at the end. But the story is relatively straightforward if you understand two things. In LeCarre spy stories, there is no there there. It's never about a secret that has to be stolen or protected. It's about the process of security -- who works for whom, who is who really who they say, who can be trusted and who will betray. What they are protecting is immaterial and never discussed. Questions of loyalty are about the security force that claims your allegiance -- MI6, CIA, KGB, not the countries who have created and harbor these forces. And loyalty to the very idea of security and the discipline security requires. And the time sequence shifts, but that is clearly laid out in the form of Smiley dictating a memorandum, so confusion as to time only lasts seconds at most--if you are paying attention.
The characters communicate in literal and dramatic code. Information is conveyed by a look, a shrug, a cock of the head, or of the eyebrow. But the film is not slow. Information arrives rapidly and in profusion, once you understand how to interpret it. It is quiet, but densely packed.
My favorite shot--a recurring sequence of a packet of papers rising, by itself, in a sort of document-dumbwaiter, acknowledging that information is the real protagonist, that data is more important than people in this universe, deserving of its very own private elevator.
The film has a wonderful visual uniformity, oddly reminiscent of Welles's The Trial. It was interesting to learn that that uniformity was achieved in a similar way as it was in Welles's film. Nearly all of The Trial was shot in a single abandoned railway station in Paris. Nearly all of Tinker Tailor was shot in an abandoned military base in England. This provided a number of structures with a wide variety of purposes and spaces, but a single gloomy aesthetic that supports the tone of the film perfectly.
That's really all I can say. The film has been too brilliantly dissected and explicated by David Bordwell, and if you are a serious student of film, you have to read "Tinker Tailor: A Guide for the Perplexed."
My own parting advice-- don't watch this for relaxation, but for stimulation. Put away the wine and brew some coffee. The film is worth a little lost sleep.
The very fine professional job that Roman Polanski and his excellent cast do in transcribing Yasmin Reza's play as the film Carnage (2011) is a good measure of the limitations of such inter-media transfers.
Perhaps I lack imagination, but I cannot fault what the filmmakers and actors have done. I didn't see the play, but from all available evidence, this is an accurate, if culturally translated, representation of Ms. Reza's play, originally written in French for a Swiss theater director. The setting feels completely accurate, the gradual setting of the sun (reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rope) evocative, the actors fully embody their characters (Kate Winslet now sounds almost more credible as an American than in her native accent, which sounds put on to please the folks back home), the staging and framing the usual meticulous Polanski job. It is beyond cliche to point out Polanski as the poet of confined space, given Repulsion, Cul de Sac, and his previous play adaptation, Death and the Maiden. But this confined space works in an odd way. At first, care is taken to keep it realistic. In fact, the Kate Winslet and Christolph Walz characters are at pains to leave the space.
But then, after some intestinal and emotional vomiting, the liquor breaks out. This is the great 20th-century theatrical deus-ex-machina, designed to get characters to say and do things they would not logically say or do, and also stay in place within the confines of the stage. Let's say it straight out-- in 2012, using alcohol in a play is a crutch. It was OK for O'Neill and Inge and Maugham and even Albee, but its time has passed and its mechanics are threadbare.
What happens at that point in Carnage is that what had been a meticulously detailed and realistic New York apartment became converted to a purely metaphoric and metaphysical space, a Huis Clos for the modern era. But the problem is that the film remained tethered to the conventions of representational realism. The play Carnage could have been used as the first half of a film, which developed and extended the ideas of The Exterminating Angel, about a class frozen in time and space, locked in a repellant embrace, continuing to decay
But Reza and Polanski make their living as entertainers. A bit acidic, a bit cynical, but never truly disturbing to their middlebrow audiences of people like me. So its characters begin their descent into primordial archetypes, to the very beginnings of human society, savage and needy, then the film abruptly stops before anyone's feelings get hurt, before cynicism converts to nihilism. A shame, because I couldn't help feeling that a better ending could have been borrowed from that of Fight Club, demolishing whole cities at a time.
Just to have seen Jodie Foster's face as she blows up a whole East Side luxury tower...that would have been a movie.
Watching Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) put into clear focus for me exactly why opera is never really going to be cinematic, albeit I enjoy quite a few opera movies. Like all adaptations, part of the problem is about space, but opera has a special relationship with time that cinema does not share.
Hitchcock limned the essential nature of theater on film, the compression of all events into a space which should be preserved if the filmmaker is to take any power from the play being adapted, rather than dissipating that compression by "opening the play up." The point of Dial M For Murder or Wait Until Dark is that the heroine, and by extension, the viewer, is trapped in a room with a murderer. If you can open the door and run out to the street, the peril is seriously diminished, if not eliminated.
And indeed, many plays are limited or telescoped in time. Alan Ayckbourn has even written three plays which take place at the same time, in parallel, in three adjacent locales. (They have even been produced in such a way as to prove that they perfectly dovetail -- an exit in one play corresponds with an entrance in another, and so forth). But the addition of music -- and nearly constant music -- gives opera a peculiar relationship with time.
First of all, opera abandons the pretense of simulating life in any way. In an instant, we recognize that we are in a rarefied world of artifice -- that everything present is standing in for something else, that nothing has been brought here from the real world. At once, we are in trouble with the cinema aesthetic. Still, fantasy has been made to work on film, especially in the Rings films and the Harry Potter series. But music has specific demands on time itself. It requires a specifed time to unfold, which may or may not correspond with the dramatic value of that moment or the words being sung to that music. In short, opera, and especially operatic dialogue, takes a relatively long time to unfold, and the adapter must either weave a cinematic design through that preset duration, or must simply "fill" the time. And cinema which is filling time is frittering its most hard-won and precious resource.
Rock opera compounds the problem. Whereas in classical opera, the music is filled with harmonic and contrapuntal complexities to engage the ear when the eye is not being refreshed, typically in rock or any music with its roots in the blues, each 4-bar phrase has only 2 or 2-1/2 bars worth of melody. Think of Bessie Smith singing a phrase and Louis Armstrong echoing and embroidering her melody in the interval before her next line. Rock usually dispenses with the embroidery and just "holds still" for 1-1/2 to 2 bars. Again, this is antithetical to film. The usual solution on film is to decorate those moments with theater-style staging: characters pace around, gesticulate and generally thrash around until the next line comes along. Thankfully, Repo! eschews the kind of cheap doggerel in the dialogue sequences favored by Jesus Christ Superstar and other dismal rock operas; the dialogue is sharper and able to move more swiftly than usual. But it is telling that even with this higher level of skill and attention to theatrical detail, we still are not convinced we're seeing a movie. It seems to be a movie of a performance, rather than an aesthetic object complete in and of itself.
There is much to like in Repo!, especially the singing of Anthony Head (best known for Buffy on television), the quavering but resilient tones of the aging Paul Sorvino, a spacey performance by Sarah Brightman and the surprising aptitude of Paris Hilton, whose singing and characterization are surprisingly professional. The notion of a cartel who finances organ transplants and reserves the right to re-possess on defaulted organs is a promising one, although we don't see any reason for those repossesions except cruelty or perversity. (That is, the story would make more sense if there were specific recipients demanding specific organs, and the air of moral ambiguity would be increased of those recipients were actually worthy and sympathetic.) The whole affair has a gratuitously goth-emo element which cries out for contextualization.
But no matter how much more coherent or well-structured the story might be. Even with good lyrics and energetic music, Repo! may do some good deeds aesthetically, but unlike Pinocchio, it will never become a real movie.
I admit it. I was hoping that the protagonist of The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) would be a guy who admired and quoted Abraham Lincoln, not a guy who rides around L.A. in a gas guzzler. Still, it is a pleasure to see a film and a leading actor who both exhibit well-earned confidence, falling just short of swagger. And somehow the earnest version of Matthe McConnaughey is more convincing when it peaks out from behind a slick and self-assured facade.
Producers Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi are to be commended for putting their confidence in director Brad Furman, whose rather thin resume makes such commercial polish and pace less than a certainty. Furman does not appear to be one of those Hollywood hotshots who's dying to sell out without having had any integrity to begin with, like those maestros of emptiness, Brett Ratner and McG, And the casting suggests that director and producers had ambitions, especially the presence of the ever-reliable, ever-rewarding William H. Macy, Marisa Tomei and Frances Fisher.
But the piece of casting that will likely continue to resonate is Ryan Phillipe as a relentless sociopath. Phillipe has always seemed a blank surface, and his lack of traction as a leading man could be ascribed to the sense of deadness behind his eyes. Here that deadness is put to excellent use, and I suspect that he is now as permanently set as, if not necessarily a villain, certainly an unreliable character, just as Tony Perkins always seemed about to go "off" after Pyscho.
Yet, with all this skill, why does Lincoln Lawyer feel like just another movie, and not another Verdict? First of all, the film feels as though it were being deliberately set up as the first of a series, although at this point that is evidently unlikely (it is based on a book which is the first of a series, but as I write this the follow-up is more likely to be on television than in the movie house). And like a series character, Mick Haller doesn't learn or change much over the course of the film. The plot lines are neatly tied up, and of course, no character is introduced unless they will serve the storyline at some later time. Incorporating something for the sake of context, texture and character revelation is alien to this kind of storytelling machine -- hence, the whiff of television lingers around what is a very skillful feature film.
And the bad guy is both generic and sui generis; either way, he is someone we are never going to meet -- the evil will never threaten us the viewers. It is purely a mystery-thriller that never threatens or challenges the viewer, the way a whodunnit feels so cozy despite its implied violence.
We might have been satisfied with this sort of thing on the big screen 40 years ago, but despite the high skill employed, which is why although the film seems designed for sequels, Mick Haller will probably find his home in our homes.
Art is abstraction, and each medium has its own set of conventions by which it conducts that abstraction. Some are obvious. Poetry organizes speech into more or less formal patterns, and paradoxically, the most formal patterns are the most popular, i.e., we love verse in regular meter and verse, even if it makes little or no sense, as in the verse of Edward Lear or Dr. Seuss. Whereas many listeners have trouble identifying or appreciating language that more closely approximates natural speech, be it free verse or even very skillful blank verse. (It is my experience that most people cannot readily differentiate verse from prose in Shakespeare without the text in front of them.) Representational painting abstracts the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional object, and abstract painting takes it a step further. Novels and stories organize experience into (more or less) coherent narratives, often with an omniscient narrator. Theater condenses that experience into limited time and space. And music is pure abstraction, simply organizing regular vibrations in forms we recognize as consonant and dissonant, and which over time seem to represent a departure and return.
Students have a hard time recognizing film as packed with convention, especially since Classical film emphasizes concealing convention in the interest of engaging the audience in the narrative. Most people cannot "see" editing, even though it is extremely artificial. No one listens to a conversation by jumping back and forth, standing behind the shoulders of the speakers. It is impossible to see a person leaving a room, and, in a split second, see them entering the adjacent room. But as long as we cut on action, the cuts are "invisible." [I have an exercise by which I have students clap their hands on each cut. Try it in an ordinary over-the-shoulder dialogue sequence and you will be surprised--most of the time--at how frequently the cuts come.] Even the "mockumentary" form preserves most of the rules of classical editing in order to avoid extreme audience discomfort or disorientation.
These issues are brought front and center when film takes its material from another medium. In an adaptation from a novel, the screenwriter must decide how to preserve the authorial voice. (And in very stylish writers, this can be a serious problem.) One must also decide whether to carry over the book's point of view; typically, the film version of a novel with a consistent but passive narrator, a Nick Carraway, will simply take a standard omniscient point of view, and make Nick a pallid character in his own story. In Olden Times, producers of film versions of plays talked about "opening up the play," that is, varying the physical locations so as to provide variety and de-emphasize the stage origins. But as Hitchcock demonstrated on a number of occasions (most notably Rope and Dial M for Murder), often the art of the play was in the way it compressed events into a single time and place, and that compression provided the tension and suspense central to the piece. It would make no sense, for instance to "open up" a play about a hostage situation. (Apropos of absolutely nothing, I DARE somebody, absolutely DARE them to turn Dog Day Afternoon into a musical. It just might work.)
(The woman in Orange is Alfre Woodard.) The piece works on a central metaphor -- one's sense of self as a collection of things, "stuff" one has accumulated over a lifetime. The act of proclaiming the words, especially before an onscreen or onstage audience, makes the equation of "stuff" with self clear and manifest; thus the mere act of performance lends concreteness to the poetry. Already there is a fusion and mutual support between expressive media.
But we are only looking at the piece at the micro level. For Colored Girls "becomes" a play by virtue of its accumulation of apparently unrelated narratives. The through-line is thematic rather than narrative, more like a song cycle than a musical.
Tyler Perry's adaptation, For Colored Girls (2010) as a theatrical film intended for a general audience chooses to frame the poems in an over-arching narrative. (Whether this is because of the inherent quality of film itself or audience expectation, I leave to wiser analytic minds than my own.) Thus, the film takes on the quality of a musical, with the 14 remaining poems treated as musical numbers. As in a musical, the "trick" is to ease the transition from Perry's inelegant everyday speech to Shange's heightened language. (The very difficulty of that transition is why so many inferior composers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Frank Wildhorn try to erase the problem by filling their plays with music from beginning to end, flattening the entire experience into an undifferentiated musical stew.) This requires a general audience to accept poetry, poetry not fitted to the precise situation on screen, and poetry riddled with metaphor in the context of a real story in a real apartment in a real city. Interestingly, in scanning the critical reaction to the film, those transitions to not seem to have been real obstacles for most viewers; certainly there was not the level of complaint one usually sees about musicals ("Where's the orchestra?" ask the aesthetically illiterate. "Same place they are when you're watching Star Wars or Die Hard," I say.)
There is criticism about the storyline itself, the setting, one or two performances or the flatness of Perry's language, but few have balked at the movement from prose to poetry, and I would argue that that is an accomplishment for which Mr. Perry has received insufficient recognition. Hats off for his courage, commercially and aesthetically and the success met in the taking of this artistic risk. Unfortunately, there are few posted clips demonstrating this transition. I would particularly call your attention to a scene in which Phylicia Rashad as Gilda tends to her injured daughter, Tangie (Thandie Newton in some very surprising work) and makes Shange sound like Shakespeare, which makes sense, as Ms. Rashad has substantial Shakespeare experience.
Here's the best I can do, the second poem in the film (the first is expertly woven into the credit sequence) rendered by Loretta Devine. The poem begins with the words, "Without any assistance or guidance from you..."
It's a "number" isn't it? Like a musical.
The other aspect of Perry's adaptation is casting -- an often-overlooked aspect of the process. Devine, Newton, Rashad, Anika Noni Rose and Perry stalwart Kimberly Elise are first-rate. Especially surprising is Macy Gray's solo turn as a philosophical abortionist. Janet Jackson tries valiantly and Whoopi Goldberg seems to be so tuned in to her character's craziness that she appears to be playing the role with aluminum foil tucked into her headgear. But to the extent this film works, a large measure is owing to the skill of his best actors.
Acting is at the heart of Jack Goes Boating (2010) directed by Phillip Seymour Hoffman from a very slight play from a screenplay by the playwright (Robert Glaudini) which barely acknowledges there is any issue at all in adaption. Heightened language is NOT a problem for this piece. The play is evidently jammed into one of those apartments in which the living room, dining room and kitchen are a single unarticulated space, which is handy for theater, but claustrophobic on film. The purpose of this compression seems to have been to precipitate the explosion between the second couple in the story who are played, in a bit of generosity by director Phillip Seymour Hoffman, by the actors who originated the roles on stage, John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega. The problem is that the whole scene is far overheated in comparison with the rest of this rather quiet film.
The romance-between-lonely-losers has been enshrined since at least 1955's Marty and not many have improved on that model. And although Hoffman seems to have been intent on transferring the play in as close to its original form, it is at its best when it makes its greatest departures, most notably the casting the Amy Ryan (of Win Win), who has become the go-to gal of independent film this season. In this very awkward set-up first date, the talk seems to have gone to death almost immediately. (Sorry about the ad here.)
And here Hoffman collaborates with both Ryan and some snow to make movie magic.
But the best movie-movie scenes arise from Jack's swimming lessons. He has promised Connie he will take her boating when the warm weather comes, and imagery flows from that. He imagines Central Park Lake awash in happy boaters. And he imagines himself not swimming, but floating, like a chubby angel in a wet firmament. Most interesting and puzzling is a moment when Jack, waiting for his friend to arrive for the listen, sees an old legless man lowered into the pool. Clearly, this was not a moment in the play. It is curious, undiscussed and unexplained. Is Jack a man without legs, who cannot move without help from others? Is the water there to liberate him and make him independent? Who knows. But that picture made better poetry than all of Mr. Glaudini's rather flat and routine words.
For a film about the development of trust, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) doesn't trust its audience very much. It turns out the lights, turns up the music, and bangs us over the head with some of the most grotesque and nauseating personal violence ever seen in a mainstream movie. It purports to condemn violence against women, then serves up a big steaming bowl of it, including attacks on and by the title character (who is not the central character).
Most of the film occupies that newly-established place bridging mystery, thriller and horror film, pioneered by Silence of the Lambs and continued with 7even. The addition of horror elements means not only horrific depictions of the murders, previously only described in more polite mysteries, but also violence upon one or more central characters, and thereby to be experienced by the audience.
That accretion of new genre conventions is almost necessary, because once the audience is past the preliminary investigation into piles of original documents and photos, the principal mystery becomes fairly easy to guess--I did so, and I'm terrible at solving mysteries. Thus, the final bursts of violence are perversely welcome after a long becalmed period, incorporating an improbably romance between the protagonist, a middle-aged reporter and the title character, a badly damaged young woman who has discovered a talent and passion for hacking. After that, there is a very limp resolution of the "outer" plot, in which the inner story has been nested. Thus, Dragon Tattoo has some unintended common ground with Inception, in their mutual Russian-nesting-doll structure.
The trust trope is thoroughly infused into the narrative: most institutions in this universe betray and degrade the people they are meant to serve. Government employees, businessmen, guardians of minors, lovers, fathers, brothers--none of them are trustworthy. It's a miracle that Blomqvist or Lisbeth can look anyone in the eye. And although the romance does not necessarily pan out, it's very existence, though brief, is a spiritual triumph.
The color palette is washed out as is de rigeur these days to indicate "atmosphere," and the production design is oppressively drab. Presumably this was deliberate--everyone seems desperate to find happiness or joy in this very bleak world. This movie's going to kill Swedish tourism.
Finally, although this is not a reflection on the film itself (which is what I try to confine myself to), one must applaud the producers' boldness in committing to filming the entire trio of mysteries at once. The Americanized version will not be done that way--there will be a slow, tentative stab at the initial installment, then a reluctantly made decision to go ahead, by which time the original actors and/or director will not be available, or perhaps the series will be abandoned incomplete due to the natural gutlessness of the American film finance market.
And will the villains in America be Nazis? That does not have the resonance in the States that it has for Europeans, who were faced with the actual option to join the party. American Nazis are fringe cuckoos. European Nazis could be either evil or careerists (like Herbert von Karajan).
But then driving out ambiguity is what American mainstream filmmaking is all about. At least they hired David Fincher for the remake, so we can hope.
You can't complain that the title is misleading. The Stoning of Soraya M (2008) is about just that. It's not about her hard life, or the whispering campaign against her or the treachery of her husband or the powerless of women in post-revolutionary Iran, although all those elements are touched in the first hour of the film, which might be considered a preamble to the main event.
Because at around the one-hour mark of the film, we know that Soraya is going to be stoned to death in just a few minutes and nothing can change that. And that fact may make this film the hardest film to watch in many years. Not hard because it is not engaging, but hard like watching videos of 9/11 is hard.
Viewed purely as aesthetics, the film is an admirable example of literary adaptation, simply because what it does in its second hour can only be done on film. I have not read the novel the film is based on--it is certainly widely and highly praised. But writer Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh and director and co-writer Cyrus Nowrasteh have lit upon purely cinematic story-telling solution to the central problem of the story: the pivotal event is sickening, horrifying and susceptible to melodrama.
Whereas other filmmakers focus on melodrama and suspense (and this is what I had expected in this case) as to whether and how Soraya will be found guilty on trumped-up charges, Soraya M reveals the plot at once and establishes its inevitability. There is no question that this woman's husband is in too great a hurry to marry his blond girlfriend, and that it is far easier to get a married woman publicly executed than to obtain a divorce.
Finally, the film gets to the heart of the matter and does what only film can do. If you have seen stonings as staged in other films, you have no idea what happens. I thought, as I saw the men digging a hole, that she will stand in the hole, dodging the stones until she can no longer do so. No. The victim is placed in the hole, and buried from the waist up (see illustration above). The arms are bound, so the victim is completely immobilized, body and arms and helpless to defend herself from the rocks, so eagerly gathered by small boys seeking excitement. In Soraya's case, the first stone is to be thrown by her father, who fails not for lack of will, but lack of arm. The effort wavers, and then the "aggrieved" husband takes up a stone, and the onslaught begins.
You think the camera will turn away--it will play out the scene on the faces of the witnesses, or of the women listening to it all from a safe distance. No again. Nowrasteh stays there, right there, as we see every rock hit face and head. This is, of course, a fiction film with actors and there was some film trickery involved, but you don't think of that as the scene unfolds. You apparently see a woman stoned to death from beginning to end.
There is a lot of idiotic criticism of the film, calling it heavy-handed, propagandistic and one-sided. These critics are all American men, mostly from the South and Middle West. None of them suggest what the "other" side, the "fair and balanced" side of a story of a person being stoned to death would be. The facts of Soraya's case ultimately don't matter, which is why I grateful the filmmakers didn't dwell on them. What matters is this. It's the 21st century and stoning people to death--by ordinary citizens--is still a legal punishment.
My write-up here will probably discourage a lot of people from seeing the film. I hope not. There is a lot of good filmmaking, and a great deal of courage from everyone involved. The pivotal scene is very hard to watch, but not physically nauseating as in a cheap horror film; it is horrifying to the mind and spirit, but ultimately edifying. One can no longer say about such practices, "Well, that's just their way there." It is better to be forced to know the truth.
Leavening the film is the action of the women as a community. Early in the story, we see Soraya protecting the property of a widower whose wife's possessions are snatched up by greedy neighbors (a choice which brings her trouble later). Later, we see Soraya's aunt (who did her best to protect her) taking charge of Soraya's daughters (the sons will go with the father) and the circle of women drawing around them to shield the from the horror. Over and over, every society tells the story; how men enter the wilderness and women bring the family, and with it decency, kindness and moral order.
It's hard to believe that Serious Moonlight (2009) was written as an original screenplay, because its physical and emotional landscape has the cramped feeling of a low-grade off-Broadway play. It's not just that it's in one room, it's that it harps on one note. What do you make of a film which has one of its two major characters duct-taped to a toilet for three-quarters of its running time? The whole film seems to have been duct-taped to a toilet.
There is a place for minimalist cinema. Hitchcock and Chaplin both engaged in this--Chaplin in One A.M., a solo turn and Hitchcock in Lifeboat and Rope, which have restricted settings and techniques. Often, the only way to adapt a play which is about confinement is to preserve that confinement, such as Extremities, Dial M for Murder or Wait Until Dark.
This story, which starts as one type of hostage story and then seems to turn into another, has no irrefutable reason that it takes place in the bathroom, and the idea that one character has been trussed up in such a way that he may relieve himself at any time (although not clean himself afterward) makes the whole thing thoroughly repellent.
It's a shame, because the new-model Meg Ryan, as seen in films such as In The Cut and The Deal, burnt but not bitter, angrier and more ironic than her younger self, is quite engaging. And the more recent Tim Hutton, with the swagger and confidence of the man that he is today, as contrasted with the boy we remember from Ordinary People (which, after all, was 30 years ago) is also good company. But though the script by the late Adrienne Shelley (Waitress) has quirks and twists, none of them make the film pleasant or funny.
Which leaves one to wonder whether Shelley directing her own work could have retrieved it from the brink.
Costa-Gavras's films have to be approached as socio-political documents before considering them as aesthetic objects. Amen.* (2002) seems sets out to confound the truism that the truth will make you free. Newly minted SS Officer Kurt Gerstein is a first-hand witness at a dry run for the Final Solution and is determined as a Christian to make it public knowledge, confident that the German people will put a stop to it, as they stopped execution of the mentally disabled. Unable to get an audience with Germans, he stumbles over a connection to the highest powers in the Vatican, who also turn a deaf ear.
As an aesthetic object the film is a perfect demonstration of how filmmakers discard the strength of the material they have acquired and fail to substitute anything as powerful. The material first appeared in Germany in the early 1960's as a play called The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth. It was a long documentary indictment of the Catholic Church and was vehemently denounced by the church, thus enhancing its fame and probably increasing the number of productions it received. (Would-be censors never learn this lesson.)
Though it was long and much of it was disputed, it was theatrical lightning, and was produced across the continent, and the Royal Shakespeare Company production came to New York to great acclaim and fanfare.
Costa-Gavras and his collaborators modified the story so that instead of the straight-on attack on the church, the film bounces between Gerstein's agony and the attempt of a young priest to get the attention of the Pontiff. This is exactly what happened to the play Amadeus by Anthony Shaffer. Where the play focused with laser beam intensity on the hatred and frustration of Salieri against Mozart, Forman's film brought in Mozart's father, Schickaneder, an elaborate physical production (in which Mozart is seen conducting an orchestra in a completely inauthentic manner), all of which diluted the film and made it utterly unclear what it was about except the fact that Tom Hulce can giggle like a fool.
Since the publication of The Deputy, Costa-Gavras claims that information has surfaced that tends to exonerate the Vatican and make its silence understandable if not excusable. I don't have the time or inclination to delve into the charges and counter-charges. All I know is that this is among the mildest and politest of Holocaust films. Admittedly it was a wise decision to play the initial gassing scene off-screen, with its horror reflected in Gerstein's eyes. But the rest of the film feels like earnest young officers and priests stomping around and telling their superiors, "I beg you to listen to me," while the elders blandly wave them away. The point is made quickly, and no new points or insights follow in the second hour.
Costa-Gavras is an exciting filmmaker when he's angry. Clearly, he's aging when the Holocaust doesn't seem to get him worked up anymore. ____ * The period is part of the title. I don't know why.
I have been interested in live theater almost as long as film and have more hands-on experience in the former when one includes non-professional and semi-professional activity. And because of my interest in both media, and because it is often impossible to see plays live in the theater for years at a time, I have always had a special curiosity about film adaptations of theater pieces.
One of the principal differences between the media is the use of dialogue. For film, dialogue is one of the possible modes of expression, but it is only one and it is always subservient to image, and often in an inferior position to other elements of the soundtrack, such as music and effects. Great movie dialogue is often elliptical, enigmatic, riddled with subtext. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." "If you build it, he will come." "Go ahead, make my day." "We rob banks." No poetry here, except the poetry of understatement, fused with story and character.
Whereas in the theater, dialogue is the principal means of expression. Characters tell us what they're thinking, what they're feeling, what they're going to do, what they just did, what happened offstage. None of this is necessary or even desirable in film. And in theater, they often make beautiful music with their speech--I don't need to quotes, open Shakespeare to any page.
This makes translation from stage to screen so tricky, because the dialogue may be the very seat of the play's value, but could prevent it from being effective onscreen. There are successful talky movies--Network, The Maltese Falcon, My Dinner With Andre, gabfests all. But that talk has been designed for film, designed to work in concert with all the other elements, and it knows that dialogue in film has two audiences--onscreen character and film viewer. And somehow, it takes less time to grasp the ideas when the camera can show us those eyes, those lips, those brows that are issuing that speech. It's almost like that thing where you can't understand what someone is saying until you put your glasses on.
I missed Bent (1997) on stage, and to be honest, the subject has little fascination for me. I'm sure one can argue that homosexuals were treated worse than Jews, but death does not seem to me to be a matter of relativity. The film has some interest because it represents Clive Owen in an early leading role, two years before his breakout film, Croupier. The first half hour of the film eschews the play's politics and seems determined to upset or offend the non-gay audience with a great deal of simulated gay porn (in that definition I include a performance by Mick Jagger in drag). Finally, the film settles down to what it's going to be about, and 45 minutes in, commences the relationship which is the centerpiece of the film.
So after a long patch of trying to be "cinematic" Bent settles down to be a straightforward dialogue-driven theater adaptation. In this mode it presents its one and only point of interest. The two principal characters are gay men imprisoned by the Nazis (one pretending to be Jewish). They are under constant surveillance and are not permitted to touch. Using words only, standing stock still, side by side, they have an extreme erotic encounter. This has several functions. It establishes the bond between them. It establishes the power of words. It makes for some discomfort among much of the non-gay audience; at the same time, most must recognize the common elements between homosexual and heterosexual encounters-- which both relieves and increases the discomfort. And despite the fact that the driving aspect of the encounter is verbal, the film medium reinforces it by maintaining a steady, still gaze, fixing the characters in the center of the frame and reinforcing the stillness around them.
After all, stillness in the theater is the default mode. A fixed frame, fixed set, often the words the only animating factor. But such a circumstance is special, heightened, in film. Stillness demands special attention on screen. So for a moment, theater and film themselves touch hands and work together.
Then it falls apart. Because, presumably following the lead of the play, in a subsequent scene the verbal sexual encounter is repeated. And where it might have had a cumulative effect in the theater, because we are in the world of words and more words is more meaning, it is simply redundant in film. Because the action, not the word, is the key in film, and we have seen and registered this action. It means nothing to repeat it, even if the actual words are different this time than last. And from there on, the film grinds to its stagy conclusion in highly formal, artificial compositions which only heighten the writer's and director's failure to bridge, or even acknowledge the gap between stage and screen.
A month or two back, I wrote about the 1950 Swedish film adaptation, directed by Alf Sjoberg, of the Strindberg play Miss Julie. That film offered interesting issues about the adaptation of theater works to film.
The 1999 Mike Figgis filming of Miss Julie pretends those issues don't exist. Evidently it was based on a prior stage production with a different cast but substantially the same text. The picture above demonstrates the degree to which the piece has been "opened up" -- a small wooded area just outside the country estate's kitchen which is the sole setting of the play. Otherwise it is a fairly unvarnished stage production shot on grainy and dully-lit Super 16 film.
The problem is, other than one of those fake sex scenes you see in dramatic films (where everyone reaches up under their clothes and the man never takes a stitch off), washed-out color and the face of Saffron Burrows (which is admittedly a cinematic event in and of itself), this film offers nothing not already present or at least implicit in the earlier film. Sjoberg has even gone farther, physically representing characters who are only spoken of in the play. Moreover, the Figgis version embraces that horrible English stage convention that lower-class characters can be represented by use of a Scots or Irish accent, while maintaining the original Swedish setting. I know, I'm supposed to hear the Glaswegian accent and know that this fellow is working class, but I can't help wondering why this guy (played by Peter Mullan) wandered away from Sauchiehall Street to get a job as a footman on a Swedish estate.
The film is such a literal rendering that when the footman sends Miss Julie upstairs to get money, we never see her do it. She just goes away and comes back with money. It would have made more sense if this film had been made first and Sjoberg's more cinematic adaptation had followed. As it is, I have no idea why this film was made at all.
This is the film blog I began to provide a model for my Film Studies students and encourage them to maintain a blog of their own. I no longer write about every film I see, but I try to take note of the unusual, the remarkable, the strange or interesting connections.
Please comment copiously!Or write to me directly at my e-mail address.
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