House of Wax





DiCaprio & Hammer with slabs of veal glued to their faces.

  
There is one moment in which Leonard DiCaprio is completely convincing as the titular character in J. Edgar (2011).  It comes toward the end when a stricken Clyde Tolson discovers Hoover stretched out on the floor, white, tubby and lifeless.  I've seen some dead bodies in my time, and in my opinion, Leonardo completely nailed it.

I'm not sure why anyone is still producing these movies from the Madame Tussaud school of filmmaking.  We no longer believe their mythmaking--books of popular biography provide more and better information for those who are interested in historical characters.  For the general public, one needs to cook up a new angle, a fresh scandal or a new interpretation.  My Week With Marilyn tells an untold story, gives us a new window into Marilyn (and into Sir Larry as well) which, together with Michelle Williams' performance, justifies yet another Monroe go-round.

There is nothing remarkable or new in J Edgar, and that includes DiCaprio's predictable performance.  Hampered by the worst make-up since Billy Crystal in Mister Saturday Night, DiCaprio demonstrates no deep understanding about how older people move and think.  He still looks like a boy, albeit a puffy boy, wearing grown-up clothes and acting "old" like the other kids in the school play do, but without having actually done the hard work of thinking through how the moving parts of the body age.  It is utterly mysterious to me how DiCaprio became a Master Actor, playing leads for Scorsese, including the even more inapt Howard Hughes.  Kevin Spacey is a master actor.  William H Macy, Gary Oldman, Ryan Gosling, Stanley Tucci, Paul Giamatti (who would have been a great Hoover if he'd had a good script) are Master Actors.  They make startling choices.  They have supple, expressive voices and eyes.  DiCaprio is well-intentioned, but never surprising, never fresh and rarely authentic.

But even if he were good, he would still be in stuck in a film that no one had taken the trouble to decide what it was about.  It spends most of its time rehearsing the well-known public outlines of Hoover's life, the Palmer Raids, the gangster era, the Lindbergh baby, the Commie hunts, the conflict with the Kennedys.  This is bad TV movie stuff (and executed in exactly that fashion) and utterly unnecessary.  The interesting, juicy stuff between Hoover and alleged lover Clyde Tolson is based virtually entirely on speculation.  Mixing this together indiscriminately with documented fact renders the entire film unreliable and therefore unengaging.  Better to have fabricated everything and focused solely on Hoover's domestic arrangements, with perhaps a nod to the hypocrisy of his public crusades, than to have jumbled docudrama and "drama" drama.  Nonetheless, the question of Hoover's possible homosexuality is neither settled nor explored, so why bring it up at all?  Where a film like Secret Honor is willing to make up the entire inner monologue of Richard Nixon's tortured soul; likewise Oliver Stone's films, especially Nixon and W dare to invent their psychodrama, much as Shakespeare would project his own dramatic ideas onto the House of Lancaster, whether or not those ideas fit the facts.  J Edgar is afraid to veer from the public record, and is stuck with a central character who is too repressed and tight-lipped to enlighten us, or, more sadly, himself.


Meryl Streep attempts to let her dental appliance do the acting.

 
The larger point is that you can't tell a story unless you've decided on a story to tell, which is also the problem with The Iron Lady (2011).  At least it has a bit of a performance, although it is not clear what it is that Meryl Streep is supposed to be doing when she is not doddering around as the dementia-ridden remnant of the feared Margaret Thatcher.  Much of the obligatory "rise to power" sequence is handled by another actress, as we are not expected to accept Meryl Streep as a young woman in her 20s anymore.  So Streep only handles a portion of the flashbacks, but as in J Edgar, it's hard to see what they're getting at.  Thatcher's only motivation to enter public service seems to be to emulate her adored father, small businessman and chamber-of-commerce leader.  Thatcher brings a nearly fully-formed political philosophy to bear, but we never see whwere it came from, how it started or how it evolved.

Art Tatum is my favorite jazz musician.  He might be my favorite musician period.  No one will ever make a story of his life.  At least I hope they don't.  Because Art Tatum arrived as an artist complete and completely sui generis.  His influences are minimal and generic, and the people he influenced few (because few have the technical skill).  His style shifted slightly with the advent of bebop -- he added some extended chords to his toolbox, but there is no mistaking Tatum for anyone else, from his first recording in 1932 or so and his last in 1956.  Great art.  Great, great art, but no story.

The worst thing about spending a lot of time with a person experiencing advanced stages of dementia is that it is very repetitive.  I doff my hat to writer Abi Morgan's fidelity to this painful subject, but major points off for sheer boredom.  If there was anything to say about the dementia, if it was related to Thatcher's career, if there was some metaphoric connection, perhaps maintaining a Conservative outlook requires a bit of amnesia, I don't know, something.  But let's face it, dementia happens to lots and lots of people and there is not anything dramatic about it.  If Michael Phelps gets arthritis, you've got a story.  If Truman Capote, who loved nothing better than to loll on a sofa, gets it -- not much story.  So Streep does her best bent old lady wobble, but so what?  (The Academy Award given to Streep should have gone to the costume designer, the wigmaker and whoever swiped those front teeth from the corpse of Alistair Sim.)  Did somebody think that famous people don't experience the ordinary infirmities of old age?

And why, for heaven's sake, is so much running time given to it?  Were we supposed to have trouble figuring out that husband Dennis isn't really there, it's just in her mind?  (Jim Broadbent was clearly hired in order to repeat what he won an Oscar for in Iris.)  Got that in the first speech, thank you, we saw The Sixth Sense.  So if there is no twist to come, why does that go on and on.  And if she's senile, how can she be accurately remembering her entire political career?  Wouldn't she remember it wrong?  Wouldn't Michael Foot be wearing a chicken suit and Parliament turning into a disco?  As in J Edgar, why the dry factoid rehearsal of her life story without any comment or perspective?

I mean really, why?  I hope nobody expected to get rich on these films.  They're sure not going to get any drama or insight.

Madame Tussaud School of Film

A film like Nowhere Boy (2010), the John Lennon portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man film requires the viewer to bring a picture of the artist to the film with them: the filmmakers haven't time for that. But the question is never resolved, and barely even raised as to what the crisis depicted in the film means to the artist and his body of work, which in turn raises the question of the purpose of the film.

In essence, Nowhere Boy is a lower-middle-class kitchen sink family drama of the type Britain started producing in the era of Lennon's young adulthood, the late 50s and early 60s. It is the battle between two sisters about how to live one's life, how to raise a child and how to show love. John's mother Julia is what might euphemistically be called a "free spirit" who was not committed to parenting when he was born. It has fallen to her older, conventional, "responsible" older sister Mimi to raise the boy. Then, in a scene reminiscent of the opening of Kazan's East of Eden, John is invited to walk a few blocks to meet his mother.

The rest of the film settles into a sort-of triangle with John's devotion to rock and roll pushed into the spiritual background. And that is the tug-of-war that pulls this film apart, both from itself and from the audience. Because we want the Beatles. To want to see a film about John Lennon is to want to spend a little more time with the Beatles. But neither the screenwriters have figured how to integrate the development of the Quarrymen with John's choices between freedom and safety as represented by his mother and his aunt, even though such a conflict would seem to be easily extended. In time Paul and George would become as formidable rivals to Mimi as Julia had been, but Nowhere Boy never goes down that road, and the Beatles remain a sideshow in a story which should have pointed to them inevitably.

Curiously, the film does not even attempt to limn the spirit-crushing grey dullness of the rations-and-rubble world of post-war England, as contrasted with, say An Education, in which the heroine's bad choices are driven as much by the constrictions of the greater world of England as by her own family's misplaced priorities. Thus, we miss what a big thing it is for John to attend a private school, to receive a guitar, and then a better one, given the general tightness of money and resources. (His fellow Beatles always scoffed at John's pretensions to working class status, albeit this film demonstrates that the middle class is just as proficient at forging broken families.)

Given that he never has to portray the well-known public John Lennon, Aaron Johnson is free to just be a conflicted and troubled teenager. Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen have no such flexibility as the respective title characters of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2010), a film no more imaginative than its generic title. Despite a promising opening depicting the famous riot at the premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," Stravinsky and Chanel are quickly covered in wax by the filmmakers, and we not only don't get a sense of their personalities, it becomes dubious that they even have personalities. Chanel seems to be "about" being cool and unflappable. Stravinsky seems to have acquired a wife and many many children without his knowledge and participation, and has no relationship with them whatsoever. Chanel and Stravinsky are naked at the same time and appear to be having sex although they do not seem to have a relationship other than hostess and houseguest. It is as if the film was made by off-world aliens who observed that humans enjoy proximity but had not bothered to observe why. It is true that Chanel and Stravinsky are known to history as fairly cold characters, but this entire film is an iceberg itself, concealing whatever potential drama there might have been under a ton of costumes, locations and production design. I can't imagine who the intended audience is for Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky; perhaps robots taking an art appreciation course.

I suppose I should offer some observations or analysis of the technique of the film, or perhaps some interesting moment in it, but at this moment, a few days after seeing the film I can remember literally nothing about it to observe. So let's move on, shall we?

How long has this been going on?

I would like to apologize to my younger self, with regard to my complete ignoring of punk rock. In my defense, pop music and mainstream rock was in a tremendous creative doldrums during my high school and college years, and I spent the time learning about jazz, classical and theater music and dismissed most everything else as not worth my time. With regard to punk, the adolescent desire to outrage for its own sake was tiresome to me, and so I declined to pay attention to the music because of the juvenile label that was wrapped around it.

The Runaways (2010) is, by all accounts, a reasonably accurate telling of the story of the band by the same name, a band, which to all outward appearances was a cheap bit of exploitation -- "let's make a bad girls band as an answer to all those bad boy bands." In fact, it seems to have been music-based, and that is an unusual thing in ANY rock movie, especially one featuring young women.

The musical process is something that is usually botched by filmmakers. Only a handful of filmmakers ARE musical. George Roy Hill, who used Bach brilliantly in Slaughterhouse Five and introduced the world to Scott Joplin in The Sting was one. (I like Hill because he avoided underscoring, letting the music stand side-by-side with the image, rather than hover down below the dialogue.) My brief research has not turned up any other examples. A number of directors, including Spike Jonze, F. Gary Gray and Floria Sigismondi, director of The Runaways, began with music video, and therefore had some practice with the fusion of music and images. (Ridley Scott, Taylor Hackford and Baz Luhrmann have also demonstrated a flair for music.)

But all this is a matter of expressing music visually. The question before the court now is the creation of music. Stories of sole composers fall into the same trap as movies about writers. There is nothing visual about a person sitting and thinking. When they do write some music, it is usually a travesty -- improvising a full-blown song-hit. Amadeus avoided the problem by relying on the legend that Mozart composed the entire piece in his head and then merely transcribed what he had already composed. Most musicians find that fairly doubtful. There are always technical, engineering-type problems to be solved when composing, especially for an orchestra. There is a line that doesn't sit correctly for that instrument in that range, voice leading to be corrected, parallel lines to be eliminated (or perhaps emphasized). Even allowing for Mozart knowing exactly how the architecture of the music would work, there are nuts and bolts matters to be worked out.

But when the story is about a band, about people playing together, now you have a dynamic among people which can be dramatized. We've seen bad jam session movies, but there have been good ones, including Jammin' the Blues and the TV special The Sound of Jazz. In those cases, actual music conversations were taking place and the director and the camera operators were astute enough to actually capture them.

The Runaways is not a documentary. Its scenes are staged, using actors, not musicians. But it has some good scenes of the musicians finding their way toward each other and coming up with a collective cohesive style. This has nothing to do with music videos or musical staging. It is about the way musicians communicate with each other and sublimate their individual expression into a group product. When The Runaways is on this course, it is exciting and powerful. When it drifts into the usual drugs-and-sex tropes in every rock-and-roll movie, it is the Same Old Stuff. Because that stuff has nothing to do with what is going on between the characters, but is simply trading in what we are supposed to think about them.

And while theater is well suited to address the distance between us and the characters, film is better at dealing with the spaces between the characters. In this case, the space between the characters is taken up with music. When The Runaways sticks to that, it is first rate.

How do you keep the music playing?

Jeff Bridges's performance in Crazy Heart (2009) seems more like that of Hank Williams, Jr. in The Hank Williams Story or Willie Nelson in Rambling Rose dragged on screen to play some variation of themselves than that of a long-time movie actor.


Perversely, like those non-actors, Bridges is most authentic when he is on the bandstand, singing and picking; less so when he is playing the roistering old road dog we've seen in The Wrestler and Tender Mercies and Walk The Line and every other "washed-up middle-aged guy in search of redemption" movie. That is pretty old stuff, and aside from the quirky presence of Maggie Gyllenhaal, there are no surprises to be found there.

So the first hour of the film is authoritative and energetic and exciting and the second hour is devoted to the "going to the AA meeting, skipping the AA meeting, getting drunk, acting stupid, going back to AA" scenario that we have seen over and over. (Especially if you watch television as well as see movies.) Side note: Best use of AA meetings in a movie: You Kill Me.

The songs, written and produced by T Bone Burnett and Steve Bruton provide much of the energy, and the unbilled performance by Colin Farrell doesn't hurt. They seemed to be on their way to creating an American counterpoint to Once, in which the music forms an inseparable part of the storytelling.

But you know you're in trouble when they haul out Robert Duvall in the second half to do his gruff but loveable old coot turn that he has paraded around dozens of movies before. Bit by bit the originality and novelty of the film leaches away, and before it was over I found my mind wandering, trying to remember the names of every other movie with this story. (I can't believe they bothered to buy a novel to base the movie on--the plot could have been worked up by reading the backs of DVD covers during a quick trip to Blockbuster.)

At least it avoided a contrived ending. There's nothing wrong with the movie, but was it really necessary (other than the need for writer-director Cooper to launch his career)?

When a picture doesn't tell a story

Is it possible that Steven Soderbergh's decision to become his own cinematographer about 11 or 12 years ago has brought down his skill as a director and a story teller? I think Che (2008) offers evidence of that.

When you speak of the film "Che" you need to clarify which of three products you're speaking of. In Europe, the film was shown in two distinct parts, Che: The Argentinian and Che: Bolivia. In the US, where the release was very limited, it was shown in Soderbergh's preferred format, a single 4-1/2 hour exhibition with an intermission. This demonstrates why some directors should not meddle with exhibition or distribution. Specifically, the film was reviewed much more critically in the US than abroad, and I believe largely because of the butt-numbing experience Soderbergh put the press through. (The review in the Maltin guide more or less admits this.)

As biography, Che gets an important principle right: decide what your story is and focus on that to the exclusion of all else. But that is only true as far as the design of the film goes, not in its execution. Biopics, when they fail, usually fail from research poisoning. The people preparing the story and script get so excited by the wealth of incident one finds in most public lives and so desirous of putting as much as possible in, both to make the film truly representative of the subject's life and to reap the benefit of all that research.

But life is not drama, and an entire life is usually a complicated, meandering thing without a clear narrative line. Narrative is artifice, so in biography, just as in any story, you must decide the spine of your story, and then dip into your source material to construct the story from the raw materials of a person's life. It must by necessity simplify, and therefore distort. If you are afraid of distortion or misstatement, you have no business even embarking on a biographical film.

The story concept behind Che is very sound--to take two central, defining episodes of Che's life and set them side by side. Triumph in Cuba, fatal catastrophe in Bolivia--and that catastrophe brought about by both the nature of the revolutionary to continue seeking more revolutions, rather than administer a government, and by following a plan devised for another place and another circumstance. It is Butch Cassidy wanting to do it all over again (appropriately, also in Bolivia), it is any conqueror who seeks that one more conquest which undoes him.

And the first film sets off on this course very well. The documentary style works well, especially the juxtaposition of imitation newsreel photography of 1965, when Che is addressing the General Assembly and visiting New York with the "real" color images of the revolution. Other than the simulated interview, we do not get to know Che well-- he is almost never seen in close-up, or indeed without other people in the shot. The cinemascope frame rarely gets near anyone, and so does a good job of depicting an entire society undergoing change. Although Che's accomplishments seem heroic, he does not appear to be glorified--we only know him through his effect on others.

But the first film introduces the poison that will kill the second film. The filmmakers are so anxious to create an "objective" point of view, that they are not willing to explain anything. A sample scene might sound like this (I do not want to insult anyone with made-up Spanish names, so I will just use random made-up names). "Did you talk to Flebus?" "Flebus will not make a deal unless we have confirmed the support of the DQV." "Then we will have to go to Schenley." "But Schenley is bordered by the Rio Blatz on the West." "I see the problem. If you look at this map [a map which the filmmakers don't show us] you can see the problem here at the southwest coordinate." "Aha. General Snodgrass has us."

The film makes no effort to tell us who these people are, what the geographic disposition is, what the names of the groups refer to. Nothing. Luckily, it doesn't matter in Part One because we have a sense of ongoing motion and eventual victory.

Now imagine the same exchanges going on for 1-1/2 hours, while the characters do nothing but walk from place to place in a tropical forest, smoke and look dirty. Apparently for about an hour of Part Two, half the characters are looking for the other half of the characters. Without success. The last half-hour is somewhat interesting, once Che himself is captured, taunted a bit, executed and his body transported for public display in a very haunting MOS montage with music. It's as if Soderbergh suddenly woke up, found his apprentices had been fooling around with the video cams for an hour-and-a-half and decided to tack on some actual cinema at the end so we might forget what we had been put through before.

It is hard to imagine as skilled and experienced a filmmaker as Soderbergh plunging into Part Two (which was filmed first) without a solid narrative concept. A hint as to how this could have happened is found in the interviews on the Criterion edition in which Soderbergh talks about almost nothing but the RED digital camera used, and how amazing it is the film got done on the budget and schedule they had. He scarcely mentions Che. (Soderbergh was brought in as director by producer Laura Bickford and star Benecio Del Toro, for whom this was a passion project. Soderbergh may have had passion for the film, but he doesn't show much for Che.)

The film does look great, through and through, even the long boring parts of the Bolivian conflict. From an outsider's point of view, Soderbergh seemed much more interested in making the shots and making the day (filmmaking jargon for completing the shots scheduled for a given day of production) than in telling a compelling story.

It seems perverse to say about a man who has preserved his independence amid a great deal of mainstream success, but maybe Soderbergh needs to get back to Hollywood.

Swoon to death

A few posts ago, I wrote about a cluster of films with writers as the central characters. Writers in movies can be tough to dramatize, and poets even tougher. Many of their most critical struggles are internal. What do you do--show a guy staring at a piece of paper? Best dramatization of the writer's dilemma is in 1776: Jefferson is trying to write the Declaration of Independence. He scribbles something, reads it and crumples the paper. Stares into space. Writes something. Crumples the paper. Stares into space. Without writing anything else, he crumples the paper. Even his unwritten thoughts are unacceptable!

Bright Star (2009) concerns the romance between poet John Keats and his young neighbor, Fanny Brawne, with whom Keats was emotionally intimate. The obstacles are not the usual: parental opposition or social-cultural differences, but poverty and disease. Problem is for a storyteller--the story is over at the moment it begins. They cannot marry, they will not marry because he is too poor and sick. In time he dies of being poor and sick. How to keep the ball in the air for 119 minutes? There is a bit of fooling around with an emotional triangle, between Keats, Fanny and Charles Brown, Keats friend and sponsor, who appears to be jealous of Fanny. Ultimately, this thread leads nowhere, but to Keats early death, foretold at the outset.

Unfortunately, Keats's poetry, unlike dramatic verse, is difficult to comprehend aurally the first time around. Only the poem "Bright Star" which is repeated a few times, and slowly makes an impact. But I cannot say that the film "cracked" the problem of dramatizing the life of a poet.

The good news about Bright Star is that it brought Jane Campion back to theaters, as Amelia (2009) brings back Mira Nair. But Amelia demonstrates that while we may think of a life as being packed with dramatic events, that does not in itself provide a dramatic shape for those events. And drama, especially on film, is about structure. Amelia Earhart's life follows a strangely straight line. She emerges as the result of a publicity search for a woman pilot to stand alongside Lindbergh in the public eye. That she is actually a competent pilot is just a bonus. The film pursues this angle strongly in the first two acts and then drops it without exploring its significance.

Anyway, the story arc is that Earhart becomes famous, first for being famous, then for flying. She (and her publicist-husband) set her higher and higher tasks for a flyer and she develops a wider and wider circle of celebrity acquaintances. As determinedly played by Hillary Swank, she is intent on furthering aviation as a viable pursuit for women. Then one day, she flies away and never comes back. And as pleasant as the movie is up to this point, its failure to come to grips with the central enigma of Earhart's life--her disappearance--makes one wonder why the filmmakers embarked on the project at all. At first, I think it might be an interesting take on publicity and celebrity, in the mode of Coppolla's Tucker, which remains a spectacularly underrated film. It might have been about Earhart's strange marriage to Putnam, which seems to begin as a business arrangement, threatens to become more than that, and at the end, is simply unclear. Was Putnam grief-stricken at her loss? We don't know from this movie.

I think it is fair to say that, even if it is just out to amuse and distract for 90 minutes, every movie needs to know what it's about and make that clear to the audience. Mira Nair has not been doing well in that department lately.

One last observation--the film continues to mark the progress of digital special effects for the simple reason that no attention ever was called to them. And in a film like this, which has to be filled wall-to-wall with such effects in order to conjure up the world of the late 20s to the late 30s, it is only helpful to the narrative illusion that one has become unaware of such things.