The Dead Body In The Pool In The Beautiful Rented Villa

A Bigger Splash (2015) direted by Luca Gaudigno is like his superior I Am Love an exploration of the lives of people with too much time on their hands.  Splash is much, much slighter, a mere improvisation with a premise of stunning predictability.  

Of course, that is probably immaterial to Mr. Guadigno.  We Americans preach narrative economy above all, and drive headlong from story point to story point.  Texture is just for cinematographers or post-production sound mixers.  But like most European filmmakers, Mr. Guadigno is not afraid to slow down and let the rhythms of life flow by, which makes this film about 20-25 minutes longer than it would be under an American film director.

And then you would have lost one of the strangest and most interesting grace notes of the film.  I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to learn that one of the four principal characters pictured above dies in a pool before the film is over.  In an American picture, we would barrel ahead to the interrogations, the unanswered questions, the betrayals, etc., etc.  But we are in Italy, and this is a rented house.  And the film takes its time to show just how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be to have someone die in the pool of your beautiful rented villa in Italy.  The uniformed policemen come and put up some very tatty crime scene tape.  Then the pool must be emptied, and that takes time.  A lot of time.  Time enough that one can go down to the police station and back and it's still not quite done and the body has still not been extricated.  The whole matter is just ugly and nasty and even if the dead person in the pool wasn't close to you, it still would throw an awful shadow over your vacation, as if someone had thrown sewage into the wine barrels.

I don't think many American filmmakers would have stopped to note that.  They want to focus on who and how and how that makes the protagonists feel, but that approach would have missed the comical upbeat at the end of the movie, in which the police chief insists on getting an autograph from vacationing rock star Tilda Swinton in the middle of an absolute downpour.  Does that explain anything?  No, but it helps make A Bigger Splash just a bit more special than it would have been.

What the camera likes

Reality saves the fiction film

It was without intention that this blog moves from Good Kill to The Good Lie (2014), but here is another issue-based film in which deflection and dissembling may be the key to survival.

In the one and only film course I ever took, the instructor had us read large portions of Siegfied Kracauer's Theory of Film.  Kracauer was not a working film critic, but a philosopher and sometime historian.  He conceived an idea that because film recorded the reflection of light taking place in front of its lens, that a natural photo-chemical process place took place during the process of film-making, that the medium was drawn towards true events -- sports, dancing, even porngraphy.  Because cinema was most cinematic when it heeded the dictates of the real world.

I'm not sure how digital filmmaking affects this theory.  The electrons don't care much about how the 1s and 0s arrange themselves -- they are agnostic about content, and it seems to me that artificial manipulation is not a lesser method of arranging electrons than exposing a photo-sensor to light, other than permitting a bit more of chance in the latter.  But that does not seem to me to be "better" only different.

Nonetheless, there is still something about Kracauer's idea that still tickles our brain, no matter how the images got there.  We are curious about the integrity of what we are seeing and audiences at Q&As want to know if a stunt was really done, if the star did it, did those animals really do that thing, did those children really say that or was that written for them?  We can't help asking, "is it real?"

Coupled with that phenomenon is the fact that there are stories in which the stakes are so high, the importance of truth and precision is so great, that it is almost insulting to build fictional narrative on such a sensitive base.  Such might be the story of the Lost Boys of Sudan.  Screenwriter Margaret Nagle did, as one would expect, exhaustive research on this difficult complex structure.  But then she did the unexpected -- she did not base her story on a true story. Nor did she get some brilliant actors to portray the Lost Boys.

Nagle made up a composite story and she cast actors who were 15 years too old for the roles.  They were too old because they were some of the real Lost Boys of 2000.  They are the film's entire raison d'etre and your reason to see the film.  Yes, it has some canny storytelling and good performances from Reese Witherspoon (in a supporting role she clearly took in order to assist with the financing of the film) and the rest of the American company, but the reason the film works at all is the simple and real presence of Arnold Oceang, Emmanuel Jal, and in this clip, Ger Duany, to bring the breath of real life to what could have been a mere "liberals feeling good about doing good" exercise.



There is a lot more that could be said about the film, but what fascinated me was the indissoluble lump of documentary truth in the middle of what is otherwise a "lies like truth" story.  These three and the other Sudanese Lost Children appearing truly save the film from itself.  From them, the film takes a sense of quiet decency instead of the passionate sermons one might expect, given the subject matter.

Me and Earl And The Dying Girl (2015) would seem to have no documentary impulse whatsoever. At its surface it seems like a Cody Diablo script written for Wes Anderson to direct.  It starts with both feet firmly planted in the Land of Twee.  It happens that I like Twee, especially when we are talking about self-conscious young people, who tend to label and categorize the components of their lives as a way of handling the inherent ambivalence and confusion of it all.

The 2.40 ratio used to show the distance and awkwardness of this relationship.

And although the artifices are dialed down as the story becomes more serious and the relationship between the two principal characters becomes more real, it still is at heart a "made-up" story.  Nonetheless, reality helps anchor this movie and makes it work more profoundly than it would otherwise.  No, not the "reality" of facing down death at a young age, nor of realizing that as a teenager, you are often more mature than the adults around you (Connie Britton, Nick Offerman and Molly Shannon all do excellent if mannered turns as the neurotic adults in the story).  No, it is the "reality" of actors really performing together in a real space and in real time, without the benefit of camerawork and editing.

It comes about two-thirds of the way through the film -- deep enough into their relationship for geeky Greg to feel free to scold Rachel for starting to give in to death.  The camera is set in a low corner with what looks like between a 10 and 20mm lens, as in the picture above.  Rachel is large in the foreground, still, listening.  Greg is farther from the camera, small, impotent, almost squeaking out his protest against Rachel's gathering indifference to the fate she is headed toward.  She neither dismisses him nor agrees with him, but her quiet ratchets up his frustration.  The scene must run six or seven minutes without a cut, a testament to the writing, to the confidence of the direction and to the skill of these very young actors to pull off this sequence which is on the one hand theatrical in concept and on the other, documentary in effect, due to its eschewing all but a few of the tools in the kit of the narrative filmmaker.  The result has an ascetic quality in a movie which begins in a rather antic mode.

I seem to find myself in a death-ridden mode in my films this week.  There is an odd resonance to events in my own life, but let us leave that aside.  The Farewell Party (2015) is packed with the kind of eccentric yet everyday old people that leaves one surprised the film comes from Israel and not the BBC. The story is simple to the point of being rudimentary, and in structure, it takes a turn to the left, another turn to the left, a turn to the right and home again, home again, jiggety jig. You know, your typical assisted-suicide comedy. Astute filmgoers will have no trouble staying ahead of its slim narrative.

For now the folks of THE FAREWELL PARTY are full of life.

But Farewell Party is not really about death or even about life.  It is about that awful moment that most couples put off and put off until they can't -- the recognition that no matter how close they are, no matter how much two people become one thing, there will be a cruel and merciless parting. That is probably the reason those of us without religious faith still hope for some sphere of existence beyond this one -- the wish for a reunion, somewhere, sometime.

Yes, love outlives death, but still exacts its price, and we must honor its power by making sure we have a good leave-taking.  Of the three suicides in the film, the first is devoutly-wished by the spouse who sees her partner's suffering.  The second is by an old woman who has no partner and no one to answer to but herself.  The third is not suffering pain, and to the eye looks healthy; but she is already leaving the earth by stages and decides she'd rather do it at once.

What makes a film which is paradoxically light-hearted in the face of these terrible questions so powerful is the real presence of these no-longer-young actors.  Sure, they probably have years to go before these questions come up, but not as many as you and I have.  And the simple quiet good sense of these characters makes everything less silly yet more entertaining. Would that we would all go on from this place in such good company as the cast of The Farewell Party.  Without old people, this movie would be offensive.  Would them, a story about the best way to die counts as a good time.

I forgot to mention there are some big walloping belly-laughs in this movie.  Don't be afraid to show it to Grandma and Grandpa.  It will probably bother them less than you.

In the end, whatever you think you can do for the dying, it is inadequate.  And that is OK.  You might as well have a good laugh when you're forced to sit in Death's front parlor.

Movies with high demands

The cowboy life Flanders-style

"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.

Chill of death

Is this how a brother looks at a sister?

If nothing else, Shame (2011) all by itself justifies digital filmmaking.  I daresay the film would be impossible by any other means, with Sean Bobbit's camera gliding smoothly as it does over the surfaces of the Manhattan night, resting for long, long takes which measure the vast distances between people, even people who have known each other well.  A cut, even to come closer to the faces would disturb the frost as it grows up between the isolated figures on the screen.  The camera is rock-solid steady.  I would bet there was not a handheld shot in the film -- if there was, it didn't call attention to itself.

This has to rank as one of the chilliest films ever made about sex, bathed in a bottle-green palette, and frequently accompanied by Glenn Gould's recording of The Goldberg Variations. 

Moreover, the Brits who made this film, including director Steve McQueen and actors Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan are using New York not as an environment, as a native filmmaker does, but as a location; a location to be explored like the caves of Lascaux, both quaint and dangerous.  It's OK that Fassbender and Mulligan not completely convincing Americans -- it's like those movies where you can tell they're speaking German because they have a German accent.

Perhaps most interesting is how the film keeps moving without an appranet narrative engine.  Nobody has anything they need to accomplish in a set period of time.  Nobody is looking to change, although Mulligan's character would probably like to get her own apartment and a steady gig.  Fassbender does not bottom out.  He does not go into treatment, or fail in treatment.

I would argue that, the title notwithstanding, there is no evidence that the character does feel shame.  A little self-hatred, a sense that what he's doing isn't working, a fear of getting caught.  But no sense that Fassbender can or wants to do anything about his addiction.  Not even after getting a beating.

It's really not a movie.  It's a snapshot.  But just as the young woman at the bar, who has come with her boyfriend, stares rapt at Fassbender's lewd proposition like a mouse staring at a snake, we can't take our eyes off the thing the protagonist has become, a thing which sheds the characteristics of a human being as the film progresses until it (he) has no reason to live other than the next pointless encounter, like a shark endlessly swimming in search of prey.  And a shark's life doesn't have to have meaning.

They really could have titled this movie Dead Man F******.

Slacker liebestod

There is a time in most lives, between ages 12 and 15, when you become privy to, and fall in love with, the twin mysteries of life, sex and death.  They are both such intimate phenomena, embarrassing when they happen in public.  They are secrets kept away from us when we are very young.  Only those who have experienced them really know anything about them.  (You hear me, holy men and philosophers?)  They require their own special spaces.  They even become intermingled for a few of us during that tender period.  I can remember bonding with a girl in high school over the novel A Fine and Private Place, which takes place entirely in a cemetary, among the recently dead.  Not surprisingly, the novel was written by a 19-year-old.

This still nicely captures the pallette and tone of Restless

Death really, is the only truly satisfying conclusion to a love story.  The marriage altar, the traditional resolution, leads us into very unromantic territory, namely the hard work of daily living; living outside the bubble of the Romantic Swoon.  Romeo and Juliet teaches us everything -- that our parents hate our happiness, that we have to split from our gangs, and love is best when the end is certain.

Bleak?  Wouldn't have it any other way.

Restless (2011) clearly announces at the outset that it (a) it will be a morbid adolescent romantic fantasy (it begins at a funeral and early on announces the heroine's imminent death); and (b) it will only be judged by the rules of post-adolescent romantic fantasy, that the rules of real life are not to be applied.  For one thing,  Mia Wasikowska's character is clearly dying of the same kind of movie disease that carried off Ali McGraw in Love Story.  She never looks tired or drawn, her skin becomes more pink and glowing as the movie goes on and pain management for her growing tumor seems to be handled with an occasional brief visit to the oncologist.  (This is clearly not the cancer that our friends and relatives get, and we need to start a movement to allow middle class and poor people access to movie-character-cancer.)  No one is upset as to whether any of these characters are attending school, especially the not-dying boy and the woods of director Gus van Sant's North Portland are obviously hospitable to rambling teenagers at all times.

Know what?  It's okay.  It's that kind of movie and if you don't want to indulge in that kind of movie, then move along, there's nothing to see here.  Yes, it goes for all the cliches -- a bucket list (not identified as such), a lovers-doing-a-million-interesting-zany-things montage, it even has a passionate lover's farewell, but that last provides a key to the film's success, at least for its intended audience (i.e., 15-year-olds of all ages).   That farewell, which threatens to send the film into the goopy sentimentality it has side-stepped, is a fake-out, a goof, a rehearsal far preferable to the IV drip-droning-monitor death scene we know and love from television.

And on the plus side, the there is no phony will-she-or-won't-she live suspense to pull the story off-point.  It's not about cures, miraculous or otherwise.  The film has the courage to point out where it's going, like a narrator or a placard in a Brecht play and then...go there.  Itis not meant to inform us or give us insight into death.  Who has any insight into that undiscover'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns?  Such stories are -- cliche alert -- always finally about the preciousness of life ("Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute? Stage Manager: No. Saints and poets, maybe--they do some." If you don't recognize that, Google it or ask your friendly neighborhood English teacher.)

But that is a topic with which the young had an ambivalent relationship.  On the one hand, they live intensely, passionately.  Each day is a month, each month is a decade, eons pass as they hurtle through different friends, enthusiasms, fashions and music.  So each moment is invested with incredible significance.  On the other hand, young people have a wobbly grasp of what a finite resource time is (who doesn't?), believe they will live forever and that there will always be time later for the difficult or the unpleasant things.  Maybe that is why they perversely enjoy rubbing their own noses in the unrelenting fact of death.

And if you want to enter Restless (a terrible title) in the proper spirit, you will have to be one of them, even if for only a brief return visit.

Death, beneath all

Private tragedy forced, painfully, into the public arena

The highest compliment I can pay to Life, Above All (2010) is that I was startled to learn that the film is based on a book, on a book by a man, on a book by a Canadian man.  It feels so authentic, so personal, so finely observed that it feels as if there is no distance between the finished film, its characters and the events of their lives.

And yet, for me, the film kept recalling that most formalized and schematic of modern dramas, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, because of the respective society's attempt to use shame to crush non-conformity or dissent.  What Life's protagonist, Chanda, has to navigate through is burden enough, especially for a 12-year-old, but its taking place under public scrutiny increases the pain exponentially.  The social stigma of and ignorance about AIDS proves more debilitating than the disease itself.

The story is built on incident virtually without plot.  The net effect is that neither Chanda nor the audience know what to look forward to, which means we share her feelings of frustration and even hopelessness.  The film does end on a note of reconciliation, but it comes without preparation, and feels a bit tacked on, although, personally I'm a sucker for Zulu harmony singing, so it got to me.

My only other observation is that cinematographer Bernhard Jasper has taken the trouble to work out how to photograph dark-skinned people in dark rooms.  They are vibrant and present and far more visible than in many more celebrated films.  Cinematographers need to study this one as an example of how to shoot black skin--in fact, it might even have made some very sick characters look too beautiful!

Death hovers just below the surface of We Bought A Zoo (2011), which is probably not mentioned very prominently in the marketing materials.  But that may be what gives the film a peculiar gray emotional undertone, and gives the rather chaotic and sloppily assembled screenplay some unity and resonance.  Without the presence of death, this could be filed next to those made-for-Saturday-matinee movies they turned out in my childhood, like Clarence the Cross Eyed-Lion and Hello Down There.

It seems truly perverse that an intended family entertainment is so death-ridden, beginning with the death of Matt Damon's wife (before the story begins) which is the inciting incident for him to buy a zoo, and continuing through the acceptance of the death of old tiger as a healing mechanism for Damon to accept his own loss.  That may be kind of weird, but it is one of the things that unquestionably works in a script riddled with red herrings, cul de sacs, extra characters, scenes and situations.  It has the marks of a three-hour script having been cut down to two, and not all that comfortably.

One note in its favor -- the film literally features lions and tigers and bears and doesn't cute them up.  The only monkey is a fleetingly viewed capuchin, and most of the other animals seem hazardous or just not people-friendly -- exotic porcupines, snakes and camels.  The "awwww" factor has been reserved almost entirely for Maggie Elizabeth Jones, as Damon's 7-year-old daughter.  Jones is ridiculously cute without ever being cloying, although she is made to say the title of the film too many times.  (Under my son's secret rules, when you say the name of the film, the film must end.  Clearly this rule was promulgated under the influence of The Importance of Being Earnest.)  But there are some impressively scary shots of big scary teeth in POV shots which omit the principal actors, but had to pose some hazard for the photography crew, at least.

Ultimately, it doesn't make any sense.  It's never really clear why owning a very marginal zoo (are there such things in the US--privately owned for-profit zoos?  The real story took place in England) is such a happy resolution.  It just seems like buying more trouble.  Perhaps sensing this, co-writer-director Cameron Crowe cooks up a finale with the departed wife rejoining her now-happy family in the cafe where husband and wife first met.  Given that we have only seen Mom in still pictures or fleeting glimpses until now, the whole scene has an odd overhang, like a cantilevered canopy that threatens to fall on the people underneath.  The movie ends with scads of happy people in the happy zoo and Matt Damon having been kissed by Scarlett Johannson (the little hussy), and it feels fun, but it never ever really feels right.

Oh, and speaking of Miss Scarlett, in this film she takes on the new role (for her) of Workboots Girl.  Workboots Girl is the inverse of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she performs the same plot function.  Where MPDG unleashes the protagonist's inner desire for freedom and creativity, Workboots Girl teaches the dreamer How To Do Practical Stuff.  She is a bit like the Hawks Woman, but the Hawks Woman does not need the man, nor does the man need her.  Workboots Girl, on the other hand must solve the protagonist's problem, or she will not be.  In this Syd-Field-Robert-McKee, we must never have a character who is just enjoyable to be with--they all must have A Function in the Story Arc.  ("Arc! Arc!" The cry of the Hollywood development executive...)
One last thing--few directors or producers seem to realize how damaging it is to film to be deliberately unclear about where it is taking place.  There seems to be a fear that if a story is grounded in a particular geography, no one who lives anywhere else will relate.  This is too obviously ridiculous as to spend any time refuting -- all identification is rooted in specificity.  The events of We Bought A Zoo took place in England, but evidently Cameron Crowe would have been uncomfortable with that, or Matt Damon signed on early, but for whatever reason, the zoo got moved into some strange landscape that bears no resemblance to any urban-suburban-exurban environment in the United States.  There are no landmarks, no local characters, no sports teams, no TV stations, nothing to ground it anywhere.  The "charming cafe" where Damon met is wife is so generic that it can literally be in any town in the world.  So when you read that the factual basis of the movie has been completely twisted and distorted, you're not surprised-- this story really feels like it never happened, and it really never happened no place.

Fresh meat

First feature films, especially independent films,  have such distinct qualities in comparison with other films that they might almost comprise their own genre.  

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) feels accomplished beyond its writer-director's resume because of his adherence to a couple of simple principles.  First, Dance With The Fella What Brung Ya.  For genre directors, that means you must obey the rules of your stated genre.  You can include other elements, you can stretch the borders, but sooner or later you must satisfy audience expectation.  For a more nuanced drama like M4, that means ruthlessly adhering to the spine of the film, not being distracted by other interesting related ideas.  It requires confidence that you will make another film, that you do not have to cram every possible idea and every directorial skill into this, your one testimonial to the world.  Because if you do make only one film, like Charles Laughton with Night of the Hunter or Leonard Kastle with The Honeymoon Killers, your discipline and fidelity to the central idea of your film will ensure that you are remembered as a great filmmaker, even with only one directorial credit in your obituary.  

Thus M4 sticks to its one powerful idea using one powerful structural device.  A young woman, stunningly played by Elizabeth Olsen, has escaped from a cult and found refuge with her somewhat distant sister.  In the cult, as in most cults, the leaders have erased any awareness of time.  There are no clocks or calendars around, no time-based goals, no sense of an end of something approaching, no promise of something new to start.  So director Sean Durkin has engineered a film which seamlessly blends past and present in the mind of Martha, so that the implied threat of the cult never really fades away, no matter how long Martha spends in her new haven.  Rarely has a film subsisted so completely on a diet of suspense without offering any sort of clear timeline; the result borders on a horror film, so terrifying is what Martha has escaped.

The other principle that Durkin has observed, at least from the point of view of a person who can only view the finished film and not the process of creating it, is forging a strong alliance with a talented and dedicated director of photography.  For someone who has not been involved in filmmaking, it is impossible to understand how key the selection of a DP is, and how important it is for director and DP to develop an intuitive collaboration.  On the most practical level, the DP is the single greatest determinant as to whether you will finish your film, finish on schedule and have coherent footage you can cut together.  But past those rudimentary considerations, the DP determines whether the movie will look like the movie you have in your head or, if you're lucky, better than that movie.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is the most striking looking independent film this year.  It may be that great noir texture is only possible on 35mm, with bold asymmetrical framing and strong key lighting that would make Edward Hopper weep in recognition.  Durkin and DP Jody Lee Lipes stage a number of scenes in a single take with a locked-off camera, an approach seen mostly in Jarmusch films or from the first year of talkies.  The result is not stasis, but a feeling of inherent tension fixed within the boundaries of the frame.  Instead of fearing some surprise from outside the camera's view, the threat seems to hover inside it, from the unexpected action of a character.

The frame above is a nice example of Lipes's effects.  It looks underexposed, but only in the sense that Gordon Willis movies are underexposed.  Faces move in and out of the light, mostly in shadow and intentions and feelings must be sussed out by the audience from subtextual hints.

It's not a masterwork, but it is assured, consistent and reliable with a dead perfect ending,  and it announces Durkin, Lipes and Olsen as artists to seek out in future.  And M4 also benefits from the reliably creepy John Hawkes, who is also seen in Higher Ground (2011), the directing debut of actress Vera Farmiga, based on a real-life memoir.  Like Martha Marcy, it centers around a woman trying to shed a belief system.  It also takes place in an underexamined rural America, not in the heartland, but in upstate New York. 

Is it possible Farmiga remembered these rural New York locations from Down to the Bone, not to mention that film's DP Michael McDonough, who also shot Winter's Bone?  This time out McDonough is asked to work with a sunnier palette, mostly insuring that all the actors' performances are seen clearly.  This is an actors' film, especially in comparison with Martha Marcy and vacillates in style and tempo, which we can presume is intended to mirror the spiritual vacillation of the central character played by Farmiga.  I will leave aside the spiritual struggle that drives the narrative; the film itself is set in a concrete world of making ends meet, of trying to keep marriages and best friends alive.  That materiality keeps the film from spiraling into a pointless debate about faith, which ultimately defies visualization and dramatization.

Fireflies in the Garden (2008) relies on that staple of independent film, the family psychodrama, complete with controlling father, enabling mother and siblings differing on how to handle them.  There are some minor variations, but nothing to explain how writer-director attracted Willem Dafoe, Ryan Reynolds, Hayden Panatierre, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Watson and above all, the non-indie Julia Roberts to this fairly routine run-through of the land between Cheever and Salinger.  Once again, Kingston, New York is on display, leading one to wonder if there hasn't been some kind of big tax dodge going on in Ulster County over the past few years.  I don't feel as if I can make definitive observations about this film, as the internet reports that 30 minutes and a music score have been cut from the film between 2008 and 2011, the year of the US release on DVD, which is how I saw the film.  The worst thing I can say about it is that it has a fatal sense of restraint and good taste.  Usually, I like those things, but dammit, I could have used some full-on weirdness and grossness to shake this film out of its well-made torpor.  

What finally sinks it is that it is a film about writers, and much of it is based on an argument about writing.  College professor Dafoe looks down on son Ryan Reynolds who writes popular romance novels.  The son's disgrace as a boy revolves around the attempted appropriation of the title poem by Robert Frost.  There is a barely-articulated argument about what is considered good writing.  And when has that ever been a good subject for a film.  At least if they were painters, we'd see their paintings.  Writers are pretty much non-starters as film characters.

And Roberts appears so briefly and for such over-dramatic reasons that it smacks of stunt casting so that her name and face could be put on the video package.  

All first films are calling cards, but some demonstrate real promise as filmmakers, and some demonstrate a future as hucksters and hype artists.  But that's better than no talent at all.

The Year of Melissa Leo?

Nobody was very surprised when Melissa Leo won the Academy Award earlier this year for playing a maternal shrew in The Fighter. But would you be surprised to learn that she turned in two completely different performances in other features released in 2010?

In Welcome to the Rileys (2010), Leo plays Lois, a timid housewife who has become frightened and agoraphobic over guilt surrounding her teenage daughter's death. Over the course of the film, Lois who slowly overcomes her fears and returns to the world of the living. Not only this woman nothing like the harridan in The Fighter, but Leo delivers a master class in physical acting. In the clip I wish I could show you, Lois has arrived in New Orleans where her husband Doug (James Gandolfini) appears to have shacked up with a 17-year-old stripper, Mallory (Kristen Stewart). What she doesn't know yet is that Doug has taken it on himself to parent this lost child, not sleep with her. They quarrel in the street and Doug hands her the car keys and tells her to go back to their home in Indiana in which she had trapped herself.

There follows a wordless 60 seconds or so in which the camera steps back, almost across the street to observe Lois preparing herself to meet this urchin, wringing her wrist, touching at her collar, fiddling with her purse, but what you see is not a grab-bag of actor fidgeting, but a woman making a decision and making up her mind to carry it out. Everyone studying acting or directing needs to see it.

Couldn't find that clip, but here is a good scene of bonding between Lois and Mallory, as you can see Melissa Leo listening to and participating in this conversation, while another tape, a tape of a happy life she lost, is playing in her head. It's called subtext, kids, and nobody makes it palpable better than Ms. Leo. In any case, it's a world away from the ferocious virago of The Fighter.

Her role in Conviction (2010) is smaller, but the Charlie Chan rule applies, whereby an important actor is never in an insignificant role, even if they only appear briefly early in the film. (The Charlie Chan rule stipulates that the best known character actor is always the murderer, no matter the clues. Its corollary is that important actors have important functions in the film. Often it means that they will be back later in the film, when their true significance is revealed.) In this scene, Leo makes the initial arrest of Sam Rockwell's character. You can see this is nothing like Lois, and even with an East Massachusetts accent, this is an entirely different person from the one she plays in The Fighter. (In fact, the accent itself is different from the one used in The Fighter.)



Turns out the character has her own demons and secrets, despite being a minor part of the story, and that's why you need a Melissa Leo in a role with only four or five short scenes.

That's three utterly different characters with three different affects all released in a single calendar year. And none of them resemble her work in Frozen River or her neurotic and driven detective in the late lamented and completely wonderful television series Homicide.

(As for the rest of Conviction, it is a perfectly straightforward television-film-based-on-a-true-story. It is directed by actor Tony Goldwyn, so it is almost entirely actor oriented, and anyone who has attended law school and most people who follow appellate cases in the news will be unsurprised by any of the plot developments. The best description of such a film is "worthy.")

The problem with "secret weapon" actors like Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Frances McDormand and J.K. Simmons is that they stop being secret. Some become less effective -- it is arguable that James Gandolfini will never shake Tony Soprano. But many of them go merrily along, either assisting or stealing films outright. And some, such as Kevin Spacey, William H Macy, Steve Buscemi, Tony Shalhoub and Tilda Swinton become stars in their own strange galaxy, occasionally visiting the Land of Regular People, and then returning to where the rest of us live. Hooray.

Bald-faced killers with a toupee

I was so intrigued by the cult film Honeymoon Killers and its relationship to a real-life case in the late 1940s that I looked up two other films based on the same case. They could be interpreted as remakes or homages to Honeymoon Killers, or simply parallel films, one of which acknowledges its predecessor extensively and comes up with a rich robust re-interpretation of the story, following the earlier film sequence by sequence. The other turns its back on Leonard Kastle's film, and to some extent on the actual Beck-Fernandez murders, and takes a creative new tack with the story which ultimately fails, and renders the film inert. The question is whether that approach could ever have worked without discarding the central premise of the real-life material, and hence, the very reason to base a film on this particular case.

The actress who plays the Martha Beck character in Profundo Carmesi aka Deep Crimson (1996), Regina Orozco, is primarily known as an opera singer, which tells you something about the movie. Where the lovers Honeymoon Killers were joined in seediness, two con artists who recognized each other, in Deep Crimson they are both absorbed in a fantasy of passionate romance. Neither of them can deal with reality and are completely committed to the idea of the grand passion. Perhaps it is telling that this version of the story includes the fact in which Beck (here called Coral) abandoned her children in order to follow Fernandez. This signals that we are not going to see a gradual slide down the moral ladder, as in the earlier film, but a portrait of a grand obsession. She imagines her paramour to be Charles Boyer, or a reasonable facsimile thereof and frequently dresses in red. She is not nearly as interested in the swindle as she is in the thrill of being on the run with her lover.

Nicolas, who corresponds to the real-life Fernandez, also seems less interested in money than his counterpart in real life or in the Honeymoon Killers. He loves the sport of seduction, and his paramount concern is the condition of his toupee. (Actor Daniel Cacho looks alarmingly like David Margulies, the actor who played the mayor in Ghostbusters, not exactly the most seductive image.) In fact, he loses heart in the whole criminal conspiracy when his toupee becomes damaged beyond repair. On top of which, he seems to have inherited blinding migraines from Clyde Barrow, in a tribute to that other film about killers in love and on the run.

Where Honeymoon Killers unfolds in a clinical, almost judgmental black-and-white, Profondo's director Arturo Ripstein's camera prowls smoothly about (no handheld or even Steadicam is evident here) in the style of early Otto Preminger, with long, takes allowing the actors to move about the environment and interact with each other. Although it is Mexican, it seems much more like a Hollywood movie, reflecting the fantasy life of the two principals. In Leonard Kastle's film, Mahler seemed like an overstatement, but in Profondo, Verdi or Puccini would fit right in.

There are some interesting variations in the way the facts of the case are used. The querulous old widow who is killed with a hammer in Honeymoon gets clobbered with a religious statue in Profondo, after going through a grotesque mock wedding in a cemetery. Profondo makes more of Beck's knowledge as a nurse, although in this version she is a bad nurse, whereas in Honeymoon she was a supervisor. But when Coral promises to perform an abortion on Nicolas's girlfriend, it is clearly in order to bleed her death. But that fails and Nicolas has to do a messy job of stabbing her. And where Beck in Honeymoon does away with the surviving toddler in a cold, frozen manner, Coral does it choking back tears, angry for her inability to connect with the child who stills want her own mother, though she is now a bloody corpse in the room.

Profondo ends like a Western. Whereas the real killers and the ones in Honeymoon die separated on death row, the Profondo killers are gunned down on the plain, dying together in a spoon position, half immersed in water which might as well be blood. Finally, these lovers are victims of as big a delusion as the women they tricked and killed, and they somehow seem pathetic where the originals were repellent.

Lonely Hearts (2006) is almost a complete misfire from start to finish, beginning with its odd conceit to center the story around the investigating policemen (who barely appear at all in Profondo). It is a novel idea, and potentially compelling, given the contrast between the thriving and exciting romantic relationship of the criminal couple and the failing marriage of the policeman. But it has a couple of negative effects. First of all, it sends the film in the wrong direction. Yes, we like policeman to catch bad guys -- especially on television, where we need to see the moral order restored. But in movies, we only like it if they catch monsters, as in Silence of the Lambs. If the criminals are interested, complicated, conflicted, they are going to grab our interest and we will not want to see them caught, at least not until their story is worked out. So our sympathies work against the intended protagonist, John Travolta's cop character.

Second, it flattens Beck and Fernandez into any criminal couple on the run. Beyond the basic mistake of the story structure, writer-director Todd Robinson turns the overweight and homely Martha Beck into the glamorous and irresistible Salma Hayek, takes away her children and all her other problems, including lack of confidence. It makes Ray Fernandez pretty ordinary, too, for whereas the real man was obsessed with a very large woman who berated and dominated him, now he is in love with a sexy, hot babe. Beck and Fernandez become run-of-the-mill swindlers turned killers -- we never see their panic or sense of doom. They are scarcely individualized at all.

In addition to a suicidal wife and a girlfriend played by Laura Dern, Travolta is given a partner, played by James Gandolfini who seems to have no story function at all other than to prevent Travolta from talking to himself and to provide voiceover narration. Neither Travolta nor Gandolfini, nor Scott Caan, who performs a bad carbon copy of his father, is as believable as a cop as they are as criminals, which undermines the film. (Yes, there are films which suggest the kinship between cop and criminal, but this is not one.) It doesn't help that Jared Leto, as Ray Fernandez is so completely lacking in any distinctive personality or style, playing a generic con man when something really unusual and strange is called for.

The one thing Lonely Hearts does well is go to town on the late 40's atmosphere-- the wardrobe, music, lighting, settings. The idea is presumably to align the film with the tradition of film noir. But this story is not going to cooperate with that notion; in fact the writer has done a good deal to destroy any sort of noir structure. It could have been, but Robinson chose to write a police procedural, with some added angst for the cop. (And even here Robinson couldn't help himself changing the details of the real policeman's life -- ironic, given that the man was Robinson's grandfather.) Production design does not a film noir make.

The decision goes to the reigning champion, Honeymoon Killers, with Deep Crimson a worthy challenger. It's time for the governor to declare a moratorium on film versions of the Lonely Hearts Killers.

The potency of decent sentiment

In the 1930s and 1940s, the studios manufactured them on a regular basis and they were called tearjerkers. Ostensibly they were for women, but since they often involved the loss not only of husbands and lovers, but of children, I am sure many men enjoyed a good sniffle in their day. The cathartic effect of viewing such vicarious tragedy was understood and accepted, even if the form was not artistically respectable. As late as 1968, theater director and critic Harold Clurman called Robert Anderson's I Never Sang For My Father "a play of decent sentiment."

Today, decent sentiment, as represented in a film such as The Greatest (2009) is too middlebrow to be endured by people of education and good taste, and calumny is heaped upon such misshapen oddities, especially by the young. But I think that non-parents must be automatically disqualified from judging any works which contemplate the death of a child. Until you've gone down that road, is impossible for mere imagination to conjure up the fear of such overwhelming and devastating loss. Until then, you can't know how losing another person, even a lover or a spouse, could drain you of your sense of purpose and identity.

And perhaps the only way to exorcise the fear of that abyss is to stare straight down to its center. And so, Pierce Brosnan as the father of an 18-year-old who is suddenly and randomly killed in a road accident cannot sleep, but simply lies in bed clutching the alarm clock, staring at it dully as it goes off. Next to him, his wife, played by Susan Sarandon, stirs from her sleep for a few moments before the memory of what her life has become hits her and she begins weeping horrifically. This scene alone makes the movie the horror film of the year for a parent.

And The Greatest is to be praised for avoiding some cliches without twisting itself out of shape to do so. The mother of the dead boy does not welcome the prospect of a grandchild by that boy as one would expect, but is angry and resentful. The film does not wander far down the road of "is the baby really our son's baby" which would be tedious and irrelevant. And it posits a sweet and quiet bond between the young woman and her would-be father-in-law.

The film has been unfavorably compared to Robert Redford's Ordinary People (which Lillian Gish, presenting the Academy Award for Best Picture, called, in a moment of Freudian truth, "Ordinary Picture"). True, it is not pretentious, it is not directed by an overrated actor-director, does not have a bunch of affluent dried-up WASPs and a loveable Jewish psychiatrist (ethnics are always the bearer of truths to those repressed WASPs). It does not play Pachelbel's Canon over and over the way they did at your niece's wedding until you wanted to grab Pachelbel by the throat and kill him again, though he has been dead for over 200 years.

The one thing the films have in common (other than the set-up of one dead son and one unworthy living one) is that they center around the repression of emotion. But instead of following the road of Mary Tyler Moore's terminal toxicity (which is what makes Ordinary People an Art movie), the parents in The Greatest break through eventually. What is surprising is that the gush of tears, which produces a palpable relief in the audience, comes not from the mother but the father.

And this reveals a little truth about what it is to be a man--a real man, not a boy-man. Contrary to the prevailing mythology about the endlessly sacrificing mother, being a man is living for other people and serving other people's goals: your children, your spouse, your employer, the organization or institution you are part of. Men--other than artists and geniuses--are supposed to submerge their entity into greater entities. Individualism and ego are discouraged. (Yes, I know the movies are full of raving Jack Nicholson-types, but they are in the movies because those people are exceptional.) We men are supposed to keep our heads down, keep the grass trimmed, keep things going, make everything work for everybody else. When we're lucky, we get a beer on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

So it is a small victory to say, "I am entitled to my own grief." The only emotions we're supposed to have is pride, braggadocio, swagger. But like Pierce Brosnan's father character, we need to claim our emotional territory, where tears are allowed.

Maybe that's not art, but it's life, and sometimes art is about life, and not just about what critics are supposed to like.

The road to . . . what?

Taste of Cherry (1997) could be titled "Several Conversations About The Same Thing," but that would make it sound tedious, when it is instead strangely riveting. Perhaps it is the question itself, or the very fact of that question being posed in an Islamic context. The question: Can suicide be a positive good? Obviously, the Qu'uran answers with a clear "no," clearer even than Judaism or Christianity.

But even more strangely riveting is the way these conversations are conducted. We are not sitting at a table as in My Dinner With Andre, nor trapped in a radio station as in Mother Ghost. Instead, the protagonist, Mr. Badii is driving around Tehran and environs in his Range Rover, meeting people and giving them rides as he asks their help with his suicide. The crunch of the gravel under the tires, the turn of the steering wheel, Badii's searching gaze, lend a hypnotic rhythm to his quest. Writer-director Abbas Kiarostami eschews hand-held, subjective or any sort of experimental shots in favor of rock-steady, smooth motion. Even Badii's careful hand-over-hand handling of the wheel contributes to an air of calm contemplation.

Although this film is cited as an inspiration for Goodbye Solo, it has nothing in common with it other than a car and thoughts of suicide. Whereas the would-be suicide in Solo has made his decision, and settles into a sour funk, Mr. Badii is on a spiritual quest, albeit one with a possibly negative conclusion. But Mr. Badii does not offer a reason for his desire to end his life, he shows no bitterness, exudes no air of failure or disappointment. He seems in search of a higher purpose to the ultimate act of negation.

He meets a number of other men in this journey, all of whom are engaged in significant work, even if it is dull or repetitive. All are making a contribution. The most engaged is the Turk, Mr. Bagheri, who works with his hands and appreciates the palpable physical pleasures that, to his way of thinking, God has made for his children to enjoy. And those joys should be enough, given that any pleasure, probably savored, bespeaks infinity. As seen in the illustration above, Mr. Bagheri's care for other people and appreciation of life seem to earn him entrance to the gates of Heaven. (They're actually the gates of the university, but I'll take a visual metaphor where I can get it.)

The film does not conclude, but merely stops, borrowing a Brechtian trick seen before in films such as O Lucky Man!, The Imposters, The Maids and even the films of Mel Brooks. I have no idea what it is supposed to mean in this context, but it is disappointing, because until then, Kiarostami was on the path to achieving the impossible, making a film, not of a story, but of the process of thinking and of making a decision.

And if this film depresses you, and it shouldn't, just swipe a plum from the fridge. There it is, all the goodness of the world. So sweet and and so cold.

Better luck next time

I sought out Goodbye Solo (2008) because of my admiration of the work of director Ramin Bahrani in Chop Shop and Man Push Cart. His work can be evocative with an understated dignity. He is especially good with children and with the use of objects to represent emotion, experience and longing.

But Goodbye Solo feels schematic, insufficiently worked-out and theoretical rather than observed. The film chronicles the meeting of a man who wants an immigrant taxi driver to drive him to the site of his planned suicide, and essentially, not to make a fuss. The driver wants to make a fuss. There's the plot. And while I understand that it is central to the film that it is not over-explained how the intended suicide got that way, that choice robs the film and the character of texture. I certainly wasn't expecting a "rubber duck": "I wants to kill myself cuz I can't go on since my wife died and I couldn't save her." (Although that particular cliche has a lot of truth in it.) But if I was the cab driver and I wanted to convince this man not to kill himself, I would have trouble coming up with reasons, given that I never know anything about him.

Oh, he has a grandson. That doesn't know he exists. Who he doesn't talk to. It's as if Bahrani is saying, "I can take any possible source of drama and eliminate it and STILL make a movie." Except that the most interesting things in the film, the driver's daughter and his wife, are almost peripheral to the whole thing.

It's a classic example of what I call a "doughnut" movie. It goes around and around its own subject matter, but as for actually delving into the subject--the choice to take one's own life--there's nothing there.

After effects

Peter Jackson, who made Heavenly Creatures, a brilliant descent into literal madness of two adolescent girl, seems to be trying the same thing in The Lovely Bones (2009), which apparently stands for the proposition that when you die, you will go to a fever dream version of New Zealand. The afterlife is, evidently, the ultimate special effect.

My wife, who read the novel, feared that the film version would focus on the crime-detection aspects of the story and get bogged down in the material circumstances of the story. That's not where the film went wrong. The story elements are actually rather dull and routine, and ultimately don't amount to anything.

So the film's entire raison d'etre is its concept of the world beyond. The story adheres to the old concept (it's prominent in Our Town and the Peter Beagle novel A Fine and Private Place) that the dead gradually lose interest in the affairs of the living, perhaps once the circumstances of their death are understood or their loved ones have learned how to properly mourn and/or move on. Sometimes its posited that they have a particular task to perform or message to pass on to the living, as in Heart and Souls or Field of Dreams.

There's two problems with all this. First of all, once you've introduced some CGI, everything looks as though it might be digitally created. This is a particularly acute problem for Mr. Jackson, whose Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners and King Kong all look as though they take place on some other version of the earth. (Maybe it's just the way New Zealand always looks.) I suppose it made him the ideal director for the Ring films. But the story comes completely ungrounded, when even the suburb neighborhood in which it begins could have been faked. (And certainly the landscape in which Stanley Tucci's villain meets his end is digitally created.)

The bigger problem, the one that all artists in this vein of storytelling share, is that Death is that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler has yet returned. (I heard that somewhere, I'm pretty sure.) Anyone who contemplates the specifics of a life other than this one is guessing. Even the Bible is vague on the particulars. And Mr. Jackson posits a child's cotton-candy Rainbow Brite eternity, which I hope is meant to reflect the very young protagonist's view of the world to come, and not Mr. Jackson's own imaginings. Let's be fair: it's an impossible subject, and that Peter Jackson stubs his toe on it is not his fault except to the extent that he tried to do it all.

I'm afraid the movie suggests that when you die, your soul goes to Wellington, New Zealand, where you will dwell in Weta Digital forever.

It's only funny when it's a real old lady

Is Anybody There? (2008) is the latest entry in the eccentric-but-innocent-kid-befriends-crusty-but-loveable-old-codger genre which I remember beginning with The Two of Us (1968) but which has its roots back at least as far as Silas Marner (that's a book, boys and girls).

Michael Caine, who plays a demented and dying low-rent magician has even been around this track before, most notably with Secondhand Lions. But one should never pass up the opportunity to see Michael Caine, who, in a single regretful glance, offers an entire seminar in motion picture acting. It's possible that he is the best that ever's been. Maybe it just helps to have tired, puffy eyes.

In the early days of Technicolor, cinematographers marveled at the quality of color in British films--so much less stark and obvious, more diffused and subtle. Turns out it wasn't the cameramen, it was the fog. Mist is so pervasive in England that the cameras pick it up everywhere. It doesn't look like they had one good day when they shot this film, and it suits the picture straight down to the ground.

The novel element in this piece is that, whereas death hovers in the wings throughout this genre, Is Anybody There? puts it front and center, not because of the old man but because of the boy, who has grown up in a private nursing home and is death-obsessed. Probably no American film could look death so squarely in the eye and without sentiment, but for the quick appearance of a badger toward the end. (This will be clear to anyone who has seen the film.) No weepy Mitch Albom moments here. This is a film for those who would go down giving the Reaper the finger.

As Groucho said, "An amateur thinks it's funny to dress up a guy as an old lady, put him in a wheelchair and push it down a hill. A professional knows it's only funny when it's a real old lady."

The Sound of their Own Voices

Watching Network (1976) and His Girl Friday (1940) in immediate succession as part of our Film Studies unit on screenplays (specifically, dialogue-driven screenplays) brought out some interesting parallels and contrasts. Both concern the control of information and its use in seduction. The seductions themselves, however, differ

Network's seduction is partly that of good old Max Schumacher, William Holden's mostly straight-arrow point-of-view character that today nobody cares about. William Holden has faded as a screen personality, despite his anchoring important films such as Sunset Boulevard and Bridge on the River Kwai. That's the problem--he anchors them, but doesn't drive them. That's up to crazy nuts like Norma Desmond, Colonel Nicholson and in Network, Howard Beale and Arthur Jensen. Yes, there's a crazy woman and she has mixed her obsession with words and numbers with her failure of a sex life, but that seems to be there to be dismissed. The ultimate seduction is of Howard Beale by Arthur Jensen, a liebestod that precipitates Beale's death. And director Sidney Lumet has said that the film itself becomes corrupted, from a straight-forward recorder of events at the outset to a stylish glamorizer at the end.

Nobody cares what the news is in Network. They're just interested in what it does for them; therein, the common bond with His Girl Friday, where the battle for eyeballs is just an instrument in Walter Burns's endless seduction. This was always true in HGF's source material, The Front Page, in which Hildy was a man. But the seduction was clearer and more palatable when it was made into a conventional romance. And here also, the romance of words is probably a liebestod. At the end of the film it seems clear that Hildy will not have an actual life, but race from scoop to scoop in the effort to hold onto her man--and her eyes glitter at the prospect.

Neither film has a music score--where would you put it? Although, I must admit that Network's super-pompous TV theme music (by Elliot Lawrence, a veteran arranger/conductor of big bands, Broadway pits and TV award shows) always makes me laugh aloud--it is so dead-on, not an ounce of exaggeration or mockery. But that is a grace note. Both films are finally about people who will, if allowed, talk themselves to death.