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.

Trying to get time onto our side

No (2012) and Stories We Tell (2013) both play interesting games with time and memory, and use similar means to do so, specifically by employing outdated technology

No, the based-on-fact story of the advertising campaign employed to unseat Pinochet as dictator of Chile in 1988 confused me when I first popped it into the DVD player, because the picture is in the 1:33, Academy ratio, often called "Fool Screen."  I couldn't believe that a distributor of serious foreign film was still issuing full screen additions, and had to check Imdb to confirm that the film was indeed shot in the old television ratio, and for a very specific reason.  No was shot on 3/4" Beta so that its original footage could be seamlessly integrated with historic advertising and news footage.  Some scenes actually show the same real-life figure shot in 2011 side-by-side with 1988 footage running on a nearby monitor.

So No hopes to make the intervening years melt away for the viewer, not by bringing the past up to the present, shining it up and making it contemporary, but sending the present back to a fuzzier, grainier time with bad clothes, bad music and even worse haircuts.  And somehow it works, making the present-day performances and the old videotape blend into one slightly blurry but still quite legible artifact.  Which contains its own irony, in that the whole story is about a manipulation of the truth which was engineered so as to make the truth possible to be spoken aloud.

For somehow, somewhere, someone realized that we are not rational beings.  We do not vote, or purchase things, or live places, or fall in love based on any kind of rational measuring of the risks and rewards, costs and benefits.  We live emotionally, and most especially we vote emotionally.  So the tiny band that wanted to unseat Pinochet, given an absurdly small volume of resources, limited money, personnel and a mere fifteen minutes a night, had to turn the enormous slow-moving ship which is a nation's politics 180 degrees from the direction it was moving.  (Pinochet was seeking a vote of confidence and to give the illusion of fairness the television stations -- all state-controlled of course -- granted fifteen minutes per night for the "Vote Yes" and the "Vote No" contingents.)  The old anti-Pinochet crowd wanted to trot out all the old sufferings and martyrdoms, the torture, the suppression, the shunning by the rest of the world.  But the marketing consultant they bring in (a composite character played by Gael Garcia Bernal) points out that you can't vote against a negative.  There is no such vote.  You have to vote for something.  And Bernal proceeds to market the new Chile like a new soft drink, car, or even charity appeal (one part of the campaign includes a "We Are The World" type anthem, a recording session recreated by the original participants).

To these eyes, we were plunged back into 1988 (especially the corny advertising of the day), the intervening time elided and the filmmakers doing their best to render the film itself transparent so as to let the rather astonishing events show through clear.

Stories We Tell, on the other hand, is reflective to the point of being reflexive, a film about itself, a film seemingly determined to eat its own tail -- or perhaps to be eaten by it.



It's the most familiar old kind of family secret -- I feel as though I've seen two or three films this very year that have turned on this device (although here it is not a device, because it is what really happened in and to this family.)  But the focus is not on the story, but the telling of it, or more precisely, of them, of stories in the plural, which is the whole point.  Everybody has a story, or at least a point of view about the central story and everyone is permitted to chime in, much to the discomfort of some of the participants.

Like the central character of No, Pinochet, the central character of Stories We Tell is dead and cannot speak for herself.  So she must be created out of the collective recollections of her family, friends and extended family and friends, like the elephant described by the blind men, or a whole gang of people describing their own shadows in Plato's cave.  Also like No, the illusion is aided by blending authentic antique Super 8mm footage with newly staged and newly shot Super 8mm with lookalike actors and artificially created settings supplementing the real footage.

However, to be honest, the stories don't really contradict each other, but only inform them.  The only real conflict (this is tricky to do without writing a spoiler) is between Polley and the man who would like to be accepted as part of the family, but is not and cannot be, who asserts that only he knows The Truth, whereas he knows his own truth, which he refuses to share because it will not be accepted as the sole or at least the primary truth.

And finally there is one piece missing.  Polley herself never addresses the ambiguity of her own situation caused by the events she relates in her film.  We see her interacting with her father and with other family members who refuse to be passive participants in the film and can't resist the urge to drag her into the storytelling, whether she wants to be included or not.  And we see her working with her director of photography on the staged sequences, yet never clearly labels or identifies which sequences are real and which are re-created -- in fact she does not even acknowledge the artifice but for editing in these "making of" shots into her film.  Her father points out on camera that she will take all the interviews which in all fairness should run unedited at length and chop them out and put them in counterpoint with each other to create a new narrative, "her" narrative, a constructed thing.

But honestly what is her choice?  To make a film is always to force a liason between reality and artifice and the question is what balance will be struck.  No film will ever live entirely in one camp or another, so why all the embarrassment and reticence about the very medium Polley has chosen to explore these questions?  She needs to take a look at Exit Through The Gift Shop or even Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story to see just how this bargain can be made without equivocation, in fact with the kind of cheeky grin that Stories We Tell could really use.

Without a song

You can see this is a model of happiness and tolerance

Pariah (2012) could be considered a feel-good movie for middle-aged middle-class white guys like me, because it makes clear that we are not responsible for all the bigotry and intolerance in the world.  Hooray for us!

Seriously, writer-director Dee Rees has done a brave thing, dramatizing intolerence within a group that has historically borne discrimination.  I am reminded of the flack Spike Lee got for revealing skin color discrimination among blacks in School Daze. 
I don't have a lot of original observations to make about this film -- it is remarkable how much was accomplished with color-coding in the cinematography (by Bradford Young) while appearing to be a realistic, documentary-style film.  By color-coding I mean that different environments were given different color temperatures, but in a much more subtle way than in, say, Steven Soderbergh's Traffic.  Her

What surprises me as I scan the credits at imdb is that there does seem to have been a music department.  I honestly cannot recall music in the film and that was a problem for me.  The film very honorably steers clear of melodrama and theatrics.  The big confrontation scene with the mother became a revelation of character, not a celebration of conflict.  So the director was not going to call for a big dramatic score that tells the audeince how to feel from moment to moment. 

But I really can't remember any music, other than the diagetic music in the nightclubs and parties.  And this is a film that does not let the viewer in on what the characters are thinking and feeling.  It keeps its distance and relies on the audience's observation of behavior to draw its conclusions.  The result for me was that the film felt closed off and chilly.  Dees was so scrupulous about not overstating her case, that she barely bothered to make any case.  I could not help but feel that a music cue or two would have helped make an emotional connection between the protagonist, Alike, and the audience.

Because dialogue, counter-intuitive as it is, is historically a distancing element in film storytelling.  In the silent era, the character and audience made a direct, pre-verbal connection which made it easier to ignore distances in time and setting and culture.  Silent film inherently brings out the universality between characters and audience and music helps bind that relationship, if it is properly done.  Silent film at its best represents the interiority of the characters as a novelist does, in contrast with the spoken words of the playwright.

To dispense with that interiority is to keep the audience at an arms length.  Perhaps that was Ms. Dees's intention.  Perhaps she did not want sentiment and pity.  But it was also hard to feel identification.  So I felt for Alike's dilemma, but I had no doubt she and her family would work it out and eventually it would all be OK and where should we go for a snack, I could really kill for some ice cream...

Places (Or Why Sad is Not Unhappy)

Ewen is not paying attention to his Happiness lessons

I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but I think the title of the film Beginners (2011) is taken from the British theatre idiom by which the stage manager notifies the actors that the play is about the start.  In the States, the SM calls "Places," whereas in the UK and much of the Commonwealth, the call is "Beginners."  (This is, of course, further proof that the Brits do not understand and cannot use the language that they initiated but which, since the death of Shakespeare, they have managed to complete bungle and misuse.  The proper word should be, clearly, "Beginnings" not "Beginners," unless the theater management has decided to replace the cast at the last minute with rank amateurs.)

My point is that "Beginners" signals the time when one is supposed to start.  And although it's a start, it's a place you've been before, such as the last time you performed or rehearsed the play.  Nonetheless, you start over, fresh, as if you've never done it before, surprised, dismayed and enlightened all over again.  An actor in the theater must "lose it" over and over again, every night.  It is a state of ever-renewing innocence.

And this wise innocence informs the film, from its dark yellow palette, its Wes-Anderson-like narration, the heroine who threatens to go Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but is too smart for that pigeon-hole, even a very perceptive Jack Russell terrier, who acts as mute Greek chorus.  There is a beautiful, simple clarity which drives the stark production design, the jump cuts which are surely written into the script, the rapid shifts of place and time.  Although the texture is dense, each small piece of the mosaic is eminently clear and well-defined.



Arthur does his best to see Oliver through.

Most of all, writer (and director) Mike Mills writes with a simplicity that would warm the heart of E.B. White.  That may well because Mills and his melancholy but not neurotic protagonist, Oliver, played with a lack of self-pity by Ewan MacGregor, both experience mourning as a normal natural part of life, not to be pushed away, but not to be wallowed in, either.  (Mills previously wrote and directed Thumbsucker, an agreeably quirky indie, which offered little beneath the surface of its odd premise.)
If you've heard of the film and not seen it, you probably heard of because Christopher Plummer won an Academy Award for playing a man who comes out at age 75.  And he does it wonderfully and fully deserves prizes.  But do not skip this because you think it is an old gay man movie and you've seen that one.  This is not a movie about an old gay man, it is about a young sad man.  But sad is not depressed.  Sad is simply a color in the rainbow of emotions, one we must have in order for the other colors to make sense and maintain their relationship with each other.  Sad is OK.  The trick is to come through and come out the other end.

SPOILER ALERT:  He does it.  He gets through.  It doesn't end with a music montage and everyone splashing in the ocean, but happiness is possible.

This post has more outright expression of opinion than I like, but simply put, I found Beginners one of the most elegant, poetic and overlooked movies of 2011.  There is a lot more to see here than Plummer's rightly-celebrated turn, including Melanie Laurent's mountains of charm and Goran Visnjic's enchanting child-man as Plummer's lover, the compact of secret playfulness between young Oliver and his bemused mother, well-limned by Mary Page Keller -- these are all recognizable human beings, rare creatures in contemporary film.  But most of all, there is the emergence of Mike Mills as an authorial voice in film whose future work I, for one, intend to follow.

Terror in contemplation

At the end of the first act of A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee, two old friends of the main characters suddenly show up at the house late at night, quite unexpectedly.  The friends simply want to stay.  Why?  They are afraid.  When they are in their own house, they are afraid?  Of what?  They don't know.  So they come to stay, indefinitely.  Later, they leave suddenly, for no apparent reason.

 But that was an Important New York play, not genre entertainment.  In genre, specifically "horror", the idea is to induce fear, or at least memories of fear in the viewer.  This usally is accompanied by a certain risibility, either out of the social embarassment inherent in being reminded of our own natural propensity to be afraid, even when it makes sense to be.  Or the audience could be laughing because the movie is laughable, often the case in horror (that is, the film is literally incapable of stirring horror because the conventions have been so terribly flouted-- the thing to be feared is so patently unconvincing that the audience's suspension of disbelief is stretched past the breaking point).

Take Shelter (2011) inverts the horror genre (which Boris Karloff rightly preferred to call "terror").  It does not aspire to induce terror in the viewer (except perhaps as an ancillary effect) but to observe the onset and effect of terror on its protagonist.  It goes so far as to keep the terror vague and unnamed.  It could be alien invasion, severe weather or anxiety attacks.  Or two of those.  Or all of them.  Or none of them.

Some writers might want to analyze the effects in this film, which I find immaterial, or add up and decipher the clues about what Michael Shannon's Curtis is sensing.  The film could be The Birds or Close Encounters ont the one hand or it could be Shock Corridor on the other.  OK, nowhere near as vulgar and crazy as Shock Corridor, but the protagonist could still be crazy.

The real trick the film pulls off is that virtually nothing happens.  Oh, Curtis buries a container in his back yard and gets fired, so there are money problems.  His daughter is deaf and there's some hashing out her education and Curtis's connection to her.  But mostly it's nothing, not even at the dramatic climax of the film.

And yet it plays.  Part of this may be due to Mr. Shannon, who has developed from an offbeat day player to a haunted, virtually Shakespearean leading man (albeit in this case, Shakespearean despite being almost completely inarticulate).  He proves the old saw that essentially films are about faces.  The picture above gives a bit of a hint.

Incidentally, Jessica Chastain has now become, for me, a Don Cheadle Actor.  This category has nothing to do with Mr. Cheadle's talent or his style.  It is simply that Don Cheadle's presence in a film as a fairly reliable guarantee that the film will not be insufferable crap; that it had the potential, at least at the outset, to be a very fine film.  Many, many times it is, but even if it is not, it still repays viewing.  The day Don Cheadle appears in a Transformers movie I will pull my knit hat down over my eyes and sit in the corner, mumbling and rocking and peeling the labels of empty Jack Daniels bottles.  (I hope Mr. Cheadle does not hear about this and does not have a cruel sense of humor.)

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 Reticent Camera

One of the pleasures to be found in Sofia Coppola's return to form, Somewhere (2010), might be called the resonances of the reticent camera. In bold contrast to the film-school boys, whose cameras track and swoop and fly all around the place, including through many places that don't exist, Coppola's camera seems to be not just nailed, but lag-bolted into the floor.

The great classical filmmakers, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, all favored a camera mounted on a tripod and set at roughly eye-level. Wilder openly disdained shots "through the fireplace." Hawks specifically sought to make the audience forget that the camera existed. And Ford always knew there was exactly one place to put the camera, creating an often painterly or theatrical composition. The New Wave and its American followers took the camera off the tripod and, to begin with, began running around with it, trying to catch the action as it walked, jogged and sometimes streaked past. People complained about the jittery, sometimes nauseating effect of handheld camera work, so we got the Steadicam and the Skycam and the Louma crane and more and more cheaper and faster ways to move cameras smoothly and effectively, often in the service of telling the story. There is no serious argument that the Steadicam shots in The West Wing convey the dynamism and perpetual workload of leadership of a major world power. It's not a frill -- it's part of the ethos.

The other side of the coin is that these toys are fun to play with. I've been on the set and I know. And I also know how setting them and lighting for them is an incredible time eater, often to produce effects that do not enhance story, setting or any other elements of the film that the audience cares about. So I welcome Sofia Coppola's static camera. Which is not there just for indolence, but to suggest an objectivity, a literal distance from the characters that is instructive, clear, ironic and sometimes downright funny. When you have a static frame, people and things can move in and out of it, instead of being the subject of the camera's relentless pursuit. Instead the camera lays back and says, in effect, "I'll wait for her. She's going to come back." And then she comes back, satisfying the expectation that's been set up and the audience and the camera are co-conspirators, knowing a little bit more about this person than she knows about herself.

So the opening of Somewhere gives us a sports car literally going nowhere, moving in and out of frame because it simply doesn't matter. Why follow the path of a car that has no destination, that will end where it starts? Why not just wait at the starting point and let it come back to you? We have not met the driver, who we will discover is the protagonist, but we already know he is literally aimless.

There is much criticism (mostly by young viewers) that nothing happens in Somewhere. This will be the case if you are the kind of person who has difficulty "reading" other people, their thoughts, moods and feelings, especially by looking at their faces. If you need "stuff" to happen, dramatic revelations, snappy dialogue, Somewhere is going to disappoint you. But if you are sensitive to the movements of the heart, you will recognize the signs of deepening levels of love and trust between father and daughter, especially since the daughter is played by Elle Fanning, who rates as MVP for young actresses in 2010-11.

Rabbit Hole (2010) also employs a somewhat reticent camera, not so much because it is waiting patiently, as in Somewhere, but because the foreground is packed with emotional action. Rabbit Hole demonstrates that the true provenance for the digital RED camera may be the actor-based film which rests on the interplay among faces, an interplay best captured within a single take. With the RED cameras, an operator can be put on each actor, and even another on a master shot. There is no "stock", so the cost of continuing to roll is marginal. Some directors don't even slate between takes, they just ask the actors to do it again without a pause. The result can be a single performance shared among several cameras, with the actors each reacting to exactly the performance you are seeing (as contrasted with having to react to an actor or even a tech sitting off-camera feeding the lines), and perfect, seamless cuts among them.

Digital cameras still do not have the range of high and low light that fine 35mm cameras have, but they are coming close. And they do not have to yield the grainy look they did ten years ago. Look at this warmly lit scene as husband Aaron Eckhart tries to soften the mood between himself and wife Nicole Kidman, both in mourning for a child lost in a random accident eight months earlier:



Note that, as casual and intimate as the scene is, the cameras are still on sticks, the relative sizes and juxtapositions of the characters perfectly conventional. No dollies, no odd angles, no jittery handheld work here, because the director has put the load on the actors and their words.

To this end, Nicole Kidman appears to be a perfect film actor, better to me than a Meryl Streep, who is always putting on a persona, which I can see her taking off at the end of the day. That is not to say that Kidman is a personality actor like Cary Grant, but a character actor without the eyepatch and the limp, like an Ingrid Bergman, who just shows up on screen as the character and nothing else. She is beautiful, but her beauty doesn't feel like a presentation, but simply a trait, like a cowlick or a birthmark (which perhaps it is). Interestingly, as one looks at this clip, Kidman's expressiveness is not centered around the small movements of the eye as is typical on film, but in body posture, tilt of the head, eyebrows, perhaps some widening of the eyelid, all tools of the stage actor.

Here is another example of digital's ability to capture the interplay of two (or more) simultaneous performances. The actors overlap and react easily and naturally. It also represents the film's wit as mother and daughter share the lighter side of losing a child:



The setups are conventional and locked down, leaving ample foreground space for the acting. Stage director John Cameron Mitchell cannily uses the old trick of keeping the actors' hands busy to deflect their attention and the audience's.

This scene does bring out a point I want to share with you. If you have heard of this film or the play, but haven't seen it, you probably think, like I did, that you are going to be pull down into a spiral of grief and conflict. I promise you this -- it won't. And if you go with it all the way to the end--and I can't imagine why you wouldn't--you will feel lightened, relieved, uplifted, especially if you are going through any kind of trial. I don't know a film that does the "life will go on and even get better" think better than this, and the reason points up an interesting contrast between stage and film.

(Incidentally, this film is a model of stage-to-screen adaptation, especially one done by the playwright. Offstage scenes are brought on stage, long static scenes are broken up into chunks, different characters move the scenes from different places, visual analogs for verbal ideas are often engaged, and a couple of brand new ideas introduced, most memorably the scene in which the husband botches the sale of the house by sharing too much. The economy and precision of what should have be been talky and indulgent is admirable.)

Both versions end with the same speech by the husband, but for a small cut which seemed redundant. (This frequently happens in the transition between stage and film -- it's possible to cut back the words both because a facial expression can substitute for the words and because we are sitting closer to the actors and we hear what they say better, which means they don't have to nail the point home the way they may need to on stage.) The husband makes a prediction of what they will do, the little gathering they will have for family and friends. The point of the speech is the ordinariness of the events he is forecasting. But on film, we can see it, we can see the warmth of the smiles and embraces, the children playing, the calico tablecloth, the food prepared and the food consumed. The beauty of plain ordinary life is there for us to see and we weep in recognition of how good those simple joys are if we will just think about what it might be like to become numb to them, as these parents did.

And the scene ends just as it did on stage, with the couple facing out and holding hands ready for the future, but now, on film, we see the yard and the tablecloth and the remains of the party. On stage, we projected our hope on them. On film, hope is made manifest.

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.

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?

Persistence of vision (and families)

For regular filmgoers, award season is like the best film festival in the world. This time of year it's possible to move from one excellent film to another over the course of a week or so, and yet I suspect you will not read another piece this month that compares The King's Speech (2010) with The Fighter (2010).

The superficial resemblances are easy - both are Little Movies That Could, extremely low-budget projects that attracted top-level talent due to the excellence of their respective scripts and the dedication and integrity of the producers. Both are based on actual events. Both deal with overcoming of physical challenges - stammering and getting beaten in the hand, respectively. Both confront problems with communication - in one case literal, and the other interfamilial communication breaking down.

But at a deeper level, both are films about overcoming the limited expectations and horizons that families can place upon an individual, especially the second son. Bertie was never expected to be king, and was specifically trained for the task, though it turns out his sense of duty and honor -- the most important attributes of a modern constitutional monarch, were more developed that his older brother David's. And Dickie Eklund was supposed to be the Pride of Lowell, not his younger half-brother Mickey Ward. Both succeed through hard work and persistence that their seniors are incapable of.

Not all second sons are literally second. Although chronologically younger, Jeb Bush was spiritually the first son of his family, the promising one, marked for success; George was the disappointment, the screw-up, the one for whom the bar was lowered. The second President Bush's story was about overcoming those family expectations, which may be one reason he is such a sympathetic person for so many Americans. Clearly, it's a story with a lot of power, as the reception for each of these films demonstrates admirably.

Both films are also about teachers who break through with their students not just by dint of skill and tenacity, but through transformative love. Many times -- too many times -- it is a teacher rather than a parent who can see through the shell a child builds around himself to see the real person inside and the real potential locked in that shell. There is no great teaching without love, and that may be the greatest lesson we take from these films.

A couple of specific observations about each. Much has been made of the fact that at one time the screenplay of The King's Speech took the form of a play. It is not clear how serious the writer was about having the story produced in that form (there was one public reading), but the real aim seems to have been to focus the storytelling on the two principal characters and the confined setting in which much of Bertie's transformation takes place. Conventional thinking suggests that this is uncinematic storytelling -- two people locked in a room. Hitchcock of all people proved that a limited group of people in a confined setting is exactly the sort of pressure cooker situation that makes for great film. He boasted to Truffaut that he could make a film in a phone booth (which, I suspect the reason the film Phone Booth was written and produced, despite its then-anachronistic situation -- just to answer Hitchcock's dare).

But in order to pull this off, director Tom Hooper takes a page from Sidney Lumet's book (specifically with regard to Twelve Angry Men) and rarely uses the same set-up or the same lens in any two scenes set in Logue's office. In addition, Eve Stewart and Netty Chapman have made the space, supposedly barren and dilapidated, fascinating and complex to look at, especially the wall which displays multiple layers of paint and wallpaper, with the result being a rich mosaic that one might pay a lot of money to have created from scratch. Hooper uses a variety of short lenses to emphasize the confinement and the strange distortions of life in the royal bubble, most obviously in a scene in which Logue first encounters members of the court and we see them loom in a bulging way reminiscent of a FedEx commercial of the 1980s. Conversely, as Bertie and Lionel stroll through the fog into what will become a rift between them, the lens is very long, minimizing the distance between the royal and the commoner who follows a step or two behind him.

I was not surprised by the humor and wit of the film, nor the skill of Firth, Rush and Bonham-Carter. What was utterly surprising was the intensity of emotion I felt during those coaching scenes. At the risk of cliche, I felt myself present in the room, and I ached for Bertie to succeed and to triumph. I will be interested to see the film again to see how that effect was achieved for me, whether it be the agonizing set-up in the first scene, the callousness of Bertie's father and brother, the generous love of Bertie's wife or the rooting interest developed for Logue -- or, most likely, the confluence of those forces. This is not to slight the great presence of charisma of Colin Firth, who we treat as one of those good Reliable English Actors, but is in fact a movie star of the order of Peter O'Toole or Richard Burton, without the alcohol, wives and bad taste. Which is not to say he's not sexy -- he's my wife's favorite, and given that she's married to me, the sexiness bar standard is very high. (Kidding, folks.)

The Fighter makes a fascinating contrast technically for all its narrative and spiritual common ground. Where The King's Speech looks and feels carefully designed, its camera moves smooth and graceful as its production design, The Fighter seems to have been caught on the fly just as the HBO documentary about Dickie's crack addiction which dominates the first third of the film has been. (I thought at first that the documentary frame was going to be a guiding narrative device for the entire film, but it is dropped before it wears out its usefulness.) This is clearly a choice, as director David O. Russell's films (I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster) have previously favored more deliberately created imagery.

There is a critical pitfall in such filmmaking, as it invites the viewer to devalue the acting, as it seems to have been part of the reality being captured by the camera. So it was heartening to see Christian Bale and especially Melissa Leo recognized for their work in the form of nominations and awards. Bale's work is the kind of total transformation we expect of his kind of master character actor, to the point that it is hard to remember what his "real" persona is like. But Melissa Leo rose to prominence in roles that were extravagantly deglamorized, most notably her hard-bitten veteran detective on Homicide. Her Alice wishes to be glamorous, to be put together, almost as if to spread a patina over a seamy existence and an exploitative relationship with her own, beloved son. Hopefully this will open new doors for an underrated artist.

Finally, The Fighter constitutes a new entry in the small, but growing sub-genre of films based in Eastern Massachusetts. Many of these are associated with Matt Damon or the Affleck brothers, but this one is not (although Matt Damon was once pencilled in for the Bale role). Two of them, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone are based on the work of the superb novelist Dennis Lehane. It might make sense to examine these films as a coherent sub-genre about a corner of America from which the parade has gone by, perhaps forever, leaving broken dreams and despair, from which the occasional triumph, as in The Fighter, gleams all the brighter.

Fathers and sons

One of the difficulties of being a young artist is that, while your technique is growing and developing rapidly, you are short on original subjects to address. Most young artists haven't lived long enough to have remarkable experiences or insight. This is probably one of the main reasons that early works are derivative, whether being pastiches of, mash-ups or commentary on the work of other artists. In a way, that's just what Citizen Kane is, a fantasia on the genre of newspaper movies and biopics with a flavoring of German expressionism and Gregg Toland Wizardry sprinkled on top. The only other route is to focus on one's own experience, circle of friends and family to an extent and with a level of detail far beyond what is commonly done -- to put life under a microscope to see what turns up.

The Duplass brothers have made a style out of no style, first making their mark with this short, reportedly made with materials and time left over from a larger project:

But of course, there is a style at work here. There is close observation of both the use of language and the obsession with presentation of self. These are both on display in the very warm and funny feature The Puffy Chair (2005). Ordinarily discussion of this film is framed by the so-called "mumblecore" movement, which seems to me no more than ultra lowbudget filmmaking, which, given the personnel, materials and equipment available without money, focuses on close personal and family relationships as revealed in naturalistic dialogue sequences. Really, this is no different than the original American independent film movement as pioneered by the Cassavetes generation. Mumblecore's status as a distinct genre is more a testament to film reviewer's ignorance of the history of the medium than to any real innovation.

But not being innovative does not negate the value of the work; rather it clears away the clutter of superficial considerations of style to the actual piece itself. The Puffy Chair discards the cliche jokes of "my-parent-as-controlling-monsters" or "my-parents-as-culturally-clueless-idiots" or "my-parents-as-deranged-narcissists" (so egregiously on display in the horrid Four Christmases). Josh really wants to get his father a nice present, and is willing to uproot his life, taking an ill-advised road trip to secure this gift. Moreover, the gift is not as advertised, and a great deal of effort and machinations will be necessary to realize Josh's dream of bliss for his pop. I'm not spoiling anything important to say that, happily, Josh comes to realize (via the agency of his dissolute brother Rhett) that this was all his own projection, and had nothing to do with really making his father happy.

The Duplasses and their friends are only adequate improvisers -- you will never get any of the brilliant mots of the typical Christopher Guest movie. Their real strength is as editors. Rarely is a scene stretched past its real value, and judging from the cut scenes on the DVD, they are ruthless about discarding material that does not land or does not contribute. One can't help wishing they would develop more craft in creating and performing material so that they would not have to go down so many blind alleys, but whatever the process, the result is balanced and well-judged. Their best effects are scenes played against people or things which do not change, despite the pleas and cajoling. The hysterical scene pictured above has Josh issuing ultimatums to an implacably closed door, without any evidence of a human behind it.

And The Puffy Chair should go down in film history for having the best, most logical, dramatically right, heartbreaking and perfectly played break-up scene ever. Instead of dramatics, screaming and psychobabble, there is the sincere mutual acknowledgment that these two people do not really share a future. And then there is a tearful embrace, a moment of mourning for a relationship that should have been, but which could not be brought back to life despite heroic measures. It is so beautiful and sweet, that you have to like both members of the now-sundered couple.

This scene comes shortly after a very simple and true father-and-son exchange about how one knows whether a woman is "the woman." (I must acknowledge that I have now been on both sides of that conversation, so it touches a tender place with me.) The cliche would have been to go on to a fumbling but sincere engagement scene. Instead, the film goes in the direct opposite direction and makes us love it, in a way that is original and satisfying.

And despite his denials, Bobby Dupea, as played by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (1970) is also eager to please his father, but unwilling to alter his own path to do so. I don't like to make these blogs too personal, but this film came out when I was a teenager trying to understand adult culture, including books and films, and I was puzzled by the praise for what seemed to me a flat and meandering film, the most famous scene of which, the famous "chicken salad" scene, was completely irrelevant to the film.



For all the originality in conception, the film never establishes a point of view about its protagonist and his choices. It is hard enough for most of us to relate to a guy working an oil rig, and finding out that his family are all pretentious classical musicians doesn't bring him any closer to us. Bobby seems to have escaped from one distant planet to another, and if the alien question wants to be rude, sleep with his sister-in-law or throw a temper tantrum, who cares?

This film was the beginning of Jack Nicholson's Legend as a Great Actor. This has always been mysterious to me. He's occasionally amusing as an eccentric, and he can do regret as in the very fine film The Promise. But his range his narrow and his style is self-regarding and narcissistic. He is the Barbara Streisand of acting: Every Nicholson Performance is about Nicholson Performing. Fooey.

Long story short, the film isn't any more insightful or dramatic to me than it was in 1970. True, it earns some points for avoiding then-contemporary cliches in dramaturgy, borne of theatrical tradition. It boasts greater realism in acting, and a naturalistic shape to the scenes. (The final sequence, in which Bobby disappears into oblivion, feels particularly right.) But it still doesn't say very much about people who are so odd that it is impossible to either feel for them or connect them to our lives. Reviewers describe it as "moody" "thoughtful" and a "study in inner pain" or "fear of the past." So the film is a detailed study of something no well-adjusted person would care about. About as interesting as a highly detailed description of a turd. There are professionals who study such things, but the rest of us can skip it.

What we talk about when we talk about vampires

I think it was Frank Langella's fault. Vampires had been minding their own business, in sort of semi-retirement in the 50s, 60s and 70s, when Bela Lugosi was a campy joke. Then along comes Frank Langella in a Broadway revival of the play version of Dracula in the fall of 1977 and instead of foreign and creepy, he's tall, handsome and seductive. (Don't consult the film version of that production--it's an unfocused mess.)

Soon everybody goes wacky for vampires, especially Anne Rice, who starts making up new rules for vampires and even starts changing the rules. Well, then it was Katy-bar-the-door, anything goes and now we have got vampires walking around in broad daylight being sparkly. Bleeachh! The word vampire has lost any fixed meaning anymore, which might be why people interested in real thrills have migrated over to zombies and werewolves.

In fact the family of mutant redneck vampires in Near Dark (1987). To its credit, its only meant to be fast, cheap fun-genre flick, so there are only three or four things you need to know about Near Dark. First, it's directed by Kathryn Bigelow of Hurt Locker fame, who specializes in stories about people who bond due to their isolation and even ostracism. She can be fearless this way, even daring to make a film about the most disgusting and repellent outcasts in our society, surfers. Second, Near Dark is a festival for those people of the age group to be nostalgic about 80s films. It has the bad hair, bad clothes and bad music that were endemic to the era. There are people who enjoy such things. There are also people who set fire to their pets.

Third, it's one of the earliest films I can remember that suggests that a vampire might be your cool boyfriend. Dracula was never going to be your boyfriend. A hot one-night stand, sure, but never your steady, who lives in the house over the next block. I wonder if Stephanie Meyer, who was 14 when this film came out, wasn't permanently warped by it. Fourth, it is the only vampire movie I know of where somebody got un-vampired. Sure, Mina in Dracula got part-vampired, but they saved her before she went all the way. Adrian Pasdar gets all better, which suggests that vampirism might just be an adolescent phase, curable with a full blood transfusion. (I wonder what other adolescent phases could be cured that way.)

Fifth (did I say there were three or four things?), this is the only film I know of in which Bill Pullman ever does anything interesting in front of a camera. Up until now, I thought he possessed some version of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, since he always seemed to disappear into the scenery behind him with his sheer mind-numbing boringness. But in Near Dark, Pullman is the mean psycho redneck in the family of rednecks, and I must admit it, he chews a pretty impressive serving of scenery. If someone makes a compilation of crazy-guy-wastes-an-entire-bar sequences, they have to include the one from this picture.

The one thing Near Dark is uninterested in is using vampires as a metaphor. They are just straight-on badasses out for a bad time, and willing to share it. Let The Right One In (2008) leans a bit more onto the metaphoric side, but wears it lightly. Where Near Dark is a romp, Let The Right One In is genuinely creepy, and unafraid to deliver one of the best horror-film come-uppances to one of the bully-villains in the history of film. (To those of you who've seen it, I'm talking about the scene in the swimming pool toward the end of the film.)

But there is, admittedly, something more on this film's mind than good clean scares. The characters are adolescent, in the very earliest stages of puberty, and all vampire stories are, to some extent, about fear of sex, and of the surrender that sex seems to require. Here we are as 12-year-olds, finally figuring out just who we are and defining our identity in contrast with the rest of the world, and now we are expected to learn how to merge our self and even our soul into that of our partner. It's not fair!

Also addressed in this film is bullying, parental neglect, wandering gender identity, being a misfit, and just how bleak and awful winter in Sweden is, especially when you live in nasty, cheaply-built, Soviet-bloc style apartments. If it were me, it would be either suicide or vampirism. It's hard to say which would be worse -- being hung upside down from a tree until all your blood runs into a jug or trying to survive the winter. A vampire attack could be sweet relief. Or at least a novelty, something to talk about until April.

It may hearten some people to know in this tough economy that there seems to be a steady position of vampire helper. Some of the story of Let The Right One In has to do with transitioning from one helper to another. A word to the wise -- you might not be gaining a new girlfriend or boyfriend -- they may just be sizing you up to become their new vampire helper. Still, for the boy in the story, it's better than being a Swedish middle schooler. (In once scene a teacher reads aloud to a class of eighth-graders from a book. When she is done, she dismisses them and they leave in a quiet and orderly fashion. There was no bell, the students were all awake and there was no backchatter from them. From this we can conclude that this is not a horror film at all but some kind of fairy-tale fantasy movie from someone's wild imagination.)

I'm kidding a lot, but the film really does cast a wonderful spell and cleverly mingles horror and sexual panic. Special effects are used sparingly but utterly convincingly, especially as we see the effects of a horrific accident with fire and the death of the vampire's first helper. Keep your eyes open during the hospital sequence. The nurse-receptionist walks outside into the winter night and we see her in the foreground and the shadowy face of the hospital in the background. Watch the background, not the foreground, and see one of the niftiest effects in the history of the genre. I stopped the disc and ran it over a few times to enjoy it.

At the end of the film, the principal characters have agreed to go on together, notwithstanding the horrors yet to come. This confirms my feeling that while Peter Pan ends as a horror story, the victim trapped perpetually as an adolescent (although this would not prevent him from running a Fortune 500 company or starting a war in a Middle Eastern country), vampire stories are (or should be) rich and truthful children's tales.

Hard boiled in the cold mountains

Someone call Gaborey Sidibe and tell her that her year's over. This year it is Jennifer Lawrence, and once again a young actress demonstrates tremendous control of her instrument as an artist and performs a thoroughly convincing transformation. The film in question is the starkly poetic Winter's Bone. A mystery of unseen violence and unspoken threat, that despite its settings in the hills of Missouri is as hard-boiled as any tale of the city's mean streets.

This is as tough as film as you'll ever see, and at the center of it a pretty blond girl who could intimidate Lee Ermey with a glance. No, I'm not talking about the sexual intimidation of the attractive woman, but a person who catches and field-dresses her own food, ask any question and stare down a drug kingpin and a bounty hunter with equal, cold quiet ferocity.

That cold quiet is key, too. Because this is not a nostril-flaring, bark-chewing performance. This is a film of reticence, of the unsaid, and Lawrence is nothing if not a master of subtext. The film has been adapted from a book and the writers bemoaned the loss of the heroine's inner voice, which is a literary device. Instead, we have the film analog, the space between the words, a space fraught with tension and meaning for all the effort that has gone in speaking the words and in not speaking others. Michael Caine tells of the time early in his career, when an acting coach asked him what he was doing in a scene in which he had no lines. "Nothing," said the young drama student. "No," said the teacher, "You are thinking of dozens and dozens of brilliant and fascinating things to say, and then...choosing not to say them."

Only here what Ree doesn't say could get her killed. Even then, she won't stop asking questions, questions about her father, the meth lab cook who has disappeared and put the family in jeopardy of losing their home to the bail bondsmen. Like Phillip Marlowe, Ree will not stop asking questions, even if she gets beat up for it. The beating seems like a minor annoyance, no greater an annoyance than getting her beaten face cleaned up.

And as in Chandler (creator of Marlowe), some of the dialogue is terse modern poetry: "Never ask for what ought to be offered." To a threatening policeman, with whom the speaker has a history: "Is this going to be our time?" "I done told you to shut up once with my mouth." “I couldn’t live without the weight of the both of you on my back”

And there is the more vivid poetry of the music. There is an underscore, and it is understated, considering some of the gothic horrors at hand. But more memorable is the foreground old-timey music, much of it performed onscreen. And I have to admit, I am always a sucker for the old tune, "Tiny Sparrow." Best old-timey music since Brother Where Art Thou. Best of all, it's not pushed on us, nor forced to comment on the story or point up tortured ironies. It just sidles up and gives a context as thoroughly as the hand-made porch the family sits on in the final, satisfying scene.

There is a lot of hooey in the internet about how authentic the film may or may not be. Suffice it to say that the novelist is happy with the film, so everyone else can shut up. Besides, it's not about how accurately the Ozarks are depicted. It's not a documentary on crystal meth or country life or anything else. The setting is rather abstracted, frankly, and that's as it should be, because the narrative has been boiled down to absolute essentials, and the details are for anthropologists. The story is almost Shakespearean -- the forsaken child seeking to reclaim a legacy and take responsibility for the continuation of the line. If Jessup was a wayward king who'd died in battle without a plan of succession, rather than a criminal trying to save his own butt, the conclusion of the story wouldn't be much different. (Yes, obviously the atmosphere is different, but that's just for variety.) If anything, the story feels like a dark fairy-tale, a feeling only intensified by the talisman which is dredged up from a near-frozen pond, a talisman which, having been retrieved by passing through great trials and hardships, solves the heroine's problems and gives her some measure of peace.

Besides Lawrence, John Hawkes and Dale Dickey are going to be cited for acting honors. (Dickey is playing the obverse side of the comic toothless hick she plays on shows like My Name is Earl, and without a trace of detachment or condescension.) The film is nominated for 7 Independent Spirit Awards as I write this, and I am willing to bet that Lawrence and the screenwriters will be remembered in the Oscar nominations. But that is all extrinsic to the movie, which does what movies do so well, putting together pictures of people-- by themselves and against a landscape -- people talking to, listening to and looking at each other and turning that into an absorbing and compelling story.