Anderson in the ascendant

It will be difficult to write anything new about Moonrise Kingdom (2012).  It's the kind of film that makes people who want to write about film want to write about it.  I will try to make my own observations, but it is unlikely that they will be unique to me.

The signature Anderson shot is what I call the Dollhouse shot, in which Anderson's camera roams through divided spaces to show how they are connected (and how they are on a set, which has an anti-realistic effect).  I first noticed it in Life Aquatic, and Mr. Fox is full of them.  But Moonrise Kingdom begins with one. (The picture on the right is a set photo from this sequence.  It is really a photo, though when reproduced in a small size it really looks a Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post.) I am reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock found it necessary to put his own cameo earlier and earlier in the film so as to get it over with and leave fans undistracted to follow the film.  In Moonrise Kingdom it may have the same function, as well as being a somewhat defiant setting of tone.  "This IS a Wes Anderson film!  You know what that means, and I'm not going to apologize for it."

It is a little appalling to see so many critics jump on Mr. Anderson for having a distinct style.  That doesn't seem to bother them with Hemingway or Faulkner or Dickens or Flannery O'Connor or Raymond Carver.  It doesn't bother them with Hitchcock or Welles or even Spielberg, who has a very particular way of using his camera.  But because Anderson uses conventions from other media, including the fine arts, illustration and the theater, the critics are all jumping up and down and turning blue!  How dare he have a distinctive voice!  All the really good directors are anonymous journeyman utterly without any element of personal expression.

There is a reason critics get excited this way.  They are all Salieris.  Third-rate uncreative nonentities, fully aware that the subject of their scribblings will far outlast those scribblings.  They are also mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons.

From this categorization I separate the valuable journalists and historians who deal in fact, like David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.  These are the kind of film writers who literally count frames.  Some writer who is obsessive in just that way should tell us if Wes Anderson has ever done a push-in with his camera.  The camera always seems to move laterally, and when there is movement in depth it seems to progress in a straight line from the horizon line toward the viewer.  There are no diagonals in Andersonland, and there are no dolly movements in towards the actors.  Too emphatic, perhaps?  Or maybe the Coen Brothers used up the quota of push-ins before Mr. Anderson could get to them.

Two things Anderson gets right that few filmmakers do.  One is very early love.  There is a wonderful mix of narcissistic unawareness of one's actions and their possible consequences and self-conscious detachment in that first fine fall into passion.  At the same time a person is engaged in headlong and reckless acts to pursue the object of passion, one is also aware that First Love is a landmark in one's life and should be observed and considered.  And one can't help wondering if one is doing it right.  Anderson and his young actors get that spot on, doing insane things and analyzing them in an overly sane way.

The other thing is the 1960s.  Most filmmakers visiting the 1960s seem to believe that 1968-1973 was when the 60s took place.  Mad Men has corrected this impression to a great extent, and yet the tone is still off in many cases.  Few things evoke the 1960s so well as the battery-operated phonograph playing a 7" 33 RPM single from Europe, and the single is by a name forgotten to all but a few of us over 50, Francoise Hardy.  That is not an exercise in obscurity, but in precision.  Also, I can't help but be delighted to hear Leonard Bernstein's recording of The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra with narration read by young Henry Chapin (plus a snippet of Carnival of the Animals), a recording my son used regularly to fall asleep to during one early phase of his life.

[On the other hand, I have to admit to being embarrassed that, as a big fan of Benjamin Britten, I was unfamiliar with Noye's Fludde, the excerpts of which sounded wonderful.  Also, it looked great in the film.  Here's a picture of it on the right. I have resolved to hunt a recording of that work down.  Britten also provides the best underscoring cue in the film, a string pizzicato melody from the Simple Symphony, another piece unfamiliar to me.  Seriously, I know a lot of Britten's work very well, but he was quite prolific.]

Noyes Fludde reinforces the film's mythic and fable-like qualities.  To the critics who find this arch, I would direct them to Homer and the Bible and see if those aren't a little non-realistic as well.

Also assisting the period feeling of Moonrise, there's the color. At least in the print I saw, the film looked as though it had been shot in the 1960s on Ansco Color which had since gone a bit green.  Hard to say why, but it helped.

We didn't realize it 15 or 20 years ago, but what cinema needed was more Bob Balaban.  Glad to see Anderson doing his part to correct this problem, and made him omniscient, as is only right and proper.

Is this the first major commerical feature shot made entirely in Rhode Island?  Having summered in Maine throughout my childhood, I can't tell you how familiar and comfortable much of the film looked.  It is the cramped shabbiness preferred by members of the meritocracy.  (See also On Golden Pond.)

Here is a very nice video about Britten's opera I found at the website of Focus Films, distributor of Moonrise Kingdom.  It is quite engaging and I hope it makes up for this very dull post about a very lively movie, which you should see especially if you have ever been in love, or a child or outdoors in the rain.

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.

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.

Side by side by 'Scope

Here it is September, and I'm still catching up with the last few Academy nominees for last year; specifically Mike Leigh's Another Year (2010), which was nominated for screenplay, which is ironic given Mr. Leigh's modus. Reportedly, he works with a group of actors around some characters and themes he is interested in. After a few months of improvisation, he goes away and writes a complete script based on that work. So in a way, Mr. Leigh partakes of a committee-type writing procedure, even within an Art tradition.

A few disjointed observations. The critical consensus was that this film was about class. Perhaps that is a British perspective, because I don't see a disparity in income as synonymous with membership in a different class. One can be part of the managerial-professional class without being particularly well-heeled. Class is substantially, if not primarily, a matter of self-identification. And the major characters in this film are all middle-class in outlook, even if some of them are skint. There are no laborers and no aristocrats to be found.

The film is not so much about the unequal distribution of money so much as it is about the unequal distribution of happiness and how people choose to deal with it. Some writers have found the central couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen to be smug and self-satisfied, whereas I think they are simply comfortable with themselves, a trait many people are not familiar with, and therefore find strange.

But to my mind, the film is structurally flawed at its heart, perhaps due to the quality of those afore-mentioned improvisations. It seems as though the film was meant to be an ensemble piece, not perhaps full-on Altmanesque, but a widely distributed set of storylines revolving around a theme, rather than the usual toolbox of suspense and melodrama. But Leslie Manville's Mary (seen in the clip) above and her desperation to belong and to be loved hijacks the film, sucking the energy out of every other corner of the film. This includes the sequence that should have been the highlight, wherein Broadbent goes to help his older brother bury the brother's wife, a procedure interrupted by a bitter, estranged son. But the incident feels isolated and without resonance, and Broadbent's brother becomes significant to the film only because of his brief awkward scene with Manville. Even Broadbent struggles to remain at the center of what was supposed to be his own vehicle.

I love Cinemascope ratio, described variously as 2.35, 2.39 and 2.40. Doesn't matter much. It seems to me to be made to show two or even three people sitting side by side. Academy ratio is for isolated stars, or perhaps two stars in tight embrace. But 'Scope lets you see the space between people (or the lack thereof) and seems to me to be far more useful in storytelling. Throughout this film, Mary wants to be close to people who don't want to be close to her, and vice versa and 'Scope is the perfect vehicle for this trope.

One odd thing about Leigh's technique -- given that it is actor-based, one would expect long, uninterrupted takes. But I was not aware of long takes or gaps between cuts. Everything proceeds along relatively conventional lines. And thankfully Leigh does not indulge in the usual practice of American character-based filmmakers -- the long static shot of a character doing nothing. I never know what to do during those. They seem embarrassing. Leigh keeps his comedy of embarrassment on screen, among the characters, rather than between the characters and the audience. It's all part of being British, I suppose.

The romance of work

The workplace romance has become an established sub-genre of romantic comedy, so established that Morning Glory (2010) jettisons the usual question of will-the-guy-like-me-if-I'm-too-obsessed-with-work which dominated forerunners like Broadcast News. It takes place in a realistic world in which the men and women all accept that you have to be obsessed and work like a demon just to hold onto jobs in television network news. The romance is deeper and more complex in this case -- it's partly the romance of getting and keeping the job (as in the same writer's The Devil Wears Prada), but it is also the romance of obtaining the approval, and ultimately the love of a withholding and difficult substitute father-slash-mentor who has helped this woman define herself. Yes, the movie is light and funny, even laugh-out-loud funny, but the platonic romance between Rachel McAdams's young producer and Harrison Ford's disapproving anachronistic journalist sends the movie in a much more interesting journey than the usual snare-the-cute-guy chick flick.

There's a lot to like about the film. Having briefly sojourned in this field a few times I liked seeing how small, shabby and in need of paint most broadcast facilities are, how exciting walking around midtown New York can be, how obsessively people can stare at charts of numbers that are alleged to tell them important things about their jobs (this can apply to almost every field of work). I liked the mistakes they didn't make -- the heroine's boyfriend has no problem with the fact that she works hard. He's part of the same world. And they skipped having her boss (Jeff Goldblum) or Harrison Ford hit on her. Hurrah. They skipped making a fool out of Diane Keaton, the long-suffering co-anchor of the troubled broadcast. I can only recall one montage -- the obligatory show-is-becoming-a-success sequence, so that device was not overdone. Nor was there an attempt to shoehorn a song in over a falling-in-love sequence.

Two minor stumbles -- the "entertainment vs. news" argument is repeated a few too many times, especially since, as Rachel McAdams's character points out, the war is over and entertainment won. And the solution to the central problem of the story, bridging the gap between McAdams's and Ford's characters and their attitudes toward broadcasting is blindingly obvious, but nonetheless takes weeks of elapsed time and almost an hour of movie time to arrive out. On the other hand, the ultimate pay-off, the manner in which Ford reaches out to McAdams, the skill and warmth with which it is delivered and edited on film, is terrifically satisfying, and makes a possibly implausible ending plausible.

Most enjoyable of all -- the real-life director of Saturday Night Live, Don Roy King, appears as the director of Daybreak, literally conducting the broadcast like Stokowski, with a grace and graciousness that makes one appreciate how miraculous daily live television is.

Paris, actually

Paris (2008) feels like another attempt to employ the Love Actually template to tell parallel stories which will converge, at least spiritually, if not in fact. In this case the hub is Paris rather than love, but both films are about battling loneliness.

The model might go back farther, to Grand Hotel, with its doomed petty clerk going to spend the time and money he has left in Berlin. In this case, a dying dancer feels himself withdrawing from the world, yet the world keeps rubbing up against him, and the people of it against each other. I suppose only a Parisian would anchor such a film to terminal illness; this is not Funny Face or Amelee, but finally there are some chance connections that make baby steps toward something more substantial.

The music is Satie, and that seems just right. Serious, reflective, but not heavy or dramatic. The professor who ambles into a foolish affair is given too much time to pontificate about French history--that point could be made much more quickly. There is that Parisian rarity--snow. Juliette Binoche is allowed to look a tired, lonely and bedraggled mother of two small children--a shocking misuse of a great natural resource. And one half-hour from the end there is an enchanting, if somewhat artificial, interlude that reminds one of a scene from Fellini, as fashionistas invade the wholesale meat market just before dawn to tease and flirt with the big strong men who haul and butcher meat. There seems to be some kind of liberation that comes with that early/late hour, and the film breaks free of its straightforward editing style and begins to skip and lark about a bit.

I appreciate that all the characters do not perfectly intersect in a marvelous complex culmination that is a glory of the screenwriters art, but has nothing to do with life as lived on this planet. Still, after all, our observing and observant central character draws no conclusions from all the dramas that pass by his windows, and we never learns if he lives or dies. C'est la vie.

Everybody get off here

As best I can tell, novelist James Parini and film writer-director Michael Hoffman intended The Last Station (2009) to be an investigation of how people maintain long and often difficult marriages. It is meant to be a paean to enduring love. Unfortunately it is as packed with useless clutter as a 19th-century dacha which cloud the virtues of the project.

First, they confuse the audience by casting James McAvoy to play the same role he played in The Last King of Scotland, goggle-eyed witness to the eccentricities of the celebrated. In order to give him an actual role, they concoct a 20th-century woman for him to fall in love with, then whisk her offstage, failing to disguise what an empty story line she represents. Then Hoffman cast, in the place of two thoughtful complicated people, two of the biggest theatrical hambones on the planet. Mind you, I think they are wonderful actors, but subtle they ain't.

Christopher Plummer plays Tolstoy as if he were looking for a proscenium to climb and some scenery to chew on, and Helen Mirren's character alternates between being an overprivileged whiner, an elderly paranoid crackpot, and a sex-crazed lady of a certain age who thinks she's still 16, especially when she jumps in the lake because she's not getting enough attention. Moreover, Tolstoy does not appear to be a great novelist but an old-time barnstorming actor, and the Countess was his manager. The Tolstoyans thus come off not as ascetics but groupies. The fine and often subtle Paul Giammati has been called upon to make a grumpy infant face and pound his fist on the table a lot. The whole thing looks as if the cast had slipped from the director's control, which, given his mediocre track record (Restoration, One Fine Day and the worst version of Midsummer's Night Dream on film, and that includes the one with Mickey Rooney).

The one commendable aspect is the physical production, largely due to being so low budget, which forced shooting in East Germany, and the use of pre-existing theater costumes rather than new built. Everything looks a bit lived-in, as is right and proper.

The final encounter, the title event of the piece, is expressly designed to short-circuit dramatic confrontation. This famous man decides to run away until he gets sick; his momentarily-estranged wife follows, and do they have a tender reconciliation? No, because history must be observed, and Tolstoy was too sick to really talk with his wife or understand much of what was going on. He dies (and oh, by the way, for no good reason, McAvoy's randy girlfriend pops up again to cheer him up).

If they hadn't been stuck with Tolstoy, they might have invented a tempestuous older couple with plenty of sturm and drang in their relationship, and they would have had the freedom to resolve their story any way they liked. Instead, they serve up this tepid porridge slathered over with outrageous overacting, which is the perfect recipe for the middlebrow cultural snob hit.

Too bad, because the theme of maintaining love between two strong people over 50 or 60 years is an excellent subject, and I hope somebody does make a good movie about that some day.