Story circle

Believe it or not, this scene is before Shirley MacLaine's character dies.

Richard Linklater's Bernie (2012), enjoyable as it is --and it is enjoyable-- straddles contradictory conventions of genre in a way that feels unfairly confusing, at least in the immediate aftermath of viewing the film.

Some reviewers have made comparisons to the Coen brothers, presumably because of the quirky characters, the wide streak of black comedy with shads of slapstick and the small town setting.  But the film takes more from the book of Erroll Morris, especially Vernon Florida and Gates of Heaven, which consist almost entirely of old people taking in wide-angle close-up.  As Bernie begins to unspool, one assumes that Linklater has found local Texas actors who fit his vision and style and deftly give the illusion of speaking spontaneously as part of the dramatic convention of "based on a true story."

But the film's actual words are "What you're fixin' to see is a true story."  Not based on-- true.  And not "going to see" but "fixin' to see."  So the tone is set -- playful country, in fact kidding the very idea of country.    So is it true or not?  Well, it is, in that "fixin' to see" kind of way.  True with a little topspin.

Because to me, at least, it was not clear exactly how close Bernie stuck to the known facts until the end of the film, when we see the real Bernie and his erstwhile lady companion.  That conclusion raises the suggestion that the interviewees were the real people who knew the real Bernie.  Did they even know they were in a Jack Black movie?  A Pirandellian effect begins to spin out of the last few minutes of the film that research makes difficult to resolve.  (Most of the on-camera interviewees are indeed actors with substantial regional resumes.)

Perhaps confusing the issue is that Jack Black does a real acting job for perhaps the first time, at least in my filmgoing experience.  This character is not even a variation of The Jack Black Character, but developed from the real materials, just like with a real actor.  Yet his beautiful clear singing voice places a level of reality under the artifice that blurs the question evn more.

And although interviews Linklater has given have revealed that the film was shot digitally, to my eyes, at least from the print showing in our somewhat run-down neighborhood house, the film looks quite grainy, almost as if the entire thing had been shot 20 years ago around the time of Linklater's Dazed and Confused, with an unstable and washed-out palette.  (I look forward to seeing it on disc to see just how rough Linklater wanted the image to look.)

I guess your mom would say we're not laughing at the people of Carthage, Texas, we're laughing with them.  But I have to say, enjoyable as the film is, the rules are not always clear.

Under my head

A passel of young'uns snapping their whippers

As far as I can tell, the 2011 remake of Footloose is a pretty good for what it's meant to be, an excuse for tweeners to get out of the house and dream about how exciting it will be to be in high school.  (This sort of fantasy is always accomplished with the help of 27-year-old actors pretending to be 17.)  It is competently put together, with some moments of visual excitement which may be attributable to the skills of director Craig Brewer, who has made much more challenging films prior hereto (Hustle and Flowand Balck Snake Moan).  I am sure this was driven both by the paycheck and genuine affection for the original 1984 film, an affection I cannot feel, as I was already too old for the first film when that one came out.

Yet I see many films for which I am not the target demo, yet they reach me in some way.  I didn't mind Footloose, I didn't dislike it, yet I find it difficult to write anything about it because it felt like just a bunch of bits of film edited together so they would last an hour-and-three-quarters.  Nothing specific was communicated to me.  I know that was just me-- the film inspired both pleasure and displeasure from many, but I just felt a pleasant numbness.

What makes a film land or not land for any individual viewer?  I could say that I think the whole premise is phony and artificial -- that towns don't outlaw dancing, although specific religious sects do.  Director-co-writer Brewer tried to increase the plausibility factor by putting the fatal accident that triggers the repression at the front of the film (after a quite energetic title sequence), but a film like this is not meant to be believability, and such things almost damage the film.  I'm reminded of films that Laurel and Hardy made in the 1940s at the major studios, rather than the independent Hal Roach studio where they had done their best work.  The studios changed their make-up and lighting to be more natural and beelievable, and in the process destroyed much of what was charming about Laurel and Hardy.  They were always strange and fantastical characters, and to put them in the real world revealed them as aging, overweight men who seemed to be so simple that they should have been under medical supervision.  No longer golden fools dancing in the moonlight, they were old and pathetic.

Moreover, the film is not a musical.  Musicals I like.  Musicals I understand.  They have a special grammar and logic that appeals to me and bypasses the rational mind.  But Footloose wants to be rational.  The key, turning point scene consists of the villain and the hero making speeches.  Not singing, not dancing, but talking.  Talking about dancing.  But talking about dancing is not dancing.  This is an out-and-out confession that the filmmakers do not know how to make dance dramatic, or indeed even narrative.  Instead, dancing is appliqued onto a story of generation clash, and the same script could be used (and doubtless will be) for tagging, skateboarding or hang-gliding or whatever those wild kids want to get up to.  It would be unsurprising to see Tuesday Weld show up as a troubled teen.  In any event, the film is a romantic melodrama with comedy overtones and a lot of footage of young people dancing.  But not a musical.

The dancing, need I point out with overmuch emphasis (as Peter Cook said), is devoid of narrative content.  The boys and girls dance because they want to dance, because they are young, and because both in movies and the real world, dancing is a socially acceptable form of public foreplay -- almost communal foreplay.  Consequently, the single best sequence in the film is the "Let's Hear It For The Boy" montage in which the non-dancing comical sidekick gradually learns to dance, and with attitude and style.  That sequence alone gives me hope that Mr. Brewer will stop his flirtation with music and make a real full-out musical someday. 

Thus I think the best audience for this film are groups of happy 8 and 9 year olds watching the movie in large basement rec rooms watching the screen and aping the dance steps as they go along, although I shudder to think of the kiddie hip grinding that is likely to ensue.  Maybe the film should be issued in a karaoke dancealong version.

Ultimately the point is that there is no point in reading anything anyone writes about Footloose.  Because it is called Footloose, the name of a 1984 film, you know almost exactly what this is and you are capable of deciding whether you will like it or not, based on that fact.  That it is decent and professional is gratifying, but irrelevant, and people like me are irrelevant as spectators.

I hope it earns Mr. Brewer the privilege of making something closer to the heart -- his and mine.

McCarthy pulls the hat trick

With Win Win (2011) co-writer-director Tom McCarthy has pulled the filmmaking hat trick and dodged the sophomore, or any other slump. If he decides to release home videos of his cat next year, I will go.



As has been my habit recently, a few disconnected observations:



Paul Giamatti is especially good at two modes: the guy who is already exasperated at what you're about to say -- he uses that for his villains and for John Adams; and the guy who knows he's going to be found out, and that it's too late to do anything but wait for it all to come down on him. He employs the latter in Win Win.



I am prejudiced toward any movie not set in New York, Los Angeles or shot in Toronto or Vancouver pretending to be New York or Los Angeles. By the way, I've seen a number of films set in Montreal, but has there ever been a film shot in Toronto which was set in Toronto? Anyway, it made me said that Long Island had to stand in for New Jersey. Still, there's a way that our houses and streets are set in this part of country that we don't generally see in the movies, something that almost screams, "this is not a movie, this is really happening." I know it isn't, but I like the illusion that it is.

McCarthy has achieved the rare accomplishment of placing a "gun in the drawer in the first act" and never pulling it out again, in violation of all conventions of play- and screenwriting. I refer to the threatening furnance in the basement. Maybe it should have its own movie (a horror film, of course).

I'm in favor of more films about high school wrestling. The more we can divorce wrestling from the trashmouth vaudeville they have on TV, the better. But it makes no sense that the leading character, played by Alex Shaffer, an excellent wrestler who plays an excellent wrestler, claims to wrestle as if he were escaping something that was trapping him. Surely only us bad wrestlers (which includes me and the co-authors of the script of Win Win) felt that way. Good wrestlers seem to float over the surface of their opponents, as does Shaffer in this film.



Non-actors like Shaffer can only work on film next to great actors like Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan. A non-actor working alongside actors awash in artificial technique would seem too small, too understated and subject to criticism for not acting. But put an actor next to a Giamatti and the understatement will blend in seamlessly.



I can't wait for the doctoral theses soon to be produced about the "McCarthy trilogy." I just hope Mr. McCarthy never reads any of them.

Gilligan's Dilemma, or why all the clam diggers?

In the post just below this, I mentioned Westerns that take place in confined spaces. Confined spaces are things characters want to get out of. In a thriller, it's in order to save their life. In a comedy, it's in order to save their sanity.

A couple of contemporary films investigate the comfort, security and smothering quality of living one's life in anchored to one spot. (Both also involve clam digging communities in the greater New York area.) City Island (2009) is so tightly limited, it would easily fit on an off-Broadway stage. (No, it's not that it's stuck in one room, but that the passions of the characters would be right at home in the theater.) As in many a farce, every character has a secret, a secret that puts them in conflict with the small-town ethos of City Island, New York. Dreams of being an actor, of smoking, stripping and considering infidelity are all deeply suppressed until they explode in a theatrical-style all-out confrontation, illustrated above.

The film has proven an audience hit, and deservedly so, especially for a strangely charming scene in which prison guard Andy Garcia auditions for a Martin Scorsese film by improvising a scene he might have witnessed at work. Maybe it's because we would love to think films succeed by the intrusion of little shards of reality. (A doubtful prospect.) The odd thing is that the film starts off by setting out a great deal of detail about the uniqueness of the setting and the proceeds to ignore those specific unique qualities in favor of treating it as any isolated small-town-type community. The people seem more quirky than the setting, what there is of it. What I'm trying to say is it's hard to say whether this family is meant to be eccentrics or typical of City Island, since all we know about it is that they fish and that some are born City Islanders and others have City Islander-ness thrust upon them.

So it's odd that this film is far more effective than the similarly-themed Diggers (2007), even though the latter film has embedded the characteristics of its setting into the character's DNA. Insularity, "us against them" mentality, "this is the way it's always been" thinking--these are built into the story and situations in Diggers, whereas City Island's characters seem to have had their quirks appliqued onto them after the fact. Nonetheless, or perhaps, because of that, City Island moves along in a purposeful manner, whereas there are dozens of scenes in which seem to lack any point or purpose in the film. They don't provide new information on characters, move the story forward or develop what little theme there is. Diggers seems to have been designed as an acting fest for the pals of writer-actor Ken Marino (late of The State), including Paul Rudd, Maura Tierney, Marino, Sarah Paulson (uncharacteristically as a put-upon mom), Ken Marino and Lauren Ambrose.

As if aping the lives of the characters, the movie ambles around in various brackish backwaters, not headed anywhere and therefore not arriving anywhere. I do have to say they have meticulously recreated the wardrobes of the mid-70s, my college days, which were probably the low point in style for the entire 20th century. It was as if Watergate had so demoralized all of us that we figured, "what the hell, we'll just wear cheap ugly crap until we cheer up."

I suspect both films were made not because of a burning desire to tell these stories, but from a burning desire to get a feature film made and develop a calling card for a feature career. There's no reason for us civilians to linger over them. Next.

Music for the deaf

There are a lot of good things in the film version of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1968) some of which I'll get to, but perhaps the most significant is right up front, when the Warner Bros. - 7 Arts logo begins the credits. The film dates back to the long-forgotten days when the major distributors were still interested in making good films, no matter their size, and no matter if they weren't necessarily Oscar-bait.

It's based on a novel by Carson McCullers, who is best remembered today for Member of the Wedding, due to both the fine film version and the continuing life of the play in the theater. Like Member, but instead of an innocent girl, it is a deaf-mute men who manages to touch the lives of everyone around him without really being known himself. There is also a young girl (presumably a surrogate for McCullers), who finally makes a connection with John Singer (ironic name, that), played sensitively by Sondra Locke, an actress who never impressed me otherwise, here making her film debut.

Alan Arkin's portrayal of Singer demonstrates his usual total absorption and complete lack of narcissism as an actor. It speaks well of American film that he was a movie star for a while, and is still a dean of acting. For a character who must indicate his thoughts, he never indicates his performance. I have to admit a personal satisfaction with the performance of kiddie show host Chuck McCann as the town's other deaf-mute, who, despite his limited mental capacity, has become a brother to Singer.

A few things to celebrate in the film: the eminently practical music of Dave Grusin. By practical, I mean that each music cue has a clearly defined function, moving us from place to place, whether literally or in terms of character. So much instrumental film music is poured over a movie like syrup, drowning everything in its wake, especially clear emotions and transitions. Another is the unfussy depiction a self-acknowledged, unrepentant drunk with a streak of chivalry by Stacy Keach, Jr. (His father was still working in those days--he can be seen as a scientist on Get Smart.) And another is the offbeat casting of Cicely Tyson, who quickly became a Noble Self-Sacrificing Black Woman, but here is an impulsive, loving, sometimes self-absorbed, hot-headed but generous girl on the way to becoming a woman.

And then there is this marvelous cross-fade. We don't see cross-fades in movies much anymore. They used to represent a passage of time and were very useful, especially for giving the audience time to breathe and reflect, something they're not called to do anymore. The one I'm thinking of begins with one of those lightboxes doctors use to read X-ray photos. The X-ray photo in question shows that the one doctor in town who will serve blacks will soon be dead. The image of the bones and organs and that ominous black dot dissolve into a strange organic fretwork which gradually becomes green with sunlight pouring through, and we see that it is the underside of the canopy of a large tree, probably an oak, and the camera tilts down to begin the next scene. If you can picture that rhythmic device in your mind, you can begin to conjure this film from a time which has disappeared about another time before, also long gone.