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.)

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.

Don't nobody know how to tell a story no more?

Maybe it's better to look at Source Code (2011) as a great little trainbound "B" movie like the original Narrow Margin, because it effectively ends at about the 70-minute mark. Hero Jack Gyllenhall solves the mystery, foils and captures the villain and saves Chicago. (Hope that's not a spoiler for anybody, but do you really think a little movie like this had the guts to destroy a major American city? It's released by Summit, for heaven's sake. It takes a Paramount or Disney to destroy major real estate.
Seriously, and I do mean seriously, screenwriter Ben Ripley, whose first produced screenplay this is after 16 years in the business, and Duncan Jones, who made the similarly and more successfully claustrophobic Moon, have thing they want to say about love, identity and indeed what it is to be human. Problem is, they never really signalled us that this was the way they were going to go. We signed on for a popcorn roller coaster ride, not a meditation on mortality, and the solution to the mystery of why what starts as a cracking good thriller, Groundhog Day On A Train With A Bomb only grossed $54 million is answered by the 20-minute appendix, which even on its own terms makes no sense.

You see, Jake Gyllenhall is inhabiting another guy's body. Not really, because it's all some of kind of simulation-that's-not-a-simulation kind of thing. Anyway, to "the girl" he looks like some other guy she knows only slightly, but inside he's Mr. JG. And she falls in love with that hybrid guy in 8 minutes, and they will spend eternity together in simulated-Chicago-heaven. Really, there's nobody that can explain this higgledy piggledy ending. I'm sure they think it's profound and something out of The Twilight Zone but it's just ill-conceived, poorly executed and made no sense to begin with.

Here's the deal -- you gotta dance with the guy what brung ya. Walk in a thriller -- you can do some awesome non-thriller stuff, meaning of life and all that stuff -- but you have to keep the thrills going right to the end, or you're going to get a reputation, and not a good one.

Another case in point, Rango (2011). Of course the big question here is just who this movie was made for, other than Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski's friends. For one thing, much of its time is taken up with a parody of both classical and spaghetti Westerns. Yeah, that's what Westerns need, a good kidding. First of all, nobody's ever done it before. Second, it's such a robust and popular genre today. I can't wait for Mr. Verbinski's scorching take-off on silent German mountain movies, and then a hot rip on Ruth Chatterton, whose popularity waned around 1932. That'll be a hoot!

As if that was not enough of an entertainment treat, the movie can't even decide what its story is. There is a rule that movies need to make a promise to the audience within the first ten minutes, narratively-speaking. Rango not only doesn't promise, it's still being coy and hinty past the 20-minute mark. This was bad enough in the 3rd Pirates movie (I wasn't masochistic enough to see the 4th) when Johnny D wandered around in a white void for 20 or 25 minutes for no apparent reason. I remember there was a lizard in that, too.

But animation is best when it is most efficient. Rango is positively roccoco. At one point, the characters all got on their birds and began to ride (they're too small to ride horses) and before they got where they were going, so many things happened I couldn't remember what their intended destination and purpose was. Clearly, this movie was intended for 82-year-old teenage boys, who can still get excited about things but can't remember what or why.

Johnny Depp is, however, a terrific voice actor, and that is part of the problem. He doesn't settle on a voice we can identify as the hero of the story. It's OK for Robin Williams as the Genie, to scramble through all his canned impressions of extinct celebrities. You're not rooting for the Genie (at least not much). But Rango is supposed to be the center of the story and I know he's a chameleon, but the film doesn't even make that fact interesting or endearing.

The curious thing is that Rango is funny all the way through. My wife and I laughed consistently in nearly every scene. There was always a clever reference, an hilarious non-sequitur, a peculiar bit of characterization. But nothing amounted to anything, nothing added up, and the stakes never seemed to matter (although we were talking about water, which means survival, nobody seemed committed to anything more than the next joke). It's like sitting down to a meal and then eating a whole bag of potato chips. (Not as if I've ever actually done that. I'm just imagining what it would be like, you see.) Lord, knows them chips is tasty but when you're done you feel oogy and sick and bloated and your body is still craving nutrition, just as your mind will crave an actual story after 107 (!!!) minutes of Rango.

How did these herrings get so red?

Unknown (2011) is another Liam-Neeson-running-around-a-European-city potboiler, so there is little to say about it with regard to film aesthetics or history. Just a few observations, then.

This film and X Men: First Class present conclusive proof that January Jones can't act. She has a petulant childish presence that works for her role on Mad Men, but nothing else to offer as an actor. She doesn't even move well, as you might expect of a former model. Can we throw the towel in on her?

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, who made a similarly botched and derivative horror film, Orphan, has a bad habit of shooting and editing ordinary events into little bitsy shots evidently intended to ramp up the suspense when what is happening on the screen is not and should not be a subject of suspense. Case in point - a baddy slides down the fire ladder from the roof down to the ground. It is presented in three separate cuts as if there was some question as to whether he would reach the ground, or perhaps suggesting that a surprise awaited him at the bottom. But no. He hits the ground and runs away. In fact, once he had left the roof, there is no reason whatsoever for the film to stay with him.

The whole film is a festival of red herrings, which do not serve as clever misdirection, but merely annoying clutter and lack of focus. The film huffs and puffs for a long time about the recovery of a briefcase which doesn't affect the story in the least.

The story turns mostly on Liam Neeson not being who he says (and thinks) he is. It takes him a really long time. About a minute into a really good but violent and destructive car chase through Berlin, replete with fancy stunt driving, I figured out that Neeson was not really a botanist. He didn't find out for another 15 or 20 minutes.

There is one moment of really good production design -- a cat and mouse scene in an art gallery filled with life-size photo portraits. Hitchcock would have known how to use the contrast between the real people and the images of people and the idea that the characters are presenting false images of themselves. Collet-Serra fumbles it.

Also, a filmmaker should have more respect for Frank Langella. He shows up, has a too-short scene with Bruno Ganz, delivers some information, half of which we had guessed, and then dies. That's a waste. You could get Dylan Baker or somebody to do that.

One innovation. You know that cliche where someone is trying to defuse a bomb, racing against time as the readout counts backward? And you know how they always finally succeed at the last moment? They don't do that here. It's almost worth seeing the whole movie.

Who let the monsters in?

Back when I wrote about Let The Right One In, the Swedish vampire movie, I noted that it had an American remake, called Let Me In (2010). The good news is that the story has not been Spielbergified or otherwise translated into standard Hollywood tropes. The director found a cold and isolated analogue to the claustrophobic Nordic winter of the original. A few things are done better, a few done not so well. My favorite scares seemed to be not quite as good, due to changes in camera placement and cutting, but it may be that since I knew they were coming, I was inured to their shock value. (Specifically, they are the hospital facade scene and the final encounter in the pool.)

The film makes good use of CGI, especially in one sequence in which the protagonist retaliates on some bullies. In the past, such a sequence would have to use misdirection, clever staging and tricky editing to cover up the necessity of not actually injuring one's actors. Now CGI permits such a scene of personal violence to be handled in a straightforward fashion.

On the other hand, director Matt Reeves, the near-genius responsible for Cloverfield demonstrates a Spielbergian flair for a bravura sequence of everyday terror, namely a car crash, using a spectacular mix of real footage, green screen, CGI and composites thereof. Here it is:



And here's a "making of" sequence that explains how it was done:




The best news is that both films are currently available on Netflix Streaming, so you can do a side-by-side comparison. There are many worse ways to spend an evening.

My biggest misgiving about the remake is the title, which, coupled with the poster art, suggests words spoken by a potential victim, rather than the words of the vampire, who, according to standard lore, must be invited into a room.

But that somewhat misleading title puts me in mind of the only entirely worthwhile sequence in the lesser Val Lewton film, The Leopard Man (1943). The film shoots itself in the foot, horror-wise when it introduces the title leopard in the first sequence in such a way as to be no scarier than "Baby" in Bringing Up Baby. Then it meanders around with a dull detective plot for a long time.

The sterling exception is this sequence in which a young girl is sent out on a simple errand by her mother. It has been set up that she is rather fanciful and her mother rather impatient. This Youtube poster has put a number of shots together which in the film are distributed over a longer sequence, but it is useful to see this thread isolated from the other parts of the film. The climax in this clip, consisting of offscreen action, ranks among the top five fright sequences in the history of film, at least to me. As usual, the unseen horror is worse than anything that a filmmaker can picture. If you are seriously interested in film, you owe it to yourself to watch this:

Appealing to all the senses

Most Americans don't watch enough foreign films. I say that not because I'm a snob or I think you should be one, but if you're a film buff, watching a film in another language opens you up to the purest idioms of film, unencumbered by either the felicities or the clunkiness of language, and the distraction of jokes and flippancy. It's closer to watching silent film, but better, and yes, there's a synchronized music score, but more importantly, even if one doesn't understand each word as it is coming out, one can hear the inflections, the rhythms, the timbre of the speaking voice, coupled with the expressions of the face, the tilt of the head, the roll of a shoulder which convey the speaker's meaning at a deeper and truer level than the words selected.

And I Am Love (2010) isn't about talk very much, anyway. There are sights and sounds, sure, but I can't think of another film that endeavors to evoke smell, taste and touch so thoroughly as this. I Am Love will surely be remembered as the film in which a woman had a virtual orgasm and fell in love upon biting into a prawn. I mean, this was some terrific prawn. And the thing is, this woman did not expect to fall in love. She didn't want to fall in love. She had a husband and a family. A big family. A big rich family (her husband's). There was no good reason to fall in love except for this fantastic prawn.

I Am Love is one of the most sensual movies it is possible to see with your eyeballs. It is a film of textures, of surfaces, of warmth and cold, of brisk mountain air and seaside breezes, of flavors, some dark, some pungent, of the touch of fingers, a massage, a haircut, of lying in the tall grass with warm sun on top and sharp jabs of long grass on the bottom. That feeling is--I presume--intensified by having to rely on subtitles to follow the relatively minimal dialogue. And to complete one's verbal disorientation, Tilda Swinton speaks Italian with a Russian accent, as she is playing an emigre. In one scene it is evident that her character does not understand English! How completely appropriate then, that her character turns away from the seemingly obvious advantages of having married into a wealthy and prestigious Milanese family, to a romance with a humble chef, whose mode of living embodies all those sensual pleasures.

You cannot write about I Am Love without talking about the exciting and surprisingly suitable score from the works of concert composer John Adams. Adams, with Phillip Glass is probably our most influential composer today. He was grouped with Adams as a minimalist, for his accompaniments often rely on simply triadic harmonies, rejecting the harmonic density of mid-20th century music. But Adams has a gift for melody and development of form that Glass has not chosen to explore, and he is our best and most interesting opera composer alive. If you haven't heard his song-cycle/music I Was Looking At The Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky is a neglected masterpiece. Go seek it out. You won't be sorry.

Adams has never licensed his music for work in film before, and did not write anything especially for the film. Instead the music was culled from his recorded catalog, and sequences were even written, shot and edited with pre-selected music in mind, most notably a sequence in which Swinton's character sort-of stalks her lover-to-be (who is a friend of her son's) through the streets of San Remo, finding herself in a Russian Orthodox Church, where she involuntarily stumbles onto her former self. The music both chugs (like the fabric mills which are the basis of the family fortune) and sings (like the souls of the lovers). If this movie can't make you want to go out and eat gourmet Italian food, it should make you seek out the work of John Adams.

There are a few ways a story of a wealthy middle-aged woman going off with her young lover can go. It can be a super-charged, rediscovering passion story like a Diane Lane movie, it can be a story of regret and despair--separation from her children and hurting her former spouse. And indeed there is tragedy in the story, but it is incidental to the main motion of the narrative, and in a way, releases Swinton's character to embrace her new path. The result is not melodramatic or romance, nor tragedy, but the difficult process of being reborn, of embarking a new life with no promises, no guarantees, but new hope of living one's true nature.

I try to refrain from straight-on reviewing or recommendations, but I Am Love, co-written and directed by Luca Guadagnino, is easily one of the best films of 2010 and I couldn't get to the end of the year without saying so. I am sorry I was not aware of it during its theatrical run and didn't see it on a big screen. If you do seek it out, try to watch it on a large monitor or projected and be sure to run the sound through a decent audio system. This movie goes straight past the intellect and goes straight for the senses like nothing I've seen.

In similar fashion, The Secret In Their Eyes (2009), last year's Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, looks as though it's going to be a movie for the brain, but goes instead for the heart. It begins like an Argentinian version of TV shows like Law and Order or House, both programs that co-writer, director and editor Juan José Camapanella has worked on. A retired investigator is revisiting a case from 20 years before, but what is being revisited is not just a case, but the life lived prosecuting all those cases, and the opportunities lost or disregarded along the way. In particular, he is reflecting on The Girl That Got Away, his superior at work, in social class and in education, who married suitably and had a family. Now they re-meet to discuss his investigation into this old, dead case and discovers things may not be as old and dead as he thought they were.

The secret of the film is in its titles. The clues are not bits of carpet fibre and DNA. They are looks between the adoring and the adored, returned or not. There is a beautiful echo early in the film, when the investigator intuits the perpetrator of a violent crime by the look he is giving the victim in an old photograph. Only a few minutes later, we seem the same investigator in another old photo, giving the same look to his unobtainable adored. The picture above is a vivid demonstration of what this film does so well. The investigators have identified the violent offender, Gómez, but he has been released because he is a hired killer useful to the Peron regime (in power at the time). The prosecutors learn they have been bested and get on the elevator. A moment later, Gómez boards the elevator. Not a word is exchanged. Gómez loads and checks his gun. The threat is all the more undeniable for having remained verbally unstated. It is like the thriller film's equivalent to a Lubitsch moment.

One of the pleasures of this film is that everything is of a piece: the "top story", the crime investigation and the "under story", the lost romance or organically intertwined. The low-key, amber-toned cinematography, understated music score and Campanella's own crisp editing all fit together as if conceived all at once in a single burst of creativity. It is a film of discretion, of understatement, of respect for its audience, confident that the audience will put together the pieces of both stories and see the connections without being whacked over the head with them. It is a lean-forward, not a sit-back, film. Lead Roberto Darin reminds me of Joe Mategna, with even more soulful eyes, appropriate for a film about seeing.

The Dragon Tattoo series, Let The Right One In and The Secret In Their Eyes demonstrate (if it needed demonstrating) that a foreign language film can be a high-quality, relatively conventional commercial and accessible film. It need not be either experimental and off-putting or derivative and schlocky. All these films will receive (or have received) American remakes. Don't wait for them. Check out the originals. The week between the holidays is a great time for cocooning with movies. Put some foreign language films on your list. It's true that if your eyelids droop, and you miss a subtitle or two, you might feel lost. But have a sip of coffee and stay with it. Your eyes, and perhaps your other sensory organs, will thank you.

The Tao of Caine

While we're on this Halloween jag, let's consider the modern urban horrors of the Michael Caine vehicle Harry Brown (2010). The film itself is not much, a minor variation on Death Wish -- the civilian vigilante. At least Caine's character has some military service to explain his inner toughness and his familiarity with guns. (Death Wish wanted us to believe Charles Bronson was an architect. I assume he designed bomb shelters and dojos for Chuck Norris.)

The film boasts gang members and dope addicts straight from RADA and is obviously shot on a housing complex slated for demolition as soon as shooting was over. Cinematography and music are by-the-numbers. You're not going to learn anything about cinema generally by seeing Harry Brown, except perhaps that once you've established that our hero has stumbled into a den of aggressive junkies and gun merchants you don't have to spend another ten minutes making the same point. But as a student or fan of film acting, this is another master class from Sir Michael.

Of course, he was born with those eyes. When he was young, the long lashes and thin eyebrow gave him an almost feminine look, an interesting contrast with the man-of-the-streets manner and Cockney accent. Then came the National Health glasses of Harry Palmer (parodied by Austin Powers) and the face could become a mask. Caine has often discussed the menacing air created by smiling with the mouth and not with the eyes. With big eyes like Caine, the threat could be devastating. As he has grown older, the glasses have come off and the eyes look puffy, almost as if they have grown callouses to protect themselves from the horrors they've seen. Robert Mitchum had those tired, puffy eyes, and they are an extraordinary tool for the older (male) actor. (Other than Simone Signoret and Jeanne Moreau, female actors have not gotten the same mileage from puffy eyes.) Puffy or not, the eyes are still a large canvas, and clearly register each thought as it passes behind it.

I've become a fan of the TV series Lie To Me. It's about an expert in facial expression and body language advising law enforcement as to whether people are lying. One of the neatest tricks in the show's bag is to cut from the end of a sequence, as the show goes to commercial, to photos of well-known people making the same face as the person at the end of the sequence; e.g., someone tells a big whopper, then you see O.J. Simpson, Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon making exactly the same face. What is remarkable about the show is not the photos--those are drawn from pre-existing research, but the demands on the actor to produce the exact expression required by the script. This is an area where ordinarily the actor and director have some latitude, but not in Lie To Me. They've got to hit it square on the money. (This is one of the reasons that I advise aspiring actors to spend more time watching fly-on-the-wall documentaries then on watching other actors. It's the same reason that journalism is a better training for writing than the study of literature--it's all about going straight to the source.)

Sir Michael would be right at home on Lie To Me. The accuracy and economy of his work is devastating. In fact, it has become more economical with the years. This would be only natural; one gets older, moves less quickly, moves less, period. For Caine it has become a matter of no longer dancing around the idea of the scene, but going straight for the center.

Caine of course, did teach a masterclass as part of a BBC series on acting. Nobody much has seen the episode on playing Restoration Comedy, but Caine's episode is well-known, even by the general public in Britain:



It is so well known, that comedian/impressionist Peter Serafinowicz parodied it:

This is the definition of inside baseball.

What Caine does could be called "How To Be A Brilliant Actor Without Being Caught Acting." At this point, I don't care much what he does, as long as he appears regularly. Viva Caine.

No doubt, not reasonable

There is no point in addressing the aesthetic qualities of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (2009). It has none. The only question is, how does such a thing happen? How does a film based on a prior film by the master Fritz Lang, starring Michael Douglas and written and directed by the solid journeyman Peter Hyams devolve into an utterly meretricious piece of tripe?

My guess is that the project begins with Ted Hartley, an ambitious entrepreneur who has acquired remake rights to a number of RKO properties. This always seemed to me a sensible idea for a business. We all know that remakes of recognized classics is pointless, and only likely to expose the perpetrators to ridicule and scorn. But there are tons of movies out there that are good, or almost good, and only need some slight change to have moved up into a higher class of film. How many movies have we seen that are going along well and then crashed and burned in the last half-hour, the last ten minutes, or even the last minute? It's not uncommon.

So making a new twisty thriller based on the somewhat implausible premise of a journalist placing himself in jeopardy of prosecution in order to prove that a corrupt prosecutor is using fabricated evidence is not a hopeless idea. But clearly he had trouble interesting young A-list talent in developing this idea, and it fetched up at the door of Peter Hyams, writer-director of Outland (a disguised remake of High Noon), The Star Chamber (starring Michael Douglas), The Presidio and 2010, a workaday sequel to the epic 2001. So although Mr. Hyams is not perhaps a startling or original artist, he has a decent track record with building borrowed ideas and well-known stars.

Here is probably where things began to break down. The modern audience will not stand for the simple complication that the plan will not work. That is obvious from the start. It's an idiotic idea--the film virtually admits it--and there is no chance it will work as planned. Here's the rule -- the plan only works if they don't reveal it to the audience. The corollary is, of course, if they tell the audience the plan, it will go wrong.

So some additional twist is required. And I will give you the spoiler, because you really shouldn't waste your time watching this movie. The journalist is actually guilty. Not only does it make the whole premise of the story ridiculous, not to mention tasteless, it makes the audience feel like a cluck to have sat through a story about a criminal who engineers his own prosecution.

There is already a very good film about an innocent man who engineers his own prosecution, called The Man In The Glass Booth, based on the play by Robert Shaw. But he doesn't want to foil his prosecutors, he wants to have someone publicly admit and be publicly punished for the genocide of the Jews. He willingly sacrifices himself to redeem humanity.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt doesn't redeem anyone. Amber Tamblyn does a decent job, and one supposes that she wanted to be seen playing a young professional woman who is capable of an adult romance, in order to break her out of the teen ghetto she was in because of her starring role on Joan of Arcadia. Jesse Matcalfe was probably happy to get a lead more demanding than the "sexy lawn boy" on Desperate Housewives. Orlando Jones does a nice job of straight acting as an honest cop, so that makes sense. But who was blackmailing Michael Douglas? Was he that hard up for work? Or needed to get out of the house? His role is not only cardboard-thin, completely unrewarding and extremely similar to a number of sneering, big-shot, scenery-chewing performances he's done before. And it was doubtless his "yes" that got the film a green light. So he is to blame in more ways than one.

Some failed films probably looked pretty good on paper and fail in the execution. This story and script must have been DOA, and yet it went ahead. With all the children going hungry and diseases to be cured, people spent time and money to actually make the film. That's a mystery.

Where do ghosts go when they die?

Roman Polanski has never made a movie that is less than eminently watchable. I have taught Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown in my film courses, and lessons learned in those films are applied at times in The Ghost Writer (2010), Polanski's entry into the paranoid political thriller genre. (Although given Polanksi's origins and his life since, I suppose all his films are paranoid thrillers. Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean people aren't after you.)

The film's title outside the States is "the Ghost" and that's how Ewan MacGregor's character keeps introducing himself, most ominously in the scene pictured above, when he simply says, "I'm your ghost," announcing that Pierce Brosnan's Tony-Blair-like character is already dead, which politically speaking he is.

Polanski is the master of what is not shown. The most famous example is in Rosemary's Baby as Ruth Gordon, having a secretive telephone conversation leans just out of shot, which caused much of the audience during the first run to physically lean over, evidently hoping they could see around the corner on the movie screen. There is a bravura example in The Ghost Writer as a folded note is passed hand to hand within a crowd. Polanski chooses to show only the hands and the shoulders being tapped. The fact of a note being passed seems to excite surprise or consternation, but we have no faces to show us this, just body language. But over the course of this very long shot, our desire to know the content of the note ramps up until the pressure is almost unendurable. Too bad the actual note itself is sort of flat compared to the build-up.

Similarly the climax of the film and the final revelation takes place just off-screen, although what has happened is clear and does not need to be shown directly to be understood. If you haven't seen the film and you want to--and you might want to becuase there are rewards to be found--be advised that Polanski's ending (which is meant to be a shock) has returned to the ethos of "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown." In effect, Polanski says, all effort to discover the truth, to effect justice are feckless and almost ludicrous. The result is a highly unsatisfying, disappointing and perhaps even predictable downbeat 70s ending--albeit in a well-designed shot of which Hitchcock would be proud.*

Which solves the final mystery: why a film which for 127 minutes of its 128 minute length seems like a rattlingly good post-Hitchcock thriller with a major star and a raft of well-known supporting players should have disappeared at the box office this spring. You just can't tell an audience it's all hopeless and expect them to like it. At least not since the mid-70s, anyway.
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* We can't discount the possibility that Polanski may have come his conclusions about truth and justice because of his own personal history as a long-time fugitive, although I think there is no hidden mystery about the acts which are the substance of the charges against him. The only argument is as to the just punishment therefor.

Undecided

Uncertainty (2009) is a good idea for a movie. In fact it was a good idea when it was called Sliding Doors or Run Lola Run (not to mention the execrable The Butterfly Effect).

Clearly the intention of the coin-flipping opening (see illustration) was to set off a bomb with two fuses. But for such a story to work, there must be actual stakes. Both Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run risked life and happiness. In one story, the couple finds a phone coveted by criminals and must decide whether to make a dishonest buck by trying to sell it to the highest bidder. I will spoil no one's day by telling you they decide not to, and end up no worse off than when they started. In the other story, they can't decide whether to tell the girl's family she's pregnant. There seems to be a slight question hovering over the future of the pregnancy, but that is dispensed with. The worst consequence here will be slight temporary family friction because of a delay in informing them.

It's a shame. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is usually a reliable guarantor of an interesting film. And he has real chemistry with the very beautiful Lynn Collins, who ought to become a movie star if there is any justice in the universe. There is some skill in the filmmakers, but not enough. There is no visual scheme other than the color-coding of the principal characters so that we know which of the alternating episodes we are watching. The dialogue was reportedly improvised and sounds it--that is, it is flat.

The writer-director team, Scott McGehee and David Siegel never seemed to want to convince us that anything about the film mattered except that they got to make it. These two made their debut with an odd film, Suture, in which identical twins were played by actors of two different races. The conceit had no thematic or other resonance that I could discern, and it all played like a private joke. McGehee and Siegel are going to have to let us in on the jokes if they are ever going to become compelling filmmakers.

Thinking makes it so

Our Film Studies class looks at Hitchcock's long-take film Rope (1948) as an object lesson in what could happen if you dispense with editing as a filmmaking tool, and rely entirely on mise-en-scene. (Film teachers take note, the film fits in either unit.)

Much has been written on how many cuts are actually in the film and the various technical challenges in its making, and you can find those elsewhere on the internet or in those funny stacks of attached papers called books; I can add nothing original to that corpus.

What surprises me each year is how this 80-minute gabfest grips my 16-to-18 year-old students without gunshots, car chases, kung fu or--wait for it--MTV-style editing. (The use of the term "MTV-style editing" is a reliable bellwether for identifying cranky old curmudgeons who want things, including aesthetics, to stay as they are. Such persons are so deeply unaware of the natural order of the universe as to be beneath contempt.)

I read recently that the film may have been inspired by a 1939 live broadcast of the play on which it is based, and I confess shamefacedly that it never occurred to me before that the film feels a lot like a live television play. Paradoxically, a live play would make use of more varied camera angles and would be able to cut in close-ups, as live TV plays employed three or more cameras which could constantly vary perspectives. Rope is more ascetic still, using a single camera. Close-ups must be simulated by dollying in or having an object brought to the foreground. None of the associative power of what Hitchcock himself called "pure cinema" (mostly meaning editing) can be brought to bear.

And still Hitchcock, rightly called the master of suspense, teases out the tiny bit of information that he has to dispense at such an engaging pace, that the film plays. It shouldn't--in fact Hitchcock considered it a failure--but it plays. One student in my class named it one of his all-time favorite films and planned to get his own copy. I can say that it does bear repeated viewing and study. The film has some corny acting and some of the intended "high style" small talk is tedious. But the power of narrative, and the ability of subtext to keep that narrative going draws the audience in. (The screenplay was by playwright Arthur Laurents, who reportedly instructed later collaborator Stephen Sondheim in the use of subtext.)

And perhaps when narrative is moving forward in a smooth, unimpeded manner we become so unaware of editing, that we are equally unaware when there is no editing. Perhaps.