"...I said I'd make a woman and indeed I did," sings Henry Higgins in a reprise of "You Did It" (cutting off the song "Without You") late in the second act of My Fair Lady. In that context, it was just an obnoxious solipsistic way of dismissing a woman's claim of self-sufficiency, by merely claiming that he had always wanted the woman to be assertive and independent, while in fact he could not tolerate anyone of any gender not bowing to his whim.
In short, it was meant to be funny and it was.
It's not funny and not meant to be in The Skin I Live In (2011) the creepiest and most perverse variation of the Pygmalion myth I've experienced (leaving aside straight-out horror movies, which are usually intentionally risible). To use a phrase I loath, "SPOILER ALERT." (I don't bother with this idea because (a) the concept of this blog is to have a conversation with the reader about films, not to review them, and respecting the distributor's marketing plans is not part of the agenda here; and (b) because the idea that the main interest in the narrative is the surprise in being caught up with the twists and turns is a 20th and 21st century perversion of the ancient art of storytelling, which consisted in keeping the listener rapt EVEN THOUGH the listener knew the story, knew all the stories, and wanted to see what you do with it.)
(Continuing this exegesis -- theatergoers do not want Hamlet to come out all different and surprising, and do not want their Mozart piano concertos to have trick endings. These sorts of demands for endless novelty are, I maintain, MARKETING considerations, NOT artistic ones. And there is research to show that people enjoy stories better when they already know the ending. More of this in my next post.)
Luckily, Almodovar understands at the deeper level what he's doing. The story, which is appalling as any Greek myth, tells of a man who mourns his dead wife by converting his hysterical and suicidal daughter's rapist into a fireproof replica of her. Take that, Medea! Represent, Oedipus! Clearly this is not meant to be accepted as events that could have actually happened at any real time in any real place. Almodovar signals this with the make-believe production design -- all solid colors, mostly primary, surfaces unblemished, a kitchen with no mark of ever having been used, a lecture hall that looks like it was completed minutes before shooting. There are no signs or indicators of real life here, of the quotidian details of existence. This is the stuff of myth, which is the only way Almodovar could get away with it (if only he did).
Two other observations and I think I'm done. One is that the entire first half hour and the double meaning of the title are virtually a red-herring. Much footage is devoted to the perfection of flame-proof skin, presumably as a reaction to the protagonist's wife's terrible death in a flaming car accident. But that ultimately is of no consequence. That gun that Almodovar puts in the drawer in the first act is never taken out again. The experimental subject never encounters potential injury by fire, fire is no part of the plot. Frankly, the details of gender-reassignment are of far more significance. And when Banderas's boss tells him to stop this line of experimentation, he does, without complaint and without secretly carrying on, like any decent self-respecting mad scientist.
Yes, the title is there because of what the characters do, the guilt they bear, the burdens they carry, all the questions of identity that such a title raises. But the double meaning it reaches for is by way of a cheat, of a plot situation that is simply grafted onto the story. That really should have been re-thought.
Finally, I have no idea what Banderas is doing in this movie, other than that he has a history with Almodovar, they helped build each other's careers and there must be a sense of mutual obligation. Because he is clearly miscast. What Banderas does is contained fury. That's his brand. The script calls for contained madness, a note not within Banderas's range. There is never a thing to suggest to irrational, or even really the dangerous quality of this character. In an effort to contain the insanity of the story, Banderas exhibits a calm impassivity which registers as indifference, especially when he casually abandons the experimentation that is supposed to be the premise of the film. Banderas's face does not yet have the visual complexity to convey two thoughts at once (compared to, for instance, an Anthony Hopkins or a Kevin Spacey), so for most of the film he seems to be merely obeying the script's dictates, without any conviction that there's anything to them.
Almodovar has always wanted to marry insightful drama with scenes of revulsion and horror, but backed to the wall on this film, he seems to have settled for the latter. Pity the better film lying just under the skin of this one.
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.
I don't have many observations to record about the chilly, dark spy picture Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). It seems to be less of a film, and more of a simulation of the experience of being a spy. Nothing is stated outright, nothing is explained, no one is identified, no one reveals their thinking. If anyone has feelings, you won't hear about it.
Even better, screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have dispensed with those two popular crutches of the modern spy film. First, the voice-over of the protagonist, explaining the arcane non-verbal transactions going on. You know the thing, "Sturgess gave me a glance that could only mean one thing" blah, blah, blah. Second, the big explanation at the end, "You see, Collins, I knew as soon as I saw Verdoux wearing the ring, that Operation Fuzzball was going to be scrubbed, because..." Clearly, the writers and director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) decided to have respect for the audience and challenge them to lean forward and come to the film, instead of being overwhelmed by it, as in a Bond or Bourne film.
The story is often referred to as "complex", but it's not so much complex as it is sub-contextual. Here is a very visual film -- the soundtrack by itself would tell you almost nothing-- the very opposite of a standard spy film, which is all explaining and a couple of gunshots at the end. But the story is relatively straightforward if you understand two things. In LeCarre spy stories, there is no there there. It's never about a secret that has to be stolen or protected. It's about the process of security -- who works for whom, who is who really who they say, who can be trusted and who will betray. What they are protecting is immaterial and never discussed. Questions of loyalty are about the security force that claims your allegiance -- MI6, CIA, KGB, not the countries who have created and harbor these forces. And loyalty to the very idea of security and the discipline security requires. And the time sequence shifts, but that is clearly laid out in the form of Smiley dictating a memorandum, so confusion as to time only lasts seconds at most--if you are paying attention.
The characters communicate in literal and dramatic code. Information is conveyed by a look, a shrug, a cock of the head, or of the eyebrow. But the film is not slow. Information arrives rapidly and in profusion, once you understand how to interpret it. It is quiet, but densely packed.
My favorite shot--a recurring sequence of a packet of papers rising, by itself, in a sort of document-dumbwaiter, acknowledging that information is the real protagonist, that data is more important than people in this universe, deserving of its very own private elevator.
The film has a wonderful visual uniformity, oddly reminiscent of Welles's The Trial. It was interesting to learn that that uniformity was achieved in a similar way as it was in Welles's film. Nearly all of The Trial was shot in a single abandoned railway station in Paris. Nearly all of Tinker Tailor was shot in an abandoned military base in England. This provided a number of structures with a wide variety of purposes and spaces, but a single gloomy aesthetic that supports the tone of the film perfectly.
That's really all I can say. The film has been too brilliantly dissected and explicated by David Bordwell, and if you are a serious student of film, you have to read "Tinker Tailor: A Guide for the Perplexed."
My own parting advice-- don't watch this for relaxation, but for stimulation. Put away the wine and brew some coffee. The film is worth a little lost sleep.
The very fine professional job that Roman Polanski and his excellent cast do in transcribing Yasmin Reza's play as the film Carnage (2011) is a good measure of the limitations of such inter-media transfers.
Perhaps I lack imagination, but I cannot fault what the filmmakers and actors have done. I didn't see the play, but from all available evidence, this is an accurate, if culturally translated, representation of Ms. Reza's play, originally written in French for a Swiss theater director. The setting feels completely accurate, the gradual setting of the sun (reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rope) evocative, the actors fully embody their characters (Kate Winslet now sounds almost more credible as an American than in her native accent, which sounds put on to please the folks back home), the staging and framing the usual meticulous Polanski job. It is beyond cliche to point out Polanski as the poet of confined space, given Repulsion, Cul de Sac, and his previous play adaptation, Death and the Maiden. But this confined space works in an odd way. At first, care is taken to keep it realistic. In fact, the Kate Winslet and Christolph Walz characters are at pains to leave the space.
But then, after some intestinal and emotional vomiting, the liquor breaks out. This is the great 20th-century theatrical deus-ex-machina, designed to get characters to say and do things they would not logically say or do, and also stay in place within the confines of the stage. Let's say it straight out-- in 2012, using alcohol in a play is a crutch. It was OK for O'Neill and Inge and Maugham and even Albee, but its time has passed and its mechanics are threadbare.
What happens at that point in Carnage is that what had been a meticulously detailed and realistic New York apartment became converted to a purely metaphoric and metaphysical space, a Huis Clos for the modern era. But the problem is that the film remained tethered to the conventions of representational realism. The play Carnage could have been used as the first half of a film, which developed and extended the ideas of The Exterminating Angel, about a class frozen in time and space, locked in a repellant embrace, continuing to decay
But Reza and Polanski make their living as entertainers. A bit acidic, a bit cynical, but never truly disturbing to their middlebrow audiences of people like me. So its characters begin their descent into primordial archetypes, to the very beginnings of human society, savage and needy, then the film abruptly stops before anyone's feelings get hurt, before cynicism converts to nihilism. A shame, because I couldn't help feeling that a better ending could have been borrowed from that of Fight Club, demolishing whole cities at a time.
Just to have seen Jodie Foster's face as she blows up a whole East Side luxury tower...that would have been a movie.
Somebody tell Errol Morris that somebody who saw a couple of movies made a cheesy imitation of a documentary, stuck Errol's name on it and called it Tabloid (2010).
Mr. Morris has two basic modes. In one he puts two people or groups of people championing competing stories in front of the camera, lets them tell their stories and gently leads the viewer toward the most plausible version of events, sometimes with the aid of carefully identified reeactments, stock footage and shots of artifacts and locations. In the other mode, he lets amiably odd people ramble on about their fixations, and we are invited to think, "Aren't these eccentrics charming? Well, it takes all kinds to make a world." There is no "other side of the story" in such cases -- the whole story is the wacky things these loveable people believe.
Tabloid botches the whole thing. An idiot-maniac is permitted to drivel on in front of the camera at length with a story so silly and distasteful that you will have to watch the film at home, near a shower or bathtub. No other perspective is offered, other than the so-called journalists who profited from spreading her delusions across the countryside. So there is none of the interesting tension of conflicting versions of the story. We get one, solitary, unitary deranged rendition of a deranged set of facts.
There are small Errol Morris flourishes -- big animated words on the screen, mock-ironic stock footage spliced in, real footage of the subject of the film (you notice how I avoid repeating her name) 35 years ago, younger and slimmer and just as crazy if not crazier.
If your idea of art or entertainment is being locked in a small room with a nut, have at it. Include me out, thank you.
The initial impulse of cinema verite as it was first defined in the sixties was to capture the world as it is, without artifice, virtually without a point of view. Frederick Wiseman is the filmmaker most often cited as coming closest to that ideal, but while Wiseman doesn't narrate his films or state a thesis or deliver a canned conclusion, but he frequently lets his subjects go on at such length as to expose themselves as foolish, vain, misinformed or incompetent. Wiseman seems to feel as though the purpose of documentary is to let the subject hang himself with his own words and acts.
Etre et avoir (2002) is not having any. [The title was translated as, literally, "To Be and To Have" but that means nothing in English, whereas the words are the basic building-block irregular verbs of French.] Interestingly, the film evidently began as a pedagogical exercise to document successful teaching techniques for the use of fellow professionals. But filmmaker Nicholas Philibert found that his first subject, Georges Lopez, teaching in a one-room school in rural agricultural France was not only a maitre (the common French idiom for teacher) but a master.
What are his brilliant techniques? What is the terminology for his instructional approach? I have no idea. We don't see any specific methods employed, other than the tried and true. There is nothing for what teachers call a Professional Learning Community to chew over here. The secret ingredient that makes Georges Lopez a great teacher?
Love.
This man loves his students like we're supposed to and often not permitted to. He pays deep attention to each one, knows their foibles and strengths, praises them and chastises them, a true in loco parentis. He is more than a master, he is a father, the father of our imaginations, almost endlessly patient, kind and firm. He settles disputes, makes students keep promises, checks their work, reviews their assessments, and lets them play, imagine, draw and dream.
Lopez and the film that contains him is so serene, poised, balanced and beautiful that it should be prescribed for any emotional upset or disturbance. A few minutes with M. Lopez, and no one could be distressed-- all is tranquility and peace.
The neutrality of the camera is a thing to behold. There is a beautiful stillness to the empty classroom, but even with the kids in action, the camera holds back, never intruding, letting them be themselves. There is a priceless bit of slapstick with two 6-year-olds trying to operate a large photocopy machine, as they go on and on trying to get the book set correctly on the glass, struggling to push the right button, keep the cover down, to little avail as they keep producing bungled copies, soldiering on nonetheless.
Philibert builds in no false drama. The children will move up to the next grade, the next school in the usual way. There are no confrontations with angry parents, no meetings with Lopez's superiors (spiritually, there are none), no extraordinary crisis. (One child is counseled as his father goes through a terrible illness, but still part of the ordinary fabric of life, a context into which Lopez attempts to put these events for his distraught student.)
Following its own quiet ways, the film's climax comes at the end of the film, the end of the school year. He and the children say their goodbyes, some for the summer holidays, some forever. He is all reassurance and warmth. And as the last one clears the threshold, Lopez suppresses the tiniest choking tear. It's more moving than all the agony of the throbbing orchestral tones of Titanic.
Etre et avoir is a reminder of just how powerfully less can be more, in life and on film.
Forget five years -- 124 minutes! There's a reason that romantic comedies, which The Five-Year Engagement (2012) is not, uniformly last 90 to 100 minutes. The ground has been covered, no matter what it is, and once the audience has sussed out your new twist or gimmick, it's your obligation to get off the stage as quickly and entertainingly possible.
But, as previously asserted, TFYE is not a romantic comedy. At times it is only a comedy the way Uncle Vanya is a comedy, which is one reason I regret it was directed by the crass Nicholas Stoller, whose last credit, Get Him To The Greek , was dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing funnier than Jonah Hill's butt crack. Moreover, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Segal seemed to be so busy acting and directing that they did not notice the fairly easy cut they could have made which would have lopped off 20-25 minutes to this film and substantially improved it.
(The cut I mean is to go from Jason Segal's character learning that his fiancee has kissed her boss straight to Segal returning to San Francisco. That would have omitted the disgusting attempted adultery-with-condiments scene and the disgusting frostbitten toe. The Apatow crowd seems to be stuck in the pubescent phase of confusing bodily fluids and food plus a fascination with bodily mutilation.)
On the other hand, Segal and Stoller have to be applauded for trying to make something different and better, even if they didn't succeed. The idea is that relationships are hard and don't match ideals, that we fail and fall short and we still love each other. Not new, but needs to be repeated for each generation.
Because TFYE is really, at heart, an example of what art historian Stanley Cavell termed the "comedy of remarriage" of which Noel Coward's Private Lives is the modern progenitor. (Cavell finds its roots in Shakespearean comedy.) In TFYE, the break-up and reunion happen in the context of an engagement, rather than requiring divorce and remarriage, but that is merely a function of changing social customs and movie censorship. The principal is the same. Unblemished happiness cannot survive, will not survive. The characters must be tempered, must be chastened, punished perhaps (maybe that's why the frostbite) so that they may learn. It might even be considered a comedy of lessons.
What makes TFYE disconcerting is that whereas Coward masks his character's pain in badinage with only the briefest of lapses revealing the truth, the characters in Segal & Stoller's script talk the way real couples having real trouble really talk. Which is fine, except for the sort of style problems raised when such material is in juxtaposition with the Apatow brand of not just fall-on-your-prat humor, but fall-on-your-prat-in-poo-three-times-over humor.
That said, I laughed not infrequently and there is one Hall of Fame scene between Emily Blunt and Alison Brie. They are arguing about the long engagement and marriage in front of a young child, and have therefore adopted (rather poor) imitations of Elmo and Cookie Monster, respectively to conduct the argument, which concludes, "'C' is for condom!"
One other odd element -- the cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe, who not only has never shot a comedy before, but is responsible for some very dark horror films and thrillers (The Road, The Others, some of the Twilight films). TFYE looked very dark, with many rollicking comedy scenes in half-shadow and the comic violence invoked real terror and pain. Now the fact is, I saw the film in my neighborhood theater, which is a little old and shabby, and it just may have been that the projector bulb was dim and that the film is very bright and cuddly and cheerful. But honestly, when a comedy film's characters get depressed, should you be just as depressed as well? I sure was.
In 2007, Dance, Girl, Dance was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", describing it as Arzner's "most intriguing film" and a "meditation on the disparity between art and commerce. The dancers, played by Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball strive to preserve their own feminist integrity, while fighting for their place in the spotlight and for the love of male lead Louis Hayward.
The inaccuracy of this plot synopsis merely demonstrates that the Library of Congress is just as bad at film criticism as most full-time professionals. I will not recount the plot -- that would waste your time and mine. I only have three observations to make.
First, the major motion picture studios commanded such a wealth of talent, that they could throw an incredible array of top-flight talent at B-level potboiler (and the production suggests that this was a B, although perhaps a B+, a notch above RKO's usual crime melodramas). Besides upcoming stars Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball, seen in A productions at RKO, there was Louis Heyward and Ralph Bellamy, cinematographers Russell Metty (Touch of Evil) and Joe August (They Were Expendable), screenwriters Frank Davis and Tess Slessinger, who between them worked on Pride and Prejudice, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and The Train (1964), not to mention Robert Wise as editor. The main thing with a studio with fixed personnel costs was to keep the most people busy at the same time, so even RKO, the least stable of the studios which owned theaters, had such excess capacity as to engage this level of talent on a programmer.
Which is my second point. The film is not groundbreaking, and fact it's message seems rather confused. Does Lucille Ball's willingness to sell herself, not to the highest bidder but the fastest one, make her a strong independent woman or a two-dollar whore? Is Maureen O'Hara's modesty about her talent naive humility or brutal honesty? Is Louis Hayward a good guy with a drinking problem or he is a user? None of this is made clear in the back-and-forth story which feels like it went through rewrites by people who hadn't read all of the previous draft.
And finally, the moments in the video I've embedded above are probably the only historically valuable moments in the film. The situation is that Lucy Ball is a burlesque star (a Hollywood burlesque star in that she sings a G-rated dirty song and never takes any clothes off) who has hired her frenemy Maureen O'Hara as a stooge to dance some ballet steps and get booed by the audience until she is yanked off and Ball comes on. (The plot of The Night They Raided Minksy's merges those two characters into one) One night, things go differently, and Judy (O'Hara) stops and makes with this startling speech about The Male Gaze. Yet, strong as it is (especially the power of a 19-year-old Maureen O'Hara), it comes virtually out of nowhere. The film doesn't prepare much for this outburst, nor does it follow up its consequences. Sincere, no doubt, on the part of Ms. Arzner and Miss Schlesinger (who was Mrs. Frank Davis), but pasted in, almost like a bookmark indicating another different film that they would have liked to make, if circumstances permitted.
There are two types of classic Hollywood film buffs, the "Great Old Days" fans, who revel in "good old-fashioned entertainment" like Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz and those of us who have binged on this stuff so thoroughly that, willy nilly, we have become students as interested in the missteps and almosts as the unquestioned triumphs. Dance Girl Dance is only for the latter, and maybe only for the three minutes embedded above.
Although I had forgotten that Louis Hayward had a marvelous voice. Have you ever seen The Return of Monte Cristo?
I'm not sure how I missed At Long Last Love (1975) when it first came out -- I was in college, I was a big fan of its director Peter Bogdanovich, who had pulled a hat trick with The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up Doc (1972) and Paper Moon (1974), and had the time and inclination to see almost everything that came out, or at least that was showing in nearby South Hadley, Mass. For all I know, it never arrived in Western Massachusetts, as it was savaged by the critics, (who it would have needed in order to succeed) got a reputation as a mega-flop (although it wasn't that expensive), was slightly recut, quickly played off and disappeared. The devastation was so complete, that the film still has never received a homevideo release. The clips floating around are evidently homevideo air checks, like the rather fuzzy potpourri I've embedded above.
I just caught up with it on Netflix, although it will be expiring soon from that site. The good news for buffs is that it will finally get a legitimate home release and we can have a debate about its merits or lack thereof on an equal footing. The rather interesting story of how the film was rediscovered and partially restored is told here, but in short, an employee of the Fox Archives who liked the movie, restored some cut material and circulated that version as the standard television cut. No one, not even the director, is calling it a lost masterpiece, but it is not at all as bad as its reputation.
The bad:
- There is no story. Really. Two couples, switch partners Shakespeare-style, and the servants chase each other in the pantry. End of synopsis. Evidently screenwriter Bogdanovich is one of those people who became so enamored with the sheer spectacle of people singing and dancing on film, they failed to observe that is only interesting over the length of a feature if one is engaged in their characters, and if the songs reflect the inner narrative. This is even true of the Fred-and-Ginger whose stories are often dismissed as piffle. Piffle they may be, but a great deal of energy was put into keeping the lovers apart, so that when they could be together and especially dance together, the relief of tension was palpable. The conventions of romantic comedy and/or farce may not be dramatically intense, but they will suffice to support the tension-and-release contours that drive the musical. Just as 1 is infinitely greater than 0, so a "light story" is infinitely more substantial than no story at all.
- Diulio DelPrete has no business in this movie. He's not terrible, but he doesn't sing, dance, perform comedy or possess either sex appeal or charisma sufficient for him to belong in a quartet with Cybill Shepherd, Burt Reynolds and Madeline Kahn. It's no disgrace to him. I don't belong in that company, either, but so far, Hollywood has shown immensely good sense by not co-starring me in major films.
- Madeline Kahn is permitted to sing under pitch, which she had a tendency to do if not curbed. Burt Reynolds frequently tries to mask his lack of ability by slurring and sliding around, but he's not as bad as he thought, and should have been encouraged to sing his songs straight.
- The choreography is uninspiring and ill-considered, a problem compounded by the lack of dancers. Stage veteran Eileen Brennan is at least relaxed in comparison to the rest of the cast, but Bogdanovich's model, Lubitsch (more about that later) dispensed with choreography, and Mr. B should have considered it.
- The first scene and song of the movie are terrible, Kahn sings it "drunk" and it takes quite a while for the film to recover. I am sure this really hurt during its initial theatrical release. Everyone experienced knows how critical it is for the first number to not only land just right, but to define the show. Think of "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof, "Rock Island" from The Music Man, "Racing With The Clock" from Pajama Game. A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum almost closed in infamy until it changed its opening number.
The good:
- Cybill Shepherd sings very well, on key and with a well-controlled vibrato to give her notes a good finish. Often the only way she can sing high notes is loudly, but that doesn't mean they are piercing or off-key, they're just not subtle. Her dancing is a little studied, it's true, but,as discussed above, no one in this film is dancing with carefree abandon.
- Bogdanovich's controversial decision to do live recording on the set gives the musical performances an authenticy and a sense of reality that breathes a great deal of energy into the film. Instead of the overly-processed sound of a voice pressed up against a microphone, we feel the entire space that the performer is in, and (unlike present theater, where everything is now miked) it makes a difference which way a performer is facing, or if they leave or enter a room. Some of the traveling shots with music are applause-worthy.
- Similarly, the long uninterrupted takes hand control of the musical performance back to the performer. Yes, this would be a better idea if the two romantic leads had had more experience at these things, but it doesn't negate the principal that this is the right way to stage and shoot musical numbers.
- The Porter numbers are great, there's a number of little-known, but top-drawer songs and the music direction overall is just fine. Not infrequently, a song ends, then resumes a few minutes later reaching into that enormous lower drawer full of extra verses that Porter always seemed to write. This is a film for fans of song lyrics, even when the lyrics don't suit the characters or the situation all that well.
- The production design is clean, satirical (clearly it is poking fun at the "Big White Set" seen in later musicals of the 1930's), lavish without being overpowering in that "70s period movie" way.
Why did it take such a beating?
- It's not perfect, and parts of it are not good at all. (Although most of it is entertaining.)
- Many critics seem to feel Bogdanovich had been overpraised (often by those very critics) and it was time to lower the boom. Musicals are always a sitting duck for these things. (e.g. New York, New York).
- The low standards of film history in 1975. Most critics thought At Long Last Love was meant to be a gloss on or an homage to the Astaire-Rogers series. After all, those were musicals made in the 30s, right? Few of them had the knowledge or the thought to realize that Bogdanovich's models were the MacDonald - Chevalier or even MacDonald - Buchanan musicals of the very early sound period. First of all, that should have been obvious because by the time Astaire entered the movies, musicals were shot to playback, not with live recording on the set. That idea by itself sets the model back to the 1929-1931 period, when musicals were either the godawful 100% talking 100% singing 100% dancing "let's-get-everybody-in-the-studio-in-this-thing" revues, a sprinkling of transcriptions of Broadway shows like Rio Rita and The Cocoanuts, or the witty Lubitsch musicals. Again, Reynolds and Shepherd confuse the issue, as they resemble none of the actors in Bogdanovich's models, although butler John Hillerman and personal maid Eileen Brennan do.
The point is, ALLL got panned for not being a Fred & Ginger movie, when it had no intention of being one. It's like criticizing me for my embroidery work. (Which I would call pointless if I was inclined toward puns.)
Neither a mass market pleaser nor caviare to the general, At Long Last Love rewards the curiosity of anyone with interest in and knowledge of movie and stage musicals. And, really, it its present age of 37 years, it really can't hurt anyone.
There is one moment in which Leonard DiCaprio is completely convincing as the titular character in J. Edgar (2011). It comes toward the end when a stricken Clyde Tolson discovers Hoover stretched out on the floor, white, tubby and lifeless. I've seen some dead bodies in my time, and in my opinion, Leonardo completely nailed it.
I'm not sure why anyone is still producing these movies from the Madame Tussaud school of filmmaking. We no longer believe their mythmaking--books of popular biography provide more and better information for those who are interested in historical characters. For the general public, one needs to cook up a new angle, a fresh scandal or a new interpretation. My Week With Marilyn tells an untold story, gives us a new window into Marilyn (and into Sir Larry as well) which, together with Michelle Williams' performance, justifies yet another Monroe go-round.
There is nothing remarkable or new in J Edgar, and that includes DiCaprio's predictable performance. Hampered by the worst make-up since Billy Crystal in Mister Saturday Night, DiCaprio demonstrates no deep understanding about how older people move and think. He still looks like a boy, albeit a puffy boy, wearing grown-up clothes and acting "old" like the other kids in the school play do, but without having actually done the hard work of thinking through how the moving parts of the body age. It is utterly mysterious to me how DiCaprio became a Master Actor, playing leads for Scorsese, including the even more inapt Howard Hughes. Kevin Spacey is a master actor. William H Macy, Gary Oldman, Ryan Gosling, Stanley Tucci, Paul Giamatti (who would have been a great Hoover if he'd had a good script) are Master Actors. They make startling choices. They have supple, expressive voices and eyes. DiCaprio is well-intentioned, but never surprising, never fresh and rarely authentic.
But even if he were good, he would still be in stuck in a film that no one had taken the trouble to decide what it was about. It spends most of its time rehearsing the well-known public outlines of Hoover's life, the Palmer Raids, the gangster era, the Lindbergh baby, the Commie hunts, the conflict with the Kennedys. This is bad TV movie stuff (and executed in exactly that fashion) and utterly unnecessary. The interesting, juicy stuff between Hoover and alleged lover Clyde Tolson is based virtually entirely on speculation. Mixing this together indiscriminately with documented fact renders the entire film unreliable and therefore unengaging. Better to have fabricated everything and focused solely on Hoover's domestic arrangements, with perhaps a nod to the hypocrisy of his public crusades, than to have jumbled docudrama and "drama" drama. Nonetheless, the question of Hoover's possible homosexuality is neither settled nor explored, so why bring it up at all? Where a film like Secret Honor is willing to make up the entire inner monologue of Richard Nixon's tortured soul; likewise Oliver Stone's films, especially Nixon and W dare to invent their psychodrama, much as Shakespeare would project his own dramatic ideas onto the House of Lancaster, whether or not those ideas fit the facts. J Edgar is afraid to veer from the public record, and is stuck with a central character who is too repressed and tight-lipped to enlighten us, or, more sadly, himself.
Meryl Streep attempts to let her dental appliance do the acting.
The larger point is that you can't tell a story unless you've decided on a story to tell, which is also the problem with The Iron Lady (2011). At least it has a bit of a performance, although it is not clear what it is that Meryl Streep is supposed to be doing when she is not doddering around as the dementia-ridden remnant of the feared Margaret Thatcher. Much of the obligatory "rise to power" sequence is handled by another actress, as we are not expected to accept Meryl Streep as a young woman in her 20s anymore. So Streep only handles a portion of the flashbacks, but as in J Edgar, it's hard to see what they're getting at. Thatcher's only motivation to enter public service seems to be to emulate her adored father, small businessman and chamber-of-commerce leader. Thatcher brings a nearly fully-formed political philosophy to bear, but we never see whwere it came from, how it started or how it evolved.
Art Tatum is my favorite jazz musician. He might be my favorite musician period. No one will ever make a story of his life. At least I hope they don't. Because Art Tatum arrived as an artist complete and completely sui generis. His influences are minimal and generic, and the people he influenced few (because few have the technical skill). His style shifted slightly with the advent of bebop -- he added some extended chords to his toolbox, but there is no mistaking Tatum for anyone else, from his first recording in 1932 or so and his last in 1956. Great art. Great, great art, but no story.
The worst thing about spending a lot of time with a person experiencing advanced stages of dementia is that it is very repetitive. I doff my hat to writer Abi Morgan's fidelity to this painful subject, but major points off for sheer boredom. If there was anything to say about the dementia, if it was related to Thatcher's career, if there was some metaphoric connection, perhaps maintaining a Conservative outlook requires a bit of amnesia, I don't know, something. But let's face it, dementia happens to lots and lots of people and there is not anything dramatic about it. If Michael Phelps gets arthritis, you've got a story. If Truman Capote, who loved nothing better than to loll on a sofa, gets it -- not much story. So Streep does her best bent old lady wobble, but so what? (The Academy Award given to Streep should have gone to the costume designer, the wigmaker and whoever swiped those front teeth from the corpse of Alistair Sim.) Did somebody think that famous people don't experience the ordinary infirmities of old age?
And why, for heaven's sake, is so much running time given to it? Were we supposed to have trouble figuring out that husband Dennis isn't really there, it's just in her mind? (Jim Broadbent was clearly hired in order to repeat what he won an Oscar for in Iris.) Got that in the first speech, thank you, we saw The Sixth Sense. So if there is no twist to come, why does that go on and on. And if she's senile, how can she be accurately remembering her entire political career? Wouldn't she remember it wrong? Wouldn't Michael Foot be wearing a chicken suit and Parliament turning into a disco? As in J Edgar, why the dry factoid rehearsal of her life story without any comment or perspective?
I mean really, why? I hope nobody expected to get rich on these films. They're sure not going to get any drama or insight.
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 triumphant march of The Artist (2011) through the 2012 award season only highlights what I see as an emerging trend in film around the world, a rediscovery of the delights of the pre-verbal aspects of film. I use the term "pre-verbal" advisedly. Just as a black-and-white film should not be defined as a film which lacks color, a sequence which relies on cinematic tools other than dialogue need not be defined as "silent" or even "non-verbal" which connote that something has been removed.
To a great degree, film speaks to the limbic brain, the center of emotions. The best films are not illustrated scripts, but images (and often sounds) arranged in time so as to suggest cause-and-effect relationships among human events which trigger emotions in the viewer. Movies do not make $200 million and make year-end best lists by having either well-organized data or elegantly artistic designs. We want them to move us, and for that, filmmakers, especially those who have taken the trouble to steep themselves in the canon, have found the Land Before Talk Began.
Hugo (2011), for example, is the first 3D movie in the current post-Avatar wave which is likely to be looked at 50 years from now. (I suspect that Avatar, as good as it was, will retain interest only as a historic landmark, as its technological achievements will soon be surpassed.) Not only does it earn a permanent place as a Scorsese film and as a unique celebration of the great Georges Melies, but it uses the 3D toolkit in an almost indispensible manner in telling its story. At its heart, Hugo is an investigation, a delving into. And whereas 3D films of the 1950s were about things popping out at us in the post-war America of abundance -- paddleballs, hubcaps, breasts -- Avatar taught that 3D is even better at delving inside a world, at entering it in depth and exploring all around it. Thus, Hugo keeps penetrating deeper and deeper into long-held secrets, with an extra overlay of clockwork mechanics which also benefit from the sculptural plasticity leant them by the 3D format. It doesn't hurt when 3D is put to work enhancing the hand-colored exuberance of Melies own work in the delightful finale.
On the other hand, the pre-verbal work of Tree of Life (2011) seems to infuriate more film fans than it delights. This film has been attacked far and wide by the people Lenny Bruce used to call the "whats-it-mean"s; the people who cannot enjoy anything unless it has a clear explanation. These people curl up into a fetal position in the face of the ambiguous, let alone the wholly ineffable. Unless there is a planned program of meaning, like a bad Stanley Kramer movie, they stamp their feet and threaten to turn blue until you bring them The Help. (I didn't mind The Help, but did anyone have the slightest doubt of either its intended message or its eventual outcome at any point?) Tree' s two central characters, son Sean Penn and father Brad Pitt (how I wish there were photos of a family reunion) are both singularly incapable of significant verbal expression. (Reportedly, this only happened to Penn's character during post-production, when his long verbal exegeses were excised.) So the audience must read between the lines, and go back to studying faces, postures and tics in order to "read" the real dialogue beneath the words.
And in a manner recalling the days of Douglas Fairbanks, who appeared to do wonderful stunts because he had a certain energy and grace plus sets designed to his exact physical specifications, Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) delivers some marvelous treats for the eye not limited to falling down the face of a large skyscraper or blowing up part of the Kremlin. My favorite sequence has to be the deranged 3D-pinball-intricacy of Tom Cruise caught in a car elevator system like a malevolent round of Plinko. In fact, to recall MI:GP is strictly to remember the visuals -- there is not one memorable line of dialogue in it -- not even a snappy catchphrase, and I would be willing to bet you could follow the action completely with the sound turned off. Let's try it when the DVD comes out.
Even a film which should qualify as a conventional egghead-arthouse-international-politics movie like Incendies (2011), based on a play about a family torn asunder in the turmoil of the Middle East (are you bored yet?) is brilliantly realized by the filmmaker's decision to hack away at the dialogue original play and substitute the expressions of the actors and a wealth of visual metaphor, not least the film's entire key -- or MacGuffin depending on how you look at it. It even has the courage to play out lengthy scenes in unsubtitled foreign languages, relying on the audience's ability to read the visuals.
Even The Artist itself relies on its pictures uncontaminated with chatter to pull off two of its most telling and moving scenes, as we see each of the major characters fall in love. For Peppy, it is the scene in which she caresses Georges's tailcoat substituting her arm for his in the sleeve, caressing it and speaking with it in a way that would be ludicrous in a "talkie" but is poetic in its silence. Similarly, the dancing scene with its multiple spoiled takes gives us a man who literally cannot let go of a woman in a sequence that could have been irritating had we been compelled to hear the same dialogue and/or music over and over, but which is singularly charming as Georges "breaks down" before our eyes, helpless in his infatuation.
And then there is the very literal pre-verbal developments of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which I had avoided in the theaters because it looked like another lunkheaded CGI-fest, but which is instead a powerful metaphor of colonialism and racism, the only Apes worthy to stand next to the original (and superior to it in my own view). Here the acquisition of language means acquiring power and status, but that does not invalidate the dignity of the apes as they were before language: they always had dignity and strength--the language is merely the instrument that allows them to communicate that to humans. In fact, the downfall of the humans was their inability to read pre-verbal communications. I'm kind of looking forward to the subjugation of the arrogant literates in the next film. And I know that's weird for an English teacher, but then film itself really has no business being taught by an English teacher.
This is the film blog I began to provide a model for my Film Studies students and encourage them to maintain a blog of their own. I no longer write about every film I see, but I try to take note of the unusual, the remarkable, the strange or interesting connections.
Please comment copiously!Or write to me directly at my e-mail address.
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