Monday, January 16, 2012
It's about which master you've been serving
By Edward Copeland
I've never read a single novel by John le Carré and I remember when the TV miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy aired starring Alec Guinness, who was Obi-Wan to me at the time (as well as the blind butler from Murder By Death — I was starting sixth grade — sue me!), but I didn't see it. In college, I did see the movie adaptation of le Carré's novel The Russia House starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, which I thought might be an aberration. I liked it quite a bit, but movies reared me to think spies meant James Bond. Now, that I've seen the outstanding new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (no commas please), I'm getting the impression that, like Rick and the waters in Casablanca, I was misinformed as to the nature of le Carré's novels. Looking at the film adaptations of his books, I wish I had time to read them now. I can't compare the new film to the TV miniseries or Gary Oldman's performance as George Smiley to Guinness', but I can say that Oldman and the new movie both are damn good.
Tomas Alfredson directed this version of le Carré's tale, marking the Swedish filmmaker's first English-language movie and his first feature since 2008's creepy and moving vampire film Let the Right One In, remade in the U.S. two years later as Let Me In.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy takes place in the early 1970s in the upper echelons of British intelligence (referred to as "The Circus.") The top man, known as Control (John Hurt, in an excellent performance), receives word that a Soviet operative in Budapest wants to switch sides so Control sends agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Hungary, but the operation goes awry and in the fallout, Control is forced to retire and so is Smiley. Control, already ailing, dies soon afterward. Word gets to Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), the civil servant in charge of British intelligence via Ricki Tarr, a discredited agent in hiding (Tom Hardy, unrecognizable when compared to his role in Warrior) that the Hungarian mission's objective truly had been to ferret out the truth about Control's suspicions that one of the top men in The Circus actually works for the Soviets as a mole.
Lacon approaches the retired Smiley and asks him to lead a secret probe to determine if the mole exists and, if so, who he is. Smiley enlists the help of a young, still-working agent, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), and another retired intelligence official Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack). Their search of Control's flat uncovers the code names he had given to his suspects, based on the old rhyme, attached to photos taped to chess pieces. Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), who took Control's job as chief, was called Tinker. Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), now Alleline's deputy, was christened Tailor. His close allies Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik) were Soldier and Poorman, respectively. Smiley, whom Control also suspected, had been named Beggarman.
Bridget O'Connor wrote most of the screenplay until her death from cancer and it was completed by Peter Straughn. Through the taut direction by Alfredson and the carefully constructed screenplay that doesn't always play out in strictly chronological order and lacks major action sequences, Tinker Tailor drips with suspense, helped in no small part by the great ensemble assembled. If the film contains a weakness, it's that the four potential moles aren't developed well enough, particularly Hinds' character. Toby Jones acts his part very well, especially considering that they almost try too hard to make him look guilty. It's interesting to see Jones in a fictional role for a change after playing Karl Rove in W., Swifty Lazar in Frost/Nixon and being the best screen Truman Capote in Infamous. In addition to those already mentioned, there is a brief but memorable appearance by Kathy Burke as another operative who was purged. Burke just doesn't appear in enough movies, but her most memorable performance might be Queen Mary Tudor in Elizabeth opposite Cate Blanchett. If you look closely, you'll spot le Carré himself playing a drunk in a Christmas party scenes. The most amazing thing for viewers of Boardwalk Empire is the chance to hear Stephen Graham use his actual British accent in his role as Jerry Westerby, an intelligence officer monitoring the teletype the night of the Hungarian mission. His look also doesn't remind you remotely of Al Capone. Interestingly enough, one of the film's more important characters, Smiley's wife, never actually appears. The two performances that deserve the most praise are Hurt's brief work as Control, which frankly I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned much in awards talk. The MVP prize undoubtedly goes to Oldman's quiet, reserved work as Smiley.
Since Oldman took the film world by storm in 1986 in Sid & Nancy, he's made some bad movies and been over-the-top at times but he's also done a lot of great work yet his performances seem resistant to recognition from his peers. Granted, I haven't seen all of the top 2011 best actor contenders as of yet, but of what I have, Oldman belongs in that list. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy deserves more notice than it's been receiving as well.
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Labels: 10s, Blanchett, Boardwalk Empire, Books, Capote, Colin Firth, Connery, Fiction, Guinness, John Hurt, Oldman, Pfeiffer
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Saturday, June 25, 2011
Someone Is Watching
By Josh R
It is now more than 50 years since Jane Fonda’s image first flickered across movie screens in Josh Logan’s Tall Story, though in truth she has been a part of the public consciousness much longer than that. Her childhood — a subject, like so many others, about which she remains conflicted — was well-documented, and provides clues as to the circuitous, unpredictable, occasionally perilous path she has traveled ever since. She was the daughter of an American icon, beloved by the public but emotionally distant at home, and a mother whose suicide remained largely unexplained for years following her death. The disconnect between the reality of those years, as she and her brother experienced them, and the version of their family life that people read about in magazines, was as vast as the divide between Barbarella and Hanoi Jane.
Jane Fonda has bridged those gaps, among many others — if not always comfortably, then with a certain kind of fearlessness. Whether this quality can be characterized as courage or recklessness, enterprise or folly, soul-searching or self-sabotage, remains subject to interpretation. She was never a premeditated chameleon, like Madonna, whose aggressively exhibitionistic persona never really changed no matter how many times her hairstyle and fashion choices did. Fonda’s transformations and reincarnations, which were much more radical and even more difficult to reconcile (even, at times, by the lady herself), seem to have been a product of curiosity, in part triggered by the irresolute feelings brought on by self-examination, and a reflection of the turbulent times through which she has lived. The name itself has different associations for different people. My 24-year-old co-worker knows her only as a spandex-clad fitness guru staring out from the cover of a VHS tape on his mother’s bookcase; a 30-year-old friend remembers her as a celebrity fan, sitting next to Ted Turner during playoff season in Atlanta and cheering enthusiastically each time Chipper Jones parked one deep into left field. Some regard her as an icon; to others, she was and remains a traitor. When I think of Jane Fonda, I think of Klute. If Jane Fonda’s life has been a study in contradictions, there is no more brilliant study of the conflicted nature of the human soul, and the manner in which bracing intelligence can exist at striking odds with naked emotionalism, than her astonishing, revelatory performance in Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 suspense thriller, celebrating its 40th anniversary today. If I judge it to be among the greatest performances ever committed to celluloid, it is in no small part due to the fact that, whenever I am watching it, all other associations I have with Jane Fonda — cultural symbol, cinematic legend, perennial lightning rod for controversy — never enter my mind. When I see her in Klute, I see only Bree Daniels.
Klute is ostensibly the story of a prostitute being stalked by a killer. In reality, it’s a film about role-playing, and the means by which people keep their true nature concealed from others in order to survive. In a way, both the predator and his prey are in the same boat, operating behind a carefully maintained façade as a means of self-protection. When the façade begins to crack, both find themselves at risk. The catalyst for their unmasking is an investigation conducted by John Klute (Donald Sutherland), a small-town policeman who has come to New York to track the whereabouts of a missing friend. His only lead is Bree, a hardened pro who has received threatening anonymous letters from someone believed to be the man he is searching for. Although she initially greets Klute’s inquiries with hostility and resistance, Bree agrees to help with the search; she eventually begins to trust and develop feelings for him. As they get closer to unraveling the mystery, Klute becomes her friend, protector, and lover. While Bree fights her self-destructive need to sabotage their relationship, a killer lurks in the shadows, fearful of exposure and determined to destroy the object of his obsession and the agent of his potential unmasking. Bree knows that she is being watched — what neither she nor Klute realize is that she is at even greater risk than either of them could have possibly imagined.
Pakula’s lean, economical approach to the material showcases the performance of Jane Fonda, but the film does not simply exist in service to her tour-de-force. The director’s methods aren’t flashy, but Klute is nevertheless visually and stylistically interesting, building tension through camerawork, use of music, and carefully devised environmental set pieces that contribute a visceral sense of atmosphere to the proceedings. Most of the action takes place in Bree’s dingy, claustrophobic apartment and on the grimy mean streets of New York City, photographed in a washed-out color palette which emphasizes the impersonal, atrophied nature of the broken-down world denizens of the criminal subculture inhabit. This is no picturesque version of the city as seen through rose-colored glasses; what we see is a grittier, tougher version of the urban jungle as a kind of crumbling Babylon — desiccated, at once both decadent and seedy, and full of hidden dangers. When, in one startling sequence, Klute and Bree go searching for a woman who may be able to shed some light upon the case — a drug-addicted streetwalker named Arlyn Page who’s sunk so low that she’s fallen off the grid — the film becomes a nightmarish tour through the underbelly of the urban sex trade, showing the desperation, waste, and sense of helplessness which characterize sordid lives lived on the margins and conducted in the shadows.
Remarkably, Pakula’s treatment of his subject matter is in no way sensationalistic. The director doesn’t gawk at his subjects or invite the audience to leer at the catalog of perversions on display; John Klute is a stand-in for the viewer, and the images and behaviors both he and the audience encounter are too sad and human to be titillating. Even in the one scene that features nudity — Bree does a striptease for an elderly client in the office of his garment manufactory — the audience doesn’t feel as though they’re witnessing something prurient or being prompted to judge. The old man watches Bree with something strangely resembling gratitude while she rattles off a ludicrous Harlequin-romance fiction about being seduced by a handsome stranger on the beaches of Cannes. It’s a strangely fragile moment, with a disarming kind of courtliness to it; Bree is acting out a fantasy for someone whose life is so far removed from anything resembling gentility and glamour that this brokered charade is as close as he’ll ever get to it. Even moments that should be pathetic or repellent are imbued with a deep sense of empathy for the people involved. When Bree and Klute locate Arlyn and her boyfriend, they are in a state of panic, waiting for their dealer and jonesing for a fix. The dealer finally materializes, only to be frightened away by the presence of strangers — the addicts attempt to secure his return, without success. When they come back to the apartment, Arlyn strokes her boyfriend’s hair and soothes his forehead with a damp cloth; as strung-out as she is, she is assuming the role of maternal caretaker and showing concern for someone she loves. Pakula’s approach is unfailingly humane; even when observing the indignities of human degradation, the film pauses for small moments of grace.
It’s those small touches — the details, really — that lend the material a deeper sense of relevance beyond the standard-issue polemical observations about the dangers of prostitution, drug use, or even the unchecked permissiveness of a society that has lost its moral compass. Klute is not a feminist film per se, but the director and screenwriter pay particular attention to the reductive attitudes society assumes not just toward women on the margins of society (prostitutes and addicts) but women in general. The first woman we encounter in the film is not Bree, but the wife of the missing man; she’s a meek, helpless figure being grilled by detectives about her husband’s sexual proclivities, and powerless to either defend him or take any action on her own in terms of tracking him down. Regardless of what she says or does, the detectives have already made up their minds that the husband is living some kind of secret life based in deviant behavior; they choose to believe this, in part because they find the wife so unexciting — who wouldn’t stray from the reservation in search of something else? Bree is introduced in a very unorthodox manner; not in a star’s lingering close-up, but in a long line of women the camera pans across as a two disembodied voices — casting directors, looking for a model for an ad campaign — mercilessly critique each candidate based on her physical attributes. After Bree has been cursorily examined and summarily dismissed, the camera pans to the next woman in line. Pakula is showing us Bree as she’s viewed by the world — not as an individual, but as a disposable commodity, the value of which is determined by external appearances. In one of many sequences in which Bree is observed in session with her analyst, she notes how men “want me…well, not me…but they want a woman....” The johns who pay for Bree don’t care any more about her than she does about them — she’s something to be used, and she feels that she’s using them in turn.
As well-enacted as the analysis scenes are — valuable not because they serve to advance the plot, but because of what they reveal about Bree’s mindset — their presence is not essential; Fonda brings such emotional honestly to the performance that the internal life of the character is made explicit — she communicates everything Bree is thinking and feeling without even having to verbalize it. When she’s with her johns, she’s in complete control — she doesn’t have to experience anything on an emotional level, because it’s all part of the act. It’s only when she’s alone, curled up in bed and scared to pick up the phone, that her vulnerability comes into clear focus; the tough-cookie exterior and you-can-all-go-to-hell attitude mask the fragile soul of a wounded, frightened child. The relationship with Klute brings out feelings Bree didn’t even know she was capable of; feeling something genuine for another person is a new experience for her, and since she isn’t pulling the strings, she can’t adjust to what’s happening. So terrified by the prospect of relinquishing control that she can’t allow herself to be happy, Bree is trying to make sense of her willfully self-destructive impulses while at the same time holding painful realizations at bay for fear of what she might find. It’s a brave, unflinching performance that reveals something new upon each additional viewing, astonishing for both its complexity and the emotional transparency with which it is achieved. Among those “non-verbal” moments that have always stood out for me: the rueful turn of the head, as though she’s just been slapped in the face, when Bree learns that a sadistic, abusive john was deliberately sent to her by a jealous friend; the wistful, almost bewildered look she gives to a child perched on his father’s shoulders, as if she’s imagining for the first time what it might feel like to be a mother; the amazing sequence when, heavily stoned, she wanders through a club, registering all the conflicting emotions she’s feeling — defiance, vulnerability, excitement, dread, relief, self-loathing — as she makes her way through the crowd to her former pimp, curling up catlike against him as Klute looks on dumbstruck. Above all, there is the amazing moment where, cornered by the sociopath who has been stalking her, she is forced to listen to a recording of another call girl being savagely murdered. Fonda has written that she was surprised by her own reaction when the scene was actually being filmed; instead of experiencing a sense of terror, she was overcome with grief for her friend — and indeed, for all the women who do what they have to in order to survive, and have the life crushed out of them by a world that doesn’t really care whether they live or how they die.
Anyone who follows this blog with any regularity is doubtless bored to tears with my constant bemoaning of the popular wisdom by which greatness in acting is measured. For those who prefer flashy pyrotechnics to emotional honesty — and the unadorned simplicity that usually accompanies it — there will never be any dearth of strenuous physical and vocal transformations to fill out Oscar categories for years to come (any day now, I’m sure Cate Blanchett will strap on a hump to play Richard III; I’ll probably be home watching TCM when that happens). The rewards for working from the outside in are greater than working from the inside out, and I’m sure there are some who look at Jane Fonda’s work in Klute and say “So what? She looks and sounds like Jane Fonda.” Of course, Bree Daniels is not Jane Fonda any more than On the Waterfront’s Terry Malloy is Marlon Brando — they are independent creations, possessed of their own unique qualities, drives, and desires, and they have been brought to life with such raw intensity that they transcend the conventional definition of acting. Call it channeling, sorcery, whatever you will — it amounts to a pretty rare feat. When I saw the actress last, on Broadway, in a play called 33 Variations, it was very apparent that Jane Fonda is still possessed of the talent, energy, and skill to breathe life into a role in a way that others seldom can. It may not be easy for her to find roles that are commensurate with her abilities, but when she does, she still knows how to make them count. At the end of Klute, Bree Daniel’s fate is left open-ended; but for the purposes of the film, at least, her story has come to a close. Thankfully — for all of us — Jane Fonda’s is still being written.
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Labels: 70s, Blanchett, Brando, D. Sutherland, J. Fonda, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Theater
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Monday, January 05, 2009
A curious case of a movie adaptation
By Edward Copeland
It doesn't happen often, but it happens. I see a film and when it's over, no opinion has formed. No form of positive adulation. No form of negative nitpicking. Not even a mood of middling indifference or having wasted time. This is how I felt after seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for the first time, but I believed that the film deserved a second look and further deliberation before I wrote anything about it.
So I watched it a second time and nearly the same thing happened. The imagery, especially the wondrous cinematography of Claudio Miranda, kept me enthralled and once again I thought director David Fincher managed to get a performance out of Brad Pitt at a level of excellence that other directors fail to achieve. As for the film itself, it still left me cold. I turned to that handy-dandy Internet and found the original F. Scott Fitzgerald short story to see if that would offer me any guidance and the answers began to become clearer.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald is nearly devoid of sentiment and falls closer to satire. Since Fincher made one of the best satires of recent times with Pitt in Fight Club, I wondered why the softer approach was taken. Reading the story also
made clear a flaw in the film's own logic. In the story, Benjamin is born as a full-grown old man, complete with beard and the ability to speak. In the film version, he's born as an old baby and as he grows younger, he shrinks back to an infant. That made sense in the story, but in the movie's logic, Benjamin should have ended up as an adult-size baby. I don't know why they chose not to do it the other way, they still could have ended up with the touching ending. Dropping some of the other aspects of the short story were wise choices as his father (who didn't abandon him in Fitzgerald's version) attempted to raise him as age specific despite his appearance, sending the old man to grade school, etc., and that could have tread dangerously close to material similar to that mawkish Robin Williams vehicle Jack. The adaptation was by Eric Roth and I feel somewhat bad leveling any criticism his way since the screenwriter has lost all his money in the Bernie Madoff scam, but I wonder if they tried to force Benjamin Button on to the Forrest Gump template.Now, I was not one of the Gump haters, who mocked its sentimentality and felt it was some subversive conservative agitprop. I enjoyed it, particularly its satire, but when I read Winston Groom's original novel after seeing the film, I was surprised to see the differences in the Forrest of the page and the Forrest of the screen much in the way I was by the two Benjamins.
In print, both were more prickly and in Gump's case, a bit profane. Neither were wide-eyed innocents that you couldn't help but love. Fitzgerald's Benjamin was born a full-size rascal but Roth's version has had his edges smoothed away. At least in the case of Forrest Gump
the movie, there were plenty of interesting supporting characters to help give the film life. (Even the casual viewer has to spot the Lt. Dan/Captain Mike similarities.) Aside from the depth Taraji P. Henson brings to Queenie, no one else gets much to do in Benjamin Button, including Cate Blanchett. I don't know why so much surprise has been expressed at her absence from the year end awards derby because as talented as Blanchett is, her role here tilts dangerously close to merely being a plot point. I never felt the romance between her character and Pitt's. Still, I found a lot to admire within the film. As I mentioned before, it is a beautiful looking film and Fincher not only gets one of Pitt's best performances out of him, he also keeps the momentum moving, even if the temperature is below freezing. What's saddest about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is what I know is going to inevitably happen (and has already started). It is destined to be overpraised and overattacked with very few standing in the middle, where my opinion at least ended up landing.Tweet
Labels: 00s, Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Fiction, Fincher, Finney, Fitzgerald, Robin
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Thursday, February 14, 2008
Let the costume do the acting
By Edward Copeland
I liked Cate Blanchett's performance in Elizabeth better than I liked the movie itself. I was somewhat surprised that she managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, given the tepid reviews and box office. Now that I've seen it, while I think it might be more fun than its predecessor and Blanchett is fine, it's still more a case of great costume design and art direction than it is great filmmaking.
One thing that I think hurts Shekhar Kapur's film is the bountiful number of projects about Elizabeth I over the past decade or so, especially the recent HBO miniseries Elizabeth I with the great Helen Mirren.
Kapur's film is campier than his first one, but there really isn't a lot in the way of characterization to offer his cast, be it Clive Owen as Walter Raleigh or Blanchett herself who, quite literally, often blends into the background. She pulls off seeming like an older version of the woman she played so well in 1998, but the entire film ends up being of limited effect.
Blanchett probably deserved the Oscar nomination more than Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, but I still think there were other, better choices out there.
As eye candy, Elizabeth: The Golden Age has its moments, but as a film, it's a nonentity.
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I liked Cate Blanchett's performance in Elizabeth better than I liked the movie itself. I was somewhat surprised that she managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, given the tepid reviews and box office. Now that I've seen it, while I think it might be more fun than its predecessor and Blanchett is fine, it's still more a case of great costume design and art direction than it is great filmmaking.
One thing that I think hurts Shekhar Kapur's film is the bountiful number of projects about Elizabeth I over the past decade or so, especially the recent HBO miniseries Elizabeth I with the great Helen Mirren.
Kapur's film is campier than his first one, but there really isn't a lot in the way of characterization to offer his cast, be it Clive Owen as Walter Raleigh or Blanchett herself who, quite literally, often blends into the background. She pulls off seeming like an older version of the woman she played so well in 1998, but the entire film ends up being of limited effect.
Blanchett probably deserved the Oscar nomination more than Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, but I still think there were other, better choices out there.
As eye candy, Elizabeth: The Golden Age has its moments, but as a film, it's a nonentity.
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Labels: 00s, Blanchett, Clive Owen, HBO, Jolie, Mirren, Sequels
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Thursday, January 10, 2008
A Sucker for Cox
By Odienator
The double entendre jokes in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story don't get any better than my title, but they share the screen with one of the more committed performances in a genre-spoofing movie. Walk Hard marks the third film in 2007's Judd Apatow triple crown, following the amusing but misogynistic Knocked Up (which he wrote and directed) and the hilarious and sweet Superbad (which he produced). Walk Hard also proved that the man who brought us The 40-Year-Old Virgin is not box-office infallible; this movie was a flop, and I'll bet it had something to do with the poster. Similar to Virgin's goofy Steve Carrell picture, Hard's poster features John C. Reilly, shirtless and goofy, paying homage to Jim Morrison. Of course, you need to be about 40 to get the reference, and most moviegoers hover around the age of 12. To them, Reilly must have looked like the poster boy for middle-age gay porn and I'm sure the title did nothing to disprove it: The Dewey Cox Story.
Perhaps the other reason why Walk Hard's box office numbers were flaccid is its marketing. I thought the film was going to be another in the seemingly endless line of bad parody movies such as Date Movie, Epic Movie and the way past its prime Scary Movie series. Walk Hard is definitely a spoof, but it's more than a series of gags thrown together haphazardly. It's closer to Blazing Saddles than Airplane!, a movie that tries to be a credible example of its target. Reilly is a good singer and an even better vocal mimic, and his performance anchors the film by becoming the one constant joke to which all the spoofy material sticks. For the most part, Walk Hard doesn't suck.
Cox comes onscreen first as a young boy who, true to musical biopic fashion, does something as a child that will haunt him until the final frame of film shoots out of the projector: He accidentally cuts his younger brother in half with a machete. The smaller Cox, who was far more brilliant than Dewey could ever be, doesn't survive, and Pa Cox (Raymond J. Barry) spends the rest of the film telling Dewey "the wrong son died." This gives Dewey a complex the film will use to explain his descent into the standard biopic excesses of sex, drugs and booze.
When Dewey is 14 (and played by the 42-year old Reilly), he runs off with his 12-year-old-girlfriend, Edith (played by 34-year-old Kristen Wiig). In order to make money, Cox waits tables at a juke joint where, according to Coming to America's Paul Bates, "people come to dance erotically." As men and women throw themselves into every sexual position imaginable while driven to frenzy by the club's soul singer, Cox wants a piece of the action on stage. He gets his big break when the club entertainment suffers several big breaks at the hands of a bookie. Dewey performs the singer's act verbatim, which, considering the Black-themed lyrics, comes off as surreal and hilarious. The people dance erotically anyway, and Cox is on the rise.
The Walk Hard of the title makes its appearance in a scene lifted from the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. Dewey's audition goes horribly, and just when it looks like his career may be over, he channels his inner Man in Black and sings the song that will become his signature. Reilly sounds more like Johnny Cash than Joaquin Phoenix, and the song works as both parody and a country western tune. With the studio musicians (Chris Parnell, Matt Besser and Tim Meadows) behind him, Dewey hits the concert circuit and his song becomes a hit. Unfortunately, Dewey's familial guilt worsens as a result of a tragic accident occurring while his parents were dancing to his hit song, "The Wrong Son Died," Pa Cox shows up to inform him.
Once his career takes off, Cox is repeatedly seduced by temptation, which takes the guise of his bandleader Sam (Meadows). Every time Cox goes to the bathroom, he finds Sam behind the door partaking in some form of drugs. "You don't want none of this, Dewey!" Sam says, all the while making it impossible for Dewey to say no. As a result, Cox becomes an alcoholic and a drug addict, plowing through groupies both male and female while his fertile wife Edith (who must have 25 kids in this short period of Dewey's life) remains at home. While partaking in his affairs, Dewey meets his June Carter Cash clone, Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer). This leads not only to the dissolution of his marriage to Edith, but also to a filthy song called "Let's Duet," where Dewey and Darlene sing more double entendres than can fit on a 45. "In my dreams, you're blowin' me," sings Dewey, "...some kisses..."
Like that which it mocks, Walk Hard takes us through various stages in Dewey's career, including his run-ins with famous people such as Elvis (played by Jack White of the White Stripes) and the Beatles (Paul is played by an actor you'd never expect). The swipes at the aforementioned are brutal enough (the Beatles wind up in what looks like a bad UFC match), but Apatow and director Jake Kasdan mine a small gem of genius when Cox pays tribute to Bob Dylan. Reilly's Dylan makes Cate Blanchett's imitation look like the bad Harpo Marx on drugs clone it is, and the song, "Royal Jelly," is a mishmash of nonsense that sounds a lot like some of Dylan's lousier material.
Walk Hard is full of little moments like these, ones that seem like throwaway gags but actually have some thought and construction behind them. Several times, the film reaches for a level of absurdity that is raucous and enjoyable, smoothing over some of its rougher patches. The songs are more than just jokes, and Reilly's versatility carries him from the deep rumble of Johnny Cash to the high notes of Roy Orbison (the Orbison song may be the best one in the movie). Reilly even gets to sing a disturbing yet touching song about his character's death during the credits. All the songs are first rate and perhaps we'll see Cox performing on Oscar night. (Don't we always?)
For all Walk Hard's verbal Cox jokes ("I need Cox," is one of the first lines we hear in the film), the piece de resistance has to be a completely gratuitous extended scene of male frontal nudity that somehow got past the prudes at the MPAA. As Dewey sits on the floor talking to his first wife during a hotel room orgy, his roadie Bert occupies the frame behind him. Or rather, a certain part of Bert. Reilly carries on a conversation with Bert's favorite toy, whose owner asks him for information and at one point, shares a beer with him. Reilly deserves his Golden Globe for not cracking up while carrying on a conversation with a guy while his junk is inches from his face. This scene is so popular that on NPR, one of the sleepy-voiced female hosts asked Jake Kasdan how he came up with the idea. Kasdan said he had seen an old Rolling Stones documentary where the entire band was full frontal nude for no reason. Bert's penis is far less scary than I'd imagine Keith Richards' to be. Richards' jammy was probably smoking a cigarette.
If you can only get to one Apatow movie from 2007, I suggest you get some McLovin, but if you can get to two, feast your eyes on some Cox.
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The double entendre jokes in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story don't get any better than my title, but they share the screen with one of the more committed performances in a genre-spoofing movie. Walk Hard marks the third film in 2007's Judd Apatow triple crown, following the amusing but misogynistic Knocked Up (which he wrote and directed) and the hilarious and sweet Superbad (which he produced). Walk Hard also proved that the man who brought us The 40-Year-Old Virgin is not box-office infallible; this movie was a flop, and I'll bet it had something to do with the poster. Similar to Virgin's goofy Steve Carrell picture, Hard's poster features John C. Reilly, shirtless and goofy, paying homage to Jim Morrison. Of course, you need to be about 40 to get the reference, and most moviegoers hover around the age of 12. To them, Reilly must have looked like the poster boy for middle-age gay porn and I'm sure the title did nothing to disprove it: The Dewey Cox Story.
Perhaps the other reason why Walk Hard's box office numbers were flaccid is its marketing. I thought the film was going to be another in the seemingly endless line of bad parody movies such as Date Movie, Epic Movie and the way past its prime Scary Movie series. Walk Hard is definitely a spoof, but it's more than a series of gags thrown together haphazardly. It's closer to Blazing Saddles than Airplane!, a movie that tries to be a credible example of its target. Reilly is a good singer and an even better vocal mimic, and his performance anchors the film by becoming the one constant joke to which all the spoofy material sticks. For the most part, Walk Hard doesn't suck.
Cox comes onscreen first as a young boy who, true to musical biopic fashion, does something as a child that will haunt him until the final frame of film shoots out of the projector: He accidentally cuts his younger brother in half with a machete. The smaller Cox, who was far more brilliant than Dewey could ever be, doesn't survive, and Pa Cox (Raymond J. Barry) spends the rest of the film telling Dewey "the wrong son died." This gives Dewey a complex the film will use to explain his descent into the standard biopic excesses of sex, drugs and booze.
When Dewey is 14 (and played by the 42-year old Reilly), he runs off with his 12-year-old-girlfriend, Edith (played by 34-year-old Kristen Wiig). In order to make money, Cox waits tables at a juke joint where, according to Coming to America's Paul Bates, "people come to dance erotically." As men and women throw themselves into every sexual position imaginable while driven to frenzy by the club's soul singer, Cox wants a piece of the action on stage. He gets his big break when the club entertainment suffers several big breaks at the hands of a bookie. Dewey performs the singer's act verbatim, which, considering the Black-themed lyrics, comes off as surreal and hilarious. The people dance erotically anyway, and Cox is on the rise.
The Walk Hard of the title makes its appearance in a scene lifted from the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. Dewey's audition goes horribly, and just when it looks like his career may be over, he channels his inner Man in Black and sings the song that will become his signature. Reilly sounds more like Johnny Cash than Joaquin Phoenix, and the song works as both parody and a country western tune. With the studio musicians (Chris Parnell, Matt Besser and Tim Meadows) behind him, Dewey hits the concert circuit and his song becomes a hit. Unfortunately, Dewey's familial guilt worsens as a result of a tragic accident occurring while his parents were dancing to his hit song, "The Wrong Son Died," Pa Cox shows up to inform him.
Once his career takes off, Cox is repeatedly seduced by temptation, which takes the guise of his bandleader Sam (Meadows). Every time Cox goes to the bathroom, he finds Sam behind the door partaking in some form of drugs. "You don't want none of this, Dewey!" Sam says, all the while making it impossible for Dewey to say no. As a result, Cox becomes an alcoholic and a drug addict, plowing through groupies both male and female while his fertile wife Edith (who must have 25 kids in this short period of Dewey's life) remains at home. While partaking in his affairs, Dewey meets his June Carter Cash clone, Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer). This leads not only to the dissolution of his marriage to Edith, but also to a filthy song called "Let's Duet," where Dewey and Darlene sing more double entendres than can fit on a 45. "In my dreams, you're blowin' me," sings Dewey, "...some kisses..."
Like that which it mocks, Walk Hard takes us through various stages in Dewey's career, including his run-ins with famous people such as Elvis (played by Jack White of the White Stripes) and the Beatles (Paul is played by an actor you'd never expect). The swipes at the aforementioned are brutal enough (the Beatles wind up in what looks like a bad UFC match), but Apatow and director Jake Kasdan mine a small gem of genius when Cox pays tribute to Bob Dylan. Reilly's Dylan makes Cate Blanchett's imitation look like the bad Harpo Marx on drugs clone it is, and the song, "Royal Jelly," is a mishmash of nonsense that sounds a lot like some of Dylan's lousier material.
Walk Hard is full of little moments like these, ones that seem like throwaway gags but actually have some thought and construction behind them. Several times, the film reaches for a level of absurdity that is raucous and enjoyable, smoothing over some of its rougher patches. The songs are more than just jokes, and Reilly's versatility carries him from the deep rumble of Johnny Cash to the high notes of Roy Orbison (the Orbison song may be the best one in the movie). Reilly even gets to sing a disturbing yet touching song about his character's death during the credits. All the songs are first rate and perhaps we'll see Cox performing on Oscar night. (Don't we always?)
For all Walk Hard's verbal Cox jokes ("I need Cox," is one of the first lines we hear in the film), the piece de resistance has to be a completely gratuitous extended scene of male frontal nudity that somehow got past the prudes at the MPAA. As Dewey sits on the floor talking to his first wife during a hotel room orgy, his roadie Bert occupies the frame behind him. Or rather, a certain part of Bert. Reilly carries on a conversation with Bert's favorite toy, whose owner asks him for information and at one point, shares a beer with him. Reilly deserves his Golden Globe for not cracking up while carrying on a conversation with a guy while his junk is inches from his face. This scene is so popular that on NPR, one of the sleepy-voiced female hosts asked Jake Kasdan how he came up with the idea. Kasdan said he had seen an old Rolling Stones documentary where the entire band was full frontal nude for no reason. Bert's penis is far less scary than I'd imagine Keith Richards' to be. Richards' jammy was probably smoking a cigarette.
If you can only get to one Apatow movie from 2007, I suggest you get some McLovin, but if you can get to two, feast your eyes on some Cox.
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Labels: 00s, Apatow, Beatles, Blanchett, Dylan, Elvis, John C. Reilly
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Whatever It Is, Kill It.
By Josh R
I am writing this brief preamble after having already completed this piece, because the nature of following paragraphs requires something in the way of explanation. I started out with every intention of writing a review of La Vie en Rose. The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and that’s not what I wound up doing. So for those expecting a critical discussion of the film, you’re not going to find it here — the film itself is not summarized or barely even discussed. Somewhere midway through the writing of this piece, my instincts pulled me in a different direction, and it became about something else entirely. Call it righteous indignation, bile or just plain whining — whatever it was, I was overtaken by the spirit (in the evangelical sense), and for whatever it’s worth, here is what the spirit had to say:
The hardest thing to place is the walk.
Most everything else about Marion Cotillard’s bizarre, fussy performance in La Vie en Rose — allegedly a biography of legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf, but really more of an extended drag act with subtitles — strikes an instant chord of recognition. The exaggerated overbite makes her a doppelganger for Strangers with Candy's Jerri Blank, the kooky creation of demented satirist Amy Sedaris. In the Comedy Central series detailing the exploits of a reformed crack whore going back to high school, the character’s aggressively protruding chompers were intended as a sight gag; in La Vie en Rose, they’re meant to be taken seriously. The voice — a guttural hiss that shifts into an adenoidal, nails-on-a-chalkboard shriek when Edith loses her shit, which she frequently does — is pitched somewhere between The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum and the cartoon hag in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (when she laughs she goes “heh heh heh”). The stoop-shouldered, saucer-eyed look, accompanied by a strenuous sucking in of the cheeks, which Cotillard affects for her representation of Edith in her 20s, is pure Marty Feldman circa Young Frankenstein. Again, it should be mentioned that when Feldman played Igor, his faces were intended to draw laughs — here they’re done with such wormy sincerity that they suggest Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, trying to look as pathetically undernourished and bedraggled as possible, in order to maximize her profit margin soliciting change from guilt-ridden passers-by.
But it’s the walk — comprised of many different components, none of which appear to have been executed without a certain degree of intense physical pain — that had me stumped for the better part of the film’s interminable 140 minute running time. With the aforementioned posture, which can only be described as Quasimodoesque, Cotillard has added this spasmodic jerky little gait that resembles nothing to be found in the realm of human motion. She looks a bit like a bobblehead doll walking on eggshells, which seems at once mechanized (like an automaton on a theme-park ride) and strangely Muppet-like. After a while, I concluded that what it reminded of me most was Sesame Street's Grover, mainly owing to the swaying motion that accompanied the convulsiveness. My mother, who is completely ignorant on most matters relating to pop culture, surprised me about midway through the film by hitting the nail on the head. “Yoda,” she crisply ventured, and with a note of thinly veiled disgust, as we watched the older Edith clumping her way across the screen with the twitching laboriousness (or laborious twitchiness, if you like) of an overburdened pack horse on a bad acid trip.
In fairness, I need to say that I am not particularly familiar with Edith Piaf, beyond having listened to a selection of her recordings. Having no real sense of the physicality of the real-life woman, I am prepared to allow for the possibility that she did indeed look, sound and act like a troll. Performances in celebrity biopics are inevitably based in mimicry, and it is obvious that Cotillard is mimicking someone — or something. I must duly stipulate that never, in my 20-some years of moviegoing, have I ever witnessed a more heavily stylized piece of acting in a film that was clearly intended as an exercise in realism. In a fantasy-based film, such as a Lord of the Rings or that Tom Cruise turkey Legend (with that creepy little hissing blue-elf thing, which the actress also occasionally evokes), it would make a modicum of sense. La Vie en Rose does not fall into that category, and Cotillard’s approach does not suggest anything even remotely resembling that which might be drawn from the realm of recognizable human behavior. It’s as she’s on a mission to make Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford impersonation look like Liv Ullmann in earth mother mode.
If you detect a note of anger in my tone, it’s because I have been of late incredibly disturbed — and genuinely saddened — by the tendencies of many Oscar-obsessed bloggers to bash Julie Christie’s work in Away from Her as means of promoting what they perceive as the superiority of Ms. Cotillard’s achievement. As those who follow the awards season are doubtless aware, Ms. Christie has bested Cotillard in many key contests leading up to the big Oscar showdown. This has sent Gollum’s partisans careening into red alert mode; I’ve read an alarming number of posts, some penned by bloggers whom I admire and respect, that take the tack of disparaging Christie’s work as an offensive strike against the prospect of her winning. This is nothing new — I’ve been guilty of voicing my disdain for films and performances with more vehemence when it becomes clear that they’re on a collision course with golden glory — but I’m perplexed and troubled by the rationale that serves as the basis for the Christie attacks.
Anyone who’s read my previous pieces on this blog knows where I stand on the prevailing wisdom about what constitutes great screen acting. There’s a school of thought which holds that the measure of greatness lies in the extent to which an actor can disappear into a role — not just by inhabiting it simply and naturally, but through techniques involving extreme physical or vocal transformation. In order to give a great performance, an actor needs to get as far away from themselves as humanly possible, to the point where their peers can say, with a note of awe in their voices, “I forgot I was watching Charlize Theron.” Above all, the effort needs to be visible — the unforced naturalism of previous generations of actors has become anathema. Champions of Cate Blanchett — a talented actress whose studied, controlled approach of late has won her widespread acclaim while leaving viewers such as myself mostly cold — would cite her chameleon-like ability to assume any physical or vocal characteristic under the sun as proof of her genius. The thought and care and intense preparation that have gone into each performance is always made explicit. Contrast that with Julie Christie, who breathes life into her role with such effortless simplicity that she hardly seems to be acting at all — she is that woman, gradually slipping away into the haze of Alzheimer’s, as opposed to giving a showy, strenuous representation of how the disease ravages the mind, body and soul.
I try to be tolerant and respectful of people whose opinions differ from my own — I actually served as the referee during a heated debate that occurred between friends two night ago over the merits of Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd — but these people need to shut the fuck up. Their attitudes represent everything that is glib, facile and wrong-headed about the popular standard by which acting is evaluated — which holds that style is substance — and their short-sightedness is slowly but surely contributing to the ruination of the cinematic art form. They’re breeding a generation of actors who will favor shtick and mimicry over honesty and feeling, and that’s a fucking shame. It’s acting as pyrotechnics, in which big, flashy special effects will have taken the place of subtlety and nuance. If one likes that sort of thing, then that is the sort of thing one likes; I'll take the other.
So now that I’ve gotten that rant out of my system, let’s dispense with the petty insults (the Muppet references, et. al.), and see what it all boils down to. There was not one moment of Ms. Cotillard’s performance, or the messy, slipshod film fashioned haphazardly around it, that rang even remotely true for me, in any way, shape or form. For all I know, the actress may have been drawing from a place of genuine feeling — but the performance is so mannered, so stylized, so forced in its execution, that the emotional truth that may or may not be fueling it never pierces through the thick, hard shell of artifice that contains it. I can’t imagine that the goal was to make Edith Piaf as repulsive and grotesquely un-humanlike as possible, but that’s the practical effect of the actress’s approach. You keep waiting for Sigourney Weaver to show up with a blowtorch gun and blast her to smithereens. The people who love this performance — and there are many of them out there — regard it with something verging on awe. As do I…albeit for entirely different reasons.
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TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
I am writing this brief preamble after having already completed this piece, because the nature of following paragraphs requires something in the way of explanation. I started out with every intention of writing a review of La Vie en Rose. The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and that’s not what I wound up doing. So for those expecting a critical discussion of the film, you’re not going to find it here — the film itself is not summarized or barely even discussed. Somewhere midway through the writing of this piece, my instincts pulled me in a different direction, and it became about something else entirely. Call it righteous indignation, bile or just plain whining — whatever it was, I was overtaken by the spirit (in the evangelical sense), and for whatever it’s worth, here is what the spirit had to say:
The hardest thing to place is the walk.
Most everything else about Marion Cotillard’s bizarre, fussy performance in La Vie en Rose — allegedly a biography of legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf, but really more of an extended drag act with subtitles — strikes an instant chord of recognition. The exaggerated overbite makes her a doppelganger for Strangers with Candy's Jerri Blank, the kooky creation of demented satirist Amy Sedaris. In the Comedy Central series detailing the exploits of a reformed crack whore going back to high school, the character’s aggressively protruding chompers were intended as a sight gag; in La Vie en Rose, they’re meant to be taken seriously. The voice — a guttural hiss that shifts into an adenoidal, nails-on-a-chalkboard shriek when Edith loses her shit, which she frequently does — is pitched somewhere between The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum and the cartoon hag in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (when she laughs she goes “heh heh heh”). The stoop-shouldered, saucer-eyed look, accompanied by a strenuous sucking in of the cheeks, which Cotillard affects for her representation of Edith in her 20s, is pure Marty Feldman circa Young Frankenstein. Again, it should be mentioned that when Feldman played Igor, his faces were intended to draw laughs — here they’re done with such wormy sincerity that they suggest Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, trying to look as pathetically undernourished and bedraggled as possible, in order to maximize her profit margin soliciting change from guilt-ridden passers-by.
But it’s the walk — comprised of many different components, none of which appear to have been executed without a certain degree of intense physical pain — that had me stumped for the better part of the film’s interminable 140 minute running time. With the aforementioned posture, which can only be described as Quasimodoesque, Cotillard has added this spasmodic jerky little gait that resembles nothing to be found in the realm of human motion. She looks a bit like a bobblehead doll walking on eggshells, which seems at once mechanized (like an automaton on a theme-park ride) and strangely Muppet-like. After a while, I concluded that what it reminded of me most was Sesame Street's Grover, mainly owing to the swaying motion that accompanied the convulsiveness. My mother, who is completely ignorant on most matters relating to pop culture, surprised me about midway through the film by hitting the nail on the head. “Yoda,” she crisply ventured, and with a note of thinly veiled disgust, as we watched the older Edith clumping her way across the screen with the twitching laboriousness (or laborious twitchiness, if you like) of an overburdened pack horse on a bad acid trip.
In fairness, I need to say that I am not particularly familiar with Edith Piaf, beyond having listened to a selection of her recordings. Having no real sense of the physicality of the real-life woman, I am prepared to allow for the possibility that she did indeed look, sound and act like a troll. Performances in celebrity biopics are inevitably based in mimicry, and it is obvious that Cotillard is mimicking someone — or something. I must duly stipulate that never, in my 20-some years of moviegoing, have I ever witnessed a more heavily stylized piece of acting in a film that was clearly intended as an exercise in realism. In a fantasy-based film, such as a Lord of the Rings or that Tom Cruise turkey Legend (with that creepy little hissing blue-elf thing, which the actress also occasionally evokes), it would make a modicum of sense. La Vie en Rose does not fall into that category, and Cotillard’s approach does not suggest anything even remotely resembling that which might be drawn from the realm of recognizable human behavior. It’s as she’s on a mission to make Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford impersonation look like Liv Ullmann in earth mother mode.
If you detect a note of anger in my tone, it’s because I have been of late incredibly disturbed — and genuinely saddened — by the tendencies of many Oscar-obsessed bloggers to bash Julie Christie’s work in Away from Her as means of promoting what they perceive as the superiority of Ms. Cotillard’s achievement. As those who follow the awards season are doubtless aware, Ms. Christie has bested Cotillard in many key contests leading up to the big Oscar showdown. This has sent Gollum’s partisans careening into red alert mode; I’ve read an alarming number of posts, some penned by bloggers whom I admire and respect, that take the tack of disparaging Christie’s work as an offensive strike against the prospect of her winning. This is nothing new — I’ve been guilty of voicing my disdain for films and performances with more vehemence when it becomes clear that they’re on a collision course with golden glory — but I’m perplexed and troubled by the rationale that serves as the basis for the Christie attacks.
Anyone who’s read my previous pieces on this blog knows where I stand on the prevailing wisdom about what constitutes great screen acting. There’s a school of thought which holds that the measure of greatness lies in the extent to which an actor can disappear into a role — not just by inhabiting it simply and naturally, but through techniques involving extreme physical or vocal transformation. In order to give a great performance, an actor needs to get as far away from themselves as humanly possible, to the point where their peers can say, with a note of awe in their voices, “I forgot I was watching Charlize Theron.” Above all, the effort needs to be visible — the unforced naturalism of previous generations of actors has become anathema. Champions of Cate Blanchett — a talented actress whose studied, controlled approach of late has won her widespread acclaim while leaving viewers such as myself mostly cold — would cite her chameleon-like ability to assume any physical or vocal characteristic under the sun as proof of her genius. The thought and care and intense preparation that have gone into each performance is always made explicit. Contrast that with Julie Christie, who breathes life into her role with such effortless simplicity that she hardly seems to be acting at all — she is that woman, gradually slipping away into the haze of Alzheimer’s, as opposed to giving a showy, strenuous representation of how the disease ravages the mind, body and soul.
I try to be tolerant and respectful of people whose opinions differ from my own — I actually served as the referee during a heated debate that occurred between friends two night ago over the merits of Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd — but these people need to shut the fuck up. Their attitudes represent everything that is glib, facile and wrong-headed about the popular standard by which acting is evaluated — which holds that style is substance — and their short-sightedness is slowly but surely contributing to the ruination of the cinematic art form. They’re breeding a generation of actors who will favor shtick and mimicry over honesty and feeling, and that’s a fucking shame. It’s acting as pyrotechnics, in which big, flashy special effects will have taken the place of subtlety and nuance. If one likes that sort of thing, then that is the sort of thing one likes; I'll take the other.
So now that I’ve gotten that rant out of my system, let’s dispense with the petty insults (the Muppet references, et. al.), and see what it all boils down to. There was not one moment of Ms. Cotillard’s performance, or the messy, slipshod film fashioned haphazardly around it, that rang even remotely true for me, in any way, shape or form. For all I know, the actress may have been drawing from a place of genuine feeling — but the performance is so mannered, so stylized, so forced in its execution, that the emotional truth that may or may not be fueling it never pierces through the thick, hard shell of artifice that contains it. I can’t imagine that the goal was to make Edith Piaf as repulsive and grotesquely un-humanlike as possible, but that’s the practical effect of the actress’s approach. You keep waiting for Sigourney Weaver to show up with a blowtorch gun and blast her to smithereens. The people who love this performance — and there are many of them out there — regard it with something verging on awe. As do I…albeit for entirely different reasons.
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Labels: 00s, Blanchett, Cotillard, Crawford, Dunaway, Foreign, Julie Christie, Musicals, Oscars, Sigourney Weaver
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
With friends like these...
By Edward Copeland
Why didn't I like Notes on a Scandal more? Don't get me wrong — overall I did like the film a lot. In fact, for the first 40 minutes or so, I was positively riveted, by the writing and most especially the great performances of Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. Then, it began to wear on me and, maybe this sounds silly, but I blame Philip Glass.
I know — we are supposed to worship at the feet of this composer but honestly, when has he composed a film score that didn't leave you with either a splitting headache or in a state of catatonia?
Thankfully, Dench, Blanchett, director Richard Eyre and screenwriter Patrick Marber mostly succeed in waging their war of narrative against Glass' intrusive notes. In other cases, such as the wretched The Hours, Glass only made a bad situation worse.
Enough about Glass — let's discuss what is good about Notes on a Scandal, and there is a lot. At the top of that list is Dench, who seems to me to be making a concerted effort to atone for her Oscar win for the glorified cameo in Shakespeare in Love (where she was admittedly good) and her Harvey Weinstein-purchased nomination for Chocolat, that even she seemed embarrassed about.
Since then, she's done outstanding work in Iris and Mrs. Henderson Presents and I believe Notes on a Scandal to be her finest film work since Mrs. Brown sparked her late career screen stardom. (Though she stays true to the essential whoredom of British actors by continuing to get paychecks for the James Bond films).
Dench's work here as Barbara Covett, a spinster busybody of a school teacher with repressed lesbian and stalking tendencies, is superb. She creates a full-bodied monster, but still lets her humanity shine through. You hate her and you feel sorry for her at the same time.
Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, a younger teacher at the same school who Barbara befriends and hopes to catch in her web once she discovers that Sheba is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students (Andrew Simpson).
The film never plays the affair for cheap Mary Kay LeTourneau-type thrills and it doesn't excuse Sheba's actions either. She obviously is as troubled as Barbara, but in entirely different ways. She knows what she's doing is wrong, but she can't stop, even when Barbara tries to "help her" end the affair and keep it secret from the school.
Of course, Barbara isn't trying to save her friend — she's stockpiling ammunition in hopes that she can make Sheba her new love obsession since her last one fled to another school to escape the old woman's needy grasp. However, Barbara turns on Sheba when Sheba "fails" her at what she considers a crucial emotional time for her to attend a play in which Sheba's 12-year-old son with Down syndrome is performing and Sheba's older husband (Bill Nighy, good in a rather small role) insists that she attend as he asks why Barbara hangs around all the time.
Soon, Barbara's machinations, motivated by pique, turn all their worlds upside down. Eyre and Marber, working from the novel by Zoe Heller, present the story very efficiently, with little that seems extraneous.
Blanchett performs well (and selling her as supporting is marketing at its finest — she and Dench are equals in the film), but we never get to see enough of what makes Sheba tick to understand why she does they things she does, from pursuing a friendship with Barbara in the first place to the affair with the teen.
In the end, Notes on a Scandal really belongs to Dench and her creation of Barbara, a screen harridan for the ages. Maybe when it comes out on DVD, they'll offer a track where you can delete the Glass score from the soundtrack and the movie will be even better.
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TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Why didn't I like Notes on a Scandal more? Don't get me wrong — overall I did like the film a lot. In fact, for the first 40 minutes or so, I was positively riveted, by the writing and most especially the great performances of Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. Then, it began to wear on me and, maybe this sounds silly, but I blame Philip Glass.
I know — we are supposed to worship at the feet of this composer but honestly, when has he composed a film score that didn't leave you with either a splitting headache or in a state of catatonia?
Thankfully, Dench, Blanchett, director Richard Eyre and screenwriter Patrick Marber mostly succeed in waging their war of narrative against Glass' intrusive notes. In other cases, such as the wretched The Hours, Glass only made a bad situation worse.
Enough about Glass — let's discuss what is good about Notes on a Scandal, and there is a lot. At the top of that list is Dench, who seems to me to be making a concerted effort to atone for her Oscar win for the glorified cameo in Shakespeare in Love (where she was admittedly good) and her Harvey Weinstein-purchased nomination for Chocolat, that even she seemed embarrassed about.
Since then, she's done outstanding work in Iris and Mrs. Henderson Presents and I believe Notes on a Scandal to be her finest film work since Mrs. Brown sparked her late career screen stardom. (Though she stays true to the essential whoredom of British actors by continuing to get paychecks for the James Bond films).
Dench's work here as Barbara Covett, a spinster busybody of a school teacher with repressed lesbian and stalking tendencies, is superb. She creates a full-bodied monster, but still lets her humanity shine through. You hate her and you feel sorry for her at the same time.
Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, a younger teacher at the same school who Barbara befriends and hopes to catch in her web once she discovers that Sheba is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students (Andrew Simpson).
The film never plays the affair for cheap Mary Kay LeTourneau-type thrills and it doesn't excuse Sheba's actions either. She obviously is as troubled as Barbara, but in entirely different ways. She knows what she's doing is wrong, but she can't stop, even when Barbara tries to "help her" end the affair and keep it secret from the school.
Of course, Barbara isn't trying to save her friend — she's stockpiling ammunition in hopes that she can make Sheba her new love obsession since her last one fled to another school to escape the old woman's needy grasp. However, Barbara turns on Sheba when Sheba "fails" her at what she considers a crucial emotional time for her to attend a play in which Sheba's 12-year-old son with Down syndrome is performing and Sheba's older husband (Bill Nighy, good in a rather small role) insists that she attend as he asks why Barbara hangs around all the time.
Soon, Barbara's machinations, motivated by pique, turn all their worlds upside down. Eyre and Marber, working from the novel by Zoe Heller, present the story very efficiently, with little that seems extraneous.
Blanchett performs well (and selling her as supporting is marketing at its finest — she and Dench are equals in the film), but we never get to see enough of what makes Sheba tick to understand why she does they things she does, from pursuing a friendship with Barbara in the first place to the affair with the teen.
In the end, Notes on a Scandal really belongs to Dench and her creation of Barbara, a screen harridan for the ages. Maybe when it comes out on DVD, they'll offer a track where you can delete the Glass score from the soundtrack and the movie will be even better.
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Labels: 00s, Blanchett, Dench, H. Weinstein, Shakespeare
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
Friday, December 22, 2006
Road to Morocco (minus Hope & Crosby)
By Josh R
In order to enjoy films, individually and collectively, you need to be willing and able to exercise suspension of disbelief.
You can’t expect every film to be, in every respect, completely realistic. For instance, if you look at the portion of It’s a Wonderful Life in which the angel Clarence shows George Bailey what the world would have been like if he had never existed, and your reaction is one of “Well, that’s just not believable” or “That would never happen,” then honey, you’re missing the point. You have to leave your understanding of what is within the realm of realistic possibility at the door.
But there are limits.
Case in point: there’s a little film called Babel winding its way through our nation’s movie theaters that is so completely illogical in every respect that it strains credulity well past the breaking point.
Now, Babel isn’t a fantasy-based film such as Harry Potter, nor science fiction, nor the kind of broad comedy where you accept the ridiculousness as in keeping with the spirit of the thing — it purports to be a realistic drama. But the implausibility factor has been ratcheted up so high that somewhere, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are watching this thing and mumbling to themselves, “You’ve gotta be fuckin' kidding me.” Copeland, I know you had issues with Training Day. I'll bet it's starting to look pretty damn reasonable right about now.
I shall now proceed TO SPOIL THE ENTIRE FILM, ruining many major plot points for the uninitiated, because frankly, I think it deserves to be spoiled — and I don’t mean by treating it to ice cream. For those of you playing the home game, I have enumerated the ways in which Babel flies in the face of reason and sanity, in some instances violating even the very laws of physics, to better help you keep score.
A film such as this needs big name stars (and a producer with a strange sense of humor) in order to get made. Babel provides these in the attractive personages of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as an American couple vacationing abroad. The loss of a baby to crib death has caused a rift in their marriage — apparently Pitt’s character deserted his wife and remaining children shortly after the little tot heaved its last breath, which is how so many grieving parents react under the circumstances (1). Really, there isn’t any explanation beyond that — the kid died, and Dad went away. And then came back.
Anyway, Pitt is trying to make amends with his understandably aggrieved missus, who treats him with the kind of edgy hostility usually reserved for traffic court. Getting back into his wife’s good graces apparently entails dragging her on a trip to the ever-popular vacation paradise that is the economically depressed rural western portion of Morocco (2). When the wife asks the husband exactly why they’re there — and who can blame her? — Pitt replies “to be alone.” His notion of being alone involves getting on a stuffy, overcrowded tour bus which travels from one depressing third world sinkhole to another (3) since, apparently, the Moroccan Board of Tourism wants British and American visitors to see only the cruddiest, most poverty-stricken parts of their mountainous terrain (4), the areas where they’ll think twice before sampling the water. As far as I know, the tour hasn’t been sponsored by UNICEF.
This is the portion of the film that makes sense, relatively speaking.
Meanwhile — or rather, before all of this — a Moroccan goat farmer buys a rifle from a neighbor for the purpose of scaring off jackals which threaten his flock. He immediately gives the gun to his 11-year-old son Yusef (4.5, making allowances for cultural differences), who proves to be a crack shot on his very first attempt at target practice. Hitting a rock from a distance of several yards on your first try can be attributed to dumb luck, but apparently, if you put a Model 720 12-gauge shotgun in the hands of a child with no prior knowledge of firearms, some of them can hit remote targets with the pinpoint accuracy of WWII snipers (5). Of course, I don’t know much about shooting things and how quickly it takes to acquire advanced skills, but these kids today can theoretically develop some sense of what’s involved from their Xbox and PS2 combat games — and just because I didn’t see a game console in the rock-and-mud hut which Yusef and his family call home doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.
In any event, this child prodigy makes Annie Oakley look like a quadriplegic trying to operate a slingshot. This is a wee bit of a problem since Moroccan pre-teens don’t grasp the potential consequences of shooting at moving vehicles for fun (6). In the single most spectacular and unlikely piece of sharp-shooting since David felled Goliath, Yusef hits Brad & Cate’s faraway tour bus from the top of a mountain and at an approximate distance of at least half a kilometer — it’s the third time he’s fired the gun since Daddy gave it to him to play with, so his skills have understandably improved (7). It would be a tough shot for even Vassili Zaitsev, but to be fair, Mozart was writing symphonies at 5 — you just can’t stop these natural gifts!
Of course, Yusef’s bullet finds its way right into Cate Blanchett, to the understandable consternation of her husband; this was not one of the things listed on Dr. Phil’s 10 Easy Steps to Fixing Your Marriage. Since there are no hospitals nearby, the tourists must travel to an isolated village with one doctor, who can be of only limited assistance given the patient’s critical condition. Over the course of the next several hours, Brad Pitt has no success in getting an ambulance to come for his wife, since there are apparently certain political considerations which take precedence over the Moroccan government’s desire not to have a gun-shot American tourist bleed to death on their turf as they twiddle their thumbs and the entire world watches via live CNN coverage (8, 9 and 10 — because it’s too cracked to assign a one-point value). Really, if the film has a message, it’s that public relations are not Morocco’s strongest suit ... or any kind of priority whatsoever. I guess they're not counting on that tourist trade. Over the next few hours, Blanchett smokes hash and Pitt beats a guy up.
Later on, Yusef’s father is equally upset to learn that (a) his son shot and perhaps killed an American tourist and (b) that his daughter has been letting Yusef watch her undress though a crack in the wall. Again, we can make allowances here for cultural differences, although I’m sure there are plenty of American parents who might experience similar reactions under the circumstances (“You shot somebody?! And you saw your sister naked?!?!) (11).
It gets better — if that's the operative term.
Back home in the good old USA, Pitt and Blanchett’s two remaining children are being cared for by Amelia, an illegal Mexican immigrant who works as their nanny — the one aspect of this film which is, sadly, entirely plausible, given America’s history of exploiting its illegal immigrant population as cheap labor without benefits. These kids have such a close bond with Amelia that they are — as is commonly the case with so many children under school age from affluent WASP homes that employ illegal servants — completely fluent in Spanish (12). I suppose this is theoretically possible given that, as Amelia later states, she has been with them since birth — although I have to believe that most English-speaking parents would prefer for their infants to learn English before they learn to speak other languages. Imagine how proud Brad Pitt must have been when his son’s first word was “Popi.” (13)
Anyway, Amelia has a sticky problem on her hands. She’s been planning to make a daytrip to Mexico for her son’s wedding, since, as we all know, so many people who have entered this country illegally — either by sneaking across borders at great risk to their personal safety or in crates marked "Handle with Care" using drink coolers as toilets — make casual return visits to the countries they escaped from (14). The difficulty stems from the fact that she must stay and care for the children, since she has no friends who can sub for her, and there are no professional babysitting services available in the isolated rural community of San Diego (15). A nephew, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, does in fact know someone who can take care of the children, but Amelia has a much better idea. The most logical thing to do, given her predicament, is to transport the children out of the country without the knowledge of their parents (16 — again, it should be worth more, but I shouldn’t play favorites). It doesn’t occur to either Amelia or her nephew — who, while presumably both illegal, haven’t really been fully impressed by the seriousness of all matters relating to the unlawful conveyance of persons across international borders — that this may not be the best way to proceed.
At this point, I feel compelled to say that there is a certain scale of permissibility when it comes to taking other peoples' kids places without them knowing about it. If a child falls and breaks his arm, by all means, take him to the hospital — even if you can’t get in touch with the parent. Under the circumstances, this is considered entirely acceptable behavior. Taking a child with you on a brief excursion to the grocery store when you run out of milk is probably not likely to be considered a major transgression. You might even let them get candy bars at the checkout. If the parent takes issue with your actions, it’s what can be termed “an error of judgment.” Taking a child on a long-distance road trip without the consent of the parent is actually what is known as “kidnapping.” If said unauthorized road trip, however innocently intended, involves taking the child out of the United States of America and across international borders, that is what is known as “stupid beyond all measure of human comprehension.” For anyone out there reading this who works in the field of private child care, including you kids who want to earn a few extra bucks babysitting, it’s important to take note of these distinctions. It's really very simple: get them to bed at a reasonable hour, make sure they brush their teeth first, and try not to take them out of the country. Write yourself a note in case you forget.
Happily for Amelia and company, the wedding goes off without a hitch — the kids even get to see a live chicken being slaughtered. When it comes to time to return home, the group naturally decides to go back the way they came, since it’s so easy for Hispanic persons to get though Mexican-American border customs checkpoints without unimpeachable documentation of citizenship (17). Given how sensitive the issue of illegal immigration is in our contemporary sociopolitical climate, the extent to which the film trivializes matters — making the characters' attitudes toward breaching borders casual beyond the realm of plausibility — is insulting in the extreme. As a fate would have it, a particularly nasty customs official decides to give them a hard time, at which point Bernal’s character does the only sensible thing he can do under the circumstances — even though he has done nothing wrong, he makes like O.J. Simpson, guns the Buick and engages the border patrol on a high speed car chase (18). For their own protection, he dumps Amelia and the children, because the safest place for them to be is apparently in the middle of more than a hundred square miles of uninhabited desert surrounded by rattlesnakes and with no food or water (19). In interest of fairness to the person who wrote this, whom I will be tactful enough not to mention by name, Bernal’s character is supposed to be somewhat intoxicated at the time — not so much that he can’t drive from Mexico to San Diego, you understand, but just drunk enough to act like an idiot with a death wish.
As if things weren’t muddled enough, there is a third storyline, although the relation it bears to the other two is minimal at best — so much so that there’s little reason for it being in the same film. Chieko is a deaf-mute Japanese teenager whose life is no bowl of cherries. At the age of budding sexual awareness, she is itching to sow some wild oats. Unfortunately, there is no one in the city of Tokyo who wants to have sex with a pretty, nubile teenager who flaunts the fact that she doesn't wear underwear (20). Sometimes, boys are mean to her when they find out she’s deaf. As so many women with physical handicaps know, the best way to get back at people who are intolerant of your disability is to flash ‘em some cooter (21…and ewww). In a howler of a scene, she tries to seduce her unreceptive dentist by licking his face, after which he goes right back to cleaning her teeth (22). Twice (23). Not having achieved the desired result, she proceeds to jam his hand into her crotch. Much to his credit, he sends her and her molars packing after that.
We eventually learn — not that it provides any real justification for the inclusion of the Japanese storyline in this film — that Chieko’s father originally owned the gun which he gave to the guy who sold it to the man whose son used it to shoot Blanchett (yeah, that’s how far they have to reach to establish a link). To all you world travelers, if you’re ever big-game hunting in a Middle Eastern or North African country, as soon as you’ve racked up as many antlers as you can stuff in your carry-on, the best thing to do is to give your $700 .720 caliber 12-gauge shotgun to some Third World local in a turban you don’t know very well (24). It’s just good manners — and apparently, there’s very little legal liability as far as Japanese law enforcement is concerned (25).
Somewhere in the midst of the insanity is an unrealized potential for great camp. Unfortunately, Babel is about as much fun as watching someone pulling the wings off butterflies for 2 hours and 22 minutes. The filmmakers take such gratuitous pleasure in observing the unrelieved suffering of others that the result verges on sadism. Usually, the year’s stupidest film is also its most depressing, but this kind of thing would be unbearably depressing even if it wasn’t such a crock.
Incredible as it may sound, some of the performers are on the receiving end of year-end awards buzz. Rinko Kikuchi plays Chieko — while she doesn’t embarrass herself as an actress, the filmmakers do a pretty good job of it for her. No one could be credible in a role like this, which would probably be degrading if it weren't so utterly absurd. The character belongs in a different film entirely (and that film is Shortbus). Adriana Barraza has some quietly affecting moments as Amelia, and might even have emerged with her dignity intact if the character’s behavior weren’t so unrelentingly stupid from start to finish. Of Mr. Pitt’s performance in Babel, I would like to say that he did a terrific job in Thelma & Louise. It’s not that he’s bad, but the performance seems to me so utterly inconsequential that I doubt we’d be hearing any mention of the word Oscar if a non-celebrity were playing it (and there are plenty who would have done it just as well, and probably better). I’m not one of those snobs who think that someone needs to be able to cry on cue in order to be considered a good actor. That said, the most amusing aspect of Babel for me was the manner in which the filmmakers abruptly cut away from Pitt’s big emotional scene to divert attention from the fact that the actor, while giving a strenuous physical representation of crying, wasn’t actually doing so.
Oddly, the person who may come across best in Babel is Blanchett, mainly because she spends the bulk of the film writhing on the floor in pain. Which is more or less how I experienced it. Although no one involved with Babel deserves an Oscar nomination, the people who have to sit through it deserve a cash settlement.
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Labels: 00s, Blanchett, Brad Pitt
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