Wednesday, December 28, 2011
An antidote for the emptiness of existence — at least for 90 minutes
By Edward Copeland
Seventeen years later…
Woody Allen makes another good movie. That's not entirely true. Since Bullets Over Broadway's release in 1994, I have liked two of his films — Match Point in 2005 and Whatever Works in 2009. However, Midnight in Paris definitely deserves the label as the first great Woody Allen film since Bullets. As Donald Rumsfeld said of the Iraq war, it's been a long, hard slog for Woody fans who used to anxiously anticipate each new Allen offering before his films turned into retreads of previous works and tasted like a fifth night of leftovers. With Midnight in Paris, his muse returns and blesses us with a fully formed, funny, thoughtful piece of cinematic inspiration.
Most people heard the news that Midnight in Paris stood tall in the Allen canon months ago when the film opened, earning raves and becoming his highest-grossing film ever. I had to wait for DVD and retain a healthy skepticism until I saw it. I simply had no other choice. During the nearly two decades that Woody toiled in the artistic wilderness, people burned me far too often by insisting Allen's latest belonged in his win column only to discover the opposite when I viewed the film. After I finished watching Midnight in Paris, it seemed as if those 17 years had been erased magically. I actually had to check IMDb because my brain couldn't conjure the titles of some of the forgettable films he churned out in those years — Small Time Crooks, Melinda and Melinda, Scoop, Cassandra's Dream, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. That doesn't even take into account the ones so bad I couldn't bleach the stain they left on my cerebrum such as Celebrity, Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Hollywood Ending. Midnight in Paris washes away those transgressions, clears the slate and renews my hope that inside the 76-year-old filmmaker there still exists things worth saying and movies worth making.
As many of Allen's films that he doesn't star in do, Midnight in Paris features a Woody surrogate and, in what might appear to be an unlikely casting choice, Owen Wilson gets to be his stand-in here. Selecting Wilson as the Woody Allen substitute turns out to be the first of many grand decisions the writer-director makes. In fact, I'll go further and declare that Owen Wilson makes the best faux screen Woody yet (and let's hope we never endure one worse than Kenneth Branagh's in Celebrity). Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful Hollywood screenwriter with an attractive fiancée named Inez (Rachel McAdams). The couple tag along with Inez's ultra-conservative parents (Kurt
Fuller, Mimi Kennedy) on a trip to Paris where Inez plans to be lazy and sight-see while Gil hopes the City of Lights ignites his first attempt at writing a novel. Paris casts a spell on Pender almost immediately, even though it's raining at the time, something that annoys Inez. "Why does every city have to be in the rain? What's so wonderful about being wet?" asks Inez, a woman Gil unconvincingly describes to strangers as charming but who looks to outsiders as a high-maintenance, judgmental snob. It doesn't take long in France for Gil to suggest that they should move there, but Inez doesn't understand what's so terrible about living in Malibu and being a rich screenwriter, especially with as much trouble as Gil tells her he's having with his novel. "I'm having trouble because I'm a Hollywood hack who never gave literature a real chance until now," he replies. Pender hates his job because he doesn't write anything of value and before we even get to Allen's major themes in Midnight in Paris, he appears to be submitting himself for some self-criticism over his output in recent years. When he made the atrocious Hollywood Ending, the movie was a one-joke notion that the industry had devolved to the point that a director no one realized had gone blind could make a movie and still deliver a box-office smash. In Midnight in Paris, (at least I hope this is the case) he's taken the same complaint and aimed it inward and disposed of it in pieces of dialogue as appetizers to a bigger and better cinematic dinner. (Besides, as far as Hollywood Ending goes, I'd submit Kurosawa and Ran as a counterargument for what blind directors can accomplish.) Gil's novel's plot teases us as to what the main course will be as it tells the story of a man who owns a nostalgia shop, selling memorabilia relating to bygone days.
While Gil and Inez wander the city with her parents, they bump into Inez's old friends Paul and Carol (Michael Sheen, Nina Arianda) and soon the two couples visit all the sites together where Paul, an unctuous know-it-all on all subjects makes it a point to show off his expertise to anyone and everyone, even telling the tour guide at the Rodin museum (played by French first lady Carla Bruni) that she has her facts wrongs). Paul embodies a 21st century representation of the man pontificating in a movie line in Annie Hall that Alvy fantasizes about bringing Marshall McLuhan out to chastise. Watching the laid-back Wilson do the annoyed Woody dance at this character type not only proves hilarious but a refreshing twist on the familiar routine. Every word Paul utters, of course, enthralls Inez, who believes he's as brilliant as he thinks he is. It's also a nice change of pace for Sheen to play a fictional creation for a change instead of impersonating famous British people. Paul probes Gil about the subject of his novel and at first, Gil resists discussing it, but Inez spills the beans and the movie's argument gets rolling — namely, is the grass really greener in the other era? Gil romanticizes the Paris of the 1920s, when so many great artists from America and elsewhere flocked there. Paul pooh-poohs the notion immediately. "Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present," Paul declares. Inez, the woman who allegedly loves Gil and wants to spend the rest of her life with him, takes Paul's side in the browbeating. "Gil is a complete romantic. I mean he would be more than happy living in a complete state of denial," she says of her fiancé. Paul isn't able to discuss any topic unless he does it at length and in long-winded lectures, so he has to show everyone what he knows of this "syndrome." "The name for this fantasy is Golden Age thinking. The erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in now," he pronounces.
Having had enough of being a foursome one night as Paul suggests they all go dancing, Gil begs off, choosing to return to the hotel and perhaps work on his novel. Instead, he walks the streets. As he sits on some steps, a clock strikes midnight and an old yellow Peugeot pulls up as if it's the pumpkin that turned into Cinderella's carriage. The antique automobile bears '20s-era Frenchmen and Frenchwomen (who may have been mice once — who can say?) drinking champagne and beckoning Gil to climb in for a ride. That's when the real sparkle of Midnight in Paris begins and it involves another Woody Allen venture into a magical realm. Gil doesn't speak French, so he's clueless as to what his fellow passengers might be saying as they take him to a party where everyone dresses decidedly retro. Fortunately, most of the other guests appear to be American or at least speak English, so communication isn't a problem. A young man (Yves Heck) sits at a piano, playing and singing, "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love." He mentions to one guest that he's a writer and they introduce him to Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill) — the Fitzgeralds. Gil finally realizes that
somehow, that mysterious Peugeot took him on a very long drive — one that traveled nearly 100 years in reverse to his ideal Golden Age where he could mix and mingle with his long-dead artistic inspirations. In the past, when Allen employed these fantastical devices it began to feel as if, to paraphrase one of his oldest jokes, he'd resorted to cheating by looking into the soul of the guy sitting next to him, only in these instances, he wasn't seeing another person but staring at himself in a mirror. Magic tricks which first played a key role in the "Oedipus Wrecks" short of New York Stories would return in Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Scoop or, to a lesser extent, assume the form of magical herbs in Alice. Actual Greek choruses would arrive to comment on the action in Mighty Aphrodite or see-through characters would pop up in the form of Robin Williams in Deconstructing Harry. This is a well that Woody drinks from often except that it works best when he employs it in service of larger ideas such as in Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo (which I still consider his best film), and, now added to that list, Midnight in Paris. As Midnight in Paris enthralled me, a small detail leaped out early on. In both Purple Rose and Midnight, he names one of the leads Gil. In the case of Purple Rose, most tellingly, the actor that Jeff Daniels plays who creates the role of Tom Baxter, the movie character who steps off the screen and into 1930s New Jersey, bears the name Gil Shepherd, only that Gil embraces his burgeoning stardom and hopes a B-picture such as "The Purple Rose of Cairo" raises his stature high enough to nab the lead in a Charles Lindbergh biopic — as long as his doppelganger in the pith helmet doesn't wreck his career. Gil Pender in Midnight in Paris may work in the same industry, but he fears he's sold his soul to it and he wants out.
The first night that Gil takes his trip back to the 1920s he also encounters Ernest Hemingway (played by Corey Stoll in the film's most entertaining performance). Fitzgerald introduces them and Gil gets the envious position of talking writing with Papa in the movie's best exchange on writing that'll appeal to anyone who has ever put pen to paper. It begins with Gil being self-deprecating about the subject of his novel (of course, no one in the 1920s has the faintest idea what a nostalgia shop is), calling it a terrible idea. "No subject is terrible if the story is true and if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms grace under pressure," Hemingway tells him. Gil then works up the nerve to ask if the author would look at what he's written and offer suggestionss.
HEMINGWAY: My opinion is I hate it.
GIL: But you haven't read it yet.
HEMINGWAY: If it's bad, I'll hate it because it's bad writing. If it's good, I'll be envious and hate it all the more. You don't want the opinion of another writer.
Hemingway does offer to give Gil's manuscript to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) to read, because he's always trusted her opinion. They agree to meet the following night and Gil leaves but suddenly remembers he forgot to ask Hemingway where to meet him, but when he turns back the coffeehouse has turned into a laundromat and Gil finds himself in 2010 again.
In the morning at his hotel, he attempts to explain his adventure to Inez, asking her what she'd think if he told her he met Zelda Fitzgerald and she's exactly like they had read and Scott really loves her and worries endlessly, but she hates Hemingway because he's right that she's standing in the way of his writing. When Gil completes his enthusiastic rambling, Inez replies, "I'd think you had a brain tumor." Gil manages to convince Inez to go back with him the next night to wait for the Peugeot, but she grows impatient and takes off before the clock strikes midnight. After Inez has left, the Peugeot arrives and takes him to Gertrude Stein's apartment where Hemingway awaits and Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) paints his current mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who catches the eye of both Gil and Hemingway. Despite the many larger-than-life figures than circle Adriana's world, she finds herself just as drawn to Gil — until she learns of his engagement. She also shares Gil's Golden Age thinking, While he thinks that she lives in the greatest time period, she thinks it's awful and wishes she could have been in Paris during the Belle Epoque of the late 19th century. Meanwhile Gil's behavior in the 21st century becomes so bizarre that his father-in-law-to-be hires a private eye to tail him on his midnight walks to see what Gil does on them, since he doesn't trust anyone who says such nasty things about the Tea Party.
Even when Allen had fallen into his long slump, he still had the ability to attract some pretty solid ensembles, not that they were given much to do. In Midnight in Paris, the casting shines with a mix of lesser-known performers and bigger names, all bring their A game to Allen's greatest screenplay in 17 years. In addition to Wilson and Stoll who I've mentioned, the cast's standouts include a zany single scene by Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali, Kathy Bates, Michael Sheen, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard in the first performance she's given that I've enjoyed and, most worth noting, Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald. Pill to me proves again she's an actress just waiting to break out. She's funny and touching here after giving a good dramatic turn in Milk and being part of the fun ensemble in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Given how many great lines Woody's script for Midnight in Paris delivers, it's tempting to rattle them all off, but I'm resisting the urge for those who have yet to see this charmer, but I have to mention one of my favorite gags when Gil runs into a young Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van) and gives him an idea for a movie — basically the plot of his film
If there has been any debate about Midnight in Paris, it's been where Allen comes down in the end on the question of nostalgia and Golden Age thinking. It seems pretty obvious to me based on what Gil's last line to Adriana is, even though he sends mixed signals by having Paul, the film's most pompous character, ridicule the idea of Golden Age thinking first. Also, as others have pointed out, throughout most of Allen's career his choices in music and references have screamed nostalgia, but Midnight in Paris plays as one of the most entertaining self-critical works any artist has ever made. At the same time, Allen does acknowledge the natural reflex to long for an earlier, better time — if not in another era, at least in one's own life.
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Labels: 10s, Branagh, Buñuel, Cotillard, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Jeff Daniels, K. Bates, Kurosawa, O. Wilson, Robin, Woody
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Monday, September 12, 2011
Technology as Savior and Curse
By J.D.
For more than two decades, director Steven Soderbergh has gone back and forth from independent to studio films with personal, experimental efforts such as Schizopolis (1996) and big budget crowd pleasers such as Erin Brockovich (2000). He’s fashioned himself something of a journeyman director trying his hand at a variety of genres over the years, from period history (King of the Hill) to the heist film (Ocean’s Eleven) to the war movie (Che), adopting a distinctive style for each one. With Contagion (2011), he can now add the disaster movie to the list. This film deals specifically with the deadly virus subgenre as he tracks an infectious disease that affects the entire world with alarming speed.
Would Soderbergh go the high road with thought-provoking science fiction a la The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Twelve Monkeys (1995), or would he go the low-budget horror B-movie route like The Crazies (1973) and Warning Sign (1985)? Whereas most of these rely on horror and science fiction tropes, Soderbergh eschews them for a more realistic take, albeit with a sly wink to the master of disaster, Irwin Allen, by populating Contagion with a star-studded cast of A-listers (many of whom have either won or been nominated for Academy Awards) only to kill some of them off. However, this is where the similarities begin and end as Soderbergh applies the Traffic (2000) aesthetic, juggling multiple characters and storylines to show how technology not only helps identify the threat quickly but also helps it spread rapidly thanks to globalization.
The film starts off on Day 2 of the outbreak with infected people in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong where we meet Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) on a business trip. She comes home to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and family in Minneapolis suffering from what seems like flu-like symptoms. She assumes that it is nothing more than jet lag but within a day she and her son are dead. The doctors can’t tell Mitch why they died and he’s left to take care of his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron).
The World Health Organization begins to identify all the cities where victims of the virus are appearing and trying in vain to contain it. They send Dr. Lenora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) to Hong Kong in an attempt to track down the origins of the virus. Meanwhile, muckraking blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) posts a clip of a man collapsing on a train in Japan and tries to peddle it to a newspaper in San Francisco but they aren’t interested. However, he soon assembles an impressive global readership that hangs on his every opinion and conspiracy theories, which not only spreads disinformation but also draws the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is leading an investigation into the outbreak in the United States and enlists the help of Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), who travels to Minneapolis and investigates Beth Emhoff’s death.
Soderbergh shows how the CDC interacts with local and national governing bodies to identify and deal with the virus while also taking us inside their laboratories where Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) is working hard to find an antidote. Soon, Homeland Security steps in and their representative (Bryan Cranston) meets with Cheever to raise concerns that the virus could be weaponized and used by terrorists to attack the United States. However, it soon becomes apparent that the problem is much more serious, affecting a large portion of the world. Soderbergh inserts all kinds of shots of people’s hands interacting with objects and other people. Every time someone coughs you wonder, "Is this person sick and are they spreading the virus to others?"
The always-reliable Matt Damon is Contagion’s emotional core, playing the character we get to know best and care about the most. He is heartbreaking early on as Mitch watches both his wife and son die and then finds out that his spouse also was cheating on him. He then has to pull it together and take care of his daughter. Damon is given moments to show how the strain is taking its toll on Mitch and the actor really grounds the film in something tangible for the audience to hold onto. Think of him as the equivalent to Benicio del Toro’s soulful border cop in Traffic. Damon is so good as the relatable everyman trying to deal with things as best he can. Without him, Contagion would come across as a little too cold and clinical.
With the help of Cliff Martinez’s brooding, atmospheric electronic score, Soderbergh gradually cranks up the dread as the virus spreads and the situation gets increasingly worse as order breaks down — bureaucratically and then everything else follows in a domino effect with looting and rioting as people think about protecting themselves. Soon, we are hit with sobering apocalyptic imagery that starts off with deserted city streets filled with garbage and abandoned cars to government officials filling mass graves with scores of dead bodies.
Soderbergh is clearly drawing a parallel between the virus and technology, both of which cover great distances in very little time thanks to cell phones and the Internet. The film matches this speed by maintaining a brisk pace but does allow for the occasional moment where key characters reflect on what’s happening and how it affects not only them but their loved ones, co-workers and so on. It is these moments where Scott Z. Burns' smart, ambitious screenplay shines, allowing archetypes, such as Laurence Fishburne’s no-nonsense executive, to show their human frailties. Burns has clearly done his homework as he presents a scarily plausible viral outbreak and how we would react to it on a personal level with Mitch and his daughter while also showing its global impact. This is important because the film throws around a lot of technical jargon and dispenses a lot of facts but Soderbergh wisely has enlisted an all-star cast to make it more palatable. Contagion is not the horror film Soderbergh has suggested it might be but rather a slick, sophisticated disaster movie that should provide the director with his first substantial commercial hit in years.
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Labels: 10s, Cotillard, Cranston, Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Soderbergh, Winslet
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010
A blockbuster with an arthouse sensibility
By J.D.
Ten years in the making, Inception (2010) is the culmination of Christopher Nolan’s career to date. It mixes the ingenious plot twists of his independent film darling Memento (2000) with the epic scale of his Hollywood blockbuster The Dark Knight (2008). His new film takes the heist genre to the next level by fusing it with science fiction as a group of corporate raiders steal ideas by entering their dreams — think Dreamscape (1985) meets The Matrix (1999) as if made by Michael Mann. While Nolan and his films certainly wear their respective influences on their sleeve — and this one is no different (2001: A Space Odyssey, Heat, etc.) — there is still enough of his own thematic preoccupations to make Inception distinctly his own. This film continues his fascination with the blurring of artifice with reality. With Inception, we are constantly questioning what is real.
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team extract thoughts of value from people as they dream. However, during his jobs, Cobb is visited by deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful femme fatale character that serves as an increasingly dangerous distraction from the task at hand. The film’s opening sequence does an excellent job establishing how Cobb and his team extract information from the dream of Saito (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese businessman, in a visually arresting sequence. He catches up with Cobb in the real world and offers him a new deal: plant an idea Robert Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy) mind that will help break-up his father’s vast empire before it becomes too powerful and do it in a way so that it seems like Fischer thought of it for it to work. This is something that has never been done before. In exchange, he’ll make it so that Cobb can return home to the United States where his children live but where he is also wanted by the authorities. So, Cobb recruits a literal dream team of experts to help him pull off the most challenging job of his career.
Inception delves into all kinds of aspects of dreams as evident in a scene early on where Cobb explains how they work, how to design and then navigate them. This is arguably the most cerebral parts of the film as Nolan explores all sorts of intriguing concepts and sets up the rules for what we’ll experience later on — pretty heady stuff for a Hollywood blockbuster. And when he isn’t examining fascinating ideas, he’s orchestrating exciting and intense action sequences. There’s an incredible sequence where Nolan juggles three different action sequences operating on three different levels of dreams that are impressive staged while also a marvel of cross-cutting editing. He anchors Inception with Cobb and his desire to return home to children while also dealing with the death of his wife. It gives the film an emotional weight so that we care about what happens to him. It also raises the stakes on the Fischer job.
Dom Cobb continues Nolan’s interest in tortured protagonists. With Memento, Leonard Shelby tried to figure out who murdered his wife while operating with no short-term memory. Insomnia (2002) featured a cop with a checkered past trying to solve a murder on very little sleep. The Batman films focus on a costumed vigilante that wages war on criminals as a way of dealing with the guilt of witnessing his parents being murdered when he was a child. With The Prestige (2006), magician Robert Angier is tormented by the death of his wife and an all-consuming passion to outdo a rival illusionist. Inception’s Cobb also has a checkered past and is haunted by the death of loved one.
Leonardo DiCaprio delivers what may be his finest performance to date, playing a complex, layered character with a rich emotional life. Cobb must come to terms with what happened to his wife and his culpability in what happened to her. DiCaprio conveys an emotional range that he has not tapped into to this degree before. There’s a captivating tragic dimension to Cobb that DiCaprio does an excellent job of expressing so that we become invested in the dramatic arc of his character.
Nolan populates Inception with a stellar cast to support DiCaprio. The indie film world is represented by the likes of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy while also drawing from international cinema with Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy. And it wouldn’t be a Nolan film without his good luck charm, Michael Caine, making an appearance. As he has done in the past, Nolan plucks a once dominant actor from the 1980s, now languishing in relative obscurity — think Rutger Hauer in Batman Begins (2005) or Eric Roberts in The Dark Knight — and gives them a high-profile role. Inception gives Tom Berenger well-deserved mainstream exposure, reminding everyone what a good actor he can be with the right material.
Regardless whether you like Inception or not, you’ve got to admire Nolan for making a film that is not a remake, a reboot, a sequel or an adaptation of an existing work. It is an ideal blend of art house sensibilities, with its weighty themes, and commercial conventions, like exciting action sequences. Capitalizing on the massive success of The Dark Knight, Nolan has wisely used his clout to push through his most personal and ambitious film to date. With Inception, he has created a world on a scale that he’s never attempted before and been able to realize some truly astonishing visuals, like gravity-defying fight scenes and having characters encounter a location straight out of the mind of M.C. Escher. It has been said that the power of cinema is the ability to transport you to another world and to dream with our eyes open. Inception does this. Nolan has created a cinematic anomaly: a summer blockbuster film with a brain.
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Labels: 10s, Berenger, Caine, Christopher Nolan, Cotillard, DiCaprio, Gordon-Levitt, Michael Mann
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Monday, May 10, 2010
La ballo vuoto o Nein! Nein!
By Edward Copeland
Sometimes the announcement of film projects seem so obviously a bad idea (at least to me) that I can't understand why everyone doesn't see it, particularly the people putting up the money. Be it those who thought a modern remake (or any remake) of The Manchurian Candidate made sense or that casting Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy in a screen version of The Bonfire of the Vanities was a good idea (before that was followed by bad idea after bad idea like an elaborate attempt by Brian De Palma to break the world record for domino toppling).
So, when a resurgence in film adaptations of musicals led to the announcement that the next Broadway tuner to hit the big screen would be Nine, I greeted the news with a big, "Why?" I've never seen Nine staged, but I know the score and, for the unfamiliar, what it is is a musicalized version of Fellini's masterpiece 8½. Maury Yeston's score is hardly memorable and as much as I love Fellini's film, if they remastered prints and did a large scale re-release of the original film, would great numbers go? Of course, I'm not in the business of reviewing films as financial decisions (even though I was right and they made a bad one), but now that I've seen it, I can review it as a film and can say that it fails as a movie as well.
Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Guido, the director with artistic block and the actor seems to sleepwalk through the entire film as if he's wondering how in the hell he got into this mess. Day-Lewis tends to enjoy disappearing into a role, but Guido is so translucent to begin with that there's no body to inhabit and certainly no scenery to chew. His chance to sing a couple of lackluster songs doesn't offer much in the way of something new either as he basically talk-sings through those, presumably to keep that Italian accent going. I'd much rather have been watching a Gangs of New York musical. Hell, as much as I despised it, a crooning Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood the Musical would have offered more entertainment. Just imagine the Act II showstopper "I Drink Your Milkshake!"
Coming from The Weinstein Company, most of Harvey's usual girls are there (apparently Gwyneth Paltrow was unavailable) and the cast boasts more acting Oscar winners than a 1970s disaster movie. Shit, excuse me a second. Sorry, had to stop and clean the vomit off my keyboard when I once again realized those award winners include Marion Cotillard. One of the few non-Academy Award winners or nominees in the cast is Fergie and she sure does look different than she did when she was married to Prince Andrew. Oh, I'm sorry. Different Fergie. Not really sure who she is, but actually she does do one of the best numbers performing "Be Italian," made famous on stage by the late Anita Morris (I remember that from a Tony broadcast).
As I guessed when I saw Penélope Cruz in Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, she got the Oscar nomination for the wrong movie when she received it for Nine. Cruz does what she can in Nine, but characterization is not a strong suit for any of the film's characters.
When Nine premiered on Broadway, it inexplicably won Tonys for best musical and best score, defeating Dreamgirls, which turned out to be a mixed bag as a movie but at least made sense to be turned into a movie. (Though the show was a flop, Maury Yeston's dull score for Nine defeated Stephen Sondheim's brilliant score for Merrily We Roll Along as well.) The Tony love at the time could mostly be attributed to the involvement of Tommy Tune, whom was worshipped by the Tonys in that era winning in multiple categories, year after year.
Making a musical out of Fellini's 8½ just seemed an odd idea to begin with. R.E.M.'s video for "Everybody Hurts" and its sequence paying homage to the film probably comes closer to the mark than the entire film of Nine does.
Now, I don't want to merely bash Maury Yeston, because years later he won another Tony for score for another best musical, Titanic, which had no connection to James Cameron's behemoth but came out the same year and was much better than the movie with the same name, and had a score infinitely better and more memorable than Nine.
Rob Marshall, who successfully directed the screen adaptation of Chicago, helmed the film Nine and honestly, I have no idea what his strategy for the film was. Some numbers seem to spring as fantasies out of conversations Guido has with the many women in his life while others seem to appear on a theater stage (or is that a movie set? Hard to tell). The dialogue scenes hardly improve the situation. You can't decide which you dread more: Characters breaking out into boring song or into boring conversation.
Though the film had its problems, his nonmusical direction of Memoirs of a Geisha showed much more promise for him as a film director. However, next up for him is yet another Pirates of the Caribbean sequel which one can only hope they subtitle We Really Are Devoid of New Ideas. It's a shame, because had many great choreography credits on Broadway and a co-directing credit with Sam Mendes on the marvelous revival of Cabaret that starred the late Natasha Richardson. Mendes seems to have made the switch in mediums much easier than Marshall.
With the exception of some clearly defined roles (Sophia Loren is the dead mother; Cotillard is the wife; Fergie is the prostitute Guido knew as a child) many of the women sort of exist in a blur without clear delineation. Judi Dench obviously is his agent and I guess Nicole Kidman is his frequent movie star, but I'm still working on Cruz and Kate Hudson, though Cruz obviously is at least a mistress.
The screenplay is credited to Michael Tolkin, author of both the novel and screenplay for The Player, and Anthony Minghella who, despite the fact he died in March 2008, must still be under contract to Harvey Weinstein, even in the afterlife. (IMDb still lists two films in development for him. Take a rest Anthony, you're dead.) In the movie, Guido hasn't written a word for the film he's supposed to start filming and Nine itself is similarly plotless. It's telling that at the Tonys the year Nine premiered on Broadway the book category is one category it did lose to Dreamgirls.
The best I can find myself saying about Nine is that the technical credits are fine from Dion Beebe's cinematography and Colleen Atwood's costumes to John Myhre's production design, but in the end it's just putting lovely wrapping paper on an empty box.
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Labels: 00s, Almodóvar, Awards, Cameron, Cotillard, Day-Lewis, De Palma, Dench, Fellini, Gwyneth Paltrow, H. Weinstein, Hanks, Musicals, Nicole Kidman, Oscars, Penélope Cruz, Remakes, Sondheim, Theater
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Friday, March 07, 2008
Centennial Tributes: Anna Magnani
By Josh R
Of the nearly 50 films that Anna Magnani made during her storied career, only a handful are available for viewing by the general public. I can therefore lay claim to having seen only but a fraction of her life's work (would that I could rectify the situation by being granted unfettered access to the vaults of Cinecitta Roma or the archives at UCLA). As it is, Magnani fans can only be grateful that many of her most celebrated performances remain readily accessible, given what a remarkable and singular talent she was, and what an impressive career she had.
While there is a fair argument to be made for the fiery yet tender leading lady as the cinema’s first truly naturalistic actress, it is also worth noting than no other performer from her country — not even the great Mastroianni — occupies a more important place in the history of global cinema. Italy’s cinematic output before the advent of the neo-realist movement had been negligible; Magnani was the face of that movement, and the impact of her work was immediate and far-reaching. She was the first Italian actor to achieve global stardom, with crossover success working in foreign productions and in other languages. These facts, while impressive, do not fully account for what qualified her as a pioneer, firing off the first and most penetrating shots in an ongoing campaign that, even now, is still being waged. In breaking the rules, she nearly succeeded in changing them.
Put simply, Anna Magnani was not beautiful, thin or young. She was over 40 by the time she achieved her widest stardom, with a Rubenesque figure, coarse features and a throaty voice. There was some precedent for this: Marie Dressler, a portly character actress of the early sound era with the countenance of a St. Bernard, had risen to the rank of leading lady and marquee attraction not before she was 60. Dressler was a star, to be sure, but envisioning her in a revealing negligee playing out a slow-burning, erotically charged seduction scene with some bare-chested, brawny buck 10 years her junior — say Lancaster, Brando or Franciosa — gives you some sense of how radically different Magnani was from anyone who’d come before, or many who have come since. Not even Italy’s premier sex symbol, Sophia Loren, ever exuded as much earthy sensuality, or expressed carnal desire as freely or as frankly as Magnani did. In The Rose Tattoo, Wild Is the Wind and a handful of other films, Anna Magnani was not only cast as an object of male desire; she was so persuasive to that end that she made slim, fine-featured young things like Marisa Pavan and Dolores Hart look pallid, prissy and frigid in comparison. In film after film, she was an irresistible source of fascination for the opposite sex, and why wouldn’t she be? Pretty girls are often no more than just that; passionate women are harder to forget.
The daughter of an Italian father and an Egyptian mother, she was brought up in the slums of Rome — that she displayed such a keen understanding of the hard-edged survival instincts of working class women was the product of firsthand experience. She began her career as a singer, performing in nightclubs. By the late 1930s, she was almost as famous as Piaf was in France; their backgrounds and career trajectories were strikingly similar. She made many poor, time-marking films before being cast by Vittorio De Sica in Teresa Venerdi, the film that launched her acting career in earnest. Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, in which she was the aching soul of a war-ravaged Rome, paved the way for international stardom. For that film, she received the best actress award from the National Board of Review — the first time any major American prize had been bestowed upon a foreign language performance. She worked for Rossellini again as the peasant woman convinced she is carrying the child of Christ in L’Amore, which cast her opposite the young actor who had also written the film’s screenplay, Federico Fellini. In Bellissima, directed by Luchino Visconti, she was tough, testy and ultimately heartbreaking as the stage mother determined to get her tiny daughter into films. The scene in which she observes, unnoticed, as her daughter’s screen test is being mercilessly ridiculed by studio executives showed how effortlessly she could segue from forceful bravado to quiet humiliation and despair. While Magnani was almost always cast as hardy, hearty women, she invariably managed to locate the fragile, wounded soul beneath the armor; audiences were always provided glimpses of the nagging self-doubts, irrational fears and easily bruised feelings that can reduce even the toughest of cookies to a state of naked vulnerability.
The world took notice, and a somewhat reluctant Magnani found herself a sought-after commodity on the international scene. She was the tempestuous star of a commedia del arte troupe in The Golden Coach, giving a grandly operatic performance; the film’s director, Jean Renoir, declared her to be “the greatest actress (he’d) ever worked with”. A star struck Tennessee Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo, a raucous comedy-drama about an Italian widow coming to terms with her late husband’s infidelity, specifically for her. Magnani declined the invitation to appear in the stage version, fearing her English wasn’t up to the task; her decision to opt out effectively launched the career of the unknown actress chosen to replace her. While Maureen Stapleton earned much praise (and a Tony) for her Broadway triumph, by the time the film version was being cast, Magnani had decided to reclaim the property. As Serefina Della Rose, her volcanic fits of fury were juxtaposed with moments of aching tenderness and grief — not even the clowny showboating of Burt Lancaster could derail her intensity, and the raw emotionalism of the performance was astonishing. She won the Oscar for the film, but the American career never really took off; not many scripts were being written with middle-age women with heavy accents in mind. She was very good — actually, too good — for the pulpy Wild Is the Wind, which brought her a second best actress nomination. If George Cukor seemed at a loss for how to temper the hamminess of Anthony Quinn, he didn’t allow it to upset the balance of the film too badly, and Magnani’s scenes with Anthony Franciosa generated more erotic heat than her ones with Lancaster had. Sidney Lumet cast her opposite Brando in The Fugitive Kind, a reworking of Williams’ Orpheus Descending — the film, while a flop, actually was better overall The Rose Tattoo, and featured a performance by Magnani that was, in some ways, superior. Her failure to receive an Oscar nomination for that film is somewhat baffling in retrospect, considering how a lean a year 1959 was for leading ladies; but Magnani lacked the transformative abilities of Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, and Oscar voters tune out when actors don’t exhibit enough range. As great as she was in The Fugitive Kind, some critics carped that, since her arrival in Hollywood, she’d been giving the same performance over and over again.
The Hollywood phase of her career behind her, she returned to Italy, probably somewhat relieved to get away from the type of films that were inclined to view her as an exotic; Magnani was too salt-of-the-earth to be considered anything of the kind, least of all by herself. Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief provided her with a rare foray into the realm of comedy, while Pier Paolo Passolini’s Mamma Roma, in which she played a streetwise prostitute trying to give her teenage son a better life, was deemed too controversial to be released in the United States until 1995 (it’s not hard to see why). She was outstanding in a film that didn’t shy away from revealing her capacity for ruthlessness, or wondering how quickly unabashed, unapologetic sexuality can pave the way to madness. Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria was a reunion with an unrepentantly florid Anthony Quinn, allegedly a comedy, and definitely a mistake.
While Magnani got a late start in the world of film, her death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 65 was sadly premature. The conventionally pretty girls born around the same time had ceased to be interesting by the time they reached middle age; but at the age of 40, Anna Magnani was only getting warmed up. In her 70s, or even in her 80s, she might well have retained her ability to generate heat.
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Labels: Brando, Cotillard, Cukor, De Sica, Fellini, Lancaster, Lumet, Magnani, Nicole Kidman, Renoir, Tennessee Williams
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Monday, January 21, 2008
Up through the ground came a bubblin' crud
By Edward Copeland
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American lives. I was thinking about coining the phrase, "There are no third acts in Paul Thomas Anderson films," except that in the case of There Might Be Blood, there isn't much of a first or second act either.
I think my father, who saw the film with me, summed it up best. "At first, I thought it was going to be about an oil war, then I thought it was going to be him versus the preacher, but eventually I realized it wasn't going to be about anything."
To paraphrase Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm," Anderson has a head full of ideas that may be drivin' him insane.
This isn't to say that There Will Be Blood lacks any positive qualities, because the cinematography by Robert Elswit is phenomenal. However, the film really is a thudding bore, so much so that parts of the annoying score by Jonny Greenwood seem to actually drone like an amplified tuning fork and bear an uncanny resemblance to that sound that used to accompany the old THX "The Audience Is Listening" promos played in movie theaters.
For most of the film, Daniel Day-Lewis' performance held my attention, despite the film's ponderous pacing and lack of focus. In fact, I was at first puzzled by the people who complained that Day-Lewis was over the top. I wished I'd never read whoever said Day-Lewis was aping John Huston, because every time he spoke that image did come to mind. Unfortunately, Day-Lewis' performance goes off the rails as the film drags on and he suddenly starts devouring the scenery as if he needed it for nourishment.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when he goes wrong: The scene where he's dining with his son and a group of rival oil executives are seated at a nearby table. For some reason, Day-Lewis begins talking out loud so they can hear while a cloth napkin covers his face.
I can only assume that by this point Day-Lewis was as bored with the movie as I was. The ham gets the better of him from that point on so by the time we get to the scenes of him as an aging recluse in a large Kane-esque mansion in 1927, he's stooping and shuffling around as if he's a cousin to Marion Cotillard's Edith Piaf, dancing across the two-lane bowling alley he's built in his home. Of course, as soon as we see the bowling alley, you have to know what's coming. It's not placed there by accident, so as Day-Lewis meanders around the bowling lane, you know that balls will be employed and pins will be used for other purposes.
So much is wrongheaded about There Will Be Blood, that I hardly know where to start. Do I complain about how the portion of the film involving Paul Dano's character covers 16 years, yet the actor looks no different in age in the 1911 scenes than he does in the 1927 ones? Do I ask why Daniel Plainview makes such unnecessary complications for himself? Do I ask what is the true deal about Paul and Eli Sunday? Are they twins? The same person with multiple personalities? It hardly matters anyway.
At one point, Plainview says that he doesn't like to explain himself and that seems to apply to Paul Thomas Anderson's film as well. Now many great films have been made that toiled in the soil of the ambiguous, but they aren't all as goddamn boring as There Will Be Blood. Do I debate whether the film is asking whether it's Daniel or preacher Eli Sunday who is truly the false prophet? Perhaps Anderson is the false prophet at work here and his proponents, many of whom I know well, like and admire, are the ones being hoodwinked.
One thing I never quite understand is the insistence some of his fans have about calling him P.T. Anderson. The credit on There Will Be Blood clearly says it was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Is it possible some of his fans could be more pretentious than the filmmaker himself? During one outburst, Eli Sunday yells at his father that God doesn't love stupid people. I don't know if any part of that is true, but my guess is that if there is a God, he doesn't love stupid movies.
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Labels: 00s, Cotillard, Day-Lewis, Dylan, Finney, Fitzgerald, Huston
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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
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