Tuesday, January 31, 2012
That's how you fictionalize your life
By Edward Copeland
While watching 50/50, screenwriter Will Reiser's fictionalized account of being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer when he was in his late 20s, I thought of Godard's famous quote about the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. Now, I don't think that Reiser and director Jonathan Levine set out to do this, but 50/50 displays an exceptional example of how not to get so locked in by one's life that your movie can't breathe as was the case with Beginners.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Adam Learner, an NPR employee who has been complaining of back pain for quite some time. When he finally gets it checked out, it turns out to be a malignant tumor on his spine. Doing the modern research technique — Adam turns to the Internet to learn what he can and finds that if the cancer hasn't metastasized, the online information gives the person with his type of cancer a 50 percent chance of surviving. When he shares that information with his best friend and NPR co-worker Kyle (Seth Rogen), Kyle likes the odds, telling Adam they are better than he'd get in a casino.
Adam's overbearing mom Diane (Anjelica Huston, in her best role in a long time) eagerly offers to take over and care for Adam despite the fact that she's already dealing with his father Richard (Serge Houde), who has Alzheimer's disease. However, Adam's live-in girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) steps up and says she'll stand by Adam through his treatment. Given the turn his young life takes, Learner understandably sinks into depression, prompting his doctor (Andrew Airlie) to refer Adam to a therapist (Anna Kendrick), only she still has her training wheels on, so to speak, as she hasn't completed her doctorate and Adam is only her third patient.
50/50 contains a lot of laughs, but it's more dramatic than I was expecting. In fact, given that Rogen basically plays a fictionalized version of himself (and when isn't Seth Rogen playing a fictionalized version of himself. Keep in mind, I never saw The Green Hornet.), I can't help but wonder if Will Reiser's story inspired Judd Apatow when he came up with Funny People where Rogen becomes best friends with Adam Sandler's comic character with cancer. Of course, 50/50 contains many major differences from Funny People, the most important being that we care what happens to Gordon-Levitt's character while I suffered some disappointment that they didn't kill Sandler off.
Gordon-Levitt continues to have one of the most amazing careers for actors who began plying their craft at an early age, dating back to TV sitcom work on the short-lived The Powers That Be from Norman Lear when he was 11 and a recurring role on Roseanne a year later. At 14 or 15, he gave the best performance in the wretched film The Juror starring Demi Moore, Alec Baldwin and James Gandolfini. Then he more than held his own as part of the comic ensemble of 3rd Rock From the Sun for six seasons.
Since he's grown into adulthood, he's completely missed the curse that often afflicts child actors, giving good to great performances in films such as Mysterious Skin, Brick, The Lookout, (500) Days of Summer, Inception and now 50/50. Reiser's screenplay delicately blends comedy and pathos and Gordon-Levitt has shown that he's adept at both forms with his previous choices, but 50/50 may be his first vehicle that allows him to display his range realistically within the same film.
Rogen, with the exception of the creepy and defiantly unfunny Observe and Report always plays himself more or less. The Rogen you see in Knocked Up simply is an R-rated version of Seth Rogen the talk show guest or Seth Rogen, award show presenter. In most circumstances, an actor like this would drive me up the wall, but I never hold it against Rogen because from the moment I first saw him on the great TV show Freaks and Geeks, he so strongly reminded me of a friend of mine from high school that each time I see him it's like seeing that friend again.
Huston, as you'd expect, turns in a great performance, even if you don't get that much of her. Howard also does the best job I've seen her do, though she never seems to look the same from one film to the next.
The other real bright spot of 50/50 belongs to Kendrick. She was so good (and Oscar-nominated) in Up in the Air. She also popped up in the fun Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World ss Scott's sister and I first noticed her in her film debut, the underrated and underseen musical Camp.
From all the praise that 50/50 received, it didn't turn out to be quite the movie I was expecting. It's good, but not in the ways it had been sold to me.
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Labels: 10s, A. Huston, Alec Baldwin, Apatow, Demi, Gandolfini, Godard, Gordon-Levitt, N. Lear, Seth Rogen
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Sunday, December 25, 2011
A human life is strictly as frail and fleeting as the morning dew
"There was not a lot of dialogue. The titles were just to keep you up. It's the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That's the reason for film. Otherwise, we might as well turn the light out and call it radio." — Robert Altman
By Edward Copeland
Akira Kurosawa was 40 years old when he made the film that truly made moviegoers outside his native Japan take notice. Rashomon began filming July 7, 1950, and, in amazing turnaround time, debuted in Japan on Aug. 25 of that same year. However, the rest of the world didn't get to see Rashomon until 1951, starting with the Venice Film Festival in September where it won both the Golden Lion and the Italian Film Critics Award for best film. It unspooled next in the U.S., where it premiered 60 years ago today.
The Altman quote that I began this piece with comes from an introduction he taped for the Criterion Collection DVD release of Rashomon in 2002. While Altman certainly had it right about the visual wonders that Kurosawa summons in Rashomon, with the invaluable help of cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, with whom Kurosawa was working with for the first time, ironically (given the movie's subject), I
believe the other much-missed filmmaker's memory may have been faulty when it came to the amount of dialogue. Granted, Rashomon isn't overly chatty, but the film says nearly as much verbally as visually, not that I fault Altman — those images beckon you to lose yourself in them, even if subtitles get missed as a consequence. After all, Kurosawa himself admitted in his autobiography Something Like an Autobiography that he tried in Rashomon to recapture the spirit of silent movies that film had lost when sound came along. Criterion printed an excerpt of his memoir in the booklet that accompanied the DVD. "Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930s, I felt, we had misplaced and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the aesthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back into the past," Kurosawa wrote. "In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit of the French avant-garde films of the 1920s. Yet in Japan at this time we had no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure of those I had seen as a boy, ruminating over the aesthetics that had made them special. Rashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research."
Know what tickles me about writing a tribute to this film? Rashomon liberates me to go into excruciating detail (if I desire) about scenes — for instance, I can describe the scene where The Woman (Machiko Kyô) turns on both her husband, the samurai (Masayuki Mori), and the infamous bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), accusing them both of being weak and egging them on to fight to the death over who gets to keep her — because that's merely one version of what happened that led to the samurai's death. No character in the movie nor any viewer in the audience can declare with 100% certainty which version, if any, depicts the truth. Rashomon makes the need for giving readers spoiler warnings moot, praise be not only to Kurosawa but to his co-writer Shinobu Hashimoto and especially Ryûnosuke Akutagawa, who wrote the two short stories, "In a Grove" and "Rashomon," which inspired Kurosawa to make the film in the first place. Once Kurosawa had all his elements in place — cast, crew, shooting locations, set being constructed — even his assistant directors came to the director and admitted that the screenplay "baffled" them and asked Kurosawa to explain its meaning. In his autobiography, Kurosawa wrote, “'Please read it again more carefully,' I told them. 'If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.' But they wouldn’t leave. 'We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.' For their persistence, I gave them this simple explanation:
"Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.
"After I finished, two of the three assistant directors nodded and said they would try reading the script again. They got up to leave, but the third, who was the chief, remained unconvinced. He left with an angry look on his face. (As it turned out, this chief assistant director and I never did get along. I still regret that in the end I had to ask for his resignation. But, aside from this, the work went well.)" It saddens me the number of books I'll never find time to read. I wish I'd read Kurosawa's autobiography at a younger age — I have
so many unfinished and unstarted books lying around the house as it is. I digress. Rashomon may have puzzled Kurosawa's assistant directors, but I grasped it from the first time I saw it as a teen. Then again, perhaps geographical differences explain the comprehension gap. Sure — they shared a common country of origin with Kurosawa, but the director had immersed himself so deeply into Western culture through movies and literature, he might as well have hailed from the U.S. as Altman and I did, despite the large differences in our three ages. In fact, in my sophomore year of high school, not long after seeing Rashomon for the first time, my English teacher gave us an assignment to write something about our own time period based on the form of Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, which we'd just studied in clsss. The teacher made no requirement that our piece be true or realistic so I titled mine Rashomon, American Style and fabricated an attack on a classmate and wrote five letters by different people, each giving different accounts of what took place, though my piece didn't dwell remotely in philosophical realms — it aimed solely at the satirical side of life. I'm proud to say I received an A on the assignment. With that little anecdote, I've finally remembered to give a broad outline of the plot of Rashomon, which I've neglected to do so far. As much as I do love Rashomon, it might not make the top five if I ranked my favorite Kurosawa films. I know it doesn't make the top four. For Altman, it and Throne of Blood were his two favorites. In that introduction, Altman said:
"Rashomon is the most interesting, for me, of Kurosawa's films.…The main thing here is that when one sees a film you see the characters on screen.…You see very specific things — you see a tree, you see a sword — so one takes that as truth, but in this film, you take it as truth and then you find out it's not necessarily true and you see these various versions of the episode that has taken place that these people are talking about. You're never told which is true and which isn't true which leads you to the proper conclusion that it's all true and none of it's true. It becomes a poem and it cracks this visual thing that we have in our minds that if we see it, it must be a fact. In reading, in radio — where you don't have these specific visuals — your mind is making them up. What my mind makes up and what your mind makes up…is never the same."
Since I've avoided, not on purpose mind you, giving even a cursory synopsis or Rashomon's plot, I suppose now offers as good a place as any other to pen a brief summary for anyone unfamiliar with the film (in the unlikely event that their eyes remain fixed on this Web page this deep into the post). The title refers, according to Kurosawa's autobiography, the main gate to the outer precincts of Japan's 11th century capital city. As the movie opens, a Commoner (Kichijirô Ueda) seeks refuge from a heavy downpour of rain beneath the gate where a Buddhist Priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a Woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) sit visibly shaken, repeating variations of how they just don't understand and never have encountered a story as strange as this one. This intrigues The Commoner, who pumps both men for information about their rambling. "War, earthquakes, winds, fire, famine, the plague — years where it's been nothing but disasters. And
bandits…every night. I've seen so many men getting killed like insects, but even I have never heard a story as horrible as this," The Priest tells him. "This time, I may finally lose my faith in the human soul." When The Priest says that, The Commoner starts to lose interest. He just wanted to get out of the rain, not listen to a sermon, he responds, then The Woodcutter shares his involvement in the story and we get our first flashback, filmed as a long tracking shot through mountainous woods behind from behind the Woodcutter before it circles around him and continues as he walks toward it — stopping when he discovers a woman's white hat and veil hanging off a bush. He continues on and finds another item on the path until he finally stumbles upon the corpse of The Man and runs back to report it to the police. The Commoner learns that The Priest and The Woodcutter had come to the gate after being at the courthouse where they listened to the testimony of the famous bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), who was apprehended by a Policeman (Daisuke Katô); The Woman (Machiko Kyô), who was discovered at a temple; and even The Man (Masayuki Mori), who may have been murdered, but tells his version of events through a Medium (Noriko Honma). No one's version of the events matches the others' completely and The Woodcutter believes everyone, even the dead man, lied. "Dead men tell no lies," The Priest insists. "It's human to lie. Most of the time we can't even be honest with ourselves," The Commoner replies, repeating nearly verbatim what Kurosawa told his confused assistant directors. Most character lists you'll find for Rashomon agree to call Chiaki and Shimura's characters The Priest and The Woodcutter, but you'll find many names Ueda's role such as The Commoner, The Peasant, The Beggar, etc. Within the movie itself, only Mifune's bandit receives a name, Tajômaru. Somehow though IMDb gives full names to The Man and The Woman who could be called The Husband and The Wife or The Samurai and The Wife, but never get proper names.While I didn't intend for this anniversary tribute to end up reading as if it were a paid advertisement for the Criterion DVD of Rashomon, the disc also contains excerpts from the documentary The World of Kazuo Miyagawa where the late director of photography explains how he pulled off the complicated dolly shot of the Woodcutter's trek through the woods as well as other tricks on Rashomon. The movie marked his first teaming with Kurosawa. The Woodcutter's walk was one of the very first shots scheduled, so Miyagawa set out to impress the director. He had the track built so the camera could do a 180-degree turn and then at the proper time had Takashi Shimura cross over the track to allow the camera to view the actor from the front. Some other Rashomon secrets that Miyagawa (and Kurosawa) share
in the excerpt involve what tricks they employed to get desired effects in the woods of the Nara, Japan, region where they filmed because the trees stood unusually tall. As a result, it interfered with Kurosawa's wish for shadows and light reflecting on the actors' faces at various times. Miyagawa used the same tool to help with both problems — mirrors. To deflect the distant rays of the suns on to the performers, Miyagawa stole the full-length mirror from the costume department and set it up so it would catch the sunlight and direct it exactly where Kurosawa sought to aim it. The director also sought to darken portions of the actors' faces with tree branches — which would have been fine if the cast all had been about 8 feet tall. Since they weren't, they jerry-rigged some mesh out of sight of the camera and attached branches to it. After that, they again made use of the mirror to reflect the shadows of the standalone branches where they wanted on the actors. One other detail the documentary excerpt includes came only from Kurosawa, who talked about the trouble of filming rain. He said that when you want to film rain, it always had to be a downpour otherwise, the rain never shows up on the film. Even then, in the case of Rashomon, he admits that they tinted the color of the rain to make certain it could be seen. Though Miyagawa and Kurosawa worked together well, they only teamed up two more times since the two men seldom worked at the same Japanese studio at the same time. Their next collaboration didn't occur until Yojimbo and, though he wasn't the d.p., Miyagawa did consult on the photography for Kagemusha. Since Miyagawa served as cinematographer on more than 80 features between 1938 and 1991, he did work with many of the biggest names in Japanese cinema at least once (often multiple times) including Kon Ichikawa, Takashi Imai, Hiroshi Inagaki, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Kenji Mizoguchi(including Sansho the Bailiff and Ugetsu), Yasujirô Ozu (on Floating Weeds) and Masahiro Shinoda, among many others.
Though the importance of the visual ingredients of Rashomon shouldn't be understated, I believe that ultimately the film's success depends on the two separate trio of performers. First, we have Shimura, Chiaki and Ueda as The Woodcutter, The Priest and The Commoner, essentially static characters that function as narrators of a sort as well as our surrogates, debating the philosophical ideas that the movie raises. The Priest struggles with his faith in light of what he has heard while The Woodcutter already has abandoned his on the basis of what he has heard and saw. The Commoner, who receives all the information about the events in the woods second hand, serves both as the audience surrogate and as
someone who long ago realized that the world doesn't function in black-and-white terms and that horrible things happen every day. When he first arrives, The Priest informs him that a man has been murdered. "So what? Only one? Why, up on top of this gate, there's always five or six bodies. No one worries about them," The Commoner responds. At a later point, The Priest seems unable to listen to any more. "I don't want to hear it. No more horror stories," The Priest pleads. The Commoner fails to react with the shock of the other two men. "They are common stories these days. I even heard that the demon living here in Rashomon fled in fear of the ferocity of man," The Commoner tells him. That part always reminds me whenever a news anchor reports on a workplace shooting somewhere and leads his or her report with someone being "shocked." How many of these over how many decades do these news readers have to talk about until they feel it's OK for them to drop the illusion of being shocked by them? I've also heard there's gambling at Rick's. All three actors serve their roles well but, as always, I'm amazed at the physical changes Takashi Shimura undergoes in his various Kurosawa roles. From a "modern" detective his own age in Stray Dog to The Woodcutter here, from the old dying civil servant in Ikiru to the main samurai in Seven Samurai — I'd be hard-pressed at any time to tell you how old he really was or what he looked like in everyday life. By cheating, I can find his age. He was 45 when he made Rashomon. He died in 1982 at 76.
The second trio's task provides a more difficult acting challenge for Mifune, Kyô and Mori. The three performers aren't simply portraying The Bandit Tajômaru, The Woman and The Man — the film requires them to play widely divergent versions of those characters while still staying within the roles' essential frameworks. All three do well but, as you'd expect, Mifune stands out, though Kyô gives him a run for his money as The Woman. When Tajômaru gives his version of events, he testifies about The Woman's reaction, saying, "Her face turns pale. She stares at me with frozen eyes, her expression intense like a child's." However, when The Woman gives her own testimony, The Woodcutter and The Priest who were at the courthouse say she was docile and nothing like Tajômaru described. The Man's tale given through The Medium paints yet another portrait.
When The Woodcutter finally comes clean about witnessing the events instead of just finding The Man's body afterward as he said before, he draws a sketch of The Woman as completely manipulative and evil. Kyô excels at all these variations. There comes a moment in one version where she's lying on the ground sobbing and suddenly sits bolt upright and lambastes both men that will send a chill down your spine. Mifune's most consistent quality is The Bandit's maniacal laugh, but his face seems incapable of exhausting possible expressions. He can be menacing, romantic, insane, sad — you name it, he probably plumbs it as Tajômaru. They even go so far as to show the difference in fighting abilities in the different version. In Tajômaru's testimony, he claims that he and The Man had a spirited sword fight and that no man had fought him as well as this samurai so he felt he owed it to him that he die admirably. In the account told by The Woodcutter only to The Priest and The Commoner, The Woman forces the two men to fight and their swordplay is sloppy and not done very well. Altman says in his intro that when Tajômaru's interrogation takes place, we never see anyone asking him questions because the audience is doing the interrogation and he was on the money about that. It's not as clear in the testimony from The Woman and through The Medium, but Tajômaru looks right into the camera and speaks to us. In that respect, Kurosawa achieved his goal of going back to the past and recapturing the days of silent movies because in many ways, that's how what divides the film and its two trios. The three men at the gate reside in the talkie and while dialogue exists in the woods, much of what happens, each time that it happens, occurs on the actors' faces.
The pair of prizes Rashomon picked up in Venice were just the first two in a long string of honors and nominations the film received stretching from September 1951 through the spring of 1953. Before Rashomon officially opened on Christmas Day 1951, the always-and-forever mysterious National Board of Review, shortly after changing its name from The Illuminati, awarded Kurosawa best director and gave the movie best foreign film more than a week earlier. The Oscars didn't have a competitive foreign language film category until 1956
so at the ceremony for 1951 films (held in early 1952), Rashomon became the fifth foreign language film to receive an honorary Oscar from the Academy's Board of Governors "as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States in 1951." The previous four went to Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief in 1947 and 1949, respectively; Maurice Cloche's Monsieur Vincent (1948) and René Clément's The Walls of Malapaga (1950). (Three additional foreign language films receive honorary Oscars before the regular category was added: Clément's Forbidden Games in 1952, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell in 1954 and Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai, The Legend of Musashi aka Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto in 1955.) Apparently, Rashomon didn't make it to England until 1952, because it was for that year that it received a nomination for best film from any source from the British Academy Film Awards, handed out in spring 1953 (and not yet merged with the British TV Academy to form BAFTA). What doesn't make sense is that NBR and the Academy both recognized that Rashomon's U.S. release occurred in 1951. Somehow though when the 1952 Oscars rolled around, the Academy nominated production designer Takashi Matsuyama and set decorator H. Motsumoto for their black-and-white art direction. Forget for the moment the question of how they ruled Rashomon eligible again but consider that being eligible the Academy ONLY nominated it for art direction in 1952, that year The Greatest Show on Earth won best picture. Also for the year 1952, Kurosawa received a Directors Guild of America nomination, the only DGA nomination he ever received, though he lost to John Ford for The Quiet Man — one of the 17 other contenders in the category. Hell, we’re already spending too much time talking about this year’s awards, I’ll stop talking about awards six decades ago now.
Besides, the honors aren't what matters in the end, it's the influence and it would be impossible to list all the movies, TV shows, plays and novels that have been influenced by Rashomon, which, of course, had its own influences to draw on before Kurosawa filmed it. Movies made before Rashomon had told a story through multiple points of views (most notably Citizen Kane), but nothing had really had alternate versions of a single event until Rashomon. When I watched Rashomon again most recently, the most recent film that popped into my mind was (500) Days of Summer where Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character's interpretation of Zooey Deschanel's character and moments they shared changed depending how he felt toward her at that given moment. In 1964, Martin Ritt directed an actual American remake called The Outrage that set the story in the Old West and starred Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey and Claire Bloom in the roles equivalent to The Bandit, The Man and The Woman and Edward G. Robinson, Howard da Silva and William Shatner in the parts equal to The Commoner, The Woodcutter and The Priest. Two recent films with similar premises, updated for the modern age, were Courage Under Fire and Vantage Point. A little Rashomon peeks out at times in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown. Many TV shows, especially sitcoms, have enjoyed borrowing the premise over the years, including a classic All in the Family where Mike and Archie differ over what happened when a TV repairman and his African-American apprentice came over. Almost by formula, any police or detective show has that quality to some extent. However, The Simpsons delivered by far the funniest dialogue exchange referring to the movie. In the 10th season episode "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo," Marge says to Homer, "You liked Rashomon the last time we saw it" to which Homer replies, "That's not how I remember it."
What remains important about Rashomon is that 60 years later, we do still remember it and the film has injected itself far enough into the cultural bloodstream that we'll continue to reference it. Sadly, the same can't be said for so much of our past works of film, television, music and literature as we increasingly become a disposable culture where it's been decided the most things should have an expiration date, usually tied somehow to the date Entertainment Weekly began publishing. Thankfully, Rashomon seems to have slipped by the pre-1990 terminators. Long may it baffle.
"It certainly changed my perception about what is possible in film and what is desirable. You just have to be able to let the audience come to that conclusion and they say, 'Oh, that isn't what happened.' Everybody that you would talk to about it — you'd sit down and make a person see the film — and ask them questions, you would not get the same answers from anybody which is the art of art. That is what art is — it penetrates your intellect…and your experience and history has to react on this new information. You're reacting from your own persona on it, but that's what gives it the power." — Robert Altman
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Labels: 50s, Altman, Awards, Books, De Sica, Edward G., Foreign, Gordon-Levitt, John Ford, Kurosawa, Mifune, Movie Tributes, Newman, Nonfiction, Oscars, Ray Top 100, Shatner, Silents, Tarantino, The Simpsons
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Monday, December 05, 2011
Like seeing your dreams in the middle of the day
By Edward Copeland
Throughout my years of reviewing, when the time came to write about the latest Martin Scorsese picture, I always felt compelled to try to craft the best piece my capabilities allowed. With Hugo marking the first time the director has used the advancements in 3D technology, I not only owed Hugo the best prose I could muster, but it required seeing Hugo the way Scorsese intended. However, because of the physical limitations that have burdened me since 2008, trips to a movie theater have become a daunting task that requires literal heavy lifting by others and a substantial expenditure of energy on my part to accomplish such a journey, even with my good friend Adderall's help. Because of the logistics involved to get me out of my bed and my home, I usually only get out for doctors' appointments and unplanned trips to the emergency room. However, when Martin Scorsese releases a new film to theaters in 3D, I had to do my damnedest to get there physically. I had to wait to see Shine a Light and Shutter Island on DVD. Hugo happens to be the first film I've seen in a movie theater in more than a year (and only my fourth since 2009) as well as my first in "real D" 3D ever. If Marty's name weren't attached, I wouldn't have made the effort, not just for any 3D movie. This creates perhaps the oddest start to a review of a Scorsese movie I've written, but when your life undergoes as massive a change as mine has in the past three years, it feels appropriate to begin my Hugo review by focusing first on what it took to get me to the movie in the first place.
As frequent readers of this blog know, I am bedridden. I won't repeat the details of what put me here, but you can read this if you don't know. To get out of bed requires at least two people setting me up on a sling and attaching it to our electric lift. For a trip that isn't to a doctor, some additional steps have to be taken. For those journeys, I can go in my usual hospital gown attire. To visit a more public place such as a movie theater, I first have to be helped to put on a semblance of clothing, which isn't the easiest task in the world when your legs don't move and you have to work the pants and shirt around a suprapubic catheter and its attached collection bag. When that's out of the way and I'm centered on the sling and its straps are attached to the hooks of the lift, one person uses the lift to raise me off the bed while the other stands behind my wheelchair to guide me in and make sure I'm tight against the back and won't slide out during transport. We strap belts around my chest and legs to help me maneuver the chair from my bedroom through the house, into the garage and up the ramp of our specially equipped van where I perform a 180 degree turn in a limited space. Then four tethered hooks and a seat belt are attached to me. Assuming all of this has gone OK — and sometimes it takes quite a bit of trial and error to make certain that I'm centered on the sling and that I'm firmly against the back of the wheelchair. Then we can ride. For trips to doctors, we receive the help of the local ambulance service that provides free "lift assist" support, sending one of their paramedic units to help my aging father get me up. Unfortunately, this service only applies to medical-related jaunts. So, unless I lied, we couldn't have them come out and help get me up so I could go see Hugo.
Three mornings a week, I have caregivers who help to give me baths, etc., from 8 a.m. to noon. According to the national website for Hugo, the theater closest to me would have its first 3D showing on the Monday after it opened at 10:15 a.m. So I decided to make my first plan be that my caregiver would come an hour later than usual and I'd eat breakfast before he got here. He'd help get me dressed and get me up and into the chair and go see Hugo with us and we'd take the bath afterward. Unfortunately, the website was incorrect and when I checked the actual theater's showtime, they weren't having a 3D showing of Hugo until 2:30 in the afternoon, which wouldn't work because of other commitments the caregiver had in the afternoon not to mention how much that would cost me in overtime. With Monday blown, I started looking at the other theaters showing Hugo in the city. The earliest 3D showtime for Hugo in the city was 11:30 a.m. at a different theater. Wednesday couldn't work for the caregiver because his son had a doctor's appointment during the time the movie would be playing. Finally, I hit upon a plan: Thankfully, the caregiver's Thursday was free so he came just to help me get dressed, out of the bed and into the wheelchair and to accompany us to the theater for Hugo.
I had been to this theater many times, but not since I'd been forced to use a wheelchair (which occurred prior to my bedridden status) so I didn't realize how piss-poor their seating arrangements for wheelchairs were. Because of my nearly constant leg pain, when I did go to the movies in the chair, to make things as comfortable as possible, I tilt-raise the chair and recline the back so the footrests can be folded to extend my legs out straight. At the other two theaters in the city I'd usually frequent, it was never a problem as handicapped seating would have recessed openings adjacent to them allowing plenty of room for this to take place. At this theater, the space between the ground level rows of seating and the start of the stadium seating is very narrow and I barely had enough room to do much of the recline or lifting of legs without smacking into either the railing behind me or the seats in front of me. I arranged myself the best I could and anxiously awaited Hugo's start.
Of course, first I had to endure the trailers, which in the non-3D portion previewed a film set for the January dumping ground co-starring Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton called Joyful Noise. The trailer even includes a joke about Parton's plastic surgery, which they really had to include since her mouth now resembles Jack Nicholson's Joker in Tim Burton's Batman when he puts the flesh makeup over his disfigured visage. They then told us to put on our glasses for the 3D previews. All the animated films designed and made in the process such as The Lorax, The Adventures of Tintin and The Pirates: Band of Misfits looked impressive. However, the previews of re-releases of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace and James Cameron's Titanic, both retrofitted to appear to be in 3D, looked like shit. Both should carry the tag line: Think They Stunk in Two Dimensions? Wait Until You Catch a Whiff in Three! Finally, it was time for Hugo.
I can't underestimate how excited I get when I'm about to see a new Martin Scorsese picture unfurl in a movie theater. I used to feel that way when I'd see the white-on-black titles of a Woody Allen film before he hit his slump and started repeating himself in the '90s. With the exceptions of Shine a Light and Shutter Island, I've seen every Scorsese feature in a theater starting with The King of Comedy. That includes After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ (which required driving to another state and standing in a line in the rain since no Oklahoma theater would show it), "Life Lessons" from New York Stories, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence (which I also drove out of state to see, but only because I was impatient), Casino (which I saw on a New York junket where I briefly spoke to Scorsese), Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Departed. I even saw A Personal Journey Through American Movies With Martin Scorsese when it was shown in a New York theater and was able to see The Last Waltz in a 20th anniversary theatrical re-release. Now, Hugo joins that list. That's 17 films. I may have seen more films in a theater directed by Scorsese than by any other director if it weren't for Woody Allen's prolific nature and my earlier start with Steven Spielberg (beginning with Jaws), though Hugo puts Scorsese ahead of Spielberg by one. When I worshipped Woody, I stuck with him well into his doldrums. My first Allen in a theater remains my choice for his best, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I saw them all that way through Curse of the Jade Scorpion. After that, I didn't have to see them and then it required too much work to see them. I've only seen one Allen in a theater since — Whatever Works — and that had as much to do with Larry David as with Woody. Still, that adds up to 20 films in a theater. It's been Spielberg's later years when I've been skipping out on theatrical showings (even when I could have attended).
Hugo starts with an awe-inspiring image that serves well as an introduction to live-action 3D for a skeptic who has felt, based on what he has read and heard, that 3D was little more than a gimmick to pump up movie ticket prices. With the exception of a couple of IMAX shorts in its early days, the last (and only) 3D movie I had ever watched in a theater was 1983's hokey-as-hell Jaws 3-D, back when the glasses were those cheap cardboard spectacle with plastic lenses of red and blue (or cyan if you want to get technical). In Hugo, we open on an FX shot that evokes an overhead shot of the entirety of a snowy Paris in the latter half of the 1920s, gliding past familiar landmarks until we arrive at its central train station and one of its huge clocks, only instead of the Arabic numeral 4, a boy's face peers out at us. The shot reminds me of young Henry Hill looking out his window at the gangsters' arrival at Tuddy's cab stand in Goodfellas. What Hugo shows us only gets more enthralling from there.
We learn that the 12-year-old boy is Hugo Cabret (played by the engaging Asa Butterworth, whose penetrating blue eyes might carry him far), who lives inside the walls of that Paris train station, winding all those clocks to make sure they keep running on time. It is a job that he inherited by default when his father (played by Jude Law in flashbacks) dies and his only living relative, Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone), takes him in. Uncle Claude is a drunken lout whose job is winding the train station's clocks so — at the cost of Hugo's education — the uncle jerks Hugo out of school and makes him his apprentice at the train station, learning his job and living there as well. Soon, Uncle Claude vanishes and Hugo takes it upon himself to perform his uncle's duties. Since he's doing the job unofficially, Hugo must filch whatever he can for sustenance as well as parts to finish repairing the automaton that his father found languishing at the museum where he worked and brought home to restore. Hugo has continued working on the unusual piece, convinced that if he fixes it, he will find a message left behind by his much-missed father. Hugo creates his own universe within the train station, though he must be careful to escape the notice of the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), whose main joy in life appears to be apprehending unattended children and shipping them off to orphanages. Separate from the use of 3D, once the movie takes us inside Hugo's world of the train station, the film proves to be a true triumph of production design that I imagine dazzles just as much in the 2D version. Dante Ferretti (Oscar winner for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and The Aviator) serves as production designer, the eighth time he's worked with Scorsese, and the sets for Hugo prove so elaborate that the credits list 10 art directors who assisted Ferretti. Francesca Lo Schiavo performed the role of set decorator, her 18th collaboration with Ferretti (she won her two Oscars for the same two films he did) and her fifth with Scorsese. Together, all the crafts people, their meticulous work filmed through the lens of master cinematographer Robert Richardson (Oscar winner for JFK and The Aviator and whose credits also include Inglourious Basterds, The Doors, City of Hope and Eight Men Out), create a visual feast that's a wonder to behold and would make a remarkable moviegoing experience even if it lacked sound, appropriate given its underlying subject matter.
Hugo has been adapted by John Logan from the unusual children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. The book, which Selznick (a first cousin, twice removed of the famous producer David O. Selznick) wrote and illustrated, is historical fiction that runs more than 500 pages long of which nearly half of those pages contain illustrations. Published in 2007, the book Selznick describes as "not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things" won the 2008 Caldecott Medal, the first for a "novel" since the prize goes to picture books. No wonder it attracted Scorsese.
In the train station, one of the main places where Hugo finds parts to swipe for his automaton is the toy shop, run by a very grumpy man (Ben Kingsley, always good, but giving another memorable performance in a career full of diverse roles). Believing he's dozing, Hugo reaches up to pinch some parts when the man grabs him and harangues him for being the thief who has been stealing from
him. He demands that the boy empty his pockets and Hugo complies on the right side containing all the pilfered pieces, but avoids his left pocket until the toy shop owner insists. Hugo reluctantly removes his father's notebook, which elicits a strange reaction from the man, who demands to know if Hugo made the drawings in it. A desperate Hugo begs the man to let him have the notebook back since he didn't steal it, but the toy shop's owner refuses, forcing Hugo to run along before he calls the Station Inspector. Later in the day, Hugo makes a new acquaintance — Isabelle (the ever-versatile Chloë Grace Moretz), who turns out to live with the toy shop owner, whom she calls Papa Georges, and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory). Hugo tells her about his notebook and how important it is to him, but refuses to say why. He waits for Isabelle's Papa Georges to close for the day and then starts to follow him, again pleading for the return of the notebook. The bitter man tells Hugo he plans to go home and burn it. Isabelle, who is listening nearby, promises Hugo that she'll keep watch over it so nothing happens. The next day, he returns to the toy shop. Georges says he expected to see Hugo again and hands him a cloth full of ashes, sending the boy fleeing in tears. Isabelle overhears the exchange and tells Hugo not to cry, but she again wants to know what's in the notebook because Papa Georges and Mama Jeanne talked and argued about it all night and Papa Georges cried as well, but he didn't burn it. He just did that to try to get Hugo to stop bothering him.Since Hugo opened prior to Thanksgiving and was being discussed in detail long before that, it's doubtful that many readers interested in the film don't already know the basics of the story and this isn't the type of movie where one needs to worry about spoilers. (If there exists in the world a person outraged that a Hugo review ruins the movie's revelation that Papa Georges is actually filmmaking pioneer Georges Méliès, I want to meet that person to find out how they knew who Méliès is but hadn't heard or read about Hugo's plot yet.) Martin Scorsese does have an unfortunate tendency to be pigeonholed as a filmmaker, when he may be the most eclectic great director we have working today — and he's been that way for a long time. In a way, you could say he resembles the Howard Hawks of his generation, working in practically every genre yet leaving his distinctive stamp on all his works. Granted, Scorsese possesses more
sophistication than Hawks — in terms of both visual style and subject matter. Hawks also didn't run back and forth between fiction and documentaries the way Scorsese does. Hugo, while it's perfectly suitable for kids to see, really works best for a special kind of kid — the type of kid Scorsese was or that I was or many of my friends were — budding film buffs. Hugo, at its core, isn't really the story of two kids trying to solve a mystery as they do in many tales that enchant young people, though that's there. It's not merely the story of an orphaned boy living alone inside a place that seems magical to him but who's pursued by a pseudo-villain, though that element exists in Hugo as well, primarily in the form of Sacha Baron Cohen's Station Inspector stalking the corridors with his Doberman. It isn't even the story of how a boy teaches a bitter old man to love life again, but that common children's story not only exists in Hugo, the main strand builds from it to accomplish what Scorsese really aims to do: pen a cinematic love letter to movies. Because of all the great directors working today, it's doubtful that any filmmaker loves movies more than Scorsese does — and it isn't just making movies that he loves. He loves watching them, helping to preserve them and just sitting around enthusiastically talking about them. Hugo, in its own way, allows him to accomplish all those film-related gerunds at once and address them to a new audience. I bet in the back of his mind somewhere, he hopes that someone born in 1999 or so sees Hugo and the experience births a new serious film fan, one who goes home and asks his or her parents about seeing a silent movie, wanting to start at the beginning of film history. If we had a title of filmmaking laureate as we do poet laureate, would there be any other American worth nominating? He's our country's film professor. They often pose the question to people about any career they might have, "Would you still do this if you didn't get paid?" I think we know what Marty's answer would be, but how would someone like a Michael Bay answer?With Hugo, Scorsese begins the film moving at a pace equal to the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning. Hugo starts leisurely with that overhead shot of Paris, but it picks up speed as it enters the train station and takes off like the famous Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas on crystal meth, zooming through those wide corridors packed with people, following Hugo through the innards of the station, sending him up and down ladders and traversing halls lined with pipes exhaling steam. Much of Hugo zips along at this pace when in the station, but Scorsese knows when to slow things down as well. In the production design, I'm sure they purposely built
the set's features to evoke silent films such as the many large mechanisms that run the station's clocks that look straight out of Chaplin's Modern Times and the clocks that reminded me of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last from the beginning, long before Hugo takes Isabelle to see Lloyd's movie and Hugo ends up hanging from a minute hand for real when fleeing the Station Inspector. By this time in his directing career (21 feature films since 1967, not counting his short films, documentaries, music videos, commercials and TV work), Scorsese has employed every filmmaking technique there is except for the 3D he's using for the first time here. It also seems to me that he utilizes more shots from high and low angles in Hugo than he usually does for a single movie. The big question comes down to how he handles the 3D, which puts me in an awkward position since I have nothing to compare it against except those coming attraction trailers. For me at least, I thought it was used very well for the first half-hour or so and isolated moments after that. After about 30 minutes though, I found the 3D to be somewhat exhausting and it wore out its novelty with me. When Hugo reaches its emotional climax, with Méliès embracing his legacy and parts of his films and A Trip to the Moon restored in its entirety, I found the 3D to be a distraction. Having seen that Georges Méliès film, I know it wasn't in 3D, so why was the moon coming toward me? I imagine that entire sequence affects the viewer more emotionally in the 2D prints.
Fortunately, the eventual 3D fatigue didn't sour me on the film itself which I enjoyed overall, thanks not only to Scorsese's still-visible mastery and his right-hand woman, film editor Thelma Schoonmaker and all the other behind-the-scenes talent. Most importantly, Hugo succeeds on the strength of its cast (though why everyone in Paris has a British accent I have no idea). Since the movie rests primarily on the shoulders of young Asa Butterfield, if his casting had been off, they'd been sunk, but he does quite well, holding his own with performers of all different levels of experience. His Hugo and Chloë Grace Moretz's Isabelle make a good team of young amateur detectives and friends who each compensate for something the other lacks. Isabelle's book smarts help their research (and con their way out of a run-in with the Station Inspector) while Hugo introduces Isabelle to the wonders of the movies, which Papa Georges refuses to let her see. Until that point, Isabelle has been the adventurer, but Hugo sneaks her into the theater to see the movie free. "We could get in trouble," she warns Hugo. "That's how you know it's an adventure," Hugo tells her. Moretz truly has proved herself an amazing young actress, putting on a British accent here, playing the young vampire last year in Let Me In and as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wise-beyond-her-years younger sister in (500) Days of Summer.
Also turning in fine, brief appearances are the previously mentioned Jude Law, Ray Winstone and Helen McCrory as well as Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Emily Mortimer and Christopher Lee playing various inhabitants of the train station. Sacha Baron Cohen provides ample comic relief as the Station Inspector who suffered a wound in World War I that requires a mechanical hinge on one of his legs so that it comes off as sort of an homage to Kenneth Mars' Inspector Kemp in Young Frankenstein. One of Cohen's funniest scenes involves Madame Emilie (De la Tour) trying to get him to show her his best smile so he can talk to Lisette (Mortimer), the girl who sells flowers that he's developed a crush on but is too shy to approach. One other performance worth noting is Michael Stuhlbarg as Rene Tabard, the film professor who wrote a book about Méliès and restores his legacy. I don't know if Scorsese met Stuhlbarg on the set of Boardwalk Empire, which he executive produces and Stuhlbarg gives one of the series' best performances as Arnold Rothstein, or if he saw him first in a completely different role as Larry Gopnik in the Coens' A Serious Man, but Stuhlbarg's chameleon-like ability astonishes.
The credit for what ultimately makes Hugo work as well as it does belongs to Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès. Kingsley has been excellent for a long time in many roles since he first captured our attention in 1982's Gandhi, showing he's equally adept in all genres and time periods in the years since. His work in Hugo may be his best since his incomparable turn in Sexy Beast, though the two parts couldn't be more different. There is neither flash nor fire in his Méliès, but you see the loss lurking beneath the man's surface as well as the joy in flashbacks to his filmmaking days. Kingsley's acting stands out better in 3D than all the other effects in Hugo combined.
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Labels: 10s, Boardwalk Empire, Books, Cameron, Chaplin, Coens, Fiction, Gordon-Levitt, Hawks, Kingsley, Larry David, Nicholson, Scorsese, Selznick, Spielberg, Star Wars, Tim Burton, Woody
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Monday, November 07, 2011
A fabulous disaster
By Edward Copeland
For people around my age, one of the biggest laughs in (500) Days of Summer comes when Zooey Deschanel's Summer tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom that lately they've been acting like Sid and Nancy. Tom takes offense, thinking she's comparing him to the late Sex Pistols bass guitarist who stabbed girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death, but Summer corrects him, "No, I'm Sid Vicious." For anyone such as myself for whom Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy served as a seminal film during high school years, it is a hysterical moment. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Cox's film. There's always a danger when revisiting treasured films of your youth, that the experience won't be the same decades down the road but I'm pleased to report that a quarter-century later, Sid & Nancy works better as a movie than I remember it doing when I originally saw it.
When the movie begins, we gaze upon a young Gary Oldman's version of Sid Vicious staring blankly, without expression, at a TV in a dark hotel room as detectives ask if he is the one who called 911. He says nothing, but we glimpse his bloody hand for a moment. What struck me isn't the context of the scene — no matter how long it's been since you've seen Sid & Nancy, you know that she's dead — no, what struck me is how amazingly young Gary Oldman looks. The actor in this 1986 film bears so little resemblance to the actor working under that name today. Can this possibly be the same man? This remarkably talented actor, still a couple of years shy of his 30th birthday then, who transformed himself so memorably into the drugged-out punk rock legend couldn't possibly be the same man now is in his early 50s and seen most often as Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies or Sirius Black in Harry Potter films? It just seems impossible, doesn't it? It's great to hear the buzz that Oldman is receiving for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy because embarrassments dominate his credits more than winners since at least 1995. Some examples: Lots of voice work for video games, The Scarlet Letter, Lost in Space, Hannibal, the TV show Friends and voices in Disney's 3-D Christmas Carol and Kung Fu Panda 2. Thankfully, we still have his Sid Vicious to be amazed by.
An even larger, more existential query loomed over me while I watched Sid & Nancy again, for the first time in I don't know how many years and began to think about what I would write in this tribute. First, came relief that I didn't find myself disappointed as has happened before when returning to a sacred relic from an earlier archaeological phase of my life. Then, I was struck by a question that had never occurred to me before about the movie — what appeal did it hold for me and many of my friends back in high school? We weren't punk rock enthusiasts — that day had largely passed though many of us owned the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (and I mean album — on wax), but we tended to be eclectic musically. We weren't lurking around shooting heroin in our veins (though I can't make that statement with 100% certainty concerning one of our informal group). Why did Sid & Nancy speak to us in such a profound way that we not only fell for the film but went multiple times? The theater which showed this movie (and we often went to midnight showings — it wasn't always The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Pink Floyd — The Wall) would be the site for both the beginnings and ends of teen hookups. I guess watching a love story about two drug-addicted people, one of whom stabs the other to death, just brings out the romance
in people. As I pondered the possibilities of why this cinematic portrait of punk had such pull over us, I looked over my notes and discovered one word that seemed to recur from different characters in the movie: Bored. There lies the link between the punk rockers in the movie and the suburban teens in a Bible Belt multiplex watching them: Both groups felt stifled to the point of losing their minds. Sid Vicious found his escape in drugs and his music; we had to make do with watching movies about him until we were old enough to get the hell out of town. In one scene in the movie, someone says, (you can't really tell who because there's a jumble of bodies crowded in sleeping bags and blankets on an apartment floor) "You know I was so bored once I fucked a dog passionately." Thankfully, it never got that bad here (that I know about). Sid & Nancy shows that even the punk fans grew tired of punk, as in a scene at a club where several sit behind a wall, not even paying attention to the Pistols. One has even brought her baby adorned with a green Mohawk haircut. One of the group, Clive (Mark Monero) announces, "Ain't gonna be a punk no more. Gonna be a rude boy just like my dad." When you consume so many drugs that you can't tell what day or country you're in, a state of ennui comes easy as later when Nancy (Chloe Webb, who's as great as Oldman) lies in bed with Sid and complains that she's so bored that she hates her life. "This is just a rough patch. Things'll be much better when we get to America, I promise," Sid reassures her. "We're in America. We've been here a week. New York is in America, you fuck," she yells at him, prompting him to look out the balcony at the Hotel Chelsea sign.
Watching Sid & Nancy now makes it easier to appreciate what Alex Cox accomplishes on a filmmaking level. He tosses out the idea of a conventional narrative (and shouldn't that be required when telling the story of punk pioneers?) while at the same time employing many standard cinematic techniques to great effect. When they get to the infamous concert on the ship on the Thames and the London police make them pull ashore, Cox throws in a short but effective tracking shot of Sid and Nancy, arm in arm and in love, oblivious to the chaos around them, as they simply walk away from the ship and the melee on the docks just to be with one another. Cox also frequently likes suddenly to distance us from characters, usually
the title ones, but not always, so they appear as specks against a background that gives the scene a different connotation such as a message about abortion. He's not above some wacky film use either. When Sid, Nancy and her friend Gretchen (played by none other than Courtney Love) cross a vacant lot and see some kids picking on another one, Sid tells them to stop. The bullies ask him who he thinks he is. "I'm Sid Vicious," he answers and then the kids run away in fast-motion speed like something out of an Our Gang short. A moment such as that reminds me of what really goes unappreciated about Sid & Nancy — its nearly continuous strain of humor, albeit mostly dark humor. Truth be told, that aspect led to my friends and I returning to the film as much as any empathy for the bored. If you just lay out the basic plot of the film — The true story of heroin-addicted musician and his heroin-addicted girlfriend who he stabs to death but doesn't face justice for his crime because he overdoses first — well, it doesn't exactly sound like a rollicking night out. The first response to that description probably would be something like, "Sounds bleak." The word that begins the IMDb plot summary is "morbid." I'm not trying to convince you that Sid & Nancy produces a laugh riot, but I've sat through many bleak films in my time (Wendy and Lucy leaps to mind) and Sid & Nancy isn't one of them because Cox and his collaborators approached the subject matter with such verve, creativity and vitality.Speaking of the painful Wendy and Lucy, two scenes in Sid & Nancy reminded me of that pretentious piece of misery (but in a good way). One emphasizes the careful balancing act Alex Cox and Abbe Wool's screenplay took with scenes that show these characters' desperation (and that one gets hit out of the park by Chloe Webb's superb work. She and Oldman both were robbed in not receiving Oscar
recognition). The second one plays as sort of a twisted homage to another filmmakers' work. Both keep humor behind the anger and tears. In the first, the infamous telephone booth scene, anxious for drugs and out of cash, Nancy calls her mom in America in the middle of the night London time telling her that she and Sid just got married. She assures her mother that Vicious isn't at all as they describe him in the newspapers and no, she's not pregnant either. Not known for her subtlety, Nancy suggests that her mom would want to send them a wedding gift for their honeymoon. Nancy explains that they don't have a place yet, so money would be better and since it's a different time there, why doesn't she head over to Western Union and wire some to them and they can pick it up in the morning. We never hear the mother's side, but it's very reminiscent of that call Wendy (Michelle Williams) makes to her sister) who has heard all her crap before and doesn't want to deal with it. (Lucky her — I immediately wanted to watch a movie called Wendy's Sister and Lucy.) Nancy loses it. "I am so married!" Nancy yells into the phone. "YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT ME! IF YOU DON'T SEND US MONEY, WE'RE BOTH GONNA DIE! FUCK YOU!" Nancy screams before she hangs up and throws such a fit she breaks the glass in the phone booth. Sid gets her to rest down on the curb. "I fucking hate them! I fucking hate them! Fucking motherfuckers! They wouldn't send us any money! They said we'd spend it on DRUGS!" she tells Sid. Then Oldman gets the scene's deadpan punchline: "We would."
The other sequence proves truly hysterical (unless you were living it I imagine). While in America, Nancy takes Sid to visit her grandparents in a dinner scene that plays as if it's a twisted homage to Alvy's visit to Annie's parents in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. There are other scenes
that obviously influenced later films or seem to predict other filmmakers' recurring trademarks. Recognizable character actors Gloria LeRoy (who still works today, which is her 80th birthday) and Milton Seltzer (who passed in 2006) play Granma and Granpa whose table gets filled out by many other men and women, mostly younger, whose relationship never is explained. What's so funny about the scene is that Nancy doesn't change herself in the presence of her grandparents and the young people, sprinkling her speech with F-bombs as always even though her demeanor is generally friendly. Sid comes off as downright polite — except for not wearing a shirt to the dinner table. The highlight comes when Granpa starts questioning Sid as he would any suitor. "So are you gonna make an honest woman of our Nancy, Sid?" he asks Vicious, who obviously misses the gist of the
question. "She's always been an honest woman to me, grandpa, sir. She never lied to me," Sid tells him. Granpa tries again, "What are your intentions?" Nancy steps in to outline the couple's plans for this: Monday they'd go to the methadone clinic, then she'd get Sid a few gigs (this takes place after The Pistols have broken up, but I'll get back to that), then they'd move to Paris "and go out in a blaze of glory," Nancy says. "Don't worry, you'll be proud of us," Sid reassures the grandparents who look anything but reassured. As the family retires to the living room, Sid promptly passing out in a chair from a bit too much
vodka, Nancy in his lap. Nancy assumes that they'll be staying there but Granma comes in and, being as polite as she can, tells her she thought it would be better if they stayed at a motel so they booked them a room there. Nancy admits she was hoping they'd drive them to the methadone clinic, but Granma says it's impossible because they are going on a trip the next day. One of the never-define teenage boys blurts, "Since when?" Granpa also gives Nancy money for transportation. She's wise enough to know what's up and storms out, but Vicious remains in the chair like a statue. The grandparents argue about how they can get him out. Eventually they do, and we see Sid and Nancy in the hotel lying in the dark watching TV. While much of the sequence has been played for laughs, it might be the film's most touching moment. "These people. Really lovely. Best fuckin' food I ever ate," Sid tells Nancy about her grandparents with a wisp of sadness in his voice. "Why'd they throw us out?" Just as he didn't understand what the meaning of Granpa's questions were, Vicious can't fathom how these people that seemed to be friendly and treating him like a human being would suddenly throw him out for some unknown reason. Nancy knows, and she gives the scene its clincher. "Because they know me." Oldman and Webb created such a magnificent acting partnership in Sid & Nancy that I wonder why no one has devised a project in 25 years that paired these two again.
Granted, the movie focuses on the couple, but it also looks at The Sex Pistols and the music industry in England at the time as well and that's where we find a lot of the humor as well. Though Sid & Nancy really only takes time to develop John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon (well played by Andrew Schofield unless you are John Lydon or are friends with John Lydon) with the other band members being more or less ciphers. While the movie portrays him as a prick at times, it also shows him as someone who aspires to some degree of professionalism, something difficult to reach when your bass guitarist tends to be wasted or not there at all. They'll be on stage at a club, ready to go and Sid will be roughhousing elsewhere in the crowd. "Sid, we'll go on when you're ready," John ("He hates being called Johnny") will shout. The movie also has much fun
with its take on the band's manipulative manager Malcolm McLaren (acted with a perpetually bemused grin by David Hayman), who at times seems less concerned that Sid might be destroying himself as long as he gets press out of it. The first time we see Malcolm, he's standing outside a club trying to lure people into a performance. "Is it fucking worth it? Yes it is," he tells anyone who passes by. When Lydon and the other members come to him to complain, explaining that sometimes they have to turn off Vicious' amp because he isn't even playing the same song that the rest of the band is and they need a new bass guitarist, Malcolm doesn't seem upset. Instead, he replies, "Sidney's more than a mere bass player. He's a fabulous disaster. He's a symbol, a metaphor. He embodies the dementia of a
nihilistic generation." Eventually, even McLaren sees the need for intervention. At first, he tries to talk his assistant Phoebe (Debby Bishop) to be Sid's handler for a couple of months, but she wants no part of it. He asks why. "Infectious hepatitis, loony girlfriend, drugs?" she lists off. "Boys will be boys," Malcolm counters. Everyone agrees when the discussion of an American tour comes up, that it's a good chance to separate Sid from Nancy for awhile, since both band and management see her as the bad influence. At a meeting at a small restaurant, they make it clear: no wives or girlfriends can go. When Nancy puts up a fit — Sid appears catatonic the whole time — Phoebe makes it clear that if they can't separate for a few weeks, Sid will be replaced. So Sid goes alone and that tour ends up being the band's end as they get booked in inappropriate venues by people not even clear who they are. (As in Atlanta, as you can see in the sign below.) The final straw comes when Sid heads to a party and walks through a hotel's glass door. When he reunites with Nancy and she decides to manage him, things go from bad to worse and everyone pretty much knows where this story ends.
As I mentioned before, the influences — intentional and otherwise — on other films and filmmakers become more apparent 25 years later. For example, it's even more obvious why Martin Scorsese thought of using Sid Vicious' take on "My Way" as the ending song for Goodfellas when you see the re-creation of the video for it in Sid & Nancy (and that is Gary Oldman doing the singing by the way), especially following the quick take of Joe Pesci as Tommy aping the famous shot from Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery. (Pardon the Portuguese subtitles.) Embedding is disabled for the Goodfellas ending, but click here.
While they stay at the Hotel Chelsea, Sid and Nancy manage to start a fire in their room and they just stare at it, fire fighters eventually coming in around them to extinguish the flames. The hotel manager (Sandy Baron), always bragging to potential tenants about the high-class clientele that have lived there, does berate them slightly but moves them to a room on the first floor accompanied by a slow-moving man who appears to be a decrepit bellhop, but doesn't appear to be that old. The only item he carries is Sid's guitar, which he hands back to him as he says something slow and cryptic along the lines of "Bob Dylan was born here" and
then extends his hand for a trip. It's the type of character we'd see frequent many a work by David Lynch, but I don't recall one making an appearance yet. They didn't really kick in until Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart a few years later. It could be pure coincidence, but when I saw him again, Lynch came to my mind immediately. Musicians and fires aren't that unusual, but it did in a way remind me of Oliver Stone's awful movie The Doors, which also only bothered to define two members of the band. As for the fire, I'm still waiting to find out how the hell Meg Ryan got out of that closet. Imagery may be what I took away most from this return visit because I'd forgotten, if I'd ever known, that the director of photography for Sid & Nancy was the ultra-talented and, of late, Coen brothers' favorite Roger Deakins. For those of you keeping score at home, Deakins has received nine Oscar nominations for cinematography and won zero. His nominations have come for The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Reader (shared with Chris Menges) and True Grit. Look at it this way: Deakins has received more nominations for best cinematography without winning than Peter O'Toole went winless for best actor — and they at least gave O'Toole an honorary Oscar.What boggled my mind then and still does now are people who think that somehow Sid & Nancy comes off as an endorsement for heroin use. Being broke, unaware of your surroundings, killing a loved one and accidentally yourself — tell me where I sign up. As the methadone case worker (Sy Richardson) tells the duo, who dismiss it as "political bullshit" when he paints it as a government conspiracy he claims to have seen first-hand in Vietnam, "(S)mack is the great controller. Keeps people stupid when they could be smart." Yes, the fantastical ending paints the idea that perhaps Sid and Nancy reunite on another plane, but that doesn't mean it's endorsing smack addiction as the path. Still, those closing sequences seem more spellbinding today than before, Of course, no knew in 1986, the symbolic power of including this image of Sid Vicious' path to a pizza joint after making bail in Nancy's slaying.
I almost could have created a 25th anniversary tribute to Sid & Nancy composed entirely of photos. As it is, I've left out many line and anecdotes that I wanted to write about, but I keep cutting them to squeeze in more art — and I'm not even getting all the art in that I wanted. I didn't begin to get into discussing what the hell has happened to Alex Cox or Chloe Webb. Still, there are so many shots I didn't get in — Sid and Nancy having a mock shoot-out on the roof of a hotel, Nancy hanging upside down from a hotel window, Malcolm scaring off men beating up Sid simply by pointing his finger like a gun, Sid spontaneously dancing with some kids after the pizza, Nancy's friend Brenda and her S&M business — but I do want to use one shot from the closing reunion sequence because I think it's the most beautiful.
Finally, just in case anyone might still believe that the movie serves as an ad for heroin, the final card that appears on the screen.
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Labels: 80s, Animation, Christopher Nolan, Coens, Disney, Dylan, Gordon-Levitt, Lynch, Michelle Williams, Movie Tributes, Music, O'Toole, Oldman, Oliver Stone, Oscars, Pesci, Scorsese, Twin Peaks, Woody, Zemeckis
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