Thursday, August 04, 2011
Free will hunting
By Edward Copeland
When it opened earlier this year, The Adjustment Bureau didn't seem to make much noise so when I caught up with it on DVD I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, both in its execution and its intriguing premise, which originated in a Philip K. Dick short story.
Dick's novels and stories have inspired a lot of films since the first major adaptation, Blade Runner, made its way to the big screen. The results haven't always been great, but they've nearly all fallen generally within the sci-fi vein. The Adjustment Bureau, based on Dick's short story "The Adjustment Team," finds itself more concerned with ideas and its touches are less of the science fiction variety, leaning more toward the philosophical, otherworldly and, perhaps, even spiritual.
The Adjustment Bureau proves to be an impressive directing debut for screenwriter George Nolfi, who also adapted the short story and whose previous scripts include The Bourne Ultimatum, The Sentinel and Ocean's Twelve, but none of those films really prepared a viewer for what Nolfi is able to accomplish with The Adjustment Bureau.
As The Adjustment Bureau opens, nothing indicates that its story will be anything out of the realm of the ordinary. Matt Damon stars as U.S. Rep. David Norris, in the midst of a campaign seeking promotion to the Senate. Norris was the youngest person ever elected to the House, having been 24 on Election Day but turning the constitutionally required 25 before taking office. Though he'd always had a reputation for hard-partying college days (he even jokes with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show about it), a few new stories and allegations hit the press right before Election Day and Norris ends up losing the Senate race. In his concession speech, he actually talks to the voters with rare honesty about the games you have to play to make sure those contributions keep coming and the consultants you have to depend on to make sure your footwear has just the right amount of scuff so that the common voter relates to you. It's such a refreshing speech that he's only been unemployed for a few minutes before people are clamoring for him to run again in 2010.
After the speech, as Norris takes a breather and freshens himself up in the bathroom off the hotel ballroom, he's surprised when a beautiful woman (Emily Blunt) wanders into the men's facilities. She's embarrassed, recognizing who he is, and tells him she's hiding out from a wedding she crashed. As the unemployed politician and the young lady get flirtatious, before they know it they are making out — just in time for Norris' closest adviser Charlie (Michael Kelly) to wander in on them and the girl to hastily make her exit. David, though you'd think he'd be most upset over the loss of the election, is more annoyed that Charlie interrupted the encounter before he could learn the woman's name or how to contact her. Then again, perhaps Charlie wasn't sent in to interrupt the encounter by accident.
Flash forward several months. David, though still called Congressman by many on the streets of Manhattan though he's been out of office for quite some time and now holds down a "real job" at the same firm where Charlie works. Unbeknownst to Norris, he's being watched by men in hats, in this case Richardson and Harry (the always great John Slattery of Mad Men and Anthony Mackie). Richardson explains to Harry that it's up to him: He has to spill David's coffee on him at an exact time to keep the plan moving. What exactly is the plan? Who are these people? We aren't certain at this stage. All we know is that all hell breaks loose when Harry's spill doesn't happen and David makes it to his bus where he encounters once again the woman from the bathroom, only this time learning her name is Elise. Charlie even calls while they are on the bus together and David explodes with giddiness sharing the news of who he's rediscovered.
Unfortunately, these mystery men don't want David and Elise together and, even worse for these manipulators, David isn't delayed arriving to work so he witnesses strange men in suits as they tinker with the brains of his co-workers, including Charlie. David tries to make a break for it, but no matter what direction he runs, Richardson always awaits, trying to get Norris to slow down so he can explain who and what they are and what is going on. It seems there's a plan to the universe and because Harry failed to delay David's arrival to work, he's seen things that he shouldn't have. Richardson assures him that Charlie and the rest of his co-workers are fine, but if David ever mentions what he's seen to anyone, The Adjustment Bureau (the outfit they work for) will be forced to erase Norris' brain of everything that's ever happened to him. Also, he was never supposed to have seen Elise again so he takes her name and phone number from David and promptly burns it. Norris, needless to say, isn't happy with this turn of events because he hasn't felt this way toward anyone the way he feels toward Elise in a long time.
Once The Adjustment Bureau workers have left, he goes to Charlie's office, looking quite morose. Charlie asks what's wrong since he was so excited on the bus. Remembering the threat to his brain, David makes up a story about something happening that made him lose Elise's number. Norris, having been a politician and harboring thoughts about returning to the field some day, is an ambitious man and it's going to take more
than the strange appearance of these people telling him that he and Elise aren't supposed to be together to stop him from trying to find her again. So, for the next two years he takes the same bus route he did the day he ran into her before on the off chance that they will meet again and sure enough, it works — he finds her again. At first, she wants nothing to do with him since he never bothered to call her, but he finally convinces her after he tells her that he got mugged later the day and lost her number and tells her the exact number of Elises in the Manhattan phone directory, none of which were her. Of course, it's the day he's set to announce his candidacy for the U.S. Senate so Charlie's frantic for his political life and Richardson and his team get rushed back on the case to try to muck up any romantic works. Norris finds himself so enthralled that he's willing to postpone the speech, but she talks him out of that and instead goes with him to it and agrees to have a meal with him before the speech and then she'll have to leave for rehearsal. It turns out she's a dancer. Throughout, Richardson's people try to throw road blocks in their path, but David and Elise keep missing them.
Once Norris' announcement has wrapped, much to Charlie's annoyance, David sprints to try to figure out where Elise rehearses so he starts randomly going into restaurants and other places to see if they've heard of the dance company and know where they are located. He gets a surprise by the appearance of the bureau's Harry, who tells him to meet him on a ferry. It turns out that not all the workers in the bureau are heartless bureaucrats so Harry wants to explain to David what he knows, but they have to do it over water. For some reason, water (or rain) interferes with their ability to track people. David asks Harry if they track everyone, but Harry says they don't have the manpower for that but the Chairman has a plan and they have to make sure the important ones stay on track. He doesn't know why they want to keep him and Elise apart, but it's part of the bigger picture. Anthony Mackie is quite good. In fact, he's always good and he's almost a chameleon. He's not an actor I recognize on sight, but when I go to look up who played a particular role, time and time again, it turns out that Mackie inhabited the character. I think it has to be the huge disparity in the roles he takes that makes this possible. I didn't recognize this sympathetic member of The Adjustment Bureau as being the only other character who stood out in The Hurt Locker besides Jeremy Renner or as the seductive drug dealer in Half Nelson trying to get the girl to be one of his runners.
It looks as if Norris has beaten the system. He and Elise fall blissfully in love and his Senate campaign hasn't had any problems. Back at "the office," Richardson discovers that they had been trying to enforce an old plan, so it wasn't really Harry's original screwup that caused this mess. Originally, David and Elise weren't supposed to be together, but at some point the plan was changed and a paperwork snafu didn't get forwarded to everyone who needed to know. Unfortunately, it has had a ripple effect forcing the Chairman to remove Richardson's team from the case and revert to the plan that prevents David and Elise from being together. For this, they bring in the big guns: Thompson aka "The Hammer" (the always good-to-see Terence Stamp). He starts simply, reinserting Elise's ex-fiancée by way of phone calls. Then he confronts David, explaining to him that her destiny of being one of the greatest dancers in history can't happen if she's with him. The appeal to his selflessness works, and David breaks up with her though it takes a toll on his campaign. He still stays way ahead in the polls, but he feels as if he's just going through the motions.
Finally, Harry hooks up with him again and tells David that the story about her dance career was a lie and he begins tutoring him on the trick on how they travel from place to place so quickly and how he can do so and escape detection. He does have another encounter with Thompson and he reveals what I feel is the story's
most fascinating premise: There is no such thing as free will. Sure, he tells David, you can pick which toothpaste to use, but for the big stuff, the Chairman (presumably God or some sort of higher being) controls everything else. Thompson explains, "We actually tried free will before. After taking you from hunting and gathering to the height of the Roman Empire, we stepped back to see how you'd do on your own. You gave us the Dark Ages for five centuries until finally we decided we should come back in. The Chairman thought that maybe we just needed to do a better job with teaching you how to ride a bike before taking the training wheels off again. So we gave you raised hopes, The Enlightenment, The Industrial Revolution. For 600 years we taught you to control your impulses with reason. Then in 1910, we stepped back. Within 50 years you'd brought us World War I, The Depression, fascism, the Holocaust and capped it off by bringing the entire planet to the brink of destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point, the decision was taken to step back in again before you did something that even we couldn't fix."As I said at the beginning, I found The Adjustment Bureau to be a good movie with fine acting, writing and directing. As you'd expect, free will triumphs, but much in the way I always felt that Magneto had the right idea and was simply practicing self-defense watching the first two X-Men films, I'm on the side of the Chairman and The Adjustment Bureau here. After all the nonsense we just experienced in Washington over the debt ceiling, wouldn't we all sleep a little better if Congress didn't have free will and someone behind the curtain pulled the strings to prevent them from screwing things up all the time? True love be damned.
Regardless of which side The Adjustment Bureau comes out for, I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.
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Labels: 10s, Fiction, John Slattery, Mad Men, Matt Damon, Terence Stamp
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Thursday, January 27, 2011
Not so good grief
By Edward Copeland
No two people grieve exactly the same way. No book contains rules for proper mourning. When someone loses a spouse, a sibling or, most tragically, a child, outsiders can't judge if their behavior is normal or appropriate. That's not the case with movies on the subject such as Rabbit Hole or performers in them like Nicole Kidman. They're fair game, especially when everything about them rings false compared to countless cinematic examples that depicted grief well.
David Lindsay-Abaire adapted Rabbit Hole from his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which I have neither read nor seen but which won one of my favorite actresses, Cynthia Nixon, a Tony Award. Our faithful Broadway correspondent Josh R selected Nixon as one of his 10 best experiences in the 2006 New York theater season. Josh wrote:
As a mother grieving over the loss of a child, the luminous Ms. Nixon brought emotional credibility to a play that might otherwise have gotten bogged down in maudlin, movie-of-the-week style dramaturgy...the actress delivered an eloquent, astutely measured account of the manner in which emotional forbearance serves as a buffer against the unbearable sense of bewilderment that comes in trying to make sense of tragedy. Rather than resorting to histrionics, Nixon registered all the pain of her character’s acknowledgement of her suffering with delicate, nuanced strokes — in a performance that was all the more powerful for what remained unsaid.
Seeing how great Nixon can be in so many different roles, I almost can visualize her performance based on Josh's prose. Needless to say, the character of Becca which won Nixon her Tony probably bore little resemblance to the Becca that Nicole Kidman brings to the screen. Kidman's Becca comes off as an uptight control freak with a superiority complex who treats almost everyone who crosses her path cruelly and as if they are imposing on her time — and none of it has to do with sadness over the death of her son. She makes Mary Tyler Moore's character in Ordinary People look warm, open-hearted and loving by comparison.
Every choice Kidman makes as Becca turns out to be wrongheaded and misguided. You never get a sense that this is a woman devastated by the loss of her young son in an accident. She plays Becca more as if the death and its repercussions were more of an inconvenience for her and she treats everyone else in similar fashion with one exception. She starts stalking and then befriends Jason (Miles Teller), the teen who drove the car that struck and killed her son. At times, the scenes between Becca and Jason made me feel as if I were watching Birth 2. Her encounters with Jason are the only moments when she displays anything resembling humanity.
As a result, where a viewer should feel sympathy for Becca, instead you just want someone to slap her. Kidman doesn't play her as someone scarred by a tragedy, she plays Becca as someone you would walk across the street to avoid because she's such a stuck-up jerk. I went back and looked at some of the reviews of the original play in 2006 and nearly all the theater critics had high praise for its entire cast (which also included John Slattery and Tyne Daly) and the production itself, though The New York Times' Ben Brantley admitted that the play itself, "As beautifully observed as Rabbit Hole is, it never rises to the shock of greatness." The reviews also noted the tears the production evoked. In the film version with Kidman, let's just say there's not a wet eye in the house.
As I said, I've neither seen nor read Lindsay-Abaire's play but I have to believe that he changed it a lot for the screenplay because there are too many scenes in the movie that I can't imagine how they would have been depicted in a stage production. There's also the fact that the play had five characters where the movie adds significant new roles played by Sandra Oh, Giancarlo Esposito and Jon Tenney.
The remainder of the film's cast can be great in other works. Dianne Wiest as Becca's mom and Tammy Blanchard as her sister come off best, but Aaron Eckhart feels nearly as false as Kidman does. Some of the blame may rest on the shoulders of director John Cameron Mitchell, who keeps everything and everyone at an icy, removed distance and may have instructed his cast to follow his lead, yet Wiest, Blanchard and Oh find ways to breathe life into their characters, so I don't think that's the case.
Eckhart's role as Howie, Becca's deeply wounded husband, may be hampered since most of his scenes pair him with Kidman's ice queen. He does better when separated from her as in some scenes opposite Oh, but when he has to respond to Kidman's offputting performance, he seems flustered. It's particularly embarrassing when the teen driver Jason comes over to give Becca a comic (which gives the play and the film its title, though without any sort of deeper explanation) and he blows up at him being there and I was again reminded of Birth where Danny Huston goes after the boy. I suppose I should be grateful for small favors — at least it's Eckhart here and not Danny Huston.
Mitchell seems an unusual choice to direct the film, following his helming the adaptation of his fun, one-of-a-kind stage musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and his attempt at making a mainstream porn film, Shortbus. Visually, he doesn't add much to Rabbit Hole and I'm not sure if he should be blamed for giving his cast bad direction or none at all.
As I wrote yesterday, when I reviewed another overrated film, Blue Valentine, one of the biggest headscratchers of this year's Oscar nominations is that the actors branch wasted two of its best actress slots on Michelle Williams and Kidman when there were so many worthier candidates out there. I truly have to believe members just filled in names based on what they heard or read and didn't watch Blue Valentine or Rabbit Hole.
As for Rabbit Hole in general, it's truly a shame because the list of great films about grieving stretches from the beginning of the medium to now. In 2009, you had a beautiful example with Colin Firth in A Single Man. Last year, I celebrated the 20th anniversary of another great example, Men Don't Leave. If you look specifically for a good example of a film about a couple affected by the loss of a child, take another look at 1988's The Accidental Tourist.
I could keep going on with examples of films that tackle the subject of grief better than Rabbit Hole does, but instead I'm just gonna mourn the talent wasted on this film and the time I lost watching it.
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Labels: 10s, Awards, Colin Firth, Cynthia Nixon, John Slattery, Michelle Williams, Nicole Kidman, Oscars, Theater, Wiest
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Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Sometimes you need some mind candy
By Edward Copeland
Though I saw it during one of the blog's hiatuses and didn't review it, I really enjoyed the first Iron Man. Based on the reviews, I expected a little less from its sequel, but damn if I didn't enjoy Iron Man 2 just as much as the original. This is my kind of mindless, comic-book inspired entertainment: sleek, funny, well-acted and just the right length, resisting the urge of so many action films to pad their running times.
As in the first film, the key to its success is Robert Downey Jr. as weapons magnate turned peacenik/Iron Man. He's charming, witty and really has more personality than any other superhero in the history of superhero screen incarnations. He's rich and fun loving, still loves to knock back some drinks or to race in the Monaco Grand Prix and he gives very entertaining witness testimony at a Senate hearing. (If Downey weren't enough to make the scene a blast, they cast Garry Shandling as the jackass senator to ensure that the sequence is a hoot.) Stark may save the world, but he doesn't mope like Batman, he's not perfect like Superman and you know he's having a good time saving the world and probably getting laid as well.
When it was announced that Jon Favreau was directing the first Iron Man, it was viewed as an odd choice, but really Favreau, who repeats those duties here as well as playing Stark's driver, makes perfect sense. He's the man who wrote Swingers and the Tony Stark character as portrayed by Downey is so money and he knows it, only he's not a pretender as Favreau and Vince Vaughn's characters were in the film that begat that phrase, Stark's the real deal.
Ironically, in another funny performance, the would-be "swinger" of Iron Man 2 is Sam Rockwell playing rival weapons magnate Justin Hammer who dreams of living the Stark lifestyle, both businesswise and otherwise. He's the corporate villain of the movie, but he's just as funny. In fact, the action scenes when they happen, though they deliver, mostly are by the numbers. It's the comic tone that makes this series so much more fun than the brooding or goody-goodness of the others in this genre.
Terrence Howard has been replaced in the role of Lt. Col. James Rhodes by Don Cheadle and while Howard is a fine actor, Cheadle actually is an improvement because he has an innate levity that Howard doesn't so he meshes better with Downey and the rest of the cast.
Of course, the real villain of Iron Man 2 is Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko, a Russian physicist whose family feels ruined by Stark's father (the great John Slattery, who only appears in old film footage — and with brown hair!) and vows to seek revenge on Tony Stark, a task Hammer unwittingly helps him to carry out while he thinks he's using Vanko to gain an edge in the arms business.
There also is a story strand involving Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, which I guess has something to do with a league of comic-book heroes called The S.H.I.E.L.D. that Stark's father helped to form and The Avengers Institute (though I don't think it involves Emma Peel), but I'm not up on my Marvel history to know that backstory, though it hardly matters. However, Jackson does deliver Fury with the same vocal cadence he used as Jules in Pulp Fiction.
Still, there isn't a weak link in the cast which includes Gwyneth Paltrow, who I tend not to like outside of The Royal Tenenbaums. If this weren't a sequel to a comic-book adaptation, saying it deserved consideration for ensemble acting awards would be taken seriously.
Justin Theroux wrote the screenplay and also came up with the story for Tropic Thunder, but many may know him best as an actor, especially for his roles in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and as Brenda's neighbor on HBO's Six Feet Under.
I tend to frown upon endless sequels in series. I liked the first two X-Men movies, but the third one stunk and I didn't even bother to see Wolverine. Still, I had so much fun turning off my brain and enjoying both installments of Iron Man, I wouldn't object to another even though I know the odds are against a third time being a charm.
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Labels: 10s, Gwyneth Paltrow, HBO, John Slattery, Lynch, Mickey Rourke, Robert Downey Jr., Sam Rockwell, Samuel L. Jackson, Sequels, Shandling, Television
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Monday, June 21, 2010
That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise
By Edward Copeland
When Oscar discussions turn to how rarely comedies take the best picture prize, one of the examples always cited is Billy Wilder's The Apartment, which marks its 50th anniversary today. While it's true that laughs are plentiful in The Apartment, the film isn't a flat-out comedy the way Wilder's Some Like It Hot was the year before. There is just as much, if not more, in the way of pathos in this best picture winner, but pure comedy or not, The Apartment remains a great film and one of Wilder's very best.
Over images of the New York skyline of Nov. 1, 1959, C.C. (C for Calvin, C for Clifford) Baxter (Jack Lemmon) informs us that the population of that wonderful city at that time is 8,042,783 and that if you
stretched all those people end to end, figuring an average height of 5 feet 6 1/2 inches tall, they'd stretch from Times Square to Karachi, Pakistan. Somewhat ironic considering a recent event involving that N.Y. landmark and that country. Baxter knows odd statistics such as this because of his work as one of the 31,259 Manhattan employees of Consolidated Life Insurance. The company's home office has more employees than the population of Natchez, Miss. Baxter works on the 19th floor and though he goes by his initials C.C., most people call him Bud. He makes $94.70 a week and has a second floor apartment at 51 W 67 near Central Park that costs him $85 a month and whose price probably makes most current New Yorkers experience minor strokes when they hear it and realize that was only 50 years ago. Bud is very popular with the executives at Consolidated Life for a very simple reason: When they need a safe locale for their philandering, the single Baxter lets them use that second floor apartment. It sometimes takes a toll on his own health and it makes his neighbors thinks he is the Don Juan of all time, but it's earning him brownie points at the company, and a single man in Manhattan will do whatever he can to help ascend the rungs of capitalism's ladder to what it defines as success.
Bud's apartment has become such a party central that when his doctor neighbor (Oscar nominee Jack Kruschen) sees him setting out dozens of empty liquor bottles for the trash, he suggests in all seriousness that he leave his body to a university for scientific study because he's amazed by his stamina and is certain he can't keep up this pace forever (since he isn't aware that it isn't one man carousing with all these women). Bud is looking forward to a rare evening with himself (He'd watch Grand Hotel if they'd stop showing the sponsors' ads and get to the movie) and his apartment when one of the execs, Joe Dobisch (Ray Walston), calls unexpectedly asking for emergency use of the pad because he's got a hot number who is a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe (a very dead-on spoof of the troublesome star of Wilder's last film). Baxter tells him he's out of booze and snacks, but relents and lets him have the place anyway, even though that means getting stuck outside in a cold, pouring rain and getting sick.
The next day at work, Baxter is a bundle of coughs and sneezes. It seems not only was he left in the cold while Joe fooled around, Joe left the wrong key under the mat so Bud was locked out of his apartment all night. He laments his illness to the cute elevator operator, Miss Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) before proceeding to his desk to try to re-arrange the sexual schedules of the men who use his apartment (who also include David White, better known as Bewitched's Larry Tate and David Lewis, General Hospital's original Edward Quartermaine) so he can get much-needed bedrest. Unfortunately, this is the day the executives
come through with their favor and he meets with the company's top man, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). At first, Bud worries that he's about to get in trouble for being the arranger of such moral turpitude but he soon realizes that not only has he just earned a promotion, but Sheldrake wants in on the apartment, so much so that he wants to secure it for that very evening, giving Baxter two tickets to The Music Man on Broadway to keep him occupied. Suddenly, Baxter feels much better, so confident he asks Miss Kubelik if she'd accompany him to the show. She tells him she's meeting a friend for dinner, but if she can get away, she'll meet him in the lobby before the 8:30 p.m. curtain time. Once again, Wilder proves his knack for bringing out the darkness in Fred MacMurray, as he did in Double Indemnity in 1944, only this time in a film with a more comic bent. He almost couldn't get MacMurray to agree to the part this time, wrapped up as he was in Disney projects and beginning My Three Sons, but fortunately he did because Wilder's instincts were correct and the casting was perfect. (Then again, maybe it's something inherent about how MacMurray and/or Wilder feel about people who work in the insurance business.)Miss Kubelik never meets Baxter at the theater, much to his disappointment, but he doesn't realize it's because her dinner date is with Sheldrake. Fran plans it to be merely dinner, but she still has feelings for the
cheater and ends up going back with him to Baxter's apartment. Of all the many great things you can say about Billy Wilder (and his screenwriting partner I.A.L. "Izzy" Diamond, who was teaming with Wilder for the third of their 12 collaborations), what a gift they had for creating memorable names: C.C. Baxter, Fran Kubelik, Sheldrake. Just insert them into a nonmovie related conversation and if the other party has seen The Apartment, odds are, they'll know of whom you speak. It's inevitable watching this 1960 film, full of smoking, boozing and philandering in the Manhattan business world to not think of the current series Mad Men. The show's first season was set in 1960 and its characters referenced seeing The Apartment, though the brilliant John Slattery as Roger Sterling found fault because he found it unrealistic that any company would have female elevator operators. Still, despite his disappointment at being stood up, Sheldrake lives up to his word and the following day C.C. moves on up to his new office.
The excitement over the promotion doesn't deter Baxter from the idea that he's going to be able to date Miss Kubelik. As Bud is settling in to his new digs, his adulterous subletters come to visit en masse, wondering why
he's been ducking them. Baxter leaves Sheldrake's name out of it, but mentions that he's found himself a girl and would like to be able to use his apartment for himself. The men congratulate him for his conquest, but question his need to see her every night. When Baxter's called away to Sheldrake's office, the quartet can't believe how selfish Bud is being about his own apartment. When he thanks Mr. Sheldrake for the promotion, he also returns something he assumes his lady friend left behind: a compact with a cracked mirror. Yes, she threw it at him, Sheldrake explains. Women can get a bit irrational at times. Sometimes he wonders if they are worth the trouble.As the office's Christmas party arrives, Baxter takes it upon himself to remove Fran from her post at the elevator to join in the festivities. Everything is going well at first until Bud departs briefly to fetch some punch and Fran gets ambushed by Miss Olsen (Edie Adams), Sheldrake's secretary and his mistress several
women ago. She greets her as the branch manager from Kansas City, the line Sheldrake used the night before when giving Baxter the tickets to The Music Man. Then Miss Olsen goes on to recount Sheldrake's other chain of mistresses before telling her, "You haven't done anything. It's him — oh, what a salesman! Always the last booth in the Chinese restaurant — and the same pitch about divorcing his wife — and in the end, you wind up with egg foo yong on your face." Bud returns and spots the stricken look on Fran's face and whisks her off to his office. He tries to change the subject by showing her the new bowler hat he's bought. He asks if she has a mirror he could borrow and she hands over the compact. Bud's heart sinks when he spots the crack and realizes she is Sheldrake's mistress. He points out that her mirror is broken. "Yes, I know," Fran says. "I like it that way. Makes me look the way I feel." What follows shows Wilder and Diamond's perfect blending of the humor and the pathos dripping in their story. A devastated Baxter, who had already agreed to let Sheldrake have an evening rendezvous, heads to a bar, ready to get blotto now that he knows the mistress Sheldrake will be having his way with at his apartment is
the woman that Baxter desperately wants to make his own. The contrast between the two locations proves telling as Baxter's drunken depression definitely leans toward the comic thanks to the appearance of the great comic character Margie MacDougall (Hope Holiday). Last weekend, Katie Finneran won a Tony for her version of Margie in the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises, the musical version of The Apartment. At the apartment, things are tense, despite the planned exchange of gifts as Fran confronts Sheldrake about what Miss Olsen shared with her. The intercutting is masterful, keeping the tone perfect, never allowing the film to go too far into a dark or light direction. At the bar, Margie pursues Bud, first firing straw wrappers at him before going up to him personally and telling him about her husband who is being held in Cuba by that "jerk
Castro." At the apartment, as if Fran didn't feel bad enough already, after giving Sheldrake an album of the music played at their Chinese restaurant, Sheldrake obviously forgot to get her anything and just hands over $100 in cash, oblivious to the implication. A furious Fran makes it clear to him rather quickly, but Sheldrake insists he's not calling her cheap. "100 dollars. I wouldn't call that cheap," she replies. Sheldrake tries to calm her as she continues to demean herself and go back to what Miss Olsen was telling her. Seeing he's getting nowhere, Sheldrake tells her that he'll miss the last train home and better get going and makes a hasty exit. At the bar, Baxter and Margie continue to get drunker and dance until the owner kicks them out. Margie asks whose place they should go to. "Might as well go to mine. Everyone else does."
When Margie and Baxter stumble their way back into his apartment, Bud is quite annoyed to find Fran still there in his bed. He wants her gone, but he soon realizes that she's not napping — she's unconscious after swallowing his bottle of sleeping pills. This sobers Baxter up quickly who rushes an angry Margie on her way, who vows that he can't treat her like this and her husband will get even once he escapes Castro's clutches, but Cuban dictators and the spouses of drunken women are the furthest things from his mind at this moment. He heads next door to get Doc's help, which Doc gladly offers, though he's still assuming that Fran's suicide attempt came from
Bud's treatment of her and his neverending train of women. The doctor and Baxter spend the rest of the night trying to bring Fran around, pouring endless cups of coffee down her throat and parading her around the apartment to keep her awake and to try to get the sedatives out of her system. The doctor continues to subtly and not so subtly criticize Bud's behavior and Baxter does nothing to dissuade him of the notion that he's the man who pushed Fran to the edge, even going as far as trying to take the blame when Fran asks what he's doing there and rambles in a way that obviously indicates that he's not the man in her life. While there are laughs in this sequence, the suicide attempt is treated in a way that belies the film's rep as a pure comedy. It's not that laughs can't be found when suicide is the subject (see Heathers, a different type of movie, 29 years later), but The Apartment is not that film. Don't take this to mean I think Heathers and The Apartment are on the same level. I love both films, but I seriously doubt I will ever make a Top 100 list that Heathers will land on.
As the Christmas Eve crisis leads into Christmas Day, Baxter calls Sheldrake at home telling him what has transpired. Sheldrake, trapped with his family, has little interest in relieving Baxter of his Fran-sitting duties, so Bud and Fran get to spend the holidays and beyond together. They begin to open up to each other as Fran expresses regret about Sheldrake. "He's a liar and that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that I still love him," she admits. Once everyone else has returned to work, Baxter calls Sheldrake again and begs him to at least talk to Fran. He reluctantly takes the call and tries to get her to be reasonable and think about how all of this will look. Fran assures him he has nothing to worry about and they can all pretend it never happened, just like Sheldrake wishes. "I never took those pills. I never loved you. We never even met," she tells him acidly. Along
the way, the beans are spilled about Miss Olsen's role in Fran's downward spiral. Sheldrake calls his secretary into his office and coldly tells her that she'll get two weeks severance pay. Miss Olsen doesn't leave without letting Sheldrake in on how he treats his women. "You let me go four years only you were cruel enough to let me sit out there and watch the new models pass by," she tells him. As she's clearing out her desk, she makes certain to set up a lunch date with Mrs. Sheldrake. The stage is set for all the players to resolve their situations and the movie to lead to its conclusion with, as so often happens in a Billy Wilder film, one of the classic closing film lines of all time.
The Apartment brought Wilder three Oscars in one night, a first for a single person, as writer, director and producer and each statuette was a deserved one. The idea for the film had been circulating in Wilder's head for decades. When he saw David Lean's Brief Encounter, his mind began wondering about the guy who provided the locale for the married lovers to meet, but the times weren't quite ready for that sort of material in the 1940s. When the real-life scandal broke in 1951 when film producer Walter Wanger shot agent Jennings Lang because he thought he was having an affair with Wanger's wife, actress Joan Bennett, it revived the idea in Wilder's head again. By the end of the decade, he and his new writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond had transformed those various strands into The Apartment.
All of the technical credits are top notch, particularly a nice underscore by Adolph Deutch, and it goes without saying that the casting is stellar from the supporting cast including Adams, Holiday, Kruschen, Walston and MacMurray. Lemmon perfectly blends the humor and tragedy in his role as the schnook and shows he can be a master of the doubletake. Still, the best work of the film, perhaps of her career, belongs to MacLaine as Fran Kubelik. Her performance gets better each time I see it. She's charming when she needs to be and heartbreaking when that's required. Most importantly, she never hits a false note. If not for Elizabeth Taylor's timely case of pneumonia and subsequent tracheotomy, perhaps she would have never won for the dreadful Butterfield 8 and MacLaine might have taken that Oscar. She certainly deserved it.
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Labels: 60s, Awards, Joan Bennett, John Slattery, Lean, Lemmon, Liz, MacLaine, MacMurray, Mad Men, Marilyn, Movie Tributes, Musicals, Oscars, Television, Theater, Wilder
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Monday, May 31, 2010
Treme No. 6: Shallow Water, Oh Mama
By Edward Copeland
Davis gives a colorful launch to his half silly/half serious campaign hitting the neighborhood on the back of a flatbed truck with loudspeakers, signs that say "Davis Can Save Us" and "McAlary A Desperate Man for Desperate Times as well as a bevy of strippers. He even gives a shoutout to his new friends, the gay neighbors he used to terrorize but he now has embraced since they pulled him off the street unconscious. He also sells copies of his campaign album. It's a fun beginning to a mostly fun episode. Forgive the tardiness in the recap, though actually only one episode of Treme has aired since this one, since it took a week off for the Memorial Day weekend. Still, given my unusual situation, I will have to wait until the series' conclusion to recap the season.
Delmond Lambreaux, Albert's son, takes his Crescent City Carnivale tour to Arizona where some of his fellow
players suggest some other New Orleans standards but Delmond, who resisted the whole idea of this tour in the first place, insists that they stick to the playlist. Rob Brown is fine in his role and I see his connection to the show more clearly than Sonny and Annie, who I've decided bore me to the point that I'm not going to bother to cover them anymore, but his scenes don't have the same charge than the others do. A great show such as Treme can have weak links, but I have more faith that Delmond will pay off down the line than Sonny and Annie ever will, especially now that it's turning into a rather typical melodramatic story of an abusive, drug addicted man jealous of his more talented girlfriend.In her continued search for clues to the whereabouts of David Brooks, Toni travels to Port Arthur, Texas, where she has tracked down one of the two remaining former New Orleans cops who were on duty when David
was apprehended. The ex-officer expresses reluctance at first to cooperate but eventually admits that he did stop David for running a red light. Toni smiles a satisfied smile for making some progress and is almost prepared to leave when it dawns on her that no one is usually jailed for running a traffic light. She turns around and the ex-cop realizes she isn't done and she asks why he took him to jail for a traffic violation. The former officer says he had to because he had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear. Toni realizes the original would be lost, but wonders if the officer's carbon might be somewhere. He admits that the reason he quit the force was the eight days after the storm he spent living out of his patrol car, scavenging for food and supplies. Having had enough, he just abandoned his patrol car in Lake Charles and if the patrol car is still there, his arrest log should be as well.Antoine pays a visit to his former musical mentor who lost his trombone during Katrina and gives him the gift of the brand new instrument that the Japanese benefactor purchased for him. Now that he's recovered his own bone, he's more than satisfied to keep using that. The old man is reluctant at first to accept such an expensive gift, but Antoine encourages him to take it and keep moving straight ahead.
Creighton picks up his agent Carla at the airport (played by Talia Balsam, the real-life Mrs. John Slattery who plays his ex-wife on Mad Men) and he tries to beat her to the punch, certain that she's been sent because his publisher wants their advance back for the long overdue book on the 1927 flood. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. They still want that book, but they are interested in a different kind of book. His YouTube rants have made him hot and they want to incorporate the current New Orleans plight into the story. Creighton rejects the idea and promises that they will have the manuscript in six weeks, but it will only cover the 1927 flood. Later, a still annoyed Creighton spots Sofia with one of Davis' campaign bumper stickers. At first, he can't believe it's the same guy who has been giving Sofia piano lessons, then he gets mad that Davis is turning such a serious matter as an election into a joke.
Davis, meanwhile, brings his coterie of strippers with him as he shows up to a televised candidates forum. He's disappointed to learn that the format doesn't allow him to sing one of his campaign songs, but he does prove entertaining with his campaign platform, which includes Greased Palm Sunday which will give a new meaning to transparency by televising bribes live on television. When he watches the broadcast later at a bar, he encounters a local pol who is intrigued by McAlary's unorthodox campaign and offers him some help to gain more traction. A surprised Davis asks if that means the man thinks he has a chance to win to which the pol replies, "No way."
Despite the rave reviews and usually packed houses, Desautel's, still faces financial struggles causing Janette no end of heartaches. Janette even finds herself hiding out from suppliers who are now insisting on cash payments for supplies and she knows she doesn't have enough cash to pay the employees for the week. She
asks Jacques (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) if he thinks, if she asked, the staff would be willing to work a week without pay in hopes of keeping the restaurant afloat. Jacques says that all she can do is ask. Kim Dickens just breaks your heart in these scenes as her passion runs into the brick wall of financial realities and how it will affect the livelihoods of people she views as family. Later, after the dinner crowd departs, Janette gathers the staff and is about to ask them the week-without-pay question, but she can't bring herself to do it. She realizes the futility of one week without pay toward solving long-term problems. She tries to be strong, but tells the staff that the restaurant has to close indefinitely. She hopes that if she can get things back in order, she'll be able to re-open soon, but if they find new work and can't return, she understands. Much later, alone at the restaurant, Janette has a glass of wine, ignores a ringing phone and exits her restaurant with her knives. Dickens' performance has been good throughout the entire run of the series, but this scene marks the best she's been, even besting anything she got to do on Deadwood.Even though Antoine and his "bone" have been reunited, Batiste still is finding it hard to find paying gigs and he's drowning his sorrows at a bar about it when Kermit Ruffins offers him a spot at the Mardi Gras Ball. It comes with a catch: Antoine will have to wear a tuxedo. He even manages to land a spot for his aging mentor, Nelson. When Antoine shares the news with Nelson, he tells him the catch is that both of them will have to undergo a medical checkup, though it's really just Antoine's concern for his old friend. The nurse who looks them over tells Antoine that he needs to lose weight, but she just thinks Nelson is depressed. "Ain't we all," Antoine sighs. When he gets home, he has more to be depressed about. Desiree didn't take his tux to a dry cleaner, she put it in the washing machine, so Antoine ends up at the ball as the only musician not in black tie.
Like a bloodhound hot on an escaped prisoner's trail, Toni's quest takes her to Lake Charles in pursuit of the ex-cop's patrol car. She fudges the truth, telling an officer there she's come to pick up the unit which relieves the officer who has been waiting for it to be picked up for months. Toni scrounged through the patrol car's back seat and finds what she's looking for: the carbons and proof of David Brooks' arrest. She then begins to leave, telling the officer someone will be back the next day to finally retrieve the vehicle.
The lack of housing for his tribe still is burning Albert up as he and his second chief, Franklin, sift through costumes. Albert heads out later because Delmond's tour has brought him to New Orleans so Albert goes to see him. At the club, Delmond notices his father paying more attention to people coming to wish him well than to Delmond's music. Between sets, Delmond let's his father know what he thinks about his lack of respect. Albert tells his son he can't stay for the second set. The following day, as the tribe continues to work on costumes, the councilman's aide arrives with what he thinks is good news: the councilman has secured a FEMA trailer to house the tribal member. Albert tosses him out.
Relaxing at home in Baton Rouge, LaDonna gets a call that her mother is having trouble breathing, so she's off to New Orleans wishing once again that she could convince the old woman to move to Baton Rouge. When she arrives at the hospital, she can't answer all the nurse's questions about her mother's medical history and when the nurse suggest her mom's pharmacy could help, LaDonna informs her it is closed.
Back from her Lake Charles triumph, Toni shares her good news with Creighton while Sofia comes in to show off her parade costume. She asks her mom what she is, but Toni is puzzled. After several guesses, Sofia says she's sperm. A shocked Toni asks her husband when exactly he abandoned his role as parent. Creighton explains the Krewe du Vieux centerpiece will be a mockup of Mayor Ray Nagin masturbating. Creighton offers to make Toni a costume, but she declines. She has to face the police and City Attorney with her new evidence afterward and that could make things more difficult.
We get a glimpse of where Davis McAlary sprang from as he visits his family to discuss his campaign. He comes from money. His parents are racists who do their best to hide it and are down on his platform, mainly for the class of people their son surrounds himself with, but Davis insists that the city is broke and the city is broken and someone must make a stand. One relative on his side is his fun, martini-swilling Aunt Mimi, played by the great Elizabeth Ashley, who is completely on board with her nephew's plans.
Before the parade takes place, Toni manages to get an early meeting with Assistant District Attorney Renee Dufossat and shows her the new evidence, including that the warrant David was arrested on was outdated. She proposes that the two of them make a joint motion for an emergency rehearing, but Dufossat brushes it off. Toni is appalled. Doesn't Renee care that an innocent man has been languishing in jail for six months? The ADA's hands are tied: the new policy is that there are no joint motions for emergency hearings. The outrage is enough to change Toni's mind about the parade that night and she joins her husband and daughter in costume ahead of the float of Nagin pleasuring himself beside a sign that reads "Mandatory ejaculation." Another thing written on the float pleads, "Buy us back Chirac." Despite the horrors the city has endured, the fun of Carnival has returned. My writings about Treme will too as well once the season has ended. With more than half its season over, Treme certainly has proven itself as one of the best dramas airing, but I've got the feeling this HBO drama will meet the same Emmy fate as David Simon's previous dramas, The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street, which filmed in Baltimore. Somehow if a show doesn't base itself in New York or Los Angeles, it's looked down upon by those voters who tend to mimeograph the previous year's nominees. Hope springs eternal, but I stopped dreaming of Emmys doing the right thing a long, long time ago.
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Labels: Awards, David Simon, Deadwood, E. Ashley, HBO, John Slattery, Kim Dickens, Mad Men, The Wire, Treme, TV Recap
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