Friday, February 17, 2012
There is no point. That's the point.
By Edward Copeland
Tilda Swinton amazes. Each year, she delivers an incredible performance in a film that, in the hands of a Harvey Weinstein or experienced studio marketing team, would most assuredly land her in the best actress Oscar field. Granted, Swinton won an Oscar in the supporting category for Michael Clayton, but she's missed the cut three years running for Julia, I Am Love and now We Need to Talk About Kevin. The big difference this year is that I believe more saw We Need to Talk About Kevin than the two previous films since Swinton won several critic awards and was nominated for both the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards. Academy voters tend to skew more conservatively and I suspect they couldn't bring themselves to mark their ballots for a performance in a film so distinctly bizarre.
Directed by Lynne Ramsay from a screenplay she and Rory Kinnear adapted from the novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin tells, in a very disjointed fashion, the story of Eva (Swinton), an artist by trade, suburban wife and mother by choice, attempting to come to grips with her guilt over the wreckage caused by her son, Kevin. The movie isn't told in a linear direction, perhaps in an attempt to surprise the audience by dropping out-of-sequence clues like breadcrumbs left to mark a meandering path back out of the woods. However, given the title, the visuals and snippets of scenes that obviously come after the incident happened, it should be clear what kind of horror took place, if only in the abstract and not the specific. The trailer and discussion of the movie pretty well gives it away anyway, so fretting about spoilers seems pointless. However, if you don't know what occurs in We Need to Talk About Kevin, plan to see the film and suspect foreknowledge could ruin that experience, just cease reading this now.
When I described the movie's story as being told in a nonlinear way, that's a bit of an understatement. This isn't simply a film that's not told in chronological order like innumerable works throughout cinematic history such as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane or Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. For one thing, only in director Lynne Ramsay's dreams would We Need to Talk About Kevin be mentioned in the same breath as Citizen Kane or Pulp Fiction, at least as far as quality goes. Secondly, the film has been edited by Joe Bini as if all the movie's scenes had been handed over cut into single frames and then tossed in the air as if someone had asked him if he'd ever played 52 Card Pickup. We don't stay in one spot very long. It makes Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, which I once described as being made for people with the attention spans of gnats, look as if it moved at the pace of Tarkovsky's Solaris. This isn't meant to be complimentary. Bini has edited practically everything Werner Herzog has made both fictional and documentary since Little Dieter Needs to Fly, so this is not his usual style even if he did have to cut the execrable The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans.
It's a shame that Ramsay chose to employ this method to tell the story because it drains We Need to Talk About Kevin of any emotional power. For that matter, it also saps the opportunity to approach the material in any of the myriad ways it hints that it might in the brief segments that will pop up occasionally such as dark satire or horror. It never slows down long enough to explore the idea that Eva's husband Franklin (John C. Reilly, who seems either terribly miscast or was directed to play his role as if he were a clueless parent in a John Hughes film) raises that Eva resented her son Kevin from birth and every time she accuses the little bastard of doing some awful thing, Franklin insists, "He's just a little boy" and buys him fancier and more expensive bow and arrow sets as he ages.
We don't get those conversations in depth though because that would require stopping the fast-forward button and watching a scene play out. It takes their young daughter losing one of her eyes "in an accident" and the 15-year-old Kevin finally showing Dad his callous side for Franklin to catch on that he and his wife should have been on eBay looking for a Dagger of Megiddo to slay their own little Damien. The movie tosses in a brief scene of humor that seems out of place where men come to Eva's door after the high school massacre selling Christianity. One asks if she knows where she's going in the afterlife. "Oh! Yes! I do as a matter of fact. I'm going straight to hell. Eternal damnation, the whole bit. Thanks for asking," Eva replies before shutting the door.
That this chopped-up mess of a movie actually produced two great performances almost makes me believe in miracles. I assume that happened because they filmed scenes whole and then just butchered them later, but they couldn't ruin the performances trapped within. Swinton, as you would expect, delivers one of the two great portrayals. The other bravura turn comes from young Ezra Miller, so good in a completely different type of role in Another Happy Day, who plays Kevin from age 15 on. I also should praise the even younger Jasper Newell, who plays Kevin from ages 6-8. He's very good as well and matches Miller well physically.
As funny as Miller was in Another Happy Day, he's frightening here, even when forced to deliver some of the kitchen sink of topics that get thrown against the wall for a few minutes. Miller gets a good speech where he blames what he did on everyone's favorite target (after violent video games) — television. Never mind that the movie shows no scenes indicating the tube exerted undue influence on Kevin. It's just required to list one of those easy scapegoat favorites: It's the "Why did the teen go mad?" equivalent of Claude Rains' Renault's order in Casablanca to "Round up the usual suspects." Now, it isn't clear if Kevin really is appearing on television or if Eva, who's sleeping on a couch, just dreams his appearance where he says:
"I mean, it's gotten so bad that half the time the people on TV, the people inside the TV, they're watching TV. And what are all these people watching? People like me. And what are all of you doing right now but watching me? You don't think they'd change the channel by now if all I did was get an A in geometry?"
It may be true, but it ain't Paddy Chayefsky. I wasn't the biggest fan of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, but it had more to say coherently about school violence in the post-Columbine era. The brief bit that touched upon the subject in the HBO miniseries Empire Falls packed a bigger punch and came as more of a surprise. Just on a purely realistic level, once we finally see the sequence where Kevin massacres many of his classmates, how in the hell would he have been able to go on that long using a bow and an arrow as his weapon? We're supposed to believe that no one in that school could have swarmed him one of the numerous times he had to load a new arrow which was every time?
The filmmakers behind We Need to Talk About Kevin undermined their film in practically every conceivable way. It's a shame because two talented performers poured their hearts into characters for a film that treated their work as little more than jigsaw puzzle pieces and obviously had no idea in their collective heads what tone they wanted, what message to convey or even if they had any ideas lurking in their skulls at all.
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Labels: 10s, Awards, Chayefsky, H. Weinstein, HBO, Herzog, John C. Reilly, John Hughes, Oscars, Rains, Tarantino, Television, Tilda Swinton, Van Sant, Welles
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Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tic yak d'oh!
By Edward Copeland
I dread reviewing movies like Blue Valentine because I already anticipate the responses to my pan of this critical darling. Some will call me a contrarian (which I'm not — if I liked it, I'd admit it), others will misread my words, thinking I'm saying those who like it are dumb or have had the wool pulled over their eyes. Many of these comments will come from other critics who will forget the most important truism of criticism: all opinions are subjective. However, what makes me not look forward to typing my thoughts on Blue Valentine the most is that, it's not even the type of film you can have fun getting revenge on for wasting your time. Recalling it for a review just means reliving the experience and it was painful enough the first time.
Now that I've decided to leap in anyway and dredge up my memories of Blue Valentine, I'm filled with sadness. It's not because that's what much of director Derek Cianfrance's film aims to elicit from the viewer as it charts the rise and fall of the relationship between Dean and Cindy (Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams) (not necessarily in that order). No, it's because I know that Gosling and Williams have talent and it's being abused here.
It seems even more tragic in the case of Williams (though I guess her undeserved Oscar nomination will help take the sting out), who seems to be drawn to roles in bad indie films such as this one. Is this masochism on her part? Not only does Blue Valentine provide her with a poorly written character that, though quite different from Wendy from Wendy and Lucy, seems to force her to play the same notes she hit in that similarly overpraised indie. In fact, early in Blue Valentine, when Cindy starts making photocopies of the family's missing dog, I actually started experiencing flashbacks to Wendy and Lucy as if I suffered from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Two wildly hyped and unjustifiably acclaimed films striking me simultaneously. Almost more than I could bear.
What made me feel worse for Williams sort of goes with the old line about actresses saying they'd only do nudity if it were integral to the story. Much was made ahead of Blue Valentine's release about how they barely avoided an NC-17 because of the sex scenes between Williams and Gosling. Now, in no respect could you call me a prude nor do I mind seeing Williams in the altogether, but for all the hype, the vigorous humping the actors simulate ranks among some of the dullest movie sex scenes I've seen. As with most of Blue Valentine, it's porking without a point.
Since the movie jumps around to various points in the couple's relationship, it's not as if the sex really reflects the relationship's state at that time: It's neither lustful nor romantic, obligatory nor forcible. Most importantly, nothing seems intimate about it. It's not often that I refer you to a comment in another review, but since it's by my faithful contributor Josh R, I will. Go read his comment on the difference between how Gus Van Sant depicts gay sex in Milk versus how Ang Lee does in Brokeback Mountain (which had a very good performance by Williams) on my review of Milk and he explains exactly how I feel about the sex in Blue Valentine comes off.
Williams deserves so much better. Just see what great work she turned in for her small role in Scorsese's Shutter Island and it shines a big bright light on what little she's given to work with in this film. In Blue Valentine, as in Wendy and Lucy, it seems as if she's intent on creating the cinematic equivalent of slashing her wrists in attention-grabbing but ultimately harmless suicidal gestures. If she continues on this path, I fully expect to see her in a role carrying The Bell Jar or starring in a remake of The Hours.
Which brings me to Gosling, whose problem in Blue Valentine, other than the same bad script by director Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis, is one of his own making. Gosling has shown before that he can deliver very good performances as he did in Half Nelson . Unfortunately, he's also displayed a tendency to substitute actorly tics, quirks and gimmicks as a substitute for actually creating three-dimensional characters. For example, see Lars and the Real Girl.
He strongly displays the Lars scenario here. OH BOY, does he do it here — tenfold. He makes Dean such a collection of artificial traits that I doubt blood flows in his veins since he's obviously been built from a kit and doesn't resemble a human being. The blowup doll in Lars and the Real Girl was more lifelike than Dean. No wonder Dean and Cindy's marriage falls apart so quickly. I don't know how Cindy lasted one night with this manufactured oddball, let alone a few years. Gosling goes so eccentrically over the top that he makes Brando's work in Island of Dr. Moreau seem subtle.
So with Blue Valentine we have another example of a 2010 film where its cast (and Gosling and Williams are essentially the only characters who matter except for John Doman in the small role of Cindy's father that just made me wish I were watching The Wire) draws more attention to a film that would otherwise fade into deserved oblivion. Except in the case of something such as The Kids Are All Right, that film's entire ensemble turns in such excellent performances that they help compensate for its hackneyed, predictable screenplay. There's no such luck for Blue Valentine which strands Williams at sea while Gosling rollicks in some twisted land of awful, mechanical Method Acting.
Williams should be grateful that enough Academy members apparently dislike Julianne Moore, fell for the category fraud of Hailee Steinfeld being supporting in True Grit and didn't see or remember Tilda Swinton in I Am Love to allow Williams to get a best actress nomination. Then again, they also nominated Nicole Kidman's icy work in Rabbit Hole, which I'll review later in the week, so maybe they were just filling in names and didn't actually see Blue Valentine or Rabbit Hole. (We do know at least the costume designers branch saw I Am Love.)
Plenty of great films have depicted decaying relationships and marriages, but Blue Valentine doesn't come close to joining that list. Some critics even had the gall to compare this film to the work of John Cassavetes. Blue Valentine doesn't even rise to the level of John Hughes and if you are a close reader of my reviews, you know what an insult that is.
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Labels: 10s, Brando, Cassavetes, Gosling, John Hughes, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Nicole Kidman, Oscars, Scorsese, The Wire, Tilda Swinton, Van Sant
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Saturday, December 11, 2010
From the Vault: The Deep End
Margaret Hall's to-do list: pick up one son from baseball, drop off daughter at ballet and get other son to music lesson. Is it any wonder she can't find the time to raise $50,000 for an extortionist? This maternal instinct lies at the heart of the new thriller The Deep End.
Margaret (Tilda Swinton) lives with her three children and father-in-law (a nice turn by Peter Donat) while her husband serves his country on an aircraft carrier. It's Margaret's oldest son, Beau, who makes mom vulnerable to blackmail, not so much by his actions as by her desire to protect him at any cost.
Based on the 1940s novel The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, The Deep End puts a domestic spin on classic film noir situations. Written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the film moves a little too methodically at the outset, but it picks up steam as it rolls along.
The solid cast also includes Goran Visnjic as the conflicted half of the blackmailing pair and, most especially, Jonathan Tucker as Beau, a teen torn over his own secrets.
While Margaret is the glue that holds her family together, Swinton serves the same purpose for the movie itself. Her subtle, striking performance turns out to be The Deep End's main asset.
The easy route would be to play Margaret as overwhelmed or distraught, but she's been steering her family's course by herself for so long that the criminal intrusions are just another errand to complete. Swinton captures this mother's devotion beautifully, never questioning what she's doing: Her son is in trouble and she's going to get him out of it.
While there are plot questions left open and the pacing lags occasionally, Swinton's wonderfully modulated performance makes The Deep End worthwhile.
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Labels: 00s, Tilda Swinton
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Thursday, October 21, 2010
Superb acting in any language
By Edward Copeland
Last year, one of the very best performances by an actress was given by Tilda Swinton in Julia, which I unfortunately didn't get to write about because I saw it during my doctor-ordered hiatus from this blog. She gave a frenetic, frazzled portrait of a woman over her head and should have received more recognition than she did. Swinton has done it again in 2010 in a film in which she not only stars but which she helped to produce and if that weren't impressive enough, her work in I Am Love is in Italian.
Whereas in last year's Julia, Swinton's title character was marvelously out of control as she made bad decision after bad decision when she became involved in what she thought was a "humanitarian" kidnapping scheme would help her money problems, but it didn't ease her substance abuse troubles. Swinton swung for the fences and hit a home run with her performance.
In I Am Love, Swinton goes the opposite direction. She's almost silent, even when her passions get the better of her, as Emma Recchi, who said she gave up her Russian identity when she married her Italian husband Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) and became absorbed into his large and boisterous Italian business family.
While the true Italian Recchis tend to be more judgmental, Emma is the one who earns the trust of her now-grown children because she doesn't cast aspersions on their lives or dreams, be it her son Edoardo (Flavio Parenti) and his desire to open a restaurant with his friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) or her daughter Betta (Alba Rohrwacher) coming out as a lesbian.
However, not all of the family feels as gracious toward Emma when she finds herself falling for the much younger Antonio, an affair that leads to unexpected tragedy. However, the scene where Emma makes her decision after confessing to Tancredi, a scene played in near silence, first between Emma and her maid and then between Swinton and Rohrwacher is breathtaking as is all of Swinton's work here.
The film itself, directed by Luca Guadagnino who also wrote the story and co-wrote the script with three others, isn't quite as good as Swinton's performance. It takes quite a while for I Am Love to get revved up and its leisurely pace almost becomes a crawl.
If it weren't for Swinton's brilliant and subdued work (in Italian, remember), I Am Love probably wouldn't work at all, but her work almost belongs in a silent film: Her face expresses so much without words. Swinton makes the experience worthwhile.
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Labels: 10s, Foreign, Tilda Swinton
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Friday, August 20, 2010
A mother's work is never done
By Edward Copeland
Prior to Mother, I've only seen one of South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's films, the incredibly fun monster flick The Host. Mother could hardly be more different, but it's a film that constantly surprises, thanks to the incredible lead performance by Kim Hye-ja in the title role.
You really don't know what to expect from Mother based on the film's opening image. Over the credits, Kim stands in the middle of a field doing a strange little dance to the film's riveting score by Lee Byeong-woo, which can seem comical when the moment calls for it and the perfect accent to the suspense when appropriate.
Mother (we're never given her full name) prepares herbs and solutions in her small shop as well as performing unlicensed acupuncture on her customers. She also keeps a close eye on her 27-year-old son Do-joon (Won Bin), a young man who obviously has something amiss about him. He may be mentally challenged or just a bit slow. In the film's opening moments, Do-joon is holding up a dog across the street from his mother's shop to wave when a speeding BMW strikes him and speeds away. A horrified mother runs to his aid. Though he's slightly injured, he appears OK, but egged on by his hothead friend Jin-tae (Jin Goo), the two hop in Jin-tae's car in pursuit of the hit-and-run vehicle.
Since it was a BMW, Jin-tae assumes it belongs to well-off members of the country club, so that's where they go, finding the car, which Jin-tae smashes the sideview mirror of before the two enter the golf course trying to track down the vehicle's occupants, with Do-joon collecting lost golf balls from a water hole along the way. When they find the golfing party in the cart, a melee ensues that ends up with both parties at the police station.
The authorities urge both sides to settle, since they were both at fault, until the wealthy golfer mentions the damage to the car as well. Finally, that matter resolves itself but a worse matter rears its head when a schoolgirl with a bad reputation (one the addled Do-joon has attempted to pick up unsuccessfully) turns up slain, a golf ball with Do-joon's signature found nearby.
Mother won't accept that her son did the killing, especially when he's tricked into signing a confession, so she tries hiring a lawyer and doing her own investigating to prove his innocence. In some respects, it's reminiscent of Tilda Swinton's character in The Deep End, but Mother's actions go deeper and darker.
The twists in Bong's film often come as quite a surprise and though it has abrupt shifts in tone, they always work. He has a masterful suspense scene where Mother is hiding in the closet of someone she's investigating when the suspect comes home for a tryst with a woman and falls asleep on the floor. Mother has to sneak out of the place without getting caught and the floor is a literal minefield of water bottles and other objects she must navigate to get to the exit.
It's not often that a movie can produce reveals that take me by surprise, but Mother does it frequently and it makes for a riveting film experience.
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Labels: 10s, Bong Joon-ho, Foreign, Tilda Swinton
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Monday, April 05, 2010
Live and learn
By Edward Copeland
You can never really claim that a year in movies has an overriding theme, but if you could, 2009's would be that so many of the better films were dependent on a single performance that almost single-handedly raised his or her film to a higher plane. You saw it with Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart to Sam Rockwell in Moon and Tilda Swinton in Julia. This is most decidedly the case with An Education, which would probably be a fine film anyway but becomes an even better one with Carey Mulligan as its lead.
Mulligan stars as Jenny, a bright 16-year-old attending an all-girls school in the London suburbs in 1961 in presumed preparation for her eventual enrollment at Oxford. She's smart, funny and talented and can't help but show it, even if it means often offending those around her, including teachers such as Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams, unrecognizable from those who only know her from Rushmore) and her stuck-in-the-mud father (Alfred Molina). As many smart teens can be, Jenny thinks she knows a lot more than she really does and, unfortunately, she suffers for it in the end.
One day, while walking home from concert rehearsal with her cello in a driving rainstorm, a handsome thirtysomething stranger named David (Peter Saarsgard) charms Jenny into his car and before long, despite the age difference, the two are dating, despite Jenny's insistence that she's hanging on to her virginity until she turns 17.
Jenny's classmates find it quite chic that she's seeing an older man while her teacher and especially the school's stern headmistress (the always reliable Emma Thompson) give her strong warnings, some threatening her future at the school. Her parents (Molina and Cara Seymour) would probably be similarly suspicious, but David manages to seduce them at a faster rate than he does Jenny. The sometimes veiled (and sometimes not-so-veiled) anti-Semitism doesn't even seem to factor in even though David is Jewish.
Before long, her parents are allowing Jenny to go on overnight trips with David and even a journey to Paris, all under the assumption that David's "aunt" will be along as a chaperon. David and Jenny's clubbing and traveling companions are usually Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike) and some of their actions, as well as David's, should clue Jenny in to the idea that her boyfriend might not be all that he claims to be, but the heart of a first love has a terrible defect that allows for the masking of a significant other's defects.
Everything hits the fan soon after David takes the big leap and proposes marriage to Jenny, who is torn since her whole life had been geared toward continuing her education at Oxford. Her father, who'd supported the idea her entire life, is quick to abandon it for a good marriage because, really, what career can she expect to have? Even Thompson's headmistress tells her there are more opportunities than just teaching for young women now: There's also the civil service.
The sparse, deliberate and well-written screenplay by Nick Hornby was adapted from the memoir by Lynn Barber and smoothly directed by Lone Scherfig. The performers all do well, especially Molina and Williams. Sarsgaard's British accent isn't even half bad. If the film has a weakness, its final scenes seem rushed to try to tack on somewhat of an unnecessary happy ending that seems out of place with what went before.
However, as far as Mulligan goes, a star is born. She is so beguiling that the overwhelming number of comparisons of her to Audrey Hepburn certainly seem earned. While you are watching Mulligan in An Education (and I don't recall any scene she's not in), you can't take your eyes off her. It's not often that you see a performance from a relative newcomer that immediately makes you anxious to see what she does next. Carey Mulligan is an actress to watch.
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Labels: 00s, A. Hepburn, Carey Mulligan, Emma Thompson, Jeff Bridges, Sam Rockwell, Tilda Swinton
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Monday, October 22, 2007
An Elixir for the Fixer
By Odienator
Michael Clayton begins with a long, rambling soliloquy and ends with the longest close-up in recent memory. The soliloquy is awful, but the close-up is fascinating.
The guy doing the Norma Desmond is Michael Clayton (George Clooney), the most financially successful member of the Clayton clan. The guy pulling the Hamlet is Michael's co-worker Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), a manic depressive who has gone off his medicine and gone native. During a deposition, Arthur gets butt naked and professes unconditional love to the plaintiff in his lawsuit. Unfortunately, he's on the defendant's side. Clayton, the law firm's "fixer" is assigned to bring Arthur back to reality, a thankless job he's done more than once. Arthur's latest outburst threatens to derail the lawsuit that has generated six years of revenue for the firm.
The character of Michael Clayton is like one of those movie psychics who can tell everyone's future but his own. In 17 years, Michael has had much success in fixing his firm's problems, but his own life could use two or three fixers. He's a divorced father whose son sees through him, the proprietor of a bar that's tanking and a compulsive gambler with an excuse for falling off the wagon: Michael hopes to win enough money to pay the debt incurred by his drug addicted, irresponsible brother Timmy (David Lansbury, the "fuck buddy" of Sex and the City). He's also in need of a new car, as the one he had been driving blows up 20 minutes into the movie.
After the explosion, Michael Clayton employs that ol' reliable screenplay trick, the extended flashback. Most of the film resides here and, like the aforementioned close-up versus monologue, it is visually interesting if not always narratively sound. Before the Clooneymobile "blowed up real good," Michael visits a client who ran over a jogger and left the scene of the crime. The client is angry when he is told by Michael that he's not the miracle worker his firm made him out to be. "I'm just a janitor," he states. "I tell you what you don't want to hear." This plotline is put on hold for the flashback, and then is conveniently forgotten about once we return to chronological order; it serves as the rare deus ex machina that's actually interesting to follow.
Michael Clayton has bigger fish to fry, however. The world is a corrupt place, from the wealthy guy who makes excuses for mowing down joggers to the chemical company who knew its product was deadly yet released it anyway. As part of his Arthur-fixing assignment, Michael meets with Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), the company rep Arthur represented before he auditioned for The Full Monty. She chews him out as expected, but he doesn’t realize just how sinister Crowder is. She has hired a shady organization to keep tabs on Arthur, bugging his phone and putting him under surveillance. Once Michael realizes Arthur is onto something, he gets ensnared in the stakeout as well.
Sydney Pollack shows up as Clayton’s boss, presenting a visual tie to the type of '70s filmmaking to which Michael Clayton aspires. Pollack’s been-there, done-that, of-course-our-client-is-corrupt attitude comes closest to the feel of some of the eponymous movies of that decade. Pollack brings an authoritative edge to his scenes; he’s completely believable as the head of the Firm (didn’t he direct that?). Pollack has bailed Michael out before, sort of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, and his tired expression when talking to Michael indicates that he’ll do it again before the film’s over.
I’d ramble on more about the machinations of the plot, but writer Gilroy is better at the dynamics of Michael Clayton’s personal relationships than how much trouble he’s in with the big bad chemical company. Clooney interacts with his cop brother Henry (Sean Cullen), his young son (Austin Williams), his co-workers, his brother’s bookie’s collector and Arthur. These scenes are interesting to watch unfold and some of the dialogue is better than it sounded when the film started. When focusing on Clayton’s interpersonal entanglements, director Tony Gilroy’s script rings true. Michael is tired, and he has blaxploitation disease — he needs just one big score to get out of the life. Whether he gets that score I won’t reveal, save to say that while the film’s climax is satisfying, it’s also rushed. All the loose ends and seemingly meandering moments pay off, but it’s cleaner than it should be.
The thriller aspects of Gilroy’s screenplay are the most problematic aspect of Michael Clayton. Yet some of his visuals and the performances he gets from his cast gloss over much of the clunkier developments. A major character is murdered in such a nonchalant way that it’s genuinely creepy. Several scenes are allowed to meander and play out, sometimes without dialogue, and that adds some suspense to the proceedings. As the film jumps from flashback to present, the film edits in different points of view and it’s fun putting the pieces together.
Tilda Swinton is perfectly cast in her standard role as enigma. She seems to play scenes so that they may be interpreted multiple ways. Early in the film, we see her shaking and sweating in the ladies’ room, and we also see her initial interaction with the surveillance/hit man organization. Is she really this naïve and nervous? Or is this an act? Why is she freaking out in the bathroom? Is it because she’s about to give the speech of her career or because she’s put a hit out on somebody? The believability of her last scene with Clooney hinges on how these prior scenes are interpreted, and Swinton is her usual blank slate, waiting for you to interpret what she’s doing. Though she has little screen time, she’s the most intriguing character in the film.
Clooney is believable as a tired lawyer whose house of cards is coming down around him (and he’s holding a losing hand in the poker room of that house). Every hair is in place and his suits are straight from the David E. Kelley section of Lawyer JC Penney’s. At the end of the film, he looks as neat and tidy as the film’s resolution, when he should be all Syriana-ed up. As he stares into the camera for at least three minutes, his face runs the gamut of different emotions as he thinks. Gilroy’s camera stays on Clooney so long that it becomes uncomfortable, but as I stared at him, I realized that this was the one time in the movie Michael Clayton could breathe easily. It cost him his soul, but the fixer was finally fixed.
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Michael Clayton begins with a long, rambling soliloquy and ends with the longest close-up in recent memory. The soliloquy is awful, but the close-up is fascinating.
The guy doing the Norma Desmond is Michael Clayton (George Clooney), the most financially successful member of the Clayton clan. The guy pulling the Hamlet is Michael's co-worker Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), a manic depressive who has gone off his medicine and gone native. During a deposition, Arthur gets butt naked and professes unconditional love to the plaintiff in his lawsuit. Unfortunately, he's on the defendant's side. Clayton, the law firm's "fixer" is assigned to bring Arthur back to reality, a thankless job he's done more than once. Arthur's latest outburst threatens to derail the lawsuit that has generated six years of revenue for the firm.
The character of Michael Clayton is like one of those movie psychics who can tell everyone's future but his own. In 17 years, Michael has had much success in fixing his firm's problems, but his own life could use two or three fixers. He's a divorced father whose son sees through him, the proprietor of a bar that's tanking and a compulsive gambler with an excuse for falling off the wagon: Michael hopes to win enough money to pay the debt incurred by his drug addicted, irresponsible brother Timmy (David Lansbury, the "fuck buddy" of Sex and the City). He's also in need of a new car, as the one he had been driving blows up 20 minutes into the movie.
After the explosion, Michael Clayton employs that ol' reliable screenplay trick, the extended flashback. Most of the film resides here and, like the aforementioned close-up versus monologue, it is visually interesting if not always narratively sound. Before the Clooneymobile "blowed up real good," Michael visits a client who ran over a jogger and left the scene of the crime. The client is angry when he is told by Michael that he's not the miracle worker his firm made him out to be. "I'm just a janitor," he states. "I tell you what you don't want to hear." This plotline is put on hold for the flashback, and then is conveniently forgotten about once we return to chronological order; it serves as the rare deus ex machina that's actually interesting to follow.
Michael Clayton has bigger fish to fry, however. The world is a corrupt place, from the wealthy guy who makes excuses for mowing down joggers to the chemical company who knew its product was deadly yet released it anyway. As part of his Arthur-fixing assignment, Michael meets with Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), the company rep Arthur represented before he auditioned for The Full Monty. She chews him out as expected, but he doesn’t realize just how sinister Crowder is. She has hired a shady organization to keep tabs on Arthur, bugging his phone and putting him under surveillance. Once Michael realizes Arthur is onto something, he gets ensnared in the stakeout as well.
Sydney Pollack shows up as Clayton’s boss, presenting a visual tie to the type of '70s filmmaking to which Michael Clayton aspires. Pollack’s been-there, done-that, of-course-our-client-is-corrupt attitude comes closest to the feel of some of the eponymous movies of that decade. Pollack brings an authoritative edge to his scenes; he’s completely believable as the head of the Firm (didn’t he direct that?). Pollack has bailed Michael out before, sort of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, and his tired expression when talking to Michael indicates that he’ll do it again before the film’s over.
I’d ramble on more about the machinations of the plot, but writer Gilroy is better at the dynamics of Michael Clayton’s personal relationships than how much trouble he’s in with the big bad chemical company. Clooney interacts with his cop brother Henry (Sean Cullen), his young son (Austin Williams), his co-workers, his brother’s bookie’s collector and Arthur. These scenes are interesting to watch unfold and some of the dialogue is better than it sounded when the film started. When focusing on Clayton’s interpersonal entanglements, director Tony Gilroy’s script rings true. Michael is tired, and he has blaxploitation disease — he needs just one big score to get out of the life. Whether he gets that score I won’t reveal, save to say that while the film’s climax is satisfying, it’s also rushed. All the loose ends and seemingly meandering moments pay off, but it’s cleaner than it should be.
The thriller aspects of Gilroy’s screenplay are the most problematic aspect of Michael Clayton. Yet some of his visuals and the performances he gets from his cast gloss over much of the clunkier developments. A major character is murdered in such a nonchalant way that it’s genuinely creepy. Several scenes are allowed to meander and play out, sometimes without dialogue, and that adds some suspense to the proceedings. As the film jumps from flashback to present, the film edits in different points of view and it’s fun putting the pieces together.
Tilda Swinton is perfectly cast in her standard role as enigma. She seems to play scenes so that they may be interpreted multiple ways. Early in the film, we see her shaking and sweating in the ladies’ room, and we also see her initial interaction with the surveillance/hit man organization. Is she really this naïve and nervous? Or is this an act? Why is she freaking out in the bathroom? Is it because she’s about to give the speech of her career or because she’s put a hit out on somebody? The believability of her last scene with Clooney hinges on how these prior scenes are interpreted, and Swinton is her usual blank slate, waiting for you to interpret what she’s doing. Though she has little screen time, she’s the most intriguing character in the film.
Clooney is believable as a tired lawyer whose house of cards is coming down around him (and he’s holding a losing hand in the poker room of that house). Every hair is in place and his suits are straight from the David E. Kelley section of Lawyer JC Penney’s. At the end of the film, he looks as neat and tidy as the film’s resolution, when he should be all Syriana-ed up. As he stares into the camera for at least three minutes, his face runs the gamut of different emotions as he thinks. Gilroy’s camera stays on Clooney so long that it becomes uncomfortable, but as I stared at him, I realized that this was the one time in the movie Michael Clayton could breathe easily. It cost him his soul, but the fixer was finally fixed.
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Labels: 00s, George Clooney, Sydney Pollack, Tilda Swinton
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Sunday, January 29, 2006
Violence and Thumbsucking
By Edward Copeland
I had the chance this weekend to catch up with A History of Violence and Thumbsucker and I actually liked them both. While the two films aren't really similar in the least, both contains in varying degrees the idea of nature vs. nurture.
In Thumbsucker, a fairly straight-forward coming of age tale, viewers are invited to watch the ups and downs of high school student Justin Cobb (wonderfully played by Lou Pucci), who is a poor student with a serious thumbsucking habit, though that state of his being and scholarliness rises and falls throughout the course of Mike Mills' movie based on the Walter Kirn novel.
The pacing is swift, the tone bittersweet and while it doesn't deign to answer the question of whether Justin's shortcomings were handed down by his parents (ably played by Tilda Swinton and Vincent D'Onofrio), the movie turns out to be quite touching.
Touching is not the word one would use to describe A History of Violence, David Cronenberg's most "normal" film yet — but it's a great one. A suspenseful tale of a man (Viggo Mortensen) whose past comes back to revisit him when he stops a robbery in his small town eatery.
In this film, the nature vs. nurture aspect is really a minor point with the subplot of Mortensen's teenage son (Ashton Holmes) who is plagued by bullies at school, but events in the movie do raise the idea that perhaps the next generation can't escape their parents' nature.
The thing that these two films have most in common is that they are so concise. After having endured the bloat of King Kong, what a thrill it was to be able to watch two really good films in the same amount of time it took to sit through Kong.
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TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
I had the chance this weekend to catch up with A History of Violence and Thumbsucker and I actually liked them both. While the two films aren't really similar in the least, both contains in varying degrees the idea of nature vs. nurture.
In Thumbsucker, a fairly straight-forward coming of age tale, viewers are invited to watch the ups and downs of high school student Justin Cobb (wonderfully played by Lou Pucci), who is a poor student with a serious thumbsucking habit, though that state of his being and scholarliness rises and falls throughout the course of Mike Mills' movie based on the Walter Kirn novel.
The pacing is swift, the tone bittersweet and while it doesn't deign to answer the question of whether Justin's shortcomings were handed down by his parents (ably played by Tilda Swinton and Vincent D'Onofrio), the movie turns out to be quite touching.
Touching is not the word one would use to describe A History of Violence, David Cronenberg's most "normal" film yet — but it's a great one. A suspenseful tale of a man (Viggo Mortensen) whose past comes back to revisit him when he stops a robbery in his small town eatery.
In this film, the nature vs. nurture aspect is really a minor point with the subplot of Mortensen's teenage son (Ashton Holmes) who is plagued by bullies at school, but events in the movie do raise the idea that perhaps the next generation can't escape their parents' nature.
The thing that these two films have most in common is that they are so concise. After having endured the bloat of King Kong, what a thrill it was to be able to watch two really good films in the same amount of time it took to sit through Kong.
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Labels: 00s, Cronenberg, Tilda Swinton, Viggo Mortensen
TO READ ON, CLICK HERE
