Working my way back into currency, I will survey a number of recent films in cursory fashion, registering my opinion more than writing a real review. I’ll simply enumerate my expectations and reactions, what I hoped for and what I got. As always, I link to Metacritic, so you can sample a range of critical opinion and amplify detail on the film, and to Netflix, for dvd and streaming availability.
The film I was most eager to see, Take This Waltz (2012, MC-68, NFX), fell short of my expectations, which were sky-high considering that Sarah Polley’s first directorial effort, Away From Her, was my favorite feature of 2007; that the film stars Michelle Williams who may be my favorite actress of the moment; and that the title and several songs come from Leonard Cohen, yet another favorite of mine. Sarah and Michelle deliver nicely, although not their very best, but I think the movie needed more Leonard Cohen, a little more head to go with the heart, a little more spirituality to go with the sex, a little more grounding of romance in social reality. This romantic triangle is too vague and too on-the-nose at the same time, without achieving a fruitful ambiguity. It’s so much a woman’s picture, at least in the Sirkian sense, that I may be somewhat disqualified to comment. Still, I would see it again.
Though Richard Linklater is one of my favorite filmmakers, I wasn’t expecting all that much from his latest, Bernie (2012, MC-75, NFX), assuming it was one of the indie master’s more commercial efforts. Turns out it’s a damn fine film, with a down home feel that makes it very personal. In his genre-busting style, Linklater mixes true crime with East Texas small town comedy, just as he mixes actors with real townspeople in a Greek chorus of gossip. Jack Black is a revelation as a funeral home assistant with a serious people-pleasing demeanor, good at corpse presentation, eulogies and hymns, and comforting widows. He sings exceptionally well, both at church and in his community theater performance of The Music Man, and he balances flamboyance and smarm to good effect. He’s the most liked man in town, until he falls in with the most unliked woman, a crotchety rich old widow played by Shirley McClaine (a long way – sigh - from Irma La Douce and my adolescent fixation). She disappears, but it’s many months before suspicion falls on Bernie, and only because showboat sheriff Matthew McConaghey (in a role for which I forgive him his “sexiest man alive” performances) scents a big score. This film manages to be both funny and thought-provoking without bustin’ a gut over it.
I approached Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012, MC-82, NFX) in a dutiful frame of mind, knowing it would be long and slow, but that Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the names to conjure with in world cinema. Despite quibbles about pace and opacity, I’d appreciated his earlier films, Distant and Climates. This film, however, really grew on me, so much so that I may show it at the Clark. Nominally a police procedural, literally a search for a murdered body, the film plays as a strange nighttime odyssey by three cars twisting through the desolately beautiful Anatolian steppe, as we gradually come to know the men in the cars -- suspects, police chief, prosecutor, doctor, etc. On one level, the film is a beautiful cinematographic essay on light at night, either from the moon or headlights or lantern-flame. But it is also a series of portraits of men under stress, and how they react to a brief vision of feminine loveliness. The film’s title alludes to Sergio Leone, and Ceylan works that same alteration between widescreen landscapes and faces in extreme close-up. At the same time, he takes inspiration from Chekhov in the careful, understated unfolding of the drama. This film turns into quite a thrilling un-thriller.
My expectations for Moonrise Kingdom (2012, MC-82, NFX) were mixed. I’ve never been a particular fan of Wes Anderson, but so many people were raving about his latest that I was willing to be surprised. The film is certainly visually accomplished, funny in places, with its winsome heart more or less in the right place, but as usual I found it overdetermined and quirky for the sake of quirk, with caricatures rather than characters, despite actors like Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and more. The child actors, a boy who runs away from camp and a girl who runs away from home, on a New England island in the 60s, are endearing enough, and competent enough in delivering lines that no child has ever uttered. But I was not won over. I remain with those who find Fantastic Mr. Fox the Wes Anderson film for people who don’t like Wes Anderson films, where his cartoon characters are actually cartoons, and realer than the actors he cuts into cardboard with his overwrought style.
As a retro exercise in style, evoking the bleakness of postwar Britain, Terence Davies’ Deep Blue Sea (2012, MC-82, NFX) is effective. As an involving drama, this adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play lacks staying power. The always-watchable Rachel Weisz plays a woman who bursts out of a comfortable but deadening marriage to a judge and shacks up with a dashing but unreliable RAF survivor of the Battle of Britain. It seems like a bad choice, given that the film starts with her suicide attempt, and nothing convinces me that a woman as intelligent as Ms. Weisz would have made it, and kept on making it, no matter how hot her flyboy lover was. The two men fill their roles adequately, but this is entirely the woman’s picture, mostly alone in a room. So the story as well as the visuals seem stuck in amber. I suppose the message is how strong even muted and suppressed passion can be. The upper lip is stiff to keep from quivering. But non-Brits may find the drama less than riveting or convincing. I’m not immune to melodrama, in the literal music-driven sense of a Douglas Sirk film, but this one did not sweep me away, left me on the outside of the woman’s dilemma.
Frankly I steer clear of most Israeli films, not wishing to probe my ambivalences about the Jewish state, but a friend assured me that Footnote (2012, MC-82, NFX) was not a political piece, but an academic comedy. Sorry, it still wore out its welcome for me. I found the jaunty music and satiric interpositions off-putting rather than funny. The rivalry between father and son Talmudic scholars does touch on some sensitive spots of academic and family life, and some scenes build up to powerful realizations, but I felt flogged along through the film, rather than carried along by it. Though one footnote can remain a scholar’s claim to fame, this one I’m inclined to skip over.
I had two reasons for watching Return (2012, MC-63, NFX). The director is Liza Johnson, who has taught at Williams, and the star is Linda Cardellini, who was forever endeared to me by Freaks and Geeks. The film is certainly a professional job for an independently produced effort, with a nice sense of locale, and Ms. Cardellini retains her magnetism, as an army reservist returning from deployment and falling into a near-catatonic state, despite a relatively easy tour of duty in the warzone. Michael Shannon tones it down as the husband who doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, and John Slattery (of Mad Men) perks up the proceedings as the fellow alcoholic vet who does. The film achieves a subdued honesty, without grabbing for any great revelation.
Once again, two of the recent films that most exceeded my expectations were documentaries. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012, MC-75, NFX) certainly changed my mind about the artist in question, whom I would have been inclined to write off as a masochistic exhibitionist. Certainly many of her earlier performance pieces involved self-harm, slamming and cutting her naked body, but to cap a recent retrospective at MoMA in which of troupe of performers reenacted some of the less violent of them, the artist took it upon herself to be present for the entire duration of the exhibition, sitting alone on a plain wooden chair in the vast cube of the new MoMA atrium, and inviting visitors to take turns sitting in the chair opposite her. A simple concept -- difficult, even punishing, in execution -- that unfolded into surprising impact and meaning. Shamanistic and sacrificial, an exercise in stillness and silence, the performance showed the power of the attentive gaze of another person to unleash emotional revelation. The camera completes the process by allowing us to gaze into those faces as well, to experience the expressive but unexpressed power of human connection. Really, you have to see it to believe it.
I’ve been impressed with Kevin MacDonald’s documentaries going back to One Day in September and Touching the Void, but Marley (2012, MC-82, NFX) involved me in its subject even more than I expected. Though not a concert film, with no song performed all the way through, this biography of Bob Marley revivified my interest in his music, and lately I’ve been listening to little else. I’d watched other films about Marley, the Wailers, and reggae music, so I was surprised to find the story told in a much fuller and richer context. This film made Marley seem even more admirable, and his appeal more comprehensible, somehow messianic without immodesty, a global figure of spiritual light, despite the quirky aspects of Rastafarianism. Through the testimony of himself and others, an impression of his power emerges, and what was lost by his early death from cancer. I had been unaware of his British father, and came to understand a sort of mixed breed wisdom and appeal, which I also see in Barack Obama, bridging personal divides as well as social.
No comments:
Post a Comment