I
am going to pick up again right where I left off, with foreign films titled by
a woman’s first name ending in “a” -- a surprisingly rich subcategory. I really liked Gloria (MC-83, NFX), both
the character and the Chilean film.
She’s a divorced woman of a certain age, who puts herself out there in a
resilient manner, attending singles events for older people in Santiago, and
flirting hopefully. Played by Paulina García, and directed by Sebastián Lelio, Gloria is funny and
touching and romantic in a real-life way, without wish fulfillment. She connects with a Mr. Right who turns
wrong; she gives him a second chance with discouraging results, but still winds
up happy enough dancing alone. The
story is slight but true, and the telling is likely to seduce you. (Again, I include links to Metacritic and
Netflix listings for each film, and for 2013 films, I add rankings on FilmComment and IndieWire critic polls.)
Then
there’s Yella (2007, MRQE-70, NFX), who certainly seduced
me. Impressed by Barbara, I went back and looked at this earlier collaboration between director
Christian Petzold and actress Nina Hoss.
Petzold has a finely-tuned sense of film history as well as the divided
history of postwar Germany. In this
film he makes an unlikely linkage between a documentary about modern business
negotiations made by his film school mentor, and Carnival of Souls, a cult horror
film from 1962. Meanwhile the subtext
conveys subtle clues about the lingering differences between the former East
and West Germanies. Just a lot going
on, in an elusive and hypnotic story.
In Jerichow (2009, MC-71, NFX), the same pair take on another
adaptation of the often-remade James Cain story, The Postman Always Rings Twice,
and make it totally new.
This streak of
similarly-titled films continues into this year with Ida (2014, MC-89, NFX), in which director Pawel
Pawlikowski returns to Poland with major impact. He left at age 14, now lives in Paris and works mostly in Britain
(see My Summer of Love), but embraces his heritage not just by making a
film set in the Poland of his childhood, but in the style of the great films of
Wajda and Polanski from that time, not to mention hints of Kieslowski and
Bresson. In narrow-format black &
white, he tells the story of a young novitiate, about to take her vows, who is
sent by the mother superior to visit her only living relative, a complicated
character played by an accomplished actress – powerful but slatternly – who has
shocking news for the young nun, played by a fresh-faced non-actress. I really advise seeing this film without preconception,
so I won’t say more than that the two opposites team up for a roadtrip in
search of their family history. The
film, in its restrained and meticulous manner, seems longer than its eighty
minutes, but not in a bad way. The
drama is beautifully underplayed, and every moment counts.
I’m a fan of Steve
Coogan, so I was interested in his new departure with Philomena (MC-76, NFX).
Judi Dench is always worth watching, and director Stephen Frears
frequently so, but the resulting film was better than I expected, almost worthy
of its Best Picture nomination. Coogan
adapted the screenplay from a nonfiction book, and plays the journalist with
wit and nuance, but without broad comedy.
Dame Dench is his subject, an Irish woman who had her child taken away
by the nuns from a home where she was consigned as an unwed teenager. Now she wants to find out what happened to
her son, so the unlikely pair make an investigative match to discover the
story, for their own respective reasons.
In the quest, the odd couple also discover a bittersweet bond, and the
search takes turns you don’t expect, to a sad but satisfying conclusion.
Dallas Buyers
Club (MC-84, FC #48, IW #45,
NFX) was also almost worthy of consideration among the best films of last year,
and Matthew McConnaghey deserved Best Actor recognition, for this as well as a
string of superior performances sufficient to make one forget -- and forgive --
the person behind the persona. Like the
actor, this film does not ask to be liked too much. He’s a scrawny, ornery cowpoke, and drunken homophobic womanizer,
who happens to have AIDS and won’t take death for a sentence. In saving himself -- through savagery and
subterfuge in his battles with the medical establishment -- he saves others,
including the transgendered Rayon, played memorably by Jared Leto. At least for a while some are saved, and an
elemental drive for survival is celebrated.
The premise seems thin and predetermined, but director Jean-Marc Vallé does a nice job of giving it dimension and surprise.
BTW,
among Best Picture nominees I watched American Hustle a second
time, enjoying the rom-com without having to figure out the con, and liked it
even more, though not as much as Silver Linings Playbook, which I fell
for completely.
Having segued seamlessly
from films titled with a feminine first name to last year’s Oscar nominees, I
can round things off with a simple pronoun, Her
(MC-90, FC # 17, IW #4, NFX). As
someone whose phone is defiantly un-smart, who relies on computer technology at
least a dozen years old, I was not the ideal audience for Spike Jonze’s latest
mind-bending fantasy. Another thin
premise here opens out into a surprisingly full world of the near future (LA
crossed with Shanghai). Joaquin Phoenix
works at an internet company where he composes, prints out, and mails heartfelt
“handwritten” letters for paying clients.
He is an early adopter of the first cross-platform operating system with
artificial intelligence. Given a
choice, he asks for the system to speak as a female, and soon he is in constant
confidential communication with Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied voice. Having met cute, they fall in love. The idea is sold better than I imagined possible,
but then oversold, the movie running long and petering out. Amy Adams has to be mentioned in a small
supporting role that could not have been more different from her character in American Hustle.
Jonze seems to have a
thing for making beautiful women look as plain as possible, as with Cameron
Diaz in Being John
Malkovich, though there he turns
Catherine Keener into the hot item, rather against type. Even lacking the wild surprise of first
viewing, a recent third or fourth look confirmed that film as masterly
inventive, with one of John Cusack’s best performances. My impulse would be to ascribe much of the
kooky charm of the film to Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay. And another look at Synecdoche, New York, which Kaufman directed as well as wrote, suggests
he rather than Jonze was the heavyweight auteur behind Malkovich and Adaptation. The
brilliant hall of mirrors that is Synecdoche
is given a retrospective poignancy by Phillip
Seymour Hoffman’s lead performance. How
long will we have to wait for Kaufman’s next masterwork? (BTW, I just watched another Kaufmanesque
film, Stranger Than
Fiction (2006, MC-67, NFX), which highlights by contrast
his continuously inventive genius.)
Scarlett Johansson plays
a totally different kind of seductress in Under the Skin (2014, MC-78, NFX). Here she has a body but almost no voice and
virtually no affect, like a computer in sleep mode. If she seems inhuman, that’s because she is, an alien wearing
human skin, luring men to a black widow-like fate. Black as the wig Scarlett wears, which makes her look startlingly
like Ava Gardner. Hard to convey just
how strange this movie is, and hard to recommend to viewers who aren’t ready to
work at making sense of the story or experiencing very uncomfortable
reactions. Jonathan Glazer’s film mixes
sci-fi and horror film tropes with Glaswegian social realism, all delivered
with art gallery visuals and music.
Hypnotic, disturbing, weirdly beautiful, and definitely not for
everyone. (P.S. Don’t make the mistake
I did, and watch Glazer’s previous film -- Birth (2005, MC-50) -- on the
strength of this one, unless you’re besotted by Nicole Kidman.)
Next up are a half-dozen
recent foreign films that I think are worth seeing -- if you’re a viewer
willing to make an effort -- starting with two by Iranians in exile. Abbas Kiarostami has become the ultimate international
filmmaker. His previous film, Certified Copy, was set in Italy with French and British
stars. His latest, Like Someone in Love (MC-76, FC #15, IW #22, NFX), is set in Japan with
a Japanese cast, and an Ozu-like style that remains unmistakably his own. I find Kiarostami thrilling in a way that’s
hard to articulate. He makes you think,
to be ever seeking for his meaning, yet in a manner that instills confidence that
there is meaning to be found. Take the
very first shot, a wide, deep-focus set-up in a Tokyo bar, where we don’t even
see the speakers of overheard dialogue, and only by paying patient attention do
we have any idea who they are and what they are talking about. From there the story takes turns we can’t
even guess at, just try to piece together after the event. I’ll say no more, so you can find out for
yourself.
Asghar Farhadi follows up
A Separation with The Past (MC-85, FC #40, IW
#30, NFX), which again plunges us into a complicated domestic situation and
asks us to sort out conflicting views and mixed motives. The film is intelligent and observant, but
perhaps a little forced, a little overcomplicated. The setting is Paris instead of Teheran, which removes the
inherent interest of seeing into an unknown world, but Bérénice Bejo has the
same effect on the audience as on the men in her life, attracting and
confounding. She’s called her Iranian
husband back to France to finalize their divorce, so she can marry the new man
whose child she’s carrying (except that he’s already married to a woman in a
coma). She’s got two daughters from an
earlier relationship and the new man has a young son, so there’s an excess of
family drama. Still -- compelling to watch,
if not in the end completely convincing.
Jia Zhangke is one of the
most interesting young directors in world cinema. His latest, A Touch of Sin (MC-77, FC #5, IW
#13, NFX), brings an unusual martial arts focus to his usual social
(sur)realism, though each of the four interlocked stories is based on a recent
Chinese news event. Beyond his typical
documentary-style critique of the inequities of China’s economic boom, each of
these episodes explodes in stylized violence.
So it’s not one of his films that I particularly esteem, but it
certainly has the hallmarks of his visual flair and seriousness of purpose.
Broken Circle
Breakdown (MC-71, NFX) is an oddity
that sometimes endears itself and sometimes does not. The Oscar nominee from Belgium is deep into the world of
bluegrass – who knew there was a Flemish slice of Appalachia in Ghent? In a fractured time scheme, flashing back
and forward, it tells of the meeting, marriage, and parenthood of a blond
tattoo(ed) artist and a Kris Kristofferson type. She starts singing with his band, and the performances of songs
like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” are very well-done, as is the sensuous love
story. The turn into family melodrama
(hardly a spoiler since you find out right away their young daughter has
cancer) is less satisfying. Director
Felix Van Groeningen’s film is not quite Once all over again, but it
plays the same bittersweet tune.
As someone who has never
found himself on Wes Anderson’s wavelength, I’m not the person to tell you
whether you should see The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014,
MC-88, NFX). Many, apparently, were entertained. I watched it in a drowsy state, not giving
it my usual level of attention, which may have been cause or effect of my lack
of appreciation. To me, it was cute but
inconsequential, a live-action cartoon.
Energetic and meticulously made, yes, but to me frankly a bore.
I
grant you that Ralph Fiennes was terrific in
Budapest, and he is equally good as Charles Dickens in The Invisible Woman (MC-75,
NFX), directed by himself. I really
liked this literate literary biography, except that it left me with the feeling
that they ran out of money and abandoned the last ten pages of the script. Up to that point the film feels
well-appointed, in true Victorian style.
As I say, Fiennes makes a highly plausible Dickens, conveying the drama
of his celebrated public readings as well as his more closed-off private
persona, and Felicity Jones is effective as Nell Ternan, the young actress who
becomes his long-term mistress. This
film does what shocked W.H. Auden about Jane Austen, “Describe the amorous
effects of ‘brass’ / Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety / The economic
basis of society.” Tom Hollander as
Dickens’ friend Willkie Collins, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Nell’s mother
round out an all-round quality production that falls just short of an outright
recommendation from me.
I’m not sure whether the
prolific British director Michael Winterbottom intended to jump the gun on
Richard Linklater’s Boyhood
but he did something like that with Everyday (MC-55, NFX), casting four real siblings and
filming them intermittently over a period of five years. Their mother is played by Shirley Henderson,
and their imprisoned father by John Simm.
As a working single parent of four, the mother’s life is an everyday
grind as she waits out her husband’s sentence. And yet there are glimmers of satisfaction, maternal and
otherwise, in her troubled, relentless life.
She’s hard-pressed but not crushed, surviving each day until the long-sought
reunion of her family, which of course brings its own problems. Very much a kitchen-sink story, told in a
documentary, caught-on-the-fly style, I found it highly watchable, like all of
Winterbottom’s work. Not everybody
does. Rule of thumb – if you like Wes
Anderson more than Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, stay away from this.
In somewhat the same
vein, I was more open than some to Run and Jump (MC-72, NFX). In Steph Green’s film, an Irish wife and
mother (very winningly played by Maxine Peake, of whom I look forward to seeing
more) is trying to hold her family together after her husband has a stroke and
returns from the hospital a mere shadow of himself. With him comes an American neuroscientist (Will Forte) who wants
to study his recovery, which is not expected to be anything like full. So besides the incapacitated husband, demanding
children, and difficult in-laws, the wife has to deal with this interloper,
observer, and -- you guessed it -- love interest. Steph Green is a young American woman exploring her Irish roots,
and relies a bit too much on indie pop-song montages to glide over emotional
transitions, but she’s still a talent to watch -- funny, sincere, and truthful.
After the break, you can
read my off-hand reactions to a score of recent films, only the last of which I
endorse and truly recommend.
Actually, the first ain’t
so bad either. Lake Bell’s
one-woman-band film In a World… (MC-79, NFX) is
certainly a modern screwball comedy that doesn’t insult anyone’s
intelligence. Besides writing and
directing, she stars as a voiceover artist, whose father is a legend in the
field but disparages the idea of female voiceovers. So she has to be plucky to make her way in the cutthroat
boys-club business, which becomes a parody paradigm of Hollywood as a whole. Busily populated by familiar faces in small
but distinctive roles, this film moves right along, alternating “hmm” with
“ha!” and really making one alert to vocal cues and sexist behaviors.
To make things confusing,
I next mention The World’s End (MC-81,
NFX), which in turn is bound to be confused with the decidedly inferior This Is the End (MC-67, NFX).
Both sci-fi comedies feature a drunken bunch of guys confronting the end
of world, but the former is British and wittier, the latter American and
grosser. The former is in the line of
Simon Pegg-Edgar Wright comic deconstructions of various film genres, the
latter features Seth Rogen’s usual crew of cronies monkeying around. Pegg is joined onscreen by the likes of
Martin Freeman and Paddy Considine for snappy verbal play. Five friends meet in their hometown to recreate
the epic pub crawl with which they celebrated graduation twenty years before,
culminating at the establishment named in the title. Things get a little wild, as the film devolves into action
sequences with alien robots and all, but a core of wit remains.
Now I’ll be getting more
into warnings than recommendations. If
you liked Little Miss
Sunshine, which I emphatically
did not, then you might enjoy The Way, Way Back (MC-68,
NFX). Jim Rash and Nat Faxon cash in on
the relative success of their screenplay for The Descendents to get their
first joint directing gig, and assemble an admirable cast including Steve
Carell, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, and others, as the clueless adults who
surround a teenager experiencing the most difficult summer of his
adolescence. Sam Rockwell struts his
stuff as the adult -- in age only -- who guides the nondescript boy into his
world, which is an actual attraction in the Buzzards Bay area called Water
Wizz. The bizarre reality of such a
place is one of the best things in the movie, but for insight into a time, a
place, and a state of life, you’d be much better off watching Adventureland.
Another fairly
well-reviewed film that I really didn’t like was Le Week-End (MC-73, NFX). Writer Hanif
Kureishi and director Roger Michell teamed earlier for one superior film, The Mother, and another pretty good one, Venus, but this effort fell
decidedly flat for me. Jim Broadbent
and Lindsay Duncan, usually pretty reliable, play an aging British couple who
try to revive their marriage, or maybe end it, by taking a trip to Paris. The city comes off pretty well, but the man
and the woman do not, as they alternate bickering and cutting remarks with
various childish capers. I was not
amused, and didn’t give a damn whether they stayed together or not.
I had more tolerance for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (MC-74, NFX) and doomed couple Casey Affleck and
Rooney Mara. David Lowery’s film is an
exercise in style, reminiscent of Altman or Malick. The story derives from films like They Live By Night and Thieves Like Us, with tender young lovers who find themselves on
the wrong side of the law and on the run.
The visual and aural communication of mood is more significant here than
story or character, so one is drawn in, if not carried along. As I have said of the Sundance series Rectify – this is a lugubrious melodrama, and that’s a good thing, if you can
bring it off -- and I think Lowery and his actors do.
Though
it seems like stunt casting, Daniel Radcliffe does make you forget Harry Potter
as he impersonates a college-age Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings (MC-65,
NFX), with Jack Huston as Kerouac and Ben Foster (also good in Saints)
as William Burroughs, more interestingly portrayed than in the recent movie
adaptation of On the Road. The
story revolves around an ambiguous character (sexually and otherwise) played
equivocally by Dane DeHaan. The film
turns into a murder mystery, and it’s fascinating that the central character
left the Beats behind and turned into a television executive. John Krokidas’ film is interesting enough,
but Radcliffe makes it a bit more so
Mother of
George (MC-77, NFX) is a Sundance indie set among Nigerian-Americans in Brooklyn, which at
its best reminded me of Fill the Void,
in its portrayal of mating ritual in an enclosed community living in internal
exile from the surrounding world, and at its worst exasperated me with the
director’s stylistic excess, intruding on characters and story of more interest
than his optical tricks.
Now
we’re into a group of films that you might think you want to see, but probably
don’t. I have a great tolerance for
Meryl Streep’s playacting, since my first glimpse of her in Shakespeare in the
Park back in the 70s, so I gave August: Osage County (MC-58, NFX) a
look, despite the dire track record of Pulitzer Prize plays turned into
movies. Matriarch Meryl is surrounded
by a bunch of welcome actors and actresses as she lays waste to her family, but
it’s all just play-acting, for show and not for truth. This is the anti-Nebraska in terms of
exploring family life on the Great Plains.
By the time I got to the
end of Lee Daniels’
The Butler (MC-66, NFX), I
was convinced that it was the worst movie I ever sat all the way through, a
laughable prestige piece that reduces forty years of African-American history
to an Afterschool Special for 4th graders. Forrest Whitaker serves as White House butler from Eisenhower
(Robin Williams, for no good reason) through Nixon (a surpisingly plausible
John Cusack) to Reagan (a bland Alan Rickman, but with Jane Fonda in a nice
cameo as Nancy). Oprah is the butler’s
wife and many more familiar faces drift through the perfunctory proceedings, a
hollow insult to what it purports to celebrate.
In
much the same vein, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (MC-60, NFX)
flattens another icon of Black history, though Idris Elba strives manfully to
inject humanity into the character of “Madiba.” This cursory treatment of decades of struggle was less offensive
to me, because I did not have deep first-hand knowledge of what was being
presented in shallow summary fashion, so I actually felt I was learning
something. And I’m happy to watch
“Stringer Bell” in any of his reincarnations.
I
would have thought the same of George Clooney until I tried to watch Monuments
Men (MC-52, NFX), which takes an interesting subject and fails to find
any interest in it, turning it into a bland, generic WWII celebrity caper, more
like Oceans Eleven than any inquiry into a corner of art history. I didn’t expect a genuine characterization
of someone like Lane Faison of Williams, but I wasn’t prepared for half-baked
shtick from the usual suspects, including Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and John
Goodman. I snapped it off in
disgust. Even Framed (NFX),
a so-so Masterpiece presentation (and Doc Martin wannabe) based on a children’s novel about the National
Gallery collection being moved for safekeeping to a mine in Wales, gives more
attention to the art in question. One
more seemingly plausible candidate I won’t be showing at the Clark is The
Best Offer (MC-49, NFX), with Geoffrey Rush as an art expert and
auctioneer, who gets into sub-Hitchcockian twists with forgeries and so on.
Before
I can consider myself caught up with recent films, I have to say a few final
words about those from 2012. The #1 on
both the Film Comment and IndieWire critic polls, but far from that in my
estimation, was Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (MC-84, FC #1, IW #1,
NFX). I’m never drawn to Surrealism in
any medium, and this film is steeped in it. Even in the narrow category of
recent films shot mostly in the back of a limosine, I may have preferred Cosmopolis.
I’ve
seen little, and liked less, of Bela Tarr’s work, and it took me three efforts
to get through his latest, and reputedly last, but I have to say that The
Turin Horse (MC-80, FC #6, IW #9, NFX) is a remarkable piece of work,
like nothing I’ve ever seen in portraying the brutal, grinding life of old
world peasants. Long, long takes in
oddly-beautiful black & white, mostly silent except for the howling wind,
while the roving camera slowly finds one stark, striking composition after
another. It’s an ordeal to submit to,
but one that lingers powerfully.
2012
saw two big popular adaptations of 19th century novels, of which I
could bear to watch no more than a few minutes each, but another one that I
found oddly fulfilling. The musicality
of Les
Miz and the theatricality of Anna Karenina left me cold, not to
mention the pomposity and tone-deafness.
But Andrea Arnold justified yet another adaptation of Wuthering
Heights (MC-70, IW #33, NFX) with a feral and fierce approach, closer to
the grim rural realities of The Turin Horse than to any Masterpiece-type
adaptation. Right down to the choice of
a black Heathcliff, she delves into the genuine savagery of Emily Bronte’s
tale. It takes an adjustment, but
rewards viewing.
I mention the
well-regarded Rust and Bone (MC-74, FC #27, IW #25, NFX) only to redirect your attention to a film
I much preferred as a celebration of the liberating power of sex for disabled
people. The Sessions (MC-79, NFX),
directed by Ben Lewin, boasts superior performances, by John Hawkes as a man in
an iron lung who dreams of sex, and Helen Hunt as sex surrogate who helps his
dream come true, but then gently returns him to reality. The film negotiates the line between
titillation and pathos with a fine sense of authentic experience.
I’ve still got old films,
documentaries, and tv series to catch up with, but at least I’m at long last
current with recent films, and hope to stay that way.
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