THE EVIL THAT MEN DO: Reviews of Animal Kingdom, The American and Mesrine, Part II: Public Enemy No. 1

Not long after seeing Animal Kingdom I was watching White Heat, the classic James Cagney film of 1949, the one where he is quoted as saying ‘[t]op of the word, ma” when he really says, “Made it, Ma. Top of the world”. Margaret Wycherly plays Ma, one of the great gangster villainesses in American cinema (for my friends who have no idea what I’m talking about, White Heat and Wycherly were both satirized in the third Naked Gun movie). But it’s doubtful that Wycherly holds a candle to Jacki Weaver as Janine Cody, the loving mother and grandmother who would regretfully, but very calmly and with all determination, have her grandson murdered if it meant preventing one of her sons from going to jail. The only scenes more chilling than that are the ones where she kisses her sons full on the lips a bit too deliberately, and then wipes them off, as if that would actually make the incestuous implication go away. It’s a fascinating study of pure evil, or actually the banality of evil, and Weaver plays it for all it’s worth.

The movie has a darkly comic opening in which Jacki’s grandson Joshua Cody, played by newcomer James Frecheville, watches a game show while he sits beside a woman who has passed out, or so it seems. It’s not long before some EMT’s arrive and it turns out that the woman is his mother and has actually OD’d, with Joshua able to answer all the EMT’s questions with the sort of detailed answers about a mother a teenager shouldn’t have to know. And to top it all off, as the EMT’s take his mother away, Joshua finds it almost impossible to stop watching the game show on TV. The rest of the movie is equally funny and depressing in the same doses. Joshua is picked up by his grandmother Janine and taken to live with his uncles, a group of bank thieves that are high on the list of a special police section who have taken to just killing their perps when they get frustrated at not being able to convict them the old fashion way. The family members themselves are the sort Ma Barker would have loved: a drug addict; a sociopath who has the hots for underaged girls; a third who starts falling apart the minute he ends up in jail; you know—Mama’s boys all. Joshua has no choice but to get in over his head until he has to take control in a final scene that is as devastating as it is surprising and makes a perfect bookend to the opening.

Animal Kingdom is one of the best movies of the year. The ensemble cast is first rate (though Guy Pearce seems to be around for no other reason than that he’s Guy Pearce and he’s from Australia). It’s one of those where no one is likeable, but everybody is fascinating. The script, by the director David Michod, is sharp and mesmerizing and the story coagulates with tension. One could question a late scene in which Joshua decides not to turn in a corrupt cop, but take matters into his own hands (he doesn’t really seem to have the brains, but maybe the family genes are finally kicking in). But that’s the sort of objection that makes my friends annoyed with me, so I’m not sure I’d worry too much about it.

I found The American both incredibly fascinating and incredibly boring at the same time; an odd response, perhaps, but apparently when I tell my friends that, many of them are in full agreement. The fascination comes from the strong, but intensely quiet, so quiet it sounds like a foghorn, mood created by the director Anton Corbijn, who also made the wonderful movie Control about singer Ian Curtis of Joy Division. The American proves that Corbijn can work equally well in color and black and white. The fascination is also helped by the setting, a smallish Italian town built on a hill that is full of twisting and turning streets, odd thoroughfares and more than enough dark corners to please any director of film noir. Much of the film does little more than follow lead George Clooney as Jack/Edward, a paid assassin, as he wanders the streets waiting for his fate to meet him at any moment around the next corner. There’s one incredible shot of the city from above showing a town that looks like one of those mazes that mice are put into when they are experimented upon. Not long ago, I got into Italian giallo films and one thing that struck me is that they all had these incredible settings that were characters in and of themselves, as if the location was found first and then a story was spun around it spiderlike. I’m not so sure that the same thing didn’t happen here.

The reason I found it incredibly boring is that I knew exactly what was going to happen ages before it happened. The screenplay by Rowan Jaffe has almost no plot turn that isn’t a cliché and no twist that hasn’t been telegraphed by Western Union, with only one jolting moment at the end that took me by surprise. The plot follows Clooney as he is ambushed while taking some time off from killing people. He flees to Rome while his boss tries to find out who is responsible for what happened. He is given an assignment (one of those last assignments that one only sees in movies), to help a beautiful young assassin by making a weapon for her that she is to use on her next gig. Now, if you can’t tell what happens from those three sentences, you have no one to blame but yourself. The whole spy versus spy conflict is straight out of the John Le Carre and Graham Greene school of burnt out secret agent men. In fact, one conversation Clooney has with a prostitute in which he tells her she doesn’t need to fake an orgasm is quite close to a conversation that Richard Gere gives a prostitute in the movie The Honorary Counsel, based on a Greene novel, down to the prostitute claiming she isn’t faking an orgasm, she really feels it (which in the world of Greene means that a woman is in love; Greene always had a touch of chauvinism about him).

One could also have doubts about the world view inherent in this story. It’s a world in which a mysterious organization that is never identified gets away with murder on a regular basis. No one knows who they are and none of them are ever caught. The police are no more than a siren heard in the background. In other words, it’s one of those paranoid government fantasies that one only sees in movies like Enemy of the State and Shooter, in which some black ops organization has omnipotent power, but still can’t keep the liberals out of office. It may work dramatically, but it’s a little hard to take it seriously, especially in a country that couldn’t kill Castro when it wanted.

But Jaffe is trying to do more than make a thriller. He also wants to explore the nature of redemption of the existence of God in a world that seems cold and heartless, and I’m all for that. Clooney is rather good at these moody blues introspective roles and his worn out good looks help carry things along. It ends with Clooney’s death, but with his soul, symbolized by a butterfly, wafting up to heaven. I have to be honest and say though I like the idea, I’m not convinced that Clooney’s character earned his salvation or his place above. He promises the prostitute to take her away with him, but surely that’s not quite equal to all the dead bodies he’s left in his path.

Mesrine, Part II: Public Enemy #1 is even better than Mesrine, Part I: Killer Instinct. To recap, Vincent Cassel plays Jacques Mesrine, the John Dillinger of France whose career of crime lasted into the 1960’s and like Dillinger, he managed to get a reputation of being a Robin Hood without ever giving to the poor. Again, Mesrine is all Cassel, a sociopath with delusions of romance, and who was famous for being charming. And Cassel is even more charming in this installment, in spite of the fact that he is forty pounds heavier, sometimes shaves part of his head to disguise himself and has a ridiculous sideburn/mustache/beard combo (though in his defense, so did everybody in those days). It also has some of the first part’s faults, like a plot that doesn’t seem to think it needs to set up characters or situations as it jumps and weaves from episode to episode with a certain anarchic structure. It does falter a bit toward the end as the chase scenes get a tad redundant and Mesrine tries to justify his sociopathology by claiming to be a revolutionary who only targets banks in order to bring the government down (and I have the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge in my pocket); there are actually times when you think the film’s creators (director Jean-Francois Richet, writers Abdel Raouf Dafri and Richet, and Cassel himself whose baby this is) might actually be buying it. The supporting case is fine, though none can equal Cassel’s bulldozing performance like Gerard Depardieu did in the first part. Even Mathieu Amalric, one of my favorite French actors, gets left behind in Cassel’s wake.

THE WOMEN: Reviews of I Am Love; Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work; Cairo Time; The Girl Who Played With Fire

There is something luminous about I Am Love from the opening shot. Much of this may be due to the gorgeous and entrancing cinematography of Yorick Le Saux. Or maybe it’s just the glowing skin of the lead Tilda Swinton that does the trick. Or maybe it’s both, seeing as how Le Saux also photographed Swinton for her earlier film Julia. It could also be the sweeping operatic music of John Adams that dots the action, or the ravishing production design. Whoever is to blame, I Am Love is luminous and enthralling to watch. Why it is so enthralling may be a more difficult question to answer. For the first third very little happens. An upper class Italian family, the Recchis, prepares for a birthday dinner for the patriarchic grandfather who still owns the manufacturing company that provides the family with its fortune. There are no major conflicts, no obvious inciting incidents, no melodramatic twists or turns. It’s just a quiet study of an upper class family living its life. There are some hints of trouble in paradise. The father Edoardo is upset that his son Edo didn’t win a race during a track meet; the grandfather Tancredi announces he is leaving the firm to both his son and grandson, something Edoardo doesn’t think is a wise idea; and Emma Recchi (Swinton) meets Antonio, the man who defeated Edo in the track meet and who hopes to open a restaurant with Edo’s support. By the time the story is over, Edo is dead and Emma leaves Edoardo to be with Antonio. As enthralling and mesmerizing as the film is, there does seem to be something missing here and that is the central cause of this family crumbling. There is some intimation that the foundations are rotting due to Edoardo’s repressiveness. He berates Edoardo over something as petty as losing a track meet; the daughter Elisabetta only tells Emma she is gay for fear of what Edoardo would say; Edoardo betrays Edo by selling the company out from under him (though Edo never really seemed all that interested in the business in the first place); and there seems to be no passion between Emma and Edoardo (though why is never explored). But somehow, in spite of all of this, the director Luca Guadagnino and the writers Guadagnino, Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo and Walter Fasano, emotionally overwhelm us in the way those grand old melodramatists like Visconti and Sirk managed to. At the end, when Emma is rushing about collecting her things to leave, Adams music takes over and sweeps us along, making us scream out “leave”, even though we’re not quite sure why she is acting the way she is. It’s like a flood; there’s no fighting it, so just grab onto a log and go with the current.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is one of the most brutally honest films I have seen about someone in which the person documented fully cooperated. Whatever else you might say about the movie, by the time it is over, you feel like you know Joan Rivers; really, really, really, really know her, warts and all (well, no warts, her cosmetic surgeon wouldn’t allow it, but you know what I mean). There’s one point where Rivers is readying herself (both physically and emotionally) to be roasted, terrified at what they are going to say, telling us and Kathy Griffin that she sure wouldn’t be doing this if she had enough money. What’s striking here is that this whole film is just one whole roast, hold the jokes. Nothing’s off limits here. Her husband’s suicide and her anger at him about it; her being blacklisted by NBC after she left Johnny Carson to do her own show; her desperate need to work (she’ll do anything, anywhere if you’ll just meet her price); her frustration at never being considered a good actress (for those of you who want to know what she might have become, you might check out the movie The Swimmer where she has a refreshing scene with the star Burt Lancaster). It’s all there. Rivers would probably call it a Brazilian bikini wax of a movie. The documentary, directed by Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg and which is the most successful one of the year so far, is riveting. It follows a year in her life where she has trouble getting work (her schedule is full of white spaces); opens a play in the Edinborough fringe and then takes it to London; does Celebrity Apprentice; and keeps up with her stand up. If you look up workaholic in the dictionary, her picture is next to the definition. The year is full of more downs that ups and you can feel her desperation, which, like the rest of her life, she is more than willing to show the audience. She wants to be loved and is not afraid to tell people that. I came away admiring and even liking Joan Rivers, but could I be in the same room with her? At one point, she has to fire her long time manager, Billy, because he keeps disappearing on her. We never find out exactly why, but it’s easy to see that it was probably due to burn out. When I talked to my friend Beriau about this, I told him that if he had left her years earlier, they could probably have stayed friends. Beriau was not so sure. As he said, one doesn’t leave Joan Rivers; how does one leave a whirling, dark vortex that sucks you in? He has a point. Thank God it’s just a movie.

Cairo Time has been compared to Brief Encounter, the staunch English film about two people who meet by chance at a railway station and consider having an affair, but never do. Though they have a point, it’s actually closer to Summertime, the Katherine Hepburn vehicle about a woman who goes to Venice, finds herself totally at a loss, and ends up having an affair with a man she meets. The reason it more closely resembles Summertime is that no matter what else it is, it really is no more than a travelogue disguised as a love story. There’s nothing wrong with that. Such a movie can be done well (like here or Summertime) and done badly (like Three Coins in a Fountain); but there are times when the sights and sounds of Cairo seem to be more important than the character’s journey. Patricia Clarkson steps into the shoes of Kate Hepburn here, playing Julia Grant, a writer who journeys to Cairo to see her husband who works for the U.N. and is overseeing a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Her husband, however, isn’t there to see her because there are complications at the camp. Instead, Julia spends her days drifting through this romantic city of the Pyramids trying to stand the heat and figure out how to spend her time since her reason for being there isn’t there. Into her life comes Tareq Khalifa (Alexander Siddig), a man who once worked with her husband, but has retired and now owns a café with the best coffee in Cairo. He takes it upon himself to show her some of the sights and help her fill up her days. The only sight Julia refuses to see are the pyramids, something she has promised to see with her husband. But as Julia and Tareq drift along, they also drift into becoming emotionally attached, not because Julia’s marriage isn’t working or there isn’t any passion left with her husband—it is and there is—it’s more because both are emotionally adrift and nothing seems to be stopping them. Julia nearly, but doesn’t, sleep with Tareq, but she does finally give in and commit emotional adultery by seeing the pyramids with Tareq. And of course, as in all tales of love affairs, just as they do, the husband returns. Unlike most stories like this, though, the husband never finds out what was going on behind his back. He goes with Julia to the pyramids, but she lies and says she has yet to see them. It’s a lovely story, though the driftiness of the plotline (written and directed by Ruba Nadda) tends to take over somewhere in the middle and the story slows a bit. But Clarkson, perhaps not quite as luminous as Swinton, is luminous enough and the movie overall is touching, if a bit minor.

I went with my friend Jim to see the Girl Who Played With Fire, the sequel to the hit The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (which I also saw with Jim). I came out thinking there must be something wrong with me because, unlike the rest of my friends and the critics, I liked it much better than the first. In the …Dragon Tattoo, I felt that the story didn’t start for about thirty minutes and that the mystery never made much sense. Here the story begins immediately and, though I have some doubts about the plot hanging together, I felt it worked much better and was more convincing than the first. Noomi Rapace is back as Lisbeth Salander, giving another intense and thrilling performance as “the girl”, a woman with a mild case of Asperger’s, but who is a brilliant computer hacker. She becomes the chief suspect in a triple murder connected to a story about sexual slavery being investigated by a paper who employs Mikael Blomkvist (also back and still played by Michael Nyqvist). There really is no mystery here because it soon becomes clear who really did it. The plot driving the story is Lisbeth and Mikael’s attempts to prove her innocence combined with an extra twist as to who the murderer is and what he has to do with Lisbeth. My friends didn’t like it because they felt there wasn’t enough of an emotional connection when it came to the characters, and they have a point. Lisbeth and Mikael don’t even meet up until the end (when Mikael finds her at a farm, though it’s unclear how he knew where the farm was located, but what’s a mystery without a few glitches between friends). There is something disjointed about it all. At the same time, I didn’t care. The mystery, Rapace’s performance, and a nice supporting job by Micke Spreitz as a man who can feel no pain, carried me all the way, even with the somewhat anticlimactic finale that is more set up for the next movie than it is an ending.

THE MEN: Reviews of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector; Brotherhood; and Get Low

I saw Ken Russell’s version of the rock opera Tommy the other night (can you say “camp”) and was talking to my friend Beriau about it the next day. I commented that even though the movie doesn’t work (in fact one can make a case that it’s really so bad, even Perry Mason couldn’t defend it before a jury), by the time it was over, you felt so up and wonderful that the awfulness of the film quickly became a distant memory. As Beriau pointed out, the reason was the music, which was beautifully recorded and sung (with an amazing cameo by Tina Turner that got applause that night). I realized he was right. It was the same thing for the movie Mama Mia!, a really terrible film, but at the same time, you were so entertained and enthralled by it all; and the reason again was the music. I mention this because this same sort of reasoning could be applied to some degree to The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, a documentary about the great music impresario and his trial for manslaughter.

I say to some degree because the movie is not awful, in fact it’s a quite interesting and, in many ways, very well done. It is problematic and there are some serious issues about the director Vikram Javanti’s approach. But whatever the problems, at the same time, one didn’t care because the movie was carpeted, and wall to wall at that, with recordings and videos of the songs that Phil Spector either wrote, partially wrote or produced (both Spector and Javanti are a bit vague about credits, one of the problematics referred to). Spector rose to fame and wealth by producing a new sound, a melodic rock and roll style known for its hummability and beauty, all about teenage angst and the inability to find someone to love, or when one does, letting the emotion overwhelm you (To Know Him is to Love Him; You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling; Spanish Harlem; culminating with the great Rivers Deep, Mountain High, performed with flashes of lightning by the aforementioned Tina Turner). He also produced songs and albums for the Beatles, including Let it Be.

When the documentary is not focusing on the music, it is divided between a one on one interview with Spector himself, as well as scenes from his trial for the death of Lana Clarkson, an actress/waitress he picked up at a nightclub. It’s hard to know how to react to Spector himself. His name is perhaps euphoniously appropriate. He looks, if not a ghost of himself, a ghost of someone, equipped with a watery, lazy eye and a slurring voice. And he comes across as somewhat mad. He spends much of his time defending himself from attacks others have made against him his whole life; from not receiving the recognition he felt he should have (this from someone living in a palatial estate few of us could ever dream of owning and someone who has made more money that many of us could ever make, even if reincarnation was a reality); and from the charges of having killed Clarkson. Though Javanti does ask questions and leads the interview, he pretty much lets Spector have his own way. Probably not a wise decision on Spector’s part, because the more he tries to defend himself, the more unsympathetic he becomes and the madder he comes across; he would have been perfect for the part in Alice in Wonderland (and he could have provided his own hair pieces, though Spector claims he still has his own hair, a claim as preposterous as his innocence). To quote a couple of clichés, he’s like a train wreck in slow motion or a motor accident you can’t look away from. The more he claims he isn’t guilty, the more you want to put him in jail and throw away the key. It’s an absolutely fascinating self portrait of a sociopath, who, like so many sociopaths, are so sociopathic they don’t realize how sociopathic they appear.

Javanti was at the screening for a Q&A and his statements and responses to some of the questions do demonstrate the problematic areas of the film. In the film, when Spector is talking about the song To Know Him Is To Love Him, Spector says it was about his father who shot himself when Spector was four; Javanti pointed out afterwards that Spector’s father gassed himself in the garage when Spector was ten. These sorts of inaccuracies are never pointed out during the movie interview. Spector at times seems to claim he had more to do with the creation of the songs he produced than he did; Javanti never challenges it (nor points out the writers of the songs when he subtitles their names during the video sections). When someone in the audience congratulated Javanti on being fair in showing both sides of the trial, all I could think was, “were we watching the same movie”? Javanti stated that he believed that Spector might have been at fault, but it was never proven at the trial. Well, we in the audience don’t really have a way of judging that, really. Much of the court case is devoted to the defense’s attack on the angle of the bullet through Clarkson’s head, that since it went upward, that wasn’t the angle a bullet would go if someone else other than Clarkson was holding the gun. Javanti never shows the scenes where the prosecutors respond to this. More insightful, perhaps, to Javanti’s approach, is that during the interview Javanti asks Spector about a piano that’s in the room. Before Spector gets up, he has Javanti turn off the cameras, but in the film, it’s never explained why. At the Q&A, Javanti reveals that he through it was because Spector was not very tall and didn’t want anyone to know. A funny anecdote until you think, “Huh, maybe this is why the bullet went at an upward angle, because Spector was so short”. Add to that Javanti’s anecdote about Spector’s refusal to admit that he wears hair pieces, and it just seems that the documentary had a few too many glaring omissions. At the same time, it was fascinating. And there was all that glorious music.

Brotherhood is a movie that shouldn’t work, but does. It’s about two neo-Nazis who are gay and fall in love. It sounds like it should be a Mel Brooks film or on one of those lists about the worst movie ideas pitched to a studio. But the writers Nicolo Donato, who also directed, and Rasmus Birch, along with the two lead actors, Thure Lindhardt and David Dencik, work very hard to make the somewhat preposterous set up work. Lindhardt plays Lars, a Danish officer who is relieved of duty when he gets drunk and puts the moves on some of his men; the army believes he will never be able to recover the respect of those he commands. Through a friend, he ends up at a party for members of a neo-Nazi movement that has grown out of the conflict over the increasing number of immigrants moving into Denmark. This is the weakest part of the film. It’s never really believable that Lars would join the group, something he initially finds offensive. The head of the group appeals to his vanity by telling Lars they are in need of people as intelligent as Lars is (apparently the movement is a tad light in the brains department and the authors don’t do anything to prove otherwise), but it’s never quite clear why he becomes part of the group. However, the filmmakers somehow get you past this section and once they do, the story does grab you. Jimmy is a member of the group who is rehabbing a house at the ocean that will be used for meetings and out of town guests. He doesn’t like Lars, at first because of his anti-Nazi stance, but then because Lars rises too quickly in respect, even gaining membership before Jimmy’s brother does (whose drug addiction and slacknerness tend to work against him). Lars moves into the ocean house and helps Jimmy work on it, but the two find that they are attracted to each other and soon they do the deed. Talk about meet cute, and you’re right, you’ve guessed it. This is really a neo-Nazi, Danish Brokeback Mountain. But no matter what one makes of it, one can’t help but get all caught up in the predicament these two characters find themselves in. They can hardly reveal what is really going on to the others and neither of them know how to resolve the situation. And they have a point. Just how do you resolve a situation like this? Lars wants to take off, but, like the mob, you don’t just leave the Nazi party. And when Jimmy’s brother sees them in bed together and blows the whistle, the suspense becomes unbearable. Much of the success of this section of the movie has to be attributed to Dencik’s intense and searing performance. You shouldn’t feel sorry for him, he’s a Nazi for God’s sake, but he is so riveting in dramatizing the characters inner struggle, that your heart does go out to him. You even want these two to somehow find a happy ending. But it’s not to be as the story concludes with an action that is perhaps a bit too much The Postman Always Rings Twice for my taste. Lars and Jimmy are beaten up and told to leave town, but before they can, Jimmy is stabbed by a gay man he had set up and bashed earlier. He doesn’t die, but ends up in a coma he may never come out of. It’s shocking, but it’s a bit arbitrary. Still, it is heartbreaking.

Get Low, directed by Aaron Schneider and written by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell from a story by Provenzano and Scott Seeks, is one of those movies that you can tell the instant it stops working. Robert Duvall plays Felix Bush, a hermit who hasn’t left his home in forty years due to some incident that took place when he was younger. He’s come to the conclusion he may soon die, but decides he wants to have his funeral first and invites everybody far and wide to come and tell a story about him and to have a party. The backstory is a little unclear. Apparently, even though he hasn’t seen anyone for forty years, people have all these tales about him; one character even assaults him in town for something he did, but since the character wasn’t even born at the time Bush started the hermit thing, one has to wonder what Bush could possibly have done to him. In fact, what people know about him seems to be somewhat arbitrary, depending on when it best helps the plot. In the last third of the movie everyone comes to Bush’s place for his funeral party and…not one of them tells a single story; there’s no real party; and this is the moment where the movie stops working. Instead, Bush tells the story as to why he became a hermit. The problem here is that when he does, your reaction is, “so why did you become a hermit; I’m not sure I understand?”. The first two thirds of the movie are actually quite entertaining, but the last third is what might be called just a tad anti-climactic. It’s like the novel Heart of Darkness; it’s great until you get to the end of the journey and meet Kurtz and then it’s all somewhat of a letdown. Robert Duvall is a natural for this sort of thing and he is excellent. But the highlight of the film has to be Bill Murray as a cynical funeral home owner who finds something of a conscious along the way. His line readings steal the show. Also giving an effective performance is Lucas Black, the hero who is trying to just understand the ridiculous situation. Sissy Spacek is along for the ride, but she doesn’t really have anything to do, or at least anything worthy of a star of her caliber. It’s a beautiful movie to look with fine period feel to it all, but it just sort of runs out of steam at the end.

UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES: Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno and An Unfiinished Film/

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is, like the film The Epic That Never Was (about Joseph Von Sternberg’s I, Claudius), a film about a movie that never got made. Henri-George Clouzot is one of France’s greatest filmmaker, known primarily over here for a handful of films: Les Diaboliques, The Wages of Fear, Les Corbeau, The Mystery of Picasso, etc. In France, he’s almost equally famous for a film he never finished, L’Enfer, a movie he started shooting in 1964, but was ill fated to never complete. That took thirty more years when Claude Chabrol produced his version in 1994.

The story is about a man, played by Serge Reggiani, who thinks his wife, played by Romy Schneider, may be cheating on him; what made the film version by Claude Chabrol so interesting is that even though you felt the husband was being paranoid, there was the very real possibility he was right; his wife could have been making whoopee with a rather hunky car mechanic (hey, it is Romy Schneider we’re talking about). It is easiest to discuss this documentary, written by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea and directed by Bromberg, by dividing it into two parts: the sections devoted to the facts of the case, the reasons for the film never being completed, and the sections devoted to an experimental approach Clouzot was using to express the lead character’s paranoia.

The story about the film itself is the most satisfying section of the movie. It details how Clouzot, normally a person who plans well ahead and is very methodical in the way he usually made movies, was overwhelmed by Hollywood money and began acting like Michael Camino, recklessly spending; living the high life; and never being able to decide when something was done. At one point he had Reggiani run across a bridge over and over again until he got it just right (what is this, a Stanley Kubrick production). Clouzot had three sets of technicians that were supposed to be setting up different scenes and shots at different locations so that Clouzot would be able to go from place to place and shoot the scenes in one day, except that Clouzot could never seem to finish the first shot and move on. He had only a limited time to shoot the film as it was because the lake he was using was going to be drained. And then Reggiania, no longer able to take Clouzot’s treatment of him (including the continual sprint across the bridge), quit. Reggiani was replaced by Jacques Gamblin, who quickly quit himself. Hey, when a ship starts to sink, it starts to sink.

A second section of the documentary is devoted to scenes from the movie itself. Most of the film was to be shot in black and white, representing the realistic parts of the plot, and there are some very beautiful scenes here with the husband being haloed by a bridge and a scene where he makes that run across the bridge and along a ridge watching his wife water ski with the mechanic. But there’s also a series of experimental shots and scenes in color that are supposed to reveal the jealous husband’s inner mental journey. These are scenes that would be a wet dream to many avant garde filmmakers. The problem here is that the filmmakers show these scenes over and over and over and over and over again. One gets the gist of what Clouzot was trying to do fairly quickly, but one still has to see the same old scene again and again and again and again. It weighs the film down and makes it difficult to stay involved. It’s as if the filmmakers were trying to convince the audience that they were missing out on something artistically brilliant with these scenes, but they do it with a feeling of such desperation, it actually has the opposite effect. Instead of thinking I missed out on a masterpiece, I just wanted to miss out on the rest of the documentary.

An Unfinished Film is also about a movie that is, well, unfinished (there’s nothing like truth in advertising). During the occupation of Warsaw and after the creation of the Ghetto, Hitler’s regime decided to film a documentary about life in that infamous location. Though no one knows exactly what that purpose was, it seems that it was supposed to demonstrate that life in the Ghetto wasn’t necessarily that bad and if it was bad for anyone, it was because the Jews themselves refused to make things better. The suggestion was to be that there was an upper class of wealthy Jews who lacked for nothing, but who were content to let those that were less well off suffer. For some reason, again no one knows, the filming was stopped and the movie never completed. What was filmed was kept in a vault along with other records of the same time period.

This is where I’m probably going to get in trouble. Though the subject matter is important and even fascinating in and of itself, and it’s a story that needs to be told, the documentary itself left me a bit puzzled and cold. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to bring away with me. I learned that the film had been made, but I’m not sure I learned much more than that and I’m also not sure that that’s enough. It certainly couldn’t help the filmmaker, Yael Hersonski, who wrote and directed, that so much of the whys and wherefores are not available. Only one cameraman was located and though he did a lot of filming, he knew next to nothing about why he was being asked to do it. In addition, in 1966, an additional can of film was discovered that showed outtakes of scenes from the earlier reels. It showed that the scenes already filmed were not cinema verite, as the saying goes, but were carefully staged, edited and crafted with a purpose in mind (at one point, Jews who weren’t razor thin from starvation were herded into a fancy restaurant created for the sole purpose of filming a luxurious repast, and given what was probably the last good meal most of them ever got, in order to prove the economic disparity of those living in the Ghetto). As fascinating as that is, I still wasn’t sure why I was being told this.

I went to see it with my friend Beriau and he gave me some insightful information. He told me he had seen scenes from the unfinished film in other documentaries about the Warsaw Ghetto, and that creators of these other films had always taken these scenes at face value, that it was accepted as fact that there was a wide disparity of wealth in the Ghetto. With the discovery of the new reels, it was revealed that these scenes were not an accurate depiction of Ghetto life, but were a lie. And that all those in the past who had claimed that there were Jews who were well off had gotten it wrong. And this was supported by survivors of the Ghetto who watched the film and told the filmmakers the truth of what had really taken place. When he told me this, all I could think was, if only this had been what the film had been about, how the earlier cans of films had been misused to prove something untrue. Instead we have a bare as bones recitation of facts that for me needed a bit more history and context than I was given.

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: OR ROMANTIC COMEDY IS ALIVE AND WELL IN LOS ANGELES: reviews of Cyrus and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

I read not long ago that many feel the romantic comedy is dead. Usually when someone makes a statement like that, what is really means is not that the genre is dead, but that the person may be looking in the wrong location. When one speaks of modern romantic comedy, people usually drop the names Jennifer Anniston, Sandra Bullock, Katherine Heigl and Julia Roberts, what might be called the Irene Dunne/Claudette Colbert, Ernst Lubitsch/Leo McCarey approach, a sophisticated, battle of the sexes. In reality, perhaps they should have been looking at a more Preston Sturgess/John Hughes approach to romance, something a bit more messy and anarchic. Last year we had (500) Days of Summer. This year we have Cyrus and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

I have never been a big fan of mumble core films. I never could get that emotionally involved with the characters. For me, this subgenre of a subgenre of films have been about overeducated people who think they are interesting, but aren’t. Baghead is one of the few mumble cores that have worked for me, possibly because it didn’t seem quite so self absorbed. Instead of containing the usual suspects found in this type of film, Baghead was about someone who was tired of not making a movie, so he decides to make one; and an entertaining good time it was, too. The makers of Baghead, Mark and Jay Duplass, aka the Duplass Brothers, have now made a new movie using the mumble core style (the feeling of improvisation, the hand held camera, the low budget look), and possibly because it isn’t about the same olds, same olds usually found in these sorts of films (including, for me, The Puffy Chair, also by the Duplass Brothers, which in full faith and disclosure was one of those films I didn’t care for), all I could think is that it’s amazing what one can do with this style when you have a good script and even better actors.

Cyrus (Jonah Hill) is the son of Molly (Marisa Tomei), a widow who has perhaps grown a bit too close to her offspring. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Cyrus has grown too close to his mother. Molly still goes out and tries to live her own life, keeping herself open to a new romance. Meanwhile, though Cyrus has reached the age where most kids have fled their home for saner pastures, he’s holding on to the homestead with all the tenacity of a farmer threatened by cattle barons in a studio western of the old days. The cowboy who wants to cut down all the barbed wire Cyrus has put up is John (John C. Reilly), a sad sack downer of a person who has never recovered from his ex-wife Jamie (Catherine Keener) leaving him and who left because, well, he’s kind of a sad sack downer of a person. But there’s no hard feelings. Jamie’s the one who gets John to go to the party where he meets Molly who rescues John from an evening where he’s flummoxed from one embarrassing scene to another with all the geeky, yet balletic, beauty of a Woody Allen (and who’d have thought one would ever want to hear the song Don’t You Want Me, Baby again). When Cyrus meets John, it becomes take no prisoners as the two fight to the death (almost literarily at one point) over Molly’s attention.

Cyrus is very funny in one of those dark, edgy, almost sick comic ways. In other words, it’s my cup of tea, Sweet ‘n Low laced with a bit of arsenic. The direction, by the Duplass brothers, is very clever. They have a habit of pushing the camera in just at the right moment to take advantage of a funny moment, almost like a laugh track (which should be a negative, but here just seems to add a punch line to a punch line). The camera almost never seems to be on the person talking, but almost invariably on the person reacting as the other person talks, the last place you would think one would want the focus to be. Yet, this decision is one of the sources of all the humor. Of course, it helps to have a great reactor in Reilly, one of our finest character actors, supported more than ably by Tomei and Keener. The weak one of the bunch is perhaps Jonah Hill, but he fights to his last bated breath to keep up with the others and doesn’t let the movie down. I’m also not convinced that Reilly’s character is totally consistent. John starts out as a person who’s every waking hour seems to suggest a person out of his depth; then he meets Molly and he becomes one of the most brilliant strategists since Napoleon. But if he’s not consistent, Reilly does too brilliant a job of covering it up. In fact, the whole thing feels a bit shaggy dog, as shaggy dog as Reilly looks. Cyrus may be caustic, but so oft is the course of true love. And when the last frame vanishes from the screen one is a tad verklempt at the possibility of two lonely people finding each other.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is awesome. It’s amazing. It’s even better than that: it’s swell. If it’s not one of the best films of the year, it’s certainly one of the most fun. Scott is a guitarist in a band who is fake dating a seventeen year old high school student; who lives and sleeps in the same bed as his gay friend; who hasn’t been able to get over his last girlfriend, who is now the lead singer of the next big band; and who falls hopelessly in love with Ramona Flowers, a woman hopelessly out of his league. Just a typical day for the new generation, apparently, since no one seems that surprised at his predicament. Ramona, in turn, does begin to fall for Scott’s lack of charm (he’s the nicest person she’s ever dated, normally the kiss of death in any relationship, but here it actually seems to work in Scott’s favor, who knew?). But in order to win Ramona’s hand in dating, Scott has to defeat in battle her seven evil ex-boyfriends, something he starts doing before he even realizes that that’s what he’s doing.

Of course, Scott is not battling her exes. He’s actually defeating the baggage they left her with. It’s a metaphor. In fact, the movie is nothing but one huge metaphor. Almost everything is both literal and symbolic. Scott must defeat the bad effect Ramona’s exes had on her in order to free her up to love him. The real scary part is how accurate a metaphor this is for love. One doesn’t have to win the present, one also has to defeat the past, which is much more difficult. And it’s all played out metaphorically in which each battle is one level of a video game with each level becoming more and more difficult. The fights are battles right out of Asian anime: love’s a game and a battlefield at the same time.

It would be interesting to know how much the look of the film came from the director Edgar Wright; the screenplay by Wright and Michael Bacall; or the source material, a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley. It would be very difficult for me to believe that the style of the movie didn’t come directly from the graphic novels themselves. The movie uses every CGI trick in the book. Scott hits his head on a telephone pole and the word “thunk” appears on the screen (Holy insert, Batman); his 17 year old fake girlfriend says she loves him and the word comes out of her mouth like a smoke ring and he bats it away before it can reach him; Scott opens a door and he’s across town; people leap at each other like an animated version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; defeated characters turn into coins worth points in a game; swords appear inside Scott. It’s like Annie Hall on acid. But it works and when Scott and Ramona find each other at the finale, one feels like the two have earned their happy ending. Some have commented that this approach overshadowed the emotion of the story. I disagree. For me, Wright and Bacall found the perfect balance to showmanship and emotional empathy.

Most of the criticism of Scott… has focused on Scott, or actually, Michael Cera, who plays Scott, as perhaps not the best choice for the role. And I can’t say I disagree with them. Cera has a rather nerdy look and his humor comes from underplaying his emotions and talking out of the corner of his mouth. He’s not the most dynamic of personalities, which is actually the key to his comic timing and success. But it is a bit hard to believe that Ramona would ever give him the time of day. She is truly out of his league. The role might have worked better with someone more like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also has a slight nerdy look (at least if he wants to have it), but is a much stronger performer. At the same time, Cera commits himself to the role and the directors and writers have so tailored it to his abilities, that Cera never actually hurts the movie and his droll, dry, arid delivery gets more than its fair share of laughs. The best performance in the whole movie is probably given by Kieran Culkin, though, as Wallace, Scott’s friend who has allowed Scott half his bed and residency in his extremely small studio apartment. It’s probably also one of the best written gay characters in American movies in some time. It also shows where modern society is when a straight man can share a bed with a gay man without any fear of being called queer, yet at the same time can ask Wallace not to stick around the night Scott has Ramona over for fear Wallace might gay up the place (and then in actually, it’s Scott who’s the real danger of gaying it all up). This is the real threat to Prop 8.

NEW BLOOD AND PLENTY OF IT: Review of Mesrine: Part I, Killer Instinct

Jacques Mesrine is the French John Dillinger, a larger than life criminal who got a reputation as a Robin Hood without, like Dillinger, ever giving anything to the poor. He’s played in Mesrine, Part I: Killer Instinct, by the exciting French actor Vincent Cassel, son of French movie star Jean-Pierre Cassel. Cassel pers is more known for his appearances in the cinema that grew out of the French new wave, a studied and careful style of movie making influenced by the Hollywood studio system and directors like Hitchcock, Huston and Ford. As Cassel fils said in a Q&A at an interview of a sneak preview of Mesrine at the American Cinemateque, he and others of his generation had to find their own voice because their father’s way of making movies wasn’t doing it for them anymore. This resulted in movies still influenced by America, but now by Scorcese and Coppola (and the wheel comes full turn). In France, the movement has been termed “new blood”, partially, probably, because there is a lot more of that liquid on the screen. This also meant that Cassel fils had to find his own voice as well, and unlike his father who made films like Army of Shadows, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Murder on the Orient Express. Vincent is known for playing thugs and dangerous characters in movies like Eastern Promises, Irreversible and The Crimson Rivers.

And Mesrine is all Cassel. Apparently it’s his baby, a vanity project that he’s been working on for many years, and he is mesmerizing in the role. Mesrine was one of those people who had charm. He could insult your ethnic background and wear his racism on his sleeve, but he had charm. He could beat up women, but he had charm. He could kill people with the cool, clear collectiveness of a sociopath, but he had charm. He apparently also gave great headlines and knew how to talk to the press. Cassel said his biggest challenge was in charming the audience and making Mesrine interesting in spite of his viciousness. And Cassel succeeds. No matter what the faults of the movie may be, one is fascinated by this character and much of this is due to Cassel’s riveting and, well, charming performance.

Cassel said that he thought that one of the reasons why Mesrine is attractive to an audience is that he was someone who would say “no” to people, to the authorities, something that all of us would love to be able to do, but almost never have the courage to try. I think that’s true, but I also agree with my friend Beriau who saw the movie with me. He thinks that Mesrine is attractive because he was willing to make the romantic gesture, no matter the odds. He breaks out of prison and promises to return to help the others escape, an absolutely ridiculous idea doomed to failure (and the result is tragic), but he made the promise and he does it. He calls his girlfriend in prison and vows to break her out and she tries to convince him not to, that she doesn’t have that much time left to serve. But no, the romantic gesture demands he try. So in turn, she has to make the equally romantic gesture back and save his life by telling his that their relationship is over and she doesn’t want to see him again. He’s a sociopathic Don Quixote and Cyrano de Bergerac combined. He’s the epitome of European existentialism; the result is irrelevant, it’s the attempt, it’s the striving to be your authentic self that is important.

The weakest part of the movie is the screenplay itself, written by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Jean-Francois Richet, who also directed, from a book by Mesrine himself. The first part depends especially on a politically history of France that may be familiar to citizens of that country, but puzzling to those on these shores. It also tries to blame Mesrine’s sociopathology on his experiences in the Algerian war in a scene straight out of something that might have happened at Abu Ghraib; it feels oversimplified, though. One gets the feeling that Mesrine would have turned out to be a vicious, misogynistic, bigoted murder with little respect for human life even if he had been joined the Peace Corp. The story also feels a bit sketchy at times; the plot jumps from place to place and over periods of time without always letting the audience in on what’s going on (exactly who was that guy was who owned the Parisian casino that Mesrine and his girlfriend Jeanne robbed; who the hell knows; after awhile, it becomes who the hell cares). At the same time, it’s so skillfully put together and moves at such an exciting speed, that you end up not caring. At the interview, Cassel mentioned that people claimed that the editing felt very American, but he didn’t see it. I did. There was one scene of a car being blown up whose effect was extended by showing it happening again and again from different angles, and the attempted rescue from the prison is riddled not just with bullets, but myriad camera angles, giving it a very homegrown feeling. Add to that the thumping, hypnotic music score Eloi Painchaud and you got a pretty swell movie.

FAMILIES! CAN’T LIVE WITH THEM, CAN’T KILL THEM. OR CAN YOU? : reviews of Life During Wartime, The Kids are All Right and Winter’s Bones

Ten years ago, the jaundiced writer/director Todd Solondz created a film called Happiness, in which nobody was happy. I had serious issues with the movie. Even though I greatly admired the writing and thought the acting was superb with inspired casting (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Louise Lasser, Ben Gazzara, Jon Lovitz…Jon Lovitz? Yup, that was him), it was about a group of people that Solondz seemed to be criticizing for their cruelty and viciousness toward each other, both on purpose and through sheer ignorance at how they were coming across in their interactions. The issue I had is that Solondz himself treated the characters with the same cruelty and viciousness they showed each other and the hypocrisy ultimately weakened the movie for me.

Solondz has now come out with a new movie, Life During Wartime. It has what is called a gimmick for its plot. It takes all the characters of Happiness and meets up with them ten years later. It has a second gimmick. None of the characters are played by the same actors that played them in the original film. This sounds like genius, genius, I tells ya. But for me, it didn’t quite do it. In fact, I really felt that everything that the first one had going for it was missing from this semi-sequel. What first struck me was the uninspired casting. Though all the actors got the job done more or less, only two really rose to the heights of the original cast: Paul Reubens in the Jon Lovitz part (the Lovitz character killed himself in the first movie, so Reubens is basically a ghost, or a projection on the part of the character of Joy, played by the fragile voiced actress Shirley Henderson, who can’t seem to resolve the various issues in her life) and Ally Sheedy in the Lara Flynn Boyle role (and who is so good, one wishes she would have had the role in the original as Boyle was the weakest performance in the movie). While the actresses who played the sisters in the original seemed like siblings, that they actually could come from the same parents, here they look like they could only be sisters through adoption (or to paraphrase Pauline Kael, they seem to have only recently become a family). Other characters, like Ciaran Hinds, the child molester, don’t even seem to be the same character, but a whole new creation on Solondz’s part. In addition, whatever one might have thought about the original, the over the top plotting (child molesting; murder and dismemberment; dirty phone calls; suicide; one’s first jism) really kept one riveted. Here, nothing that much seems to be going on. Because of this, what seemed to be a brilliant and highly original idea, just seems more a puzzlement. The major question now becomes not why people are acting the way they are in Solondz’s universe, but why Solondz wanted to visit this universe again.

Winter’s Bone is also about a family that isn’t very nice to each other. But they aren’t nice about not being nice like in Happiness, where the characters throw out backhanded compliments and barely veiled insults, delivering them through smiling mouths and condescending gazes. In Winter’s Bone, the families actually go the distance and kill each other if the situation calls for it. Well, it’s not the way my family would handle it, but who are we to judge, really? And from the perspective of these people, the death of the central character’s father in this stark and unyielding movie (the title seems a very apt description) was called for. Winter’s Bone revolves around Ree Dolly, a teenager not quite old enough to join the army without her parents’ permission, and who is responsible for her two younger siblings and a mother who is barely functional emotionally. Her father was arrested for dealing meth (the main crop in the area where economic decay seems to have left locals with few choices), but then went missing when he was released on bond. Now, if he doesn’t show up for the hearing, the bond is forfeited and his house and land go up for sale to pay the debt, leaving Ree and her family homeless. My friend Jim, who went with me, observed that if this had been a typical Hollywood studio film, the main character’s goal would have been to find out who killed her father. I think he may be right. But here Ree doesn’t care who killed her father, partly because she knows that trying to find that out could lead to her death; but more importantly, she knows that her father deserved what he got. He broke the code of the locals by turning state’s evidence and that is just something one doesn’t do in this backwoods area. Winter’s Bone is a fine movie, the sort of movie that keeps me going to the theater. The script (by Anne Rosellini and Debra Granik) and directing (by Granik) are as taught and stark as the environment. The acting is first rate with Dale Dickey as Merab, the powerful wife of the head of the family who killed Ree’s father, and John Hawkes as a relative who looks like he’s wasting away from his drug addiction, taking the highest honors. Both have faces that look like the harsh winter background that surrounds them. You’d certainly never be able to recognize any of the actors by their head shots. Jennifer Lawrence as Ree carries the movie ably on her back. Dickey is the one with not just the best line, but the line that might summarize the whole culture Ree grew up in: when Dickey takes Ree to find her father, they go to a lake where his corpse has been submerged. They are there to cut off his hand so Ree can prove he’s dead (which means he didn’t skip bond and it is no longer forfeited), so Ree has to lift her father’s arm out of the lake. When Ree drops the body back into the water after the amputation, Dickey asks her why Ree did that; they have to take both hands or the authorities will think the person only cut off one of his hands so he wouldn’t have to go to jail; it’s a trick the authorities have caught on to (how many times did it take for this happened until the authorities realized they were being fooled).

The family in The Kids Are All Right aren’t very nice to each other either. But their sniping and bickering rises out of their being a family for so long. It’s not that they dislike each other, it’s more that they’ve lived together for so long, they’ve forgotten how to be nice to each other (that and many writers consider families that don’t snipe to be inherently uninteresting). The Kids Are All Right starts out as a variation on Boudu Saved From Drowning, the classic Jean Renoir movie from 1932 in which a homeless person, Boudu, is brought home by the head of a bourgeois family and moves him in after which Boudu proceeds to seduce everybody and destroy their middle class assumptions. In The Kids Are All Right, Boudu is Paul, played by Mark Ruffolo, an organic farmer/restaurant owner who always looks like he’s shaking something out of his hair like dirt being shaken off the roots of the vegetables he’s raising. He enters a household headed by Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) and proceeds to seduce everyone. He convinces the son Laser (Josh Hutchinson) to drop a friend that’s leading down a wayward path; he convinces the daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) that it’s time for her to become more of an adult and wean herself away from her controlling parents; and he convinces Jules that she has talents and self worth in her own right and doesn’t need to exist only in the shadow of her spouse. The only one he has trouble seducing is Nic, but he gets her, too, eventually; though he gets her just as she realizes that he is a seducer, and his house of cards falls down. Now the movie begins to resemble Martin Scorcese’s version of Cape Fear in which De Niro tried to destroy Nick Nolte’s family, but in so doing, made them realize that there was something wrong at the core of their relationship and brought them closer together than they had been in some time. Here, Paul seduces and in so doing first destroys the family, but in doing so makes them realize that something has been wrong with the way things were for some time, and ironically they emerge stronger than they were before. Though The Kids Are All Right is intelligent and entertaining, there is also something about it that doesn’t quite work and that may be the character of Paul. It’s hard to know exactly how to feel about him at times and this ambiguity may be what’s throwing the whole thing off balance a bit. The key scene here is when Paul tells Jules that he loves her. This, to be ruthlessly honest, is not one iota convincing or believable mainly because his relationship with Jules is no different than any of his other relationships with women. Actually, from my perspective, Paul is almost as sociopathic as De Niro’s character in Cape Fear. He has sex with Jules, but while Jules has some sort of excuse (she is not getting the attention from Nic she needs and she is desperate for someone to tell her that she is worth something, anything), Paul has no such excuse. He seduces Jules for the same reason he seduces every other woman; he wants another notch on his bedpost (and his smirky, sly smile suggests that Jules being a lesbian is just icing on the cake). To prove just how evil he is, just look at the scene he has with Tanya (Yaya DaCosta), his fuck buddy, a woman who has clearly hinted (so clearly it was like hinting him over the head with a dirt clod from his garden) that she wanted to have a deeper relationship and even start a family; but when she asks if she can come over, he heartlessly accuses her of not wanting what he suddenly, out of nowhere, wants: a family. It’s cruel and heartless and shows someone who desperately needs to find a soul. But the question is, did the authors (Stuart Blumberg and Lisa Cholodenko, who also directed) do this on purpose; and if they did, to what purpose? It actually reads a bit like the character of Paul sort of got away from them and they weren’t sure exactly what function they wanted him to serve. At the same time, The Kids Are All Right. is very enjoyable and a real crowd pleaser with an independent film veneer. It’s the Little Miss Sunshine of the year, one of these films that tries to convince people it’s being daring with its subject matter as well as a challenge to its audience. It isn’t and it isn’t, but that’s one of the reasons it’s so popular. It makes people think it’s something that it’s not; it has its cake and eats it to.