THE EYE OF THE STORM and KEEP THE LIGHTS ON

The Eye of the Storm, the new period film written by Judy Morris and directed by Fred Schepisi, employs the Merchant/Ivory recipe for making a film, along with the same results.  Take a classic novel (here one written by Nobel Prize winning Australian Author Patrick White); add a lot of money, time and energy on the technical aspects of the film (cinematography, costumes, sets, etc.); then fold in a roster of well respected actors (Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush).  Let it all simmer together until voila: a meal that is sumptuous, but more than a bit dull.

The story revolves around Elizabeth, an aging matriarch nearing death, played by Rampling with a courageous lack of vanity (i.e., make up) that even surpasses Bette Davis’ performance in Mr. Skeffington (okay, okay, a little too inside a reference there, I admit it, but you go with what you got).   Elizabeth’s two children (Rush and Davis) don’t love her (and it’s not long before you figure out why), but they dutifully gather to wait for the inevitable: the reading of the will. 

Schepisi, who has made some wonderful films in the past (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and The Devil’s Playground to name a few) can never quite get the tone right here.  It’s all a bit much and off center (is it a comedy, a drama, a tragicomedy; is it a breath mint, a candy mint).  And Morris can’t quite find a focused enough through line to hook the story to (it’s almost unclear why Rush’s character is even in the movie, he really has so little to do with it all but mine it for an autobiographical play he writes in the epilog). 

Everyone and everything is filmed for maximum decadence and decay.  And in case you don’t get it, there are shots of worms eating their way out of pears; flies caught in mason jars of preserved fruits; and gardens overflowing with earthworms.  But perhaps the most bizarre bits are Helen Morse as the appropriately named Lotte, Elizabeth’s companion and housekeeper, performing cabaret numbers in 1920’s drag, singing as if the Nazi’s were nipping at her rear end and she were a cast member of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (though I doubt it would have helped if her act had been modeled on Bob Fosse).  

Everyone tries hard and the movie reeks with sincerity.  But in the end, what everyone is trying to do here is all a bit too vague.  To return to the opening metaphor, it’s a soufflé that just refuses to rise.

I’ll just make this next one short and sweet.  Weekend was a movie about two gay men who somehow convinced themselves (and the audience) that a three day, one night stand had more romantic meaning than it did.  The characters weren’t very interesting and it was like watching paint dry.  Keep the Lights On is about ten years in the life of two gay men and the difficulty of maintaining their relationship since one is a drug addict.  The characters are marginally more interesting and the paint dries a little faster, but that’s about it.

TO ROME WITH LOVE

I loved To Rome With Love.  And before everyone goes all tweetery on me and starts ending me hate mail, I am fully aware that it has its faults.  I don’t care.  I loved it.   To Rome With Love is really a portmanteau film, merely an excuse for writer/director Woody Allen to string together four separate stories.   In this way, it’s more or less like his early film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.   But whereas in …Stranger only one story really worked (that of Josh Brolin plagiarizing a friend’s novel when the friend went into a coma), all four stories in To Rome… had merit.  Yes, there is a certain awkwardness to some of the plotting and parts of it could have used a bit more thinking through and may even feel rushed, but they all had their charm and a certain magic to them.  The one that pretty much succeeds on its own terms and feels the most fully realized over all is the one with Woody Allen and Judy Davis (who spouts Allen’s bitchy lines with an Eve Arden heat seeking missile of a delivery) in a tale that feels like a short story that Allen would have written for the New Yorker.  In it, he’s an ex-opera director who discovers a major tenor in the father of his future son-in-law.  The problem is that the man can only sing beautifully in the shower.  So Allen has to stage the singer’s performances in the style of Mary Martin performing I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair in South Pacific, with the end result an hysterical staging of Rigoletto.  The second most successful story concerns two honeymooners, innocents from a small town, who find themselves not only seduced by Moma Roma itself, but the man by a prostitute (a very funny Penelope Cruz) and the woman first almost by a movie actor, but then all the way by a hotel thief (you had to be there) in a plot that feels a bit more than borrowed from Federico Fellini’s movie  The White Sheik.  The best performance is probably given by Roberto Benigni as an everyman who finds himself suddenly, out of nowhere, and for no explainable reason, famous for being famous.  The start is a bit clunky and the idea is obvious, but Benigni is a riot.  The least successful, but perhaps most interesting, is Alec Baldwin (somewhat type cast as a somewhat rueful architect) who once lived in Rome.  He meets a young man (Jessie Eisenberg), also an architect, who just happens to be going through the same romantic crisis that Baldwin went through at the same age.  The dialog and philosophical tete a tetes feel a bit dated and very Annie Hallish, and Baldwin’s integration into the story is not well thought out.  It should have been better, but it also has its moments.  The stories all seem unified not just by location, but by theme.  If feels as if Allen is saying that maybe it’s better to not achieve one’s goals, that perhaps in life one would be happier and more at peace if one settled for a simpler life.  In the end, only the Allen character really gets what he wants (staging the perfect opera), but it’s an illusion.  He doesn’t realize that he is actually being ridiculed by his peers.