MIFF 2005 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK
By Joel Johnson
DAY 3
Five Children and It.
At my wife’s insistence, Day 3 began with Five Children and It.
Children’s literature buffs will quickly recognize this as a work by author
E (Edith) Nesbitt. She was also the author of The Railway Children
which has been adapted for two film versions and into three television
series in Britain. This film begins with the five children boarding a train
in London during World War I that will take them to live with their Uncle
Albert (Kenneth Branagh). Both father (Alex Jennings) and mother (Tara
Fitzgerald) have worked to do for the war effort. Father is a pilot headed
for dangerous aerial combat. The eldest Cyril (Jonathan Bailey) has been
given the mantle of family leadership by the parents, but high-spirited
Robert (Freddie Highmore) resents this authority conferred on his brother.
The five children also include sisters Anthea (Jessica Claridge), Jane
(Poppy Rogers), and baby brother Lamb (played by twins Alec and Zak
Muggleton). Once they arrive at their uncle’s dark and forbidding estate,
they receive one extra-solemn instruction about not going into the
greenhouse. Robert veritably flies immediately to the greenhouse to see what
all the fuss is about. Then like Eve, he induces all his siblings to violate
the one proclaimed prohibition. One passageway opened by Lamb and the
children are on the beach with It—a sand fairy (voiced by Eddie Izzard).
Sand fairies can grant wishes and the children have some interesting
adventures in wishing. John Stephenson’s film has a little trouble getting
its fantasy off the ground, but eventually it does with the predictable
comic highlights, family melodrama, and educational lessons intact. Adults
certainly hardened to sterner stuff with more bang for the buck may find the
story a little too simple, gentle, old-fashioned and trite. Despite my
ambitions to be a hard-headed critic, I found myself caught up in the
emotions the film sought to play. Thinking perhaps my own sentimentality had
undone my critical skills, I quickly solicited the opinions of the four
young girls who had been serendipitously placed in the row directly in front
of me. They cheerfully acknowledged that they had enjoyed the film. So the
children’s film based on the children’s book had clearly hit the intended
audience—children—and many of the adults allowed as they had liked it, too.
Angela
The next film also focuses on children, but it clearly is not intended for
an audience of children. Rebecca Miller’s first film Angela explores
the imaginations of children. Primarily, this is Angela’s (Miranda Stuart
Rhyne) imagination—the elder of two young sisters. The girls’ mother Mae
(Anna Thomson) is suffering from mental illness so neither mother nor father
Andrew (John Ventimiglia) is able to provide effective parenting. Angela and
her younger sister Ellie (Charlotte Eve Blythe) try to make sense of the
strange things that are happening around them and try to figure out the
rules of living so that they can get to heaven. The film has scenes that are
lyrical and others that are deeply disturbing. Both the Virgin Mary and
Lucifer make appearances. This particular screening suffered because the
Opera House sound system muddied the dialogue and the dialogue provides the
key for how the images fit into Angela and Ellie’s view of their world.
While the film alternately lifts one up and then hits one with disturbing
material, the film definitely showcases Miller’s talent in displaying the
power of a child’s imagination in creating both beauty and horror from the
shards of life interpretations provided by adults. She is ably assisted in
this endeavor by cinematographer Ellen Kuras (who has shot all three of
Miller’s films here at MIFF as well as I Shot Andy Warhol) and composer
Michael Rohatyn (another three-time collaborator with Miller). Miller did
allow during her Q & A that she was very naïve when she made Angela
and described is as “so uncommercial.” She did acknowledge that the
children’s view of Christianity was somewhat autobiographical from her own
preoccupations as a child. I can’t say that I enjoyed this film—at least,
not consistently—but it is so intriguing that I’m going to try to find it so
I can see it again.
The Beautiful Country
The week before MIFF started, my wife and I saw the Maine State Music
Theatre production of Miss Saigon. Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland’s
The Beautiful Country is a powerful film that tells a similar story
as that musical. Both are concerned with the lives created by US soldiers
and Vietnamese women during the decade-long war that continues to
reverberate in both the American and Vietnamese consciousness. The
Vietnamese look at these mixed race children as “bui doi” which translates
to English as “less than dust.” Damien Nguyen stars as such a child having
reached adulthood when the film’s story begins in 1990. Apparently raised by
his aunt and grandmother in rural Vietnam, Binh has learned a number of
survival skills for his life with, yet apart from his extended family. There
are lovely scenes of Binh fishing and riding a water buffalo in the
beautiful Vietnamese countryside. Yet when his aunt accepts a marriage
proposal, her new husband leaves suitcases with Binh’s possessions outside
the door. His grandmother finally tells him that his mother is not dead as
he has always been told and that she is living in Saigon—now called Ho Chi
Minh City. Here, too, Binh’s mixed race background marks him for scorn. A
tragic accident necessitates that Binh flee and his mother Mai sends him off
with his little half-brother Tam on an epic journey intended for America. A
land he has been told is a “beautiful country.” However, a Malaysian refugee
camp is Binh’s first stop. There he meets Chinese refugee Ling (Bai Ling)
and a family unit coalesces—perhaps initially based on the two adults’
attachment to Tam. They finally get on a ship bound for America as illegal
immigrants. Sabina Murray and Lingard Jervey are credited with collaborating
to develop the film’s story with Murray credited as the screenwriter. The
film’s story, its unfussy cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh, its pacing
through the editing of Wibecke Rønseth, and the choice to film extensively
in Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Mandarin in addition to English makes the film
feel almost like a documentary. The film is quite intriguing and maintains
audience interest virtually throughout, although I found its approach to the
ending to be a much slower than I would have preferred. However, other
festival goers seemed to feel that the slow pace was essential to this very
personal bittersweet journey. Regardless, the film tells a powerful story of
the painful links between Vietnam and the United States.
Shakespeare Behind Bars
Shakespeare Behind Bars is a documentary about a progressive
rehabilitation program offered to prisoners at Luther Luckett Correctional
Facility in Kentucky. The Shakespearean play the group will workshop,
rehearse, and eventually perform is The Tempest. The overriding theme of
this play is forgiveness and the men of the theater group have a great need
for forgiveness and, especially, to forgive themselves. The group includes
several murderers, armed robbers, and a pedophile. Hank Rogerson’s
documentary takes its time in introducing us to the institution, the actors,
the play, and the horrific crimes committed that have scarred the
perpetrator and so many others. Despite the acts, the prisoners must
continue their own journey through life attempting to find some redemption
for, as one described it, “the worst thing I have ever done.” The men do not
mince words as they describe their actions. It is clear that they deeply
regret the actions taken which landed them in prison. While the stories may
include information about how they did not receive the nurturing they felt
they needed nor how to process anger constructively, they generally do fully
understand their own responsibility for what they have done. The face of a
murderer is not a monster, but one that can be very human. The journey these
men go on is to discover in the play and, specifically, the parts they play
key elements for their own lives. It is an amazing process to watch. I don’t
know if this will be my choice as the best film of this year’s MIFF, but it,
like Beautiful Country, is one that I will want to remember before I vote.
Additional Review
Mouth to Mouth
Ellen Page is a young
woman who just turned 18 in February. This was about a month after she
created a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival with her portrayal of a 14
year-old girl in Hard Candy who turns the tables on a man in his
thirties that she met on the internet. In Alison Murray’s similarly intense
film about the things that are not supposed to happen during one’s
childhood, she stars as a young teen absorbed into an exploitative cult
called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge (Spark). The bizarre
lifestyle of the cult and their sense of imparting profound wisdom to
everyday people is somewhat reminiscent of the Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots.
They start by intervening to address the drug problems the runaways have and
then gradually begin a process of grounding down their young victims. Eric
Thal plays Harry, the group’s leader. He quickly demonstrates his hypocrisy
by outlawing sex and then seducing the young girls. Murray shows the full
callousness of his seduce-blame-and-abandon conquest strategy. Things get
really weird for Sherry (Page) when her mom Laurie (Natasha Wightman) shows
up. Much to Sherry’s dismay, her mom decides to join the group, too. The
film occasionally reverts to dance to show some things that it doesn’t seem
to adequately handle through the rest of the film and the mother-daughter
relationship is one of the sequences where this is used. Considering the
strong sense of reality the film had usually tried to maintain, the dance
just seems odd and off-putting. But off-putting could be said about much of
the film. Ultimately the film simply doesn’t work despite some potentially
powerful material. The leader seems to lack a true charisma or message that
would reach the kids and the kids seem too fragile and weak to ever have
gotten too far from home.
Day 4 -->
