FOUR REVIEWS:
KNOCKED UP, THE VALET, JINDABYNE, and THE AURA
By Joel Johnson
KNOCKED UP
Written and directed by Judd Apatow;
director of photography, Eric Edwards; edited by Brent White and Craig
Alpert; music by Loudon Wainwright and Joe Henry
With: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul
Rudd, Leslie Mann, Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and Harold Ramis.
Rated R. Running time: 129 minutes
Judd Apatow (The
40-Year-Old Virgin) has emerged from this season of the “Threes” (Spiderman-3,
Shrek the Third, the third Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s
End, and the third Ocean movie—Ocean’s 13) as the latest
filmmaking darling with his critical and box office comedy sensation
Knocked Up. Knocked Up takes a situation that generally isn’t
used as the makings of comedy: reckless sexual indulgence between two people
who don’t know each other and would seem to be mismatched that leads to an
unintended pregnancy.
The mother-to-be
is Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), a staffer at E! Entertainment
Television who has just gotten a promotion to be an on-air personality.
Her celebration of this finds her out with her married sister Debbie (Leslie
Mann, director Apatow’s real-life wife) at the same nightspot that Ben Stone
(Seth Rogen) and his loser buddies Jason (Jason Segel), Jay (Jay Baruchel),
Jonah (Jonah Hill), and Martin (Martin Starr) have chosen to frequent. These
guys appear so mentally challenged it does cross one’s mind that they simply
do not have the wherewithal to handle being a character with a name
different from their real name. Ben and Alison meet at the bar waiting to be
served, and the chivalrous act of letting her have his beer sets in motion
the events that will change their lives. Coaxed by his self-professed
babe-magnet friend Jason, Ben reluctantly follows up on his earlier
encounter. Heigl’s Alison, showing all the good judgment and restraint in
matters sexual that she’s learned on the set of her television show
Grey’s Anatomy, drunkenly invites Ben back to her sister-in-law (usually
called the mother-in-law) apartment at the home of her sister and
brother-in-law Pete (Paul Rudd) for a romp in bed. As things heat up as they
are wont to do, Ben mistakes her urging to “get on with it” as he fumbles
with the contraceptive accoutrement not as “hurry up and put it on,” but as
the Nike ads say: “JUST DO IT.” So he does. The next morning Alison begins
to come to grips with who this man really is, and she is definitely not
impressed.
Nor should she be.
Ben and his buddies seem like pledge rush rejects from National Lampoon’s
Animal House Delta fraternity. Ben has been living off a small
settlement of a few thousand dollars for the last several years in Southern
California. It’s so ridiculous it should be worth a few laughs, right? They
are working on a website that directs the curious and pruriently motivated
directly to the “good parts” of a film where an actress was in some state of
dishabille (except they wouldn’t know this word) or naked or otherwise
engaged in some form of sexual behavior. It is not that this is a stupid
thing to do because there isn’t a market for this type of information. There
most definitely is. What is supposed to be funny is that they are clueless
that their website would not be the first to offer it.
Apatow throws the
full monty from the gross-out comedy arsenal, but his best asset is Rogen,
who makes an amiable teddy-bear presence. The film’s focus is on Ben’s
journey to fatherhood, and it is hard not to root for Rogen to make it.
There is an excellent scene between Ben and his dad (Harold Ramis) that
convinces Ben he should be eager to accept fatherhood. Of course, Ben’s
father’s credentials for dispensing relationship advice is undermined by the
revelation that he’s been married and divorced three times. Halting though
Ben’s journey may be, it does indeed begin.
However, the film
doesn’t choose to provide the counterpoint of Alison’s journey to
motherhood. We instead see that the seemingly perfect little family of
Alison’s sister Debbie, her husband Pete, and their two cherubic daughters
Charlotte (Iris Apatow) and Sadie (Maude Apatow) is rife with fault lines.
Pete needs space, and Debbie needs constant reassurance. The Alison
character seems to have been seriously shortchanged. She has no friends, no
dreams, and no drive. The lack of drive really flies in the face of the
backstory created for her. One usually doesn’t just fall into jobs as on-air
television talent without a fair amount of ambition and perseverance. We can
understand that she didn’t dream about ending up with someone like Ben as
the father of her children, but we never learn what her dreams are. While
the mismatched parents would seem to make a fairly compelling case for
terminating the pregnancy, it certainly does not fit the story and would cut
short the movie somewhere around the forty-minute mark. However, it seems
rather bizarre that the only one to mention abortion (rather obliquely) is
one of Ben’s dim-witted roommates and that this option is never really given
any serious consideration.
The film does have some very funny segments, but it’s not
quite as funny as it would like to be. The humor is often stupid and
offensive. Telling a story about this situation from a comic perspective is
unique, and this would clearly make it seem fresh to critics and moviegoers.
There are some good scenes as the couple lurch toward being a family, and
Apatow does capture the ebb and flow of insecurities and trust. The crux of
the film is how this very unconventional young man adopts the very
conventional role of husband and father when life-altering fatherhood stares
him in the face. This is familiar to most people in the audience, and Rogen
does have a way of being endearing. But this isn’t a fresh resolution to the
film, and it is definitely a fable. It is to be hoped that this one will not
encourage people to act rashly in sexual situations, feeling that somehow an
unplanned pregnancy will just work out like the movie. It works out here
because it is in the script, and the pat ending doesn’t feel fully earned.
VALET
Written and
directed by Francis Veber; original music by Alexandre Desplat;
cinematography by Robert Fraisse
With: Gad Elmaleh, Alice Taglioni, Daniel Auteuil, Kristin Scott Thomas,
Richard Berry, Virginie Ledoyen, and Patrick Mille. Rated PG-13. Running
Time: 85 minutes
Comedy is an art
form that can have enormous difficulty in transcending national boundaries.
The problem is not the lines drawn and the different colors used on a map to
distinguish different nations but the languages spoken and understood.
Francis Veber’s Valet (La Doublure is the original
French title) does, however, make the trip from France to the United States
and delivers its laughs. The film, of course, owes much to the long
tradition of French farce.
Daniel Auteuil
plays CEO Pierre Levasseur, who owes his position to his marriage to his
wife Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) as much as to his business acumen and
who suddenly finds himself getting an ultimatum from his supermodel mistress
Elena (Alice Taglioni): Divorce his wife and make her Mme. Levasseur. While
publicly arguing about this, a paparazzi swoops in to take an incriminating
photo of the couple. While conniving Christine sharpens her nails to make
sure that she gets her fair share of his flesh, Pierre and his attorney
(Richard Berry) concoct a scheme to save his marriage and his portfolio.
They must find the third person in the photo—restaurant parking valet
François Pignon (Gad Elmaleh), who just happened to be passing by—and
convince him that he and Elena should pose as a couple.
François Pignon—if
that name sounds familiar you probably have seen one of the five other films
that Francis Veber wrote and/or directed that had a character with that
name—has his own troubled romance with childhood sweetie and budding
bookshop entrepreneur Émilie (Virginie Ledoyen). She feels that she has
outgrown the happy-go-lucky François now that she is up to her beautiful
eyes in debt for her bookstore inventory. Enter preening peacock and
avaricious cell phone salesman Pascal (Patrick Mille), seeking to steal away
beautiful Émilie. So, to stir the comic stew, we have two intersecting love
triangles and a few other characters such as Pignon’s adoring parents, a
slacker roommate, and an ailing doctor who makes house calls. It also owes
much to its fine cast. Auteuil completely throws himself into his role of a
two-faced philanderer who becomes unnerved by what he himself has created.
Scott Thomas thoroughly enjoys delighting in his discomfiture. Elmaleh is
effective as the earnest everyman both bemused and beset by what others want
him to do. Taglioni turns her caricature role of vapid self-involvement
completely on its head to be sweet and wise in addition to beautiful. There
is a steady and regular flow of the paroxysms of laughter. This is, however,
minor Veber and doesn’t quite match his work in The Dinner Game and
The Closet, but nonetheless it is a perfect “Friday night” movie.
JINDABYNE
Directed by Ray
Lawrence; written by Beatrix Christian, based on the story “So Much Water So
Close to Home,” by Raymond Carver; director of photography, David
Williamson; edited by Karl Sodersten; music by Paul Kelly and Dan Luscombe,
featuring Soteria Bell
With: Laura Linney,
Gabriel Byrne, Deborra-lee Furness, John Howard, Leah Purcell, Stelios
Yiakmis, Alice Garner, Simon Stone, Sean Rees-Wemyss, Tatea Reilly, Eve
Lazzaro, and Betty Lucas. Rated R. Running time: 123 minutes
Director Ray
Lawrence and screenwriter Beatrix Christian transport to Australia Ray
Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” about fishermen
discovering a dead body in the Pacific Northwest. Jindabyne is a lakeside
community in Australia, and the lake was manmade with the dammed up water
covering an earlier community. An old newsreel tells the story of this
history in the opening minutes, setting the stage for reflection on the
lives of those we follow. This is the second time this story has been
adapted for the big screen. It was one of the source stories used for Robert
Altman’s Short Cuts. In addition to focusing exclusively on the story
of finding the dead body, this version adds in a cultural dimension. The
pretty young woman (Tatea Reilly), whose body is found, is Aborigine. She
has been murdered. Although we don’t actually see her killed, we see events
leading up to this and then what happens after it. The audience knows right
away who did it. Many films have used similar set-ups for a story about the
police or an official or unofficial sleuth solving the crime and bringing
the murderer to justice, but this is not that kind of film. This is a story
about how people relate to each other, whether they respect each other, what
they consider important, how they look at the past, and how they mourn those
they have lost.
Four couples
celebrate the beginning of a short vacation. The men will be heading off on
an annual fishing trip in nearby mountains that are sacred to the Aborigine
people. There are evident fault lines in the relationships—fault lines that
will be stressed by the events of the next few days. Irish immigrant Stewart
Kane (Gabriel Byrne) runs the local service station and is the leader of the
group of fishermen. After a long drive and an equally long hike into the
wilderness, he will discover the woman’s body in the stream where the men
will fish, and it will be his decision to postpone reporting the discovery
until the end of the fishing trip. This decision will be questioned harshly
by the police and the local papers, but the most severe judgment will come
from Stewart’s own wife Claire (Laura Linney), who struggles both to
understand her husband’s action and to make amends for his negligence to the
woman’s family and friends. Linney is outstanding in this role. Each of the
couples has their own issues to sort through for which their role in this
tragedy will serve as a prism. Stewart and Claire must come to terms with
Claire’s abandonment of her family for the first eighteen months of her
son’s life—presumably due to postpartum depression. Carl (John Howard) and
Jude (Deborra-Lee Furness) are raising their mischievous granddaughter
Caylin-Calandria (Eve Lazzaro), following their own daughter’s death. Rocco
(Stelios Yiakmis), Carl and Jude’s would-be son-in-law, is dating
part-Aboriginal schoolteacher Carmel (Leah Purcell). Stewart’s young hired
helper Billy (Simon Stone) is the conscience of the fishermen and just wants
to start a life together with Elissa (Alice Garner) and their baby.
The film’s story
is ultimately about real life in the crucible of tragic events and bad
decisions. This is a layered film that seeks and does its best to keep the
audience’s attention throughout. There are no throwaway scenes. This would
be an excellent film for a discussion on subjects such as death, morality,
and cultural differences. Seeing this film on DVD could be quite helpful,
with the opportunity to employ subtitles for the accented English as well as
the possibility of a commentary to help provide insight into the intentions
of the filmmakers. This is a tough film and deals with some difficult
material, but it makes a very worthwhile outing to the cinema.
THE AURA
Written (in
Spanish, with English subtitles) and directed by Fabián Bielinsky; director
of photography, Checo Varese; edited by Alejandro Carrillo Penovi and
Fernando Pardo; art director, Mercedes Alfonsín
With: Ricardo
Darín, Dolores Fonzi, Pablo Cedrón, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Jorge D’Elia,
and Alejandro Awada. The film is unrated. Running time: 138 minutes.
While watching a
film, it isn’t often that I am reminded of Alfred Hitchcock, but in The
Aura Fabián Bielinsky (Nine Queens) delivers the same thrill and
dread of which Hitchcock was the acknowledged consummate master. Ricardo
Darín is the mild-mannered everyman at the center of The Aura. He is
an epileptic taxidermist named Espinosa, whom we first meet picking himself
off the floor by his bank’s automatic teller machine. Physicians call an
aura the sensations that act as a precursor to an epileptic seizure. Next we
see him working on a fox in his workshop while listening to classical music.
A woman—presumably his wife—is a shadowy distorted presence in the
translucent glass of the workshop door. We are aware of her voice, but we
cannot make out any words and no subtitles are provided. The music is turned
up. The camera pans across a counter with newspapers shouting headlines of a
series of botched heists and deadly shootouts. Later we see him delivering
the stuffed fox to a natural history museum where he runs into a fellow
taxidermist Sontag (Alejandro Awada).
While the two men
are waiting to receive payment at the museum’s pay office, Espinosa posits a
precisely detailed plan to rob the place. Sontag is not impressed, reminds
Espinosa of his childhood cowardice, and offers instead a hunting trip as a
challenge to Espinosa’s manhood. Initially disinterested, Espinosa changes
his mind when he realizes that his wife has moved out while he was at the
museum. We have learned that Espinosa is a quiet, fearful man who has shied
away from conflict and who has never even used a gun to kill an animal like
the trophies he mounts. His old acquaintance shows that Espinosa
masterminding a precision heist and brandishing a gun to carry it off is
simply a deluded fantasy.
The hunting trip
goes badly. The four-star hotel where they were planning to stay is full and
so are all the other standard hotel accommodations. They are, instead,
directed to primitive hunting cabins deep in the woods. Once actually
hunting, the two men fall out. Sontag heads back to the cabin in disgust,
but Espinosa lingers in the woods trying to screw up his courage to get off
a shot at a deer. When he finally pulls the trigger, he will set in motion a
bizarre set of circumstances that will change the lives of many people. He
will eventually have to face down his fears, using every soupçon of guile
and cunning that he possesses and find a toughness that he has heretofore
lacked in order to survive. He will eventually find himself insinuated
indispensably into the middle of a criminal enterprise because he knows too
much. He will find the reality of dealing with men driven by desperation to
moral bankruptcy to be far more gruesome than his fantasy.
Ricardo Darín’s
Espinosa is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s everyman heroes, such as those played
by Jimmy Stewart, who find themselves caught in the middle of something
extraordinary that has reached into their conventional lives. Bielinsky
keeps the narrative moving efficiently, pushing and then slowing the pace of
the action. He cleverly uses imagery that shows the mundane of human
civilization and the wild savage beauty of nature, other images that evoke
the seizure, and then adroitly endows an animal with omniscient wisdom.
Bielinsky manages to do with a good story (Bielinsky also wrote the script),
good actors, and fine execution of filmmaking what all the CGI in
Spiderman 3 and its ilk failed to do—make my heart beat faster.
Regrettably, we will have no more of his films to look forward to since he
suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after completing this one.
