A QUARTET OF REVIEWS
THE HOLIDAY,
COPYING BEETHOVEN, INLAND EMPIRE, AND TEN CANOES
By Joel Johnson
THE HOLIDAY
Written and
directed by Nancy Meyers; director of photography, Dean Cundey; edited by
Joe Hutshing; music by Hans Zimmer
With: Cameron
Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jack Black, Eli Wallach, Edward Burns, Shannyn Sossamon,
Jude Law, and Rufus Sewell. Rated PG-13. Running time: 131 minutes
1/2
Nancy Meyers has
been a player in the movie business since being a screenwriter on Private
Benjamin (1980). She continues to write, but she has added producer and,
in the last few years, director to her vitae. Her forte is comedy—especially
romantic comedy. In The Holiday, Meyers combines her affection for
movies and the business of making them with a double helping of romantic
comedy. Kate Winslet plays a writer for a London daily paper. Cameron Diaz
plays a high-powered Hollywood marketing executive specializing in making
film preview trailers. About the only thing they share are unsatisfying
romantic relationships.
Iris (Winslet) has
been holding a torch for Jasper (Rufus Sewell) for three years when she, in
her role as a reporter of the society news, is specifically singled out to
receive the public announcement of his engagement. Iris decides she needs to
get away for the holidays. In L.A., Tinseltown couple Amanda (Diaz) and
Ethan (Edward Burns) have run out of magic. Although Ethan admits to an
indiscretion with another woman, he scores fencing points by placing blame
on Amanda’s workaholic lifestyle and her restrained emotions. She is, he
notes, a woman who doesn’t even cry over their failed romance. This scene
will never be included in an adoring retrospective of the work done by
either Diaz or Burns. They have the thankless task of showing their
characters’ blasé self-centeredness while going through what for most of us
would be an intense emotional experience. With tearless Amanda barely able
to register annoyance at this set of slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune, it hardly seems to justify Amanda’s demand for an immediate change
of venue.
However, Amanda is
soon on a home exchange website and emailing Iris about spending two weeks
in Iris’s cozy Cotswold cottage. Sooner than you can say, “Let’s exchange
homes,” the ladies are winging their way to each other’s houses. Eventually,
the two ladies’ love interests land on the scene. Iris’s brother Graham
(Jude Law) shambles inebriatedly into Iris’s cottage late one night and gets
much more than sisterly shelter from Amanda. Miles (Jack Black) and his
girlfriend Maggie (Shannyn Sossamon) show up at Amanda’s Hollywood mansion
to pick up Ethan’s laptop. Although there’s quickly an easy rapport between
Iris and the low-key Miles, this relationship will just simmer for much of
the film. Miles can only be described as Jack Black dialed back. While some
may find him thus pleasantly charming, fans of the more manic Black
characterizations will likely be disappointed.
Meyer ratchets up
the Hollywood factor by not only having Amanda and Miles (a composer) work
in the movie business, but she also features ninety-one-year-old Eli Wallach
as retired screenwriter Arthur Abbott, whom Iris befriends. Arthur, in turn,
prescribes old films to give Iris “gumption.” Arthur also appears to be
Nancy Meyer’s mouthpiece for a few pet peeves. More amusing is the use of
popular trailer narrator Hal Douglas for film trailers cut directly from
Amanda’s own self-perceptions. It will be interesting if audiences enjoy the
movie insider stuff. It is not particularly novel since films about making
films have been overdone in recent years.
This is, of
course, a chick-flick. So how do our leading ladies fare? Kate Winslet is
vulnerable, sad, angry, funny, and adorable. She shows a full range of
emotions and is eminently convincing in every scene. To be fair, she has a
role with a perfect foil (Sewell), a fairly straightforward interior life,
and the ability to express all of her emotions. Diaz has a truncated
emotional palette and struggles to make it believable. She fares best in
typical dating scenes with Law and less well when her character pulls back
from the relationship. Her character should have a more complicated interior
life, but Diaz is never able to make us believe that. She gets little help
from the script in explaining her feelings. Unfortunately, Diaz’s struggles
are only made more obvious by Winslet’s ease. An alternative version of the
film might concentrate on the Amanda story so that this character could be
better developed, but it would seem to be a major mistake to jettison the
best part of the film—Winslet’s Iris. The Holiday is far from
perfect, but it is amiable, entertaining, and has a couple of nuggets of
wisdom. That might not be quite enough to justify a full-price evening
admission at the multiplex, but it should be just fine for a matinée or home
viewing.
COPYING BEETHOVEN
Directed by
Agnieszka Holland; written by Christopher Wilkinson and Stephen J. Rivele;
edited by Alex Mackie; director of photography, Ashley Rowe
With: Ed Harris, Diane Kruger, Matthew Goode, Ralph Riach,
Joe Anderson, and Bill Stewart. Rated PG-13. Running time: 104 minutes
Films about
artists usually spend far too much time on the peccadilloes of their
personal lives rather than on the creative process that made their lives
notable. A glaring example of this is a French film called The Children
of the Century (1999) in which prolific nineteenth-century writers and
lovers Georges Sand and Alfred de Musset spend the entire film loving,
drinking, fighting, taking drugs, and making up without once even picking up
a pen. Clearly, the creative act (writing, painting, etc.) may not be
especially cinematic, but that has not deterred director Agnieszka Holland.
She has not only superbly captured one of the world’s most famous and
magnificent composers in the act of creating music but has also delivered a
commentary on artistic creativity.
Ed Harris is
fantastic in delivering a florid performance as an earthy and manic Ludwig
von Beethoven driven to complete his final works. Harris is able to
incorporate his character’s many contradictions into one coherent
personality. He behaves outrageously and is aptly described as “the beast,”
but he can also be gentle and insightful. He is brilliant yet completely
blind about the one person he held dearer than any other—his nephew Karl
(Joe Anderson). He is deeply ambivalent about God, acknowledging the gift of
being able to create music and resentful that God has made him deaf by
stealing his ability to hear music anywhere except inside his head.
Diane Kruger,
playing the fictional role of composing student Anna Holtz assigned the
titular task, is a revelation. Director Holland acknowledged to the Toronto
festivalgoers that she had had her own doubts as to whether the German
model-turned-actress was up to role but admitted being very pleased with her
performance. Certainly this should gain Diane Kruger much respect for her
acting ability instead of seeing her as “just another pretty face.” This is
very definitely a love story, just not a sexual one. Both actors deserve
Oscar consideration. Those responsible for the look of the film have made
the filmgoer feel transported body and soul to a gloomy, gothic early
nineteenth-century Vienna. The music is, of course, fantastic. The Toronto
film festival audience responded enthusiastically to both the film and the
filmmaker.
INLAND EMPIRE
Written and
directed by David Lynch; edited by David Lynch; art director, Christina
Wilson
With: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Grace
Zabriskie, Julia Ormond, and Harry Dean Stanton. Rated R. Running time: 179
minutes
David Lynch films
are never ordinary and forgettable like dozens of films that flood movie
theaters every year. That doesn’t necessarily translate into a film-going
experience that is fun, uplifting, entertaining, poignant, moving,
thought-provoking, heart-breaking, or any of several other adjectives that
might be regularly used by viewers to describe their favorite films. It is
worth noting that this film follows Mulholland Dr., and it appears
that some of the same concepts that were part of that film are part of this
one. Both have main characters that are actresses, and there is a blurring
of the actor’s real life and the actor’s role. As always, Lynch likes to
avoid the more typical filmmaking preoccupations of other writers and
directors. There is no chronological narrative and no metaphysical reality
as the action jumps around in time, in place (Hollywood, Los Angeles, and
Poland), sets of characters inexplicably appear and disappear, and
characters may literally see themselves in other situations.
Laura Dern, who
also starred in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart
(1990), accurately describes the situation, saying that she’s “lost track of
time” and can’t tell whether it’s yesterday, today, or tomorrow. Dern
delivers a dynamic central performance that deserves to be praised as she
keeps the audience’s focus and sympathy in the midst of a large cast and
lots of wild stuff. She is without question the film’s anchor. In that the
film returns several times to a set featuring three rabbits in a room, the
“Alice in Wonderland” motif of going down a rabbit hole is all too apparent.
Lynch is nothing
if not visually interesting, though his digital video cinematography
provides more dark, dingy, and dirty images than bright and garish ones. The
location scout seems to have cornered the market on abandoned buildings,
dark alleys, grimy corridors, and rundown homes. Still there is plenty that
is visually jarring and shocking, even if just occasionally it has a
whimsical flourish. This film has a fevered quality even more than other
Lynch productions. It seems to be a drug trip for those averse to using
psychotropic chemicals. Lynch doesn’t provide answers, and I don’t think I
have the Rosetta stone for his films. Inland Empire may have several
meanings in Lynch’s mind, but to me it speaks to the power of the human
imagination that resides within each head. Regardless, it continually
amazed, amused, repulsed, and befuddled me. However, as much as I enjoyed
the film, I couldn’t blame the three who were sitting directly in front of
me for leaving after the first hour. If you prefer conventional narrative
storytelling and realism, David Lynch’s Inland Empire is clearly not
the film for you.
TEN CANOES
Directed by Rolf
de Heer and Peter Djigirr; written by Rolf de Heer; cinematography by Ian
Jones
With: Richard
Birrinbirrin, Johnny Buniyira, Frances Djulibing, David Gulpilil, and Jamie
Gulpilil. Not Rated. Running time: 90 minutes
Dutch native and Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer and
his codirector Peter Djigirr provide a fictional film that fits a discipline
that now seems all but lost: cultural anthropology. The ubiquitous global
presence of Western—and especially American—culture has homogenized the
cultural diversity that was once studied in detail during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
Aboriginal actor
David Gulpilil (Walkabout, Crocodile Dundee, and
Rabbit-Proof Fence, among others) provides narration that accurately
sets the film as “my story and not your story.” Starting with the Aboriginal
creation story that has all life coming from and returning to a pond, the
film unfolds as a story within a story as we visit a time in the generations
before the white man arrived in Australia and then go back to an even
earlier time. This is a story about desire, jealousy, and wrongful revenge
in a society that permits polygamy. This does not mean that we are treated
to a film full of florid emotions and pulsating narrative. The film also
devotes time to give us a demonstration of the traditional technique for
making canoes from bark. This film is definitely a pageant with frequent use
of tableaux for telling its story. Its broad brushstrokes demand only a
snippet of dialogue or even just a look to illustrate. This Australian
Foreign Language Oscar representative is a unique film, but its leisurely
pace and modest acting performances probably will keep it from being one of
the five finalists (from an initial field of sixty-one films) let alone
taking home the prized statuette. Still, film viewers with an established
appreciation for National Geographic and who are looking for
something vastly different from typical Hollywood fare will find a rough gem
in Ten Canoes.
