THE DRIVE TO REVIEW:
SO MANY MOVIES, SO LITTLE TIME
Open Hearts (Elsker Dig For
Evigt)
Nicholas Nickleby,
Down With Love
Assassination Tango
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (À la Folie…Pas du Tout)
Raising Victor Vargas
Russian Ark (Russkij Kovcheg)
Bruce Almighty
Spellbound
Laurel Canyon
Winged Migration (Le Peuple Migrateur)
The Dancer Upstairs
By Joel Johnson
This is the movie critic’s version of the game-winning touchdown drive. I
have been diligently watching all sorts of movies with the intent of sharing
with you my reactions to them. Unfortunately, I have not been quite as
diligent in actually writing reviews of these movies. Despite my best
intentions, my slothful nature has come through once again, and I find myself
behind. So down by a score with just a handful of grains left in this game’s
hourglass in the shadow of my own goalpost, it is crunch time (don’t you
just love sports metaphors?). It’s time to put it all together and go the
distance for a glorious game-winning score. I may be short and pudgy—sort of
like Roger Ebert—and I may aspire to having a thumbs up / down trademark
like Roger Ebert, but I want to be Joe Montana.
Open Hearts (Elsker Dig For Evigt) was the Danish entry for
the best Foreign-Language Academy Award. You probably didn’t know that. The
five finalists represented Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, and Mexico. The
Danes were an also-ran but had something that many other entries into the
Foreign-Language category did not have—American distribution. Some years,
even being a finalist doesn’t get you that. Susanne Bier’s film is notable
as being a Dogma film duly certified as meeting the chastity vow for
bare-bones essential filmmaking unsullied by elaborate sets, glitzy
lighting, soaring soundtracks, phenomenal computer-generated special
effects, etc. The Dogma ethic, originated by Lars von Trier, Thomas
Vinterberg, and a handful of other primarily Danish filmmakers, is either a
reaction to Hollywood’s over-reliance on technical production values at the
expense of good story telling or a way to artistically glorify filming on a
shoestring or maybe both. Open Hearts is, however, one of the
most effective of the Dogma films (I have seen several), and the reason is
that it has a very thought-provoking story to tell. A traumatic car accident
changes the lives of several people, including the accident victim, his
fiancée, the woman driving the car that hit him, and her husband. How does
one respond to the tragic circumstances this sets in motion—with an open
heart or a closed one? The film is at its best exploring the angry and
bitter reactions of the newly-disabled young man, the germination of a new
love between the beautiful rejected fiancée and the too-helpful physician
whose head is too easily turned, while his wife who drove the car and their
family try to deal with the guilt, anger, and pain of the new situation.
Bier generously spreads the guilt and humanity throughout the characters in
the film and, while dealing with an angst-ridden story, what slowly emerges
is something quite hopeful. The film is weakest in showing the accident,
presenting the accident victim as having suffered a spinal cord injury, and
presenting the hospital setting. The realism of the premium production
values is worth something, but as the action became less confined to the
hospital and the wonderful actors (Sonja Richter, Mads Mikkelsen, Paprika
Steen, and Nikolaj Lie Kaas) get to play their roles, I became less swayed
by the weaknesses that had seemed so glaring. This is a surprisingly
affecting film if one has the patience to let the story do its work (
/4
stars).
The next film I saw was Douglas McGrath’s Nicholas Nickleby,
the most recent of several adaptations of Dickens’s sprawling classic. It
features a veritable who’s who of established screen presences (Christopher
Plummer, Edward Fox, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson, Nathan
Lane, Barry Humphries, Alan Cumming, Timothy Spall, and Sophie Thompson) as
well as several up-and-coming talents (Charles Hunnam, Romola Garai, Anne
Hathaway, Jamie Bell, Helen Coker, and Kevin McKidd). Dickens’s story is
truly sprawling, going from Nicholas’s happy childhood to family penury
after the premature death of his father to Wackford Squeers’s dreadful school
to a traveling troupe of players to exploitation of Nicholas’s beautiful
sister to Nicholas falling in love to confrontation with his greedy uncle.
Believe it or not, I have left out a few plot developments. The film is a
pared down version of the story that filled over eight hours in one
small-screen adaptation. Some films suffer from too little story to fill a
feature film, but this one has too much story. The result is that the actors
troop on and off the screen having had little time to develop their
characters. Charles Hunnam has the unenviable task of being the title
character, one of Dickens’s virtuous and noble young heroes. It’s not easy
being a paragon of goodness. There are, of course, a slew of Dickens’s
colorful characters and some deliciously evil ones, too: Christopher
Plummer’s heartless Uncle Ralph Nickleby who’s most vicious savagery is
reserved for himself; Juliet Stevenson’s cruel and lascivious Mrs. Squeers;
and Edward Fox’s smarmy bullying lech Mulberry Hawk. However, I really do
wish that Nicholas’s delightful sojourn with the players (Nathan Lane and
Alan Cumming) had lasted a bit longer. For me, that was the highlight of the
film. The film does sustain one’s attention, but is in such a rush to get
through the story that the power inherent in it doesn’t have time to build (½).
I did have hopes that Down With Love would prove to be a good
film. After all, I have liked both Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor in
other films, and I have even watched Rock Hudson-and-Doris Day romantic
comedies without suffering any ill effects. Alas, this ersatz one simply did
not work. I suspect that while certain film scholars and critics may
appreciate the slavish devotion to recreating the look and feel of a vintage
1962 vehicle for Rock and Doris, the sense for me (and probably most
everyone else) will be that the film has been seen before. There’s only so
much admiration I can summon for Renée as she preens in the hideous fashion
excesses of the early ’60s. Then there are all those less than compelling set
designs which are dead-on for filmmaking from the period but are no match
for today’s production values in creating a realistic setting. A Saturday
Night Live skit featuring both of these things would have probably done
the trick for me and gotten it all out of my system. Although the storyline
of the Doris character publishing a book that urges women to seek
empowerment through adoption of the same seduce-and-sayonara strategies
employed by men certainly suggests steamy material, the finished product was
pretty tepid and probably would have seemed so even in 1962. The adventurous
part of the script comes with the accusation from Sarah Paulson, in the
girl’s best friend role, that David Hyde Pierce’s character, in the Tony
Randall guy’s best friend role, might be gay as an explanation for his
shyness. Homosexuality would not have been acknowledged in a mainstream
film, and it would take several years before the word “gay” became
synonymous with homosexuality. However, the biggest problem with the film is
that its few moments of amusement seem to be too few and far between. A
brief what-might-have-been sequence occurs during the closing credits when
Renée and Ewan do a song-and-dance number. Perhaps these two actors, having
been stars of the most prominent movie musicals in a couple of decades, could
have done a musical version of Rock and Doris. That would have probably
gotten more than these ()
stars.
Robert Duvall wrote, directed, and starred in a wonderful film that received
a plethora of award nominations and critical acclaim. The year was 1997 and
the film was The Apostle. That was then and
Assassination Tango is now. This film grows out of Duvall’s love of
tango and his personal connection to Argentina. This connection includes
Argentinean Luciana Pedraza, his real-life live-in girlfriend, who co-stars
as a professional tango dancer and is just one of several fine dancers
featured in the film. So the Tango part of the story is well
supported by beautiful and agile legs. The Assassination is,
however, in big trouble. Duvall is a professional hit man living in New York
City with his film-role live-in girlfriend (Kathy Baker) and her daughter
(Katherine Micheaux Miller) whom Duvall’s character adores much more than
her mother. His apparently quiet family life, except for picking an argument
with the neighborhood detective, is disrupted by a new assignment to avenge
the disappearance and murder of an Argentinean family’s son during the cruel
repression by the ruling military junta in the ’70s. The target is an aged
general living a quiet and comfortable retirement in Buenos Aires. The hope
for a quick fly-in, shoot the guy, fly home fades when the old guy hurts
himself and ends up spending a couple weeks in the hospital. With oodles of
spare time, Duvall’s assassin first hires a local prostitute (whom he asks
to call him “Pepito [Daddy]”) and then discovers the charming tango studio
right by his hotel. The group, headed (I use that term very loosely) by
Rubén Blades, who has hired him, seems to have been given a script intended
for The Three Stooges and told to deliver it straight. Of course, the
hope may have been that if the group seeking his services is so buffoonish
perhaps we won’t notice that the so-called best-at-what-he-does hit man
doesn’t seem all that sharp either. So the film meanders back-and-forth
between the stalled machinations for the hit and the tango action. The hit
man becomes so entranced by the flashing legs of Luciana that he begins to
openly flirt with her. She seems intrigued but not enamored by her
mysterious suitor. That is a lot better than I could do since it seemed a
relief that the timetable for the hit was pushed up inexplicably by Duvall.
For this unhealthy and unwieldy marriage of murder and dance, I can only
give (½).
The prospect of the delightful Audrey Tautou saying He Loves Me, He
Loves Me Not (À la Folie…Pas du Tout) about me would normally be
exhilarating, but after viewing this movie I am not so sure. She is so bad—I
mean good—in a bad way—or is it so bad in a good way? Audrey plays
Angélique, the evil twin of the mischievous, yet beneficent Amélie she
played in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film Amélie. Angélique is a
student deeply in love with a married physician with a pregnant wife, and we
experience the relationship through her eyes. She suffers from being taken
for granted and callously neglected. Her friends try to convince her to dump
the creep and move on. A fellow student, besotted with Angélique, is willing
to champion her cause with the unrepentant philanderer. Then we see the
relationship from the physician’s perspective. The meaning attached to a
wide variety of events is very different. The accumulating
misinterpretations take on a comic, yet ultimately disturbing quality as the
physician’s (Samuel Le Bihan) home life and work begin to unravel more and
more. Laetitia Colombani (director and screenwriter) and Caroline Thivel
(screenwriter) have fashioned a very dark and unsettling black comedy about
obsessive love. This clearly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s no
denying the cleverness and the power in this film that completely turns
romantic comedy upside down ().
Peter Sollett’s Raising Victor Vargas is an admirable film in
several ways. It is a film made by young Latinos living in New York City
about young Latinos living in New York City. It is a quintessential
low-budget independent film with settings that are real because they are the
places where the cast and crew live, work, and play. The emphasis is on the
story by collaborating screenwriters Peter Sollett and Eva Vives. It
addresses the serious and paramount issue of finding your identity and
learning how to have an intimate relationship while wending one’s way to
adulthood through the minefield of adolescence carrying unrealistic
expectations, trying to develop and maintain the image others have of you,
despite poverty, and amidst difficult family relationships. Victor (Victor
Rasuk) is a cocky young man with a well-burnished image of himself as a
super-cool ladies man. Ordinarily, Victor’s character, with a braggadocio
that far outstrips his talents and charms, might be the comic relief in a
more slick conventional teen comedy. His image needs some serious propping
up when he is discovered in the midst of a tryst with a very uncool
chubby girl named Donna. Interestingly, Donna doesn’t appear again in the
story despite living just one floor above Victor. Anyway, he decides that he
needs to score with the beautiful Judy (Judy Marte) in order to restore his
image. Judy is initially unimpressed by her would-be suitor, but decides
that playing along with his pretense may ward off the undesirable crude male
attention that her beauty inspires. This slice-of-life film shows not only
the uneven progress of this would-be romance, but the parallel courtships of
Victor’s best friend Harold and Judy’s best friend Melonie as well as Judy’s
brother Carlos and Victor’s half-sister Vicki. Although the action is often
comical, the film takes love and sex seriously. We also get to know Victor’s
struggling, yet ultimately strong and resourceful family with his elderly,
head-of-household grandmother, his brother Nino, who is the apple of his
grandmother’s eye, and his contentious half-sister. The film speaks in the
frank tough-speak of teens and deals with sexuality in the way that teens
really deal with it, so, of course, this has earned it an R-rating,
theoretically keeping it from the teen audience to whom it should be most
powerful. Despite its rough-hewn feel, this is a very delightful and wise
film (½)
Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (Russkij Kovcheg) is a unique
film viewing experience. Its claim to fame is that it was all done in one
take. This is not that the film is composed of a series of particular
segments filmed in one sequence (a take) but that the entire film is one
long continuously filmed ninety-six minute sequence. This is a remarkable
accomplishment considering that the film travels throughout the Hermitage in
St. Petersburg through room after room, encountering large ensembles of
costumed actors, over two thousand, appearing as people and simulating events in
Russian history. This is a fantastic choreography of cast and crew. Those
who are students of the technique of filmmaking are sure to be amazed at
what intensive planning and, reportedly, several months of rehearsal it took
to stage everything successfully for one long take. Similarly, an intimate
knowledge of Russian history might prove exceptionally helpful in unraveling
the scenes recreated for the film. For a more casual filmgoer (even one who,
like me, is interested in Russian history), the events displayed may make
little sense as our tour guide, Marquis de Custine (Sergey Dreiden), a
nineteenth-century French diplomat, does not explain very much as he
stumbles back-and-forth through history. The effect of the film is to
experience a combination walking tour of the art and a history pageant. In
the broadest terms, the film displays the grandeur and opulence of the
Russian Imperial court in St. Petersburg, a city created by Peter the Great
to foster a closer relationship with the West, from the 1700s to the eve of
World War I. The art is the flower of European culture, featuring some of
the greatest artists the world has known. The culmination of the film is a
glorious grand ball from 1913, signifying not only the last days of
happiness and peace in Imperial Russia but also the end of St. Petersburg as
Russia’s eyes looking to the West. The actors who play Lenin, Stalin,
Trotsky, and portray the Russian Revolution are unseen and unheard, yet as
we follow the gallantly dressed nobles and their elegant ladies leisurely
strolling out of the opulent ballroom, one expects to see them massing to
seize the stage. A terrific film for those with specialized interests, but
for entertainment value only (½)
from me
Bruce Almighty is the latest Jim Carrey vehicle. The film’s
premise is that Carrey is a local television news reporter frustrated that
he is not taken seriously because he is prohibited from doing the “hard”
news and kept in the “soft” news ghetto of reporting on such fluff stories
as efforts to bake the world’s largest cookie. There’s an interesting art
imitating life angle to this premise. Carrey, who shot to fame in Ace
Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber, is the leading
practitioner today of manic physical comedy. He has tried, with mixed
success, to broaden his work into more serious films such as The Cable
Guy, The Truman Show, Man on the Moon, and The
Majestic. What gives the film a serious story is that Carrey’s
character feels that his stalled television news career is God’s fault. God
is not doing his job and answering his prayers for career advancement or,
worse yet, God’s plan is deliberately designed to frustrate him. God, played
by Morgan Freeman in the best portrayal of God since George Burns in
Oh, God!, decides to give Carrey an opportunity to see if he can do
a better job while God takes a vacation. Clearly, many of the moral dilemmas
that humans face revolve around whether it is right to “play God,” to
circumvent the natural order or plan intended by God. Taking another’s life
is to “play God” and decide the length of that person’s life. To
deliberately make a direct copy of a genetically unique being through
cloning is to “play God.” Altering the genetic make-up of a being is to
“play God.” We are attracted and at the same time repelled by the prospect
of “playing God.” The film, directed by Tom Shadyac and based on a script by
Steve Koren, Mark O’Keefe, and Steve Oedekerk, indeed has some serious
issues on its mind. However, Carrey’s titular Bruce Nolan is at the same
time both too manic and zanily funny and not zanily funny enough for this
film to work for maximum satisfaction. The result is a film that has some
supremely manic comic sequences laced with trademark gross-out humor
floating like islands in a calmer, not overly funny film. However, the
intermittently over-the-top zany Carrey is too funny for the audience to
take seriously his sense of being wronged by God and the dilemma posed by
his opportunity to play God seriously. One suspects that this could have
been a terrific vehicle for Tom Hanks, who would have been a more subtle
comic presence and would have been able to bring the appropriate gravitas to
the moral issue posed to us all. Unfortunately, while compromises may be
most successful when nobody is totally happy, a movie that fails to totally
please any segment of the audience doesn’t please anyone (½).
Jeffrey Blitz, the director of the documentary Spellbound, has
put together a most compelling and admirable film. He introduces us to eight
contestants in the National Spelling Bee, their families, their friends, and
their communities (who seem to have a predilection for misspelling the
congratulatory messages to their favorite son or daughter). These are each
very special, unique and interesting young men and young women. Being a
nationally competitive speller doesn’t just come naturally. It is the result
of an enormous amount of hard work just like reaching the pinnacle in any
other type of competition. What’s unique about this competition is that,
while good spelling may be somewhat beneficial throughout life, one ages out
of the competition at fourteen. This is well before many other types of
competitions really get started. Most of the competitors and their families
have some ambivalence about the demands required of these youngsters to
perform at this level. Despite the hours of hard work, luck is an
omnipresent part of the steps, from local school competitions to regional
competitions to state competitions just to get to the National Spelling Bee.
A competitor may be able to spell every word in the competition except the one
word that he or she was asked to spell. The comfort level established by the
film crews is so exceptional that you truly feel that the portraits of the
individuals and families could not have revealed them any more fully. We
finally arrive at the National Spelling Bee, the equivalent accomplishment
of making it to the Olympics, with eight rooting interests. You wouldn’t
think that watching highlights from a spelling bee could be that riveting,
but it is. You begin to feel that you are in the competition ably handling
word after word and then glad that you are only watching a movie about a
spelling competition rather than trying to compete. This is a film about
winners and fittingly it is a winner ()
itself which is what we should remember about every film (like this one) or
person nominated for an Academy Award.
Laurel Canyon is Frances McDormand’s film. She plays Jane, a
once and future wild child, who has never fit anyone’s idealized version of
a mother. It’s not that she has been a truly bad mother but that she has
rarely if ever put her son’s needs ahead of her own. Her now-grown and
semi-estranged son Sam (Christian Bale) is a recent medical school graduate
from Harvard who has come back to Los Angeles for a plum internship
assignment. He brings his fiancé Alex (Kate Beckinsale), another medical
school graduate, who is finishing a thesis. They decide to live in his
mother’s home in Laurel Canyon, an arrangement that is
eminently acceptable because she won’t be there. However, when they arrive
not only is his mother living there but there’s a rock band living there,
too. Jane may be a less than stellar mom, but she’s a quite successful
record producer. Between recording sessions, she hangs out with the band,
smoking dope and acting as muse to Ian (Alessandro Nivola), the band’s
leader. Despite the sweetheart rent situation, Sam wants to find a new place
to live. Alex, on the other hand, is intrigued by Jane and Ian. She neglects
her writing, only half-heartedly searches for a new place to rent, and
arranges to spend time hanging out with Jane, Ian, and the band. Alex seems
like a lonely kid who has just moved and is just so eager to find a way to
fit in with the kids in the new neighborhood. This makes her somewhat
unconvincing as the focused student who has been head of the class at
Harvard Medical School, but it does start exposing the fissures in the
relationship between Alex and Sam. Sam, for his part, finds himself
attracted to Sara (Natascha McElhone), a second-year resident at the
hospital where he works. Sara is from Israel and there appears to be no
particular reason for her to be from Israel except that Natascha may have
wanted to try to do an accent. (Maybe Lisa Cholodenko who wrote and directed
Laurel Canyon will explain that creative choice on the DVD.) Perhaps worse
for Sam than that he discovers that he may like Sara is that Sara really
likes him. Suddenly, the straight-arrow young doctor is dealing with some
murky moral issues. Meanwhile Jane is trying to finally make a connection
with Sam. McDormand is note perfect as she goes up-and-down the emotional
scale from irresponsible to playful to tough to patient to loving. The
script has the characters doing and saying some things that strained
credibility, but Jane is always completely believable. Despite an
interesting premise that challenges and explores relationship boundaries and
one rock-solid performance, the finished product doesn’t fulfill the film’s
potential (½).
Lots of people may have the same reaction I did when I heard that
Winged Migration (Le Peuple Migrateur) was being shown. A film about
birds?...flying?...huh? I probably wouldn’t have wanted to go except that my
wife would have whined and whined because she loves nature programs. No, I
cannot say that she dragged me to see this film. I saw the preview and was
fascinated by how close the filmmakers had been able to get to the birds and
literally make the viewer feel like one of the geese, ducks, cranes,
penguins, etc. as they migrate north and south, sometimes going the full
distance between the arctic and the Antarctic. It had taken three years to
collect the footage, and a myriad of birds was featured. There are segments
showing how they interact with people and the dangers that are posed by
industrial development encroaching on traditional habitat. The different
birds sometimes threaten each other, and there are dangers posed by natural
phenomena of weather and geography. However, you do not get an endless
lecture describing every behavior and every situation. There’s a
surprisingly spare narration supplemented by an equally spare use of
captions. We experience the flight of these migratory birds virtually from
everywhere to everywhere accompanied by a variety of celestial-sounding
music. The effect is absolutely glorious. Are you still hesitant to see this
film? It may mean something for you to know that much of the creative
talent, primarily from France, that put this film together did a terrific
documentary Microcosmos (1996) about the insect world and then
worked on an outstanding fictional feature Himilaya (2000) set
in Nepal. Himilaya (alternate title: Caravan)
was nominated for the Foreign-language Academy Award. Winged Migration,
too, was nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary film category.
The only criticism I have is that after flapping my wings flying
back-and-forth north and south in all types of weather, I could have
returned a few minutes earlier to the farmland in France from whence the
initial migrants embarked. (½).
John Malkovich has been an actor in a large number of films during a
20+-year career. His credits include many films produced in Europe that
either are not released here or receive very limited releases here, so the
number is actually much larger than many might expect. He has played film
directors in films, most famously portraying the great German director F. W.
Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire. In The Dancer Upstairs,
he gets to direct for real for the first time. It is an auspicious debut.
The material, a screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare based on his own novel,
is incredibly timely. I suspect the film resonates more deeply now than the
novel did when initially published in 1997. It is set in an unnamed South
American country. The cast of Hispanic actors speak primarily in English
with accents giving the foreign flavor to the material. Only occasionally do
the accents overwhelm the dialogue obscuring meaning. Javier Bardem,
nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for Before Night Falls,
plays Rejas, a talented man with high ideals trying his best to take care of
his family, to do his job, and to serve his country well. He has a
beautiful, but vacuous wife (Elvira Minguez) more interested in cosmetic
surgery, beauty tips, and romance novels than anything of substance. He has
a young daughter (Marie-Anne Berganza) who takes dance lessons. He is
working as a policeman after having previously been a lawyer. He is a member
of the relatively small middle class in a country with a very small, wealthy
power elite and a large number of people living in squalid poverty. A series
of criminal events occurs across the country. A Maoist-style communist
revolution appears to be coalescing around a shadowy individual known as
Ezequiel. Rejas is assigned to investigate and is told, if he can’t get his
hands on this Ezequiel, the government will declare martial law. The
memories of troops ruling the streets are not happy. The signs of this
insurgency are everywhere and yet no one seems to know anything. Gradually,
Rejas and his partner Sucre (Juan Diego Botto) unravel more and more about
the convoluted revolution as the terrorist acts become more and more brazen.
The perpetrators of terrorism include children. When confronted about
children killing themselves as suicide bombers, one would-be suicide bomber
retorts, “But I’m already dead.” The bodily damage done by this violence is
graphically depicted. As the pressure mounts, Rejas finds himself confiding
to and attracted to his daughter’s beautiful dance teacher, Yolanda (Laura
Morante). Rejas is a man desperately trying to live a moral life surrounded
by the ambiguity of those who have knowingly compromised themselves for
personal gain and those whose moral certitude justifies any act of violence
and anyone’s death. Communism may no longer be the spirit guiding
revolutions these days, but clearly the confluence of frustration, anger,
and idealism continues to create causes that are perceived to be worth both
killing and dying for. Malkovich’s film is chillingly thought provoking and
stays in one’s head for days (½).
TOUCHDOWN!
