April 2009: 10 Mini Reviews
April 17, 2009
The last ten films I've seen.
Lawrence of Arabia ('62): David Lean won the second of his two Best Director Oscars for this sweeping desert classic - part war film, part bio-pic, part poli-social commentary - about the adventures of T.E. Lawrence and his campaign during WWI to unite the Arabs against the Turks, with grudging British assistance. Peter O'Toole gives one of the great performances in film history as Lawrence, a blue eyed, soft-spoken romantic who finds a kind of elegance in the desert (“it's clean”), and profits a swelled vanity when the Arabs take him in as their own in a difficult, seemingly impossible push against the Turkish army; when his carefully constructed war against the Turks – destroying their rail system, thus weakening their supply of arms – leads to a systematic massacre, Lawrence straddles the thin line between war hero and ego maniacal messiah. At nearly four hours, this is one of the few long movies that never feels its length; it begins with a script (by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, originally uncredited due to the blacklist), which is constantly at odds with the film's romantic vision of the desert in portraying Lawrence and his duel role as savior/egotist, and through Lean (and by extension, Freddie Young's mesmerizing wide-screen photography), grants the story enough wealth, beauty, scope, and care to never have to rely on bio-pic cliches to make Lawrence a fully realized, conflicted anti-hero.
To Live ('94): Three decades in the life of one Chinese family, beginning in the glitzy entertainment district of pre-war Shanghai, and ending after the ideological chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the late '60's, directed by China's most famous film-maker, Zhang Yimou, with a melodramatic grandeur that, despite convention and sentiment, earned him a two-year ban by the communist government, who apparently didn't look kindly upon the poverty and death depicted of Mao's glorious plan. As things go from bad to worse, war breaks out, homes are lost, children die, the film is held together by the strong bond between the leading actors (Ge You, Gong Li), and Yimou's persistent suggestion that a strong will and togetherness can get you through anything, which, come to think of it, isn't too anti-communistic after all.
Sansho the Bailiff ('54): Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi and photographed by the legendary Kazuo Miyagawa, using beautiful black and white lighting and stunning elongated takes, this simple story about a family broken up by slavery and the years it takes to reunite, is at once poetic and heartbreaking, one of the most wrenching films about injustice you’ll ever see. Remarkably, this was Mizoguchi’s 85th movie as director; how many directors in the history of cinema can you say made their greatest film the 85th time around?
Laura ('44): All time classic film noir with Dana Andrews as a bitter detective on the case of murdered society girl Gene Tierney; when the girl shows up alive, just as the detective is falling in love with her painted visage hanging above the fireplace, nothing is as it seems – and that's the best part. Directed by Otto Preminger, after original director Rouben Mamoulian had a falling out with studio chief Darryl Zanuck, this twist filled gem features hilarious supporting turns by Vincent Price, Judith Anderson, and Clifton Webb, who all at one point or another are prime suspects in the murder, and a famous score by David Raksin that perfectly encapsulates the strange romance between the back-from-the-dead Tierney and the disturbed Andrews.
Tell No One ('06): One of the great murder mysteries of the decade, this French head-scratcher stars Francois Cluzet as a doctor who, eight years after the murder of his wife, starts finding clues to suggest that she's still alive, and there's one heck of a conspiracy surrounding it all. Credit goes to director Guillaume Canet (whose work I'm not familiar with) for fashioning a Hitchcockian Wrong Man scenario, with a million twists, that never betrays its strong characters for routine action and easy answers; this is literally a film where you never know where it's heading, and that's far too rare in most mystery films today.
Do You Remember Dolly Bell? ('81): Bittersweet semi-autobiographical first feature from Yugoslavian master Emir Kusturica, about peasant life in Sarajevo in the early '60's, seen through the eyes of a teenage boy as his father, a supporter of communism, slowly dies of cancer. The title figures into the boy's sexual coming of age, as a gangster hides a prostitute (stage name Dolly Bell) in his barn loft, instantly falling in love with the lovely girl, but when the gangster returns, and the girl is gang raped, the boy is helpless to stop it. Kusturica, who in later films like “Black Cat, White Cat” and “Underground”, would explore gypsy life with an almost maniacal cinematic overabundance, tells this sentimental story with few flourishes, instead focusing on the atmosphere and social milieu of the early days under communism, suggesting the boy's loss of innocence (and the death of the father), as a turning point towards political and social upheaval.
Across the Pacific ('42): John Huston reunites the three principal leads of “The Maltese Falcon” for this exciting, slightly racist, propaganda-fest pushing for support of the Pacific campaign, with Humphrey Bogart as a disgraced Army man who cozies up to Japanese sympathizer Sydney Greenstreet aboard a steamer to thwart further Pearl Harbor-esque attacks. The fact that the plot takes the steamer to the Panama Canal, rather than “Across the Pacific” is only a minor fault, the real problem is with the treatment of the Japanese, even Japanese-Americans, as broken-English speaking assassins and henchmen, who Bogart single-handedly destroys with some quick thinking and improbably good timing. Along for the ride is Mary Astor as Bogart's on-boat love interest, and periodical comic relief, but she doesn't have much to do in a film that's almost entirely about espionage, propaganda, and drumming up business for war bonds.
Adventureland ('09): Greg Mottola follows up his smash hit “Superbad” with this bittersweet nostalgia piece about work, friendship, and first love in the summer of '87. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Mottola's surrogate, just out of college, who takes a job at a crummy local amusement park to help pay for grad school; there he meets an array of well drawn character types, including the moody, beautiful Kristen Stewart, who turns out to be his dream girl. But she has problems - her father is controlled by a shrewish new wife, her mother is dead, and she's sleeping with a narcissistic, much older mechanic (Ryan Reynolds, playing well against his romantic-comedy roots), which riddles her with self pity – and the boy isn't exactly experienced in romance, which makes the awkwardness all the more realistic and touching. Nothing from “Superbad's” raunchy craziness would lead you to suspect that Mottola was such a sensitive writer/director, but he has the same kind of love and care for his well developed characters as a Noah Baumbach, Eric Rohmer, or Woody Allen. This may be the smartest, sweetest film I've seen in 2009, no wonder that it's a flop at the box office; how can a movie this perceptive about young adult life possibly compare with the fake escapism of Vin Diesel and Hannah Montana?
The Lion King ('94): The fourth, and best of Disney's animation renaissance in the early '90's, this time forsaking the usual fairy-tale adaptation for an allegory about life, death, and responsibility in the animal kingdom of Africa, in which a young lion cub has to own up to his past and avenge the murder of his father. The breathtaking animation is matched by an Oscar winning score by Hans Zimmer that features perfectly placed African themes, and the songs by Elton John and Tim Rice became instant hits (the love song “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” won the Oscar, but we remember the hilarious “Hakuna Matata” best), but it's the story that counts most, a mixture of “Bambi” in the all too real murder of the King, and “Hamlet”, in the young cub's avenging the murder by an evil uncle (Jeremy Irons, the film's best vocal performance), making this possibly the most intense Disney film since “Pinocchio” and its donkey transformation scene. In 1995 Disney introduced the all computer “Toy Story” and the history of animation would change forever, but there's a certain charm to the painstakingly animated animals of this traditional work (only one action scene is enhanced with CGI), and if there's a more rewarding and beautiful opening five minutes to any animated film than the masterful “Circle of Life” that starts the film, a scene that sets the film's social and visual structure without a single word of exposition, I'd certainly like to see it.
Danton ('83): Two things I don't delude myself into knowing much about are the French Revolution and the communist takeover of Poland after Solidarity, and according to everything I know about this fantastic film from displaced Polish master Andrzej Wajda, working in France as part of a co-production with Poland, that's neither here nor there. I'm sure it helps to know the basic fabric of the Revolution, and how a liberal filmmaker might resent communism in his home country, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that there's metaphors abound in Wajda's thrilling rendering of the Terror, and all the political squabbling and backstabbing that went along with it. And even if you can't figure it out, Criterion's few bonus features (though no commentary track) will fill in the basic specifics, the rest is just the pure joy of watching a great filmmaker, great actors (Wojciech Pszoniak as Robespierre, Gerard Depardieu as Danton), and a larger than life subject, spring to fruition in vibrancy.