January, 2009: 15 Mini Reviews
January 3, 2009
The last fifteen films I've seen.
I Know Where I'm Going! ('45): Smack in the middle of a string of ambitious Technicolor epics, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger shot this lovely black and white romantic drama, starring Wendy Hiller as a bride who questions her impending marriage to a pompous millionaire when she falls for the charms of a broke Scottish laird (Roger Livesey), utilizing all the local scenery and beauty of the Hebrides to celebrate the soon to be end of the war with romantic fervor and capitalist satire. That our heroine is at first nothing but a sprightly gold-digger, and that she knows it and flaunts it, is the target for Pressburger's most pointed criticism, but as the charms of Livesey, the stunning beauty of the island, and the swirling winds of fate drive her to a character change, the film becomes less about ridiculing English capitalism and more about the necessary personal drive towards happiness over wealth and comfort. Less famous than the following “Black Narcissus” and “The Red Shoes”, but equally as beloved, especially by romantics who find the Scottish Isles to be the ultimate vacation aphrodisiac, but especially by film buffs who find Powell's seamless manipulation of location photography and studio filming (Livesey famously never set foot outside of England) a master class in production and editing, the film only gets better, and sweeter, with age.
Judge Priest ('34): In the brief history of the collaboration between Will Rogers and John Ford, this pro-south comedy lands somewhere in the middle, better than “Doctor Bull”, but not as good as “Steamboat 'Round the Bend”, which makes it only mildly worth watching. Rogers is a well respected town judge who butts heads with stubborn prosecutor Burton Churchill (a Ford regular) when a southern war hero is charged with assault, leading, eventually, to a climactic courtroom scene that finds an all black marching band (led by Ford's favorite stereotype, Stepin Fetchit) playing “Dixie” to sway the all white jury in their favor, a scene as awkward and racially problematic an any in Ford's southern-love films. Frankly, for an Irishman from the northeast, Ford's unabashed love and respect for the defeated ways of the Old South is kind of baffling, but who am I to judge the master, who obviously found a symbiotic friendship with the laid back Rogers, and their collaborations were diverting at best.
Key Largo ('48): As a hurricane pounds on the shores of Key Largo, gangster Edward G. Robinson pushes around a group of hostages, including war vet Humphrey Bogart, old hotel owner Lionel Barrymore, and hot widow Lauren Bacall, while trying to pull off a counterfeit money scam in this tense and star studded drama from John Huston. Less than a crime thriller, though there are shoot-outs and beatings, Huston and Richard Books adapt Maxwell Anderson's stage play into a kind of psychological game of machismo, with the howling winds and threat of imminent death-by-tidal-wave pushing Robinson and Bogart to the brink; of course we know Bogart comes out on top, in both life and courage, but it's Robinson who we remember best, taking on a middle-aged Rico Bandello and making him as cocky, and vulnerable, as before, but with years of experience weighing on his every move. There isn't too much difference between this and Howard Hawks' 1944 “To Have and Have Not”, in fact the ending here was lifted directly from Hemingway's novel, with permission from Hawks, who used a different resolution, and though there's hardly any of the former film's intense sexual tension (even Oscar-winner Claire Trevor as a boozy ex torch singer is rendered undesirable and pathetic), the psychological battle between Robinson and Bogart alone make it a top draw, and one of Huston's best films of the '40's.
WALL-E ('08): Pixar has done a fine job with the DVD of this brilliant piece of animated storytelling, about a lonely little robot left on Earth to clean up an ecological disaster 700 years after humanity jumped ship, with an insightful commentary track by director Andrew Stanton, and over an hour of bonus documentaries on the painstaking four-year production. Various docs show us how Stanton and his tireless crew achieved the ultra realistic, verite design of the apocalyptic first act (with help from guest cinematographer Roger Deakins), in which WALL-E putts around a wasted landscape compacting trash into gigantic towers, and eventually falls in love with a sleek flying probe droid named EVE, sent on a mission to discovery plant life, and how, using advanced computer and audio equipment, sound designer Ben Burtt was able to give believable personalities to characters with, at best, a limited electronic vocabulary. That the most touching scene from any film this year involves two futuristic robots looking each other in the eyes and holding hands is a testament to the film's ability to draw you in with the most basic of human emotions, in a future filled with devastation and bleak prospects, and it's a testament to the work ethic of Pixar that, for a film that took four years to make, it looks absolutely effortless.
Le Silence de la mer ('49): Howard Vernon gives a quietly sympathetic performance as a cultured Nazi officer, stationed in a dark country house in occupied France, where a kind old man and his niece evoke resistance with the silent treatment, in this adaptation of a famous work of the Resistance by Vercors. Working for the first time with any kind of budget, outside of the studio system, Jean-Pierre Melville and cinematographer Henri Decae turn Vercors' library into a den of noir shadows and peaceful resistance, and like the American noir films Melville was famously fluent in, ideology plays as tragedy, as the niece (Nicole Stephane, later of Melville's “Les Enfants terribles”) harbors a love for the “good German” that has to go unfulfilled by the rules of war and national conduct. Melville uses expressionistic lighting and intense close-ups to elicit reactions that otherwise might go unnoticed in a film that is virtually a three-man play, with only one speaking participant, limited to a shooting space no bigger than your average dining room, and the effect of the sharp key light in the character's eyes, and wafting shadows across their faces, speaks of an impossible situation where potential mutual friendship and attraction is rendered mute in pain, frustration, and loneliness in total.
The Pixar Story ('07): Well produced documentary on the history of Pixar animation, included on the Special Edition of the “WALL-E” DVD, which tracks the advancement of CG animation along with the growth of the California studio, from a small independent bunch of animation nerds funded by George Lucas, to the giants of the industry they are today. We know how great Pixar is, we wouldn't buy the DVD's if we didn't, but this 90 minute doc is more than just nepotism of a company spouting its greatness and wealth, it's an informative examination of the incredible advances in animation technology, from “Steamboat Willie” to today's visually complex computer masterworks, and paired with “WALL-E”, arguably the studio's best product yet, it's an appropriate and tasteful celebration.
The Maltese Falcon ('41): John Huston's first assignment as director, after years of toiling as one of Warner's top writers, was this meticulously detailed mystery adapted from Dashiell Hammett's 1930 masterpiece, and the result, rocketing both Huston and lead Humphrey Bogart to stardom, as well as all but laying the foundation for film noir, is the stuff of legend. Huston takes Hammett's carefully constructed plot, in which shamus Sam Spade tracks down the valuable titular bird after his partner is killed for it, playing the greedy likes of Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Mary Astor off each other to get his answers, letting the allure of the bird's tremendous value win over better judgment, and makes a documentary like film where the gaze of the camera captures the schemes, betrayals, and lies in stunning subjectivity. With a cynical detective, a dangerous femme fatale, an almost impossible to follow mystery plot, and a brilliantly constructed studio set that lets Huston and crack cinematographer Arthur Edeson effectively play with mood lighting and shadows, the film is almost always cited as the first noir, but more accurately, it's a character study of desperate and greedy people who forsake love (and humanity) for a chance shot at riches, and if it contains the elements of noir's better known period ('44-'59), that's the genius of John Huston in creating an oppressive and stylized atmosphere for his pathetic group of dreamers.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ('08): David Fincher expands a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and turns it into a monumental film about time, fate, coincidence, and true love, spanning nine decades in the unusual life of a man who ages backwards. With tremendous special effects and makeup, Fincher turns Brad Pitt into Benjamin Button, born a baby but aged past 90, who, as he grows taller, begins to grow youthful, so as he matures into beauty, everybody around him withers into old age and dies. The concept works best early in the film, when the hideous baby is left at a New Orleans old age house and as he grows up and becomes more physically fit, friends appear just before death, but past the two hour mark, as his life-spanning love for Cate Blanchett begins to crack under the impending inevitability of his regressing to childhood, the tragic overtones come to overwhelm the sometimes fantastical and haunting story arch. With more than a slight resemblance to “Forest Gump”, which had a similar voice-over structure, decades spanning love story, and maturation of a crippled “child” into a globe-trotting adult (both films were written by Eric Roth), this is the kind of ambitious, gorgeously shot epic that wins the favor of Oscar voters for shear emotional overload, but it's neither as fun, or as well acted as 'Gump', and if it takes home the Oscar, it'll be by default only, in a year where anything more original than a man aging backwards was hard to find.
I Shot Jesse James ('49): Even in the very beginning of his directing career, pumping out sensational war films and B westerns on Poverty Row, Sam Fuller was an independent minded maverick, infusing his familiar assignments with peculiar framing, cutting, and close-ups, creating an economical mise-en-scene that made the films cheap but unusually original. Thus is the case with his first feature, “I Shot Jesse James”, a telling of the assassination of the famous outlaw with a sympathetic understanding of his killer's motivations, psychological struggles, redemption, and eventual murder. The acting, from John Ireland as Robert Ford, to Reed Hadley as Jesse James, isn't uniformly special, in fact, the few scenes between the two before Ford plugs him in the back are tinged with a kind of disturbing homo-erotic master/pupil aura that renders the quick assassination in the third reel out of place, even though we know it's coming, but then Fuller was never known for guiding anything more than competent actors to competent performances, it's all about his staging, precision camera movements and editing, and even in its earliest form, his style was exciting.
The Jungle Book ('67): Loosely based on a book of stories by Rudyard Kipling, this sweet and funny film all but saved Disney animation in the wake of Walt's death, thanks to tremendous box office and a quality of product missing in the previous “Sword in the Stone”. The story, about a panther and a bear who have to get a “man-cub” home to his man-village before a predatory tiger kills him, is really about growing up, learning to accept responsibility, and staying sharp and alert in a dangerous world of snakes and vultures. Phil Silvers singing “The Bare Necessities” is one of the best scenes in all of Disney, but for a complete bizarre knockout, the scatfest between Silvers and Louis Prima (as crazy King Louie) on “I Wanna Be Like You” is about as jazzy and modernist a piece of film-making you'll ever see in Disney, and it's hilarious.
The Quiet Man ('52): John Ford won his fourth Best Director Oscar for helming this passion project, a whimsical and loving tribute to Ireland, drinking, courtship, fist-fights, ritual, and the complexities of marriage. John Wayne is Sean Thornton, an American boxer who comes back to his birthplace in the Irish countryside to buy his family cottage; when he sees lovely red head Maureen O'Hara herding sheep by the roadside, he enlists the talents of the local matchmaker (Barry Fitzgerald) to help win over the woman's oafish brother, played with comedic brilliance by Victor McLaglen. But a rivalry ensues, and when the brother refuses to hand over his sister's dowry, a symbol of independence, legacy, and a woman's right, a shadow hangs over the relationships until Thornton can set it right, using violence he's intended to swear off. Cinematographer Winton Hoch makes good use of the green countryside, and his Technicolor photography won an Oscar, but more important than the professional and seamless film-making is the chemistry of Ford's familiar cast, from Wayne, O'Hara, Fitzgerald, and McLaglen, to Ward Bond as the local priest, Mildred Natwick was a rich widow, Arthur Shields as a boxing enthusiast reverend, and Francis Ford, the director's older brother, as a boisterous old man, it's evident that everyone involved knew they were making something special, and thanks to terrific performances, they were right.
The Killing ('56): Stanley Kubrick's low budget homage to gangster films is itself often cited as the greatest American heist film of all time, thanks to a desperate lot of thieves, comprised of recognizable film noir vets, who execute a precision raid on a race track bank vault, and let it slip away through paranoia, bungling, and the inevitability that crime can't pay in the pictures. Kubrick pushes his constantly mobile camera through cheap, expressionistic sets, using harsh light sources to create a dingy atmosphere in which the group of men (Sterling Hayden, Jay C. Flippen, Ted de Corsia, Elisha Cook Jr.) plan their heist to the second, using a studio enforced voice-over narration to guide the time-shifting narrative with ironic detachment. At 28 Kubrick was already a virtuoso at camera movement, atmosphere, and narrative manipulation, an auteur in the making, and if the film owes a debt to the likes of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “The Asphalt Jungle”, “Rififi” and “The Naked City”, it's only as homage; this is a film that's too grungy, too calculated, too devastating to be a mere rip-off, it's of its own element, and a pure cinematic adrenaline rush.
Doubt ('08): Skilled acting distinguishes this sterile theatrical adaptation from mediocrity. Tony winner John Patrick Shanley brings a flat cinematic eye to his famed play, about the struggles of two nuns, mother superior Meryl Streep and impossibly innocent teacher Amy Adams, in proving their worst fears, that the kind parish priest, Philip Seymour Hoffman, has abused a young alter boy. That the boy is the school's only African-American, in an early '60's New York suburb made up almost entirely of Irish and Italian catholics, is constantly picked on, and shows homosexual tendencies, only makes the suspicions more logical, and dire, but the premise of Shanley's examination is that we don't know if any of it is true, neither do the nuns, and what looks suspicious might just be misconstrued as kind affection. Adams holds her own against the dynamic heavyweight duo of Streep and Hoffman, as does Viola Davis, in one tremendous scene as the boy's less-than-worried working class mother, but Shanley is a better writer than he is a cinematic director, and scenes of mass, dinner ritual, confrontation, and exploration are only made exciting because of the strength of the acting on display, not Shanley's rigorously boring mise-en-scene, made legible only with the suggestions of top lensman Roger Deakins, who keeps the camera where it should be, on the actors and their unquestioned gifts.
In Bruges ('08): Playwright Martin McDonagh makes a terrific film debut with this dark gangster comedy, about two London hitmen ordered to take a sabbatical to the titular medieval Belgian tourist destination after a botched job back home draws heat. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are the hitmen, the former a twitchy mess after accidentally killing a child on his last mission, the latter a middle aged pro who finds the architecture and centuries dating history of Bruges to be beautiful and inspiring; they each have their flaws and reasons for needing the vacation, but when the boss (hilariously foul mouthed Ralph Fiennes) calls and orders a new hit, their budding friendship, and the safety of the innocent people around them, is put to a strain. McDonagh's film is at times jarring in the way it blends irony, satire, and romantic comedy with the overwhelming heaviness of its issues with murder, guilt, and suicide, but the screenplay pulls it together flawlessly, the acting, especially Farrell, giving the best performance of his career, is superb, and the setting, with its mixture of old buildings, canals, bars, religious architecture, and paintings (one Bosch triptych spells out the film's purgatory symbolism in stark terms) is unforgettable.
Reprise ('08): Young Norwegian director Joachim Trier experiments with narrative structure in this New Wavian masterwork, exploring the friendship of two 23-year-old writers whose lives cross cut as their manuscripts experience different levels of rejection and fame. With a nod to Godard, Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt manipulate our perceptions of time and space, fiction and reality, to lay the foundation for our two author's career paths, one seemingly derailed by mental illness, the other by a lack of critical appreciation, while relationships with girlfriends and their close inner circle of friends completes a convincing array of young twenty-somethings on the verge of life, and potential greatness. Of the many editing tricks the film employs, my favorite involves a tender memory flashback as Phillip (Anders Danielson Lie), just out of the mental hospital after a suicide attempt, recalls his love for Kari (Viktoria Winge) by stroking a single strand of hair, the 20-minute sequence leading to their first meeting post-hospital, a bravura sequence using invisible cuts back-and-forth (a cafe meeting, a walk in the park) in time to suggest the dreamlike nature of the tender, dangerous love affair. It's not often you see a film about kids in their early twenties, struggling to set their lives on the right path, told with such tenderness and precision; it's a testament to the writing, performances of the largely unknown cast, and brilliant narrative structure that not only do we care about these characters, their decisions, and their fortunes, but become totally engrossed in the realistic, modern, and complicated direction of their immediate destinies.