½Madagascar ½
PG, 80 m., 2005
With the voices of: Ben Stiller (Alex the Lion), Chris Rock (Marty the Zebra), David Schwimmer (Melman the Giraffe), Jada Pinkett Smith (Gloria the Hippo), Sacha Baron Cohen (Julian), Cedric the Entertainer (Maurice). Directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath and produced by Teresa Cheng and Mireille Soria. Screenplay by Mark Burton and Billy Frolick.
One of the fundamental philosophical questions of our time is why Goofy is a person and Pluto is a dog. From their earliest days when Mickey Mouse was still in black and white, cartoons have created a divide between animals who are animals and animals who are human—or, if not human in the sense that Paris Hilton is human, then at least human in the sense that they speak, sing, have personalities, and are voiced by actors like Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, and Jada Pinkett Smith.
Now comes Madagascar, an inessential but passably amusing animated comedy that has something very tricky going on. What happens if the human side of a cartoon animal is only, as they say, a veneer of civilization? Consider Alex the Lion. In the Central Park Zoo, he’s a star, singing “New York, New York” and looking forward to school field trips because he likes to show off for his audiences.
Alex (voice by Ben Stiller) lives the good life in the zoo, dining on prime steaks every day provided by his keepers. His friends include Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith). If Alex likes it in the zoo, Marty has wanderlust. He wants to break out and live free. One night he escapes from the zoo, and his three friends catch up with him just as he’s about to board a train for Connecticut, acting on bad advice from the giraffe, who has informed him that is where “the wild” can be found.
The animals are captured, crated up, and shipped off aboard a cargo ship to a wild animal refuge in Africa. On the way, a mutiny by rebellious penguins leads to them being swept off the deck and washed ashore in Madagascar. They’re back in the wild, all right, but without survival training. The local population, primarily a colony of lemurs, is ruled by King Julian (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his right-paw man Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer).
Some of the locals think maybe the New Yorkers are obnoxious tourists, even though Alex stages his zoo act, much in the same sense captured prisoners of war entertain the commandant. Then the intriguing problem of the human/animal divide comes into play. Alex misses his daily stacks of sirloin and porterhouse. He is a meat-eater. He eats steak. “Which is you,” Marty the Zebra is warned. At one point, driven wild by hunger, Alex even tries to take a bite out of Marty’s butt.
This is the kind of chaos that always lingers under the surface of animal cartoons. How would Goofy feel if Pluto wanted to marry one of his daughters? There is a moment at which Madagascar seems poised on the brink of anarchy, as the law of the wild breaks down the detente of the zoo, and the animals revert to their underlying natures. Now that could have been interesting, although one imagines children being led weeping from the theater while Alex basks on a zebra-skin rug, employing a toothpick.
The movie is much too safe to follow its paradoxes to their logical conclusions, and that’s probably just as well. The problem, though, is that once it gets the characters to the wild it doesn’t figure out what to do with them there, and the plot seems to stall. Madagascar is funny, especially at the beginning, and good-looking in a retro cartoon way, but in a world where the stakes have been raised by Finding Nemo, Shrek, and The Incredibles, it’s a throwback to a more conventional kind of animated entertainment. It’ll be fun for the smaller kids, but there’s not much crossover appeal for their parents.
Madison
PG, 94 m., 2005
James Caviezel (Jim McCormick), Jake Lloyd (Mike McCormick), Mary McCormack (Bonnie McCormick), Bruce Dern (Harry Volpi), Brent Briscoe (Tony Steinhart), Paul Dooley (Mayor Vaughn). Directed by William Bindley and produced by Bindley and Martin Wiley. Screenplay by William Bindley and Scott Bindley.
What is it about Indiana that inspires movies about small-town dreamers who come from behind to win? William Bindley’s Madison, the story of a town that races its own hydroplane on the Ohio River, joins Breaking Away (a bicycle race), Hoosiers (high school basketball), and Rudy (local boy is too small to play football for Notre Dame, but that doesn’t stop him). All four stories are inspired by fact; maybe that has something to do with it. A story about Bobby Knight would of course have to be based on fiction.
As Madison opens in 1971, times are hard for the town, which was once the busiest port above New Orleans and one of the richest cities in the state. Factories are closing, people are moving to big cities to find work, and although Madison is the only town to enter its own boat in the Gold Cup, things look grim for this year’s race.
The boat is Miss Madison, an unlimited hydroplane (I think that means anything goes with engines and speed). The Gold Cup has been held since 1950; local businessman Jim McCormick (James Caviezel) used to pilot the boat but retired after an injury ten years earlier. Now he is suddenly needed again, by the town and the boat, and comes out of retirement to the pride of his son, Mike (Jake Lloyd), and the concern of his wife, Bonnie (Mary McCormack), who like so many movie wives frets that her spouse is either (a) going to get killed, or (b) not be home for dinner.
Miss Madison’s engine has exploded during a time trial and the boat itself is seriously damaged. It looks as if the town will not have an entry in the very year it hosts the famous annual race, but then Mike and his crew go to work. They need a new engine and can’t afford one, so under cover of darkness they slip off to a nearby town and steal the engine from an airplane displayed in the courthouse square. Without being a mechanic, I am fairly sure such an engine, if it were indeed still in the plane, would be filled with dead leaves and hornets’ nests and would need more than a trip through Jiffy Lube, but never mind: It purrs right along on race day.
For the town, meanwhile, the race is heaven-sent. It provides a boost for civic morale, keeps a few more citizens from moving away, attracts tourist dollars and television publicity, and gives everyone a chance to sit on the river banks in their lawn chairs with their picnic baskets. Much of this is made possible by Mayor Don Vaughn (Paul Dooley, who played the father in Breaking Away). He shifts some city funds, probably illegally, to find the money to back Miss Madison.
As sporting events go, hydroplane racing is pretty straightforward. The powerful boats race around a river course, making lots of waves and noise. Some of the boats have commercial sponsors, and one of the unique elements in Madison is negative product placement. One of the boats has “Budweiser” written all over it, and much is made about the rich and high-powered brewery team, but they’re the bad guys and we want to see Bud lose to Miss Madison.
The cast is stalwart. Jim Caviezel, who made this movie in his pre-Passion days, is a salt-of-the-earth small-town dad who shares a secret with his son: a hidden cave that’s “one of the special things about where we live.” Mary McCormack, as wife and mother, is stuck with the obligatory speech, “You have a choice to make—me or the boat.” But after she pays her dues with that tired line, she perks up and brings some sunshine into the movie. There is also sadness, which I will not reveal, except to say that driving one of these boats might be a good way to compete for the Darwin Award.
Who else? Oh: Bruce Dern. He’s the expert mechanic who can turn around a stolen antique airplane engine in twenty-four hours. I saw him not long ago while revisiting After Dark, My Sweet (1993) and was happy to see him again. He has a way of chewing his dialogue as if he wants to savor it first before sharing it with us.
Mad Money ½
PG-13, 104 m., 2008
Diane Keaton (Bridget Cardigan), Queen Latifah (Nina Brewster), Katie Holmes (Jackie Truman), Ted Danson (Don Cardigan), Adam Rothenberg (Bob Truman). Directed by Callie Khouri and produced by James Acheson, Jay Cohen, and Frank DeMartini. Screenplay by Glenn Gers and John Mister.
There is something called “found poetry.” The term refers to anything that was not written as poetry but reads as if it was. I would like to suggest a new category: found reviews. These are not really reviews but serve the same function. I found one just now, and after a struggle with myself, I have decided to share it with you. It is about Mad Money, a movie in which Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, and Katie Holmes are lowly workers who team up to rob a Federal Reserve Bank.
I was noodling around Rotten Tomatoes, trying to determine who played the bank’s security chief, and noticed the movie had not yet been reviewed by anybody. Hold on! In the “Forum” section for this movie, “islandhome” wrote at 7:58 a.m. January 8: “review of this movie … tonight i’ll post.” At 11:19 a.m. January 10, “islandhome” was finally back with the promised review. It is written without capital letters, flush-left like a poem, and I quote it spelling and all:
hello sorry i slept when i got back
well it was kinda fun
it could never happen in the way it was
portraid
but what ever its a movie
for the girls most will like it
and the men will not mind it much
i thought it was going to be kinda like
how tobeat the high cost of living
kinda the same them but not as much fun
ill give it a 4 Out of 10
I read this twice, three times. I had been testing out various first sentences for my own review, but somehow the purity and directness of islandhome’s review undercut me. It is so final, “for the girls most will like it / and the men will not mind it much.” How can you improve on that? It’s worthy of Charles Bukowski.
Anyway, here’s how I was going to start out:
Mad Money is astonishingly casual for a movie about three service workers who steal millions from a Federal Reserve Bank. There is little suspense, no true danger, their plan is simple, the complications are few, and they don’t get excited much beyond some high-fives and hugs and giggles. If there was ever a movie where Diane Keaton would be justified in bringing back “la-di-da,” this is that movie.
Keaton costars with Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes. She’s set up as a rich wife whose husband (Ted Danson) gets downsized. They owe a mountain of debt, their house is being repossessed, and she thinks she might as well (gulp) get a job. The best she can do is emptying the garbage at the Federal Reserve.
That’s when she spots a loophole in the bank’s famous security system. She figures out a way to steal used bills on the way to the shredder and smuggle them out of the building stuffed into her bra and panties, and those of her partners in crime, Katie and the Queen. This system works. And the beauty is, the money isn’t missed because it has supposedly already been destroyed. All they’re doing is spending it one more time on its way to the shredder. A victimless crime, unless it brings down the economy, of course.
I would have gone on to observe that the movie makes it all look so easy and painless that it’s a good thing it opens with a flash-forward showing them in a panic mode, so we know that sooner or later something exciting will happen. In the meantime, we get more scenes starring Ted Danson, with a hairstyle that makes him look alarmingly like a cross between David Cronenberg and Frankenstein’s monster. And there’s of course a chief of security who is constantly being outwitted. And so on.
Mad Money is actually a remake of a 2001 TV movie, I discovered on IMDb. Britain’s Granada made it about a team of cleaners who pull the same scam on the Bank of England. Two character first names are the same (Bridget and Jackie), but the last name of the Keaton and Danson characters is changed from Watmore to Cardigan. Go figure. Or don’t. The bottom line is, some girls will like it, the men not so much, and I give it 1½ stars out of 4.
Mamma Mia!
PG-13, 98 m., 2008
Meryl Streep (Donna), Pierce Brosnan (Sam), Colin Firth (Harry), Stellan Skarsgard (Bill), Julie Walters (Rosie), Dominic Cooper (Sky), Amanda Seyfried (Sophie), Christine Baranski (Tanya). Directed by Phyllida Lloyd and produced by Judy Craymer and Gary Goetzman. Screenplay by Catherine Johnson, based on the stage musical.
I saw the stage version of Mamma Mia! in London, where for all I know it is now entering the second century of its run, and I was underwhelmed. The film version has the advantage of possessing Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth, and Julie Walters—but they are assets stretched fairly thin. And there are the wall-to-wall songs by ABBA, if you like that sort of thing. I don’t, not much, with a few exceptions.
But here’s the fact of the matter. This movie wasn’t made for me. It was made for the people who will love it, of which there may be a multitude. The stage musical has sold thirty million tickets, and I feel like the grouch at the party. So let me make that clear and proceed with my minority opinion.
The action is set on a Greek isle, where the characters are made to slide down rooftops, dangle from ladders, enter and exit by trapdoors, and frolic among the colorful local folk. The choreography at times resembles calisthenics, particularly in a scene where the young male population, all wearing scuba flippers, dance on the pier to “Dancing Queen” (one of the ABBA songs I do like).
It would be charity to call the plot contrived. Meryl Streep plays Donna, who runs a tourist villa on the island, where she has raised her daughter, Sophie (Seyfried), to the age of twenty. Sophie, engaged to Sky (Dominic Cooper), has never known who her father is. But now she’s found an old diary and invited the three possible candidates to her forthcoming wedding. She’ll know the right one at first sight, she’s convinced. They are Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and Harry (Colin Firth), and if you know the first thing about camera angles, shot choice, and screen time, you will quickly be able to pick out the likely candidate—if not for sperm source, then for the one most likely to succeed in one way or another.
Meryl Streep’s character of course knows nothing of her daughter’s invitations, but even so, it must be said she takes a long time to figure out why these particular men were invited. Wouldn’t it be, like, obvious? She has earnest conversations with all three, two of whom seem to have been one-night stands; for them to drop everything and fly to Greece for her after twenty years speaks highly of her charms.
The plot is a clothesline on which to hang the songs; the movie doesn’t much sparkle when nobody is singing or dancing, but that’s rarely. The stars all seem to be singing their own songs, aided by an off-screen chorus of, oh, several dozen, plus full orchestration. Meryl Streep might seem to be an unlikely choice to play Donna, but you know what? She can play anybody. And she can survive even the singing of a song like “Money, Money, Money.” She has such a merry smile, and seems to be actually having a good time.
Her two best friends have flown in for the occasion: Tanya (Christine Baranski, an often-married plastic surgery subject) and Rosie (Julie Walters, plainer and pluckier). With three hunks their age like Brosnan, Firth, and Skarsgard on hand, do they divvy up? Not exactly. But a lot of big romantic decisions do take place in just a few days.
The island is beautiful. Moviegoers will no doubt be booking vacations there. The energy is unflagging. The local color feels a little overlooked in the background; nobody seems to speak much Greek. And then there are the songs. You know them. You may feel you know them too well. Or maybe you can never get enough of them. Streep’s sunshine carries a lot of charm, although I will never be able to understand her final decision in the movie—not coming from such a sensible woman. Never mind. Love has its way.
The Man ½
PG-13, 79 m., 2005
Samuel L. Jackson (Agent Derrick Vann), Eugene Levy (Andy Fidler), Miguel Ferrer (Agent Peters), Luke Goss (Joey Trent), Anthony Mackie (Booty), Susie Essman (Lieutenant Rita Carbone), Horatio Sanz (Diaz). Directed by Les Mayfield and produced by Robert N. Fried. Screenplay by Jim Piddock, Margaret Oberman, and Stephen Carpenter.
The Man is another one of those movies, like Lethal Weapon 2, where the outsider finds himself in the dangerous world of cops and robbers. The cop this time is Derrick Vann, a hard-boiled Detroit ATF agent played by Samuel L. Jackson, and the outsider is Andy Fidler (Eugene Levy), a dental supplies salesman from Wisconsin. Fidler loves his product so much he chats up strangers about the glories of flossing.
The plot: Agent Vann’s partner, who is on the take, has died in connection with a heist of guns from the ATF lock-room. A crook named Booty (Anthony Mackie) may be the key to the killing. Vann, an honest agent, mistakes Fidler for an underworld contact working with Booty. When he finds out how very wrong he is, he still needs Fidler to pretend to be a black-market arms dealer if the sting is going to work.
Whether the sting and the movie work are two different questions. Jackson and Levy are in full sail as their most familiar character types: Jackson hard as nails, Levy oblivious to the world outside his own blissfully limited existence. They could play these characters in their sleep. Their differences provide the setup for the whole movie: these two guys linked together in an unlikely partnership during which their personalities (and Fidler’s problems with intestinal gas) will make it difficult for them to share the front seat of Vann’s customized Caddy.
The Man is very minor. The running time of seventy-nine minutes indicates (a) thin material, and (b) mercy toward the audience by not stretching it any further than what is already the breaking point. You know a movie like this is stalling for time when it supplies Agent Vann with a family so that his wife can call him in the middle of the action: “Your daughter wants to know if you’ll be at her recital tonight.” Yes, it’s the ancient and sometimes reliable Dad Too Busy for Child’s Big Moment formula. Does Vann wrap up the case in time to walk into the room just as the recital is beginning? Do he and his daughter exchange a quiet little nod to show family does, after all, come first? I would not dream of giving away such a plot detail.
Levy has funny moments as the fussy dental supplies fetishist but never goes into full obnoxious mode as Joe Pesci did in Lethal Weapon 2. He plays the character like a conventioneer trying to be nice to an alarming taxi driver. Jackson plays the cop like a man who has found a bug in the front seat of his car. What’s interesting, however, is that they don’t get locked into a lot of black-white shtick; their differences are defined through occupation, not race, except for the odd ethnic in-joke involving hot sauce.
The inescapable fact about The Man is that this movie is completely unnecessary. Nobody needed to make it, nobody needs to see it, Jackson and Levy are too successful to waste time with it. It plays less like a film than like a deal.
At Telluride I was talking to James Mangold, the director of Walk the Line and other ambitious pictures, and he said an interesting thing: Hollywood executives are reluctant to green-light a project that depends on the filmmakers being able to pull it off. They want familiar formulas in safe packages. An original movie idea involves faith that the script will work, the director knows what he’s doing, and the actors are right for the story. Too risky. Better to make a movie where when you hear the pitch you can already envision the TV commercial, because the movie will essentially be the long form of the thirty-second spot.
Go online, look at the trailer for The Man, and you will know everything you could possibly need to know about this movie except how it would feel if the trailer were eighty minutes long.
Manderlay
NO MPAA RATING, 139 m., 2006
Bryce Dallas Howard (Grace), Isaach De Bankole (Timothy), Danny Glover (Wilhelm), Willem Dafoe (Grace’s Father), Lauren Bacall (Mam), Zeljko Ivanek (Gambler). Directed by Lars von Trier and produced by Vibeke Windelov. Screenplay by von Trier.
Alabama, 1933. A caravan of black limousines carries gangsters from a gold-mining town in Colorado to a rural Alabama area where slavery still survives as an institution. Alabama looks uncannily like Colorado, as it must: The story that began in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2004) continues here, with the same visual strategy of placing all the action on a sound stage, with chalk lines indicating the outlines of locations. A few rudimentary props flesh out the action, including doors, windows, and machine guns.
The movie is the second in a trilogy by von Trier, who has never visited the United States but has set several movies here, all of them generated by his ideas about American greed, racism, and the misuse of power. To say his America is not recognizable to any American is beside the point; neither is the America in most Hollywood entertainments. Presenting imaginary worlds as if they were real is how movies work.
Von Trier’s purpose is fiercely polemical. The Danish iconoclast holds strong ideas about our society and expresses them in satiric allegories of such audacity that we cast loose from realism and simply float with his conceits. The crucial difference between Manderlay and the almost unbearable Dogville is not that his politics have changed but that his sense of mercy for the audience has been awakened. The movie is thirty-eight minutes shorter than Dogville (although none too fleeting at 139 minutes), and the story is more clearly and strongly told.
He begins with a plantation in Alabama where slavery has never been abolished: Mam (Lauren Bacall) rules with an iron hand, assisted by her foreman, Wilhelm (Danny Glover), a slave who believes his people are not ready for the responsibilities of freedom. Driving up to the gates of the imaginary plantation, Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her gangster father (Willem Dafoe) are surprised to find slavery still flourishing. Grace declares this cannot be, that the plantation must be informed of such historical events as the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.
Grace’s father has crimes to commit and wants to keep moving: “This is a local matter,” he tells his daughter, echoing the argument used for generations. She thinks not and persuades him to leave behind a lawyer and four thugs with machine guns. Using brute force if necessary, she will impose democracy on this backwater. Von Trier’s parallels with Iraq are not impossible to find; this Alabama is no more fictional than the prewar Iraq depicted by the neocon advocates of war.
Mam dies soon after Grace frees the slaves, and Grace herself steps into the power vacuum, establishing a benevolent transitional authority. She will teach the slaves to vote, and then hold elections. Soon, but not yet, they will govern themselves. Doubts are expressed by the slave Wilhelm, who cites the insights in a book hidden under Mam’s mattress—a volume categorizing the various kinds of slaves and their abilities. The slaves, he says, have grown accustomed to the plantation routine; dinner under Mam was always at seven, but what time will it be if the matter is open for discussion? And who will plant the crops and plan the harvest? Jobs don’t get done by themselves.
Grace has her gangsters wear blackface and serve dinner to the slaves, who find the exercise offensive. She orders crops planted and rejoices at the harvest, although gamblers arrive to cheat the slaves, and company stores recycle the wages right back into the pockets of those who pay them. Again, there are contemporary parallels: One of the purposes of every colonial exercise is to open up markets for the occupying power.
I wouldn’t go so far as to claim Manderlay is fun to watch. Von Trier, who can make compulsively watchable films (Breaking the Waves), has found a style that will alienate most audiences. Maybe it’s necessary. On his bargain budgets, he certainly couldn’t afford to shoot on a real plantation, with period detail. His actors work for peanuts (and even so, Nicole Kidman and James Caan bailed out after Dogville). The stark artificiality of his sets makes it clear he’s dealing with parable and excuses his story from any requirement of reality. The real action generated by his story begins after the film ends. If audiences still exist for movies like this and debate them afterward—if, that is, not every single moviegoer in America is lost to mindless narcissistic self-indulgence—the arguments afterward will be the real show. Many moviegoers are likely to like the film less than the discussions it drags them into.
The film has a closing montage of photographs showing the history of African-Americans in America, from slavery through decades of poverty and discrimination to the civil rights movement, both its victories and defeats. Von Trier no doubt intends this montage to be an indictment of America, but I view it more positively: From a legacy of evil, our democracy has stumbled uncertainly in a moral direction and within our lifetimes has significantly reduced racism.
No doubt if everyone in America had always been Danish, we could have avoided some of our sins, but there you have it.
Note: Just in time to be tacked on to the end of this review, von Trier has issued a statement of revitality to Variety. Ray Pride of Movie City News quotes him in part: “… I intend to reschedule my professional activities in order to rediscover my original enthusiasm for film. Over the last few years I have felt increasingly burdened by barren habits and expectations (my own and other people’s) and I feel the urge to tidy up. In regards to product development this will mean more time on freer terms; i.e., projects will be allowed to undergo true development and not merely be required to meet preconceived demands. This is partly to liberate me from routine, and in particular from scriptural structures inherited from film to film….”
The most delightful element of this statement is his assumption that his films are “required to meet preconceived demands.”
Man in the Chair ½
PG-13, 107 m., 2007
Christopher Plummer (Flash Madden), Michael Angarano (Cameron Kincaid), M. Emmet Walsh (Mickey Hopkins), Robert Wagner (Taylor Moss), Tracey Walter (Mr. Klein), Mitch Pileggi (Floyd), Joshua Boyd (Murphy White). Directed by Michael Schroeder and produced by Schroeder, Randy Turrow, and Sarah Schroeder. Screenplay by Michael Schroeder.
Man in the Chair is a movie about a high school student who enlists two movie industry veterans from old-folks’ homes to help him with his project. And I mean old folks. Flash Madden (Christopher Plummer) claims to have been given his nickname by Orson Welles on the set of Citizen Kane, which means, if he was twenty-five at the time, he is ninety-one now. And Mickey Hopkins (M. Emmet Walsh), a writer, claims to have written Queen Christina, which, if he was twenty-five at the time, would make him ninety-nine.
Of course we know Mickey didn’t write Queen Christina (or Gone with the Wind, another one of his “credits”), and the odds are against Flash’s story, too. The chances are they are both lying, but the kid, Cameron (Michael Angarano) doesn’t think of that, and neither does the writer-director, Michael Schroeder, although it might have made this a better movie.
What it is, instead, is a half-baked idea for a movie with way too many characters and subplots. Do we really need another lovable cheering section of characters (and character actors) who live at the Motion Picture Home and have individual headlined character traits? Do we need animal haters who catch and kill dogs as a business? Do we need the kid to have a mean father? Do we need him to have a competitor who bullies him at school? Do we need for old Flash to be such an alcoholic that to still be drinking like that at ninety-one must mean he only started at ninety?
The movie works so hard at juggling its clichés that it fails to generate interest in its story—which turns out to be not the skateboarding drama the kid had in mind, but a docudrama Flash sells him on about the mistreatment of old folks like Mickey. Then the animal subplot takes over as the old folks and the kid attack the cruel dog pound, uh-huh. And there is a stunt involving gasoline that is way too far over the top.
Christopher Plummer is a superb actor. I applauded him off-Broadway as the best Iago I have ever seen. No doubt there were aspects of the idea of this character that appealed to him, but did he measure its probability? And as for Mickey, M. Emmet Walsh, also a great character actor, has made a living looking moth-eaten and ramshackle, but good Lord, what they do to Mickey in this picture, it’s a mercy his poor mother isn’t alive to see it (if she were 25 when she had Mickey, she’d be 124 now).
I know an old writer. His name is William Froug, he lives in Florida, and if you look him up on Amazon you will see he is still writing brilliant and useful books about screenwriting and teleplays. He is not merely as sharp as a tack, he is the standard by which they sharpen tacks. If he had been advising the kid, the kid would have made a better movie, and if he had been advising the director of Man in the Chair, we would have been spared the current experience. Just because you’re old doesn’t mean you have to be a decrepit caricature. One thing that keeps Froug young is that, unlike Flash Madden, he almost certainly does not sit on an expressway overpass guzzling Jack Daniel’s from a pint bottle.
Note: If flashbacks are meant to recall reality, it is unlikely that the slate on Citizen Kane would have misspelled the name of Orson Welles.
Man Push Cart
NO MPAA RATING, 87 m., 2006
Ahmad Razvi (Ahmad), Leticia Dolera (Noemi). Directed by Ramin Bahrani and produced by Bahrani, Pradip Ghosh, and Bedford T. Bentley III. Screenplay by Bahrani.
Man Push Cart was filmed in Manhattan by an American born in Iran and an American born in Pakistan, and embodies the very soul of Italian neorealism. Free of contrived melodrama and phony suspense, it ennobles the hard work by which its hero earns his daily bread. He owns a stainless-steel bagel wagon, which he pushes through the lonely predawn streets. He sells bagels and sweet rolls and juice and coffee, and many customers call him by his first name, although they would never think to ask his last one.
The character, named Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), has had a life before this, but the pushcart now defines the parameters of his existence. He was a Pakistani rock star, although how that career ended and he came to New York to push a cart (which would be a subject of a more conventional film) is barely suggested. Ahmad’s wife is dead, his in-laws will not allow him to see his son, and maybe he originally came to America to seek the child. Now he sells bagels.
We see the world he inhabits outside the cart. He knows the other nearby vendors, including a Hispanic woman at a magazine stand. Romance would be a possibility, except that romance is not a possibility in Ahmad’s life. It is too filled with the making of a living. Like so many Americans who work low-wage jobs, sometimes two or even three of them, his work essentially subsidizes his ability to keep on working.
Ramin Bahrani, the writer-director, shot his film on a shoestring, in less than three weeks. He often used a concealed camera, shooting what was really happening. There’s a scene of unforced spontaneity when Ahmad offers to sell some bootleg videos. The two guys he pitches say they know where to they can get bootlegs, two for eight bucks, in Brooklyn. Those two guys did not know they were in a movie.
Ahmad’s cart is stolen, and therefore his livelihood. We get a glimpse backstage of how the vending cart economy operates. What can he do without a cart and a way to replace it? He will, we understand, keep pushing, if not the cart, then something. Man Push Cart as a title encapsulates human survival at a most fundamental economic level.
Bahrani’s film was accepted by Sundance 2006. The festival offered an opportunity for his low-budget effort to find audiences, and I immediately invited it to my Overlooked Film Festival last April. A central Illinois audience reacted, if anything, more favorably than the Sundance crowd. The film’s story is simple, moving, and inescapable.
In a film like this, it is pointless to describe screenplay, acting, or direction. The film is resolutely utilitarian. No effort is made to create a visual look; the camera simply, impassively regards. Razvi’s acting never strains for effect; it embodies the bleakness and exhaustion of his character. Bahrani, as director, not only stays out of the way of the simplicity of his story, but relies on it; less is more, and with restraint he finds a grimy eloquence.
Bahrani was inspired by The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, the story of a man who spends his life pushing a rock up a hill, only to see it roll down again, and only to push it back up again. Well, what else can he do? Man Push Cart is not an indictment of the American economy or some kind of political allegory. It is about what it is about. I think the message maybe that it is better, after all, to push the cart than to face a life without hope at the bottom of the hill.
March of the Penguins ½
G, 80 m., 2005
Morgan Freeman (Narrator). A documentary directed by Luc Jacquet and produced by Yves Darondeau, Christophe Lioud, and Emmanuel Priou. Screenplay by Jordan Roberts.
After a long summer of feasting, their bodies stately and plump, the emperor penguins of Antarctica begin to feel, toward autumn, a need to march inland to the breeding grounds “where each and every one of them was born.” They are all of a mind about this and walk in single file, thousands of them, in a column miles long. They all know where they are going, even those making the march for the first time, and when they get there these countless creatures, who all look more or less the same to us, begin to look more or less desirable to one another. Carefully, they choose their mates.
This is not a casual commitment. After the female delivers one large egg, the male gathers it into a fold of his abdomen, plants his feet to protect it from the ice below, and then stands there all winter with no food or water, in howling gales, at temperatures far below zero, in total darkness, huddled together with the other fathers for warmth. The females meanwhile march all the way back to the sea, now even more distant, to forage for food. When the females return to the mass of countless males, they find their mates without error and recognize the cries of chicks they have never seen. As they nurse the chicks, the males crawl back to the sea for food.
March of the Penguins is simply, and astonishingly, the story of this annual cycle. It was filmed under unimaginable conditions by the French director Luc Jacquet and his team, including cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison. There is not much to choose from in setting up their shots: On the coldest, driest, and (in winter) darkest continent on Earth, there is snow, and there is ice, and there are penguins. There is also an ethereal beauty.
Although the compulsion to reproduce is central to all forms of life, the penguins could be forgiven if they’d said the hell with it and evolved in the direction of being able to swim to Patagonia. The film’s narrator, Morgan Freeman, tells us that Antarctica was once a warm land with rich forests that teemed with creatures. But as the climate grew colder over long centuries, one life form after another bailed out, until the penguins were left in a land that, as far as they can see, is inhabited pretty much by other penguins, and edged by seas filled with delicious fish. Even their predators, such as the leopard seal, give them a pass during the dark, long, cold winter.
“This is a love story,” Freeman’s narration assures us, reminding me for some reason of Tina Turner singing “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” I think it is more accurately described as the story of an evolutionary success. The penguins instinctively know, because they have been hardwired by evolutionary trial and error, that it is necessary to march so far inland because in spring the ice shelf will start to melt toward them, and they need to stand where the ice will remain thick enough to support them. As a species, they learned this because the penguins who paused too soon on their treks had eggs that fell into the sea. Those who walked farther produced another generation, and eventually every penguin was descended from a long line of ancestors who were willing to walk the extra mile.
Why do penguins behave in this manner? Because it works for them, and their environment gives them little alternative. They are Darwinism embodied. But their life history is so strange that until this century it was not even guessed at. The first Antarctic explorers found penguins aplenty but had little idea where they came from, where they went to, and indeed whether they were birds or mammals.
The answers to those questions were discovered by a man named Apsley Cherry-Garrard, as described in one of the most remarkable books ever written, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). He was writing not about the journey of the penguins but about his own trek with two others through the bitter night to their mating grounds. Members of Robert F. Scott’s 1910–1912 expedition to the South Pole, they set out in the autumn to follow the march of the penguins, and walked through hell until they found them, watched them, and returned with one of their eggs. Cherry-Garrard retired to England, where he lived until 1959; his friends felt the dreadful march, and the earlier experience of finding the frozen bodies of Scott and two others, contributed to his depression for the rest of his life.
For Jacquet and his crew, the experience was more bearable. They had transport, warmth, food, and communication with the greater world. Still, it could not have been pleasant, sticking it out and making this documentary, when others were filming a month spent eating at McDonald’s. The narration is a little fanciful for my taste, and some of the shots seem funny to us, but not to the penguins. When they fall over, they do it with a remarkable lack of style. And for all the walking they do, they’re ungainly waddlers. Yet they are perfect in their way, with sleek coats, grace in the water and heroic determination. It’s poignant to watch the chicks in their youth, fed by their parents, playing with their chums, the sun climbing higher every day, little suspecting what they’re in for.
R, 93 m., 2007
Nicole Kidman (Margot), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Pauline), Zane Pais (Claude), Jack Black (Malcolm), John Turturro (Jim), Flora Cross (Ingrid), Ciaran Hinds (Dick), Halley Feiffer (Maisy). Directed by Noah Baumbach and produced by Scott Rudin. Screenplay by Baumbach.
I wonder if his family knew Noah Baumbach was taking notes? First in The Squid and the Whale and now with Margot at the Wedding, he puts an intelligent but alarming family under the microscope and finds creepy-squirmy things crawling around. Of course, there is no reason to be certain the family in either movie is inspired by his own. But given the degree of familiarity, there’s no reason not to, either. Besides, the character Margot in this one is accused of storing up every family pain, humiliation, and embarrassment for recycling in her short stories. Isn’t there a rule that if you bring a literary crime onstage in the first act, you have to commit it in the third?
The movie opens as Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her son, Claude (Zane Pais), are traveling by train to the wedding of Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the sister she is not on speaking terms with. Pauline still lives in the big family house up east. With a child of her own, the precocious Ingrid (Flora Cross), and another on the way, Pauline’s planning to marry Malcolm (Jack Black), who can spend up to a week writing a letter to the editor and is growing a mustache that he hopes will look funny.
Margot, the writer, has deliberately not brought along her husband, Jim (John Turturro), because she has plans to meet Dick (Ciaran Hinds), her former and perhaps future lover, at a local book signing. Dick has a daughter, Maisy (Halley Feiffer), who is just at that age when she has power but not wisdom about sexuality. Maisy and Ingrid will bond and no doubt start a first draft of Ingrid and/or Maisy at the Wedding.
All of these characters gather with some apprehension for an outdoor wedding that may not have been planned out of the pages of American Bride. And Margot is brutal with Pauline, advising her that Malcolm is not worthy to be her husband. We’re not sure. He seems extremely inward and eccentric, and possibly unemployable, but maybe he’s just what a high-powered ball of nerves like Pauline needs, if not as a husband, then as a letter writer. He is certainly the only person on the horizon without a neurotic agenda.
It is never explained why the two sisters haven’t been speaking, but I understand why. They are such equals that neither one has ever been able to gain the upper hand. All of their lifestyle choices seem intended as rebukes to each other. They’ve spent a lifetime both trying to stand on the same place and push the other away. There’s no great painful event in the past, just the mutual feeling that each is complete without a sister. Notice the scene when Pauline challenges Margot to climb a tree.
On the other hand, they’re able to be brutally truthful with each other, especially in conversations about their sexual desirability. What does it do to a woman when she spends years pushing off men who want to sleep with her and gradually finds there’s no one to push? Where are male chauvinist pigs when you need them? Many of their conversations take place in front of the kids, who look like they are in training to become the next generation of dysfunctionality.
Writing about this movie from the Toronto festival, Jim Emerson had a great observation: “It’s like a Neil LaBute picture cowritten by Jules Feiffer.” Yes, and Elaine May might have done one of her ghost rewrites, so to speak. The characters are into emotional laceration for fun. They are verbal, articulate, self-absorbed, selfish, egotistical, cold, and fascinating. They’ve never felt an emotion they couldn’t laugh at.
Which brings us full circle. Margot at the Wedding may not be based on Noah Baumbach’s own family, but it demonstrates a way of looking at families that he must have learned somewhere. Both of his parents were writers and, to one degree or another, film critics; I remember Gene Siskel telling a friend at dinner that film critics eventually became critical of everything: “For example, your tie is hideous.” In revenge, the friend went to Marshall Field’s and asked to buy their ugliest tie. Two salesclerks helped him in a spirited debate to select the tie that qualified. My friend wore it the next time they met. Siskel identified the brand of the tie correctly and said: “If you like that tie, it shows you have better taste than 99 percent of men.” So it goes with the family in this movie. All of its members are engaged in a mutual process of shooting each other down. Watching Margot at the Wedding is like slowing for a gaper’s block.
Marie Antoinette
PG-13, 123 m., 2006
Kirsten Dunst (Marie Antoinette), Jason Schwartzman (King Louis XVI), Rip Torn (King Louis XV), Judy Davis (Comtesse de Noailles), Asia Argento (Madame Du Barry), Marianne Faithfull (Empress Maria Teresa), Danny Huston (Joseph). Directed by Sofia Coppola and produced by Coppola and Ross Katz. Screenplay by Coppola, based on the book by Antonia Fraser.
Ten things that occurred to me while watching Marie Antoinette:
1. This is Sofia Coppola’s third film centering on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you. It shows Coppola once again able to draw notes from actresses who are rarely required to sound them.
2. Kirsten Dunst is pitch-perfect in the title role, as a fourteen-year-old Austrian princess who is essentially purchased and imported to the French court to join with the clueless Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) to produce an heir. She has self-possession, poise, and high spirits, and they are contained within a world that gives her no way to usefully express them. So she frolics and indulges herself, within a cocoon of rigid court protocol.
3. No, the picture is not informative and detailed about the actual politics of the period. That is because we are entirely within Marie’s world. And it is contained within Versailles, which shuts out all external reality. It is a self-governing architectural island, like Kane’s Xanadu, that shuts out politics, reality, poverty, and society.
4. Schwartzman, like Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation, plays a sexually passive sad sack who would rather commiserate than take an active role. Danny Huston is priceless as Marie’s older brother, brought in from Austria to give the young king a few helpful suggestions about the birds and the bees. The old king, randy Louis XV (Rip Torn) would certainly need no inspiration to perform, as his mistress, Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), immediately observes.
5. All three of Coppola’s films, and this one most of all, use locations to define the lives of the characters. Allowed complete access to Versailles, she shows a society as single-mindedly devoted to the care and feeding of Marie Antoinette as a beehive centers on its queen.
6. On the border for the official handover, Marie is stopped, stripped, and searched to ascertain, brutally, if she is indeed a virgin and, for that matter, a female. In a deal like this, it pays to kick the tires. I was reminded of the scene in von Sternberg’s Scarlett Empress where Catherine arrives at the court of the czar and the royal physician immediately crawls under her skirt to check her royal plumbing. Every detail is covered by the French authorities; they even confiscate her beloved dogs, but tell her, “You can have as many French dogs as you like.”
7. Coppola has been criticized in some circles for her use of a contemporary pop overlay—hit songs, incongruous dialogue, jarring intrusions of the Now upon the Then. But no one ever lives as Then; it is always Now. Many characters in historical films seem somehow aware that they are living in the past. Marie seems to think she is a teenager living in the present, which of course she is—and the contemporary pop references invite the audience to share her present with ours. Forman’s Amadeus had a little of that, with its purple wigs.
8. Everyone in the audience knows Marie Antoinette was beheaded, and I fear we anticipate her beheading with an unwholesome curiosity. Coppola brilliantly sidesteps a beheading and avoids bloated mob scenes by employing light, sound, and a balcony to use Marie’s death as a curtain call. Hired, essentially, to play a princess, she is a good trouper and faithful to her role. It is impossible to avoid thoughts of Diana, Princess of Wales.
9. Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.
10. It is not necessary to know anything about Marie Antoinette to enjoy this film. Some of what we think we know is mistaken. According to the Coppola version, she never said, “Let them eat cake.” “I would never say that,” she says indignantly. What she says is, “Let them eat custard.” But, paradoxically, the more you know about her, the more you may learn, because Coppola’s oblique and anachronistic point of view shifts the balance away from realism and into an act of empathy for a girl swept up by events that leave her without personal choices. Before she was a queen, before she was a pawn, Marie was a fourteen-year-old girl taken from her home, stripped bare, and examined like so much horseflesh. It is astonishing with what indifference for her feelings the court aristocracy uses her for its pleasure, and in killing her disposes of its guilt. 
Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School
PG-13, 103 m., 2006
Robert Carlyle (Frank Keane), Marisa Tomei (Meredith Morrison), Mary Steenburgen (Marienne Hotchkiss), Sean Astin (Joe Buco), Donnie Wahlberg (Randall Ipswitch), Danny DeVito (Booth), John Goodman (Steve Mills), David Paymer (Rafael Horowitz), Camryn Manheim (Lisa Gobar), Adam Arkin (Gabe DiFranco), Sonia Braga (Tina). Directed by Randall Miller and produced by Eileen Craft, Miller, Morris Ruskin, and Jody Savin. Screenplay by Miller and Savin.
When he was twelve years old, Steve promised Lisa that they would meet again on the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the new millennium, at a reunion of their class at Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School. Now Steve is forty-eight, it is May 5, 2005, and he’s piloting his station wagon down a lonely highway to make that rendezvous. If you’re still reading, I’m as surprised as I am that I’m still writing.
Think about this. You liked a schoolmate when you were twelve and for almost forty years have focused on this reunion. Are you crazy? When I was twelve, I did not even take ballroom dancing classes, for which I thank the nuns of St. Mary’s Grade School. It was all we could do to practice for the rhythm band. A rhythm band, as you rich kids may not know, is a band consisting entirely of cheap rhythm instruments. Sister Marie Donald would put a record on the Victrola and we would accompany it by ringing our triangles, rubbing our ratchet sticks together, and pounding on tambourines. If a kid was left over, he would bang a desk lid up and down. The school had a piano, but it was in the auditorium.
Anyway, while racing to his rendezvous with Lisa, Steve (John Goodman) is in a car crash. The crash is witnessed by Frank (Robert Carlyle), who is driving a bakery truck. Frank calls 911, encourages Steve to hang in there, and accompanies him in the ambulance to the hospital. Steve keeps blubbering about Lisa: “I made this appointment almost forty years ago! I promised Lisa I’d be there!”
“Keep him talking!” a paramedic advises Frank. This is not a problem. Steve talks on and off during the entire movie, telling the story of his relationship with Lisa and the dynamics of their class at the Marilyn Hotchkiss school. Occasionally his heartbeat falters, and we hear the ominously level tone of a heart monitor flatlining. But then Frank asks him another question, and thank God! The monitor starts beeping again, as Steve shares another memory from his past. He talks so much, the HMO must be shipping him to a hospital in another state.
Frank himself is grieving; his wife has committed suicide, for unexplained reasons. He promises Steve he will go to the Marilyn Hotchkiss reunion and look for Lisa, and this he does. He is painfully shy as he asks one woman after another if she is Lisa, but Lisa does not seem to have taken the appointment as seriously as Steve. Meanwhile, Frank has a run-in with Randall Ipswitch (Donnie Wahlberg), who warns him to keep his hands off his half-sister Meredith Morrison (Marisa Tomei). Randall is so angry, he even gives Frank’s bakery truck four flat tires.
Was there ever a place in this or any reasonably adjacent universe where Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School could be considered a plausible story? I doubt it. It matches nothing in my experience. I have written before about the Thelma Leah Rose Ballroom Dancing Academy, which was above the Princess Theater on Main Street in Urbana, Illinois, and where I learned the fox-trot, the waltz, the mambo, the canasta, the pinochle, and many other dances—all of them, my wife confides, very badly.
We were younger than today’s twelve-year-olds have ever been. I can assure you that the little Steves and Lisas in our class did not make appointments for forty years hence. We looked at each other with fear and loathing. The only reason I took the dance class in the first place was that I was in training for the St. Mary’s Seventh-and Eighth-Grade Prom, at the Urbana-Lincoln Hotel. Sister Nathan and Sister Rosanne laid down the ground rules: They wanted to see daylight between the dancers. As far as I was concerned, they could have seen Indiana.
The adults at the Hotchkiss reunion are played by an assortment of splendid actors. Mary Steenburgen is the heir to the Hotchkiss legacy, and the students include Sean Astin, David Paymer, Adam Arkin, and Sonia Braga. Tomei is adorable as the bighearted Meredith, who despite her attack-dog half-brother sees that Frank has a wounded heart, and she attempts to mend it. I hope she gets the flour out of her hair. All I can say about Lisa is, when we finally meet her, she’s smoking. As a far better critic than I once wrote, there wasn’t a wet eye in the house.
Married Life
PG-13, 90 m., 2008
Pierce Brosnan (Richard Langley), Chris Cooper (Harry Allen), Patricia Clarkson (Pat Allen), Rachel McAdams (Kay Nesbitt). Directed by Ira Sachs and produced by Steve Golin, Sachs, Sidney Kimmel, and Jawal Nga. Screenplay by Sachs and Oren Moverman, based on the novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham.
Remember the time businessmen were expected to drink martinis at lunch, and the time they were expected not to? Ira Sachs’s Married Life begins with Harry taking Richard into his confidence at a martinis-and-cigarettes lunch that confirms the movie is set in 1949. Harry (Chris Cooper) is a buttoned-down, closed-in respectable type. Richard (Pierce Brosnan) is more easygoing. You can tell by the way they smoke. Harry is painfully earnest as he tells his friend that he plans to leave his wife for a much younger woman. The younger woman truly and deeply loves him. All his wife wants is sex.
Why does Harry share this information? I think he wants understanding and forgiveness from a man he respects. He has arranged for the young woman to join them at lunch. Here she comes now. She is Kay (Rachel McAdams). She has the bottle-blond hair and the bright red lipstick, the Monroe look. But don’t get the wrong idea. She’s a sweet kid, and she really does love Harry. The movie has a voice-over narration by Richard, but we don’t need it to tell from the look in his eyes that Richard desires Kay, and that from the moment he sees her he wants to take her away from the dutiful Harry.
How dutiful is Harry? So devoted to his wife that he can’t stand the thought of telling her he wants a divorce. He decides to take pity on her, spare her that pain, and murder her instead. Sort of a mercy killing. He’s serious about this. He knows how devoted his wife is to him and how this news would shatter her, and he doubts she could stand it.
This story, which crosses film noir with the look and feel of a Douglas Sirk film, balances between its crime element and its social commentary: Everything Harry does is within the terms of a circa-1950 middle-class suburban marriage, with what we have been taught are all of its horrors. Marriage is always bad in these dark movies. I personally think it was better than in 1950s comedies, but then that’s just me. We have the same problems, but we smoke less and use more jargon. And no generation thinks its fashions look funny, although Gene Siskel used to amuse himself by watching people walking down the street and thinking to himself, “When they left home this morning, they thought they looked good in that.”
But enough. What about Harry’s wife? She is Pat, played by Patricia Clarkson, who is so expert at portraying paragons of patient domestic virtue: so trusting, oblivious, or preoccupied that she never thinks to question Harry’s absences when he’s seeing Kay. Richard observes all of this in a low-key, factual way; it’s as if he’s telling us the story over martinis. He even addresses us directly at times.
Will Harry really try to kill his wife? Many men have killed their wives for less, shall we call them, considerate motives. Sachs and his cowriter, Oren Moverman, have based their screenplay on the pulp novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven by John Bingham, who, I learn from the critic Keith Uhlich, was a British intelligence agent and the original for John Le Carre’s character George Smiley. Smiley, however, would be the Richard character here, not the Harry. The story has been ported from the land of roundabouts to the land of four-way stops, all except for Richard, who is British and urbane, which with Harry possibly passes for trustworthy.
Pierce Brosnan is becoming a whole new actor in my eyes, after this film, The Matador, Evelyn, and The Tailor of Panama. It’s the kiss of death to play James Bond, but at least it gives you a chance to reinvent yourself. Chris Cooper reinvents himself in every film; can this be the same actor from Adaptation? Here he seems so respectable. Rachel McAdams does a nice job of always seeming honest and sincere, even when she makes U-turns, but Patricia Clarkson, as always, has a few surprises behind that face that can be so bland, or scornful, or in between. Still housewives run deep.
There is so much passion in this story that it’s a wonder how damped down it is. Nobody shouts. And we discover that Harry is not the only person in the story who can surprise us. The lesson, I think, is that the French have the right idea, and adultery is no reason to destroy a perfectly functioning marriage. But is the movie about marriage, or sex, or murder, or the murder plot, or what? I’m not sure. It deals all those cards, and fate shuffles them. You may not like it if you insist on counting the deck after the game and coming up with fifty-two. But if you get fifty-one and are amused by how the missing card was made to vanish, this may be a movie to your liking.
Martian Child
PG, 106 m., 2007
John Cusack (David), Joan Cusack (Liz), Bobby Coleman (Dennis), Amanda Peet (Harlee), Sophie Okonedo (Sophie), Oliver Platt (Jeff), Richard Schiff (Lefkowitz). Directed by Menno Meyjes and produced by David Kirschner, Ed Elbert, and Corey Sienega. Screenplay by Seth Bass and Jonathan Tolins, based on a novel by David Gerrold.
“I’m not human,” little Dennis says at one point in Martian Child. So he believes. The lonely orphan has convinced himself that he was not abandoned by his parents but arrived here from Mars. To protect himself against the sun, he walks around inside a cardboard box with a slit cut for his eyes and wears a weight belt around his waist to keep himself from drifting up into the sky. At no point during the film does anyone take mercy on the kid and explain that the sun is much more pitiless on Mars and the gravity much lower.
Still, this isn’t a film about planetary science but about love. Dennis attracts the attention of a lonely science fiction writer named David (John Cusack), a widower who can’t get the cardboard box out of his mind and goes back to the orphanage one day with some suntan cream. Eventually, almost against his own will, he asks Dennis to come home with him for a test run and decides to adopt him. The movie is the sentimental, very sentimental, story of how that goes.
Few actors in the right role can be sweeter or more lovable than John Cusack, and he is those things almost to a fault in Martian Child, which is so bland and safe that it might appeal more directly to children than adults. Cusack plays another widower in his much more affecting movie Grace Is Gone, and you wonder why he took two fairly similar roles so closely together.
This is not to say Martian Child lacks good qualities. Young Bobby Coleman plays Dennis as consistent, stubborn, and suspicious, and Amanda Peet has a warm if predictable role as the woman in David’s life who starts out as best friend and ends up where female best friends often do, in his arms. But it is Joan Cusack, John’s real-life sister playing his movie sister, whose contribution is most welcome, because she brings a little sassiness and cynicism to a film that threatens to drown in lachrymosity.
The movie leaves no heartstring untugged. It even has a beloved old dog, and you know what happens to beloved old dogs in movies like this. Or if you don’t, I don’t have the heart to tell you. And there is the standard board of supervisors in control of adoptions, which without exception in this genre adopts a policy against adoptive parents who are loving and loved, or who exhibit the slightest sign of being creative or unorthodox in any way. I suspect they would rather have a kid adopted by a mercenary than a science fiction writer, especially one who hasn’t already ripped off Dennis’s gravity belt and left him to float up into the sky, where it is very cold and even lonelier than inside a cardboard box.
Masculine, Feminine
NO MPAA RATING, 103 m., 1966 (rereleased 2005)
Jean-Pierre Leaud (Paul), Chantal Goya (Madeleine), Marlene Jobert (Elisabeth), Michel Debord (Robert), Catherine-Isabelle Duport (Catherine-Isabelle). Directed by Jean-Luc Godard and produced by Anatole Dauman. Screenplay by Godard, based on La Femme de Paul and Le Signe by Guy de Maupassant.
“We went seeking greatness in movies, and were most often disappointed. We waited for a movie like the one we wanted to make, and secretly wanted to live.”
That’s the line I remember best from Godard’s Masculine, Feminine, and not the more famous “We are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” When we found a movie like the one we secretly wanted to live, we did not even seek greatness; greatness could take care of itself. The joke at the center of Masculine, Feminine (1966) is that its young French characters were fascinated by America, and its young American audiences were fascinated by them. When the movie came out, we all focused on “Marx and Coca-Cola,” but now I see that the operative word is “children.”
I was barely older than the characters when I wrote my review of the film. I affected a certain detachment (“the French New Wave is coming full circle and recording what has happened to those influenced by it”). I didn’t own up to what I really liked about the movie: the way its young hero moves casually through a world of cafés and bistros and the bedrooms of beautiful young girls, including a pop star who is maddeningly indifferent to him.
I wanted to be Paul, the character played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, or at least be Leaud, and appear in movies by Truffaut and Godard, or at least live in Paris and walk down the same streets. All of the rest—the radical politics, the sex talk, the antiwar graffiti Paul sprayed on the car of the American ambassador—was simply his performance art. By acting in that way, he could meet girls like the pop singer Madeleine (Chantal Goya) and her sexy roommates. If you didn’t have the money to live in the world of a girl like that, it was a useful strategy to convince her of the purity of your poverty.
I call them “girls” deliberately, and Leaud’s character is a boy. Pauline Kael, who loved the film, was even more heartless in her description, calling them “this new breed between teenagers and people.” She is alert to the way they boldly discuss birth control but don’t in fact have the pill or know much about sex. Yes, the French are said to be great sophisticates, but the birth control method promised to Madeleine by Paul is one with many a slip ’twixt the method and the control.
The movie has been restored in a new 35mm print. You can appreciate Godard’s vigorous early visual style; long before the Dogma movement, he shoots with natural sound and light, he inserts his characters into real times and places, and he practices his own form of withdrawal by separating the movie into fifteen chapters, each one with a title. There is an extended sequence where Leaud’s character “interviews” a beauty contest winner, and the entire conversation is completely understood by both of them to be a pick-up attempt.
In a buried sense, everything Leaud does in the film is single-mindedly designed to get him into bed with girls who are not very interested (or interesting). He says he is a communist. He supports the workers. He paints slogans. He makes radical political comments. He is at the barricades in the sense that barricades are found in the streets, and when he hangs out in cafés the streets are right outside. In the movie’s first shot, we see him trying to flip a cigarette into his mouth in one smooth movement, Belmondo style, as in Godard’s first film, Breathless. He never gets it right. From the way he smokes we suspect that smoking is not the point: Smoking like Belmondo is the point.
The movie was inspired by two short stories by Guy de Maupassant. I have just read one of them, The Signal, which is about a married woman who observes a prostitute attracting men with the most subtle of signs. The woman is fascinated, practices in the mirror, discovers she is better than the prostitute at attracting men, and then finds one at her door and doesn’t know what to do about him. If you search for this story in Masculine, Feminine, you will not find it, despite some talk of prostitution. Then you realize that the signal has been changed but the device is still there: Leaud’s character went to the movies, saw Belmondo attracting women, and is trying to master the same art. Like the heroine of de Maupassant’s story, he seems caught off guard when he makes a catch.
The actress Chantal Goya was interviewed about her experience on the movie. She remembers the first day: “Jean-Pierre Leaud, whom I didn’t know from Adam, or Eve, came over to me and, looking me straight in the eye, asked me point blank, ‘Will you marry me?’ I told him, ‘We’ll see later. I’m in a hurry. Bye.’ I went home at noon.” I’ll have to see the film again to be sure, but I have the strangest feeling that moment is in the movie. The appeal of Masculine, Feminine may be that it’s not a movie like the one they wanted to make and secretly wanted to live, but the movie they did make, and were living.
The Matador ½
R, 96 m., 2006
Pierce Brosnan (Julian Noble), Greg Kinnear (Danny Wright), Hope Davis (Bean), Philip Baker Hall (Mr. Randy), Adam Scott (Phil Garrison), Dylan Baker (Lovell). Directed by Richard Shepard and produced by Pierce Brosnan, Bryan Furst, Sean Furst, and Beau St. Clair. Screenplay by Shepard.
I walked into The Matador expecting one film, and saw another. On paper, this sounds like a formula thriller, and the casting seems to confirm that: Pierce Brosnan as a hit man, and Greg Kinnear as a businessman who meets him in a hotel bar. But Brosnan redefines “hit man” in the best performance of his career (“I facilitate fatalities”), and Kinnear plays with, and against, his image as a regular kinda guy. By the time Hope Davis, Kinnear’s wife, meets this killer her husband has told her so much about, she has her first question ready: “Did you bring your gun?”
The movie has a plot in which I suppose it matters who gets whacked, and why, but it’s essentially a character study, in which Brosnan, Kinnear, and Davis are invited to riff on the kinds of characters they often play—maybe even get even with them. Every actor who has ever played James Bond spends years reading about how his latest role helps him to “shed the Bond image,” but Brosnan appears in Matador with his character of Julian Noble so firmly in place that no shedding, molting, or other divestment is necessary.
Julian and Danny Wright (Kinnear) meet in the middle of the night in the hypermodern bar of a Mexico City hotel so sterile it makes the facilities in Lost in Translation look funky. During a moment of alcoholic truth, Mr. Wright shares with Mr. Noble the story of the death of his infant son. Julian counters with a dirty joke. Danny is insulted and walks out. But the next day they begin again after Danny demands, and receives, an apology.
Julian Noble’s awkward joke is a defining moment in the movie, establishing him as a man cut off from all others, a man who confesses, “I don’t live anywhere,” a man wandering lost through booze and hookers, a man afraid of losing the skills that make him a useful hit man. He has lost the ability to carry on an appropriate conversation, and when Danny Wright is willing to listen to him, simply listen, he becomes grateful and they become friends.
If Julian needs a confidant, Danny needs a distraction from financial desperation. He has lost not only his child but also his job, and he is in Mexico City trying to cobble together some kind of improbable business deal. Julian offers to take him to a bullfight, and in a wonderfully written scene the conversation turns to the mechanics of hired killing. Julian picks out a man from the crowd, a man obviously with bodyguards, and walks Danny through a dress rehearsal of how he would kill the guy and get away safely.
Months pass. Back in Denver, we meet Carolyn (Hope Davis), Danny’s wife. She is known as Bean. Yes, Bean. Bean and Danny are still in love; there’s a sweet scene where she remembers how in high school he told her how pretty she was. The doorbell rings and it’s Julian, desperate, falling to pieces, telling Danny something that we suspect may be true: “You are my only friend in the world.”
Julian moves in, fascinating Bean, Danny, and their young son. Ironically, Julian is equally fascinated by Bean and Danny’s love for each other: He’s made his way through life, he says, “running from any emotion.”
Other characters become involved. There is talk of Julian’s panic attacks and a meltdown in the Philippines. His employer, Mr. Randy (Philip Baker Hall), has lost patience; he’s like an investor who loved a stock but knows it’s time to dump it. Julian’s life may be in danger. At a crucial moment he walks through a hotel lobby carrying a gun and wearing only boots and Speedos, and although there is a reason for this, the real reason is to show Julian reduced to despair and public humiliation and meeting it with jaunty indifference.
Brosnan is so intriguing to watch in the movie. Unshaven, trembling, hung over, fearful, charming, confiding, paranoid, trusting, he clings to Danny and Bean like a lost child at the zoo. Where did he get those shirts he wears? They look like they were bought six at a time out of the back of a van at a truck stop. The richness of his comic performance depends on the way he savors and treasures this character; at no point does Brosnan apologize for Julian, or stand outside of him, or seem to invite our laughter. He is like the charming stranger you meet in a bar, who you know could become your best friend if he were not so obviously a time bomb.
Against Brosnan, Kinnear and Davis are perfect foils, enjoying his character as much as he does. The three actors do something that is essential to this kind of comedy: They refuse to be in on the joke. It’s not funny for them. They never wink. The movie’s writer-director, Richard Shepard, balances the macabre and the sentimental, and he understands that although his film contains questions like, “Don’t successful people always live with blood on their hands?” its real subject is friendship.
Match Point
R, 124 m., 2006
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (Chris Wilton), Scarlett Johansson (Nola Rice), Emily Mortimer (Chloe Hewett Wilton), Matthew Goode (Tom Hewett), Brian Cox (Alec Hewett), Penelope Wilton (Eleanor Hewett). Directed by Woody Allen and produced by Letty Aronson, Lucy Darwin, Stephen Tenenbaum, and Gareth Wiley. Screenplay by Allen.
One reason for the fascination of Woody Allen’s Match Point is that each and every character is rotten. This is a thriller not about good vs. evil but about various species of evil engaged in a struggle for survival of the fittest—or, as the movie makes clear, the luckiest. “I’d rather be lucky than good,” Chris, the tennis pro from Ireland, tells us as the movie opens, and we see a tennis ball striking the net; it is pure luck which side it falls on. Chris’s own good fortune depends on just such a lucky toss of a coin.
The movie, Allen’s best since Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), involves a rich British family and two outsiders who hope to enter it by using their sex appeal. They are the two sexiest people in the movie—their bad luck, since they are more attracted to each other than to their targets in the family. Still, as someone once said (Robert Heinlein, if you must know), money is a powerful aphrodisiac. He added, however, “Flowers work almost as well.” Not in this movie, they don’t.
The movie stars Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Chris, a poor boy from Ireland who was on the tennis tour and now works in London as a club pro. He meets rich young Tom (Matthew Goode), who takes a lesson, likes him, and invites him to attend the opera with his family. During the opera, Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) looks at Chris once with interest and the second time with desire. Chris does not need to have anything explained to him.
Tom’s own girlfriend is Nola (Scarlett Johansson), an American who hopes to become an actress or Tom’s wife, not in that order. Tom and Chloe are the children of Alec and Eleanor Hewett (Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton), who have serious money, as symbolized by the country house where the crowd assembles for the weekend. It’s big enough to welcome two Merchant-Ivory productions at the same time.
Chloe likes Chris. She wants Chris. Her parents want Chloe to have what she wants. Alec offers Chris a job in “one of my companies”—always a nice touch, that. Tom likes Nola, but to what degree, and do his parents approve? All is decided in the fullness of time, and now I am going to become maddeningly vague in order not to spoil the movie’s twists and turns, which are ingenious and difficult to anticipate.
Let us talk instead in terms of the underlying philosophical issues. To what degree are we prepared to set aside our moral qualms in order to indulge in greed and selfishness? I have just finished rereading The Wings of the Dove by Henry James, in which a young man struggles heroically with just such a question. He is in love with a young woman he cannot afford to marry, and a rich young heiress is under the impression he is in love with her. The heiress is dying. Everyone advises him he would do her a great favor by marrying her; then after her death, inheriting her wealth, he could afford to marry the woman he loves. But isn’t this unethical? No one has such moral qualms in Allen’s film, not even sweet Chloe, who essentially has her daddy buy Chris for her. The key question facing the major players is: greed or lust? How tiresome to have to choose.
Without saying why, let me say that fear also enters into the equation. In a moral universe, it would be joined by guilt, but not here. The fear is that in trying to satisfy both greed and lust, a character may have to lose both, which would be a great inconvenience. At one point this character sees a ghost, but this is not Hamlet’s father, crying for revenge; this ghost drops by to discuss loopholes in a “perfect crime.”
When Match Point premiered at Cannes 2005, the critics agreed it was “not a typical Woody Allen film.” This assumes there is such a thing. Allen has worked in a broad range of genres and struck a lot of different notes, although often he uses a Woody Figure (preferably played by himself) as the hero. Match Point contains no one anything like Woody Allen, is his first film set in London, is constructed with a devious clockwork plot that would distinguish a film noir, and causes us to identify with some bad people. In an early scene, a character is reading Crime and Punishment, and during the movie, as during the novel, we are inside the character’s thoughts.
The movie is more about plot and moral vacancy than about characters, and so Allen uses typecasting to quickly establish the characters and set them to their tasks of seduction, deception, lying, and worse. Rhys-Meyers has a face that can express crafty desire, which is not pure lust but more like lust transformed by quick strategic calculations. Goode, as his rich friend, is clueless almost as an occupation. Mortimer plays a character incapable of questioning her own happiness, no matter how miserable it should make her. Johansson’s visiting American has been around the block a few times, but like all those poor American girls in Henry James, she is helpless when the Brits go to work on her. She has some good dialogue in the process.
“Men think I may be something special,” she tells Chris.
“Are you?”
“No one’s ever asked for their money back.”
Match Point, which deserves to be ranked with Allen’s Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, Everyone Says I Love You, and Crimes and Misdemeanors, has a terrible fascination that lasts all the way through. We can see a little way ahead, we can anticipate some of the mistakes and hazards, but the movie is too clever for us, too cynical. We expect the kinds of compromises and patented endings that most thrillers provide, and this one goes right to the wall. There are cops hanging around trying to figure out what, if anything, anyone in the movie might have been up to, but they’re too smart and logical to figure this one out. Bad luck.
Me and You and Everyone We Know
R, 95 m., 2005
John Hawkes (Richard), Miranda July (Christine), Miles Thompson (Peter), Brandon Ratcliff (Robby), Carlie Westerman (Sylvie), Hector Elias (Michael), Brad Henke (Andrew), Natasha Slayton (Heather), Najarra Townsend (Rebecca), Tracy Wright (Nancy). Directed by Miranda July and produced by Gina Kwon. Screenplay by July.
Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know is a film that with quiet confidence creates a fragile magic. It’s a comedy about falling in love when, for you, love requires someone who speaks your rare emotional language. Yours is a language of whimsy and daring, of playful mind games and bold challenges. Hardly anybody speaks that language, the movie suggests—only me and you and everyone we know, because otherwise we wouldn’t bother knowing them.
As a description of a movie, I suppose that sounds maddening. An example. A young woman walks into a department store, and in the shoe department she sees a young man who fascinates her. His hand is bandaged. She approaches him and essentially offers the gift of herself. He is not interested; he’s going through a divorce and is afraid of losing his children. She asks him how he hurt his hand. “I was trying to save my life,” he says. We’ve already seen how it happened: He covered his hand with lighter fluid and set it on fire to delight his two sons. He didn’t think lighter fluid really burns you when you do that. He was wrong. He was thinking of rubbing alcohol.
Now imagine these two characters, named Christine (Miranda July) and Richard (John Hawkes), as they walk down the street. She suggests that the block they are walking down is their lives. And so now they are halfway down the street and halfway through their lives, and before long they will be at the end. It is impossible to suggest how poetic this scene is; when it’s over, you think, that was a perfect scene, and no other scene can ever be like it.
Richard and Christine are at the center of the film, but through Richard’s sons we meet other characters. His seven-year-old is named Robby and is played by Brandon Ratcliff, who read my review from Sundance and wrote me a polite and helpful letter in which he assured me he’s as smart as an eleven-year-old. In the movie, he visits an online sex chat room even though he knows nothing about sex. He knows enough about computers to sound like he does, however, by cutting and pasting words, and using open-ended questions. Asked what turns him on, he writes “poop,” not because it does, but possibly because it is the only word he can spell that he thinks has something to do with the subject.
His fourteen-year-old brother, Peter (Miles Thompson), is being persecuted by two girls in his class named Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend). They are intensely interested in oral sex but unsure about its theory and technique. They decide to practice on Peter. I know this sounds perverse and explicit, and yet the fact is, these scenes play with an innocence and tact that is beyond all explaining. They are about what an embarrassment and curiosity sex is when you’re old enough to know it exists but too young to know how it’s done and what it’s for. They are much intrigued by a neighbor who is a dirty old man in theory but not in practice.
Other characters have other plans for perfect lifetimes. Young Peter, once he shakes off the relentless Heather and Rebecca, is fascinated by Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), a ten-year-old neighbor who does comparison shopping to get the best price on kitchen appliances. Peter catches her ironing some towels. They are going straight into her hope chest, she explains. She is preparing her own dowry. Her future husband, when she grows up and finds him, had better be ready to be good and married.
There is also an art curator (Tracy Wright) who has a strange way of evaluating art, as if she’s afraid it may violate rules she’s afraid she doesn’t know. She has a sexual hunger that proves particularly hard to deal with. She is, however, able to project her longings into the uncomprehending world; the strategy she uses, and the result it brings, is a scene of such inevitability and perfection that we laugh at least partly out of admiration.
Miranda July is a performance artist; this is her first feature film (it won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, and at Cannes won the Camera d’Or as best first film, and the Critics’ Week grand prize). Performance art sometimes deals with the peculiarities of how we express ourselves, with how odd and wonderful it is to be alive. So does this film. As Richard slowly emerges from sadness and understands that Christine values him, and he must value her, for reasons only the two of them will ever understand, the movie holds its breath, waiting to see if their delicate connection will hold.
Me and You and Everyone We Know is a balancing act, as July ventures into areas that are risky and transgressive, but uses a freshness that disarms them, a directness that accepts human nature and likes to watch it at work. The MPAA gave it an R rating “for disturbing sexual content involving children,” but the one thing it isn’t is disturbing. When the movie was over at Sundance, I let out my breath and looked across the aisle at another critic. I wanted to see if she felt how I did. “What did you think?” she said. “I think it’s the best film at the festival,” I said. “Me too,” she said.
Melinda and Melinda ½
PG-13, 99 m., 2005
Radha Mitchell (Melinda), Chloe Sevigny (Laurel), Jonny Lee Miller (Lee), Will Ferrell (Hobie), Amanda Peet (Susan), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Ellis), Wallace Shawn (Sy), Larry Pine (Max). Directed by Woody Allen and produced by Letty Aronson. Screenplay by Allen.
Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda begins with friends having dinner in a Chinese restaurant. One of the friends is played by Wallace Shawn, who (Allen’s audiences will know) has had a famous restaurant meal or two. Shawn is a playwright, debating another playwright (Larry Pine) about whether the world is essentially tragic or comic. They devise two versions of a story, which changes in detail and tone according to whether it is comedy or tragedy, and the film cuts between those possibilities.
The exercise involves two couples, both disrupted by the unexpected entrance of a character named Melinda (played by Radha Mitchell). For Susan the independent filmmaker (Amanda Peet) and her husband, Hobie (Will Ferrell), an out-of-work actor, she is the downstairs neighbor. For the rich woman Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) and her husband, Lee (Jonny Lee Miller), an alcoholic actor, she is Laurel’s old college friend.
In both cases, Melinda is the catalyst for adultery, which does not play out the same way in the two stories. Indeed, almost all the characters except Melinda are different in the two stories because you would cast a comedy differently than a tragedy. Unexpected characters like Ellis Moonsong (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a composer, turn up to supply the third point in two romantic triangles at once.
From time to time, Allen reminds us that all of these characters are being imagined by people at dinner, and all of their feelings are being created out of thin air. The film’s last shot, a bold masterstroke, leaves this perfectly clear, and strands us looking at the closing credits, which as always are played over some good traditional jazz. Why won’t Woody choose one of these stories or the other? Why won’t he either cheer or sadden us? When he abandoned comedy for neo-Bergman exercises like Interiors, at least they were Bergmanesque all the way through, with no excursions into romantic comedy. Why can’t he make up his mind?
But you see, he has. Allen has made up his mind to pull the rug out from under us as we stand at the cocktail party of life, chattering about how we got there, when we plan to leave, and how we’ll get back home. He has shown that the rug, the party, and all of the guests are shadows flickering on the walls. Melinda and Melinda is a movie about the symbiosis of the filmmaker and the audience, who are required to conspire in the creation of an imaginary world. He shows us how he does it and how we do it. In its complexity and wit, this is one of his best films.
That creates a particular challenge for the actors, who are expected to act as if they are in either a comedy or a tragedy and do not know about the other half of the movie. Radha Mitchell, who is the crossover character, rises to the challenge and is impudent in the comedy and touching in the tragedy; she must have had to compartmentalize her emotions, but then that’s what actors do.
The two stories are a little sketchy because neither one is required to have a beginning, middle, and end—to deliver in traditional terms. They’re works in progress. That may sound frustrating, but it’s sort of exciting, as if Allen is allowing us to read his early drafts. Perhaps in Woody Allen’s mind a dinner party is held nightly at which his optimistic and pessimistic selves argue about his next project. Melinda and Melinda may be a dramatization of his creative process.
Before the movie opened, A. O. Scott wrote a provocative article in the New York Times, concluding: “Instead of making the movies we expect him to, (Allen) stubbornly makes the movies he wants to make, gathering his A-list casts for minor exercises in whimsy and bile that tend not to be appreciated when they arrive in theaters. How could they be? Mr. Allen will never again be his younger self, and his audience, as long as we refuse to acknowledge that fact, will never grow up, guaranteeing our further disappointment. Maybe what we have on our hands is a dead shark.”
That’s a reference to Annie Hall, which won the Oscar and was the high point of America’s relationship with Woody Allen (“A relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies”). With Scott’s words I have some sympathy. Woody Allen made members of my generation laugh when we were young, and now he doesn’t make us feel young anymore. Scott argues that by refusing to repeat himself, Allen has left himself open to the charge of repeating himself: There he goes again, doing something different. I cannot escape the suspicion that if Woody had never made a previous film, if each new one was Woody’s Sundance debut, it would get a better reception. His reputation is not a dead shark but an albatross, which, with admirable economy, Allen has arranged for the critics to carry around their own necks.
Melinda fails the standards of most audiences because it doesn’t deliver a direct emotional charge. It doesn’t leave us happy or sad for the characters, or even knowing which characters we were supposed to care about. That, however, is not Allen’s failure, but his purpose. More than any other film that comes to mind, Melinda and Melinda says, clearly and without compromise, that movies are only movies. They’re made up of thin air, the characters are not real, they could turn out however the director wants them to. We get all worked up about what Frankie does in Million Dollar Baby, and would get just as worked up if he did the opposite, both times talking about Frankie as if he were real and had actually done something. At the end of Melinda and Melinda, we realize that neither Melinda nor Melinda is real, but Woody Allen certainly is.
Memoirs of a Geisha ½
PG-13, 137 m., 2005
Ziyi Zhang (Sayuri), Ken Watanabe (The Chairman), Michelle Yeoh (Mameha), Gong Li (Hatsumomo), Koji Yakusho (Nobu), Youki Kudoh (Pumpkin), Kaori Momoi (Mother), Suzuka Ohgo (Chiyo). Directed by Rob Marshall and produced by Douglas Wick, Lucy Fisher, and Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the book by Arthur Golden.
I suspect that the more you know about Japan and movies, the less you will enjoy Memoirs of a Geisha. Much of what I know about Japan I have learned from Japanese movies, and on that basis I know this is not a movie about actual geishas but depends on the romanticism of female subjection. The heroines here look so very beautiful and their world is so visually enchanting as they live trapped in sexual slavery.
I know, a geisha is not technically a prostitute. Here is a useful rule: Anyone who is “not technically a prostitute” is a prostitute. As dear old Henry Togna, proprietor of the Eyrie Mansion in London, used to cackle while describing to me his friend the Duchess of Duke Street, “Sex for cash, m’dear. That’s my definition.”
Is the transaction elevated if there is very little sex, a lot of cash, and the prostitute gets hardly any of either? Hard to say. Certainly the traditions of the geisha house are culturally fascinating in their own right. But if this movie had been set in the West, it would be perceived as about children sold into prostitution, and that is not nearly as wonderful as “being raised as a geisha.”
Still, I object to the movie not on sociological grounds but because I suspect a real geisha house floated on currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display here. I could list some Japanese films illustrating this, but the last thing the audience for Memoirs of a Geisha wants to see is a more truthful film with less gorgeous women and shabbier production values.
This is one of the best-looking movies in some time, deserving comparison with Raise the Red Lantern (in more ways than one). On the level of voluptuous visual beauty, it works if you simply regard it. The women are beauties, their world swims in silks and tapestries, smoke and mirrors, and the mysteries of hair when it is up vs. hair when it is down.
I am not disturbed in the least that the three leading Japanese characters in the film are played by women of Chinese descent. This casting has been attacked as ethnically incorrect, but consider that the film was made by a Japanese-owned company; the intent was not to discriminate against Japanese, but in favor of the box office. The movie was cast partly on the basis of star power: Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh are not only great beauties and gifted actresses but box-office dynamite. Even in Japan, Zhang and Li outgross any Japanese actress.
They do wonders with their characters, who are trapped in a formula fiction but suggest possibilities they cannot explore. There isn’t the faintest suggestion of free will, but then free will has never played much of a role in the world of a geisha. That’s made clear at the outset, circa 1929, when a widowed fisherman sells his daughters on the human market in Kyoto. The older girl, although hardly old enough for sex, is sold directly into prostitution, while the nine-year-old Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) is sold to a geisha house where she will be an unpaid servant until it is determined if she is elegant enough for the house’s clientele.
The house is run by Mother (Kaori Momoi), and its ruling geisha is Hatsumomo (Li). Chiyo quickly becomes best friends with Pumpkin (Youki Kudoh), a girl about her age, and they are raised by the house under a strict discipline that trains them for a lifetime of flattering wealthy men. They learn that love has no role in this world (although Hatsumomo sets a bad example). Geisha lore hints that they do fall in love with clients, but the operative word is “client” and the love is not free. Nobody wants it to be—not the geisha, who is earning her living, or the client, who is using money to control a woman while maintaining his independence and, for that matter, to observe a distinction between his geisha and his wife.
The key male in the story is the Chairman (Ken Watanabe), who first encounters Chiyo when she is a child and suggests her to Mother. As Chiyo and her beauty grow, it becomes clear she may represent a threat to the dominance of Hatsumomo. The story resumes when she is in her mid-teens and is purchased from Mother by Mameha (Yeoh), Hatsumomo’s rival, whose master plan is to use her control of the younger girl to win control of Mother’s house away from Hatsumomo, who expects to inherit the reins. Hatsumomo in response acquires Pumpkin as her own proxy in the battle. It is amazing that a client stepping through their doors is not killed in the crossfire.
Chiyo is renamed Sayuri and is now played by Zhang. The movie, almost like a tourist, prowls the geisha quarter of Kyoto, visits a sumo wrestling match, and attends a dance performance where Sayuri stars. Then World War II intervenes (that is the best word for its role in the film), and in peacetime the Chairman now desperately needs Sayuri, who has always loved and still does love him, perhaps because he steered her as a child into the best geisha house. It suits him for Sayuri to become the friend of his colleague Nobu (Koji Yakusho), and there is great intrigue surrounding the auctioning of Sayuri’s virginity. This takes place, if my math is sound, at her fairly advanced age of about twenty-six, which reminds me that Oscar Levant claimed: “I’ve been in Hollywood so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
I realize that my doubts and footnotes are completely irrelevant to the primary audience for this movie, which wants to see beauty, sex, tradition, and exoticism all choreographed into a dance of strategy and desire. Memoirs of a Geisha (directed by Rob Marshall of Chicago) supplies what is required elegantly and with skill. The actresses create geishas as they imagine them to have been, which is probably wiser than showing them as they were. There is a sense in which I enjoyed every frame of this movie, and another sense in which my enjoyment made me uneasy. I felt some of the same feelings during Pretty Baby, the 1978 film in which Brooke Shields, playing a girl of twelve, has her virginity auctioned away in New Orleans. The difference is that Pretty Baby doesn’t evoke nostalgia or regret the passing of the world it depicts.
Memories of Tomorrow 14
NO MPAA RATING, 122 m., 2007
Ken Watanabe (Masayuki Saeki), Kanako Higuchi (Emiko Saeki), Kenji Sakaguchi (Naoya Ito), Kazue Fukiishi (Rie Saeki), Asami Mizukawa (Keiko Ikuno), Noritake Kinashi (Shigejuki Kizaki). Directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi and produced by Sunao Sakagami and Tatsuo Kawamura. Screenplay by Uiko Miura and Hakaru Sunamoto, based on the novel by Hiroshi Ogiwara.
At first it’s a matter of a missed word, a forgotten name. Then he forgets how to drive a familiar route. The advertising executive keeps his worries to himself, but he can’t hide his problems, and eventually a doctor delivers a dread prognosis: early onset Alzheimer’s. He is only forty-nine.
Memories of Tomorrow is the first movie I’ve seen about the disease that is told from the sick person’s point of view, not that of family members. The director, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, often uses a subjective camera to show the commonplace world melting into bewildering patterns and meanings. The subject of the film, Saeki, is a high-octane ad executive with a young and eager team, and as a perfectionist, it depresses him to discover his own imperfections mounting. He forgets dates, times, business meetings. In one breathtaking scene, he gets lost in Tokyo’s urban maze and takes instructions from a secretary over his cell phone while literally running back to his office.
The character is played by Ken Watanabe (Batman, Memoirs of a Geisha, Letters from Iwo Jima), and there is a personal element in his brave and painful performance. Watanabe is now forty-eight, and since he was thirty, I learn from the Japan Times, he has been fighting leukemia. His Saeki is just as determined to fight Alzheimer’s and is much aided by his patient and courageous wife, Emiko (Kanako Higuchi), who writes notes naming everything in their house, prepares his daily schedule, and keeps up a brave front.
He holds on as long as he can, even accepting a lesser position and a smaller pension to stay with his company, but finally he must retire and return to a home where now it is his wife who goes out every morning to earn a salary. He has better days and worse days, and a day fraught with fear when he must make a speech at his daughter’s wedding. He loses the text of his speech. “Just say anything,” his wife whispers. “I’m here for you.” She takes his hand.
She has the patience of a saint, but one day he physically hurts her. The director handles this painful moment with great visual tact, not showing it but instead cutting to the sudden darting offish in an aquarium. And then his wife snaps, telling him with cold anger what a distant husband he has been, how flawed, how cruel.
The movie isn’t structured like a melodrama but reflects a slow fading of the light. There are moments of almost unbearable sadness, as in what he reveals to a nurse at the end of a tour of a nursing home. And we observe the indifference of the company where he has been a salaryman all his life: Yes, thanks for your contribution; now go quietly, please, and don’t let the clients know. Some films on Alzheimer’s attempt to show an upside. I don’t think there is an upside. At least with cancer you get to be yourself until you die.
The Memory of a Killer ½
R, 120 m., 2005
Koen De Bouw (Eric Vincke), Jan Decleir (Angelo Ledda), Werner De Smedt (Freddy Verstuyft), Hilde De Baerdemaeker (Linda De Leenheer), Jo De Meyere (Baron De Haeck), Geert Van Rampelberg (Tom Coemans). Directed by Erik Van Looy and produced by Hilde De Laere and Erwin Provoost. Screenplay by Carl Joos and Van Looy, based on a novel by Jef Geeraerts.
The Memory of a Killer contains the elements of a typical police procedural, transcended and brought to a sad perfection by the performance of a veteran Belgian actor named Jan Decleir. In his appearance Decleir reminds me of Anthony Quinn, and in his behavior of Jean Gabin—the Gabin of the late gangster films, playing men who are weary of crime and yet live by an underworld code.
Decleir plays Angelo Ledda, a professional hit man. He is assigned to go to Antwerp in Belgium and kill a man. He protests that he is too old—he’s retired. “Men like us never retire,” his boss says. Angelo tells the waitress to bring fries with his steak, and she reminds him that he’s already ordered them. Here is the first hint: He is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. In Belgium, he visits his senile older brother in an institution. An orderly describes the onset of his brother’s symptoms. “I know how it begins,” Angelo says firmly.
He is a contract killer who knows he is losing his mind. Like the hero of Memento, he writes notes to himself on his arm. But The Memory of a Killer is not another version of Memento; it is a full-bore traditional “policier,” beginning with a plainclothes cop busting a man who is selling his eleven-year-old daughter, and continuing with a series of killings, as powerful men try to conceal their connection to child prostitution. The first man Angelo kills is a prosecutor who will not drop the investigation. His second assignment…
I’ll leave that for you to discover. It is an assignment he will not accept. “No one will,” he tells the man who wants him to do the job. Angelo is a killer, but he is also a man unwilling to cross a certain line. In her review of this movie, Manohla Dargis has a lovely observation: “Here is a thriller that asks, Are men essentially good or do they just sometimes forget to be bad?” Angelo is forgetting to be anything.
The police/criminal side of the plot could be from a novel by Ed McBain or Nicholas Freeling; the psychological side could be from Georges Simenon. The movie is based on the novel The Alzheimer Case by the Belgian writer Jef Geeraerts, which unthreads a plot involving buried perversion and aristocratic hauteur, contrasting it with the declining years of this hardworking professional man, the contract killer.
Koen De Bouw plays Eric Vincke, the fortyish cop assigned to the original child prostitution case; he follows the thread as it leads to powerful people and stays on the case in defiance of his superiors. Along the way, he comes to realize that Angelo Ledda is on both sides of the moral equation: as a murderer to begin with, and then as a man working against the same perverts Vincke is after. His first challenge is to figure out who Ledda really is; the old man maybe declining, but he is experienced and canny, and he uses a masterstroke to throw the police off his scent.
There are crime stories, and then there are stories about people involved in crime. The Memory of a Killer is in the second category. It follows a rich European fictional tradition, which in addition to the authors I’ve mentioned also includes Michael Dibdin, Henning Mankell, and Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. In their work, crime is used as a quick entry into the secrets of the heart, and guilt is not assigned so easily. When Gabin plays a crook in a movie like Touchez pas au Grisbi, he somehow becomes the hero.
As the plot of The Memory of a Killer leads into a labyrinth of decadence and obscurity, one murder connects to another, and desperate men take risky measures. Old Angelo is the wild card, sought by both sides, working in the shadows, hiding out in places remembered from his childhood in Antwerp. He knows his way around. He realizes that, one way or another, he is on his last job. And that makes him doubly dangerous, because he has nothing to lose but his life, which is slipping away anyway.
Watch Decleir’s performance. He never goes for the easy effect, never pushes too hard, is a rock-solid occupant of his character. Everything he has to say about Angelo is embodied, not expressed. By the end we care so much for him that the real suspense involves not the solution of the crimes but simply his well-being. Talks are already under way for a Hollywood remake of The Memory of a Killer, and the names of many actors have been proposed; the Hollywood Reporter lists DeNiro, Caan, Hopper, Hopkins. But this performance will not be easily equaled. Gene Hackman, maybe. Morgan Freeman. Robert Mitchum, if he were alive. Decleir is the real thing.
The Merchant of Venice ½
R, 138 m., 2005
Al Pacino (Shylock), Jeremy Irons (Antonio), Joseph Fiennes (Bassanio), Lynn Collins (Portia), Zuleikha Robinson (Jessica), Kris Marshall (Gratiano), Charlie Cox (Lorenzo). Directed by Michael Radford and produced by Cary Brokaw, Michael Cowan, Barry Navidi, and Jason Piette. Screenplay by Radford, based on the play by William Shakespeare.
Thinking to read The Merchant of Venice one more time, I took down the volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies, only to be reminded that this dark and troubling play is classified with his comedies. Its two natures come from different spheres; sunny scenes of romance alternate with sadness, desperation, and guile. When Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, steals his fortune and leaves his home to marry Lorenzo, it’s as if she’s escaping from one half of the play to the other.
Michael Radford’s new production is, incredibly, the first theatrical film of the play in the sound era. There were several silent versions, and it has been done for television, but among the most important titles in Shakespeare’s canon, this is the play that has been sidestepped by not only Hollywood but every film industry in the world. The reason is plain to see: Shylock, the moneylender who demands repayment with a pound of flesh, is an anti-Semitic caricature; filmmakers turned away and chose more palatable plays.
Yet Shylock is an intense, passionate character in a great play, and Radford’s film does him justice. Although Shylock embodies anti-Semitic stereotypes widely held in Shakespeare’s time, he is not a one-dimensional creature like Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, but embodies, like all of Shakespeare’s great creations, a humanity that transcends the sport of his making. Radford’s Shylock, played with a rasping intensity by Al Pacino, is not softened or apologized for—that would deny the reality of the play—but he is seen as a man not without his reasons.
The film opens by visualizing an event referred to only in dialogue in the original: We see the merchant Antonio (Jeremy Irons) spit at Shylock on the Rialto bridge, as part of a demonstration against the Jews who are both needed and hated in Venice—needed, because without moneylenders the city’s economy cannot function, and hated, because Christians must therefore do business with the same people they have long executed a blood libel against.
That Antonio spits at Shylock, asks him for a loan of 3,000 ducats, and boldly tells him he would spit at him again is, in modern terms, asking for it. That Shylock loans him the money against the guarantee of a pound of flesh is not simply a cruelty, but has a certain reason; Shakespeare’s dialogue makes it clear that Shylock proudly declines to accept any monetary interest from Antonio and has every reason to think Antonio can repay the loan, which means that Shylock will have borrowed the money at cost to himself and loaned it to Antonio for free.
That Antonio comes within a whisper of losing his flesh and his life is, after all, the result of a bargain he quickly agreed to, because he also thought he would escape without paying interest. Shakespeare’s great courtroom scene, in which the Doge must decide between the claims of Shylock and the life of Antonio, is undercut by the farce of the cross-dressing Portia’s last-second appeal; on the merits of the case, Shylock should win.
But I have written as if you know who Shylock and Antonio and Portia are, and you may not; The Merchant of Venice is studiously avoided in those courses that seek to introduce Shakespeare to students, who can tell you all about Romeo and Juliet. One of the strengths of the film is its clarity. A written prologue informs us of the conditions of Jewish life in Venice in 1586; Jews were forced to live in a confined area that gave the word “ghetto” to the world, were forbidden to move through the city after dark (although they seem to do a lot of that in the film), and were tolerated because Christians were forbidden to lend money at interest, and somebody had to.
The plot is driven from the comic side by the desire of Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes) to wed the fair Portia (Lynn Collins). She has been left by her father’s will in the position of a game show prize; her suitors are shown chests of gold, silver, and lead, and made to choose one; inside the lucky chest is the token of their prize. Elementary gamesmanship cries out “Lead! Choose the lead!” but one royal hopeful after another goes for the glitter, and the impoverished Bassanio still has a chance.
He will need money to finance his courtship, and turns to his friend Antonio. The play famously opens with Antonio’s melancholy (“I know not why I am so sad”), but the casting of Jeremy Irons makes that opening speech unnecessary; he is an actor to whom sadness comes without effort, and a dark gloom envelops him throughout the play. The reason for this is implied by Shakespeare and made clear by Radford: Antonio is in love with Bassanio, and in effect is being asked for a loan to finance his own romantic disappointment. Whether he and Bassanio were actually lovers is a good question. How genuinely Bassanio can love Portia the lottery prize is another. That these two questions exist in the same place is a demonstration of the way in which Shakespeare boldly juxtaposes inner torment and screwball comedy.
Shylock is a cruel caricature, but isn’t he also one of the first Jews allowed to speak for himself in gentile European literature, to argue his case, to reveal his humanity? It’s possible that Shakespeare never actually met a Jew (to be a Catholic was a hanging offense in his England), but then he never visited Venice, either—or France, Denmark, or the seacoast of Bohemia. His Shylock begins as a lift from literary sources, like so many of his characters, and is transformed by his genius into a man of feelings and deep wounds. There is a kind of mad incongruity in the play’s intersecting stories, one ending in sunshine, marriage, and happiness, the other in Shylock’s loss of everything—daughter, fortune, home, and respect. And Shylock’s great speech, beginning “Hath not a Jew eyes?” is a cry against anti-Semitism that rings down through the centuries. It is wrong to say that The Merchant of Venice is not “really” anti-Semitic—of course it is—but its venom is undercut by Shakespeare’s inability to objectify any of his important characters. He always sees the man inside.
Pacino is a fascinating actor. As he has grown older he has grown more fierce. He is charged sometimes with overacting, but never with bad acting; he follows the emotions of his characters fearlessly, not protecting himself, and here he lays bare Shylock’s lacerated soul. He has a way of attacking and caressing Shakespeare’s language at the same time. He loves it. It allows him reach and depth. His performance here is incandescent.
Of the others, Irons finds the perfect note for the treacherous role of Antonio; making his love for Bassanio obvious is the way to make his behavior explicable, and so Antonio for once is poignant, instead of merely a mope. The young people, Bassanio and Portia, resolutely inhabit their comedy, unaware of the suffering their romance is causing for others. Only Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson) still seems inexplicable; how can she do what she does to her father, Shylock, with such vacuous contentment?
The film is wonderful to look at, saturated in Renaissance colors and shadows, filmed in Venice, which is the only location that is also a set. It has greatness in moments, and is denied greatness overall only because it is such a peculiar construction; watching it is like channel-surfing between a teen romance and a dark abysm of loss and grief. Shylock and Antonio, if they were not made strangers by hatred, would make good companions for long, sad conversations punctuated by wounded silences.
Michael Clayton
R, 119 m., 2007