Films Seen - February 2005

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

WHEN WILL I BE LOVED (57) (dir., James Toback) Neve Campbell, Fred Weller, Dominic Chianese, James Toback [If this were a Woody Allen movie - which it almost is, only faster and trashier - it might be called "Hustlers and Mentors". Weller is the former but claims at one point to be the latter, just as Toback (hilarious as a randy-academic version of himself) claims to seek "socio-political context" but has obviously never outgrown the youthful way of finding out by trial and error (a hustler's approach, albeit employed for higher ends). Neve too turns out to be a hustler and the title (I think) turns out to be a lie: the passivity of 'being loved' is the opposite of what her character wants - she's into "exploring the possibility" ("What am I capable of doing?"), which the film implicitly accepts as a spoiled-rich-kid worldview yet can't help applauding, just as Toback himself flails towards self-knowledge in random, indulgent ways. It's not really collage when he just cuts back and forth for no particular reason - finding each scene more or less as he left it - and not really a Moment out of Time when he stops everything dead to lather classical music over two girls making out behind a muslin curtain, yet the film is more controlled than previous Tobacks (Chianese grounds it nicely), and perhaps more upfront: Neve gets loved every which way - by men and women, roughly from behind and romantically from afar (a mentor's love, wanting only to enrich, taking only the pleasure of giving) - but may be most complete, if the full-circle ending is any guide, lost in blissful self-love, pleasuring herself with the shower-head as the film gets underway. An apt image.] 

THE AVIATOR (55) (dir., Martin Scorsese) Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, Alan Alda, John C. Reilly [Feels like the whole film has OCD, like Leo soaping his hands harder and harder yet unable to scrape the dirt off, like Blanchett's "too many acute angles" - laughing and flouncing and tossing her head - as Katharine Hepburn, like the dinner at the Hepburns' with everyone talking at once and nothing being said: the rhythm is all-out - spurred by constant music in the background, old jazz standards mostly - but the first half is extremely annoying and I'm not really sure it's supposed to be. Staccato shenanigans never connect, nor does the jittery rhythm evoke 30s Hollywood hedonism - more like cokehead hysteria, though I guess it could be the same thing - but the real problem is it feels like something's stirring behind the hi-jinks, an itch that can't be scratched. That turns out to be the hero's psychosis, and the film improves tremendously once it's out in the open, esp. because Scorsese is better on power-mongers and power struggles than movie stars and good times (he's not happy till a night out turns into a brawl, with the music shrieking manically and Errol Flynn in the thick of it), just as he was better on power struggles than spiritual questions in KUNDUN, and better on power struggles than passionate love in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. Initially sets up a dichotomy of Businessman vs. Artist, but in fact Hughes was never an Artist but a Scientist, an engineer obsessed with building the perfect plane, cleavage-exposing dress and/or WW1 action sequence; Scorsese doesn't seem to see any difference, which says a lot about the kind of Artist he is - Hughes too would've insisted on massive sets and no CGI in GANGS OF NEW YORK - and the film ultimately works by force of identification with its hero (also because the ending is near-perfect), but you think it'll be exhilarating and it isn't really. Maybe only violence really exhilarates Marty, or at least syncs up with his natural style. DiCaprio's fine as ever, but simply looks too young; MVP goes to John C. Reilly, once again turning dogged loyalty into a thing of beauty.] 

HIDE AND SEEK (34) (dir., John Polson) Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue [It's the little things: Polson gets a great shot in the prologue, De Niro at the bathtub weeping over his wife's body and the camera inching to the left - peeking round his body, as it were - to slowly reveal little Fanning standing creepily at the doorway, some distance behind him - but then promptly spoils it with a dolly-in to Fanning, followed by a close-up of her face; even if the CU were needed, to show the girl's reaction, the dolly is completely unnecessary, and only spoils the impact of going from creepy wide-shot direct to CU (or - even better - creepy wide-shot direct to opening credits). The rest of it is more of the same, indifferently-made horror with De Niro phoning it in as the shrink (I love Nigel Andrews' comment in the "Financial Times" that he embodies a new Cartesian Law: "I shrink, therefore I ham"), tricked out with ooh-scary whispers, a music box, la-la-la music over the credits and so on - not to mention That Twist, which is everywhere these days and deeply depressing in its implications, because of course it makes no sense unless one subscribes to the tabloid-sensationalist view that 'ordinary' people routinely hide unimaginable depths of perversity, weirdos are everywhere, stay at home and lock up your children, etc. Something changed when we collectively began to accept - and indeed assume - that the quiet neighbour next door could be a serial killer.]

LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS (59) (dir., Brad Silberling) Jim Carrey, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning, Meryl Streep [Consider the closing credits. On the one hand, they're a 5-minute roll-call including "Additional Second Second Assistant Directors", a "Water Safety Co-Ordinator" and "Paint Forepersons" (all of them male); on the other, they're a magical mélange of silhouettes, cut-outs and charcoal sketches, beautifully designed and animated. Point being, one can rail - correctly - against the onslaught of 'corporate values', timid PC choices and kids' fantasy books getting snapped up in the wake of Harry Potter, but the visuals still recall CALIGARI (the crooked Expressionist beams in Olaf's mansion) and Méliès - or at least the Smashing Pumpkins video that recalled Méliès - and Count Olaf in profile looks like Punch from Punch and Judy, and he ties the kids to the railway tracks like a Silent villain, and reads a magazine with Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera on the cover, and Emmanuel Lubezki finds wondrous effects in the wild skies and mountain-ringed lake. Bottom line? The suits may have thought it up - and no doubt approved the broad performances, and the way the plot skips away from its one disturbing aspect, the NIGHT OF THE HUNTER-ish bad parent (the whole thing could be a metaphor for child abuse: "No-one ever listens") - but the creative team do the job creatively, without too many cheap shots; even the po-mo stuff has a PRINCESS BRIDE cleverness (the killer leeches are a direct steal, albeit changed from eels), as opposed to SHREK desperation. The archly 'dark' tone - as per the title - gets a little precious, but no more so than Hitchcock introducing a particularly blood-curdling episode.]    

THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES (45) (dir., Walter Salles) Gael Garcia Bernal, Rodrigo de la Serna, Mia Maestro [Che Guevara as the elephant in the bedroom. Ostensibly a road movie about two young men - one of them named Ernesto Guevara - on a trip round South America, except that when he talks about retiring to found a hospital in Patagonia "when I grow old" you feel a pang of regret, knowing he never will, and when he leaves his rich girlfriend's hacienda to go back on the road you know he's turning his back on respectable middle-class life for the rigours of being down with the Common People, etc. Finally shows its cards after about an hour, when Ernesto meets the disenfranchised miners and has his revolutionary conscience pricked, but the film doesn't build on that - you expect it to get more and more intense but it kind of subsides again, and the extended finale in the leper colony is as placid and discreet as the rest of it. May be underrating it a little, because it's watchable enough, but the airbrushed, polite tone doesn't leave much residue; also, am I the only one who wonders why crossing the river at the end is such a big deal (I mean, it can't be more than half a mile)? Does symbolic swimming carry a higher degree of difficulty?]  

MEET THE FOCKERS (15) (dir., Jay Roach) Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand [Haven't quite decided if this is I HEART HUCKABEES for morons or BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE with Jews taking over from blacks as resident court jesters, but it's pretty painful either way. Hoffman (as Bernie Focker) replaces the corpulent journo in CONTROL ROOM as my Most Annoying Character of the year, and for much the same reasons - he's so full of himself, and preens so much, and thinks he's so charming - except in this case the film actively sides with him (and Streisand as Mrs. F.), giving them the big laughs, the last word and even reasonable-person disclaimers like "Whatever works" and "Hey, it's your choice", when it's abundantly clear whose choices the film considers healthy, and whose noxious. Meanwhile, De Niro's uptight Byrne can't even talk to a cop - which you'd think he'd be able to, with his CIA training - without getting everyone thrown in jail, though he does finally learn to open up and let it all hang out (the credits should've included Special Thanks to America's therapy culture). Obviously works as a Revenge of the Blue States, but it's so one-sided it quickly turns into Laugh at the Uncool Person comedy, interspersed with toilet humour and prurient huh-huh-she-said-orgasm moments. "Best of all is that it's even-handed," I wrote re: MEET THE PARENTS four years ago. Yes.] 

LIFE IS A MIRACLE (54) (dir., Emir Kusturica) Slavko Stimac, Natasa Solak, Vesna Trivalic, Vuk Kostic, Nikola Kojo [Life is a circus, more like: horses, sheep, a railway guard sucking on a raw egg then clucking like a chicken, a dog barking and a bear (from Croatia) knocking down a door - all before the opening credits are even over. Nature keeps its co-starring role, poking aggressively into the action - a cat snatches food, a horse shoves its head through an open window, a dove perches stubbornly on the cannon of a tank - presumably making a statement on War as an insult to the natural order, or maybe Kusturica is just a fan of those cute gift-shop postcards with dogs riding unicycles on their hind legs and whatnot. Certainly, war gets forgotten as the plot lurches forward, and it's hard not to notice - as in PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME all those years ago - that the hero's soldier friend is actually quite heroic (and never wanted war in the first place), the unpleasantness blamed on vaguely-defined money-men and mendacious opportunists. Machismo seems deeply ingrained in the ex-Yugoslav psyche, hence the bluff old-fashioned peasant mayor (bumped off by the warmongers) who's actually quite corrupt and dictatorial but is shown as the salt of the earth - significantly he dies outdoors, close to the land, a few feet away from an incurious horse - or the foreign, English-speaking woman reporter who's introduced, as in PRETTY VILLAGE, solely to be mocked and humiliated. Still a couple of uproarious set-pieces - esp. the one mixing opera and football - and a pleasing mix of looseness and political incorrectness: Kusturica is like Iosseliani's country-bumpkin nephew, swigging moonshine brandy instead of good red wine - and just as bracing, in his unreconstructed way.]   

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (72) (dir., Clint Eastwood) Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman [UNFORGIVEN without the cowboy hats, at least in terms of structure: another tale of a man forced to destroy everything he stands for - in effect, destroy himself - for the sake of love, loyalty and doing the (emotionally) right thing, with the audience manipulated into urging him on (the hillbilly family is important in this respect) then left to wonder if the ending is tragic or just elegiac. The deck is stacked a little more in this case, both because Frankie's protected more than William Munny ever was and because the ending is in line with the Principles of Boxing - a sport where, as shown in the opening scene, taking the punch is sometimes the best way to heal the wound (an "unnatural" sport where "everything is backwards", as we're repeatedly told) - and of course Clint is so iconic nowadays it's hard to see the ending as anything other than noble self-sacrifice. Much of it is similarly unambiguous (or less ambiguous than it likes to pretend), just as a training montage under soft piano and poignant voice-over is still a training montage - but the film is still a bit uncertain about its hero, his closed-in world with the dead light where you never apologise and never explain. Deep down he's a failure, and the built-up body is itself a delusion - just like 'Danger' and his own simple-minded delusions - allowing failure to be bypassed and concealed; only when the body is destroyed is one forced to "open up", "take a chance" and confront the Truth, whether you want to call it God or the absence of God. Lacks the scope of MYSTIC RIVER and the dialogue often sounds 'crafted' in a theatre (or TV) way, e.g. when the girl suddenly becomes articulate and talks about her life; still beautiful to look at, and Clint the actor hasn't been so affecting ... well, ever.]

RAY (54) (dir., Taylor Hackford) Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Clifton Powell, Regina King [A lot of life to cram into 152 minutes, so a certain shorthand is acceptable - Ray as a child learning to 'listen' (i.e. use his ears as his eyes) in the space of one scene, or his manager literally putting cash in the payola DJ's pocket after he plugs their song. Stays surface-level, skimming from one part of the life to another: the heroin addiction gets forgotten for a while then brought to the fore as required, the brother's death is set up, shown then recedes into the background till recalled at the very end, a ghostly child asserting "It wasn't your fault" (swear to God, the moment he appeared I knew that line was coming). Wildly artificial yet the film is entertaining - and, pardon my ignorance, informative - a speeded-up mini-series with a new Year in the Life flashing up every few minutes, a new aspect introduced and dealt with, a name dropped, a box checked ("Come see Ray's new piano, it's called a - a - a Wurlitzer!"), hurtling along like a behind-the-scenes special with extra production values. Foxx is mostly mimicry - and the dubbing when he 'sings' is distracting - but certainly accomplished, and the portrait that emerges - Ray as a man of immense appetites and wilful, er, blindness, leaving damaged people in his wake - isn't all hagiography. Character Actor Appreciation Alert: Richard Schiff, Kurt Fuller and Harry Lennix!]

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (29) (dir., Joel Schumacher) Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson, Simon Callow, Ciaran Hinds, Minnie Driver [Compare and contrast a much more successful Andrew Lloyd Webber adaptation, EVITA, which used montage - the fundamental difference between film and theatre - to transform the experience. This (ALW-produced) slog tries instead to reproduce the play, from the 80s synth-drum orchestration in the title song (that church-organ riff still sounds like the intro for some old prog-rock opus) to the Phantom's stylised mask, going overboard with theatricals, costumes, vain prima donnas, dressers applauding in the wings. Works for a while but it's just empty spectacle and a lot less dazzling onscreen than (allegedly) onstage, mired in a stagnant prettiness of Cocteau-inspired candelabras, falling snowflakes, gold-leaf sets, red velvet curtains, lead actors with sculpted cheekbones warbling the repetitive music; I rolled my eyes (who wouldn't?) when the diva's 'old-fashioned' OTT opera singing gets ditched - cleaning ladies blocking their ears to illustrate how unpopular such noise is with Ordinary People - in favour of Rossum's bland, audio-wallpaper Lloyd Webber style (cue standing ovation). Turns into a major drag, characters increasingly muddy - they even smudge the one poignant facet, Christine seeing the Phantom as a father-figure when he wants to be her lover - and those songs can drive you nuts. This'll Knock 'Em Dead Dept.: "All I ask of youuuuuuuuuu," sings the Phantom, spreading his arms in time-honoured Big Finish fashion, and the camera soars up and up and up...]