Films Seen - October 2005
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
BROKEN FLOWERS (53) (dir., Jim Jarmusch) Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton [What's the point? Thought at first it might be Youth, an "over-the-hill Don Juan" striving to connect with past vitality, hence the shock-insert of Girlfriend #2 looking startlingly young in a picture from the past - tying in with the irrepressible (and extremely nude) 'Lolita' - but now I'm pretty sure the seminal image is the clip from an old TV cartoon towards the end, with the stork deciding a newborn's gender by random selection: Life, from birth to death, as a lottery, tying in both with the clips from DON JUAN at the start (TV acts as a kind of unfeeling chorus, taunting and twitting our hero) and Winston the neighbour's faith in answers and rational explanations, shown by events to be misguided (there are no answers; everything's random; you can't divine the truth by deduction and observation). In other words the film is nihilistic, not aggressively but resignedly and loveably, like Bill Murray - and though its wry joke is that, by validating his worldview, he opens himself to an endless universe of possibilities (he may spend the rest of his life trying to draw out unsuspecting young men, haunted by the notion that any of them could be his son), it doesn't change the fact that his worldview is validated; Jarmusch may see the pivotal letter as a wake-up call, but it only confirms that sleepy-eyed Bill was wide awake to begin with. Murray's hangdog style never gets old - his cadences make "You are certainly right about that" synonymous with "You're an idiot" and he has the long-suffering serenity of someone who's got mad and come out the other side; he says "Go home. Leave me alone" in a mild conversational tone, as if saying "OK I'll see you later" - but his stillness contains an arrogance that's begging to be shaken up, and besides nobody likes a know-it-all; the dedication to Jean Eustache seems odd, given how MOTHER AND THE WHORE explores its characters' self-delusion whereas this basically posits a weary cynic, takes him on a voyage of discovery only to deposit him back where he was in the first place (the absence of a twist is the twist). Or maybe minimalism just works better in comedy than drama, on the Mel Brooks basis that "Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die"; the old Jarmusch deadpan is a laugh but also a shield, on a par with the stone-faced comic. At some point you have to admit vulnerability.]
CORPSE BRIDE (69) (second viewing: 72) (dir., Mike Johnson & Tim Burton) with the voices of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson [Seemed a mite self-conscious on first viewing, transgressively morbid (for a kidpic) with its drab brown-and-grey 'real' world and festive, candy-coloured afterlife - it's especially obvious when the old coachman dies, and finds Death a blessing; this is a film the little Goth-girl in BEETLEJUICE might've made, unlike BEETLEJUICE itself with its messy turbulent purgatory - but it proved irresistible on second viewing, the uninspired songs being the only minor debit (and even those are vastly superior to the hollow racket in CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY). Follows in the footsteps of BLITHE SPIRIT and Robyn Hitchcock's "My Wife and My Dead Wife", and contrives it so both prospective wives are equally appealing - both among the innocent misfits who populate the Burton universe, unlike the rift between fantasy and commonsense reality in BIG FISH; the only rift here is between the venal and the pure-of-heart, and Death has nothing to do with it. There are puns ("Why so blue?"), in-jokes (Peter Lorre!), slapstick but also something more, a vision of cross-cultural (Living/Dead) harmony that's both poignant and timely (is it just coincidence that organised religion is mocked, in the figure of the clueless priest?): the Night of the Living Dead turns into a family reunion, though only after a little boy (the pure-of-heart) recognises his grandpa. A kidpic for budding artists and sensitive flowers, its villains those who care for money and position, its heroes those who can appreciate the moonlight (the Corpse Bride can!) or the poignant image of a sad pale boy playing the piano in a big lonely mansion - or Depp's superb voice-performance, underplaying just like he does in his flesh-and-blood performances to evoke a worrywart poet who's dreamy, quizzical and very decent ("I made a promise"). Why have crane-shots and fluid camera moves if you're making stop-motion animation, though? It might as well be CGI...]
LAST DAYS (72) (second viewing: 78) (dir., Gus Van Sant) Michael Pitt, Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, Scott Green [Took a second viewing to appreciate how vitally important sounds are to this Life (and Death) of a Musician, esp. the early section when Blake/Kurt is wandering around - the visuals seem becalmed but the soundtrack is buzzing, scenes defined by the crackle of a fire, a far-off rumble that turns into a train roaring by, church bells pealing, dogs barking, water rushing, and of course his own half-audible mutterings, adding his music to the hubbub (it takes a while to realise that he hears music everywhere; then again, it takes a while to realise he's a genius, as opposed to a spaced-out basket case). Once or twice it even emerges as songs, coming to life in the great pull-back scene - as others have noted, the seamless shading from diegetic to non-diegetic (*) is the crux of it (i.e. the way it looks at first like he's playing the music, only for Van Sant to reveal it exists independently of Blake and his sordid little life) - and what seems like aimless druggie posturing turns out to be a poignant snapshot of the creative process, and how its demands can destroy the creator. Still two problems, the problems I had after first viewing: (a) Van Sant's worldview, as in ELEPHANT, has a touch of art-school self-pity (his epigraph might read: "It's a cruel world for sensitive things"), and (b), more importantly, the pared-down style of the recent mood-pieces overlaps in this case with Blake's purity of spirit, bracketing film and protagonist and thereby applauding the viewer for being aligned with Van Sant and his hero as opposed to all those 'others' - the music-industry vulgarians who call him on the phone, the feckless friends who only want to use him, and by extension all the other film directors making over-explicit films instead of concentrating (like Blake and Van Sant) on hidden essentials. GERRY worked on a tension between its buffoonish heroes and implacable camera - the film was shot, implicitly, from Nature's point of view - whereas this is shot, implicitly, from Blake's point of view; the camera's made to express his aloofness, inching close to self-congratulation. Still a problem on second viewing, but it's now more apparent that the film is generous even to characters who aren't Blake - as long as they have some calling, some belief system, some reality: when we cut from the awkward proselytizing Mormons to Blake upstairs, ready to collapse, there's no judgment either way (more a case of two different realities, different paths to the same destination), and Blake has his music like the Mormons have their history and the Yellow Pages guy has his trusty compendium - dare we call it a bible? - of knowledge (even the feckless friends are sympathetic, in a lost-soul way). It doesn't mock, merely wallows in a certain drugged-out melancholy - which is hardly a reason to deny its formidable artfulness. The perfect-joke manipulation of a three-layered shot, couple sleeping in the foreground, Blake outside through the window, TV between them taking over the shot with a glimpse of comical kung-fu (it's a great dilemma: do we go with the silly distraction, or stand by our duty to observe the rather boring people in the frame?). The avant-gardist pleasure - another viewer dilemma - of light reflected in the windshield as Ricky Jay speaks, forming its own weaving patterns as his face appears and disappears (an effect repeated later with sound instead of light when Blake talks to the guy at the club). Scott Green singing along with the part people always sing along to when they listen to "Venus in Furs": "I am tired, I am weary..."]
(*): Thanks to reader Michael Kanbergs for pointing out that it actually stays diegetic throughout - presumably, Blake is "using a number of pedals/loops to play along with himself", as Michael put it. Which is true. But it does initially look like the music emanates from Blake's guitar-playing, and he does then put the guitar down only for the music to continue - and that, I'm convinced, is a deliberate effect on Van Sant's part, opening up the poetic possibility that the music has a life of its own, i.e. that Blake's art is bigger than Blake himself. But yeah, I guess "diegetic" was the wrong word. This is what I get for dipping a toe into film theory...
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (71) (dir., Miranda July) John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson [Over-obvious? Maybe, with the Theme actually appearing onscreen in the title of that art exhibition ("Touch in the Digital Age") but still a poignant vision of a world where human, physical touch has been regulated almost out of existence - "We don't touch the foot anymore," explains the shoe salesman apologetically, and of course there's the bit where the art-gallery woman insists that our heroine send in her work through the proper bureaucratic channels, even though they're standing next to each other and she only has to reach out and take it - forcing people into new ways of connecting (like Internet chatrooms and cyber-reality) and new ways of seeing (like the scene that explains the title). July is very much in the twee David Gordon Green style (one line - "I want my children to have magical powers" - is almost a direct quote from GEORGE WASHINGTON), but it works in this case because the outlandish metaphors and 'quirky' lines are explicitly seen as a code, a way of getting round the proscription on direct contact; our heroine's problem is that she believes in the magic of metaphors, so e.g. when she and the guy have the conversation about a relationship being like a street, she thinks they've actually connected and are ready to move on, whereas he (like most people) sees it as a game and thinks she's nuts when she gets in his car. Strangest and most striking of all is the level of neurosis about "real" vs. fake - as if nothing in the world were reliable anymore - and the way the worldview grows surprisingly conservative, blaming self-affirmation (note the mother's T-shirt) and political correctness (like the art-gallery people; "Is she of colour?") for the state of things, and tagging its young people with old-fashioned values: the boys sing their hapless father a church hymn while the girl next door keeps a hope-chest and looks forward to traditional gender roles, cooking in the kitchen for her husband and daughter. Generation 00s adrift and desperate for love, hampered by an over-processed world that classifies, signposts and second-guesses everything, drawn to circuitous modes of escape or else the opposite, the kind of emotional directness - touch, connection - their elders find simplistic and outdated (unless perhaps they're Bush voters, and this could be seen as the arthouse-movie arm of the backlash against (post-)modern living that contributed to the Dubya Phenomenon). Obviously flawed, but in 20 years it's going to be such a time-capsule.]
THE ARISTOCRATS (57) (dir., Paul Provenza) [Tourette's Syndrome gets name-checked, and with good reason; this is a film about a "show-offy" joke and the impulse to show off that makes a born comic - a form of insecurity (worse, a form of hysteria) which is why it's fitting that the film itself is insecure, unable to stay on one thing for more than a few seconds. The joke itself is admittedly poor but the real letdown is the absence of truly shocking humour, and even though it's mentioned that racism and gay-baiting (among other things) would be the real taboos, none of the comics are inclined to tackle them, at least on camera; body-fluids humour seems tame by comparison, and no amount of "cocksucking motherfuckers" can change that - any more than they change the fact that a semi-libellous dig at powerful agent Joe Franklin dutifully gets declawed in the closing credits. Useful mostly as a snapshot of the showbiz mentality, obv. including hysteria, insecurity and the dutiful brown-nosing of powerful agents - the joke, we're informed, is a show business joke, which may be why comics concerned with their street-cred (Chris Rock, most notably) treat it condescendingly - and the big climactic set-piece, Gilbert Gottfried's wildly successful rendition post-9/11, is instructive: "Sight & Sound" think it's a shame he didn't carry on with the 'tasteless' 9/11 jokes that alienated his audience - forcing him to tell The Aristocrats as an emergency measure - but the point is that being a comic works by collusion, like doing card tricks, and only a very bad comic would keep plugging away once the audience accuses him of having an ace up his sleeve (all comics want to be loved, hence the cosy fraternity of comics implied by the movie; though it's worth wondering what Andy Kaufman - the rare comic whose insecurities were too deep to be salved by other people - would've made of The Aristocrats). Speaking of which, Eric Mead's card-trick version of the joke is ... astonishing.]
INNOCENCE (70) (dir., Lucile Hadzihalilovic) Zoé Auclair, Léa Bridarolli, Marion Cotillard [Is innocence a prison or a state of grace? Fragile but not strictly speaking mysterious, at least in the sense of concealing its effects; water symbolism is right in your face, clearly equated with sexuality - placid and unthreatening for those still young enough to splash around innocently, gushing and strong as a fountain once puberty hits, devious and deadly as water in a leaky boat for those who try to sail before they're ready - and the doll's-house effect of artificial order, a stylised reality, announces itself from the very first scenes (there's even a forbidden forest, with snakes and horses). In a way its simplicity is the point, Hadzihalilovic taunting the dark side of the male gaze as flagrantly as boyfriend Gaspar Noé did with the rape in the tunnel in IRREVERSIBLE: the film is so uninflected, the camera eye so unblinking, you can only be aroused if you're a pervert - yet it's made clear the girls are being groomed for men, glimpsed in the dark auditorium watching them dance (voyeurs, just like us), and you can't accept that without also acknowledging your own role as intruder in this forbidden girlish idyll, just as it was subtly 'wrong' to sit there watching Monica Bellucci get raped in a tunnel, even if we claimed to find it horrifying (our gaze is itself sexualised, deviant sexuality merely something we've been conditioned to reject). The film is cheerily complicit, making it easy, airbrushing rebellion (disobedient girls become non-persons) and seemingly agreeing that "obedience is the only path to happiness"; the solemn little girls become playthings in the cinematic doll's-house, like the parade of subtly fetishised images - a spider on skin, a pillow in the lamplight - leaving it to the viewer to decide: Is the ending happy? Or does it hide a lash of feminist fury?]
HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE (78) (dir., Hayao Miyazaki) with the voices of Chieko Baisho, Takuya Kimura, Akihiro Miwa (English version: Jean Simmons, Christian Bale, Billy Crystal) [Writing this a month after the event, but I guess one might say Miyazaki's cinema works by being, on the one hand, extremely generous - there are no villains; misfit characters are brought together in an improvised family ("Looks like everyone in our little family is a bit complicated," laughs Howl); various creatures help each other and wish each other well - but also, on the other, essentially private, always keeping something in reserve (the exception is the more aggressively message-mongering PRINCESS MONONOKE, and maybe that's why it works less well for me; on the other hand none of the films have broken the 80+ barrier - I haven't seen TOTORO - and maybe it's because of this distance they have, the hint of formality and quietude). Characters are happiest when pursuing their personal projects or communing with Nature - Howl's gift to our heroine is a quiet meadow where she can presumably sit and contemplate - and transcendent moments often come incognito (Howl sees the beautiful young woman beneath the hag, but she's asleep and doesn't know it); emphasis is placed on a clean house, a cosy fire, and there's little of the extrovert quality found in American cartoons (or, to be fair, in real-life children); if Miyazaki's oeuvre were a person it might be a great philanthropist who works all his life in determined anonymity, diffidently doing good, and dies completely unknown except for his own private joy at having helped people - a scenario I at least find profoundly moving. There's a happy ending here but it appears in quotation marks - "A happy ending?" smiles the witch, and shrugs as if to say 'people need their little pleasures' - and the pacifist message hates War as a sin against Nature, in the same way all the various characters struggle against spells that transform them into something unnatural (Howl himself is the most dysfunctional, till saved by love); and throughout it all is the loose lilting rhythm of Miyazaki's fairytale narrative and the charm of his visual imagination - a scarecrow hopping over the crest of a mountain path, tar-blob minions sliding through the walls in mud-slime battalions, the witch attended by page-boy cherubs with page-boy haircuts - the setting a blend of futuristic (flying ships, etc) and Tintin-style Mitteleuropean just as magic co-exists with the everyday (wizards side-by-side with bakers and greengrocers) in this tolerant vision. Nothing new, perhaps, but the man makes the best fairytales anywhere today - possibly the best in movie history - and it's time people just accepted that.]
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (66) (second viewing: 57) (dir., David Cronenberg) Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, William Hurt, Ed Harris [Glad I saw it again, because I hadn't really picked up on the dream motif the first time - monsters in nightmares, the short-order cook's ex-wife who used to dream he was a killer and hit him in her sleep, above all William Hurt asking, "When you dream, are you still Joey?" - Violence as a parallel world at one remove from our own, consciously repressed but constantly impinging on the subconscious, incidentally placing quotation marks (because it's 'all a dream') round the action of the second half and allowing its stilted quality, the way everything seems flat and inevitable (of course the son will finally blow up against his tormentors; of course Dad will confront him afterwards, and lose his cool and end in more violence). Second viewing otherwise a dud, however, not revealing more than was already obvious: Violence an inescapable part of our collective psyche, always lurking within, an atavistic shadow of Man's barbaric past (the history of violence), terrifying and of course exciting too; the two sex scenes are echoes of each other, both driven by the thought of trying to capture something feral and pure - early sexuality before the intervening layers of cynicism and exhaustion, primeval violence before the intervening layers of civilisation. (The past hangs heavy, as when Jack's girlfriend wonders what kids did for fun 100 years ago - and of course he replies that nothing really changes.) All quite intriguing, but not exactly hard to tease out; Cronenberg's precise style seems to deaden more than it illuminates, talk of 'more honest' violence seems overstated (it's just a couple of graphic inserts) and the open-ended final shot needed more edge - Viggo just seems to be saying "Forgive me", when the monster should be right there in the open. Good detail, but there doesn't seem to be much point. Maybe I'm missing a layer.]
London Film Festival, Oct. 13-29 (41 films + 2 oldies)
THE WEDDING DATE (41) (dir., Clare Kilner) Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Amy Adams, Jack Davenport [Women of the world explain: Are you now so post-feministically confident that it amuses you to watch super-efficient career girls portrayed as needy pathetic klutzes forever apologising, bumping into things and laughing nervously - or do you actually yearn for a soulful, soft-spoken man to take you in his strong arms and murmur, "You're safe, relax ... Remember what an incredible woman you are"? Could be the latter given the occasional edge in this flimsy chick-flick, and the hurt confusion in benighted heroine's eyes when someone reminds her she was voted Most Likely to Age Well back in high-school - but then why is it all so phony and predictable? Dermot as the "Yoda of escorts" is more like the James Bond - poised between boredom and unflappability - and they fall in love but fight over something silly, and her Dad takes her aside and gives her a pep talk and Dermot says "I'd rather fight with you than make love with anyone else" and then The End. Is this really what you want, ladies? How about the coarse show-offy cousin who comes on like a pushy refugee from some crass British version of "Sex and the City", and says "Oh God, I think I've just come" when Dermot winks at her from across the room? Has it really come to this?...]
MA MERE (62) (dir., Christophe Honoré) Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes [What does it mean that the mother suddenly appears - then mysteriously disappears, like a ghost - initiating the plot and the son's education/corruption, just as he's about to expose himself to another young boy at the beach? Is it a joke on the 'good' mommy's duty to ensure her little boy doesn't grow up gay (like later on, when she hires a girl his own age to "look after" him)? Maybe a red flag coding what follows as a fantasy of conflicted sexuality, having to depose the Ideal Mother and embrace the Perverse Mother (like when he cringes in disgust, watching her cavorting drunk in a bar full of half-naked men)? Could be all (or none) of the above in this kinky drama which unfortunately loses focus in the second half, turning into shock for its own sake, but Garrel is a good deal more relaxed and expressive than he was in THE DREAMERS and the first hour at least is great filthy fun: racked by Oedipal whatsit he masturbates to his hated father's porn mags, then pees on them and wails "Don't tell Mom!" when finally caught - but Dad is already dead and Mom is a well-known slut, setting him up with a bad-mother surrogate (who fixates on his anus, like a mother with her baby, and plants a kiss on his naked ass like mom-from-hell Ruth Gordon in WHERE'S POPPA); "Admit that I'm disgusting," says Mother, and love me for it - a defilation, and semi-explicit blasphemy (sons are gods; mothers, saints) that's the only way out of his Oedipal guilt, but of course he can't love her that way without also killing her, literally and metaphorically. Maybe it doesn't make sense, and nor does the film after a while - is it about wearing masks? about religion? about sexual freedom as superiority to those pitiful many "waiting for Death to enlighten them", like the hapless tourists who occasionally appear on the fringes - but those with a taste for pretentious French skin-flicks are unlikely to mind. "There's no guilty pleasure," claims someone - but there is, and this is it. Also quite arousing, but I don't know if that makes me a repressed bourgeois or just a sick puppy.]
RED EYE (53) (dir., Wes Craven) Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jayma Mays [All incidentals in the set-up - a self-help book, a little girl, a heavy bag, a sweet old lady - and the Hollywood-thriller initiate grins in anticipation because we know they're plants awaiting payoff, to be dropped into the plot at significant moments. Except they're not, at least not cleverly, and the B-movie structure is enticing - enclosed space, real-time feel, high-concept premise - at least till you realise it's not in fact an amped-up B-movie with ideas beyond its structure, but a damped-down A-movie with a structure to fit its ideas. Cillian Murphy never changes his performance when revealed as the villain, which is actually a neat trick - he's creepy and charming from the get-go, so all he does is vary the proportions slightly - but he fights like a girl in the big climax, which is partly on purpose (a cool professional driven to desperate measures, his "male-based fact-driven" logic giving way to "female-based" emotion) but fully earns the heroine's final "You're pathetic"; it's intriguing that they're both workaholics - he's so pissed off when he gets her cocktail wrong - but how intrigued can you be when the smart twists don't come and the plants don't pay off as expected? Pro-homeland Message seems a bit of a stretch, to be honest - whole rape flashback seemed no more than the usual dopey back-story, setting up a female-empowerment angle; is Rach ever coded as a patriot, before the lazy plot-serving detail of saving country before Daddy? - but I'm glad someone's thinking it.]
TRANSPORTER 2 (58) (dir., Louis Leterrier) Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Matthew Modine, François Berléand [10 Reasons Why This Film is Awesome: (1.) Psycho babe 'Lola' in bikini-top, lingerie and with a machine-gun in each hand, especially when the nurse asks what her problem is and she replies with a smile, "My problem isn't medical ... (brings up the gun and shoves it in her face) It's psychological". (2.) François Berléand dissing an American cheese sandwich. (3.) Suave villain Alessandro Gassman importuning our hero not to let "my grammatically impeccable syntax fool you", he really is a nutjob. (4.) Taciturn hero using a length of hose as a lethal weapon against an assortment of thugs armed with axes and machetes, having previously (5.) commandeered a jet-ski ("I'm trying to catch a bus"), neatly flipping the girl who's driving it so she somersaults in the air and lands on the seat behind him. (6.) A car chase up the various floors of a car-park, ending with our hero crashing through the wall of the top storey, sailing across the street and dropping smoothly in the building opposite - only topped by (7.) hero and villain fighting in a plane as it falls to the ground, still solemnly trading chop-socky moves as it crashes in the sea and starts filling with water. (8.) Villains never firing when they have our hero cornered - instead it's the old 'Sit down, Mr. Bond' routine - firing hundreds of rounds as he runs away but missing every time, then throwing away their guns in disgust when they run out of bullets. (9.) Transporter's special relationship with his car, emergency rations including a row of spare cellphones in the glove compartment and a new suit of clothes in the trunk. (And he also resists a woman's advances - She: "Is it because of who I am?"; He: "No. It's because of who I am" - which might be because she's married or because TRANSPORTER 3 is about to out him as the first gay action hero.) Finally, (10.) the way he bonds with the little boy by asking riddles, but finally slinks away - muttering the answer to the riddle quietly to himself - when the family's reunited and the boy's parents are there to play the game with him - back on the road, on to the next job like a lonesome cowboy, a steely gleam in his eye to hide the pain. Reason why, despite aforesaid awesomeness, it's still only a 58: everything else, really...]
STANDER (47) (dir., Bronwen Hughes) Thomas Jane, Dexter Fletcher, David O'Hara, Deborah Kara Unger [Entertaining rubbish, except when it reaches for more and blames apartheid for destroying the idealism of its anti-hero, a South African cop turned bank robber (the present government, which co-financed, gets a pat on the back with the Afrikaners' dire predictions of what would happen if the blacks ever took over; "They would kill us," says one, but another opines, "Maybe they're not like us"). In any case, political comment doesn't really fit here - much more typical is the emphasis on dorky 70s fashions (those sideburns!) and hyperactive soundtrack using just a quick snatch, actually just the first line, of Bad Company's "Can't Get Enough" - "Well I'll take whatever I want" - over a montage of bank robberies; Hughes makes it move at a thrilling pace but everything is done for effect - a demonstration in a township is helicopter shots of crowds marching and chanting ANC anthems, and the mix of spectacle and song is seductive but the more it plays the more it turns into a music video, losing all reality. Jane grins like a maniac and also gets naked at every opportunity (is this the mark of a woman director?), he and Unger making perfume-commercial love silhouetted against a window; finds its level in the second half as a flashy riff on BONNIE AND CLYDE, with a little too much plot in the final stretch. Calling all nitpickers: had Warholiana trickled down sufficiently that people were already making references to someone's "15 minutes" being "up" in early-80s South Africa? I smell Anachronism.]
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE (65) (dir., Rebecca Miller) Daniel Day-Lewis, Catherine Keener, Camilla Belle, Beau Bridges [Didn't realise I was so alone on this one till I checked out the reviews, and I see how it could seem precious and clumsy - but the over-obvious symbolism (yes, there is a snake) seemed part of the same directorial strategy that blasts Bob Dylan songs without trying to 'drop them in' artfully and also (more important) has things happen without over-explaining, letting the meanings emerge organically. In fact, it's exactly the same sensibility as the lead character's - and DDL's overpowering performance - a man who's blunt, impatient, stuck in another age (the age of Freudian snakes and Dylan), committed to "living a different way" and big on organic lifestyles in general (he'd probably condemn movies as a case of authoritarian auteurs limiting the "total freedom" of the audience). It's also clear he fancies himself - "I'm wondering if you're crazy or not," says Keener, and he gives a wolfish grin and replies, "That's a waste of time, honey" - but self-regard is built into Day-Lewis' persona, the whole spiel of the Ultimate Actor who only deigns to grace us with his presence once every few years; he owns the movie, and the showdown with amiable Bridges couldn't have worked with a less intense actor - it's the tension of his simmering violence, the way his middle-class hosts don't realise they're dealing with a wild animal, that makes it such a relief when the violence gets channelled into self-realisation; he also incidentally seems to bring out the best in 18-year-old Belle, who I was shocked to find has a decade's worth of credits in big-studio crap, given that she seems pure and artless as a young doe (of course she's an actress, giving a performance in her own right; but I bet it's partly that she felt too intimidated to try the usual fluttery tricks). The film takes ages to spell out their relationship, which is effective and also appropriate since it's a tale of the incest that dare not speak its name; it seems to leap where most films trudge, eliding characters' thought-processes - Jack tends to do things without any warning and Rose's reactions are instinctive, whether asking the boy to deflower her or coming into the new woman's bedroom with a loaded gun - and there's something refreshing about that. Maybe, like its hero, it's essentially a failure, half-assed in its pursuit of the new, underrating the complexity of 'normal' things (it's telling that he never really gets Keener, thinking her the straightforward woman who's going to put some order in his life whereas in fact she's got her own quirks and neuroses); like him, however, it's essentially a noble one.]
THE SKELETON KEY (60) (dir., Iain Softley) Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, John Hurt [You know when they say 'The South will never die'? That's not just a figure of speech. Spooky ending makes up for a lot, notably a middle section when the tension seems to seep out of this eerie little thriller, despite Mr. Softley's keyhole-shots and sudden vertiginous high-angles. What seems implicit - modern heroine falling under the spell of an old culture with old supersitions - is revealed as explicit, while the subtext-theme of Time running out - heroine saying she thought she had more time to reconcile with her father, a life (in the opening scene) reduced to a box of mementos and an old key-chain reading "Live Fast, Die Young" - cleverly turns out to be connected to the main twist. Did we really need the crap whereby her compassion for paralysed Hurt is in fact displaced emotion from not having cared for her Dad, though? I wish they'd give it a rest with these cute Syd Field-ish back-stories acting as 'motivation'.]