SHORT REVIEWS - 2003
by Chris Fujiwara
ALEX & EMMA
In the cultural neverland where Rob Reiner’s senile comedy takes place,
Luke Wilson’s first novel (about "commitment") makes enough of
a splash for him to sign a deal whereby he’ll get $125,000 on finishing
the second. With the deadline a month away, he’s in debt to a Miami loan
shark and hasn’t written a word. So he hires agency stenographer Kate Hudson
and dictates the novel to her in his quaint Boston garret while the audience,
clenching its teeth, waits for the romantic dust motes to fly.
Loosely based on the circumstances of the composition of Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, this disaster also draws on Richard Quine’s 1964 farce Paris When It Sizzles, which likewise has the writer and his secretary/muse appear as characters in the story-within-a-story. The feebleness of the film’s grasp on contemporary reality may be gauged from the scene in which a "what’s it gonna be, sweetheart" bus driver waits with his door open for Hudson to take her endless Parthian shot at Wilson in front of his building. Bostonians may get a mirthless snicker or two out of the filmmakers’ notion of "Jamaica Plain," or the montage in which Wilson and Hudson go on a Duck Tour to recharge his creative batteries. (110 minutes)
CHIHWASEON/PAINTED FIRE
Director Im Kwon-taek’s 95th film (the 94th was the superb Chunhyang) is the fictionalized account of the life of Jang Seung-ub (known as Ohwon), a legendary Korean painter of the late 19th century. With inexorable subtlety, the movie shows Jang’s rise from poverty to renown against the background of the political turbulence of the period.
Jang’s genius, appetite, and prodigality are natural forces for which the film seeks no explanation. He scatters and destroys his masterpieces, surrounds himself with kisaeng (Korea’s geishas — in a memorable close-up, when he’s extracted from one of them by soldiers, his semen spills on the floor), and drinks constantly ("If you want to paint, first learn to drink," he counsels). Im’s classicism depends on the tension between the flow of lines across space (which is in harmony with the flow of life) and the arbitrary, austere rectangle of the film frame. Covering 50 years, the narrative gives an impression of constant movement caught in stately snapshots. The film’s fusion of history, legend, and art is so complete, and its elementalism so direct, that the Empedoclean ending is justified. In Korean with English subtitles. (117 minutes)
CONFIDENCE
The details of the plot of this swift lark, in which a grifter (Edward Burns) runs afoul of a gangster (Dustin Hoffman) and must pull off an elaborate con to make things right, require no comment other than that neither the plausibility of the scheme nor its ready comprehension by the viewer is high among director James Foley’s priorities. He’s more concerned with keeping the film stocked with swindles, standoffs, repartee, revelations, double-crosses, and generic self-consciousness. Of the freshness of these staples, suffice it to say that no one will leave Confidence feeling that he or she has just witnessed any radical innovations in the crime-film genre.
Counting in the movie’s favor are the performances of Hoffman (enjoying himself as the flamboyant kingpin), Rachel Weisz (elevating a token role), Andy Garcia (doing a fair Timothy Carey impression), and Robert Forster (dominating the film in a bit part). Above all, Foley gives Confidence a crisp visual flair that remains watchable even when the plot is just a blur. It may be worth sitting through the film just for the sidewalk-café scenes, in which the blizzard of cars and pedestrians makes it even more impossible than usual to pay attention to what’s being said. (98 minutes).
THE CUCKOO
In 1944, a Finnish sniper and a disgraced Russian officer take shelter in the home of Anni, a Sami (Lapp) reindeer farmer. The Russian thinks the Finn is a German and wants to kill him. As far as the Finn, a pacifist, is concerned, the war is over. Anni, who hasn't been with a man in four years, would also prefer it if the three of them got along.
The main innovation of Alexander Rogozhkin's film also proves its fatal flaw: the three characters each speak a different language and are unable to understand each other, but everything they say is subtitled for the viewer's benefit. Since the film's linguistic point of view thus changes with each line of dialogue, and since the characters exist only through their speech , no emotional involvement with them is possible. The film becomes a series of ludicrous misunderstandings, leading to a dreadful turn to spirituality as Anni tries to prevent the dying Finn's spirit from leaving his body. In a shot that unfortunately must be seen to be believed, the spirit, strolling away with a boy guide over the Lapp landscape, stops and signifies to the audience that he hears Anni's call by cupping his hand to his ear.
FIDEL
Estela Bravo’s smooth hagiography of Fidel Castro portrays the Cuban leader
as "a socialist survivor in a capitalist world" and focuses on his
political and symbolic importance for Latin American and African postcolonial
liberation movements. Newsreel footage is weighted toward state occasions with
cheering crowds. Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Walker, Harry Belafonte,
Angela Davis, and other notables give testimonials. Criticism of Castro’s
civil-rights record is addressed in a dainty manner, through his apologists’
words. In a representative scene, the jeep in which Castro takes Ted Turner
on a grand tour of Cuba breaks down — proving, in the film’s terms,
that Fidel, just like regular Cubans, is inconvenienced under his country’s
austere economy. After a quick repair, the jeep starts up again — signifying
that Cuba will keep moving forward in spite of setbacks. That’s the film’s
consistent level of rhetoric. But however simple-minded Fidel is, it can be
valued as a corrective to US propaganda.
HOLES
There’s no point in making strenuous objections to this leisurely, benign film for 11-year-old boys. It has a welcome contempt for authority that’s justified by the story, in which the wicked warden (Sigourney Weaver) of a juvenile correction center forces her charges to dig holes in the desert in the hope of recovering the spoils of a notorious 19th-century female outlaw. The film gets points for showing a mouth-to-mouth kiss between a black man and a white woman (the sympathetic outlaw, whose adventures are recounted in running flashbacks). Within the limits imposed by the script’s ban on ambiguity, the performances are mostly good, especially that of Jon Voight (disguised as Wayne Newton). But is it too much to wish that Holes had been made with a little more deviousness, a little less zeal in spelling out the obvious? There’s no possibility that any member of the audience, no matter how young, will miss any point. The tyranny exercised by director Andrew Davis is as total as that of his villains. (111 minutes)
THE HUNTED
Left unhinged after a gory stint with NATO troops in Kosovo, a US Special Forces soldier (Benicio Del Toro) returns home to Oregon and starts ripping up deer hunters. To catch him, the FBI recruits the man who trained him in killing, an expert tracker named L.T. (Tommy Lee Jones, whose mournful, almost diffident performance is in key with the film’s overwhelming grimness). Early on, L.T. marks himself as a force to reckon with when he goes alone into the woods after his prey, rejecting offers of assistance with the curt rejoinder, " If I’m not back in two days, it’ll mean I’m dead. "
Doing all that could be done to make this drab exercise in bloodletting look like a real movie, director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) brings textured, layered imagery and disorienting low angles to the scenes in the woods, defends with vigor his status as a master of chase scenes, and keeps the jolts coming. Lunging at thematic resonance, the script provides a running series of Abraham-and-Isaac references and audience nudgers like comparing the American city — in this case Portland — to a " wilderness. " But The Hunted works only when it’s taciturn, blunt, and savage. (94 minutes)
IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY
A comedy/drama starring Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, and Cameron Douglas (Michael’s son and Kirk’s grandson) as members of the same family threatens the most rancid kind of feel-good-about-patriarchy lovefest. For most of its length, Fred Schepisi’s film does a skillful job of avoiding the project’s obvious pitfalls. A kaleidoscope of short scenes covers a few crisis-packed days in the lives of three generations of a wealthy Jewish family in New York City. Kirk plays a retired lawyer, Michael his lawyer son, Bernadette Peters the latter’s wife, Cameron their college-student son, and Rory Culkin his little brother. The communication problems and resentments among these five provide the film with its thematic freight, which Schepisi handles with a light touch. He also accommodates Kirk Douglas’s physical frailty and speech impairment (the result of a stroke) with unsmothering tact. The family’s path toward reconciliation comes to feel like a trudge, but when you consider the wallow in self-approval this movie could have been, that it comes so close to painlessness is gratifying. (109 minutes).
LEVITY
"You’ve got to lighten up a little bit," Kirsten Dunst says to Billy Bob Thornton midway through this humorless, awful movie. It’s the only true note struck in writer/director Ed Solomon’s leaden script. Thornton stars as Manual, a staring zombie who’s tossed out of prison after serving 23 years for the hold-up killing of a convenience-store clerk. After a short spell of not knowing what to do with his freedom, Manual finds his calling preaching to inner-city kids who’re serving under community-service sentences. He also stalks and woos the sister (Holly Hunter) of the person he killed.
Levity is a compendium of five or six different redemption melodramas, among which it’s hard to pick the most cliché’d and unbelievable, though the nadir of offensiveness is reached with the apparitions of Manual’s angelic victim. Dunst (wasted here) plays a character described in the press notes as "a beautiful and privileged wreck of a young woman." The movie is something of a beautiful and privileged wreck itself, thanks to its only commendable feature, Roger Deakins’s cinematography, which would have come off as less overwrought in a film less tepid and pretentious. (100 minutes)
THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE
This earnest, doleful film comes complete with flash-card intertitles that pant out its themes ("Lust!" "Self-sacrifice!"). Kevin Spacey plays the title character, a University of Texas philosophy professor and anti-death-penalty activist. On death row for raping and murdering a fellow activist (Laura Linney), Gale sells his story to an investigative magazine reporter (Kate Winslet) whose colleagues call her "Mike Wallace with PMS." That line gives Winslet one of the two notes for her character, the other being the teary-eyed discombobulation that comes over her as she races the clock to prove Gale’s innocence. One of Gale’s books is called Dialogical Exhaustion. If that means running out of things to say, the dialogical exhaustion in The Life of David Gale comes not a moment too soon (not that the film isn’t just as clunky when the characters shut up). The script has its weaknesses; the direction by Alan Parker is disastrous. A minor point of interest: this may be the first American major-studio film to feature a lecture on Lacan (it doesn’t help). (130 minutes)
LUTHER
This bio-pic drops into every pitfall the form offers. Pretending to immerse us in the Europe of the early 1500s, the film fails to evoke a world that’s believable or surprising, so intent are director Eric Till and writers Camille Thomasson and Bart Gavigan on propping up the various straw men, symbols, and clichés they think they need to tell Luther’s story. Joseph Fiennes plays Martin early on as a cloddish naïf, just to reassure audiences that they won’t be spending two hours with some kind of intellectual; when he must appear as a scholar and teacher, he turns into a stand-up comic. Now and then Luther wrestles alone with his demons, in scenes intended to show that he has a dark side, though not dark enough to endanger anyone but himself. The style of the film is encapsulated in the slow track-in on our hero as he refuses to recant his writings before the Inquisition. This hackneyed underlining proves that Till has no faith in his actor or his material. Peter Ustinov’s performance as Prince Frederick of Saxony is squirted into the film in little blots of disapproval and consternation. (115 minutes)
MAX
Taking as its premise Adolf Hitler’s youthful flirtation with art, this
film explores two theses: (1) the Third Reich might have been avoided if the
cultural arbiters of his early days had taken him seriously as an artist; and
(2) fascism is art by other means. The first thesis needed more outrageousness
than writer/director Menno Meyjes can muster: the climactic contrivance by which
Hitler’s hopes of a one-man exhibition are violently cut short is a poor
excuse for historical irony. The second thesis is set out bluntly — "
Politics is the new art! I am the new avant-garde! " , Hitler (Noah Taylor)
expostulates to Max (John Cusack), the Jewish gallery owner who befriends him
— and then left hanging, as if the film were giving the audience an essay
assignment.
What else do we have here? Some half-unintended humor (like the already celebrated " Come on, Hitler, I’ll buy you a lemonade " ), a reasonable Cusack performance, an earnest but undernourished re-creation of the art scene of post–World War I Germany (almost the first thing seen in the movie is George Grosz vomiting). Firmly in the spirit of the film, Taylor’s Hitler is a vivid portrait of dogged self-seriousness. (106 minutes)
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL
Before becoming a standard exercise in wearing out welcomes, Gore Verbinski’s adventure comedy brings good spirits and narrative vigor to its chore of refurbishing the pirate genre. The sometimes elegant dialogue is mostly free of the solecisms usually deemed necessary to obtain the target audience’s support for period blockbusters (I still remember the moment in The Patriot when Mel Gibson asked Joely Richardson whether he could sit next to her and she replied, "It’s a free country — or at least it will be soon!"). Although two hams (Geoffrey Rush and Jonathan Pryce) are on hand to provide what’s called acting, the film’s one interesting performance is that of Johnny Depp, who as a pirate captain in search of a ship surrounds himself in a blur of sensuous hand motions while flouncing through the proceedings in long braids and eye shadow. That some of the pirates (those commanded by Rush) are zombies, sort of, proves helpful neither to their adversaries nor to the special-effects team, who drop the ball on what would have seemed a surefire play: the transformation between fleshy body and skeleton as a zombie pirate moves in and out of moonlight. (134 minutes)
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Neil LaBute's latest is set at California’s nonexistent Mercy College, a twilight zone of contrivance where students talk in an odd patois into which chunks of oldspeak and literariness have fallen ("This is rich"; "I’ve got a little Gregor Samsa thing going here"). The characters, like the experience of watching the film, can be described only within quotes: "sophisticated, amoral" art student Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) picks up "geeky" lit major Adam (Paul Rudd) and transforms him by degrees into a "cool dude" — a process that comes to seem more and more "sinister" as it becomes clear that Evelyn has a "hidden agenda." The obsessive sterility of LaBute’s mise-en-scène, in which background detail is all but absent, forces attention on the games of condescension and provocation in his end-to-end two-person dialogues (in which Adam’s two friends, played by Gretchen Mol and Fred Weller, also take part). It would seem we’re expected to react with mounting discomfort and fascination, though boredom, laced with a sporting curiosity about what kind of unpleasantness impends, is just as appropriate a response to the stunted souls who haunt LaBute’s campus. (96 minutes)
SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton are all that this mild lark has going for it, apart from some canniness at manipulating the well-worn levers and sticky springs of what, these days, we're supposed to call romantic comedy. Nicholson plays the 63-year-old owner of the world's second largest hip-hop label. While visiting the bedroom of the latest of his many much-younger conquests, a Christie's auctioneer (Amanda Peet), Nicholson suffers a mild heart attack, which leads to his becoming marooned in the beach house of Peet's 50-ish mother (Keaton). The debt that this setup owes to Kaufman and Hart's 1930s Broadway farce The Man Who Came to Dinner can be acknowledged in the dialogue, thanks to the circumstance that Keaton's character is (we're notified) “the most successful female playwright since Lillian Hellman.”
From then on it's all about how Nicholson reevaluates his life and achieves nirvana with Keaton, despite her guardedness in matters of the heart and her acquiring a younger suitor in the form of Keanu Reeves. Writer-director Nancy Meyers' guiding of all this heavy machinery may fairly be called ruthless.
STEVIE
After making his hit documentary Hoop Dreams in 1994, Steve James took his camera to rural southern Illinois and sought out Stevie Fielding, a troubled young man to whom James had, while in college, served as a Big Brother. If the film that resulted is remarkably unpleasant for most of its two hours and 20 minutes, that’s not just because of the horrific details of Stevie’s life (which the movie has the merit at least of bringing to light), but also because of the filmmaker’s constant foregrounding of his own dour compassion and tight-lipped misgivings. One of James’s voiceovers sums it up: " Stevie had wanted to be in this film so that he could spend time with me. And there I was repaying him by putting his tortured life on display. "
A shot near the end speaks volumes about James’s style and concerns: after Stevie’s girlfriend suggests that " something good came out of " the process of shooting the film, the handheld camera moves in to a close-up of James looking skeptical, detached, and grim. It’s possible to admire James’s honesty in making his bad conscience so apparent, but he never confronts with any clarity the question that looms over his film: why make it? (140 minutes)
SWIMMING POOL
This elegant suspense piece from François Ozon (Sous le sable/Under the Sand; 8 femmes/8 Women) stars Charlotte Rampling as a successful, ill-tempered British mystery novelist whose publisher lends her his house in Provence so she can work on her next book. She’s dismayed to find that she must share the place with the publisher’s nubile daughter (Ludivine Sagnier), who is given to bringing home older men and having loud sex with them. Then she becomes interested in the girl as possible source material for her novel, and mayhem erupts.
Ozon is, as always, a remote, mechanical director with a dry and cold style, a neat stack of chips on each shoulder, and every intention of keeping several sinuous steps ahead of his characters and his audience. Here, his chilliness is perfectly suited to the ambiguous relationship between the two main characters. The flat, airy, sinister quality he generates (as in Sous le sable, which is probably still his best film to date) remains interesting and pleasurable, if not deeply compelling. Rampling’s performance gets better as her character loosens up, and the plot reversals in the last section will fuel many a post-film conversation. In English and French with English subtitles. (102 minutes)
VIEW FROM THE TOP
A downtrodden but plucky Nevadan (Gwyneth Paltrow) escapes small-town anomie to find glory as a flight attendant in Bruno Barreto's brief and brightly colored, if not very funny, pop confection. In its eerie blend of irony and sentimentality, the film feels like an accurate recreation of a mental juggling act that must be familiar to many Americans: holding the tackiness and the false promises of official culture in affectionate contempt, while believing in the eventual vindication of true love, hard work, and honesty. Fusing these two positions in queasy splendor, the film, at the last moment, takes two figures whom it has ridiculed throughout (Mike Myers's nerdy trainer and Candice Bergen's parvenu socialite) and turns them into poster children for middle-class solidarity. But the film's insouciance is so all-embracing that pointing out unacknowledged contradictions seems petty, especially since for much of its length, the only possible interest of View from the Top lies in seeing Paltrow and co-star Christina Applegate squeezed into the various outfits that mark their characters' progress.
all this stuff originally published in The Boston Phoenix and © copyright 2003 Chris Fujiwara