Modern Women: One Imprisoned, One Unbound

Reviewed: I’ve Loved You So Long, Happy-Go-Lucky.

Kristen Scott Thomas and Sally Hawkins play two strikingly different characters who are, nonetheless, so similarly magnetic that they threaten to overpower the films that surround them by the sheer force of their personalities  (I’ve Loved You So Long and Happy-Go-Lucky, respectively). Each character repels and attracts, waxing and waning, provoking disarming, oft unsettling responses.

Disconsolate Juliette (Scott Thomas) is brought to the country home of her sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) after spending 15 years in prison. As a prospective employer says accusingly, “You must have done something really bad!” Indeed, Juliette was convicted of a heinous crime, but until the specifics are revealed, the film simply observes her tenuous attempts to connect with a sister and a family she has never really known.

Juliette’s parents disowned her, and the considerably younger Léa has lived her adult life as an only child, marrying the sensible but cautious Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), adopting two Vietnamese girls, caring for Papy Paul (Jean-Claude Arnaud) in her home, and teaching literature at a local college. Juliette is so angry, anguished, and deeply scarred that it’s only with supreme effort that she can deal kindly and calmly with the new-found family that surrounds her.

She acts as though she can never be forgiven and should never be forgiven, and she barely manages to restrain herself from visibly flinching when she is shown an act of kindness. She doesn’t want pity, she doesn’t expect anything from anyone, and, probably above all, she doesn’t expect anyone to understand what she has experienced.

Scott Thomas gives a superbly modulated, finely-tuned performance as Juliette. When she flares into anger, it’s real and heart-stabbing; when she lapses back into long periods of functional though terminal despair, it’s nearly heartbreaking. Once we learn of the crime which she committed, of course, it’s fairly well impossible to have any sympathy for her, and that fits with her physical and mental disposition.

What happens eventually is that Juliette earns a small measure of empathy; she may be a monster, and we may not understand why she did what she did, yet in the here and now, she deserves respect because she doesn’t make excuses for herself and is trying mightily to be a positive, contributing member of society.

Then debut director Phillipe Claudel, working from his own script, screws it all up by introducing an incredibly infuriating twist that tends to invalidate everything that has come before it, as though this strongly personal drama were a mystery potboiler requiring a tidy resolution.

Up until that point, it’s easy enough to excuse the stage-bound dramatics and the resolutely non-cinematic approach to the material. Scott Thomas definitely makes the movie worth watching, and I was fascinated by Claudel’s idea of trying to make an inherently unsympathetic character human without making her either a cartoonish villain or a superheroic heroine.

If you miss the movie in its theatrical run (in Dallas, it ends at the Inwood tomorrow, December 11), it should play just as well on DVD.

 

From skimming earlier reviews, I fully expected Sally Hawkins’ Poppy to be well-nigh unbearable, so chirpy, upbeat, and relentlessly optimistic that she would give a curmudgeon such as myself heartburn.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to find such a fully-realized character at the heart of  Happy-Go-Lucky, written and directed by Mike Leigh. Poppy is an “in your face” kind of happy person, the sort who tell perfect strangers to smile and look on the bright side of having personal possessions stolen. At various times throughout the movie, her aggressive charms become grating, and it might be tempting to tell such a person to shut up, stop talking, keep your mouth closed.

Yet Poppy is also warm and empathetic, incredibly supportive of her friends and family, and clearly someone who has decided to be cheery and optimistic rather than dwell on the negative. That might make her appear out of touch with reality, but, really, it’s just the way she’s decided to live her life. To a certain extent, it’s a defense mechanism, a facade, a put-on, a mask: she’s just as capable as anyone else of having her feelings hurt, getting shook up by a would-be stalker, and being frightened by intimate contact with a furious man.

On the flip side of the coin, she hasn’t retreated from life. While she doesn’t allow her desire for a romantic soul mate to dominate her thinking, she’s very much open to the possibility, and doesn’t shy away when a man asks her out on a date. She’s just as content to spend time with her long-term friend and roommate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) or her younger sister.

And as flippantly bouyant as her personality may be, is she any more irritating than a relentlessly downcast, bitter, cynical person would be? Both personality types can be equally trying to someone who fancies himself a calm, peaceful, mellow, middle of the road moderate — who, in turn, could drive either Poppy or her polar opposite a little bit crazy with his indecision and passive/aggressive behavior.

Happy-Go-Lucky presents Poppy’s “other” in the person of Scott (Eddie Marsan), a strict driving instructor who Poppy engages to give her weekly lessons after her bicycle is stolen. He is uptight, tense, and rigid, with an intolerant worldview that manifests itself more and more as the weeks go by. We know they’re bound to come into genuine conflict sooner or later, so we hold our breath and wait to see how it will be resolved. And then when it is played out, it caught me completely off-guard.

Mike Leigh has developed a rich cinematic vocabulary; the film feels open, airy, and welcoming, even when the characters feel stuffy and constricted. Still, Leigh knows when to pull the viewer uncomfortably close, and when those rare moments arise, it’s mesmerizing. I could barely stand to watch what was happening, and yet I couldn’t look away.

Happy-Go-Lucky is sufficiently intimate to play well on a small screen, but in a cinema setting it was a rich, eye-opening experience. Locally, it’s playing upstairs at the Inwood and will continue for at least one more week.

Peter on Film – November 08

November was an incredibly busy month due to personal and professional obligations, which, unfortunately, allowed less time than usual to write about films. My two reviews for Das Manifest are only available online in  German for the moment; eventually I’ll post the original English-language text, but I still get a kick out of seeing my words translated into German. Obligation-wise, things appear to have calmed down now — fingers crossed and all that rot — so I’m hoping that December will allow things to balance back to the normal rollercoaster that is my life. Thanks for reading!

Cinematical:

Indie Winners: Bruce Campbell, ‘Noah’s Arc,’ Bill Maher
Asian Cinema Scene: ‘Heibon Punch’ Searches for Big Breasts in Japan
Spin-ematical: New on DVD for 11/04
Charlize Theron Recruits Tom Cruise in ‘The Tourist’
Cinematical Seven: Most Memorable Campaigners
Asian Cinema Scene: ‘The Vampire Who Admires Me’ Haunts Hong Kong
Asian Cinema Scene: Jackie Chan Lines Up ‘Junior Soldiers’
Are ‘Twilight’ Fans “Twums” or “Mothersuckers”?
Asian Cinema Scene: ‘Sideways’ Remake in Japan
Indie Winners: ‘Striped Pajamas,’ Jean-Claude, and Love
Asian Cinema Scene: John Woo’s ‘Red Cliff’ Big in Japan
Who Wants to Watch Michael Moore Bitch About the Economy?
Spin-ematical: New on DVD for 11/18
Review: Twilight — Peter’s Take

Das Manifest:

Review: Righteous Kill 
Review: Saw V

Twitch:

DVD Review: Syngenor

TWILIGHT

Remarkably faithful to the spirit of its source material, the film version of Twilight crams most of the key episodes from Stephenie Meyer’s novel into its breathless, 122-minute running time. Under the direction of Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen), Twilight gallops along handsomely, showcasing the cloudy, misty beauty of its gorgeous Pacific Northwest forest locations; you can practically smell the pine trees and feel the crunch of fallen leaves beneath your feet. Using voice-over narration sparingly, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg trots out all the major (and most of the minor) characters from the book, recounting the story in abbreviated fashion while demonstrating respect for Meyer’s novel and its huge, faithful audience.

– Read my complete review at Cinematical.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

With few exceptions, the present generation of film directors have no idea how to compose action sequences so that they don’t immediately dissolve into incomprehensible gunk.    

This is readily apparent in the opening sequence of Quantum of Solace, a whiz-bang cacophony of flash and dazzle completely lacking in context or geographical sense. I munched popcorn as James Bond — identifiable only because we know the current iteration of the secret agent is played by the blonde Daniel Craig, and thank goodness for his hair color — crashed his car into other cars on a mountain road. Metal, rubber, and glass careened and collided, and then it was over and a body we were probably supposed to recognize appeared in Bond’s trunk after it crash landed, and the credits rolled.

Quantum features several recurring character from Casino Royale — besides the usual Bond and M. (Judi Dench) from the British Secret Service, rogues like Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), and Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), plus good old Felix Leither from the CIA (still dependably played by Jeffrey Wright) — which only serves to highlightthe many shortcomings of Quantum. 

Casino Royale director Martin Campbell and his team staged superbly fluid action sequences, whether on foot or on car. Shots were framed so as to establish the geography of each setting and to show where the participants where located in relation to each other, thus heightening the danger — close proximity equals suspense — and, though the pace was often furious, it served to increase the suspense.

Here, Marc Forster directs everything in such a flurry of movement that we don’t know who’s chasing whom. Even when the action is confined to one room, it’s impossible to know what’s happening, even when that room is a small elevator! 

Bond has always been a kind of elegant superhero, as least as depicted in the long-running film series, impervious to pain, always calm, cool, collected, and ready with a wisecrack. The Casino Royale reboot allowed Craig, an excellent actor fully capable of portraying a stylish brute with both manners and deadly skills, to help reshape Bond into a modern undercover operative. 

Quantum jettisons almost every hint of frivolity in favor of following Bond as a coldblooded killer bent on revenge, incapable of restraint as he chases down Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) the man responsible for the death of his beloved Vespa from the previous installment. Greene is part of a secret, powerful, multi-national cabal intent on doing something evil in Bolivia on a grand scale, while masquerading behind the facade of an environmental organization. Bond’s sometime cohort is Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who is hell-bent on her own mission of revenge.

Craig is, once again, quite good; Kurylenko holds up her part quite nicely (an improvement over her thankless job in Hitman). The screenwriters (Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, re-written by Paul Haggis) work hard to be relevant, dragging in U.S. foreign policy, the exploitation of the poor, South American dictators, and British acquiesance as a minor player on the world stage. The film is efficient but more than a bit dreary. This is Bond in a bad mood, down and depressed and angry without being willing to admit it. 

Despite all that, it’s briskly entertaining in its own way, though I can’t help wishing for a lighter tone the next time out. Even the playfully named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Atherton) introduces herself simply as “Fields, just Fields,” which is quite a disappointment in a film without Q, Miss Moneypenny, “Bond, James Bond,” and “shaken, not stirred.”

As it is, Quantum of Solace plays like a very decent action picture, but not very much like one with James Bond as Ian Fleming’s 007.

CHANGELING

Why go to all the trouble of gloriously recreating 1928 Los Angeles, complete with rambling street cars and multitudes of beautifully costumed extras? Maybe to dress up the black and white brush strokes that define the characters. 

Having grown up in Los Angeles, I was well-aware that the city’s police department has a shameful history of criminal corruption, though I’d never heard of the case at the heart of Changeling, Clint Eastwood’s film starring Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins, a single mother whose young son Walter disappears one day while she’s at work. A boy roughly matching the description and claiming to be Walter is foisted upon her by the LAPD, even though she insists that it’s not her son. Wishing to avoid embarrassment at all costs, the LAPD, in the person of a stiff-jawed precinct commander (Jeffrey Donovan), stubbornly insists that something’s wrong with her and goes to extreme lengths to shut her up.

J. Michael Straczynski’s script does a good job of laying out the case, which certainly deserves to be better known. The LAPD and its cohorts in crime, including assorted doctors and nurses, treated the woman abominably and needed to be brought to justice. In bringing the story to the screen, though, Eastwood decided that Changeling should be a story of absolutes; Christine Collins and those who believe and help her, notably an activist priest (John Malkovich), are absolutely good; those who wronged her in any way are absolutely evil. 

It’s an approach taken by someone who is outraged by something that happened far in the past and determines that those who were in the wrong must be portrayed without any degree of doubt or humanity, just to prove how wrong they were. This has the consequence of placing a nurse following a doctor’s order on the same level as a serial killer; they’re both cold and nasty and unforgivable, if all you do is look at their harsh expressions and rigid body language. 

That shading belongs to the director, and it’s a trick that Eastwood has played many times before — just think back, for example, to Hilary Swank’s hellaciously unsympathetic and unfeeling family in Million Dollar Baby. It mars a movie that’s already hobbled by a saintly, disspirited performance by Jolie and wildly uneven turns by the kid actors. But it’s not their fault; blame a director who may have been a little too hasty to pass judgment on dead people.

Peter on Film – July 08

Recently I wrote two reviews for the wonderful German-language movie site Das Manifest. They were kind enough to translate my pitiful English, add pictures, and make me look like a professional.

Linkage: The Dark Knight  (2008; distributed by Warner Brothers); Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008; distributed by Universal Pictures).

I had a difficult time deciding if a certain movie was really, really good, or really, really irritating, and finally came out on the side of good. Trouble was, I missed my target date for publication at Twitch by more than two weeks. Ah, well.

Linkage: United Red Army (2007; self-distributed by the director).

Mad Detective opened at only one theater at New York, but it was also available via VOD. I wrote about that first in an article for Cinematical, and then expounded further upon the film itself in a review at A Better Tomorrow.

Linkage: ‘Mad Detective,’ VOD, and Acceptable Compromises  (article); ‘Mad Detective’  (review).

ICE ROAD TRUCKERS

It’s the crackling of the ice that drew me in, but it’s the gruff and bluff drivers who keep me watching Ice Road Truckers. Catching up with the last episode of the first season a few weeks ago, I found it completely unnerving that big rig truck drivers were hauling their muli-ton loads on thin layers of ice over frozen rivers. Imagine my reaction when the second season began and the men started driving over — the ocean!

The drivers are not young and pretty wannabe actor/models. They’ve put in many years on the road, and their ungainly bodies are swaddled in layers of clothing, appropriate to the sub-zero temperatures and the nature of their work. They’re rough but down to earth and pragmatic; they drive the ice roads because they can make a huge amount of money in a few short months.

They earn their money because — as the show’s narrator relentlessly reminds us — their vehicles could plunge through the ice and  disappear into the water in a matter of moments. After watching several episodes, I began to understand the basic physical principles involved that allow such weighty machinery to be supported by ice that’s just about three feet thick. That’s when the personalities of the men came to the fore, ranging from relaxed (Hugh) to religious (Alex) to complaining (Rick) to complacent (Drew), plus some hard workers that are more difficult to draw a bead on: Jerry (the concerned coordinator), Eric (steady she goes), and Bear (the wise veteran).

Maybe the biggest appeal, though, is the weather. There’s something very uplifting about watching men buried under mounds of clothing dealing with artic conditions when it’s the dead of summer and the thermometer’s popping past 100 degrees.

Linkage: Ice Road Truckers (2008; Season 2; airing on The History Channel).

MAMMA MIA!

Martial arts movies have often been compared to musicals, not only for their graceful choreography, but also because the fight scenes resembled songs, around which the remainder of the narrative was strung together. Jackie Chan famously remarked in his autobiography that before making a film, he would come up with three great action sequences, and then turn things over to the scriptwriter to come up with some way to link the three together. Sammo Hung said that for his classic Pedicab Driver, the Hong Kong-based scripter was late in delivering pages to the Macau-based production, so they simply made things up as they went along.

That’s very much the feeling I had when watching Mamma Mia!, the film version of the very successful stage production. As an unapologetic, longtime fan of Swedish pop group ABBA, I was curious to see how a story could be derived from a group of unrelated songs, and I very much wanted to see how Meryl Streep fared in a full-flung musical, based on the singing talent she previously displayed in Postcards From the Edge (To date, I haven’t been able to sit through A Prairie Home Companion, where she reportedly also sings).

Alas, the film is a train wreck. Two or three of the musical numbers are passably entertaining, but Streep is uncharacteristically overblown and shrill. In fact, all of the performers over-emote, as though they’re playing to the cheap seats, and the narrative, such as it is, is emotionally phony and desperate to please. Karaoke singing is best appreciated when the listener is intoxicated, and Mamma Mia! is no exception to my ears and eyes, though that didn’t keep the atypically older, majority female audience at a Saturday morning screening from roaring with laughter. How appropriate that everyone is sent out of the theater singing “Waterloo.” If only the movie were as short and sweet.

Linkage: Mamma Mia! (2008; distributed by Universal Pictures.)

THE WACKNESS

Perhaps too perfectly, Jonathan Levine recreates a torpid 1994 New York City summer in The Wackness, a coming of age story that is too drab for its own good. The picture itself is drained of color, which makes for a very distinct palette, and one imagines that Levine intended for the characters to stand out in the monochromatic surroundings by virtue of their lively personalities.

The only one who succeeds is Olivia Thirlby, playing a casually-dressed yet very sexy fantasy girl who is the object of yearning by our putative hero, embodied by Josh Peck as though he were constantly smoking weed. Peck’s perpetual languor, his lazy speech and slowed down movements, may fit the character, but it leaves a yawning (and I mean that literally) hole at the center of the story that is not filled by Ben Kingsley’s actorly impersonation of An Unhappy, Unhappily Married, Upper Middle Class White Man. Kingsley screams mid-life crisis, so nothing he does is much of a surprise, and he’s so bored that it tends to rub off on the viewer.

Things liven up when Peck and Thirlby get together later in the picture, and Levine’s good visual instincts as a filmmaker come to the fore. He achieves more with less in a passionate outdoor shower scene between the two young lovers; it almost feels like poetry. But then someone starts talking again, and you wish everyone would just shut up.

The Wackness made me want to see more of Thirlby and to watch what Levine does in the future. But even though I lived in New York City in the summer of 1994, it didn’t make me feel nostalgic at all, which is totally wack.

Linkage: The Wackness (2008; distributed by Sony Pictures Classics).