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 View image Roger & Chaz Ebert, with Roger's second sidewalk star. (All photos by Jim Emerson. Thanks to Kim Robeson for the use of the camera on this one!)  View image Man Push Dog. Anyone will tell you that one of the joys of TIFF is the street food. I was inspired to take this after seeing "Chop Shop," Ramin Bahrani's second film after "Man Push Cart." Want green olives on that dog? I do. On average, I saw two to four movies a day at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival -- and, incredibly, I didn't see a bad movie. That's nine days and 20-something pictures (less than one tenth of the total screened), but I don't think I've ever had a run of good movies like that in my life. No, I didn't write about everything I saw -- but I also liked Ira Sachs' "Married Life," Chaude Chabrol's "A Girl Cut in Two" (figuratively and literally), Gus van Sant's "Paranoid Park," and those other movies I saw, except for the one I walked out on (the third in a four-movie day) that was not so much bad as doleful and predictable. And there was the Woody Allen movie I accidentally half-saw, without knowing I was half-seeing it.
 View image Toronto Film Festival Co-Founder Dusty Cohl with Roger Ebert. Ya got a coupla stars here.  View image Ingmar Bergman's Death (center, rear) welcomes ticketbuyers, lined up at the TIFF box office in the Manulife Centre, which is being remodeled (nice duct-work, eh?) and currently looks like something out of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." The woman in orange (center, foreground) is one of the fest's fantastically friendly and organized volunteers. On the other hand, I also didn't take all that many risks. Most of what I saw was by familiar directors I like, or came recommended by fellow critics or other film festivals. There were some movies I wanted to see just because they sounded interesting (not because I'd ever heard of the filmmakers), but I couldn't squeeze them in, and in that sense I did not have the full experience a festival has to offer.
 View image They do love their celebs up in Toronto. Last year, air-polluting, environment-destroying Sean Penn smoked at a press conference and it was a huge scandal. The paparazzi couldn't wait to catch him with a cigarette this time. And when they did -- front page news! Anyway, although I fear some of the films I saw even ten days ago are no longer as vivid in my memory because of the ones I've seen since, here were my ten favorite Toronto movies, in very rough order of preference:
"No Country for Old Men" (Joel & Ethan Coen)
"I'm Not There" (Todd Haynes)
"Chop Shop" (Ramin Bahrani)
"Secret Sunshine" (Lee Chang-dong)
"Eastern Promises" (David Cronenberg)
"Atonement" (Joe Wright)
"The Orphanage" (Juan Antonio Bayona)
"Persepolis" (Marjane Satrapi & Vencent Paronnaud)
"Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" (Eric Rohmer)
"4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days" (Cristian Mungiu)
More photos after the jump...
Continue reading "TIFF 2007 Wrap: Personal best & indelible images" »
 View image Celia (Keira Knightley). I have a question about these kinds of dresses: Are they meant to be worn more than once? Don't they get dirty and wear out pretty fast, dragging around on the ground like that? My dog ate the book. Well, not really, but when I was about 200+ pages into Ian McEwan's 350-page "Atonement," my copy somehow disappeared. I found it weeks later, in a dark corner under the bed, and by then was already on to something else. I put it aside, intending to pick it up again soon, but the next thing I knew months had gone by and I was on my way to the Toronto Film Festival where a movie called "Atonement" was being screened.
While watching Joe Wright's intensely cinematic interpretation of McEwan's book (co-executive-produced by McEwan and written by Christopher Hampton, best known for adapting "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Honorary Consul"/"Beyond the Limit," "The Quiet American," "The Good Father), I kept wondering how far into the story I had actually read. Every once in a while something would happen and my memories of the book would snap into place. But by the end (actually, by the point Robbie reaches the beach and goes for a drink), I had lost any literary moorings and was completely immersed in the movie.
Actully, I was immersed in the movie from the beginning: a shot that follows a parade of toys on a little girl's bedroom floor to the desk where she sits before a typewriter, composing her first play, "The Trials of Arabella." Using a typewriter as a musical instrument in the score may sound a bit precious, but it works cleverly and hauntingly in "Atonement," the story of a 13-year-old girl -- an aspiring writer -- who enlists her extended family in her imaginative productions... with, as they say, disastrous results. Her "ruthless innocence" (in a phrase used, I believe, by Kathleen Murphy) spurs her to miscast the roles in a melodramatic fantasy-scenario that's beyond her understanding. And yet, once she imagines it, she sticks to her story, and crushes lives with her godlike (author-like) will.
 View image Robbie (James McAvoy): An idealized vision. This is the story of the uncomprehending gaze of pretty blonde Briony Tallis, how fixes her subjects like insects pinned to a board -- as in a repeated shot of her cold blue stare through a windowpane. She frames a scene in her imagination and fits it into a false outline of events. The moment is stunning in the true sense of the word -- but among the many things Briony doesn't realize at the time is that she is freezing her 13-year-old self in the same instant. She determines the consequences of what she has witnessed, and what she has imagined, and in those moments has locked herself into her own existential coffin. For the rest of her life, no matter what she does (or writes), she will never be anything but that 13-year-old girl, stuck in the past.
"Atonement" is an intelligently, evocatively directed movie in every aspect, from the adoring ways in which the romantic leads are photographed (who would have thought James McAvoy could be filmed as gorgeously and lovingly as Keira Knightly?), to a long take along the shore at Dunkirk that is one of the most complex and emotionally shattering single shots in movies.
I don't want to say much more now, until we can have a more detailed discussion about the last ten minutes or so. But as I wrote in a comment earlier, I wasn't sure the 2,000 or so people at the public screening in Toronto's grand old Elgin Theater were reading the ending the way I did. When I got home, I delved into the epilogue of the book (it gives nothing away to say it's set in "London, 1999") and discovered that Hampton and Wright had conceived an impressively cinematic way to transform what is, almost by definition, a thoroughly literary conceit. I think the ending of the book is even more devastating than the film's. But let me say this much: It's based on a moral tale by Ian McEwan, the man who wrote "Enduring Love," a book (and a fine movie) with a similarly ambiguous title. "Atonement" may describe its subject as acutely as "Do the Right Thing" describes what Spike Lee's movie is about....
 View image They could be nuns. Those could be habits. But they're burkas. What is that supposedly ancient Chinese curse? "May you live in interesting times"? The proverb may be of dubious origin, but it captures the fate of Marjane, the heroine of "Persepolis," in a Persian nutshell. The precocious Iranian girl is born during the reign of the Shah (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi), witnesses his overthrow during the Islamic Revolution, becomes enamored of pop music and punk rock (and Bruce Lee) as powerfully disruptive and liberating political forces, and experiences a new world of sexuality and materialism in Europe. "Persepolis," based on the autobio-graphic novels by Maryjane Satrapi and co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is absolutely enchanting -- a history lesson, a fairy tale, and a girl's-eye-view of growing up. It's a movie that makes you feel glad to be alive.
I wasn't familiar with Satrapi's work, but from what I've seen since, the (mostly black-and-white animation renders her style beautifully: a mix of charming, early Hanna-Barbera coloring-book simplicity, and more atmospheric watercolors or charcoals that suggest a '60s and '70s European sensibility. The delicately modulated tones of "Persepolis" are similarly sophisticated. It veers from hilarious to poignant, sweet to terrifying, abstract to concrete, personal to political, cynical to rhapsodic... and back again.
Our guide is the stubborn, courageous, effervescent Marjane herself, a smart and instinctively rebellious girl who (like most young Westerners) instinctively cobbles together her identity through pop culture and politics. Or make that pop culture as politics. The privately and publicly expressed preference of ABBA over the Bee Gees (or Iron Maiden over both) is just as important -- and in many respects equivalent -- to favoring the Revolution over the Shah. Marjane isn't always admirable (who is?), but we unfailingly empathize with her emotional, philosophical and ideological struggles. (And she has the wisest grandma in the world -- who also disapproves of her granddaughter's actions at times, but never offers anything less than unconditional love.)
"Persepolis" streams by in no time, yet manages to convey the sense of an entire childhood into early adulthood. Upon getting back to my room I immediately ordered the books, "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2."
(Thanks to Ken Lowery for recommending this movie. It was just the nudge I needed to reshuffle my screening schedule.)
 View image Me with post-festival headcold, after just getting back home and sinking into the comfort of my den-like Man Chair. (all photos by Jim Emerson, except as noted) My taxi driver to the airport yesterday (he was Ethiopian, but had lived in Toronto for 18 years) asked me if I'd seen any "movie stars" at the film festival. I had to admit I hadn't -- although I've encountered people I consider to be movie stars on the street in past years: Luis Guzman, Liev Schreiber, Brian De Palma, Sara Polley, Stephen Rea, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne...
 View image
The ubiquitous (and deservedly so) Girish. A man with cinecurean tastes. (That's a neologism of my own invention that is related to "epicure" and has nothing to do with "sinecure," I don't think.) Toronto, at least at festival time, is a celebrity-mad city like no place I've ever seen. Celebrities make the front pages of the newspapers just because they're celebrities and they're in Toronto. Rogers cable used to have a non-stop TIFF schedule of celebrity gossip, celebrity interviews, off-the-cuff "reviews," and celebrity press conferences. I don't know if they did that this year, because I never turned on the television in my hotel room. (Meanwhile, TiVo was covering other necessities for me at home.)
 View image Andy Horbal plays Mephisto at the foot of the Stairway to Heaven (the escalator to the Varsity Cinemas).  View image The House Next Door's Keith Uhlich took this shot of himself with his MacBook, outside the press office at the Delta Chelsea. Some journalists and critics were doing celebrity interviews in addition to going to movies, with stars like George A. Romero (whose girlfriend was the bartender at my hotel!) or Jodie Foster or Brian De Palma or Bela Tarr -- in gang-bang roundtables or 15-30-minute individual sessions. The people I was most excited about getting to meet were my fellow movie bloggers. I had lunch with Girish Shambu between screenings in Toronto last year, and it was a pleasure to see him again, particularly since he enjoyed the oblique, androgynous eroticism of the luminous Eric Rohmer movie as much as I did. His highest recommendation was for Barcelona-born director Jose Luis Guerin's "Dans la ville de Sylvia" -- which, unfortunately, I missed. We also thought Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine" was among the very best things we'd seen.
 View image Frames within frames within frames -- and film-festival bedhead. Me at work in my Toronto hotel room. Keith Uhlich, editor of "The House Next Door," organized a mid-fest critics' roundtable podcast, 'round a tiny round table in Nathan Lee's hotel room with Nathan (whose byline should be familiar from the Village Voice, Film Comment, The New York Times), Torontonian eyeWeekly critic Adam Nayman, Keith, and me. It was too much fun -- we ran out of time long before we ran out of stuff we wanted to talk about. Of course, that was the morning I forgot to bring my camera. Too bad, because if you saw Nathan's new-mown haircut, you'd want to rub his head. It's that cool. (I'll post a link to the podcast when it's available, if you want to hear us go on about the trials of film critics filing reports and interviews from festivals, our indelible images from TIFF, Brian De Palma, Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes, semiotics [not much!], and I forget what else.)
 View image Christopher Long, in Philly Eagles t-shirt, who has a woman on his right shoulder saying: "Come, have another cup of coffee!" and a man on his other shoulder saying: "No, there's a huge schedule of films to see -- what's next?" I also got to meet up with Christopher Long, a frequent and valued contributor to Scanners comments, and reviewer for DVDTown and other sites. Chris claims to loathe Paul Haggis's "Crash" (and Sam Mendes's "American Beauty" -- two peas in a pod) even more than me. I don't know if that's possible, but I found him convincing. They both do the same morally corrupt thing, anyway: taking grotesque clichés and then flipping them around so that that they are... even more insulting clichés. All in the name of "enlightenment." We had a nice talk about our mutual admiration for Divine, too. Don't recall how that one came up.
I'm delighted to have more faces to put with the words I've appreciated from these folks for so long.
Continue reading "TIFF 2007: Movie bloggers EXPOSED!" »
 View image Roger Ebert with his "star" -- outside Dusty Cohl's annual Floating Film Festival Chinese dinner in Toronto. (photo by Jim Emerson -- with Kim Robesons's camera) I've got several planes backed up on the runway (and by that I mean movies to write about lined up in my head) from this year's Toronto Film Festival -- plus a couple posts' worth of photos -- but for now, here are the official TIFF 2007 award winners. I'll have a list of the best of my fest soon. Now I gotta catch a plane...
Audience Award: "Eastern Promises" (David Cronenberg, Canada/USA). My review here. Roger Ebert's here. Runners up: "Juno" (Jason Reitman), "Body of War" (Phil Donohue and Ellen Spiro).
FIPRESCI International Critics Award: “La Zona” (Rodrigo Pia)
CityTV Award for Best First Canadian Film: "Continel, Un Film Sans Fusil" (Stephane Lafleur)
Artistic Innovation Award: “Encarnation” (Ahani Bemeri)
Diesel Discovery Award: “Cochochi" (Israel Cardernas and Laura Amelia Guzman)
Toronto City Award: "My Winnepeg" (Guy Maddin)
Roger Ebert's dispatch about all the TIFF 2007 awards is here.
 View image Look familiar? A redacted web image from Brian De Palma's "Redacted." Because of the whole "Hitchcockian thriller" rep that's stuck to Brian De Palma for so many years and so many movies ("Sisters," "Obsession," "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill," "Blow Out," "Raising Cain," "Mission: Impossible," "Femme Fatale," "The Black Dahlia") some people seem to forget that De Palma is (was?) first and foremost a political filmmaker. Because his "Redacted," a fictionalized film that uses a variety of documentary techniques from amateur combat videos to "Al Jazeera" to YouTube," concerns war crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq, the connection to his Vietnam movie "Casualties of War" seems obvious.
But the stronger connection, I think, is to "Greetings" (1968) and "Hi Mom!" (1970), two then-counter-cultural comedies, more influenced by Godard than Hitchcock, that toyed with our perceptions of Vietnam, terrorism, law and order, Black Power and other issues of the day as they were filtered through the mass media. De Palma provocatively mixed satire, "documentary," pornography, voyeurism, journalism, improvisation and Godardian alienation strategies into volatile, combustible Molotov-cocktail-movies.
I don't know when De Palma has ever been accused of being sincere, but "Redacted" feels to me as close as he's ever come. He's engaged in a way he did not seem to be with "The Black Dahlia" (though I realize that's not saying much) and sections of the film are shocking and incendiary. De Palma won the best director award at the Venice Film Festival, and I think he really set out to give the audience a better, more visceral understanding of what has been going on in Iraq for years now -- not by painting the Americans as "villains," but by showing what happens when raw recruits are thrown into guerilla warfare. Very much like in that other undeclared war that we're told we're not supposed to compare the current one to. And, as the title suggests, this effort is designed to get past the heavily censored narratives and images we have gotten from our government officials and embedded reporters (WMD, Jessica Lynch, looting, Pat Tillman...), to tell some of the stories that the mainstream press is still too cowed to report.
But chief among my problems with "Redacted" is that, if you've seen "Greetings" and "Hi Mom!" (and you absolutely should -- they're both on DVD), and you know that De Palma has now made an Iraq movie, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know. The night raid scene in "Redacted" is the "Be Black, Baby" National Intellectual Television documentary in "Hi Mom!" But what seemed radical and revolutionary and experimental in the late 1960s and early 1970s is now fairly commonplace. Adding visual references to Arab satellite networks and Islamist web sites and video conferencing doesn't have the same immediate impact. We've all seen this sort of thing in other movies and on network TV.
In fact, if you've watched the actual documentaries about Iraq on "Frontline" ("News War," "The Soldier's Heart," "The Lost Year in Iraq," "A Company of Soldiers," "Beyond Baghdad," "The Insurgency") and "Bill Moyers' Journal" ("Buying the War") and "60 Minutes" ("The Killings in Haditha"), "Redacted" looks like pretty tame and routine stuff, despite its inflammatory subject. (Do check out those links in the previous sentence, if you haven't seen them already.)
And while I think the movie is pretty fair about making points on all sides (it's a good sign that His Ignorance B--- O'------ started attacking the movie as "anti-troop" before he or virtually anyone had even seen it), I think it fatally wrongheaded in its handling some of the boots-on-the-ground characters. It's self-consciously a take on the platoon movie, with Kubrick references from "Paths of Glory" to "Barry Lyndon" to "Full Metal Jacket" on prominent display. We have the requisite platoon types, of course: the book-reading, glasses-wearing intellectual/moralist; the "journalist" who's out to collect war stories (only here he's an aspiring, untalented filmmaker who uses every cheesy transitional device in iMovie and doesn't stand a chance of getting into film school); the fence-sitter who's so morally shellshocked that he can't make sound decisions between right and wrong; the idiot follower; and the psychopathic killer the idiot follows. Although a French documentary takes pains to show the stress the troops are under, and how these men must make split-second decisions about life and death at any moment (see "Frontline"'s "The Soldier's Heart" for some real un(der)reported stories), the American Psycho and his fat toady are just flat-out cartoon-evil in ways that don't illuminate anything and, what's worse, simply hand ammo to the enemy (e.g., B--- O'------, A-- C------, and other propagandists and demagogues who unfailingly value ideology uber alles).
Where are the many, many good, decent soldiers (and Marines) who signed up after 9/11 and then, because they were thrown into this situation without adequate preparations or resources, found themselves ill-equipped to deal with blowback beyond anything their leaders had led them to expect? We know they're out there (over there and back here, if they were lucky), and any one of their stories is much more inherently dramatic and tragic and morally challenging than simply pitting "decent" American fighters against "evil" ones. I'm sure both kinds exist, but this is exactly the kind of senseless black-and-white false dilemma that got us into the Iraq-mire to begin with. There's a scene in which the two "bad apples" (did Donald Rumsfeld tape this bit?) shoot their own badass video that is so callous and crazy and pointless that I began to wonder if De Palma had consciously decided to include it in order to feed inflammatory material to the Fox News agit-prop machine. That ought to help promote the movie....
 View image Todd on Bob: Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), as one incarnation -- a name-dropping bluesman in 1959 (with tales of Blind Willie McTell and Gorgeous George) who seems to think he's still in the Great Depression. Others include Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), Jack Rawlins/Pastor John (Christian Bale) and "Billy" McCarty (Richard Gere). "I was born a poor black child..."
-- Steve Martin, "The Jerk"
"God, I'm glad I'm not me."
-- Bob Dylan, on reading an article about himself in 1965
(quoted in the press kit for Todd Haynes' movie, originally titled "I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan")
Folk-turned-electric singer/songwriter Jude Quinn (looking for all the world like Bob Dylan circa 1965 and played by Cate Blanchett) is riding in a big black limousine when, unaccountably, Allen Ginsburg (David Cross) appears on a golf cart in the rear window, smiling and waving with his frizzy hair blowin' in the wind. Ginsburg pulls up alongside the limo, Quinn rolls down the window, and they travel along parallel trajectories (past a cemetary) while having a brief exchange about an interview Ginsburg had done with a reporter in which the Beat poet was asked about Quinn's musical motives as if all Voices of Their Generation were pretty much one and the same. "They asked you that?!?" Quinn laughs.
 View image Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) in "I'm Not There" in "Don't Look Back" in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in black and white. That's a little taste of what it's like to watch Haynes' "I'm Not There," which is not only a kaleidoscopic view of events in the life, music and myth of Bob Dylan, but a critical deconstruction and synthesis of Dylan's various media representations -- from D.A. Pennebaker's legendary "Don't Look Back" to Dylan's own "Reynaldo and Clara" to Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan." In some ways, it's the natural companion to "Don't Look Back" (actually re-enacting some scenes and interviews from that documentary in a new context), the movie Dylan probably wanted "Reynaldo and Clara" to be, and in other ways the movie Haynes wanted "Velvet Goldmine" to be. It actually goes back inside these films (Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night" and "Petulia," Godard's "Masculin-Feminin," Fellini's "8 1/2" and others, too) -- and the old stories, the album covers, the liner notes, the newspaper and magazine clippings -- and recapitulates and reinterprets them in new contexts. I was thrilled by it, moved, dazzled, entranced. I love this movie.
 View image Christian Bale (this guy can do anything) as Jack Rawlins. The earlier film was about the glam era, freely mixing bits and pieces of fact and lore from the lives of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Ferry and others (don't forget Oscar Wilde, who is deposited on earth by a UFO), and that's the kind of thing Haynes is up to here -- mostly with Dylan, but also with "real" and fictional characters around him. Some are identified by their familiar names (like John, Paul, George, and Ringo), some are thinly disguised (or undisguised) stand-ins. And this time he has the music rights, too. Just about the only thing missing is Donovan.
Do you have to know about, or have lived through, the life and legend of Dylan to "get" this film? I don't know. I don't think so, but you'll certainly understand it on more levels if you've seen the Pennebaker, Dylan & Sam Shepard, Scorsese, Peckinpah, Godard, Lester, Fellini, et al. movies mentioned above. And if you know at least some of the music, and something about the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene and the war in Vietnam and the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in protest and Joan Baez (and "Diamonds and Rust") and Sara and Swinging London and the Beats and Albert Goldman and The Hawks (and The Band) and The Basement Tapes and the Rolling Thunder Revue and "Tarantula" and Columbia Records and the motorcycle accident and the "electric" debut at the Newport Folk Festival and the so-called "Royal Albert Hall" concert in 1966 ("Judas!" "I don't believe you...") which actually took place at Manchester's Free Trade Hall (just another part of the legend) and Elvis Presley movies and James Dean movies Marlon Brando movies and Montgomery Clift movies... and so on.
I was a senior in high school when "Blood on the Tracks" came out and utterly changed my life (not the first time Dylan would do that for me), so although most of '60s Dylan predated my awareness of his actual records (we sang "Blowin' in the Wind" in my fourth grade homeroom, with Miss Kwinsland on ukelele, but I didn't know it was a Dylan song; we sang Woody Guthrie tunes, too), I absorbed a lot of this stuff simply by being a young American with an interest in politics and art and pop culture. But do you have to be familiar with all of this in order to appreciate "I'm Not There"? I don't think so. (But consider this: Bruce Greenwood plays Quinn's BBC interviewer/adversary, Mr. Jones, and Pat Garrett.)
A Dylanophile friend was asked if he was in "Dylan heaven" after the film. He thought for a moment and then said, "Yeah. I guess I am." I don't know about that. But I'm at least knockin' on heaven's door.
That's all I'll say for now, because I'm salivating over the prospect of seeing and writing about this movie in more detail later....
Oh, just one other thing. I've talked to five or six people who, unprovoked, described exactly the same response to different moments in the movie. But they all involved having the experience of consciously thinking: "I am in love with Cate Blanchett."
 Look at this woman. Do you hate her character yet? Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" is one of the scariest films ever. Because it plays like a hidden-camera home movie as psychological x-ray. And no one is spared its cold, uncompromising scrutiny. (Or think of it as a segment of TV's "To Catch a Predator" -- and, as on the NBC flytrap reality show, everybody is the predator.)
If I were a character from the movie critiquing the movie, I would probably say something like: "Noah Baumbach must really detest his dreadful dysfunctional family." Baumbach's follow-up to "The Squid and the Whale" (among my top films of 2005) is another dead-on portrait of monstrously self-absorbed Northeastern inbreeders who believe that being "authentic" or "honest" means they have to express every single critical judgment or self-indulgent emotion that occurs to them, especially if they can use it to belittle or undermine somebody else in their immediate circle. Usually, that includes throwing in a clinical diagnosis, as a way of damning and dismissing the subject, and getting the amateur diagnostician off the moral hook just a little. (If you claim to be observing a "condition," then neither you nor the object of the diagnosis can be held fully responsible.)
If I describe it as a horror movie -- torture porn about a long-obsolete class of super-self-conscious but utterly un-self-aware white East-Coast intellectual trash -- I trust that also conveys how bitterly, nastily funny the movie is. It's like a Neil LaBute picture co-written by Jules Feiffer. Scalpel-sharp. Merciless. Cruel. Uncompromisingly misanthropic. And really getting off on being so.
I don't think I've ever felt such contempt toward characters in a movie before. Perhaps it's Strindbergian. The TIFF catalog compares the movie to Bergman and Woody Allen's Bergman exercise, "Interiors," and even Eric Rohmer. (Rohmer without pity. Or affection, I guess.) I thought it was more like "The Devil's Rejects," if the members of the Firefly family fed upon one another. And it's funny.
The people in this movie are types who either crib from their friends' and families' lives for their New Yorker short stories -- or who are mortified and infuriated that details from their lives are appearing in their friends' or families' New Yorker short stories. You may assume there's an "autobiographical" dimension to it not only because one of the movies subjects is the way writers autopsy and cannibalize the people in their lives for their fiction, but also because each and every knife-twisting line is so toxic and cutting, so astonishingly self-serving, that you figure somebody just had to have actually said it, or thought it, or attributed it to somebody else in a snarky piece of gossip disguised as a revealing psychological insight disguised as an expression of sincere concern. In other words, the way these people talk and behave seems too awful not to be true.
"Well," says one published author in the film, "we all take from life." The difference is that, by this point in the movie, I assume her work is probably terrible, simultaneously pitiless and self-pitying, relentlessly "honest" and utter bullshit. (See the character of Briony in "Atonement.") Baumbach himself, however, is an exceptionally keen writer and observer of the stifling Upper-East-class milieu in which he was raised. (Both his parents are writers and -- ouch -- film critics.) Which doesn't mean his movie has anything to do with them. But one littérateur in the film observes that the character of the father in another's story is loathsome but strangely sympathetic. You could say the same thing about nearly any character in "Margot at the Wedding." Just leave out the "sympathetic." In fact, just about anything you can say about this movie has already been addressed (and ridiculed) in this movie.
Here's the basic set-up: Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her androgynously doughy offspring, appropriately named Claude (or "Clawd" or "Clod," as in formless lump of dirt, played to excruciating perfection by Zane Pais) go to visit Margot's estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) in the old family house on the beach where they were raised. Pauline is about to get married to Malcolm (Jack Black), another shapeless wad of humanity who sports an ironic mustache that's "supposed to be funny." Next door are some vile neighbors living in a shack with the Kid From "Deliverance," who are probably killing and eating whatever creatures (including wild animals, domesticated dogs and human babies) they can hunt. They're like the family from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (Tobe Hooper's), but they seem a little more human(e) than the main characters in the big house.
Everybody is so busy trying to avoid appearing hypocritical that there's not a genuine, straightforward emotional interaction in the film, just bubbles of self-absorbtion bumping into one another. These are extremely isolated, ultra-privileged people who would prefer to feel guilty about their privilege than grateful, because guilt intensifies their drama and their suffering and their sense of their own significance. Which, in the end, makes them feel a little better about themselves.
Oh, and there's the most cynically self-conscious use of a dog in the history of motion pictures. Baumbach knows exactly what he's doing, and it works.
If I'm making the film sound detestable, maybe that's the best way I know of to express my admiration for it, and the way it keeps relentlessly covering the same ground (the characters' linty psychic navels) while still managing to top itself, scene after scene. You'd think there's be almost no place to go after a mother -- quietly, with a vicious mixture of "concern" and disappointment -- tells her teenage son that he's "changed" and no longer has the grace she says she once treasured, and then adds as an afterthought, "But you're still handsome!" And yet, there is. The scene I just mentioned made me gasp and then laugh in astonishment. Unfortunately, through most of the movie, nobody around me was laughing much. To them, it maybe seemed more like Eugene O'Neill, I don't know.
Every performance in the film is terrifyingly good/awful. (That is, the actors hit every off-note just right, and the characters -- in case I haven't made this clear -- are mortifying.) I think there's some kind of excoriating analytical and observational genius in this home-horror-movie about cretinous, semi-articulate dunces. But when it was over (climaxing in an astonishing moment of self-dramatization and self-absorbtion), the same thought popped into my head that did at the end of Todd Solondz's outlandishly scornful "Palindromes": Who's going to want to expose themselves to this gory dissection of these coldblooded creeps? Makes you want to see a good George Romero zombie movie. At least the Living Dead have real, uncalculated emotions.
P.S. I just went back and re-read Roger Ebert's review of Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects." For me, the comparison works perfectly: Here is a gaudy vomitorium of a movie, violent, nauseating.... If you are a hardened horror movie fan capable of appreciating skill and wit in the service of the deliberately disgusting, [this film] may exercise a certain strange charm. If on the other hand you close your eyes if a scene gets icky, here is a movie to see with blinders on, because it starts at icky and descends relentlessly through depraved and nauseating to the embrace of road kill.
 View image Song Kang-ho ("The Host") and Cannes 2007 best actress Jeon Do-yeon in "Secret Sushine." The use of pastel blues and pinks in this movie is... disturbing. Lee Chang-dong's "Miryang" ("Secret Sunshine") begins with a CinemaScope view of a wide-open landscape beneath a big blue sky, and ends looking into the dirt of a tiny urban courtyard, in a corner with cement bricks, a discarded plastic bottle, a rubber hose, congealed muck and mud. How it makes that trajectory I am not going to say -- although, if you were unfortunate enough to read the Toronto Film Festival catalog entry about the film (say, with an eye toward making a decision about whether to see it), you'll find the film's single most shocking plot development revealed at the beginning of the third paragraph.
This is criminally unfair to the audience, and another reason why, as I wrote recently, I like to know as little as possible about films before I see them, and engage in my due-diligence research afterwards. You don't realize how much a film can be ruined even by seeing a few images in a trailer (or production stills) in advance. It's terrible. Somewhere in your memory, you keep waiting for the images or moments to appear in the film, and too often the stuff the distributor has chosen for public release is designed to sell the picture but not to serve the audience's appreciation or experience of it once they've bought a ticket.
"Secret Sunshine" is the meaning of the name of the South Korean town Miryang, to which Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon, best actress at Cannes for this harrowing performance) and her son Jun are relocating in the first shot of the movie. That's all the story detail you're going to get from me. Like the first image (which suggests a road behind them that we only learn something about later), the final one indicates that the film is over, but that something continues. (It may also strike you as a miniaturized/essentialized recapitulation of a stunning shot of a lake from somewhere in the middle of the movie.)
The film is brave and unsparing (as is Jeon's performance) and asks some challenging and disquieting questions, among them whether human values such as love, mercy, morality, meaning and forgiveness still have meaning if we shift the ultimate responsibility for them away from human beings onto some (Christian, in this case) concept of God. What is the significance of these principles if they're viewed not in human terms but as supernatural absolutes? "Secret Sunshine" is film about hope and despair, about the stages of grief and several of the "Deadly Sins" (pride, most of all), and just how much a person can withstand (think Job) and still hang on to life, to meaning, to sanity.
It's a hard film to write about without using superlatives.
 View image There are movies being shown in six or eight theaters in the building on the left. That's all I know. (photo by Jim Emerson) Film festivals allow you the opportunity to see movies without knowing much of anything about them in advance. If you don't want to, that is. The problem with this is that, unless you have a festival catolog (the hefty TIFF 2007 one is 480 pages and sells for $37), you also have no idea of what you don't know about. Today, I arrived more than a half-hour early for a screening of Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There," only to discover that the previous film (something about "Cassandra") was running about 45 minutes late. The Toronto festival is quite punctual, so this was a most unusual occurrence. The staff person allowed some of us into the theater to sit through the end of the previous movie, in which case we would be able to retain our seats for the one we'd actually come to see.
Now, normally I'm like Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" and I don't go into movies late. I rarely leave early, either, even if I think the movie's terrible. In this case, I thought I'd just go in and rest my eyes, since I knew nothing about the film I was about walk into the middle of. It soon became apparent that it had Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell in it, as two brothers who were involved in some kind of murder scheme. It was thoroughly mediocre, and I wondered how some first-time commercial filmmaker had lured such a cast, especially with this lackluster script. (Tom Wilkinson showed up, too.) But, I was also seeing it from the middle, sometimes with eyes wide shut, because I was only there to have a seat for the next movie.
When it ended (badly), the credits appeared and I immediately recognized the typeface. It was Woody Allen's latest movie. Surprise.
I write this not to report on a movie I only saw the last half of, but because as I was sitting there I was thinking about how little I have known -- quite deliberately -- about the films I have seen before I have gone to see them. (Of course, I hadn't intended to see even part of this one. That was just an accident.) For the most part I'm trying to maintain blissful ignorance, going into these films with no preconceptions except that I may know who the director is, or who one or two of the cast members are. Or somebody I trust has recommended it. That's as much as I want to know.
Some people at the press and industry screenings seem to know everything about them before the lights go down, but I don't listen to them. So here, in the interest of full disclosure, is how much I knew about some of this year's TIFF movies going in (including a few I haven't yet seen):
"Eastern Promises": David Cronenberg movie with Viggo Mortensen. Not a clue as to what it was about, who else was in it, what it was based on (if anything), or what the title meant.
"Michael Clayton": George Clooney wearing a suit and tie. Nothing else.
"4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days": Romanian film about an abortion that won at Cannes.
"Chop Shop": Second film by Ramin Bahrani ("Man Push Cart"). Unaware of where it was set or what it was about, except I thought there was a kid in it.
"Redacted": Brian De Palma. Something about Iraq.
"Secret Sunshine": Asian film (I don't even know what country) that won an award for something somewhere (I think it was Cannes). A friend said I should see it.
"The Orphanage": Mexican. Produced by Guillermo Del Toro. Appeared to be kinda creepy, and somebody had compared it to "Pan's Labyrinth."
"Margot at the Wedding": Written and directed by Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale"). Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, and Jennifer Jason-Leigh. That's all.
"Persepolis": Black and white. Animated. No idea of language or subject.
"Atonement": Based on Ian McEwan novel I haven't finished (but have at home). Don't know who directed it or who's in the cast.
"The Man From London": Directed by Bela Tarr.
"I'm Not There": Todd Haynes' movie in which several people play Bob Dylan. I knew Cate Blanchett was one of them.
"No Country for Old Men": A Coen brothers movie, based on Cormac McCarthy's book (which I'd read). Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem were in it. Roger really liked it.
"Into the Wild": Sean Penn-directed adaptation of Jon Krakauer's biography of Christopher McCandless, which I read about ten years ago and really liked. I knew Emile Hirsch was the main character, but I couldn't recall any movies I'd seen Emile Hirsch in before.
(Once again, my brain is so full of movies I want to write about that I can't concentrate on any one long enough to finish writing about it. I've got about four posts partly written. Hope I'll get a chance to within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, there are more movies to see...)
Toronto's is an international film festival, and naturally the films are shot in locations all over the world. But one thing so many of the best films in this year's fest have in common (a thing all great films have in common) is not the places in which they're shot, or set, but the places they create, and pull you into. These aren't travelogues. The films are the places, whether the geographical locations exist independently of the pictures or not.
There's Texas and there's Mexico and there's "No Country for Old Men."
Tommy Lee Jones' character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell begins Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" with an elegiac monologue about missing the "old times." His words are spoken over a montage of western landscapes in blazing oranges and reds (the incomparable Roger Deakins is the DP). By the end of this reverie, we're no longer in the past but in the harsh daylight of the present, and the color has drained from the images. The way Ed Tom sees it, he's outmatched in the modern world where violence is random, unmotivated, and unpredictable.
Within moments we see a shocking example of what he's talking about, as Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) strangles a man on the linoleum floor of an office, his dead yellow eyes fixed on the ceiling. That's a terrifying touch: Chigurth doesn't even look at his victim, even while he's garroting the guy. And then, one of those Coen touches: a shot of the floor, covered with a mess of black heel marks from the killer and his prey.
"No Country for Old Men" is one of those movies I think provides a critical litmus test. You can quibble about it all you like, but if you don't get the artistry at work then, I submit, you don't get what movies are. Critics can disapprove of the unsettling shifts in tone in the Coens' work, or their presumed attitude toward the characters, or their use of violence and humor -- but those complaints are petty and irrelevant in the context of the movies themselves: the way, for example, an ominous black shadow creeps across a field toward the observer ("No Country" has a credit for "Weather Wrangler"); or a phone call from a hotel room that you can hear ringing in the earpiece and at the front desk, where you're pretty sure something bad has happened but you don't need to see it; or the offhand reveal of one major character's fate from the POV of another just entering the scene; or... I could go on and on. To ignore such things in order to focus on something else says more about the critic's values than it does about the movies. It's like complaining that Bresson's actors don't emote enough, or that Ozu keeps his camera too low.
A moment here to celebrate the genius of one of the greatest talents in motion pictures, supervising sound editor Skip Lievsay, who has worked with the Coens (and Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese and others) since way back before the mosquito buzzing and peeling wallpaper of "Barton Fink." Since the bug zapper in "Blood Simple," in fact. Also, composer Carter Burwell ("Psycho III"!) has been associated with the Coens for just as long. He's credited with the music in "No Country," too, but it's to his merit that I don't even recall any music in the picture -- except for one memorably Coen-esque appearance by a mariachi band.
When I read Cormac McCarthy's novel, it struck me as a Coen screenplay just waiting to become a Coen film. Indeed, by that time it already was. And it could serve as a model of prose-to-film adaptation, choosing exactly the right moments and movements for the picture, and leaving alone others that are better suited to literature. (This is especially true of some very savvy omissions in the latter part of the movie.)
"No Country for Old Men" makes me want to echo Jean-Luc Godard's famous celebration of Nicholas Ray: "Le cinéma est les Coens!"
When it comes to grim accounts of healthcare issues and bureaucracy in Romania, photographed in long takes with a hand-held camera, the 2007 Cannes Palme d'Or winner "4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days" plays like a screwball comedy next to last year's relentless three-hour endurance test, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu." (A test, by the way, that I failed.) That's not to say it's any less harrowing; it's just shorter and, in my view, less distractingly theatrical. (The cinematographer is the same -- Oleg Mutu -- so the difference may be in the director.)
Here, the long takes (sometimes entire scenes) don't keep reminding you that they're being filmed by somebody walking around with a camera. The work is steady, controlled, disciplined. And, like several impressive films at this year's Toronto Film Festival (including "No Country for Old Men," "Chop Shop," "Persepolis," "Paranoid Park") it chooses just the right moment to cut to black at the end. (That's a favorite device of mine, and it seems to be quite popular about now.)
As you may know, Cristian Mungiu's film is about an abortion, which virtually guarantees it will be "powerful." But what makes the movie work is the portrayal of the characters: Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), the central character, helps her passive-aggressive roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) arrange for an illegal, hotel-room "probe" procedure performed by a cut-rate black market abortionist who goes by the name Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov).
But this isn't just another story about women victimized by men in a repressive and bureaucratic political system (although it is that, too). The most infuriating character in the whole piece is Gabita, who is so irresponsible and "helpless" that she deliberately puts Otilia at risk again and again, by forcing her to take all the risks except for the actual procedure itself. You wonder how the weak and utterly blank Gabita ever even survived to reproductive age, and whether she would have done anything at all if Otilia hadn't stepped up to take responsibility. (Gabita seems like the type who would just give birth and then walk away from the baby -- whether in the hospital or in an alley somewhere.)
This in no way excuses the ways Mr. Bebe exploits the situation, but during a painful, protracted negotiation in the hotel room, your sympathies are -- for a while, at least -- more with him than Gabita. She has failed to follow any of his instructions (meeting him in person, reserving the room), which makes him justifiably distrustful in a country where performing an abortion carries a stiff prison sentence. But he eventually crosses a line, from understandable paranoia to cold manipulation of the situation.
"4 months..." is a sharp political commentary about free-market forces in a socialist bureaucracy where nearly everything is regulated by the government. In certain respects, Mr. Bebe is simply an entrepreneur, a man who identifies a need and fulfills it to make a profit. Pure capitalism, supply and demand. Meanwhile, the government keeps its citizens' social, economic and private lives wrapped in a binding of red tape.
I'd love to see a Bordwellian Average Shot Length analysis of this film. Fortunately, the long takes don't call attention to themselves. One such shot at a dinner table, during a birthday party at the home of Otilia's boyfriend, is composed with the boyfriend's mother on the left, Otilia in the center, the boyfriend slightly behind her, and his father on the right. Olilia has just left Gabita in the hotel room after the abortion. She doesn't want to be here, and she's thoroughly distracted. The conversation and activity (eating, smoking, drinking) go on all around her, and she remains relatively immobile in the frame. She is in the action, but not of it, and the camera communicates her distress and unease with subtle effectiveness.
"4 months..." is an impressive film. But it does not reflect well on the Cannes jury that it was chosen for the Palme d'Or over the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men." That seems almost inconceivable. One is a good movie; the other very nearly defines the essence of movies.
 View image Armin Mueller-Stahl at the head of the table, head of the family You are going to hear a lot about this, so I may as well begin with it: There's a fight scene in David Cronenberg's Russian mob thriller "Eastern Promises" that is sure to go down as a raw, brutal and pulse-pounding landmark in the history of fight scenes. It takes place in one room, with no props except for a couple knives. People in the audience at the Toronto screening I attended were flinching and gasping as if they were being punched in the face. Which, of course, is the idea. If a fight scene doesn't make you feel like you're part of it, so that it quickens your heartbeat and your breathing, then it's a failure. And Cronenberg's makes you realize how many movie fights are flops -- and how really hard it is to kill or immobilize a human being with your arms, legs, feet and hands.
Literally and figuratively, "Eastern Promises" has balls.
And in this sense, it reminds me of both the excruciatingly protracted struggle between Paul Newman and the Russian agent in "Torn Curtain," and the knock-down, drag-out fist-fest between Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter's "They Live!
 View image Lamppost-spined Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts. Directed in a bold, graphic style similar to that of his previous film, "A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises" is shockingly gorgeous, for all the ugliness it portrays. The film is set in London, and the colors are dark and heavy: gray skies, slick black streets, brandy, absinthe, venous blood. A hospital midwife (Naomi Watts) finds a patient's diary that gets her involved with Russian gangsters -- in particular, a shrewd and ambitious chauffeur played by "History of Violence" star Viggo Mortensen, looking sharper and more angular and cooly abstract than ever. (Watch the way he props himself against a lamppost so that they become extensions of each other. How does he do that?)
It begins like a Cronenbergian horror movie, and becomes... a Cronenberg gangster movie -- an elemental struggle between good and evil, life and death, east and west, blood and money, trust and betrayal, commerce and morality, mind and body. Remember, that's "elemental," not "simplistic." There are... complications.
More when the movie opens.
NOTE: Watts' proud, abrasive, vodka-swilling Russian uncle is played by the great Polish director, Jerzy Skolimowski ("Deep End," "The Shout," "Moonlighting").
Within the first 30 seconds or so of Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop," you know you're in good hands. I've written quite a bit about how much I loved Bahrani's debut feature, "Man Push Cart," from its opening shot to its final ingenious moment, and "Chop Shop" is a piece of filmmaking that is every bit as observant and assured. So, that first shot: A cluster of day workers stand in wait. This could be anywhere -- California, Texas, Mexico, South America -- but the first thing you sense is that it's not: it's this particular place, even if we don't know the name of it yet. The camera (hand-held, but not shakycam style) pans to the left as a truck pulls up. A guy gets out and picks two men for the job, telling a persistent kid, "I don't need you today" -- and the accent is unmistakably NY. As the pickup pulls out, the kid hops into the back.
Simple enough, but in these few seconds the movie establishes a setting, a milieu, some characters and the beginnings of a story with an ease and grace that you don't often see in the work of filmmakers who are much more established. What's more, the film develops a sense of place, and the people who inhabit that place, that few movies ever succeed in capturing. This guy knows how to make movies.
I admit I went in wanting to like "Chop Shop." I'd been wowed by "Man Push Cart," and I met Bahrani and that film's star, Ahmad Razvi, at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival a couple years ago, and I liked them and their work so much I wanted them to succeed. But by the end of "Chop Shop" I was walking down Bloor Street about 18 inches above the sidewalk, just from seeing a film that skillfully avoided so many pitfalls and cliches, and that felt so fresh, so alive, and just so right down to its last detail. (And, once again, the moment at which the movie chooses to end is both unexpected and unexpectedly satisfying. Seconds before it happens, you just feel it's so right it's inevitable.)
Here's what I knew about "Chop Shop" going in: It was directed by Ramin Bahrani and I was pretty sure it had a kid in it. That's all. Except I knew it had been shown at Cannes. I wish you'd see the film the same way (trust me), but I want to tell you as little as possible while still conveying my enthusiasm.
 View image Alejandro P., director Rahmin Bahrani, and DP Michael Simmonds on the set in the setting of "Chop Shop." As usual, I'll explain next to nothing of the story, except to say that it concerns a 12-year-old boy named Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), who works any number of odd jobs (subway candy vendor, bootleg DVD salesman, chop shop assistant), mostly in and around the "Iron Triangle," a neighborhood of body shops and junkyards in the shadow of Shea Stadium in Queens.
But here's the thing: Too many of these "slice-of-life" movies feel like they're made by tourists. They shoehorn a fairly generic story and characters into a "colorful" setting in hopes of getting a distribution deal at Sundance. In "Chop Shop," the story and characters seem like details that the filmmaker has noticed within the hustle and bustle of this patch of city real estate -- as if they were here all along, and it just took someone with a sharp eye and an attuned ear to pick them out and give them shape. The texture is organic and alive; the story is an accumulation of incidents and experiences.
Listen to the hum of an oscillating fan in a tiny plywood room; the irregular tapping sounds (rain on the roof, or expanding/contracting pipes, or an overworked mini-fridge?) that turn out to be coming from a bag of microwave popcorn; the rising and falling roar of an unseen ballgame echoing off the honeycomb of metal garage doors and cement walls. Notice the mud puddles in the potholed streets; the pit bulls and the pigeons; the meats sizzling on a grill at a block party; the elevated trains passing over and through on their way to other neighborhoods, other people, other "stories" (the way they're photographed they are both part of the teeming cityscape and a reminder of a whole stratum of life going on above the low-lying realm where these characters scrape together a living, and a life).
 View image Isamar Gopnzales and Alejandro Polanco, as sister and brother Isamar and Alejandro. I don't want to use one American indie to bash another, but... looks like I'm going to. Consider "Quinceañera," a Sundance prize-winner that felt like a guided-tourist movie to me. In my review, I wrote: If there was ever a movie that seemed precision-tailored for a Park City reception, this is it -- the quintessential example of the festival's favored brand of hand-crafted, slice-of-life, youth-oriented filmmaking that expresses affection for a nicely captured American subculture. In other words, it's a Sundance specialty, right from the box.
This is a shopping-list movie: A double coming-of-age story spiced with local color; a bittersweet portrait of a Los Angeles neighborhood in transition; a warm and soapy celebration of a Mexican-American community. "Quinceañera" is also a thoroughly predictable melodrama that's both kitchen-sink and "After-School Special." You can see every plot development coming from miles away, much more clearly than you can see downtown L.A. from Echo Park most days. The story is so generic it seems put together from pre-fab modular elements... The life of a movie is all in the details, the atmosphere, and the contrast between "Quinceañera" and "Chop Shop" could not be more vital or revealing.
Ahmad Razvi, the star of "Man Push Cart," has a supporting role here as a local shop proprietor, but remains a star. The camera loves this guy, and he holds it with the magnetism of Harvey Keitel in early Scorsese movies. In fact, if Bahrani's guiding influences in "Man Push Cart" were the likes of Bresson and Ozu, he seems to have been inspired by Scorsese and Altman this time, in making a movie that recalls "Pixote" and, of course, Italian Neorealist classics like "Bicycle Thieves" and "Paisan," but without the slightest hint of sentimentality. I'm told he starts shooting his next movie in two weeks. My movie-lovin' heartbeat quickens at the news....
 View image Emile Hirsch as Alexander Supertramp. A star is (re)born. Ladies and gentleman, writer-director Sean Penn has not ruined the story of Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, in his big-screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book, "Into the Wild." The movie has awkward patches (is it too late to get rid of the strident Eddie Vedder songs?), devices that just don't work (lose the distracting handwriting from Alex's diary scribbling across the screen), and it leans toward romanticizing what is known about a life that is more ambiguous and mysterious in Krakauer's necessarily fragmentary, journalistic chronicle.
 View image The last known photo of the real Chris McCandless. But Penn's empathy with his driven hero is unmistakable and deeply felt. Alex (as he renamed and introduced himself to those he met on the road) was a kind of Holy Fool, a young man whose rebellion against his parents' values -- indeed, their very lives -- grew into a wholesale rejection of society and the culture of materialism that he found empty and meaningless. His contempt for the hypocrisy of the world into which he was born transcended the teenage bellyaching of Holden Caulfield. Alex's literary models are Thoreau, Tolstoy and Jack London. Shortly after fulfilling his parents' expectations by graduating from Emory University in 1990, he donated all his savings (about $24,000) and disappeared into the wild, heading west to Colorado and California, south to Mexico, and eventually north to Alaska, as a "leather tramp." Shoe leather, that is.
His journey -- like most quests -- was as relentlessly internal as well as geographical. He was driven, in every sense of the word. Was he running away from something or in search of something, or both? And was that thing, in either case, himself?
Of course, the answers to these questions are unknowable -- as, fundamentally, was Chris/Alex, perhaps to himself and to all who met him. But his idealism, his motivation, his disillusionment and disgust with convention, animated him and sparked a flame in others, who tended to see part of their better selves in him. Penn's adaptation falters when it tries to simplify the character, to suggest answers to questions that, to be honest, must be left open.
The film attempts to draw a direct "through-line" (or, if you prefer, "character arc") from a philosophical youngster who tells an old man that the value of life does not come from human relationships, to a supposedly wiser (but not much older) young man, isolated in the wilderness, writing between the lines in a Russian paperback novel that happiness is meaningless unless it is shared.
By then we already know that some of Alex's happiest moments were when he was alone, and that while he cared for other people, he didn't rely upon them to give his life meaning. (And who says he was primarily interested in finding "happiness," rather than some kind of larger truth or awareness?) I think the movie presents this notion of "shared happiness," in the section captioned "The Getting of Wisdom," as a breakthrough, a moment of enlightenment, rather than simply a moment -- one of many notes to himself Alex left behind. This is not simply a story of Christopher McCandless reinventing himself as Alexander Supertramp, only to better understand and accept his identity as Christopher McCandless again. To see it that way is to mistake fractional evidence for a shapely scenario (think of the case for invading Iraq, SP).
I read Krakauer's book about ten years ago, but I don't recall any evidence to indicate Alex refused to have sex with a girl he befriended because she was underage. Chris/Alex's apparent lack of interest in sex was a mystery to everyone. He seems to have channeled his drive into other areas. At any rate, the way the scene is presented here (girl undresses and presents herself to him on a mattress) doesn't play. It feels like a development presented explicitly to explain or illustrate, to address a particular question about the character rather than to explore it.
Now I realize I've spent four paragraphs about what I don't think works in the film, when I started off by announcing that it I liked it, was moved by it, and that it wasn't the misfire I had feared. I say that not because I had any reason to think it would fail, just that I felt so strongly about the source material that I really, really didn't want to see a disservice done to it.
 View image The abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness where the real McCandless camped. Two things immediately impressed me about "Into the Wild":
1) The diversity of the locations so vividly (and often spectacularly) captured by Penn and cinematographer Eric Gautier. Each place registers an emotional and psychological impression. These aren't just landscapes Alex happens to pass through; we seem to be entering them through his experience, and to absorb something from them as he does. Appropriately, the place that seems the least distinctive is the one he left behind, the world of his parents (school, suburbia) that he rejects.
2) The equally vivid, lived-in feel of the performances. Emile Hirsch has never quite registered with me before, but this is a star-making role. He has to hold the entire movie together, while everyone else passes through his life. Hirsch may now be where Leonardo DiCaprio was around the time of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "The Basketball Diaries." The movie goes right to the verge of making Alex/Chris too saintly, but Hirsch suggests the naivete and self-possession/selfishness of a young man who, perhaps, can't accept love and doesn't know quite how to express it. But he does recognize its expression in others.
From the moment Brian Dierker appears, I figured he was either a great actor or not an actor at all. Turns out this is his first screen credit, and he's a veteran Grand Canyon river guide. Penn must have recognized the real thing when he saw it. As Rainey, one of the "rubber tramps" (on tires, in an RV) who picks up Alex, he's startlingly authentic, an old hippie who's learning that life isn't what he's thought it was, or would be. This is one of those rare nonprofessional turns that is so real, so lived-in, that it deserves recognition -- even if the guy isn't "acting." He's absolutely genuine in his own skin. Many professionals would give their eye teeth to achieve this level of authenticity on the screen.
Of course, Catherine Keener, as his old lady, is one of the few pros who can match this level of unforced naturalness, and her scenes with Dierker are heartbreaking. She is the emotional center of the movie: Alex is the son she lost, and she's the mother he wishes he had had. They both recognize this bond subconsciously from the moment they meet, and it's as if they've each found a missing part of each other.
Alex is blessed with a series of influential, much-needed father figures. In addition to Rainey, there's Vince Vaughn (funny and poignant) as a factory farmer, and Hal Holbrook (eloquent beyond words) as a widowered leather-worker. It seems trite to mention Hollywood awards in the face of such affecting work, but when the Screen Actors Guild nominates their "best ensemble cast," everybody here deserves to be in the running.
"Love comes in at the eye."
-- William Butler Yeats -- and David Cronenberg ("Videodrome")
Eric Rohmer has made a career out of chronicling the rituals of romance (and Romanticism), from the 6th century to the present, and from his celebrated film series, Six Moral Tales (1963 - 1972), Comedies and Proverbs (1981 - 1986), and Tales of the Four Seasons (1990 - 1998). And then there are those elegantly contrived period pictures that don't fit into the series, like "Perceval," "The Marquise of O," "The Lady and the Duke" (which I haven't seen) and now "Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" (known in English-speaking Canada as "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon").
Two of my favorite Rohmer films (perhaps my two very favorites) seem to be among his least-mentioned: "Perceval" and "Summer" (aka "Le Rayon vert") -- the former completely artificial (shot on a painted soundstage) and the latter an equally charming portrait of a romantic klutz.
"Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" is a Rohmerian delight, another ritualized romance (highly mannered behavior, poetic language) played out in a naturalistic pastoral setting (an unblemished slice of French countryside around the River Lignon). It's all an elaborate game of appearances, deceptions, seductions and betrayals -- about what is seen or not seen, what is said or not said, and how love comes in at the eye, but is sealed with the mouth. The characters -- high-born and common-folk; shepherds, shepherdesses, nymphs and druids -- intermingle in a realm of symbols and prophecies that is both fleshly and spiritual, earthy and philosophical. It's a moral tale, a comedy, a proverb, and a seasonal story (midsummer, I'd say) that toys enchantingly with the paradoxical nature of love, and the contradictory distinctions between the lover and the beloved.
I don't even want to try to describe the fantastical plot, but let it suffice to say that young lovers are separated by a misunderstanding, and they must cross the river that flows between them, and flirt with crossing sexual boundaries, in order to reunite as one. The teasing, seductive visual and narrative strategy (adapted from the 17th century novel "L'Astrée" by Honoré d'Urfé), is designed to teasingly delay gratification until it climaxes in a bedroom with three voluptuous women in loose white nightdresses sleeping in one fluffy feather-bed (two shepherdesses and one nymph), and a shepherd disguised as a druidess (but really the long-lost lover of one of the shepherdesses) across the room, alone, in another bed. The sexual tension is ripe and delicious... and as unbearably tantalizing for the audience as it is for the frustrated lover.
Rohmer loves to photograph the most beautiful creatures in the most luminous light, and at age 87 his eye and his sense of rhythm is faultless. Astrée (Stéphanie de Crayencour) is a fair and incandescent beauty, and the strikingly androgynous Céladon (model Andy Gillet) makes as lovely a druidess as he does a shepherd. Not really my type, but I wouldn't kick this Frog out of a Mistletoe Festival...
(Thanks to Kathleen Murphy for her unprintable shorthand description of erotic storytelling in and about the courts of Henry IV and VIII, which made me appreciate this movie all the more.)
Tom Wilkinson has probably won an Oscar nomination for supporting actor in "Michael Clayton" before he ever appears on the screen. Or he should, anyway. But then, he should also be competing with (just to mention some of the other supporting male performances I've seen in Toronto thus far) the likes of Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook and especially Brian Dierker in "Into the Wild"; Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men" (or are those leading actor performances?); Armin Mueller Stahl and Jerzy Skolimowski (!) in "Eastern Promises"; and definitely Sydney Pollack in "Michael Clayton"...
Now, I am not one of those people who come to Toronto for Oscar-spotting purposes. But "Michael Clayton," written and directed by "Bourne" series screenwriter Tony Gilroy, is the kind of smart, crisp, "serious" mainstream entertainment that gives Hollywood (or the part of it influenced by George Clooney) a good name. I guess you could describe it as a Manhattan "legal thriller" -- most of the main characters are corporate lawyers -- that strikes a delicate tonal balance between the cynical political paranoia of the "Bourne" movies, the satirical paranoia of "Network," the corporate paranoia of "The Insider," and the legalistic paranoia of "Erin Brockovich." And, as in all these movies, when you're feeling paranoid, it doesn't mean somebody isn't out to get you.
Wilkinson finds that perfect chord, and establishes the tone of the movie, in his off-screen opening monologue, a breathless rant of a voice message left for his fellow attorney, the eponymous Michael Clayton (Clooney), the firm's "fixer" who is called in to take care of delicate "problems" for a rich and powerful clientele. Wilkinson's character, Arthur Edens, is a brilliant lawyer who's been working for more than a decade on a single case, involving a chemical manufacturer that, after the usual cost-benefit analysis, released an agricultural product with toxic effects on humans. (The company's earth-friendly TV spots will look painfully familiar to PBS viewers, where such underwriting entities are expert at peddling their green corporate citizenship.)
Arthur is also manic-depressive, and he's gone off his meds, and he's raving about the moment of clarity he's having about the dirty, soul-killing business he's in. He's like Peter Finch in "Network," only his volcanic monologues aren't quite so messianic. (But then, he's not working from a Paddy Chayevsky script, either. Actually, I think "Network" would have been a better movie if it had been written and directed more in the style of "Michael Clayton." That is, a bit more dryly.)
 View image Clooney and Pollack: These guys are good. Really good. The movie revolves around the title character's face, and its hard to think of another actor who could hold it together the way Clooney does. His eyes reveal a quicksilver intelligence -- always sizing up the situation, figuring out how best to play it, even when he's utterly lost -- that Clooney can do without looking like he's trying. He doesn't give things away, he just registers enough to for you to notice without noticing that you're noticing. And that's a considerable accomplishment (especially when you remember how broadly, goofily dumb he can also play with supreme confidence, as in the Coens' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"). Equally adept, and really fun to watch, is Tilda Swinton as an ambitious corporate climber, who rehearses her every statement while nervously trying on the appropriate uniform for each boardroom crisis. (Look for Ken Howard and Miles O'Keefe in surprising roles as professional office politicians.)
And there's ever-reliable Sydney Pollack, who has become one of my favorite character actors ("Husbands and Wives," "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Sopranos"). The man is a consummate actor, so effortlessly natural he can make others look mannered next to him. That makes him the ideal foil for the comparably relaxed style of Clooney, and their scenes together are especially fun to watch. They also provide Wilkinson with something solid that he can bounce his wild, unpredictable serves off of. (I feel about Pollack the opposite of how I feel about Sean Penn: the former is a better actor than a director, and with the latter it's the other way around. Pollack is a producer on the film -- and Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Anthony Minghella among the executive producers -- and I mean no slight when I say I found myself grateful that they decided to let, or enable, somebody else to direct this one.)
Gilroy does just fine in his directorial debut. His style suits his actors (and, for that matter, his leading characters): handsome, smart, economical. Three of the last four shots in the film (number three is simply a bridge between two and four) are quiet stunners, though I would have cut to black about two or three seconds earlier at the end. The first of these final shots sums up the virtues of the film ideally: While quite naturally following the trajectory of one character in the foreground, the fate of another is captured in the same frame, but out of focus and in the receding background. It's another perfect note, and it's handled so deftly you could almost miss it. You won't, though -- and the great thing is you'll feel like you discovered it yourself. Along with everybody else in the audience.
Re: "No Country for Old Men." I just want to get this out of my system right now, between movies: Fantasticsplendidsuperbterrificwonderfulamazingbrilliantmasterpiece. Unblurbable? If you're not exhilarated by this piece of filmmaking, then I don't know what you could possibly like about movies. More when I have a chance to organize my overstimulated, overstuffed eyeballs and brain. I'm only five seven movies into my festival, and not a dud in the bunch, which is most unusual. A sight for sore eyes, indeed....
 View image Belén Rueda revisits "The Orphanage" of her youth. Or is it the orphanage that's revisiting her? As I was leaving the theater after watching Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Orphanage," still in the movie's thrall, I thought for a moment that maybe I'd seen my favorite of the festival. It was only the second film I'd seen (and the movies ahead included the Coens, Cronenberg, Rohmer, Herzog, De Palma, Rivette, Greenaway, and who knows how many other big names), but I figured this had to be a good omen. Because in that moment I believed it to be possible -- and if movies mean anything, they renew and inspire hope for the medium itself.
Guierrmo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" was my favorite film of last year's fest -- and, as it turned out, my best picture of 2006. "The Orphanage," produced by Del Toro, isn't the seamless masterpiece that movie was, but it's another strong, dark fantasy-fable and horror movie about mothers and children -- that is absolutely made for adults and not for children. I'd venture to say there are more goosepimply moments and well-earned jolts in this picture than in your average year's worth of commercial shockers. And yet, it's also the only horror film in recent memory that brought me to tears. (The last one may have been Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" -- but that was nearer the beginning of the movie.)
"The Orphanage," as the title suggests, is an Old Dark House ghost picture (haunted by "The Haunting" and other shadowplays), with "Peter Pan" at the center and the specter of Roman Polanski repeatedly glimpsed around the edges, as if in tricks of peripheral vision. A ghastly face contorted into a permanent scream invokes "The Tenant" (and the open jaw will return in another horrifying image); a woman alone in rooms that play tricks on the mind, recalling "Repulsion"; a shot peering around a corner that, like the famous moment from "Rosemary's Baby," had me leaning to see what was in the blackness around the bend.
The revealing camera movement, in which you anticipate the sight of something (awful) beyond the edge of the frame, is the film's signature. You know Bayona has gotten under your skin when Laura watches a 16mm silent home movie of what we're told is a boy with a deformed face. We see the child from behind in an underlit room, studying at a desk. The hand-held camera slowly moves up behind him, but all we can see is the back of his head, so that we both dread the reveal and can't wait for it. That's the essence of suspense, and it's a standard trick in the thriller repertoire. It just happens to be exceptionally well done here. And although I've touched on a half-dozen movie references already, it's not because "The Orphanage" goes through the usual motions of offering shout-outs to its influences. They are well-absorbed here. (Oh, and did I mention "The Descent or "Dead Calm" yet? Think of the mothers driven to psychological extremes in those movies...)
Laura (Belén Rueda, from "The Sea Inside") plays a fiercely devoted mother, raised in the institution of the title, who returns to the decrepit building with her husband and son. The boy begins to draw away from his parents in favor of new imaginary playmates he discovers in and around the house -- and the beach cave beneath the lighthouse that can be seen from his bedroom window. Or, maybe, it's they who discover him.
All due respect to "The Sixth Sense" (which I think is a nifty movie), but this isn't exactly, "I See Dead Children." "The Orphanage" takes its characters to the deepest, darkest places imaginable and dares them to fight their way back. There's a distinctively Spanish/Mexican sensibility at work here, in which the gruesome realities of loss and death and decay are acknowledged in the open, a part of life as it is lived, and there are no guarantees of a fairy-tale Happy Ending for anyone. That's because, as these cultures understand in their bones, the genuine, non-Disnified fairy tales don't necessarily have happy endings.
Rueda's performance is fearless and ferocious. Laura's own orphan past returns as a deadly children's game, a test to see how far she's willing to go, how much she'll risk, for her child. In some respects, her journey is not unlike the otherworldly plunge JoBeth Williams' character takes in "Poltergeist," to reclaim her daughter from the Other Side. There's a scene with a psychic (a pale and spectral Geraldine Chaplin, looking like a Day of the Dead Catarina skeleton in Victorian dress) that also quite deliberately conjures up "Poltergeist."
To describe this mother's descent into the underworld as "bone-chilling" is not hyperbole. It's just a starkly accurate description.
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An afterthought: Why are the sing-song rhymes and games of children so spooky? (One, two, Freddy's coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door...)
 View image An image from the lost masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni, a surprise unveiling at the Toronto Film Festival. Oh, no: It's just the interior view from my hotel room on Bloor Street. Sorry. (photo by me) Here's what happened: The 2007 Toronto International Film Festival started tonight. I got here last night. But let me back up a little. Seconds before getting into the car to head to SEA for my flight to YYZ (that's Toronto Pearson Intenational Airport), I realized I'd forgotten some dog bones that I left in a bag on my porch. Not for my trip, for my dogs. Who are staying with my mom, who was gracious enough to give me a ride to the airport because she loves me and because she said she'd be up at 5 a.m. on a Wednesday anyway. So I quickly ran back to fetch the pressed rawhide nuggets of chewable deliciousness. The moment I sprung off to fetch I felt the most searing pain in my left calf.
It felt like a Charley Horse -- but, fortunately, it was only excruciating when I tried to use it. Sitting or standing was fine. It only hurt when I walk. Long story short: Five hours of aviation-enforced immobility later (plenty of time to stiffen up real good), I hobbled, drenched with sweat, lugging my bags through a new (and seemingly endless) Torontonian concourse, filled with dread. (And did I mention pain?) There's lots of walking to be done at TIFF, even when you're staying close to the center of the action. Fortunately, I was able to get a massage at the hotel health club at the last minute. It didn't fix the problem, but I think it loosened it up a bit.
This morning I awoke to a moment of pulse-pounding suspense. Put some weight on it and... "Mein fuhrer, I can valk!" As Sugarpuss O'Shea put it, "It's as red as the Daily Worker and twice as sore ("Ball of Fire") but I can deal with it. I cannot describe my relief.
I'm still out of it, though. I think my brain circuits have shorted from yesterday's pain and anxiety overload. Today, I went to get some eye drops for an irritated right eye. (Eye drops are film festival essentials, as anyone will tell you.) The nice pharmacist recommended some antibiotic drops, down aisle 3 on the left, in a yellow and red box. I got 'em. Put 'em in my eye. Hurt like hell -- like no other eye drops I have ever experienced. That's because they were ear drops.
It's a good thing I'm spending most of the time, very still, in the dark. Eyes wide open.
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Tonight, I made a vow to myself, that I hope you will help me keep. Just for the hell of it: no superlatives in my Toronto coverage, which means giving up some of my favorite crutches ("splendid," "superb," "terrific," "wonderful," "amazing"). Which I try to avoid anyway, but too often fail. It's too easy, especially when you're cinematically overstimulated and writing on deadline. I've seen two terrific movies so far and I could go superlative crazy any second, but I'm going to try not to. Please let me know (and I'm sure you will) if I screw up.
(NOTE: I'm using "superlative" in the looser, colloquial sense -- as in "hyperbole," not just the superlative ["-est"]form.)
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Toronto may be the only film festival in the universe where the laminated passes that you have to wear on a strap around your neck have ac |
