Renoir (***)

Not a biopic of Pierre Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), this is more like a family portrait set in the great impressionist’s late career. Like a painting, the film is still but nice to look at. It helps that Renoir lived on the French Riviera in a large home with a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. (The director, Gilles Bourdos, also lets the camera fall out of focus a few times, making the screen look something like an impressionist canvas.) In contrast to a movie such as The Last Station, which similarly follows Renoir’s contemporary Leo Tolstoy in his senescence, it is a movie of temperaments rather than beliefs. Where a Tolstoy evolved to the end and lived a personal life of some turmoil, Renoir liked to think of himself as a craftsman who liked to “go with the flow” and favored calmness. Though crippled by painful arthritis, he carries on as before, carried around on a chair by his female staff and working with the brush taped to his misshapen hand. Asked by his doctor what he’ll do if he cannot use his hand, he says, “I’ll paint with my dick.”

Red-headed Christa Theret plays Andrée Heuschling, Renoir’s last model, though Bourdos has set the story in 1915, a couple of years before she actually posed for for the old man. This allows him to set her arrival in the midst of the first World War and proximate to both the recent death of Renoir’s wife and the arrival of his son Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who is convalescing after an injury. Another son, though also injured, is still on the front, and the third, too young to fight, is still at home.

It probably helps to know that Jean, the middle son, would become celebrated in his own right, though not for painting. Here he has principle but not ambition. Andrée, known as Dedée, inspires and challenges him in the manner of many young women in many movies about many sorts of young men. She brings out old desires but no new changes in the painter himself. Through her, we see his personality and the way he worked and the way the other members of the household regarded him.

Renoir the man was an innovator. Renoir is merely competent. Not a great love story, it is simply a drama centered around the great man, whom even his sons call “Renoir.” Bourdos and Bouquet, who gives a fine performance, give us a man who obviously inspired deep loyalty, but whose family relationships lacked intimacy. (The youngest son calls himself an orphan.)

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viewed 4/24/2013 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/24–25/13

War Horse (**3/4)

It’s rare that you see a movie these days without the slightest shred of cynicism or guile. Though he may have been among the generation of directors who helped make us all a bit more cynical, and be depicting World War I, a war that inspired much cynicism, Steven Spielberg is not afraid to be sincere, or even a bit corny in this case. When even Batman movies are celebrated for their darkness, the sincerity of this adaptation of a Michael Morpurgo novel (also made into a play) is somewhat refreshing. Beginning just before the war in Devon, in the English countryside, Spielberg gives us a virginal, literally wide-eyed farm boy (Jeremy Irvine) whose love-at-first-sight bond with the horse he calls Joey bounds an otherwise episodic film that slightly reminded me of The Red Violin, in which a musical instrument, not an animal, is passed from hand to hand. In the course of this film, “Joey” finds himself among the allied Brits and French as well as their German enemies (though all dialogue is rendered in English), and everyone seems like a fine fellow, or gal.

This is not to say the film is without social critique. Though there is not a moment in which anyone discusses why the war is being fought, that itself suggests the pointlessness of it all. Spielberg is judicious in depicting the violence—this isn’t Saving Private Ryan—but the few combat scenes make an impression. In the first, Spielberg shows us a phalanx of men on horseback, and machine guns, but not the horses falling. Instead, we see the battlefield littered with corpses. (The film evokes also of the significance of animal power just before it would give way, in battle, on the road, and on the farm, to the internal combustion engine.) Later sequences are set among the trenches so peculiar to that conflict. There is also a class-consciousness in the film. A foolish British commander is, like the landlord threatening to foreclose on the farm boy’s parents, just another person controlling the lives of ordinary folk.

Though most of the above is intended as praise, the entirety of the thing has a cloying quality not unlike certain romantic comedies—like Love Actually, actually, whose screenwriter, Richard Curtis, collaborated with Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) in adapting Morpurgo’s novel. Like Love Actually, War Horse is full of appealing but thinly drawn characters who disappear—or die—before their stories become compelling. It is possible for a war story to be also a fable, but the realism here only emphasizes the heavy hand of the storyteller. The way the farm boy’s dad buys the horse on a whim—risking the farm because he has a feeling about the horse—is indicative of the approach. Of all the characters, only his wife, played by Emily Watson—emerges as somewhat three-dimensional.

Spielberg has rarely made a bad film, and maybe never a dull one. This is neither, and would actually be a good film to see with a child, one just old enough to begin to understand war and to appreciate a glimpse at the world on the cusp of modernity.

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viewed 2/4/12 1:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/4–2/5/12

Sweet Land (***)

? Suspicion and confusion greet a German mail-order bride (Elizabeth Reaser) who arrives at the end of World War I in a Minnesota farm community. Her nationality, combined with her lack of English skills, delays the wedding.

+ This is a quiet, subtle movie that’s partly about a young woman adapting to a new setting while not speaking the language, partly about a young couple’s halting courtship, and partly about what it might have been like to live in that time and place. I can’t think of another film that shows the process of learning language so well. The heroine knows no English at first (but for one comic phrase), and we watch, bit by bit, as she becomes more conversant. Reaser has to do a lot without speaking much, and she should garner some attention with her performance. The movie is beautifully shot on location in the stark Minnesota landscape.

- I’m a big fan of subtlety, but this might be too minimalist for my taste. Unless I missed it, you never really learn what led the main character to emigrate or why she became a socialist, for example. The film’s flashback structure adds little. And I thought it was a little unnatural how much the other characters speak to someone they know only speaks German.

= *** I found this story an absorbing collection of mostly small moments, but it might bore some people.

Jet Li’s Fearless (***3/4)

? In 1910, the best fighter in the Chinese province of Tianjin (Li) is matched against four international opponents in Shanghai. The story then flashes back to tell a fictionalized version of the life of Huo Yuan Jia, beginning with his childhood humiliation by a rival. Although there are many fight scenes, the story contains a strong dramatic component. Not what you’d expect from the guy (Ronny Yu) who directed Freddy vs. Jason and Bride of Chucky.

+  The many imaginative fight scenes, which incorporate the martial art called wushu, are far from the only reason to watch. Thematically, the Shanghai-shot movie is more about Yuan Jia’s struggle against his own arrogance than his quest to become the top fighter in his province. The violence is rarely lethal, and only then to make a point against brutality. (The fighters are shown signing a “death waiver” before each contest.) The story also takes in a little bit of Chinese history, as the period portrayed was one in which China was beginning to be threatened with cultural and military domination. Circling back to the opening scene, the conclusion is a moving surprise.

- This isn’t really a mark against the movie, but some people may prefer the fantasy action and mythical storyline of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, or House of Flying Daggers. Both the fighting and the plot are basically realistic here.

= ***3/4 Sure to be one of the year’s top movies, this transcends the martial-arts genre.

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House of Sand (***3/4)

--> --> ? Having been led by her husband across the windy, barren landscape of Northeastern Brazil to a nearly unpopulated coastal area in 1910, a woman (Fernanda Torres) struggles to find a means to leave, or to accommodate. The only other inhabitants are her mother and a few ex-slaves and their descendents. Brazilian star (and 1999 Oscar nominee) Fernanda Montenegro, who is the mother of Torres, plays the same role in the movie. As time goes by, the roles of the mother and daughter shift.

+ This is an absolutely beautiful movie, both in the story it tells and the stunning way the landscape is filmed. I see a lot of movies where the characters’ lives look more fun than mine, but this isn’t one of one of them. Yet other people’s boredom can become compelling when distilled into a two-hour drama. In the way House of Sand observes its main character dealing with enforced isolation, it reminded me of Cast Away, which I loved. As with that movie, when it skips ahead in time I felt almost cheated by not seeing what happened in the meantime. I don’t want to overextend the comparison, because in other ways the movies are very different. There’s no Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball. There’s not much talking at all, which is something I liked in this case. And the time period covered is far longer. When news comes of the outbreak of the Great War, it’s already ended. In a short time, this movie transports you to a place and time when it was possible to be that isolated. The ending is simple and cathartic.

- I did wonder what the woman did all day when she wasn’t scheming to leave. However, I think these parts of the story are intentionally left for the viewer to fill in.

= ***3/4 Not quirky minimalist like the movies of Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers), but haunting minimalist, sort of like those of South Korea’s Ki-duk Kim (3-Iron, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring), this may not be a movie for everyone. It’s not as depressing as it may seem, but there’s no laughs either. Still, I found it a moving piece about the way that the choices we make, and the choices life makes for us, shape our lives.

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