The Monuments Men (**3/4)

I’ve usually enjoyed George Clooney’s acting roles, but his directorial projects (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads) have mostly seemed more admirable than winsome. So it is with this one, which takes a solid subject, art treasures looted by the Nazis, and renders it more drily than I’d have hoped.

Not surprisingly, the cast is full of big names: Clooney himself plays the leader of a middle-aged band of art experts who don uniforms in order to keep the treasures out of German hands, or get them back before they’re destroyed. His recruits include Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin, and Bob Balaban. But the best role is Cate Blanchett’s, an employee of the Nazis in occupied Paris who is happy to betray them, but also suspicious of the motives of the American (Damon) sent to enlist her assistance. Hers is by far the most complex character. Clooney has the biggest role, but his most significant function is to make a few speeches saying that art, the cornerstone of civilization, is what everyone was fighting for, so the mission is worth it. How more meaningful, I thought, it would have been to include a glimpse of the art before the war, rather than first encounter it in warehouses and similar settings, in bulk.

In terms of plot, this is a true-story version of National Treasure. In form, though, it’s mostly an old-fashioned adventure film. Put a bunch of colorful characters together, have them troupe around Europe, let fun ensue. But the tone seemed to me downbeat, yet without being especially emotional. Even when the monuments men come upon a cache of gold teeth removed from people sent to concentration camps, the moment seems perfunctory. Also present are multiple scenes in which the art men confront the enemy, or those who are potentially the enemy. I thought of Inglorious Basterds, in which similar moments crackle with tension. Of course, Clooney is a thoughtful man who is unlikely to make a truly awful movie, or an unintelligent one. Here he works with his longtime writing and producing partner, Grant Heslov, and everything is executed with competence. But little pizzazz.

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viewed 2/12/14 7:30 at Roxy; posted 2/12/14

Kill Your Darlings (***)

Daniel Radcliffe has already played a number of non-Harry Potter roles, and his role as beat poet Allen Ginsberg should further assure that he won’t be typecast. I quickly forgot about wizards as I watched him essay the role of the Jewish, Paterson, New Jersey-reared Ginsberg, off to Columbia University to discover his literary talents and his rebellious side. There, during the war years, he meets Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), an impetus for both the creative and destructive impulses. And, possibly, a murderer. The killing in question may be known to those who know about Ginsberg (and, if you don’t, I suspect you won’t be seeking out this film) and is revealed at the start of the film, though not the victim, or the reason.

The first half of the film is jazzy, like beat poetry. In one scene, Carr and Ginsberg seem to magically stop time in a club. Director John Krokidas employs a lot of montage scenes to suggest the magical haze that enveloped the two young men. In some scenes, William Burroughs (Ben Foster) appears, weird and druggy, years before his own infamous involvement in a killing. Later, they hang out with a new friend named Jack who’s at Columbia on a football scholarship. This of course turns out to be Jack Kerouac, who’s been at sea but not, as yet, on the road. They pull pranks. They invent a new artistic movement (called “new vision” the term “beat” yet to be coined) before producing any significant work. Young Allen learns of the older man (Michael C. Hall) who has been pursuing Carr, and discovers his own sexuality. Late in the film, Ginsberg calls Carr a “phony,” but that was my own impression immediately. So I found him an annoying, pretentious character—no fault of DeHaan—and was happy when the film reached the more heavily plotted stage in which there is betrayal, heartbreak, and the killing. Allen has to decide whether to help his friend, who’s been arrested.

This well-acted drama is for those curious about the birth of a movement, or for those who like to be reminded that the men (women being bit players in this movie) who create the future were once unformed young persons playing at being adults.

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viewed 11/13/13 7:25 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/13/13 and revised 11/14/13

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (**1/2)

There are ordinary biopics, careful to identify places and persons and dates, often with on-screen titles. They’ll advance the story by showing the subject mentioned in newspaper headlines, or seen on a talk show, or performing. They’ll start with formative childhood incidents and end with the character’s death, or with an epilogue telling us in a conclusory paragraph. Sometimes, they win Oscars for the leads, as with Jamie Foxx in Ray or Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. This impressionistic take on another French icon is another sort of biopic, something like the take on Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would  inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.

Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point.  Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.

The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.

As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.

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viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)

J. Edgar (***)

J. Edgar Hoover served the United States Department of Justice for over 50 years, the last 48 (1924–1972) as head of what was called simply the Bureau of Investigation when he joined. So it’s a daunting task to sum up that career in a two-hour film, as director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) have tried to do.

Hoover may be better remembered today for clashing with Bobby Kennedy and trying to discredit Martin Luther King in the 1960s, or for his long relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson. But he also created the modern FBI and brought a professionalism to the task of catching criminals, even as the methods he sanctioned stirred controversies that reverberate in these days of warrantless wiretaps and detention without trial. Black and Eastwood devote considerable time to the anti-communist Palmer raids, which made Hoover’s name, and to the Lindbergh kidnapping, which, when solved, solidified his reputation as a crime fighter. A fictional device—Hoover is supposed to be dictating a memoir—frames the 1920s, '30s and '40s segments and gives us Hoover in decline (but still wielding power) while skipping over the 1950s entirely.

The hoary flashback structure doesn’t reveal any notable contrast in the older and younger man, aside from the almost-convincing make-up job on DiCaprio. (In that regard, I thought Naomi Watts, as Hoover’s longtime secretary, and Armie Hammer, as Tolson, were more convincingly aged.) Insofar as Hoover’s view of himself and law enforcement were concerned, he seems to have emerged fully formed in his 20s. Watching the ever-confident Hoover in action is engaging, but rarely exciting. I wonder if a musical score would have helped. Hoover most comes to life in the personal scenes. He seems only to have been close to two people, his mother (Judi Dench), who made him courageous, and Tolson. Tolson, as played by Hammer, humanizes the Hoover character, and even if you have contempt for the man’s self-aggrandizing and legally questionable tactics, the singular devotion of these men seems creditable.

Eastwood takes no clear view on whether Hoover was justified, mostly presenting Hoover as he saw himself. He takes a middle road as to the Tolson relationship. It can scarcely be doubted that these men who dined together, vacationed together, and had no other serious relationships had a romantic attachment, and Black’s screenplay assumes that. However, given how little is known about how they behaved in private, the period of Hoover’s adulthood being an age when privacy was granted to public figures, it shows wise restraint as far as sexual matters. The audience is allowed to assume what they will as regards this while it is suggested that Hoover’s upbringing, his nature, and the times would have made him disinclined to violate propriety. If there is one thing that unites Hoover’s anticommunism, his distrust of agitators like King, and his fierce approach to ordinary criminals, not to mention his careful habits of dress and speech, it seems to be a true distaste for disorder or change.

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viewed 1/11/2012 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/11/2012

Nuremberg: Its Lessons for Today (***1/4)

This documentary was compiled in 1948 but qualifies as new based on the addition of narration by Liev Schreiber. (The text is by the late writer Budd Schulberg and his brother, Stuart.) The subtitle is misleading*, as the film simply summarizes the celebrated 1946 trial of 19 accused Nazi war criminals. Footage of the proceedings is intercut with documentary evidence of the case being made. The first half mainly shows how the Nazi conquests were planned well ahead of time, and systematically accomplished. On screen we see, for example, letters signed by Adolf Hitler in 1939 stating Germany's peaceful intentions toward nations such as Denmark, or Switzerland. Then we see footage of the invasions, Poland first, then much of Europe by the end of 1940. Those on trial are referred to as “Defendant Goebbels,” “Defendant Goering,” and so on. Collectively they are simply “the conspirators.”

The second half of the film concentrates on the war crimes and the idea “total war” that allowed no sympathy for the enemy, whether that was Soviet POWs, resistant villagers, or, above all, the Jews. Any educated person has seen images of emaciated Jews, dead and alive, from the concentration camps. (Indeed, even in the ghettos there were starvation conditions.) In 1948 undoubtedly they would have been altogether startling to most people, and even upon repetition seeing such disregard for human life does not lose the power to shock.

The film ends by drily reciting the verdicts. Indeed, it is a dry presentation of facts, which is actually its strength. Such truths need no dramatic staging. In clips of several of the final statements, the defendants apologize, or state their ignorance of most of what happened, or blame Hitler for betraying Germany and themselves. Of the four prosecutors, the American, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, perhaps most effectively summarizes the collective case against them by essentially ridiculing the idea that, despite holding high positions of authority, each had virtually no knowledge of the horrible things the others were doing. Despite this, the focus is not the individual guilt of each defendant, but the actions of the Nazi regime collectively. I can only guess how I would have reacted had I been learning about these things for the first time.

* Though it’s correctly spelled with no apostrophe, which is nice to see.

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viewed 5/18/11 at Roxy and reviewed 5/19/11

Of Time and the City (*1/2)

Outside of England, the only thing people probably know about the city of Liverpool is that it was the hometown of the Beatles. After seeing this film, you will know two things, the other being that it was also the hometown of writer-director Terence Davies, best known for his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. Not so much a history of the city as Davies’s nostalgic audiovisual memoir, mostly of the late 1940s through about the mid-1960s, it is clearly a deeply personal, carefully crafted film. Nonetheless, this doesn’t prevent it from being a dreadful bore.

The Beatles do show up, but for less time than a 1970 song (“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”) by Manchester’s Hollies is used, oddly, to illustrate footage of returning Korean War veterans. According to the narration Davies pompously provides, he had by 1970 lost interest in popular music, as well as his faith in God and queen. Religion and monarchy bring out snide sarcasm (the queen and her husband are “Betty and Phil”), but that’s at least a relief from the poetic pretention that Davies otherwise employs, e.g., blankets that “warm but give no comfort”—why’s that?

Primarily, the visuals are street scenes of ordinary citizens, quaintly dressed, that do convey the sense of long ago, longer even than the 50 or 60 years ago from which they actually date. In a few cases, important persons or events or prominent buildings are seen, but little information is imparted. Apparently it is enough for us to know that these are the scenes Davies recalls, bittersweetly but mostly fondly, in his mind. I longed at least for some on-screen descriptions. Although the footage skips about in time, the newest—dreary public housing in the 1960s and 1970s, casually dressed diners and shiny buildings in newly filmed scenes—is shown, by way of contrast, toward the end. The newer the footage, the more likely it is to be in color and of greater technical quality; this has the unintended effect of suggesting steady improvement, though if anything Davies intends the opposite.

It seems wrong to slam a work that was obviously a labor of love, and made with obvious attention. But there are ways to make a work personal while engaging the audience. For most viewers, watching this may be a chore.

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viewed 4/5/09 at Bridge (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/6/09

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (***)

This family film spins the Loch Ness monster myth into a gentle family film about a Scottish boy (Alex Etel, of Millions) and his secret pet. Besides that, the story revolves around a British naval company whose commander seems to think a small village might become a major front in the second World War, the boy’s recently widowed mother (Emily Watson), and a mysterious handyman who helps out both mother and child. Despite all that, and the beast given life via 21st-century effects, the movie is at heart an old-fashioned tale of a time and place where a summer, even during wartime, would allow a young boy time to while away freely.


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reviewed 1/11/08

Lust, Caution (***1/4)

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain follow-up trades rustic Wyoming for stylish Shanghai in an erotic thriller set as the Japanese are consolidating their occupation of China just before World War II. All of Lee’s films are evocative of place and time, and I was drawn into this world from the opening scene, which crackles with maj-jongg tiles being tossed about like the conversation of the women playing, talk of business deals, black market consumer goods, and romantic gossip. One woman is significantly younger than the others, a seemingly naive recent bride. She’s not, but that gets ahead of the story, an adaptation of a novella by Eileen Chang that is loosely based on fact.

The young woman, played by newcomer Tang Wei, is a university student recruited by an acting troupe who are also self-styled revolutionaries who amateurishly plot to assassinate a collaborator. Given a pseudonym, a false identity, and some clumsy, comical lessons in seduction, she becomes acquainted with the powerful man and her own sexuality.\

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reviewed 11/02/07

Letters from Iwo Jima (***)

? Clint Eastwood’s companion film to his Flags of Our Fathers tells the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the view of the Japanese, in particular the commander Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and a private played by singer-actor Kazunari Ninomiya.

+ Eastwood’s mostly subtitled film (with a script by newcomer Iris Yamashita in collaboration with Flags scribe Paul Haggis) is most fascinating for its unique perspective. Watching the huge American naval contingent arrive provides quite a different sense from the same scene’s counterpart in Flags. Brief flashbacks and the interactions of the soldiers provide a military and cultural context for the willingness of the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, resulting in a stunning casualty rate exceeding 95%. Yet the movie shows them as brave but not fearless, not the automatons that the Americans suspected. Kuribayashi, the commander, had spent time in America, and his character merges the Japanese and Western sensibilities. Cinematically, Letters gives a more vivid portrait of the geography of the island and the elaborate tunnel system that the Japanese had created in anticipation of the battle. Both Watanabe, who’s played similarly powerful men in The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Batman Begins, and Ninomiya give appealing performances. The 60-years-ago flashback device is more effectively used than in Flags.

- Although powerful, the movie feels overlong at 142 minutes. Additionally, the more historic movies I see, the more I’m convinced of the merits of on-screen titles, which in this case would have better conveyed the passage of time. It’s hard to tell that the battle took over a month, and the war preparations over half a year.

= *** Unlike Flags of Our Fathers, which primarily depicts the aftermath of the battle, this is all-war, all the time. Depicting combat at its most desperate and horrific, it’s a better film than Flags, but it may seem tedious to some.

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The Black Dahlia (**1/2)

? The lurid 1947 murder of budding Hollywood starlet Elizabeth Short, dubbed Black Dahlia by the press, was the inspiration for James Ellroy’s 1987 novel, on which Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds) has based his screenplay, directed by Brian De Palma. The story follow a Los Angeles cop (Josh Hartnett) and his interactions with his partner (Aaron Eckhart), his partner’s girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson), and an alluring witness (Hilary Swank). Although the murder was a sensational press case, this aspect of the murder is not emphasized.

+ De Palma’s re-created Los Angeles is fabulous to look at, and the camera work is fantastic. Parts of the movie are a match for the style of the previous Ellroy adaptation, L.A. Confidential, one of the best films of the 1990s.

- Overall, I found the story less interesting than I’d have expected, in part because none of the characters seemed especially appealing. Swank’s allure (or her character’s) was elusive to me, and the other three seemed flavorless. Although the basic plot is clear enough, some small things were confusing. (For one thing, I missed some of Ellroy’s prose that Harnett’s character says in the voiceovers.) Much is made of the resemblance between the murder victim and Swank’s character, so it was distracting to me that Swank doesn’t look much like Mia Kirshner, who plays Short. The twisty ending is satisfyingly shocking, but for me had no emotional impact. Finally, although the period detail of the movie is completely convincing, the characters and story feel slightly modern.

= **1/2 If you only see one period film this year based on a decades-old Hollywood mystery, make it the more convincing Hollywoodland.

 
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Mrs. Henderson Presents (***)

Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins buoy this “inspired by true events” comedy of a widow who opens London’s first theatrical revue to feature nude women.

What’s with the English and comedies about stripping? Following on The Full Monty and Calendar Girls comes the “inspired by true events” tale of a 1930s widow (Judy Dench) who opens London’s first theatrical revue to feature nude women. Actually, for all that this is the thing being used to sell the film, the movie really doesn’t make much of a fuss about it. If anyone but a government minister or two got upset about this assault on propriety, it’s not shown here. Perhaps Londoners were too worried about Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombing the crap out of them to trifle over such things. The widow Henderson is self-assured and snobby, but likeable. Of India, from which she has returned following her husband’s death, she says, “There was always somebody to look down on.” Dench’s matter-of-fact-delivery of this pronouncement is one of the reasons to see this. Unpretentious elitism is something you don’t se a lot on film. Bob Hoskins is her match as the equally strong-willed manager of the theater. (Will Young, the first UK Pop Idol, also makes his acting debut.) Briskly directed by Stephen Frears (High Fidelity), this is a charming movie with a slight plot and strong characters.

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posted 9/17/13

Memoirs of a Geisha (***)

With softly lit sensuality, this beautiful version of Arthur Golden’s novel outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture and builds a decent plot around their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears.

I’d kind of expected this adaptation of Arthur Golden’s novel to play on the stereotype of a stoic, selfless Asian, with the heroine bravely rebelling and trying to assert her individualism against a conformist culture. Happily, it’s not so. Directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, it replaces that film’s kinetics and quick cutting with softly lit sensuality, set to a quiet John Williams score. It begins with the tale of a girl sold by her father, and the people she came to know as her new family in prewar Kyoto. Zhang Ziyi plays the girl as an adult; her Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon costar, Michelle Yeoh, plays a mentor, and China’s biggest star, Gong Li, a nemesis. Though missing the ritualistic detail of the book, the film outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture. While the people in the story are not particularly deep, they are more than types, and they are different. Their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears are the basis of the plot. You may not even notice that this plot is built around the thin edifice of a single meeting of a girl and a man (Ken Watanabe).

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circulated via email 12/29/05 and posted online 9/20/13

Pollock (**3/4)

Like or hate the famous “drip paintings” of the artist Jackson Pollack, there’s no denying that he was a unique artist with a distinct sensibility. But, despite fine performances by Ed Harris as Pollack, and Marcia Gay Harden as his wife, fellow abstract painter Lee Krasner, the movie makes the art less interesting, not more. Concentrating on the post-war years the couple spent on Long Island, Harris (who also directed) paints his character a rather ordinarily self-important, not atypical alcoholic, and Krasner as an all-too-typical spouse who chose to stay with the talented but difficult man.


 viewed 3/22/01 6;15 pm at GCC Plymouth Meeting and posted 7/26/14

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