The Limits of Control (**1/4)

Jim Jarmusch is one of the few film directors who may be (slightly) better known than any of the films he’s made, which include Down by Law, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and, most recently, Broken Flowers, which managed to gross over $13 million in the United States. Despite that modest success, Jarmusch has moved no closer to the mainstream, and this faux-noir drama maintains the minimalist style his films exemplify.

My feeling watching this was that Jarmusch had gotten ahold of a half-finished David Mamet script and stretched it out to a two-hour length. Specifically, there is a stylish, sophisticated, nearly silent lead (Isaach De Bankolé, possibly employing his native Ivory Coast accent) who is sent to Spain. Maybe he’s a hit man, maybe an art thief, maybe it doesn’t matter. He meets a series of persons, each of whom greets him by asking whether he speaks Spanish (he doesn’t), leaves him with a scrap of paper, and in between imparts a bit of philosophy. Jarmusch seems to get self-referential when one (Tilda Swinton in femme fatale mode) says that she likes it when actors don’t say anything. She likes Hitchcock too, but if you know Jarmusch you won’t be expecting any high-tension conclusion. And there isn’t, although the the plot is sort of tied up, if not entirely explained.

Jarmusch hasn’t so much made a movie as a collection of influences—the 1967 film Point Blank, for one—and recurring motifs, including song lyrics, matchboxes, a mysterious, nude young woman, expresso orders, and the tai chi practiced by the lead. It is to a normal thriller as tai chi is to ice hockey. Of course, the director’s movies have all been deliberately paced, but this one is also repetitive and pretentious. It’s very stylish, and strikingly shot; the meaning of the characters and the symbolism and the location and the murder—there is one—should provide hours of fodder for those thusly inclined. But by the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t.

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viewed 5/24/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/28/09

The Good German (***)

? Continuing his quest to make at least one of every type of movie, Steven Soderbergh turns his attention to the World War II mystery-thriller, utilizing black-and-white photography to give his adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s novel the look of a period film. George Clooney, working with Soderbergh for the fifth time, plays a war correspondent/army captain in bombed-out Berlin at the time of the Potsdam Conference. Tobey McGuire, playing a soldier serving as the journalist’s seemingly chipper driver, plays against type by turning out to be a black marketeer with a wide nasty streak. Cate Blanchett plays a German Jew, known well to both men, whose has managed to do what she needed to do to survive until 1945.

+ Soderbergh is always attentive to detail and has obviously seen a lot of film noir and other old movies, especially Casablanca, whose plot this somewhat recalls. Even the screen wipes used to transition between scenes and the noticeably fake rear projection in the driving scenes are reminiscent of an older style of filmmaking. So is Thomas Newman’s score. Only the language—more explicit than the censors once allowed—is updated. It’s perhaps more true to life, but jarring in such a context. Blanchett commands every scene she’s in, and it’s her character that the story turns on.

- The obvious comparison to Casablanca (whose famous ending is visually replicated here) is instructive. Both stories are about idealism in places where cynicism is the mood of the moment. Both are anchored by the memory of a past affair. Even though it’s conveyed by just a couple of brief flashbacks, the romantic back story in the older movie is enough that you feel as sucker-punched as Bogart when he and Ingrid Bergman are separated. The captain’s affair with his onetime protégé is not rendered with such sentimentality. There is some smart dialogue here, but no “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Replacing Bogart’s weary stoicism is Clooney’s journalistic objectivity, which is not quite the same thing, and is shed more quickly. The journalist is as much an audience stand-in as a full-fledged character. Thus I found myself less invested emotionally with the movie as I might have. Still, being negatively compared to an all-time classic is no great insult, and the thread of the plot still pulled me along, especially in the second half.

= *** On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 6 for the characters, an 8 for the mystery, a 4 for the romantic aspect, and a 10 for the look and feel.

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The Ice Harvest (***)

A subdued film noir (with mild comedy elements and good dialogue) starring John Cusack as a Wichita mob lawyer who steals a couple of million from his employer.

John Cusack stars in this downbeat Christmas tale, which probably won’t linger in theaters until the holiday. He, an attorney, and Billy Bob Thornton have just swiped a couple of million dollars from the local mob in Wichita, Kansas. (Even if the movie does take its setting from the Scott Phillips novel on which it’s based, and even if it makes it look it like a small town consisting largely of strip joints rather than a city of 300,000 people, I have to give an extra quarter of a star just based on this novelty.) The director is Harold Ramis of Caddyshack, Ghost Busters, and Groundhog Day fame, but this isn’t much like those, or like Thornton’s other Christmas cheer-down, Bad Santa. In fact, it has the feel of the last movie on which writers Richard Russo and Robert Benton collaborated, Twilight with Paul Newman. It’s a subdued, old-fashioned film noir, complete with a femme fatale (Connie Nielsen). It’s probably boring if you’re looking for much action or even scenery, and the story elements are familiar, at least if you’ve seen some old detective films, but it does have well-written dialogue, suspense and some humor. Oliver Platt is amusing as Cusack’s drunken friend, who tells anyone in earshot that he’s pals with a mob lawyer (i.e. Cusack), though Thornton has movie’s only real laugh-aloud line.

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circulated via email 12/15/05 and posted online 9/20/13