Human Capital (***1/2)

A must-see for fans of parallel storylines…. Dino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is a social-climbing real-estate investor who can’t wait to buy into a hedge fund run by his wealthy new friend, Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifuni), whose teenaged son is dating Dino’s daughter Serena. The movie begins, almost, with Dino’s story, but then retells the story from two other points of view, starting with Giovanni’s wife (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who spends her days shopping, but once dreamed of a career in theater.

The film’s central event is a bicycle rider’s collision with an SUV on a dark highway near Milan. Besides the mystery of who the driver was, the title suggests the greater theme of money. Social class is only a subtext, but it’s a big part of what’s intriguing about the film, a seamless adaptation by director Paolo Virzì of a novel by American writer Stephen Amidon.

IMDb link

viewed 10/20/14 3:20 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival]

Blue Jasmine (***1/2)

Another year, another Woody Allen film. Following 2012’s forgettable To Rome with Love, Allen has returned to America but found another new (for him) locale, San Francisco. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), formerly Jeanette, formerly of Manhattan, formerly wed to a wealthy businessman (Alec Baldwin), has headed west to live with her very different sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins). When we first meet her, she’s bending the ear of her airplane seatmate in the baggage checkout area. She’s a narcissist who talks a lot, talks to herself when no one else is available, and presents numerous scenery-chewing opportunities for Blanchett, who’s in all but a few scenes. She’s often funny. Hawkins, whose breakthrough role in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky got her a well-deserved Oscar nomination, has the less showy (and slightly smaller) role, but is a worthy counterbalance/foil for Jasmine.

Ginger herself is a mostly happy-go-lucky despite having lost money, and perhaps her ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), in an investment scheme facilitated by Jasmine’s former husband, whose financial machinations are depicted in several flashbacks featuring Baldwin.

Woody Allen has made a lot of films about wealthy people, and a few about working class people, but the class themes in this movie, a source of some of both the comedy and the drama, are unusual for him. Issues of class, parental favoritism and sibling rivalry are mostly under the surface, but they, and Ginger/Hawkins, are what elevate Blue Jasmine above airier trifles like Midnight in Paris. Whether or not you root for the suddenly destitute Jasmine, whose husband left her with only the sense of her own superiority, to resurrect herself, you’ll empathize with Ginger.

The male characters —notably Clay as the ex and Bobby Carnavale as Ginger’s mechanic boyfriend — are both thinner (unidimensional) and broader (less subtle), but Carnavale  provokes a couple of the bigger laughs. Another unusual feature (for Allen) is that there are actually children in the film. These are also small roles, but the deadpan/bewildered looks of Ginger’s two preteen boys as Jasmine tries to explain the virtues of electroshock therapy and the importance of tipping well are nearly worth the price of admission.

This is more than the best film Andrew Dice Clay has ever appeared in; of Allen’s, it’s easily the best since Vicky Cristina Barcelona, five films ago, more substantial than Midnight in Paris while maintaining that film’s mainstream appeal. Maybe one day he will even discover the existence of music written after the 1930s.

IMDb link

viewed 8/6/13 7:30 pm [PFS screening]; posted 8/9/13

Arbitrage (***1/2)

Add Robert Miller to the pantheon of smug rich guys Richard Gere has long excelled at playing. There he is glibly explaining the financial crisis on a TV talk show, or having backseat meetings in limos, or doing a quick drop-in on his mistress’s gallery show, which he’s financed. But mostly he’s bobbing and weaving to complete the deal that will save him from the deal that even he who weathered the housing bubble could not resist, a no-risk proposition that went wrong anyway. Only selling the company can save him. None of this has much to do with arbitrage, which relates to exploiting short-term price differentials, but in this case the idea is to conjure an image of sophisticated financial chicanery.

This, the feature debut of Nicholas Jarecki, is an exploration of power and its limits in the guise of mainstream suspense at its best. One thing even the wealthy and powerful cannot avoid is the need for sleep, and it is this that causes the accident that threatens the deal, his family life, and his freedom.

IMDb link

viewed 9/27/12 7:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/27/12

The Queen of Versailles (***1/4)

Twenty-six thousand square feet. Enough room for a couple, eight kids, a nanny, and assorted staff. Enough room to host a reception for all 50 Miss America contestants. Could anyone want more? Apparently, David and Jackie Siegel could. When Lauren Greenfield began her documentary, David was the “time share” king who had recently opened his greatest project, a skyscraper in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas. He boasted of having personally gotten George W. Bush elected president. Jackie, his third wife, was an ex-beauty queen who had borne him a new family of seven young children, though a Filipino nanny did a lot of the less-fun stuff. (They had taken in another girl, Jackie’s niece.) And 26,000 feet was just not big enough.

The Seigels’ new place, nicknamed after the French palace, would become a boondoggle symbolic of the Great Recession, and David’s attempts to maintain his empire, and Jackie’s to reform lifestyle, would give Greenfield’s film an unexpected story arc. David Siegel has meanwhile sued Greenfield over her editing choices, which he argues exaggerate the financial troubles, but all things considered, they don’t come off too badly. At least, they seem more relatable, less hateable, than you would think if all you knew was the bare facts above. Jackie, who is the main character, may not be the world’s best mother—she freely confesses she wouldn’t have had so many kids if she needed to actually raise them herself—and she may be a bit childlike herself, but she’s no Leona Helmsley figure. That is, she’s pleasant to spend time with.

In the end, money, especially money one comes into suddenly, as by lottery or marriage, may not change a person so much as allow a person to indulge the personality one already had. That’s the sense I get here. It’s probably just as true of reality-show contestants, and that’s the vibe of this documentary.

IMDb link

viewed 8/22/12 7:20 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/13–9/15/12

The Intouchables (***)

Americans may see European films as rather arty by nature, but that’s probably because we don’t get to see many of the mainstream ones, and mainstream moviegoers wouldn’t watch them if we did. Which is too bad, in this case, because this is a pretty good mainstream film. Sure, any story about a poor black kid bonding with a rich white dude, a handicapped one yet, is already bordering on cliché, and is ripe for emotional manipulation, even if it’s set in Paris, and even, or especially, if it’s a true story. (Kind of—the actually poor kid was Algerian, although, in the context of France, it doesn’t matter that much.)

 

Driss (Omar Sy) is the poor kid, an ex-con who’s only applying for a job so he’ll be able to collect public assistance. Phillippe (François Cluzet) is the paralyzed aristocrat in need of someone to help dress and bath him. When Driss says his references are Kool and the Gang and Earth, Wind, and Fire, Phillippe misses the joke. When Phillippe refers to the composer Berlioz, Driss only knows it as the name of a housing project. But he likes that Driss won’t treat him like damaged goods. And so, Driss gets to stay, and slowly ingratiates himself into the household, though not into the undergarments of Phillipe’s redheaded assistant. And, of course, becomes a better person.

 

Was the real Driss hired without the barest of background checks or even discussion? I don’t know, but suspect not. Some of the other events seem telegraphed, but the characters seem genuine. The humor does too. It’s a formulaic picture (though not a tearjerker, as one might expect), but one well executed. At least, French audiences, who made it the second most popular domestic release of all time, thought so. Pity it will never play in the multiplexes where, were it in English, it might find a ready audience looking for a feel-good comedy-drama.

IMDb link

viewed 4/26/12 7:30 at Rtiz east [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/27/12 and 6/3/12

The Housemaid (***1/2)

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the rich “are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” South Korean director Sang-soo Im uses a remake of a 50-year-old film to explore this idea. At the same time, like its predecessor, it’s a psychological drama. Do-yeon Jeon (Secret Sunshine) plays the title character, whose sexual liaison with her wealthy employer begins a surprising and unfortunate chain of events.

When the original version of this movie was made, in 1960, South Korea was a poorer country, and the family the girl works for has struggled to afford a nice house. Here, although we never find out the source of the wealth, it’s clear that the husband has never wanted for it, and that his wife, pregnant with twins, shares his attitude of entitlement. There are a couple of other significant characters not found in the 1960 version. Notably there is an older servant who has been with the family four decades. As the film goes on, we find that she is more than a stock character, but instead a woman with her own resentments and motivation.

The older film is a well-made, but at times campy, melodrama that winds up being a bit like Fatal Attraction. Besides the issue of class being much more prominent here, the other difference is that the maid herself is a much more thought-out character, really a different one altogether. In the original, she veers wildly between heartsickness and vindictiveness in a way that suggests she’s simply a crazy girl. Sang-soo’s film is much more sympathetic to the maid. For her employer, there is another quote, attributed to Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, that seems apt: “In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.”

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/24/10

All Good Things (***1/4)

Some are ruined by being born into the wrong family. And some by marrying the wrong person. It’s not obvious, except in the fact that the story flashes back from a courtroom scene, that things will go wrong for David Marks (Ryan Gosling), the personable young son of a wealthy New York real estate speculator (Frank Langella). Nor for his future wife Katie (Kirsten Dunst), a sweet girl he meets in 1971. With her, he moves to Vermont, where they run a health-food store called All Good Things. Seemingly metaphorical, this was in fact the real name of the store operated by the husband and wife who inspired this movie, directed by Andrew Jarecki from a script by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling.

Jarecki is best known for another family saga, the Capturing the Friedmans. That was a documentary whose intrigue came in part because the truth about this strange family was somewhat elusive. The reason this heavily researched drama is not a documentary becomes clear eventually; although Jarecki is subtle about depicting some of the darker elements of the story, he obviously has assumed (or very strongly implied) facts that in real life must have been uncertain. Where the film remains ambiguous is in why David’s life goes sour, or at least why it happens when it does. Jarecki succeeds in depicting the progress of his disintegration, and Katie’s different sort of decline. Gosling is typically fine, Dunst heart-rending in her later scenes, and Langella suitably imposing. And obviously, that David witnesses his mother’s death as a child, that he is emotionally repressed, and that his father was an overbearing presence are part of what leads him astray. Yet what is apparent, especially the hold the family real estate business has on him, is not always palpable. In the end, this is a character who remains as elusive as he must have seemed to the Texas jury he testified before in 2003.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/13/11

I Am Love (**1/4)

The rich, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. Servants wait on them, they live on great estates, and they pass large fortunes on to their progeny. But their fears and desires are not unfamiliar. When an Italian patriarch makes a surprising choice as to who will succeed him as the head of the family-run textile business, we wonder if it will cause a rift. When the daughter of the family secretly confides to her mother than she is a lesbian, we wonder why it must be a secret. When the son ponders opening a restaurant with a new friend, we wonder if he’ll abandon his role in the business.

Don’t wonder too much, because the main subject of the movie is the mother, Emma, played by Tilda Swinton. Learning that her son’s friend is a cook, she takes an interest in the younger man. Swinton’s gifts apparently include speaking Italian with a Russian accent, as her character is an immigrant. (There is here the curiosity of having two native English speakers in significant roles, as Marissa Berenson plays Emma's sister-in-law.) In fact, the drama comes out of an earlier documentary director Luca Guadagnino did about the actress.

Guadagnino’s direction tends to draws attention to itself. At its best, his use of long shots, quiet, and ambient sounds emphasizes both the grandeur and the singularity of the family’s lifestyle. At other times, the use of unusual angles, odd close-ups, and jarring compositions by modern classical composer John Adams seems off-putting and pretentious.

Food lovers may enjoy the movie; it’s hard to say which is more pruriently displayed, the sins of the flesh or of the palate. The leisurely sex scene, intercut with shots of insect on flowers, gauzy shots of torsos, and closeups of skin, is positively operatic. On the other hand, a loving close-up of a seafood appetizer lasts so long that I thought there must be a secret message, written in balsamic vinegar, on the plate.

All in all, this was like a coproduction of Architectural Digest and Food & Wine. The characters seemed distant, like they were in a magazine. In the end, I felt a little like the diner given the seafood dish. It was beautiful to look at, but in the end you realize there are only three shrimp on the plate, and you are left in want of something more substantial.

IMDB link

viewed 7/7/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/11 and 8/3/10

The Nanny Diaries (**3/4)

A recent college graduate takes a detour on her career path to work for an extremely demanding female boss in Manhattan. Though she mocks the values of the people she works for, she nonetheless gets drawn into their world and strives to please them, at the cost of her personal life. You could easily mistake this plot for that of The Devil Wears Prada, another movie adapted from a bestselling novel. (In fact, a copy of Prada can be seen in a beach scene.)

The young graduate, Nan, is here played by Scarlet Johannson, the wicked boss by Laura Linney; there’s also a four-your-old child and a little-seen husband, played by Paul Giammatti. Linney’s character is called Mrs. X. Whereas this gives the novel the feel of a confessional, in a movie, where we can actually see Mrs. X, it merely seems awkward. One thing that was changed from the novel is that the heroine now has no experience. Her potential employers’ apparent willingness to overlook things like references, sort of explained by her being white and native born, still strains credulity, especially given Mrs. X’s overall overprotectiveness.

This is the second non-documentary feature from the married writer-director team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. As with their acclaimed American Splendor (which starred Giammatti), they incorporate some fanciful visuals into the movie, including a couple that nod to that most famous of movie nannies, Mary Poppins. As excessively narrated by Johannson, the movie is an extended metaphor in which the wealthy Upper East Side wife is seen as a unique culture, like that of a tribe in some faraway place. Clever, but more so as an idea than as actually executed in the movie. Primarily this is so because the story actually reveals little about either nannies or the wealthy elite that you wouldn’t already imagine. The narration apologizes in advance for engaging in “geographic profiling,¨ e.g. the observation that “adultery is pathologically ignored” among these ladies of leisure. Of course, stereotypes can be true, but rarely tell all. Where Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly was, in Prada, both a type and something more, Linney is the perfect picture of the spoiled trophy wife, but only that. (Giamatti is even more one-dimensional.) Where Prada was witty and sharp, The Nanny Diaries is merely likable, the wishful-thinking ending being symptomatic. (“Don’t think having money makes it any easier,” we’re told. Really?)

This is the kind of movie I like. It’s fun to watch the clash of different values; it’s interesting to watch the behavior of those whose money insulates them from having to do things they don’t want, like take their children to school. The relationship between the nanny has some interesting parts, even if the boy’s rubberband transition from hating to loving her is too easy. Except for the way the heroine gets simultaneously courted by a dozen women without even trying, which is embarrassingly silly (men, maybe), there’s nothing particularly bad about this movie. But nothing good enough to recommend, either.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/30/07

After the Wedding (***1/2)

? An orphanage manager (Mads Mikkelsen) reluctantly leaves Bombay to return to his native Denmark to make a funding pitch to a wealthy businessman. An offhand invitation to the wedding of the businessman’s daughter leads to an unexpected reunion with consequences for both men, as well as for the businessman’s wife and children. Directed by Susanne Bier (Brothers, Open Hearts).

+ The well-crafted screenplay has two significant surprises that have stunning consequences. In the businessman we see both how wealth is used for power and the limits of that power. His actions create an unexpected moral dilemma for the other man. Mikkelsen, who played the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, shows his versatility, and the rest of the cast is equally strong. I especially liked Rolf Lassgård as the rich man whose actions leave the most room for different interpretations, and whom we see as imperious CEO, doting father, angry drunk, and more.

- I think I’d have liked there to be another scene in the movie where I found out more about what the other characters think about the aforementioned moral dilemma. Bier’s frequent use of extreme close-ups is occasionally distracting.

= ***1/2 Whether you like good plot twists, morality plays, or just good character dramas, this is a winner that deserved its nomination for Best Foreign Language film.

IMDb link

After the Wedding (***1/2)

? An orphanage manager (Mads Mikkelsen) reluctantly leaves Bombay to return to his native Denmark to make a funding pitch to a wealthy businessman. An offhand invitation to the wedding of the businessman’s daughter leads to an unexpected reunion with consequences both men, as well as for the businessman’s wife and children. Directed by Susanne Bier (Brothers, Open Hearts).
+ The well-crafted screenplay has two significant surprises that have stunning consequences. In the businessman we see both how wealth is used for power and the limits of that power. His actions create an unexpected moral dilemma for the other man. Mikkelsen, who played the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, shows his versatility, and the rest of the cast is equally strong. I especially liked Rolf Lassgård as the rich man whose actions leave the most room for different interpretations, and whom we see as imperious CEO, doting father, angry drunk, and more.
- I think I’d have liked there to be another scene in the movie where I found out more about what the other characters think about the aforementioned moral dilemma. Bier’s frequent use of extreme close-ups is occasionally distracting.
= ***1/2 Whether you like good plot twists, morality plays, or just good character dramas, this is a winner that deserved its nomination for Best Foreign Language film.

IMDB link

reviewed 5/11/07

Friends with Money (***1/2)

Nicole Holofcener’s (Lovely and Amazing) latest, an ensemble piece about three couples and their single, poorer friend, continues to reveal a talent for portraying small moments that reveal a lot, and adds an extra dash of humor.

Nicole Holofcener’s third film is, like the others, chatty, personal, and intimate. Like her second one, Lovely and Amazing, it’s an ensemble piece. Catherine Keener (also seen in both of Holofcener’s earlier films), Frances McDormand, and Joan Cusack are the female friends, while Jennifer Aniston, once a Friend, is the friend without money, and the only single one. (The husbands also have significant roles, but are played by less-familiar names.) Having well-known actresses in the leads helps differentiate the characters, but mostly it’s the writing. The plots revolve around mundane activities like building an addition to the house, arguing over a parking space, and so forth. Far from being dull, the familiarity of these characters makes the movie compelling, as does a surprising amount of humor. Holofcener manages to portray women without group hugs, clothes-changing montages, and other things that get movies tagged with the derisive “chick flick” label.

IMDb link

posted 9/4/13

Match Point (****)

Wealthy Londoners replace neurotic New Yorkers in Woody Allen’s drama-cum-mystery about a social climber (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) lusting after his pal’s fiancé (Scarlett Johansson). Compelling characters and an ingenious ending make it well worth a look.

Perhaps having exhausted all stories about upper-middle-class New Yorkers, Woody Allen has famously headed to London for this and his next movie, Scoop. Jonathan Rhys Meyers (of Bend It Like Beckham) stars in this one as a just-retired tennis pro who’s taken a job as an instructor. In no time he’s insinuated himself into a wealthy family--palled around with the son, paired up with the daughter (Emily Mortimer), and resolutely lusted after the son’s sultry American fiancée (Scarlett Johansson). Notwithstanding the change of setting, Allen’s on familiar thematic territory, chronicling the activities of urban sophisticates. (Their fondness for opera is a bond between the two men.) Witty conversation and intermittent humor give way to suspense. So much depends on luck, says the voiceover, yet for much of the film lust plays a much bigger part.

I’m not going to say more about the plot or Allen’s ingenious resolution of it. Match Point is the second of his films in a row (after Melinda and Melinda) in which Allen hasn’t appeared. Unlike, say, Celebrity or Anything Else, there’s not even a neurotic Allen facsimile on hand. Rhys Meyers plays one of Allen’s more unsavory main characters, while Johansson’s, more complex, is likely to evoke differing amounts of sympathy. This is probably Woody Allen’s best movie since Crimes and Misdemeanors (1986), with which it shares a couple of key plot elements (though with less philosophizing). Although I’ve enjoyed Allen’s recent films (excepting the one-joke Hollywood Ending), they’ve tended toward the ephemeral. This isn’t a perfect film. An interior monologue near the end is hokey. However, it’s entertaining from beginning to end and leaves an impression when it’s over.

IMDb link