August: Osage County (***1/2)

This is one of those stories about dysfunctional families coming together that usually take place over a Thanksgiving weekend or at Christmas. In this case, it’s a disappearance, but the elements are the same. Start with the mother, whose pain-pill dependence and freewheeling tongue provide another scenery-chewing role for Meryl Streep. Her husband (Sam Shepard) is a onetime poet who, oddly provides the opening narration, quoting T. S. Eliot, then goes missing. Soon after, the daughters show up. Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), the caretaker, has never left Oklahoma. Flighty Karen, the youngest, chattiest, and cheeriest, comes from Florida with her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney). Barbara (Julia Roberts), the eldest, is the one most resentful of, but most like, her mother. She brings her estranged husband (Ewan McGregor) and her daughter (Abigail Breslin). If we knew the future, she tells the 14-year-old , “we’d never want get up in the morning.”

The rich dialogue is among the pleasures of this adaptation of the Tracy Letts play; Letts himself provides the script, and it retains a certain play-like quality and structure, although a few scenes are set outdoors. This means lots of dialogue, well-crafted characters, and a lot of confrontational scenes, any of which, in some other movie, might be the centerpiece scene. Many of these are funny, which means the heavy themes — addiction, alcoholism, adultery, to take just the letter A — never seem ponderous. Instead, they provide just the right mixture of pathos and juicy revelation.

IMDb link

viewed 1/19/14 1:00 pm at AMC Marple; posted 1/22/14

The Great Beauty (**)

“A feast for the eyes” (or senses) and “a love letter to Rome” are the two obvious accolades that came to mind as I watched this lengthy Italian drama, and, sure enough, a Google search revealed both phrases as frequently used descriptors. They’re phrases one might well use on a thinly plotted mood piece such as this, were one trying to compliment it. Or one might compare its auteur, Paolo Sorrentino, to his revered countryman, Federico Fellini. In any case, Sorrentino has a flair for the visually arresting. Whether in long shots of singing nuns in ancient edifices or dizzying close-ups of dancers in a club, as in two lengthy opening sequences, he gives you the sense of being a voyeur. In more than one scene, characters intently watch others for the simple delight of observing. And that is what this film is like.

At the center of all this is Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), who at 65 is undergoing a self reevaluation. The author of one acclaimed novel in his younger days, he’s made his living since then with celebrity interviews and profiles of weird performance artists. Lots of scenes open with incongruous shots of, say, a nude woman hitting her head against a wall. Jeff himself is a voyeur by both profession and inclination. As to why he has never written another novel, he says it’s because he like to party too much. Not married, he spends his days as a younger man Mike, hanging out in clubs, picking up much younger women, sleeping late, and so on. In the course of several days, he does all of this, has off-kilter conversations with his housekeeper, and meets with old friends.

Parts of this film grabbed me, as when Jep forces his interview subject, the naked head-banger, to explain her meaningless. But this is a self-contained scene; it exemplifies the sometimes brutally candid approach to life but is not a significant plot point. After a succession of such disconnected segments, the movie began to seem long. Also, I don’t necessarily mind a weird movie, or one that mixes in some fantasy sequences, but this movie at times has a kind of studied weirdness that put me off. An example is when Jep gets into an elevator and asks the man next to him about his suit, but the man says nothing. In another segment, Jep delivers a sermon on proper funeral etiquette while watching his love interest try on dresses in the distance. Maybe he’s talking to her, maybe to the audience, maybe to himself, but this seemed odd for the sake of oddness. We are all voyeurs when we watch movies, hoping to see some version of truth, and this movie struck me as a version of something else.


IMDb link

viewed 1/15/14 7:30 at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/20/14

Departures (***1/4)

The surprise Academy Award winner in the foreign-language film category is, for awhile, something like a Japanese Six Feet Under. Happily married but unhappily laid off (from playing cello in a bankrupt, second-tier Tokyo orchestra), timid Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) returns to his hometown and half accidentally takes a job “encoffining” the deceased. Some of the early scenes are played for laughs, as when Kobayashi’s first job turns out to be playing the deceased in a training video. Gradually, the humor gives way to a sort of circle-of-life vibe, as we see how the job—one heavily stigmatized in Japan—is not about caring for the dead so much as comforting the living. Probably the sequences in which Kobayashi performs his rituals could be edited a bit more tightly, and the story arc is predictable, but the setting is novel and the actors playing Kobayashi’s calm boss (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and chipper wife (Ryoko Hirosue) are appealing. The movie works a little hard to be “moving,” but, aided by the Joe Hisaishi score, actually is at times.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/24/09

Meet the Browns (**1/4)

Another movie from the dramatic juggernaut that is Tyler Perry, providing another in a series of lessons in how to be black in America. Or at least, that’s how it seemed after watching this, Perry’s play adaptation that follows only a few months after his last effort, Why Did I Get Married? That one was about a group of upper-middle-class folks on a winter retreat, and this is about a struggling single mom, Brenda, played by Angela Bassett, but there are still certain things you can count on in a Tyler Perry movie. One, there will be a male lead who’s buff, single, and ready to devote himself to the female lead. Here that would be Rick Fox’s Michael, who also wants to coach her son, a gifted basketball player. He shows up in Chicago, then, in a marvelous coincidence, turns out to come from the same small Georgia town as Brenda’s dad, a man she never met. By contrast to Michael, there is the villain, Brenda’s ex, a deadbeat with no observable redeeming qualities. There is a mixture of comedy and drama, with the Chicago scenes are virtually all serious. The comedy takes place in Georgia, where Brenda and her kids have gone for the father’s funeral. Lots of offbeat relatives are there too. But most of all, there’s that emphasis on family, faith, and community that imbues all of Perry’s movies. “One thing a black woman knows how to do is make it” and “God will make a way” are the sort of aphorisms the characters deliver, which I guess is comfort food for Perry’s reliable audience. I don’t think God always makes a way, but it’s the predictability of His deliverance that makes the movie Perry’s least successful as a director. The humor feels more strained than in Why Did I Get Married? and the brief appearance of Perry’s drag-wearing Madea is a scene that could have, and should have, been excised.

IMDB link

viewed 3/22/08; reviewed 3/27/08

Death at a Funeral (***)

Family and friends come to a lovely house in the English countryside to mourn. Things start badly when the wrong body is delivered. The son of the deceased (Matthew MacFayden) worries that his eulogy will pale in comparison to the one his brother, a big-shot writer, could deliver. The niece worries about whether her crusty father will like her new fiancé. A family friend worries more about the rash on his arm. But this Frank Oz-directed farce ends up revolving around a small stranger (Peter Dinklage) and a pill bottle. There are one or two overfamiliar elements, like the cantankerous grandfather, but some orginality about the way they're handled. The plot requires undue carelessness surrounding the handling of both the pill bottle’s mislabeled contents and the mystery man. However, the characters are essentially believable, and one or two are colorful. There’s the odd bit of (literal) toilet humor but no fart jokes. Getting funnier as it goes along, this is a Funeral that most people should enjoy.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/30/07