La Jaula de Oro (***1/2) [screening]

The title, meaning “the golden cage,” sounds pretty and poetic, but the film itself is an unsentimental look at three teenagers heading north from Guatemala. We never learn why they’ve decided to leave, or what they’re leaving behind. With vague hopes of a better life in the United States, and dreams of snowflakes, they make their way through Mexico, like thousands of others using the tops of trains as free transportation. This route was also portrayed in 2009 fine Sin Nombre, which wove in a story about gang rivalry. This movie is less heavily plotted, and quieter, though many of the same perils are illustrated. A major turn in the plot does occur midway, but this only emphasizes the film’s strong theme, which is the role of luck. Some of the train riders will make it north, some will get sent home and give up, or perhaps try again, and some will meet worse fates. Sara, one of the teens, disguises herself as a boy to avoid some of those risks, but some cannot be controlled.

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viewed 10/21/13 6:50 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and posted 10/21/13

Le Havre (**3/4)

I’d guess half of the French movies I’ve seen take place in Paris, and none in the port city whose very name means port. Technically, it may not be French, as its producer, director, and writer is the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past). The less-familiar setting would seem to suit Kaurismäki’s seemingly stylizing rendering of the place. Although the film provides just enough hints to give the setting away as present day, or close to it, everything about it seems designed to make the place seem frozen in some time where people still use rotary phones (or have none, in the case of the main character), smoke in hospital rooms, and have never heard of a chain restaurant, or any sort of chain. Here a man can still make a modest living shining shoes, then toddle off to the pub while his wife contentedly cooks dinner for him.

It’s all very quaint, and so it would be more accurate to call Kaurismäki’s style of storytelling simple rather than minimalist. Although the story has the aging shoe shiner (André Wilms) shelter a Gabonese boy trying to evade the authorities, this is no more a film about illegal immigration than, say, Taxi Driver, is about teen prostitution. It’s a decent story about decent people being decent. I would like it to have been a little more than that, but the film is never more, though never less, than pleasant. Perhaps the closest it comes is when the shoe shiner, short on cash to help the young man, enlists the aid of a local rocker called Little Bob, who plays himself. True to form, his music sounds up to the minute, if the minute is in 1977.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse 12/8/11 and reviewed 12/8/11

Biutiful (***1/4)

Moral complexity is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s thing, whether in his native Mexico (Amores Perros), the United States (21 Grams), or in Morrocco and Japan (Babel). Leaving no continent unconquered (except, so far Australia, notwithstanding his employment of Naomi Watts and Cate Blanchett), he’s set this in Barcelona, with Spaniard Javier Bardem as the lead, a single father hustling to earn enough money and prepare for his children’s uncertain future.

This has one of those beginnings that irritate me, with seemingly random scenes—an unseen couple whispering about a ring, a dreamy conversation in snowy woods—starting the film. Then we see Bardem nervous at a doctor’s office, “interpreting” for the dead at a funeral, negotiating over illegal street vendors, and so on. Somewhere in there is a half-naked woman make noise while another man tries to hush her up so he can talk on the phone. Yet this turns out to be not as tricky as it seems. For the first time, Iñárritu focuses mostly on a single character, although dancer turned actress Maricel Álvarez makes an impression as a woman whose mental health and drug issues have caused custody to be awarded to her ex-husband.

Bardem’s character is struggling with his own issues, both ethical and practical, and his crises in both areas, crises with little time to resolve, create an increasingly compelling narrative.

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viewed 3/27/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/29/11

Frozen River (***1/4)

I love a movie that's about something I've never even thought about, or a completely unfamiliar place. The heroine here (Melissa Leo), if that’s the right word, finds herself with an opportunity to make ends meet by smuggling illegal immigrants. But she lives along the Canadian border, in the northernmost part of New York State. So the customers are not poor Mexicans, but Asians who've paid tens of thousands of dollars to be transported in a car trunk across land and ice claimed not by Canada or the United States, but the Mohawk tribe.

Leo plays a middle-aged mother of two whose husband has taken off to feed his gambling addiction, a woman who carries a pistol, who works in a dollar store, who doesn’t know where Pakistan is, who fears losing the down payment she put on a double-wide modular home. Her partner-in-crime is a Mohawk woman who’s not well-liked, or that likable, and one imagines that their serendipitous joint enterprise is about the only way these women would come into contact.

The cultural aspects are secondary to the plot, but certainly add to it. The setting is at once new and familiar. The location along the St. Lawrence river, in a part of America where the nearest big city is Montréal, is unusual enough, but the nondescript look of the place is what anyone who has driven much in rural America has seen. This is not the idyllic Americana that small-town movies emphasize, but the America built around old state highways and cheap architecture.

Everything about this movie is as believable as the lines on Leo's make-up-free face, the shot that begins the movie. (She’s very good, as is Indian actress Misty Upham.) This is a nicely compact drama about a mother, not illegal immigration or race relations. The ending may work too hard to ingratiate the characters rather than bring these social issues into sharper focus. It remains a small movie. But expect big things from its first-time writer-director, Courtney Hunt.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/17/08

The Edge of Heaven (***1/4)

A Hollywood movie with a title like this would probably be given to a gushy romance film, possibly where dead people get reincarnated and come back to earth. Here it’s given to an intriguing drama bookmarked by a pair of quasi-accidental deaths that merely leave behind those who grieve. The story begins with a lonely old man, a Turkish German, who asks a prositute to come live with him, but shifts in unexpected directions. To me they were some unlikely directions as well, like the way the man’s son, a professor, doesn’t question the stranger who comes to live with them, or the way the prositute’s daughter finds a lover and a home—the day after she crosses the border into Germany—by begging for money. Hey, maybe that works there. Once the wheels of the story are in motion, it gets better, though. Now in Germany, now in Turkey, the point of view shifts from one character to another in a way such that I became increasingly caught up in the cross-cultural tale.

The writer-director, Fatih Akin, the German-born son of Turkish parents, directly explored identity issues in his previous movie, Head On, but even with an illegal immigrant at the center of the story, only brings them in insofar as they further the story. That story uses locations in a memorable way to tell a universal story of children who disappoint parents, parents disappointing children, and children and parents who come to understand, or at least forgive, each other. Venerable character actress Hanna Schygulla has a strong presence as a grieving mother, but Nurgül Yesilçay is also notable as the female lead.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/13/08

The Visitor (***1/4)

Character actor Richard Jenkins gives a fine performance as a middle-aged professor who, returning to his temporarily abandoned New York apartment, finds an immigrant couple living there. It’s a misunderstanding, and so accommodation, not confrontation, results.

Some aspects of United States immigration policy are depicted, but the movie doesn’t seem intended to be political. It seems at first like it’s going to be one of those dramas where the colored folks (he’s Syrian, she’s Senegalese) teach the old white dude how to be hip. The professor, a widower, discovers an unlikely affinity for African drumming and gets lessons from the younger man. But the main story is of a lonely man finding an unexpected way out of a rut. For the couple, it is a story of the fragile world some people inhabit and the tiny happenstance that turns their lives around. For writer-director Tom McCarthy, it’s the follow up to The Station Agent, another tale of disparate people coming together, although here the immigrants are secondary characters. While The Visitor lacks the humor and quirky charm of that film, there’s a similar warmness to the storytelling, and McCarthy easily avoids the sophomore slump.

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viewed 6/6/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 6/25/08

Fast Food Nation (***1/4)

? When Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear), a rising star from the corporate headquarters of “Mickey’s” orders his company’s “Big One” signature burger at an outlet in the hinterlands, the cook gives him the old spit-in-the-meat. But it turns out that extra-special sauce may not be the worst thing he’s ingesting. The problem, as his boss puts it, is “there’s shit in the meat,” and Don has been sent to check out the Colorado packing plant that turns cows into frozen patties. The ever-versatile Richard Linklater, whose A Scanner Darkly came out just a few months before this, here collaborated with author Eric Schlosser to turn the latter’s non-fiction best-seller into Dan’s story, as well as those of Amber, a low-paid cashier at the hinterlands Mickey’s, and Sylvia, one of the many undocumented Mexicans who form the plant’s compliant labor force. After all, to get beef to wholesale at 40 cents a pound requires efficiency at every step of the fast food chain.

+  Linklater and Schlosser have generally done a good job in creating a storyline that doesn’t simply feel like a documentary in disguise. It helps that some of the juiciest morsels of information are delivered by the likes of Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Willis, colorful in small parts. Sylvia is played by Maria Full of Grace’s Catalina Sandino Moreno, and TV actress Ashley Johnson seems natural as high-school student Amber. Without seeming too heavy-handed, or using one-dimensional characters, Linklater shows how both people and animals become commodities in the same system.

- Don, the corporate guy, disappears from the movie for about an hour, right when his story gets interesting. You can surmise what happens in the meantime, but probably another few minutes, or different editing, would have balanced things out.

= ***1/4 It didn’t bother me that the characters in the three storylines barely intersect, because that’s part of the point, but it’s something some people probably won’t like. Nor are tidy endings and sunny optimism to be found here. (There is occasional humor.) The characters in Fast Food Nation each have to deal with facts that it would be easier to ignore. A lot of people probably won’t want to watch this movie for the same reason, but anyone who’s ever eaten beef that comes from a commercial meat packing plant should watch at least the last ten minutes, a brief but unpleasant tour of the “killing floor,” filmed in a real meat-packing plant, that shows what it takes to turn massive numbers of cows into pieces of meat. This is the flip side of Super Size Me, which looked at a key element mostly missing from the movie’s recipe, the consumer. But anyone who pays attention will supply that ingredient himself.

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