I’m gonna keep beating a horse. Because it…just…won’t…die…. After I emerged ashen-faced and a little dumber from a screening of 300, I was ready to stop watching movies altogether. Luckily, the next night I was able to catch an advance look at that film’s polar opposite, Sarah Polley’s truly lovely and, for me, wrenching winter poem Away from Her. Elegant and lucidly told, even as it jumps around a bit chronologically, Away from Her, is a remarkably rich debut feature from Polley, who has remained one of the most consistently valuable adult actresses in film for well over a decade. Her mixture of honesty and tremulousness translates beautifully behind the camera with this character-fueled examination of individual and collective memory and loss; she directs with an unemphatic yet undeniably cinematic style. The premise (an elderly husband and wife dealing with her gradual succumbing to Alzheimer’s) didn’t quite prepare me for the complex approach the film would take to its characters’ perspective, a darting, dancing look at the mysteries of the mind and heart, expressed solely in the humane faces of its actors, notably Gordon Pinsent and the astonishing Julie Christie. Much more on this film from Reverse Shot in the coming months.
(The cast of JOSHUA, from left to right: Jacob Kogan (as the titular Joshua), Vera Farmiga, Sam Rockwell)
Spinelessly poised somewhere between suspense and irony, ineptness and derivation, low camp and high homophobia/misogyny, George Ratliff’s THE BAD SEED-cum-ROSEMARY’S BABY-cum-THE OMEN-cum-THE GOOD SON-cum-A.I. Sundance offering JOSHUA isn’t really worth a preview, save for its boasting an appearance by murmured Meryl Streep-in-waiting sensation Vera Farmiga. As much as I enjoyed her “make lemonade out of a lemon” wizardry with a weak-link character in THE DEPARTED, and though I’m as strangely, largely baselessly, optimistic about other future turns by this NY Times Magazine endorsed gelfling as the next fan of unorthodox-looking actors with real chops - it’s necessary to prepare y’all for her rather embarrassing turn in this turd. Either left to her own over-emotive devices by a novice director or instructed to gamely ramp up the clichéd hysterics with each snoozily constructed scene of “suspense,” Farmiga just looks, sounds, and moves all wrong. Granted, she’s got nothing to work with here save for an ill-fitting Mia Farrow close-crop, stock postpartum insanity, and the task of working opposite one of the worst child acting performances in memory (not helped by the script’s insistence that all of Joshua’s lines either begin or end with, “Mommy” or “Daddy” - OMG, direct address is SOOO CREEPY!). But, pro that she is, what makes Farmiga truly pale is her actual investment in the shoddy material as co-star Sam Rockwell stands beside it, ever still Sam Rockwell. An homage in a film of wishful homages, this time to John Cassavetes’ snarky ROSEMARY’S BABY turn, Rockwell’s decision saves him - as it saved/condemned Cassavetes - from too close an association with the proceedings. Normally I far prefer the professional, vainless investment of a Farmiga to a mannered, half-serious Rockwell, but with this kind of material it’s hard to begrudge an act of survival. May Vera, whoever she is, find her way forward, living down as she must this bloodied-foot, breast-pumped, crazy-mommy (or is she?) performance.
The talk of the Sundance Film Festival, Robinson Devor’s Zoo conveys, with remarkable restraint, intimacy, and visual daring, the inner worlds of men and the horses they love. Initially, Devor’s clinical approach to the too-nasty-to-be-true dramatization of the widely reported incident from July 2005 of a man who died from a punctured colon after being bare- and broke-backed by a beloved stallion gives way to a surprisingly tender second half, in which all the sensationalism, along with any hint of exploitation, simply falls away, leaving a pure, surprisingly sensuous romance. Harry Potter no more, Daniel Radcliffe, with a newly muscular physique honed from endless hours chained to work-out benches overseen by ruthless chicken-hawk agents and publicists, portrays Kenneth Pinyan, both at ages 17 and 45 (the aging makeup is dramatic and convincing, with full Gyllenhaal throw-pillow under the shirt for good measure). All controversy and salaciousness aside, Radcliffe, who’s legal in England, makes for a prime piece of man-meat ready to be rode beyond the horizon. What’s most refreshing though, is that Devor’s compassionate perspective, rendered by Police Beat cinematographer Sean Kirby in gorgeous colors, perched between the naturalistic and the surreal, never plays the subject matter for cheap laughs.
Yes, it’s that good. The National Bozos of Review this week seemed to have stumbled upon a good decision, giving Clint Eastwood’s part two of his WWII duo, Letters from Iwo Jima, its best picture prize, while tossing Scorsese the director award for The Departed. Skeptics (understandably, considering the National Board’s iffy history and dum-dum track record; a tad too cynical considering Eastwood’s stellar recent track record) chalked it up to some Warner Bros. bed-snuggling….blah blah. Certainly the rest of that list is sheerly hilarious (Blood Diamond!!!), but now having seen Eastwood’s film, there seems to be no question of its worthiness. We’ll cover the film more in depth later on, but for all those gnashing their teeth to see how Eastwood handles this almost blindingly sensitive and somewhat unprecedented subject matter, your minds can be put to rest. Freed from the burden of Haggis-speak, Eastwood regains the intimacy he does so well: Letters from Iwo Jima is written by first-timer Iris Yamashita as a heart-wrenching crawl towards doom. The good intentions of Flags of Our Fathers were somewhat undermined by broad sketchiness and an overly fragmented narrative—Eastwood is best at narratives that move forward with deliberate inexorable tragedy (The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby) and that convey the passage of time in subtle, shadowy gestures. Iwo Jima is a war film that leaves the space for those moments, here between men, stranded and knowingly headed towards their own annhilation. Iwo Jima is a great human tragedy, neither too do-gooder nor agenda-driven (both the Japanese protagonists and the American enemies—the latter barely registering as characters, seen often from great distances—display both barbarism and mercy, alternately), a new viewpoint of an age-old story, one that most Americans have perhaps never thought of. It’s both earnest and cunning in the way that it plays with Americans’ conceptions of the Imperial Army, and it neither refutes nor justifies the knowledge we bring with us as viewers.
It’s a precarious picture…an American director, fascinated by the notion of Japanese “honor” and patriotism, delves into history, trying to excavate a buried world for the edification of himself and his viewers…a lesser filmmaker, one who doesn’t understand the importance of silence, the weight of violence, and the tenderness bred in isolation, would have exoticized these characters (played outstandingly by all, especially, Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, and Tsuyoshi Ihara). Miraculously, Eastwood falls into none of the traps.Those moments that seem indelibly “Japanese” (most involving the honor of suicide in wartime) register with tremendous emotional weight…to such an extent that the plight of the American soldiers in Flags seem as trivialities in comparison. Eastwood seems to have put his heart and soul into the crafting of this film, and his passion, empathy, and respect for his subject matter registers in nearly every frame. It’s the American film of the year.
Sorry to disappoint the eager faithful, but Mad Mel’s long-awaited Apocalypto is by no means the grand folly we’d all hoped - which is not to say that it’s any good. Indeed, for this viewer, who has thus far managed to avoid the Passion juggernaut, there’s not enough fuel for outrage in Mel’s jungle trek. There’s some particularly bloody violence, sure - and some of it certainly gratuitous - but far from the expected psychopathological tour through the Mind of Mel, Apocalypto is notable mainly for its utter conventionality. Not every producer/director would have wanted to make a jungle epic with unknown foreign actors speaking an indigenous tongue, or been able to secure studio financing for it, but almost any reasonably competent director could have turned out what we see on the screen, and how we see it.
The easy barbs aside, Gibson’s certainly not a bad director, in the technical sense. If he evinces no real personality of his own, he’s learned well from his mentors, and has a particular knack for giving large crowd scenes some subtly dynamic visual interest, rather than just relying on teeming masses to supply the effect on their own (as captives are brought through a village, feathers fly through the air as village women pluck chickens en masse, and men whip wet sheets around to send arcing volleys of water through the frame). His chief failing is simply that he has learned to make movies in Hollywood, and Hollywood filmmaking techniques exert a homogenizing effect on all the story material they touch - even that which is supposed to plunge us into an entirely different, alien world.
Gibson’s Mayans might have sticks through their nose and looped earlobes, but they walk, talk (even in dialect), pose, gesture, and are filmed like any actor in any other Hollywood movie. One of Malick’s many accomplishments with The New World was to make his natives different without turning them into alien Others or objects of exoticism: these people walked, moved, acted differently from the whites they encountered (who, to Malick’s equal credit, walk, move, and act differently than whites do today). Imagination has to function alongside any surface “authenticity” in order to fully immerse us in some strange and distant environment - Gibson’s technique in Apocalypto, on the other hand, would be equally valid for Lethal Weapon 5 (God forbid).
Gibson’s utterly conventional choices, while not “ruining” the movie, thus render it singularly uninvolving, even during its more clever and lively moments. Ultimately, the greatest entertainment comes from totting up the visual and narrative cliches that really gather steam in the last 45 minutes or so; my personal favourite being the single, fateful (and slow motion!) drop of blood that gives away the hero’s hiding place to his pursuers (made all the better as the villains have been eviscerating people all morning, thus, one would think, rendering precise blood identification more problematic). So fulminators of moral outrage will unfortunately have to look elsewhere, as Mel even has the historical sense to identify, in the closing frames, the titular catastrophe with the arrival of the European conquerors - though according to The Fountain, the natives should really welcome them as liberators.
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