Tonight at the Film Experience: my review of When Marnie Was There the last and/or last-for-right-now film made by the great Studio Ghibli. Spoilers: it is a worthy finale.
Thứ Năm, 4 tháng 6, 2015
SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - I'D LIKE TO MEET HIS TAILOR
In Tibet - do you see what I mean? Tibet. What werewolf movie starts in fucking Tibet? Do they even have werewolf lore in Tibet? Do they have any kind of wolves in Tibet? But in Tibet we are, alongside the brusque and peremptory Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull), an English botanist hunting for the legendary mariphasa lumina lupina (dog Latin for "man-changing wolf light") a plant that blooms in the moonlight. And he finds it, too, though only after being attacked by a large hairy animal we barely catch a glimpse of, only being able to make out that it has rather more of a human shape than one would expect of a wild creature. Literally bloody but unbowed, Glendon still has his eyes on the precious mariphasa, which he takes back with him to England in the space of a cut.
And back in England, we get a much better sense of Glendon's interest and personality than we had before, and the short version is "arrogant dick". He's so obsessed with his discovery that he can barely feign niceness to his wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson) or pretend to be happy about the party being held in his house, for which he is either the guest of honor or the host, it's a little fuzzy. What matters is that one of the guests at that party, apparently uninvited, is a Japanese botanist, Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland, a genuinely gifted actor whose talents are tough to appreciate in later days, given that almost his entire career was spent in yellowface), who confusingly claims to have met Glendon back in Tibet (hint, hint), and who quite unprompted goes on a little lecture about "lycanthrophobia", as the script laboriously terms it, and explains that the mariphasa is in fact an herbal retardant that staves off the transformation of a werewolf during the three days of the full moon. And would Glendon believe it, but Yogami happens to know of two men with the werewolf curse in London right that very minute (hint, hint).
Glendon first discovers the truth of Yogami's prattling when his synthetic full moon lamp, part of his experiment to force the mariphasa to bloom, turns his hand into a hairy, clawed monstrosity. And while he's able to use the single flower on the plant to return himself to normal, there are not other flowers at the ready, and the full moon is right around the corner. Thus begins the part of the film that actually resembles the subsequent development of the werewolf genre: Glendon's panicked attempt to cure himself or at least keep himself safely locked up, after he murders a woman the first night.
The single element of Werewolf of London that most likely killed it in 1935 happens to be the most interesting part of it now: Glendon is an unpleasant man, and Hull's performance makes it more so. The actor despised the role and the film, and his performance showcases that, but somehow it ends up working to the movie's overall benefit. The character is snappish and unsympathetic, but he also pops off the screen far more than most horror heroes of the '30s, and after so many years of sad, mopey sorts being terrified of themselves as they transform into beasts, it's bracing to encounter a character so direct and intelligent about dealing with this hideous curse. Particularly since wolf-Glendon is apparently more conscious and intelligent than the usual blunt force of animalistic nature. The very first thing he does is to go to find Lisa at a party hosted by her blustering Aunt Ettie (Spring Byington at her most enervating, and I say that as someone who's usually tickled to see Byington's name pop up in the credits), which she's attending in the company of her old flame Paul Ames (Lester Matthews). The film makes a point of clarifying that werewolves instinctively desire to destroy what they love most in human life, but there's enough meanness to Hull's Glendon that there's a little tension underlying his savagery, like he's almost eager, Hyde-style, to go do the wickedness that he can't as a moral man. And that, in turn, deepens his character arc throughout the slender but impressively dense 75-minute feature: the film tracks Glendon's commitment to besting his smug, nasty self, not just taming the animal within. Lon Chaney, Jr's Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man is the best part he ever played, but there just aren't as many layers there, even if he's infinitely more readily likable and pitiable than the prickly Glendon.
That makes for quite a lot to find fascinating in Werewolf of London, though not, perhaps, as much to love. And it is, in fairness, a bit difficult to respond to as a genre film, by '35 standards or our own. Individual moments work beautifully: the moment when Glendon's cat unexpectedly turns on him and leads him to the knowledge that something inside of him is broken, or one of those newspaper headline montages that turns into a bleak projection of what Glendon thinks might happen in the future, or above all, the film's utterly terrific transformation scene, with Glendon looking a bit shaggier every time he walks past one in a series of tall pillars, none of this "freeze frame and dissolve" nonsense. It's quite honestly the best werewolf transformation scene I can name prior to the watershed year of 1981, when The Howling and An American Werewolf in London both showed up.
In between those singularly great moments, though, the film's something of a drag: the exposition, however necessary to a 1935 audience with limited context for werewolves, is dumped in artlessly, and Oland can't ever find a path to make it feel sensible within a character who's already compromised by how transparently he's there for the eminently predictable twist ending. The whole matter of Lisa and Paul Ames's gentle flirtation is out-of-placed, stuffed in just to add a romantic lead, since Hull clearly can't be one. And the film is wretched with comic relief, above and beyond the standards of '30s horror - there's some business with two drunk old ladies that only takes up maybe five minutes, tops, but also manages to never, ever end.
If I had to sum it all up, it would be by saying that director Stuart Walker is no James Whale, and cinematographer Charles Stumar is no Karl Freund. The film has limited style and absolutely no successful management of tone: John Colton's screenplay mixes lightness and horror and pathos well enough, but the movie itself mashes them all into one unpersuasive flatness. It's a movie that feels cheap, even though by the onscreen evidence, that couldn't have been the case; but there's no atmosphere at all. The cast does what they can to keep the drama steady (absent the comic side characters), and the werewolf is different enough from anything we're familiar with, both visually and in his obvious intelligence, that he's always a bit unnerving and threatening. But for all that I honestly do admire the film's strengths, I will not pretend that it's one of Universal's strongest horror films of the '30s - it is average at best - nor does it offer more, really, than an intermittently captivating snapshot of the road not taken towards a more scientific and urbane werewolf genre than the one we ultimately got.
Body Count: 4, though only half of that number are innocent victims.
Thứ Tư, 3 tháng 6, 2015
BEST SHOT: DICK TRACY
Hit Me with Your Best Shot returns from hiatus with one of the best and hardest assignments Nathaniel has ever given us: 1990's Dick Tracy, directed by Warren Beatty and shot by Vittorio Storaro, with costumes by Milena Canonero and production design by Richard Sylbert. And I name all four of those people because they are, between them, the heart and soul of what makes this film all that it is, namely the most comic-ey of all movies yet made. In its colors, its lines, and its compositions, (and in its performances and writing, for that matter), the animating principal behind the movie was to make something that looked as much like a comic strip as it possibly could.
When a film's visual style is so unmistakable, it's easy to know what approach to take to picking a best shot: what image most successfully evokes Chester Gould's Depression-era action comic? And then, it becomes stupefyingly hard to actually find that one single shot, because Dick Tracy is pretty close to entirely perfect. There are only images that look like they were ripped directly from the garish four-color Sunday funnies. It's nice that there's no such thing as a wrong choice, but it makes it damn hard to come up with the right choice.
After a hell of a lot of thinking, anyway, I ended up with this one:
There's a hint of perversity in selecting a shot from a movie with such distinctive and luscious costumes that doesn't show off those costumes even slightly. But it has everything else I wanted. The bright cherry red bricks shading into black is a perfect example of getting everything from just one color and smart lighting, capturing the careful shading of a top-notch comic artist with a level of texture and boldness of saturation that would defeat newspaper printing. The silhouettes and the half-seen violence are a nod to German Expressionism, the style that directly influenced Gould's carnival of grotesque human forms, and to Expressionism's American kid, film noir, the style to which so many urban-set crime pictures have owed their everything, with Dick Tracy in particular borrowing extensively from the vocabulary of thick shadows and damp corrosion that make up noir.
But what really appeals to me about this image is none of that, not even the minute echo of red in the hat of the gangster about to be pushed through the window. It's the cracked glass. There's something that feels so perfectly, iconically comic-strip about that cracked glass - it's exactly the kind of small detail that makes great graphic storytelling, suggesting violence, momentum, tensed-up energy. And of course, seconds after this still, that gangster comes plowing through the glass, so that violence and tension are hardly accidental. But let's not skip ahead - in this one moment, the shape of the bodies and the lines in the glass provide all the illusion of force and movement that we need. I can't with a straight face call it "the best" evocation of comic art in the movie. But it's one that gives me a hell of a lot of pleasure.
(For more thoughts, check out my Dick Tracy review).
When a film's visual style is so unmistakable, it's easy to know what approach to take to picking a best shot: what image most successfully evokes Chester Gould's Depression-era action comic? And then, it becomes stupefyingly hard to actually find that one single shot, because Dick Tracy is pretty close to entirely perfect. There are only images that look like they were ripped directly from the garish four-color Sunday funnies. It's nice that there's no such thing as a wrong choice, but it makes it damn hard to come up with the right choice.
After a hell of a lot of thinking, anyway, I ended up with this one:
But what really appeals to me about this image is none of that, not even the minute echo of red in the hat of the gangster about to be pushed through the window. It's the cracked glass. There's something that feels so perfectly, iconically comic-strip about that cracked glass - it's exactly the kind of small detail that makes great graphic storytelling, suggesting violence, momentum, tensed-up energy. And of course, seconds after this still, that gangster comes plowing through the glass, so that violence and tension are hardly accidental. But let's not skip ahead - in this one moment, the shape of the bodies and the lines in the glass provide all the illusion of force and movement that we need. I can't with a straight face call it "the best" evocation of comic art in the movie. But it's one that gives me a hell of a lot of pleasure.
(For more thoughts, check out my Dick Tracy review).
THE LITTLE BIG ONE
Let me re-emphasise, that this is a very by-the-books disaster movie. In a genre that's particularly beholden to formula and common elements, San Andreas still stands out for the purity of its commitment to that formula. We have the couple about to get a divorce thrown together by the terrible events unfolding around them, a daughter readying to go to college when her life is thrown into disarray, a puffy scientist trapped with a designated audience surrogate, a slimy capitalist whose fate is ironically tied to his profession. The opening scene is a mostly stand-alone setpiece designed to show off the hero's particular skill set; the final scene involves an enormous American flag slowly whipping in the wind. It's almost a holy thing, I really mean that. Not since, good Lord, maybe Volcano back in 1997 have I seen a disaster movie so painstakingly eager to be the most prototypical disaster movie it could possibly be. Or at the very least, The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.
This is not at all meant to be a slight against San Andreas, which knows exactly what it is, what it's doing, and why. Disaster movies, like romantic comedies and slasher films, derive much of their pleasure from being predictable, and finding most of their individuality in their execution. And this is the slight against San Andreas, which is many things that aren't terribly complimentary - unbelievable in the extreme for one, unusually indifferent to deaths of human beings beyond its core group of named characters for another - but is worst of all for being preposterously not-fun. Since the all but forgotten days of The Mummy Returns, Johnson's screen persona has fully coalesced into a big meaty goofball, too campy to be a serious action star and too imposing to be a standard-issue comic character actor; isolated counter-examples in the intervening decade and a half like 2013's Snitch only demonstrate his considerable onscreen charisma and movie-star qualities thrives in an atmosphere of jokey flippancy. The screenplay by Carlton Cuse, from a story credited to Andre Fabrizio & Jeremy Passmore (though "writing" the "story" in a film like this is mostly a matter of plucking down plot elements like overripe apples), is absolutely not jokey, nor flippant, even when it seems like that would be the obvious thing to do with it: Johnson gets a grand total of one dumb one-liner.
Instead, we get standard-issue family drama presented with an extraordinary lack of irony: Ray Gaines (Johnson) is a helicopter rescue pilot with the Los Angeles Fire Department, and a wife named Emma (Carla Gugino) who is leaving him, and about to move in with a handsome architect, Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd). Ray does his best not to be a jerk about this, even when it falls to Daniel and not himself to bring his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) up to Seattle. For Ray, in the time-tested way of action heroes, spends more time attending to work emergencies than his loved ones. Meanwhile, a pair of Caltech professors, Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) and Dr. Kim Park (Will Yun Lee), have a perfect opportunity to test out their earthquake-predicting model during a freak event in Nevada. Kim dies rescuing a child from the collapsing Hoover Dam, but in the process, he and Lawrence prove their model works, and Lawrence is able to use the data to discover that the San Andreas fault is about to blow. Like, now. Too soon for there to be any chance of evacuating the tens of millions of people who will be immediately affected by the gigantic quake, but enough time that he can get on the air with CNN reporter Serena Johnson (Archie Panjabi) to explain to the audience what earthquakes are.
The movie doesn't genuinely care about Lawrence, but Giamatti is the second-biggest name in the cast, so it keeps cutting back to him without ever finding a remotely organic or elegant way of tying its two subplots together (the solitary link is that, prior to heading to Caltech, Serena went on a ride-along with Ray's crew in the opening scene, as he fearlessly rescued a young woman from a fissure that foreshadows the quakes to come). This leaves San Andreas moving along only in the lumpiest sort of way, on top of how clumsily it juggles the two plots it's actually committed to: Ray and Emma flying, driving, and otherwise scrambling northward through the devastation of southern California on the way to San Francisco, where Blake has teamed with a pair of English brothers, sexy Ben (Hugo Johnston-Burt) and tween Ollie (Art Parkinson), after Daniel reveals how totally craven and Evil Movie Capitalist he is. For as the most brazen of all its clichés, San Andreas goes all-in on "architecture is the path to enormous financial success" as its villain's backstory and personality. But anyway, as Lawrence tells everybody to beware the even bigger second quake on the TVs that no longer work, what with the California power grid being gone, the estranged couple reunites on the hard road north, while Blake proves to be her father's daughter and manages to use wits and survivalist know-how to keep herself and the brothers alive through fires and floods and collapsing buildings.
The least we can say about all of this is that the visual effects and especially the sound work are pretty good, though the film suffers from some particularly weightless CGI (almost the first thing that happens in the whole movie is an animated car flipping down a hill like a tin can, and a mere two weeks after the heaving metal of Mad Max: Fury Road, it's even more depressing to watch than it might have been otherwise). It suffers much worse from director Brad Peyton, whose entire list of features preceding this have been worse sequels to bad children's movies (his Journey 2: The Mysterious Island was one of those very same movies where Johnson got to be good and campy and fun), and who comes to this film totally without the skills required to make large-scale destruction looking visually spectacular and exhilarating. There are scattered scenes that work tremendously well: Emma scrambling through a disintegrating skyscraper to jump on Ray's copter in the midst of an explosion of dust could stand with any mid-level tentpole movie in recent memory, and there are some aerial shots that show off the enormity of the destruction with an appropriately epic popcorn movie sensibility. But they are much outweighed by sequences that feel limited in scope and ambition. It's never persuasive that anything bigger than what the heroes can see with their own eyes - nothing here like the last time San Francisco was devastated onscreen in 2014's Godzilla, and the terrible grandeur of the action seemed bigger than human understanding. San Andreas is cramped, without the compensating factor of being more intimate with its characters by virtue of backing away from a broad canvas. It's scared of ambition and too flimsily-written for anything else, and while it's sufficiently noisy and pretty to exist as a big ol' summer picture of no distinction, it's definitely not the kind of thing that anybody will remember a couple of years into the future.
5/10
Thứ Ba, 2 tháng 6, 2015
JUNE 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW
The good news: this has already been the summer of Mad Max: Fury Road. The bad news: this is now going to be the summer of movies that aren't Mad Max: Fury Road. That being said, I concede that June has a couple of films that, in any other context, I'd be excited for. Not now, of course, with cinema having reached its end point and all. But some of it could still be entertaining enough.
3.6.2015
It made me so absolutely happy when Entourage, the feature adaptation of the 4-years-in-the-ground HBO program about the worst kind of American maledom, got moved up to a Wednesday release. Because that meant that it couldn't possibly win the weekend at the box office. And that meant that there was nothing that could compel me to see it.
Anybody who reads that sentence and makes this film their ACS fundraiser review request goes on my enemies list.
5.6.2015
Melissa McCarthy and her best director, Paul Feig, team up for Spy, which is, I gather, about a spy. The word that it's the first McCarthy feature that uses here comic talents beyond an ability to spout vulgarisms and be fat makes me incredibly happy, and I'll happily declare this the comedy I'm most excited about for the whole summer.
And because the universe can't say "no", there's a film called Insidious: Chapter 3, and I am so, so angry that I already used my "Inshittyous: Crapter X" joke, because I think that represents the best I can do relative to this franchise.
12.6.2015
Having been born late in 1981 and thus spending the summer of 1993 as an 11-year-old, I am precisely the audience that Jurassic World wants to hit square in the nostalgia. And boy, is it not doing that. I get that everybody wants to see this movie more than I do, but I cannot to save my life imagine why. Those are some boring, generic trailers.
I mean, of course I will see it, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Over in the world of limited releases: the Sundance-feted teen cancer drama Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a film I'm looking forward almost solely to be furiously pissed-off at it. Not a healthy attitude, I know. But that title. It's like the last of the mid-'00s indie quirkfests was found frozen in the Arctic ice and has been thawed to terrorise the city before it's nuked back into oblivion.
19.6.2015
Speaking of films that Sundance kind of liked that seem just awful, awful, awful to me, Dope and Infinitely Polar Bear are both hitting simultaneously, the latter more than one whole year after its premiere. Talk about promising.
But that doesn't matter! There is a new Pixar film, after two years of nothing and five years since their last clear-cut masterwork! And if the folks at Cannes know what they're talking about, Inside Out is all kinds of perfect in every way. This was, at the start of the summer, my second most-anticipated after Mad Max; everything that's happened in the last month has only solidified that position.
26.6.2015
Having not hated Ted, to my absolute shock, I suppose I find myself not-dreading Ted 2. But boy, can I not find a single reason to be excited for it.
And I don't have any fucking clue what to make of Max, a patriotic story of a soldier dog with PTSD that appears to be at least three totally irreconcilable movies in one, based on the trailer. The unifying thesis seems to be "who doesn't like dogs?" which, while true, is a weird foundation for a wide releease in the middle of summer.
Also, that's a really fascinating double-feature, right there.
3.6.2015
It made me so absolutely happy when Entourage, the feature adaptation of the 4-years-in-the-ground HBO program about the worst kind of American maledom, got moved up to a Wednesday release. Because that meant that it couldn't possibly win the weekend at the box office. And that meant that there was nothing that could compel me to see it.
Anybody who reads that sentence and makes this film their ACS fundraiser review request goes on my enemies list.
5.6.2015
Melissa McCarthy and her best director, Paul Feig, team up for Spy, which is, I gather, about a spy. The word that it's the first McCarthy feature that uses here comic talents beyond an ability to spout vulgarisms and be fat makes me incredibly happy, and I'll happily declare this the comedy I'm most excited about for the whole summer.
And because the universe can't say "no", there's a film called Insidious: Chapter 3, and I am so, so angry that I already used my "Inshittyous: Crapter X" joke, because I think that represents the best I can do relative to this franchise.
12.6.2015
Having been born late in 1981 and thus spending the summer of 1993 as an 11-year-old, I am precisely the audience that Jurassic World wants to hit square in the nostalgia. And boy, is it not doing that. I get that everybody wants to see this movie more than I do, but I cannot to save my life imagine why. Those are some boring, generic trailers.
I mean, of course I will see it, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Over in the world of limited releases: the Sundance-feted teen cancer drama Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a film I'm looking forward almost solely to be furiously pissed-off at it. Not a healthy attitude, I know. But that title. It's like the last of the mid-'00s indie quirkfests was found frozen in the Arctic ice and has been thawed to terrorise the city before it's nuked back into oblivion.
19.6.2015
Speaking of films that Sundance kind of liked that seem just awful, awful, awful to me, Dope and Infinitely Polar Bear are both hitting simultaneously, the latter more than one whole year after its premiere. Talk about promising.
But that doesn't matter! There is a new Pixar film, after two years of nothing and five years since their last clear-cut masterwork! And if the folks at Cannes know what they're talking about, Inside Out is all kinds of perfect in every way. This was, at the start of the summer, my second most-anticipated after Mad Max; everything that's happened in the last month has only solidified that position.
26.6.2015
Having not hated Ted, to my absolute shock, I suppose I find myself not-dreading Ted 2. But boy, can I not find a single reason to be excited for it.
And I don't have any fucking clue what to make of Max, a patriotic story of a soldier dog with PTSD that appears to be at least three totally irreconcilable movies in one, based on the trailer. The unifying thesis seems to be "who doesn't like dogs?" which, while true, is a weird foundation for a wide releease in the middle of summer.
Also, that's a really fascinating double-feature, right there.
IT IS A VERY PLUM PLUM
A review requested by Jordyn Auvil, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.
The big problem with The English Patient isn't even its fault: the problem is that Elaine Benes fucking hated it, and nobody who saw that 1997 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld before they caught up with the Oscar-worshiped romantic epic could possibly avoid hearing any echo of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's passionately anguished delivery of her character's rants. "Sex in a tub! That doesn't work!" or the incensed "Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! Die!" I will confess that, years and years before I first say the movie in the mid-'00s, I was prepared from that one line to find it unendurably stretched-thin and pokey, on top of already having my knives out from the film that swept the Academy Awards for 1996 when, if the universe were just, Secret & Lies and Fargo would have fought it out for all of the trophies everywhere. Is it any wonder, then, that it met my expectations?
Revisiting the film twice since than has softened me towards it, though I still can't say I love it; of director Anthony Minghella's picture postcard literary adaptations, I would rank it behind The Talented Mr. Ripley in every respect. It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well. I've found, generally speaking, that people who like The English Patient but don't adore it tend to cluster into two camps, based around which half of it is better: the "present day" plotline, or the "flashback" plotline, with the tacit implication that it would be better for all concerned if it could have gotten by without necessarily having to spend so much time on both of them. I happen to be a member of the "present day" camp, which is in no small part because I am also a member of the "Juliette Binoche is the best actress of the 1990s, and I really like you, Kristen Scott Thomas, but I'm sorry, just not that much" camp.
As adapted by Minghella from Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, broadly speaking, tells two love stories that play out during the Second World War, one in the beginning of the war, the other in its waning days. The action radiates backward from an Italian monastery that barely remains standing after years of fighting, currently serving as a field hospital. Here, Québécoise nurse Hana (Binoche) tends to a terribly burned English patient (Ralph Fiennes), who remembers neither his name nor his story. But as he slowly doles out what he does know, to Hana and to David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), another Canadian recuperating in the area, he learn the full version of his history, the one he either does not or cannot access himself. He is, it turns out, the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, and at the time war broke out in the late 1930s, he was mapping the Sahara Desert for the British government, alongside an Englishman named Madox (Julian Wadham). Their expedition is joined by the married Cliftons, Katharine (Scott Thomas) and Geoffrey (Colin Firth), and Almásy and Katharine soon strike up a love affair that ebbs and flows during those tense times in North Africa. Back in 1945, while Hana tends to Almásy and hears his story, she meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh engineer in the British Army, and has a much less torrid, heaving, and sandy affair of her own.
The English Patient is a film of particular bigness, as Minghella splashes all the grandeur of the Sahara and North Africa across his screen in dauntingly orange landscape shots and more domestic scenes that lovingly foreground Stuart Craig's heavily detailed, lived-in production design. And it is also a film of great and subtle intimacy, relying extensively on close-ups of Fiennes and Scott Thomas. This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for). But if I allow my inner Elaine to pipe up, it's also monotonous: there simply isn't much incident to stretch out to 162 minutes. Individually, many of the component scenes of The English Patient are miracles of mythic filmmaking: the sequence in which Almásy carries Katharine from a plane crash to the safety of some distant caves is Epic Cinema 101. But these great moments are separated by longueurs that do absolutely nothing but restate things we already knew, and though Scott Thomas was never better at inhabiting the space in front of the camera with casual sensual force than she was in this production, any movie that consists for seemingly half of its running time of watching two people smolder at each other is a movie that needs to answer some tough questions about its priorities.
That's part of why I prefer the framework with Hana and Kip and David: it feels more consequential, more rooted in historical context, and more driven. None of this is accidental, mind you. An important part of Minghella's strategy in the film is to contrast the relatively straightforward, plain, and tangible "now" story with the heated, highly subjective and abstracted "then" story, which is meant to work as a hazy dream of physical memory and emotional states - it is an impressionistic approach rather than a narrative one, nimbly aided by cinematographer John Seale and composer Gabriel Yared, the most important members of the filmmaking team for helping to construct that kind of detached High Romantic atmosphere of feeling rather than observing. And I admire this. But I would admire 50 minutes of it every bit as much as I admire two hours of it.
The Italian framework, meanwhile, is much less showy, but for my tastes, much more meaningful. While Scott Thomas and Fiennes are stuck playing concepts of erotic psychology, Binoche simply gets to play a human being, and she's better in her role than either of them (Andrews is the best member of the cast every time he opens his mouth, but in a limited part that has been weirdly slashed down from its importance in the source novel). And instead of the heaving visual overstimulation of the Eternal Desert, it takes place in a perfectly realised, deeply physical space, one in which the use of color and framing and slowness do a superb job of evoking the feel of cool, damp air, and the rough texture of ancient brick and stone. If the romantic flashback segments of film are an evocation of the way we remember places and physical sensation, the framework evoke feeling things and being in places right now. And coupled with the more down-to-earth characterisations and performances, I find all of that to be more satisfying.
That all being said, The English Patient is exactly the kind of movie that feels like it ought to have an enormously passionate fanbase - it is an intense, lush experience that hits right in the gut, while the films I will eternally check it against, Fargo and Secrets & Lies, take dead aim at the brain and allow the libido to shrivel up unattended. The English Patient is utterly gorgeous, and it's lusty and sexy in a very literate, classy way - the R-rated Miramax equivalent to the star-studded, posh European superproductions of the 1960s. There's a lot to be said for that, even when the results are the kind of half-baked and over-baked confection that this particular film turns out to be. I do find it all a bit tiring rather than exhilarating, and I can't imagine that's what the filmmakers had in mind, but I absolutely do respect the top-to-bottom commitment to making this movie the most fleshed-out version of itself possible. It's an enormous, indulgent beast, but it's completely honest about it.
Revisiting the film twice since than has softened me towards it, though I still can't say I love it; of director Anthony Minghella's picture postcard literary adaptations, I would rank it behind The Talented Mr. Ripley in every respect. It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well. I've found, generally speaking, that people who like The English Patient but don't adore it tend to cluster into two camps, based around which half of it is better: the "present day" plotline, or the "flashback" plotline, with the tacit implication that it would be better for all concerned if it could have gotten by without necessarily having to spend so much time on both of them. I happen to be a member of the "present day" camp, which is in no small part because I am also a member of the "Juliette Binoche is the best actress of the 1990s, and I really like you, Kristen Scott Thomas, but I'm sorry, just not that much" camp.
As adapted by Minghella from Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, broadly speaking, tells two love stories that play out during the Second World War, one in the beginning of the war, the other in its waning days. The action radiates backward from an Italian monastery that barely remains standing after years of fighting, currently serving as a field hospital. Here, Québécoise nurse Hana (Binoche) tends to a terribly burned English patient (Ralph Fiennes), who remembers neither his name nor his story. But as he slowly doles out what he does know, to Hana and to David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), another Canadian recuperating in the area, he learn the full version of his history, the one he either does not or cannot access himself. He is, it turns out, the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, and at the time war broke out in the late 1930s, he was mapping the Sahara Desert for the British government, alongside an Englishman named Madox (Julian Wadham). Their expedition is joined by the married Cliftons, Katharine (Scott Thomas) and Geoffrey (Colin Firth), and Almásy and Katharine soon strike up a love affair that ebbs and flows during those tense times in North Africa. Back in 1945, while Hana tends to Almásy and hears his story, she meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh engineer in the British Army, and has a much less torrid, heaving, and sandy affair of her own.
The English Patient is a film of particular bigness, as Minghella splashes all the grandeur of the Sahara and North Africa across his screen in dauntingly orange landscape shots and more domestic scenes that lovingly foreground Stuart Craig's heavily detailed, lived-in production design. And it is also a film of great and subtle intimacy, relying extensively on close-ups of Fiennes and Scott Thomas. This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for). But if I allow my inner Elaine to pipe up, it's also monotonous: there simply isn't much incident to stretch out to 162 minutes. Individually, many of the component scenes of The English Patient are miracles of mythic filmmaking: the sequence in which Almásy carries Katharine from a plane crash to the safety of some distant caves is Epic Cinema 101. But these great moments are separated by longueurs that do absolutely nothing but restate things we already knew, and though Scott Thomas was never better at inhabiting the space in front of the camera with casual sensual force than she was in this production, any movie that consists for seemingly half of its running time of watching two people smolder at each other is a movie that needs to answer some tough questions about its priorities.
That's part of why I prefer the framework with Hana and Kip and David: it feels more consequential, more rooted in historical context, and more driven. None of this is accidental, mind you. An important part of Minghella's strategy in the film is to contrast the relatively straightforward, plain, and tangible "now" story with the heated, highly subjective and abstracted "then" story, which is meant to work as a hazy dream of physical memory and emotional states - it is an impressionistic approach rather than a narrative one, nimbly aided by cinematographer John Seale and composer Gabriel Yared, the most important members of the filmmaking team for helping to construct that kind of detached High Romantic atmosphere of feeling rather than observing. And I admire this. But I would admire 50 minutes of it every bit as much as I admire two hours of it.
The Italian framework, meanwhile, is much less showy, but for my tastes, much more meaningful. While Scott Thomas and Fiennes are stuck playing concepts of erotic psychology, Binoche simply gets to play a human being, and she's better in her role than either of them (Andrews is the best member of the cast every time he opens his mouth, but in a limited part that has been weirdly slashed down from its importance in the source novel). And instead of the heaving visual overstimulation of the Eternal Desert, it takes place in a perfectly realised, deeply physical space, one in which the use of color and framing and slowness do a superb job of evoking the feel of cool, damp air, and the rough texture of ancient brick and stone. If the romantic flashback segments of film are an evocation of the way we remember places and physical sensation, the framework evoke feeling things and being in places right now. And coupled with the more down-to-earth characterisations and performances, I find all of that to be more satisfying.
That all being said, The English Patient is exactly the kind of movie that feels like it ought to have an enormously passionate fanbase - it is an intense, lush experience that hits right in the gut, while the films I will eternally check it against, Fargo and Secrets & Lies, take dead aim at the brain and allow the libido to shrivel up unattended. The English Patient is utterly gorgeous, and it's lusty and sexy in a very literate, classy way - the R-rated Miramax equivalent to the star-studded, posh European superproductions of the 1960s. There's a lot to be said for that, even when the results are the kind of half-baked and over-baked confection that this particular film turns out to be. I do find it all a bit tiring rather than exhilarating, and I can't imagine that's what the filmmakers had in mind, but I absolutely do respect the top-to-bottom commitment to making this movie the most fleshed-out version of itself possible. It's an enormous, indulgent beast, but it's completely honest about it.
Thứ Hai, 1 tháng 6, 2015
BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CALIFORNIA IS FOR EARTHQUAKES
Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: we all know that San Andreas brings back the noble and intensely cliché-happy formula of the all-American disaster picture. What is perhaps a bit surprising is just how far back in history this particular lineage can be traced.
The greatest of all city theme songs, "San Francisco" ("...open your golden gate / You let nobody wait outside your door") feels like something that should have simply come into being spontaneously, not turned out as the result of something so crude as songwriters writing it. But that's exactly what happened: before it became one of the official songs of one of the world's great cities, it was written by Bronislaw Kaper, Walter Jurmann, and Gus Kahn as the theme for 1936's San Francisco, one of MGM's biggest productions that year, headlined by its A-listers Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. It's common for even non-musical Hollywood production of that era to sport a big song (and with MacDonald in one of the lead roles, San Francisco can't help but start to drift into the world of the musical), but rare indeed for that song to be used in such a structural way as we see here: over the course of the movie, "San Francisco" starts out off as a brash declaration from the rough-and-tumble underclass of the Barbary Coast, the most long-lived outpost of the city's birth in Old West lawlessness, it gradually shifts into an audible signifier of the characters' humble, honorable pasts as they attempt to disguise and redefine themselves, and it finally ends the film in the same way it's been used for eight decades since: as an anthem for the pride and resourcefulness of the people of a city that survived and rebuilt in the face of one of the most destructive natural disasters in North American history, the earthquake of April, 1906.
For that is exactly the subject San Francisco takes for itself. Not the earthquake itself, precisely, though the very first thing Anita Loos's screenplay does it to remind us via a title card that at 5:12 in the morning on 18 April, the city was devastated by a major quake, and the second thing it does is to portentously roll back the clock to the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day, 1906. Thus the first three-quarters of the movie (which comes in just shy of two hours) take on a grim cast, as the reasonably conventional romantic drama that makes up the bulk of the drama clicks by without ever quite letting us forget that we're only months - weeks - days - from the onset of horror. But the movie is only about the earthquake symptomatically; its deeper concern is with the rugged survival instinct of its characters, the kind of people who'd set up shop in what was, in 1906, just s 57-year-old city and still very aware of its rough, brutal roots. The film is enormously guilty of making Sweeping Proclamations about the kind of people who live in a given place, but it's still one of the best combined tributes to and criticisms of the character of a community. You needn't go any further into the future than 10 months later to find Fox's In Old Chicago, a movie that's almost a carbon copy of San Francisco in its plot structure and characterisations, to see what this looks like when it's not going right. This picture might be corny as all hell and its depiction San Francisco might be clichéd, essentialist, and reductive, but it has the goods.
As is already clear, I suspect, the film's basic shape is identical to disaster movies for decades to come: we get to know the characters, we get (hopefully) invested in their hopes and dreams, and we are as wrenched as they are by the slashing interruption of death and destruction across the smooth development of a conventional series of dramatic and melodramatic plot beats. And for as much as the movie hangs a sign reading "mind the earthquake" around the movie right at the start, it's genuinely startling and confusing when the world finally starts to move - having seen the film twice, I managed to be caught completely off-guard even the second time. Before that all happens, though, we get a loving recreation of the Barbary Coast of decades ago, in which "Blackie" Norton (Gable) is the owner of the Paradise, one of the Coast's most beloved and glamorously tacky clubs. The film kicks off when he hires Mary Blake (MacDonald), a classically trained singer from Colorado who has been in San Francisco for several fruitless weeks, trying to make her fortune in California like so many hopefuls before and after. Mary's exquisite voice is too rich and big for the Paradise, and she's aggressively courted for a job by Jack Burley (Jack Holt), a member of San Francisco high society and manager of the Tivoli opera house. Complicating things, while Blackie and Burley feud over Mary's career, they're both falling deeply in love with her, and her attraction to Blackie gets in the way of her own best judgment for her career and her dignity. Complicating things even more, Blackie has been tapped by the rest of the Barbary Coast business owners to run for the city's board of supervisors, a position he takes not to help secure their crooked interests, but to help reform and rebuild the coast. And he thus makes a major political enemy in the form of none other than Jack Burley. While all of this swirls around, Blackie's childhood best friend, Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy) tries to act as his conscience, but at least tries to make sure that Blackie can't drag Mary down into the mud with him.
The film benefits from a director with as tight a control of characterisation as Loos, and from director W.S. Van Dyke, one of those studio workhorses who has been almost entirely lost to history, but who could always be counted on for a drum-tight treatment of whatever story or genre was handed to him (his film with the longest shelf-life is undoubtedly The Thin Man, a crackerjack sophisticated comedy that resembles San Francisco only in that it is fearlessly well-paced and has a great central pair of performances). Having been gifted with a handsome reconstruction of 1906 San Francisco thanks to all of MGM's considerable resources, the filmmakers smartly fail to linger on it for the sake of sheer period spectacle, one of the most common mistakes of that studio's most prestigious film in that decade. Instead, the focus in on character and performance, with the result that the central trio of Gable, MacDonald, and Tracy are in great form: even stalled in the "beaming, moralistic Catholic" mode that he dealt with somewhat often at this point of his career, Tracy is up to some of his best work of the decade, while MacDonald is as good here as any anything she ever made outside of her defining collaborations with Ernst Lubitsch.
But Gable is the stand-out, given a tole that plays to every single one of his strengths, minimises his weaknesses, and guided by direction that encourages him to own the nastiness of his character rather than use his huge charisma to paper over it. Temperamentally and functionally, Blackie is a pure stock character, and there's nothing Gable can to do to fully eradicate that fact, but he does deepen it considerably. The actor and character mix sharp business acumen, borderline thuggish emotional bullying of Mary and Father Tim, and a goofy, sweet little boy attitude to love and the possibility of making the world a better place. He is a deeply enthusiastic figure, above all things, which makes his passions all the more moving (the way he cheerily snaps off the phrase "art-tistic achievement" is as good a line reading as any in Gable's career), and his blindly self-serving cruelty all the more horrifying, since we can so easily understand why his victims can be carried along with his pettiness.
Gable's performance is the thematic spine of San Francisco: the combination of can-do will and unsophisticated roughness that the film posits as the defining characteristics of the city's people. He makes such a life force on screen, in fact, that the movie can't quite cope with it: Loos's script, perhaps owing to jitters about glamorising bad boy behavior in the early Production Code era, obsessively ventriloquises Christian morality that it doesn't fully believe in, harping on Blackie's sinfulness and the danger he poses to Mary's very soul. But it feels very much not of a piece with the rest of the film, and the harder it tries to veer towards religion (which it does most strenuously in the final scene), the more inauthentic it feels. Doing good and being good isn't the film's true purpose: moral and spiritual ambiguity are where it's far more compelling and where it makes its strongest impact.
Gable, then, is one of the two reasons that San Francisco is more than an enjoyably polished studio picture; the earthquake itself is the other. It's not, maybe, the best effects work that could have been scrounged up, even in '36: the shaking sets feel an awful lot like shaking sets. But the sequence is a triumph of sound design (for which the film won its only Oscar, out of six nominations, including Best Picture) and even more of editing, which was overseen by John Hoffman for this sequence only. It's openly indebted to the Soviet montage theories of the late silent period, cutting between images with a frenzy that's impressive in the 2010s, and incomparably brutal and disorienting by the standards of the '30s. The savage chaos of the earthquake, the suddenness with which violence can strike, are both impressively communicated by this sequence; it is one of the triumphs of spectacular filmmaking in its entire generation. Even more so, given that it manages to achieve something that has evaded disaster movies since as long as they've existed (and this was by no means the first, though the genre began to take its most complete form beginning in the '30s): it depicts its disaster in an engrossing, spectacular way, while also making sure that we're not just exulting in mass death. The earthquake in San Francisco is utterly horrifying, showing how quickly and painfully human life could be snuffed out, and spending a great deal of time in the smoking, ruined aftermath, with Gable's glib Blackie turned into a shocked, dazed shell of a man as he moves through the devastation. It's closer to a horror movie than an action film, while also being as humane as any disaster picture on record. The passage of years would make onscreen devastation look more and more impressive and realistic with every new fad for the frequently-resurgent genre, but they'd tend to double-down on bland characters stuck in tired formulas (San Francisco is formulaic, but not bland), and this is one of those rare cases in which one of the earliest examples of a style is also among the very best.
For that is exactly the subject San Francisco takes for itself. Not the earthquake itself, precisely, though the very first thing Anita Loos's screenplay does it to remind us via a title card that at 5:12 in the morning on 18 April, the city was devastated by a major quake, and the second thing it does is to portentously roll back the clock to the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day, 1906. Thus the first three-quarters of the movie (which comes in just shy of two hours) take on a grim cast, as the reasonably conventional romantic drama that makes up the bulk of the drama clicks by without ever quite letting us forget that we're only months - weeks - days - from the onset of horror. But the movie is only about the earthquake symptomatically; its deeper concern is with the rugged survival instinct of its characters, the kind of people who'd set up shop in what was, in 1906, just s 57-year-old city and still very aware of its rough, brutal roots. The film is enormously guilty of making Sweeping Proclamations about the kind of people who live in a given place, but it's still one of the best combined tributes to and criticisms of the character of a community. You needn't go any further into the future than 10 months later to find Fox's In Old Chicago, a movie that's almost a carbon copy of San Francisco in its plot structure and characterisations, to see what this looks like when it's not going right. This picture might be corny as all hell and its depiction San Francisco might be clichéd, essentialist, and reductive, but it has the goods.
As is already clear, I suspect, the film's basic shape is identical to disaster movies for decades to come: we get to know the characters, we get (hopefully) invested in their hopes and dreams, and we are as wrenched as they are by the slashing interruption of death and destruction across the smooth development of a conventional series of dramatic and melodramatic plot beats. And for as much as the movie hangs a sign reading "mind the earthquake" around the movie right at the start, it's genuinely startling and confusing when the world finally starts to move - having seen the film twice, I managed to be caught completely off-guard even the second time. Before that all happens, though, we get a loving recreation of the Barbary Coast of decades ago, in which "Blackie" Norton (Gable) is the owner of the Paradise, one of the Coast's most beloved and glamorously tacky clubs. The film kicks off when he hires Mary Blake (MacDonald), a classically trained singer from Colorado who has been in San Francisco for several fruitless weeks, trying to make her fortune in California like so many hopefuls before and after. Mary's exquisite voice is too rich and big for the Paradise, and she's aggressively courted for a job by Jack Burley (Jack Holt), a member of San Francisco high society and manager of the Tivoli opera house. Complicating things, while Blackie and Burley feud over Mary's career, they're both falling deeply in love with her, and her attraction to Blackie gets in the way of her own best judgment for her career and her dignity. Complicating things even more, Blackie has been tapped by the rest of the Barbary Coast business owners to run for the city's board of supervisors, a position he takes not to help secure their crooked interests, but to help reform and rebuild the coast. And he thus makes a major political enemy in the form of none other than Jack Burley. While all of this swirls around, Blackie's childhood best friend, Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy) tries to act as his conscience, but at least tries to make sure that Blackie can't drag Mary down into the mud with him.
The film benefits from a director with as tight a control of characterisation as Loos, and from director W.S. Van Dyke, one of those studio workhorses who has been almost entirely lost to history, but who could always be counted on for a drum-tight treatment of whatever story or genre was handed to him (his film with the longest shelf-life is undoubtedly The Thin Man, a crackerjack sophisticated comedy that resembles San Francisco only in that it is fearlessly well-paced and has a great central pair of performances). Having been gifted with a handsome reconstruction of 1906 San Francisco thanks to all of MGM's considerable resources, the filmmakers smartly fail to linger on it for the sake of sheer period spectacle, one of the most common mistakes of that studio's most prestigious film in that decade. Instead, the focus in on character and performance, with the result that the central trio of Gable, MacDonald, and Tracy are in great form: even stalled in the "beaming, moralistic Catholic" mode that he dealt with somewhat often at this point of his career, Tracy is up to some of his best work of the decade, while MacDonald is as good here as any anything she ever made outside of her defining collaborations with Ernst Lubitsch.
But Gable is the stand-out, given a tole that plays to every single one of his strengths, minimises his weaknesses, and guided by direction that encourages him to own the nastiness of his character rather than use his huge charisma to paper over it. Temperamentally and functionally, Blackie is a pure stock character, and there's nothing Gable can to do to fully eradicate that fact, but he does deepen it considerably. The actor and character mix sharp business acumen, borderline thuggish emotional bullying of Mary and Father Tim, and a goofy, sweet little boy attitude to love and the possibility of making the world a better place. He is a deeply enthusiastic figure, above all things, which makes his passions all the more moving (the way he cheerily snaps off the phrase "art-tistic achievement" is as good a line reading as any in Gable's career), and his blindly self-serving cruelty all the more horrifying, since we can so easily understand why his victims can be carried along with his pettiness.
Gable's performance is the thematic spine of San Francisco: the combination of can-do will and unsophisticated roughness that the film posits as the defining characteristics of the city's people. He makes such a life force on screen, in fact, that the movie can't quite cope with it: Loos's script, perhaps owing to jitters about glamorising bad boy behavior in the early Production Code era, obsessively ventriloquises Christian morality that it doesn't fully believe in, harping on Blackie's sinfulness and the danger he poses to Mary's very soul. But it feels very much not of a piece with the rest of the film, and the harder it tries to veer towards religion (which it does most strenuously in the final scene), the more inauthentic it feels. Doing good and being good isn't the film's true purpose: moral and spiritual ambiguity are where it's far more compelling and where it makes its strongest impact.
Gable, then, is one of the two reasons that San Francisco is more than an enjoyably polished studio picture; the earthquake itself is the other. It's not, maybe, the best effects work that could have been scrounged up, even in '36: the shaking sets feel an awful lot like shaking sets. But the sequence is a triumph of sound design (for which the film won its only Oscar, out of six nominations, including Best Picture) and even more of editing, which was overseen by John Hoffman for this sequence only. It's openly indebted to the Soviet montage theories of the late silent period, cutting between images with a frenzy that's impressive in the 2010s, and incomparably brutal and disorienting by the standards of the '30s. The savage chaos of the earthquake, the suddenness with which violence can strike, are both impressively communicated by this sequence; it is one of the triumphs of spectacular filmmaking in its entire generation. Even more so, given that it manages to achieve something that has evaded disaster movies since as long as they've existed (and this was by no means the first, though the genre began to take its most complete form beginning in the '30s): it depicts its disaster in an engrossing, spectacular way, while also making sure that we're not just exulting in mass death. The earthquake in San Francisco is utterly horrifying, showing how quickly and painfully human life could be snuffed out, and spending a great deal of time in the smoking, ruined aftermath, with Gable's glib Blackie turned into a shocked, dazed shell of a man as he moves through the devastation. It's closer to a horror movie than an action film, while also being as humane as any disaster picture on record. The passage of years would make onscreen devastation look more and more impressive and realistic with every new fad for the frequently-resurgent genre, but they'd tend to double-down on bland characters stuck in tired formulas (San Francisco is formulaic, but not bland), and this is one of those rare cases in which one of the earliest examples of a style is also among the very best.
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