The Merchant Ivory movies are banquets of good taste that often don’t taste all that good. We ingest all the stellar acting, directing, high fidelity to original source material and all the lush fixings but we leave undernourished. After The Bostonians, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, Jefferson in Paris and The Golden Bowl, we ask ourselves if we’ve missed the main course. Merchant and Ivory are sometimes too gentlemenly as movie makers; they’re resolute
in being as “literary” as the novels they adapt and in doing so they often miss the elements of drama and surprise in the central themes—that is, the differences in expectations and emotional responses we derive from the word and the kinds we get from a movie. Two examples: the audience doesn’t perceive any punch when Emma finds out she was willed Howards End—it’s like “Oh, really?” as she slides her arm through Anthony’s—and in Remains the audience is robbed way too early of the irony
of the new owner of Darlington Hall. But with E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Merchant and Ivory are really connecting, we can feel this is material they feel through the flush of experience and they know where they’re going with it. They’ve found the heat in Forster in much the same fearless way director Iain Softley found it in James with The Wings of the Dove. (Even if the duo take a lot longer.) The fright for Maurice and his ilk in Edwardian England is that their closeted sexuality might be discovered and what would await them: social ruination, prison, even corporal punishment. In the age of Wilde, blackmail and entrapment are seemingly around every darkened corner. Yet love in the time of “obscene imaginings” is only mildly abated and in the long of painful celibacy there can be ladders to explosive orgasms. When Maurice is at just
about the end of his hold on his own mental well-being, he sees in his bedroom window the object of consummation. What man in his virginal state hasn’t come close to premature ejaculation when he’s in the throes of his first lustful embrace? If in Maurice Ivory gives us a case of claustrophobia with so many confining fussy settings, he never narrows the scope of what’s going on in them—his actors relish the chances to
keep in perpetually ruminative character—and he finally delivers a dream wet with satisfaction.
Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and the follow up Mr. Bridge are sometimes called satirical looks at the upper middle class American WASP out of 30s/40s Kansas. And somewhere on the Internet there’s a lousy essay making the
couple analogous to politician Robert Dole and presumably his wife Elizabeth. That is to say, because the essay didn’t have the guts to, no Whitey is really racist if the blacks and Jews and other minorities just do what the Bridges and the Doles tell them to. In another but more richly conceived essay on the net there’s the assertion that a reader is never sure what side the author is on; he’s observing through multiple short scenes the lives of a couple not yet coming to grips with their learned prejudices
their own children are quick to abandon. (Connell suggests the mindsets of Walter and India Bridge won’t change—mirroring the deserving fate of Elizabeth Dole’s reelection campaign.) The movie version Mr. & Mrs. Bridge by the Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala team attempts to combined both books and present evenly the frictional sides of Walter as a sex-starved uptight lawyer who's got a yen for one of the daughters, and
India a frump who never uses her brain. Because the Newmans—Paul and his wife Joanne Woodward—are on board, the social hatreds of Walter and the ignorance of India are constricted; the characters remain clearly what they are but any deep offense of bigotry or for the stupid is given the customary softening we’ve seen in other movies by the movie-making team. Newman and Woodward are first rate, acting better in this than anything they’ve done together since The Long, Hot
Summer. Naturally the character contrasts are the show: the old man is rigidity with cracks—he can’t really say no to his kids; the old bag a fumbling mess who during one crisis or other thinks tea or hot chocolate or the “Mystery of Marriage” pamphlet can be problem soothers. Walter believes he cuts through the crap; India’s unable to enforce a single proscription—like stopping Saundra McClain's scene-stealing maid Harriet from boozing on the job. (And India's inability to do much—she doesn't
even honk the car's horn!—is evidently the key to her last scene.) Woodward reportedly said that Mr. Bridge was closer to who Newman was than any other character he played and probably what she meant was the fatherly concerns and not Walter's politics. As for Woodward, many will recall that one of the great laughs from the Kael years was her quip that Woodward was “turning into the educated people’s Lana Turner.” After this and a few other “Hazel”esque performances, she fermented into
Shirley Booth.
That old codger John Simon could on rare occasion deliver a nifty: about New York, New York, he wrote that Martin Scorsese's “directorial vision seems to be no greater than that of a man driving through a downpour without turning on his windshield
wipers.” Nowhere in his piece does he intimate the downpour was likely blow. But Julia Phillips did, in her diarrhetic You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. Wheezing out a ton of dope-loaded intensity, NY, NY is a jittery trip down the Memorabilia Lane of the Big Band Era Scorsese calls his “most personal film.” With such inflamed indifference—the effects of bullshit improvisation out of
control—all the performers in it, all the things about it and probably most of the viewers watching it feel clogged, immobilized by the obsessiveness. Yet it's enough of a bummer curiosity to sit through. Flashing a not quite so grand art deco style by Boris Leven, and a lot of red producing a claustrophobic, mummified atmosphere, the movie is fascinating for its sickie contentiousness: Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli play off each other as if in the throes of war games. Who's going to go over the
top first? (Answered quickly.) Who's going to be the first punching bag? (Answered not so quickly.) Even discounting the druggy frenzies, they have more “energy” to burn than should be legal. They're also too confined in the old Hello, Dolly leftovers in which they're showcased as wastes: De Niro, once more doing a variation of Marty's wired ego syndrome, is an acting machine without an off switch,
and Minnelli is locked into gesturing and screwing up her over-cosmeticized
face with befuddled expressions. (The coke blocking the neuro transmissions?) If only she weren't playing it up as such a hideous looking thing, with her Andrew Sisters hair, her horrible drag costumes, her sexlessness. While her mouthing of the soundtrack is sometimes not quite in sync with the strength with which she sings, the singing is as good as it has ever been. On DVD, Scorsese restored the number “Happy Endings,” cut originally because of the film’s running time, but I couldn't determine
its non-reality—is it a theatre stage number or staged on a set of a movie inside the movie? New York, New York is what happens when good artists escape to influences through which they convince themselves their visions are clear and in check. That's what Richard Dreyfuss thought too, before he experienced the horror of seeing his bloated mug splattered across the screen in Close Encounters. Looking back, all
of them seemed ready for Betty Ford even before opening its doors.
Rob
Marshall's
Nine is about as sexy straight as Elena Kagan. Bloated with
neutered incidentals about Daniel Day Lewis's Guido as an irresistible kingpin
director suffering a mid-life crisis in the midst of a creative one, the
musical is apparently about his reconciliation with himself and his wandering
fancies and at the same time with his long-suffering wife, his mother and
his extramarital bimbos. Those who sat through all of Fellini's
8½, progenitor of the musical, may have eventually
picked up on what it seemed to be about—a vanity celebration
of the exhausting vagaries of a genius who just happens to be Italy's most
famous movie maker. A lot of hopeless-to-explain viewers defend the meandering
with fulsome theories and those of us who don't merely accept it as foreplay
to the visual cums he'd later splatter all over the screen. But why Marshall
is helming this unmelodic roundelay about Fellini's alter and his broads
locked into their Euro brooding is a bit more perplexing for both sides. He
got away with Chicago because he cut any risk of emotional
attachment and relied on staccato editing and stiletto choreography to transform
the original Roxie Hart into a cold-blooded wench; his triumph was avoiding
having to go to bed with Renée Zellweger. (Even the equal opportunity
offender “Family Guy” got it right about her.) He can't, however,
get away with his antiseptic barriers in
Nine. This is a decidedly hetero mélange of pseudo
reality and fantasy demanding erotic sizzle between the boring mournings
after; instead, we sense the same apprehension that most of the performers
project: we feel and the actors look trapped in the director's dissociation,
his estrangement, from the material. Unable to knead his shoot-the-wads
flashiness to an egotist's daydreaming, some sympathy is due: the Arthur
Kopit book of
Nine
is inchoate, scrambled with things going every
which way (just like the primary source). Michael Tolkin (The
Player) did the screenplay and Anthony Minghella provided polishing
(before dying several months prior to the start of filming) and likely both
writers might have surrendered to the gamble that the magnetic presence of
Javier Bardem as a seductive Guido would coalesce all the fragmentation because
their own efforts to fortify the puerility came up woefully short. Then Bardem
pulled out and Day Lewis came on board, altering the sexual force and ethnicity
of the character. And Maury Yeston's score hasn't much to cream over either;
when story elements are turned into lyrics and melody, the sounds are discordant
and Marshall's presentations, requiring sensuality over gymnastic gyrations,
just too damned derivative. Carmenized in top-heavy curls,
Fergie works those chairs from Cabaret and
Chicago when belting out “Be Italian,” and she's
nearly overwhelmed by the cavernous set; Penélope Cruz slithers down
that tiresome ubiquitous (and pink!) phallic symbol while singing minus irony
“A Call from the Vatican”; and Kate Hudson's energizing “Cinema
Italiano” is more a 60s homage to her mother circa “Laugh In”
done MTV style than as tribute to Guido. (Are there whiffs of plagiarism
in the song and routine? From “Thriller” maybe?) Only one of the
tunes, “Unusual Way,” had the promise of torch, voiced with poignancy
by Nicole Kidman in a prom formal, but the number is never a whole, it's
been chopped into pieces so there's no build. An alarm goes off when Judi
Dench appears in an Anna Wintour cut and it keeps wailing as she sings
“Folies Bergère” like a female Maurice Chevalier. Marion
Cotillard does a Madonna-like “Take It All” and while warbling
“My Husband Makes Movies” she walks up and down stairs rather
idiotically. There's a need for a shock absorber when Sophia Loren can't
do a simple waltz with her son the movie maker—she's uncertain
and ungraceful, unforgivable coming from a director who's a master dancer.
(He hides her in funereal candles, ready for visitation.) Trying to act out
the mess, flabless Daniel Day Lewis puts his trust in smiles, accent, acrobatics
on scaffolding and an overload of cigarettes. He's the kind of thespian who
turns the craft of acting into the art of vacancy. With the shivers and
sexlessness of
Nine, Marshall turns himself into a closeted
lesbian.
Barbara Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand is the pivotal biography on the 20th Century’s most controversial philosopher; it takes you into murk no
one had sloshed through before and that every subsequent
book about Rand has borrowed—if not stolen—from. Foremost throughout Branden’s intimate recollections is the revelation of her subject as the ultimate selfish bitch. By the time you finish the 422 pages, you’re convinced that Rand was her own planet circling her own sun and you’re also sure that she was pernicious as inner person who received—and continues to receive—reverential respect she doesn’t deserve. Branden is incisive and insightful as she psychologically dives into Rand who, while railing against
religion and the contemptible mobs, fostered her own propaganda and clique in the form of Objectivism. But you’re just as struck that as intelligent as Branden is, she sacrificed her own sense of self to a dumfounding altruism that was anathema to the Goddess she worshiped. She’s written an apologia not just about her own tolerance of and then justifiable exit from Rand’s ruinous personal influence but also an unsettled forgiveness of the woman she had every right to hate more than love. What’s uncomfortably implicit
is that Branden is writing the confession many of us have agonized through when our entrancement by the mesmerizing intelligence of a human nova turns to embarrassing self-clarity, how we acceded to subservience to a higher power who “denounces,” “rejects,” “scolds,” “accuses,” “threatens” and “despises” all others by self-righteous decree, who is irrational, surreptitious, an emotional murderer like the rest of us. All of this comes out in the Showtime version of The Passion of Ayn Rand. In a resonating depiction that makes the movie the perfect companion piece to the second half of the book, Helen Mirren once again sheds her own star skin to become a conduit to history. Her Ayn is not a pretty picture; the fearsome effrontery is there from the start and the dread steadily builds until the brutal slaps against Barbara’s husband Nathaniel, real assaults the real Rand neither apologized
for nor had the perception to see as the beginning of the collapse of her reign of reason and rationale. Today Rand’s philosophy in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is still entertaining and very stimulating reading; for simplification’s sake, her Objectivism tantalizes for its importance of liberation of self from the shackles of conformity. And when watching videos of her debates
with others, it’s inescapable that she’s blade-sharp, ready to cut to smithereens opposing views of those who dare to challenge but, as with the novels, the value is in the drama of the writer, her ideas second. This is the diametric opposite of what she said she intended; it is, nevertheless, the absolutism of her life. Rand never solely ran her own business or ever ran for public office or accepted an appointed or advisory position in government in an effort to apply her laissez
faire doctrine. But disciple Alan Greenspan did and we’re now left in the horrific wake of capitalist deregulation. Beware what your atlas shrugs.
FRAULEIN
X: Remember Keir Dullea defending Lana
Turner against a murder charge in the soaper Madame X and in
the finale he finds out he's the son she was forced by a hateful mother-in-law
to give up years ago because of some sudsy crime of social embarrassment?
There's a very distant kinship to that kind of fear of revelation in
The
Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry
and written by David Hare, the same team that gave us The
Hours, yet another drama about the damages of secrets. Liked
The
Reader because we're not allowed
to know why German Michael Berg (the younger played by David Kross, the older
by Ralph Fiennes) never revealed exculpatory evidence to lessen the punishment
of WWII crimes by Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) as an Auschwitz/Kraków/Death
March guard who was held chiefly responsible for murdering hundreds of Jews
by locking them in a burning church. It's obvious initially why Berg doesn't:
he had a brief but very hot affair with the considerably older Hanna
in 1958 that no one knew much about (though his dad might have suspected he was getting
laid). The affair having been over for some years, Berg is now a law student
of Bruno Ganz and required to attend public trials and during one of them
he discovers Hanna is being charged for crimes against humanity he knew nothing
about. (Neither he nor Hanna discussed a whole lot between sex except books;
they didn't even exchange names during the earlier period of their relationship.)
Despite his embarrassment, he consults with Ganz about knowing information
that would assist her and he even goes to see her before the trial ends.
Arriving at the prison, he gets a case of cold feet, exits before the visit,
and decides not to inform the court of what he knows as fact. Subsequently
Hanna is given a much harsher sentence than the five other guards, who in
effect frame her by claiming it was she who wrote the typical Nazi
fill-in-every-detail report of the extermination in the church. As her personal
reader of novels (including War and Peace, Lady Chatterley's
Lover, Chekov's The Lady and the Dog), Berg knows that
she couldn't have written it. Aside from the potential mortification of admitting
he knew and in what ways he knew her, he may have deemed that Hanna's own
testimony, voiced with chillingly curt apathy, was sufficiently self-damning.
He might have felt his own generation's pressure to condemn the Germans who
were villainous Nazis (as a clear distinction from regular German Army),
though the scenes in the theatrical release don't emphasize this as much
as the deleted ones on the DVD release. Possibly more central to his lack
of help is that he was going to punish her, far less for Holocaust
atrocities, much more for having ended their affair so abruptly, for having
literally walked out of his life. But we're not sure. We're not sure, either,
why the prison authorities didn't intervene on her behalf when they would
inevitably discover Hanna lacked literate functionality. When
The
Reader was in the running for some
2008 Oscars and various critics' associations honors, there were more than
just a few on the Internet, and in the printed press as well, who complained
that if a major movie deals with the Holocaust, it usually gets priority
consideration. Before this movie, there was Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, Polanski's The
Pianist, and before them Life is Beautiful and
Schindler's List, and before those The Music Box
and Sophie's Choice. (Even Italy did a prestige TV special
entitled “Angela,” and I'm intentionally avoiding other movie examples
and TV's “The Holocaust,” “Playing for Time,” “Escape from Sobidor” and “War and Remembrance.”)
The complaints have more than a whiff of prejudice, but it doesn't make them
entirely illegitimate. There's something about Zyclon B dramas and their
derivatives that get voters to check their ballots; giving awards to them
seems a way of easing a collective guilty conscience, a way of distancing
the painful reality of an unimaginably horrific part of our world history.
Because it's safely on screen, and not in our neighborhood like Dachau, the
unimaginable becomes the art of irony. While the actor members of the Academy
of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences nominated Winslet for the right performance
in the best actress category (wisely ignoring her misfittedness in
Revolutionary Road), one of the ironies of her Oscar win is
that Hanna's demise was a self-imposed sentence without reflexive moral mandate.
The audience isn't stomping for blood due to Winslet's precisioned balancing
of Hanna's lack of education with a growing self-discomfiture about war deeds
and actions she originally failed to equate with inhumanity. Ironies perhaps stronger
and arguably more immoral when joined are her reader's ambiguity and ambivalence.
TUPPERWARE
ROAD: What is the best actress of
her generation doing in her husband's poopo profundo
Revolutionary
Road? Kate Winslet plays a morose,
discontented 1950s American wife and mother of two who can't move beyond
the flop she made of herself in some local theatre production. Not only is
the character second rate whine, Winslet aches out a second-ratedness; the
conspicuous miscasting is too much for her. And for us: the marriage to Leonardo
DiCaprio is in crisis too early into the movie—they start arguing in
the car and DiCaprio pulls into a highway rest stop and they get out and
re-do George and Martha's “total war” from Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?—but without any preparatory details we can't
gauge the depth of their bitter estrangement. The on-going shouts and insults
are glazed, as in impenetrable; the otherwise dollar store grievances
are being viewed through Tupperware, matching the prestige cast. As
the movie bloats forward, somebody forgot to burp Tup's patented top
because Kate begins to leak flatulence about escape, wanting to drop out
of middle class entrapment and move to Paris so hubby can find himself while
she works as some secretary. Huh?! We don't believe it for
a minute, and neither can she. In short order she expands her gripes; still
maintaining a spotless home while packing for the trip, she spouts a mix
of Ayn Rand and The Feminine Mystique and the whole dreary
panoply—“the hopeless emptiness” of her life, the search for
“truth,” how she has to find a place for herself, wanting a
“whole other future”—gets trotted out. But the departure to
happier pastures gets stuck in a detour when she discovers she's pregnant
again and hubby is offered a promotion. Except for some sleazy dancing
and quickie in a parking lot with her neighbor, her mood becomes increasingly
encased in depression; she becomes a female eunuch out of 'night,
Mother. We don't need to read Richard Yates' novel to know it's coming
(or welcome it). We do, however, in order to penetrate the movie because
Justin Haythe's script is inchoate and badgering. The novel, published in
1961 to excellent reviews but never a popular read until now, is a more damning
version (I'd say steal) of Sloan Wilson's
The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit. Where Wilson uses WWII as early foundation of problems
to come, Yates attempts to connect the Revolution of 1776 to the need to
be freed from the shackles of the Eisenhower 50s, that handy whipping boy
period supposedly responsible for discontenting people to their deaths. Though
both writers use career drive, materialism and television as culprits for
the decade's sociological ills, Yates excoriates them as lethal traps, that
they kill individuality. He makes King George's oppressions and Rand's warning
of mind-numbing conformity worthy of a two-fer—abortion
and suicide. (So that's what the Revolution was all about.
Who knew?) Haythe's screenplay, centering on “poor me” harangues,
booze and adulterous sex, is probably not meant to be this impersonal, but
Sam Mendes's direction, particularly of his wife, is very and that's
what's fatal. His removal of anything we can feel for the couple—for
example, when we see them with their children—seems an
intentional omission of emotions so that once more he can give in to
his penchant for being judgmental about American social mores. Just
who the fuck is he to finger-point about our sins? After his freeze-dried
nit-picking in American Beauty and now
Revolutionary
Road, American moviegoers should
insist he be deported back to England and made to take a hard look at the
moral collapse of the promise of Tony Blair's Labour Party. He'd have plenty
to bitch about. DiCaprio manages not to embarrass himself, though he's mired
in so many brawling matches it's difficult to recall his better moments.
Kathy Bates represents Yates' hatred of duplicity: she periodically incarcerates
her son, played by Michael Shannon, for suffering the scary 50s mental illness
best described as bluntis truthitis. But he brings a bit of energy to the
Tupperware Road wake. The movie's very ending, right out of the novel, provides
a remuneration for the audience, a rather dangerous one at that: as Bates
backstabs, her husband turns off his hearing aid and it's the perfect
gesture reflecting what many of us feel about what we've
sat through.
Excepting Richard Lester's Robin & Marian, long time pop promulgation hasn’t permitted much of a somber view of the mythology of Robin Hood, not after Errol Flynn's romp in The Adventures of..., Mel Brooks’ takeoff
Men in Tights, or Kevin Costner’s Prince
of Thieves. (Or the Patrick Bergen version
bordering on the humorously psychotic.) Watching Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, with Russell Crowe as the democratic rogue, it’s assumed by the beginning—the intro of Cate Blanchett’s Marion—that things are going to be played relatively straight and soon confirmed when Eleanor of Acquitaine regally cautions her malevolent wus of a son John on the hazards of duplicity with Godfrey (Mark Strong,
fresh
from Sherlock Holmes, doing Basil Rathbone). And in this version of the Robin legend Richard the Lionheart is dispensed with quickly. At the conclusion, we’re still not sure what to make of where we’ve been taken. We’ve spent all that time carefully watching Crowe (and his growing warts) and Cate hoping for clues yet what we get from them aren’t jocular talking points but polite foreplay. It isn’t until Robin’s unmerries booze on bees’ honey that things loosen up and that the
material
isn’t meant to be as luggy and stale as it appears. (The uplift doesn’t last long, though in the climatic battle against France’s King Philip, we get Cate doing a Keira out of King Arthur.) The movie opens very dark and remains under-lit throughout that even in Blu-ray we can’t always tell what’s happening in scenes. If the wattage had been turned up just a bit, we might have been able to see where the money was spent, because this is a tempered spectacle without much computer fakery.
Spending in excess of $430,000,000 on Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and now Robin Hood, Scott has become Samuel Bronston reincarnated.
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) was released in pre-war France in 1939 and met with protests and bans. About an Upstairs/Downstairs flock of empty-headed romancing adulterers who gather for a hunt and surprise masquerade party to relieve their mounting boredom, the Jean Renior-directed classic romp is as
much of a mirror of class privilege today as what was reflected then. Because, let’s face it, we haven’t changed; the class-separated money-hungry amoralists, for the most part, are still getting away with crimes paid for by everyone else. Fresh eyes to this work probably will not be as impressed as many previous viewers and critics were; we’ve had and probably have had it with the movie's “sophisticated” influence in endless refills of upper/lower class dramas—remember The Shooting Party?—and only last season the world went nuts for “Downton Abbey.” What’s very impressive about Renoir’s movie isn’t only the flowing camera or editing but also, maybe primarily, the aphoristic dialogue, both smartly and hurriedly spoken—we really need to be fast absorbers of loaded subtitles. The lead actress Nora Gregor, as Christine, doesn’t
quite emerge as singular a presence as the others in the cast and hardly her fault: for seasoned British and American audiences, she’s a conflation of Sonja Henie, Judith Anderson, Celia Johnson and Pat Nixon (Richard’s wife). The apparent ease with which her Christine jumps from one man to another to corpse and then arrogantly assume protective excuse is lasting barometer. If moralists back then were outraged that rules of retribution weren’t abided by, it’s not known outside of art houses if audiences actually
laughed at the lack of them. The new Criterion Blu-ray edition has a cover inviting titters but don’t be too shocked if our atlas of twittering twats merely shrugs.
UGLY
ANNA: R. J.
Cutler's The September
Issue isn't a documentary on Anna
Wintour's reign at Vogue, it's a kissumentary. No accident
that the chronicler was granted access to Wintour and Vogue a
year after the splash of Streep's characterization of her in The Devil
Wears Prada—a cunning way to respond to all the media
speculation that Streep got too close. What do we get? A reserved frostie
as ringer for Lee Grant who wears her flapper hair and sun glasses as
protective armor. We're not going to be allowed to know much about her, we're
only going to be allowed to see that she's as much performance art as the
art Vogue fashion editor Grace Coddington conjures for the
designers deigned worthy by the industry's most powerful arbiter. Absent
is a single moment of the meaning of “stuff” that Miranda Priestly so expertly conveyed; not a single word about Wintour avoiding elevators if they were filled with the little people; not even a wink about why she's called “Nuclear Wintour.” If power is all about career-making, setting trends
and propelling sales via a print medium, Wintour may be the most influential
print deity of all time. And the worst-dressed: reported that she gets an
annual $200,000 clothing allowance but who'd be caught buried in those
printastrophes, those sleeveless frumpy geometrics and Rorschach tests? For
the movie's poster, she's wearing one of those atrocities, accessorized by
a bread loafs-like fur scarf, over-her-calves booties and, as more armor,
a gray coat with a collar that suggests a skinned Chinese Shar Pei. (At the recent State dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao, she was equally ugly in a business suit with a Vogue circulation chart as pattern.) In droopy black, looking somewhat like
the bohemian older sister of actress Lindsay Duncan (Servilia in HBO's “Rome”), Coddington, a former model, has the flair for extreme
stylistic presentation, and, after decades of a working relationship with
Wintour, a much-needed skill for expressing subterranean bitchery. The design
star of the inside pages, she's smartly obeisant to her boss. In an industry
that takes no prisoners, that sucks on the tits of genuine creative artists
and pansy provocateurs who in turn grovel for glossy spreads and mentions,
Wintour exalts as its supreme cipher, a hag in high-priced rags deconstructing
the glam she's pushing. The rendition of herself would be contemptuous camp
if not for its contemptible intentions. Wikipedia is more revelatory than Cutler's ass-kissing.
Too soon into Sex and the City 2, as you’re hearing a chorus sing “If
Ever I Would Leave You” at the nuptials of Him & Him, you begin to feel a creepiness coming on fast and just a few minutes later, when that mascara-drenched jackal Liza Minnelli shows up several decades removed from Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” your worst fears are realized—you’re already sick of the whole shebang and there are almost two hours to go. It gets worse: the over-the-top Patricia Field outfits on every scale, the over-stressing of the latest “women’s issues,” the plot contrivances that
are not germane but preposterous, the men never having much to do except fulfil crotch fantasies. (And this time out they’re falling short on their duties.) Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie and Kim Cattrall’s Samantha are self-absorbed Randettes with ever growing and irritating unattractiveness. Does anyone give a shit about Carrie’s desire to make a life just for herself and Big, how they don’t need children, how she’s crackbrained over a kiss she received from a previous lover in Abu Dhabi? Would we be surprised
that if there’s another chapter of these Anna Wintour bimbos she’ll find Big enlarging elsewhere? Parker’s Jewish sense of style has become faulty and never clearer than when she buys that pair of pukey Aladdin-like shoes. And what is that parasol-like atrocity she’s wearing in the market? How many more of Samantha’s droolings for meat must we have to endure? And what’s with the suitcase as a gynecological pharmacy? She’s a hustler going to extremes to salvage the kooze nobody wants anymore.
It’s enough to make us want to booze—permanently. Inexcusably dumbass that the movie is filmed in Morocco but the settings are pretending to be Abu Dhabi, similar to the idiocy of using Malibu as Mexico in the first S&C movie. It’s also offensive that Samantha defies the restraints of her host's country by feeling up a stud in a restaurant in front of native patrons and flips the bird to judgemental gawkers when her purse spills out condoms. Is there a purpose for flaunting her
ugly Americaness? For that violation of the infantile, she and director Michael Patrick King and writer Candace Bushnell deserve immediate arrest and imprisonment at Abu Ghraib. (We're thankful we believe in more than one second chance: wasted in The Ghost Writer, Cattrall redeems herself opposite Matthew Macfadyen in Channel 4's “Any Human Heart.”) Like the legion of fans for the original series, I’ve often enjoyed the broads and the situations they encountered and how they sought
resolutions to their dilemmas in about 30 minutes per episode. The superficial accoutrements weren’t too hyperbolized and sometimes the price for the phoniness of fame
was very funny, like when Carrie falls on her ass as a runway model and one of the gay chums comments, “OMG, she’s fashion road kill.” Sometimes I could be very moved by the interference of real life: when Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda was on the blower telling Carrie about her mom’s sudden death, it was a scene verbatim out of my own life. But movie versions of TV shows suffer inherent danger in elongation, exposing their bibles by using empty filler, the gimmicks and the limitations that charmed
through installments become taxing when confined. Maybe only the Star
Trek franchise defies this because of scifi nuts' continuing need for greater special effects and outlandish new worlds. But we know the world of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Kristin Davis’s Charlotte too well. Listening to Carrie in this installment, via voice over or on the phone or in direct conversations with all the others, the utterances are mundane, repetitious, without our need to know. It’s fatal for the movie to supply its own review, even if it’s a fictional one in The
New Yorker. The caricature accompanying the piece, with Carrie's mouth taped shut, says it all. Justly earning Razzies for Worst Screen Couple/Ensemble, Worst Prequel/Remake/Rip-Off/Sequel and Worst Actress for the gal pals.
Avoided the 2009
Sherlock
Holmes for a while because the
previews and clips suggested it's a little too over the top, and I'm not
crazy about Robert Downey, Jr., or Jude Law, who gets my flesh crawling.
Then my niece hands me the DVD and says, “You liked The
Illusionist, you might like this one.” Clever girl: I didn't
just like the latter, I loved it. Skillfully, patiently directed by Neil
Burger, the flick's captivating, romantic and exquisitely shot chiaroscuro
style by Dick Pope, with subtle visual and special effects and a last stage
trick out and out startling. But a movie by Guy Ritchie compares to one of
2006's best? With a moody lampblack opening like a 19th Century James Bond
cross-pollinated with Batman and Robin, and with Downey speaking with a winning
accent stolen from Christopher Hitchens (with insertions of Cedric Hardwicke,
Ralph Richardson and Robert Stephens, who also played the sleuth),
Sherlock
Holmes compares
very favorably. With so many surprises to choose from,
the biggest, of course, has to be Ritchie. Who thought he had it
in him to put together a refurbished Holmes & Watson tale? While the
actors' chatter and some of the action remain at credibility's edge, tho
never to the detriment of the audience's reception, Richie's shared vision
of an industrial charcoal London—the crowded and dealing
alleys, dirt-covered streets and booming construction—is
the joy of this entertainment. Our eyes are often battling
to absorb all the inspired flourishes: Sarah Greenwood's production design,
the art direction by Niall Moroney and James Foster and James Foster and
Nick Gottschalk and Matthew Gary, Kate Spencer's set decorations and some
spiffy costumes by Jenny Beavan. And the CGIers, the names too numerous
to mention, honorably spent a mighty portion of the $90,000,000 price tag.
Saving for special mention Philippe Rousselot's lush Stygian-like lighting
and photography and the sharp blade editing by James Herbert; together they
encase and speed forward the expectant Holmesian cleverness as chimera. The
major villain, first glimpsed with a serpent's tooth, is Mark Strong giving
homage to Danny DeVito's Penguin, and the moviemakers even threw in a variation
of Bond's Jaws—Robert Maillet as Dredger. The tasty pleasure
of this techno eclair is that it oozes rich filling without the dangers of
excess trans fat.
An unlikely source
of praise for A Single
Man comes from Chris Matthews
who on MSNBC’s “Hardball” applauded Colin Firth’s work
as “the best performance of a homosexual since Peter Finch’s in
Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” Coming from that movie-loving
liberal blowhard, we might
be tempted to over-hail Firth’s class act depiction of an early 60s closeted
college professor who’s in sedate suicidal mourning over the loss of
his lover of 16 years to an accident, even though we perceive early
on that the aspirin intake quietly tweets a serious malady as plot linchpin.
The dilemma, at least for me, is accepting Firth for what,
exactly—his
sexless trot to the grave? Director Tom Ford says that his movie
début is about enjoying life’s senses to the fullest, but
how can that be when Firth’s character is repressing the most vital
ones when he refuses the services of a Spanish hustler who apparently has
the assets to fully reawaken them. What man in his rightfully lusty mind
would turn that away? The final day’s “clarity” of Firth’s
teacher equals courteous rejection and subsiding death wish: the
portrayal has a Fanny Hurst/Manuel Puig flavor of self-sacrifice filtered
through Christopher Isherwood’s sensibilities. That in 2009 a highly
respected gay artist would make a movie sponsoring denial over cuming is
an appalling contradiction; there’s not a chance in whoever’s Hell
that Ford himself would buy into the chastity he’s putting Firth through.
It’s a betrayal; neither the material nor the audience deserves this
retrograde oppressiveness, not when our own experiences reflect the reality
that grief often propels the strong urge for sex. What
isn't sanctimonious is Ford's compulsive/obsessive designer
eye—he’s
meticulous, almost methodically spot-on with details (the “light in
your loafers” self-bio sequence), incidentals, very much owing to John
Schlesinger and his Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Frequently, however,
we have to remind ourselves that
A Single
Man is set in 1962, and we get
help only occasionally from that Brigette Bardot wanna-be in Firth’s
classroom, the mohair sweater worn by the Angel of Life, and Julianne Moore
in a trashy Ann-Margret-as-Blanche-Devereaux bouffant. (Moore and Firth are
a little like a “Will and Grace” duo.) Up close, Firth carries
a nipper of Christopher Hitchens, and in those nerdy glasses he conjures
up Marcello Mastroianni out of 8 ½ and Michael
Caine. Matthews’s hosanna for Firth would be earned if it hadn't been attached
to an infuriating inference Ford seems to
endorse—Ken
Mehlman's self-loathing that the only good gay man is a dead one.
Hardly an accident that the beginning and ending sequences of David Fincher’s The Social Network conclude with the admonishments that Mark Zuckerberg, the face of Facebook,
is either “an asshole” or tries very hard to be one. If we evaluate him by this movie, by what we’ve read about him elsewhere and by what we saw during his interview with Leslie Stahl on “60 Minutes,” Zuckerberg doesn’t need to try to be one because the malady seems built into his DNA—his dysfunctional nature and attitude. Along with Sarah Palin, he’s about the most fitting example of the persistent narcissism infecting us as social beings because, despite his anti-social tics, he’s convinced over 500
million of
the equally self-absorbed that there’s value in an endless supply of digital photos, alarmingly empty-headed “me too-ism” and idiotic exposure of privacies. (Click here for my own experience.) All of this makes the movie riveting, and if some of it doesn't appear germane to the story Fincher is telling, its collective self-centeredness
definitely is—as a tale so expansive it overrides everything we regard as social etiquette. Now the social norm, Facebook is the International Directory for exposing en masse traits we were once educated not to. On that basis, and if not bestowed by closeted Facebook addicts, the movie’s many awards as the year’s best are legitimate, and it can be said unhesitatingly Fincher has never been better as a director. (Remember Alien 3 as a scorched bathhouse for psychos, or the spiked dildo slaughter
of
Se7en?) Andrew Garfield’s
thick-haired Eduardo Saverin stands out as the only character worthy of shedding regret for, while Justin Timberlake’s turn as Sean Parker sufficiently recoils until he’s seen swishing away from the camera in a scene or two, reminding us that he's a little too relaxed as one of Beyoncé's “Single Ladies.”
Except for Sweet Smell of Success, which I saw again during TCM’s tribute, was Tony Curtis any good? The greasy curls, the “low life” persona, the years of waste in one bad sex comedy after another, he personified the
pinups from the old movie magazines a little too well—he solicited as a “pretty boy.” Remember when the Empress wrote about Marcello in A Special Day—that he’s a “little loose in the seat”? Fits Curtis and evident in Paris When it Sizzles. (He and Louis Jourdan might have triumphed together in La Cage aux folles.) But in a role which needs whorishness, as in Sweet Smell, he holds
up, he deliciously becomes the slime bag he portrays. He’s not afraid of Burt Lancaster as actor, either, and it’s another treat for foofs that otherwise domineering Burt allows all of his co-stars their moments—including Martin Milner in the scene during which he’s trying not to have to kiss Lancaster’s ass while eager to stomp on Tony’s. The movie itself really holds up too, infected with Walter Winchell menace and Dorothy Kilgallen bitch venom, and the seamy heavy “night life” b & w look is like sludge
to plow through. I’ve always had it for ex-stripper Barbara Nichols. Her harsh blondness and shrill voice were trademarks that unfortunately narrowed her opportunities, and the buxomly cheapness had been over-exposed in those sleazy men’s magazines of the 50s. Yet she had an innate agreeableness about her, an endearing way of working her not-so-smarts. You didn’t feel a need to protect her, as you did with Marilyn, but she had grit and empathy. In Sweet Smell
of Success, director Alexander Machendrick tones her down, even letting her whisper, and guides her in pulling off a difficult sequence during which Curtis pimps her out. That she’s typecast is obvious; that she’s memorable against the likes of Lancaster and Curtis remains no small feat.
2012 is, story-wise,
ineffably dumb-dumb, but all of us who've seen Roland Emmerich's other special
effects extravagances—Independence Day and
The Day After Tomorrow—know that going in.
We keep going back for the next outlandish CGI fix and Emmerich delivers
with eye-popping catastrophe. Who doesn't enjoy it when L.A., Vegas, the
White House and the Vatican get theirs? Disbelief on automatic suspension,
Emmerich still pulls a few boners too many. How could it be technically possible
to build in two years those giant updated Noah's Arks deep in the Himalayas?
The dynamiting of the mountains and removal of the dirt and the building
of the mammoth caves and roads to transport to and fro the materials to the
caverns would have taken at least a decade, no? But the selected throngs
don't ask, they only clamor in frenzy to get on board, including England's
Queenie and her shitting Corgis, before the apocalyptic tidal waves hit.
John Cusack must have it written into his contracts that he wear black (no
star seems to need it more), and as I write this, I can't remember the names
of any of the other actors in the cast except Woody Harrelson, continuing
the over-done quackery of Randy Quaid in
ID4.
Peter O’Toole explains it all for us: Venus is “about a dirty old man and a sluttish young woman.” Wrap it in the world of septuagenarian actors, throw in a bit of pleb
Pygmalion and a dash of vulgar Educating Rita and what we get is O’Toole delivering a master's love of his craft. It’s a near-capper to a long career of frayed, flawed eccentrics—Lawrence, Henry II, the Earl of Gurney, Eli Cross, even Anton Ego—that have become his destiny fulfilled. No other elder actor alive right now could do Maurice—and perhaps no other actor would want to because in order to play him, he has to be utterly fearless. (Hollywood was probably a bit too skittish to
bestow the Oscar he deserved, not after that table scene.) With Vanessa Redgrave enhancing further her welcomed magnanimity and Jodie Whittaker as Jessie. Directed by Roger Mitchell, whose most popular movie is the trifle Notting Hill, and penned by Hanif Kureiski, who wrote My Beautiful Laundrette, Venus is not based on but is inspired by the Junichiro Tanizaki novella Diary of a Mad Old
Man, a fitting subtitle. A year later O'Toole would provide wondrous fun in the nonsense of Ratatouille, for which he maximizes his voice as Anton in a mellifluous British drawling the likes of which have never been heard before. It may be the greatest supporting act in animation.
Paul Schrader’s 2007 The Walker has as close to zero pulse as an otherwise interesting movie gets. A glimpse of the hangers-on class in Washington, it’s about a gentleman
who spends most of his time escorting the bored wives to functions their hubbies conveniently become too busy to attend. Since most of the male companions known as “walkers” are gay, the absent husbands are presumably worry-free about any beddie-bye consequences but, as Woody Harrelson represents, walkers are often the most “in the know” consumers of gossip, specifically the ruinous kind. And so when there’s a murder within his coterie, he becomes convenient suspect and even more conveniently dropped by
his card-playing hags. Harrelson reportedly disliked his own work, though he’s anything but bad doing a combo of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. His self-evaluation might be showing a bit of kindness towards Schrader who composes as if he's latently human and conducts as a dead director walking. You see and hear his impairments in wasting the topnotch supporting cast of Kristen Scott Thomas (why is she always so sourpussy?), Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin and William Defoe. We’d all agree that Washington
is terminal with financial irresponsibility and a lack of any common sense; it is not, however, a lifeless ménage of boring sex scandals.
LAWRENCE IN LOVE: Ken Russell’s
Women
in Love looks and sounds
much better four decades removed from the initial snipping that the movie
isn’t the novel, that it short-changes D.H. Lawrence’s search for
and the balance in “the finality of love,” that Russell hyperbolizes
the famous moments more than clarifies them. The movie is, all and all,
respectful and yes, it “gets” the author. In order to do so, the “getting” are hurdles accomplished by sprinting, swimming,
wrestling, writhing and sledding through the novel’s highlights as showpieces.
But why not? They’re showoff moments in the book too. For all of
Lawrence’s intense preoccupation with sex and his meanderings about
relationships between the sexes, what he left fittingly
unresolved remains unresolved in the movie. That, I think, is what saves
Russell from the gallows he was sentenced to by critics who convicted him
of lurid floridity. The origins of his penchant are evident but relatively
subdued, thanks to Billy Williams’s romanticized photography through
which some of the imagery grabs us more than the source. What’s pleasantly
surprising is how much Russell and adapter Larry Kramer extracted using
the Gregg method. Lawrence’s daring, his quest for new kinds of
emotionally, sexually and intellectually satisfying relationships with both
sexes, to find an alterative to marriage, to seek out the additional perfect
bond between men, never came to fruition, not because he didn’t try
but because he didn’t supply any fearless free thinkers to join him.
In this regard, he rigged the story because as Rupert (Alan Bates) he
remains the priest of love and the other three in his foursome are conveniently
flawed, locked in by their social and cultural conscriptions and contagions.
Rupert’s woman to love is Ursula (Jennie Linden) who’s emotionally
jealous and obstinate; Rupert’s man to love is Gerald (Oliver Reed),
who admits he can’t feel or understand much that isn’t anger and
suffering of women and who becomes unfortunately involved with Ursula’s
sculptress sister Gudrun (Glenda Jackson), a castrating sadist/Bohemian whose
Isadorian free-associating shouldn’t excite Gerald as much as warn him
away. If there’s impatience in viewers before arriving at Zermatt, it
likely comes from Linden; she’s not bad, she delivers her load of lines
with very clear intent, but when closed-minded, shrill and whiny you
can’t phantom how the wordsmith Rupert, the guru of love exploration,
tolerates her. (D.H. did because he's writing about his wife Frieda.) Reed,
at his most attractive in top hat, is a match for
Jackson—they’re both
misfits—and there’s conviction when he explicates Gerald’s
limitations, only we’re not sure where they come from. Arrows point
every which way: the nutcase mother, the debilitated father, the sibling he
accuses of murder-suicide. Jackson’s
face—despite
a mouthful of bad
dentistry—and voice congeal with instant commandeering authority;
she's a few light years away from Lawrence's “soft”
physicality of Gudrun, but she really zeroes in on her elusive
contempt and brittleness. The author writes of the character: “Cross
the threshold, and you found her completely, completely cynical about the
social world and its advantages. Once inside the house of her soul, and there
was a pungent atmosphere of corrosion, an inflamed darkness of sensation,
and a vivid, subtle, critical consciousness.” Jackson's performance
would be the beginning of what she would do without peer for roughly
thirty years: compel, subjugate, infuriate. (She’s now a long-standing
member of the British Parliament.) Bates is the fantasy embodiment of Lawrence,
without a hint of illness a version of a maturing pretty boy that was the
author in his pretty boy youth. With the script necessarily stripped of
prologues, Bates has to start right in on Lawrence’s verbosity on sex
and what he achieves—for
example, with
that fig—is no small feat of showmanship. He maintains a cordiality
even while the negatives encircle him and in the last scene speaking his
last line, straight from the novel, there's an echo of tragedy in
the Lawrentian declaration: after Bates' own death, it came to public
light that he was a tormented bisexual, unable to balance his needs in
relationships; he became Gerald. It is at Zermatt where the movie looses
focus, which is understandable: entitled “Snowed Up” in the novel,
the lengthy chapter is Lawrence anatomizing the Gerald/Gudrun coupling, the
inevitably contagious destructiveness in power and control wars. Alternately
provocative and gasbaggy, this climax is bruisingly and steadily
insightful, he's at his zenith in elucidating the maelstroms of inner conflicts.
Russell and Kramer try to compress while maintaining integrity but we're
bogged down with the intentionally repulsive casting for Loerke. He's
meant to be repugnant insect to Gerald, but the prejudicial stereotyping on
screen defuses not only the climax (though beautifully framed), it also
absolves Gudrun's oxymoron that “life doesn't really
matter—it is one's art that is central. What one does in one's life
has peu de rapport, it doesn't signify much.”
Lawrence's breakthrough
art can't be divorced from his
life.
Text COPYRIGHT ©2008-2009 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.