The Pretty One

I must say, I was faintly surprised to find that, in addition to starring in The Pretty One, Zoe Kazan did not contribute to the screenplay, so marked it is by the same wishy-washy sensibility that dragged the premise of her 2012 feature Ruby Sparks down from the mountain of its spectacularly dark premise (a writer's fictional creation, the embodiment of everything he wants in a woman, suddenly comes to life) and into the valley of forceful reassurance and tonally deaf endings. LaMarque's film, her first feature, also has one hell of a premise (though familiar to those who saw, or at least saw ads for, the Sarah Michelle Gellar TV show Ringer) - following a deadly car accident, Laurel assumes the identity of her more-successful-and-popular twin sister Audrey (both played, skillfully, by Zoe Kazan).

At first, Laurel is merely mistaken for Audrey, but once she recovers her own memories, she can't help but continue the charade (fantasy?). After all, Audrey lives in her own spectacular apartment, while Laurel has remained at home, caring for her father, since their mother passed; Audrey has a successful career as a real estate agent, while Laurel helps their father create forgeries of famous paintings to sell to collectors (get it, because copies); Audrey has been immensely successful with men, while Laurel only just lost her virginity to a high school boy she used to babysit. And worse, she's far more into he than vice-versa. Moreover, assuming Audrey's identity becomes a way for her to still feel connected to her sister. There's plenty that LaMarque and Kazan suggest about the grieving process that is, or at least could be, incredibly rich material for a film.

Unfortunately, LaMarque sticks instead with letting the entire dramatic tension hinge on whether or not Laurel will eventually reveal who she is, and when that's your dramatic premise, she can't just not say anything. The film is so eager to please and reassure its audience that by the time the chips are down, not a word is left unsaid. The rest of the film becomes a series of declarative statements, some of which are fairly affecting (John Carroll Lynch is especially good as her father), many of which are just way too desperate to appear vulnerable that they feel false an manufactured. Kazan hits some very spectacular notes early on, but there's something about LaMarque's compositions (sometimes wide, sometimes shoving her subject into a corner of the frame) that distances us from the immediacy of the emotion without offering an intellectual consideration to embolden it. It seems at once somewhat reaching to be haunting and dreamlike but also super-likable. The cast comes close to grasping that goal, but the confused direction and tame screenplay keep it forever bound to mediocrity.

It doesn't help that it exists in one of those worlds in which no one has an actual job that they actually have to report to five (or even two) actual days each week, yet never seem to struggle or have to make compromises in their made-up careers. It's great that Laurel's father can just fake paintings all day, so successfully that he doesn't even have to sell any of Laurel's shortcoming efforts, or that Laurel's new boyfriend (Jake Johnson) sells used books from his house, but they're more excuses than explanations for how they can just do whatever they want, whenever they want. This is one of those sort of stock complaints about the cinema in general (Roger Ebert wrote, of Billy Wilder's 1960 classic, "In many movies, the characters hardly even seem to have jobs, but in The Apartment they have to be reminded that they have anything else), but seems exacerbated here by the simple fact that so little seems to truly affect these people in a permanent way (even the grieving process is more alluded to than invested in), at least give them a stressful job or something.

Her Limitations

I've been thinking a lot about Her over the past week or so. I've only seen it once, at the end of November, and I liked it a lot, but something kept me from embracing it entirely. As I started to put my top ten list together, I knew I'd be considering it, but as soon as I prioritized other films, I quickly let it slip and kind of put it out of my mind. And now it's come rushing back, and, unlike what usually happens when I turn over films of which I am quite fond again and again, it has diminished somewhat in my estimation (mind, it's a very fine film, just not a great one), and I think I've figured out why.

Beyond Joaquin Phoenix's involvement, I thought a lot about The Master, my favorite film of last year. Both films are in some way about loneliness, about desiring to make meaningful connections at a time in one's life when such a thing seems very difficult, if not impossible. They're both very melancholic, very sad, sometimes elusive. But where Her falters for me is in speaking directly to it, in getting very plotty with its dissection of loneliness and isolation. Theodore (Phoenix) will directly state everything that's wrong with him. His ex-wife (Rooney Mara) will point out that he's always wanted a relationship that he can control entirely, so dating a computer is all too perfect for him. In response, Theodore will begin to doubt the legitimacy of his emotions. It's the kind of very connective, A happens, then B happens, so thus C happens, tissue that works well in a more dramatically-motivated structure (crime films and romantic comedies, especially), but feels out of place in something that's so concerned with feelings we have a hard time classifying or understanding, which, at its best, is Her's primary concern.

The main reason I've come to value Paul Thomas Anderson so much is his willingness to go with an absolute gut instinct, and run all the way with it without stopping, no matter how weird or seemingly out-of-place the moment may seem on paper, and still manage to make it cohere emotionally. Her is dealing with a very unusual relationship, but plays it quite safe in its plotting, too timid to strike a note that may seem discordant, yet still resonate (the surrogate scene comes very close, but take the easy way out). It can't chase a feeling on an uncharted path, moving resolutely instead towards its inevitable (yet still quite affecting) conclusion, and thus it cannot truly represent the experience of the emotions it's exploring. Loneliness and frustration and jealousy do not follow straightforward trajectories; the films that represent them best will be wild, unpredictable, deeply uncomfortable, often hurtful, and outlandishly daring.

The Top Ten Films of 2013

I always like to say, first of all, that there's no such thing as a bad year for film, and I mean it. I saw 150 new-release films last year; there were a lot of bad ones, but when I started to assemble this list, I was once again struck by just how many were really quite good. This was a year in which many a director really went all-out, aimed for something truly grand, and hit varying degrees of success along the way. That there were people willing to finance and/or distribute films like Twixt, Passion, The Canyons, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers, Stoker, The Act of Killing, A Touch of Sin, Blancanieves, Beyond the Hills, and Leviathan is nothing short of astounding, even if none of them made the list below. Add to that Upstream Color, which its filmmaker distributed himself, and more perhaps normative, but still exceptional, films like Frances Ha, Nobody's Daughter Haewon, The Place Beyond the Pines, White House Down, Furious 6, Captain Phillips, About Time, and Before Midnight, and it's hard to really complain at all. That said, in all fairness, I should note that my pick for the year's best film, one I find absolutely wonderful, singular, vital, and so deeply moving, would have only barely cracked my top five in 2011. That isn't to diminish this year's achievements - as you can already gather, they were considerable - just to place it all in context.

And so, onward we go.

10. Star Trek Into Darkness

You know, I’m not big on the idea that the best movies are the ones you want to pop in on a rainy day and watch over and over again, but I certainly understand the mindset, and do think there’s quite a lot of merit to those films that spark such interest and passion. And so we have Star Trek Into Darkness, a film I was amazed to love so much (I am not a big Trek guy, but have an operational understanding of, and occasional appreciation for, its most popular incarnations) that I saw three times in theaters and now own, very happily, on Blu-ray. J.J. Abrams has built, as he did with Mission: Impossible III, a freaking machine, moving briskly from conflict to conflict, doing away with all the squabbling that made the first film so relentlessly dull and sticking us instead with a group of people who are very good at what they do, genuinely respect and like one another, but have different ideas on how their collective job should be done. The aesthetics of the conversations - the vocal patterns, physical stances, quickly-dispelled dialogue - are as rousing as they are reliable (never mind more traditional aesthetic pleasures - Dan Mindel’s genuinely anamorphic, boldly-lit celluloid images are breathtaking). That it also has the two best action set pieces (the ship-to-ship space jump and the Enterprise falling) I’ve seen all summer, and probably in many years, is no small bonus.

There is the matter of the plot, which is, it must be said, kind of a chore, but even as it simply, repeatedly rips off the beats and often direct actions of an earlier beloved entry in the Star Trek franchise, doing so actually has the (probably accidental) effect of justifying the absurd decision they made in the last film to make this universe a parallel timeline to that which we are most accustomed. By regurgitating so much of The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek Into Darkness suggests that all of this was fated to happen in various configurations, and there’s only so much one can do to change the course of history, which, for a reboot said to be dreadfully low on such things, is a pretty Trekkian concern. (Available on DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube, and Redbox Instant)

9. 12 Years a Slave

This is not a film about slavery. Granted, it takes the system as its subject, but what makes the film so powerful is the way in which director Steve McQueen and writer John Ridley use it as a means of exploring the very idea of institutional evil, the way it can develop and, more damningly, the way it can flourish. They take for granted that you know that slavery was a bad thing, that the people who profited from it were bad people, and then show the kind of delusion required for someone to convince themselves that they are in the right. For some it’s religion, others the law, others a sense of power, and many simply the supposed morality of the free market - it’s good because it works. Those are themes not at all bound only to 19th century America. They then go a step further and show the complicity required not only of the profiteers, but of all of us, in order for such an evil system to thrive; no, this is not only a story of one man’s suffering, but how we all, constantly, every day, then and now, tacitly allow these things to happen for any number of reasons. Maybe because the problems seem too vast, or too entrenched. We’ve grown up with them, so they must be a fact of existence. Maybe we have turned away from them so much that they hardly seem like problems at all. Maybe the punishment for opposing it would be too great. Or maybe we simply avoid them for fear that the total acknowledgement of how much suffering results from the systems that bring us life’s most essential ingredients - food, clothing, shelter - seems almost too much to bear, or even comprehend, and we cope with them for our basic sanity.

That’s what 12 Years a Slave is about - being forced to look at something so bizarre and inhuman and awful from which we, as so many characters (including its protagonist - the flashback to him in the shop isn't there merely to establish the shopkeeper) do throughout the film, so often turn away. (Currently in theaters)

8. Trance

As films about the desire to uncover something horrible buried in oneself goes, I understand why many value Shane Carruth’s spectacular Upstream Color more, but for me, Danny Boyle’s truly nasty, lurid thriller resonates much more palpably, in no small part for refocusing that horror as a true part of the protagonist, and not something foisted upon him. Simon (James McAvoy) is an art auctioneer who teamed with a gang of thieves, lead by Vincent Cassel’s Franck, to steal an incredibly valuable painting; when a whack on the head renders Simon unable to recall where he stashed the damn thing, he goes to a hypnotist (played, hauntingly, by Rosario Dawson) to try to recover the memory, and thus the painting. And that’s just the surface of how truly ludicrous and silly the plot is. As one might guess from my set-up, however, she and Simon uncover a great deal more than that, about each other and about a very real, honest desire we all have to forget our worst traits and actions, and the horror that comes about in being forced to face them. Boyle layers the film with the ache of memory, familiarity, sub- or unconscious passion, with so many frames (Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is extraordinary) echoing elements palpable and yet unnameable. (Available on DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube)

7. Museum Hours

My high school drama teacher used to say that there were really only basically two stories - boy meets girl, and new guy comes to town. I don't agree, but it’s still interesting to consider just how many stories more or less fall into these two fields. Museum Hours has both, but not with the usual connotations. Johann (Bobby Sommer), a security guard at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, befriends Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), a visiting Canadian, but they’re hardly on the path to romance. Moreover, she’s not in town on pleasure or to escape her sordid past or whatever; she was the only family member available to visit her cousin, whose illness has sent her into a coma, and they were never terribly close. Jem Cohen crafts an air of melancholy, yes, and the emotional effect of the film is considerable, but it’s the way he interweaves very personal conflict and intimate relationships with the museum’s art that really makes this an exceptional work. By showing so much of the painting so prominently and intercutting it with Johann and Anne’s trips around the city, along with a museum guide or two along the way to explicate the innumerable approaches and interpretations of the original art, we begin to pick up on the connections this art, hundreds of years old, has to our contemporary lives, and how little separation there is not only between classical art and our everyday experiences, but by extension, our lives and those who lived hundreds of years ago. We are all part of the same continuum; their art expresses something of us as much as it did theirs. It may not be a gigantic revelation to those who think about artistic expression on a regular basis, but Cohen has found a very emotional, personal way to express it that lifts the supposition out of its academic nature and into the streets, as it were; to our economic hardships, our losses, our joy, our momentary elation and our everlasting satisfaction and despair. (Available on DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes, and Vudu)

6. To the Wonder

Describing this as a “minor” film by Terrence Malick is both informative and revelatory, in that it is not perhaps as fully-formed an idea or piece as his previous films, and yet is so staggering and wholly felt that it just goes to show how gifted an artist he truly is. Forty years after his debut film, Malick has found a team of collaborators that allows him to use the cinema as another type of artist might sketch, expressing the urgency of certain feelings that would be stifled under further refinement. His familiar traits are present as always, bringing out the beauty and grace in the most everyday and ordinary (a laundromat, a drive-thru), never mind those things theoretically earthbound but quite actually fantastical (the breathtaking Mont Saint-Michel). But he hasn’t dwelled with such specificity on this film’s inner themes, of the way people pull intensely together only to almost unconsciously drift apart, since 1978’s Days of Heaven, but whereas that broken relationship came from poverty and greed, this comes merely from incompatibility and an inner, unquenchable desire and yearning. Malick directs his cast not to any sense of realism, but to using their bodies as means of expression, so that every element is truly felt rather than said. (Available on DVD, Blu-ray, Netflix Instant, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube, and Amazon Instant)

5. Enough Said

If there are two cinematic mainstays from which I have come to expect very little in this day and age, it’s the romantic comedy and the mid-level, character-based, quasi-indie “dramedy.” That Nicole Holofcener could combine the two and create something so potent as this seems nothing shy of a miracle. Or at least a massive creative accomplishment. Taking a premise as built for screwball as any - middle-aged divorcee (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), finds out that the man she’s dating (James Gandolfini) is actually the ex-husband about whom her new close friend (Catherine Keener) has been complaining for weeks on end - and downplaying it at every turn, Holofcener has built a film that speaks to the way we protect ourselves in romantic endeavors, all within the form of a frequently hilarious, densely-but-not-suffocatingly-structured 90-minute comedy. Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini are in peak form, doing all the complex work that it takes to just play regular people, with all their foibles and faults, none of which diminish their humanity, or, if you like, “likability,” but rather enhance it tenfold. It’s been years since a film carried itself so well by just giving us two characters worth caring about. And getting quite a few laughs along the way, at that. Louis-Dreyfus’s expression of confused disgust at herself when she says “Yeah, I got real boobs” on their first date will forever make me laugh. (Available on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Google Play, and Vudu; on DVD and Blu-ray January 13th)

4. The Strange Little Cat

One small apartment. A seemingly-ever-expanding family gathering for a meal. A number of small machines on the fritz. And a cat perhaps not as odd or diminutive as the title would suggest. Ramon Zürcher’s debut film combines all of these, with healthy doses of Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Alain Resnais for good measure, yet emerges the most singular and undefinable cinematic experience experience I’ve had all year, one so enrapturing I restarted it the moment the credits had finished (its 65-minute running time was certainly complicit in this instinct). I can guess at its themes, if it has any, but I’d rather not. I’d rather just mention that nothing else this year provided such sheer delight. Zürcher, by dispensing with any requirement to reveal even the barest of plot concerns, uses every minute for invention, for controlled bits of chaos, for quiet observation and the surprising abnormality of everyday life. (Currently without distribution)

3. Pain & Gain

Michael Bay has made several very good films in the past. This is his first masterpiece, the kind that makes even his fans reexamine those that came before, and his talents altogether. Following three bodybuilders (Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie, and Dwayne Johnson) who hatch a scheme to steal everything from one rich asshole (Tony Shalhoub), Pain & Gain so thoroughly eviscerates the commercialized portrait of the American Dream that it’s a wonder there was anything left of it for a half-dozen other films to tackle this year. The bodybuilders aren’t just looking to become successful - they want the fame, the glory, the women, the drugs, the boats, the LIFE. And they want it now. And Bay gives it to them on their terms, framing them the way they see their lives, on the edge of desert cliffs, against American flags and churches and neon lights, more than a little complicit in their sociopathy. Where Martin Scorsese couldn’t help but judge his Wolf of Wall Street protagonists, Bay is just enough a degenerate director to completely soak you in the psyches of his, leaving you questioning your own complicity in even viewing the damn thing. But by contrasting that with their actual behavior and complete stupidity, he more forcefully undermines his entire aesthetic than ever before. The result isn’t just ideologically invigorating, but wildly entertaining and by far the funniest I’ve seen all year. Wahlberg hasn’t been this good since Boogie Nights, completely unafraid to warp his natural earnestness into total moral corruption, but somehow, Dwayne Johnson still steals the show as a drug-addict-turned-evangelical-Christian-turned-drug-addict who’s never able to totally square the warring factions of his own psyche, even when they seem to be quite clear. I could not have possibly loved this film more. (Available on DVD, Blu-ray, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, and Redbox Instant)

2. Inside Llewyn Davis

Joel and Ethan Coen have made so many great films that each new one causes me to wonder if they’ve ever done anything better, and so it is with Inside Llewyn Davis. It feels like their best, but that can’t possibly be true...or can it? Ah, well, it’s a good problem to have. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a folk singer in New York in 1961. He plays gigs, sleeps on friends' couches, accidentally impregnates women, insults damn near everyone sooner or later, and lives by intense principles to guard his ability to continue to play other people’s songs independently. We can mourn Llewyn’s difficulty in making a living, but one must ask oneself, what, really, does he have to contribute? Among its many other noteworthy points, the last scene cleverly suggests that it is not simple exposure he lacks, but inability to stand out from a flock of others doing the same thing just as well. Yet he remains a deeply sympathetic character, an outlet for so many of our worst impulses, and as potent a figure in mourning as the cinema has ever seen. The Coens and Isaac craft dozens of small moments that belie years of struggle and hardship; the film takes place over a single week, but seems to encapsulate a year. Who would have the best attitude after all that?

Isaac, so good in so many unremarkable films over the past few years, gives the best male performance of the year, deeply in tune with precisely what film he is in and how he can contribute, able to convey depths of regret, uncertainty, and misplaced aggression with the line reading of a single word. His relationships with the few characters given more than one scene seem to constantly deepen; what stands out first as contemptuousness later feels more like jealousy, then like compassion, then like mutual understanding of respectful differences. Llewyn, like the Coens, looks at first glance like a guy who snobbishly insists that he has it all figured out; the closer you get, the more you see the doubt, the fear, the longing, and the despair. (Currently in theaters)

1) You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

Like Francis Ford Coppola (whose beautiful Twixt finally came to Blu-ray this year), Alain Resnais is making old man films with a young man’s vitality. Perhaps that has contributed to neither being terribly fashionable anymore, and I guess I just have to square whatever that says about me with the fact that I adore the work both have done in recent years, most of all this new wondrous film by its 91-year-old auteur. Such a promise as the one contained in its title would be tantalizing from anyone; from Resnais, who has given us such singular and undefinable experiences as Last Year at Marienbad, Mon oncle d’Amerique, Je t’aime je t’aime, Providence, and Wild Grass, it seems downright impossible. And yet, I do believe it to be true. In it, a group of actors, all playing themselves (they include Sabine Azema, Mathieu Almaric, Pierre Arditi, Anne Consigny, Lambert Wilson, and Michel Piccoli), assemble to watch a recording of a new production of the play Eurydice, in which they all starred many years ago in various incarnations. As they view the film (which was made separately from the production of YASNY, and directed by Bruno Podalydès), they begin to casually recite their lines along with the actors, before finally standing up and gradually performing the play themselves, sometimes interacting directly with the film they are viewing, with Resnais infusing CGI backgrounds to fill the imagined space of a black box theater.

So the film is at once a straight adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s play, and an expression of longing for one’s youth, giving these older actors a chance to dig into emotions they’ve perhaps long left behind. Azema in particular is extraordinary, and those who have seen the work she did with Resnais in the 1980s will certainly find much to celebrate; those who have not will doubtlessly seek it out. Anouilh used the legend of Orpheus as a jumping-off point to explore the intense selfishness of young romance, and there’s something about Eurydice that seems almost unhinged in how totally committed she becomes to Orpheus, especially given the past she gradually reveals, and Azema plays right into Eurydice’s wild-eyed amazement at the tiny joys and unacknowledged tragedies that we quietly accept every day. As the title indicates, Resnais has a playful streak within him, but never at the expense of the drama, either inherent to the play or the extratextual themes he’s exploring, making for a tragic melodrama that’s a lot more fun to watch than one might expect. Approaching his 70th year of filmmaking, Resnais continues to find new ways to reinvent his chosen medium, and I couldn’t be happier to be here experiencing it. (Available on DVD, Netflix, iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube)

Strike Anywhere

I wrote this piece for a class in college, with a prompt from Christian Keathley's wonderful book, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees, which asked participants to focus on a specific, seemingly meaningless moment to speculate on and draw from it larger, probably unintended meaning. To coincide with the recent release of Red River on Blu-ray, I thought it'd be a fitting time to revisit it. It has been modestly revised over the years.

In his review of the film as part of his Great Movies series, Roger Ebert declares:

Red River is one of the greatest of all Westerns when it stays with its central story about an older man and a younger one, and the first cattle drive down the Chisholm Trail. It is only in its few scenes involving women that it goes wrong…The three scenes with Tess (Joanne Dru) are the movie’s low points, in part because of her prattle (listen to how she chats distractingly with Matt during an Indian attack), in part because she is all too obviously the deus ex machina the plot needs to avoid an unhappy ending.

Essentially, Ebert is right. Tess’ purpose is to make two people – Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) and Tom Dunson (John Wayne), suddenly get along after a bitter feud arose between them. I disagree, however, with Ebert’s assertion that Tess’ scenes are the low points. She provides the film’s most magical little moment. In her first conversation with Dunson, she swings her arm down and strikes a match on her table. It’s the swing of her arm and the instant ignition of the match that has me mesmerized. The swing itself suggests a casual nonchalance, and firmly establishes that she is in control of the scene; despite his cultural image, John Wayne appears quite small here, even weak. A lot is done with simple staging – she is standing and he is sitting – but it’s the match strike that instantly and naturally commands our attention.

First, the means by which director Howard Hawks accomplished the shot is a minor miracle unto itself. He cuts quickly after the match is lit, but not right away – the shot lingers just long enough to show the match catch fire. The first thought that might roll through an audience member’s mind is that Tess had a strike anywhere match, a very common item today. However, this sequence takes place in 1866, but strike anywhere matches wouldn’t be developed until the early twentieth century.

Matches have been around for centuries in one form or another, but it wasn’t until 1827 that they became anything close to what they resemble today; that is, based on friction, designed to ignite only when run against a specially prepared surface. Beyond that, the safety match wasn’t developed until 1844. Prior to this, matches shot sparks around and had pretty uncontrollable flames. Given that no sparks emitted and the flame was relatively under control, Tess was probably using a safety match. The striking surface required to ignite a match, however, was typically composed of 25% powdered glass, 50% red phosphorus, 5% neutralizer, 4% carbon black and 16% binder – probably not the rough makeup of Tess' table, which looks like it was coated with leather. Whatever it was covered with, it would be absurd for a table in a wagon train to be covered with a material that only really exists to strike matches on.

So what happened? Does Tess have some cunning skill with a match? I propose instead that this sets Tess up as a force in the film. Roger Ebert noted that Tess is there basically as a plot device, and that’s true. But the film continuously tells us she has some sort of otherworldly quality. In her introduction, she’s receives an arrow to the shoulder and scarcely has a reaction; if it has any effect, her expression indicates it’s one of heightened sexual attraction. This, combined with her mastery of fire, tells us that Tess is more than just a person, but a force, which she proves to be when she somehow makes everything okay between Matt and Tom at the end. She’s capable of controlling the world around her.

Besides, Tess is a “strike anywhere” girl. The strike-anywhere/safety dichotomy runs throughout Hawks’ work, and echoes into cinema today. This dichotomy typically comes in the form of two potential mates one of the protagonists must choose between. The clearest example comes in Bringing Up Baby - David (Cary Grant) is all set to marry the safest of all possible women, Miss Swallow (Virginia Walker), who wants nothing more than to support David in his work, even though that means denying him all of life’s pleasures. That is, until he meets one of the wackiest women in the history of film in Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn), who grabs every chance life throws at her and lives every moment as though it were her last, a true “strike anywhere” woman if ever there were one.

That’s not all, folks. Only Angels Have Wings shows a less immediately conflicted Cary Grant stuck between a woman who understands his love of flying, and one who wishes he’d just stay on the ground. His Girl Friday flips the gender roles, with Rosalind Russell torn between the very safe, secure Ralph Bellamy and the wild, unpredictable, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants Cary Grant. In The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe seems to only run into “strike anywhere” types, from Vivian’s younger sister sleeping with every guy in town, to a bookstore employee who closes early to secure some private time with Bogart. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes takes this to the extreme, as we see Lorelei constantly pulled away from her obedient, soft-spoken fiancée towards a life of debauchery and extravagance, Dorothy somehow emerging as the stable one in the twosome, only looking for a man to truly love.

Again and again, Hawks seems drawn to these dynamics, and regardless of where the script draws its ideological line (and it sometimes lands on “safe”), Hawks is always sure to posit the “strike anywhere” as by far the more interesting, more fulfilling possibility. Even when Cary Grant settles on the safe choice in Only Angels Have Wings, he does so as he rushes out the door, eager to get in the air again, and all the way up to that point, Jean Arthur, the “safe” one, is painted as too hysteric and anxiety-ridden to grasp what makes these men shoot up into the air. 

This strike-anywhere/safety dichotomy lives on today, albeit in the much less interesting Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Now a staple of all things quirky, one need only watch films such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Garden State, Elizabethtown, Superbad, Clerks II, or The Last Kiss to catch at least traces of girls who really have nothing else to do in their lives except be completely unpredictable and rescue the guy from his bland, boring life. What separates the modern trend from the one Hawks presented is that there is no second thought given to the modern “strike anywhere” girl. She is so obviously the right choice from the start, not just to the audience, but to the protagonist as well. In Hawks, Bringing Up Baby in particular, we see the natural, destructive end such behavior would no doubt bring about, not just to the protagonist’s personal life, but also to his or her job and everyone they come into contact with. Like Tess in Red River, Susan Vance seems to make the world around her conform to her whims, as David suddenly starts living the life Susan creates for him. This makes David’s decision all the more interesting and satisfying, as we know he’s attracted to her for her faults, not in spite of whatever faults she may one day reveal. And if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

He Flies Through the Air With the Greatest of Ease

The above still comes from My Favorite Wife, a film slightly more fun in point of fact than in point of watching. The central drive of the screwball comedy comes from Cary Grant's presumed-dead wife (Irene Dunne) suddenly returning on, wouldn't you know it, the very day he has finally remarried (to a none-too-pleased Gail Patrick). The film gets probably a little too much mileage out of Grant figuring out just how to explain the whole damn thing to Patrick, as Dunne manipulates any number of awkward interactions between the three of them (even when she's not in the room) to her eternal advantage, but the picture really turns into something upon the discovery that the circumstances of her survival - she was shipwrecked and stranded on an island for seven years - were greatly aided by the presence of another man.

Even as Grant is playing down his desirability (he's a little more David Huxley than Walter Burns, though not as extreme as either), eclipsing this trait is no small feat, but one ably attained by one Randolph Scott, here the very paragon of exaggerated masculinity. The above still comes as Grant reflects on some athletic feats he just saw Scott perform at the local club, and indicates some of the finer points in the film, and of screwball comedy in general, in its ability to reflect marital anxieties without being, well, so damn reflective about the whole thing.

It's impossible to imagine such a picture being made today, in which a wife more or less comes back from the dead just as a husband has remarried, and getting away with it as comedy. The picture is not without sentiment (there are more than mere tonal similarities with the prior Grant/Dunne hit The Awful Truth, it must be noted), but those moments are inextricably bound with the comedy, and neither diminishes the other. Furthermore, that the wife character could have clearly carried on a romantic and sexual relationship, as difficult a sell as it must have been then (the censors' attempts to get RKO tone down such implications appears to have been completely unsuccessful), would be almost unheard of now. Modern sympathies would be automatically reversed, and, well, it's just a shame the way women get treated in movies these days, that's all.

And furthermore, just what was Randolph Scott doing with those two women at the Pacific Club when Cary Grant starts spying on him?

The film is credited to Garson Kanin, a more accomplished screenwriter than director (he wrote Born Yesterday, The Girl Can't Help It, and Adam's Rib, for starters), who stepped in for Leo McCarey (he of the great The Awful Truth) after the latter's near-fatal car accident. McCarey produced and co-concocted the story with screenwriters Bella and Sam Spewack, a husband-and-wife team who themselves apparently knew something of marital strife. I can't speak to the extent of McCarey's involvement on set (TCM's notes on the film say Kanin directed "portions"), but his brand of cleverly-framed sentimentality is more than a little informative here.

Thunder Road

"When I'm driving, I got a guy on the radio who talks to me…I can't see him, but he talks to me."
- Cole Trickle (Tom Cruise)

Like his dynamic, rhythmically beautiful The Fan, Tony Scott's Days of Thunder does not have the greatest reputation, even among his admirers. Obviously made to capitalize on the success of Top Gun, reuniting director (Scott), star (Cruise), and producers (Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer) to, what would appear from the outside, lesser commercial effect (though the film was far from the failure many predicted, more than doubling its budget at the worldwide box office). Top Gun was never a critics' darling, but its monumental popularity has ensured it a permanent place in the conversation, while Days of Thunder - so much weirder and more esoteric, nearly the film many perceive Drive to be - has practically been left behind, forever in the shadow of the iconic fighter jet.

Throughout much of the first half, the film lives up to that perception. Dawn-set shots of racetracks anticipate the arrival of Cole Trickle, as if summoned by another character's question, "Who is this driver?" Vrrrroooooommmm and up pulls Cruise in full Movie Star mode, seemingly a lifetime removed from his eager young cadet in Top Gun. This guy had just been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, worked with Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Dustin Hoffman, and Paul Newman. And he knows it.

Days of Thunder was not, however, as has been suggested, something Tom Cruise was trapped in. His "Story By" credit (alongside Robert Towne, who wrote the screenplay from there), the only one in his entire career, was not, at least according to Scott, purely a matter of a star managing someone else's idea. "Cruise and Jerry and Don went to a school where you learn to race Porsches," he told Entertainment Weekly. "That's where it all began. They said, 'Fuck, yeah! Let's do a motor-racing movie!" That buoyant spirit carries that first half, as we're left to marvel at Cole's seemingly boundless ambition ("There's nothing I can't do with a race car" is the film's signature line for a reason), his manager, Harry's (Robert Duvall), eternal patience and wisdom, and the entire spectacle that is Nascar, the actual sport of which has perhaps never been depicted better. While television struggles to show it as anything more than cars gradually moving in a circle, Scott gets his camera right down on the racetrack, right up in his drivers' faces, right alongside the cars as they move upwards of 200 mph. And you believe it.

That sense of speed takes on a deadlier meaning once Cole nearly gets killed in a race. He's then transferred to the medical care of one Dr. Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman), a neurosurgeon who also happens to be beautiful enough to sleep with Tom Cruise. This element of the film has received its share of guffaws and ridicule from those who tend to believe beautiful women rarely amount to anything substantial, which, even if this particularly sexist view held any water, is actually directly mocked when Cole embarrasses himself by mistaking Claire for a stripper. You could condescendingly say the film knows what it is, and that'd be true, but it doesn't make excuses for it - it just lays it all out there without a care or second-guess in the world. "That's right," it might as well be saying, "this young, beautiful woman is a brain surgeon, and you'd be a fool to question it."

Moreover, their romance contains a heft usually left on the table in these types of pictures. In addition to not considering Claire at all when he puts himself in danger, Cole nearly kills her when he decides to race an annoying taxi driver in the populated city streets, a feat for which she justly rebukes him. Aside from a rather lovely and teasing sex-y scene, Cole and Claire are rarely satisfied with one another. Top Gun's Charlie might have disliked the type of guy Cruise's Maverick was, but Claire is completely opposed to the man Cole is. He only becomes more difficult and more determined. His idea of dates are to go to race tracks and visit fellow drivers. She wonders if he wants anything more in life; he wonders who she's really asking for. Even in their bedroom scene, the most affection she can lend him is physical curiosity - "'How can I be in bed with this guy?'" Cruise asks for her. "I know the answer to that one," she replies. Her brief cheers in the final showdown are less those of a converted fan, and more of someone genuinely concerned for his safety. Before he steps out on the track, they seem to be telling one another, "I love you, but I can't accept you," even as they're withholding even that much. People in Tony Scott movies don't always explain themselves so well, but they do understand one another.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's essential piece on Scott, "Smearing the Senses," addresses just this, and provides a window through which all of the filmmaker's work can be viewed and appreciated. An excerpt, describing Spy Game:

The images cut [Redford and Pitt] apart and then the editing glues them back together until it becomes clear that their camaraderie isn't just a question of professionalism, but is in fact an emotional bond existing on some kind of more subtle level. Sure, this is the usual male weepie hokum - but it's in movies more than anywhere else that hokum finds its greatest opportunity to be profound....

Scott's late period is rich with this sort of form-theme-plot unity. His hyperactive, impressionistic style made no attempt to accurately represent physical reality - and the movies, in turn, are about people who establish relationships that transcend physical presence while dealing with some concrete, physical threat which the relationship ultimately allows them to overcome. These are movies about the denial of physical reality made in a style that denies physical reality - and, occasionally, common sense - at every opportunity.

A more fitting description of Days of Thunder, there may not be. Cole, and every other race car driver, forcefully deny themselves the potential physical consequences of their lifestyle. "The only time a driver goes to a funeral is when he's actually dead," Harry says. Scott abstracts the race sequences, never letting us know the context for the race outside of what is immediately surrounding Cole, and relying on Harry to let us know his immediate goals. Yet its physicality is striking; the fragility of the cars, and their drivers, is never forgotten. They are shaken and thrown every which way as their vehicles seem on the edge of exploding at any second. The image above is at once a striking illustration of danger, and a manifestation of Cole's worst fears. Below, Scott throws in light patterns to indicate either nirvana or panic - in both cases, flirting with death, brushing up against the edges of this mortal coil.

While Cole's bond with Claire is more physically manifested, literally (in their sexual contact) and figuratively (by how often Scott places them in the same frame), Cole's with Harry is an ethereal one, lending that very quality that would come to define Scott's later work. Much of their relationship is cemented with Cole in the car, and Harry speaking to him a mile away. Look at that quote at the top of this post - "I can't see him, but he talks to me." Cole is laying in an MRI machine, desperate for someone to say something to him, so accustomed has he become to being alone in a metal box, yet accompanied by a friendly, reassuring voice.

The excitement of the race is gradually whittled away, as we see the addiction to racing and, more generally, to one's ability to survive, erode Cole's relationship with Claire and his rival Rowdy's relationship with everyone. Rowdy's deterministic, "I'll only see a doctor when I'm dying" philosophy nearly kills him. He can't remember winning the Winston Cup; even his own name seems to be slipping. We, too, question Cole's need to get back into the car for one more race. It was one thing for Maverick to funnel that "need for speed" into flying. Theoretically, he'd end up fighting for his country and all that (this isn't really the space to debate military ethics, mind). Cole gets a gold cup. Days of Thunder never really makes some larger moral justification for its sport, the way dozens of basketball, baseball, and football films do - racing brings glory, at most, and not even lasting glory. Racing is cheap, and drivers are disposable, easily replaced or moved between the cars, the real stars. In Scott's opening montage, he gives us a shot of a huge American flag, then a small Confederate one, then a whole line of corporate flags. Racing is deteriorating the type of desire that once fueled American ideology, funneling a hunger for greatness towards outmoded values and commercial exploitation.

Cole is perfect for this world, something of a blank slate, almost purely a bundle of instincts and ambitions. He's like Robert Stack in The Tarnished Angels, the kind of guy who could win the war if he had a war to win. Without one, he's nothing, just a guy with a lot of talent that needs an outlet. "Harry, where'd you say your driver's from?" he's asked, in anticipation of Cole's seemingly heroic arrival. "Eagle Rock," his partner replies. "That's up around Wilkesboro, isn't it?" "No, Glendale. California." "He's a Yankee?" Harry asks. "Not exactly. If you're from California, you're not a Yankee. You're not really anything." It's an easy way to appeal to people predisposed against the very town that produces the entertainment of which they cannot get enough, but it also violently subverts Cruise's archetype before he even gets onscreen. What appears to be a nearly mythological figure is actually just a shell. And he'll have to grapple with that for the rest of the picture.

As a final aside, Quentin Tarantino claims to likened Tony Scott to Douglas Sirk back in the early 90s, and it's one of those things that's stuck with me. Both are obviously marvelous visual directors, and Tarantino mentioned it as a way of saying that cinephiles would only realize later what they had with Scott, but the more I think on it, the deeper that tunnel runs. They're both fascinated with exploring illusions of happiness and archetypes (intense melancholy runs through many of their films), presenting characters at once the way they perceive themselves, and how they're perceived by others, and the slippery bits that fall between each side. Anyway, beyond the comparison to Stack in Angels, Days of Thunder has one of the more Sirkian titles in Scott's filmography (which also makes it one of the better ones); you could line that up alongside many of Sirk's most famous - Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Allows, The Tarnished Angels - and it'd fit right in.

Days of Thunder is far from the most exciting entry in Scott's filmography, let alone his best, but I was really struck by just how strong and affecting it is, and how it really signaled the way for everything he was about to unleash on the world over the next twenty years. It's not just the boldness of his style, his willingness to embrace a certain otherworldly quality in his images - it's the repression, the sincerity, the subversion, the true embrace of that great Ernst Lubitsch maxim, "Every shot is the most important shot." No matter how many of them there are.

Performance

Last weekend, I pulled up Brian De Palma'sPassion on VOD, largely because it was a new release I wanted to get under my belt eventually (and I didn't have nearly enough time to pack in Marketa Lazarova, which I've been dying to see in the month or so since buying the Criterion Blu-ray - but, you know, 165 minutes). I was surprised to find just how much I liked the film, as De Palma is not one of "my guys" by any stretch.

With Passion, De Palma's most melodramatic streak is, if not as perversely indulged as in The Black Dahlia, then certainly presenting a sort of aged exhibitionism, and his aesthetic is beautifully wrought with a thoroughness of form-is-content rigor that is better discussed in Glenn Kenny's review than I could manage here. The key passage is thus:

De Palma's style has always used split-screen, and his compositions often manipulate backgrounds and foregrounds so that one tells an almost completely different story that the other does, simultaneously. Our ways of looking at the world have caught up with De Palma's way of presenting information on a cinema screen. And as I said, it's all pretty exhilarating if you're turned in on that level.

No disagreement from me. Where I sometimes felt De Palma was being...if not excessive, then certainly extra-expressive with such split-screen virtuosities, they did make the kind of wild, inventive use of the frame that one longs for. With Passion, beyond the totally thrilling aesthetic experience they create, there's also a real narrative/emotional/thematic hook to them, as we question just what is being watched, by whom, and where each person in this arrangement is. The eventual payoff these questions anticipate is perhaps predictable (perhaps not), but is at least a cohesive viewpoint, the kind of thing that makes it frustrating when people say it's "got style, no substance," as though the two are so inextricable.

Some of that perceived lack of substance has been said to have come from the performances, namely from the two leads, Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace. Kenny again, setting the stage:

...the ridiculously flat dialogue and almost pantomime performance styles on display in Passion will not come as any surprise to a longtime De Palma watcher, although they are likely to elicit some sort of "That was stupid" reflex in non-adepts.

And then, a series of critics dancing on it...

Richard Corliss, in TIME:

McAdams, usually a winning personality, seems embarrassed by her presence here; and Rapace, who invested a Mensa fury into her Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, looks frightened, as if assaulted by the camera's glare. 

Lee Marshall, at Screen Daily:

[T]he high-profile casting of Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace in the two main roles works a lot better on paper than it does in practice.... Whereas Kristen Scott-Thomas and Ledivine Sagnier fully inhabited their roles as domineering boss and sexy ambitious but fragile underling [in 2010's Love Crimes, of which this is a remake], McAdams and Rapace never really convince as rich, manipulative and self-assured advertising executive Christine and talented but rather innocent and insecure junior manager Isabelle. McAdams is better though at catching the playful, parody element in her role, something that Rapace, who is all intensity, seems to struggle with.

Guy Lodge, at HitFix, after describing Rapace as "utterly at sea":

No less strangely cast is McAdams, years too young to possess this dragon-in-heels role with the coolly unimpressed swagger of Kristin Scott Thomas. Still, if she seems to be playing dress-up in several scenes, at least she's playing: she deserves a more responsive scene partner when she sweetly bares her teeth and says, "You have talent. I just made the best use of it." 

Jamie Dunn, at The Playlist:

The characters are little more than noir cyphers, but both actors are game and have fun taking turns at playing femme fatale as they cross and doublecross each other throughout the increasingly convoluted narrative.

Review after review, critics are at least rising above Kenny's "This was stupid" prediction, but rarely giving anyone involved more credit than "it looked like they had some fun." Look at the word choices - they "never really convince," McAdams is "too young to possess." These are startlingly normative approaches to cinema, acting, and representation, demanding verisimilitude from a film, and filmmaker, who giddily laughs at the very notion. I would argue that what De Palma and his actresses are up to is far more intriguing, nefarious, and layered than many are recognizing, or what they're asking for. Further, I would submit instead that McAdams' and Rapace's (possible) shortcomings are to De Palma's tremendous advantage.

Danny Kasman's assessment at Mubi is far more attuned to De Palma's wavelength:

Remember how Rebecca Romijn watches Stanwyck in Double Indemnity at the beginning of Femme Fatale, as if taking notes? The characters in Passion have taken notes from Femme Fatale: an abstraction based on a fiction based on a fantasy. It is complex, dextrous, and awkward: Rachel McAdams plays and acts the seductive, power hungry blonde in a performance that is like a kabuki imitation of the type; Noomi Rapace is her underling, friend, object of love and obsession, our heroine and, therefore, at first, directed to act “normally.” (This film's skewering of cinematic female friendship is twisted, sinister, cynical and terribly interesting.) Like in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, but far more knowingly, cleverly, the director is here forcing a confrontation between two entirely different acting styles and kinds of characters. In Passion, one is ostensibly a hollow signifier, the other our, the audience's, psychological subject, person of empathy. Except the film, lurchingly structured in three fascinating sections, with the middle one styled radically differently, introduces a third character, another woman (which brings the collection to: a blonde, a brunette and a redhead), who begins to appear more normal as Rapace's character enters deeper into the story and begins to be abstracted by the movements and conventions of her plot. 

De Palma has no problem outright saying he felt he could improve upon Love Crimes immediately after seeing it. And yes, Kristen Scott Thomas might be better suited to Christine, an exploitative, manipulative business executive from a casting director's perspective. Thomas is nearly twenty years McAdams' senior, and is perhaps (I've not seen the film) a little bit more believable in the role of someone who has risen to such a position.

De Palma's never been about "believability." McAdams' relative youth actually gives him more to play with, not less, and the extent to which she is posturing as an actress capable of a certain heightened, just-this-side-of-camp performance mirrors the way her character is, in a sense, performing as an executive, as a manipulator, as a sexual deviant, etc. Every stilted, "awkward," pronounced line delivery of hers is the sign of a woman whose construct of herself is inseparable from the real thing. Christine's (and perhaps McAdams') inability to convince us mirrors, and feeds into, the contempt her staff has for her. People have a certain level of respect for somebody who has worked long and hard to get where they are, even if they are unpleasant - Christine commands nothing of the sort.

But she keeps acting the part, down to her costume, or lack thereof. In a film consumed with sex and sexuality, we see Rapace naked, but not McAdams. Let's suppose that she would have been willing - how much does it say about her character that she insists upon covering herself up in the midst of otherwise rather outlandish sexual predilections? "Even the sexual decadence is of the clichéd lace and carnival-mark variety," Marshall writes, noting that Christine "lives in an apartment that comes across as a tad too brash and flashy for her character." Which, again, might just be the whole point. As with everything De Palma, style is content. Christine's blonde-blonde hair, pale (sometimes sickly) white skin, red-red lipstick (and sweaters, dresses, and high heels), and black, elaborately-strung lingerie are as much a character-born formation of Powerful Woman as De Palma's inclination towards what he wants to see onscreen. In a recent interview with Film.com, he had this to say about that:

Men have been undressing women in various art forms since the beginning of visual art. You could make this film with two men, but, I mean, all you have to do is look on your television screen or go Googling or pick up a magazine, and what do you see? Women, dressed and undressed. That's what people are interested in.

Of course, De Palma trying to insist that he's just giving the people what they want is sort of laughable in considering a film as weird and alienating as Passion. Since it's also concerned with the recording and representation of oneself through images, though, it's not an unfair place to begin. In fact, the MacGuffin of sorts that sets the entire plot in motion is an ad Isabelle (Rapace) creates, centered around a smartphone, placed in the rear pocket of a shapely pair of jeans, capturing images of guys ogling a woman's derriere. That is what people are interested in. Christine is a reflection of our desires, or what she (and De Palma) perceive them to be. One character says of her that "she gets what she wants," and that may largely come about just as much from giving everybody the image they want.

Isabelle, by contrast, fashions herself a more removed, down-to-Earth, "authentic" "cool boss" type, forever the victim of Christine (until, you know, she's not), and that formation has largely consumed her outward persona. She doesn't know how to land a client at a party, doesn't know how to speak up when Christine steals her idea for an ad, doesn't even know quite how to behave when Christine shares an extended kiss with Dirk, her lover. It's only in private - to her assistant, or to her lover - that we see the truth. She certainly knows what to do and say around a man, and not just any man. Her relationship with Dirk is barely sketched and never described, but it's a whole other dimension to a woman who is apparently too shy to speak to someone at a social gathering. In bed, she's more rawly sexual than Christine's constructed lust, and will slowly unleash a cruelty more personal and pointed than Christine's cold calculations.

The way those two personalities play off one another are key to the film's rather evolved and considered notions of...certainly not good and evil; some reversal of sympathies. Christine may be more outwardly repugnant, unpleasant, and motivated purely by selfishness and greed, but she's never doing any real harm, and is able to view all her actions through the lens of "business." Isabelle, meanwhile, has our sympathies, and we can identify with her more personal motivations, but her ends are drastic and horrific. She's playing the victim just as much as Christine is playing the villain, and her commitment to that role goes down far darker paths.

It's a dicey proposition to try to deduce how much of this is intentional, to what extent the actresses are playing into it, but since when has intent mattered anyway? Christine and Isabelle are playing something they know themselves not to be, and their uncertainties and hesitations are ultimately their undoing. Perhaps that goes for the actresses as well. Part of the challenge of directing is channeling everything an actor has to give - which might include accounting for their weaknesses - towards some artistic effect. However De Palma tuned his instruments, the result is indeed electrifying and playful, but also intriguing, layered, and resonant.