To Havre and Have Not

Just to clear up any confusion - I liked Ari Kaurismäki's Le Havre. I just didn't love it. It's a boldly theatrical film exploring rather minor emotional shifts, and is an absolute pleasure to watch in many regards. I just didn't think it all came together as successfully. In any event, my review is now up at Battleship Pretension.

The Skin I Live In (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

The following review contains spoilers.


In the supplements on the Criterion edition of Harakiri (which I reviewed for Battleship Pretension (plug!)), screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto provides some insight into why his flashbacks are so effective, noting that "it isn't a flashback if it moves in the direction of the drama." Each of the flashbacks is "introduced" by an important dramatic turn or a new question. Also, there are people in each scene as clueless about the story Hashimoto is about to cut to as we are in the audience. Each time, we get a dramatic, emotional reason for diving into the past to illuminate the present.

And this is the key to what's missing in The Skin I Live In. Almodóvar begins with a fascinating set-up. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant surgeon researching a new type of artificial skin, which he's testing on a patient, Vera (Elena Anaya), who also seems to be his prisoner. Their relationship is intriguing, as Vera seems to want him desperately while Robert is constantly battling his own attraction towards her. The film's best image is classic Almodóvar - Robert spies on Vera through a camera, which he views on a plasma screen as big as his wall. Before long, a crook will break into their house and rape Vera, with strong implications that they used to have a relationship. She tosses out a line that feels revealing even before we know the context - "I've had enough of sex in the garden" (or something to that effect).

Even better, the answers to all of these questions are thematically satisfying, emotionally shattering, and quietly terrifying, but their presentation is so ham-handed and obvious, bereft of true dramatic impact and stuffed into a flashback that serves no structural purpose.

The key revelation is that Vera was once Vincente, a wayward, pill-addicted twenty-something who raped Robert's daughter, Norma, sending her spiraling into insanity and eventually killing herself. Upon hearing about the rape, Robert kidnapped Vincente and locked him in a dungeon, before performing on him a forced sex change (the result of which leaves him looking very similar to Robert's late wife, who ran away with her lover, was burned in a car crash, and eventually committed suicide) and keeping her prisoner for further experimentation. Which, by the way, is an awesome story, but even the best concept goes sour when mishandled.

The flashback itself is totally unmotivated. Robert and Vera have sex, and then each seems to dream, or at least reflect upon, about how they met. First, we see Robert's perspective of a wedding he and his daughter attended, and how he found his daughter lying in the garden unconscious, clearly the victim of rape. Then, Almodóvar cuts back to the present, gives us an isolated shot of Vera asleep, and fades back into that same night to show her perspective. But her flashback doesn't start there - it starts in Vincente's mother's vintage clothing store, in which Vincente and another woman work. We know right away, because of the principles of cinematic language, Vera has to be one of these two people. But then Vincente attends the wedding alone, and suddenly the whole movie opens up in front of us - Robert kidnapped Vincente and locked him in a dungeon, before performing a forced sex change on him and keeping her prisoner for further experimentation. And yes, I know I already typed that sentence, but only as a means of pointing out how redundant the film becomes, because the next ungodly amount of time is showing step-by-step how this is carried out, and the whole affair starts to feel a lot like the last few episodes of Lost - lots of answers without any emotional heft.

The key problem here is that all of the characters already know the whole story. We're kept in the dark because it's more surprising that way, but as a result, we're on a totally different trajectory than the characters. We don't get any time to truly appreciate Robert's struggle, because by the time we move back to the present, he's made up his mind - Vera goes free, and they're going to live together and have lots of creepy sex. Vera, despite her promises, eventually turns on him, killing Robert and Robert's mother/housekeeper. But her struggle, her chess game, is kept totally secret until a few seconds before that particular showdown.

So we can reflect on the earlier, more intriguing part of the movie, and apply the twist in order to gain some emotional resonance, but it's unnatural, unearned. We're being manipulated, saving the film's most intriguing element for a revelation that operates as a twist. But unlike the twists in Memento, Fight Club, Psycho, or any of the other classics of "gotcha!" cinema, it's not used to mirror the characters' emotional journeys. It's used cheaply, and elaborated on unnecessarily, when time could have been spent with the characters and what all this has meant to them. Instead, by the time we cut back to the present, everyone seems pretty content. Until suddenly they're not. Couldn't we have gotten a hint of Vera's plan? Wouldn't that have been more emotionally satisfying, never mind the heightened dramatic intrigue. Couldn't we get a moment of Robert wondering what kind of monster he has become, or maybe an indication that he believes he's earned his monstrosity after the tragedies that befell him? Or maybe he's too completely lost in his own obsession and madness to even think these things. We never know.

I'm left wondering just what this movie was trying to do, exactly. If it's yet another contemplation about how an urge for revenge manifests itself in worse acts than that which it's avenging, fine, but by the time we meet Robert, it's already clear that whatever he did to Vera was far worse than anything she could have done to him. Robert's plight remains distant, unknowable to us; he's a monster when we meet him, and the unfolding revelations only help us to understand, but never sympathize. Meanwhile, save for one glorious moment in which she discovers yoga, we never really see Vera for who she is until the final minutes of the film. The last scene, in which she reunites with her mother and the other girl in the shop, is similarly backwards - because of the events shown in the film, it makes narrative sense for Vera to reveal herself to the shopgirl first, but the true emotion should remain between Vera and her mother, and we're only given a slight hint of that.

The Hills Have Ides

Among my observations that didn't quite fit into my review of The Ides of March, which is now up at Battleship Pretension:

-I loved, loved, loved the way the characters kept referring to life after campaign management, and starting a consulting firm, with the kind of tone people usually use to talk about retirement homes or death. Said so much about these people and their way of life.

-I knew instantly that Marisa Tomei played a reporter, not because I read/saw the played or read any review or really had much in the way of prior knowledge of the film. I knew she was a reporter because she wore glasses and had ruffled hair. Clooney, for all the subtlety he gets from performers, is in full-on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind mode when it comes to visualizing his characters.

-Speaking of Confessions, this makes two films in which Clooney has cast himself as the antagonist of sorts. I don't think it's a role for which he's particularly well suited, but since it's only really been twice now, it has felt like a breath of fresh air each time. So in other words, if he made a habit of this, I'd get sick of it fast, but since it's so spread out, it works quite nicely, and he's very good in the film.

-IMDB assures me that I have seen Jennifer Ehle in stuff before Contagion, but that was the first film in which I really noticed her, and between that and this, she's my new favorite actress. Does almost nothing but is so naturally wonderful it makes me wonder if I'm just missing the millions of tiny things she's doing.

-Max Minghella (a.k.a. Divya a.k.a. the Winklevii's friend in The Social Network) is a really good actor, but I wonder if he'll only ever work in movies about processes, i.e. he's uniquely suited to spouting exposition and portraying someone caught in the beginning of a success he always expected.

-I know it's cool to rag on her, but I still like Evan Rachel Wood. This isn't her strongest moment, but her character is also kind of ridiculous, and more than a little bit of a plot device. I can totally see the character working really well onstage, and a little bit broader, but the translation loses a lot by demanding subtlety.

It's an uneven film to be sure, yet I think it might be Clooney's best to date. Good Night, and Good Luck was a more unified work, perhaps, but it was also a lot simpler. With this, Clooney's actually making a film about something in us as people, and how that manifests itself in modern life.

Two for Blu

Well, more of Blu as in Blu-Ray, but hey, that works too.

I recently had the chance to look at two recent releases from The Criterion Collection for the good folks at Battleship Pretension. I loved the hell out of Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage, even if I wish the special features were a little more...I don't know, special or something. On the flip side, I was a little ambivalent about Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins, but gained a greater appreciation for it after listening to Adrian Martin's commentary, which sadly stands as that disc's sole supplement. For the rest of my thoughts, click on the respective links. We've been getting a lot of readers, which is awesome, but very few comments, and we'd love to see more discussions start up!

You Can Count on Margaret

Meant to post this on Friday, but if you live in New York or Los Angeles, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go see Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret this week. It was shot several years ago, but has been held up in editing and legal proceedings ever since. The result isn't perfect, but it's so, so, so good. Fox Searchlight is dumping it big time, but it's a damn good movie that deserves better. I don't know when or if it'll be hitting other cities, but if Fox updates their website or I hear about it opening elsewhere, I'll be sure to at least post it to Twitter. In the meantime, my full review is up at Battleship Pretension.

Oh, also, I'd recommend against seeing the trailer; it misrepresents the hell out of the movie, among other undesirable traits.

On Movie Stars and Hands in Jars

The above image will START to explain the title of this post, anyway. Point is, I have two new reviews up at Battleship Pretension, and I have been remiss in sharing them. The first is of the amicable, if not exceptional, Moneyball by the might-be-great-someday director Bennett Miller. I found his Capote to be similarly bland, directionally, though he's now two-for-two in bringing out great performances from his leading men. Not a major accomplishment when dealing with Philip Seymour Hoffman (who also co-stars, rather ineffectually, in Moneyball), but Brad Pitt has a surprisingly uneven track record as a leading man. In fact, looking at it now, this is only the second time I thought he's actually given a truly great lead performance*, for reasons detailed in the linked review.

On the other end of the equation, I gushed for many, many words about The Criterion Collection's outstanding release of all of Jean Vigo's films, titled appropriately enough, The Complete Jean Vigo. As I said, my gushing knew no bounds there, so I will keep it necessarily bounded here. Other than to say if you've never seen Vigo's work, life's about to get a little sweeter.

*The first was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and you can just suck on it if that's not good enough for you. Or read my lengthier, more well-worded rational, here. Also, he was not the lead in Fight Club, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Seven, or probably any other movie about which you're ready to say "well, clearly you haven't seen..." though I welcome all attempts to the contrary.

The Help (dir. Tate Taylor)

There has, unsurprisingly, been a lot of discussion surrounding The Help since its release. Movies about race tend to do that. There have been the usual claims that it's another movie about whitey saving the black folk (although the film makes great pains to not come across that way, and I really don't think it does). There have been issues of representation - are the black people too saintly or just saintly enough? And perhaps more importantly, there's been debate about whether making a comedy about mid-century race relations in Mississippi is a good idea at all.

All that is sort of besides the point to me. My big beef with the film - along with several smaller beefs - is that it doesn't give racism its due.

Now let me explain. Racists be crazy, we know that. But there has long existed a strand of institutionalized racism in this country, and when people use that term "institutionalized racism" they're not talking about the institution like the government's an institution. It's not as though someone laid down the law and all the white people kind of sit around saying "I know, this segregation's a bitch, but what'll you do?" It was an institution because nearly everyone was onboard with it. Undoubtedly there were some people who bowed to public pressure because they're trying to keep up appearances or wanted to fit in or hey life's hard enough as it is without doing the whole changing the world thing and sometimes you just want a decent meal and to keep the electricity on. But for the most part? That was an ugly scene, man. But The Help would have you believe that NO ONE in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s was totally down with the whole racism thing except for ONE PERSON, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard, playing somewhere in the key of Timothy Dalton in Hot Fuzz), who must have some sort of unimaginable power over the residents because she's managed to convince all of them to go along with this whole racism idea of hers. All except that damn feminist!

The story nominally centers around Skeeter (Emma Stone), a recent college grad who just landed a job as a journalist, in her quest to give voice to the long-suffering maids of Jackson, though she doesn't really have much of a story here herself. Her purpose is purely political - she's there to convince us we'd be just like that if we lived back then, and to assure the viewer that the filmmakers don't believe these racist things the characters are saying, because look here's this nice independent liberal woman who agrees with 2011 sensibilities and rolls her eyes at all this other silliness. Dramatically, her role is as the vehicle in which we travel to visit the maids - chiefly Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) - or the racists, or all the nice people who just can't wait for Skeeter to get the word out that black people are people too so that they can finally come out and say the same thing. It's as though, by the end, everyone suddenly woke up and said, "my goodness, the 1960s are here!"

There are other more objective, dramatic issues with the film. For instance, just to make sure Hilly isn't the only one we'll have, we're given Minny's abusive husband, who exists entirely offscreen, lest he take on the qualities of, y'know, a person. That'd be complicated. Then there's an extended, frequently referred to bit of quite literal bathroom humor that, were it a part of a Farrelly brothers film (and it would not be out of place), would earn derision from the very crowd who here celebrated it. But perhaps that's speculation on my part. Maybe what I meant to say is that it wasn't funny the first time, nor the nineteenth time the movie makes a joke about the same freaking incident. Don't these people have anything more important to talk about? There's also the scene in which Skeeter completely rips into her date, who despite being a bit of an ass, probably at least deserved the consideration of a conversation. And I'd appreciate this bit as a nice little character flaw on Skeeter's part - maybe she's a bit of a hothead? - if the film didn't leave a beat for the audience to cheer.

On the whole, the Tate Taylor's direction is an abomination that would make Stanley Kramer rise from the dead to join Paul Haggis in saying, "miiiiight wanna hold back a little there." Every opportunity for subtlety is completely glossed over - Hilly is absolute evil and Skeeter is absolute good. Pure and simple, and even the slightest suggestion otherwise would totally undermine what we're going for here, which is the oh-so-daring message that racism is bad. At least Kramer and Haggis had the guts to tackle the subject in their own time, and with characters that had some semblance of dimension. Taylor's direction is flat and uncompelling, barely a step above Judd Apatow aesthetically and near the bottom of the barrel emotionally. I know there are those out there for whom this created a grand emotional swell, but I simply can't get that worked up when the film can't give me an actual person to root for or against while actively denying the very real stakes that would have been present in this setting. It's no great victory defeating the concept of racism when that entire struggle is waged against a single person.

I swear the movie would have you believe Hilly invented racism, and as of 1960, was its sole proponent, so if we can just do away with her this whole misunderstanding would clear right up! Even her ancient mother (Sissy Spacek), who probably knew people who fought for the Confederacy, just adores the maids in that homespun racist sort of way (and the film urges us to laugh along with, and celebrate, a character who not too long ago had Minny fanning her with a newspaper, with absolutely no sense of irony about the whole thing). In one scene, one of Hilly's friends even tries to speak up on her own maid's behalf, and Hilly just keeps shutting her down like an abusive husband.

I don't have a problem with light, frilly entertainment, but I do think it's immoral and irresponsible to present something so complex, volatile, and still relevant so simply. The film's treatment of racism is too pat for a force that continues to drive at the way this country operates. It's a nice enough way to introduce a 7-year-old to the concept, I suppose, but no adult should accept the ideological undertones of the film. Sure, it makes mention of the KKK and of other people, somewhere over there, committing horrible acts based solely on the color of a person's skin, but the people in your neighborhood, the ones you go to church with? Oh, they'd never do that. Look at how nice they are! They might be a little curt, but that's only because life's stressful sometimes and they are so very Southern. But give them time, talk reasonably to them, and they'll understand. The film doesn't quite end on a note of "and none of that was ever a problem again!" but it seems to suggest it's only a few years down the line (just as soon as Mighty Liberal Skeeter puts a stake through Hilly's heart...or something).