Deborah Lipp

A second Monday Movie Review.

De-Lovely (2004) 7/10
Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) looks back upon his life, his career, and his marriage to Linda Lee (Ashley Judd).

De-Lovely is an odd duck of a musical. It strives towards (and I think achieves) honesty about who Cole Porter might have been, and what his life might truly have been like. The interweaving of Porter songs, some in a traditional musical comedy style of ‘people just knowing the words,’ some as performance, and many as a blend of the two, usually works. Some of it seemed gratuitous and squeezed in—Be a Clown was particularly irritating, as it just played out the same fun-on-the-movie-set images that every version of Be a Clown (or its clone, Make ‘em Laugh) has ever offered, without telling us anything new about the characters or the song.

The performances of Porter songs by pop stars are rather self-conscious. Look! It’s someone you young people have heard of! Nonetheless, I enjoyed many of them.

The conceit of the film is that Porter has died and, accompanied by an angel (Jonathan Pryce), he is looking back upon his life as a staged musical that he has composed. This is the sort of device that can really turn you off at the outset, but I feel it worked. It was oddly touching and thoughtful. The old age makeup used on Kline is, thankfully, not the embarrassment that most such attempts turn out to be.

The relationship with Linda is the heart of the movie. The film speculates that Linda knew about Cole’s homo- or bisexuality from the beginning (which is likely) and was happy to enter into a sexless marriage. Although the film looks behind closed doors into hearts that were never opened to biographers, it is consistent with the known facts. I think there is a delicate truth here, in the portrayal of the complex interplay between love and sex, marriage and friendship and romance.

Although not entirely successful, I found De-Lovely moving and worthwhile.

The Prestige (2006) 6/10
Rival magicians Borden (Christian Bale) and Angier (Hugh Jackman) each seek the secret of the other’s tricks, especially the elusive “Transporting Man.”

Screenwriter/Director Christopher Nolan specializes, it seems, in uncovering secrets, and in making that uncovering tell us something about ourselves. His Memento was a bravura piece of work, with a gimmick both clever and simple. On the one hand, it was compelling, and on the other, it wasn’t distracting; it stood to the side and let us contemplate the relationship between memory and self. Unfortunately, there is so much illusion in The Prestige, so much complex and over-loaded discussion of its nature, that the whole idea of insight is entirely lost. Oh, sure, there’s a final scene discussing The Meaning Of It All, but there’s no experience of that meaning.

The movie opens with an explanation of the title (which you’ve heard if you’ve seen the previews). A magic trick has three acts: A Pledge (showing you something ordinary), a Turn (doing something non-ordinary), and the Prestige (twisting the Turn back in on itself). With a title like The Prestige, and a director like Nolan, we know this movie will twist around quite a bit. But the twists are singularly unsatisfying. There are three major ones, of which one has stopped mattering by the time it is revealed, one is obvious for at least a half-hour before the reveal, and one is just stupid. I’m sorry, but…stupid.

The stellar cast (including Michael Caine, Scarlet Johanssen, and David Bowie) are all there to play dress up and fool around with the cool machinery, none of them make us forget that there’s a lot of whiz-bang razzle-dazzle to pay attention to. And if the actors can’t misdirect you, then it’s not much of a magic trick.

Despite the movie’s disappointments, let’s give a nod to one of the most beautiful opening shots I’ve seen in a long time; the field full of top hats is exquisite.

Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) 8/10
It’s about 1950 in the Pacific Northwest. When a fisherman drowns, murder is suspected, and the trial of Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune) brings up the history of racism against the Japanese community here, the damage wrought by internment, and the childhood romance between Kazuo’s wife Hatsue (Youki Kudoh) and Ishmael (Ethan Hawke).

The moral center of this movie is trite. Prejudice is bad, justice is good, and some wounds can heal. Wow. But That’s a wire frame on which to hang the coat of many colors that is Snow Falling on Cedars. Other than the thin structure of an unfair trial fueled by racism, there is little in this movie we’ve seen before. Japanese internment hasn’t been dealt with much in movies, certainly not as an element of a personal tale.

Snow Falling on Cedars is primarily a visual study of the way that memory works. It is full of imagery; beautiful imagery, horrific imagery, images that pop up out of sequence in the mind’s eye of the people haunted by them. Ishmael looks at Hatsue and sees their childhood together, sees their first kiss, sees her family taken away to the internment camp, all in a blur of memory and feeling. The memories are haunted, angry, frightened, and lost, but feeling is dampened; it is the images that dominate. The dampening of feeling is, I suspect, intended, and tied with the symbolism of a blanket of snow; it also prevents the film from being a soap opera.

Images provide questions as well as answers. Revelations, when they occur, are visual, except in the somewhat forced dénouement to the trial. We see a letter being written and read. Is it written sincerely, or under duress? We don’t know. We see memories…or are they fantasies? As a heavy blizzard falls, everything is shrouded in coldness and fog.

One revelation bothers me. Without revealing it, I still wonder if it was a revelation at all; if the filming cleverly hid something, or stupidly failed to show it. It was something I didn’t feel needed hiding, nor was the reveal particularly…revealing.

As usual, Ethan Hawke gives a passable performance that, while good, will never be studied by acting students. Youki Kodoh is extremely affecting, and Rick Yune does little but be stoical and very handsome (but he’s very good at that). Supporting players, including Max von Sydow, Celia Weston, and Sam Shepard, are impressive. But the star is the cinematography, and the way that the cinematography is edited together to create an impression, not of beauty, but of the memories of beauty. Everything here is bittersweet.

The Wild Bunch (1969) 8/10
Aging outlaws (including William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) have outlived the Old West, but still cling to a life of bank and train robberies, even as cars and machine guns make their appearance. Directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Sometimes you’ll see a fanboy say that so-and-so must “hate comics” (or whatever the subject matter is) because so-and-so criticized them fiercely. I saw this recently in Bond fan circles when those opposed to Daniel Craig’s casting were dismissed as “haters” and “not real Bond fans” by enthusiasts of the choice. But to criticize something in minute detail, you have to love it. There’s simply no way to absorb and understand the minutia without affection.

Peckinpah must have loved Westerns, and he must have loved violence, but The Wild Bunch is also a bitter criticism of both.

I’ve never seen The Wild Bunch before, but it’s impossible to be a film fan without reading both the praise and the criticism. Peckinpah, it’s said, adores and adulates violence; he makes it a dance, and he makes it gruesome to an unprecedented extend. Even in 2006, it’s obvious when watching The Wild Bunch that it depicted a violence the genre had not seen before. And while it is easy to be offended by the spurting fountains of blood, it’s impossible not to know that the film seeks to acknowledge a truth about brutality. Peckinpah wasn’t the first to see a kind of poetry in a dying lawman falling off his horse, that had been around for years; instead he was the first to see (and film) both the poetry and the ugliness in the same lawman falling off his horse. This is a message to those who love to watch the deaths of those lawmen, a message about what it might really be like. Indeed, I have no idea if big gushes of blood are any more realistic than no blood at all, never having seen an actual lawman shot off his horse, but the blood sends a message that bloodlessness does not.

There are no beautiful outlaws in The Wild Bunch. William Holden was certainly beautiful as a young man, but he is not glamorized here. Indeed, our outlaws are introduced in World War I era Army uniforms, and if ever there was an uglier, more sexless uniform, I don’t know it. It’s like a mockery of (and reference to) John Wayne wearing his iconic Civil War uniform in The Searchers. If Holden is unbeautiful, try standing him next to Borgnine, and that’ll really drain the pretty out. Ain’t an Eastwood in the bunch, I tell you.

There are no good guys here, and indeed, it’s hard to know for whom to root. The opening shoot-out is like an ode to the meaninglessness of choosing a side. In a later extended sequence across multiple battles, Mexican general Mapache fights it out with Pancho Villa. Our outlaws are working for Mapache, but he is a brute, and is hated by a Mexican outlaw whose village he destroyed. Meanwhile the U.S. Army, our outlaws, bounty hunters, and railroad men are all in a gun-battle in which nobody seems to be on anybody’s side.

Our “heroes” are definitely not heroic either. Certainly Holden’s Pike has a sense of honor, as does Borgnine’s Dutch and Edmond O’Brien as Sykes. But they also leave their dead for the buzzards and brutalize whores, whom they then underpay. (This is a very misogynist movie.) We are meant to sympathize with these men, but not to like them.

Peckinpah avoids iconic scenes. [SPOILERS AHEAD] » Read more..

The Departed (2006) 9/10
Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) grows up under the tutelage of Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), ruthless boss of Boston’s Irish mob. Sullivan becomes a police detective, working as a mole to protect Costello. Meanwhile, Internal Affairs places Bill Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a mole in Costello’s mob, taking the trouble to first hide any evidence that he is still a police officer. The two moles come closer and closer to finding each other’s identity. Directed by Martin Scorsese.

Among other things, The Departed is a work of technical virtuosity. Here is a film in which all the pieces come together; it is brilliantly filmed, edited, performed, and scored (in Scorsese’s trademark pop/rock style). Scorsese has perhaps never been so confident as a director, so mature.

The movie reminds me, and many others, of Goodfellas, although I caught enticing whiffs of Taxi Driver. » Read more..

Network (1976) 10/10
Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a news anchor with declining ratings, is fired. The next day he announces, during his newscast, that he intends to blow his brains out on the air. A sensationalist programming director (Faye Dunaway) decides that Beale should continue on-air, and he is given a show as “the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves.” Directed by Sidney Lumet.

Network is a satire of a medium that nearly defies satirization. Fortunately, screenwriter Paddy Chayesfsky was up to the task, and the movie holds up even today. Stand Network next to Broadcast News, which takes its characters less seriously and its comedy less black; they’re both saying the same thing, that news is not news when it’s on television, it’s entertainment, and that has repercussions. James L. Brooks‘s movie is concerned with what that does to news, while Lumet’s is concerned with what it says about entertainment, and what entertainment means to us anyway. Network predates and predicts reality TV and lurid freak-of-the-week talk shows, but its aim is wider. Network is skewering not just TV, but the way that TV makes us think.

Standing beside the dark comedy of the TV show itself (Sybil the Soothsayer, anyone?) is the relationship between fired news producer Max Schumacher (William Holden) and Diana Christensen (Dunaway). Each scene between them is played as a television scene, each line of dialogue is either about television, or sounds like a television script. Until the end, they speak entirely in cliches, and in self-awareness about the cliches, and in network lingo. Diana, Max finally realizes, is television. She has scripts, not experiences, and is numb to real feeling.

The screenplay is as smart as smart gets. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” “You have meddled with the primal forces of NATURE!” “It’s not a psychotic break, it’s a cleansing moment of clarity.”

Network has long been called a writer’s movie. But it doesn’t suck for actors, either; three of whom won Academy Awards. (The brilliant William Holden was nominated in the same category as co-star Peter Finch, who won posthumously. It’s impossible to compete with a corpse.)

The film is sharply funny, full of witty flourishes, and yet works as drama as well. Despite the satiric nature of the relationship between Diana and Max, they are genuinely moving together, and Dunaway’s Oscar was well-deserved.

I first saw this movie in 1976, and, other than a few very famous clips, hadn’t seen it since. I find it remarkable that, after thirty years, some scenes were still vivid in my memory. Network is like that; it paints a strong and memorable picture.

As a postscript, have you noticed how the darkest, most portentious, most dystopic movies of the past are now being described as “timely”? Sorta fucking miserable.

(I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to cross-post anymore!)