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Review: This is
a slow, tempting drama, played out on a wide screen set up like a stage, with
the simple Shakespearian setup of revenge. A somewhat winsome college
freshman, Frank (Nick Stahl) is carrying on an affair with an older woman,
gets knocked off by a crude blue-collar and somewhat decaying ex-husband-a
crime which the family must avenge vigilante style, given the paucity of the
police and justice system.
This film was
real hit at the 2001 Sundance. I think it makes an interesting
comparison to The Deep End, in terms of psychological intensity
and panoramic storytelling, even if the setup is more traditional in content.
The final vengeance, though, is chilling, reminding one of Blood
Simple.
A
comparable family grief film is Moonlight
Mile, written and directed by Brad Silberling, from
Touchstone (why not Miramax instead?) The setup is that a gangly young
man, Joe Nast (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), the son-in-low-to-be,
comforts the grieving parents (Ben and Jo Jo Floss, played by
Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon) of his fiancé after she is gunned down in
a bar. The story is loosely based on an incident earlier
in Silberling’s own life. Nast is actually already living in the
parents’ home, a setup that seems awkward until we gradually understand how
Nast was to get into the father’s “commercial real estate” ambitions. The
quiet story gradually reveals layers of secrets and side affairs. The film
apparently is supposed to build up to a courtroom drama scene where Nast is
supposed to testify about his own loss, but comes apart, mumbling on the
witness stand, until he recovers himself to make a rather wincing speech
about “the truth.” Gyllenhaal’s manner is so underplayed and
low-key that it seems almost stagnant. I think a lot of script readers would
have rather seen the victims’ impact, prosecution and courtroom part done
with more emphasis and direction, since courtroom drama is perceived as a
good way to explore many different issues (including some of mine). (The
death penalty stuff gets short circuited.) Pets fill in some action
into the film, including one scene where a dog barfs on camera (never seen
that before in the movies), and later when the dog is attacked by a cat (the
cat triumphs again in the final scene). The film is widescreen and looks
bigger than it really is.
Another
comparable film is Kevin Spacey’s production of The United States of Leland (Paramount
Classics, Trigger Street, Thousand
Words, dir. Matthew Ryan Hoge, R, 112 min, 2004; note – Kevin Spacey is
one of the founders of Trigger Street, which provides networking for new
filmmakers). This is a non-linear retrospective docudrama of the murder of a
retarded boy by a seemingly gentle teenager Leland FitzGerald, played by Ryan
Gosling. A prison teacher (Don Cheadle) befriends Leland and then
announces his attempt to write a book (“you’re not a writer until people read
what you write”) about the boy, although this would obviously violate his
confidentiality agreement at work. Leland’s father (Kevin Spacey) is a
jet-setting fiction author and literary agent
who despises autobiography dressed as fiction. The father also
believes that he can be admired for his writing but not for what he is as a
person, an idea that locks into the idea of self-handicapping behavior. (A
good one for Dr. Phil.) And Leland himself starts handwriting his thoughts in
a prison social studies book. The plot builds up around the victim’s family,
especially the brother of the victim (Chris Klein) and his father (Martin
Donovan). It turns all to Shakespearean tragedy without that much
character-driven explanation (as you would find with the bard himself).
Leland’s flaw seems to be a kind of apathy that makes him so pliable that he
can become unstable. But part of the explanation may be a homophobic
statement made by his father to the jail teacher earlier, as the killing
happens in an embrace after the retarded kid becomes confused by a barricade
on a bicycle path. You leave the theater wanting to see a movie about
teens who turn out well. In my own life, I have met enough who did,
despite jet-setting parents.
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (Paramount Classics, 103 min, R,
dir. Mike Hodges) provides another story about family grief that fits the
paradigm of In the Bedroom. Here the movie tracks two brothers Will Graham
(Clive Owen) and Davey Graham (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Will is working as a
manual laborer logging in Wales, and Davey is dealing drugs
in London. We only gradually learn about the characters but when a deal
goes bad, Davey is forcibly sodomized. In a brutal sequence that follows, he
waddles back to his flat, vomits, slips into a cold bath and slits his
wrists. The scenes are quite graphic. Will, when he learns what
has happened his family, returns to seek revenge, out of, as he
claims, pure grief. The film is remarkable in the detail of the mundane
indoor scenes, and tells most of the story with little verbage, except
when the medical examiner is explaining the clinical details of forced
“bugger” (anal rape). The opening credits are in black and white, and
the colors in the movie itself have an edgy, metallic look, which must have
required a lot of playing with film stock.
Separate Lies (2005, Fox Searchlight/Celador/DNA, dir. Julian Fellowes,
based on the novel A Way Through the Wood, by Nigel Balchin, 1950) again
presents us with the aftermath of tragedy, and the moral dilemma of coming to
terms with responsibility for it. I remember the topic of moral dilemmas at
the Unitarian Fellowship in Eagam, MN a few years ago and the
kids took it up. Here it is very much the grownups,
in Britain and Wales. Before the credits, an elderly man on a
bicycle is struck by a car, perhaps just the handlebars. The driver runs. His
widow-to-be Maggie (Linda Bassett) may have seen who did it, a playboy
William Bule (Rupert Everett, who in this movie seems to be rather
hairy for a change). Bule was having an affair with
Anne Manniny (Emily Watson), who feels hemmed in my
her moralizing solicitor husband James (Tom Wilkinson). There are
delicious sequences as this unravels, as when James calls William and pretty
soon James and Emily have their confrontation. While she is preparing
delicious hors d’oeuvres and salads, she tells James she did it. When she
confesses the affair, he vomits on camera. Now, James had been pleading to
get the guilty party to confess because justice under the law is the morally
right thing. Or is it? What is the outcome of doing right? The characters
change as they face the real consequences of ideology.
Match Point (2005, Dreamworks/BBC,
dir. Woody Allen, R, 124 min) is a steady British dramatic thriller, in the
studied style of Woody Allen, all right, rather than Hitchcock, who seems
invoked by the plot. Former tennis star Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers)
takes on a job as instructor/playboy at a London estate of Alec
Hewett (Brian Cox), first teaching the son Tom (Matthew Goode), and quickly
marrying Chloe (Emily Mortimer), while falling for Tom’s fiancée Nola Rice
(Scarlet Johansson). The scenes with her are quite passionate with
mutual undressings. She gets pregnant, whereas Chloe at the time can’t,
and we have our problem for Chris to solve. I can say that he gets away with
it, somewhat by luck, and you seem to like him. Some critics have
pointed out that all the characters in this movie are evil in some degree,
and one wonders why one makes “evil” into a protagonist, but the characters
are not presented that way. Instead, Chris, poor-born, has been trying to
weed his way into a privileged world based on family ties, and his failures
come across as perhaps Shakespearian but not in any way nihilistic. At one
point, the police contact him with a phone call to the house and ask him to
come in – that is how such things start. Now both Rhys-Meyers and Goode look
a bit like hairless-bodied clones of Hugh Grant, and they both parade through
the movie open-necked, without undershirts.
Interesting metrosexuality.
Dial
M for Murder (1954, Warner Bros., dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 105 min, play by
Frederick Knott). “People don’t commit murder on credit.” This famous film,
that I wasn’t allowed to see as a boy, is the inspiration of “Match Point”
probably, as a retired English tennis player (Ray Milland) plots to eliminate
his wife, who is seeing an American writer (Robert Cummings) by blackmailing
an ex-con (Anthony Dawson) to break in, hide, and strangle his wife when she
is beckoned to the phone. Maybe British phones had the “M” isolated then.
There are plenty of Hitchcock’s famous close-ups and the typical detailed
plotting of British mysteries with ordinary things. (This style of
photography works better in 3-D, in which this film was originally shown.)
The plan goes wrong, and the wife gets convicted to be hanged. So the writer
comes up with a Plan C. As with the Woody Allen film, all of the characters
are rotten.
Strangers on a
Train (1951,
Warner Bros., dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 101 min, novel by
Patricia Highsmith) is one of Hitchcock’s most diabolical film noir
masterpieces, in the sharpest black-and-white you ever saw. The plot is stock
Patricia Highsmith, like Mr. Ripley. On a train (at the time, the
Pennsylvania railroad between New York and Washington, probably one of the
electric trains), a likeable young tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Grainger)
meets a stranger, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), who will evolve in the movie
as a demented, psychopathic (or at least sociopathic) playboy. Bruno peppers
him with questions, having recognized him, and starts exposing his own value
system. One should try anything in life once. He proposes the perfect murder,
where two strangers commit each other’s crime so that the police will not
have motives. (“They swap murders. Each guy does the other guy’s murder. Then
there is nothing to connect them.”; “You think my theory is OK, you like
it.”) Apparently he knows that Guy’s marriage to
his pipsequeaky wife (Kasey Rogers) is on the rocks. After they get
off the train, Guy finds out he can’t get a divorce. Bruno stalks her into an
amusement park, and strangles her after getting off a lover’s lane ride (and
asking her simply, “Is your name Miriam?”). (The shot, reflected in
eyeglasses, is famous.) Hitchcock has mixed plot and character in this
film, as he has shown Miriam to be quite a tramp in public herself before her
partially deserved demise. Of course, Guy and his family have to keep the
police at bay. Guy agrees to go along with his end of the deal and murder
Bruno’s father. Does he really agree, or is he just outflanking Bruno? They
come into confrontation, and a chase that winds up in a
famous merrygoround scene, where they fight, Guy saves a little
boy, and the ride crashes.
There
are obvious “lessons” in the film, about attracting attention to oneself from
unstable people and potential stalkers, even in a lower tech, pre-Internet
world. There is wonderful attention to the finest details, such as the lost
cigarette lighter. The action takes place in unspecified cities in the
Northeast, probably around Baltimore.
Unlike
“Match Point,” here at least one of the major characters, Guy, is good and
likeable, for the most part. Hitchcock pays attention to the smallest
details, even the manly hair about Guy’s wrists in the opening train
compartment scene. Later Guy is presented on the courts in tennis matches
(remember how the audience eyes follow the ball, except for Bruno) as a
lanky, hairy handsome man, rather like the youngest version of Andre Agassi
(before all of the latter’s “changes”).
The DVD comes
with a bonus that offers the “preview” version, which may be the British
release.
The DVD commentary
points out differences between the movie and Highsmith's book. For
one thing, Guy is an architect in the book (not exactly a Howard Roark) and a
tennis player in the movie. And Guy finally gives in to a moment of rare
weakness and murders Bruno's father in the book. The commentary points
out that Highsmith seemed to write to exorcise her own compulsive
demons, that she imagined herself as capable of these crimes. The commentary
even mentions the rather Nietzchean idea that someone who carries
out a murder is "superior," perhaps an offensive notion that is
"bad for you." This is, after all, a film noir and a novel noir.
The film apparent triggered Highsmith's career, that would
include 22 novels.
There is also
some controversy as to whether Bruno is homosexual. Hitchcock was ambiguous
on this, and it is not necessarily so. Nevertheless, the initial meeting on
the train, where the shoes touch, playing footsie, is almost like a
"pickup."
Highsmith was
particularly concerned with randomness, of how things happen, how good people
can suffer and bad events can go unpunished, how villains can entice a
rooting interest. "You never know what is going to happen in the future."
The
Lady Vanishes (1938, Criterion, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, novel by
Ethel Lina White, 97 min) is another delicious old black-and-white
mystery based on what happens on a transcontinental train. This time Iris
Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) meets an old lady Froy (Dame
May Whitty) at a mountain lodge when they are snowbound. They get on a
train to go home and Froy disappears, and all the other passengers
deny having seen her. Pretty soon there is a faceless corpse, or at least a
doll, and then the train is attacked. Miss Froy is carrying a
secret code. What is interesting is that the story anticipates World War II,
and the plotting to keep secrets away from the Nazis. The movie was remade in
1979 and directed by George Axelrod.
Suspicion (1941, RKO Radio, dir.
Alfred Hitchcok, novel “Before the Fact” by Francis Iles aka Anthony
Berkeley, 99 min). An English socialite Lina (Joan Fontaine) meets
a playboy (Cary Grant) on a train, in a tunnel no less, and falls for him,
gradually to become suspicious of his intentions when he gambles behind her
back and gets fired, all while pretending to work. There is some moralizing
about the work ethic. The novel is famous for being told from the viewpoint
of the victim. The ending, arguably violating the novel (where Lina is
the accessory before the fact for her own murder), is vintage Hitchcock (with
the car-on-a-cliff scenes) and anticipates his later work. I love the line
about the novelist who says her villains are actually heroes.
Little Children (2006, New Line Cinema, dir.
Todd Field, 130 min, R) will probably be compared to In the Bedroom but
it is much more rhapsodic and impressionistic. The New Line trademark plays
against a rising Doppler train whistle (instead of its music trademark), and
the train sound becomes a leitmotif for the mood of this most disturbing
movie about suburbia. Then we open with the broadcast of a video about a
registered sex offender Ronald McGorvey (played by Jackie Earl
Haley), whose apparent crime was indecent exposure in front of a child, for
which he served two years. He is constantly referred to as a pedophile and
pervert, but the facts of his case seem less clear. It’s even possible that
the exposure was inadvertent or accidental. Various married couples
congregate in various situations (Robert Altman like) and focus on their fear
of the sex offender, who faces a societal ostracism out of proportion to his
crime. So this turns into a movie about the emotions behind the socialization
that it takes most ordinary people to marry and raise families, and connect
to their “little children” who are abundant in this film. The people are
fruitful and they multiply.
The
“prom king” is handsome young lawyer Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), married
to Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) but he plays around with Sarah
(Kate Winslet). That gets explicit, close to NC-17 territory. A retired
policeman (Noah Emmerich; Gregg Edelman is Richard) is leading the
picture crusade to keep Ronald pilloried, with ugly pictures and bullhorn
attacks, but the cop has a skeleton in his own closet—an accidental shooting
of an innocent juvenile. The guys have a touch football league that reminds
one of Invincible.
The
story builds in little steps. One disturbing scene occurs early when Ron goes
skinny dipping in the town pool, and all of the townspeople scram because the
“pervert is on the loose.” They refer to him as scum or vermin, to be
exterminated, or at least castrated (the poor guy will take the knife on
himself eventually). All of this hostility and hatred comes out of the need
to "protect" their own progeny. You see the "monster"
close up, haggard, aging, but at least he isn’t going bald in the legs. But
then we learn that Ron lives with his mother (Phyllis Sommerville), who
has always overprotected him. She tries to get him to date a woman his own
age, and he isn’t attracted to her, he thinks, yet eventually his behavior on
the date does turn a bit inappropriate. There is a snide line that any man
who lives with his mother is suspect. That is my situation now, but it wasn’t
in the 90s, yet some coworkers thought that I lived with my mother when I
didn’t, because I had not created my own family. Mr. Field would have had to
exercise great caution in constructing this story, to keep the character
generic and general, or else risk accidental libel. Yet the reality of all of
this is even more subtle. Some of us are not very good at building our own
families, so if family responsibility or eldercare comes our way, we aren’t
good at it. If Mr. Field wants to explore that angle in another film, I can
certainly help him .
The camera
focuses a lot on Wilson, his muscularity with hairy chest and legs; it's as
if it is the male, rather than the female, that really needs to be perfect in
Field's world. The film, from the opening train horn, tries to hypnotize the
moviegoer into living in this Stepford-wives like wold,
closed off (except for the self-propelled commuter train cars) as if it were
a closed universe, to experiment with perfection, and the contempt for those
who miss the mark. We've seen that kind of thinking in history before, and we
know where it can lead.
This film,
though funded by a major studio, is starting with a platform release in
independent theaters (like Landmark) to build an audience, due to its very
sensitive subject matter.
The
film is narrated by the voice from PBS Frontline (Will Lyman).
Running with Scissors (2006, TriStar, dir.
Ryan Murphy, book by Augusten Burroughs, 116 min, R, USA) also uses
the Doppler train horn in anticipation of critical intimate scenes, and I
wonder if Murphy and Field were familiar with each others’
films. The film is adapted from a memoir by the protagonist, Augusten,
played for most of the movie by 20 year old New Jersey actor Robert
Cross. The greatest part of the film takes place around 1978, during the
Carter administration. He is raise by brainy but dysfunctional parents: an
alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin), and a wanna-be-famous writer mother
Deidre (Annette Bening). When the couple breaks up, the fracture is such
an amputation that their therapist (Brian Cox, from L.I.E.) winds up with
custody. Augusten winds up living in weird, Tim Burton like environments,
where his creativity shines but he has to survive events like the cannibalism
of a pet cat. Augusten announces that he is gay (at age 13,
according to the movie) and soon is picked up by another of the therapist’s
patients, Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes). The film implies a relationship (it
never shows the intimacy explicitly), which would be blatantly illegal (and
put Neil in the penitentiary) in every state. But Murphy justifies the
relationship, not only by the author’s factual history, but also by
making Augusten the one level headed character in the whole movie.
The teenager is always articulate and cognizant (like the teen character in
“Almost Famous”) in a see of dysfunctional adults.
Clearly, Augusten cannot become a victim. You have a moral answer
to something most people see as repellent today, and it doesn’t answer the
legal questions. Deidre for a while resents her son’s competition
as a writer. She has self-published one book and had the book signing
parties, but gets rejected by every “legitimate” New
York publisher. Eventually she does get some poetry
“published.” Augusten goes to New York as a teen, without
school and a job, and somehow makes it and will survive the epidemic in the
80s. This is a slick looking film, Cinemascope, from a standard studio
(Columbia TriStar), but made for “only” $12 Million and marketed as an art
movie.
A Matter of Taste (“Une affaire de
gout”, 2000, TLA/Pyramide, dir. Bernard Rapp, novel
by Phillippe Balland, France, 90 min, sug PG-13) is
a bizarre, somewhat Hitchcockian mind game. A wealthy industrialist
Frederic Delamont (Bernard Giraudeau) hires a younger
look-a-like Nicholas (Jean Pierre Lorit) as a professional food taster
for business trips. He puts Nick through bizarre and intrusive physical exams
and surveillance. He seems to fear poisoning and industrial espionage. He
becomes jealous of Nick’s relationship with a girl friend
(Florence Thomassin) but his attachment to Nick seems to me more a mind
game than sexual. There are interesting excursions to North
Africa and to ski country, and then bizarre effects with switched
identities. The story is told from the point of view of a police narration.
Frederic seems to be more interested in living out a head trip than in any
real relationship. The title in English used to be used as the rating for a
lot of movie reviews in a PTA magazine in the 1950s!
Transsiberian (2008, First Look
International / Filmax, dir. Brad Anderson, 111 min, R, Spain/UK) A
couple takes the trans-continental train
from Beijing to Moscow and is drawn into complex intrigue
involving Russian heroin smuggling. Woody Harrelson is the good buy and model
train enthusiastic, whose knowledge come in handy with real trains.
Also Emily Mortimer (as his wife), Eduardo Noriega as the wild Spaniard, and
Kate Mara as his greedy girl friend. Epic visual clues to the plot.
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