Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Lots to read. Get busy!
AMERICAN SPLENDOR - USA - written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini from the comic by Harvey Pekar
Of the documentary "The Young and the Dead," the previous film by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, I wrote the following:
"In general, the documentary is funny and fascinating, but it never really approaches the depth one might expect given the material. ... [T]he film lacks that indefinable something that would push it from amusing to transcendant. ... 'The Young and the Dead' is pleasant and absorbing, and occasionally hilarious, but I came away wanting something more."
It's with great pleasure that I report that their new film, "American Splendor," does not have this problem. In fact, in both its themes and structure, in its acting, and in sheer entertainment value, it may be the best movie at this year's film festival.
It's essentially a biopic, adapting for the screen the autobiographical comics written by Harvey Pekar over the last couple of decades. He's an irascible sort; in Paul Giamatti's exceptional performance, he slouches around the streets of Cleveland, muttering and glaring at whatever displeases him, which is just about everything. We see him from the beginning, when he convinces his friend, rising comics star Robert Crumb, to illustrate his text. Pekar's comic, called "American Splendor," records the minutiae of his world, from the inane to the insightful: his dead-end file-clerk job; his co-workers, fascinating in their banality; and his general dissatisfaction with the world at large. The film shows us how he meets his wife, Joyce (Hope Davis, equally good), his bout with cancer, his recurring appearances on the David Letterman show, how he and Joyce adopt a daughter, and so on.
It sounds pretty conventional, following the chronology and hitting the highlights, but Springer Berman and Pulcini make a number of choices that have profound consequences for the film. These choices may seem simple in concept, but they have the effect of elevating the material into one of the most intriguing, spectacularly original explorations of an artist's soul, temperament, and creative objectives I've seen in years.
Their first choice is obvious right away: They have Harvey Pekar himself narrate the film. While we watch Giamatti-as-Pekar shuffling along the sidewalk, we hear Pekar saying, "This is me. Well, this is the actor they got to play me. I don't think he looks like me, but whatever." Immediately, we know the filmmakers are up to something, that they're establishing a certain conceptual distance, and a framework for the themes they'll be investigating.
Then they intercut the re-creations, the actors' performances, with documentary footage, interviews mostly, of the actual subjects: Harvey, his wife, the other people around him. Initially, it seems a little strange, as though to highlight the differences between the actors' portrayals and reality. But then there's a scene between Giamatti-as-Pekar and a co-worker, a highwater nebbish who speaks in an adenoidal honk, someone we assume is a caricature; and at the end, we hear, "cut," and we pull back to see Giamatti-the-actor in front of a camera, breaking character, walking out of the scene. He joins the other actor, the nerd, in a pair of canvas-back chairs, as if taking a breather, while in the foreground, real-life-Pekar and the actual guy who was just being played by the other actor interact over a craft-services table, revealing that, if anything, the actor's performance was too mild. For a moment, we don't know what to think, and then it's as if a dazzling light comes on.
Our suspicions of the movie's intentions are confirmed as the movie begins blending the two realities. When Pekar is invited to appear on the Letterman show, we begin with Giamatti-as-Pekar in the greenroom, along with Davis-as-Joyce, waiting for his segment. Giamatti-as-Pekar goes backstage, Letterman announces him, and then we see Davis-as-Joyce in the greenroom, looking at the television as real-life-Pekar comes onscreen in actual historical video footage.
It sounds bizarre, and really, it shouldn't work, but given the nature of Pekar's comics, it makes a strange kind of sense, and in fact turns out to be the perfect means of exploring his persona. Pekar is only the writer of his comic; he recruits various artists to handle the illustrations, all of whom draw him slightly differently, with different physical emphasis: extra-baggy eyes in one version, wild hair in another. The result is something like a prismatic effect, as we see multiple ways of interpreting Pekar's character, all starting with his own text but revealing different facets, and none of them entirely capturing him as a complete human being -- and it's the film's particular genius to not just notice this but to make it a central thematic device. We even briefly see Pekar represented onscreen as animation, to add yet another perceptual wrinkle.
All of this is cemented into place with two scenes at about the two-thirds mark. In one, Giamatti-as-Pekar breaks the fourth wall (further blending realities, since up to now only real-Pekar has acknowledged the camera), telling a story that seems to be a non sequitur given where we are in the film, but as he does so, his environment is drawn around him, comics-style, while he moves. And in the other scene, which gives us Giamatti-as-Pekar pacing his bedroom in the middle of the night, unable to sleep due to cancer fears, we hear in his panicked rant an almost inadvertent yet strikingly lucid expression of his own artistic drive. When his wife wakes up and asks him what has him so worried, he sputters out his existential dilemma: Is he nothing more than a character in his own story? If the cancer kills him, will his story go on anyway?
"American Splendor" proceeds almost intuitively, without any pretension; the filmmakers are clearly making choices and mixing elements in a way they think will be interesting, but it feels as though even they are surprised by the discoveries, and the amazing number of magical sparks being struck from their juxtapositions. What they wind up with, partly by design and partly by alchemical good fortune, is a deeply profound and thoroughly cinematic exploration of the relationship between an artist's work and his (and our) perception of self. And if that sounds dryly intellectual, don't worry: the film is smashingly entertaining, and occasionally fall-down hilarious. The actors are brilliant; the subject is worthy; the filmmaking is inspired. I can't wait to see it again.
HUKKLE - Hungary - written and directed by Gyorgy Palfi
We watch a film like "Hukkle" with a different part of our brain than we watch conventional movies. Almost entirely wordless, and essentially plotless according to the normal definition, the film explores its scenario in a way we're not used to seeing. As a consequence, rather than letting plot points in a story flow past, we must watch in order to collect data, gradually connecting various apparently unrelated elements to build up a complete picture, almost as if we're constructing a jigsaw puzzle.
Obviously, "Hukkle" demands a lot of patience from its viewers. In a conventional film, the visuals are largely disposable, for once we've seen how a given event has pushed the story along, we can set the images aside and move on to whatever comes next. Here, though, we don't have that luxury, because until very late in the picture we don't know how important any given moment might be, or in what way one scene or shot might turn out to be connected to something else much later. In order to figure out what's going on, therefore, you must build up a much larger stack of mental pictures than is usual, and, more importantly, keep them available in your memory so you can quickly attach them to related material as the film progresses.
I know this seems strange, so as illustration I'll describe the first few minutes of the movie; that'll give you an idea of how it works. We begin with an old man, and watch his puttering routine. He's got the hiccups (the title of the film, pronounced "hook-lay," is apparently the Hungarian word for hiccup), but it doesn't appear to bother him much. Eventually, he goes outside and sits on a bench alongside the road. Then another guy goes by, driving a wagon; he doesn't acknowledge the old man, or even seem to know him. We follow the wagon into the woods, where the driver begins filling metal canisters with water while the horses shift nervously. Shift from there to a woman nearby, engaged in her own activity apart from the man with the canisters. And so on.
It sounds a little like Richard Linklater's "Slacker," following connections from person to person, but "Hukkle" is much more abstract, not least for being almost dialogue-free. The cuts are not always obviously related, either in time or space; we can jump abruptly from a group of lawn bowlers to a closeup of the massive testicles of a hog, swinging heavily as it swaggers down the road. In fact, the film has a definite preoccupation with animals, from a frog-eating fish in a pond to moles that tunnel beneath people's gardens to a small cat in some evident physical distress (animal lovers beware). In general, "Hukkle" provides a remarkably complete tour of its village, focusing on unexpected objects or finding new angles on familiar material. It isn't just a "montage movie," either, like "Baraka" or "Koyaanisqatsi," where once you recognize the central theme you can relax into the imagery. "Hukkle" proceeds with the undeniable sense that it's got a specific mystery to untangle, and that if you just stick with it, eventually you'll find the key that will bring everything into focus and reveal what's going on in this strange little town.
This is a lot of work, obviously, and will be exasperating and exhausting to viewers who aren't used to keeping so many mental and visual balls in the air. It's immediately clear that the movie won't be tipping its hand any time soon, and that you'll be expected to pay close attention if you want to solve the riddle, which will make the film a long, dreary haul for anyone who didn't know what they were in for. If you're the sort of viewer who wants to play the game, though, you should have a lot of fun putting the pieces together, and puzzling out the movie's purpose. Along the way, you can enjoy some truly excellent and innovative cinematography (by Gergely Poharnok), and more than a few delighted laughs as the film surprises you with some unexpected image or other.
The film's only significant disappointment, unfortunately, comes in the revelation of its central mystery. Everything comes together in the space of about a minute close to the end of the film, and while the light comes on suddenly and brightly, it turns out to be not very interesting, at least not compared to the film's highly unconventional presentation. I'm not going to give it away, of course, in case you decide to see for yourself, but I predict that when you figure out what's going on, you'll say, Oh! with a nod and a grin, but then you'll blink, the grin will fade, and you'll say, Oh; is that all? All of that for this?
Until then, though, "Hukkle" is a noteworthy experiment, and a work of cinema not quite like anything I've ever seen. It suggests that Gyorgy Palfi is a filmmaker with a highly original voice, and one to keep an eye on in the future (apparently, he's only 29). While the ending is kind of a letdown, the path to get there is fun and interesting, and you're left with some uniquely imaginative pictures burned into your memory. I have mixed feelings about the film, but I think I can safely recommend it to the right type of viewer.
I, TARANEH, AM FIFTEEN - Iran - written by Kambuzia Partovi and Rasul Sadrameli, directed by Sadrameli
It's interesting how a change in setting can give a seemingly old story new resonance. The plot of "I, Taraneh, Am Fifteen" would barely pass muster on the Lifetime Channel if it took place in, say, Baltimore. But because it's set in Iran, we see it with fresh eyes, and renewed interest in how a familiar tale will play out in an unfamiliar environment.
You'll recognize this almost as soon as I begin relating it: Taraneh is a fifteen-year-old girl. She lives with her grandmother, as her mother is gone and her father is in prison. She's a student, and has ambitious dreams for the future. Then a local boy, a few years older, expresses an interest in her; she feels too young to be married, but she can see the value in the union, and the boy's mother, also initially reluctant, is willing to be convinced. Because of her age and status as a student, she's joined in something called a contract of "religious intimacy," which is not quite marriage but which allows them to be together without sin or scandal. Within a few weeks, though, the guy turns out to be a schmuck, and at her request the contract is dissolved; but then she discovers she's pregnant.
You already know where this is going, and for the most part you're correct. Her friends urge abortion; she recoils. She has to drop out of school and find flexible employment. Her grandmother dies, so she must secure new housing. She meets people among the underclass, some of whom help her, while others don't have her best interests at heart. She seeks official redress, but the social and legal systems aren't set up to deal with people in her situation. And so on.
It's basically a social realist story, of the sort made famous by Italian filmmakers in the 1950s, and now, in America at least, after coming in and out of fashion in over the years, generally relegated to television. Like these thematic predecessors, "I, Taraneh" isn't trying to construct a complex allegory, or jerk our tears with melodrama, or subject us to empty, reassuring platitudes; its intent is simply to document an individual slice of life with as much honesty and fidelity as it can muster, and then offer the unsentimental portrait to viewers as a record of one of the thousands of small tragedies that pass unremarked every day.
Here in the West, though, we watch with slightly different eyes, letting the familiar story flow by while looking for the points of contrast and similarity, learning about life in what we've been taught is an alien culture. And from that perspective, the most interesting thing about "I, Taraneh" is how mundane it seems. To support herself, Taraneh gets a job in a restaurant; she takes orders, clears dishes, and deals with obliviously self-absorbed customers like any waitress at any greasy spoon. Naturally, there are small differences; as per the laws controlling movie content in Iran, the women's dress is strictly regulated, and the female actors aren't allowed to touch the males, among other things. But as is common in Iranian film, the director is artful enough to work around these obstacles, so it isn't too distracting.
The film's greatest asset, along with its crystal-clear, unembellished style, is the central performance by Taraneh Alidoosti (who shares her name with the role). The character is young and a little naive, but she's not stupid, and Alidoosti, with wide, bright eyes, imbues her with calm determination and a refusal to be beaten by an unfair system. She's not an angel, either; she can sometimes be irrationally stubborn, and she lets her fear of her father prevent her from confessing her situation to him for far too long. In other words, she's a human being.
Now, I don't want to oversell the movie, because, again, the storyline will be superficially commonplace to anyone who's seen an American issue drama, and may disappoint people who are expecting a radical departure just because it's foreign. "I, Taraneh" is not that kind of movie. Rather, it's a straightforward, almost austere, staging of a plot that could happen pretty much anywhere, with added interest provided by the backdrop of a culture in transition. It's a good film, and a worthwhile addition to Iran's increasingly impressive cinematic canon.
WHALE RIDER - New Zealand - written (from the book by Witi Ihimaera) and directed by Niki Caro
Formula filmmaking gets a bad rap. As should be obvious from a moment's thought, there's a very good reason there's a formula in the first place: When it's done well, it produces a film that works. We write down recipes we like, don't we? The only downside to the formula is that, like a recipe, we can get tired of the same thing over and over, or if it's made poorly or indifferently it can be hard to digest.
"Whale Rider" certainly meets the description of formula entertainment, with a coming-of-age empowerment tale we've seen before in its broad strokes. However, writer-director Niki Caro gives the old recipe a new spin with fresh ingredients, and we allow ourselves to be carried away despite our familiarity with the overall structure. In many ways, "Whale Rider" represents almost the definition of crowd-pleasing entertainment: within fifteen minutes, you know where your heart wants the story to go, and you trust the movie to deliver the expected triumph, but you don't know exactly how it'll play out.
The story: Pai (short for Paikea) is an eleven-year-old girl in a Maori village on the coast of New Zealand. She doesn't understand why her grandfather, Koro, seems so disappointed in her; we know from a prologue that he's been waiting for a firstborn son to whom he can pass leadership of the village, and that his own first son has frustrated him twice, once by showing no interest in the post (and, in fact, leaving for greener pastures), and then by producing Pai instead of the hoped-for son. Finally conceding defeat in his own bloodline, Koro gathers together the other firstborn sons in the village and begins teaching them "the old ways," so he can select the one who best represents his vision of the role. Pai doesn't accept his insistence that her sex makes her ineligible, and begins eavesdropping on his lessons with the boys.
You can already guess the last five minutes of the movie, but it's the path to the destination that represents the film's strength. The simple fact of the setting, and the rarity of movies set in a Maori milieu, lets "Whale Rider" put a unique spin on a familiar story. The film has a good sense of humor, also, and takes time to let its characters breathe in amusing ways. (Notice what Pai's uncle, her father's younger brother, is doing when she goes to him to learn stick-fighting.) In addition, these characters are all uniformly likeable; even the grandfather, while a gruff and occasionally unreasonable antagonist, never crosses the line into unredeemability.
The film is aided by a wonderful cast, including Rawiri Paratene as the grandfather, finely balancing stuck-in-tradition obstinacy with a sense of unacknowledged personal failure that keeps him sympathetic, and Vicky Haughton as Pai's grandmother, who takes no guff from her husband. The best performances are from Cliff Curtis as Pai's father, whose conflict is about getting away from the village while still feeling connected to his heritage (he's got a career as a native artist in Europe), and, as Pai, Keisha Castle-Hughes, who is a noteworthy discovery. If you have a daughter between the ages of eight and fifteen, take her to this movie; Castle-Hughes's portrayal, especially remarkable for being a debut, will give your daughter everything she's looking for in an inspiring onscreen role model.
"Whale Rider" is not a film for the cynical. It's unabashed about its girl-power theme, and its message of affirmation will probably be annoying to those proudly jaded viewers who claim to have seen it all. If it bothers you that, when you see the grandfather toss the talisman into the water as a challenge to his male acolytes, you know what's bound to happen ten minutes later, then this movie is not for you.
But for everyone looking for an old-fashioned, uplifting story, one that introduces them to people and places they otherwise wouldn't get to know, "Whale Rider" is easy to recommend. It's the old cliche: you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll applaud the plucky heroine, and you'll walk out with a smile in your heart. The film delivers everything the typical moviegoer wants to see when he or she sits down in the dark, and when it gets a wide U.S. opening on June 20, it deserves to be a breakout smash.
CABIN FEVER - USA - written and directed by Eli Roth
Eli Roth obviously knows his audience. He knows what people who sit down to a dead-teenager movie want: a little sex mixed with a lot of splatter, and a handful of shriek-inducing surprises tempered with a lot of laughs. He knows most of all that this sort of horror movie is absolutely not intended to be taken seriously; it can give the audience an occasional shiver, but primarily it's supposed to be fun, because for the under-thirty viewers it targets, death is still a distant abstraction, a subject to be treated with almost the same sense of furtive mischief as sex mostly because of how much that irritates the uptight adults the teenagers and twentysomethings may not even consciously know it's their mission in life to annoy.
To that end, Roth's new throwback horror flick, "Cabin Fever," sets up an utterly horrific situation, and then plays it mostly for broad, if dark, comedy. It's remarkably old-school in the way it isolates a group of hormonally addled youths, throws a nasty twist at them, and then mines the scenario for grisly humor. It ain't Fellini, obviously, but then it isn't trying to be; for its target audience, "Cabin Fever" will work like gangbusters.
Roth's procedure is as follows: Take three guys and two girls, in their early twenties, and send them on a beer-guzzling vacation at a remote cabin in the woods. Quickly sketch their characters and relationships in shorthand; these two (jerk and minx) are a randy couple, these two (nice guy and sweetie) aren't but might be, and the leftover guy is the obligatory goofball. Let the goofy guy have a disturbing encounter with somebody in the woods, a man who appears to be wasting away from some grotesque disease. And just when it appears the goofball has forgotten, bring the stranger back, pounding on their cabin door in the middle of the night with gore oozing from his orifices. After getting rid of him, the now-trapped youths must contend with fear and mutual paranoia, as they're unable to either leave or call for help, the local yokels seem either too incompetent or too dangerous to be trusted (especially the party-obsessed deputy who drops by for a hilarious visit), and, worst of all, they don't know which if any of them might have been infected.
Roth has a lot of fun nodding at the conventions of the genre, and referencing other movies his audience is likely to have seen. The isolated forest is a staple of horror, from "Evil Dead" to "Last House on the Left" to "Friday the 13th," and at times Roth shoots his setting in ways that will make fans nod in recognition. He also tweaks slightly the sex-gets-punished formula, and surprises us by not always tying order of death to degree of horniness. In addition, Roth knows that the characters need to be smart enough to make choices that drive the story (and occasionally fire off a funny line), but not smart enough to actually get out of the situation; this is the sort of movie where the trampy brunette's behavior amounts to, basically, oh my god, we're all going to die, I think I'll take a bath.
This is also the sort of movie that knows its audience will be entertained, not repulsed, by buckets of gore. The scene in which the same trampy brunette casually picks up a razor is meant to provoke knowing, nervous laughter less than outright horror, because we know that if she's infected, she's going to be shaving off more than her leg hairs in a minute, oh ho ho. At other times, we get to see the results of a shotgun blast to the head, a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition, and a flesh-tearing attack by a rabid dog, among other things. This stuff is obviously way too over-the-top for the average filmgoer, but if this kind of thing sounds appealing to you, then know that "Cabin Fever" gives you everything you're looking for.
To the non-fan, movies in this genre may seem easy to make, but it's actually fairly difficult to pull off these things with anything resembling originality, wit, and style. Look at the recent Jason-Voorhees-in-space movie, which hit all the expected marks but was still amazingly dull and lifeless (until the scene toward the end with Jason slamming the sleeping bag against the tree: that was funny). Here, by contrast, there's some wickedly clever writing, such as the way Roth establishes the disease vector, and how that clues us in to which character will be next to go. The movie also boasts a truly demented, laugh-out-loud ending.
So while "Cabin Fever" is probably too extreme and too gleefully nihilistic for the mainstream crowd, it's exactly what its intended audience is looking for, and is the best midnight movie I've seen in ages. Roth deserves credit for spurning the typical supernatural indestructible-killer cliche, and coming up with the flesh-eating disease instead, because it lets him spin the obligatory ingredients in fresh new directions. If the idea of laughing at a group of horny kids whose skin is dissolving into goo sounds like fun, then "Cabin Fever" is the movie for you.
RESPIRO - Italy - written and directed by Emanuele Crialese
"Respiro" is one of those movies about a free spirit who longs to throw off the social shackles placed on him or her by a repressively hidebound community. It's a familiar story model: You've seen it before in films ranging from good to awful, from "Beauty and the Beast" and "Harold and Maude" and "Footloose" to "Chocolat" and "Sweet November" and "The Banger Sisters." It's a powerfully attractive theme, because to some extent we all feel confined by the demands of society, and we can identify with the person who lives by his or her own rules. "Respiro" aspires to this (the title, referring to "breathing freely," is the giveaway), but a fairly significant miscalculation sends the film rather badly off-course, and in the end it doesn't work at all the way it was clearly intended to.
Valeria Golino, beautiful as ever, plays Grazia, the free spirit around whom the movie revolves. She's married to Pietro, a fisherman; they live on a tiny island near Sicily, a community so isolated and insulated that a newly-transferred policeman has trouble understanding the local dialect. Pietro loves Grazia, but he has to put up with her mood swings, which careen unpredictably between joy, sentimentality, anger, and gloom. (Hey, she's just Italian, you might say; but no, this goes beyond that.) The family discusses putting her in some sort of psychiatric facility in Milan, but she refuses to go along with it. Her relationship with Pasquale, the older of their two sons, is stronger than with the younger son Filippo or daughter Marinella, and when her irrepressible ways get her in trouble, it's Pasquale who comes up with an unexpected way to help her cope with the aftermath.
The island provides a breathtaking backdrop for the story, with its rugged cliffs, satiny beaches, and clear water. All the people are equally gorgeous as well, from the frequently-nude Golino to the dark-eyed boys who run rampant through the town, their lithe, sun-bronzed limbs flying. With all the spectacular scenery on display, both geographic and human, any halfway-decent film editor could put together a ravishing preview, offering a taste of the female-empowerment story but emphasizing the sumptuous visuals, such that the typical Miramax crowd would be lined up around the block.
Unfortunately, what they'd actually see isn't exactly what the commercials would advertise, because the movie rather significantly overshoots the mark on Grazia's free-spiritedness. It's a tricky balance in movies like this; you want to establish the central character as uninhibited without being out of control, and fun-loving without being irresponsible. "Respiro" fails to achieve this balance. By the middle of the film, instead of wishing for Grazia to cast off her cultural chains, we're thinking her family is right about getting her to see a psychiatrist. And at the end, we don't feel triumph that she's succeeded in living her dreams; we feel anger and sadness that she's going to continue avoiding the mental-health treatment she so obviously and desperately needs.
Now, it would be different if this were clearly a fantasy, more like "Chocolat," in which we could safely ignore the real-world implications of the story and buy into a more fanciful narrative. But in addition to the main plot, "Respiro" gives us packs of wild children who roam the island apparently unsupervised, forming ad-hoc tribal alliances for brutal skirmishes and inflicting casual nastiness upon one another for no reason beyond sheer bloody-minded boredom. The film sees the island's children clearly, and doesn't buy into the saccharine myth about youthful innocence; "Respiro" knows that boys and girls both are capable of cruel mischief that would shock observing adults, and these scenes ring as some of the most truthful in the movie. But they don't belong in the same film as the frothy escapism of Grazia's story, and keep pushing us into a reality that doesn't let us ignore the likely consequences of her emotional illness.
"Respiro" wants to overwhelm you with its physical beauty, and fool you into thinking that Grazia's problems are less serious than they are. Golino gives an excellent performance in the role, but she's ill-served by a screenplay that misjudges and misrepresents the character's situation. On one level, "Respiro" succeeds: I definitely want to visit the island and see the magnificent scenery for myself. However, I want to bring along a straightjacket so I can find Grazia and drag her to the hospital.
Exceptional work, HH. Thanks.
"Moriarty" out.
