Hey folks, Harry here - with John Gholson and a pair of nicely written reviews on a couple of indie flicks... THE MATADOR with Pierce Brosnan and CAPOTE with Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Of the pair, CAPOTE's been consistently receiving higher praise, due mainly to the fantastic performance given by P.S. Hoffman. Anyway, let's swing down south to Savannah and see what's playing next to the juniper...
Hi, Harry,
Just some more notes from the Savannah Film Fest. On
Thursday I got the chance to see The Matador, a shaggy
little comedy starring Pierce Brosnan as an assassin
who finds an unlikely friend in a nebbish businessman
played by Greg Kinnear.
Brosnan's Julian Noble is a piece of scuzzy
Brit-trash, scoping out underage pussy between kills
in Mexico City. Kinnear's Danny Wright is the kind of
fidgety WASP that Kinnear can play in his sleep—a man
whose future, at work and at home, depends on a single
business deal in Mexico City. The two men meet by
chance in a hotel bar over margaritas. Julian is
celebrating his birthday alone and clings to white
bread Danny in a desperate attempt to find at least
one friend he can spend his birthday with.
It's not long before Julian confides his occupation to
Danny at a bull fight in the city. Danny, instead of
running far, far away, is fascinated by Julian's work
and returns home with an exciting story to tell his
friends. Julian is not as fortunate after Mexico
City; he starts to have a mental breakdown. The job
is catching up with him, and his screw-ups may cost
him his life. In his desperation, he turns to who he
considers his only friend, Danny, who he hasn't seen
or spoken to in the six months after their encounter
in Mexico City.
This is ultimately the kind of movie that, if you
caught it on cable one afternoon, you probably
wouldn't change the channel. The film starts strong;
every frame is bursting with color and seeing Brosnan
play against type is a blast. By the time it reaches
the one-hour mark, the central conflict still hasn't
really been established, and the audience begins to
lose a little patience with the film. The supporting
cast (Hope Davis as Kinnear's wife, Phillip Baker Hall
and Dylan Baker as Brosnan's employers) are wasted in
tiny, shallow roles. Kinnear plays a variation of the
wide-eyed upper-middle class shlub we've seen him play
before, but it's Brosnan's memorable role as Julian
Noble that steals the show. He'll fuck anything that
moves and the man is given some fantastic, filthy
lines to say. I liked the film, but it teeters on
precious—too enamored of its own cutesy concept to let
the story move like it should.
Last night was the screening for Capote starring
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the legendary writer. At
one point in the movie, Harper Lee (played by
Catherine Keener) asks Truman Capote, “How do you like
the film?” Capote replies, “I don't see what all the
fuss is about, frankly.” I nodded in agreement.
I've been hearing a lot of buzz on how phenomenal
Hoffman is in this film, and guessing from the crowd
last night, other people had too. The place was
packed to the gills, standing room only, everyone
crammed in to hear what all the fuss was about.
Capote isn't a biopic at all, but instead a very
specific slice of Truman Capote's life. The film
begins in 1959 and ends in 1965, and focuses
exclusively on Capote's relationship with the
murderers he made infamous in his novel, In Cold
Blood. His fascination with Perry Smith motivates his
writing. Smith is a soft-spoken half-Cherokee orphan,
well-read and mannered, who just happened to put a
shotgun to the head of every member of an innocent
Kansas family one fateful night.
Capote's character is complex as hell. At first you
peg him as a bleeding heart liberal when he tries to
get the boys a better lawyer. Later in the film, this
action is revealed as a way for Capote to insure that
the boys aren't put to death before he's able to
finish his book. It's this very way of thinking that
hollows Capote's psyche by the end of the film. His
desire to remain the working writer, while feigning
compassion to extract the material needed for his
research, is so tightly wound that it's hard at times
to tell which Capote is real. The shallow egomaniac
or the former orphan with a smilar upbringing to Perry
Smith's own? He's two-faced, no doubt about it, but
it's a realistic duplicity—not the typical liar you
see in films whose very nature usually casts them as
the villain. Capote is no villain. He's fascinated
by the monster that can lurk just under the surface,
but he's not honest with those feelings. He knows
this book will make him a literary ginat, and he's not
honest with those feelings either. Nor is he honest
with his own feelings for Smith.
Hoffman sounds like Capote, but looks like Hoffman, so
it takes a bit to get used to Capote's weird
high-pitched Southern twang coming from Hoffman's
lips. It's a tough film psychologically and Hoffman
carries the weight of making Capote likeable in the
face of his own moral murkiness. The movie is deadly
slow and moves at a snail's pace, but it's a rewarding
character study that I'm glad I saw. I wasn't as
enthusiastic last night when I left the theatre,
partly because of the languid pace, but the more I
think about Capote the character, the more I like the
film.
For the sake of the site, call me filmcans!
Take care,
John Gholson
