Okay, one last catch-up column as I wrap up the giant movie marathon from the holidays, and then I’ll have my favorites of the year list ready for you.
I love when I’m working my way through a stack and there’s a little film that I expect nothing from that just blindsides me. SWEET LAND is a gorgeous feature debut by writer/director Ali Selim, and a real showcase for the performance of Elizabeth Reaser. Set in the ‘20s (except for a brief wraparound set now), this is the story of a couple brought together by arrangement, and the way their relationship defines their community.
The film opens with a single quote:
“Let us hope that we are preceded in this world by a love story.”
What a lovely thought. That simple statement lingered with me all the way through this gentle, human story, and I find even a week later, I am moved by the sentiment. Maybe I’m sentimental because I grew up in a house where I had parents present who were obviously very much in love, but I think there’s something pretty great about celebrating this sort of devotion in a film. Inge (Reaser) is brought from Norway to the wilds of Minnesota to marry Olaf (Tim Guinee). What Olaf doesn’t know at first is that Inge is German, and it’s not a good time to be German in America when she arrives. She’s a lightning rod for suspicion, and her arrival creates any number of tensions among Olaf’s neighbors. Alan Cumming, John Heard, Alex Kingston, and Ned Beatty all round out the community, and they do warm, funny work here.
The film’s virtues are the simplicity with which it tells its story and the room it gives Guinee and Reaser to really inhabit these roles. This is a film about small behaviors, the way intimacy grows between people, and it’s the sort of film that people claim they want to see, but that almost never ends up finding an audience in the theater. It doesn’t star people you know immediately, so it’s a hard sell.
Take a look at the trailer here.
It’s worth tracking down at some point, and I guarantee that this is a far more satisfying and emotionally resonant date movie than most of the insulting garbage that Hollywood fobs off on us under the same guise.
For example, someone on this site recently tried to sell the notion that THE HOLIDAY was some sort of knowing funny film about human behavior. Bullshit. Giant giant bullshit. Nancy Meyers doesn’t make films about human behavior. She’s one of those deeply phony perpetrators of “chick flick” garbage, and I don’t believe much of anything I see in her films. She throws around the names of classic film comedies and great screenwriters in this film, hoping it will earn her some sort of credibility, but all it does is remind me how great something like THE LADY EVE is, and how very, very far from that the films of Meyers truly are.
What’s really odd about the film is the way there appears to be no drama of any kind in it. Everything unfolds with a clockwork predictability that I would imagine bores even the most avid viewer of this sort of thing. Two women are having man trouble. There’s Amanda (Cameron Diaz), a trailer editor in Los Angeles, and there’s Iris (Kate Winslet), a something-to-do-with-books-I-think-but-it-barely-matters in England. They meet on the Internet and within the first 30 seconds of knowing each other, agree to switch houses for Christmas. This leads to all sorts of hilarity as the women each find the perfect guy in the unlikeliest of places and everyone gets exactly what they want, including neighbors, acquaintances, and random passers-by. In the world of Nancy Meyers, everything always turns out fabulous as long as your kitchen looks like a catalog and you all wear sweaters. There’s never a moment where the outcome of this one is in doubt, so all you need to do is settle in and eat your popcorn while Jack Black mugs it up in an underwritten role, Jude Law pours on every bit of rumpled English charm he can in an equally underwritten role, and pretty much nothing happens aside from people acting cute. It was a rough fall for Kate Winslet and Jude Law. Even if you liked her performance in LITTLE CHILDREN, you were one of only 57 people who saw the film. And even if you liked Minghella’s BREAKING AND ENTERING with Law, no one even noticed it was released.
Together, both of them appeared in THE HOLIDAY, which no one will remember exists in six months, and ALL THE KING’S MEN, a remake no one was asking for. I’m not sure what it was that Steve Zallian saw in Robert Warren’s novel that made him feel like he had to make it again, but it’s been filmed once before quite well, and the story’s a bit of a museum piece at this point. Yes, there will always be someone abusing the power they’re given by the American political process, but hopefully, there will always be people to call them on it. I’m tired of watching studios greenlight obvious hamhanded political metaphors like this one just because they’re not crazy about a seated President. Do I love George Bush? No, not really. But does that mean I have to sit through Sean Penn’s Willy Stark as punishment?
I think the worst sin this particular version of the story commits is that it is boring. The whole point of the character is that Willy Stark is so charismatic that he draws us in. Voters vote for him despite being told exactly what he is because of the power of his presentation. No matter how much sound and fury Penn throws at things, I can’t imagine anyone voting for his version of Stark, and that hobbles the film. Also, Jude Law makes for a dreadful narrator. It’s a largely reactionary role, and Law doesn’t have the inner life to pull it off. He wanders through most of the film as a blank, and leaves the audience without anyone to identify with. Overall, this one just never gets off the ground, and the result is a tough two hours to sit through.
Meanwhile, the film I thought sounded most like a homework assignment this fall turned out to be a gentle pleasure, and a welcome surprise for me. I’m not terribly interested in English royalty, and I’ve never understood the fascination that people outside England have with it. But THE QUEEN is a film that makes some canny political points with a sure hand and a nimble wit. This is absolutely the year of Peter Morgan, the film’s writer, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that he’s a playwright. THE QUEEN almost feels like an adaptation of a stage piece. It’s intimate drama, and there’s a sense that you are audience to something truly private through most of the film. I’m not sure what materials Morgan used in researching his film, but he’s a gifted dramatist with a remarkable ear, and his way with language is a big part of what makes the film such a confident pleasure.
Yes, Helen Mirren really is that good. Her performance as Queen Elizabeth II is so good that I forgot I was watching a film about a real person. I forgot that this is, for all intents and purposes, a biopic. I normally think of biopics as being past tense things, movies about people who are gone now. Doing one about people who are still in the headlines currently is really bold. We all have a very particular media image in our heads of Elizabeth II and Tony Blair and Prince Philip and Prince Charles. And, of course, of Diana. Although she is not a character in this film, her essence is the single largest influence on what we see. She’s a presence because of the space her sudden absence leaves behind. Actually, that’s not true. The film is set about a year after Diana renounced her crown and divorced Charles, so she’s already gone from the family before she dies. With that infamous accident in the tunnel in France, her absence suddenly becomes permanent, and that is what the film deals with... the question of how the royal You is supposed to behave when confronted with that sudden permanence. Diana is not loved by Elizabeth. When she left the family, she left the family in every way. Prince Philip (an underrated James Cromwell) is obviously still hurt by the divorce, upset on his son’s behalf. He can barely contain himself from snarling when Diana’s name comes up, and only his British-stiff upper lip keeps him from being openly disrespectful of the dead. Alex Jennings is a great choice for Prince Charles, who has been the most public of the Royals during my lifetime, particularly during his time with Diana. It’s not an impression, and he’s not a dead ringer for Charles, but he captures something about the public Charles just right, and it makes it more impressive when he reveals colors that we’d never see in public. He wants to mourn, wants to reach out to the public, but he knows how much his mother disapproves, how much tradition weighs on him to do nothing. He wants to do right by his position, but also by his sons. And he wants to do right by Diana, who he obviously still has deep feelings for.
The real meat of the film is what happens between Queen Elizabeth II and newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Blair. Michael Sheen’s been around. He’s been in a ton of films I’ve seen. He’s even played some roles I’ve liked. But he’s one of those actors I’ve never noticed. Until now. Tony Blair turns out to be the role he was born to play.
The way these two very different political animals circle each other, trying to figure out how to engage, little confrontations, each of them testing the other... that’s where Morgan’s background as a playwright really comes into play. He writes fantastic conversation, and Stephen Frears seems completely engaged by the material. He directs with just the right touch, and he knows how to let things breathe enough to keep this a movie. His use of location is specific and persuasive, and there’s a dry visual wit to the film. Overall, it’s a smart, adult piece of entertainment that has a lot to say about the way we interact with fame in our culture, and the way power can be illusory, a kind of prison.
Morgan makes some of the same points in his other produced screenplay this year, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, which features one of the year’s other most-awarded performances. Forest Whitaker has done great work in a lot of movies over the years, a consistently impressive actor. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been a fan, but I’m not particularly surprised by his Idi Amin. It’s a role that seems tailored to many of Whitaker’s strengths. He has a teddy bear charm that can turn into a chilling psychosis with a single gesture. James McAvoy costars with Whitaker, playing a fictional character, a composite of several real people with a dollop of invention thrown in. Nicholas Garrigan is a Scottish doctor who ends up catching Idi Amin’s attention. Amin is absolutely crazy about all things Scottish, and he adopts Garrigan as his lucky charm. I think because I know that much of this is fiction, I found it less engaging than THE QUEEN. I would have rather seen a straight biopic about Amin without the device of McAvoy’s character. There’s a love story I find uncompelling and the film works less as a thriller than as a character piece, so when it goes through the motions of the action stuff, I found myself impatient. I think Kevin Macdonald is a solid filmmaker, and there’s a lot of good stuff in the movie. I just didn’t think the whole was as impressive as some of the parts.
I don’t think I’d ever put a film like WORDPLAY on an end of the year list. But it’s one of those films that I will tell friends to add to their Netflix list. It’s a really entertaining movie, provided you think a movie about crossword puzzles sounds interesting. The movie asks the question of the people in the film: what makes crossword puzzles interesting in the first place? Why do them?
What I find more interesting, and what I’ve never really thought about until seeing the film, is who makes crossword puzzles, and how? I love movies that capture a subculture in full geek bloom, and Patrick Creadon manages to find his way to the epicenter of the crossword world via Will Shortz, the editor of the NEW YORK TIMES crossword, considered by most to be the best of the best. Creadon uses two staged events to bookend his film, to excellent effect. First, he had Shortz create a crossword around the theme of “word play.” He follows Shortz through the process, then films several famous crossword fans as they all work on the same puzzle, including Bill Clinton, the Indigo Girls, and Jon Stewart. He also shows us several other creators working on puzzles, and you get an explanation of how each one has a different personality, and how their puzzles are different. The second staged event, and the larger one by far, is an annual crossword puzzler’s convention in Stamford. It’s a competition, and it’s also a social event in which these puzzlers let their freak flags fly. Watching this part of the film, I couldn’t help but think of BNAT, where each year I see several familiar faces, as well as many new faces, and we all are there united by a deep geek love of the same thing. WORDPLAY isn’t a profound film, but it’s a joyful and affectionate one, and if you get tired of seeing manufactured Hollywood phony feel-good films, give this one a try for the real thing.
Fabian Bielinsky was the real deal. NINE QUEENS, which he released in 2000, was more than just a great con man movie. It was also a broken-hearted film about the state of affairs in Argentina at a time when it felt like the country was on the verge of going under. Everyone in Argentina had just been conned in a banking collapse that is still being dealt with, and NINE QUEENS may be the most pointed film about that, even if it sort of sneaks up on the issue. It was a long wait for his follow-up, EL AURA, and even if I am pleased to have finally seen it, that pleasure is made bittersweet by the knowledge that it is Bielinsky’s last film. His heart attack last year, just as EL AURA was rolling out into international release, was a shock. It’s even creepier once you see how the spectre of death hangs over EL AURA all the way through, and when you realize this is the last statement Bielinsky will make as a storyteller.
Ricardo Darin, the Argentine star of SON OF THE BRIDE and NINE QUEENS, appears here as a nameless taxidermist whose fascination with crime leads him into a bizarre situation where his darkest dreams have a chance to come true. He’s the sort of guy who sizes up every bank he walks into. He watches guards. He pays attention to where cameras are and how doors are set up and he remembers everything. But he’s never acted on these impulses, and he lives instead a life of constant frustration. Then he’s invited by a friend on a hunting trip, and what happens there sets off a chain of events that puts him in the right time and place to actually be part of a real job. But is he as good as he thinks he is? Can he really do what he’s always dreamed of? The film is too long, and it gets a little bogged down in the middle, but there is some great creepy material here, and by the time the film ends, Bielinsky has created such a powerful feeling of dread that you may find your whole body clenched without realizing it. He was great at what he did, and he will be missed.
Another small film I caught up with during this overdose of movies was Steven Soderbergh’s experimental microbudget movie BUBBLE. Working from a script by Coleman Hough (FULL FRONTAL) and using non-professionals for his cast, Soderbergh created a creepy little film about stunted desire and muted ambition, a sad story about a pointless murder. It’s effective and unnerving in places, and I particularly like the use of a doll factory as a location. But when I see Soderbergh work in a minor key like this, I’m often left wondering why. Sure, I admire the notion of doing a small film or two between giant movies, but what is it about this material that compelled him? I’m more interested in the performances, particularly the strange simmer of Debbie Doebereiner as Martha, than I am in the non-story. There are a few moments where Soderbergh adds some visual flourish, like when Martha goes to church, but for the most part, it’s a near-documentary approach. This is a small film in every way, but not a bad use of 80 minutes.
What’s strange is how Soderbergh’s “big” movie this year was just as experimental. THE GOOD GERMAN may have been adapted by Paul Attanasio from the novel by Joseph Kanon, but it feels to me like a wise-ass reaction to someone watching CASABLANCA more than anything.
Sure, there are other visual touchstones you can pick out as you watch the film, but it’s been said that filmmaking is the ultimate act of film criticism, and this seems to be Soderbergh spitting in the face of Hollywood’s traditional happy endings.
I like the ambition of shooting everything in this period piece using only equipment that would have been available at the time, and I think Soderbergh’s alter ego, Peter Andrews, does a great job with the black-and-white photography. It’s evocative stuff, and the recreation of post-war Berlin is convincing. I love the use of the stock footage for transitions. I think the film is a technical treat, and I enjoyed watching it on that level. Dramatically, though, it never really finds its footing. The central mystery is a bore, and it all seems to be in service of a final scene where they literally do a shot-for-shot recreation of CASABLANCA, only to completely subvert its meaning in an almost willfully perverse way. It’s a shaggy dog story, a long way to go for a very slight punchline, and it makes me think that Soderbergh is more interested in entertaining himself than an audience these days.
I’m not really sure what I expected from the other “good” film this Christmas, but THE GOOD SHEPHERD sort of knocked me out. As a friend of mine put it, “I went in expecting a procedural thriller, and instead I got an opera.” Robert De Niro, working from a dense and brilliant screenplay by Eric Roth, has created a doomed snapshot of the history of covert intelligence in America. I am fascinated by this period of history and by the largely-invisible men who made up these secret armies. Matt Damon may be the single best actor working right now at playing mysterious blanks. Even when he does nothing, he suggests an inner life that keeps these characters from vanishing off the screen entirely. Edward Wilson, his character in the film, plays a key role in everything from WWII through the Bay Of Pigs, and in telling his story, De Niro and Roth tell the story of how we as a country traded our soul for security that may only be an illusion.
What’s really clever here is how Roth and De Niro have taken our real history and played jumble with it. If you know your CIA stories, you’ll recognize many of the dramatic threads here, and you’ll have fun trying to mix and match who the various characters represent.
If you don’t, though, don’t worry. By turning it all into fiction, Roth and De Niro have ironically managed to make something that tells some essential truths. They’ve also taken some heavy cues from THE GODFATHER films. There’s more than a hint of the Corleones in the various goings-on in this film. Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin (who had an amazing year of both film and TV work this year), Billy Crudup, Robert De Niro, Michael Gambon, Martina Gedeck (so good in THE LIVES OF OTHERS this year as well), William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, Lee Pace (also good in INFAMOUS this fall), Joe Pesci, and John Turturro make up just some of the sprawling cast, and Eddie Redmayne plays a pivotal role as Edward Wilson Jr., who ends up playing a key role in American history without realizing the implications of his actions.
If you have no interest at all in recent American history, the film might bore you, and if you aren’t interested in watching a film where you can legitimately wonder if some of the dialogue is meant to be code or just a sign of emotional atrophy, then this isn’t for you. But I found the entire thing exhilarating, and especially when it began to pay off the long slow burn. The last half-hour was a series of moments where I felt blind-sided, one emotional crescendo after another, and by the end, I was worn out. Robert Richardson’s photography is magnificent here, and the score by Bruce Fowler and Marcelo Zarvos lends a quiet paranoid edge to the proceedings. It’s a powerful adult meditation on the sins we’ve committed as a country, and the personal price so many have had to pay for what we view as freedom. I loved it. Every complicated second of it.
Throw in a handful of other movies I watched like WASSUP ROCKERS and 49 UP and BROTHERS OF THE HEAD, all of which I’ll try to review in my DVD column when it returns next week, and that sort of wrapped things up for the year for me. That means all that’s left to do is actually write my list now, and I’m done with 2006.
*sigh*
See you in a few.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
