Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here.
Even on days where I don’t have a press screening scheduled, I try to sneak off to see a film in the theater. Two recent movies that I saw with paying audiences were both films I was intensely curious about. And both were films that had been met with fairly divisive reactions.
And I’ll give you the short versions of the reviews right here up front...
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE: Interesting mess.
THE DARJEELING LIMITED: Sweet soulful little comedy.
.. so you only have to read the rest of this if you really care.
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
I’ll give Julie Taymor this much: she aims high.
I’m sure this was greenlit as “MOULIN ROUGE using all Beatles music from the director of THE LION KING.” And, y’know what? That’s exactly what it is. There’s not a single surprise in the film. It’s big and broad and trippy in a safe mainstream way, and it makes fairly potent use of music that has a built-in emotional meaning to several generations of people. It’s very plastic. It’s a shameless rip of HAIR. It’s obvious and on-the-nose in many places.
Yet weeks after seeing it, I still find myself thinking about some of what it does right. It’s not a “good” movie in the sense that it holds together or coherently accomplishes its goals, but it certainly has an aggressive desire to entertain and astonish. It’s busy, but it’s never Baz Luhrmann-style frantic. The leads are both squeaky clean, even when they’re scruffy, and their Noxema-perfect take on the ‘60s is sweet in a very silly way. In fact, that’s sort of true of the entire movie. It’s a theme park ride through an idealized version of an era that was romanticized even as it was happening. It’s pretty much the exact same creative impulse as Cirque Du Soleil’s LOVE, and it’s pretty much the exact same sort of surface razzle-dazzle.
If that sounds awful to you, the movie’s not going to change your mind. I went to see the movie on a Sunday afternoon at the Northridge Pacific Stadium 10, and it was about 2/3 full. It was the fabled four-quadrant audience, too. Old and young alike. And as the movie unfolded, they actually applauded in at least two places. I couldn’t tell you what it was that made them do so, except that Taymor’s gift is her ability to build a musical number. She knows how to start small and then build and build and build. She doesn’t really know how to sustain that feeling over the length of a full feature film, though, so it’s like it just does the same sort of thing over and over, and it’s vaguely exhausting. The movie seems to spin its wheels for a while in the middle, and there are some digressions that really don’t go anywhere, like everything involving Bono and Eddie Izzard. And the ending is shameless in the way it’s staged. Shaaaaaaameless. You almost have to admire someone who can go for it with that sort of abandon.
Speaking of shameless, I think it’s time I fess up to my godawful crush on Evan Rachel Wood. She’s a creamy cheerleader dream at the start of the film, and then she gradually becomes a political activist, the cutest li’l political activist you ever did see. She furrows her brow and cries her sky-blue eyes out, and there’s a lot of slow-motion involving her, and as a performance, it’s not much. That’s the way the film’s designed, though, so it’s not her fault.
The actors who make the strongest impression are Dana Fuchs and Martin Luther as Sadie and JoJo. They’re adults compared to the rest of the cast, and that difference in life experience gives some actual soul to the way they perform their songs, and their understated love story plays as a nice contrast to the overheated young love that drives the movie. I also found the work of the adorable T.V. Carpio to be oddly touching. Her search for sexual identity is played down to the point of confusing some viewers (check out Roger Ebert’s review), but she hits some lovely grace notes as she suffers her various unrequited lesbian crushes. What I haven’t really seen anyone comment about in discussing the film’s perspective on The Beatles is that screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais were there at ground zero when the Beatles exploded. They lived through it, professionally and culturally.
And there is something groovy about the way the world of the film is established as a place where the Beatles don’t exist, but where they seem to have been diffused into the very fabric of the... well... the universe. They are the fabric of space and time, and that’s why their lyrics end up in the mouths of the characters, and that’s why the names are the way they are, and that’s why the Beatles songs have the power they do in the lives of the people onscreen. Clement and La Frenais were working in English TV when the Beatles exploded, and they must have seen the way the band’s insane level of sudden influence in pop culture changed the landscape. This script is an expression of that, and as such, it may not work completely, but it’s certainly a sincere attempt at saying something about the band and not just leaching off of the enduring power of their music.
THE DARJEELING LIMITED
Sometimes, the critical community is just waiting to pile onto someone, and the film they release has little or nothing to do with the way people react to it. In this case, Wes Anderson’s been brewing this big wave of discontent among certain audiences for a while now, and it finally crashed into him. Sadly, it happened on a film that is, for the most part, solidly built, well-acted, and heartfelt, and it’s a shame that everyone rushed to dismiss the movie for having certain signatures of the filmmaker in place. When we start attacking our filmmakers for developing a particular voice, something seems wrong.
After all, that’s one of the hardest things for any artist to do... establish a voice that is theirs. So much art has been created, and so many choices are put in front of the consumer every year, that it seems to me that someone who creates an instantly recognizable aesthetic that is their own, and who sticks to that aesthetic while telling these sweet, devastating little family portraits, is someone whose work we should regard seriously.
Wes Anderson is obviously a filmmaker of skill and precision. And I don’t buy the argument that his style suffocates the life out of his films, or that his style is precious. I don’t buy the argument that there’s something wrong with his style. I think his work with cinematographer Robert Yeoman and production designer Mark Friedberg is as sharp as always.
And, more importantly, I really like the script that Anderson co-wrote with Roman Coppola (CQ) and Jason Schwartzman. I think it’s sweet and eccentric and well-observed, and Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Schwartzman make a really appealing trio of overgrown broken boys, running from daddy’s memory, trying to find mommy. It’s very basic family stuff, very straightforward. It certainly doesn’t redefine the territory that Anderson writes about. But his gift as a filmmaker is creating these particular worlds that reflect the characters that are at the center of them. I think one of the reasons people didn’t like THE LIFE AQUATIC (which I’m quite fond of) is because they didn’t “like” Murray’s character. The whole world is centered around this guy who I’m guessing they didn’t like. In a way, I get it. Anderson’s not afraid to have an unlikable lead. He’s not afraid to let his characters be weak.
And in THE DARJEELING LIMITED, they certainly are. Francis (Wilson), Peter (Brody) and Jack (Schwartzman) are all different, but equally dysfunctional. Francis is a study in how to be a success as a a professional person and a complete disaster as a private person. He’s controlling, pushy, opinionated, passive-aggressive. He’s obviously got money, resources, and he can focus in certain ways. But when he shows up with his head bandaged elaborately, something’s deeply wrong. There’s no question about it. Peter’s the same way... he looks fine on the outside, like a productive member of society. But he’s a walking museum, carrying around all these fetishized items that belonged to his father. Their father. And he’s running from the impending birth of his child. Actually hiding from it. Abandoning his wife in the final days and hours of pregnancy so he can ride a train into India without knowing where he’s going. Jack’s a degenerate womanizer, habitually moving from empty encounter to empty encounter because the relationship he really wants to be in is the same relationship he fled the country to avoid. The structure of the film is deceptively simple. The three brothers get together for not-entirely-clear purposes and ride a train across India. And in the process, they don’t do as much healing and growing as one might expect. I like that Anderson’s characters get better by degrees and not with sudden blinding epiphanies. I find the sort of microscopic character growth he loves so much to be more honest, more genuinely moving in the end.
I also tend to forget from film to film that Wes Anderson is frequently fall-down funny. And maybe it’s a very specific taste, but it works for me. I love the obsession with Indian over-the-counter medications in the film. I love the brilliant opening scene with Bill Murray. I love the relationship that Jack develops with Rita, played so perfectly by Amara Karan. I love Jack’s constant assertations that his clearly biographical “fiction” is completely made up and has nothing to do with real life. And I dearly love what happens when we finally meet their mother and realize just where each of the personality traits we’ve seen so clearly defined in the boys came from. Here’s why I don’t buy it when people say that Anderson’s film are growing increasingly antiseptic and cut off from people... his observational skills about the little things that make us who we are... they’re as sharp now as they ever have been. He writes character with the precision of a novelist, and that’s how his films strike me every time out. They are both dense with detail and completely happy with being oblique and suggestive. Anderson’s not afraid to suggest something and leave it for you to fill in the details. He’s perfectly happy to allow you, the viewer, room to have your own reactions to things.
I’m glad Anderson has stuck to his guns and that he knows exactly what he wants to do as a filmmaker. If he ever chooses to shake up his aesthetic, I hope he only does it for his own reasons, on his own terms. Until then, I’m perfectly happy to visit his world every few years, and as long as he and his collaborators continue to create such moving, human stories, I’m onboard wherever this train is headed.
I’ll have another double-feature review later tonight, along with my look at one of the best films playing in limited release right now, a grand new statement from one of the oldest masters we have working at the moment.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
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