Capone's Art-House Round-Up with THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY: THEM and Terry Gilliam's THE ZERO THEOREM!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY: THEM
It's difficult to discuss the experimental ambition of first-time writer-director Ned Benson without it sounding like a gimmick. But the truth is, his gimmick is meant to reveal on film, in the way it rarely has been visualized, the idea of memory during an emotional crisis. In other words, how do we remember particular, highly volatile moments in our lives differently than the other person or people in the room with us? The way Benson shot the story of Eleanor Rigby (Jessica Chastain) and her husband Conor (James McAvoy) was as two full-length films, both titled THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY (sub-titled HER and HIM), each one following its character in the wake of the couple breaking up after a terrible tragedy in their marriage. And anytime the characters' lives intersect, we see two somewhat different versions of those encounters, one in each film.

When the film was picked up by The Weinstein Company, not surprisingly, Benson was asked to create a more commercial, single, two-hour film (sub-titled THEM) for release this month, while the two separate films will be released in October in select market art house films (I'll review them separately once I've seen them). It feels strange seeing and reviewing first the version of this story that is the compromise, but at the same time, I relish the idea of examining the differences and to see if Benson reveals anything about the way memory works in the heat of the moment, and how it relates to the truth.

There's not much more to know about ELEANOR RIGBY in terms of plot. The film goes back and forth between past and present, and we see the way the couple got together, fell in love and lived their lives happy until they weren't. I don't want to reveal exactly what event set them down such a bad road, but only because the films seems to treat the event like it's a big secret, and I'm not sure the story benefits from that approach. Once they are separated, Eleanor cuts all ties with Conor, and he spends all of his time stalking her, trying to talk to her and win her back. That's essentially the story. All that surrounds that tale is window dressing in the form of supporting characters who are hit and miss.

In the early parts of the film, I thought Chastain may have been going too far down a melodramatic path in terms of her performance, but then we meet Eleanor's mother (played by the French queen of pain, Isabelle Huppert), and then we realize that Chastain is just trying to emulate and keep up with dear old mom. Then if I told you that William Hurt plays her loving but clueless professor father, everything comes into focus in terms of Chastain's measured and fractured portrayal. McAvoy takes a more straight-forward approach to Conor's pain and suffering by drinking himself into a stupor in the restaurant he runs with his buddy Stuart (Bill Hader) and moving in with his completely disconnected father (Ciarán Hinds).

Of the two stories, hers is the more curious and interesting. Eleanor befriends Prof. Friedman (Viola Davis), a friend of her father, whose class she wants to take just to get out of her parents' house. She also bonds with her younger sister Katy (Jess Weixler), who has her own issues to contend with that are far less severe than Eleanor's, but don't tell her that. Conor never comes across as dangerous, but his borderline creepy stalker ways would look a lot less cute if it were anyone other than McAvoy doing it. He's convinced that just getting Eleanor to talk with him will be the first step toward putting their lives back together, but she's not so sure.

Since I'm guessing director Benson had to pick one version of the scenes the leads have together for his blended cut, I wondered a great deal whose take on these conversations we were getting (we won't know for sure until we see the separate films). But THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY is a fascinating work even in this version. Perhaps too cerebral for its own good, the film is nevertheless counter-balanced by the two main performances that are as convincing as two new lovers as they are an estranged couple on the verge of imploding.

Some of the personality flaws the characters have may be a bit too cliche and precious, but the actors burn through those veneers with pure passion, rage and guts that you hardly notice. I'm a sucker for this brand of unorthodox filmmaking, and am more than intrigued to carry out the filmmaker's full vision before too long.


THE ZERO THEOREM
I'm not sure I could pass a test on director Terry Gilliam's latest dystopian opus THE ZERO THEOREM, something of a companion piece (in spirit, at least) to his previous films BRAZIL and 12 MONKEYS, but I know I enjoyed the hell out of its free-wheeling, steam-punk-lite take on the future of technology, industry and government, and the way all three work to crush the spirit of humanity with sensory overload and impossible tasks meant to keep ordinary citizens in line by making them fearful and powerless. And Gilliam (working, in this case, from a screenplay by Pay Rushin) captures most of the oppressive joys with a great deal of human and personality—sometimes too much, but he always seems to do it better than most.

Head shaven to make him look even more like a drone, Christoph Waltz plays Oohen Leth, a computer wizard whose production output for his company is exemplary, and therefore his bosses (represented by a character known as "Management," played with a sort of Zen menace by Matt Damon) select him for a special project: to discover the reason for the very existence of humanity using mathematics. Or perhaps his real purpose is to discover that humanity has no purpose, thus fully crushing the spirit and will of all people.

The project is appealing to Oohen because he's not much of a people person, and has been begging his manager (David Thewlis) to let him work from home, which this project requires. And what an appropriate home it is—an abandoned, burned-out church that feels more like a vacuous prison that somehow fits right into the Gilliam universe. Oohen has also spent a great deal of his life waiting for a phone call that most understand will never come. It's a call that he got into his head when he was much younger was going to tell him his own purpose in life, and because this notion is bordering on insane, he is being forced to receive online visits from a useless therapist, Dr. Shrink-Rom (Tilda Swinton).

As he is carrying out his seemingly impossible assignment, he receives visitors that seem to be designed to distract him from his work, including the beautiful, flirty Bainsley (French actress Melanie Thierry), who runs a virtual reality escort site where she and Oohen spend many an extended period sitting on a beach that doesn't exist. Also on hand is Management's computer whiz son Bob (Lucas Hedges), who arrives to fix Oohen's computers after he smashes them to bits in a fit of frustration.

As with all of Gilliam's films, a great deal of the joy of watching them is seeing how he makes very little money look like something epic. While most of the action in THE ZERO THEOREM takes place in Oohen's home, when he does stray out into the world, the sci-fi elements leap off the screen and make you realize that even a sane person would have a difficult time living under these conditions of talking advertisements, constant visual stimulation, not to mention the more conventional pressures of work and family, which seem heightened in this version of the future.

THE ZERO THEOREM may be too much Gilliam for some, but I tend to enjoy his brand of controlled crazy in heavy doses. For better or worse, his vision of the future hasn't changed that much over the years since Brazil. If anything, it's gotten more desperate while still offering a ray of hope for our hero. Sadly that ray may take the form of complete insanity, but as one wise man once said, "Well, nobody's perfect." That being said, I think as long as Gilliam is making movies, some small pocket of the world is pretty close.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
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