Capone's Art-House Round-Up with THE FAMILY FANG, THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY, VIVA, and APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD!!!

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 FAMILY FANG
I’m not sure if you’re aware of it, but white people have it rough all over. And few white families have it rougher than the Fangs of upstate New York, a family of somewhat famous performance artists that who would stage fake, often horrific, events (like a fake bank robbery that ends in a shooting) just to capture on camera the reactions of the real-life people who bear witness. Something about their brand of pranks made them recognized for capturing genuine emotions and thus a small piece of the human condition…or so we’re told. The family includes patriarch Caleb (James Butler Harner as a younger man; Christopher Walken as a much older one), mom Camille (Kathryn Hahn; Maryann Plunkett) and siblings Annie (who grows up to be a noted actress, played by Nicole Kidman) and Baxter (who becomes a novelist, played by Jason Bateman, who also happens to have directed THE FAMILY FANG).

The adult children are torn, because they know they were severely messed up by the experience of growing up in this environment where you could never tell what was real and what wasn’t, unless you were in on the joke. At some point when they got old enough, the kids started to become the victims in these pranks rather than co-conspirators, and it drove Annie out of the house when she was still a teenager. But Annie and Baxter also realize that they likely would not have excelled in their chosen fields without this background, so they are reluctantly grateful, even though they avoid their parents like the plague. But when Baxter is in an accident that requires hospitalization, the staff gets in touch with his parents. When he finds this out, Baxter calls Annie and asks for a rescue; naturally, they all land up at the hospital at the same time and end up back at the old homestead.

A great deal of THE FAMILY FANG is a trip down memory lane. The parents have a stash of VHS tapes containing their hidden camera pranks, which the kids go through to maybe understand their own history and to find out when and why the pranks turned on them and felt far more like attacks. Kidman fares the best in the film, as an actress having self-worth issues long before she is reunited with her family. When the parents decide to take a long weekend in the country and end up disappearing in a part of the state where a great number of truck stop murders have taken place, Annie immediately assumes it’s another gag, while the police and Baxter assume the worst.

Based on the bestselling novel by Kevin Wilson and adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Lindsay-Abaire, THE FAMILY FANG’s biggest drawback is that there is no empathetic entry point into this family. Baxter is probably the closest we get, but his bit hangup is writer’s block. Boo hoo, join the club. Something told me very early on that being put back in a room with the two crazy people that raised him would kickstart the creative juices once again. I certainly don’t need a film filled with likable characters for it to be tolerable, but give us someone to care about who doesn’t come across as either a whiney child or a total asshole.

I was a strong supporter of Bateman’s directing debut, BAD WORDS, both because of his nasty performance and his well-crafted direction. But something is missing from THE FAMILY FANG, which is a shame because there are a few great elements floating around in its running time, chief among them Kidman’s performance, who turns out to be great as a neurotic actress on the verge of total collapse. There’s a message in here (however muddled) about coming to terms with who we are and who made us that way, for better or worse (I’ll let you guess which one dominates this film), and when a legitimate, cohesive thought escapes from these players, you feel it. But most of the time, you just want to kick them in the throat for being so annoying and clueless about how human beings work and connect.


THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY
Attempting to use a visual medium to tell a story involving a process of the mind in an interesting manner is one of the most difficult exercises known to all of filmdom. But that doesn’t seem to stop filmmakers from trying to make it work, likely because, when it’s done well, it can be quite exhilarating. The latest example of this belongs to THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY, the true story of Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, HBO’s “The Newsroom”), an Indian math genius living in the early part of the 1900s, whose work is still the foundation of much study decades later.

He began his professional career as a lowly clerk with no formal education, working for accountant Sir Francis Spring (Stephen Fry), who saw great potential in the young man. Ramanujan was also newly married, still living with his mother, who did not get along with wife Janaki (Devika Bhise). And all of them were living in poverty. Sir Francis has enough confidence in Ramanujan to allow him to send a letter explaining some of his theorem to Cambridge professor G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), who is astonished by the examples sent to him. Ramanujan is invited to study at Trinity College at Cambridge, and the two men form a friendship built almost entirely on a very pure love of the worlds that mathematics opens up to them.

Facing a great deal of racism among the faculty and students, Ramanujan also feels hindered by having to learn the basics of presenting results, rather than simply giving them. Hardy’s primary task is getting his pupil taken seriously and eventually published, but the young man has never written out the proofs that would form the building blocks of his calculations. He also has no skills in actual lecturing and presentation of his formulas, so he must be taught that as well, which he feels is a waste of his mind and time. THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY is equal parts a story about Hardy letting Ramanujan set his mind free to expand his knowledge, and about Ramanujan learning to rein in his all-seeing brain and focus on showing his work. There’s a moment in the film when one of Hardy’s well-meaning colleagues (played by Toby Jones) finds errors in one of Ramanujan’s formulas, and it’s a humbling lesson for the young man, who has gone his entire life believing that if he saw it in his head, it was right.

The final third of the film concerns Ramanujan’s struggles when he contracts tuberculosis during the winter months at school, and it’s only then that Hardy realizes that this young Indian student may be his only friend. A subplot involving letters between Ramanujan and his wife never reaching each other might be entirely based on fact, but it doesn’t make the film any more interesting. The most fascinating moments in THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY revolve around the work and the struggle Ramanujan faces to be taken seriously by the skeptical faculty, and any time the movie strays from that, it suffers.

The film also gives Irons one of his best roles in decades, playing a fully fleshed out character with actual human emotions and a pulse, and not just a vague authoritative type with a weighty voice. Patel is also quite exceptional in this piece, as a man torn between several worlds and always looking for ways to make himself a little less homesick for India and his wife. Avoiding sentimentality at all costs, director Matt Brown (whose only other film is the 2000 release Ropewalk) and writer Matt Brown (working from the biography by Robert Kanigel) focus on that small number of individuals who find emotional satisfaction in knowledge, while keeping a safe distance from A Beautiful Mind territory. THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY is a mostly solid endeavor that certainly offers up a story you’ve likely never been exposed to.


VIVA
Part Cinderella story, part family tragedy, VIVA, Ireland’s selection for Best Foreign Language Film, is actually set entirely in Cuba and centers on the magical-realistic world of drag performers in Havana. Young Jesus (Héctor Medina) does hair and makeup for some of the performers, but has aspirations of being a performer one day. When the club’s manager and lead performer Mama (Luis Alberto García) decides to give the kid a break and do a number, the transformation is staggering and a new star is born in the form of Viva, who walks into the crowd and is promptly punched in the face by a customer who is unfamiliar to any of the performers.

Jesus does what he can to survive, after being abandoned by his father at a young age and having his mother die on him when he was still a youngster. He does hair in the neighborhood when he’s not at the club, and when money is tight, he sometimes hustles in the local gay pick-up park, where his young, striking features make him a favorite among the visitors. It should come as no surprise that the stranger that punched Jesus is his father, Angel (Jorge Perugorría), who has been in jail and otherwise absent from his son’s life for 15 years, but comes back expecting to run the roost again. He starts by forbidding his son from performing any longer, and since the usually supportive Mama doesn’t want any trouble in the club, he honors the father’s demand, which breaks Jesus’ heart.

Writer Mark O’Halloran and director Paddy Breathnach (I WENT DOWN, BLOW DRY) have a wonderful grasp of the desolation of modern Cuba, which occasionally gives way to great beauty. A former boxer, long out of training, Angel believes he can get a job back at the gym at which he used to train, but a severe drinking problem, and even more troubling rage issues, make that impossible, making him even more of a burden on Jesus’ way of living. There is a strange kind of love between the two men that stems from Jesus wanting to be a dutiful son (if only to get his father to allow him to perform again) and Angel wishing he wasn’t such a human disaster so that he could counsel his son properly.

The drag shows are hypnotic, especially when Viva is on stage, and the rest of the film throws a sobering spotlight on lives lived on the brink of homelessness, prostitution, starvation and bodily harm. I could listen to Mama and the other performers all day, as they discuss their lives outside the club, gossiping about other performers, men they’ve dated, and other backstage secrets that we rarely are privy to, even in documentaries about these glamour queens. At its best, VIVA transports us to another place so completely that it feels like another planet; but when it sees fit, it hurls us back down to the lowest depths of this world as well. It alternates from exotic to all-too-familiar with seamless transitions and staggering performances at its core, until you find yourself immersed in the sights and sounds of every corner of Havana, which is on the verge of dramatic change.


APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD
This visionary animated work imagines a world in which the greatest inventive scientific minds of the 19th and early-20th centuries are removed from society, resulting in a world fueled entirely by coal and charcoal. Yes, steam punk has entered children’s films in that stunning APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD, a French, Belgian and Canadian co-production that is perhaps one of the most visually creative and expressive animated work I’ve seen outside of Studio Ghibli.

Young Avril (or April, in English) and her parents are working on a formula to make certain animals indestructible, and instead make them intelligent enough to speak. This development sparks a revolution of sorts in which scientists go missing and, by 1941, Napoleon V is the ruler of France, while the world is left in an invention-less limbo—no televisions, no flight beyond large zeppelins on cables, no conventional electricity, and certainly nothing powered by petroleum-based products. Now a young woman, Avril (voiced by Marion Cotillard) is still searching for her missing parents, while some unknown force is pursuing her, hoping she can finish the invincibility formula, which sets her on the run with her talking cat, Darwin (Philippe Katerine); her grandfather Pops (Jean Rochefort); and a young rapscallion Julius (Marc-Andre Katerine).

APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD is co-directed by Christian Desmares (animation coordinator on Persepolis) and Franck Ekinci, working from the graphic novel by Jacques Tardi, and the scope and realization of the technology on display here is almost too much to take in with just one viewing. Perhaps the most shocking aspect to the movie is that many of the world’s animals have been exposed to the intelligence formula and have been talking and inventing ways to make themselves stronger and more dangerous through technology for decades. Every frame of this work is magnificent and beautifully executed world building and genuinely innovative design work. Most true animation lovers are constantly looking outside of the U.S. for truly inspired works of art, and APRIL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD is true science-fiction accomplishment.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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