→ October 2, 2012
→ By

Midnight in Paris.

Before this weekend I had actually seen just one Woody Allen film, Annie Hall, which I couldn’t stand, mostly because I couldn’t stand Allen’s character, which I guess means I couldn’t stand Allen himself since they seem impossible to distinguish. Since that’s regarded as one of his best films, perhaps his greatest film period, I always assumed that I wouldn’t like much of his oeuvre and used my movie-watching time on other directors. The reviews on last year’s Midnight in Paris were positive enough, especially in saying that the film was different from much of Allen’s work, that I figured I’d give it a shot, especially since I’m working through most of last year’s Best Picture nominees. I absolutely loved this movie, so my own – dare I say it? – bias against Allen nearly kept me away from a great, fun, romantic film.

Midnight‘s main setting couldn’t be much more in my wheelhouse, as it contains an homage to the 1920s within its meditation on nostalgia and our modern happiness paradox, along with a touch of magical realism that, to Allen’s great credit, is never actually explained. Owen Wilson, as likeable as I have ever seen him, plays the Allen stand-in character Gil, unhappily engaged to a narcissistic, shallow woman (played unlikeably by Rachel McAdams) who seems like she might be one of the Bluths’ first cousins, and whose mother might be Lucille Bluth’s long-lost twin sister. Gil is on a vacation to Paris with his fiancee and future in-laws, yet he wants to settle in Paris and try to become a serious novelist rather than continue as a hack screenplay writer, while his intended wants to live to Malibu and spend a lot of money on material things.

The engagement/family plot is almost worthless except as a setup for Gil’s desire to escape to another life, or, as chance would have it, another era. I was close to giving up on the movie after ten minutes before the real story emerges. (Spoilers ahead.) While wandering around Paris alone late one night, Gil is picked up by an old car full of drunken French revelers who insist that he join them and who take him to a party where he meets an American couple named Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, only to discover after his initial skepticism that he’s been sent back in time to the 1920s. Over the course of several such nights, he encounters a number of famous writers, artists, and critics of that time, develops a crush on a French model, and, of course, reevaluates his engagement and the serious choices he’s about to make with his life and career.

These scenes in the 1920s feature a number of well-known actors and other recognizable faces having a blast playing those famous figures from the Parisian salons of that decade, a pleasure that becomes immediately infectious as Adrien Brody gets into character as Salvador Dali or Kathy Bates steals scenes as Gertrude Stein. Gil getting career advice from Ernest Hemingway or trying to mediate between Zelda and F. Scott could seem precious or sentimental in the wrong hands, but Allen makes the dialogue fit these larger-than-life characters in ways that blend our modern perceptions of them with enough realism to maintain the illusion that Gil’s trips back in time are, within the confines of the film, true to life.

Aside from Allen just having fun with famous figures from one of the west’s most fruitful artistic eras since the Renaissance, he also gradually takes the viewers into a serious meditation on the different lenses through which we view our present and the past, especially a past we only know through historical accounts. The past into which Gil travels is inevitably better than the present; perhaps they were all a figment of his imagination, but regardless, they appear as that time period does in its contemporary literature, while shielding Gil from the personal suffering that might come in his own time where he has established, meaningful relationships. Allen nearly writes himself into a corner with this gilt-edged look at the past, but his resolution, while a little quick, is also clever and uncontrived, a spoiler worth preserving at the same time.

Rachel McAdams is shrill and two-dimensional as Gil’s fiancee, and Kurt Fuller, goofily funny as the socially awkward coroner on Psych, is wasted as her snobby father. I’m not even sure who played the mother but she’s such an awful caricature it’s not even worth looking it up. The joy in this movie is in the nocturnal sequences, where Wilson shines – never quite developing the Zuckerman-esque level of annoying that Allen himself achieved for me in Annie Hall. It’s good enough that I feel like I have erred in failing to give the director a second chance sooner, so I’ll end with a question: If I didn’t like Annie Hall but loved Midnight in Paris, which Woody Allen movie should I watch next?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 3, 2012
→ By

The Descendants.

I’ve been less motivated to watch all of the 2011 nominees for Best Picture than I was the previous year, with a few films in this year’s batch in which I have absolutely zero interest (The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and the winner, The Artist failing to meet expectations for me – to say nothing of the time I’ve spent watching rookie league games the last two months. I finally got around to watching The Descendants this weekend, and I’m struggling to find a credible reason why it wouldn’t beat out The Artist in a fair fight, one based strictly on the quality of the films rather than what I presume was a nostalgia move.

George Clooney plays the starring role as Matt King, a successful Hawaiian attorney whose wife, Elizabeth, suffers a serious boating accident at the start of the film, leaving her comatose and eventually without hope of recovery. Matt’s two daughters, the wayward Alexandra and the sassy Scottie, were already struggling before the accident, and the situation is made worse when Alexandra informs her father that Elizabeth had been having an affair. This revelation launches Matt, with Alexandra’s help, on a quixotic quest to identify and confront the man who has cuckolded him, only to find that he, too, has a family likely to be devastated if the adultery is unearthed. It’s clear as this storyline unfolds that this is not only Matt’s way of dealing with his two-headed grief, but a way that his remaining family nucleus can come back together and try to heal as a single unit, rather than three individuals drifting apart on a sea of sorrow and hurt.

None of the film’s characters, even side characters like Alexandra’s sort-of-boyfriend Sid, ends up one-dimensional, a rare trick in a movie with this many people in pivotal roles. The film could easily have demonized Elizabeth’s paramour, and while he’s hardly a good guy, he’s more than just a dark presence around the story’s periphery. Elizabeth’s father similarly appears with a purpose but with a severe underlying pain that governs his anger towards Matt and Alexandra, anger that presents Matt with a difficult decision near the end of the film. I had a little trouble with Judy Greer as the oblivious wife of Elizabeth’s lover, although that was primarily because every time she talked, I pictured Cheryl from Archer (whom Greer voices brilliantly).

The movie’s subplot, however, has all of the sentiment and overstatement that the main plot lacks. Matt is the sole executor of the trust overseeing the 25,000 acres of “pristine” land on Kauai that must be sold before the trust dissolves in seven years, and most of the various cousins involved in the trust want to sell out to a developer who’ll build a resort, golf course, and and other commercial properties, making the cousins instant millionaires. I doubt I need to explain what course Matt ends up taking, although the film offers minimal explanation for it beyond his soliloquy at the time he makes it (in which he acknowledges that he has no immediate solution to the problem caused by the rule against perpetuities); the parallel between his attempt to save the land and his newfound attention to the consequences of his actions and his similar efforts to save what remians of his family is obvious and forced, the one false note in a film that otherwise succeeds on how often it feels true.

George Clooney excels in the role of Matt, although I did find it hard to accept one of the most famous actors in the world in this sort-of-everyman role – doesn’t everyone around Matt realize he looks a lot like George Freaking Clooney? – and the attempts to frump him up a little, like tucking in his shirts, greying his hair, making him run oddly in flip-flops, and so on, only emphasized the disconnect between the character and the actor, much like Cary Grant in his final film role, Walk, Don’t Run. Clooney is at the point in his career where any performance in a serious film that isn’t worthy of an Oscar nomination is a surprise, so I was far more taken by the performance of Shailene Woodley, making her feature-film debut as Alexandra, who begins the film away at a reform school where she’s supposed to be getting help with substance-abuse issues. Her character develops far more over the course of the film, sometimes in mildly surprising ways, as she goes from spoiled, snotty, justifiably-angry daughter to her father’s main emotional supporter and partner-in-crime. Woodley had to show more range than any other actor in The Descendants, from the heartbreaking scene where she learns that her mother isn’t going to recover to the just-as-heartbreaking scenes at the end where the family says goodbye – delivering subtle grace notes like her movements as she brings her younger sister into their mother’s room – enough that I’m surprised she didn’t receive more attention come awards season. With that kind of ability and the requisite beauty (Hollywood accepts no less), Woodley looks like a star in the making.

Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen so far, I’d put The Descendants on top, ahead of Hugo, which I loved but which didn’t have the subtlety of The Descendants and relied more on fantasy to drive its main plot forward. That’s not necessarily bad, but I think it’s harder to make a great film while trying to keep the characters and story firmly grounded in reality, and of course The Descendants couldn’t fill space with special effects or long flashback sequences. The Descendants also found significant humor in the cracks between the darker sequences in the film. Both movies make The Artist look like paper-thin in comparison.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ March 23, 2012
→ By

The Artist.

Here’s my basic problem with The Artist, which I saw two weeks ago: The more I try to think about it, the more I end up thinking about something else.

Don’t mistake my tone there – it’s a very good movie, at different points entertaining, funny, and poignant; beautifully shot and staged; and simply written with little that doesn’t belong. But it didn’t stick with me at all; a great movie will come back to me often, days or even weeks after I see it, with the best scenes replaying in my head regardless of whether I called them to mind. I end up considering and reconsidering themes or questions or ambiguities, often until I see a different film. But The Artist brought none of that. It was a fun way to spend two hours, but I couldn’t call it more than that.

The Artist is, at heart, a tragic romance, the story of a man, George Valentin, who is madly in love with himself – so much so that he can’t seem to recognize it when someone else actually cares about him. The title might even be ironic, and given how he treats most of the people in his life, especially after his career begins to unravel, it might have more accurately been called The Asshole.

Valentin (Best Actor winner Jean Dujardin) is a silent-film star whose life is altered by two major events near the start of the film. One is the advent of talkies, which he dismisses as might anyone who finds his livelihood threatened by new technology or innovation. (I imagine buggy drivers had some choice words for the first automobile as well.) The other is a chance encounter with an adoring fan, the fresh-faced and aptly-named Peppy Miller (Best Supporting Actress nominee Berenice Bejo), to whom George gives a role as an extra in his next film. Her star rises with the rise of sound in pictures while he is cast aside, eventually blowing his fortune to produce a silent film that, for a variety of reasons, tanks at the box office, after which his wife leaves him and his life spirals down to the bottom of a series of bottles. He hits bottom twice, and Peppy ends up in position to repay him for his part in starting her career – if only he wasn’t too buried in self-pity to notice.

The strongest aspects of the movie lie in its subtleties, as the plot itself is pretty straightforward and there aren’t any real subplots. Peppy criticizes silent movies once she’s a star by referring to actors “mugging” for the camera, but Bejo and Dujardin mug a lot less than I expected without sacrificing the expression a silent film requires from its stars. I was far more impressed by the mass of activity underneath the film’s surface, some of which holds clues to the small twist at the end of the film that casts Valentin in a better light (but only slightly), some of which just made the film a greater pleasure to watch – such as the scene in the studio’s offices where the camera shows three floors simultaneously, with a flurry of activity around Peppy and George as she tries to reconnect with him, unaware that he’s just been sacked by the studio.

But the production values and strong performances couldn’t quite get me past how sparse the actual story was. Valentin starts at the top, falls to the bottom, nearly dies, considers suicide, but never seems to learn a damn thing – not the need to change, not the value of treating people well, not how to live within his means, nothing. Only at the very end do we see a small sign that he may have learned some humility, but even that is tainted by its circumstances. He waited around for life to come back around and save him. We spend more time laughing at misfortunes of his own making than we do empathizing with him because we never seen the insecurity that lurks behind the pride.

The dog is awesome, though.

—

I was familiar enough with the film going in to try to guard against the reflex reaction that the film only won the Academy Award for Best Picture because it seemed designed to win the award – a black-and-white love letter to nascent Hollywood shot in 4:3 with only two lines of spoken dialogue, coming at the very end of the film. And, to the film’s credit, it wasn’t hard to get lost in the story, even with the twists I kind of knew were coming. But it seemed rather insubstantial for a Best Picture winner, according to the arbitrary standard in my head for that award. I expect more depth from a film deemed the best of the year by that body.

I’ve only seen one other Best Picture nominee from last year, and The Artist was better, but I’m not sure what made this film, stripped of gimmickry, better than, say, Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s prettier, and more mainstream, and not half as disturbing, but none of those things really makes it better. I’ll work my way through the nominees as I did last year, as well as a few movies that film-critic friends of mine have pushed me to see (coughA Separationcough), but I’ll predict now that I’ll find something else I thought was more deserving. Next up is Drive.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,