→ December 24, 2011
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 film).

I rate John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy among the best suspense novels I have ever read, a wordy but incredibly tense spy novel from 1974 that borrows from the great detective novels of thirty to forty years prior. Hearing Gary Oldman was set to play the lead in the first adaptation for the theaters was exciting and worrying, not so much about Oldman but about how well such a dense book could be adapted to the two-hour constraints of the modern cinema. The worry was needless, as the adaptation, while dispensing with much of the detail of the book, is extremely faithful to the novel’s plot, and one of the most intense smart films I have ever seen.

(I have not seenthe six-hour BBC adaptation from 1979, starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, so I can’t offer a comparison – and, given the differences in duration and thus most likely in pacing, perhaps I’m also not hampered by the comparison either.)

The four words in the film’s title refer to codenames for five* senior British intelligence officers, one of whom is a Soviet double agent, referred to as “Gerald” in the book but only as “the mole” in the movie. As the movie opens, we see a botched operation in Budapest that appears to leave another British agent mortally wounded, after which the head of the unit, known only as “Control,” and senior agent George Smiley (Oldman) are sacked. Several months later, after Control’s death, Smiley is approached by Oliver Lacon, the civil servant who oversees MI6, the domestic intelligence agency known colloquially as “the Circus” (for Cambridge Circus, where Le Carré has located MI6’s offices), to lead an off-the-books investigation to identify the mole. Officially retired, Smiley recruits the young Peter Guillam, still employed by MI6, and one other retired agent to find out how Budapest truly went awry, what happened in Istanbul with rogue agent Ricky Tarr, and to ultimately set the trap into which the mole will walk.

*The fifth is Smiley, who is absolved from guilt when the investigation begins, while the name “Poorman” is used for the remaining suspect.

Oldman plays Smiley with tremendous understatement, especially in comparison to roles like Stansfield or Sirius Black, very much in keeping with Le Carré’s Smiley, who, even when beset by inner turmoil, rarely lets it reach the surface, and prefers to conduct his interrogations as the facilitator rather than the aggressor. This is a film of absent looks and tense pauses, with Smiley setting up the pins for others to knock down. Whether this is Best Actor nomination material or not depends largely on performances I haven’t seen by other actors, but its subtlety might mask its degree of difficulty to the point where voters overlook how key Oldman’s performance was to the film; his one great scene, reimagining a conversation with a briefly captured Soviet agent in Delhi several years previously, nearly explodes with Smiley’s emotional turmoil (and the symbolism of the purloined lighter), yet never quite boils over. One can only imagine the American remake, what with smashed lamps or over-the-top profanity or whatnot.

Aside from Oldman, the cast reads like the leading British actors were all fighting each other to get parts in the film, resulting in some powerful performances by big names in modest roles. Colin Firth appears as the caddish Bill Haydon; Ciarán Hinds (perhaps known best as Albus Dumbledore’s brother in the last two Harry Potter films) is underused as Roy Bland; John Hurt, as Control, is apparently morphing into Ian McKellen; Stephen Graham (of Snatch and Boardwalk Empire) has a critical cameo; and Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Sherlock Holmes in the current BBC series starring that character) is even more critical as Peter Guillam, as tied up by internal demons as Smiley yet less able to restrain them. Even Tom Hardy, as Ricky Tarr, the one character who shows substantial emotions in the film (crossing the line into the pathetic, a deviation from the literary Tarr), manages to avoid sliding into the melodramatic.

The pacing of Tinker Tailor is outstanding, a direction set in the opening sequence, where the screenwriters have heightened the tension by putting the blown operation first. I remembered just enough of the book to follow the story without trouble – I actually remembered the codename of the mole, but not his actual identity, so I wasn’t sure of the ending until the big reveal. However, if you haven’t read the book, the film doesn’t waste much time with explanatory material, and it might take you a few scenes to figure out who’s who and what exactly is under investigation. The flashback scenes aren’t that clearly delineated from the present-day investigation, since they only go back a year or so and can’t be distinguished with hair and makeup. Karla, the fanatical KGB super-agent who never appears in the film except in flashbacks where only his torso is visible, also never receives any sort of introduction before characters begin referring to his existence. We lose some of the backstory of the four suspects, but it’s less necessary in a film that revolves around Smiley and the unraveling of the intrigue, rather than, say, the psychological motivation of the traitor.

The upside of the lack of long-winded explanatory passages is that the film drops you right in the heart of the action, grabs you by the throat, and spends two hours daring you to breathe. And yet there are no cheap, mass-market gimmicks to turn a taut, intelligent spy novel into a mainstream action flick; the furthest it panders is the occasional bit of inserted humor, or the on-screen death of a character whom I think was merely presumed killed by the Russians in the book, but nothing that changes the plot itself, which is ideal as the plot is the book’s greatest strength. (Connie Sacks’ one laugh-inducing line, while funny, is hopelessly out of tune with the rest of the movie, unfortunately.) Deviate from the details if you must, but when the plot’s the thing, leave it be, and the screenwriters – one of whom died at age 49 of cancer before the film was released – did just that.

The only real issue I had with this adaptation is the ending, where the final exposure of the mole’s identity is cut quite short, replaced with a series of wordless scenes set to a recording of “La Mer,” a great song that seemed forced here in a film so reliant on silence through its first 120 minutes. I could have done with less of that, especially the final flashback to the agency holiday party, and more with Smiley confronting the turncoat. It was an average finish to an otherwise plus film, one I’d gladly see again to watch for details I missed because I was so engrossed in the plot.

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→ October 3, 2011
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Jane Eyre (2011 film).

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre is #38 on my ranking of the 100 greatest novels I’ve read, a spot that balances the highly improbable plot against the brilliance of its blend of a gothic horror story, a traditional romance (complete with brooding hero), and a portrayal of a smart, independent female heroine. It is so beloved across the English-speaking world that it has received at least eleven adaptations for the big and small screens, including this spring’s version starring Mia Wasikowska as Jane, combining her brilliant performance with a script that’s faithful to the book’s dialogue and characters but upends its narrative structure to negative effect.

If you haven’t read the novel, you should, but here’s a quick summary. Jane Eyre is orphaned and raised by her cruel aunt, shipped off to a strict Christian boarding school, and eventually hired as governess to another orphaned child, Adele, whose guardian, Edward Rochester (played by Michael Fassbender, whom you might recognize from the bar scene in Inglourious Basterds), is that dark, brooding hero. She and Rochester develop a slow-burning romance even as he hides a terrible secret that will prevent them from marrying – and when that secret is revealed, Jane flees in the middle of the night, eventually finding shelter with a rural missionary, St. John, and his two sisters*. St. John (Jamie Bell, better known as the original Billy Elliott) intends to leave for missionary work in India and proposes that Jane become his wife and join him in his work … but, of course, Jane is not finished with Rochester, regardless of her desire to forget him and their tragedy.

*In the book, it’s revealed that St. John and Jane are, quite improbably, cousins. The film dispenses with this, a reasonable choice even though it makes one of Jane’s eventual decisions seem more generous as a result.

Moira Buffini’s script is incredibly faithful to Brontë’s original words, if not the structure as a whole. Many memorable phrases from the book are preserved here either wholly intact or with minor changes in word order or tense, including its best line, Jane’s question to Rochester, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Waskikowska plays Jane as close to her literary counterpart as I could imagine, while Fassbender and Bell both shift their characters one half-step towards the audience – Rochester still broods, but never seethes, while St. John, so austere in the book, shows Jane a quiet affection that one might at a glance mistake for love until Jane calls him out on it. Brontë’s novel gives so much more depth to Jane than to either male character that infusing both with more humanity is actually a welcome interpolation, within the boundaries set by the author but in a way that makes the emotions in the film seem more much real.

Buffini decided, however, that using Brontë’s words she would alter the sequence in which we see the major events: The film begins with Jane’s flight from Thornfield, and has her reliving her story in her mind as St. John and his sisters attempt to restore her to health. The decision to use the hackneyed flashback narrative technique detracted greatly from the film, both up front – where, if you didn’t know the plot, you could easily get lost – and at the end, where the tension of that part of the book is dissipated. In the novel, that last section derives all of its drama and narrative greed from the reader’s desire to see how on earth Jane could be reunited with Rochester after fleeing from Thornfield, disavowing her past, and taking up a quiet life as a village schoolteacher to lower-class girls. Her dull life adds nothing to the tension of the book’s core romance, put asunder by Rochester’s deceit with no apparent way to repair the rift, so it is merely the passage of time, of page after page without progress, that provides any incentive at all to plow through descriptions of her life with St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) and his sisters. But by shifting half of the time spent on this section of the story to the beginning, and just generally cutting down on the screen time committed to it, there’s virtually no tension left – a viewer unfamiliar with the story would have no idea how close Jane comes to committing to go to India, and the reason for her refusal to marry St. John without love appears to be solely that she still loves Rochester, not that she’s an independent woman who is unwilling to sacrifice her principles for social expediency. Minimizing the portions of the book that focus on Jane’s youth and her time with St. John is an understandable move to fit the novel into two hours, but losing the gravity of the decision she makes with regard to the latter is a major blow.

I’m no Oscar prognosticator, but I would throw out there a guess that Wasikowska might earn a Best Actress nomination for her role here, while the film itself should grab a passel of nominations for costumes, lighting, and scenery. There was a very clear determination to make the film look as authentic as possible, including the use of natural light – meaning candlelight or fireplaces for nighttime scenes, enhancing the gothic feel of the film – at all times. It had to make the production more difficult, but the reward for that effort is evidence throughout the movie.

Jane Eyre also saw a longer adaptation in 2006 starring English stage and TV actress Ruth Wilson as Jane and Toby Stephens (son of Dame Maggie Smith) as Rochester. This four-hour miniseries ran on PBS here as the two-part finale of Masterpiece Theatre (now simply known as Masterpiece), hewing much more closely to the book’s plot structure while altering more of its dialogue and even playing a little loose with Jane’s character, modernizing her in a way that seemed out of place in a work set in the 1840s. Despite that, it is beautifully rendered and the script gives a much fuller treatment to the development of Jane’s relationship with Rochester that simply isn’t possibly in the 120 minutes of the 2011 version.

Also, if you’ve read Jane Eyre or seen any of the film adaptations, you must read Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, a hilarious satirical romp that involves a literary detective who has a special relationship of her own with Rochester and is on the case when a madman makes sure Jane doesn’t wake up in the middle of that one fateful night.

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→ September 14, 2011
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Moneyball.

Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out.

The movie failed first and foremost for me as a movie, not just as a baseball movie. (I’ll get to the baseball parts later.) The general plot here is that the A’s lose their 2001 ALDS to the Yankees and are about to lose three major players to free agency, so Billy Beane goes hunting for a new way of doing business. He runs into a stats geek working in Cleveland’s front office named Peter Brand, hires him, and Brand brings the sabermetric philosophy that we now associate with the early 2000s Oakland teams. This causes friction with Oakland’s scouts, who are all idiots, and Art Howe, who was a stubborn idiot (this is the movie, not my opinion), and Billy might even lose his job until the A’s get hot and win 20 games in a row. Meanwhile, we are to believe that this is all so Billy can purge the personal demons created by the failure of his playing career.

Billy is the only fully realized character in the entire movie, and even at that his disparate pieces don’t tie all that well together. Peter Brand, a.k.a. Paul Antipodesta, is a mousy number cruncher who looks like the lay viewer would expect a stat geek to look – unathletic, dressed in dull collared shirts and ties, intimidated by the players, with no complexity to the character. Howe is nothing but a holier than thou obstacle for Beane whose entire motivation for his stubbornness is his desire for a contract extension – a hopelessly tired plot device that makes for a one-dimensional character. Even Casey, Billy’s daughter, who is shoehorned into this weird plot strand about him possibly losing his job, is nothing more than the plot strand requires her to be.

The lack of multi-dimensional characters is exacerbated by the languid, aimless plot and stop-and-start pacing. The film mopes through Opening Day and the beginning of the A’s season, races through their midyear turnaround, then jumps through most of the winning streak until the twentieth victory, at which point we’re handed slow motion views of the A’s blowing an 11-0 lead … and of Art Howe thinking, with no sound at all. Even the paces of conversations are strange and often forced; one of the “action” scenes, if I could call it that, involves watching Billy juggle three GMs (Shapiro, Phillips, and Sabean) to try to acquire Ricardo Rincon. All three GMs come off as stooges, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell to watch anyone, even Brad Pitt, talk on the phone.

Pitt is very good with the stilted material he’s given and clearly made an effort to look and act the part, from his hair to his tone of voice to his facial expressions. He’s also frequently eating or drinking, which he seems to do in every movie in which he appears. Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, is very good when he can use his character’s dry, monotonous delivery for comedic effect, drawing laughs from lines that aren’t inherently funny because his timing is so good. Chris Pratt has several funny moments as Scott Hatteberg, very recognizable if youve seen his work as Andy on Parks and Recreation, although he really only has two scenes of any significance in this movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman was wasted as Howe, unfortunately, playing a one-note character who would like you to know he doesn’t care what you have to say about baseball. Robin Wright Penn is also wasted as Beane’s ex-wife who is apparently married to a closeted gay man.

I could have tolerated a lot of flaws if Moneyball had just given me a good baseball movie, with some real tension to it, or perhaps a strong character study of Billy Beane. But the film provides neither, and I spent most of the movie wondering what was really on the line here. The A’s don’t win a playoff series in 2002, so the script can’t set that up as a goal or use the playoffs as a climax. Beane took a $39 million team to the playoffs the year before; he wasn’t going to be fired in May for taking a few risks that his owner more or less told him to take (and if he had been fired, he would have been hired by someone else in a heartbeat, despite the character’s later claim to the contrary). His daughter is worried about him because she doesn’t see the big picture, but neither she nor her father is in any real jeopardy at any point in the film. We’re not playing for anything here.

—

Then there’s the baseball stuff, which is not good. For starters, the lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page; they are set up as dim-witted bowling pins for Beane and Brand to knock down with their spreadsheets. It’s cheap writing, and unfair to the real people being depicted. Current Oakland scouting director Eric Kubota also gets murdered in a drive-by line that depicts him as a clueless intern given the head scouting role after Beane fires Grady Fuson in April after a clubhouse argument (that never really happened). I’ll confess to laughing at the scout referring to “this Bill James bullshit,” although the A’s bought into that bullshit years before the film claims they did – and, in fact, hired Paul Depodesta three years before the movie-A’s hired Brand. (In the film, Fuson refers to Brand as “Google boy,” a term applied to Depodesta by Luddite beat writers in LA three years later.)

The film also relies on some pretty gross misrepresentations or oversimplifications of the business. The idea of a GM getting on a plane and flying two thirds of the way across the country to meet another GM to discuss a trade for a left-handed reliever is so absurd that it should set off alarm bells in even the casual fan. Do you really think that GMs only talk trades in person? That they fly to meet each other for tete-a-tetes before consummating any deal? Similarly, teams don’t sign injured players to guaranteed contracts by flying out to their houses (on Christmas Eve, apparently) without having them go through physicals.

I wasn’t as concerned with the script having Beane trade Carlos Pena to Detroit for a reliever and some money (as opposed to the actual three-team, seven-player deal including Jeff Weaver and Jeremy Bonderman) as I was with seeing Pena, an intelligent, gregarious person, depicted as a sullen Latino player. I also find it hard to believe Beane would ever say he didn’t care about pitchers’ platoon splits. And the film’s emphasis on Beane not making it as a player seems to point to questions about his makeup, especially his confidence, which hardly ties into a film about how makeup is overrated.

If you do end up seeing the film, and I imagine most of you will, there is one scene towards the end that stood out for me as incredibly spot on, so much so that it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the film. Beane is sitting in what was then called the .406 club at Fenway Park with John Henry, who is about to offer him a record-breaking deal to become the Red Sox’ new GM. Henry expounds on how Beane’s method of doing things is going to sweep through the industry, and how critics within the game weren’t just trying to protect the game, but were expressing their own fears about their livelihoods. That speech applies just as well to any industry undergoing the kind of creative destruction ushered in by Bill James, Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane. Remember that when you see the next written attack on “stat geeks” who are ruining the game along with a defense of RBIs or pitcher wins.

If you haven’t already done so, go read the book before thinking about seeing this movie, and maybe go watch Brad Pitt steal every scene he’s in in Snatch instead.

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→ August 29, 2011
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (film).

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two years ago and didn’t care for it, between the awkward prose, stilted characters, and violent revenge fantasy that fueled the story, so I gave up on the trilogy rather than plowing through the two subsequent, longer books that followed. The film adaptation of the book garnered very positive reviews, however, as Larsson’s plot, too thin and angry for a 600-page novel, worked well in a 150-minute film that was ultimately powered by Noomi Rapace’s star-making turn as Lisbeth Salander.

If you haven’t read the book, the basic plot is that Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative journalist in temporary disgrace who is hired by an aging industrialist to solve the 40-year-old disappearance of the industrialist’s niece Harriet. The industrialist used a research firm to investigate Blomkvist first, and the reclusive, tortured hacker Lisbeth Salander, who did the actual research, ends up teaming up with Blomkvist to try to solve the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance and find the previously undetected serial killer whose identity Harriet seems to have deduced right before she vanished.

Salander’s character is all hard edges, from her eidetic memory to her flawless cracking skills to her extremely insular personality to her refusal to talk about the traumas of her past. Her portrayal ends up critical to the film, not just because she is the Girl of the title but because Blomkvist’s character is about as dull as an old butter knife. Rapace, a Swedish actress whose English-language debut will come in the next installment of the Sherlock Holmes reboot (which, as a fan of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, I have to say looks like a circus freakshow’s take on the character), inhabits the character with a brooding intensity and a barely concealed rage that keeps threatening to explode through the surface. But even when she is violently raped – more on that scene in a moment – by her legal guardian (long backstory there), she channels that rage into a violent, controlled revenge that gives her what she wants by reversing the balance of power. Conveying all of this through Larsson’s clipped, unrealistic dialogue is not simple; it puts more responsibility on the actress involved to convey it through body language, tone, and facial expressions, and Rapace does so from start to finish. It was no small shock to see her out of character in one of the DVD extras and discover she’s kind of cute. There is no cute to her portrayal of Lisbeth.

That rape scene, though … I’ll confess that my wife and I both voted to fast-forward through it. We’d both read the book and knew exactly what was coming, but the thought of watching that attack on Lisbeth in real time was repulsive, and the film does not shy away from just how violent the attack was, or just how much of a violation it was. That scene in the book is all about power and powerlessness, and there’s no question that those aspects come through in the film version. Even at double the normal speed, it went on too long to stomach, and watching Lisbeth get her revenge doesn’t erase it for the viewer any more than it would erase it for her character.

The last half of the movie is all about Blomkvist and Harriet looking for clues in old newspapers and business records for the identities of the serial killer’s victims and, eventually, his identity as well. There’s tension as they visit the sites where various bodies were recovered, but no real drama until Blomkvist blunders into the killer’s grasp and has to be rescued by Lisbeth in a scene of fake-tension – you know Blomkvist isn’t going to die with two more films in the series, but the book and film both push him to the brink of death before it happens. In other words, don’t watch this just for the plot, which is mildly interesting but also extremely sick (reflected in the book’s original Swedish title, which translates to Men Who Hate Women). Watch it for Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth, and for the tremendous prep work that had to go into creating all of the documentary evidence that she and Blomkvist eventually use to find the killer.

–

I commented on Twitter that I was unlikely to go see the English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, due out in theaters this winter, because these remakes tend to fall short of their originals. This isn’t strictly a language issue for me, but a cultural one. For one thing, large American studios that remake foreign films tend to Hollywoodize the films to increase their commercial appeal, often changing plot elements, dumbing down smarter dialogue, softening harsher elements that might scare away viewers or hike the film’s MPAA rating, or employing more marketable actors who might bring their own audiences. They have every right to try to make more money, of course, but these are not factors that typically increase the quality of a film. For another thing, there is a pretty clear insinuation in these remakes that the studios believe that Americans will not – or can not – tolerate a film with subtitles. I’m not exactly Mr. Art Film Snob, but I’ve seen at least 20 films with subtitles in at least eight foreign languages and have never once felt that my opinion of a movie suffered because it was subtitled. You get used to them in a matter of seconds, and then you don’t notice them for the rest of the film. Did Inglourious Basterds fare worse at the box office for its heavy use of subtitles? No. So why do we need an English-only version of a film that was made very well by native actors in their own country?

Several readers argued that the director of the English version, David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network), makes it worth watching on its own. I understand that the director of a film can have significant influence on its ultimate quality, but in this case, I’m not concerned about the directing but of the script itself, and as far as I can tell, Fincher wasn’t involved in the screenplay, which was adapted from the book (not the Swedish film) by Steven Zaillian, whose filmography since Schindler’s List skews towards big-budget and commercial efforts, including Mission: Impossible, Hannibal, and, of interest to most of us, Moneyball. I’d also consider it a negative that the filmmakers were reportedly offering too little money for the role of Lisbeth, not because I think money buys you a better actress but because it sends a signal that the studio and/or Fincher don’t see Lisbeth’s role as the crucial one. I might eventually see the English version, but the early indicators on the film’s quality are not all that favorable in my eyes.

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→ August 6, 2011
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True Grit

The 2010 version of True Grit (iTunes versionicon) earned ten Academy Award nominations – winning none, so I hope it truly is an honor just to be nominated, otherwise the Coen brothers must be really pissed off – which accurately reflects the quality of the acting, the screenplay, and the visuals. It’s also an unusually mainstream film for the Coens, who seem to specialize in cult favorites or films that garner more acclaim from critics than at the box office. I enjoyed the film more for its critical aspects than for the story, and would rank it as above-average but have a hard time pushing myself to call it plus.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father was robbed and murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney, who subsequently fled into the Indian Territories (now constituting the bulk of Oklahoma) to escape arrest. Mattie, ostensibly in a frontier town to collect her father’s body and belongings, hires the dissolute bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn – over his objections – to catch Chaney, with the condition that she accompany him on the chase. They are joined by the arrogant Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, himself pursuing Chaney for the murder of a state senator and a dog in Texas. (It is unclear which was the greater transgression.)

The Coen brothers were, as far as I can tell having not read the novel, faithful to the original work, or at least far more so than the 1969 adaptation for which John Wayne won an Academy Award. (I haven’t seen that film either.) That decision appears double-edged to me, for while it means they stuck to Mattie’s perspective and gave her character a richness it might have otherwise lacked, it also leads down the figurative and literal slope of coincidences and sentiment in the film’s final fifteen minutes. Everything is a little too clean and perfect. You knew that a snake would come into play. You knew someone would fall into the hole in the ground. The Coen brothers didn’t have to kill off a main character to make the film a little grittier, pun intended, but it seems that their loyalty to Portis’ original work won out.

Two aspects of the film stood out over all others. One, obviously, is Hailee Steinfeld, who portrays Mattie and was just 12 years old when True Grit was filmed. Her performance was absolutely critical to the movie’s success – she needs to be tough, firm, adult-like in sensibility yet still maintaining the naïveté of a child of her age; if she’s not believable, nothing that comes after in the film would matter. She must be able to boss around the grizzled, alcoholic Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges) and yet to be vulnerable when she’s first exposed to violence or finds herself disdained (or worse) by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). And she owns the screen in her negotiation with the dismissive horse-trader that ends with her talking him into a corner and out of his money, a scene where you would easily forget Steinfeld’s age were you not reminded of it within the dialogue. That she accomplished this at her age in her first significant film role is remarkable and justifies the passel of awards she won for her work, as well as the nomination for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (an award won by Melissa Leo for The Fighter).

The other aspect that stood out is the cinematography, which is not something I ordinarily notice in films unless it’s done poorly. But the Coen brothers played True Grit as a classic Western epic, filling the screen with wide-angle views of the countryside, using plot elements like having Mattie on top of a cliff while a battle rages below as an excuse for Roger Deakins to give us an expansive shot of the dusty plateau where the climactic encounter of the book occurs.

(I admit I would have loved to have seen an outtake featuring Rooster Cogburn ordering a White Russian, but maybe that’s just me.)

As for the Best Picture race of last year, I’d still give The King’s Speech the nod over True Grit; both were well-acted, but the two lead performances in The King’s Speech were better than any of the three major performances here. Both films benefited from some contrived drama – the former by altering historical circumstances, the latter through a little coincidence and some silly foreshadowing – but The King’s Speech did so more subtly.

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→ April 3, 2010
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Tales of the South Pacific.

My 2010 Predictions post is up, including standings, playoffs, MVPhe/Cy winners, and a top 3 for each RoY award. There’s also a straggler post from Arizona on Fabio Martinez and two other Angel prospects, and I did a chat on Friday afternoon.

I’m scheduled to be on the Herd on Monday morning, but the weekly ESPNEWS hit is off next week.

—

James Michener won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, later adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into a Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning musical, which later became a hit movie*. The stories in the collection are connected, so while there’s no single narrative through the series (aside from World War II itself, a fairly compelling plot even sixty-plus years later), characters appear in multiple stories and you couldn’t read them out of sequence without missing some history or the occasional inside reference. They’re interesting, often funny, frequently romantic (in the classical sense, not in the Harlequin sense), but nothing Michener wrote could compete with his concise recap of the assault on the (fictional) island of Kuralei and the brief story that follows it, as the narrator walks through the cemetery that holds the fallen from that battle.

*I actually had no idea that “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from South Pacific until I sat down to write this post. I figured it wasn’t originally from that hair-coloring commercial, but I couldn’t have even guessed what musical contained the track.

Some scattered thoughts from this book:

* This had to be an inspiration for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in multiple ways. I could imagine Heller writing his novel as a sarcastic, almost angry response to Michener’s somewhat antiseptic take on a brutal war – but at the same time, Michener mined subtle humor from incompetent officers, and the character Tony, who flies all over the Pacific trading one good for another in pursuit of liquor, seems like a precursor to Heller’s Milo.

* Tales of the South Pacific would never win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction today. The first 30-odd years of the award largely rewarded novels told stories highly illustrative of some aspect of the American experience. If you look at recent winners, particularly the last ten years, the emphasis has been on edgier fare – Oscar Wao, Middlesex, The Road, even the blacks-who-owned-slaves backdrop of The Known World – with the occasional exception for an old-school winner like Empire Falls (which handled several major and very modern themes) or Gilead (I imagine the gorgeous prose and raw emotion won out). Michener’s novel today is almost more like a smart beach read, enjoyable, set in a serious time, but not a novel for the ages.

* The mere title of this novel reminds me of the best musical that never existed, found in an episode of the TV series Amazing Stories called “Gershwin’s Trunk,” in which a songwriter with writer’s block uses a psychic to contact the ghost of George Gershwin, who provides him with (among others) a song called “I Discovered You,” leading with the couplet: “Balboa thought it was terrific/When he discovered the Pacific.” Twenty-five years I have had that song in the back of my brain. It’s a hell of an episode.

Next up: A book written by a reader! Richard Dansky’s first novel, the ghost story Firefly Rain, which is excellent through the first 100 pages.

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→ August 17, 2009
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No Country for Old Men.

Tentatively scheduled to be on Mike & Mike at 8:42 am EDT on Monday. Latest draft blog entry is posted, with updates on the Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Rangers.

I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men before seeing the film and knocked it off in just three days. The book is riveting, a quick-moving hard-boiled mystery along the Texas-Mexico border that starts when Llewelyn Moss comes upon the carnage at the scene of a failed drug shipment, decides to take the money he finds, and ends up hunted by the law and by an amoral hit man named Anton Chigurh. The story is interspersed with first-person passages from Sheriff Bell, who tries to make some sense of the violence and disregard for life he saw while pursuing Chigurh. It is quick and dense with action; McCarthy makes scenes like Chigurh buying medical supplies and treating himself for bullet wounds interesting and fast.

I still haven’t seen the film version, but if the movie was true to the book for the character of Chigurh, I’m surprised to see that any actor could win an Oscar for that role. Chigurh is central, and he is undeniably scary, but he is also completely one-dimensional and boring. He’s an automaton, a remorseless, reasonless killer with no personality and little action in the book beyond (sometimes inventive) murders. The reader sees Chigurh from the omniscient narrator’s perspective, but the narrator’s view is limited to Chigurh’s actions during the events of the novel, and we are left with the same confusion and lack of information as Sheriff Bell, who refers to Chigurh as a “ghost” and whose window into Chigurh is limited to the events laid out in the novel. We know Chigurh by the trail of dead, but we know nothing else of him. (One possible interpretation of Chigurh is that he is Fate or, more likely, Death, which would explain the lack of emotion and inability to change his course of action; I imagine you could write a whole thesis on that topic.) Sheriff Bell is the most interesting and complex character, but he’s not involved in the action – he’s the thoughtful, not-dead narrator who can’t figure out the hows and whys of what he witnessed – almost as if he’s God looking down on a world gone mad.

I also found McCarthy’s prose, a little unclear in the best of circumstances, to be at its most confusing in No Country, not just due to his standard aversion to punctuation but also due to the constant scene-shifting. There are two unnamed characters in offices whose roles were never clear to me, and, when one of them is killed, I wasn’t even sure which one it was.

The problems with thin characters only bothered me upon reflection – the book was a fantastic read because of the pacing and McCarthy’s tremendous and sometimes beautiful prose, and there’s plenty of material to consider after the fact that makes up for the weak characterizations. It’s not as good as Blood Meridian or The Road but still a solid read.

Next up: Back to Blandings Castle for some Heavy Weather.

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→ May 3, 2009
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The Reader.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader – the basis for the film that starred Kate Winslet getting “repeatedly naked,” according to Bill Simmons – is an impressively complex work given its length, around 220 pages. It is nominally the story of Michael Berg, who is fifteen when the story opens, and Hannah Schmitz, who is more than twice that age; the two end up in an intense sexual relationship, one that echoes the relationship of Lolita but that is told from the younger participant’s perspective. (Of course, older man/younger girl is significantly more scandalous than older woman/younger guy, which further pushes this issue into the background.) Hannah breaks the relationship off suddenly, disappearing from Michael’s life without warning, only to reappear years later in a substantial coincidence as Michael finds himself assigned by a college class to cover a war-crimes trial in which Hannah is a participant. Michael realizes that he knows something about Hannah that would exonerate her of the worst of the charges – it won’t take you that long to figure it out – and his choices from that point forward dictate the course of the rest of Hannah’s life, much as her choices with him when they were lovers dictate the course of the rest of his life.

My theory of the book is that Schlink was not referring to Michael or Hannah with the title “The Reader,” but is referring to us. In the first part of the novel, he gives us the affair, one that despite Michael’s youth and a heavy reliance on sex with little conversation is not scandalous and is even presented positively. Hannah is mysterious and moody but appears to be hiding some secret pain. Michael is young and innocent but cares deeply for Hannah. There are a few hints of the age imbalance, but the net for Michael is give to us as positive. Schlink is just setting us up, however; the sympathetic characters of part one are not so sympathetic after all – Hannah was a guard in the SS and is accused of complicity, if not outright responsibility, in the deaths of hundreds of female Jewish prisoners; Michael, ruined emotionally by the teenage dalliance with Hannah, can’t take simple steps to help Hannah or simply make her life in prison a little better, much less offer her any sort of absolution for breaking off a relationship that, ultimately, was wrong. Did Michael have an obligation to come forward during Hannah’s trial with his exculpatory evidence – or to at least confront Hannah about it? Why would Hannah refuse to set aside her shame to avoid a horrible fate – did she want to go to prison, to seek absolution through the justice system because the dead could not absolve her? Hannah’s choices are particularly mysterious, since she rarely speaks to Michael when they’re together and has but a handful of lines of dialogue after part one. In a short novel, Schlink presents moral dilemmas while also challenging us to reconsider our loyalties to the two main characters. Why are those two sympathetic in part one, when ultimately, we know so little about them, and some of what we know is less flattering than we believed at first glance? Is the responsibility on the author to reveal everything at once, or on the reader to consider all possibilities before drawing conclusions or developing attachments to specific characters?

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→ December 17, 2008
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Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins is one of my daughter’s favorite movies, and I’ve seen it probably 30 or 40 times in the last few months. (“Watcha Poppins?” could get annoying after the hundredth time, except that she’s so excited about it that I could never hold it against her.) So I decided to take a crack at the book on which the movie is loosely based. Mind you, I was unaware that there was a book until a few months ago, and it turns out that there are eight in the series, although reportedly P.L. Travers, the Australian critic who wrote the books, hated the Disney film so much that she refused to allow them to make a sequel.

Even for an adult, the book is fun, although it’s a lot less whimsical than I would have expected from the movie. Poppins herself is not Julie Andrews’ version: She’s quite severe with the children, who are naughtier than their film counterparts, and she’s nowhere near as pretty as Julie Andrews was. Most of the anecdotes in the film come from the book, but with changes:

  • Mary and Bert (who barely appears in the book) do enter into a painting and go to a country fair, but without the children.
  • Admiral Boom, who appears a few times in the film as comic relief, appears just once in passing in the book.
  • The tea party on the ceiling comes doesn’t include the jokes that are central to the film scene. The talking dog that alerts Mary to the problem in the movie is actually part of a different story altogether in the book.
  • Katie Nanna has already quit at the start of the book.
  • Jane and Michael have twin, infant siblings who get their own story in the book.
  • The entire sequence on the rooftops appears to be original – Bert, also called the “Match Man” in the book, is clearly a longtime friend of Mary Poppins’ but only makes his appearance as a street artist, not a chimney sweep.
  • The run on Mr. Banks’ bank and Mrs. Banks’ suffragette efforts are original to the film, and in the book, Mary Poppins stays a year or so, rather than the week of the movie.

Yet at the same time, two of the best stories in the book – which is more a collection of stories than a single narrative – is omitted from the film entirely. In one, Mary takes the children to Mrs. Corry’s for gingerbread cookies, only to learn how the stars ended up in the sky. In another, the twins earn top billing, and the reader sees how infants see the world and that we lose something when we grow out of that stage of life.

The difference in Mary Poppins’ character between the book and the film is enormous. In the film, she’s there for the purpose of bringing the slightly neglectful father who is married to his work and has some rather definite ideas about family life back into the loving-father role. In the book, she’s there to trigger Jane and Michael’s imaginations and improve their behavior; Michael in particular has one story where he’s a real brat, and Mary whisks him and Jane around the world visiting “friends” of hers (they’re animals now, but in the original version were apparently people based on unflattering stereotypes).

Unlike the movie, which has a single narrative and draws you into the story and the two main characters (Mary and Bert), the book is just a collection of fun and imaginative stories that doesn’t create the same connection between the reader and the main character. So while I recommend the book because it’s fun and the magical twist in each story is usually very clever, I wasn’t sucked in the way I have been to other great children’s novels like The Phantom Tollbooth.

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→ March 11, 2008
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The Namesake (film).

The film version of The Namesake felt like a mediocre adaptation of a great book. I can’t speak to whether the book on which it’s based, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, is great, but the movie aspired to a scope that it wasn’t able to reach. It’s a quality movie, but one that left me feeling like it had missed its target.

The story … well, that’s the problem. The story lacks a coherent center. It is the story of a family, or perhaps the story of a culture clash, but either way it suffers without a central character to anchor the plot. The movie’s first half or first two-thirds or so focus on Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, the husband and wife and eventually the parents of Gogol Ganguli (the namesake of the film’s title), who takes over as the movie’s center through its finish. We start with Ashoke nearly dying in a train wreck in India, then we’re presented with the arrangement of his marriage to Ashima, and then they’re married and arrive in the U.S., where he’s lived for a few years since the accident. The movie settles in to a sweet sequence on the early years of the Gangulis’ marriage, then suddenly their two children are teenagers, at which point Gogol’s unusual name becomes a key plot element.

The movie jumps too quickly to achieve the epic scope of a novel that is attempting to tell the story of the clash between Indian and American cultures through the example of a single family. At one point, the scene changes and we see Ashima talking to a co-worker. She utters two sentences, around fifteen words. The scene ends, we’re taken somewhere else, and we never return to the previous point. This can work in a movie that’s trying to evoke a frenetic feeling in the audience, but a movie of deep emotions and big themes shouldn’t be rushing from one plot point to the next.

As another example, take the film’s last third, where Gogol wants to change his name, has a white girlfriend (the worst-drawn character in the film – about as three-dimensional as a piece of paper), then marries a Bengali girl in a 180-degree reversion to his roots, and then sees that marriage end in one of the less believable relationship-ending conversations you’ll see. (At the risk of spoiling something, let’s just say that Gogol must be telepathic to figure out his wife’s secret from the one verbal slip.) Gogol’s life alone, including his journey from assimilated American teen to proud son of Indian immigrants to one-foot-in-each-world yuppie to his uncertain future would fill a two-hour movie without any trouble. Squeezed into forty minutes, it feels cursory and unsatisfying.

I’m underselling the movie by focusing on this treatment of a rich plot. Ambition in a movie plot is a good thing, and the fact that they couldn’t fulfill the story’s promise is a minor criticism as opposed to the criticism I have of most movies, which is that their plots couldn’t fill a thimble to the halfway mark. The acting by all three of the leads in The Namesake is outstanding; Kal Penn’s performance will add yet another nail in the coffin that House is very slowly building itself, as I’ll have a hard time taking him seriously as a goofball. (Yes, I know he played Kumar, but that’s not exactly in my Netflix queue.) Some of the scenes shot in India are gorgeous; the costume design in the two Indian weddings is outstanding; and I thought the (almost) wordless scene between Gogol and his bride on their wedding night was really well done, a strong piece of writing that took its cue from how people actually interact with each other. The Namesake is absolutely worth renting; I’m just lamenting the movie it could have been instead.

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