|
Home Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Cinematic smorgasbord:
No stars to Bright Stars The films this month are a collection of inquiries and entertainments with little direct connection between them.
A Serious Man
After the success of their No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers released Burn After Reading, a dark comedy that gave Brad Pitt his best comic role ever, and now they have released A Serious Man, a film set in the Minnesota of their childhood that combines the metaphysical darkness and the humor of the previous two films.
Larry Gopnik, a university physics professor, is coming up for tenure; he leads an ordinary middle-class life, seems happy and loves his family—his son soon will celebrate his bar mitzvah. But in this 1967 Coen version of the Book of Job, a few other things, mostly bad, also are going to happen to Larry. The Book of Job explains the suffering of its main character as a test of his faith and as a contest between God and the devil; in the end, God tries to make restitution to Job, although some of us wonder whether anything can ever compensate him for his losses. The Coens downplay the overt supernatural underpinning, and the ending makes the last scene of No Country for Old Men seem clear and positive by comparison. It gives a new meaning to God speaking from a whirlwind.
A Serious Man raises in a contemporary context a number of the questions people have always asked about Job’s misadventures. The most obvious is, to paraphrase a recent bestseller, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “Good” is equivalent to “serious” in the film, hence the title: the hero has tried to be a good man. But what is “serious” and is that good enough? For what—God’s approval?
Larry’s sanctimonious friend, Sy Ableman, who is stealing Larry’s wife, is even referred to as “a serious man.”
The characters also keep asking, “How do we understand God’s will in relation to what happens to us?” The Coens are not necessarily suggesting a religious framing of the question, but most people try to interpret their lives in this way. A recent PBS series on the “human spark” argued that one of the characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals is the compulsion to see patterns in the world and to explore them, a compulsion that has led to the scientific method, among other things and to civilization as we know it. For example, in the film a dentist finds (or thinks he finds) Hebrew letters on the back of one of his gentile patient’s front teeth. What is the meaning of this miracle? No one knows, not even the learned Rabbi. So eventually the incident is forgotten, except that it makes a good story to illustrate the mystery of existence. We seem compelled to make sense of what happens, whether it makes any sense or not.
Science fiction writers have a saying that magic is a phenomenon for which you don’t know the scientific reasons. Are the Coens saying that most religious writing, such as the Book of Job, occupies a similar niché, where “the will of God” (or Hassim, if you’re Jewish) fills in when we can’t find a logical answer? Although the Coens do not provide an answer, they present the problem in an engaging fashion.
The cast has no big stars, but several faces look familiar from being seen in many supporting roles. Michael Stuhlbarg is fine as Larry, and Richard Kind is excellent as the confused, perhaps brilliant, perhaps evil Uncle Arthur. Fred Melamed nearly steals the first part of the film as Sy, Larry’s unctuous and hypocritical best friend, and Sari Lennick and Aaron Wolff are fine as Larry’s wife and son.
The Coens have fun satirizing the various learned rabbis, who haven’t a clue about the answers to Larry’s questions but urge him to be patient, that all will turn out well. One of the larger uncertainties of the last part of the film is whether Larry’s son will be so high on pot at the bar mitzvah he will forget his part in the ceremony or fall off the platform. There also seems to be some connection between the fuzzy television reception the Gopniks get and the clarity of the will of Hassim.
A Serious Man is vintage Coen brothers filmmaking—funny, serious and satirical. If you like the Coens, the praise doesn’t get any higher than that. Top
Cold Souls
Sophie Barthes wrote and directed her first feature, Cold Souls, which debuted at Sundance. The film, which stars Paul Giametti playing a character named Paul Giametti, has echoes of Being John Malkovich and of two other Charlie Kaufmann screenplays, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York. Yet part of the film’s charm is its plot originality as well as its philosophical underpinning.
Paul Giametti is rehearsing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in New York, and the stress of the part is weighing heavily on him. His agent suggests he read an article in the New Yorker about soul removal, and, against his better judgment, the actor visits the exreaction facility. The smooth-talking Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) suggests he have his soul extracted and stored until the performance of Vanya is over, thus avoiding the anguish of playing such a soulful part. In a painless procedure, Giametti’s soul is removed and stored in a glass container—it’s about the size of a chickpea—and he chooses to store it in the main office rather than avoiding sales tax by storing it in New Jersey. As you have probably now guessed, parts of this satiric film are hilarious, but like all good satire, it takes its subject quite seriously at times.
The problem is that removing his soul also removes Giametti’s talent as an actor, and his attempts to do a “soulless” Uncle Vanya are ridiculous. A temporary transplant of a Russian poet’s soul brings too much weight to the part, and Giametti must go in search of his soul, which has now been illegally transported to Russia and implanted into a beautiful but limited Russian soap opera star, who thinks she has received the soul of Al Pacino.
A parallel plot concerns the story of a Russian “mule” named Nina (Dina Korzun), who smuggles souls into and out of the United States. She and Giametti meet as she leads him back to Moscow to attempt to recover his soul. The rest of the film shows his problems when they get to Russia and reveals, before the final credits roll, whose soul ends up in whom, although the last, lovely shot of the two meeting on the seacoast leaves some ambiguity as to the resolution.
The acting is uniformly fine with Giametti a stand-out playing someone who is like himself, and Dina is excellent as the soul-transporting Nina. Strathairn brings just the right cold-blooded, pompous concern to the role of the head of the soul-extraction business, finally acknowledging he understands very little of the effects of what he is doing. Lauren Ambrose is beautiful and ditzy as the television star Stephanie, and Emily Watson and Katheryn Winnick are under-utilized as Paul’s wife, Claire, and as Sveta, the “Russian poet” who sells her soul.
The film’s strengths include its original concepts and the many ideas raised about the soul and individual identity in the film. The soul extractor removes only ninety-five percent of the soul, leaving a fraction still in the original body, a fraction, which, like a vestigial organ, may grow a new soul. The problem multiplies with the mules, who have had numerous insertions and extractions, and consequently have numerous residues remaining within them. The flashbacks the new owners of the souls have from the previous owners’ lives echo the problems of transplanted hands and eyes in many horror films of the middle of the century. Of course, the traffic in souls obviously parallels the traffic in body parts, with poor people selling parts of themselves to the wealthy. In fact, the film’s greatest problem is that it has too many ideas (would that more films had this problem!), many of which do not receive proper development. For example, the question is asked, what happens to an extracted soul when the original owner dies, but no answer is given. The character Sveta, whose soul Giametti receives temporarily, is a fascinating and sympathetic individual about whom little is revealed. Top
Bright Star
Director Jane Campion, best known for her 1993 Oscar-winning film, The Piano, repeats some of the romantic qualities of that earlier success in this, her first film in six years. Bright Star, which draws its name from one of John Keats’ sonnets, covers the last two years of the poet’s life, chronicling his intense but unconsummated love with Fanny Brawne, a girl who lived literally next door.
Despite my affection for literature, I find that films about poets and writers are often full of slow, boring scenes in which the writer stares into space and then scribbles something down while voice-over narration cues the viewer into the creative process. Fortunately, Campion avoids these pitfalls and offers a story about two young people (one eighteen, the other twenty-four) who fall in love; their methods of livelihood—one is a poet, the other is a seamstress—undoubtedly affect their relationship, but Campion focuses on their love, a force which may or may not have affected Keats’ poetry in a positive fashion (historians and literary scholars are divided on this issue).
When Keats first meets Fanny, they are neighbors; and shortly thereafter, the Brawne family rents the other half of the house where Keats and Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider) are living. Brown, himself a poet, realizes that Keats is far above him in talent and has taken as his mission to protect Keats and to foster his production of poetry.
Despite some good (and some bad) reviews of his published writing, Keats is considered a failure by most people—certainly a financial failure. Fanny’s mother is concerned her daughter’s interest in the young poet will distract her from the task of finding a suitable (i.e., financially secure) husband. Fanny knows little about poetry but finds Keats interesting for himself, with poetry being merely the icing on the cake, while most of Keats’ other friends seem interested in him for his poetical talent. With her mother’s reluctant consent, they become engaged but apparently have no physical relationship beyond holding hands and exchanging a few kisses.
The film is told exclusively from Fanny’s point of view. As Keats’ tuberculosis becomes worse, his friends raise money to send him to Italy in the hope that a warmer climate will improve his health—it was a standard (and flawed) method of treatment. His lungs completely destroyed, he dies in Rome at the age of twenty-five.
Campion presents the love of Keats and Brawne through beautiful, poetic imagery, all the more impressive since their passion never goes beyond a kiss. A field of blooming bluebells; a room full of fluttering butterflies; a drenching rainstorm in the woods as Brown, Brawne and Keats argue—such scenes portray the emotions through visual correlations without hammering the viewer with symbolism.
The acting is excellent. Abbie Cornish brings Fanny Brawne to life as an impetuous, self-reliant young seamstress interested in fashion, flirtation and, finally, John Keats. Her performance is overwhelming as she listens to the letter detailing Keats’s death. Ben Whishaw (Perfume and one of the Bob Dylans in I’m Not There) is the very stereotype of the slender, tubercular Keats, but he adds enough perplexed emotion and acting details to transcend the cliche.
As the credits roll, his voice-over reading of some of the poems is quite well done. Paul Schneider plays Charles Armitage Brown as part buffoon, part protector of Keats, and part rake, as he criticizes Fanny for loving the impoverished Keats but then proceeds to impregnate a new servant girl. Kerry Fox is excellent as Fanny’s patient and understanding mother, but the film is almost stolen by Thomas Sangster and Edie Martin as Fanny’s younger brother and sister, Samuel and Toots. Ms. Marton, with her red curls and mischievous expression, becomes the visual focus of any scene she’s in, especially when she’s carrying around a black-and-white cat, as she often is.
The costumes are, thankfully, less extravagant than those for most period films, and were nominated for an Academy Award. Some of the sets are authentic buildings and some are not. The house used for most of the film is not the actual Keats house, which was too small inside to accommodate the film crew, but the end of the film shows Keats’ coffin being loaded into a hearse, and behind it are the Spanish Steps in Rome, leading up to one of the better views of the city, and to the right is the actual house where Keats died. It is now open to the public as a museum dedicated to Shelley and Keats.
The film ends with Keats’ death (which, thankfully, is not shown), but Fanny, after mourning Keats for several years and wearing his ring for the rest of her life, finally married a man some years her junior and had three children. She told no one of her relationship to Keats, even as his reputation grew, and on her deathbed gave his letters, which she had preserved, to her children with the stipulation that they be kept sealed until after her husband’s death.
Later, the children sold them to the highest bidder and even published a few of them to jack up the subsequent sales. After the publication of the letters, critical reaction initially swung against Ms. Brawne, as some reviewers charged her with distracting Keats from his poetry, but in recent years it has swung back in her favor, seeing her as more of an inspiration to Keats than a detriment. He requested her letters to him be burned after his death.
Campion’s film stays as close to the facts as they can be determined today, but, that issue aside, Bright Star is a beautifully filmed story about tragic young love; that it is also about one of the greatest poets in the English language simply increases its charm. Top
Where the Wild Things Are
Spike Jonze, best known for music videos and two feature films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, has created a film generally true to Maurice Sendak’s childhood classic. Expanding Sendak’s nine or ten sentences to more than 100 minutes of movie time requires some additions, both in the framing story and in the scenes in the fantasy portion.
Max (Max Records) gets an older sister Claire (Pepita Emmerichs), and his mother (Catherine Keener) apparently has a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), but none of these changes clash with the original story. Similarly, on the fantasy island, the same creatures appear but now they have names and their personalities are expanded through dialogue and action. The additions—owls, a dog on a sand dune, building a fort, sleeping in a pile, squabbles among the creatures—slide smoothly into the overall design. While viewers may argue about the appropriateness of these changes (and reviewers did), nothing jars and the final film seems unified and effective.
One of the keys to making this film successful is the character of Max; and, as he is played here by Records, he is a delight—raucous, sweet, wild, smart, innocent, manipulative and, finally, after an extended rumpus, ready to return home for comfort and food from his mother. Although he is a little older than the original Max, he still is capable of childish actions. Equally important are the creatures, and, with the help of Jim Henson’s muppet shop and a little computer tweaking, they are as close to Sendak’s drawings as live-action creatures can be. The voices are supplied by actors such as James Gandolfini (Carol), Forest Whitaker (Ira), and Chris Cooper (Douglas), and they disappear into their roles. The exterior scenes were shot in Australia, and the wide deserts, beaches and tropical forests beautifully flesh out the story’s visuals.
Since virtually all viewers will have read the book, little needs to be said about plot or interpretations of the animals as aspects of Max’s nascent personality. A scene or two may be too strong for very small children—a few bones that look human recall the wild things’ threats to eat Max—but most viewers will enjoy it. This film debuts as an instant classic and is likely to remain one for the foreseeable future. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at www.mmnow.com
[
Home | Home
Cinema | Top ] |
