the Winslow Boy: (1999. dir: David Mamet) This is the least Mametish of any Mamet thing you'll ever see. It's based on the old Terrence Rattigan chestnut, enormously popular on the mid-20th century British stage and now long out of fashion, long on stiff-upper-lip Brit-talk and pretty much devoid of action. It's a courtroom drama that never walks into the courtroom; we hear about the proceedings secondhand. The younger son of an Edwardian family is expelled from a naval academy for allegedly stealing a postal order, and his family puts everything at stake -- wealth, health, reputation, the older sister's engagement -- to clear his name.
The oddness of pairing Mamet with this starchy old chamberpiece works amazingly well, as each entity finds its flaws negated by the virtues of the other. Mamet's usual tiresome quirks, for instance, -- the half-sentences and barked profanities, the masculine insecurities sublimated into cons, heists and powerplays, the cold and twistily-layered thriller plots, -- are none of them applicable here; rather, he submerges himself with an uncharacteristically slow grace into the world of the story, and with grand results. Likewise, intolerant of sop, he ruthlessly wrings every last bit of sentiment from the piece, inspiring wonderfully stripped down performances from his actors in the process. They talk in his favorite clipped, Mamet-speak staccatos, a tactic which works against the mawkish grain of the story to reinvent the piece into something new and strange and wholly sublime.
X-Files, Season Three, Ep.53, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose": (1995. dir: David Nutter) Alright, I don't have an "X" movie, so I'm using my favorite X-Files episode instead. This is the one with Peter Boyle as a life insurance salesman who has the unpleasant ability to see exactly how a person will die. It's got melancholy, it's got funny, it's got poetry and supernatural, it's got the late Peter Boyle in one of his great performances.
The Year of Living Dangerously: (1982. dir: Peter Weir) Gorgeous and phantasmagoric evocation of Sukarno's Jakarta in the early 1960s. To see it in the theatre is like taking a very sensuous drug trip, and even my dingy old pan-and-scan copy works some magic. It's more than that, though, with complex characters (and the setting, too) vividly explored, affording us glimpses of secret depths without presuming to show too much. This was Weir's first step toward Hollywood and a sort of climactic culmination after the building poetry of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Last Wave, and Gallipoli. After this, there would be glimpses of greatness but nothing near as good until 2003's Master and Commander. Linda Hunt won an Oscar for Billy Kwan, the strange, noble and a little bit creepy photographer with pretensions to puppet-mastery over the lives of his friends, and Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson are both at the top of their respective games. The story feels so rich and layered that after I first saw it I sought out the book by Christopher Koch to find out more, and decided that this is one of those rare films that outstrides its source material. Now, reading the rave reviews on Amazon, I wonder if I should have a second look.
Zidane, un Portrait du 21e Siecle: (2006. dir: Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno) A movie like a hallucinogen. On April 23, 2005, Real Madrid plays Villarreal at the Bernabeu, Madrid's home stadium. Instead of watching the match, we watch Zenadine Zidane, the tonsured gallic midfielder, up close and from distance. He is miked and at various times we hear his breathing, or the satisfying thump of his boot when he connects, or crowd sounds, or only the hypnotic overlay of heart-slowing music by Mogwai. A few things come clear about football when you're watching a single player; one is that it is very like war, involving long periods of vigilant inactivity followed hard upon by bursts of sudden violence. Another is the centrality of bodily fluids to the player's experience: spitting and wiping the face clear of sweat and snot take up a crazy amount of time. The mikes in Zidane's boots emphasize his endearing habit of dragging his feet during abeyant moments, and the occasional subtitle sharing quotations from interviews emphasizes his mystical side. And he is mystical, --equal parts mystic and warrior, barbarian and nobleman, I'd say, but maybe I'm prejudiced. He is larger than life, and it is as easy to romanticize as it is to demonize him.
In this match, he has one superb run up the wing and cross in for the equaliser, a fantastic play involving mad footwork through a bramble of defenders. When you are the famous Zidane, every time you gain possession you also get a thundering posse of foes galloping around you, and up close like this it genuinely feels like there's a threat of physical violence in it. Really the point scored is his; someone else did the easy part of heading it in. In the aftermath of the goal his apartness becomes apparent; during the whole of the match he seems only truly to connect with Roberto Carlos, with whom at one point he shares a joke we do not hear, and David Beckham, who seems genuinely fond of him. There is a lovely, soft-spoken moment after an unfair penalty has been given away in which Zidane murmurs to the ref, "You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed," almost avuncularly, without heat or vitriol. The vitriol comes later, in the second half, during which he sees more action than the first, and suddenly, from seemingly nowhere, he is engaged in a fierce physical altercation with an opponent for which they are both red-carded from the pitch. It seems a fitting end for a film which will no doubt survive as the most enduring record of his legacy, since we all know him not just as a great player but also as The Fellow Who Headbutted That Annoying Italian Man During The World Cup. I'm sorry. Are my prejudices showing again?
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