things i've been watching: august 2009

In the Loop: (2009. dir: Armando Iannucci) Seldom does one really laugh all the way through a comedy. With luck one gets two belly-laughs and a fistful of chuckles. Maybe people just aren't as funny as we used to be. Maybe we're just too bitter. Here's one for you: In the Loop, a -- not just scathingly. What's the word I want? -- a skin-flayingly funny, dark, endlessly smart, and completely depressing British comedy playing now at your local cinema. It has the opposite of the Obama Effect. If you are one of the millions who felt inspired to political involvement during his campaign, this film is the antidote. By the time you hit sunlight, you'll not only never want to have anything to do with politics, you'll never want to read a newspaper, vote in an election, or live in a country with any sort of government, or, indeed, other humans in it.

Peter Capaldi has a big honkin' hootenanny with his once-in-a-lifetime role as a foul-mouthed Scots bulldog of a Minister whose thankless task it is to see that Great Britain comes in line with the PM's decision to follow America into a bogus war in the Middle East. You start out laughing, and there are jokes hidden under jokes, with the improvised feel of a great ensemble cast. It's filmed handheld under true light; it looks and feels a lot like the original the Office. It's not that it ever gets unfunny, just its meanness thickens your blood until you at last resemble Bernard Hill in his first appearance as Theoden King in the Two Towers by the time you try to leave your seat. When the credits roll down, literally every character has either sold his soul, been morally degraded, humiliated, or resigned. Most don't get to choose from the list, but get two or three, even all four. My favorite of the many shining performances is from Zach Woods as Chad, a pathetic but wonderfully funny power-worshipping aide who switches his lovestruck allegiance from one power-player to another as they fall and rise, and never manages to catch anyone's attention, really.

See this movie, by all means, and then go out and get weasel-faced drunk and pray to all your various gods for Obama and the fate of this country.


the Fall: (2006. dir: Tarsem Singh) >SPOILER ALERT< Gorgeous and phantasmagoric period-piece set in the early days of Hollywood. A crippled and suicidal stuntman lies helpless in hospital and tells an epic tale to a little girl with a broken arm to try and coax her into stealing morphine for him. Most of the film is the story as we see it played out in her head and hear it narrated by him. When he speaks of an Indian, we know he means a Native American because he talks of wigwams, but she sees an eastern Indian whose wigwam looks like a Taj Mahal. The disjointedness is dreamlike and enchanting. Lee Pace as the stuntman is wonderfully, opiately sensuous in his hospital bed, and although it has a happy ending, there is a climactic scene that is so heartrending I felt my sorrow aching in the palms of my hands as I wept.




Duel in the Sun: (1946. dir: King Vidor) >SPOILER ALERT< I never much liked Jennifer Jones when I was a kid, but then I saw her in things like the Song of Bernadette and Portrait of Jennie. Had I seen her in this, I think she'd have been my hero. My mom remembers her aunt taking her to see this when it came out and it was so sexy and passionate it left an indelible mark on her. And it still is: one of those movies that pulled no punches, left no holds barred. It's filmed in deep, passionate colors all the way through, deep reds and striking greens and yellows. Jones plays Pearl Chavez, an embodiment of sensuality, destined to inspire the animal in those around her, a girl whose rational capacities have been so utterly neglected that she is led through life by emotion and her netherparts. She is sent to live with rich strangers, and among them, two opposite brothers: Joseph Cotten as the left-brain, moral voice, and Gregory Peck as the dark embodiment of animal passion, Pearl's great love and nemesis.

In these days of quirky underplaying, Jones' performance looks like a typhoon. With utter shamelessness she throws herself headlong into each emotion, pausing only long enough to fully embody each as it passes. Her face expresses lust and hatred with hypnotic totality, and I could listen all day to that voice, sultry to the point of indecency. When Joseph Cotten reaches out to offer her a good-girl future living with his nice wife and him, away from her bad-girl present with Gregory Peck, it sounds stultifyingly awful, and although Pearl wants to be a good girl, we know she never can tamp herself down to that drab level, and she responds to him with, "I wish I could die for you," because she can only live passionately or die, there is no third choice.

In addition to that last, magnificent scene in which the hater/lovers kill one another while simultaneously crawling desperately across the desert for one last kiss, other reasons to see it include a powerhouse turn by Walter Huston as the self-styled Sin-Killer, a Texas preacher who puts in a word with Pearl towards salvation but admits it's a long-shot, and Lillian Gish as the matriarch of the house. Now THERE'S a woman who knows how to play a death-scene.

the time traveler's wife and (500) days of summer: it's about love, baby

This is HG Wells on love: "I think that in every human mind, possibly from an extremely early age, there exists a continually growing and continually more subtle complex of expectation and hope; an aggregation of lovely and exciting thoughts; conceptions of encounter and reaction picked up from observation, descriptions, drama; reveries of sensuous delights and ecstasies; reveries of understanding and reciprocity; which I will call the Lover-Shadow... I think it is almost as essential in our lives as our self consciousness.
...When we make love, we are trying to make another human being concentrate for us as an impersonation or at least a symbol of the Lover-Shadow in our minds; and when we are in love it means that we have found in someone the presentation of the promise of some, at least, of the main qualities of our Lover-Shadow. The beloved person is for a time identified with the dream -- attains a vividness that captures the role, and seems to leave anything outside it unilluminated."

How you react to that passage will perhaps say something about your age, your gender, your self-image; most pertinently, it'll reveal where you land on the scale of Pragmatist to Romantic, and how you feel about your rating. Some folks are proud romantics, more are slightly sheepish and coy about it, and in most mixed-gender crowds it's hipper to scoff (at all things, but especially at love). That is not to say I think the romantics are right or the pragmatists are mere killjoys. (Any true romantic will tell you there's more anguish in it than joy. They will also tell you there's a razor-thin line between pleasure and pain, and that they've spent at least one summer listening to nothing but Joy Divison. Aptly enough, Joy Division is a theme shared by these two films: spot the references!) I do think that our modern-day notions of romance are forced, untrue, even cruel, and this is a perfect double-feature to use in the examination of the issue.

To begin with, the Time Traveler's Wife. It's got a splendid cast and a big-money look, and what better new slant to lay over the top of the old boy-meets-girl chestnut than a fellow who's shaken loose in time, who might turn up grey-haired for your wedding or post-pubescent when you're forty? There may be a metaphor in it for those damaged but well-meaning lovers among us who show up when they can but often forget to bring their inner selves with them. If so, that's more interesting than what most viewers will bring away, which is a fairly straightforward primer for the female of the species on everything we're supposed to obsess over from the youngest age to the oldest: romantic love and its relationship with destiny (because without destiny at its foundation, romantic love stands on very shaky little colt-hooves indeed), the Very Expensive Wedding and the conventional and mutually-fixated marriage lived in the always immaculate home and accompanied by the traditional, compulsive emotionality over breeding and child-rearing. The Wife works as some unspecified sort of artist, but that doesn't have much to do with her Life (that is to say, with The Husband); it's merely what she does. She keeps no servants, but somehow the house is always dauntingly immaculate, interestingly so, like those ideal living rooms you see in the most expensive but ecologically-correct catalogues for those rich people who were raised by hippies and don't want their houses to look like rich people's houses. How does she do it? or does he? We never see anyone wasting time cleaning, although a main bonding experience seems to be the mutual preparation of food in their very immaculate and interesting-looking kitchen. It's all shorthand, I expect, for Traditional Family Values and subliminal advertising for those expensive catalogues. Otherwise we'd see someone doing the occasional dish or getting annoyed that the garbage hadn't made it to the curb on time.

On the one hand, I dare you to look me in the eyes and say you do not love Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in this movie, do not look forward with curiosity roused to the next leap in time (where will he find clothes? who will be waiting for him after his leap? and how does death, as it must, fit in?). On the other hand, the movie feels dangerous in the way that Sleepless in Seattle did all those years ago: impressionable girls are going to come away with a handful of irresistibly attractive notions that are not Romantic in the most soulful sense, but "romantic" in a cynical, wedding-industry way. And although its story is unequivocally engaging, its script is an obstacle on the road to any quality the film achieves: in its best moments it is pedestrian and obvious, buoyed up only by the talents involved and the strangeness built into the story itself. (My favorite moment is after Claire and Henry have had a life-changing fight. She gets a secret call in the night and sneaks out to pick up a younger version of Henry who has just time-traveled into the moment. He asks where his older self is, she tells him, "I wanted a little time away from him," and he says, "How's that working out for you?" in that low-key, Eric Bana way.) At the lowest point in their marriage, Claire rails that because she met him when she was eight and they had already been married several years from his perspective, she'd never been given a real choice, a fighting chance.

(500) Days has its focus pulled in on the destiny question as well but the debate is laid straight out on the table: Summer (Zooey Deschanel) doesn't believe in love, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a big old gooey and glum romantic who thinks he's found his soulmate. If Time Traveler dipped a little too liberally into that old paintpot marked "SENTIMENT. WARNING: TOXIC IF OVERUSED" and felt its wings dragged down near-fatally into muck, (500) Days flirts, but ultimately non-fatally, with over-cleverness. Part of what saves it is the quality of its pop culture satire, like the soda-pop-advertisement-ish music video that is our young hero's morning walk to work after his first night spent in Summer's arms, or the Bergman film he gets caught in once the relationship goes south. Again the cast is near-perfect and Levitt's charms and sex appeal win us over in a character that might have seemed irredeemable.

Those cynics among you who are NOT secret romantics will be annoyed to learn that the True Love vs Sheer Fantasy debate tips ultimately into the corner of the romantics, but only after a rather good and very funny examination of both sides. Tom works as a writer of greeting cards and ultimately recognizes that the business he is in is part of the problem, along with pop music and Hollywood (we are told early on that his ideas about love were gleaned from repeated early viewings of the Graduate on television. When he takes Summer to see it she leaves the cinema weeping uncontrollably). There's more than a little Annie Hall here, with its meta-fictional tactics, its quirky-girl heroine (poor Zooey. She didn't ask to be the archetype of eccentric muse girl, did she?), its fast-and-loose playing with time. On first viewing, it bears up surprisingly well beneath that weighty mantle.

Here's the final tally: all told, I cried only once, and then only a few tears (four or five, tops) during the Time Traveler's Wife despite repeated coaxings for a more prodigious outflow, and I frown upon its lack of introspection, but I laughed many times, sometimes loudly and long, during (500) Days, and I like its negative capability: it knows destiny isn't true, but it believes in it anyway. So that one wins.