An Education: (2009. dir: Lone Scherfig) As per the hype, Carey Mulligan is indeed both skilled and adorable. The cast at large is highly satisfying. The appeal is not so much in the story, which is an old and simple one (young girl nearly throws away her future when swept away by an affable roue), but in the easy, charming way it's put together. Scherfig and his team manage to avoid those sucking fens of sentiment and cliche, realizing a place and time (suburban London in the early '60s) truly and without ostentation.
I was going to say that how you react to this movie depends on how you feel about Peter Sarsgaard, the rotter in question, and to a large extent I stick to that. If you don't like him, you won't like the movie. He's got the most difficult role because we never really get inside his head; we see him from the outside, through the eyes of others. On the other hand, I've always liked Sarsgaard; I'll go out of my way to see a movie if he's in it; and I think he's missed something crucial in this role. Having said that triggers a flag in my head and I go back to the last time I mentioned him in a post (reviewing In the Electric Mist) and by gum if I didn't say pretty close to the same thing about his performance in that. My reluctant conclusion is that he's one of those lazy actors who ignores the problem aspects of a character, glosses past them trusting charm and enigmatic smiles to carry him through instead of tackling and solving them, as, say, Glenda Jackson or Daniel Day-Lewis might do. It's not the worst thing that can be said about an actor. He's in good company. Henry Fonda comes to mind in that respect. More than once I've seen Fonda go kind of blank and stoical when a sticky corner of a character or a problem line presents itself (see, for instance, There Was a Crooked Man). And who doesn't still love Fonda? In any case, charming as he is, Sarsgaard is the potentially weak link in the cast. And, by God, I still like him.
Alfred Molina gets much of the buzz for his turn as The Father, and he is, as always, very good, but it's Rosamund Pike who turned my head as the decidedly unclever beauty dating the cad's business partner and best friend. Most actresses would play her lines for the laughs for which I think they were written, but she avoids that easy way. Every thick thing she says is completely frank, often tinged with that panic experienced by those who are highly intuitive about people but completely without intellectual prowess and who discomfitingly find themselves surrounded by clever people.
the China Syndrome: (1979. dir: James Bridges) Nuclear power scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Driving past Hanford on the way home from Seattle used to give me a badassed case of the creeps. This is the place where the plutonium was manufactured for the bomb we threw at Nagasaki. The tower is fat and squat and has an evil dome like something Saruman would have built.
I remember seeing this movie at the drive-in. It's got an anti-nuclear message and Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and it might have been self-righteous and awful except that it was made right at that cusp, just before the hideousness of the eighties was brought to bear on filmmaking, while there was still a use of quiet and verisimilitude. The instigating scene, in which there is a panic at the nuclear plant caused by a faulty gauge and secretly filmed by a team of news reporters there to do a fluff piece, is a wonderful thing. The combination of Jack Lemmon and Wilfrid Brimley is lovely. The suspense is allowed to build unforced by music or fancy camera nonsense, just through a decent script and some damn fine acting. There is some oversimplification, I assume for the sake of the drama, in which the nuclear muckymucks wear blacker than is perhaps believable hats, killing without conscience; or maybe I'm a little Pollyanna, I don't know. Anyway, good vs evil are suspiciously pat here, which brings us back to the first law of learning your history from Hollywood, which is: don't do it.
The best part is the directing: simple, straightforward, the telling of a story. I miss the seventies. I miss silence over rolling credits. I miss little things like Jane Fonda carrying a tortoise inside when she walks into her house, a tortoise that she never talks to or about, that never gets explained or addressed; you just know it's part of her life and that suggests that there are many parts of her life you know nothing about which suggests that her life stretches beyond the boundaries of the screen in all directions, which is never a bad thing in filmmaking, and doesn't happen enough anymore in these literal times.
Junior Bonner: (1972. dir: Sam Peckinpah) A peculiarly sweet and endearing ode to rodeo -- peculiarly sweet for Peckinpah, especially. Steve McQueen and Robert Preston make an easy and likable father-son team. I've never been a Preston fan -- he's a little too musical-theatre for me,-- but in this role as a hard-drinking, hard-riding, jovial storyteller of a man who always pleases his audience, it works. The really extraordinary part comes from Ida Lupino, though. Never in all my years have I seen a female character in any Peckinpah film given the opportunity for depth and sympathy that Lupino's is here, and she doesn't waste it. Plus (bonus!) there's Ben Johnson, always a good thing.
The Sun Also Rises: (1957. dir: Henry King) Picaresque Lost Generation ramble from bar to bar, drink to drink, diversion to diversion. No one ever writes or works at all, except bartenders and bullfighters. It reads better than it plays because the writer had a certain talent. Twenty years later or made in Europe, it'd've been edited more dynamically; as it stands, there's a dull, repeating sequence in which they walk into a bar, remove their wraps, order their drinks, over and over. Instead of pulling in and making it personal, the filmmakers pulled out and made it epic, which is sometimes pretty but mostly a bore. Tyrone Power is alright and Ava Gardner is gorgeous. The bullfighter is played by the very young Robert Evans, which is kind of a kick, but the only real attraction is Errol Flynn as an aging, drunken roue watching himself fade into impotency and unimportance but still able to laugh at himself. It's fascinating and true and unutterably sad, and I'd have given him an Oscar for it.
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