Movies: November 2006 Archives

The Fountain seems like a damned curious piece of work until you realize the likely circumstances of its creation. Unable to shake the germ of a great idea having to do with a fallen Spanish conquistador, the Mayan Tree of Life, and an astral journey toward a distant nebula that may be the entrance to the underworld, writer/director Darren Aronofsky forced a narrative opportunity, and then pursued that dream even as it seemed to be collapsing under its own weight. He’s made a film that's unlike anything else you'll see this year — clearly influenced by Kubrick, and perhaps by Tarkovsky and Bergman, it ruminates on the inevitability of death, spins mythology into some kind of psychological resonance, and doubles as a love letter to his life partner and mother of his child, Rachel Weisz. It's messy. It's also, to my eyes, more than a little silly. It's a work of huge ambition that has the air of grand folly.

There's something playful, or willfully perverse, about casting one of the world's most spectacularly photogenic actresses in the role of a photographer -- essentially recasting the object as subject even as the movie camera lingers on her good looks. Here's FUR: an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus, as much a spiritual sequel to Secretary as an Alice in Wonderland twist on Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Here's a dodgy biopic from filmmakers who worked up the gumption to take on the Diane Arbus story in order to explore a peculiar fascination with all the things that are suggested by the Arbus biography: a fascination with outsiders; a seething, well-hidden dissatisfaction with the role of a housewife in 1950s New York; and an indulgent, searching sensuality hidden just below those primly belted housewife dresses.

I couldn't watch Saw III, and its depiction of an extended, sadistic game that psycho killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) plays with his victims, without thinking of reality TV shows like Fear Factor. Can it be a deliberate parody?

"Do you believe in God?" Elvis (Gael García Bernal) asks 16-year-old Malerie (Pell James), after she says his cursing bothers her. "Yes I do," comes her certain answer. It’s that certainty that director James Marsh seems interested in challenging in The King, an accomplished but upsetting look at a demon visiting a family of true believers in Corpus Christi. Elvis is the son of a prostitute, a discharged sailor come to Texas in search of the father he never knew — David Sandow (William Hurt), a reformed philanderer who runs a cavernous church called Sanctuary. Marsh’s decision to portray Sandow as a doctrinarian who belittles his teenaged children and denies his own checkered past makes the events that transpire — as Elvis insinuates himself into the unsuspecting family in unsavory and ultimately devastating ways — feel punitive and mean-spirited. And yet there’s something fascinating in Bernal’s portrayal of a gentle monster who seems truly not to see his own evil, and in James’s depiction of the girl who submits easily to his ravishing, which is a kind of liberation. In context, the film-ending declaration "I need to get right with God" feels like the punchline to a very sick joke.

Originally published in the White Plains Times, October 20, 2006

In his 70s, Clint Eastwood has found a vigorous second wind as a much-respected director of serious, popular fare. He may have hit a wall with Flags of Our Fathers, a sensitive, clear-headed but bloated and slightly preachy World War II picture aimed at an audience that probably feels Saving Private Ryan is the last word on the spectacular horrors of a necessary war. The elaborate battle sequences that depict the bloody U.S. siege on Iwo Jima are notable for their unaffected look at the young soldiers involved. (They feel more personal than similar scenes in the more expertly tooled Ryan.) But the real subject is propaganda, which the film explores by following three of the soldiers who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi — in one of the most famous of all wartime photographs — after they return home. The screenplay (co-written by Paul Haggis, who wrote and directed the Best Picture-winning Crash) zigzags forward and backward in time and imposes an old-folks-reminiscing framework that the story neither demands nor benefits from. Eastwood’s follow-up, scheduled for early 2007, is Letters From Iwo Jima, meant to tell the story from the Japanese point of view. That could be something to see.

Originally published in the White Plains Times, November 3, 2006