Humanizing The Vacuum

Watching Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam Twenty, I couldn’t escape the conclusion, based on Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, and Stone Gossard’s remarks, that the band thinks, “So, like, one of our best friends OD’d, we sent a tape to a surfer dude with a great voice, we jammed, and suddenly topless chicks at Lollapalooza were screaming ‘TEMPLE OF THE DOG!’ at us. Then things got complicated.”

Another example of his fascination with the privileged, artist-approved moment, Crowe’s discursive documentary eschews narrative — it avoids even a point of view. I don’t know what Pearl Jam “means” other than that they became reluctant avatars of grunge, reacted in part to the publicity by fighting a moneyed leviathan like Ticketmaster, then — well, I’m not sure; among its other problems is no conclusion. Like Scorsese’s George Harrison, which elided the singer-guitarist’s most compelling paradoxes, Pearl Jam Twenty doesn’t even bother to follow the most conventional if reductive of narrative tricks: using biography to illuminate artistic creation. Why did Pearl Jam include an accordion-anchored dada exercise called “Bugs” on 1994′s Vitalogy? How did the band reconcile its punk and post-punk covers (Talking Heads! Dead Boys! Split Enz!) and producers (Mitchell Froom engineer Tchad Blake) and the studiousness with which it massaged classic rock tropes? The answer to a sympathetic non-fan like me is obvious: Pearl Jam took Neil Young’s ethos seriously. Despite five minutes of air time to the Mirrorball collaboration and an estimable if unsupported preface explaining how Seattle’s weather forced music devotees into loving classic rock, disco, New Wave, and pop with equal fervor, Crowe doesn’t even get Vedder or Gossard to admit that, if you’re a band whose collective record collection is so rich, then, to quote Young, it’s all one song. He will not allow for the possibility that in the last five years Pearl Jam has recorded its most lasting work; 2006′s eponymous album and 2009′s Backspacer are the sounds of fortysomething men with the confidence to winnow their influences into a recognizable, quietly weird stamp. Pearl Jam Twenty doesn’t document: it’s inept hagiography.

I thought the failure of Solaris (2002) had taught George Clooney the peril of choosing roles in which he’s asked to impose his unimpressive physicality over his talent for glib chatter. The American, Anton Corbijn’s attempt to turn Clooney into Alain Delon, is attenuated and vacant; it nods towards the “leisurely” thrillers of the seventies without justifying the homage. Why do we need patient takes of Clooney assembling assault rifles in the twenty-first century? To remind us that men wrote and directed this film, The Love Interest, played in a distracted manner by Violante Placido, is also a prostitute whose relationship with the Cloonster “redeems” her. Said redemption is complete after she enjoys some awesome cunnilingus and orders a complex meal (and wine) in Italian, eliciting an exasperated eyeroll from the waiter. Sydney Pollack died before Corbijn could cast him as the crusty but benign handler.

Friends swear by Step Brothers, the 2008 comedy starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as two grown child-men forced together by marriage (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins play their parents). One went so far as to say it was the best comedy of the decade.

This was okay! Talladega Nights boasted much better one-liners despite being 657 minutes long. Most of the cracks here were a beat away from being funny (the dick eating in international waters needed one more take); the rhythms were slack. So I settled for eye candy: Will Ferrell in a worn Pablo Cruise T-shirt, Steenburgen’s perfectly timed moues of exasperation (whatever happened to her anyway?). Good bits: “It’s like masturbating in a time machine”; I laughed at the second nutsack-on-the-drums sequence (“Motherfucker!”), not the first; every one of Adam Scott’s scenes. My favorite performer was actually Richard Jenkins, doing maybe his best work ever (“FAILLLLUUURREEES!).

Were it not for a sickly ending involving a pigeon trapped in the Museum of Natural History and a bogus moment in which The Great Stentorian Ham (Christian McKay) confesses to Richard (Zac Efron) that actors perform because Deep Down they’re scared of Being Themselves, Me & Orson Welles would be a minor triumph — as diverting as Bullets Over Broadway if not quite at Topsy-Turvy‘s level. Richard Linklater is so good at directing performers that I suppose he can’t bother to throw away wet scenes; he thinks he can redeem them with the players’ gusto.

So much has been written about McKay’s impersonation that I have nothing to add except that Welles loses not a shred of vileness by being filtered through Efron’s avid recollections. Efron is the real surprise. This sounds silly, but Efron’s polyurethane cuteness — generating the erotic heat of a supermarket candle — reminded me of Alain Delon, who was no great actor but convinced a lot of us that feline languor can seem dangerous. He was a fascinating camera subject. Efron has, to be very, very kind, a long way to go, but he’s a sensuous object here. More importantly, he can think in character — a feat that has escaped Brad Pitt.

Black and white photography as rich as Christian Berger’s in The White Ribbon is as much a triumph of legerdemain as it is of lighting; the imprimatur of black and white in a post-Ted Turner world signals seriousness of intent. Very serious. Michael Haneke is no Judd Apatow. He’s a proselytizer, a thesis writer, a scold. But he’s got good editing reflexes; if he were ponderous the experience would be a mortifyingly slow death. It’s unclear what exactly Haneke wishes to articulate here. Random outbreaks of violence in a German town just before the pistol shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria – well, what else? If Caché, The Piano Teacher, and his two versions of Funny Games proved anything, it’s Haneke’s penchant for collective guilt. The subtleties of pathology interest him less than blaming the forces that shaped it. He’s smart enough not to give it a face or name; he won’t even limn it, which adds to the undercurrent of menace with which his films are imbued – and which has certainly helped their box office. Caché fans gave him a pass because the requirements of his choice of genre (mystery) helped him keep hidden what Henry James would call the figure in the carpet. Audiences can respond to the vague dread and take pride in not knowing what the film was “about.”

The sharp, almost woodcut images in The White Ribbon force Hanenke into more direct expression. His self-control is so powerful that the movie avoids the explicitness I expected from the movie’s fable-like contours; it’s as amorphously hortatory as the rest. Watching Samuel Fuller’s White Dog for the first time a few days ago, I was struck by its resemblances to one of Buñuel Mexican movies: its tone-deaf, emphatic, expository dialogue with acting to match (a simmering Paul Winfield excepted), Manichean ethics, and determination to prove a thesis. It did – scarily. I don’t wish The White Ribbon had been a pulp thriller, but, boy, two and a half hours of scowls and accusations demands too much of Haneke, not to mention the audience. He hasn’t written enough of a movie to sustain the portents of doom. Even Carl Dreyer and Bergman – to whom Haneke’s compositions and conceptions owe a considerable aesthetic debt – brought most of their movies in a reasonable hour and forty. The cast is strong, particularly Leonie Benesch as the nanny. Haneke has assembled quite a menagerie: so many wan, grim Lutheran zombies.

In yet another example of a film “about” a novelist made by people who’ve never read a novel, The Last Station exists as a vehicle to get costume designers, Helen Mirren, and Christopher Plummer a bunch of Oscar nods. Less risible a notion, however, than accepting the shouted drivel about “freedom” versus “love.” I can’t think of a single grace note: not Mirren’s embarrassing performance (all this blather about what a cougar she is, yet a role like this is supposed to burnish this rep?), not Plummer, not the execrable score, not James McAvoy (playing one more in his long line of anomic ingenues in period drag), not Paul Giamatti reprising his breathy, bearded John Adams*. For writer-director Michael Hoffman, “Tolstoy” is a signifier of depth and sincerity, especially when his novelist most resembles the guru of a Los Angeles New Age consortium whose selfishness is supposed to be cute because, after eighty-five minutes of grotesque insensitivity, he expires histrionically before making it clear to the audience that he really did love Mirren after all. And we all need love.

* One half of a grace note: Giamatti is a dead ringer for the middle period Henry James.

“Exotic” and “colorful” are the most baneful adjectives used to describe Pedro Almodovar’s work (“stylish” is a close third), and in recent years their synonyms transform into a kind of shorthand by which an entire ethos is evoked without analysis. On the evidence of Broken Embraces, I’d use “saccharine,” “otiose,” and “rote.” If Almodovar had cast Ashley Judd instead of the admittedly ravishing Penelope Cruz, American critics would pat him on the head for writing and directing an occasionally diverting variation on a Lifetime movie garnished with signifiers from Ross Hunter sudsters: inversions on the theme of blindness, illegitimate sons, father “issues,” the tension between “reality” and “fiction,” and so on. But, to quote Bob Dylan, nothing is delivered. The signifiers signify nothing except as devices with which Almodovar attenuates a malnourished story.

As accessible and welcome a camera presence as Cruz has become, she can’t do anything with a role that less gifted actresses like Jane Wyman and Lana Turner would have played with more zip. It’s to her credit and Almodovar’s that she’s restless enough to test our responses to her screen self, but this kind of languid Woman of Mystery is the kind of banality we no longer need to see onscreen in the twenty-first century (it was dull even when Marlene Dietrich mocked and sulked through them in her Von Sternberg films). She’s miscast; every inch of her fights with the role’s constraints. She’s too extroverted an actress to play a character whose motives are supposed to remain open to conjecture, which I admit is a shrewd way of arguing that Almodovar himself let “ambiguity” substitute for bad ideas. She gets no help either — Broken Embraces is the first Almodovar film in which the supporting cast barely rises to the occasion. Only Bianca Portillo, so excellent as the selfless nurse in Volver, stirs herself, but by the end of the movie the performance turns into a briny slog.

The flowering of Almodovar’s career that took place with 1999′s All About My Mother — the enthusiasm with which audiences and the Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Biases suddenly “got” him — has made the task of assessing his new films more difficult, if only because his movies exude so much sensual pleasure. If his work has deepened in the last ten years, credit his discovery of the loud smacking kiss (recorded as if it was a cannon firing on Waterloo), the feel of silk or polyester around a woman’s hips, and the way in which his admiration of old movie crap reinforces what has been a theme in his work since the 1980′s: the unexpected, perverse, but satisfying bonds we form with other humans. I can’t hate Broken Embraces, as terrible as it is; it’s as vaporous as nineties films like High Heels and Kika, which for a few years scared me into thinking the screwball melodramatist of Law of Desire, Matador, and Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown had succumbed into a fetishist of sartorial and feminine swank (Bad Education also came closest to blah, but Gael Garcia Bernal was more malleable than Cruz). The reviews for this were generally favorable, though, so I’m afraid we have to wait a few years before Almodovar’s Juliet of the Spirits-Satyricon-Roma period gets reassessed.

After a terse, unsentimental first third, The Messenger drifts into the weeds when Ben Foster teases the audience with a will-he-or-won’t-he pass at grieving wife Samantha Morton and comes to a full stop when Woody Harrelson and Foster turn the movie into attenuated psychotherapy. Before that though, first-time director Oren Moverman (he cowrote Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There) shrewdly uses Harrelson’s talent for jus’-folks empathy and Foster’s for bottled fury. As members of the Army’s Casualty Notification unit who have to continually enact the shadowplay that constitutes the rules of engagement for this most grievous of domestic duties, they act as if they’re one visit away from nervous collapse; Harrelson’s insistent chatter about chicks and uneven embrace of teetotalism rubs against Foster for nearly an hour. Moverman’s pedestrian visual sense can’t purge the air of manipulation; we know that sooner or later one of these guys will blow their top like Alec Guinness in The Bridge Over the River Kwai: how devotion to duty erodes one’s humanity, and so on. But like that other good “Iraq movie” The Hurt Locker, maybe it took post-2006 “surge” politics to create a context in which films concentrating on behavior and mannerism suddenly seems the proper way to respond to Iraq (The Messenger and The Hurt Locker’s austerity make Rendition and Stop-Loss look like the Crash of Iraq War films). If Overman and Kathryn Bigelow are liberals, at least their movies have little patience for proselytizing — for now at least. I can imagine Bigelow succumbing to the agitprop temptation (Overman’s talent is more verbal).

The Messenger isn’t as harrowing as The Hurt Locker; I never felt as if anything was at stake. But it’s honest. As a scene with a hammy Steve Buscemi (as a devastated father) proves, Overman gets hokey when forced to film set pieces designed for Academy Award consideration, but he’s terrific at bits of business. The scene I remember most isn’t even a scene; it’s a cutaway to a busy playground that settles into terrified silence as the parents watch Foster and Harrelson grimly walking to the next household to which they must deliver bad news.

Written and acted like a musical without song, Tetro is the work of an old artist recreating the follies, turpitudes, and half-formed fantasies that he would have embalmed and buried in his first film or novel (like Bernardo Bertulucci’s Before The Revolution or star Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66, say). In Coppola’s imagination, men ask to use land lines because they don’t carry cell phones, writers smoke indoors or at sidewalk cafes, and Michael Powell kitsch like Tales of Hoffmann is valued for its color, spectacle, and oversized emotions. On one hand, it’s unbelievable that the seventysomething Coppola, writing his first original script since The Conversation, believes fraternal relations  (Gallo and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich play the brothers) haven’t evolved since the days of Rocco and his Brothers; on the other, foregoing the constraints of realism allows Coppola to populate a fictive Buenos Aires as conceived by the Jean Renoir of The Golden Coach. Coppola spins familiar movie archetypes like expertly constructed tops.  A local theatrical troupe, sufficiently beguiled by the promise of a terrible manuscript of Gallo’s that Ehrenreich has stolen and rewritten, pops in often to offer choral commentary on the action. As Gallo’s common-law wife Maribel Verdu, last seen on these shores as the impossibly vivid seductress from Y tu mama tambien, makes us forget Penelope Cruz ever existed. Carmen Maura, once and future Almodovar muse, plays the ridiculous part of a film critic whose influence scares the bejeezus out of everyone (is this Coppola taking his revenge years later on Pauline Kael?).

Shot mostly in Rumble Fish-esque black and white (to signify seriousness), Tetro has little of that film’s ponderousness. Coppola injected art-school steroids into a teen pulp novel in the 1983 film. Tetro by contrast has the texture of South American magical realism (he alludes to Roberto Bolaño in the DVD commentary) into which Coppola has poured four generations of craft. While it’s obvious Coppola has learned little about life — much less other movies — in the years he spent recouping his fortune  planting vineyards, he’s molded every cinematic memory in his big head into a work whose singularity depends on the collective unconscious of a generation raised on those films. I hate the idea that he’s made a film for film students, though; could it be he hopes the Netflix generation will watch The Red Shoes and Elia Kazan’s America, America and know the work of Visconti?

I mentioned the supporting cast, but the two male leads carry Tetro through its occasional lapses of common sense.  Vincent Gallo’s nasal, harsh voice and insolent manner finally get a proper unveiling; he reduces the floppy-haired post-Brando manner to essentials. With his sensual John Mayer lips and slight tonal resemblance to the gormless Michael Pitt, Ehrenreich projects surprising force despite not having a character to play for most of the movie; he’s the young man of vibrating sensitivity to whom vibrant things happen. The lucky bastard gets a bathtub scene with two lesbians, but to play with the Ehrenreich character’s faint hint of homosexuality is beyond the filmic imaginings of uber-male Coppola.

In the wrong mood, Tetro will annoy; it’s the kind of movie you’ll argue about (and for) passionately. The last fifteen minutes are the kind of nonsense that only a filmmaker of near-genius can conceive. But Coppola earns the right to believe his own hype: it is a return to “personal” roots that the early entries in Coppola’s resume never were, if by “personal” he means filming beautiful actors in exotic locations doing ridiculous things with authentic feeling. It’s also literally worlds away from the recent work of Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas, and let’s not even mention the rest of American film. I hope Coppola returns to the typewriter for his next outing.

If Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law had agreed to star in a Sherlock Holmes movie in which they sat over a fine meal and good wine, debating the subtleties of detective work and numerology as if they were André Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With André, Guy Ritchie would still have mauled it.

It took thirty minutes of watching 35 Shots of Rum to figure out that Lionel (Alex Descas) is Josephine’s (Mati Diop) father, not her lover. In the manner of the Taiwanese cinema with which she shares stylistic affinities, Claire Denis places considerable demands on the audience’s patience. What links her work with recent films by countrymen Oliver Assayas (Summer Hours) and Andre Techine (The Witnesses) is its puzzling over the composition of the family. In an era when immigration from former colonies has changed the molecular structure of nationhood, why define family as a unit that shares blood relations? As quick and fluid as the part of a story that in the memory erases the extraneous, 35 Shots of Rum suffers like most Denis films from a lack of tension; her camera tends to arrive at conflicts already resolved, or before arguments erupt. Movement is her favorite subject. The second most erotic-touching moment between father and daughter occurs when Descas, ravaged by a hangover, allows his daughter to nurse him to health as if he were suffering from a disease. “Erotic” yes, sensual definitely, but not sexual. Diap’s long arms uncovering crock pots and pouring water suggest a woman very far from feeling indentured to her father; she’s accepted that this is the most fulfilling relationship in her life. The biker boy played by Gregoire Colin (playing a variation on his pouty-lipped cad from The Dream Life of Angels) merely satisfies bodily urges. As for the film’s most erotic moment, it takes place after this makeshift family, all of whom live in the same apartment complex, suffer a tire blowout and takes refuge at a cozy dive a few minutes from closing time. They dry off and wait for their food by dancing to the Commodores’ “Nightshift.” The combination of water, the warming effect of one drink, and a spontaneous overflow of emotion lends both the pas de deux between Diap-Descas and the cybersoul elegy to Marvin Gaye a sense of unrealized possibilities; with this song, in this bar, at this moment, these characters can go anywhere, and it frightens them. To follow these people this far you have to trust Denis’ method, and what she does with these actors, who once again show that acting isn’t pretending so much as behaving. The wonder of Denis’ method is to satisfy despite ending the movie exactly where we expected. And yet — why is Descas’ final grin so enigmatic?

I was disappointed that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans wasn’t as lurid and purple as last fall’s reviews suggested. Breakdancing corpses and emotive iguanas aside, the only element that distinguishes this from a two-hour episode of “The Wire” is Nicholas Cage’s Death Star forehead (are those hair implants?). What Cage does onscreen isn’t so much acting as performing. Like Robert Downey, Jr he has an uncanny ability to read the mood of the audience, so that just when we think he’s coasting he gives a throwaway line like, “No, thank you, we’re just gonna stick with our sparkling water” uncharted depths of weirdness.

The other star of Bad Lieutenant is, of course, Werner Herzog, who could probably have played the title character himself if he were as much a household name in Hollywood as he is in the art house circuit. Eschewing the topographical specificity of his documentaries, Herzog shoots New Orleans like it exists only in Cage’s fucked-up head: washed-out yellows, digitized red sheens, the interiors of bars decorated with one foot in the colonial days and the other in a post-Katrina version of ersatz local color. Surprisingly, Herzog stages Cage’s acts of sadism with no fuss. His big freak-out scene, a glimpse of which is in the photo above, is shot with less pep than a pan over a country road, on which we see the mangled body of an alligator a few yards from a totaled car. Characters pop in and disappear at Herzog’s whim (the worst casualty: a mulleted Val Kilmer, ready to out-weird Cage).