Gateway Cinephiles

Publish or Perish

The Ghost Writer
2010 (France / Germany / UK)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: March 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Roman Polanski’s thrillers pulse with their own curious rhythms, conveying a sense that everything—conversations, knowledge, even physical space—is ever so slightly out of sync.  Few directors possess his uncanny facility for pulling together all the elements of cinema, especially the selection of shots and music, to evoke a veiled, relentlessly sinister reality.   Whether he succeeds (Chinatown) or fails (The Ninth Gate), the result is unfailingly sumptuous and moody.  So it is with The Ghost Writer, a potboiler set in the rotten twin worlds of politics and publishing, executed with the auteur’s customary dramatic dexterity and passion for generic trappings.  Polanski makes no effort to conceal his personal fingerprints on the film: its politics are acidly suspicious of American power and yet also vaguely sympathetic to (ahem) public figures hounded by public outrage and the courts.  Yet the film remains relentlessly engaged with the noir-tinged plight of its nameless protagonist (Ewan McGregor), a man who, like Jake Gittes, considers himself a savvy mercenary, and whose pursuit of the truth is rooted not in airy ideals but in his resentment at being played for a fool.

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Innocence and Other Noble Lies

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
2009 (Austria / Germany / France / Italy)
Director: Michael Haneke
Viewed: March 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

There is a mystery at the core of Michael Haneke’s Palm d’Or-clinching new film, The White Ribbon, but it is not a mystery that requires a solution.  Unlike the director’s brilliant splatter of post-modern mindfuckery, Caché, his latest feature does not wander outside the frame in the pursuit of answers.  The culprit who has committed The White Ribbon’s bizarre misdeeds is hiding in plain sight.  Set in the rigidly Protestant German hamlet of Eichwald just before World War I, the film presents the events of a single year, a year in which a series of peculiar and disturbing misfortunes befall the community.  Someone in the village is clearly responsible for these misfortunes, but sorting out whodunit is, at best, tangential to the film’s striking emotional and intellectual vigor.  Maintaining a mannered, somber tone that swathes the viewer in Old Testament dread, Haneke uses his setting and plot as portals through which he accesses a breathtaking array of themes.  Impeccably constructed and exquisitely shot in black-and-white, The White Ribbon will frustrate viewers seeking dramatic jolts.  This film is all trembling and lip-licking, a work brimming with the sour-gut sensation that something is wrong, just out of sight.

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Experimental Treatment

Shutter Island
2010 (USA)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: February 21, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Eternally the Catholic kid from the Garment District, Martin Scorsese has long used his narrative features to explore the relationship between violence and guilt.  Granted, the stultifying, deforming influence of societies on the individual frequently figures prominently into his films, with the societies in question ranging from blinkered, hierarchical subcultures to the vast, alienating melting pot of over-stimulated contemporary America.  Even Scorsese’s most unambitious feature in the past two decades, his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took pains to develop the original film’s anemic foundations into a more substantive commentary on the absurdities of the criminal justice system and the allure of masculine mythology. However, cultural settings only seem to hold the director’s attention inasmuch as they relate to searingly personal concerns; at the center of most Scorsese films is a battered man squeezed between others’ rules and his own sins.  Given these tendencies, I suppose I should have expected that Shutter Island would prove to be something more elaborate and bruised than the “mere” creepshow thriller that is being presented in the film’s promotion.  Not that there’s anything wrong with a creepshow thriller done exceptionally well (q.v., Drag Me to Hell), but Scorsese, despite his profile, isn’t the film-maker that leaps to mind when one hears the phrase “Master of Horror.”  Shutter Island feels for all the world like a florid imitation of a Wes Craven delve, and it’s only in the final twenty minutes that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Scorsese tell, the strand of private Christian torment that stretches all the way back to Mean Streets.

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Hurry Up and Wait

Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.)
2009 (Romania)
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Viewed: February 9, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

Corneliu Porumboiu’s willfully staid and yet wholly absorbing new feature, Police, Adjective, operates on two interlocking planes.  On the one hand, it is a police procedural of the driest sort imaginable, an agonizingly attentive study of how peoples, objects, and information travel through a drug investigation in a small Romanian city.   In this city, the Eastern Bloc bureaucracy (and furniture) is still firmly in place, as are draconian narcotics laws that the rest of the European Union has discarded.  Strictly as a lesson in how dull police work can be, and specifically how dully absurd it can be in a former Communist dictatorship, Police, Adjective is an intriguing work, whose stifling realism serves as a direct refutation to the bombast of the Cop Picture (regardless of nationality).  Porumboiu, however, is far too talented and unruly a director to simply engage in a bit of genre revisionism and call it a day.  Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us.  What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.

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Bad Bad, Not Good Bad

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
2009 (USA)
Director: Werner Herzog
Viewed: February 7, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Full disclosure: I have never seen Abel Ferrara’s pitch-black 1992 character study, Bad Lieutenant.  Neither has German film-maker and madman Werner Herzog.  Unlike me, however, Herzog has directed a film titled The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, so he perhaps needs a better excuse than my all-purpose cover for any patch of cinematic illiteracy, “It’s in my Netflix queue.”  If the reports are to be believed, Herzog does not regard his new feature as a remake, reboot, re-imagining, or anything of the sort.  He claims that he doesn’t even know who Ferrara is, and that the film’s producers dictated its title.  All this makes me much more comfortable approaching tBL:PoC - NO (yeesh, it hurts to type that) as a standalone work, rather than a tribute to or riff on Ferrara’s film.  Unfortunately, even if one regards Herzog’s film as a wholly original work, there’s no way around the fact that it is his sloppiest film in years, especially when compared to his last narrative feature, the lean, propulsive Rescue Dawn.  Did I mention that the corrupt, degenerate, possibly psychotic police lieutenant of the title is played by American actor and madman Nicholas Cage?  Letting Cage run loose in such a role might have been a nutty stroke of genius, but alas, Bad Lieutenant proves to be just another Bad Nick Cage performance, surrounded by a tonal and thematic muddle.

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Play It Loud Enough to Keep the Demons at Bay

Crazy Heart
2009 (USA)
Director: Scott Cooper
Viewed: February 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

When you strip Scott Cooper’s directorial debut, Crazy Heart, down to its skeleton, there’s not much that’s original about it from a story standpoint.  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a broken-down musician must come to terms with his personal demons before he can rise from the ashes and regain some of his former fame and fortune. Alas, Cooper doesn’t bring anything especially cinematic to these deeply rutted roads.  Sure, Crazy Heart was filmed on location in the American Southwest, and that lends it an agreeable sun-beaten texture, but Cooper’s direction is undistinguished.  Based purely on the look of the thing, Crazy Heart could pass for a television movie-of-the-week rather than a limited theatrical release boasting high-profile actors.  Fortunately, those actors are all in fine form, especially Jeff Bridges, who portrays the aforementioned broken-down musician, a grizzled country veteran named Bad Blake.  The glib cynic in me would like to believe that someone observed, “You know, put the Dude from The Big Lebowski in a cowboy hat and he could pass for the lost brother of Kris Kristofferson,” and then—bam!—there’s your movie.  Blessedly, Bridges’ performance amounts to much more than canny casting.  He and Cooper turn a familiar story, executed with rote efficiency, into something haunted and ultimately worth watching.

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Plenty of Memberships, Few Privileges

Up in the Air
2009 (USA)
Director: Jason Reitman
Viewed: January 16, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Back in May 2008, I observed after a second viewing of the backlash-savaged Juno that Jason Reitman’s crisp, understated direction plays a crucial role the film’s success, and that it in fact called to mind the comedic work of Sydney Pollack.  I still stand by that statement, and by the film’s place as one of the most perfectly realized ensemble comedies of the decade, which I will readily defend with knife clutched firmly in teeth.  However, Reitman’s latest film, Up in the Air, serves primarily to highlight the bottled lightning quality of Juno, solidifying its status as a fortuitous confluence of direction, writing, and performance that may never again be approached by the parties involved.  Up in the Air boasts none of the focused, superbly paced comedic storytelling that characterized Reitman’s previous effort.  In fact, the characteristics that most define his direction here are a distressing lack of understanding regarding his audience’s sympathies, and a clumsy attempt to fuse two or three stories that do not function together as well as he imagines.  To be sure, George Clooney’s unfailingly magnetic presence renders the proceedings more tolerable than they would otherwise be, and the central romantic drama of the film is compelling stuff.  Yet these caveats only highlight the ill-advised and even insulting aspects of Up in the Air.

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Late to the Game: Funny People

2009 (USA)
Director: Judd Apatow
Viewed: January 7, 2009
Format: DVD – Universal (2009)

Funny People represents a distillation of the best qualities from Judd Apatow’s previous film, Knocked Up.  In this dark, meandering tale of second chances and human fallibility, the director employs both his ruthless pursuit of affecting emotional detail and the self-effacing vibe of star Seth Rogan (in his plush animal mode).  Meanwhile, the film jettisons the last Apatow outing’s retrograde sexual politics and ridiculously pat conclusion, resulting in a melancholy film that reveals the director not as an intrinsically comedic film-maker, but as someone interested in the absurdity of psychological landscapes.  Thus, Funny People, while hardly a barrel of laughs, is nonetheless perceptive, audacious, and weirdly charming.  Adam Sandler indicts his own career via a thinly-veiled alter ego character, and Leslie Mann’s performance devastatingly demonstrates how bright, bighearted people can make unbelievably stupid decisions.  Apatow’s focus on his characters’ feelings rather than the narrative is both a strength and a weakness.  Absent a conventional structure or a clear antagonist, Funny People spins off the rails a bit in the final half-hour, as the director searches for a way to conclude a story that has no end.  Still, the film proves to be an invigorating slap to viewers expecting yet another storybook conclusion.

Late to the Game: The Limits of Control

2009 (USA)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Viewed: December 26, 2009
Format: DVD - Universal (2009)

Whether a given viewer will find Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control to be a gorgeous slice of generic deconstruction and existential provocation, or just a frustrating string of opaque, inert set pieces will be a matter of taste.  Count me among those who, while conscious of the film’s pretensions, found Jarmusch’s latest work invigorating.  The film follows a sleepless Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé, resplendent in sharkskin suits) as he travels across Spain on a sinister errand, meeting a progression of oddballs with whom he exchanges matchboxes and cryptic messages.  Backstory and motives are never elaborated upon, because of course the film’s thriller elements aren’t the point. (To wit, Jarmusch stages a James Bond infiltration sequence entirely off-screen.)  The director is working in Lynch-country here, sans that director’s smudging of dream and reality.  The Limits of Control is foremost about the evocation of mood: through conversations laden with significance; repeated dialog, objects, and motifs; Christopher Doyle’s sun-kissed cinematography; and the soundtrack by experimental metal group Boris.  While the absence of emotional footholds necessarily limits the film’s potency, Jarmusch nonetheless delivers a daring and inexplicably compelling work about, well, control, and its increasingly illusory nature in the modern world.

Late to the Game: Five Minutes of Heaven

2009 (UK)
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Viewed: December 24, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2009)

Just as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s uncommonly penetrating Nazi epic Downfall pivoted on Bruno Ganz’ portrayal of Adolf Hitler, so too does his tale of the Irish Troubles’ aftermath rests on the shoulders of an actor.  However, Five Minutes of Heaven’s most riveting performance isn’t delivered by its most familiar face, Liam Neeson, whose repentant Loyalist now works in conflict resolution.  Leonine and haunted, Neeson suits the material well, but the film’s locus is unequivocally James Nesbitt, as the brother of a Catholic man a seventeen-year-old Neeson gunned down.  Goaded into confronting his brother’s murderer by a company that engineers reconciliations for television, Nesbitt is wholly mesmerizing as a frayed man who is utterly unapologetic about his hatred and his lust for revenge.  Hirschbiegel and writer Guy Hibbert never lose sight of the story’s essential theme of the futility of blood-for-blood, but they are unafraid of exploring other avenues, such as the insidious nature of indoctrination, the toxic effects of grief on families, and, most damningly, the manner in which the media exploits human tragedy and treats peacemaking as just another bit of niche programming.  It’s primarily some third act wheel-spinning and narrative goofiness that prevents the film from feeling like an unqualified success.