GONE GIRL (2014)
Director David Fincher’s latest attempt to
decipher the evolving state of human relations is not a pleasant experience. If
you go to the movies to be entertained rather than contemplate social
criticism, then I would definitely skip this one.
From
the nauseating sweet dialogue between husband Nick (Ben Affleck) and wife Amy
(Rosamund Pike) to the easily misled police investigation and the irresponsible
TV media, the narrative of “Gone Girl” illuminates an artificiality that
pervades American society; everyone has a role they feel obligated to play as
if we are all starring in one long,
commercial-free reality show.
From “Fight
Club” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to “Zodiac” and “The Social
Network,” Fincher has been exploring the difficulties of finding one’s place in
the world and the extent to which some individuals go to fit in. At times, the new
film seems as contrived as its characters, but, of course, that’s Fincher’s way
of hammering home his points.
The plot,
from Gillian Flynn’s best-selling novel (she also wrote the script), provides
the director with all the raw material to dig below the veneer of life as it
follows the investigation and reactions, public and private, when Amy goes
missing. The script captures all the contemporary trappings of a high-profile
missing person: the teary news conferences with family; the rallying support
from the community; the rumor mill of cable news shows; and, finally, the
invasion of any sense of privacy the family once had.
In this
case Nick seems too cool, too level-headed for both the police and tabloid TV,
especially once his version of his marriage begins to unravel. Again, image is
everything, so to save himself he hires razzle-dazzle attorney Tanner Bolt
(actor-filmmaker Tyler Perry, giving the film’s most entertaining performance)
and starts using the media to put his own spin on the story.
I am purposely being vague about the plot,
because each of the twists, which start coming at you early and never let up,
should be experienced without preparation. This is a violent, heartless and
pretty frightening morality tale that will leave you wanting to take a very
cold shower; its linage can be traced to David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and Brian
De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill,” in which murder, sex and identity are all rolled
into one psychotic nightmare.
“Gone Girl” should be the star-making role for
Pike, a British actress who is probably best known as Tom Cruise’s costar in
“Jack Reacher,” but gave a better performance as the object of desire for Paul
Giamatti in the little-seen “Barney’s Version.” As Amy in “Gone Girl,” she’s
both damaged and fragile, calculating and dangerous; the alchemy of a woman
asked to be more than she can possibly handle.
Affleck’s
blandness fits the role of Nick perfectly, as his reactions to the firestorm
that rises around him fit the subdued tone of the picture. The supporting
players are all superb, especially Perry as the blunt-talking lawyer, Kim
Dickens as the dogged Det. Boney; Carrie Coon as Nick’s twin sister and real soul
mate; David Clennon and Lisa Banes as
Amy’s manipulative parents and Neil Patrick Harris as Amy’s naïve, obsessive
ex-boyfriend.
Fincher
finds the perfect metaphor for the dysfunctional state of marriage and a
society whose dirty laundry inevitable turns up on the 11 o’clock news when, at
a crucial moment in the film, Amy agrees to talk truthfully to Nick only in the
shower, guaranteeing he’s not wearing a wire.
It’s probably
the only moment in the film where you can be sure you’re getting the naked
truth.
BOMBSHELL (1933)
He’s the answer to one of the great
Hollywood trivia questions, typically stumping all but dedicated movie buffs.
Who is the credited director on both “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of
Oz,” probably the two most iconic films of the American cinema’s Golden Age.
You’d think Victor Fleming would be lionized
as one of Hollywood’s great filmmakers simply based on these two masterpieces
of popular entertainment. Instead, he’s been marginalized by historians, his
reputation dented by the fact that numerous directors had their hands on both
films, leading to the oft-repeated theory that they are producer-driven pictures.
Fleming’s standing was also undercut by his
early death of a heart attack at age 59 in 1949. Others of his
generation—those who started in silents
and toiled sometimes with little recognition in the studio system—were still
working in the 1950s and early 60s, when film critics and historians started
celebrating the filmmakers from the first half of the century. Fleming’s
career, cut short by death and ending with a much publicized bomb, “Joan of
Arc,” was never considered in the same league with contemporaries John Ford,
Howard Hawks, William Wellman, William Wyler, George Cukor and Michael Curtiz—except
during his own time.
A superbly researched biography and
reappraisal of the director by film critic Michael Sragow, “Victor Fleming: An
American Movie Master,” published in 2009, attempts to resurrect the filmmaker’s
reputation.
Fleming’s entry into the film industry
came because he was skilled at working on motors and could drive a car—the idea
that those skills were so highly prized in the 1910s is one of this biography’s
many examples of how things have changed so dramatically in the past 100 years.
He soon was operating cameras, making his
mark as Douglas Fairbank’s early cameraman, helping the acrobatic star become
the medium’s first action hero. Fleming quickly became one of the silent era’s
top filmmakers, making acclaimed (but now lost) films “The Rough Riders” and
“The Way of All Flesh” before helping to define the film personas of Gary
Cooper in “The Virginian” (1929) and Clark Gable in “Red Dust” (1931) and then
making a star of Spencer Tracy in “Captains Courageous” (1937).
As far as the two elephants in Fleming’s
career, Sragow makes a strong case that Fleming spent the most time of any of
the other directors on the films and did much to shape both the Rhett-Scarlett
relationship and Judy Garland’s performance as Dorothy. Fleming wasn’t a
sensitive, coddling director; he could be brusque and short tempered. But, most
tellingly, he was much admired by contemporaries, an adventurer who raced cars
with Hawks and was a pilot in the early days of aviation.
He fell in
love with Ingrid Bergman during the filming of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”—he was
25 years her senior—and that love affair ultimate led to his final failure,
aiding her dream to bring “Joan of Arc” to the screen. Is there anything worse
than leaving the stage after delivering your least satisfying work?
My favorite Fleming film is his sarcastic
tribute to the idiocy of his own industry, “Bombshell.” Jean Harlow, in what
may be her most complex role, plays movie siren Lola Burns (a barely disguised
version of Clara Bow, an ex-lover of the director), who is in constant battle
with the studio’s fast-talking, cartoonishly named publicity man Space Hanlan
(Lee Tracy).
The
screwball comedy is filled with inside jokes and references to actual events:
Lola is starring in “Red Dust” opposite an unseen Clark Gable, directed by Jim
Brogan (Pat O’Brien), an obvious caricature of the director himself. Lampooning
the nonstop fake publicity created by the studios at the time—Space actually
hires a stalker to claim he’s Lola’s husband—and the rampant insincerity of
nearly everyone, “Bombshell” is both chaotic fun and biting satire.
Hollywood priorities are made crystal
clear by Hanlan when he assures reporters that Lola can’t be having a baby
because “it’s not in her contract.”
Though hailed after his twin successes of
1939 (including best director Oscar for “GWTW”), he made just one more first-rate
picture, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1941), before his death 10 years later.
During the 1940s, he started many projects that never made it to the screen,
including a version of “The Yearling” that was to star Spencer Tracy.
Sragow, in his valid attempts to boost
Fleming, sometimes overrates some of his films, turning pedestrian pictures
such as “Test Pilot” and “A Guy Named Joe” into forgotten masterpieces. But
overall, the film critic succeeds in shining a spotlight on a great filmmaker
who somehow got lost in the shuffle of time.
THE TRIP TO ITALY (2014)
Even when the
self-styled arrogance of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, a pair of veteran British
TV comics playing characters based on themselves, grows tiresome, the stunning travelogue
of Italian coastal cities and amazing meals the actors consume is well worth
the price of admission. Not to mention, the impressions.
This second “road” picture—the first was
“The Trip” (2011), which took them to the English countryside—is again mostly
about Coogan’s and Brydon’s dueling egos, as both savor every putdown of the
other’s career successes and failures as they go from one incredible hotel to
another. Like an old married couple, they never stop chirping at one another
over the tiniest of things.
Despite all the bickering, what makes
these two such entertaining dinner guests for viewers is their extraordinary
ability to mimic the voices of well known actors, mostly United Kingdom
natives. Their go-to impressions are
Michael Caine—they have his vocals down pat from “Alfie” to his most recent
work—and Al Pacino, who they turn into a raving clown. But the highlight is their
extensive dissection of Christian Bale’s and Tom Hardy’s incomprehensible line
readings in “The Dark Knight Rises.”
With astonishing precision and endless assurances that they greatly
admire both actors, Coogan and Brydon nail the ridiculously mannered speaking
voices the “Dark Knight” actors brought to that film.
Writer-director Michael Winterbottom, who
first introduced these two as “characters” in his 2005 film about a location
filming, “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,” keeps the movie from
becoming a series of skits (it’s based on a British TV series with the pair) by
introducing small little dramas (women, family, career) along the way.
It helps, greatly I would think, that you
know the difference between Richard Burton and James Mason and understand James
Bond film history, but with that caveat, you won’t see many films this year as
funny as “The Trip to Italy,” and probably none as visual pleasing.
THE COSSACKS (1928)
Leave it to Hollywood to take a Leo Tolstoy
novel about a 19th Century Russian soldier who falls for a girl
while visiting the Caucasus region and turn it into a comic-adventure starring
John Gilbert.
Gilbert plays Lukashika, a young man of
leisure who has no interest in the war parties his village sends out as part of
the long conflict between Russia and Turkey, instead content on showing off his
horse riding skills and flirting with girls. Only when he’s publicly ridiculed
by Maryana (French actress Renée Adorée), the town’s beauty, does he prove
himself an able soldier and leader, living up to his father’s expectations.
Then Prince Olenin Stieshneff arrives
from Moscow with a message from the Tsar: peace has been reach with the Turks.
That news spurs some of the movies best lines, including “Peace is for old
women and sheep” and “We can’t stop fighting the Turks, we have nothing else to
do.”
But the Prince has something else on his
mind. To forge an alliance between Moscow and the Cossacks, he is to marry a
local girl. Immediately, he sets his sights on Maryana, who, as he tells his
aide, “is the least unsightly of her tribe.”
Any resemblance to Tolstoy or history is
pure coincidental, but the film is a well-made late silent that satirizes the
nobility’s “concern” for villagers, while paying homage to the uneducated
masses whose loyalty to the crown enabled these long, pointless wars to
continue.
Director George Hill, a cinematographer,
from 1913, before becoming a director, best known for two 1930 hits, “The Big
House” and “Min and Bill,” is the credited director, though Clarence Brown also
shot some of the film. Whoever is responsible, “The Cossacks” features the kind
of fluid camera movement and naturalistic acting that marked silent
pictures at their maturity.
Gilbert was among the top stars of the time,
with a string of hits including “The Big Parade” (1925), “La Bohéme” (1926),
“Flesh and the Devil” (1926) and “Love” (1927), the last two with his
off-screen lover, Greta Garbo.
Adorée, who also played Gilbert’s love
interest in “The Big Parade,” had a very short run of fame in the mid 1920s
before she was forced to retire when she was stricken with tuberculosis, an
illness that killed her a few years later at age 35.
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2014)
It makes perfect sense that Jim Jarmusch
would direct a vampire movie. His characters, from those clueless layabouts in
“Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law” to the cold robotic people of “Ghost
Dog: The Way of the Samurai” and “The Limits of Control” have always been less
than human, creatures of the night who speak in special code, a hipster
Jarmuschian cool.
His latest focuses on two eternal souls,
symbolically named Adam and Eve.
Eve
(Tilda Swinton, always a little less than human) is a brilliant, haughty woman
ensconced in Algiers while Adam (Tom Hiddleston, Loki in the “Thor” films and
Fitzgerald in “Midnight in Paris”—match that for range) is on the other side of
the planet; he’s a hermit musician living in a dilapidated house in Detroit.
The strength of the movie is the mini-worlds these depressed, aimless
character, once lovers, inhabit and how they interact with their enablers.
Eve relies on a sympathetic cafe owner and
another vampire played by John Hurt, while Adam has Ian (Anton Yelchin), an
eager sycophant willing to locate whatever strange request Adam makes.
Yet the film goes nowhere, lacking in any
recognizable plot or substantial dramatics. The most interesting thing they do
is acquire their needed blood supply, not from sucking necks, but from blood
banks and through bribery.
At one point, while Eve is visiting Adam,
her sister (a decadent L.A. party girl played by Mia Wasikowska) shows up and
adds some unruliness into the proceedings, but not enough to save the movie. As
much as I appreciate the somnolent mood—especially effective is the car trip
they make through the sad, deserted streets of Detroit—Jarmusch’s stylish
touches don’t add up to much without a story.
Gorgeously shot by French cinematographer
Yorick Le Saux (“Swimming Pool,” “Arbitrage”) and well acted by Swinton and
Hiddleston, “Only Lovers Left Alive” should have been something more than just
another Jarmusch oddity.
HEAVEN’S GATE (1981)
It’s been more than 30 years since this
epic Western became shorthand for over-indulgent directors, financially
out-of-control productions and box office disasters.
A damning review by esteemed New York Times
critic Vincent Canby sunk the much-anticipated film before it ever reached the
rest of the country. Director Michael Cimino, whose “The Deer Hunter” won him
best picture and best director Oscars in 1978, went from Hollywood’s latest boy
wonder to pariah. In the three decades since the fiasco, he has directed just
four features, none in the past 18 years. Few Oscar-winning filmmakers have
faded into such deep obscurity as Cimino, who is 75.
In 1982, when it finally reached theaters
in the hinterlands, United Artists, the company that was all-but destroyed by
the $30-million film’s failure, had sliced an hour out of its 3 hours and 39
minutes. Despite all the critical horror stories, I was pleasantly surprised by
“Heaven’s Gate”; it was filled with beautiful composed and photographed praire
scenes, memorable acting and contained a compelling story of the racist,
land-grabbing history of late 19th Century America. It was no “Deer
Hunter”—despite its flaws, a great film—but I found the shortened “Heaven’s
Gate” to be among the better films of 1982.
When I finally saw the uncut version of a
few years later, it made me question what I had originally seen. And, watching
it against at its full length recently confirmed its deserved spots on the list
of movie disasters, along with “Cleopatra” (1963), “Howard the Duck” (1986) and
“Cutthroat Island” (1995).
The
convoluted plot centers on the real-life Johnson County War, which took place
in Wyoming in 1890, when government-backed cattle owners had to fight off the
immigrant homesteaders who claimed the land the syndicate desired.
Kris Kristofferson plays a lawman of some
ilk—everything about this film is purposely vague—who returns to the area and
takes up for the harassed farmers. He’s backed by a colorful but rather
pointless character played by Jeff Bridges.
Kristofferson’s James Averill shares a girlfriend
(a miscast Isabelle Huppert as the local madam) with Nathan (Christopher
Walken), a gunman employed by the land barons, who have decided to just kill
all these pesky immigrants.
Lingering off to the side is a cynical,
perpetually drunk Irvine, played by John Hurt, who was a Harvard classmate of Averill.
The
film never properly explains how these Harvard grads end up in these dusty,
far-from-anywhere environs or why everything moves at a snail’s pace. Even
after the plan of the rich men is made public, everyone sits around waiting for
the massacre to happen.
What really kills the move are the interminable
set pieces that needlessly go on long after their point has been made. The same
criticism has been made about “The Deer Hunter,” but I would argue that the
intense emotions of that film are augmented by the pacing. Not so in “Heaven’s
Gate;” if anything, if my memory of the trimmed version is accurate, it seems
to dissipate the energy level, exasperating one’s attempt to understand the
character and follow the story.
The opening scene at Averill’s Harvard
graduation day goes on for at least 30 minutes without adding much to the upcoming
plot. By the end, I was tired of these characters and had little interest in
their fate. Only Vilmos Zsigmond should be proud to list the film on his
resume; the exception cinematography should have earned him an Oscar
nomination.
Cimino made a somewhat interesting crime
picture, “Year of the Dragon” (1985) that was notable for its excessive
violence (it was scripted by Oliver Stone) and the moody performance of Mickey
Rourke, who had a small role in “Heaven’s Gate.” More unremarkable were “The
Sicilian” (1987), from a Mario Puzo novel, and “The “Sunchasers” (1996), starring
Woody Harrelson as a kidnapped doctor. The director’s best film since “Heaven’s
Gate” was a remake of the 1950s thriller “Desperate Hours” (1990), a great
vehicle for acting, with Rourke in the Humphrey Bogart role and Anthony Hopkins
in the role originated by Fredric March.
Since 1996, his only credit is for
directing a segment of a 2007 French documentary on filmmaking, “To Each His
Own Cinema.”
Thirty years ago, newspapers and magazine were filled with stories on
how studios were going to pull back on big-budget films, that a conservative
approach to movie making would be ruling the day. That lasted about a year and
the coffers opened up again.
No one’s looked back since. Movies cost so
much now (averaging more than $70 million) that no one, outside the studio
gates, even pays attention. Turns out, “Heaven’s Gate” was even successful as a
warning sign.
HOWL
(2010)
This impossible to classify homage to
Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem isn’t much of a film, but it will be a pleasure
to anyone who admires the screed that is “Howl” and the iconoclastic author.
Shot as if it were a documentary, the
picture only uses words from the poem, Ginsberg’s interviews and the
transcripts of the obscenity trail that followed its publishing by City Light’s
founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. As Ginsberg, James Franco mostly speaks directly
to the camera or during the recreation of the poet’s first public reading of
the epic piece of social criticism in a San Francisco coffeehouse. The film
also features stark, impressionistic animation that offers a visual
interpretation of Ginsberg’s words.
The only real drama is the trial, in
which the state brought obscenity charges against Ferlinghetti, which is nearly
comical almost 60 years later. David Strathairn plays the prosecuting attorney
who, uncomfortably, reads passages from Ginsberg’s often explicit verse and
asks university professors to explain their meaning. Jon Hamm gives a nicely
measured performance as Ferlinghetti’s lawyer.
Because the film has limited itself to
only words from Ginsberg and the trial, scenes with actors portraying Ginsberg
brothers-in-arms, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and his life partner Peter
Orlovsky have no lines. It’s very odd; a bit too disciplined for its own good.
The film is written and directed by well-known documentarians Rob Epstein and
Jeffrey Friedman, who have made the gay-themed films, “The Celluloid Closet”
and “The Times of Harvey Milk.”
Franco is quite good in delivering “Howl”
even though I was a bit taken aback when stanzas were skipped or the order
changed to fit in the film’s narrative. If you’re making a film about a poem
(which may be a first), at least give me the entire piece, start to finish.
Yet, I’ll admit, the trims don’t diminish the power of Ginsberg’s message. This
angry cry for inclusion and its unflinching profile of those living outside the
restrictive box of mainstream society remains timeless.
