MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011)
In a rare pre-credit prologue, Woody Allen and cinematographers Darius Khondji and Johanne Debas take viewers on a seductive picture postcard tour of Paris, from sunlit landmarks to rain-swept narrow streets and the spectacular nighttime illumination, with jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet’s evocative music as the soundtrack. It sets the stage perfectly for a fairytale adventure into the city’s artistic past and romance present.
Allen’s alter ego in the film is Gil Pender (played with scruffy innocence by Owen Wilson), a successfully Hollywood screenwriter who, while visiting Paris with fiancé Inez (a blonde Rachel McAdams) and her haughty “tea party” parents, considers giving it all up to become a starving artist in Paris and finish his novel. Nothing could be more ridiculous to Inez, a practical, material-oriented woman who seems to find Gil more of a bother than companion.
The picture starts out in familiar Allen territory with Gil tossing out asides as the bozos around him play narrow-minded straight men; the thoughtful romantic stuck in a world of pompous realists (most amusingly, Michael Sheen’s know-it-all professor). The weakest aspect of the script turns out to be the inexplicable relationship between Gil and Inez. She treats him like a child, seemingly only interested in his Hollywood paychecks, while Gil doesn’t show any signs that he ever listens to what his pretentious girlfriend is saying. It’s obvious from their first scene that they’ll never last.
But “Midnight in Paris” isn’t about their relationship. Allen’s focus is exploring how Gil comes to grip with his attachment to the past as a way to avoid tough choices of the present and his realization that everyone is responsible for creating their own golden age.
The picture becomes something special when a drunken Gil gets lost walking back to his hotel and accepts a ride from a group of revelers riding in an antique automobile. He soon finds himself at what looks to be a fancy costume party with a 1920s theme. He’s amused when a couple introduces themselves as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and a familiar looking piano player croons Cole Porter tunes. But when Scott, Zelda and Cole take him to the famous nightclub Bricktop’s (where Bechet performed regularly) and then to a café where Ernest Hemingway to holding forth, Gil starts to believe that he’s actually been transported to his favorite era.
Allen finds the perfect balance of awe-inspired homage and comic caricature in his recreation of the oh-so-serious artists of the ‘20s and their interactions with Gil. You don’t necessarily need to be a scholar of the arts and literary world of the Paris café set, but the comedy quotient rises considerable if you are familiar with Hemingway’s prose, Zelda’s mental history, Dail’s paintings, T.S. Eliot’s poetry, Luis Bunuel’s films and the general disposition of the surrealists. Anyone acquainted with Allen’s short stories won’t be surprised by how he turns these legends into comic relief; he’s been poking fun at these folks since the ‘60s. But he’s also making light of his own nostalgic glorification of the writers and visual artists of the early 20th Century.
Much credit must be extended to the marvelous collection of actors who make these characters believable at the same time they are serving Allen’s wild imagination. First and foremost is Corey Stoll (a homicide detective on “Law and Order: LA”) as a self-indulgent, talkative Hemingway, who hilariously speaks in the same short, dramatic sentences found in his prose.
Bringing a serious, humane tone to the film is French actress Marion Cotillard (Oscar-winner for “La Vie en Rose” and the most interesting character in “Inception”), as Adriana, a lover of Picasso and other painters, who shares Gil’s longing for a simpler, more meaningful past. Then, among many others, there’s Adrien Brody as a flamboyant Dali, Alison Pill’s hysterical Zelda and Kathy Bates as the tough-talking, but kindhearted Gertrude Stein, who finds time to advise Gil on his novel. And, adding to the Parisian scenery, Carla Bruni, the wife of French president Sarkozy, plays a helpful tour guide.
The 75-year-old Allen continues to be the most productive filmmaker in American even as his fan base, both moviegoers and critics, shrinks. Even his biggest supporters recognize that he’s made some bad films in the past two decades (led by “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and “Anything Else”) but if a young director named Allan Konigsberg had made “Match Point,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “You Will Met a Tall, Dark Stranger” over the past five years, he’d be the toast of Hollywood and in talks for the new Angelina Jolie comic caper.
But even considering the undervalued work he’s done recently, “Midnight in Paris” is probably his best film since “Bullets over Broadway” (1994). This magical romantic comedy, which taps the artistic giants of the last century for both wisdom and buffoonery, just may convinced his doubters that the old man still has a good joke or two up his sleeve.
EVER IN MY HEART (1933)
Unlike the other great actresses of the 1930s—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert—Barbara Stanwyck spent that first decade of sound working in films that are now barely remembered. The family dramas “Stella Dallas” (1937) and “Golden Boy” (1939) are the best-known pictures of the era; hardly the Oscar-winning classic her contemporaries were starring in.
Yet Stanwyck’s performances in the first few years of her career, in pictures such as “The Miracle Woman” (1931), “Forbidden” (1932), “The Purchase Price” (1932), “Baby Face” (1933), “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” (1933) and “Annie Oakley” (1935), reveal an actress who had already mastered the subtlety and naturalism she needed to craft emotionally truthful, understated characters. Whether she played a cynical evangelist, an ambitious prostitute or a farmer’s wife, Stanwyck found the simple humanity within these women.
Her screen-filling vibrancy in on display in this underrated World War I romance in which she plays a New England debutant who falls for and marries a German-born college professor. Their lives seem perfect until war breaks out in Europe and Germany becomes the hated enemy. Suddenly, their friends and neighbors, previously portrayed as warm, supportive people, turn on them, displaying fearful racism that strains their marriage and costs him his job. Otto Kruger, a veteran character actor who usually played unassuming doctors and lawyers, gives a solid performance as the husband as does Ralph Bellamy as the couple’s best friend.
Eventually, the war separates the couple and takes the film in surprising, emotionally complex directions.
In just 68 minutes of film, director Archie Mayo (“The Petrified Forest”) and screenwriters Bertram Millhauser and Beulah Marie Dix aren’t given enough time to fully explore this intriguing story of a couple divided by prejudice. “Ever in My Heart” plays like an outline of a better movie surrounding Stanwyck’s rich portrait of this naïve Yankee awakened to a cruel, often confusing world.
THE LINCOLN LAWYER (2011)
In previous generations, the role of Mick Haller, an ethically challenged Los Angeles lawyer who works out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, would have been played by Paul Newman or Jack Nicholson. In 2011, the colorful character is portrayed by goofball comedy star Matthew McConaughey. In other words, I wasn’t expecting much.
Turns out McConaughey offers just the right amount of smirking sarcasm and righteous determination as Haller defends a well-heeled young playboy (Ryan Phillippe) charged with the brutal beating of a prostitute.
Haller and his trusted investigator Frank (William H. Macy) utilize their resourceful, often legally questionable methods to undermine the prosecutor’s case, but end up finding out more about their client than they counted on.
The story, based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling novel, like so many detective/crime plots, is cleverly entertaining and chock full of energy until it comes time to wrap up all the loose ends. Having not read Connelly’s novel, I don’t know if he handles it any better than director Brad Furman (whose only previous feature was the action flick “The Take”) and screenwriter John Romano. The film stumbles to its end with a series of plot turns that grow less and less believable and a denouncement that goes on forever.
The strength of “Lincoln Lawyer” clearly isn’t its story, but the thoroughly engaging Haller and the fine-turned attitude McConaughey brings to the role. Unfortunately, the supporting characters, despite the fine cast, aren’t nearly as interesting.
There’s the tough-talking, sexy and still supportive ex-wife who’s also a prosecutor (the ubiquitous Marisa Tomei); the annoying, spoiled rich kid (Phillippe), the street-wise sidekick (Macy); a sleazy, underhanded bail bondsman (John Leguizamo); the jack-of-all-things-illegal driver (Laurence Mason); the cloying family attorney (Bob Gunton); and the snobbish and supportive mother (Frances Fisher). It’s a virtual encyclopedia of stock crime-picture characters.
Yet despite the shortcomings, it’s hard not to enjoy “Lincoln Lawyer” and hope that McConaughey’s Haller returns to the screen.
TOWER OF LONDON (1939/1962)
For reasons that are unidentifiable to me now, the 1939 treatment of this semi-historical royal bloodbath was one of my favorite films when I was a teenager. Maybe it was the scenes of the club-footed executioner, menacingly played by Boris Karloff, torturing various enemies of Richard III that impressed me; or the little dolls, Richard keeps in a diorama depicting those in line to the throne.
Watching it forty years later, this version of the 15th Century battle for the British crown that, most famously, inspired William Shakespeare’s “Richard III” turns out to be an over-plotted, poorly acted melodrama that manages to turn the maniacal Richard into something of a bore.
More entertaining, or something close to that, is Roger Corman’s low-budget drive-in treatment that stars his best collaborator Vincent Price as the steely eyed Duke of Gloucester who, in this version, does his own killing.
Price’s Richard, complete with the hump and page-boy hairdo, not only wastes little time offing everyone between him and the crown, but is haunted by the ghosts of his victims. He lurches around the minimal sets in his oversized capes, planning his next move as the late King’s widow and her supporters huddle in another part of the castle.
Price plays the role as half comic, half Shakespearean (something he did more successfully in “Theatre of Blood”) as his Richard splits his time between being an evil genius and teetering on the brink of insanity, shouting at his otherworldly visitors.
Price had one of his earliest film roles in the 1939 version, playing Richard’s weak, greedy brother, Duke of Clarence, who famously dies in a vat of Malmsey wine.
Basil Rathbone doesn’t bring much sizzle to this 1939 Richard and he doesn’t have much of a hump either (compared to either Price’s or Laurence Olivier’s in the Shakespearean version released in 1956), but the real problem is the over-plotted script. It tries to cover all the complicated maneuverings of this messy ruling family and by the end, a score card is needed to know who is left standing.
If it wasn’t for Karloff, who was born to play an enthusiastic executioner, the film would be completely forgettable. The tale of Richard III loses its teeth without Shakespeare’s verse; the magnificent “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech and the warrior-king’s battlefield plea, “A horse, A horse. My kingdom for a horse.”
13 ASSASSINS (2011)
I’ve never been much of a fan of martial arts action pictures, but this slice of bloody Japanese history is filled with very human, but amazingly skilled, sword-wielding warriors and some of the most thrilling, intense hand-to-hand battle scenes I’ve seen in awhile.
Lord Matsudaira (Goro Inagaki), a young, sadistic warlord-in-the-making, considers it an obligation of rulers to occasionally kill and torture (so much more fun) the local peasants so they appreciate their status. When a respected leader’s son and daughter-in-law are slaughtered, he enlists retired samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho, best known outside Japan for “Shall We Dance?” and U.S. films “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Babel”) to take revenge on Matsudaira.
Like “Seven Samurai” and its remake “The Magnificent Seven,” a motley crew of loyal fighters is recruited and plans are made to ambush the heavily guarded evildoer.
With just 12 samurai (plus Koyata, a talkative goofball they find en route to the battle), they prepare to take on a well-trained, well-equipped militia of about 200 by jury-rigging an entire village (in a sort of 19th Century version of “Mission: Impossible) and luring the target into their trap. In the final 40 minutes, the combatants wage an unrelentingly intense, complex and ridiculously entertaining fight to the death that makes everything that came before it in the film child’s play.
Veteran director Takashi Miike, remaking a 1963 Japanese film, in addition to choreographing the amazing set pieces, brings out the personality of the various samurai, especially Shinzaemon, his young cousin and Koyata, the hyper dude who leads them out of the forest.
For aficionados of this genre, this is a must see and even for those who find much of this stuff laughable, this is crazy action and great fun.
THE VISITORS (1972)
If this dreary, heavy-handed critique of America’s involvement in Vietnam hadn’t been directed by Elia Kazan, it would have long been forgotten.
The film ranks as the legendary director’s most disappointing, both in its didactic script (written by the director’s son Chris) and oppressively dim look. The added cachet of the movie being James Woods’ starring debut is a nice bit of trivia, but it’s a thankless role that’s more about talking points than creating real character.
Woods plays Bill, a vet who serves as caretaker on a rambling, rural property owned by his girlfriend’s reclusive novelist father.
The unfriendly father (veteran TV actor Patrick McVey) spends his days drinking and writing in the guest house, while his daughter (Patricia Joyce) and Woods tend to the property and their newborn.
Their routine is disrupted when a pair of Bill’s war buddies show up unannounced, immediately putting him on edge. Steve Railsback, who later played a very convincing Charles Manson in the 1976 TV movie “Helter Skelter” and starred in the cult favorite “The Stunt Man” (1980), and Chico Martinez play the mysterious visitors who, we eventually learn, spent time in military prison because Bill reported their rape and murder of a Vietnamese civilian. Despite their assurances to the contrary, they are clearly out for payback and Bill and the audience sit around waiting for it.
The low point of the picture is a long, insufferable, testosterone-fueled discussion of war experience between the alcoholic writer (a WWII vet) and the visiting Vietnam vets, which ends with the killing of a neighbor’s dog. (Just in case you didn’t get Kazan’s point of view.)
There are elements of Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (1971) and the 1955 melodrama “The Desperate Hours,” but while Kazan’s movie contains the same tense threat of danger, it offers no insight into the issues of violence in modern society, the nature of passivism and the dead end of blind loyalty and retribution. The film just lets those fascinating issues remain bottled up in this frustrating set of characters.
If the film accomplishes anything, it’s to perpetuate the ridiculous belief that all Vietnam vets are either sensitive souls who regret their role in the conflict or twisted psychopaths destined to commit some heinous crime once they returned stateside. Unfortunately, that became the fall-back position for too many Hollywood depictions.
The director took one more chance behind the camera and the results were exceedingly better: the 1976 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon” starring Robert De Niro and an all-star supporting cast. But it wasn’t enough to earn Kazan, then 67, another directing gig. He spent the remaining 25 years of his life writing novels and his memoirs, while maintaining his position as both a mentor to young acting and directing talent and a pariah to those who never forgave his testimony during the blacklist era.
TEMPLE GRANDIN (2010)
In the 1950s, when 4-year-old Temple Grandin was first diagnosed with autism, doctors believed the condition was caused by a lack of affection from the child’s mother. Just as ridiculous and scientifically unsound, today many believe vaccinations are the cause. It remains a devastating neurological disability, leaving many sufferers with limited communication skills, an inability to show affection to others or interact in society and unusual cognitive processing methods.
Grandin’s parents were advised to place her in an institution (remember “Rain Man”?), but instead her mother dedicated herself to teaching the girl to speak and function in the world. This thoughtful, inventive bio-pic made for HBO follows Temple (played to perfection by Claire Danes) from college to her success as an expert in the humane treatment of cattle.
Grandin’s interest in cows begins when she spends a summer at her aunt and uncle’s Arizona ranch and observes the cattle being herded into a squeeze machine used to settle them before they receive an inoculation shot. She constructs her own “hug” machine (substituting for human contact) that calms her enough to allow her to survive college and then graduate school. Soon she’s writing articles about the treatment of livestock and designing ways to improve the slaughtering process.
Along the way she encounters the usual array of obstacles, mostly in the form of old-fashioned ignorance and prejudice. It’s pretty hard to avoid these types of clichés when filming a bio-pic, but director Mick Jackson (a veteran British filmmaker best known for his early ‘90s hits “The Bodyguard” and “L.A. Story”) does a superb job of not trying to do too much or turn the picture into highlight clips. The idea to visually show how Temple thinks---she remembers every image she’s ever seen---gives the film the skewed perspective of its subject, while offering fascinating insight into the autistic world.
Jackson has assembled an impressive cast---cable movies are attracting better supporting actors than feature films these days---including Catherine O’Hara in a rare non-comic role as Temple’s aunt, Julia Ormond as her devoted mother and the always memorable David Straithairn as her high school science teacher who first taps Temple’s potential.
But this is Danes’ show, fulfilling the promise she’s shown since her acclaimed work on the TV series “My So-Called Life” at age 15. She’s given good performances (“Romeo + Juliet,” “Shopgirl”) but this is a career-making role, winning an Emmy and Golden Globe. Had this been a feature film, it surely would have earned her an Oscar nomination. The way she modulates her voice, distorts her rubbery face and utilizes an unbound energy to create a character both frustrated and distinguished by her autism is mesmerizing.
Grandin, now 64 and a professor at Colorado State University, is an exceptional and inspirational person; the movie matches her on both counts.
HOW DO YOU KNOW (2010)
I guess this James L. Brooks film must be considered a romantic comedy, despite lacking in much romance and devoid of comedy. As excruciatingly painful to sit through as any movie in recent memory, the writer-director of “Terms of Endearment” (1983), “Broadcast News” (1987) and “As Good as It Gets” (1997), fails to produce a single line of dialogue that should not have been rewritten or create a single character that rises above the level of serviceable.
In addition to the sophomoric, pointless and leaden script, the acting is nearly unwatchable. I had no memory of ever seeing Paul Rudd in a film (in checking his filmography, he’s appeared in a handful of movies I’ve seen, including “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy” and “The 40 Year Old Virgin”), so I hate to damn an actor for one role, but in “How Do You Know” he exudes the energy of a 2 by 4. I kept waiting for his character to display a glint of personality and then the film was over. His performance would barely be acceptable in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
His opposite is Reese Witherspoon, who seems to be under a spell here, unable to connect to her character—a Team USA softball player who becomes disoriented and vulnerable after she’s cut from the team—to anything close to reality. She jumps in and out of the bed of an obnoxious chauvinist (Owen Wilson as a dumber-than-a-rock professional baseball player) while George (Rudd) keeps running into her in typical romantic-comedy plotting.
I guess we are suppose to feel for George because he’s been indicted by the government for stock manipulation, which he clearly is clueless about. Actually, his character would have been more interesting if he had committed the crime.
The poor acting in this picture extends to Jack Nicholson, who has been guided to two Oscars by Brooks (supporting actor in “Terms of Endearment”; best actor for “As Good as it Gets”) and has appeared in four of the director’s six films. Here he plays George’s frantic father and conniving boss who shouts his lines without much conviction and, worst of all, is never once funny. He gives better performances at Laker games.
It’s clear that Brooks was attempting to create another offbeat female character struggling to find her way in the world (following Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News” and Helen Hunt in “As Good as It Gets”), but Witherspoon’s Lisa is a cipher who doesn’t seem capable of sticking to a decision. Brooks’ writing and direction has left this fine, energetic actress all made up with nowhere to go.
Most critics ripped the director’s last film, “Spanglish” (2004) for its clunky writing and strained performances, but that was a masterpiece compared to this mess.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Saturday, April 30, 2011
April 2011
NETWORK (1976)
What made Sidney Lumet, who died in April, such a compelling filmmaker for a half century—from his high-powered debut, “12 Angry Men” (1957) to his innovative, cynical final film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)—is that he never ventured far from his signature theme: the struggle to remain moral in an amoral society.
Whether it’s an honest cop navigating the streets of New York, a thoughtful juror, a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor, a determined district attorney, a cynical TV executive or a down-on-his-luck lawyer, Lumet’s characters are defined by their principles and their ability to resist the temptation of corruption.
Those characters, challenged emotionally and ethically, attracted great actors and, under the director’s Midas touch, produced some of the most intense, complex and exciting performances of the past five decades. Under Lumet’s direction, 18 actors earned Oscar nominations, but that doesn’t include Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb in “12 Angry Men,” Jason Robards in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962)—arguably the greatest performance by an film actor—and Ralph Richardson in the same film, Sean Connery in “The Hill” (1965), John Cazale in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), Treat Williams and Jerry Orbach in “Prince of the City” (1981), Jeff Bridges in “The Morning After” (1986), Christine Lahti in “Running on Empty” (1988), Nick Nolte and Armand Assante in “Q&A” (1990), Ian Holm in “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1997), Peter Dinklage in “Find Me Guilty” (2006) and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”
Yet as memorable as the acting always was in a Lumet picture, what elevated his best work was his impeccable ear for intelligent, sophisticated screenplays, honed during his years directing TV dramas in the 1950s. And leading that list is Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network.”
For this filmgoer, only Woody Allen has made more pictures than Lumet that I’ve watched over and over again, inevitably finding them just as compelling and entertaining the third time as I did the first time. And leading that list is “Network,” Lumet’s greatest achievement and one of the 50 finest American films ever made.
It’s easy to dismiss Lumet’s contributions to this daring critique of American values and the loss of humanity in the race for money and power in honoring the erudite script by Chayefsky. While the screenplay is among the most literate and thoughtful ever written, there are good reasons why Chayefsky chose Lumet to direct his prize.
First, Lumet shared with the writer roots in early TV and was equally versed in the vagaries of the industry. Second was Lumet’s acumen with actors: he elicited great performances from no less than six actors in “Network” (not to mention Lee Richardson’s commanding narration). And third, Lumet was not a director of comedies: he never makes a show of the incredulous situations—TV news taken over by the entertainment department; Howard Beale’s on-air rants; a show starring terrorists—treating them as seriously as the 6 o’clock news used to be. If anything, this approach makes the comic aspects more authentic and the realistic plotlines compellingly immediate. In lesser hands, the film could easily have turned into an over-the-top, dark yukfest that might have been hilarious, but not a timeless masterwork.
What also makes Lumet the perfect director for “Network” is his comfort with talky pictures. His two superb Eugene O’Neill (the ultimate writer of long monologues) adaptations, “The Iceman Cometh” for TV in 1960 and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” along with “12 Angry Men” and “Fail-Safe” were perfect preparation for the heartbreaking, soul-searching speeches, many taking place in tight quarters, that make “Network” such a memorable movie.
The famous “Mad as Hell” scene (it’s on YouTube if you don’t have the DVD) offers a prime example of Lumet’s mastery of storytelling. Starting outside in the rain with the lone figure of Howard Beale, the scene moves into the TV studio as Beale takes his place behind the anchor’s desk. Lumet moves us back and forth between Beale’s rant, the frantic excitement in the control booth with its wall of monitors and then finally to a single TV in the living room of Max Schumacher (Holden), where his daughter opens the window onto the sight of the neighbors mimicking Beale’s rant. The camera pulls back to show an entire block of open windows and screaming New Yorkers: the power, for better or worse, of television demonstrated starkly and dramatically in about five minutes.
As Lumet reveals in “Network” and in so many other films, understanding the human heart is more important in creating great movies than flashy camera movement or breakneck editing.
In his excellent 1995 book, “Making Movies,” in which Lumet details every aspect of the filmmaking process, he summarizes his career philosophy:
“I have no preconceived notion that I want the body of my work to be about one particular idea. No script has to fit into an overall theme of my life. I don’t have one….The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at that moment, it’s enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about.”
THE CONSPIRATOR (2011)
What is most surprising about this fascinating historical sidebar to the Lincoln assassination is that it took over 100 years of cinema before it made it to the big screen. Despite a few TV movies on the conspiracy, only a 2009 short film has previous focused on accused conspirator Mary Surratt. But, judging by this presentation directed by Robert Redford, it might be a story better told in a documentary.
Surratt (Robin Wright), whose son Johnny was a member of the John Wilkes Booth-led plot to kill Lincoln and other government officials, is tried by a military tribunal organized by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline). In fact, there’s little interest in determining her guilt; officials hope to draw in her fugitive son.
A young lawyer and Union war hero Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) is engaged by a forceful senator (Tom Wilkinson), disturbed by Stanton’s disregard for the Constitution, to defend this much-hated women.
That the trial is a sham enrages Aiken, turning him into a true advocate for Surratt despite the damage his actions have on his personal and professional life.
If this all sounds familiar, it is because the scenario—with other names and involving other cases—has been the fodder of movies since actors began talking. Redford’s handsome, well-acted, impeccably staged picture (written by James D. Solomon) never catches the tinder-box fever that engulfed the nation as the war came to an end and Lincoln was buried. And his choice of McAvoy to carry this passion play (and its inevitable comparison to the contemporary military trials for accused terrorists) overestimated the young actors’ skills. In the three previous films I’ve seen him in, “The Last King of Scotland,” “Atonement” and “The Last Station,” I’ve been underwhelmed; I’m at a loss as to why he’s the star of a major motion picture.
Even the flashbacks of the conspiracy in operation the night Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre add little energy or excitement to the film; they look like those reenactments done for TV crime documentaries.
What saves the film from being purely educational is the powerfully stoic, austere performance of Wright. Looking gaunt and plain, Wright does more with her eyes and body gestures than most actors can do with pages of dialogue. Central to this character is her unwavering determination to protect her guilty son and in Wright’s hands that emotional resolve turns her into a martyr of nearly Biblical proportions.
Wright has been giving intensely emotionally performances for more than 20 years, thought mostly in films few saw, including “The Playboys” (1992), “She’s So Lovely” (1997), “A Home at the End of the World” (2004), and “State of Play” (2009). She’s best known as the hippie girlfriend of “Forrest Gump” (1994) and the ex-wife of Sean Penn.
The top-notch supporting cast—Wilkinson, Kline, Colm Meaney, “Gilmore Girl” Alexis Bledel, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Huston—keeps you thinking that something will spark the film beyond a by-the-numbers recreation of a crucial moment in American history. But it never happens.
RAWHIDE (1938)
Though Lou Gehrig, one of the most accomplished hitters in baseball history, has been one of my favorite players since boyhood and his life was chronicled in the Gary Cooper movie “The Pride of the Yankees” and later in a TV movie, I either forgot or never knew that he starred in this B Western.
Susan King, the invaluable film writer for the Los Angeles Times, mentioned the movie in a roundup of baseball-themed pictures marking Opening Day. Through the magic of Netflix, I was watching it a few days later.
Gehrig, a strapping 6-2 athlete with Hollywood good looks, seems perfect for the movies. Yet he’s required to do very little in this by-the-numbers cowboy flick, playing himself on a visit to his sister’s Montana ranch during the offseason. It’s hard not to cringe when he jokes about quitting baseball for the cowboy life knowing that he was forced to retired a little more than a year after the release of the picture. (The mysterious muscle disease that took his life in 1941, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, became known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”)
Gehrig even gets to sing (the song features the lyrics “I used to chase flies, now they’re chasing me.”) but most of the warbling is left to Smith Ballew, a popular recording artist and minor singing cowboy of the 1930s, who plays the lawyer who helps Gehrig and his sister escape the clutches of the town’s evil syndicate.
The highlight of the hour-long programmer is the comical bar fight featuring Gehrig and his cohorts tangling with the gunslingers who work for the town’s boss. At one point, Gehrig starts hurling billiard balls at the bad guys, knocking them out of the fight, as if he’s firing baseballs across the diamond.
Gehrig has a hard time keeping a straight face in the serious scenes, but isn’t half bad when he strikes a joke and flashes his wide grin. For fans of baseball history, this curio is a must-see, offering the rare opportunity to see “The Iron Horse” just being himself while wearing an enormous cowboy hat.
WIN WIN (2011)
The characters that populate writer-director Tom McCarthy’s films act and sound just like your friends and neighbors and face the same insecurities and problems. That’s not necessarily a good thing in Hollywood, where ordinary is difficult to package and market for a big opening weekend. That probably explains why his latest and most accomplished movie opened in March.
As in his first two films, “The Station Agent” (2003) and the much better “The Visitor” (2007),” McCarthy brings an odd assortment of needy people together to form a modern version of the extended family and he does it without turning them into sentimental stereotypes.
In “Win Win,” Paul Giamatti, the ultimate “regular guy” actor, plays Mike Flaherty, a small-town lawyer with a wife (Amy Ryan, Oscar-nominated for “Gone Baby Gone”) and two young daughters. But he’s worried: about the lack of clients, a ready-to-die generator in his office, pending bills and the high school wrestling team he coaches that lose every meet.
Then a meal ticket comes Mike’s way when he convinced the court to name him the conservator for Leo (Burt Young), an elderly client entering dementia. The ethically questionable deal pays him $1500 a month and since the old man hasn’t heard from his only offspring in 20 years, Mike feels safe.
Then, Kyle, Leo’s grandson (played with just the right amount of James Dean cool by Alex Shaffer) shows up and everyone’s lives are altered.
At the center of the film is this troubled teen with his distinctive dyed blonde hair and a Zen-like demeanor who wins the heart of Mike and his family, while turning out to be a championship-caliber wrestler.
The bones of the plot—a needy kid, a losing sports team inspired by an outsider, a battle between a negligent parent and a caring new family—could have easily become a shallow, teary melodrama but McCarthy avoid the traps and never allows the characters to slip into caricatures.
There aren’t any showy performances here, just actors inhabiting their characters, bringing messy truths and hard-earned hopefulness to the film.
While Giamatti and Shaffer are the most interesting and developed characters, “Win Win”—like all of McCarthy’s pictures—is filled with wonderful supporting players who all have their moments. Ryan, who was devastating as the selfish, white trash mother in “Gone Baby Gone,” plays the exact opposite here, creating a nourishing, giving mother-wife who helps turn around Kyle’s life.
Then there’s the eternally sulking Steven (Jeffrey Tambor, the veteran TV comic actor) and the clueless, optimistic Terry (Bobby Cannavale from McCarthy’s “Station Agent”) as Mike’s best friends who help him out with the wrestling team. Watching these three as they coach their colorful collection of mostly inept teen wrestlers is the definition of pitch perfect comic acting.
Easy to overlook is “Rocky” jokester Young, who gives a poignant portrayal of a feisty, but confused man who just wants to stay in his home. All these characters represent what McCarthy does best: Give voice to a community of people who need each other more than they know.
BREAKTHROUGH (1978)
If this World War II actioner had been made in the late 1950s or early ‘60s, when stars Richard Burton and Robert Mitchum still resembled front-line soldiers, it might have been slightly interesting. By 1978, the actors look more like World War II vets than participants, offering comically bad performances as they walk through their roles with the energy of a nightlight.
Burton plays a thoughtful, discontent German sergeant (reprising a role originated by James Coburn in Sam Peckinpah’s vastly superior “Cross of Iron”) who, as the war nears its end, tries to broker a cease fire before a bloody fight over an Italian village begins. Mitchum is the laid back American colonel who ends up being Burton’s messenger after an encounter in no man’s land.
Mitchum seems amused by the war and those serving around him. In his first scene, in which he’s meeting with his commanding officer (Rod Steiger in a small role), he pulls out a foot-long cigar and lights up. It would have been a funny moment in a comedy (even Steiger’s character is startled by it) but is totally out of place in a serious war picture.
But nothing Mitchum can do or say can upstage the specter of Burton. For some reason, the uniform emphasizes the actor’s small shoulders and torso and his enormous head; he looks like a comic figure wearing a costume (remember Arte Johnson from “Laugh-In”?), ill suited to combat. Adding to his out-of-place appearance is his stern, pained expression he maintains throughout the film. Burton looks more like a man in his 70s than his actually age of 53.
Even his distinctive, commanding baritone cannot overcome the sense that you’re watching an actor going through the motions, barely cognitive of the role he’s playing. Meanwhile, Mitchum seems to be enjoying the scenery and reciting the cliché-riddled lines.
Director Andrew V. McLaglen (“Shenandoah,” “Chisum”) doesn’t do much to keep this mostly uneventful story moving and fails completely to create any sense of tension or doom as soldiers prepare to engage each other in battle.
“Breakthrough” may not be the worst war picture ever made, but it may be the most disappointing considering it stars two of the finest actors of the postwar era. Just the year before, Burton had given an excellent performance in the film adaptation of “Equus,” while Mitchum, three years earlier, delivered one of his most memorable performances as Philip Marlow in “Farewell, My Lovely.”
I trust that Burton and Mitchum drank themselves to sleep each night after the shoot and had a great time exchanging “war” stories. As for watching the resulting movie, I would not advise doing it sober.
ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO’S NEST (1975)
When I first saw this movie, I was 19 and on a date. My mind was clearly on other matters, because I left the theater unimpressed.
I’ve seen “Cuckoo’s Nest” a few times since and now recognize it as an American classic, among the 100 best pictures in history. A recent viewing, after re-reading Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, increased my appreciation of the film, especially the screenplay by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.
The back story on how the book became a movie would make for an interesting film itself. Kirk Douglas bought the rights to the novel—based on Kesey’s work as a volunteer at a veteran’s hospital--before it was published and eventually had writer Dale Wasserman turn it into a play. The actor starred in the 1963-64 Broadway production, which also featured Gene Wilder and Ed Ames. A few years later, on a goodwill trip to Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, Douglas meet a young director and was impressed enough to offer him a chance to direct the film version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Douglas promised to send him a copy of the play.
The director, Milos Forman, never received the book (Communist censors had confiscated it) and assumed the famous actor was all talk. But when Douglas’ son Michael took up the cause to get the film made in the 1970s, he offered it to Forman, now living in America.
Douglas chose Jack Nicholson for the role of R.P. McMurphy, a seemingly untamable rebel stuck in an institute where rules and discipline dictate life, after seeing his performance as the foul-mouthed Navy tough guy in “The Last Detail.”
Forman went with unknowns for the rest of the roles, including eventual best actress winner Louise Fletcher as the unrelenting Nurse Ratched and Will Sampson, a 6-5 Creek Indian discovered by a Portland car dealer.
Playing Chief Bromden, a patient who pretends to be deaf and dumb while constantly sweeping the floors, Sampson brings this unforgettable character to life and went on to play Indian roles in two dozen movies and TV productions until his death at 53 during lung-heart transplant surgery. Also playing patients were a very young Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, William Redfield and, as the stuttering Billy Bibbit, Brad Dourif.
The Chief narrates the book, using his apparent deafness as a cover to hear conversations he otherwise would never be privy to. Also, in the novel, it is the Chief’s depiction of the Combine and the Fog, imaginary elements of the vast machinery utilized by Nurse Ratched and her staff to control the patients, which transforms the book more than just a collection of adventures inside the nuthouse.
Goldman and Hauben brilliantly strip away the interior narrative of the book, making it McMurphy’s story rather than the Chief’s, without losing the theme of society’s crushing effect on individualism. Instead of the Chief being a prominent character from the start, he slowly emerges as an important ally of McMurphy and, ultimately, his protector. (The change greatly displeased Kesey, who also wasn’t happy with the casting of Nicholson, preferring Gene Hackman for McMurphy.)
What connects with audiences is McMurphy’s sanity; he’s an unruly troublemaker, but there’s nothing wrong with his mental state. He finagles his way into the facility hoping it will be an easier ride than the work farm he was confided to. At first, he’s quite pleased with himself, as he takes over the place, turning it into a virtual gambling parlor and then leading the inmates on a renegade fishing trip. But little does he know what fate has in store for him.
The screenwriters took a great novel, disassembled it and put it back together for the cinema in a way that utilizes the book’s best ideas, its heartbreaking moments and singular characters while creating their own work of art.
IN A BETTER WORLD (2011)
About halfway through this Danish drama that won the 2010 Oscar for foreign-language film I was baffled as to why anyone thought it worthy of any honor. Then, what appeared to be a rather ordinary tale of a pair of teenage boys with family and emotional issues, turns into a thought-provoking, intricately plotted thesis on the insidious nature of violence and how we confront its perpetrators.
This deceptively straight-forward story opens in an African refugee camp where Anton, a Danish physician (Mikael Persbrandt, looking like and with the calm resolve of a young Max von Sydow) is attending to the sick and injured, including a pregnant girl whose stomach has been cut open by the henchmen of a ruthless strongman for pure sport.
Back in Denmark, he attempts to teach him son, a regular victim of the school bully and his new friend, who just lost his mother to cancer, that responding to violence with more violence is a hopeless, losing battle.
In the boys’ black-and-white world, the father’s intellectualizing is lost and they seek revenge, first on the bully and then on an angry auto mechanic who gets into it with the doctor.
Christian (a memorably intense William Jøhnk Nielsen) is a very troubled boy who blames his father for his mother’s death and, in confused desperation, strikes out against the cruel world, bringing the more naïve Elias (Markus Rygaard) into his schemes. On the surface, Elias seems to be adjusting to the separation of his parents—his mother is also a doctor—better than they are, but nothing in this film stops at the surface. The story goes back and forth between Africa and Denmark as it depicts both children and adults relying on violence to vent their anger and express frustrations.
Director Susanne Bier and writer Anders Thomas Jensen, whose “After the Wedding” (2006) also received a foreign film Oscar nomination, display a steady hand as the film steadily becomes more emotionally involving and its issues move to the forefront. Yet Bier’s camera refuses to turn away from the violence or its devastating aftermath, whether it’s in a poor African village or on the playground of a suburban European city.
I can’t offer an opinion as to whether “In a Better World” deserved the Oscar, having not seen any of the other nominees (don’t get me started on why the year’s foreign film winner isn’t released in the U.S. until the following April), but I’m certain it will rank among the best films of 2011.
What made Sidney Lumet, who died in April, such a compelling filmmaker for a half century—from his high-powered debut, “12 Angry Men” (1957) to his innovative, cynical final film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)—is that he never ventured far from his signature theme: the struggle to remain moral in an amoral society.
Whether it’s an honest cop navigating the streets of New York, a thoughtful juror, a guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor, a determined district attorney, a cynical TV executive or a down-on-his-luck lawyer, Lumet’s characters are defined by their principles and their ability to resist the temptation of corruption.
Those characters, challenged emotionally and ethically, attracted great actors and, under the director’s Midas touch, produced some of the most intense, complex and exciting performances of the past five decades. Under Lumet’s direction, 18 actors earned Oscar nominations, but that doesn’t include Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb in “12 Angry Men,” Jason Robards in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962)—arguably the greatest performance by an film actor—and Ralph Richardson in the same film, Sean Connery in “The Hill” (1965), John Cazale in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), Treat Williams and Jerry Orbach in “Prince of the City” (1981), Jeff Bridges in “The Morning After” (1986), Christine Lahti in “Running on Empty” (1988), Nick Nolte and Armand Assante in “Q&A” (1990), Ian Holm in “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1997), Peter Dinklage in “Find Me Guilty” (2006) and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.”
Yet as memorable as the acting always was in a Lumet picture, what elevated his best work was his impeccable ear for intelligent, sophisticated screenplays, honed during his years directing TV dramas in the 1950s. And leading that list is Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network.”
For this filmgoer, only Woody Allen has made more pictures than Lumet that I’ve watched over and over again, inevitably finding them just as compelling and entertaining the third time as I did the first time. And leading that list is “Network,” Lumet’s greatest achievement and one of the 50 finest American films ever made.
It’s easy to dismiss Lumet’s contributions to this daring critique of American values and the loss of humanity in the race for money and power in honoring the erudite script by Chayefsky. While the screenplay is among the most literate and thoughtful ever written, there are good reasons why Chayefsky chose Lumet to direct his prize.
First, Lumet shared with the writer roots in early TV and was equally versed in the vagaries of the industry. Second was Lumet’s acumen with actors: he elicited great performances from no less than six actors in “Network” (not to mention Lee Richardson’s commanding narration). And third, Lumet was not a director of comedies: he never makes a show of the incredulous situations—TV news taken over by the entertainment department; Howard Beale’s on-air rants; a show starring terrorists—treating them as seriously as the 6 o’clock news used to be. If anything, this approach makes the comic aspects more authentic and the realistic plotlines compellingly immediate. In lesser hands, the film could easily have turned into an over-the-top, dark yukfest that might have been hilarious, but not a timeless masterwork.
What also makes Lumet the perfect director for “Network” is his comfort with talky pictures. His two superb Eugene O’Neill (the ultimate writer of long monologues) adaptations, “The Iceman Cometh” for TV in 1960 and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” along with “12 Angry Men” and “Fail-Safe” were perfect preparation for the heartbreaking, soul-searching speeches, many taking place in tight quarters, that make “Network” such a memorable movie.
The famous “Mad as Hell” scene (it’s on YouTube if you don’t have the DVD) offers a prime example of Lumet’s mastery of storytelling. Starting outside in the rain with the lone figure of Howard Beale, the scene moves into the TV studio as Beale takes his place behind the anchor’s desk. Lumet moves us back and forth between Beale’s rant, the frantic excitement in the control booth with its wall of monitors and then finally to a single TV in the living room of Max Schumacher (Holden), where his daughter opens the window onto the sight of the neighbors mimicking Beale’s rant. The camera pulls back to show an entire block of open windows and screaming New Yorkers: the power, for better or worse, of television demonstrated starkly and dramatically in about five minutes.
As Lumet reveals in “Network” and in so many other films, understanding the human heart is more important in creating great movies than flashy camera movement or breakneck editing.
In his excellent 1995 book, “Making Movies,” in which Lumet details every aspect of the filmmaking process, he summarizes his career philosophy:
“I have no preconceived notion that I want the body of my work to be about one particular idea. No script has to fit into an overall theme of my life. I don’t have one….The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at that moment, it’s enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about.”
THE CONSPIRATOR (2011)
What is most surprising about this fascinating historical sidebar to the Lincoln assassination is that it took over 100 years of cinema before it made it to the big screen. Despite a few TV movies on the conspiracy, only a 2009 short film has previous focused on accused conspirator Mary Surratt. But, judging by this presentation directed by Robert Redford, it might be a story better told in a documentary.
Surratt (Robin Wright), whose son Johnny was a member of the John Wilkes Booth-led plot to kill Lincoln and other government officials, is tried by a military tribunal organized by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline). In fact, there’s little interest in determining her guilt; officials hope to draw in her fugitive son.
A young lawyer and Union war hero Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) is engaged by a forceful senator (Tom Wilkinson), disturbed by Stanton’s disregard for the Constitution, to defend this much-hated women.
That the trial is a sham enrages Aiken, turning him into a true advocate for Surratt despite the damage his actions have on his personal and professional life.
If this all sounds familiar, it is because the scenario—with other names and involving other cases—has been the fodder of movies since actors began talking. Redford’s handsome, well-acted, impeccably staged picture (written by James D. Solomon) never catches the tinder-box fever that engulfed the nation as the war came to an end and Lincoln was buried. And his choice of McAvoy to carry this passion play (and its inevitable comparison to the contemporary military trials for accused terrorists) overestimated the young actors’ skills. In the three previous films I’ve seen him in, “The Last King of Scotland,” “Atonement” and “The Last Station,” I’ve been underwhelmed; I’m at a loss as to why he’s the star of a major motion picture.
Even the flashbacks of the conspiracy in operation the night Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre add little energy or excitement to the film; they look like those reenactments done for TV crime documentaries.
What saves the film from being purely educational is the powerfully stoic, austere performance of Wright. Looking gaunt and plain, Wright does more with her eyes and body gestures than most actors can do with pages of dialogue. Central to this character is her unwavering determination to protect her guilty son and in Wright’s hands that emotional resolve turns her into a martyr of nearly Biblical proportions.
Wright has been giving intensely emotionally performances for more than 20 years, thought mostly in films few saw, including “The Playboys” (1992), “She’s So Lovely” (1997), “A Home at the End of the World” (2004), and “State of Play” (2009). She’s best known as the hippie girlfriend of “Forrest Gump” (1994) and the ex-wife of Sean Penn.
The top-notch supporting cast—Wilkinson, Kline, Colm Meaney, “Gilmore Girl” Alexis Bledel, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Huston—keeps you thinking that something will spark the film beyond a by-the-numbers recreation of a crucial moment in American history. But it never happens.
RAWHIDE (1938)
Though Lou Gehrig, one of the most accomplished hitters in baseball history, has been one of my favorite players since boyhood and his life was chronicled in the Gary Cooper movie “The Pride of the Yankees” and later in a TV movie, I either forgot or never knew that he starred in this B Western.
Susan King, the invaluable film writer for the Los Angeles Times, mentioned the movie in a roundup of baseball-themed pictures marking Opening Day. Through the magic of Netflix, I was watching it a few days later.
Gehrig, a strapping 6-2 athlete with Hollywood good looks, seems perfect for the movies. Yet he’s required to do very little in this by-the-numbers cowboy flick, playing himself on a visit to his sister’s Montana ranch during the offseason. It’s hard not to cringe when he jokes about quitting baseball for the cowboy life knowing that he was forced to retired a little more than a year after the release of the picture. (The mysterious muscle disease that took his life in 1941, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, became known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”)
Gehrig even gets to sing (the song features the lyrics “I used to chase flies, now they’re chasing me.”) but most of the warbling is left to Smith Ballew, a popular recording artist and minor singing cowboy of the 1930s, who plays the lawyer who helps Gehrig and his sister escape the clutches of the town’s evil syndicate.
The highlight of the hour-long programmer is the comical bar fight featuring Gehrig and his cohorts tangling with the gunslingers who work for the town’s boss. At one point, Gehrig starts hurling billiard balls at the bad guys, knocking them out of the fight, as if he’s firing baseballs across the diamond.
Gehrig has a hard time keeping a straight face in the serious scenes, but isn’t half bad when he strikes a joke and flashes his wide grin. For fans of baseball history, this curio is a must-see, offering the rare opportunity to see “The Iron Horse” just being himself while wearing an enormous cowboy hat.
WIN WIN (2011)
The characters that populate writer-director Tom McCarthy’s films act and sound just like your friends and neighbors and face the same insecurities and problems. That’s not necessarily a good thing in Hollywood, where ordinary is difficult to package and market for a big opening weekend. That probably explains why his latest and most accomplished movie opened in March.
As in his first two films, “The Station Agent” (2003) and the much better “The Visitor” (2007),” McCarthy brings an odd assortment of needy people together to form a modern version of the extended family and he does it without turning them into sentimental stereotypes.
In “Win Win,” Paul Giamatti, the ultimate “regular guy” actor, plays Mike Flaherty, a small-town lawyer with a wife (Amy Ryan, Oscar-nominated for “Gone Baby Gone”) and two young daughters. But he’s worried: about the lack of clients, a ready-to-die generator in his office, pending bills and the high school wrestling team he coaches that lose every meet.
Then a meal ticket comes Mike’s way when he convinced the court to name him the conservator for Leo (Burt Young), an elderly client entering dementia. The ethically questionable deal pays him $1500 a month and since the old man hasn’t heard from his only offspring in 20 years, Mike feels safe.
Then, Kyle, Leo’s grandson (played with just the right amount of James Dean cool by Alex Shaffer) shows up and everyone’s lives are altered.
At the center of the film is this troubled teen with his distinctive dyed blonde hair and a Zen-like demeanor who wins the heart of Mike and his family, while turning out to be a championship-caliber wrestler.
The bones of the plot—a needy kid, a losing sports team inspired by an outsider, a battle between a negligent parent and a caring new family—could have easily become a shallow, teary melodrama but McCarthy avoid the traps and never allows the characters to slip into caricatures.
There aren’t any showy performances here, just actors inhabiting their characters, bringing messy truths and hard-earned hopefulness to the film.
While Giamatti and Shaffer are the most interesting and developed characters, “Win Win”—like all of McCarthy’s pictures—is filled with wonderful supporting players who all have their moments. Ryan, who was devastating as the selfish, white trash mother in “Gone Baby Gone,” plays the exact opposite here, creating a nourishing, giving mother-wife who helps turn around Kyle’s life.
Then there’s the eternally sulking Steven (Jeffrey Tambor, the veteran TV comic actor) and the clueless, optimistic Terry (Bobby Cannavale from McCarthy’s “Station Agent”) as Mike’s best friends who help him out with the wrestling team. Watching these three as they coach their colorful collection of mostly inept teen wrestlers is the definition of pitch perfect comic acting.
Easy to overlook is “Rocky” jokester Young, who gives a poignant portrayal of a feisty, but confused man who just wants to stay in his home. All these characters represent what McCarthy does best: Give voice to a community of people who need each other more than they know.
BREAKTHROUGH (1978)
If this World War II actioner had been made in the late 1950s or early ‘60s, when stars Richard Burton and Robert Mitchum still resembled front-line soldiers, it might have been slightly interesting. By 1978, the actors look more like World War II vets than participants, offering comically bad performances as they walk through their roles with the energy of a nightlight.
Burton plays a thoughtful, discontent German sergeant (reprising a role originated by James Coburn in Sam Peckinpah’s vastly superior “Cross of Iron”) who, as the war nears its end, tries to broker a cease fire before a bloody fight over an Italian village begins. Mitchum is the laid back American colonel who ends up being Burton’s messenger after an encounter in no man’s land.
Mitchum seems amused by the war and those serving around him. In his first scene, in which he’s meeting with his commanding officer (Rod Steiger in a small role), he pulls out a foot-long cigar and lights up. It would have been a funny moment in a comedy (even Steiger’s character is startled by it) but is totally out of place in a serious war picture.
But nothing Mitchum can do or say can upstage the specter of Burton. For some reason, the uniform emphasizes the actor’s small shoulders and torso and his enormous head; he looks like a comic figure wearing a costume (remember Arte Johnson from “Laugh-In”?), ill suited to combat. Adding to his out-of-place appearance is his stern, pained expression he maintains throughout the film. Burton looks more like a man in his 70s than his actually age of 53.
Even his distinctive, commanding baritone cannot overcome the sense that you’re watching an actor going through the motions, barely cognitive of the role he’s playing. Meanwhile, Mitchum seems to be enjoying the scenery and reciting the cliché-riddled lines.
Director Andrew V. McLaglen (“Shenandoah,” “Chisum”) doesn’t do much to keep this mostly uneventful story moving and fails completely to create any sense of tension or doom as soldiers prepare to engage each other in battle.
“Breakthrough” may not be the worst war picture ever made, but it may be the most disappointing considering it stars two of the finest actors of the postwar era. Just the year before, Burton had given an excellent performance in the film adaptation of “Equus,” while Mitchum, three years earlier, delivered one of his most memorable performances as Philip Marlow in “Farewell, My Lovely.”
I trust that Burton and Mitchum drank themselves to sleep each night after the shoot and had a great time exchanging “war” stories. As for watching the resulting movie, I would not advise doing it sober.
ONE FLEW OVER THE
CUCKOO’S NEST (1975)
When I first saw this movie, I was 19 and on a date. My mind was clearly on other matters, because I left the theater unimpressed.
I’ve seen “Cuckoo’s Nest” a few times since and now recognize it as an American classic, among the 100 best pictures in history. A recent viewing, after re-reading Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, increased my appreciation of the film, especially the screenplay by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben.
The back story on how the book became a movie would make for an interesting film itself. Kirk Douglas bought the rights to the novel—based on Kesey’s work as a volunteer at a veteran’s hospital--before it was published and eventually had writer Dale Wasserman turn it into a play. The actor starred in the 1963-64 Broadway production, which also featured Gene Wilder and Ed Ames. A few years later, on a goodwill trip to Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, Douglas meet a young director and was impressed enough to offer him a chance to direct the film version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Douglas promised to send him a copy of the play.
The director, Milos Forman, never received the book (Communist censors had confiscated it) and assumed the famous actor was all talk. But when Douglas’ son Michael took up the cause to get the film made in the 1970s, he offered it to Forman, now living in America.
Douglas chose Jack Nicholson for the role of R.P. McMurphy, a seemingly untamable rebel stuck in an institute where rules and discipline dictate life, after seeing his performance as the foul-mouthed Navy tough guy in “The Last Detail.”
Forman went with unknowns for the rest of the roles, including eventual best actress winner Louise Fletcher as the unrelenting Nurse Ratched and Will Sampson, a 6-5 Creek Indian discovered by a Portland car dealer.
Playing Chief Bromden, a patient who pretends to be deaf and dumb while constantly sweeping the floors, Sampson brings this unforgettable character to life and went on to play Indian roles in two dozen movies and TV productions until his death at 53 during lung-heart transplant surgery. Also playing patients were a very young Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, William Redfield and, as the stuttering Billy Bibbit, Brad Dourif.
The Chief narrates the book, using his apparent deafness as a cover to hear conversations he otherwise would never be privy to. Also, in the novel, it is the Chief’s depiction of the Combine and the Fog, imaginary elements of the vast machinery utilized by Nurse Ratched and her staff to control the patients, which transforms the book more than just a collection of adventures inside the nuthouse.
Goldman and Hauben brilliantly strip away the interior narrative of the book, making it McMurphy’s story rather than the Chief’s, without losing the theme of society’s crushing effect on individualism. Instead of the Chief being a prominent character from the start, he slowly emerges as an important ally of McMurphy and, ultimately, his protector. (The change greatly displeased Kesey, who also wasn’t happy with the casting of Nicholson, preferring Gene Hackman for McMurphy.)
What connects with audiences is McMurphy’s sanity; he’s an unruly troublemaker, but there’s nothing wrong with his mental state. He finagles his way into the facility hoping it will be an easier ride than the work farm he was confided to. At first, he’s quite pleased with himself, as he takes over the place, turning it into a virtual gambling parlor and then leading the inmates on a renegade fishing trip. But little does he know what fate has in store for him.
The screenwriters took a great novel, disassembled it and put it back together for the cinema in a way that utilizes the book’s best ideas, its heartbreaking moments and singular characters while creating their own work of art.
IN A BETTER WORLD (2011)
About halfway through this Danish drama that won the 2010 Oscar for foreign-language film I was baffled as to why anyone thought it worthy of any honor. Then, what appeared to be a rather ordinary tale of a pair of teenage boys with family and emotional issues, turns into a thought-provoking, intricately plotted thesis on the insidious nature of violence and how we confront its perpetrators.
This deceptively straight-forward story opens in an African refugee camp where Anton, a Danish physician (Mikael Persbrandt, looking like and with the calm resolve of a young Max von Sydow) is attending to the sick and injured, including a pregnant girl whose stomach has been cut open by the henchmen of a ruthless strongman for pure sport.
Back in Denmark, he attempts to teach him son, a regular victim of the school bully and his new friend, who just lost his mother to cancer, that responding to violence with more violence is a hopeless, losing battle.
In the boys’ black-and-white world, the father’s intellectualizing is lost and they seek revenge, first on the bully and then on an angry auto mechanic who gets into it with the doctor.
Christian (a memorably intense William Jøhnk Nielsen) is a very troubled boy who blames his father for his mother’s death and, in confused desperation, strikes out against the cruel world, bringing the more naïve Elias (Markus Rygaard) into his schemes. On the surface, Elias seems to be adjusting to the separation of his parents—his mother is also a doctor—better than they are, but nothing in this film stops at the surface. The story goes back and forth between Africa and Denmark as it depicts both children and adults relying on violence to vent their anger and express frustrations.
Director Susanne Bier and writer Anders Thomas Jensen, whose “After the Wedding” (2006) also received a foreign film Oscar nomination, display a steady hand as the film steadily becomes more emotionally involving and its issues move to the forefront. Yet Bier’s camera refuses to turn away from the violence or its devastating aftermath, whether it’s in a poor African village or on the playground of a suburban European city.
I can’t offer an opinion as to whether “In a Better World” deserved the Oscar, having not seen any of the other nominees (don’t get me started on why the year’s foreign film winner isn’t released in the U.S. until the following April), but I’m certain it will rank among the best films of 2011.
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