The films I'm talking about are not the multiplex fodder that most Americans think of when they think of "the movies" (myself frequently included); I mean the smaller films that barely have a chance to find an audience before getting yanked from the few art house chains and independent theaters that remain and that never play in the sticks. I should confess, though, that I am not a very good cinephile. I will rarely travel far to see a good film - these days, it's tough to get me to leave the island, though I will do it for a special film that I won't get to see in a theater otherwise or that I feel I MUST see as soon as possible.
For instance, as a die-hard Woody Allen fan, I will always see his latest film immediately upon release. Most of them vanish shortly thereafter, although this year's effort, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, became popular enough to get a wider release and even won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy. So, good for Woody. This week, too, I plan to go to San Francisco to see the "roadtrip" version of Steven Soderbergh's Che, in which the whole film is shown rather than broken up into two parts. Four hours long? Shot on the Red One? Soderbergh and Del Toro? Violently mixed reviews? Cinephile catnip!
Last week, Scott and I traveled to Berkeley to see The Wrestler. We had heard all the buzz, so we had to catch it. I found the film to be very moving and satisfying, with minimal schmaltz and a quietly extraordinary performance from Mickey Rourke. Marisa Tomei, who has always seemed to me to be working hard (and impressively) to actually earn that Oscar she got way back in 1992, is also great here. I had been thinking about The Wrestler for a few days until I spoke to my film school buddy, Andy, who pointed out how terrible the script is - and he's right. The script for The Wrestler is a paint-by-numbers quickie sports-movie formula piece, with an embarrassingly awful subplot involving Rourke's estranged daughter. It could easily be that "Wallace Beery wrestling picture" Barton Fink finds himself unable to write.
But his argument left me strangely unmoved and failed to change my impression much. It's true that Andy and I have often disagreed about movies in the past - he has frequently said that I "like everything," an untrue statement on its face, but indicative of my ability to be swept away - but here it's not that we disagreed, exactly. It's that, at a certain point, the film went somewhere for me that I found quite interesting. Early on, the Tomei character quotes the passage in Isaiah that predicts the suffering of the Messiah and the redemption of believers - "by his stripes, we are healed" - which she unironically attributes to the film The Passion of the Christ. She's suggesting that the way Rourke's washed-up professional wrestler abuses his own body for our entertainment is not unlike what that Jesus character in the Passion undergoes. After I heard this, I felt I understood something essential about the character and about the filmmakers' purpose - it's a film about a man who believes he's nothing more than a piece of meat, good for nothing but a beating, and about his messy, faltering, daily search for redemption.
As an allegory, in its moving story and in its the performances, The Wrestler far transcends its script; I think it's Darren Aronofsky's best work to date. Fans of the Dardennes will note with interest some of the camerawork in the film, too - the Belgian brothers have developed a distinctive style for their super-realist dramas, two of which have won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in the last decade, in which they frequently hover their hand-held camera just over their subject's shoulder. Aronofsky co-opts this style frequently in his film in a way that, for me at least, immediately recalled The Son or Rosetta, among other films. I suppose if the Dardennes are, perhaps, the most-celebrated neo-realists working today (for lack of a better term), it makes sense that this kind of camera work (hardly unique to them, but somewhat unusual in narrative film) has become a kind of shorthand for "authenticity." A bit of a cheap trick, really, that Aronofsky uses only occasionally - but it's nice to see him trying new things.
Another film that makes much better use of Dardenne-style camerawork, less obtrusively and more rigorously fused with an objectively framed, devastatingly omissive mise-en-scene, is the 2007 Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, by Romanian writer/director, Cristian Mungiu. I only saw this recently, on DVD, and it's an example of the kind of film that I am sometimes too lazy to see. Another is the likewise highly-praised, The Edge of Heaven, which I have had from Netflix for several weeks now. 4 Months I had for about four months. Okay, not that long; as the film is about an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania, my very-pregnant wife opted out, and I assumed I was in for a big downer and it took me a little while (and her being out of town) to pop it into the DVD player.
I am very glad I did. It's an extraordinary film, powerful, clear-eyed and straightforward - it takes place in nearly real time and makes no political statements about abortion, apart from simply depicting the harrowing, horrifying ordeal of such a procedure under a dictatorship in which it's illegal. Most striking for me - because from early on I could see I would not be spared much, though the worst moment takes place off-screen - were the relationships. Otilia and her pregnant friend, Gabita, reminded me very strongly of some of the young women I knew in college. These women had extremely intense, emotional friendships of the kind that appear quite strange to young men, for whom things might be simpler or more straightforward, relationships that are sometimes strengthened by awful behavior rather than kindness, as if that awfulness itself is an assurance of intimacy: I would never dare to treat anyone else so horribly and with such selfishness; it is only because we are like sisters that I am willing to do so. It is not worth citing specifics because - if anyone were to actually read this post - I would hope not to ruin one minute of this film, which must be the best of the year.
I want to move now, quickly, through a few other films that I have seen recently, as I try to catch up with 2008:
Gran Torino, is a funny, satisfying bit of hokum, starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. The trailer sold the film as some kind of geriatric Dirty Harry film; in reality, it's another of Eastwood's sly revisionist takes on his violent persona, like Unforgiven, though not nearly as fine a work as that film. If sentimental and a bit hokey at times, this story of a ridiculously cranky, racist old-timer who loves his vintage Gran Torino and little else has enough specific and unique details of time, place and character to help the film work pretty well. Eastwood's character helped build the titular muscle car as a Ford mechanic in better times, and Eastwood-the-director clearly felt a resonance in this story of an old, muscular American archetype who finds the world changing all around him, even as he tries to cling to what he knows. It's a terrific performance, both gentle and foaming at the mouth, wise and reckless, stern and hilarious. (Seeing this film made me want to go back and watch the Dirty Harry films, the first two of which I screened over the weekend. They're a lot of silly fun, of course, but it's also interesting to see the San Francisco of the 70s as well as the filmmaking style of that time. And Clint Eastwood in the first Dirty Harry film must certainly have the Best Haircut in Cinema.)
Doubt is an example of the oft-tested rule that prize-winning plays rarely translate to the screen. Kim and I saw the film while we were up in Red Bluff, with a very well-behaved crowd, which I appreciated. And I think the blue-hairs in the audience had a nice time discussing the film afterwards; Kim and I actually had a long conversation about it as well. Any film that generates productive argument after leaving the theater has gotta be worth something, I'll give it that. For me, I guess I simply did not have any of the "doubt" about what happened that supposedly drives the film. The story, set in the 1950s, is about whether or not a priest at a Catholic school had some kind of inappropriate relationship with a young male student. Absolutely nothing in the film made me suspect that the priest had acted inappropriately. Nothing. Not the fact that he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who always plays total schlubs and creepy losers, not the fact that he had longer-than-usual fingernails, not the fact that Meryl Streep demolished him and all available scenery in every scene she "shared" with him (which made it a pretty fun performance to watch, don't get me wrong - but I was certainly watching a performance, not any kind of recognizable human being). However, it became clear after leaving the theater that many other viewers thought the film was much more ambiguous than did I. Well, fine. Glad they enjoyed it.Finally, a film I recently saw on DVD that many people probably also missed this year: In Bruges. Written and directed by the talented playwright, Martin McDonagh, it's one of those rare films that manages to balance beautifully between pitch-black comedy, poignant drama and violent action. Tonal shifts like that are very tough to pull off; on top of that, theater writers don't often make great screenwriters, let alone directors. McDonagh makes it all look easy here, making the tired hitmen-out-of-water genre fresh again with clever dialogue, rich characters, and genuinely heart-stopping twists and turns. Colin Farrell gives the best performance of his that I've seen - he's wonderfully oafish, idiotic, hilarious and moving, all at once - with terrific work from Brendan Gleason and Ralph Fiennes. Farrell pulled off an upset at the Golden Globes by winning in the comedic acting category - a richly deserved and unexpected win.
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