FRANCES HA 5/26/13

Finding roommates in NYC, “the city of all possibilities” to share your space and often your innermost dreams and insecurities is the backdrop of the eccentric, sometimes annoying comic/tragic film FRANCES HA, directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written with Greta Gerwig who plays the Frances of the title. The Ha part will be wittily explained in the final frame. The movie is shot in a sepia tone – no color to distract from our fundamental human needs – finding a home, finding love and/or companionship, realizing our ambitions, and finding the economic means to do so, in this case preferably in the arts, covering the wide gamut of the “creative” spectrum. No character is a day-laborer - all come from the subculture of talented, yearning, touching on 30 year olds that populate our fair city moving from Chinatown to Washington Heights, and even dipping a toe into Brooklyn. But things are not always black and white – luminous grays make the city and its characters both more depressing and also more transparent.

We meet Frances (Greta Gerwig) and the beloved roommate  Sophie (Mickey Sumner) acting a bit bizarrely “mock fighting” on the streets of NYC, but then falling into one another’s arms in laughter. This scene encapsulates the intensity of their relationship as most adored best friends who can communicate, understand and accept one another – no “guy” intrudes on this special bond. NOT until Sophie announces that she is going to leave and move into another apartment with her boyfriend aptly named Patch. This shocking announcement leaves the loyal Frances at very loose ends. An aspiring dancer, and not a very good one, (but a much better choreographer,) she spends the rest of the movie wildly searching for a Sophie substitute – not only to live with, but to rekindle what was once a cherished kinship. Platonic vs. romantic love, the deeply affecting roots of each are explored.

My movie mate observed (and I agree with her) that Greta Gerwig is an actress who is always Greta Gerwig – like the Diane Keaton of Woody Allen films is always Diane Keaton. There seems to be a cult following for this lovely actress who through her body gestures proclaims contradictions. Tall, lithe, slightly awkward, and overtly “bouncy”– skipping and running like a gazelle along the streets of NYC, as if the sheer beauty of movement can overcome despair.

Throughout the film, Frances is so vulnerable, dependent, and oblivious to social cues, that I cringed and squirmed uncomfortably, watching how she talked too much, desperately searching to communicate – “searchers” who are too obvious are often avoided because they embarrass others – until she finally settles down within herself after a brief not-the-usual-kind of interlude to Paris. From being irritated with her character, I gradually, and surprisingly, found myself touched by Frances to the point of feeling tender affection for this fragile, oddball spirit, and was disconcerted to find that I was holding back tears.

Frances’ “coming of age” story involves a trip back to her family home in Sacramento where we experience her role as daughter with both parents (acted by her actual mother and father) in a caring environment, and a short but revelatory stint back to her Vassar College haunts. An oft-explored idea is revisited - sometimes we have to go away to come back and re-connect with our lives afresh.  I have known people like Frances who are earnest and ambitious, tender yet steely and ballsy enough to discern what is needed to take what little control they can over their lives. Director Noah Baumbach skirts the all-too-familiar tightrope of clichés to make FRANCES HA worth viewing.

THE GREAT GATSBY 5/11/13

I am NOT a Baz Luhrmann fan with his self-conscious overindulgence in excess. Lately I have been paying more attention to the opening credits (down to the fonts that are used) shown at the beginning of a film, giving me a glimpse into what I will have to look forward to for the next few hours. So from the start, my aesthetic taste was being tested as I inwardly cringed at a movie that straddled comedy and tragedy ending up being a burlesque parody.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby has been laying on my night table ready to be picked up and read for about a month, but if I were to judge the original book by this adaptation, I would toss it into the garbage. I love a unique literary voice – and language – but this flat lusterless cinematic interpretation could not be saved by the glitter and gloss which screamed out at us with every frame – no cake under all that icing.

Despite Director Baz Luhrmann’s cast of fine actors, they were unable to breathe life into this romantic fable of deception and obsessive love set in the “free-spirited” postwar 1920’s “Flapper Era.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, portrayed by Tobey Maguire, is the linchpin of the story that begins and ends with worshipful utterances about his mysterious, wealthy, ostentatious party-hosting neighbor - the flamboyant Jay Gatsby (a preening Leonardo Di Caprio,) who adores Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) a daughter of “old money”, married to a racist, womanizing “lout.”  The plot thickens when we find out that Daisy and Jay were once lovers  - the re-telling of an oft-told tale.

This film version of The Great Gatsby never convinced nor touched me. Why did Gatsby merit such fascination, unless it was the allure of the  Horatio Alger myth  reaching for the dream of America’s unlimited opportunities in a society that claims to eschew class distinctions?

If you love spectacle this is a movie for you. I found it visually boring and commonplace. 

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST 5/6/13

Indian director Mira Nair’s new film THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST  based on Mohsin Hamid's novel short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, literally collides with current events and the ethos that perhaps formed the psychology of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. This is a movie about desire, disappointment and disillusionment between two worlds that are harder and harder to keep separate, hurtling towards one another with a speed that seems unstoppable. It is also about the “roots” of the formation of one’s basic ideology, and how “beliefs” can blossom and decay via explosive circumstances. We see the intersection of two vital individuals, each embracing their expatriate countries, whose lives are pulled in opposite directions, based on the events of September 11^th 2001 and their own personal collision course toward catastrophe.

The movie titles appear on the screen from the last letter of a name spelled in reverse – an indication of the back and forth in time and the cultural breakdown between two changing societies – America and Pakistan. We first meet Changez  (complexly portrayed by Riz Ahmed) in 2011, ambitious, and self-confident in a café in Lahore, Pakistan talking with an American journalist/author named Bobby (Liev Schreiber), a man ingrained enough in this region to speak fluent Urdu. Bobby is there to interview Changez about the recent kidnapping of a respected American professor in the school where the young man teaches. This abduction turns out to be the catalyst that moves the film’s plot, giving it a sense of tension while merging with the Pakistani protagonist’s interior and exterior moral conversion. Through the recording sessions we travel back ten years and experience this brilliantly original young man – a Princeton graduate complete with a lovely artist/photograher girl friend (Kate Hudson,) living a privileged life in his adopted homeland and his transformation into a “reluctant fundamentalist.”

Ten years before, Changez was a Wall Street analyst mentored by Jim Cross (a terrific Kiefer Sutherland) whose robotic body movements are in perfect synch with the conglomerate that he leads, its powerful global tentacles dug into corporations all over the world. We also are witness to Changez’s own ruthlessness in business and his indifference to the livelihoods of the workers his expediting cost-cutting decisions affect. Changez’s conduct propels him to greater success in his grasp for the “American Dream.” But everything changes after the horrific attack on the World Trade Center Towers, launching a xenophobic response from some of Changez’s colleagues as well as public service employees that he encounters on the streets of NYC and at airports while traveling for business. Racism, the abrogation of civil liberties, and profiling intrude on Changez’s idyllic corporate environment as well as his intrinsic values, and he eventually returns to Pakistan - too smart to be conscripted by any "terrorist" group though his political sympathies have been inherently altered.

Music and song – voices filled with longing and poignancy are also at the core of this film and contribute to its enigmatic surroundings. Contrasting visual environments - the dark and mysterious ambiance of Pakistan vs. the clear, brisk light of New York City felt too pat and obvious, but I was moved by the story of this sensitive young person whose life is shattered by unforeseen violence, and the impact it made on his belief system. I cannot help but think of the prisoners who have been locked up in Guantanamo Bay prison camps for 10 years and how those years of confinement, without a trial, have radicalized those who might have been innocent. The ideas in this movie are worth pondering over and over again. The tragedy continues.

IN THE HOUSE (DANS LA MAISON) 4/29/13

The director François Ozon’s new film IN THE HOUSE (DANS LA MAISON) is an unusually structured movie where the plot construct is self-consciously overweening. I am still mulling over my own response to IN THE HOUSE. The interweaving of reality and fantasy, the dislocation of time, the artifice of the “story-line,” and the nature of the teacher/student relationship, becomes the movie’s dizzying underpinnings. YES this one is still rattling around in my head especially since I have been insinuating myself into historical works of art, through the manipulation of photographs for the past few years, so I felt an uneasy personal affinity to the blurring of the edges of fact and fiction.

The film starts off with digital animations that rush by us on the screen during the opening titles – so we are visually alerted to the fact that what we see can be toyed with, and we are not dealing with traditional straightforward movie fare. We then  meet one of the two protagonists – Monsieur Germain, the teacher (Fabrice Luchini)  who is at a meeting in a Lycee (High School) named after one of France’s greatest authors - Gustave Flaubert (the ultimate literary stylist), a clue that we will be dealing with ideas about writing and the “creative” process.

Monsieur Germain, a self acknowledged “failed” novelist is grading assigned papers at home, disgusted and bored with the level of idiocy in his writing class complaining to his Art Gallerist, equally self-absorbed wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) about his students, when he reads an essay titled “In The House” containing a spark of lucidity and a flair for language and  observation written by Claude Garcia (confidently acted by  Ernst Umhauer.) We then meet this handsome 16 year-old boy who is furtively spying on another young man, his home and family. Claude’s background is barely revealed; we know he lives alone with a disabled father- his mother having left the family when he was a child. By the intensity of his expression and the mutually collaborative passion of the symbiotic student/teacher relationship, we become aware of Claude’s obsessive desire for what he perceives as “normalcy.”

We, the audience, are then drawn into the film’s ensuing drama, witnessing the endless revisions, editing and re-editing of the original “In The House” essay. Ultimately Claude through his friendship with the "model" family's son gains access into the “house” and participates in their family life, where he himself becomes a pivotal, creepy, catalytic force in the development of the narrative. Subsequent episodes psychologically reveal the lives of the characters that Claude covets. Throughout this complicated stagecraft, the student is in constant collaboration with his abject teacher  who is advising him as to style and literary do’s and don’t's, and occasionally pops up (invisible to others) at critical moments in the film with plot contrivances and recommendations.

The prevailing question is how much of what we are seeing is real and how much is simulated by a fertile imagination? Watching IN THE HOUSE I felt drained by the brain-twisting, chilling and yet pathetically touching incidents of a boy in need of a family, and having to invent one – over and over again. 

MUD 4/27/13

Jeff Nichols the director of MUD was also the director of TAKE SHELTER – a film whose hallucinatory cinematography stayed with me so “hard and long” that eventually I needed to make a painting to push it out of my head. MUD has some of that same visual power and palpable sense of place – this time we are not in the fields of Ohio, but rather in Arkansas in houseboats along the Mississippi River.

This is a movie about trust, and LOVE, revealing the different forms this powerful emotion engenders - familial love, obsessive love, romantic love, the innocence of first love, and the disillusionment that often comes when we eventually step out of love’s rose-colored “bubble” and come face to face with the reality of loss and separation - all seen through the eyes of young boys inching toward adulthood. Two expressive smart fourteen years old best buddies, the sensitive dreamer Ellis (soulfully acted by Tye Sheridan) and his more down-to-earth pal Neckbone (Jacob Lofland ) live their lives and participate in their family livelihood along the banks of the Mississippi River; the river being a major character in this film beautifully unearthing mysteries and the expansive dream of freedom.

 One early morning the two boys piloting their motorboat come upon a magical scene – a large boat perched in a tree on an island in the bayou. They decide that this will be their secret hideout. But upon further investigation they find that someone else is already living there. We then encounter a scraggly man called Mud ( Matthew McConaughey acting against pretty-boy type) who is both chilling and portentous, but also vulnerable and in need of help. Ellis, with the candor and freshness of youth, trusts his intuition and decides to assist this stranger - the quintessential vagabond who can spin yarns that enchant. The more skeptical friend Neckbone goes along for the proverbial “ride”, but eventually he too is bewitched by Mud’s persona and his explanation for why he is hungry, literally exposed, and in circumstances fraught with danger. Reese Witherspoon plays Juniper the gorgeous long-legged, woman – the actualization of Mud’s life-long fantasies and his Achilles heel. Sam Shepard whose presence often steals most scenes, is again stoic and compelling, portraying  another sphinxlike loner  living on the river who has a past relationship with Mud and along with Michael Shannon (the hero of TAKE SHELTER) a surrogate father figure.

The boys are then drawn into a complicated scenario of flight, menace and rescue. Ellis, with his essential goodness strengthened because of meeting the enigmatic Mud, displays an honesty and directness which is unusually refreshing. He ultimately accepts his own family's intricate relationship, and becomes prepared to  confront the puzzle that is life with his youthful idealism still intact.

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES 4/20/13

I am attracted to films that allow me to enter lives and sub-cultures that often are chilling, alarming and at the same time perversely compelling. I am able to penetrate worlds that I do not inhabit, but am afforded a glimpse into a cloudy window of human despair and joy. Therein lies the fascination and I am able to do this in the refuge of a darkened theater. The director Derek Cianfrance’s new movie The Place Beyond the Pines is an ambitious attempt, but not a wholly successful one, to address what I felt was a profane “reckoning.” Coincidence and “karma” are underscored in this multi-generational film of fathers and sons; the tragic deeds– even in the act of extreme confusion and good intentions - will be handed down upon their sons.

An electric Ryan Gosling plays Luke a motorcycle “drifter” whose actions in an attempt to behave responsibly and to monetarily support a one-year-old son, the existence of which he recently became aware of, and the ensuing consequences of his reckless exploits, evolves into the narrative groundwork that weaves throughout this film. Not only is Luke’s appearance frightening– tattooed to the hilt, living an aimless life on the precipice - he nevertheless, through the emotions perceptible in his facial expressions, is able to elicit our sympathy with a humanity that belies his outward veneer. Ryan Gosling is an actor that is so riveting that he takes over every scene; his presence sucks the life out of most other performers, though Ben Mendelsohn as his accomplice, a fellow ‘outcast”, is clearly up to the task and does not disappoint.

The story contrasts Luke the “outlaw” with a young, idealistic policeman Avery, played by Bradley Cooper, also with a young son, who eventually “hunts” the "vagabond" down. Cooper does not have the interior girth to make me care about him, but soon he becomes the crux of the film - which I found to be a weakness - fighting corruption and tapping into his own appetites for success and eventually participating in the political arena. Guilt, regret and the past are the haunting motifs of the rest of the movie. Fifteen years later, we see the consequences of these emotions on the two protagonists’ young sons as they grow up and eventually meet up and collide in High School where the drama from years ago explodes anew. 

The circle is completed.

42 4/13/13

I cannot write about director Brian Helgeland’s new movie 42 and be clearly objective since baseball is so tied up with some of my greatest childhood feelings of elation and sorrow. I sat in the darkened theater choked up with tears in my eyes – pure nostalgia – for how much baseball meant to my twin sister and I, and the passion with which we rooted for rival teams - Florence was the Brooklyn Dodgers fan and I was an avid New York Giants fan. During the baseball season, my father who personally cared nothing about the game, took us weekends on the subway either to Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds whenever the teams played at home. Our shared sibling bedroom wall was divided down the middle – like an iron curtain - with posters of Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Roy Campanella, etc. on her side of the room, and Willie Mays, Don Mueller, Bobby Thomson, Monte Irvin, Hank Thompson, Sal Maglie, etc. on mine.

42 is an interesting, and admittedly sentimental, baseball film about the intense desire of Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), the Brooklyn Dodger’s General Manager to integrate baseball and to find the one baseball player in The Negro Leagues who could withstand the pressure and racism that Rickey knew would be heaped upon the super athlete who broke the “color barrier” in this our National – NOT All- American pastime. That person was Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) and the choice was an ideal one as he was a great baseball player (42 was the number on his uniform) who had enough confidence to brave and confront this heroic task, not with his temper, but with his bat and glove on the baseball diamond. Off the field we are offered an intimate love story between Jackie and his beautiful wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) who is as spirited as he is, and from the onset of their relationship his main supporter notwithstanding the simplistic Hollywood-style treatment of woman as helpmeet.

 The film is not reluctant nor does it gloss over the prevalence of racism wherever Robinson played; be it on the field, among teammates, in the stands, in the baseball administrative hierarchy, and of course in the showers. Chadwick Boseman looks like Jackie Robinson and gives an admirably stoic performance deflecting the taunts and abuse – both verbal and physical thrown at him– while still maintaining his character’s dignity. I was distracted seeing Harrison Ford’s strangely warped make up, and his theatrical depiction as Branch Rickey, a character who spouts the Bible and Greek mythology in one breath, as well as avuncular philosophical advice with the next. I personally loved seeing baseball legends, those I had actually seen play, such as Pee Wee Reese, Ralph Branca,  Eddie Stanky,  Enos Slaughter and Leo – oh that philanderer!- Leo Durocher “revealed/exposed” through their interactions with Jackie Robinson.

The theater erupted with applause at the end of the movie. I too clapped – something I rarely ever do, knowing that in my case memory and the personal were the measure of my response. Before I even left the theater I called my sister. No, this was not a great movie, but yes, it was great entertainment and its message should be told over and over again to the men and women and particularly the youth that will be its audience.