Dance Me to the End of Love

Wim Wenders takes us to the river in Pina.

* * * Pina.  Written and directed by Wim Wenders. In English, German, and French.

Inside the world of modern dance, the profile of German choreographer Pina Bausch was as high as Bill T. Jones, Alvin Ailey, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham and other, more recognizable names. This will likely change for the rest of us with the arrival of Wim (Wings of Desire, Paris Texas) Wenders’ film tribute, Pina. Though it has been nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar this year, calling Wenders’ film a “documentary” arguably stretches the term too far. What Pina “documents” is a truly visionary imagination whose productions could be as surpassingly strange as any fiction.

            Like the works of many of her contemporaries, Bausch created original dance pieces that elude easy description. Through the 1970’s and ‘80’s, her Tanztheatre Wuppertal was renowned for surreal, evocative productions combining intense, elemental emotions with equally elemental stage settings. Her dancers didn’t just glide over a stage—they cavorted with dirt, water, rocks, even ice. Bausch’s method could be as ineffable as her themes; one dancer interviewed by Wenders recalls the only direction she received in twenty years under her was “Get crazier.” (Other, equally Delphic pronouncements included “Go on searching” and “Dance for love.”) However she did it, in classic pieces like Rite of Spring (1975) and Café Müller (1978) Bausch went places that don’t have names, dancing on the edge of a razor between exaltation and chaos.

            Film and dance have a long history together, but the marriage is not necessarily a natural one. A movie can record an impression of movement, but at the cost of the physicality that gives a live performance its scale, its special electricity. Wenders made Pina to be seen in 3D, but I saw it sans glasses, and didn’t really miss it. His most effective move, rather, lies in breaking Bausch’s work loose from the confines of the theatre, taking it out into forests, tunnels, trams, factories, escalators and other ordinary locations. By making the “where” as interesting here as the “what”, Wenders renders Pina into a true collaboration.

            Alas, the collaboration turned out to only one-way: two days before filming was set to begin in 2009, Bausch died suddenly at the age of 68. The shock of that sudden loss inflects everything in the film. Most obviously, it makes Pina into a valedictory in which her genius is showcased, but her humanity is obscured. Nobody could have produced works of such demanding precision without stepping on a few toe-shoes—to “get crazier” necessarily must have led her to some dark places. Wenders is understandably loathe to suggest ill of the dead, but a real documentary should not have been. A bit too much of this film has her former collaborators sitting in dejected silence, unable to fathom that she is gone.

            Indeed, there were quite a few moments in Pina when I was perplexed or bored. If dance on film can never get any deeper for you than the “When You’re a Jet” number in West Side Story, this may not be the trip for you. But there are also many passages of ravishing, oblique beauty, like the bastard spawn of Julie Taymor and Tarsim Singh. Bausch’s personal search may be over, but at least we still have the snapshots she sent back.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

Dude Looks Like a Lady

Mia Wasikowska and Glenn Close promenade in Albert Nobbs

* * 1/2  Albert Nobbs.  Written by Glenn Close, John Banville  & Gabriella Prekop, based on a short story by George Moore. Directed by Rodrigo Garcia.

Next to The Iron Lady, where Meryl Streep convincingly plays a woman pretending to be a man, this year’s gender-bending honors go to Rodrigo Garcia’s Albert Nobbs.  From The Year of Living Dangerously to Tootsie to Boys Don’t Cry, Oscar loves cross-dressing—maybe as much as it loves disabilities. It is perhaps understandable, then, that we approach Nobbs with a certain amount of cynicism.

            The eponymous Nobbs (Glenn Close) is a mousy, fastidious creature who works as a waiter in a second-tier Dublin hotel sometime early in the last century. Such establishments were like the heavily-staffed “great houses” beloved of BBC period dramas— places that operated under a working truce between upstairs and backstairs. Nobbs, a model employee, is so good at seeming unexceptional in both worlds that he’s under the radar before radar was even invented.  The script (written in collaboration with Close herself) isn’t coy long about why: “Mister” Nobbs is a woman on the run from a bitter past as an orphan, who tolerates years of scurrying like a rat in hopes of achieving her dream of one day owning her own tobacco-shop.

            The prerequisite here lies in playing a woman who masquerades as a man so well she fools her colleagues for years. Close lends Nobbs a certain physical dignity by giving him a lack of flexibility in his neck and shoulders, as if a man is just a woman with fewer working joints, and speaks in a whatever is the opposite of a falsetto but sounds equally phony.  Poor Nobbs is somehow hairless as a gecko at a time when facial hair on men was de rigeur, has no discernible Adam’s apple, and works long hours at the hotel but never shows a hint of five o’clock shadow.  In this, Close’s performance is more admirable than convincing.

            None of these problems are fatal, though. Nobbs’ real ambition, after all, is not to be a man but to be invisible. Though some might take this movie to be about the freedom to express one’s inner sexual identity—to mistake it for transgender empowerment or some equally absurd anachronism—the script is emphatically not about any of that. Nobbs is pretending for economic reasons, just as the hotel’s cut-throat owner (Pauline Collins) selectively plays the hapless ninny and local handyman (Aaron Johnson) pretends to be a expert boiler mechanic when he isn’t. As hinted at by the hotel’s carousing nobles (The Tudors’ Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in a strangely abortive role), true gender-bending has always been with us, but only as the prerogative of the leisure classes.

            Amid the general drabness, the film presents one bright spot in Janet McTeer’s deft performance as Hubert, a housepainter with a secret much like Nobbs’. Where Close comes off as a skilled actress working hard to play a man, McTeer just seems mannish without any of the artifice or fuss. Hubert walks around with a bust bigger than Dolly Parton’s, yet nobody would dare accuse this hulking, man-breasted dude of being a lady—and we just believe it. Whatever McTeer is playing, she finds some element of joy in an otherwise dreary story. Let Oscar take notice.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

The Sorrows of Young Johann

Stein and Fehling do the ordinary thing in Young Goethe in Love

***  Young Goethe in Love. Written by Alexander Dydyna, Christoph Müller & Philipp Stölzl . Directed by Philipp Stölzl. In German. Available from Netflix.

Though we live in an anti-intellectual age, bio-pics about elite Dead White Males are not quite extinct. The condition is that the emphasis must never be on their genius or any particular ideas they might have espoused. Instead, in films like Amadeus, Immortal Beloved, and Shakespeare in Love we see great minds doing ordinary, non-elite things, such as being young, getting hammered, getting sued, and falling in love. In other words, we like our geniuses to be just like the rest of us—only more so.

            In Philipp Stölzl’s Young Goethe in Love, we meet the progenitor of German romanticism, one of the towering polymaths of any age, in his salad days as a legal apprentice. More specifically, we see him being young, getting hammered, and falling in love. How much does this movie want to bring this Ur-genius down to earth? Perhaps allowing for the possibility of a blockbuster Disney musical down the road, its original title was Goethe!

            As played here by Alexander Fehling, young Goethe (say Gew-ta) is a good-natured scamp, a law-school washout and a disappointment to his father (Henry Hübchen).  Sent to clerk in the backwater town of Wetzlar, Goethe soon finds trouble in the form of a local mädchen (Miriam Stein) whom the script declines to call by her full name—Charlotte—but by the suggestively Bond-girlish “Lotte Buff”. A soloist in the church choir, Lotte has a corresponding artistic temperament, and best of all appreciates Goethe’s brand of poetry, which eschews the classical allusions popular at the time in favor of a certain immediacy of feeling. Trouble is, Goethe’s boss (Moritz Bleibtreu) has also set his powdered wig in Lotte’s direction.

            How does it turn out? Goethe’s real Wetzlar misadventures formed the basis of his first literary success, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774),  an epistolary novel about a young law student driven to despair by love. The book has been credited as the first popular best-seller in the history of modern fiction, and the foundational work of the Romantic movement. It also led to a wave of actual suicides by lovelorn young men in Europe.

            Goethe was a heavyweight, but Young Goethe has a pleasant, feather-light feel that is (as one character quips) more Sturm und Drunk than Sturm und Drang. Though the script is full of coincidences and “did I happen to mention?” moments typical of the bodice-and-culottes genre, it boasts strong performances that make it work anyway. There’s real chemistry between Fehling and Stein, whose pairing suggests a young Heath Ledger travelling back two decades to co-star with an emerging Sean Young.  The latter looks like she might have stepped out of a Gainsborough painting, yet—charmingly—she doesn’t seem to own a comb.  Even Bleibtreu, as Goethe’s plodding bourgeois rival, earns his share of pathos here. The combination of pretty faces, appealing performances, and ravishing production design makes this feel less like a European production than Hollywood at its most entertainingly middlebrow.

            The real Goethe went on not only to become a literary lion, but to contribute meaningfully to natural sciences like botany and physics, and play a part in setting the context for Darwin’s insights into evolution.  He also loomed large as a cultural influence, both by reputation, by active research in history and folklore, and by his inspiration of musicians like Mozart and Beethoven, and thinkers such as Hegel, Jung, and Nietzche. Nor was his affair with Lotta Buff the be-all and end-all of his romantic career—he had several momentous loves before her, and had an affair later with Christiane Vulpius that, after a brush with death during the Napoleonic Wars, became a long and mutually fulfilling marriage. In short, the months covered in the film is perhaps the least interesting of Goethe’s life and afterlife. But if Goethe! gets us thinking more about of the seminal figures of modernity, then what’s a few tipped tankards and unlaced bodices in the process? 

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro     

The Streetfighter Experience

Carano and Fassbender have a bad date in Haywire.

* *  Haywire. Written by Directed by Lem Dobbs. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. 

Director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Che, Traffic) is developing a pattern of casting unorthodox female leads for his films. For The Girlfriend Experience (2009) we got porn star Sasha Grey in her first mainstream role, and under Soderbergh’s direction, not badly acquitting herself. Now we have Haywire, in which Gina Carano, a championship-level “mixed martial arts” fighter (currently 7-1 in competition) plays a black ops super-soldier out for revenge against her double-crossing employer (Ewan MacGregor). So does she do as well as the porn star?

            The short answer is, well, yeah. And while this film will undoubtedly make more money than Grey’s, and Carano can almost certainly kick her ass (and Ron Jeremy’s too), it’s also a far more formulaic movie than The Girlfriend Experience. In fact, after the unexpected pleasures of Soderbergh’s last film, Contagion, Haywire seems so numbingly conventional as to be actually depressing.

            Carano is Mallory, a former Marine now in the so-called “private sector” of covert ops. By some contortions of Lem Dobbs’ incomprehensible script, she is sent on a mission to Barcelona that turns out to be a set up, which she instantly and without apparent justification sniffs out. Naturally, instead of escaping to make inquiries from a safe location, she goes on a Jason Bourne-style vendetta against MacGregor, his pal Antonio Banderas, her ex-partner (Channing Tatum), and anybody else with a gun and a penis who happens to be in the way. And while she’s unstoppable, and she’s relentless, and swears “I don’t wear the dress,” she apparently does pause to put on lip-gloss before heading out to kick male butt. Bet neither Tom Cruise nor Matt Damon could pull that off.

            There is a lot of action in Haywire, and some of it is well done. Soderbergh shoots Carano’s fight scenes at eye-level and with minimal cutting—just a master (or is that a mistress?) of her craft showing her skills. Then again, the professional actors here look pretty skilled too, including Michael Fassbender as an MI-6 agent so scrawny he’d barely outweigh Taylor Swift. Carano is no siren in a catsuit, no Kate Beckinsale. Her appeal lies in bringing a certain pantherish grace to the mat, along with a thick, Gina Gershon-esque sensuality. But it’s still not obvious here what a professional fighter can bring to a movie that a professional actor can’t, with coaching.

            Perhaps the best (as in symptomatic) scene here is when Carano and Fassbender come back to their hotel room from a dinner date. Both look good, and the air between them is charged with erotic possibility—until they get into the room and start beating the bejesus out of each other. This is symptomatic because this, apparently, is what we Americans would rather see two attractive, unattached people do in a hotel room than the obvious alternative.

            To his credit, Soderbergh has developed a style that can make a shit sandwich taste like it just needs a little mayonnaise. Though Haywire is a formula movie through and through, he works hard to deglamorize it, to shun the marquee set-pieces and landmarks typical of, say, the Mission: Impossible movies. Here, everything is just a little more ordinary, just a little bit smaller than life. The result isn’t the worst thing in the world. But one can’t help thinking that a guy with Soderbergh’s talent should stop wasting his time making better-than-average shit sandwiches.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

Don't Eat the Cobbler

Foster, Reilly, Waltz and Winslet stuff their pie-holes in Carnage

*** 1/2 (out of five stars) Carnage. Written by Yasmina Reza & Roman Polanski, based on a play by Yasmina Reza. Directed by Roman Polanski. 

Two couples, strangers to each other, meet in a Brooklyn apartment. Broker Nancy (Kate Winslet) and corporate lawyer Alan (Christoph Waltz) are a New York power couple; writer Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly), a hardware supply salesman, are a pair with a working class/bohemian feel. The purpose of their meeting is to work out an amicable settlement of a schoolyard fight between their kids, wherein Penelope and Michael’s son lost a couple of teeth. The tone at first is cordial, as all think of themselves as “evolved” human beings, and are nothing if not reasonable people. And indeed, all goes well—until Penelope uses a few provocative terms to describe the beating (“intentional” and “disfigured”), and Alan the lawyer, who annoys everyone by not turning off his cell phone, turns to Penelope and asks—with threadbare civility—“Now why would you use a word like ‘disfigured’?”

            Thus begins the descent into decidedly unevolved behavior that is Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play, The God of Carnage. To call this film enjoyable is perhaps to stretch the meaning of “enjoyable” for some people. By turns appalling, outrageous, dispiriting, and yes, hilarious, the best comparison to it might be Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—albeit in a polite urban setting instead of an academic one. The pleasure here, as in the Edward Albee play, lies in watching the complacent masks people wear in public slip, droop, and fall away. Not exactly a good date movie, this.

            What it does offer is four terrific actors making the most of a script so sharp it may just make your ears bleed. Reza, a daughter of Iranian/Hungarian Jews working in Paris, has written material that is not only bitterly funny, but transcends our expectations in multiple ways. We naturally expect the conflict to unfold along the lines of the fight in the schoolyard, with each set of parents loyal to his/her kid. But as Reza works out the implications of her premise, the players constantly make and break other alliances with each other—alliances of class and sex—as well as break along the fault-lines of their troubled marriages. The cross-crossing patterns of recrimination and disappointment, as well as compassion, leave an impression that is bewildering in its complexity—Inception for grown-ups.

            There are no weaknesses in the cast. As the chronically aggrieved Penelope, Jodie Foster digs beneath type here, uncovering the moral smugness that often lurks beneath the sort of political correctness exemplified by, yes, Jodie Foster. Winslet the wan broker and Reilly the doltish plumbing supply salesman are more alike than you’d expect, insofar as they’ve both given up on expecting fulfillment from their respective relationships. And Waltz, with his silky condescension, plays what might as well be the domesticated descendant of the cultured Nazi he played in Inglorious Basterds.

            It comes as little surprise that this concentrated bit of misanthropy comes from Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist), still an international fugitive from a statutory rape charge in California. Indeed, it’s not hard to see what might have attracted him to this material, featuring as it does a basic transgression (an assault in a schoolyard…or a sex crime) that must be remedied by people who ultimately reveal themselves to be as flawed as those they purport to judge. Like the meeting between Reza’s characters, both the legal and the public trials of Polanski have become circuses. In Polanski’s defense, after a childhood spent fleeing the Nazis, an adolescence chaffing under Communism, the murder of his wife by the Manson gang, and the transnational bungling of his rape case, he at least comes by his jaundiced view of people honestly.

            It would be fair to call Carnage misanthropic, but that description would not be complete. There are moments of unexpected sympathy here too, and a kind of eloquence amid the screeching. I didn’t come out of this movie hating humanity, but with the fondness that comes from looking at it from a wry and pleasant distance. Perhaps this is the way Roman Polanski lives with his memories.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

             

Silents is Golden

Dujardin and Bejo are the cat's meow in The Artist.

**** (out of five stars) The Artist. Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.

According to certain critics, it’s been all downhill for movies after the advent of sound, circa 1930. There’s some merit to the argument: in the silent era, without recourse to spoken dialog, filmmakers were obliged to be inventive in telling stories. And indeed, virtually all the visual tropes we now take for granted in movies—montage, close-ups, continuity, cross-cutting, dissolves, location shooting, even color—were pioneered and thoroughly explored before sound.

            But when actors began to speak, all too many movies became little more than canned theatre—actors trapped on soundstages, yakking. To see the difference, compare a classic from the golden age of silents, like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, with even a very good Hollywood talkie of the next decade, such as Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937). Door had a crackling good script, but in terms of visual interest, there’s just no comparison—the silent film is light-years ahead, despite being ten years older. Here, as in many instances of technological advancement, something was lost in the exchange.

            French director Michael Hazanavicius’ The Artist evokes this loss vividly, touchingly, and irresistibly. As you may recall, Hazanavicius and his stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo last made an impression with their scrupulously perfect James Bond parody, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006). That film didn’t just goof or pastiche on an already oft-spoofed genre—it tunneled to its Cold War roots and channeled its very essence, right down to the look and feel of the film stock, and the way Connery/Dujardin wore his Saville Row suits.

            The Artist is more ambitious, resurrecting the entire pre-sound epoch in stunning detail, from the rich black and white cinematography to the lush, over-wrought musical cues. But its triumph is not just technical. Even more impressively, it recreates what was most emotionally satisfying about the era too—the drama on a human scale, the post-Victorian sentimentality, the way a star’s smile—in this case, Dujardin’s winning, cocksure grin—can light up a scene as brightly as an arc-lamp.

            The script by Hazanavicius concerns George Valentin (Dujardin), an Errol Flynn-type silent movie star who is flying so high he almost casually makes a star out of Peppy Miller (Bejo), a chorus girl he takes a shine upon. Trouble is, Valentin is too set in his ways to make the jump to talking pictures. His career crashes just as Peppy becomes the face of the new era onscreen. Even worse, Valentin is too proud to notice that Peppy is in love with him, or to accept her offers to help him out of his tailspin.

            Though the story is almost as generic as the film’s plain vanilla title, Hazanavicius more than makes up for it with his obsessively crafted execution. To someone of his turn of mind, his kind of Gallic rationality, a film about a silent film star—naturellement—must be silent too—which The Artist, in fact, is (with a few key exceptions). But before you punt at the prospect, rest assured the lack of spoken dialog is not missed here because it’s barely noticeable. What the critics have merely argued, Hazanavicius demonstrates—most of the talking in movies is dispensable.

            Where OSS 117 was hit or miss in the humor department, this time Hazanavicius hardly ever puts a foot wrong. There’s nothing extraneous in The Artist, nothing that doesn’t pay off handsomely in the end. Best of all, Dujardin and Bejo are terrific together—the onscreen chemistry hinted at in OSS is fully realized here, and as appealing as each is alone, they are even better as a pair. This may be the most poignant evocation of all: at a time when actors increasingly find themselves emoting in front of green screens, or opposite not other actors but guys in motion capture suits, this kind of simple, can't-be-faked human chemistry is another aspect of “old” cinema at risk in the digital revolution.

            If there a misjudgment anywhere in this film, it’s in one key detail in the soundtrack. At the climax in the story, when Valentin is about to hit rock bottom, Hazanavicius makes use of a key passage in Bernard Hermann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—a movie very much from the sound era. Of course, it is a ravishing piece, well-chosen for the moment. But for film buffs—a key audience for this film—it’s a musical cue that’s as recognizable as, say, that two-note string signature from Jaws. For however brief a moment, it dragged this fan boy out of the movie’s spell.

            But only for a moment.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

A Storm of Swords

Lucy Lawless orders you to "strip" in Spartacus.

* * * (out of five stars)  Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. Created by Stephen S. DeKnight. Available on Netflix. (Spartacus: Vengeance premieres on STARZ on Jan 27, 2012.)

             

Of all the stylistic spawn of Zach Snyder's 300, the best may be STARZ's Spartacus. Now entering its third season (or more precisely, its second-and-a-half—see explanation below), the series has everything Synder's testosterone-pumped sandal epic had—and then some. For not only do spurts of blood and lopped limbs arc through the air in tender, loving slow motion, and the bronzed sides of masculine beef glisten in the simulated sun, but this Spartacus breaks new ground in its unapologetic, full-frontal sexuality. Classic Hollywood always made the pagan Romans a decadent bunch, but this show leaves virtually nothing to the imagination, including the question "When does a busy gladiator have time to do all that man-scaping down there?" You won't get the answer in the first two seasons (available on Netflix until February), and I'm guessing you won't get it in Spartacus: Vengeance, starting on January 27. But what you do get is eye-opening enough. It’s a fair bet that, like in the previous seasons, you’ll have ample occasion to watch this show slack-jawed, wondering Did I really just see what I thought I saw?

            The show's maximalist aesthetic is not all that makes it compelling television. To get at that, we have to go back not just to Synder's movie, but to the legacy of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus. As we all know, Spartacus was a real person, a Thracian gladiator who led a serious uprising against Rome in the late days of the Republic. Kubrick’s film, like its dogged and methodical hero, has earned classic status in the half century since its release. Indeed, with the brutal elegance of its action and the intelligence of its chief players (Kirk Douglas, Laurence Oliver, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov), it actually left some of us (OK, maybe just me) yearning for more. Just who are those guys sharing Spartacus' formative days in the ludus (gladiatorial school) of Gnaeus Lentulus Batiatus? We hear their names (Crixus, Galleno, et al.), but who are they, and what are their stories? We know Spartacus has a thing for the sweet-faced Varinia (Jean Simmons), but what loves and passions drive his comrades in arms? True, these may be questions nobody asked. But this new Spartacus hurtles at maximum warp toward the answers, driving all before it with its pure, pulpy momentum.

            At a time when the craft of politics has a bad odor, it’s not surprising that this contemporary Spartacus (Andy Whitfield) is no ideologue, no fighter for principle. Instead, he’s just a barbarian chieftain out for revenge. Betrayed during a joint expedition with the Roman army, Spartacus and his wife (Erin Cummings) are cast into slavery, with the former consigned to the brutal training regimen of Batiatus (John Hannah). A shrewd judge of character, Batiatus knows that Spartacus may be the champion and cash-cow he’s always wanted—if he can be properly motivated. The bargain is struck: if Spartacus will play the obedient slave, Batiatus will reunite him with his wife. Spoiler alert: Batiatus keeps his end of the bargain, but not in the way Spartacus expects.

            For a show that pretends to be about nothing else but blood and sand and cocks (with a little girl-on-girl action mixed in), Spartacus features better performances than it has any right to. Hannah is a social climber of DeNiro-esque intensity, a kaleidoscope of venality relishing the twist of every knife he can stick in his adversaries. Yet he also shows a conditional sort of honor when circumstances dictate. Playing his wife Lucretia, Lucy Lawless would also pretend to be without scruple—except for her devotion to Crixus (Manu Bennett), the school’s champion before Spartacus. There’s no question who wears the pants in their affair (her most frequent command to him seems to be “strip”), but for all its frank portrayal of female lust, this is more femdom than feminism. The stakes rise further when Crixus conceives an unwise love with Naevia (Lesley-Ann Brandt), Lucretia’s personal servant.

            Under the guise of big-screen spectacle, Dalton Trumbo’s script for the celluloid Spartacus was a cri de coeur against the Hollywood blacklist. The TV show’s original Spartacus, Andy Whitfield, seems a diminished figure compared to Kirk Douglas, both in the modesty of his style and the limits of his motivation. The series’ first season ends just as the gladiators rise up against Batiatus; how it would contrive to make Whitfield into the plausible leader of a universal slave revolt would have been interesting. Alas, the actor was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma after the first season, and passed away in September. The transition from self-motivated gladiator to crusader for freedom will now rest on the thin shoulders of Liam McIntyre, who faintly resembles Whitfield and got his blessing to take his role.

            Spartacus is a show with few pretensions, but the context of tragedy surrounding it (Whitfield was only 39 when he died) lends it a faint wistfulness that humanizes it in a way some much better-written shows rarely achieve. Indeed, in case Whitfield improved enough to return, the show took a detour for its second (half) season, telling the back-story of Batiatus and Lucretia and their school before Spartacus’ arrival. Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, as the six episode prequel was called, is as much guilty fun as the first season, and is worth watching first for those who want to get up to speed before the next season begins in late January.

            Purists find much to object to in the show’s portrayal of antiquity’s “peculiar institution”. Though Spartacus (and Gladiator, for that matter) present their fights as always life or death, real gladiators were too expensive commodities to risk losing every time they stepped into the arena. Like modern performers for the WWE, gladiators knew how to put on a good show without necessarily killing each other. Many, if not most, gladiators survived their combats if they fought well. It was actually the Christians, having seeing many marytrs made in the arena, who had an interest in making pagan institutions seem as barbaric as possible.

            Yet some thought has obviously gone into the show: its clunky, stilted dialog seems laughable at first—until you realize that the writers are trying to approximate the sound of spoken Latin. (For example, since the equivalents of common English terms like “thanks” and “sorry” would have sounded more formal in Latin, the characters here say “gratitude” and “apologies”.) Next to the frequent beheadings, this is a small thing, but as a show like Deadwood proved, there can be universes in small things.

            The universe of Spartacus is a coarse place, but it comes by its coarseness honestly, with no apologies or (gods help us) irony. For that, it deserves its fair share of gratias. 

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro

Slack Key

Clooney and Woodley are stuck in low gear in The Descendants

* * (out of five stars)  The Descendants. Written by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash. Directed by Alexander Payne.  

 

In Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), the prickly wine aficionado played by Paul Giamatti condemns a lackluster glass of cabernet franc as “hollow, flabby, overripe.” This critic feels similarly let down by Payne’s flabby, overdue follow-up to Sideways, The Descendants. This half-hearted comedy-drama isn’t the worst thing in the world. Let’s call it an unremarkable bottle of wine that took way, way too long to get to the table, and subsequently suffers the consequences of over-anticipation.

            The schlemiel this time is Matt King (George Clooney), a good-hearted but emotionally unavailable family guy who happens to own a few thousand acres of prime Hawaiian real estate. While he is busy deciding how to deal with the bevy of developers who covet his legacy, Matt’s wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) drifts into an affair with another man, and then into the path of a stationary object during a boating accident. She is now comatose and dying, forcing Matt to at last confront the superficiality of his relationships with her and his two daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller). Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants is basically the story of a man who belatedly realizes he’s sleep-walked through his life, and is not entirely sure he wants to wake up.

            Payne is at least on to something in the premise. As Matt observes early on, the fact that he is a rich man living in a tropical paradise is no guarantee of happiness. More precisely, his advantages allow him to be as desperately unhappy as anybody else—just on a higher plateau. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he says in the film’s first five minutes, thereby setting us up for something a great deal edgier than Payne delivers.

            Indeed, it’s hard to figure exactly what The Descendants wants to deliver. Aside from some odd moments, it’s not particularly funny. It won’t make you cry. Aside for a brief scene near the end, it offers no dramatic fireworks, no bravura performances that make good clips during the Oscar show. What narrative momentum it does have—such as when Matt decides he must seek out and confront his wife’s lover (Matthew Lillard)—is spent in very talky, very civilized scenes that are resolved in very talky, very civilized fashion. In short, it offers nothing like the catharsis in Sideways, as when Paul Giamatti grabs a bottle of bad wine and runs into the vineyards screaming for everyone to leave him alone.

            Mostly, The Descendants seems content to be a somewhat quirky (but not too quirky) semi-comedy that somehow deserves our attention because it has heavy themes. Those themes don’t exactly weigh on its soul, exactly, but lie somewhere in its vicinity. It is to Payne's credit that he has produced a mature story here, for mature minds. But that doesn’t mean it needs to feel like a funeral reception, afraid to be too amusing or too loud—in short, to be too fun.

            Don’t believe the hype that will undoubtedly attend George Clooney’s “slack key” performance. True, he proves he has the integrity to allow himself to be ordinary, to be the guy who wears Hawaiian shirts in Hawaii without irony—but is this really much of an accomplishment? Is his acceptable masculinity, the debonair charm of his Clooniness, really that common in the world that he must prove he can turn it off at will? Having Clooney play the schlump is like watching Scarlett Johansson fill penny-rolls in her sweatpants—possible, but why?

            With its layered performances and rich quotability, Sideways is already on its way to full cult status. Election (1999) is also deservedly remembered. The Descendants isn’t Payne’s sophomore effort (as in “sophomore slump”), but it sure feels like it. Seven years is a long time to wait for a drink that is just “quaffable”.

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro

The Uninvited Guest

Dunst conducts in Lars von Trier's Melancholia. 

*** 1/2 (out of five stars)  Melancholia. Written and directed by Lars von Trier.

Danish director Lars von Trier got himself into trouble at the Cannes Film Festival last spring with some rambling, intemperate remarks about Nazis (“I really wanted to be a Jew and then I found out that I was really a Nazi…I understand Hitler. He did some wrong things, absolutely, but I can see him sitting there in his bunker at the end ... I sympathize with him…I am of course, very much for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass. But still, how can I get out of this sentence? No, I just want to say about the art, I'm very much for Speer...”). Trier’s bold foray into no-go territory got him personally banned from the festival. It also led many to wonder if the maker of Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville was being a sly provocateur, or just a fool who, if entrusted with a shovel, couldn’t resist digging himself deeper and deeper.

            In fact, the answer to this question is right where it should be, in the very film he was presenting at the festival. The elegiac and utterly crackpot Melancholia once again shows von Trier to be a visionary AND a fool, for it is — if nothing else — a meditation on why being “exceptional” and “an exceptional pain in the ass” must often correlate in art.

            Melancholia is a boutique end-of-the-world movie, far from the routine apocalypses offered up by Hollywood. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is an advertising executive who is getting married to what seems like a decent guy (Alexander Skarsgård) at the palatial abode of her future brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland). The latter is the kind of rich guy who regularly reminds her that the splendor of his generosity comes at a high cost. But despite the top-flight wedding planner and convenient golf links, Justine is perversely determined to be unhappy, smiling what everyone can see is a threadbare smile and spurning her groom’s advances in favor of some random guy in the sand trap of the 18^th hole. “Sometimes I hate you!” cries her faithful, exasperated sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), to which her sister replies, “What did you expect?”

            The wedding is a disaster, but is only an appetizer for ensuing, radical shift in the film’s tone. The existential cause for Justine’s misery, you see, is a rogue planet that has left its hiding place on the far side of the sun and may or may not be on a collision course with Earth. Sutherland’s John, who stands in for the kind of cocksure rationality von Trier despises, is thrilled by the passage of the planet “Melancholia”. Justine expects the worst, and more seriously, thinks a collision may be for the best. “The earth is evil,” she declares. “No one will miss it.” No credit for guessing which character — the technocrat or the lissome Cassandra — turns out to be right.

            The juxtaposition of tragedy of manners and sci-fi spectacle, with the orb of Melancholia gradually filling the sky over John’s empty estate, seems awfully contrived. Yet the mood von Trier builds here wins you over with its power and utter lack of compromise. Justine is von Trier himself, a depressive barely able to function under normal circumstances, as when she weeps with despair at the prospect of climbing into a bathtub. Yet when it comes to facing universal mortality she, the archetypal artist, is unflinching. The edge of the knife is where she lives, after all, and the sense that something is indeterminately “wrong” is her accustomed mode.  Von Trier perpetuates the metaphor with a long sequence at the opening of the film, depicting a series of static tableaux of Justine waterlogged, Ophelia-like, and Justine with spikes of electricity leaping from her fingertips—not unlike the filmmaker with his bag of special effects tricks. Meanwhile, planet Melancolia stalks the earth, promising the ultimate rolling of the credits.

            While von Trier seems ferociously anti-commercial in his choice of subjects, he has a way of patiently building suspense that is compelling from even the most conventional perspective. Similarly, though he seems to identity most with Justine, the heart of his film is given to Charlotte Gainbourg as the rock-solid but increasingly desperate Claire. Gainbourg—who was spookily good in von Trier’s Antichrist—plays the emotional anchor this time, although anchored in ground that is itself losing solidity.

            It is tempting to dismiss both this film and its maker as completely nuts, but there are rewards for sticking with both. Afflicted as we all are by forebodings of melting ice caps and the next, inevitable pandemic, it would be a lie to for any of us to claim we can’t understand the disquiet of someone like Justine—or the despair of artists like von Trier, whose circle of compassion seems to include, yes, even Hitler. Somehow, in a medium where our collective imaginations are straitjacketed by the bounds of PG-13, his flaws don’t look so dangerous after all. 

© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro