War Horse

Written at the time of the film's release...

"The Lives That Pass Through a Horse"

or

"Come On, Joey! Come On!"

The one-two punch of two Spielberg movies opening within a week of each is almost an embarrassment of riches, and in going from Tintin to War Horse it's a journey from the ridiculous to the sublime. We've seen what happens when Spielberg tries to make a Kubrick film (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence), a David Lean film (Empire of the Sun) or cut up like Hitchcock (Jaws), but what happens when he makes a John Ford film?

The answer is War Horse, based on the 1982 children's book by Michael Morpurgo, which was subsequently staged as a play adapted by Nick Stafford at London's National theater. Somewhere on this journey, Spielberg got wind of it, and the tale of World War I told from a horse's point of view became Spielberg's second Christmas release. Horse movies have all the sentimental elements of fables, which is why children love them, but the circumstances of this one have little to do with childhood concerns, but have more to do with kinship between man and beast in an unsentimental, often brutal world of adults. 

It has all the elements of Ford: the Irish flavor as it begins in Devon, with the Narracott family acquiring a noble, unbreakable horse for plowing their hard-scrabble field; the horse—named Joey—learning to trust its first master, young Albert (Jeremy Irvine); the family being threatened with eviction by an uncaring bank (personified by David Thewlis' examiner); the "it takes a village" atmosphere that Ford engendered in his films (and not necessarily to come together in a common purpose, so much as to comment and gossip on it); the low comedy relief of animals—Spielberg makes goofy use of a particularly belligerent farm-goose and Ford favored horses that acted against training and merely acted like horses. Even the town of Devon looks precisely like the 20th Century Fox back-lot recreation of the Welsh mining town in Ford's How Green Was My Valley.

But tough economics trumps sentimentality here and the horse is sold into service in WWI to keep the family going, and The Great War passes the horse from hand to surviving hand, some gentle, some harsh as the battles change the landscapes and fortunes of those in the European theater.

The war goes from planned charges to muddy trench warfare, Spielberg opens it up with a spirited run where, Joey, alone and ownerless for the first time in the film, makes a desperate gallop for freedom (something possibly learned by a former caretaker), through, over and past the soldiers huddled in the trenches and ironically ending his gallop in the middle of No Man's Land, where warring parties must watch and wonder at the sight between them that has nothing to do with the concerns of Man.

But, where War Horse most resembles Ford's work is pictorially—Spielberg sticks to close shots for moments of drama, but when he opens up, it calls to mind advice that the old Commander gave the young director when he was still dreaming of making movies (see video below). He's definitely paying attention to the horizon in this one, and the film, especially in its final moments, seems to come from a different era, one more rich in design and purpose.

In its color, both in sentiment and photographically, War Horse hearkens back to another period of cinema, one that was simpler and more direct, but it never betrays anything less than sophistication of subject matter and maturity of purpose, while still maintaining a high level of entertainment value. At this point in his career, Spielberg is presenting a master class in film-making, evoking the past when it suits him, but maintaining a personal growth that seems to never flag.

Anna Karenina (2012)

Struggling with writing a review of Cyrano, the latest from director Joe Wright. So, in the meantime, here are a couple reviews from his past work that I haven't put up yet.

Written at the time of the film's release...

 

Artificial Intelligence
or
Anna! Karenina! The! Musical!

Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" is considered by many the greatest novel ever written, and has been adapted so many times (two of them starring Greta Garbo!), one is tempted to name any version "The Last Remake of Anna Karenina." So, the task for director Joe Wright and scripter Tom Stoppard must have seemed daunting, or as one of Zsa Zsa Gabor's later husbands stated it: "You know what you have to do, you just have to find a way of making it interesting."

Well, this one is interesting, alright. And it hues closely to Tolstoy's novel in the way that a CliffsNotes Edition sticks close. All the plot points are there, the characters whittled down to their bare essences, or eliminated altogether, and breezily delivered in a theatrical manner, save some significant exceptions. Truth is, Wright makes this version of Anna Karenina the way Baz Luhrmann would, as a grand, operatic experience staged in an extraordinarily choreographed with the emphasis on the "arch" (as in "playfully and affectedly roguish") in Proscenium Arch.

Jim Emerson had a fascinating article* (based around Skyfall) on his "Scanners" blog on the difference between a "theatrical" film and a theatrical film and its use of space as defined by the limitations of the frame and a stage directors' tendency to reflect that frame with its own limitations resembling the dimensions of a stage. 

Wright fully embraces that concept and goes further; for the main story of the hoi-polloi and their social and political gamesmanship, all of the action takes place within the false spaces of a theater (at times even using the rafters as locations for traditional street-scenes): train and carriage scenes are decidedly set-bound with no effort made to reflect a "real" world outside the windows; transitions are made "in-camera" without editing, so a very stagy and choreographed bureaucratic work set-up with synchronized rubbing stamping (set to Dario Marianelli's interesting score) segues to a restaurant scene by merely having the "extras" trade in their black business suits for waiter-whites; a formal society ball is not an intricate commingling of dancers that Wright so effectively engineered in Pride and Prejudice, but is an elaborate ballet, where the participants barely touch and their hand movements are intricately swanning in nothing that approaches a traditional dance (at times, to keep track of the principals, the foreground dancers in our field of vision "freeze" to better make out the focus of our attention). Like Francis Ford Coppola's set-bound version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, It's all very elaborate, "stagey," false, and at times clever but, a lot of the time, merely "showy," like a musical with no libretto, something to separate this "Anna" from the more realistic, even if filmed in-studio, versions. 

The performances run that way, too. Keira Knightley is an exasperating Anna, conflicted but fatally committed to fully expressing whatever is on the surface of her heart. Her P & P co-star, Matthew McFadyen is a burlesque cousin Oblonsky, fatuously showy in a way that reminds of Kevin Kline performing a burlesque role. Jude Law—not one of my favorite performers—here is exceptional as Anna's cuckolded husband, and is so restrained and non-theatrical, that it sets him apart from almost every other performer, isolating him, and is a good short-hand way of showing why Anna might be dissatisfied with him. Olivia Williams has a small part as the Countess Vronsky, whose son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is the very florid object of fascination for Anna.

Anna (Keira Knightley) runs from Vronsky at the Ball
and experiences a little fore-lightening from an approaching train.
It's dangerous in a Joe Wright theater.

But, almost the entire film is deliriously fascinated with the artificiality that it undercuts the very real passion and consequences of actions of the people in the film, reducing them to "players" as opposed to human beings.

I say "almost" because Wright does change things up to "open up" the segments featuring Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) and Kitty (Alicia Vikander), who already have their disappointing encounter with Vronsky and move on. When they reunite, their segments are set in a real world of sky, clouds and fields befitting the couple who exemplify wisdom, forbearance and patience. Wright puts them in our world, relegating the others to an artificial world that is essentially stage-managed (even at the end with a coda of Karenin and the remains of his family, it is contained in the stage-world that Wright has chosen to house his film.

It's different, even interesting in an oddly disrespectful manner, as the flightiness of the bourgeoisie and their concerns are merely shadow-play and window-dressing—it is true to an extent—but by pushing the metaphor so aggressively, it undercuts any feeling one has for the players in the majority of the film itself, and reveals itself as resembling the tut-tutting of the hypocrites who turn against Anna. I'm not sure that Tolstoy had that intention (even strained through Stoppard), and this film might have benefited  from a less facile presentation that required less stage-craft and something more resembling (I don't know) empathy?

Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman has a new film—I'm Thinking of Ending Things—coming out on Netflix September 4th.

This was written at the time of this film's release.

"And the Truth Is..."

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

William Shakespeare "As You Like It" 2/7

Director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) wakes up every morning with a fresh pain to fuss about in the morning and a malady that he saves for the afternoon. He's a mess. So's his life, and the only time he feels comfortable is telling actors how to play their parts. But he frets about everything else. "I have 650 lighting changes! Why does it have to be so complicated?" "Because you make it complicated," says his wife Adele Lack (Catherine Keener), whose own art is to make paintings so small you need magnifying specs to look at them in the gallery. She's reductive. He likes to blow things out of proportion, which sometimes manifests itself, physically, as sycosis. "It's spelled differently," he tells his daughter Olive. "P-s-y 'psychosis' is when you're crazy, like Mommy is sometimes."

Welcome back to the World of Charlie Kaufman (and yes, after all the success you can still call him "Charlie"). Kaufman's screenplays are expanded "Twilight Zone" episodes where reality is warped and woofed through the gray matter of Kaufman's mind and some basic axiom of the human condition comes shining through like sunlight through cheese-cloth. Synecdoche New York is the same sort of Möbius-loop swirl like Kaufman's scripts for Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Adaptation.* (and his puppet-film, Anomalisa).** And as with those scripts, you not only get the story as it stands, but also a look into the soul of Kaufman, as well. Malkovich was the story of an street-artist who dreamed of being more than a puppeteer and ended up becoming a director of another man's life--a grander-scale puppet-master. Eternal Sunshine explored relationships and the hopeless act of putting one behind you. Adaptation. was a look at obsession, disguised as Kaufman's own frustrations at trying to write a screenplay for an un-adaptable book. Synecdoche New York is another step altogether: Kaufman makes his directorial debut in this film about a director who can direct anything but his own life.

"And the Truth Is..."

"...well, like most directors, I suppose, what I really want to do is act."

Mel Gibson's Oscar speech, 1996

As life sometimes happens, when one part of your life is going great, another slides. Adele has taken Olive to Berlin for a showing of her work, and the weeks stretch into months, and Cadon can't hold his fragile state enough to have an affair with Hazel (Samantha Morton) the ticket-agent at his theater. The he gets a MacArthur grant. How's he going to spend his "genius" money? He rents a warehouse--like a monolithic Quonset hut in the middle of Schenectady, and begins a series of work-in-progress workshops, where the play will begin to take shape. But pretty soon, the play cannot be contained, and Cotard begins to wander through an increasing maze of scenarios intertwined with a phalanx of actors seeking direction and a city-scape forming inside the warehouse. He begins to lose track of his life and the play's purpose until he hires Sammy (the terrific Tom Noonan) to play himself. Sammy claims to have followed Cotard for years and says he knows the director better than he knows himself. At the time, that didn't seem like quite a stretch. For awhile the two are inseparable.

And then things start to get a little bit weird.

syn•ec•do•che (sĭ-něk'də-kē) Pronunciation Key n. A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).

To explain any more of the plot is to do two things: 1) Give away what's going on, and 2) explain what's going on; I can do the first, but not the second, which 1) is anathema to film criticism and 2) required of film criticism. The stew of Synechdoche New York is so rich that one can only pick a flavor or two, a passing impression, the overall emphasis, but I can't tell you what it tastes like, other than to say "I enjoyed it immensely, and I'd order this item on the menu again." I can understand why it would completely overwhelm a casual tasting or appear too rich to stomach, and I can certainly see the polarizing effect it has on those whose tastes don't run to such things.

But taste is an individual thing, and the structure of Synecdoche New York, which, in itself, is its own false-front, is a deliberate shout-out that "Nothing is real," so if you're looking for explanations of some basic matters, it's just not going to happen, because the connective tissue that would provide the answers not only isn't there, it's considered irrelevant to the task at hand, and manipulated to actually confront, confuse, and consternate. And make a joke of it.

Which I find hilarious.

For instance, I love that Kaufman cast two actresses—Samantha Morton and Emily Watson—who I find, frankly, a bit indistinguishable, and cast them as an important woman in Cadon's life and the woman who's playing her in the play. That the two actually do become indistinguishable is a wonderful joke that I, alone, might get, but I still enjoy it. That the background score for a poignant telephone conversation seems to travel over the telephone line, as well (with the same tinny sound), is a great joke, but might frustrate someone else looking for logic or reason. That Adele coughs in a voice-over might make someone throw up their hands and question why someone would consider doing that only makes me giggle. That Hazel, when taking a tour with a real estate agent, makes a comment that she's really nervous about buying a house, but really wants to take the plunge, so much so that she'll ignore that the house is on fire, and, oh by the way, the agent's son is living in the basement, only reminds me of the compromises I've made and the flaws I've overlooked in similar decision-making processes. It also says something about the character...yes (*sigh*) in a lunatic way...but I found it funny.

"And the Truth Is..."

"I thought I was President of the United States. Then when my daughter was born, I realized I was just the Secret Service."

Seattle actor Ken Boynton, explaining Fatherhood

What's interesting to me is that I have my own ceiling of "guff" in movies: I'll "take" Kaufman because the spirit in which he creates is playful, the ideas he expresses I find, if not profound, worthy of consideration (such as the over-uttered point of "SNY") and the work, and the path taken to get there, entertain me; I appreciate the journey, even if the destination disappoints.

Yet, as a recent post on David Lynch's Inland Empire made abundantly unclear (my fault: I'm sorry, I was being illustrative of my frustration with the piece and its artist) there's only so much obfuscation I can take. There is a difference between an artist being deliberately "difficult" to understand, and an artist with a point to make. If you want to confound, go into the puzzle-making business. If you want to communicate—and that means taking the chance that your message may be received and judged—make sure that you're communicating. Inland Empire had no "Rosetta Stone," not even the orientation of humor, to guide the viewer, so whatever "TRUTH" Lynch was aiming for got lost in the scene-shuffle.*** One can argue about the cruel economics of the film business, but every so often an indulgent artist has to give his Muse a bracing cuppa joe, black, (and amusingly, Lynch, of all artists, should know this!) and show it where the audience is sitting.****

Which brings up the philosophical question: If a theater-troupe makes a play in an empty theater, does it make a sound

And the answer is: "Who cares?" Play on.

"And the Truth Is..."

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

Ernest Hemingway, "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

* I thought I'd posted my review of Adaptation.. Guess I was wrong. I'll post it next week....and my pissy little review of Inland Empire. 

** Although nobody ever brings up his writing for "Ned and Stacey" and "The Dana Carvey Show"

*** I don't make a habit of beating up on Lynch. I love 80% of his out-put, especially The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Falls, and The Straight Story. Wild At Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, pffft!

**** At the Guild 45th late show, a late-comer sat across the aisle from me, and throughout the movie we separately giggled and hooted throughout the film, laughing at the same parts. Only when the credits came up did we glance at each other and, in a perfectly synched move, raised our drink-cups in salute to the screen.

The Theory of Everything

2b ‹ ¬2b: That is the Question
or
"What if the Hokey-Pokey IS What It's All About?"

Before Benedict Cumberbatch played Alan Turing as he does this movie season, he was the first person to play Dr. Stephen Hawking in a dramatization of the theoretical cosmologist's life for the BBC.

Now there's a feature film about Hawking, which is just a bit more fascinating than the BBC tele-film and, frankly, might be one of the best written films of the year, The Theory of Everything.

Based on the memoir of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde (played by Felicity Jones—in a fierce performance), it tells the same story as the BBC film but from the human, not theoretical side, and finds a fascinating sub-text and motivation that joins both work and personal lives portrayed. For the story of Hawking's amazing work as a theoretical physicist despite the debilitating effects of ALS is well-known, but the personal story is not.

The story starts in Cambridge in the 1960's when young physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne from Les Miserables and My Week with Marilyn) meets Jane at a Cambridge mixer. He's gangly, awkward, but smart and funny. She's an English rose, tentative but hopeful. He's studying theoretical physics; she's in the humanities ("medieval poets of Iberian Peninsula"). She's CofE ("I have a problem with the whole celestial dictatorship premise" he offers); he's a cosmologist ("It's a kind of religion for intelligent atheists"). The one thing they have in common—tenacity.

While she pursues the Iberian poets, and he, his area of inquiry (inspired by his instructor, played by David Thewliss, after a visit with theorist Roger Penrose—played by Christopher McKay), they pursue each other, culminating in a Cambridge dance where, eerily, magically, the white shirts and frocks glow under a black-light. "You know what causes it?" Hawking offers.  She doesn't, and braces for a long, complicated answer. "Tide," her says simply. "The phosphorous in the detergent causes the glow under ultra-violet light." It's a funny answer for a beautiful image. And it might even distract from seeing that the physicist's hands are already starting to twist.

Tide. And he decides after some deliberation to focus his thesis on time. But, as Chaucer, and a great many who came before, observed, both wait for no man. Hawking's balance is becoming erratic, and he has difficulty holding the chalk to write his equations on a blackboard. A brutal fall in the Cambridge courtyard puts him in hospital and a spinal tap produces a diagnosis—ALS, a motor-neuron disease that will cripple him, but leave his mind intact. As he's told by his physician, "The thoughts are not affected. It's just that no one will know what they are." In one of the many wonderful images of the film, Hawking sits in a bath staring at his increasingly claw-like hands, as if willing them with that enormous intellect to straighten.

The prognosis is two years. Hawking hides himself away, grieving, determined to focus on his studies while he still has the time to do so. He refuses to see Jane, determined that she not have to endure what, for him, is a death sentence. He breaks off any idea of a romance that is doomed from the start.

But, she is as tenacious as he.

Hawking's story is an amazing one. But, it is incomplete without the story of the woman who stood by him when he was unable to stand. As he amazed the world with his theories and leaps of imagination—let alone his ability to communicate them to a large public—she was his caretaker, wife and mother of his children, sacrificing everything to keep him alive and thinking. Think he has courage? What about her?

The Theory of Everything is something of a revelation to me, as Hawking's story is inspiring, but his divorce from his first wife (and subsequent marriage to his nurse) always struck me as an abandonment of the woman who struck with him for thirty years through his worsening physical condition and annoyed me in my judgmental way. I'm not one to know the circumstances, as I'll never know what it's like to a) be a genius and b) be trapped in a non-responsive body. What The Theory of Everything provides is the missing component in the equation: the first marriage to Jane Wilde lasted 30 years; when they first met, fell in love, married, they were making the best of a bad situation that was only supposed to last two.

Think of that and the place it put Wilde, who loved him, in. That Hawking lived so long (and still abides) is a miracle unheard of. But, it is not what Wilde, in love with, and devoted to, the fully functioning man could expect or hope for. Hawking's long life was a life sentence for her, one she did not sign up for when the crisis hit for them both.

It evokes an odd mixture of guilt and empathy to consider what that might be for her. Two years might have been manageable for a woman in love in her 20's, but had she known that Hawking would live so long, would she have made the same brave, selfless decision?

At what point does tenacity have its limits for any human being?

And at what point does dependency become empathy?  Love is a two-way street—in the view of so much sacrifice, sacrifices have to be made.

The Theory of Everything is not a normal love story, it is, actually, much more than that. There is no "they lived happily ever after" here ("ever after" evoking both triumph and dread). Love is not simple, like in the movies and romance novels where things fade to black before things get interesting. Love is complicated and messy...and thrilling and horrible. Sometimes it can only be endured by the strength of that needing and selfless bond of love, and the combination, the chemistry—the equation—of the two people who share it (on either side of the equal sign). Love is tough stuff. And, like aging, it is not for wimps.

The Theory of Everything evokes such wondering, dark thoughts as it unspools and for days after, exposing love in all its complications. I found it refreshing from the steady shining eyed twaddle of romance films, and for the first time in years, I dropped tears, watching it.

Highly recommended.

Stephen Hawking is now 72 years old.

Jones, Hawking and Redmayne