Little Children

Written around the time of the film's release. Field's most recent film—after an extended hiatus—was Tár, which received lots and lots of attention.

Little Children (Todd Field, 2006) One I've been wanting to see but avoiding. Again, bad decision. 

 

Todd Field has the spirit of Kubrick in him. Field, as an actor, worked on Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick subjected him to "the drill" about his first film, In the Bedroom—"Why do you want to make that? What can you bring to it? How can you tell your story more compellingly? Is it worth doing, though?" 

 

But Field is a far looser director, and with a much more sure sense of humor, though that was missing in Bedroom. That razor-like humor helps in this story of a neighborhood not coping well with a convicted sex offender in their midst (he's a flasher). Everyone in the Boston suburb is on the critical edge of everyday panic and with an aversion to complacency combined with a complacent lethargy—sure, everyone is a hypocrite about something—so everyone seems determined to see how far they can push the envelope before things come crashing around their ears. 

But the film focuses on a quartet in the neighborhood: retired cop Larry (Noah Emmerich) is a retired cop on disability, who misses the job and finds some solace in harrassing the sex offender Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), who wants to live a normal life—like his Mother (Phyllis Somerville) whom he lives with wants for him—but his past is a constant deterrence.

Larry is friends with Brad (Patrick Wilson), who is studying for the Massachusetts bar (at least he should be), but has chosen to be a househusband and raise his son Aaron (Ty Simpkins) while his wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) is consumed with her PBS documentary career.

Brad spends many a lazy afternoon taking Aaron to the park, giving the gaggle of stay-at-home Moms there a chance to observe appreciatively and speculate about him. One of those gaggle is Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), who was working on her doctorate, but gave up on it when she married her now-estranged husband. All of this talk of Brad makes Sarah curious, and—as her husband is more interested in internet porn than her—they gradually "it's-only-platonic" themselves into having an affair. An affair that ultimately leads them to want to leave their respective spouses and run away together.

Every film is a bit of a "bubble-world," limited in scope to the characters featured prominently in the story. And it's the chief complaint by people who don't like particular films that they depend too much on the limited cast-members to sell the coincidences that make up a story. Little Children is one of those films. Pull out any of the plot-threads and it'll tumble like a Jenga tower.

But, that argument is so much blinkerdly cherry-picking. One of my favorite episodes of the podcast "This American Life" the author Lisa See tells of the Chinese proverb "No coincidence, no story" and the entire show curates stories from listeners with the most amazing coincidences. One is hard-pressed to think of a film...or a book where the confluence of incidences didn't create some narrative thrust. No coincidence, No story...even if it's only that these people are locked under some circumstance...if only by coincidence. 

So it is with Little Children. There is an air of clinical observation to the film that is cruel and humorous, though, for the characters portrayed, everything is of deadly earnest and has complex consequences. And its use of Will Lyman (the voice of "Frontline" as well as "Last Week Tonight") as narrator is brilliant. 

Uniformly the cast is excellent with Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson (he had the least showy role in HBO's "Angels in America" as the closeted conservative), Jennifer Connelly (restrained and never better), and particularly Jackie Earle Haley as the flasher. Absent from movies for years, Haley now has a cadaverous look like he's being consumed from the inside, and his beady-eyed pressurized work keeps you on pins and needles. He and Winslet received the lion's share of accolades at awards-time last year, but the film itself should have received more attention...certainly more than The Departed did. 

 

Todd Field is a guy to watch.

All the King's Men (2006)

Written at the time of the film's release. Recent events have compelled an update.

All The King's Men (Steven Zaillian, 2006) The story goes that Robert Rossen, the director of the 1949 version of All the King's Men was not happy with his film. Too long, too talky, and too boring, Rossen was unsure of what to cut to get it down to length. A plan was drawn up: he told his editor to take 30 seconds from the beginnings of scenes and 30 seconds from the end. What was left came in under two hours of running time and moved at a jarring pace, but it won Oscars for its star Broderick Crawford, Best Supporting Actress Mercedes McCambridge...and as Best Picture.

All the King's Men was already a great film, but there were too many compromises to the Hays Code to get it to the screen. Steve Zaillian (a fine screenwriter, who directed a favorite film of mine Searching for Bobby Fischer) decided to make a new film of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize winning book, and sadly, wasted the opportunity in a film convinced of its own importance.*

From the crack of thunder that appears before the opening credits, to the thudding James Horner score that telegraphs (with hammers) each imminent plot-point (Horner uses one dirge-like theme which, by its third appearance, I had assigned lyrics "This-is-a-sad-sto-ry/A-bout Lou-i-si-an-na"), to the subdued lighting and the art design in shades of "Godfather" mordant, everything about this movie promises great portent, but merely meanders through its story of how nothing born of corruption can come to any good, be it man, ideals or building materials.

It's a frustrating film to sit through, because the pieces are there given a less respectful (as in funeral-respect) presentation. The cast is impressive. Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Hopkins play the well-to-do Stanton clan. Kathy Baker and Jude Law are the blighted Burden clan, and Sean Penn, looking more and more like a young George C. Scott, plays the fictional surrogate of Huey Long, Willie Stark. As his flaks and flunkies, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson and Jackie Earle Haley.

Good cast. But there are problems. Penn, as he is wont to do, goes over-the-top in his speechifying, his arms waiving wildly in the air, his fingers doing filigreed dances. Where Penn got the inspiration to play it this way is a mystery, as footage of Long in speech-mode (below) shows him much more in control. Not even Adolph Hitler emotes this much. Jude Law, never the strongest of actors, falls into the dreariness of the film, staring at the other actors or nothing-in-particular with sad doe-like eyes.** One suspects editing problems with this film—Zaillian did spend an inordinate amount of time in post-production on it. Subjects are brought up and dropped, like Stark's football-playing son, who figures prominently in the '48 film, is mentioned here and then never heard from again.*** We never do find out how Burden's mother acquires facts to make an accusation against him. Mark Ruffalo's character is left as a dissatisfying enigma.

What we do get is ponderous, and pretentious. Zaillian spends a lot of screen-time trying to show (visually) that the only thing that could unite the "hicks" and gentry of Louisiana is death. Again, that same lesson has been told in better films.

2023 Update: At the time the film came out, there was speculation that it was a "dig" at then-President George W. Bush. If so, it was bound to disappoint both sides, no matter where you came down on that particular president.

But, a re-watch today would make folks blanch—"well, that-tha-that's Donald Trump!"

Nope. Trump just borrowed from the same play-book that politicians have been using since politics became the world's "second oldest profession:" "Get elected by any means necessary. Cease power. Never let it go." That's the genius of Robert Penn Warren's book; he found inherent truths in the process and they continue no matter what generation after reads it. Sure, it seems like Trump—except for the details, the milieu, the accent. But, the autocracy is there. The crowd-whipping. The scandals. Warren could be accused of writing cliches. But, cliches are there because they're unerringly true and happen enough to become cliches.

For the truth is, politicians lie. And people look for a Messiah and want to be lied to. They eat it up. And the ultimate cliche. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.

Just because it's a cliche doesn't make it not true.

* Given the awards-history of the cast and screenwriter it was assumed that this version of All The King's Men would be a top contender come Oscar-season, but its poor box-office reception scuttled those hopes.

** K (who likes Law) kept yelling out "accent-drop!" whenever his "Lawsiana" draw-el moved to Market Street. Anthony Hopkins, the sly old dog, doesn't even try.

*** Sadly, Zaillian, in an attempt to simplify his film, gutted some crucial scenes from it including the sub-plot about Stark's son, and an extended ending that provides the best scenes for Jude Law and Jackie Earle Haley.

Lincoln

Noisy and Messy and Complicated 

or 
WWLD?

At the end of John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln, "the jack-legged country lawyer" (as played by Henry Fonda) walks up a blighted horizon in the darkening gloom, as thunder rolls in the background, the rough-hewn fence he trudges along taking on the look of military barricades, as the young Lincoln walks with his long stride into the storm of history awaiting him. Steven Spielberg's Lincoln starts where Young... left off—with the sound of thunder over credits, which evolves into cannon-fire before placing us straight on in the middle of the Civil War, blue-on-gray, white-on-black (and the reverses) amid the blood and the mud of the Earth. The shots of the battlefield are tight, confusing, with no sense of place, no horizon—just a frame filled with humans killing each other by any means. No glory. No higher purpose. Just the immediacy of conflict. 

War is the point at which politics breaks down, and politics is where Spielberg's film is concerned to compare and contrast with today's stew of chicanery, graft, and playing fast and loose with the facts to the purpose of getting your way.  'Twas ever thus, and it was no different in Lincoln's time—they just didn't have cameras documenting everything then.

Young Mr. Lincoln: walking into a History still to occur.

\The approach is as good a starting place as any—that is, ending with Ford's last gambit—linking the two, as both films' main goal is to take the monument out of the man, and put him within reach of attainability, wart and all. The canonization of Lincoln began at the moment of his death with the pronunciation "now he belongs to the ages" and his visage, homely, homespun, ragged sunken and contemplative, has been preserved in nickel, bronze, marble, granite to the point where one can hardly imagine it as flesh and blood anymore. 

As portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln is pitch-perfect, not only in his make-up, but his high tenor rasp of a voice, and—the remarkable part for me—in his still-legged gait that kicks and plants itself on the earth, not too steps away from the ragged dance of Wyatt Earp (Fonda, again) in My Darling Clementine. It's a big, robust cast—I had error alerts for all the names I tried to cram into this article's meta-data labels—but the hub of it all is Day-Lewis' Lincoln. Soldiers (including Lukas Haas) quote his Gettysburg Address back to him (which the President tries to staunch: "Been there, delivered that."*) His wife (Sally Field) constantly badgers him—but then she consistently badgers everybody, his cabinet is frequently frustrated by him, by his prevarications, his story-telling that constantly derails conversations to his agenda, and his thought processes which annoy them. "Actually," says Secretary of State Seward (David Straithairn) after Lincoln quotes verse, "I have no idea what you mean by that."

What he means may be too pragmatic for them, it's just how he expresses it that confounds. In one exceptional scene—Tony Kushner worked on this script for a long time and it shows—Lincoln explains in minute, often harsh, detail how he employed his newly granted War Powers Act and it comes down to what he thought he could get away with, legally.

His concern, in the waning days of the war, is to pass the 13th Amendment, thereby abolishing slavery, and it takes every trick, every dodge, every promise and appointment in the middle of a lame-duck Congress before the war could end. The timetable is critical: Lincoln has just been re-elected and is riding a wave of popularity; a crucial number of Congressmen are in their last days of their jobs and are looking to their futures and not to the wishes of their constituents; and, if the war ends, the urgency to pass the Amendment will dwindle, amidst the rebuilding of the Nation. Lincoln's Republicans will vote for it, but they need to tone down their rhetoric. The Democrats are dead-set against it, but getting Democrats to agree on anything is like herding cats and Lincoln wants to exploit the party's fractures into fissures.  

So, the problem is attacked from several fronts (if only the war had started that way): Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), prominent Republican and journalist, is sent to the South to negotiate a Southern settlement, which the South is anxious to do (although Lincoln is reluctant). Meanwhile, he wheels and deals with the largesse of power, offering appointments, threats, anything to curry votes, and unleashes a trio of stooge-lobbyists (James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson) to press the flesh and pass the greenbacks (not "officially," though). Votes are critical. On the home-front, Lincoln's son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is back from college, but feeling the weight of his kinship with the President and wants to enlist, which sends wife Mary Todd into another accusatory tailspin as she has barely survived the death of their son, Tad.

Throughout, Lincoln keeps his counsel. but sometimes erupts into spasms of frustration—with "Molly" (as he calls her), the congress and his cabinet, choosing his moments and pressing his advantage, knowing no peace except what he can create for himself.

As good as Day-Lewis is, he's matched by Tommy Lee Jones as House Republican Thaddeus Stevens. In chambers, Stevens sits and fumes, then reaches his limit and bursts out in loud insulting harangues, just in control enough to get his point across, and even smiling tightly—very tightly—when when dressed down by Mary Lincoln over his tight reins over The White House purse strings. Jones finds different ways to make his speeches crackle, while never betraying any sense that the words haven't sprung originally from his head. And Spielberg has given special attention to casting key roles with the like of great character actors like Bruce McGill, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Lee Pace who make their relatively small parts punch out and become memorable.

And Spielberg's eye for painterly detail shines, as Lincoln moves through the gloomy corridors of The White House or sets up an eerie dream sequence for the President. And in one lovely scene, between Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant (Jared Harris), where the war's toll on Lincoln is expressed in Day-Lewis' exhausted eyes and the shadows of a long rank of soldiers trudging in front of a setting sun play across his face.  

You can't see the moving shadows

Spielberg's regular team of artists: Kaminski, Kahn, Carter, and Williams construct a great quilt of imagery and dynamics, making Lincoln a fascinating display of historical intimacy writ large.  It would make a superb triple bill sandwiched between Young Mr. Lincoln and The Conspirator.

* There's a nice contrast of Lincoln delivering a dedication at a flag-raising ceremony that lasts a measly few lines.  "That's my speech" he says as he tucks his paper back into his stove-top hat. They can't all be gems.

Watchmen (2009)

"Turning Air to Gold: The Transmutation of 'Watchmen' from Graphic Novel to Silver Screen" 

After years of failed attempts by various studios and directors, "Watchmen", Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' epic deconstruction of super-hero stereotypes in graphic-novel form has finally made it to the screen. Two studios financed it (with proceeds going to a third) and the director is Zack Snyder, who did an interesting re-make of Dawn of the Dead, and the film adaptation of Frank Miller's "300."

300 (the film) was a somewhat mixed result due to the weakness of its source material, and Snyder's reliance on a bleached CG oppressiveness, but one could see him trying to find interesting ways to make Miller's panoramas and boxes translate to interesting moving images, if not a fully-realized film. When one heard that his next project was to film the unfilmable "Watchmen," there was some cautionary hope: Moore's works "From Hell," "V for Vendetta," and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" were not the movies they should have been, mostly due to liberties taken to Moore's blue-print (and as a result, Moore has refused any interest, personal or financial, from filmed adaptations of his writing—his lack of credit yawns like a big black hole in the film's credits).

His "Watchmen" is another animal—a sprawling 12 issue serial based on an alternate Earth where masked vigilantes do exist, it crossed eras and locations in a blink, played on nesting cultural references and on-the-nose word-play, while having the look and feel of a movie story-board. It looked like it should be filmed, even though its nudity, ultra-violence and political satire made it somewhat over the heads of the casual movie-goer and beyond the scope of the MPAA. Given Moore's history, the expectations were another bastardization, or, given Snyder's, a by-the-numbers adaptation with nothing new to offer. The result, though, is neither extreme. It's a faithful adaptation that doesn't mind sharing in the fun of creation.*

"Structurally, There's No Difference"

 

Snyder and his scriptwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse have compressed the story, eliminating some second and third-tier characters (although they appear in the movie if you're looking for them), completely eliminating the parallel stories (in comic form) of "Tales of the Black Freighter" and the super-hero memoir "Under the Hood" (which will appear on a separate DVD, apparently) and concentrating on the main thread of the story: "Somebody is killing the Great Retired Superheroes of America."** 

It follows the investigation of never-realized super-group The Watchmen into who might be killing their members, starting with The Comedian, a government-sanctioned vigilante. All the Watchmen are vigilantes and, to some degree, fascists breaking arms and legs in brutal fist-fights that are, in the film, probably the best realized comics-fights yet filmed—like cage-matches in the open air. They all dress in the spandex kicking heads for different reasons and their very differences in attitude, sense of justice and heritage are what make the characters interesting, not the justice dispensed.

There's action aplenty,*** but where Snyder has excelled and made the film his own is to take Moore's example and kick it up a notch. Moore's super-America of 1985 has Nixon still in the White House for an unprecedented sixth term, the Viet Nam War having been won by Watchmen incursion. But Snyder doesn't stop there. There are all sorts of cultural references spread throughout the film mixing History with heroes. TV, political and business personalities are recognizable from their Real World counter-parts. Moore piled on the culture references but Snyder takes advantage of the audio-visual tools he has to provide a great soundtrack of hits from a diverse group of Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkle, Leonard Cohen, and Phillip Glass. Compositions and dialog are taken from other movies to sometimes hilarious effect, and although one doesn't want to give away too many of Snyder's surprises, to not acknowledge them would be giving this film's own strengths short-shrift. It is its own animal—a fully functional moving picture that takes the strengths of the comics medium source, but builds on it and takes the viewer between the panels without a sense of filler or extraneous material.

"But my Eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light/That split the night" 

Just as Moore nested references throughout the series, Snyder takes visual cues and unites them throughout the film. Where Moore has his "Smiley Face" icon throughout (a device that seems a shade contrived in the film), Snyder's white-bright light flashes carry resonances throughout the film, especially in an ages spanning credit-sequence (which contains one of the best comics call-backs in the film).

Those flashes will carry dramatic weight throughout the movie right up to the ending (which manages to logically improve on the novel's proposition-of course, that's how you solve "the problem," it's been staring us in the face all along).

But, you can have all the CG wizardry in many worlds if the organic part of things, the actors, don't breathe life into the characters, and here "Watchmen" excels. Patrick Wilson has spent too much time being the handsomely bland blonde guy that it's a welcome relief to see him stand out appreciably as Dan Dreiberg, The Nite-Owl. Matthew Goode as Ozymandias has a lazy, lithe, slurry quality that shows how used he is to being The Smartest Man in the Room, always. Jeffrey Dean Morgan has the hardest role as The Comedian, but makes it work, as Malin Akerman does for The Silk Specter. 

But the big raves go to to guys who spend most of the time hidden: Billy Crudup, who manages to make a character of Dr. Manhattan despite the fact that it's all CGI imagery (can you believe they wanted Schwarzenegger for the role?), and Jackie Earle Haley, who does wonders as Rorschach. The stand-out character of the series needed a superb performance and Haley, who's made few mis-steps since re-igniting his peculiar acting career slams it home. One hopes that his talent is acknowledged soon.

I was surprised and delighted by Watchmen, the movie re-creating the same emotions I had reading the book all those years ago. But I wonder how much information one would get from the movie without having read the source. For me, there was recollected information bursting out of every frame, but to someone without the book in their banks those frames might seem over-crowded with useless knick-knacks...instead of pieces of the puzzle. Without that fore-knowledge, is the movie as compelling, or does one take a Manhattan-ish dis-interest?

* There have been some review complaints of "slavish" adherence to the source material. Whole sections have been lifted, but it's only once in awhile when those sections encompass a lot of material (usually from a God's eye perspective). "Slavish adherence" is simply not true. Even if it was, when was that ever a movie sin? Nobody complained when "Lonesome Dove" stuck so close to Larry McMurtry's novel. Why is it an issue now? Nothing else to write about? 

** "Watchmen" grew out of Alan Moore proposing a 12 issue series based on characters acquired by DC Comics when it bought the Charlton Comics line. DC wanted to use those characters in the regular comic-line, but wanted Moore's story, too. So, Moore created new heroes based on those characters: Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan; Blue Beetle became Nite-Owl; The Question became Rorschach; Pete Cannon-Thunderbolt inspired Ozymandias; The Peacemaker became The Comedian; Nightshade became The Silk Specter. 

*** Watchmen is a hard "R" for moments of sexuality, nudity and stomach-churning violence, for instance, characters are meat-cleavered in the head, one criminal has his hands tied to prison bars and his arms sawed off, not to mention the near-occasion of brutal fights—The Silk Specter breaks an arm so hard the bone pierces the skin — and a prison fight ends when a prisoner is dowsed with boiling oil. The movie begins with a bone-crunching fight between The Comedian and an unknown assassin, leading to his being thrown through a plate-glass window a couple dozen stories high. The movie's lone super-powered hero, Dr. Manhattan, explodes people with a wave of his hand. The show I went to, a couple brought their five year old son. He's gonna be in therapy for months.