The Lucky Ones (2008)

A review of one of the films from the post 9-11 environment, written at the time of the film's release.

 

The Lucky Ones (Neil Burger, 2008) Every war, every "police action," seems to have its "re-patriation" film. World War 1 had The Razor's Edge, 2—The Best Years of Our Lives, Vietnam—Coming Home. The Lucky Ones involves returning troops in the ongoing Iraq War, different from their cinematic (and real) fellow troops in that they're not coming home. They're on a 30 day leave before going back as part of the "stop-loss" program. So, this takes place as more of an interruption to their service. What happens when the environment is not so regimented, or as dangerous. The three come back from the war altered, and all have specific goals in mind, all of which change when they actually touch boots to ground in the States.

It follows three vets—Cheaver (Tim Robbins), an older sergeant just off his third and last tour, T.K. (Michael Peña), wounded, but gung-ho about going back, and Colee (Rachel McAdams), a neophyte coming back with a mission and a hole in her leg. They're all damaged: Cheaver is psychologically out-of-whack; T.K.'s purpose is to get back to his fiancee to see if "his equipment" still works after being wounded; Colee wants to find the family of the guy she hooked up with there and return his guitar to them. Meeting on the flight state-side, they decide to pool resources to get where they're heading. But, like any road-trip, there are detours, changes of plan, and the occasional loss of bearings. Stability is not to be found at home for any of them, and the trip only reinforces the perception that their fellow soldiers are the only ones who've "got their back."

Some of the episodes reach a bit, while some feel natural, and mostly the film avoids easy answers—less than it avoids mention of the war, except for a brief opening scene. The Lucky Ones is less concerned with Iraq, than it is with the soldier's plight, caught in the demilitarized zone of not fitting in either here or there. Putting them on the road—in transit—reflects that sense of rootlessness (as most road-movies do) that these perpetual soldiers must have that is unique to this era's soldiers. The film never really tackles that subject head-on, as it almost has a duty to do, instead relying on the various "missions" and destinations to define the characters. Ultimately, the film has nowhere to go once those stories are used up, and the film ends on a logical melancholy note.

Where it shines is in the performances. As with the war, Burger and his co-writer Dirk Wittenborn are quiet about the soldiers, presenting them as rather independent pawns in a much bigger game, their choices on the road sometimes unconventional, and not S.O.P.  But McAdams, Pena, and especially Robbins (this is some of his subtlest work in the past decade and nice to see), breathe a likable humanity into their characters, buffering the moments of manipulation and contrivance. You like these guys and want them to succeed, even if they are a bit unreadable—enough so that some of their choices surprise, even deep into the movie. That The Lucky Ones manages to do that is no small accomplishment.

After Hours

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985) "Different rules apply when it gets this late, ya know what I mean? It's like...'after-hours.'"

Radio monologist Joe Frank died January 15, 2018 and several podcasts who have depended on the spoken word for their medium of choice remarked on his passing. 

But, what seldom came up was the lawsuit. 

Joe Frank sued the producers of After Hours for similarities to his monologue called "Lies." Details of the settlement have never been disclosed, but when you listen to "Lies" and you watch After Hours and it is obvious down to some very specific details that the movie's first portion is a bunch of "Lies." I mean, "bagel and cream-cheese paperweights?" That's the sort of detail that can't be dismissed as the coincidence of two competing "Earth-hit-by-asteroid" movies or "Truman-Capote-writes-"In-Cold-Blood"" movies.* That sort of "coincidence" is right on the proboscis.

Soho

Lawsuit aside, After Hours is one of my favorite Scorsese films** (and I have several of those) as it perfectly captures the bizarre sense of a city's nocturnal side, especially when one is "up" past one's comfort zone due to circumstances beyond one's control with looming consequences once the sun decides to crash the party. I've had nights like that, wandering for miles in the dead of night in the one section of town that doesn't seem to have a gas station at any close proximity—would it be open if there was? But, stuff happens. It just doesn't pile up like this: 

"My God, Marcy finally met Mr. Right"

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is a corporate drone where he...oh, who cares what he does, it isn't important, but it has something to do with computers or computer training ("I'm just a word processor, for Christ's sake!" he will scream to the heavens at one point). Whatever. It doesn't matter. But, after droning away another day, he goes back to his meticulously arranged apartment, checks out what's on cable—and nothing's on—he goes to eat a lonely dinner at a lonely diner, head down in a book (Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer"***) when he looks up and sees Marcy (Roseanna Arquette) watching him. They nod, they smile, and they start to talk...

They talk about "Tropic of Cancer"—she likes it, can quote from it ("'This is not a book, it's a prolonged insult; a gob of spit in the face of art; a kick in the pants to Truth, Beauty, God' something like that...that's all I remember")—and it seems they have a lot in common...enough to continue the conversation. About the cashier "making these strange movements," about how she's going to her friend's loft downtown Soho and she's a sculptress making plaster-of-Paris paperweights of bagels with cream-cheese. She gives him her friend's phone number and later on, he calls her and she's had a fight with a friend and is feeling vulnerable—why doesn't he come over? She's glad he called.

And that's all it takes.

After a "Mr. Toad's wild-cab-ride" that is so violent he loses the $20 bill he was going to use to pay the fare, he goes up to the apartment of Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino), who is working on a sculpture of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Marcy's not there; she's at the all-night drugstore ("She all right?" "It's under control") although she calls ("Well, of course he's here, you invited him...it's your problem, Marcy, I'm not gonna tell him...) and Kiki asks him to help with the sculpture. His shirt gets messed up and Kiki offers to launder it, giving him a replacement to wear for his "date". They talk about how the plaster is hard work and screws up your shoulders and Paul offers her a massage and after he mentions she has a good body, she agrees, remarking that she doesn't have any scars—"some women are covered with them head to toe...horrible, ugly scars...I'm just telling you now"). He brushes that off, starting a story of how, as a child, he'd spent a night in a burn ward and, before he can get to the meat of the story, she falls asleep. Then, Marcie walks in.

They retire to Marcy's room and her first question is "What'd you do to her?" which makes Paul defensive, and Marcy shrugs it off just as quickly. Saying that she's going to take a quick shower, she asks "I hope you don't have to get up early or anything. Because I think you're somebody I can really talk to. Tonight, I feel like I'm gonna let loose or something. I feel like something really incredible is going to happen here. I feel sooo..excited. I don't know why. I feel it. I'm glad you came." And she laughs semi-hysterically. And then she winks, which Scorsese emphasizes with a forward-travelling shot. 

Marcy's phone rings and Paul hesitantly answers it: "She can't come to the phone now." "Tell her Greg called" and hangs up. Kiki appears in the door-way, stripping off her bra: "She back?" Paul can only lamely answer: "Yeah." She sulks away, and Paul can only shake his head. Weird. He takes advantage of Marcy's shower-time, to look at her bag—the prescription she got was an ointment for second-degree burns, then the shower stops, and Paul hurriedly puts the ointment back in the bag just in time to not be detected. It's then that the conversation takes on what Frank describes as "a slightly pathological cast." "Hey, I thought I told you to stay on the bed..." (she hadn't), then tells him to wait. At that, point Howard Shore's original score kicks in with a back-beat of ticking (Paul is constantly checking the time on his watch) as barely-registered whispers between Marcy and Kiki can be overheard in the next room.

Marcy pokes her head in the doorway, looking troubled. "Did you say something?" (He hadn't) "I thought I heard you say something." (He didn't). Her mood changes and she tells Paul that she'd been raped in that very room. Paul is horrified. "It's alright, it was an ex-boyfriend of mine. I slept through most of it" A change of subject and venue seems called for and they go out for coffee at a diner, run by Peter (the late and sadly-missed Dick Miller), who knows Marcy well. Paul asks about "Franklin" the name on the door-bell of the apartment and she tells him that's her husband. Paul registers another pause, trying not to react—he'll do that a lot. Seems they weren't married very long, that he lives in Turkey and is a film-freak, whose favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz. In fact, on their wedding night, when they were making love, he kept yelling "Surrender, Dorothy!" "Naturally," she says, as he takes his hand "I don't like to talk about it." "Can we get the check?" Paul asks suddenly.

It's then that Peter delivers that signature line at the top of the post. "It's on the house," he says. "After-Hours." Marcy and Paul go back to the Franklin loft, where he tries to make out with Marcy, but she starts to break down, they retire to her room, Marcy has another whispering session with Nikki, and then Paul turns petulant, as if all of the delays, intrigues, and feints have worn thin. He becomes a real jerk and Marcy goes crying to Nikki (ostensibly so Paul can buy one of their bagel and cream-cheese paperweights—"...as we sit here chatting, there are important papers flying rampant around my apartment 'cause I don't have anything to hold them down with!") and Paul goes out into the night where it is pouring down rain, and he becomes soaked. But, he can't get home, even by subway, because he only has ninety-seven cents...and fares go up to $1.50 at midnight.

Paul can't even go the Men's Room without being confronted with dread.

That is just the first half-hour of After Hours, and already it is so filled with a sense of dread, mystery, paranoia, miscommunication and misdirection that if Kafka were in the audience, he might run to the comfort of the lobby to soak his head in hot butter.

Paul will spend the night as it ticks away in an increasingly threatening waking nightmare. During the course of the evening, he will lose $20.00, find another, and lose that and his apartment keys, discover a dead body by suicide and be suspected of murder, as well as being a burglar, a pervert, and nearly having his head shaved, on top of being chased by a vigilante mob who know him because his face has been plastered on ever corner light pole. The very boundaries of Soho are a trap that he can't reach, without being attacked, killed (or worse) being accused of something else, by an increasingly misunderstanding and self-obsessed citizenry.

What makes the screenplay (and resulting film) interesting—and what sets it apart from Joe Frank's original source—is its intricate machinations in setting up this Kafkaesque Soho-scape of incomplete information and missed opportunities. But, it does so in a limited scope where Paul Hackett is only one among the Soho nighthawks who knows the complete story (or as much as he can) and his very knowledge of what's going on in the moving, changing landscape is what makes him suspected of the activities that the people he encounters are sensitive to. He's the stranger in a strange land, walking into an established and tenuously connected environment that he, by his movements—and resulting twists of Fate—disrupts. Soho has a barely functioning cohesion to begin with, but Paul's presence sends it spinning off its axis. He may ultimately be blameless for what happens, but it might not have turned out this way were he not there—making him totally to blame. Consider him the anti-George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life, whose existence determines the difference between Heaven and Hell (or, specifically, Bedford Falls and Potterville). Maybe they should've called this "It's a Horrible Night." 

The world is an intricate mechanism, but throw your shoes into it and you're a saboteur. Rather than be a boon to the community, Paul is the salt in the sugar-shaker, and, as a result, he gets plastered for it. All he can do is retreat to familiar surroundings and know his place, while the rest of the world moves on around him.

After Hours, despite its opening "lifts," is a wholly derivative but amazingly original film. And it's one of my favorites in the Scorsese output.

* Curiously enough, there's an "L.A. version" of After Hours that came out about the same time: the more plot-driven Into the Night, directed by John Landis and starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer.

** The first choice of director was Scorsese, but he was embroiled in pre-production of The Last Temptation of Christ, and so producers Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne turned to neophyte director Tim Burton, after they'd seen his short "Vincent." Plans to start went into place and then The Last Temptation of Christ fell through, which put Dunne and Robinson in an awkward position: how to tell Burton. When Burton was told that Scorsese was interested, he immediately responded: "I gracefully withdraw from the project. I do not want to stand in the way of anything Martin Scorsese wants to do." Burton would make his feature directing debut with Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, and Scorsese released The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.

*** A very After Hours section: "One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. ... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing."

Sweet Land

Written at the time of the film's release.

Let us hope that we are all preceded in this world by a love story.

Don L. Snyder "Of Time and Memory"

This was Valentine's week and the requisite rom-com, Music and Lyrics, opened on the day to generally luke-warm reviews. I was looking at Roger Ebert's web-site, and reading Jim Emerson's half-hearted 3-star review of The Fountain that ends with him saying "but I'd much rather watch somebody shoot for the moon when the stakes are sky-high than sit back while they play it safe" and I thought only a film-reviewer who'd seen too many half-hearted, limp romantic comedies could say that.

 

Myself, I'd rather see a film that succeeds, however humble its aspirations.

So to find a film like Ali Selim's feature debut Sweet Land is something of a miracle. It is simple to the point of artlessness and has the genuine tone of a film where the camera is simply turned on and happy accidents allowed to fill the screen. Of course, it was meticulously planned to appear that way (14 years, in fact) but never once does this multi-generational love story tell its oft-told tale of love and struggle in the heartland in a way that feels less than fresh and improvised. Even a descent into Capraland is greeted with something of relief.

There's more to it than this simple outline, but Sweet Land tells the story of a Norwegian Bachelor Farmer who sends for a war-bride in the days following World War I. Trouble is, she's German, speaks but a smidgen of English ("Hello" and one useful exclamation of hunger) and has no "papers." Without them, their arranged marriage can't be performed and the two must get along under the watchful eyes of their neighbors, the suspicions of the church and the post-war fear of all things German (One could say it's a film for the times, but given its long gestation period one has to conclude, sheepishly, that its a film of any time). There are the inevitable complications, but ones born of the awkwardness of the situation, vagaries of the time and the realities of the harvest. One comes away with the entirely appropriate feeling that love isn't "star-crossed" and superficial, but very hard work. A refreshingly truthful idea, that. One wants these kids to work it out, despite the odds. Most rom-com's have me wanting them to get it over with.

A good chunk of the film is spoken in Scandinavian and German, never needing to stoop to sub-titles, and that is due to the lived-in performances of its two leads, Tim Guinee--explosively self-contained and reticent as the NBF--and the gifted Elizabeth Reaser, so transparent and natural an actress that she could have done the entire movie in German and still communicated every emotion economically and fascinatingly. They say that for a movie to succeed takes a lot of work and some form of miracle and Reaser is this film's miracle. 

They are supported by many marquee names, John Heard, Ned Beatty, Lois Smith and Alan Cumming, who also produced. Audiences should be grateful to him for championing this powerful little movie of the heart, with its discreet camera work, extraordinary performances and story that transcends time and celebrates place. Released in 2005, but making it to Seattle at the end of 2006, it would have been a shame to see this exquisite movie die on the vine.

2016 Update: Ten years later and I still fondly recall Sweet Land, so special is this film—not a lot of narrative, but a lot of good film-making went into telling the story. Tim Guinee has been doing a lot of television work—a LOT of television work—and Reaser has done extended work on "Grey's Anatomy," "The Good Wife" and "Mad Men," but is probably best known as being the matriarch of the Cullen clan in the "Twilight" movies. Ali Selim has done some directing work for television, but hasn't done any feature work since. 

 

Somebody give this man some money. Sweet Land showed the mark of a brilliant director and those are few and far between and should not lay dormant.