Choke

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Written at the time of the film's release.

"Know Thyself"*

or 

"The Running Gag"

Vincent Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is conflicted, stymied, blocked, obstructed and stone-walled.

 

He is not, however, impotent.

He's a sex addict. He's half-heartedly going to a support group for sex mania. And whole-heartedly failing to commit...to the group's four-step program, or any serious relationship. In fact, every time he goes to one of the meetings he ends up taking a step or two back. 

 

Understandable, as the group is full of sex maniacs!

He works as a tour-guide at a historical reconstruction of a Revolutionary-period village ("I am the back-bone of Colonial America" he intones to the camera, as if he was reciting narration from "Fight Club"--the marketing for the film features that film's title in slightly smaller type than its own). There, he fantasizes about ripping the bodices off of every female employee. He wants to know them in the biblical sense, if not know them in the intimate sense.

His mother (Anjelica Huston) is in a permanent care facility suffering from dementia, not from Alzheimer's, but from repeated and systematic drug use. She now only recognizes Vincent as one of a series of dead lawyers she once knew, which is fine, except that Vincent wants to know more about his past--specifically who his father is--and that knowledge is slowly fading from memory. Vincent is desperate to know that he has some DNA not related to his addled mother's.

 

His life is so abnormal, that he craves the normal even if he wouldn't recognize it if he was hit in the head with it. As a child he was jerked from foster-home to foster-home, always rescued by Mom, for a series of runs-to-the-border interrupted by arrest and another foster home. The only love he has known is when his mother saved him from choking on a corn-dog using the Heimlich maneuver. Now, he goes from restaurant to restaurant purposefully choking on food, in the hope that someone will rescue him. And give him some money out of sympathy to keep Mom in that facility.

The story so strains to be unconventionally amusing that it is crushingly disappointing to have it become so...conventional in its resolution and the embracing of the good and the normal as the panacea for all ills. Choke plays by the old bait and switch of the Hollywood system under the Hays Code. Lure the audience in with scandal, titillation and promises of lurid behavior, then turn it into a homily about the right, true path. Choke becomes the sort of sanctimony-in-wolf's-clothing that you would find in such films as Peyton Place, Sex and the Single Girl, or any horny teen sex-comedy, combined with the basic trope of psychological films where all one's neuroses are cured with a sudden remembrance of that one key event that unlocks all the symptoms, and you have the basic dull curve that Choke slides into. Everything falls like a house of cards once the underlying truth is revealed.**

One should expect more from the author of "Fight Club," but it's not his fault. Blame writer-director Clark Gregg for this one. He's taken all the thorns off of Palahniuk's outline and exposed the basic tawdriness of his novel to the light of day and making it shrivel like a vampire.***

 

The only thing to recommend this film is Rockwell and Huston, who manage to breathe life into their characters--they're the best written in the screenplay. Sensitive viewers should be aware of the pervasive language, and sexual situations, which are not glamorized in the least.

* Inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. John Huston used it in the prologue for his film Freud: The Secret Passion, as the basic tenet of psychology. In the context of Choke, I find it a rather useful and funny reference.

 

** As in the other Palahniuk adaptation. It's interesting, the whole "falling house of cards" metaphor for the psychological scale falling from one's eyes can be applied (quite literally) to Fight Club as well, and it's just as much an oversimplification of the process as Choke, or for that matter, Freud, or Spellbound. It did clue me into the conclusion that Fight Club is a completely mentally-contained movie--that is, it's all happening in the main character's head. All of it. Or it doesn't make any sense. If that is the intention, my respect for the film just doubled. Maybe the scales fell from my eyes.

 

*** One more thing: Gregg joins the group of actor-creators not content to stay behind the camera of their films, ala M. Might Shyamalan, Mike Binder, and Kenneth Lonergan. The likes of Costner and Harris and Gibson act and direct because the producers cut their losses on actors' "special projects" by keeping their legitimate box-office draws up-front. There's no financial reasons that Shyamalan or Lonergan or Gregg should be splitting their attentions acting, and writing-directing. Hitchcock made cameos in his films initially to fill in crowd scenes, then it came to be expected--a running gag lasting throughout his career. Here the "Hitchcock moments" are merely self-serving.

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?

The Merry Gentleman

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

"Fat Man Doesn't Want to be Fat—Still Eats the Fries"

 

Kate Frazier (Kelly Macdonald) has escaped an abusive relationship from her policeman-husband (Bobby Cannavale), and is now hiding out in another town, anonymous, working, and giving varying excuses for the "shiner" she's sporting. She doesn't want to get involved, but ends up fighting off questions and the advances from all sorts of flawed men. That includes the police detective (Tom Bastounes, who will go far, I'll bet) investigating the "jumper" that Kate saved the same night that a man in her office building was killed by a sharp-shooter across the street.

What she doesn't know and the detective suspects is that they were one and the same man. Tom Logan (Michael Keaton) is a tailor by day, but freelances as a hitman in Chicago. He's good at both jobs, but only one of them makes him suicidal. And in one of the neat touches of the screenplay, Kate and Tom have this odd habit of saving each other's lives.

Actors want to direct. But not all actors can. For every vain-glorious exercise of star-clout, there are the actors—like Redford, Gibson, even Ben Affleck—who surprise you and make you realize that they probably should have always been behind the camera.

Add Michael Keaton to the list. The duality that he's displayed on-screen—at least the conflict between the comedic and the dangerous—is just as potent in The Merry Gentleman, his directorial debut. Spare, austere, almost seeming like a British mystery, Keaton lures you with a tightly static camera that lulls you until it starts to move, as it does rarely. Keaton the director is extremely generous with his actors, holding back his own performance—it's all in his eyes, deepening the mystery, while providing great showcases for the rest of the cast—all of whom feel they walked in on the set from their day-jobs being those people. Kelly MacDonald (the Scottish actress who played Josh Brolin's wife in No Country for Old Men) has the most prominent role, trying to maintain a happy face on her own double life, trying to avoid past mistakes and failing miserably, something she has in common with most of the characters in the film. It's an incredibly assured directing debut (of a good screenplay by Ron Lazzeretti), with only a couple stumbles on ancillary characters where things aren't as tight—and that's because Keaton didn't go for a close-up. He was shooting for the movies, not for TV. That's the kind of mistake I'll take.

The Merry Gentleman is an interesting little movie—it feels like it's been told before (hit-man finds he has feelings)—but never in so subtle or so clever a way. It's well worth seeing. And I'm looking forward to Keaton's next directing job.