Midnight in Paris

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

"Gertrude Stein Punched Me in the Mouth"
or
"L'époque est toujours plus belle de l'autre côté du pont Einstein-Rosen"

I first came to Chicago in the twenties, and that was to see a fight. Ernest Hemingway was with me and we both stayed at Jack Dempsey's training camp. Hemingway had just finished two short stories about prize fighting, and while Gertrude Stein and I both thought they were decent, we agreed they still needed much work. I kidded Hemingway about his forthcoming novel and we laughed a lot and had fun and then we put on some boxing gloves and he broke my nose.

 "A Twenties Memory" by Woody Allen

Copyright © 1966-1971 by Woody Allen

I've been waiting for Woody Allen to make this film since before he asked to Play It Again, Sam (or even What's Up, Tiger Lily?). 

Based on a routine from his stand-up days,* which he later expanded for a piece in "The New Yorker" (see above), Midnight in Paris follows Gil (Owen Wilson) a self-absorbed, neurotically anxious writer of Hollywood fluff ("Wonderful, but forgettable...sounds like something I wrote"), who is obsessed with death,** as he travels to Paris from Pasadena with fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams, but it could just as well have been Elizabeth Banks) and her conservative family. Gil is working on a novel, long in the gestation, and is distracted by the vapid shallowness that he is about to marry into. Paris is shops, restaurants, museums and snootiness, and to escape the jejeune de vivre, he takes a late-night walk through the streets of Paris and is approached by a vintage taxi.

Entering the cab for Gil is a magical moment for him, on the same plane-breaking as when Tom Baxter (or is it Gil Shepherd) walks off the screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo. He is instantly transported to 1920's Paris and becomes lost in "The Lost Generation" (without the benefit of having survived World War I), meeting Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Zelda (Alison Pill) and Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), all the heroes of his favorite literary era and time, the 1920's. He's enchanted...and as his novel is about that period of time...inspired. He goes back to Inez, gob-smacked, unable to explain where he's been all night, but "alibi's" his adventures as a dream (as they are, certainly in the aspirational sense). He tries to bring Inez to the party, but the magic doesn't work—she's as unthrilled with Gil's stories as he is with her wine-tasting adventures with acquaintance Paul (Michael Sheen).

She leaves. And the taxi arrives, bearing Gil and Hemingway to the apartment of Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and Alice B. Toklas (Thérèse Bourou-Rubinsztein), who are playing judgemental hosts to Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) and his enchanting mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard). Gil gives his novel to Stein and Hemingway to critique, but he is drawn to Adriana, making her way through the 20's as best she can.

So, the two planes of existence for Gil are set up: his modern-day drudgery on the cusp of a marriage of inconvenience; and his fantasy past, where his dreams are reality and reality can make dreams. You know where this is going.

It doesn't matter, though. This is a "feel-good" Woody Allen picture—the kind people like—where the messages are still telegraphed the way they are in "obvious" Allen movies, the coincidences just a little too convenient, but so full of incident, grace and nuance (and quite a bit of humor) that it goes down well (as Allen groused throughout Stardust Memories, audiences "like his earlier, funnier [movies]"). That Gil is such a sunny presence in the past (and as played by Wilson, he has a guileless charm that doesn't sacrifice intelligence—he's the way you'd imagine Jimmy Stewart would play Woody Allen), even his kvetching is charming and not harsh.  It doesn't matter that you be a history buff and "get" all the references,*** (and we meet Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Salvadore Dali [Adrien Brody], and on a side-trip, Toulouse Lautrec, Gaugin and Degas).

Of course, Gil is enchanted; he is an era when his heroes are still at the stage he is, becoming themselves, with their best work still ahead of them. His age of magic is their everyday life. The interesting lesson of the film (and what makes it special and wise) is that the knife cuts both ways. The "lesson" is both sour and sweet, but not hope-crushing—a little bit of salt in the creamy fluff.

 

And no, nobody punches Gil in the nose—but you can't help noticing that Wilson's is a little broken.

*  I mentioned before that I was in Europe. It's not the first time that I was in Europe, I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d'Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygienist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Years Eve party. It was April. Scott had just written "Great Expectations," and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he was... looked to me eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen. That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth.

** Yes, this is the Woody Allen character.  His films never fall too far from the analyst's couch.

*** I certainly didn't—I had to do some referencing for the line: "That was Djuna Barnes (I was dancing with)?  No wonder she wanted to lead."

Rust and Bone

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

Last Man Standing

or

You Don't Know What You Got 'Til It's Gone

Jacques Audiard's new film De Rouille et le D'os  (Rust and Bone, in English) is as far afield from his last film, The Prophet, as could be. That film was a mini-Godfather, that showed the traps a criminal puts himself into, whether he's in prison or the King of the Hill.  

Rust and Bone, though, is a love story about the transitory nature of selfishness and the numbing vacuousness of complacency, which sounds like it'd be a a dull film, or a pedantic English theme. Combine it, though, with kick-boxing and killer whales chewing your legs off, and it becomes a different animal altogether.

Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), unemployed father of Sam (Armand Vendure), crashes with his sister in Antibes, while he tries to get his act together. He jogs, he works out at the gym, dreams of being a kick-boxer, but the best he can do is bounce at a night-club, where he meets Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), or rather rescues her, from an altercation. 

She's a performer with a local Marineland park, directing killer whales through stunts and tricks, before a live audience. Everything is going well during one performance when an accident happens and, as a result, Stéphanie loses both legs below the knees. Submerged in depression, contemplating suicide, she calls Ali for help (it would be another of his string of odd jobs to earn money), where he starts to help her with therapy, specifically carrying her down to the wheelchair-inaccessible beach, so she can swim.

Ali is so deeply rooted in his own needs, that almost by osmosis, Stéphanie begins to care more about herself, and stops living in the past. The sex between them helps. But Ali is entirely self-absorbed and wants to keep things casual. For further money, he starts participating in paid street-fight competitions, while Stéphanie takes the plunge and decides that she'll invest in artificial limbs and learn to walk again.

It's such a lop-sided story of co-dependency that it may seem like a frustrating film, but the performances of the two leads, Cotillard and Schoenaerts, go a long way in keeping interest. Cotillard, in particular, seems to be oozing this performance out of some deep, dark place in her core (either that or she didn't sleep for a week) that is painful but fascinating to watch, while Schoenaerts is such a non-expressive performer, you might think that he is so completely internalized that he just walked off the street. 

And it's the performances that balance this film out, making the paths the actors take even necessary to sell the circumstances when the movie veers into melodrama, making an emotional course correction to get to an ending that...well, might have a point, even if a conventional one.

Meanwhile, Audiard does some impressive work with merely images, as the character of Ali is somewhat uncommunicative, and subtle shadows over people's faces suggest a shift in attitude between them. And the whole Marineland sequences are like a sensory-overload nightmare—music constantly blaring, a robotic response-non-response from the performers to the audience, the pure, dumb folly of it all is quite an amazing sequence of textures and tones that provide a great deal of foreshadowing, even though you don't know what's coming—you just know that the place is on the knife-edge of panic and chaos.

So, an interesting film once it gets started, but then suffers a shift-tone that leads to some mighty convenient changes of heart, and makes Rust and Bone get all gooey inside, without (thank God) anthropomorphizing the whales.

La Vie En Rose

La Vie En Rose (aka La Môme) (Olivier Dahan, 2007) Sentimentality is a funny thing. The world over, people wept for France's "little sparrow" Edith Piaf and the brief life that was snuffed out too soon. 

That she was the instrument of her own demise made no difference. That she started out as a street urchin, singing for her drinks and drugs, was discovered and "cleaned up" for public consumption but never lost the grime of the street from her soul, went through love and loss, then disappeared into a fog of drugs that left her a shell of what she once was, didn't matter. 

 

Driven by ego and the need for acceptance—from an audience she now had contempt for—she continued to perform, collapsing on-stage frequently, and still had the temerity to sing, as her last signature piece, "I Have no Regrets."

Swell. As I said, sentimentality is a funny thing. Watching Dahan's "La Môme," (or La Vie en Rose in this country) K muttered: "...France's Judy Garland." Yes, but I don't think Garland was so ferociously unempathetic. Piaf wore her street-toughness like armor and treated those who tried to manage her...with disdain. They must have really loved her to keep working for her, to the point of self-delusion, to the detriment of their own worth.

Not very sympathetic thoughts for a celebration of "the little sparrow." But, Dahan made a tough-minded film that still manages to eke out sympathy for its hard-bitten subject. And there are moments of visionary work: I'm thinking of the sequence of Piaf's formal "debut"—with new wardrobe, new presentation, new hand gestures and a hard-taught respect for a song's text—all done in fading montage and a burgeoning score. But Piaf is silent (a practical consideration, as there are no recordings of her during that period). It's a controversial, contrarian move, but all the more powerful because of it.

It showcases Piaf as presentation, and the point could not have been made more forcefully had a singing voice been dubbed in. A lot rides on Marion Cotillard's performance of that scene, and she is never less than stubbornly brilliant in the film, brushing away easy sympathy for the character, and conveying her power brutishly. The film also won an Oscar for its intricate make-up work, but Cotillard works far beyond its confines to convey the ravages that life, but mostly Piaf's stubbornness, heaped upon her shoulders.

When Piaf died, I was in grade school and the teacher brought in her records to play for us what the world had lost. Most of us listened attentively, though not comprehending what this had to do with the price of tea in China (as if we cared about that, either!). But a bunch of the kids hid giggles behind hands and snorted at the quavering tones and incomprehensible language. As that old memory came bubbling up, I couldn't help thinking Piaf would be on the side of the urchins and not the sparrows.

C'est la vie.

A Very Long Engagement

Written at the time of the film's release in 2004. There have been a lot of movies about WWI since then. Now, you know what they were watching when preparing their movies.

 

A Very Long Engagement (aka "Un long dimanche de fiançailles") (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004) Epic war film, reuniting Jeunut with his Amelie star Audrey Tautou, that tells the story of one woman's search for her lost lover who went to WWI and never came back. The film is full of story and incident (and Jeunet's wind-up mechanism way of telling a story) that it makes the 134 minute film feel a lot longer.The film starts as a story told in flash-back of five soldiers who were court-martialed for self-mutilation (shooting themselves in the hand by various means) in order to get themselves out of the war and the hellish existence in the trenches on the front line. One of them is the Manech (Gaspar Ulliel), lover of Mathilde (Tautou), whose fantasies and re-imaginings of the circumstances of the war make up the bulk of the film's realisation. By various means, she begins to piece together the story of her lover's court-martial and punishment (he and the others found guilty are thrown out of the trenches into "no-man's land" to fend for themselves), which are told "Rashoman"-like from different angles and perspectives.

The war-scenes are appropriately grisly, Jeunet displays his usual penchant for things grotesque--there's a murder of a rotund general by a prostitute that's particularly...interesting--that are part and parcel of his films, and there's the tendency to turn his films into little Rube Golberg-esque mechanisms, that can become tedious as much as they can delight (He always has to thrown in "the mechanism of sex" joke somewhere, too).*

Still, as distracting as his eye for the unusual shot can be, there are moments of "gee-whizzery" and CG-wizardry that are pretty wondrous, and stay in the head long after the details of the movie fade. Jeunet is a master of bending reality to meet his artistic goals, whether lighting and dressing an area to its maximum potential, or employing digital tricks to make it conform to his vision or the past's.

Examples of some of the amazing frames of A Very Long Engagement, some courtesy of Evan Richards and his wonderful blog "Cinematography, Etc.**

A make-shift field hospital set in a dirigible hangar is engulfed in flames

when a bomb sets off the contained hydrogen.

A sinister night meeting is made even more so in Jeuneut's composition

--as the one must come down to the other's level.

Going a long way for a visual pun-a farmer is met by gendarmes to join the war-effort,
and the wind from their car sweeps aside the tall grass leading to their wagon. "Draft," indeed.

Jeuneut makes incredible use of depth-of-field here, as Mathilde seeks out the wife of one of 

the condemned in a market-place (Yes, that is Jodie Foster, whose french is impeccable)

A Luhrmann-esque "post-card" shot told in lettered flash-back.

A CGI recreation of WWI-period Nice, France. Quite Nice, in fact

The crippled Mathilde must stand on her rickety wheelchair to reach for war records.

"MMM"--the initials "Manech's marrying Mathilde" --is a constant icon throughout the film. 

Here, Jeuneut cranes up from the carved initials to Mathilde's obvious bliss.

The shot will continue further up to include an albatross-symbol of tenacity.

The young Mathilde fantasizes that her new boy-friend will save her from falling from the lighthouse. 

The next scene will have them embracing as they gaze from the light in a mock-Hollywood shot.

Jeuneut makes the stair-way leading to the light-house lamp a literal "golden spiral".

From the impossibly soaring crane-move preceding it, it's obviously a set, 

but the breathtaking sun-set looks quite real, even if it is computer-enhanced.

Jeuneut makes Mathilde's family's home warm and earthy by accentuating the color palette of the scene.

The Fog of War--Jeuneut drains the color out of a stark battlefield to shades of gray.

A hospital is drained to a sepia tint, not unlike the jaundiced color of old medicine bottles.

The lighthouse stirs to life

Ultimately, it is such a polyglot of a movie that one can't help feel it might split any potential audience. Those wanting a purely romantic film will be put off by the war scenes and the occasional blunt sexuality, as well as the prolonged sense of hopelessness the film radiates. Those interested in the mystery aspect will be frustrated by the lack of momentum in the progress of acquiring facts and the diverging stories leading to blind alleys. What spurred me on was seeing the amazing scenes like the preceding ones, and seeing a new one around every splice.

It's an amazing film, if not everyone's cup of tea.

* It occurs to me that in the unlikely event Steven Spielberg ever wants to hand over the reins of the "Indiana Jones" films to another director Jeunet would be the perfect choice. ***

 

** Sadly, no longer a part of the Inter-webs. But, credit where it is due.

 

** Uh, yeah. He didn't.

The Dark Knight Rises

Written at the time of the film's release.

The Bane of Our Existence
or
"Okay, What Joker Put Yeast in My Dark Knight?"


"All stories end in death, and he is no true story teller who would keep that from you"--Hemingway

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story"--Welles

So, Christopher Nolan's "Batman" trilogy ends in a nearly 3 hour film that neatly wraps up the story. How does it end? That would be telling. The comics went through a phase where Bruce Wayne ruminated that he was working towards a world where he wasn't needed. That's a nice little "buttoning up" of the "Dark Knight" story, but it's not complete. What of Bruce Wayne? Nolan has the opportunity in his version to really end it—he doesn't have to sell comic books next month—so, he can take it anywhere he wants to go. And one realizes (if one really wanted to end the story) that the only real happy ending that could be achieved is if Bruce Wayne became the one thing he never knew as a child—a caring, present father. Anything else makes the story a tragedy, and Bruce Wayne the last victim of the gunman's bullets that killed his parents. Given this series' downbeat tone (that of the sacrificial martyr) and of the available previews for The Dark Knight Rises, such a scenario does not seem likely. Given that, Nolan can take the tragedy of his hero in any number of directions.

Bane (Tom Hardy here) is the perfect villain to bring into the mix. A hopped-up minor character, he is best known as the lead antagonist for the "Knightfall" storyline (that seemed to last a couple years). In "Knightfall," the drug-pumped super-villain released every criminal in Gotham's prison system for The Bat to deal with, while he hung back, biding his time. Then, when the Batman, weakened and exhausted, finally confronted him, Bane broke his back, leaving Wayne paralyzed and unable to fight on. It fell to the rest of "The Batman Family" (including the once-and-future "Robin's") to take on the mantle and continue the fight.

Nolan's canvas is a bit broader, taking into consideration the events of the two previous films to create something a bit more apocalyptic, a rumination on the fractious quality of good vs. evil and the slippery slope to Hell that ideology and good intentions can be tilted towards. Nobody's pure in this one, there's no whack-job with delusions of grandeur behind the assault on Gotham City, with avarice their sole motive. Everybody, wearing white or black, thinks they're doing the right thing. And everybody's wrong.

It's eight years since the events of The Dark Knight that resulted in the deaths of D.A. Harvey Dent, Rachel Dawes, and the subsequent disappearance of the man suspected in the killings, the Bat-man (Christian Bale). Now, Bruce Wayne is an exile in his newly-rebuilt Wayne Manor, walking stiffly with a cane due to some unknown injury (part of me wants to think it was due to him being stabbed by one of The Penguin's umbrellas). He sees no one, is a recluse, and there are rumors he's turned into a Howard Hughes-style eccentric, apparently due to a massive investment in a clean energy prototype that failed and cost Wayne Enterprises a fortune...or at least half of it.

The chief backer for the project, Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) tries to get past the constant guards of faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine, putting in the most emotional performance he's done in years) and Wayne exec Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who fill the functions of acting as Wayne's heart and brains (and conscience), if not as surrogate Mother and Father. A rival exec, Daggett, is trying to take over W.E., by any means necessary, in this case, employing a terrorist named Bane, who has his own bones to pick (and break) with Gotham's golden boy. At the beginning of the film, Gotham in morosely complacent (and obviously filled with exposition), having cleaned up crime by the draconian Dent Anti-Crime Act, which has incarcerated over a thousand criminals in Gotham's Blackgate Prison.

But things are percolating underground, disrupting Gotham's infrastructure.  Bane has an army of misfits and big plans that have outgrown the desires of his patron, and there's a lithe cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who is caught with her hands in the Wayne Manor safe by the man himself ("Oops," she says, not very convincingly). Yes, she's pilfered Martha Wayne's pearl necklace, but more importantly, Bruce Wayne's fingerprints. What does she want with those?

It's only one piece in an intricate puzzle of escalating consequences that Batman must unravel if he is, once again, to save Gotham City, and he must confront his past and overcome great injury, physical and emotional, if he is to prevent a catastrophe...one of his own devising.

That's the gist of it, but it is convoluted by elaborate set-pieces that are, frankly, jaw-dropping, and ends up with Gotham isolated from the rest of the nation, in the hands of criminals with big ideologies and little concern for how roughly they're applied. The police are paralyzed—most of them trapped in the deep infrastructure of the city (a little too conveniently) while Bane initiates a countdown to total destruction.

A countdown of five months.

To quote The Riddler:"????" Five months? How suspenseful is that? And you'd think that somebody, somewhere, would be able to unravel the plot or situation in such a time-frame. But, it's basically a set-up for what Nolan depends on to generate suspense throughout the movie—the last minute "save," that is usually explosive and comes from nowhere, because the writer-director has made motivations ambiguous enough as to be unreadable.* Everyone has got a secret that will be revealed at the most opportune moment of drama. If the mystery was revealed in a drawing room, it would feel like cheating, and the revelations almost psychic.

Speaking of unreadable, Tom Hardy's Bane is hampered by a mask of a morphine dispenser (to keep him from feeling pain), as opposed to the enhancement-juice-pumping-apparatus from the comics (This leads one to ask: if the guy can be stopped by breaking the mask, why does Our Hero employ so many body-blows?  Face-shots, man!!). He is perpetually muffled by this thing, which Hardy compensates for with an almost jolly Father Christmas speaking style, making a clever, unnerving ying-yang effect for the character. Ultimately, though, he's something of a vapor-tiger, like Darth Vader, the big bloated bloviator who's merely a "blind," a distraction for the real danger.

But...five months??**

Another thing: Nolan has come out publicly saying that he wants to make a Bond movie (and the snowbound facility infiltration in Inception is a bowler-tip to them). I would submit that he already has, this film being it. So much of it is borrowed from Bond that all one needs is a casino scene to make it complete (a costume party has to suffice***). The opening sequence, the-villain-that-feels-no-pain, the duplicitous females, obligatory "Q" scene, the tick-tock final set-piece and other aspects can be attributable to Bond films of the past. At least someone is borrowing from the Bond series this time, instead of the other way around.

But, his world of comic-book fantasy is far more gritty and down-to-Earth than any other, and that's what makes "The Dark Knight Trilogy" good; it's relatable, it feels like it could happen, if someone had the will, the wherewithal and the wallet to do it. It also feels of our time. There's been a lot of gas about the politics in this film—uninformed, desperate gas—but the whole uprising scenario, the subjugation of the privileged with no benefit to the less fortunate, the breaking down of society and the cleaving of its people is the stuff of water-cooler vitriol and feels like the temper of the times. The Tea Party AND the Occupy Wall Streeters can both find things to point at and go:"See?"

I'm not going to speculate which side is right, and Nolan is obtuse (and politically slippery) enough to play it right down the yellow stripe of the road. But, this British director is saying something about the State of the Union with a full child-warbled rendition of The Star Spangled Banner (before a particularly horrific football game) and a shot of American flags in tatters on a city street, deep in the movie. They're there for a reason, but not for anything specific enough other than "we're a fragile alliance and we're in trouble."

And that we need heroes—selfless ones, for whom profit is not a motive—and that, "anyone can be Batman."****

* Case in point:  there's a scene where Catwoman uses a Wayne-supplied bat-bike to blow a hole in a tunnel to make an evacuation tunnel for the sealed-off city, a task initiated by the Caped Crusader.  Following it, Nolan sits on a pull-in shot of Hathaway with an enigmatic smile on her face that communicates...nothing. Except an odd complacency. It will only be resolved...if there's anything TO be resolved, later in the film. 

** There are neat touches, and a refresher of both The Dark Knight AND Batman Begins will help. One nice thing—Nolan recalls a scene from BB when a young Bruce Wayne falls down a tunnel and is subsequently rescued by his father, by having a similar scenario played out here, with the Obi-Wan presence of a dark father figure from his past. Nice touch.

*** A masked ball at which, like in Batman Returns, Bruce Wayne doesn't wear a mask.  Heh.

**** Just not Nicolas Cage, please...

What do they say at Marvel? "What a poser..."