Still Life / Sanxia haoren
Director: Jia Zhang-Ke. Screenplay: Jia Zhang-Ke. Cinematography: Yu Likwai. Film editing: Kong Jinlei. Art directors: Liang Jingdong, Liu Qiang. Sound design: Zhang Yang. Music: Lim Giong. Producers: Xu Pengle, Wang Tianyun, Zhu Jiong. With: Zhao Tao, Li Zhubin, Zhou Lin, Lan Zhou, Li Jinsheng, Li Yongzhong, Luo Mingwang, Jiang Deping, Jiang Shiping, Tian Jiquan, He Zhongming, Wang Jianhong, Zhu Jicheng, Qian Zhigul, Lan Tianyan, Ma Xiang, Li Yonghu, Li Lunshiang, Long Xiaomao, Yang Longzhen, Zhang Zuoping, Wei Shengfa, Wang Hongwei. China/Hong Kong. Language: Mandarin. 108 min. 2006.
The setting of Jia Zhang-Ke’s staggeringly inspired film is a Chinese town called Fengjie, which is being systematically leveled by teams of demolition workers as a river-taming project raises the local waterline and floods the area. Against this ready-made metaphor for the modernization of China, which achieves impressive progress by literally sweeping away time-honored venues and values, two stories interweave. In one, a rural laborer comes to the town in search of a wife and daughter he hasn’t seen since the girl was an infant; in the other, a woman arrives to track down her errant husband, who’s been away “on business” for two years.
Jia has been a fascinating writer-director ever since his streetwise drama “Xiao Wu” made international waves in 1997, but “Still Life” places him among the giants of contemporary Asian cinema. The acting is nuanced, delicate, and exquisitely modulated. The screenplay evokes compelling emotional truths that are all the more powerful for being expressed in exquisitely understated terms. And most stunning of all is the radiant imagery caught by Jia’s brilliant cinematographer, Yu Likwai, whose graceful compositions, fluid camera movements, and truly magnificent sense of color enrich every moment of every scene. This is filmmaking of the very highest order. It simply can’t be overpraised.
Gone Baby Gone
Director: Ben Affleck. Screenplay: Ben Affleck, Aaron Stockard, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. Cinematography: John Toll. Film editing: William Goldenberg. Production design: Sharon Seymour. Music: Harry Gregson-Williams. Producers: Ben Affleck, Sean Bailey, Alan Ladd Jr., Danton Rissner. With: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver, Michael Kenneth Williams, Edi Gathegi, Mark Margolis, Madeline O’Brien, Slaine, Trudi Goodman, Matthew Maher, Jill Quigg, Sean Malone, Brian Scannell, Jay Giannone, William Lee, Jimmy LeBlanc, Kippy Goldfarb, Elizabeth Duff, Cathie Callanan, Cameron Henry, Bobby Curcuro, Matt Podolske. US. 113 min. 2007.
Ben Affleck scores impressively in his feature-directing debut, thanks partly to his brother Casey Affleck’s inspired performance as a private eye who’s hired by a working-class family to energize the search for their kidnapped child, whom they suspect the police department has given up as lost.
The movie’s grim verisimilitude is further enhanced by director Affleck’s refusal to soften the story’s many tragic twists and to compromise the desolation of its darkest scenes or the confusion of its most chaotic moments. He and coscreenwriter Aaron Stockard also deserve credit for letting the characters speak in realistically crass language; as someone who lived in the Boston area for years, I can testify that every four-letter word rings true, and the ten- and twelve-letter ones do too.
On the downside, there’s a gaping hole in the plot (why don’t the cops examine the corpse in the quarry?) that weakens the picture’s second half, and another that does the same for the denouement. These flaws aside, though, Ben emerges here as an extremely promising director, and Casey consolidates his position as one of the most exciting young character actors in Hollywood today.
Into the Wild
Director: Sean Penn. Screenplay: Sean Penn, based on the book by Jon Krakauer. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Film editing: Jay Lash Cassidy. Production design: Derek R. Hill. Music: Michael Brook, Kaki King, Eddie Vedder. Producers: Art Linson, Sean Penn, William Pohlad. With: Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Hal Holbrook, Vince Vaughn, Kristen Stewart, Brian Dierker, Zach Galifianakis, Thure Lindhardt, Robin Mathews, Haley Ramm, Bryce Walters, Steven Wiig. USA. 140 min. 2007.
Sean Penn took on a real challenge when he decided to adapt Jon Krakauer’s eponymous book, which tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, a gifted and idealistic young man who finished college with flying colors, donated all of his savings to charity, and hit the road like a modern-day Jack Kerouac, hitchhiking from one short-term stopover and part-time job to another. Eventually he reached his final destination in Alaska, where he lived successfully off the land until a couple of unforeseen errors caused his death.
Penn‘s approach to this material is different from Krakauer’s in important ways. For starters, Krakauer reveals McCandless’s death at the get-go, while Penn saves it for the end, evidently hoping that suspense over the outcome will hook audiences more deeply into the tale. This is naïve; lots of people have read the book, and the paperback edition even puts the passage about McCandless’s demise on the cover. Yet it prefigures the conventional storytelling tactics of the picture as a whole, which replaces Krakauer’s clear-eyed pragmatism with high-key movie emotionalism.
Viewers unfamiliar with the film’s source won’t make such comparisons, of course, but they may be perplexed by some of the picture’s details. An example: McCandless is enough of a cultural rebel to give away one pile of cash and set fire to another when he enters the wild, but he’s not enough of a maverick to have sex with a sixteen-year-old girl who practically dragoons him into her bed. So is he a freethinking radical or not? This question is resolved in the book--to McCandless the girl was just another teenybopper, not interesting enough to be attractive--but in the movie it’s hastily and skimpily explained. (It doesn’t help that Tracy's played by a gorgeous actress who looks more like a movie star than a trailer-park waif.) More examples: Penn injects unneeded sentimentality into a sequence about McCandless’s friendship with an old man he’s met on the road, and he overuses a McCandless family secret as a raison d’être for the young adventurer’s restless, sometimes reckless personality. More broadly, Penn gives the film a flashback-heavy structure that mimics the book’s digressions into tangential subject areas (themselves an echo of McCandless’s digressive wanderings) without sustaining the intellectual momentum that makes Krakauer’s account so compelling. It’s possible to explain these decisions away—regarding the girl, for instance, McCandless may be manifesting the ascetic personality that took him to the wild in the first place—but Penn doesn’t deploy them cleverly enough to make them work as well as they need to.
I don’t normally push book-film comparisons this far; it’s a truism that adapting a book means exactly that, doing whatever’s necessary to make it speak in cinematic terms. But here the book is an extensively researched account that aspires to the lofty goal of journalistic truth, while the film is a highly subjective melodrama that aspires to the lower goal of psychologically plausible entertainment. Objectivity and subjectivity are relative qualities that exist more in theory than in practice, but the reduced impact of “Into the Wild” onscreen convinces me that Penn would have done better to sponsor a documentary that plugged directly into Krakauer’s chronicle, even if this meant dispensing with the remarkable portrayal of McCandless by Emile Hirsch, an actor of great promise. “Into the Wild” is a good movie based on material with far richer possibilities. And as a colleague said to me the other day, is Sean Penn really the guy to tell us burning money is a swell idea?
The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
Director: David L. Cunningham. Screenplay: John Hodge, based on a novel by Susan Cooper. Cinematography: Joel Ransom. Film editing: Geoffrey Rowland, Eric A. Sears. Production design: David Lee. Music: Christophe Beck. Producer: Marc E. Platt. With: Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane, Frances Conroy, Wendy Crewson, Amelia Warner, Gregory Smith, James Cosmo, Jim Piddock, John Benjamin Hickey, Emma Lockhart, Drew Tyler Bell, Edmund Entin, Gary Entin, Jordan J. Dale. USA. 97 min. 2007.
The premise is a tad simplistic even for the movie’s young target audience: The good forces are Light, the bad forces are Dark, and 14-year-old Will, who thought he was an ordinary kid, learns that he’s obligated to zip around the space-time continuum to make sure the goblins of gloom don’t extinguish the human race. An awesome responsibility, you say? Will isn’t fazed for long. Why, his dad wrote a thesis on this very subject, and hey, there isn’t that much to do in England, where his American family has moved for reasons more plotty than commonsensical.
It’s the opposite of a secret that Susan Cooper was a very unhappy author when she realized what the filmmakers were doing to her youth-market novel, and they certainly have scrambled her franchise’s formula, from upping Will’s age to thumbtacking extra words (“The Seeker”) onto the title of her second installment, which is the basis for the picture. Civilian moviegoers won’t much care, though, and on its own terms the film is reasonably good fun, with a couple of amusing performances and a generally lively mood. I hasten to add that on its own terms the story doesn’t make a single bit of sense, especially at the end, which is uproariously absurd. Could this be the work of Dark, powerful enough to resist the brightness of a projector lamp? Hmmmm……….
We Own the Night
Director: James Gray. Screenplay: James Gray. Cinematography: Joaquin Baca-Asay. Film editing: John Axelrad. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Music: Wojciech Kilar. Producers: Marc Butan, Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall, Nick Wechsler. With: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Alex Veadov, Tony Musante, Danny Hoch, Oleg Taktarov, Dominic Colon, Elena Solovey, Moni Moshonov, Maggie Kiley, Paul Herman, Antoni Corone, Craig Walker, Claudia Lopez, Kate Condidorio, Edward Shkolnikov, Scott Nicholson, Robert Kirk, Fred Burrell, Luigi Scorcia, Doug Torres, Tony Guida, Patrick M. Walsh, Coati Mundi, Ed Koch. USA. Languages: English, Russian. 116 min. 2007.
The title comes from a police-department slogan, but the main character is Bobby, an upwardly mobile scofflaw (Joaquin Phoenix) who runs a New York nightclub where he hangs out with his girlfriend (Eva Mendes) while hosting a Russian drug kingpin (Alex Veadov) and other unsavory clients. The last thing he wants his felonious friends to find out is that he comes from a family of cops, with a high-ranking father (Robert Duvall) and a brother (Mark Wahlberg) who’s rising fast. These two confront Bobby and demand his cooperation in busting the kingpin. A couple of plot twists later he agrees, and therein lies the tale.
I see nothing positive in the current fashion for bashing people from Eastern Europe and environs. James Gray makes this something of a specialty, with “Little Odessa” among the three pictures he’s written and directed to date. David Cronenberg joined in with “Eastern Promises,” and like that disappointingly unimaginative melodrama, “We Own the Night” is basically an old-fashioned Mafia movie with different accents. The acting is consistently solid—not surprising, given the consistently solid cast—and there are some riveting set pieces, most notably a harrowing car chase in a driving rainstorm. But there are unexciting stretches too, and the finale is an inexcusably long indulgence in sentimental hooey, perhaps aimed at making us think the movie isn’t bashing Russians after all. Leave fifteen minutes before this and you’ll have a reasonably diverting time.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Director: Shekhar Kapur. Screenplay: William Nicholson, Michael Hirst. Cinematography: Remi Adefarasin. Film editing: Jill Bilcock, Andrew Haddock. Production design: Guy Dyas. Music: Craig Armstrong, A.R. Rahman. Producers: Tim Bevan, Jonathan Cavendish, Eric Fellner. With: Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush, Samantha Morton, Abbie Cornish, Rhys Ifans, Jordi Mollà, John Shrapnel, Susan Lynch, Penelope McGhie, Robert Cambrinus, Eddie Redmayne, Adrian Scarborough, William Houston, Steven Loton, Martin Baron, Steven Robertson, Tim Preece, Jeremy Barker, George Innes, Adam Godley, Kirsten Coulter Smith, Kelly Hunter, Christian Brassington, Tom Hollander, David Threlfall, David Robb. UK/France. 113 min. 2007.
Cate Blanchett first played the Virgin Queen in the 1998 costumer “Elizabeth,” which also featured Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham, her aristocratic henchman. Both are back, along with director Shekhar Kapur and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin, for this unofficial sequel, which picks up roughly where the earlier film—about the rise of Elizabeth I to the English throne and the early period of her sovereignty--left off. The main storylines involve the growing hatred of her Protestant reign by King Philip II of Spain, a staunchly Roman Catholic ruler; the tensions between Elizabeth and the imprisoned Mary Stuart, a k a Mary, Queen of Scots, regarded by some as England’s rightful monarch and possibly linked to an assassination scheme that Sir Francis defeats with unintended and unwelcome consequences; and the Queen’s crush on Sir Walter Raleigh, who’s returned from the Americas with Indians and tobacco to show off.
Kapur has become a director of strong imagination and great technical panache. Returning here to a subject he knows well, he parlays a string of vivid performances, plus powerful support from Adefarasin’s camerawork and razor-sharp film editing, into a picture containing little in the way of realism but a great deal in the way of Hollywood-style splendor and motion-picture mythmaking. Blanchett is genuinely regal as the eponymous heroine and Rush is exactly right as Walsingham, cruel and calculating in one scene, proffering heartfelt repentance to his monarch in another. Clive Owen is generally persuasive as Sir Walter, although his handsome looks and alluring demeanor are too picture-perfect to be quite credible. Also first-rate are Abbie Cornish as Bess, a lady-in-waiting who abuses her royal namesake’s confidence without really meaning to; Jordi Mollà as King Philip, a mostly unsympathetic sort whose grief at the destruction of the Spanish Armada is unexpectedly real and touching; and most of all Samantha Morton as Mary Stuart, who becomes a strikingly complex character despite the very limited screen time Morton has to work her magic.
The history set forth in the screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst is no more trustworthy than that of most cinematic extravaganzas with period themes, although Hirst is something of a specialist, having scripted the “Elizabeth” of 1998 and other historical dramas. (The routing of the Armada is downright bogus, drenched in action-movie clichés.) Nor need we take the story’s personal psychology as particularly true or perceptive; the Queen’s role in this epic is to be queenly, aside from a few moments of movie-type emotionality, mostly connected with Sir Walter’s presence or absence. Veracity and psychology aren’t the points in a picture that unabashedly values spectacle and momentum above all else. These it delivers in an abundance that would have pleased Her Majesty herself. It should please many moviegoers too.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Director: Andrew Dominik. Screenplay: Andrew Dominik, based on the novel by Ron Hanson. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton, Dylan Tichenor. Production design: Patricia Norris. Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis. Producers: Jules Daly, Dede Gardner, Brad Pitt, Ridley Scott, David Valdes. With: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Paul Schneider, Sam Shepard, Jeremy Renner, Mary-Louise Parker, James Carville, Zooey Deschanel, Kailin See, Garret Dillahunt, Brooklynn Proulx, Dustin Bollinger, Tom Aldredge, Martha Bolton, Lauren Calvert, Jesse Frechette, Pat Healy, Michael Parks, Ted Levine, Michael Copeman, Laryssa Yanchak, voice of Hugh Ross. USA. 158 min. 2007.
The title tells all, before the movie even starts. Dispensing with standard narrative suspense is just one of many artistic coups that make this arguably the best western since Robert Altman’s classic “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” way back in 1971.
In place of ordinary suspense, writer-director Andrew Dominik offers enormous amounts of narrative tension, which builds to multiple climaxes in individual scenes while gathering strength for a rich culmination shortly before the finale, followed by a denouement of great and melancholy power. The result is simultaneously an engrossing genre piece, a sensitive psychological study—the title characters aren’t the only ones with complex and contradictory personalities that eventually do them in—and, most surprisingly, an exploration of celebrity culture as practiced a century ago, revolving around Robert Ford’s romantic view of the outlaw who becomes his friend and then his foe while remaining his enigmatic ego ideal throughout.
Roger Deakins has been one of Hollywood’s most expressive cinematographers for decades, and his work here is unsurpassed, capturing the look and feel of the Old West with a warmth and vividness that few films have equaled since John Ford’s glory days. But both Dominik and Deakins have to share credit with an enormously talented cast. Brad Pitt gives an authentic, three-dimensional performance as Jesse James, and Casey Affleck is a revelation as Ford the so-called coward, projecting a strikingly curious persona that combines the doggedness of a dullard, the naïveté of a child, the subservience of a sycophant, and the thinly veiled wiliness of an utterly amoral scoundrel. Affleck’s performance here, paired with his riveting work in Ben Affleck’s savvy melodrama “Gone Baby Gone,” which premiered at virtually the same time, marks his emergence as one of the most gifted character actors in film today. (Full disclosure: Casey was a student of mine at Columbia University, and I like to think I taught him every single thing he knows. As if.)
Nor does the excellent acting stop with the leads. Sam Shepard is pitch-perfect in the very small role of Jesse’s brother Frank James; Sam Rockwell is ditto as Robert’s brother Charley Ford; Paul Schneider steals several scenes as another outlaw; and so on, all the way to Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel, whose appearances in very small parts bespeaks the production’s perceptive attention to the story’s active margins as well as its centers of gravity. A special nod also goes to James Carville, the celebrated political consultant, who plays a wheeling-and-dealing governor here; we knew he could mold performances, and now he shows he can carry one off as well.
Some critics have predictably attacked the picture for being mannered and arty, charges I anticipated before I’d finished watching it. All this means is that Dominik’s ingenious blend of narrative realism and daring visual poetry, staking out a cinematic zone about midway between classicism and modernism, is too much for some spectators (including professional ones) to take in. Don’t make their mistake. Expect the unusual, settle into the movie’s unhurried sense of time, and look for character-based epiphanies rather than explosive bursts of violent action. You’ll have one of the most memorable film experiences of recent times.
Kurt Cobain About a Son
Director: A.J. Schnack. Cinematography: Wyatt Troll. Film editing: A.J. Schnack. Music: Steve Fisk, Benjamin Gibbard. Producers: Chris Green, Noah Khoshbin, Shirley Moyers. With: voices of Kurt Cobain, Michael Azerrad. USA. 96 min. 2006.
This offbeat documentary tells rock star Kurt Cobain’s story by presenting excerpts from an interview he gave to journalist Michael Azerrad, who audiotaped more than twenty-five hours of material for a book he was preparing about Nirvana, the fabled Cobain band. The images on the screen are only vaguely related to the things Cobain says, providing poetic counterpoint rather than literal-minded illustration. Your fascination with the film--think “Koyaanisqatsi” with a Seattle beat--will be directly proportional to your fascination with Cobain himself. For dedicated fans it’s a unique and engrossing treasure trove.
2 Days in Paris
Director: Julie Delpy. Screenplay: Julie Delpy. Cinematography: Lubomir Bakchev. Film editing: Julie Delpy. Art direction: Barbara Marc. Music: Julie Delpy. Producers: Christophe Mazodier, Thierry Potok. With: Julie Delpy, Adam Goldberg, Daniel Brühl, Marie Pillet, Albert Delpy, Aleksia Landeau, Adan Jodorowsky, Alex Nahon, Vanessa Seward, Thibault De Lussy, Sandra Berrebi, Arnaud Beunaiche, Claude Harold, Emma Piesse, Ludovic Berthillot. France/Germany. Languages: English, French. 110 min. 2007.
Julie Delpy is a quintuple threat in this romantic comedy—writing, directing, editing, composing the score, and doing a 110-minute Diane Keaton imitation, opposite the Woody Allen of Adam Goldberg, who’s afflicted with the same nervous dialogue, imaginary ailments, and relationship problems that the real Woody has been selling tickets with for decades.
The plot, such as it is, centers on a Frenchwoman paying a brief visit to her Parisian parents with her American boyfriend in tow; the humor, such as it is, comes from his edgy rapport with her echt French kinfolks and his gradual realization that her love life before meeting him was a lot more hot and hectic than she’s been letting on. There are some funny moments, often tucked into throwaway lines and gestures, and Delpy’s real-life parents are wonderful (especially Marie Pillet, her mother) as her fictional mère and père. The story almost gets interesting when Delpy’s character reveals occasional signs of real psychological instability, especially in a restaurant scene and an explosive verbal duel with a cab driver. But ultimately the picture’s ingredients don’t add up to very much; like a soufflé from the budget menu, it’s lightweight, pleasant, and forgettable.
The Darjeeling Limited
with
Hotel Chevalier
Director: Wes Anderson. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Producers: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Lydia Dean Pilcher, Scott Rudin. With: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Amara Karan, Wallace Wolodarsky, Waris Ahluwalia, Barbet Schroeder, Irfan Khan, Camilla Rutherford, Bill Murray, Natalie Portman. USA. 91 + 13 mins. 2007.
Three wealthy American brothers, poor little rich boys all, board a train in India to seek spiritual enlightenment, family reconciliation, and lots of possibilities to get plenty high on everything from alcohol to cough syrup to stuff you smoke in a pipe.
This mild-mannered comedy is Wes Anderson’s most economical movie since the underrated “Bottle Rocket,” and it’s likable all the way through, thanks to understated acting by the three stars and superb portrayals by a gifted supporting cast; among the standouts are Amara Karan as a spunky train hostess, Waris Ahluwalia as the vehicle’s long-suffering chief steward, Wallace Wolodarsky as an assistant to the tourists—looking like a cross between Wallace Shawn and Paul Giamatti, he gets great mileage from a tiny role—and best of all Anjelica Huston as the travellers’ mom, who makes a very late appearance but steals the screen every moment she’s around. The movie builds even less momentum than the subcontinental train of the title, which manages to get lost even though it’s on rails, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture with more endings, one after another after another. … But you’ll enjoy the ride if you check your goal-oriented habits at the door and simply go with the cinematic flow.
"Hotel Chevalier," a brief two-character short, is the unofficial Part 1 of “The Darjeeling Limited,” not shown in theaters (although it has been shown at film festivals and press screenings) but available for downloading from the Internet. It concerns a couple played by Schwartzman and Natalie Portman making a melancholy attempt to jumpstart their stalled love affair in the Paris hotel where she’s tracked him down. The feature will make sufficient sense if you don’t bother to catch the short, and the whole arrangement seems flat-out gimmicky to me. Ditto for the music tracks of both pictures, by the way, which exploit the instant nostalgia value of various oldies in ways the pioneering Martin Scorsese never would have dreamed of, or wanted to.