IRISH AND ITALIAN

IRISH AND ITALIAN

          By now I am sure, anyone at all interested in current cinema knows about the release of Martin Scorsese’s new work, The Irishman.  In addition to all the initial publicity surrounding its appearance, on both Netflix and ultimately in theaters, most of the reviews appear to provide the usual Niagara of superlatives worthy of a Donald Trump rally speech, interrupted only by exclamation points, that generally passes for film criticism these days.

          Based on a book about a real person, Frank Sheeran, who worked for the Mob and allegedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, the movie features a whole compendium of the director’s typical methods, subjects, and themes.  Essentially a voice-over narrative, which Scorsese often employs, the movie proceeds from the reflections of the aged Sheeran (Robert De Niro), now in a nursing home, facing the end of his life.  Complete with a priest who sporadically visits Sheeran, the narrative then constitutes something like a confession, with the narrator returning frequently to his greatest regret, his estrangement from his daughter.  (Perhaps because of his Catholicism, Scorsese likes to use the device of confession, which also explains his attachment to voice-over narration).  Apparently to prevent the work from turning into one long, linear chronology, the director moves scenes and sequences back and forth in time as he follows Sheeran’s career from truck driver to thief to mob enforcer to the confidant and eventual assassin of the labor leader.

          Along with some of the director’s favorite techniques, the cast includes some of his favorite actors; aside from De Niro, who has appeared in so many of his films he easily qualifies as Scorsese’s alter ego, Al Pacino appears as Hoffa, Joe Pesci plays Russell Bufalino, and Harvey Keitel occupies a small role as Angelo Bruno, all actual mobsters in Sheeran’s life and career.  In keeping with its pseudo-documentary style, the film often freezes a frame, showing those men and other gangsters, complete with the dates and causes of their deaths, mostly of course from lead poisoning.

          Along with the frequent movements back and forth in time, the film applies state of the art techniques to alter the appearance of the characters, so that they look the appropriate age in a particular scene or sequence.  Typically, Scorsese also uses the appropriate popular music of each time period as a background and even a commentary on the people, places, and actions.  The clothes, the cars, the interior decoration all match those moments—Scorsese is famously meticulous in the look of his pictures.

          As for the picture itself, despite the hype and the praise, it is actually a very long, repetitive, intermittently dull movie not terribly different from a number of Scorsese’s films, though inferior to several of them; it takes a long time in its elliptical manner to tell its essentially simple story.  If it resembles any of his films in the gangster genre he frequently explores, it seems quite close to Casino, another long, repetitive, overpraised work based on a mobster’s reminiscences.  Its time scheme, its production values, its distinguished cast rescue it from what could have become crushingly boring. 

          Despite that cast, however, the performances generally disappoint, especially those of the two headliners.  De Niro naturally occupies the screen most of the time—it’s his story, after all—but he seems to play almost every moment the same way, with the same mostly impassive facial expression; he confronts almost every situation with a squint, a shrug, a downturned mouth apparently intended to show emotional engagement, but mostly suggests a kind of deadly neutrality.  Pacino, on the other hand, plays Hoffa with an occasionally exhausting excess, remaining on one note—anger—throughout and confined by the picture to a series of repeated scenes, in most of which he flies out of control.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most impressive person in the movie, the real star, turns out to be Joe Pesci.  Totally unlike the scary psychopath of GoodFellas  or Anthony the Ant of Casino, as Russell Bufalino he virtually exudes enormous confidence, even charm, as he attempts to instruct Sheeran in his understated way in various violent behaviors, including murder; somehow he retains a certain likeability throughout the picture, and somehow, with his quiet style he dominates the scenes he occupies.  He essentially outperforms every other actor in the movie, quite an achievement, considering his colleagues in the cast.

Scorsese’s apparent attempt to make the film a kind of epic, a reflection of an era with its own peculiar hero, ultimately fails.  His major figures prove only intermittently interesting, his plot meanders without a good deal of energy, and the focus of it all, Jimmy Hoffa, generally seems a hysterical clown.  Despite the gushing paroxysms of so many critics, great length does not automatically confer greatness itself; size provides no special grandeur.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

          At least since Pagliacci the clown who laughs on the outside while crying on the inside is a most familiar figure, a sentimental cliché, but the much discussed new movie Joker takes that concept a good distance farther.  The title character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) works for a hire-a-clown agency, where he dresses in a costume and waves advertising signs, entertains children at parties and in hospitals.  A man singularly without joy, he suffers from a neurological problem that causes him to laugh uncontrollably for no reason, a condition that, not surprisingly, lands him in trouble when he laughs in the presence of the wrong people at the wrong time.

          A very different person from the Batman’s notorious adversary, Arthur lives with his disabled mother in a crummy apartment in Gotham City, stamping grounds of course for our old friend the Caped Crusader.  (Among references to other movies, including such disparate titles as Psycho and The King of Comedy, the Batman franchise dominates the plot, with names, people, and events that echo the comic books and the films).  Inevitably his character has inspired much learned commentary on his predecessors in the role; his makeup recalls several of them and his behavior perhaps most closely resembles Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character as a sort of Iago, in Coleridge’s words, “motiveless malignity casting about for an occasion.”  Since he lacks the compelling enemy represented by Batman, in effect he ends up striking out at any target that attracts him, and some of the attacks are shocking.

          Dogged by bad luck, his disability, and his extremely odd personality, Arthur finds his world increasingly frustrating, another motivation for his violent actions.  Since the comic book script takes his story all over the place, the movie often teeters on the brink of incoherence, with new stories frequently intersecting with Arthur’s daily life and all its problems; he embarks, for example, on a quest for the man he thinks is his father, a man who also becomes a victim of his increasing distance from reality; he may or may not have a girlfriend who lives in the same apartment building; he may or may not join the audience for a late night television talk show.   At times the movie makes it difficult to discern if he is living in the real world or in a fantasy of his own creation; at a certain point the real and the hallucinated world merge and Arthur commits a series of shocking crimes while the city explodes into violence.  His actions, one of them captured on television, inspire riots that serve as the background to what becomes his homicidal insanity.

          Perhaps because of its origin in comic books, Joker displays a kind of drab, muddy color scheme and a consistently squalid setting.  Gotham City entirely lacks glamor and most of the dwellings, especially Arthur’s apartment, look shabby and grimy, needing paint, repairs, cleaning.  Even the talk show that Arthur ultimately appears on—with Robert De Niro playing the host—looks dark and dull, without the brightness and glitter one would expect from show business.

          Although Joaquim Phoenix no doubt deserves some praise for his performance, which must have been a grueling experience, the horrible sound of his endless cackle and the constant closeups of the pained rictus of his grinning countenance grow difficult to endure.  The insane violence of his actions adds another level of disquiet to the film’s subjects and incoherent themes, which somehow manage to be simultaneously excessive and narrowly defined.    

          Perhaps at least partially as a result of the publicity and the debate surrounding the movie, Joker enjoys a record size box office, and apparently its nihilistic themes strike a chord in certain young people, so troubling a notion that some theaters post a security guard in the audience.  Personally, I am not sorry I saw the film, but somewhat sorry it exists for me to see it.

New Chick Flick

New Chick Flick

          Always happy to jump on a bandwagon, the reviewers now crow about the new wave of liberated women in contemporary cinema, perhaps another, more positive spin on MeToo.  The gushing over Wonder Woman  somehow omitted to mention that the movie was really just another superhero flick, dependent on the usual stunts, pyrotechnics, and computer generated images, as much a silly comic book as any of a dozen of its predecessors—the Batman franchise, the Iron Man franchise, the Spider-Man franchise, etc., etc.  A comic book is a comic book, a superheroine differs not at all from a superhero, and given the wondrous technology of contemporary cinema, anyone of any sex can spin and fly through the air, shoot out thunderbolts, battle monstrous villains, and wear a distinctive costume: big deal.

          With a good deal less fanfare and very little in the way of the fabled magic of the cinema, a couple of recent films further demonstrate the penetration of women and their roles in today’s movies.  Both Widows and The Kitchen show strong, independent women taking over roles that formerly belonged to men, specifically for most of them, the men they married.  Though based on quite different sources, they share a surprising similarity of subject, tone, and theme.  Oddly, however, in both films the women, generally represented as smart, tough, and resourceful, are also, not to put too fine a point upon it, criminals.  They steal, they kill, they destroy: what’s not to like?

          In Widows four women whose husbands, a group of thieves embarking on a big caper, are incinerated when their scheme goes terribly wrong, decide to finish the uncompleted job.  One of them finds her husband’s detailed map and designs for the robbery and decides to enlist the other widows in a scheme of their own.  They then follow the usual patterns of the big caper flick—casing the home of their quarry, a corrupt, mobbed up Chicago politician, assigning specialized tasks to each suitable member of the quartet, meticulously checking on bodyguards, security devices, schedules, etc., figuring out precise locations and timing, in short practicing all the methods of the form.

          The film then shows the actual robbery, which unsurprisingly escalates from a meticulously planned operation to a series of violent confrontations, shootings, and even a death.  In keeping with the traditions of the form, the action naturally enlists the audience on the side of the perpetrators, so the viewers in effect must root for the bad guys, one of the great paradoxes of so many crime movies.  The genre, whether featuring men or women, appeals to the spirit of criminality in all of us.

          Following a quite similar pattern, The Kitchen also features a trio of newly independent women carrying on the activities of their spouses, though in this case, the husbands have been incarcerated.  The title refers to the area of the West side of Manhattan known for generations as Hell’s Kitchen, a tough, largely Irish community, but also perhaps to the kitchens that the women leave in order to embark on their own criminal enterprise.  Bitter about their treatment from the Irish mob that controls the streets of their neighborhood, the women seek more financial support from the mob leaders, and when the crooks reject their requests, resolve to take matters into their own hands.

          That decision involves canvassing the neighborhood shops, informing the owners that they will now collect the protection money and provide the service that the mob never did.  When the local gangsters get wind of the development, a small war breaks out, and of course, the women eventually win it, then go on to bigger and better sources of income and power.  The two main characters, played by Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish, undergo some major transformations, approach the brink of an internal battle, but eventually settle for equal shares of territory, money, and power.

          The most impressive actions of both movies, more powerfully emphasized in The Kitchen, demonstrate a shocking propensity for violence.  The armed robbery and shootings of Widows follow a relatively logical path from the intricate planning to the execution of the scheme, an understandable result.  In The Kitchen, however, the women carry out a whole series of murders, most of them in cold blood, and come to enjoy the process as well as the profits; the movie really suggests a whole new level of viciousness for the chick flick, no longer a vehicle for romance and light comedy, or even for costumed superheroines performing acrobatics, but now a perfectly functioning addition to the long, crowded genre of crime film.  As they used to say, sisterhood is powerful, now it is very powerful.

          One of the differences between the two films may result from their different origins; Widows is based on a novel by Gillian Flynn, while The Kitchen began life as an apparently still running series of comic books.  That movie’s open ending implies more to come, though it doesn’t inspire in me any wish to see a sequel or read the comic books.  Both films, however, demonstrate how far the chick flick has progressed in the empowering of women, proving that they can commit crimes of all kinds as well as any cinematic males and behave with viciousness worthy of any gangster, even without dressing up in a dominatrix outfit.  The scene that perhaps best summarizes the distance the form has traveled amounts to the best pushing-on-old-lady-down-the-stairs act since Richard Widmark’s memorable moment in Kiss of Death.  It must be seen to be appreciated.

         

Tarantino’s Hollywood

          As usual, the praise and prizes pour in for Quentin Tarantino’s new movie,  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with most of the commenters describing it with the recurring term, “epic.”  If one strictly applies the word to the length of a work, then the movie certainly earns it—Once Upon a Time runs for almost three hours, not an uncommon length for a Tarantino film.  Probably the most overrated filmmaker around—though there is a lot of competition for that spot—he positively drools over excess, which somehow thrills the reviewers, and might explain the overused adjective; in his work, including the present one, epic too often simply means bloated.

          The movie’s once upon a time is 1969, a pivotal year for a number of reasons, ending a tumultuous decade and because of the notorious murders committed by the Manson family, which the director confronts and which in a sense end a particular era for Hollywood itself.  One of its stunning achievements is the director’s reproduction of that period and its setting in Southern California, which has rarely looked so attractive in a film and makes you wish you lived there.  Hollywood characters naturally populate the film: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, an alcoholic TV star on the decline; Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, Dalton’s stunt double, best friend, chauffeur-gofer; Margot Robbie plays the doomed actress Sharon Tate.  Crowded with famous faces in smaller roles, the picture also exploits the presence of people like Al Pacino, Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, along with less well known performers impersonating some now departed actors.  Rafael Zawierucha plays Roman Polanski, for example, and Mike Moh does a turn as Bruce Lee in a fight scene with Cliff Booth.  (Damian Lewis, who plays Steve McQueen in a brief scene, incidentally, looks amazingly like the star). 

          The movie proceeds episodically, showing scenes and sequences from Rick Dalton’s career, both past and present, mingling the various moments in time.  Throughout the action it provides a kind of history of the popular culture of the late 1960s, with familiar titles on movie theater marquees, snippets of old black and white television shows, even a clever recreation of a scene from The Great Escape where Rick Dalton auditions for the Steve McQueen role, repeating the exact words and movements from the original.  The clothes, the cars, especially Rick Dalton’s immense Cadillac, a great yellow battleship of a car, and in contrast, Roman Polanski’s classic MG, recall a time when automotive styling achieved some distinctive and attractive shapes and looks.

          As usual, Tarantino includes overextended, sometimes quite unnecessary sequences, apparently to exploit the star power of his cast.  In one barely relevant moment Brad Pitt climbs up on the roof of Rick Dalton’s house to repair a TV antenna (remember them?), mostly so he can take off his shirt and display his trim, buff torso to the females in the audience.  Demonstrating a weakness in the narrative, he employs a voiceover by Kurt Russell to provide information about a series of spaghetti Westerns that Dalton, following in the footsteps of Clint Eastwood, makes in Italy to resurrect his career; the voiceover papers over an apparent need to abbreviate yet another long episode.

           In a long sequence Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, goes to a theater showing The Wrecking Crew so she can see herself in the movie as a member of the audience; for several long minutes the camera shows her repeatedly reacting and overacting with glee, looking around, virtually mugging to signify giddy enjoyment.  In one clever twist in an otherwise silly piece of film she watches actual scenes from the picture with Sharon Tate so that the woman playing the actress responds to the person she impersonates.

          With the invasion of the Manson family, whose members appear and reappear throughout the action in usually casual but increasingly ominous ways, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reaches its perhaps logical climax, which the people and plot have been inexorably approaching throughout the movie.  The director, however, changes history by reimagining the crime, providing an alternative ending to the shocking event that in a sense ended the decade.  As a result, the movie concludes with a final sequence that begins in violence and ends in wishful thinking, perhaps appropriate for both Hollywood and Hollywood.

THE GREAT WAR

THE GREAT WAR

          “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon, one of the most famous poems of World War I, provides the title for Peter Jackson’s documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.  Jackson takes the words, slightly rearranged, from the fourth stanza:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

          Jackson’s film indeed remembers the Great War, the War to End All Wars—the usual titles for what came to be known as World War I when another European and global engagement inspired the now familiar numbering—and especially the men who served.  The director, best known for The Lord of the Rings spectaculars, mined what must be hundreds of miles of film from the collections of the Imperial War Museum to show some of the story of the British soldiers who fought and died in that conflict.  Any veteran of cable TV knows the innumerable documentaries on this, the first filmed war, but Jackson uses entirely unfamiliar material from the archives to create something like a soldier’s history, from the declaration to the Armistice.  He shows the sequences of recruiting and training, complete with inadequate equipment and preparation, and the embarkation to the Continent, so eagerly anticipated by politicians, propaganda, and the combatants themselves.  The film then settles into an essentially chronological account of what became organized butchery on a hitherto unimagined scale.  He accompanies the film with narration drawn from the words of the soldiers themselves as they described their own experiences from that recruiting, outfitting, training, and so forth, then of course the years of stalemate and suffering, all the way to the Armistice.

          The director chooses footage of practically all the activities of the soldiers, concentrating especially on their daily life in the squalor of the trenches, interrupted by the innumerable dangers of their periodic attacks across No Man’s Land, that devastated ground, a wasteland pocked by shell holes, inhabited by the dead of many nations, fought over for four long, bloody, useless years.  He shows the first appearance of the clumsy early tanks, one of the major weapons that World War I introduced, along with the airplane and poison gas.  The movie reveals more than most of the usual documentaries the realities of existence in those trenches that came to symbolize the static warfare that a legion of incompetent and inhuman generals established.  As a result, we see bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, headless corpses, bodiless heads, all so familiar that the soldiers hardly notice them, and of course long lines of wounded men.  We also see less dramatic but equally distressing images—the lice that bred wildly in the unsanitary conditions, the lesions of trench foot from long periods of standing in water, even the boards placed on sawhorses that passed for latrines, as well as the men using them. 

One of the saddest short sequences, however, involves an officer reading a short speech to his men just before they go over the top, as the expression went, a moment that, as Jackson points out, would constitute the last half hour of their lives; they indeed did not grow old.  The picture also at least hints at the truth of the prevailing English social system, which happily sacrificed the lower classes in a slaughter that took the lives of a million of their subjects.  Jackson omits one important result of the war, the mutinies that occurred in every nation’s armies, the refusal of men to obey the idiotic commands that would send them to certain death.

When the war finally ends, the soldiers meet their enemy, often in the form of prisoners, and realize that they were fighting innocent, ordinary young men like themselves, who served under the same fools, suffered the same privations and fears, and endured the same attacks and barrages.  As history shows us, of course, that War to End All Wars ended nothing and in fact created the Second World War, the national divisions that remain today, and perhaps even the wars that followed.

One of the most remarkable achievements of They Shall Not Grow Old involves the actual methods of turning the available footage into a watchable feature film.  In an extraordinary postscript, Peter Jackson addresses the camera and details all the painstaking effort that the production required.  He shows how his technicians brightened dark images, darkened bright ones, dealt with the problem of all the varying frame speeds—from hand cranked cameras—in order to achieve a uniform speed.  He recruited lip readers to translate the silent dialogues into actual speech, even recovered the notes for the sort of lecture that the officer delivers to those men who don’t know they are about to die.

He also mentions several of the untold stories of that war that he had to ignore in order to concentrate on the trenches.  He includes some footage of the air war, for example, some of the work in the factories, including the important role of women, who in fact were to some degree liberated by their war work.  We can only hope that he or someone like him will now use the technology, the experience, the people, the whole cinematic infrastructure he has created to tell those necessary stories before they are entirely lost to the global memory.  The film at least validates Binyon’s poem: it remembers.

 

ROMA

ROMA

          The Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s career includes a rather unusual variety of works.  Like the comedian who has always wanted to play Hamlet, he apparently disdains the successful mainstream Hollywood films he has made, while aspiring to something he believes is stronger, truer, perhaps realer.  In addition to the erotic road movie, Y Tu Mamá Tambien (2001), he directed Children of Men (2006), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and Gravity (2013), pictures that won both critical praise and box office bucks. 

His new film, Roma, however, brings his focus back to his native country and, according to his own statements, his family history and background.  Its simple story involves a middle class family living in a suburb of Mexico City, the Roma of the title; the family consists of the physician father, the research biologist mother, a grandmother, and three children.  The real subject of the picture, and the character through whose eyes all the people appear and act, is the maid/housekeeper/nanny Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio).  The movie opens with her going about one of her daily tasks, repeated throughout the course of events, and progresses deliberately through the routine of her days—cleaning, making beds, helping the cook, obeying the whims of her sometimes capricious employer (Marina de Taviva), and especially, dealing with the children.

The movie settles into the rhythms of the family’s life, often set against the troubled background of recent Mexican history—the action takes place in the 1970s—showing some of the large and small public events of its time.  A small band of uniformed men, playing a martial tune, marches down their street periodically; a group of apparent paramilitary trainees engage in some sort of ninja exercises; a political controversy ignites a demonstration that explodes into vandalism, violence, and death.

As the country undergoes its struggles and tensions, so does the family.  The father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), claiming initially to be attending what turns out to be a very long conference, actually leaves his wife and children for another woman.  Cleo’s boyfriend Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), one of the militant kung fu fighters, turns out to be a vicious betrayer, who impregnates her, then refuses to acknowledge either her or her pregnancy.  The focus on Cleo and the plight of the mother and family emphasizes the strength of the female and the weakness of the male characters, selfish, cruel, and inadequate. 

Filmed in black and white, at times in an almost documentary style, and somewhat reminiscent of the highly praised Indian film of 1955, Pather Panchali, in its frequent employment of panoramic shots, Roma expands its view from the confines of the family household where Cleo works to the squalid town she visits to confront the angry, faithless Fermin.  Its concentration on the family expands along with the camera’s changing focus, comprehending some of the breadth of the political violence and its intrusion into Cleo’s life. 

Its steadfast fix on Cleo, her endless humdrum chores, her relationship to the family she works for, and the ultimate resolution of the marital problems all combine to make Roma a rather different version of that familiar contemporary genre, the chick flick.  In this movie the women confront and triumph over adversity, even tragedy, and reaffirm the power of the family and their love of the children.  The film shows the inadequacy of the males and the growing strength of the females, a theme far distant from the usual romantic nonsense of the form, and a theme appropriate to the plot, the characters, and to Roma itself.