Cafe Society

Review of Café Society

          His fans will no doubt rejoice at the annual Woody Allen movie, this one called Café Society, and not terribly different from his last dozen or two dozen mediocre efforts.  (One exception: Blue Jasmine, a very unusual work from Allen, and a very good movie).  Set in the 1930s and narrated by the writer-director, the film shows the career of a young man from Brooklyn, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), who goes to Hollywood to make a life for himself; he hopes that his uncle, Phil Stern (Steve Carell), a successful movie agent, will help.

          Phil deputizes one of his secretaries, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), to show his nephew around town, the Hollywood of a now romantic past.  After a number of pleasant excursions, the two young people reach a point of mutual affection, but as it turns out, Vonnie is involved in an affair with Uncle Phil.  That discovery drives Bobby back to New York, where he launches a successful career working for his gangster brother as the maître d’ in his posh night club.

          The movie’s occasionally comic moments revolve around the amusing Dorfman family, which bears some resemblance to the family in one of Allen’s better films, Radio Days.  Its emotional elements remain steadfastly on the surface, with the writer-director telling the audience pretty much what the two main characters feel about each other.  Since neither Jesse Eisenberg nor Kristen Stewart convey anything resembling genuine passion, they appear merely to be acting out Allen’s hardly credible lines.  Eisenberg pretty much owns the tiresome role of the naïve young guy, which he’s played far too often, and though Woody Allen, Jesse Eisenberg, and Steve Carell constantly proclaim her beauty, Stewart remains a quite ordinary and quite insipid personality.

          The movie looks carefully polished and authentic, with the cars and clothes and, especially, all the wonderful popular music of its time.  Oddly, nobody refers to the Great Depression that after all, defined the decade.  Café Society belongs with most of Woody Allen’s recent—actually over a couple of decades—works: it’s trivial, shallow, and utterly empty of anything resembling real emotion.

SPLASH AND CUT

SPLASH AND CUT

Review of A Bigger Splash

            It’s one of those occasionally tense European decadent dramas, complete with wonderful Mediterranean scenery, appropriately accompanying weather, and a considerable amount of nudity, just the sort of thing, in fact, to wow the reviewers.  A Bigger Splash also employs a couple of highly regarded performers, Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, in some rather unlikely roles.  Such a full and attractive package should appeal to the appeal to art house crowd, and its generous display of nudity might even bring in a wider audience.

The story revolves around four characters enduring an uneasy relationship in on a picturesque Italian island, where a famous rock star, Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton), suffering from strained vocal cords and reduced to silence and occasional whispering, is apparently vacationing with her lover, documentary filmmaker, Paul De Smedl (Mathias Schoenaertz).  Interrupting their idyll, her producer and former lover, Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) calls and announces he will be visiting with his 22-year-old daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson), whom he has not seen in many years.  Not surprisingly, his intrusion triggers a series of difficulties, erotic encounters, and ultimately, disaster.

Contrasting with the voiceless singer and the passive filmmaker, Ralph Fiennes maintains a manic volatility throughout the movie.  Dancing, singing, shouting, jumping naked into the swimming pool, and thoroughly obnoxious, he indeed makes a bigger splash than anyone else.  His history with the singer establishes a level of discomfort in the group and of course disturbs the relationship between Marianne and Paul.  He behaves as a kind of engineer of mischief, stirring up the past, delighting in the tensions he creates.  As he grows increasingly annoying, the plot grows increasingly repetitive until some predictable and some completely unpredictable events move the film to a surprising close and a couple of unexpected twists of plot and character.

A Bigger Splash, which owes something to the French movie La Piscine and the more recent Swimming Pool, creates a most attractive atmosphere of Mediterranean languor—the landscape, the houses, the town, the food, the wine all virtually invite the audience to participate in the vacation along with the characters.  The movie runs too long until its strange and unexpected ending, and I am not sure if Ralph Fiennes or Harry Hawkes deserves the blame, but the character seems exactly the sort of person I would never want to be around; his manic energy and domineering personality should alienate even the most forgiving viewer.

Review of Genius

            Many years ago in his reminiscence of The New Yorker, James Thurber remarked that writers in America were either putter-inners or taker-outers, an accurate division of much of our literary history.  Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson come to mind, one an inclusive, verbose celebrant of the nation, its language, its people, the other a neurotic recluse writing spare, stripped little gems in a terse conversational style.  In 20^th century poetry the equivalent artists might be Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg; Hemingway and Faulkner surely provide the most appropriate examples of two coeval geniuses who wrote the best fiction of their time in completely different styles.

            The trophy for greatest putter-inner of that now distant past, however, undoubtedly belongs to Thomas Wolfe, whose novels simply overflowed with words, demonstrating a kind of inebriation with sheer vocabulary.  Based on a book by A. Scott Berg, Genius deals with the relationship between Wolfe and the most famous editor of the 20^th century, Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, who edited, among others, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  When Wolfe enters his world, the writer-editor connection ascends to a new level, in some ways changing the lives of both men.

            After repeated rejections, the young writer (Jude Law) brings his long, unwieldy manuscript to Perkins (Colin Firth), who finds it compelling and astonishes the author by accepting it; they work endlessly, with Perkins attempting to prune the excesses and Wolfe fighting to retain his original, voluminous, and undisciplined prose.  The novel, for which Perkins supplies the title, turns out to be Wolfe’s first and most famous, Look Homeward, Angel, and also turns out to be a best seller, creating a reputation that made him famous in the 1930s, but which, aside from a few courses in Southern literature, mostly in Southern universities, is mostly forgotten today.

            The real story of the film concerns the growth of the personal relationship between the two very different men, one a young, boisterous, immature artist from the South, the other a middle-aged, uptight Northeastern WASP.  Sloppy, awkward, sometimes rude and obnoxious, insulting to other writers, Wolfe becomes a friend and something like a son to the cool, restrained editor.  The friendship also creates tension between Perkins and Wolfe’s lover, the theatrical designer Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), who nurtured the writer’s career and regards the editor as a threat.

            Genius provides glimpses into Wolfe’s brief life—he died at 38 of tuberculosis of the spine—and the success of his later novels.  Comically and truthfully, it shows his bringing a couple of crates of manuscript to Perkins’s office, all of which he considered one work of fiction; Perkins heroically quarried two or three novels out of the inchoate mess.  The move provides only a few perfunctory scenes of actual editing, with Perkins naturally insisting on cuts and omissions while Wolfe begs for inclusion of all of his hundreds of thousands of words.  Whether editing makes for interesting cinema remains doubtful, of course, though with that rare element,  imagination, it might prove a productive subject for some entertaining sequences.  Although he certainly accomplishes his apparent goal of showing the two characters, the director, Michael Grandage, never takes a chance with the fascinating problem of writing and editing.

            Jude Law, who’s been busy lately, makes a perfectly acceptable Thomas Wolfe, with a performance as excessive as the original; the overacting and repetition sometimes grow tiresome, but he projects a believable portrait of the artist.  The real subject of Genius, however, is not the writer but the editor—when was the last time a film employed such a protagonist?—embodied brilliantly by Colin Firth.  Always tightly buttoned up, he wears his fedora in everywhere, indoors and out, even when fishing, in a three-piece suit, with Hemingway (Dominic West), so that the hat becomes an expression of his rigidly controlled personality, perhaps even of his editorial philosophy.  Firth acts with remarkable restraint, establishing the distinction between him and his young writer and demonstrating the gap both must close, perhaps in a way suggesting that two very different men are both in their own way worthy of the film’s title.

Review of Money Monster

Review of Money Monster

            S & B (stocks and bonds) may now replace S & M (you all know what that means) as a sexy subject in contemporary cinema—the love of money is the new eroticism.  Probably fueled by the  financial scandals that flame in the headlines week in and week out, a number of contemporary films show some of the wheeling and dealing in that congregation of gamblers, thieves, and whores that constitutes both Las Vegas and Wall Street.  The trend may have begun with Wall Street itself, then continued through such recent films, once again based on actual events, as The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short, which explains the housing bubble and its bust (frankly, even after seeing the movie I still don’t understand it).

The new movie Money Monster touches on another result of financial manipulation, seldom mentioned in all the learned analyses of the so-called experts, the impact of the shady practices on ordinary people.  The film revolves around a TV show called Money Monster, hosted by Lee Gates (George Clooney), clearly based on the CNBC show Mad Money and its host, the manic Jim Cramer.  Dressed in odd costumes, with a different intro for each show, Clooney jumps all over the set like a crazed monkey, offering financial advice to viewers.  His show suddenly crashes to a halt when an intruder named Kyle (Jack O’Connell) sneaks onto the set, fires a pistol at the ceiling, and outfits him in the sort of vest favored by suicide bombers.

The movie settles into a series of desperate attempts by Gates to placate the intruder and a series of ploys to defuse the situation while a national TV audience watches.   Kyle’s rage results from one of Gates’s stock market tips, which led him to invest an inheritance from his mother in the stock of a particular company that soon after lost most of its value.  Stalling for time, arguing his cause, Gates tries a clever ploy, asking his viewers to buy stock in the company so that it increases in value and Kyle won’t kill him; after a momentary jump, it declines, deflating the host’s image of himself, a nice touch in a film that occasionally mixes comedy with its drama.

The static situation opens up when Gates, still suited in the bomb vest, with the pistol to his head, leads Kyle on a march down to Wall Street itself, followed by scores of policemen and cheered on by thousands of onlookers, a kind of pedestrian parody of the infamous O.J. Simpson slow speed chase.  There they finally learn the real reasons for Kyle’s loss and confront the mastermind behind the stock manipulation that caused it.  The movie ends in a kind of despair over the helplessness of ordinary citizens to cope with corporate exploitation and the hopelessness of defeating the people behind it. 

Although repetitive and generally unconvincing in its attempts to create any real sense of danger and suspense, Money Monster touches on some important matters for contemporary America.  It clearly demonstrates the possibilities for fraud and deceit in the business of stocks and bonds and, worse, shows how the right people can achieve those goals without anything in the way of punishment.  Some of its best material, however, derives from its depiction of just how a television show works, the preparation, the role of the director, the activities of all the people behind the cameras, and so forth.  American film especially excels at showing process—how a thing is made, how a particular job is done, how people manage certain complicated tasks, and Money Matters shows once again the fascination of such a subject.

STILL MORE SHORT TAKES

Eye in the Sky

            No movie could possibly be more relevant to our troubled time than Eye in the Sky, which confronts with exquisite tension one of the most morally ambiguous practices of the   combat in the Middle East.  The movie deals with a single action, the debate over deploying a drone strike on a single house in Kenya apparently inhabited by terrorists intent on a suicide bombing mission.  That simple situation expands into a number of actions, technologies, and problems that now result from the unending “war on terror.” 

            As part of its progress and as a visual demonstration of the complexities involved in its ostensibly simple story, the film shifts constantly among all the people who control the remarkable technologies that send a missile toward a particular target.  Helen Mirren plays a British officer, Colonel Katherine Powell, in charge of a team of experts tracking the activities of suspected terrorists in a surveillance operation employing satellites, drones, and agents on the ground.  She wants to order an American missile strike on the house, but must clear the action through a committee of English government officials and a general (Alan Rickman), who sit around a table arguing the pros and cons of the decision.

            The officials need a confirmation of the threat, a process that as the debate goes on grows increasingly complicated and increasingly dangerous.  In addition to the long range surveillance, the agent in the actual area (Barkhad Abdi) risks his life to investigate the suspects’ house, controlling small drones—one a mechanical bird, the other, believe it or not, a mechanical bug (no pun intended) to spy on the preparations.  The images he sends show the terrorists, apparently preparing for a suicide mission, packing vests with bombs, which increases the urgency of the deliberations.

            The whole mission pivots on one of the disturbing moral questions that contemporary, remote-controlled warfare raises, euphemistically called collateral damage, otherwise known as the wounding, maiming, and killing of innocent noncombatants.  The problem centers on one young girl, selling bread that her mother bakes in a makeshift booth near the intended target; she becomes the single human representative of the term and the reason that so many people agonize over the decision to send a missile into the terrorists’ house.  That tension escalates with the camera’s constant shifts from the British command center to the debate of the civilians in charge to the American military personnel who will fire the missile to the dangerous situation of the agent and his desperate attempts to save the little girl.

            The film also demonstrates some of the conflicts and consequently, the complex emotions among the various entities that control the mission—civilians in government, British and American military personnel, the anguished agent in place—as they debate the pros and cons of the action they contemplate.  For all its technological wonders and its convincing display of warfare as we now practice it, Eye in the Sky creates much of its considerable suspense as much from its examination of the human questions it raises as from its meticulous representation of the process of locating, identifying, and attacking an elusive enemy.

Miles Ahead

            Written and directed by Don Cheadle, who also stars as the title character, Miles Ahead purports to show a difficult period in the life of the great musician Miles Davis, when he stopped performing, recording, and even playing his instrument.  Most of the movie shows a most irascible, mercurial artist abusing his wife, arguing with friends, and fighting a pitched battle with the record company executives attempting to acquire a tape of a private recording session.  To compensate for the repetitive action, the director uses flashbacks to show some other aspect of Davis’s life and art.

            Wearing a major Afro, Cheadle makes Miles Davis, whatever his artistry, a most unpleasant person, drinking, drugging, and alienating most of the people around him.  He also invents an entirely bogus plot revolving around the mysterious tape of the mysterious music.  David Brill (Ewan McGregor), a writer from Rolling Stone, joins Davis in a ridiculous quest to recover the stolen tape from the heartless businessmen.  The two of them engage in one of those tiresome movie car chases, with Davis firing a revolver with an apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition, thus turning a presumably well intentioned biopic into a bogus thriller.

In fact, despite Cheadle’s impersonation and Davis’s music on the soundtrack (though not enough of it, to be sure), the entire movie exudes an atmosphere of fakery.  Apparently Cheadle had to invent a white character in the form of the completely uninteresting McGregor to obtain financing for the work; the ridiculous plot, such as it is, presumably derives from Davis’s legitimate, though nonviolent conflicts with record company executives.  The final unraveling of the mystery of the missing tape provides a disappointing downbeat ending (no pun intended, jazz fans).  I am sure Don Cheadle could have done a better job, and I believe Miles Davis deserves a better picture than Miles Ahead.

 

Papa: Hemingway in Cuba

            As a lifelong reader of Ernest Hemingway’s work, and as both a student and a teacher of his stories and novels, and creator of a Hemingway seminar, almost anything connected with the author attracts my interest.  His work and his life obviously also attract the interest of a great many others—the most famous writer of the twentieth century, his novels and stories have been filmed many times; he is the subject of innumerable biographies and critical studies; a character in his own right, he’s also been the subject of several documentaries and feature films, rare for any writer, especially in America.  He appears in Alan Parker’s film, The Moderns, about the artistic life in Paris in the 1920s, and in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which employs the same subject.  Unlike most writers, he led an adventurous, eventful, fascinating life, which along with the popularity of his fiction, made him a unique phenomenon in the world of letters.

            The latest treatment of the author, played by Adrian Sparks, based on the reminiscence of a writer named Denne Bart Petitclerc (I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of him), deals with some of his time in Cuba in the last years of his life.  Played by Giovanni Ribisi, the young writer, called Ed Myers in the film, writes a letter to his hero Hemingway, who likes it so much he calls him up and invites him to Cuba.  His first trip there proves a great success and leads to many more; the film’s plot, in fact, resolves itself into a series of Myers’s visits to Hemingway’s house in Cuba, where he becomes one of the entourage of friends and hangers-on who surround the writer.

            The series of visits also turns into a chronicle of the author’s battles with depression and his angry slide into madness.  Continuing the practice of a lifetime, he drinks heavily, argues with everyone, abuses his wife Mary (Joely Richardson), acts out violently, threatens suicide, and insults and alienates his friends.  Perhaps worst of all, he finds he can no longer write, a circumstance that contributed as much as his alcoholism and his various head injuries to his suicide, eighteen months after the events in the movie. 

            For the most part the film repeats a many of the known facts of a very public writer’s life, most of them reported in detail by innumerable biographers.  The script also depends heavily and frankly, embarrassingly, on a whole catalogue of Hemingway’s statements, most of them taken from his writing and again, well known to the point of cliché—all that stuff about beginning with one true sentence, for example, and the comments  about drinking, sex, danger, love, etc. , and all delivered sententiously by Adrian Sparks.  It also tends to create a parody of a man and a writer who, tragically, by that time had already become something of a parody of himself.

            The portrait of Hemingway also suffers from the performance of Adrian Sparks as the title character.  He looks a good deal like the writer in his later years, but his behavior exaggerates everything about him, taking the character far over the top and pretty much keeping him up there on one loud, long, repeated series of actions and utterances.  Covering some of the same material, the HBO movie Hemingway and Gellhorn accomplishes a significantly fuller and more interesting creation with more sensitivity and artfulness.  The fascinating man, the great writer, the adventurous life, the tragic ending still await the script and the film to bring them all fully into existence.

ANOTHER QUICKIE

ANOTHER QUICKIE

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

            After most famously establishing herself as a comedian with her uncanny Sarah Palin imitation, and as a comic actor in Sisters, where she uttered more raunchy lines and dick jokes than, well, you could shake a dick at, Tina Fey turns more serious in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.  Rather loosely based on the memoir Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker, who covered the fighting in Afghanistan, the movie uses the military lingo for WTF, initials that every Facebook user understands.  In her first non-comic role, Tina Fey plays the reporter, called Kim Baker in the movie, which also transfers the protagonist from print journalism to television.  The film shows a great many episodes, some familiar to any viewer of television news and some even indeed comic, in that useless war that Kim Barker witnessed and reported on; in addition, it also shows the activities of the whole gang of journalists, photographers, cameramen, and their guides and interpreters.

            The general substance of the movie involves the growth and development of an inexperienced, generally ill equipped journalist as she progresses through the chaos and destruction of war to competence in her profession.  After an introduction to the chaotic life of a journalist in a war zone, Kim Barker learns how to become a war correspondent.  She manipulates the Marine general (Billy Bob Thornton) in Kabul in order to get a story; she outwits the lecherous attorney general (Alfred Molina), and she begins an affair with a Scottish photographer (Martin Freeman).  After acquitting herself admirably in a number of difficult situations, she also learns about the betrayal of loyalty and competence through the actions of a colleague and her boss (those familiar with my situation at City Newspaper will understand).

As the novice in Afghanistan discovers, war itself provides an enormous rush of adrenaline, a complicated mixture of emotions that explains some of the attractions of combat, even for noncombatants.  Like a lot of participants in warfare, she finds the gunfire, the bombs, the several skirmishes she covers, the discomfort of primitive quarters, and the death and destruction somehow exhilarating and even addicting.  Although the movie illuminates the progress in learning and awareness of a courageous and resourceful young woman, it also shows something most observers ignore, that war, despite its obvious horrors, often arouses some powerfully positive emotions in people.  It reveals to them a courage they may not have known they possessed, it sometimes ennobles them, it encourages gestures of sacrifice and honor, it intensifies all sorts of feelings.  In the midst of danger, against the bloody background of violence and destruction, people often even fall in love.

To begin with, as a hundred years of cinema shows, Hollywood gives good war.  The innumerable war films almost invariably emphasize not only heroism and sacrifice, but also the moral and physical consequences of mass combat.  Although the movie employs some witty situations and dialogue to convey some of the ambiguity of Kim Baker’s experience of war, it also suggests some reversal of the usual war film, a common point in contemporary cinema.  In short, although this time the protagonist is female and a noncombatant, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot belongs with some other recent films, among them The Hurt Locker and American Sniper; it suggests, like it or not, some of the actual joys of war.  It explains why soldiers encounter difficulty accustoming themselves to peace, a letdown that seldom appears in the usual discussions of post-traumatic stress disorder, and why some well known war correspondents frequently return to the battle zones.  War is hell, to be sure, but it also is somehow a richly exhilarating experience. 

QUICK NOTES: Star Wars

            With the possible exception of some Antarctic explorer or some hermit meditating in some remote cave, the latest addition to the Star Wars franchise, number seven in the usual Roman numerals, (which impart more dignity) The Force Awakens , enjoyed one of the most profitable opening weeks in history, benefitting of course from what also must be the longest and loudest pre-release publicity campaign, complete with hundreds of related toys, games, puzzles, etc.   The distributors even offered advance reserved tickets, which sold out almost immediately (why people camp out to be the first to see a movie that will play for months at all times of the day at many theaters is a question that always puzzles me).   With that hype and the history of a fantastically successful franchise, the latest addition could not possibly fail.  And it did not.

            Despite the hype and the box office boffo, the new film accomplishes little in the way of advancing its subject, the history of the future.  That history, for example, remains confusing, despite all the nonsense about rebels versus the Empire, the Dark Side, the Force, and so on; at the same time, it remains the same old good guys versus bad guys, complete with all the aerial fights between the two sides, light saber duels, and troops of neo-Nazi storm troopers shooting blasters and usually missing their targets.  The picture continues the theme of fathers and sons, with a confrontation between Han Solo (Harrison Ford of course) and his estranged son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). 

            Aside from resurrecting Ford, the film also brings back Carrie Fisher and, momentarily, Mark Hamill, reconstructing the trio that made the whole franchise work in the first place.  Although their appearance may thrill the millions of diehard fans, they actually contribute very little to the movie itself, which once again depends largely on its special effects in the usual triumph of technology over imagination.  Probably the best comment on the series and the film belongs to Harrison Ford; when he suddenly appears, a character says, “You’re Han Solo.”  He replies with a certain weariness, “I used to be.”  That line appropriately sums up the film and the franchise.

THE HEART OF THE SEA

BEFORE MOBY DICK

In the Heart of the Sea, directed by Ron Howard.

            Ron Howard’s latest movie displays a rather unusual layering of sources, originating as a book by Nathaniel Philbrick about the sinking of the whaleship Essex, itself based on the actual contemporary account of the incident, which in part inspired Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby-Dick.  The movie shows Melville (Ben Wishaw) visiting Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), who served as a young boy on the ship, to find out the truth behind the event and the subsequent survival of some of the crew.  At first reluctant, apparently laboring under a burden of guilt from the past, Nickerson recounts his memory of the voyage and the attack of the whale that sank the Essex.  His story then comes to life in the extended flashback that constitutes the major portion of the movie.

  Howard shows the fascinating details of loading the ship’s supplies, the implements and tools the crew need to ply the profitable and extremely dangerous trade of whaling, and examines a few of the personalities involved in the voyage.  He essentially invents a conflict between the chief character, first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and the captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), both of them actual people who sailed on the doomed voyage, providing a perhaps unnecessary context that ultimately distracts from the central story.  When in the course of the voyage—a three-year journey—the crew meets another ship’s crew in South America, they hear the story of a white whale that sank their ship; the captain refuses to believe what he regards as a fantasy and sails for the area where the sinking allegedly occurred.  When they encounter a whole herd of whales, the crew launches their boats, but one of the whales (not really white, by the way, but mottled), turns and swims furiously toward the Essex, ramming and sinking it.  The rest of the film turns into a survival story, with Owen Chase and Captain Pollard sailing their little boats across thousands of miles of open ocean before finding land and eventually, rescue.

The author of the book shows that the survivors accomplished an amazing feat of seamanship in their long journey, superior even to the epic feat of Captain Bligh of the Bounty.  The director chooses to deal mostly with the Tom Nickerson’s remorse, the result of the cannibalism that the survivors practiced, actually an accepted practice in such desperate circumstances, a kind of law of the sea, well known among the inhabitants of the great whaling port of Nantucket Island.  That focus makes the presence of Herman Melville a kind of footnote to the story, perhaps to remind the audience of the basis of the novel.  Although colorful and certainly authentic in its details, the film sacrifices the real dangers and real courage of whaling for the melodrama of guilt and the personal stories of Owen Chase and George Pollard.  Although it shows some of the actual work of whaling, In the Heart of the Sea could benefit from more of that historical accuracy and less emotional invention.

Haunting and Revenge

Haunting and Revenge

The Revenant, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu.

            Hollywood often rewards actors for stretching themselves to a new dimension, which usually translates as shaving their heads, choosing to look less attractive than usual, playing a disabled person, or simply playing against type.  That thinking probably accounts, at least in part, for the nomination of Leonardo DiCaprio for his performance in The Revenant, a film surrounded by many stories about the difficulties of its production.  According to the director,

Alejandro González Iñárritu, DiCaprio not only performed under conditions of extreme cold and discomfort, but also, though a vegetarian, ate (or at least chewed on) a chunk of raw bison liver or heart or some organ, depending on whose account  your read: the sacrifices one makes for the sake of art.

The film itself derives from a famous historical incident as well as from the novel of the same name by Michael Punke.  In 1823 a trapper named Hugh Glass, one of a party of mountain men seeking beaver pelts, was badly mauled by a bear; the leader of his group left two men behind, one of them Jim Bridger, who became one of the most famous Westerners of them all, to tend his wounds and protect him until he died.  Thinking he was doomed and fearing for their own safety in an area patrolled by hostile Indians, the men abandoned him, an act that haunted Bridger the rest of his life.  As it turned out, Glass miraculously survived and, without weapons, tools, or supplies, traveled hundreds of miles to catch up with the men and exact a fitting revenge.  (In 1971 a pretty good movie, Man in the Wilderness, starring Richard Harris and John Huston, told a somewhat different version of the Glass story).

The major plot of the picture, changed and embellished significantly by the director, follows in a linear fashion Hugh Glass’s (DiCaprio) struggle for survival and his phenomenal journey through difficult and dangerous country.  It also presents an almost masochistic epic of suffering, as Glass manages to cauterize his throat wound by burning it with gunpowder, shows him crawling, gradually limping, swimming through icy waters, and evading Indian attacks in order to catch up with his betrayers, Bridger (Will Pulter) and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).  The director fleshes out that relatively simply plot by intercutting scenes showing Fitzgerald, the major villain, spinning lies about Glass’s death and burial, and Bridger suffering his guilt in silence.

The director, who made the most successful Birdman, also thickens the soup by adding characters and events to both the factual and the fictional story—flashbacks to Glass’s Indian wife, now dead, Fitzgerald’s murder of Glass’s young son, a climactic fight, and so forth.  He also appears to have attended the Terrence Malick school of sentimental mysticism, interpolating events from Glass’s life, his memories of his wife and son, and dreamy, sometimes hallucinated images of the wife for some reason floating in the air above the wounded trapper.  Presumably these memories and images provide some of the motivation, beyond mere revenge, for Glass’s epic quest.

Although Leonardo DiCaprio occupies most of the screen time, raw meat eating and all, several other actors also perform competently and believably.  Tom Hardy in particular, as John Fitzgerald makes a most convincing villain who betrays without a qualm and embellishes his story with a number of inventive details, becoming for a while the hero of his own tale.  The bear that attacks Hugh Glass deserves at least a mention for best performance by an ursine actor since the late Bart the Bear, who distinguished himself in The Edge a number of years ago.

Filmed in natural light in appropriately rugged surroundings and terrible weather in Canada and Argentina, The Revenant stands out among the current crop of honored films for the daring and determination of the director.  If he bears comparison, for good or for bad, with Terrence Malick, he also resembles the Werner Herzog of Fitzcarraldo in his apparent attraction to suffering, a kind of obsession with authenticity that cost his cast a good deal of physical pain, hypothermia, frostbite, etc., similar to the problems Herzog’s alter ego, Klaus Kinski, complained about in Burden of Dreams.  If directing a movie presents the sorts of challenges that involve something like running a small country, Iñárritu may qualify as a benevolent dictator and his film certainly reflects the verisimilitude he sought.

HATEFUL

The Hateful Eight, directed by Quentin Tarantino.

            Judging by the advertisements littered with exclamation points by the usual exclaimers and the raves by the usual ravers, Quentin Tarantino’s newest movie, The Hateful Eight, represents yet another success for the writer-director.  Sporadically a darling of the reviewers, his peculiar penchant for excess and his delight in spilling blood, for reasons I cannot fully understand, endear him to many commentators.  His debut film, Reservoir Dogs, represents just the sort of amoral, brutal nihilism that launched his career; an attempt at a big caper flick, it features an ensemble of actors who turn up in his later work, and enough blood to paint a whole room red.  One memorable sequence shows a man bleeding to death for practically the whole movie, with a red tide washing all over the set; another shows a man, Michael Madsen as I recall, in an apparent attempt at grisly wit, shouting into the severed ear he holds.

Now in The Hateful Eight the director employs some of the standard devices of the Western, along with a few other forms, to create a complete bloodbath, with something like a dozen corpses littering the scenery, a kind of Reservoir Dogs with horses.  The title itself suggests his take on The Magnificent Seven, an ironic inversion to show his cleverness.  The movie begins in a time-honored manner, with a long panorama shot of a magnificent Wyoming mountain landscape covered with snow, as a solitary stagecoach traverses the screen.  Blocking its path, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a bounty hunter, sits on a stack of corpses, evidence of his success and proof of his prowess.  In the coach another hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), holds Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in handcuffs; he plans to bring her, a murderer, to the nearest town for hanging.

The three of them, along with a couple of others, stop at a saloon/restaurant/ lodging house called, for some reason, Minnie’s Haberdashery, where the bulk of the movie’s action takes place.  Inside the Haberdashery, a stagey situation unfolds, where another half-dozen actors play cat-and-mouse games of identity and motive with Warren, and several of them refight a battle in the Civil War, where Warren’s troops opposed the Confederates led by another inhabitant of the bar, General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern).  The action settles into a violent, profane version of an Agatha Christie whodunit, with a cast of likely suspects marooned in a secluded location while Warren determines, through available evidence and reasoning, who poisoned a pot of coffee, which results in a couple of spectacular deaths; he also works out some of the truth about the assorted characters and their reasons for visiting the Haberdashery.

Tarantino divides the very long movie into chapters as if it were indeed a detective story, then adds his own voice-over narration, showing a series of brutal killings that created the present situation in Minnie’s Haberdashery.  The narration accompanies flashbacks to events that explain the identities of the characters, the evidence that Major Warren uncovers, and ultimately, the fate of all the people in a film that, oddly, combines incessant violence in language and action with as much talkiness as some polite British drawing-room comedy. 

The violence includes the graphic murders, complete with buckets of blood, of almost everyone in the cast, a couple of bloody projectile vomitings, the amputation of an arm, the explosion of a head, and a slow strangulation by hanging.  The acting for the most part meshes nicely with the action, with the prize for the highest ascent over the top won easily by Samuel L. Jackson.  His presence, by the way, underlines the status of Tarantino himself, who has now gone all self-referential, employing actors from his previous movies, like Jackson and Michael Madsen in this one, and in effect repeating himself in echoing the situation and action of Reservoir Dogs.  As for Jennifer Jason Leigh, the poor woman serves as something like a punching bag for Kurt Russell, who slugs her almost every time she opens her mouth, applies a bowl of hot stew to her face, then vomits blood all over her.  (For this she attended drama school?).  The crude violence she endures, along with the elaborate verbal and visual exposition, serve well to sum up the meaningless, sadistic, and essentially juvenile vulgarity of Tarantino’s vision.