MARGOT AT THE WEDDING - CRITERION CHANNEL

 A rare case where I was able to re-examine a movie, and where I changed my mind.

ORIGINAL THEATRICAL REVIEW - NOVEMBER 2007 [source]

Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding is another dysfunctional, comical family dramas of the kind the writer/director does so well. Though maybe not as good as his breakout 2005 hit The Squid and the Whale, Margot is of the same ilk: smart, literate, and self-deflating.

Margot (Nicole Kidman) is a popular author of high-brow family dramas, probably not entirely dissimilar to the one she currently finds herself occupying. In fact, given some of the resentment her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) expresses in regards to her personal life being fodder for past fiction, it's safe to say Margot writes her stories exactly like the life she and her family live. The strain of these resentments, as well as the shared memory of an abusive father, has divided the sisters, who haven't talked in several months. They have a third, unseen sibling named Becky who apparently got the brunt of their upbringing. Her problems are the only things Margot and Pauline can truly agree on, reserving their most judgmental tones and cruel giggles for conversations about everything that's wrong with Becky.

A temporary reconciliation has been reached between Margot and Pauline in light of Pauline's approaching marriage to Malcolm (Jack Black). This will be the second marriage for Pauline, the first one having fallen apart when Margot exposed its darkest guts in a New Yorker short story. Pauline has one child from the old marriage, a pre-pubescent girl named Ingrid (Flora Cross). Margot has two children, one of whom she brings with her. Claude (Zane Pais) is her favorite son, a mama's boy who is reaching that age where strange smells are emerging from his armpits and girls' breasts capture his attention. Not exactly the best time for being in a family crisis, but little does Claude know, he's got one coming. Margot hasn't decided to visit her baby sis for wholly selfless reasons, oh no.

Noah Baumbach is amused by intellectual phonies, and he loves to let the air out of their tires. In his college drama Kicking and Screaming [review], he portrayed young people in transition, having to face up to the real world where the pretentious theories of the classroom neither paid the rent nor got them over snares in romance. The father in The Squid and the Whale, played with convincing self-delusion by Jeff Daniels, likes to pretend that growing up means never having to stop quoting Breathless [review] in the original French. When he does so, Baumbach's sleight of hand is clear: he can pull the pin on these toy hand grenades because he knows that the difference between the real and the plastic is very slim. The only separation between himself and the misguided characters he writes about is that he's holding the pen.

Margot may be Baumbach's most conflicted character yet. We meet her at that crossroads where her illusions about her safe little world are very near shattering. She prides herself on being able to diagnose what ails others, and she has no fear telling those people exactly what she thinks is wrong with them. Yet, her assessments are capricious, and she doesn't always stick with one opinion for long. She is also deathly afraid of confessing her own problems, hence leaving Claude in the dark about the impending divorce of his parents. Margot is the kind of role that Nicole Kidman does like no one else. She's frail and trembling, yet also intimidating. She's often the smartest in the room, the most good looking, even the tallest, and she uses that to her advantage just as much as she uses a glass of white wine with an ice cube to maintain her icy distance.

Even so, Kidman conjures a persistent ache for Margot. Her eye for illness is just as turned inward as it is out. Her obsession borders on hypochondria. Despite her maddening changes of tune and comical theories on everything from mothering to relationship politics, when her full vulnerability comes through, we still manage to feel for her. In one of the movie's best scenes, Margot gets thrown under a bus at a public appearance at a bookstore, and she ends up tearfully revealing how much living has started to scare her. The compulsions that drive her to pick life apart are also picking apart her own. The scene also gives Jennifer Jason Leigh a chance to show her sensitive side. Both actresses are very good in this movie and well cast as siblings.

The relationship between Pauline and Malcolm gives Margot ample opportunity to dole out criticism. The more she focuses on the problems she perceives between them, the further she can push back her own issues. Margot tells Claude that Pauline is crazy, one of the many indiscretions that betrays the sister's trust, but Pauline seems ridiculously together by comparison. Malcolm is also an easy scapegoat for Margot's ire: a jobless musician turned painter who spends more time writing pointless letters to magazines than he does wielding a brush. Normally, Jack Black's preening performances are enough to make me stay away from a movie, but Noah Baumbach is just the right director for the comedian. The austere tone of Margot at the Wedding cages the performer, and Baumbach lets him out for well-timed outbursts. What's great, though, is there is more going on here than just quick temper tantrums. Malcolm is riddled with doubt, and his breakdowns push Jack Black to go deeper with it rather than just relying on his usual bag of tricks. It's his best role since High Fidelity, kind of like Barry has grown up and discovered what a loser he really is.

For Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach adopts a more cinema verite style, letting the overcast skies of the coastline where Pauline lives cast a gray pall over everything. Cinematographer Harris Savides shot the movie using older lenses and mostly natural light, and the jerky camera movements and quick cuts give Margot at the Wedding a spontaneous and intimate atmosphere. Given how often the plot is advanced by someone peeking through holes in walls or listening to a conversation from outside a door, the movie gives the viewer the impression that he or she is spying in on something they weren't actually invited to witness.

The only downside of Margot at the Wedding is that at times it may be too smart for its own good. Though Baumbach doesn't make too much of the metaphor of the family tree that needs to be cut down despite denials that it's really rotting or even make his set-ups for later plot devices too obvious, he does lose his way in the labyrinth of lies once or twice. Luckily for him, he always has a dry, sardonic joke waiting to put the train back on track, and luckily for us, he isn't so bitter with cynicism that he forgets to have a heart. Making things fall apart is easy, but Noah Baumbach has enough going on, he is ultimately able to put Margot at the Wedding back together in ways that are both unexpected and satisfying.

DVD REVIEW - FEBRUARY 2008 [source]

If fictional accounts of literary lives are to be believed, the pursuit of stories and greater academic discoveries is an existence cancerous with disdain. Life can't just happen, every event must have meaning, contributing to a larger metaphor. The story of your life is grist for the story on the page, and not only can people not trust you to refrain from twisting what happened to them into some greater fiction, but if they are in the same profession as you, they might also twist yours. If they are not writers themselves, then the writer runs the risk of the people around them twisting their intent, or even seeing images of themselves in the creations even when the images aren't really there.

As a novelist, I can't entirely dispute this. Part of what made the caustic Margot at the Wedding so painful to watch the first time (my original review got plenty wrong) was the fear that maybe the damage being done was damage I would encounter all on my own. Don't get me wrong, I really liked the movie, but I wasn't going to immediately rush back and see it again.

At least not when I could wait for DVD.

Margot at the Wedding is the latest film from Noah Baumbach, co-writer of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou [review] and the man behind The Squid and the Whale, both of which are also about literary lives (though Zissou hides behind the mask of adventure). In this one, Baumbach turns his lens on a pair of sisters. Margot (Nicole Kidman) is a Manhattan-based writer who is traveling to the coast with the eldest of her two boys, Claude (Zane Pais), to attend the wedding of her estranged sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Margot had originally RSVP'd a "no" for the event, not wanting to support what she sees as a bad decision on Pauline's part. The younger sister has only known her fiancé, Malcolm (Jack Black), for a very short time, and Margot's sibling judgment is fierce.

The change of heart on Margot's part is not the act of kindness she outwardly portrays, but more selfish. She is running away from her failing marriage, hiding out in a familiar place to avoid the reality of her situation. Pauline lives in the house they grew up in, and just so happens to be near Dick Koosman (Ciaran Hinds), another writer that Margot has been having an affair with. (Has there ever been a more perfect douchebag name than "Dick Koosman"?) These and many other secrets begin to emerge as Margot reunites with her sister and starts stirring things up. There is an abusive father in the girls' past, as well as a third sister. Pauline is pregnant. The two younger sisters resent their elder sibling for using their lives in fictions. Malcolm resents everyone who does anything because he really does nothing. Much of this comes to light in strange ways, with Baumbach using the secret code of sisters as an effective tool for digging toward the emotional heart of a given scene.

It would have been easy for Noah Baumbach to sculpt a self-important drama of the erudite and academic (Pauline is a teacher, but that rarely comes up, because when Margot is around, everything is about Margot), but he avoids the preciousness and self-defensiveness that often arises when intellectuals write about their own kind. Not only did I find Margot at the Wedding funnier (though still in a mean way) the second time around, I appreciated more how Baumbach was willing to hang back and let his actors have the space to move and live and be. Shooting with mostly natural lighting, eschewing a traditional musical score, and using handheld cameras to get in close and move on his feet, the director sets up the locale and lets the drama unfold without forcing it to fit strict literary lines. He does toy with metaphor, most obviously the central family tree that stands tall in the backyard and that outsiders say is rotting, but he doesn't spend a lot of time pushing any greater meaning on his audience than what they might decide to pick up on their own.

Likewise, when the situation overloads and events hit critical mass, it sneaks up on the viewer rather than feeling inevitable--even though it is inevitable, because everything that goes wrong has been pushed into position by Margot's meddling. Nicole Kidman is fearless as the extremely unlikable lead character, who seems capable of diagnosing everyone's problems but her own. It's a bit of an overstatement to call her the lead, though; it's just that her character's name is in the title. It's really an ensemble piece. Jennifer Jason Leigh is a quiet treasure that doesn't get put to use nearly enough anymore, and Jack Black has never been this good. He plays the same kind of emotionally stunted know-it-all that garnered so much notice in High Fidelity, but after life has kicked him a few times. The smug irony has been bled right out of the performance.

Everything in Margot at the Wedding is done smartly, right up to the ending. Be warned, the final sequence comes quick, but back it up and watch closely. The snap decision is all in the action, in the simple business of leaving everything behind and moving forward. Also consider the last scene in relation to the first, the thing that Claude mistakenly thinks he found on the train is now there with him on the bus. Though it happens abruptly, it's vitally important.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN - CRITERION CHANNEL

Back in my earlier days as a reviewer, when I was more ambitious, if I had reviewed a movie in its theatrical release, I would re-watch it and write a new piece if I later was assigned the DVD. At times, it was interesting, because I might find different things on each viewing. For instance, Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding: my first take was in some ways contradicted by my second take.

Below are my two reviews of Joel and Ethan Coen's 2007 Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men--recently added to the Criterion Channel--written for DVDTalk about four months apart. 

THEATRICAL RELEASE, 11/8/2007

There is a dread that lingers long after No Country for Old Men has gone through its closing credits. Long after Tommy Lee Jones speaks his final lines, long after you've realized that this movie is not about what you thought it was, but about something else entirely. That dread is what another character, the El Paso sheriff that shares a meal and some wisdom with Jones, calls "the tide." It's not one thing that changes the world for the bad, he says, but the whole tide of things that will overwhelm you.

No Country for Old Men is adapted from the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy. It has been brought to the screen by the Coen Brothers, and despite the fact that they worked with their long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins, it doesn't really look like a Coen Bros. movie. It doesn't feel like one either, it doesn't move like one. In fact, had you played me this movie cold and told me nothing about who was involved, I wouldn't have guessed in a million years. I'm a big fan, too. I even liked The Ladykillers, which most people rip on pretty freely. It's been three years since that movie was released, and No Country for Old Men suggests that the famous filmmaking duo thought long and hard about how they would return to the Cineplex after that failure. For two guys whose early reputation grew fat on stylistic innovation, this quiet reinvention of what they are about is no less than astounding. Gone are the visual tricks and the hyperactive cameras, and in their place is something mannered, complex, and foreboding.

The plot of No Country for Old Men revolves around a satchel of money. While out in the Texas desert hunting, straight-laced welder Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) happens upon the remnants of a drug deal gone bad. He finds the $2 million in cash that was intended to be the buy money and makes a rash decision to take it home, leaving the lone survivor of the bloodbath to die on his own. Feeling guilty, he returns to the scene in the middle of the night, only to be spotted by bad guys who want their money back. Barely escaping alive, Llewellyn sends his wife (Kelly Macdonald) off to her mother's and goes on the run.

Too bad for him his pursuer is a one-stop death machine. Anton Chigurh, played with a seething menace by Javier Bardem, started his killing spree before he even got to the mess in the desert, so Llewellyn is just going to be another notch in his belt. The simple act of filling up his stolen car with gas is like an existential exercise in flexing his muscles. There is nothing Anton does that won't end in someone bleeding out on the floor.

Add to the mix Tommy Lee Jones as the local sheriff and you have the three main ingredients in this Texmex recipe. Though no one would blame you for thinking Jones is once again playing the same role he's been playing for the last ten years, it's been a long time since he's been this good. His take on Sheriff Bell could have been just another run-through of the actor's good humored cynicism and cornfed homilies, but Jones rightly sensed that he was the true emotional center of No Country for Old Men, the spiritual avatar of its deeper themes; as a result, he sheds the skin of easy comfort that he's worn through most of his recent films and lets his soul back out. Just as the Coen Bros. appear to be blazing new trails for themselves, dropping their old tricks for serious storytelling, so Jones seems to have wearied of his homespun image and has decided to put that weariness on film.

Essentially, No Country for Old Men is a four-pronged chase picture. Bardem is on the trail of Brolin, the money men and dealers team up to chase them both, and Jones is chasing all three. When they do catch up with one another at different times in the picture, the results are unexpected and harrowing. Yet, each twist of the plot strides in on a very comfortable gait. The Coens don't rush it when it doesn't need to be rushed, and they never inject a scene with an inflated sense of peril. There is time enough to get where they are all going.

Or so it would seem. The ironic thing about the pacing of No Country for Old Men is that ultimately, despite the lack of panic, time is running out. It's a eulogy for a particular way of life, a lament for dying values. Anton Chigurh, with a name that sounds like the sweetest confection, is a force of nature that has come seemingly out of nowhere, and he represents the future less than he represents the divide. He twice lets his victims gamble on their life, the call of a flipped coin determining if they win or die. The old sheriff is heads, a thinker who follows a code and predetermined ideas, whereas Llewellyn Moss is tails, running on instinct, making choices that his counterpart would never make.

Even with all the dead bodies that litter the road these men travel, the most devastating part of No Country for Old Men has nothing to do with blood, guns, or any of that stuff. Those are not the things that linger. Hell, most of the more surprising bends in that road (and there are several near the end) eschew those elements altogether. The true brutality is the passage of time, in our awareness of it, and in the inevitability of the countdown. Like Chigurh, it can't be stopped. Not by pure stubborn action, not even by the capriciousness of chance. Perhaps it's better to be like Llewellyn and try to remain ignorant of what lies ahead, because when it's all down to the wire, there is no comfort in acceptance.

DVD RELEASE, 3/11/2008

My take on this year's Academy Awards was that it was a tough year to get it wrong. Except for a few glaring exceptions (*cough* Atonement *cough*), the major categories were packed full with amazing talent. This embarrassment of riches meant no film scored a clean sweep, though the Coen Bros. masterful rumination on time and tide, No Country for Old Men, came close.

It's an interesting film to ponder, because it seems to me that its fan club is populated with just as many people who misunderstand the film in the same way its detractors misunderstand it. I realize that interpretation of any art form is subjective, and I definitely subscribe to the theory that any explication is valid as long as it can be backed up, so I am not saying that these people are wrong. Even so, let me tell you why they are.

Most complaints hinge on the now infamous climax interruptus and the following tumbledown denouements. In short, some viewers have been upset by what was not shown, the point in the movie that conventional wisdom and Robert McKee would likely suggest is the proper ending. In truth, if this action had been shown on screen, it would have been the only conventional element in an otherwise unconventional picture. If No Country for Old Men was the kind of western/crime picture it is regularly painted to be, I would think the dissenters were on the side of the angels; however, the contrary is true, and the movie, like the best rock 'n' roll, is running with the devil.

Adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is less a tough-guy genre story and more of a lament for the same. McCarthy and the Coens have come to bury Clint Eastwood, not to praise him (much less save him). (And, for the record, the absent scenes are also absent in the book.) It's not about the crimes or the getaways, it's about what these events represent.

As a good indicator of where some of the well-meaning attention No Country has garnered has taken a wrong turn is the overwhelming amount of ink devoted to Javier Bardem's performance as Anton Chigurh. Don't get me wrong, every ounce of praise heaped in Bardem's direction is deserved. His portrayal of the amoral Chigurh is one of the most carefully wrought and fiercely scary portrayals of a bad guy ever put on celluloid. Yet, there is a reason Bardem won for Best Supporting Actor and not as the lead. To consider Chigurh the lead is like giving the Death Star top billing in Star Wars. Chigurh is a force of the times, a catalyst for change, the unerring and unbending agent of fate who forces the hands of the men who run from him and the ones who pursue him. We've all seen that coin toss scene a million times now, and it's an important moment in the movie. Win or lose, you have to play, and if you don't know that, get out of the way, you're already done.

Though No Country for Old Men is an ensemble piece, if I had to pick a lead, I'd say it's the Tommy Lee Jones character, Sheriff Bell. He's the old man that the country has abandoned. He represents past values, the guy who got things done a certain way and had certain unassailable beliefs that he never thought would be rocked. Chigurh is the powerhouse that is pounding at the Sheriff's foundations, while Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is the modern man caught in between. He doesn't have the history of Bell to rely on, nor has he fully sussed out what the new system of values will be in Chigurh's future. He's running from Chigurh's deathly vengeance while Bell is trying to embrace him, to keep him safe. Neither position is Moss' place, and thus he must keep moving. The alternative is stagnation and death.

The beauty of McCarthy's metaphor is that it comes dressed in familiar armor, and thus the film adaptation shows up in the trappings of genre. One can easily enjoy the movie in that sense, but if you aren't watching for the way the Coens are dismantling genre, removing each piece of armor one by one, then you are likely going to find some disappointment when your expectations are subverted.
Funnily enough, all of the characters in the movie are going to learn essentially the same thing about expectations. Their belief in the order of the universe holds little weight, as the universe is wont to spin at its own accord. Even Chigurh, who attempts to destroy order by imposing his own concoction of chaos, is forced to learn what real randomness is. Moss' wife (Kelly MacDonald) is the only one willing to call him on it. His coin, as she explains, has no say in his actions, it's really just him, he will act as he will. His last scene in the movie is when one of the few truly random acts occurs, the one thing he doesn't make happen.

So, what then does a man do when the universe fails him? Keep soldiering on, it seems. Sheriff Bell finds no satisfaction in surrender, and the dreams he shares with his wife, of the inconsequential material world being lost and the hope for some light in the darkness, are suggestive of the only absolutes he can be sure about.

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX - #700

I'm just going to come out and say it: I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Wes Anderson's stop-motion animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl children's book captivated me from start to finish. It's a charming blend of old-school kids movies, literature, and the sort of meticulous, virtuoso filmmaking that Anderson fans clamor for. Make no mistake, the writer/director's move from live-action adult parables to cartoons has not dulled his aesthetic. This looks and feels just like a Wes Anderson film, from the way the shots are framed and how the characters behave, to the carefully chosen soundtrack and the obsessive attention to detail. It's even a story about fathers and sons, how one fox's midlife crisis causes strife for his wife and child, the familiar emotional terrain of almost all of Anderson's personal epics.

Mr. Fox is voiced by George Clooney, and he is the kind of blindly optimistic, cocksure rapscallion this particular leading man has always done well. The film opens as a young Mr. Fox and his wife, Felicity (Meryl Streep), find themselves in a rather sticky situation outside a chicken coop. Mr. Fox is a chicken thief by profession, but when he's told that his wife is expecting, he's also informed that he's expected to settle down. Fast forward several years and Fox, now a newspaper columnist, realizes that he is only six months younger than the age of his father when the old man died. Not content to leave a minor mark when he passes on, he buys his family a home on top of a hill looking down on the area's three most successful farms, owned by the three meanest famers. His secret plan: one last heist, robbing the full trio.

Yes, I realize that a mid-life crisis is a weird central conflict for what is ostensibly a family movie. Then again, many a classic children's tale is about very adult concerns, they are only dressed up in youthful clothes. The best kiddie fare is multi-leveled, inventive, and intelligent, three descriptives I would apply to Fantastic Mr. Fox. Wes Anderson and his co-writer, Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), manage to create a way for their younger viewers to engage with the material without talking down to them. A very important side story involves the Fox offspring, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), competing with his talented cousin, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson, who created all the artwork for his brother's other films). The prize is Mr. Fox's favor. Ash is a "special" kid who likes superheroes and wants to be a rascal like his dad. If only it came as natural for him as it does to Kristofferson...

Fantastic Mr. Fox moves at a leisurely pace, regularly stopping to enjoy the world that Anderson has borrowed from Dahl and explore its details. Explanations of the animal children's favorite game, "whack bat," and schematics of the local geography enhance the narrative rather than slowing it down, recalling similar moves that Wes Anderson has made in movies like The Royal Tenenbaums [review] and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. [review] These elements hearken back to one of the themes of the director's earlier pictures, the lesson that the patriarch of each film tries to impart to his children: enjoy the specifics before you lose them. We often forget that children's entertainment is as obsessed with mortality as any high-brow literature or cinema. You're never too young to gather those rosebuds.

Which is not to imply that Fantastic Mr. Fox is heavy. It's anything but. This film is a fun romp through the animal kingdom. Eventually, the three farmers--voiced by Michael Gambon, Robin Hurlstone, and Hugo Guinness--have had enough of Mr. Fox's thieving and decide to do something about it. Their hunt for the creature goes overboard, driving all the animals underground, where they reconvene and rise up . The ensuing battle gives Mr. Fox a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the others and Ash the opportunity to prove his worth to his father (and himself) and reconcile with his cousin. Along the way, there are musical interludes, references to other movies (Willem Dafoe voices a rat straight out of West Side Story), and many big laughs.

It's interesting that two of our most unique modern filmmakers--first Spike Jonze with Where the Wild Things Are [review] and now Wes Anderson with Fantastic Mr. Fox--have chosen to withdraw from adult features and focus on adaptations of all-ages material for their latest efforts. Both have yielded amazing motion pictures with emotional resonance, and each with remarkably similar messages despite having different timbres. Just as Litte Max had to indulge in some wild rumpusing to understand himself in Jonze's film, so too does Mr. Fox encourage the other animals to be who they are, to let themselves go wild when the time calls for it. It's good to be responsible, but not at the sacrifice of one's sense of self. Bill Murray can provide the voice of a badger and they can put that badger in a three-piece suit, but underneath, he's still a mean ol' badger and even deeper down, still Bill Murray.

Another thing that Jonze and Anderson have in common is the creation of a visually stimulating universe using mostly traditional methods. For his Wild Things, Jonze insisted on putting actors in giant Muppet suits rather than creating them using CGI, and the result was that they had a real presence on screen with the boy hero. Anderson doesn't have any "real" elements in his animated movie, but his use of stop-motion techniques that have been made all but obsolete by computers lends Fantastic Mr. Fox a nostalgic quaintness that you're never going to find in the Shrek movies. This looks like weird shorts I used to see on PBS when I was a kid, and though some of the production team has groused about Anderson's demands for real hair and the use of other difficult materials, his stubbornness pays off. The animation looks remarkable on the screen, and I quite regularly forgot that I was watching a cartoon. Though there is nothing extra in the credits, I urge folks to sit through them and see how many people it took to make Fantastic Mr. Fox. This type of thing really does take a village.

Beyond the animators, part of the success of the film's believability is also owed to a smart cohesion between animated object and actor. Anderson achieves Pixar-level casting, having his animators borrow mannerisms from Clooney and Schwartzman and the rest in such a way that the performance becomes so believable, you stop hearing the famous voices and instead hear real characters talking. It's easy to line up a superstar cast, it's much harder to get the right people for the job. These creatures have personality and panache, and even the smallest part is thoughtfully considered.

I am sure that there will be much debate about Fantastic Mr. Fox. I am sure some badger-types will insist that the vision of Roald Dahl is sacrosanct, and others will question the occasional adult touches; others will grouse that Anderson is too precious for his own good, the way they so regularly do. Let them cuss and shout those complaints loudly; I will cuss louder. Bottom line is that Fantastic Mr. Fox is a youthful, joyful effort from a filmmaker who has spent his career chasing his childhood visions. I'm happy to say that with this feature, Wes Anderson has finally caught up with them.

This review was originally written for the theatrical release of the film; images are taken from the 2009 DVD edition.

FRANCES HA - #681

The true achievement of Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha is how effortlessly it captures the inconsistencies of youth without being overly precious or dishonest. Sure, Frances can be quirky, and she's selfish, but she's also lonely and a bit lost and, though lacking in essential self-awareness, desperately confused by the ups and downs of her own existential crisis. Frances Ha is a movie about a young woman getting her life together, even when she doesn't realize that's what's happening.

Greta Gerwig (Damsels in Distress [review]) stars as Frances, a 27-year-old dancer living in New York City. Frances is a third-stringer at her dance company, always on the sidelines, the understudy to the understudy. This, alas, is her place in life across the board. She rooms with her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), who is, for all intents and purposes, Frances' caretaker and, arguably, her lover. It's not that they are physically affectionate in a sexual manner, but Frances puts all her eggs in Sophie's basket. Sophie has a job in publishing and she's in charge of the rent. She also has an actual relationship with a guy who works in finance (Patrick Heusinger). While Frances assumes this camaraderie will go on forever--the play fighting, sharing the same bed, Sophie telling her bedtime stories--her desire to stay stuck in one place is undermined by the fact that the world keeps turning without her. Sophie moves on, and Frances is left to fend for herself.

It's refreshing to watch a movie about a twentysomething whose whole reason for being doesn't hinge on romance. Frances Ha, which Baumbach co-wrote with Gerwig, appears to be consciously working against the standard narrative dynamic of the post-collegiate experience. It's not uncommon for graduates to enter the real world and quickly fall into the drudgery of everyday existence. Frances continues to pursue her dreams, but not with any real hunger. Likewise, her relationships outside of Sophie are dominated by her strong connection to the other girl. Even when invited along to a dinner party thrown by wealthy professionals (including a cameo by the rock duo Dean & Britta, who also contributed to the soundtrack), she can only talk about Sophie. When she moves in with two young trust-funders, she remodels one of them, a funny writer who otherwise might have affection for her (Michael Zegan), into a new version of her "lost love." Someone has to tuck Frances in at night.

Baumbach's other movies, which include The Squid and the Whale and Greenberg [review], have always occupied a space slightly removed from the common populace. His characters are erudite, his humor arch. Frances Ha has a more street-level immediacy than his previous efforts. Stylistically, the film is equal parts Nouvelle Vague and 1970s Woody Allen. Cinematographer Sam Levy (Wendy and Lucy [review]) shot the movie in black-and-white, his loose framing mimicking the intimacy of observance rather than more conventional cinematic staging. Reportedly, much of Frances Ha
was shot on the fly out in public, using digital cameras, allowing for New York to be an unwitting participant in Frances' story. While I wouldn't call the movie "realistic," there is an immediacy to how it transpires that at least makes it feel real.

For the last several years, Greta Gerwig has made a name for herself in a variety of independent and mainstream pictures. She emerged from the "mumblecore" scene in the mid-'00s, including collaborating on two features with Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends). Taking charge and forging her own stories suits the actress, who has long been a critical darling but has yet to have that breakout role to really make her a star. Frances may just be it, as her natural charisma allows Gerwig to be as scattered and even self-destructive as the story requires without having the audience turn against Frances or get fed up with her. The actress also seems to have pulled something out of Noah Baumbach. He has never made a film this light on its feet before. Gerwig is already in the writer/director's next as-of-yet untitled project, and one can only hope they continue to collaborate. I wouldn't mind seeing an ongoing pairing between them akin to Woody Allen's revitalizing working relationship with Scarlett Johansson.

Despite a purposely jarring third-act break, Baumbach and Gerwig establish a nice comfort zone for Frances (and the audience) that allows for the ending we'd been rooting for even as we were baffled by Frances' reluctance to pursue it. It's a bit risky in execution. Frances doesn't change gradually, and no explanation is layered over her wake-up call. The alarm goes off, and the next thing we know, she's out working her brand new day. We end up accepting the sudden shift because, in a sense, the director is jarring the viewer out of his or her comfort alongside his protagonist. We have become so comfortable with Frances' screw-ups, we are somewhat culpable in her failure to change. A little disappointment and some role reversals are required for Frances to move on, but ultimately, we all feel better when she does. If her truncated last name is a punctuating laugh, it comes with the contentment of laughing with her, rather than at her, thus making all the difference.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 5/13

IN THEATRES...

* Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach, having found a new muse in Greta Gerwig, strikes out anew.

* Gimme the Loot, street-level cinema verite following two graffiti artists preparing for a big tag.

* The Great Gatsby in 3D has two-wasted dimensions. Shtick and spectacle from Baz Luhrmann.

* The Iceman, a biopic about one of America's most notorious contract killers. Michael Shannon lends the role intensity, but the script only touches the material gingerly.

* The Purge, Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey in a tense little thriller with inklings of political allegory.

* Sightseers, the new film from Ben Wheatley, a rebel in search of applause. Take a tour of misanthropy.

My Oregonian columns:

* May 3: the food documentary The Food Hunters, Harold Lloyd's classic Safety Last! newly restored, and the 18th-annual HP Lovecraft Film Festival.

* May 10: a two-week film noir festival at Cinema 21; Rock Hudson starring in John Frankenheimer's whacky psych-out Seconds, and the political/social documentary The Mosque in Morgantown.

* May 17: a rare noir Fallguy; Luis Bunuel directs Catherine Deneuve in Tristana; and Guy Pearce sends 33 Postcards

* May 23: Douglas Fairbanks as The Thief of Bagdad; Paul McCartney gives us a Wings Rockshow; the Experimental Film Festival 2013.

* May 30: Take a visit to Skull World; look at the making of two different forms of art with Becoming Traviata and Bel Borba Aqui; get gay married for a greencard in I Do.

* June 7: underground crime fiction by way of Flamingos; the activist-focused environmental documentary Elemental; and Stress Position, an agitprop art school prank.

ON BD/DVD...

* Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, a 1973 disjointed road-trip romance from Alan J. Pakula.

* Save the Date, a wedding-centric sorta rom-com with Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan, co-written and featuring artwork by cartoonist Jeffrey Brown.

* Wake of the Red Witch, a seafaring, bodice-ripping potboiler with John Wayne.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 3/10

Welcome to April...

IN THEATRES...

* Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton's ego-driven "reimagining" of a classic that didn't need his help.

* The Art of the Steal, a documentary about Philadelphia's appropriation of the legendary Barnes Foundation and its art collection.

* Chloe, a Skinimax flick wearing the lingerie of high art. I wasn't fooled. Which is amazing, because I'm easily distracted by boobs.

* Clash of the Titans. Yes, yes, I know you want big monsters fighting, but do you also want to be bored by those same monsters and totally unimpressed by the digital effects and 3D? Then by all means, let the gods punish you.

* The Ghost Writer. What's all the fuss about the new Roman Polanski? What's the hubbub, bub?

* Greenberg, an emotional suckerpunch of a movie from Noah Baumbach, who pulls an amazing performance out of Ben Stiller. I love this movie so much, and it only gets better the longer it sits in my brain.

* Green Zone, the new one from the Bourne guys goes heavy on the action and the politics.

* Hot Tub Time Machine - Not a comedy, but a Republican fantasy about going back in time to the Reagan era and then returning to the modern world to discover your actions in the past caused the victory of Capitalism. Also, lots of boobs. More failure for boobs this week. The world has gone crazy!!!

* The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg & the Pentagon Papers, a compelling documentary about the man who tried--and kind of succeeded--to stop the Vietnam War.

ON DVD...

* 44 Inch Chest, a talky British gangster drama that loses its way, squandering an amazing cast that features Ray Winstone, Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt, and the might Ian McShane.

* The Beaches of Agnes, the enchanting self-portrait by the first lady of the New Wave, Agnes Varda.

* The Brothers Warner, a mild profile of the guys who started the famous studio that bears their name.

* Ciao, an indie film searching for love in the midst of loss. Flawed, but shows great potential.

* An Education, one of my favorites of 2009 is now on DVD. A wonderful character study that brings early 1960s London to life.

* Fantastic Mr. Fox, the irresistible stop-motion animated movie from Wes Anderson. Well, you could resist it, but why would you hate yourself that much?

* Gigante, an oddball subversion of the romance genre from Uruguay. Also coupled with the even better Danish short Dennis.

* Gogol Bordello Non-Stop, a documentary about the gypsy punks.

* More Than This: The Story of Roxy Music, not the most comprehensive Roxy documentary, to be sure, but I liked it.

* Paris, in which Cédric Klapisch bites off more than he can chew trying to portray a whole city. A fine performance by Juliette Binoche makes it watchable, though.

* Young Sherlock Holmes, repacking an old childhood favorite. I find the movie holds up.

DILLINGER IS DEAD - #506

Dammit, you got me again, Marco Ferreri! Advantage to you. While our contentious relationship isn't exactly on par with the feud between Armond White and Noah Baumbach--for one thing, even if you were alive, you'd likely have no idea who I am--this cinematic ping pong game has got to stop. The first serve I took from you was your vaunted masterwork La Grande Bouffe, and to say I was underwhelmed would be to put it mildly. Your second volley was your follow-up, 1974's absurd take on U.S. history, Don't Touch the White Woman. That film irritated the living crap out of me, and in my review, I promised to stay out of your way if you stayed out of mine.

Well, you had to go and get yourself a Criterion release, didn't you? Hit me where I live, whydoncha? So here we go, third pitch and third strike*: Dillinger is Dead, your 1969 oddball nugget about one man's restless, insomniac night roaming around his own mind. Despite my misgivings, I was willing to give you a fair try. And I did. Only it's another swing and a miss.

Thankfully, unlike the other films, this one neither irked nor angered me. On the contrary, Dillinger is Dead has left me so nonplussed, I really don't know what to say about it. I have no reaction beyond a shrug. Not exactly a stellar recommendation or a fiery condemnation, I know. In fact, I think we'd both feel more comfortable if I hated it even worse than White Woman. My review might as well be written on a wet paper bag.

Let me try to explain this movie for the folks in the cheap seats. Esteemed 1960s screen actor Michel Piccoli plays Glauco, a man who makes a living designing gas masks. Not necessarily an ignoble profession: if the modern world is going to poison the air you breathe, Glauco is going to protect you from that poison. Though, when it comes down to it, he's really designing the devices so that his side of whatever war may be around the bend can survive gassing the other side.

After a brief introduction at the gas mask factory, Glauco returns home. There, he visits with his druggy wife (Anita Pallenberg, sexy paramour of Rolling Stones-guitarist Keith Richards), rejects the dinner left out for him, and makes himself something else instead. (In foreshadowing to La Grande Bouffe, Piccoli stares at pictures of meat in a cookbook the way other men stare at pornography.) In the midst of cooking, the maid Sabina (Annie Girardot) comes home. Glauco also goes looking for some spices, and in the closet, he finds a mysterious bundle. It's a pistol wrapped inside a newspaper with a headline announcing the death of legendary gangster John Dillinger. Glauco dismantles the gun, reassembles it, and paints it red with white polka dots. He also has his dinner and watches some home movies, sometimes molesting the screen, sometimes reenacting what he is seeing.

In the midst of this, Glauco also spies on the maid, and then tries to have sex with her after he fails to wake his wife up to do it. As the man of the house, Glauco is a predatory but ultimately impotent lion. He stalks around, but he gets little attention and little respect. Maybe that's his lot in life. He doesn't kill, he just enables other men's success on the battlefield. Sabina uses the telephone to talk to her secret lover, and Glauco's wife uses her own modern toxins to dismiss him.

This is all told in exacting detail, step by step, with many of the tasks shot in real time and without interruption. The action is accompanied by a steady stream of contemporary songs broadcasting over Glauco's radio, many of them lyrically apropos to what is happening. As the film rounds its final corner, there is even one shocking act that so surprised me, I jumped in my chair. Without giving too much away, let's just say that gun in the first act definitely paid off in the last one.

To what end, though, I really don't know. The events of Dillinger is Dead are seemingly random, accurately portraying an aimless night, but maybe they are not. Maybe there is some complex code here that I am meant to put together were I so inspired. I would make a go at it if I were being graded, but I'm not, you are, Maestro Ferreri, and you've done nothing to compel me to want to understand Dillinger is Dead more. The way I see it, it's your job to make me want to know what it all means, not mine to find a reason for your film existing. That's the pact you make with the audience: we're willing to do the work, you just have to make it worth our while.

What's odd is, I didn't hate Dillinger is Dead. I wasn't bored by it, nor did I find it tedious. The set designs, with the cool '60s furniture and the vivid colors, were easy on the eyes. Similarly, Piccoli is an actor worth watching. He is extremely confident in front of the camera and comfortable in his skin. His every move is natural, he's not shackled by actorly gestures. There is talent here, it's just not sufficiently focused in such a way as to make me care.

The back cover of the DVD calls Dillinger is Dead "a surreal political missive about social malaise," a description that brings to mind Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. That is a film I very much enjoy, probably because Bunuel's pranksterism and point of view give the viewer something to hang their hat on. In his essay in the Criterion booklet, critic Michael Joshua Rowin suggests that Ferreri had no such interest in giving his audience the same courtesy. He labels Dillinger is Dead as intentionally irrational, designed to duck away from any one interpretation and leave itself open to varying opinions and arguments. In one of the interviews with Ferreri reprinted in the same booklet (okay, I guess I did at least do some of my homework), the director states that "ambiguity" is Dillinger is Dead's reason for being.

So, I guess mission accomplished, then?

* I'm not good at athletics. Let the mixed sports metaphors abound!

The film's trailer.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.

MY DINNER WITH ANDRE - #479

At the end of Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest's Corky St. Clair returns to New York from the Missouri burg where his dreams of a life in the Legitimate Theatre were dashed on the small-town rocks and opens up his own memorabilia store. Guest fills the shop with all kinds of ludicrous, non-existent movie tie-ins, including My Dinner with André action figures. The joke is, of course, that they should probably be "inaction" figures, because Louis Malle's 1981 movie is about as far from action as you can get, at least in the physical sense. There's plenty of mental action, but one doesn't really needs dolls to act that out. Maybe a better toy would be Wallace Shawn and André Gregory masks, and kids could fight over who gets to be the forceful André and dominate the conversation, sort of like getting to be the cop instead of the robber.

My Dinner with André is the brainchild of its two stars, actor/playwright Wallace Shawn and theatre director André Gregory. Of the pair, most moviegoers probably recognize the very recognizable Shawn from his roles in films like The Princess Bride and Clueless; he is currently playing Blair Waldorf's stepdad on Gossip Girl. The entire movie is an extended conversation between the two men, who wrote the screenplay and play versions of themselves. It's a heady movie, covering art, psychology, and philosophy via esoteric anecdotes, mostly coming from André, who shares some of his bizarre experiences from his worldwide search for authentic meaning and experience.

It's one of those left-field concepts that sounds boring but is so very much not boring it's almost shocking. I recall it being a picture that Siskel and Ebert championed back in the day, which is weird because I wasn't even ten when the film came out. Was I really paying attention to those guys back then? I guess so. I suppose it could be a trick of memory, the sort of illusory trap André might call into question in the film, that I could have just heard those famous TV critics talking about it much later. Then again, André would also probably encourage me to get rid of my TV altogether, in which case he would have cut off my cable to spite his own face.

It's weird considering a film like My Dinner with André in 2009, because the cultural landscape has changed so much since Louis Malle set up some cameras and filmed two New York intellectuals debating over a helping of quail. There is an intentional obscuring of the barrier between fiction and reality in this film, like a window that has been washed but the soap streaks are intentionally left on the glass. This is before shows like The Hills and its fake ilk, before reality was packaged and falsified and sold back to us as something genuine as an increasingly standard business practice. When I saw this movie in my late teens, for the first and only time until now, it didn't even occur to me to question whether it was real or not. I assumed it was a true conversation caught on the fly, not a scripted event made to look like it was really happening. I suppose that speaks to how far the film went over my head, that I spent at least twenty years thinking it was a documentary and not a piece of fiction. I suppose, though, that it's a better truth than believing anything that comes out of Heidi Montag's mouth. Even so, the caveats keep rolling; My Dinner with André would probably also reject the notion that any one illusion is quantifiably good in comparison to another.

The film does cover a range of topics, but they all eventually come back around to the concept of self and how one views the world. After a brief intro following Wallace Shawn through New York, listening to his thoughts as he explains the set-up of this dinner, we get into the thick of it relatively quickly. Yet, that set-up also gives us a fundamental understanding of the two character constructs we are working with. Shawn is a playwright concerned with his own failure and how he will make ends meet; André is a successful enough director that he was able to drop out of the business. Even so, there is a sense that he is no longer what he once was, that he is now a failure, as well, and rather than wishing to avoid him because of some social imbalance, Shawn seems scared that his companion might reflect his own insecurities back at him. His failures are Wallace Shawn's failures, too.

In a very abstract way, there is a case to be made for André representing God and Shawn humanity. André instigates the dinner, and he also begins the conversation with stories of how he learned to manipulate reality and control people through improvisational acting exercises. It is an anecdote that sets the stage both for the topics to follow and introduces the notion, false as it may be, that this is also improvisation. André's example is an event where actors were pushed to play themselves rather than invented characters, just as they are seemingly doing here. Life is performance, so performance is no different than life. Like the anti-Keyser Söze, André's trick here isn't making us believe he's not real when our experience tells us otherwise, but that he is, even when the strings are showing.

As the night wears on, though, André's tales take on an increasing weariness, a despair that all situations can be manipulated and people can't be pushed to act for themselves, as if the Supreme Being were sick of governing the minutia of our nowhere lives. Neither Malle nor the authors really set up any of this divine argument, and to be perfectly honest, it was a total afterthought on my part, but it does have a certain sense to it. André is trying to find a way to be an enlightened being, and he is searching for meaning wherever he can find it, placing great mystical importance on coincidence and his own perceptions of an interconnectedness. Be it art or activity or what have you, people need to come together and create moments of purity, reminding themselves that they are alive by creating illusions that paradoxically will force us to acknowledge that all life is a dream. If everyday experience is lacking in sustenance, then there must be something transformative to free our souls from the existential abyss that is modern living.

It's a self-indulgent argument, and it's hard not to look at André as a self-involved white man of privilege, a position I think the filmmakers are fully aware of. In a way, André is being set up to be knocked down, with Wallace Shawn given very few interjections--acting being reacting, Shawn doesn't sit idly, the amount of listening may make his the more difficult performance. Most of his thoughts are saved until his cathartic third-act speech (right on cue, right when it's needed*) in defense of day-to-day living, of the importance of surviving and the strength of the individual and the few real bonds one makes. This is enough, this is important, life is in the details. In a way, this, and the fact that My Dinner with André exists at all, supports Shawn's earlier argument that art should reflect life and the common experience; yet, it also supports André, who says that people know enough of their own lives and don't need to see their personal dramas played out for them on stage or screen, they need something else to transport them.

Which is just what My Dinner with André does for its running time. For nearly two hours you are likely to forget whatever else is around you, what bills aren't paid or that you need to put your laundry in the dryer, because you'll be wrapped up in this conversation. It may not be as important as André would have us believe, that this entertainment, no matter how intellectually stimulating, is merely a distraction from our own mortality, but each of the men does end up proving that art can be what he wants it to be without canceling out the other. Being both a reflection and a distortion, it can show us our personal reality while also showing us a different one; we see ourselves in what is separate from us. It may only be a magic trick, but it provides succor via entertainment, while also changing one's frame of reference and, therefore, one's perception. At one point, André asks if maybe the only art that will work anymore is the art that is geared toward an audience of one. Though this was still true in a darkened Cineplex, where each audience member sat alone with his or her thoughts and these two dinner guests, it's now even more valid in the age of DVD. And yet, that once very public private act of going to the movies was still communal in that a group of people engaged in it at the same time; are we now more disconnected as we enjoy more and more of life in the confines of our own homes? Does it make us better or less equipped to replicate the unheralded victory that sneaks its way into the voiceover at the end, when Wallace Shawn informs us that he goes home and tells his girlfriend all about his meal? He carries the torch for the conversation and passes it to someone else. I guess our new challenge is to get out of our easy chairs and do the same.

For those who want to go behind the curtain and learn more about how the reality informed the film and how Malle, Shawn, and Gregory built a piece of fiction out of actual lives, the lead feature on DVD 2 should satisfy your concerns. Filmmaker Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding) spends about half an hour each with Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, and the interviews explore who these men are and how they came together to create My Dinner with André. It digs into what parts of their own lives served as source material and how the two of them cobbled it all together, and then how they hooked up with Louis Malle and the ways the director shaped them into actors and their script into a movie. Baumbach is a good interviewer, sparking a dialogue that does service to the film and those who appreciate it.

The tables--and the camera--are turned in the other program, a 1982 episode of the BBC magazine show "Arena." Titled "My Dinner with Louis," it's a 52-minute portrait of Malle, based around an interview conducted by Wallace Shawn. The full scope of Malle's movie career is explored, complete with clips, in an attempt to divine the director's artistic impulse and the themes of his work. It's a great insight into the man who would read the script for My Dinner with André and think, "This is a movie I have to make."

Louis Malle

* Though, arguably, it's actually a second-act shift, this not being a by-the-book third act film. (I can hear Charlie Kaufman in my head, "Don't say ‘third act.'")



For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.