CARANCHO - CRITERION CHANNEL

 This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2011.

Two people meet out on the job. Simple enough. She's an EMT, he's an ambulance chaser who works for a private social services agency that helps car crash victims fight insurance companies. She is naturally suspicious of him--his job is not one a good lawyer chooses for himself--and yet he is attracted to her, wants to prove to her that he's an okay guy. The dude convinces the girl to have coffee, the conversation goes well, and things start to take their natural course. Except they both have their secrets, and when those come to light, each will have to choose how acceptable they find the previously unknown character traits.




This is the basic set-up of Carancho, a film from Argentinean filmmaker Pablo Trapero. Though it may sound like a conventional romantic drama, Carancho slowly morphs into a bleak crime picture, one that grows darker with each successive frame. Some may find it unrelenting, and folks with aversions to car crash footage may want to look away (I lost count of how many collisons there were); though I didn't think it was perfect, I thought Carancho was pretty good.




A large reason why the movie works is its excellent cast. Luján the EMT is played by Martina Gusman, who was amazing in Trapero's previous (and better) motion picture, the prison drama Lion's Den [review]. Luján is biding her time riding around in ambulances until she can get shifts as a doctor. She's also got a bit of a morphine habit; nothing that interferes with her day to day, but enough that her bosses probably wouldn't approve. In essence, she has a good heart, and so her suspicions that the group that the lawyer works for is not really helping the victims come from a good place. Sosa is played by Ricardo Darín, the lead from The Secret in Their Eyes [review]. Meeting Luján has come at the right time for Sosa. He has almost gotten back on his feet, and her distrust reminds him of the man he always intended to be.




The main problem here is that Luján is correct in her assumptions. Sosa works for bad men who not only bilk their clients out of most of their settlements, but they also create fake accidents to get even more payoffs. One of these accidents goes wrong, providing the narrative fulcrum for Carancho. Faced with his own deceit and with the woman he loves knowing what a heel he's been, Sosa has to face the music, and he tries to put things right--something that gets both him and Luján in hot water with some dangerous people.





Those expecting a big love story out of Carancho are likely to be disappointed. Though there are tender moments between Luján and Sosa, they come in between arguments, mistakes, and even unsettling eruptions of violence. Each step they take to try to get out of the moral quicksand only sucks them down deeper, culminating in a final desperate act. It's a variation on both "love on the run" and "one last job" film conventions--though Trapero and his writers keep their intentions pretty well guarded. For a lot of the movie, I couldn't guess where the characters were going or when the last double-cross was going to occur. I'd call Carancho a potboiler, but the general temperature is chilled by anxiety and fear. These guys aren't criminals, they are well-meaning people who have made some bad choices. Trying to correct them is harder than going along, that's the difficult of taking up residency in morally gray areas, and it's what makes their predicament interesting.






Trapero and cinematographer Julián Apezteguia shot Carancho with the RED digital camera, and much of the film has the immediacy of the verité style that the technology allows for. They shoot in close quarters, following their characters through their professional hazards and getting into the thick of it as things get rough; likewise, intimate moments between the two leads are shot in close-up, bringing us into their affair, as well as their pain. The stark photography makes Luján's struggles with her addiction grimy and unattractive--there is no romanticizing any of this. I loved Martina Gusman in Lion's Den, and she is equally fierce here, though the Luján role allows for more range and a different kind of vulnerability. Gusman is definitely an actress to watch.




Carancho starts stronger than it finishes. Once the mysteries of the story unfold and the characters reveal what they are hiding, there is a kind of perfunctory structure to how the rest of it plays out, even if the viewer can't see around every corner. It doesn't help that Trapero drags his feet getting there, making it harder to take when the movie continues to spiral downward into the darkness. The final shots push the irony a little too hard, and truth be told, it's the one move you're likely going to be able to call ahead of time. Even so, Carancho is a meaty cinematic effort, giving the audience much to chew on, and it's admirable that it avoids pulling its punches or delivering the ending most of us would expect, regardless of how much we may want it.




LION'S DEN - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for my Confessions of a Pop Fan blog in February 2009 as part of my coverage of the Portland International Film Festival.

It's been a long time since I've seen as good an opening to a thriller as the first ten minutes of Lion's Den. Following a disconcerting animated credits sequence featuring a sing-a-long with South American children--I wondered it they had switched screenings on me--we get a series of quick-cut scenes where the film's heroine, Julia (Martina Gusman), slowly comes out of a state of shock to realize that there have been two bloody murders in her home. The way director Pablo Trapero (alongside three other writers) pulls you into the plot is deftly executed, moving rapidly to knock the audience off balance and put us in Julia's shoes.

Because from there, Lion's Den isn't really a thriller, but a prison drama about a young mother in a situation that has gotten out of her control. Unable to give a feasible account of the evening--which involved her lover and his boyfriend in a knife fight, leaving the boyfriend dead and the lover, Ramiro (Rodrigo Santoro), badly wounded--Julia is locked up pending trial. Since she is a couple of months along in a pregnancy, she is assigned to a maternity ward where convicted mothers can raise their own children until they are four. Depressed and nauseous with morning sickness, Julia takes a while to adjust to life inside, but eventually she becomes part of the community, even taking a lover, Marta (Laura Garcia), and using her outside connections to get goods for the inmates. Several years pass, and all the while Julia keeps fighting for her freedom. When her mother (Elli Medeiros) tricks her into taking her young son away, however, everything unravels.

Lion's Den is a harsh story filmed in a gritty style and lacking in any overt sensationalism. The script taps into a universal fear--of being caught in a legal system you can't get out of and incarcerated--and adds a specific and unique wrinkle I don't think we've seen in cinema before. The maternity prison is like a daycare center in Hell, a lethal combination of violence, boredom, and dirty diapers. A unique setting is nothing without a great character, however, and Julia is a fully realized human being with a real journey to undergo. The selfish, bleach-blonde girl at the start of the picture is vastly different from the confident, fierce mother that exits the final frame. Outside of one previous acting credit (Trapero's 2006 film Born and Bred), Martina Gusman has almost exclusively been a producer up until now and even has an executive producer credit on Lion's Den. Whatever prompted the switch deserves some kind of tribute or monument, because she's utterly convincing as Julia. So much so, I have cause to wonder if she really was pregnant during shooting. If not, Gusman sported the most impressive prosthetic belly I've ever seen. The performance shows an amazing range that is likely only just scratching the surface of her ability.

The film ends somewhere in the same territory where it began, with final scenes closer to a thriller than the hard-edged drama that passed between. Yet, neither the beginning nor the end feel disjointed from the middle, the transitions are as natural as Julia's changes. Behavioral action drives life, and it can drive a very good movie, as well. Lion's Den is one to look out for.

THE LUSTY MEN - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.

Equal parts modern western and prototypical sports picture, Nicholas Ray's 1952 drama The Lusty Men is an interesting sideshow story about a particularly hard-living group of fellows and the consequences their choices have on the women in their lives.
 

Robert Mitchum stars in The Lusty Men as Jeff, a champion of the rodeo circuit who returns to his Texas hometown after an injury takes him out of competition. Looking to make a little money and maybe even save up to buy the house he grew up in, Jeff signs on at a nearby ranch. There, he befriends Wes (Arthur Kennedy), a newlywed who has designs on the old property himself. Wes and his wife Louise (Susan Hayward) have been content with the slow and steady path to homeownership, but meeting Jeff gives Wes an idea: he can start riding broncos and busting bulls and make the cash he needs quicker. Louise isn't so keen on the idea, she's scared her husband will end up with a debilitating injury the same way his new trainer did. She doesn't get much say in the matter.
 

The majority of The Lusty Men's running time takes place on the road, as the threesome hooks up with the regular rodeo caravan and go from town to town chasing prize money. Wes takes to it naturally and starts winning; he also takes to the nomadic lifestyle, partying after the big show, attracting the attention of groupies. Meanwhile, Louise attracts the attention of Jeff, who silently pines for the sort of life she's hoping to achieve. She takes comfort in his steady gait, even as she begs him to get her husband out of the game alive. It's an interesting love triangle, lacking in any real infidelity. Jeff only states his true intentions outright when Wes has taken things too far. The resultant showdown takes place in the arena, with each man looking to measure his masculinity by how long he can stay on a bucking horse.
 

The Lusty Men is refreshingly restrained when it comes to the melodrama, with Ray preferring the rough-and-tumble world of professional cowboys to any bedroom antics. The movie's heroes are adrenaline junkies who view settling down as a kind of selling out. That is, until they don't anymore. Mitchum plays it tough, but the actor also shows great empathy and vulnerability. He doesn't stop Wes because he knows he can't, the rider has to make his own choices; yet, he also recognizes the damage done to the wife. (If he didn't, the script provides the audience with multiple parallels so we can see places Wes might end up.) For her part, Hayward shows a nice balance, allowing the allure of the party life to distract her, but never losing her resolve.
 

Ray and cinematographer Lee Garmes (Duel in the Sun, Nightmare Alley) capture all the thrills and danger of the rodeo events, working nicely with editor Ralph Dawson (Harvey) to meld the long shots of the actual horseplay with the close-ups of the actors both in and out of the stadium. It works nicely. The Lusty Men is reminiscent of many race-car pictures that would follow, not to mention a little bit like a western version of the traveling circus drama. The even emotional tone might disappoint some, but it fits the idea that these tough customers leave everything out there on the field. My only complaint is a rather abrupt ending that not only sews things up a little too neatly, but also left me confused and reaching for the rewind to try to discern whether what they suggest just happened really did.

HANNAH ARENDT - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2013.

One assumes biopics about noted intellectuals and philosophers aren't exactly the easiest thing to sell to studio execs, much less an audience. Even Albert Einstein tends to only get movies when it's either a romantic comedy or an imagined fantasy pairing him with Marilyn Monroe.


 

So, hats off to German director Margarethe von Trotta (Rosenstrasse, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum [review]) for not only getting folks to back her movie about 20th-Century philosopher Hannah Arendt, but for also making it entertaining and provocative.




Co-written by von Trotta and Pam Katz (Remembrance), Hannah Arendt stars Barbara Sukowa (Europa, Berlin Alexanderplatz [review]) as the central character, a Jewish woman who fled from Germany during World War II. Arendt landed on her feet in America, where she began writing her many books exploring the relationship between individuals and the society in which they live, and how each is defined by the other (to be fairly simplistic about it, as my understanding of Arendt's actual writing is limited). She became a professor at the New School, and eventually became a naturalized citizen.


 

von Trotta's portrait picks up in the early 1960s, just after the arrest of Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann, who was abducted and taken to Israel by Mossad in order to stand trial. Arendt decided she wanted to see what this notorious individual looked like up close, having herself been separate from much of the atrocities of Hitler's rule by getting away during the war. So, she proposed to The New Yorker that they send her to Jerusalem to cover the proceedings.


 

Once there, the movie tells us, Arendt was surprised to find that Eichmann was not some larger-than-life personality, but a mere bureaucrat whose very averageness suggested a more insidious cruelty than she even imagined. He embodied what she called the "banality of evil." His terrible activities organizing the transport of Nazi prisoners to their deaths at concentration camps were not undertaken for selfish gain, personal hate, or any other strong conviction. His adopting the standard Nazi defense of "I was just following orders" was indicative of the truth: he had surrendered all personality to "the law." He was all the more disgusting for having just done his job instead of exercising some kind of moral imperative.


 


 

This became a central thesis of her articles and her eventual book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, though, as Hannah Arendt points out, the main controversy and criticism of the material was that, in looking at all the evidence presented, Arendt noted what she considered an error in judgment on the part of the Jewish leaders who cooperated with the Nazis. Their hope of lessening the damage by trying to go along, to her mind, only led to more deaths. In much the same way pundits tend to do today (and so it seems history repeats), seizing on and singling out such incendiary elements without acknowledging the totality of the work only proved to cause an uproar and derail any serious engagement with the topic by the populace at large.


 

Hannah Arendt deals with the full story, from the visit to Israel through to the criticism and defense of the articles. It features lots of heated debate, flashbacks to Arendt's college affair with Heidegger (Klaus Pohl), a little bit of political intrigue, and lots of wrestling with notions of what's noble and correct--or as Arendt puts it, "right and wrong, beautiful and ugly." The film engages with the ideas in a meaningful way, avoiding creating any "Ah-ha!" moments like we tend to see in biography movies about singers or artists, while also remembering to treat Arendt as a human being. Essential to her intellectual pursuits is her stable home life. Arendt had a very loving marriage with her husband, Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), the man she fled Germany with and her most ardent supporter. The turmoil over her choices cost Arendt many friends, but Blücher held strong.


 

von Trotta presents the material clearly and directly. Outside of the flashbacks, she doesn't get fancy with structure or try to liven things up by making the movie slick or flashy. Rather, she lets her steadfast actress carry the narrative. Sukowa is phenomenal in the role, embodying Arendt's courage and conviction, but also understanding that such a stance comes with nuance. A true thinker allows for doubt and anxiety, and despite the many accusations to the contrary by others in the film, Sukowa shows Arendt to also be a woman who genuinely felt things. It's this compassion that maybe allowed her to strive for a greater understanding, divorced from her own feelings. (Despite thinking Eichmann was an unremarkable individual, she felt his crimes deserved the punishment of death.)


 

This mixture makes for an engaging example of how good biopics can be with a smart guiding force and a focused narrative. Hannah Arendt bites off exactly what its writer/director can chew, digesting the material in a way that is both illuminating and a pleasure to watch.


DARK DAYS - CRITERION CHANNEL

 This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2011.

Marc Singer's documentary about homeless people living in the subway tunnels under New York City, Dark Days, was released at the turn of the new century.


 There is no hard sell or high-concept pitch for this one. Singer opens the lid on an entire community living below the streets of the Big Apple. Some of the folks went underground in the 1970s and had yet to move their lives back up top when the film crew went down into the blackness. Living in a state of perpetual night, these tunnel dwellers learn to cope with their surroundings, building homes out of scrap and finding ways to get along. Some of them are on drugs, some are clean, and none of them could have predicted they would end up here. Dark Days follows a select handful, getting a sense of their day-to-day, digging a little into their past, and in general acting as a passive observer, giving the participants a clean platform to express themselves.


 

We see a variety of activity. One of the subjects takes care of several dogs, another hustles on the streets to find trash he can sell. Another man talks about how he eventually conquered his crack addiction, while Singer shows us another lighting up. There is also Dee, the only woman the film follows for any length of time. Her shack gets burned down due to some disagreement with another addict. We never really learn why, and Singer never asks. There seems to be no whys or wherefores in Dark Days, just as after a while there is really no above or below. There are only the tunnels and the pervasive darkness. Forget ceilings or sky or even time. Living in the subway is an all-encompassing isolation. As one of the men explains it, he thought his life down there would be temporary...and that was five years ago. Basic human concerns keep them going: feed yourself, clean yourself, keep warm. And though most claim to be on their own, they all end up finding some companionship. This is a neighborhood like any other, no matter how unconventional.


  






 

Singer's choice to shoot in black-and-white only emphasizes this otherness. The world contained in the frame is contained even further by the limited light that Singer brings into the picture. Color would only remind us that this is an incomplete existence, which would fail to effectively communicate the exile. Color would point toward a ceiling, whereas black-and-white ensures that the "regular" world is forgotten. There is only the drudgery of this purgatory. One day looks like any other.


 

Change comes unexpectedly, giving Dark Days a third act where prior there might have been none. Amtrak succumbs to pressure to clean up the tunnels, and this opens the way for advocacy groups to negotiate a safe return to regular life for the homeless being displaced. Hope emerges in the darkness thanks to a government voucher program that sets up the subway's inhabitants in new apartments. The anger at this forced eviction quickly turns to elation, and Singer captures the cathartic demolition of the underground shantytown. For some of these folks, wielding the sledgehammer to knock down their make-shift walls is the first time we see them fully happy. The prisoners are destroying their own prison.


 

Even so, I can't tell if the coda of Dark Days is intentionally precarious or if it's my own cynicism coming to bear. It's hard not to wonder how well any of the individuals we've met will function in their new lives. Singer shows them in their assigned apartments--cooking, decorating, dreaming of decorating more in the future--and it struck me that in some weird way, they have only traded one enclosed space for another. It's like how addicts pick up other addictions to replace the ones they are getting over--alcoholics turning to coffee, or smokers turning to junk food. Have they emerged into the sunlight only to close themselves off? Ironically, the community has disappeared, now they are even more on their own than they were prior.


 

Luckily these concerns are answered by some of the bonus features presented on video editions of Dark Days over the years. Bac at the 10th anniversary [when this review was first written], Mark Singer went back to visit the tunnels for a new twenty-minute documentary featurette called "The Tunnel Today." It's amazing how different it all looks years later. For one, we are seeing many of the locations in color; for two, the tunnels are now open and the sun can come in. Singer finds strange remnants of the lives that were once here: fading graffiti, indications of now missing huts and train tracks, spliced wires, scorch marks from when Dee's shack burned down.


 

Singer clearly has a melancholic nostalgia for his time spent in the tunnels, living with his subjects, immersed in their experience. This is more evident in the "Life After the Tunnel" featurette, a collection of stills from the movie with Singer narrating. The documentarian has kept in touch with most of the people in the movie and tracked their journeys. For the most part, the main people featured in Dark Days have gotten on well with their lives above ground. They got clean, got jobs, and rebuilt their existences, flying in the face of conventional cynicism and the misconception that people living on the streets don't want change or help. Granted, the move wasn't 100% successful, but nothing ever is. Even so, humanity is perhaps the most resilient natural resource we have.


GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI - #1057

 

Is there a more elegant genre mash-up than Jim Jarmusch’s turn-of-the-century film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai? It’s more than just a marriage of mob and samurai movies, it’s an urban drama about a neighborhood, touching on both race and class in its depictions of Blacks and Italians. And on top of that, it embraces hip-hop, with RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan both providing a groundbreaking score and showing up in a cameo. 

 

Even with all that, it’s light as a feather. Ghost Dog has the usual laconic Jarmusch feel, despite scenes of incredibly precise action. For fans of Jean-Pierre Melville, you will see his influence all over this, from the snippets of philosophy taken from the Hagakure warrior’s code to the calculated assassinations Ghost Dog performs. Quiet, patient, and deadly. 

 

 

The origin story of Ghost Dog is a classic trope. As a young man, Ghost Dog (played with a calm forcefulness by Forest Whitaker) is rescued from a beating by gangster Louie (John Tormey). Over the next several years, Ghost Dog devoted his life to training to be a samurai assassin, shedding material things, living on a rooftop with his pigeons (shades of On the Waterfront). That is the backstory, at least, told in short, repetitious flashbacks. The here and now of it features Ghost Dog acting as Louie’s retainer, serving in the background, killing people Louie needs killed. Ghost Dog has done this twelve times perfectly, but at the start of the film, we see the thirteenth go wrong: when performing a hit on a gangster (Richard Portnow) who is sleeping with the boss’ daughter, the warrior is surprised to find the daughter (Tricia Vessey) is in the room. She was supposed to be gone. 

 

Of course, Ghost Dog does not harm the girl, but the indiscretion raises the ire of her old man (Cliff Gorman), not just because his baby girl was in harm’s way, but also because this leaves a loose end that can trace back to his having ordered a hit on a made man. Thus, Ghost Dog must be removed from the equation. 

 

Things don’t go that way, naturally. Ghost Dog is more than a match for the aging, overweight mafia killers. There is a subtle change of power at work in the New York of Jarmusch. Young Black men work the streets stealthily. Ghost Dog has compatriots everywhere. We never see them in action, but they are acknowledged. They have moved in. The Italian mob, on the other hand, could be seen as aging out: ineffective, comical, caricature. Jarmusch doesn’t lean on it, but it’s there. 

 

What’s also there is the smaller world of misfits that Ghost Dog relaxes in. His best friend is a French ice cream man (Isaach De Bankolé) who plays chess with Ghost Dog. They converse, despite having no common language--the running gag being that they often say the same things. There is also a little girl, Pearline (Camille Winbush), whom Ghost Dog trades books with. She is like a small version of him, and indeed, Ghost Dog fans have been waiting for a Pearline sequel just as much as Kill Bill fans have been clamoring for the child of Vernita Green to grow up and take revenge. 

 

See? There’s a lot going on. But it never seems like too much. Not under Jarmusch’s care. His hand is steady, his approach both easy and concise. He knows each move he needs to make, but he also isn’t afraid to breathe, to let a moment be loose. It’s a pretty impressive act, all said and done, and one could argue he’s applying all the lessons of the Hagakure to his modern Way of the Samurai, being nothing and being everything at once. 

 

Fun aside, back in 1999, I was editor in chief of Oni Press and we were asked by the studio releasing Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to do a one-off comic they could use as promotion. My business partner and publisher, Joe Nozemack, had the great idea of hiring Scott Morse (then doing our book Soulwind, currently a story man at Pixar and recently the author of Dugout: The Zombie Steals Home) to bring to life one of Ghost Dog’s perfect hits. We never interacted with Jim Jarmusch, alas, but it’s still an effort we are all very proud of. You can still find it here and there if you care to seek it out. 

 

 This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

THE ILLUSIONIST - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2010.

 

 

If there is such a thing as a match made in heaven, the animated movie The Illusionist just may be the most convincing evidence of it we'll find here on Earth. This delightful movie is the latest effort by Sylvain Chomet, the gifted director responsible for The Triplets of Belleville. For this new feature, Chomet is adapting an unproduced screenplay by master French filmmaker Jacques Tati. Tati was a comic figure in the mold of Charlie Chaplin, playing the befuddled Monsieur Hulot in a series of films he wrote and directed, including Mon Oncle and what I consider to be his masterpiece, Playtime [review].




The central character of The Illusionist is a magician who looks and acts very much like Hulot; which is to say, Chomet has modeled the stage performer Jacques Tatischeff on Tati--tall, thin, a bit of a hound-dog face. The Illusionist is as Chomet imagined the author would have made it, rejigged slightly for the cartoon format, but otherwise very much in the spirit of the tale's originator.




 

 

The Illusionist is set in the late-1950s (the movie's most concrete reference to a specific time is a newspaper with a headline about the chilly relationship between Nixon and Khrushchev, which would have been during Eisenhower's Presidency). An aging stage magician, finding himself out of work in France, hits the road in search of a new gig. In London, he is upstaged by an hilariously effete rock band before being reduced to playing an outdoor party. There, a drunken Scotsman invites him out to his village, where the magician sets up in the local pub. His act goes down a storm. His tricks have a particular effect on the poverty-stricken, teenaged barmaid Alice, who isn't aware that the objects the man makes appear out of thin air aren't actually coming out of thin air. She believes magic is real and that the conjurer can make anything he wants.




Enchanted as she is by Tatischeff, Alice follows him when he leaves for Edinburgh, and touched by her devotion, the magician takes her under his care. Her appetite for new things is too hard for him to keep up with, however, particularly in light of his profession's flagging popularity. New technology and new sounds are pushing out the old music hall routines--Alice and the magician live in an apartment building with acrobats, ventriloquists, and clowns, all of whom are having trouble keeping their acts alive. Eventually, Tatischeff has to start moonlighting doing other jobs just to make ends meet.




Describing the basic plot of The Illusionist does it little justice. Tati emulated silent comedy, and he was more interested in humorous scenarios, quiet slapstick, and elaborate scenic concoctions than he was in traditional narrative. His movies rarely had dialogue--and indeed, there are only a handful of complete sentences spoken here, and most of those are either in French or Gaelic (I believe). In the same way Chaplin resisted talkies because they restricted which borders a movie could cross, so too did Tati strive for the universal by favoring behavior over banter. Laughter knows no language, and he communicated more with a gesture than most do with whole paragraphs.




 

 

It is to Chomet's supreme victory, then, that he so perfectly conjures his own illusion: the essence of Tati. The magician is an exact replica of Hulot, and yet doesn't exist as some mere carbon copy. This isn't another soulless digital manipulation made for a cola commercial; rather, this is more like an animated séance, of bringing the legend back from beyond the grave, and by using traditional hand-drawn animation (with just a smattering of digital effects), Chomet creates a supernatural dreamscape for Tati to once again perform his pratfalls, huff his harrumphs, and fill new audiences with laughter. The Illusionist is beautifully rendered. The backgrounds teem with a warm nostalgia while the portrayals of everyone from a sad-eyed French chanteuse to a greedy booking agent meld Tati's perception of human nature with the incisive wit of caricature. Chomet also takes liberties with the animals that occupy his world, giving them their own personalities far beyond what Tati could have achieved with the real thing. (Though, I must say, I would have loved to see the flesh-and-blood actor messing around with an honest-to-goodness rabbit.)




As traditional hand-drawn animation continues to become just that, "tradition," it's hard not to greet every movie that bucks the trend as the last of a dying breed. Fittingly, Tati's screenplay already had plenty to say about changing tastes and the obsolescence of old-style entertainment. This gives The Illusionist a surprisingly bittersweet tone in its final act. As his peers drift into other things or have their souls crushed, so too does Alice find other distractions, losing her need for the old man. For Tati, who was as fascinated and amused by technology as he was concerned about its effect on society, the ending is surprisingly concrete. Perhaps this contributed to why he never made The Illusionist himself, it would have required his saying good-bye to an art form he wasn't ready to let go of. Instead, Chomet has made that farewell for him, and done so as tribute. The Illusionist is its own long-distance wave goodbye to a one-of-a-kind performer, a wonderful ode to all that could have been.