Film Review: The Visitor

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The Visitor, written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, is surprisingly enjoyable. The story is nothing especially original--it’s about a withdrawn man who learns to care about others and enjoy life again--but McCarthy doesn’t sentimentalize things, and he uses his cross-cultural spin on the material to keep the details fresh. He also gets terrific performances from his cast, particularly from Richard Jenkins, the veteran character actor in the lead.

Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a sixtyish economics professor at Connecticut College. Using a book project as a pretext, he cuts his teaching load down to one class, but he never does any writing, and he recycles his lecture notes for the one course he does teach. Walter is so disengaged that, about a month into the semester, a student has to remind him to issue a syllabus. His colleagues don’t interest him, he couldn’t care less about his students, and he has no friends. The interiors of his home in New London are so immaculately kept that it’s hard to believe anyone lives there. He is like a ghost walking through his own life.

Walter is a widower, and it becomes clear that he has never completely gotten over to his wife’s death. She was a professional concert pianist who also enjoyed a recording career, and Walter constantly plays her CDs whenever he’s at home alone. He has also resolved to learn to play the piano himself. But he has no aptitude for it, and after going through five instructors, he still struggles with such basics as keeping one’s fingers curved while playing. His inability to let go of his wife shows in other ways: he still wears his wedding band, and he has held on to the two-bedroom walk-up they owned in Manhattan.

Walter hasn’t been to New York in ages, but when a medical situation prevents a colleague from attending a conference there, he reluctantly agrees to go in her stead. After arriving, he discovers that a young couple, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), are living in his apartment--a con artist had taken advantage of his absence to rent it to the pair. Walter agrees to let them stay until they can find another place, and he becomes friends with Tarek, a charming, guileless Syrian who plays the African djembe drum in a local jazz band. Walter becomes fascinated by the instrument, and before long, he has a djembe of his own, having a high old time practicing with Tarek in the apartment and playing with other drummers in Central Park.

Richard Jenkins earned a deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination for his work here, and he gives a subtle, carefully modulated performance. His portrayal of Walter’s dourness in the film’s early sections is perfection: slumped shoulders, slightly stooped walk, and a manner of speaking that suggests an impatience to get to both the end of the sentence and the conversation. The strength of his performance is in how he uses these details as a foundation for the character--they’re his default position. He never abandons them, and the counterpoint they create with his happiness with the drums and Tarek’s friendship is obvious. They also provide an effective contrast to the concern and anger he shows after Tarek, who is in the country illegally, is arrested and turned over to immigration authorities. The most striking aspect of Jenkins’ performance is the way he uses Walter’s sullen mannerisms to suggest that they’re his way of conforming to a routinized existence. Walter intuitively knows where the line is drawn, and it gives an added edge to his most demonstrative scene, in which he rages at a detention facility’s waiting-room staff for their unhelpfulness, all while keeping the mandated distance from their desk area. Everything is within the rules, even when he loses control of himself.

Jenkins is provided with able support by Haaz Sleiman, who gives Tarek an open-faced charm that allows the viewer a more acute sense of the shift in Walter’s personality. Sleiman’s presence highlights Walter’s stuffiness, but it also brings Walter’s transition to happiness out in stark relief. He may seem too trusting and friendly towards Walter, but the extent of his naïvete is deliberate on Thomas McCarthy’s part. The difference between his attitude and Zaineb’s wariness towards Walter is so sharply etched that McCarthy clearly intends the viewer to see Tarek as something of a fool. But to McCarthy’s credit, he never invites one to look down on Tarek; he and Sleiman take one right inside the character’s feelings, whether it’s with his high spirits while performing or his frustration and terror during his incarceration.

The other two principal cast members deserve mention. It may seem that Danai Gurira isn’t given much to do as Zaineb. Most of Zaineb’s scenes show her being suspicious of Walter and impatient with Tarek, but McCarthy allows Gurira to hit some subtle effects, namely in how she seems to effortlessly convey Zaineb’s growing trust of Walter in the film’s second half. And Hiam Abbass, who plays Tarek’s mother, has extraordinary presence. Her manner is quite reserved, but it speaks loudly of the character’s pride and strength. She provides a strong complement to Jenkins’ Walter in the second half, and it’s quite satisfying to see the mother and Walter develop a rapport.

Thomas McCarthy gets wonderful work out of his ensemble, and he does a terrific job of realizing the story beyond them. One is especially taken with how enjoyably he evokes the New York milieu and its multicultural aspects. The nuances in some of the scenes are occasionally off. It's usually in ways that lead one to expect the scnes to conclude in a manner that never comes to pass, but he gets everything at the right pitch in most of the others. There are also times when his precision is almost uncanny. He doesn't overplay the visual joke of having the stuffy WASP Walter playing alongside the mostly African drummers in Central Park, and he never gives too much emphasis to certain dramatic touches, such as having as Walter look away while he presses a letter against the detention-center glass for Tarek to read. In these scenes and others, the dramatization is just right. The film is also superbly paced, and McCarthy never loses touch with the emotional core of the material.

The picture eschews a happy ending, at least in terms of the plot. Tarek’s story doesn’t end well, and Walter loses the new people in his life almost as quickly as he found them. But the film isn’t about finding happiness so much as it is about dealing with loss. The people in one’s life are never going to be a constant; the only constant can be one’s attitude towards life. To borrow the film’s key metaphor, one must always maintain the beat. The ending has Walter losing everyone important in his life once again, but this time, he’s not going to let that beat go--either figuratively or literally. He's found a triumph that rises from loss.

Film Review: The Counterfeiters

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film earlier this year, and it's not hard to understand why. The two best foreign films of 2007--the year's two best films, period--were Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Both were eliminated from contention in the foreign-film category by the Academy's arbitrary rules and convoluted nominating process. That left a weak field, and given the Academy's traditional fondness for movies about the Holocaust--it seems like one walks off with a major prize every year or so--The Counterfeiters had the inside track to the award. The film holds one's interest (although in a way one resents), but there's nothing especially artful or compelling about it. The Holocaust setting deserves something more accomplished.

The film tells the story of Operation Bernhard, a Nazi plot to destablize the British economy by flooding the country with fake currency. A team of Jewish artists, engravers, and printers was assembled at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. Kept in relative comfort, they set out to solve the assorted logistical and practical problems involved in, at first, perfectly counterfeiting the British pound, and then the American dollar. It is estimated that the phony British currency they produced amounted to four times the value of the actual money in circulation, which made the effort the largest known counterfeiting operation in history.

Ruzowitsky begins the film after the war has ended, where we see his protagonist, Saloman Sorowitsch (Karl Marcovics), at a Monte Carlo gambling resort. He's carrying a briefcase full of banded cash with him, and he uses it to check into a luxury hotel and idle his time at the casino. He is revealed as a Jewish concentration-camp survivor after a woman he picks up notices the tattooed number on his arm. He then flashes back to his life in Berlin before the war, where he used his considerable artistic talents for counterfeiting and passport forgery. After being apprehended and sent to prison, he finds himself at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he begins working with the other prisoners to successfully forge the pound and the dollar.

The film is never compelling on more than a melodramatic level. Ruzowitsky's sole means of generating narrative interest is by keeping one in dread of what may happen next. One is given the obligatory scenes demonstrating the guards' capacity for arbitrarily abusing and murdering the prisoners. Ruzowitsky also keeps one aware that once the prisoners succeed in counterfeiting the currency, they will have outlived their usefulness to the Nazis. They will be either be killed or returned to the general camp population, which could also mean their deaths. The difference between the camp commandant, who treats the Bernhard prisoners relatively humanely, and his second-in-command, a murdering sadist, is also exploited--one sits uneasily waiting for when the brute inevitably takes over the camp. And there's the prisoner who has tuberculosis--when will the guards discover his condition and kill him?--as well as the prisoner who becomes suicidal after he discovers his family was murdered at Auschwitz. The film prepares the viewer for one awful development after another, and the only questions are when they will take center stage.

Ruzowitsky does develop a narrative strand with possibilities for dramatic conflict. One of the prisoners, Burger (August Diehl), was an anti-Nazi agitator before being sent to the camps. He is sabotaging the efforts to counterfeit the dollar. He's an idealist with absolutist moral views, and Ruzowitsky presents him as a counterpoint to the pragmatic Sorowitsch, who feels little compunction in collaborating with the Nazis, as it means he will live another day, and it can create opportunities to help the other prisoners when they're in need. Burger's attitude, if left unchecked, could get them all killed. The film raises the question of whose behavior is the more truly moral, but it answers it too easily in Sorowitsch's favor. There's little sense of a potent right-against-right conflict between the two characters, and Ruzowitsky can't resist treating it in melodramatic terms: Will the Nazis become so frustrated with the failures that they kill all the prisoners, or will the prisoners relent and turn Burger in? It becomes just another opportunity to fill the audience with dread.

The conflict between Sorowitsch and Burger is also hampered by the film's inability to create any rapport between the audience and the two: one is always left on the outside looking in. Ruzowitsky clearly intends for Soroswitsch to be sympathetic--he's always shown helping the other prisoners, and he refuses on principle to snitch about Burger's sabotage--but the film never allows one to identify with him. Part of the problem is in the writing, but some of it lies with Karl Marcovics' performance--he's just too stoic to make one feel Sorowitsch's conflicts. One understands them intellectually, but the emotional resonance just isn't there. August Diehl is somewhat better--he effortlessly conveys Burger's fervor--but the script doesn't develop the character enough for him to give Burger any dimension beyond the first view of him.

The film is ultimately affectless, and Ruzowitsky's screenplay and direction never rise above mediocrity. One understands the Holocaust's appeal to filmmakers--it allows for a tense, thriller-like atmosphere, and the circumstances allow for moral questions that can occasionally be profound. But it also allows for a film to have an inflated aura of importance that the filmmaker doesn't justify. The appeal of The Counterfeiters is middlebrow, and rather disgracefully so. The Holocaust was a great human tragedy, and it should be treated with the utmost respect. It certainly shouldn't be grist for the mill of unimaginative filmmakers in their quest to win awards and impress people.

Film Review: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a superb film. It won the Palme d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, but its low profile in the U. S. isn't surprising. It tells the story of two young women in Ceaucescu's Romania, and their experience with securing an illegal abortion after one becomes pregnant. The film sounds like a dreary, grungy piece of social realism, and coming from Europe, it's probably going to be slackly paced. In short, it's most likely a film that one couldn't pay U. S. audiences to see. The film is definitely a grungy piece of social realism, but it's redeemed by the dynamism of Mungiu's approach. It is captivating from beginning to end.

The film takes place over the course of a day in 1987. The two protagonists, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), are roommates in a university residence hall in Bucharest. Gabita is pregnant, and due to the Ceaucescu regime's strictly enforced pregnancy laws, she has arranged to get an illegal abortion. As the film opens, we see Otilia's preparations with helping Gabita--buying cigarettes and soap, borrowing the last of the needed money from her boyfriend, and haggling with hotel clerks to secure a room.

It's during Otilia's scenes with the hotel clerks that the differences between her and Gabita come into focus. When we first meet Gabita, she seems oddly dissociated from the fact that she's about to get an abortion. Otilia seems more engaged with the situation--she's running around doing errand after errand to get ready, and all one sees Gabita do is wax her legs. Gabita was supposed to make a reservation at a particular hotel, but Otilia has to haggle making arrangements at another once it becomes clear that Gabita never bothered. Gabita also sends Otilia to bring the abortionist, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), to the hotel in her stead. It's in clear defiance of his insistence that Gabita meet him. He's facing a substantial prison term if he's discovered performing an abortion by the authorities, and he's absolutely exasperated by the failure to follow his instructions. It doesn't end there; Gabita's flightiness has resulted in their being in a hotel other than one he approved (i.e. one that won't demand ID from him at the desk). She has also lied about how far along the pregnancy is, which could result in a more severe prison term if he's caught. She doesn't even remember to bring a plastic sheet for the bed. The story goess from this crisis point to Otilia's troubled relationship with her boyfriend. It concludes with the tense efforts to dispose of the aborted fetus.

Otilia is clearly a far more grounded personality than Gabita, and Anamaria Marinca's excellent performance captures both her determination and personal conflicts. She's caught between her friendship with Gabita and her disdain for Gabita's irresponsibility, and one can sense her sympathy with Mr. Bebe's aggravation when she tries to mediate things in Gabita's favor. The circumstances lead Otilia to literally prostitute herself to help her friend, and Marinca makes her anger and disgust quietly palpable. Marinca also conveys the tensions between Otilia and her boyfriend after Gabita's abortion sours things between them. Marinca's technical control is on stunning display in a dinner scene with the boyfriend and his family. Mungiu holds an extended shot of everyone at the table, with Marinca's face the focus of the composition. For several minutes, one watches her expression shift between boredom, impatience, and annoyance with the boyfriend's snobbish, self-absorbed family, who talk about her as if she isn't even there. Marinca never breaks character, and she keeps the shifts expressive and fluid; it's a bravura display of discipline and skill.

Mungiu's direction maximizes the impact of Marinca's performance in this scene, and the approach he takes is characteristic of his work throughout. He designs every scene in terms of counterpoints. In the dinner scene, he uses the staging and framing to play Otilia's stillness and silence off the dinner-table bustle and prattle of the boyfriend's family; the contrast brings her facial expressions out in stark relief. In the hotel-room confrontation with Mr. Bebe, he builds a powerful dynamic between the women's anxiety and Bebe's logical, dispassionate response to everything. The scene is also an extraordinary showcase for Vlad Ivanov. He paces his delivery of Bebe's lines terrifically well; he manages to sound mechanical and unaffected simultaneously. When Bebe finally loses his temper, the eruption of anger is like a slap in the face. But Mungiu's skills go beyond the dynamism of his staging and his capacity to showcase actors to their best effect. He also demonstrates a superb eye for verisimilitude: the setting is perfectly evoked, and the characters seem entirely of a piece with it.

Ultimately, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days manages to transcend the homeliness of its subject matter by being a terrific piece of suspense filmmaking. But it does not rely on the dread of melodramatic suspense; it uses the suspense of compelling dramatic conflicts. The haggling with the hotel clerks, the confrontation with Mr. Bebe, the experience at the family dinner--all are developed in terms of conflict, rising tension, and resolution. They are stunningly brought off. Cristian Mungiu's skill is such that one wonders what he couldn't tell an interesting story about. Here's hoping that Mungiu can find a path to success with U. S. audiences. They don't know what they're missing.

Film Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is about hero worship, and it depicts Ford (played by Casey Affleck) as the archetypical fanboy. He romanticizes Jesse James (Brad Pitt), collecting and obsessing over dime novels that feature the famed outlaw. It becomes clear that while growing up, these fantasies were the only real company he had. Relating to other people is largely beyond him; he can't deal with anyone without fidgets and fibs. He's profoundly aware of his inadequacy; his only security comes from the aura he sees around Jesse James, and one can tell he hopes one day to be the source of such an aura himself. With the help of his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), who's a member of the James Gang, Ford joins up with his idol. Jesse finds the tongue-tied young sycophant alternately amusing and annoying. At one point, he asks, "Do you want to become like me, or do you want to be me?"

Ford's relationship with Jesse, which went from idolatry to a disillusionment that led Ford to murder him, might make for an interesting film. But Dominik, working from a well-regarded novel by Ron Hansen, doesn't provide it. The film is a shapeless meander, and at two hours and forty minutes, it is tediously long. The first half, which depicts the collapse of the James Gang until only Jesse, Ford, and Charley are left, is a near-incomprehensible mess. The scenes don't build into each other, and many of the characters are so poorly differentiated it's hard to tell them apart. The second half, which deals with Ford's betrayal and eventual murder of Jesse at the behest of the Missouri governor (James Carville), is much clearer, but Dominik doesn't give it any dramatic momentum. The only thing driving the movie is the anticipatory dread one gets from the knowledge that Ford will inevitably gun Jesse down.

One wonders if Dominik even thinks he's telling a story. His approach to the material appears modeled after Terrence Malick's work. The film's interest in narrative seems less about dramatization than in using it as a taking-off point for poetic visuals. Malick can get so caught up in his imagery that he loses sight of the story he's telling, but his tropes are generally quite inventive. With Dominik, it's one hackneyed image after another: repeated shots of clouds rolling by in fast-motion, and wind blowing through wheat fields. Dominik is also repetitive and unimaginative when it comes to setting up scenes. I lost count of how many times he opens one with figures in long shot against a landscape, with the camera pulling back until we see that we're looking at them through a window, and then it keeps pulling back until we see that they're being watched by another character. He doesn't even make competent use of voiceover narration; it often just redundantly describes what the film is showing. Cinematographer Roger Deakins and the set and costume designers give the film an austerely elegant look, but the scenes are so poorly conceived and staged that it seems like dressing a chimp in Armani.

That said, the austere compositions work to create some dynamism with Casey Affleck's performance as Ford. The refined look of the images creates a strong counterpoint with Ford's squirrelly awkwardness, and it emphasizes how out of place he is and how uncomfortable he is inside his own skin. Affleck's performance also finds an effective contrast with the steely-eyed wariness Sam Shepard gives Frank James in an early scene. But I don't feel Affleck's performance, while strong, deserves all the plaudits it's received; it feels too deliberate and mannered.

Brad Pitt convinces one of Jesse James' charisma, but he can't pull the disparate strands of the character together. His Jesse becomes increasingly unravelled over the course of the film, with growing fears of betrayal from every corner. He has no idea who he can trust. But one can't reconcile the paranoid displays and emotional outbursts with Pitt's larger characterization; they seem to come out of nowhere, and one watches them with a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. James Carville has a strong presence as the Missouri governor who wants Jesse James killed, and Alison Elliott gives some snap to her line readings as Ford's sister Martha, but the other performers don't make much of an impression.

Ultimately, Andrew Dominik seems undone by hero worship of his own. He seems so enthralled with the idea of recreating Terrence Malick's tone that he gave little attention to understanding how Malick's effects are achieved. He's oblivious to his inability to work effectively in that mode, and he didn't develop the story or the characters enough to catch him if he failed. At the beginning of the film, Ford says, "I got qualities that don't come shinin' through right at the outset." One can almost hear Dominik saying this in his own defense, but what Dominik seems to think are his qualities don't come shining through at all.

Film Review: American Gangster

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Ridley Scott's American Gangster opens with a horrifically brutal prologue. One sees a man tied to a chair, beaten bloody, and having gasoline poured on him. The film's protagonist, played by Denzel Washington, looks on and lights a cigar, throwing the lighter onto the man and immolating him. He then unloads an automatic handgun into the burning body. The character's appearance seems discordant with his actions: he's well-groomed and wearing an elegantly tailored suit. One waits and waits to see how this shocking opening fits in with the rest of the film, but one never finds out. It perversely sets the stage for the film in this: American Gangster is one dramatic set-up after another with no follow-through.


The film is based on the true story of Frank Lucas (Washington), a Harlem crime boss who in the 1970s became the biggest importer and distributor of heroin in the U. S. The narrative follows the arc of his rise to power and fall, interweaving it with the story of Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), an incorruptible New Jersey police detective and eventual district attorney who headed the investigation that brought him down. Along the way, the film contrasts the orderliness of Lucas's life with the messiness of Roberts's, and one sees both men's frustrations in dealing with the corrupt narcotics investigation unit of the New York City police department. The film ends with Lucas and Roberts as allies, with Lucas helping to bring down the corrupt elements of the NYPD in exchange for a lighter prison sentence.

Ridley Scott does a superficially professional job of directing: the action is clearly and often lavishly staged, and there's his trademark attention to detail in the cinematography and production design. But the film's scenes don't seem shaped to get anywhere. The problem may be partly in Steven Zaillian's script: the story's events progress logically, but they never build any narrative intensity. Every time the movie seems to be setting up any kind of dramatic turn--a conflict between characters, a suspenseful twist--it gets dropped almost immediately. There's an attempted hit on Lucas's beauty-queen wife, but nothing comes of it. Lucas brutally beats his brother Huey (Chiwetel Ejiofor) after Huey's carelessness leads to a shakedown by the police, and nothing comes of that either. Roberts coerces an underling in Lucas's organization into wearing a wire, and Scott and Zaillian don't even bother to create any suspense over whether the fellow might get found out.

The biggest wasted opportunity comes with Lucas's confrontation with Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) over Barnes' diluting Lucas's product before putting it out on the street. The film sets up a striking contrast between the dignified Lucas and the obnoxious Barnes, who's portrayed as a petulant, drug-addled buffoon. The scene ends inconclusively, and one expects Lucas to have Barnes killed. Audiences would have relished seeing him go down, in no small part because Gooding quickly reminds one of why he's the single most annoying actor working. But again, nothing comes of it. One can argue that it wouldn't be factually accurate, but given the romanticized portrait of Lucas and the fabrications about Roberts' life--he and his first wife didn't have a child together, so there's no basis for the custody fight the film shows them engaged in--would changing the facts in this instance really have mattered? Scott, Zaillian, and Gooding take serious liberties with their portrayal of Barnes, anyway. I don't think anyone would guess from what's shown here that the character's real-life counterpart was the inspiration for the Wesley Snipes character in New Jack City, or that he was such a smugly insolent media magnet that Jimmy Carter made it a priority for the Justice Department to bring him down.

There isn't one memorable performance in the film. Denzel Washington fares best, partly because of his natural charisma, and partly because his reserve contrasts strongly with the other performers. He's a nobleman among the riff-raff. But there's no shading in the performance, and no dynamic driving it. The only interesting effect he manages is Lucas's tendency to threaten people with such understatement that it come across as a joke. One laughs, but one feels dread as well, as he's so earnest that it's obvious he isn't kidding. Russell Crowe does a creditable job, and there's not a false note anywhere in his portrayal, but there's no dynamism either. Scott has assembled some terrific performers for the supporting cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carla Gugino, and Ted Levine, but it's easy to forget they're even in the film. (The waste of Ejiofor, one of the most interesting actors to emerge in the last few years, is all but criminal.) Ruby Dee earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance as Lucas's mother, but it's obviously a career acknowledgement. The only scene where she makes any kind of impression--when she sharply warns Lucas to be prudent in seeking revenge against his enemies--isn't anything one hasn't seen a hundred times before, and there isn't anything particularly distinctive about it here.

The film reminds one a great deal of Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat. The structure is largely the same: the lives of an ace police detective and an elegant master criminal are depicted as contrasting parallels, and the lines of their narratives build independently until they ultimately intersect in the the film's climax. But Heat gives one what American Gangster doesn't: suspense, dynamic characters, and a story that seems developed instead of summarized. American Gangster is a handsomely realized production, but its good looks are only skin-deep.

Film Review: Atonement

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Note: My review of Ian McEwan's original novel can be read here.

A few weeks back, in my review (click here) of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, I highlighted the observation that artists seem to fall in two categories: dramatists and illustrators. Dramatists put their skills entirely at the service of the material. Illustrators, on the other hand, use the material as a stage to flaunt their technical ability. Joe Wright, the director of Atonement, seems to fall in between the two camps. Like the novel, the film is divided into four sections: a fateful day at an English estate in 1935; the horrific retreat of the British military at Dunkirk in 1940; an episode in London before, during, and after the events at Dunkirk; and an epilogue set in the present day. Wright and his scenarist, Christopher Hampton, do a fine job of reimagining the latter two sections for the screen. They even manage the trick of fixing the novel's awful ending while remaining true to it. But their treatment of the first two episodes are the product of an illustrator mentality: lavishly presented, technically astonishing at points, but dramatically inert.

To be fair, I don't think any filmmaker could have successfully adapted the 1935 section, which takes up the first half of the novel, and stayed true to McEwan. It tells of the young lovers Cecilia and Robbie (Keira Knightley and James McAvoy), and how their romance was horribly thwarted by the resentful, jealous actions of Cecilia's thirteen-year-old sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan). McEwan's rendering of this episode is distinctly modernist. The narrative is presented through the shifting points of view of the three main characters, and the different perspectives are carefully developed and orchestrated to build the events to a climax. But a film has almost no choice but to present the narrative in objective terms, and neither it nor the characters are particularly interesting when seen from the outside. Wright and Hampton are faithful to a fault, so the plotting and the characters seem thin. James McAvoy has given audiences fine, layered characterizations in such films as Becoming Jane and The Last King of Scotland, but the film's Robbie offers him nothing to work with. He's a handsome, amiable blank. Keira Knightley makes a stronger impression, but once one observes that Cecilia is headstrong and beautiful, that's it. These lovers are a dull pair, and the opening section often leaves one stuck admiring the production design and the scenery.

The only dramatic interest in the first part comes from Saoirse Ronan's performance as Briony. Straight-backed, her face as tight as a drum, Ronan marches through the family manor with such determination--and so little wasted movement--that when she comes to a closed door, one doesn't know if she's going to open it or knock it down. Ronan successfully renders the single-minded, hyper-controlled manner of this lonely, alienated thirteen-year-old, and it gives her the foundation for an extremely strong characterization. One can always feel what her Briony is thinking, because it always comes across as a crack in her prim façade. This is true whether it's Briony's annoyance with another girl's efforts to one-up her, or her curiosity and shock when she walks in on Cecilia and Robbie having sex. The tenacity of her machinations against Robbie, which end with him unjustly being sent to prison, is completely convincing, and it creates the first half's only suspense. One watches with dread wondering if she'll actually succeed.

The Dunkirk section, which features Robbie five years down the road as a British soldier, follows his efforts to join the troop evacuation. It is the weakest part of the film. It's dramatically shapeless, and the events from the novel that could give it some urgency have been largely truncated. Wright has received a great deal of acclaim for an extended Steadicam tracking shot that travels among the groups of soldiers at the Dunkirk beach, but the reason it's so conspicuous is that there's nothing else of interest going on. Brian De Palma, who's the master of this kind of setpiece, always puts the audience inside the characters' heads. In the magnificent Grand Central Station scene in his Carlito's Way, one is completely caught up in Carlito's predicament, and the sudden-death approach to staging and shooting only adds to the urgency. Wright's setpiece is a marvel of logistical planning and execution, and it may be the most elaborate shot of this sort ever attempted, but it's a textbook example of a movie director thinking like an illustrator. Wright gets so caught up in the camera choreography that he forgets he's dramatizing a story.

He finally gains his footing in the London section. It's loaded with incident, and told through the eyes of a single character, so Wright and Hampton aren't trapped by their inability to approximate modernist prose effects. It also has a strong narrative line: the 18-year-old Briony (played by Romola Garai), learns humility and caring through her experiences as a London nurse. This leads her to seek reconciliation with Cecilia and Robbie, who've since been reunited, and to atone for what she's done. The film takes one fully inside Briony's guilt over her actions. The scenes of the hospital overwhelmed by the Dunkirk wounded, as well as the confrontation with Cecilia and Robbie, have all the intensity one could ask for.

Wright and Hampton's assurance extends to the epilogue, and they tweak McEwan's wretched closing revelation just enough to make it work. In the novel, McEwan reveals that the preceding narratives are the elderly Briony's fictional reimaginings of the events in 1935 and 1940. The "real" Cecilia and Robbie never had the happy ending of sorts that's shown. McEwan is obnoxiously offhand about this, and the revelation of Cecilia and Robbie's actual fate is confined to a single sentence. Wright, Hampton, and the film's producers must have realized that if they'd stayed true to this, they were risking riots in the theaters. They give us the ending McEwan should have. Cecilia and Robbie are treated with dignity, and their plights are recreated for the audience in flashback. The film also ends on a sweet, romantic note that McEwan may have felt himself too sophisticated to provide: we see Cecilia and Robbie frolicking on the Sussex beach, happy in the elderly Briony's fantasy of what might and should have been.

The modifications made to the ending point to what might and should have been for the movie as well. Wright and Hampton should have realized that attempting to recreate the novel's opening sections and remaining true to McEwan's treatment was folly; they needed to reimagine it in their own terms. Once McEwan's masterful prose rendering is removed, there isn't enough left to merit interest. When one sees that flashy Dunkirk setpiece, one wonders if Wright was so overtaken by creative boredom that he kept himself occupied by creating logistical challenges for himself. His imagination comes to life in a more laudable way when he takes it upon himself to solve the dramatic problems McEwan created with the novel's ending. One wishes he'd approached the entire film in the same manner. As it is, Atonement is an erratic piece of work, though a good complement to the book it's taken from. Its failures only make the novel's successes shine brighter, and it succeeds most where the novel lets one down.

Film Review: Away from Her

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Away from Her, writer-director Sarah Polley's adaptation of the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," is a remarkable debut feature. It's a film that, unseen, one approaches with trepidation. The original story (featured in Munro's 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) is constructed around the experiences of an elderly man whose wife has developed Alzheimer's. But Munro isn't especially interested in the material's dramatic possibilities; she uses it to create a meditation on how, regardless of our idealistic notions of love, romantic relationships are always rooted in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. It's a contemplative, extremely literary piece, and Munro's effects are far too abstract for a filmmaker to even consider trying to translate successfully. In order for the story material to work onscreen, the filmmaker would have to focus on its melodramatic aspects, and the potential for an adaptation to degenerate into a disease-of-the-week movie is enormous. But Polley is canny enough to transcend the material's pitfalls. She keeps the histrionics to a minimum, and the extraordinary sophistication she shows as a scenarist and filmmaker allow her to pull the film off.

The story's two main characters are Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona (Julie Christie), a retired couple living in a lakefront house in the Canadian countryside. As the film begins, we see Fiona begin to show the early stages of Alzheimer's. It gradually gets worse and worse. She goes from putting a skillet in the freezer to walking aimlessly through the nearby town, initially unable to recognize Grant after he comes looking for her. For her safety, they decide to admit her to a local upscale nursing home, but there's one catch: once she's admitted, Grant will not be allowed to visit her for 30 days. He grudgingly accepts, but once his month-long banishment ends, he returns to the home to find that Fiona no longer remembers him. Further, she has developed a close relationship with a mute, wheelchair-bound man named Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Grant's dedication to her turns him into an unhappy daily observer of the new relationship. After Aubrey's wife (Olympia Dukakis) decides to take her husband back home, Grant is faced with a horrible dilemma: either reintroduce Aubrey into Fiona's life, or watch her mourning for their relationship destroy her mind completely.

Sarah Polley is best known as an actress. Her most notable role is probably the teenage bus-accident survivor in Atom Egoyan's adaptation of Russell Banks' The Sweet Hereafter. Egoyan is listed as an executive producer of Away from Her, and Polley appears to have been following his artistic lead in making the film. The style is remarkably similar to that of The Sweet Hereafter: the flashback structure, the carefully composed photography, and the even, deliberate pacing. She and cinematographer Luc Montpellier have put together a great-looking movie. The imagery has a remarkable graphic fluency, and it's never static or emptily pictorial. Everything in the movie is carefully thought out in terms of effect. She even brings off such Munro flourishes as the skunk lilies metaphor and the recurring motif of the street sign for a conservatory. That said, one never sees Polley coasting on Munro's work. She gives the story a structure that's distinct from the prose version, and she considerably fleshes out the narrative with material of her own. Everything, though, manages to feel all of a piece.

Gordon Pinsent carries the emotional weight of the movie, and he brings it off with aplomb. His Grant has a quality one sees in more than a few older men: a devil-may-care attitude that suggests there's a little boy in him that's never grown up. Pinsent has his best moment when he smartmouths a teenage girl visiting the home when she mistakes him for one of the residents. Grant used to be a college professor, and Pinsent makes one immediately see that he'd be popular with his students; he can both identify and parry with them. But Pinsent also makes one feel the depth of Grant's love and commitment to Fiona, including both his concern and his determination to do what's right by her. He is the focus of every one of the film's scenes, and his presence is never anything but welcome. Pinsent captures the contradictions in the role and delivers a beautifully realized characterization.

Julie Christie's widely fêted performance earns its plaudits. No actress has ever aged as beautifully as Christie has onscreen, and it may be that her visible age is what makes her look so extraordinary--there's a poignance in seeing those remarkable features and watching the youth slip away. That quality makes her a perfect choice to play Fiona, and she builds the performance from her other natural attributes. The key element in her characterization is her poise. There's an elegance to Fiona at all times, and Christie uses it to heighten the discords of the character's panic and fear when she realizes she's in a situation where her memory brutally fails her. When Fiona is asked what she sees in Aubrey, she replies, "He doesn't confuse me." Christie makes you feel both Fiona's sense of comfort and the terror that feeds it. Her emotional shifts are remarkably delicate and fluid as well. No word in the critical lexicon is more abused than "lyrical," and I do what I can to avoid it, but no other word better captures the grace and heartbreaking beauty of Julie Christie's performance.

The film has flaws. Grant's musings on past extramarital affairs are a key part of Munro's original story, but they're the hardest part of the story to do justice to. Spelling the circumstances out to the degree Munro does would just bog the film down. Polley apparently recognized the problem, and she jettisons the details--references to the infidelities are generally quite oblique. But she also appears to recognize the thematic importance of the affairs, so she tries to compensate with new material that makes clumsy reference to them. Christie makes a confrontational scene on the way to the nursing home work, but I don't think anything could have saved the ugly scene where the home's head nurse jumps to conclusions about Grant and tells him off. Munro implies that Grant begins an affair with another woman after Fiona moves to the nursing home, but Polley makes it explicit, and unlike Munro, she can't make the relationship make sense. In the original story, Munro makes it clear that there's a commonality of background that attracts Grant to the woman. He sees himself having married someone like her if his life had taken a different direction when he was younger. But in the film the two initially have nothing but antipathy for each other, and beyond a pathetic mutual neediness, there's nothing that brings them together. There are also some grotesque bits involving the other nursing home residents in the latter sections of the film. The worst involves a former sports announcer who walks down a corridor giving a play-by-play on another character's emotional distress.

But these complaints are quibbles. Sarah Polley is a remarkable filmmaking talent. The picture has been made with an extraordinary precision, but every emotion on the screen seems freshly felt. She does a wonderful job of orchestrating the story material, the actors, and her visual treatment. She makes the story her own, and the film is a superb complement to the work that inspired it.

Film Review: Becoming Jane

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Becoming Jane, a fanciful treatment of the life of the young Jane Austen, is an entertaining little movie. It's not on the level of Shakespeare in Love, whose lead it is obviously following. It doesn't have that film's sophistication, to say nothing of its wit. But Becoming Jane is solidly written and handsomely produced, and the director, Julian Jarrold, keeps it moving at a brisk pace. It's a kitsch treatment of Austen and her work, but it's extremely well-made, and it certainly holds one's attention.

The idea behind the film was to interpret Austen's life in the terms of one of her magnificent romantic-comedy novels. We don't know much about Austen's life, and even less about its romantic side--she never married--but her letters contain references to a flirtation when she was 20 with the young Thomas Langlois Lefroy, a future Parliament member and judge. She completed her early drafts of Pride and Prejudice a couple of years afterward, so the screenwriters, Kevin Hood and Sarah Johnson, concoct an Austen-style relationship between her and Lefroy. Hood and Johnson couldn't end the story in the manner of Austen's novels--Austen and Lefroy went their separate ways before marrying--so they substitute Austen's embarking on her career. Along the way, we see the young lovers whose attraction to each other increases the more they push the other away, the complications to their relationship caused by family obligations, and observations into the social mores of late-18th century England. The film's only serious misstep is its epilogue, which tramples all over the known facts of Austen's life in the service of a hackneyed, sentimental ending.

Austen is played by Anne Hathaway, who's a surprising choice for the role, and not just because she's American. The film's Austen is arrogant and rude a fair amount of the time, and Hathaway's specialty in her other roles has been to smile, be charming, and otherwise ingratiate herself with the audience. When she's been called on to do something other than that, as she was in her later scenes in Brokeback Mountain, the energy drains out of her, and she becomes a cipher on the screen. It's clear Hathaway isn't up to some of the technical challenges of playing the film's Austen. The accent she affects doesn't match any of the other actors (not even fellow American James Cromwell, who plays Austen's father), and she has trouble with several of her line readings. The screenwriters chose to have Austen talk in the manner of her prose, and Hathaway turns the long, clause-heavy sentences into tongue-twisters. She has trouble pacing her delivery of the more complicated lines, and on the occasions when she pulls it off comfortably, she can't muster any conviction behind the words. Either way, the lines just hang in the air, stilted and unnatural.

Hathaway has a great camera face, and she uses it far more expressively than she has in her earlier roles. The contrast of the ebony hair and eyes with the alabaster skin draws one's attention right away. In her previous work, Hathaway has relied on the easy rapport her features grant her with audiences in order to charm them. It's often made her an enjoyable presence in films, but it's also made her come across like a piece of fluff--she seems to avoid any opportunity for dynamism in her characterizations. But in Becoming Jane, one never catches her falling back on her charm. She maintains some emotional distance from the audience, and the tension it creates is striking. Hathaway's line readings may falter, but her facial expressions leave no doubt about Jane's feelings, and her timing with regard to them never goes slack. It's her most compelling performance to date.

Hathaway's Jane rarely seems relaxed, and the contrast with James McAvoy's easy presence as Lefroy results in a terrific chemistry between the two. The film's Lefroy is a happy-go-lucky rake when we first meet him, and McAvoy does a seemingly effortless job of embodying the character. One can immediately feel the joy Lefroy takes in his antics, and the further joy he takes in taunting Jane with them. As the film progresses, McAvoy's shifts from flirtatiousness to love to romantic loss are remarkably fluid; he takes what at first seems like a stock bad-boy role, and he provides the emotional depth to make the different sides of the character wholly believable as they're revealed.

One wishes Julian Jarrold had been able to bring out the other performances to better effect. Apart from Hathaway and McAvoy, the only actor to make a strong impression is the late Ian Richardson, who plays Judge Langlois, Lefroy's uncle and benefactor. Jarrold has gathered some first-rate performers, including James Cromwell, Julie Walters, and Maggie Smith, but he doesn't give them much of anything to do.

The screenplay has some problems as well. Jane's resentment over the status of women in her society is too modern and blunt to be believable. One can sense these frustrations in Elizabeth Bennet and the other women characters in Austen's novels, but it's usually more subtle and far less overtly angry. There's also a lack of sensitivity to the mores of the period. Jarrold and his writers apparently wanted to portray Jane as a New-Woman Gibson Girl a century before their time: she's strong-willed, independent-minded, and she's even good at men's sports. However, no woman of Jane's class would ever behave as insolently as Jane does towards Judge Langlois in a dinner scene with him, Lefroy, and others. She would certainly know better than to act like that when she was seeking the judge's favor. And as noted above, the epilogue is poorly conceived, and some key plot points aren't properly developed: a background character proposes to Jane late in the film. It's revealed that he's taken drastic action to disrupt her relationship with Lefroy, but there's been no indication that he's had any interest in Jane up to that point. One also wishes the writers had been able to include something of the wonderful sense of irony that drives Austen's novels.

But these shortcomings are trifling. The central story of Jane's relationship with Lefroy always stays on track. Quite remarkably, Jarrold includes many aspects of late 18th-century life that are extraneous to one degree or another, but he never loses the story's momentum. He also knows how to emphasize the picturesque elegance of Eigil Bryld's cinematography without getting bogged down in the imagery. The work of the technical crew, from the production design to the costumes to the editing, is first-rate. Becoming Jane isn't a great film, but it has its pleasures, and one won't feel the two-hour running time has been wasted. Sometimes, that's all a film needs to be.

Film Review: La Vie en rose (La Môme)

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Olivier Dahan's film about the life of singer Édith Piaf, La Vie en rose (titled La Môme in France) feels less like a European film than any picture from France I've seen. Continental filmmakers--even action directors like Luc Besson--tend to favor a deliberate, contemplative approach to pacing that's completely at odds with Hollywood style. (It's why most American audiences find European films almost impossible to sit through.) But Dahan always keeps things hopping. He uses just about every trick he can think of to keep the film's scenes active and lively. La Vie en rose is never dull. But Dahan's approach also points up what makes his take on Piaf's life so unsatisfying. He doesn't reflect on the deeper implications of what he shows us, and he ends up with a shallow, limited portrait of his subject.

Piaf's life certainly wasn't the stuff of dullness. She lived as a street waif, spent part of her childhood growing up in her grandmother's brothel, and nearly went blind from keratitis while living there. (She credited the restoration of her sight to a pilgrimage her grandmother's prostitutes took her on to the shrine of St. Thérèse in Lisieux.) She began earning money as a street musician at 14, had a baby at 17 that died in infancy, and spent her teens around the assorted thugs, derelicts, and prostitutes who populated the Montmartre section of Paris. At 19, she came to the attention of nightclub owner Louis Leplée, who hired her to sing in his cabaret. After Leplée was murdered, she became involved with the manager who turned her into a star. After World War II, she became internationally famous, had a notorious affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan, married twice, suffered through alcoholism and morphine addiction, and died of liver cancer at the age of 44. One could make a score of movies from the facts of her life.

The amount of material may be what ultimately defeats Dahan. Thinking back on the film, it's hard to remember any character in it besides Piaf (played by Marion Cotillard from the age of 19 on). Even Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) and Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins) don't make much of an impression. Major aspects of Piaf's life are completely ignored, such as her experiences during the Occupation. (Watching the film, one would never know World War II had happened.) There's also nothing about her acting career, or her mentoring of the actors Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour. Dahan treats things like the death of Piaf's baby as an afterthought, and he gives a bizarre emphasis to extraneous bits, such as a prostitute being injured by a customer playing amateur gynecologist. The story has no structure, a failure made all the more glaring by the opportunities in the material. Piaf's early life had a remarkable number of parallels with her mother's; why not use them to give some thematic order to the story? Dahan appears to see the possibilities in using Piaf's prayers as a unifying trope, but he drops the idea almost as soon as he introduces it. The only approach to ordering the material that he adheres to is to not let Piaf's physical decline and death turn the latter section of the film into one long diminuendo. He takes the easy way out: he uses short scenes of the dying Piaf throughout to treat the bulk of the material as flashbacks. But he doesn't bother to hide the cheesy obviousness of that idea; the flashbacks have no relevance to the scenes in Piaf's future that prompt them. Dahan just doesn't think like a writer.

He does think like a director, though. The film is full of superbly realized set pieces. I was most impressed with his handling of the scene where Piaf learns of Cerdan's death. He begins by showing Piaf dreaming of Cerdan arriving in her hotel suite, and then, awake, driving herself crazy because she can't find a gift she wants to give him. Her entourage gathers and informs her that Cerdan has been killed, and, devastated with grief, she flings open a pair of doors to find herself onstage. Using a Steadicam, Dahan films this all in a single take. One can almost imagine Brian De Palma and Alfonso Cuarón, the masters of single-take Steadicam scenes, jumping to their feet in applause. And there are many other examples of filmmaking savvy, such as the scene of Piaf's triumphant music-hall debut: we see the audience slowly go from skeptical to ecstatic despite Dahan's keeping Piaf's singing off the soundtrack. Visually, the film is extraordinarily well-realized. The music halls, Depression-era Montmartre, late-1940s Manhattan--Dahan and his art directors and designers keep them dreamy and realistic all at the same time. The attention to detail is extraordinary.

That extends to the performance of the film's star. Marion Cotillard does a masterful job of mimicking Piaf's surface mannerisms and, with the help of some ace make-up artists, her physical appearance. It's the kind of performance that in Hollywood films has Oscar written all over it, and earlier this year, Cotillard became the first French actor to win the prize for work in a French-language film. But it's not the sort of thing I'm impressed by. Cotillard's Piaf comes off like a nightmarish cross between Giulietta Masina and Liza Minnelli. She's waifish, but invariably loud, insufferably high-strung, and almost monstrously temperamental. The performance is also too one-note in most scenes. It's hard to reconcile the overbearing Piaf with the calm, almost blissful one we see in her moments with Cerdan, or in a beachfront interview with a French journalist. One doesn't object to these scenes; they're the only ones in which I enjoyed Cotillard's performance, but the failure to address the incongruity is troubling. It's not a well-rounded portrayal.

La Vie en rose makes one wonder if it's a sign of increased homogeneity in Western filmmaking. The French director approaches his work like a Hollywood one (an ambitious, imaginative one, but a Hollywood filmmaker nonetheless). The French star seems to take her lead from the bad example of the Hollywood prestige-picture acting of Meryl Streep: surface detail is all; emotional truth is secondary. (Cotillard is nowhere as boring as Streep was at her technically masterful worst, but the similarities in their styles are hard to miss.) Worst of all, the concerns of good writing, such as developed themes and solid construction, seem to fall by the wayside. And production values are, of course, first-rate. Several years ago, Terrence Rafferty described another Hollywood-style French film as "the death of French cinema." It's not dying, but, language notwithstanding, it may have entered a phase where it's no longer uniquely French.

Film Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

This review originally appeared on Pol Culture.

I can't say Julian Schnabel has been a favorite among contemporary painters. Any artist who would proclaim himself "as close to Picasso as you're going to get in this fucking life" is so insufferably arrogant that one wants to dismiss his work before even seeing it. And one finds the paintings easily dismissable: Schnabel's major achievement as a painter was turning the "openness" aesthetic of the great Robert Rauschenberg into kitsch. Rauschenberg profoundly challenged a viewer's sense of perception and meaning. The ordering process of one's mind takes the chaos of the outside world and systematizes what it finds into patterns of associations and meaning. Rauschenberg reconfigured objects and images into groupings that exist outside the mind's systematizing process, and this reordering carries a jolt. It shocks one into a more "open" quality of perception, and it calls one's attention to the beauty of the randomness of everyday experience. Schnabel degraded this into gimmicky rendering techniques, like using fragments of crushed plates to create images on canvas. (Click here for an example.) Like his contemporary Jeff Koons, he's the sort of artist one loves to hate: the only pleasure to be had from his work comes from scoffing at it.

When Schnabel branched out into directing films in the mid-1990s, my disdain for him led me to avoid them. This was despite my interest in the 1980s New York art world depicted in Basquiat (1996), and the acclaim and honors accorded actor Javier Bardem for his work in Before Night Falls (2000). But Schnabel received, among other honors, a Best Director Academy Award nomination for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, even though the film wasn't nominated for Best Picture. I've long observed that a film that gets a directing nomination at the expense of one Best Picture nominee is often better than all of them, so The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, despite my opinion of Schnabel, ended up on my must-see list. And I was more than pleasantly surprised.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is adapted from the short memoir of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby. In 1995, Bauby, the 43-year-old editor of the French edition of Elle magazine, suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to speak, and unable to move beyond blinking his left eye. Working with a frequency-alphabet card and a secretary, he dictated the book letter by letter, word by word, by blinking yes when the secretary read the correct letter off the card. The book told of his experiences in his condition (called Locked-In Syndrome) and the joys he found or rediscovered in life. The book was published in March of 1997, ten days before Bauby died of pneumonia.

Schnabel's anything-goes approach to rendering may make his paintings seem gimmicky, but working with story material appears to discipline his imagination. He presents Bauby's narrative in a beautifully poetic and expressive manner. Filmmaking techniques are used expressionistically. The film begins when Bauby (Mathieu Amalric)awakens from his coma, and it takes the point of view of Bauby's good eye. Schnabel, as he does in his paintings, throws everything but the kitchen sink at the task of dramatizing Bauby's awakening and disorientation: the camera pans reflect his eye's movements, and his wooziness is rendered by blurs, superimpositions, and such unusual effects as reflecting light off of water onto the characters. Everything is juxtaposed with Bauby's voiceover on the soundtrack. Bauby is taught to blink once to say yes and twice to say no, and Schnabel uses the flashes of black to create a visual vocabulary from inside Bauby's perspective. The viewer comes to automatically register Bauby's emotional state from the tempo of the blinks, and eventually, one can tell that when the screen blurs Bauby is crying.

Schnabel never belabors his effects. He's consistently inventive, and he builds on his establishment of Bauby's perspective by using it to introduce the viewer to a number of the other characters, including his former partner Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner), his speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), and his physical therapist Marie (Olatz López Garmendia). Schnabel makes them all distinct by dramatizing Bauby's attitude towards them; the physical therapist, for example, is presented as an object of lust for Bauby: he can hardly look away from her breasts when they first meet, and the therapy session we see makes her seem almost brazenly flirtatious. After about forty minutes, Schnabel moves outside the exclusive perspective of Bauby's eye, and the film then shifts back and forth between Bauby's first-person perspective, third-person objectivity, flashbacks, fantasy sequences, and daydream collages. The picture is often one dazzling visual trope after another.

These wonderfully expressive visuals all grow from a simple, powerfully dramatic story: Bauby, who has lost everything, learns how to regain and redefine his life. The tragic loss of his body leads to the triumphant realization of his soul. Ronald Harwood's script initially presents Bauby as a man who wants to die. One can sympathize: he cannot move or speak, he cannot wash himself, and he's fed through a tube. The story's turning point comes wheh he tells this to his speech therapist. She becomes furious with him, upbraiding him for wanting to so completely turn his back on his friends, his family, and even herself. Shamed by her reaction, he realizes that memory and imagination can provide a lifetime of pleasures, and he's further completed by the joys and pleasures that his love for those in his life can bring. He hits upon writing a book as a way of embracing them all, and exploiting an outstanding contract with a Paris publisher, he gets them to provide a secretary (Anne Consigny) for transcribing his eye-blink dictation. Early on, Bauby despairingly thinks about all the "lost opportunities" taken from him by the stroke; the film is about him getting them back.

The picture has flaws. In a flashback showing the healthy Bauby with his invalid father (Max von Sydow), the father looks into the mirror, and we see the reflection beside a black-and-white picture of Bauby. The half-smile in the photo echoes his paralyzed self's half-frown. The juxtaposition is a far too obvious ironic identification of Bauby's paralysis with his father's condition. And in an absolutely ghastly scene--one completely fabricated for the film--Bauby is sitting with Céline when his girlfriend calls. She refuses to visit because she can't bear to see him in his condition, and Céline is forced to translate his side of the emotional conversation over the phone. Having to translate Bauby's words of affection to the woman who stole him from her--not to mention having to listen to the girlfriend's outpourings in return--Céline ultimately feels compelled to leave the room. One wants to go with her. The scene is an embarrassing, humiliating ordeal for the characters, and it's unbearable. One could also do without the gratuitous homage to the famous eye-slitting scene in Un chien andalou.

But these missteps aside, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an powerful story full of visual wonder. Schnabel redeems himself for those who recoiled during other periods of his career. With this film, he succeeds where his paintings failed. He lives up to Rauschenberg's example. The "openness" aesthetic is brought to narrative filmmaking, and with marvelous success. The film recreates and reconfigures our understanding of the world around us; familiar sights and objects sparkle with the magic of discovery. One can easily imagine the late Rauschenberg beaming his memorable smile after seeing this picture. It's a great film.

Film Review: Juno

This review was originally published at Pol Culture.

With her tiny stature and narrow figure, Ellen Page might seem an unusual romantic fantasy for teenage boys and young men, but she's a potent one nonetheless. She's not the ideal arm-candy trophy girl, like Anne Hathaway, or a plush sex fantasy come to life, like Scarlett Johansson. The girl Page projects is the one a fellow would want around when he puts the hormones and the outside-world façades aside--when he wants to kick back, hang out, and smile.

Juno is a lovely showcase for Page's charm. This high school comedy gives her the best role she's had to date, and she delivers a terrific performance. In the opening scene, the 16-year-old character is walking around her suburban Minnesota neighborhood, swigging from a jug of fruit drink, all the while displaying the faux bad attitude some women affect to make fun of themselves when they're having their period. Juno, though, isn't having her period; she's several weeks late, and the mock-bitchiness masks her terror over what's happened: a spur-of-the-moment decision to seduce her sheepish pal Paulie (Michael Cera) has left her pregnant. Page's deadpan style lends itself beautifully to irony, and while she nails the character's sarcastic bravado in the film's opening, she also conveys the fear and dread underneath.

Much has been made of Page's terrific comic timing; her delivery of the stream of one-liners provided for her by screenwriter Diablo Cody is indeed superb. But the low-key, at times laconic manner that makes the sarcastic lines so effective also allows Page to put across the character's emotions and attitudes with a dazzling economy. The depth,as well as the tensions,in her relationships with Paulie, her father (J.K. Simmons), her stepmother (Allison Janney), and her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) are quickly apparent. When Juno meets the baby's prospective adoptive parents, Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), one can immediately feel her wariness of Vanessa and her immediate rapport with Mark. And Page maintains Juno's quiet transparency throughout. In the film's most emotional scene, when she realizes that Mark and Vanessa aren't the happy couple she hoped them to be, Page may leave one feeling slightly stunned: the discordant emotions are dramatized by broken speech rhythms, uncertain movements, and a brief view of tears. The contrast of these with her usual cool helps dramatize her emotional quandary more vividly than any yelling or flailing about could manage. Juno's feelings are often only implied by the script, but Page never fails to clearly put them across; she transforms the words on the page into a fully realized character on the screen.

This is not to say Diablo Cody's screenplay is lacking. Besides the cleverness of the dialogue, the story is beautifully constructed, with the characterizations and relationships concisely integrated into the action. The film occasionally engages in time-out exposition to explain a character or situation, but Cody makes a point of writing it flip and funny, and the film never gets bogged down. She ably builds the story to a climax. The dramatic crux of the film comes from the fact that Juno's decision to carry the baby to term has largely alienated her from the life she led before the pregnancy, and she relies more and more on her idealized view of Mark for a sense of security. The story's crisis point occurs when the problems in Mark and Vanessa's marriage boil over, and Juno realizes that they are not who she thought they were. She has to decide what to do with the baby, and Cody skillfully blends audience suspense over the decision with the emotional scenes of Juno's giving birth. The revelation, when it comes, is extraordinarily artful; one knows in an instant that Juno has intelligently reevaluated the decision and the people involved. This wiseacre teenage girl has grown up; her greatest pleasure in life may be singing and playing guitar with Paulie, but she approachs decisions like a responsible adult.

One wishes Jason Reitman's direction did more to mirror the no-muss, no-fuss approach of his star. The film has a lovely sense of pace, but some of the staging ideas are a bit too self-conscious, like the repeated motif of having the high-school track team run across the frame, or showing Juno repeatedly walking against the flow of students in the school halls. And Reitman tends to linger too long over telling details, such as Juno's hamburger phone, Paulie's racecar bed, or that the interiors of Mark and Vanessa's home look like the photographers from Better Homes & Gardens will be arriving any minute.

However, all is forgiven when one sees the beautiful work Reitman gets from his ensemble. The always terrific J.K. Simmons gives Juno's father a lovely warmth: after Juno has given birth, the father tells her that one day she'll be there again on her own terms, and it's the most touching moment in the film. The straightforward, no-nonsense manner Alison Janney gives the stepmother leaves no doubt where Juno's sardonic nature comes from; it might make even more sense if she was the character's mother. Olivia Thirlby is all friendly, supportive energy as Leah, and Michael Cera's Paulie is like a big, floppy stuffed animal--if you understand that girls sometimes love 'em dumb, you can see why Juno likes having him around. Jason Bateman effectively plays Mark as a man who's never really grown up, and while I wish the film had shown more of Vanessa's control-freak side, Jennifer Garner does a fine job of conveying that, despite her anxious and off-putting qualities, she is a thoughtful, responsible woman.

And, of course, there's Ellen Page. Her work in Juno is delightful, but her performance is so well-realized that one can't help fear that, like Molly Ringwald and Winona Ryder before her, she'll be so identified with teenage roles that she'll be stuck in a niche, and then discarded as time passes her by. But one can't worry about what we may not get from a performer in the future, one can only enjoy the work we can see in the here and now. Juno is one of the finest comedy films of the decade, and Ellen Page's performance is the icing on the cake.

Film Review: There Will Be Blood

Dramatists and illustrators. That's how the late cartoonist Gil Kane categorized the practitioners of his art. A dramatist is focused on realizing the subject material as fully as possible. These artists have considerable technical mastery, but they never flaunt it. Form is subservient to content, and technique is subsumed in the work. An illustrator, on the other hand, is devoted to displays of technical virtuosity; the subject matter is of secondary concern. An illustrator's energies are all but entirely dedicated to inspiring admiration for his or her skill. Kane's binary is certainly applicable to artists in other media. I was reminded of the distinctions while watching Paul Thomas Anderson's highly acclaimed There Will Be Blood, a strikingly directed film that, for all the fluency of its staging, camerawork, and editing, is dramatically inert. Once one is done admiring the skill of Anderson (and star Daniel Day-Lewis), there's not much of interest.

There Will Be Blood is not a coffee-table book of a movie, like Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Anderson isn't obsessed with the pictorial; he's caught up in the cinematic rendering of the material. He favors long takes, with the staging of the action elaborately worked out; extended tracking shots are not unusual. The film begins with a long, largely wordless sequence covering several years. We are introduced to Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) in the year 1898, when he's a silver prospector toiling alone in a small mine. The film quickly establishes him as a man of indomitable will. He breaks his leg in a fall down the mine shaft, and then hauls himself without help to the ground above. From there, he crawls on his back across the wilderness to the nearest town. He refuses to see a doctor about his leg until a chunk of silver is assayed and cashed. In the years that follow, he converts the silver mine to an oil well and hires men to work it for him. When one is killed in an accident, he adopts the man's motherless son as his own. This opening section, about twenty minutes long, is an expertly executed piece of visual storytelling. Anderson's assurance raises one's expectations for the rest of the picture. But while Anderson may be caught up in the cinematic presentation of the story, he often appears lost in the challenge of bringing it to life. Whenever he needs the actors to do more than follow stage directions, the film just lies there.

One quickly loses confidence in the picture. The first scene after the prologue shows Plainview a decade down the road, making a pitch to a rural community to allow drilling leases on their land. But the controversies among the locals that derail Plainview's offer are murky, and the feeling of clarity Anderson has established collapses. The scene that follows is even more disappointing. A young drifter, played by Paul Dano, offers to sell Plainview information about his family's farm, where oil has been discovered seeping to the ground. The scene on paper must have seemed a crackler: a tense thrust-and-parry between Plainview and the drifter, with Plainview using his considerable skills as a con-man to get the information at minimal cost, and the drifter holding the information close to the vest, knowing that once he lets it go, it's gone, and whatever he has when he gives it up is all he'll get. But on film the scene is tepid and slack: it begins, it goes on for a while, and it ends with Plainview setting off for a small town in northern California. There is next to no tension or suspense. Most of the other dialogue scenes are equally flat. They don't seemed shaped for effect. One wonders if Anderson knows why he included them, beyond solving the mechanical story problem of getting from point A to point B.

Part of the problem with the dialogue scenes is Anderson's staging: the actors often seem posed in the shots, and the pauses in the exchanges are generally a beat or two too long. This gives the film a stilted quality, and a good deal of the time it feels as if the actors are hanging suspended from the ceiling. The other major problem is the casting. Apart from Daniel Day-Lewis, none of the performers has a strong presence. Perversely, they seem to be have been selected for their mildness; every potential antagonist for Plainview is played in the same low-key, unassuming manner. Day-Lewis, on the other hand, plays Plainview as a force of nature--he's the dark side of the American ideal of self-reliance--but he isn't given much of anyone or anything to play off. The performance has nowhere to go.

The one hope for dramatic conflict comes from the drifter's twin brother (also played by Paul Dano), who's a preacher and faith healer. Plainview sets up drilling operations near the town, and the preacher is a nagging, scolding thorn in his side. The preacher takes every misfortune that befalls Plainview--the death of a worker, an underground oil fire, Plainview's adopted son H. W. becoming deaf--and uses it as an opportunity to harass Plainview into donating money to his church. Their mutual animosity leads to the film's funniest scene. A local farmer forces Plainview into joining the church in exchange for the use of a key piece of land, and Plainview has to repent his sins before the congregation. Because of H. W.'s condition, Plainview has sent him away to a boarding school for deaf children. The preacher exploits Plainview's guilt to the fullest. He exhorts Plainview to repent "abandoning" H.W., and Plainview forcefully does so. The irony and drama in the scene comes entirely from Day-Lewis's performance; he easily puts across that Plainview isn't repenting anything, and the vehemence with which he expresses "repentance" comes entirely from his anger over having to humiliate himself in front of the town. Day-Lewis's Plainview may be yelling "I have abandoned my boy!" at the top of his lungs, but one can tell that he's brimming with the desire to tear this upstart preacher apart limb by limb. But any hope of a grand conflict between the preacher and Plainview comes to nothing. This minister is a twerpy charlatan. Paul Dano, despite his character's bellowing and gesticulating, made more of an impression playing the introverted, willfully mute son in Little Miss Sunshine.

Anderson's previous films, such as Boogie Nights and Magnolia, demonstrated that he likes and knows how to work with large casts. Why would he let this film seem so empty of characters and give Day-Lewis no one to play against? One answer is that he expected Day-Lewis to give a capital-G great performance as Plainview, and he didn't want anything getting in the way. Nothing should distract audiences from the genius of Day-Lewis's interpretation. If this was the strategy, it backfires for two reasons. The first is that a great performance needs strong performances around it to create contrast and give it definition. Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara would be nothing without Clark Gable's Rhett Butler; Marlon Brando would have been nowhere without Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire; and Jack Nicholson was tremendously benefitted by the distinctive supporting cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The second reason is that Daniel Day-Lewis is probably the last major actor I would describe as an audience-pleaser. He inhabits his characters brilliantly, but he's so earnest about it that he's probably the most humorless name actor in the history of film. Day-Lewis can be great when he's able to fit his work into a director's conception, but he doesn't have enough to give as a performer when the director tries to shape things around him. Nothing makes a movie more turgid than when a director tries to convey awe for an actor to an audience. One might say Day-Lewis does to Paul Thomas Anderson what Meryl Streep did to Alan J. Pakula, Mike Nichols, and Sydney Pollack back in the 1980s.

There Will Be Blood is a film to admire at times. Unfortunately, admiring is all one can do. I can appreciate the distinctive details of Day-Lewis's performance, such as the bold John Huston voice he gives the character, or the almost obsessive determination in his movements. And I can appreciate Paul Thomas Anderson's fancy blocking and show-off camera moves. (His chops in these areas are conspicuous enough to almost conceal how much he lets the character scenes go to hell.) I just wish they'd given me a story to enjoy. After I get that I'll be delighted to study how brilliantly they pulled it off. In short, I wish Anderson and Day-Lewis had dramatized There Will Be Blood, instead of illustrating it. And that Anderson had maintained enough perspective about Day-Lewis to know when the illustrations were coming up short.