Jason's Short Takes
by Jason Comerford
And now, for some bite-sized reviews of films I've seen lately, seeing
as not many of them warrant lengthy reviews...
O Brother, Where Art Thou? was one of the most
frustrating experiences I've had in a theater in the longest time. I can't
quite decide if it was sticking to Homer's The Odyssey that became so problematic
for the Coen brothers, or if it was just a case of creative ennui. The
pieces are there for the film to be great, but it never comes together;
it has a hurried, slapdash feel to it, and it comes at you from so many
directions you're never quite sure what to make of it. It's so lushly photographed
(by Roger Deakins) that you're initially tempted to take it as some kind
of demented Southern-Gothic fairy tale, but its characters lack precisely
the kind of mythic broadness that would make them fit into such a schematic.
The Coens' best work (Raising Arizona, and two-thirds of The
Hudsucker Proxy) has seen them sharply define characters with a line
or two of dialogue; in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, two of the three main
characters (played by Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro) are hardly distinguishable
from each other. Granted, the film really isn't about eccentric characters,
but more about road-movie incidents; the problem is, the incidents don't
run smoothly together. You feel jerked along the film's path, rather than
seeking it out for yourself. Oddly enough, it seems like the Coens wanted
to make a musical; there are a lot of musical interludes, the best of which
are a haunting river-baptism sequence and a riotous KKK rally as staged
by Busby Berkley. One wishes they'd gone all out; the musical sequences
have a loving feel to them that they almost make the rest of the film worthwhile.
But the film's focus is so wobbly that it never settles on being one thing
or the other that it pretty much cancels itself out.
There's plenty of cleverness to the film (the best touch was re-imagining
the Cyclops of The Odyssey as a villainous Bible salesman), but
even at their most cynical, the Coens usually manage to rouse up some kind
of triumph-of-the-common-man spirit. Here, their reach exceeds their grasp;
there's not much weight to anything, and the only thing you take with you
when you leave the theater is how pretty everything looked.
Mythic coherency certainly isn't a problem for Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In just about any other movie year, it wouldn't
get nearly the attention it's been getting of late, but as it is, it's
a well-done slice of East-meets-West pop storytelling, drawn with vivid,
colorful strokes. What surprised me most about the film was how familiar
it was -- director Ang Lee went back to his roots and in essence, he's
made a tried- and-true Western with a gender switch, and martial arts in
the place of six-shooters. (The film feels like an old Louis Lamour novel
as filmed by, say, a feminist Akira Kurosawa.)
After all those great movies Lee has done in the past -- The Wedding
Banquet, and, in particular, The Ice Storm -- and it turns out
he just wants to be John Ford. Still, the film has an irresistible pull
to it; the moment the disguised Zhang Yiyi leaps off the ground, with Michelle
Yeoh in hot pursuit, it's a moment straight out of a classic storybook,
gravity be damned. The movie is designed to be entertainment at its purest,
and it's awfully close to succeeding. It's a testament to Ang Lee that
the film's complexities aren't laid on with a heavy hand; there's plenty
of plot to go around, and the film is so carefully constructed that it
works like clockwork, juggling at least five separate story threads with
impeccable control. The performances are a somewhat mixed bag; Yeoh and
Yiyi are terrific, but the usually riveting Chow Yun-Fat is stilted and
obviously uncomfortable with his role; the actor's innate gravity is about
the only thing that keeps you interested in his character.
With all the standoffs, bar brawls, hot-under-the-kimono love affairs,
and flashy imagery, one might expect a wall-to-wall orchestral score full
of clustered noise, but Tan Dun performed probably the most interesting
experiment in film music in a long time; he made the subtext the predominant
selling point of the score, and he never deviates from it. There's a breathtaking
sequence late in the film where Yun-Fat and Yiyi duel on the treetops;
Dun scores it with mournful cello passages instead of laying on the brass.
What's most fascinating about the score is how much of it really stays
with you; by speaking to the purest emotional thrust of the story, but
with so much class and restraint, the music creates so much by spelling
so little out. It's not quite clear to me what all these film critics have
been crowing so orgiastically about for the last six months, but as it
stands, the film is done with class and intelligence, and you really couldn't
ask more from it.
I saw Pollock on the recommendation of one of my
readers, and while it's somewhat impenetrable, it's a very admirable effort.
Actors who end up directing films usually let themselves be the center
of attention, and this one's no exception, but when it's Ed Harris we're
talking about, the circumstances change somewhat. Harris is one of those
fascinating coiled-spring actors who's like dynamite come to life; you
know he's going to blow up, you're just not sure when. So playing a manic-depressive,
alcoholic-asshole genius like Jackson Pollock is a godsend for Harris,
and sure enough, he knocks the role right out of the park. But Harris is
such a skilled, controlled performer onscreen that he knows when and how
to underplay; when he cuts loose, it feels honest because he's really harnessed
the character. The film is a labor of love for Harris -- he spent years
scraping up the financing for it -- and it really feels like it, which
may or may not be a good thing. There's no punches pulled when it comes
to Pollock's erratic behavior, but there's not much validation for it either;
it's another one of those frustrating biopics where you're left with just
enough of an outside-looking-in feeling that you can't quite surrender
yourself to it.
The film illustrates a lot about Pollock without giving us much about
his motivations -- except for an odd sequence in the film's second half
where Pollock is interviewed by Life Magazine, we see a lot of painting
but we're not necessarily sensing what's moving the paintbrush. Harris'
direction isn't fussy or stylized -- the scenes are well-shaped and despite
a lack of conflict in many of them, they have the indefatigable ring of
truth. There are also a handful of superb performances -- Harris', for
one, and from Marcia Gay Harden, the wonderful Jeffrey Tambor, and a somewhat
skin-crawling turn by Amy Madigan (ëHarris' wife). (Harden takes a near-
impossible role -- basically a punching bag for Pollock with a heavy accent
-- and gives it a tough, touching spin.)
Jeff Beal's score is about what I expected, but that's not a bad thing
-- Beal does an admirable job in catching the energy of the painting sequences,
and wisely underplays the film's more difficult emotional territory. It's
sparsely spotted, but that works in its favor -- the music is well-used
to show Pollock's obsessions, and it goes a long way in filling in some
of the film's dramatic gaps.
I read Bridget Jones' Diary a while back and enjoyed
its bitchy-Brit snap; author Helen Fielding may or may not be heir apparent
to Jane Austen, in that she loves to explode social mores with witty asides,
but nonetheless, the novel is a quick, entertainingly acidic read. The
new film of the novel, directed by Fielding's close friend, documentary
filmmaker Sharon Maguire, captures much of the novel's best attributes
but adopts a more conventional ending. Just the same, it's sharp and entertaining,
even if it falls into oh-so-predictable rhythms in its second half. The
film goes a long way on the skills of Renee Zellweger, and the film really
wouldn't work without her; Zellweger keeps her character from becoming
a pincushion and instead really lets us in on her pain and her humor, sometimes
both within the space of five seconds. The best acting that Hugh Grant
has ever done comes in the first ten seconds in his performance; the wicked
shark-like look in his eyes as he exits an elevator, and so enters the
movie, is one of the best introductions to a character I've seen in a while.
Grant falls back on his trademark foppishness some in later parts of the
film, but he's an entertaining scumbag, just the same; Colin Firth, on
the other hand, is playing the same role he's been playing for years, and
despite his talent and engaging onscreen nature, he's really got to play
something other than a scorned suitor.
The film goes to show that well-cast actors can take a movie a long
way; the film has the rough edges that one would expect from a first-time
director, but there's enough going for it that you're willing to forgive
its occasional blunder. Patrick Doyle's score is horribly mixed, and what
one can make of it is distressingly routine, tinkly romantic chords here
and there in the style of his music for Mrs. Winterbourne. It's
about what you'd expect for a film like this, but from a composer of Doyle's
caliber, it's disappointing just the same.
Email Jason at: Jcomerford79@juno.com
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