The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2008)

When a friend visits Jean-Dominique Bauby in his hospital room, he relays the latest gossip from Paris: "Jean-Dominique is a vegetable." Bauby wonders what sort of vegetable he has become: "A carrot? A pickle?" His friend doesn't hear these floral ponderings, but from the view inside Bauby's head, it's clear that he's anything but a spud. Which is not to say he isn't in a pickle. Bauby was once the editor of French Elle magazine, but in his early forties, he suffered a massive stroke that left him with a rare condition known as "locked-in syndrome." It is aptly if cruelly named -- his mind, as active as ever, is like a caged bird, trapped within an immobile, completely paralyzed body. He is able to blink his eyes, which becomes his only means of communicating with the outside world.

Specifically, he has a left eyelid. To prevent infection, his right eye is sewn shut in a gruesome scene early in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the glorious and unflinching film based on Bauby's memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. The scene is especially blood-curdling because, like much of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it is seen from within, from the point of view of the owner of that unlucky eye. Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood lock the viewer of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly into Bauby's small prison, looking out through the same small window, with only Bauby's overactive mind as companion. But what a funny, lively, imaginative companion he turns out to be. And he has lovely visitors: his patient, doting ex Celine (Emmanuelle Siegner), the mother of his three children and a woman who clearly still loves him; his speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze), and eventually, Claude (Anne Consigny), the assistant who takes the dictation of his left eye and helps him write his book. It is some time in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly before the film escapes the perspective of that liminal eye, and gives us a full view of Bauby and the world outside his mind.

That world is greatly diminished, but it was once quite full. Bauby was (and in his mind at least remains) an unapologetic sybarite, enjoying a life of glamour, good food, fast cars, and beautiful women. The butterfly is Bauby's metaphor for his airy, flitting, high-flying mind -- a mind that is astonishingly liberated by the loss of its earthly container, and all those earthly pleasures. It would be trite to describe The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as a film about the human spirit triumphing over adversity. More accurately, it is about the soul breaking free of its constraints -- constraints imposed from without and within. As Bauby comes to see, he is not the only person imprisoned by circumstance, or an unwilling body, or by self-forged shackles, nor is his current state entirely new -- it's different from his old life, but not less free.

The butterfly is an apt metaphor for Schnabel's film, with the filmmaker finding his own freedom in Bauby's imaginative flights of fancy. Even when he is at his most self-pitying, Bauby's words are comical, witty, ironic, and poignant, roaming freely across the full range of human emotion and human experience, free-associating through memory and desire, fantasy and invention. The richness of his inner life makes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a film that is not, ultimately, sad or depressing, but rather wise, lyrical, moving, and joyful. In giving substance and reality to the wanderings of the mind's eye, Schnabel, working with the ingenious cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, creates a visual world rich in metaphor and spirit, looping freely through time and space, unconstrained by the fetters of plot and straightforward narrative. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is, not surprisingly, dreamlike in its logic as it weaves a tangle of neuronal threads, knots, and loose ends into a vibrant, shimmering, luminous cloth of transcendent and subtle beauty.

28Jan2008

Cloverfield (2008)

The copy-and-paste feature of the personal computer is brilliantly useful and, unlike so many things about personal computers, an actual timesaver. It must have saved Drew Goddard, the screenwriter of Cloverfield, a whole hell of a lot of tedious typing, since the screenplay of said movie amounts to about 75 pages of people screaming "Oh my God!" over and over and over and over (movie critics can use copy-and-paste too). Goddard would have had to type those words thousands of times had he been using an actual typewriter, and he might have realized it wasn't worth the effort. Just imagine Orson Welles typing "Oh My God" 10,000 times in Citizen Kane. There would be no "Rosebud," and we would be all the poorer for it. We can perhaps count ourselves lucky that Welles didn't have a PC, and unlucky that so many screenwriters now do.

Cloverfield is a faux home movie about the destruction of New York by scary monster. You know how the perfect YouTube video is about three minutes long? Anything longer than that and the mind begins to wander from the cute frolicking kittens and the humiliating Japanese game shows, and even Jersey grrrl Chunky Pam starts to lose her lustre. Cloverfield takes that YouTube post-reality, post-verite, post-Blair Witch penchant for self-documentation/aggrandizement and turns it into a (barely) feature length monster movie in which the video camera-wielding twenty-somethings are so dull, featureless, and stupid that you'll be relieved to see that a monster is annihilating Manhattan with great efficiency, and will get to them forthwith.

Not that you'll see all that much of that monster. Uber-producer J.J. Abrams (Lost) likes to keep his scary beasts obscure. When it does finally show itself, the Thing That Ate New York is a kind of Geigeresque reptilian critter, a glossy, high-tech, depsychologized Godzilla without the big dino's rubber soul. But back up about an hour and it turns out that the thing that really kills in Cloverfield is boredom, and specifically, a lifeless going away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is departing for a job in Japan. The party is hosted by Rob's brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and Jason's significant other Lily (Jessica Lucas). They are all mildly attractive in a more or less indistinguishable way. The lackwit behind the video camera is Rob's pal Hud (T.J. Miller), who is at first a reluctant videographer, but later embraces the role with such enthusiasm that he manages to keep on shooting (at eye level, no less) even while frantically running from the monster, while traversing the rooftops of crumbling skyscrapers, while... you get the picture. If only he could have stopped screaming "Oh my God!" while shooting his end of the world video for posterity, and had the presence of mind to say something intelligent by way of narration. It must be said, however, that Hud's screaming is no less interesting than anything anyone else has to say in Cloverfield.

The monster is indiscriminate in killing the no-name cast, which is a small mercy of Cloverfield. The characters are both vapid and obtuse, which is, as always, a winning combination in motion picture entertainment. While the city crumbles around them in a massive cloud of dust tackily reminiscent of 9/11, Rob and his pals decide to buck the trend, and common sense, and head uptown to rescue Rob's ex-girlfriend, who is, according to her cell phone message, grievously wounded and trapped in her high-rise apartment. Why Rob's friends and a random hanger-on from the party decide to follow their brainless leader on his quest for something like redemption and/or true love is anybody's guess, but clearly these young adults don't have the sense to know when it's time to get the hell out of Dodge. Thanks to Hud's mad documentary skilz, the rest of us get to tag along too. "People will want to see what happened," Hud says. Well, actually, maybe not.

  Aside from the vaguely realized YouTube-gen, everybody's-a-celebrity-and/or-papparazzi idea -- the movie's only laugh comes when Lady Liberty's head rolls down the street and everybody whips out a cell phone camera to capture the moment -- Cloverfield is basically a little exercise in coupling high-tech special effects with faux low-tech camera technique. Director Matt Reeves and cinematographer Michael Bonvillain keep the camera moving and jiggling constantly, which is necessary to maintain the film's home movie conceit, but also rather tiresome. Cloverfield clocks in at a mere 84 minutes, which would ordinarily be quite economical, except that there's only about 20 minutes worth of plot here, and virtually no dialogue (discounting the repetitive screaming). By YouTube standards, it's about 81 minutes too long.

21Jan2008

The Bucket List (2008)

With Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson in it, *The Bucket List* has a promising cast. Too bad the movie doesn't let these two do anything novel or particularly interesting. Nicholson plays Edward Cole, a rascally, oft-married, self-absorbed billionaire CEO who runs hospitals. Ha ha, he winds up in one of his own hospitals, only to find out he can't have a private room because it's company policy. He grudgingly shares a room with Morgan Freeman's Carter Chambers, a brilliant autodidact and self-sacrificing auto mechanic who gave up his dreams of higher education to provide for his family. Carter is yet another saintly character for Freeman, who has already played God twice. (He ought to branch out a little and play a devil for a change.) Edward is cruel to everyone and an almost insufferable egomaniac, but he's more interesting than Carter, whose most pronounced quirk is that he loves to watch *Jeopardy!* and always knows all the answers. Like Edward, Carter has terminal cancer. The two men bond over their disease, apparently, since they have nothing else in common except geographical proximity. They write a "bucket list," a list of things to do before they kick the bucket, and set out to do them.

Luckily, since Edward is filthy stinkin' rich, nothing is out of reach. Too bad these two geniuses, with the world at their feet, can't come up with a list that isn't full of cliches. Drive a race car; go skydiving; get a tattoo; climb the mighty Himalayas. This is a list for a dying twelve year old. At least half of *The Bucket List* is spent in the hospital, which is perhaps the best indication of just how anemic and uninspiring the list turns out to be. They see a fair number of the seven wonders of the world, but those wonders have rarely seemed less wonderful. *The Bucket List* winds up being a kind of road trip/travelogue, with screenwriter Justin Zackham throwing in a smidge of self-help book philosophizing to give this feel good/feel bad movie a teensy bit of meaning. 

As might be expected, the wise Carter has much to teach Edward about the meaning and value of life, etc. During their spanning-the-globe adventure, Carter is the tour guide, a font of historical and geographical knowledge, as well as an expert on the sage wisdom of the ancients as regards the afterlife. It's no surprise that the movie arranges it so that Carter's got a thing or two to learn as well, although his character, who up and leaves his loving family behind for a last hurrah during his final days, is not especially believable, and the lessons he learns would fit quite nicely on a "Thinking of You" Hallmark card.

Director Rob Reiner might want to take a lesson or two from his former, brilliant self (see *This is Spinal Tap* and *The Princess Bride*) and put "make another great movie" on his own bucket list. *The Bucket List* can go on his list of movies that should have been (but probably could not have been) better.

 14Jan2008

Juno (2007)

If you can get past the first half hour or so, when the dialogue is just too mannered, too studied, and too overwritten to be believed, and then get past the way that Juno MacGuff, a cute, quirky 16 year old who finds herself in the family way, speaks with the frankness of a four year old (often about the same bodily functions that so fascinate four year olds), then you might find *Juno* a funny and original comedy, despite its borderline After School Special plot. 

You might. What *Juno* has really got going for it are a handful of terrific performances by actors who manage to transcend the sitcom-my tendencies of the movie, to muscle through the cutesy-poo hipper-than-thou stuff to actually find the tender heart buried under all the punchlines. For starters, there's Ellen Page as Juno MacGuff, a mouthy teen, named for a Roman goddess, who relishes the role of outcast, but not as much as she thinks she does, and who finds out she's not as smart as she thinks she is either. Page, more than anyone in *Juno*, has to act around the sarcastic, too-clever words that come out of her mouth to create a believably human character, and she manages it, flipping quickly from childlike naivete to juvenile hubris to semi-maturity. It's a performance that really saves the movie from itself. Juno's dad and stepmom, respectively, are played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, and you could hardly find a pair of actors who are better at playing funny-serious -- they both bring the right combination of warmth, weariness, tenderness, sass, and wisdom. 

So, Juno has impulsive sex with her dorky-but-sweet pal Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and gets pregnant. After briefly entertaining the possibility of an abortion, Juno decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption. Her parents are actively supportive, with reservations. Paulie is quietly supportive. Her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), a cheerleader, is cheerily supportive. The "desperately-seeking-spawn" adoptive couple she finds in the Penny Saver, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) are thrilled. Then Juno is thrilled to discover that Mark is not as square and uptight as his tidy suburban home suggests -- he's actually a cool musician who watches gory horror movies and swaps CDs with Juno. Eventually, despite all the support and enthusiasm, Juno's perfect plan runs into complications, and she finds out she's not as mature and capable as she thinks she is.

As coming-of-age-through-crisis stories go, *Juno* does not break much new ground, although first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody brings a new voice and a post-feminist perspective to potentially melodramatic old-school material. There's evidence of emerging maturity in the writing of *Juno* -- as the movie progresses, the dialogue gets more believable and less forced and mannered, so there's a kind of coming-of-age for the screenwriter as well as the heroine going on. Director Jason Reitman (*Thank You For Smoking*) leans too heavily on quirky alt-folk songs to set the tone at the start of the movie, and doesn't do enough to reign in the off-putting, overly jokey dialogue. As the tone and mood of the movie change, becoming warmer and more intimate -- on a meta level, the director comes of age in *Juno* too -- it also becomes more believably real, so that it can all end on a note of refreshing honesty and unexpected emotional depth.

07Jan2008

Atonement (2007)

Atonement is a handsome movie, filled with striking visuals and attractive people. Director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice), working from screenwriter Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel, has created a movie that's less emotionally engaging than it is intellectually and aesthetically interesting, which would be fine if Atonement were not meant to be, among other things, a romantic tearjerker.

The story follows star-crossed lovers Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy). She's a daughter of privilege, enjoying idle days on an idyllic estate during between-the-wars England. He's the gardener, and the son of a housekeeper (Brenda Blethyn). Robbie and Cecilia are not so much star-crossed, really, as they are double-crossed by Cecilia's 13 year old sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan), an aspiring writer who, suffering a combination of puppy love, jealousy, sexual naivete, and a vindictive fictiveness, betrays Robbie, telling a lie that sends him to jail and sets off a family tragedy with ongoing repercussions.

Told in three parts, the story follows Briony's betrayal and its aftermath, for her and for Robbie and Cecilia. The first part of the story is the most engaging, owing in large part to an especially intense and self-assured performance by Ronan. Atonement succeeds in creating a tense drama that percolates the familiar British brew of class-consciousness, simmering sexuality, interpersonal misunderstanding, and villainy. This first part of the story is passionate and devastating in a way that the rest of the movie never quite recaptures. The story then follows a young adult Briony (Romola Garai), who becomes a wartime nurse, and Cecelia and Robbie, who are separated again when he goes off to fight the war. Although this middle section of the movie features several striking and memorable scenes (including an impressive five minute long tracking shot of the surreal scene at Dunkirk, during the historic evacuation there), it never quite clicks with the same energy or force as the movie's prologue. Partly it's that Knightley and McAvoy, although their characters pine for each other across the miles, never quite snap together as an onscreen couple, so their separation is less acutely felt than it is merely seen and understood to be tragic and poignant. At the same time, they are frequently in the middle of other tragic and poignant wartime incidents, and Atonement tries valiantly to create a sense of sweeping scale, of its characters being caught up in events far bigger than themselves, events which amplify the effects of Briony's fabrications, giving them a truly tragic dimension. All the heat and fire Atonement might generate are continually damped down though, in one way or another.

That emotional distance is interesting when the story's final and surprising revelation unfolds -- Briony is by then an old woman (played by Vanessa Redgrave with the same cropped hair and shapeless frock worn by the younger Briony) and a successful novelist. Atonement is, of course, the story of her attempt to redeem herself, and to atone for the sin she committed in her youth. And so, the meta aspect of Atonement, the intellectually interesting part of it, is the way Briony, a storyteller, goes about trying to make things right after her original storytelling sin, and how she does it not so much for the sake of Robbie and Cecilia, but for her own sake. What ought to be a shocking revelation, however, is not quite the gutwrenching surprise it might be, which is to say it is surprising without being gutwrenching, another instance in which the movie gets everything right except the feeling.

It's not for lack of trying. The music frequently swells to signify the emotional intensity that is lacking elsewhere in Atonement. Dario Marianelli's musical score is punctuated with the insistent percussive sound of a click-clacking typewriter. The typewriter-as-percussive-instrument is a clever conceit that is interesting at first but quickly becomes overbearing and overly literal-minded. Wright manages to capture a look and sense of place, even a sense of romantic possibility, in a way that often suggests other movies, particularly romances from the World War II era, which Atonement mimics right down to the clipped, rapid speech of its characters. The pitfall with that kind of homage is that it begins to look and feel like no more than homage, a genre exercise that leaves its characters, and its audience, feeling cold. Atonement is a period movie that evokes the movies of the period; it's a literary adaptation that remains faithful to its source; it is high-minded and literal-minded to a fault. In all that effort to be true to some other idea or ideal, Atonement never quite coalesces into something unique or outstanding or beautiful or moving in its own right.

17Dec2007

The Illusionist (2006)

In turn of the century Vienna, a magician enraptures audiences with his marvelous illusions. Orange trees grow on command. The laws of physics are temporarily suspended. Death visits a maiden, although she lives to tell the tale.

Eisenheim the Illusionist (Edward Norton) also angers a prince, one Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), who sees in the magician's work not an opportunity for amazement, but an annoying riddle to be solved. In attempting to show up the showman, the temperamental prince is instead made the butt of an elaborate, mythical joke. Even worse, Eisenheim steals the prince's girl, Sophie (Jessica Biel), although it might be said that she had been Eisenheim's girl all along. Sophie was Eisenheim's childhood sweetheart. They were torn apart by circumstances and socio-economic realities --he was the son of a poor carpenter, she was a duchess -- then brought back together by a chance encounter. (Although it's possible, within the elusive, illusion-packed structure of The Illusionist that there are no chance encounters.)

What follows from the prince's cuckolding is a cat and mouse game between Eisenheim and police inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), an amateur magician who admires Eisenheim but works for the prince. There is socio-political intrigue involving marital alliances and plots to overthrown the empire, there's a little romance, a little murder mystery. Eisenheim becomes rock star famous, and manages to foment revolutionary tendencies among Viennese spiritualists with his apparent ability to conjure the dead. For the "it's all about me" prince, Eisenheim's magic show becomes a personal and political threat.

Based on a short story by Steven Millhauser, The Illusionist, written and directed by Neil Burger, is an entrancingly elaborate cinematic sleight of hand. It's also a thoughtful exploration of the nature of illusion, and the power of magic and the mind, set in a time and place -- Freud's Vienna -- where the mind was on everybody's mind. Depending on what you believe, and your tendency to wish for happy endings, the movie's finale may give away too much, or nothing at all -- the revelations come to Uhl, who may or may not be clever enough to have figured out what really happened.

What really happened remains the central mystery in this teasing, playful movie. So much of the story depends on the difference between seeing and believing, between what's objectively real and what's subjectively real -- both for the audiences in the film, and for audiences of the film. Are Eisenheim's parlor tricks real? Does he have the power to manipulate space and time, or just to manipulate the minds of his audience? (Either one would be a pretty neat trick.) These are, of course, key questions about the power of the cinema and its elaborate illusions as well, and that synthesis of onscreen/offscreen ideas is not lost on the filmmakers, who employ low-tech stagecraft and effects (with the technical guidance of the venerable magician and magic historian Ricky Jay) to recreate the film's historically accurate magic tricks. Eisenheim's elaborate ruses go beyond the visual, incorporating timely ideas and jokes, and timeless mythology and fairy tales. They go beyond the stage as well, and the puzzle that dogs the dogged Inspector Uhl is whether anything having to do with Eisenheim is not an illusion.

There is an interesting and illuminating interplay between Norton and Giamatti in The Illusionist. Both are really good, really interesting actors, with  very different styles that turn out to be quite complementary here. Giamatti's openness is revealing and engaging, making him an ideal sort of narrator in The Illusionist. He's rational, a thoughtful puzzle-solver, and a man who appreciates a good mystery. These might not be ideal qualities for investigating someone like Eisenheim. Norton, on the other hand, tends to be elusive and closed, with a face that reveals virtually nothing (or reveals only falsehoods), making the darkly secretive trickster Eisenheim an excellent counterpoint to Uhl. Together they embody the tensions, so much in play during the cultural, social and technological upheavals of turn of the century Europe, and so much at the heart of The Illusionist, between science and superstition, fact and fiction, the real and the ideal, the rational and the romantic.

4Sep2006

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

If you're contemplating a trip to the multiplex to see Snakes on a Plane, you pretty much know what you're signing up for. You will not be disappointed. Snakes on a Plane is chock-full of snakes. On a plane.

As the high-concept title suggests, Snakes on a Plane does not slither far from its B-movie roots, providing ample opportunities for serpents to have fangs-bared hissy fits, and put the bite, and the squeeze, on the particularly hapless passengers of one ill-fated redeye flight from Hawaii. As one would and should expect from a movie like this, passengers who are a pain in the asp are unlikely to get off the plane alive.

One of the great pleasures of Snakes on a Plane, aside from the chomping, hissing, slithering, wriggling snakes of course, is the presence of Samuel L. Jackson, who famously campaigned to keep the movie's awesome title after film execs tried to change it to the utterly uninspired and uninformative *Pacific Air 121*. Jackson won, and legions of fans got on board, turning the film into an internet phenom that spawned mini industries in unofficial t-shirts and bumperstickers. Web fans even managed to get a line of dialogue, too profane to be repeated in a family newspaper, inserted into the film, and convinced the film's producers to up the sex and gore quotient. With two snake attacks occurring in jetliner bathrooms, and the easy eloquence of Mr. Jackson, the Olivier of %$#@!, Snakes on a Plane handily earns its R rating.

Once you know there are snakes on a plane, it doesn't much matter how they got there, but scribes John Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez put in the effort to create a modestly plausible explanation. A surfer dude named Sean (Nathan Phillips) witnesses a particularly brutal murder committed by ultra evil gang boss Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson). FBI agent Neville Flynn (Jackson), saves Sean's hash and sneaks him on a redeye flight from Hawaii, filled with unaccompanied children, a mother with a baby, honeymooners, a chihuahua, a baby and dog-hating businessman, and a germ-phobic rapper and his entourage, as well as not one but *two* flight attendants on the verge of retirement. Kim's henchmen fill the plane's cargo hold with deadly snakes and spray pheromones on flower leis to get the serpents riled up. Havoc ensues. Panic ensues. Agent Flynn is required to kick some asp and, inevitably, help fly the plane.

Director David R. Ellis (Cellular) gooses the film with snake-vision-cam, extreme close-ups, fast edits, salacious snake bites, and hundreds upon hundreds of tetchy snakes (some rubber, some CGI, and some the real McCoy). The action is fast-paced and to the point. The snakes are after the passengers. The passengers are scared, desperate and disgruntled. Some will act heroically, others will be jerks. The movie is alternately hilarious and nerve-jangling, and for one brief moment, it was even quite emotionally moving (don't worry -- it was a very brief moment).

Although Snakes on a Plane is a direct descendant of disaster flicks like Airport, and its comedic spawn Airplane!, I couldn't help but be reminded of United 93 while watching Snakes on a Plane, because, despite the obvious differences between a finely-crafted semi-tongue-in-cheek movie about snakes on a plane and a very serious, very arty movie that reenacts the actual hijacking of an actual plane, there are some striking similarities between the two movies. Snakes on a plane and suicidal hijackers on a plane are similarly scary, and while the latter are not likely to bite a guy on his, er, little friend, the human emotions involved, and the potential consequences, are pretty much the same. Now, that's about as timely and politically relevant as Snakes on a Plane can possibly get (aside from a reference to a particularly venomous Middle Eastern snake) because, although it would be quite a serious matter if *your* plane were full of an international assortment of irate snakes, it is somewhat harder to take seriously the idea of slithering serpents bringing down a jumbo jet. 

That notwithstanding, the passengers of Pacific Air 121 have to wrest control of their flight from a bunch of angry snakes. They have the unflappable, decidedly not ophidiophobic Agent Flynn, a no-nonsense representative of our government (although he is more "my man!" than The Man), which gives them a distinct advantage over anyone on a Samuel L. Jackson-free airplane when it comes to fighting terror in the skies. And if there's one other thing you've gotta know going into a movie called Snakes on a Plane, it's that in the Snakes vs. Sam Jackson smackdown, my man in the Kangol hat is gonna prevail.

21Aug2006

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

The dysfunctional family is the bread and butter of indie movies, be they comedies or dramas. Back in the day, they showed up pretty regularly in serious and seriously funny mainstream movies too. Those would be the days when the Hoovers' 70s vintage, school bus yellow Volkswagen bus wasn't a vintage bus at all, but a reasonably recent vehicle. The VW bus, the symbol of a more freewheeling time, has its own mystique, and has been a vehicle of deliverance, discovery, and disaster for passengers who, like the Hoover clan, take to the open road, with all its promise and peril. The road trip movie, too, is a mainstay of the indie movie. Pile a dysfunctional family in a VW bus for a road trip and you've got all the makings for a low budget collection of cinematic cliches. Point that family in the direction of a child beauty pageant and, well, things might get ugly in a very sitcommish way.

Turns out they do get pretty ugly for the Hoover clan, but Little Miss Sunshine, despite a premise that sounds entirely unoriginal, is a caustically funny, persistently melancholy, unexpectedly fresh and spirited little movie about the pursuit of dreams, and a family on the move and on the verge. 

The Hoovers are on the verge of financial ruin, thanks to dad Richard's get rich quick scheme to sell his get rich quick scheme to the masses. The masses, apparently, aren't interested. Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a would-be motivational speaker whose message, a nine step program for success in everything, verges on emotional abuse when he applies it to his kids. The family is on the verge of emotional collapse too. Mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) has just taken her brother Frank (Steve Carell), a suicidal Proust scholar, under her wing and into the Hoover home. Frank is fresh from a failed romance and career-destroying indiscretion, and winds up bunking with his teenage nephew Dwayne (Paul Dano), whose only words of comfort are a hastily scribbled note that reads "Please don't kill yourself tonight." Dwayne, an avid Nietzschean, hates his family so much that he has taken a vow of silence and hasn't spoken in nine months. His 7 year old sister Olive (Abigail Breslin), a cute little dumpling with big glasses and even bigger ambitions, rarely stops talking, and has dreams of beauty pageant glory. Helping her in her quest is Grandpa (Alan Arkin), a crusty old curmudgeon with a taste for porn and heroin.

Olive's unexpected ascendance into the Little Miss Sunshine pageant competition results in the entire family piling into their decrepit VW bus for a hasty trip from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. There are roadblocks along the way -- car trouble, financial trouble, marital and family troubles -- that both threaten and strengthen family unity, such as it is. 

For Richard, his daughter's quest for pageant glory is an occasion for life coaching, nutritional counseling, and the application of the nine steps. Nobody calls him Dick, but they really should. The rest of the family circles the wagons to protect Olive from a cruel world and her own quixotic dreams, although they don't do the same for dad or Dwayne, who, as it happens, really need the protection more. Porn and Proust collide in a convenience store; dreams of freedom -- from worry and want, misery and necessity -- collide with reality on the road to California, as they do on the road of life. Like other families before them, the Hoovers are heading for California in search of a dream, but they may be traveling in the wrong direction.

As road trips tend to do, this one brings out both the best and the worst in the Hoovers. The VW bus ought to be the poster car for unexpected engine trouble, as anyone who has attempted a cross-country trek in one knows only too well. But for that very reason it's also a symbol for the very American do-it-yourself spirit, a roll-up-your-sleeves and get-er-done optimism that well describes the Hoovers. It's an optimism that isn't necessarily grounded in reality, of course, and reality for the Hoovers, as it is for many contemporary Americans, is that disaster and ruin are one missed exit, one lost opportunity, one wrong turn away.

The screenplay by Michael Arndt is brisk, light-footed if not always lighthearted, and crammed with funny moments, absurd sight gags and dialogue that zips from the profane to the profound. Little Miss Sunshine was directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who make a smooth transition here from music videos to feature films. The movie isn't flashy or particularly stylish, but there's nothing wrong with filmmaking that doesn't call attention to itself, especially when it's enhanced by exquisite comic timing, a careful navigation through wildly swinging moods, and a deft avoidance of false sentimentality. Little Miss Sunshine is grounded by excellent performances across the board, a breezy absurdity, and an unexpected insightfulness that transcends the familiar and predictable. 

14Aug2006

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Like the dysfunctional brains of its characters, A Scanner Darkly is sometimes confused and adrift. The movie, adapted by Richard Linklater from Philip K. Dick's novel, follows a handful of Substance D users. Substance D, a.k.a. "Death" is a pharmaceutical nightmare, a feel-good drug that eventually produces hallucinations, brain damage and serious cognitive dysfunction. In the not too distant future, in a fascist America not too different from present-day America, Substance D users are everywhere, including the police department.

Officer Fred, an undercover narc assigned to infiltrate a Substance D distribution network, is also a user. Under the "scramble suit" that obscures his identity from everyone, including his fellow officers, he's Bob Arctor, who may or may not be involved in selling D. Fred is assigned to keep an eye on Bob -- he (Fred) watches surveillance video of himself (Bob) on a bank of monitors in a generic, flourescent-lit office. Confusing, to be sure, and Bob/Fred isn't really sure who he is or what he's doing a lot of the time.

A Scanner Darkly employs the same interpolated rotoscoping animation technique that Linklater used in Waking Life. It involves tracing over live action images, and results in a wiggly, liqueous, surreal but real look that suits this kind of trippy headgame story. Rotoscoping preserves the visual aspect, the movements and facial expressions, of an actor's performance, while also allowing for interesting visual alterations and enhancements of the characters and backgrounds. The characters in A Scanner Darkly often look like they're floating slightly off the ground, and there's a kind of 3D effect, where people both blend into and stand out from their surroundings. It's a perfect visual metaphor for characters coming unmoored from their lives and the world. 

Beneath the animation, with its chunky slabs of paint-by-numbers color and Play-Doh-y squishiness, are terrific performances, particularly by Robert Downey, Jr. (no stranger to drug abuse problems himself) as the shifty James Barris, and Woody Harrelson (himself a happy hemp activist) as Ernie Luckman. Barris and Luckman live in Bob's house and spend most of their days in frequently hilarious flights of drug-induced paranoia, able to leap from small inconveniences to vast conspiracies in a single bound. Freck (Rory Cochrane) is an occasional hanger-on, an ultra-paranoid D user who experiences continuous and horrifying hallucinations. Bob (Keanu Reeves) struggles to keep the two halves of his brain, and his identity, together. His brain is literally splitting in two, he's told, the two halves involved in a hemispheric battle for dominance. But maybe what he's been told isn't true. The scramble suit he wears creates a constantly shifting external identity, a vague, blurry jigsaw puzzle of faces and bodies that never form a cohesive whole, just as Bob and Fred share the same body but seem to remain vague and blurry to each other. Reeves' vocal mannerisms are reminiscent of *The Matrix*'s Agent Smith, although his confusing experiences are more like Neo's, which adds another intriguing twist to his character.

Dick purportedly wrote A Scanner Darkly after his own nightmarish experience with drug abuse and rehab in the 70s. What, precisely, the story is about tends to be obscure, and there's a drifting looseness to the film's narrative that lets it spin in multiple directions at once: Fascist states that monitor our every move, turning us all into narcs ready to turn on each other, and eventually turn on ourselves; A cautionary tale about the horrors of drug addiction and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex; The soul-dullification and mass delusion of the suburban lifestyle; Cognitive dissonance and the confusing nature of "reality." There's a psychedelic grab-bag of ideas contained in A Scanner Darkly, and the movie is at its best when it drifts with the different currents and undercurrents, and gets temporarily caught in swirling eddies before being spit back into the random, meandering flow. A Scanner Darkly is most interesting when it makes the least sense, and least interesting when it does make sense, at the end, when the tangled strands of the story are pulled together into a tight explanatory twist.

10Aug2006

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Curmudgeons are so rarely appreciated that it is with a bit of relief that we might regard the latest incarnation of the ever-so-curmudgeonly Mr. Darcy in the umpteenth adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. A sarcastic pill with a stick up his butt, Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) has plenty of pride, although it is perhaps just a cover for his cripplingly antisocial shyness. He more than meets his match in Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley), which is, of course, the whole point of Pride & Prejudice -- meeting one's match. Lizzy's as quick with a sharp quip as Darcy, and almost as disinclined to play the match game, although, as a young woman in 18th century England, unable to inherit a penny from her father's estate, she has little choice.

The Bennet family is in a constant tizzy. With five marriageable daughters and no sons, the family's home will pass into the hands of an unpleasant male cousin, Reverend Collins (Tom Hollander), a boring, diminutive parson, and a man of undeserved self-importance, who comes to call at the Bennet home, trolling for a wife. He sets his sights on Lizzy, to the delight of Mrs. Bennet (Brenda Blethyn), a woman so desperate to marry off her girls she seems to think of little else. The first line of Austen's book is: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." That notion, that marriage is a business, a pecuniary matter of mergers and acquisitions, is ever on the mind of Mrs. Bennet. That she loves her daughters there can be little doubt, but it is her business to see them all form advantageous alliances, i.e., to marry money. Mr. Bennet (an amused and amusing Donald Sutherland) is a loving and patient husband and father, but he doesn't share his wife's mercenary enthusiasm for business. 

Neither does Lizzy, who finds herself unaccountably attracted to the surly Darcy, not knowing that he is similarly smitten with her. Neither cares about money (he doesn't have to, having plenty of it), or the business of marriage, and neither seems to care for the other, which is, of course, the story's greatest source of tension and delight. When two smart, gorgeous people, born to be together, refuse to fall in love, it's almost unbearable, like watching a bomb being defused -- there will either be an explosion or there won't, a kiss or none at all, but oh, the snipping of all those crossed wires!

The plot, of course, creates plenty of crossed wires, and gives Lizzy ample reason to dislike Darcy: he's filthy rich, there are abundant rumors of caddish behavior, and he interferes in the romance between Lizzy's sister Jane (Rosamund Pike) and eligible, wealthy and willing bachelor Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods). But if circumstance keeps dousing the flames of love, it keeps fanning them at the same time, putting Darcy and Lizzy in frequent, and frequently uncomfortable proximity.

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach work a remarkable amount of Austen's book into the movie, and keep the prejudicial misunderstandings coming quickly enough to hold would-be romance convincingly at bay. The dialogue, much of it taken straight from Austen, is crisp, snappy, and deliciously witty. Knightley and Macfadyen play Lizzy and Darcy like a Tracy-Hepburn pair -- the verbal sparring is smart, fast, and sassy, with a delectable undercurrent of erotic tension. They're equals, in fact and in each other's eyes, even if their social positions could hardly be more unequal. Knightley's performance is fierce, vivid and smart. Macfadyen must face comparison to what is widely viewed as the gold standard of modern Darcys -- Colin Firth's portrayal in the BBC miniseries. He's more than up to the challenge, with a splendid Darcy who is openly churlish, but secretly a dewy-eyed romantic. 

The movie makes the most of the nuanced social criticism and proto-feminism in Austen's work, turning Lizzy's stubborn quest for love and romance, pursued in spite of her sex's utter financial dependence on men, into an almost quixotically heroic undertaking. In her stalwart refusal to settle for a merely convenient union, she strikes a blow for love and self-respect. Lizzy's sisters are another matter. The demure Jane aside, they are a giggling, silly pack, constantly on the prowl for handsome men in uniform. Impish troublemaker Lydia is the sister most likely to bring scandal upon the family, and Jena Malone plays her as a giddy, callow teen, largely oblivious to the social forces at work in her world.

Pride & Prejudice is filled with the usual buzzing dances, elegant drawing rooms, and period costumes, but the settings are as lively and vivid as the sparkling cast. The Bennet home is as shabby as it is warm, and any girl who dares to venture outside (as Lizzy is wont to do) will generally come back with a fair amount of mud on the hem of her dress. The movie breathes life into the period, which is a great relief after so many stuffy, airless, high-minded literary adaptations. Pride & Prejudice is as action-packed as any romantic comedy, and every scene is filled to the brim with meaningful conversation, manners, pomp and circumstance. The director, and cinematographer Roman Osin keep the camera moving, swirling around the characters, creating the sense that country life in the social season is as lively as any city club scene. Everyone is on the prowl, whether they mean to be or not. Georgian England is depicted as a veritable meet market where hearts and minds are equally engaged, although whether the heart should follow the mind, or the mind should follow the heart is really the heart of the matter. Pride & Prejudice, a smart movie that makes the heart leap and skip, is a vote for the latter.

5Dec2005