Hard Times
A critical thumbnail for October so far, as post-reviews:
Nue Propreite (Private Property) (2006) If this nail-biter isn’t about incest, real, imagined or postponed, what’s it about? The dangers of spoiling your children after divorce? Or is it just Huppert, who if she played my mother in a film about my uneventful suburban youth would make it roil like Flaubert?
Eastern Promises (2007) Likely to be the most overrated film of 2007, and this coming from a Cronenbergian; with A History of Violence you had the clear sense Cronenberg was half-satirizing the violent melodrama, especially after William Hurt showed up. Here, he just makes it seem mechanical, and overstructured, and posed. I found the Russian gangsters in We Own the Night more convincing.
A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) The greatest British film until Brief Encounter? Anthony Asquith’s hyper-silent, making up for the lack of sound with visual electricity Hitchcock would’ve given up a few dinners for, is a revelation.
The Last Winter (2006) Larry Fessenden’s eco-spookfest takes inconvenient truths head on, landing at a small oil-company outpost in the Arctic on the verge of excavation, and gleefully watching as the warming elements, and whatever primeval force is released from under the melting permafrost, takes down the Stagecoach-like crew one by one. The best actors (Kevin Corrigan, James LeGros, Connie Britton) juggle Fessenden’s sometimes leaden lines, the less-than-best (Ron Perlman) drop them flat, and Fessenden makes great hay with his icy locales and frozen corpses. Both the F/X and the sermonizing are a little groan-worthy, but the mood is helpless and apocalyptic.
The Notorious Bettie Page (2006) Imagine, making midcentury S&M pin-up porn dull. As a woman Page couldn't’ve been this empty-skulled, this naive, this uninterested in sex and men.
The Bridge (2006) Necro-doc about the Golden Gate’s suicides that is, in its own way, appalling. Should the filmmaker have been watching patiently from the ground for jumpers, or somehow stationed himself near the railing and tried to interview the poor bastards?
Ou Meli-melo (Mix-Up) (1986) Jonathan Rosenbaum is apparently under the impression that this French doc, which recounts how two English women, now fully grown, were accidentally swapped at birth, how everyone discovered the mistake years later and decided to do nothing about it, except more or less treat the other family as relatives, is one of the greatest films ever made. It’s very interesting, if a bit pretentious in its mocked-up direct addresses, but proliferating dualities and affected script "readings" do not an earth-shaker make.
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) (2006) Juicy, multiple-POV surveillance melodrama, hard to resist in the viewing (if only American films dared to verbalize so little of what is actually happening in the story), and easy to forget afterwards, except that its happy ending to the Stasi reign smells a little Schindler’s Listy to me.
We Own the Night (2007) James Gray makes the same movie a third time, but these are interiors, crowds, real city homes and working-class environments we haven’t seen since Forman’s Czech days. Moral: don’t run a nightclub?
Michael Clayton (2007) The only thing I dislike about this thoroughly meaty and precisely judged character study/legal mystery is its wrapped-up, tell-it-to-Tilda ending, which of course is no triumph at all because Clooney’s hero, already wasted from the worst month in his life and a career that’s destroying him from the inside out (all of it humdingerly portrayed), now faces his own company, to whom he’s in debt and who will certainly see him swing. So I don’t really dislike anything; if only every screenwriter would try for the Paddy Chayefsky Jr. seat like Gilroy did.
And I thought I was the only sentient being in the known universe who wasn't "floored" by Cronenberg's "masterpiece". Well, aside from the redoubtable Armond White, that is. And when one finds oneself moving to where White is, one knows dark days are coming.
Yes, okay, props to Viggo, 'natch, for a seamless and note-perfect performance, but since Cronenberg has abandoned the use of the outre his work seems DOA without the kick we once got from those horrific body-horrors. And women? Well, I'm waiting for Cronenberg to give us another female character like Claire Niveau, a promiscuous, drug-addicted mutant (in best Austin Powers voice, "Yeah, ba-bay!") I mean, does anyone really believe that graphically slicing open a neck or two is "edgy"? Really? But critics called this being "tactile". Please. Give me Bruno Dumont any day over current Cronenberg for tactility or materialism- nice buzzwords, those. How did Cronenberg come to get an unlimited pass card?
DP Peter Suschitzsky's work is exceptional, as always. The way he photographs interiors as closed forms of somber color is striking, how even exteriors seem interior, everything extraneous to the mental landscape of the narrative is removed, recalls, for me, the work of Leon Spilliaert, the bathouse brawl could be something visualized by Francis Bacon. If a case is to be made for Cronenberg as a formalist, one has to take Suschitzsky's contribution into account, no question.
Funny, Michael, you mentioned James Gray. As I was watching Eastern Promises I was recalling "Little Odessa", my favorite of the same three films Gray has made, and how I much preferred its reach for the elegiac and operatic over Cronenberg's embalmed touch. Those psychic punches of his don't land has hard as they used to.
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I'm with you 100%. But even you overrated that now-famous bathhouse scene, which was adroit and expert but hardly, for me, formally arresting. I too miss the old Cronenberg, even the Cronenberg of M. Butterfly and eXistenZ. And "embalmed" is the well-chosen word here, if only in reaction to the dynamic film described by critics, not the cool, perfectly capable and unadventurously formulaic film I saw.
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No, Darjeeling Limited will be the most overrated film of 2007. Anderson uses big movie budgets for exotic, mindless vacations these days. Sad.
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