New Deal Sally

Four Months and a Weekend

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:41:25 GMT

This here dame has finally scribed another long-form essay and, lo!, it's about writer/director Andrew Haigh's extrordinary Weekend, which singlehandedly resuscitates the foundering genre of romance. Read it at the estimable site Press Play, baby dolls.

Why Bridesmaids Just Ain't Funny

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 12:18:32 GMT

Question: How many feminist girls does it take to light a lightbulb?
Answer: It’s women—and that’s not funny.

You get the picture. Feminists aren’t funny. Feminist cultural criticism is even less funny. So God knows that to complain about Bridesmaids, which opened last month to a round of fanfare, isn’t funny. The movie has made more than $100 million at the box office at this point. Many, many women—including many whom I adore and admire—have sung its praises to the high heavens. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that attending this film is a political act: Use your box-office dollars to compel Hollywood to continue to put more funny women front and center. And all that jazz. So this New Deal Sally has tried to keep mum.

Except that Bridesmaids is a disaster on the women tip. Or, to be more specific: feminist tip.

I know, I know. That’s not funny.

But for long stretches, Bridesmaids isn’t either, despite all the bruja-ha it’s been reaping. In fact, in addition to being the least funny comedy over which producer Judd Apatow ever waved his Magic Wand (vibrator joke intended, always), it’s actually kind of offensive. At the very least, it’s wrongheaded.

To be clear: Many, many times in my life I’ve refrained from calling foul on pop culture transgressions. But it’s one thing to grind while Kanye hollers “We want prenup!” and it’s another thing to pretend these standard poop-n-puke frat-gags pasted over a Cathy Comic plot is anything but a not-so-hot mess—let alone a triumph in any way for women.

The shtick: Eminently likeable Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, a thirtysomething Milwaukee denizen whose life is the craphouse. Since her bakery went under and her boyfriend left her, she’s been reduced to working at a jewelry store (insert engagement ring jokes here) and to living with her mother (Jill Clayburgh’s last role, tragically). To make matters worse, she’s sleeping with the world’s most toxic bachelor (Jon Hamm, who seems to relish sending up his own good looks more than any other living handsome man), and her BFF Lillian (fellow SNL veteran Maya Rudolph) is getting married—to a wealthy nebbish! Naturally, Annie finds herself roped into co-bridesmaiding with a random gaggle of ladies including a virgin type (Ellie Kemper, best known as The Office’s Erin), a wannabe-MILF (Wendi McLendon-Covey), a bulldoggish fat lady (Melissa McCarthy), and a pathologically passive-aggressive trophy wife Helen (Rose Byrne), who does her best to undermine Annie in order to become Lillian’s new BBF (Best Bridesmaid Forevs). Insert other acronyms (and parentheses) here.

The film starts on its highest note, as the 10 minutes of screen time preceding Lillian’s engagement and Annie’s devolution into live-action Cathy are marvelous testaments to the casual, kind honesty that distinguishes earned adult female friendship. And, as they’re both old hands at oddball, wonderfully manic improv, Rudolph and Wiig riff off each other brilliantly when given a chance to really do so. Best is when they attempt to participate in an outdoor bootcamp class without having to shell out a fee.

But once Annie becomes bridesmaidzilla, the movie devolves into a bad-tasting waffle: Annie channels a hysterical banshee at various wedding-related events and is defeated by the thinly drawn Helen in the Best Friend Olympics. Aka the single girl is humiliated—and humiliates herself—once again. Quel radical.

The problem is that, despite Wiig’s screenwriting credit, this is basically a Judd Apatow flick (he’s a producer; his pal Paul Feig, director), which means it boasts his odd pacing and even odder, socially conservative values.

I actually love Apatow as a writer/director—I’ve yet to tire of The 40-Year-Old Virgin no matter how many times I watch half of it on nonpremium cable—but his boys-will-be-boys ethos and aesthetic doesn’t exactly lend itself well to what’s being hailed as the breakout female comedy of the, uh, millennium. At the end of the day, all his films are about how guys most highly prize their dude time but aren’t really men unless they settle down with a hot grown-up lady who’s funny, though not, G-d forbid, as funny as they are. With Bridesmaids, he ensures that vision of the cosmos, however unintentionally, since these chicks are not as funny. Honey.

I’ve heard tell that the original cut of this film ran at least an hour longer than its 124 minutes, and it seems likely that the outtakes far outstrip what seems patched together to presumably please reluctant male attendees. To be fair, a haphazard wobbliness has always distinguished Apatow films, has even granted them a 70s-throwback appeal that offers welcome relief from the too-slick Action Jacksons that typically hurl down the Hollywood pipeline. But here, though plotpoints may be randomly dropped, potentially strong characters may go nowhere, and seemingly inconsequential scenes may drag on forever, them girls are most resolutely put in their place. Methinks I smell too many suits in the kitchen.

Indeed, some of what’s been omitted in Bridesmaids adds up to a real loss. Such as any real ensemble scenes featuring these amazingly gifted women that do not include convulsive diarrhea or binge drinking. Or a legitimate explanation for why Lillian, who seems like a salt-of-the-earth girl’s girl in the very best sense of that term, would lack any other real female friends besides Annie—not to mention why she would abandon her lifelong best friend to be bought off by a Nutra-sweet type like Helen. Though occasional scenes are funny (especially one where Annie labors mightily to snare the cop’s attention in a truly inspired montage), mostly I found myself gritting my teeth. Female competition is an old saw, and though I’d never pretend it doesn’t exist, it only works as a cinematic device when its retrograde nature is acknowledged. Since such self-awareness is in zero evidence here, the result packs about as much of a punch as an episode of The Hills.

For though the normally on-point Melissa McCarthy has defended her role in this film, I find it hateful and, yes, antifeminist. She’s the badly dressed, (mostly) delusional, greedy-Gus fat girl whose desire is trotted out solely as a source of humor. She takes all the wedding party favors (live puppies, an admittedly excellent touch) and assumes she’s good friends with Annie though, apparently, the two have only hung out a few times. (That Annie doesn’t protest this fact seems more a product of the film’s slipshod editing than anything else.) And though she may correctly identify a nebbish on the plane as an undercover US Marshall, their subsequent sex scene –in which she pauses to eat enormous amounts of food between throwing him down—is worse than any of the have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too bullshit that you’d expect from the Farrelly Brothers. Or take the dynamic between good-girl bridesmaid Kemper and the wannabe MILF who makes out with her in the perfunctory girl-on-girl scene: a subplot that clocks in at roughly two minutes. And, really, the whole “girl fight” theme that provides the backbone of the storyline is a disaster. It’s not just that all these elements are regressive; it’s that female bodies, and specifically female desire, are consistently objectified as fodder for amusement and very mild titillation, and the “subject” doing the objectifying is the same-old, same-old--Juddy’s boys, in other words--while we women somehow cheer it on.

Um, that emperor is not wearing any clothes. The brother is naked.

There’s more, of course, such as the film’s mostly unexamined associations between marriage and finances, between men as financial objects and women as sexual objects: Ya gotta get hitched to shed your solvency issues, sisters! And: If daddy doesn’t make enough, better marry somebody who does, no matter how otherwise un-noteworthy he may seem.

But the bigger question is why so much has been made of this nothing-to-write-home-about flick. Since it's not awful so much as just More of the Same, why has it been heralded as the best advance for women since the advent of the birth control pill? Even in the last five years, far stronger, well-observed female comedies have come our way via both TV and film.

To wit: I may not love Tina Fey (her mean girl politics reinforce too much of the status quo though she is undeniably, searingly funny) but Baby Mama outstrips Bridesmaids all around, even though I found it mediocre at the time, and 30 Rock's characters Jenna and Liz Lemon are far too clever to dismiss out of hand. The work Amy Poehler has been doing on TV’s Parks and Recreation not only is better-observed and more deeply felt but manages to uphold female friendship as well as common decency while producing hysterical moments week after week. (My man Ron Swanson doesn’t hurt in that department.) I’ve touted Drew Barrymore’s 2009 roller-derby minor masterpiece Whip It in this blog before, but it bears repeating that it’s a female-produced, female-directed, female-written, nearly entirely female ensemble romantic comedy that includes slapstick, clever one-liners, go-get-you-some-girl carnality, and a terrific humanity that endows all of its characters, however minor, with nothing less than three dimensions. I may have spotted a fourth in a few instances.

And, when I was lucky enough to take in a Q & A with Elaine May after a 92nd Y screening of her director’s cut of Ishtar a month ago, her arch commentary reminded me once again that smart-talking dames have been doing it on their own terms since my beloved screwballs of the '30s and '40s. That other Mae, for example, was writing, producing and sashaying through her own musical comedies more than eight decades ago—and no can deny that Dame West boasted a far stronger command of her sexuality than these do-you-think-I’m-pretty? Lily Livers who mostly pepper screens these days.

So what’s the big deal with Bridesmaids? Because it not only keeps the bitches in their place but makes them feel victorious about it. Because it ain’t going to shake anything up even if the women sail to theaters in droves. Because it comes bearing nerdy male Hollywood’s ultimate seal of approval—the Apatouch—and because the attendant big-studio muscle thereby ensured it a big-studio publicity campaign as well as three-gazillion screens across our Glorious Nation. Because, ultimately, exactly what makes this negligible summer comedy so palatable to the greater American public is why it fails short:

It could have used a woman’s touch.

2010 Top Ten, Sally-Come-Lately Style

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:09:23 GMT

I confess that I’ve experienced a very difficult few years—more hardships than joys; more losses than wins. That Age of Grief, as Jane Smiley once described one’s 30s, in which I shed the sort of illusions that our culture reinforces. Namely, that remaining young and pretty forever was a valid goal, that belonging to any kind of relationship was preferable to going it alone, that death wasn't a regular part of life, and that things could get better without our actively making that so. Now, I’m clearer but possibly harder to bear; kinder and a hell of a lot less nice. I could say the same of the best films of this year.

For the first time in at least three years, the quality of new releases is on an upswing. In 2008 and 2009 I felt hard-pressed to identify ten films I liked well enough to include in such a list, and would have been patently screwed were it not for international fare. But something has shifted in 2010, and keeping this list to just ten proved a happy challenge. New and more established filmmakers produced thoughtful, far-ranging films that embraced the medium of film and also transcended our expectations of the form. Few of the films I liked best were comfortable but all of them offered insights both big and beautiful into the tenacity of spirit--human and otherwise.

So, without further ado, my 2010 Top Ten.

10. Blue Valentine. By focusing solely on the beginning and end of the relationship between nurse Cindy (Michelle Williams) and her housepainter husband Dean (Ryan Gosling), director Derek Cianfrance brilliantly launched a new kind of DIY, guerrilla anti-romance in which we were invited to tap into our own experiences and biases in order to supply its middle. It should surprise no one, then, that the film has been released in multiple variations amid a cloud of controversies, including one about its MPAA rating. At Sundance, reviewers decried its length and unfair treatment of Cindy; the film’s more recent, shorter iteration (the only one I saw) includes far more exploration into what rendered Cindy so world-weary than what made alcoholic man child Dean tick. The intimation was that such a cold-seeming woman required more defense than a mad, and maddeningly stuck man, but, hey, therein lie this lady reviewer’s bias. At any rate, for once both Williams and Gosling were so aptly cast that their neo-method acting worked in this blotchy, acutely observed, and commendably unfair blue swan song.

9. My Dog Tulip. For the record, I fell for this animated ode to the bond between J.R. Ackerley and his Alsatian, Tulip, months before I lost my cat of 15 years, Max—and viewing it again after his death only underscored the film’s strength. Indeed, only its small scale keeps it from living higher on this list. Hand-drawn in lush, Lucian Freudian detail that cleverly undercuts the memoirist’s wonderful knack for understatement, directors Paul and Sandra Fierlinger do justice to that rarest of things: entirely mutual, heartfelt love between two beings. Take that, Lassie. And RIP, dear Maxie.

8. Black Swan. Directors Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky share a predilection for heavily cerebral smoke and mirrors as well as an unfortunate, seemingly congenitally sense-of-humorectomized aesthetic. But whereas the former’s films are all smoke and no substance, Aronofsky has made the excavation of flesh and blood his business in each of his films, mostly to harrowing effect. This sort of sincerity shines best in a melodrama—a genre I’ll defend to the bitter end—so it goes to show that Black Swan is the director’s best work to date. I could rhapsodize for pages about its uncampy, pitch-perfect shrillness; its spot-on casting; its clammy, genuinely hot sensuality; its highly stylized palette and costuming; and its Russian, Rosemary’s Baby-built dread but instead will boil it down to this one fact: Natalie Portman actually acts---and thrillingly so—at the film’s climax. Given that this girl will phone it in for every other moment of her can-I-still-play-precocious-at-70? career, Aronfsky deserves all the praise he’s reaped. And then some.

7. The Fighter. It’s not just because I love all the work of evil genius David O. Russell (his divisive 2004 masterpiece I Heart Huckabees stands out as one of the last decade's best offerings), and it’s not just because my family hails from the film’s locale of Lowell, Mass, and it’s not just because I love how much Russell can extract from his actors, even overrated Christian Bale, whose X-Treme Sports approach to acting actually works in this role as a bottomless junkie. It’s that, despite its name, The Fighter is not a traditional boxing movie so much as a keenly drawn treatise on the Shakespearean, unholy trauma that can be family---complete with a Greek chorus of slack-jawed, flat-assed Masshole sisters cruising en masse for a bruising. This film is so smart and so feeling that I’m inspired to give a pass to what’s proven the downfall of every working actor: those shitty New England accents.

6.Winter’s Bone. No doubt about it: the emerging category of alt-country indies, best exemplified by the works of David Gordon Greene and Jeff Nichols, is a like-it-or-lump-it venture. And though I admire the genre’s sure stillness, I hadn’t really surrendered to its grim stakes until director Debra Granik’s Ozark-set, sinewy neo-noir about 17-year-old Ree (the unflinching Jennifer Lawrence)’s quest to find her dead-beat dad. Boasting female screenwriters and producers as well as a female protagonist and director (maybe the missing element was a woman’s touch), it reduces rather than builds, so that just when you think you can’t take another minute of its cold-blooded tension, it yields something rich and complex and even a tad sweet. Rarely, if ever, has a film so effectively drawn on the quiet destructiveness of rural poverty as a mere starting point to a larger, more universal fable about blood loyalty.

5. Mother. In his story of on an apothecary owner’s efforts to absolve her mentally challenged son accused of murder, Bong Joon-ho (The Host) puts front and center the sort of older woman (extraordinary Hye-ja Kim ) who hovers nervously at most films' peripheries. And from an early scene the pathological attentiveness of this Mother (she looms too large as an archetype to be granted a specific name) is clear. In it, while her son pisses against a wall, she edges over and peers down intently with a curiosity less prurient than proprietal: she produced him and so, by the transitive property, she also produced this urine. At first devastatingly funny and then plain devastating, this remarkable meditation on the fine line between need and love comes cloaked in the director’s trademark, maniacal whimsy.

4. Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser). Next to Arnaud Desplechin, Christophe Honoré is my favorite contemporary French film director. That’s saying quite a lot, since I only seemed to like French film for three of the last five years (and that’s saying even more, since I loathe the sound of the French language.) But I always felt that Honoré did better by the gents, especially the ones undone by grief. Not so with Lena, in which he tackles with his signature lyricism and hot-headedness all kinds of hard questions about the role of a woman inside the institution of family. Bristling and broken-hearted, Lena (the ever-more formidable Chiara Mastroianni) may shuttle herself and her children between their Parisian apartment and her parents’ country home, but she never feels at home, certainly not within herself. Within her casually brutal extended family, only she and her kids seem to really love each other, but she’s wound so tight that no one, not even her, believes she’s equipped to raise them. (Her ex husband seems greatly inconvenienced that she’s outlived his love for her.) With a conclusion that says much about the victory and defeat that is liberty in all forms, this film spares nothing, especially our feelings. It is glittering and tragic and resignedly radical. Oh, how I love it.

3. True Grit. I still can’t bring myself to watch the 1969 John Wayne vehicle, but this remake mines the Coen Brothers’ very best qualities—their unsentimental economy as well as their reverence for a good yarn and a Big, Big Sky—with none of their self-satisfied snark. Matt Damon, who’s become Hollywood’s only movie star who’s also a truly versatile actor, plays excellent second fiddle to Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld), a 14-year-old girl intent on avenging her dead father. In Steinfeld, the Coen Brothers have found perhaps the last adolescent girl in America who would turn her nose up at a term like tween or, god forbid, cute. In an ideal world, every young girl would be forced to lay aside her Barbie for the two hours it takes for Mattie to string up her dad’s killer by any means necessary. The unflinching epilogue, in which she’s become a steely, one-armed spinster who never forgot a good turn, comprises my favorite moments of film this year.

2.Carlos. Who knew Olivier Assayas had it in him? Before his 319-minute masterpiece about a terrorist whose greatest enemy is his own vanity, he was best known for the not-subversive-enough Summer Hours as well as Demonlover, which in one hollow swoop channeled nearly every cynical impulse that doomed early-aught art-house cinema. Which is to say I was not a fan. But Carlos is everything a film should be but rarely, if ever, is: epic, messy, passionate, politically astute, morally and intellectually complex, and ridiculously sexy. In Édgar Ramírez, Assayas has established a bona-fide matinee idol who can woo the hell out of a gun and, oh yeah, a woman. Even better, Assayas has established himself as a director who relishes the big screen but doesn’t rely on its proportions to tell his many rich stories. To misquote Eddy Murphy in Delirious, now that’s a movie.

1. Another Year. In a recent interview, Mike Leigh played the world’s teeniest-tiniest violin about how much goes unlauded in his films—namely his cinematography and writing. While it’s best to let others come to that party on their own, no matter how slowly, the bloke does have a point. Especially because Another Year may be his finest accomplishment in a long, storied career of many tones and even more colors (that were, yes, beautifully photographed). Much has been touted in Lesley Manville’s performance as a boozy singleton whose angry self-pity threatens to alienate her the kindly, contented couple Tom and Gerri; she deserves every kind note. But more than with most of his film’s, Leigh’s lovely bones –his clean, deliberate structure; his wandering eye that channels later Altman--stand out in every scene. Year pulls nary a punch as it scrutinizes the limitations of friendship and kin in a great wash of tea and wine and nervous laughter that will ring in your ears long after it’s died out. In so many ways, this is the writer-director’s crowning achievement, a searing distillation of his career-long themes: haves and have-nots, as well as the potential for misery and happiness that lurks in every minute of every day.

You Say Fact, I Say Fiction: I'm Still Here and Catfish Call the Whole Debate Off

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:38:23 GMT

We’re all back to school in one way or another--including the film world, who is rolling out all the top guns for Oscar consideration right around now. To that end, I’ve seen a bevy of fascinating, and fascinatingly flawed, films in the last few weeks. The two haunting me most are the docs I’m Still Here, Casey Affleck’s exploration into brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix’s ostensible nervous breakdown, and Catfish, about 24-year-old NYC photographer Nev’s curious relationship with an 8-year-old painter and her talented Michigan family. The old news, and even older hat: controversy swirls around both docs, whose authenticity has been called into question ever since their initial screenings. In the case of I’m Still Here, of course, Affleck invited that controversy, especially since he declared this week that he and Phoenix staged the breakdown, including the actor’s legendarily dissociative Letterman performance. Many critics and (fewer) members of the general public are now up in arms. How dare he prank us? Who does he think he is? Who does he think we are?

L’Shana Tova, indeed.

The concept of a mockumentary has been around for a while. In 1984 Rob Reiner launched it on a big-daddy scale with This Is Spinal Tap. One of its costars, Sir Christopher Guest (Nigel “Take It to 11” Tufnel), went on to legitimize it as a venerable genre with his steady stream of clever, sometimes mean-spirited sendups, including Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. Over the last decade, the mockumentary has ripened into the ideal form of satire for a culture so steeped in irony that the denotation of sincerity (and irony, actually) has largely gone missing. Some of our most clever TV shows follow the format, including the too-overlooked HBO Lisa Kudrow vehicle The Comeback as well as The Office (American and English) and my current favorite network TV show, Parks and Recreation.

Then there’s the fact that reality TV is hugely scripted. I would have assumed that the revelation of this ruse would have generated a large public outcry since the one saving grace of these shows is that these events really take place. After all, who would elect to watch untrained actors improvise badly around a contrived premise? But people continue to water-cool this garbage with an alarming dedication. As in: it’s entertaining, and we feel superior to these folks, so who gives a fig?

So why the kerfuffle about whether documentaries or, for that matter, memoirs are “fake?” Is it just that audiences prefer to be in on the joke?

Years ago, James Frey got hung out to dry for fabricating sections of his recovery tell-all A Million Little Pieces. The public outcry was understandable; people felt duped by his claims. The real problem was that memoir was so badly written, so artless, that only the veracity of its seemingly implausible facts could make it worthwhile. When it turned out that he had not, in fact, been jailed many times; had not hit a police officer while high on crack, Oprah (who had touted the book) went to town on him, while the rest of the media sniggered from the safety of her skirts. “It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequence,” wrote Maureen Dowd, conflating the concept of “factual inaccuracy” and “untruth” once again.

Have we forgotten that memoir, and most documentary, is inherently subjective? Someone has chosen to tell a story and thus, by the act of that choice, it becomes his story in that certain details have been subjugated to ones that matter more to him, regardless of whether they actually took place. Years ago, when documentaries mostly aired on television, they could have been expected to conform to journalism standards, which uphold facts and objectivity so that we can form our own truths. But as docs have migrated onto big screens (a transition I find largely questionable), they have increasingly, and rightfully, been held to cinematic standards, which means that they have grown more deliberate, more constructed, more artful. Michael Moore may use New Yorker fact-checkers to verify the accuracy of his material, but even he might acknowledge he is deliberately selecting material that erects the three-ring circus over which he presides like a pundit lion. (Hear him roar).

When asked how she remembered all the facts in her memoir Autobiography of a Face, the late Lucy Grealy is said to have responded, “I didn’t remember them; I wrote them.” The distinction is an important one. Whether something actually happened matters less than whether it tells the truth at hand. In art, even nonfiction must be rendered creatively, which means that it must capture some aspect of the human condition in a way that enables others to capture it as well. Details are changed or even constructed all the time, even in stories recreating actual events. When it comes to art, what matters is not whether material is accurate but whether it resonates. Certainly a world of difference exists between the two concepts. Art carves into the loneliness we all carry by pulling back curtains and revealing the truth of who we are and what we experience. It is communion, the application of our creativity in a way that reaches others as well as our own real selves. To do so requires careful selection and organization and intuition. Reckoning, in other words, rather than fact-checking.

Some shrinks contend that the dreams a client makes up are even more useful than the ones he really experiences. Either way, it all comes from the same morass. Creativity is a constructive solution to that morass. It emerges from a collective unconscious, the same place where you might argue spirit dwells if you believe in such concepts. The truth—the core self—is communicated regardless of whether it is springing from the subconscious or unconscious. Our job, whether as parents or writers or filmmakers or engineers or waitresses, is to serve as vessels with enough integrity and courage and patience to express whatever it is that’s struggling to come through us. To me that is truth—achieved with the grace of creativity, obscured when we lack faith in ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Which brings me to Catfish and I’m Still Here. It’s more difficult to discuss Catfish, since so much of its impact lies in the careful unraveling that each viewer should be allowed to experience on her own. (A.O. Scott may be OK about revealing its spoilers, however elegantly, but I’m not.) Suffice it to say that film reminds us how we disfigure our true desires and identities when we sublimate and ignore them, and how much more possible this has become in the Age of Online Everything. The doc conveys this lightly and then less lightly, but nearly always with a compassion that seems more old-soul than the twentysomething filmmakers’ chronological age. When I saw it, I was unaware of the “hoax” claims that had been following it. After hearing about them, I was struck most by their irrelevance. If some of Catfish has been staged, this only have enhances the veracity of its message: that few of us are who we’d like to be most of the time. The story remains effective regardless of whether it occurred first in someone’s head or in the reality we obstensibly share.

In both films, we are being asked to look at the pain invoked when a person’s only sense of worth is channeled from others, who are then not real to her outside of her own needs. Surely, I’m Still Here invites a more complicated discussion if only because the viewing of it is such a harrowing experience. You flinch the way you do when some one else get punched, so it’s natural to want to know whether that punch really happened, and if it was worth it. After 108 minutes of watching Joaquin slide into the squalor of his own navel—incoherently mumbling (I’ve never seen an American movie use so many subtitles for native English speakers before), getting shat on figuratively and literally, sniffing coke off hooker’s titties, extolling the virtues of lady buttholes, obsessively surfing his own online press, vomiting convulsively, vibrating with panic, growing a big dreadlock and even bigger gut, and generally humiliating himself and others with a wretched abandon—you get what’s really going on, whether you like it or not, whether it really happened or not. Narcissism is brutal, and the celebrity culture that supports its eternal, sickening spin is even more so. Joaquin, who’s been in the public eye since his childhood (and who lost his brother in and to it), is both its perpetrator and victim—as is his “new brother," Casey, who plays much the same subversive sidekick role here that he seems to play with his real-life bro, Big Ben. (Along those lines, I'm Still Here is a much bigger film, and even bigger mess, than Ben's autovalentine The Town.)

The estimable New York critic David Edelstein wrote recently of the process of reviewing Catfish and I’m Still Here: “As a critic, I have always had a responsibility to watch documentaries with a skeptical eye, aware that reality--even in supposedly fly-on-wall depictions--can be so easily manipulated. But do I now have to view every documentary filmmaker as a potential scam artist?” To that I reply (and in the interest of my own transparency I acknowledge this continues a conversation I began with Edelstein in person): “This depends on your definition of scam artists.” Since the fundamental message of the film seem so painfully truthful, I would hardly place any of these boys in that category. These young(ish) men aren’t hustlers so much as anxious. Anxious to please, anxious to educate, anxious to open our eyes. I believe they were looking to convey exactly how much our needs can lead us to fool, and be fooled. God forbid we're not in on that joke.

Of The Father of My Children, and the Orphans We Carry

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:58:37 GMT

For a month people had been telling me that I would “just love” Father of My Children, a phrase I am sure they did not intend as the kiss of death. But others presupposing my taste irked me; if it were that uniform, I thought, there would be no point to my reviewing film. And I was irked by the prospect of the film’s director, Mia Hansen- Løve. Only 28, she first had made a name for herself as a young actress in films directed by her now new-husband, Oliver Assayas, 26 years her senior. But because I respect the film’s publicist—she’s one of the few who only represents films she genuinely admires—and because I was growing embarrassed by my terrible inflexibility, I requested a screener and an interview with Hansen-Løve. When the first sleeve I received contained the wrong DVD and the second arrived only hours before our scheduled interview, I began to wonder if perhaps my cynicism was merited, if the whole endeavor was ill fated.

Then I watched the film.

Loosely based on the life and death of French film producer Humbert Balsan, The Father of My Children’s central character is an independent film company manned by debt-ridden producer Grégoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing). At its start, Canvel is a blur of motion, juggling movies in various states of production and postproduction, investors, the bank, his gorgeous and gently understanding wife, his two young children as well as his ennui-struck teenaged daughter. But when he gets pulled over for speeding, he’s informed he’s already amassed so many traffic points that his license is revoked. Though he declares the bus is great (“I can read scripts and met someone I am going to produce!”) it’s clear that Canvel has reached a saturation point. The jig is up.

But the extent of his predicament comes in and out of focus for Canvel, who, like all of the most daring and important producers, leads his professional life only one step ahead of total, unrectifiable chaos. He continues to stammer incessantly into his cell phone even though the only phrases on the other end are now “I need” and “no.” When the bank finally freezes all his accounts, he freezes as well, and his sudden stillness is scary. What comes next might be inevitable given that his very lifeblood seems to pump directly in and out of his company, but shocks nonetheless, and the second act of the film consists of his family and colleagues numbly sifting through the detritus of his company in the wake of his suicide.

This is not an easy movie. It tackles big stuff-- the biggest, really, like the precarious balance between present and future, family and work, business and art, mortality and immortality. But it breathes, nonetheless, and encourages us to do so too even in the wake of the grief it inspires us to recall in our lives. Bathed in sunlight streaming through dusty windows, Father’s depiction of independent film’s messy, demanding sprawl is powerfully understated. Like Canvel himself, it is so grounded in film history that it boasts a startling lightness, like the child who dares to climb the highest tree because he’s sure someone will rescue him—until one day he realizes they won’t.

I hurried to my interview with Mia Hansen-Løve, suddenly anxious to talk with the person who could create such a work. Since I was the first person scheduled to speak with her that day, everyone was still milling about in the publicist's office. Mia herself sat awkwardly, almost as an afterthought, sipping from a cup of black coffee. I sat down and quietly told her how much I liked the movie and we started from there.

What followed was the most moving conversation that I’ve ever had with a filmmaker, which is saying quite a lot since filmmakers are wonderful to talk with, as they tend to be curious about everything. We spoke of the influence of the Nouvelle Vague on her work, and of how Humbert Balsan committed suicide after he agreed to help her make her first feature. (A young male character functions as her stand-in in the film.) We spoke of the spirituality of film and filmmaking, and of how rarely it gets discussed. In fact, I found myself wishing for much more, but since Hansen-Løve had a full day of interviews still looming, I exited back into the day--- reeling, blinking madly in the bright sunlight.

A month later, I finally pulled out the tape recorder to transcribe the interview, almost afraid of reliving the conversation lest it might not prove as transcendent as I’d remembered it. But I found nothing. Nothing at all, save a mocking, barely discernable hiss.

Really, I should have known from my other line of work that this might happen. It always does whenever something steps right out of the time-space continuum. When everything else falls back and all you can hear is the sound of another person’s voice in that Winesburg, Ohio, “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other” way, electronics tend to break down. And certainly the conversation that Mia and I had took us both out of the rush of our two, otherwise divergent lives. Suffice it so say we bore witness to each other’s grief, though hers was receding and mine was yet to come.

For it was when I initially had sat down to transcribe this interview that I suddenly flashed on how much Eleanor Salotto, my first literature professor, my most important mentor, and a true friend of my heart, was going to treasure this film. The email I’d sent her recently had bounced back, and so I googled her in a mindless, mild reverie of procrastination, wondering if she’d left the Southern women’s college where she’d taught for the last decade. The first hit was a local TV spot declaring her a missing person. It took me another ten minutes before I ascertained that a body recovered from Virginia’s James River had been identified from her dental records.

I couldn’t breathe.

I knew then that my interview with Mia must have taken place during the week that her body was found, and I saw suddenly how Eleanor had woven in and out of our whole conversation, as we probed at the topic of mentors, and of how suicide exists in relation to the act of creating art, of writing, of directing.

I’ve never understood suicide. I’m a big believer that if things are so bad you’re willing to kill yourself off, you should consider what else you’d be willing to kill first—like a shitty job or a bad relationship or the part of yourself that you’ve been too afraid to change.

In fact, the only time I ever seriously considered it was in the summer of my 19th year, which resembled too closely Sylvia Plath’s19th year. That was when I realized that no matter how poorly my parents had prepared me for anything resembling life, I could no longer blame anyone but myself for whatever happened next, and promptly fell into a depression so bottomless that my doctors were convinced I had a brain tumor. It was Eleanor who saved me then. She had been my freshman English professor the year before, and when I wrote her to say I wasn’t going to return to school, she called me immediately. In her high, fluting voice, she said, “Listen, you need to come back to school and study something besides your own navel.” She went on tell me that I was going to be ok, because she was going to make sure of it.

And she did. I had my first session with the therapist she found me on the night that I returned to school, and I slowly came back to life under her tutelage, though it took me a year to be able to see colors again or sleep more than three hours at a time. Once a week she carefully phoned me and asked me the right questions, light but pointed. She taught me how to balance a checkbook and how to say thank you and, more importantly, how to say no, thank you. She taught me how to buy a dress, how to eat in a restaurant, how to look people in the eye and how to turn in a paper on time no matter how tumultuous my personal life might have been.

She’d be so cross with me if she knew that I hadn’t finished this piece three weeks after the movie had already opened in New York. When I knew her, Eleanor turned everything in on time, no matter what else was going on in her life. That was the only way to reinvent yourself, she suggested to me, and indeed when I met her family, I understood. It wasn’t that they were awful. She was actually close with her sister, though they had nothing in common but their father, who wore the vacant stare some men acquire as soon as they start their first dead-end job, and the memory of their mother, who’d died when they were far too young. But it was clear Eleanor had come from a family bound to be more alarmed than charmed by a child as inquisitive and sensitive as she must have been.

So only she could raise herself –and she did, tenderly, slowly, methodically. She worked to put herself through college and then taught young children while she studied how to live as an adult separate from her clan’s mortal coils. She was in her mid-30s when she sorted out what she wanted to be when she grew up, and started graduate school shortly after; landed her first tenure-track professor gig in her mid 40s. It was lucky that she radiated a Modigliani beauty whose timelessness made it hard to place her at any age, though it sometimes might have made her feel even more out of step with her peers. (She was 57 when she died but was widely reported as 47, which seemed entirely physically plausible.) Certainly I know it took such hard work to reinvent her wheel that she did not have the energy left to even imagine raising someone else. She was the father—and mother—of her own self as child, and all those roles for one person proved more than enough.

After I got better, I learned that the therapist she found me had also been her therapist, and that she had been saved from a depression even more gripping than the one that had possessed me. But I was young and seeking inspiration rather than fissures in the precious porcelain that was Eleanor and her old-world Italian complexion, so I focused on the implicit happy ending. All I knew was that she had gotten out, finished all the school she needed to attend, lived on her own terms with no family or man to tell her what to do. I wanted to be her when I grew up.

She inhabited lovely, well-appointed spaces decorated with small prints and pink and mauve antiques that were surprisingly luxuriant to sit upon. I adored staying with her during my school breaks, when we slept together chastely beneath her fluffy white duvet on her bed with its ornate wooden carvings. I marveled over the array of lotions and potions polished to a high sheen in her spotless bathroom and studied closely her books, her artwork, her wardrobe. For my college graduation, she cooked a lamb tagine and served me a generous glass of garnet-colored red wine in a large goblet. At my setting at her tiny, heavy table she placed a box so beautifully wrapped that I didn’t want to disturb it, though I felt immeasurable pride and pleasure when I fingered the stiff silk scarf it contained. What I remember most about that evening, though, is the tagine recipe, carefully cut out of a magazine, lined up on the kitchen counter next to another article describing the wine she’d selected for our evening. Even then, my heart filled for the little girl relishing her grown-up dream. It still does.

Over the years, we grew apart. I wanted to raise myself, finally, and it is my fervent belief that we must at least temporarily leave all our guides if we’re to absorb their teachings well enough to navigate on our own. She didn’t approve of where I’d diverged from her path, anyway. Though I loved English literature as much as she did, I’d foresworn graduate school and declared New York my university. She deemed the dramatic fits and starts I called my love life ridiculous and messy, and I suspect felt the same about my apartments-- colorful sprawls of dresses and books and odd bots on every surface, punctuated by the blur of my two sleek cats who leapt wherever and whenever they pleased. Her discomfort was more than evident when she began to stay with me on her breaks, and I found it rude.

The last time she ever stayed with me I was in the process of retiling my kitchen floor, and she declared the apartment uninhabitable. She ran up a long-distance bill that seemed huge on my yoga teacher salary, and listened to classical music too loudly on her Walkman all night in my narrow bed while I struggled to sleep. Finally I bequeathed the apartment to her entirely and didn’t creep back from my boyfriend’s until she’d already left for the airport. My cats were enraged.

Although I don’t regret the chasm that widened between myself and my parents after I finally got off their shabby couch, I regret that I could not release my petty grievances with Eleanor while she was alive. We stayed in touch, especially after she was appointed the director of a university film studies program and I became a film critic, and remained a beacon for me as a single, childless woman, but we were never close again. We slipped from that domestic intimacy into friends who met only once during her visits to New York, and then eventually stopped talking even on the phone. Once she tried to tell me how disappointed she was by the distance that had grown between us, but I responded coolly, refused to be pulled in.

Like Canvel’s filmmakers, I had made her into something she did not ask to be, and then punished her for not living up to it. Yes, she was fussy and, yes, perhaps a greater flexibility might have helped her later, when she began to find the life she’d worked so hard to achieve ultimately disappointing. But she loved me fiercely when I was at my most unlovable, and she raised me the best she could. More to the point, she saved me from myself, and it will haunt me for forever that no one, including me, saved her from herself in turn.

Though Eleanor’s had been ruled an apparent suicide, I wondered at first if it had been murder, which I found I preferred to the idea of her ending her own life. One day mid-semester, she’d simply not appeared at her classes or picked up the friend who’d flown into the local airport to visit her. I might not have seen Eleanor in years but it was inconceivable that she could've transformed so completely from the woman who always honored her commitments, especially to herself. But when I heard back from the few people whom we still knew in common, they’d confirmed a note had eventually been found.

I imagined the velvet and lace finery she must’ve left behind, the pages of notes in her round, precise cursive for her next book of critical theory, the hush of her ordered rooms, the students still living at the vulnerable precipice from which she’d rescued me, and it slayed me. A friend took me out kayaking in Red Hook’s harbor to cheer me up but I found myself shaking as the sun set on its dirty waters, imagining the will and misery required to plunge herself forever into the dark mystery of a river.

I suspect that in the end it was the work that failed Eleanor, as it failed Canvel and Balsan, for it was the work that always lived at the center of her life. Every painting she observed, every film she attended, every meal she enjoyed, every conversation that took place, even the oddly old-fashioned clothing that she managed to find no matter how modern the boutique, always came back to her own world of critical literary theory, where Hitchcock and Zola and postmodernism and the Brontes shimmered together in a hypnotic, spidery gossamer.

Only 2 percent of modern suicides are by drowning, but such deaths were more common during the 18th century, the literary period Eleanor claimed as her academic field. And when the life outside of her studies failed her, I believe she wrote herself into her work, fabricating her own death as the kind of gothic detective fiction that she had written about so cleverly for years. I can imagine her admiring the symmetry of the death, its neatness, and I both love her as the little girl building out her own life one last time, and feel desperately, violently ill.

As Canvel’s (and Balsan’s) family, friends and colleagues must have felt though for opposite reasons. It was their fate to inherit the mess of his company, which he abandoned rather than solved. It is my fate and the fate of everyone who loved Eleanor to inherit the legacy of her unexpressed anger, an anger I now realize I always sensed beneath the precision. But I wasn’t big enough to embrace that little girl who feared that if she didn’t do all her homework exactly the right way she’d lose her ticket out. Instead, I was annoyed by her. She deserved to know she was lovable not despite those qualities but because of them, as they’d helped her survive as long as she did. Instead, I think that we all let that rigidity keep us at arm’s length, even those of us who should have known better, read her better. Wrote her better.

When I watched Father of My Children I was still groggy, nursing my first coffee, combing the film for possible interview questions. Less than ideal circumstances for full surrender, and yet one instance especially caught me.

In it, Canvel and a colleague are listening to a director rant about how they’re cutting corners. After she leaves, his colleague explodes upon him as well: “I work seven hours a week. I get home at 12 am too! I’m killing myself here!” Shoulders slumped, Canvel shuffles into his office and mumbles that he’s going to take a nap, though he’s typically a man on line in every sense of that word. He falls asleep instantly, and the next shot is of a young boy from an earlier, mid-century era, playing wordlessly. For a second, we’re disoriented. Is Canvel dreaming of his lost youth? Is the film itself jumping back in time to his childhood? Then the shot widens to reveal the screen on which the image is projected, and Canvel only half-watching what must be a rough cut or dailies.

It’s a segue that distills so much. How artists invariably transform patrons into the parental figure who’s let them down, whom they scorn and rail against but petition endlessly. Of how Canvel would prefer to be the beloved child rather than the censorious, responsible parent---probably why he made film in the first place. Of how the experience of watching a film sends us back to our childhoods, when when we were still willing to suspend judgment and surrender to awe. Expected to be awed, even. When we still hoped.

And at that instant, a text comes through on the cell Canvel is idly thumbing in the dark: “Accounts frozen.”

I may not recall some of the details of this conversation with Mia Hansen-Løve but I remember the fluting voice not unlike Eleanor’s in which she struggled to communicate in English. With her colorless features and neat but unremarkable sweater, she did not seem like the French husband-stealing vixen I’d imagined though did she seem very French. More like a big thinker-- a perpetual student, in an unaffected, endearing way. I saw then that what she and Assayas shared was a serious, old-soul empathy.

I had asked her if she so frequently worked with kids because she herself had been a child actor, but she responded that it was because of the purity of intent that kids possess. This reminded me of the segue from Canvel's nap, and to my surprise I began to weep while I described the beautiful confusion that it had triggered in me.

“It made me think about how we look to be redeemed by art, especially film, and how it sometimes works but as a means, not an end,” I said through my tears and she began to weep as well, nodding, as did her translator who had seen the film only the night before.

At that moment, the publicist reminded us gently that many others were waiting to speak to Mia, and so I collected my things in a daze not unlike Canvel's, except mine was the daze borne of the joy art can help us attain. It was the joy of communion, both with others and with our true, timeless selves. Which is what, ultimately, this brilliant film is about—that connection to ourselves and between each other that art can make possible.

And what remains when what saved us becomes that which fails us most.

A New New Deal

Sat, 08 May 2010 08:08:56 GMT

Six months ago I attended an irritatingly avant-garde, interactive performance of Macbeth—and let’s just say the Cursed Play duly extended its curse to me. I jostled everything in your exoskeleton that you don't want to jostle--and since then nearly everything in my life but my address has changed. Even my haircolor.

I’m back up and running, finally. Soon I'll post something more substantive here again, as well as some links to some of my other onions. And if you have time today, please stop by the panel on documentary film criticism that I am speaking on, along with a host of estimable others. Here's the New Yorker's Richard Brody's take on it.

See you on the flip-flop, dolls.

By George

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:20:06 GMT

I have come to the entirely un-revelatory conclusion that George Clooney is the new Sydney Pollack.

Pollack came into the public eye in the ‘60s and effortlessly bridged a burgeoning counterculture movement with big-studio Hollywood; he produced, directed, acted; he worked nearly equally in TV and film and he even bridged the never-narrowed divide between European and American film, appearing in the French Fauteuils d'orchestre only two years before his 2008 death from stomach cancer. With zero fanfare, he shifted between indie and big-budget films to produce some of the best films of the last decade, including Ira Sach’s Forty Shades of Blue, Michael Clayton and the underrated Breaking and Entering, directed by the also recently deceased Anthony Minghella, with whom he exec-produced No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. And let's not forget his pivotal cameo in the last season of The Sopranos, which I prefer to pretend was his last role. (His actual last role was in the one-for-them Made of Honor.)

I cried when he died. He was my kind of tall, gravely-voiced hero: a cool nerds who was so comfortable with himself that he made you comfortable. We need more people who don’t get distracted by the us vs. them game if standards are to truly improve.

And now there’s George Clooney, with whom he often worked. True, George is distractingly, suspiciously pretty. Couple those good looks with the tics that distinguished his early acting (the lowered lid gaze; the eternal head-rolling) and it’s no wonder he once seemed the unlikeliest of candidates to take up Pollack’s mantle. He languished forever in TV: Facts of Life, Roseanne and then as Dr. Ross, the rake with the Roman haircut, in ER. (Amusingly, he also had an early stint in an ‘80s sitcom called E/R.) But late blooming lent him the complexity that those good looks never could--his real-deal clan also may have helped along those lines—and suddenly the way he worked his jaw spoke of longer, more compelling shadows.

So while he floundered in the franchise-halting Batman & Robin and painful Michelle Pfeiffer romcom, he made his celluloid name in less likely projects: the QT-written Robert Rodriguez genre-fucker From Dusk Til Dawn and in Out of Sight (to date, my favorite Steven Soderbergh movie). These days he works in TV and film; speaks both indie and big-budget; produces, directs, acts; plays nicely with both the boys and suits; wags his tail and his brows; shifts beautifully between comedy and drama; and serves as a regular player for nearly every interesting American director. He’s a secret nerd, someone who relishes roles that render him the butt of the joke, whether it’s as the wheeler-dealer who’s no longer doing either effectively, or as the handsome buffoon whose vanity keeps landing him in hot water to great comic effect. He also channels a downtrodden watchfulness in roles like Michael Clayton. But the serious side—the gravitas as opposed to aw-shuckness—emerges best when he’s behind the camera, when his only real flaw can be death-by-earnestness. And let’s not forget his politics, as in: He actually has them. Not knee-jerking grandstands, but long-tail, deeply considered values that he brings to bear in a grip of projects. Like Pollack, Clooney seems to believe in the power of the medium to not only move people but to stir them to action. Is he the best actor, producer and director around? Not yet, and he may never make the robust, nearly infallible crowd-pleasers that marked Pollack’s career. But for all the clatter that always surrounds Clooney, the breadth of his contributions still go oddly unnoticed. Along with a handful of others, he is steadily laboring to raise movies’ bar, and arguably ours in the process. He seems to hold America itself to standards that we've largely scrapped or, worse, forgotten.

And speaking of swoony Clooney, Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is so much better than I had hoped, largely because of baby George. Based on its surrounding flap—the reputed crew animosity toward their largely invisible director; the ridiculously masturbatory New Yorker profile (naturally, since Anderson shares its twee sensibility)-- I had feared it would be a self-involved jumble. It’s not. It’s clever and endearing. Stop-motion may be the ideal medium for detail-obsessed Wes, and the voice actors do a wonderful job, especially Streep, whose voice proves downright sensual separated from her hyper-gesticulation. But the real star is Clooney. Disembodied from his actual physicality, he is easier in his skin, freer to express a rakish, indeterminate sexuality that falls in step with an old-Hollywood tradition of the impossibly dashing leading male. Ahem.

The film’s only real weakness is that, even at 88 minutes, it lags near the end. Ever since Anderson started cowriting with Noah Baumbach, his films never have a decent third act. That is because Baumbach simply cannot write a good script. He can hatch a decent premise with well observed characters, but he cannot actually plot. Words I never thought i'd utter: O Owen Wilson, where art thou?

Notes From the Overgrowned

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:35:47 GMT

Or should I say Overgroaned?

Tis true: After nearly three weeks of bloggy silence I assault you right out of the gate with not one but two puns. What can I say? This is the New Deal. See Sally run.

To wit:

1. I really dug Where The Wild Things Are, even more so a month after screening it. I’ve never fancied Spike Jonze’s films before; his meta navel-gazing always seemed a squandering of his wholly original talents. But this project channels a purity that his previous ones only mourned, abjectly. It’s not really for (or explicitly not for) children so much as it is about childhood and how it never ends. How we never scrap those little-kid raw feelings so much as obscure them, developing coping mechanisms that morph us into what Sherwood Anderson called the “grotesques.” Even the occasional scenes that dragged evoked the pleasurable, painful restlessness of childhood that is never as comfortable as we remember later. The voice actors nailed it, especially raspy, tender James Gandolfini, my forever crush. And the film looked so great, though I could have done without the overkill of Karen O’s indie-cred soundtrack. I hate soundtracks more and more.

2. The Jews are back this fall. For years the only representation of actual Jewish America onscreen has been the never-ending onslaught of Holocaust flicks and Judd A(pa)toners. (That’s three, I know.) It’s enough to make a girl long for the likes of Barry Levinson, Rainman aside. But this year, not one but two films featured in NYFF culminated in a bar mitzvah: Todd Solonz’s Life During Wartime (one word: OMAR) and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, which may be their first somber movie of merit. No Country for Old Men didn’t work for me because their odds bodkins, Yiddish sensibility didn’t marry well with the sere-sky, ultimate-gentile subject matter. Here, literally on their own turf, The Brothers C bare their existentialist fangs. I’d never really considered it before, but Judaism filtered through the superficial ‘60s that made it to the Heartland defines Coen—though usually with a whiff of pre-Code Hollywood whimsy. Grim and glacial, Serious Man never equivocates as it swoops around big questions. Namely, how to secure meaning in a dank present that lacks a fairytale myth of afterlife.

3. Also. How funny that there are not one but two Jobs floating through theaters right now: Serious Man’s Jewish Job, Larry Gopnik, and the gentile Precious, who admittedly prays at the altar of pop culture rather than Christ. Job has always surfaced as a cinematic device throughout film, though he’s usually redeemed, whether it’s in It's a Wonderful Life or Scorsese’s oft-forgotten After Hours. He also typically grates, and I've trying to sort out whether Precious and Serious Man grate less because they are never really redeemed.

4. And speaking of big, unanswered questions, I have become obsessed with Swedish detective novels. It started with Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequel, and now I’ve moved onto all of the gloomy Wallander books by Henning Mankell. They’re not the most expertly plotted of mysteries; The Wire may have set the bar too high for detective fiction in all mediums. But the genre's existentialist despair, the uncompromising work ethic, the acceptance of how sad life can be when you try to live it as an adult, and the undying conviction that people can do better by each other—it's all so Swedish, so unadorned, so oddly comforting. I recommend.

My Precious

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:10:23 GMT

It’s a sign of the times—at least, my times—that I didn’t attend as many of the New York Film Festival screenings as I would have liked this year. I’d been enthralled by nearly the entire press screening schedule but welcome to another episode in New Deal Sally Wears Too Many Hats. (Other episodes: “Say It Isn’t So: Four Weeks Without Laundry” and “Suitor, Realistically I Will Call You Back Next Month.”)

So I missed the Grass entries--Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's Sweetgrass and Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass, both of which I’d anticipated hotly--and hit the big-ticket items. A mixed bag, as were the corresponding press conferences. Suffice to say I met Michael Williams, The Wire’s Omar Little, glory be, who stars in Todd Solondz’s unessential Happiness sequel. More on the festival may come later this week, but right now, I am too busy worrying over the screening of Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. My problem: how to acknowledge the problems of this film without pandering to what I view as a possibly knee-jerk dislike of it.

Let’s start with the unwieldy title. Enough of a mouthful to put off marketers had Tyler Perry and Dame Oprah herself not stepped up with financing, but necessary to distinguish this project from Push, a sci-fi thriller opening this year. Incidental or not, the nod to author Sapphire feels apt. Her book may be one of the most unforgettable, unblinking American works of literature to have been published in the last 20 years. It is also one of the most redemptive, if you can soldier through its first half.

For Sapphire doesn’t fuck around. I’ve been studying her trajectory since I majored in identity politics (not officially, but I got my degree at a women’s college in the ‘90s so you do the math). Back then, she mostly generated hot, ragged doggerel that infused a sly sexuality into such womanist anthologies as This Bridge Called My Back and put the rest of the now-defunct slam scene to shame. Then Push came out. It makes as its beginning a human subsisting in the kind of primordial ooze that only modernity can really achieve: A 16-year-old, illiterate, HIV-positive, Welfare-dependent, pregnant-with-her-second-child-from her-drug-addict-daddy, black, obese, daughter of a physically and mentally abusive invalid woman who treats her like a slave rather than kin.

Precious cannot write. She cannot read. She can barely talk. She cannot formulate even to herself what her reality is because she has been installed in an emotional and intellectual Helen Keller zone by the very people who should have rescued her. Girlfriend has no tools but her own innate humanity. But this, Sapphire reminds us, is quite a lot.

The trajectory of the book is a steady, stream-of-conscious incline in which Precious is saved by her own resources as well as by the very bureaucracy that helped imprison her. As her writing sharpens into focus, so does her soul. When her second pregnancy gets her ousted from her regular school, which has allowed her to matriculate to the 9th grade despite her illiteracy, she enrolls in an alternative GED program. Her teacher, the gorgeous lesbian Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), as well as social worker Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), gradually usher her to autonomy from her clan and to consciousness. It is a Buddhist koan in its own way, this book. It shows us how being present for and in our lives is all that is required to truly appreciate them, no matter how dour they seem.

But this is not the stuff that films are made of, even indie films—and I use the term loosely, yes. Forget about the double negative introduced by Toni Morrison’s Sula (“black and female”): Precious’ initial reality is so unremittingly dark that it is hard to imagine it translating to film accurately without a large measure of melodrama. It frontloads all its misery so convincingly that her burden becomes the reader’s burden, and then systematically, blissfully lightens it with every page. This does not exactly translate into an ideal cinematic arc, which Sapphire must have felt that as well. Word is she always resisted a film adaptation, and, upon finally signing off on this script, stepped away entirely.

So does the resulting film actually work? I am aware that many of my colleagues adamantly think not, but my answer is: mostly. Director Lee Daniels, best known for producing the wholly grim Monster’s Ball, has found the dramatic tension in Sapphire’s story by staging increasingly explosive confrontations between Precious (Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe) and her mother Mary (Mo’Nique). It helps that it’s set in 1987 Harlem, when an HIV positive diagnosis was still a death sentence and when hiphop culture still demanded something besides hypercapitalism. It helps too that Daniels has settled on a visual style that is vivid and punchy without being glib. The bright hues of that era--reds and violets and royal blues and lemons --careen at us, lightening without lessening Precious’ load. And the use of voiceover, which consists of her mumblings, proves more useful than grating (that’s twice this season counting The Informant!) as it casts the discrepancy between her internal hypervigilance and the 300-pound, small-eyed zombie seen by the world. Less compelling are the strangely pat fantasy sequences she dips into when her reality grows intolerable—when her mother goes after her, when boys in the neighborhood push her down, when she looks in the mirror. The performances themselves are extraordinary, particularly Mo’Nique’s. As the malodorious Mary, she hovers right at the edge of plausibility but, thrillingly, never jumps over that cliff.

Thus far I’m ignoring the elephant in the room. It has long been my policy to not posit or respond to other critics, and I am ashamed of my impulse to do so now. But during the screening in the Walter Reade theater, I looked around at my shrinking and shrugging colleagues and tried to recall a time I’d been more alienated from this crowd while viewing a film. Certainly not Antichrist: Watching Charlotte Gainsbourg hammer Willem Dafoe’s genitalia a tutti induced a gallows camaraderie. Maybe during Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, which I felt spoke of a once-American impulse for social-spiritual improvement that is now unapparent and unwelcome. That film invokes a similar discomfort as Precious does. I will say it bluntly: Both films require of its viewers a greater sense of context than most Americans can handle or even are capable of comprehending. We are no longer a country of generalists. We are a country of willful amnesiacs who stick to our niches and refuse to connect any dots.

Precious’ stakes are vast. To be fair, some may believe these stakes have been achieved falsely. That it suffers from the And And And Syndrome. Obesity and AIDS and illiteracy and teen pregnancy and physical abuse and incest and the lesbian plot? It just kept coming, I heard one person complain.

To a degree, it comes down to where you’ve been. Some find Precious’ plight implausible or even inconceivable. Other people who have a chance to view this film may find it just another day on the IRT. In the interest of semi-disclosure, I acknowledge that the slow-stirring violence of Mother Mary sitting on her couch, her hot-and-cold manipulation, her dark, unwelcoming house lit only by a flickering tv and her self-rationalizing anger, and the film’s overall matter-of-fact attitudes about poverty and resignation and danger, gave me a start of recognition. I identified more with Precious’ savagery than I do with most stories about families, more than I ever feel I can let on in the liberal-arts world I now inhabit. Especially now that the post-'60s guilt has lifted, we as a country seem to be expected to disavow just how horrible daily circumstances can be for many among us. Normal is a lot more relative than what makes some folks comfortable, in other words.

But there has never been anything gained from the “keeping it real” game, that battle of who has suffered more, of who legitimately can claim authority on hardship of any sort. All that matters is that some may find aspects of this film frighteningly familiar in a way very little on celluloid is to them, and others may not. And even those who can identify with aspects of Precious may find all her problems and experiences a bit much. May find this film as cheap and manipulative a bag of tricks as I find Spielberg’s.

Rest assured I’m not so earnest as to think that Sapphire, cool customer that she is, did not deliberately create a modern Job in Precious. She locked her in a place so dark that very little light could initially creep in, and then showed that even someone in that circumstance could use language and internal strength to escape into joy. As a literary device, it worked, partly because as readers we’re forced to live inside Precious so her limited self-expression is ours. She writes phonetically so that we can barely understand what she is conveying. As her writing improves, her ability to recognize and communicate her world expands and thus ours does as well. The relief granted by that process is the Buddhist principle incarnate. The coming awake.

Daniels does a good job of acknowledging Precious as Job. That the sum of her circumstances bowl over even the “institutionalized,” the people working in the system who typically think they’ve seen it all. We see it in their widened eyes and second takes. (Mariah Carey as a social worker wearing a ‘stache and a stunned expression alone may be worth the price of admission.) Even the other students in her alternative learning program, fellow Sister Outsiders, know Precious has had it bad. So to my mind, the true way to gauge whether the film works is not to determine whether her circumstances are feasible so much as whether her redemption, her coming-to and coming-out, works. Do we feel attached enough to experience relief when she comes alive? Do we believe that she has? Given what a catalog of modern woes she represents, can we find enough specificity in her redemption to care? Do we feel redeemed?

Yes, I admit I am invested enough in this story to want to give it a pass. And, like I said, my answer is mostly yes. But the reality is that when you make a film that asks so much of its viewers, you have to come correct. Hot colors, hot performances, hot music comprise a good start. But this film was bungled post-production: It bears the choppy, uneven exposition of an editor who killed the wrong babies. It is not just because I am perhaps her biggest fan that I think we see too little of Mariah. As Mrs. Weiss, she functions as an important medium between a system that fails to recognize the girl’s humanity and one that does. But the few scenes that take place between she and Precious refer to more that were clearly cut, and that absence looms large. It even undercuts the climactic confrontation between Mary, Weiss, and Precious—which in itself is edited very badly. In its final version, this scene only includes Mary’s testimony and the other two women’s response to it, but long speeches from Precious and Weiss have so obviously been omitted that you can practically glimpse the scissors. (At the NYFF press conference, Daniels acknowledged that they did make such cuts.) The result is still devastating—Mo’Nique brings it home—but fails to provide the real catharsis that Precious and we deserve at this point.

The worst I can say about this film is that it proceeds as if that catharsis has been achieved although it has not. But the best I can say about it is that somehow I did not mind. Her pain and courage had wormed its way to me despite its problematic packaging. It is a testament to the spirit of both this film individually and to the process of making a film that takes such risks that it can sprawl this far, make this much of a mess, and still generate so much good faith in at least some of its viewers. For upon its completion, I did feel redeemed. Mostly yes.

Of Drew I Sing

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:33:21 GMT

Dear Drew:

I hope it’s all right if I call you Drew. To tell you the truth, I feel like I’ve been your cigarette-sharing babysitter ever since I suffered through the intolerable cuteness of ET. At this point, it'd be tough to muster anything but a first name. So let me get down to brassy tacks here. I’ve never outright disliked you— except maybe when you threw your titties at Dave Letterman in 1995—but didn't grasp your appeal when you were younger. I had sympathy for the baby act: the tiny, raspy voice and extra-widened eyes. Clearly, you’d not been nurtured enough by your boozy, narcissistic Hollywood clan, and shedding the preciousness of the child actor is notoriously difficult. Just look at twee Natalie Portman. But I found you a bore. Then you busted out with the strange, floozy subversion of Poison Ivy. You were frizzy-haired and puffy and, well, interesting. And after that, I kept a closer watch.

You possessed strong, secret internal resources that hustled you swiftly past a bevy of ugly stages: neglected-child Drew, rehab Drew, Playboy Drew, (pre-)Paris Drew, bad-marriage Drew. You even bypassed the traditional movie-actress eating disorder and obstinately carried 10 more pounds than anyone else in your town for a while. Best, you seemed like a real girl’s girl. You had female friends, business partners, even lovers—and not solely for the camera’s pleasure. I started to view your ditziness as pure screwball dame, the highest of compliments from this New Deal Sally.

But the fact remained you were never much of a performer. Always endearing, sure, but in role after role you emitted the same sincere, soft silliness that wore thin by the end of the film. Invariably there was some moment when you had to mine a real emotion, and your face would nearly collapse from the strain. Mine too.

It was when you produced Charlie’s Angels and cast yourself as the snarly Dylan that I finally got it. You made more sense on the other side of the camera. Sure, you didn’t exert enough Hollywood power to override the layers and layers mandated to strategically cloak your normal-sized body. But as the badass in that trio, you seemed so much more at ease if still more awkward than funny. The film itself, as well as its sequel, was my kind of big, dumb studio movie--sarcastically sexy and good-naturedly game, with plenty of kickboxing and lipgloss and oddbot cameos. As for Donnie Darko, I may have loathed its meandering numbness, but I respect what foresight producing that sleeper required.

Though I didn’t know from roller derby and view Ellen Page as the worst thing to happen to indie film since Quentin Tarantino, I was curious about Whip It, your first feature. Excited, even.

It was so much better than I’d hoped. You cast it brilliantly and then coaxed strong performances from actors who, in some cases, had been phoning it in for a decade. You brought out the rarely seen warmth in Kristen Wiig; the subtle notes in the often-braying Marcia Gay Harden; a convincing redneck Daddy from nebbishy Daniel Stern. You even extracted three dimensions from the typically monotonical Ellen Page and went to town with Juliette Lewis’ hard-faced survivor streak, neatly sidestepping her indecipherable yowling. And you gave yourself, wisely, a snack-sized character role as Smashley Simpson, an elbow-jabbing hippie chick.

The storytelling took its cues from the performances, gliding between a coming-of-age story, an indie romance, an ass-kicking sports saga and a girl-girl extravaganza without faltering in pace or tone. You drew in broad strokes without devolving into caricature, mostly because the big heart we all knew you had ensured no hollow malice or hipster hollow ever snaked its way onto the screen. Sure, you still haven’t found your way when it comes to shooting action sequences; I couldn’t always tell what was actually happening in the rink. But, you managed to provide unguilty fun—such a rarity these days. (I think Elf was the last film that gave this particular kind of good time.) Also, the fact that you invited all the real-life NYC roller derby queens to rouse the critics' screenings made my experience about a million times cooler. Those chicks would make a dentist appointment a million times cooler. Imagine what they did to a room full of dour-faced men in black glasses.

Really, I just want to say, Lady Drew, that I hope you aren’t taking your opening weekend numbers to heart. I know they were not even in the ballpark of spectacular, but your movie on wheels will have legs, I promise. Long after the flat-faced, faux-feminist folly of the likes of Jennifer’s Body has been forgotten, you’ll be making movies I am relieved to watch. You done good, kid.

Yours, alliteratively,
NDS
xxx

The New Deal

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:34:45 GMT

It’s been nearly three years since I blogged about film regularly. I fell out of practice ahead of the curve, before Twitter rendered what once seemed like undigested blurts positively Odyssean. I did not shut up not because of the old adage, “If you don’t have anything nice to say…” but because of a variation on it: If you don’t have something worthy to contribute to the conversation, keep mum, mum. Not exactly pithy, but you get my point. I prize silence unless something really needs to be said and, over these last several years, what contemporary cinema has inspired in me has better suited a book report than a fully considered essay. The 100-word film reviews that comprise my bread and butter have done the trick. Quel new millennium.

Around the same time I shut up, I started Screwball Dames Sundays. My girlfriends and I would rustle up an improbable meal (think peach-sea salt salads and whiskey ice cream) and plant in front of a celluloid fast-talking broad from some other, better era. Some of us were dykes, some of us straight, but all queer for these women. O, Barbara Stanwyck! O, Rosalind Russell! O, Lauren Bacall! O, Jean Arthur! The kind of ladies whom you only find amongst European women or drag queens these days. Nothing like those pigeon-toed tabula rasas smeared instead across contemporary silver screens. Indie girl Barbie! Action star Barbie! Rom-com Barbie! MILF Barbie! Cougar Barbie! Hip hop Barbie! Thank you, doctor, but I require a stronger prescription.

The dames of yesteryear were my kind of ladies. Idiosyncratically gorgeous, each one radiated a beauty that was cultivated rather than inflicted. Not one of them were traditionally drop-dead by today’s standards-- not Bacall, once you parse out her long-lady features; not Marilyn, who’d be written off as a chubby hausfrau; not Mae West, who’d be mistaken for an actual drag queen. Nay, these women doctored up their dame personas themselves, donning crooked grins and lowered lashes and fabulous hats and skinny shimmies riding dangerous curves. And their films arranged themselves around that fact, supplying clever dialogue and snappy editing if sometimes staid cinematography.

After a month of these Sundays, I stopped referring to myself as a biologically female drag queen. How I talked, ate, laughed and wept, even how I strode down a subway platform, had felt so robustly feminine compared to what slouched around me that I’d come to feel I belonged to a different sex entirely. But the films reminded me that I was not a biological sport so much as an anachronism: a grown-up lady. I live at the top my 30s and have counted among the tall bottle blonds of this world since I was 11. I strap on tall pumps, tight skirts, and red lipstick, and am not known to suffer fools gladly. I’m that old-time broad with a wisecrack and a broken heart. Someone who earned her face—for better and worse. A woman rather than a girl in a town, a country, an era that does not embrace growing up.

And grownups are what contemporary American film lacks: the snap in the spine that you typically only find in adults, or people who actively aim to become adults. There is so little grown-up lady energy on big screens these days that the only semitalented Julia Roberts is a relative grand dame. And I’m not just talking about the actual ladies. I am talking about films with grace and wit; big brains and big hearts; forms as glorious as their function; standards; risks. Movies.

I don’t see the world I wish for -–which is what all my favorite movies have always proffered at their core--anywhere but in European film these days. I can admire a Bujalski film for its deliberate, careful work, but his characters and their small stakes, their passive-aggressive proddings masquerading as interrogatives, their underdog-as-overdog aesthetic just ain’t my thing though it prevails everywhere I look. Neither is that parade of earnest docs that don’t boast enough cinematic value to merit the large screens they’ve migrated onto from PBS and premium cable. Neither, obviously, is the muddled tyranny of the (un)proven formulas big studios keep churning out with a willful blindness.

So what’s changed? Why am I blogging, apparently at some length, now?

It’s too easy to ascribe it to what I persist in referring to as the new economy. When the bottom fell out a year ago, a spate of articles posited how a recession might positively affect art. And though those halcyon days have yet to arrive, I remain hopeful that higher stakes in real life will beget higher stakes in our films. We’ve all sobered up in the last year, realized that a theoretical daddy doesn’t loom who will bail us out of all of our financial and creative malfeasance. But have we accepted it yet? Ideally, only the filmmakers passionate enough to persist by any means necessary, old-school 40 acres and a mule style, will survive. The early-aught dilettantes fueled by cheap new technology and never-ending credit lines may now fade away. At the least, we have all been reminded that it is a privilege to make and view films.

This fall’s slate—the prospect of discovering what, if anything, has really changed--has helped to rouse me out of Greta Garboville. But the real reason this lady has stirred has very little to do with such lofty, sociological reasons. It comes down to my trip to mid-coast Maine last month. Away from the Assburglar exchanges that comprise New York social life, I climbed back to my real self for the first time in a really, really foul year. No movies, I swore. No screens of any sort. Instead, I swam in the cold, Northern sea; feasted on lobsters trapped at the end of our dock; read expertly plotted British and Swedish detective novels; flea-marketed; kayaked; cooked increasingly baroque meals; slept long and hard. At night all was quiet; no one else’s lights or chatter punctuated the black sky looming outside our windows.

'Twas wonderful.

One evening it grew cool and we could feel Fall nosing into our cottage. We pulled quilts around us on the couch after dinner and surrendered to our long-dormant television. Like a beacon, all the reds and shadows of The Godfather whooshed into the blackness of our cottage. Suddenly I was transported from Maine and the unhappiness I’d only semi-escaped to the ritualistic underworld of mid-century Manhattan and Long Island. I had forgotten just how much a movie could move you from here to a there. I was captivated, in love again. Finally.

To be clear, I still think that a lot of what's appearing on silver screens is largely not worth the 12 bucks most Americans have to pay to see it. I sometimes prefer the new genre of strong television serial introduced by the likes of HBO (and expect to see me discuss it here from time to time). I am uncomfortable with the critical chatter that falls so frequently below the belt. But alone in the dark, as Ebert would say, I realized I wanted to share where I’d been. Selfishly, I miss completing the journey films always launch. The only way I know to complete that journey is to write my way to you.