Ill-Informed Gadfly

The hero of Michel Gondry’s “The Science of Sleep” is a shy, eccentric artist who struggles to differentiate dream from reality. Yet the movie encompasses much more than the hero’s kooky headspace. Gondry has created a vivid and beautiful film that should resonate with anyone who’s ever tried in dreamland to smooth out the waking world’s disappointments. Gondry’s previous movies, “Human Nature” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” sometimes lacked a human touch. Not so here. Gael Garcia Bernal as Stephane and Charlotte Gainsbourg as his next-door-neighbor, Stephanie, balance childlike enthusiasm with adult neuroses to create a potential love match worth rooting for. As their names suggest, Stephane and Stephanie are too much alike. When they’re working together on a whimsical art project, their chemistry is off the charts. But the rest of the time, they’re awkward, hostile and confused. “The Science of Sleep” is wondrous when it captures the excitement of collaborative art and stinging when it explores the emotional violence we sometimes inflict on those we love. At first, Stephane complains that he can’t dream about Stephanie, but she slowly gains prominence in his dreamscapes, suggesting his growing affection for her. Gondry’s handmade visual effects are confident and seductive, and he gets the little details right, like the way physical space is altered in dreams. “The Science of Sleep” unspools like a funny and poignant dream you don’t want to wake up from.

LISTEN: The Science of Sleep

For a longer essay about the movie … Read the rest of this entry »

Aspiring filmmakers, take note: If you want to see a director make all the wrong choices, check out Steven Zaillian’s epic botch job on “All the King’s Men.” In Zaillian’s ham hands, Robert Penn Warren’s fictionalized portrait of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long is less a cautionary tale about corruption in politics than a lugubrious and stultifying soap opera about the impotent ruling class. Zaillian isn’t interested in dramatizing the journey of well-intentioned hick Willie Stark from small-town patsy to fearsome political boss; he takes that for granted. We get next to nothing of Stark’s domestic life, which supplied the superb 1949 version of “All the King’s Men” with much of its grit and heartbreak. Zaillian would rather plumb the psychology of the gone-to-seed aristocrats in Stark’s orbit. Stark pops up almost at random to bloviate, paying lip service to what should be the heart of “All the King’s Men”: the tension between his honest desire to help the poor and his enthusiastic absorption into a corrupt system. Zaillian doesn’t care about the poor, and he never creates a lifelike milieu – even the extras are unconvincing. He’d rather watch earnestly as his opulent cast – Sean Penn, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo and James Gandolfini – speaks his overheated dialogue as if for posterity. This acting equivalent of murderer’s row offers little more than broad gestures and ersatz Southern accents. Led by a flailing director who doesn’t have a clue what his movie should be about, they’re as helpless as amateurs.

LISTEN: All the King’s Men

My buddy James and I like to joke about how while most actresses have no-nudity clauses in their contracts, Kate Winslet has a nudity clause. She is required to appear naked. (Ewan McGregor has one too.) If you don’t believe me, rent “Hamlet,” “Titanic,” “Hideous Kinky,” “Holy Smoke,” “Quills” or “Iris.” And has anyone seen “Jude”? I haven’t, but I wouldn’t rule anything out.

Anyway, I read something a while back (perhaps when the movie was supposed to be released last December) in which Winslet, now a mother of two, pledged that “All the King’s Men” would contain her final nude scene. Of course, it doesn’t really count because it’s so demure. You don’t really see anything, as if that matters in Winslet’s case. David Mamet jokes about this phenomenon in his movie “State and Main.” The star of the movie within the movie (Sarah Jessica Parker) doesn’t want to appear topless. The problem is solved when the filmmakers realize she doesn’t need to: “You could draw them from memory!”

I say all this not to mock Winslet. She’s a phenomenal actor, and when she bares all it’s never gratuitous. It’s just liberated and honest. Hell, she even projects a healthy body image: In none of these scenes does she look emaciated. As Joan Rivers joked before the “Titanic” Oscars: “Leonardo DiCaprio weighs less than Kate Winslet’s arm.” That’s cruel, sure, but I think Rivers was poking more fun at Hollywood’s absurd standards of beauty than at Winslet. She’s always looked gorgeous, and I don’t think Rivers would dispute that.

And because Winslet looks like a woman you might actually encounter somewhere on Earth, she’s able to project a matter-of-fact sensuality. I just hope that element doesn’t melt away as she enters the next phase of her career. Certainly “All the King’s Men” was a misstep. If you want to make Winslet look plain, cast her as an idealized Southern belle and bathe her in gauzy light. It doesn’t flatter her. Unadorned, she’s beautiful; dolled-up, she looks like she’s trying too hard. Plus, her accent and characterization are flaccid. I blame the director, Steven Zaillian, more than I blame Winslet, but I hope she doesn’t continue to choose misguided prestige projects like this now that her wild days are over. I would lump “Finding Neverland” in that category too: Who wants to watch an adventurous actor like Winslet coughing up blood into a hankie because she’s dying of the consumption?

There’s more Kate to come this year. She plays a suburban temptress in “Little Children,” although the sex is likely to be tasteful, with Todd Field (”In the Bedroom”) behind the camera. If the movie clicks (and early buzz is positive) she’s likely to score her fifth Oscar nomination — at age 31! She deserved every single one of them, perhaps no more so than for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” considering how sketchily written her character was. Only Winslet could make Clementine Kruczynski indelible.

She’ll also appear this December in “The Holiday,” the latest frothy (and inevitably clumsy and endless) romantic comedy from Nancy Meyers (”Something’s Gotta Give”). She plays an English country lass who switches houses with L.A. glitzer Cameron Diaz. And she gets to fall in love with Jack Black, which I really look forward to. He can be a camera hog, sure, but he’s also a generous and empathetic actor — he’ll bask in her radiance. In a way, I’m looking forward to “The Holiday” more than “Little Children” because it will allow Winslet to be loose and relaxed. She’s an effortless, instinctual performer, and she doesn’t need potted-up melodrama or period cliches to display her gifts. Just let her behave and react, you know, like people do, and she’ll be wondrous.

Christopher Guest ought to sue for plagiarism. Not only does British filmmaker Debbi Isitt crib his mixture of loose, improvisational scenes and documentary-style confessionals, she also rips off the let’s-put-on-a-show structure of Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show” and “A Mighty Wind.” Isitt follows three couples picked by a glossy wedding magazine to compete for the most original wedding of the year. Only one of the three couples actually seems right for each other — they want a wedding inspired by Busby Berkeley musicals, even though the bride is tone deaf. The others — a tennis-obsessed yob and his Canadian partner, and a naturist and his less clothing-averse fiancee — are divorces waiting to happen. “Confetti” gets chuckles along the way and some solid improvisational work from the likes of Martin Freeman (Britain’s “The Office”), as the male half of the musical couple, and comedian Jimmy Carr as the magazine’s blithe, irresponsible publisher. (”Not everyone wants to ruin their wedding with a gimmick,” he muses. “Some do.”) But the movie often feels strained and wan. You may despair at the pace at which title cards announce how many weeks are remaining until the big weddings. Then, once the big day arrives, Isitt tries too hard to send audiences out with smiles on their faces, undercutting the movie’s mild satirical bite.

An affecting character study of a troubled, drug-addicted inner-city teacher, “Half Nelson” is also a bracing examination of the sad state of American leftist politics. Director Ryan Fleck and his co-screenwriter, Anna Boden, are sympathetic but clear-eyed about the left’s struggles to reassert its relevance. “Half Nelson” takes place at the messy crossroads between idealism and real life.

Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is an energetic, charismatic social studies teacher who’s ballsy enough to teach dialectical theory to eighth-graders — and talented enough to pull it off. He also coaches the girls’ basketball team. (Dan is white; his students are mostly black; Brooklyn is the setting.) But if teaching is the noblest profession it’s also the one of the most draining. All educators need to blow off steam. Dan’s favorite method is to snort cocaine, drink whiskey and have sex with strangers. It’s not just a dangerous recreation: Dan is an addict, and when he doesn’t have enough money for his usual eight-ball of blow, he buys “the other shit,” i.e. crack. And one of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps), catches him smoking it in the locker room. Whoops.

Thus begins a delicate push-and-pull between teacher and student, who fumble toward something resembling friendship even as each realizes the dangers involved. Meanwhile, Drey starts getting attention from Frank (Anthony Mackie), the neighborhood drug dealer who put Drey’s older brother in prison (he worked for Frank and refused to rat him out). Frank begins looking out for Drey, giving her money and candy, cheering for her at a basketball game. Dan, who knows a dealer when he sees one, is openly hostile to Frank and tries to keep Drey away from her. Meanwhile, Drey, who is 13, tells her overworked paramedic mom that she doesn’t need to worry about her. She’ll figure out herself whether her associations with these men put her in danger.

“Half Nelson” doesn’t just pay lip service to dialectical theory. It builds it into the structure. Thesis: Dan. Antithesis: Frank. Synthesis? That’s up to Drey. And yet the movie never gets bogged down or precious. It always feels real.

Fleck and Boden have a superb ear for dialogue. Dan uses street slang just often enough and just confidently enough that his students can relate to him and still take him seriously. Gosling is brilliant in the role. He never overdoes the junkie tics. Most of the time, he can function just fine. And even when he’s strung out and working on no sleep, he can still catch a student copying another’s test. Gosling has a quiet, piercing charisma. You understand why women are drawn to him despite, or sometimes because of, his sloppy-hipster appearance.

Dan’s confrontation with Frank is a marvel. He warns Frank to stay away from Drey while making palpable the burden of what they both know: that he can’t claim the moral high ground because he buys what Frank sells. In a lesser movie, this scene would end in violence, but Fleck and Boden take it in a peaceful but sad direction. Gosling imbues Dan with hope and frustration, idealism and anger, self-confidence and self-pity.

The frustration often emerges when Dan is trying to reconcile his left-wing politics with contemporary reality. He refers to an infamous University of Maryland study indicating that nearly 75 percent of President Bush’s supporters still believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Iraq had ties to al-Qaida, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. “What are we supposed to do about that?” he asks, expressing the left’s impotence at counteracting the right-wing propaganda machine. When Isabel (Monique Gabriela Curnen), a fellow teacher who has spent the night with him, sees several leftist treatises on Dan’s bookshelves, she asks him if he’s a communist. It’s not an accusation — she’s merely intrigued. But Dan reacts with hostility, treating her coldly.

Another key scene finds Dan at home with his family. His parents are alcoholic ex-hippies who have long since drowned their idealism. They’re casually dismissive of Dan’s work, and his dad, after a huge glass of whiskey, lets fly with his latent racism. The evening sends Dan into a despairing tailspin that ends with an excruciating encounter in Isabel’s apartment, beginning when he knocks on her door and announces, “I am not now … nor have I ever been … a communist.”

“Half Nelson” is a work of fierce intelligence and emotional truth. It’s important but not self-important, because the story and characters are so much more than mouthpieces for the movie’s worthy ideas.

Brian De Palma delivers his usual complement of sordid sex and stylized ultraviolence in “The Black Dahlia,” but without the passion and lucidity that characterize his best work. The material seems perfect for the underappreciated auteur of “Blow Out” and “Dressed to Kill”: the bizarre and horrific slaying of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short in 1947 Hollywood. De Palma breezes through some of his favorite themes: doppelgangers, mutilation and obsessions that drive decent men to ruin. But he gets bogged down by a script that can’t streamline its convoluted source material – James Ellroy’s speculative novel. Ellroy clearly wasn’t writing for a movie audience when he decided to give nearly identical last names – Bleichert and Blanchard – to the two cops investigating the Dahlia case. The detectives, played by Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart, are former boxers who return to the ring to slug each other in a publicity stunt that earns them plum assignments on the LAPD’s warrant task force. None of this backstory is relevant to Short’s murder, but De Palma dutifully plows through it anyway – aided by a pedestrian voice-over from Hartnett. For all I know, Ellroy’s novel had a Dickensian richness of detail, but it makes for an overstuffed movie. De Palma is a master of sophisticated genre films: lurid, ironic, visually daring thrillers that add up to more than the sum of their parts. “The Black Dahlia” has so many parts it would require advanced calculus to put them together.

LISTEN: The Black Dahlia

I can’t imagine this movie being made in any decade but the 70s, when Hollywood’s appetite for conventional heroism was at its lowest ebb. Richard Lester’s 1976 movie explodes the Robin Hood myth. The pitch should have been simple enough: “Robin Hood and Maid Marian get old.” In Lester’s hands, the gimmicky concept becomes an adult, melancholy study of aging and the fallacy of glory on the battlefield. It’s like a Robin Hood movie directed by Robert Altman, although Lester has a greater affinity for action sequences and casts A-list movie stars (Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn) instead of actors’ actors.

Lester begins with a jarring and unnerving montage, straight out of Eisenstein: a vulture’s head, fresh fruit, rotten fruit, a cross blocking the sun’s rays, an elderly man with an empty eye socket. We are clearly not in a fairy tale, but instead in some dusty no-man’s land somewhere between Britain and Jerusalem. Robin (Connery) and Little John (Nicol Williamson) have been fighting the First Crusade with King Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris) for 10 years, and are fed up with warfare. The king, who long ago lost his moral compass, has ordered them to sack the castle occupied by the one-eyed elderly man, women and children. They refuse. Richard, played by Harris with a frightening casual insouciance, leads the attack himself and throws them in jail. But he gets an arrow in the neck for his trouble, and while the wound appears superficial (he pulls it out himself), a couple days later he’s dead.

That frees up Robin and John to return to Sherwood Forest. The more things change, the more things stay the same: The Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw) is still in charge, sapping the populace of its strength with his draconian taxes. But Marian (Hepburn), abandoned by Robin decades earlier, is no longer holding a candle, unless she’s kneeling in prayer: She’s joined a convent. And the sheriff is about to haul her off to jail, leading to a renewal of his old battle with Robin and a rekindling of the flame between Robin and Marian.

Although he takes some liberties, Lester is committed to showing a more plausible early-medieval milieu than any previous Robin Hood chronicler. The people are dusty and dirty, and they live hardscrabble, death-haunted lives. Robin and John, both past 40, know they’re on borrowed time, life expectancy-wise. No men-in-tights elegance here: Their first big caper, involving the scaling of a castle wall, is a test of endurance. Can they get up there without falling? Can they keep swinging heavy swords in suffocating armor? They fare better than men their age should, but Lester doesn’t cut them many breaks. There’s a sweet moment later when Marian takes off Robin’s shirt and sees all his scars — then reveals her own, from a suicide attempt after his departure.

While Hepburn has left her Holly Golightly days behind, she has a perpetual girlishness that radiates from beneath her nun’s habit. And Connery is wonderful: relaxed, virile and self-possessed. Both of them command the screen effortlessly. And Shaw makes a sly, languid sheriff, one who knows he can’t defeat Robin unless it’s on his own terms. Otherwise, it’s not worth trying.

“Robin and Marian,” with its lovely orchestral score by John Barry, manages to be both romantic and skeptical. Lester pulls off a similar mixture of tones in “Superman II”: He’s a director confident enough to throw everything into the stew. He balances movie-movie grandeur with psychological complexity. Only at the absurd, existential finale can he be accused of overreaching.

This is an elegant, sophisticated actioner with a rock-solid premise: An undercover cop infiltrates a crime gang, a gangster infiltrates the cops, and each seeks to discover the other’s identity. Co-directors Andrew Lau (who also stars as the gangster-cop) and Alan Mak stage their existential thriller against a bleak and unforgiving Hong Kong, much like the L.A. of Michael Mann’s “Heat” — a major visual and thematic influence. While “Infernal Affairs” (2002) has some operatic qualities, by and large it’s efficient and restrained. Lau and the great Tony Leung (the cop-gangster) perform in the same clipped, businesslike style. The story has a ruthless momentum, quickly establishing how each man began to infiltrate the other’s organization 10 years earlier before moving to the present. The scenes with their respective love interests are a bit sugary for American tastes, but the movie never loses its hard edges.

UPDATE: Before I saw “The Departed,” Martin Scorsese’s big-budget remake of “Infernal Affairs,” I thought Scorsese would have trouble capturing Lau’s austere emotional palette. I shouldn’t have worried. Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan made “The Departed” their own by infusing it with bracing gallows humor. “The Departed” is juicier, less solemn and more fun than its source material.

Hi everyone, Ben here. I think the categories on this site have been self-explanatory, but I wanted to point out a new one I’ve added: Four Stars. It’s where you’ll find reviews of movies I absolutely love — favorites from the past and candidates for my Ten Best lists of the future. It also pleases me to mention that there will be a new entry in the Four Stars category coming soon: Michel Gondry’s “The Science of Sleep.”

Reviews that appear in the Four Stars category will continue to be posted in the three main categories for reviews: 91 Seconds on Film, New Movies and Old Movies. If anyone was confused about this point, 91 Seconds on Film includes my WNRN reviews, while New Movies consists of material written specifically for this site. So far, there has been no overlap between the two, but if I end up reviewing “The Science of Sleep” for WNRN there will be another, longer post in the New Movies category.

Ah, Bertolucci! Your fluid visual dynamism will sweep me away so long as I have eyes to watch movies. Your crane work is so elegant, your zooms and tracking moves so fast and yet so perfectly timed that they’re never jarring. Your lighting and color schemes, working with the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, are so daring and seductive. And on the rare occasion when your camera is static, your mise-en-scene is breathtakingly detailed. Your lyrical use of interior and exterior space should serve as an inspiration to any aspiring filmmaker. Like “Days of Heaven,” this is a movie I will see in the theater every time I get a chance. With “The Conformist” (1970), I have no choice, because Bertolucci is the rare great filmmaker whose ouevre remains largely unavailable on DVD. I wait patiently for the opportunity to see “1900,” “The Last Emperor” and others.

What struck me on this viewing of “The Conformist” was how Bertolucci’s exultant visual style is the entry into a defiantly quirky, tragicomic political epic. I think in my younger days, as my mind opened to the artistic possibilities of cinema, I responded most to movies with Big Ideas, which “The Conformist” certainly has — backed by a fresh, bold vision. You can’t ask for more. But now, I’ve seen so many movies (and so many bad ones) that I ask for less. I really just want to have a good time, and “The Conformist” delivers on that level, too. It is frequently very funny. I always appreciated Stefania Sandrelli’s cheeky, goofy work as Giulia, the bourgeois wife of fascist flunky Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), but I think I was never fully comfortable admitting how central she was to the movie. Clerici’s reactions to her provide the key to his frenzied, desperate and entirely unsuccessful attempts to belong in Mussolini’s Italy. If he really were the perfect fascist he says he wants to be, she would be ideal for him. The problem is, Clerici’s conformity always comes with an ironic distance. His every move is self-conscious and calculated. He’s always playing a good fascist and never being one. Giulia, sexy and docile, easily amused and intellectually vacant, remains to him what she is to us: a source of amusement. And we see the consequences of this in the epilogue, when the reality of being married to a phony for several years has drained her spirit.

What’s so smart and invigorating about “The Conformist” is what a poor conformist Clerici is. If he really were what he says he wants to be, he’d be a monster. But with his panicky, quick-footed walk and his fey poses with his handgun, how can anybody take him seriously? He’s a comic-pathetic figure, a dilettante and a coward — and an emotionally damaged one at that, as we see from his relationship with his hedonistic mother and institutionalized father. He’s also ashamed of a formative homosexual experience in his youth that he recounts, in dubious detail, to a priest. Meanwhile, his relationship with a blind fascist writer (Jose Quaglio) has a screaming gay subtext.

“The Conformist” isn’t all fun, of course. It shows the brutal efficiency of Mussolini’s secret police at rooting out “subversives,” even when the mission is led by the ineffectual Clerici. SPOILERS. This time, it seemed obvious to me that Clerici ultimately has nothing to do with the Quadris’ deaths. Instead, his handler (Gastone Moschin), disgusted by Clerici’s cowardice, circumvents him to make sure the job gets done. END SPOILERS.

In the past, I think I was so awestruck by the beauty of Dominique Sanda that I never bothered to analyze her character. She plays Anna Quadri, the wife of the anti-fascist exile (Enzo Tarascio) whom Clerici has been ordered to assassinate. Bertolucci encourages us to see her as a dreamy fantasy the way Clerici does — before Anna is introduced, Sanda appears, briefly, in two other scenes, as two different prostitutes. (The first is a brunette, the second a redhead; Anna is a blonde.) But Anna is a grounded, pragmatic character: She uses her seductiveness as a defense mechanism. When she puts the moves on Clerici and Giulia, her goal is to protect her husband by neutralizing the threat Clerici poses. If Clerici happens to fall in love with her, so be it. It’s never clear whether the Quadris have a fully functional marriage, but Anna clearly respects her much-older husband’s beliefs and knows he could be killed for them.

Damn, what a movie. It’s thrilling to have its images fresh in my mind again, and to plumb its psychological complexity. “The Conformist” is a masterpiece. In telling the tale of a buttoned-up fascist, Bertolucci celebrates creative freedom. With every lyrical flourish and weird peripheral detail, he subverts Clerici’s lockstep delusions.