I’m beginning to think this kind of shot, with flowers in the corner foreground and landscape and/or character figures in the background is a signature shot for Miyazaki, appearing as early as Panda Kopanda from the early ’70s.
(Screencap via DVD Beaver.)
Let’s begin with the fact that I’ve never cared much for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. I’ve read it three times over the years, and I still remain cold to it. Therefore when I say that I think this new film version is a good adaptation of the novel, you should know that I’m not coming from the perspective of thinking the book is an amazing masterpiece. Part of what this means is that even though I enjoyed the film, when push came to shove it left me pretty much as cold as the book does.
This is a story about the American Dream. It’s literary, and therefore it’s a story about the ultimate emptiness of the American Dream. As you would expect from a Baz Luhrmann production, the way this is conveyed in the film is by an opulent visual design that is ultimately shown to be an illusion. I saw the 3D version, and in that form it opens flat before expanding into 3D and then halfway through the end credits lets the air out of the 3D, as it were, to return to a flat look. In between the flatness is all the spectacle you could hope for, but Luhrmann uses the spectacle to embody Fitzgerald’s ironic commentary on the American Dream. As another critic commented, he also uses 3D in a similar way to what Scorsese did in Hugo, creating a very artificial look like something out of a storybook. Here the storybook fairytale is that money can buy you class, and there is no happily-ever-after.
So I thought the film was great on a visual level, and I will probably see it again just for that. There are also some interesting interpretive adjustments. The most obvious one is in the character of Nick Carraway, who in the novel is the narrator but in the movie actually writes the book as a form of therapy. I thought this was very clever, but it doesn’t end up solving the problem of Nick, which is also ultimately the problem of Gatsby. We are supposed to admire Gatsby, as Nick does, because everything he does is for love, while everything the Buchanans do is to protect themselves and their privilege. Gatsby is the foolish, impractical American Dreamer, whose romantic idealism is a source of innocence and also the cause of his downfall. Compared to the corruption and brutality of the Buchanans, who use people and throw them away, we are supposed to prefer Gatsby’s tragic romanticism. Yet try as I might (and I love a romantic tragedy) I just cannot feel any sympathy for Gatsby, and thus Nick’s passionate love of the man makes no sense to me. They both just seem like idiots.
It does seem to me that the Gatsby of this film is an interesting stab at making the character more sympathetic. Basically Luhrmann and diCaprio make him a child. It’s as though he has never grown up emotionally, and the film communicates this in a number of ways, both behaviorally in Gatsby’s own shyness and awkwardness, verbally in Nick telling him he’s acting like a child, and visually in tying the starry dreams of the older Gatsby to the starry dreams of the child Gatsby. But all this really does in the end is make Gatsby seem pathetic. Again, there’s nothing to admire there. He’s a stunted soul who is incapable of learning from his mistakes. It doesn’t help that his criminal life is papered over, so that his innocence seems false.
These are flaws straight out of the book, which strikes me as a wish-fulfillment story for middle class Americans who like to imagine that they are morally superior to the brutal, decadent upper class. The film makes some attempt to bring forward the racial subtext that Fitzgerald hints at with his depiction of Tom Buchanan’s white supremacist ideology, but it would require far more radical revisions to really do anything with this. I wondered whether it would it would work to make the Wilsons a black couple, but I think it would be very tricky and would make the moral hypocrisy even more transparent. Maybe the film is doing well just to suggest the limitations of Fitzgerald’s racial awareness.
Luhrmann’s adaptation struck me as clearly superior to the 1974 Redford-Farrow film on just about every level except possibly the interpretation of Daisy Buchanan, who seems here more sympathetic and less selfish. Or maybe Mia Farrow is just a better, sharper actress than Carey Mulligan. In any event, I also thought The Great Gatsby was a better film than Luhrmann’s previous effort, Australia (2008), but not quite up to the level of his first three films. Whether that’s the result of flaws in the film or my antipathy to the novel is hard to say. I still recommend it and will be seeing it again myself. If nothing else, it’s a fun story to argue with.
I’m probably outing myself as some kind of superhero fake-fan by confessing that this was one of my favorite superhero movies in a long time. I liked it better than the other two Iron Man movies. I liked it better than The Avengers. I certainly liked it better than any of the Dark Knight movies. Maybe the only recent superhero movie I enjoyed this much was X-Men: First Class, but I think I liked this one better than that too.
Now, it’s not because I think Iron Man 3 is a great movie. I really am not a big fan of superhero movies — or of superhero comics, for that matter — so I come to this with low expectations. All I was expecting to see was big screen spectacle, massive CG action sequences, giant explosions, etc. It’s got all that, and it’s well done, too. But what really won me over on this one is that it didn’t take itself too seriously. The first two Iron Man movies had a nice sense of humor, but I found this one utterly hilarious. Robert Downey Jr is given a steady stream of wisecracks and pratfalls, and he goes to town with them. Director and co-writer Shane Black, who worked with Downey on the superlative Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, does a great job of showing us the wounded psyche beneath the non-stop jokes, but he doesn’t overdo it. In fact, he makes the post-Avengers PTSD that Stark is suffering funny too. This skates on the edge of bad taste or glibness, but it gives the humor a sharp energy too. Meanwhile the other great comic performance in the film cannot be discussed without spoilers, but let’s just say it comes out of left field — or out of the bathroom, actually, and boy is it a stinker.
It must be said that as far as the plot and themes and character development go there’s not much here, or at least it’s all pretty standard. But superhero movies tend to be pretty formulaic anyway. Most of them depend on epic action and emotional melodrama to sell the story, but this one sells all that with almost pure comedy. The comedy isn’t as black as it is in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but it still embraces the essential absurdity of the superhero (and supervillain) world even while embracing the romantic heroism on the surface. Maybe it’s this contradiction that I found so enjoyable, despite the formulaic elements. It shows us the smoke and mirrors backstage, but somehow that only makes the blood and thunder within the proscenium more spectacular.
Jeff Nichols’ follow-up to his apocalyptic Take Shelter has a lot of interesting elements, but I ended up finding it less than the sum of its parts. The story begins with two Arkansas boys taking a motorboat to an island in the Mississippi, where they find a bigger boat up in a tree. This is boy’s adventure paradise, except it turns out that somebody is living in the treed boat. This is Mud (Matthew McConaughey), who is hiding out on the island for mysterious reasons. He enlists the help of the boys, Ellis and Neckbone.
It’s really Ellis’ story. It’s a coming-of-age story of sorts, but melded with other genres, including romance and thriller. One of the problems I had with the film is that I didn’t think Nichols had a very sure hand as he moved between genres. Everything felt curiously flat, with the romance not very romantic and the thriller not very thrilling. What keeps it going is a fine sense of humor and an interesting cast of characters, as well as a strong sense of location in the backwater Arkansas town and its riverside poverty row.
In thinking about why I ultimately felt dissatisfied with the movie, one thing that sticks out is the characterization of women. The three main women in the film are Ellis’ mother, Mary Lee, who is unhappy with her marriage and wanting a change; May Pearl, who is an older girl that Ellis falls for; and Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), who is the undeserving object of Mud’s ancient romantic yearnings. All of these women are portrayed in terms of how men feel about them, and the mother is the only one who seems to have any depth of character. The coming-of-age aspect of the story centers around Ellis learning that women can break your heart, but, you know, life goes on. The sense that this is some kind of secret, hard-earned wisdom amongst men seemed pretty alien to this old bachelor.
Well, the theater where I saw this was packed, and the crowd seemed to be into it, so maybe I’m out of step on this one. The story certainly had its meandering pleasures (Michael Shannon as Neckbone’s weird, womanizing, pearl-diving uncle was a treat), but it just didn’t cohere for me. (Insert “muddy” pun here.)
I’ve only seen one other film by Terrence Malick, The New World (2005), which I watched on DVD in the past year or so, sometime after The Tree of Life (2011) came out. I liked it well enough that I decided to try more Malick, and so I saw To the Wonder yesterday. I didn’t like To the Wonder as much as The New World, but I’m not sure why exactly. It may be because To the Wonder is actually less of a fantasy and more a document of a world in crisis, even if calling such a dreamy film a document is a bit of a stretch. It’s quite possible I just found Oklahoma less interesting to look at than Virginia.
Toward the end of To the Wonder I decided that it was a melodrama, albeit a very arty, oblique melodrama. It’s about the failure of love and the failure of faith, but it’s also about the persistent wonder of the world in the face of such failures. The central story is about the romance of the European Marina (the abnormally beautiful Olga Kurylenko) and the American Neil (a stolid, opaque Ben Affleck). They meet and court in Paris, and Neil brings Marina and her young daughter, Tatiana, back to his home in Oklahoma. The relationship fails, and Marina and Tatiana return to Paris. Neil has a fling with an old friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams), but he eventually asks Marina to return sans Tatiana. They get married, but their relationship immediately hits the rocks again.
Interwoven with this main story is not so much a story but a thread about a Catholic priest played by Javier Bardem who is having a crisis of faith while counseling others, such as Marina and Neil, through their life problems. Much of the spoken word in this film is internal monologue by Marina reflecting on her romantic yearning and crisis and internal monologue by Father Quintana reflecting on his spiritual yearning and crisis. We also see Father Quintana ministering to the downtrodden in the poorest parts of town and in prison. This aspect of the film seems to connect with Neil’s job as some kind of environmental inspector who tests soil and water around construction and industrial sites that are polluting the areas where the poorest people live.
The film is most effective in the way it communicates non-verbally through color and composition and juxtaposition, but the relentlessly stylized acting (or moody posing, as the case may be) does seem a bit ridiculous after a while. (Shades of Upstream Color, which has indeed been described as Malickian by some critics.) I was reminded several times of Scott Eyman’s immortal comment regarding Mary Pickford’s The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917): “Too much dancing here.” Marina is characterized by almost constant dancing and twirling, which is apparently supposed to communicate her joie de vivre. Well, a little bit of that goes a long way, and a lot of it goes much too far. Still, as much as I thought Rachel McAdams was completely miscast as a ranch wife, the use of color in her outfits to communicate her character’s evolving feelings for Neil reaches a beautiful apotheosis when she dons a red dress at the climax of their passion for each other.
I guess I would say that the film skates the fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, falling to either side more than once. The most moving moment for me was late in the film when Marina touches Neil’s hair in a tender gesture of paradoxical absolution. Marina is the key character in the film, and I suppose she’s intended to be a mythic, unreal figure — a goddess or an earth spirit or a nymph. Another great image is one of the final ones, as she licks raindrops off the buds of a tree. She is sensual and erotic and warm, perhaps with a bit of Molly Bloom in her, while Neil is aloof and enigmatic and cold, perhaps befitting the elusive, borderline abusive beloved.
Ah well, any film that uses a long section from Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Articus (the migrating geese movement) can’t be all bad. I came away with mixed feelings, but more positive in the end than what I ended up feeling for the similarly arty, fragmentary Upstream Color. I hope it wasn’t just because of Olga Kurylenko’s improbable beauty looming large and pouty on the big screen. No, I prefer to think it’s that Malick resolves his film not on an improbable escape from the cycles of suffering and crisis, but on moments of grace and forgiveness within this mortal coil.
Well, I guess my feelings about this film are see-sawing at this point, although I was feeling decidedly negative about it when I went to bed last night. (I chuckled sympathetically at the subject-line of one IMDB review: “Tedious, pretentious and utterly exhausting”.) Upstream Color was made by Shane Carruth, who directed it, wrote it, shot it, edited it, composed the music, and plays one of the main characters. It arrives in the theaters with a certain amount of buzz, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about his first film, Primer (2004), too. It feels very personal, perhaps too personal.
It’s kind of an anti-story, but what is the story it’s struggling against? The science fictional aspect is about a worm that apparently produces a psychotropic substance that allows one person to control another or maybe synchronize their actions with another. This is not explained or discussed or theorized about, so it feels more like a fantasy or work of magical realism than science fiction. Over the course of the film we do see something like a life cycle for these worms, but again nothing is explained and what we see doesn’t actually seem to make a lot of sense when you think about it. Not logical sense anyway. It’s more like a dream or a nightmare.
The story is told in an extremely oblique, elliptical, scattered way. We start off following a guy who collects the worms and who eventually kidnaps a woman named Kris and uses the worms on her. After that we mostly follow Kris as she wanders around in a daze following this harrowing, horrific experience, eventually connecting with a guy named Jeff (Carruth) who has problems of his own that we only slowly learn about. Interspersed with their love story are scenes involving a pig farmer who plays a part in the life cycle of the worms and who also records experimental music.
Dialogue is fragmentary, repetitive, sparse. The flow of images is also fragmentary, mixing bits from different points of time and seeming to mix bits from alternate realities too, or different versions of the story. There’s a strong sense of dread, paranoia, schizophrenia. There’s a strong sense that it’s all about to make sense, but the meaning never quite arrives. At the same time there does seem to be a throughline to the story, and it even has something like a happy ending. Perhaps it makes sense on its own terms, but my initial feeling was that its own terms are ultimately so private and introverted as to be essentially empty.
The paranoid feeling of dread it engenders reminded me at times of Take Shelter (2011), but oddly enough Upstream Color is ultimately less ambiguous than Take Shelter. In terms of visual style and anti-storytelling it also reminded me at times of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), with its genre story chopped up and swirled around into an enigmatic, repetitive melange, except Marienbad never reveals any kind of narrative throughline. It also reminded me at times of Vanishing Waves (2012), with its story of troubled souls struggling to make a connection with each other in a oblique science fictional setting, but Vanishing Waves was less reticent and more emotionally generous. In terms of my frustration with it, I was also reminded of Meek’s Cut0ff (2010), where the attempt at existential profundity struck me as sophomoric. Just keep hitting us over the head with Thoreau’s Walden, Mr. Carruth, and I’m sure we’ll eventually see the light of your brilliance.
Yet like Meek’s Cutoff there were aspects of Upstream Color that I liked, including the sound design and some of the tantalizing scenes that suggest meaning on the horizon. There’s one sequence where the two lovers argue in repetitive, shifting fragments about whether a childhood memory is hers or his. There seems to be real confusion on the point, possibly because the worms cause a psychological synchronization in which two minds become one, but it also feels like a genuine lover’s quarrel that has a playful, bickering side to it. It’s a nicely human moment that also seems to have larger implications. There are other sequences like this that I found very intriguing. Too often, however, it seemed like a morose, turgid slog through somebody’s very personal, internalized confusion, flailing in the direction of meaning and completely lacking in poetic transmutation.
The surge of contemporary silent films continues with this Spanish adaptation of the Snow White story. Once again, however, it seems to be set in the era of silent films, which is an odd aspect of this modern movement. Director Pablo Berger adapts the fairy tale within the world of bullfighting and toreadors, which disguises the nature of the story at first (at least if we don’t know what “blancanieves” means in Spanish). The great toreador Antonio Villalta is seriously gored by a bull, and his distraught wife, Carmen, dies as she gives birth to their daughter. Antonio’s beautiful nurse, Encarna, becomes the evil stepmother.
The first half of the film is better than the second, although the whole thing is thoroughly delightful as a visual exercise. The music by Alfonso Vilallonga is also great, channeling Debussy in his Iberian mode. The lighting is utterly magical, and the black and white images and compositions are constantly striking. Berger uses very few intertitles, communicating as much as possible via images alone. The girl who plays the young Blancanieves is a real charmer, and the rooster, Pepe, who is her best friend is a strong character in his own right. It’s interesting that the most prominent character in the poster is Maribel Verdú as the evil Encarna, which seems to acknowledge that once Macarena Garcia shows up as the adult Blancanieves, the show loses some steam.
That said, the second half of the film does ring some interesting changes on the fairy tale, with Blancanieves finding refuge with a band of dwarf toreadors. I thought the ending was particularly compelling, with a genuine aura of melancholy and a hint of Tod Browning grotesquerie.
Mostly, however, I recommend this as a gorgeous work of silent film-making. I hope these productions will branch out into color and different eras and styles, but as an homage to the silent era, this is beautiful stuff. That the story is also poignant and funny and sweet and dark is just icing on the cake.
I’ve now seen seven of Shelagh’s Intense, Low-Fi Top Films of 2012, and I’ve gotta say hers is turning out to be a great list. I just bumped Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial to the top of my Netflix queue.
Like all right-thinking people I’ve reread this book in anticipation of the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation that’s coming out this year. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it twice before, but it has never made any lasting impression on me, perhaps because the copy I have (which I bought used in college) is randomly marked with inane underlinings and marginal notes. Or maybe I always get confused by the non-linear way that Fitzgerald tells the story, weaving back and forth in time to create a portrait of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan that never seems to add up to anything for me.
I suppose the fascination of Gatsby is that he’s that great American type: a con man. A pretender. Like Alien in Spring Breakers he became a gangster to drag himself up from nowhere by his bootstraps and is living the American Dream, although Alien doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is, unlike Gatsby. But that’s almost by-the-way to the novel, in which Gatsby’s past is revealed in inert flashbacks that don’t have much drama, while what sizzles and pops is the fantasy life he creates in his Long Island mansion and in his dream of love with Daisy.
In the end we learn that all of Gatsby’s pretense is about winning Daisy’s love, and the irony of the novel is that Daisy is entirely unworthy of Gatsby’s obsession with her. Daisy and her husband Tom represent the worst of America: upper class parasites living numb, loveless lives and destroying everybody in their path, including Tom’s lower class mistress, Myrtle Wilson, and her hapless husband. Gatsby believes that Daisy really loves only him, but he is delusional on that point, just as he’s delusional about the idea that by becoming rich he can join her social class. His pathetic delusions kill him. The Buchanans, who conspire to and commit actual murder, escape to continue their empty, loveless lives.
Probably the main reason I’ve never connected with this story is that Gatsby seems like such an idiot to me, and of course the Buchanans are hateful. Why should I care about any of them? The key figure in this regard seems to be the ambiguous figure of Nick, who narrates the story. Nick is an upper middle class young man who, following service in World War I, feels dislocated from the quiet life in the Midwest, where he grew up, so he moves to the more exciting environs of New York to try to make his own way, albeit bankrolled for a year by his father. He’s fleeing a relationship that everybody assumed would become a marriage, and soon he is embroiled in a romance with the famous golf player, Jordan Baker, who is a friend of Daisy’s and just as jaded and amoral as she is.
Nick is the audience surrogate, even as he’s an author surrogate. His judgment on these characters is a guide to ours, and ultimately his allegiance is with Gatsby rather than with his cousin Daisy. This is a problem for me, because I don’t find Gatsby any more admirable than Daisy, but for Nick Gatsby’s foolish, self-destructive romanticism is admirable because it isn’t corrupt and selfish, unlike the behavior of the Buchanans and Jordan. When Nick rejects Jordan after Gatsby’s death, this is the resolution of the drama. He is siding with the uncorrupt and unselfish and returning to the honest land of the Midwest.
So I’ve finally pieced this all together by thinking about it, but I’ve still never felt it in my bones. I’ve never really felt Gatsby’s drive to win Daisy, and thus I’ve never felt Nick’s torn fascination with Gatsby. What works for me in the novel is the depiction of desperate fun in the Jazz Age — a term coined by Fitzgerald. The party in the New York apartment that Tom and Myrtle throw after they have sex, ending when Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose, and the big party at Gatsby’s mansion where Nick first meets Gatsby, who recognizes him as a fellow soldier, are the best parts of the book for me. The sense that social class matters more than money still has a powerful bite. As a romantic tragedy, however, it feels inert to me. Maybe Baz will finally make me feel the sorrow behind Gatsby’s tragic delusion.
