Modern Suburbia

Finding Peace Outside the Big City

In that vast expanse between Mad Max nihilism and Forest Gump chocolates lies real life, in all its bone fide euphoria and unavoidable diminishment. Two recently released films—one in theatres and one on DVD; one almost feel-good, one more thoroughly bittersweet—chart that territory with admirable honesty. Even while facing brute truth—because of facing brute truth—the overall effects were strangely uplifting, a welcome departure from tidy endings and deus-ex-machina resolutions.

35 Shots of Rum starts and ends with a rice cooker. That I have been unable to get rice cookers out of my head since seeing the film is a measure of writer/director Claire Denis’s careful cobbling of props and shots to create a compelling slice of life. She chooses her words and themes just as judiciously, creating a work that is spare on dialogue (indeed, the appearance of a chatty character towards the end of the film accosts the ears) and unfreighted by political extrapolation (of which, there is plenty to contend with, but that is the purview of other films). In focusing on everydayness, the movie becomes a roomy, mindful meandering through an ensemble of very ordinary lives, lived bridge-and-tunnel distance from a big city’s dizzying enticements, opportunities, even its potential for alienation.

At the heart of this journey, fittingly enough, is Lionel (Alex Descas), a commuter train engineer who ferries souls back and forth between Paris and its less glamorous suburbs as if traversing a modern Styx. His story intersects, overlaps but never overtakes those of the other characters—his daughter Joséphine (Mati Diop), studying economics at the local college; his old flame and neighbor Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a cabdriver, also in the transport business; and the aimless penthouse dweller with the Johnny Depp squint, Noé (Grégoire Colin). Like Kieslowski’s Decalogue, 35 Shots packs lifetimes of quiet drama within the framework of an apartment building and entire passions and possibilities awaken, endure and die within those walls.

There is among these characters a finely nuanced, almost painfully civilized regard for each other (this his how we know we’re not in Hollywood), punctuated at times by intense feeling. For example, in an especially true-to-life bar scene, we are treated to an entire exegesis on romantic relationships, all through the unconscious choreography of the dance floor—the infatuated intensity of a one-night-stand, the companionable familiarity of exes, the gamesmanship of young love and the crushing devastation of unreturned adoration. Throughout the film, the intimate, consistently observant camerawork is riveting, lingering on objects, caressing shoulders and ankles, peeking into private moments.

We come to know Lionel, tangentially, through those objects and moments, and learn that his own losses have not destroyed him. His moorings are held in place by a comfort in routine—work schedules, pre-dinner drinks, domestic rituals—and a conviction that his daughter is his great accomplishment and perpetuation, both repository of the past and promise for the future. This self-assurance steels and steers him, even when tragedy hits close to home, a steady railway man through and through. He breaks that resolve on rare occasions when milestones of sufficient grandeur arise. Then and only then, life merits some all-out celebration and excess, namely those 35 shots—a release, a reward, a poetic reminder of life’s intoxicant warmth and sting.

The poetry of The Wrestler, on the other hand, can be found in Mickey Rourke’s blunt and bruised face. Though we get ringside seats to the battering, head-butting and burlesque of modern wrestling, there is no more eloquent statement on life’s violence—its toll, trials and heartache—than that bashed-and-rebuilt, survivor-to-the-last, (and here’s the kicker) gentle-under-it-all mug. Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a past-his-prime New Jersey wrestler who’s hit the skids when health issues and weariness threaten to take away his livelihood and sole source of validation. The experience forces a change; after years of tossing intimacy aside for career, Randy must tough it out some other way, abandon his quest for fame, glory and the adulation that passes for love, perhaps even re-route and right his life.

Though more than capably directed by Darren Aronofsky (of Pi and Requiem for a Dream), the plot itself is awash in cliché, from the down-and-out fighter to the estranged father-daughter relationship to the underdog’s scrabble from the depths. Instead of a prostitute, we get a stripper with a heart of gold. But the familiarity of the plot—as old as Greek myth, as predictable as a Grimm fable—is what makes it so accessible and the brilliant performances Aronofsky draws from his actors are what make it so gripping. For Rourke, Randy is the role he’s prepared all his life to play and he fleshes out the finer shades of vulnerability, haphazard desperation, thick-skinned stamina and resignation in the character. As Cassidy, Marisa Tomei re-invents the standard-issue stripper with well-developed armor of her own (both characters hide best when completely exposed), a jaded demeanor and a hint of hopefulness (she’s the one who spurs Randy toward reconciling with his daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood). She represents a lifeline for Randy, but one that is at various points too short, too tenuous or too late. Ever the self-made man, Randy performs his most courageous act outside the arena: staring down his history, owning up to his failures and forging ahead anyway.

In the end, 35 Shots of Rum and The Wrestler make a thought-provoking double-feature about the unsung bravery of facing each day and salvaging a sense of humanity from life’s occasional or accumulated wreckage. Lionel and Randy pick their way through the debris and have found different ways of accommodating it. Whether through saving or squandering, protecting or risking, merely subsisting or offering sustenance, each makes peace with his disappointments. As for finding physical and spiritual nourishment on the way, sometimes a rice cooker is just a rice cooker and sometimes it is a small salvation.

Style Over Substance

People in Glass Houses

A Single Man has several points of entry. You can view it as a visually pristine rendering of middle-class life in 1961 Los Angeles, the ordered quiet before the pending storm of social change. You can view it as a post-World War II portrait of a gay relationship, thriving in its semi-closeted way amid the presumptions and prejudices of the time. Or consider it a career-defining tour-de-force by Colin Firth, a performance made all the more powerful by its nuanced understatement. Trouble is, the movie (and the Christopher Isherwood novel on which it is based) is meant to be an inside look at the unremitting despair and derailment of a man’s life after his lover dies. Yet the sleek, impervious style of the piece keeps us at bay, so that we never quite enter the heart of the story. This is the movie’s chief failing.

George (Firth) is a middle-aged literature professor at a small southern California college. At the start of the film, he is a hollow man going through the motions, relying on habit and routine to hold his days together. Eight months prior, his lover Jim (Matthew Goode) died in a car crash and the happiness they built together is shattered, mocked by the stunning glass house, all modernity and hope for the future, that George must now inhabit alone.

We are treated to scenes of George’s vivid, companionable past (nestled on the couch with Jim and their curled-up fox terriers, like a puzzle with every piece in place) and his colorless, frustrating present (his students just stare at him blankly when he expounds on fear). His life once held many pleasures, most of them emanating from the 16-year love he shared with Jim. Now, his closest comrade-in-arms is his old friend Charley (Julianne Moore), whose own internal crisis echoes George’s. Relocated Londoners both, they’ve leaned on one another over the years and each is mourning a life that is now essentially over.

A Single Man is fashion designer Tom Ford’s first foray into feature-length film and the world he creates is as picture-perfect on the surface as any runway show, from the clean-line mid-century furnishings to the meticulously attired and coiffed characters. As juxtaposition to George’s inner turmoil, this set dressing works well enough. But Ford’s impulses often take him in cool and cold directions and so it is fortuitous and wise that he chose to work with two of the finest warm-blooded actors around. Colin Firth registers every vulnerability and defense with economy and constrained emotion, as if any release whatsoever would be his destruction. (The scene when he hears of Jim’s death is a heartbreak.) Julianne Moore is the very definition of a faded bloom, dressed and made up to vivacious perfection but lifeless inside. They bring a palpable bittersweetness to the movie that cracks its fastidious veneer.

Restraint and order are not bad stylistic choices for a story about a man whose pain lies deep. But reinforced by other distancing devices, like the unnecessary narration at the start and end of the film (when George’s gestures and expressions say everything more immediately than words ever could), claustrophobia becomes the predominant aesthetic. The story doesn’t breath and, in fact, dies a bit.

Occasionally, by serendipity or design, a rush of air enters the action and that is when the most refreshing and moving moments occur—a neighbor’s little girl introduces George to her pet scorpion; an inebriated Charley and an accommodating George rouse themselves for a last dance; George shakes his reserve and takes that midnight swim. More connections like these would have built some emotional momentum and infused the film’s ending with more impact.

Revealingly, Ford sees film as “a world that’s hermetically sealed in a bubble forever” and, while this is technically true (if one ignores re-released director’s cuts), not every movie feels hermetically sealed. It’s a definition more apt for a mausoleum than a movie. In the case of A Single Man, this containment (which permits style to reign at the expense of story) makes for a visually impeccable but emotionally dull (as opposed to dulled) experience. If Ford wants to connect with his audience, he needs to crack a window or two in that glass house, let some disorder and dirt in, give those of us outside the fashion industry something to relate to.

Scrapping History

World War II, Take 2

Never one to back away from a fight, Quentin Tarantino takes on an epic one in his latest venture, Inglourious Basterds, vanquishing the Third Reich and rewriting a prominent chapter in 20th-century history along the way. His movie re-imagines the trajectory, though not the ultimate outcome of the Second World War (the Axis still loses), using his trademark tropes of oddball manifestos, mesmerizing banter and flamboyant violence at turns barbaric and comic. Not since Mel Brooks mounted the Nazi musical “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers (1968) have we seen such a giddy, raucous romp through World War II.

In typical genre-mashing style, Tarantino opens his war movie with plaintive strains of tumbleweed music, leaving no doubt of where we are existentially—codes of honor, black hat/white hat, cowboy justice. Geographically, the scene is Occupied France, starting in 1941, and the dueling parties—black hat and white hat respectively—are the sinisterly cheerful, rumor-sniffing SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and the take-no-shit, take-no-prisoners US Army Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). A Tennessee native with unexplained rope burns around his neck, Raine leads a team of Jewish-American soldiers, those inimitable “Basterds,” in a quest for Nazi scalps.

Each of the two men loves, indeed revels in, his work and the collision course between them is accelerated by an entertaining roll-call of Tarantino creations—a chatty Nazi war hero, both bolstered and sickened by his achievements; an unflappable British undercover agent, always combining a stiff upper lip with a stiff drink; a strong, silent soldier who annihilates Nazis with brute force and a baseball bat; and a glamorous German movie star-cum-British spy. But the catalyst for the action comes in the form of the seemingly unassuming, steel-willed Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent). Cinema proprietor, femme fatale (evidence of yet another genre) and sole survivor of her family, Shosanna is a woman on a mission: to kill the Nazi high command and thereby avenge her family and end the war. A Nazi film premiere provides the perfect opportunity, inevitably attracting the attention of the “Basterds” who hatch an eve-of-destruction plan of their own.

Like all Tarantino pictures, this one is filled with Jeopardy-worthy trivia—nitrate film burns three times faster than paper, Goebbels was the Nazi David O. Selznick—and peppered with unusual props, sometimes meaningful, sometimes just fun (a calabash pipe, a recurring glass of milk). It’s all the spillage of Tarantino’s overstuffed mind, as obsessed with a good (even if improbable) story as with esoteric or banal minutiae. (Royale with cheese, anyone?) This is why his movies are such a great ride, crammed with elaborate set pieces and unexpected, yet satisfying, plot twists.

Oscar will surely recognize Tarantino’s writing efforts, if not his directorial skill, and buzz has surrounded Austrian TV actor Waltz in his breakout role as Landa, deservedly so. But I’d like to take a moment to appreciate Brad Pitt, the Clark Gable of our era. Like Gable, his acting talents are overshadowed by his movie-star looks, sardonic smile and mega-celebrity life. But he’s turned out to have a real knack for comedy and, sometime while we were busy swooning, he’s built a reputation for indelible comic portrayals, starting with his rooster-strutting charm in Thelma & Louise, through the impassioned gibberish of Snatch, to, in more manic form, aerobically-fuelled ADD in Burn After Reading. Here, he adds to that growing resume with a quirky performance of drawl-infused nonchalance and deadly conviction. It’s time to give the man his props and let him be Cary Grant for a change.

Inglourious Basterds has received some heat for playing fast and loose with facts—the movie is “unconcerned with moral dimensions,” “trivial,” “appallingly insensitive.” Perhaps these reviewers missed or were less than charmed with the spirit of the enterprise. Tarantino’s not making a documentary nor is he interested in moralistic drama. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, he is interested in classic battles between good and evil, a movie mainstay, but he regards his role as that of ringmaster or impresario of the proceedings, letting us decide what to make of the action. In the end, history (incidentally, also a dispassionate onlooker) gave the Allied Forces victory as the culminating moment; Inglourious Basterds offers a different kind of catharsis, though in fantasy form—sweet revenge.