Category: Drama

BABYLON

By Marc S. Sanders

Director Damien Chazelle has come a long way since his first major motion picture, Whiplash, a small film about a young, tortured drummer.  Since that accomplishment, he seems to get more and more elaborate with each project.  Babylon certainly exceeds ambition in any select 3–5-minute scene it offers within its grand opus.  The main title card doesn’t appear on screen until after the first thirty minutes and by then you are exhausted, yet completely awakened.

Babylon begins in the mid-1920s, during the pioneering times of Hollywood filmmaking where silent films were fresh and were regarded outlets for escapism and entertainment.  Big studios like MGM were not quite on the scene just yet and movie makers experimented with their films having no regard for rule and caution while constructing them.  On a busy day of shooting at around 3:15pm, an open field sword and sandal battle might turn up an extra in an accidental death with an impaled spear.  No matter.  Must keep shooting before daylight is lost and everything runs off schedule. 

It was at this time that a star like Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), rugged with a square jaw and dashing with a pencil thin mustache, offered greatness in movie houses that showed silent pictures.  A new discovery like Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) who seemingly came in off the street captured producers and patrons alike with her wide-eyed expressions and lanky, yet appealing posture.  These were the first celebrities of the advancing twentieth century.  They were starlets that brought people back and back again to the cinemas to witness battles of roman conquest or dancing on top of a bar while batting their long eyelashes for a mug at the camera.  The filmmakers loved to work with them. 

These performers ruled Hollywood until the Talkies appeared on the scene.  Movies with sound revolutionized the industry, but these famed individuals couldn’t keep up with the evolution.  Audiences and filmmakers couldn’t accept a compatibility.  Try to imagine a Jack Conrad listen to a packed movie house chuckle at one of his romantic speaking scenes.  It’s heartbreaking to watch.  He was admired, but now he’s a joke.

When the sun would set, the parties soaked–make that drenched–in orgy and debauchery would begin and nothing was off limits.  Naked women would happily get high and drunk and tossed over a large crowd.  Prop penises would be inserted into one partygoer and then another and then another.  Fat ugly men would happily accept getting urinated on.  Endless amounts of liquor and especially cocaine would be gulped and snorted and the greatest dares imaginable would always try to top themselves.  Have you ever heard of a party getting so out of control that someone would go so far as to wrestle a rattlesnake in the middle of the desert?  Jack happily watched all this decadence go down.  Nellie joyfully became the outrageously intoxicated and fearless ringleader. 

I have offered only a sliver of description for Chazelle’s over three-hour film.  To sum up, Babylon offers a hard-edged response to the family friendly interpretation found in Singin’ In The Rain.  Both films delve heavily into the transition of silent filmmaking to talking pictures and those who were left behind.  Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s G rated picture will have you giggle at their Lina Lamont with the squeaky voice and pratfalls who’s all wrong for the next phase.  The heavy R rated dramatic interpretation is offered in Chazelle’s script with Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy and her Jersey accent, accompanied by unrefined posture and behavior.  Her drug binges are no help either.  Margot Robbie is fearless in her performance.  She is messy, sloppy, harsh and frenzied with her character.  One thing that came to mind as she is snorting line after line of coke is that at that time, there was no such thing as a means for rehabilitation like today.  No one was even looking out for the harm that drugs and alcoholic binging could have on people.  People were left to their vices to just drown in their poison of choice.  For silent pictures, you could plaster them in makeup and costume and let them mug and bat their eyes for the camera.  It didn’t matter if their speech was slurred.  Talkies required much more concentration of their performers.

The main player of the film is newcomer, Diego Calva, as Manny Torres.  A Mexican who inadvertently finds himself in the Hollywood nightlife while pushing an elephant up a steep hill only to get shit on.  (The elephant serves no purpose except to make an appearance at one of these crazy parties.)  Manny has an instinct for what’s to come in the movies and builds himself up into a studio executive.  While he’s dangerously falling in love with Nellie, he’s also discovering next big things like a Negro entertainer who’s magnificent with a trumpet, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo).  Manny is a good man who swims above the dangerous life of Hollywood partying and decadence.  He’s an innovator that’ll never receive credit for what he uncovers.  That’s for the white executives to profit from.

A minor but welcoming story is Sidney’s.  He’s soon hung on posters outside movie houses, and performing with big bands.  Hollywood awards him with riches he could never imagine and never asked for.  However, ironically, his complexion comes off too white against some of his other band players and the idea of caking himself in charcoal makeup is insisted.  How will Sidney respond to this humiliating request? The wealthy also have a particular regard for him.  His status as an entertainer.  Do they see him as a showboat clown or the artist he values himself to be?  How does Sidney want to be considered?

With all of the parties and drinking and drug use to go around, Babylon goes off in a hundred different directions before it finds an even keel outline that switches storylines from Jack to Nellie to Manny and Sidney.  Chazelle strives to one up what other filmmakers before have attempted.  I could not help but think about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights which follows the porn industry in the late 70s and early 80s.  Happiness abounds until time and technology and constant self-abuse cause everything to unravel.  Babylon follows a very similar trajectory.

A friend of mine found Babylon too be overly gratuitous.  She’s not wrong, but while she took it as a complaint with the film.  I take how superfluous the movie is as a major compliment.  There are long scenes where Chazelle will not surrender for the audience.  He shows how drug raged Nellie is when no one will fight that rattlesnake by having her violently pick it up, swing it around and thus it will eventually latch on to her neck while she’s running around amid a gang of naked partygoers.  Then we get to see another starlet cut the snake off below it’s head, rip its fangs out of Nelly’s skin and proceed to suck the venom out.  Oh, you’ll squint and squirm through the whole scene.  What do we learn from this?  Drugs are bad.  Really bad, and they will delude you into acting with no vices or boundaries.  So, let’s be completely honest about it.

When Nellie is recruited for a talking film, we see take after take after take of her trying to make her mark while it is shouted over and over again to the crew to shut the fuck up.  There can be absolutely no noise from anywhere that the mikes can pick up and it doesn’t matter if a crewman is getting dangerously overheated in a soundbox.  (No air conditioning could be allowed because the hum would be picked up by the microphones.)  It’s a brilliantly, well edited, long and tortuous scene of flaring tempers, sweat, heavy light and stress.

I remember reading an interview with Henry Hill, the mobster who was the focus of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.  Hill said with no uncertainty that the characters portrayed by Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro were not even close to how frightening and violent their real-life counterparts were.  So maybe even Scorsese glossed over how harsh that world ever was.  Damien Chazelle is a relentless filmmaker with Babylon.  Nothing is whitewashed.  Most of what you see is shock value, but that’s the message he’s conveying and per his research he must be convinced the life of this era was actually this outrageous and way over the top. He’s certainly not forgiving with how manic these people lived, particularly with Margot Robbie’s character.

At the same time, he calms the film down to offer a harsh truth to a quickly becoming has been like Jack Conrad, Brad Pitt’s character, no longer in his prime.  Jean Smart portrays a gossip columnist reminding Jack that the height of his career is long gone, but fifty years from now, new generations will be rediscovering his achievements.  He will be a legend for all eternity.  Chazelle is speaking to us, those that appreciate what Turner Classic Films and other formats like videotape and DVD offer to see the first of these kinds of pictures where it all began with legends like Jack and maybe Nellie and especially Chaplin. Chazelle was an important student of this later generation.  This is the best scene of the picture with a magnificently written monologue, and I won’t be surprised if Jean Smart gets an Oscar nomination that no one ever saw coming.  I’m inclined to declare she should just get the award.  It’s such a telling moment for all kinds of movies.

Chazelle loves to make films.  The epilogue to Babylon demonstrates his affection as his story jumps to twenty years later, and an older Manny watches Singin’ In The Rain in a theatre. From what he inadvertently brought to the fold all those years ago, movies have evolved and continue to develop into bigger scales of what we could never have thought possible.  Chazzelle edits in a sequence where it started with silent films like A Trip To The Moon and Keystone Kops over to grand musical ensembles and adventures like Ben-Hur and then on to special effects with quick cuts of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Terminator 2, and Avatar.  Flashes of color appear on the screen and then quickly cut back to these captions in celebrated films and film stock.  I don’t believe any of this spoils anything of the film, but I like to recognize how Chazzelle takes inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s bewildering conclusion to 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Movies are going on and on and on.  Whoever is hot now and presently significant will have to adjust to an ever-changing industry.  Once celebrated puppeteers working for guys like George Lucas have no value in an age of computer graphic engineering.  Big box office stars might not be able to uphold their careers during a time of streaming films that come to us by means of our flat screen TVs we can affordably buy at Walmart.  Kardashian girls are more widely recognized than maybe a Jack Nicholson or a Meryl Streep.  (Someone I know had no idea who Carol Burnette is.)

It’s hard to sum up everything captured in a film this big and ambitious and yes, gratuitous.  Perhaps, the best I can tell you is simply that a hard truth to accept is that casualties come from discovery in a film like Babylon. 

THE WHALE

By Marc S. Sanders

I still have a lot of catching up to do, but arguably the best performance by any actor in 2022 comes from Brendan Fraser in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, an adaptation of the stage play written by Samuel D. Hunter.

Fraser plays Charlie, an intelligent online writing professor.  His course is done online as he has become an enormously overweight recluse, following the loss of his boyfriend, circumstances to be revealed over the course of the film.  Charlie is so obese that he can barely walk, and he confines himself to the left side of his sofa with the television in front of him and his laptop nearby to conduct his courses or to pleasure himself with gay pornography.  He has a walker to get himself on to his feet and carry his bulk, but showering is not easy.  Even picking a key up off the floor is an impossibility.

He receives visits from his only friend, a nurse named Liz (Hong Chau).  When she arrives on Monday, she discovers that his blood pressure is indicative of congestive heart failure and urges him to go to the hospital.  He insists he can not afford the bills and has no insurance.  He also receives unwelcome visits from a young man named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) spreading the word of God with brochures from the local church.  Lastly, the visits Charlie treasures the most are from his cruel and mean-spirited daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) who takes no reservations with berating Charlie as a deadbeat dad and only comes to him because she practically demands he write her essays to avoid dropping out of school.  She also rudely takes pictures of Charlie at any given moment.  Each time she raises her cell phone for a click, it feels like she is giving her father the harshest middle finger imaginable.

Much like an earlier film, known as The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky explores what comes after the main character has tormented himself into a destiny difficult to escape or be rescued from.  Aronofsky is frank about offering up helpless souls only now living with everyday ongoing pain both physically and, as we discover, more importantly, mentally.  Highlights of Charlie’s day are when the pizza is delivered and he shouts through the door that the money is in mailbox.  The delivery guy knows the routine all too well by now and the best he can offer is to ask if Charlie is okay while never seeing his grotesque appearance.

Aronofsky doesn’t offer much variety on the surface.  The film takes place entirely in Charlie’s apartment.  Sometimes we go down the hallway and see another room or we get a conversation between Liz and Thomas on the front porch.  The cast only boasts seven actors.  Yet, Hunter’s screenplay is not limited to what Charlie is having to endure.  There is also an unexpected backstory to Thomas and there’s more to uncover with Liz and Ellie. The pizza delivery guy, who we never see, even discovers something.  One particular essay about Moby Dick that Charlie desperately urges Thomas to read out loud early on has a surprising significance that I didn’t see coming. 

Still, the film belongs almost entirely to Brendan Fraser and how he enhances the performances of his cast mates, particularly Sadie Sink.  Their scenes are so well performed.  She is an outstanding young actor working on a manic level.  I imagine Sadie Sink had to come down from the hyper activeness of her scenes.  She is uncompromisingly mean. When the director yells, there is no way she could just turn that characterization off.  I bet she walked away from the set to catch her breath.  Opposite her, Fraser’s character has no choice but to be more restrained.  Physically, it is hard for him to breathe and therefore speak at times at a high octave.  He cannot stand up very well and rush to embrace his daughter even if he wanted to try.  She is mean enough to challenge him though.  The outcome of that moment will have you hate her character for sure.  Yet, you don’t forget she’s a kid and her current state is a product of something else, perhaps from Charlie’s past misgivings.

Timewise, they are also on uneven playing fields.  Hunter’s script counts down the days as the top of some scenes depict it as Monday and then Tuesday and so on.  Charlie is running out of time and has a lot of hanging threads to tie off.  Ellie has an entire life ahead of her to name call and scream at him and hurt him, but Charlie cannot afford to upset someone and work on apologies later.  The best he can take advantage of right now is to appeal for all the wrongs he’s committed or been accused of.  Most importantly, can he fix his relationship with his daughter?

Liz is a health care professional by trade and knows what is best for Charlie, but likely also knows it’s too late and rather hopeless, considering his current condition.  So, it only makes sense to surrender to his needs by bringing him meatball subs and barbecue ribs.  What she is determined to do is to keep his daughter and ex-wife away from him.  It’s a conflict that Charlie has no choice but to allow.

Thomas is that last new person to ever enter Charlie’s life.  Yet, what is his gospel of God and salvation going to do for Charlie now?  Charlie can’t keep this kid from coming over, but is he really going to listen and take any of it seriously? 

Brendan Fraser’s performance is so limited to the setting of the film and the physical restraint of being a large man with no flexibility.  However, he provides so much in the pain his character has suffered long before the current week captured on screen.  It’s an astonishing achievement in acting.  Within the bulbous head depicted in so many closeups are tired eyes that have gone through so much like toiling with leaving a marriage in exchange for a homosexual relationship, and weakening a connection with his child.

Beyond the enormous weight he lives with, Charlie also lives with an unhealthy food addiction.  Just ahead of the last act of the film, Aronofsky is relentless in showing how Charlie responds to personal suffering, not physical, by drowning himself in enormous amounts of sloppy and messy food as Fraser guzzles everything into his mouth.  Charlie suffers from so much more than just being morbidly obese.  He could live with that.  It’s other moments and people and losses in his life that are hard to continue to live with.  The difficulty of those things is cursed upon by Charlie with uncontrollable amounts of food.  Some people who suffer with difficult matters might hide in bed all day or binge watch television for an entire week.  Some turn to drugs and alcohol.  Charlie binges on food.  He doesn’t love his food.  He only uses it to drown out his pains.

I imagine it’s hard to learn about people like Charlie who are held down by the challenge of extreme obesity.  They have become so physically large that they literally can not get up from their sofa without help and therefore never leave their homes.  Because they never go outside, we are unaware of people like this.  I once had a neighbor that I never, ever saw.  I could hear their TV in the apartment next door but I never saw them.  How is that possible?  Why is it that they never revealed themselves?  There’s a story there.  Maybe a terrible or uncontrollable dilemma.  Darren Aronofsky, Samuel D. Hunter and Brendan Fraser offer a glimpse into what goes on behind this closed door.  It’s heartbreaking. 

Maybe it is so tragic because of why Charlie is shown within his confines by Aronofsky, written within the circumstances that Hunter offers and most importantly demonstrated by Fraser as a man ready for his life to end.  If only he can resolve a final digression with his teenage daughter suffering from a pain of anger likely instigated by him. 

Again, Brendan Fraser’s performance is the best one I have seen this year, and with no doubt in my mind, he should absolutely win the Oscar.  This could go down as the best accomplishment is his colorful career. 

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

By Marc S. Sanders

I have finally righted a serious wrong and watched Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, and what a pleasurable experience it has been.  Reader, if this movie lover who gets hopped up on science fiction gobbley gook with laser swords and spaceships can watch an old black and white movie feeling sorrow for its main characters, and elation when the film finishes, then it’s easy to understand how timeless and impressionable Capra’s classic film truly is.

I recall when I had finally seen It Happened One Night, originally released in 1934 and arguably the pioneer of the romantic comedy genre.  I could not help but connect certain moments and pieces of dialogue to the films released while I was growing up, like When Harry Met Sally… and Bull Durham.  Those films took inspiration from Capra’s comedy with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.  Capra pioneered storytelling once again with It’s A Wonderful Life.  As my wife and I watched the movie late last night until nearly two in the morning, I said to her this is like Back To The Future.  My wife said A Christmas Carol.  Both true statements.  So perhaps while Capra was revolutionary with his own storytelling, he might have been adopting some inspiration from what came before as well.  Regardless, I applaud his approach.  Frank Capra is a tremendous gift to the cinematic medium.  If there was a Mount Rushmore for filmmakers, Capra would most certainly be sculpted alongside the likes of Hitchcock, Chaplin and Disney.

George Bailey (James Stewart) has big dreams of leaving his sleepy little town of Bedford Falls and building grand designs of skyscrapers while also exploring the world, beginning with Europe and Alaska and whatever else needs discovering.  Like any of us, our yearning for adventure and the destinies we wish for get interrupted. Before you know it, we ask ourselves if life has passed us by.  It takes a guardian angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) to remind George that life has been with him all along; maybe not the life he envisaged, but certainly a life of purpose and significance beyond just himself.

George watches as his high school chums go on to grand accomplishments that pay off in enormous amounts of wealth.  His younger brother Harry (Todd Karns) goes to college, gets married and becomes a celebrated war hero.  However, George remains in Bedford Falls offering loans to his fellow townsfolk that he can’t afford to honor with a business he inherited from his father.  To lend and support comes involuntary to George.  He’s just a good man. 

On the other end of the spectrum is the mean, wealthy miser Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore).  Barrymore plays Potter like one of the worst villains in the history of cinema.  An unforgiving, jealous wretch of a man.  His cruelty is long and unmatched, even if he is relegated to a wheelchair.  He knows how destitute George is, despite his unending generosity, but Potter won’t tolerate the admiration George receives.  To squash George’s stature, he’ll buy out his business.  He’ll make every effort to silence George Bailey’s influence.  Potter will even try to take George under his wing where he can maintain complete authority as a big fish in the small pond of Bedford Falls.  Yet, Potter’s never-ending wealth cannot crush the love for George’s humbleness and giving nature.

A favorite device of mine in movies is when the filmmaker can turn the story’s setting into a character all its own.  Examples of this are shown in pieces like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List where the use of thousands of extras and piles of rubble bring testimony to the atrocities of the Holocaust.  In James Cameron’s Avatar (which I just watched as a refresher for the just released sequel), an imaginary neon glowing planet awakens our senses, and we learn that its inhabitants form a symbiont circle with the plant life and animals that dwell there.  In many films, the time and place speak to the viewer.  Bedford Falls is a main character to the story.  Capra makes wonderful use of the Main Street where each business building quickly becomes very familiar as if we have walked into these small town structures a hundred times.  It hearkened me back to my time in Fair Lawn, New Jersey where I would accompany my grandmother on her daily errands to the bank, the kosher deli and the Woolworth’s.  Wherever she went, everyone knew Helen.  In Bedford Falls, the pharmacy with the soda jerk doesn’t look new to me.  It appears like I’d seen it a hundred times before.  Martini’s, the bar, felt like I knew every hob knobber in the joint.  I could smell the ink and feel the creak of the wooden floors in Bailey Building and Loan. 

The townsfolk are also assembled wisely by Capra.  An old man sitting on his porch at night takes in the flirtations that George and soon to be wife Mary (Donna Reed) exchange with one another.  This man represents Bedford Falls taking stock in what’s to come next for our protagonist.  The people in this town have a rhythm to their gatherings.  Capra offers a magnificent shot where the camera is overhead behind George, wearing his overcoat and hat, and the townspeople are facing him at the other end of the sidewalk.  They expect of George, but does George have anything left to give?  I can only see the back of Jimmy Stewart, but I know all too well the expression he’s sending to the people opposite him.  Look at the scene where they march over to George Bailey’s business demanding their monies back.  How one delivers a line followed by another is perfectly timed to James Stewart’s despair.  The ending is beautifully cut as these same folks come into George’s home to offer their sense of giving during a desperate hour of need for George. 

I always knew the story of It’s A Wonderful Life.   Years ago, I saw a stage production where Miguel portrayed George opposite his girlfriend in the role of Mary.  Yet, I was not familiar enough with the surprises that Capra’s film offers.  I just didn’t realize how much fantasy is embedded in the movie as Clarence is meant to be a naïve angel who has yet to earn his wings.  Seems a little too childlike for me on the surface.  I’ll admit I didn’t take to the angels represented as blinking stars early in the picture.  That’s hokey!  However, when Clarence is personified in the latter half of the film, Henry Travers brings a sense of clarity to the purpose of life when he forces George and maybe anyone watching the movie to imagine what things would be like had they never been born.  Reader, I think I’ve seen story adaptations like this on episodes of Family Ties and The Golden Girls.  In this movie, it becomes frightening as we realize the actions we take carry impacts with them.  Had George not rescued his brother Harry from a skating accident, what would have happened to a squadron of soldiers during the war?  Had George not had the nerve to dance with Mary at his high school dance, what would have happened to her?  Had George not existed, then he wouldn’t be available to lend monies to people and what would have happened to a beautiful collection of new homes that would never be erected?  These questions are incorporated into roughly a thirty-minute last act that remind you to appreciate all that you saw earlier in the film.  I want to say its cheesy, but Travers and Stewart really don’t make it that way.  The sequence comes through with forthright honesty from Travers, never going big or outlandish, and genuine anguish from Stewart who convincingly appears like he’s lost everything when earlier he felt like he had nothing. 

I read that Jimmy Stewart did this film shortly after returning from serving in World War II.  He was suffering from PTSD and much of the torment and agony that George exhibits was coming through naturally on film.  This has to be one of the all-time greatest performances on screen.  Jimmy Stewart’s timing in practically every scene of the picture is perfection.  He’s a wide eyed optimist with big enthusiasm to get his life going.  Then he transcends into a teasing flirt with the girl he was not expected to hook up with.  When George tells Mary he wants to throw a lasso around the moon and give it to her, I really believe he could do it.  We have Jimmy Stewart to thank for that.  Later, he’s unexpectedly frightening as he is on the verge of being charged with fraud and penniless.  Stewart is uncompromising in front of Donna Reed and the young actors playing his children.  When he kicks over the table with the train set and gifts, on Christmas Eve, it’s terribly shocking.  Sadly, it’s relatable.  A film from 1946 presents personal problems and struggles that exist today.  That is why It’s A Wonderful Life is such an important piece.  We struggle to live with our struggles.

Frank Capra’s film is necessary to remind each of us to never give up, no matter how hard it gets.  We have value.  We have importance to ourselves and to others.  We are loved.  Yes, it’s only a movie and it conveniently solves itself in its made-up fantasy.  However, those that enrich and occupy space in our daily lives are real and they are folks who depend on us for their fulfillment and happiness.  We are necessary to making their lives better and sustainable.  Reciprocally speaking, they are just as important to mine and your satisfactions.  It might be drippy to claim that Frank Capra’s film is a “feel good movie,” but I prefer to believe that the writer/director, along with Stewart, Reed, Travers and the rest of the company served a higher purpose. They demonstrate that we have all been blessed with an enormous gift filled with the riches of love and friendship that life absorbs and treasures. 

Happy Holidays!!

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 BRUXELLES

By Marc S. Sanders

You ever see a movie that feels like utter torture while watching it, and then when you have time to reflect on it later, you at least appreciate the message it delivered?  I guess this can apply to my experience with Sight & Sound’s recent selection of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the greatest film of all time; number one on their list of the best 100 films of all time.  This picture usurped other achievements like Citizen Kane (number one for close to five decades) and Vertigo (which held the top spot since 2012).

Chantal Ackerman directed this feminist film in 1975, produced in Belgium, about a widow named Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) who lives a very mundane life.  The running time of 3 hours and 21 minutes positions a still camera depicting her everyday activity over three ordinary days.  We see Jeanne boil potatoes, prepare soup, and escort gentlemen callers behind her closed bedroom door.  One man per afternoon.  In the evening, her non talkative adult son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) arrives home and she serves him soup and dinner.  The viewer watches them eat their whole meal with Jeanne barely able to hold conversation with her son who remains mostly unresponsive.  After dinner, the sofa in the living room is unfolded into a cot for Sylvain to prepare for bed.  The following morning, Jeanne takes time to fold her son’s pajamas and shine his shoes.  Jeanne will then run errands like seeking out a particular color of yarn for sowing, or a button to replace on her coat.  She also waits for a colleague (maybe another woman in her line of work) to drop off her baby to be watched for a short period of time, before Jeanne’s next afternoon appointment with another gentleman.  After the appointment, she will fold up the little towel in the center of the bed for where her customer positioned himself.

This is a very tedious film to watch with little dialogue that is delivered in French with subtitles.  There is insight to be gained however, and as I reflect on the film, it mostly comes through in the deliberately long running time.  I believe Ackerman was attempting to make a viewer’s experience with the piece feel as lonely and mundane as the main character.  There are very few cuts in the film.  Often, for long periods of times, maybe as long as four or five minutes, we are watching Jeanne sit in a chair staring into space.  We will watch her walk down her hallway or across the street to the post office.  We will watch her button every button on her coat or house robe.  We observe her take a routine bath.  We see her peel potatoes.  We watch her enter the kitchen to find a utensil and then leave while turning off the light.  She’ll then return to the kitchen for something and turn the light back on.  Near the end of the film, she receives a package and has trouble with a knot while undoing it.  After nearly three hours of this routine kind of activity, I knew she would leave the room, walk down the hall, enter the kitchen, pull open a drawer and look for a pair of scissors. There is nothing special in any of this, but it remains in the final print to be witnessed.  Nothing you see in this film is enhanced with stimulating devices like dialogue, music cues, lighting effects, close ups or strategic editing.  Even the title of the film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is very, very boring and ordinary.  We are simply watching how a lonely widow lives from day one to day two and on to day three.

I am one of four members of a movie watching group of friends who get together (hopefully once a month, if our schedules allow it) to watch three movies on a Saturday or Sunday.  One member selected this film out of curiosity with Sight & Sound’s notable recognition of late.  (We also watched Shane Black’s Kiss, Kiss, Bang Bang and Doug Liman’s Go.)  While we are watching these selected movies, we respond like any audience member should to a film.  We’ll laugh or scream.  We’ll comment in moments that seem appropriate and keep the mood lively.  Much commentary was tossed around among the four of us while watching Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  At times we sounded like locker room boys.  On multiple occasions I told my good friend Anthony how much I hate him for selecting this slog of a picture to watch.  We even started to look for symbolism or inconsistencies in the film.  On several occasions, we see Jeanne enter the kitchen and there is only one chair positioned at the table.  She walks out of the room and when she returns there will be two chairs, only we never saw her or Sylvain bring in a second chair.  What could that mean?  Is this film suddenly going to reveal itself with a supernatural characteristic?  Could there be someone else in the house?  Will Sylvain and Jeanne have dinner at the kitchen table tonight, instead of in the dining room.  Is there something symbolic about this disappearing and reappearing kitchen chair?  I’ll save you the trouble, Reader.  It means nothing.  I could only draw that it is an error in editing or continuity.  Yet, that is where our minds would go to, as we absorbed these long moments of ordinary life.  Blame us for yearning for the quick fix that most movies offer.  We are simply weak, very weak, men.

Bear with me as I tell you that to watch Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is sheer torture.  To listen to a faucet drip into an empty tin pan or watch a strand of grass grow in real time is at least as entertaining.  Movies serve to make us laugh or cry or scream in fear and heighten our suspense.  Movies serve messages that we choose to agree or disagree with.  Movies teach us about a kind of person or industry we may never come across and movies allow us into the mind of an artist’s own imagination.  Movies can disgust us.  Movies can anger us, and movies are also there to frustrate us, like Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

To think back on this film, I’m taken with Jeanne, the character, and what she ultimately does before the film concludes.  I’d never spoil the movie’s ending.  However, it stands as the most memorable moment in the picture.  It’s a scene I won’t forget and it certainly is the most eye opening.  Most importantly, it’s understandable having lived as a witness to Jeanne’s seemingly worthless and boring lifestyle. We’ve all endured boredom.  I’d argue at times we’ve all felt a lack of worth to ourselves and those around us.  I certainly have questioned my value on this earth more times than once.  Therefore, to really feel how hollow Jeanne is with whom she caters to each day, like an unresponsive son or gentlemen callers that lack loving affection while they pay for a quick tryst, a viewer must endure the long running time of the film.  It’s the most assured way to embrace the authenticity of Jeanne’s empty livelihood.  The most important element to Chantal Ackerman’s film is likely the running time.  How else to truly understand how mundane a lonely widow is than to live through a near full three days with her?  Therefore, Ackerman is successful in getting across what she wanted to with her film.

Credit should be recognized for the actress Delphine Seyrig.  To simply sit in a chair staring into space with a camera (likely positioned on a tripod) at the other end of the room and not break character for long periods of time requires extreme concentration and endurance.  To share a scene with another actor that does not respond to anything you are doing, is equally challenging.  Seyrig is a professional actress, whose career I’m not familiar with.  She has likely portrayed more stimulating characters with more hyperactivity in other pieces of work.  To bring a performance down to a level of this most extreme kind of monotony is certainly dexterous while requiring complete focus. 

I’ll likely never watch Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ever again.  I don’t need to.  I won’t gain anything new on a second or third viewing.  I won’t ever forget the film, however.  It stands apart from most other films I have watched because the construction of the piece is intentionally unexciting and the performances are deliberately ho hum.  There are people who live completely uninteresting lives, and it is certainly sad to acknowledge that.  Movies will tell me that a deranged man will kill people.  They will also tell me that heroes go searching for treasure or that employees have a desire to exact revenge on their boss.  Movies will demonstrate how families will love each other or how two people fall in or out of love.  Movies will also explain how sorrowful it is for a person to experience loss.  Movies will also tell me that people live within a mind that offers no self-worth while their heart beats and beats from one mundane and ordinary day to another.  The best example of that is Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  An admirable accomplishment for a film dependent on the study of a woman’s sheer emptiness. 

THE FABELMANS

By Marc S. Sanders

Often, coming-of-age stories are narrated through the eyes of the child on the cusp of becoming a teenager or a grown up.  It’s important you realize that I say through the eyes, however.  It’s what the protagonist observes that allows him or her to appreciate, and comprehend.  Steven Spielberg will tell you he came of age by learning how to make movies.  It stands to reason however, that he did not come of age by looking with just his eyes, but rather with his 8mm and 16mm cameras.  The Fabelmans is a fictionalized, loose interpretation of how the celebrated filmmaker transitioned from adolescence into young adulthood with dreams of telling stories with movie making inventiveness.

Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle, the older version; Mateo Zoryan, the younger version – both performances are magnificent) is escorted for the first time to the movies by his parents Mitzi and Burt (Michelle Williams and Paul Dano) on a wintery New Jersey night in 1952, where he sees The Greatest Show On Earth.  For eight year old Sammy, what starts out as nervous fear of what to expect in a dark theater with a giant screen turns into exhilaration as a car does a head on collision with a locomotive.  Shortly thereafter, a series of eight Channukah gifts assemble a Lionel train set for Sammy.  It’s exciting to see it go around on an oval track.  It’s more electrifying to preserve it on film with a toy car driven by a Mordecai figurine crash right into the steam engine and the boxcars hitched to it.  That was Mitzi’s idea to capture it on film.  That way Sammy can get a thrill out of watching the accident over and over again without causing any further damage.

Sammy only progresses from there.  When Burt gets a job promotion, the family moves to Arizona.  The desert allows a teenage Sammy to continue with his love of filmmaking by shooting his family during the cross country trek and then making westerns and war films with his Scout Troop pals as the actors.  He sets up tracking shots by propping his camera on a baby carriage rolling along cardboard laid out on the ground.  Ketchup becomes blood.  Sammy is even inventive enough to poke holes in the actual film strip at precise moments when his sheriff and outlaws fire their six shooters.  Now it really looks like the cowboys are shooting real rounds of gunfire.  Mom and dad, his sisters, his teachers, and friends are all impressed. 

His Uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen) is also dazzled by Sammy’s natural talent.  Bennie is Burt’s best friend and co-worker, and per Mitzi’s insistence he moves to Arizona with the family.  By use of his camera and editing machine, Sammy will soon learn that Bennie actually means more to Mitzi than he does to Burt. 

With a script that Spielberg constructed with Tony Kushner, the director/writer depicts a kid, much like he was, who expressed his honesty and learned the truth about the people around him when his projector was on.  The camera doesn’t lie, ever.  A motion picture camera will even hold on to the final beats of a person’s pulse before they finally expire.  That one moment in time where there’s life and then suddenly there’s death can be eternalized on film, forever.  It’s through this storytelling device that allows The Fabelmans to stand apart from other coming-of-age films like Rebel Without A Cause or Splendor In The Grass or any of the John Hughes brat pack films.  The childlike quality yearning for adventure and fantasy shines through with Sammy’s westerns or John Wayne inspired war pictures.  Sammy also realizes though that he can pick up on real life and emotion with his 8mm, like on a family camping trip.

Michelle Williams gives an outstanding, sometimes ethereal performance.  It’s real.  She’s not doing fantasy.  Yet, she lives for the fantasy and adventure.  I recall a well known anecdote of Spielberg where he described in his youth, his father woke up the family in the middle of the night to watch the skies for a meteor shower.  (Watch The Skies was the original title for his film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.)  In The Fabelmans, Mitzi enthusiastically takes her children in the car to pursue a tornado.  Later moments will have her dancing freely in her nighty in front of the car headlights while the family is camping; uncaring over the fact that her dress is see through.  Sammy will notice how awkward his father Burt feels, while at the same time seeing how enamored Bennie is at the sight.  Williams has a beautiful balance though of a woman trying her best to appear happy and collected for the sake of her children and husband, but not living the story she wants.  This will influence Sammy as he maps out his own future.  He’ll live the life he wants.  Learning the merits of algebra will never hinder his destiny to make movies.

Later occurrences will show evidence as to how well Sammy can capture reality with his camera.  Following a series of bullying and antisemitic teasing after the family transitions to northern California, Sammy is welcomed to shoot the senior ditch day at the beach.  A telling moment occurs when the film is shown at the prom.  The taller bully is overwhelmed by how championed he’s depicted in the film.  He’s bordering on furious with Sammy, though.  The mean kid knows he’s cruel to the scrawnier, Jewish Sammy, and it immediately eats away at him with guilt over his past treatment.  Sammy’s film has changed and disrupted this kid.  Another kid bully is shown to look like the jerk he is and nothing else.  He walks alone on the beach.  He’s not an athlete.  He’s nothing but a no talent, unlikable antisemitic jerk.  This kid is also changed because now he can see what he truly is as the viewer looking at his own cruel behavior shown on film for the whole world to see.  Movies will bring out what we harbor deep down, inside. 

Ironically, Sammy is so well versed with camera work and follow up editing that he is practically unaware of how durable his theme of honesty through the lens truly is.  What Sammy captures comes without even trying and it sends a raw emotion to the viewer, whether it’s a mean-spirited bully or even his own mother watching.

Steven Spielberg could never be anything else except a movie maker.  Yet, after over five decades he’s still introducing audiences to new kinds of accomplishments.  He started as a director with adventure and fantasy on his mind with the likes of monster trucks, killer sharks as well as swashbuckling treasure seeking and visitors from outer space.  Later, he had to reinvent his craft and think outside his fanciful dreams to show brutality and hope through horrifying moments in history like the abuses endured by black southern plantation dwellers, slavery, the Holocaust and the unglamorized harshness of war, political unrest, and terrorism.  Further on, he carried out the romance of stage musical performance and even learned to poke fun at his own past accomplishments.

In the short period of time that we get to know Sammy Fabelman, we see transfers of perspective in this young boy’s outlook through a camera.  Sammy goes from making silly mummy monsters of his sisters to intimate hand holding shared by his unhappy mother and the man she truly loves, a man who is not his father. 

Whether he is watching his own films, or it is his friends, or his mother, his father or even his tormentors at school, Sammy realizes that a film will always do one thing and never falter away from that one thing.  His camera will always, always, always tell the truth. 

Thankfully, a truly inspired epilogue moment, which left me with a big, enthusiastic grin, has Sammy still learning that as frank as his filmmaking may be, it’s important that it is also never boring.  I don’t think I have ever been bored with a movie made by Steven Spielberg.

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Norway, 2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Joachim Trier
Cast: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh Fresh
Everyone’s a Critic Category: “Watch a Film with Subtitles”

PLOT: The chronicles of four years in the life of Julie (Renate Reinsve), a young woman who navigates the troubled waters of her love life and struggles to find her career path, leading her to take a realistic look at who she really is.


I love “what-if” scenarios.  There is a whole line of comic books, Marvel and DC, dedicated to intriguing “what-if” questions.  What if Peggy Carter took the super-soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers?  What if Bruce Wayne’s parents had not been killed?  And so on.

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is a what-if scenario for film geeks.  What if…Woody Allen wrote a romantic comedy about a woman in her 30s on a road to self-discovery?  And then what if Ingmar Bergman took a crack at the screenplay and decided it was too happy, so he added some material about death?  And then…what if David Fincher directed it on 35-mm film with the bare minimum of CG effects?

Julie (Renate Reinsve, who won Best Actress at Cannes for this role) is a 30-something woman who cycles through career paths before finally settling on photography.  She meets, falls in love with, and moves in with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a comic-strip creator and author in his 40s.  They are happy together, share deep conversations, discuss kids (he wants them, she doesn’t), and spend time with his family at their lake house.

But then one night Julie walks home from a business function with Aksel and, for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, crashes a fancy party.  Here she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a charming fellow with a broad smile.  They talk.  There is a clear connection, but they are both in committed relationships.  They decide they will not cheat.  But…what defines cheating?  Does drinking from the same bottle of beer constitute cheating?  What about sharing a secret?  What about smelling each other’s sweat?  How far this little game goes, I will not reveal, but it did not end where I thought it would.  Their meet-cute ends with them walking home in opposite directions, neither giving the other their last names so they won’t be tempted to search for each other on Facebook.  Will they meet again?  Don’t make me laugh.

The Worst Person in the World is brain candy.  I am on the record as stating that I have been, somewhat unsuccessfully, avoiding films with heavier subject matter over the years.  (I can think of no situation in which I would willingly sit and re-watch The Conformist [1970], for example, to see what I missed the first time I slept through it.)  However, over the years I have seen and reviewed some heavy films that were highly rewarding: Amour [2012], Incendies [2010], and Nomadland [2020], to name a few.  The Worst Person in the World is not quite as gut-punching as those other films, but it was intelligent and funny and startling in all the right places, and what more could you ask for in a romantic comedy/drama?

The David Fincher element I alluded to earlier comes from the visual style of the film.  Director Joachim Trier loves to include primary colors, especially white, in his compositions, which is apparently a big no-no when it comes to cinematography.  The result of this choice is that anything containing colors of any kind really <pops> on the screen, while lending a kind of antiseptic feel to some of the scenes, as well.  For some reason, I associate that combination of clinical distancing with popping colors with Fincher.  (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2011] comes to mind.)

There’s also a celebrated sequence in which Julie, still in a relationship with Aksel but unable to stop thinking about Eyvind (especially after bumping into him again unexpectedly), conjures a fantasy in which she runs to meet him where he works while the entire world around her remains frozen in place.  The effects in this sequence are flawless, especially when you realize that the only CG effects were those removing visible supports that kept a couple of bicycles and human limbs suspended in midair.  Everything else was done 100% real, in-camera, with real people simply frozen in place.

The effect of this scene is magical.  It evokes that giddy period we (hopefully) all remember when a brand new love has taken hold of us, and the rest of the world goes on hold while we hold hands and kiss and share a sunset and talk and walk and kiss again and time stands still, or goes too fast, depending on your point of view.  The brilliance of this movie is that it evokes those glorious feelings…and the whole time, in the back of the viewer’s mind, is that reminder: “But they’re cheeeatiiiing…”

The movie’s title immediately made me think Julie was the titular “Worst Person”, and for a while it seems to be true.  She can’t decide on a career, she knows she doesn’t want kids with Aksel but can’t really explain why, she impulsively flirts with Eyvind, she writes an internet-famous/infamous article wondering how a woman can be considered a feminist if she engages in oral sex.  But after watching the movie, I don’t believe that’s the movie’s intent.  I think we’re supposed to see how other people, including myself, might make the mistake of thinking Julie is a terrible person.  On the contrary, she’s just as confused and inarticulate about relationships and feelings as I am, as any of us are.  As she breaks up with someone, she makes what might sound like an emotionally cruel statement: “Who knows?  Maybe we’ll get back together again in the future.”  But in reality, she’s just refusing to rule anything out.  Badly phrased?  Perhaps.  But she is being as honest as she knows how to be.

(I haven’t even discussed the sequence where Julie ingests some “magic” mushrooms and goes on a drug trip for the ages, involving cartoon characters, aging, a touch of body horror, and the kind of face painting you’ll NEVER see at a theme park.  The movie even pokes fun at the shock of some of this imagery by inserting a shot of a movie theater full of people visibly cringing…a neat bit of meta-humor/commentary on the value of shocking your audience.)

The Worst Person in the World is worth your time if you’re a fan of love stories that don’t pander in any way, shape, or form.  Director Joachim Trier has gone on record as saying it’s a “romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies.”  That’s about right.  Don’t look for a conventional happy ending or a conventional main character.  These are just people searching for connection, who even when they’ve found it, never stop looking.  For better or worse.


QUESTIONS FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

Best line or memorable quote?
JULIE: If men had periods, that’s all we’d hear about.

How important is it to you to watch a film in its native language?
Very. But not always. For example, I would not have wanted to watch a dubbed version of The Worst Person in the World. However, I have no issue with watching a dubbed version of something like Akira [1988] or Spirited Away [2001]. It comes down to the medium. For live action, I feel it’s most important to know the precise meaning behind what the characters are saying, and it’s difficult to get that from watching someone’s lips not moving in synch with the sounds coming out of their mouths. However, with animation, I want to drink in the visuals as much as possible, and that’s not as easy to do when you’re trying to read subtitles.

Do you feel subtitles lessen the overall movie experience?
Not at all. Look at Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [2009]. In that film, subtitles were absolutely essential to the plot, especially the opening sequence at that French farmhouse. There are those who disagree, but that’s my opinion. (But don’t get me started on those who insist on watching English films with English subtitles on…that’s another story.)

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

By Marc S. Sanders

The characters in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross are under terrible pressure.  They are salesmen who are consistently chasing insurmountable sales goals in real estate properties.  One of them has an ill daughter in the hospital.  Another has a temptation to rob his office as a means of earning some fast cash.  Another is in despair of his self-worth.  To be a salesman, of any kind of commodity, is a tough life to lead.  The payoffs can be enormous when a sale is successful.  However, once a transaction is complete, the response is often “what have you done for me lately?”  These guys are never happy.  However, they are also some of the cruelest, most insensitive, and thoughtless people you will ever meet.  They have no other choice but to behave that way.  It’s the nature of the business.

The film adaptation of Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize winning play contains a collection of outstanding actors doing some of their best work.  They embrace the brutal dialogue the screenplay hands over to them with relentless cursing and flaring tempers.  Glengarry Glen Ross has you believe that you run your sales career on your own with little help or encouragement from the people you slave for. 

Early in the film, Alec Baldwin, known only as a man named Blake (based on the end credits) visits the office where these salesmen are based out of.  He delivers an unforgiving and harsh reality of what these men must do.  They either get their sales numbers high on the board, where they can win a new Cadillac, or they settle for a set of steak knives for second place.  After that, they are fired.  Regardless of where they currently stand though, they should not even be pouring themselves a cup of coffee.  Coffee is only for closers.  The office manager, known as Williamson (Kevin Spacey), only provides the men with sales leads that have already been exhausted with rejection and hang ups. 

Director James Foley does a wise technique with color.  The first half of the film appears in drabs of greens and greys amid an evening of torrential rain downpour.  Before Blake finishes his threatening presentation, he dangles new leads, the “Glengarry Leads,” in front of the men saying these are not for them, because they are only for closers.  The old leads that Williamson hands out are on green index cards, nothing flashy.  Blake’s leads are bright pink with a gold ribbon tied around them.  Foley makes sure that even a prop tells a story.

The salesman that gets the most attention is perhaps Shelley “The Machine” Levene played by Jack Lemmon.  He’s elderly and past his prime with no numbers currently on the sales board.  Frequently, he is making calls to the hospital for an update on his daughter who is due for surgery, but if he can’t make a payment, then the procedure is likely not to happen.  Lemmon is fascinating in maybe the best performance of his career.  Many of his scenes are toe to toe with Spacey as he shifts from pleading to demanding to disingenuously threatening and ultimately bribing Williamson for the new leads. Levene is so out of touch now that he can’t even sell Williamson on helping him out.  Spacey as Williamson is terrific in his defiance to not lend any sort of aid to Shelley.

David Mamet added additional material to the script, not found in the stage play.  The Blake character is new to the film, for example, and I think it is a better, more fleshed out story because of it.  As well, Foley is able to go outside of the reserved settings of the bar and office, as he follows Levene making a knock-on-the-door sales call in the middle of the rainy night to a family man.  This may be Lemmon’s best scene of the film as he weasels his way into the home to quickly get his raincoat and hat off and get a seat on the sofa as he begins his “once in a lifetime” opportunity that the potential customer may miss out on.  It’s a sales pitch, despite Lemmon’s charm, and the patron can see right through Levene’s performance.  As the door closes on Shelley, you’re terribly sad for his desperation and failure.

On the other end of the spectrum is the current, most successful salesman named Richard Roma.  He’s played by a showy looking Al Pacino who initially doesn’t perform in the broad strokes he’s become recognized for as an actor.  Pacino does a quiet, delicate approach to his character’s sales presentation as he shares a table with a sap (Jonathan Pryce) who is weeping into his liquor glass.  Roma stretches the rainy evening out in the bar with this guy, talking about vague anythings, until he can subtly pounce on him with a brochure that’ll get his signature on a contract. 

Two other salesmen, Moss and Aaronow (Ed Harris, Alan Arkin) vent their frustrations elsewhere in the bar as they eventually segue into an idea of burglarizing the office for those tempting new leads.  However, are they working together as a team on this idea, or is one working something over on the other?  Mamet’s dialogue is chopped up perfectly with utterances and interruptions, that before a character reveals his intentions, you are left flabbergasted.  What is demonstrated here is that a skillful salesman is also an efficacious manipulator.

The second half of the film is set on the following morning where the sunlight has come through.  New revelations following the stormy night from before will present themselves as the men gradually arrive at the office to find it actually has been robbed.  The obvious of circumstances are there.  However, Mamet sets up an ending that’ll leave you breathless.  It did for me the first time I watched the film.  Just when you think you are watching a protagonist throughout the film, something else entirely comes up.

Glengarry Glen Ross has been regarded as a modern-day Death Of A Salesman.  Maybe it is.  I’ve worked in this kind of field before. There were months where I was good at it, and like everyone else, I would brag about my success with recaptured anecdotes and celebratory curse words flying out of my mouth.  There were also months where I would gripe about how uncompromising this life is. When I didn’t want to do sales any longer, I spent twelve years as an assistant to sales representatives.  They are not your friend.  They are only focused on the next contract to be signed and booked before month end, and they will ask anything of you with a seething f-word attached to their request.    Are we so terrible if we can not make an unreachable goal with tools that offer no help and supervisors that lend no encouragement or forgiveness?  To be a salesman means that any of your past accomplishments or education do not define you.  You are only identified as the one who must acquire the next thing, and then the next thing after that.  It will change your attitude about yourself and how you treat others.  It’ll alter your dialogue which is so vitally apparent in Mamet’s story.  It will even influence you to take measures you never thought you’d be capable of.

James Foley enhanced an already electrifying script from David Mamet.  He knew that if he was going to show how hard and challenging it is to be a salesman of boring, uninteresting, and practically intangible parcels of land, then he was going to have to be relentless in the art direction and settings contained in the film.  The first half of the film never, ever lets up with the rain storm going on outside in the city street.  The evening is as black as can be, and yet Williamson casually will ask Levene if he is going out tonight. Who in the dead of night in the rain is going to want to talk to a droning salesman about anything?  Yet, that’s what is expected of this life.  The office setting is unfriendly, decorated with ideals that hang from the walls with phrases like “A man must embrace further than what he can reach.”  Little touches like this only add to the uncaring and selfish nature the men really have for one another. 

Glengarry Glen Ross depicts a hard life for the man in a suit.  You may dress like what is expected of a professional, but you are also always scraping the bottom of another bottom.  The cliché that money can’t buy happiness is personified in a film like this.  You may get to the top and score a nice commission, but it’ll soon be forgotten and nothing you’ve done before will lend to your current state.  Next month, someone else will be standing where you are standing.  Worse, you may never be standing on top again, and then what will you do?

Sadly, I believe that Glengarry Glen Ross reflects what many people experience at least at one point in their lives.  We are all salespeople to a degree whether we are doing a job interview or even trying to impress the parents of someone we are dating.  It doesn’t always work out.  The question is where do any of us go from that point.

THE BLACK STALLION (1979)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Carroll Ballard
Cast: Kelly Reno, Mickey Rooney, Teri Garr, Clarence Muse, Hoyt Axton
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 90% Fresh
Everybody’s a Critic Category: “Watch a Film Starring Animals”

PLOT: After being shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in the 1940s, a boy bonds with a magnificent Arabian stallion and trains him to race after their rescue.


Horses are great, but they are not my favorite animals.  That honor goes to the great white shark.  (They fear nothing; the only things they are even cautious around are larger great whites…but I digress.)  I always hear and read about how magnificent and majestic and spiritual horses are.  I have never denied their intelligence, but I never jumped on the bandwagon with folks who believe they are angels on four legs.  And I’ve never really gotten into horse racing, at least not on an ongoing basis.

But there is one movie that combines the mystique of horses and horse racing with poetry, grace, and true art.  Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion is one of the most beautiful films ever made.  The visuals are so good and well-edited that fully 28 minutes of the movie are presented with zero lines of dialogue spoken.  After a fearsome shipwreck, Alec Ramsay (Kelly Reno) finds himself stranded on a desert island along with a magnificent unnamed black stallion whom he later simply calls the Black.  During this shipwrecked portion of the movie, all dialogue is dropped, and we simply watch as Alec and the Black overcome their initial fear of each other and bond.

It is in these scenes that The Black Stallion truly shines.  There is one particular sequence that will stick in my memory forever.  After some days and weeks alone, Alec tries to get the Black to eat food directly out of his hand.  In a nearly unbroken take, we watch as the Black warily approaches Alec, then turns away, snorting and stomping, then turns back, taking one cautious step after another, getting closer and closer…and it all looks completely organic.  It’s one of the greatest acting performances by any animal in any film I’ve ever seen.  In that scene, the Black exhibits more proficiency at acting on camera than I’ve seen in a few human actors I could name.

When I first saw this movie at 8 years old, I couldn’t fully appreciate the ingenuity of this portion of the film.  All I cared about was how invested I was in seeing Alec bond with the Black.  I didn’t care about cinematic theory and editorial processes and visionary cinematography.  But it’s all there in full view, presenting a visual story clearly and cleanly.  Buster Keaton would have loved this movie, I think.  (At least, the silent portions, I would imagine.)

The Black Stallion piles on one visually exhilarating scene after another involving Alec gradually gaining enough trust from the stallion to the point the Black allows Alec to ride him.  And then they are both rescued and returned home to America, and it’s here the movie seems to stumble just a bit.  After the grand vistas of their desert refuge, the white picket fences and tree-lined avenues of 1940s suburbia is a tad underwhelming.  When the Black gets spooked by garbagemen and runs off, we do get a nice contrast of seeing this semi-mythical creature of a bygone age galloping past storefronts and hurdling fruit crates.

Alec chases the Black and eventually finds him in a seemingly deserted barn owned by one Henry Dailey, an ex-jockey played to utter perfection by Mickey Rooney.  To say Rooney’s performance in The Black Stallion is “natural” is an understatement.  And to older audience members familiar with Rooney’s performance as a jockey in the 1944 film National Velvet, this must have been like seeing the remaining members of the Ghostbusters reunite in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021).  When he trains Alec how to ride the Black, you get this incredible sense of a man tapping a massive reservoir of knowledge for the benefit of the next generation.  I don’t know if I’m accurately describing this facet of Rooney’s performance, but if you watch the movie, you’ll see what I mean.

As do so many other movies featuring horses (not all, but many), The Black Stallion culminates with a horse race, this one pitting the Black against the two fastest horses in the country.  As we are fed information about how and why this race comes about, I particularly noticed how one phrase was repeated at least twice: “They’ll never let him run…he doesn’t have any papers.”  No doubt there are horse enthusiasts who know what that means.  I haven’t the foggiest clue what they’re talking about, but the cool thing is…it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter now, and it certainly didn’t matter when I saw it as a kid.  It’s enough to know that “papers” are something other horses have, but the Black doesn’t, and that seems pretty important to some people, no matter how fast he runs.  It’s just another way The Black Stallion is constructed to appeal to audiences of all stripes, be they equestrian aficionados or rank amateurs.  There are not a lot of films that can do that, and I don’t know if The Black Stallion gets recognized enough for that accomplishment.

The climactic horse race ends exactly how you would expect it to end.  Formulaic?  Of course.  But what a race!  The cinematography, editing, Oscar-winning sound design, and carefully restrained use of the musical score all combine to create a moment every bit as thrilling as any NASCAR race.  Even now, watching the movie for this review, I fell into the moment all over again, smiling with delight as Alec and the Black pound their way around the track, hooves thundering on the dirt, pumping my fists when Alec discards that pesky helmet and goggles, and those other horses ahead of them get closer and closer…

Any lover of horses owes it to themselves to find and watch The Black Stallion.  Kids will get a kick out of it, but adults will, too, perhaps on another, more nostalgic level.  (That could just be me projecting based on my own childhood memories, but I stand by it.)


QUESTIONS FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

  1. Which character were you most able to identify with?  In what way?
    Well, for me, there’s no question I identify with Alec.  I still remember how I felt watching this movie for the first time.  I mean, I didn’t necessarily want to BE Alec, but he was my entry into the world of the movie.  I knew how he felt when he was trying to convince his mother to let him ride in a race.  I knew what he must have felt at the very beginning of the movie when his curiosity about the Black overcame his very real fear of such a powerful animal.  And I thrilled when he raised his hands in triumph during the horse race.  (Kind of an easy answer, to be honest, but…there you go.
  2. If you were to make a movie starring animals, what animals would you choose, and why?
    …well, as I mentioned before, great white sharks are my favorite animals, but they are notoriously difficulty to film, as shark cinematographer “Three-Fingers” Joe will tell you.  I’d have to go with dogs.  Much easier to train, plus every day they see you arrive on set, they’ll treat you like they thought you’d be gone forever.  My film would be a comedy/sci-fi story involving a cat’s brain being transplanted into a dog’s body.  Maybe get Paul Rudd to do the voice of the dog.  …it’s a work in progress.

FRACTURE

By Marc S. Sanders

When director Gregory Hoblit was shooting this film, did he ever wonder how preposterous this courtroom mystery is?  

This ridiculous effort featuring a tired Anthony Hopkins as a suspect representing himself, and a very green Ryan Gosling as the prosecuting attorney proudly boasts a centerpiece storyline of simply finding a gun used in an attempted murder.  That’s it really.  No nuances.  No subtle riddles.  Just a “what happened to the gun?” plot line.  

It’s any wonder that I had never heard of this movie until I found it on Netflix.

Take my advice.  Find something else on Netflix.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)
Director: Michael Cimino
Cast: Robert De Niro, John Cazale, John Savage, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An in-depth examination of the ways in which the Vietnam War impacts and disrupts the lives of several friends in a small steel mill town in Pennsylvania

[Author’s note: This will be the first in an ongoing series of reviews inspired by a book given to me as a birthday present by my long-suffering girlfriend.  Entitled Everyone’s a Critic, it challenges readers to watch a movie a week within a given category, then answer questions like, “Why did you choose this particular film” or “Do you feel this film deserved the award? Why or why not?”  Clearly designed to inspire discussion.  This category was “A Film That Has Won Best Picture.” This format is a work in progress, so I hope you’ll bear with me on future installments.

I am going to assume, for the most part, that most readers will have seen the movies being reviewed in this series.  Therefore, some spoilers may or will follow.  You have been warned.]


Once about every couple of years, I like to pick up and read Stephen King’s The Stand in its original uncut version.  My paperback copy runs to 1,141 pages, not including King’s foreword and a brief prologue.  Even Tolstoy would look at that thing and go, “Dude…edit yourself.”  But having read it numerous times now, I cannot imagine what could possibly have been excised from the edited version of King’s novel.  Every detail of that apocalyptic saga feels necessary.  Reading it is like falling into a fully realized alternate universe.

That’s what watching The Deer Hunter is like.  I can still remember the first time I watched it.  I knew its reputation as one of the greatest Vietnam War movies ever made, had heard of its harrowing Russian Roulette scene, and was intensely curious.  I popped it into the VCR, hit play…and for the first 70 minutes I got a slice-of-life drama about steel workers in a tiny Pittsburgh town (Clairton, for the detail-oriented) where, mere days before three friends ship off to Vietnam, one of them is getting married.  And the centerpiece is the wedding reception.  Ever watch a video of a wedding reception?  How high do you think a young teenager would rate its entertainment value on a scale of 1 to 10? 

I could not appreciate, as I do now, how vital this scene is.  Relationships are stated, expanded upon, and brought to a kind of cliffhanger.  Take the mostly non-verbal interplay between Linda (a luminous young Meryl Streep) and Michael (Robert De Niro).  Linda is clearly in a relationship with Nick (Christopher Walken), but it is painfully obvious that Michael and Linda have eyes for each other.  Mike watches intently from the bar as Linda dances at the reception, and whenever their eyes meet you can almost hear their hearts stop beating.  The oblivious Nick even pairs them on the dance floor while he visits the bar himself.  The awkwardness as Michael forces small talk and Linda shyly reciprocates is palpable.  And…is that Nick giving the two of them the eye at one point…?

As a kid, I wondered why this soap opera nonsense was necessary in a Vietnam film.  Of course, I didn’t know what was coming.  That’s the beauty and wonder of The Deer Hunter.  It challenges you to follow along with this miniature melodrama to give meaning to what comes next.

There is a key moment during the reception when an Army soldier wearing a green beret stops by the reception.  Mike, Nick, and Steven (John Savage), who are gung-ho about serving their country, yell their support and let him know how much they’re looking forward to killing the enemy.  The steely-eyed soldier raises his glass, looks away, and says, “Fuck it.”  It’s not terribly subtle, but the ominous nature of this moment always fills me with a sense of foreboding, even having seen the film many times by now.

But even after the reception is over, there is one more small-town pit stop to make before the movie gets to Vietnam.  (In fact, The Deer Hunter spends surprisingly little time in Vietnam.)  Michael and a group of friends including Nicky and Stan (John Cazale) go hunting for deer in the mountains as a kind of ritual before Nick, Mike, and Steven are deployed.  It is in this sequence that Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s talents are put to stunning use.  We are shown vistas of the Allegheny Mountains that are simply breathtaking, with Mike and his friends seen as mere dots in the mountainsides.  Choral music with a men’s choir singing in Russian is heard on the soundtrack, giving the sequence a majestic aura that must be seen and heard to be believed.

Then the hunt is over, and the boys all have one last drunken night at the bar owned by another friend, John (George Dzundza in an under-appreciated, realistic performance).  Here they all sing along to Frankie Valli and listen somberly as John plays a sad classical tune on his piano.  And then, in one of the film’s masterstrokes of editing, we slam-cut immediately to the jungles of Vietnam – no boot camp, no footage of them being trained or flown over there, just suddenly they’re there and the contrast between the carnage we experience in the first few minutes of Vietnam versus the rhythms of their lives in Clairton could not be more extreme.

In a horrific but mercifully brief sequence, we watch as a Viet Cong soldier calmly walks into a burned-out village, discovers a hidden pit holding terrified villagers, and remorselessly tosses a grenade inside.  We then watch as Mike, now a battle-hardened soldier, emerges from a hiding place with a flamethrower and burns the VC soldier alive.

The effect of this scene cannot be understated.  To witness Michael torching a soldier, even after that soldier committed a brutal act himself, is jarring.  And why is it so jarring?  Because we have seen Mike as a civilian, as a friend, as a would-be lover, during that lengthy sequence at the wedding reception and while hunting with his friends.  Admittedly, you got the sense that he could or would get violent if necessary.  (He’s clearly the alpha male of his “clique.”)  But this…I mean, damn.

Then, in one of those Hollywood conveniences that never get old, Mike is unexpectedly reunited with Nick and Steve who just happened to arrive at that very same village with another platoon of US soldiers.  And then, immediately after being reunited, they are captured by enemy forces, imprisoned with several enemy combatants in a riverside compound, and forced by their sadistic keepers to play Russian roulette with each other as the guards bet on the outcome.  Michael comes up with a horrifyingly logical escape plan: convince the guards to put THREE bullets in the chamber instead of one.

Much has been made regarding the historical inaccuracy of this scene.  To those arguments, I say: who cares?  As someone once said, riffing from Mark Twain, “Never let facts get in the way of truth.”  The truth of the matter is, the Vietnam experience was a modern-day horror show, leaving physical and psychic scars on its participants and on our country.  In my opinion, the Russian roulette scene can be interpreted as a symbol of how those soldiers, or ANY soldiers, must have felt every single day.  Going on a routine patrol in the jungle could have potentially lethal circumstances.  They rolled the dice every time they called in an airstrike, betting they didn’t get firebombed themselves.  Booby traps were everywhere.  How is life in a war zone that much different from being given a one-in-six chance at living or dying?

I’ve already gone into far more spoilers than I am accustomed to, so let’s just say this happens and that happens, Michael winds up making it back home, Steven is grievously wounded in the escape attempt, and Nick goes AWOL when, after making it back to a military hospital in Saigon, he wanders the streets at night and discovers an underground ring of lunatics who run a high-stakes game of Russian roulette.  And we’re still just at the mid-point of the film.

When we see Michael back home, the earlier sequences establishing the rhythms of small-town life and his feelings towards Linda, for example, all come into focus.  We need that reception and the hunting scenes so we can see how much Michael has changed.  For example, when Michael is arriving back home by taxi, still in full military dress, he spots a huge banner: “WELCOME HOME MICHAEL”.  He tells the driver to keep going.  In a hotel room later that night, he sits on the edge of his bed and rocks back and forth, winding up crouching against the wall.  He is completely unable to process how to deal with people anymore.  Or, at least, he doesn’t trust what he will or won’t say.  I watch that scene, and I feel such intense sympathy and empathy.  What he’s feeling, what he’s been through, what he’s seen, is so huge that he knows he’ll never be able to explain it to anyone who hasn’t been there.  He knows he’ll get questions like, “What was it like?  Did you kill anyone?  How are you feeling?  Where’s Nicky?”  I’ll never know what it’s like to fight in a war, but if I had gone through what he’d gone through, I wouldn’t have stopped either.

There is a heartbreaking scene where Linda, who is more than a little distraught that Nicky is AWOL, hesitantly suggests to Michael that they go to bed.  “Can’t we just comfort each other?”  Mike rebuffs her, but in a way that makes it clear he’d like to, regardless.  De Niro’s performance here is staggering.  As he walks out, he makes a statement, showcasing how much he is feeling but also how unable he is to articulate it: “I feel a lot of distance, and I feel far away.”  I knew exactly what he was talking about.

The very end of The Deer Hunter is one of the most emotionally shattering finales of any movie I’ve ever seen.  It ends with a simple song, first sung as a solo, then joined by everyone else at the table.  I will not reveal what happens to get us there.  Is it shameless manipulation?  Yes.  Does it work?  Yes, so I can forgive the “shameless” part.

One of the criticisms I’ve read more than once about The Deer Hunter is how “one-sided” it is.  To which I say, “Well, duh.”  The Deer Hunter is not presented as a history lesson or a lecture on the internal politics in the country of Vietnam during the war.  The Deer Hunter is intended to make us feel something.  It wants to show us what happens to a person who is exposed to the very worst side of human behavior and lives to talk about it.  It wants to remind us that a country can wave a flag and stand for what’s right and be willing to sacrifice its best and brightest souls for a righteous cause…but it must also be prepared for the aftermath.  The Deer Hunter is a somber prayer that our country remembers the cost it demands, and that it will take care of its own when the dust settles.