Category: Miguel’s Reviews

BEASTS OF NO NATION (2015)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga
Cast: Idris Elba, Kurt Egyiawan, Abraham Attah
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 92% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In an unnamed African country, a young boy gets separated from his family and is trained to be a soldier for a guerilla combat unit.


It’s been said – I don’t remember by whom, maybe François Truffaut – that there is no such thing as an anti-war film because combat scenes are inherently thrilling.  Look at the D-Day landing in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.  Brutal and horrific…but visceral and powerful and exciting at the same time.  Squint at those scenes a little bit, think about the ultimate sacrifice made by so many soldiers for their country, and it’s almost a recruitment film.

There are, as always, exceptions to the rule.  I challenge anyone to watch the Russian film Come and See, about the experiences of a young soldier during World War II, and come away feeling anything but dismay and disgust at the institution of war.

Beasts of No Nation is also an exception.  Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (No Time to Die, co-writer of It [2017]), it features numerous combat scenes involving pre-teen boys firing machine guns, tossing grenades, and wielding machetes on men, women, and children.  The movie is fictional, but the experiences are taken from true-life stories of real boys who were kidnapped by rebel armies.

The young boy in this story is Agu (Abraham Attah in a brilliant, subtle performance).  He’s maybe 11 or 12 years old.  In the opening scenes, we see he and his family are poor, but happy.  He plays with his friends.  They try to sell an “imagination TV” to anyone who will listen to their pitch.  (What is an imagination TV?  …use your imagination.)

One day rebel forces march into town.  Or government forces.  It’s never made quite clear, and I think that’s on purpose.  In this unnamed country, one side is as bad as the other, so it really makes no difference.  His mother and sister are whisked out of town to relative safety, while Agu and his father and brother are left behind.  However, he is soon separated from them (in a scene that reminded me oddly of Empire of the Sun, though even more traumatic) and he runs into the jungle where he is soon captured by a roving combat squad led by a man known simply as the Commandant (Idris Elba, in another brilliant performance).  The Commandant sees potential in Agu and takes him under his wing.

Here’s where it starts to get disturbing.  Agu is trained to be a soldier.  This involves standard training about how to move in the field, but it also involves a brutal hazing ritual where he must run between two columns of men who beat him with heavy sticks as he passes.  Make it through and you graduate.  Get knocked out and…well, you don’t want to get knocked out.  He and other boys are subjected to a cloud of smoke and haze created by burning gunpowder.

Why do this?  From the army’s standpoint, a young boy makes an ideal soldier.  He requires little pay, eats less food than a grown man, never questions orders, and provides unswerving loyalty in return.  The trick is teaching them to kill on command.  For Agu, this part of his training comes when a prisoner pleading for his life is brought before him.  The Commandant hands him a machete.  “This man is with the people who killed your family,” he says.  The scene is simply shot, but it’s horrifying to see Agu’s eyes go blank as he stares at the prisoner.  The culmination of this scene is one of the most disturbing visuals I’ve seen since Requiem for a Dream.  The most chilling part is Agu’s voiceover, which we hear at many other points in the film: “God, I have killed a man.  It is the worst sin…but I am knowing, too, it is the right thing to be doing.”  Brr.

Whether Agu finds redemption or rescue or whatever, I leave to you to discover.  I will say the movie looks marvelous.  Director Fukunaga served as his own cinematographer AND camera operator (after the first operator tore a hammy on his first day).  It’s well made, directed with a sure hand and a fine visual instinct.  I don’t want to give away too much about the ending, but watch Agu’s face.  As he speaks, you can see the blank, flat stare of someone who has seen enough to know he’s seen too much.  It’s the face of someone who has been through more than any of us should be put through.  And he’s not even old enough to shave yet.  That’s what makes Beasts of No Nation a truly anti-war film.

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (2005)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Miranda July
Cast: John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 82% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A lonely shoe salesman and an eccentric performance artist struggle to connect in this unique take on contemporary life.


There is a scene in Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July’s directorial debut, where Christine, an aspiring artist played by July herself, has submitted a videotape of her experimental video shorts to a museum curator who’s looking for examples of new art in a digital world.  At the end of the video, July addresses the camera and bemoans the fact that the curator will probably never watch the tape or get that far.  She pleads: “If you are watching this, then just call this number, the number you see on your screen, and say, ‘macaroni.’  …Just ‘macaroni’ and hang up.  No questions asked.”

In that moment, in the middle of a movie where I was never bored but constantly off-balance, I connected with Christine.  I’m guessing other people do, too, but I’m just guessing.  Who among us has never wanted validation or confirmation from someone, anyone, the world, that, yes, I see you and I hear you?  That right there is one of the reasons I do theatre, man.  I don’t always talk about it, but it’s there.  And I appreciated seeing that heartfelt emotion acted out in such a quirky and direct way.

That’s just one of the charms of this movie that defies description.  It’s a romantic dramedy where the two ostensible romantic leads can function around other people, but just barely.  There is also a subplot about two young boys who are bullied by two witless teenage girls.  How witless?  They thoughtlessly flirt with a much older man who starts leaving sexually graphic notes on his living room window so the girls can see them as they walk to school.  I won’t even tell you how their bullying of the two boys leads to the kind of sexual experimentation I devoutly hope doesn’t happen…but probably does more than I would care to admit.

Now, I’m making this sound like a Larry Clark movie (Kids, Bully), but it’s not.  The main story involves Christine and Richard (John Hawkes), a recently separated father (of the two young boys).  Richard works at a shoe store and is a hopeless romantic, not just when it comes to love, but life in general.  He tells his co-worker, “I want to be swept off my feet, you know?  I want my children to have magical powers.  I am prepared for amazing things to happen.”  But his idealism sometimes moves him to do and say odd things.  Near the beginning of the film, as he’s preparing to move out of his house and into a small apartment, he runs out to his front yard, gets his kids’ attention, and carefully and methodically uses lighter fluid to set his hand on fire.  Why?  His explanation (if I remember it correctly) is semi-reasonable, but I can’t help thinking there might have been a better way to demonstrate his thought process.

Christine is an aspiring artist who makes short experimental videos in which she provides voice-overs to still photographs.  In my mind, they are examples of how she might relate to people in real life if she weren’t so terrified of how other people might respond if she reaches out to them in person.  Her day job is as a taxi service for the elderly – sort of a proto-Uber service.  One day she drives a client to the shoe store where Richard works.  Richard notices small scars on Christine’s ankles.  She says her shoes rub her ankles, but all shoes do that because she has low ankles.  Richard looks her dead in the eye and says one of the best lines in the film: “You think you deserve that pain, but you don’t.”

Something passes between them, and the rest of the film, as far as these two are concerned, is about getting these two dysfunctional people together.  There are obstacles, of course.  A sick kid, an unexpected visit from the ex-wife, some examples of logic that seems rude but really isn’t.  It’s hard to explain.  But theirs is the thread that holds the rest of this weird film together.

And weird it is…but in that good way, you know?  Richard’s two sons are Robby, maybe 7 years old, and Peter, probably about 12 or 13, right when the hormones are kicking in.  In their off time, Peter visits an online chat room where he starts interacting someone who calls themselves “Untitled.”  (He calls himself “NightWarrior.”)  Their conversation gets racy.  If you think this is improper or immoral to show in a film, allow me to direct you to my own experiences on AOL chat rooms when I was that age.  (That’s one of the things the movie gets exactly right: the teenage boy’s curiosity/fascination about sex.)  Thing is, Peter is doing the chatting with Robby right there next to him.  Robby has no idea what he’s reading.  When Peter jokingly asks Robby for something dirty to type, Robby launches into this incredibly detailed scatological description of what he thinks is dirty.  At first, I was a little shocked, but then I started laughing because this is something else the screenplay gets exactly right.  Ask a really little kid to say the dirtiest thing they can think of, and this is the kind of thing you’re most likely to hear.

The movie is full of little moments like that.  The main love story is tooling along, and suddenly a store-bought goldfish is left on top of someone’s car in a baggie.  We’re watching Christine agonize over whether to call Richard or not, and then those two teenage girls from before persuade Peter, the teenage son, to let them give him what they call a “Jimmy Ha Ha.”  It’s exactly what you’re thinking.  Why do they do this?  Because they want to settle an argument over which of them can do it better.  Where were those girls when I was in high school???

And don’t even get me started about what happens when Robby, the youngest boy, starts posing as NightWarrior and chats with Untitled on his own.  This exceedingly weird situation, which I can honestly say I’ve never seen in any other movie before, leads to a moment when Untitled asks to meet NightWarrior in person.  The payoff of this story thread is sure to divide audiences, but I found it both hilarious and oddly touching.

If I’m making the movie sound like a mixed bag, well, it is.  But nothing ever goes too far in the taste department.  The perv who leaves graphic notes on his window has an interesting reaction when his bluff is called.  The Untitled/NightWarrior stuff comes to a proper close, in my opinion.  And Richard and Christine?  Well…what kind of romantic dramedy ends with the lovers NOT getting together, right?

Bottom line: Me and You and Everyone We Know is constantly engaging, constantly weird, but never boring, never conventional.  It held my interest for 90 minutes.  That’s more than I can say for most romantic dramedies involving poop jokes and “Jimmy Ha Ha’s.”

A MAN ESCAPED (1956, France)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Robert Bresson
Cast: François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 100%

PLOT: A captured French Resistance fighter during WWII engineers a daunting escape from a Nazi prison in France.


In an old Peter Benchley novel called Q Clearance, a White House staffer tries to get his chatty secretary to pare down her long-winded stories by saying (I’m paraphrasing here): “I want you to imagine the story you’re telling me is a nice big hamburger patty.  Now put that patty on a hamburger bun and cut off all the meat that doesn’t fit, and only tell me about what’s left.”

In a nutshell, that’s A Man Escaped.  In this prison break film, there are no overly dramatized shots or scenes or performances.  There is no musical score aside from snippets of a Mozart mass heard here and there.  There are no shots showing simmering tensions between our hero and the prison guards or his fellow prisoners.  We are only shown what’s outside the prison twice.  Everything beyond the walls is established by strategic use of sound effects: traffic, train whistles, dogs barking, children playing.  Director Robert Bresson is only interested in showing us the story.  No dramatics, no theatrics, just a good story well-told.  He used only non-professional actors, people who would get on with the business of telling the story without giving a “performance.”

Fontaine is a French Resistance fighter captured by the Germans in France in 1942.  He is brought to prison where he is beaten for trying to escape during his transfer.  A voiceover tells us everything we need to know about his surroundings, his cell, his neighbors, and his desperate desire for escape.  He smuggles a letter to his colleagues outside the walls via a prisoner who is allowed visits from his daughter.  But then that prisoner is transferred, and he is alone once again.

The film is meticulous in the details of his escape plan.  We learn in an opening title card that all the details are based on the memoirs of a resistance fighter who really did engineer an escape.  Even if some of the minute details were changed for the movie, all that matters is that it’s extremely plausible.  We see Fontaine sharpening the handle of a metal spoon to make a chisel; carefully loosening the wooden boards of his cell door; unspooling the chicken wire in his meager bedframe to create rope; even cannibalizing an air duct to create primitive grappling hooks.  When he’s forced to shatter a pane of glass, he dumps the shards into his politely named “slop bucket” and empties it into a well with the other prisoners.

Watching these details unfold, I was reminded of many other prison escape films that seem to have borrowed from A Man Escaped.  His method of disposing waste materials is referenced in The Great Escape and The Shawshank Redemption.  Chiseling through the door panels reminded me of Escape from Alcatraz and Eastwood tunneling through the wall.  At one point, Fontaine must time his efforts with a passing train whistle, just as Andy timed his efforts to thunderclaps in the sewers of Shawshank.  Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you realize somebody else did it first.  Discuss.

The planning of the escape is where the film generates most of its suspense, especially when Fontaine is informed he will be executed.  The next day, another prisoner, Jost, is assigned to his cell.  Fontaine is almost ready to make his escape.  Is Jost an actual prisoner or a snitch planted by the Germans?  In a chilling voiceover, Fontaine realizes he will either have to trust Jost with his plans or kill him when the time comes.  Does he have it in him to do that?  We wonder along with him.

There are bits and pieces of conversations among the prisoners in the shared washroom, and we hear from a preacher and a priest about various spiritual aspects of prison life and our natural tendency towards liberation over incarceration.  There is fruit for discovery there, but I must be honest, I don’t remember too much about it now.  A Bible verse is quoted about Nicodemus questioning the concept of being “born again,” but aside from the obvious similarities of salvation and escape, I’m afraid any larger implications didn’t stay with me later.  I was more impressed with the main storyline of Fontaine’s escape rather than with the spiritual and philosophical implications of imprisonment, communication, liberation, etcetera.  Maybe when I watch it again, I’ll have more to say on that topic, but not today.

A Man Escaped doesn’t have all the fireworks we have come to expect from a prison break movie, but it is still captivating to watch.  The idea that the nitty-gritty details of his plan are even partially based on fact is remarkable.  Ask yourself if you would have known how to make rope out of chicken wire and strips of cloth.  Heck, I have problems tying my own SHOES in the morning, let alone making rope.

SELMA (2014)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Ava DuVernay
Cast: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, Common, Tim Roth
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 99% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.


In one of the special features on the Selma Blu-ray, Oprah Winfrey, one of the film’s producers and co-stars, says that Selma is the first feature film with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the central figure.  (She is presumably not counting TV movies or miniseries.)  There have been one or two other films where King appears as a “side” character, but never as the star of the film.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I found that tidbit of information fascinating, especially after watching Selma, which carries all the cinematic heft of any Oliver Stone biopic.  For example, I never knew there were two previous attempts to make the iconic march from Selma to Birmingham, some fifty miles away.  The first attempt, at which King wasn’t present, was violently turned away by local police with batons, tear gas, and honest-to-God bullwhips.  The second attempt, this time with many white participants, mostly clergy, was aborted by King himself after he had second thoughts about asking people to potentially lay down their lives for the cause.

That right there is indicative of far more conflict than I ever thought existed in the mind of Dr. King, played with poise and pent-up energy by David Oyelowo.  In my mind’s eye, King never wavered.  He was always 100% sure of his actions because his cause was just.  But, surprise, he was also a human being who was clearly affected by the injuries – and fatalities – sustained by the folks who were marching for that cause.  Selma brought that dimension home to me in a potent, well-made film.

The beginning of the movie sets the tone poetically and tragically.  After a scene with Dr. King receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights activism, we are shown the truth of the situation in the American South in the mid-60s.  A black woman tries to register to vote in Selma and is turned away by a racist registrar.  In Birmingham, a bomb goes off at the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls.  When King arrives in Selma to organize a protest, he is greeted in a hotel lobby by a friendly-sounding white man who proceeds to punch him in the face.  King even meets opposition from a separate civil-rights group in Selma who are uncomfortable with how most out-of-state protesters march for King, not necessarily for the issues.

Nor is King portrayed as the perfect husband to his wife, Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo, who incidentally also played Coretta Scott King in a 2001 HBO movie, Boycott).  Their home life is troubled right from the get-go.  That’s a factor that I learned about years and years ago, but it’s still something that takes a little getting used to.

No one likes to hear that great men were human, too.  We want our heroes, whomever they might be, to be spotless.  Selma doesn’t shy away from the less flattering, more human side of Dr. King.  After the FBI taps his phones, they send an audio recording to Coretta with the sounds of two people having sex.  Martin listens in dismay but insists to Coretta that’s not him on the tape.  She agrees with him (“I know what you sound like, Martin.”), but you get the idea that she’s still upset that this kind of thing would be an issue.

I loved the scenes where King is invited to the Oval Office to speak directly to then-president Lyndon B. Johnson, who desperately tries to get King to back off Selma.  Johnson wants what every President in history has always wanted: a second term.  King reminds him that, if he would simply pass a law removing any and all voting restrictions, he would win a second term in a landslide…thanks to the black vote.  Johnson urges King to wait, King urges Johnson to act, and they make little progress for most of the film.


I am no historian, but I have no doubt that Selma is at least as accurate as Nixon or JFK or any other big-budget historical film.  That is, mostly true.  When it comes to film, I’m a big believer in the credo: “Don’t let facts get in the way of the truth.”  If Selma were to show each and every incident that led to that march, I’d still be watching the movie because it would be 10 hours long.  I feel that the movie captures exactly what needed to be captured and did it in such a way that not only was I entertained, but I also learned some things I didn’t know.  (I never knew about the death of a white protester, for example.  Or about the “night march” that occurred somewhere between the first two attempts, and which also resulted in someone’s death.)

After having just watched movies like Whiplash or The Prince of Egypt that got me genuinely emotionally invested, so that their finales had me floating a few inches above my sofa, I must be honest and say that the finale of Selma did not quite inspire that same reaction in me.  It was compelling to see the march finally taking place, especially when intercut with shots of the actual marchers making their way to Birmingham.  I enjoyed King’s speech on the steps of the capital building (although I learn from IMDb trivia that director DuVernay allegedly reworked some of the speeches to make them more cinematic).  I thought it worked well as a climax to the film.  But honestly, I wanted to see a little more of the march itself.

I suppose it could be argued that the march was not quite the point of the film.  Selma highlights the struggle more than the victory.  It demonstrates the terrible hurdles and living conditions faced by black Americans during those dark days.  Have things improved since then?  Well, I’d say things have evolved into something different.  Some things change more easily than others.

The struggle continues.

WHIPLASH (2014)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A promising young drummer at a prestigious music conservatory is mentored by an instructor who will stop at nothing to realize a student’s potential.


That’s right, I finally jumped on the bandwagon and watched Whiplash after no fewer than eight years of prodding by my fellow cinephiles.  Not only can they finally get off my back about it, but they all now owe me one.  Hope you all enjoy Wild Tales when next we meet.

I was hesitant to watch Whiplash because it was released and gained notoriety at a time in my life when I was yearning for some positivity after getting psychically beaten down by some really depressing foreign films.  Why, I asked myself, would I want to subject myself to ninety minutes of watching J.K. Simmons verbally abuse some poor kid just so he could play the drums a little better?  I’ve seen this movie before.  The abusive mentor sees the light, the victimized student either turns his back or excels like never before, etcetera, etcetera, blah blah blah.  I had the whole plot written out in my head from start to finish.  (I used to do that a lot, I’m realizing…kinda stupid, in most cases.)

Having just finished watching it, I can say, without reservation, that Whiplash belongs on the short list of the best films ever made about the drive for artistic perfection along with The Red Shoes, Black Swan, and Amadeus.  And it manages to have its cake and eat it, too, when it comes to the ending.  Tragedy and triumph walk hand in hand, though not necessarily in the way I would have ever imagined it.

Andrew (Miles Teller) is a talented young jazz drummer who has just started his first year at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory of Music.  He is anxious to gain the attention of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the leader of the school’s prestigious jazz ensemble, The Studio Band.  Fletcher is a piece of work.  To say he engages in mind games is like saying Bill Gates dabbles in computers.  He recruits Andrew for his own band in the middle of someone else’s music class.  On his first day with the Studio Band, Fletcher berates another musician for playing off key.

Did I say “berates?”  Fletcher belittles, humiliates, and degrades the poor guy with a stream of profanity that would have made the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket envious.  He fires the guy on the spot.  When the guy leaves, Fletcher looks around and confesses that he wasn’t really out of tune, but he didn’t know he wasn’t, which is just as bad.  Accurate?  Technically yes.  Does that kind of teaching method belong anywhere outside of a military unit?  I’m going with “no.”

Andrew is willing to go along with this because he doesn’t just want to be good, he wants to be GREAT.  He wants to be remembered in the same breath with Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich, and he believes, like Fletcher, that greatness is not achieved without struggle and sacrifice.  Again, technically true.  Would Rembrandt have painted half as well with both ears?  Would Beethoven’s Ninth be remembered today if Beethoven hadn’t been totally deaf by the time it was finished?  The rolls of the Screen Actors Guild are littered with actors from broken or abusive homes.

There’s a revealing scene when Andrew eats a meal at home with his father and uncle and his two cousins.  The table conversation rings with praise for the two cousins who play football at their school and scored a long touchdown, etcetera.  When Andrew talks about being a “core” member of the best conservatory jazz ensemble in the country, he’s met with polite congratulations and that’s about it.  No one seems to think he’s going to make it as a musician, not even his own father.  “I’d rather die drunk, broke at 34 and have people at a dinner table talk about me than live to be rich and sober at 90 and nobody remembered who I was.”  Like Charlie Parker.  Like Amadeus.  Andrew’s only goal is to be great.  If he has to give up friends, romance, even family to achieve it, so be it.

But at what cost?  Fletcher pushes Andrew so hard that his hands bleed during rehearsals.  He demotes Andrew, then puts him back in the core, demotes him again, then basically makes him re-audition for the core spot against two other alternates until 2 am.  In one excruciating scene, Andrew actually tries to play in a competition after being in a freaking car accident.  It’s a truly desperate act from someone who is so afraid of being anonymous that only a body cast will stop him from taking his shot.

Make no mistake, the rehearsal scenes and the verbal and mental abuse from Fletcher are not pleasant.  They’re emotionally engaging, but they were also off-putting.  In a strange way, I was reminded of Requiem for a Dream and its disturbing subject matter that was nevertheless compelling to watch.  When we get to what happens to Andrew after the car accident, I was getting thoroughly depressed, despite the powerful emotional beats of what came before.

But then the movie enters its final act, and that’s where Whiplash finds another gear story-wise.  Andrew and Fletcher meet in an out-of-school setting, and Fletcher has an interesting speech where he says, among other things, “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job.’”  He admits his tactics were brutal, but he devoutly believes in the necessity of pushing people beyond what is expected of them.  “Otherwise, we’re depriving the world of the next Louis Armstrong.”

Fletcher convinces Andrew to play for a new jazz ensemble one last time.  What happens at that concert is so horrifying that I watched most of it through my fingers.  I kid you not.  But then the screenplay transforms that situation into something magical, almost religious.  You get the sense that all of the horrible and despicable things Fletcher did and said during the whole film, all misery we had to endure with Andrew, during which time I wondered, “Why am I watching this??” – all of that unpleasantness was just the setup for the finale.  And that finale only means something because of everything that came before it.

In other words, just like Andrew, I was only able to experience that tremendous cathartic moment at the end because of the suffering I had experienced in the movie’s first 90 minutes.

…which leaves me feeling torn because that’s exactly the kind of thing that Fletcher believes in, but which I feel is unnecessary outside of a boot camp.  Ideally, yeah, I think that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  I’ve directed my fair share of community theatre productions, and I’ve never had to resort to yelling or humiliation as a method to get what I’m looking for.  But then, I’m directing community theatre, not a multi-million-dollar film that may live or die on the performances I’m getting or not getting from my star.  Nor am I a drill sergeant training men to become soldiers.  It seems there is a line, but apparently to get certain kinds of results, it must be crossed.

It’s this dichotomy that will likely keep me awake the next couple of notes.  That and the senses-shattering finale.  I mean…I did not see that coming.  (And man, I am a jazz fan, so to me it was like eating a perfectly-cooked steak.)  It was not a pleasant road to get there, but it had to be unpleasant.  Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been great.

LEVIATHAN (2014, Russia)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Cast: Aleksey Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In a rugged coastal town in northern Russia, Kolya fights against a corrupt mayor to keep his house from being demolished.


The coastal town in Leviathan might be considered beautiful in some other film.  The crashing waves on its rocky shores are reminiscent of Norway or Iceland.  But in this movie, behind every exterior shot of a stupendous mountainside is a sense of dread or gloom.  No doubt there are people in this town who celebrate things like birthdays or holidays or weddings.  Not in this movie.  In Leviathan, the atmosphere seems to prohibit any kind of celebration that isn’t preceded by consuming large quantities of vodka.

Kolya is a husband and father who lives in a house he built (he says) with his own two hands, along with his wife, Lilya, and son, Romka.  He’s currently locked in a legal battle with the corrupt mayor, Vadim, who wants to bulldoze Kolya’s house to make way for what Kolya assumes will be yet another mayoral mansion.  Like all the men in his circle, Kolya drinks a little too much vodka at times and is a bit of a hothead, which is a strike against him whenever he tries to reason with the authorities about his problems.

Kolya calls an old lawyer friend, Dmitriy, in Moscow for help.  Dmitriy does some digging and shows up at Kolya’s house with a folder full of damaging information against the mayor.  We get a good sense of how the mayor operates in a scene where he shows up drunk at Kolya’s house and demands that Kolya learn his place in the grand scheme of things.  He has power and he knows it, but in this scene, and in others where he flexes his power, he’s never far away from a bodyguard or a henchman or three.  He’s a mean little man.

Not that Kolya is a saint himself, either.  He doesn’t shy away from giving his son a sharp smack on the back of the head for sassing Lilya.  When he drinks, he’s more given to insults than jovialness.  But he really does seem to love his wife, and we feel for him when we see his efforts to get the mayor off his back through legal means, when what he’d REALLY like to do is just shoot him and be done with it.

The movie establishes this basic plot relatively slowly.  It’s a great example of a slow burn.  The first few scenes seem unconnected as we see Kolya and Lilya interact with Romka, and Kolya picks up Dmitriy from the train station, and they have a meal, and so on.  It isn’t until we reach a scene in a courtroom where the whole plot is spelled out for us in an astonishing rapid-fire speech from a judge who reads out what sounds like twenty pages of legal findings in about three minutes.  It was almost like listening to a Russian version of a Micro-Machines commercial.

As the story moves on, that sense of dread escalates.  It’s that kind of feeling you read about in books where a storm is approaching.  There’s no rain, but the air is a little sharper, the wind just a tad heavier.  The whole first half of the movie is like that.  Small things happen here and there that point subtly towards impending disaster.  In one shot, Kolya cradles a shotgun in his lap.  In another, we discover that Dmitriy and Kolya’s wife are a little more than just friends.  Kolya is detained by the police for making a scene in a police station.  We see his capability for violence even though it is never truly demonstrated.  That simmering anger underneath everything he says makes any conversation with Kolya a little edgy.

At one point, the corrupt mayor comes down on his cronies, telling them to do their jobs and get Kolya and his lawyer friend off his back.  After that, in a remarkably tense scene, Kolya, Lilya, Dmitriy, and some other friends go out shooting by a small lake and waterfall.  It’s all friendly enough, with a little portable grill and the wives making kebabs and the vodka flowing freely.  But as they set up the targets (empty bottles on a log), and each of the men take their turns with their rifles, I was inexplicably on edge.  I felt, I knew that something was going to happen, I just didn’t know what.  Their children run off to play by the water…is one of them going to drown?  One of the shooters has brought, not a rifle or a shotgun, but a freaking AK-47.  (He makes short work of the target bottles.)  Was this guy going to turn the gun on Kolya?  It’s a masterful bit of suspense that culminates in a completely unexpected direction.

There are other twists and turns in the story that I won’t reveal here, but what is this movie really about?  It’s about nothing more or less than how some men seem to be born to suffer.  Kolya is one of these men.  He has a teenage son who tolerates him, but can’t stand his wife, who is actually the boy’s stepmother.  A powerful man will stop at nothing to seize his house and land, and there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do about it.  The circumstances of how and when he discovers Lilya’s infidelity are traumatic, to say the least.  And for almost two-and-a-half hours, Kolya suffers the trials of Job.  Lilya gets her fair share of grief, too.

And yet, somehow, it was still an entertaining watch.  What separates this film from another movie about human suffering (say, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) is HOW this movie was made.  Rather than presenting the story in a documentary fashion, Leviathan looks and feels like it was shot 100% by a Hollywood crew with Hollywood production values.  It rather looks and feels like a high-end Coen brothers movie.  The story is about suffering, true, but the movie itself is slick and well-constructed.

I liked how the corrupt mayor, Vadim, visits his local Orthodox priest with his woes, and the priest, who seems to be more than a little involved in Vadim’s business dealings, advises him, “All power is from God.  As long as it suits Him, fear not.”  Basically, he’s telling Vadim to use his power to do what’s necessary, and because God is also powerful, He will be on Vadim’s side.  A rather self-serving interpretation of the power of God, but there you have it.  And then, later in the film during a sermon to his congregation, he does a complete about-face, talking about how God sees everything, but he is not honored by a show of force.  Here’s a man who tailors God’s will as it suits him.  If the mayor is a mean little man, this priest is an enabler.  I’m not sure who I disliked more.

(For the record, Leviathan has one of the most interesting and surprising “payoff” scenes I’ve ever seen in a film.  When I saw it, my jaw dropped a little…it almost redefines the movie like a Shyamalan-esque twist.  Almost.  Not quite.  But it’s interesting in that kind of way.)

Earlier, I Googled “famous Russian movie comedies” and found a page that listed ten “essential” Soviet comedies.  None were made before 1984.  I tried again and found a list of fifteen great modern Russian comedies stretching from 1995 to 2018.  I have never heard of a single one of these movies and have no idea how I would go about finding a copy were I so inclined to actually watch one of them.

I mention this because, after watching Leviathan, I needed convincing that Russian directors could direct anything other than deep dramas about the human experience in one way or the other.  Of the six Russian films I’ve seen, three are Soviet era (Come and See [1985], Mirror [1975], Stalker [1979]), and two of those are by the same director, Andrei Tarkovsky.  The others are this film and two silent classics, Battleship Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera, which doesn’t qualify as a deep drama, I guess, but I include it for the sake of thoroughness.  The best Russian films are well made, to be sure, but light-hearted they are not.  I’m not a film scholar, but I would guess it has to do with the inherent toughness that comes with growing up Russian.  Those crazy winters, the bloody history of the place, the financial hardships, etc.  It would be interesting to see a Russian comedy, if for nothing else just to see what might make a Russian laugh.

(P.S. The IMDb trivia page reveals that, for many of the drinking scenes, the actors chose to drink real vodka. As a result, many of the takes of those scenes in the film are the 8th or 9th take, where the actors are genuinely drunk. Maybe THAT’S what makes a Russian laugh…?)

IDA (2013, Poland)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Cast: Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1962, Anna is about to take vows as a nun when she learns a family secret from her only living relative. Both women embark on a journey to discover their family story and where they belong.


There are countless movies I’ve seen that remind me why I love the movies.  Ida is the first one I’ve seen in a very long time that reminds me why I love Ansel Adams.  Shot in stunning black-and-white and in the old “Academy” format with black bars on both sides – basically a square screen space instead of a rectangle – Ida is composed almost completely of static shots that have been framed in such a way that you could select almost any shot from any scene, frame it, and hang it in a museum.  Frankly, the beauty of the film is breathtaking.  If the story is a tad shallow or cryptic, I can live with it because it was such a pleasure just to drink in the visuals.

Anna is an orphaned novice nun in a convent in Poland in 1962.  She is on the verge of taking her vows when she gets a letter from an aunt she never met or knew existed, but who suddenly wants to meet her.  Anna travels to the city to meet the aunt, Wanda, who rather coldly informs Anna that the parents she never met were Jews who were killed during the war.  Anna is not Anna, but Ida.  Wanda confirms this by noticing Anna/Ida’s red hair and commenting that her parents had red hair.  Ida wants to find her parents’ bodies, so she and Wanda begin a search that will reveal a lot more than just final resting places and familial closure.

At one point, Wanda and Ida have a conversation about the vows Ida is about to take.  Prior to this conversation, Ida has observed that Wanda drinks, smokes, and appears to bring various men home to bed with her on a somewhat regular basis.  Wanda simmers under Ida’s blank but judgmental stare.

Wanda asks her, “Do you have sinful thoughts sometimes?”

“Yes.”
“About carnal love?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.  You should try.  Otherwise, what sort of sacrifice are these vows of yours?”

My knee-jerk reaction was that Wanda is clearly trying to get a rise out of Ida, but I admire the sentiment and the logic behind that statement.  How does one know what they’re giving up if they’ve never experienced it to begin with?  It’s like a truism: how can you appreciate light if you’ve never been in the dark?  But it’s not that simple.  I do not smoke because I want to be healthy, or at least a little healthier.  You could say that I’ve “given up” smoking, but I’ve never experienced it.  Does it count as giving something up if you never took it up in the first place?  It’s an interesting conundrum, one that Ida has no real response to.

But I want to get back to the imagery.  That is the real draw of this film for me.  The only other film I’ve seen that really captures this same vibe is Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.  There is one shot that captures Ida and a young musician she and Wanda meet during their journey.  Ida and the young man are having a conversation outside of a small ballroom, sitting in front of doors and windows with some ironwork.  The two of them are framed so they are very small at the bottom center, while the rest of the frame is filled with these black silhouettes, backlit by the ballroom fluorescents.  When they speak, the English subtitles are displayed, not at the bottom of the screen, but near the top across a black bar formed by the dividing line between the window and the transom window above it:

The unexpected placement of the subtitle took me out of the movie, but only momentarily because, again, what a shot.  They are so small in the frame, especially Ida, and the world around her is so huge.  This visual theme is repeated over and over again, and not just with Ida.  When they are driving down a country road, the static shot is not just of the road, but of the trees towering on either side, and the road itself receding into the distance towards the bottom right corner of the screen.  It’s magnificent, and my words are not doing it justice.  You’ll have to see for yourself.

When it comes to the story…to say the dialogue is minimal is, appropriately, an understatement.  The viewer is asked to do some heavy lifting because Ida says very little.  I guess it’s a bit like a Rorschach test.  We observe Ida in a situation, something happens, she says nothing, but proceeds to do something, and we are left to wonder why she does it.

Take that scene with the musician.  Earlier, Ida had been in an argument with Wanda about Wanda’s loose morals.  Wanda asserts that even Jesus loved Mary Magdalene and tries to look up the story in Ida’s Bible, but Ida grabs it from her and storms out of the room.  Later we see she has gone downstairs to the club to meet with the musician in front of those windows.  Why?  It’s up to us to answer the question.  Maybe she’s lived her life believing one thing, and now suddenly her entire belief system is being shaken up, and perhaps this is the only way she can be a rebel before taking her vows.  And she’s just talking to the guy.

The movie is full of moments like that.  An unexpected death occurs.  Ida’s response is to get dressed up and go dancing.  Say what?  When you watch the movie, we’ll discuss what was going in Ida’s head during those moments.  I’m not a hundred percent sure.

By the time the movie’s over, we’ve seen two graves, a suicide, a nun bathing herself, and some of the best cinematography I’ve seen outside of a Kubrick film.  Director Pawel Pawlikowski is virtually unknown to me, although he was up for Best Director in 2019 (losing to, how about that, Alfonso Cuarón for Roma).  His narrative method is a little oblique for my tastes, but his visual style is superb in every way.  I’m glad it’s in my collection.  Whenever I’m in the mood for a visual feast, Ida will do the trick.

CITIZENFOUR (2014)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Laura Poitras
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Documentarian Laura Poitras captures the first week or so of Edward Snowden’s leaks to the press and the ensuing aftermath.


Over the last month or two, I have watched two stirring documentaries (Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Nostalgia for the Light) that redefined my idea of what a “good” documentary should be.  Instead of being passive observers, those filmmakers documented what they saw and then commented on it with definite viewpoints and biases.  Narration was used heavily.  That’s not normally my favorite kind of documentary, but they were clear exceptions to my rule.

Tonight, I finished watching Citizenfour, a documentary about the first week or so of the Edward Snowden whistleblowing controversy.  In direct opposition to the other documentaries I’ve seen recently, this film steadfastly avoids narration and simply presents the facts as they happen.  As I was watching, I was simply absorbed in the storytelling, and after it was over, it occurred to me that this documentary captured something incredibly rare: the first few days of a national scandal, behind the scenes with the actual person blowing the whistle, BEFORE the story breaks.  It was captivating.

But that sense of being a fly on the wall is nothing compared to the revelations Snowden made.  If you’re politically-minded, Citizenfour is not just revelatory; it’s chilling.  If one-tenth of what he discusses just in this film is true, the ramifications are vast.  I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the secret surveillance programs Snowden describes are exactly the kind of tools needed to create a dictatorship.  When a government is using a program/algorithm/whatever that can follow your movements via phone calls, emails, e-payments, cell phones, laptops, etcetera…that’s a police state, empirically.

Snowden’s revelations are so mindblowing and voluminous that paranoia is the rule of the day.  He contacted Poitras and a reporter from The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, via encrypted emails and air-gapped laptops and arranges to meet them in a Hong Kong hotel.  He makes a quick call to room service, then disconnects the phone.  Why?  Because, according to Snowden, the NSA has technology to listen in on conversations via a telephone handset, even when it’s hung up.  Later, the hotel’s fire alarm starts going off sporadically.  Snowden reconnects the phone and asks the front desk what’s going on, and he’s told it’s a scheduled test.  “Nice of them to let us know,” Snowden says.  Random event?  Who knows?  It’s a mark of how well the movie is constructed that seemingly innocuous events are transformed into, “They’re listening…”

The film follows the story, including the publication of the reports that eventually resulted in Snowden being forced to live in Russia for the better part of a year after his passport was revoked.  We meet Julian Assange as he organizes Snowden’s legal strategy along with a squad of ACLU attorneys, all working pro bono.

The genius of the film is how it simply presents the facts and allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions.  Is Snowden an attention-seeking charlatan?  Or was the US government actively spying – spying – on American citizens without their knowledge?  After a while, without really trying to, the movie takes on the air of one of those classic paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.  At one point, Snowden logs into a laptop while covering his upper body with a blanket like a tent, presumably to make sure no one would be able to tell where he was by using the camera on his laptop.  Or something.

(Admittedly, we only hear snippets of opposing viewpoints, one from then-President Obama where he agrees that Snowden created a much-needed discussion but declines to call him a patriot because of his methods.)

But surely some of this stuff is a little too sensational, right?  The cynic in me wants to believe that’s the case.  But consider: The material in Citizenfour was so sensitive at the time that the director, Laura Poitras, had to move to Berlin because she kept getting detained by border authorities when trying to re-enter the US.  All the film footage was kept on encrypted drives to prevent access from…whomever.  In fact, she edited the movie completely in Berlin so the FBI couldn’t serve a search warrant for the drives.  Just in case.

At one point, Snowden and reporter Greenbaum carry on a conversation about another whistleblower, apparently inspired by Snowden, who seems about to release information about drone strikes and watch lists under Obama.  They are careful to censor themselves by not saying certain words and phrases out loud.  Instead, they write key phrases on pieces of paper and hand them back and forth.  And then the paper is torn to pieces.  Normally, this kind of thing would reek of paranoia, but considering what has come before, it seems perfectly reasonable, in light of what they’re discussing.

I gotta say…in all honesty, I may not be the best person to review this movie.  I think it’s well-made and eye-opening and informative, but is it going to make me change my online or cell phone habits?  Probably not.  I’m in my 50s, and I enjoy the convenience of Amazon Prime and paying my bills online and using my phone to pay for things when shopping.  Am I worried I’m being spied upon?  I suppose I should be.  But I’m not.  I guess I’m willfully ignoring facts, at least the ones based on this documentary.  I’m not saying I like it.  I’m definitely against it.  But is it enough to make me change my behavior?  If I’m being honest, no.  (And if I can’t be honest in an online review, where CAN I be honest?)  But, bottom line, Citizenfour is one of the finest documentaries I’ve seen in recent years. If you’re running short of things to be outraged about, look no further.

BLANCANIEVES (2012, Spain)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Pablo Berger
Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Maribel Verdú, Macarena García
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 95% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A re-telling of the classic Snow White, Blancanieves is a beautiful homage to the black-and-white Golden Age of European silent cinema, set in a romanticized 1920s Seville.


If you are one of the 3 or 4 people in the world who have ever wondered what would happen if Terry Gilliam and Guillermo del Toro collaborated on a black-and-white silent film, your prayers have been answered.  Blancanieves is a beautiful anachronism, a black-and-white silent film created as a tribute to the silent films of nearly 100 years ago that gave birth to the motion picture industry as we know it.  The filmmakers have remixed the classic Snow White fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm into a movie that puts all the recent Disney remakes to shame.  THIS is how you pay tribute to your predecessors.

The updated story takes place in Seville during the 1910s through the 1920s.  Antonio, a famous bullfighter, is gored in the ring and paralyzed.  Traumatized by her husband’s injuries, his pregnant wife goes into premature labor and dies after giving birth to a daughter, Carmencita.  Antonio remarries to a scheming nurse, Encarna (Maribel Verdú, whom you may recognize from Y tu mama tambien or Pan’s Labyrinth).  Encarna, who gives gold diggers a bad name, manages to keep Antonio from ever seeing his daughter, who is raised by her grandmother.  But true to Brothers Grimm fashion, Carmencita (and her pet rooster, Pepe) eventually must come to live with her father and her evil stepmother, whose idea of caring for her paralyzed husband is to leave his chair in a sunny spot of the house while she indulges in a little S&M with the chauffeur.  Why didn’t we see THAT in the Disney version?!

If you know the story of Snow White, you know what happens next.  The insane jealousy, the trip into the forest, the attempted murder, her discovery by a group of little men (only six this time, and they’re bullfighter/clowns).  But everything is turned on its head slightly.  For example, she loses her memory, even forgetting her own name.  She remembers the steps to bullfighting, but she doesn’t know why.

We even get a scene with the infamous apple and the “Sleeping Death,” although the resolution to Blancanieves’s predicament is not quite what I was expecting.  It will take you by surprise, too.  I guarantee it.

This was such a charming movie to watch.  It was full of the kind of shots and edits that are typical of silent films of the ‘20s.  I won’t catalog them all here, but their usage really put me into the “vibe” of that bygone era.  I especially liked the liberal use of double-exposure shots to reinforce a state of mind, or to remind the audience of a piece of “dialogue.”  Or, most effectively, when Antonio reminisces about his dead wife.

And the actress who plays the adult Carmencita, aka Blancanieves, is one of the most beautiful actresses I’ve seen in a while.  For the record.  Films are heavily reliant on faces, silent films even more so.  They found the perfect face for this character.  A true beauty.

There were some nice quirks, too, that reminded me of Terry Gilliam more than anything or anyone else.  Among the six dwarves is one named Josefa.  Josefa is either a really ugly woman or a really bad drag queen.  In miniature.  Her name is mentioned, and that’s it.  No explanation given for her appearance.  We move on.

A word of warning: you know those stories you hear about how the Grimm fairy tales have been “cleaned up” or edited over the years either to remove the more gruesome elements or to tack on happy endings for kids?  Yeah.  Keep that in mind.  That’s all I’ll say.

I used to tell people that, if they’ve never seen a silent film before, The Artist (2011) is the place to start.  Having seen Blancanieves, I think I have to update my statement.  The Artist is a great deconstruction of the art of silent films, but it would be even better to start with a great example of the medium itself.  Sure, there’s always Chaplin and Lloyd and Keaton, but for someone who has historically shunned silent films, Blancanieves is an even better entry point.  It’s a little harder to find, but it’s worth the effort.

AMOUR (2012, Austria)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Georges and Anne have known a lifetime of love within their intimate marriage. Though their bond has survived the test of time, it’s about to meet its greatest challenge.


I’ve only seen three films by famed German director Michael Haneke.  The first was Caché (2005), which some may consider maddening, but which I think is a masterpiece of open-ended storytelling designed specifically to provoke arguments at the nearest Starbucks after the movie is over.  The second was The White Ribbon (2009), a pre-World War I fable about what happens when children give in to their tribal appetites.  I thought it was well made but a little too sedate, but it also won an unheard-of FOUR awards at Cannes that year, so what do I know.  (One day I’ll watch Funny Games [1997], but today is not that day.  Tomorrow is not looking good, either.)

Last night, I finished watching Amour, Haneke’s 2012 film that won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars that year, and the Golden Palm at Cannes.  After seeing three of his films, the one thing I can say about Haneke as a director is that he is apparently a perfectionist, who edits and composes shots as well as Kubrick, and that his subject matter is all over the place…also like Kubrick.  He also does not shy away from shocking the audience by lulling them into a kind of complacency before presenting them with a moment of violence or revelation.  Like Hitchcock, he plays the audience like a grand piano.

Amour tells the story of an octogenarian couple, Georges and Anne, still very much in love with each other.  They are retired music teachers living a quiet life of piano concerts, meals at the kitchen table, and reading the newspaper.  Georges might be a little more straightforward or curt than Anne, but they clearly know each other’s rhythms.  The style of the film clearly indicates their routines with a brilliant economy of editing and camerawork, not to mention the subtle performances from the two main actors.

One day, something happens at the breakfast table.  Anne and Georges are having a conversation over a boiled egg when Anne simply stops and stares into space.  Unable to get a response, even after dabbing a wet towel on her face, Georges prepares to fetch the doctor.  Suddenly Anne snaps out of her trance and wonders where Georges is going.  When he tries to explain what’s happened, she gets confused and angry with him for torturing her.  But when she tries to pour herself a cup of coffee, the coffee goes everywhere except in the cup, and suddenly her right hand seems to be trembling…

At this point, in years past, I would have probably turned this movie off, or returned it to Blockbuster without finishing it.  I can hear my inner monologue now: “Why do I need to watch an ultra-depressing movie about someone who’s dying?  I mean, I can hope that it has a life-affirming message at the end like Philadelphia or Angels in America, but this is a foreign film that won awards at the Oscars AND at Cannes, so chances are it’s going to end on a down note.  Who needs it, am I right?”

Well, Amour may not have the kind of crowd-pleasing finale one might hope for, but it is nevertheless engrossing, quietly devastating, and even a little terrifying.

…you can’t see it, but I’m very frustrated right now.  I’m trying to figure out how to write the rest of this column and it’s eluding me.

With a movie like this, an analysis of its technical prowess seems irrelevant.  I learn from the extras on the Blu ray that the couple’s apartment was constructed entirely on a set with a big green-screen backdrop.  Haneke wrote the script with his parents’ apartment in mind, so it seemed appropriate to just recreate it on a soundstage.  How does this contribute to the story?  I honestly don’t know.  I would imagine it enabled the filmmakers to control every aspect of lighting so that anything involving scenery through the windows felt as if it was real.  So I guess there’s that.

My problem is that this movie is intended very specifically to make you empathize with the characters.  It does this job very well.  It was a pleasure to watch a great film with great characters in the hands of a great director.  But if I’m going to talk about how the movie made me feel…I guess I must be honest and say it didn’t exactly make me feel good.  It didn’t make me feel bad, exactly, just really, really sad.

There is a kind of sadness I can feel at certain kinds of films (The Remains of the Day and Requiem for a Dream come to mind) where the endings are so mind-blowingly sad, and so unexpected, there is a kind of emotional exhilaration that accompanies the sadness.  I am so wrapped up in the story I have left real life behind, but after the movie is over, I am back in the real world, and I am stoked to tell someone about how great the movie is, despite its dark material.

With Amour, though, when the end of the film arrives, and I’m back in the real world…I still felt like I was in the movie.  Because, in a way, the movie is about me.  About all of us.  One day, I will (finally) grow old and eventually die.  Watching the scenes where Georges stares into Anne’s eyes as her body functions waste away and he reluctantly hires a nurse who is stronger than he is because Anne has lost the use of her right side and must be carried out of the wheelchair to be bathed?  Listening to the conversation when Anne says point blank that she sees no point in going on living if she’s going to be such a burden?  Watching Anne’s face when the nurse turns her in her bed to demonstrate to Georges how to put on her diaper?

Watching these scenes, I wondered how I would feel myself if I were to succumb to something similar.  I tell myself I would want to live.  There’s a line in Full Metal Jacket: “The dead know only one thing.  It is better to be alive.”  But what if I got as sick as Anne does?  What if I lost the power of speech?  What if I lost the ability to type with both hands, as I’m doing right now?

I’m not even sure that is the point of the movie, to make me reflect on my own mortality.  It’s said that Haneke made this movie to honor his aunt who suffered a degenerative disease as Anne does.  The title of the movie is Amour, so maybe I should be writing about the great love between Georges and Anne.  But whenever I think about that aspect of the film, I fall back into thinking about myself again.  It’s a vicious cycle, and I’m not sure how to break it.

I’m making this movie sound depressing to the nth degree.  I suppose it is, by default, but it is still definitely worth your while to watch.  It is so well made and so thought-provoking.  It deserves to be seen and discussed, ideally with someone you love.  I don’t agree with every decision made by the characters in this film.  But I understand why they were made, so I do not judge them.  One day, I will get old, and I will think back to this movie and say to myself, “Now I really know how they feel.”


P.S.  The only reason I don’t rate this movie 10/10 is because there’s a brief prologue involving an empty apartment and a bedroom with a single occupant that, to me, telegraphed a key moment that I saw coming a mile away as the scene unfolded.  But that’s just me.