Absence makes the heart

That Barton Fink Feeling is on hiatus. The Wife and I have been in pre-production for a long-term project set to premiere January 23, 2009.

We Own the Night

The descent into a life of crime is an old Hollywood standby. James Gray’s gloomy We Own the Night (2007) puts a reverse spin on this familiar storyline, following a character unwillingly compelled to uphold the law. A black sheep in a family of cops, Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) manages a Brooklyn nightclub in the late 1980s. His father (Robert Duvall) and brother (Mark Wahlberg) want Bobby’s help nailing a Russian drug dealer, a regular at the club. As the drug war escalates, Bobby must choose between the pleasure-seeking life he’s happy with and whatever love or loyalty he has left for the blue-steel family that can’t conceal its contempt for him.

Gray wears his influences (Scorsese, Coppola, The French Connection) on his sleeve, beside his unmistakable ambition. We Own the Night strains for tragedy—Henry V as a coked-up club kid. As the pop songs of Bobby’s youth (Blondie, Bowie, the Clash) are replaced by an overcast orchestral score, the character’s situation grows more dire and Phoenix’s performance hardens. If only the entire picture didn’t have the same dutiful, hangdog air throughout.

The set pieces, however, are exceptional. Gray can be all thumbs when it comes to tone or pacing, but action storytelling brings out the best in him. A rainy outer-borough car chase; a nail-biting stash-house appraisal; a climactic pursuit through tall grass with shotguns drawn—the film comes alive during these heightened, turning-point sequences. Each one is intuitively, spectacularly conceived, evidence that Gray might one day deliver the magnum opus he seems to think it’s his responsibility to produce.

The Illusionist

A good illusionist inspires the audience to believe the impossible. This is true of movies as well as magic shows. Set in Vienna circa 1900, and shot on location in the Czech Republic, The Illusionist (2006) stars Edward Norton as the mysterious Eisenheim, a master showman whose acts of enchantment seem to defy the laws of physics and nature. (He takes only seconds to transform an orange seed into a fruit-bearing tree; such was considered entertainment in the days before NASCAR.) Writer/director Neil Burger links these two seductive forms of artifice, cinema and conjuring, by suggesting that some of Eisenheim’s tricks are accomplished with early movie projectors. Occasional period effects such as blurred edges or iris shots sneak into cinematographer Dick Pope’s handsomely colored images. One particularly striking close-up begins out of focus, shimmering with gaslight fumes, and then resolves to show Eisenheim staring directly into the camera as if to hypnotize the viewer.

Frequently a guarded performer, Norton uses his meticulous technique to keep Eisenheim at arm’s length. Holding his cards close to the vest may pique the audience’s interest, but it drives some of the other characters bats. Eisenheim’s success draws the attention first of the sympathetic Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giammati, cast wonderfully against type) and then of Uhl’s employer, Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell). A rational but arrogant man driven mad by his aging father’s refusal to yield the Hapsburg throne, the prince perceives Eisenheim’s sorcery—and his increasingly devoted following—as a revolutionary threat.

According to Burger, whose tightly constructed script is based on a short story by Steven Millhauser, the conflict between Eisenheim and the authorities was initially conceptual: “The charges against him in the short story are that he’s been blurring the distinction between truth and illusion, between art and reality.” That sort of thing doesn’t always play onscreen, so Burger, a fine dramatist (and a whiz at misdirection), expanded some characters’ roles and created others out of whole cloth. Millhauser’s existential showdown hasn’t been banished entirely, but The Illusionist grounds it within the overlapping conventions of the detective story, romance, and period film.

The detective, obviously, is Uhl, mildly corrupt but still a mensch. (As the introverted Eisenheim recedes, growing more powerful the less he speaks, Uhl becomes the narrative’s focal point.) The romance comes from Eisenheim’s relationship with the duchess Sophie (Jessica Biel). As children they were forbidden to see one another because Eisenheim is a commoner, the son of a cabinet maker. By the time he returns to Vienna as an adult, Sophie has become the prince’s kept lady. Valued not simply for her beauty but also because marrying into her family will cement the would-be usurper’s political alliance with Hungary, Sophie wants no part of Leopold’s plot. In fact, Eisenheim may have traveled the world and studied what Uhl calls “the dark arts” simply so that one day he could obey his lover’s plea, “Make us disappear!”

After Sophie is found dead, presumably murdered by Leopold, Eisenheim goes into hiding. He re-emerges with a stripped-down act—no sets or sleight-of-hand—and wordlessly summons ghosts to appear onstage, Sophie’s among them. Apparently so shattered by grief that he no longer bothers to wear a tie (the superb costumes were designed by Ngila Dickson), Eisenheim’s monkish aspect and possibly supernatural abilities rouse a segment of the populace that takes him for a prophet. Is he trying to ruin the prince, or—as Eisenheim explains to the angry, conflicted Uhl—does he simply want to be with Sophie in whatever way he can? Perhaps the two goals are not mutually exclusive.

Burger’s understanding of the period deepens the film considerably at this point. He strikes an intelligent balance between characteristics of the fading 19th century (the vogue for spiritualism) and the imminent 20th (loosening of class distinctions and the rise of technologies such as the cinema projector). The Illusionist’s Vienna is not the romantic capital of Strauss waltzes and Sachertortes. The city in 1900 was far more interesting, a locus of both vanishing traditions and incipient modernity. (The seat of the declining Hapsburg Empire, Vienna was also home at this time to trailblazing artists and thinkers such as Freud, Klimt, and Mahler.) This history flows through the picture like a subterranean river—not unlike Philip Glass’s score, with its seesawing harmonies mirroring The Illusionist’s unsteady relationship between appearance and reality.

How can it be that such a distinctive, pleasurable film, which places few demands on its audience but never doubts their intelligence—how could this picture have left so faint a mark during its release two years ago? In this age of round-the-clock entertainment coverage, was it simply crowded out by shameless, bloated pocket-pickers such as Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and forgettable prestige pictures such as Flags of Our Fathers? When film lovers ask why Hollywood doesn’t make more story-driven movies with good characters aimed at an adult audience, this is what we’re looking for. Since media outlets are more interested in reporting the details of some D-list celebutante’s latest sonogram or underwear mishap than they are in fulfilling any cultural mandate, they can’t be trusted to alert the public to films like The Illusionist unless the movie arrives with a ready-made storyline of Oscar hype or “controversial” subject matter. It must not have been considered highbrow enough for the cinema journals, either, for most of them ignored it, too. In the past (perhaps an idealized one), this kind of unpretentious entertainment, which trusts the audience to discover its virtues, could have been taken for granted. Not anymore. The trick when one appears is not to let it pass you by.

I Vitelloni

One of the best reasons to keep watching movies is that even a known quantity like Federico Fellini can surprise you. I’m not usually a fan of his work, but my wife and I have been screening Italian pictures lately—sneak previews for an upcoming vacation—and my pedantic sense of obligation prevents us from ignoring the country’s most famous cineaste. Having little desire to re-view the incorrigible sentimentality of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, or to try finishing the unwatchable Satyricon, we chose Fellini’s first great success, I Vitelloni (1953). An international award-winner, it’s the filmmaker’s most conventionally satisfying picture, the product of his finest direction prior to the unique 8½.

Employing in-depth classical staging to represent the variously intimate, burdensome, and disenchanting relationships among friends and relatives in a provincial Italian city (modeled after Fellini’s hometown, Rimini), the story circles around a group of five aimless men, each about 30, who still live with their respective families. The episodic structure should be familiar from the American pictures I Vitelloni has inspired, such as Mean Streets or Breaking Away. Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), the ladies’ man with plump lips and an Elvis pompadour, makes a reluctant show of settling down after marrying Sandra (Eleonora Ruffo), the sister of Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi). Typically a quiet observer, Moraldo frequently appears off to one side or to the rear of shots, his physical detachment a subliminal marker of the separation from his friends that escalates as the narrative develops. The group is rounded out by Alberto, a pudgy good-time charlie with sister problems of his own (played by Alberto Sordi, who won the Venice Film Festival’s best actor award); Leopoldo, an aspiring poet and playwright (Leopoldo Trieste); and Riccardo, a singer (Riccardo Fellini, the director’s brother). (Who is the sixth man with a mustache and big nose, who lingers at the margins, doing little and saying less? Is he the narrator, or is it a collective voice a la the Virgin Suicides?)

Fellini and his three cinematographers thoroughly capture the inertia of a seaside town during the off-season. Tellingly, the only time the narrative shifts away from this unnamed Rimini is not when Fausto and Sandra honeymoon in Rome but when it appears Sandra has run away, no longer able to tolerate the conscienceless Fausto’s philandering. We spend the duration in town, no more likely to escape than the vitelloni (a slang term essentially meaning “hopeless loafers”) themselves. In this picture, Fellini strikes a balance he’d never again achieve, presenting his characters’ frustrations and aspirations without ignoring or schmaltzifying their limitations. The mood is often sad, sometimes merry, and always appealing.

Although the director quit Rimini for Rome more than a decade before I Vitelloni, he respects his characters’ shared, unspoken reluctance to leave behind everything they know, even if that familiarity is what they most want to escape. This paradoxical, sympathetic emotion courses through the picture and culminates in Moraldo’s hesitant, practically fearful expression at the end. La Dolce Vita’s protagonist (Marcello Mastroianni), who could be the vitelloni’s Roman cousin, finds himself in a similar predicament—longing to break out of his empty yet comfortable life—but Fellini makes the mistake in that picture of presenting Marcello’s anomie as symptomatic of a decadent society. I Vitelloni shrugs off such pretensions and therefore seems less dated than the self-consciously “modern” La Dolce Vita.

Fausto, Alberto, and the rest are roughly Fellini’s own age at the time of filming, but the movie is no self-portrait. Whatever autobiographical resonance it holds derives from the filmmaker’s memories of a world he left behind—and, perhaps, in projections of the arrested development he might otherwise have succumbed to. This distance from his own life story may be what allowed Fellini to construct I Vitelloni’s classical mise-en-scene, an effective style he would nevertheless abandon as he came to favor the garish “Felliniesque” look, defined by pageantry, serpentine camera movements, and ghoulish close-ups.

Without resorting to the later films’ sometimes heavy-handed effects, I Vitelloni’s mise-en-scene (basically, how the director sculpts the elements placed before the camera through staging, lighting, performance, etc.) makes the town seem alternately oppressive and empty. Consider how many sequences begin with shots of crowds, or with a single image of multiple characters bunched into the frame, but then conclude with a single character either isolated by a tight frame or left alone in long shot. When seeing off the honeymooners, for example, close to a dozen people run alongside the train, waving and cheering. After an awkward moment they disperse, leaving only Moraldo to gaze over his shoulder at the long line of tracks that leads out of town. This scene will be mirrored by the conclusion, when the one character who does manage to leave Rimini departs in secret, seen off only by a young working-class boy he’s befriended.

The beach, like the train station, is one of the film’s significant locations. Not coincidentally, both sites mark the city limits and feed romantic dreams of escape. Seizing one of Rimini’s few networking opportunities, Leopoldo winds up at the seaside in the wee hours with a visiting, corpulent actor. (With his dreams of artistic success, Leopoldo is the only one who does not hide or displace his wish for a different life.). He hightails it back to town upon realizing that the older man is more interested in a boardwalk assignation than in discussing his play. During these beach scenes, composer Nino Rota’s plaintive, sometimes even brooding, themes mingle on the soundtrack with the slashing wind, most memorably on the cold, gray afternoon when the vitelloni kill time on the pier and amble in their overcoats by the deserted shoreline.

Fellini’s eye for composition works best when he has this kind of empty space to play with. Surprisingly, the director finds similar room to breathe in the overstuffed middle-class interiors. During a montage when the vitelloni each return home from a late night out, there is a distant shot of Alberto lifting his mother in his arms while his sister types nearby. An empty chair in the foreground reminds us of their dead father. The open space surrounding the chair keeps the viewer remote from Alberto’s fleeting show of affection. We analyze it rather than share it. Fellini holds the composition, and Alberto walks through a doorway that divides the frame. He sneaks a drink from the liquor cabinet while his mother and sister remain in the other room, unaware. That one shot could be the entire film in microcosm.

It isn’t only the men who have to cope with the challenges of provincial life. After Sandra returns from Rome she is greeted by two friends. The welcome soon turns sour as the others’ backhanded compliments feed Sandra’s insecurities about her shotgun marriage, a constrictive three-shot emphasizing her uneasiness. Fellini reserves his most emphatic camera movement for Sandra, as well—a quick track into close-up to convey her shock upon learning (at the family dinner table, no less) that Fausto was fired for forcing himself on his boss’s wife. The camera pulls back to reveal Sandra’s father standing behind her, his back turned significantly, underlining the sense of shame and obligation that influences most decisions in this community.

Sandra and Moraldo’s father worries about the boys being arrested in his home—imagine the scandal! In its concern for avoiding public disgrace, I Vitelloni has more in common with Pietro Germi’s comedies, especially the fantastic Seduced and Abandoned, than other Fellini pictures. In Seduced and Abandoned the manic performances and camerawork reflect the hysteria behind maintaining “respectability,” of sweating to keep up appearances when everyone knows what they hide, anyway. Unlike Germi, whose frenzied style implies that repressive social conventions are the product—and the cause—of insanity, Fellini’s measured mise-en-scene offers little social critique. Whether his characters leave or remain in Rimini seems an entirely personal matter.

“Carnivale is over,” someone says the morning after the blowout party, when everyone in town returns to work and forgets the previous night’s indulgences. But for Federico Fellini, soon to become one of the world’s most famous moviemakers, carnivale had just begun.

Batman Begins

You can bet that the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker will monopolize any conversation surrounding The Dark Knight when the anticipated Batman sequel premieres next month. Good thing, too, as 2005’s overrated Batman Begins couldn’t muster a compelling villain if the production’s catering budget depended on it. (The flavorless script offered three onscreen baddies to choose from, but only one—Tom Wilkinson’s condescending gangster—was the least bit interesting.) Director Christopher Nolan, who made his bones with the unique Memento, also failed to come up with a visual style to rival the gothic pop lyricism of Tim Burton’s standard-setting Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992). Lacking even a sleek Batmobile, the only thing Batman Begins has going for it is an unexpected series of parallels between its hero, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), and the ultimate millionaire vigilante, President George W. Bush.

The corrupt, crime-ridden Gotham City’s salvation hinges upon the selflessness of its wealthiest citizen—a fantasy of supply-side economics aimed at kids too young to vote. Troubled by responsibility to his father’s legacy, the young Bruce thinks first to cast off six generations of Ivy League privilege and strike out on his own. Rather than become a silver-spoon cowboy, he trains as a ninja. He dabbles in drugs (a rare, hallucinogenic flower, admittedly more New Agey than the president’s booze and blow). Then he is born again, vowing to channel his less savory impulses into dedication to a higher purpose.

Returning to Gotham City and the corporate world, Bruce seeks counsel from his father’s associates—although Michael Caine’s Alfred and Morgan Freeman’s Lucius are less alarming tutors than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. While laying the groundwork for his covert crusade, Bruce maintains a facade of playboy antics, leading the press to misunderestimate him. Eventually he dons Batman’s cape and mask to wage war against a mustachioed former ally, Ra’s al Ghul. (Though the character is portrayed by Irish actor Liam Neeson, the name has a distinctly Arabic tang.) Ra’s al Ghul’s hideout is more Himalayan mountain retreat than Iraqi spider hole, but nevertheless this head of an international terrorist organization must be forcibly removed from power if civilization as we know it is to survive. (He threatens to employ chemical weapons of mass destruction.) Local authorities wring their hands over Batman’s unsanctioned aggression, as well as their own failure to prevent further violence.

Who’s the ideal viewer for this film, Alex P. Keaton? The script (by Nolan and David S. Goyer) takes pains to emphasize that Bruce’s billionaire father didn’t get wealthy by exploiting the less fortunate. Wayne Enterprises may churn out weapons prototypes faster than the Pentagon can buy them up, but Bruce’s dad also built a monorail for all the regular joes who just need to get to work, so he must be a saint. Not only are the Waynes model philanthropists (and opera subscribers); Bruce’s Batcave is an expansion of the subterranean corridors built by his ancestors, who offered up Wayne Manor as a way station for the Underground Railroad. For all the genuflecting toward a supposedly superior ruling class—and the picture’s outright hostility to the justice system, with the insanity defense standing in for all softheaded bleeding-heart principles—Batman might as well be fighting to lower the tax rate on short-term capital gains.

Comic-book movies’ current, unfortunate ubiquity makes it easy to overlook one of the genre’s strangest qualities. Painfully obvious dialogue and story construction notwithstanding, these movies are typically drowning in subtext. Consider the first Spiderman picture, in which Peter Parker’s struggle to harness his newfound powers is the heroic reflection of a teenage boy’s attempt to deal with puberty’s upheavals. Or Superman comics, which have been read productively in light of the immigrant experience. (Brad Bird’s animated films, especially his superheroic The Incredibles but also last year’s Ratatouille, are the latest of Superman‘s descendants, high-minded pop art that explores the contradiction between American exceptionalism and the desire to fit in.)

Batman stories, with their withdrawn hero and noir-ish cityscapes, could never be about anything as messy or as earthbound as hormones. Unlike the nerds and mutants who populate most other comic books, Bruce Wayne is an establishment figure, equally at home in the Batcave and in the boardroom. In Batman Begins, the superhero doesn’t simply vanquish the bad guy; he also engineers a hostile takeover, which is staged as Bruce’s rakish reclamation of his birthright. The rich get richer, and the above-the-law captain of industry is society’s only hope for deliverance.

Burton’s movies downplayed these reactionary overtones. Instead they tapped a vein of movieland grandeur, due in no small part to the Deco-expressionist production design by Anton Furst and Bo Welch and the exuberant performances of Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. But Nolan’s Batman Begins appears merely gloomy (not in a good way) and self-serious. Every decade gets the Batmobile it deserves, and the 2000s’ looks like a tank with monster-truck wheels, better suited for the streets of Basra than Gotham City.

Shine a Light

Click here for my review of the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light (directed by Martin Scorsese), published by The House Next Door.

My Blueberry Nights

Rather than reinvent the wheel with his first English-language feature, Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s hipster poet of the lovelorn, takes his voluptuous show on the road. (Far) East meets West in My Blueberry Nights as Wong’s heroine, the just-dumped Elizabeth (Norah Jones), licks ice cream and her wounds in a Brooklyn café then skips town for a series of waitressing jobs in Tennessee and Nevada. A predictably mass-transit-reliant New Yorker, she’s often forced to ride the bus, but the filmmaker—who loves no less than Ozu to omit expected scenes—never once shows Elizabeth gazing plaintively through a Greyhound’s window.

Jones, a musician and non-actor, certainly doesn’t smolder like iconic Wong actresses Maggie Cheung, Ziyi Zhang, or Gong Li. But casting the quintessential Starbucks singer may seem less bizarre when one considers that Wong regularly invites Asian pop stars to act in his pictures. Jones’s flannel pajamas vibe is somewhat at odds with the director’s fashionable aesthetic, but she’s not bad for an amateur. It’s the supporting cast, though, who carry the film, including a rumpled Jude Law as Jeremy, a typically pining Wong hero; Natalie Portman as a peroxide poker mistress, who may or may not know all the angles; and the excellent David Strathairn, for whom the challenging task of playing drunk seems as easy as pie. The musician Chan Marshall (who performs under the name Cat Power) also pops up for a wistful scene with Law. Her foxy song “The Greatest” is one of the picture’s refrains.

Wong brought his usual bag of tricks to America—blissful, grainy slow-motion; romantic voiceover narration; prismatic, bebop editing (courtesy of William Chang); and an obsession with the way people eat, drink, or smoke both to feed and to assuage their longing. But he left behind the indulgent glamour of his recent pictures, looking instead to recapture the indulgent nonchalance of his mid-’90s work. One of the best scenes finds an exuberant Jeremy pouring his heart out over the phone, only to learn he has the wrong number. “No, I don’t want to order any fried chicken,” he tells the unheard stranger on the line. “Thanks for listening, though.” Substitute Cantonese for Law’s Manchester accent, and this bit could easily have appeared in an off-the-cuff pop concoction like Fallen Angels or Chungking Express.

Exoticism has long been part of Wong’s appeal, so it’s no surprise that many American critics expressed disappointment in My Blueberry Nights when it premiered at Cannes last year. Noodle shops, cheongsams, and the Chungking Mansions have been replaced by known quantities: blue-plate cafés, convertibles, poker instead of mahjong, hand-rolled cigarettes, and lonely people dependant on the kindness of strangers. But My Blueberry Nights, its patchiness notwithstanding, offers more than just Wong “doing” America.

Yearning, this auteur’s great theme, is universal. In Hong Kong, yearning generally points to the past, but in this country it faces westward. Wong and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji (longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle is absent), film the American desert rapturously, as few have since Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, another world class director’s tepidly received stateside layover. There’s a beautiful counterpoint at work between Jeremy’s cramped, layered restaurant and the broader, eventually epic spaces in which Elizabeth finds herself. And, unabashed romantic that he is, Wong ends My Blueberry Nights with a kiss. Sweet.