The House of Mirth

It is my lament that costume dramas fail to receive much discussion around these parts. Both The Wings of the Dove and Sense and Sensibility flirt with greatness in my eyes, but ultimately it comes down to which film most profoundly disturbed me about its themes of possession and the delicacy of social status, and thus Terence Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2000) becomes the obvious pick. Courtly love and procuring a spouse never hinged on such financial stability, and courtly love thus becomes a minefield of manipulation and masochistic desire.

Davies extends Wharton’s critiques on the historical limitations of women, where prodigious women who desire material and financial comforts must marry well by presenting themselves to men as commodities. The Lady in courtly love assumes no inner identity, but always remains a thing whose blank surface internalizes the ideals that the man desires for her. Lily Bart’s refusal to be narcissistically prized generates a subjectivity that is adamantly unlike the projection of the Lady. Because of her independence, Lily (Gillian Anderson) sees herself as separate from this commodification and thus able to comment on women’s submission to their mates.

When she ruins a chance at a spouse, Lily turns to Lawrence Selden (Eric Stoltz), her confidant and close friend for support. That these two feel a kinship for one another is noticeable from the first. He even appeals to her sense of integrity, noting that such wooing is essentially debasement. Still, while he believes that her wooing of men for financial benefit cheapens her, Selden cannot bring himself to consummate their relationship precisely because he knows that he lacks the very commodities that he endeavors to break her of, which, in turn, reveals that Selden orders his life by the same conditions that he teaches her to abhor.

This is a film that is fated to end miserably, but in its critique of the gender and social limitation toward women, it is profoundly liberating. By casting a clear indictment about the inequities presented for women throughout the nineteenth century, The House of Mirth becomes powerfully meaningful, allowing its criticism to extend throughout all social classes, becoming both backward-looking and strangely prescient.

The House of Mirth: 10/10

Memories of Murder

South Korean director Joon-Ho Bong's Memories of Murder (2003) is an exceptionally well-built machine, using classic tropes of the serial killer thriller and tweaking them enough and making us care about the characters enough that we forgive the rote formal procedure of the film. That is, while this film is nothing especially original, it fashions mood and an atmosphere all its own that lets it rise above simple remakes of earlier films.

Inspired by true events, the film examines the first known incident of a serial killer in 1986 South Korea, where his female victims were found raped, gagged, and mutilated whenever there would be a rainy day. Bong utilizes the basic atmosphere of Se7en, a film that itself felt like the crimes only took place in perpetual rain, but it never feels like lip service. The whole inspired by true events helps gloss over some of these issues, but it's largely that we honestly care for our principle detectives, despite their faults. Our rural detective garners the most sympathy in his mistaken desire to simply receive praise and fashion a confession onto the first suspect he and his partner can torture into confessing. With the arrival of another detective from Seoul, though, the film shifts into a more humane examination of crime investigation. Indeed, the lead characters’ humanity may be what is most helpful to shifting this film away from simple stereotype.

Another way that the film transcends simple genre filmmaking is the atypical political critique, since the film implies that some of the inability of the detectives’ attempts to catch the killer lie in the social and political turmoil in South Korea at that time, since police forces were being used to quell political uprisings in larger cities. Memories of Murder pays enough subtle attention to this aspect that it worked as fascinating subtext and gives the film a sociopolitical context that most films of this genre lack. This quality lends the film a moral critique that likewise lets the film extend beyond bits of comedy and a steady thread of suspense. Love that shot of the kidnapper's appearance in the rainy background as one of his victims realized that the whistling wasn't only her own. Subtly terrifying. A beautifully crafted genre piece, and what a muted, introspective finale.

Memories of Murder: 8/10

Ghost Rider

Ah, comic book movies. Treat them too seriously and they devolve to mirthless, over-the-top grim spectacles of machismo and vengeance (see Sin City). Treat them with reverence but mistake what can translate into film with what can’t and you get Mark Steven Johnson’s Ghost Rider (2007), a thoroughly appalling piece of cinema that will make oodles because it requires no commitment and simply churns out empty thrills. Films have rarely been so slight as this one.

If one is unfamiliar, hot-shot carnie motorcycle stuntman Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) makes a deal with the devil (Peter Fonda) to save his father from the grips of cancer, a disease that has spread from the ills of cigarettes. Alas, while the father awakens and feels fine the next day, he just gets in a bike wreck the same day, proving that you might as well die from cigarettes as die from bike wrecks. Inane. Anyway, Johnny tries to spare the life of his childhood beloved (now Eva Mendes), a reporter, from the dangers of being too close to him.

Unfortunately, despite my hopeful anticipation that this would be beautifully bad, Ghost Rider instead mostly trails toward pointless mediocrity. All the things that gave the character an edge, the Penance Stare and the flaming skull, just don't translate dramatically to a feature film. Take a pile of melodrama, add horrendous music that cues us along, remove the top three buttons of Eva Mendes' shirts, and add mediocre CG that lacks any of the over-the-top absurdity that Cage has, and you're left with a film that divests itself of its greatest strength--a game Cage and Sam Elliot. The script sucks, though we all knew that, but the film lacks anything close to an interesting villain, with Bentley chewing the scenery and then some in vain, and the film is devoid of the energy and vitality that could make something like this appealing. Largely uninvolving and thoroughly rote filmmaking, I'll instead just forget this vacuous film ever happened and return to the madcap joy of the Wicker Man…

Ghost Rider: 3/10

Toy Story 2

What is fascinating about 1999 is that the three most fascinating films released that year all contain great pathos regarding the rupture of innocence and the chasm that threatens to tear apart the generations. However, while Julie Taymor’s Titus and Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant both chronicle this thematic with wondrous results, it is ultimately John Lasseter’s Toy Story 2 (1999) that most haunts me. While the film is bereft of nihilism, its exploration of how all children eventually abandon that which made them so as they grow older became a critique that cut right to the bone, and its pathos is never exploited but merely observed, which itself becomes a testimony to the maturity with which Lasseter and Pixar treat their material.

Andy, the boy who owns all the toys, leaves behind the aging Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) as he goes off to camp, and a conniving toy collector, Big Al, snaps him up at the family yard sale. While Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the rest of the toys plot a way to spring the toynapped Woody, Woody himself is confronted with the reality that a boy’s love toward his toys always comes to an end, either mutating into an eye toward capital gain (as we see in Big Al) or simply evaporates with time (as we fear with Andy). Even as Woody is repaired and newly minted for resale by Big Al, he must combat a less than fulfilling reunion with his TV show’s partners in the form of Stinky Pete, all while nurturing along a (relatively) platonic relationship with Jesse the Cowgirl.

The film’s metacommentary on the guilt and abandonment of childhood reaches its nadir when Jesse sings the lilting “When She Loved Me,” a song mourning the loss of her former owner. Likewise, the depression that sinks into Woody’s every fiber as he himself works through his fears of abandonment become the centerpiece to what is ostensibly a celebratory children’s tale, granting the film a complexity of emotion that Pixar has still to top. It is this undercurrent of honesty that allows the film to balance on both ends of the scale as the film ends—perhaps Andy will soon tire of the toys, but the love that he feels for them now is enough, which itself isn’t much different than the ultimate articulations of why should we be that Woody Allen or Ingmar Bergman come to their strongest films.

Beyond the meticulous animation design, the film scores major props for using the angelic voice of Sarah McLachlan. Moreover, while the film never indicts children, it offers a gentle reminder to them to be as loving as careful with their toys as they are with their real-life counterparts, for how we act around our toys seems to be how we act around others. A beautiful, melancholy film, yet still imbued with so much life.

Toy Story 2: 10/10

Dead Ringers

Few directors maintain a consistent yet chameleon personal stamp on their films more than David Cronenberg. Despite such a diverse filmography, including mini-masterpieces in The Fly and Videodrome, it is ultimately Dead Ringers (1988) that possesses the greatest resonance to these eyes. Externally a psychological horror film detailing the growing disconnect between twin gynecological brothers as a girl comes between them, by film’s end Dead Ringers is far more concerned with issues of familial dependency and reliance on abstract definitions of humanity and mutation.

While the brothers, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played magnificently by Jeremy Irons), begin the film as symbiotically joined in thought and deed, with the dominant Elliot securing the submissive Beverly women as the two trade off, that homogeny of order is soon displaced with the appearance of an actress, Claire (Genevieve Bujold), who awakens Beverly to a consciousness of secrecy and dependency entirely apart from Elliot. Thus, while it is earlier understood that, as Elliot tells Beverly, “you haven't done anything until I've done it too,” Beverly finds that he and Elliot are growing estranged by their very different personas and aspirations.

So Cronenberg fashions a film reconciling this sense of separation from two people who always felt themselves to be one. The twins’ anatomy and how they identify with it, best showcased in a fever dream that Beverly has of Claire severing the link between he and Elliot with her teeth, becomes for Beverly a conscious decision to likewise alter and amputate the flesh of their patients, externalizing the submissive twin’s inner fears. Here we see the admittedly cold and sterile surgical tools to be used on the “mutant” women, and the tools’ subliminal horror is channeled into our growing understanding that the brothers are similarly headed toward a symbiotic amputation.

Aided by a Howard Shore title theme that is certainly the most haunting and evocative of his career, Cronenberg’s film ends with a humanist mourning on the inability of the brothers to, like the metaphorical Siamese twins they reference, live without the other. The tenderness displayed in the final shot refutes those who feel Cronenberg is too clinical here, as its composition returns to the images of art at the film’s beginning with their tragic return to a prelapsarian innocence. A tragic yet beautiful encapsulation of Cronenberg’s themes, and certainly his most personal film.

Dead Ringers: 10/10

The Conversation

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) is a slow burn, threatening an internal fever pitch yet outwardly letting Coppola explore obscurity and anonymity through the eyes of a surveillance man, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) who denies any secrets. Yet beneath this persona is the bruised ego of a man all too aware of the damage his surveillance who caused, cognizant of the fact that he’s responsible for at least two deaths. This conscious reticence and refusal of liability is counteracted by dreams wherein he suffers and tries to come to terms with his guilt, even trying to prevent death from the traumatic forward momentum he sees.

Having gained access to a couple’s private conversation by centralizing into their meandering discussions with surveillance audio tapes, Caul is masterful at fine-tuning the inarticulate sections. However, when he realizes that these individuals also work at the same business that has contracted him, Caul becomes suspicious of the intentions of his employer, especially when he recollects on the conversational aside, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Fearful of the repercussions and unable to suture together his personal responsibility, Harry Caul works to undermine those that threaten this couple’s lives.

In terms of a psychological study, few films are as complex as this one. Caul refuses any person entrance into his personal life, refusing to even tell his long-time girlfriend about his past, and it is telling that the solitary time we see him muster enough trust to try true dialogue with another, that same trust is subverted vis-à-vis a planted pen and, secondarily, theft of the audio tapes. Moreover, multiple viewings of this film reveal the depths to which he himself is being monitored, so that the surveillance man from Detroit now clearly seems to me central to the wire-tapping that lies somewhere in Caul’s room.

As a chronicle of the unnerving historical time period (both socially and psychologically), few films better capture the distrust and alienation of constant surveillance. Moreover, the slow burn mutates into a tense psychological thriller near the climax as blood becomes more than merely a residue, but instead stains everything that Harry Caul thinks about. Whether this film merely exists as testament to those disquieting fears of a by-gone era or exposes that same precondition in contemporary times is unknown; what is known is that The Conversation masterfully cements Coppola as a legend of the psychological drama.

The Conversation: 10/10

Walkabout

Few films are as hypnotically constructed as Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), a film that irrevocably details the shattering of childhood innocence, the implacable relationship of man to nature, and the solace that is found in cultural strangers who are nonetheless linked by their will to survive. This is a film that refuses to conform to rigid expectations of genre, often confounding our sensibilities by leaving secondary characters’ motivation anonymous, so that we can only determine scenes by the narrow subjectivity that guides the camera. It is an ingenious move, lending the film a sense of mystery and awe that allows the themes to exist at a more organic level.

The film follows a young 14-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter) and her 6-year-old brother (Luc Roeg) who are abandoned in the Australian outback by their father, a man who appears to have a nervous breakdown, shoots at them, and commits suicide during an afternoon picnic. These scenes unfold with the murky ambivalence of the unknown, leaving the girl to help her brother to fend for themselves in the outback and hope to survive until civilization can find them. They stumble upon a teenage aborigine boy (David Gulpilil) who is transitioning into adulthood by surviving on his own. The three form a kinship based on something beyond language and begin to take pleasure in the autonomy that they possess, fashioning a selfhood out of their predicament.

Yet this isn’t to say that Roeg isn’t critical of the cultural gap that exists between the three. While the White boy and the aborigine are able to express themselves with clarity and understanding, the girl and the aborigine lack this same ability, since the relationship is constricted by her more adamant subconscious demand that language conform to her more rigid definition of it. Here we see traces of sociopolitical and cultural critique from Roeg, in that the girl’s hesitance to bond linguistically with the aborigine harkens back to her upper-middle class upbringing. Likewise, the camera lingers on the girl’s body sensually at times, a move suggestive of the camera’s shift toward the aborigine’s subjectivity, yet the girl adamantly rebukes his attempts at courtship, preferring to remain chaste as opposed to shift toward the irrevocability of mature adulthood.

This is a film filled with long meditative passages unfurling themselves organically, creating contrasts and rhythms that extend the themes of the lead characters. Scenes of everyday nature are often intercut with scenes of mundane survival of the three, and the film is likewise conscious of the inevitability of the events of life, crosscutting between the aborigine’s carving of a kangaroo and the butcher’s carving of meat ready to be sold. When the three discover an abandoned house that is close to civilization, the film begins its push toward externalizing the sadness and mourning that has been internal for much of the film, leading to the aborigine’s suicide. This is the moment that defines the film, yet it too is shrouded in mystery.

The film concludes with the girl, now in adulthood and presumably married, looking back in reflection at this time of childhood as a return to the primal beauty and wonder she once knew, reminiscing when the three could swim naked and delight in their innocent play in lakes, when life was still a reservoir of untapped potential. It is this melancholy that affixes itself to Roeg’s film, and it is this melancholy that grants the film its greatest strength. A masterpiece of meditative cinema.

Walkabout: 10/10

Stranger than Fiction

Stranger than Fiction (2006) is firstly the best work Marc Forster has done behind the camera (he of Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball fame, both films which adequately though never articulately express their ideas). This here is a film that celebrates verbal intelligence and wit, and loves to take its time understanding character dynamics, freely roaming when it must in order to better facilitate the viewer's investment in the story and everything that it entails. As such, when the film must get cloying, it itself recognizes that it loses much of its emotional power, but acquiesces in order to become something more humane. I like that acknowledgement. But this film lies more in the hands of the writing than the directing.

Writer Zach Helm has fashioned a fascinating conceit to have lead character Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), an IRS auditor, be forced to listen to a narrator (Emma Thompson) give eloquence and meaning to his daily action. However, the narrator is more than an omniscient presence, since Harold soon realizes that he is a creation of some writer, and that she plans to kill him off to arrive at the perfect ironic ending. Meanwhile, the animosity local baker Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal) harbors toward him is slowly unfolding to reveal a possible romance, so clearly Harold doesn't desire death anytime soon.

All the characters have plenty of opportunity to shine and there are no true one-note characters here that matter. And come on, the guitar bit into the kiss is one of the sexiest things that's been in cinema all year. Largely, this is a film that celebrates actual ingenuity in its characters, and while that reduces the level of uproarious laughs, the laughs here come from somewhere more honest and within the characters.

At this point, a second viewing (which it will be given) could bump the film to a 9 as an exemplary model of how to fashion a comedy that exudes charm, tenderness, and an understanding for the human character. Nonetheless, it is powerfully alive and generously humorous, and contains some thought-provoking questions about cynicism versus optimism, and what makes life worth living.

Stranger than Fiction: 8.5/10