Muriel's Wedding

P.J. Hogan’s Australian film Muriel Wedding’s (1994) is one of the premiere exhibits of what honesty and comprehensiveness can do to what is ostensibly a genre product. Only in the most shallow of terms can this be called a chick flick as it’s more a film that simply appropriates those tropes in order to stage a psychological drama of womanhood as it corresponds to the awkward and callow Muriel (Toni Collette), a woman so desperate to be considered beautiful that she acquiesces to external definitions of beauty and accomplishment. And while this merely demonstrates the superficial showiness that weddings and marriage can attain if wrongly desired, and thus the superficiality behind “chick flicks” in their most rigid definition, it is integral precisely because Muriel believes in the one-to-one correlation between marriage/happiness.

When mediocrity becomes so conditioned in the interiority of Muriel’s character that she begins to compulsively lie, fabricating untruths in the attempt to win friends and respect, she loses her individuality. When she first meets Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths), she constructs a false engagement to a man to keep from revealing the truth that haunts her—that she is pointedly, inflexibly alone. And while we see that this shifting of character is not entirely bad since there are numerous negative personality traits she has that have damaged her socially, it’s still a fundamental change in her character and thus is one that lessens her dedication to her individuality.

For her part, Rhonda possesses a volatile personality, one that is willing to lash out savagely to avenge the wrongs of adolescence to hilarious results, as when she honestly yet spitefully reveals the truth about another’s bridesmaids, but that same instability is cast inward and internalized when Rhonda becomes aware that she has cancer on her spine which dehabilitates her early vitality and leads her into depression. Thus, we start to see Muriel and Rhonda each invert their depression, with Muriel projecting outward after years of internalizing and Rhonda internalizing after years of externalizing.

The titular wedding sequence chronicles the giddy and oblivious Muriel, who’s so attuned to her need to upstage her friends’ disparagements at her spouselessness that she commits to an artificial marriage, one designed merely to satisfy country politics so that her new spouse, David, can participate for Australia in the swimming meets at the 2000 summer Olympics. In committing to this artifice of a marriage, though, Muriel loses Rhonda’s respect for her, as she surrenders to her dream rather than her individuality. Yet at the wedding we begin seeing glimpses of Muriel’s natural beauty that is only countered when her honest giddiness transforms her beauty into pointed naïveté, trusting in the dream to the detriment of her integrity. Yet her eventual shedding of the narcissistic desire for marriage leads her, and the film, to a greater awakening, one that instills in the whole affair a sanctity of friendship that is largely absent from the marriage.

My singular fault in this film is Muriel’s decision to bed David. While such a scene suggests reciprocity and genuine communication between her and David when he formerly despised her, as when he secured Muriel and himself separate bedrooms and thus neutralized any thoughts of intimacy, the two later come to understanding about each other. Both of them understand the other’s game and Muriel’s naïveté is revealed to be her way of consciously hiding all of her transgressions, so that we see the fragility at work in her mind. Yet while the sex affirms the attraction of marriage, it is also paradoxically negated by her realization that she must leave the marriage. At this point I am unsure whether this is a regressive or progressive gesture, as there’s some slippage in the connotations (does this mean there’s no longer a one-to-one correlation between sex and love for Muriel or is this merely a means to sanctifying the marriage before she realizes what she’s done?).

Still, this is the only flaw in the film, and it’s one that is comfortably in my top 100 now as an embodiment of how to fashion a near-perfect film from the constraints of genre. This is one that only a film swap would have forced me to watch, and it’s one that will be suggested to others so that they too may see a quality example of the “genre.”

Muriel's Wedding: 9.5/10

2001: A Space Odyssey

Few films are as directly meditative as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Constructed around visuals and music rather than conventional dialogue, this is one of those few films that underscores its intelligence, and the intelligence it seeks to impart onto audiences, vis-à-vis pure cinematic framing. Throughout the film Kubrick absolves words of their standard power, placing rhetorical power instead in the frequent ambient sounds and the transformative energy of the photographic lens. Thus, the film exists on a scale that truly surrounds the mind and body as one watches it.

Moreover, it is this dichotomy of the mind/body split that Kubrick seeks to consider in new terms, starting with the Dawn of Man sequences. Here we see the apes struggling to survive even as they are at one with nature. However, once the mysterious monolith appears as they will throughout the film, the apes begin to learn and create (fashioning weapons here), so that nature is a construct that can be subject to domination. Thus, we arrive at a first thesis—wherein because mankind is vulnerable to the outside interference of the monolith, though that word interference has problematic rhetorical connotations, they are here able to survive attacks at a greater frequency. Violence and intelligence collide, then, contributing to the first growth.

Later growths in the film concern how that intelligence is to be used, and how humanity responds to the monolith, so that the outlets that these monoliths present are seen as reservoirs of untapped potential and transcendence, seen in new technological, ethical, and biological changes. The humans change, but then so too does the super-computer HAL 9000, and not all of these changes bode well for the future of individual humans. Yet the sense of awakening that the monoliths present allows new forms of existence where intelligence is shifted from a physical dominion into something metaphysical, so that in the end when the physical body falters, the mind can begin again, transplanted into a more perfect, more harmonious (and transparent) union as the star child at the conclusion. Yet even here the film does not end; it does not end until the camera lens brings the star child’s gaze directly to our gaze, wherein the child seems to be questioning if we too are ready for the next stage of evolution.

2001: A Space Odyssey: 10/10

Linda Linda Linda

Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Linda, Linda, Linda (2005) is an appropriately odd film, one that celebrates the innocence and fearlessness that comes with being a teenager. Structured around four teens in suburban Japan who plan to play at the school’s rock “concert,” the film doesn’t quite a singular tone, partaking in both the ambivalence and latent desire of attraction, as well as the contemplative struggle for one of the four, a Korean, to be an individual in the midst of country expectations from Japan. Through it all, there’s a sublime joy to the characters and their endeavors that makes the film take flight, even when some of its realism fades into fantasy.

However while the Korean/Japan juxtaposition is initially emphasized with the schoolmates, little is actually dealt with. One expects a bit more engagement with the Japanese/Korean dynamics, whether through a study of the ennui that threatens to swallow up the outsiders in Japan or through an examination of the singer's social situation at home. Additionally, while it's almost pleasing to see a film that leaves so much of the boy-girl relationships muted and unresolved, it kinda feels like there needs to be a bit more concrete there.

Essentially, this is a quality film through and through, but to lavish it with rhapsodic love seems a bit much. Because of its lack of socio-historical engagement at times, the film can feel slight, though always enjoyable. For example, while the enthusiastic response from the attendees at the concert's end when they take the stage felt just a little too emphasized and thus unreal, the film is successful enough in its character types that we forgive it and soar along with the girls.

Even with its various shortcomings, it's still eminently viewable.

Linda Linda Linda: 7.5/10