ROUNDERS (John Dahl, 1998)

I haven’t seen Red Rock West (1993) or Unforgettable (1996), but The Last Seduction (1994) is depressive and contemptuous of its audience. Still, a beguiling Rounders may owe something to director John Dahl. Certainly the film is beautifully written by David Levien and Brian Koppelman, elegantly lensed in sometimes noirish colors by Jean Yves Escoffier, and magnificently acted by Martin Landau.

His, the most resonant character, is fleshed to the bone—Abe Petrovsky, an aging New York law professor lugging baggage: the irreversible estrangement dictated by a father, now deceased, who expected him to become a rabbi—for generations, the family’s anointed role for sons. What happened with Abe? His parents had moved from Israel to the States, weakening the link of patriarchic devotion and strengthening the secular character of their son’s heritage. The boy was not rebellious. He commenced his Talmudic studies on schedule but just couldn’t find, or feel, God. Though he dropped out of the yeshiva, he didn’t automatically drop into law; rather than a calling he answered, secular law was the destiny he was driven to. When a student of his, at a similar crossroads, asks Abe if he would make the same choices again, Abe replies, “What choice?” And the suggestive way Landau enacts the encounter in a bar leaves no doubt that, for all his confessional hush, Abe has played out this exchange before, and will do so again, drawing here and there yet another tottering law student into his ritual of remorse, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner endlessly repeating his personal history, in his case in a hopeless attempt to expiate what (even to another set of his own eyes) was never a sin, only the course of his life that elected him to follow it. Exacerbating this haunted man’s drama is the Holocaust; to ancestral eyes, which he has interiorized, Abe has rejected his responsibility as a surviving Jew to contribute wholeheartedly to the continuation of his faith. In Crimes and Misdeameanors (1989), Woody Allen, bless him, first cast Landau in a moral drama touching on the complexity of this theme, drawing from the actor a fine performance; but, as Abe Petrovsky, Landau surpasses himself, as though driven to declare from the depths of his own soul his right to express his Jewishness even as an actor and not necessarily through religious leadership. If Landau earned his Oscar for his poignant Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994), he earns it a couple of times over for the more powerful work that he does here.

But the protagonist of the film is Mike, whose immersion in an underground world of illegal high-stakes poker adds to its risk an echo of his law professor’s suggestion of an imperiled people. Inspired by the confession Petrovsky makes to him, Mike drops out of law school to pursue the adventure of this risk, by going his own way becoming, in effect, Petrovsky’s extension. (The film slyly enforces this connection by not providing their obligatory surrogate father-son farewell scene.)

However, Petrovsky is mirrored also, darkly, by another character in the film: the demented, infantile, mob-connected “KGB,” to whom Mike becomes mortally obligated when he foolishly vouches for the debt of a dissolute, irresponsible friend. Gambling Mike’s ambition is to roll up a stake and take off for Las Vegas, to flee retribution from KGB, but most of all to test himself against the best poker players, in a world championship; once struggling to keep afloat, now he must struggle to stay unbroken and alive. What a wonderful final shot this film gives us: cars moving forward at eerily identical speeds, Mike’s Vegas-bound one among them, the occupant(s) of each—like Abe to law—magnetically drawn to whatever, wherever. Here is a suspenseful glimpse of destiny revealing either uncertain hope and possibility or impending ruin, even mass doom—an image of the Holocaust. This dead-on thematic summation taps into the agonized, suspended mood of the highway long shots in David Cronenberg’s terrific Crash (1996).

Indeed, a problem with Rounders is that it recalls so many other films, including a bottom-of-the-barrel The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961). Besides substituting cards for pool, Rounders at least gets rid of the earlier film’s reductive allegory, lousy dialogue and dank expressionism. All this makes it even more like The Cincinnati Kid (Norman Jewison, 1965)—the cause of enough embarrassment that a passing remark in Rounders even acknowledges the resemblance.

The acting varies. Landau, I’ve said enough about. As Mike’s buddy, Edward Norton is never off-pitch with his single note; but he has nothing like Robert De Niro’s force in a similar role in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973). Indeed, Norton has dashed hopes for his gifts so many times since his electrifying appearance in Primal Fear (Gregory Hoblit, 1996) that it’s time to declare a moratorium on praising his acting. (Question: In Levien and Koppelman’s original script, were the two boys, as here, Irish Catholics?) John Turturro is adequate in another of his smarmy roles, but John Malkovich lacks convincing menace as KGB. Finally, the Diana Scarwid of her day, Gretchen Mol is a total wash-out as Mike’s studious, sanctimonious girlfriend.

And Matt Damon, who plays Mike? Those who have patiently waited for Damon to fulfill the promise of his fine acting in Walter Hill’s splendid Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), take heart. As Rounders led up to its tense point of climax, where KGB baits Mike into a life-and-death match, I mused: “I know what Mike’s about to do, but I won’t believe it. For the movie to keep going, Mike must do this, so I’ll go along with it. But I won’t believe it.”

Mike indeed commits the anticipated act; and, with his back to the camera, no less, the exquisitely timed way Damon enacts this pivotal moment, you believe it.

REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES (Patricia Cardoso, 2002)

Sentimental and insubstantial, Real Women Have Curves revolves around the generational dispute between a mother, a Mexican immigrant, and a daughter who is eager to embrace most aspects of her identity as a first-generation American. The daughter, Ana, has just graduated from high school and wants to go to college (her Latino English teacher encourages her to do so), but instead she capitulates to her mother Carmen’s desire that she operate a steam press at the dress factory where her mother works—a “sweatshop,” Ana accurately calls it—that’s run by Estela, her older sister. Above all, Carmen wants to hold together her family in East Los Angeles, and it may even be that Ana, by working at the shop rather than, as she still hopes to do, striking out on her own isn’t as insensitive as she sometimes seems about the cultural discombobulation that her parents have had to endure. Still, parents must let go of children and let them be, and, given this tragic circumstance at the very soul of family life, it’s a wonder that the writers, Josefina Lopez and George LaVoo, and the director, Patricia Cardozo, chose to focus on Ana, who is as shallow as any other teenager, rather than, say, on Carmen, who surely has the richer story to tell. (The film is based on a 1990 play by Lopez.) This, then, is an opportunistic film cashing in on the currency that two things hold at the box office: the young; the United States. I regret to say it’s little more than that.

One, in fact, is stopped short at the door. The title is objectionable. Both Ana and Carmen are fat (which will mean to many that they lack the curves that shapelier women possess). It is just as absurd, surely, to insist that slender women aren’t “real” as it is to insist that unslender ones aren’t. The title is so much a part of the American tendency to convert every social or cultural controversy into a fight to the death—a figurative fight to the death, at least—that the film had me somewhat out-of-joint even before it started. The point is: all women are “real,” no matter what the condition of their waistline. Of course, Real Women Have Curves is a catchy title, and it has the advantage of inadvertently announcing the film’s opportunism right from the get-go. One instantly knows that this is going to be a hard film to like. (Not for those at Sundance, though, where it took the audience prize.)

Carmen hates her body image, and now and then even Ana betrays the unhappiness about her weight that comes from having been called for years Butterball, as a term of endearment, by her mother. Nevertheless, for reasons of denial and political correctness, Ana generally insists that she is content with her body image and on one occasion leads the dress shop workers, including Estela but excluding Carmen, an outraged holdout, in a feminist stripdown in defiance of the American standard of trim femininity. It’s a good thing that the impetus for this extravaganza of disrobed pudgy flesh is the heat in the unventilated sweatshop; this connects the event to something real and important. Regrettably, however, the film all but dismisses the deplorable conditions with which these workers are routinely beset in order to stress Ana’s growing awareness of how hard Estela works to keep the shop (barely) afloat. We know that the overworked, underpaid Latinas are making $18 dresses for stupendous mark-ups to be paid by the white credit-card crowd, without any financial benefit accruing to themselves. Yet the workers, perhaps grateful for any employment at all, appear unbothered by the situation, and Ana is too busy radicalizing in the cause of “fat power” to donate time to more necessary struggles—the bigger picture, as it were. I am very moved by the philosophy of acceptance that permeates, say, Yasujiro Ozu’s films; but this really doesn’t apply to Cardoso’s film, in which the beleaguered, exploited workers appear oblivious, not accepting. This film, let me tell you, is no Bread and Roses (Ken Loach, 1999). Rather, it raises serious issues peripherally simply to sweep them under the rug in favor of family cohesiveness.

Nor is it a work that seriously engages the monumental theme of the struggle to assimilate that American immigrants and their children wage. For that, consult Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Antonia or even Upton Sinclair’s 1906 The Jungle. However much credit one wishes to give the film for avoiding melodramatic excesses, it’s a thing of inflated feelings rather than penetrating analysis. The film essentially toys with human experience. It fails to come to grips with the excesses of quotidian American capitalism.

Women have brains as well as curves—and hearts, and souls. (As do men.) Not in this film, however, where at least the bickering mother and daughter appear to have strayed from the set of a blatant, mechanically pleasing TV sitcom. Even Estela, the film’s most interesting character as she unconscionably pursues economic success on the backs of her employees, is sentimentalized in a scene or two. Too much in this film is rigged to affect an audience; little is sounded out for reality or truth. How horrible that the film, while casting a critical eye on Carmen, refrains from doing so in the case of Ana. This is cruel as well as unfair. Finally, it’s hard to know what to make of the fact that most of the major male characters—Ana’s father and grandfather, and her non-Latino boyfriend—seek to avoid confrontations with Carmen at all costs.

By way of compensation, the final shot of the film, in New York City, where Ana has gone at last to attend Columbia University, no less, is terrific. Ironically, though, this belated high point serves only to remind one how much infinitely better a film, on a similar daughter-mother theme, is Chantal Äkerman’s News from Home (1977), which has the wisdom and humanity not to promote one family member’s reality at the expense of another’s. Äkerman’s New York-set documentary, about her flexing her independence while dealing with her mother’s lonely demands for company back home in Brussels, is about two real “real women.” Cardoso’s film, by contrast, is all papier-mâché.

America Ferrera (TV’s Ugly Betty) plays Ana, Lupe Ontiveros plays Carmen, and Ingrid Oliu, the standout, plays Estela.

PANTALEÓN Y LAS VISITADORAS (Francisco J. Lombardi, 2000)

Some twenty years ago, Francisco J. Lombardi made a powerful film about a military boys’ school, La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs, 1985), based on a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. In the meantime, he has been prolific; but marketplace censorship being what it is, extremely few Peruvian (or any other international) films reach the United States. Now available on VHS and DVD, however, is another film by Lombardi based on another book by Vargas Llosa: Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Pantaleón and the Visitors), an accomplished, enjoyable satire on the military mentality.

Pantaleón Pantoja (Salvador del Solar, best actor, Gramado, Festróia, and Cartagena film festivals) is a handsome young army captain who is recruited by his commanding officers to execute an important mission. He is charged with establishing a floating brothel to service soldiers posted on remote outposts in the Amazon jungle. Fastidious and prudish, he reluctantly accepts, but his rigorous competence, as well as methodical penchant for facts and figures, turns his efforts, as usual, into great success. Of course, he does not dare disclose the exact nature of the assignment to his wife, who, ignorant of the fact that her spouse is testing out aphrodisiacs, cannot imagine why, suddenly, he is after her for sex three times a day. Pantaleón hopes to raise the consciousness of his harem of “visitors.” He tells the girls, “Remember: Work ennobles and dignifies”—a sentiment they enthusiastically parrot at assembly.

Poor Panta! With his wife pregnant with their “little cadet,” he falls in love with one of the “visitors,” a girl named Olga from Colombia. What’s the boy to do? He gives Olga a “strictly work-related” “quality test,” but this one-time sex of theirs blossoms into a full-fledged affair in which they try out a variety of positions. One suspects that Panta’s bed life with his spouse is far more conventional, far less abandoned. When her husband is “outed” on the air by a vicious local radio personality to whose broadcasts she is addicted, Panta’s wife walks out on him, and General Collazos curtails the Amazon operation, denying it ever existed for the sake of propriety and public consumption. Part of the cover-up requires an end to Panta’s once promising military career, but Panta refuses to resign. He is summarily sent to No Man’s Land, to teach literacy. Panta’s explanation for his tenacious commitment to the military: “I need bosses. When I don’t have them, I don’t know what to do. I need to obey orders.”

The script by Enrique Moncloa and Giovanna Pollarolo, which won the prize at Gramado, is excellent, and Lombardi engineers a fine segue from comedy to heartfelt pathos. It is in the latter phase that the film’s satire becomes especially sharp, but Lombardi has achieved an absorbing, intelligent piece of work from start to finish. (One can apply its insights to a wide range of recent U.S. military behavior and events.) Lombardi was named best director at Gramado, where his film also won the top prize.

Since del Solar resembles the U.S. actor Jim Caviezel, it is all the more startling that he gives such a moving performance.

Pantaleón y las visitadoras is narrative cinema, which is never, really, the most interesting kind. It relies on story and characters. But within this self-imposed limited expressiveness, it gets the job done—like Panta himself.

The film is a joint production of Peru and Spain.

CINDERELLA MAN (Ron Howard, 2005)

It was Damon Runyan, I believe, who fixed the tag “Cinderella Man” to light heavyweight boxer James J. Braddock during the Great Depression. It is fitting, therefore, that Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man, which is about Braddock’s failures in the ring—his boxing license was revoked in 1933—and sensational comeback in 1935, should be vaguely Runyonesque as well as Capraesque. Howard has said he owes his interest in the time in which the film is set to his father, actor Rance Howard.

The film is a formal mess, and its being so gives a distorted and highly limited view of the Depression. Indeed, the film aestheticizes the Depression and the uncertain time for the Braddocks—Jim and his wife, Mae, and their several children—leading up to the Depression. (The film begins in 1928.) The interior space of the Braddocks’ Jersey home is gorgeously underlit; after their electricity is turned off for nonpayment of bills, the effect is even more gorgeous, with a row of candles flickering in the luxuriantly rich darkness. There is nothing especially wrong about Salvatore Totino’s color cinematography, but it is inanely applied. What do these pretty pictures have to do with anything? I am reminded of the low point in Steven Spielberg’s ghastly Schindler’s List (1993), when the belching smokestack of a death camp crematorium achieves a similarly inappropriate gorgeous visual effect. Like Spielberg there, Howard simply doesn’t stop and think. Who doesn’t like a gorgeous film? That’s all he is concerned about. It doesn’t cross his mind that the visual aspect that he and his cinematographer achieve is out of sync with what the film is purporting to show: economic hardship and struggles; difficult human lives.

And Howard compounds this fault further. Our eyes adjust to the scarce interior light. But once Braddock is outdoors, among a throng of laborers hoping for work, the sky is dull and blank: another aesthetic choice. This is preposterous. However well one may rationalize the scarcity of light indoors, what is one to make of it outdoors? Doubtless, Howard backed himself into a corner. Having lowered the lights indoors, for the sake of stylistic consistency he now needed to “lower the light” outside! Thus Howard reduces the Depression to a climatic event rather than a socioeconomic one, since the contrivance of the degree of overcast all but overwhelms the image of scores of men who are out of work and desperate for a day’s employment. Howard’s film is too wrapped up in his eye and too little in sound judgment or his compassion for suffering humanity.

Borrowing a page from Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004), another film about a boxer, Howard resorts to cardboard melodrama by making Braddock’s opponent in the ring, on the occasion of Braddock’s comeback, a sadistic villain. Like Eastwood, Howard is apparently incapable of grasping the concept of shared tough times, in which “opponents” are equally entitled to our sympathy and compassion. However, it is even more essential for Howard to grasp this because his film is set in the Depression, when countless individuals found themselves in the same socioeconomic boat, struggling to keep afloat. Braddock’s decency does not require the melodramatic foil of a vicious opponent. Moreover, Howard should have resisted this conventional impulse of his on another score: the opponent who is made out to be vicious here, inside and outside the ring, is an actual person. Max Baer, whose namesake son is still with us, I believe, was nothing like how he is unconscionably portrayed here. Here is some material about Baer from Wikipedia, the online Internet encyclopedia:

[Baer] turned professional in 1929, progressing steadily through the ranks. A ring tragedy little more than a year later almost caused him to drop out of boxing for good. Baer fought Frankie Campbell . . . on August 25, 1930[,] in San Francisco and knocked him out. Campbell never regained consciousness . . . [and] eventually died of extensive brain hemorrhages. . . . This profoundly affected Baer; according to his son, Max Baer, Jr., he cried and had nightmares over the incident for decades afterwards. He was charged with manslaughter. Although he was eventually acquitted of all charges, the California State Boxing Commission still banned him from any in-ring activity within their state for the next year. He gave purses from succeeding bouts to Campbell’s family, but lost four of his next six fights. He fared better when Jack Dempsey took him under his wing, and Baer put Campbell’s children through college.

This is the soul whom Howard’s film vilifies. There is something else, of course, that needs to be stated about Max Baer. Again I quote from Wikipedia:

In 1933, Baer (with a Star of David embroidered on his trunks . . .) boxed Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium, dominating the rugged fighter from Germany into the tenth round when the referee stopped the match. Because Baer defeated Schmeling, Hitler’s favorite, and had a Jewish father, he became a hero to the Jewish people . . .

Given the time in which Cinderella Man is set, I ask: Is this a soul whom Howard should be vilifying? Is Howard incapable of grasping that, even in a film about Braddock, Braddock shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all? Since the film refers to the real world, Howard ought to have understood that the world is a bigger place than his simplistic film allows. It may be that Howard lacks the heart to find Braddock’s comeback inspiring except as a consequence of the melodramatic contrivance of Braddock’s goodness opposing somebody else’s nastiness. But fairness and the possibility of better filmmaking ought to have made him resist trying to fit Max Baer into such a reductive mold.

Although the film divided reviewers and fared poorly at the box office, many have praised the sequences in the ring. Howard pulls few punches there, but we have seen the same stuff done just as well many times before.

Russell Crowe, as Braddock, gives the one good performance. (Paul Giamatti as Joe Gould, Braddock’s manager, is slow, selfconscious and way over the top.) Craig Bierko plays Max Baer as though Baer were Max Schmeling.

Shame, shame on little Opie.

KING KONG (Peter Jackson, 2005)

Here is one of the major points on which Peter Jackson’s King Kong breaks down. One of the principal themes of the original Schoedsack-Cooper masterpiece is how civilization sublimates primitive religious awe and worship in its audience responses to modern entertainment. Jackson, perhaps choking on the density of crusading Christian import in his vile Lord of the Rings trilogy, erases from his remake of Kong all consideration of the role of religion. More or less, this leaves his version to be about nothing. Like Ron Howard’s Capraesque Cinderella Man (2005), Jackson’s Kong uses the Great Depression as mere set decoration. However, the socioeconomic insecurities that the Depression fostered intensified an already begun religious revival in the U.S., making the film’s argument highly topical in 1933. Since the worldwide popularity of the execrable Lord of the Rings films was primarily greased by a worldwide religious revival, it behooved Jackass to address this theme afresh for his own time.
     Despite what some naive viewers of the remake have insisted, Jackson’s Kong makes less, not more, of the relationship between the ape and Ann Darrow than does the original. In Jackson’s version, the relationship is entirely unmotivated. For Schoedsack and Cooper, Ann responds to Kong with Kierkegaardian dread—simultaneous attraction and repulsion: this, partly owing to the uncertainty with which the Depression has blighted her socioeconomic circumstance. (The role in Carl Denham’s jungle picture saves her from starvation.) But there is also another, ironic genesis for her mixed feelings about the ape: Driscoll’s misogynism and Denham’s failure to protect her, against which her relationship with the ape registers an interesting protest. (Jackson’s division of Driscoll into two separate characters, Driscoll and Baxter, is an act of cluelessness and desperation.) Jackson simplifies the relationship, making it idiotically tender all-around, purely to pursue the same kind of sentimentality that attaches itself to the religious obsessiveness in the LOTR series. To accomplish this pursuit, Jackson must dangerously ignore how dangerous Kong is—how dangerous it is for civilization to release from their state of sublimation these primitive impulses. Along the way, the Schoedsack-Cooper team mount a shrewd assault on the cold-hearted, capitalistic agenda that Denham embodies. Toward the end and at the end, Jackson mounts a gesture or two in the direction of this theme, but it can hardly resonate in a lavish, expensive production that itself embodies the agenda it is (however gingerly) protesting.
     The computer-generated imagery that Jackson uses fails to do what the marvelous special effects in the original did (and still do): draw us into a fantastic realm where the civilized yields to a tribal, primitive and, indeed, prehistoric reality. The effects in Jackson’s film draw attention to themselves, becoming an end, not a means, and transporting the audience nowhere, least of all to Skull Island.