Solemn, slow, intelligent though in no way inspired version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Grigori Kozintsev’s Soviet Korol Lir, based (like his Gamlet) on a Boris Pasternak translation, is a terrible disappointment. Jüri Järvet, the Estonian actor who plays Lear, does a so-so job.
Lots of lovely black-and-white shots, but scarcely a single interesting one.
A better film than Peter Brook’s inhuman King Lear the same year, and better, too, than Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985); but essentially this one is solely for the culture-vultures.
Archive for September 3rd, 2007
KING LEAR (Grigori Kozintsev, Iosif Shapiro, 1971)
September 3, 2007BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (Ang Lee, 2005)
September 3, 2007Some years it is especially hard to be a United States American in terms of the national heartbreak one is called upon to endure. One such year was 1998. In the summer, in Jasper, Texas, James Byrd, Jr., an African-American man, was chained to the back of a truck by whites and dragged to his death along a rough road. In the autumn, in Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old college student, was tied to a post in a field and beaten to death because he was gay. Wyoming, Texas: both these states—the home states of Cheney and Bush, although Texas came to be home to them both—coordinate the main plot elements in Brokeback Mountain, a film haunted by our memories of 1998. It isn’t an entirely successful film. It is needlessly morose, lugubrious and sentimental. Most of the shots fail to attain the analytical standard of filmmaking art. A lead performance is deficient, no matter the journalistic acclaim it has been bewilderingly garnering. None of this, however, prevents the film from packing an enormous wallop.
The action begins in 1963, months before the assassination of President Kennedy. Two boys in their late teens, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, take a summer job herding a Wyoming rancher’s sheep in the wilds, camping out, and falling into a homosexual experience neither of them could have anticipated. These are “Marlboro men,” not queers, after all, in their boots and jeans, puffing on cigarettes underneath their cowboy hats. Indeed, their first occasion of gay lovemaking—one of them suggests he was otherwise a virgin—seems to come out of the blue. The screenplay, by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, from a short story by E. Annie Proulx, attempts a vague basis for the act as a reaction to previous parental strictures warning against homosexuality. It feels forced. One simply has to accept the unlikely launching of the boys’ gay partnership so that the story can get moving.
Of the two, Ennis, brilliantly played by Heath Ledger, is the more conflicted. He has a sweetheart back home whom he plans to marry; what on earth is he doing with Twist? He cannot help himself, however. He and Jack become lovers, although, oppressively mindful of the times and of American bigotry, he succeeds in resisting Jack’s offer to go off and ranch together. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma, who bears him two daughters, more or less supports him as the high school dropout patches together odd ranching and other assorted jobs, and divorces him, at least in part because of his continuing association with Jack. (Upon Jack’s first visit, she catches sight of her husband and Jack passionately kissing.) The boys’ cover for their sexual outings couldn’t be more macho: they’re “fishing buddies”—“Or is it hunting?” Jack’s wealthy wife, Lureen, at one point sarcastically asks. Jack has a son. Working for his father-in-law, he is a successful salesman. (He had been a flop on the rodeo circuit.) He also lives more recklessly than Ennis, dipping south of the Texas border for paid bliss with Mexican male prostitutes. Jack ends up being bludgeoned to death for being homosexual. This occurs in the same state where Kennedy was killed. By that time, Jack is 39 years old—ten years younger than Byrd when he was decapitated, killed.
The film is not without wit. Ennis is the orphan, but it is Jack whose name is Twist. The implication is clear: If you have to hide your sexual identity, you are an orphan in America even if your parents are alive.
The film is bookended by two beautiful extreme long-shots of a truck on the road at night—literally and symbolically, Ennis’s comings and goings. Regrettably, few of the shots in between amount to anything. Like George Clooney’s visually reprehensible Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Lee’s film is overpopulated with closeups, including tight closeups, without rhyme or reason apart from the manipulative motive of Lee’s hoping to foist these characters on us, the better for us (presumably) to identify with them. But, early on, the gorgeous shots of sheep, with the boys herding the sheep, at least subliminally connects the boys with our memory of Matthew Shepard (note the last name), and a stunning shot of one of the herd ripped open by a coyote, its carcass bleeding on the ground, connects with the Wyoming fate of Shepard and the Texan fates of Byrd, Twist and, possibly, J.F.K. (President Kennedy is never mentioned in the film—and perhaps he doesn’t need to be.) There is some good material here, then, but scarcely enough; and the Edna Ferberitic saga, as the film drags the two main characters through the years, pretty much exiles the result from serious consideration as a substantial piece of work.
Nevertheless, the Wyoming-Texas axis, with its 1998 associations, provides a springboard for interesting speculation. Unfamiliarity breeds fear, which breeds hatred and bigotry. But there is more to white hatred against blacks, and straight hatred against gay, in the American landscape: the Puritanical idea of taint—of contamination. The legal definition of black in the South, once upon a time, was “one drop of Negro blood”—and any such reference to blood always implies contamination or its possibility. What does this definition mean in the American context? With racial mixing such as plantation practices facilitated, with slave owners seeking respite from their proper wives by bedding with the unpaid help who were required to do their bidding, how can a member of subsequent white generations ever be certain that he—I use the masculine pronoun because this is almost entirely a white male psychological issue—is not “tainted” by at least “one drop of Negro blood”? It is the fear of being black that helps explain pathological white hatred of blacks in the United States. Having demonized blackness, or having had blackness demonized for them, certain whites must face the terrifying prospect, in our racially mixed-up landscape, that the “demon” lies within. (Incidentally, Adolf Hitler, who little resembled the Aryan model he extolled for the German state, feared he was Jewish.) It is much the same with hatred of homosexuals. If “one drop” of “gay blood” is all it takes to make one homosexual, using the outmoded legal definition of Negro (and why not refer to “gay blood” since it is as specious and unscientific a definition as racial blood?), and if gayness has been demonized, then certain individuals may feel compelled to strike out against homosexuals—brutalize and kill them—in order to still fears about their own “tainted” sexual identities. The detection of the slightest homosexual affect in themselves causes some people to hate those who hold up a mirror to them, showing them what they are terrified of being or becoming.
Brokeback Mountain does nothing to get in the way of our giving serious thought to a serious issue. Lee, who is Taiwanese-born, more often has highlighted the oppression of women in various societies; here, he has shifted his attention to another oppressed group. But he has proceeded with more sensitivity than intellectual acumen or artistic purpose. Instead, he has gone the route of pop propaganda. By imposing straight stereotypes on gay characters, he hopes to expand the comfort level of nongays toward their gay brethren. He has made a tearjerker in a good cause—but he has made a tearjerker. In retrospect, even his wonderful Sense and Sensibility (1995) seems less indebted to him than to Jane Austen, Emma Thompson’s script, and the performances of his cast, especially those of Thompson, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman. Even there, scenery and cinematography take precedence over purposeful mise-en-scène.
At the end of Brokeback Mountain, the implication arises that Ennis’s memory of the love he and Jack shared has made him a better father. This, of course, is possible; love is transformative. However, if we believe this as it unfolds in the film, it is less due to Lee or the script than to Ledger, whose integrity in the role of Ennis, not to mention his convincing middle-aging, is the principal feature commending the film. On the other hand, Jake Gyllenhaal is not nearly so credible as Jack. Early on, he is at his best; but he ages unconvincingly, and his performance strikes many more sentimental than authentic notes. (He could be acting in the television series Dallas.) Ledger strikes chords of great tenderness in his scenes with Gyllenhaal, but Gyllenhaal’s Jack never seems to love Ledger’s Ennis as much as Ennis seems to love Jack. This is ironic, given that Ennis is the character who is more conflicted about his homosexuality, and it is quite possible that this is a deliberate choice on Lee’s part and on Gyllenhaal’s. But the discrepancy between the love that Jack professes and the love that is apparent, at least to my eye, eventually defeated my understanding. My conclusion: Gyllenhaal can’t act.
The wives are played by Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway. Although he attempts to show the adverse impact on these women of society’s strictures against their spouses’ sexuality, Lee does so dutifully, not searchingly. He doesn’t give these two characters their full due. Not surprisingly, Williams is dreadful; Hathaway, on the other hand, lends her decent soul a spark of ambiguity. Randy Quaid is good as the boys’ homophobic boss, the one with the sheep, Kate Mara is lovely as Ennis’s elder daughter about to marry, and Roberta Maxwell is haunting as Jack’s mother.
Haunting also, and gorgeously bluesy, is Gustavo Santaolalla’s score.
Let us hope that Brokeback Mountain corrals a lot of goodwill and reaches its propagandistic goals. In any case, Ledger has nicely erased his vacuous pretty-boy image and given us all a big surprise. We were plain wrong about him. A performance like this doesn’t come out of nowhere. Heath Ledger must have been (much) more talented than we realized. Let us hope he doesn’t backslide down Brokeback Mountain.
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LITTLE DORRIT (Christine Edzard, 1987)
September 3, 2007The financier Merdle is a secular God in Charles Dickens’ excoriating Little Dorrit, a richly detailed novel that marked the author’s second step, after Hard Times, toward more baleful fiction. It was fully accepted and expected that Merdle would buy up the whole of England to extraordinarily beneficial effect so highly he was seen as having the most enlightened social and political aims. Perversely, Christine Edzard in her film of Little Dorrit—all in all, the best Dickens film I’ve seen*—banishes Merdle to brief background appearances until his suicide, while underscoring the patriarchic element he represents by the ironical indirection of having had his wife constantly speaking for and representing him. In effect, Merdle ultimately appears only to vanish, leaving us to contemplate his invisible influence in most everything we have seen, and exposing the riotous lack of appreciation of the deleterious effects of capitalism throughout various strata of Victorian society. Marshalsea, a debtors prison, keeps collecting people who had been marked by great expectations but who end up, for all their airs and ambition, as the disposable property of creditors. Amy Dorrit—“Little Dorrit”—was born in Marshalsea, where her father is incarcerated.
Edzard has divided her thoroughly engrossing, deeply moving, brilliantly edited six-hour film into two parts: “Nobody’s Fault,” where even responsibility for widespread poverty is taken up by no one, and where someone or other declares “Nobody’s fault!” so often it comes as a shock when someone says “My fault!” over the accident of brushing against someone else in the street. Following Dickens, Edzard also undertakes a satire of bureaucratic runaround, propelled by Arthur Clennam’s desire to secure a patent for a safely operating machine for his business, that suggests Kafka as well as Carlyle. The second part, beginning with her birth, follows Amy’s pilgrim’s progress, humanizing Amy by disclosing her noble interiority, whereas in the first part we view her in patches from the outside. Before Edzard concludes her calmly feminist work we see a number of scenes we have already seen in the first part, but with the events shifted to Amy’s perspective, a partial, miniature echo of Robert Browning’s method in The Ring and the Book. Don’t worry; it all ends happily with a wedding. But Shakespeareans know that such anticipated bliss is problematic. Amy marries a man who, throughout the first part of the film, somehow failed to notice how much in love she was with him. Edzard’s first-half reliance on Clennam’s perspective has extended this failure to ourselves. “Nobody’s fault!”
Except for Derek Jacobi, who is typically doughy as Clennam, the actors provide a phenomenal range of quirky, colorful humanity. For me, the three best performances are given by Cyril Cusack as Amy’s uncle, who is as devoted to his brother as Amy is to her father, Roshan Seth as Pancks, and Joan Greenwood as elderly Mrs. Clennam, who has a family secret tucked away. Sarah Pickering is strikingly convincing as “Little Dorrit.”
To be sure, the novel’s complicated plot has been streamlined; but what a rich, dark and glowing tapestry the film is all the same.
* Yes, better than George Cukor’s David Copperfield (1934); yes, better than David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946).
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EXODUS (Otto Preminger, 1960)
September 3, 2007How does one explain it? The superficiality of much of the action and virtually all the characters; historical inaccuracies; the minimal Jewishness in evidence, whether in terms of religious observance or the casting of Gentiles in nearly all the younger Jewish roles; the schematic quality of the film’s portrayal of the conflict between Jewish factions, the militant Irgun and the politically minded Haganah; the almost laughably preachy speech—Dalton Trumbo authored the script—that the protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan, gives envisioning a future time of peace between Jews and Arabs: Given all this, how does one explain that not only Jewish America but also Israel itself has heartily embraced Otto Preminger’s 208-minute superproduction of Leon Uris’s popular novel about the imperiled birth of the modern nation of Israel?
Of course, Preminger is a master of mise-en-scène, with numerous shots being as beautiful as they are functional; Louis R. Loeffler’s editing dazzles; Ernest Gold’s main theme rouses; and so forth. But two more things, I believe, help explain the degree to which Jewish favor lights on this Exodus: the scope of the film can itself be interpreted as paying tribute to the momentousness of Israeli history and its right to exist; and, above all, what is so rare in a film of this size, its entirety is unified by a single and compelling thesis: whether executed by Arabs or the British, any effort to block the realization or survival of Israel, whether consciously or unconsciously, is an attempt to extend the Holocaust.
Some of the acting, alas, is awful, with Lee J. Cobb ham-fisted as Ari’s father, Sal Mineo emoting instead of acting in the role of young militant Dov Landau, and pretty-boy John Derek ridiculous as Ari’s lifelong Arab friend.
Superlative entertainment—colorful, engrossing, heart-pounding, moving.
LE BEAU SERGE (Claude Chabrol, 1958)
September 3, 2007Claude Chabrol has repudiated his first film, because of its Roman Catholic themes and imagery, and one must admit it is rough-hewn, schematic, and uncertain as to tone; but Le beau Serge is among Chabrol’s most deeply affecting works. Shot on location in black and white in Chabrol’s hometown of Sardent, mixing locals and as-yet unfamous professionals, blending heightened drama and documentary realism (and including autobiographical elements), it was made outside France’s film industry. It inspired the 1959 Manifesto that announced and launched the nouvelle vague.
After twelve years’ absence, twentysomething François (Jean-Claude Brialy, giving the best performance) returns to Sardent and almost immediately runs into childhood friend Serge, a truck driver who is a drunk and abusive spouse. Both boys have had their lives interrupted: tubercular François, convalescing in the shadow of the illness that nearly claimed his life, has had to set aside his studies; Serge, who did the same with his dreams of becoming an architect once he impregnated Yvonne, now his wife. The couple’s first child, born mongoloid, almost instantly died; now that Yvonne is again pregnant, Serge dreads the same outcome. Eventually François risks health and life to retrieve Serge in wintry weather and bring him to the scene of Yvonne’s giving birth. The sacrifice that results is best understood within the psychological framework that both boys are at some level different aspects of the same character: the one who escaped Sardent, and the one who didn’t.
Since this is Chabrol, there is considerable ambiguity. In one magnificent shot, François is literally looking down on the village square from his hotel room. His young life’s journey makes him “feel above” his country roots; but isn’t he also searching for Serge, or possibly his own childhood self, somewhere down below?
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