THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

Gorgeously photographed in color by Bruce Surtees, son of Robert, so that we never lose sight of the beautiful land that has been and is being bloodily spoiled, The Outlaw Josey Wales is scenarist Philip Kaufman’s veiled meditation on the U.S. war in Vietnam. Set right after the conclusion of the American Civil War, it is based on the novel Gone to Texas by Forrest Carter. It opens in Missouri; farmer Josey Wales is helpless to prevent an invasion of Northern “redlegs” who burn down his house and slaughter his family, because Wales has refused to concede defeat (which is no reason at all), setting him on an outlaw course of hateful vengeance. The war that has ended thus goes on, in another, sublimated form, and is given by dint of political allegory an anti-American twist insofar as the U.S. rampage in Southeast Asia is seen as a foreign invasion exacting a hideous toll. One can cynically suggest that Clint Eastwood, who replaced director Kaufman with himself, hasn’t a clue as to any of this; but his later, fine Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) imagines the Pacific phase of the Second World War from the Japanese perspective. Regrettably, however, all of Eastwood’s contributions to The Outlaw Josey Wales—direction, lead performance—are inept, with a single exception: the hilarious speed with which Wales apparently becomes a pop/folk figure. Chief Dan George gives the best performance, as Lone Watie, an old Cherokee who is philosophical about war and about defeat: “I myself never surrendered. But they got my horse, and it surrendered.” Wales brings Lone Watie into the fold of his own journeys, eventually also admitting others, by getting him another horse. A horse can be replaced; alas, the surrogate family that Wales attracts cannot restore all that he has lost.
     Johnny Carson, the Internet Movie Database claims, considered this the greatest Western; but, given its rich raw material, one is constantly nagged by how unfeeling, cluttered and unfocused it is. I suspect that Kaufman would have done better; it is impossible to imagine his doing worse.

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PELLE THE CONQUEROR (Bille August, 1987)

Prosaic, pictorial rather than visually expressive, richly photographed in color by Jörgen Persson and beautifully acted by 12-year-old Pelle Hvenegaard in the title role (best young actor, European Film Awards), Pelle erobreren is based on the first of the four 1906-1910 novels by future communist Martin Andersen Nexø. His namesake, modeled on Nexø, is indeed the character with which Hvenegaard launched his ongoing acting career. Nexø, an added pseudonym, was the name of the town on the Danish island of Bornholm to which Martin Andersen moved with his family, from the slums of Copenhagen, in 1877.
     Directed by Bille August, winning his first Palme d’Or at Cannes (1991’s The Best Intentions, written by Ingmar Bergman, would bring August his second), Pelle eronreren begins in transit: Swedish immigrants crowd a boat to Bornholm in hopes of a better life toward the end of the nineteenth century. Once there, Lassefar, who is far from being young or strong, and son Pelle are the last ones to secure farm work. At the Kongstrup farm they are both treated disdainfully, in the case of the boy, even brutally. Lasse drinks; ambitious Pelle dreams—and finds his way to a job in the Kongstrup mansion. Pelle loves him, but his father is too broken by life to be any sort of positive guide for Pelle’s future. Earlier, a ranch hand had promised to take Pelle with him when he left for America—but didn’t. At film’s end, Pelle bravely takes off on his own.
     Regrettably, August seems more interested in telling a story than in analyzing the systemic political causes of Lasse’s defeatism. Too, despite a plethora of best actor prizes (Guldbagge, Bodil and European Film Awards, Robert Festival), Max von Sydow is not at his best as Lassefar.

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THE FUNERAL (Juzo Itami, 1984)

We need to tread lightly to grasp a culture other than our own. What, for instance, is the aim of the joke of a man’s death in the pre-credit sequence of writer-director Juzo Itami’s The Funeral (Ososhiki)? The boisterous gentleman, who is diabetic and not quite 70, secured that very day a positive report from his annual check-up; but, buoyed by this, instead of maintaining his diet, he celebrates by overindulging at dinner and suffers the massive heart attack that ends his life. The “joke,” then, is at the expense of human nature—or at the expense of this particular human’s nature, his recklessness. Many U.S. Americans, however, rightly or wrongly are likely to detect a needling of Japan’s system of socialized medical care. Is its presumed ineptitude contributing to the joke, contrary to the customary attribution of Japanese longevity to this system?
     Itami’s Funeral, his directorial debut, painstakingly details the three-day family event that includes the deceased’s burial. Hilarious, in the film’s first movement, with the exchange of sandwiches between two adjacent cars heading to the hospital morgue: the overhead shot, with wheels nearly touching, parodying the chariot race in Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959).
     My one complaint: the funereal underlighting of much of the film is sufficiently cozy to be a bit smug. Otherwise, as family secrets tumble out, it is a perfect comedy.
     The deceased’s daughter Chizuko and her husband, Wabisuke, both actors, are played by Nobuko Miyamoto, Itami’s wife, and Tsutomu Yamazaki (best actor, Kinema Junpo, Blue Ribbon, Japanese Academy Awards), who had been brilliant as the murderous medical student in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), with both continuing as stars of Itami’s Tampopo (1986) and A Taxing Woman (1987). Ososhiki brought future suicide Itami best film, direction and screenwriting prizes.

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PRECIOUS (Lee Daniels, 2009)

To prevent its being confused with another 2009 Push, Lee Daniels’s film is being called Precious: Based on the [1996] Novel Push by Sapphire. Mindful of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, one might instead call the film Invisible Girl. Sixteen-year-old Claireece Precious Jones is an illiterate, overweight junior high school girl in 1987 Harlem. Those who notice her do not see her but, rather, another opportunity to be cruel at her expense—as though life isn’t hard enough already on Precious. Her first child was the outcome of rape by her father, who has made her pregnant again, drawing her unmarried mother’s wrath against her; welfare cheat Mary feels that Precious, whom she savages repeatedly both verbally and physically, stole her boyfriend away from her. Once her new pregnancy is discovered, Precious is kicked out of school; a literacy education program takes up the slack. Her social worker and her teacher each intend for Precious to have a future. They break through the sullen armor that has built up around her by degrees, making possible her dream (which we hear as voiceover) that Precious will get through to somebody or somebody will get through to her. Throughout, Daniels generously applies closeups so that Precious won’t remain “invisible” to us.
     The film is alternately brilliantly taut and amiably roomy, with riffs of fantasy, marshaling expressionistic and avant-garde techniques, correlative to Precious’s interiority; when her raging mother flings an object at the back of her head, on the kitchen floor Precious flashes back to her father raping her while insisting he loves her—memories that segue into her escape from reality: dreams of her being a celebrity with attentive, adoring fans. Her clothes, hair, make-up are all suddenly gorgeous.
     As Precious, first-timer Gabourey Sidibe is tremendously moving.

SPARE PARTS (Damjan Kozole, 2003)

Absent any analysis of causes for recent refugeeism in Europe, writer-director Damjan Kozole’s Rezervni deli is more unpleasant to watch than it is edifying. This drama about the clandestine transportation of illegal refugees, for 1,000 euros a head, from Croatia, through Slovenia, and across Italy’s border, and the toll this takes on both refugees and transporters, is facile—and in rich though restrained color, irrelevantly lovely to the eye. Somehow a film in which there are multiple deaths, including an entire family that had been stuffed into the trunk of a car, should not seem so aesthetically contrived. From Slovenia, the film won in seven categories at the Slovene Film Festival, including best film, director, cinematographer (Radoslav Jovanov).
     The two main characters man one of the vans. Pot-bellied Ludvik, an alcoholic whose cancer-ridden wife committed suicide, has taken young Rudi under his wing, giving him a beating when the boy’s actions are “unprofessional.” Ludvik, a former speedway racer, asks Rudi only one question before taking him on: “Can you drive?” At film’s end, Rudi, who has taken Ludvik’s place, asks the same sole question of a new boy. By then, the same setting, with competitors racing around the track, has passed fully into metaphor. The process goes on and on, with death the only “out.”
     The title refers to a recurrent fate of the refugees. In Italy they are slaughtered for their organs, which are then sold: “One kidney,” Ludvik tells Rudi, “is worth 15,000 euros.”
     One of the refugees, a Macedonian girl who exchanges sex for medicine for her deathly ill companion, commits suicide. Nastily, Kozole, a former punk rocker, has Rudi wake up just following the reporting of this news on his television.
     The film, exploitive, lurid and self-congratulatory, is another Schindler’s List.