My taste does not normally run to what Michael Mann does, which he always does superficially. I suppose the film of his I have liked the most is the Hannibal Lecter one, Manhunter (1986)—that is, until today. Public Enemies is as superficial as everything else Mann has done; for instance, we do not learn much about Depression-era bank robber/killer John Dillinger; for instance, what motivated his criminal activity? But this time it hardly matters. This time, Mann has given his film such an incredibly rich surface that we do not miss the missing depth. At least I didn’t.
Mann has orchestrated the conjuring of Chicago about a decade earlier than when he himself was born there. Elliot Goldenthal’s original score helps create a melancholy mood that suits Dillinger’s end, as do the three songs sung by Lady Day that punctuate the soundtrack. Moreover, working with high-definition video, Dante Spinotti has contributed dark, disquieting, gorgeous, deeply affecting visuals that likewise help Mann create a sad world of bruised dreams and desperate lives, for all the bravado that cover these. Mann has created an emotional imaginative space where fable and history intersect.
The three main performances are outstanding. Johnny Depp is wonderful as Dillinger; much of the sympathy he draws from us derives from the abhorrent vicious treatment—the “advanced interrogation techniques”—to which J. Edgar Hoover’s thugs subject Dillinger’s girlfriend, Billie, in their efforts to capture Dillinger. Marion Cotillard is superb in the heartrending role of this proud young woman who proves as fragile as a twig. Finally, Christian Bale is a taut fist as Melvin Purvis, the agent in charge of Dillinger’s capture, whose eventual suicide, it is implied, is provoked by the extent that Hoover’s “methods” countered Purvis’s principles, splintering his soul.
Archive for February, 2010
PUBLIC ENEMIES (Michael Mann, 2009)
February 24, 2010WILD GRASS (Alain Resnais, 2009)
February 21, 2010We glean from Georges Palet’s thoughts, which we hear as voiceover (intermixed with some omniscent voiceover), that he has a problem: he has killed, has been incarcerated for it, and must work steadily at suppressing an urge to kill again. The shot of a multitude of working timepieces at the jeweler’s to which he has gone to get the battery in his watch replaced tells us, also, that Georges (as well as the director) is obsessed with time. He is no longer young, although his younger wife, Suzanne, is devoted and, currently, anxiously loyal.
Directing Les herbes folles is 87-year-old Alain Resnais, so we think of his longtime, considerably younger partner, actress Sabine Azéma, especially since she plays Marguerite Muir, the dentist whose wallet, stolen by kids along with her still missing pocketbook, Georges finds by his car in a commercial parking lot and, given his criminal past, reluctantly turns into the police. Georges (André Dussollier, at his best) is attracted to the photograph in her wallet of Marguerite in full regalia as an airplane pilot. They talk, quarrel, meet, part, kiss. Resnais’s impeccable mise-en-scène includes imagery both grounded (grasses and weeds bursting through concrete) and airborne (repeated shots of Marguerite’s pocketbook, having been grabbed by the thieves, seemingly floating on its own through air). Finally, the Palets end up in the private plane that Marguerite is piloting when she fatefully turns over the controls to Georges. Throughout, the vulnerabilities of these three characters have been given a good airing; now, disaster strikes. But note Resnais’s navigation of camera and sound; we see and hear nothing—which to this cinéaste means that Resnais can’t let harm come to these people or let go of them.
A film of some wit, strained charm, and little else.
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VINCERE (Marco Bellocchio, 2009)
February 20, 2010A Pirandellan air permeates Vincere, which means to win, to overcome, written (along with Daniela Ceselli) and directed by the maker of Enrico IV (1984), Marco Bellocchio. Mockingly aping his father, dictator Benito Mussolini, after one of Mussolini’s exaggerated speeches, Mussolini’s son, also named Benito (Filippo Timi plays both characters), goes insane under a combinate burden: his mother’s incarceration in an insane asylum for insisting that Mussolini, who has married since, is her legal husband and that her son, “Benitino,” is also his son; his father’s having nothing to do with him; his father’s being both beast and buffoon on national and international stages. However, it is the boy’s mother, Ida Delser, who is the protagonist of Bellocchio’s latest brilliant film. The existence of Mussolini’s first wife and son became widely “known” only in 2005.
Covering nearly forty years of twentieth-century Italian history, Vincere charts Mussolini’s rise from impoverished socialist-activist to Fascist dictator through two agencies: rabble-rousing exploitation of class division and anti-clerical sentiment (Mussolini ultimately uses the Church to legitimize his rule); his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, which bourgeois Ida bankrolls—this, despite their (presumably) marrying, the sum of Mussolini’s use for her. Ida is unable to “move on.” Along the way, she is advised to “play a different role,” that of an obedient, submissive, domestically inclined woman rather than an enraged, agitated irritant. This is what Mussolini himself has done in becoming Il Duce: he has found another role to play. For Mussolini, power means hiding from view–his own and others’–the trauma of his initial poverty.
Favoring browns and dimly lit, the first movement suggests buried lives and buried truth. Bellocchio strikingly weaves fictional and archival materials as time, proceeding, locks Ida and son into hopeless lives and, finally, common graves.
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THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (William Wyler, 1946)
February 18, 2010Written by Robert E. Sherwood from MacKinlay Kantor’s blank-verse novella, Glory for Me, The Best Years of Our Lives is William Wyler’s finest, most moving film, the one most infused with his humane sensibility and least compromised by melodrama. It essays the civilian readjustment of three soldiers upon their return home to Boone City somewhere in the corn belt. Their paths never crossed before the war, but they become friends on their flight back in a military transport.
One of these is Fred Derry, an Air Force captain and bombardier who returns to his pre-war job as a soda jerk, which he summarily loses. Derry has returned also to the wife he hardly knew, who likes better her husband’s impressive uniform than she does her husband, who for the moment seems without prospects. Homer Parrish (Harold Russell, best supporting actor Oscar), a sailor who lost both hands in the war, is terrified of reuniting with fiancée Wilma. Al Stephenson (Fredric March, best actor Oscar), an infantry sergeant, has returned home to Milly (Myrna Loy, best actress, Brussels) and two grown children. (Al, nervous, hopes to postpone having homecoming sex with Milly.) A banker, he is promoted to vice president in charge of loans; but, familiar with the courage and determination of the men he fought with, and wishing to bet on the future of America, he locks horns with bank management over his tendency to approve loans for returning G.I.s with little or no collateral.
The supernally clear deep focus that cinematographer Gregg Toland helped Wyler achieve suggests that the present contains a vision of the future. However, the most brilliant passage, in an airfield of retired B-52 bombers, finds Fred wandering into his recent past.
Oscars for best picture, direction, screenplay.
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THE INHERITORS (Eugenio Polgovsky, 2008)
February 26, 2010Closeups of hands at work—hands weaving, bundling logs, making bricks, harvesting: hard work—work done by children, some as young as four or five, sometimes helping their elders, sometimes laboring off on their own. Los herederos, Eugenio Polgovsky’s most recent Mexican documentary, which Polgovsky directed, digitally videographed and edited, all brilliantly, vindicates what I wrote about his earlier Tropic of Cancer (2004): “A stark examination of impoverished life in post-NAFTA Mexico turns into a powerful consideration of how hard some people must work just to survive. . . . [A] kid in his twenties[,] . . . Polgovsky, who was born in Mexico City, is the future of cinema.”
There is so much that is memorable in Los herederos, for example, the shot of a young boy making a wood carving, the knife that his small hands are using stained with his fresh blood as he presses on with his work, with great skill and daunting speed, for the boy isn’t whittling away his time in some suspended state of childhood idleness, he is producing merchandise for sale, and the more merchandise the more sales and the more meager profit for his family. Later, we see a shed full of the painted handiwork: it is gorgeous, and we remember the spilt blood that has been painted over, which the child kept diligently working through, paying it no mind. The title of Polgovsky’s film refers to inherited poverty in rural Mexico; all the children we watch are “the inheritors” of that, including the little girl, in a yellow dress, whose father, working in the fields, asks her mother across a distance to have their daughter bring him a bucket. To stress the work, rather than familial sentimentality, Polgovsky cuts away and attends to other laborers and their labor before returning to the little child with the blue plastic bucket she is bringing to her father. This is a film of devastating poetry.
Polgovsky has edited for his film the labor of four or five different families in different Northern Mexican villages, one of which is strikingly elevated. Despite his Russian name, he does not even once indulge in the Soviet rhetoric of work’s joyfulness and nobility because it is helping to build some sort of a future. What we see is work, work and more work that is done for survival’s sake and by the skin of the teeth. There is no contextualizing onscreen script, no talking heads, only the sparsest talking (at one point a child speaks aloud—to himself), no background music: just people who have committed no crime but who have been sentenced to life entrapment with hard labor. Polgovsky dignifies his subjects by the purity of his filmmaking methods. Two other films came to mind as I watched Los herederos: with its meshing of different rainshowers to create a single combinate event in which Amsterdam pedestrians participate, Joris Ivens and Mannus Frånken’s Dutch documentary Regen (Rain, 1929); from Bernanos, Robert Bresson’s fictional masterpiece about an impoverished, put-upon child, Mouchette (1966). All three films exemplify a kind of purity that helps distill an aspect of compelling human experience.
I say there’s no music in the film. With charm and wit as well as bracing irony, Polgovsky points this out in a passage of maybe one or two moments’ duration. Beginning with the spinning wheel that a woman is working, music seems to be generated by the machinery and the labor (here, I thought of René Clair’s inventiveness in the 1930s). Polgovsky cuts amongst faces, including the elderly, who silently seem to hear this imaginary music that we also hear. Poignant.
I cannot praise this movie enough—nor the resourceful children who share their unceasing labor and, here and there, glance with a quick half-smile into the video camera.
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