CRAIG’S WIFE (Dorothy Arzner, 1936)

The second of three film versions of George Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1926 play Craig’s Wife was directed by Dorothy Arzner, who took a feminist tack with the material. Hers is a far more interesting and intelligent film than the other version I have seen, Vincent Sherman’s glossy, more psychoanalytic than socioanalytic Harriet Craig (1950), which is more a vehicle for its star, Joan Crawford, than really about anything. In the spirit of Harriet’s own endless lies, Sherman’s film only pretends to be about things by paying them lip service.
     But Arzner’s film takes to heart what Harriet here tells her niece, Ethel: “I saw to it that my marriage was a way to emancipation. I had no private fortune, no special training—so the only road to independence for me was through the man I married. I married to be independent.” Harriet Craig is a monster who cares more about her house, its appearance and the things in it (like the precious vase on the living room mantle) than she cares about her husband or her husband, Walter (John Boles, very good); but her distorted humanity, Arzner conveys, is the result of the limited range of opportunities for American women who were not born to wealth or status.
     The final screen of script—“Those who keep to themselves are usually left to themselves”—feels tacked-on, as though the studio were insisting that this, and only this, is what the film is about. Indeed, Harriet is all alone at the end—all alone, that is, with her house. Everyone, including Walter, who had doted on her but now sees her as horrible, has abandoned her. Harriet would rather that the police suspect Walter of a double murder than have unpleasant gossip targeting her: this is what turns Walter against her. Also leaving Harriet behind are her niece, who leaves with her fiancé, and her aunt, who leaves with the housekeeper—a lesbian couple right under Harriet’s snobbish nose.
     Arzner also was a lesbian, and there is another gay character about, and gay and lesbian actors are onboard as well. All this reminds us how much of an outsider Harriet feels herself to be in her husband’s family home. In short, Arzner extends compassion and sympathy to Harriet Craig, whose reaching out her hand as the front door shuts behind her next-door neighbor (played wonderfully by Billie Burke), leaving her hand lost in air, compellingly encapsulates all the abandonments suffered in quick succession by the once-cold woman who is now dissolved in tears.
     Rosalind Russell, resembling a demented Wendy Hiller, manages to avoid Crawford’s grandness and obstinacy. She plays Harriet Craig at the last as a shattered vase.

THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

Flimsy, farfetched even for a comic book, Batman’s self-sacrificial fate as a hunted criminal convoluted and unconvincing, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight isn’t even an especially good actioner. Much of it, although edited to speed along, is repetitious, hence tedious, with only a couple of sequences giving the heart a consummate jolt. The film has been attracting praise for the fact that its main “good-guy” characters are each deeply flawed and compromised, if not downright corrupted by the dark side of humanity, that is, evil; but the filmmakers seem to overindulge this aspect just to make the point. Gotham City is in a pickle, and its annoyance with vigilante Batman is believable enough; but everyone finds a reason to resemble the chief villain, the Joker, a tad too easily. One almost expects the accompaniment of a song and a dance.
     This is Heath Ledger’s last film. Our Grimm brother, our Casanova, Ledger is incredibly funny and scary in his sloppy clownface, a messy allusion to Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928), with a sidewards glance at Bette Davis’s Baby Jane. Morbidly menacing, an id exposed and without constraining borders, Ledger’s Joker is a match for the wonderful performance that Jean-Louis Barrault gave as Opale in Jean Renoir’s The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959), based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Young Heath portrays some mayhem in us all that most of us succeed in keeping from ever coming out.
     For me, though, the performance of the film is the one given (again) by Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon. Gordon’s ordinary-bloke love of and devotion to his family give the film some much needed heart—although this sets the police lieutenant between a rock and a hard place as to how he is to do his job.
     Christian Bale is still the best Batman, although Bruce Wayne isn’t allowed a moment’s grief for the lost love of his life.
     Aaron Eckhart’s transformation from good to evil, from upstanding District Attorney Harvey Dent to Two-Face, with the name Dent suggesting that Two-Face was always a potential in him, simply doesn’t work for me. It seems forced by the script rather than arising from some part of the character’s reality. Eckhart is a clumsy, phony actor.

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD (Francesco Rosi, 1987)

Based on an incident that Gabriel García Márquez recalled as having occurred in Sucre, Colombia, in 1951, and which he wrote about in his novella Cronica de una muerte anunciada, Cronaca di una morte annunciata is one of Francesco Rosi’s weakest films. Those who haven’t read the book may feel that Rosi is being needlessly ambiguous; those who love the book may feel he has sacrificed some necessary ambiguity. Even so, this is an atmospheric deconstruction of a horrible murder, to which outcome many contributed, most by doing nothing to prevent the murder, and all of them, even the actual perpetrators, even their priest, who, like everyone else, knew the perpetrators’ intent to kill, washing their hands of responsibility for the outcome. Bridging the quarter-century time-range of the action, from the commission of the murder to its (at least partial) unraveling, is Márquez’s stand-in, Dr. Cristo Bedoya (Gian Maria Volontè, collaborating with Rosi for the last time), who, returning to his hometown after a long absence, plays journalist and detective, conducting interviews and piecing together clues. Curiously, Rosi doesn’t apply his renowned gifts for blending documentary and fiction. Rather, the entire film resembles a fantastic, moody fiction, and this befits its multiple viewpoints about the long-ago crime, the elusiveness of its reality and truth. Indeed, the overhead shot of the stabbed corpse dreamily takes us back to Rosi’s great, undreamy Salvatore Giuliano (1961)—only with added zest: the victim, Santiago Nasar, is dressed in (now) blood-spattered white.
     Bayardo San Roman (Rupert Everett—despite what you’ve read, excellent), a wealthy stranger in town, marries Angela Vicario (Ornella Muti, lovely, especially at the end), whose mother (Irene Papas, giving the best performance) before the wedding tells her anxious daughter: “Nobody loves at the beginning. It has to be learned!” That night, Bayardo redeposits Angela at her family’s door, disgracing the family; she is not a virgin. Her two brothers will set this right with an honor-killing; the name Angela gives up is that of Santiago. If we believe her, it is because Santiago (Anthony Delon) resembles Alain Delon.
     This isn’t Chabrol; the film’s stylistic ambiguities do not ultimately point to the theme of ambiguity, but, instead, to the rash crime in the absence of convincing evidence against the victim, the culture that compels the Vicario brothers to commit the crime, the hypocrisy of those and of those institutions (including the law and the Church) that permits the crime to go forward, the complicity of so many “innocents,” including Santiago, who (whether for guilt, honor or love) barely lifts a finger in his own defense.

TRANSAMERICA (Duncan Tucker, 2005)

Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica is preposterous, with more holes in it than Swiss cheese. The bail-jumping doesn’t bother me, because in a case where bail is set at $1 there’s no way that the New York City legal system would bother about this kid. But why on earth would Toby go off with this presumed missionary and how, once he has seen Bree’s penis, can he possibly not be able to figure out who Bree is? It’s farfetched that Toby can’t answer his own question when he asks Bree why she is helping him; it is twenty times more farfetched when he asks Bree why her mother is being so nice to him. But, but, but . . .
     The film overflows with sweetness, humor, humanity, and as much convincing as contrived conflict. All the acting is excellent, and Felicity Huffman gets better and better as the film proceeds. The film’s aura and sensibility reminded me of Gillian Armstrong’s 1987 High Tide starring Judy Davis.
     I remain, as you know, highly susceptible to road pictures, but in recent years I’ve been seeing a lot of bad ones. While no one could mistake Transamerica for being a major entry in the genre, the consensus that it’s a so-so film sparked by a brilliant performance is wrong. Watching it comes close to pure pleasure—and there’s even a little Dolly Parton at the end.

WHAT TIME IS IT? (Ettore Scola, 1989)

Mostly taken up by conversation between two characters, a father and his grown son, Ettore Scola’s Che ora è? is commendable most of all for its refusal to sink into the usual claptrap, soap operatic melodrama. (Think I Never Sang for My Father, Gilbert Cates, 1970.) Usually these films are full of contrivance, a part of which involves a teary-eyed capitulation of one character to the other. Scola’s film, which Scola co-wrote along with his daughter, Silvia, and Beatrice Ravaglioni, is headed toward a subtler reconciliation, to which both characters contribute.
     Marcello is a wealthy, highly successful lawyer in Rome, who is visiting his son for the day in Civitavecchia, the port town where Michele has one more month of military duty left to serve. Each feels that the other is disrespectful of his privacy, and indeed Marcello asks Loredana, Michele’s girlfriend, whom he meets for the first time, and only at his own insistence, how good in bed his son is. (This question, which she has the good sense not to answer, cracks up Loredana.) Marcello wants to know that his son is okay. Meanwhile, Marcello himself is not okay. Two years after suffering a heart attack, he is overweight, overindulging and smoking. His recurrent cough sounds horrible.
     This is a modest film and, really, not a particularly good one—but one that’s simply better than run-of-the-mill father-son tearjerkers. It is thoughtful, quiet, sincere, respectable.
     The two lead actors, Marcello Mastroianni and Massimo Troisi (who, ironically, both had about the same number of years left to live), shared the best actor prize at Venice, but only Mastroianni gives a convincing performance.