Chinatown (1974) is a genuinely great pop movie, film noir par excellence.
This is the 1970s’ 1937, and how interesting it is! True, the film’s ending is too grim and ugly, but it serves to remind us that the world of crime is more horrifying than noir was ever allowed to tell us.
Superlative work from Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.
Chinatown (1974 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Directed and scripted by Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea (2012), based on Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play, is a thematically rich enterprise about a woman who leaves her older husband for another man, only to be rejected by him after the woman’s failed suicide attempt. The film provides a message regarding the frequent failure of shallow people (such as the lover, Freddie Page) to understand those whom they love, or “love.” It also presents a woman, Hester Collyer, who does what all of us do: She lives strictly according to her physical and psychological needs, both positive and negative. And, oh, how it alienates her lover! As I said, the film is thematically rich.
It begins with Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto accompanying Davies’ images, music which shortly becomes inappropriate because it is too lovely and sweeping. What follows, however, is limpid and disturbing film drama, slow-moving but memorable. Rachel Weisz is darkly sensitive, poised but trembling, and not at all butch as Hester. Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale are also flavorously true.
The Deep Blue Sea (2011 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In early ’02 I had the chance to see, here in Tulsa, Warren Leight’s excellent play, Side Man (1998), whose themes include 1) the decline of jazz performance as a profession, and 2) when the stable household is naught but a ghost.
Trumpet player Gene moves in with and, after getting her pregnant, marries naive, sensitive, foul-mouthed Terry, but can only handle the horn not the marriage. This is all recalled in memory-play form by the couple’s 29-year-old son Clifford, bruised and surviving, and still loving his parents. Like his much featured bandmates, Gene cannot cope with ordinary social life: As playwright Leight points out, he “exists in sort of a bubble. When the conversation isn’t about music, he’s elsewhere; even if he’s talking to you.” Perennially the side man is on the side.
As for Terry, she gradually becomes a lost boozer and shrew (“I’ve been dead for thirty years”), an inconsolable wreck. Half out of her mind, she whines at one point about wanting to join a convent in Montana or Minnesota, which is interesting. Surely she sees a convent as an inviting antithesis to all she has known, as a place of order and wholeness.
Side Man isn’t chary about showing us the lesions of life. The side men-musicians besides Gene have them too: Jonesy is a drug addict who gets three of his teeth broken, Al suffers a mini-stroke. The good times inevitably pass in this spiky, honest, and nicely structured play which I was fortunate to see in a successful production.
SideMan by Warren Leight – November 2009 (Photo credit: Dragon Productions Theatre Company)
The late Kryzysztof Kieslowski of Poland directed and co-wrote in the early Nineties a film trilogy named after the three colors of the French flag—blue, white and red—which was intended to express something about the virtue-ideals represented by those colors. Blue, dealing with liberty, was so atrocious I can’t believe any critic could like it, but of course there were critics who did, and if they liked that, they most certainly would like White, concerned with equality, which was better. The only thing I liked about White was some of its humor; all else was ridiculous. That a loser of a husband wants to show his thoughtless ex-wife that he can achieve equality of a kind with other men was a good premise, but how fatuously and awkwardly it was presented.
Slightly more pleasing but still not acceptable is Red (1994), about the nicest virtue-ideal of them all: fraternity. Regarding this one I can at least say there is more than just one quality about it I like, but it is hardly cheering to see customary absurdity in plotting. Red is even more effectively filmed than, and just as nonsensical as, White.
In what lies the fraternity? Here is what I enjoy most about Red: it lies in a friendship between a 20-odd-year-old female model and a 60-odd-year-old retired male judge, which friendship is just that—a friendship—there is nothing sexual about it. They simply take an interest in one another, and rightly so from a cosmic perspective. The model, you see, is destined to hook up with a man who completely resembles the judge when he was young, but this is the film’s biggest groaner. Last I checked, life doesn’t work like that.
With his dignified face and quiet manner, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the judge, and with her friendly face and mature-young-lady manner, Irene Jacob plays the model; both are appealing. So are the visuals, replete with shades of red never allowed to engulf the other colors, never too opulent. And what suppleness in the directing! Kieslowski was a middling artist, but in White and Red a remarkable moviemaker.
(In French with English subtitles)
Cover of Red (Three Colors Trilogy)
Derek Cianfrance, writer-director of the second-rate Blue Valentine, has a respectable film in The Place Beyond the Pines (2013). The three-part chronicle proffers Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a virile stunt motorcyclist who finds out the tiny son of ex-lover Romina (Eva Mendes) is his, and thus he longs to support the child. Whence comes the money? Luke starts acquiring it by robbing banks, but Robin, the pal who assists him, is alarmed at Luke’s inordinateness. The cops don’t like it either: A policeman named Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) goes after the robber. As it turns out, Avery’s story has to do not just with Luke but also with Luke’s son, once he becomes a teenager, and with a bevy of corrupt cops.
The movie runs 2 hours and 20 minutes, and after more than half of that time is over, the script turns thoroughly schematic and relies too much on coincidence. Yet it holds us, and is meaningful. Cianfrance is an artist, one who doesn’t always make good choices, but an artist nonetheless. There is a more skillful representation of people in this film than in Blue Valentine. The story takes place in Schenectady, New York—in an America where people’s lives are regularly running off the rails. They resort to crime and drug abuse and one-night stands that produce babies. Hence it’s a running-off-the-rails that ought to lead to humility (to humble penitence), but often it is only the glaring error of an honorable man that leads to humility. Such is the case with Avery.
Who will make up an honorable America in the future?
English: Ryan Gosling outside a concert for his band Dead Man’s Bones in Montreal, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
