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The famous picture about two “cowboys” working with livestock who initiate a homosexual love affair in 1963, Brokeback Mountain (2005) tells us that sexual and emotional self-denial is an unfortunate, even a tragic, thing. It’s wrong: What it should be telling us that such self-denial CAN BE an unfortunate thing, not simply that it is. Pretty simpleminded message.
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It never came to a Tulsa theatre, but 2007’s Broken English, which I saw on DVD, is a small triumph for director-writer Zoe Cassavetes. Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) has no boyfriend. She does have a fling, however, in her native New York City with a Frenchman, Julien (Melvil Poupaud). It hurts her when he returns to Paris; indeed, Nora’s life is a vacuous mess. Ergo she decides to fly to Paris with her best friend to try to find Julien, that is, to find a man she does not actually love. She goes because she wants to love and to be loved. On another level, she goes not to find Julien but herself.
The film has to do with the drift and hope, not to mention the anxiety, of the lovelorn. I can’t resist declaring that this is one Nora who is not in anyone’s doll house–because she has no husband. Even so, there is no evidence that her best friend, a dissatisfied wife played by Drea de Matteo, is living in Ibsen’s doll house either. The adeptly directed Broken English is the work of the daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. It’s more deserving than daddy’s films.
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Shark Night 3-D (2011) is meant to resemble grindhouse movies of the ’70s, which is to say it’s disgustingly low and stupid. Its PG-13 rating, though, is just about right: it features neither the F word nor bona fide nudity.
It must be that an American Idol culture sooner or later produces a flick like this, which co-stars an utterly hot but badly performing Katharine McPhee, an Idol alumna. Superior acting issues from Sara Paxton and Dustin Milligan, who are also utterly hot. The thing is, if Shark Night were a song routine, Simon Cowell would deservedly savage it.
Make a grindhouse movie if you will, but a useless mess is–probably–all you’ll end up with.
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Though somewhat plebeian, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) is a heartfelt and unusual religious, or Christian, film. The direction is sometimes heavy-handed, as when Jesus dissuades the Jewish men from stoning Mary Magdalene. But mainly it is absolutely solid, and several scenes make the movie memorable.
One of these is when Jesus stamps to death the strange snake which slithers out from under the androgynous Satan’s garment and which presumably represents evil. Another is the sequence in which at Golgotha the wind starts blowing and the sky becomes overcast to convey a sense of foreboding and yet hope. It precedes Jesus’ death and the tear-from-the-eye-of-God shot, and all of it is good directorial work from Gibson.
Even better is the resurrection scene. We see, from the Lord’s perspective, the stone roll away inside the dark tomb and a subsequent shot of thrown-off graveclothes. Then Gibson presents just the right images of Christ’s face in profile.
True, the violent cruelty of the Romans becomes tiresome, but the film succeeds at showing us utter mayhem along the Via Dolorosa after Simon of Cyrene is grabbed up and Jesus collapses. Too, thank goodness we get a respite from all the cruelty with an interlude, very Catholic, about Veronica and her handkerchief. Veronica, by the way, is both Jewish and sweet, but The Passion of the Christ does come down hard on the Jews because, as critic Stanley Kauffmann explained, the New Testament comes down hard on the Jews. Gibson’s film is a biblical one. Accordingly, however, it does not shy away from the truth of Jesus Christ having died for all humanity, for Jew and Gentile alike. That quiet resurrection confirms that “he was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53), those of all of us.
Jim Caviezel is fine as Jesus, though Maia Morgenstern, remarkable in The Oak (1991), has an easy part to play as Mary. Still her anguish is real. With his impeccable facial play, Hristo Shopov (Pontius Pilate) is magisterial.
Again, The Passion is a bit Hollywood-plebeian: I can do without the demon-baby Satan carries in his arms in one scene. But in its own way the film is riveting, a brutal work of orthodoxy about Evil and Redemption. It makes the unorthodox The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) look even sicker and stupider than it is.
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The failure of America’s first black president to see the unsatisfactory directions in which he is taking the country (e.g., health-insurance premiums are rising and entrepreneurs decline to start businesses because of Obamacare) has driven the minds behind The Help (2011) to earnestly focus on the past and a relentlessly racist Mississippi. That’s Hollywood for you.
Based on a best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, Tate Taylor’s film presents wise and noble black maids of the early ’60s and, more often, white middle-class women too many of whom are flibbertigibbets and dopey conformists. I said “too many” of them, not “all” of them. Exceptions are Emma Stone’s Skeeter and the lady played by Sissy Spacek–that is, the mother of the outrageously racist Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard).
Obama aside, it is doubtless true that Hollywood also wished to turn what I assume to be an entertaining book into an entertaining movie. The Help tells a juicy yarn, even as it gives the story of Skeeter and her new boyfriend short shrift.
Emma Stone is quite good in the film; I’d like to see perfection from her because I believe she’s capable of it. Octavia Spencer has real appeal as black maid Minnie; Viola Davis is authoritatively excellent as black maid Aibileen. Howard proffers a bit too much on-the-surface acting, but this is probably partly the fault of writer-director Taylor since he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing in his depiction of white women. His film is almost misogynistic.
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The foreign-aid programs or projects of Western governments are there to help the poor. They are also there to be exploited by crooks, which is what happens in Gianni Amelio’s deeply humane Lamerica, from 1995.
The crooks in question are Fiore and Gino, two Italians who seek to set up in Albania a non-functioning shoe factory with the foreign-aid money of the Italian government. Only with the help of a dishonest Albanian official can they do this, for they need a native “chairman” for their phony company and a middle-aged suit finds them one among Albania’s wretched. This is Spiro, a senile old gent in a rotten, neglected prison from the days of Enver Hoxha. It is assumed that Spiro is an Albanian hero who fought against communism before Hoxha’s regime jailed him for fifty years, but that is not the case. He is Italian, a deserter from Mussolini’s army in the late Thirties.
Gino finds this out as his and Fiore’s scheme unexpectedly begins to unravel. Italy under Mussolini annexed Albania, then lost its rule when the communists took over in 1944. Such Italians as Spiro (real name: Michele) who stayed in the tiny country hid their nationality lest the new government imprison or execute them, notwithstanding Spiro/Michele got imprisoned anyway. For a while Gino finds the old man hard to handle, and the wheels of his jeep get stolen. Later he is detained by Albanian police and his passport is taken away. Forced to board a ship full of would-be immigrants to Italy, Gino sees Spiro/Michele there, dementedly believing he is sailing to America, or, as he pronounces L’America, “Lamerica.” Italy, it transpires, is the Albanians’ Land of Opportunity. Their America. They yearn to go there.
Gino the con man witnesses and even experiences the communist and post-communist misery and poverty of a broken country (which is not to say he reforms). There are characters in the film who wish they had communism back, but it so happens that Hoxha’s government left the Albanians no capital to live off of, to work with. A government once willing to execute Italians, it leaves behind what may be in fact a Putin-like authoritarianism; Lamerica gives us a glimpse of this. At the same time, the Italy that wishes to aid destitute Albanians cannot even help or rescue a fellow Italian–actually a Sicilian–like the old man. The tone of this film is gentle and uncynical; Amelio hates no one and is not angry at “welfare fraud” or communism or fascism. He is a moralist, however, one whose jaw has surely dropped at the scale of human want in a world of government failure and callousness.
