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TIFF ’14 Wrap-Up: The Gift of MAGI and some quick takes

September 30, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, TIFF

by Bill Chambers I try my best to stay away from the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto’s state-of-the-art cinematheque, during the Festival, because for a goodly portion of those ten days it becomes Pandaemonium with a red carpet. But I made what I hope is a self-explanatory exception for the Industry conference “Ad Infinitum: Bigger, Faster, Brighter Movies – The Changing Creative Landscape of Digital Entertainment,” where Douglas Trumbull–who designed the lightshows for, among others, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner; directed the cultish SF movies Silent Running and Brainstorm; and engineered Back to the Future: The Ride–debuted/previewed his new MAGI process, a digital replacement for his late, lamented Showscan. Trumbull took the podium to introduce a featurette on his work that set the context for UFOTOG, a short subject shot in 4K resolution and 3-D at 120 frames per second (fps). Although the piece dovetails with Trumbull’s geeky interest in space invaders (the title is a portmanteau of “UFO” and “photography,” just as MAGI is a weird anagram-cum-abbreviation for “moving image”), its raison d’être is to serve as MAGI’s proof of concept. Good thing, too: as a narrative, it’s pretty incoherent.

Fantastic Fest ’14: It Follows

September 24, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

****/****
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Darkness by Day

September 22, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror

El día trajo la oscuridad
****/****
starring Pablo Caramelo, Marta Lubos, Romina Paula, Mora Recalde
screenplay by Josefina Trotta
directed by Martin De Salvo

by Walter Chaw A girl closes a gate, one of those rural gates that spans an entire driveway entrance, and director Martin de Salvo shoots it with a camera mounted on the end of the gate itself. It’s innovative and intimate, and there’s something adoring in it, so we adore her. She’s Virginia (Mora Recalde), a caretaker of her father, a doctor, at a house in the middle of nowhere. One night, he carries in her cousin, Anabel (Romina Paula), mumbles that she’s ill, and takes her up to a bedroom, closing the door. Darkness by Day, de Salvo’s second feature, is beautiful, unfolding in long, contemplative wide shots that, in their composition and subject, remind a great deal of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. It resembles that film, too, in the way it moves like a nightmare–the kind where nothing’s wrong, except everything feels bad. Virginia begins to sleep a lot. Her cousin wakes up, and they spend time together talking, listening to old records, drinking wine. There’s a story between them told only through glances that linger maybe a beat too long and a dance that seems fuelled less by wine than by nostalgia. And nobody seems to be answering the telephone at Anabel’s family home anymore.

TIFF ’14: The Look of Silence

September 7, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Taiwan, TIFF, UK

Senyap
****/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Bill Chambers Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is devastating because it doesn’t offer any moral opposition to the glibly boastful first-hand accounts of Indonesian death squads; and his The Look of Silence is devastating because it does. A B-side to The Act of Killing but no mere Blue in the Face afterthought, The Look of Silence follows Adi, a 44-year-old door-to-door optometrist whose senile father is 103 and whose mother improbably claims to be around the same age. The father has forgotten but the mother has not that Adi was preceded by a brother, Ramli, who was killed during the “communist” purge (the picture reiterates that anyone who didn’t immediately fall in line with the military dictatorship was tarred with the same brush, regardless of political or religious affiliation)–though “killed” somehow undersells his execution, a two-day ordeal that culminated in Ramli’s castration. Adi watches Oppenheimer’s footage of the murderers describing his brother’s death in that animated, kids-playing way familiar from The Act of Killing, though these are not the same two “actors” who appeared in that film, underscoring that desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

Telluride ’14: ’71

September 5, 2014****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014, UK, War

****/****
starring Jack O’Connell, Paul Anderson, Richard Dormer, Sean Harris
screenplay by Gregory Burke
directed by Yann Demange

by Walter Chaw I’m old and stupid enough to have contextualized the “Troubles,” the armed conflict in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants, the IRA and the Brits, into a few U2 songs and that Paul Greengrass movie named after the same incident as…um, that one U2 song. I believed it was a tense period marked by a few unpleasant incidents. Yann Demange’s debut feature ’71 has shown me exactly how ignorant I’ve been of recent history, with a film he himself describes as an excoriation of our propensity, across nations and time, for sending our young men off to fight “dirty” wars. It’s absolutely harrowing, and it provides no respite to its tension. The best type of history, it’s alive and vital, thought-provoking and utterly, dispiritingly familiar. It reminded me a lot of Gallipoli; and as with Gallipoli, I feel like ’71 will be the moment a young actor (Jack O’Connell this time) becomes a star. It’s brilliantly shot, smart, and brutal. I went in it not knowing a thing about the film or what it portrayed and left a true believer.

Telluride ’14: Showcase for shorts

September 3, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, France, Short Films, Telluride, Telluride 2014, UK

Toutes des connes **/**** (France, 6 mins., d. François Jaros) Recently redubbed Life’s a Bitch, Toutes des connes is a fitfully-engaging relationship dramedy composed of a few dozen ultra-shorts featuring a guy (scriptor Guillaume Lambert) who breaks up with his girlfriend, goes through stages of grief and acceptance, then gets back together with the girl. It’s well done for what it is, but it feels like it needed half the time to be what it is. Toutes des connes doesn’t do anything surprising or innovative, announcing itself conspicuously as a calling-card film for director Jaros. Yes, I see that you can shoot and edit, though the grieving dude with the shaving-creamed face staring at the mirror thing was funnier in Raising Arizona.

Telluride ’14: Two Days, One Night

September 2, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she’s too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It’s Petula Clark’s French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon’s “Needles and Pins,” “La Nuit N’en Finit Plus.” Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she’s so natural in this moment–in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It’s stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable–a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter (“Thank you, goodbye”) is identical each time. It’s through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there’s ever been.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

August 5, 2014****/****, 1970s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mexico, Peru, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

Aguirre1

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentaries A
starring Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw A work of holy madness about acts of holy madness, Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a transcendent, haunting film that defies description and captures, somehow, what it means to be human in all the venal, small, sometimes grand things that being human implies. Once seen, it’s never forgotten, and upon repeat viewings, it’s one of those pictures that makes you want to cry for no particular reason but that it is, in almost every non-quantifiable way, perfect, a film alight with invention, love, and passion–a memoir of the worm in the gut that demands blood and glory. Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is an under-lieutenant in the bona fide Peruvian expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction of the Peruvian Indians meant as a suicide pill for their conquistadors. Once the expedition bogs down in the mud of the rainy season, Pizarro sends nobleman Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) off with Aguirre on a satellite mission to scout a path ahead for the main body. Though neither party was ever heard from again, Aguirre, The Wrath of God proposes to tell the final days of Ursua’s doomed men.

Ace in the Hole (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

July 22, 2014****/****, 1950s, 2014, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Billy Wilder, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Satire, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Bob Arthur, Porter Hall
screenplay by Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Ace in the Hole is full of bees. It’s the most scabrous, uncompromised work from Billy Wilder, who never made a movie that wasn’t kind of an asshole; and never made a movie that didn’t reflect the essential nihilism of his worldview. He’s a fascinating figure, Wilder–a director of obvious genius who has defied easy auteur classification not because he didn’t have his distinguishing characteristics (the outsider hero yearning for assimilation, for instance), but because his films are only queasily liked and then only at arm’s length. His stuff is poisonous. There’s a sense that reviewing him is like trying to dissect a facehugger: if you poke too insistently, you’ll release acid. You can point to Some Like it Hot as an exception, but I would respond that that film is about a notorious gangland massacre, repressed homosexuality, rape (kind of), chiselling, and the difficulties embedded in gender expectation and objectification. Wilder’s treatment of Marilyn Monroe there and in the earlier The Seven-Year Itch, and his later comments about Marilyn’s stupidity, her breasts, and his venal rationale for working with her twice, all feeds into the read that Ace in the Hole is close to autobiography. A curmudgeon with wit is an asshole by any other name. What would Wilder have done with his dream project, Schindler’s List? Like Ace in the Hole, I imagine it would have been more about a world that would endorse such atrocity than about the atrocity itself.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

July 9, 2014****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw Matt Reeves’s remarkable Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter Dawn) isn’t the best sequel since The Empire Strikes Back, but it is the best sequel since The Dark Knight. It’s uncomplicated but beautifully executed–so pure and genuinely felt that its conclusions about the unavoidable zero-sum game of tribalism land are not didactic but poetic. That certain sense of Tennyson bleeds into the overgrown post-apocalyptic landscape, all torpid acedia in its human ruins and in a tree-bound ape village that represents a sort of circular hopelessness. We recognize it as the beginning of a successor civilization that is unfortunately exactly like the beginnings of the civilization on which it’s being built. Dawn‘s best trick is in balancing our sympathies in this way. We cast our lot with heroic Caesar (Andy Serkis, in a motion-capture performance that is one of the great silent-movie turns, ever), who’s pushing against a Cheney-manqué in Koba (Toby Kebbell). Caesar gratifies our instinct for the underdog: it’s easier to identify with Adam than with Nero. And then Reeves shifts to a human refuge and populates it with people, specifically Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Ellie (Keri Russell), working on a peaceful solution against the more bellicose and paranoid of their number (Kirk Acevedo and Gary Oldman). No fair guessing which philosophy wins out–it’s the only one that ever seems to.

Breaking the Waves (1996) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

June 4, 2014****/****, 1990s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Denmark, Directors: Lars von Trier, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgård, Katrin Cartlidge, Udo Kier
screenplay by Lars von Trier and David Pirie & Peter Asmussen
directed by Lars von Trier

by Bryant Frazer Breaking the Waves can make you queasy from its opening moments, when director Lars von Trier’s name appears with the title superimposed over it, the title card swaying gently on screen as if it were photographed at sea. The effect is less subtle on home video than it is on a big screen, where you’re not as aware of the edges of the frame, but the message is the same: suddenly, you’re adrift, unmoored, alone.

Her (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 12, 2014****/****, 2013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi

Her1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

by Walter Chaw Two moments early on in Spike Jonze’s Her. The first when our hero, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), initiates his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and is asked to characterize his relationship with his mother; the second when, in flashback, Theodore and his ex, Catherine (Rooney Mara), pretend to choke each other. They’re waypoints Jonze establishes for his piece: in one direction, there’s Blade Runner and its questions of proximate humanity; in the other, there’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its mad love. Jonze establishes, too, that this will be a work of science-fiction owing its parentage to the best sources, that its premise will be fantastic but grounded in characters and their place in the world. Of all the compliments I can think to pay this film, the best is that Her is at least the equal of its waypoints. More, when its solution recalls the metaphysical coda to the great The Incredible Shrinking Man, it’s the equal of that as well.

Grey Gardens (1976) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 7, 2014****/****, 1970s, 2014, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection

Greygardens1

GREY GARDENS
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke

THE BEALES OF GREY GARDENS (2006)
***/****
directed by Albert Maysles & David Maysles

by Jefferson Robbins “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and present.” That cast-off remark from Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale early in Grey Gardens, the documentary molded from her enclosed and deluded life, is a cornerstone truth in so many sad domestic stories like hers. Every Gothic romance novel knows it, with their living ghosts rattling around grand old manses much like Little Edie’s 19^th-century East Hampton estate–not least Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, a work she returns to over and over. It’s an affliction, this unstuckness in time, and it besets the aged and the ill until nostalgia becomes, essentially, the place where they live. Her mother, Edith Ewing “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale, the more insightful of the pair, recognizes it in her daughter as well as herself. “I’ve certainly got ideas about living in the wrong time,” the matriarch says from the stained twin bed at Grey Gardens she seldom bestirs herself to leave. And then one of her many cats defecates in a corner, sheltering behind the vivid oil portrait of Big Edie in her beautiful, younger years.

Persona (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

April 29, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Persona1

PERSONA
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullman
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

LIV & INGMAR
**½/****
directed by Dheeraj Akolkar

by Bryant Frazer In early 1965, under the influence of the French New Wave, half dead from pneumonia and subsequent antibiotic poisoning, and depressed by more than just the view from his Stockholm hospital bed, Ingmar Bergman cobbled together some ideas for a small movie about two women. Addled by the administrative headaches of his position as the head of Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre–and probably discouraged by the frosty reception that greeted his recent comedy and first colour film, All These Women–he felt a small movie was the only kind he would be able to make. And so he started putting together, in his head, a modest drama. He imagined two women comparing hands. One of them, he decided, would be talking, and the other would be silent. It went from there.

La Notte (1961) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Lanotte1

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki
written and directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw The second film in a loose quartet of Modernist, existentially-despairing–some would say brutal–Michelangelo Antonioni pictures, La Notte is the one I would identify, if pressed, as the best among L‘avventura, L‘eclisse, and Red Desert. I’d even go so far as to call it Antonioni’s best movie overall: the one that most completely encompasses the filmmaker’s worldview and puts into sharpest relief the tools with which he expresses it. He’s at the height of his powers here. I would argue that although his Blow-Up both defined foreign film as a genre for American audiences (while proving instrumental in defeating the Production Code, heralding the level of acceptance and permissiveness that made the American ’70s in film possible) and is indisputably his most influential work (indeed, it’s among the most influential films of all time), it’s La Notte that offers the cleanest insight into who and what Antonioni is as an artist.

The Wind Rises (2013) + Frozen (2013)

February 25, 2014****/****, 2013, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Musical, Romance, War

THE WIND RISES
****/****
written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki

FROZEN
**½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”
directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee

Editor’s Note: This review pertains to the original Japanese-language version of The Wind Rises.

by Walter Chaw Hayao Miyazaki’s alleged swan song The Wind Rises is mature, romantic, grand storytelling that just happens to be something like a romanticized biography of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M, which led, ultimately, to the Zero. Indeed, for a Western audience, watching Jiro’s dreams of squadrons of Zeros buzzing over fields of green is chilling, and advance critics seemed unable to distinguish the Japanese war machine from the film’s focus on a life lived in pursuit of dreams. In truth, separating these two aspects of the picture–the proximate and the historical–is self-defeating. (Dismissing the movie out of hand is equally blinkered.) One without the other, The Wind Rises loses anything like substance, resonance, importance. It would fall on the one side into gauzy bullshit, on the other into Triumph of the Will. As is, it’s something more akin to Studio Ghibli’s own Grave of the Fireflies in its humanizing of a man whose dreams were corrupted into something terrible. Einstein would be one of the West’s potential Horikoshi corollaries–and if Miyazaki had done Albert’s biography, I’d expect to see mushroom clouds illustrating his fantasies of relativity. For Horikoshi, Miyazaki provides upheavals and disasters as highlight to each of his life events: He first meets his wife in a train crash; in a lilting epilogue, when Jiro bids farewell to his dead wife, Miyazaki offers fields of devastation and a village in flames. Throughout, Miyazaki presents earthquakes, rainstorms, sudden bursts of wind as reminders of…what? The inevitability of change? The portents of war? The cycles of life and death? All of that; but what compels is the idea of helplessness in the face of larger forces–that although we chase our dreams, we’re never really in control of our destinies.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 30, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 5, 2014****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

Her (2013)

December 18, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
written and directed by Spike Jonze

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

December 8, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw I love the Coen Brothers, despite my suspicion that most of their movies don’t think much of me at all. What’s often read as disdain for their characters I’ve read mainly as antipathy for their audience: I believe they like their characters just fine, it’s just that they could give a shit about your opinion of what happens to them. I love the Coens for their literary acumen, for their fine ability to understand not simply the form of genre–and, in their adaptations, of authors–but the entire function as well. They don’t just adapt Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis novels, they adapt those writers’ entire bodies of work. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a remarkable retelling of The Odyssey, for instance, because in addition to following the outlines of the poem, it adapts its themes and storytelling strategies; it’s a dissection and a representation and glorious, of course. They return now to The Odyssey–or, at least, to the character of Odysseus–in Inside Llewyn Davis, a picture set in 1961, among the bohos and coffee shops of a Greenwich Village on the verge of Bob Dylan and the counterculture, and it’s populated with lost souls in overlapping underworlds. Transpose that passage from Homer where Odysseus fills troughs with sheeps’ blood to draw the undead (and finds his poor deceased mother there at her drink) to scenes in Pappi’s (Max Casella) infernal nightclub as proto-hipsters and neo-beatniks assemble blandly on the edge of a trembling something while performers bleed out before them. In rituals for new gods, after all, there must be lambs to slaughter.