Wall (2004) – DVD

February 10, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, DVD, France, Israel

Mur
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
directed by Simone Bitton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wall's greatest strength–its serene pictorialism–is also its greatest limitation. On the one hand, the film asks us to think long and hard about the sheer presence of the massive concrete edifice designed to keep terrorists out of Israel and whether that presence is necessary. To that end, it features some skilful photography of the towering edifice in all its intrusive glory. On the other hand, Wall pushes the surrounding populace onto an abstract plane, letting the Kafkaesque spectacle drive the movie when really it ought to be providing more, pardon the pun, concrete information. It's a tough call, as the film manages to gently grip instead of blind with the alienating rage the subject understandably attracts–it gets you to listen, but at the expense of a certain kind of perspective. Still, considering the passionate hysteria this topic usually incites, perhaps it's offering a necessary stretch of distance.

Sundance ’06: Into Great Silence

February 7, 2006Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Sundance, Switzerland
Die Große Stille****/****directed by Philip Gröning by Alex Jackson I actually saw director Philip Gröning's previous film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. It was called L'Amour, l'argent, l'amour, and it was kind of awful, I guess, very long and very pretentious. But it was kind of mesmerizing, too, and the mesmerizing and the awful become inextricable--it's the sort of "bad" movie that only a true genius could make. Gröning's Into Great Silence is in the same insane tradition. I offer no intellectual defense towards either of these two movies; I don't know if I'm complimenting the Emperor on his…

Sundance ’06: By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston

February 2, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Sundance
***/****directed by Cédric Laty & Vincent Gérard by Alex Jackson I'm certain that William Eggleston is a real photographer; I'm a little less sure that Cédric Laty and Vincent Gérard are real Frenchmen: I can't find anything about them on the Internet not directly related to this movie. You would understand my skepticism were you to see By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston, which plays like a particularly bizarre practical joke. The film purports to be a study of Eggleston's life and work, but it's actually more of a Parisian love letter to American cars, the American south,…

Pickpocket (1959) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

January 30, 2006Posted in****/****, 1950s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Martin La Salle, Marika Green, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal
written and directed by Robert Bresson

Pickpocketcapby Walter Chaw Manny Farber described the films of Robert Bresson as “crystalline,” and it’s hard to argue with the singular idea of purity represented by that word: they’re all of gesture and implication, reduced down to the purest grist so that the powder of dramatic movements, rubbed together, might hum in miniature perfection. Diderot, Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky are sent to the kiln in Bresson, emerging at the end as a distillation thick with the observation that human behaviour, winnowed down, is only as mysterious as the mechanical motions of insects. When you use a term like “crystalline,” you evoke clockwork–the inner workings of music boxes, say. It’s wilfully, damnably, emotionally inscrutable, of course, and if it also calls to mind a watchmaker and his intricate art, then find another explanation for Bresson’s fascination with, and eroticizing of, the secret life of hands.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

January 25, 2006Posted in2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Mexico, Mystery, Theatrical, Western

*½/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Dwight Yoakam
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Tommy Lee Jones

Threeburialsby Walter Chaw Crash by way of Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones's "fuck you" of a mouthful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another fairytale salvo from the race divide, fired from that good place that results in cultural artifacts so unbearably cheesy and proselytizing that any potential heat is lost long before the second reel has finished unspooling. It's about serendipity, this elegy for the American West, hence no transgression is left unredeemed in its long, rambling, "it's good for you, so swallow it" narrative, with blame going in equal portion to Jones–whose smug, smarter-than-you are attitude has shoehorned him into prestigious position as the resident asshole of Man of the House, Men in Black II, and The Missing–and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams, Amores Perros), who paints every Mexican in the film in the same shade of saintly. (All the gringos, on the other hand, have a lot to learn about the grand mystery of being human.) It's tedious, unsurprising stuff, this picture–the kind of thing that gets the Right in a bunch about how Hollywood is a tool of the subversive Lefties while making smart folks on both sides of the Culture War cringe before its condescension.

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006) + Why We Fight (2006)

January 20, 2006Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Documentary, France, Satire, Theatrical, UK, War

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
*/****
starring Albert Brooks, John Carroll Lynch, Sheetal Sheth, Fred Dalton Thompson
written and directed by Albert Brooks

WHY WE FIGHT
**/****
directed by Eugene Jarecki

by Walter Chaw The most frustrating thing about Albert Brooks's crushingly boring, infuriatingly unfunny Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (hereafter Comedy) is the possibility that such was the intention all along. 'Lost in Arabia' (well, India and Pakistan–let's not get crazy, here) finds Brooks doing a high-wire act with post-modernism–the same one he's been doing his whole career, as it happens. At some point, though, it's fair to wonder how long you can push self-awareness before it finally flies apart in a storm of narcissistic deconstruction. Mull over, if you will, a moment where Brooks (as Brooks) recreates one of his classic gags–involving the world's most ironically-tragic ventriloquist–in the middle of an interminable stand-up routine staged in a New Delhi auditorium, closing his act with the dummy (the wooden one) drinking a glass of water. It's Brooks, and Brooks's film, in microcosm: a man who returns the term "mortification" to ritual and religion while being incapable of subsuming the belief that he's still the smartest guy in the room. The trick of Comedy is that in making a movie that isn't very funny about a man who isn't very funny in the middle of a gulf of cultural misunderstanding that's especially not very funny, Brooks hopes to draw a corollary between how the troubles of the world boil down to everybody's inability to communicate. As revelations go, it's not earth-shattering. Guess it goes without saying that it's also not worth the effort to get there.

The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes (2006); Mutual Appreciation (2006); Unknown (2006)

January 19, 2006Posted in2000s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Fantasy, France, Germany, Music, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE PIANOTUNER OF EARTHQUAKES
*½/****
starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho
screenplay by Alan Passes and The Quay Brothers
directed by The Quay Brothers

MUTUAL APPRECIATION
***½/****
starring Justin Rice, Rachel Clift, Andrew Bujalski, Seung-Min Lee
written and directed by Andrew Bujalski

UNKNOWN
½*/****
starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Bridget Moynahan, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Matthew Waynee
directed by Simon Brand

by Walter Chaw The Quay Brothers, Stephen and Timothy, are marvellous animators, having shepherded stop-motion and a disquieting biomechanical ethic into a series of notably discomfiting shorts, more than one of which pays tribute to their hero/mentor Jan Svankmajer. I met their 1995 transition to live-action features (Institute Benjamenta) with equal parts excitement, curiosity, and trepidation–I believed they'd be a little like either fellow animator-turned-director Tim Burton or those masters of a form who overreach by switching to a different medium, à la Michael Jordan. The truth is somewhere in-between, as the Quays have retained a bit of their glacial patience and a marked affection for created environments but have miscalculated the extent to which our fascination with animate clockworks translates into a commensurate fascination with people sitting around, staring at a wall. The former inspires existential thoughts on the nature of sentience; the latter generally inspires boredom. No question in my mind that something's lurking in the Quays' underneath, but it's important to mark that fine line distinguishing fascination from obtuseness for the sake of itself. Exploring the waking/dreamlife divide is interesting–but it's neither original nor terribly useful when the main tactic seems to be to conjure up pomposity-inspired sleepiness.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) – DVD

December 15, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, France, Robert De Niro, Romance, Spain, UK

½*/**** Image A Sound A
starring F. Murray Abraham, Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Mary McGuckian, based on the novel by Thornton Wilder
directed by Mary McGuckian

by Walter Chaw Given its cast as well as its presumption to chart the hazy intersection between predestination and circumstance, Mary McGuckian's excruciatingly dull The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the third adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, might be the biggest miscalculation of the year. Start with Robert De Niro as the corrupt Archbishop of Lima, presiding over the inquisition of Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne). Six years previous Juniper witnessed the unceremonious snapping of the titular bridge, which sent five random people to their howling doom. Had they known how boring our good brown-robed pilgrim would make them out to be, I wouldn't wonder why they didn't try to float. No, Brother Juniper has decided that he's going to write the world's dullest book about this quintet of unfortunates so as to perhaps accidentally ken the mysterious workings of the Almighty in the small lives of small people.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

December 9, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the novel by Arthur Golden
directed by Rob Marshall

Memoirsofageishaby Walter Chaw The wounds that WWII opened between the Chinese and the Japanese are still fresh. Over the course of a twelve-year occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese regular army, at least nine million Chinese civilians were butchered–and though the Chinese, lacking a unified defense, bear the burden of poor organization, petty in-fighting, and a fair share of mortal Pollyannaism, the Japanese refuse to this day to apologize for what they have officially dismissed as the standard toll collected in conventional warfare. I believe it’s this–as opposed to the centuries of racial hatred–that has called down the normally quiescent Chinese activist contingent on the suddenly-thorned head of the Steven Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, a film written, directed, and produced by Caucasians based on a book by a white author who was promptly sued by the geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, he interviewed for the book on the grounds that he not only betrayed their confidentiality agreement, but also fabricated the fate of her virginity, which she claims was never auctioned off in the way that the Arthur Golden novel describes. True or not, it’s the sort of thing that would be particularly attractive to a Western mind transfixed by the sexy Mystery of the Geisha.

Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (1973) – DVD

December 2, 2005Posted in1970s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, DVD, France, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller, West Germany

Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eyes
La morte negli occhi del gatto
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jane Birkin, Hiram Keller, Anton Diffring, Serge Gainsbourg
screenplay by Antonio Margheriti and Giovanni Simonelli
directed by Anthony M. Dawson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You could complain–and someone surely has–that Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye is a rote, decadent-rich-people intrigue with a bit of roving-camera patina for flavour. But that kind of sexy fluff has its qualities late at night when you're not interested in explanations–and really, the sight of elfin Jane Birkin looking befuddled at a string of murders in the family castle doesn't require much in the way of an excuse. What's refreshing about this bit of giallo naughtiness is that it commits totally to the sensuality of its milieu: rather than mete out absurd Catholic punishment for loose living, it feels for its damaged freaks like Douglas Sirk trapped somewhere on the Scottish moors. None of this adds up to more than good, racy fun, but it's genuinely enjoyable as opposed to insanely earnest. It gives you illicit pleasure instead of tearing a strip off you with nastiness.

The Beautiful Country (2004); Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005); The World (2005)|The Beautiful Country – DVD

November 23, 2005Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Norway, Theatrical

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Bai Ling, Temeura Morisson
screenplay by Sabina Murray
directed by Hans Petter Moland

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
*½/****
starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff
written and directed by Miranda July

Shijie
****/****
starring Zhao Tao, Chen Taisheng, Jing Jue, Jiang Zhong-wei
written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke

Beautifulcountrycapby Walter Chaw Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature–of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words–so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film–even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

The War Within (2005) + Paradise Now (2005)

November 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, France, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Palestine, Theatrical, Thriller, War

THE WAR WITHIN
**/****
starring Ayad Akhtar, Firdous Bamji, Nandana Sen, Sarita Choudhury
screenplay by Ayad Akhtar, Joseph Castelo, Tom Glynn
directed by Joseph Castelo

PARADISE NOW
***/****
starring Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel
screenplay by Hany Abu-Assad, Bero Beyer, Pierre Hodgson
directed by Hany Abu-Assad

by Walter Chaw Two films, one by New Jersey filmmaker Joseph Castelo, the other by Palestinian lenser Hany Abu-Assad, begin to make inroads into what is perhaps the most inscrutable phenomenon of the so-called War on Terror: suicide bombing. They’re important films, I think, mostly because suicide bombers, like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of WWII, make it easier to generalize and dehumanize/demonize the enemy as faceless zealots. Every manned car-bomb, every explosives-strapped martyr, creates ideological schisms on either side–more so and deeper, I’d offer, than conventional missiles or rifle shells do, because here we’re striking at the very heart of the way we perceive life and the afterlife: holiness and sin, valour and cowardice. If there’s ever to be some sort of olive branch in this millennia-old conflict, it has to start with an agreement not only to recognize the humanity beneath the atrocities committed by both sides in the name of defending home and hearth, but also to admit that centuries-old texts about the supernatural are piss-poor signposts pointing the light of right reason.

Oliver Twist (2005) + Kings & Queen (2004)

October 5, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Czech Republic, Drama, Esoterica, France, Romance, Theatrical, UK

OLIVER TWIST
**/****
starring Ben Kingsley, Barney Clark, Leanne Rowe, Mark Strong
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
directed by Roman Polanski

Rois et reine
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Maurice Garrel
screenplay by Roger Bohbot, Arnaud Desplechin
directed by Arnaud Desplechin

by Walter Chaw Roman Polanski is an architectural director. By that I mean he moves his camera in careful, constructed motions, and the characters he places within these movements are best when they seem restrained by them, oppressed by the presence of the director in a way similar to Hitchcock’s protagonists. Indeed, Polanski at his best (Repulsion, Knife in the Water, The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown) makes films that Hitchcock might have made: alight with social revulsion, weighted by claustrophobic set-pieces, and thick with subtext. But Polanski at his worst (Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate, Frantic, Pirates, Tess) betrays a tendency towards the frenetic–an unbecoming manic energy that leans towards the childish instead of what I think is the intended demoniacal. Polanski close to the vest is Polanski at his best, and when midway through something tending towards mediocre like The Pianist, he erected a literal wall within which to restrain his antihero (tellingly, the best Polanski protagonists are acted-upon)–that architectural boundary allowing the director to regain his footing, if only for the last part of the film.

TIFF ’05: Dear Wendy

September 26, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance, TIFF, UK
*½/****starring Jamie Bell, Bill Pullman, Michael Angarano, Danso Gordonscreenplay by Lars von Trierdirected by Thomas Vinterberg by Bill Chambers It's a classic catch-22: Dear Wendy reveals that Jamie Bell was born to play Billy the Kid, but it probably also squanders his chances of doing so. As Dick, the orphaned son of a miner, Bell dons Michael J. Fox's effeminate cowboy duds from Back to the Future Part III and transforms the town's social lepers into a gang of gun fetishists known collectively as the Dandies; director Thomas Vinterberg and screenwriter Lars von Trier give us the gay burlesque version…

TIFF ’05: Heading South

September 24, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF
Vers le sud***½/****starring Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal, Ménothy Cesarscreenplay by Laurent Cantet & Robin Campillo, based on short stories by Dany Laferrièredirected by Laurent Cantet by Bill Chambers Heading South (Vers le sud) represents such a departure from the milieu of Laurent Cantet's previous film (2001's brilliant psychological thriller Time Out (L'Emploi du temps)) that you can't really say it rounds out a trilogy he started with Human Resources. Nevertheless, it resumes his fascination with people in transience, people who've erected complex façades to avoid the repercussions of personal or professional failure; Cantet's pictures are screwball comedies played…

TIFF ’05: All the Invisible Children

September 20, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: John Woo, Directors: Ridley Scott, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, TIFF

Fest2005children**½/****
directed by Mehdi Charef, Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, Jordan Scott and Ridley Scott, Kátia Lund, Stefano Veruso, John Woo

by Bill Chambers Named after an initiative of the Italian Development Cooperation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that supports Unicef and other global charities, this omnibus project assembles seven short subjects about children from a handful of world-class directors, all of whom were instructed to locate their contributions in their home and native land. Poverty seems to be the unifying theme until Jordan and Ridley Scott's vaguely autobiographical segment, which sticks out like a sore thumb but subversively suggests that if All the Invisible Children proper has any lessons to impart, they revolve around the auteur theory. Having never seen a film by Mehdi Charef or Stefano Veneruso, I don't know how closely their episodes hew to their previous work, but I can tell you that Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, the Scotts, Kátia Lund, and John Woo tread familiar ground in a borderline egotistical fashion.

Transporter 2 (2005)

September 2, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, France, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Amber Valletta, Kate Nauta
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Louis Leterrier

by Walter Chaw After the unqualified triumph of Unleashed, the other Luc Besson/Louis Leterrier flick from 2005, my expectations were sky high for Transporter 2, the sequel to Cory Yuen's fitfully-entertaining, unapologetically puerile throwback to the delirious Hong Kong cinema of John Woo and Ringo Lam. (Yuen returns as choreographer.) What a disappointment, then, that this picture's even weaker than its predecessor in terms of character development and plotting, content as it is to be a Jackie Chan ripper with Man on Fire's plot. What so intoxicated about Jackie Chan was this gathering cult of personality born of the man's reckless disregard for his own well-being in the pursuit of fashioning a body of work (individual scenes, not films–the films mostly suck) that for a while resurrected Buster Keaton in every movie theatre outside American soil. Without that sense of Chan's legacy (no one is "collecting" Jason Statham's groovy but inorganic fight scenes), all that's left is a vacuous, utterly-disposable chop-socky flick that pervs on girls with the same kind of childishness with which it pervs on cars. Telling that the MacGuffin of the piece is a hyper-phallic syringe and that the chief henchman is Lola (Katie Nauta), an Aryan Grace Jones with a fondness for lingerie and submachine guns.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

August 25, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Kenya, Mystery, Romance, Switzerland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John Le Carré
directed by Fernando Meirelles

Constantgardnerby Walter Chaw An interesting companion piece to both Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American and Andrew Niccol’s upcoming Lord of War, non-antipodean Fernando Meirelles’s follow-up to City of God, the John Le Carré adaptation The Constant Gardener, is beautifully shot in the murky style of David Fincher or high-fashion photography. Not a bad thing–indeed, The Constant Gardener is one of the most technically proficient pictures of the year–but not a great thing, either, when talking about children killing children in Brazil’s favelas or, as is the case here, a British diplomat confronting his culture’s pathological politeness in the plague-fields of Kenya. What recommends The Constant Gardener is the uniform tonal perfection of the performances, and even if the film itself seems to glamorize (and condescend to) the plight of starving and exploited African nations, it at least demonstrates, along with its cinematic brethren (add The Interpreter and Stephen Gaghan’s forthcoming Syriana to that list), cinema’s willingness to take a more global stance. A paternalistic one, for the most part, but a global one just the same.

The Transporter (2002) [Special Edition] – DVD|[Special Delivery Edition] – DVD

August 22, 2005Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, France, Thriller

**/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras C
SDE DVD – Image B- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jason Statham, Shu Qi, Francois Berleand, Matt Schulze
screenplay by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen
directed by Cory Yuen

by Walter Chaw That Cory Yuen's The Transporter is unapologetically misogynistic, badly plotted, and poorly acted isn't so much a criticism as a recognition that one of Jet Li's favourite Chinese directors has made a French film in many ways identical to the chop-socky/gun-fu flicks China was churning out throughout the eighties and into the nineties. Where the film fails is in its resemblance, ironically, to Yuen's own work on The Bodyguard from Beijing (and even the awful Women on the Run), and in its uncomfortable similarity to John Woo's Hong Kong output–a cribbing owed as much to Yuen as producer Luc Besson, who has made it something of a closet industry in his action films to borrow liberally from The Killer and Hard-Boiled (and, in this particular instance, A Better Tomorrow II). The Transporter is too slick and winking, then–a post-modern take on the "heroic bloodshed" genre that already had one foot in self-satire, with the other dancing in operatic melodrama. The foot shouldn't be keeping time with a techno beat; it should be tapping to a lonesome harmonica.

Broken Flowers (2005)

August 4, 2005Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Mystery, Road Movie, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw I think that humour is a sharply-honed defense mechanism: something ingratiating in its ability to transcend taboo and thus, through laughter, enlist others in a secret club where the only law of membership is mutual transgression. And I think that comedians–the good ones–work from a well of demons deep and dire. It's no surprise to me that Robin Williams can actually manage a human performance in Dead Again, or that Jim Carrey can be brilliant in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, since so much of comedy is knowing what's acceptable and, more importantly, what's not. More to the point, it's no surprise that Bill Murray could refashion his career from the drunken bully of "Saturday Night Live" into this aging penitent, seeking absolution from some unnameable sin forever regenerating itself like a Promethean liver. It only took a couple of decades, but Murray has finally become Somerset Maugham's pilgrim Larry Darrell (whom he played in 1984's underestimated The Razor's Edge)–true maturity having a lot to do with the understanding that it doesn't take a shake-up as seismic as WWI to turn a man to blue moods. Often the first step in an existential journey is spurred by something as simple as a realization of how big of an asshole you used to be.