Monday Reviews: The American. Also: Venice

Henry James kept warning us: Americans going to Italy are always asking for trouble.

Exhibit A: The American, which I'm so glad I elected to see, despite the strenuous pooh-poohing of early audiences and several reviewers. The movie is nifty and tense, if not quite rich enough to prompt full outrage at the bad rap it's gotten for not being a Bourne film. Then again, it's also earned back its moderate production costs already, so no need to cry over spilled bullet casings. Yes, it's a bit slow and airy as thrillers go, but the tension surged impressively more than once, and I followed the dénouement with bated breath. Always exciting, too, to find out that a film that looks this good cost so little, but then, maybe George owns all the Italian locations? Anyway, go see The American, and make sure not to expect either a lemon or an unfairly maligned masterpiece. I'm sure it prompts a wide range of responses on its own without buzz-slaves and their viral preconceptions doing that work on its behalf. Here's my full review.

Exhibit B: Venice, and lo scandalo Tarantino. I find it completely plausible that Tarantino & Co. fluffed things bigtime, but it's hilarious to me how little sense of independent agency is being ascribed to the other jurors in a lot of the press. Guy Lodge, as riled as anyone about the double-dipping for two of the Competition's less well-received entrants, at least makes the rational observation that the inordinate attention cast on A Sad Trumpet Ballad (Director and Screenplay) and Essential Killing (Special Jury Prize and Actor) is as likely a symptom of intense, maybe even factionalized feelings spread across the jury as it is of a Tarantino oligarchy, Dogtoothing poor Arnaud, Luca, Danny, Guillermo, Gabriele, and the much-missed, unbeatably named Ingeborga Dapkunaite into crawling on their knees and speaking Quentin's private, profane language. (By the way, we already have it on good authority that Arriaga, as soon as his blindfold was lifted and his legs unbound, began to write a non-chronological screenplay about the whole, bitter, Salò-style experience. Imagine how much he loooved the dawning reveal that wait! Quentin and Sofia have known each other in the past!)

Please know that I'm in no mood or position to apologize for this jury, especially having seen literally none of the movies. Almost all the critics I trust seem agreed that notable perfidies of evaluation have been committed. And please note that Tarantino is now a surprising 2-for-2 in reporting his festival juries to have been unanimous in picking the top prize, though certainly stranger things have happened. To me, the Hellman citation really tipped things: even if lots of the jurors like Hellman and/or Road to Nowhere, surely they realized that the laurels to Coppola and de la Iglesia would already be received as Tarantino tossing bouquets at an ex and a stylistic sibling, but they might have survived the impression of favoritism without the additional, effusive hat-tip to Monte, for a category of award they didn't even need to give. It kind of seals the perception. Still, I do think it's worth pointing out the following:

• The Reuters/New York Times piece that's floating all over is at least as meretricious as the jury decisions it criticizes. Or maybe you agree that the vaunted and longstanding Toronto International Film Festival is an "up-and-coming rival" to the completely different scene of the Lido? Similarly absurd: griping about there being "no prizes for Italian films," when this is hardly a mandate, and Guadagnino and Salvatores were right there in the jury box to wave the ol' green, white, and red if they had felt so moved; and expressing astonishment that Gallo copped a Volpi Cup for a performance "during which he uttered not a single word." Taken any temperature reads lately on an AMPAS voter watching a wordless performance—say, by Jane Wyman, Holly Hunter, Marlee Matlin, or Samantha Morton? Familiar with the idea of silent acting? Did you know They used to do that, and that it occasionally turned out okay? I can imagine Gallo's prize being specious in other ways, but his lack of dialogue hardly seems like the lead story here.

• People can question Tarantino's favoritism as much as they like, and there may well be a warrant, but Venice can't possibly have expected him to operate otherwise, given that Cannes '04 already served the template for what a QT presidency looks like: runner-up prize for something right in his wheelhouse (Oldboy/Trumpet), and a controversial top prize that gives him plenty to talk about (read: loudly stick up for himself about). Guadagnino's friend and muse Tilda Swinton was widely rumored to have stood up against Tarantino's tastes on the Croisette six years ago; her advocacy of Tropical Malady was almost certainly crucial to that film's winning of a Jury Prize. The takeaway here is to make sure Swinton is always on a Tarantino jury, or else on every jury. Her platoon of tastemakers did awfully well by the Berlin slate in 2009, spreading the wealth around well-liked titles while still making adventurous choices, and passing over famous Swintonian accomplice Sally Potter.

• Coppola is Tarantino's ex, but surely Isabelle Huppert's debts to Michael Haneke are at least as deep, probably more. The White Ribbon maybe had more advocates at Cannes '09 than Somewhere did on this year's Lido, but it's not as though everyone adored it, and journalists were less quick to accuse Huppert of "favoritism" than they are to allege it of Tarantino. Why? I wonder if the European press is making more than we Anglos are of the little-acknowledged fact that no American director had ever won a Golden Lion that wasn't part of a split decision until Aronofsky did it two years ago for The Wrestler, and now we've got another victory for a studio-backed U.S. auteur already. If you consider that Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution were largely American-mades films (Lust had Taiwanese and American funding), then that's four out of the last six. Does this made-in-the-USA mini-wave factor into the irritation so many are feeling?

• One year's outraging jury choices occasionally turn out to look like pretty good calls in retrospect, or at least highly defensible ones. David Cronenberg almost got thrown out of Cannes in 1999 for daring to give the Dardennes' Rosetta a Palme over All About My Mother, and for sending three trophies the way of Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité. The stink was unbelievable, but I bet a lot of cinephiles today have at least as much time for Rosetta as for Mother (and Almodóvar did take the directing prize), and Cronenberg's wasn't the first or the last Cannes jury to give it up big-time for Dumont. Even people who hate his films have had an awfully easier time seeing and fighting about them after the Humanité gongs than they would have before, and miraculously, things turned out okay for Pedro and his gal-pals. All of which is good for film culture, even if Cecilia Roth's Manuela admittedly knocks Séverine Caneele's hardy, pugnacious rutting for six.

So before we all go burning our Jackie Brown DVDs in the streets, then, or hiring George Clooney to shoot QT in the head from some nearby, impossibly verdant Italian mountaintop, maybe we all ought to have a look at the films (which only some of the furious protesters have done). We also might wait for a sense of how the awards outcomes ultimately wind up serving the winners as well as the abjectly unchosen. No press is bad press, particularly not the "You wuz robbed" press that Almodóvar rode all the way to his first Oscar. I'd love to see something semi-comparable happen for admittedly tougher sells like Post Mortem or Black Venus, or at least for the more insulated snubbee, Black Swan.

If you're still not appeased, and you feel compelled to pop a valentine into the mailbox along with your condolence note to Natalie Portman (who I suspect will find it in her to survive this devastating setback), may I suggest addressing it to the true believers of SIGNIS? In the last three years, they've given their Competition prize to The Hurt Locker, Lourdes, and now Meek's Cutoff. Maybe a lot of distinguished Catholics doubt whether women can be priests, but they sure seem to believe they can be cream-of-the-crop filmmakers, and I know which one I'd rather be. So, hooray for them and their flawless choices, regardless of gender ramifications. In fact, they've managed to coronate my own favorite Competition films of '08 and '09 and my most-anticipated title from '10, and I wonder what I did to deserve to have my own predilections flattered in this way. I know the Catholic church, via its Legion of Decency, did no favors to American film culture when they used to run our ratings system, in the pre-MPAA days, but time does fly, and I'm starting to think these SIGNIS/OCIC folks oughta be granted their own distribution wing. Why should Sony Classics have all the fun?

And if I have so much to say about Venice jurying, why not do some of it myself? I've added a Venice Film Festival subsection to the site, mostly as a smaller companion piece to the Cannes pages I've maintained for a while. As with most things, though, the new, slimmer model is also a notable upgrade. Best feature: tiny Twitter-sized reviewlets of all the Golden Lion competitors I've seen from the last six years. Worst feature: the number of legendary Lion claimants I have never seen, by Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Rossellini, Ray, Godard, Antonioni, Hou, Varda, Tsai, von Trotta, Olmi, Zanussi, Zhang, Rosi, and many more.

Clearly, I need to get on top of this situation. By all means, tell me the first Lion of Yore that you think I ought to visit. If I start getting too heckled for my own shortcomings, though, or feeling too embarrassed, I will gladly relight the pyramid of dry wood underneath Tarantino, just to deflect attention. Because, after all, what on Earth could he possibly have been thinking? I heard a rumor that Fedorchenko did actually win, but Jack Palance, that nutty old coot, read the wrong name. And what did the petite Natalie ever do to Quentin, anyway? Maybe he's an O.G. Star Wars fan?

The Damn Basterds Won't Let Me Be...

...and though I have a lot else to get done this weekend and can't afford the time to write or deliver a finished screed, I am finding myself too upset but also too gripped by my response to this movie, and by several other people's responses to this movie, that I can't not write about it. Plus, I figure: what the hey. Tarantino loves chapters. And he's hardly one to balk at breaking his own mammoth pieces into smaller chunks (if only because higher powers force his hand), and hoping nonetheless that people will keep checking in. So, that's how it's going to be.

Chapter 1: Whipped Cream
Chapter 2: Perspective

How Low Can I Go?

Lower, possibly, if the sadistic odiousness and smug, heartless flippancy of the whole thing, plus the patent failures of several long and dumbly blocked scenes, and of whole plotlines and entire performances, make me unable to care that Waltz is terrific, that the strüdel scene works, that some of the camera movements in the opening sequence are as arresting as the cackling smoke-face at the end, and that there is a kind of Bonnie and Clyde bravura to the climax of the basement scene. But even in that scene, conviction and verve duke it out with grandiosity and rot and Just, Shut, Up, so much so that I can't tell what finally wins. Much to admire, arguments to be made, lots of smart people who've taken a lot from this movie. But it's a hard, terrorizing, and willfully dumb object, frequently earning as blunt an adjective as "stupid," and the last half-hour could barely stop begging me to despise it. I have begun to comply, though I'm trying, sort of, to resist.

Picked Flick #41: Jackie Brown

Reservoir Dogs wasn't my cuppa, but I can see that it has its virtues. Pulp Fiction glistens and grooves, an almost immaculate pop object, and yet I never seem to reach for it when I'm shuffling through my old favorites. The first Kill Bill boasted a beguiling structure and some whizz-bang craftsmanship, especially in the action scenes, which made it only more surprising and intriguing that Kill Bill, Vol. 2 slowed to such a relative crawl, plumbing for feeling instead of laying on the pizzazz. These movies all hold together beautifully, and yet—when you absolutely, positively got to thrill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes. Jackie Brown is the AK-47 in Tarantino's arsenal, which is all the more surprising because, on the surface, the director seems to have more on his mind than blowing us away.

Jackie Brown starts hitting pitch-perfect notes in the opening credits, and it literally never stops. Pam Grier, dolled up for her job as a stewardess for Cabo Air, glides into the right edge of the frame, while Bobby Womack's creamily desperate anthem "Across 110th Street" sets a pristine, hummable stage for both the character and the movie. It's such a simple gesture, capturing Jackie so quickly at her coolest, then gradually hastening her toward the airport gate as she realizes she's running out of time. The whole movie will plot this same course, not just because Jackie stays all but invisible for the next half-hour (and therefore has to hustle a little to reclaim her own film), but because Tarantino's direction and his script are so exquisitely keyed in to Jackie's pragmatism and her panic: "I make about sixteen thousand, with retirement benefits that ain't worth a damn... If I lose my job, I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with." Jackie's basic, wholly adequate motivation for lawlessness is that from where she's standing, she can see the dying of the light. When she drags herself out of jail, she worries about how bad she looks. When she sits down with her obviously smitten bail bondsman, the first thing they discuss is how to quit smoking without gaining weight. Pam Grier is so pert, charismatic, and funny in the role that there isn't anything cloying about Jackie's anxieties, just as there is nothing overly precious about the film's presentation of them—even when Tarantino lays down a vocal track of a much younger Grier singing "Long Time Woman" as a funky and succinct counterpoint to this older, soberer, but still very funky version of herself. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jackie Brown is how unfoolish and—a very un-Tarantino word—how wise this film looks and sounds while espousing a then-34-year-old, nonblack, male filmmaker's vision of Jackie's predicament. Though the colors and songs are all Tarantino-brite, the framings are contemplative and often very simple, even amidst key episodes in the criss-crossy plot; as the narrative accelerates and the vise of possible failure closes around Jackie and her weathered but plucky accomplice Max Cherry (an invaluable Robert Forster), the film never deviates from its carefully restrained pace and rhythms. Almost every sequence is designed such that seemingly simple actions communicate several things at once: Jackie trying on a new suit, Bridget Fonda refusing to answer a phone, Robert De Niro looking for his car in a parking lot, Lisa Gay Hamilton making nervous contact with Jackie in a food court. Every one of them is crucial to Jackie Brown's plot, but they've all been filmed with the frisky, on-the-fly texture of grace notes and improvs. The film has an exacting, exquisitely calibrated structure, loping forward and then looping backward, but the steady hand and living, breathing humanity behind every moment lend Jackie Brown a warm, plausible, and deeply enjoyable spontaneity.

Tarantino and Grier have "got" Jackie the way Mankiewicz and Bette Davis "got" Margo Channing, within a comparably ambitious script and a similar marshaling of the actress' own backstory and persona into the service of the character. Too, if Jackie is Margo, Samuel L. Jackson is the Addison DeWitt of ghetto crime. His charisma, irony, and verbal dexterity are such that the audience instantly falls for him, but then our breath really catches as the actor and the film lay bare the discomfiting essence of the character. Ordell Robbie is, obviously, an even tougher, more vicious piece of work than Addison, but he still profits mightily from Tarantino's knack for spinning wily fun out of a fundamental, uncompromised melancholy—since Ordell, no less than Jackie or Max, lives and acts from a critical juncture between his youth and his legacy. Almost any one-line sample of Jackson's dialogue and delivery is a devilish, delicious, highly profane movie unto itself: "My ass might be dumb, but I ain't no dumb ass" or "You think I'm gonna let a little cheese-eating nigga like this fuck that up?" or "Shit, Jackie, you come in this place on a Saturday night, I bet you need nigga repellent to keep motherfuckers off your ass!" Jackie's response to this last is a very modest "I do okay," but for Jackie, as for the film, that's a monumental understatement. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1997 Miramax Films/Mighty Mighty Afrodite Productions.