Cannes 1995: Day 12: May 28

The Quick and the Dead, USA, dir. Sam Raimi

Many people need no help appreciating Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. If you're me and can't help feeling agnostic, recuperating more admiration for Jarmusch's affected earnestness and genuine idiosyncrasy is a lot easier after seeing a revisionist Western as flat and plodding as Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead Or Sharon Stone's The Quick and the Dead (she also produced), or whoever's The Quick and the Dead. Even the mid-90s' reigning Goldilocks can't save the movie from being too much or too little at all times. The narrative disarray is total—as evidenced by a major flashback tucked into the last ten minutes, which, incidentally, unfolds a scene the audience has already worked out—but even disarray is more interesting than the utter stasis of so many shots where Stone or Russell Crowe or Gene Hackman just stares at people, or the brute momentum of the shootout scenes where the same same same thing happens as the field of contestants winnows down to an utterly foreordained foursome. Raimi's attempts to wake himself aren't any more interesting than the impressions of Raimi asleep at the wheel. But rather than keep laying on Cannes's closing night film, I'm inclined to put pressure on the oft-invoked phrase "revisionist Western," because the John Ford retrospective that unfolded throughout the festival—25 features in ten days——shows that even peak-period Westerns by figures as major as Ford were "revisionist" as often as not. Few have been as austere in their outlook, albeit frequently purple in their prose, as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  This 1962 James Stewart/John Wayne vehicle, which could not possibly be more cannily cast, challenges and complicates so many myths of the frontier, the ballot box, the law, the state, and the gun that you're hard-pressed to find any Western trope that survives intact. I wish I'd had time for more of the Ford films, but boy was I glad to have saved them up so that I didn't finish on Raimi's folly, and I could take in a rounder, wider, bitterer scale of revision than the simple notion of a girl with a gun.

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Cannes 1995: Day 5: May 21

Carrington, UK, dir. Christopher Hampton

What's going on?  It would be a significant overstatement to say Cannes 1995 wasn't giving us anything to enjoy or admire in its first 100 hours. Sharaku and Angels and Insects have real lingering power, The City of Lost Children at least offers grand spectacle, and the programming in Directors' Fortnight and Un Certain Regard picked up some of the Main Competition's slack. Carrington might be the high-water mark of the Competition thus far. One week later, the jury certainly held that view; give or take Sharaku, I'm inclined to agree with them. But as much as I've always liked Hampton's movie, it's a surprising apex, one-third of the way into the world's most auspicious film festival. Plenty of worthy rental choices below, but also a couple of indifferent doodles and must-avoids.

Updated: For even richer thoughts on many of the films listed below, head over to the first Jury Roundtable, where we all go into more detail about our reactions. 

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Cannes 1995: Day 3: May 19

Beyond Rangoon, UK/USA, dir. John Boorman

1995 boasted the largest roster of Competition titles in recent Cannes history—which is all the more surprising given that some of these entries, like Angels and Insects, would have played equally well in the sidebars, and others, like Beyond Rangoon, could have been skipped altogether. But if the Palme contenders hadn't yet yielded much excitement, the sidebars were starting to pop with buzzy titles, hailing from Tinseltown and Tehran...

Updated: For even richer thoughts on many of the films listed below, head over to the first Jury Roundtable, where we all go into more detail about our reactions.
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Cannes 1986: Some Rough Patches

So far Nagisa Ôshima's Max, mon amour is my least favorite film in the Palme competition, and Ruy Guerra's Ópera do Malandro is my least favorite sidebar selection. You can see the reviews by clicking those links and gauge my progress with the festival so far. But even after hitting these two rough patches, I can promise there are better films looming on the review horizon. And besides, I wouldn't leave the 1986 Cannes Film Festival for anything. It's the only place I can find where no one is talking about Harry Potter.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Showgirls

Even without looking back at Showgirls, as per Nathaniel's instructions for this new feature, I can tell you that this is my favorite shot. Whenever I hear about anyone sabotaging anyone in real life, I think about this image. Whenever I hear the phrase "lost her marbles," I think about this image. Whenever I almost slip on the sidewalk in the winter in Chicago, which happens a lot, I think about this image. It's not my favorite moment in Showgirls, which unquestionably involves the full-bodied heaving of ketchup onto a heap of French Fries and – in answer to a completely innocent and rational question from a friendly stranger – the explosively pouty line-reading, "Different! PLACES!!!"

But this is my favorite shot.

Actress Files: Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor, Raintree County
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1957 Best Actress Oscar to Joanne Woodward for The Three Faces of Eve)

Why I Waited: This film has had a PR problem for more than fifty years, which probably explains its continued absence on DVD.

The Performance: What is Elizabeth Taylor doing in Raintree County? Is she acting, per se? Are we to trust the implication of this first in four consecutive Best Actress nominations that she is acting well? The questions of Liz's talent and taste never really resolve themselves. Sure, there's Woolf, but if as consistently hamstrung a screen presence as Hilary Swank can yield a Boys Don't Cry, there is no telling what any dubiously equipped but diligent actress might attain in the right circumstances. One wants to believe that Liz can act, even more so after Raintree earned her (alone, among everyone involved) some strong notices and bagged her this nod. What's on the screen, though, is hard to parse into categories like "good" and "bad," though there are interludes when it's pretty unambiguously bad, or when it's such high-calorie camp that it tastes indefensibly good.

Indeed, the tension between coveted ideals and plain facts is a poignant sticking-point for the whole film, which yearns so evidently to be the next Gone with the Wind, to salvage a capsized and smashed Monty Clift, to harvest a whole trawling-net of Oscars despite its profound failures of dramatics and workmanship. A viewer might be forgiven for feeling sentimentally sorry for such a lush, tacky, manifestly broken project. Maybe the affects of the antebellum South are contagious, since as with Old Dixie itself, I don't find any nostalgic foothold in Raintree County; its "glamor" looks pretty threadbare and calculated to me, yet its lush craving to be thought of as glamorous yields a peculiar pitying quality, a willingness to go along with the lie. Like Blanche DuBois, the film begs you to find it fetching, and its dreams for itself are touching even as, or maybe because, it seems suffused with self-consciousness that it wouldn't stand up to the faintest ray of direct light. In many ways, Liz's performance as the vixen Susanna Drake, the amoral wife with a secret, represents both an apotheosis of this quandary, this plea for esteem from a piece of obviously bruised fruit, but it's also the one element of the movie for which anything like a defense could plausibly, with heavy caveats, be mounted.

She doesn't appear until 30 minutes into the movie, though if you paused the film at that juncture, you'd be hard-pressed to recount anything that's really happened yet. Director Edward Dmytryk seems stymied by the bozo story, the hollow romanticism, and the mandate to frame as much of the MGM production design and the natural backdrops as possible in any given shot. Clift seems half-present even in the scenes where he doesn't look more materially impaired, and Eva Marie Saint is pure skim milk as a woman who will obviously be thrust aside once some generically inevitable, gutsy and enticing brunette shows up. But if sultry, forward, manipulative Susanna is pure convention, Liz remains sui generis. After who knows how much practice in real life, she fuses coy girlishness and undisguised libido with the best of them. "Are you a fast runner?" Susanna asks Clift's flummoxed and awed John Shawnessy, as they discuss an upcoming race in which John is to take part. "I'm a pretty fast runner myself," she supplies, with the kind of deadlocked gaze that, in a bar, always leads to a quick demand for the check. Exercising her Dixieland right to brazen hypocrisy as a social nicety, she apologizes instantly for her unladylike behavior. John immediately responds, "I like un-ladies." We know, Monty, we know.

Fixating on Clift's torments, Taylor's compassion for human wrecks, and the voluminous press about her being his nurturer on set and his protector among the higher-ups can feel like an unbecoming, extra-textual fixation, especially when Raintree County proves so bulging yet empty that thinking about almost anything else becomes tempting. Really, though, the translucency of the Monty-Liz narrative just beneath the John-Susanna affair redeems the movie on a key emotional plane. As written, there's no reason for him to put up with her, and nothing but dimestore neurosis, pathologized sensuality, and incipient Gothic madness underneath her naughty-doll carapace. (Dolls trail the character everywhere in the mise-en-scène, which eventually figures as a plot point.) As embodied by these two, Monty's gravitation toward her tenderness is as palpable as Liz's is toward his hurt and beauty. All of which leads to some profound dissonance with the unstable, unprincipled conniver and the stalwart teacher-soldier-politician that they're meant to be playing, but Raintree's script can stand to be sidelined. You almost wonder if Dmytryk and his team knew they were getting more from the celebrity melodrama à clef than from the ostensible scenario.

For the most part, Clift looks too helpless to exert any agency over the strange, unsutured double-film that Raintree becomes, but Liz, who's always got at least one set of wits about her (and usually more), seems to thrive on the chance to embellish both halves of her offscreen persona, the sexual mercenary and the maternal shoulder to cry on. She sinks her teeth into the ruthlessness and then the hysteria of Susanna, with something like the ragged, barely dignified verve of Suddenly, Last Summer, and secure that she needn't play up to this tawdry material, in the way she did for the following year's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, at some cost to her basic charisma. As I said recently about Ann-Margret in Tommy, Liz's willingness to Go There on behalf of a loony picture turns out to be a key asset. The kind of carnal and despondent raving she does on her funereal slab of a four-poster bad, her frazzled apostrophes about the vileness of Negro blood, the way she shuts her eyes and clamps her throat around the Nasty Truth of What Happened in the Past—she isn't the kind of actress who can make you believe any of this hornswoggle, which isn't to be believed in any case, but her tremendous capacity for taking it seriously as something to be effigied in the name of entertainment makes for some good spectacle. She utters the phrase "Find the raintree!" in exactly the beatific way she would later say "White diamonds!" but the movie needs that kind of credulous commitment. Something approaching a character, defined by her own excesses, actually comes into view, as does a saucy little essay about Americans who cleave so tightly to their myths, their guilty secrets, the literal and figurative toys of their childhoods that they'll mortgage their adulthoods and those of others in defense of these playthings. That she (Susanna) can fume and flail in these ways against her disbelieving husband (John), while projecting at the same time that she (Liz) is somehow sustaining and solacing him (Monty) through these very tirades of corrupt but earnest emotion makes the performance and the movie more senseless but also temporarily galvanizing. Co-dependency has rarely been so exposed in all of its reciprocal sickness, nor shown to be such a genuine balm between unlikely intimates.

Which isn't to say that Taylor's Susanna is a creation one dreams of seeing on an Oscar ballot. It's all so overblown, so rendered in crayon: the stay in the boobyhouse, the kudzu accent ("THHIS iz ware ah LEE-uv!"), the weepy collapses, the uproarious martyr complex. But there's a canniness, even a sort of breathtaking ambition to Liz's schtick, which wouldn't come through in any one scene but congeals across the three hours. (Something ought to.) Proud and catlike, she seems to know that she's doing four things at once: giving a fitfully witty but under-trained and sometimes embarrassing dramatic performance; furnishing a lewd, sparkling stripe of invulnerable movie-star charisma to a project in dire need; not competing with so much as constituting part of a parti-colored mise-en-scène that swallows up everybody else, except for Monty, so long as he's with her; and, as far as that goes, keeping her friend alive and at work, whether or not that's ultimately what's best for him. None of this constitutes a recipe that could or should be easily repeated, but bigger rewards have been conferred on lesser exertions. Given that Oscar often seems like just as much of a cheap-brass, ignobly sustained, self-flattering dream as Raintree County, or as pre-war Mississippi gentility, Taylor's nomination, a head-scratcher in many ways, makes its own kind of compelling sense.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 32 to Go

Actress Files: Sarah Miles

Sarah Miles, Ryan's Daughter
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1970 Best Actress Oscar to Glenda Jackson for Women in Love)

Why I Waited: Try as I might, I don't always have 206 free minutes in a row.

The Performance: I know David Lean took the public lambasting of Ryan's Daughter very hard and only barely got over it to make one more movie, 14 years later, before he died. I don't see any need to further pillory a movie that has already been so roundly rebuked, but then the bashful gentleness of a lot of the reviews that greeted the DVD release in 2006 don't seem like the right way to go, either. Let's just say that, give or take a few scenes of mutual but benign incomprehension between Sarah Miles as a young Irish lass and Robert Mitchum as the much older schoolteacher she convinces to marry her, and aside from about 10 or 15 scattered minutes of prickly character moments or atypically enigmatic montage, the rest of Ryan's Daughter's three and a half hours are just as preternaturally weightless as you've heard. Freddie Young has photographed the movie in super widescreen for postcard prettiness, disclosing a set of priorities that are about as wrong as they could be for the material, which itself requires an exceptionally nimble execution so as to dissipate the scent of very stale air. In short: a timid young wife seeks an older, unthreateningly asexual husband but later discovers the appetites of her body, very inconveniently whetted by a soldier of the British Army who's been called in to quell the Irish discontent.

Miles is the wife, and the reason I stress the tremendous shortcomings of the film is that, at the basic stylistic level, she's all but barred from making an impact. The opening movements of the film clearly mean to present her as a sort of blooming flower, but while I appreciate that a certain degree of clichéd dollishness is avoided, she's somehow done all her wardrobe shopping in Outer Dowdsville: beige sweater down past her butt, shapeless gray tent of an ankle-length skirt, wide-brimmed hat, and a wig that looks like horse-tail. Strolling alone on clifftop and seashore with her parasol, Miles might be registering any number of nuances on her face, but we'd never know, which is partly down to that hat, but more because Lean forfends our getting very close to her—not that the actress looks especially inspired in such close-ups and two-shots as are doled out to her.

I'd call it a fair expectation that, knowing you are starring for David Lean at the most aggressive stage of his encroaching ailment, Elephantiasis of the Travelogue, you might need to devise a more physical rendering of the character, to stand any chance against the Super Panavision vistas in which you are sunk. "But render what character?" Miles may surely have asked, and who could blame her? The script supplies so little, and an externalized portrait of her vague arc defies easy imagining. In direct proportion to his wider and wider shots, Lean seemed to grow more and more taken with the idea of opaque characterizations. If his Lawrence is at last a sphinx, his Rosy Ryan Shaughnessy wastes a great name on being, from the get-go, a lovin' cipher. Lots of dewy, tentative, or stupefied glances, a bit of trembling lip. But what's behind it all? As though to give Miles even less to play with, or against, Ryan's Daughter rather pointedly eschews any dialogue at all for long periods, and as her English innamorato, Lean cast sullen pretty boy Christopher Jones, so disastrous an actor that all of his dialogue required redubbing. These gratuitous ordeals come together in a long, wordless sequence of D.H. Lawrence-style seduction between Miles and Jones in a forest of heather and jade, and if the dewy, soft-focus longueurs of this interlude manage to be less entirely cheesy than they could be, they do so without aiding Miles in any real way. Nor does she offer any memorable stamp of her own.

Personalizing stamps are a recurring problem for this actress: I have seen her now in Antonioni's Blowup; John Boorman's Hope and Glory, a generous Best Picture nominee in 1987; and Ryan's Daughter. In the former, I recall her peering silently at David Hemmings from her kitchen floor while she's in the midst of a serene rut with another man, and that's it. From the Boorman, nothing. None of these pictures have styled themselves as showcases for their casts, and if Miles doesn't seize the camera of her own electric accord the way Vanessa Redgrave does in Blowup, she cannot quite be blamed for that, or for the fact that two of her better-regarded performances, in Lady Caroline Lamb and the Palme-winning The Hireling, are more or less elusive these days. I hear that she achieves a carnal vitality in Joseph Losey's The Servant, and though Ryan's Daughter is too roseate in conception to profit from such a knack, it's true that when you do see Miles elevating her scenes, they tend to be ones where some force of sexuality is privileged. Rosy giggles, wonderfully, upon being told that virginal men fear the prospect of initiation and of their own potential failings as much as women do. (I also like her short, sincere, but meaningful laugh near the end—the end!—of the movie when her father promises to write letters to her; the plain fact that he won't, even if he momentarily intends to, amuses her.) Rosy doesn't set out to hurt anyone, and if Mitchum's humble, almost diffident schoolteacher showed any erotic confidence, or any interest in her libido, she'd never have strayed. As it is, she enjoys watching him work in the yard without his shirt, and looks surprised but unembarrassed at such enjoyment. When she asks him to keep the shirt off inside, he huffily demurs, obviously if implicitly chiding her for her nascent lustiness, and Miles shows us well that Rosy is genuinely flustered and confused.

She isn't failing, then, to make studied decisions about her character, and she appears to intend a welcome liveliness for Rosy, inward and outward, that never resolves itself. The thinness of the plotting and the pristine, listless emptiness of the lensing are barely superable hurdles... but why do four hours pass without her sticking much to the screen, and why did three such different directors all fail to get any charge from her? Lean and Antonioni treat hers as the kind of spectacular face that rewards any peer of the camera, but that confidence seems misplaced. She has the open, curving face and the aqua gaze of Samantha Morton, but she lacks Morton's moonglow quality; Miles doesn't seem to have any pores, much less an inner radiance, and she gives rather frozen poses of thought rather than, as Morton does, fine-grained transmissions of how thought fluctuates and questions itself. There's also a bit of Susannah York in Miles, but she's less striking, and minus the perverse charge. I await screening the picture that really makes the case for her. In the meantime, it's a pity to see her nominated for a picture that starts her so far behind that it's no mystery when she never fully catches up. For visible signs of effort, she might deserve a second star, but the lasting impression is just too close to zero.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 34 to Go

Actress Files: Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith, Travels with My Aunt
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1972 Best Actress Oscar to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret)

Why I Waited: Because I am no fan of Auntie Mame, and I had always heard Travels with My Aunt described as "Okay, but no Auntie Mame." And I wonder if you've ever noticed that, once you've seen one comic performance from Maggie Smith...

The Performance: Clearly a low-point in the history of the category, and not only in retrospect: reviews at the time were split at best, and the nomination raised some eyebrows where it didn't provoke outright moans. Which, obviously, isn't to say that the performance doesn't have its fans. Indeed, it's precisely the sort of overbearing Daft Hussy camp that exists so as to generate a cult following. More power to all those queens who at any time in their lives have gone to a costume party as Aunt Augusta Bertram, for you know these faithful must exist. Thing is, were Maggie herself to attend such a party, there's no end to the amount of shade that would be thrown at her hard-driving but creaky and too often joyless approach to the character.

Who knows how much input she had, if any, to the lugubriously overwrought makeup and hair designs of Carmen Sánchez and José Antonio Sánchez, stuck with the task of transforming an actress in her late 30s into a beldame well into her dotage. Surely, though, they represent the only team of cosmetologists in Hollywood history who felt compelled to make Maggie's cheeks look even more sunken and her eyes more unsettlingly profound, like something out of Franju. But pity the poor dears who, in grim cahoots with Oscar-winning costumer Anthony Powell and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, have to pass the character off in one extended flashback as a blushing schoolgirl. I understand that at one point in time, Maggie Smith must have negotiated secondary education, but even by the ghastly standards of any advanced performer trying to pass for 16, is there any face in movies less plausibly matched to the body of a uniformed adolescent?

The performance is in many respects a sort of catalog of tasks that no one should assign to Maggie Smith: be a belated teenager, be a premature dowager, sing, go Big as often and as far as possible, have an ongoing drugs-and-sex fling with an understandably adrift Lou Gossett Jr., fritter and quip with abandon until a climactic and lachrymose plea for affection, conjure a notorious legacy of sexual irresistibility. In fairness, the last point is one that Smith occasionally marshals in her favor. Her Augusta flaunts an erotic chutzpah that just dares people to second-guess her. When this odd, unexpected apparition at a family funeral counters the rumors that she was lost at sea many years ago, offering the retort that she was "rescued – many times," I see an ember of glee in the actor and the performance, and a zesty distillation of that peculiar but intense sexuality for which Smith is such an unlikely vessel in more "serious" films like Jean Brodie.

(Image c/o the Evening Standard, documenting this performance at its least makeup-enhanced)

But this is an early bit, doomed to dozens of basically unvarying reiterations. Worse, there remains the problem of chiseling away at the thick cement of affectation, much less the sepulchral layering of pancake makeup, so as to furnish any oxygen to that essential spark of mischief. I recently re-screened the first half-hour or so of Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater and rediscovered Smith's small, hilariously disingenuous turn as a live-in seductress of Anne Bancroft's husband. What a marvel, what fun to see her breathing so much easier, feeling out her moods and gestures, rather than arriving to the part already locked into a rigid retinue of mannerisms. I hear that Smith is much more inventive on stage, and she's such a droll reader and stylist that I don't want to solemnize the account of watching her give even a bad performance. We need more actors who can transform a line like "You insignificant bank manager!" into such a delectable truffle.

Nonetheless, even by the familiar standards of Maggie "doing" herself in a film like Gosford Park, in Travels with My Aunt she's just laboriously encrusted. The plot, apparently derived in a free but dulling way from Graham Greene's comic novel, is so over-stuffed with outlandish incident and aggravating contrivance that it's hard to imagine any performer thinking they need to festoon the picture with more clutter. I'm equally mystified by Smith and director George Cukor's evident strategy of selling every moment of the character to the rafters, so that we can see how fully "in" on the joke of this person they are. As if it could possibly be otherwise! Augusta is indefensibly obnoxious, squeezing interludes of faux wisdom (e.g., "Some of us get out of life what everyone else is stupid enough to put into it") or ghastly introspection ("Sometimes I get the awful feeling that I'm the only one left who gets any fun out of life") between her tiresome habits of lying, smuggling, dithering, bamboozling, dragooning, and making a cock of herself. That Smith's garish overplaying, either in sync with Cukor's notes or (one hopes) in defiance of them, amounts to a constant burlesque of unnecessary ironization, maybe even a form of apology, only intensifies the displeasure of spending two endless and arbitrary hours with her. Grating with such brio yet standing apart from her own performance: it's like bringing an intolerable date to a party and imagining that you are easing the situation by telling everyone in attendance, "Sorry about my date, isn't s/he the most grueling nuisance?" A surefire tactic for getting everyone crankier at you than at the bugbear on your elbow.

I like Maggie Smith, even though I can't help grousing about a film career largely misspent on a seemingly willful program of not challenging herself, which makes it harder to view Travels with My Aunt as what it probably is: a massive but early lapse in how to conceive a character for the screen and scaling one's effects. I have only ever liked her less in Tea with Mussolini, almost three decades on. Still, though it's surely down to directors and casting agents as much as it is to her, I wish Smith had learned a lesson of keeping her roles and approaches more varied and earnestly modulated, rather than just keeping a future eye on dialing herself up to "8" or "9" rather than "10" or "11," perpetually. Scuttlebut on the movie has always run that Katharine Hepburn badly wanted and developed this role until the studio dropped her for being too old. I'm not convinced I would have liked Travels in any configuration, but asking a newly celebrated character actress three decades younger than Hepburn to tie herself up playing too old and too young within a lavishly overproduced nonsense plot was surely not the ideal solution... especially once it became obvious (surely by the first day of shooting?) that Smith was making all the crudest, least disciplined choices about how to navigate such a buzzkill assignment. Holding my ear up to the lion's share of her scenes, I hear her saying, sotto voce, "Can you believe what a sod they've made of this script?" and "Aren't you glad I'm at least going at it full-bore?" To each his own diva-kitsch, but from my perspective, No and No.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 37 to Go

Birthday Girls: Shirley MacLaine

Shirley MacLaine, Irma La Douce
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1963 Best Actress Oscar to Patricia Neal for Hud)

Why I Waited: Neither Billy Wilder nor Jack Lemmon is high on my list of favorites; it's quite possibly true that I've seen too many of the wrong movies by both of them, but I don't care for The Apartment, the previous and more famous outing for this trio. Irma La Douce is appreciably longer and less well-liked than that one is. Plus, in my experience, Hollywood producers not named Arthur Freed should have stayed out of their studio-set versions of "Paris" more often than they did. Plus, we know right off that we're dealing with a "cute" hooker, handled by a director whose apparent feelings about women I am elated I do not share. So, I admit I had the collywobbles.

The Performance: You say tomato, I say tomahto, you say self-fulfilling prophecy, I say no, Irma La Douce really is incredibly lame, despite the game contributions of cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg and the production designers. MacLaine doesn't help out nearly as much as you're hoping, partly because she can't, and partly because she won't. First, the "can't" part: while it's no surprise that Wilder and Lemmon are utterly besotted with each other, I still thought a film called Irma La Douce had a fighting shot at being about Irma. But once Lemmon's naïve, incompetent police officer shows up, and then falls for Irma, and then concocts one of those don't-ask schemes for why he just has to spend half of the film as a tony British aristocrat duping Irma into serving him exclusively, you just know who's going to win the looming mug-off. In this case, Wilder won't even allow for a fair fight. He cedes MacLaine less and less screen time as the film wears on, and more than that, he pushes her into second- and third-level planes of his setups, or frames her in key scenes so that her back is to us during most of her dialogue. She's annoyingly, joylessly neglected in her own film, which I suspect might have been sold to her as a chance to seize center stage in flouncy costumes and expensive studio style, especially after she was the best damn thing in The Apartment, and cruelly un-Oscared.

So, poor Shirley, whom I often like. But there is most certainly a "but," since nearly all of the charm she used to endear us to Fran Kubelik and distract us as well she could from the distasteful and chauvinist story-structures of The Apartment has turned into a rote, flippant kookiness in Irma La Douce. To grind down all of MacLaine's appeal would take a much worse movie than this one is; she's hard pressed to reap any laughs, but she wins a few smiles. Still, she occupies an unenviable middle-ground between limping through the tired motions of the screenplay and buying into the myth of her own pixie irresistibility. One needn't blame her for the script's many redundancies, like the long opening sequence in which she wheedles extra cash out of all her johns through a daisy-chain of cooked-up bathetic stories. However, she sells all of these stories in just the same low-energy way, appearing as though she adores Wilder and Diamond's dialogue beyond any sense of having to help it along, yet without actually believing a word of it. The character and her circumstances are just a routine to her, a middling-at-best sketch that she might use to pad out a Vegas show or a variety hour, and so it's telling when she ends one scene grinning nonsensically into the camera and making jazz-hands at the audience, and later has to batten down her own giggles after bellowing out a seemingly random line, with a deep, chesty bravado that makes no sense except as the fleeting impulse of an inveterate cut-up who's just entertaining herself.

What MacLaine needs, not for the first or last time, is a director who won't cut away from her quite so often but also won't put up with all her tics and lunges for audience affection. She also needs a film that yanks the lapdog out of her hands and the black rat's-nest wig off her head and gives her something to do instead of crap to hold. Her whole being is cluttered here with props to assemble into a color-by-numbers character—though I admittedly liked her adorable emerald bra, and feel it more than earned its screen time. The one scene where the writing breaks form to suggest what Irma La Douce might have been, if it felt like turning the tables with real zeal on Hollywood's massive dowry of pop-sexist clichés, comes when MacLaine's Irma begs Lemmon's nebbishy boyfriend not to get a job, asking what kind of woman it would make her if she couldn't support a man through her own honest work. It's clearly meant as a needle in the eye of all those "Baby, I'm the breadwinner!" scenes in mid-century movies (and in mid-century marriages), but there's nothing on either side of this scene, despite the gigantic 150-minute running time, to let MacLaine take it anywhere... and because she's taking such a slim and coasty approach to Irma anyway, she's built no reserves of emotion or personality in the character by which to sell the joke as anything but a toss-off gag. She tries that laughing-through-tears bit that shows up in so many of her performances, particularly on the seemingly annual occasion when she rendered another gamine streetwalker, but the bit doesn't have any specificity. You can't deny the movie or the lead performances their moments of zest and color, but there's a lassitude and a spendthrifty, Brat Pack-y complacency to the whole affair, and certainly, too, in MacLaine's comportment. It still speaks ill of Wilder that he so patently loses interest in Irma, but it's more than possible that Shirley beat him to it, and I can't honestly say that I missed her when she receded.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 38 to Go

Birthday Girls: Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford, Coquette
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(winner of the 1928-29 Best Actress Oscar)

I have seen Coquette (reviewed here) three times, and I think about it more than anyone probably should. Here's why: Mary Pickford, essaying her first speaking part in motion pictures, is widely cited as the worst-ever winner of the Best Actress prize, and before you go around agreeing with a charge like that, you oughta be sure. Coquette itself is, if anything, even worse than Pickford's performance. The movie is instantly dated, maudlin, erratic, gaudily dressed, and technically slapdash, but before we get to feeling too superior, the real reason I dwell on the movie so frequently is that I often, while sitting before a new theatrical release, pose what I call The Coquette Test. Sure, it's easy to kick a 1929 movie that everyone already hates, directed by that same numbskull who, in the very same year, took a notorious "Additional Dialogue by" credit on his film version of The Taming of the Shrew. But if, say, The Last Station or A Single Man or Me and Orson Welles were also 80 years old, instead of just feeling like spotty and desiccated antiques, would we be any kinder to them than we are to Coquette? Have trophy-minded movies really gotten better, especially when you start ignoring publicists, "buzz," and ad campaigns, and when you avoid the oft-floated logic that just because a hundred Tooth Fairys come out every year that deserve nothing but opprobrium, we should induce a sort of Ivy League grading curve by which something as tawdrily mediocre as Station or Welles gets bumped up to a C? When a prestige movie starts heading south, or when it just starts out that way, I often ask myself, "Would I rather be watching Coquette? Is this movie any less incongruous in its own time than Coquette was in the era of Pandora's Box and The Passion of Joan of Arc?" Reader, I must confess, the face-off usually ends in a draw.

But let's not dodge the issue: Coquette is a dog, and Pickford is barely tolerable in it. She handily gives one of the worst performances ever nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, and she won for it, almost certainly because of her stratospheric celebrity and her crucial role in founding United Artists as well as the Academy itself, only two years prior to her copping this trophy. Awfully cheeky to be 36 years old and playing an airheaded chit who can't help flirting with every man in the room, from her father's peers to the local bad boy. Pickford looks suspiciously dowdy, and not just because her infamous haircut has her looking so matronly, or because she's so perpetually clad in distressed housedresses and nightmarish effulgences of figure-killing tulle. Even amidst such intense internal competition, the most antique thing about Pickford's Norma is the actress's creaky performance style, yet this isn't an "old" style so much as a frantic, immature feint at what grand acting by established masters might look like. Dabblers in early cinema might assume that Pickford hasn't yet recalibrated her gestures or mannerisms to suit the new sonic capabilities of the medium, but you could watch silent films for days without seeing anything this garish. Pickford has no one to blame but herself for her insistence upon buttoning and almost corkscrewing her thin lips until her mouth looks like the knotted end of a balloon, and then calling greater attention to this bizarre mannerism by repeatedly pointing an index finger, inexplicably, to her face. She's a fright of uncontained energy, and not in that Clara Bow way that can be infectious in spite of itself; she looks harried and taxed, like she's somehow overthinking the part without actually thinking at all. She whinges, she scowls, she bends over backward as her boyfriend of ill repute whispers sweet pledges to her in a forest glade. She flails her arms in the air when she races across Southern streams to find him, and sinks like an eight-year-old into the lap of Louise Beavers, humming away as her loyal mammy (!). The close-ups are impossible to parse: if you didn't know that Johnny Mack Brown was playing the object of her adoring ardor, you'd wonder why she's sniffing and glowering at this fellow who has come to surprise her at a dance. Her odd vocalisms ("Ooh yoo doon't knoow my deddy!") make Singin' in the Rain's Lina Lamont seem like a creature drawn from life, and when her character gets dragooned into one of those fifth-act court-trial sequences that have felled many a better movie than Coquette, she quakes in her chair and whips her head about, letting her voice go so high and shrill that you worry she might be tearing it.

In truth, such vulgar bathos represents the high point of what Pickford manages here: her spasms of grief and her wracking sobs of divided loyalty between her priggish dad and her rough suitor at least have some energy, unlike her unlovable take on the preening ingenue or her great-auntish lack of softness or ease in her mid-story clenches. Adding final insult to injury, I always misremember Coquette, which is subtitled A Drama of the American South, as a kind of mothy Hollywood pantomime of ante-bellum backwardness. Sadly, a series of party invitations that become key props about twenty minutes into Coquette confirm that this story is set in 1928, meaning that Sam Taylor thinks that women of the world were still saying things like, "Oh, what does it matter what I do? Oh, MICHAEL!" (when Michael isn't even around, incidentally), and Mary Pickford still thinks that the best use of her talents at 36 is to play an already specious character as 18-going-on-7, for maximum irritation and minimal sense of purpose. If the Academy has rarely got things as right as it did when it voted Janet Gaynor its first Best Actress, it's rarely (if ever) been as wrong as it did with Pickford.

(Poster image c/o the Wikipedia entry for Coquette)

Monday Reviews: Shutter Island and The Last Station

Trust me that I realize that my site would profit from more reviews and more quickly written ones, especially when I manage what for me is the unusual feat of seeing a major release with an opening-night Friday crowd. If you're looking to build attendance stats for your movie site, that's how you do it, but I trust it's obvious by now that I'm not a big traffic chaser. Still, I'd have loved to have had time this weekend to write up more of what I had to say about Shutter Island, and maybe I still will, but for now, it's high time to get cracking on stealing someone else's good idea—that is, following the recent cue of a critic I idolize and at least give you short glimpses of where I am with what I've been seeing lately. So:

SHUTTER ISLAND (IMDB)
A farrago, sometimes in a way that's easy to indulge, but you still wind up uncertain which makes less sense: the bonkers narrative we think we're watching (though we're never exactly fooled) or the climactic explanations. As if the gangrenous photography isn't off-putting enough, the disastrous marriage of over-plotting to self-undermining "suspense" becomes awfully hard to take. About two flat or wobbly performances for every solid one; only Clarkson remains fully unscathed, but Haley, Levine, Lynch, and Meryl's former detox roommate Robin Bartlett at least acquit themselves. Sadly, a horrible case of reverse-proportion mandates that the actors with the largest parts give the weakest performances, including yet another limp outing from DiCaprio, who's starting to seem Swankish: i.e., nearly irredeemable unless every single other element is working perfectly around him, which it certainly isn't here. Soundtrack lets us know how it would sound if you used an entire sequoia as the bow for your cello, and is overmixed and appallingly literal to boot, though I did like the death-crawl version of Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" oozing over the final credits.

Production design is both over-elaborate and annoyingly unclear. One crucial location has been selected for maximal difficulty of access in case you’re a paranoid schizophrenic fugitive attempting to sneak in, but it sure involves a lot of trouble for other folks who need to get there, if only once. The worst kinds of red herrings, like a bad case of creeping palsy in a film whose conflicts should be cognitive, set in at exactly the most dunder-headed moments, as when a character is about to perform heroic acts of impromptu rock-scaling. Logical outrages aside, emotional claims verge on zero. Film finishes with a 10-minute sequence by a lakeside that manages to be gratuitous in the two worst ways: narratively unnecessary, since we already know what's happened, and supremely untactful, since it comes across as an exercise in killing off some kids and letting some actors over-emote their reactions to obscene events, dotingly repackaged as thrill-ride climaxes. But if you think that's bad, wait till you get to Dachau. Between the garish and cheap interpolation of the camps as backstory and the dada obsession with callow or meaningless citations of other films (by Powell and Pressburger, by Hitchcock, by Antonioni, et al.), I think we can assume that Scorsese is a Basterds fan. Which, from me, is no compliment, but at least Tarantino's movie has (misplaced, inconsistent, bloodthirsty) guts. Shutter's just got ghosts, including the specter of whatever this Cadillac cast and crew must have thought they were joining forces to make. D+

ALSO IN THEATERS:
THE LAST STATION (IMDB)
Intriguing to learn that Tolstoy was so explicitly deified in his own lifetime, to the extent that woodland communes of ascetic, self-sustaining disciples accumulated around his estate. That is, if this is even true: The Last Station is one of those relentlessly artificial and tedious arthouse dandelions that you entirely stop trusting, right around the time it decides that a cafeteria-quality romance between James McAvoy and Kerry Condon is as interesting as the deeper but oddly muffled dynamics between the Tolstoys, and that embarrassing boudoir talk between Mirren and Plummer is a merry substitute for facing the complex ties of ambivalent matrimony. Not for this movie to plumb the only interesting questions it ever raises, which are about those impromptu cults and about staying committed to a partner that no one else can stand. The film pushes its august performers into purple, bowdlerized versions of the subtler characterizations they'd surely have preferred to offer, and subsists on its own thin-gruel diet of overly literal dialogue, garish lighting, literal mustache-twirling, and on-screen captions that provide such odd cues as "Moscow, Tolstoyan Headquarters." James McAvoy makes off with one very sweet scene of tearful joy at being praised by a hero, all the more endearing since the praise is hardly unequivocal. Everything else amounts to endless shots of actors looking at each other, looking out windows, looking into windows, closing their eyes expressively, and looking yearningly out of frame. About ten minutes total feel remotely "historical." Whole film plays like a Garson-Pidgeon vehicle from the mid-40s, well after the Miniver good will had expired. D

Truck Stop

I am not fooling anyone with these short posts while I wade through an especially busy period at work. I will be more than happy to tell you how superficial and inanely directed An Education was and to offer some more CIFF reviews from my notes, especially of the jury's favorite film, Mississippi Damned. In the meantime, a brief missive to let you know disappointed I was a couple of weeks ago to miss James Mottern's Trucker during its one-week run at Facets in Chicago, only to elatedly discover that it resurfaced for one more week-long run at the darling, 80-year-old Wilmette Theatre. I popped in tonight for a look at Michelle Monaghan's buzzy performance, currently on the receiving end of one of those personal-mission PR campaigns that Roger Ebert devises for himself every year or two.

I haven't done this for three years, but I walked out. I have certainly seen many worse movies in that time period than Trucker; for me to exit the theater early, either the print has to burn in the projector or my indifference to the movie has to be compounded by a huge tidal wave of anxious guilt over everything else I need to be doing. That's certainly what happened to me at Trucker, but I must say that Monaghan's utter failure to say "Man!" or "Dude!" in any remotely convincing way didn't help (and the script forces her through it incessantly). Nor did the cruddy, unprofessional, aggressively off-putting look of the film, even when one allows for the limited budget. Plus, when I scooted, at around the 40-minute mark, Monaghan was about to Bond With Her Child, after a narratively slapdash series of circumstances lands him back in her lap after ten years or so. We were about to hit the compulsory juncture where she Sticks Up For Him against some arbitrary foe, even though They Don't Really Like Each Other Yet. I am happy to grant that things might not unfold exactly as one expects over the rest of Trucker, but even half of what I expected would have been too much on this particular evening. Just now, I don't want to see any kid pouting in any car with any hard-living adult unless the (putative) adult is Tilda Swinton and they're about to crash the sedan through the corrugated tin "wall" between the U.S. and Mexico. You know what I mean.

I do feel confident, though, reporting to all you Oscar-hawks that I can't imagine us needing to worry about Monaghan. Clearly, lots of people are more taken with her work than I was (conceding that I still have half the movie to watch), but you only get nommed for stuff like this if the movie carries a real ring of hard-luck authenticity à la Melissa Leo, or if the scale of self-transformation, cosmetically and career-wise, is as galvanizing as it was for Charlize Theron and Sally Field. Monaghan isn't a big enough Name, and the performance isn't different enough from stuff you've seen dozens of times before, for her to generate nearly enough traction. No matter how many slings and arrows get shot at Amelia, Swank would be in before Monaghan would be... and surely among Cornish, Mirren, Wright Penn, and Cotillard, we've got other ways to fill out the category without either of them factoring in.

Assuming, of course, that Meryl Streep, Gabourey Sidibe, and Carey Mulligan are already in. Which I'll have more to say about in due time. But I'll go out on one more limb, since why not? My personal feelings about the performances aside (as much as that's possible), and having now seen that full trio of front-runners, I think Sidibe will win, especially if she keeps doing the kind of press that reveals how much acting she was doing as Precious. Streep's still a threat, and I suppose Mulligan is, too, but it's not quite the performance I was expecting—in terms of what it is, not how good it is—and I can't quite see Oscar voters carrying her to the top of the heap.

A Good 'Man' Is Hard to Find

Still catching up on some backlogs of work that I amassed while hitting CIFF so heavily over the last two weeks. I've got lots more movies to tell you about and hope you'll keep checking in. But since so many commenters and off-board e-mailers keep writing to ask what went down so badly between me and those "Man" movies, I'll say very, very, very briefly:

A Serious Man is certainly "well made" from any number of angles, often literally, since a major raison d'être of the film is to remind us of how eccentric, hard-edged, but unsettlingly articulate a cinematographer Roger Deakins can be. But "hard-edged" doesn't even scratch the surface, and what an implacable, obnoxious, yet weirdly insubstantial surface it is. A Serious Man raises several "interesting questions," more perhaps about the Coens than about its own characters. Moreover, for me, the film furnished a summary case of the brothers underscoring, avoiding, protracting, and cretinizing all the wrong stuff, at tremendous cost to those questions and perspectives the film pretends to animate. It was unrecognizable to me as a human experience, and feels belabored in a heaping handful of ways without ever clarifying why the writer-directors were going to so much trouble, since they don't seem to exorcise any ghosts from their pasts (much less erode the present-day chips on their shoulders) so much as they exaggerate scenarios and bestialize, narcotize, or trivialize their characters until, finally, the protagonist's spiritual quandary entailed much more of an ordeal for me than it seemed to even for him.

But at least it's an interesting failure, and if it didn't bespeak such lurid shortcomings of compassion and point of view, I might grade it higher. Whereas A Single Man just seems badly made, egregiously clichéd in astonishingly dated ways, and incapable of generating a solid idea for why it's even attempting the sensuous, woozy Wongisms that it's so nakedly trying for (without, for my money, coming anywhere close to them). Firth is fine, but hardly the powerhouse we've been hearing about; Mickey Rourke deserves a good cry if A Single Man makes off with this year's Best Actor Oscar, though I suppose Firth has earned some kind of Good Sport award for consenting to the most jaw-droppingly asinine conversation scenes imaginable with Nicholas Hoult, in a hopelessly shallow turn as an admiring student and self-styled Emissary for the Living. (Spoilerish:) If you always enjoyed the dodgy finale of American Beauty, you'll enjoy it even more when you get to watch it again here, especially if you find yourself hoping for just a bit more morbidification of sexuality and desire, and some even more outlandishly misplaced paeans to the status quo and to a mushy, secularized model of human predestination. And this time, the film itself gets to be the killer! All that, plus some of the most risible university pedagogy since Babs nattered on about courtly love (and, later, prime numbers!) in The Mirror Has Two Faces, which is more maladroit and less sophisticated on the whole than A Single Man, but only by an unexpectedly and tragically small margin.

CIFF 09: Lovely, Still

Not so very long ago, I was dipping my toe into the eddying waters of Oscar prognostication, at which time I opined that if the infamously unpurchased Lovely, Still ever scores a U.S. distribution deal, then Martin Landau or Ellen Burstyn or both might gratifyingly add to their career tallies of Academy nods. (It would be his fourth and her seventh.) That conjecture was based entirely on second- and third-hand reports on screenings from Toronto '08, but now that I've seen the movie, I feel that I can go on record that Landau and Burstyn probably wouldn't be nominated even if it were 1996 and Harvey Weinstein opened the movie on Christmas Day. The actors are fine but the movie starts out frustratingly slight and inelegant and then slides precipitously into something that actually galled me, and not in that Inglourious Basterds sense of prodigious but diabolically misplaced gifts. I explain what I mean in this full review, but I do hope that Martin and Ellen get other tries at front-and-center parts before they fully retire from the screen. Meanwhile, I'm embarrassed at myself for letting not just Oscar hype, but potential Oscar hype for a movie that hasn't even been bought yet goad me into watching something this amateurish and finally dishonest, when I could have set my sights somewhere else.

You can't win 'em all, but thankfully you can win some of 'em—and after seeing about twice as many CIFF movies as I've admitted so far, I've still seen more good eggs than toss-outs. Keep watching this space!

Lovely, Still plays on Saturday 10/17. Martin Landau plans to attend, so even if you're as disappointed by this new film as I was—and, obviously, you might not be—it would still be a kick to ask him about Bela Lugosi, Cary Grant, and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

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.

Tedious Liaisons

I haven't been a Stephen Frears fan for a while, but this is getting ridiculous. His reputation as an "actor's director" notwithstanding, he has three principal thesps to work with this time around, and he freezes one of them into a totally unilluminating, hedonistic pout (Friend), allows one of them to trundle around playing almost every moment to an unseemly hilt (Bates), and proves just as unable this time as last time to lead his star (Pfeiffer) into a persuasive connection to the woman she's playing or the period she inhabits. I didn't expect great things from Chéri, but I didn't expect such deeply annoying superficiality, and such total avoidance of the emotional matters at hand. Full review here.

Reviews This Delicious...

...deserve to be cited in full, with all due respect to their original source at the Daily Telegraph:

The Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert Experience
(* out of *****) That's one dimension per Jonas, which is about right: the singer thinks he’s Jagger, the frizzy one jumps about a lot, and the young one does a hideously unappealing squealy-anguish thing with his voice. Hate the songs. What a lot of hair they have. Don't ask me the names.

You've all long ago bookmarked the Tim Robey index, right? If not, I cannot guess why. Meanwhile, jewels of first-run critique like this as well as the delicious bon mots of the past I keep uncovering while doing my research and teaching on American film reviews have prompted a new sidebar fixture. "Wish I'd Written That" even applies in cases like the inaugural one, when I certainly don't wish I'd seen the movie, but I can enviously admire the succinct pertness of this response all the same. I'll figure out a place to archive these as they rotate; your job is to keep checking back.

You Close Your Eyes...

...and hope that this is just imagination...

For Once in My Life...

...I'm 100% with David Denby. And I have been since October, when I first saw Slumdog, so don't hound me about a "backlash." No backlash could possibly make up for the obscene, um, "frontlash" that this antic, tasteless, over-scored, poorly written and acted, structurally impossible movie has been enjoying. Winter '05 had a great Best Picture coronation and a soul-killing presidential inauguration. If you can only have one or the other, I'm obviously pro-'09, but still.