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2008 NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL GUEST BLOGGER: FILMLINC- Darren Aronofsky, director of the virtuoso Requiem for a Dream (2000) and last behind the camera for The Fountain (2006), is striking at new ground with The Wrestler, a film of surprising compassion about the small-town circuit of professional wrestling. Aronofsky himself mentioned at the NYFF press screening that he’s always been curious why there were so many boxing films as an American oeuvre, but none that tackle the sensation of professional wrestling. With this film, he does it graceful justice.
Ahead of the camera is a sublime, anchoring performance by Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a man well past his heyday from the sold-out crowds of his professional wrestling career in the mid-1980s. His very vitality, however, still lies with wrestling; it’s his only source of income, all he knows how to do, all he loves to do, and he moves up and down the mid-Atlantic through towns like Rahway, New Jersey and Wilmington, Delaware to do it. He’s well-respected among his fellow wrestlers, though it’s clear that he’s approaching the eclipse of his career. Playing to smaller arenas and various perversions of the standard WWF glam of the 80s (including one match involving stapleguns and barbed wire), The Ram is running out of gas, finally collapsing of a heart attack after a particularly brutal match.
This heart attack is the pivot of the film; The Ram, more aware of his mortality than ever, is adrift with a job behind the deli counter at a Central Jersey supermarket. He tries to reach out to his estranged young adult daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), though he isn’t sure of his own intentions. He tries to forge a deeper relationship with Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), a simpatico stripper he’s known over the years; it’s perhaps with her that he is able to grapple with hope with respect to What Comes Next in his life, and a scene where the two share a mid-afternoon beer at a dive bar is both tender and unflinching in its honesty.
The screenplay by Robert D. Siegel is a fascinating deconstruction of two people whose lives are critically connected to their jobs; both are past the prime their profession requires, and this fact alone is an inevitable threat to their respective occupations as professional entertainers. Tomei’s Cassidy serves as an effective foil to Rourke, playing both parallel and counterpoint to The Ram and thereby provides a satisfying depth of context to the film. Rightful praise is being showered upon Rourke; his performance is effortless and careful not to drift toward the sentimental. Tomei (who likely can boast more shirtless screentime than many other over-40 Oscar-winning actresses) is always a welcome presence onscreen, though this role doesn’t grant her the access to the break-out intensity of some of her past work.
Much of the pleasure of Aronofsky’s work is in his sincerity to the material. Reaching out to the professional wrestling community, Aronofsky casted only professionals as the wrestlers in his film. He’s careful to not mock his characters despite their flirtations with destitution. This ode to a fictional wrestler at the pinnacle of his life is captivating and never rings false; Aronofsky is consistently proving himself to be one of his generation’s most gifted and earnest filmmakers.--TOM TREANOR
The Wrestler closes the New York Film Festival this Sunday night.
Read more at the Filmlinc blog.
Check out our INTERVIEW WITH DARREN ARONOFSKY.
REVIEW: Changeling
Changeling, the latest directorial effort by Clint Eastwood, is the story of a young mother rocked by the sudden disappearance of her nine-year old son. Beginning with the desperate search for the missing boy, what soon evolves is a tale of intimidation and police corruption at the highest levels, and how both these elements are linked to the unmasking of the serial murders of several local boys. All the elements are in place for a sensational potboiler, and could only be the work of fiction—but staggeringly, Changeling, in its entirety, is an account of the true events.
It is Los Angeles, 1928. Christine Collins (played with careful, subdued energy by Angelina Jolie), a single mother with an ascending career at the telephone company, comes home to find her young son, Walter, has gone missing. She is devastated, left with no clues, and after a few months police inform her they’ve finally found him in tow with a drifter in Dekalb, Illinois. When the boy is brought to Los Angeles, Christine’s reunion collapses with nightmarish, gothic results: The boy who claims to be Walter is not her son, she knows it plain as day, but is coerced by the LAPD that he could be none other than Walter, and desperate for positive press they send the boy home with her and report that mother and son have been happily reunited. Christine is rigored into shock, and doubly upsetting is the comfort with which this young impostor has settled into his newly-anointed life as Walter Collins.
The screenplay has an intriguing interlocking structure; the impetus of the movie settles on Christine’s search for Walter (despite the refusal of the LAPD to engage in a case they’ve jiggered to be closed), with a midsection detailing how the LAPD chose to dispose of Christine as she took her story to the press—by charging her with hysteria and locking her in the county’s psych ward. These elements, in turn, open onto the larger mystery of a string of disappearances of young boys, leading to uncover what would soon be coined the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, of which Walter Collins was a victim.
I’m frankly fascinated that this film wasn’t made sooner; the inherent sensationalism of such a story (serial murders, police corruption, false imprisonment) seems like an elaborate ready-made thriller. Eastwood has a careful eye for the newly-burgeoning Los Angeles of the early 20th century (evidenced by an opening flyover shot of the tree-lined suburbs and contrasted by an analogous closing shot of the bustling city proper); the film is wonderfully consistent in its setting and demonstrates a dazzling command of 1920s/1930s period detail. Jolie’s performance is admirable; her mega-stardom (thankfully) does not corrode her character, and she crafts Christine Collins without the abject ferocity one would typically expect of an “Angelina Jolie” performance. Christine is a polite and soft-spoken woman, but also uniquely progressive and determined. To watch her hold her own while being unjustly thrown into the loony bin is a testament to the triumph of will within her, and this film is a respectful biopic for the woman Christine Collins was.--TOM TREANOR
REVIEW: Gomorra
Gomorra might be mistaken for a network narrative in the style of Traffic, Crash or Babel, given its implications as a synedcoche for a global social problem. But whereas Soderbergh, Haggis and Izarritu build their structures horizontally, Matteo Garrone’s depiction of the Neapolitan Camorra crime network is constructed vertically, with the film’s five primary narratives burrowed deep within various levels of the Camorra hierarchy.
Totb (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a young boy who finds work as a mule for some mid-level thugs. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), fresh out of college, goes to work for a waste management specialist who dumps toxic materials for the Camorra as a means of financial expediency. Ciro (Ciro Petrone) and Marco (Marco Macor) are Scarface wannabes who have a nasty habit of stealing cocaine and guns from the wrong people. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is put-upon accountant assigned to make the rounds and deliver bribe money to members of the organization–which seems to be just about everyone. Pasquale (the artist within the diegesis) is a fashion designer forced to work for one of the Camorra’s front operations, and then begins to clandestinely design for the Camorra’s Chinese competitors. None of these narrative strands ever intersect, but their autonomy only seems to reinforce the deeply penetrative aspect of the Camorra within Neapolitan society in particular, and global commerce in general.
Garrone’s camera provides a rough-hewn look, underscoring the kinetic immediacy of his subjects’ lives. “I wanted to give back to the audience the emotional experience I had,” Garrone told me. “We went to the location after the script was written. I was very shocked by what I saw. The best way to give back those emotions would be to act like the film was a documentary. We wanted to be invisible . . . to disappear.” Indeed, Garrone’s camera serves to understate much of the narrative content of what we see.
An indicative shot is of Totb looking over the balcony of his apartment complex to see someone beaten to a pulp by a set of Camorra soldiers. The camera pans down from Totb to the beating, then back up. Totb doesn’t betray any overt emotions, but his fear and attraction to the Camorra (reminiscent of a similar shot early on in Goodfellas) is felt through Garrone’s simple, immediate mise-en-scene.
Another visual strategy is to suddenly move from rough, hand-held methods to very careful, almost stately extra-long shots that reduce the characters to mere specks smothered by their oppressive environments. “I wanted the frame to surprise the audience,” Garrone said. “It’s very instinctive . . . it tells, but surprises, emotionally.” The technique gives us pause to reflect on the broader scope underlying the characters’ actions, a scope of which they may not even be aware, since they are so caught up in the present.
Gomorra was based on the 2006 bestselling non-fiction exposé by Roberto Saviano–a book so controversial that due to constant death threats, Saviano has a permanent security detail in Italy. “I haven’t seen hope for people in that territory,” Garrone lamented. “There are good people . . . not conscious about the decisions they make. I have hope for the conscience of the people who live there. [But because] the Camorra is in place of the government, all is confused, bad and good.” The one glimmer of hope Garrone possibly sees for these rural areas outside Naples is in education. “They are beginning to solve the problem of education, [which can begin] change between the individual and institutions.” But, with a distinct air of heaviness in his voice, Garrone concluded, “we will see.”
This fatalism is palpable at the film’s conclusion. Totb helps bring about the murder of a close friend, Maria. Pasquale is almost killed and becomes a truck driver in order to take himself out of the game. Roberto angrily quits his job on principle, but is left at the side of the road, unsure of where to go. Marco and Ciro are murdered for their petulance. Nobody gets out alive, and everyone left standing has little future. But, as with Roberto staring out into the countryside, perhaps we will see.--EVAN DAVIS
Read more at the Filmlinc blog.
Check out our INTERVIEW WITH MATTEO GARRONE.
REVIEW: Four Nights with Anna
Jerzy Skolimowski read a sentence in a newspaper about a man who climbed into the bedroom of a woman he loved—just to watch her sleep. This one-liner was the inspiration for his first film in seventeen years, Four Nights with Anna. Skolimowski is a director who’s able to render the bleak beautifully, with richness and complexity—while simultaneously preserving its essence. His film achieves this through stunning cinematography that captures, for example, a dilapidated Polish village in its somber blue and grey light. Emotionally, he manages to provide the viewer with the protagonist’s deep sense of loneliness, achieved through the subtle characterization and stellar performance by Artur Steranko.
We first meet Leon Okrasa, clumsily sneaking around the small village he inhabits. He is, at best, a sketchy fellow. His obsession with his neighbor Anna, and his job in a crematorium, is a cause for concern; but soon we see the gentleness within the stalker-like behavior. Leon begins his visits to Anna’s room and lovingly watches over her as she sleeps, adoringly mending her clothes, and even painting her toenails. His mysterious past is revealed to us through his haunting flashback images. These jarring temporal shifts break from the stark realism of his desolate existence and provide surreal dream-like moments that allow us to gradually come to understand the reasoning behind this man’s bizarre actions. We are given the rare opportunity to intimately know a kind of person no one ever gets to know. We come to realize why such a person remains in solitude and feel the tragedy of such a fate.
Skolimowski’s return to filmmaking has granted us a truly artful and humanistic film. It provides viewers with an experience that enriches an understanding of the world that would not be possible in “normal” reality. With little dialogue, he’s able to visually depict Leon’s emotions and the overall melancholia of his circumstance. The richness of tone, felt in the variant shades of grey in the sky, buildings, Leon’s clothes, the hopeful contrasts provided by the occasional red apple or red toenails, and the frequent disorienting darkness we are subjected to, elegantly parallel his tragically obscure existence. Trapped inside, Leon is constantly depicted looking out longingly, hoping to connect. But his window looks onto a brick wall. Ultimately, he faces it knowing that it signifies his inescapable condition.--AILY NASH
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Read more at the Filmlinc blog
Check out our INTERVIEW WITH JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI.
REVIEW: A Christmas Tale
As a take on the standard “home for the holidays” genre of film comes director and co-writer Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale [Un conte de Noël]. Although the themes of such a film aren’t anything new (happiness and strife, but family love soldiers on), Desplechin’s take on the material is refreshing; an upper-middle class family from the north of France has to face mortality and the uncertainty of the relationships that have been forged and broken apart over the years.
Most of the heavy lifting in the film is handled by a strong ensemble cast; this film isn’t particularly “arty” or terribly meditative, and it shows as each scene drives a spike into the film’s agency. Headlining is Catherine Deneuve (forever ravishing, who previously worked with Desplechin on his 2004 film Kings & Queen [Rois et reine]) plays Junon, the matriarch of the Vuillon family, newly aware of a life-threatening bone disease that will take her life unless she finds a compatible match for bone marrow donation. Her illness, in some ways, is what brings together the family as a whole for the first time in six years. Eldest daughter Elizabeth has estranged herself, and it seems her entire family, from middle son Henri (Mathieu Amalric, of last year’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Le scaphandre et le papillon]); her reasoning for excommunicating him from her life is lacking convincing necessity, though the family doesn’t seem to challenge her desire to keep Henri out of her life and the life of her teenage son, Paul.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. A Christmas Tale is a family soap opera in full-swing, padded on all sides by the off-beat deadpan humor the family seems to be so comfortable in. Not a large family get-together could go by without the airing of some dirty laundry, including patriarch Abel’s obsession with the remaining time his wife has left, a peek into an awkwardly acknowledged extramarital affair, and the growing mental instability of eldest grandchild Paul.
Director Arnaud Desplechin (who I’m told has a reputation for off-kilter films) gives us a Christmas tale that volleys some pretty standard tropes about family holiday movies: estranged siblings, loner grandchildren, sick but brave family elders. Although the pieces don’t seem to be trumpeting anything new, I’d argue that Desplechin deploys them in ways that catch the viewer off-guard. His style could be described as jumpy; scenes are strung together by non-sequitirs, sometimes punctuated by title cards for each “movement” of the film. Some characters have sudden soliloquies that establish background and mood rather than interweaving with the story. In order to balance the soapy interiority of the Vuillon family Christmas atmosphere, Desplechin deploys contrasting settings (the warmth of the Vuillon home, the cold hospitals, the neon darkness of a discotheque in town) to break up the momentum. I think he’s driving for something that appears fragmentary but has more connective tissue than meets the eye…. not unlike how families grow, and how children do return home once again.--TOM TREANOR
Read more at the Filmlinc blog.
Check out our INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR ARNAUD DESPLECHIN
REVIEW: SUMMER HOURS
A woman who has just celebrated her 75th birthday sits in a chair of the house she has lived in for decades. Her children and grandchildren have just left the celebrations. The maid (practically a member of the family) asks how she is feeling. The woman—half-bathed in the blue twilight, half-enclosed in shadow—sighs. “There are stories that interest no one anymore . . . but there is the residue, there are the objects.” A gentle piece of chamber music plays underneath. The woman stares out into the darkness. Fade to black.
Few moments in recent cinema have moved me more than the last time we see Hélene (Edith Scob) in Olivier Assayas’s new film, Summer Hours. Mere minutes later, the film has moved ahead four months, and Hélene has died from unspecified causes. Her three children—Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier)—are left to decide what must happen with the family home. As time passes the children slowly reveal how much of their lives and history together infuses every object, every crevice, and every windowpane in the big, mournful house.
What is so ecstatically beautiful about Summer Hours is the careful attention to the nuances and delicacies of family interaction, no matter how much they’ve drifted apart, geographically and emotionally. Frédéric, the oldest, is an economics professor and the only child who stayed in France. Adrienne is a designer who has settled in New York, and who has managed to stay the most youthful and vital. Jérémie, the youngest, has moved to China because of his job in international commerce. Frédéric is the only one who actually wants to keep the house, and the one most invested in keeping the memories within it alive. It is implicitly understood by all how much of the family’s history will be lost with the sale of the house and the objects within it.
Assayas brilliantly employs his formalistic gifts to evoke the elegiac nature of the family’s struggle. His compositions are still lifes, evocative–in detail and emotion–of those of the late 19th Century masters, using light, shadow, and movement to breathe human existence into the inanimate. A graceful tracking shot around a desk in the Musée d’Orsay seems like Assayas’s recontextualization of the dolly around hospital statues in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century. Both are incarnations of human memory within the inanimate world, but whereas Apichatpong is mysterious and ebullient, Assayas is specific and mournful. His spiraling camera-moves in Frédéric’s kitchen after the funeral stick closely to the three siblings, subtly uncovering the their true feelings about the future of their mother’s estate. Adrienne even bursts into laughter as she struggles to tell her brothers that she is getting married, and that because of this, her chances of enjoying the house are diminishing. Joy in sadness, dejection in hope; these are the trials of a loving but fragile family.
The house is sold, the children and grandchildren have moved back to their respective corners of the world, and Frédéric’s teenage daughter, Sylvie (Alice de Lencqueisaing) has narrowly avoided criminal charges for theft and marijuana possession. The summer has begun again, and Sylvie throws a massive party for her friends at the house before it’s re-occupied. Initially, we wonder if her friends are violently tearing down the past to make room for a more superficial and destructive future. But as the camera follows Sylvie preparing for the party, as her guests roam the hallways, we realize that the next generation is bringing the house to life again. She runs into a meadow with her boyfriend and describes to him how she and her grandmother used to pick cherries when she was a little girl. Assayas longs for the history of this family to continue in the spirit of the old house, but says that although it cannot, the grandchildren will find ways to create a new history of beautiful, tender memories. Joy in sadness, dejection in hope; such is the life of a loving and evolving family.--EVAN DAVIS
Check out our INTERVIEW WITH OLIVIER ASSAYAS.
