DRIVE (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

It's easy to see why a lot of critics (particularly the American ones) are a bit gaga for Nicolas Winding Refn's noir/western/gangster flick Drive.  In today's Hollywood, so saturated with CGI heavy action films that might as well be cartoons, Drive is an anomaly; a star studded film concerned more with character and atmosphere than extravagance.  The latter it does masterfully, creating a cool retro eighties vibe while still make it clear that the film is set in the present.  As for the former, it does a decent job, better than most modern genre films, but no where near as good as it does with it's setting and atmosphere.

That atmosphere is established immediately with a cold opening that clearly positions the film as coming from The Driver's (Ryan Gosling, who never gets a name) point of view.  Like him, the film is cool, detached, and professional, with enough confidence for three leading characters.  During this opening, we see The Driver (do I need to specify that he's a getaway driver?) pick up a couple of crooks who have just robbed a warehouse.  As he takes them away from the heist he is simultaneously listening to a police scanner and a basketball game.  He moves casually through the streets and we think that he has gotten away clean.  Soon though we hear the scanner indicate that his car was spotted and police are on the look out for a Monte Carlo (the most popular car in California we're told in a brief flashback).  He knows that he blends in and never breaks a sweat.  Where you would most often expect, from a Hollywood film, some spectacular car chase where everyone's catching air and sparks are flying, you get instead a precisely edited scene where The Driver speeds only when absolutely necessary and we discover that he isn't just listening to the game because he's an avid fan and is just that cool but because he's been planning his disposal of the getaway car to coincide with the end of the game so he can make an easy escape by blending in with the crowd.  It's a brilliantly executed sequence and it sets a high standard for the rest of the film.  One that unfortunately, it falls just short of measuring up to.

It maintains the atmosphere, but the effect wears off.  The characters simply aren't developed enough.  There's been much talk about Albert Brooks and his turn as gangster Bernie Rose, and it is a good performances that Brooks eats up in his limited scenes (4, maybe 5).  Everyone else is more or less just a face.  Bryan Cranston plays Shannon, The Driver's mentor of sorts, and gets a fair amount of screen time.  He doesn't really do anything though, outside of the requisite exposition that gives a little of the background between him and The Driver.  Ron Pearlman, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks (who doesn't have a line if I'm recalling correctly), and Kaden Leos round out the cast who seem to have been cast for their faces.  Great faces all, but it would have been nice to have a little more character there as well.  No, I didn't forget about Carey Mulligan.  She plays Irene, The Driver's neighbor, and continues on her endless campaign to bore me to death.  She is one of the dullest, most one dimensional actresses around and her success baffles me.  But I digress.  The two meet and he is enamored by her (and her young son, Benicio).  A relationship seems like it might develop but then we, and The Driver, learn that her husband Standard (Isaacs) is about to be released from prison and come home.  Here Refn again wisely goes against our expectations; instead of a big confrontation between the husband and The Driver, they end up forming a tentative friendship.  Eventually, Standard's criminal past catches up to him and he is forced to do a job to try and relieve a debt that he incurred in prison.  Because of his affection for Irene and Benicio, The Driver decides that he will help Standard with the job, unbeknownst to Irene.

This of course marks the beginning of the end, as these things never go well in movies of this type.  A heist is planned, and is botched with Standard getting killed.  As it unravels we learn that the only players involved are all the characters that we've been introduced to, with Pearlman's Nino at the top of the pyramid.  It's the kind of situation generally reserved for stupid comedies or "Three's Company," where a simple conversation could probably fix everything in ten minutes.  Alas, that doesn't happen.  Instead we get a series of scenes with escalating violence with Nino trying to clean up the mess by sending a variety of goons to kill everyone off.  It's pretty Standard stuff.  Excuse me, standard stuff.

Through it all The Driver remains stoic, almost.  There were three instances that I thought I saw Gosling letting The Drivers feelings show, and they're all telling.  The first is actually a series of instances in itself; it's the interactions Gosling has with kid.  They get along and The Driver smiles at him, something I don't think he did once to Irene.  There is almost a hint of jealousy in The Driver's face when he looks at Benicio.  A longing to return to a more innocent time.  The Driver's next emotional outpouring comes during his escape from the botched hold-up.  Once he realizes things are out of hand, he and Blanche (Hendricks) take off and are pursued by another car.  What exactly this car was doing or who sent it, I didn't quite get.  I know they weren't cops.  It was a double cross of some kind I think but it's not really important.  During this chase The Driver gives a couple of looks of frustration and anger at the rear view mirror.  He seems genuinely pissed that someone is able to keep up with him.  That's it.  Outpouring over.  The final moment, and the most telling, comes when he stomps a man's head to pulp in an elevator.  Refn shoots The Driver from below, focuses on his face as he continues to stomp on his assailant long after he's dead.  In his face we see not just the psychopathic rage that he's manage to hide (even when committing other acts of brutality) but also a bit of glee buried in there as well.  Irene recognizes it immediately and steps away.

The rest of the film continues to follow The Driver as he eliminates the rest of the remaining players.  It's all fairly conventional despite the occasions mentioned (and perhaps a few others) where Refn deviates from our expectations.  That's all fine.  I enjoy genre filmmaking and  have embraced the amoral characters at the center of noirs, westerns, and gangster films.  So it was disheartening to see (technically hear), after so much that was good about the film, College's song "A Real Hero," used to close the film.  Refn gives us a close up of The Driver and we hear the refrain from the song  "...real human being, and a real hero..."  Now, I've been done with irony for sometime now but if ever there was a moment when it was need, it's this one.  Instead, Refn seems deadly serious; he really wants us to consider this guy some kind of hero.  Why, because he stood up for the woman?  Because he left the money on the ground after his final murder?  If he had just driven away, covered in blood, without the awful song force feeding us, the film would have been an undeniable success.  Instead, it's a well made, well acted, enjoyable ride, with a completely disingenuous ending that spits in the face of its audience.  Refn has enormous potential and this is an improvement over the misstep that was Valhalla Rising (2009).  I hope he can find the edge that he had in his best film to date, Bronson (2008), and doesn't become sanitized by the Hollywood machine.

Revamping

Not that anyone's paying attention, but I recently stripped the blog of most of it's reviews.  I left the few that I thought were decent.  I've also eliminated categories and tags as they just seemed to make things more confusing.  I'm going to attempt to do a post a least once a month but we'll see.  Two little ones make it hard to find the time (especially since I need time to actually watch the flicks).  Thanks to anyone who might actually be reading this.  Hopefully I'll have something new for you soon.  Peace.

GREENBERG (Noah Baumbach, 2010)

I'm not director Noah Baumbach's greatest fan.  Let's just get that out of the way right up front.  I am, however, a fairly strong supporter of Ben Stiller's dramatic work.  His breakout dramatic performance in David Veloz's Permanent Midnight (1998) was a revelation and I had hoped it would mark the beginning of something great for Stiller. Well, it didn't exactly do that.  While he did attempt more drama, in Neil LeBute's Friends and Neighbors (also 1998) and Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), he has mostly stuck to the broad comedies that most associate with him.  So I was excited and dismayed when I heard he was collaborating with Baumbach; excited that he would be doing something other then being a Focker and dismayed that it might be wasted on a director I feel is, at best, decent.

I am relieved to report that Greenberg is a good film and that it's Stiller's best work since Permanent Midnight.  He plays a misanthrope in his early forties who recently got out of a psychiatric institute.  He lives in New York but has left to crash at his brother's in Los Angeles (where they grew up) while he and his family go on a vacation.  He starts a relationship with the family's assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig).  Actually that's a bit of an overstatement.  They meet, he calls her out of the blue and goes over to her house with the intention of going out to a bar.  They have an awkward conversation.  He asks if she has anything to drink and says the bars will be filled with the "tunnel crowd" anyway, or at least L.A.'s version of the tunnel crowd.  More awkward conversation.  An awkward kiss.  A little awkward cunnilingus.  And there you have it, the beginnings of an extremely awkward relationship.

These are damaged people.  We don't actually see the damage or even get to hear much about it (she just got out of a long relationship and he lives with the guilt of breaking up his college band right at the moment when they were about to get a record deal), but we see the way they act and interact and it's not a hard determination.  He's worse off then her.  Though he's made a successful career out being a carpenter he can't get over the guilt he feels for letting his friends down.  Of course this isn't what he tells himself or the people in his life, but his actions betray.  The first person he contacts in L.A. is Ivan (Rhys Ifans), one of those former band mates who has now found himself living "a life he never imagined."  Roger attempts to renew the friendship as if the past doesn't exist and Ivan, very amiable, goes along despite the fact that his personal life is in shambles as well (he's going through a trial separation).  The more Roger tries to mask his regret the with his misanthropy, the more transparent he becomes, until everyone (other band members and an old flame also live in L.A.) is talking about the past and wondering what could have been.

With his past friendships either worthless (he also has an old flame who rejects him played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), Roger turns more and more to Florence, the one person who he knows in L.A. who doesn't share his past.  He is attracted to her but there time together is more about him not being with the other people he knows then really caring for her.  Why Florence would have any interested in this guy is beyond me.  From the beginning he has pretty much treated her like a servant, which is after all the function she serves for the family.  Not that she's the greatest catch in the world.  Beside having just had a bad break-up Florence is not the worlds most desirable person; she's meek, flighty, naive, and kind of a bore.  Some might think her sweet but I was mostly annoyed with her.  Which is not to say that it's a bad performance.  Gerwig (who I'd never seen before) hold her own with Stiller, who almost all her scenes are with.

Baumbach does a nice job of balancing the two main relationships in the film; Roger and Florence and Roger and Ivan.  As the older relationship falters the new one expands until finally, on a single night, Roger and Ivan "break up" and Roger pours his heart out to Florence (albeit in a very long voice mail).  It seems it may be time, finally, for Roger to let the past go and move on to something new.  The film is wise enough not to give us a happy ending but allow it to remain ambiguous as to the future of this rather strange couple.

While I'm still not sold on Baumbach, I think this is his most mature and accomplished piece.  His previous film, Margot at the Wedding, was an awful slog of a movie that attempted to hard to simulate the aesthetic of the French New Wave.  Greenberg dispenses with that aesthetic and replaces it with one more akin 1970s American filmmaking; I was reminded on more then one occasion of Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces.  Stylistically it felt much more appropriate to the types of stories Baumbach seems to gravitate towards and for once it left me wondering what he might do next.  (As it turns out that will be an adaptation of The Emperor's Children by Clair Mussud.  The story of overprivileged  youths whose lives and attitudes are shaken by the events of 9/11).  If he's able to incorporate his influences in an organic way, as he's done in Greenberg, there might be some hope for him.

BLACK SWAN (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

I'm going to try and write this without using the word lurid.  Awe hell.  Well, to late.  I guess I'll just jump on board with the 90% of reviewers who made sure to bust the word out in the first paragraph of their reviews.  It's not a very insightful comment but it is accurate.  You see, the thing about be lurid is that its kind a hard to miss.  Luridness is all surface.  What I don't understand is why so many critics seemed surprised by this aspect of the film.  Aronofsky is not exactly known for his subtlety.  His films bludgeon, they assault.  They are films about people on the edge and they reflect that anxiety visually.

In Black Swan the person on the edge is Nina (Natalie Portman), a  ballet dancer who has been relegated to small parts her entire career.  She has skill in abundance but lacks, for director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the passion of a true artist.  She's a technician and though she longs to get the lead in Leroy's "re-imaging" of Swan Lake, he seriously doubts that she can pull of the devious Black Swan, though he knows she's perfect for the White Swan.  This set the stage for the backstage drama that structures the narrative.  It's familiar ground that anyone who's seen All About Eve (which should be everyone) will recall.

The setting really isn't that important however, and the heart of the film involves Nina's quick descent into madness.  Or maybe that's a slow descent, or maybe she's mad from the beginning.  Whatever, either way things are not good in Nina's brain.  Like so many a suffering heroine before her Nina's troubles stem from sexual repression.  In this case the repression is due to the isolation that has been imposed on Nina throughout her life by her mother, Erica (a very good, very unnerving Barbara Hershey).  Isolated doesn't quite cover it.  Nina has been sequestered, made to care only about what her mother cares for, ballet.  A failed dancer, Erica lives through her daughter.  She's a stage mother.  A really creepy stage mother.

Leroy gives her the part despite his reservations and because, in the grand tradition of (fictional) choreographers/directors, he has a massive ego and thinks he can transform her himself.  Oh, if he only new how fucked up she really is.  Though he's a cad and has a long history of getting involved with his dancers (he must have spent his youth watching All That Jazz over and over), Leroy's treatment of Nina is surprisingly tender.  Okay, so he forces his tongue down her throat in one scene but he really is doing it for her.  I can't believe I just wrote that sentence but it is the truth.  You see, Leroy is one hundred percent right about Nina.  She is bottled up.  He sees it in her dancing but we get to see its root causes, the aforementioned mother.  What neither he nor Erica know is that Nina isn't just repressed but is suffering a psychotic break.  Aronofsky visualizes this psychotic break by having Nina continually seeing herself in other people.  No that's not right.  Not in other people but as other people.  This first occurs randomly with a stranger whom she passes on the street but soon she is seeing her own image in place of all the other women in the film: her mother, the previous prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), but mostly in Lily (Mila Kunis), the new girl fresh of the bus from San Fransisco.  As is necessary in these kinds of stories, Lily is everything that Nina is not: a free spirit, passionate but not obsessed with perfection, and most importantly sexually free and uninhibited.  She attempts to befriend Nina and for a moment it seems like she may be the one who helps Nina come out of her shell.  Then, after a late night of parting with Lily (probably her first night out ever), Nina arrives late for rehearsal to find Lily filling in for her.  She's enraged and assumes immediately that the whole previous night was an attempt to make her late and thus steal the part from her.  Despite assuring her that Leroy made her the back up and that there was nothing she could do about it, Nina still feels betrayed.  Whatever progress might have been started for Nina's psyche is abruptly halted and her sickness is forefronted from then on.

This may make the film seem like it is primarily a "back stage" tale like the aforementioned All About Eve or Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls.  While that element is there and it is of some importance, it is not at the heart of the film.  Another frequent comparison is with Roman Polanski's Repulsion, another tale of a sexually repressed young woman who goes mad.  It's a fair comparison but for me neglects to account for just how good Natalie Portman is in the role of Nina.  There is in Nina a sadness that is missing from Carol (Catherine Denevue) in the Polanski film.  This quality creates a point of empathy for Nina and elevates the material beyond the melodrama and horror elements that the film uses.  Rather than just being a showbiz film or a horror film, Portman and Aronofsky turn it into a film about the fragility of identity.  I was reminded most of another film I viewed recently, Robert Altman's underrated Images.  Thinking of Images made think of the film that inspired it, Ingmar Bergman's Persona and it is that film that serves as the foundation for Black Swan.  Like Bergman, Aronofsky isn't afraid to tackle challenging subject matter.  Both films are consumed with questions of identity:  how do we form it, what does it mean, and basically, who the hell are we.

Bergman was also capable of exuberant style, as Persona clearly shows.  Underneath that style, as is the case with Aronofsky, is a tremendous humanity and compassion for his characters and the audience.  I'm not trying to say that Aronofsky is on par with Bergman.  Bergman is one of the finest filmmakers the world has ever seen and while I've liked all of Aronofsky's films thus far, it's still to early to say just how good he might become.  He does though, like Bergman, seem compelled to ask the "big" questions.  Whenever an artist, particularly it seems film artists, tackle these questions and take it seriously, there will always be those who side step it with criticism that focus on (perceived) weaknesses of the artist.  So be it.  If you want to focus on the sensationalism, or the use of cinematic stereotypes that's fine, just remember that those things are tools just like the thousands of others employed by filmmakers every day, and if you don't look at what they end up constructing...well, you're only seeing a portion of what's there.  There's a myriad of critics who seem to take this approach; who spend more time calling Aronofsky names then discussing the work.  I've liked him since I first saw Pi and I named Requiem for a Dream the best film of the first decade of the new millennium.  Black Swan isn't as good as either of those pictures but it shows again that Aronofsky is unafraid of grand topics and grand style.  In the current American cinematic climate that, for me, makes him one of the best and boldest of directors.

Ultimately Black Swan is a sad film.  Behind all the special effects and horrific imagery is the story of a talented young woman who really is very sick.  In the end we realize that none of what we've seen (i.e. what Nina has seen) has any basis in reality.  Leroy only wants her to be great, Lily just wants to befriend her, and her mother is equally sad, having given up her chance at greatness (or even mediocrity) to raise a child, only to smother that child to the point where she has no idea who she is outside of the identity her mother's prescribed for her from birth.

IMAGES (Robert Altman, 1972)

In between the genre busting classics McCabe and Mrs. Miller (western) and The Long Goodbye (noir), Robert Altman took the time to make the little seen, under-appreciated Images.  Influenced, by the director's own admission, by Bergman's Persona (1966), Images is an attempt to "visualize the schizophrenic mind" and it is in these moments that the film is most effective.  Altman said that the initial idea for Images center around a scene that sprang to mind one day while he was eating lunch.  In it a man in woman are have a discussion/argument, the woman is in a bedroom and the man is moving in and out of an enjoining bathroom.  At one point during the conversation the woman looks up and the man appears as someone she has never seen before.  It's a creepy idea and when it happens early in the film, it sets the psychological tone for the whole film.  It's also one of my personal favorite cinematic moments.

As the narrative progresses we discover that Altman didn't use his original idea completely; the man who suddenly replaces the woman's husband is not a stranger but a former lover of the woman, Cathryn, played by Susannah York.  She is schizophrenic and has a variety of symptoms including her husband suddenly appearing as someone else.  During the entire film some variation of this is taking place.  Either she sees her husband as someone else or she sees that someone else in the same room as her and her husband.  Altman was wise and intuitive enough to throw in some other symptoms as well (though he claims he did no research for the film, relying on instinct), like Cathryn suddenly not liking the taste of an apple and having an irrational fear of a local dog.

We never learn anything about Cathryn's history; has she been in therapy, been violent before, when did the symptoms first originate, was there a stressor involved?  Personally I think the film is better off not bringing up these questions.  Instead, we're left to decode the reason(s) for her break based on what Altman gives us.  As far as I can tell the primary reason for her psychotic break is guilt over her own infidelity; we are given evidence of two affairs and, I believe, a third is hinted at.  This guilt is coupled with the almost constant presence of her husband Hugh's (Rene Auberjonois) camera.  Altman uses the camera to symbolize Cathryn's paranoia and to create a sense of the inescapable.  No matter where she goes the camera seems always to be watching her, as if the eyes of her cuckolded husband.  Simultaneously Altman allows the camera to stand in for the Cathryn's lonliness and the very reason she cheated in the first place; it represents one of the many distraction that keep Hugh from giving Cathryn the attention she needs.  Though he seems to care for her, Hugh spends more time with the camera, hunting, or (seemingly) at his job, then he does with Cathryn.  It's an interesting case of dual representation that mirrors Cathryn's state of mind.

The film was shot by the great, great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and was the second of three collaborations with Altman (The aforementioned McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye being the other two) and for my money it's the best looking of the three.  Shot in Ireland in the winter, the film has a damp and foggy look to it, perfect for it's subject matter.  It looks both natural and oneiric in a way that is specific to Zsigmond's work in the 70's and early 80's (he worked with many of the great directors from the period).  Very beautiful.

One can't talk about images without mentioning the amazing score by John Williams (yes that John Williams).  Williams had the brilliant idea of hiring Stomu Yamashta to created unique sounds to incorporate through out the film.  Make no mistake though, the score belongs to Williams, who wrote in ever instance of these sounds in his original score.  It's a really remarkable piece.

Ignored at the time of it's release (despite being nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes), Images has yet to get the attention it deserves.  It's by know means a perfect piece (Altman even admits that it can be a bit heavy handed at times) but there is so much that is interesting that it easily overcomes it's flaws.  You wouldn't think that a film from a master like Altman, originating in his most productive and innovative years, could fly under the radar for so many decades but here it is.  Hopefully more people will find it, it's worth it.