Closer
Closer is the latest release by Mike Nichols, who hasn't released a movie I've enjoyed since
Working Girl in 1988 (and even that one I'm only so-so on). Most recently, Mix Master Mike earned acclaim for the overrated demagoguery of
Angels in America on HBO. He returns to movie theaters with this adaptation of the Patrick Marber play of the same name, the story of two couples whose infidelities overlap in intriguing and not neccessarily expected ways.
It gets better after the first sequence, I promise.
For some bizarre reason, possibly ether-related, Nichols decides to open the film with a thoroughly ridiculous slow-motion shot, set to the strained ballad "The Blower's Daughter" by 2003 Shortlist winner Damien Rice. The song is one of those post-Dave Matthews breathy, whispery jobs, where the singer informs you about the depth of his emotions by over-pronouncing random words. In this case, it's "eyes," and so the phrase "I can't take my eyes off of you" becomes "I can't take my eeeeee-yieeeeee-yes off of you." Cause, you know, he's in love and stuff.
So, Jude Law's frustrated novelist Dan walks towards Natalie Portman's punkish American gal Alice on the streets of London in slow motion, Damien Rice's eeeeiiiiiieeeeeesssssss can't be taken off of her, and then she's hit by a taxi. I swear. It's sudden, ludicrous, and so surreal that you half expect Dan to take off his glasses, rub his eyes, and look back only to see everyone on the street around him looking at him like he's insane. But, no, it's real, Alice is down for the count, and Dan rushes her to the hospital. And there, in the waiting area, they begin to conversate, and the movie gains its footing.
What transpires will feel vaguely familiar to anyone with a history of watching movies about turbulent romance. People meet, fall desperately in love, and break one another's hearts in fairly quick succession. The movie succeeds not by carving out any new terrain in the battle of the sexes, but by astutely observing its central four characters, and providing you with just enough information to invest in the drama, but not so much activity as to overwhelm quiet, individual moments.
Soon enough during the course of Dan and Alice's romance, complications arise. Dan has fallen for the feisty, recently divorced Anna (a subdued Julia Roberts), who says she wants nothing to do with him. He plays a cruel joke on her (in one of the film's few lively, comic set-pieces) that winds up bringing her in contact with Larry (Clive Owen), the man of her dreams, whom she later marries. Over the course of the next few years, there are numerous infidelities on the part of each individual member of each couple.
Nichols' sense of pacing here is immaculate; we never feel that the relationships or conversations are being "rushed," as occurs so often in films about budding romance. However, there is something of a frenetic feeling to the creation and dissolution of these affairs. Characters seem a bit hasty to fall in and out of love, and I suppose on some level, this is the point. As Alice notes in a monologue near the film's opening, when a great love has ended, it's best to simply break someone's heart and leave immediately after, so as not to prolong the drama.
As happens with any theatrical adaptation, the passage of time in the film is handled rather abruptly. There were, I fear, woefully few transitional sequences added from play to film, so scenes tend to open with some obvious throwaway line to give the audience its bearings (generally of the "Alice! I haven't seen you in three long months!" variety). Sometimes it works, other times not so well.
But despite any structural deficiencies, the film moves along in surprisingly entertaining fashion, particularly considering the heavy nature of the material. Most of this must be credited to the performers, who keep an admittedly dialogue-intensive film from feeling too weighty for a Friday night at the movies. One of the great touches of Marber's script is its fluidity. We're never quite sure how to feel about anyone, and rarely get even a glimpse at the true moral character of the protagonists until the flm's final moments. (There are really no heroes or villains in a film where everyone cheats on each other).
In this way, it reminds me of Neil LaBute's caustic
Your Friends and Neighbors. But while that film argued that human beings are either sadists or cowards,
Closer sees these qualities intertwined inside all of us. In this way, it mirrors Godard's
Contempt, with its intimate exploration of the life-altering, confusing transition that suddenly occurs when a great love ends.
Clive Owen, who also appeared in the stage version of
Closer, appropriately gets the meatiest role, taking Dr. Larry from needy pervert to vengeful manipulator to pained everyman in a series of sequences that could very well net him recognition come awards time. Will this film finally bring him the acclaim he so desperately deserves Stateside? Let's hope.
Portman also does a nice job with a tricky role. The much-discussed nude scene no longer appears (sorry, dudes), but she's on display in stripper-wear enough to satisfy the horndogs like myself in the audience. Alice is a lovely character, cold and distant in the way of all truly desirable movie women, and Portman's well-cast in the part. I must confess to harboring some leftover animosity for her participation in the disgracefully cloying wannabe tearjerker
Garden State earlier this year. I tried, successfully I hope, not to let it influence my feelings on this movie.
The film ends in much the same way as it begins, with Damien moaning about his eeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiicccccccceeeeeeeeee and Natalie strutting across the street in slo-mo. It annoyed me less the second time around (possibly because I knew the Rice song would be over momentarily, and I already knew the movie was good), but it's still not the best bookend. I'm not quite sure why Nichols decided to go so over-the-top for the film's beginning and end, particularly when the film's mid-section goes for intense, brutal realism rather than spaced-out movie fantasy.
A Very Long Engagement
Sentimentality can be a wonderful attribute of a film, but as easy as it is to deploy it is almost as easy to misuse.
Amélie used it to build a contemporary cinematic Paris out of the white-washing magic of love, and that film's director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, makes a tragic misstep in his follow-up
A Very Long Engagement by giving the overpowering sap of hope the ability to unify a nation’s memory of war.
The film is adapted with a heavy hand that too often betrays its literary source novel by Sébastien Japrisot—for example, an unnecessary narration alternatively describes exactly what is being seen amongst peppering prose-like elaborations which Jeunet chooses not to visualize—and the baroquely cinematic images, a cast deaded by a painfully plain script, and the flair of Japrisot's prose and Jeunet's visual flourish rarely weave into cohesion. The film chronicles the tearful hope and intricate detective work of Mathilde (Audrey Tautou), whose fiancé Manech (Gaspard Ulliel) is MIA in the First World War. Manech is presumed dead by everyone but his sweetheart, who is not so much a living breathing character as she is conduit for a French optimist’s wrenching emotional need to make sense of such an absurd war.
Contradicting the film’s allegiance to Mathilde’s passionate, luck-based outlook on life, the wide-eyed Tautou tracks down her long lost love through a completely rational investigation. For this she employs a detective to track down missing witnesses, and then interviews them herself, attempting a
Rashomon-style narrative of memory revision of an event in the war previously thought understood by its participants. But unlike Kurosawa’s testament to the slipperiness of human perception, Mathilde’s information gradually fits together like a puzzle, and by the end the audience has a unified picture of Manech’s terror-filled experience in the trenches, which leads our heroine to her damaged beau.
It is not Mathilde’s naïve outlook and child-like attachment to her initially clearly dead fiancé that torpedoes Jeunet’s film, which is by measures overlong, choppily structured, and far too reliant on a faulty visual style (a multitude of CGI tableaus, pointlessly ornate crane-shots, and a over-filtered combination of golden tinged nostalgia and dirt-grey horror) rather than on the sadly homogenized acting of its supremely talented cast. What sinks this ship is the very idea that Mathilde’s love, translated to hope, can piece together a definitive representation of World War I. As Mathilde’s exhaustive job as a receiver of several brutal oral histories of war experience labels her as a cipher for understanding the Manech’s story, Manech’s story is thereby the story of the experience of the Great War. With Mathilde’s perseverance, Jeanut and his co-writer Guillaume Laurant give the audience what is suppose to be a narratively clear, emotionally focused, and singularly thematically driven picture of the war. To make nothing of the entirely bland and unrealized story of female homefront suffering, sarcificies, and the women's complicated relations to their menfolk,
A Very Long Engagements’ telling us that hope and love can piece together and “solve” the mystery of the absurdities and horrors of war is a quite probably the most offensively positive, naively presumptive application of sentimentality possible. For a film that tries so hard to visually depict the revolting, dehumanizing experience of war and the strength of the heart laying await at home, it comes as a complete surprise that the resulting film is a disservice to the unexplainable experience millions of people felt during this, or any war.
Alexander
This white man's burden is the idea of his own greatness. Like
Troy before it, the obsession of Oliver Stone's Alexander (Colin Farrell) is the creation of his own myth. Bypassing the majority of the youthful king's unification of the Mediterranean, Stone is more interested in Alexander's existential crisis as he and his weary army of loyal Macedonians march farther and farther East trying to forge and define a legend-in-progress.
Narrated "historically" by Alexander's fellow general-turned-historian Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins),
Alexander spends much of its first hour touring frescos and wall-paintings depicting the trials and tribulations of heroes in the Greek myths. Ostensibly the director is drawing a parallel from these two dimensional, public, simplified, myth-making tableaus with the projection of the film on the wall of the cinema. But even Stone's idea of chronicling a faux-historical journey of a great man’s army as if it were a self-conscious media machine from 2500 years ago fails to explain the constant ellipses
Alexander uses, jumping from the warrior's teenage tiff with his father Philip (Val Kilmer) to Hopkins proclaiming only through narration that Alexander soon after ascended to the throne subsequently conquered much of Europe.
The elision is a hard swallow in contrast to the first and principle battle of the film, which is carefully setup as a straight tactical reenactment. Stone takes his time detailing Alexander's risky strategy, subtitling specific army positions and literally giving a bird's eye view of the phalanxes and cavalry maneuvers, but then inexplicably leaps over the battle's dramatic conclusion--Alexander apparently losing his gambit but the next sequence showing him entering Babylon in triumph. Much of
Alexander’s three-hour running time follows this mystifying technique of attempting broad extrapolation, turning it into extended visual self-gratification, and following it by chronological truncation. The drama of the film--existing mainly in Alexander's vaguely defined motivation for dragging his countrymen into the Eastern hinterland, and his laughable pseudo-Freudian conflict with his "sorcerous" mother Olympias (Angelina Jolie) who attempts to mold him into a great homosexual king--is limpid, generalized, straightforwardly melodramatic, and constantly fails at elucidating the film's characters, story, or historical interpretation. Alexander's unexplained motivation to reform the “barbarous”, and “racially impure” East into the civilized, cultured, united model of the white West likewise fails both to explore this fascinating ideology of Greek city-state building and to connect Alexander's military mission with the America's current political situation.
That a nearly three-hour movie never makes clear what it really is about is shameful, and as Stone leaps and glosses over history, action, characters, and a story all at once, one wants to picture a film that has been homogenized and butchered by its own grandiose production scale rather than the bewildering mess of a director's vision. One searches furtively for some sort of subversive content from Stone, and the end of the hunt produces only one possible answer: that the expositionally glossed over, dramatically immature, historically didactic film is really Stone showing how presumptive both the public and historians are when looking at fragmented historical records and artistically depicted myths. In its grand, inexplicable failure, perhaps Stone’s film is an attempt to show that the archetypal stories created on those walls in Greece are just as vapid, melodramatic, simplified, and pandering to mass tastes as a mediocre, overripe spectacle of ineptitude like
Alexander.