Say What You See

A comment left on the NY Times site, in response to the timely article by M. Dargis and A.O. Scott.

This article seems basically a plea of resistance against critics that deem themselves arbiters of filmmakers’ skill. Thank you, Mr. Scott, for debunking the absurd claims of some armchair director like Richard Schickel, who somehow came away from Tree of Life believing Malick intended to tell a dramatic, three-act story and somehow did not have the skill to do so. Or worse, stuck in a belief that there is only one way to affect a film audience.

Probably the hardest, most important part of being a professional critic is viewing so many films and still viewing them holistically—as if everything was intended to be the way that they saw it. It’s important not to assume everything you don’t like is a mistake, or that every artist is dumber than you, because it will be especially embarrassing when you use made-up science phrases like “nuclear family—nuclear universe”.

A pox on the so-called critics whose writing is a blend of subjectivity and namedropping every film they’ve already seen. [Although really, placing Tree of Life alongside Hiroshima Mon Amour is an interesting comparison—which unfortunately Schickel promptly put in his garbage can.] Why? Has every cinematic idea been tried? Has film storytelling been completely perfected? When every film is completely homogenous, will the critics’ job be better or worse?

This is a movie about a relationship, but it’s really the guy’s story. Dean is charismatic and relatable, and Cindy is passive. Everywhere she goes, men hit on her. The way she reacts—or really, doesn’t—is the most insight we get into her feelings. She is angry when her boyfriend comes without a condom, so she stops talking to him. She’s the primary breadwinner and responsible parent, but she lets Dean lecture her. She lies there and lets him fuck her.

Sure, it’s noble, in a small way, that Dean wants to raise somebody else’s baby. It’s tragic how her daughter loves him and she doesn’t. But until he trashes her office, we don’t really see why she doesn’t. While her arc is about growing as a person, and outgrowing a man who’s become less attractive to her, that’s not the story of this film. Of course the world is full of people who bottle up their feelings, and some of them are women, but to me it’s just obvious Blue Valentine was made by a man.

Uncle Boonmee asks the ghost of Huay: after he’s died, where can he find her? She pointedly doesn’t respond. Ghosts aren’t attached to places, but people. Her ghost is his memory; without Boonmee, no Huay.

As his kidney drains, Boonmee imagines a kind of time machine that erases people, and replaces them with a projection. As he speaks we see a series of freeze frames— young men posing with an ape suit—possibly production stills. This suggests that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is such a projection—of a lifestyle of Thai farmers at its end, and of the production of this film itself. Once upon a time, such a “past life” might be a story like the Princess and the Catfish; the projection that replaces it, the snapshots, are strange but banal.

In the end, Tong and Jen become such projections even as they live and wake and watch TV. Boonsong saw such an apparition in his photo, he sought after it and became one of them. An onlooker in the dark, a ghost monkey: eyes like lasers, otherwise devolved. The cinema audience.

Before his diagnosis, Uxbal’s world is already akimbo: domestically, where his family is falling apart, and professionally, where nothing short of global trade inequality manifests itself in his work. He sees his role as a manager of this imbalance, a hand to steady the scale.

So when the time comes to “settle his accounts”, Uxbal presses hard on one side of the scale. And time and again he’s faced with his own denial, his culpability for the violence around him. He’s naïve about his wife and his boy is beaten, about money and his cheap heaters kill, about the goodwill of his friend and his kids are nearly left alone with nothing.

He rushes through everything from religion and mysticism to sex and substances, ethics to familial love, but ultimately all these are just a struggle against—and a means of denying—his mortality. It’s not the most affirming message, but it’s no surprise that he can’t rectify the universe in a month, let alone a lifetime. There’s something noble in that denial, but he should have told his daughter sooner.

Do people consider the title of this film to be ironic? Maybe Mabel is drinking when she ducks into the kitchen. She seems awfully quick to say “I take morphine” in the incredible, long fight before she’s committed. But besides that, we see very little of her intake. It isn’t a movie about addiction. So what else could her “influence” be—inner demons?

She’s emotional and repeats things, but she’s not irresponsible, beyond her self-destructiveness. Her kids are smart, well-adjusted and they love her. It’s Nick that gets violent; it’s uptight women on the street that won’t tell her the time. Most of her problems are social, not personal—created by Nick’s neglect, his jealousy, the expectations of the family, other parents. These are the pressures Mabel is ‘under’, and when she’s put away, and Nick deals even more poorly with the same, the question goes from “What’s the matter with Mabel?”—to “How doesn’t this happen to everybody?”

Everybody dwells on the recurrent Perrin/Pignon character in Veber’s films. Sure, auteurs create a universe common to all their films. But we’re not meant to believe he’s a character like Kiyoshi Atsumi’s Tora-San, whose itinerant life has seen 48 episodes of classic hijinks. It’s more interesting to me that only one character recurs in his films; that one character is the butt of all the misfortune. Recalls the Jerry Lewis adage, “Comedy is a man in trouble”.

Another similarity in Veber movies—La Chèvre, The Closet, The Valet—is the frequent use of a character’s job to take them out of their comfort zone. But just because that’s a device, it’s not formulaic in itself. Characters defined by their occupation account for a lot of diversity in Billy Wilder’s films, for instance. Wilder, whose 1981 film Buddy Buddy, I just learned—is adapted from one of Francis Veber’s plays.

A timely film for the current political moment in the Middle East. I remember an interview sometime last year in which Tariq Ali said the question he gets most often in the Middle East is—”Where is our Chavez?” We may soon find out.

South of the Border plays like an exposé, a work of counter-propaganda, which is to say, its intentions are propagandistic and never really transcends them. Its politics are too resolute for it to come off any other way, though it does try. Most everything is shot in verité style; the occasional use of massive lightboxes just means we see the lights in the shot. Stone figures himself into the film, and his shlubby presence in the frame relaxes the politicians, who seem eager to relate to him. When it works, it seems a uniquely USA-oriented mouthpiece of this moment in the populist revolution of the Americas.

There have already been so many landmarks in South America since this film, from the attempted coup against Correa in Ecuador to the election of Dilma Rousseff, the first female President in Brazil.

The scene where Chavez breaks the bicycle in half is priceless. The scene where Morales “hooks up” Stone with some coca leaves, a little awkward. For a bit more of Chavez’s proclivity for propaganda (and its more manic side), I was impressed by the Frontline special, which is free to watch online.

Fran Lebowitz is guarded about calling herself a humorist. A wit, she says, is the same principle, without the understanding that she won’t insult the audience—and warmth.

Be that as it may, this brief portrait of Fran in her self-described “last laugh” period, seems very much like a standup comedy special. In fact, near the end of the film, when we see an archival clip of a very young Conan O’Brien show, the tone is strikingly like Scorsese’s interview—her split-second timing as if she’s heard every question before, the way she looks past the interviewer, the comic beat of licking her lips.

Her lecture and Q&A is even more overtly like comedy, despite the wooden hall, podium, Toni Morrison beside her. Every facet of her image—the intellectual, cultural critic, abstaining from modern life, technology, driving a 30-year-old Checker—seems irrelevant, esoteric. But her use of language is so contemporary, it’s as though she’s permanently ahead. She shuns warmth, seems proud to offend, but her style—humor—is inclusive in its nature. And what standup comic would do half a set and spend the rest of the time taking questions from the audience?

The Diamond Dogs tour, where Bowie first visits America, around the time he’s said he was living on “red peppers, cocaine and milk”. Not sure whether it’s more alarming to imagine his habit or actually witness his eating disorder. Nowhere does his genius sound more dubious than in his own struggles to articulate it. On its unflattering side, this film seems less like a promotional documentary and more like an episode in a 21st century reality series. Were there drugs in every shot they didn’t use—eg. the panicked sniff when he hears sirens behind the limo?

Even so, the elaborate stage productions—which look low budget and practically Spinal Tap by today’s standards (Bowie even explains why he decided to start dancing in his live shows, gasp)—and crazed live performances are an amazing document, and the best thing I’ve seen related to that relative stinker of an album.

Watch on Vimeo.

I like how keenly this movie is cut for comedy: the Greek chorus of kooky ladies, Bale jumping out the window. Appreciated the shitty 90’s video cameras and all the scaling artifacts in the fight scenes.

It’s fitting that Wahlberg came on as producer, as it’s really the actors’ movie. The hugeness of the Bale and Leo characters are actually the source of the conflict, and after so much blustering, it’s surprising that the third act is actually kind of a deflation of those characters into civility.