Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

 

Foreign flair adds to thriller, animation and comedy
The films this month include a well-written thriller, an animated film from an Iranian expatriate, a film about a dysfunctional family coping with the father’s dementia, and a humorous examination of how the United States helped the Afghans defeat the Russians.

In Bruges
In Bruges is the feature film debut of writer-director Martin McDonagh, whose earlier short film, “Six Shooter,” won an Academy Award in 2006. McDonagh established his reputation as a playwright, and the strongest influence on this film, in my opinion, is Nobel-Prize-winning British playwright Harold Pinter.
While some reviewers commented on the obvious allusions in the film to Nicholas Roeg and to Welles’s Touch of Evil, none seemed to notice the dialogue is straight Pinter, as characters echo each other’s lines, bait each other with dark humor, overwhelm the viewer with obscenities and mimic lower class Irish dialect. Even the situation is a developed version of Pinter’s short play, The Dumbwaiter, in which two professional killers are sent to an unlikely location to await orders from their boss.
McDonagh adds motivation for the characters’ actions while Pinter simply leaves the motivations as mysterious as everything else in his play. Saying the film is a development of a Pinter play is not a criticism of it; McDonagh brings the absurdist plot and trademark Pinter dialogue into a mainstream film and makes it work.
Two professional assassins, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are sent from Ireland to the Belgian city of Bruges to hide out after Ray accidentally kills an innocent victim during a job. They are to see the sights, relax and wait for word from Harry (Ralph Fiennes), the crime boss for whom they work. For Ken, the assignment is a welcome diversion, and he wanders along the medieval city’s canals and through its churches and museums with interest and a guidebook in his hand; for Ray, the assignment is sheer torture, as he shuffles his feet, waggles his eyebrows and constantly complains like a child forced to attend a boring cultural exhibit. Only the varieties of Belgian beer and the attention of a dope-peddling young woman named Chloë (Clémence Poésy) make the situation at all tolerable for Ray. Then Chloë’s boyfriend and Jimmy the dwarf (Jordan Prentice) appear. Next, a message arrives from Harry, and the reason for their presence in Bruges is made clear as well as the nature of their assignment. Finally, Harry arrives, and events work their way to the inevitable bloody climax.
The acting is excellent on all fronts. Farrell makes his low-key, whining hit-man believable as he blunders through the city, and Gleeson balances him as the good-natured, amiable, but ruthless Ken. Their verbal interactions often are very funny, and both characters, despite their professions and actions, engage the audience’s sympathy. Fiennes also is excellent, as befits one of England’s finest actors, although sometimes he seems to be imitating Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. Poésy offers strong support in a minor role, as does Prentice as the racist dwarf Jimmy.
The city of Bruges, “the best preserved Medieval city in the world,” is a major element of the story. The boats on its canals, the paintings in its museums, the walks along its cobblestone streets—all contribute to a visual quality that significantly enriches the film. Many of the scenes are set in identified museums and churches, and the paintings shown complement the film’s themes of guilt and retribution. One of the paintings is brought to life at the end of the film by actors on a movie set. The film certainly will boost the tourist trade in Bruges, a city that most people are unfamiliar with.
Although some viewers will be disturbed by the violence and the use of the F-word 125 times in a 117-minute film (according to a supplement on the DVD), the film is a solid examination of guilt and retribution as well as one often funny and exceptionally well-acted. It’s also a great way to have a quick look at Bruges. Top

Persepolis
Persepolis is based on the two-volume graphic novel (i.e., comic book) by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004). Satrapi, a Paris-based author, was born in 1969 in Rasht (Iran) into an affluent family.
She grew up first under the Shah’s government and then under the fundamentalist regime that replaced it. As a teenager, she was sent to Vienna for safety and went through the usual angst of those years, an angst exacerbated by feeling even more of an outsider than most teens. She returned to Iran as a young adult but finally decided she could not live there, no matter how much she loved her parents and her culture.
Persepolis is not a film with a political message, although one could read a message into it, but rather it’s a story about a girl growing up with her family in a difficult political situation. For example, her Uncle Anouche is first imprisoned by the Shah’s men, then released by the revolutionaries, and finally executed by the fundamentalists and buried in an unknown grave in the grounds of the prison. She and her family try to cope with these changing circumstances. The film often is quite funny as when the young Marjane buys a bootlegged Iron Maiden audio tape on the street, and at home, like many other teenagers, stalks around her bedroom playing air guitar on a tennis racket.
Satrapi says she was inspired originally by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but the animation drawings of her film are much simpler—hard-edged, black-and-white, all hand-drawn over a two-year period by French illustrators. Rather than simply filming the drawings she had made for her comic book, she and her co-director and fellow illustrator, Vincent Paronnaud, re-thought the entire project and came up with drawings that fit the animation process and still remained true to the spirit of the comic book, e.g., the story is now told in flashback. Most of the film is in black and white, except for scenes at the beginning and the end, and Satrapi says it’s a color film of ninety-five minutes of which ninety-three are in black and white. Unlike most current animated films (Pixar’s productions, for example), Persepolis is entirely hand drawn, as the supplements on the DVD illustrate.
The original film was released in the United States with a French soundtrack and subtitles, but the DVD has been released with an alternate dubbed soundtrack in English, a standard practice for animation. While I normally prefer subtitles, with animated films, where the eye is busy with the visuals, the subtitles can often be a distraction, so a dubbed version is welcome. Of course, if you want to listen in French, with or without subtitles, that option is available on the DVD.
Both versions use Chiara Mastroianni as the teenage and adult Marjane, and Catherine Deneuve as Tadji, Marjane’s mother (Deneuve in reality is Mastrioianni’s mother). Uncle Anouche is voiced by Iggy Pop in the English version, Marjane’s father by Sean Penn, and her grandmother by the incomparable Gena Rowlands.
To say much more about the film would be to repeat needlessly the plot or other elements, and I can only recommend that you see the film, for much of its charm lies in the animation and how the story finds its form through that artwork. Persepolis won the Jury Award at Cannes, was nominated for an Academy Award, and was named the year’s Best Animated Feature by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Online Film Critics. Top

Savages
Savages is a story about how two adult but immature siblings have to deal with the dementia of a father who treated them very badly as children but now is totally dependent upon them for care. Jon and Wendy Savage (their names ironically echo the characters in Peter Pan who never wanted to grow up) receive a phone call that relates how their father Lenny has been found writing obscenities on the bathroom wall with his excrement. Further, the woman he has been living with has died, and her children want him out so that they can sell the house in Sun City.
Wendy (Laura Linney) is a forty-something aspiring playwright who supports herself by working as a temp and applying for grants; she is having a dead-end affair with a married man who stops in to see her while he’s supposedly walking the dog.
Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater professor in mid-career at a university in Buffalo where he is trying to finish a book on Berthold Brecht; he is having an affair with a woman from Rumania who is about to be deported because her visa has expired, and he won’t marry her. Obviously afraid of commitments, these people are probably not the best ones to care for a recalcitrant father needing daily care.
However, they manage to move him to Buffalo, and place him in a nursing home for the few months he has left. These actions and their visits to their father force them to confront each other and a number of issues from the past they had avoided. That they both have gone into the theater profession is no accident, for each has a number of masks and personae to slip into. While this is not a light-hearted drama, writer/director Tamara Jenkins manages to slip in enough humor to keep it from being too bleak, such as the scenes of Jon weeping over his breakfast because his girlfriend is such a bad cook, and Laura trying to feed Jon while he is fastened to the door frame undergoing therapy in a neck brace. Nonetheless, anyone who has been through this situation will wince in places where the film presses on old scars.
Jenkins, whose previous feature was Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), indicates on the DVD that she drew her material from her own experience and from the experiences of people she knew, and the film seems accurate, from its depiction of the father’s confusion to the friendly sterility of the nursing home and its competent but detached staff. Dealing with a parent sliding into dementia seems to be the new rite of passage for this generation, something to face just after you get over your mid-life crisis and before you have to confront the possibility of your retirement income running out before you do.
Linney and Hoffman are excellent as the brother and sister trying to deal with their father, each other, and the past. Oscar nominations would be appropriate. Broadway veteran Philip Bosco, who plays Lenny, holds his own with this illustrious group, and the result is some of the finest ensemble acting you will see in a long time.
Savages has most of the virtues of the typical independent film—a timely but often neglected subject, realistic settings, excellent acting and a unified vision from the director; it also has some of its flaws—a meandering story with frequent subplots; not much action; and characters you’re not sure you want to know. Despite its subject matter, Savages has a positive ending that implies people may do better when they are forced to grow up and face an unpleasant reality. So much for Peter Pan. Top

Charlie Wilson’s War
The name of Mike Nichols on a film as director usually ensures at least a competent film, and often one of originality and quality. Add to the film the names of three Oscar winners as actors—Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman—and the expectations become quite high. Fortunately, this film lives up to them, buoyed by the solid screenplay of Aaron Sorkin, another Oscar winner.
Based on a true story (in this case George Crile’s book of the same title), Charlie Wilson’s War explains how a Texas Congressman, a CIA misfit and a right-wing Texas socialite funneled nearly a billion dollars worth of weaponry to the Afghan rebels in their fight against the Soviet Union. The result was the defeat and withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan. While this may sound like another military movie, it has few war scenes other than a refugee camp and stock shots of helicopters and tanks being destroyed by missiles from handheld launchers.
The film concerns itself with the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that was necessary to achieve the arms delivery, such as the plan to have the funds appropriated by Congress without anyone catching on. Another major problem was to get Israel to work with the Moslem countries to provide the weaponry without either acknowledging the other’s activities. The film is filled with humorous moments as Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) drinks whiskey and chases women with one hand while arming the Afghan “Freedom Fighters” with the other. Julia Roberts, almost parodying her own image, makes Joanne Herring a memorable if not exactly complex individual.
Hoffman almost steals the show as CIA rebel Gust Avrakotos. Look at his performances in this film, in Savages and in the recent Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (to be commented upon next month). It’s hard to believe it’s the same actor. Which one will he receive Oscar nominations for?
The sets and photography transition smoothly from a Playboy Club to Congress to the mansions of Texas and the refugee camps of Afghanistan. Nichols is adept at picking out the telling details—a bugged bottle of Scotch, the expensive gazehounds curled around Wilson’s Congressional aide Bonnie Bach (Amy Adams) as she sits at the foot of a staircase drinking a martini, the missing arms of two Afghan children, the surprise and pleasure in the Afghan faces when the first helicopter crashes and burns.
The film opens and closes with Wilson receiving an award for his covert activities, and it is clear his reputation as a lightweight, boozy Congressman known as “Good Time Charlie” showed only one aspect of his character. His visit to the refugee camp brings the other side of his personality to the fore, and he just keeps pushing until he gets the Afghans the weapons they need. The DVD has interesting interviews with the real Wilson and Joanne Herring as well as pictures of Avrakotos, and Wilson explains how the refugee camp affected him and changed his goals. What happened after the Soviets withdrew is another example of an opportunity that America lost through inaction, and six years later the Taliban came to power.
While all of the details of what happened could not be conveyed in a two-hour movie, Nichols’ film seems to give a fairly accurate picture of events, and it makes a compelling story. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at www.mmnow.com

 

[ Home | Home Cinema | Top ]