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Home Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Different take, familiar tale offers good cinema
The films this month include two variations on familiar plots, a powerful Belgian film and a major Hollywood game-changer.
Crazy Heart
You’ve seen it all before, of course—the talented performer, the self-abuse with alcohol and drugs, the decline into the mental and physical pit, and then (almost always) the redemption. Whether he’s named Ray or Johnny or even Loretta, it’s a country pattern, and it keeps playing and getting actors nominated for Academy Awards—whether they’re named Fox or Phoenix or Spacek.
What you haven’t seen is the performance given by Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake, the broken-down country star driving his aging Suburban from bar to bowling alley, singing, running off stage to throw up, and returning to finish the song. Bridges is one of our finest actors, and he settles into the role of Bad Blake with such assurance and ability it’s hard to believe he’s acting—but he is. Think of “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski. He’s not Bad Blake. Think of the lounge musician in The Fabulous Baker Boys (with his brother Beau)—it’s certainly not Bad Blake. And don’t forget the alien from Starman, an Academy Award nomination.
Bridges just slides into each role and becomes it. He’s amazing. Sometimes, in Crazy Heart, when he wakes up in a cheap motel room and looks around, you can almost smell the stale sweat and bad booze. Oh, and he does his own very credible singing, and makes you believe he’s an aging country music star who can still recapture his former magic when he’s semi-sober and feeling good. Bridges, after five previous nominations, won this year’s Oscar for best actor, and he deserved it.
The plot is negligible—we know most of it already, so let’s skip it. Two other performers stand out. Maggie Gyllenhaal, another underrated actor, plays Jean Craddock, the divorcee with a four-year-old son who wants to believe Bad Blake may pull himself together, but who is too smart to believe either him or herself. Gyllenhaal, with Bridges, makes believable the relationship between the young woman and the aging musician, and she received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Colin Farrell plays Tommy Sweet, a major country star who learned his singing and playing from Blake and now wants Blake to open for him and write songs (Blake doesn’t want to, but he needs the money, which is very good).
Farrell plays Tommy—not as a bad person taking advantage of an old friend he has discarded, but as a young man who truly values Blake but is savvy about the country music scene. He knows where the money is and wants to give Blake a share of it. Farrell also does his own singing and makes it work. In one very ambiguous scene, Tommy Sweet comes onstage and sings with Blake, and it is never quite clear, to the audience or to Blake, whether he is paying homage to Blake or undercutting him with Sweet’s own popularity.
With his usual skill, Robert Duvall (a coproducer of the film) plays Wayne, an old friend who tries to help Blake kick the bottle. Anyone remembering Duvall in Tender Mercies will see the connections between that film and this one. The music is written and overseen by Stephen Bruton, Ryan Bingham, and T Bone Burnett, and they make Blake’s former hits seem plausible—“The Weary Kind” won the Best Song Oscar.
In music history, Blake appears to fit in with the Cash-Nelson-Jennings group of outlaws, and in the film he acknowledges Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. One interesting quality of the film is that, as Blake recovers from his drinking, his singing gets better.
An even better aspect of the film is that the ending, while not downbeat, certainly avoids the typical Hollywood treacle. I like the last shot a lot. But, despite all the other virtues of Crazy Heart—the music, the photography, the supporting roles—see it for one reason: Jeff Bridges’ performance. Top
Sherlock Holmes
While Crazy Heart is an interesting and well-done riff on a country song we have heard many times, Sherlock Holmes is a refurbished and slightly jazzy CD version of a song we have heard previously on scratchy 78s and a few 45s. Guy Ritchie’s successful attempt to resurrect the Holmes franchise reclaims some material from the Conan Doyle stories and strips away some of the layers of details accumulated through multiple screen and television adaptations, e.g., the deerstalker cap and fancy pipe. He also emphasizes some previously neglected areas, e.g., Holmes’ ability as a bare-knuckle fighter, to create a detective who may appeal to what Ritchie sees as today’s audience.
The setting is London in 1891, dark and gloomy, with Tower Bridge under construction, an edifice that provides the setting for an exciting climactic chase and battle. This CGI-created London is impressive, and the other visual details of the period are realistic and satisfying.
Robert Downey, Jr., creates a Holmes who is less aristocratic than that of Basil Rathbone, but probably closer to the person Arthur Conan Doyle had in mind. He’s mentally and physically very quick, athletic, witty and prone to depression if nothing exciting is going on.
The cocaine is downplayed, as is the modern attempt to read a homoerotic relationship into the Holmes-Watson partnership. Jude Law is a younger and fitter Watson than has been common in past film versions, but that again is closer to Doyle, whose Watson is an athlete, crack shot and military hero, as well as a physician.
The chemistry between Downey and Law works very well—there’s a buddy relationship, but they taunt each other constantly. Each, of course, has a female interest. Watson has his fiancée, Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly), and Holmes has his former (and perhaps current) nemesis, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), lifted from A Scandal in Bohemia. She is one of the few people who has ever outsmarted Holmes, and therefore, he finds her irresistible. Both women seem to exist mostly as window-dressing, although Adler leaves Holmes tied nude to a bed with only his hat to cover his private parts.
Holmes’ arch-enemy, Dr. Moriarty, does not appear in this version, although there is a warning at the end that he is “afoot.” Instead, Mark Strong plays Lord Blackwood, a serial killer who dabbles in the pseudo-occult and appears to return from the dead to take over England and the world (yes, it’s that kind of trite plot).
Fortunately, the narrative here is even less important than in most Holmes adventures, and Ritchie keeps the action moving so quickly that by the time the audience figures out how preposterous the whole story is, the film is nearly over and it doesn’t matter. This film is pure escapism, and it’s slickly done.
The only serious question at the end is who will play Moriarty in the next film, and, of course, there will be a next film. Ritchie obviously hopes this film will “reboot” the Holmes franchise, and Robert Downey can alternate between making Holmes movies and Ironman movies. Perhaps that’s the key—Moriarty will doff his Victorian garb and underneath will be Ironman, with Downey playing both characters, a la Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers or Sam Rockwell in Moon. Such a development would probably just suit Downey’s ego. Top
Lorna’s Silence
In sharp contrast to the bang-bang entertainment of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is Lorna’s Silence, the new film by Belgium’s leading directors, brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The Dardennes make quiet, powerful films, such as The Child and The Son that explore the problems of the lower class in Europe. The first is about a baby sold for adoption whose father must then go through several ordeals to reclaim him, and the second concerns a teacher who must deal with his emotions when he finds that one of his students is the boy who accidentally killed his son. The Child and Rosetta, which I have not seen, won top prizes at Cannes. Often the films have religious or moral overtones that add resonance without being heavy handed. The father in The Son is a carpenter, and Lorna’s Silence may involve a mysterious pregnancy.
An Albanian immigrant, Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is in the marriage-for-pay business in the Belgian city of Liege. Members of the mob have paid a Belgian drug addict, Claudy (Jérémie Renier), the father of the baby in The Child), to marry her in order for her to acquire residency papers. Although she lives with him, she keeps him at arm’s length. When the mob members come to her and suggest they eliminate Claudy so she will be free to marry a Russian who needs Belgian citizenship, she at first experiences few qualms. Besides, the money is very good and will enable her to finance a little bistro that she and her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj) want to start (her boyfriend has no problems with the way she gets her money).
Complications begin when Claudy tries to kick the drug habit, and Lorna is impressed by his determination.
She suggests to the mob that perhaps it really isn’t necessary to kill Claudy, and they agree to consider an alternative course of action. Claudy and Lorna end up in bed together, and the next morning she sees him ride off on his bicycle, and then matters take a strange, but logical turn that can’t be discussed without giving away too much of the plot, which was suggested by a true story told to the Dardenne brothers by a drug addict.
As the rest of the film unwinds toward a tense but ambiguous ending, Lorna tries to deal, often quite courageously, with the events that have befallen her. Like most of the Dardenne brothers’ heroes, she is coerced by economic forces to make choices that often conflict with her better instincts.
Arta Dobroshi is fine in her debut role as Lorna, but Jérémie Renier, as the drug-addicted, emaciated husband, steals almost every scene he’s in. One of the Darnenne brothers’ regular actors, he just disappears into his roles and creates characters so real he hardly seems to be acting. The photography is unobtrusive, but vividly portrays the bleak world in which the characters live.
The brothers have said all of their films center on the concept that human life is priceless, but their characters have to go through many obstacles and experience personal growth to learn this fact. Lorna’s Silence, perhaps more than their previous, more highly-regarded films, clearly makes this point. The film won the prize for best screenplay at Cannes (in French, Albanian and Russian, with English subtitles). Top
Avatar
Probably the most anticipated and talked about film of the year, Avatar is noteworthy for the fact that, unlike Titanic, it did not win Oscars for best picture and best director, these awards going to James Cameron’s former wife, Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker. The plot, characters and special effects have been written about so much that this review will focus only on those qualities that seem most obvious or outstanding.
First, Cameron has taken movie-making to a new level by creating set, character and action sequences almost totally with computer-generated images (CGI). His alien moon, Pandora, is gorgeous and believable, filled with stunning plant life, animal creations and natural phenomena, such as the airborne floating islands. The beauty and believability of the setting dwarf previous attempts at creating alien worlds.
Second, all of the natives on Pandora are ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned Na’vi, creatures who have an empathy with the plant and animal life around them, an empathy, which often echoes Native American beliefs. The main character, Jake (Sam Worthington), is a paraplegic who is wired into a device that lets him inhabit an artificial Na’vi body (an avatar) and interact with the natives, even though they realize he is artificial. All of these characters are CGI creations—the characters who appear only as Na’vi never actually appear in their own forms on screen. Cameron has created a film in which the actors are totally his own creation.
The same computer-generated graphics are used for the action sequences, and, altogether, it makes an amazing movie. Unfortunately, other aspects of the film do not meet the high technical standards, although these problems are not new with Cameron.
As Titanic demonstrated, Cameron has a good sense of film structure and how to tie the parts together to form an organic whole, but his plots seem far-fetched, even for fantasy; his dialogue often is clunky and trite, and his characters are seldom memorable, even with good actors. The dropping of the jewel into the sea at the end of Titanic, while perhaps romantic, does not seem like the action of a practical woman who was a survivor, who had lived as full a life as the heroine of that film.
In the same way, the ending of Avatar, while set-up with care by what came earlier in the film, just wasn’t convincing. In a world where oil is pumping into the ocean, coal mines are exploding from inadequate safety measures, the rain forest is being decimated and rapacious mining interests plunder any area with the slightest bit of commercial value, I find Cameron’s ending stretches my credibility past the breaking point. It’s the ending I want, but it’s not the ending I believe has any chance of happening. It makes me sad.
The dialogue is just adequate. For example, in Crazy Heart, Bad Blake says to the reporter at one point, “I want to talk about how shabby you make this room look,” a line that sticks in your head, and it’s one of several in that film.
Cameron’s dialogue is utilitarian—it moves the characters forward as necessary, but there’s no zing to it. And the characters are likewise just there, with few if any surprises. What makes Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) behave the way she does? Even the character of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is barely developed beyond his disability and his dead brother.
The villains are completely two-dimensional. If Stephen Lang weren’t so good at chewing up the CGI scenery as Col. Miles Quaritch, his character would be laughable; even with the zest he brings to the role, the character is about as trite as they come. In short, Cameron needs to hire a good scriptwriter to polish his dialogue, give the characters some depth (so they will do something that surprises us), and effect a resolution that has some plausibility.
On the other hand, the visuals in the film are so fine everyone should see the film just for them. It’s a game-changing work, and anyone interested in film needs to see it. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: Films are available on DVD or VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films can be found at www.mmnow.com
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