Lisa Cholodenko'sThe Kids Are Alright deserves credit for a few things, not the least of which is that it treats gay marriage as a thing that exists even if it isn't legally recognized. The lesson that Cholodenko should have learned was that this fact alone was not enough to propel a mediocre film to higher places.
Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have been together for two decades. During that time they have raised two children that they sired using donated sperm. Shortly after Joni (Mia Wasikowska) turns 18, her 15 year old brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) talks her into contacting the donation bank to learn the identity of their biological father. Meet Paul (Mark Ruffalo) a restaurant owner and one time sperm donor who will turn their world upside down.
Of course, Nic and Jules are reticent about inviting Paul into their lives and this tension begins to scratch the surface of a union that is already rocky. Nic drinks too much. Jules is flighty and doesn't have a regular job. There are moments of cliched relationship criticism that are designed to not only draw attention to the issues of the connection between these two, but also remind us that marriage is hard.
Jules ends up having a fling with Paul. It's not a question of her becoming interested in men, but she needs someone to have a connection with. Here is where the film asks for narrative forgiveness because its set-up is so unique. It doesn't work. The first 30 minutes of the film do a very nice job establishing that this is a marriage like any other and when it begins to crumble under the weight of mistrust and infidelity it attempts to fall back on the crutch of their relationship's unique ingredients. The problem is that it's difficult to care.
While Moore and Bening are perfectly fine in the film, there just isn't much there to work with. These characters are simply not very engaging and the film plays like a lesbian retelling of a poor John Updike short story. The kids are rebelling in the way that teens rebel against their parents whether they're black or white, gay or straight. But it never goes anywhere. No emotional wells are mined and no truth is ever revealed.
The Kids Are Alright just can't ever seem to make up its mind as to what it wants to grow up to be one day. One moment it's two teens searching for a biological identity. The next it's diving into the deep end of a lesbian marriage and a infidelity saga told like a low-level version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. It's a melange of good ideas and half-starts, but the film is lettered with disappointments, screw-ups and apologies that never seem to be truly honest. Yes, marriage is hard no matter who is involved. As it turns out, so is making a movie about it.
If someone ever made a Rupert Murdoch biopic, they’d have no choice but to compete with Citizen Kane -- and they would come up short. There is no other option; the story of a media tycoon has been told already, and it was done artfully and beautifully enough that in all likelihood no filmmaker will ever surpass it when making a film about a media tycoon. It’s inevitable.
Geniuses, auteurs, propangandists and budding filmmakers have been dutifully making war movies in the 74 years since Jean Renoir made The Grand Illusion. Many of the films made in that time have been truly great, yet in one way or another they are forced to stand in the shadow of this World War I epic.
After their plane is shot down over enemy territory during a reconnaisance mission, Lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin), a blue collar pilot and his commanding officer, the refined, upper class Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) find themselves in the custody of the German army. Because they’re officers they are well treated and they find compatriots in their fellow French captives. Renoir displays a wonderful knack for using humor and music to convey the bond between the imprisoned men without giving his audience the mistaken impression that the life in camp is simple and easy. Food is shipped in to their well heeled bunk mate Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) and they have blankets, books and a stove. Things could be worse. Yet, they are not free. Naturally, they attempt to escape.
Their plan is to dig a tunnel under the barracks (sound familiar?) that leads to the outside garden and from there they can sprint to their freedom. However, before they can implement their plan to completion, the prisoners are packed up and shipped off to another camp deep inside the German lines.
It is in the new camp that Capitan Boeldieu has the added benefit of finding himself in the generous good graces of his captor Captain von Rauffenstein played with an elegant vigor by Erich von Stroheimm. Rauffenstein senses an immediate connection with Boeldieu because they share a bond of old world class and all the proper social graces. The two share cigars and talk about life before the war. These sequences not only reinforce the class warfare angle in the film -- which never becomes boorish -- but also help to greatly humanize the German captor. Stroheimm’s effortless ease with multiple languages and his empathy for his new French friend make him seem the most cosmopolitan and gentle warden one could possibly imagine, furthering the sensation of absurdity in wartime mores. It is also a marvelous device to display the identical nature of the day to day life of the French and German soldier before they were charged with killing each other. These are just a hint of the brilliantly subtle masterstrokes used by Renoir to make his anti-war statements without ever stooping to soapbox aggrandizement.
Boeldieu eventually uses cunning and his connections with Rauffenstein to give his comrades Marechal and Rosenthal an opportunity to escape. The sequence that follows is a simultaneously thrilling escape scene and an exceedingly poignant display of selflessness. In Renoir’s capable hands, the mood is never overstated nor does the action ever become didactic. Renoir doesn’t merely explore these themes of sacrifice, duty and the struggle of survival, he reinvents them; shattering preconceived notions on the barbarism of war and the cut and dried natures of its participants.
Gabin and Fresnay are wonderful together. Their class differences supply the subtext for virtually every interaction they share without falling into tedium. And while there is never any actual rift between the two, this separation of upbringing translates into wonderfully palpable tension between a pair of soldiers angling for the same gain; their own freedom.
The supporting cast is astonishingly good, especially Dita Parlo who plays the lonely farm woman Elsa. Her beautifully quiet presence is a beacon in the last third of the film and she shines within every frame that she occupies.
This is Gabin’s film though, and he flourishes. He is at times coarse and vulgar, other times lovable and humble. It's an emotional honesty and profundity that is rare and almost non-existent in today's cinema. Gabin’s Lt. Marechal contains a complexity so richly honest he forges a completely visceral presence on-screen.
Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece is perhaps the finest film ever made about war, but maybe even more lastingly, it also defined many of the individual aspects of the entire genre. There are prison break sequences that helped to set a course for films like The Great Escape. The boredom and comraderie of POW life displayed so artfully here are echoed throughout Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17. Many of Renoir's anti-war devices are also implemented quite well into anti-war classics like Breaker Morant and Paths Of Glory. And these examples can only begin to scratch the surface of its sphere of influence.
Much like Casablancaafter it, The Grand Illusion has been copied so many times because it is so perfect. Every worthwhile war film made since seems merely to be an homage to this peerless classic. And Renoir does it all with fewer than ten gunshots. How's that for efficiency? If war films were lightbulbs, Jean Renoir would be Thomas Alva Edison.
The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (1973) directed by Peter Yates
Robert Mitchum’s quiet and shabbily dignified Eddie Coyle is well aware of the score; he is about to go to prison after getting busted driving a truck full of stolen goods. The sentence is likely to be two years and when he goes away, his wife and children will have no choice but to go on welfare. In Coyle’s eyes, needing a hand out for his family is a much bigger disgrace than a two year stay in the pen. But he’s not bitter. This is how things go when you’re in the business of small time crime.
Unlike other cinematic gangster types, Coyle has no appetite for the big score or the long con. He leaves the machinations of big crime to the idea men. In one of the film’s early scenes, Eddie tells a young buck gun runner about the time when his fingers were crushed in a drawer as punishment for a screw up on a job that landed the wrong guy in jail. Mitchum relays this tale in an utterly non-dramatic and unsympathetic way. To Coyle this is a lesson he learned the hard way and he plans not to repeat the experience again.
The narrative weaves between a trio of bank robbers (one played by Alex Rocco) that Eddie is supplying guns to as he attempts to stockpile cash before he heads to prison; bar owner/Fed informant/gun for hire Dillon (Peter Boyle); a conniving US Treasury agent Dave Foley (Richard Jordan) and the youthful and brash gun peddler that Coyle gets his weapons from.
It’s the treasury agent that becomes the thread that weaves all these lives in tighter with the cloth of Eddie Coyle. A promise of reprieve from his prison sentence is held over Coyle’s head if he can prove to “Uncle” that he is working on their behalf. The closer the prison stay gets the more Eddie considers handing some of his “friends” over to Uncle if only to help protect his family. This inner dilemma becomes interspersed with the comings and goings of Eddie’s colleagues to create a pitch point of culmination in the film’s final 30 minutes.
The Friends Of Eddie Coyle is a beautiful film to look at, despite its bleak and sometimes hopeless story. Yates masterfully captures the early 1970s Boston crime world with peeks into parking lot meet-ups, stakeouts, pool halls and dive bars. This is a blue collar crime world where these men would be going to work in a ship yard or a steel mill were they not gangsters. The crime here is not elegant. These are men of meager aspirations. At one point, Coyle waxes poetic about being able to have enough money to retire to Florida. It’s a humble goal and the subtext of Mitchum’s delivery belies Eddie’s own realization that the dream will never, ever become reality.
This is not a perfect film. Too much attention is paid to the bank robber angle and the details of three separate jobs they pull. Yates handles these scenes with a certain panache and they are done quite well for what they are, but they remove us from the Coyle story line and after more than one sequence they become redundant. Dave Grusin’s score is also terribly distracting and utterly out of touch with the film’s make-up and characters. A vaguely funk-oriented instrumental soundtrack that might have worked brilliantly in other films of the time, here just seems out of place and haphazard.
The film’s climactic sequences (no spoilers) seems almost anti-climactic by the time it arrives. Yet Yates builds suspense and tension by incorporating a Bruins game at Boston Garden into the mix. Dillon remarks at seeing Bobby Orr, “What is that kid, 24? What a future he’s got.” It’s a future that Coyle and his “friends” will never have. It is a future of security, peace and prosperity.
In the world of Eddie Coyle, no one tells the truth. At least not the whole truth. The only real and genuinely ardent fact in Eddie’s immediate realm is that he’s stuck in his early 50s with a dead end dilemma that allows for no easy choices.
Ultimately, it is Mitchum’s restrained and toughly honest performance that elevates The Friends Of Eddie Coyle to be greater than the sum of its parts. Dignified gangsters who live by a jagged criminal code are a dime a dozen, but Eddie Coyle carves out a niche in the genre because he's not hunting for respect or hustling to move a rung up the ladder. He is genuinely trying to do things the right way in the only ways he knows how. The decisions are flawed and the results are doom-like. The path to hell is paved with the best of intentions.
There is a scene in The Runaways that takes place in a beaten down, gutted out trailer that doubles as a rehearsal space in which producer/guru/Rasputin Kim Fowley, played with verve if not subtlety by Michael Shannon, barks at his young teen girl proteges and instructs them in the ways that rock and roll is hard. He intones to them that they need scream their feelings and they hit their audiences hard and with brutal and breaking honesty. This scene is replayed at least three times throughout the film. It's a schlocky mantra that becomes played long before you've heard the end of it for the first time. More importantly, it also rings extremely hollow and contradictory as the story unfolds.
The story, if one can be so kind as to call it that, revolves almost exclusively on the relationship between Runaways lead singer, Cherrie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). We watch stock footage of their failures and their awkwardness as LA teens. We see Currie's mother announce she's jetting off to live in Indonesia with her new husband, but Currie and her sister must stay behind. A scene plays out in which Jett is accosted for attempting to play electric guitar in a lesson and she leaves in a huff offended by the sexism of her instructor. Currie gets booed off the stage at her high school talent show. In essence it's the distillation of dozens of biopics and coming of age tales told by rote in a rigid and unimaginative fashion. While it's only exposition, by the time we get to any actual plot development, the film already seems bloated and floating face down in its own vomit pool.
Fowley happens upon the girls at a nightclub and hatches a plan to start the first all girl rock band. This is the first of many instances in which the angle of "girl power" is wildly subverted. Fowley, a creepy and selfish man if we're to learn anything from his on-screen portrayal, molds these young ladies into his nubile quintet of sex kittens for the rock and roll masses. He's peddling a product even if they're aiming for something higher.
Fanning and Stewart are workmanlike in their performances and they can hardly be blamed for the film's numerous shortcomings. It's quite obvious they are making the best of a bad situation and there are even a couple of moments where Fanning rises above the din to let out a spark of what's possible in there somewhere if only someone could eke it out to words on a page and good directorial note. But the script paints nearly all of the major players as exaggerated one note versions of real people and creates almost no nuance or subtext to any moment or conversation. If the actual Runaways were this vapid, drug addled and clueless, they'd never have made it out of that trailer.
The film does look quite good visually, though. The deep red hues and golden touches in the set pieces in the film and much of the cinematography touch nicely upon an idealized version of 1970s America and it works well with the motif of the picture. Several of the concert sequences are well filmed too, but none of this can hope to save The Runaways from being anything more than a hackneyed biopic with a pleasant plastic sheen over its top.
An glammed up look at the short life of the original Runaways lineup, on the surface, might have been a good idea at one time or another. But, with this telling, the shine quickly fades. Most of the storylines seem long exhausted before they ever get started and are riddled with cliche; drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, parental abandonment and the desire for a teenager to find her own voice all get the typical treatment without any sense of irony, self-discovery, true redemption or any greater meaning at all. It is simply told as a straightforward, chronological tale of a band, of its rise and its fall. It's either told all wrong, or its just a very boring and obvious story.
Le Samourai (1967) directed by Jean Pierre Melville
It takes a man with a great deal of self-confidence and a true sense of his own vision to invent a line from the book of Bushido and then use it as an ethos for his film. Jean Pierre Melville is such a man. At the outset of the 1967 hitman tone poem that is Le Samourai, Melville does just that. The entire opening credits sequence is a static shot of a dilapidated apartment that contains seemingly nothing. It's a simple shot of a man lying on a bed smoking in the dark. The room is cold and dank. There is no score playing. Rain can be heard through the slightly opened window. Cars drive by in the rain and their shadows bounce off the ceiling while a lonely bird flutters in a cage set upon a table just left center-screen. After the credits are finished, a proverb appears in the lower right hand corner:
"There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it be that of the tiger in the jungle ... perhaps ... - The book of Bushido (Book of the Samurai)."
The line is a ruse. Melville simply conjured the line as an umbrella for the film's primary theme. Nowhere in the Book of Bushido does this proverb actually appear. Yet, it is with this sort of mind game trickery that Melville begins his hard boiled opus. And that is all the more to prove his point . . . perhaps.
The idea of killing simply for money is antithetical altogether with the code of the Samurai, who kills for his honor and with ethical conviction, but our anti-hero in Le Samourai is a paid assassin and he's a very good one. While there is no way to know if Melville was aware of the contradiction between his main character and the actual philosophy of the traditional Samurai, in Melville's hands everything seems like a stylized mash-up as only he could see it. In this way, the false Bushido proverb resonates almost more than if it had been real to begin with.
Our Samurai, Jef Costello is played flawlessly by Alain Delon. At first blush Delon looks all wrong for Costello. He's dashing, quiet and confident. For all the reasons that Robert Mitchum or Yves Montand or Humphrey Bogart could pull off a role like this, Delon seems to be miscast. And yet, because he looks so terrific he is forced to overcompensate with a stoicism, a lack of true expression and a detachment that translates perfectly to Melville's theme of solitutde and duty. This approach also allows for Costello to become an almost voyeur of his own behavior bringing the viewer even closer to him in a co-dependent fashion.
Costello is hired to kill a club owner and the only reliable eyewitness to the crime is the club's pianist. Yet, when a harsh interrogation yields nothing from the eyewitness, Costello is left to wonder why he's let of the hook - though he never interprets the pianist's failure to finger him as a gesture of kindness. In essence, he plays the angles; curious as to what greater motivation would be the impetus to keep Jef on the streets.
Costello has manufactured a nearly air-tight alibi with the help of his sometime girlfriend, Jane (Nathalie Delon) Costello and is still doggedly pursued by a Police Superintendent (Francois Perier). It is in this duel of Costello vs. Cops that Melville's inner Kafka truly takes over and Le Samourai begins its transformation from simply a good crime film into something of a higher power. The extensive visual groundwork thus far laid - images of a bird trapped in a cage, the lonely apartment room and Costello's detachment from society - excavate a deeper well of existential dilemmas. Using the paid hitman as a foil, Melville explores the lonely concept of one man against the world and the futility of duty without a greater meaning.
In an interview for French TV in 1967 just prior to the film's release, Delon says that the film is about loneliness. While he's very much on the mark with that statement, it's also like saying Babe Ruth was very good baseball player. It's factually accurate, yet overly simplified. Melville's exercises in exploring the characters of loneliness are always so damned artful and sleek and beautifully rigid the depth of them is lost - on the surface at least. This is just one of the things that makes them truly great.
In a deceptively quiet and simple moment, Delon is dressing his arm after he's wounded in a scuffle. He methodically cleans the wound, drapes it in gauze and wraps an outer layer of tape and dressing over the bandaged area. He does not panic, though he is certainly emotionally affected. He does not moan or wince though he is certainly in pain. The scene is like watching a tribesman walk over hot coals. The suffering is a part of the journey and there are lessons to be garnered within it. Moments like these are myriad in Le Samourai and they're easy to miss or undervalue. Melville is a master at creating so many of these moments that we are permitted to see beyond the window of the narrative arc even if it we don't fully realize it at the time.
There is an almost maniacal pathos in Melville's attention to detail as he creates an underworld that is largely a nod to American film noirnoir elements with the stark designs of late 60's Europe and a knack for a timeless sense of slick fashion with a private eye bent. In short, it all looks utterly beautiful and dangerously erotic.
It's the beauty of the film and Delon's asexual power that allow the visual nature of LeSamourai to sneakily reinforce the overarching theme of the film, even if that theme is fabricated in Melville's own mind. Loneliness, of course, is not an unusual subject for the cinema, nor is the lone man crime thriller. However, in Melville's hands, this meta-mash-up of street crime, existential meaning, the loneliness of life and hyper-real set pieces comes off the screen as a genre all its own. Le Samourai is an obvious influence on filmmakers like John Woo, Quentin Tarantino and served as an enormous inspiration for Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai. It's hard to create a new language within the gangster movie genre and Melville does so brilliantly. It seems even more impressive that he started just by inventing one little proverb for the Book of Bushido.
