| While it would be difficult to confuse Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson on the basis of anything other than their surnames, both the Valley film geek (P.T.) and the Texas film geek (Wes) inspire a similar calm in their audiences, a comforting awareness that their magnificent, all-encompassing sensibilities are in full control. From the first frame of P.T.’s latest, Punch-Drunk Love, one becomes aware that the director is an auteur in the deepest sense, intuitively understanding the relation between image, dialogue, music, light, and all the other myriad factors that make up the cinematic experience in a way that more veteran directors would give their left Ferrari for. For those of you who hoped the film would resolve that eternal question, “What’s a filmmaker like P.T. Anderson doing with a shlub like Adam Sandler?” it doesn’t. The mysteriousness of Anderson’s interest in Sandler persists, and yet—the movie works. Sandler’s electric-blue suit and perpetually glazed expression become contemporarily iconic, and the film’s evocation of the astonishing, alien nature of blossoming love is truly touching. The long shot of Sandler and Emily Watson meeting in Hawaii, where his polite handshake becomes an embrace, is a reminder that filmmaking, at its best, is like alchemy—creating something golden out of the mundane.
—SAUL AUSTERLITZ (top)
ARARAT
(2002, Miramax, $29.99)
In 2002 two acclaimed filmmakers made extremely personal films about recent ethnic genocides. One was awarded with the Palme d’Or and an Academy Award for Best Director. The other was lambasted for his didacticism and largely abandoned by the viewing public. Here’s hoping that Atom Egoyan’s Ararat finds its audience on home video. The format serves the picture well, for as much as it is an epic, it is an epic of intimacies. The film takes place in present-day Canada, but is concerned with the past, when the Turkish government effectively annihilated it’s Armenian population in 1915. Turkey has officially denied the atrocity, leaving generations of displaced Armenians struggling to reconcile their present lives with the horrors of the past. The story is close to the writer-director’s heart, himself a Canadian of Armenian decent.
Egoyan carefully crafts his screenplays like spider webs, with ellipses that intersect and eventually find a unifying terminus. The events of Ararat center around the production of a film about the genocide, focusing by turns on the film-within-the-filmmakers, an Armenian scholar and technical advisor to the film, her son who may or may not be a heroin smuggler, and the customs agent who is determined to find out. Unlike the director’s twin masterworks, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, some of Ararat’s narrative strands fall flat. But in dealing with the difficulties in representing history and the lingering effects of an unspeakable tragedy (even on people half a world and nearly a century removed) Egoyan creates a film of lasting emotional resonance. Ararat bears witness for the voiceless victims of the 20th century’s forgotten genocide.
I first saw the film during its opening weekend in a theater near L.A.’s Little Armenia. The house was full, and I was one of the few non-Armenians in attendance. It was a generational affair, viewers ranged from preteens to their wheelchair bound great-grandparents. As the closing credits rolled, Ararat received sustained respectful applause. This was a film many had been waiting their entire lives to see. To criticize its didacticism is to negate its raison d’etre. Ararat may not be Egoyan’s best film, but it is easily his most passionate.
—DAVID CONNELLY (top)
INTACTO
(2002, Lion’s Gate, $24.99)
Positing every life decision as the result of mere luck, director Juan-Carlos Fresnadillo effectively eradicates morality and choice as indicators/by-products of humanity. And not just that: in Fresnadillo’s fantasy world, luck is a germ that can be gleaned off of someone else and appropriated. It could easily be read off as a disturbing, irresponsible metaphor for “bug-chasing,” already disturbing and irresponsible enough a lifestyle, but the film goes one step further: the grand poobah of this ragtag clan of underground luck-suckers, the “luckiest man on Earth,” played by coughing, crusty Max Von Sydow, is a Holocaust survivor! Yes that’s right, take it from Fresnadillo—genocide survival is that reducible. In the defining scene, this “lucky” bunch runs at full throttle blindfolded through a dense forest, hoping not to smash head-first into a tree. The director is similarly blindfolded throughout—dodging niggling details like emotional context and ethical quandary at every turn. Jacques Demy ironically wove questions of coincidence and fate into rich tapestries of moral consequence and small-scale tragedy; in this post-Amelie, post-PT Anderson landscape, this is strictly film school stuff, trendy and self-regarding. Its half-assed, bemused sci-fi framework seems like something Charlie Kaufman wrote at age 8, and actually left at the bottom of his night table drawer.
—MICHAEL KORESKY (top)
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA
(1984, Warner Bros, $26.99)
For his slyly political Scope comic books of a Cinecitta West conjured from grandiosely recalled childhood serials, Sergio Leone may be remembered as the penultimate director of movie-movies, but in his final decades-in-the-making effort the filmmaker took a downright literary turn. Leone’s sole outing into the other unmistakably American genre is a huge, woozy, opium-scented thing that reverently and lovingly exhumes pieces of classical gangster and noir films (Fred Zinnmeman’s Act of Violence, among others) and replays them, poker-faced, through a lyric filter of Dickens, Gatsby, and Proust (“What’ve you been doin’?” “Been goin’ to bed early,” goes one exchange early in the film). The result is something uniquely beguiling and labyrinthine; you can try to hold on to a different one of its thematic threads with each viewing, only to be hypnotized and submerged as they tangle, unsnarl, and finally dead-end into the dumb grin of Robert De Niro’s Noodles. Along the way you get popcorn American history, startling sepia sexual candor, rumination on the vagaries of memory, the immortal Tuesday Weld as a jazzy, jizzy nympho, and, yes, more than a few stillborn subplots that sputter off into the nouveau night. The 229-minute film contained on this DVD is the longest ever domestically available, but adds only a few minutes of graphic violence to the long-standard “Director’s Cut.” One is left only to imagine the fabled version of 40+ minutes greater length. Very simply one of the finest filmic achievements of the Eighties or any decade, Once Upon a Time in America could only grow greater with its girth.
—NICK PINKERTON (top)
UMBERTO D
(1952, Criterion, $39.99)
Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, the director and writer of Umberto D, dreamed of one day making a film that would be the ne plus ultra of Italian neorealism. In it, the camera would follow one individual for exactly two hours. Not possessing any prior knowledge of their history or personality, the spectator would watch a small chunk of their lives. At the end of the allotted time, the film would end. No conflict, no resolution, no three-act storyarc—just the life of the common man onscreen. De Sica and Zavattini never got the chance to realize this dream project, but its closest relative is the effulgent Umberto D. The title character, a retired Roman, suffers the slings and arrows of everyday fortune, buoyed only by the presence of his preternaturally perky dog Flick. The film’s humanist perspective allows it to avoid the Big Statement in an effort to detail the specifics of untrammelled reality. Umberto’s strained circumstances are captured expertly by De Sica’s direction— you can practically touch the peeling paint on the walls of his rooms. The closing sequence, where Umberto loses, and then recovers, Flick, is a release of all the emotion patiently stored up by the filmmakers over the course of the film, and here it becomes evident that Umberto is one of the great characters of the cinema. Even De Sica and Zavattini’s resplendent Bicycle Thieves cannot match Umberto D’s quotidian radiance.
—SAUL AUSTERLITZ (top) |
