I can't muster much energy in reaction to Noah Baumbach's Margot At The Wedding, which takes the director's previous focus on bourgeoisie malaise to new and unpleasant heights. It provoked a visceral reaction in Armond White though, whose incredibly entertaining review is below.
Self-Punishment:
Noah Baumbach is the Lars Von Trier of Brooklyn and the Hamptons
by Armond WhiteNoah Bambauch makes it easy to dislike his films. Problem is, he also makes it easy for New York’s media elite to praise them. Start with his style: The Squid and the Whale and Baumbach’s new Margot at the Wedding are two of the decade’s most repellent movies. Visually, both look like mud; their smart-ass, low-budget affectations (shot by high-price cinematographers) bridge lo-fi mumblecore with Conde Nast hipsterism. This anti-aesthetic lays waste to the bromide that nobody sets out to intentionally make a bad movie; Baumbach does. His deliberate ugliness makes him the Lars Von Trier of Brooklyn and the Hamptons.
Baumbach’s characters—picked from New York’s self-punishing literary class—are also repellent. Not since Woody Allen’s Big Apple reign in the 1980s has a filmmaker so shamelessly flattered the professional classes in the guise of exposing them. Baumbach labels their tales with haughty movie titles that are actually New Yorker magazine short-story code, referencing a style of middle-class entitlement and smirk.
Margot at the Wedding is imitation-Salinger, pitting two sisters, novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her artistically floundering older sibling Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who are lifelong cat-fighters. When the sisters reunite for Pauline’s Hamptons marriage to Malcolm (Jack Black), a failed musician, they greet each other with hostile quips about incest, rape, betrayal, loneliness and the inferior mob.
We’ve seen these skittish hateful chicks before, in Woody Allen’s laughable Interiors, but Allen was weaned on the crisis-and-catharsis mode of Ingmar Bergman movies; Baumbauch, the post-Boomer scion of film critics, stays cool. Not sentimental like Allen, or haunted by religious guilt like Bergman, he’s free to be intellectually skeevy. He makes Pauline and Margot reprehensible as a sign of his daring artistic cruelty.
Sure enough, morons think Baumbach’s deep because he wallows in unsightly “truths,” but creatures like Margot and Pauline can be dismissed as dime-store Freud. “What was it about Dad that had us fucking so many guys?” Pauline wonders; and at a public reading of her fiction, Margot pleads for her autobiographical protagonist, “a loathsome character yet we feel a strange sympathy for him.” Both personalities are recognizable—but preferably at distance. Baumbach rubs our noses in their stench through some mixed-up notion that their bad behavior is unconscious and fascinating. But to hear characters brag “I haven’t had that thing yet where you realize you’re not the most important person in the world” or “He’s not ugly, he’s just completely unattractive” is not amusing. It’s a dreary experience.
Appointing himself cinematic enabler to New York’s most obnoxious people, Baumbach makes it obvious that each sister represents one side of his own psyche—just as the parents in Squid and the Whale were embarrassing family self-portraits. He pretends messy Margot and persnickety Pauline are worth our attention because they’re so pathological: They berate each other (and Pauline scolds her androgynous teenage son) fearful that despite advantages of education and money, they’re both really mediocre.
But Margot at the Wedding isn’t a story of neurotics struggling to be loved; it’s an example of Baumbach struggling to validate middlebrow narcissism. He perverts lessons in humanity taught by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and even Wes Anderson, the great visionaries of American family and class warfare. But notice: Baumbach’s sympathy for the devil never extends outside his clan (Pauline’s Hamptons neighbors are depicted as violent weirdos—carnivores!). He domesticates bigotry. The kitchen confrontation between Pauline and Malcolm is a case-in-point: It’s not an ethical, emotional trade-off; each cowardly egotist talks at cross purposes through Baumbach’s smug dialog. He’s always looking for malice and humiliation, as when a rat is discovered at the bottom of the family swimming pool.
Kidman tries making Margot pitiable, but she remains a cold actress. Brave Jennifer Jason Leigh, the finest film actress of the ’90s, gets disgraced. Baumbach not only turns Leigh’s fearlessness into Isabelle Huppert-style masochism, he offends her person with a scene where Pauline shits her panties. And we see it. Baumbach can’t guide us through troubled emotions like O’Neill, Williams and Anderson; he leads us into the shallow end of arrogance, conceit and ugliness. The rat at the bottom of the pool is Baumbach himself.
Jumper is a monumentally stupid movie about a guy with god-like powers who uses them to look cool standing in front of tourist attractions. It's going for the "superheroes without capes" thing that people seem to be into right now, and it succeeds admirably at achieving that misguided objective.
I feel bad for Hayden Christensen, I really do. In role after role, you can see him struggle valiantly under the weight of "words" and "movement". He's trying so hard, acting the hell out of every syllable, but he's never been able to transcend the whiny male model caste into which he was born. Sorry, dude. You are probably a fine human being, but you are a terrible actor. Christensen plays David, whose ability to teleport at will is discovered by the EVIL (he's so EVIL!) Roland Cox (Samuel L. Jackson). Roland is a "Paladin", part of a religious order that kills "Jumpers" because they regard their power as an abomination. So David goes on the run, taking his high school crush Millie (Rachel Bilson) along for the ride... because... umm...
They have sex, presumably only because they are pretty and in Rome and The Fray is playing on the soundtrack, and soon she's mixed up in his crazy teleporters-vs.-people-who-don't-like-teleporters-war. Some things happen, and then the movie is over.
Someone who seems to revel in the inanity of this whole enterprise is Samuel L. Jackson, who is hellbent on joining Christopher Walken as a walking monument to ridiculousness. But he's a lot more fun when he's not winking at the camera, and in Jumper he's too busy being crazy to wink. With white hair and a menacing growl, Jackson brings ten times the inherent watchability that Christensen commands to the screen. And there is this moment, this amazing moment, when he realizes that he's (spoiler, I guess) gotten his comeuppance, and the look on his face is one of the most incredible things I've seen on film for a while. Oh man, is it good.
Between this and 1408, the man's nearly succeeded at cornering the market on completely insane performances in sub-par genre movies. Hell, even his prestige performances (Pulp Fiction, Black Snake Moan) build their respectability on a foundation of trashy crap. Huh. Weird. That probably means something about something.
The director is Doug Liman, who made Swingers, The Bourne Identity (good, but easily the worst of the three), and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (blargh). While I always tried to tell myself that Swingers was about the unsatisfying hollowness of its main characters' affected neo-retro style, it's getting harder and harder to reconcile that line of thinking with his growing catalog. I still like Swingers (bunches), but I think it might have just been intended to look cool. Looking cool seems to be Doug Liman's chief auteurial concern.
There's a directness to Jumper that I liked a lot. Not having
been based on an iconic pre-existing property, the film quickly
establishes the power, the villain, and the conflict, and we're off. It
doesn't get bogged down in superfluous fanboy shout-outs ("They're fighting a Sentinel in the Danger Room!") or ineffective gravitas.
That said, Jumper buys into the trendy notion that robbing
superheroes of their inherent absurdity, that grounding them in "the
real world", is necessary to make them palatable to a 21st century
audience. As with Heroes, "As long as they're not wearing masks
or capes or underwear on the outside of their pants, the audience will eat whatever shit we feed them,"
seems to be the rule. But let's be honest, is this movie any less
idiotic because it's not called Jumper-Man? The filmmakers seem to think that it is, but I disagree.
By way of an update to my previous post: Friday Night Lights is coming back. Here's hoping that Season Three remembers to not be terrible. Season Two forgot.
Oh man, I'm funny.
The musical biopic has enjoyed such success as a genre only because the filmmaker autobiopic isn't yet a marketable option. So much ego and artistic masturbation is poured into the genre's masterworks, whether it's Taylor Hackford's Ray or last year's love letter to layered appreciation, I'm Not There (Todd Haynes).
OK, to be fair, I haven't seen I'm Not There yet. Maybe it's good.
Anton Corbijn's Control is the story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division. And for a film about a band that's as consequential as they were, Control is surprisingly tolerable.
Sam Riley is Ian, the unknowable and ultimately doomed genius, while Samantha Morton is his wife Deborah. And that's key. Because while most musical biopics relegate the bedraggled first wife to a supporting role in the first twenty minutes (a trope that Kristin Wiig worked magic with in Walk Hard), Deborah Curtis looms large in Control, larger than Ian at times.
Most of what I know about Joy Division comes from listening to their progeny (Interpol, et al.) and from Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, so I don't come to this with the baggage that some might. But neither does Corbijn, I'd argue, and that's a hell of a feat considering the fact that he directed videos for them. While Joy Division's music is central, of course, it never steals the spotlight from character. In Walk The Line, we get to watch the supposedly history-of-musical-expression-altering moment that Johnny Cash momentously farted out the title song. There's much less of that bullshit here. The music exists, and it is great, but no sequences are built around explicating it, and the film is more concerned with the relationship between Ian and Deborah. The black and white photography is gorgeous, and the film fails to indulge in the "wages of fame" self-pity that's so prevalent these days that it's invisible. Control would almost work if it were complete fiction, a litmus test that should be applied to prevent the next fake memoir debacle.
I say "almost" because there's still that whole romantic doomed artist thing. But when Control veers too close to that brink, Samantha Morton pulls us back. Cause she's just the shit, and her work gives Deborah Curtis the weight that she, and many other put-upon first wives of asshole musicians, richly deserve.
Paranoid Park is at once a hollow non-event and a completely entrancing piece of thing. Gus Van Sant's latest meditation on beautiful young people doing awful things or having awful things done to them really had its way with me, much more so than his similarly oblique Elephant.
The pretty boy here is Gabe Nevins, who has a face that's as emotive as a Staples catalog. But that's the whole point. The non-performances that Van Sant is able to coax from his young actors are always much more effective than the alternative, anyway.
Nevins is Alex, a pubescent skateboarder, and a cypher upon whom his parents project the guilt they feel over their divorce, his girlfriend projects her desire to cross the sex barrier, and his little brother projects his need to talk about Napoleon Dynamite. But who is Alex? What does he want? Just to be left alone with his skateboard, it seems. Van Sant cuts around a central traumatic event that Alex is running from. Something unspeakable happened at the skateboard park of the film's title, and Alex becomes even more of a blank slate than he was before as details eke slowly from Van Sant's cubist construction. (I know there's actually an accepted definition of film cubism, and that's not what I'm talking about).
While another director would probably have focused on fleshing out "the skateboard community", the very notion seems antithetical to these boys' existence. It's an idea laughed at when the investigating detective brings it up, and Van Sant does well to avoid that cliché in favor of his main character.
Christopher Doyle, the legendary DP who shot Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love and Van Sant's amazing Psycho remake, might want to think about sticking to the Pacific Northwest, because his work has rarely looked more beautiful. And that's saying something. Or at least I hope it is.
There's a lot of lovely dissonance going on, a tension created between sound and picture that, at one point, called to mind a friend's experience of seeing the last reel of 300 with a different' reel's soundtrack, something that he at first thought was an intentional move to create dialectical perfection before he realized that it was just the theater's incompetence at work. That's just a long way of saying that "the sound was weird". Whereas the use of Elliott Smith's "Angeles" in Van Sant's Good Will Hunting strikes a lot of people as cloying, employing the same song here seems like more of a comment on the use of Elliott Smith's "Angeles", and breaks all the momentum that a montage is supposed to be so good at creating. From Billy Swan's "I Can Help" to Nino Rota's Juliet of the Spirits score, the music (and use of sound as a whole, come to think of it) only serves to underscore the unsettling absence of guidance and that informs everything Paranoid Park is about.
Written at Caitlin's request:
In Chris Gorak's Right At Your Door, dirty bombs explode in downtown Los Angeles, rendering everything fucked for everyone. Like Civic Duty, the film is a weird exercise in liberal fear-mongering, a clinical and unremarkable examination of a world where "everything changed after 9/11" and "if we _____________, haven't the terrorists already won?"
Rory Cochrane (who I had confused with Kevin Corrigan, so that was a disappointment) plays Brad, unemployed and financially dependent on his upwardly mobile wife Lexi (Mary McCormack). She's on her way to work when the bombs go off, and Brad is left in the hills to wonder whether or not she survived. Soon, it becomes clear that the bombs released a lethal pathogen, and Brad seals up the house. Lexi shows up, Brad is forced to decide things about things, the government is soulless, blah blah blah...
There's about 20 minutes of material here stretched to 90, and while I'm totally willing to admit that the ground-level terrorist strike thing is completely effective in freaking me right the fuck out, I don't need more stress in my life. I've got dogs for that.
Number of F bombs dropped: 2
Number of good movies reviewed: 0
Few things make me as happy as this video does.
