3 posts tagged “harris savides”
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.
Man oh man, I love Zodiac.
David Fincher, who's responsible for the melodramatic and mythological Se7en, seems here to be issuing a cinematic retraction. In that film, the killer and the detectives hunting him are locked in an existential battle; Morgan Freeman's very soul seems to be at stake (along with Brad Pitt's sanity). And while the ending of Se7en may feel unsatisfying moralistically (Our guys won the day, but did they really?), it at least leaves the viewer with clear questions with which to grapple (and, if we're being honest, pretty obvious answers). Was the fanatical hunt worth the personal cost? (No.) Was justice truly done? (No.) Did the serial killer "win"? (Yes.)
Zodiac, on the other hand, refuses to elevate its subject towards the easy or archetypal, wallowing happily in the tedious procedure of the case's actual events for well over two hours. Jake Gyllenhaal is Robert Graysmith, the San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist who becomes obsessed with the city's resident homicidal maniac. Mark Ruffalo is Inspector Dave Toschi, the detective who spends most of the film trapped in bureaucratic coordination hell, not leaping over moonlit rooftops with his gun drawn (Fincher draws the parallel kind of obviously with the character's incredulity towards a newly released Dirty Harry). And Robert Downey Jr. is loose cannon reporter Paul Avery, whose descent into madness and ultimate obsolescence is one of the film's great tragedies.
It's a serial killer film in name only, avoiding all of the stylistic trappings of the genre so that the murky reality of procedure is allowed to fester in the mind of the viewer. Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt so effectively convey the paranoia and dissatisfaction that drives Graysmith for years after the murders seem to have stopped. The director's stylistic impositions coalesce beautifully with a script that doesn't indulge them, so that Graysmith following another dead-end lead in a cinephile's basement becomes a terrifying crystallization of uncertainty and fear.
I can't figure it out. The film sprawls without focus far past the two hour mark. There is an unhealthy attachment to history, a crime that shitty biopics usually commit without compunction. And yet, Zodiac is the best movie of 2007. I have no answers. Neither does Zodiac. Oh!
I've been really surprised to see it on so many top-ten lists these past few weeks. I honestly thought that I was unique in my appreciation, and I'll admit that I was excited by the fact that the film was so roundly dismissed by audiences upon its release. Here's a movie whose merits I could proselytize, an exciting discovery hidden in plain sight. But I guess I wasn't the only one, and for that I'm truly glad.
I've seen the film three or four times now, but I'm really looking forward to watching the new director's cut that's just come out. Nine more minutes of Jake Gyllenhaal reading files! Nine more minutes of Robert Downey Jr. verging on incoherence! Nine more minutes of the maddeningly inconclusive!
When the most interesting portion of a film's story is conveyed in "Where Are They Now?" subtitles during the final thirty seconds, you know you're in trouble. Although you probably should have realized you'd be in trouble walking into a movie called American Gangster, a title that clearly illustrates the misplaced reverence and beat-you-over-the-head "American Mythology" that the movie delivers.
Ridley Scott's American Gangster could've been made by one of its titular character's flunkies, it's so fawning and flattering. Sure, Denzel Washington's Frank Lucas is a drug dealer, but never forget that he's just an African-American businessman serving the people, rising above, operating according to his principles. He and the detective who's after him are different sides of the same principled coin, which is why they get on so famously when they finally meet up some time after the two hour mark.
I'm serious when I say that the first two hours and twenty minutes of this movie are superfluous at best.
There's a story (maybe apocryphal, as I can't find the quote) that Harrison Ford criticized his character in Blade Runner as a "detective who doesn't do any detecting". By comparison, Russell Crowe's Richie Roberts makes Ford's Rick Deckard look like Hercule Poirot. Roberts' main accomplishment is finding out his quarry's name, from which the pieces fall into place for him and his scrappy band of honest cops. Richie is that rare clean cop, something we are shown early on and then told a dozen times throughout the film. "Remember when Richie didn't take home that trunkload of cash?" Yes. It was twenty minutes ago. I just saw it. And then you told me twice. I remember. When Roberts isn't sitting in a room letting the investigation come to him, he's dealing with his tattered personal life. Oh boy is his personal life in shambles. I understand. And I don't really care.
To be fair, Crowe and Washington are both interesting to watch, although it's the most conscious I've been of "acting craft" being exercised since Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett caterwauled at one another in Babel.
There are extended sequences of cash porn, shots of greasy thousand dollar stacks shot from as many angles as could be conceived of by Scott and cinematographer Harris Savides (Zodiac, Elephant). There is a period soundtrack to convey CONTEXT IN BIG LETTERS, there are "heavy" sequences of G.I. drug use. Plenty of opportunities for tension are discarded in favor of what must be slavish attention to historical accuracy, as when one of Lucas' henchmen is forced to wear a wire the size of a shoebox for Roberts and his detectives. Instead of mining this for drama (Donnie Brasco, anyone), the henchman records the necessary information secondhand through someone who's on the phone to Lucas in Asia.
The story's most interesting sequence revolves around Roberts' investigation of drug smuggling by way of the caskets of American casualties of Vietnam. But the drama is ratcheted up so far past the point of credibility (It's so surprising that the stodgy military officials don't want a detective going through dead bodies on the runway of the airfield!) and then becomes a non-issue so quickly that I felt duped into interest. Duped and angry.
In the end, the film succeeds admirably at being "The Black Scarface" that it's billed as, and you do with that what you will. Not a big Scarface fan, myself.
