.....

 

 

It’s the day before the opening of one of my favorite film festivals of the year, the International Thessaloniki Film Festival so I’m going to have to break down and see My Big Fat Greek Wedding tonight… in Greece. It’s a hit here, too, and my friends who’ve seen it can’t believe I havne’t seen what they call “My Beeg Fat Wedding.” There are other movies on screens here that I haven’t caught yet, such as David Cronenberg’s Spider and Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, but someday, maybe someday, I’ll get to see those in the States. But My Big Fat Greek Wedding in Greece? It sounds just right. And afterwards? A night of marvelous Greek food in this teeming, very young port city.

A few words about Femme Fatale and Tully below, but first, 8 Mile. The early reviews of Curtis Hanson’s film don’t seem to be describing the movie I saw. Here’s the first thing I have to say: What a mouth the man has on him.

That’s not a reaction to the notoriously uncouth raps of Marshall Mathers, nor the measured enunciation in his performance as Jimmy Smith, Jr., or: "Rabbit," a character whose life neatly parallels his own rise through rap out of the blasted, begrimed detritus of Detroit, 1995.

I’m actually talking about his mouth. Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys) does many things just right in his reinvigoration of the essential contours of the rags-to-raps story line (such as not pushing the plot to encompass a hyperbolic raps-to-riches tale). Along with hiring confident, assured performances to surround the novice star, such as Kim Basinger as his hapless mother and Mekhi Phifer as Future, the rap M.C. who believes in him, Hanson put Eminem through a six-week day-to-night rehearsal period. It shows in the eloquence of the stares and glares and bursts of pique and fits of temper on screen. Measured and modulated, Rabbit’s moments are never thrown away, but seldom overscaled. The performance doesn’t seem derivative; there’s none of Elvis Presley’s callow diffidence, little of James Dean’s well of self-pity, for instance. Instead, we get the eloquent inexpressiveness of the kid with talent who must find a way to decipher the scrawls on his fists, the backs of sacks and cardboards, the inside of his skull. Thoughts flicker, eyes burn: this is screen acting.

The deep focus look of the wet, chilly dead city is another inspired stroke, as lit and framed by Mexican director of photography Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, Frida). A hallmark of the 58-year-old Hanson’s work in the past decade has been this kind of straightforward, unassuming craft, artistic ego subsumed into the passion of performance, of a story cleanly told. It’s all here in 8 Mile, which is a hundred miles above pro forma rock biopics like Purple Rain.

But Eminem. The dead, solid scowl. The body language, confined and leashed, of a slight slim man who vibrates with ambition. Where is his performance most eloquent? That mouth.

Beneath close-cropped hair, hooded, blue-green eyes, a suitable but unexceptional nose, there’s a full -  but not Jagger-ful - l bottom lip, a thin wave of upper lip holding in check its potential for beauty’s arrogance.

Watch this compact man on screen. The performance is succinct, gestures precise. The eyes hold anger. The mouth is moist, quietly tremulous. This is where the acting begins. His romantic foil is the tiny, fierce Brittany Murphy, with enormous eyes, lips rich with full-blown delirium. Your eyes ping and pong: Eminem and Murphy are both adepts of the glance, two forms of fury, their eyes and mouths a match. They say casting’s ninety percent of the director’s job; Hanson is a quiet master of examining the actor’s face, never finding it wanting, only wanting its full naturalistic range to flower. The plot of 8 Mile is familiar, but Hanson (with screenwriter Scott Silver) brings it up to a brisk 100 percent, naturalism keeping the stakes from melodrama and operatic gesture. We don’t learn Rabbit’s innermost hopes, thoughts, fears, but they are indicated, intense cryptic scrawls on skin, on Eminem’s lips.

In shorthand, Tully, a delicate, confident movie nearly lost to distribution vagaries (and which showed on Sundance Channel in March), could be dubbed a contemporary Hud, with family legacies unraveling on a Nebraska farm, altering the lives of three men over two generations of a close-mouthed family. But that hardly captures its simple beauty and distinctive tenderness. As directed by Hillary Birmingham, and adapted by Birmingham and Matt Drake from an award-winning 1992 short story, it’s a luminous, lived-in gem that is agile yet modest, with open eyes and open ears. Tully gleams with authenticity. The dialogue is human-scale yet wry, and the sound design has cool authority as well. There is a scene where the wind kicks up in a field of soybeans, and I’d swear the sound is not like wind in corn, or wheat, but soybeans. The performances are note-perfect throughout. Years after his mother’s death, young Tully (Anson Mount) chases all the women he can in several counties’ radius. Tully, Sr., the serene and sorrowful Bob Burrus, hides behind the hard work of the farm, yet there is an entire life between this taciturn man’s eyes.

As Earl, Glenn Fitzgerald makes a fine, confounded younger sibling, torn between admiration, intuited, and resentment, earned. Tully also strikes sparks with Ella (Julianne Nicholson), a friend of Earl’s who is strong enough to rebuff most of the advances of a womanizer-in-the-making like Tully. You watch this coltish, carrot-freckled woman and your eyes widen, "Tully, you dumb-ass," you want to yell, "Notice her!" Birmingham, trained in documentary, like cinematographer John Foster, is adept at the sightlines of stolen glances, and the framing of incidental elements, from traffic lights to power lines, from farm equipment to skeptical expressions, cannot be faulted. There is emotional power in the state of reserve, Birmingham and her collaborators know, in story as well as in form. Tully is the laconic soul of an unremarked Midwestern generation. It belongs on the big screen, and it should tug even the chilliest of hearts.

Femme Fatale is Brian DePalma’s most elegant waking nightmare (or dreamy terror) in many, many years. I was in happy shock throughout: Fuck!, I had to mutter, slumping all the way back in my seat, this is good, raunchy, sleek, convoluted, profane, obsessive, self-reflexive, self-self-reflexive, sexy, smart, personal, uncompromised. Most misunderstood the polish of the achingly sincere Mission to Mars and prototypical DePalma-scripted movies like Raising Cain tend to obscure their formal virtues through thematic obsession and narrative mayhem. (Or like Mission Impossible, they are as obdurate as obsidian against any admiration but for pricey polish.) Yet the Byzantine layering of the veteran director’s twenty-third feature is a genuine thriller (and exquisite thriller) from start-to-finish, aided by Thierry Arbogasts’ lush cinematography and Ryuichi Sakomoto’s drenching and drowning of a score (drawing wittily and emphatically at points from Ravel’s "Bolero"). Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is the central fact of this twisty entertainment’s thesis: without her emphatic, impertinent beauty, it’s unlikely we’d care so much about this wicked fable of female empowerment, Cinderella as quick-change artist with unlimited sexual agency. Merrily, merrily, merrily, film narrative is but a dream. With Antonio Banderas, witty and lithe as a paparazzi turned conceptual artist who sets the plot and the lustier moments into motion; a handful of smaller roles are sweet surprises. Similarly, it would be nefarious to describe the orchestration of the sustained opening heist and its glassy sensuality.

E-me: Brian DePalma: sensual artist or maker of kinky smut?