Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

November 1 , 2003

Screamer envy

There's nothing better after a two-hour-fifteen-minute seafaring historical epic than Russell Crowe filling a Q&A with lengthy, practiced anecdotes that answer questions he's anticipating, alternating with the comedy stylings of Richard Roeper. So went the promotional preview of Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in Chicago. A magnificent portrait of a character in love with himself: I'd say the same for Crowe's performance in Weir's vivid movie as well. (The new Home Vision edition of Weir's early movies The Cars That Ate Paris and The Plumber have extended interviews with the director, videotaped earlier this year, that offer insight into his diverse and restless career.)

Also this week, director Richard Donner and producer Lauren Schuler-Donner put on the dog-and-pony show for the long-in-the-works Michael Crichton adaptation Timeline, dropping by the compact screening room where most movies are shown to Chicago's critics, right after a showing. They entertained light questions from all comers, including Roger Ebert and the Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington, fixated on critics (as well as industry members) being supplied copies of the year's movies.

DONNER: It's asinine.

SCHULER-DONNER: At least they're allowing the Academy to get them, but it's not at all fair with the critics. We don't like it. [Wilmington nods intently.]

DONNER: It's insane.

SCHULER-DONNER: This was done at a very high level. A lot of the small ones [distribution labels] are owned by the big ones.

[A further chorus goes up, insisting on the necessity of professional critics watching movies at home several times after seeing them at screenings in order to catch all the nuances.]

DONNER: What can I tell you? Come over and we'll run it for you.

When Timeline opens, I'll run some anecdotes the Donner party offered over lunch the next day.

Historical televisionism

Lies, damned lies, television. Irish documentarians Kim Bartley and Donncha O'Briain traveled to Venezuela, the world's fourth largest exporter of oil, at the end of 2001 to shoot a portrait of democratically-elected president Hugo Chavez, whose populist intentions were inspired by Venezuela's liberator, Simon Bolivar.

In April 2002, in a country where eighty percent of the population lives in poverty, members of the military and the former ruling class attempted a coup to prevent any redistribution of oil income, with the cooperation of seven privately held television broadcasters that claimed Chavez, among other things, was "mentally ill", "sexually fixated on Fidel Castro," or, in the words of the late Jesse Helms, "consorted with narco-terrorists in Colombia." In the taut 70-minute running time of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, the filmmakers' access seems ubiquitous, capturing with clarity and speed the events at the presidential palace and on the packed streets of Caracas as the coup d'etat toppled within hours. It's also a remarkable portrait of the power of unfair and unbalanced media in swaying sentiment rather than intellect in our ever-mutating present moment.

The twenty-first century needs many more awe-inspiring acts of witness like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, works of art and heart. Chavez remains adamant in defining the world for his countrymen, rather than the interests of other countries: "I've had to withstand huge international pressures but I don't care if it means that one day I have to go to the gates of hell to defend the people of Venezuela then so be it, I will defend you come what may."

Great goodbar almighty

Of all the scary places not to go, walking into a dark room where Looking for Mr. Goodbar is playing on the TV is one of my favorites.

Silly comparisons have been made between Richard Brooks' shrill, 1977 anti-sex screed and Jane Campion's haunted, weary In the Cut. Yet each filmmaker's reacting to their own fears; Brooks, 65 and estranged from the world of women in their twenties when his movie was released, Campion, 49, wondering about her own generation's dealings with love.

But God bless Jane Campion's beating, pretentious heart. Oops, I mean, ambitious heart. My favorite pan of the movie, in the Nation, by Stuart Klawans, who I had forgotten how much I enjoy reading. In its entirety: "Because I have reviewed every feature film by Jane Campion, in tones that have ranged upward from respect to wild enthusiasm, I will record that she's got a new release, In the Cut, which she based on a thriller by Susanna Moore. Campion is entitled to a mistake. Let it go."

Manohla Dargis' interview with Campion in the Los Angeles Times (available only to subscribers) is entertaining, capturing the director's giddy physicality, as is Joy Press' in the Village Voice. Press writes, "[Susanna] Moore's novel haunted Campion, but she didn't consider translating this explicit story into film for a while. "It was like-duh, do I want to be hated?" [Campion] laughs. "And I kept thinking, could I be Frannie? I don't know if I could, really. But as an artist I'm attracted to subjects I feel I have to grow into. I had a reluctance and a willingness-which I guess is Frannie."

Drawn from Susanna Moore's 1995 novel, Campion told me her film is about "the death of romance," not so much a thriller as a raw, tactile consideration of the mystery and suspense of touch and want. Downtown Manhattan, now: Frannie (Meg Ryan) teaches creative writing, collects words, seems mostly in a daze. A young woman is murdered, severed head left in Frannie's petal-strewn Lower East Side garden. When Frannie meets Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), the brooding, blunt homicide detective investigating the case, something sparks, and their sexual bond grows as killings continue.

After seeing In the Cut twice, I can't agree with reviews that have dismissed it as grandiloquent Guignol, a failure more horrific than terrifying. Campion's movie is luxuriantly visual, mostly in a ruby-and-amber haze, warm yet smudgy. Cinematographer Dion Beebe's camera jitters and steals looks at passing figures. Some have called Cut pretentious, for its simmering mood, occasional blunt symbolism, for Frannie's spooked-faced alienation, for her relationship with half-sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who lives above a strip club and has her own pronounced case of erotomania, obsessing on a therapist who made the bad choice of sleeping with her once, then "firing" her as a client. They both bear mostly unspoken, even unspeakable, emotional damage. It's loneliness, an urban isolation. "This is what I do to get a dick inside of me," Pauline says, with characteristic Leigh wooziness. In film and novel, Pauline reflects, "I can remember every guy I ever fucked by the way he wanted to do it, not how I wanted." That moment, like many, is about Ryan's face. Frannie's given up, something in her face her eyes, has gone slack, as she tolerates the worst of modern men in the city and their immodest shortcomings.

Almost all the dialogue in the script (co-written by the novelist) is drawn from the book, but the playful, literary voice affected by Moore is gone, replaced instead of Ryan's shell-shocked weariness. Frannie seems the saddest soul even in an extended masturbation scene, where she strains at the limits of her body, her twerpy play at flexing, extending her bare feet. It's an orgasmic reach repeated once she and Malloy are in bed, a scene between Ruffalo and Ryan played out in extended takes, with near-explicit forms of foreplay I can't remember in an American movie. (Some might find the site of Malloy's licking ticklish or even inappropriate; squirming in your seat only rhymes with what they're up to up on the screen.)

Even with cuts mandated for an "R" rating, there's an everyday groping and striving to much of their encounters. Asking her at the Toronto Film Festival about how involved her directions are in such scenes, the first of many self-effacing Campion giggles surfaces. "Well, I'm the director, you see, I have to sculpt it!" She pauses. "It's very graphic and particular in its instructions, even in the novel, so you just follow the manual. Very easy, really."

What I found most harrowing was how palpable Frannie's disenchantment is in Ryan's performance, capturing how women who are in their late thirties or early forties stop believing in romance. "Yeah, yeah, I think that's the serious heart of the film."

It's dispiriting, I say, when Frannie's listening to the nonsense of an actor-turned-doctor (Kevin Bacon) who's sort of stalking her after they've been together only twice. "I think what's hard about us in western culture, men and women, is the unexamined power of the romantic myth, what we demand or want from partners and from our love life and our romances that just can't deliver. It simply doesn't and can't. I think it has everybody looking in the wrong way and spending their lives endlessly, y'know, especially women, if they don't feel they have a partner or they're not loved, that this means in some way that their life's not real or not whole."

That something's missing? "That there's a dark abyss in it. Somehow their meaning is removed from them if they're not seen as lovable in the world or loved by a man. Also, by that age, it's not the first romance. [Women] have become professional at it, almost like war veterans. They finally become damaged. In their heart, like Pauline knows, she probably can't do it, won't do it. But she looks at her sister and thinks Frannie is okay, she's healthy enough, she could get there." Campion laughs, considers the appropriateness of her words. "I would actually use the metaphor of Vietnam veterans," she says confidently, saying she found that between the lines of Moore's story. "People that have just seen too much and are wounded by it. Their experiences are too upsetting."

Further complicating the family dynamic, Frannie and Pauline's father is drawn as what Campion calls "a serial romantic. One of the problems about the serial romantic is that they're always enthusiastic about the next one. Highly enthusiastic. And they're not looking backwards at what's happened to those who they [were with] long ago, even if they had children with. We see it in our generations now, children from perfect romantics who feel very unloved. It's the fallout from love as a kind of pursuit."

Waxing Roth

Set on a New England campus, mostly in chilly winter, The Human Stain is an adaptation of Philip Roth's intense novel about the later years of an academic accused of being un-PC (Anthony Hopkins) who has, in fact, been passing for white for decades.

His memories of his youthful revisionism surface when he starts a relationship with an abused younger woman (Nicole Kidman); they strike sparks that warm them, but confound the community. Director Robert Benton's approach is bluntly stated, intensely acted, dramatically valuable. He even gets a performance out of Gary Sinise that, unusual for the actor, seemed to match the fabric of the rest of the movie.

Benton tells me that the movie wouldn't exist if it weren't for his collaborators, notably Chicago producer Tom Rosenberg and his Lakeshore Entertainment, the late cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, who died of a heart attack, only in his early 50s, after shooting the film- "I had hoped to make the rest of my movies with him," Benton told me; and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, adapting Philip Roth's 2000 novel. At 70, Benton says he doesn't think earlier films he worked on, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Kramer vs. Kramer could be made today.

The movie opens with a departure from Roth's book, with several faculty members crossing the campus in tennis whites, discussing the sexual predilections of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton a few moments before professor Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins) will be accused of being politically incorrect, or perhaps even racist, for referring to a few students who'd never come to class as "spooks." The nonexistent students, a committee is formed to tell Silk, were African American. Silk is outraged for academic reasons, but he never speaks his mind. Immediately, Silk's longtime wife reacts, and her reaction is tragic: she dies in his arms.

The audience is then privileged to see his memories of having been a talented young man, a boxer and academic, but who could never advance in the worlds he coveted as a black man. Hopkins? Passing? Why not? Movie acting shouldn't have to be taken so literally. Silk becomes involved with Faunia (Nicole Kidman), a younger woman, who works several demeaning jobs, worrying each day her angry ex-husband (Ed Harris) will return.

The community does not approve of this disgraced, seventyish man consorting with the thirtyish Faunia (and in a late editing choice, Faunia's illiteracy, one of Roth's literary ironies, was cut out.) Silk befriends Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a blocked novelist who becomes Silk's friend and confessor.

It is a small canvas. The acting is forceful, the adaptation forthright. It's not Roth's sustained, sneaky howl on screen, seeming to me more like a striking portrait of controlled rage: how do we socialize ourselves against our inner fears, longings, loathing, without letting them eat us alive inside?

Early reviews from The Human Stain's premiere at the Toronto Film Festival were withering, and I was surprised to read them; much of the commentary seemed to center on the movie the writer expected to see, or the adaptation of the Roth text they wanted, rather than the fiercely focused movie on screen, distilled to a few gestures of outrage and loss rather than sprawling across a larger canvas.

I talked to the once-wunderkind 57-year-old Nicholas Meyer (final writer on Fatal Attraction; director of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan) at the Four Seasons in Toronto during the film festival. After we're introduced, he stirs his tea, slouches into one of the hotel's overstuffed pink-and-rose-striped chairs.

Why so few attempts at Roth on screen? "I don't really know. I know that the output itself, while prolific, is also uneven. This, I think, is one of his almost completely successful books. There are some like American Pastoral that are almost home runs. It's a terrific book, then something happens in the last sixty pages, and everything goes all diffuse. The books need problem-solving."

I'd think financiers fear the subject matter as well; the profane opening dialogue added by Meyer suggests even stronger material to come. "But that's what Roth's book is about, I think. How we're so busy being afraid of anything that is construed as politically incorrect, socially incorrect. In an era where we've all been de-clawed, de-fanged, y'know, comedians just make safe jokes and nobody wants to stick his head up too high for fear it'll be chopped off."

So then it takes the confidence and experience and age of someone like you, or Rosenberg, or Benton, I ask, to make it happen? He pauses, slouches and slides across the chair. "It's interesting because those very tennis players to whom you allude are in fact scorning this sort of Oprah culture, the yap-yap-yap culture in which confession and closure are all. What is open-ended, what is rude, what is raw, what is incorrect, what is unforgivable, what is human-is banished. What you'd now done, we've raised a generation of people-kids, artists-who are cut off from that bolder time when everything was bolder including movies."

We differ on the definition of irony for a few minutes, and Meyer adds, "Finally, I think irony's become so omnipresent in our presentational venues that you don't even register it as irony anymore, it's just a way of being in which things that matter not to get either attention or serious attention."

European filmmakers like Lars von Trier have worked with melodrama to get past this problem, I offer. "Yeah," he says.

I wait.. Nothing. I continue. After his handful of experiences as I director, I venture, did that help him as a writer, to simplify, to try to tell the truth? "I became a much better screenwriter once I was also directing. At least for me, I can't say for other people, but for me there was no other way to learn in a kind of visceral fashion what the proportionate relation between words and pictures were."

You became more impatient with the writer in you? "I was much more prodigal with language until I had directed and realized the enormous significance that could be achieved with fewer words. Words in the movies, too many of them, have the opposite effect of what you intend? They don't become more cumulatively eloquent or affecting, they become more affecting and eloquent the more you take out."

Of his early, Oscar-nominated script for The Seven Percent Solution, Meyer says, now almost horizontal in his chair, "I read it recently, it was, 'Where is the blue pencil?' It's not like they're stupid words. It's intelligent. But it is not, uh..." He finishes his thought: "It's not cinematically eloquent."

 

Email Ray Pride