Pride Unprejudiced

More and more small movies get misplaced theatrically, but in the parallel universe of DVD (versus the cinema and festival releases touted by critics), where a larger number of eyeballs are available, several worthy titles have hit the street. Among them are The Promotion, Married Life, Reprise and Son of Rambow. Here's an interview with writer-director Steve Conrad about The Promotion; a talk with writer-director Ira Sachs and lead Chris Cooper about Married Life; a brief video excerpt from an interview with longtime partners, Son Of Rambow writer-director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, as well as shorter notes on Gypsy Caravan, The Counterfeiters and Irina Palm.

I'd also recommend my extended interview with Joachim Trier, director and co-writer of the vivid, bravura, gorgeous, funny, sad, beautiful, smart (but never smug) display of cinematic fireworks called Reprise. The DVD includes Trier's commentary, deleted scenes and several short making-of pieces that demonstrate the talent brought to bear on this nearly overlooked gem. Plus, the "sorry" montage, demonstrated how that's the most common English word spoken in Norway.

Steve Conrad and
The Promotion (***)

A painful slice of humor about office work participates in whatever soul deadening attributes there are to a day of regimented tasks. Underlying bitterness rules: day after day you're expected to laugh at the idea that your life is shit, your diet is shit, your job is shit, and you know what? You are shit.

The English original of The Office is more about malfeasance and malapropism, about raging egos of small people, and the American variation found its footing in the giddy range of its characters (and respective actors). Still, it's a gratifying surprise to find that Chicago-based screenwriter Steve Conrad's promising directorial debut, capturing the rivalry between two men, mild-mannered, levelheaded Doug (Sean William Scott), and eccentric Québécois transplant Richard (John C. Reilly) for a manager's job at a supermarket, is a likeable, often-tender, lovingly paced comedy of no small charm, a small miracle in an age of accelerated pacing and masticated punch lines. There's a clean visual scheme to Conrad's images as well, especially in the supermarket set, which amuses without soothing.

The cool of Scott's performance is notable, but Reilly manages to bring seriousness to even his character's most ignoble moments. (The ending of the movie does something I won't describe that remains oddly fond toward Richard.) The fluency of Reilly's Canadian accent is part of his craft: his range of Canuckian intonations go well beyond cliché. "I love John's accent, too," Conrad tells me one late afternoon in Chicago at Bucktown's old-style Charleston bar just before the film's release. "The small things he does that make the feelings feel larger. The up-talk? And he finds the words to do that in. I really want to make a movie with him where we can totally get down for a whole shoot. It's tough when he does some days and someone else does some days. I'd love to make a movie with him where he's the guy. He's gonna do it, he's going to do a Being There if someone lets him. Ideally, the way I'd love to see John's career playing out, and I hope it's what he's hoping for, too, would be like Gene Hackman. Every five years he carries a picture, but then he does these other things where he helps everybody make their movie stronger."

Hackman's gift shows in reaction shots. He listens visibly. "Aw, man," the screenwriter of The Weatherman and The Pursuit of Happyness says with a smile. "I became fascinated, but never asked [John], who started suing him first? He comes in for an audition, you might be tempted to say, 'Aw, I don't' know if you can play this guy and then he does it and he's so interesting. What I love about Reilly, and I told him as much to his face, I didn't know if it was an insult or a compliment, but I said, John, did you ever do social studies and like you've got your social studies book and you're studying the Dustbowl era? And you see the pictures of those kids? But they were also coal miners? They had faces like they're 8 but they're also 80? You could be in one of those pictures, you look like an old kid.' He goes, 'No I understand, but I'm a good dancer.'"

Conrad is also effusive about Lili Taylor, who plays Reilly's Scottish wife, and Jenna Fischer, who in deft, small strokes manages to gently convey marital intimacy between her nurse character and her frustrated, not-yet-a-man of a husband. There's a broad recurring gag about loud neighbors in the apartment next door, and Fisher's whispered line readings are among the funniest things in the movie. ("Dream or real?" "Real." "Oh my god," she replies in an aria of intonation and "Female lions do the hunting" is an ordinary-ish observation she works wonders with.)

I latched onto one of the small gestures between the couple that sings. They're in a prospective new house. Sunlight pours in, no furniture obscures the gleaming hardwood floor. In this unfurnished room, she's wearing half socks. "I didn't count on anybody ever noticing those socks!" Conrad says, "but I had a whole story for how they got to that house, to think where they are before and where they go after. Because you have to costume them, and you want it to feel right, I wanted it to help me tell the story. I pictured her coming home from work and being so excited to go see the house that she just quickly changed into that sundress and she didn't change into what women would probably wear, which would be flip-flops or laceless sandals. I said you should be in these socks. And then she came up with the idea she should slide across the room because it felt good. And the socks led to a weird little thing. But that part came from her. One of the cool things about shooting movies is that you can choose all these little things that help tell the story so much."

Son of Rambow (*** ½)
with Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith

Garth Jennings' Son of Rambow takes the same rude clay as Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind with fruitful results. In the case of Rambow, two English 11-year-olds in the early 1980s get the idea of remaking Rambo: First Blood out the wilds of their imagination. The two boys are marvelous casting coups, from Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a member of a puritanical sect, whose first movie experience is a bootleg VHS of the Stallone-starrer he becomes obsessed with, and local bad-boy Lee Carter (Will Poulter), always identified by both names. Will Proudfoot! What a name, especially applied to Milner's small pale bright eyes! This episodic, mildly sentimental tale has drawn comparisons to Wes Anderson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a more fruitful parallel to this joyful endeavor is the film Lasse Hallstrom's never topped, My Life as a Dog: there's genuine heart amid the prankish tomfoolery, and an overt homage to Midnight Cowboy is not misplaced. There's Keatonesque comedy framing, too. The kids are beauties. It's terrific when Jennings get to them becoming "blood brothers" by a pond in a glade and in super-close shots of them we discover suddenly that the cheekbones of both are festooned with freckles. There are so many small, bright surprises it'd be a shame to give them away: this is one of those happy incidents I just like to point in the direction of and mouth the word, "Go!" (The early-1980s New Romantic music homages are giddy and knowing, to give away one bit of the fabric.) Jennings and longtime production partner Nick Goldsmith (who make videos under the Hammer & Tongs label and collaborated on Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy) are wonderfully aware of the goodness in naughty lads, prehensile geniuses in their splendid bloom. The footnotes to their own childhood experiences glow in on-screen exaggeration. In the clip below, Jennings and Goldsmith talk about the music they chose and their memories of the era.

Ira Sachs and Chris Cooper on
Married Life (***)

The four friends in Married Life, Ira Sachs' mix of drama, dark comedy (with a couple of scenes of genial whimsy) are lucid about some things but reserved about others.

In an unnamed city in 1949, Harry (Chris Cooper) is a businessman hidden behind large horn rims; long-married to his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson), he becomes convinced that the only way his wife can be happy is that he not confess his affair with younger, blonder Kay (Rachel McAdams) but instead murder Pat to put her mind at ease. Our narrator-observer-interloper is Richard (ever-cheeky Pierce Brosnan). Harry and Pat still don't agree about what constitutes love, and she speaks more like a John O'Hara character than a potential noir victim: "If you don't want the truth, you shouldn't ask me." There is a post-war sense of an acceptance of death that never becomes grim, yet aside from the manners and period furnishings, there is a sense of "now," a sustained present tension, to Married Life.

"Once we decided it was 1949 and we create a world which was 1949, then we didn't have to talk about it," Sachs tells me. This film, unlike say, Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, has fewer immediately apparent references to past films. (Coincidentally, Married Life and Haynes' I'm Not There were co-written by Oren Moverman.) "Yes, yes. There's none of that. Literally, once you've built the house these people live in, there's no need to talk about it being the past. It's Patricia Clarkson's character, it's Chris Cooper's character, and they're in a marriage. That's something they could pull from the present tense. I don't look at this kind of story as old-fashioned. It was a very direct approach, there was no postmodern thinking."

Cooper works with such reserve, you wonder if (not when) Harry's inner life will ever spill out, to the point of, say, Joseph Cotton's Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt loosing his misanthropic "merry widow" speech. "I think a lot of acting, a lot of life and a lot of acting, is what isn't expressed," Sachs says. "Rachel and Chris have that in common, the sense that there's something really held back, more so in this movie than Patricia and Pierce. [The fact that] something is held back creates the tension of every scene, that what is not expressed, and yet you feel what's right under the surface. That's what propels the internal drama of the story. It's on the surface; it's in the image, because of [Chris], in a lot of ways. There's so much he creates just under the surface. Chris would always say to me, 'You're not seeing my eyes. You're not seeing my eyes. If I said, 'I need more,' he'd say, 'You're not seeing my eyes.' And it's so true. So much is being done with so little."

I ask Cooper to elaborate. "This is from previous experiences where I've worked with directors who spent their time in front of the video monitor. And they're asking for more, more, more, more, more. This has happened so many times where I have to anticipate now when I'll hear that. I heard it… Run off the number of films. This happened on Seabiscuit the first day of filming. Gary [Ross]'s saying, 'Y'know, I want to see a little more. 'I said, please just go see the dailies on a big screen and he came back the next day and he apologized he said, 'Just tell me to shut the fuck up.' A very nice way of saying, you're giving me more than enough. You're giving me more than I needed, I didn't see it in that monitor. It's just something I've been made aware of."

There is some irony, however, in the self-amused narration by Harry. He seems to know several kinds of "truth." "I think you try to invest each scene with a question," Sachs says. "That's the same in 40 Shades of Blue [Sachs' second feature] or this movie, where it's more external what the questions are. But I wanted to go back to the idea of this not being a film full of quotes. Peter Bogdanovich said there's no such thing as old films, there's only good films and bad films. What I would say is that this kind of story is as present, as present tense, the story, the time, the structure is present tense because this kind of tale is part of our imagination because of 100 years of filmmaking."

Dickon Hinchliffe's lush, melancholy score is like a cross between David Raksin (Laura, Force of Evil) meets Tindersticks (Hinchliffe's band). "We started working on this score before we'd shot the film," the 42-year old director says. "Rachel had the score in her ears before a scene. Dickon, one thing I learned working on him with this film, it's about understanding [what came before in film] history. The level of artistry, whether it's [Chris] and Monty Clift and John Garfield or me and Renoir or whatever. Dickon knows… I learned all this stuff about Bernard Hermann and what [in his music] came from Shostakovich, but not in an academic way, but he has a great, deep understanding of the musical score and where it can come from and what it can do. But he is a modern writer." The music from the end credits of Married Life plays automatically when you Hinchcliffe's site.

Gypsy Caravan (***)

Jasmine Dellal's heartening Gypsy Caravan follows a six week 2004 tour through the U.S. and Canada of Romani, or "gypsy," musicians from around the world who'd never met, haling from Romania, Spain, Macedonia, and India, but sharing tradition, blood and song. As the tour progresses, and Dellal intercuts sparing bits of performance with a visit to the home ground of the individual musicians, they gradually grow into community, and begin to collaborate, creating cross-boundary music that is thrilling to behold. The characters are what stand most in memory, from the Macedonian diva, who, childless, adopted forty-seven children, and frail, elderly Nicolae Neacsu, whose eyes light up at the sight of women and whose body comes to taut life when a violin is tucked under his chin. Della's editing is seductive, creating rhythms and metaphors with quiet assurance. Consider, among other images, a moth around a bare light bulb in a Romanian village near the film's end: in context of the film, it's a lovely shot, but has three or four other meanings as well. Dellal's collaborators include Albert Maysles, who shot part of the picture.

The Counterfeiters (** ½)

Stefan Ruzowitzky's Austrian selection for Best Foreign Language Academy Award, The Counterfeiters (Die Falscher) is very good, no matter how much one might have wished a movie like the sterling, startling 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (from Romania) to have been in the top five selected through the Academy's arcane processes, which include the selection of a single entrant from each non-English speaking country, selected by a local industry committee and to have the largest percentage of its dialogue in its native language. (The Israeli The Band's Visit, a comedy about miscommunication, was tossed out because its Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking characters can only communicate in fractured English, ergo too much of the "wrong" language.) Based on a novel called "The Devil's Workshop," The Counterfeiters is best at portraying how small moral choices are compounded in the face of the need to survive. The story wends its way to 1944, where Jews and criminals in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin have been assembled to forge as many dollars and pounds as possible to undermine the economies of the Allies. Seedy-featured Karl Markovics makes a watchable antihero. But indirection is the way to go with any contemporary Holocaust drama that hopes to succeed, and at its best moments, Ruzowitzky's film accomplishes that. (The little-seen Fateless may be the latter-day avatar of this approach.) There's a world outside the walls of the compound, and from sound and rumor, a terrible one, a frightening one that the captives' imagination doubtless know will turn out as terrible as history knows. Antiheroes survive, but at great cost.

Irina Palm (1/2 *)

Marianne Faithfull and handjobs? Isn't that a bit… disquieting? Especially being of a certain age? A kind of Lars Trier-Michael Haneke-lite, German-born Belgian director Sam Garbarski's five-production-nation Irina Palm situates the game, once-gamine Faithfull at a glory hole at a hole-in-the-wall called Sex World in London's Soho, her character demonstrating her love for a life-endangered grandson by earning money while the risk of getting "penis elbow." A comedy to laugh at and easily forgettable, far, far from being a Calendar Girls or Full Monty, unlike the blunt, aggrievedly obscene lyrics to Faithfull's perhaps best-known song, "Why'd ya do it, she said, why'd you let that trash get a hold of your cock, get stoned on my hash? Why'd ya do it she said, why'd you let her suck your cock? … Why'd ya do it, she said, why'd you spit on my snatch? Are we out of love now; is this just a bad patch? Why'd ya do it, she said, why'd you do what you did? Why'd ya do it, she screamed, after all we've said, every time I see your dick I see her cunt in my bed." Poor baby.

September 3 , 2008