Clint Eastwood’s
Changeling
Centerpiece of The 46th annual New York Film Festival
Starring: Angelina
Jolie; John Malkovich; Jason Butler Harner; Jeffrey
Donovan; and Amy Ryan.
Reviewed by Frank J. Avella
The story of Christine
Collins and the injustices which were perpetrated
against her by the Los Angeles Police Department
in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s
is the stuff that can inspire great filmmaking.
It is also the type of material that can degenerate
into cliché’d melodrama and become
the stuff of mediocre TV movies.
Changeling
is a film struggling to be the former and, sometimes,
slipping into the latter.
Master auteur Clint
Eastwood has proven that as he gets older, his
work seems to become more nuanced and extraordinary.
The WW2 bookends, Flags of Our Fathers and
the brilliant Letters from Iwo Jima,
two years ago, are proof enough of his talents
and endurance as a filmmaker. And December will
bring Gran Torino, Clint’s latest
film.
Clint’s decision
to bring the story of Collins to the screen is
bold and admirable. And his choice of Angelina
Jolie as the star is a pretty ballsy choice as
well.
On a gorgeous Los
Angeles day (redundant) in March of 1928, a single
mom was forced to disappoint her nine-year old
son, Walter, by going into work (she’s a
telephone operator) instead of bringing him to
the movies, as promised. Upon her return home,
there is no sign of Walter; and so begins a harrowing
and painful saga of a mother’s search for
her son, which initially seems dire and futile.
Four months later,
a boy matching Walter’s description is found
in Illinois. Christine restlessly waits as the
police arrange a media-saturated reunion between
mother and son—the only problem is when
Christine sees “Walter” she instantly
knows it’s not her child but is coerced
into bringing him home anyone. After a few weeks,
she returns him and all hell breaks loose. How
dare a woman question the LAPD? She must be delusional.
Christine soon
finds herself institutionalized for daring to
challenge the system. Enter Reverend Gustav, a
vociferous activist against the corruption in
the LAPD who does all he can to fight for her
rights.
Simultaneously,
another story is unfolding that involves the grisly
murders of young boys.
In Eastwood’s
hands, Changeling is a taut, tantalizing
and compelling thriller. It holds you on the proverbial
edge of your seat. It’s mightly powerful
as the various cross-stories unfold and the audience
is assaulted by a series of outrageous and unjust
twists and turns. It provides hope, breaks your
heart, makes your stomach churn and fosters anger
and disgust at the people who are supposed to
be our protectors.
Jolie’s performance
is problematic. At the Festival press screening
I overheard both extreme ends of the spectrum
from “She’s phenomenal and will be
Oscar nominated” to “She was terrible,
one-note.” I don’t think either extreme
is quite fair. Firstly, she is handicapped by
a script that demands the most obvious, commonplace
dialogue delivered in some incredibly formulaic
scenes. And yet, even when there was no dialogue,
her portrayal felt a bit too defiant and modern
to me without the grit that should accompany it--Jessica
Lange’s fierce and ferocious Frances
comes to mind—almost as if she was
forcing herself to hold back. And yet, maybe that
was the right choice since she was a woman in
a time when women were not allowed to challenge
authority.
I never found her
uninteresting or bad, simply off-track. Perhaps
she’s just miscast. It’s hard to believe
Angelina Jolie not speaking up for herself. Ultimately,
I do blame the scripter, J. Michael Straczynski,
since she was often forced to do her best with
simply sub-par lines and scenarios.
John Malkovich,
having a grand year after his terrific turn in
Burn After Reading, dives into the role
of the Reverend with great relish and perfect
indignation.
Amy Ryan is pretty
powerful is what amounts to a cameo role.
And while much
praise will be lavished on the dastardly, camera-mugging
Jason Butler Harner who plays the evil Gordon
Northcott, my favorite supporting male turn was
Jeffrey Donovan as the arrogant jackass police
Captain who insists that Christine take the imposter
boy home “on a trial basis” to save
face.
Clint gets the
period perfect with help from his crackerjack
team including: James J. Murakami’s awesome
Production design; Tom Stern’s wonderful
camerawork and the haunting score, composed by
Eastwood himself.
While my feelings
about the film are mixed, I was always mesmerized
and it made me want to learn more about the real
Christine Collins as well as the murders. Perhaps
that’s the best compliment I can give the
film.
Laurent Cantet’s
The Class (Entre les murs)
Opening Night of The 46th Annual New York Film
Festival
Starring: François
Bégaudeau
Reviewed by Frank
J. Avella
The winner of the
Palm d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film
Festival and France’s official entry into
the Oscar race, Laurent Cantet’s engrossing
film, The Class, opens the 46th annual
New York Film Festival with a heap of accolades
already in tow.
With an intense,
docu-style narrative and a deliberately claustrophobic
setting, Laurent and co-writer and star François
Bégaudeau (who also wrote the novel the
film is based on) and Robin Campillo, have created
a fascinating microcosmic meditation on social
justice and how one’s cultural and class
background play into how much power that individual
is allowed in any given society. In this case
the ‘society’ happens to be a classroom.
The Class
takes place entirely in a school or on the school
premises, but mostly in François’s
junior high school class. The movie chronicles
one school year in the life of a teacher and his
twenty-five students—although many get short-shrift
in the screenplay to make way for the louder,
more colorful characters.
Bégaudeau
plays the autobiographical role of the teacher
who seemingly cares a great deal about his students
but whose low self-esteem and abundant pride get
in the way when it matters most. It’s a
sharp and impressive performance with the real/cinema
lines blurring in a mesmerizing manner.
As for the student
body ensemble: these are not the apathetic, indifferent
zombies flooding the screens in recent American
films (most notably in Antonio Campos’ irritating
Elephant-wannabe, Afterschool, also
playing the Festival), these are willful, obstinate,
argumentative, intelligent students who challenge
everything from the racist manner in which subjects
are taught to the rules they are forced to follow
in class.
The film features
overlapping dialogue and improvised scenes that
add to the naturalistic feel. Cantet’s frame
is almost always filled with students. I wish
he had used more of peripheral kids in the final
cut.
What The Class
does is ask urgent questions; questions about
democracy and the fear of nonconformity. It may
be a French film but it resonates intensely here
in the good ol’ US of A.
Steve
McQueen’s
Hunger
46th Annual New York Film Festival
Reviewed
by Frank J. Avella
Five years ago,
Lars Von Trier’s groundbreaking film, Dogville,
had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival.
Lions Gate acquired it for distribution and dropped
the ball completely. Instead of releasing it in
2003, where it might have gotten critical and
awards attention, they dumped it in early 2004
with a practically non-existent promotion campaign.
Dogville remains one of the true cinematic
gems of the decade that no one has seen.
Steve McQueen’s
gripping and ballsy film Hunger is, by
far, the best film to show at this year’s
New York Film Festival and one of the best films
of 2008, that is if IFC (the company that has
acquired it) is smart enough to not follow Lions
Gate’s blunder and release the film in 2008.
If they do, Hunger could find itself
doing quite well since it’s a powerful and
different take on an oft-told story. McQueen,
like Von Trier--although in a completely different
manner--fucks with the way an artist can tell
a story onscreen. And in doing so rewrites the
rules. The results are invigorating and mesmerizing.
Hunger
takes us into the bowels of the psychological
madness of prison life. The setting is Northern
Ireland in 1981. The film recounts the events
that lead up to the IRA hunger strike that took
the life of nine prisoners including the leader,
Bobby Sands.
The plot is pretty
simple but the presentation is fascinating as
McQueen and his co-writer Edna Walsh, structure
the story in a most original way. We first meet
prisoner Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan), as he
is brought in. His hair is violently cut and then
he is thrown into a filthy cell (where smeared
feces stain the walls in an almost-painterly way)
with another non-conformist, Gerry Campbell (Liam
McMahon), who trains him in how to behave and
how to smuggle in items and communications.
We then meet Bobby
Sands (Michael Fassbender) and midway through
the pic, there is an extended 22-minute scene
between Bobby and his priest, Father Dominic (the
extraordinary Liam Cunningham). McQueen holds
the same shot of the two of them sitting across
from one another for most of the duration of the
scene. It’s an audacious move but the results
are riveting as they discuss the morality and
ethics involved in the notion of giving up your
life for your cause. In this scene, in particular,
the script probes all the questions and answers
and, in the end, one is still left with a discouraging
sense of futility.
The final act is
the determination and simultaneous deterioration
of Bobby, body, mind and spirit. McQueen doesn’t
hold back as we watch the lesions grow on his
emaciated body and witness the hallucinations
caused by lack of food. Then we watch his parents
seeing their boy near death.
In a devastating
performance that is uncompromising and so bloody
real it’s painful to watch, Michael Fassbender
is simply astonishing as Sands. To say he embodies
Sands completely is an understatement. Fassbender
reminds one of Daniel Day Lewis with his total
immersion into his character. It’s the bloody
performance of the year.
McQueen, an artist
making his motion picture feature debut, takes
many unconventional liberties including allowing
us to see what the guards who are doing the terrible
torturing feel as well. It’s a bold idea
that works brilliantly as we realize that they’re
forced, by the Thatcher regime, to carry out horrific
acts that go against their nature.
The look of the
film is impressive, specifically Sean Bobbitt’s
camerawork which is visually arresting.
The unrelenting,
visceral depiction of Bobby’s decline is
one of the many ways McQueen toys with the our
senses, giving us a cinematic experience that
cannot really be described as enjoyable, but can
easily be called transcendent.
Ari
Folman’s
Waltz with Bashir
46th Annual New York Film
Festival
Reviewed by Frank
J. Avella
Ari Folman has
created one of the most visually arresting, politically
potent films of 2008. Ironically Waltzing
with Bashir (in Hebrew with subtitles) is
a documentary. It also happens to be an animated
feature. The style is graphic novel meets anime
meets live action and the end result is cinema
that transcends the norms of storytelling to offer
a disturbing, visceral experience for the viewer.
Waltz with
Bashir follows Folman’s autobiographical
journey of recollection concerning his involvement
in the 1982 invasion of Beirut, as a member of
the Israeli Army, and the discovered massacre
of thousands of Palestinian civilians by Christian
Phalangists.
Exactly why did
Folman decide that the best way to capture the
haunting horrors of genocide onscreen was via
animation?
With barely any
archival footage, the notion of filming middle
aged men against a black backdrop droning on about
their horrendous experiences seemed pretty dull
to Folman so, instead, he embarked on telling
his surreal war story by way of animation where
he could depict things in a new, exciting and
graphically violent way without alienating an
audience. In addition, the memory mystery aspect
of the pic is emphasized via dreams, nightmares
and speculative moments that would appear silly
in a live action film.
The engrossing,
non-fiction narrative begins in a bar where an
old friend of Ari’s discusses a recurring
nightmare he has about being chased by 26 angry
dogs. He explains that the number is significant
because he was ordered to murder that exact number
of dogs during the Lebanon invasion over twenty
years ago—yet he hardly recalls anything
else about the conflict. In this early sequence
the power of using animation becomes obvious since
it would have been near impossible for Folman
to recreate the dream visuals in as effective
a way. The dogs are so real, so terrifying and
seem to be charging directly at us onscreen that
I almost lept out of my seat in fear!
After the opening
sequence, Ari realizes that he, too, can hardly
recall anything about the time when he was a soldier
in the Israeli Army, so he embarks on a voyage
of remembrance. Why has he repressed his memories
of that time? What was his involvement in the
invasion?
To help him fill
in the blanks, he interviews other soldiers who
were there and slowly is able to put the macabre
pieces of the horrific puzzle together. Along
the way, we become privy to the lunacy of combat
and the hellish nature of war.
The movie plays
like an exciting thriller-mystery but there is
a sense of foreboding and dread as well. And as
we watch the film lead to the inevitably tragic
conclusion, we are left with feelings of disgust,
outrage, disbelief and wonder.
Folman has the balls to ask hard questions. Questions
that are important for his country, his continent
and the world to ask. Folman: “Having made
Waltz with Bashir from the point of view
of the common soldier, I’ve come to one
conclusion: war is so useless that it’s
unbelievable. It’s nothing like you’ve
seen in American movies. No glam, no glory. Just
very young men going nowhere, shooting at no one
they know, getting shot by no one they know, then
going home and trying to forget. Most of the time
they cannot.”
The film is fascinating
cinema with vivid and dynamic visuals and an ending
that will haunt the viewer for a long time to
come. Folman has crafted a powerful, unique and
devastating chronicle of man’s inhumanity
to man. He has also written and directed one of
the best films of 2008.
Kelly Reichardt’s
Wendy and Lucy
46th Annual New York Film
Festival
Starring: Michelle
Williams
Reviewed by Frank
J. Avella
Wendy
and Lucy is basically a road movie; a different
type of road movie than audiences are used to
seeing on the big screen. Not because the two
leads are a young woman and a dog, but because
the story commits itself completely to one financially
destitute but tenacious vagabond in her quest
for a better life for herself and her canine.
Wendy Carroll has
left an unhappy life in Indiana; just how unhappy
we are only given clues to, including a phone
call where she seems to get along far better with
her brother-in-law than her sister. Wendy is traveling
with her best friend, Lucy (played by the filmmaker’s
real dog), destination: Alaska. Of course, post-Sarah
Palin, the desire to migrate to Alaska takes on
an entirely new and disconcerting resonance.
Unfortunately,
her car breaks down in Oregon, which leads to
a series of desperate moves that lands her in
jail and estranged from Lucy.
Michelle Williams
embodies Wendy wholly and completely. She is onscreen
for almost every shot so the viewer takes the
journey with her and Reichardt does an amazing
job of chronicling the minutia of her day-to-day,
hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute strife-ridden existence.
Williams, ironically, has a lost puppy-dog look
throughout, as if she’s been beaten down
so much in her short life that she had to leave,
but she never seems to lose hope for something
better and is never bitter about the lousy cards
she’s been dealt.
Based on the short
story, Train Choir by Jon Raymond (adapted
by Raymond and Reichardt), Wendy and Lucy
is stark, minimalist, anti-Hollywood cinema, but
is never uninteresting or pretentious. Reichardt
and Williams truly care about their protagonist
and want her to find some semblance of a good
life, but they’re also realistic enough
to realize the odds are against it.
One gets the feeling
there are far too many Wendys wandering around
these United States trying to simply feed themselves
and find a place in this land where they belong.
The recent financial crisis makes this film even
more urgent since many more Wendys will be out
there soon.
Reichardt presents
a piece of Americana that is difficult to swallow:
a gorgeous landscape where the inhabitants do
not care for one another; a dog-eat-dog world
where, in the end, the dogs eat better than most
people.
Darren Aronofsky’s
The Wrestler
Closing Night of The 46th annual New York Film
Festival
Starring: Mickey
Rourke; Marisa Tomei; Evan Rachel Wood; and Judah
Friedlander.
Reviewed by Frank
J. Avella
Mickey Rourke gives
the performance of his career in Darren Aronofsky’s
riveting new film, The Wrestler. Okay,
you’re thinking: “Well, now, is that
really saying much?” But you must remember
prior to hitting the wall and allowing the excesses
of Hollywood to consume him, Rourke managed to
carve out quite an impressive array of portrayals,
specifically in Barry Levinson’s Diner,
Alan Parker’s Angel Heart and Barbet
Schroeder’s Barfly.
Still not convinced?
Then allow me to rework that opening sentence:
Mickey Rourke gives one of the best performances
of the year in Darren Aronofsky’s riveting
new film, The Wrestler. Better? Well,
it’s true! Really.
As has-been wrestler,
Randy “The Ram” Robinson, Rourke sears
the screen It’s a complete transformation
into this sweet, down-on-his-luck-lug, who feels
more alive in the cheesy world of professional
wrestling than anywhere else.
It’s a fairly
simple story about a aging champion who’s
physical ailments are beginning to prevent him
from doing the outrageous stunts that will bring
in any money and glory. Ram lives in a trailer
park and works at a deli counter. He is estranged
from his daughter (a moving Evan Rachel Wood)
and begins to develop feelings for an aging pole
dancer (Marisa Tomei), who has baggage of her
own.
In the hands of
a lesser director this could have been a paint-by-numbers,
tug-at-your-heart popcorn flick. And while the
screenplay, by former editor of The Onion Rob
Siegel, is sometimes overly sentimental and a
bit too Hollywood, Aronofsky decides to probe
deeper. His camera follows Ram around like a pushy
fan, wondering where he is going, what he’s
doing next. Of course, this is the genius helmer
of Requiem for a Dream, so it’s
no surprise the film is as good as it is.
Aronofsky wants
to delve into the pain that is felt by a man who,
having made his career in the circus-like, wrestling
world, must now figure out what he is trained
to do if that world is no longer an option to
him.
Rourke is simply
remarkable. It’s a full-on, give-it-his-all
turn and the results are exhilarating to watch.
Mickey Rourke will be Oscar nominated for Best
Actor. Trust me.
Having been unjustly
overlooked by the Academy last year for Sidney
Lumet’s astonishing Before the Devil
Knows You’re Dead, Marisa Tomei delivers
another vanity-free performance. She is poignant
and her scenes with Rourke reek of real-life,
which is wonderfully refreshing. Look for her
to make the Supporting Actress list.
The Wrestler
carefully tows the line between melodrama and
realism and remains true to Ram’s hard-knock
life. The final shot will leave you speechless
and breathless.
