Best and Brightest

Because I lack the capacity for independent thought, I usually see the (non-Spielberg, non-Eastwood) films with high cumulative Metacritic scores. This fall, that brought me to Bright Star and An Education.

My first and most lasting takeaway from An Education is that our star, Carey Mulligan, looks like an exact cross between Michelle Williams and Katie Holmes.



The character's name is almost Jen Potter, so I'll just call her that. One of the big problems with the film is that we don't get far enough away from Dawson's Creek plotting and visuals. One of the (theoretical) advantages of cinema is that it can take you to open places, widen the scope of television. Instead, An Education gives us the same sets and situations repeatedly: the schoolroom, the dining room table, the "French" cafe, the bachelor pad. And when Jen finally gets to Paris, it's three minutes of amateurish, fast-motion footage of landmarks.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before getting to Paris, Jen's walking home in the rain with her cello when an extremely creepy man twice her age begins flirting with her. This is David (played by a not-really-that-handsome Peter Sarsgaard). Jen starts palling around with him and his friends, Danny and Helen, who are, I think, supposed to be fun but stupid (as a point of reference, Helen is definitely the Busy Phillips of the movie).


Reviews of An Education hype the supporting actresses Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams as educators/foils for Jen. But mostly they just blink and absorb Jen's perfectly written and entirely unbelievable speeches. We hear a lot about Jen's brilliance but see no substantial examples of it. Look--her Jane Eyre paper got an A+ with red exclamation marks next to it! She loves French film but we don't get the name of a single one.

The emotional climax of the film is silly. The foreshadowing is so heavy-handed there might as well have been a scroll across the bottom of the screen:

THERE'S SOMETHING SHOCKING AND IMPORTANT IN THE GLOVEBOX

I was hoping she'd come out with a slick handful of aborted fetuses, but it was only some letters to David's wife. Yes, it turns out that this charming playboy with a murky personal life actually has a wife! That the scene takes place at an Esso Station, which is so much more evocative at the end of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, only makes An Education feel more banal. Then there's David's car rolling away from Jen over the cobblestones (hello Washington Square) and an actual montage of the seasons changing and Jen studying Latin until--ta da--she gets into Oxford after all. Or was it Cambridge? Who cares.

We know exactly where we are in Bright Star: a place and time where Paul Schneider's Charles Brown was allowed (encouraged even) to wear these pants:


Hampstead Heath, 1818. John Keats (Ben Whishaw) is a young writer being attacked physically by tuberculosis and intellectually by the 19th century equivalent of angry poetry bloggers. Abbie Cornish is Keats' love interest Fanny Brawne, who, to be fair, also kind of looks like Katie Holmes.


But what makes Fanny so much more watchable than Jen is that she makes things. She dresses in elaborate costumes of her own design. She stays up all night embroidering a heartrending image of a tree for Keats' dead brother. We admire her because she has an eye for beauty the same way Keats does.


In patient tracking shots, Jane Campion ties the couple to the countryside, seen in strolls through grass and lakeside picnics. My favorite scene happens after Keats finds a valentine from Brown to Fanny, becomes upset and sparks a tripartite run through the soggy woods. There is no petty argument over a perceived infidelity; there's a much more interesting, passionate conversation on what a valentine (what love) means. Of course, Fanny and Keats come to an accord, while Brown goes down a different avenue (there's a great, completely telling moment when, after polishing off a scone, Brown wipes the crumbs off on the maid's apron).

I also appreciate Bright Star for presenting a realistic view of the poem writing process. There are high points.


But Bright Star shows many more scenes of the men sitting around in darkened rooms for hours on end, then acting surly whenever they're interrupted. Brown is hilariously snarky after a long day at the inkpot while Keats is more philosophical: "It ought to come like leaves to a tree, or it better not come at all." If only...


If I had any critique it would be that the endgame is predictable with Italy in long shot and "Ode to a Nightingale" in voiceover but, before that, the film is full of surprises, like butterflies flitting about quiet white rooms. I use that metaphor because it takes a special kind of film to pull off, as Bright Star does, a long sequence of butterflies living, and dying, in an English country house.

"I’m here to make some solemn declarations"

Sometimes it is hard to approach a masterpiece. How do you describe what makes it so masterpiece-y? I’ve spent some time with Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings & Queen trying to figure out how to commemorate its greatness. Watching the DVD extras really helped with this endeavor—Desplechin, adorably soft-spoken, says that he tries to put “at least five ideas” into every minute of film. His willingness to put in so many ideas, some unified, some disparate, jams every sequence in the film with an intimidating amount of detail. The quality from shot to shot is so unflagging I was reminded most of The Godfather, another family epic.

Pleasurably, the families in Kings & Queen are composed of artists rather than mobsters. The two central figures are Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), an art dealer with a 10-year-old son and her estranged, bipolar, second husband, Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), a renowned violist. As her father (who looks like a more interesting John Updike) is dying, Nora attempts to reconnect with Ismael so that he might adopt her son before her third marriage (to a man who actually seems more like a character in The Godfather). The difficulty is that Ismael has been committed to a psychiatric ward (headed by an icy Catherine Denueve) after nurses discovered him in his apartment, whose main furnishing was a noose hung above a stool.

I feel silly discussing plot matters when the true gift of this film is Desplechin’s writing—every character, no matter how minor, shines with originality and purpose. Take Ismael’s lawyer, a Hunter S. Thompson figure that, in maybe 15 minutes of screen time, betrays Ismael, steals pharmaceuticals, seduces Denueve, saves Ismael, provides sage advice and departs.


In his half of the film, Ismael reveals himself as one of the most fascinating characters in recent memory (and puts Amalric near the top of my best living actor list). All of the large and small details of his life are captivating. He is a wreck—he’s kicked out of his quartet, his own sister is filled with contempt for him, he bails out on women as fast as possible (claiming they have no souls). But then. He is a jaw-dropping as a break dancer in the hospital’s music therapy room. He makes every person he meets laugh in one way or another. He gives is sort-of-son a moving, ten minute lecture on the nature of parents and life. On a smaller scale, he gives his sister a blank Christmas card folded in quarters in August. He plays an invisible violin for a fellow inmate who’s feeling sorry for herself (this is especially funny because he is without his viola for most of the film). He gently neatens a pile of corn flakes that have been spread all over the floor during a shootout at his father’s grocery (yes, there is even a grocery store shootout in this film). He sometimes wears a musketeer doublet in public. For all these idiosyncrasies, you know Ismael, you are infuriated by his childishness, you are shocked at his generosity, you are, yes, moved by his humanity.


And Nora might be better! Devos’ role is more difficult—she has to play off of not only Ismael but her deceased first husband (the father of her child), her third husband, her business manager, her wayward sister, her son and, crucially, her father. She is the Queen. She barely sleeps for the whole film and when she does she is exhausted by the ghosts that visit her. She, consciously or unconsciously, makes the same arms-out albatross gesture that she did as a kid, posing for a picture with her sister. She talks to her son like he's another of her lovers. She reads Dickinson.


I can recall only a few scenes in cinema that are truly breath-taking and one is in Kings & Queen, when Nora reads a letter from her father after he's died. Not only do we hear his voice, we get a grainy, low-contrast documentary-style shot of him reciting its contents into our ears. It is shocking and wonderful because we think they have a good relationship (the film opens with Nora giving him a rare print of Leda and the Swan) but quickly find out otherwise. A few excerpts: "Your egoism has been monstrous...I burn with anger...you're delighted because pride makes you weak...I fear you, I hate you...I find it unfair that I should die while you live..." It's a poisonous bouquet of daggers--my hair stood on end. I felt relief when the scene flickered out because the image and voice had become my father's, the rage something incomprehensible and familiar.


It's a sequence so good it restores your faith in the art.

I also applaud Desplechin's willingness to make a literary film. In the DVD interview, he talks about how he wanted Kings & Queen to join the pantheon of stories where a powerful woman picks from an array of suitors. On screen, he is able to blend the opposing genres of melodrama and burlesque into a cohesive whole--it doesn't seem overly experimental thanks to his skill as a director. Many times, a cut from the hyperactive Ismael leads to a still Nora, giving the production a sense of balance. The camera is a benevolent, omniscient narrator allowing all characters their space.

So Kings & Queen is there in the 00’s film pantheon, rubbing shoulders with No Country for Old Men, 2046, Lost in Translation...and, of course, Redbelt.

Transforming Poetry

I was so excited after watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that I composed this poem:

Bay’s Movies

A movie of Michael
Bay’s showed an Autobot,
at evening in Los Angeles,
battling a Decepticon, watched

by two young, seemingly
hot people, on a sound stage adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Shia LaBeouf,

knew his almost complacent
banality and the distance
he felt from Megan Fox.
Yet another film

of Bay’s has the
aging Optimus Prime with his
awkward armor standing
in a CGI desert, of ruined pyramids,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and LaBeouf are,
trying to get back to
the Princeton dorm room, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the CGI desert, with
an Autobot, bleeding.
The story is true.

*

(Tip of the cap to Roberts Bresson and Creeley...I'm sure they would have wanted it this way.)