Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Ghost Writer (2010)

Director: Roman Polanski                              Writers: Robert Harris & Roman Polanski
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                       Cinematography: Pawel Edelman
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson

The Ghost Writer began as a novel by the British author Robert Harris, who has written some very nice World War II related suspense novels like Fatherland and Enigma. The film has a distinctly European look to it, even when it supposedly moves to the United States. Normally this is something I like very much, and it’s obviously due to the fact that director Roman Polanski still can’t return to the United States and filmed the entire project in Europe. Unfortunately, the film has a very claustrophobic feel. The primary setting is an unnamed island somewhere on the eastern coast of the United States, and most of the time there is spent in a luxurious, though sparse and cold, house on the beach.

The film begins with a ferry unloading onto the island and a car in the front row that doesn’t have an owner. Eventually we see a body washed up on the shore of the island and we only learn later that it is the ghost writer for the former prime minister of England, Pierce Brosnan, who is living in exile on the U.S. island. With the ghost writer dead, Ewan McGregor’s agent gets him an interview with the publishing company in London and they offer him the job, on the contingency that he finishes in four weeks. When he arrives at Brosnan’s compound he finds the prime minister enigmatic, recalcitrant, and distracted. When allegations come out that he gave approval for terrorist suspects to be water-boarded, suddenly the publishers want the manuscript in two weeks. But Brosanan heads to Washington, leaving McGregor on the island and, he soon abandons the book in order to figure out who killed the previous ghost writer.

Harris’s story unfolds incredibly slowly, perhaps more than any of the films made from his novels, and without any real idea of what’s going on an hour and a half into the film it tends to drag. And it’s not as if there are a surfeit of suspects, either. In this case, literally no one could have done it. Motives are completely absent from the proceedings leaving the audience as clueless as McGregor as to what is going on. Eventually the answer comes, but by then it is little more than a disappointment. There is intrigue aplenty, but all of it going on behind the scenes and while the final reveal had the potential to be satisfying, I have the feeling that Polanski sabotaged it, for it’s vastly different than the ending of the book.

I can’t say that this is a good film because there is absolutely nothing suspenseful about it. McGregor is something of a poor man’s Kenneth Branaugh, younger but without the twinkle in his eye. Brosnan’s performance seems phoned in, as do practically all of his performances. He’s trying so damn hard to not be typecast that he has wound up typecasting himself and in the process has become an incredibly uninteresting actor. The supporting cast is about the only thing in the film that is good. Kim Cattrall goes back to her English roots to put on a British accent as Brosnan’s secretary, and Olivia Williams is tremendous as Brosnan’s wife. Tom Wilkinson has a brief turn as one of Brosnan’s fellow college students, and Robert Pugh is fantastic in a small roll as a former minister, while Eli Walach has a small cameo as an island resident. But even that isn’t enough to save the film. By the time the final reveal comes, the whole exercise seems corny. In the end, The Ghost Writer is little more than a rather tedious mystery.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

The Tree of Life (2011)

Director: Terrence Malick                              Writer: Terrence Malick
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                       Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain and Fiona Shaw

The Emperor has no clothes . . . again. And I’m not shy about standing up and telling the world. This is yet another attempt at subverting film conventions for nothing more than the sake of doing it, a pretentious, pompous, self-important attempt at being “artistic.” I came to this film through David Denby’s terrific book Do The Movies Have a Future In it he very astutely identifies what is wrong with the film industry today, but he also mentions a few films made in the last few years that he thought were exceptional. Unfortunately, his choices show him to be in the thrall of the critical camp that believes the more unintelligible a film is the more artistic it must be. Well, I picked all of them up at his recommendation and at this writing it’s no surprise that all of them have eventually found their way to this blog.

The Tree of Life is not a movie. It’s an image collage. And like most collages, which take other people’s pictures from magazines and the Internet and use them to create an “original” piece of art, Terrence Malick has taken images from the Hubble space telescope, BBC’s Planet Earth series, and the International Space Station, thrown them together with some pretentious shots of people doing random things and randomly emoting and called it a film. Fair enough. He certainly has the right to do that, just as I have the right to call it crap. The thing is, this is nothing new. In writing we call it plagiarism. And unlike a film like Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which has a definite purpose in reassembling existing film, Malick apparently hoped no one would notice he was passing off someone else’s imagery as his own.

Experimentation with film imagery has been going on since the birth of cinema. Just one early example is the short film Lot in Sodom from 1933, but I’m sure there are many examples from the silent era as well. There is absolutely nothing new in Malik’s film. The entire piece has a distinct air of artificiality, just as similar attempts in art and music and literature are equally artificial. And this is incredibly ironic for a film that seems to want desperately to connect the characters to the history of life on earth. His painfully crafted shots of characters, like something from a pharmaceutical commercial, feel distinctly unreal. The immaculate houses that they wander through as they emote, do not look lived in. The front yards and streets and summer houses are not their own. They are interlopers masquerading as people, pretending to have emotions and daring us not to be “moved.” But we’re not. Like the blank canvas pretending to be a painting, or the dead silence pretending to be music, The Tree of Life is simply vacuous imagery pretending to be a film.

And I’m critical not because I don’t “get” what Malick is attempting to do. Oh, I get it all right, which is exactly the reason I hate it. I would actually love to see a film in which characters who are so deep in their delusions of god that they eventually become disillusioned at what is in actuality a random and indifferent universe that they so desperately want to impose order upon. But this isn’t that film. I would love to see a film about a family who genuinely struggles to make sense of the death of one of it’s own even decades later. But this isn’t it. And if I want to see gloriously photographed images of space and planet Earth, there are plenty of other vastly more interesting and entertaining documentaries I can watch. At the end of the day, however, there is one positive thing I can take away from The Tree of Life: I never have to watch another Terrence Malick film again.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Out of Sight (1998)

Director: Steven Soderbergh                        Writer: Scott Frank & Elmore Leonard
Film Score: David Holmes                           Cinematography: Elliot Davis
Starring: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames and Albert Brooks

I could say this is a poor man’s Get Shorty, but since both films came from the mind of the same author I can only say this is a lesser Elmore Leonard. Out of Sight tries valiantly to capture the magic of the earlier film, but just can’t do it. The direction is of lesser quality and the story isn’t quite as interesting, but the most glaring difference is that the cast is decidedly second-tier. Instead of John Travolta and Rene Russo, here we have George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. They’re good, but . . . nowhere close to the lighting up the screen the way the earlier pair did. At the same time the story itself, while entertaining in a way, is ponderous and slow and ultimately disappointing, especially when compared to the earlier film. I don’t think it’s Elmore Leonard’s fault, I think the reason for the failure is attempting to make the film in a very different style, and yet being unable to resist trying to capture the magic of the earlier film.

The structure of the story is fairly interesting. The opening is an out of sequence shot of Clooney coming out of an office building, throwing his tie on the ground in anger and walking across the street to rob a bank. The robbery is ingenious, but he’s caught when his car won’t star. In a Florida prison he plans a breakout that works, but runs smack into federal agent Jennifer Lopez and he winds up in the trunk with her car as his driver, Ving Rhames, makes their getaway. But once the pair has gone their separate ways they can’t stop thinking about each other. Clooney is on his way to Detroit, the reason shown in a flashback of his time in a California prison where he became the protector of white-collar criminal Albert Brooks. It’s when he’s out of that prison that he goes to ask Brooks for a job and, insulted, leaves the building in a huff, precipitating the bank robbery in the introduction. In Detroit the caper goes horribly wrong but in the end love triumphs, with Samuel L. Jackson as the unwitting matchmaker.

As with all of Leonard’s novels, it’s a twisted tale that includes lots of comedy. Director Steven Soderbergh deliberately steers away from Quentin Tarantino’s style, using a very interesting color palate and inserting a dream sequence that is wonderfully surprising. The supporting cast also includes some great actors. Don Cheadle plays the convict shaking Brooks down in prison, but his role is a strange one, inconsistent, and just seems odd rather than compelling. Dennis Farina has a nice turn as Lopez’s daughter, but Michael Keaton has little more than a cameo as her current boyfriend. The great Viola Davis plays Cheadle’s girlfriend, and Luis Guzmán is the convict Clooney ratted out to make his escape in Florida. By far the worst casting choice, however, is Steve Zahn. He is totally out of place in this film, so much so that the first time I tried to watch it I turned it off as soon as he showed up.

With all this talent it seems as if the show should have worked. I absolutely love Albert Brooks, and the straight roles he’s been doing lately, like the one in Drive, are fantastic to watch. But even Brooks isn’t enough to save it for me. It’s an interesting film to watch, but I wouldn’t call it entertaining. David Holmes serves up a standard score. Perhaps if they’d had some iconic musical hook, like Booker T. and the M.G.s in Get Shorty, it would have helped. I don’t know. Out of Sight is a film that, on paper, seems like it should work and, to be fair, a lot of people really like it. I’m just not one of them. It’s a disappointing film for me and, in the end, anything that I have to make three attempts to get through is not something I’ll ever go back to.