Understanding Screenwriting #15

By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Bedtime Stories, Last Chance Harvey, Valkyrie, Waltz With Bashir, Meet Me In St. Louis, Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Them!, and Jumper, but first:

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FAN MAIL: Matt Zoller Seitz, I figured you were kidding about the suggestion of using the Lubitsch line on the DVD box, but I could not resist replying. You are right about the difficulty of getting the right tone across in writing. That’s why we all need great actors to read our lines properly.

For Matt Maul, the story of Wise not being told that Klaatu was a Christ figure is from the same Creative Screenwriting article I mentioned. Edmund North had it in his notes, but never bothered to tell Wise. Well, he really didn’t need to know, did he? And if he had known, he might have made it more obvious. Although giving him the human name Carpenter makes it fairly obvious. And Matt, your line that “Given that Klaatu's warnings are still basically backed up by his ability to destroy the earth, his admonishments comes across as ‘stop hurting the planet or we'll blow it up’” captures the problem with the film more succinctly than I did.

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BEDTIME STORIES (2008. Screenplay by Matt Lopez and Tim Herlihy, story by Matt Lopez. 95 minutes): Also not Lubitsch, but also funny.

The first thing you have to know is that I have never been an Adam Sandler fan. For that matter, I have never been much of a fan of any of the man-child comedians. Harry Langdon always struck me as creepy, Jerry Lewis as bizarre, and Will Ferrell as infantile. The only time I liked Sandler was in Punch-Drunk Love, which was an Adam Sandler movie for those who didn’t like Adam Sandler movies. But the trailer for Bedtime Stories, which was probably the best trailer for all the Christmas releases, showed promise. Sandler seemed to be a little more reserved than normal, and the basic idea (a man tells his niece and nephew stories, which sort of come true) seemed to have possibilities. So I took my seven-year old grandson. Noam already loves Keaton and Airplane!, so I figured it was worth a shot.

What the trailer does not tell you is that there is a rather complex main plot, especially for a family film. Lopez and Herlihy set it up with surprising speed and without losing the kids in the audience. Sandler’s Skeeter has been cheated out of taking over his father’s motel, now a hotel. He wants to get the hotel back.

His sister insists he babysit her son and daughter while she goes off to Arizona to look for a job, since the school she is principal of is closing. Since Skeeter is the antithesis of a school principal, all he can do is tell them stories (and look how the writers have already set up that he and not his sister is the one who tells stories). The first one is a thinly disguised version, set in the Middle Ages, of his situation at the hotel. The additions the kids make to the story sort of come true, and Skeeter is now determined to make the storytelling help his quest for the hotel. So we have a purpose to telling the stories. As the film progresses, we go from recognizing the real elements in the stories to recognizing the story elements in real life. Not everything comes true in the way we expect. Birnam Wood does not literally come to Dunsinane, but sort of.

So, through the magic of CGI, we get the Middle Ages, Ancient Rome, and outer space, and for once the CGI is used to, a) tell the story, and b) tell the jokes. A character made up of snot in the outer space story not only gives us laughs in that story, but then connects with action in the main story. The script is surprisingly focused, with very little that is extraneous, not often true of comedies. Remember the sister’s school? It’s not just a setup.

The characterization is also focused, which keeps the actors from going all over the place. Sandler is restrained, but not too restrained. And who should show up in two extended cameos but Rob Schneider. If there is any actor I like less than Sandler it is Schneider, but he’s actually good here. (Don’t let that get around; it will spoil his reputation.) If you have a good script, you can reduce the temptation for the actors to improvise, always a good thing. Because of the variety of stories and time periods, the casting is crucial to the film, since they need actors who can play several different variations on their characters. At first you may think Guy Pearce of Memento is wasted in what seems to be a standard prissy villain role, but stick around until he unleashes, how shall I put this without giving too much away, his inner Hugh Jackman. The female teacher Skeeter gets involved with is played by Keri Russell and it is at least a little more than the standard girlfriend part. She gets a lot to do, and a lot to react to off from Skeeter’s character.

Bedtime Stories is an entertaining comedy, but not a great one. There are a lot of small laughs, but no belly laughs. When I ran my DVD of Keaton’s The Navigator for Noam, he was laughing so hard we had to pause for him to go to the bathroom so he would not pee in his pants. The same thing when we looked at Airplane! He liked Bedtime Stories, but he stayed in his seat the entire film.

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LAST CHANCE HARVEY (2008. Screenplay by Joel Hopkins. 92 minutes): O.K. it’s not … surprise … Curtis, Linklater, Krizan, Delpy, and Hawke, but it’s charming.

Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman had a couple of scenes together in Stranger Than Fiction and seemed to hit it off professionally, so Thompson was on the lookout for a script they could do together. She mentioned this to Hopkins and he came up with this. That’s the way Thompson has been telling. On the December 28th Charlie Rose show, Hoffman said the script may have been written for them, or it may have been written before and then adjusted for them. He had at least one other version as well. I’d buy Thompson’s version, since Hoffman used to insist that his performance as Stanley Motss in Wag the Dog was not a Robert Evans imitation.

However it happened, the script is a star vehicle for the two of them. I mentioned in US#11 that my wife and I were taken with the trailer, at least partly because of the on-screen chemistry between Hoffman and Thompson. The script does write to their strengths, but it is a little too much in their comfort zone. It is fun to see Thompson play a woman who isn’t quite sure she is going to make a romantic attachment, as she did in Peter’s Friends and Sense and Sensibility. It is also fun to see Hoffman play a guy who can’t quite connect, as he did in The Graduate and Tootsie. But they both have been doing that for a long time. They do it well, which is the reason to see the film, but couldn’t Hopkins have gone around a couple of unexpected corners? I am sure both stars could corner well. And it suggests the scenes are not as strong as they might be when the wordless montages show more chemistry between them than the dialogue scenes.

Hoffman is Harvey, who has come to London for his estranged daughter’s wedding. She wants her stepfather to give her away instead. And he learns he’s lost his job. He and Kate meet, twice actually before they really meet, a nice touch, and walk around London getting to know each other. Ah, just like Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan’s Before Sunrise. Sort of, but more like Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke’s sequel, Before Sunset. In the latter film, Jesse and Celine are meeting ten years after they have had the fling in the first film, so the characters are older and wiser. So are Harvey and Kate, but Linklater et al dig deeper into the characters. Delpy and Hawke had been thinking about the characters for the intervening ten years and it shows.

If you know the geography of London, Harvey and Kate have to have been wearing hiking boots to get from here to there in a couple of scenes. Part of what Hopkins is trying to do is to make London seem as romantic as Paris generally is in movies. But Richard Curtis did that already, especially in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Both films feature extended scenes on the South Bank, but Curtis got there first.

Hopkins also shortchanges the secondary characters, always a potential error in star vehicles. See below for how to avoid the problem. For all the time they spend walking around London, the wedding reception is still going on when Kate convinces Harvey to go back to it. He takes her along. Now think about everything you could do when the shlub of a father suddenly shows up with a woman who looks like Emma Thompson. Sorry, none of that happens. Harvey has a quick line that his ex-wife is giving Kate the eye, but nothing more is done with it. Like the film, the scene is charming, but more could have been done with both.

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VALKYRIE (2008. Written by Christopher McQuarrie & Nathan Alexander. 120 minutes): No, it’s not Shakespeare, or even Nunnally Johnson, but it’s entertaining.

In 1950 Johnson wrote The Desert Fox, a film about German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. Johnson’s script did not deal with Rommel’s fight against the British in North Africa, but his involvement in the July 20th plot to kill Hitler. Johnson said in the oral history interview I did with him that he thought the material was Shakespearean, “It is just so good, still so good. It was on a very high level, and I don’t pretend that I got anywhere near the level that it deserved.” He came close, and although the DVD is usually filed in stores in the Action section, it is more of a character study.

Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander’s Valkyrie is not so much a character study as it is a suspense and action picture. And they have a big star to deal with as well. The picture opens with a scene in the North African desert where we are introduced to our star character, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Some version of the scene was in the script from the beginning, but according to Christopher McQuarrie, the scene kept changing as the film went through production. In view of all the discussion on various blogs and websites about Tom Cruise playing a German with an eyepatch, some of the details of the scene may well have been written in the later revisions to get the audience used to him. The scene starts with von Stauffenberg’s voiceover in German before mutating into English, and the action is set up specifically to show his injuries, especially to his eye. The scene, like the brief opening scene with Cruise at LAX in Collateral, reassures us that we are in the theater where the Tom Cruise movie is playing.

That is important because we then get one of the earlier attempts on Hitler’s life, with von Stauffenberg nowhere to be seen, but with at least one of the top British supporting cast, Kenneth Branagh as Major-General von Tresckow. McQuarrie and Alexander do a good job of balancing off the von Stauffenberg scenes with other scenes that tell the plot. Cruise is well cast because it is necessary that von Stauffenberg be completely charismatic and nobody can deliver that like Cruise. His is the star part, he knows it and McQuarrie and Alexander know it. And the supporting Brits know it too and can play variations that bounce off Cruise. Particularly from the mid-eighties on, Cruise has been very smart about surrounding himself with classy older actors, e.g. Newman in The Color of Money and Hoffman in Rain Man. We also get scenes with von Stauffenberg’s wife, but these are very generic. The wife is played by Carice von Houten, and the star of Black Book is wasted.

As you would expect from a script that Christopher McQuarrie, the author of The Usual Suspects, was involved with, there are some ingenious twists and turns. (No, Hitler does not turn out to be Keyser Söze.) Even if you know the plot is the July 20th plot, you will probably be so caught up in the story that when von Stauffenberg goes to a meeting with Hitler on the 15th you will have forgotten. That attempt does not work out, but it shows us the process, so that shortly thereafter we do not need to see all the lead-in on the 20th. And the attempt on the 20th comes about an hour and ten minutes into the film. You would expect it to come later, with a quick wrap-up afterwards. But here is the inventive part of the script: the attempt fails, which only makes things worse. We, and von Stauffenberg, do not know for a long time whether Hitler has been killed. The rest of the plan goes into effect, but with not all of those Brit supporting actors going along. This ratchets-up the suspense and the action as the plot unravels. The script and the picture, in effect, deliver more than promised, always a good thing.

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WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008. Written by Ari Folman. 90 minutes): Where’s Ward Kimball when you need him?

In an interview with Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly Ari Folman, the writer/director of Waltz With Bashir, tells the genesis of the film. A friend of his told him of nightmares he had been having about his experiences in the Israeli army during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Folman, who had been there as well, realized he had no memories of the events. Folman began talking and taping others about their memories and working with a therapist to bring out his own memories. Then Folman decided to turn all this into a documentary. People often think the “writing” of a documentary is just the narration, but as I pointed out in writing about The Order of Myths (US#2), there is much more to it. The most crucial writing element in documentaries is finding the structure. Here it is Folman’s search not only for his own memories, but through the others, finding out what happened when the Israeli army stood by and let the Christian Phalangists massacre Palestinian refugees. So far, so good.

Then Folman decided to focus on the surreal aspects of his and the others’ dreams. Wait a minute, can you make a surrealist documentary? Does not surrealism seem to be at odds with the very idea of documentary as reality? Yes but. As anyone who has lived through any of the last seventy years or so knows, reality in the world we live in is almost surreal by definition. And even further back, Luis Buñuel (of course, who else would you expect?) proved you could make a surrealistic documentary with his 1933 Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread). It is all in how you put together the realistic details. So, so far, still so good.

Then Folman decided he wanted to make it an animated documentary. Wait a minute, can you make an animated documentary? Does not animation seem to be at odds with, well, you get the idea. But animation has been used in documentaries from the beginning. There are slightly animated maps in the first documentary feature, Nanook of the North, in 1922, and Walt Disney did some great propaganda animation for the Frank Capra World War II series Why We Fight. But a documentary that is totally animated? Well, yes, Disney again, with his 1943 Victory Through Air Power, where he uses animation to give us concepts and ideas that you cannot literally show, such as the size of 1943’s aircraft by showing the Wright Brothers plane recreating its original flight on the wing of an airborne B-19.

Yeah, fine, but still … a surrealist, animated documentary? Disney again, although most of the credit goes to one of his genius animators, Ward Kimball. Kimball got the call from Disney to do the Tomorrowland films for the fifties television series Disneyland. For the 1957 episode “Mars and Beyond,” Kimball's team talked to scientists about what life on Mars might be like. Then the team went across the street from the studio, got drunk on stingers, came back to the studio, drew up the weirdest things they could conjure out of what the scientists said. Then they went home, slept it off, and came back a couple of days later and animated the sequence. Voila, a surrealist animated documentary. (The backstory is from a visit Kimball made to my documentary class at LACC in the seventies.)

So how does Folman and Waltz With Bashir stack up against Kimball and “Mars and Beyond”? Not well, unfortunately. The first problem is that Folman and his animator Yoni Goldman have animated the interviews. Folman is insistent that his process is not the same as Rotoscoping, since the animation team does trace over the live action interview material, but uses that material as a guide. Either way, we lose an enormous amount of the facial expression of emotions that we would get in live action. The idea may have been to give us a little distance from the speakers, but there is too much distance. Think of some of the documentaries you have seen where interviews and emotions are at the heart of the story, such as Roger & Me or Paris is Burning. Norma Desmond was partially right; they had faces, along with the dialogue.

Too much time is taken up with the interviews, and the recreations of the action the men talk about get visually repetitive as well. Since one of Folman’s ideas was that animation can deal with the surreal elements of the dreams and the events, it is especially disheartening that the dreams are not MORE surreal. Granted he does not have the Disney studio structure behind him, but he and Goldman could have been more visually inventive.

The final structural choice is an odd one. At the very end, Folman cuts to live action television footage of the actual victims of the massacre. Since he has brought us into the world in a completely animated way, it is a disconnect to go to live action. I think his idea was probably to remind us that this all was real, but it has the effect of making us suspect Folman did not trust his own film.

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MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944. Screenplay by Irving Brecher & Fred Finklehoffe, based on the stories by Sally Benson. 113 minutes): Why are all Christmas movies deranged?

Turner Classic Movies ran this one on Christmas Eve, I suppose because it’s the one where Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” While the film is not as bizarre as Capra’s film noir Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life, it is strange enough.

The cute, adorable daughter, Tootie (played by Margaret O’Brien, of whom her occasional co-star Lionel Barrymore is reported to have said, “If that child had been born in the Middle Ages, she would have been burned as a witch”) is obsessed with death. She is constantly planning to kill off her dolls and give them elaborate funerals. I suppose that may come from the fact that her mother is played by Mary Astor, who only a few years before was Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon.

That’s weird enough, but the plot, which the writers take almost half of the film to get around to, is that the father has an offer of a job in New York. He wants to move, but the family is resistant. Resistant is hardly the word; they are closer to psychotic about the idea of leaving St. Louis. Now I am a Midwesterner by birth and have, as you may have read here, certain reservations about the East Coast, but the wife and children here seem to be determined to avoid anything that would in any way expose them to a wider world. I suspect that this film was the hit it was in 1944 and 45 because people felt that way at the end of World War II. They just wanted to go/stay home and be left alone.

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FORT APACHE (1948. Screenplay by Frank S. Nugent, based on the story “Massacre” by James Warner Belllah. 127 minutes) and SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949. Screenplay by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings, based on the story “War Party” by James Warner Bellah. 103 minutes): As a jobbing film historian and western fan, I feel obligated to check in occasionally with the Ford cavalry trilogy.

These first two films of the trilogy popped up on cable recently and I was struck yet again by how sloppy Ford let scripts be when he did not have a strong producer like Samuel Goldwyn or Darryl Zanuck to guide the scriptwriting process. In the case of Fort Apache, Ford had Nugent, a first-time screenwriter who had been a film critic for The New York Times, put in so much comedy “relief” that critic James Agee noted “there is enough Irish comedy to make me wish Cromwell had done a more thorough job.” Ford thought that comedy was one of his strong suits, but it wasn’t. The drunken sergeants scenes stop the picture in all the wrong ways. At least on DVD or DVR you can fast forward through them.

The drunken sergeant is reduced to one in Yellow Ribbon and is not as obnoxious. The problem with this script is the last half hour, which is incoherent on a dramatic level. Captain Nathan Brittles is due to retire, and he goes out on one last scouting party. He returns and says goodbye to his troop. They give him a watch, a nice emotional scene. Fine, “the end” as the troop rides off without him? Not quite. After Brittles has the drunken sergeant put in the brig for being out of uniform (Brittles has given him his civilian retirement suit), Brittles says goodbye to the women at the fort. O.K., “the end” … not yet. The Indians are getting ready to drive the white men out and who shows up at the troop’s location? Brittles, still in uniform, claiming that his new watch says he is still on active duty until midnight. Brittles talks to the Indian chief to try to convince him to stop the attack. The chief says he can’t since the young braves want to go to war. Brittles runs off the Indians’ horses, stopping the attack. Now it is past midnight and he is a civilian. He is riding off into the west. “The end?” Not a chance. Sgt. Tyree comes after him to tell him his request to become a civilian scout for the Army, which has not mentioned before, has come through. So Brittles returns to the fort where, it being a John Ford movie, there is a dance going on. And then Brittles goes out to the grave of his wife to talk to her. Finally, “the end.” How could you do all that in a more coherent way?

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THEM! (1954. Screenplay by Ted Sherdeman, adaptation by Russell S. Hughes of a story by George Worthington Yates. 94 minutes) and JUMPER (2007. Screenplay by David S. Goyer and Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg, based on a novel by Steven Gould. 88 minutes): A highly informative double feature.

After writing about The Day the Earth Stood Still in the last column (US#14), the differences between fifties’ sci-fi and current sci-fi was floating around in my head. Them! popped up on Turner Classic Movies, so I gave it a look. Like the earlier Earth Stood Still, it begins in an almost documentary fashion. Two New Mexico Highway Patrolmen discover a little girl in shock, the remains of her parents’ trailer, and a roadside store that has been ransacked. Lots of questions are set up, and we don’t see the GIANT ANTS until almost half an hour into the picture. There is not only one scientist, but his attractive daughter is also a scientist. They give us a more or less buy-the-premise-buy-the-bit explanation: the rules of the world of the film are established and then stuck to. The writers have beautifully taken advantage of the desert locations and, more famously, the storm drains of Los Angeles. They have also given us some interesting characters, particularly a civilian pilot being held in a psych ward and a drunk who may or may not have seen something.

The same day I saw Them! I later caught Jumper on HBO. No restraint here. David Rice discovers he is a “jumper,” meaning he can jump from place to place. As in from New York to England. He discovers this ability when he is a teenage boy and runs away from home. So what does he do with his gift? He jumps into banks and steals money. He jumps to London, seduces a girl, then jumps out of the room. In other words, he behaves like a stupid teenager. Even after he has gotten older. Is that the best the novelist and three screenwriters could come up with him to do?

He eventually goes back to his home town and reconnects with the girl he had a crush on. He remembers she wanted to travel, so he asks her to go to Rome with him (on a plane, not through his jumping). How does she react to this proposition? She goes with him without a second thought. Wouldn’t you have a second thought if a geek from high school suddenly showed up and offered to take you to Rome? The daughter-scientist in Them! does do a certain amount of screaming, but she does seem to have some intelligence and character. This girl has neither.

So off they go to Rome and into the Colosseum. The Colosseum is used moderately well, but the rest of the picture jumps all over the world, given us postcard views, but never using the locations as well as Them! uses the few it has. The director, Doug Liman, is one of those indie directors (Swingers and Go) who have moved into big studio films. He did a knockout job on The Bourne Identity, and he seems to assume here that if he jumped around a lot in that film, he can do it here. The difference is that Bourne Identity had a great story and a great character. David is just a typical teenager, even in his twenties, and the rules of the jumpers' world are constantly changing. Unlike the “rules” about the ants in Them!, David is being chased by one “Paladin,” and sometimes, depending on what they need for the scene, several, who are determined to kill him. If David’s life is a teen fantasy, then the Paladins are the equivalent of the grownups. Since David is doing a lot that is illegal, I was rooting for the Paladins to kill him.

Did I mention this is simply conceived as fantasy/nightmare for teen boys? David’s mom has left the family years before, and he has to deal with a difficult father. If only his mom had not run off. Boo-hoo. But when David and the girl are arrested by the Italian police, who suddenly comes through the door but Mom, telling him to ditch the girl and jump out of the situation. We later learn that Mom is a Paladin and left so she wouldn’t have to kill her own son. Now THAT would have been an interesting movie.
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Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays.

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947 (89). Judex (1963, Georges Franju)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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This remake of pioneer cineaste Louis Feuillade’s 1916 action serial featuring cinema’s original caped crusader can function today as a surreal subversion of the modern superhero genre that movie houses the world over. While Judex (played by real life magician Channing Pollack) makes a bold entrance in a tuxedoed bird costume to orchestrate the death of a greedy financier, he, unlike most contemporary superheroes, is mostly ineffectual for the remainder of the film. He’s upstaged by a slinky, shape-shifting minx (Francine Berge) who changes disguises at every step of a kidnapping plot so haphazard it slips like mercury through the viewer’s grasp. No one character maintains control of the narrative, which operates like a soccer game, bouncing in jagged trajectories with every unexpected death, deception or deus ex machina revelation. But once in a while a stunning moment will materialize to sear itself into the memory: a masked ball of wealthy socialites wearing bird’s heads; Francine Berge’s lightning transformation from a sweet-faced nun to a sleek cat burglar outfit; Edith Scob’s delicate body floating downstream; a boy staring transfixed at the fresh corpse of a woman who’s fallen to her death. Feuillade’s grand vision was of a world whose capacity for imminent, explosive chaos resisted the authoritative logic of 20th century narrative; Franju is clearly sympathetic to Feuillade, but goes further in imposing a new authority, one of the lyrical dream image. If only more summer blockbusters had that sense…
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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Bliss-Out: Cadillac Records

By Andrew Chan

What will the next Great African American Movie look like? What will it be about, and who will make it? As if in answer to these questions, the past few years have seen the emergence of a new black prestige picture, a breed of studio-driven, Oscar-ready fare that runs parallel to a whole subgenre of independents aimed squarely at black viewers. Presenting a counterpoint to the T.D. Jakes adaptations and Tyler Perry comedies, films like Ray, Dreamgirls, The Pursuit of Happyness, The Great Debaters, and Talk to Me focus on historical or socially conscious subject matter, with the ultimate aim of demonstrating the black community’s contribution to mainstream American culture. But like the rest of each year’s Oscar hopefuls, it’s been (at best) a mixed bag, both commercially and artistically, and as usual the triumphs have belonged exclusively to actors rather than filmmakers.

Since black artists have been dominant in popular music to a degree they never have been in the film industry, it seems inevitable that the new black prestige picture has often taken the history of African American music as its reputable, thematically rich, and commercially viable template. (Look out for the upcoming Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and two Marvin Gaye biopics, all reportedly in the works.) In Darnell Martin’s Cadillac Records, a smart, ecstatically performed remembrance of the 50s and 60s Chicago blues label Chess Records, the genre has finally found its touchstone. The film follows the blues from its early days as folk music, when it was treated with anthropological curiosity by institutions like the Library of Congress, to its evolution as the popular form that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll and R&B. Unlike Dreamgirls’ idiotic take on the Motown story, it charts the relationship between black artistry and American commercialism without turning a blind eye on white exploitation, or becoming puritanical about “selling out.”

As a showcase for black performers, Cadillac Records is as much of a bliss-out as Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and as much of a collaborative achievement. Instead of adopting the model of the biopic, with its fetishization of lone pioneers, the film assumes the form of a variety show overflowing with talents and idiosyncrasies. The diversity of flavors on display extends beyond the music to the characters themselves, which means that the quiet charisma of Muddy Waters, the anger of Little Walter, the spooky self-possession of Howlin’ Wolf, and the zaniness of Chuck Berry are not viewed as interchangeable. Already, the lion’s share of acclaim has been showered on Jeffrey Wright, whose portrayal of Muddy Waters has earned him long-overdue recognition as one of the best things going for contemporary American movies. But by far the biggest surprise on the male-dominated roster is the film’s top-billed woman, delivering one of the outstanding performances of the year.

How has Beyoncé managed to reverse the downward trajectory of her movie career in one 20-minute appearance, forever erasing comparisons to unfortunate divas-turned-thespians like Madonna and Mariah Carey? And when are the critics going to notice? If her previous attempts at acting found her glassy-eyed and sheepish, Cadillac Records (which she executive-produced) offers an opportunity for the kind of redemption few could have expected or even wished for her. She certainly didn’t strike most fans and purists as the ideal choice to play Etta James: many asked if the young star’s thin frame would fill out to the great blues singer’s full figure, or how a soprano could possibly substitute for a contralto. Also, up until now, no one would have mistaken Beyoncé for a bona fide blues or soul vocalist, since her exhilarating performances are almost always in service not of emotion but of an outrageous, unapologetically plastic persona.

Perhaps the key to this unlikely match-up is that, despite the differences in the two women’s voices, both singers offer worldviews that are fundamentally secular and frequently profane. It’s hard to imagine either artist being hailed for possessing “the voice of an angel,” à la Sam Cooke, or the “voice of God,” like Aretha Franklin. Etta’s low-pitched, rough-textured vocals are rooted in the earthiness of blues, while Beyoncé’s pretty, flighty tone exemplifies the slickest of commercial black pop. These women represent the lineage of African American music before and after soul’s golden age, and seldom incorporate the gospel-inherited transcendence and religious engagement that became a major factor in the genre's history.

Making her entrance an hour into the film, Beyoncé imitates Etta’s thick-hipped strut with Oscar-baiting fervor. The smirk and backtalk couldn’t have been much of a stretch for a woman whose alter ego is named Sasha Fierce, but from the beginning, the signs had me wary of yet another tough, long-suffering, ultimately one-dimensional black female character—the type that continues to pervade our movies. Within the constraints of her limited screen-time, Beyoncé is forced to conceive of Etta in a handful of clichéd contexts associated with this problematic archetype: pouring out her soul in the studio, confronting her past by meeting up with her estranged white father, revealing her self-destructive streak in an overdose scene. Beyoncé readily embraces this time-worn caricature, demonstrating the speed with which it can elicit sympathy and goodwill from an audience, but somehow she also makes it her own. Like an Etta song, she sets you up to feel pity, then throws your convenient response back in your face.

In the film’s climactic number, Beyoncé seals the deal with her rendition of “I’d Rather Go Blind,” a tune that sounds less like a Chess record than a country-soul classic. Watching the scene unfold, I remembered the first time I fell in love with the song a few years ago and realized what a master of understatement Etta could be. For what is probably her finest recorded performance, she turns the amplitude down on her powerful voice, even keeping it subdued in the few moments when she belts out, and renders the beautiful lyrics (complete with stuttering repetitions) as an intimate confession rather than an open-throated catharsis. In the canon of songs about helpless, poisonous love, Etta’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” belongs with Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain”—it’s a whisper, not a howl. Such subtlety would seem to make demands that Beyoncé’s incurably theatrical singing style could never deliver on.

Yet, as an actress and a singer, she finds ways to make her interpretation both faithful and fresh. Sung directly to an impossible, already-married love interest, label founder Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), the performance begins from the point-of-view of the male, gazing at Etta from behind with his puppy-dog eyes. From the start, the pace and phrasing of Beyoncé’s vocals follow Etta’s with surprising fidelity. Then, as the camera inches forward, eventually framing the singer’s face in close-up, the scene builds in intensity, climaxing with a sneer at the corner of her mouth, and a few defiant, gut-wrenching wails. It’s clear her version is not the original’s moan of resignation, but an enactment of all the bitterness and resentment on which Etta James based her take-no-prisoners persona. And just as Raphael Saadiq did this year in his album The Way I See It, Beyoncé transforms a meticulous recreation of a vintage sound by laying her unmistakable vocal sensibility on top of it, allowing us to hear for ourselves how she borrows and departs from her musical ancestor.

After the disastrous Dreamgirls, Across the Universe, and Mamma Mia!, it’s a relief to find a director who knows how to craft a solid musical number, how to move us subtly but decisively from the spoken world to the sung. The success of Cadillac Records is due in part to a structure that is modeled after the songs it celebrates. Character, atmosphere, and entire emotional worlds must be constructed in a matter of minutes, so that the musical performance can triumph over the predictable narrative. Like the rest of the film, the scene banks on the greatness of the music, but lives or dies on the strength of the performer. By the time Beyoncé is finished with “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she has achieved what neither Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles nor Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash could manage: a respectful embodiment as well an expansion of a mythic figure. She takes us across a curiously underexplored frontier, where the emotional and physical abandon of an R&B performance becomes both the means and the substance of great melodramatic acting.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

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946 (88). Prima della rivoluzione / Before the Revolution (1964, Bernardo Bertolucci)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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We have Bernardo Bertolucci’s second feature to thank for serving a vivid analogy to the flaws of communism: like sleeping with your hot aunt, it’s a utopian fantasy that, once achieved, goes downhill in a hurry. This semi-autobiographical account of a doomed love affair between a young bourgeois leftist (Francesco Barilli) dallying and diddling with his disaffected aunt (Bertolucci’s then-wife, the delectable Adriana Asti) is filmed with genuine emotional conviction towards its ideological confusion, trying its damnedest to articulate its ambivalence through a barrage of stylistic conceits openly borrowed from New Wave contemporaries (even Asti is a mash-up of Anna Karina kitten-cute and Vitti-Moreau-nioni neurosis). The jump cuts, poetic monologues and musical interludes are alternately impressive in their omnivorous ambitions and overbearing in their bombast (especially when Ennio Morricone’s music swells to overkill levels). The most memorable stylistic elements are those that would become the touchstones for Bertolucci’s career: a camera that moves like a dancer through time and space, wishing to brush its gaze against everything in sight; and a darkly sensuous knack for depicting forbidden sex as a form of self-knowledge, an inescapable vortex at the heart of existence. Few filmmakers have been able to channel the cinema to evoke their all-consuming libido; the catch is that the leftist sentiments depicted in this film (which, upon its spring ‘68 release in Paris, helped incite the May Riots) amount to just another dalliance for this quintessentially bourgeois superconsumer of life experience. It amounts to an international arthouse version of The Graduate [TSPDT #215], as clever as that film in fashionably tweaking middle-class boredom with cougar sex and hip filmmaking to compensate for a muddled, reactionary critique of society. As far as movies depicting scandalous intercourse leading to social revolutions go, Harold and Maude [TSPDT #493] reads like Das Kapital compared to this defeatist tract.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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Directorama: Guess the MacGuffin

A Weekly Webcomic by Peet Gelderblom

[Author's Note: For more information or to browse earlier episodes, visit www.directorama.net.]

Click to enlarge:

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Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. He founded 24LiesASecond, for which he wrote and edited several essays, and is the twisted cartoonist behind Directorama (the website as well as the book).

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There Will Be Choice: Why Gone Baby Gone Is the Best Film of 2007

By Robert C. Cumbow

[Publication Note: This article is being cross-published with Parallax View.]

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 05/11/2008, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that make you who you are: your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in those things.
—Patrick Kenzie—

Gosh, what a great year 2007 was for movies. You could wipe out the Academy’s five Best Picture nominees, replace them with five others, and still have an honorable rack of best-picture candidates. One of those second five could easily be Ben Affleck’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone—my personal vote for best film of the year.

A well-crafted film, richly deserving of the honors it has received, No Country for Old Men nevertheless too often feels like a collection of highlights from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, sometimes about one guy, sometimes about another, never matching the novel’s more focused vision. There Will Be Blood is even more all over the map—gorgeous to look at, but without the discipline of knowing where it’s coming from, where it’s headed, and what, if anything, those two points have to do with each other. Michael Clayton bounces between rich characterization and caricature, moral complexity and empty-headed mantras about corporations. Atonement seems to be about one thing, but only for the purpose of revealing ultimately that it is about something else altogether—not romance or betrayal but the power of art to liberate, and the impossibility of such liberation. And it takes that war-epic detour in the middle, as if to say, “Hey, guys, this isn’t a chick flick! Honest!” Juno is primarily about language, but uneasily so, since its characters, who are all sharply defined and mostly well-rounded, nevertheless all speak with the same voice—the impossibly quick-witted and widely experienced voice of one clever writer. And the language of the film’s characters is an end, not a means, never satisfactorily bound to the film’s moral theme about decision-making.

Gone Baby Gone is also about decision-making; but unlike the Academy’s five nominees, it is a film that from the first to the last frame never forgets what it’s about, and remains unrelentingly faithful to its theme throughout. Director Ben Affleck shows an unerring eye and a concentration of intent that makes this film really special.

For one thing, it’s not just about decision-making, but also about the consequences of decisions. Every character in the film makes choices, and the film’s commitment to its South Boston framework continually asks—as smalltime private eye Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) does in his opening voice-over—whether those choices are what define us or not, and whether they are “real” choices at all, or are already determined by the nature of the chooser, dictated by the choices he didn’t make. In this sense, Gone Baby Gone is a more consciously focused (though less intellectually daring) meditation on freedom and determinism than the Coen Brothers’ palimpsest on Cormac McCarthy.

Both Afflecks impart an honest and uncompromising sense of place to the film, through repeated visual and verbal reminders of the neighborhood, its people and the inescapability of the city. In a sense, the film is the anti-Departed, quietly insisting on an authenticity of location that is far more crucial here than in Martin Scorsese’s New Yorker’s love-letter to Boston, where Beantown provides only a convenient situs of crime and police corruption appropriate toa transplanted Hong Kong action film. On the second point, it is also the anti-Juno, since each of its characters sounds authentically like himself, not like one or another aspect of the same writer’s wit.

Indeed, just as Patrick is alone with the decision he ultimately makes, he is also alone among the film’s major characters in the dialect he speaks. His fiancée, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), doesn’t sound at all like Patrick, and she ends up leaving him over the choice he makes. It’s not an Irish-vs.-Italian thing; she’s just not from the neighborhood.

Similarly, Detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), the Louisiana transplant who engineers the decision that Patrick makes the choice to undo, doesn’t sound like Patrick. But these things aren’t so simple, as Remy remarks to Patrick early in the film: “You might think you’re more from here than me. But I’ve been living here longer than you’ve been alive, so who’s right?”

Patrick’s right—at least in the sense that he makes a choice that someone outside the neighborhood would not make and probably would not understand.

Actually, Patrick makes two choices in the course of the film: to execute the child molester Corwin Earle (Matthew Maher), and to turn in Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) and send Amanda home to her mother (Amy Ryan). Everyone supports his first choice, because all of the major characters are uncompromising in their hatred of child molesters. “You gotta take a side”; “you did what you had to do”; “you should be proud of yourself.” Even Patrick’s belief that he wouldn’t make the same choice again “doesn’t make it wrong” in Remy’s view. But in Patrick’s second choice, he is all alone. Bea—his client—isn’t there to thank him, and Helene’s persistence in her old behavior (despite her earlier promise that she would change, and in exact fulfillment of Angie’s prediction that she would be unable to) does nothing to assure Patrick of the rightness of his choice. Ben Affleck pointedly does not take sides; he knows his film is not about rightness of the decision but about the reasons Patrick makes it and has to live with it.

Affleck’s unwillingness to take a side informs his decisions about camera placement and frame composition. Whereas Jason Reitman recognizes the volatility of the abortion/adoption issue in Juno and he and scenarist Diablo Cody carefully deflect and nullify anticipated audience reactions from either side of the fence, Affleck concentrates on what his film is about and chooses a style designed to keep his audience from being distracted from the central idea. As just one example—well, two—in the scenes in which Amanda is taken from the Doyles and reunited with her mother, we are not allowed to glimpse the child’s face. In the police car, we see her, hands to her mouth, in an ambiguous gesture of what could be anticipation or apprehension; but Affleck is smart enough to recognize that any shot of Amanda’s face when she is taken from the arms of Francine Doyle (Kippy Goldfarb) or delivered into those of Helene McCready would introduce interpretation into the shot. It would raise the issue of the welfare of the child.

Child custody decisions in the United States are always made based on an analysis of the “best interests of the child.” Significantly, Gone Baby Gone is not interested in the best interests of Amanda, though most of its characters are, particularly Angie, Remy, and Doyle. Most of the film’s major characters are concerned with the interests of the child or of themselves or both. Angie frames the issue nicely when she wonders whether keeping inside information about police efforts to recover the child is “better for Amanda or better for us.” Remy and Doyle and Lionel make pronouncements such as “I did what I did for the sake of the child” and persuade themselves they are doing “one last good thing.” But Patrick, Helene, and Bea—all from the neighborhood—take for granted their sense that Amanda belongs where she comes from, not with a family that can give her a better life. “It wasn’t your life to give,” Patrick tells Doyle, and imagines a grown-up Amanda accusing him of having left her in the hands of a family that “wasn’t my family.”

Angie and Doyle both sense Patrick’s uncertainty and pounce on it: “This is the kind of thing that if you do, Patrick, you want to be sure,” she tells him; and moments later the retired police chief plays on Patrick’s fear that “this might be an irreparable mistake.” Patrick readily admits his uncertainty, and even in the film’s unforgettable closing shot seems unsure of whether he did the right thing. But this only reaffirms the point that the rightness of the decision is not the issue. In Patrick’s view his choice was a foregone conclusion. Amanda’s belonging to where she came from and the inevitability of Patrick’s choice to that effect are two sides of the same coin—not a coin that has traveled 28 years to get to this time and place, but a coin that was always irrevocably of the neighborhood.

So the dialectic of the film seems to be determinism vs. free will, and the dilemma is evident even in the rhetoric of Captain Doyle, the foremost of the film’s “free will” forces: “We don’t know why people do what they do. Everybody looks out his own window.” He says those words without knowing that with them, he damns himself. He is in the hands of Patrick, and Patrick already knows the only window he’s ever been able to look out of.

Are we free, or do we only believe we are free? Does it matter? Or is it only important how we behave with regard to things we can’t do anything about? This is not only a question that also arises in No Country for Old Men—it’s a question as old as Oedipus. The tale of Oedipus is, among other things, one of the oldest detective stories, perhaps the oldest. It’s about a resourceful guy who’s smarter than anyone else around him, better than everyone else at solving mysteries, figuring things out. But he’s never figured out the one great truth that there are forces he can’t beat, things he can’t outsmart. His tragedy is that all of his great detective work brings him to the recognition that the things he didn’t choose are the ones that made him who he is, and that he himself is the killer he is looking for.

There’s no greater story than that. Gone Baby Gone isn’t exactly the same story, though, since Patrick already knows, from the first words and the first frame of the film, that he is a product of the choices he didn’t make. Still, he’s as good a detective as old Oedipus. He talks like a plain blue-collar guy from the neighborhood, but he really is smarter than everyone else around him, gets out of tight spots through resourcefulness and a little bravado, and really does figure out the mystery through sheer, dogged detective work, when everyone else has given up. But he’s no better (or worse) than Oedipus when it comes to discovering himself and having to live with the consequences. The old cliché that when you save a person you become responsible for that person has never had such a literal meaning as that suggested by the ending of Gone Baby Gone.

The first time I saw Gone Baby Gone, I had the haunting sense of being reminded of something, not directly, but obliquely, in a ghostly sort of way. What especially resonated was the way the film’s central quarry scene leaves you disoriented, untethered, in a kind of free fall. She’s dead; where can the film go from here? “And like that, she was gone,” says Patrick in voiceover, reminding us of The Usual Suspects, and invoking the same kind of loss of narrative equilibrium: Have I been watching the right film at all?

Upon a second viewing, the ghost made itself known: Gone Baby Gone’s narrative structure is the narrative structure of Vertigo. A detective is hired and becomes obsessed with the person who is the center of his investigation. Then, at the center of the film, that person dies in a fall from a high place, and the shock leaves the detective unhinged and the audience looking around for something to grab hold of. The detective refuses to let go of the investigation, and it almost seems as if his tenacity wills the dead person back into existence. He solves the mystery, with someone else’s confession filling in the details; and then, in his pride at having figured it all out, he plays God, takes control of the destiny of the reborn victim, and ends by precipitating consequences he will find difficult to live with, and facing an agonizing awareness of himself.

There are differences of detail and nuance, of course. Scotty Ferguson was calculatedly hired and was a dupe in a conspiracy; Patrick’s hiring by Bea was accidental, and Lionel and the cops weren’t conspirators, they just made it up as they went along. But it’s the same story. One point of difference, though, is more than incidental: In Vertigo, Scotty, like Oedipus, thought he was acting freely throughout the “case,” only to find he was controlled by forces outside himself; in the second half of the film, he gets a second chance, and even when acting truly freely, ends up causing the same result, with greater and more tragic finality than before. Like Oedipus, he turns out to be the killer he was looking for. Patrick, by contrast, never believed he was free in the first place, and ends up not a lost soul like Scotty Ferguson but with the conviction that he could not have done otherwise. In that context, the consequences Patrick has to live with, bleak as they are, look a lot like redemption.

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Robert C. Cumbow has been writing about film for nearly 40 years. His work has appeared in Film Comment, Film Quarterly, the Seattle Film Society journals Movietone News and The Informer, and in numerous newspapers. He is the author of Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone and Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter, both available from Scarecrow Press. He is especially proud of his liner notes for the Rhino Records/Turner Classic Movies edition of the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bob is a trademark/copyright lawyer, heads the intellectual property practice at Graham & Dunn, Seattle, and teaches Trademark Law and Advertising Law at Seattle University School of Law.

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945 (87). Il Sorpasso / The Easy Life (1962, Dino Risi)

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Dino Risi, who passed away this June to little fanfare, helmed nearly 80 features over a career spanning seven decades, the most celebrated of them being this road comedy, one of the early influencers of the genre. A mild-mannered student (Jean-Louis Trintignant, more buttoned-up than usual) has his eyes opened to the excitements and vices of booming 60s Italy when he’s taken for a ride by a braggadocio businessman (Vittorio Gassman, whose last name fits his character in terms of his talking and driving). The garrulous script is co-written by Ettore Scola (We All Loved Each Other So Much, A Special Day), and it shows in the story’s reliance on broad social types who require a full story arc to acquire dimension and pathos. Trintignant never overcomes the flat naivete of his character, basically a prop for Gassman’s blowhard hedonism, which borders on belligerence (not surprisingly, Risi also wrote and directed the original version of Scent of a Woman). But when Gassman points out a family secret to his protege’s unbelieving eyes, he gains credibility as a social critic who’s not so much an asshole as too smart for his own good, earning the film a rib-jabbing cynicism worthy of Billy Wilder. The sudden, tragic ending feels as arbitrary as the one in Easy Rider [TSPDT #331], a film it allegedly inspired, while other sardonic moments are undercut by the film’s essential ambivalence towards its own social critique: a fete full of gum-chewing teenyboppers eager to lose their virginity brims with leering undertones of adult envy; a sun-baked beach party exceeds tourist ad levels of brain-fried fun. The Easy Life’s ambivalent worldview may lack the singular formal curiosity of Antonioni (whose L’Eclisse is the target of the film’s biggest punch lines) or the carnivalesque lyricism of Fellini, but the way it mixes equal parts hipper-than-thou wisecracks, mainstream morality and tasty dollops of la dolce vita may account for its mass appeal.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.

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The Criterion Collection #112: Playtime

By Chris Gisonny

[Playtime screens in 70mm on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. Click here for screening information.]

A man approaches a uniformed doorman from the sidewalk, holds up a cigarette, and casually asks for a light. The doorman waves his hand and tells him to “go around.” The camera drifts back to reveal the huge pane of glass separating the figures, so spotless that the man (as well as the audience) initially fails to perceive its existence. This ground-floor window of a modern and sterile building, an invisible barrier of progress, forces the man to walk to the entrance to receive his desired light; the shot, at once a joke and a lament, indicates the presence of a master.

Who else could be responsible for Playtime (1967) but the great Jacques Tati? The production of this meticulous masterpiece was so prolonged and disastrous that the film stands as both the apex of his career and the cause of its ruin. Playtime addresses some heavy themes, among them the alienation of the individual in the modern world, the unforeseen complications arising from technological developments that promise to make life easier, and the harmful effects of corporate, homogeneous architecture on cities around the world. Tati cloaks these concerns in charm, optimism, and hilarity, developing his comedic material out of our collective tendency toward clumsiness and error, despite our wishes to the contrary, and ultimately celebrating this imperfection as the foundation of spontaneity, creativity, and human compassion.

Some films are the result of a director gone mad and such is the case with Playtime. Tati shot the film in 70mm and practically built an entire city for its production, complete with functioning streetlights, miniature skyscrapers on wheels, and enough electricity to power a small town. The final product was huge in every aspect except profit. Its failure at the box office, coupled with its enormous cost, ensured that Tati’s career would never fully recover. Tati himself offered the best expression of the film’s damage upon his financial situation: “I had a house before Playtime. I don’t have my house today.” Yet this bankruptcy-inducing disaster is one of the most unique viewing experiences in the history of cinema.

The gargantuan frames that confront us in Playtime brim with activity, resulting in an engaging film that offers the viewer the choice of what to watch in each scene. Such a generous structure rewards multiple viewings and many will find themselves laughing at jokes they failed to notice the first and second time around. Tati’s camera records the human comedy from a distance, allowing us to view it as a system powered by foibles, disasters, and misunderstandings. How often is it that the members of a film’s audience find themselves concerned more with the movements of the characters as opposed to dialogue (minimal) and plot (vaguely absent)? In this sense Playtime is something of a hilarious ballet and Tati its inspired choreographer. The graceless dance of its characters provides most of the laughs.

Tati distributes the jokes democratically among the mostly anonymous cast. We can almost label everyone in this film a comedian of sorts. This differs remarkably from the efforts of most screen comics, from Keaton and Chaplin to the Marx Brothers, who tended to act as the nucleus for the chaos orbiting around them. Tati did not employ his bumbling but endearing cinematic alter ego Monsieur Hulot as the central character of Playtime; rather, Monsieur Hulot often finds himself stumbling into the center of the action and back to the periphery of the scene like so many of the extras crowding about. This is a film in which either nobody is an extra or everybody is an extra.

The notion that Playtime condemns uniformity and celebrates spontaneity becomes apparent in the infamously intricate “nightclub sequence,” wherein the proud staff of a chic Parisian restaurant struggle to complete some last-minute construction with an urgency approaching panic as their fashionable guests arrive for the grand opening. The club deteriorates amidst deadpan reactions from the wait staff and stiff interactions between the guests. Monsieur Hulot arrives and, true to his unintentionally destructive character, immediately breaks the glass door to the consternation of the doorman (who learns quickly that he can hold the doorknob in place without anyone realizing the door is missing) and later quite literally brings down the roof. It's a descent into the carnivalesque, a riotous celebration wrought by intoxication and error, a blossoming of human interaction previously denied by the imposing buildings and the rigid movement of the figures darting about the maze of their interiors.

Monsieur Hulot and the exhausted guests emerge from the nightclub as the sun gradually rises above the buildings. Color blossoms brilliantly in the form of ribbons, balloons, clothes, decorations, automobiles, and street signs, contrasting sharply with the mostly grey tones presented earlier. Children, a species omitted from most of the film’s narrative, suddenly dot the sidewalk, smiling in awe at the exciting world twirling around them. The score, a beautiful waltz, invites us to marvel at the transformation of this soulless district of Paris into a spectacular carnival. The shots that reveal cars in a roundabout mimicking the slow rotation of a carousel are simply poetic. This final sequence might be Tati’s way of suggesting that “playtime” is necessary for any human being, no matter what age or social position, to dispel the harm created by our unconscious conspiracy to dull existence with stress and work. This manifests itself in a particularly beautiful shot: a young boy standing on a street corner blows a disastrous note on a toy trumpet. A stiff-looking man in a suit gently removes the trumpet from the boy’s hand and raises it to his lips to produce a brief, tidy, and instructive note of his own before handing it back to its patient little owner.

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IMAGE/SOUND/EXTRAS

Playtime is presented in its original aspect ratio (anamorphically enhanced) of 1.85:1. According to the Criterion DVD booklet, a “35mm reduction internegative, made from the restored 65mm interpositive,” was used for the digital transfer. It would be wise to view this on the largest television screen available. Although viewing the DVD won’t replicate the experience of a 70mm projection in a crowded theater, Criterion has presented us with a beautiful version of the film that one can delve into at leisure. The remastered soundtrack is thankfully crisp, as the creative sound design is a crucial element of any Jacques Tati film.

In terms of extras, what you’ll find here are mostly anecdotes about the infamous production with sprinklings of interpretation, which is the case with the audio commentary delivered by film historian Philip Kemp, the introduction by Terry Jones, and the video interview with Tati’s script supervisor Sylvette Baudrot. An essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum pairs an analysis of Playtime with an account of the critic’s personal experiences with both the film and its creator. Au-delà de “Playtime” gives us the gift of rare footage of the production. “Jacques Tati in Monsieur Hulot’s Work,” a BBC documentary from 1976, intersperses interviews with Tati with footage from his films. An audio interview with Tati from the 1972 San Francisco International Film Festival sheds some amusing light on his cinematic technique. Perhaps the most interesting feature is the meta-slapstick of Cours du soir (1967), a short film in which Tati and a group of students discuss and practice the art of observation and mimicry.
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Chris Gisonny blogs at What is the Fourth Dimension?.

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New New World: An Exchange, A Conversation, An Epigraph

By Ryland Walker Knight & Keith Uhlich


INTRODUCTION

The House Next Door's own creation myth is by now well-known, but once more, with feeling...

Originally begun as a solo venture by Matt Zoller Seitz, The House's primary aim was to act as an online venue of support for Terrence Malick's The New World. It was exactly three years ago today (January 2nd, 2006) that Matt published the first in a series of articles parsing and illuminating Malick's masterpiece. Like the film, the blog would grow beyond its initially stated purpose, becoming a widespread collaborative effort, a home for many voices (harmonized, dissonant, solo) to speak their varied truths.

Yet even in moving forward, we'd somehow always manage to circle back where we'd come from: Matt's remained a vocal advocate for The New World here and elsewhere; the film has been referenced, by fellow contributors and readers, in innumerable comments threads; my inaugural piece at The House was a breakdown of the differences between the 150-minute Academy cut and the 135-minute theatrical cut. And so we loop 'round again on this, The House's third birthday/anniversary.

A few months ago, an extended cut of The New World, running 172-minutes, was released on DVD. Contributor Ryland Walker Knight and I began an e-mail dialogue about this version, though we only ever got through a single exchange (my fault, mea culpa Ry). Our e-mails are reprinted, with minor structural and clarity edits, below, though we both of us wanted to more fully mark the moment, so after a recent joint viewing of the film (Ryland having become, once more, a fellow New Yorker) we recorded a podcast conversation that expands on our thoughts—you'll find it after our initial missives to each other. And just below that is an epigraph, chosen by Ryland, that speaks to a facet of his experience with the film.

It remains only to wish all House contributors and readers a Happy and Healthy New Year. There are some exciting developments on the horizon in '09, and I hope you'll all continue with us on the "long, strange journey." Destination, quite happily, unknown. (KU)

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AN EXCHANGE


KEITH UHLICH: I feel safe saying that this is my favorite cut of the film, and I think that's mainly because more of The New World is, to me, never a bad thing. Malick's shown the possibilities over three released cuts; unlike Mann with Miami Vice, futzing around with the elements only enhances things. If I think I'm mostly going to keep coming back to this cut (and I do hope, someday soon, for a Mr. Arkadin-like 3-cuts comparative DVD set) it's because it feels most fully realized. I harbor a suspicion that it might be viewed (at least in immediate experience) as the most conventional because of the intertitles (chapter divisions like "A Proposal" or the brilliant, self-aware first one, "A New Start"), but I think even there Malick takes conventions of the form and twists them to his allusive/elusive purposes (the final chapter heading, "And Last," still haunts me, and I might have to make use of it in a piece someday just as homage).

If anything, the 172-minute cut brings back the dissonance I felt in the 150-minute Academy cut as regards the voice-over work. When the film was theatrically released at 135-minutes (and the following is not meant as a "shouldn't-have-done-that" observation) Malick more often matched the voice-over to onscreen action and/or let each person have their say before going to another speaker. In the Extended Cut, characters talk over each other in the voice-over, even, at several points, over their own thoughts so that two or more threads of consciousness are apparent. Smith makes explicit reference to this at one point, arguing with himself about his conflicted feelings over Pocahontas—it's in the scene where he's traveling up the river to deal with the merchant Indian, the sequence that bookends his idyllic one-on-one reverie with Pocahontas. The specific line is "cannot walk two paths at once" (a sentiment that Malick disproves).

More on that scene: The merchant Indian hands Smith a coin and Smith observes that it's "the source of all evil. It excuses vulgarity. Makes wrong right; base noble." That really resonated with me; I'm sure it has something to do with the financial crisis as well as my own fluctuating situation monetarily. It also rhymes with Smith's earlier monologue where he states of this new world that "there will be no landlords to rack us with high rents." If he only knew. I wasn't a fan of HBO's John Adams miniseries, but I thought it ended on an appropriately ambivalent note with Adams calling on his descendants to live up to what he and the Founding Fathers had created. It had a sense, as I think it does here, of speaking forward while looking backward. I actually hope to title a book of mine (probably a collection of film-related essays) "The Eternal Present." That's something I look for in movies, the sense that, though a story may be specific to a particular time and place, it resonates throughout all that has come before and all that will come to pass.

That gets into Malick's own methods. Go here, if you haven't already, to see a YouTube breakdown of some of the references in the film. The invocation by Pocahontas in the prologue alludes to a poem by Vachel Lindsay. Among other textual referents (besides the actual diaries of Smith, Rolfe, etc) are Vergil and The Aeneid, Montaigne, The Bible, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Then, of course, the musical ones: Mozart, Wagner (a semi-ironic use, I believe, because it hints as much at encroachment and eradication as to transcendence and triumph), James Horner, etc, treading various generations. Forwards and backwards always, simultaneously.

A good place to close, save for the observation that I think more time is given, in this cut, to the development of Smith and Pocahontas' relationship, and I think the film is all the better for it.


RYLAND WALKER KNIGHT: I'm with you, Keith, and I'll take it a step further: more Malick is always a good thing. The publicity description and solitary still image from his forthcoming Tree of Life make me tremble and smile and lick my lips just as that (it feels) long ago promise of further versions of The New World surfacing in our lives. It feels so long because, as with all of us, so many things have happened since Christmas 2005. And always, in one way or form, The New World has been there, lurking, smiling back at me. I feel very Serge Daney here: if ever a film has watched me and marked my life, even during this brief (yet long! and full!) interval, that film is this one, this unending glimpse of sublimity.

I cannot avoid myself when I talk of The New World. There's plenty to talk about in the film, of course, and I will get there—it's why we're here—but, first, please indulge me. I was lucky enough to be among the select few of the public who got to see the 150-minute cut thanks to my first whirl through New York City (thank you Jann and Don and Ken Burns and, of course, Allison) and its treasures both dirty and sparkling, its opportunities cinematic and (all other forms of) idealistic. Now I've always said, and continue to say, that The Thin Red Line is my "favorite" film; but this New World was something else, something truly special. I still revere that 150-minute cut precisely because it feels so lost, because I feel its lack. (Were the suits to be brave and release that Arkadin-like set you pr