Steady Diet of Film

Review: Uncounted, the New Math of American Elections

 

On last Sunday's episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, reporter Katrina vanden Heuvel mentioned during the journalists' roundtable that a lack of polling place preparedness could sway the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and she was nearly laughed off the stage. I repeat, the very notion of compromised voting eight years after the supreme court appointed a president and just four years after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (in a joint decision with Congress) deemed it necessary to send international observers to monitor our elections for the first time, was immediately discarded by a group of prominent political writers from the most widely read news sources in the country. It's possible there's never been a clearer illustration of the mainstream media's apathy to question status quo that has served us so well for the last several years. This void has left a public more primed than ever for the chaos and clumsiness of blogs, talk radio and agit prop documentaries.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt's highly anticipated follow up to Sundance darling Old Joy, a film heralded as high watermark in contemporary minimalist film-making, debuted at Cannes this year to equal acclaim. Wendy and Lucy is generating even more Oscar buzz for actress Michelle Williams (she also nominated in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain). Wendy and Lucy follows flat broke a young woman Wendy (Williams), who is traveling with her beloved dog on an very oddly navigated course from Indiana to Alaska. Her destination Alaska, which holds a near the mythic level of possibility for of a high-paying cannery jobs. But their plan is curbed when her car breaks down in a small Oregon town. Further drama compounds the pressure and hopelessness of Wendy's situation, when, after a series of bad events, Lucy goes missing.

The film is at its best when it relies the most on Williams. Watching her move through this story, it’s easy to be reminded of a young Sandrine Bonnaire in Agnes Varda's 1985 Vagabond. Both actresses employed a level of understatement to create characters living on the fringes of society that it's rare to find in narrative film.

Rumored to have been borne from the frustration of seeing Katrina victims who were too poor to flee the storm being criticized for "stupidity" by right-wing radio personalities, Reichardt's personal politics can at times become obstacles. Like an unnecessary subplot in Courtney Hunt's Frozen River earlier this year, there comes a point where Reichardt seems to lose confidence in our her audience’s ability to empathize with a poverty-stricken protagonist. Instead, she and temporarily shifts the danger to a more innocent victim (in Frozen River an infant, in Wendy and Lucy a dog). I can't decide if this is incredibly cynical or bleakly pragmatic.

Where Old Joy relied on conversations to illustrate the gulf between two recently reunited friends, Wendy and Lucy resorts to a few fairly standard conventions to engage without providing backstory. The camera dwells numerous times on an unexplained bandage on Wendy's leg. We see her dire financial straits reinforced again and again with panning shots of the meticulous expenditure log she keeps in a spiral-bound notebook. Lastly, a moralizing lecture (delivered by a snide, Jesus-loving teenager in Act 1) winds up providing the conscience of the entire film. In a film so self-consciously styled to be minimal (with no score and very little dialogue or plot) these ham-fisted choices blare like sirens. 

RIYL: Once, Ballast, Secret Life of Words, Dark Water Rising.

Wendy and Lucy will screen October 4th at the Mill Valley Film Festival and will open in limited release December 10th 2008.

Review: Synecdoche, New York

 
Let's get the obvious out of the way, unpronounceable movie titles are rarely a good idea. They're a turn off to mainstream moviegoers and an irritation to those of us who take no pleasure in listening to people tediously stumble over foreign words.  And many jokes have been made (fairly so) about the parallel opaqueness of title and inscrutability of plot. Synecdoche, New York is bleak, indulgent and at times borders on cruel in how far it goes down its own rabbit hole. But not unlike director Charlie Kauffman's previous films as a writer (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), it's one of the most exciting films of the year.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director whose work is going largely unnoticed in Schnectady, New York. He's devoted to his young daughter but his relationship with this wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has imploded. She leaves him, takes their daughter and goes to Berlin with her boozy friend Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Adele immediately becomes a huge art star while Caden's life completely unspools. He imagines the worst possible outcomes for their daughter (the way only a suburban father could: getting tattoos, dancing in PG-rated burlesque shows and ultimately forgetting her uncool dad).

At the same time he is rewarded a MacArthur Grant and is determined to make something "true and honest". Which for someone as self-obsessed as Cotard, means a scene by scene retelling of his own life including the two failed love affairs he attempted with a box office girl from this theater (Samantha Morton) and an actress (Michelle Williams). Neither of these women are pleased with their depictions in his play and bail. When his mother dies he checks out all together and hires an actress (Dianne Wiest) to play himself, who first feeds him his "lines" through an earpiece and then physically takes over the role of Caden Cotard all together.

And for an added layer of self-reflection, Caden also sees a therapist (Hope Davis). Whose scenes harken back to the madcap New York-based comedies of the early 90s that have been sorely missing from the indie film world. It's a niche Davis was elemental in defining and it's delightful to see her playing funny again.

Synecdoche is a stunning directorial debut and reflects a level of ambition largely absent from American film directors. Through all the gross out, quirkiness, despair and confusion the film revels in it always maintains a whimsical sense of humor and a steady sense of itself.  Directors who have plumed far less emotional depths aren't able to maintain a rudder through their own eccentricity (paging: Wes Anderson) with this sort of perverse clarity. 

RIYL: All That Jazz, Youth Without Youth, The Intruder, Inland Empire, Punch Drunk Love. 

Synecdoche NY opens in select cities November 7th.