Reviews

I'm a lifelong Salt Lake-area resident, former (ten-year) student of ballet, and occasional season subscriber to Ballet West, so I've been quite interested to see what this Ballet West reality show would turn out to be. Ballet West is an old and much-respected company and its dancers' personal lives are frequently commented on locally--the unusually high count of married couples in the company, in particular--and so I'm not surprised that they were deemed strong subjects for a ballet reality show. The obsessive ballet world was ripe for reality show treatment, and so far I'm glad that our local dancers were chosen for the job. (Another selling point: reality show subjects with ties to Mormonism/Utah seem to be Hot Stuff in TV Land. I think network executives have discovered the fierce viewer loyalty Mormons provide anyone they perceive as being connected to their culture, even indirectly.)

Of course, a more documentary treatment of ballet would have been preferable--there are some standard reality show elements in Breaking Pointe that made me laugh out loud. For starters, suspicious editing practices: was that shot of principal artist Christiana Bennett scowling really a reaction to the new girl's praised performance, or completely unrelated? There's some typical forced conversation and amplified drama: does the real Allison really walk up to other dancers unprovoked and mockingly reduce their superior abilities to fat, sturdy ankles? I doubt you'd survive long professionally with such behavior, unless you've been cast as the Villain and charged with the task of stirring up on-screen mischief. And there are also a few too-convenient symmetries, as the envied rising star and her only close friend are promoted and canned, respectively. Did company director Adam Sklute choose which handful of dancers to feature based on the drama of the particular fates he already had planned for them? Or maybe he fired Katie for no other reason than to provide a nice dramatic contrast to Beckanne's good fortune, as well as the side benefit of romantic tension in parting Katie from her dancer boyfriend? Though I was not surprised to see such familiar reality show devices in the show, I was a little disappointed.

But I can't compare a reality show airing on a crappy minor network to Great Documentary Cinema, and for all its flaws I think this show must sit somewhere near top of the reality show heap. I was glad to see that the producers haven't tried to impose a general cat fight vibe on the company--a rare thing in the reality show world, where the assumption is that viewers tune in to see real or fabricated animosity between the characters. Except for Villain Allison (whose evil seems a bit forced, as I already mentioned), the dancers come across as driven and ambitious but ultimately good-natured and occasionally self-deprecating. Overwhelmingly likable. I certainly want to believe the best of these people: I have a fondness for them after watching them onstage for years--Bennett in particular--so it's great to see that this is a better-than-average reality show and portrays the dancers as being better-than-average human beings. The dancing here is beautiful and the dancers are quite articulate in explaining their world, and so if I can make it through next week's Ballet Babes Gone Wild bikini episode without being fatally annoyed, I expect I will enjoy the rest of this series very much.

In the interest of full disclosure: I'm a devout Mormon and was sad when Richard Dutcher, erstwhile director/writer/actor in the LDS-themed film world, left the faith a few years back. His Brigham City is one of my favorite films and both it and his States of Grace are part of my (small) DVD collection. I routinely push them on friends in an effort to win him converts. I remember my dismay as I watched his groundbreaking God's Army followed closely by a host of moronic LDS-themed movies, from melodramatic adaptations of Jack Weyland romance novels to lame Mormon vanity comedies. These throwaway films, crashing down the Mormon film trail Dutcher blazed, often made much more money than did his films. And so when we see his screenwriter character in Falling repeatedly selling out to fund his worthier aspirations, we can perhaps understand the real-life source of that disillusionment. The public is generally uninterested in difficult, thought-provoking films and Dutcher and his character in Falling have learned that the hard way. I knew this was a theme of the film, and walked into the theater inclined toward sympathy.

But this film is in some ways a unfunny caricature of difficult, thought-provoking films. I went in knowing that this was an especially dark departure from Dutcher's former work, but expecting it to at least be honest. I'm very selective about the violent films I see, and based on his former work I felt I could trust Dutcher to make the all darkness in his film relevant. I was disappointed in that: in its attempt to be gritty and world-wise, the movie becomes the very sensationalist gore fest it is criticizing. Maybe the over-the-top violence was intended partially as irony (pointing back to a meeting Dutcher's character has with a cynical film producer), but if so, it is an exceptionally dark irony, and in my opinion, ineffective.

This is largely because the story plays out with all the subtlety of a morality play or Greek tragedy: in some ways satisfying in its symmetry and poetic justice, but hardly creating in me a connection to the characters that would have moved the experience beyond catharsis to real empathy and sorrow. Their former goodness is very faintly drawn, and their cold attachment to their respective ambitions is quite pronounced from the start, and consequently brief flashbacks to a brighter past (and a heartwarming interlude at the Los Angeles LDS temple) were not sufficient for me to accept the idea that there was much real curse-the-gods tragedy in their stories--just garden variety vanity and stupidity turned bloody by an unfortunate entanglement with violent street gangs.

I am also tired of filmmakers trying to push their artistic journeys as heart wrenching tales of the Everyman. While my life is enriched by excellent filmmaking (including some of Dutcher's past work) and while I am disappointed that some of the most gifted and uncompromising filmmakers often have to fight impossible battles to get their work seen and appreciated, I struggle to care about the stories behind the scenes as much as some in the industry think I should. Give me a character compromising his/her integrity to fund an exceptionally noble ambition of some kind and I'll call that a tragedy worth bleeding quarts over.

I am hopeful the that something of the old Dutcher will return, but in the future I will be cautious and wait for more reviews to come out before I buy a ticket to one of his movies. I hear his next offering is a slasher flick. I hope he's been getting a good wholesale rate on all this fake blood.

I will not be watching the second half of Jane Eyre. It has gorgeous production values. It has a striking Bleak Housean filming style that is a joy to watch. It is following the plot line fairly faithfully, considering that must be pared down to four hours. Its crime is a lack of Bronte soul -- it is the skeleton of the Jane Eyre story draped in the threadbare rags of any modern chick flick of the week.

Don't get me wrong. It's not horrible. I give it four stars not because it's worse than most of the inane stuff on TV and in theaters. It's quite a good movie so far, by those standards. I give it four stars because it claims to be Jane Eyre, and then abandons the essence of Jane Eyre on the cutting board. It would be more aptly titled, "A lovely and well turned out little period romance featuring characters and situations similar to those in Jane Eyre."

Mr. Rochester is slight and weak and not even remotely "vulcanlike." He doesn't storm -- he barely drizzles. He certainly fits the "ugly" bill better than does my preferred Rochester (Timothy Dalton). But Dalton got everything else right where Toby Stephens got it wrong -- the glowering, the ferocious lunging at his demons. A Bronte film must have its powerful, brooding, haunted, selfish male lead or it's just another assembly line girl power movie. Modern sensibilities be d***ed -- I don't want no kinder, gentler Rochesters.

Jane is played by a pouty beauty with severe eyebrows whose only claim on the requisite plainness is an austere hairdo. She delivers her saucy lines with a fair amount of spunk, but the between-spunk stretches are painfully bland. This Jane doesn't THINK spunky -- she only talks spunky. I much preferred the angle Zelah Clarke took on the role -- that bemused little smile she employed while she bided her time and sharpened her tongue. This new Jane is better than her Rochester, but she couldn't have succeeded even if she'd completely understood the inner workings of her character -- she's simply wrong for the part.

The worst offense is the language. The plot of Jane Eyre was no doubt remarkable 150 years ago when it was first published in a world in which women were still thoroughly dominated by men. However, the book remains powerful not because of the plot, which has been reworked in a thousand subsequent romance stories and which is not so relevant in our post-women's-lib world. Rather, it's still powerful because of the fire of the language -- the delightful verbal sparring between the two leads and the beautiful expressions of embattled love. And this production makes almost no use of the original language. I was so disappointed.

It's like Shakespeare adaptations. I have no problem with a movie like Baz Luhrman's Romeo+Juliet. It's actually pretty neat -- visually stunning, with intriguing interplay between the original plot and modern themes (except that the inner city gang wars thing had already been done in West Side Story, of course!) Shakespeare is not in his plot lines -- in fact, he stole every last one of his plots from earlier writers. And he's not in the costuming or the sets. Shakespeare is in the language, and if you take that away, you need to call it something besides Shakespeare. That's why Romeo+Juliet can be called Shakespeare (very loud Shakespeare), even though it has a radical veneer.

And that's why this Jane Eyre is not Jane Eyre -- because of the insipid dialogue slapped onto almost every scene. Perhaps long stretches of Victorian speech are more than most modern viewers can endure -- fair enough. And much editing is necessary to fit the story in the allotted time slot. But there were plenty of important scenes in which more of the original language could have been used, sparing us the bland nonsense whipped up by screenwriters who seem to give our intelligence little credit. I will not be tuning in again. I have no desire to see what they will do to with the first proposal scene, the heartrending departure scene, or the exquisitely subdued second proposal. While I suppose it's possible they will redeem themselves in the second half, I'm not holding my breath -- it would be very difficult to build a fire with the soggy kindling the first two hours left behind.

Another thing that bears mentioning for those who are not familiar with the book: there are a couple of painful time lapses in the story of Jane Eyre that are crucial for making Jane's experiences at Thornfield explosive -- her difficult childhood and the months she stays with her cousins. Not many people care to endure a longer movie in order to experience that payoff, and given its time restraints this film has generally focused on what it should have. But as long as you're breaking out of the feature film format and going miniseries, I tend to think you should give Jane's childhood its full due. Similarly, I suspect that if there's only two hours left to the series, her time at Moorhouse is going to be severely abbreviated and consequently there won't be nearly enough distance and emotional buildup between the departure and the reunion. These are problems with all shorter Jane Eyres -- not this one in particular.

And finally, what's with the ouija board scene? What is that supposed to do besides tell us something about Blanche Ingram that we already know? And why, o why, did they fool around with the fortune teller scene?? Do they think we are offended by cross dressing? Does Toby Stephens have a "no skirts" clause in his contracts? They paid for an extra actor and in the process deflated a scene that ordinarily provides a delightful (and tension-building) exchange between Jane and Rochester. Since when do ANY Bronte lovers require a chaperone? Yeesh.