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Reviews
The Girl in the Café (2005)
With the flicker of an eyebrow...
It's possible to be right -- and subtly to miss the point. The reviewers are right who complain that the love story sits uneasily with the sermon, and that the sermon itself is banal. But these complaints pale before the phenomenon that is Bill Nighy. Has anyone, anywhere ever given a more wrenching account of loneliness? Nighy underplays as usual: we learn more about his empty life from his subtlest and most fleeting expression than we would from pages of dialogue. That Gina means well -- but devastates Lawrence -- is her sad and, yes, selfish function in the film, which makes the title true and cuttingly ironic: as the girl in the cafe, Gina offers the hope of a connection she can't sustain. His reward? Loneliness piled upon loneliness. Ours? The chance to watch a brilliant actor give an indelible account of a disease endemic in the affluent West: disconnection and the death of hope.
360 (2011)
Poor copy of a classic original
360 lacks the glint of malice and sardonic cynicism of its model, Schnitzler's La Ronde, filmed in 1950 by Max Ophfuls. It wastes the talents of two fine actors, Jude Law and Anthony Hopkins. Law's part, in particular, amounts to a sniffle and a sneeze; Hopkins is given a monologue — in which he conveys the secret of life according to a Jesuit he knows: "Fuck it." His search for his missing daughter never acquires suspense or urgency. And the sterile, fluorescent lit morgue sucks oxygen from the movie. 360 is a travelogue that pings from Berlin to Paris to London and pongs to Denver and Phoenix and back again. But in each city we see only hotel rooms and airports. A drive around Vienna's famed Ringstrasse, the final act is meant to connote the casting off of shackles — from employer, from exploitative sister — in favor of impulse, liberation, and life. But it leaves us skeptical that the pair will end up differently from the couple at the end of The Graduate, a film with which it otherwise has little in common.
Poltergeist (1982)
Feeble characters vs. predictable monsters
Poltergeist: Tobe Hooper; Steven Spielberg. In the clichéd phrase: This is a movie that those who like this kind of thing will like. A movie I wanted to like, but found dated and disappointing. The performances are adequate, although the family are disconnected and loveless; why, for instance, include an elder daughter who gets less than five minutes of screen time? (And given my arithmetic , would have been born when her mother was sixteen.) As so often in Spielberg, a child is endangered; as so often in Spielberg, the child is rescued, in this case, safe in her mother's arms, and covered in red-orange jello. Unsurprisingly, the visual effects now seems a bit quaint,, which is not the movie's fault. What is its fault is its failure to make us care about its characters. For example, when the medium asks which is the authoritative parent, the couple are at a loss. Also objectionable — one hopes then as now — is JoBeth Williams's costume for the final showdown, a not quite crotch length tee shirt and visible white panties — enough, presumably, to satisfy male voyeurs — and in the bathroom is subjected to a kind of supernatural rape. But hey — a mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do, and she couldn't be expected to know that "this house is not clean" before she luxuriates in the tub, thinking all is well. Unless, that is, she'd ever seen a horror movie, which would have alerted her that as a woman with a daughter, she'd constitute the Final Girl. Given the running time, she should also have known that the house is most definitely not clean, and that she'd have to face a final showdown with fierce and enraged ghosts and spirits. I admit to being puzzled by television's being the conduit to their world. Is the message that TV is dangerous? or that children shouldn't be allowed to watch it? or that they should be taken to the movies instead? Presumably not this film, which in my admittedly conservative view is too gruesome for preteens (although they probably love it). If there's a Lubitsch touch, let's propose a Spielberg touch, and assume that had Spielberg had time to direct it, it would have been a different and better film. But if he had, we might not have ET (with its feisty single mother and convincing children), and that we would miss more acutely than this film with its unconvincing family.
Carrington (1995)
La Ronde on the fringes of Bloomsbury
La Ronde on the fringes of Bloomsbury
"Carrington" is a sub-Bloomsbury version of La Ronde: X desires Y and sleeps with Z, A wants B, but sleeps with C, and so on and so on. This game of musical beds should carry the film, especially given Jonathan Pryce's uncanny impersonation of Lytton Strachey and Emma Thompson's persuasive Carrington. Add a script and cinematography to fulfill the nostalgia quotient, and le voila: life is lived and art is made en plein air and during an eternal summer; winter seems never seems to intrude, and the "staff" keep discreetly in the kitchen and the basement where they belong. All these Good Things should carry the movie. Alas, they do not. As in all biopics, the writing plays fast and loose with the truth. But was it absolutely necessary to insert two of the most famous Lyttonisms: his account of proposing to Virginia Woolf ('ghastly"), and his declaration that he would try to "come between" his sister and a potential rapist? In this tiny circle, desire balked and desire gratified seem almost incestuous.. And the lack of a coherent narrative leaves us puzzled. For example, Lytton's sudden gift of "a motorcar" to Ralph Partridge is unprepared for and opaque. Is he wooing Partridge? Using Partridge as a pander? Demonstrating uncomplicated generosity? The film's failure to answer questions like these saps its interest. "Carrington"isn't dull, exactly; rather, it's beautiful, nostalgic, and inert.
La grande illusion (1937)
Island of civility in a sea of barbarism
As the critic Walter Benjamin reminds us, no civilization without barbarism, no enlightenment without inhumanity. So it is in Grand Illusion. The civilization lies in the camaraderie among the prisoners; the barbarism, offstage in the trenches where so many of the Lost Generation were slaughtered. Renoir's business, as always, is with the warm, the human, the civilized. Here he underlines that camaraderie by including "the Jew," whom he exempts from the worst of French anti-Semitism, and the members of the working class whose technical skills have made them pilots. Dalio is wonderful as "the Jew"; Gabin no less so as the former "mechanic." Fresnais and von Stroheim, the aristocratic career soldiers, hold themselves aloof, and experience the warmth ironically at best; not without bitterness, they agree that the war has put an end to heir world. A masterpiece among Renoir's masterpieces, it speaks to us almost as powerfullhy as it did to its first audiences. As we watch, it lets us believe in a tiny, imperiled, and almost unimaginable island of civilization where Gabin and "the Jew" can make common cause. But not without the reminder of barbarism: the guns pointed at the end by the frustrated German soldiers. Civilization, barbarism: Renoir understands both, and as always, celebrates the first without overlooking its second.
I Capture the Castle (2003)
Watch for Bill Nighy
The presence of Marc Blucas (known in Buffyworld as "Old Potato Nose") makes this film inferior to any Merchant/Ivory production and most of Masterpiece Theatre. Blucas is always a block of wood, and here, with his corn-fed voice and face, is severely miscast. As always, Bill Nighy is wonderful — endlessly interesting during his too-brief appearances. We believe in his dedication to his art — if he could only practice it — and in his rage at himself as failed writer, failed husband, and failed father. The young women are negligible: is the tired diary-narrative convention meant as the writer's coming-to-art? If so, she needs lessons in plot- and character-construction. Two young women, two young men: It worked for Shakespeare, but despite the presence of the eponymous castle, helps neither the screenplay nor us. Isolation and shabby gentility relieved by marriage; writer's block relieved by a silly strategy unworthy of Nighy's character and performance? I watched for Nighy (as I watch Love, Actually); he's the brooding presence throughout the film, but notwithstanding, I'd like my two hours back.