Footnote (Friday, March 9, 2012) (25)

Joseph Cedar's Footnote was Israel's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race this year - and it is a very good film, well worth watching. It has a very dark and cerebral tone that generally has the comic feeling of Jonze's Being John Malkovich -- a bit of a latter-day screw-ball with lots of bleakness.

Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) and Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) Shkolnik, are two leading Talmudic professors in Jerusalem. Father, Eliezer, a broken man filled with almost no love left inside, has spent his entire life researching variations in versions of the Talmud, only to blocked by his main academic rival. His greatest accomplishment is being referenced in a footnote by his mentor. Uriel, his son, a joyful husband and father himself, has become a leading expert on Talmudic traditions, softer subject matter that the father resents. He seems to be a pushover in life and in his family, but a very good man.

One day Eliezer is surprised to get a phone call that he won the most prestigious national prize for scientific research, after he tried for dozens of years, but always came up blank. He seems like a changed man all of a sudden, finding some joy in his accomplishment. The next day, however, Uriel is called to the prize committee's office where they tell him that he was supposed to win rather than his father and that his father got the phone call by mistake (they're both Professor Shkolnik, after all). He now has to figure out a way of convincing the committee to give his father the prize despite internal academic political issues.

The film explores the intersections of truth and fiction, hard scientific research and fluffy social scientific observation. Both men would argue their work is hard research, but Cedar certainly suggests that there's some chest puffing involved in all academic work. There is also a very glib idea that all academic work really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the real world -- that internal politics of any organization have as much to do with what gets out and its impact as the significance of the work has.

Cedar uses a very sarcastic style throughout, both in his script and in the formal presentation. When Uriel visits the committee in their offices to discuss the problem, there are seven people (he makes eight) in a tiny closet of a room. Whenever anyone wants to get in or leave, they have to rearrange the chairs in a funny bit of physical comedy. Cedar cleverly mixes wonderfully rich long takes (the first shot lasts for about 8 minutes) with elegant dutch angles and interesting lenses. At times there's a jokey score, at other times there is pure silence, as different characters struggle with internal hopes and fears.

There are also, sadly a handful of untied up elements that seem to lead nowhere, but also don't really act as MacGuffins (the big prize itself is a true MacGuffin). There's a bizarre suggestion that Eliezer has a former girlfriend who comes back (actually it's really not clear who this woman is... I'm just guessing that she's an ex) and Uriel struggles with his ne'er-do-well son who is happy to sit and watch TV rather than studying. These things really should have been cleaned up and cut out -- the film would have been a lot tighter without them.

This is a very funny and smart movie and a lot of fun to watch, with great acting throughout (because everyone really plays it straight and not over-the-top, which it really is). I'm happy it doesn't dwell on the rather tired trope of father-son relationships and deals more with the means of academia and the reality of "Truth" and acknowledgment as these are much more interesting ideas with more room for fresh comedy.

Stars: 3 of 4

Carnage (Saturday, December 17, 2011) (117)

I didn't see the Yasmina Reza play "God of Carnage" when it played in New York a few years ago. Something about the celebrity cast and the concept of the story turned me off. Now Roman Polanski and Reza have adapted the play for the screen and I see why I avoided it to this point.

Carnage is a movie about American liberalism run amok. Two couples, the Cowans (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) and the Longstreets (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz), meet in a North Heights/DUMBO apartment to discuss a violent fight their sons had. Nobody wants to really say what is on their mind (that they are incredibly embarrassed and that they are somewhat ashamed of their sons' bad behavior) but nobody really wants to let the situation pass without getting in the last word. Their discussion begins with an agreement of guilt and then devolves into a shitshow of accusations and torturous interactions where each of the four people show themselves to be disgusting for what they say and do.

I read the tone as particularly anti-Liberal and specifically anti-American (though I guess that has a lot to do with me). The idea that these people are obsessed with this event and can't see how unimportant it is, shows how shallow they all are. When Foster's character talks about a book she is writing, about Darfur, our eyes all roll as we realize she's that fucking person... obsessed with saving the world as she lives in a gorgeous apartment with the view of bridges.

Polanski and Reza seem obsessed with showing that this is reality - that these people are you and me - but it all comes off just a bit off-key. It's 98% real, but that missing 2% is rather painful. To be picky: At one point, Waltz looks out the window and comments at a passing train, "Look, you can see the El." Sorry, buddy, but the El is a thing in Chicago -- in New York and Brooklyn it's called a "subway" or a "train"; there is a lot of discussion of the "flower shop up by Henry," but Henry Street is a North-South street and if you're talking about it, you say "over by Henry" or "up on Henry". (Prepositional shibboleth... like how you live in Manhattan but on Miami Beach.) I know these are really small and insignificant things, but they point to the "fun-house mirror" quality to the film and its conclusions, rather than it being a real reflection of anything in our world. I can imagine a guy getting a phone call while at a friend's house, but I can't imagine a guy taking a call every three minutes and not excusing himself. (This is something I blame on the transition from play to movie, where a small thing we must suspend disbelief for onstage doesn't work onscreen.)

This is all further magnified as the actors all speak in a very deliberate, enunciated style, highlighting the written-quality of their language. Sadly Waltz's American is rough and has rounded consonants... and Reilly is not really that kind of actor, so we end up with the two women speaking in this style and the two men struggling to catch up. It seems very unintentionally Brechtian and uncomfortable (to say nothing of the Brechtian idea that this is was not shot on location in Brooklyn and is a reconstituted apartment, shot somewhere in Europe).

I can't totally understand what Polanski is trying to achieve with such an expressionistic film. Is he criticizing American liberalism because it has directly affected his life? Am I reading too much into that? Is that the very point? It all seems interesting as a curiosity, but a bit shallow. As much as I love Brooklyn apartment porn, this all feels more like snuff than anything particularly erotic.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Young Adult (Thursday, December 15, 2011) (116)

Young Adult is the second movie by the writer-director duo of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman. Their first effort, Juno, was peppered with the cool lingo of the youngs and seemed to convince people for a minute that it was an accurate depiction of what young culture was like - honest to blog! And yet, Juno was one of the most shrill and frustrating films I've seen in a long time. It was totally cutesy and overdone, to say nothing of the ridiculous decision to keep the baby - which relegates the precocious high school girl to a life of subservience and mediocrity.

Young Adult is a similar window into a world that we all feel familiar with, but wish we could forget or ignore. It's as much an attack on Middle America, its values, aesthetic and gestalt, as it is an exploration of a reckless misanthrope. What comes off, though is much more cruel and mean-spirited than anything I would have expected from this tandem.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a young-adult fiction writer in her mid-30s whose life in Minneapolis seems to have hit the rocks in recent years. She's divorced and lives alone in a nice-looking condo with her purse dog. She drinks a lot and falls down drunk in bed alone most nights. One morning, when struggling with a writing assignment, she gets an e-mail from the wife of her high school boyfriend that they had a baby.

This sends her into some bizarre manic episode where she drives to her small hometown, ostensibly far away and in the middle of nowhere (though it looks like it's in the Minneapolis suburbs), so she can reconnect with the ex, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), and woo him back to her. While there she meets up with the nerd from her high school, Matt (Patton Oswalt), who has grown up to be a nerd, but nice a nice one, and runs into her parents a few times. She finds that life is not as wonderful in a small town and that she's much more messed up than she wanted to admit... and that she really doesn't want to go back to her glory days of high school.

My biggest problem with the film is that it's never clear to me what the hell Mavis is looking to find. We understand her life is a mess, but she seems to deny it to herself (or if she is aware of her issues, she doesn't want to face them and keeps doing the stuff that's bad for her) (a comedy about an alcoholic is pretty thin, no?). It seems she wants to regain the stature she had in high school, when she was "cool" and hot and had lots of sex behind the football field (even though she was dating Buddy...?), but it's never clear what her ultimate goal is. Does she want to ruin Buddy's happy life for the schadenfreude? Does she really give a shit about what happened to her 20 years ago? This feels like an atmosphere piece and really under-developed, more concerned with cutesy jokes and "remember-whens" more than a Sweet Home Alabama return-to-glory piece.

The troubling part throughout this film is that it has a very mean undertone to it. Mavis looks down on the losers of her hometown because she lives in the big city... of Minneapolis (which I'm not judging). The weird thing is that the film's basic premise of city vs. small town doesn't work because the small town looks really sweet and rich. Despite the abundance of fast food (which Mavis seems to relish), there's nothing really wrong with the place. The finale has a bitter tone to it, when Mavis and Matt's sister (of all tertiary characters!) have a discussion at cross-purposes about what they want and hope for. That no characters' stories really ever end (Matt is asleep and unresolved; Buddy will probably hate her, but we don't know) is particularly frustrating.

I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to feel and think about Mavis by the end of the film. She seems mostly aloof, self-centered and mean and doesn't seem grow at all from the first scene (OK - she says she'll clean up... which you can totally believe from an addict). I don't know why I have to sit through this whole film if Mavis neither learns a lesson to be better or pays for her shitiness. I'm not sure Cody and Reitman know the answer to this. Basically she goes from shity, to lady who wants to regain her lost youth, to shity. That's pretty silly, I think.

Stars: 2 of 4