Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

A little bit of character goes a long way
    The selections this month follow no theme - except perhaps that of making a new start - but all are original, well-made films that are long on character and short on violent, purgative action. All end on at least an even keel and most are upbeat. Two are in English, two are subtitled.
    
    
    Directed by Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat and The Cider House Rules) and based on the Pulitzer Prize novel by E. Annie Prouls, The Shipping News is the most predictable film in this group. Yet solid acting, spectacular Newfoundland photography and some interesting twists keep the viewer involved.
    Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) is a beaten-down man whose over-sexed wife has sold their six-year-old daughter to an illegal adoption agency for $6,000 before she and her new boyfriend drive their car into the bay and drown. His aunt Agnis (Judi Dench) shows up to inquire about her brother's recent death, and as Quoyle rescues his daughter and tries to cope with his out-of-control life, she convinces him to return with her to Newfoundland, where their family originally lived. There Quoyle attempts to start a new life in the old family house, a monstrous, run-down building tied to the surrounding rocks by huge cables--a visible symbol of the family's deterioration.
    Quoyle gets a job at the local paper writing "The Shipping News" column, although he has never been a reporter, but through luck and determination and the encouragement of editor Jack Buggit (Scott Glenn), newspaperman Beaufield Nutbeem (Rhys Ifans) and local widow Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), he succeeds. (Yes, the characters' names are impossible.) Doing everything he can to undercut Quoyle is Tert Card (Pete Postlethwaite), the assistant editor. Quoyle's progress to believing in himself is slow, and along the way he finds out about his family's sordid history (they were pirates) and about the darker aspects of its living members. Gradually Quoyle comes to terms with his daughter, his aunt and himself, and the story ends on a positive symbol.
    Critics were divided over Spacey's acting as Quoyle, some calling his performance understated and subtle, others calling it mechanical and flat. While it certainly doesn't compare with his acting in The Usual Suspects, Seven or American Beauty, it's competent and effective in a film about a beaten-down loser in a setting where the landscape dominates everyone. Judi Dench is excellent as usual as the crusty Aunt Agnis. Although Dench has carved out a niche for herself playing this kind of character (as in Shakespeare in Love or Chocolat), her scene in the kitchen as she explains to her nephew about his father shows how she suddenly can bring a scene alive as few actresses can. Moore is effective, as are Ifans, Postlethwaite and Glenn.
    Cate Blanchett almost steals the film in the small role of Petal, Quoyle's wife, before she dies early in the film. Blanchett creates a sensual, hard, and ruthless yet vital character out of what could have been a stereotype. Quoyle's daughter Bunny is played, at any given time, by one of three identical triplets (Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer), and if you can tell one from the other, your eyes are sharper than mine.
    The film ultimately is dominated by the Newfoundland landscape--rugged, unforgiving, bleakly beautiful. It shapes the narrative just as a similar coastline and similar weather shaped the narrative of Snow Falling on Cedars. The family house, tied down to the rocks like some beached leviathan, looms over the characters and the setting, but even it is diminutive when seen against the surrounding rocks and seacoast.
    The flashbacks of the family history are handled nicely, especially a scene where the house is hauled across the ice in a raging snowstorm (a scene reminiscent of the house-hauling scene in The Claim).
    Several critics complained that the film lost the essence of the novelÐe. g., Quoyle in the novel was a fat lump of a man, almost a physical grotesque and hardly a Kevin Spacey look-alike; but, while I have not read the novel, how could anyone reasonably expect to find a grossly unattractive hero in a Hollywood film where the major purpose is to make money?
    Even Orson Welles cast himself not as the hero, but as the overweight, seedy villain in Touch of Evil, opposite Carlton Heston, and then, of course, stole the show!
    Overall, despite being a little too tidy and polished, The Shipping News is a solid, upbeat drama with acting that often is impressive and landscape photography that offers sufficient reason alone for seeing the film.
    

    
    Last Orders is a small film about a cross-section of English society from the forties to the present. With the help of a stellar cast, director Fred Schepisi succeeds in showing that the life and death of a shopkeeper can be as moving as that of an epic hero.
    The plot, based upon the Booker Award novel by Graham Swift, turns upon the dying request of Jack (Michael Caine) that his ashes be scattered off the pier at Margate (hence the title). Ray (Bob Hoskins) agrees to get Jack's son Vince (Ray Winstone) and two of his old pub friends--Vic (Tom Courtney) and Lenny (David Hemmings)--to make the trip. Amy (Helen Mirren), Jack's wife, refuses to go because she visits their severely retarded daughter every week on Thursday, and for fifty years Jack has declined to accompany her. The men set out, and the film follows them as they drive to Margate, a resort town where Jack had planned to retire. They stop frequently for pints and food or to visit a place important to Jack or a war memorial (all of them carry vivid memories of WWII). As they travel, they remember the previous years, and through flashbacks, the film explains how they became friends and why their relationships are the way they are. Finally, they reach Margate, and as the rain blows across the pier, they toss Jack's ashes into the sea. In parallel action, Amy says good-bye to her daughter, acknowledging that fifty years may be enough of taking care of someone who will never register her presence.
    As the plot summary indicates, this is a film that explores the successes and failures of ordinary people over a span of half a century, and it's hard to imagine a better cast. Caine exhibits the raffish charm that has made him a perennial star, but here he adds to it a layer of warmth and stubbornness that gives it a different twist. He confides, on his death bed, to Ray that, "If you get the chance, go first. Going's easy. There's nothing to it. It's the ones that carry on that have it hard." And the other characters do their best at carrying on. Hoskins is superb, projecting a congenial character who met Jack during the war and remained his friend for life. His facade slips only once as he sits on a bench in Canterbury cathedral and remembers a too-brief six weeks many years ago. Hemmings, Modred in Camelot and the photographer who personified swinging London in Antonioni's Blow-up, is almost unrecognizable behind bushy brows, sagging jowls and a boxer's body gone badly to seed, but his acting has never been better. In the flashback scenes he is played by his son Owen. Courtney, in his youth portraying the misunderstood adolescents of Billy Liar and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and later demonstrating his acting ability in films such as The Player, plays Vic, the successful undertaker and the only whiskey drinker of the group. He almost disappears into the character. Winstone, who held his own against Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, is fine as Jack's son who finds out the truth about himself long after he has rebelled against carrying on the family tradition. Mirren brings feeling and patience to the role of Amy that makes her worn-down character sometimes almost shine.
    Last Orders, whose title also refers to the last call for drinks in the pub, is about loss and how the memories of that existence continue. It successfully captures how a life is made up of many small actions that are set in the details of everyday living; how each choice, sometimes even a trivial one, affects that life. Throughout the film Jack's love for Amy radiates, but he can't deal with his daughter and refuses to see her. Vince stops to scatter some ashes at the hop field where Jack finally explained to him who he really was and Lenny, not knowing what it means to Vince, starts a fight with him. Every character has such strengths and weaknesses. Like most men, they are reluctant to discuss personal matters, and the phrase, "That'd be tellin'," echoes throughout the film.
    Some viewers may find the pacing slow and the cockney dialects too thick to follow. I finally activated the English subtitles on the DVD because too many of the speeches were not intelligible. But these problems are outweighed by the film's virtuesÐreal people with their eccentricities, failures and successes. It's one of the few films that focuses on the lives of ordinary men talking, drinking and growing old together. Although it deals with a death, it is a death that not only ends some things but also provides possible beginnings. It's a balanced ending to a rich, deeply-felt film.
    
    
    
    
    Jean-Pierre Jeunet has previously co-directed one of the most visually impressive fantasies in recent years, The City of Lost Children, as well as Delicatessan and Alien Resurrection. Unlike those three films, Amelie, which was one of the most successful films ever in France, is bright, cheerful and optimistic, just the sort of escapist fare we need as the stock market rolls in the gutter and CEOs fail at feigning innocence. Amelie Poulain (Audrey Tatou) is the child of a family whose members show little affection to each other; her contact with her physician father is so infrequent that when he gives her a yearly physical exam, her heart beats faster, making him think she has a heart problem. Amelie grows up, and one day in her apartment she finds a boy's memento box hidden behind a loose board; she sets out to return the box to the now-adult owner, vowing to herself that if she is successful, she will spend part of her life doing good deeds for people. When the man weeps over the return of the box, Amelie launches herself into the activities that occupy the rest of the film.
    Detailing Amelie's activities would reduce much of the humor of the film. She sets out to do good--sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Along the way she encounters a globe-trotting statue of a gnome, a man who repeatedly takes his picture at automatic picture-taking booths around the city, a young man who collects the discarded pictures from such booths and pastes them into notebooks, a trio of lovers at the shop where she works, a light-sensitive painter who copies Renoir's masterpieces over and over and various others.
    Jeunet exploits the film medium to make his comedy work. Voice-over narration provides counter-point to some of the action, the camera speeds up and slows down, scenery is digitally enhanced or reduced and some of the best touches have little to do with the on-going narrative. For example, Amelie stands looking out over the city, and the voice-over narrator says she sometimes wondered how many people at any given moment were having orgasms, and then a rapid montage follows of people in ecstasy, after which Amelie turns to the camera, smiles and says, "Fifteen!"
    On the downside, the film tends to wander now and then as though searching for more whimsey to insert. If such a light confection of a film has a problem, it's the calculated quality of the humor, as though Amelie, with her broad smile, were sometimes saying, "Isn't this amusing? Don't you want to giggle?" I also had some ambiguous feelings about her deliberate and repeated intrusion into other peoples' lives, but perhaps we should be grateful for a charming film that has as its highest goal to entertain us and encourage us to treat other people with more consideration. The film, in French with English subtitles, received an R-rating because of the above-mentioned montage and some scenes in a sex shop.
    
    
    
    Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung's third film, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, is difficult to write about because it depends so heavily on the visual aspects of the medium. Anyone watching it becomes immersed in the sensual rhythms and lives of three couples in contemporary Hanoi to the extent that it's almost a jolt to find yourself in your own house at the end.
    The plot, somewhat like that of Last Orders, focuses on a small group of friends and relatives as they gradually reveal their truths, secrets, joys and misfortunes to us. The film opens with a man and a woman waking in the morning; he begins his exercises to the slow rhythms of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground on a tape player, and she does Tai Chi to the same accompaniment. As incongruous as it may sound, the combination seems natural. We gradually learn that the two are brother and sister still living in one of the family houses that border a cafŽ that the family owns. The two other sisters and their families live in adjoining houses. On this day they have closed the cafŽ to prepare a feast meal to commemorate the death of their mother.
    As each character is introduced, everything seems serene, yet each has problems, and tensions lie below the calm surface, as they do for most people. One sister is married to a photographer who takes nature pictures and consequently he's away on assignment much of the time; they have a small son called "Little Mouse." But the husband has a secret, and his wife does also. The second sister is married to a writer who is within a chapter of finishing his novel, but has developed writer's block. Is his trip to Saigon to research the family history legitimate, or does he have other adventures in mind? The film follows the family for one month, from the celebration of the day of the mother's death to the celebration of the day of the father's death. During this time, one sister becomes pregnant, another thinks she is, and the rituals and rhythms of daily life continue. Like the novels of Jane Austen, nothing from the outside world intrudesÐonly a reference to Ho Chi Minh City reminds us of Vietnam's turbulent history.
    Director Hung and his photographer, Mark Lee Ping-Bin, who shot Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, reviewed in these pages in June, have created astonishingly sensual images that pull the viewer into the scenes. Mannered stylists, they shape the images of rain falling on the tropical foliage of the city, bicycles speeding through rain-flooded streets, a man floating languorously on his back in a lagoon, the same man supporting the body of his young son in the water, the patterns of sunlight and flowers in rooms, the three sisters washing their hair together, tall islands of rugged stone in the water and on and on. Each shot is casually, but precisely composed, and the director is content to frame the scene and let the actors move through it rather than constantly cutting back and forth to them.
    The photography, the emphasis on images of water and sleep and the pace of the editing all lead to a dream-like experience where the pleasure of the visuals becomes more important than sorting out the story. For a unique cinematic experience, in Vietnamese with English subtitles, submerge yourself into The Vertical Ray of the Sun.
    --Leonard G. Heldreth
    
    Editor's Note: All films reviewed are available as DVDs or videotapes from local stores.

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