Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

The latest releases, from angels to barbarians
Our wide-ranging group of films this month includes an offbeat animation and a moving drama from Canada, a two-part prize-winning play brought to the screen, the two halves of a Quentin Tarantino film and a sweet and undemanding comedy for the Christmas season.

 

The Triplets of Belleville
The animation in The Triplets of Belleville is a far cry from that of the typical Disney or Pixar production. It’s more like the old Max Fleisher style of Betty Boop brought up to the color era and loaded with artistic details. Dense, full of allusions and often beautiful, the film showcases the work of Montreal artist Sylvain Chomet, and the result is an Oscar-nominated film like no other.
Except as a framework for the animation, the story is simple and, in many ways, unimportant. The impressive black-and-white opening shows people arriving at a fancy 1930s nightclub—hugely obese women decked out in evening gowns and furs who drag their diminutive men behind them by one hand. Inside, the Triplets of Belleville, a singing group somewhat like the Andrews sisters, do scat singing on the stage and introduce other acts while Django Reinhardt plays the guitar with his fingers and toes.
First is a character like Josephine Baker, complete with a skirt made of bananas and no top; then there’s a dancer like Fred Astaire, whose shoes rebel and, growling, drag him off the stage. Then the picture begins to roll, and we realize we’re watching an old black-and-white television in a room in the 1960s. Madame Souza, handicapped with a short leg, lives here with her young orphaned grandson named Champion, and it is clear that she has devoted her life to raising the sad young boy.
When Champion grows up, he becomes a racer in the Tour de France, but is kidnapped by French mafia and taken to Belleville. The rest of the film tells how Madame Souza and the dog Bruno, an enormously fat bloodhound, rescue Champion. Along the way they encounter and enlist the help of the triplets, now elderly women living in a rundown hotel that is mainly occupied by prostitutes.
Bruno the dog, a major character in the film, is obsessed with his food dish, and the only force overcoming his desire for food is his compulsion to waddle upstairs every fifteen minutes and bark ferociously at the trains that pass just outside the window, all because a toy train ran over his tail when he was a pup. For some reason, this repeated action seems simply hilarious. We sometimes get to see Bruno’s dreams, which are in black and white, and in them he lords over the humans.
The triplets take Madame Souza and Bruno into their house and give them a place to sleep. They feed them, but the triplets eat only frogs, which they get by tossing hand grenades into a nearby swamp. The stunned frogs are made into stew, although one succeeds in climbing out of the pot. The sisters also make frog-sicles. Another high point is the sisters’ concert, using a vacuum cleaner, a newspaper and the racks in an empty refrigerator—you have to see and hear it to believe it.
The film is full of lovely, original images that avoid the sanitized quality of much of Disney and its American imitators, and the music is fine. The song “Belleville Rendezvous” is one of those silly songs that stick in your head for days (there is a complete music video of it on the DVD). I could go on about all the great scenes and images in this film, but, if you have any interest in animation or clever, satirical and warm-hearted films, just see The Triplets of Belleville.
In fact, you’ll probably want to see it twice to avoid missing anything. I prefer it to Finding Nemo, which won the Oscar for animation that year. The very few lines of original French dialogue are dubbed into English, but this is essentially a no-dialogue movie, so don’t worry about the language—what’s going on is distinctly Gallic, but no language knowledge is necessary.

 

Angels in America
Like the Pulitzer-Prize-winning play upon which it is based, Angels in America has two parts separated by eight months: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. The screenplay was adapted by Tony Kushner from his plays and directed by Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Primary Colors).
Set in 1985 in New York City, the film’s central character is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a young man diagnosed with AIDS who tries to come to terms with his own impending death and with the hallucinations and visions that begin to intrude into his consciousness. Some of these are the angels of the title. Further, Prior’s Jewish lover, Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman) has decided he can’t deal with Prior’s illness and moves out, leaving his friend to face the disease alone.
A second major character is Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), the historical character who was an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy during his witch hunts and the primary architect of the conviction and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Cohn has just been diagnosed with AIDS, although he refuses to acknowledge his homosexuality and demands that the disease be identified as liver cancer, because homosexuals have no power and he is power obsessed.
The lawyer that Cohn has been grooming to protect him from the Justice Department is Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), a blond, muscular young Mormon who is attempting to conceal from his wife and often from himself that he is attracted to men.
Joe’s wife, Harper (Mary-Louise Parker), gets through her day by systematically taking too many Valium pills, only half realizing how much she hates her husband, her religion and her life.
Late one night Joe has one drink too many and admits his homosexuality in a phone call to his mother, Hannah (Meryl Streep), who flies in from Salt Lake City to see what craziness has gotten into her son and becomes involved with several of the other characters.
A major character who interacts with all of the others is Belize (Jeffrey Wright), a gay nurse at the hospital who is friends with Prior and Louis and who takes care of Cohn when he is brought to the hospital. Supporting characters include Prior’s doctor, a homeless woman, and the principal Angel of America (all played by Emma Thompson) and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and a Jewish rabbi (Streep in two additional roles—plus she does an angel).
All of the leads are excellent—Pacino is in one of his best roles ever and Streep obviously has fun playing multiple parts, as does Thompson. Kirk, Shenkman and Parker are excellent, and Wright, who won a Tony for his part in the original production, won a Golden Globe for his performance here.
Thompson added just the right touch of humor to her portrayal of the angel, and her homeless woman was virtually unrecognizable. I did not see the original production, but the special effects here, while a little over the top at times, were well done and perfectly consistent with Kushner’s sometimes overdone prose—there is something intentionally campy about some of the special effects.
Particularly impressive were the scenes that did homage to Cocteau and “heaven,” located at the top of the flaming ladder, a black and white landscape of fallen Greek columns through which Prior stalks in a blood red jacket like the Red Death itself.
The photography (with lots of zoom shots for effect–something I normally don’t like) and music were fine, as they needed to be to sustain the six-hour running time. Overall, it’s an excellent production, especially for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to see the plays on stage. Produced by HBO, the series won Emmys for best mini-series, best director, best actor (Pacino), best actress (Streep), best supporting actor (Wright), best supporting actress (Parker) and best script.

The Barbarian Invasions
Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions follows the characters is his The Decline of the American Empire, released sixteen years ago. Rémy (Rémy Girard), a Montreal history professor, now has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The doctor tells his estranged wife Louise (Dorothée Berryman) to call the family, and she asks their son Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), a wealthy commodities trader and broker, to fly home from London. The other child, a daughter, is on a sailing ship in the Pacific and can’t get to land.
When Sébastien arrives, he finds his father in a crowded ward while many other patients occupy beds in the hall. He wants to move his father to a better room, but his father says, “I voted for Medicare, and I’ll accept the consequences.”
Sébastien and his father never have gotten along. When the father describes his son as a “puritanical capitalist” and himself as a “sensual socialist,” the description seems accurate.
Nonetheless, when the son finds that the floor below his father’s is entirely empty, it takes only a small bribe in a folder to the hospital administration and a larger bribe to the union officials, who really control the hospital, and soon his father has a freshly painted private room of his own with good food and lots of space.
To be sure that the space is occupied well, Sébastien arranges to have his father’s old friends flown in for a last reunion. Through a drug dealer, the son also arranges for his father to have the heroin needed to ease his pain. Slowly the freeze between father and son begins to melt.
Other people come to visit—Rémy’s mistresses, of whom there were several, and some of his students (whose reason for coming is made clear only after they leave). The son arranges a satellite video hookup on his computer for his sister so that she can visit with her father. But the cancer is taking its toll.
For Rémy’s last days, Sébastien rents a lakeside cottage where they all used to gather, and everyone moves in and stays until the day when, with his friends’ knowledge, Rémy chooses to overdo the amount of drug in the drip and take his exit.
The film may sound depressing, but there are many comic scenes, such those when the friends talk about the past and their infatuation with any ideological scheme that came along, or when one of Rémy’s mistresses tries to crawl into bed with him, or when Sébastien encounters a narcotics cop on one of his visits to the drug dealer.
The film also shows how people can come to terms with their own mortality and acknowledge and apologize for their shortcomings with their family. These characters have human strengths and failings, and Rémy’s death is one of quiet dignity with his friends looking on and his son holding his hand.
The title refers to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, which Rémy refers to as the beginning of the barbarian invasions, drawing parallels with the decline of Rome and echoing the title of Arcand’s earlier film. It also could metaphorically refer to the cancer cells invading and destroying his body. The Barbarian Invasions is a beautifully made adult film that focuses on character and the inevitable trials of human life and death.

Kill Bill
The two parts of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Kill Bill, originally were to be released as one film, but he was unable (or unwilling) to trim it to no more than 150 minutes. Consequently, the two parts were released as feature films about six months apart, and, as they now appear on DVD, the break is a reasonable one, especially when we consider Tarantino’s love of genre films and his constant homage to earlier filmmakers.
The first part of Kill Bill is a non-stop action film that focuses on kung-fu, swordplay and violent slaughter. It has an Eastern flavor appropriate to that content, with settings in Japan and China, as well as the United States. It focuses on the acts of revenge that The Bride (Uma Thurman) visits upon the people who tried to kill her, and people who know the films that Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) imitates can cite chapter and verse for the various scenes. The second part, while it has violence and vicious fights, offers more dialogue and more character development as well as motivation.
Gradually it becomes clear how each of the characters became as he or she is, and the motivation is revealed for the wedding rehearsal slaughter (now regarded as mythic). Tarantino manages to pull this off while still surprising us in the individual encounters, especially the encounter of The Bride (whose name turns out to be Beatrix Kiddo) with Bill (David Carradine) at the end of the film.
Also, the second half of the film, set almost entirely in the American Southwest, is influenced by the films of Sergio Leone (The Fistful of Dollars trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America), as the pacing, photography and music all illustrate.
The length also echoes Leone’s films, which were generally cut drastically to bring them down to two and a half hours or less upon their original releases in the United States (most are now available uncut on DVDs).
While no great dramatic dialogue exists in the Kill Bill films, all of the actors are quite capable and turn in excellent portrayals of the various unsavory characters. They include Uma Thurman (in Pulp Fiction), David Carradine, Michael Madsen (in Reservoir Dogs), Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, Michael Parks, Vivica A. Fox and Sonny Chiba.
Tarantino has great fun mixing black-and-white photography with color and changing the aspect ratios. The first half lacks Tarantino’s typical elliptical and witty dialogue, but the second has more of it.
This film is about violence and the satisfaction of revenge, especially served cold. It has few intellectual pretensions, but is charged with action, film references and occasionally some surprising wit—but not always.
For example, as one reviewer pointed out, the reference to the grave of Paula Schultz seems to be a reference to a 1968 film comedy entitled The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, but then where does it go? Have enough people seen that unknown film to get some obscure reference, perhaps to action in it, or is it just a private pun? Maybe he just needed a name and didn’t want to make one up? Do such references add to the film, or is Tarantino just showing off? I certainly don’t know.
Overall, this film is vintage Tarantino, and if you enjoyed the originality, action and dialogue of his previous films, the two parts of Kill Bill will not disappoint. He’s one of the major directors working in American film.

 

Love Actually
Set at Christmas, Love Actually is a feel-good film that, except for some nudity and simulated sex, fits into the holiday spirit, even to its resident Scrooge. It’s directed by Richard Curtis, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Even with over two hours running time, there are too many characters and intertwining plots, and it’s a bit heavy on the sweetness, but how can you go far wrong with Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Rowan Atkinson, Alan Rickman and Billy Bob Thornton (as the President of the United States)? It’s a funny and moving film about love being all around if we’ll just look, as the popular song in it says.
But maybe you should watch it after the kids go to bed; it’s R rated and two of the characters who fall in love are stand-ins for porno actors.
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

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