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Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Comedies, documentaries without objectivity
The films this month include two comedies and two documentaries,
although neither of the latter fits the “objective”
quality usually expected of documentaries.
Burn After Reading
Identifying the Coen brothers is no longer necessary after the
Oscars last year for No Country for Old Men, but Burn After Reading
is not like No Country. Whereas No Country was a dark drama in
which almost everyone dies, Burn After Reading is a twisted comedy
in which almost everyone dies. It also completes the “idiot”
trilogy they were making with George Clooney, including Oh Brother,
Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty.
Most important, especially for those who enjoy Coen humor, it’s
one of the funniest, most offbeat films about clueless people
you will see—at least until the Coens make another one.
The Coens appropriate Hitchcock’s theory of a MacGuffin to
trigger the action—simply a device that is useless, but everyone
wants. In this case, it’s a computer disk with some information
on it. The plot is difficult to describe; the interconnections
between characters, both real and imagined, double back on each
other in multiple ways.
The film opens with Linda Litzke (Coen spouse Frances McDormand)
being examined by a cosmetic surgeon to see what tucks and lipo-sucks
can do to improve her appearance. She acknowledges that, “I’ve
taken this body just about as far as it will go,” and now
she needs some help. Linda works at the “Hard Bodies”
gym with Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who always has a set of
ear-buds stuck into his head and is grooving to the music; there
doesn’t seem to be much between the ears to interrupt the
flow of sound.
When a computer disk is found in the ladies’ dressing room,
Linda and Chad think it is valuable enough for blackmail or sale
to the highest bidder. The disk originally belonged to Katie Cox
(Tilda Swinton), who was gathering information on her husband
Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), in preparation for filing for divorce;
Osbourne is an accountant for the treasury department (or maybe
it’s the CIA) and is in the stressful process of being demoted
or fired. Harry Pfarrer (Clooney) is having an affair with Katie,
among others, and is married to Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel), who
writes children’s books and often is away on book-signing
tours. Take these characters; confuse them; take them to CIA headquarters,
the Russian Embassy, Georgetown and various other locations; put
lethal weapons in their hands and aim them toward each other;
and the result often is very funny.
Oh, and there’s Richard Jenkins as Ted, the owner of the
gym who is hopelessly in love with Linda, and J.K. Simmons as
the CIA superior whose standard question is, “Did you burn
the body? Good!”
The film is full of big and small jokes and set pieces that keep
it humming along (e.g., the device Harry is building in his basement
which justifies the film’s “R” rating). There’s
a lovely scene of Osborne wearing a bathrobe and waving a hatchet
as he chases Ted down the street, and Pitt steals virtually every
scene he’s in by simply wearing spandex and dancing to the
music.
It’s a nasty, hilarious series of jokes about people hopelessly
in over their heads and too dense to realize it. Don’t miss
it.
Ghost Town
A light frothy comedy that mixes Topper, Ghost, Blithe Spirit
and The Sixth Sense, David Koepp’s Ghost Town is simply pleasant
entertainment that succeeds in most areas. It doesn’t blow
up, trick the audience, titillate with gratuitous sex scenes or
depend on a cute child to rescue a bad plot.
Dentist Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) is a misanthropic individual
who enjoys his work, not only because it pays well, but also because
he can stuff cotton into the mouths of his babbling patients and
shut them up. Nor does he go out of his way to be polite, closing
elevator doors in the faces of women with packages, snatching
cabs from people while rain pours down and indulging in other
rude behavior. His life, however, changes one day when he goes
in for a bowel examination and demands general anesthesia.
When he awakens and exits the hospital, he suddenly realizes that
the streets have more people in them than before—walking
dead people. A hilarious confrontation with his doctor reveals
that technically he was dead for a few minutes during the examination,
and he now can see ghosts.
These ghosts, like the ones in The Sixth Sense, all want something,
and they follow him about like rock groupies, even standing beside
his bed at night waiting to make their pleas. The chief supplicant
is Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear), who offers to chase off the other
ghosts if Pincus will break up his widow’s impending marriage
with a lawyer that Frank detests. Pincus agrees, and the rest
of the film follows the adventures of the two as Pincus tries
first to befriend and then to influence Gwen Herlily (Téa
Leoni). Of course, the other ghosts don’t stay away, and
there are additional complications, but that’s part of the
story.
Gervais is fine and funny as Pincus, and Kinnear, channeling Cary
Grant, is suave and calculating as the ghostly husband who was
busy conducting an affair when death intervened. Leoni is believable
as the wronged widow, although a little less believable in her
final scene. The only real problem with the film is that the explanation
for all the wandering ghosts doesn’t make much sense in view
of Pincus’s activities just before the explanation, but,
hey, we don’t expect a logical spirit world, do we?
All the technical aspects of the film are well done, and the additions
to ghost mythology are interesting—when you unexpectedly
sneeze, you’ve just walked through a ghost. Given my recent
allergy attack, they must have been thicker than pollen around
my house this morning. Ghost Town is light, sometimes wicked entertainment,
perfect to take your mind off the cold and the snow outside.
My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin’s films are unique. Often set in his native Winnepeg,
they are shot in black and white, drawing upon techniques associated
with early film-making—iris transitions, shallow focus, artificial
sets, scratched or faded stock, exaggerated acting—so that
his work looks like pieces of old film that someone found and
patched together.
Sometimes compared to David Lynch, Maddin’s features and
short films are equally surreal, but less violent and more dreamlike.
The silent-film techniques and contemporary point of view convey
the quality of dreams, where something almost is right, but not
quite the way it should be, where the feeling evoked is more important
than the visuals or content. His films—Tales from the Gimli
Hospital (1988), Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2001)
and The Saddest Music in the World (2003)—have slowly built
their own audience, and My Winnipeg, his most accessible film,
won the award as Best Canadian Feature at the Toronto International
Film Festival in 2007.
Although originally commissioned as a documentary by the Discovery
Channel, My Winnepeg, as the title indicates, is Maddin’s
extremely personal view of the Manitoba city. While many of the
statements made undoubtedly are false, they represent how he sees,
or imagines, the city, and the result is far more interesting
than the usual commercial documentary about a city.
While all of his films have autobiographical elements, My Winnipeg
draws directly from Maddin’s experience growing up in a household
where his father was a professional hockey coach and business
manager of Canada’s national team, his mother ran Lil’s
Beauty Shop and his brother committed suicide. Alternating between
the hypermasculine world of the professional hockey arena and
the hyperfeminine world of his mother’s beauty salon, he
cites three smells that dominate his memories—breast-milk
from the special room where women nursed their babies during a
game, sweat from the men’s locker rooms and urine from the
trough in the men’s toilet.
The film professes to be an exploration of why Maddin has never
been able to leave the city, and, explore his reasons by recreating
his childhood, he hires people to go with him back to the house
where he grew up and recreate his memories of the past. Although
most of the people are nonprofessionals, he lures Ann Savage,
film noir star of Detour (1945), out of a fifty-year retirement
to play his mother. As he thinks about the city, he laments the
destruction of buildings that were important to his childhood—a
major department store, two professional ice areas, a community
swimming pool on three levels—and examines the stories that
have grown up around the city.
Maddin acknowledges he is attempting to mythologize the city,
to see it as it exists in history and in the minds of its inhabitants
rather than as it would appear to a tourist. He cites its location
at the confluence of two rivers, buffalo stampedes, a sign graveyard,
the ghosts of the great hockey players, a simulated Nazi takeover
of the city and an amazing scene of horses frozen upright in the
river where they tried to escape from a fire.
Maddin bends facts into non-reality—two cab companies, one
of which travels the main streets and the other, the back alleys;
streets named after prostitutes; the highest incidence of sleepwalking
of any major city; keys to all their old residences for the sleepwalkers
in case they try to go home again; a law that requires residents
to take in anyone who shows up at their door incoherent in the
middle of the night.
And through it all are the swirling snowflakes, the drifted streets,
the black-and-white figures trudging along under the streetlights,
even snow plows clearing streets that lead off into dreams—we
recognize this city, no matter where or when it is located.
My Winnipeg is strikingly original and personal. No one else could
have made this film, and watching it is like sitting down with
someone and going through his family photo album. The silent film
techniques combine with the contemporary sensibility to give the
film a timeless aspect, which helps Maddin capture and understand
his childhood memories and his inability to leave Winnepeg. This
is not a mainstream film and will not be for everyone, but as
we move into bleak February in the U.P., it’s interesting
to see how a creative filmmaker can turn the constantly falling
snow, the isolation, the long winter nights and a sense of the
loss of the past into a lovely, cinematic meditation on the nature
of reality in another northern city.
Encounters at the End of the World
German director Werner Herzog has made more than fifty films,
both fiction and nonfiction, including Aguirre: The Wrath of God,
Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu,
Grizzly Man and Rescue Dawn.
In a recent science fiction film, The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog
used, for footage of an alien planet, some film shot under the
ice in Antarctica by his friend Henry Kaiser.
Intrigued by what he saw, Herzog secured funding from the National
Science Foundation and the Discovery Channel to go to the South
Pole and film the research going on there; his only reservation
was that he would not make a “fluffy penguin” film.
Arriving at the NSF McMurdo Station, a raw base camp of 1,100
scientists and support staff, Herzog turns his camera on the people
and surroundings he finds there, looking for something interesting.
He is not disappointed.
Among the highly educated, eccentric folk who have ended up at
the bottom of the world, he finds a linguist running the greenhouse,
a man with advanced degrees in philosophy operating the forklift,
a former banker who now drives buses, a pipefitter whose finger
length convinces him he is descended from Aztec kings and a computer
technician who has traveled Africa in a sewer pipe and who is
able to compress her body to fit into carry-on luggage. There’s
also the man who keeps the ice-cream machine operating.
Many of these people are professional wanderers who have come
to Antarctica because they have been everywhere else (would ordinary
people come here to stay for five months of unending daylight
and the equivalent period of darkness?), and Herzog presents them
in all their eccentricity.
Before people are permitted to leave McMurdo, they must undergo
survival training, part of which is to be tied to each other with
a rope and cover their heads with buckets to simulate white-out
conditions. They also have to build an igloo and stay in it overnight.
Watching some of the most intelligent and highly trained people
on the planet blunder around in the snow can be amusing.
After passing the survival course, Herzog and his cameraman leave
McMurdo to visit the outlying camps where most of the scientific
activities are occurring. They examine the volcano research going
on at one of the few volcanoes with a visible magma field and
learn what to do if the volcano blows up. They travel to a research
station where a large balloon is being launched to study neutrinos,
subatomic particles so bizarre that they seem to exist in an alternate
universe. They visit a seal-research station, where seal calls
are recorded and their milk is analyzed for possible ways of causing
weight loss in humans. Along the way, they encounter Shackleton’s
cabin, standing intact from his 1916 expedition, its shelves still
stacked with canned goods, and an ice tunnel in which people have
left mementoes for the time when no humans will remain there (or
perhaps anywhere)—framed flower pictures, strings of popcorn
and a frozen fish.
Their final goal is the Ross ice shelf, and the holes bored and
blown through the ice to study the flora and fauna on the ocean
floor beneath. The divers and photographers, displaying a common
fatalism, refuse to use guide lines, which would hinder their
movements and range, trusting instead to their instincts to take
them back to the holes where they can surface. The photography
here is stunning—long vistas of curved blue ice, five-armed
creatures standing on the ocean floor, an undulating jellyfish
with transparent tentacles and a crimson center, seals gliding
away into the darkness, and other sights that stretch the imagination.
Some reviewers objected to Herzog’s voice-over narration,
for he controls the viewer’s reactions to what is on the
screen, but he never said he would make an “objective”
documentary. The organization is loose, following Herzog’s
journey as it develops and going off on digressions that interest
him, but what he provides is so impressive that he deserves whatever
indulgence is necessary.
Even though Herzog chooses not to lecture, and even criticizes
the “tree huggers” and “whale huggers,” the
material in the film indicates that he and most of the scientists
in Antarctica think the end of man is rapidly approaching.
Living every day with the evidence of global warming, when icebergs
as big as a state go drifting north to melt, they seem stoic and
resigned to the fact that the tipping point for saving things
probably is past.
Herzog sums up this position with one of the most compelling images
in the documentary, an image, despite his earlier disavowal of
it, of a penguin. In a group of penguins heading toward the water
and food, one turns away and heads in the opposite direction,
toward the inland mountains where it will surely die. Trudging
along, secure in its belief that its brain is directing it correctly,
it confidently marches toward its doom. Herzog clearly sees the
human race marching in the same direction.
Despite the pessimism, see this film for its overwhelming view
of one of the most beautiful places on earth. Herzog’s vision
is not one to be missed.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or
VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found
at www.mmnow.com
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