|
Home Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Thankful for DVDs: independent films that missed
the big screen
For various reasons, the films this month, sometimes
despite big budget and award-winning actors and directors, received
little marketing or publicity from their distributors and often
went directly to video release.
Some are “independent” films that traditionally are
ignored because they show little profit in commercial release,
tying up a screen that could be running Animal House 2009 and
pulling in scads of money. Fortunately, we can access some of
these films on the DVD shelf.
Goodbye, Solo
Ramin Bahrani was born in Winston-Salem (North Carolina) of Iranian
parents and, by his account, grew up as an outsider in that Southern
culture: he said there were the blacks, the whites and then him
and his brother. After two highly regarded films set in New York
that received minimum distribution (Man Push Cart and Chop Shop),
Bahrani, who teaches film at Columbia, has returned home to set
his third film in Winston-Salem.
Like the other two films, it deals with the way recent immigrants
cope with life and try to succeed in the United States, but it
avoids sentimentality and the clichés of race and nationality.
Its characters simply are trying to learn how to live in the situations
in which they find themselves.
The recent immigrant in this film is the title character, a Sengalese
cab driver whose inevitable good humor and infectious smile could
be annoying, but they are so much a part of him that the audience
accepts his optimism. He drives a cab around Winston-Salem at
night, lives with his Mexican wife who is expecting their first
child and serves as a loving father to his wife’s nine-year-old
daughter from a previous relationship. He also is studying hard
to be a flight attendant, but his wife opposes this possible career
move because he will be away too much. Solo is that rare character,
a good person trying to survive and help others without being
mawkish about it.
His opposition in this film is William, a seventyish white man
whose rough life has left his face as lined and pouched as the
proverbial twenty miles of bad road. William is as silent as Solo
is loquacious. He hires Solo to take him to a movie theater each
week and then take him home two hours later. On one of these trips,
a scene which opens the movie, William offers Solo $1,000 to drive
him in two weeks to Blowing Rock National Park, a nearby place
where the snow is said to fall upward and the wind is so strong
that a stick thrown into it will not fall to earth.
When Solo inquires about William’s reason for going to Blowing
Rock, the old man’s silence implies that he is planning to
kill himself. Solo, full of life and enthusiasm, cannot understand
William’s desire to end his life, and he spends the next
two weeks trying to discover William’s reasons, much to the
old man’s irritation.
In less original hands, this film could have devolved into a sentimental
cliche in which the organic, life-loving black man teaches the
jaded and disillusioned white man how to value himself and life.
Fortunately, that doesn’t happen. Instead, Bahrani explores
these lives, knowing there are no easy answers and that any answers
that do appear may not be valid for others.
The audience finds out a little about each man, but large areas
of mystery remain. Solo, for example, knows the answers to the
questions in the flight attendant’s manual, but, despite
his charisma, fails the interview. William may have a connection
to someone at the theater, but that is never affirmed. In the
end, Solo drives William to Blowing Rock, and viewers will have
to decide whether the ending in this transcendent setting is appropriate—most
critics felt it was.
The relatively simple plot has some parallels with Iranian director
Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film, A Taste of Cherry, in which
a cab driver solicits help from his passengers to help bury him,
but the differences are greater than the similarities.
With this minimal plot, Goodbye, Solo must depend on strong characters
and acting, and everyone involved is simply excellent. Solo is
played by newcomer Souleymane Sy Savane, a former model, flight-attendant
and cab-driver from Senegal. He has charisma to burn and makes
his optimism contagious rather than annoying; he refers to his
male passengers as “big dog” and the cab dispatcher
is “pork chop.” With his love for his wife, adopted
daughter and the child his wife is carrying, he simply cannot
understand why William would want to die.
William is played by Red West, a marine, Golden Gloves boxer and
stuntman, as well as a boyhood friend of Elvis Presley. Later
he was Presley’s bodyguard and a member of the Memphis Mafia.
One story says he separated from Elvis after he broke the foot
of a cousin who was bringing Presley drugs and told the cousin
he would work his way up to his face.
West has appeared in Viva Las Vegas and other Presley movies,
as well as playing tough guys and small parts for the last fifty
years. When West smokes a cigarette and stares into space, the
action acquires an epic quality; his character is not the sort
of person who makes a decision lightly or who likely will change
it once he has decided. William and Solo, separated by forty years
of living, nonetheless are intrigued by the other’s attitudes,
even though neither would ever acknowledge it.
Also outstanding is Diana Franco Galindo as Alex, Solo’s
young step-daughter. Alex is intelligent, curious, realistic and
never cute. She is that rare exception in American film—a
believable child.
Goodbye, Solo is a film that lingers in the memory for weeks after
it has ended on the screen. Roger Ebert calls Bahrani the “next
great American director.” See if you agree.
In the Electric Mist
Surely, somewhere in Hollywood, someone didn’t know what
he (or she) was doing. Maybe a mid-level film executive with a
splitting hang-over headache mistook one title for another—“Electric”
appears in several film titles, and with demons hammering on your
head, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish such things.
Or maybe some minor executive had a long-standing grudge against
one of the principals in the film (e.g., a film conservative resented
Tommy Lee Jones’ friendship with Al Gore) and decided it
was pay-back time.
At any rate, In the Electric Mist a solid crime film with book-connections,
sociological overtones, a major director and academy award-winning
stars, went directly to video without being released on the big
screen. Thank goodness for DVDs.
The film is adapted from James Lee Burke’s In the Electric
Mist with the Confederate Dead, one in the series of best-selling
“Dave Robicheaux” novels that follow the adventures
of a recovering alcoholic law-enforcement officer. The film is
directed by award-winning French director Bertrand Tavernier (’Round
Midnight), and he seems right at home in the French culture of
Louisiana.
Robicheaux (Tommy Lee Jones) works for the sheriff’s department
in New Iberia and runs a bait and tackle shop on the side. The
town is excited over a film being made in the area, and one of
Robicheaux’s first acts is to arrest the male lead of the
film, Elrod Sykes (Peter Sarsgaard), for driving drunk.
Robicheaux, a recovering alcohol, is sympathetic, and in return
for information about some bones the star has seen while on location,
he lets the young man go.
Like most solid crime thrillers, the misdeeds of the present are
tied to those of many years ago, and Robicheaux tries to solve
the murder of Cheri LaBlanc, a young prostitute connected to Julie
“Baby Feet” Balboni (John Goodman), while investigating
the circumstances of a thirty-year-old murder that may involve
Twinky LeMoyne (Ned Beatty).
Tavernier and his screen writers, Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski
(authors of the Jack Nicholson metaphysical thriller The Pledge),
have updated the story from the nineties to the post-Katrina period,
and with this change they are able to bring in mob connections
more easily.
Robicheaux is a complex character, a Catholic ex-alcoholic who
looks at a glass of alcohol but refuses to drink, a sheriff who
bends the law occasionally to the breaking point to bring criminals
to justice, a man who doesn’t hesitate to leave incriminating
evidence in the right places or to rough up a criminal until he
gets the information he wants. Yet, he has a soft spot for people
with drinking problems while acknowledging his own weakness, he
has nothing but contempt for the criminals he encounters, and
he clearly would die for his wife and daughter.
Jones, who recently has made a pattern of playing experienced
law-enforcers (e.g., No Country for Old Men), brings individuality
to this part and makes it his own. Award-winning actress Mary
Steenburgen develops the small part of Bootsie, Robicheaux’s
wife, into an effective counter to her hard-driving husband, while
Goodman has a ball chewing up the screen as “Baby Feet”
Balboni.
Beatty is excellent as always, while Justina Machado and Pruitt
Taylor Vince are fine as supporting law enforcers Rosie Gomez
and Lou Girard.
Then, as icing on the acting cake, add an appearance by blues
guitarist Buddy Guy performing at a local nightclub, one by film
director John Sayles as a film director, and one by “The
Band” icon Levon Helm as the ghost of confederate General
John Bell Hood.
The intrusion of the ghosts of the past (included in the book’s
title) first occurs after someone slips drugs into Robicheaux’s
Dr. Pepper, but the ghost returns later to talk with the detective
and counsel him.
A number of reviewers were put off by this visitor from the Civil
War, but he emphasizes how much the past still is alive in the
bayous, reinforces the connection between the two murders, and
highlights the metaphysical nature of Robicheaux’s character.
Between Jones and Helm, they make the interaction work.
Overall, In the Electric Mist is an excellent detective film with
a complex plot, a moody setting, and superlative acting all across
the board. It’s one of the little treasures that sometimes
turn up on the DVD shelves.
Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is Reichardt’s second
feature film, after Old Joy; she and Jon Raymond adapted it from
Raymond’s short story, “Train Choir.” Critics generally
loved this quintessentially “independent” film while
average viewers either liked it or hated it.
The film follows the adventures of Wendy (Michelle Williams) and
her dog Lucy through a couple of days as a series of mundane mistakes
and bad luck take Wendy into deeper difficulties. The two are
traveling to Alaska to find summer work in the fish canneries
when Lucy’s aging Honda, in which they had been living, breaks
down near the Oregon-Washington border.
Trying to make such a long trip in this car is not the best decision
Wendy ever made, but it is not the only poor decision she makes.
Throw in some bad luck and interaction with minor characters,
both good and bad, and Wendy has one of those depressing, slowly
deteriorating days that everyone has experienced. How she copes
with it while trying to find Lucy, who disappears for a while,
essentially is the plot of the film.
Lucy’s problems, some of her own doing and some beyond her
control, could be seen as symbolic of the economic times the country
is going through. One reviewer describes it as “a story that
speaks more to the human condition and to politics in America
than any film in recent memory” and “the best film of
2008.”
Williams (Brokeback Mountain; I’m Not There; Synecdoche,
New York) is excellent as Wendy; even reviewers who disliked the
film praised Williams’ performance. She manages to combine
fragility, vulnerability and lack of street smarts with a steely
determination that keeps her moving toward her goal.
Walter Dalton is completely believable as the Walgreen security
guard who loans her a cell phone, and Will Patton is effective
as the mechanic who may be ripping her off.
The natural beauty of the setting is well-captured by Sam Levy’s
photography, and the soundtrack essentially uses natural sounds
instead of a music track.
The direction is spare, avoiding sentimentality with regard to
both Lucy and Wendy, and none of the film’s eighty minutes
is wasted. Wendy and Lucy won the Toronto Film Critics awards
for best acting and best picture, and many viewers will enjoy
it; others, however, undoubtedly will be bored.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or
VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can usually
be found at www.mmnow.com
[
Home | Home
Cinema | Top ]
|
