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Home Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Famous novels, great writers and post-apocalyptic adventures
The films this month include a mystical post-apocalyptic adventure, an adaptation of a famous novel, a South Korean film and an account of the last year of a great writer.
The Book of Eli
The Book of Eli is a curious but entertaining mixture of genres and characters that seldom appear in the same movie. The basic genre is post-apocalyptic survival film, a genre that includes 2012, The Road, Knowing and all the films in which vampires and zombies take over the world—Zombieland (worth a look, by the way), Daybreakers, Romero’s umpteenth Dead resurrection, and all the ones I’ve deliberately not seen. And don’t forget the original template for many of them—the Mad Max trilogy—you can be sure the directors of Eli didn’t.
Into a bleached, burned-out desert spotted with wrecked cars, dilapidated houses, and the occasional corpse comes a man on a journey, a clone of the man-with-no-name from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. He shoots a bow and a pistol, wields a long knife and karate-chops his way through any opposition while dodging bullets and opposing weapons as if they did not exist.
As in many Western films, there’s a ramshackle town presided over by a tyrant who controls the residents because he controls the town’s water supply; he has his usual gang of enforcers.
All of this is done very well, if predictably, but some originality comes in with the religious subplot. The hero is carrying the last copy of the King James Bible, and he is walking west with it because a voice told him to do so.
The tyrant of the town wants Eli’s Bible in the worst way, because he watched TV evangelists as a child (before the “flash” that destroyed civilization), and he thinks having the Bible is the best way to control his followers and expand his power.
This subplot doesn’t get in the way of the movie’s action sequences but does add an interesting resonance—is Eli being protected by divine forces? Sometime it seems so, especially near the end of the film.
Denzel Washington is excellent as the pilgrim, and Gary Oldman gives literate, sometimes witty depth to what essentially is a stock character, the villain, Carmichael. Tom Waits plays Mr. Fixit, an aging engineer who tries to keep the relics of civilization working, a task which makes him valuable to Carmichael. Jennifer Beals serves as Claudia, Carmichael’s mistress who was blinded by the flash thirty years ago. Mila Kunis, as Solara, Claudia’s daughter, walks through her part with immaculate makeup and the required girlish sex-appeal, but not much else.
The icing on the acting cake comes from a short scene at a deserted farmhouse in which an aging couple, George and Martha (can anyone say Washington?), help Eli and crank up their ancient disco records for him. The couple are played by Frances de la Tour and Sir Michael Gambon, and their scene is one of several that give a dark humor to the film. A throwaway humorous shot shows a tattered movie poster of another seminal post-apocalyptic film, A Boy and His Dog.
The Book of Eli was directed by Allen and Albert Hughes, twins whose last film was the underrated From Hell with Johnny Depp. They direct in a stark, effective graphic-novel style that is exactly right for this stripped-down, survivalist film.
They often frame the shots like a story board in a comic book, and this technique keeps the action moving, although the plot sometimes gets as fuzzy as it does in comic-book narratives. The “flash” and its immediate after-effects (the burning of all Bibles) is not explained much, and the thirty intervening years get short shift.
The film has long sequences without dialogue (such as the opening scene), a quality appropriate for a world in which people generally avoid each other, and the color is desaturated to the point that most scenes are grey or dirty brown. Cat-lovers will hate the opening scene in which Eli stalks and bags a scrawny cat for his dinner, although it seems unlikely that this hairless critter would have survived in such an environment.
Despite the rambling plot and several surprise twists near the end, The Book of Eli keeps the viewer’s attention in ways that much bigger, more bombastic films do not. Top
A Single Man
Tom Ford, the first-time director and co-writer of A Single Man, is a very successful fashion designer whose work brought Gucci out of bankruptcy and boosted the stock of Yves St.-Laurent before he established his own fashion house.
Not needing to make movies to pay the bills, he brings artistic freedom and the same critical and practical eye to his role as director as he brought to his fashion work. The result is one of the more visually interesting films of the year, and, because of the stunning acting of Colin Firth, it’s also one of the most moving films of the year.
The script is based on a 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, whose earlier “Berlin Stories” were made into the play, I am a Camera, then into a film of the same name, and finally into the musical play and film, Cabaret. Isherwood was an openly gay writer at a time when such a stance was neither easy nor prudent, and his novel about a middle-aged man trying to cope with the death of his lover, set off some bells upon its publication; it has since become one of the cornerstones of gay studies.
The film shows one day in 1962 in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a day when he decides he can no longer continue the life he has experienced since his younger lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), was killed in an auto accident eight months before. They had been together for sixteen great years, a relationship that is shown in flashbacks, and George has tried to move on, but nothing works—he cannot get his life back on track.
Giving up, he has decided to live one day as fully as possible and then kill himself. In the background, the critical actions of the Cuban missile crisis play out, but most of it fails to reach through the depression that insulates George from daily existence.
During the day, he quietly makes arrangements for his exit—clearing out his university office, emptying his bank account, leaving notes for people, even laying out his funeral clothes, and, oh, yes, buying some bullets for his vintage Webley revolver. He teaches his class on Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, ends with a mini-lecture on the place of invisible minorities in a society, and is propositioned by a young Latino hustler (Jon Kortajarena) outside a liquor store.
He also has a brief discussion with one of his students, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, the now grown-up boy of About a Boy), who is determined to become friends with George, but is unable to penetrate the sadness and despair that surrounds his professor. That night, George meets with his old friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), runs into Kenny again, and ends his day, but not quite as he had anticipated.
The film is crafted and staged beautifully, as one might expect from such a director. Ford has obviously studied Hitchcock’s and Pedro Almodovar’s films, as well as those by Wong Kar-wai, drawing upon, for example, Almodomar’s use of large posters (Hitchcock’s Psycho) in unexpected places, and Wong’s languorous pace, elegant photography and music (they used the same composer). But the main reason to see this film is Colin Firth’s performance—he shows more emotion with more restraint than virtually any other actor. Watch the flashback scene when he receives the call that Jim has been killed, but Jim’s parents would prefer that he not attend the funeral.
He is calm outwardly and thanks the caller, but the slow inner collapse is apparent and devastating. Firth, who won the Venice Film Festival Award for best actor, carries the film and deserves his Academy Award nomination for best actor.
Moore is fine in the less demanding role of Charley, George’s best friend and one-time lover, who desperately wants to make their relationship work “as a couple,” but they both know better, for all their posturing. Nicholas Hoult, now a tall, lanky youth with green eyes and sharp cheekbones (he could have been a model for one of Ford’s fashion layouts), is effective as the young man who wants a relationship with George but can’t make up his mind about it, perhaps because of his own naivete. When they strip and go skinny-dipping, the contrast between George’s middle-aged body and Kenny’s supple youth says it all.
One serious technical problem with the film is Ford’s use of color. Normally, the color scheme is desaturated, reflecting George’s bleak view of the world, but occasionally, when something catches his interest (as when he meets the young Latino hustler), the colors increase in intensity and then fade back into grayness. At first it appears interesting, and it does convey how George sees life, but later in the film it becomes merely noticeable and finally annoying. It detracts from the excellent acting and consistent emotional tone of the film.
A Single Man is so fine in its design and acting that these qualities carry it past any shortcomings. It’s quietly heartbreaking. Top
Mother
South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s new film is radically different from his last, the highly successful Host, which established box office records in South Korea. Instead of a monster that was spawned by American radioactive waste dumped into a river, lives under the bridge and swings through the city by its prehensile tale, the stars of this film are Mother (Kim Hye-ja) and her twenty-seven-year-old son, Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin).
The beautiful young man (played by a Korean matinee idol) is mentally challenged—his thought is slow, his actions childlike and his attention easily distracted. He still shares a bed with his mother, and his problem is not explained until late in the film.
Watching from her apothecary, where she is chopping herbs, she sees Yoon, while playing with a dog, step into the street where a speeding Mercedes bumps him. He is uninjured, although Mother cuts herself and spills some blood on him, an anticipation of crucial action later in the film. That night Yoon, stays out late, drinks too much and follows a school girl into an alley.
The next morning the girl’s body is found slumped over a balcony railing, and because of an incriminating golf ball found near the body, Yoon Do-joon is arrested. Mother sets out to find the real killer, and the film follows her adventures as she encounters street thugs, corrupt lawyers, prostitutes, junk dealers, sympathetic friends and antagonistic neighbors. Sometimes the story seems like a murder mystery, at other times a very dark comedy and at other times it becomes melodramatic. Throughout the story, Mother keeps her faith in her son’s innocence, and the end of the film finds the two back together, each with more knowledge than at the beginning.
Mother is played by Kim Hye-ja, a famous stage and television actress in Korea, and the director waited several years to get her for the part. His patience was rewarded, for her range of acting in the film is extraordinary.
Nearly her equal is Won Bin as her mentally impaired son. Just when it seems the viewer has him figured out, he says something smarter than he should have said or does something that shows he sees a lot more than he admits. The supporting characters are all interesting—quirky, unpredictable, sometimes treacherous, often helpful. They keep the narrative moving, but not necessarily forward.
The opening shot of Mother is one of the strangest ever. Dressed in a jacket and skirt, Ms. Kim Hye-ja walks toward the camera through a large field of golden grass. A few feet in front of the camera, she stops and begins to sway in time with music on the soundtrack. Her movements gradually become more animated with the music, and she takes off her jacket, raises her arms and begins to dance, turning in time to the music.
The dance continues for quite some time, with her alternately smiling at the camera and grimacing as though weeping. Only later does the viewer find out where she is and how this scene fits into the narrative. This opening shot is a bookend to a scene at the end of the film when she dances up the aisle of a tour bus filled with other mothers and their children.
You won’t meet another character like Mother for a long time, and the film is a fascinating and memorable glimpse into a contemporary Asian society. The film is in Korean with English subtitles or dubbing. Top
The Last Station
The title The Last Station refers to the small train stop where Count Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) becomes ill and dies in 1910. One of the world’s first superstars because of his writings and the influence of his ideas, Tolstoy expired in this small Russian town surrounded by reporters and inquisitive citizens waiting for the latest word from, or about, one of the most famous men in the world.
Michael Hoffman, writer and director, has fashioned a film, based on Jay Parini’s semi-fictional novel, that traces the family conflicts, power struggles and contradictory actions that brought the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina to this location to die.
In his own time, Tolstoy was as highly regarded for his utopian ideas—passive resistance, sexual celibacy and the rejection of private property—as for his writings. His followers, known as “Tolstoyians,” formed utopian societies in which they tried to live according to the master’s directives, and his ideas have been acknowledged as influences by Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Count Tolstoy, however, did not always follow his own recommendations (he fathered thirteen children by his wife and had many affairs), and his followers fought with his wife and some of his children over who should have control of his legacy, both the propagation of his ideas and the huge fortune he had acquired.
The center of the film is Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), an idealistic young man who has been hired by Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) to be Tolstoy’s private secretary. Chertkov is also the titular leader of the Tolstoyians and eager for the writer to change his will and leave legal ownership of his works to “the Russian people,” just the sort of idea that would appeal to Tolstoy. Valentin is told that a part of his duties is to record and bring back to Chertkov everything that Countess Sofya Tolstoy (Helen Mirren) says or does.
The countess, after having presented her husband with thirteen children, having copied War and Peace by hand several times (no one else could read Tolstoy’s handwriting) and having endured other indignities, felt she was entitled to his estate, and she attempts to lure Valentin to her side.
Also tempting Valentin is Masha (Kerry Condon), a robust young woman living at a commune near the Tolstoy estate where Valentin stays periodically; she teaches him that a passionate body trumps a detached ideal virtually every time, no matter how passionately one may pursue the ideal.
The power struggles between these people are interesting, although the romance between Valentin and Masha clearly is an added subplot to introduce some nudity and sex for young moviegoers, and it doesn’t go anywhere except to bed. While all of these characters (with the exception of Masha) are based on historical people, and we find out in the closing credits what happens to each of them, the film, for this viewer, never quite comes alive or brings that twinge or insight or emotion that creates a memorable film.
The acting is as good as it can be, given the script and predictable plot. Christopher Plummer received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, and he nicely conveys the idea of a man caught up in believing profoundly in himself.
On the other hand, there was quite a bit of chewed scenery lying on the floor after the episode where the eighty-year-old man hops about the bedroom waving his arms and crowing like a rooster while Mirren clucks at him from the turned-down bed.
Mirren was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress (which tells you which character the Academy thought was most important), and she matches Plummer both in acting ability and scenery chewing—witness her crockery-smashing episode. Both of these historical figures were so used to grandstanding in their personal lives they probably went “over the top” about as frequently as the actors portraying them.
James McAvoy portrays awe-struck, dewy-eyed innocence quite well (which is all he is asked to do most of the time), and provides a focus for the story. Paul Giamatti nicely conveys the sinister nature that underlies a utopian belief gone bad, but when he literally begins to twirl the ends of his mustache, it is hard to keep a straight face. There’s also a strong hint of Chertkov’s infatuation with Tolstoy and of his jealousy of Sofya, who accuses him of being male-oriented.
On the positive side, the film highlights aspects of Tolstoy’s life not commonly known, gives a likely view of Russia at the time, and, near the end, shows archival footage of the actual Tolstoy striding about. Nonetheless, the film presents a predictable view of the great man and makes little attempt to offer insights into the contradictory aspects of his life. It’s another attempt by Hollywood to capture the lives of great writers—if you enjoyed the film version of Dr. Zhivago, this one is in the same well-tilled field. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can often be found at www.mmnow.com
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