Movie Monster

Watching Synecdoche, New York is like catching up with an old friend whose company you enjoy, but who—slowly but surely—starts to monopolize your time. You know that his blathering is a tic he can’t control, so you don’t want to push him away; alas, you feel compelled to check your watch and marvel, “My! Look at the time!”

One could have hardly expected a linear narrative in the directorial début of Charlie Kaufman, the man who penned Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Synecdoche begins in the real world of stage director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose production of Death of a Salesman is premiered to great acclaim. For once, the artist-hero’s professional life is spotlessly meteoric; it’s everything else in his life that sucks. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) confesses to having joyful fantasies of Cotard’s death while they’re in couples’ therapy with their self-promoting bimbo of a therapist (Hope Davis). Adele jets to Germany, and takes their beloved daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), with her. And Cotard has other problems. His health is an H.M.O.’s nightmare: He becomes a baton passed between dispassionate doctors. And, though his artistic stature affords him plenty of opportunities for romantic liaisons, Cotard can never quite consummate his flings—including the one that we in the audience are most primed to want him to have: an affair with the quirky ticket-window lady, Hazel (Samantha Morton). Here’s a man who gets a MacArthur grant—a free-pass to complete his magnum opus—and yet he’s a perennial downer. Is Cotard seriously an attempt to construct a Citizen Kane of artists?

Cotard wants to use the grant to produce something honest, so he decides to make a play about his life, and procures what appears to be an abandoned warehouse for his theater. Well, it’s really not a theater, for it houses no audience—only an ever-growing scale reproduction of Cotard’s native Schenectady. His play really is his life. Hazel, now his assistant, watches as their doubles meander about and eventually require doubles of their own. And so on, and so on. Cotard does not let his art imitate his life, he uses his art to duplicate his life, and that which is his “real” life becomes a jumbled mash-up of frayed plot threads and motifs. Kaufman deliberately skewers the timeline, and blurs the line between reality and fiction, but Kaufman lacks the patience and lucidity of David Lynch at his best—think Mulholland Drive compared to Inland Empire. Yes, I get that disorientation is Kaufman’s point, and no, it’s not “over my head.” One reviewer called the writer-director a “master of mindfuckery.” That’s rather inaccurate—and if it wasn’t, I might’ve dropped a variant of that ol’ grin-inducer, too. Kaufman isn’t fucking with anybody’s mind; he’s lost in his own.

A “synecdoche” (for those of you not up on your obscure literary terminology or words that rhyme with cities in upstate New York) is a part of something representing its whole. Kaufman, like Cotard, sees himself as an isolated part of an intangible whole, one voice in a sea of billions. But what occurs in Synecdoche is something of an oddity: His voice overpowers our individual responses. The structure may be baroque, but the dialogue and ideas become so externalized that our minds have no room to play; we are muddled by too great a volume of information presented to us, not by too many layers. That is what distinguishes this cerebral thunderstorm from, say, There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson gives us a gift box and lets us shake it; Kaufman, in Synecdoche, tears off the wrapping paper before we get a chance to guess at the box’s contents.

There’s a sense that Kaufman is trying to top each of his previous credits—to topple film itself. It’s an attempt not just to break, but shatter, the fourth wall—a study of the futility of doing exactly what he’s set out to do: turn real life into fiction, and fiction into reality. (He’s not merely trying to get outside his head. Like Cotard’s Schenectady simulacrum, this movie is supposed to be a physical manifestation of Kaufman’s mind, and an invitation for us to keep him company inside it.) But, the real world is too large and complex for theater (or cinema) to do it justice—a built-in justification for Synecdoche’s surrealism—and, as his hero discovers, you cannot live solely in your own head or life will pass you by. Kaufman has built in so many layers of recursion, and loaded this film with a life’s worth of philosophical wonderings and anxieties; but while Synecdoche is intensely personal, it’s also implacably cluttered. Kaufman’s ideas are both cogent and cohesive; they transcend the movie’s density. The problem is that the ideas are so raw and close to the surface that they begin to take precedence over the story; it violates the writer’s credo: “Show, don’t tell.” As a feature, Synecdoche is like an experimental short extended too far—a long, rambling joke that continues to be set up long after you’ve ascertained the punchline.

To their credit, the actors never lose touch with the characters; they are brilliantly sustained. The performers have, however, caught Kaufman’s lugubriousness bug. Hoffman is droll in just about every role I’ve ever seen him in; you could cast him as the lead in The Passion of the Christ, and he’d still have that subversive wit—his saving grace. Here, he hits the right tone of (reluctantly) detached irony—that not-quite-self-awareness that’s typically labeled “Kafkaesque.” (Hey, if Kaufman can reference The Trial, why can’t I…?) But poor Hoffman, as this sick, addled theater director, is blobbier than usual; you tire of your urge to kick this sluggard into getting off his arse and doing something . Morton, however, seems almost unrecognizable as Hazel, who floats about like a shy bubble that Cotard’s sharp sorrow perpetually pops. Her sweet pathos earns her rapport with the audience.

Unfortunately, despite their talent, the cast gets caught in Kaufman’s maelstrom. Like painters who throw globs of paint onto a canvas, Kaufman is whamming every idea he has onto celluloid; he’s splattering layer upon layer, before the last has even dried—as if his ideas have expiration dates, and those dates are fast approaching. Synecdoche is a work of depth, honesty, intelligence, humor (thank God), and passion, but more intimate, detailed explorations of Kaufman’s gnawing neuroses could be equally—or surpassingly—deep, honest, intelligent, humorous and passionate if not explored en masse. There’s so much material here that Kaufman should take a cue from Obama and “spread the wealth.” (Perhaps he also shouldn’t regard Adele’s miniscule paintings so flippantly…) Having seen the movies produced from Kaufman’s previous scripts (as handled by other directors), I know he is capable of such work. But, after Synecdoche, he must’ve thought he’d never get the directorial reins again. In this film’s grandiose terms, how could he ever produce a successive picture that could “top” this?

Seeing the new French horror film Martyrs is like going trick-or-treating and ending up with a frayed philosophy text in your pillowcase. The writer-director, Pascal Laugier, has modernized the biblical story of Job—who lost everything, except his faith in God—by giving it the grindhouse treatment, grafting on the carnage of cheapo slashers. His heroine is stripped of her possessions, loved ones, skin, and this time around, her faith is despoiled, too. The French seem to think they can find art in anything, but is the beauty of this gnostically inclined torture-porn more than skin-deep?

Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) is kidnapped as a child, and abused by faceless captors. She is force-fed gruel—I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Soylent Green—and her only reprieve from the metal chair she’s chained to is getting pummeled by a bald brute. If she passes out from the blows, she’s slapped awake, and treated to more. She eventually escapes her captors, and is institutionalized, but the doctors can’t see the vindictive golem that slashes her wrists, and haunts her waking nightmares. Years later, she locates two of her captors who are now living an unassuming middle-class lifestyle. To appease her golem, Lucie pops them (and their children) full of lead, and her sympathetic girlfriend, Anna (Morjana Alaoui), helps her dispose of the bodies.

The golem returns for Lucie—but from Anna’s point of view, we see that it’s but a product of Lucie’s unhinged amygdala; Lucie loses her battle with the nonexistent demon, and slits her own throat. Anna, however, finds that the torture chamber of Lucie’s recollections is, in fact, very real. She rescues a denatured woman with a metal plate stapled to her skull, but is captured by the black-clad boogeymen-torturers who’d abducted Lucie; they imprison Anna for 17 years, and abuse her just as they had her girlfriend. After scene after scene of senseless, repetitive violence, Anna recalls advice from Lucie: let go. By the time her flesh is shorn, she’s photographed like Christ on the cross or Joan of Arc—her dulled-out eyes pointing heavenward. This has been her captors’ goal; the movie archaically defines a martyr as a witness, and Anna is their witness to l’autre monde. She whispers what she’s seen to the Mademoiselle in charge of the organization (Catherine Bégin), who looks like the chic, caked-up landlady of Mulholland Drive. A rotting gaggle of elderly aristocrats gathers to hear about what lies beyond the grave, but the Mademoiselle puts the barrel of a gun between her lips and recommends to one witness that he “keep doubting.”

Even after the gore-splattered success of other recent French horror flicks (such as the barbaric, but affably daft High Tension in 2003), and Hollywood’s own spate of factory-produced pukers (Saw, Hostel, et al), Laugier ran into difficulty getting Martyrs financed and produced. Censors slapped it with an unprecedented 18+ rating in its native country, which the filmmakers have appealed. One can see how this film could raise such objections: Despite all the choppy camerawork, we can see all the bloody chops. But the film’s spiritualism may make the ickiness run deeper than Lucie’s cuts. Martyrs is a “torture-porn,” all right, but I don’t think it conforms to the tenets of that genre as laid out by David Edelstein in New York magazine. The movie’s brutality is, in its way, cathartic, but we see it clearly from Anna’s sane point of view, and aren’t implicated in the boogeymens’ crimes. Martyrs also seems part of that international wave of movies in which crowd-pleasing violence is paired with warped philosophical underpinnings, and then decreed “deep” by critics who are easily distracted by clever visuals. This dubious genre includes the Kill Bill movies, The Dark Knight, and the absurd revenge-fantasy Oldboy from South Korea.

But perhaps there is a peculiar depth to Martyrs, a film which is more ambiguous—albeit less humorous—than all of the above movies (with the exception of The Dark Knight). Before the picture was played at the screening I attended, Laugier appeared in what looked to be a last-minute video introduction. Unlike the brutal movie, its director seemed an affable, limp-postured, but good-humored fellow; he smiled shyly when he said that he hoped that we in the audience would like his picture because he himself was on the fence. He recounted its production as if he had blacked out during the process; sometimes he’s proud of Martyrs, and sometimes he can’t believe he’s made a film like this. Is Laugier perhaps like Meursault when he harangues the chaplain at the end of The Stranger—embracing the ultimate uncertainty of life, but nearly driven mad by the revelation? Laugier’s “madness” would then translate into the marathon of suffering and gore and masochism that appears in his deeply agnostic movie. Through the torturers/evangelists, he shows us (consciously or not) how ultimately destructive and fruitless it is to try to know with certainty that which is unknowable. What we see is Laugier’s psychomachia refracted through his id.

But, as much as j’adore l’ambiguïté français, it’s easy to read too much into movies of this sort, particularly on the basis of psychiatric evaluation. However, it should be noted that Martyrs, with all of its entropy and eccentricity, never seems to use violence immorally. We are clearly put on the side of the lesbian lovebirds, and their torturers are sick and twisted in the manner of religious fanatics rather than evil stick-figures. The movie is a bloody scourge, and I can’t admit to enjoying its flagellation and mutilation, no matter how much some of the slasher-film junkies in the audience may find it funky or liberating. Laugier’s points could have been made in a better way, but I cannot deny Martyrs’ standing as a work of ’roid-raged art.

“I don’t really subscribe to any label,” says Nick (Michael Cera) in advertisements for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. How cute. But would he agree that the label “high school movie” doesn’t apply to this film because its teenage lovebirds spend dusk-till-dawn looking to consummate their love—and thus their “adulthood”—at an indie-rock concert rather than a house party?

The avian 18-year-old would be emo if he weren’t straightedge; he’s the bassist for a gay rock band, The Jerk Offs, and still recovering from a break-up with a bitchy queen of his own, Tris (Alexis Dziena). Tris goes to a Jerk Offs show with her friends Caroline (Ari Graynor), a dipso, and Norah (Kat Dennings), a dyspeptic. The latter kisses Nick at random, and goes home with him in his Little Miss Sunshine-yellow Yugo—mainly to keep up the pretense that they’re dating so that Norah can snub Tris. But Nick’s fellow Jerk Offs tell Norah to give Nick a try; Tris has left him a mopey shell. She and Nick share a passion for the band Where’s Fluffy—which is to play at a mystery time and venue that they must follow clues to determine—and a need to locate Caroline, who’s drunkenly tripping across the five boroughs of New York. Their romantic vicissitudes are intermingled with their urban odyssey, and serenaded by a soundtrack that sounds as though it’s been selected from a Pitchfork Media best-of list.

There’s really nothing objectionable about Nick and Norah; it’s like a tenant who always pays on time, but looks to the floor as he passes you in the hall. The scriptwriter, Lorene Scafaria (who adapted Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s novel of the same name), provides some amusing dialogue that comes as freely from these teenage characters’ lips as puke does from Caroline’s. Peter Sollett, the director, has some witty touches, and is generally respectful of the actors—that is, except in some of Caroline’s drunk-girl escapades, to which the audience was most receptive. But the movie takes its setting and color scheme from Taxi Driver and gives them the soft-focus gauze of Disney’s Times Square. It’s a punk-scene pastoral: All the grit that makes New York appealing to indie-rockers is swept into the subway grates, parking is plentiful, and the City is like one big small town. While not nearly as cloying as Juno, Nick and Norah is also a square attempt to sell “counterculture” chic with any trace of subversion drained; it’s cinematic Jonas Brothers. Nothing roots these bourgeois scenesters to their scene except their salable taste in music, though the fine performances by the young cast (particularly Dennings) help one forget how redolent these characters are of the stockpile. Even the inclusion of homosexual band-mates (the good-natured Aaron Yoo, Jonathan B. Wright as a butch groupie, and Rafi Gavron with an ambiguously appealing curl to his lips) doesn’t change the formula much—the filmmakers have just multiplied the “gay best friend” by a factor of three.

However, one gets the impression that Sollett and company are people of talent who were given some material that could grow teeth, and were then forbidden to take a bite. It has the skeleton of family-friendly schlock, but the filmmakers’ honesty, intelligence and clarity is worthy of approbation, even if the movie’s jagged bones betray its meaty milieu. Nick and Norah is salesmanship striving for sincerity, and professional enough that one can bear the conventional ending, and almost accept that Nick was in love with that Molly Ringwald-dominatrix Tris. I left the theater feeling a flaky happiness, but it was the kind of mood that fizzles away like bubbles when you open a bottle of pop.

There really isn’t much more to say about this sleepy-hipster Superbad other than, “Wake up, Michael Cera!” He’s found a nifty niche: By not acting “hip”—but simply, sweetly likable—he’s become the hippest major male star working today. (Perhaps the makers of his two most recent projects can take a cue from that discrepancy.) His stature is analogous to that of Dustin Hoffman before Hoffman’s post-Graduate work; but Cera’s coming off his third starring role, and starting to coast on his increasingly introverted charm. If he doesn’t start to season his shtick, he’ll end up a fad. His infinite playlist needs some new tunes.

In No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers declaimed that the sky was falling, and used allegorical constructs to bolster their assertion. In their new film, Burn After Reading, they’re dealing with human characters, and look upon the sinking sky with a shrug, as if to say: “Who cares? It’s just caving in on morons.” And, just as I admired No Country for its craftsmanship but couldn’t accept its apocalypticism, I laughed through Burn, but left needing an antacid to salve its misanthropic aftertaste.

At a svelte 97 minutes, the movie runs like a lightweight imitation of the Coen canon: first-time offenders commit a modest crime, and it metastasizes into an ordeal big enough to swallow an ensemble cast. And the Coens have assembled quite a cast: George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins and—what the hell—Brad Pitt. The latter is a particular asset. His character, Chad, and McDormand’s Linda, are the cloddish fitness instructors who find the memoirs of a former C.I.A. analyst, Osborne Cox (Malkovich), in their gym. Cox is—or flatters himself by thinking he is—the only sane person in a web of wackos. Malkovich’s bursts of rage are this blue-blood’s only defense mechanisms. The analyst is the only one aware of the absurdity of his situation, and thus the character the Coens are seeing through, so his breakdown has added comic resonance: a twinge of self-effacement. Cox has been laid off for bogus reasons, and his icicle of a wife (Swinton) is cheating on him with a meathead (Clooney) who’s cheating on her. What little control Cox exercises over his life is diminishing, so he’s in no mood to deal with opportunistic amateurs looking for him to cough up a so-called Good Samaritan tax in return for his manuscript. Linda is certain that her discovery will be remunerative enough to pay for cosmetic surgery she’s deluded herself into needing—so certain that when Cox refuses to pay her, she offers his document to the Russian embassy.

One can accept the movie’s viewpoint that Americans are a pack of dolts whose self-absorption gets them in over their heads because Pitt and McDormand play their roles without malice. These characters aren’t just punch lines, but people with drives that we can relate to in moments of self-reflection. Pitt, who used his star presence brilliantly to give credence to his Jesse James last year, achieves his effects by taking our expectations of him, and tossing them back at us like a hot potato. He probably hasn’t been able to cut this loose since 12 Monkeys, and the freedom has made him giddy. But the key is that his Chad isn’t a fitness fiend just so he can flex his biceps; Chad wants to have fun, think positive, and be a team-player. Likewise, Linda’s monomania about getting a tummy-tuck doesn’t extend to inhibiting her from crying when Chad goes missing. (McDormand—a.k.a. Mrs. Joel Coen—is proficient at tacky American accents. Linda’s bears resemblance to Sarah Palin’s. Coincidence?) These characters may be the emotional equivalents of babies, but at least they’re human babies. Their superior (Jenkins), however, is no toddler. His overtures to Linda never make it through her thick skull, but he’s willing to act selflessly for her, and that gives the film a touch of heart without weighing it down; we need someone we don’t feel condescending toward.

For most of the movie, the Coens expertly gallop through dildo jokes, chance encounters and hook-ups, sudden deaths, and endless complications. Their characters weave us through it, and at its best, Burn suggests the underappreciated 1975 farce Shampoo, with Clooney’s character resembling an Eastern-establishment version of the promiscuous Beverly Hills hairdresser that Warren Beatty played. The filmmakers likely wanted a reprieve from the heavy No Country—they’ve dropped their usual symbols and languorous tracking shots, and even went so far as to adopt a conventional, mock-action score (by Carter Burwell). But they deprive us of an ending, replacing it with the expository banter between C.I.A. agents (the chief of whom is played drolly by J.K. Simmons) who summarize all the off-screen action, and conclude that there’s nothing worth gleaning from this whole big mess. This is the Coens’ theme: all their plot machinery is meant to add up to nothing; the point is that it’s meaningless. They’ve dropped another weight on our laps.

The ad-hoc operatives function like the petty dei ex machina that Shakespeare sometimes used ironically. But the Coens’ irony is shrill; they seem to be withholding one of their famously elaborate endings punitively. And with so many of the plot elements left up in the air, their stunted dénouement seems slovenly beyond the joke of its slovenliness. When members of the audience laugh at this postmodern insolence, one wonders how aware they are that the filmmakers have just slapped them across the cheeks. Do people really care so little for these characters that they’ll allow the film to annihilate them so snidely? The Coens have insulted both the audience and themselves.

From the way most American films perceive Southwestern Europeans, one might think that the Old World has graduated past employment. All its inhabitants are retirees with nothing better to do than paint, write poetry, and—mais oui!—make dirty, dirty, sexy love. This atmosphere of leisure is about the opposite of the low-pressure system that perpetually hovers around director Woody Allen’s Big Apple-centric head. So, when he drops his American surrogates off in Spain for their summer abroad in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we know they won’t be staying there past fall.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall), the narrator too plainly tells us, is a lover of order and orderly lovers. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), on the other hand, is the soul-searching bohemian, the fatalist. Allen’s schematic vision is clear: Both girls will fall for the same hunky Spaniard (Javier Bardem), and both will have their concepts of love challenged. Allen, going on 73, has made a movie about young lovers taking advantage of their age, and one can clearly see that he’s living vicariously through his heroines’ dalliances. But this isn’t a dirty-old-man picture; it’s one of few Woody Allen movies that seem unlabored. His vicariousness has given his hoary art a whiff of youthful wanderlust. But not totally.

Fans of the director have come to expect his overwriting, which is, of course, a function of his chronic apprehension. In his comedies, it can be a blessing, and in his dramas, a curse. (As he’s aged, it’s begun to blight his comedies, too.) In classics like Annie Hall, his total disclosure is part of the joke, whereas in something like Match Point, his over-delineation is a whapping of “Did you get it? I’m an artist, and this is what I’m saying…” This current film is really neither comedy nor drama: it’s a droopy daydream—a romance novel jazzed up with semi-ersatz questions about the ontology of love. But, although that might seem like a damning evaluation, the picture’s utter disconnection from reality (Vicky’s getting her master’s in Catalan culture!) makes its intellectualized reverie seem somehow grounded. The dialogue, despite its absence of “unimportance”—i.e., any references to popular culture or contemporary society—is, at least, colloquial; and though the voice-over narration often serves as a sort of Venn diagram for Allen’s themes, it evokes a storybook atmosphere, and keeps the viewer from working too hard. Who’d want to when the weather’s so nice and the people are so lovely…?

And the cast really is lovely. Allen makes Hall his avatar. She shares her surname with his most famous heroine, and her strikingly fragile features with Mia Farrow, but her initial prudishness around Bardem’s blunt Don Juan Antonio is pure Allen—and a trifle emetic. She’s soft as butter, though, when her schemas about love start to collapse, and it’s a pleasure to watch her melt. Johansson cleverly underplays her character’s restive ennui, but has a quiet slyness about her when she discusses—but really brags about—her unorthodox sexual practices with Juan Antonio, and his trigger-happy ex, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz).

Cruz, as a voluptuary, gives the picture its kick and vitality. She forms the third vertex in a love triangle reminiscent of the one in Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague classic Jules and Jim (an odd reference for the steeped-in-Bergman director): the utterly self-aware Catherine to Bardem’s passive Jules and Johansson’s skeptical Jim. Her Maria Elena is the self-appointed genius whose pretensions climb the slopes of Parnassus—and provide us with our most substantial chuckles. Her majesty complements Bardem’s sensitive artist, and he’s a lothario for whom sex is truly an art unto itself: lovemaking, literally. Bardem gets away with the Latin-lover cliché by keeping all his emotions just an inch or so behind his heavy eyes, but never closer. The only cliché that fizzles out entirely is Chris Messina as Vicky’s straightedge fiancé. Allen goes overboard castrating this character whose competition with the fiercely virile Juan Antonio already puts him at a disadvantage.

All in all, Vicky Cristina is a holiday for those who think they’re getting their protein from Allen’s existential quandaries, and that excuses the fatty Spanish trimmings. In actuality, it’s all flan: you fill up on it fast, but it goes down smoothly.

The word “Batman” is omitted from the title of The Dark Knight for good reason: He’s hardly in it. His screen time pales in comparison to his adversary’s—maybe not in terms of minutes, but certainly in memorableness. To fend off comparisons to Jack Nicholson, director Christopher Nolan pulled a wild card for his Joker: the newly respectable Heath Ledger. And the late actor, with a fusillade of raw (but intricately coordinated) malice, roars past every other respectable performer in this film. It’s an epical swan song for Ledger’s career, and it’s just what Nolan must have been looking for—and it’s exactly wrong for this movie.

Ledger was a very good actor, and might have eventually become a great one, but, even at his best, he was always acting. When his lovelorn cowboy in Brokeback Mountain agonized, one could picture Ledger working up a fury in front of his mirror the morning before. Likewise, every tic, every grimace, every lick of the lips that his Joker makes in The Dark Knight seems right on schedule. Ledger was a sincere hard worker who took professional chances; he meticulously studied and scrutinized every detail of the characters he played and tried his damnedest to absorb their pathos. But, though his hard work paid off, his methods were often transparent. Watching his Joker, one can see the extent of his toils. The problem with his performance, which is a problem with Nolan’s conception, is that Ledger works too hard.

Nicholson, who grew fat on an unprecedented paycheck for his work in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, knew better than to overwork his acting muscles refining the role of a gangster who slips into a vat of acid, decides to wear clown makeup and causes mayhem thereafter. The actor relished in a hammy performance which perfectly jibed with Burton’s excessively silly, off-kilter vision. But Nolan’s no Burton. His take on the superhero franchise has gotten so dark, it’s become lights-out. In Batman Begins, as in Spider-Man II, it was personal—Bruce Wayne, Batman’s Fortune 500 alter ego, battled with his psyche and from villain to villain to villain (with Katie Holmes nestled in between). Nolan’s “darkness,” in comparison to Burton’s, lay mainly in the fact that Christian Bale brooded where Michael Keaton was wry. Batman Begins was great fun because it was given room to grow; the climaxes kept mounting, but the principals were given enough space to cultivate performances that were just funny and believable enough to make Batman’s personal crises plausible. The Dark Knight is all Ledger, all sadism—the Joker is so pumped up that we hardly remember that we’re watching the Joker.

For the role, the Aussie’s boy-next-door looks are tarnished with greasy, phlegm-colored locks, bulbous scars and makeup smeared on like an Insane Clown Posse groupie’s. This Joker’s a clown Rob Zombie would be proud of. But the writers (Nolan co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, and the story with David S. Goyer) splatter him throughout the movie as if he were a work of genius. They feed him with little globules of Foucauldian nihilism, and Ledger delivers them menacingly. It boils down to “the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules!”—everything’s random, so let’s dynamite
everything set up to maintain order. I’m sure the writers intentionally left the discrepancy between the Joker’s hostility toward order and planning and his ability to pull off elaborate ruses glaring in order to give him a supernatural mystique. But in so doing they waive all grounding this film has in “realism.” It’s silly in the wrong way—pretentious for masquerading as profound. Nolan’s Joker is differentiated from Burton’s because this clown appears to have a Philosophy 101 textbook up his sleeve, and one’s credulousness is further taxed by this Joker’s lack of backstory. His daddy-beat-me tales are all lies; he’s just an omnipotent boogeyman—a Michael Myers—apparently the embodiment of absolute evil. How could Roger Ebert say that, with this film, “Batman is not a comic book anymore” when its bad guy is pure 2-D comic-book contrivance? His motive is to derive pleasure from dispensing pain; it doesn’t get more basic (or shallow) than that. (Critics weren’t too hip to the same shortcoming in No Country for Old Men, either.)

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Be Kind Rewind is nothing but a trifle: a sweet, technically crude little comedy. It’s of note only because it is so terribly put together, and yet the work of an artist whose reputation is based on technical sophistication. Writer-director Michel Gondry’s experimental techniques beautifully served Charlie Kaufman’s unorthodox screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but he seems to innately sense the lack of inspiration in his own material and just can’t bring himself to direct it.

The high-concept premise is intriguing enough. Mike (Mos Def), a clerk at a dilapidated, Kevin Smith-esque video store, erases all the tapes and needs to film homemade replacements. But after seeing Jerry (Jack Black)—banned from the store by its owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover)—survive electrocution at a power plant and become “magnetized,” you brace yourself for the worst. The plot clips on without ever clicking and all predictable storytelling methods are adopted, until the end, that is, when predictability is replaced by implausibility—more on that later. Mr. Fletcher is on vacation when Jerry screws up the tapes. The store is facing abolition for a new shopping plaza. A pretty girl (Melonie Diaz) is co-opted to help and sticks with the boys—has she nothing better to do? They replace the lost movies with cheesy knockoffs they produce themselves, and the replacements begin to attract long lines of customers. The trio becomes local celebrities. Jerry becomes a primadonna starlet. They take pride in their work and the whole neighborhood gets involved. One’s fears that this is actually for the Nacho Libre audience become overwhelming.

Jack Black is a lump on the screen and he smears all over his scenes because there’s no one for his outsize acting to bounce off of. Only when other characters are played too broadly—as much of the supporting cast is—does Black demur, as in the scenes with the stereotypical kids from the hood. Black can be funny when working with a good script and a director who can control the comedian’s seemingly involuntary exhibitionism. In Be Kind Rewind, he’s magnetized, all right, but he doesn’t stick to chain link fences—he’s stuck to Gondry. Black is the director’s trump card, but Gondry loses almost every hand because everything else he’s got is just a two of clubs. Black’s small victory is that he’s the only one who plays dumb colorfully. Mos Def looks like he was tranquilized before every shoot; his character’s a flimsy yawn, a set piece for Black to toy with.

Here’s an example of the director’s shoddy handling of a joke. Jerry compares their home movies with Shakespeare, but mispronounces the Bard’s name. As Black delivers the line it’s mildly funny, but then Gondry cuts to Mike asking, “What did you say?” then Jerry not knowing what he’s done wrong, then Mike laughing it off, saying, “Nothing…” Gondry’s pacing is unbearably goopy. He moves the film along like a slug on caffeine binges; and when things finally happen, you can’t figure out why.

The movie’s selling point is its amateur reproduction of famous hits, but even they leave something to be desired. Mike and Jerry don’t seem to be making movies on a small budget; they seem to be squandering a big budget on dumb things. When, for their magnum opus, they put the video camera behind a fan to produce a silent film effect and use pizza to double for pools of blood, it’s cute. But it’s neither clever nor plausible that they’d use dozens of life-size cardboard Model T’s in a street scene; couldn’t Gondry, known for in-camera effects, come up with something scrappier? He obviously loves his job and wants to share some of that magic with those in the audience; unfortunately, his “populist” message comes off as anachronistically naïve. In the age of Youtube and postmodern parody-overload, who’d pay to see a rinky-dink knockoff of Ghostbusters on V.H.S.? And the ending is so implausibly idealistic, and with such a looming sense of regret, that the viewer drowns in heavy syrup. The regret, by the way, is too abstract for one to wholeheartedly share in. Is it lamenting the loss of video stores with bad selections? Small businesses in general? Schlocky movies?

Mike and Jerry’s little projects actually emphasize the inadequacies of Gondry’s. Is it some kind of inside joke that he doesn’t seem to know where to place a camera and fudges the rules of editing? If it’s humor, it’s too dry for such a wet film. The best joke was one that the projectionist made at the screening I attended: right after Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow—reenacting her roles in comparably sentimental Woody Allen movies) demanded a refund for a bum tape, a hole burned through the reel and some customers walked out of the theater, presumably wanting their money back. I thought it was a joke at first, but that would have been giving the movie too much credit.

Reviewing Be Kind Rewind here, I feel a little like a bully beating up the asthmatic kid who really means well: Juno grossed as much on Be Kind Rewind’s opening weekend as Be Kind Rewind did. But the way that Gondry is beatified by cinema students, it’s curious that he so utterly failed to pull this off. If he doesn’t start improving soon, he may lose his halo.

I’m glad people are finally hip to the program—Juno’s Academy Award-winning “legitimacy” only further drags scriptwriter Diablo Cody’s reputation into the brackish puddle of square mud. (I won’t say that I said it first, Slate and Gawker, even though I pretty much did.) Attacking Cody, as the Gawker article, “Diablo Cody Backlash in Full Swing,” does, is now all-too-easy. Cody’s vulnerability is two-pronged: it can come from both the corporate and indie side of things. To the suits, this woman who’s “personally put [her] vag out there” and would do so again if “the Beef Council would cough up the proper endorsement money” is a liability to her reputation among the “just folks” demographic, which is only slowly warming up to family-friendly filmmakers openly bearing their vaginas. To the hipsters whom she briefly won over, she’s an opportunist in trendy clothing—a person who’d “leak” nude pictures of herself onto the Web might very well be as coyly spurious as the dialogue she writes. Jason Reitman, Juno’s director, has been consistently backgrounded—probably because he dutifully served Cody’s language like those Nazis who were “just following orders”—and will probably fall into hack mediocrity making yet more conservative pictures packaged for liberals.

But then, still basking in the limelight, is Ellen Page—opportunist and backstabber. She herself mocked Cody on Saturday Night Live, where an unflattering male impersonator of Cody egged Page into delivering Juno-esque patter. This might have been copacetic with me if she hadn’t prefaced her slander with “I’ve had an amazing year! I was nominated with an Academy Award for my role in Juno…”—delivered in the exact manner of the sexperimental teenie-bopper that Cody provided for her. It’s just a joke—yes, I know—but it’s a cowardly one. Page wouldn’t dare assail her grotesquely popular movie (or her part in it) even now that it’s gotten some flack, but she doesn’t mind flogging its scapegoat, the very same woman who called Page “superhuman” in her acceptance speech. One can’t blame everyone involved (you can come out from hiding, Michael Cera and Jenifer Garner—even if the latter did devote too many acting muscles to her cardboard-cutout character…), but the Juno phenomenon is not just the fault of its so-called stripper-cum-blogger-cum-screenwriter. The person who embodied the title role must take some responsibility, too.

Perhaps the continual praise for Page’s performance is merely a reflex for those who can’t quite admit entirely that they were wrong about the movie. I stand by my initial analysis that she was good at timing the deluge of her precious verbiage, but I’d be pulling a Diablo Cody if I were to say it was an Oscar nomination-worthy performance. From the “criticisms” I’ve read, you’d think that the concept of someone-acting-sarcastic-to-conceal-their-true-feelings was an invention of Page’s. Wowee!

I hardly remember the young actress from the X-Men flicks and I’ve yet to see Hard Candy or any of her more “out there” pictures where she reportedly gives good performances. (If the rumors are true, I shan’t retract my forthcoming remarks, but at least I’ll feel better about the world.) But how could this 21-year-old, who’s been quoted on IMDB as saying such truistic statements as, “I don’t really want to do the Hollywood thing. I think you ought to try to say something with your movies,” and “I don’t care if people like my character. I just want them to think about the movie’s message” conscientiously play Juno? How could an actress who claims to be a “feminist” who “tries to steer clear of the ‘stereotypical roles for teenage girls’ because she finds them to be ‘sexist,’” really take pride in a this-side-of-Hollywood flick about a girl whose best buddy is her dad and who cares so deeply about “true” (monogamous) love with a boy? What could be more “Hollywood”?

If anything, Juno asserts pre-feminist messages, the most obvious of which is “keep the baby.” Having conservative values is one thing, but to sugarcoat them in the name of the almighty dollar is yet another. (As of February 17^th, Juno has grossed $125,047,654.) And then to persist in standing by your hypocrisy while hopping on the burgeoning bandwagon against it… Ellen Page has secured mainstream success by selling what she would have formerly claimed to be her soul; for her to toss cruel jokes at Cody’s expense as though she’s not her accomplice or promoter or friend may be a receipt of that sale.

So, all of you converts out there who have come to dislike this most controversial of Academy Award nominees, I applaud you. But please remember, this is the “Juno backlash”—to save all your vitriol for Diablo Cody is to let other guilty parties off the hook.

[Now that No Country for Old Men is last year’s Best Picture, I felt I should post the review I wrote way back in pre-Oscar times. Warning, there’s a spoiler.]

Until the end credits, there isn’t one bar of music in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. In fact, the bulk of the first third of the film is as visually empty as the soundtrack; it’s Middle-of-Nowhere, Texas, 1980: beautiful in it’s bleakness—untamed, unpopulated. The photography, by the brothers’ longtime associate, Roger Deakins, is always sumptuous, but it works better here than in most of their films; this film needs to be implacably picturesque and distant—the world of this movie isn’t quite real, not quite full.

The story follows around Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who, on a solitary hunting trip, stumbles on the remains of a mass execution of drug dealers in the desert. We never figure out much about them—and neither do the police—but they were certainly the victims of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a merciless killing machine. Moss is the kind of man who thinks of himself as a modern day cowboy, but, in actuality, is just a Vietnam vet whose “home on the range” is in a trailer park. He is so deadpan that his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), doesn’t believe him when he remarks off-handedly that the valise he’s brought back from his hunting expedition is loaded with cash. Moss does not realize, however, that his cash came equipped with a tracking device. After Carla Jean is safely away with her batty mother, Moss finds himself playing cat-and-mouse with Chigurh. Though he’s no Rambo, the vet is resourceful; his laconic understatement makes him the perfect foil for Chigurh, the latest word in sardonically unfeeling inhumanity. While not perfect, Moss is scrappy and not easily frightened; he acts the way we’d like to think we would in the face of robotic evil.

And then he’s killed off.

As the trusty old sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, Tommy Lee Jones enters into the movie relatively late. Dealing only with Carla Jean, he’s practically a bystander, never directly involved in the A-plot, only watching from afar. Jones’ character is a particular specialty of the Coens—like Frances McDormand’s cop in Fargo, he’s old-fashioned, glib, and utterly straightforward. On the surface he may seem like a typical Tommy Lee Jones part, too—his Man in Black without the zazz—but he’s not. Like the rest of the Texans here, he’s tough and reserved, yet older enough to think he’s seen it all. But he’s never seen anything like this.

In the beginning, his understatement makes him seem as dead as the deathly flat landscape, but he’s not; something dies in him later on. (And Jones lays it to rest gracefully.) Like all cowboy heroes, he has to be internalized and stoic, but he, like Moss, is out of his league. Unfortunately, that seems more troublesome than any of the graphic murders Chigurh commits; are the Coens really saying that mechanized evil (a single-minded clockwork orange) has rendered traditional American goodness obsolete? This apocalyptic revelation leads Bell—a sheriff so old and craggy that the bags under his eyes couldn’t be taken as carry-on—to finally retire.

One may be led to think that No Country for Old Men is a tract about evil, but it’s not. The evil embodied by Bardem’s character is rarified to the point of absurdity. He and his motivations are more primitive than any of the other characters. I can only recall one shot from the entire movie that might lead one to believe that Chigurh is layered—his reaction when he realizes that Moss has the gumption to fight back. Bardem’s portrayal is quietly effective, but one-note; he’s too much of an allegory to be believable. One can surmise from A Clockwork Orange how the evil inside of Alex has come to a boil, but Chigurh lacks a past or even a context. He’s menacing, but too far removed from the reality of evil to be rationally feared. The Coens are talented enough to ratchet up the suspense in ways that befit such a proficient thriller, but Chigurh is a monster better suited for horror films.

The movie is more accurately about fate than evil; fate being a significantly more powerful force in this world. Much of this fatalism is probably due to Western-gothic writer Cormac McCarthy, on whose novel this movie is based; but that’s not to say that the Coens haven’t had a long and solid history of determinism in their movies. Criminals, in particular, seem to lack control over their destinies—as in The Big Lebowski or Fargo, crimes are always being botched by imperfect miscreants. In Barton Fink, John Tuturro’s screenwriter is entrapped by the old Hollywood system. There, however, the hero’s flaws and missteps partly brought him to his downfall; here, Moss only makes one mistake—being bold enough to defy Chigurh. Unlike several minor characters, Llewellyn meets his demise off-screen; the motivation behind that device is obscure, but ultimately cruel. He never even stood a chance.

Fortunately, the Coens are smart enough filmmakers to allow room for caveats. There is some semblance of love and compassion and human feeling here, even if it’s piled under layers of toast-dry Texan drawl. And, though defeated, Bell ends the movie on a note of tentative faith. Maybe he’s not been destroyed after all.

Persepolis may be a landmark: the first ever feature-length animated autobiography. Based on graphic novels by Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi, this Franco-American production (which Satrapi co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud) is international in scope, often enjoyable and perhaps even “truthful,” but limited in a way that is so fundamental that I could not assent to the “magic” that other reviewers have found in watching it.

The story spans something like fifteen years, beginning in 1978 when Satrapi would have been eight or nine. The autobiographer is voiced by Gabrielle Lopes as a child and, when older, by Chiara Mastroianni—daughter of Marcello and Catherine Deneuve, who also plays her mother in the movie. She’s the precocious scion of a left-leaning, bourgeois family in Tehran at a time of turmoil. When the dictatorial shah is overthrown, a nascent Westernized democracy is anticipated; instead, Iran drifts into a situation reminiscent of those famous lyrics by The Who: “Meet the new boss/ Same as the old boss.”

Satrapi, an independent-minded teenager in a repressive, sexist culture, feels squashed and leaves the country for a Francophone lycée in Vienna. She falls in with a crowd of nihilist, anarchist hipsters; but they are only interested in Satrapi’s exoticism, and their intellectualism is depicted as baseless because they’ve never suffered.

Satrapi has and continues to. She ends up a vagrant with tuberculosis and decides to return home where religious oppression is back in swing and everyone acts as vapidly as the Europeans. She gets hitched to a man she loves (because it is the only acceptable way for them to publicly show affection to one another under the new regime), but only one scene later, her new hubby is watching Terminator on television and their relationship has fallen apart. Eventually, she returns to Europe—this time France—but, perhaps since this is a French film (and France Satrapi’s adopted home), that nation is spared criticism; her time there merely serves the movie as a teaser and a coda (both confined to the airport, no less).

Persepolis is, essentially, an outsider story; like so many artistic types—so many “misunderstood kids”—Satrapi can’t seem to fit in anywhere. But due to the nature of her eventful life, her tale balloons into an international put-down. Not only are her friends flimsy, but all the Viennese: her lovers, the nuns, and even the batty professor who takes her in. This film takes on the duplicitous philosophy that we as Westerners take for granted our enlightened mores and civil liberties, and yet are shallow and unable to relate to those who have suffered violent social and political upheaval. Our pat on the back turns into a jab at the eye.

Because of this, well-meaning Westerners may see the movie and feel a misguided sense of inferiority. One gets the feeling that Satrapi’s strife is what has made her unable to relate to those around her; she can’t befriend anybody because she’s on a higher plane. She tries to blend in, but her inability to do so is treated like a foregone conclusion. Despite her charming wit, she seems to still carry a Debbie Downer outlook like a ball and chain; her life’s been hard, yes, but of course it’ll be difficult for her to make genuine friends if she keeps using that as a wedge between her and everyone else.

I definitely had sympathy for Satrapi—for the political tumult she faced and the seeming constancy of her loneliness—but I also grew tired of her alienation. (Yes, I realize that this is based on a real life, but real life isn’t always cinematic.) Her teen angst is cleverly handled, but, at its roots, is still the same teen angst that has become risibly predictable in American movies. I doubt that Satrapi, at least consciously, is anywhere near as snobbish as I might make her seem, and there is good indication that some of her teenage disaffection is meant to be taken ironically. But the fact that not a single European (or Iranian upon her return) stuck out to her as worthy of being a full-developed character in her autobiography is suspect. Holden Caulfield’s alienation was somewhat ineffable, but he was still a teenager when he narrated his story. Satrapi’s teen angst was both cultural-political (which could have ugly, didactic implications) and ineffable (a literary and cinematic theme that has been running low on gas since The Graduate), but now she’s 39. Couldn’t she have fleshed some characters from her past out beyond caricature in retrospect?

Topicality, like liberal guilt and ineffable alienation, tends to drum up critical support, and in the eyes of film critics, it’s a good time to be Iranian. Americans’ current view of Iran is muddled at best—it appears to be backward in terms of sexism and anti-Semitism, and religious fundamentalism is never cool, but it also seems to be Westernizing and unworthy of the armed conflict of which the Bush Administration is so fond of insinuating. An open-minded person wants to identify with Iranian characters, wants to prove their well-founded inkling that “they’re human, too.” Unfortunately, Persepolis puts such a narrow lens on Satrapi and her social isolation that, outside of her and her immediate family, characterization is blotted out. We get the family and the relatives (whose politics align with those of many in the audience), but by singling them out in a whole big world of empties, one feels their identification with the interesting characters marred by a sense of detachment.

Persepolis does, however, have things in it worth recommending. The fact that it’s a cartoon is one asset; that downplays some of its astringency without severing connection at the primal level. The French seem to be the avant-garde in terms of animation these days, considering the stylistic freshness of this and The Triplets of Belleville, though that movie is now (gasp!) five years old. The black-and-white style here has both the boldness of Soviet Constructivist propaganda and the elegant succinctness of daily comic strips. Further, the animation has an interesting effect which may or may not have been intentional: it seems to blur the ethnicity of the characters.

The cartooniness also lends a lot to the film’s often-wonderful sense of humor. The scenes with Satrapi’s uninhibited grandmother (Danielle Darrieux) always have some charm, and Satrapi has a lot of self-effacing moments that really take advantage of the format—her bout with puberty is one and the before-and-after depiction of one of her boyfriends is another. It’s hard to believe that someone with the wit and humility that she displays throughout the film has such trouble fitting in.