Movie Monster

People speak of The Artist as if its being a black-and-white silent film were a liability. As if the Weinsteins were taking a risk tantamount to installing hand cranks in the whole bevy of new Beamers. But that assumes that The Artist is an audacious work of art, and not the screen equivalent of the gimmick books by the register at Urban Outfitters. It’s a sweet-natured throwback—an impressively faithful simulacrum—and fun till the plot gets a little tedious and the novelty wears off. Grandma may approve of it more than she does of your apartment’s toilet-side edition of Everybody Poops; but both are processed quickly, and are just as quickly flushed away.

The lineage is so obvious and well-established—the director, Michel Hazanavicius, has cribbed from A Star is Born and Singin’ in the Rain—that plot explication is nearly irrelevant. But here goes. It’s 1927, and movie star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) basks his adoring public in a smile broad enough to sprain his jawbone. Enter Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) who—thanks in part to George’s tutelage—becomes the new It Girl, just in time for sound to come into play and dethrone the king of silents. Her meteoric success is in direct variation with his career’s demise; but she pines for him, and he’s got a hankering for her, so George’s John Gilbert grows up and becomes the Fred Astaire to Peppy’s Ginger Rogers. In sum, the plot’s as thin as George’s mustache—and light as a communion wafer: Although it stretches only as far as the early ’30s, the storyline is pure Post-Code morality. Peppy would be a contemporary of Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West—but she’s the kind of gal who makes whistles look filthy. Perhaps she’s kinkier on screen—we aren’t shown the source of her star appeal; her career isn’t elaborated on beyond the titles of her vehicles. But Peppy the civilian is selfless, sexless, and one- dimensional enough that a more opprobrious critic might find the film’s sexual politics reactionary. Even this less opprobrious critic thinks it odd that we become as easily inured to the movie’s antique attitudes as we do to its antique format, itself a surprisingly easy sell. Maybe, because of the medium, we tolerate the message?

Hazanavicius doesn’t just replicate the texture of silent films with camera angles and lenses, or from the boyish spring in Bejo’s Charleston step, or the craggy facial canyons of the ever-abiding stock-character chauffeur (James Cromwell); he recreates a context in which we accept the conventions—some may say inanities—of an earlier era of storytelling, with a minimum of irony. This produces some wonderful moments, such as when Peppy’s hand caresses her thigh from the sleeve of George’s unoccupied jacket, or George’s nightmare—synched to glaringly artificial sound effects. But The Artist is imitative rather than innovative; its dramaturgy and camerawork aren’t interesting beyond the fact that they are convincingly old-fashioned. It doesn’t have the insatiable ambition of the German Expressionists, or the intricate stunts of Keaton and Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, or the show-stopping song-and-dance numbers of Singin’ in the Rain. And when he threatens to stray beyond the pale of nostalgic novelty, in an allusion to Vertigo—30 years, and about as many genres, off—Hazanavicius cops out completely. The Artist is winsome but negligible. But if the blue-haired ladies who were applauding in the audience keep clapping as loudly as they did for The King’s Speech, giving the Oscar to this silent may be a sound choice.

It’s easy to get a Jim Henson contact high from watching The Muppets—even if, as Dana Stevens eloquently puts it, it’s just as easy to “kvetch and cavil about the details” like Statler and Waldorf, the ever-senescent season-ticket holders counted on to lob verbal tomatoes from the balcony. We begin the journey in Smalltown, U.S.A., a frog’s leap away from the Simpsons’ Springfield on the map. (This is the first mistake: It’s a parody of a kind of corn that grew well before Kermit emerged from his swamp, a little too generic for the gang that took Manhattan or followed the Rainbow Connection to Hollywood.) This place has cheer enough to kill a caroler—even the locals collapse in exhaustion after their introductory musical act—but Walter (Peter Linz), a fleece homunculus among flesh-and-blood just folk, never quite fit in, despite the support of his significantly fleshier “brother” Gary (Jason Segel). Pensive Walter thought he was alone in the world until he saw The Muppet Show. So when Gary takes his supremely patient lady friend—this is their 10th anniversary, and Gary never produces a ring, perhaps as a warm up for Segel’s future projects—Mary (Amy Adams) to L.A., Walter tags along, much to Mary’s politely masked chagrin. When they tour the defunct and dilapidated Muppet Studios, Walter overhears a clandestine meeting held by oil baron Tex Richman (Chris Cooper), who says he’s buying the property to create a Muppet museum, but actually intends to scrap it and drill for oil beneath. (Good luck working with Los Angeles city planning on that one.) Our heroes bring this to the attention of Kermit—living like Norma Desmond, implicitly because he’s still secretly smitten with Miss Piggy, now plus-size editor at the Paris office of Vogue. They decide to buy back their land the only way they know how: Reunion Special! And so the backstage-musical gears begin to grind.

Pace the Occupy Sesame Street camp, I think the movie’s flaws have less to do with depriving children of their oil-soaked brainwash than depriving adults of some of their favorite celebrity sock-puppets. (For the record, the principals never state their position on fossil-fuel consumption; Kermit knows how hard it is to be green. And don’t the filmmakers get credit for making Gonzo a job-creator: a toilet tycoon? If you’re blue, it’s easy to make the green.) Gonzo, Fozzie, Rowlf, and the others get relatively short shrift—even if it’s justified, more or less, by a very Muppety montage: a little bout of self-awareness in which the characters order the film editor around. Which gets to my overarching point that, even if Segel and Nicholas Stoller’s screenwritten portrait of their childhood idols is crooked, it’s crooked at the right, sweet-but-silly angle. So there’s little use in getting too worked up about how some of the musical numbers—the director, James Bobin, has previously plied his trade on Flight of the Concords—seem a pinch half-assed, with fine songs like Adams’s “Party of One” (when she’s doing a little Kristen Wiigling at Mel’s Diner) and Cooper’s gangsta rap ending a bit too early. Or how Segel, a rubber monument to schlubbiness, has a smile that looks forced, even if it isn’t, and like it’s always struggling to conceal despair. I’ll even forgive the ad hoc framing story, about blandly uncompelling Walter, because its purpose—introducing the younger generation to the troupe their parents have brought them to see—is evident, if less essential than feared.

It’s my impression that these weaknesses indicate that The Muppets was explicitly not conceived in terms of focus-grouped Disney shapeliness, and that the sentimentality—nostalgia is sentimentality—is at least of the genuine sort. Just as the sentimentality embedded in the question that both the movie and the media have asked—are the Muppets still relevant?—is also genuine. It answers itself and begs for a “yes.” I don’t remember half as much fuss over the Smurfs being cinematized last summer, or the Chipmunks and their ear-piercing squeakquels. Relevance is not a germane factor in attaining precious P&A. But the Muppets hold a special place in the hearts of people in the same age bracket as those who wrote this movie and its attendant barrage of think-pieces, and who enlisted in its army of cameos. (Except for a dim walk-on by Selena Gomez, the guest stars are 30 and up.) Although he donned their duds, Henson wasn’t a hippie; but he was very invested in the generation gap that grew in the 1960s. The Muppets came to represent a compromise between the variety-show values of yore and a counterculture that strove to break down formal and artistic conventions as part of its purgative program. The Muppet Show didn’t just pioneer this formula, it fed it to the young—to children who went on to make The Simpsons and the Pixar movies and Modern Family. Its impudence can be blamed for making legions of kids think they’re cleverer than they are, but it was a gateway drug to a type of comedy that’s now pervasive: virtually the only style that brings the critical class and the hoi polloi (if the two can still be distinguished) together. The experiment was a success. And I can objectively prove that the filmmakers’ intentions were sincere because, in the segment in which Gonzo’s poultry-fetish girls sing a cover of Cee Lo Green, they resist the refrain “Cluck you.”

One of the hallmarks of a depressed mind is what Travis Bickle called “morbid self-attention.” Perhaps that explains why the depressed mind behind Melancholia—the film that Lars von Trier was supposedly trying to promote during his foot-in-mouth outbreak at Cannes this year—is so acute at describing the condition, as well as the delusions that always creep in its wake, and yet pedestrian in his handling of so much else. The flesh on her face brittle, as if, on top of those exemplary cheekbones, dishwater was coursing through paper veins, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) chokes on tears, as well as on meatloaf, which, in her state, tastes like ashes; she cannot even let her anxieties steep in a hot bath without her sister’s assistance. Earlier, on her wedding night, she can—but only while the guests are waiting for her to cut the cake. Though bluntly written, and slightly overplayed by Kiefer Sutherland, as John, Justine’s pretench swain of a brother-in-law, there’s a prickly, honest scene in which John has his dolorous in-law, whose lavish reception he funded, promise to be happy, for the sake of her sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). This is a promise no one can keep, really—but especially not Justine. To be melancholy is to be emotionally paralyzed; the shortcomings of the will and the problems of the world mesh together like the junkers in a demolition derby, and you feel as if you’re behind each wheel. When someone as beautiful as Dunst is overtaken by despair, it underlines the ineffability of the soul; the halo of glamour, mislaid though it might be, is backlit by mystery. The actress has down pat the way the afflicted cast their glances in multiple directions at once. All too often, the real world is filtered from that field of vision, as if it were hidden behind a pane of pain.

Dunst’s performance aside, the movie itself seems a little sealed off. In Dancer in the Dark (2000), Trier juxtaposed Björk’s bleak existence with the escapism of Hollywood musicals; here, Justine’s Pre-Raphaelite princess fantasies hardly contrast with the jet-set profligacy of her “real” world. Even though the limousines have Pennsylvania plates, John’s ancestral castle, where Justine’s wedding reception is held—judging from the the topiary, Marienbad has been retrofitted as a driving range, though its one-percenter clientele is still in zomboid circulation—was shot in Sweden. (In Vladimir Nabokov’s slim, wonderful novel Pnin, a pompous nonconformist—read: Vladimir Nabokov—calls melancholia a “bourgeois” affliction. Here, it seems, depression comes with a much heftier price tag.) The delocalized setting, the faceless guests in their Armanis and ice, the Bruegel and the Wagner, the casting of Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt as the bride’s—thank God!—separated parents, are all so foundational to the European art house that Trier’s attempts at contemporary realism, viz Rachel Getting Married, resonate unevenly. All the more so because they’re thinly conceived. There’s no way to accept Justine as a whiz at advertising; or Stellan Skarsgård, as her boss, bullying her into inspiration in the midst of her holy matrimony; or her blank-slate groom (Alexander Skarsgård), whom she immediately cheats on with a random pischer—she’s too fickle to consummate her vows. And for all the cheddar he cheesed on these nuptials, couldn’t John have hired a better band? In air this refined, how could “La Bamba” on a keyboard even exist?

I should probably mention that Melancholia is not only the title, but also the name that some cutup at NASA has given to a planet on an improbable course to collide with Earth during the film’s second half. (This sapphire bulb has, if nothing else, a more metal name than Pandora.) We get a glimpse of it early on, in a prelude—or, maybe, premonition—that precedes Part I, the wedding sequence, which is named after Justine—whose own name is somewhat tackily lifted from de Sade. The hypnotic lentor of this preview is astounding—dead fowl fall from the heavens and, in the heavens, two C.G. globes perform an interstellar waltz, neither of which certain if the other is leading. (It’s almost too astounding, because its intensity goes unequaled until the end.) We can tell this is the tempo that Justine perceives life to be playing at because she’s hitched to a smog of gray yarn, which she later describes as her figurative ball-and-chain. And, since we see serpents of electricity flutter from her fingertips, we know she’s got the power. Not the power to zap enemies, like the emperor in Return of the Jedi, but to face the impending apocalypse. John, swaddled in silk suits and faith in reason, denies it; the scientists say, or so he says, it ain’t gonna happen. But Justine intuits the end, accepts it, and claims “The Earth is evil … We don’t need to grieve for it.” Claire, for whom Part II is named, is as damaged as her sibling, but in a different way; she wants to ring in the end-times as one would the new year, with a glass of wine on the balcony. Maybe a round of Cranium. Her indulgence in the worldly and material seems to be, in Trier’s view, a lethal form of repression. Fatalism is pragmatism: Trier’s trying to convert us. As Claire whimpers, Justine, still as the Buddha, embraces the blaze.

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Maybe the consensus is correct: Maybe The Rum Diary should’ve been called The Rum Diarrhea. Without tipping the scale from mildly clever to insouciantly crass, the film’s narrative sense is slushy—as if all involved were taking their orders from Captain Morgan, rather than screenwriter-director Bruce Robinson—and, yes, I dare say, it gets runny. But some hangovers are worth the tomfoolery that produced them, if only by a miniscule margin, and Johnny Depp hits the throwaways that Robinson slugs at him early on outta the park, their conjoined beer muscles as revved up as the Austin-Healey that Depp’s wino newspaperman nearly drives off a cliff. The Rum Diary is both an adaptation of a San Juan-set opuscule that publishers were allergic to in 1959, and an homage to its author: Hunter S. Thompson. But the novel is by a (not untalented) 22-year-old affecting the disillusion of the middle-aged Graham Greene; its slack action culminates in an apocalyptic feeding frenzy—maybe the butterfly flap that broke the dam for the famous “wave speech” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but probably not.

Robinson—who hasn’t directed a feature since 1992, but indicated comic mastery of Thompson-friendly boho indigence in Withnail and I (1987)—has made the fanboy mistake of replacing his hero’s forms of amateurishness with his own, telescoping both. With the book’s most active character excised, and its antagonists marginalized, there isn’t a personality on screen that can’t be classified as schizophrenic. But the director had in him at least one indelible image—a Looney Tune gendarme, framed at a Gilliamesque angle or like a peasant in Potemkin, flames working their way up his mustache—and he’s got Giovanni Ribisi playing a welcome Withnail figure, by way of Charlie Day. (Michael Rispoli, more-or-less the skeezy sensei for Depp’s Thompson-to-be, would be a natch to play Perkus Tooth in an adaptation of Chronic City; but his voice is dangerously close in timber to Benicio del Toro’s.) What would the O.G. [Original Gonzo] Dr. Thompson have thought had he seen himself at the center of a Shakespeare in Love? He’d fear and loathe the messianic truther that Depp, distant and introverted when barbs are in short supply, devolves into. But the one-liners might’ve had him grinning under the brim of his fishing hat.

The confessional documentary is as morally gray as a tabloid and as potentially colorless as a broadsheet. If a subject is made to play the fool, whose fault is it? Are they marionettes or the scene-stealing stars of their own one-man shows? Embedded in those answers is our permission to exercise an alienable right that we in the audience want to, but aren’t sure whether to, indulge in: the right to laugh. Is the subject self-aware or has he or she been psychically denuded by the camera—or, in Errol Morris’s case, the Interrotron—and, by extension, the person sitting behind it? Or is it maybe a smidgen of both? Watching Morris’s Tabloid, I laughed like a hyena at the sacrifice of a boar; Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming and a natural camera presence, seems to have been eaten alive by Miss Piggy, and she spouts the same line about a pasty pudge-ball Mormon (Kirk Anderson) that the Muppet reserves for her beloved, befuddled Kermie. Morris is too smart and experienced a filmmaker to fall into the traps I’ve set for him—he seems almost at the mercy of his unreliable narrator, and he foments the resultant discord as only an artist can; but then McKinney is not as hard a target as a seasoned old pol like Robert McNamara. Or is she? Both the former beauty queen and the secretary of state who transacted the Vietnam War know how to schmooze the cam and cool a hot mic. But I’m pretty sure McNamara wasn’t off his rocker.

The title refers to the venue in which McKinney became a bonafide celebrity. A native of North Carolina who commanded the pageant circuit from an early age, she somehow finds herself, by the mid-1970s, in Utah—and, so she claims, ignorant of Mormonism and its customs. In what might have been a wet dream for legions of other eligible bachelors, she aims her obsessiveness at Anderson, a virginal evangelist who, by her account, punked out on her—leaving Salt Lake City for London to fulfill the same obligation that the young Mitt Romney did when he sought to make Mormon converts in France. (Anderson declined to participate in the making of this movie.) McKinney soon comes into money, by means which are not altogether verifiable and which I will leave to the film to disclose, and uses it to kidnap him; tie him to a bedpost at a cottage in pastoral Devon; and, depending on who you ask, rape him. Repeatedly. When Anderson, who has been freed from his cage like a canary into the dubious solace of smog, testifies against her—she thinks due to doctrinaire bullying from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—McKinney ends up behind bars. But also on the front page. An innocent abroad, with a gift for gab that overlaps with the poetry of romantic incoherence, McKinney’s antics make her the golden girl of the piss-yellow press—which, as is its wont, micturates on her image as soon as it becomes expedient to.

Like a police dog’s nose, one’s mind automatically slides to the ignominious News of the World scandal from last summer; and, by interviewing two representatives from rival papers that profiled the “Mormon sex-in-chains case” back in the ’70s, Tabloid gives the American viewer a little insight into these thankfully alien, and hopefully moribund, institutions. But I couldn’t bring myself to hate those two crusty old gents, whose intentions probably differ—but overlap—with Morris’s. And though that’s not the most enviable piece of real estate within the Venn diagram, it’s partly exonerated by another recent affair that this movie reminded me of: the Pyrrhic “winning” of Charlie Sheen. He carved his sick self up and stuffed it down our throats. For the paparazzi, it was a veritable free lunch—for weeks—so, as contemptible as their exploitation of a mentally ill man was, he was literally asking them for it, and at what seemed to be a mostly conscious level. He profited from his own breakdown, so all parties were parasites: perfect symbiosis. McKinney’s strange tics may be the product of an imbalanced mind, but she seems to have used her eccentricities to seduce the tabloid reporters, just as she seems to be performing for Morris. Next to Sheen, her self-exploitation seems sweet, even quaint. To some degree, she still sees herself as an innocent, which probably can’t be said for the minus one of Two and a Half Men, who seems to relish in his raunchy guilt.

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