Movie Monster

[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.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is the kind of film that hovers over you like a cloud; it has the immensity of an epic, the density of a biblical exegesis and the mood of a surreal horror picture. Its two and a half hours go by smoothly and yet the movie has something of an irregular heartbeat; it might be called a high-strung impressionist’s dream of American Gothic.

The thirty-year saga begins in 1898, at which time Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an amateur oilman operating a small derrick in a forbidding Southwestern desert, although, from the look of it, the scene may as well have been placed among the Iraqi ruins where Father Merrin unleashed the demon in The Exorcist. When, after much toil and the loss of at least one life, black gold finally manifests itself in the manmade well, it’s as though it’s coming to life—it sputters and seethes as if in a witch’s cauldron—and a grandiose climax on the soundtrack registers its birth as an evil portent. (The music here echoes that which played when Jack Torrance entered the haunted hotel bar in The Shining.)

Within a few years, Plainview becomes a shrewdly professional oil prospector. He moves into communities and, flashing his leathery smile, boasting of his “frank” manner and status as an old-fashioned family man (he has adopted a dead miner’s son, though claims that the boy, H.W., is his), swindles the townsfolk out of their land.

After receiving a tip from Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), he slithers his way into Little Boston, California, and sets up a rig there. Even when the derrick goes ablaze—with an explosion that costs H.W. (Dillon Freasier) his hearing—Plainview is perfectly, maniacally happy; the earth is pregnant with a seemingly unlimited supply of oil, the lifeblood of the burgeoning American economy, as well as Plainview’s planned isolation from the rest of the human race. Put as simply as possible, the plot of There Will Be Blood is a stringing together of the oilman’s exploits at toppling everyone and everything around him in order to divorce himself from mankind.

Plainview has just what his name implies—a “competition” in him and a simple distaste for people—but the way the camera lingers on him suggests a deeper, stickier quality to his personality. I’m still trying to determine how much I like Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance; he has the uncanny ability to contort his jaw and control every furrow in his brow. It’s wildly theatrical and magnetic—as in Gangs of New York, where he came off as rather silly—and once again he’s topped it off with an absurd accent, something like a Tammany Hall caricature mixed with Sean Connery. Anderson doesn’t quite get it, either, but he loves to let Day-Lewis’ facial fluctuations fill the frame. Maybe it works because it’s such a grandiose, classical performance (mustachioed, he looks like a silent movie villain or Timothy Dalton from Hot Fuzz) and yet he touches on something behind the misanthropy and greed—as Plainview’s interspersed malice and tenderness in raising H.W. suggests. Because it’s so blatant, it’s a discomforting performance—it has the effect of when a friend says something offensive and you think initially that it’s a joke, but come to realize that he really means it. His wittiness and scariness are eerily inseparable.

Dano’s performance and role are equally oblique. His plaintive face looks even more like clay here than in Little Miss Sunshine and this nebulousness is both his menace and vulnerability. In Sunshine, Dano’s role as a psilosopher amounted to little more than stylized teen angst. When, here, as an evangelical preacher, he casts out a demon from a parishioner, Dano builds up a fury that’s eerily adolescent but nonetheless hypnotic to watch, reminiscent of both Gene Wilder and the somnambulist in Dr. Caligari. The character is either a phony or has the wrath of God on his side, and that spooks—more than spooks, infuriates—smug, satanic Plainview. Dano and Day-Lewis are most enjoyable together—their smarminess, deviousness and sheer energy complement one another (we are tickled by our inability to determine which character poses a greater threat to the other)—and when their dialogue overlaps, as it does in one scene, one can see Anderson tipping his hat to the late Robert Altman, to whom this film was dedicated.

The flaw with Dano’s part is that it’s actually—maybe—two. After Paul departs following his initial scene, Dano is thereafter known as Eli, Paul’s twin brother and the faith healer. Paul is never seen thereafter and only mentioned again much later. Unfortunately, despite the insistence of Dano and Anderson in interviews that the former plays two parts, the twin conceit is made entirely unclear in the movie; it has baffled critics and audiences so much that it’s found its way into being a subheading on the movie’s Wikipedia page. Before knowing of the controversy, I chalked off the duality as schizophrenia—and the friends I saw the movie with corroborated that theory. That, in my opinion, would have enriched the film more and helped explain some of Plainview’s incongruities, in particular an inexplicable scene where he wails on Eli Sunday.

This mistake may be glaring, but seems of little consequence when compared to the immensity of the picture and all that works because of—or despite—the film’s size. Technically, Anderson has matured in the decade since Boogie Nights when his camerawork was good, but often extraneously braggart. The tracking shots smoothly wander about, but pick up some arresting images, such as the inflamed geyser of oil and the tarred smile on Day-Lewis’ serpentine face, which radiates the orange glow as he watches the derrick burn.

The music, composed by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, is likewise brilliant and baroque and sinister; it’s downright phantasmagorical. It holds the dark-toned images together and keeps one’s mind in a liminal flux; it pulls the movie outside of both the early 1900s setting and the present, and prevents the audience from interpreting Anderson’s imagery at face value. In some movies, this can be a distraction, but here it keeps one on edge—captivated, but skeptical. Anderson invites you to do your own interpretation, wants your mind to wander into all sorts of dark corners.

There is so much going on here and it’s a remarkable feat on Anderson’s part that it resonates so well. There Will Be Blood was inspired by an eighty-year-old novel by Upton Sinclair, the early twentieth century socialist activist and author. Although Anderson has undoubtedly taken many liberties with the material (the implications of Plainview’s trade are quite topical), Sinclair’s influence is nonetheless felt. The names—Paul, Eli and Abel, their/his father—all carry meanings from the Bible. When Plainview discovers oil in the beginning, he smudges it on baby H.W.’s forehead like the ashes dusted on the foreheads of churchgoers in preparation for Eastertide. In the movie, the Church, as represented by Sunday (another, if somewhat more obviously, connotative name), and the avarice of capitalism, as represented by Plainview, are both shifty, abstruse creatures duking it out in front of the poor Little Boston townsfolk—at least in my humble estimation.

But that reading by no means makes the movie closed for interpretation; it’s wide, open, expansive and it encourages the viewer to take it upon him or herself to tool with its director’s ideas. Anderson has several firm conceptions of what he thinks the movie means, but he insists on engendering conversation, and that’s what makes a sophisticated artist. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—which, out of the films I’ve seen, was the other giant of 2007—was similarly flexible. While that movie was sometimes a tad too obvious, this one was sometimes a tad too obscure. No matter; they’re both wonderfully solid and yet graciously democratic works. If dingbat Juno beats There Will Be Blood out for Best Picture, well, there will be blood.

The highly-acclaimed Juno is up for several awards, among them Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actress and Writing—the very same categories it occupies as a nominee in the Independent Spirit Awards. The only honor it deserves is one that doesn’t exist: Phoniest Movie of 2007. The script, by Diablo Cody, is almost as horrendous as its writer’s pen name: none of its characters are remotely believable; instead, they’re just quirkiness incarnate. It’s an unholy marriage of the worst of indie-film snarkiness, “Family Guy”-paced reference slinging, and treacle.

Juno (art by Erin Nuzzo)

The first third of the movie seems to be a solipsism centered on sixteen-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page, whose character’s very name is quirky nonsense). The snarky, sharp-tongued teen gets knocked up by Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and decides to give her baby up to an older couple, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner). When she meets the surrogate parents, she’s a fount of bizarre, insensitive comments, mostly aimed at Garner’s consummate yuppie, but they might as well have been directed at Margaret Dumont from an old Marx Brothers movie (although the lines would have been far wittier in that); miraculously, Vanessa doesn’t hear or react to a word of Juno’s “zany” antics.

Even worse, Bateman plays an erstwhile grunge rocker, which gives Juno an opportunity to list all of the totally cool music she listens to: a formidable list that includes Patti Smith and The Stooges. The music that’s actually in the movie is neo-folky and somnolent. It reminds me of something Roger Ebert mentioned in his thirtieth anniversary review of The Graduate: the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack in that film (lauded at the time for being trendy and youthful) now seems “safe”—better suited, therefore, for lackadaisical Benjamin than vampy femme infidel Mrs. Robinson. Juno’s tame score, credited to Mateo Messina, seems more reflective of the eponymous teenager than the musical tastes that Cody feeds her. When Juno exuberantly rolls off her favorite bands, it’s nothing but the filmmakers dropping names in order to pick up some free hipster credibility; the whole movie is artificially cool, and thus, truly, deeply square.

Ironically, the square, “poignant” moments were probably those I liked best, but even the most authentic scene was screwed up by the director, Jason Reitman, whose previous feature, Thank You for Smoking, was a paean to inauthenticity. Vanessa is touching Juno’s baby-swollen gut and talking to her future child, but the scene is set in the middle of a shopping mall. You’d think someone would think it strange to see a thirty-five-year-old woman groping a pregnant sixteen-year-old’s stomach.

And Juno, the “offbeat” teenager who supposedly loves hard music, is as saintly square as the teens on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel; her wardrobe and manner present her as a modern high school punk, but, in temperament, she’s really just an old-fashioned, harmless puck. The angel’s only “sin” is having a single sexual encounter with a boy she loves—a big-hearted dork. (Cera, as the shy, vulnerable Bleeker, is one of the strong points of the movie. His lines aren’t any better written than Page’s, but his sweet, effeminized delivery of them makes the dialogue—if not more believable—more affecting.) Otherwise, she’s in a perfectly loving relationship with a supportive father and step-mother. When she announces her pregnancy to them, they jokingly wish her problem was due to alcohol or drugs, but such things don’t seem to physically exist in this universe. Movies with subject matter like this one’s are often applauded for being more “realistic” or “truthful” than your average Can’t Hardly Wait or Drive Me Crazy, but, despite the pregnancy, I have difficulty remembering the last time I’ve seen kids (or adults) as well-adjusted as these. This might as well be a “very special episode” of “Father Knows Best.”

Juno is sometimes funny—in a Vaudevillian, eye-roller type of way—but it hardly deserves the laudatory talk it has garnered. Reelview.net’s James Berardinelli calls it “the kind of the film where a viewer almost needs to look for a reason to dislike it for it not to work.” Well, I didn’t have to look too far to realize how sloppily plotted this was: key moments of the stories come quickly, illogically and without build-up. For instance, there’s no mention of how Juno is treated as that-girl-who-got-pregnant at her high school (other than a few quick shots of students giving her stomach dirty looks) until it’s suddenly a big deal. Also, Mark, the likable ex-rocker, turns pedophile douchebag awfully quick. Bateman, perhaps wrongly, portrays him through most of the film as a sympathetic never-was whose loneliness draws him to pregnant—but uncorrupted—Juno. But that subplot is thrown an absurd curveball; he becomes so low that there’s no indication that he even plans to help out with raising the baby after divorcing Vanessa at the end.

And while my beef with Juno’s (and the rest of the cast’s) so-called wisecracks may be personal preference, Ellen Page’s performance is hardly internalized; she’s fine with timing, but all the movie does is have her blab on and on—not as a self-defense mechanism, but as an effect of bad, showy writing. (In the actress’s defense, Juno’s dilemma is treated as nothing more important than the usual lovelorn teen-movie girl problems—she wonders if it’s really possible for two people to be happy together forever.) Juno acts more sophisticated than she is, but not in the way real girls her age do; she delivers self-conscious lines that make it sound like she’s a wizened sixty-year-old living it up in a sixteen-year-old’s body. Juno’s skittish friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) seemed more like a real girl of that age and was often funnier to me than the title character.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the reviewers were right and this went on to be the next Little Miss Sunshine, which, despite its sitcom-family foibles, had some genuine characters in original situations—and saved its contrivances for the end. Knocked Up, which, like Juno, was categorized as “realistic” and “hip,” may have actually deserved those labels; it was easy-going and playful and didn’t have to mention the nineteen-seventies punk scene for audience approval.

I don’t dislike Juno because it’s unhip; I dislike that it appeals to viewers’ egos (to that inner plea for hipness inside everybody’s head) using cheap methods like name-dropping and fashionable trappings that are all surface and give little indication of genuine experience, intelligence or sensitivity. There’s a pleasant story here, but it’s buried underneath cancers of “I’m cool!” and “Look at me!” Others seem to react to the nervous barrage of jokes and saccharine moments which come so constantly that they mask how very premeditated or inaccurate they sound. Unfortunately, to me, it’s all spiel and no substance. Juno pretends to be cooler and funnier than it really is; it’s more like a real teenager than the title character it concocts.