Wendy and Lucy

Dir. Kelly Reichardt
2008
9.0


Director Kelly Reichardt's 2008 film Wendy and Lucy has been described as a “politically urgent road movie.” Though it may seem a trifle particular, Wendy and Lucy hardly gives the sense of any urgency, be it political or otherwise. Rather the film moves slowly and quietly, unfolding in a way that is both precious and intensely difficult. There is also the problem of the genre “road film” which in this case is entirely nominal. Meeting Wendy just as her car breaks down in a quiet Oregon town, the viewer finds the protagonist covering very little in the way of pavement. However, metaphysically the film is a constant state of determined wandering. The question is then: what defines a road film? Is it the pretense under which so many characters and people alike set out on: the hope of uncovering some occult or sublime truth about themselves or humanity. Or is it instead some unconscious and thus inescapable urge to escape? It would seem to be the difference between a want and a need. Something created or driven by an outside force and the internal struggle for spiritual survival that presses all other needs to the side. Wendy and Lucy, as a film, travels the latter route and arrives painfully at the spiritual awakening that so many seek to achieve while watching America roar past them.

Based on the short story “Train Choir” by Jon Raymond, Wendy and Lucy instantly gives the impression of a short but masterfully written novel where every word is carefully selected in order to achieve maximum affect (think Hemingway). The film is also highly reminiscent of the late master director Ingmar Bergman. Here the stark countryside of Sweden has been replaced by an almost picturesque (if implacable) small American town. Wendy (Michelle Williams) chaffs with the town's locals who seem to have achieved some sort of sad, monotonous stability with only the smallest hints of the "political urgency" mentioned earlier. Placing the film in a contemporary context the viewer knows the times are troubled. While the story may take place on the fringe of economic stability, the film does not hit you over the head with sentiment or guilt. Rather it is Wendy whose straits are more dire and urgent than anyone she meets in town.

She has arrived in town only to find that her car won't start and, after an uncomfortable incident with a rhetoric charged youth at a grocery store, her dog, Lucy, has gone missing. Lucy in turn becomes the symbol of Wendy's own lostness. Wendy's search for Lucy quite literally becomes a search for herself. So charged by her unconscious need to be reconnected with Lucy, Wendy forgoes all other hardship. Even a potentially dangerous encounter with a deranged homeless man only strengthens Wendy's resolve to find Lucy. When she does, seeing her sitting happily in the yard of a foster family's home, the tight constraint and determination that had held her together up until this point snaps. She weeps at seeing Lucy so happy without her and realizes that if she is to truly succeed in her journey toward becoming a happier more fulfilled person (for which her destination of Alaska is only a tangible, if idealized, representative) she has to let go. The film proposes that in order to move forward one must blow away the last sediments of the past. Her catharsis is magnificently placed alongside a scene of her boarding a train and an extended shot of the placid coniferous trees of North West America blending beautifully together, framed by the setting orange sun.

Supported by a unique ensemble cast of mostly unrecognizable or non-actors (with the notable exception of Will Patton) Michelle Williams carries the film's emotional weight as if it was truly her own. Her performance is engaging and pitch perfect, reminiscent of the most memorable of classic performances. Enough can not be said about her acting accomplishment in this film and though the framework is lo-fi indie the emotional depth she communicates with such a sparse script is beyond measure. The film itself succeeds where many “character films” do not due to its utterly engaging vision of a classically structured America disintegrating before our very eyes. The words of the Walgreen's security guard ring loud in our ears “There used to be a mill here. Now I don't know what people do.”

The film could have easily succumb to myth making, what with the extensive use of train whistles and the socially marginalized that populate their barren tracks and woods, if it were not so humanizing in its vision. The film does not seek to propagate the mysterious charm of isolation and travel, the mixture by which some assume a spiritual awakening will manifest. Rather it seeks to show the depravity of such ideas; the sheer unmistakable absurdity of wanting such circumstance. If Wendy's rejection of Lucy is any indication then we may conclude that enlightenment is not in looking but in finding. Maturity and self-understanding are the results of facing what we discover, be it good or bad. Understanding and divulging this sublime understanding, Wendy and Lucy is as socially committed as it is effortlessly poetic.

Up

Dir. Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
2009
8.9


There is really no need to introduce Pixar Animation Studios. No need to explain how, over the past 15 years, Pixar has released the most timeless and transcendental animated features since the golden age of Walt Disney. Furthermore, it is pointless to note that Pixar is a studio comprised of adults making sophisticated and thoughtful films, consistently marketed toward children, that obliterate age demographics. Instead let's focus on the micro evolution of Pixar's thematic content and vision. Toy Story was primarily a singular childhood fantasy which dealt with the less than instinctive practice of social acceptance. Finding Nemo used a dual narrative in order to find common ground between the desires of children and the protective qualities of overbearing parents. Ratatouille etched a beautiful portrait of the relationship between independence and interdependence in romance and society. WALL-E delivered a universal (and overtly political) message against ennui and the distractions of the digital age. With Up, Pixar's 10th feature, the studio has delivered its foremost adult film. With themes of aging, loyalty and the burden of memory, Up is Pixar's most finely cultivated and quietly introspective film yet.

Known more for humanizing marginalized animals and objects (fish, rats, toys, robots, etc.), Up is only Pixar's second film to exclusively follow human characters. Moving beyond the familial adventure of The Incredibles, Up is both familiar and unfamiliar to the studio's filmography. To begin, its principle character is a senior citizen. At first this choice may seem unorthodox but Pixar brings in familiar elements to marry the film with the rest of its canon. First, the tried and true “unlikely ensemble”: the old man (Carl), a pudgy and useless boyscout (Russell), a 13 foot tall exotic female bird named Kevin, and a “talking” dog called Dug. Second, the growth of the principle character who remains obstinately insular until an emotional breaking point whereupon he commits himself wholeheartedly to righteous morality and the happiness of his companions. Pixar's films could be considered structurally formulaic in this sense, but each navigates its scenario in a way that is so thrilling and highly involved that the complaint becomes virtually invalid.

In each of Pixar's films there is some sort of initial disturbance ranging from the innocuous arrival of a new toy to the capture of a fish's sole offspring. These are the moments, which are usually affixed with modest tension, which catapult the narrative into motion. Up doesn't necessarily break this pattern but the film does structurally postpones its ascent into linear narrative. Beginning with Carl's childhood and the meeting of his eventual wife Ellie, the film enters a harrowing and emotionally wrenching montage that encapsulates the passing of time and the strife of two lovers. It is unveiled that Carl and Ellie's dream is to travel to South America and discover the enchanted lands of Paradise Falls, which first captured their mutual imagination when they were children. However, as so often happens in the real world, events interject. As the montage progresses there is shot after shot of a glass coin jar, which contains their funds for the trip, smashed in order to recover from loss (injury, destruction, etc.). The montage is particularly moving in its dealing with two mature themes which are broached silently and sadly: an incapacity to have children (or perhaps, worse still, a miscarriage) and Ellie's death. Cinematically masterful this montage serves a very special function for the rest of the film: it injects meaning into personal objects causing them to later become representative of Carl's memory.

Carl, after battering a civil servant and being ordered to abandon the house he has lived in for most of his life, inflates thousands of balloons and soars into the sky toward South America. The rest of the story is an exercise in classic Pixar adventure, although at times the film works a little too hard to overcome its own sentimental inertia. Carl remains dedicated to the house which has become the embodiment of his dead wife. Even with the buoyancy of adventure (which the balloons represent) the house (Carl's memory) still remains a burden to him until circumstances arise that force him to choose between this precious relic of his past or a new life of meaning. Choosing the latter, there is a beautiful and iconic shot of the house, colored balloons still tethered to it, sinking away into the clouds: a weighty and powerful memory finally being released by its owner.

Back in 1995 I was seven years old and likely polishing off the last of the Walt Disney classics that I was raised on. That same year Pixar released its first feature and, in retrospect, its safe to say that a new epoch began. While Toy Story's animation was groundbreaking then (and still remains a milestone in digital animation) it is a “child's plaything” in comparison to Pixar's recent accomplishments. Known for their uncanny attention to detail, since the turn of the century the studio's animators have exploded into larger and larger digital environments. From countries to continents; the epic vastness of the ocean to the infinite reaches of the universe, Pixar has visually transported viewers to the very limits of imagination. Though it may seem a somber step back from WALL-E's intoxicating spectacle, Up moves viewers in a distinctly different way: emotionally. The subtlety and communicable depth of the film far exceeds anything yet achieved by Pixar. Though not without fault, Up is yet another massive achievement from a studio still reinventing itself and redefining popular cinema.

The Departed

Dir. Martin Scorsese
2006
9.3


Martin Scorsese is a man's director. In forty years he's nearly perfectly the mobster film, a genre more frequently avoided by women than war films or sci-fi movies. And you can easily see why: his mobster movies tend to conform to male stereotypes: an affinity for violence, sex, power, and essentially all the things the typical man is supposed to want as defined by the propaganda of consumerist culture, that we have furthermore accepted as truth. The mob itself is centered around a system of patriarchy: a system measured by male desire. This system states that a man who does not want anything is useless. The things mobsters pathologically desire become objectified. Sex, money, property, and respect all become means of measuring a man's greatness. Women in mobster films (including Scorsese's) are almost always on the peripheral. On occasion two men may fight over a women but it is not, generally speaking, because of some profound connection but rather an intrinsic need to assert dominance. In The Departed, Martin Scorsese's most rigorously taut and suspenseful film, the all-consuming “mob mentality” is profiled and defined with greater precision than ever before. Encased in what can only be called the best screenplay of the decade Scorsese unleashes a powerhouse of stars and, per usual, directs them to cinematic greatness. In the face of such a towering and enchanting success, it is easy to overlook his history of misogynistic film making and easier still to accept it as a term and condition of an exceptionally talented director.

One could argue that The Departed pointed to an elevation in Scorsese's consideration of women. However, the recurring motifs of sons, impotence and sexlessness, which could potentially be used to support this point, do more to increase the insecurity and fallibility of the principle male characters than to heighten the stature of the film's neglected females. In fact the film's only principle female role functions more as a meeting point for the film's two deceivers, and her character is flat and remotely lifeless. However, this is the only flat and lifeless portion of the film. Trying to summarize the film's plot would indeed be an unfortunate decision at this junction. With The Departed Scorsese unleashes a hail of details in conjunction with violent sensory overload (the often discontinuous diegetic system alone is brilliantly disconcerting) that literally leaves the viewer stunned. This is perhaps Scorsese showing his own form of dominance over a genre that he helped define and keep alive since the 1970s.

Though Scorsese does not adhere to standard thriller film levels of suspense and detail, he roughly maintains their ratio. Not only are the levels of plot detail and visual excitement simply extraordinary, Scorsese imbues his film with his own polished psychology theories. There is, of course, the symbiotic relationship of law and crime which is explored in most every “crime” movie, but rarely to such a degree. The film's recurrent “what's the difference?” theme (facing a loaded weapon, cui bono?, could I do murder?) finds deep roots in the Neitzchaen principle of moral superiority or “beyond good and evil.” Direct references are made to Freud, however they are more for emphasize on the undercurrent of philosophy pounding in the blood of this film rather than for intellectual vanity. Scorsese takes his film is so many exciting directions at once that it's hard to recognize, even after several viewings, what is actually stimulating you. The Departed marks the difference between a film that is too complicated and poorly handled and one that the viewer gets more out of every time they watch it. It's a difference that's difficult to quantify but William Monohan's screenplay masterfully fills every crevice of curiosity and follows each loose end to its respective conclusion. You get done watching The Departed and you don't scratch your head and go “Huh?”. Instead, you feel like you need to go lie down or take a walk. You feel like you've just finished something seriously involving although you've only been sitting on your couch. In short, it's exactly how a movie should make you feel.

Despite all his achievements both in The Departed and its predecessors, Scorsese has still not managed to completely level with women. To illustrate, think of The Departed's final sequences as sex. The phallic-pistol erupting, which here would represent the male orgasm and directorial climax, causes the death of Costigan (which the viewer has unknowingly been anticipating) and the voyeuristic peak of the viewer's (representative of women) climax as well. This moment would have been the perfect cinematic rendering of mutual pleasure between director and viewer, had not two more murders taken place within seconds of that initial one and one more just before the final credit sequence roles. These sequential murders become symbolic of selfish pleasure (taken on by the director) for which we feel very little. They feel vaguely excessive and cheap: a means of ushering the film's finale which, while not rushed, doesn't feel entirely appropriate. Perhaps its our ingrained sense of American, bureaucratic law and order that informs our conviction that someone should have been arrested, although our most basic and instinctual sense of justice is satisfied with the final death. Nevertheless, Scorsese is surely putting the finishing touches on a grotesque portrait of primal urges. In doing so, however, he almost involuntarily associates himself with the engendered and dealt-with flaws of the characters he portrays so brutally. The act is corrupted and dangerously indulgent. It exercises the same system of desire etched out by the mob itself. For a film so sophisticated its conclusion feels unnervingly primitive. Perhaps it is best to conclude by saying that even a film as well thought out and executed as The Departed still cannot help but give insight into the mind of the man behind it.

8 1/2

Dir. Federico Fellini
1963
n/a


Every so often a piece of art comes along that unveils a secret or sacred part of our essence. Through trial and error, persistence or sheer will power, this work crumbles away part of the our monotonous understanding of trivial modern life and reveals a blinding light that is at first disorienting and then ecstatically revelatory. It infuses a sense of livelihood and purpose. It elevates and inspires. Over the course of history its importance does not diminish and its meanings become manifold and gain complexity until it is very nearly hidden beneath a shroud of myth. I can only imagine that there is a world of intellectual analysis based around Federico Fellini's 8 ½. To avoid it would be arrogant but to submit to it wholly would be ignorant. 8 ½ beautifully demonstrates the very human alternations between intellectual self-reflexivity and subconscious desire, as well as establishing the benefits and consequences of both. The film wistfully flows in and out of profound dream sequences which show the viewer the internal starvation of Guido Anselmi, the film's artistically and morally nomadic protagonist. He is as human as any character ever portrayed in cinema and Fellini painstakingly constructs his imperfections: his arrogance, his lies, his narcissism. But we do not hate Guido. We love him. He represents the best and worst of us, on a scale so grand it borders on and finally willfully submits to delightful madness. With 8 ½ Fellini constructed a human god; a towering figure so universal it is painful to watch his delusions of self-control, but worse still when he plummets to depths of self-loathing. With Guido Fellini asks one truly important question, the one that will forever keep his film from aging: what makes a man free?

Freedom, at least to Guido, is explained eloquently in the middle of a lavish fantasy sequence in which Guido returns to his home amongst all the women he has ever laid or loved. He says “happiness is being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.” Happiness and freedom go hand in hand in 8 ½. Of course the two are also implicitly linked to his melancholy. As Guido sheds off his relations with the people in his life (from cheating on his wife to constantly avoiding an overly demanding and entirely disconnected French actress, as well refusing to respond to any questions regarding his upcoming film), he encounters a compounded contradictory feeling: happiness at avoiding all the obstacles presented in his life and sadness at losing his relation to the world. These emotions are of course subtle in the film's "real" world but in the world of Guido's mind, which includes dreams and fantasies, they are illustrated poignantly: escape as Guido flying upwards only to be pulled down by studio executives; guilt as consultations with his dead father; innocence as bizarre ritualistic scenes of sexuality from his youth. Guido desperately wants to create something original and honest. He can no longer force himself into the mold his producers wish for him. His film's unfinished spaceship stands as an aching metaphor for all the vulgar attempts to consciously create a beauty that exists only in the mind's untouchable regions. In 8 ½, beauty is grotesque and cruel, perfection is rejected and what remains is truth.

What is so true about 8 ½ is not cinematic, nor is intellectual. Cinematically Fellini utilizes interpretive surrealism to communicate Guido's devastating emotions. As for the film's scholarly side, the character of Guido's friend the film critic, who functions as our interpreter, synthesizes the film's artistic and intellectual efforts. He demands a high level of academic thought process to be rendered as something honest, original and triumphant. His philosophy is summed up perfectly when he tells Guido “it is better to destroy than to create something useless,” after Guido aborts his sci-fi project, a moving scene rendered as Guido's suicide. The film critic also draws direct attention toward the film's recursive nature and self-reflexivity. Given that 8 ½ is a largely autobiographical, using Fellini's own mounting artistic crisis as a template, it further takes on emotional gravity. All this is to say nothing of its pioneering use of film as a means of documenting the artistic process of film making, or metafilm, which would inspire a league of filmmakers from Francois Truffaut to David Lynch.

The biggest achievement in the film is Fellini's expansion of cinema's ability to communicate. Fellini, more so than any director of his time, engorged the possibilities of cinema, and 8 ½ is the culmination of all that came before and would come after. Everything, from his contemplative and creative camera use, to his mix of surrealist and symbolic elements, to his unflinching condemnation of his actions via the film's painfully honest narrative, Fellini opened the door to film's new consciousness. His freedom which traces, shades and textures his masterpiece, is the ability to step through doors as they appear. It is the desire to see what comes next and the humble awareness of what has come before. Freedom is not a void. It is the process by which we all come to discover the truth about who we really are. It is the beauty and grandeur of everything. It is sublime. It is pure celestial bliss. It is beyond words.