A Serious Man

Dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
2009
8.8


Co-en-i-za-tion:
-noun
the attribution of a universal or symbolic quality to transient and otherwise helpless human beings.

A Serious Man, the Coen brothers' 14th feature, opens with the quote “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” If ever there was an aphorism which the characters in the brothers' films applied less to their lives, I would like to see it. Whether it be the vendetta driven Lewelyn Moss or the scheming of Jerry Lundegaard, Coen characters have a unfailing tendency to complicate their lives in a misguided effort to simplify them. In A Serious Man we bear witness to the trials and tribulations of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). In a state of constant frenetic panic, Larry's world unwinds until nothing remains but the very core of his being. In it's calling into question the usefulness of allegory and its subsequent affect on our ability to endure misfortune, the Coen's make one of the more remarkable turnarounds of their impressive career. A Serious Man exalts rather than depraves the suffering of its protagonist, easily making it the most humanitarian film in the brothers' grim body of work.

Over the course of their career, the Coens have become masters of allegorical realism. The self-contained worlds of their films give the impression that there is always a lesson needing to be learned. Occasionally this attribute has devolved into absurd social satire (Burn After Reading) but for the most part the Coens have maintained the heady combination of stories unique enough to capture our interest but universal enough to sustain the high moral ground they tend to tread upon. A Serious Man aligns itself most closely with Fargo as a film about the universe inflicting its indifferent wrath upon a man. Like Jerry Lundegaard and Barton Fink before him, Larry Gopnik becomes painfully aware of his own simplicity and impressionability, which in turn shatters the small world he lives in. However, the parallels to A Serious Man are not found simply within a single text or within the Coen's oeuvre. The film is a composite of numerous stories with each marking the point at which faith in a higher power must either be accepted or rejected.

To call A Serious Man a film about Judaism is both a under and overstatement. The important religious elements are here (faith, morality, fidelity, etc.) but the film is not simply about a man coming to terms with God's way (“The boss isn't always right, but he's always the boss.”). Larry, in Murphy's Law free fall, is driven by the question “Why?” but the Coens are driven by a different, related question: “How?” How do we believe? The brothers point to the religious significance of allegory and parable which have played a large part in how they tell their own stories. Where Larry, in vain attempts to assert his seriousness, seeks to understand the math or the reason behind his suffering, the Coens suggest that there is no reason and never was. In their impressionistic use of the story of Job (Larry), David and Goliath (Larry's habitually pot smoking son Danny [Aaron Wolff] is hounded by the beastly Fagle), and Adam and Eve (the film's prologue in the Polish shteti) among others, the Coen's are really illustrating a complex portrait of the uselessness of parables as a means of, or reason for, living.

This reading is complicated because without the allegories to give it existential buoyancy A Serious Man might never leave its narrative bed; lying prostrate in the face of an uncaring universe. When Larry seeks spiritual guidance from a trinity of Rabbis he finds the naivete of the junior Rabbi an immediate tool for reassessment. When this fails, the practiced pragmatism of the 2nd Rabbi, who not only gives Larry a feasible solution but also becomes the mouthpiece for the Coens assertions about the use of purpose driven tales, only redoubles Larry's conviction that God wishes him to suffer. From the 3rd Rabbi he is given nothing, which is perhaps all he ever needed. Throughout the film various characters give credence to Larry's suffering as he proclaims to everyone “I haven't done anything!” The tighter Larry grips his metaphysical oiled rope, the faster he descends into the swirling madness of the film's finale.

“I understand the math. I don't understand the cat,” Larry asserts to his blackmailing Korean student, Clive. In this case the context is Shrodinger's Paradox, but the quote can be read widely. Larry is a rational man but the world is not a rational place. Through sheer perseverance Larry attempts to understand why these unfortunate incidents keep occurring in his life but ironically detaches himself from their real life consequences. We constantly are catching him in media res, always shocked by some new fact that, to him and us, has come out of nowhere. Though it may sound like a world of suffering, the Coens actually come to empathize with Larry. Calling attention to their own thematic use of allegory, the Coens have finally found a character they do not wish to make a martyr of contemporary morality. They almost give him a satisfying ending but then it wouldn't be a Coen brothers film without some level of ambiguity. Larry's call from the doctor and the approaching storm are not the final nails in the grave of the Gopniks or the Jewish clan at Saint Louis, Minnesota. They are, in fact, reiterations of the film's opening quote. We never truly figure out what is right and wrong because the destructive will of the universe (or God) comes to sweep us all away before our existential queries are answered. With questions swirling around the film's ending (What will happen Larry? Why isn't Danny frightened of the oncoming tornado? What is the significance of the recurring Jefferson Airplane song?), the film's iconic final shot may be the best answer. Or perhaps better still are the words of Clive's inconsistent father: “Please, accept the mystery.”

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Dir. Wes Anderson
2009
6.3


For what it could have been, anyone might have assumed Wes Anderson was the perfect director for a film adaptation of the Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anderson has a history of channeling the repressed trauma of childhood and chronicling the misplaced desires of patriarchs while still being lovingly committed to traditional familial values and affection. However, while Dahl presented a knowing and gentle sympathy for children, Anderson's Mr. Fox appears mysteriously callous toward kids and adults alike. In the last decade, the director's profound empathy for his characters has receded leaving in its wake a shallow, superficially delightful circus of fantastic auteurist signifiers (the “Anderson trademarks”: slow motion sequences over 60s pop music, perfectionist refinement of costume and set detail, banal quirkiness, etc.). What makes Anderson's films fun to watch used to be meticulously balanced with what made them difficult to watch. His archetypes (the unholy trinity of The Loser, The Stoic Wife and The Bastard) though recognizable throughout his filmography have been systematically reduced from flawed but beautiful statues to infantile water color portraits. Much as Mr. Fox delights in lateral movement over depth of field (see the film's opening sequence) so too has Wes Anderson come to delight in fanciful vision over rigorous realization.

Perhaps the question really is: why the high standards for Anderson? While he is certainly of the American school of auteurism, beyond The Royal Tenenbaums it is arguable that Anderson has done little that is anywhere near as complete. Rushmore is the pretentious purist's favorite while The Life Aquatic was perhaps his most accessible film (or at least most widely seen) before Fantastic Mr. Fox. Darjeeling Limited was a failure on almost every level and one is hard pressed to find a casual viewer whose actually seen Bottle Rocket. However, this lack of obviousness, the vague sense of the occult, is what brings viewers back to Anderson's films even if they themselves don't realize it. While Anderson's most important elements and themes came together with exquisite empathy in The Royal Tenebaums, it has largely been left up to the viewer to discern the importance (or lack thereof) in the remainder of his oeuvre.

And for the most part it has been there: the psychological portraits of the aforementioned archetypes and their patient and sympathetic dissection, the non-linear transgressions into bizarre, idiosyncratic worlds, and the strangely updated sign posts of classic cinema. Anderson has always represented an intentional and thus self-aware digression from the norms of Hollywood. Despite his big name rosters he has never been an actor's director. His films are alternatingly cathartic and not with narrative structures that air on the side of nomadic and ephemeral. Though his art direction is compulsively organized, the films themselves appear loose, capable of going in one direction or another; shifting their weight distractedly while making plot decisions on the fly. There are no real surprises in Anderson's filmography because everything is some kind of a surprise.

So, where does Fantastic Mr. Fox fit into all this cerebral cinephilia? It doesn't. The trend one could identify as early as The Life Aquatic has been fully realized. With Mr. Fox, Anderson has largely abandoned his early earnest efforts to portray unrealized characters. He opts instead for the venue of children's film and uses it as an excuse for lazy and hopelessly disappointing workmanship. Mr. Fox, (here The Bastard becomes not a “son-of-a-bitch” but a “Wild Animal”) is worse than his predecessors, who recited self-prepared speeches about their obvious short comings without really believing in them, by knowingly betraying the one's who care about him all the while celebrating for them their fortune at having such a “fantastic” presence in their lives. This difference is naturally thin and difficult to nail down in writing but painfully obvious on screen. It is also greatly aided by an important inter-oeuvre thematic transgression: constant character (and thus viewer) empathy for The Bastard. Compare the way Mr. Fox's family (with the exception of his son Ash who plays the alienated and hopelessly self-deluded Loser) and friends treat his selfish actions throughout the film with the coldness Royal Tenenbaum is met with upon his return to his family home. Despite the seemingly great lengths that Mr. Fox goes to win back the respect and adoration of everyone (ironic yet expected given that this has always been his intention) they are physical not emotional hurdles. The 85 minute adventure narrative condenses all Anderson's once carefully detailed themes into visual tropes and dull exposition.

Anderson has always loved The Bastard, the one who turned his back on everyone who ever gave a damn about him in order to satisfy some internal, animalistic and deeply (although never too deeply) repressed desire. Mr. Fox is Anderson's most simplified and fully-realized Bastard. A self declared Wild Animal, Anderson embraces this default persona and calls for all the film's animals to all become “Wild,” which, if we follow the analogy, means they should all become slaves to their respective primal instincts. Which, especially at the point during which this action is called for by Mr. Fox, should not involve working together to help the the bastard who has, of course, single-handedly gotten them into their current predicament. The Bastard used to be a loner in Anderson's films: the guy no one wanted to see, much less help. In Fantastic Mr. Fox he becomes the down-and-out self-sacrificing character who all other characters eventually come to pity despite that he has not truly changed nor attempted to. Which, for anyone dedicated to the subtly of Anderson's films, is even more disappointing than the film's deplorable deus ex machina finale. In the end, despite Fantastic Mr. Fox being the ill-fitting puzzle piece of Wes Anderson's authentic puzzle of modern relationships, the film is best summarized by the simple platitude (which is also Anderson's uncomfortable, obvious and contradictory self-reference) Mrs. Fox expresses at the film's cavernous mid-point: this story is just too predictable.

The Hurt Locker

Dir. Kathryn Bigelow
2008
9.6


With a film as culturally significant as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker it can be difficult to identify a critical starting point, especially at this late hour. I begin this way because after its sweep of the Oscars, its feted run at the major international film festivals and the editorial press it has received from nearly every film magazine in print not to mention the publicity it has accrued through American political journals, it is difficult to imagine a time when The Hurt Locker did not exist on such a broad plane. Had I written this review while the film was still in theaters or even upon my first viewing several months ago this introduction would have never crossed my mind, never mind this page. Nevertheless, here we are. As a budding critic I feel the push to add my personal perceptions to the insurmountable melting pot of analysis that surrounds the film. However, as a young cinephile for whom great films often take on an untouchable, transcendent quality I struggle with reconciling my intrinsic and often contradictory desire to be both an objective spectator and enthralled participant. Fortunately, I found a cinematic outlet for this internal conflict in the landscape of struggle that defines The Hurt Locker.

Though The Hurt Locker is indisputably greater than the sum of its parts, its ten minute opening set piece nevertheless sets the hyper-kinetic and fragmented tone of the narrative. Captured under the tyranny of the relentless sun, the film instantly makes psychic connections to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Albert Camus' The Stranger, works driven by that celestial malevolence whose unforgiving intensity can shatter the soul of man. This scene, as with all other major set pieces in the film, is intensely calculated to produce a specific effect: the tension-release of drug addiction. The impatient POV shooting combined with the extra-diegetic sound of jets screaming overhead and confrontational babble readily assert the intensity of the fear we immediately recognize in ourselves and the relief we feel when the bomb finally does explode. This technique invariably lays the framework for painful self-actualization in the viewer and the infinitely more complex sense of guilt that will arise when we realize our self-indulgent proclivity for immediate resolution over long term suspense. Barry Ackroyd's masterful cinéma vérité camerawork, a distant relative of Emmanuel Lubezki's more phantasmal work with Alfonso Cuaron, immediately interpolates the viewer into the position of voyeur. This placement puts us alongside the crowd of Iraqi civilians who watch casually from their balconies as the film's bomb squad protagonists go to work. The conclusion of this powerful opener casts an ominous influence on the way the bomb diffusers view these detached witnesses. Not only that, their paranoid gaze implicates our own displaced pleasure at watching personal and political drama unfold.

These themes (voyeurism and addiction), for which Ackroyd's jittery camera and Sergeant William James' (the brilliant Jeremy Renner) cigarette are the respective symbols, maintain a ripeness of meaning throughout the film. The film's self-declared agenda, to elucidate the “war as drug” metaphor, is thankfully proved in context rather than in exposition. Not unlike Apocalypse Now!'s hallucinatory realization of the Vietnam War as a personal battle of remote morality versus conditioned madness, The Hurt Locker supposes that a radical shift must take place within any man at war in order for him to either thrive in his environment or flee the face of horror. At first, Sergeant James seems an archetype, a Pragmatic Nihilist, but spoils this simplicity in his questionable attachment to (and ultimate obsession with) the Iraqi boy he befriends. My personal favorite reading of James' character is the modern Leviathan: a composite of America's contradictory desires and misplaced trust, a comparison that takes on a level of superficial believability whenever James' dons his Man-God bombsuit. He is at once Pontius Pilate washing his hands (or body) of the blood of an innocent and Jesus Christ the self-sacrificing savior of mankind. In the end, of course, Bigelow does all these reductive types one better by proving that James' is just a man with one love: life in the crosshairs of death.

James' presence is the catalyst for the painful catharsis' of his fellow team members. Sergeant J.T. Sanbourne (Anthony Mackie), the dogmatically conservative member of the group, discovers in himself an acute jealousy at being outperformed by the new maverick. After a near death experience in the film's final set piece, Sanbourne drops his facade of machismo and flaunts an unwavering affection for both James and the world he has left behind. Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is troubled from the start, hoisting on himself the blame for the death of his former team leader. A reappearing Army therapist adds an introspective and revealing quality to Eldridge's suffering, while simultaneously offering him the emotional support soldiers often deny themselves in the face of wishing to appear unbreakable. It is of course a purposeful irony that said therapist's untimely death in the field would be the impetus for Eldridge's immediately-repressed nervous breakdown. While Sanbourne initially outwardly despises James and then comes to love him, Eldridge goes from expected ambivalence to indignant hatred after a frenzied and ill-conceived mission results in an injury which hospitalizes him.

With an appropriate if melodramatic epilogue leading into the film's much needed metaphysical 'release', The Hurt Locker concludes by being nothing short of outstanding. A feverish travelogue through the dark night of the soul, the film bridges a thirty year gap with the greatest of hyper-realist war films: Apocalypse Now! While that film was a hazily beautiful piece of deconstructionist filmmaking and despite the great number of obvious differences, The Hurt Locker is truly its cinematic complement. Here the drug of choice is not a psychedelic which distorts reality and detaches the participants from the grotesque realities of war, but a narcotic which brings the immediacy and visceral intensity of combat to an almost intolerable closeness. The Hurt Locker is, in short, the most complete and intense staring contest any lover of cinema could ever hope for. You blink, you die. So, how did you do?

Mid-August Lunch

This review was originally published here on Tiny Mix Tapes.

Dir. Gianni di Gregorio
2008
7.2


Intermittently throughout Gianni di Gregorio's debut feature Mid-August Lunch (of which he is the writer, director and lead actor) I couldn't help but ask myself “What would Woody Allen do?” Gregorio the writer/director culled his screenplay from a would-have-been scenario: in mid-August, just before the Italian summer holiday Ferragosta, his landlord drops in to remind him of his mounting debt. The landlord gives Gregorio the option of wiping the slate clean by watching after his aging mother for a few days. Where Gregorio the writer/director, who already spends much of his time caring for his own madre, pridefully declines, Gregorio the character resignedly acquiesces. Knowing this fictional fork in the road, Gregorio the actor fails to convince the audience he is living anything other than a fanciful daydream; a “what if?” scenario one muses on absently rather than considers thoughtfully.

Allen, who often relived the most acutely painful and rapturous moments of his life through his films, managed to maintain a distance between himself as an artist and the intimacies of his private life even as they were being portraying honestly on the screen. Gregorio intuitively limits the artistic and emotional distance between himself and his precious chamber comedy. It's important to realize that Gregorio did not originally write the part for himself. However, when it came time for production and a “middle-aged man, more or less an alcoholic, who had lived for years with his mother” was called for, Gregorio presumed the autobiographical nature of the part would allow him to easily transition between the subjective, lived-in role and his directorial duties. This assumption proves incorrect. Gregorio's Gianni is a shallow, uni-dimensional character, lacking the intuitive self-criticizing and moral doubtfulness of Allen. Gianni's character is a patron saint of patience and humility. Even his constant consumption of wine is merely a crutch the director uses to insinuate rather show Gianni's frustration and stress.

Once this initial barrier of absurdity is crossed and the ladies (four in total) settle in with Gianni as their dutiful caretaker the film does take on a relieving, earnest realism. The set pieces are finely realized and range from the comic (the landlord's mother escaping for a night of drinking and smoking and her misguided attempts at seducing Gianni) to the genuinely affecting (the chattering mother of Gianni's doctor thoughtfully reminisces about her youth as the camera moves slowly across the room toward a dimly lit open window). In fact, the film's most imprecisely enjoyable moments occur when Gianni is elsewhere and any combination of the non-actors playing his lounging geriatrics are left to their own devices. They quibble and elicit fond forgotten memories drawing an attentive portrait of a culture that is quietly disappearing.

This particular aspect is definitely the film's strong suit: the credence given to the experiences and the motivations of the elderly. When it comes to consensus on aged Italians stereotypes abound: from venerable and dangerous (think Tony Soprano's mother) to callous and crazy. Few take into consideration the loneliness faced by the elderly who, even in their ostensible childishness, are nevertheless reaching out desperately for camaraderie. The acute sadness felt at the film's final scene where Gianni announces that the landlord will be arriving soon to retrieve his kin is the mature complement to kids at summer camp. The “it's over already?” sensation and the pleading with the retrievers for just a few more precious moments in the anomalous universe they've built for themselves through mutual affections and shared experiences. Though Gregorio alleviates the tension coarsely by turning it into a half-hearted joke, the attentive viewer retains the impression nonetheless.

This Italian indie proves not so much an outstanding success as a modest and occasionally elegant first effort. Gregorio, whose previous credits include co-writing the critically celebrated Gomorrah, has proved that he can do wide scope writing in a socio-political context. However, it has never been an accepted assumption that because one can paint beautiful landscapes that one can also produce a fine portrait. Though Mid-August Lunch is clearly a beloved pet project and one more devotedly human than Gomorrah if Gregorio is to exceed the unpretentious expectations set by his debut he may want to take a page from that other, aforementioned triple-threat filmmaker.