A Single Man

Dir. Tom Ford
2009
7.5


In dealing with Tom Ford's debut feature film A Single Man, I came to the conclusion that it would be ideal to write two reviews. The first would discuss the film's sexual politics. In fact, just in reading or hearing about the film one is likely to find out, first and foremost, that A Single Man is about a gay man. While this review would no doubt defend the film as being about a lot more than “a gay man” it would also note, at the risk of sounding bigoted, how, were the film about a straight man coping with the loss of his heterosexual partner, two reviews would be entirely superfluous. In other words: controversy and timeliness are built into A Single Man's take on America's relationship to homosexuals. This same review would draw parallels to 2008's Milk and ask whether or not sexual persecution in cinema is exploitative when it is shown by a person of the same orientation being portrayed? On a tangent this review might also attempt at defining the difference between gay cinema and the academically fetishized blanket genre “queer cinema”.

The second review is the one you will find here. This review critiques the film's cinematic merits. One could suggest that this is a restrictive means of judging a film. No art lives inside a cultural vacuum and a film like A Single Man is as likely to change an uncertain voter's perspective as any campaign speech. And while the Prop 8 debate still rages on, in this tiny corner of the world I'd like to talk a little about color, light, dedication and love. A Single Man is a day in the life of George Falconer, an older English man who teaches at a university in Southern California. As you've likely gleamed from my introduction, George is also gay. Having lost his lover of 16 years in a car crash 8 months earlier, George has finally had enough of his internal suffering and decides to kill himself. The story is told alternately in stylized flashback sequences and present tense vignettes between George and his housekeeper, sexually curious student, former female lover (Julianne Moore is divine as damaged goods) and myriad others.

Director Tom Ford is an openly gay fashion designer turned filmmaker who impressively financed the entire seven million dollar project himself. Ford is self-proclaimed lover of cinema and his handsome film is evidence enough of that. With sets designed by the folks over at AMC's powerhouse drama Mad Men and outfits that would make Edith Head swoon, A Single Man is an impeccable looking film. Ford's attention to detail is remarkable and not limited to sets and costumes. The film teems with erotic energy. Certain body parts, mouths in particular, become so intensely charged with sexuality that their image seems pressed to the screen, just about to burst through. There is also Colin Firth's performance as George and his ability to tell the whole story of his emotional life with just his face. Ford meticulously captures the sometimes hallucinatory subtlety of George's perception with remarkable efficiency.

Of course all this attention to lush detail has a cost. Fashion tends to work in dizzyingly fast paced or instantaneous mediums (run way shows and photo shoots respectively). At times it seems as if Ford is trying to capture too much in a single shot, an understandable side effect of the fashion industries need for “the perfect photo”. Unfortunately, in conjunction with this perfectionism is Ford's insistence on premature cutting and editing. While his unique use of filmic blush, where the cold color palette saturates at moments of physical or emotional intimacy, is an impressive derivation from Hitchcock's historic use of lighting as mood, Ford tends to rush things along forgetting to give his film room to breath. Cutting is properly used in places (ex. George's fragmented flashbacks of receiving the news of his lover's death), but overall Ford has difficulty committing to long takes and mise en scene.

A Single Man is a film about the fragility of perfection. On the exterior the stodgy, stiff, immaculately soignée George is a picture of English intellectual rigidity. Inside though he is something else entirely. George is best surmised in a mid-film, haunting tableau of his desk where all his important possessions are arranged perfectly while his revolver sits at an angle, disturbing the pristine symmetry of the arrangement. The audio visual aspects of Ford's film are as impeccably put together as George's wardrobe and home. But his film lacks inner turmoil; George's restless soul. Ford's drama is uneven and his dialog is stilted, just a shade too literary. What we miss is the shattering and putting back together again of George's heart. Firth works hard to overcome the slow script but in the end chocks up an incredible performance that the film does not completely deserve. Maybe the film's subject matter was just too close to home for Ford and he compensated by making the text into more of a film than it otherwise needed to be. Whatever the case may be, A Single Man represents an impressive, fresh faced debut from a director worth looking out for.

Grave of the Fireflies

Dir. Isao Takahata
1988
9.0


A few months ago a good friend suggested I watch Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro and Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies in tandem. Released by the same studio in the same year, one could hardly find two more opposing companions. Miyazaki's Totoro is a light hearted account of childhood adventure with a profound yet gentle subtext. Takahata's Fireflies is a full blown, heart breaking tragedy. Channeling all the frustration and anguish of post-war Japan without once submitting to outrage or propaganda, Grave of the Fireflies is focused not on the superficial valor of wartime heroes but on the hapless civilian casualties. It is at once both mythic and human, neo-realist and magically surreal. It is also a testament to the absolute cultural and psychological devastation left in the wake of WWII and its continuing influence on new generations of filmmakers.

Takahata's film represents a composite of three types of war films: the glorifying war film (think: Independence Day), the emotionally devastating war film (think: Saving Private Ryan) and the politically and/or morally inconclusive war film (think: Gary Cooper on the mount in Sergeant York). For a war film (or more precisely a film about war) it contains little action although it doesn't avoid graphic violence. Images of bodies being ceremonially burned and cities being torched are grisly and upsetting but Takahata never makes his film into a piece of propaganda. In the tradition of the Italian neorealists who regularly fought against a faceless or nonexistent enemy (that enemy was often Italy itself), Takahata's film avoids a distinct antagonist. In fact, not a single character in the film speaks a hateful word against “the enemy”. Every citizen conserves all their energy to be put toward optimistic patriotism.

As for the film's protagonists, a boy and his younger sister, their drama is weighty but never exploitative. The children's father is in the Navy and is never seen. They are looked after by their mother until she dies in an air raid. They are sent to live with their aunt who is burdened by their appetites and perceived uselessness. Though she harasses the children about their complacency during wartime she is never vilified. When the children decide they have had enough of her misinterpreted tyranny they flee to an abandoned bomb shelter. As the two slowly descend into starvation the horrific contradiction of wartime nationalism becomes self-evident: while Japan cares deeply for its population, it is helpless to stop the slow death of two of its citizens. The tragedy heightens when the viewer realizes that is the pride and unfortunate choices made by the boy that will ultimately cause both his and his sister's deaths. However, it is his selflessness and bravery, critical and controversial terms given the boy's stealing and looting during wartime solidarity, that allows them to stay alive as long as they do.

Most especially in these scenes by the lake where the bomb shelter is located, Fireflies recalls Kenji Mizoguchi's mastery of formal composition and dramatic integrity. The hallucinatory juxtaposition of fire falling from the sky causing mass destruction and the serenity of fireflies illuminating ponds and caverns while joyous laughter echoes from all around, reflects and becomes largely symbolic of the brutal tragedy the two children face: a country both divided and united by war. Though the locations remains largely static, the narrative takes on mythic proportions. Takahata lends a divine humanity to the film's more purposefully allegorical second half. Even when he dips into surrealism, Takahata maintains an intense sense of gravity with each image adding to a tantamount sense of fate.

Ultimately the film represents all that post-war Japanese filmmakers have had to face in coming to terms with the devastation of defeat. Much like post-war German cinema, this sub-conscious weight has greatly affected the mood of the country's more thoughtful filmmakers. If Miyazaki could be charged with escapism (an unjust accusation if one is willing to seriously study the recurrent themes in his oeuvre) the same cannot be said about Takahata. His dedication to the individual in a time of national crisis is both heartbreaking and fortifying. One of the foremost post-war filmmakers in Japan, Yasujiro Ozu, showed that there is drama and sadness, joy and death behind every door. Grave of the Fireflies is not meant to be an anecdotal microcosm but just one door in the infinite hallway of suffering that was, and continues to be, WWII.

My Neighbor Totoro

Dir. Hayao Miyazaki
1988
8.2


For my part, I have seldom known external rupture. From my birth to when I left for college I lived in the same place, never once changing school districts or towns. Internally my experience was bread and butter: as a youth I created adventure and occasion out of the most commonplace objects and ordinary events. As a teenager I rebelled against my perceived commonality and turned inward, discovering (or perhaps inventing) all sorts of meaningless melancholy and angst. I sometimes wonder what my childhood and subsequent adolescence would have been like had they not been so regular and consistent. What if I had been faced with a real outside threat to the stability I had long ceased appreciating? It is this sort of hypothetical question regarding the universal experience of childhood that Hayao Miyazaki has been exploring for years. It is in My Neighbor Totoro that he answers the question as firmly, simply and gracefully as possible.

Miyazaki makes kids films about what it's like to be a kid, as opposed to the contrived schlock of so many Hollywood G-rated films which are all slick production and dichotomous simplification. In regards to the smooth and undoubtedly coercive experience of Hollywood versus the challenging, exciting and sometimes a bit frightening world of Miyazaki, one might argue that while it is certainly important at an early age for a child to feel empowered, it is also important for them to feel safe. Miyazaki knows that the former is, if not more important, generally less of a priority. Miyazaki's films feature children, divorced from the protection of their parents, making decisions for themselves. These decisions, which are often physically realized in a surreal, quasi-fictional environment, are nonetheless grounded in day-to-day reality and informed by the strange yet beautiful rationality of children.

For the girls in My Neighbor Totoro the challenge to their confidence is a move from a town to a rural farming community. A country idyll, initially fixed in animated realism turns magical when the younger of the two girls follows a small creature into the trunk of a massive Camphor tree and discovers the drowsy giant Totoro. What is perhaps most impeccable about the film from this point forward is how the discovery does not launch a serious narrative arc of any kind. As viewers we are privy to the growing bond between the sisters and the relationship between the two and their father and mother, the latter of whom is in a long-term care hospital.

While rich with moments of childhood fantasy which cross over into reality in a characteristically Miyazakian way, the film does not eschew seriousness. When their father fails to return on time from the university he teaches at, the girls hold a vigil at the bus stop where Totoro joins as a surrogate father figure. Fantasy characters as stand-in family members are a recurring theme in Miyazaki's work which further suggests the symbiotic relationship between the real and the imagined. At the news that their mother has fallen ill again, the younger girl attempts to walk to the hospital and along the way gets lost. Her elder sister and an collective of neighbors begin a search that turns desperate when a girl's shoe is located in a nearby pond. Faced with mounting tension the film elegantly unwinds with the family united around a symbolically charged ear of corn.

A beautiful film from first frame to last and an evocative excursion into the minds of children, My Neighbor Totoro delicately balances subtle character development with a heartwarming story of family and community. Without moralizing or becoming heavy handed, Miyazaki illustrates the dramatic conversion from conventional life to exotic adventure that only children are capable of. As our frontal lobes develop and we begin to reason away the more fantastic trappings of our imaginations, so too does it become more difficult to face the darker shades of reality. While children may not have an understanding of death, adults often struggle to find a means of coping with that knowledge. My Neighbor Totoro exemplifies the courage and strength in children who are given the opportunity to feel empowered and independent; who are not sheltered from reality but rather use the real world as a building block for something far more exciting but no less profound.

The Road

Dir. John Hillcoat
2009
6.0


What makes a novel unfilmable? With regards to The Road, John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, many critics have settled comfortably on the director's inability to capture the “tone” of the novel. The novel itself is a compact epic about the condition of the human soul under intolerable pressure and the small means by which one survives both personal and global catastrophe. McCarthy's “tone” is one of patience and grief; love and doubt. Evoking a sense of American spiritualism, McCarthy's novel is spacious even at claustrophobically suspenseful moments. The text's episodes are punctuated by the physical blank space on the page which isolate them from each other and give the reader an indeterminable sense of time passing. And rightly so, as the characters themselves have no sense of time. As the father himself says “for ever is no time at all.” Perhaps this is the biggest difference in tone: where McCarthy strips away the artifice of his medium (including chapter markers, punctuation and character names) in an effort to connect the reader viscerally to the tragedy of his story, Hillcoat pads his melodramatic adaptation with cinematic fluff only occasionally exhibiting a capacity to transcend cinematic restrictions.

In this way director and elder protagonist are ethically linked. Throughout the film, the father (Viggo Mortensen) fails to reconcile his now-archaic morality with its absence in the post-apocalyptic world. He renders everything in black and white terms: they are bad because they cannibalize and we are good because we suffer before God. In a civilized world this view is functional, if overly simplistic, but morality in the new world is as useless as the scattered dollar bills and shelled out computers found in the ash covered country houses and burnt-out cities of the film. The Road represents a world in which economic and moral systems of value have imploded. The Father clings desperately to his roots as a conscientious human being though he gradually sheds his sense of identity when he leaves his wedding ring and photo of his wife behind. Still, he continues to draw lines on a canvas that no longer exists and never fully abandons himself to the moral grey zone of the new world. What is more complicated still is that this self-righteous “good man” is also a bigot. Though he claims faith, he trusts no one. By the film's conclusion he has not fully reconciled himself to the overhanging cloud of savagery which has been creeping in on him as slowly as death.

So too does Hillcoat never fully abandon the pretenses of narrative in favor of a post-Hollywood cinema the likes of which might have stunned unsuspecting viewers. Of course, this is not entirely his fault. A film is not a novel. A film, at least on this kind of scale, is not an individual endeavor. Even if Hillcoat had desired to supersede the rigorous guidelines of the American studio system it is quite likely that an intolerable amount of bureaucracy would have stood in his way. Be that as it may, let us not forget Billy Wilder. Or Hitchcock. No doubt comparing John Hillcoat to Alfred Hitchcock is going to sound crass and controversial but the point is that expansive, subversive work can be realized under the restrictive hold of the modern studio system but it must be done fastidiously and with great inspiration.

So, it isn't Sunset Boulevard or Rear Window but The Road is not a complete wash. Though Hillcoat lacks total authority over the original text, nevertheless the film does a couple of things quite well. Javier Aguirresarobe's cinematography is a manic depressive relative of Roger Deakin's on Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of the Jesses James. Here, rather than fields of golden wheat and snow covered valleys, Aguirresarobe elegantly captures each dying blade of grass and sagging telephone poll. In flashback, saturated cold orange light is expertly used in contrast with the film's monochromatic present tense. Also in common with Jesse James is a score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, the purveyors of dark Americana. Unfortunately, due to the film's already heightened and over-milked melodrama, Ellis and Cave's score is insultingly ineffective. Perhaps the snatches of diegetic piano music occurring occasionally throughout the film would have sufficed. Mortensen puts in another performance for the books, although Kodi Smit-McPhee as his son manages to upstage him at crucial moments. Charlize Theron is fine in flashback sequences as an emotionally devastated mother who chooses death over suffering. The singular recurring prop, a pistol with two bullets, resonates with intense dual meaning: survival or suicide.

In the end we are faced with what The Road could have been (elegiac tone poem) and what it is (moralizing studio melodrama). For what he might have intended to do with the text, perhaps it best to say that Hillcoat attempts too much. Despite minimalist dialog the film covers morality, God, the myth of Prometheus, value systems, modern family relationships (the film's finale resoundingly concludes that the rural Christian nuclear family, dog included, is best) in the context of a psychological thriller that simply doesn't excite. In short, there is too much pristine imagery and not enough acting. The depth of the characters' relationships rely too much on audience inference, which is ironic given how often Hillcoat forcibly directs our sympathies. In the future the director must commit himself more fully to his work lest it disappoint audiences on both ends of the cinematic spectrum.