With the overwhelmingly negative reaction to his lead performance in Napoleon, Joaquin Phoenix is hopelessly stuck between a rock and a hard place — people are sick of watching him play weird and sullen wackos but they also won’t accept any attempt he might make to play normal. His doleful nut persona can no longer be used without spurring mass derision on the part of Joe and Jane Popcorn.

“Joaquin Phoenix’s One-Man Cult of Depressive Method-Acting Vanity,” posted by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman:

“Joacquin Pheonix’s character in I’m Still Here is an actor who replaces performance with the actorly exhibitionism of mental illness. And that, in a way, has become the story of Joaquin Phoenix as an actor.

“Whether he’s taking on the role of one more morose everyman dweeb, a Batman villain, or Napoleon, he plays severely damaged people, but what he’s really doing is projecting the dramatic image of himself as an actor reaching into the lower depths.

“On occasion, he transcends the self-focused gloom and brings off something miraculous. I thought he was genuinely great in Joker, in part because the director, Todd Phillips, knew how to build and sculpt Phoenix’s performance; let’s hope that he helps Phoenix bring off a comparable feat opposite Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux.

“But as films like Napoleon and Beau Is Afraid reveal all too clearly, Joaquin Phoenix has become an actor who needs to be rescued from his worst impulses. Too often, he sinks into his own torpor, steamrolling his movies with the depressive wacked song of himself.”

For some reason I began to watch Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time in America, which I’d seen twice in ’84 — the truncated 139-minute Ladd Company version, which was moderately awful, and then the sadder, more meditative 229-minute version, which played (and still plays) much better**.

Last night’s viewing, alas, didn’t go as well. I mostly felt bored and repelled, and then I started fast-forwarding from time to
time, and then more frequently. I eventually gave up.

My primary blockage was due to feekings of absolute loathing for the main characters…Robert De Niro‘s Noodles (imagine grappling with that absurd nickname throughout your life) plus all the other weaselly gunsels and thugs (James Woods, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Treat Williams, Danny Aiello, James Hayden and especially the repulsive William Forsythe).

I hated the two gratuitous rape scenes, both perpetrated by Noodles with poor Elizabeth McGovern and Tuesday Weld suffering the assaults. Ennio Morricone wrote a moving, melancholy score, but I just felt bored and soiled by the damn thing…having to suffer the company of so many ugly and distasteful animals and sleazoids.

The 269-minute version deserves a certain “respect,” but I will never, ever re-watch this film at any length…life is too short. It’s a beast.

The version that screened at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival ran 251 minutes…imagine.

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Posted on 9.10.11: Christopher Plummer‘s beguiling performance in Mike Mills‘ Beginners (i.e., a 70ish dad who decides to come out and live his waning years as a gay man) has looked like a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor Oscar all along.

But after seeing Plummer charm and electrify and ham it up and speechify in gloriously boozy Shakespearean fashion in Barrymore, which I saw a couple of hours ago at the Bell Lightbox, I’m all but convinced he has the Oscar in the bag.

Barrymore basically captures (and visually enhances to some extent) the stage show that Plummer performed in New York and Stratford in the mid ’90s, and lately performed again in Toronto earlier this year.

As long as the Academy sees this low-budgeted Canadian film, that is. Once they all see it, the game will be pretty much over. Because Plummer isn’t just portraying the late John Barrymore, and is so doing reanimating all the flamboyance and lamentations and exaltations of a once-great actor’s career in his last year of life, he’s also playing, in a sense, himself. There are, after all, certain parallels.

Add this performance to Beginners plus Plummer’s turn in David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and he’s going to be awfully hard to beat.

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I’m thinking of Woody Allen’s remark about the face of one his aunts looking “like something you’d find in a live bait store.” Woody knew that the funniest jokes are the cruelest and that every joke had to have a point. He was saying that life was grim and suppressive in ethnic, working-class Brooklyn, where they sure didn’t breed them for beauty.

Ditto to a somewhat lesser extent in Westfield, New Jersey, where I suffered through my childhood and mid-teen years.

When I was young almost all of the older people I ran into (suburban parents, teachers, merchants, civil servants) were not, shall we say, abundantly attractive. Certainly compared to the on-screen talent. None of them looked like Kirk Douglas or JFK or Dirk Bogarde or Jean Simmons or Elizabeth Ashley or Tony Curtis or Jeanne Moreau or Burt Lancaster.

I’m not saying our adult-aged neighbors were generally ugly but they certainly seemed homely and stessed and spiritually downcast and hardened by age or drink or cigarettes. Whatever glow or promise they had as youths had certainly been ground out of them. Well past their prime.

The men looked just as morose and imprisoned and regimentally dressed as the women. They were tidily or correctly attired and drove nice cars, but to me they seemed to behave like inmates of some huge, sprawling suburban concentration camp.

I was struck by this Times Square photo because this is what so many mothers, teachers and grandparents dressed like. (The Pat Nixon-like woman in the middle is clearly a Republican.) The idea seemed to be “our faces might look grim and puffy or hardened and resigned to an unwelcome fate, but our frumpy department-store clothing completes the effect.”

it was enough to put you off the idea of growing up and becoming an adult yourself.

From my gloomy, lemme-outta-here, eight-year-old perspective the deal seemed to be “if you study hard and follow the rules and obey your parents and get into a good college you too can grow up to look hemmed-in and compromised and dress frumpy…when you grow up you too can develop homely, chubby faces and adhere to the dreary social order of things…but only if you work hard and get really good grades. You don’t want to be left behind!

Posted on 2.22.12:

Friendo: “Neil Burger’s The Marsh King’s Daughter (Lionsgate/Roadside, 11.3) is ostensibly a thriller, and I love thrillers. Good director, talented stars — but Bezos wants $19.99 to RENT the damn thing.”

HE to Friendo: “The combination of Daisy (‘who’s Cary Grant again?’) Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn plus that awful title (who would want anything to do with a marsh king, much less his daughter?) sounds lethal.”

Supporting player #1: “So this guy rules the marshlands, you’re saying? Residents pay tribute, owe him their lives, work for him, fear him?”

Supporting player #2: “Yeah, pretty much.”

Supporting player #1: “I’m taking a film crew into the marshlands next month. We have permits from the state film commission but…what are you saying, we also need permission to shoot in this guy’s territory? We need to butter him up, pay him off?”

Supporting player #2: “I wouldn’t recommend not doing that. He’s a ruthless, powerful cat. You need to show obeisance.”

On the morning of Sunday, 3.25.62, N.Y. Times readers may have scanned a mild little Tom Wicker story about President Jack Kennedy having briefly chatted with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the El Dorado Country Club during a weekend visit to the Palm Desert area.

Quoting press secretary Pierre Salinger, Wicker reported that the Kennedy-Ike discussion had lasted “fifty-one minutes.”

Wicker’s story discreetly observed that JFK was “spending the weekend nearby.” What Wicker meant but was professionally obliged to ignore wasn’t “newsworthy” by Times standards, but was certainly legend-worthy. For the Palm Desert dish that Wicker side-stepped was comprised of three tasty intrigues.

One, Kennedy was staying at Bing Crosby’s sprawling, Spanish–style home located within the grounds of Palm Desert’s Ironwood Country Club,

Two, he had decided on the Crosby estate and against staying at Frank Sinatra’s nearby desert home after being told (by either J. Edgar Hoover or Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy or both) that Sinatra had been maintaining close ties with certain mafia figures, and that Kennedy couldn’t afford the tainted association.

And three, that JFK and Marilyn Monroe had not only attended a party the night before (Saturday, 3.24) at the Crosby estate but had spent the night together at a separate cottage on the property.

This is how things worked in the Kennedy era. Big-time, well-connected reporters didn’t touch this kind of material. That was the understanding.

Three days ago I began tearing through Glenn Frankel‘s “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,” an essential, smoothly readable history (published in February 2017) of the legendary Carl Foreman.

The book focuses on Hollywood’s traumatic, ethically fraught Red Scare era of the late ’40s and ’50s, and particularly the trials and tribulations of this once-blacklisted producer and author of High Noon‘s allegorical screenplay as well as several other classic, hard-hitting films (Champion, Home of the Brave, Young Man with a Horn, The Men, A Hatful of Rain, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Victors).

I thought I knew the High Noon saga top to bottom, but Frankel’s well-researched book taught me quite a few things.

I finished it last night, and immediately wanted to re-watch Lionel Chetwynd‘s Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents (’02), a two-hour PBS documentary that dug into more or less the same Foreman saga.

I hadn’t seen Chetwynd’s film since an invitational Academy screening 21 years ago, but I keenly recall the excitement and controversy.

The controversy stemmed from Chetwynd’s doc having delivered a persuasive, highly damning portrait of High Noon producer Stanley Kramer, who went on to direct a string of urgent and respected social-political dramas including The Defiant Ones, On The Beach, Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg.

Chetwynd’s film (assembled from Foreman’s corner) accused Kramer of cowardice and personal betrayal, and there wasn’t much of an argument to be made as Chetwynd had done his homework and then some.

I recall praising Darkness at High Noon in my then four-year-old column, which was then berthed at reel.com. The film is narrated by Richard Crenna with Foreman’s first-hand account read by Richard McGonagle.

My initial search this morning yielded a YouTube version that was posted a year ago by Carl’s daughter, Dr. Amanda Foreman. Alas, it looks like hell due to having been horizontally taffy-pulled. Chetwynd’s original version was composed in 1.37.

I’m figuring that a version that represents the original aspect ratio has to be accessible. (A MUBI version has disappeared.) I’ve just reached out to Chetwynd, etc.

From Todd McCarthy’s 4.10.02 Variety review of Chetwynd’s film: “Pic pivots on the charge that Kramer essentially robbed Foreman of his rightful credit as producer of High Noon after the latter had left the U.S. for England to escape the snare of the blacklist (his writing credit was protected by the Writers Guild).

“After firmly establishing Foreman’s right to that credit on what was bannered ‘A Stanley Kramer Production’ and demolishing the long-standing rumor that the film’s much-noted cutaways to clocks to reassert its real-time structure were not in the script but added in post-production, Chetwynd backtracks to relate his protagonist’s biography, from Chicago upbringing and apprenticeship in Frank Capra‘s WWII filmmaking unit to rising late ’40s screenwriting rep on Home of the Brave, Champion and The Men.

“That outspoken Hollywood conservative Chetwynd should be taking up the cause of former Communist Party member Foreman may raise an eyebrow or two. But the doc assumes a vigorously pro-Foreman position not only in opposition to HUAC but especially against [Kramer’s] alleged weak-spined duplicities.

“Kramer’s family is now disputing the film’s characterization of him, and while his side of the story goes unrepresented here, the sort of thorough documentation Chetwynd offers on Foreman’s behalf will be hard to refute.”

I had gotten to know Chetwynd in ’94 and early ’95 while writing a long Los Angeles magazine article titled “Right Face“. It focused on various Hollywood actors and screenwriters who had experienced varying degrees of suspicion and discrimination due to being conservatives in an overwhelmingly liberal town.

They’re like racehorses in the stall, going “whurhr-huhr-huhr!” and kicking the wall and champing at the bit…“we want to push back at all those elite industry know-it-alls and Telluride tastemakers so badly!…we can’t wait to set them straight.”

…but not always.

There are days when I feel like Dennis Hopper‘s Tom Ripley in The American Friend — “I seem to know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is.”

But that’s just the proverbial doubt dog tugging at my overcoat. Mostly I feel fine.

Thanksgiving dinner at Jett and Cait’s was warm and cool and soothing, and familiar in the best ways imaginable.