“I found the whole time [in the writing of The Queen] that I had to dampen down the inflammatory nature of what I was being told,” screenwriter Peter Morgan tells N.Y. Times profiler Sarah Lyall . “You have no idea how much hosing down and cooling of information we had to do. We were shedding and throwing out sensational information the whole time.” A little too much!

In this well-researched, skillfully written New Yorker piece about the life and legacy of the life of Marie-Antoinette, Judith Thurman says the following about Sofia Coppola, director of the empty and for the most part despicable Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.20):

She “is a fashion celebrity and muse who helps to publicize the work of designer friends by wearing it with the teasing glamour of a jaded virgin playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. She has always been drawn to beautiful, trapped girls, who belong to a generation too cynical to unite in rebellion and too cool to unite in conformity. You can see why Coppola thought that the ‘teen Queen’ — a hostage to appearances — would make a good subject. But, rather than play to [Marie-Antoinette’s] forte for impiety, she and an ensemble of virtuoso technicians have produced — despite the odd, postmodern wink — a sanitized, old-fashioned costume picture.”
Thurman’s piece again reminds me what a fascinating film Marie-Antoinette might have been if someone other than Coppola had directed it.
Marie-Antoinette unfolds as if there was such thing as a film school with an unlimited stratospheric budgets for its students, and Coppola was a student in this school and her instructor had said to her one day, “Sofia, I’m giving you a special assignment. I want you to do more than just make a film about Marie-Atoinette — I want you to portray her in the shallowest and most vapid way imaginable. Really, Sofa…I want you to take out everything that would give her depth, resonance, empathy. I want you to gut your film of everything but the emptiest elements. You can do this, Sofia. I have faith in you. Just look within yourself, look at what your own life has been, use your father’s connections…and follow your heart.”

Queer Lady

Stephen Frears‘ The Queen (Miramax, 9.30) will open the New York Film Festival this Friday (9.29), but it’s also been shown at the Venice Film Festival. It would have been okay to write about it after that festival debut, but I’ve been holding back. I’ve decided to let go today because a guy called me a candy-ass the other night for doing so.

I don’t want to put The Queen down — it’s intelligent and restrained, and Helen Mirren gives us a fascinating Queen Elizabeth II — but there’s not a whole lot to it, really. It’s a tidy, occasionally intriguing drama about the push-and-tug between the Queen and Prime Minster Tony Blair (Michael Sheen ) in the wake of the death of Princess Diana in September 1997.
And all we’re left with at the finale is what we knew going in — that the Royals, seen by the British press as cold and unfeeling about the Diana tragedy, were reluctantly obliged to make a show of sharing in the nationwide grief. The movie simply shows us the day-by-day, inch-by-inch process by which this happened.
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After days of frosty disdain and indifference behind the gates of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and yet with Blair delicately but persistently trying to awake the Royals and, as he allegedly expressed it himself, “save these people from themselves”, the emotional urgency of the situation gradually penetrated, and Queen Elizabeth responded with a couple of photo ops and a well-written but somewhat curt TV address.
I was unable to detect any current in this film that lifts it above the realm of a muted inside-the-palace parlor piece. Jolting, searing cinema it’s not. It feels a bit too much like its subject, almost as if the film was co-directed by Queen Elizabeth herself, and it feels a bit too miserly with historical details. And yet it unfolds in a tight, well-ordered, agreeably perfunctory way.
It modestly satisfies, in other words. I didn’t feel burned, just under-nourished, and I’ll be surprised if very many people come out of it with any major beefs.

Mirren seems to “get” Queen Elizabeth in a mildly intimate, as-deep-as-it-goes way. She’s very skilled at conveying that overly hemmed-in, elite-British mindset. But you’re still left with an impression at the end that this woman and her husband, Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Sydney ) are very odd ducks — chilly elitist relics, totally cut off from the hurly burly, existing (“living” seems too intense and palpable a term) in a membrane of protocol.
The Windsor-Mountbattens are as close to the embodiment of “bloodless” as anyone could possibly imagine. By the standards most of us live by today, by the notion that you have to open up and give a little and show a little heart in life’s affairs, they’re all but mummified.
The Queen is not, to me, as satisfying in a passionate, striking and emotionally pronounced way as Mirren’s other Queen Elizabeth performance in that HBO film with Jeremy Irons (which she won an Emmy for). Her performance for Frears is necessarily restrained, dry and reserved, as befits the subject. Which makes for a bit of a problem.
Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth obviously isn’t the gusto type — everyone will get this, of course — but that still leaves us with a character who’s at once interesting and yet a kind of walking mannequin.
The story I would have liked to see would have had a little “live Diana” — maybe some flashbacks with an actress portraying her (Diana never appears in the film, and is only verbally referred to), with a fuller, tastier reenactment of her final night on the earth with Dodi al Fayed — and with sharper exchanges between the Queen and her son about the whole messy thing with Diana and Camilla Parker Bowles, and more telling details about the curiousness and remoteness of the life of the Windsor-Mountbattens.

Just as these people are museum pieces, so is the film to some extent. The fact is that it doesn’t have a lot of “English” — no real visual pizazz or seasoning. With such a bloodless lead character and such an understated story, you’d think Frears would have used some high style to compensate.
I would have preferred more of an exploration of the emotional unruliness and the deterioration of courtly dignity that Diana brought to the Buckingham Palace soap opera. And the appalling lack of good judgment in hooking up with a scumbag like Dodi Al Fayed.
The film reminds us that Queen Elizabeth harbored negative feelings towards Diana, and thought that she had done immense damage to the monarchy. I think she was more correct than incorrect, I feel, in her disdain for Diana’s lack of taste and judgment. And yet the film doesn’t fill us in at all about what happened with Diana, or why — no dirt. It is assumed that we’re fully up to snuff on her romantic dalliances and can render our own judgments. I think that’s a bit of a cop-out.
(I was asked to write a long file about Dodi al Fayed when I was working at People in ’97. After making calls and taking notes for three or four hours, I knew he was basically trash — a spoiled son of a rich man, a guy who didn’t pay his gardener bills. And yet Diana chose him to be her boyfriend. That told me a lot about her, sad to say. The truth is that she was not an especially bright woman.)

Frears seems to have shot what was on the page, it seems, and worked on getting the performances right, but he didn’t seem to have the budget or the time to be expressionistic in an angular, big-screen sense. The Queen feels television-y. This isn’t The Hit, Bloody Kids, The Grifters or High Fidelity. It’s not even up to the level of Mrs. Henderson Presents. It’s more in the realm of Prick Up Your Ears or The Snapper, that British-Irish TV film he did about the young girl having a baby.
Frears is a seasoned pro, but at what point does the fine art of shorthand, less-is- more storytelling — the notion that it’s always better to show a bit less than what viewers might want to see — become dramatically stultifying? The Queen skirts the edge of this.
The most emotionally moving moment is when a big antlered stag stops and peers at Queen Elizabeth as she’s waiting to be picked up after her jeep stalls in the middle of a river in Scotland. It’s the only time she really lets it out during the whole film. I felt much more from the Queen’s relationship with this animal than in her relationship with Blair or her son or her husband or her aide or her mother. Really.
Underneath the story of Blair managing to goad Queen Elizabeth into showing a bit of her emotional self (or at least pretending to do that), The Queen seems like a quietly persuasive argument for the abolishment of the Royals, which is why, I’m guessing, it’s struck some chords with the British. But I wonder how average Americans will respond, or if they’ll respond at all.

The question is, what is it that we, the audience, derive from learning that once, and only once, a famous woman of state who seems to be the most emotionally remote and rigidly-mannered public figure on the face of the globe let down her guard a wee bit and showed a bit of humanity and softened her rectitude… but only after days and days of people and newspaper headlines saying, “What is wrong with this woman? Where is her heart?”
Keeping it all inside with a stiff upper lip is not a recipe for emotional health. Most of us know that…except for Queen Elizabeth, it seems. Maybe she’s learned at the end of this drama that it’s better to let the heart show a bit more…fine. Good for her if she came to this place. But I wasn’t entirely sure at the end of the film that she had.
In her final scene with Blair, she seems to be mostly shaking her head a bit quizzically and saying “I don’t know what happened, frankly.” It confused her, threw her off balance. What, then, does Queen Elizabeth’s momentary softening have to do with the price of rice in our own lives? Not very much, if you ask me.
Incidentally: Frears uses some footage to suggest a brief coverage of the Paris car accident that took the life of Princess Diana and Dodi al Fayed, but no one “plays” these two. (Not in the print I saw, at least.) And yet below is a photo of Frears directing a couple sitting in the back seat on a black car — a couple that looks very much like Diana and Dodi — the blonde hairdo looks exactly like hers, and the guy seems to be of Middle Eastern descent. It suggests that Diana and Dodi were in fact cast, portrayed and filmed, and then Frears cut the footage.

Four days ago TMZ’s Claude Brodesser-Akner (where did the “Akner” come from?) wrote a short piece about the whacking of Bradford Simpson, the top guy at Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Appian Way. A big reason Leo fired the poor guy, Brodesser-Akner reports, is that “lots of interesting stuff was in development [at Appian Way], but little has come to fruition.” Brodesser-Akner mentions Appian Way’s interest in developing a film about LSD guru Timothy Leary , (with the idea of Leo eventually playing him), hiring playwright Craig Lucas (The Dying Gaul) and Leary archivist Michael Horowitz to develop the screenplay. Hold on, hold on…I know more about Appian Way and the Leary project than Brodesser-Akner. Leo’s interest in the Leary thing has been festering for over two years. I wrote a short piece about the whole magilla last March. Here’s the key observational quote: “There’s not a lot of focus at Appian Way…Leo is all over the map…[Appian Way] doesn’t exactly have a center-of-gravity thing going on.”

“‘What’s human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?'” — alleged Mel Gibson remark following last night’s Apocalypto screening at Austin’s Fantasticfest. The film, which Harry Knowles saw twice yesterday, is about big bad Mayans (aggressive, militaristic) conquering and mauling a smaller and simpler grass-hut society.
So there’s the critique of the U.S. and the Bushies — an idea to hold onto — but the thing that seemed to have really impressed everyone last night are the B-movie action-driven aspects.
“After the second screening, I have to say it plays even better,” Knowles has written. “The themes about how the industrial needs of a civilization, even a primitive one, lay the groundwork for moral, societal and physical decay really begin to come out. Then there’s just the pure B-movie pulp of an action film. I heard at least five people afterwards say that it was a Mayan Western.
“Louis Black, editor of the Austin Chronicle, was heard to say, many times, that “it’s like a Terrence Malick film with a B-movie plot!” — and if you know Louis, you know how heartfelt and excited that was. One of the reasons Louis Black and I are friends and have known each other for the last 30 years is that we love High Art and Low Art. And most of all we love it when the two converge. This is a B-movie with the soul of a great artist and the production values of the best of Hollywood.”

Mel Gibson, wearing a mask and a wig so he wouldn’t be noticed, visited two Oklahoma towns on Thursday and Friday to attend test screenings of Apocalypto, which Disney will release on 12.8. The Friday screening played before “a mostly American-Indian audience” — the film is about an ancient Mayan culture — at the Riverwind Casino in Goldsby, Oklahoma. The Thursday screening happened at Cameron University in Lawton. If anyone who saw Apocalypto at either screening wants to share, please get in touch. It’s strange that Gibson would wear a “mask”, no?

Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20) has been seen on the Left Coast, and it’s “damn good,” according to a certain eyeballer. The word is that some kind of limited peek will be given to a select group within a few days. That doesn’t mean anyone’s necessarily going to write anything about it straight away. Let’s see how it plays out.

There’s a certain John Fordian echo in Flags of Our Fathers that I won’t explain but which I loved hearing about this morning. If the film has a primary focus, it’s about the battle between war legend and war reality — the space between the legend of battlefield heroism as promoted in political speeches and by war memorial statues, and the reality of what it actually is for the men who lay their lives on the line.
But the comment that really raised my eyebrows was a thought passed along to this witness from a voice in the Eastwood/Warner Bros. camp, to wit: as good and admirable as Fathers is, Letters From Iwo Jima — Eastwood’s lesser-budgeted film about the Japanese forces who fought the Americans on that volcanic island in early ’45, and which is acted entirely in Japanese — is “a better film.”
This is obviously just an opinion, just one guy talking, etc. But when you consider the persistent questions about whether Letters will in fact be released in December ’06 or sometime in January ’07, well….what are people thinking? Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima are joined-at-the-hip movies — same war backdrop, same battle, same director, same color scheme. Some of the same incidents, according to Peter Bart‘s 9.3.06 Variety piece, are depicted in both.
How, given all this, can they not be considered as a single unified work? What person with any respect for what Eastwood has apparently constructed here would argue for Flags to be released on 10.20.06 and Letters to be released in January ’07, which would mean that the latter wouldn’t qualify as a ’06 Best Picture candi- date? Especially given that guy’s view that the Japanese film is the “better” work?

I reviewed Paul Haggis‘s Flags script last April — here’s a portion of what I wrote:
“Flags of Our Fathers is about the loneliness and apartness of young soldiers living in two worlds — the godawful battle-of-Iwo-Jima world where everything is ferocious and pure and absolute, and the confusing, lost-in-the-shuffle world of back home, where almost everything feels off and incomplete.
“There are many, many characters in Flags but it’s basically about three of the six young Marines who raised the American flag on a pole atop Mt. Surabachi during the Iwo Jima fighting in early 1945, resulting in a photo that was sent around the world and came to symbolize the valor of U.S. soldiers.
“Three of the flag-raisers died in battle soon after, but the three survivors — John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe), Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford ) — were sent home to take bows and raise funds and build morale on a big public relations tour arranged by the military.
“And the film — the script, I mean — is primarily about their vague feelings of alienation from their admirers and even, to some extent, their families. And vice versa.
“Heroes, a narrator says at the end, are something we need and create for ourselves. But the soldiers don’t get it or want it. They only feel for each other. They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends.”

There was a Big Unaddressed Element in Michael Fleming‘s 9.21 Variety story about Crash director Paul Haggis suddenly abandoning Against All Enemies, a feature adaptation of Richard Clarke‘s best-seller about the roots of 9/11, and his jumping into “talks” to direct Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron in The Garden of Elah .
The BUE is why did Against All Enemies, a Sony project with Sean Penn playing Clarke, suddenly disassemble? An ICM source close to the situation says Fleming’s story creates a misleading impression since “there’s always been this little movie” — i.e., the Garden of Elah project — “that Haggis has wanted to do before Enemies, which, for the longest time, has been set for a March or April ’07 start date.”
Haggis never returns calls, but here’s a scenario involving Penn. A person who usually hears reliable info passed part of this along (he first heard it around the time of the Telluride Film Festival) and the core of it has been confirmed again today by another party in a position to know.
Sony execs, it’s being speculated, finally saw a finished version of All The King’s Men in July/August, realized they almost certainly had a bomb on their hands, and decided this was imminent partly due to Penn’s less-than-charismatic lead performance as Willie Stark. (The $3,709,000 it’s expected to earn this weekend means it has bombed, and as much as Penn’s performance has been admired by some criitcs, lovable and charismatic he’s not.)
This determination led to attempts to try and figure a way to uncast Penn as the Enemies lead. One way to push him out was to renegotiate (i.e., reduce) his fee. (Before he won the Best Actor Oscar for Mystic River Penn was probably struggling in the under $5 million range, and after the Oscar he probably got his quote up to the $8 to $10 million range…maybe.) Penn’s CAA agents balked and wouldn’t reduce it, and Haggis stood by Penn, and so Sony pulled the plug.
The Penn-wouldn’t-reduce-his-fee-so-Sony-pulled-the-plug story is precisely how it was passed along to me. The rest is informed speculation. If it turns out to be true it could be read as another instance of a big studio saying no to out-of-proportion demands from a big-name movie star.
Another possible factor is that Sony had developed concerns about the box-office potential of Against All Enemies, given the decent but less-than-explosive responses to United 93 and World Trade Center.
Sony may have also developed cold feet due to the political storm that came out of the anti-Clinton-administration inaccuracies in ABC TV’s Path to 9/11, which covered some of the same territory as the Clarke book, and perhaps because they saw a potential for troublesome controversy in Against All Enemies, which had onscreen speaking parts in an early screenplay for Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney (but not President Bush).
Fleming reported that Warner Independent Pictures will distribute Garden of Elah (which is ashitty title, by the way…what does “Elah” mean?) domestically, because WB owns the underlying material from which Haggis wrote the script.
Elah is an adaptation of Mark Boal‘s Playboy magazine piece “Death and Dishonor” about a mysterious disappearance of an Iraq War veteran.
“Jones will play a career soldier whose son mysteriously goes AWOL, shortly after returning to the U.S. from the front lines in Iraq,” Fleming’s story reads. “Theron will play a local police detective who helps him get to the bottom of the soldier’s disappearance.
“Pic is a fictionalized version of a true story, in which retired Army vet named Lanny Davis uncovered that his son had been murdered during a night of carousing. He’d been attacked by members of his own platoon who were still hopped up from a ferociously violent battlefield tour in Baghdad.”

“But for the most profoundly cinematic/ thematic take on our shared global dilemma, nothing compares to Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27.06). It’s the apotheosis of the multi-story, meta-tragic approach Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga have been perfecting with Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Here the scope is wider, the craftsmanship gives Martin Scorsese a run for his money, and the emotional, political and philosophical implications are devastating yet, in their simple, honest way, reassuringly humanistic as well.” — L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss on the recently-launched “Reel Deal” site.

Postscript to yesterday’s riff about Pete Hammond‘s what-about-Zodiac? piece: a certain know-it-all is saying there’s no way Paramount is going to platform-release David Fincher‘s drama in late December in New York and Los Angeles because they don’t want anything else in the soup that might dilute their efforts, even a little bit, to get World Trade Center a Best Picture nomination.
The likelihood of this happening is just about zilch — ask anyone, it’s not in the cards — but WTC is the only pure-Paramount, pure-Brad Grey, pure-Gail Berman contender and apparently it’s a point of pride. Flags of Our Fathers and Dreamgirls are, first and foremost, DreamWorks productions, and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel isn’t pure-Paramount either but Paramount Vantage.
Zodiac, a deep-dish procedural about the hunt for a serial killer in the late ’60s and early ’70s, is not the sort of film that tends to attract Best Picture talk, but it might be good enough to wind up on some ten-best lists, and there’s a chance that this or that element (Robert Downey‘s supporting performance is said to be special) could be saluted by this or that group. But Paramount doesn’t want it released before 12.31.06, this guy is saying, because of a Quixotic dream that World Trade Center might lasso a Best Picture nomination.
How titanically lame is that?
The brilliant David Poland has written on his Hot Blog that “Paramount will NOT release Fincher’s Zodiac for Oscar contention this year. I would bet much on this. They not only have too many awards movies already, but World Trade Center has been given high priority, while Dreamgirls and Flags are expected to make their own gravy, the charge being led by Terry Press. There is less than 1 percent chance that Paramount would ever risk WTC for the sake of Zodiac. I know it gives bored people something to talk about, but it ain’t happening.” Listen to the tone in his words. Poland is smugly satisfied and content that a David Fincher movie is, he believes, going to be kept out of the 2006 Derby for the sake of Oliver Stone’s not-bad 9.11 movie. This news actually PLEASES him. What the…?

Hold up on those wildcat Friday numbers from back east and consider this studio projection: (1) Jackass: Number Two will end up #1 with roughly $27,317,000 for the weekend; (2) Jet Li’s Fearless will end up with $9,716,000; (3) The Gridiron Gang will end up a hair below that with $9,617,000; (3) Flyboys will come in with $5,042,000; (4) Everyone’s Hero, $4,823,000, (5) The Black Dahlia, $4,358,000; and All The King’s Men will finish with $3,709,000…dead.

While speaking to Factory Girl star Sienna Miller, Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye makes mention of the fact that “those who have seen early rough-cut versions” — partly a reference to yours truly — “tell me the performances of Sienna and leading man Guy Pearce, as Warhol, are brilliant. So much so that studio chief Harvey Weinstein plans a year-end Oscar campaign for them.”

I never said anything rock-solid about Harvey planning to release Factory Girl, so presumably Baz has done some digging of his own. That or Sienna said so.
Here’s how I put it in mid-August: “I know award-quality when I see it, and Sienna Miller’s capturing of Edie Sedgwick totally rates. It may be the most eerily accurate reviving of a dead person I’ve ever seen in a film. And yet Miller projects dimension and gravitas in spades — an unmistakable sadness and snap and aliveness like nothing I’ve gotten from an actress in any movie so far this year. She isn’t just a dead ringer for the real McCoy — she gets her fluttery debutante laugh, that mixture of Warholian cool and little-girl terror, the giddy euphoria, the cracked voice. It’s more than convincing — it’s a kind of rebirthing.”