Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling, a 1920s kidnapping melodrama starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, was going to open on November 7th. Now Universal is announcing a new date that’s two weeks earlier. The limited release will be on Friday, 10.24, and the wide on Friday, 10.31.
Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling.
There’s no ambiguity about the title, by the way, as was indicated during the Cannes Film Festival. Eastwood’s films will definitely be called Changeling, despite that festival rumble about a possible switch to The Exchange and producer Brian Grazer having toldVariety‘s Anne Thompson during the festival that he “thinks” it’ll be called that.
My reaction after catching the Cannes makeup screening: “Longish and leisurely paced. Delivers a keen sense of humanity and moral clarity. Offers a complex but rewarding story. Really nice music, as usual, that lends a feeling of warmth and assurance. Superbly acted, shot, and paced (not every movie has to feel like a machine gun).
“More than a few top-notch performances — Jolie’s leading the pack. A movie that understands itself and its subject matter completely. Some overly black or white-ish characterizations, but not to the extent that they bug you horribly. Aimed at adults (i.e., those 25 and over with the ability/willingness to process this sort of thing). Not a great film, but a very fine one. Terrible last line, though.”
“When Changeling was translated into French as L’Echange, many folks liked The Exchange better. Director Clint Eastwood was noncommital at the press conference, but [producer Brian] Grazer thinks it will stay Changeling in the U.S.” — from Anne Thompson‘s Variety column, posted a little while ago.
If Grazer “thinks” it will stay Changeling, that means he’s not 100% sure, which means the title is in play. I think The Exchange mildly sucks myself. It sounds dry and underdescriptive — close to meaningless . It suggests an allusion to some sort of financial-barter transaction rather than a switch. And even something that clearly refers to one young boy replacing another doesn’t sound right to me, having now seen Eastwood’s film. Changeling without a “The” is probably the one to stick with.
The moral undercurrent in Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys — a quietly devastating Turkish family drama about guilt, adultery and lots of Biblical thunderclaps — is in every frame. It’s about people doing wrong things, one leading to another in a terrible chain, and trying to face or at least deal with the consequences but more often trying to lie and deny their way out of them. Good luck with that.
Hatice Aslan, Yavuz Bingol in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys.
I was hooked from the get-go — gripped, fascinated. I was in a fairly excited state because I knew — I absolutely knew — I was seeing the first major film of the festival. Three Monkeys is about focus and clarity in every sense of those terms, but it was mainly, for me, about stunning performances — minimalist acting that never pushes and begins and ends in the eyes who are quietly hurting every step of the way.
It’s a very dark and austere film that unfolds at a purposeful but meditative (which absolutely doesn’t mean “slow”) pace, taking its time and saying to the audience, “Don’t worry, this is going somewhere…we’re not jerking around so pay attention to the steps.”
A 50ish politician named Servet (Ercan Kesal), fighting off sleep as he drives on a narrow country road, hits a man and kills him. Freaked, he drives off without calling anyone. The next day he convinces the quiet-mannered Eyup (Yavuz Bingol), his longtime driver who’s abut the same age, to confess to the crime and do the jail term, promising to give him a lot of money in addition to paying his salary to his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan), and son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) while he’s in stir.
Except Servet soon takes advantage of Eyup’s absence of having it off with Hacer in a what-the-fuck recreational sense. (He’s a politician, after all.) The plot thickens when Ismail, a morose downhead to begin with, learns of the affair and starts twitching with anger and grief and guilt, not knowing what to do or say. Then Eyup gets out of jail and immediately starts to sense the after-vibe. Then we realize that Hacer hasn’t indulged with the boss out of lust or boredom or to keep him sweet but because she’s obsessively in love with the creep. (Good God.) Then matters get even worse.
Every step of the way you’re reading the characters, absorbing what they’re feeling or looking for, guessing what they might do, feeling their vulnerability, pulling for them, wanting to see it all come out right or at least end in a way that won’t result in more pain or ruination.
Ceylan and his cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki are into filling their frames with muted but luscious browns, grays, blacks (lots of black) and faded greens. The visuals are such a bath that Three Monkeys almost deserves a standing ovation for this alone. But it’s the unstinting sense of engagement with the moral cost of what’s being done and lied about and covered up that matters. It’s heavy material, all right, but it’s not a reach to call it the stuff of classic tragedy. The script (by Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kesal) is right up Will Shakespeare’s alley.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
And ohhh, that thunder! Four or five times it growls and rumbles like God’s angry symphony. Lightning, too, at the very end.
I think Three Monkeys is fundamentally a political film because it’s telling an eternal political truth, which is that people with money and power rarely pay for their wrong-doings — they simply arrange for someone down the food chain to take the rap. And then sometimes they fuck the rap-taker’s wife for good measure.
The (mostly) static camera work and powerful quietude of Three Monkeys reminded me every so often of Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which played here last year and won the Palme D’Or.
I’m not sure if Three Monkeys is a masterpiece — I’m still sifting it through — but I knew all along I was watching an exceptional, very powerful, high-end thing. It’s the kind of film that plays like gangbusters inside the Grand Palais but will barely be seen in commercial cinemas, and may even irritate the ADD crowd. It’s not going to do much business in the States, I’m guessing — some critics, I’m told, were saying they bored with it as they talked things through at the bottom of the steps outside the Salle Debussy — but it looks to me like a sure contender for the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme D’Or.
You absolutely have to put Hatice Aslan at the very top of the list of Best Actress winners here. I don’t care what comes along between now and Friday the 23rd — her performance is knockout stuff. Ditto Yavuz Bingol for Best Actor. I read somewhere that Ceylan, in the tradition of Robert Bresson, doesn’t use professional actors; I read somewhere else that he uses friends who are actors– just not famous ones. I’m sure someone will point out what an ignoramus I am for not knowing this stuff chapter and verse.
It’s obviously early to be talking Palme D’Or winners, but when a film has the Unmistakable Right Stuff, you know it right away. Moral fortitude, razor-sharp vision and stylistic sure-footedness of this calibre are impossible to ignore.
Originally a photographer, Ceylan seems to me like the Satyajit Ray of Turkey. His hallmarks, to quote from a recent Turkish Daily News article, are “a strong minimalist shooting style, themes of alienation and” — I didn’t know this until recently — “strong autobiographical elements.” The piece adds that Ceylan’s cinema “is not for those who view cinema as a form of entertainment, but for festival-followers who revere art-house filmmaking.”
Except — hello? – great art-house movies are something very close to entertainment. They take you out of yourself and into a realm that adds to your empathy and understanding of life’s infinite sadness. They turn you on with their mesmerizing style and condensed capturings of instantly recognizable human folly. When films of this sort really deliver they satisfy in ways that stay with you for decades. They add meat to your bones.
Wednesday, 5.14: Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness (comp.). Thursday, 5.15: Pablo Trapero‘s Leonera and Ari Folman‘s Waltz with Bashir (comp.) along with Mark Osborne and John Stevenson‘s Kung Fu Panda (non-comp), Steve McQueen‘s Hunger and de Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry‘s Tokyo! (Un Certain Regard). Friday, 5.16: Arnaud Desplechin‘s Un Conte de Noel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Uc Mayman (comp.) along with Allison Thompson‘s The Third Wave (Seance Speciale) and James Toback‘s Tyson (Un Certain Regard). Saturday, 5.17: Walter Salle‘s Linha de Passe, and de Jia Zhangke‘s Er Shi Si Cheng JI (comp.) along with Woody Allen‘s Vicky Cristina Barcelona and de Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser (non-comp.), and Daniel Leconte‘s C√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢est dur D√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢etre Aime par des Cons (Seance Speciale).
Sunday, 5.18Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorra and Brilliante Mondoza‘s Serbis (comp.), plus Steven Spielberg‘s non-comp Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Indiana Jones et le Royaume du Crane de Cristal) at 1 pm, plus Wong Kar Wai‘s Ashes of Time Redux (Seance Speciale) plus Raymond Depardon‘s La Vie Moderne and Antonio Campos‘ Afterschool (Un Certain Regard). Monday, 5.19: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Le Silence de Lorna and James Gray‘s Two Lovers (comp.), plus an hommage for Manuel de Oliviera, plus Pierre Scholler‘s Versailles and Ruben Ostlund‘s De Ofrivilliga (Un Certain Regard) plus Marco Tullio Giordana‘s Sanguepazzo, referred to parenthetically as Une Histoire Italienne (Seance Speciale). Tuesday, 5.20: Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling and Kornel Mundruczo‘s Delta (comp.) plus Emir Kusturica‘s Maradona by Kusturica (non-comp.), plus Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Terence Davies‘ Of Time and the City (Seance Speciale), plus Amat Escalante‘s Los Bastardos and Jean-Stephane Sauvaire‘s Johnny Mad Dog (Un Certain Regard).
Wednesday, 5.21: Steven Soderbergh‘s Che and Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (comp.), plus Jennifer Lynch‘s Surveillance (non-comp.), plus Quentin Tarantino‘s Lecon de Cinema (Seance Speciale) plus Bent Hamer‘s O√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ Horten and Matheus Nachtergaele‘s A Festa da Menina Morta (Un Certain Regard).
That’s eight days’ worth — enough for now. I’ll get to Thursday and Friday’s films (5.22 and 5.23) tomorrow or later today. They include Phillipe Garrel‘s La Frontiere de L’Aube, Atom Egoyan‘s Adoration, Charlie Kaufman‘s Syndoche, New York, Laurent Cantet‘s Entre Les Murs, Wim Wenders‘ Palermo Shooting, and Abel Ferrara‘s Chelsea on the Rocks.
The Clinton team’s hammer-home message of Barack Obama being a :paragon of elitism” vs. Hillary Clinton’s touted rep as a holder of “testicular fortitude” is, of course, absurd. But tell that to your average Indiana or North Carolina Enquirer-reading prole. This is bad. This is less bad. This is good.
Iron Man (Paramount, 5.2) boasts a perfect Robert Downey performance and delivers some moderately satisfying summer-movie highs in a right-down-the- middle sort of way, but it’s been over-praised. It does a lot more clomping around than dancing or shuffling, and we’ve all had enough clomp to last a lifetime. This movie doesn’t deserve a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 94% from the regulars and an 88% from the elites. It’s more a B-plus type of thing. Which is not a put-down.
Iron Man is fine as far as it goes, but too often I felt underwhelmed. I was never twitching in agony, but the advance word had suggested it might lift me out of my chair. Forget it. I sat there with my legs crossed going “uh-huh, yeah, not bad, down with it, okay, pretty good, decent,” etc. All I’m saying is that the praisers need to take it easy. Iron Man is not some instant orgasm device. It’s okay entertainment, but it isn’t the least bit wonderful or groundbreaking or head-turning so…you know, calm down.
The two big gripes are (a) it slavishly follows the superhero-movie origin-story template, and I’m wondering why so many critics are so unbothered by this S.O.S. being trotted out again; and (b) why isn’t anyone saying anything about the jingoistic get-the-dumb-terrorists plot that John McCain or Dick Cheney will be totally delighted by if and when they see it? That’s supposed to be what….cool? We all need to climb into the Bush tank for a couple hours in order to enjoy this thing?
For my money Iron Man is a little too similar to….I was going to say Chris Nolan‘s Batman Begins, but we’ve all sat through the same formulaic superhero crap too many times.
Once again the affluent superhero-to-be has pronounced character flaws. Once more he’s oblivious to the fact that a good girl/good guy who’s been his/her friend all along is an ideal romantic match. Once again the superhero-to-be comes to an awakening, finding his alter ego and new purpose in life, by suffering a terrible trauma. Once again it takes a while for the superhero to perfect his superhero technology. Once more an older, vaguely sinister business colleague is revealed to be a villain at the end of Act Two. The superhero’s modest and self-effacing best friend stand by the superhero through thick and thin, occasionally dispensing sage advice and always coming through at some crucial moment. The superhero is nearly done in at one point — close to death — but he will rally like a champ, getting all of his strength back and then some in order to have a major face-off with the big villain at the end of Act Three. Thrillingly, lots of expensive stuff will get smashed or burned or blown to bits
It’s. The. Same. Old. Shit. Except it’s Downey as the superhero, and that means a cool-edge factor that you don’t usually get with films of this sort. I could go on and on about this but we’d all rather hang with Downey inside one of these big clanky superhero flicks than…I don’t know, a more straightforward actor. But it’s not all Downey. It’s also a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges playing a baddie, and I was bored stiff. I’ve seen and processed everything this guy has ever done and he just doesn’t have any fresh tricks left in his knapsack. Gwynneth Paltrow is more likable in this than in anything she’s been in since Shakespeare in Love. Terrence Howard is as auto-piloty here as he’s been in everything he’s made since Hustle and Flow.
Cheers to Jon Favreau for having developed his chops to the point where he can throw one of these films together and give it (by way of casting Downey or whatever) a little English and extra-ness. And for losing all that weight. But there’s no song begin sung inside this film. It’s just another big fucking lego movie with a cool guy in the lead role.
I love this David Denby description in his New Yorker review; “Downey, muttering to himself, ignores everyone else in the movie for as long as he can. Fixing his eyes, at last, on another character, he seems faintly annoyed that his privacy has been violated. Yet he delivers — to the camera, and to us. He can make offhandedness mesmerizing, even soulful; he passes through the key moments in this cloddish story as if he were ad-libbing his inner life.” Bottom line: decent movie, great lead performance, and a realization on your way out to the parking lot that sounds like “wait a minute…I’m not sure if that was as good as I thought it was while I was watching it..why are my friends telling me this was so great?….what, are they desperate to like something?”
Defamer‘s Stu VanAirsdale has posted a video snippet of Robert De Niro‘s remarks at last night’s Meryl Streep tribute at Lincoln Center.
“If De Niro’s appearance is any indication, all those haters who ridiculed the actor’s agency switch last week might have another thing coming,” VanAirsdale notes. “De Niro killed. In a cruise-ship comic kind of way, perhaps, and filing through a fistful of index-carded one-liners, but still.” HE comment #1: Yes, he did pretty well at the lecturn, but you can’t hear what he’s saying on Stu’s video — it’s too echo-y. HE comment #2: Despite his genius instincts as an actor, De Niro is not known for being the most intellectually gifted actor in the business, so it makes sense that he would bring along the index cards in case, you know, he “went up.” (Which happens to everyone.)
The best quote from that alleged written-within-CAA letter about De Niro’s departure: “Bobby blames everybody but himself for the way he’s squandered his career, and refused lots of quality pictures because they wouldn’t give him producer credit. [He] had a choice ten or so years ago. He could either go the Nicholson route — very selective, very particular, protect the brand — or go out sending himself up in tripe like Analyze This, which made money but turned him into that ‘old psycho guy.’ He could have concentrated on quality stuff, but instead wanted to keep funding his little empire in New York.”
Some random responses to John Horn‘s 4.14 L.A. Times piece exploring the why and wherefores of the recent talent-agency shakeups. I’ve read it twice and I still haven’t absorbed the “there” that is presumably there. I’m in the middle of a third read as we speak. I’m down to reading sentences out loud and repeating them until the “oh, now I see!” kicks in.
The intra-agency trades “are related to growing anxiety over the future of the film business,” he writes. How do you quantify “growing” anxiety? The talent representation business runs on anxiety. Agents feed on it. It’s the one constant that has permeated the business since the days of silent pictures. A monkey with claws dug in to every player and every career. John Horn, trust me, is himself haunted by it. I eat anxiety for breakfast. To me it isn’t a monkey but a gorilla, but on some level I’m resigned to that. Robert DeNiro going from CAA to Endeavor is a big “whoa”? In whose mind? In the eyes of the critics and reading public the man is finished as any kind of heavy talent or formidable player. He’s made too much crap, taken too many paycheck jobs. One look at that godawful Righteous Kill trailer and you go, “Jesus, God… what happened?” Every second or third film the man makes could and should be something smallish, soulful, risk-taking. Whoever you may consider to be the Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini or Michelangelo Antonioni of our time, DeNiro should at least be trying to hook up with these talents. Has he? Doesn’t seem like it.
“Instead of gambling on a broad and eclectic slate of movies, the studios are making creative decisions as much on spreadsheet projections as gut reactions to great screenplays,” Horn reports. “Studios not only are making far fewer films but also allowing concepts and marketing hooks to govern greenlight decisions rather than a specific actor’s availability and interest.” Haven’t producers been lamenting “high concept” thinking since the early ’80s? Groaning how difficult it is to get a movie going that isn’t driven by a simple, easy-to-digest marketing hook? This has been a Hollywood malaise issue for a long time now. What’s new here?
Two of the significant talent switches listed by Horn are those by actors Ashton Kutcher (from Endeavor to CAA) and Jennifer Connelly (ICM to CAA). No offense, but who cares what Kutcher is up to? I admired Connelly’s work in House of Sand and Fog and A Beautiful Mind, but are her representational loyalites matters of any real interest to anyone? I’m not trying to be an asshole. I’m just asking.
“The head of production at one studio said that when his movie budgets now grow too expensive, he insists that actors give up one of their prized perks: a percentage of every dollar that comes in.” Ooohh, poor babies!
“Several managers said that many actors who were once guaranteed to open a film at the box office are no longer a sure bet, as was proved by the poor openings for Will Ferrell‘s Semi-Pro and George Clooney‘s Leatherheads.” Ferrell has done fairly well until recently, but when has Clooney (whom everyone loves) ever opened anything?
Open letter to Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe: In 2004 Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris (Standard Operating Procedure, The Fog of War), working with MoveOn.org, created a brilliant series of TV ads about “real people” (mostly Republicans) who’d voted for George Bush in 2000, but had decided to vote for John Kerry in 2004. This year, there are many more Republicans talking about voting for Obama than were persuaded about Kerry four years ago. See where I’m going with this?
Standard Operating Procedure director Errol Morris — Thursday, 4.10, 4:50 pm.
I’m frankly surprised that you guys, being as savvy as you are at political ads, haven’t yourselves contacted Morris about doing a series of spots about Obamacans, and this time actually put them on the air. Oh, you didn’t know? Morris’s ’04 spots never went on TV — they were viewable only at moveon.org, and later, of course, at errolmorris.com. Democrats!
Morris told me Thursday he’s definitely open to coming up with a series of Obama spots. Perhaps he’ll even devise something better than the Republican switch idea. (Or not.) You should make this happen either way. You’ve obviously flush enough to hire the Frank Lloyd Wright of documentarians, and getting a bunch of Obama-favoring non-liberal Average Joes to speak to Republicans, independents and Reagan Democrats could seriously influence things, especially with about half the independents leaning toward McCain right now.
Conventional wisdom says that a twice-bumped movie that ends up opening in February of the following year has a problem. On the other hand we’re all on a moving train, and it’s necessary each and every day to hit refresh and ask, “Okay, what’s changed? What’s evolving? What is the reality of the situation right now?” Here are some thoughts and comments I’ve been processing since posting a brief item about this matter yesterday afternoon:
(1) United Artists publicity/marketing chief Dennis Rice says the reason for the switch was “real simple. The last three years of the first weekend in October produced roughly $85 million for top twelve pictures. For the last three years for President’s weekend, the top twelve have produced $150 million. We’re a small start-up company and we’re looking at the bottom line, and with the February opening we’re looking at a bigger opening, a holiday weekend and a longer playing time.”
(2) I recognize that the President’s Day weekend has delivered bonanza box-office for films like Jumper, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Ghost Rider, Bridge to Terabithia, The Pink Panther, Hitch, Constantine and so on. But all these movies were crap-level “audience” movies, and Valkyrie is a big-budget, class-A World War II thriller with a superstar lead (Tom Cruise), a blue-chip supporting cast (Kenneth Branagh, Terrence Stamp, Bill Nighy), a top-drawer director (Bryan Singer), an Oscar-winning screenwriter (Chris McQuarrie), etc.
(3) So yes, the money-making opportunity is obviously there, but it’s nonetheless unusual for an ostensibly classy, first-rate film of this sort to be bumped out of two release dates in a given year and then shifted over to February. How many films that have been twice bumped have turned into formidable critical and commercial hits?
(4) When I read an early version of McQuarrie’s Valkyrie script, it didn’t seem like an Oscar contender — I was thinking “smart thriller and leave well enough alone.” It could score in the acting categories, however, and certain films — Silence of the Lambs, Gladiator, Crash – have opened outside of the Oscar season fall-holiday weekend and gone on to get recognized. “If recognition comes, so be it,” says Rice.
(5) The February 23rd date was deemed especially attractive after Joe Johnston‘s The Wolf Man dropped out of that slot — fine. But what was Valkyrie facing on October 3rd? The Express, a football movie directed by Gary Fleder, plus Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Nights in Rodanthe and Possession. Obviously not much competition. The big competition the following week (Oct. 10th) would have been Ridley Scott‘s Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.
(6) “Actually, I heard the push-back of Valkyrie isn’t necessarily just to [postpone] the film,” a director-writer wrote this morning. “The motive is to give Cruise a chance to court other studios and get a commercial film on the boards, such as The Hardy Men with Ben Stiller or even another Mission: Impossible, before the Singer flick opens and possibly colors perceptions [on this or that level].”
(7) There’s a belief among this and that producer that October is “the new Dead Zone,” as one industry-watcher explained this morning. This is based on the disappointing or underwhelming box-office that several prestige-level dramas and dramadies encountered last October — among them Rendition, Reservation Road, Gone Baby Gone, Sleuth, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Things We Lost in the Fire, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Michael Clayton, Lars and the Real Girl, Dan in Real Life, Control, etc.
(8) “I heard that Singer was trying to shape [Valkyrie] into something like [Alfred Hitchcock‘s] Rope…a kind of intense suspenseful parlor drama,” the director-writer said this morning. “But it was apparently one of those things that was one thing on the page, something that read well, but it became something else when the actors starting saying the lines on the set and people started looking at it as something to watch and sink into. I’ve been told it plays like an HBO movie.” Is that a put-down? Not in my book.
(9) A small group has seen a cut of Valkyrie. A journalist friend says he knows two people who’ve seen it and have said that it’s ‘really good‘ and have said that UA pushed it back because they still have to shoot the big desert sequence.” (I answered that the movie may be fine, but this is early April — almost six months before the 10.3 opening, which is plenty of time to shoot a desert sequence and pop it into the front section.) Another guy I know was told a while back by a person not with MGM or UA that he might be invited to a screening of it, but then it didn’t happen. The vibe he got from this person was a kind of a “hmmm, what do we have here?”
Most depression-era gangsters had coarse features — puffy, rough-looking, scarred, pockmarked — with feral, pitiless eyes. Some were flat-out ugly. Movie stars tend to have appealing, often pretty faces and are pretty much unable to walk into a room without engaging audience empathy. So there’s a Hollywood b.s. factor going in when you cast anyone genetically gifted as a gun-totin’ psychopath.
Johnny Depp during filming of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies
Like, for example, when Bonnie and Clyde producer Warren Beatty cast himself as the short, dorky-looking Clyde Barrow. This worked, obviously, because the equally pretty Faye Dunaway played Bonnie — she and Beatty at least made for a balanced fantasy — and because the film sold them as a couple of rebellious ’60s kids. But the movie star-gangster thing is basically trouble.
Did anyone believe Tom Hanks as gangland assassin in The Road to Perdition? I was able to roll with it because director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall did a superb job together, and because Hanks gave it hell — but nobody bought it deep down.
I’m as willing to be suckered by Hollywood flotsam as the next guy, but I know right now I’m going to have trouble accepting the dark-eyed, still boyishly good-looking Johnny Depp as the notoriously impudent and snarly-looking John Dillinger in Michael Mann‘s adaptation of Bryan Burrough‘s “Public Enemies.”
John Dillinger
Nobody is a bigger fool for Mann films than myself. I fell for the fumes in Miami Vice, and took a lot of heat for that. And I’m fairly certain I’m going to love (or at least be impressed by) Public Enemies. But Depp-as-Dillinger seems almost surreal in its physical (and possibly spiritual) wrongness. The only ’30s gangster Depp could realistically play, maybe, would be Pretty Boy Floyd (who wasn’t that pretty, by the way).
The best Hollywood facsimile of all time was Warren Oates in John Milius‘ Dillinger (’73). He looked like the real McCoy, he had the internals, and he was Warren Oates. I never saw Lawrence Tierney‘s portrayal in Dillinger (’45), but I’ll bet it was fairly on the money. I don’t think you can’t “play” a gangster. On some level you have to actually be one, or the audience will smell it.
I don’t know what this says about Jude Law, but his most convincing screen role by far was a gimpy, twitchy, odd-looking assassin in The Road to Perdition. George Raft, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart totally looked and acted like real toughs. But some guys just don’t have it. Look at that shot of the real Dillinger above — there’s a world of hurt and rage and vengeance in that beefy Midwestern face. There’s a reason why Pat O’Brien or Franchot Tone or Jimmy Stewart almost never played villains. (Until they got older, I mean.)
Depp is much more in the delicate, ethereal, sensitive-guy realm. There’s a reason why he was so good as Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood and Jack Sparrow, roles that are partly about tapping into a certain otherness (including a female side) that pretty much runs away from any sort of brawny machismo. This isn’t a precise analogy, but Depp is basically a 21st Century Franchot Tone with a little perversity and eye shadow on the side.
I’m mentioning this because AICN ran some shots last weekend of Mann, Depp and others shooting a bank-robbery scene somewhere in Wisconsin. (It happened in Columbus, Madison, Baraboo…one of those.) And your first thought is that Depp and his tommy-gun-brandishing cohorts look like actors playing gangsters in their 1930s hats and overcoats. Unfair to judge from a few cheap-ass snaps, I realize, but that’s what they look like. Public Enemies is an adaptation of Bryan Burrough‘s book,” which is about the gangsters who shot up the midwest in 1933 and ’34 — Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Alvin Karpis and the Barker family. Mann’s film may be a full-on adaptation, although reports have so far suggested it’s mainly about the bloody and raucous crime career of Dillinger, which lasted a little less than 18 months (early ’33 until his death in July ’34).
Michael Mann during filming of Public Enemies
One synopsis says the focus is on FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and his attempts to stop Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Marion Cotillard will play Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette. I’ve read about Channing Tatum playing Pretty Boy Floyd, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, Jason Clarke as John “Red” Hamilton, John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, David Wenham as Dillinger gang member Harry Pierpont, and Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson.
Principal photography on Public Enemies began in Columbus, Wisconsin on 3.17.08 and will continue in various Wisconsin and Chicago locales until late June. Some parts of the film will reportedly be shot in Crown Point, Indiana, the town where Dillinger escaped from jail.
HE reader Richard Huffman wonders if N.Y. Post reporters Kati Cornell and Samuel Goldsmith were “played” in the reporting of a 3.15 story about Ashley Alexandra Dupre, given an end-of-the-story quote attributed to defense attorney named Steve Zissou, the character played by Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic.
“What’s the likelihood that someone has that name outside of that Wes Anderson flick?,” Huffman wrote. The answer is that there are men and women with movie-character names all over this country. They’re ubiquitous. And they’ll probably have to deal with bad jokes about this the rest of their lives.
Switchboard has three Steve Zissous in New York alone, and one living at 1 Irving Place in Manhattan. There are two New York State guys called Frank Galvin, i.e., Paul Newman‘s drunken attorney character in The Verdict. There are four guys named Roger Thornhill, Cary Grant‘s adman in North by Northwest, in New York State also. The state is home to no less than seven fellows named Max Fischer, the name of Jason Schwartzman‘s character in Rushmore. There’s even a guy named Hans (not Han) Solo with a business address at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
And this is just from a casual scan of one state. There are probably scores of U.S. citizens going by every major character name in movie history except for eccentric Stars Wars names Boba Fett, Jar-Jar Binks and Lando Kalrissian. I wonder how many guys are named Charles Foster Kane? Or John Book, i.e., Harrison Ford‘s cop character in Witness?
Now that I think of it, I can definitely imagine Star Wars freaks (just starting their adult lives in ’77, now pushing or slightly over 50 with grown kids) with kids named Lando or Han or Obi-Wan. Lando Rodriguez. Obi-Wan Schwartzman.
Wait — there’s a guy named Frank Bullitt, Steve McQueen‘s detective in Bullitt, living on Rochester Street in West Los Angeles right now. Same two l’s and two t’s. What if it turns out he’s driving a dark green late ’60s Mustang fastback?