So the reason Martin Scorsese‘s George Harrison: Living in the Material World wasn’t included in today’s announcement release about 2011 Toronto Film Festival docs is that it’ll probably wind up debuting at the 2011 New York Film Festival instead. NYFF honchos didn’t reply so no confirmation, but I was told earlier today that discussions are underway for Scorsese’s 210-minute doc to premiere at their festival.
I was expecting the Harrison doc to play Toronto because Scorsese’s Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, which also ran long (208 minutes) and was cut by the same editor (David Tedeschi) who cut Material World, played Toronto in 2005. Tradition and all that. But the NYFF guys have apparently stepped in and said to the HBO reps, “No…our festival, not Toronto’s…because we’re cooler.”
So that means I definitely have to stay in Manhattan for a good two weeks after the 2011 Toronto Film Festival ends on 9.20. I don’t feel I can miss early ganders at Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy or Scorsese’s Harrison doc, even though the latter will air on HBO on 10.5 and 10.6.
The Toronto doc list includes Wim Wenders‘ Pina, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb‘s This Is Not A Film (which will again raise questions about why Panahi and his family just blow that Teheran popstand and move in to Paris?), Morgan Spurlock‘s Comic-Con: Episode IV — A Fan’s Hope, Frederic Wiseman‘s Crazy Horse, Bill Duke and D. Channson Berry‘s Dark Girls, Rithy Panh‘s Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon‘s Girl Model, Jonathan Demme‘s I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful, Werner Herzog‘s Into The Abyss, Jessica Yu‘s Last Call at the Oasis, Alex Gibney‘s The Last Gladiators, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinfosky‘s Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Stephen Kessler‘s Paul Williams Still Alive, Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill‘s Sarah Palin — You Betcha!, Mark Cousins‘ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, and Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin‘s Undefeated.
God, it killed me to type and code that last graph!
I for one am tremulous with concern about what Baz Luhrman is going to do with (and to) F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby when he begins shooting it in 3D later this year. Carey Mulligan is too diplomatic to voice fears along these lines, but she surely knows that Baz would sooner slit his throat than simply “film the book”.
My guess is that Luhrman’s conjuring of 1920s Long Island will be as authentic as his recreation of “belle epoque” Paris in Moulin Rouge, or maybe Zack Snyder‘s ancient Greece in 300.
The upside is that no matter how eccentric Luhrman’s version turns out to be, it’ll have more of a pulse than Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, widely regarded as one of the stiffest adaptations in Hollywood history. The downside is that Baz has been indulging his exuberant instincts more and more as he grows older. The Baz who made Strictly Ballroom or Romeo + Juliet, even, has pretty much disappeared.
The lineup, once more, will be Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway; Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson; and Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker.
It would be snarky to categorize Sarah’s Key (Weinstein Co., 7.22, NY and LA), an intelligent and delicately handled melodrama about a journalist’s exploration of a Jewish family’s incredibly tragic history, as a “holocaust soap opera.” It does, however, feel like this when the personal saga of the 40ish journalist (Kristin Scott Thomas) is focused upon. Mainly a thread about her being pregnant and wanting the baby and her boyfriend not wanting “to be an old dad,” etc.
I didn’t dislike these portions and I do understand the strategy (inspired, I gather, by Tatiana de Rosnay‘s book of the same name) of using a present-day character to take the audience into the past, etc. But I did feel underwhelmed by them.
The heart and marrow of Sarah’s Key is the sad and agonized tale of Sarah Starzynski (who’s mostly played by Melusine Mayance), a child who was scooped up during the arrests of Paris Jews in July 1942 and confined, along with her mother and father, inside the infamous Val d’Hiv arena before being sent to a concentration camp.
SPOILERS (IF YOU LIVE IN A CAVE) FOLLOW:
This is tragic enough, but when the police first come Sarah makes her younger brother hide in a bedroom closet and then locks him in for safekeeping, and keeps the key with her. Five or so weeks after her arrest she escapes from the camp and makes her way back to Paris with the help of adoptive parents to see about her brother. What she finds provokes such horror and despair that she never recovers,. The anguish stays with her as she grows up, emigrates to the U.S., marries and has a son, and right up to the moment that she decides to stop the pain. A bit of a Sophie’s Choice ending, in a sense.
The journalist’s story continues, however, when she tracks down Sarah’s son (Aidan Quinn), a Florence-residing chef who hasn’t a clue about his mother’s history. He becomes an angry denier when Scott lays it all out, claiming he doesn’t want to know, etc. Why am I going over this? Let’s drop this aspect.
SPOILER SECTIONS ENDS.
There’s a significant pothole in the casting of Sarah’s Key. A weak link, to be more precise. Every film is a series of links in a chain, and if one of them fails to hit the right note or deliver the right element, the chain snaps. The movie doesn’t fall apart, exactly, but it does feel diminished to some extent. And the failure, for me, in Sarah’s Key is in the very different eyes belonging to the two Sarah’s (Mayance and Charlotte Poutrel, who plays Sarah in her late teens and early 20s).
Mayance has big, beautiful, glistening-pool eyes, and Poutrel’s eyes are hazel-like and a bit smaller and narrower. They’re really quite different despite the fact that eyes never change as a person ages. The instant you first see Poutrel you know for sure she’s not the little girl you’ve gotten to know over the last hour or so, and that the transition hasn’t worked, and that the illusion has been shattered.
And yet Poutrel, curiously, does strongly resemble Natasha Mashkevich, the actress who plays young Sarah’s mother during the first third. And Quinn, even more strikingly, has watery blue eyes that could have come from Mayance if she’d grown up and had him.
So the casting is interesting and almost right except for the totally unacceptable lack of resemblance between Mayance and Poutrel. This, for me, was more than a speed bump. It’s a stopper.
Fortune has posted a video of Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg chatting with Fortune‘s Andy Serwer to discuss 3D technology and why 2011 movies have so far, in Katzenberg’s opinion, blown chunks. JKatz actually asks for a show of hands to confirm or deny “if the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you’ve experienced in the last five years of your life.”
“For sure the 3D bloom came,” Katznberg says early on, “and for sure the bloom is off the rose for a moment in time, driven by a singular and unique characteristic that only exists in Hollywood — greed. And, you know, so I think there were, unfortunately, a number of people who thought that they could capitalize on what was a great, genuine excitement by moviegoers for a new premium experience, and thought they could just deliver a kind of low-end crappy version of it, and people wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t know the difference. And anything ?? you know, nothing could have been further from the truth.
“The film business, on the other hand, is extremely challenged right now in ways that I don’t think, certainly not in my career in the industry, have we faced. And it’s a sort of perfect storm, if you will, of a number of factors.
“The first is that driven by the most stressed economy of our lifetime, you know, this recession made every single person look at and reassess price/value in every aspect of their life. Proctor & Gamble deals with it the same way, Wal-Mart deals with it, the way movie companies and studios are having to deal with it, which is, is something worth today to me what I’m paying for it. And people are consciously thinking and making that assessment on a daily basis.
“And what happened is, at the moment in time in which they were making those assessments, in particular about owning DVDs, is also the moment in time in which all sorts of new delivery opportunities presented themselves, which, by the way, are still enormously in flux, and you can’t ?? anybody that would sit here today and say, okay, well, I kind of understand where this all ends up a year, or 18 months, or two years from now, I think is kind of foolish, to be honest. There are so many changing aspects about it. And so we have what is for sure a systemic change in consumer habits with regard to how they consume movies. And what we haven’t yet found is what is that new model.
“Now, having said that, more people are actually watching movies today than ever before around the globe. The question is, how are they going to do that, how are they going to access it, how much of it is going to be through streaming, how much of it is going to be bundled, how much of it is going to be on a per-play basis, how much of it is going to be digital, how much of it is going to exist in the cloud, and we can go on, and on, and on with all of these things, all of which are incredibly real. And so, right now in the center of that is a change in habits, a change in platform, a change in delivery, and therefore uncertainty and challenges financially.
“A movie experience is a passive experience. The storytelling narrative is something that I think is still a unique and interesting, and valued experience by people around the world. And whether it’s done in a movie theater or in your home, or on your laptop, or iPad, or whatever the device is, people love that passive experience. And we see it, again, there’s more and more consumption of it.
“What all of these devices and social networking things do is they’re going to actually force Hollywood to make better products, because today the thing that is probably most askew in Hollywood is the issue of marketability versus playability. And what that really means is that there is this sort of unholy alliance that has existed forever between art and commerce, show and biz. And today it’s out of balance and it’s too much on the biz, and it’s too much on the commerce and it’s too much on the marketability and the fact is that I’m pretty confident, and let’s do it, because this is supposed to be an interactive experience here, which is could we agree?
“Let me have a show of hands of people that would say the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you’ve experienced in the last five years of your life.”
What has Katzenberg been watching? The last six and a half months have seen The Guard, Captain America, Drive, A Better Life, The Tree of Life, Beginners, X-Men: First Class, Bridesmaids, Win Win, Hanna, Midnight in Paris, Source Code, Cedar Rapids, Meek’s Cutoff, Super, The Lincoln Lawyer and Jane Eyre. That’s almost 20 films that have been very good, good or better than half-decent.
HE’s congratulations to Sony Classics for steering Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris to the highest dollar tally of any Allen film ever — $41,793,000. This clever little fantasy time-trip movie has been in theatres for two months and is still in the top ten. The word-of-mouth train will probably keep it going through August, and a possible surpassing of $50 million.
Annie Hall is still Woody Allen’s biggest all-time grosser, if you adjust for inflation.
The real measure of an all-time theatrical hit, of course, isn’t dollar grosses but number of tickets sold. And if you’re comparing present-tense dollars to the past, you naturally have to adjust for inflation.
So if you calculate the value of dollars in the ’70s and ’80s (Allen’s box-office heyday) into 2011 greenbacks, the all-time Allen champs are actually, in this order, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and then Midnight in Paris.
Hall, Allen’s first big hit, took in $38,251,425 in 1978. But according to Dollar Times’ inflation calculator a 1978 dollar is worth $3.53 in 2011. So Annie Hall‘s 2011 gross expands to $135,027,530.
Allen’s Manhattan earned $39,946,780 in 1979. By today’s calculator (the ’79 dollar being worth $3.24 in 2011) that figure comes to $129,427,567.
Allen’s second-highest grosser after Midnight in Paris is 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters, which took in $40,084,041. But with the 1986 dollar worth $2.01 in today’s market, Hannah‘s re-calculated gross is $80,568,922.
Then again today’s ancillary markets are more vigorous and plentiful than they were in the ’70s and ’80s so you have to calculate this also.
The problematic 1950s theatrical technologies known as Smellovision and Aromarama are dead and gone and will never return. And subsequent attempts to bring odors into movie-watching are nothing to hold onto either. The scratch-and-sniff Odorama process used for John Waters‘ Polyester was lame. And a new version being used with Robert Rodriguez‘s Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, a kind of swipe-and-smell deal called AromaScope, is another cheap trick.
The Rodriguez film is in 3D so the added-aroma element creates what they’re calling a 4D experience.
I for one would love it if Smell-o-vision worked — if there was a super-effective, high-function theatrical technology that dispenses aromas to go along with whatever’s being shown on the screen, and then quickly vacuums that aroma back to make way for the next olfactory immersion.
It would be nothing short of ecstatic to watch Lawrence of Arabia this way. Imagine savoring convincing simulations of the aromas of the Nefud desert, of camel shit and tobacco smoke in the British officer’s club, of oranges and grapes in Damascus, and the muddy streets of Daraa.
It’ll never happen in a theatre, but what if some kind of home-based aroma dispenser could be hooked up to specially coded Blurays of new and classic films? It could add a whole new element of serious immersion. I would install this system in a heartbeat if it really worked.
Imaging smelling North by Northwest — the aroma of 57th Street in the late afternoon, the splattering of bourbon onto Cary Grant‘s gray suit, the scent of a warm plate of brook trout and a Gibson martini on the 20th Century Limited, the aroma of sex and Arpege perfume in Eva Marie Saint‘s sleeping compartment, and so on.
Imagine the wet-dog smell of Wookie hair in Star Wars, and the horrible gut stink coming from that dead Tauntaun that Han Solo opens up with his light saber in order to provide warmth to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back (“I thought they smelled bad on the outside!”). Imagine the smell of armpit sweat and stale air and Manhattan rainstorm aroma while watching 12 Angry Men. Imagine the aromas that would accompany a smell-o-visioned Inception — the sea water, the Paris streets, the scent of nearby pine trees and damp snow covering that mountaintop fortress, etc.
There would be very few films that wouldn’t be enhanced with this technology, should someone invent a version that really and truly performs.
There’s a Japanese-produced technology that has introduced aromas into theatres and homes, but the home version, which reportedly costs about $750 or so, works through a machine that “has to be topped up with fragrant liquids which create the scents.” That sounds tedious.
I suffer a chalk-on-a-blackboard spasm every time I hear NPR reporter Michele Norris pronounce her first name as “MEE-shell.” The correct pronunciation is Mee-SHELL (with that delicate French inflection on the second syllable) or Mis-SHELL. I literally wince when I’m driving in the car and Norris comes on and says her name. She doesn’t just emphasize the “MEE” — she revels in it. I’ve been to France many times and I worship the language, and Norris’s mispronunciation, I feel, smacks of cultural arrogance.
I complained about this nearly three years ago, but I didn’t offer what seems like a logical analysis. MEE-shell plus the re-spelling of Antoine as “Antwone” (as in Denzel Washington‘s Antwone Fisher) suggests that this is an African-American cultural thing. They’re don’t want to roll with the French (in these two instances, at least) and have a need to colloquialize and make it their own.
Can you imagine the furor if some Anglo TV or radio journalist did the same? What if a TV anchor named Enrique Phillips (having had a Latino mother, let’s say) decided to pronounce his first name “Enricky”? Or if a TV journalist narrating a documentary about Emiliano Zapata pronounced the Mexican revolutionary’s first name as “Eh-MILLY-yano” instead of the correct “Aymeeyahno”? People would pounce and say “show some respect to the Spanish language,” etc. But Michele Norris gets to mangle her first name because she’s African-American and is therefore allowed to “street” her name down any way she chooses.
Go ahead and pounce on me for this, but I have the high ground here. However your name is pronounced in the culture that spawned it, say it that way. If your name is Marcello Mastroianni, you absolutely must pronounce it as “MarCHELLo MahstroyANNI”….period.
Update: Here’s an excerpt from a Skanner interview with Michelle Norris:
Kam Williams: “Attorney Bernadette Beekman says, ‘I always wondered about the pronunciation of her name. [‘Mee-shell’] Why the emphasis on the first syllable?”
Michele Norris: “I don’t exactly quite know why my father stepped on the first syllable like that, but I proudly honor him now by insisting that people pronounce it the way that he did.”
So her father, Belvin Norris, Jr., is the culprit. Michele was born in 1961. She was four when Paul McCartney‘s “Michele” came out in late ’65, so I’m guessing that’s where her father got the idea, thinking that if it was good enough for the Beatles, etc. Maybe. That or he just decided to create his own sound. If Belvin had been to Paris (which I doubt) he would’ve pronounced it differently, I imagine. Or perhaps not. I know that if my father had decided to address me as “Jeef” or “Jefferoon” when I was a kid, you can bet I would have blown that off and come up with my own pronunciation.
The Martin Scorsese 3D film formerly known as Hugo Cabret (Paramount, 11.23) and recently retitled Hugo (apparently because Paramount marketing data indicates that American moviegoers don’t like a funny-sounding French name that they aren’t sure how to pronounce), has a just-up trailer. Except Hugo sounds complex, no? Shouldn’t they just retitle it Hugh or, better yet, H?
My impressions of the trailer: (a) The Paris cityscape looks animated, like something out of Tintin; (b) Scorsese directed this? It looks and feels like a high-end family film made by Robert Zemeckis or Steven Speilberg; (c) The atmosphere feels very “storybook” and the emotionality a bit obvious and on-the-nose, even primitive; (d) the kid playing Hugo (Asa Butterfield) has great eyes; (e) Is the train station supposed to be Gare du Nord? Or is that a picayune question?; and (f) those titles look like something out of the mid ’50s 3D House of Wax with Vincent Price.
A mere two days after coming upon a 1958 Los Angeles Times front-page headline informing that Zsa-Zsa Gabor had admitted accepting a $17,000 fur coat from Ramfis Trujillo, the Uday Hussein-like son of the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, I discovered a website showcasing 1950s-era covers of Whisper magazine, apparently a slimier, runtier version of Confidential, and a November 1958 story riffing on Trujillo, Gabor and Kim Novak, whom the dictator’s son also allegedly “knew”, so to speak.
I wasn’t looking for Ramfis Trujillo material, mind. His Zsa-Zsa connection was a secondary headline — a glancing peripheral — alongside the Peter Lawford broken-arm story I satirized the other day. But he turned up again this morning nonetheless.
Shawn Levy‘s biography of Porfirio Rubirosa, “The Last Playboy,” is “filled with Trujillo stories, including a lengthy chapter about the Ramfis/Zsa Zsa/Kim Novak affairs,” Levy informs. Also: a history of Confidential and other magazines takes up most of a chapter.”
“Could one of the most brutal killers in the world openly hobnob with the Hollywood set today? We doubt it. But back in the day, a few rumors of murder only bolstered a man’s adventurous reputation, as proved by this November 1958 Whisper showing Rafael ‘Ramfis’ Trujillo, Jr. charming Zsa Zsa Gabor and Kim Novak. One or both women, you may notice, actually appear courtesy an X-acto knife and glue, but what self-respecting tabloid has time to locate a legit photo when paste-up will do the job almost as well? Trujillo did date and bed both Gabor and Novak in real life, which makes this cover technically accurate, and makes him the second most enviable Dominican jet-setter in history.
“Ramfis Trujillo reportedly gave most women that frisson some find irresistible, but his life wasn’t all starlets and champagne. Though he wanted nothing more than to be a playboy, there was an obstacle in the form of family baggage. Specifically, his father was a sadistic military dictator who had been put in power in the Dominican Republic by the CIA. Trujillo, Sr. expected his son to continue in the family business. This had been abundantly clear to Ramfis since the day his father made him a full general — with full pay — at age nine. For this and other reasons, he grew up with a warped sense of power and, by the time of this Whisper cover, had already ordered several murders and indulged in the occasional gang rape.
“He might have been considered a classic chip-off-the-old-block, save for rumors that Ramfis’s father was actually a Cuban named Rafael Dominicis — hence the “illegitimate dastard” tag in the banner. But the story about Ramfis being illegitimate was strongly denied by everyone involved (except Dominicis, who ‘disappeared’).
“In any case, through the late 50s Ramfis tomcatted his way from Hollywood to Paris, and only occasionally let his urbane manner slip to reveal someone considerably less charming beneath. He seemed to have settled into his chosen lifestyle permanently when he married an actress named Lita Milan, below, who had starred opposite Paul Newman in The Left-Handed Gun.
“But back in the Dominican, the impulsive Rafael Trujillo, Sr. was behaving less and less like the good lapdog the CIA had put in charge three decades earlier. Eventually, his U.S. benefactors turned against him and he died in a fusillade of possibly CIA-arranged bullets.
“Junior succumbed to the pull of familial duty, as well as the desire for revenge, and flew back to the Dominican to restore order. This involved personally killing some of the participants in his father’s assassination. While this must have given him great satisfaction, it did little to stabilize the country. Under pressure from both internal enemies and the U.S., Ramfis Trujillo fled to Spain less than a year later with a casket containing millions in cash, jewels, bonds, and his father. By 1969 Jnior was dead too, due to complications stemming from an automobile accident in Madrid.
“In the end Ramfis Trujillo presents an interesting question of nature versus nurture — was he meant to be a ladykiller, a real killer, or both?”
Tapley and Thompson share some intriguing calls here and there. But Thompson, in my judgment, passes along what feels like contradictory sentiments.
Early on Tapley asks Thompson about the Best Picture and/or Oscar-nomination potential for Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Thompson mulls it over, hesitates, decides what to say. “I have to tell you that I’m assuming….that Terrence Malick is taken seriously by many of the crafts people in the Academy,” she finally says. “Because [The Tree of Life] is a work of considerable achievement…it’s very hard to call, very hard to tell…[but] the Academy will recognize the craftmanship involved.”
In other words, The Tree of LIfe hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of being Best Picture nominated.
Fox Searchlight will presumably push for this honor, and in a better world a movie that swirls around so imaginatively in the oceans of the past and present, like Life, deserves industry-wide praise. But Malick doesn’t make “Academy movies” and he’s never kowtowed to or schmoozed with the Academy membership, so forget it. Especially with mainstream boomer critics like Kenneth Turan and Marshall Fine being foursquare against his latest. The Tree of Life might have a shot at a Best Picture nomination if the ten-nomination standard was still in effect, but with the current system? No way.
The contradiction, it seems to me, comes when Thompson applauds the Academy’s recent Best Picture rule change, which declared that for a film to be Best Picture nominated 5% of Academy membership must put it at the top of their nomination list. She says she’s “thrilled” with this new rule because the ten-nominee experiment of ’09 and ’10 was “a big mistake” because “Academy members were stretching to fill in those ten slots and putting in movies they didn’t love.”
The 10-nomination idea, of course, was to offer some seasonal nomination love to the widely admired also-rans (indie quality faves plus popular audience pics like The Dark Knight) that didn’t have a serious chance of winning. It was an equation that a mentally-challenged person could comprehend — five nominations for movies that members genuinely love, and five nominations for movies they seriously like. How difficult is that? At the end of every year I compose a list of excellent, very good and very respectable achievers, and it always comes to at least 20 if not 25 films. And Academy members couldn’t think of ten?
Thompson acknowledges that it’ll now be “tougher for independent films to get into the top five…consensus and mainstream titles will win the day.” And she’s “thrilled” with that? Yet she’s reluctant to call a spade a spade by declaring that The Tree of Life is exactly the kind of film that is out of the Best Picture race because of the new rules.
Tapley ask Thompson if Super 8 is an Oscar contender? What? Super 8 is a highly enjoyable, quality-calibre, Spielberg-referencing summer monster flick that was never expected to compete in this realm. And yet they go on and on. Tapley: “Could it get nominated?” Thompson: “I don’t think for Best Picture.” And yaddah yaddah.
Thompson also calls it “the ultimate boomer movie” No — Super 8 is the ultimate GenX movie. Apart from those who enjoy the revisiting-the-Spielberg-glory-days aspect, it’s primarily connecting with people who were tweeners and teens and early-college age in the late ’70s or early ’80s…people in their early to late 40s. Only the youngest boomers (a.k.a., the generational tweeners born between boomer and Genx, like President Obama) fit this demo. Most boomers started popping out in ’46 and throughout the ’50s, and are mostly aged 50 to 65.
Tapley asks about Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia, which Thompson calls her “favorite film at Cannes,” and whether Kirsten Dunst, winner of that festival’s Best Actress award, will get any awards action. Short answer: Nope — Von Trier killed Academy interest with his flippant Nazi remarks.
Right after the Melancholia discussion Tapley says that “we’ve got ComicCon coming” in a week and a half and Thompson replies, “From the sublime to the ridiculous!” Good one.
Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult is mentioned, and I don’t agree with their downbeat “uh-oh” tone. Tapley: “I’ve heard Margot at the Wedding comparisons.” (So have I.) Thompson: “That’s not good.” Tapley: “[Charlize Theron is playing] a character you don’t necessarily empathize with like characters in [Reitman’s] other films.”
Wait a minute — a troubled, somewhat curmudgeonly but (to go by the Diablo Cody script I read) highly unusual and interesting female character is “not good”? Why is that? Why can’t we sink into characters who are a little bit thornier than the usual-usual? Isn’t life-reflecting honesty what finally matters in a film? Shouldn’t our ultimate criteria be the quality of writing and directing and acting?
I was stirred and intrigued and frequently taken away by portions of Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Lifewhen I saw it in Cannes. So when friends told me they planned to see it last night it suddenly seemed like a good idea to join them. But now, 12 hours after the lights came up in Arclight #5, I’m not so sure.
Jessica Chastain in The Tree of Life
Life is still a gentle, layered, highly undisciplined cosmic church-service movie — a quiet spiritual environment to dream inside of and meditate by. But (and I’m sorry to say this in a way) it doesn’t gain with a second viewing. And all very good or great movies tend to do this. So what’s wrong?
I was made fun of on 5.22 by New York‘s “Approval Matrix” guy for tweeting from Cannes that I was glad I’d seen The Tree of Life but I’m “not sure if I’ll buy/get the Bluray.” Now that I’ve seen it twice I know I won’t bring the Bluray home. In other words I immediately sensed it wasn’t a two-timer in Cannes and now the proof is in the pudding, so I would say my premonitions have merit.
For me, The Tree of Life is an amazing film in the sense that it gathers and swirls it all together in the same way that I myself swirl it all together ever day, soaking in my blender shake of childhood memories, present-day ennui, seaside dreams, forest-primeval dreams and dinosaur dreams, catch-as-catch-can impressions and endless variations and meditations about loss and lament and the absence of grace, etc. That plus “fuck me because it sure could have been a happier life if it hadn’t been for my gruff, largely unaffectionate, World War II-generation dad who brought darkness and snippiness too many times to the dinner table,” etc.
I’m always disengaging from the present and wandering around in the past and thinking about dinosaurs and Dean Martin and Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin and cap guns and girls in bikinis on beaches and how my mother looked and sounded when she was young, and how I used to argue with myself about who was worse, she or my father. All I know is that except for movie-watching and running around with friends, my childhood was a Soviet prison-camp experience — a spiritual gulag. My parents and the public schools I attended may have made me into a tougher, more resourceful survivor than if they’d been “nicer” and easier on me, but God, what a price.
I’m presuming it’s not just me who takes this head-trip all the time, but each and every person on the planet. Malick is merely taking a grab-bag of his own lamentings and assembling them into a film. That — don’t get me wrong — is a very welcome thing. I’m immensely grateful that a film as nourishing and open-pored as The Tree of Life is playing in the same plex alongside Transformers 3 (a film that gives you no room whatsoever to trip out).
But I’m not convinced that what Malick has done is all that staggering or transcendent or worth the kind of in-depth explanation piece that Salon‘s Matt Zoller Seitz has written, which reminds me of the sermons that Episcopalian ministers used to deliver when they tried to explain what God and Jesus could or should mean to the average parishioner (i.e., myself). I used to quietly groan to myself during these sermons, and then I took LSD when I was 19 and I finally did see God and Jesus, and I realized what tepid and cautious fellows those ministers were.
I’m basically saying that my second Life experience was the same exquisitely captured, three-card-monte salad toss. The dreams and ennui of Mr. Malick when he first hatched the idea back in the ’70s (when it was called Q) + the joy and wonder of Emmanuel Lubezki‘s cinematography + Malick’s “I’ll figure it out during editing” strategy. Many an ambitious and/or captivating film could be described as being “less about itself than what you the viewer would make of it,” but The Tree of Life is especially that kind of film. You’re on your own, baby.
My first Cannes tweet still says it all: “Terrence Malick made The Tree of Life in this free-flowing, free-associative way because he could, because he doesn’t have Bert and Harold Schneider riding his ass in post, and because God told him to…like it or lump it.”
The other problem was last night’s Arclight showing was projected with insufficient light and with a slightly hazy focus. Malick asked projectionists for 14 foot lamberts of light when showing his film. I knew right away I was looking at something like 10 or 11 foot lamberts…somewhere in that vicinity. Not terrible but not enough. Some if not much of the subtleties in Lubezki’s visual scheme are simply not manifested when the brightness levels aren’t full-on. And I was really pissed off during the closing credits when it was obvious that the focus had never been there all along. The Arclight is supposed to be a top-quality experience, but it wasn’t good enough last night in theatre #5.
“What does a man care about?,” Hemingway asked Hotcher. “Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them.”
Hotcher visited Hemingway visited him in June 1961. The novelist had been succumbing to what seemed to be paranoia and had been talking about suicide (and had attempted it once or twice) and had been undergoing shock treatments. Hotchner asked him, “Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?”
“What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself?,” Hemingway replied. “Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?”
“How can you say that?,” Hotchner replied. “You have written a beautiful book about Paris, as beautiful as anyone can hope to write.” He meant A Movable Feast.
“The best of that I wrote before. And now I can’t finish it.”
Hotcher told him to relax or even retire.
“Retire?” Hemingway said. “Unlike your baseball player and your prizefighter and your matador, how does a writer retire? No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same damn question: what are you working on?”
The truth? If you’re a writer who’s 62 or 52 or 32 or 42 and you feel you’re really and truly past it? Unable to write well or feel or give pleasure or just live in a way that feels honest and robust and complete? I don’t know. It’s a tough one to answer. I do know if you’ve written well before you can write well again. I’m better at it now than I was five years ago, and certainly ten or twenty years before that. How could Hemingway have unlearned what he knew so well, and did so well in his prime? Maybe it was the booze. It often is. Alcohol and other substances certainly did in Hunter S. Thompson, who went out the same way.
The wondrous and eternal thing about writing is that you never stop getting closer to the best you can do. The process never ends. The light is always just up ahead.