Through a magical combination of caffeine, sugar, nicotine (not one word…not any of you), starvation and lack of sleep, I have survived another 48 hours of the festival, adding three films to my roster o’ fun. And unlike most of what I saw over the weekend, these films will actually be distributed in the US in the next couple of months!
Despite being one of those people I never really knew existed, I really like the of Stephen Frears. With the odd exception. He’s not an auteur, not hardly, but he’s not a hack, either: he picks scripts he likes, and makes really solid movies. And by and large, that’s because he manages to snag some phenomenal actors.
Never more so than in his latest, in which Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins both play at the top of their considerably admirable games. The film is inspired by the true story of a wealthy widow in pre-WWII Britain who buys a theatre, in the process creating the West End. The “twist,” of course, is that to make the thing profitable, she decides to put on a very chaste and refined nudie review.
Even without that development, there’s a hell of a lot of good movie going on here. I don’t know what it is about the British theatre world that lends itself so well to Profound Statements About The Artisitic Process, but there you have it. It’s a remarkable and wonderful depiction of the family (the film uses that term, and uses it proudly) that puts on a show, night after night, and why they do it. When pre-WWII becomes intra-WWII (as it always does in these films), the plot adds a level of Mrs. Miniver-style “we go on because we are English!” style posturing without dropping into the warmed-over jingoism that can often entail: they act like that because they need the morale, not because it will actually change one damned thing. I should point out that all of this tone and theme comes comfortably packaged in one of the funniest movies of the year, and that is totally due to Dench and Hoskins, and how joyfully they play off each other.
The best recommendation I can ever give: it feels like a blend of Topsy-Turvy and La règle du jeu, and it doesn’t even wither for the comparison.
The “Felicity Huffman as a transsexual” movie, and I wish there was more to say about it than that. Because I’ll tell you, Felicity Huffman makes a damn good transsexual, after you get used to her voice (which, I am told, is pretty accurate). There’s a lot of pain and a lot of confusion, and it’s truly heartrending. The plot revolves around her discovery of a son she’d fathered in college, and there are some amazing moments when you can see in her eyes that she wants to embrace him but just can’t quite, and…
The problem is, this amazing character and relationship are plugged into a maddeningly by-the-book road movie. Diner? Check. Southwest desert? Check. Mirrored scenes of horrible meetings with family? Check. The requisite “charming American oddballs” sequence is at a transgender pride party, played by real transgendered persons; director Duncan Tucker, at the screening I attended, described this as his tribute to the people who have gone through that journey in their life, and while I see the respect, it still seemed profoundly gaudy to me, like Even Dwarfs Started Small or something from latter-day Fellini. Not “bad,” not “exploitative per se,” but really, damn weird.
Tucker also said that he didn’t want to make a “transexual movie,” but a movie that just happened to include a transsexual. Which is admirable, and he succeeded. I think next time he should shoot for an interesting movie that just happens to include a transsexual, and he’ll have something.
Best Q&A moment of the night-
MAN: “Could you talk about your experience with the writer?”
TUCKER: “Well, I wrote it.”
There’s a lot to like here, including a career-best performance from Jason Schwartzman, but something about this film really held me at a remove. It’s based on a really good novella by writer/star Steve Martin, about a young woman at the LA Saks Fifth Avenue who falls for a middle-aged guy who does everything he can to keep her from getting too attached, while a well-intentioned slacker waits hopefully in the wings. In the book and in the screenplay, there’s something tender and heartbreaking about the hopefullness and loss, and the actors (Claire Danes rounds out the big three) handle the material with sensitivity and no small amount of charm.
The problem is that the film is a vacuum. No matter how melancholy the story is, it’s still light in touch. But the direction by Anand Tucker violates that. In his hands, the film becomes a sort of museum piece, or rather a Faberge egg: it sees itself as delicate and precious, and very lovely to behold, and as such it become kind of meaningless as anything other than an object to stand back from and murmur, “yes, that’s nice.” What I mean, in film-student terms, is that the compositions are all just so, and the camera sits with such reserve and refinement, like every shot was taken from Pensively Tragic Cinematography for Dummies. I have seen other films in which the camera calls attention to itself as a frame for a very precise mise en scène (hi, Wes), but rarely does it leave a film so airless.
Special attention must be paid to the score by the magnificently-named Barrington Pheloung, which is, to say the least, over-bearing. To steal from one of my view companions, it makes eating McDonald’s seem like High Drama. It’s this massive wall of violins and Romantic gimcrackery, and it never fucking lets up for a second. I mean, it does, but it’s very suffocating.
Which is too bad, because I managed to care for the characters even despite all this. Imagine if they were in a film that treated them as more than posable dummies.
Next up: Roger Ebert talks about dead pets.