By D.K. Holm
January 24, 2006
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
The Aristocrats
MATCH POINT
Here is my audio review of MATCH POINT.
Toward the end of the 1912 version of his book THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM, Shaw turns finally to Ibsen's last play, WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN. Shaw summarizes what the play is about, explaining over the course of three or four pages how Rubeck, a sculpture artist, creates a great work of art toiling from the living image of a woman named Irene, who views her life's goal as that of aiding Rubeck in his pursuit of genius; but Rubeck's failure to reciprocate and engage with Irene on an intimate level leads to disaster. Later, Rubeck marries Maja, while Irene slips into a life of prostitution that ends in her suicide. Years later, disappointed in his art and bored with his life, wife, and fame, Rubeck makes one last effort to connect, taking Maja on a long-promised trip to see the world from the great heights of a mountain range.
"And now," Shaw notes dryly, "the play begins." Shaw's clever rhetorical device serves to illustrate dramatically, especially to the reader unfamiliar with the specific play Shaw is talking about, how what is the "story" to mundane playwrights is to Ibsen merely backstory. The mediocre playwright begins at the beginning. He has no other way. He can't wrap his mind around his material in any other fashion. The artist, the genius, in Shaw's view, begins with the consequences of that story and fills in the background for the curious viewer as the play unfolds. In Tarantino's phrase, he gives you the answers first, then the questions.
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If Ibsen (or Shaw, or Tarantino) had written Woody Allen's new movie MATCH POINT, it would have begun where, say, former tennis star Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is shown quite happily married and returning home to his newly pregnant wife Chloe (Emily Mortimer), having just murdered his troublesome American actress mistress, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), and then chart the machinations he must go through to mask the crime. Or maybe this imaginary rewriter would begin his version of the story where the movie now ends, with Wilton, now eliminated by the police as a suspect thanks to a fortuitous coincidence, reconciles himself to his newly ordered life, perhaps to pick up the story a decade later, when his horrible crime comes back to haunt him in unexpected and jarring ways.
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Which is only to say that Allen's new film is very old fashioned. It starts at the beginning and goes to the end and in between it fills in gaps. If Wilton is advised by his father-in-law (Brian Cox), a rich man and head of a successful investment firm, to pick up some university night classes in anticipation of a better job after the new year, Allen dutifully shows us Chris in a classroom scribbling notes. Allen begins with Wilton applying for a job as the club pro for an exclusive organization. He then meets and becomes friendly with Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), the Hugh Grantish quasi-wastrel scion of an aristocratic family. Through Tom, with whom Wilton shares an interest in opera, Wilton meets Tom's sister Chloe, who, it turns out, is available.
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Wilton never seems all that much really interested in Chloe, but many a tennis bum, lets himself be carried along by the easy money and sex he finds in that lifestyle. Like Tony Wendice in DIAL 'M' FOR MURDER, he's been having a hard time adjusting to a life outside tennis, and a career in "Dad's" firm is just the ticket.
Allen doesn't present Wilton's motivations as evil, just easy, or lazy, or perhaps his due, the way that athletes often have a sense of entitlement. But we are also meant to recognize that Wilton is one for self-improvement, reading Dostoyevsky simultaneously with the CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO DOSTOYEVSKY (not the way to do it, actually: the Cambridge book is not a trot, but a collection of essays). This visual namedropping is one of the few links that the film has with previous Allen works, because the director has managed this time around to erase himself from the surface of the film in a way he never has before.
Another link, though, as many others have pointed out, is with Allen's 1989 film, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, which charts the parallel but morally differing career trajectories of a loser filmmaker who can't win back his wife or prospective mistress and a wealthy ophthalmologist who successfully pays to have his troublesome mistress assassinated. In the film's poignant ending, the two men meet for a few seconds of private philosophical banter. Arguably Allen's greatest film, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS came out when Allen was interested in a form of narrative dualism and a kind of middlebrow O. Henry style "irony," as seen in MIGHTY APHRODITE, DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, and CELEBRITY. MATCH POINT doesn't make its points as explicitly as does CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (especially in its under the end credits pseudo-documentary footage). Rather, it simply observes, as if the camera represented someone who could not intervene, who could do nothing but watch as fate unfurled its dire plot.
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As is also well known, the script was originally written to cast a Jewish character "infiltrating" a WASP family. Funding proved easier from English sources, apparently, and Allen found that the text could be easily reconfigured to accommodate his new sponsors. It's perhaps just as well: the old version may have opened up Allen to charges of being a self-hating Jew, remarks that Philip Roth suffered back in the 1960s.
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What the English setting does for the American Allen is give his film a Kubrickian feel. The film even opens with a tracking shot. And the first scene, the interview between Wilton and his prospective employer, even feels like the job interview in THE SHINING. Throughout the acting is subtly brilliant in that Kubrickian manner, possibly because he almost always dealt with British actors, and a kind of calm infuses the family scenes. The Hewett family is presented as achingly good, like Annie Hall's, with but a few quirks, such as a bit of a drinking problem running from mother to son, and the mother's tendency to outspokenness when she's had one "G&T too many." But, as it turns out, the mother is in fact right: Nola, the then current girlfriend of her son and the target of her future son-in-law, is evil, or at least the cause of evil in others. Like Kubrick (and Welles and Tarantino, for that matter), Allen is chary of actual sex in his films, despite his "sexy" reputation. MATCH POINT contains some of the few images of the ultimate human intimacy in any of Allen's films thus far.
MATCH POINT is even funny, but in a way that thrillers are funny, rather than comedies. Yet it is not really a thriller, either. It is an "art film," an ambitious account of an aspect of the way we live now, how good people can be evil or ignore evil. It draws on Dostoyevsky, and middlebrow ideas of luck and chance. The film begins with narration that is not revisited, but that makes a point about the way a ball falls. Later, a ring falling similarly turns out to be a trick on the audience, one that makes them see a tilt in the morality of the movie (surely it can't be endorsing murder as a viable solution to one's difficulties?).
Is Allen, by the way, the long time analysand, aware that Freud was not the biggest fan of Dostoyevsky? His reaching for the Russian writer feels like grasping at vague links to big "ideas." There were a few things I didn't like about the movie. The use of opera, especially of Caruso on the soundtrack, feels forced and artificial. And the slow degradation of Wilton's values seems to be more because he went to WOMAN IN WHITE rather than that he killed two people.
Other than that, MATCH POINT is a finely crafted, deeply etched morality tale that, interestingly, raises more questions than it cares to answer.
I don't fly. I was in a Cessna once when I was a kid, but I didn't have occasion to travel during my tweener and teen years, and by adulthood lost the wanderlust that would make me swallow my fear (or a valium) and get on a plane and go somewhere. I think it is safe to say that I am terrified of flying. For example, I even have dreams in which I find myself in, say Rome, with friends and am having a marvelous time, until I realize, in the dream, that I must have got there somehow, and the means were no doubt flying, and that at the end of the trip I will have to fly back! The happy dream instantly turns nightmarish and I awake in a panicky sweat.
The coincidence of two airplane thrillers released in the same season seemed too happy an occasion to pass up and not reveal this personal secret. Unfortunately, I sat through both films in the theater with nary a tremor of panic, enjoyed them both, and looked forward to the DVDs, which now reside on my desk.
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The lack of airliner related chills is probably due to the fact that both films shift the panic away from the airplane per se and onto some threat to family. In FLIGHTPLAN (Touchstone, 98 minutes, PG-13, 2.35:1 enhanced, DD 5.1, DTS 5.1 and 2.0, French and Spanish language tracks and French and Spanish subtitles, one sheet insert, animated musical menu with 14-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, January 24, 2006; also full frame, UMD), it is the whereabouts of little Julia (Marlene Lawston), daughter of Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster), the recently widowed industrial engineer who designed a part of the plane that the duo are now using to accompany back to Long Island the corpse of Kyle's husband. When Julia disappears, Kyle pressures the crew to search the plane; but they soon begin to suspect that Ms Pratt is delusional, that Julia is in fact as dead as her daddy. Just as the viewer is beginning to wonder the same thing, Kyle sees, in a moment lifted from THE LADY VANISHES, a small mark that Julia left on the frosted glass of the airplane window.
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There are a lot of clever touches in the film, such as the airline being called Aalto, after the great Finnish architect, and director Robert Schwentke (TATTOO) gets quite stylish with the camera within the relatively small and repetitious space of the fuselage. He's a regular Brian De Palma with the lens as he roves the environs from all manner of angles.
Unfortunately, FLIGHTPLAN is another one of those fucked up Hollywood projects that has god knows how many writers and got changed in midstream, from something else to what it is now. When Foster came on board, the film switched from a guy and his son fighting terrorists to a woman and her daughter getting gaslighted by an extortionist. I guess this was effected without too much damage to the integrity of the piece, and anyway, audiences seemed to like it, to the tune of $184 million dollars. And I certainly enjoyed the formal beauty of the film, and it is well acted all around by the likes of Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean and others in thankless roles that give them relatively little screen time or room to make something of it.
Jodie Foster is undeniably a great actress (two Oscars, just like Hilary Swank), but her politics or private life or something usually keeps her out of mainstream movies. Apparently, she can only bear to be in a typical Hollywood film if she can play the single mom to an endangered tyke, or some kind of asexual spinster. She's not quite cut out even for those roles. She is super intense, and her huge, pained, liquid eyes demand to be used for something grand and emotional and tragic. Still, I enjoy her hugely in these minor films she's been making of late. I like it when she says, "What?," her signature query uttered in almost all her film in a kind of dazed, disbelieving pant, and I thought she said, "You're pathetic," just like Rachel McAdams in RED EYE, but I couldn't find the line on the DVD.
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Supplements kick off with an audio commentary by Schwentke that walks you through the movie on a technical level, with some attention to the meaning and emotions and the convoluted production history. For those who have seen it, he does affirm that the Arabs on the plane are not the people in the house next door to Kyle whom she thinks are spying on her. The main televisual extra is "The In-Flight Movie: The Making of FLIGHTPLAN" divided into a bunch of smaller parts (Security Checkpoint: Story of a Thriller, Captain's Greeting: Meet the Director, Passenger Manifest: Casting the Film, Connecting Flights: Post Production, Emergency Landing: Visual Effects), with a "Play All" option, plus the additional "Cabin Pressure: Designing the Aalto E-474." And finally there's a host of trailers (THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, ANNAPOLIS, {PROOF}, SHADOWS IN THE SUN/EVERYTHING YOU WANT, THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED, LOST: SEASON TWO).
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RED EYE (Dreamworks, 95 minutes, PG-13, 2.40:1 enhanced, English and French DD 5.1, and English DD 2.0, with English, French and Spanish subtitles, animated musical menu with 16-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, January 10, 2006) should be the "better" film because it is helmed by master of suspense Wes Craven. But production values are not quite as high, and Craven doesn't take the opportunity to exercise his camera muscles.
This film actually is the one about terrorists, but it is much more intimate. About half the film takes place in the four square feet where hotelier Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) sits next to the initially seductive Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) on her flight from Texas back to Florida. I hate to spoil this but it turns out that Rippner is using Lisa as a key tool in a 24ish terrorist plan to assassinate the head of Homeland Security (Jack Scalia).
This intimacy is almost unique in cinema, and Craven and his credited writers do a great job of wringing all the potential out of it. The film isn't just confined to the plane, however. There is a great Williamson-esque scene back at the Reisert house, where her dad (Brian Cox) has been held as an unknowing hostage. It's all good, if minor stuff, just Craven dipping his toes into the thriller, as opposed to making another horror film.
For extras, there is a casual and informative commentary by Craven, producer Marianne Maddalena and editor Patrick Lussier, in which they actually acknowledge the existence of FLIGHTPLAN. There is also a conventional "The Making of RED EYE, a little profile, "Wes Craven: A New Kind of Thriller," and a brief gag reel.
By one of those marvelous coincidences found in movies due no doubt to the art form's sheer mass, RED EYE comes out just a week before THE VIRGIN SPRING, Ingmar Bergman's most literally religious film, and the one that formed the unofficial basis for THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.
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When critical commentary back in the 1980s first pointed out the similarity between the two films, one smacked a metaphorical palm to the brow and said, "Of course." Now, however, with both Bergman and Craven the authors of many more films after that, and with this brand new DVD of THE VIRGIN SPRING [Jungfrukällan] (The Criterion Collection No. 321, 89 minutes, full frame, DD mono, 32-page insert with cast, crew, chapter titles, essays by Peter Cowie and Lilla Isaksson, source poem, letter from Bergman on censorship, plus eight-page insert of CC tittles, static musical menu with 21-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, January 24, 2006), it might be more profitable to note their key differences, obvious or not.
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Perhaps the most obvious thing to say is that VIRGIN SPRING is not, strictly speaking, a horror film. Which isn't to say the film lacks terror. Convention has it there is no loss as painful as that of a child. But between the 1960 of VIRGIN SPRING, and the 1977 of LAST HOUSE, the world changed in both subtle and dramatic ways. The key difference as far as the two films are concerned is in moral structure of society of Bergman's medieval world, the film's early 1960 release date, and the burgeoning hippie climate of the 1970s, with its free love, its drugs, and its distance between parent and child. I would hazard to guess that in fact the "violence" of 1500s is in fact mirrored by the world of Vietnam and race riots.
There is much more ambiguity in Bergman's movie. Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), the victim of a rape and murder whose killers attempt to sell her still blood soaked clothing to her devout father (Max von Sydow, whom Bergman himself thought overacted in the movie), is not simply the golden child and fair contrast to her dark foster sister Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), but a spoilt, seductive princess who in part brings about her own demise. And the father is not without his own ambiguity. He spoils and indulges his daughter and that may be a tad bit of lust there, also. These elements are not present in Craven's film.
VIRGIN SPRING is one of two films that Bergman made back to back from scripts by Ulla Isaksson, the other being the previous year's THE BRINK OF LIFE. Bergman appeared to be in a transitional mode, going from high profile international films such as THE SEVENTH SEAL, to what were to follow, highly personal, interior, difficult films, his "chamber films." Perhaps unconsciously, he needed a break from himself, and took on these two scripts from someone else. They are still slow, methodical, and theatrical, but also have a beam of non-Bergmanian light in them found no where else in his canon.
Robin Wood hails THE VIRGIN SPRING as "a near-perfect film" (he didn't like the von Trierian hymns at the film's close). Today's viewers I fear may tend to view it as a sluggish and overly simple narrative with an obvious schematic, and ultimately not as powerful as it should be. But one knows what Wood means. It hits all the marks, does what a good solid film in the tradition of quality should do, and makes sense, which is nothing to sneer at.
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Criterion's disc is packed with extras. There is, first, an introduction by Ang Lee, followed by an informative commentary by U of Washington prof Birgitta Steene, who gives the background of the story (based on a short poem from the 1300s), the times, Bergman's ambivalence toward faith at the time, the production history, and certain critical observations. There is also a 20-minute video interview with the film's two contrasting stars, Gunnel Lindblom and Birgitta Pettersson, and finally, there is an audio seminar with Ingmar Bergman at AFI from 1975, in which, by the way, VIRGIN SPRING does not figure. It's divided into six parts (Working With Actors, Dreams and Music, Budgets/Beginnings/Rushes,
The Camera, Theater and Film, Something to Say).
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What is only implied or suggested in VIRGIN SPRING — father to daughter incest — is fully conscious in SARABAND [Anna] (Sony, 120 minutes, 1.78:1 enhanced, Swedish DD 2.0, English. French, and Portuguese subtitles, one-sheet insert, animated musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, January 10, 2006). Who knew that Bergman, who is almost 90, still had it in him. Retired from directing for about the third time, he makes his first film as a director since 1982, employing the latest digital technology. He also returns to the characters he created in SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, in what is less a sequel than an epilogue.
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In fact, the characters don't really even seem to be the same ones from SCENES, except that the Johan character (Erland Josephson), is still more or less a cold, defensive prick, now taking it out on his adult failure of a son, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt). Another coincidence with VIRGIN SPRING is that Henrik's daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius) quickly becomes the center for general protectiveness that easily turns to lust, and in fact, Henrik has an incestuous relationship with his daughter, whom he is instructing in the cello. The incest part of the film hits you like a brick; in fact, you can't really believe it and doubt that it is really happening and start reviewing the familial relationships to figure out who is who again in case you made a mistake. But no, it's really happening. And it is such a big deal in the film it makes you take the long view and reconsider some aspects of Bergman's earlier films, such as VIRGIN SPRING.
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Supplements consist of a lengthy account of the making of the film, which was shot in digital video mostly on a set, and is informative, and three trailers (THUMBSUCKER, HEIGHTS, THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY).
KOMBI NATION (Life Size, 88 minutes, 1.85:1, DD 2.0, English subtitles, static musical menu with 15-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $27.95, released on Tuesday, January 24, 2006) is a minor little film about an obscure aspect of international life, i.e., that New Zealanders go on a Grand Tour of Europe in their late teens, which they call an OE, for overseas experience, and that these trips are an occasional for debauchery and self-examination. If your only experience of a Kiwi is via Peter Jackson, this film will be salutary.
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Premised as a REAL WORLD doc about an OE, the film follows Maggie (Genevieve McLean) as she flies out to England, where she meets up with her best friend and the friend's sister (Gentiane Lupi, Loren Horsley) and also a drug-dealing male (Jason Whyte) who has paid to hitch a ride with the trio. Sex, jealousy, anger, crude touristy stuff, and finally reconciliation all happen, until the three girls ditch the film crew itself, an all too often passive observer of the events in the girls' lives.
The faux documentary style and the basic unlikability of the characters put one off; but the quartet go to many interesting places, and the proceedings do feel "real." One suspects that New Zealanders get a lot more out of the film than foreigners. For them, then, a 20-minute promotional doc, "Making of KOMBI NATION," explains the subtleties of the film.
D. K. Holm's 2006 Film Diary (Otherwise Known as a Blog)
Tuesday, 10 January, 2006
Tonight I learned that Chris Penn died. He was found sprawled across the bed in the bedroom of his four-story condo by his cleaning lady, who summoned the cops. He was 40, and overweight, and his manner was more or less like Charlie Haid as Renko in HILL STREET BLUES, brash, loud, easily mistaken for a racist redneck even though he was the scion of Hollywood royalty, his father, the late Leo Penn, being a director, and his mother, Eileen Ryan, an actress (his brothers are, of course, Sean, the actor, and Michael, the musician). He is also the third member of the RESERVOIR DOGS cast to die, after Lawrence Tierney and Eddie Bunker,
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I doubt that there is a "curse" on Tarantino's film. It's more that as an action film fan he is drawn to the kinds of Hollywood tough guys who live life hard and end up in one scrap after another until they die a hard death. I know very little about Penn except what I've seen on the screen. Though only about 27 when he made RESERVOIR DOGS, Penn already had that shredded, worn, dissipated look and feel like the overlooked actors — Michael Parks and Robert Forster among them — Tarantino has made a sideline out of resurrecting. It wasn't his first film but it already felt like a comeback.
He was also one of the great "anger guys," a member of that small, select group of actors who through the power of their girth and the blessing of their voice could convey anger with rare conviction. Like the late J. T. Walsh, Lee J. Cobb, the sadly little remembered but beautifully tonsiled Paul Shenar, and relative newcomer Titus Welliver, Penn had a knack for rage. Tarantino used this trait, intentionally or not, to beautiful effect in RESERVOIR DOGS. And there are few moments as casually cruel as when Penn asks, "You mean this cop?," before shooting the already tortured policeman tied to a chair, putting a sudden end to the criminals' discussion and concerns. Penn was one of those great minor actors that few filmmakers knew how to use or what to do with.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, February 9, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.
COMING SOON: A package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, Italian horror films, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!
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