USA

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

André Crous

Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit is faithful to the novel, but the epic length of this three-part production is unjustified.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected JourneyUSA/New Zealand
2.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 165 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Desolation of Smaug
– The Battle of the Five Armies

During the 10 years that elapsed between the making of the epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings and the three films that compose the The Hobbit trilogy, it was unthinkable that anyone other than Peter Jackson could do justice to the original novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Jackson had created a landmark piece of cinema that melded a vast array of special effects, motion-capture technology and epic storytelling to produce films that were held together by a very strong story and dazzled us with some remarkable set pieces in the genres of adventure, drama, fantasy and war.

Perhaps it is true that Jackson was the only person who could have made The Hobbit at the same level as the Lord of the Rings films, but it is a pity he wasn’t aiming higher. In his previous trilogy, he pulled together a disparate group of individuals – four hobbits, a dwarf, an Elf, a wizard and two humans – with a dynamic sense of tension, action and friendship.

The Hobbit doesn’t reach the same level of excitement or provoke the same interest. At the beginning of the film, we see the dwarf kingdom prosper before being attacked and evicted from their own treasure-filled mountain, Erebor, by the dragon Smaug. Shortly afterwards, Gandalf the Gray (Ian McKellen) knocks on the door of Bilbo Baggins’s (Martin Freeman) door in Hobbiton and manages to convince him, with some reverse psychology courtesy of a horde of dwarves – who raid his pantry – led by heir apparent Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), to join in the journey back to Erebor, somehow slay the dragon and win them their kingdom back.

In this sense, the story resembles, in broad strokes, the quest of the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings; however, the group is by no means as interesting as in the other films. This weak spot greatly impedes our engagement in the social fabric, despite magisterial efforts by Freeman.

But there is at least one marked difference between the narrative structures of the two series. Whereas The Lord of the Rings was told entirely in the present tense, except for that exquisite prologue narrated by Cate Blanchett in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit is framed as a story written by the old Bilbo to his nephew Frodo. The cuts back to him, 60 years after the events, which for those who haven’t seen the other films or read the books spoils the story by revealing he survived the ordeal, border on the tedious, and Frodo’s appearance here also seems more like a cameo than a necessity.

There is little variety in terms of the storyline and its different groupings of characters, but the film reaches a high point when Bilbo is separated from the group of dwarves, finds the One Ring and plays a game of riddles with Gollum. Gollum, even more than Gandalf or any of the elves, is the one character from The Lord of the Rings whom we are really glad to see again, and every minute spent in his company is electric with tension and expectation.

There is one aspect of the film, however, that is groundbreaking, and this deserves to be mentioned in every review. Films are usually recorded and projected at a rate of 24 frames per second. That is the minimum amount of frames necessary to render a moving image that doesn’t suffer from the stuttering movements of early cinema. With The Hobbit, Jackson collected double the data and had many of the prints projected at 48 frames per second, a process that is called High Frame Rate, or HFR, coupled with 3-D effects.

The result is distracting as we are confronted with twice the amount of data as usual, and while things move at a more “natural” speed, it nonetheless seems to be too fast. It is effectively high-definition images, and with the three dimensions, rendered here more strikingly than in any other film this reviewer has ever seen, all pretense of fiction seems to disappear.

But, ironically, that is a problem. While the quest for so-called realism in the cinema is important for the viewer to feel somehow part of the action, there is a difference between feeling like you’re there and feeling like it’s reality.

Middle-earth is a realm of fantasy, and any illusion that the creatures are almost “real” will be easily rejected by the viewer, creating a barrier to our investment in the events, or feeling of being present.

Maybe it is merely a question of getting used to the HFR – it will almost certainly be used in the future – but this new technology would seem to benefit a documentary film much more than one set in a fictional fantasy land.

The two-dimensional version is much more palatable, and the same will be true of the 3-D version screened at the conventional 24 frames per second. In terms of tone and story, this first film, whose running time of 165 minutes is pure self-indulgence (the entire series is based on a book that is one-third as long as the Lord of the Rings supertome), is far from the success one had expected from Jackson.

War Horse (2011)

André Crous

The First World War–set War Horse is Steven Spielberg’s formulaic, epic ode to friendship, courage and horses.

War HorseUSA
3*

Director:
Steven Spielberg
Screenwriters:
Lee Hall
Richard Curtis
Director of Photography:
Janusz Kaminski

Running time: 145 minutes

The key to understanding War Horse lies in a shot that occurs about 45 minutes into the film.

What starts as a close-up of a horse lying on the battlefield gradually shifts, as the camera moves backwards and upwards, to reveal an entire field strewn with equine carcasses. The image is a direct copy of the signature shot of the classic Gone with the Wind, in which a city street in downtown Atlanta is filled with hundreds of bloodied bodies of the injured, the dying and the dead – all victims of the Civil War.

The link between the two shots is director Steven Spielberg’s very clear desire to present his central character, the titular war horse named Joey, as he would a human being. If you fail to see this horse as any less human than the individuals who dot the narrative, you will find the experience very frustrating indeed. Though Spielberg stops short of having the animal speak, one has the very firm impression throughout that the horse can understand the humans perfectly.

War Horse starts by making a play for the audience’s emotions immediately. The teenage Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) lives on his parents’ farm in Devon, England, surrounded by green pastures and rolling hills. In a drunken stupor, his father – as in most of Spielberg’s films, here too the father is either absent or somehow severely lacking as a parent – buys a show horse for the astronomical price of 30 guineas in an attempt to rile up the other bidder, his landlord. But the family doesn’t have the money, so the landlord gives them an ultimatum: Train the horse to plough the field and earn back the money by next summer or lose the house.

Of course, despite the odds, Joey the horse is trained remarkably easily by young Albert, who by virtue of his combination of sincerity, determination and humility seems to speak to the horse. Actually, he does speak to the horse, and the horse listens. Also, in the matter of a few minutes, Albert and Joey establish their own code of communication: If Albert cups his hands and blows into them to imitate an owl, Joey will come running. When the boy and the horse are tragically separated, we already start imagining what this framing device will look like come the climax.

This listening is one of the baffling aspects of the film that many viewers might find too difficult to swallow. Though it is often noted that Joey is “a remarkable horse”, its reason for being so extraordinary is never explained. To be sure, Joey overcomes some terrible obstacles along the way, most notably the First World War, and accomplishes some daring feats, but mostly it is taken for granted the horse will make it to the end of the film no matter what.

Joey travels between many owners, sometimes because they are killed, sometimes because the horse is captured by someone else. A significant part of the film is made up of these loose threads in which the individual, briefly in possession of the horse but always respectful towards the animal, discovers just how wonderful the young stallion is. In the end, the threads are loosely connected, but by that stage, you might need to have some teeth pulled because of the syrupy storyline you’ve been subjected to already.

Again and again, War Horse portrays Joey as a horse with human qualities, and in the face of the obvious sentimentality that Spielberg conveys with his spotlights and his soft focus, many of these scenes work almost in spite of themselves. A particularly touching moment comes when Joey cares for Topthorn, a companion horse that resembles everyone’s idea of Black Beauty.

Joey is clearly the film’s central attraction, but he is special only because he is the title character and Spielberg’s camera loves him. At one point, in a dazzling moment that will forever be associated with the film, just as the boys riding their bicycles toward the moon is tied to E.T., Joey gallops heroically across a battlefield in a single, unbroken take, while explosions rock the night sky.

For all the galloping and the detailed recreations of battle scenes and the ghastly trenches of the First World War, the film is about a promise Albert made to Joey: “Wherever you are, I will find you, and I will bring you home!” The stench of sentimentality could easily have been worse than the stench of the dugouts on the frontlines, but for the most part, Spielberg’s creativity transcends his material.

Mindwalk (1990)

André Crous

Mindwalk is a philosophical talkathon that promotes a vision of the world as an interconnected whole even as its central trio barely interacts with anyone or anything else.

MindwalkUSA
3*

Director:
Bernt Capra
Screenwriters:
Floyd Byars
Fritjof Capra
Director of Photography:
Karl Kases

Running time: 110 minutes

Mindwalk is a film with talking heads. It engages in deep philosophical discussions about the complexity of life and the shortfalls of the Cartesian way of thinking. But it features very little human drama and completely ignores its spectacular setting, the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey off the coast of France.

Written by Fritjof Capra, a physicist and expert in systems theory, and directed by his brother, Bernt, the film features a politician, a poet and a scientist ruminating at length on whether one can understand life by approaching it piece by piece, like a machine. Actually, it is mostly the scientist, Sonia Hoffman, doing the ruminating. As the clear proxy for the systems theorist who wrote the screenplay, Ingmar Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann takes charge of the conversation and never lets up. Shifting back and forth between physics and philosophy, she elaborates in detail on the two fields and quickly plays the role of wise teacher lecturing to her curious students.

Sam Waterston plays Jack Edwards, a conservative Democratic senator who is fresh off an unsuccessful run for the White House and has come to France for a long weekend to recuperate. His longtime friend and former speechwriter, Thomas Harriman (John Heard), is living in Paris and accompanies him on his trip. No sooner do they land at Mont-Saint-Michel than they come across Sonia, who comes here to think big thoughts. But this is where the action, limited as it is, stops for the next 90-odd minutes. And what follows is scene after scene of Sonia explaining her “ecological” vision of the world that emphasises interconnectedness.

And yet, this intellectual trio is completely cut off. With rare exceptions, they do not interact with anyone but move about in empty spaces in and around the abbey. They resemble the electrons inside the vast expanses of the atom over which Sonia waxes lyrical. She is continuously in a position of power. Seemingly all-knowing, she is the one who teaches but speaks with the force and the tone of someone used to having to speak over people to convince them. Now and then, Waterston and Heard make quick quips or ask a question, but they are like well-read middle-schoolers attending a lecture for PhD students.

But given the setting, namely the famous abbey on an island that is only accessible on foot during low tide, it is astonishing that religion never features in their exchanges. Nor, for that matter, does Jack’s or Thomas’s personal life. And the conversation twists and turns at the whim of the speakers. Very little is based on the actual environment they move through. This is a truly breathtaking lack of imagination and creativity and proves the film’s real purpose: to educate rather than to entertain.

Sonia swings wildly between pure physics and the heavy burden of being connected to (and, therefore, responsible for) everything. She even appears to promote Béchamp’s terrain theory by pointing to the relative difference in cost between maintaining a healthy diet and paying for a medical procedure because of bad eating habits. But what she is talking about is nothing short of a systemic overhaul where the modern world (and politicians, like Jack) prioritise quick fixes and incremental change, if any. She mentions the Native Americans making decisions by considering their impact seven generations down the line. And there are some worthy insights about the impact of our perception on the thing we perceive. 

These are all interesting thoughts, but in a narrative vacuum, they struggle to breathe and ultimately suffocate under their own weight. There is a very meek attempt to show that Sonia does not, in fact, have all the answers. She has a strained relationship with her daughter, who is always in a huff, and seems to live a very solitary life with her books and her theories. But Mindwalk offers us no insight into her life, and she shows no signs of personal development.

Every now and again, Thomas quotes a philosopher (“as Heraclitus once said…”) or a mythical figure (“as Merlin once said to King Arthur…”) or recites an entire poem (Pablo Neruda’s “Enigmas”), however tangentially relevant to the conversation. But no connections are as bad as the filmmaker’s attempts to jump from one scene to another. The cuts are hard and sharp and there is no winding down of a comment, just a realisation that the scene has come to an end, and it’s time for a change of locale.

Although it is unclear how far Jack came in the race for the presidency, his mere presence here should provide a rich opportunity to investigate the potential for implementing Sonia’s ideas in practice. Jack freely admits he is beholden to lobbyists and the whims of his constituents, but his tendency to compromise is at odds with the paradigmatic shift that Sonia desires. And yet, this clash of approaches is never seriously tackled. All three seem to agree that all of this talk of change is hopelessly impractical, at least within the current system. But no one is willing to change the system itself; they would rather be content with merely discussing the benefits of living in a different system.

The film, bereft as it is of narrative development, could easily have been staged as a theatre play instead. What saves it from utter mediocrity is the performances of its three leads, who all do the best they can under the circumstances. Waterston, in particular, conveys a genuine empathy and intellectual curiosity to stand in for those viewers who find this kind of thing more appealing.

Mindwalk is not a work of entertainment, not by a long shot. It is a video with a single purpose: For Capra to have something to screen for his first-year systems theory students on their first day of class. The question is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there something when it mostly consists of nothing?” We could easily ask the same of the film.

Hugo (2011)

André Crous

Hugo is Martin Scorsese’s ode to silent cinema and serves as a fantastic treat for children and cinephiles alike.

HugoUSA
4*

Director:
Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter:
John Logan
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 125 minutes

It was always just going to be a matter of time before Martin Scorsese made a film about a filmmaker. In 2004, the fast-talking film encyclopedia of a director had already dipped his toe in the water with the Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. But in his latest film, Hugo, an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s award-winning book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, he goes all out. In the process, he rehabilitates one of the pioneers of the seventh art, Georges Méliès, and exhilarates the audience.

The first filmmakers, the Lumière brothers, emphasised cinema’s potential to capture daily life exactly as it takes place. By contrast, Méliès, who had evolved from magician to director, wanted to inspire the audience with flights of fancy made real. Even those viewers today who have never seen a silent film will recognise the shot from his Trip to the Moon, in which a rocket ship crashes straight into the eye of the Man in the Moon.

Scorsese, better known for using the Lumière brothers’ brand of objective realism, fully embraces Méliès and his kind of magic in Hugo. The film is a love letter to the era of silent films and features many clips from films dating to the early years of the cinema.

With action set in a snow-swept interwar Paris, whose blues and yellows have been amplified to suit the fanciful mood of the picture, the film shimmers with fantasy. Scorsese here takes full advantage of the digital format’s ability to liberate the camera, since the content isn’t always real. In the very first scene, the camera descends from the heavens above Paris, swoops down through falling snowflakes, makes its way onto the platform, swerves between trains and passengers at Montparnasse train station, arrives at the concourse and finally rises up toward the clock, behind which we can make out the figure of young Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).

The 13-year-old Hugo has been living between the walls of the station since the untimely death of his father, a watchmaker, a few months earlier. He stays alive by stealing scraps of food from the dining carts inside the station and swipes clock parts from a toy stand to use in an “automaton”, a kind of robot he inherited from his father.

The man behind the counter at the toy stand is Méliès (Ben Kingsley), whose fame all but evaporated after the Great War and who is now producing mechanical toys that keep children’s dreams alive. An encounter between him and Hugo leads to an eventual friendship between Hugo and Méliès’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a precocious girl whose love of books has her using big words and falling in love with characters ranging from Heathcliff to David Copperfield.

The sets and the background characters don’t always look particularly realistic. But regardless of whether this was done deliberately or is a consequence of the as-yet-imperfect 3-D technology, the almost dreamlike images are exactly in line with the films of Méliès himself. Unfortunately, the film’s dialogue occasionally comes across as rather forced, while a nutty performance by Sacha Baron Cohen as the station commissioner verges on the farcical. His actions, including a stubborn commitment to send stray children to the orphanage, don’t allow us any room for pathos, which the film desperately needs toward the end.

A more general problem is the characterisation of adults as somehow conspiring against children, before having a sudden change of heart to reveal that they have been acting out because they were scared to believe their dreams could be realised.

Hugo is a kind of time machine that takes the viewer back to the days of black and white, when it was so clear there was something magical about going to the movies. It is a work of which Georges Méliès would have been very proud. The clips from films by Harold Lloyd, D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton contain moments that far surpass Scorsese’s film in terms of wonder and excitement, but the importance of making Méliès accessible to a new generation of viewers can’t be understated and is one of the central reasons for recommending this enchanting film.

Frankenweenie (2012)

André Crous

With Frankenweenie, a remake of his own material, Tim Burton outdoes himself by mostly restraining his creative tendencies.

FrankenweenieUSA
4*

Director:
Tim Burton
Screenwriter:
John August
Director of Photography:
Peter Sorg

Running time: 85 minutes

Frankenweenie is a stop-motion film made by the master of the morbid, Tim Burton. However, while many would readily think of his visually exuberant ventures (Big Fish, Dark Shadows and Alice in Wonderland, among many others, spring to mind), he is also the author of works that are at once comical and reflexive, even moving, like Edward Scissorhands or Corpse Bride.

One of Tim Burton’s first films was a 1984 short titled Frankenweenie, in which a young boy called Victor brings his pet bull terrier, Sparky, back to life by flying a kite during a thunderstorm with Sparky attached at one end. The film was a clever adaptation of the 1931 James Whale–directed horror classic Frankenstein, which centres on the misunderstood loner embodied by Frankenstein’s monster, who comes to a nasty end when he is chased by hordes of rabid townspeople wielding torches and pitchforks and ultimately perishes inside a windmill that’s been set alight.

Burton’s 1984 film was a scream, with violins throughout the score and people in constant hysterics, but it is absolutely worth checking out, even though most viewers tend to shy away from short films while having no problem watching an episode of a television series that is exactly the same length.

This live-action film has now been remade by Burton with numerous changes, some of which are inspired, while others are the almost expected consequences of stretching the same story from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.

In both stories, Victor is a bit of a recluse whose only real connection to the world is his dog, and he suffers terrible guilt and loss when Sparky dies as he crosses the road to fetch a ball Victor either threw or hit, depending on the film you’re talking about. In the new film, equipped with his own editing suite to perfect his short film projects, Victor is more of a nerd, and it’s not difficult to recognise Burton as the young boy.

The first half of the story stays more or less the same, but many formerly peripheral characters have here been given extra weight, with their particular actions expanded to fill the time. Whereas the original film was mostly about Victor’s discovery that electricity can reanimate the dead (incidentally, Victor’s surname is Frankenstein) and Sparky’s subsequent adventures that upset the small-minded townspeople, Burton’s feature-length film has many extra storylines.

The most intriguing of these involves the square old man living next door to the Frankensteins with his soft-spoken niece and her French poodle. He is the mayor of the small town and basically a carbon copy of Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace, except we never have any sympathy for him. Sparky has his eye on the French poodle, Persephone, and the attraction is mutual. In what is bound to be one of the film’s signature moments, a spark of electricity flies from the recently resurrected Sparky to Persephone, producing a white streak in her honeycomb, à la Bride of Frankenstein.

One unexpected improvement on Burton’s original is the personality Sparky now has, which Burton wasn’t able to glean from a real animal in his previous live-action short.

The plot is modestly modelled on Frankenstein, though only the transformation from death to life and the final chase of townsfolk with torches (but without pitchforks) are worth paying attention to.

What is more interesting is Burton’s use of his short film to tease the viewer in a way that is enriched by her having seen the earlier film but for whom such knowledge is not essential: Certain pivotal scenes are deliberately drawn out a little longer, and in the process, we move closer and closer to the edge of our seats, even though we know things will work out they did in the first film. Sparky’s death is one such moment, and so is the film’s final scene.

The director’s creativity is on full display in scenes at the pet cemetery, where gravestones are shaped into peculiar objects that reflect the animals buried below, but the last part of the film, in which a Godzilla-like tortoise, a halfbreed bat-cat and a delirious tribe of sea monkeys terrorize the small town of New Holland, is overkill and feels out of step with the rest of the production. Especially in light of the very touching, intimate shots that are interspersed with the footage, mostly with Sparky the outcast, this detour into mega-monster territory is wholly uncalled for.

With the addition of characters such as the wide-eyed cat, Mr. Wiskers, whose clairvoyance is proved by the form of its faeces, and the long-faced and eerie but misunderstood science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski (voiced by Martin Landau), this Frankenweenie has its eye firmly on the goal of entertaining the viewer. Add to this the central character of Sparky, the coat on his freshly exhumed body barely held together by screws and stitches, the evocative music of Danny Elfman and Burton’s always funny take on small-town America, and you have a film that is mostly as good as it can be given its apparent limitations as an adaptation of a 30-minute film.

Even if you are not a fan of most of Tim Burton’s films, this one is a must.

A Hidden Life (2019)

André Crous

A Hidden Life may have relatively more substance than most of Terrence Malick’s other films, but the director’s immutable style is lazy at best and incongruous at worst.

A Hidden LifeUSA
3*

Director:
Terrence Malick
Screenwriter:
Terrence Malick
Director of Photography:
Jörg Widmer

Running time: 170 minutes

Most of us tell ourselves that we would have stood up for justice if we had lived in Germany under Hitler. While it is true that many Germans at the time were unaware of the full extent of the Jewish genocide, they knew enough. But what if your neighbours and friends also went along to get along, regardless of whether they believed in the Nazis’ hysterical nationalism and ideology of Aryan superiority? At what point would you have resisted the march towards groupthink? At what point would you have abandoned your principles?

A Hidden Life doesn’t get close to answering this question for us. However, this is a Terrence Malick film, so the question is not even evident at all. Nothing is, except the audio-visuals: In addition to reams of pages of voice-overs, which is, unfortunately, par for the course in a Malick production, there is also the expected curated selection of classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Dvořák) and other stunning instrumental pieces (Górecki, Pärt), as well as breathtaking emerald-green scenery that is far more complex than the film ever tries to be. 

Based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, a young Austrian farmer who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, the plot is more substantial than many of the director’s other recent films. And yet, because it is Malick, we get very few scenes of genuine drama. Instead, there are plenty of oh-so-serious voice-overs or off-screen monologues to convey romance and struggle. These narrations are delivered in English by German actors. And since Malick has never cared much for the realism of the spoken word, they all fall flat.

We first meet Franz (August Diehl) and his young wife, Fani (Valerie Pachner), in 1939, around the time Germany invades Poland. We don’t get to see any of this, however, because the camera is too busy roving the lush green hillsides and calling our attention to the prominent church tower in the small town of St. Radegund, very close to the former border with Germany. (Austria had been annexed by the German Reich in March 1938.) The town’s aggressively nationalistic and often drunk town mayor likes to rant and rave about how “foreigners swarm over our streets – immigrants who don’t care for the past, only for what they can grab”. And the townspeople appear to share these views.

But all the while, the taciturn Franz’s face is sombre. We see his stubborn resistance. We see the wheels turning in his head. And we see his unwillingness to take up arms against Germany’s so-called enemies. But whatever personal, emotional or intellectual motivation he has remains obscured all the way through. Why does he resist when no one else does? What makes him different? Where does he find the resolve to persist despite threats of violence and, ultimately, the certainty that this path leads to an early death?

At first, Franz is called up to do military training. Although he is against the idea of ultimately using this knowledge to fight for the Reich, he heeds the call. A few years later, with the war in full swing, he is called up to serve, but upon arrival at the garrison, he refuses to pledge allegiance to Hitler and is arrested. He says he would be willing to serve in a non-combat capacity, but for this, he also has to take a loyalty oath. Thus begins his incarceration, which quickly leads to a trial and, in short order, his execution.

While he is away, his wife, Fani, becomes the target of the villagers because her husband has a moral compass. On top of taking care of her three young daughters, she also has to plough the field, harvest the crops and draw water from a drying well. But the village turns against her, first with the scowling looks they give her, then by shouting at her in public and finally by shamelessly stealing produce from her field. She is even hounded out of church by the stares of her fellow congregants. She is othered because of her husband’s refusal to kill for their Führer and, more importantly, because of her love of and respect for Franz. But what her own views are is impossible to determine despite the hours we spend with her.

While Franz languishes in Tegel prison in Berlin, the soundtrack continues to be filled with his and Fani’s monotonous voice-over readings of their letters to each other. But because Franz speaks so rarely, at least outside the ethereal sphere of the voice-over, we don’t understand what he is really thinking in real time, and this ponderous approach gets us nowhere close to understanding what brought him to this point. “I can’t do what I believe is wrong”, he says. The Nazis are perplexed as to why he would risk his life to take a stand that is bound to be forgotten by history. Time and again, they tell him that his voice doesn’t matter. However, the question of why they should care if his actions are supposedly so insignificant is never addressed.

It goes without saying that this kind of bravery, especially in retrospect, is absolutely extraordinary. History provides us with very few examples of such men or women. And it is a shame that the film recounting his story is so empty. Over the course of its three-hour running time, we get to know every inch of the farm and the granite mountains but learn very little about the man at the centre. He is religious, but we never see him reading the Bible. He has no real answers to others’ questions, but he has no questions of his own.

Despite the vertiginous use of wide-angle lenses and restless camera movements, not to mention the frames that decapitate its characters, there are also countless beautiful shots. But presenting a film about suffering as if it were a spread in Outdoor Photography is highly questionable, particularly as these images have no discernible purpose other than beauty for the sake of beauty. Unlike The Thin Red Line, in which Malick depicted the Solomon Islands as an exotic utopia ravaged by the horrors of war, A Hidden Life never deviates from portraying Radegund as an aesthetically pleasing wonderland that is always lush and green, no matter the season.

By now, the Malick approach to cinematography has long run its course. A film cannot live off push-ins, pull-outs, jump cuts, low angles, a dazzling colour palette and endless voice-overs alone. Any five-minute extract will contain all of these elements. Sometimes, there is a surprise, but it is never a good one, as when the camera suddenly takes a first-person perspective for no other reason than to show off. The most memorable example is of a prison guard assaulting Franz, causing the camera to flail around violently on the ground. Or when a fade-out elides an expected confrontation before it even starts. Or when a Nazi officer quotes from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

The struggle and the suffering get lost in the poetry of it all. Whatever is going on, there will be a tiresome voice-over intruding on the action or a violin playing in the background. It’s all mesmerising and can lull us into a state of reverie but is completely lacking in immersion or immediacy. 

This is a story worth telling, but A Hidden Life is not the way to tell it.

My Salinger Year (2020)

André Crous

My Salinger Year, about an awkward girl learning the ropes at a literary agency, is as shallow as a glossy magazine.

My Salinger YearCanada/USA
3*

Director:
Philippe Falardeau
Screenwriter:
Philippe Falardeau
Director of Photography:
Sara Mishara

Running time: 100 minutes

She has never read Catcher in the Rye but worships its elusive author, J.D. Salinger. She wants to be a writer but rarely puts pen to paper. She never learns any hard lessons but is constantly on the verge of tears. Her name is Joanna, and she is a mess, a bit like the movie she stars in, called My Salinger Year.

In the mid-1990s, Joanna (Margaret Qualley) is fresh off a degree in English literature and has published two poems in the Paris Review. On the spur of the moment, she decides to put her studies at Berkeley on hold, break up with her boyfriend and move to – rather, stay on in, as she is the kind of person whom things happen to rather than the one who makes them happen – New York City. She wants to become a writer, but in the meantime, she has to pay the bills, so she contacts a recruitment agency.

Like a godsend or just a magnificent manifestation of serendipity, she immediately lands an interview with the serene but mostly expressionless Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), an agent who always seems to be moving in slow motion. Joanna is told that she will spend her days typing out dictation and answering the heaps of fan letters sent to her client, “Jerry” aka J.D. Salinger, by using rather impersonal form letters. Under no circumstances is she to write on her own, at all.

Of course, she ignores this advice, but not in the way we might expect. She doesn’t appear to write much, except a line of poetry here and there, which we never hear or read. No, she is so filled with her own sense of importance and a naïve Messiah complex that she starts writing personal responses to the fan letters. Her own life is a disaster, but she wants to help others, most of whom are obsessed with Holden Caulfield (it seems those who admire Salinger’s other novels are much more balanced individuals), fix theirs.

In the meantime, director Philippe Falardeau spends an inordinate amount of time trying to cram his screenplay full of retrospective comedy about the time period, particularly as far as the then-nascent internet technology is concerned. Somehow, while this is 1995, Margaret is still afraid of bringing a computer into the office. When a PC does appear, everyone is told it should be used to track down Catcher in the Rye facsimiles on the World Wide Web. And people gossip about how silly e-mails are and how they are, fingers crossed, just a passing fad… Har har.

But then, despite her plain incompetence at the job, Joanna receives more and more responsibilities from Margaret, who cannot be a fool because, after all, she represents the mythical Salinger. Joanna even starts chatting to “Jerry” over the phone, who encourages her to write every day. We never see her following his advice, but by the end of the story, she suddenly has a collection of poetry ready to be submitted to that pinnacle of excellence in the realm of the printed word, the New Yorker. She might just be full of herself, but the film appears to be telling us that she has blossomed into a publishable author along the way (perhaps via osmosis through her connection, however tangential, with literary greatness?).

We never figure out what is going on in Joanna’s head because she appears to be a teenage girl trapped in a 20-something wannabe poet’s body. She has told herself that she will be a writer one day, but this film provides no blueprint or development that would allow her to reach that goal. Very little drama is on display. Even when things get heated (for example, when a teenage Salinger fan, much more mature than her, comes to the office and gives her a good dressing down), she simply persists with her juvenile rebellion by continuing to write non-form letters to the fans.

The decision to present Salinger as an enigma (his face is never clearly shown) deserves some praise, as does the long single take at the end of the film that turns out to be a dream, but Qualley never rises to the challenge of infusing her character with more than a deer-lost-in-the-headlights quality.

My Salinger Year, which is lit so brightly that even the night-time scenes feel like they are taking place at high noon, is the ultimate feel-good Hallmark Channel film. At least the similar-in-the-broadest-outlines The Devil Wears Prada had two strong intriguing central characters, but Falardeau’s film has none, despite a last-ditch effort to inject some drama into Weaver’s character, Margaret. And at a major moment towards the end of the film, when Margaret reveals to Joanna that she knew the latter would make a fabulous agent the first time she laid eyes on her, it is difficult not to wonder whether Margaret has lost her marbles.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Minamata (2020)

André Crous

Jacques Rivette would not be pleased with the tragedy porn that is the dramatisation of the Minamata chemical disaster of the 1970s.

MinamataUSA
2.5*

Director:
Andrew Levitas
Screenwriter:
David Kessler
Director of Photography:
Benoît Delhomme

Running time: 115 minutes

I recently mentioned Gillo Pontecorvo’s notorious Kapò while reviewing a film that appeared to strive for a deliberately artistic depiction of war. This reference, always tied to Jacques Rivette’s review in Cahiers du cinéma, has become commonplace in film criticism. But it is because of the ferocity of the allegation and the clarity of the writer’s moral vision that it continues to pop up in reviews.

Look, however, in Kapo, at the shot where [Emmanuelle] Riva kills herself by throwing herself on an electric barbed-wire fence; the man who decides, at that moment, to have a dolly in to tilt up at the body, while taking care to precisely note the hand raised in the angle of its final framing – this man deserves nothing but the most profound contempt.  (Jacques Rivette, “On Abjection”, translated by David Phelps with the assistance of Jeremi Szaniawski; originally published as “De l’abjection” in Cahiers du cinéma 120, June 1961, pp. 54–55)

When atrocities are presented in a way that prioritises our appreciation of the beauty and the composition of the image over the inherent misery that is depicted, then the author of the image deserves our contempt. And it is difficult to argue against having contempt for the way Minamata goes about glamorising the suffering of others. This is tragedy porn writ large.

Based on the real events surrounding the Chisso Corporation’s dumping of mercury in the Japanese town of Minamata, which deformed the town’s population (mostly its children, but also some adults), the plot focuses on acclaimed LIFE photojournalist W. Eugene “Gene” Smith, played by Johnny Depp. Gene, who appears to deal with the post-traumatic stress accumulated over a lifetime on tough assignments by drinking himself into daily stupors, is visited by a young Japanese woman named Aileen. The pictures that she gives him immediately convince him he has to go and witness the horrors for himself.

His editor at LIFE, who can see the writing on the wall for the once prestigious magazine, whose pages are now filling up with ads to make up for the decline in subscriptions, harbours many a doubt that his prize-winning photographer will be able to cope and make the deadline, but as usual, an inebriated Gene somehow wraps him around his little finger and gets the green light. It is tough to stomach that the editor of a publication as illustrious as LIFE could be so easy to manipulate, but before you can say Jack Robinson, he has agreed to Gene’s terms, and the latter is off to the land of the rising sun.

It isn’t long before we see the calamitous effect of mercury on the local population. Gene and Aileen stay with a very friendly couple whose daughter Akiko is one of those suffering as a result of Chisso’s unsafe dumping of its chemicals. The world-renowned Japanese hospitality is on full display as Gene gets his own darkroom kitted out almost exactly the way it looks back home. Where his host found the money (and the time!) to do this remains a mystery, however.

What is not a mystery at all is the physical effect of the chemicals on the people, and especially on the children. Again and again and again, the camera seeks out the stiff and deformed hands and feet, constantly reminding us of the toll this disaster has taken on people’s bodies by directing its gaze at them. In so doing, the film is not showing us these characters as people but as objects to inspect and to pity.

Gene doesn’t speak the language, but Aileen translates for him. However, it is often very challenging to understand the English spoken by the Japanese characters. This is particularly true when the soundtrack contains additional noise or people are speaking over each other. A handful of moments when the characters speak Japanese and the film uses subtitles are very helpful. But it is head-scratching how Gene and Aileen end up together by the end of the film and, according to the end titles, get married around the same time. They are merely two people in the same place more or less sharing an experience or two, although he spends most of the day taking and developing his pictures on his own without her help or support.

But beyond the ludicrous relationship that the film wants to suggest, the most objectionable part is the stylised approach to the objects of suffering, namely the children of Minamata. In particular, the film features an extended take in which the real Gene’s famous Tomoko in Her Bath picture comes alive. Meticulously restaged to be identical to the photograph, albeit initially in colour, we see the mother holding her deformed daughter in the bathtub. The moody lighting perfectly conveys the feeling that this is a moment of significance. When Gene’s editor subsequently receives the picture, the significance is further underlined by him nearly bursting into tears. This is tragedy porn at its most grotesque.

The story of how a Japanese company could get away with deforming people barely 25 years after the Americans’ atomic bomb had created tens of thousands of hibakusha (in fact, Nagasaki is located close by) seems like material for a significant dramatisation. But we mostly get Gene walking around (drunk) with his camera, conspicuously taking pictures of as many of the town’s inhabitants (and their deformities) as he can, which feels very much like an invasion of privacy. In addition, the cinematography is not only all over the place and without a perspective but is sometimes rather crude, as when close-ups on faces go in and out of focus or a tracking shot of one female assistant fills the frame with her skirt-covered bottom as she moves down the corridor.

Minamata feels like it was produced in a rush. The basics of the tragedy are intriguing, and some title cards remind us of similar catastrophes around the world, but the people who are used to tell the story are made to look one-dimensional and uninteresting. Add to that the absolutely immoral decision to artfully depict the victims as freaks, and you get a film that is an abject failure.

Viewed at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.

Denali (2015)

André Crous

Denali is a love letter that conveys a lifetime with a wave of feeling but without ever reaching for emotion.

Denali

USA
5*

Director:
Ben Knight
Screenwriter:
Ben Knight
Director of Photography:
Skip Armstrong

Running time: 8 minutes

It is rare for voice-overs to be deployed successfully. But Ben Knight’s Denali is rare in many ways.

It may be the most beautiful eulogy that has ever been written on film. All of 8 minutes in length, including credits, it looks back over a lifetime filled with comedy and tragedy. But in large part, it’s an adventure, a shared experience of a bond that is as strong as anything we can imagine. When the identity of the narrator was unexpectedly revealed about a minute into the film, tears started streaming down my face and didn’t stop until the closing credits rolled, at which point I was literally gasping for breath. The voice-over narration belongs to the title character, Denali, who (not which) is a 14-year-old mutt.

Of course, it’s a human being reading the lines. But that is also the point. Most people have animals as pets, but few have them as part of an active life in which they serve as loving companions, fellow adventurers and compassionate co-survivors. Denali’s friend and owner is adventure photographer Ben Moon, who got the dog in his mid-20s and has spent his entire adult life with Denali by his side.

This life includes a great deal of time spent on the beach but also in hospital as Moon struggled with but ultimately survived a bout of cancer, a period during which his insurance company kicked him off his plan (after all, the story takes place in the USA). Denali’s emotional intelligence lies in its knowledge that we want to see what we believe to be true. We believe that our pets – especially our dogs – can sense how we feel, that they understand us without us needing to tell them and that they care for us no matter what happens.

“When someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy”, the narrator tells us. It serves as a reminder that many of us already have this kind of love in our lives and should recognise it more often. It may seem like the act of a simpleton – of someone who cannot remember the past and does not consider a future in which the affection is not returned. But it is as pure an expression as one can imagine of life-giving love that soars the heights of Denali’s namesake, the highest mountain in North America.

Unsurprisingly, given the title and the fact that one of the world’s best-known outdoor clothing brands provided half the budget, every single image looks like a crisp painting and offers a direct link to nature. The voice-over is delivered nearly monotonously and yet, it is deeply moving. Human but different, it stands in perfectly for the quasi-human thoughts of a dog.

Denali is not just a film for those who have lost pets they loved. Nor is it even for those who have ever had pets. It is a film for anyone who has ever had an intimate relationship with anyone or anything. If you have lost that person or that animal, this is for you; if you have ever been scared of losing him or her or it or them, this is for you; if you are human, this film is for you.

Marriage Story (2019)

André Crous

Marriage Story tells the tale of a divorce, but instead of focusing on the protracted heartache, Noah Baumbach shows how entangled two souls can be, especially when they are struggling to uncouple. Marriage Story

USA
4*

Director:
Noah Baumbach
Screenwriter:
Noah Baumbach
Director of Photography:
Robbie Ryan

Running time: 135 minutes

The devil is in the details, but so is the divine. Two people who have lived together for years, had a child together and worked together suddenly separate to file for divorce, but these details remain embedded in their beings. With every encounter, the two souls are inadvertently drawn back to each other, even as the brains in the two bodies tell them not to. This is the tragic soil of a separation in which the two people who know each other best and can still stand each other try not to be together.

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is not so much an autopsy of a failed marriage as it is a forensic examination of a burgeoning divorce. What is most striking, however, is that things look grim even when the characters have the best intentions. The film opens with an extended montage that is filled with so much love and emotion the viewer may very well burst into tears right at the outset. In voice-over, we hear Charlie (Adam Driver) list all the things he loves about his wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson). Next, Nicole relates to us everything that makes Charlie so special to her. These are all details, many of them mundane, but they are the accumulated moments and qualities that epitomise their loving perception of their partner in sickness and in health, in love, marriage and life. That is, until it all falls apart.

We are quickly disabused of our fanciful notion that the love we see onscreen is enough, as the sequence ends with the couple at a marriage counsellor. But Nicole has made up her mind: She wants to leave Charlie and his theatre company and her job as actress in his plays and their life in New York – all of it – and move back to Los Angeles to star in a television pilot. And she is taking their young son, Henry, with her. A few days later, when Charlie comes to California to visit, he finds out she is intent on staying and has hired a high-powered kale-eating lawyer (Laura Dern at her absolute best) to defend her interests, just in case.

It should come as no surprise that Marriage Story is most affecting when the two main characters try to work through the rubble of their relationship. Filled with words carved from the flesh of its two leads, these moments are particularly poignant when they play out in an intimate setting. In a pivotal scene halfway through, Baumbach puts Charlie and Nicole in an empty room with nothing on the walls and no other characters to distract us, and he forces the couple to empty their souls. It works brilliantly as drama, and the scene is written in such a way that neither of the two characters consistently has the upper hand. We can easily sympathise with either of them. In fact, our sympathies swing back and forth between the two as the scene unfolds and they glimpse more and more of each other’s (and their own) deepest darkest sides.

It all comes down to the details – sometimes hidden, sometimes out in the open – and how they accumulate over time. Nicole’s reason for leaving Charlie does not have the drama we often associate with break-ups. We never even see the moment it happens. It was one final straw that landed on a decade of detail and broke the marriage carriage. It was as simple as her receiving a script for a pilot and him letting out a chuckle at the idea she would swap off-Broadway for Hollywood.

But that is exactly how these long-term relationships fall apart. Not with a bang, but with a fizz that is long in coming. And after holding their emotions in for long enough, the dam break is a sight to behold, especially in the hands of players as accomplished as Scarlett Johansson and, particularly, the large-of-frame but vulnerable-0f-voice Adam Driver.

In an early post-breakup scene at their Brooklyn apartment, Charlie finds his wife speaking to him like a stranger, but when Nicole says good night and turns the corner and the camera lets us see her unguarded, the true emotions are overwhelming. It is a breathtaking revelation that demonstrates how Baumbach puts his characters through their paces while never letting go of them as fully fledged human beings.

Those details of a relationship remain deep down, even when the people involved tell themselves they have moved on. We are reminded of how embedded they are again and again throughout the film, right to the very end. In so doing, Baumbach stitches his characters together even as their relationship irreparably disintegrates, offering a tragic reminder of the past while the present lurches forward, inexorably, towards a future that appears all but inevitable.