2.5 stars

Every Man for Himself (1980)

André Crous

With Every Man for Himself, after years in the experimental wilderness, Godard marked a return to narrative form but failed to come to terms with the persistent shortcomings of his filmmaking.

Every Man for HimselfSwitzerland/France
2.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean-Claude Carrière
Anne-Marie Miéville
Directors of Photography:
Renato Berta
William Lubtchansky

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Sauve qui peut (la vie)

After more than a decade in the wilderness, Godard marked his return to mainstream cinema with the Switzerland-set Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)), released in France in the summer of 1980. But Godard being Godard, “mainstream” is a relative concept when applied to his works. We can start by saying that there is a relatively comprehensible story, the actors don’t break the fourth wall, Godard doesn’t constantly interrupt with a voice-over and all talk of Mao and the proletariat has been banished from the screen. So far, so good.

But Godard hasn’t reinvented himself. Still not a fan of conventional narratives, the 50-year-old director gives us crumbs dressed up as fragments and uses montage and “slow-motion” (more on that in a minute) to stretch proceedings to 90 minutes. Hung on a prologue, three units and an epilogue of sorts, his film explicitly but also half-heartedly tries to corral a pulpous narrative mess into a sturdy structure. The story involves a filmmaker – first name “Paul”, surname “Godard”, because of course (he even smokes a cigar, like the director) – who never works; his former girlfriend, Denise, who has a job at a television studio; and a prostitute named Isabelle with whom Paul spends a rather uneventful night. However, the units, each of which focuses (mostly) on one of the three main characters, are far from solid, and the production could easily have done without the intertitles (“Imaginary”, “Fear” and “Commerce”).

It is to the film’s credit that it spends most of its time on the third story because while the action is continuously flimsy throughout the full 90-minute running time, the acting (by a young Isabelle Huppert) is simply stupendous when compared with the wretched performances in the other two storylines. Although the hilariously narcissistic Jean-Luc Godard uses the opening credits to inform us that this is a film “composed by” him, the three supposed movements of the piece often lack a melody, and harmony is nowhere to be found.

In the prologue, Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) is shown leaving his hotel room, where he has been staying for months in the Swiss town of Nyon, on the banks of Lake Geneva and just next to Jean-Luc Godard’s hometown of Rolle. He is pursued to his car by one of the bellboys, a middle-aged Italian, who asks him to screw his ass since “half the navy” has already had a go. Paul aggressively rebuffs his advances, but this topic isn’t broached again and we never learn what led to this explosive interaction in the first place. This won’t be the last time we are confronted with inexplicable and undeveloped sexual assault, however. When Paul goes to collect his 11-year-old daughter, Cécile, from football practice, he asks the coach whether he has ever fantasised about his own similarly pubescent daughter.

Granted, because of the way the scene is staged (we don’t see Paul speak to the coach; we only hear them off-screen), all of this inappropriate dialogue may be taking place in Paul’s head. One would certainly hope that is the case. But when Paul later meets up with Cécile and her mother to celebrate Cécile’s birthday, his incestuous hints are made very publicly. The topic of incestuous desire appears to be included for no reason other than formal coherence, as the third part of the film features a scene in which a prostitute pretends to be a young girl who, upon returning home from college, parades her vagina in front of her parents. And Godard is nothing if not obsessed with form, however unconventional, amorphous or trivial it may be.

Denise phones Paul to ask him a favour: to collect the filmmaker Marguerite Duras from a local college and bring her to the studio for an interview. Paul very unenthusiastically agrees but eventually sabotages Denise’s plans by taking the acclaimed filmmaker (who only speaks offscreen) straight to the airport. Paul appears to do everything possible to earn the wrath of everyone around him, including us. He is unlikeable and never shows any sign of self-reflection, doubt or internal development. Thankfully, the film pays almost as little attention to him and his balderdash as we do.

When we reach the third and most substantive part of the plot, there is a real sense that the plot may finally be developing into something resembling coherence. The focus shifts to Isabelle, played by the magnetic Isabelle Huppert, who carries the movie with her nuanced performance. It is during this segment that the film delves into the themes of power dynamics, humiliation and gender roles. The conversations between Isabelle and her sister offer some of the clearest insights into the film’s thematic concerns, which are otherwise obscured by Godard’s eternal penchant for disjointed storytelling.

The director’s obsession with form is exemplified by the way he employs slow-motion and abrupt cuts to street scenes throughout the film. These techniques create a jarring, disorienting effect, and one cannot help but feel that Godard is more interested in the visual impact of these messy montages than in using them to advance the narrative.

The film’s score is another point of contention, as the electronic music used during key moments often feels out of place. This is particularly noticeable during a fight scene between Paul and Denise, where the downright laughable musical accompaniment detracts from what could have been an emotionally intense scene. And although this is arguably the film’s most famous sequence, its form feels surprisingly simple for someone who had spent most of his life trying (unsuccessfully, with the exception of Breathless) to add interesting gimmicks to his films. This is not slow motion but a continuous start-stop, which is as frustrating to look at as the term suggests.

Although Every Man for Himself has a few moments of insight that are not in the spotlight, the film primarily strives to be a loose collection of disjointed scenes rather than offering a cohesive narrative. At times, for example, a character (usually a woman) hears music that no one else does, and there is a discussion about men’s need to humiliate women repeatedly. These moments could have offered a real hook for the audience, but because the rest of the film is so fragmented and lacks coherence, their potential value falls through the cracks.

With Every Man for Himself, Godard shows he hasn’t changed much since conducting his audiovisual experiments in the 1960s. He still refuses to play by the norms, and his films continue to look visually unappealing and sound messy. He decided to use a single gimmick (a kind of slow-motion that stops and starts at irregular intervals) for no clear purpose other than to emphasise moments that would be too brief if shown at normal speed. Like a stopped clock, his approach captures a handful of special instances, but he also ruins them by adding terrible music or repeating the same formula over and over again. This is not the work of a serious filmmaker but reminds those in the back that for Godard, filmmaking is a purely solipsistic exercise.

A Woman is a Woman (1961)

André Crous

A harbinger of Godard’s future preoccupation with the artifice of most cinematic productions, A Woman is a Woman is an experiment in sight and sound rather than a fully formed work of entertainment.

A Woman Is a WomanFrance
2.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Une femme est une femme

A Woman is a Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film in colour, his second to be released and his third overall. With its seemingly continuous focus on the artifice in and of movies, it also marked a significant departure from cinematic conventions – even for the man whose Breathless had popularised the jump cut.

Using its trailer-like opening credits to promote itself as not only a fiction, a sort of fairy tale (the first words we see onscreen are “IL ÉTAIT UNE FOIS”, Once upon a time), but also a “French comedy” and a “theatrical musical” that is “sentimental”. All of this happens in screen-sized capital letters. The words are in red, white and blue, France’s national colours, and for some odd reason, we even get a reference to Bastille Day when “14 July” fills the screen.

When someone offscreen shouts “lights, camera, action!”, we are further alienated from the action by being reminded that we are watching a staged production. There is a constant siren blaring to remind us this is all fake, and Godard uses many a tool to this end. Why he does this is anyone’s guess because he certainly doesn’t have a story to fall back on.

Alright, that is not entirely accurate. The film is about Angela, a young woman with a strange accent (played by Danish-born Anna Karina) who absolutely wants to get pregnant. The guy she lives with, Émile (a dashing-as-ever-despite-the-sad-puppy-eyes Jean-Claude Brialy), says they can have a child as soon as they get married. But he’s in no rush to get there.

Meanwhile, Angela, who works at a strip club of some kind (during the girls’ performances, all the men in the audience sit expressionless at tables very far apart – social distancing before it was a thing), decides she will grab the bull by the horns. The bull is a friend called Alfred Lubitsch, a portmanteau presumably taken from directors Alfred Hitchcock and Ernst Lubitsch, neither of whom would have dreamt of making as dreadful a film as this one.

There is some light-hearted discussion among the three, a pout, a shout and finally, a laid-back consensus to consummate as widely as possible. But how Godard decides to mount his paper-thin story is frustrating because his approach seems so arbitrary.

Sound and image are frequently decoupled, at least insofar as we expect them to be continuous. The soundtrack is filled with bits and pieces of music and ambient sound that start and stop again and again at the discretion of the director. When Angela sings at the club, not only does she break the fourth wall, but the accompanying piano music (played by someone other than the pianist, because he sits with his arms folded) disappears every time she opens her mouth. It is a gentle destruction of audio-visual conventions for no apparent reason other than artistic masturbation.

The assault on film grammar starts with the very first cut, which jumps across the 180-degree line. At the strip club, this cut (not quite a jump cut, rather a faux raccord that pretends space and time are respected even as they clearly are not) raises its head again, albeit more playfully, as the girls change their wardrobes by simply walking through a curtain.

The underscoring of the artifice continues unabated as all three characters look into the camera at various points, often to comment on the proceedings. During a particularly dramatic domestic scene, Angela and Émile even bow to the audience (the camera) mid-quarrel. But things really start to fall apart when Godard introduces the “real world” into his fake film, even when this real world is connected to film.

For example, the Belmondo character says he doesn’t want to miss the broadcast of Breathless on the television, in which Belmondo had played the lead. At the strip club, someone exclaims that film’s climactic phrase, “c’est dégueulasse”, on the loudspeakers. And later, Belmondo runs into Jeanne Moreau playing herself, and he asks how it is going with Jules et Jim, the film she was then shooting with François Truffaut.

All of these bits are ornaments that, at best, are not integrated into the flow of the narrative and, at worst, do not belong in the film at all. The whole thing feels like an experiment gone wrong, despite the steady, measured presence of Brialy and the comfortable rebellion of Belmondo. Unlike many of her other performances, Karina’s character here is a drag and the film’s prime exhibit of the lack of depth it gives its characters.

Actions are mostly relegated to physical theatre. At one point, Karina is frying an egg. She flips it into the air, then proceeds to leave the kitchen with the empty frying pan, answers the phone in the next room, tells the other side to wait a moment, returns to the kitchen and catches the egg with the pan at exactly the right moment. The film, especially the scenes inside the flat, feels incredibly staged, but to what end? Just to remind us that we are not watching reality?

While looking half-embarrassedly into the camera, Brialy is forced to say the words, “Is this a tragedy or a comedy? Whatever, it’s a masterpiece.” A masterpiece this is not. It is a play filmed with a minuscule cast, bright lights, colourful dresses and long takes, but with frivolous audio gimmicks (including sometimes playing the music on the soundtrack so loudly the actors’ dialogue is barely intelligible) and a multitude of references for an audience of one: Godard.

The average viewer may very well sympathise with Karina having to choose between Brialy and Belmondo, but when it comes to the film, the choice is clear: just turn it off.

Mouchette (1967)

André Crous

Robert Bresson was a thoughtful theorist on how to construct a film, but his characters do not resemble flesh-and-blood human beings. The widely praised Mouchette is among the worst offenders.
Mouchette

France
2.5*

Director:
Robert Bresson
Screenwriter:
Robert Bresson
Director of Photography:
Ghislain Cloquet

Running time: 80 minutes

Sometimes, even when confronted with material that ought to bring us to tears, there is no other way to respond than with boundless laughter. This is the case with Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, a terribly acted film about an innocent girl enduring one tragedy after another without any hope of salvation.

In a way, the audience should be able to sympathise with her because for them the possibility of salvation is equally elusive. Mouchette is a tragic pile-up of calamities, both in the life of its main character and in the art of filmmaking itself. Transitioning from one disaster (humiliation, death, rape) to the next is just one part of the equation, but Bresson rarely knows how to direct scenes with dialogue and is even worse when it comes to personal interaction.

(In)famous for using non-actors in his film, Bresson gives the titular role to the 16-year-old Nadine Nortier. She had never appeared in a film before and would not do so again. Her character is in a truly miserable situation. With a mother on death’s door and an alcoholic father, she has to take care of her baby brother. She has another brother her own age, but somehow he manages to be absent from most of the film. And because of her simple clothing, clog-like shoes and reserved manner, her classmates and imperious teachers relentlessly pick on her. Of course, as with many other female characters in Bresson’s films (Au hasard Balthazar immediately comes to mind), she bears it all with a brave face but no push-back.

The one glimmer of hope peeking out from among the rubble of the girl’s existence is a bumper car ride. Although the staging lacks even a modicum of creativity, we finally see Mouchette emote without looking like a wooden Bressonian model. A well-dressed young man her age repeatedly bumps into her car, which turns her melancholy into joyful laughter. However, we can’t forget that this is a tragedy with a capital T. The scenes ends almost as quickly as it begins. When she is about to speak to the boy, her drunken father suddenly appears and hits her across the face. She silently yields to his authority and accompanies him back to the bar, albeit with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Halfway through the silent agony that is her existence, Mouchette is raped by a sleazy poacher named Arsène. Fortunately, unlike her counterpart in Balthazar, she doesn’t start dating the rapist. (Although she eventually calls him her lover, her motivation for doing so is much clearer than it was for Balthazar‘s Marie.) But the scene is an absolute farce. Mouchette and Arsène move hesitantly, in slow motion and without emotion towards and away from each other. He weakly grabs at her, she weakly repels him and then silently relents. We only hear the crackling of wood in the fireplace – a shockingly unsavoury metaphor for a director renowned for his use of sound.

Another metaphor – morally less objectionable but even more ham-handed – that the film deploys involves the hunt. In one of the first scenes, we see Arsène setting traps for pheasants. And in the film’s penultimate scene, Mouchette, whose name literally means “little fly”, witnesses a rabbit hunt. The viewer would have to be blind to overlook the explicit comparison.

But what is really grating about the film is Bresson’s apparent inability to create realistic drama. When Mouchette somehow loses her shoe in the mud, she takes a seat a few feet away. Quite a while later, Arsène appears, notices that she has lost her shoe, then takes her to his cabin and leaves her there before going back to the same spot to retrieve the shoe in the middle of a rainstorm. None of this makes any sense. The director so desperately seeks to inject drama into his film that he grasps as wholly incredible straws. Despite some nifty editing, the film’s final scene is not much better.

It boggles the mind why Bresson continues to be hailed as a visionary filmmaker. He certainly benefited from the admiration of the Cahiers crowd, but frankly, he was a one-trick pony. One of his first films, A Man Escaped, released in 1956, was a minimalist but tense work of genius. But it seems like the work of an entirely different and much more capable man than the one who subsequently made Pickpocket (whose interesting visuals barely compensated for the performance of its lead actor), and then Balthazar and Mouchette, both of which contain extraordinarily inept bits of acting throughout.

Mouchette feels out of step with its time, and not in a good way. Except for the bumper cars and the two hunting scenes, there is little dynamism, and a succession of setbacks suggests there is little to hope for and disengages us from the narrative. This little fly deserves to be swatted away.

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.

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.

The Painted Bird (2019)

André Crous

The Second World War was a grim time to be in Eastern Europe; The Painted Bird depicts it as the seventh circle of hell, in which episode after episode ends in horror but adds precious little to our understanding of the war or its victims.

The Painted BirdCzech Republic
2.5*

Director:
Václav Marhoul
Screenwriter:
Václav Marhoul
Director of Photography:
Vladimír Smutný

Running time: 165 minutes

Original title: Nabarvené ptáče

Persistent death by gunshot, brutal eye-gouging, paedophilia, skull-pecking, shoving a glass bottle up a woman’s vagina. These are just some of the horrific acts inflicted on the characters of The Painted Bird for no apparent reason. It also features a good-hearted Nazi soldier as one of its lone sympathetic characters, which is almost always a bad idea.

Based on the eponymous novel by Polish writer and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosiński, the plot comprises a string of nine episodes. And each of them tries to top the horrors of the previous one. The story, filmed in gorgeous black and white, takes place during the Second World War in an unnamed East European country where everyone speaks a fictitious Slavic language (Interslavic, an artificial language developed by Vojtěch Merunka).

Everyone, that is, except the main character, who is called Joska but remains anonymous until close to the end. We first lay eyes on him when he is about 10 years old, and over the course of the film, he ages enough for us to notice the passage of time. Played by Czech actor Petr Kotlár, he speaks Czech, is Jewish and lives on a farm with an old lady named Marta. To demonstrate how obscure the storytelling is, it is wholly unclear whether this is just a nice old woman, his grandmother or his aunt, and reviews filed from the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival have come up with different interpretations.

In the very first scene, he is already being terrorised, as a group of young boys pursue him through the forest and eventually catch up to him. They grab his pet ferret, pour gasoline over it and set it alight. Together with Joska, we watch helplessly as the animal twitches in agony before it ultimately stops moving and turns into a pile of soot. But much greater tragedy lies ahead for the poor boy.

Very soon, Marta dies from old age, and when he discovers her, his shock is such that he drops the lantern and burns down the house. This incident sets him on a journey of discovery not so much of himself but of the evil in people. Hell is other people, director Václav Marhoul seems to be saying.

These hellish figures take many forms, but most of the episodes are so superficial that there is no chance to get to know the characters before they inevitably die in a variety of ways or commit atrocious acts that send Joska fleeing their company or, often, both. After his parents have left (or were taken) but before all the other tragedies befall him, he already engages very little with Marta, and he is so emotionally isolated that it takes him a full day to discover she has died.

What follows are episodes of such depravity that it is difficult to view them as anything but gratuitous – flogging a dead horse to give the illusion it is still breathing. In the next village, Joska is taken under the wing of a sorceress named Olga, who buries him upright, leaving only his head exposed and sticking out of the ground. This leads to a gruesome scene in which giant crows descend on him. At first, he scares them away by screaming at them, but when they return he inexplicably falls silent, and they start pecking at his shaved head.

He escapes the crows’ claws and Olga’s clutches, only to face the first truly disgusting setup at a mill, whose miller (played by Udo Kier) is paranoid that his wife, whom he beats all too frequently, is interested in another man and proceeds to gouge out the poor man’s eyes. We get a giant close-up of the eyes lying on the ground. Later, the naïve Joska tries to return the eyes to the man, who now sports giant black holes for sockets.

And so it goes, on and on. Before long, he witnesses a woman being raped with a milk bottle, is forced to eat out a lascivious young widow and is himself raped more than once by a man who buys him from the local priest, played by Harvel Keitel. There is simply no end to the cruelty. And yet, we never get any insight into Joska’s mind, because he is more or less expressionless throughout the ordeal.

The concatenation of horrors offers no point of entry for the viewer but, instead, beats us over the head with some universally loathsome villagers committing unspeakable acts. If Marhoul had wanted to convey to us that the Nazis were not the only bad people fighting the Second World War in Eastern Europe, and that the non-Jewish population was similarly deplorable, he could easily have found a better way.

But arguably as controversial as anything else is a scene in which Stellan Skarsgård makes an appearance as a Nazi called Hans. Soon after a drunk Soviet soldier tells the villagers to deliver Joska to a nearby group of German soldiers, Joska is seen walking the train tracks accompanied by a clearly conflicted Hans. But rather than kill him, Hans, for no real reason other than this is what the screenplay obliges him to do, lets the boy escape. The film contains barely any warfare to speak of, and for the most part, Nazis are wholly absent. Therefore, it is pretty distasteful for the director to insert them here and make one of them the kindly Hans, whom we never get to understand beyond his charitable act.

The Painted Bird‘s one major missed opportunity comes right at the end, when Joska is sitting around a fire under a bridge with fellow war survivors. This scene goes nowhere but would have made sense and packed a serious punch if some of the faces had been shown to belong to some of his erstwhile adversaries. There are certainly more examples of this, but one scene that springs to mind where this is done correctly is the celebration in the streets shortly after the Normandy landings towards the end of Claude Lelouch’s Les Misérables.

There are only three commendable elements here: Firstly, the idea of using Czech as the “outside language” even though it is mutually intelligible with Interslavic is a brilliant metaphor for Joska’s “outsider” status as a Jew among the general population. In addition, the fact that Kotlár himself is a Gypsy gives further depth to this metaphor. Second, the images are beautiful, although they stick in our heads for their grisly content rather than their composition. And third, a scene late in the film when Joska shares a tree with taciturn Soviet soldier Mitka (Barry Pepper) is disarmingly charming, with them finding a moment of real serenity amid the gloom. That is, before Mitka mows down the inhabitants of a small village.

The Painted Bird is an austere account of war. Its sympathies are ambiguous, but its intention is clearly to shock us rather than put us in the shoes of its main character. The shocks are grotesque, and instead of punctuating the plot, they end up being the plot. 

The film’s screenings at the international festivals in Venice and Toronto were followed by sensational reports of people fleeing the cinema, distressed by the events they were forced to witness. It has to be noted here that the implication was always that people can’t handle the truth. Let me offer a counterpoint: Sometimes people simply walk out of a screening because the film is bad.

Booksmart (2019)

André Crous

Told from a female perspective but playing like a cheap Netflix fusion of American Graffiti and Superbad, Booksmart hopes (in vain) that we can look past its lead’s impish behaviour because she’s more-studious-than-thou. 

BooksmartUSA
2.5*

Director:
Olivia Wilde
Screenwriters:
Emily Halpern
Sarah Haskins
Susanna Fogel
Katie Silberman
Director of Photography:
Jason McCormick

Running time: 90 minutes

There are few people as annoying as know-it-alls. Now imagine someone like this playing the lead in a feature film and failing to recognise her own deficiencies at any point in the story. It is near impossible to root for such an individual. And yet, this is the main character in Booksmart, a film that takes place over roughly a 24-hour period on the last day of school and seems to pitch itself as a female-driven American Graffiti or Superbad. Unfortunately, it has little more going for it than meagre production values, a forgettable soundtrack and a complete lack of visual creativity.

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) is student body president and will be valedictorian at her high school graduation the next day. Seemingly living a life of privilege (we never see her parents, and the implication is that she somehow lives on her own on the top floor of a big duplex apartment unit), she sees herself on a glide path to the Supreme Court bench within a few years. Clearly, there is no shortage of hubris, although it is not rooted in anything except grades.

She and her best friend, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), have spent their entire school career seemingly insulated from any and all social contact, as we soon learn when Molly overhears her classmates maliciously gossiping about her. Confident in her own academic superiority, however, she confronts them by suggesting graduation is the end of the road for them, only to learn that the cool kids have way more layers than she thought: One is going to Harvard, another is headed to Stanford and the most popular guy in school has been accepted at Georgetown, while the resident stoner and long-term school student has been recruited as a programmer for Google. She not only misread the classroom: She has misread the classroom for years and never learnt anything except her school work. By the looks of it, social interaction and life, in general, have completely passed her by.

For Amy, life is somewhat more complicated. An out but introverted lesbian for the past two years, she has focused all her energy on work (and, presumably, the high-maintenance friendship with Molly) and has yet to find an outlet for her teenage hormones like her peers. She has super-religious parents who are fully supportive of their daughter, so getting laid is (as in so many other films) actually the most pressing challenge to her otherwise blissfully elite existence.

Having just realised that they have missed out on being teenagers, and given the symbolic importance of the last night of school, Molly devises a plan to attend the year’s biggest party and rack up some experiences before she graduates to residing inside the law library at Yale. Basically, her big plan is just to go to the party, where she will get to hook up with her uber-popular vice-president, Amy will finally make out with a girl, and they will somehow make up for a youth ensconced in a bubble of superiority. This “plan” is pathetic, but what is even worse is that the film somehow allows most of Molly’s dreams to come true, without her having to change a thing about herself.

The characters’ passivity is mirrored by the film itself, which has little in the way of either physical or audiovisual dynamism. Most scenes feel desperately empty, and shots with more than two characters involved in the action are few and far between. The screenplay’s central focus is on the Molly/Amy duo, and yet, by the end of the film, they are still two-dimensional, at best. The film isn’t interested in doing more than scratch the surface, and in the one big confrontation between the two girls, their dialogue fades out so that we can’t hear them, lest they appear to be more complex than a blank page.

By far the most interesting character is their cool English teacher, Miss Fine, played by the supremely talented Jessica Williams, who belongs in a much better film. The amount of personality, back story and feeling she brings to her character in just a handful of scenes is simply astounding. Jason Sudeikis is another comedian in the cast and turns up at school as the principal, although his talents are much better deployed later on when he pitches up as a Lyft driver. The topical issue of teacher pay is hinted at but probably too serious a subject to address in a film that is clearly more about lip service than thoughtful speech. (Props are given, however, when props are due: Uganda is dinged for its abysmal LGBT record.)

It might be unfair to expect any film about high school seniors to ever equal (never mind surpass) the brilliance of Will Gluck’s Easy A. But Booksmart‘s central characters are nowhere near as dynamic, independent and charismatic as Emma Stone, and the camera, by comparison, looks like it is fixed in place. In addition, while Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in Easy A have rightly been called the best movie parents of all time, Molly’s mother and father are inexplicably absent. Meanwhile, Amy’s very Christian parents (played by Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) only appear once and come across as overwrought caricatures every bit as childish as a baby on a sugar high.

Booksmart touts its feminism by pointing to other strong women (Molly’s room is adorned with pictures of Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) instead of infusing its own potentially thought-provoking central duo – a loud feminist and an out lesbian – with any kind of energy or insight beyond juvenile frolicking. They know everything, but they know nothing. Worst of all, it took them their entire young lives to figure out that being self-centred outsiders has its drawbacks.

It is incredible that it took four writers to come up with this shallow narrative headlined by a girl devoid of self-reflection and her omega-female sidekick. All the students change their minds about their peers within a single night and mostly without any serious drama. The scales fall off their eyes as if by magic, and by the end, there is absolute harmony and understanding. One half expects them to burst into a full-on musical number.

This film is often as nauseating as the excessive compliments Molly and Amy give each other and deserves a failing grade.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)

André Crous

Despite its long gestation and its release more than a decade after the original trilogy, the Star Wars origin story (Episode I) is one of the worst instalments in the entire series.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom MenaceUSA
2.5*

Director:
George Lucas
Screenwriter:
George Lucas
Director of Photography:
David Tattersall

Running time: 135 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– Attack of the Clones (Episode II)
– The Revenge of the Sith (Episode III)
– Star Wars / A New Hope (Episode IV)
– The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V)
– The Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
– The Force Awakens (Episode VII)
– The Last Jedi (Episode VIII)

“Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.
Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.
While the congress of the Republic endlessly debates this alarming chain of events, the Supreme Chancellor has secretly dispatched two Jedi Knights, the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, to settle the conflict….”

Thus reads the opening crawl of the first instalment of the Star Wars series. It is lengthy (that final paragraph is a single, 35-word sentence), mentions taxation in the opening paragraph and is generally uninspiring. All in all, this is a terrible way to start a franchise, but luckily Episode I had history on its side: A trilogy of films, Episodes IV–VI, released between 1977 and 1983, had already gained a mass following and laid a firm fictional foundation by the time this origin story was released in 1999.

Episode I contains its share of dramatic irony because thanks to the other films we have the benefit of foresight regarding many of its characters’ destinies. Nonetheless, it is surprising that director George Lucas presents key moments with a complete lack of energy or flair. Consider the first meeting between Anakin Skywalker, here an 8-year-old boy, and his future bride, Padmé, or the first time the astro droid R2D2 lays its eye on C3PO, its eventual partner through thick and thin. These moments are not visually highlighted, and there is nothing to suggest their future importance, even though Anakin asking whether Padmé is an angel is kind of cute.

But then, it is generally accepted that the instalments directed by Star Wars creator Lucas were mostly dull in comparison with those that were not. Episode I, in the works for a decade and a half after the original trilogy, disappointed many people who had grown up on this series loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (隠し砦の三悪人 / Kakushi toride no san akunin). Lucas fumbles with comic timing again and again and again, mostly because of the ludicrous character named Jar Jar Binks, a creature that is both physically and tonally awkward and reaches for laughs at many an occasion by saying “How wude!” with a pout that does not elicit a single laugh but rather a queasy shrug from the viewer.

The plot in this first film revolves around Queen Padmé Amidala, who is strung up so tightly in a variety of elaborate costumes that she can barely speak a word when she opens her mouth. This gimmick gets old very quickly and minimises the charm and sparkle she has when she is out of her costume, as in the first half of the film when she pretends to be a handmaiden and spends a great deal of time in the company of the young Anakin Skywalker.

Queen Amidala’s planet of Naboo has been taken over by the Japanese-accented Neimoidians. They are receiving guidance from a shadowy figure who only appears to them as a hologram (thus, he is the “Phantom Menace” in the title, although this term never appears in the film), whom we know from later films as the Emperor. Lucas finally reveals the identity of this individual during the final moments thanks to a quick pan that ends on the face of someone who has gained more and more power throughout the film. 

In the meantime, the origin story of Anakin Skywalker’s journey to becoming a Jedi starts with a chance stop on the planet of Tatooine, where two Jedis, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, are seeking help while the queen’s planet is under occupation. They meet Anakin, whose midi-chlorian levels are off the charts, meaning not only that the Force is strong with him but also that he might very well be “The One” who will “bring balance to the Force”. Although just 8 years old, he is remarkably gifted at podracing (the film’s podrace is shown in full and lasts an exhausting 10 minutes) and has even built his own droid, C3PO.

Qui-Gon is so sure of himself that he decides to buy Anakin’s freedom and take him to the Jedi Council on the city-planet of Coruscant, where the boy undergoes a test not unlike the one the Tibetan lamas administer to find the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. Master Yoda, who cannot see into the future but can sense negativity radiating back from it (possibly by means of past films), says Anakin may very well be The One, but his anger and fear, tied to his mother who was left behind on Tatooine, could lead him to the Dark Side. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

This may be one of the worst initial films ever in a series. While the technology in 1999 had certainly improved over that of the 1970s and 1980s, and Lucas was able to bring to life a civilisation like Coruscant and stage a fast-paced (albeit overlong) podrace inside canyons, there are major flaws. For one, the humanoid characters like Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padmé all look above the faces of the CGI characters, like Jar Jar, when they are speaking to each other. That is very distracting and should not be happening.

Another problem is the chemistry between Anakin and his mother, Shmi. Although the latter was played by the legendary Pernille August, she speaks her dialogue as if she is performing a line reading. Meanwhile, Anakin, played by Jake Lloyd, is at times perfectly restrained, but when he is called on to show any kind of emotion ranging from sadness to elation, he rushes headlong towards the histrionic side of the spectrum. And when these two characters interact with each other in the same scene, the result is absolutely frigid and unaffecting.

Lucas also made the peculiar choice to break the fourth wall and put the viewer in the position of a droid, C3PO, on three occasions during a scene when Anakin is speaking to him (and looking directly at it/him). This feels completely out of sync with the rest of the filmmaking style and is not grounded in any apparent perspective.

The highlight of this first instalment is the climactic lightsaber battle between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on the one side and the evil Sith, Darth Maul (basically, a nemesis of the Jedis), who wields a red double-sided lightsaber, on the other. While the location is limited, the stakes cannot be higher, and for those who have already seen Episode IV, the death of Qui-Gon will have at least a narrative, if not a visual, parallel with the death of Obi-Wan, who survives the attack here.

Episode I lays some of the groundwork for the rest of the story, but despite having a wealth of elements at its disposal and knowing full well that most people who saw it at the time were already familiar with the characters’ eventual development, the film is disappointingly reticent about presenting its material in a way that would enthuse its base. Lucas’s almost laser-like focus on mining for a laugh at the end of scenes, usually by deploying Jar Jar Binks, is as misguided a strategy as he could have embarked on, and ultimately the film feels exceptionally inept.

Milada (2017)

André Crous

First biopic of Milada Horáková, who resisted the Nazis but was executed by the communists in Czechoslovakia, is an utter disappointment.

MiladaCzech Republic
2.5*

Director:
David Mrnka
Screenwriters:
David Mrnka
Robert J. Conant
Robert Gant
Director of Photography:
Martin Štrba

Running time: 125 minutes

Milada is about one of the most heroic characters of the 20th century and among her native Czechoslovakia’s most tragic figures under the country’s decades-long totalitarian rule. Filmmakers had avoided telling her story for a long time, but nearly 70 years after a show trial staged by the country’s communist regime and a decade after new footage of the excruciatingly biased nine-day trial was discovered, we finally have a film meant to share the full story with us. It is painful to watch – but for all the wrong reasons.

The film depicts nearly two decades in the life of Milada Horáková, an outspoken Czechoslovak lawyer who came of age at the same time as her country and was active in the resistance during Nazi occupation. Despite an initial death sentence, she was eventually imprisoned until the end of the war and elected to the Constituent National Assembly, but after the communist coup in February 1948, which she vehemently and vocally opposed, she was arrested and ultimately executed.

And yet, despite its basis in real life, Milada is an atrocious piece of filmmaking. First-time director David Mrnka clearly made an effort with period costumes, but whether because of a lack of money, of creativity, or of filmmaking experience (likely all of the above), the film commits one sin after another.

At a very basic level, the transitions between scenes are laughable. Mrnka seems to believe he has only two tools at his disposal: the spinning newspaper headline (to provide wider historical context, the way films did at the time) and the fade-out (to indicate the passage of anything from hours to years). Both of these processes are sorely overused and suggest an editor asleep behind the console.

The intention was never to borrow filmmaking techniques that were in use in the 1930s and 1940s, however, as we get five almost identical sequences of Horáková’s family in the car in 1948/1949, driving along the same road in the Czech countryside to visit family close to the border, while many of the shots are obtained by drone. Now, obviously, drones have no business in a historical film unless they are used, as in Milada‘s final minutes, in the context of a shot whose existence is not tied to a specific moment in time. The use of the drone – not one, but FIVE times – is nauseating, onanistic and entirely inappropriate.

There is little to say about the copious use of the fade-out – a shake of the head and a deep eye-roll will suffice. But sometimes the fade-outs are so obtrusive that they terminate a scene before its emotional climax. The scene in which Milada is taken away by the State Security is staged in such a way that her husband, Bohuslav Horák, watches her being driven away as he hides behind a corner. When the car passes, we get a point-of-view shot from inside the car, which implies Milada sees Bohuslav’s shocked face. But before we get a reverse shot from Bohuslav’s POV, the editor presses the “fade out” button, ending the scene prematurely and completely forgoing a shot that would have taken our breath away.

Ayelet Zurer, an Israeli actress with a Czechoslovakia-born mother, stars in the lead. The entire cast is made to speak in a Czech-inflected English, but only the Czech players can do this convincingly. In addition, Zurer likely didn’t have enough time to prepare, as her accent is not only generally bad but also inconsistent: Sometimes within a single sentence, she can’t decide whether to roll her r’s or to pronounce them the American way (Czech only has rolled/trilled r’s). Other non-Czech actors also struggle mightily with the accent, and Robert Gant, who plays Bohuslav, settles on something akin to a Russian accent, which, considering that his character is wholly opposed to Soviet influence, is very unfortunate.

Even the bookends, which feature Horáková’s daughter, Jana, collecting her late mother’s letters to her from the newly elected democratic government shortly after the collapse of communism, miss the mark completely. We are told that Jana fled to Washington, D.C., in 1968, where she has lived since then. And yet, when actress Taťjana Medvecká speaks English, there is not even a hint of an American accent in her speech; on the contrary, the accent is entirely oriented towards British English.

But what is most jarring in this production is the lack of introductions to major characters. Jan Masaryk, the son of Czechoslovakia’s founding father and a long-time diplomat, is shown on the night of what is widely assumed to be his murder (although oddly enough, the film presents his death in a very ambiguous way). But he is barely introduced, and those unfamiliar with Czech history are unlikely to know what or whom they are looking at. Other characters, from Alois Schmidt, who appears to be an associate of Horáková’s, to the callous state prosecutor Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, right up to the slightly comical Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, are either not introduced by name or sketched so superficially that the uninitiated will struggle to understand their role in the events.

Most bizarrely, Horáková’s alleged co-conspirators appear out of nowhere at the trial. We have never seen them before, and we can easily assume she had never met them before, but that is not historically accurate. The film ignores the fact that five of them had the same party affiliation as her. Nonetheless, there is absolutely no contact – not even a sympathetic or a fearful glance exchanged – between them.

Finally, the staging of the show trial does not make anything dramatic of the vulnerable position in which Horáková is placed: a slightly raised podium in front of a long row of judges and Communist Party officials, where the defendant is made to stand awkwardly in full public view. There is no creativity to the camerawork or the composition of the visuals. Instead, we basically get a colourised version of the original television footage. 

Perhaps the only thing Milada does right is to suggest that, in some respects, the communists were far worse than the Nazis. This comparison remains a sore point in present-day Czech society. Nazis, and Germans more generally, were thrown out of the country after the Second World War; by contrast, the communists stayed and remained part of society after the collapse of their regime. But when we learn that Milada Horáková was allowed to see her family when she was imprisoned by the Nazis, while the Communists refused any and all contact, it is impossible to ignore the contrast. The film’s courage to speak the truth in this regard is commendable.

Despite the exemplary life and tragic death of its titular character, the film is an utter failure. It provides a vague outline of events, but the myriad fade-outs are simply farcical, and the mediocre performances and the badly structured narrative keep us at arm’s length from a flow of history that should have swept us off our feet.

The Butler (2013)

André Crous

Real-life story of White House butler struggles to make us connect with historic moments.

The ButlerUSA
2.5*

Director:
Lee Daniels
Screenwriter:
Danny Strong
Director of Photography:
Andrew Dunn

Running time: 130 minutes

The Butler tells the story of Cecil Gaines, a black man who served as a butler in the White House in the second half of the 20th century, and the landmark events he witnessed with almost unfettered access to the corridors of power.

Opening on a cotton plantation in the 1920s, we see the young Cecil’s mother being dragged to a shed by the white landowner, and as she screams and the many workers around pretend not to hear anything, for fear of retribution, we cringe. The film certainly evokes some powerful moments from the tainted history of the United States, but we also cringe because the roles of the landowner, the young Cecil and his mother all seem so incredibly simplistic and wholly lacking in complexity.

Luckily, Vanessa Redgrave shows up. She stars as the landowner’s mother, and while she is an old white woman with obvious power to wield over her slaves, she leaves the dirty business to her son. Meanwhile, she attends to the needs of the young Cecil, who – his mother having become emotionally unstable after the rape and his father having been shot because he (more or less tacitly) condemned the treatment of his wife – is turned into a servant in the mansion.

Redgrave’s appearance is brief but satisfying, as we plainly see her being slightly conflicted by devotion to the boy’s well-being while also conscious of the as yet unbridgeable divide between them because of the colour of their skin.

The rest of the film, however, is a terrible let-down. Instead of focusing on Gaines’ emotional and intellectual journey from a plantation to the White House, from the South to Washington, D.C, the film flashes through many pivotal moments in the nation’s history without showing how they affect his way of thinking, leaving us to believe he is unaffected by the societal tremors that shake the country, the result of Selma, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers and the presidents of the United States.

The tension could have been an interesting one: Gaines (played as an adult by Forest Whitaker) is a man who wants to provide for his family, and he has a genuine skill, namely to serve and to serve well, but is he betraying his own people, many of whom are dying in Alabama and Mississippi and across the country as they stand up against intolerance?

Like Helen Mirren’s character, Mrs. Wilson, in Gosford Park, he knows when the president will be hungry, and he knows when the president will be tired, perhaps even before the president knows it himself. But he learned a long time ago that he is a black man in a white house, and that he was not hired to contribute or interfere with politics.

His son, who goes to school in the Deep South around the time of the civil rights revolution, has a very different idea, and he is constantly at odds with his father’s apparent passivity in the face of continued injustice. But given how little we actually see of a movement toward racial equality on the side of the presidency, with the possible exception of Kennedy (even Lyndon B. Johnson’s role is downplayed), we cannot understand why Gaines sticks up for his white masters with such foolhardy narrow-mindedness. He may be frustrated with his son’s tactics, but why do we get the feeling he pooh-poohs the strategy, too? Gaines never offers an alternative to his son’s idea to be a Freedom Rider or to sit at a lunch counter where only whites are served.

It cannot be overstated how simple the film is, how predictable every single scene is, or how little we learn about the slow march toward full equality (underlined by the inevitable scenes with Barack Obama’s 2008 election at the end of the film), particularly the painfully slow awakening of Gaines’ own civil rights conscience. Daniels’ attempts to get us closer to the character by having him speak to us throughout are unsuccessful and, on the contrary, become rather irritating.

The Butler’s screenplay surely presented producers with an easy opportunity to tell a story that was rather uninteresting but whose context of inequality between the races is still valid today despite the Obama epilogue. James Marsden is charming and clearly inquisitive as John F. Kennedy, Jane Fonda is delicious as Nancy Reagan (although a large swath of the United States is bound to be furious with this casting decision), and Gaines’ son Louis is visibly tortured by what he sees as his duty to fight for equality even though his father is serving some of the cream of the political hypocrites.

The insight into Gaines’ character is minimal, as he seems to be isolated from the tides of history breaking on his doorstep for most of the duration of the film. Given that director Lee Daniels is both black and gay, we frankly would have expected him to tell a story about persecution with much more intimacy and understanding instead of merely reciting the vague outlines of history that skim over decades of important events without pausing to take in their meaning and significance.

The Butler is a crude depiction of U.S. history and actually diminishes the many landmark achievements of its civil rights heroes.