The Sandman: Grade A

A

The Sandman (2011)

Fabian Krüger, Irene Brügger, Beat Schlatter; Writer-Director Peter Luisi. (Swiss German, subtitled).

This is a strange, original, humorously surreal story about a man whose body gradually turns into sand. The premise is bizarre, reminiscent of a Kafka novel. Benno, a stamp collector (Kruger) works in a shop where the boss is annoyed at finding grains of sand on the counter. Then Benno discovers sand in his bed. He sweeps it away, thinking nothing of it. But then there is sand in his kitchen, in his shoes, everywhere, and he realizes the sand is coming from him.

He confides in the waitress (Brugger)who works in the coffee shop below his room, even though the two of them have an icy relationship because her loud singing practice in the evenings keeps him awake. She spurns him out of hatred, and anyway cannot understand his complaint, “I am losing sand!” He starts dreaming about her every night and is quite annoyed by that. He becomes desperate when he realizes that his body is wasting away as the amount of sand he gives off increases.

It might sound like a wacky one-idea story, but it isn’t. Various twists and turns kept me guessing throughout. At first I thought it was an existential idea, of the “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” type, and maybe it is. Then it turns out that he loses more sand when he is being untruthful, so he embarks on a program of absolute honesty, as in the Jim Carrey movie, Liar, Liar. Okay, I thought, so it’s a Pinocchio story. But then another twist: anyone who smells the sand immediately falls asleep. (Some great lines here: “Smell my sand.” “No, I am not going to smell your sand!”) So, a bedtime “Sandman” story? But no, another twist develops, and then another and another. The film is endlessly creative in that way.

The cinematography is wonderful and the pictures are more and more shocking and surreal as the movie progresses. Inevitably, and rightly, Benno and “Sandra,” the girl in the coffee shop, come to a romantic understanding. It is extremely hard to write a non-cliche story with non-stereotyped characters, but this movie is an original.

Melancholia: Grade A

A

Melancholia

Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgård, Alexander Skarsgård, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling; Writer-Director Lars von Trier.

This film is perfection of the art in every respect except one: editing. Its 2 hour, 15 minute runtime is not justified by the material. Not that I was ever bored, because the visuals took a grip on my eyeballs from the opening scenes and never let go. But the first half, focused on an elaborate wedding, verged on repetitive and tedious.

In the first half, Justine (Dunst) marries Michael (A. Skarsgard) in her sister’s home, so luxurious it would make royalty blush. Throughout this long segment, Justine is withdrawn and melancholy and finds no happiness in the wedding. But she is there, after all, in the appropriate costume, so she is conflicted. She arrives 2 hours late, then during the festivities, disappears to take walks on the grounds, retires to take a nap, and even takes a bath. She finds no pleasure in the social rituals of dancing, drinking, cutting the cake, exchanging the vows. Is it because she is clinically depressed? Maybe, but it is more like she just doesn’t see the point of the ridiculous ceremony. Her mother (Rampling) is explicit about contempt for all aspects of marriage, but Justine seems ambivalent. She can’t decide if she wants to be a member of the social community, with all its stupid, contrived rituals, or whether she is an existential monad, alone in the world, finding her own meaning. Her vacillation goes on far too long. I wanted to scream at von Trier, “Okay, we get it!” But I think he was trying to make the viewer feel Justine’s conflict, the endless, intellectually empty tedium of well-worn social ritual, and attraction to fabulous costumes, bright lights, fine food, and excellent music. I felt it, though I didn’t need such a long dramatization.

In Part 2 the story focuses on Clair, Justine’s sister, married to Jack (Sutherland). Justine stays on with her sister’s family after the wedding because she alienated her new husband on the wedding night and he left in confusion. Claire is worried about a new planet, called Melancholia (get it?) hurtling toward Earth, threatening total destruction. Jack assures her that all the scientists predict it will miss, and that “Melacholia will pass us by.” In other words, Justine’s rejection of the social rituals we live by will not hurt us, and death itself will pass us by, because we are together. Justine tells Claire however, that we will all die because the Earth is evil. Her melancholic diffidence now seems like stoic acceptance of humanity’s inevitable fate.

The themes in the film are thus the most fundamental existential questions facing us, the inevitability of death, the meaning of society, the vagaries of fate, and the survival of the planet, making the movie intellectually and emotionally engaging, much more than mere eye candy. Acting by Dunst is phenomenal, and von Trier takes advantage of her beauty in some stunning, if gratuitous, shots. Acting is also very strong from the other main characters, especially Rampling. Sets, costumes: superb. CGI: perfect. Directing: flawless. It’s a masterpiece.

The Turin Horse: Grade A

A

The Turin Horse (2011)
János Derzsi, Erika Bók; Directors Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, (Hungarian; subtitled).

I only discovered Bela Tarr in 2006 when I saw his 1988 movie, Damnation (reviewed in this blog 11/27/06). Turin Horse was his last film. Like Damnation, this one is long (2.5 hrs), extremely slow, shot in beautiful black-and-white, and ultimately about the desperation of life under totalitarian (communist) rule in Hungary. It is utterly mesmerizing, depressing, and beautiful, but only recommended for viewers who are committed to film as an art form.

A poor, elderly, and disabled country farmer in Italy, about 1900, makes a meager living carting goods, his horse an old, gray, sickly mare. He lives with his daughter in a fieldstone house in a cold, windy, treeless land where a howling gale rages for most of the movie. It’s always winter, cold, and bleak in a Bela Tarr movie, because that’s how life was under communism. The storm is the harsh and relentless politics blowing through the land, the dust making the simplest movement a challenge. The man and his daughter eat boiled potatoes, fetch water from the well, stoke the wood stove, gaze numbly out the dirty window, and sleep. She spends a lot of time dressing and undressing her father, who has a bad arm. They both spend a lot of time harnessing up and unharnessing the horse. This goes on and on, repeatedly.

Scenes are re-enacted in excruciating detail, every day. After about three cycles, I inwardly screamed, “Please, God, no! Not another boiled potato!” But yes, it was another boiled potato, and we again watched it being prepared, served, and eaten, in almost real-time. The same for all the other daily chores. Over and over with tiny, tiny variations, sometimes only in the camera movements or angles.

But this is exactly the point. The audience literally feels, viscerally, the hopelessness, the meaninglessness, the mind-numbing repetitiveness of that life. We understand experientially, in a way no narrative description could ever convey. That’s what makes the film an unforgettable artistic triumph. Yes, it takes a difficult 2.5 hours of nothingness to “get it,” but that’s a lot less than a lifetime.

A few things do happen, though. The horse gets too sick to work, and finally, the well goes dry. So they are doomed. They gaze numbly out the window into the winter storm. The final scene, of the two characters sitting at the table (over potatoes not boiled – no water), is pure visual poetry. They look somehow Christlike at that point.

The blurb for the film says that this old horse was the exact one that Nietzsche famously encountered in Turin in 1899. But that is a red herring that should be ignored. If the ads told you what the movie was really about (existential nothingness), you wouldn’t go.

The cinematography is extremely interesting and beautiful, the music hypnotic – deep bass and cello, repetitive, droning, beautiful, and soporific, in keeping with the tone. The visual images burn into your brain as you stare into the face of a human condition reduced to a mechanical numbness that strangely still retains its dignity. The portrayal is not completely realistic (e.g., who chops the firewood and cuts the hay for the horse; who maintains that stone house, etc.? Surely not the woman alone, and surely not the one-armed man). So there is a theatrical element to the storytelling, but the realism of the life somehow comes through that artifice brighter than actuality.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Grade A

A

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas; Writer-Director Woody Allen.

An elderly married couple breaks up (Hopkins-Jones) when he realizes that his wife “has let herself get old.” He hits the gym and takes up with a young, beautiful, airhead, gold digger prostitute. Meanwhile their daughter (Watts) breaks up with her husband (Brolin), a failed writer. Each of the four is soon attracted to other potential mates. Everyone is haunted by failed relationships and struggles to start a new life.

It took me a while to get into this movie. It starts out with dreadful acting, a stilted script, noticeably mechanical directing, and a dreadful, intrusive narrator. I thought, "This is aggressively bad!" About halfway through, some real acting begins to show, although the characters never do become well developed. Finally I realized what Allen was trying to do. He did not want us to get involved with these characters. They are symbols, or archetypes for the lives in our culture, not real people we should care about. That’s why the plot line is practically nonexistent, the romantic relationships stereotypes, and the acting hollow. None of that matters. He is forcing us beyond the particular characters into universals. We are being shown the archetypes of modern, Western, sophisticated urban life, so that we might reflect on its meaning, or lack of same. Ultimately this is an existential movie that says, your life has no meaning, despite today’s passions and angst that seem so gripping. That is the human condition.

What makes this approach work is the superlative film making, especially the sets and costumes. Every detail, and I mean every one, is absolutely perfect. Colors, camera angles, framing, lighting, movement, rhythm, jewelry, hairstyle, buttons, every tiny detail is done to loving perfection, and the movie is worth seeing just for that exercise of craft. But as a bonus, you get the subtle existential message, and the pleasure of seeing some familiar faces on the big screen. You could watch this movie as a mildly interesting romantic comedy/drama, but you’d be missing the point. It is so much more if you look a little deeper.

Up In the Air: Grade A

A
Up in the Air (2009)
George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick; Director Jason Rietman.

Clooney is an HR consultant hired by firms to fire people when they need to cut staff. He lives most of his life flying and traveling through airports. Along the way he meets Farmiga, also a frequent flyer, although it is unclear what she does. They strike up a relationship in an airport bar and continue a no-strings attached sexual friendship whenever their travel schedules intersect. It is an extremely slow starter. Clooney describes his life and values in a deadly voiceover and the dialog with Farmiga is so rushed and cute it is simply not believable. The first half hour is boring as mud. That relationship eventually turns extremely interesting however.

Kendrick’s character is a recent hire to the HR firm. She is assigned to travel with Clooney to learn the ropes. Her acting jumps off the screen and she certainly holds her own against Clooney and Farmiga. Her character is clunky, naïve and nerdy alternating with sensitive and sophisticated, but she overcomes the weak writing by sheer force of acting ability.

Sets, costumes, locations, cinematography, and even hair-dos are perfection in this movie. The airport hotels and the Milwaukee wedding are especially cringe-producing in their accuracy. The music is just awful, mostly a nasal folk singer whining over a thin guitar, and they gradually crescendo the sound track until it is deafening and you have to hit the mute button. That happens at least four times in the movie, so there must have been some kind of payola going on to justify it.

And speaking of payola, the movie was well-funded by product placements: American Airlines, Hertz, Hampton Inns, Hilton, to name a few. Nevertheless, a huge collection of production companies was announced in the beginning, so it would be interesting to learn how this picture came together.

The collection of wisely deleted scenes illustrates how the themes of modern alienation, difficult relationships, and economic hardship were carefully refined after shooting. Despite its flaws, I rate the movie highly because of strong acting, especially by Kendricks and Farmiga, but Clooney also acts, a departure from his usual mugging, and because of those poignant existential themes that make it provocative, a movie that makes you think about the human condition in modern America.

A Serious Man: Grade A

A

A Serious Man (2009)

Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolf, Sari Lennick; Writer-Directors Ethan and Joel Cohen.

Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor at a Midwestern university, and a 1960’s Jewish nebbish. He lives in a Levittown-like suburb (sets and costumes are absolutely nailed in this film), with his out-of-control teenage kids and wife who wants a divorce.

The wife and her paramour (Melamed) try to be “adult” about confronting the cuckolded husband by suggesting ever so kindly that he might be “more comfortable” if he moved out to the Jolly Roger Motel. The unctuous pseudo-caring of the lovers' “advice” is squirm-in-your-seat funny and a masterpiece of acting and directing.

Numerous other troubles, large and small, befall the professor, who seeks advice from rabbis and lawyers, each of whom is a brilliant parody. There is no plot, just a documentary of this Job-like man’s pathetic life.

The opening scene, which seems disconnected at first, is in retrospect, the key to this funny but dark satirical essay on Jewish existentialism. The opener says that in “the old days” God was present to us and we knew what things meant and we knew how to act. The rules were simple. Today, God does not seem present in life and nobody knows what anything means. It is a scathing commentary on modern life, not just Jewish life, but in this case, life in the Jewish tradition.

The writing is flawless. The acting is utterly gripping by just about every character, and that’s a tribute also to the directors. I was put off a bit by the main character’s extreme passivity, which was frustratingly unrealistic, but it was designed to highlight the world around him, not him as an individual, so it works. Sixties and seventies rock music (featuring Grace Slick) mixed with some lovely ceremonial cant, was excellent. It is another masterpiece from the Cohen brothers.

Revolutionary Road: Grade B

B
Revolutionary Road (2009)
Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio. Director Sam Mendes.

Winslet was nominated for best actress in this film and won best actress for her much less compelling (although naked) performance in The Reader. This is by far her better work. DiCaprio also delivers outstanding acting and the two of them raise this mediocre screenplay far above average. Imagine Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. DiCaprio is some kind of cubicle worker in 1955 New York city (did they have cubicles then?) and Winslet is the suburban housewife in Connecticut. Despite being young newlyweds at the bottom of the food chain, their house is a magnificent, two-story, 5,000 sq. ft Colonial outfitted for a prince, but never mind that, because real estate agent Kathy Bates calls it a “charming little cottage,” so there you go! We never do understand what DiCaprio does for a living but he hates the job, has martinis for lunch we see the affair with the secretary coming from a mile away. We don’t know what Winslet does all day either. She acts in a dreary community theater, but her two young children don’t eat, read, go to school, play ball or even talk to her, so that must leave her a lot of free time. Yet she feels suffocated in a pre-Betty Friedan sort of way and yearns for she-knows-not-what, but it would definitely be in Paris. Instead of that, DiCaprio takes the big promotion at work, so they fight. Dishes are thrown, chairs are smashed, epithets are hurled. Events ensue. The ending is not happy.

The screenplay is mundane and predictable. The 1950’s are caricatured as strict, suffocating conformity, and some of that was true, but I remember those times and there was plenty of diversity. After the war (WWII), people were extremely eager to have stability, conformity, predictability, respectability and above all, steady income. It was not oppression, it was opportunity. For DiCaprio and Winslet to be existentially tormented, they would have to come from a very non-typical background, but we know nothing about their history, social class, education, parents, military service, nothing at all. We don’t know why they feel trapped by circumstance. They are mere stereotypes.

Recreation of the 1950’s is pretty good, although with anachronisms, and over-use of the same Buick. This could have been a killer movie if it had been set in modern times, because then the writers could not have relied on 1950’s stereotypes and would have had to come up with some real character motivation and dig into some genuine existential issues. Still, it is worth watching for the good acting.

The Hit: Grade C

C
The Hit (1984)
John Hurt, Terence Stamp, Tim Roth; Director Stephen Frears.

An English gangster (Stamp) turns state’s evidence against the gang then goes on the lam in southern Spain. Eight years later, inevitably, a couple of henchmen (Hurt and Roth) come for him. They need to transport him to Paris, where he will be killed, so the rest of the movie is a long road trip north, through the Pyrenees, into France. The trio acquires a young Spanish woman to act out stereotypical scenes. There are various incidents along the way such as bar fights, car breakdowns, temper tantrums, and so forth, as the characters get to know each other and we get to know them, during their journey. The henchmen are perfect stereotypes, Hurt with his implacable face and steely gaze, Roth the labile psychopath. Stamp plays a sort of otherworldly existentialist who accepts his destiny with equanimity, talks about life and death in philosophical terms, with humor, and does not try to escape. All three of those performances are enjoyable, even if the characters are superficial, because the story is delightfully oddball. This is a recent Criterion Collection re-issue with the film all cleaned up, colors bright, sound clear. Unfortunately there is only one DVD extra, a very boring television interview with Stamp.

The Sensation of Sight: Grade A

A
The Sensation of Sight (2006)
David Strathairn, Daniel Gillies, Ann Cusak, Joseph Mazello; Writer-director Aaron J. Wiederspahn.

This existential indie echoes Beckett and Mamet in its writing and Hal Hartley (without the sense of humor) in directing. A depressed English professor leaves the classroom to sell encyclopedias door to door pulling a child's wagon. Or at least that is his story. He is actually drifting aimlessly through a bleak, November New England small town, sleeping on park benches and sometimes selling a single book for $20 to strangers who take pity on him. He is supposed to be “finding himself” but he speaks like an idiot savant. It is riveting acting by Strathairn, but at no time do we believe he was a college professor. Meanwhile, multiple subplots in the town develop, and Crash-like, become increasingly interwoven. A depressed ex-con walks around with his guitar, trying to find himself, shadowed by the dead brother he can’t forget. Another ex-con tries to visit his young daughter while the wife and daughter avoid him. The salesman happens to stay at the same B&B as the mother and daughter and happens to knock on the door of the husband, and happens to have lunch with the despondent guitar-player’s father and sister. None of it makes much sense, as with life itself, we are to understand. Nevertheless, Stathairn’s performance is a revelation and the photography is pure eye candy. The dialog is stagey and writerly but engaging. At 133 minutes, the film easily could have been edited, as could almost any film where the writer is the director and a distanced perspective is lacking. Music is highly listenable and varied, but not integrated. All but two of the parts elicit strong acting, making the viewing experience very positive overall.

The Bothersome Man: Grade B

B
The Bothersome Man (2006)
Trond Fausa Aurvaag, Petronella Barker. Director Jens Lien. (Norwegian, subtitled).

A ragged man (Aurvaag) wanders in the Icelandic desert until he is picked up by a black limo and taken to the city where he is inexplicably given a posh flat and shown to an easy office job at a nice company in the city. That is his transition from the wilderness to civilized society. He adapts quickly to civilized life and begins dating a co-worker (Barker). But is something wrong in paradise? The food is tasteless, the drinks never make you drunk and nothing has any smell. The the city is geometrically interesting but almost colorless; grays, blues, taupe. Even the inside of people’s apartments and houses are minimalist and “inoffensive.” The man moves in with his girl, who is obsessed with interior design. They have mechanical sex. He is unfaithful to her but the new girl won’t commit to anything, finding him only “pleasant.” A crack in the façade of polite society is represented by a crack in a basement wall. Beautiful music seems to be coming out of it. The man attempts to tunnel through the rock and concrete to the music and the light. The idea is not original, (e.g., The Truman Show, The Prisoner), but it is a timeless one, beautifully photographed, subtly presented, and well-played. It is nice to see Oslo and the Icelandic desert and hear an interesting language.