My son, my son, what have ye done: Grade A

A

My son, my son, what have ye done (2010)

Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon , Chloe Sevigny; Grace Zabriski; Co-writer and director: Werner Herzog.

This very non-traditional, and very Herzoggian film is not for those who insist on a conventional story. It is a collection of creative scenes and stunning cinematography, loosely held together by the story of a police hostage situation in San Diego. And I emphasize “loosely.” But for Herzog fans, and David Lynch fans, this movie is exciting and challenging.

Shannon plays an insane stage actor who kills his mother (Zabriski) with a sword, then retreats into his house with hostages. Dafoe is the police detective who tries to talk him out, but eventually calls in the SWAT. But that story is just a framing device for other characters to fill in the background with flashbacks, as the detective interviews them. Sevigny is the killer’s fiancé and does most of the talking. She reveals that the suspect became “strange” after he returned from a trip to Peru, and after that he was disruptive in the play rehearsals (the classical Greek Tragedy, Electra, in which a man kills his mother) that they were both in (the fiancé playing the part of the mother).

We in the audience see immediately that the man has gone schizophrenic, hearing voices and speaking madness, but the fiancé must have never taken a psychology class, because she tolerates him. But this movie is not about realism. It’s about creative filmmaking. The so-called “story” is just an excuse to shoot fantastic scenes, such as a stampede at an ostrich farm, and an extremely good Greek chorus singing in the Electra play. There are too many other non-sequitur scenes to mention, but each of them is challenging, and thrillingly creative. Herzog channels Lynch, who was an executive producer but apparently did not have a hands-on role.

It’s not a perfect movie. The acting is wooden and the speeches contrived. The characters are symbols, not people. There is no dramatic tension, because we don’t care about the hostage situation or any of the characters. There are some obvious and distracting green-screen shots.

But the music is wonderful, some kind of Spanish language singing, and the scenery and sets are perfect. I tried to find the meaning of the San Diego matricide within the ancient Electra story, but the parallel is no more than a loose analogy. A study of insanity, it isn’t: Guy goes nuts, the end. A cop show, it isn’t. Good storytelling, it isn’t. The movie is only about exploring the creative boundaries of filmic, visual language, and by that criterion, it is an artistic triumph. But not for everybody.

The Brothers Bloom: Grade C

C
The Brothers Bloom
Adrian Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz, Rinko Kikuchi; Writer-Director Rian Johnson.

Brody and Ruffalo are brothers and con men in New Jersey. Brody wants out, but Ruffalo talks him into one last job, a complex hustle of a rich heiress (Weisz) that takes the trio to Paris, Prague (if I recall), someplace in Mexico, and other places. The McGuffin is a rare medieval book worth millions. Predictably, Brody falls in love with the mark and the job goes bad. Or does it? Maybe that was all part of the con. Maybe Brody is being played by Ruffalo. Or maybe Weisz is actually not the mark but is in on the con. By the end of the movie it is impossible to tell what is real and what is the con, which is how Brody’s character feels. So I guess that is tricky. What put me off though (besides Brody’s excruciatingly stiff acting), is the wacky screenwriting. Why was it necessary to have Weisz’s character demonstrate that she could juggle chain saws while riding a unicycle? Is that funny? It has nothing to do with anything. There are many such campy, tongue in cheek scenes that don’t make any sense and disrupt the story. Maybe I’m too old to understand the humor. Ruffalo gives a good performance, and Weisz is beautiful. Locations are attractive, but overall, the story was lacking in tension, not believable, and unnecessarily complex. Characters were less than two-dimensional, if that is possible. They were actually caricatures of characters. The movie is worth a mindless kill of two hours if your expectations are low.

The Return: Grade B

B
The Return (2003)
Vladimir Garin, Ivan Dobronravov, Konstantin Lavronenko; Director Andrei Zvyagintsev (Russian, subtitled)

In this lyrical visual poem, two teenage boys (Garin and Dobronravov) must come to terms with their taciturn father (Lavronenko) who appears unexpectedly after a twelve year absence. They know him only from a single picture their mother kept. The father (who has no name in the movie) takes them on a road trip to a remote seashore, and then in a small dingy to a mysterious island some distance out. All the while the boys talk about the father, argue about him, wonder. He treats them very sternly but also with respect. There is no plot. Oddly, there is a quasi-McGuffin, a buried treasure the father digs up on the island, but we never learn what is in the box or why he wants it, even though it apparently is what motivated the journey. We never learn why the father was absent or where he has been. The story is all about the relationships among the three, and it explores them masterfully. It’s a quiet movie, mostly visual, with little dialog and very little music. The cinematography is thoughtful and beautiful. There is always a palpable sense of mystery, even foreboding, even though ultimately nothing happens. Objectively, the pace is extremely slow since there is no story deveopment, but in fact I was totally engaged for the whole ninety minutes with the visuals, the extremely fine minimalist acting, and the emotional tension. The movie has that mysterious and unforgettable sense of time, place and character, such as in Le Chateau de ma Mere (1990).

Australia: Grade F

F
Australia (2008)
Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman; Co-writer and director Baz Luhrmann.

Kidman is an English aristocrat who goes to northern Australia just before the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942. Her husband is dead but she decides to continue running the cattle ranch with the help of ranch-hand Jackman. There is some predictable humor as the city girl confronts the grit of the outback.

The movie is actually a concatenation of two stories, which explains its 2 hour plus running time. In the first story, she must get 1500 head of cattle to Darwin before the monopolistic cattle baron King Carney sews up the contract with the army. A ragtag crew is put together, including herself on horseback, speaking politely to the cows (guffaw!), a drunk handyman, and a cute aboriginal boy. Together they endure many misadventures as they drive the cattle for several days. The landscape is beautiful and beautifully photographed. There is a subtheme of the boy’s relationship with his grandfather, an aboriginal shaman who seems to live in the wild, away from any community. In the end, the cattle arrive on time, she gets the contract, saves the ranch, earns her spurs and falls in love with Jackman. What more could you want?

Then the second movie starts with the Japanese invasion. There is much fire and destruction, the boy is captured by Catholic missionaries and taken away, and Kidman is separated from Jackman. Each assumes the other has been killed, but then there is a sentimental reunion with swelling violins, and you’d never guess this part, the young boy is returned safely also! Everybody goes back to the cattle ranch happy, healthy, and whole.

The acting is terrible, even from Kidman, who is a master of the craft, so I would have to put that down to bad directing. Everybody barks their lines without context, while gestures are pure canned ham. Even Kidman’s famously expressive facial twitches are exchanged for slack-jaw farce. At first I thought all this was supposed to be ironic, because the movie has the feel of a 1960’s television show, like an extended episode of Bonanza. But it’s not ironic, it’s just bad.

Music is exceptionally obnoxious; loud, irrelevant, in-your-face orchestration that instructs you what to feel at each moment. The aboriginal theme is trivialized rather than explored. CGI effects are primitive, intrusive, and unconvincing. The narrative is just one cliché after another, utterly predictable, cloyingly sentimental. The second story was perhaps supposed to be a Gone With the Wind or Casablanca sort of epic showing individuals as pawns in a larger historical drama, but if so, that failed also, because the individuals were only cardboard cutouts and the war story only perfunctory. Is the great Australian scenery enough of a value to save this movie from failure? Not quite.