February 2004

• The Fog of War (2/1, YSC [2003])–Wow. For anyone who was young and antiwar in the sixties, this is a must-see. McNamara comes across not at all as the simple evil we attributed to him, but as a complex, intelligent, and extraordinarily right-thinking man, but not what would seem to follow from that, one who was simply buffeted by forces beyond his control. He manifestly was partly in control of those forces, but, as the Watergate saying goes, mistakes were made. He is extraordinarily honest about acknowledging the mistakes now, and in fact says that he recognized them as mistakes then, tried to guide LBJ away from them, but what is odd is that he seems not to have been tortured by the mistakes, nor to be tortured by them even today. He comes across as an outwardly honest man who is so repressed that he can’t be honest with himself. Except that any formulaic description, that one included, is inadequate to describe what’s going on in this film. Also worth noting is the occasional sound of the director’s voice–the only voice other than McNarama’s that we hear. Morris’s interjections come in an agitated, screechy voice that jars us away from McN’s calm, level pronouncements. The result is to remind us that there is a creative force guiding what sometimes seems just a 90-minute speech. Occasional graphic tricks–handwritten numbers from a casualty list fall from a bomb bay into the sky in the image that will certainly stick with me the longest–perform the same function, as if Morris needs sometimes to say, "Hey, wait a minute–this is not just Bob McNamara’s story, it’s mine, it’s ours." A profoundly disturbing and remarkable film.
• The Dreamers (2/13, YSC)–This is three films, really: an erotic film that is marvelous, with three beautiful bodies in various permutations, backed by a lush Parisian apartment; an allusive film that is similarly marvelous, a collage of film and music that made me smile more than I can recall ever doing at a film I ultimately didn’t like much; and finally, a film of ideas that is thoroughly puerile. Of course, puerility is the point: these are just children, and like all of us, they’re under the illusion that these ideas they’re having, these words they’re using to articulate those ideas, are original. Oddly, they’re not much better as sex than at thinking, and their cinemaphilia takes the form of an ongoing trivia game, but because the erotics and the allusions are visual and aural, the naVveté underlying them doesn’t undercut them; the ideals, however, rely on language, and simply knowing that the language is supposed to be banal doesn’t relieve its banality. In short, a wonderful film to watch and hear, a disappointing one to think about. Incidentally, I went to the first screening at the York Square–always a good policy, since the theater’s ill-maintained projection equipment autoedits a film throughout its run–and, after starting 25 minutes late (presumably because of slow courier service from New York–or at least that was the excuse I got the last time this happened), it broke down 3 times.
• Osama (2/14, Union Sq.)–A Western viewer of a film based on sexual disguise unavoidably brings to bear a cultural history of farce, from at least Shakespeare (there must be some obvious Greek or Roman antecedent I’m forgetting) through Some Like It Hot and beyond, so one hurdle in watching this drama about an Afghan girl whose mother and grandmother cut her hair and dress her in her dead father’s clothes so that she can go out and earn their bread, women being barred from the workplace by the Taliban, is understanding that there’s absolutely nothing funny about this charade. Actually, that’s not quite true: some humor peeks through even from the Afghan perspective, but while we know that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon aren’t going to be machine-gunned if their disguises slip, we don’t know that about "Osama," so even the humor has a deadly edge. A chilling film that makes no attempt to provide a happy ending, or any ending at all–it stops, like every episode of life, as if the filmmaker simply ran out of film.
• Trilogy: After Life (2/14, Ang.), On the Run, and An Amazing Couple (both 2/14, Vil. E.)–Technical Difficulties Weekend continues, as everything at the Angelika is running 15 min. late (but that doesn’t stop them from showing the traditional 10 min. of trailers), which, combined with the Times’ misinforming me about the next film’s starting time (I hustled from Houston & Mercer to Second and 12th in record time, arriving with a couple minutes’ bathroom time before the 4:45 show–except that luckily, in buying my ticket from the machine [no waiting on line for me!], I noticed that the 4:45 show had started at 4:30), made me miss the start of that one–but no problem: I already knew from the one I’d seen what happened there. This is a wonderful exercise in narrative triangulation: the three stories, listed as a drama, a thriller, and a comedy (actually a traditional French sex farce), involve the same characters and take place over the same timespan, but each focuses on different characters–a conceit that reflects the truism that in life, each of us is the star in our own film, and everybody else is simply a supporting character. The same scene pops up in two–or, rarely (I can think offhand of only one example), all three--films, but often it is shot from a different angle, revealing different information (such as that a hidden third character can hear the conversation between two people who seemed, in another version, to be alone). The effect is confusing and exhilarating, and I can’t imagine watching the films, say, two weeks apart. One of the bits of great fun in putting together the puzzle is seeing, say, why the headlight of one character’s Jag is missing–a piece of evidence that was shown and then dropped in another film. Incidentally, I watched them in the reverse order of their French release (On the Run was released first here), but the director has said that that shouldn’t matter, that he’d love to hear different reactions of people watching in any of the six possible permutations. For my part, I was very glad I watched the sex farce last, not only because it ended my M4 on a much cheerier note than would have, say, Osama, but because there were aspects of that film that would have seemed unforgivably silly without the logic of the other two narratives to make sense of them. Another "incidentally": I’d been fretting my slow pace of moviegoing after last year’s record performance, but looking back at last year, I see that I didn’t see my 10th film until my first M4, on 1 March. Of course, I’m assuming that M4s will be rarer this year, what with my having spent all my money, but at least this one gets me up to a more than respectable pace, and I intend to see #12 today. [11]
• 50 First Dates (2/15, NoHa)–Not hard to guess how this was pitched: Memento meets Groundhog Day. But as bad as that idea may sound, the humanity of the script and the actors makes this worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with those films. Sandler’s performance is–dare I say it?–low-key, and Barrymore is perfect in a role that calls for her to be a little clueless all the time. It’s sort of a Farrelly film, less uproarious and less dependent on bathroom humor. In fact, although there are elements played strictly for yuks, Lucy’s condition is not among them: it is something that has severely challenged a family, and Henry’s sympathy with that allows both the family to let him in and us to let the movie in. And so at some point, you start praying that the film won’t forfeit everything it has, against all odds, earned by solving everyone’s problems with some clichéd another-bonk-on-the-head solution. Instead, it offers something so original and so chilling that I was still tearing up a mile away from the theater.
• My Architect (2/21, YSC)–A very interesting documentary that would be more effective if less personal, I think. The film is a search for clues about the strange triple life the architect Louis I. Kahn. Kahn married young and lived with his wife until he died, but (at least) twice he had long affairs with women he worked with, fathering a child with each. (His marriage produced one child.) One of the illegitimate children was the filmmaker, which provides the impetus to the film but also its Achilles’ heel. The film investigates many intriguing questions–not only that of how a man could juggle three lives like this, but also about the very nature of "family"–but because it investigates them from the inside, too often the emotional moments seem staged and self-serving. The filmmaker, Nathaniel Kahn, is not particularly appealing, which might matter less if another consciousness were driving the film but which in the event keeps us (or me, anyway; obviously others feel very differently about it) from caring as much as we otherwise might. Still, a worthwhile film. By sheer coincidence, in the evening I watched the just-out DVD of Stone Reader, a film that had barely missed the cut in an early M4, which is also a documentary search by the filmmaker for a mysterious and missing figure–the author of a single extraordinary novel–who occupies his thoughts. In part because this filmmaker is more engaging, in part because there is, in theory, at least, much less at emotional stake, I found this film much more satisfying.