Dull Nightlife: CAFÉ SOCIETY

Late period Woody Allen is certainly filmmaking that’ll charm those already predisposed to finding comfort in his rhythms and style – the unwavering font, the American songbook score, the familiar character types, the thematic concerns of a midcentury pop philosopher – and deter those who’ve tired of his tricks (or his personal life). He can still provide a surprise now and then – last year’s Irrational Man was a (probably) self-aware curdling of his tropes; 2011’s Midnight in Paris had lovely French time-travel romanticism – but you mostly know what you’re going to get. Well, you make a new movie a year for over four decades and see how many new topics and techniques you can come up with. So it’s no surprise Café Society, this year’s Allen feature, finds him noodling around with ideas he’s used better before. There are unrequited romantic connections, affairs, insecurities, intellectual posturing, an ambitious and sensitive young Jewish man and his family, and the wistful melancholy of nostalgia. It’s not Allen’s best representation of any of the above, lightly skipping across the surface of places where his writing has other times deepened.

One of his period pieces, it’s told in a brightly artificial simulacrum of New York and Los Angeles of the late 1930s, the better to keep the jazz flowing on the soundtrack and the arch reproduction pseudo-literary stuffiness of the dialogue era-appropriate. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a squirrely young New Yorker who on a whim moves to Hollywood in hopes his uncle (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent, will find him a job in the industry. His mother (Jeannie Berlin) calls ahead and tells her brother to help, but the agent brushes her off. He’s too busy to look after his nephew, but after weeks of waiting relents and puts the eager young man to work running errands. This gets him working closely with a sweet, smart assistant (Kristen Stewart) with whom there’s instant infatuation. Too bad, then, that she has a mysterious unseen boyfriend, a married man whose identity is eventually revealed to be a character we’ve already met. Standard setup, the plot and dialogue are merely going through the motions, but there are some small glimmers of life amidst the artifice.

The early, breezy passages of the movie are a mild warmed-over farce, with characters jostling for attention and obscuring truths. It has low-key charms, but the cast remains posed and situated in the precise, and precisely too-perfect phony, period detail. It looks not like events lived, or situations performed, but games of make-believe staged for our benefit. It’s not a cast; it’s people in costumes. Still, the actors do what they can. Stewart, who unfailingly brings a real sense of grounded presence to the screen, is the highlight. She has a scene where she has to keep feelings hidden while reacting in shock and pain as one lover unknowingly recounts a slight the other shared in secret. The emotion is plain on her face in a twitch of the eyes and a slight shift of the jaw, and yet it is entirely believable that her scene partner wouldn’t notice. A close second for most valuable player is Berlin, grounding a stereotypical Jewish mother role with lived-in conviction. Eisenberg, for his part, plays the Allen-impersonation trap, stammering and twitching, stumbling through wordy lines. And Carell puffs out his chest for a shallow impersonation of an early-Hollywood powerbroker type.

As the film progresses Allen balloons the small, simple, obvious premise into something approaching a sprawling semi-comic family drama. We end up following Eisenberg’s character for several years past the end of the farce, through its fallout and into what’s surely at least a decade of time passing. Threaded throughout are cutaways to Corey Stoll as his two-bit gangster brother who opens a café (and draws in a bunch of high society) while staying a step ahead of the law. (That many of these cutaways are quick gags about gruesome murders is an odd hitch in the otherwise pleasant, even-keel tone.) Other people floating through the supporting cast include a glamorous divorcee (Blake Lively), and a sharply dressed bicoastal power couple (Parker Posey and Paul Schneider). There’s some fun in the mostly intelligent casting, though not every character crackles with the right interest, and not every actor is up to delivering or improving upon what they’re given. Better small pleasures are in the humble glowing cinematography from the legendary Vittorio Storaro (of such beautifully photographed films as The Last Emperor and Apocalypse Now), who captures warm sunny contrasts and, in one striking shot, a luminous, dusky, full-color angle on a bridge that recalls Manhattan’s famous shot.

With a pretty surface exploration of a small variety of relationships, it slowly becomes a melancholy movie about missed connections, about people who’d rather live in denial than face up to the ways they’ve hurt others. And even then the denial slips, leaving them contemplating their choices with regret. That’s a great flicker of life, but embedded in half-thought and underwritten scenes which often seem to grasp for obvious lines and hanging lampshades on thematic points already plainly visible above the subtext. For instance, a character actually trots out the old “an unexamined life…” saying unironically, before putting a spin at the end in a hacking punchline. Like so many of Allen’s lesser works, it’s underwritten. A great performer with a reasonably complicated part like Stewart or Berlin can be lively, dry, funny, and convincing, but smaller roles and lesser actors flounder as the plot and mood slowly peter out. Scene after scene sits flat and tired, jolted occasionally with the sparks of the better movie it could’ve been with another draft or two.

Traverse City Film Festival 2012: Dispatch #1

What may have been lost, if it was ever really known, in the stories of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret’s lengthy, contentious postproduction, subsequent botched limited release, further subsequent rise as a critical pet cause, and eventual extended cut DVD, is that the movie plays. In a big theater with a sold out crowd, a rare occurrence for this film that a screening today at the Traverse City Film Festival offered, the movie is a symphony of crowd reactions: gasps, laughs, groans, and heavy silences. Sometimes, all of these reactions mixed together with slippery agility, as in the harrowing, horrifying accident that sets the tone of the film early on with its mix of precise acting, remarkable realism, and sly gallows humor. On a day that the festival offered many interesting films and a packed Q&A with Susan Sarandon, this was the must-see event.

The story of a teenager (Anna Paquin) who witnesses a fatal bus accident and then spends the next weeks and months grappling with the emotional fallout of the tragedy while life somehow trudges on around her remains powerful and messy. The ensemble is rich and delicately balanced with her mother (J. Smith-Cameron), the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), teachers (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), boys (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Kulkin), and an unlikely new friend (Jeannie Berlin), among others, playing their parts in her life story. Each character feels fully realized, even when in a plotline that feels edited down to evocative wisps or in a relationship – as in the sharply observed mother-daughter conflict - that slowly takes center stage. What’s most powerful about the film, what makes it such an emotional workout, is the way it manages to bottle a kind of whiplash self-important precociousness of adolescence where grappling with deep and powerful philosophical and emotional topics still unknowingly creates an incredibly self-centered point of view. This is a film about a girl who slowly begins to realize that others are not merely supporting characters in the opera of her life.

This is my second time through Margaret and I found it to be even better than I remembered. It’s an expertly written, breathtakingly acted, experience, a sort of interior epic that reconciles its lack of cohesion and conventional narrative within an emotional framework that makes intuitive sense. Sitting near the front of the theater with the towering screen revealing all the more strikingly the film’s visual powers – a scene in which a taxi cab is suddenly, subtly surrounded by buses felt nearly overwhelming – the film took on a precision that I somehow missed in my initial viewing. Though I really liked the film at the time, I have an even better appreciation now. How often can you sit and feel a big crowd wrestling with a film so emotionally and thematically dense and articulate, so deeply felt and so smartly filmed? The brilliance of Lonergan’s film is the way it invites us into the life of a character and is unafraid to explore, to allow plot points to exist and breathe like life events, to grow and develop, to wither or fade at their own paces.  It’s truly some kind of masterpiece.

Also screened:

            Christopher Kenneally’s documentary Side by Side is a decent primer on the history of digital filmmaking and its conflict with traditional celluloid. All arguments get their (sometimes surface-level) day in court here as the film follows our host and guide Keanu Reeves as he talks to prominent directors (Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, David Lynch, Robert Rodriguez, Danny Boyle, Lars von Trier, the Wachowskis, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron) and cinematographers (Michael Ballhaus, Anthony Dod Mantle, Wally Pfister, Vittorio Storaro, David Tattersall, Vilmos Zsigmond). The film’s a who’s who of modern cinema, filled with interesting, charismatic artists, which makes it all the more disappointing that it gets so carried away with its history lesson that it forgets to actually interrogate these artists’ theories, claims, and opinions. Instead of editing in a way that puts traditionalists, pioneers, and those in the middle in some kind of conversation, the documentary is content to be an overlong, occasionally repetitive, clip to show an Introduction to Film Studies class. That’s fine for what it is, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t have the kind of depth I would have appreciated.

Everybody Hurts: MARGARET

Margaret’s two-and-a-half hour run time is a jumble of themes and scenes, adding up to a deeply affecting, bogglingly complex picture of human emotion and moral quandaries. It’s a film that feels sifted, chopped, and cajoled into being. It's a powerful, sweeping yet intimate collection of moments that build towards a powerful, unexpected climax: a thorough evocation of its difficult characters living lives in a recognizable world. It’s rich and thought provoking.

The film is a quintessential sophomore effort, bigger in ambition, weightier in scope, risking a mess. Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, after the 2000 release of his terrific, small-scale debut You Can Count on Me, filmed this in the fall of 2005. Since then, the film has been wrangled around in post-production under a cloud of unhelpful lawsuits and countersuits between the studio and financiers, conflict between the director and the editors, and even the deaths of two of the producers. Getting the film finished at all with so much strife puts Lonergan on a short list with Terry Gilliam of directors who work with a potent mix of genius, patience, and bad luck. The final product proves the struggle was worth it. 

Margaret is about Lisa, a teenage girl (Anna Paquin) who is startlingly, frustratingly real. Her moods swing wildly. She can be pleasant and flirty or a snapping vindictive twerp. She’s just a kid, one capable of great precociousness and blind to the overwhelming extent of her own naïveté. Living in relative privilege with her stage actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron) and her little brother (Cyrus Hernstadt) in New York City, she has little practical reason to involve herself in anything but the constructed conflict that arises out of the typical teen problems. 

She fights with her family. She’s attracted to two of her peers (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Culkin) and can’t quite sort out her feelings. One of her teachers (Matt Damon) has caught her cheating on her geometry tests. Another, her English teacher (Matthew Broderick), strikes her as dorky, yet his readings of poetic language are sometimes moving in a way she can’t find words to express. These are all common enough adolescent problems, sources of angst that fade with maturity and age. She’s still in the midst of sorting out competing impulses and emotions. Then, one day while wandering the streets of the city in search of a cowboy hat to buy, she catches the eye of a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) as he pulls away from the curb. He’s wearing a cowboy hat. She tries to run after the bus, hoping to get the chance to ask him where he bought his hat. In this brief moment of distraction, the bus hits a pedestrian (Allison Janney).

Lisa feels responsible for the accident and lies to the police to protect the driver. But then, the memory of the incident eats away at her. She’s deeply affected, rattled, disturbed and distressed. And yet the world moves on. Her mother finds a new boyfriend (Jean Reno). Her teachers keep teaching. Her friends (Olivia Thirlby and Sarah Steele) keep chattering. The boys are still interested in her. The world keeps spinning. And yet how can it keep spinning when she has been in the middle of such a traumatic incident, an out-of-the-blue moment of violence for which her sense of culpability is eating her alive, is churning her emotions, won’t let her rest easy? So she lashes out. (Several scenes in the film draw out a post-9/11 parallel with some potency.) She snaps at her mother. She cancels a trip to visit her father. She takes steps to contact the family of the woman hit by the bus and finds a strange sense of comfort in connecting with a woman (Jeannie Berlin) who was a friend of the victim. Lisa selfishly convinces her to sue, to keep the pain of the moment alive in the courts and hanging over the driver’s head. 

Though the plot is driven to a certain extent by the actions and emotions of Paquin, the film doesn’t rely for its impact on her alone. The supporting characters are so fully, tenderly realized with nuanced performances that weave into the frazzled fabric that they feel to be as startlingly, frustratingly real as the teenage girl they all come into contact with. Gallagher’s lovesick teen, Damon’s caring teacher, Ruffalo’s casually troubled bus driver, Culkin’s lothario, Janney’s dying woman and Berlin’s mourning friend all are so beautifully acted and wonderfully played that they add up to an ensemble of depth and interest. Each character feels fully realized, whether in a plot-line that feels edited down to evocative wisps or in a relationship – as in the sharply observed mother-daughter conflict — that slowly takes center stage. 

What’s most powerful about the film, what makes it such an emotional workout, is the way it manages to bottle a whiplash self-important precociousness of adolescence where grappling with deep and powerful philosophical and emotional topics still unknowingly creates an incredibly self-centered point of view. This is a film about a girl who slowly begins to realize that others are not merely supporting characters in the opera of her life.

Out of the cast, J. Smith-Cameron stands out. As the mother, she exudes thwarted warmth, a caring compassion that is ineffective and unreceived by the adolescent angst to which it is directed. She makes her living embodying emotions of characters, yet she finds herself frustrated by the difficulties of “playing” the mother. In a terrific scene, she argues with her daughter, devolving into a great mimic of her behavior. She plays the part, but she has no reference for her own identity. She'll be there for her daughter whenever her daughter rediscovers the need for maternal comfort. This is an example of the film’s beneficial looseness and choppiness. A character of great depth and thematic importance seems to float in and out of focus, ultimately useful, but not always clear. 

In total, the film is an expertly written, breathtakingly acted, experience, an interior epic that reconciles its lack of cohesion and conventional narrative within an emotional framework that makes intuitive sense. Sitting near the front of the theater with the towering screen revealing all the more strikingly the film’s visual powers – a scene from a low angle seeing a taxi cab suddenly, subtly surrounded by a canyon of buses felt nearly overwhelming, echoing the girl’s towering confusion. How often can you sit and feel a crowd wrestling with a film so emotionally and thematically dense and articulate, so deeply felt and so smartly filmed? The brilliance of Lonergan’s film is the way it invites us into the life of a character and is unafraid to explore, to allow plot points to exist and breathe like life events, to grow and develop, to wither or fade at their own paces. It’s truly some masterpiece.

Lonergan features a prominent allusion to a quote from George Bernard Shaw, tossed off and referenced casually, illuminating themes with which the film is playing. The full quote, from the 1903 play Man and Superman, is one character’s condemnation of another’s “regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, [which] occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.” This is a film about just that. Growing up is hard to do. Learning how to interact with others is complicated. Margaret is a sprawling evocation of this hard, complicated mess.