The Write Life: BERGMAN ISLAND

Mia Hansen-Løve is one of our most attentive filmmakers, crafting narratives with the ease of lived experience and characters brimming with relational tensions and satisfactions. There’s something so finely tuned and yet so relaxed in her framing and her generosity for performers. And she brings deceptively simple, tender ways to capture moments of interpersonal shifts so charged with the electricity of human connection that one can practically feel the emotion tingling on the back of the neck. It’s beautiful. Take her 2012 feature Goodbye, First Love, one of the most achingly earnest explorations of young love in all its sensual dimensions and inevitable heartbreaks. She films these ordinary entanglements with all the freshness and novelty the characters would feel, and with the openness and perspective to see how fleeting are the moments and yet how how long-lasting the impact.

With her latest, Bergman Island, she makes an ode to cinephiles and filmmaking in the most loving way, telling stories within stories. She follows a couple (Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth), both screenwriters, as they book a writing retreat on Fårö, the Swedish island where the great Ingmar Bergman lived and worked. He’s the auteur behind such classic philosophical and psychological classics as The Seventh Seal, with its knight playing chess with death amidst the plague, and Persona, in which two women by the seaside slowly seem to start sharing mental states. Bergman made films alive with religious and moral dimensions as they push at the austere edges of what cinema can do. He opens up space for close identification, and deep contemplation. That they’re also often full of life—funny, idiosyncratic, playful, personable, and profound—is something those who know him only by reputation sometimes miss. His films often find people in moments of emotional extremities, contemplating endings of one kind (divorce, retirement) or another (disease, despair, death). How fun, then, that Hansen-Løve has given us a movie that’s all beginnings, with a central character struggling with how to end her latest story.

It’s ultimately not just a tip of the hat to one of cinema’s grand old masters, or a winking parade of references for cinephiles to smile and nod and check the box. It’s an encouraging and earnest grappling with his themes in the style and tone of another’s. Sure, Hansen-Løve starts her film on the level of a lark, with the couple settling into a house and discussing their location’s importance, taking in a screening, going on tours. But this isn’t just spot-the-allusion comedy; it’s a genuine character piece, with a couple of writers talking honestly about their work, their inspirations, their ideas, and the ways in which their relationship and their surroundings affect them. But then the movie reveals its fullest form when Krieps asks Roth for advice on her screenplay. She has a great start, but can’t figure out where to go from there. And so she tells him her outline so far. And from there, the movie becomes that movie, with her narrating. And it’s even better than the one we’ve been watching! It stars Mia Wasikowska as a young woman traveling to Bergman Island for a friend’s wedding, an event at which she’ll be reunited, for the first time in a long time, with her first love (Anders Danielsen Lie). There’s fine-tuned restrained melodrama here, as the couple, both with relationships back home, cautiously approach a revival of past feelings. The movie crackles with romantic tension as both actors embody their past experiences and potential future coming together. The heartfelt push-pull of this romantic suspense transcends feeling constrained by its movie-within-a-movie nature; it has the swooning fullness and compelling dilemma of the best films.

Hansen-Løve frames the act of storytelling as something of a magic trick, with all the hard labor of synthesizing inspirations and experiences and locations in a way that somehow adds up to us feeling and thinking and dreaming with fictional people. This is part of what makes the film so charming. And her ease with actors gives it the extra dazzling layer. This is no mere academic exercise or referential reverence for closed-off worlds of cinephilic knowledge. (Although it’s not not that in some ways. If this film encourages people to become Bergman heads, more power to it.) It’s alive with the stuff of art, with a knowledge that artists are people—complicated, difficult, full of personal eccentricities. And that not only informs their work, but is their work. Here we see the act of creation and the creation itself, sitting comfortably together. Knowing the making doesn’t diminish the full feelings it can generate. And knowing the maker doesn’t prevent us from getting lost in it. So it is with these fictional filmmakers; so it is with Bergman. In this film, so light and so lovely, we are asked to confront the beginnings of things, and in the end, it casually asks us to decide what makes for an ending that we will find fulfilling. As Margaret Atwood once reminded us, “So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.”

The Deadly Companions: THE HATEFUL EIGHT

Quentin Tarantino’s films are unfailingly concerned with using impeccable craft – sharp widescreen blocking, showy camera moves, nesting doll narrative structure – to show off his video store savant chops. Each new effort is an excuse to raid the cabinets of his genre knowledge: gangster pictures, heist movies, blaxploitation films, kung fu cinema, spaghetti Westerns, World War II epics, car chase actioners, and Grindhouse exploitation flicks. He loves the idea of movies almost as much as actually having made a movie. His latest is The Hateful Eight, a blending of a Sergio Corbucci snow Western and an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery. It’s also easily identifiable as a Tarantino picture, not just in its predictable mixture of inspirations, but in concerning itself with secrets and revenge, violence and profanity, chatty killers and Rubik’s Cube plotting tied up in a bow made from faux-vintage 70’s tics. By now you should know exactly what to expect out of his films.

A Tarantino film always features long talkative sequences of deferred suspense slowly building to shocking outbursts of violence. It forms the backbone of his best pictures. (Inglorious Basterds, for example, is a cascading collection of perfectly structured chatty setpieces.) With The Hateful Eight he makes an entire picture out of one enclosed talkathon. Set in the years following the Civil War, at a remote roadhouse in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) and his captive (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are trapped in a blizzard. Stuck waiting out the storm with an eclectic group of strangers – a rival bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson), a stagecoach driver (James Parks), a hangman (Tim Roth), a cowboy (Michael Madsen), an elderly Confederate veteran (Bruce Dern), a Mexican proprietor (Demian Bichir), and an unpersuasive rookie sheriff (Walton Goggins) – he’s convinced one of them is secretly scheming to spring his prisoner. Each is an opposite of some sort to another, a tangle of conflicts and grievances ready to boil over.

The ensemble is Tarantino’s most derivative, from Jackson as essentially an older, chattier Django Unchained to Roth in a role that sounds written for Christoph Waltz. They, and the rest, are types and remain so, conduits for Tarantino’s words and pawns in his plot. At least the cast is made up of dependable character actors who are relishing the opportunity to speak elongated, dense, complicated paragraphs of chewy dialogue. The performances are crackling, but it’s Tarantino’s shaggiest, emptiest script, his thinnest idea stretched across three hours. Maybe that part won’t feel quite so acute years from now, removed from the elaborate White Elephantine presentation and promotion, conspicuously hyping connection to canonical old school epics like Ben-Hur through its 70mm format and reviving (sort of) the roadshow concept, from overture and intermission to the commemorative booklet. It’s less and more than all that, some of his sharpest direction married to his most hollow story.

Set almost entirely in a small indoor space with a raging blizzard outside, there’s a great sense of claustrophobic paranoia (echoes of The Things, emphasized with an ominous Morricone score) as the tough men size each other up, and the captured woman quietly looks for a way out of her chains. She knows who’s there to help her, but she doesn’t let on, both to keep his cover and to keep the audience’s guessing game going. It’s fun watching the other characters try to figure it out for themselves, a neat little mystery primed to explode. Cinematographer Robert Richardson (in his fifth collaboration with Tarantino) executes tight and elegant formal control, staging varied and interesting angles within the confined space, juxtaposing it with blindingly white vistas of howling winds and galloping horses. It breathes with lengthy takes and long looks, not exactly slow cinema, but of a relaxed pace that recalls, say, Blake Edwards’s unusual 1971 film Wild Rovers in its easygoing Western danger. Nothing like a Tarantino picture to make one want to scrape the back of the brain for obscure genre comparison points.

My attention did not drift once during the extended runtime. He’s too good a craftsman and has too good a cast trapped in a gripping hook for that to happen. But I did find myself questioning why I had to be watching it. All Tarantino films deal with “edgy” material, that is to say uncomfortable subject matter (the holocaust, slavery, and so on) used for genre ends and political points, loaded up with bloodshed and profanity in overtly movie-ish ways. But Hateful Eight is barely engaging in any serious ideas beyond “people can be awful,” and isn’t using any of the inherent subtextual tensions to meaningfully add to the suspense or the drama. It’s merely cheap offense muddying an otherwise engaging and entertaining experience.

Despite a black bounty hunter and Confederate veterans cooped up together, it has only fleeting serious thoughts about race, and despite the one woman in the bunch being a villain (we’re told she’s bad, but never why until late in the game) gender rarely overtly enters the question. It’s a movie that’s just out to tell its simple, nihilistic little story (everyone has their hateful moments) in a complicated, drawn-out way, exploiting hot-button ideas with no intention of using them for more than uncomfortable shocks. At least the plotting is reasonably compelling, and the mystery engaging enough. It’s sometimes fun, and other times nasty, but the two were mostly mutually exclusive here in my eyes. But being so long and so well constructed it had plenty of time after nearly every instant that lost me to win me back.

The film has a wicked mean streak, with slurs spat out for comic effect, a woman repeatedly battered for punctuation and punchlines, and an extended rape anecdote staged for queasy laughs. (That it probably didn’t really happen, and is instead a story told to make another character mad, doesn’t blunt the cackling glee with which the devastating act is visualized for our benefit.) The movie is willing to toss aside any possible avenues of empathy in order to go for a brutal moment. It’s an unserious lark with serious violations and sadism on its mind, feinting at heavy ideas to fill the bitter hollow pit in its core. The movie wraps up with Tarantino’s usual gnarly violence, cartoonish and self-satisfied gobs of gore spraying out from the cast members one by one. It’s a long-delayed payoff – half exciting, half disturbing – for so much talky, sick tension.

A release of a sort, predictable but vivid and full of his typical surprise kills, the climax also deflates suspense and danger, especially as many fatal shots are played for cruel jokes (even when it happens to characters we’re basically rooting for). It matches the amped up ugliness of the subtext, and the relentlessness with which most of the gooiest gore effects are inflicted upon women and people of color in the cast (most of them in a depressing mass murder flashback). The Hateful Eight is disturbingly easy, and often entertaining, to watch, but hard to indulge, playing with painful cruelty for light distraction. Unlike his last few films, where violence is modulated and contained within a moral and pointed context, here it is unmoored, grotesque, deadening. The movie is compelling but difficult, a pointed display of American bloodlust and prejudice that ends up grooving on such nastiness.

A Change is Gonna Come: SELMA

Whatever their individual merits, or lack thereof, Hollywood reflections on the Civil Rights Movement from the likes of Driving Miss Daisy or The Help tend to conclude by putting on a happy face. They’re viewing the tribulations of the time through a historical distancing complex that takes great pride finding history in the past. How terrible racism and its effects, they say. And yet situating a story as vital as a fight for human rights through the view of sympathetic white help, told firmly from a supposedly more enlightened present, provides only uplift. One whose knowledge of history comes only from Hollywood could be excused for thinking the story of Civil Rights is the mission-accomplished post-racism lie sold by the willfully ignorant.

The power of a film like Ava DuVernay’s Selma comes in its restoring to history its devastating immediacy, while refusing to obscure the direct line from then to now. It takes as its subject the 1965 marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. That was a mere 50 years ago, when brave peaceful protesters were beaten by eager police in riot gear, in front of news cameras for the entire world to see. In this film, each blow feels fresh, the bruises still painful. It keeps the focus of a heroic, historic moment rooted in the humane details, presenting key figures as complicated human beings confronting the worst of humanity with hard-fought grace and determination. It’s a film that plays on your historical knowledge – you can’t watch an opening scene of little girls in their Sunday best walking through a church without a sick feeling of dread suspecting their fate – without taking it for granted or softening historical horror with the benefits of hindsight.

Every choice made by the filmmakers is rooted in immediacy and intimacy. They take our usual view of history – of Great Men, Important Speeches, and Big Moments – and restore a sense of the masses to a movement. The Civil Rights Movement was, after all, made up of people, hundreds and thousands of individuals whose collective voice was heard. The marches at Selma may have been organized and inspired by, among others, Martin Luther King Jr, but he needed the passion and commitment of the people who made up the crowds. DuVernay’s film’s most powerful moments are in its crowd scenes, when King (played brilliantly and convincingly by David Oyelowo) is simply one of many marching towards crowds of cops and hecklers, determined to draw attention to their cause.

Placing the crowds and King on similar levels of focus, the film draws a lively and humane reenactment. We come to recognize faces (Oprah Winfrey, Common, Lorraine Toussaint, Tessa Thompson, Stephan James, and more). We can pick them out in the crowds. We know a little of their stories. We see their eagerness, their idealism, their pragmatic planning. Then we see them shoved, hit, shot at, and bludgeoned. Their faces are bloodied as they limp to safety, ready to head out and march again the next day. At its best, Selma is history written with lightening, sharply revealing and an electric burn. It burns for the ferocity of the facts, and the sad recognition in them of so many concerns that linger still. When an unarmed black man is gunned down by white cops who will never be punished, it’s hard not to read echoes of current events in the pain and sorrow on the screen.

Writer-director DuVernay’s previous films were small-scale intimate dramas, tenderly studying the emotional currents between her characters. You can see that skill in Selma’s portrait of King’s relationship with his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and closest advisors (Wendell Pierce chief among them). Not just the easily appropriated, endlessly quotable symbol to which he can so often be reduced, we see King at a recognizably human level. He heads to the streets, ready to face death threats and worse as he delivers sermons with fire and conviction, no matter his private troubles and doubts. But we also see in the small, quiet moments of his life as husband, father, and friend, soft intimate spaces over which hangs the import and danger of his righteous calling.

The film is more diffuse than a biopic, and the time with the supporting cast doesn’t allow for any one standout amongst them. King still dominates the proceedings, drawing focus even when not on screen. He’s a figure of inspiration and conflict amongst everyone, but it’s always clear he’s only human. It’s a picture of a person, and of a movement, that manages to be honest without tearing anyone down. Following backroom negotiations, strategy sessions, and heartfelt speeches between moments of extreme racial tension and sympathetically drawn character moments, Selma is best when it’s witnessing the crisis points of the conflict, and when sitting back with the activists in casual moments of camaraderie, eating, praying, or singing while planning the next move. In those cases, DuVernay makes a film most clearly interested in the human experience first, not just the Big Important moments.

The film falls into some conventional docudrama patterns, like unnecessary time-stamped text and a few clumsy integrations of full names and position statements, orienting the audience at the (brief) expense of immediacy. So, too, the scenes in the White House with LBJ (Tom Wilkinson) or the State Capital where George Wallace (Tim Roth) growls and spits slurs, sequences which sit at a remove from the street-level interest. But when the story and the filmmaking sits powerfully close to the planning and the protests, it is too vitally alive to be held back entirely by such predictable based-on-a-true-story message movie moments.

Bradford Young’s cinematography finds glowing skin tones in cozy interiors that crackle with dimly-lit beauty reminiscent of Gordon Willis. But then we head outside with the protestors, where under the bright light of the sun, angry, violent racism must inevitably meet non-violence. The emotions of real people who somehow muster the courage to put themselves in harms way for what they believe are beautifully realized in a present tense, shorn from the usual feel-good conclusions. This is a hard-hitting view of these events, sympathetic and inspiring, but also pragmatic and clear-eyed about how hard-fought the battle, how real the accomplishments, and yet how ongoing the conflict.

Quick Looks: ARBITRAGE, THE GOOD DOCTOR, and SLEEPWALK WITH ME

In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays a hugely wealthy banker in some serious trouble. He’s become embroiled in a complicated financial deal that’s threatening to sink his company if the funds don’t get moved around quickly enough to cover his assets. And that’s not even the worst of it. He sneaks away from his wife (Susan Sarandon) to drive upstate with his mistress (Laetitia Casta) and ends up flipping the car. When he comes to, he sees that his mistress is dead in the passenger seat so he flees the scene of the accident. (The pointed intent couldn’t be clearer: the rich flee catastrophe on instinct.) So he’s dealing with financial trouble and legal trouble, skulking around large boardrooms, spacious offices, and fancy apartments, trying to avoid the consequences of his actions.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki has created a phony fantasy of a character study that feels altogether too calculated a guesstimate of how the one-percent lives. (Not that I have any experience with that income bracket, but it can’t be as simple as it’s made to seem here.) To put such material in a standard thriller (the kind with dramatic turns that make it play like an episode of Law & Order from the suspect’s point-of-view) only cheapens what was sparsely drawn to begin with. It should be juicier and with more of a bite; it’s all strangely toothless. That said, Gere gives a persuasive performance of a man crumbling under the burden of keeping up appearances. I also appreciated the work of Nate Parker, as a working-class man Gere debates scapegoating, and Tim Roth, as the investigator who is frustrated that the legal system seems rigged in favor the rich. Would that these performances were in a movie that would be able to better show them off.

Director Lance Daly’s The Good Doctor is a squirmy thriller about a lonely young doctor (Orlando Bloom) who falls in love (no, obsession) with a pretty patient (Riley Keough). He decides to tweak her medication in order to keep her in the hospital under his care. The script by John Enborn follows this situation to its predictable conclusion and the talented supporting cast (including Taraji P. Henson, Michael Peña, and J.K. Simmons) fills out the plot convincingly enough. It’s a shame, then, that the whole experience is just a sad, slow circle down the drain, completely without tension and devoid of emotional interest. This is a thinly imagined thriller that manages nothing more than a queasy feeling once or twice. It’s most unfulfilling in its flat visual style and ploddingly obvious script. As someone who sort of enjoyed Daly’s similarly slight first feature, the kids-in-puppy-love romance Kisses, I’m especially disappointed to see that this is where he’s gone next. He’s a director of potential and maybe someday he’ll live up to it.

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has told the same – very funny – story in several mediums now. If you’re anything like me, you may have managed to hear several times over (in his stand-up, on This American Life, in his memoir) about his intense sleepwalking problem that caused him to, say, dream about a jackal intruding in his bedroom, which would result in him fast asleep shouting at a hamper, fully convinced he was confronting a wild animal. This is obviously a problem, but his career seemed to be taking off and his relationship with his girlfriend was growing complicated and one thing leads to another and he’s in a deep sleep while jumping out a second-story hotel window.

This story’s latest telling takes movie form in Sleepwalk with Me and it’s perfectly fine, though I did wonder if it would have worked better on me if the novelty was still there. Birbiglia, here the writer, director and star, has a loose, casual style that pumps up dream sequences with off-hand discombobulation that is undercut with silly shifts to reality. To fill out the rest of the semi-autobiographical movie, it follows Birbiglia’s relationship with his girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose) as well as his growing stand-up career that takes him from hotel to hotel, crummy gig to crummy gig. Altogether it plays like Woody Allen lite, warm and sweetly small. This is a minor, but often charming movie, mostly because Birbiglia is so likable. But the thing of it is, you’d have just as good a time listening to the original monologue, so I have a hard time recommending this movie outright.