The Sense of an Ending: OH, CANADA

Paul Schrader’s films have always been political and spiritual and death-haunted. He is the screenwriter of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, among others, some of that master’s most doom-laden and theologically minded. As writer-director on his own, Schrader has given us everything from the incisive work of contentious race-relations and union-building as Blue Collar and the sorrowful ecological and religious angst of First Reformed, his late, fiercely philosophical, intense masterwork. His newest film, Oh, Canada, is especially funereal. Here’s a work from an elderly filmmaker who uses his own closeness to death—the 78-year-old’s recent hospital stays have been well-documented—to make a film perched on that precipice. He’s adapting a Russell Banks novel for the second time in his career, after the powerful alcoholism drama Affliction. This new one stars Richard Gere as a terminally ill filmmaker—a famously draft-dodging documentarian—who agrees to an interview for a movie about his life made by one of his former students (Michael Imperioli). The old man is seated in front of an Interrotron, the camera setup invented by filmmaker Errol Morris to allow the interview subject to comfortably stare straight down the lens by using mirrors to put the questioner’s face directly above it. Gere, looking convincingly frail and confused, inhabits this director as he is asked to tell the story of his career. 

What follows is a slipstream of memories flowing into flashbacks. Schrader plays with time as he plays with color and aspect ratio to visualize a man lost in his own times. Jacob Elordi plays the younger Gere, and then Schrader freely mixes between the two actors in the flashbacks, sometimes Gere playing opposite younger actors. He also has Elordi play scenes against Uma Thurman, who plays two roles, one past and one present, as do some other key cast members. As you age, faces and names blur like this. It makes for a film that’s shot within a sense of an elderly man remembering and inhabiting his memories in the same moment. In this man’s confessions of past failures and foibles, the effect is demystifying—showing life is more complicated and less dramatic than the myths that build up around us—and clarifying. He can’t keep it straight, even as he tries to set the record straight. Most Schrader films pull inward even as they move outward. This one goes only inward—politics and business and war and art all caught in the undertow of a man’s life as his reminiscence finds fleeting connections and lingering divisions. It’s not so much a movie of an old man’s regrets. It’s a movie about an old man’s accumulated hypocrisies and misalignments as he realizes, perhaps too late, that these fragments add up not to a unified whole, but a fragmented one. The result is a fragmented movie, frustrating and yet somehow complete all the same.

Just the Start: NYMPHOMANIAC: VOL. I

It’s difficult not to be aware that writer-director Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. I is half of a movie. Even if you didn’t hear that the Danish provocateur’s latest film ran nearly four hours at its festival debuts and has been cut into two parts for American release, or didn’t understand the title, you’d realize there’s more to the story when the film fades to black, plot and theme left tantalizingly unresolved. Next to the end credits runs a rapid-fire montage of context-free imagery next to the words “from Nymphomaniac: Vol. II.” And so it is hard to come up with a definitive statement one way or the other about the film in its totality, since such a declaration depends partly on where it goes from here. What can be said is that Vol. I is an often dazzling film, intense and thoughtful even as it sets out to shock and amuse with blisteringly matter-of-fact frankness.

As the title suggests, the film is about a sex addict. We first meet her (Charlotte Gainsbourg) passed out in an alley. A kind older gentleman (Stellan Skarsgård) stops to help. She refuses an ambulance, but agrees to accompany him back to his apartment where he makes her a pot of tea. There’s no sexual tension between them, but there is a mutual human curiosity. She launches into her life story, rattling off anecdote after anecdote. She becomes our complicated, and maybe unreliable, narrator, telling him and us about her family, her friends, and, most of all, her sexual encounters. These she takes special pleasure in lingering over sordid details, making sure to emphasize the role each one plays in forming her shame and self-loathing. The man, to his credit, does not judge her. Her engages her, talks her through her feelings, tries to shift the subject by drawing comparisons to fly fishing, math, and art, Bach, Poe, and Fibonacci. Where this conversation is leading neither seems to know, but the steady hand of directorial vision seems guiding them to some kind of conclusion.

Von Trier’s recent films have directed sharply interior emotional landscapes outward into the world at large. Antichrist, his dark and troubling 2009 film, suggested that profound grief could radiate into the environment, deteriorating and rotting surroundings until chaos reigns. His Melancholia, one of the best films of 2011, was even more overwhelming, finding deep depression so destabilizing and overpowering that nothing less than the end of the world becomes sublime release. But in Nymphomaniac: Vol. I, the woman’s interior desires, a mingling of hunger and disgust, are expressed in the world only insofar as she needs other people to fulfill her needs. In long flashbacks, anecdotes sad and funny, energetic and elegiac illuminate her progression from curious teen to a young woman juggling dozens of encounters a week, leaving a trail of bewildered and exhausted, and sometimes happy, men in her wake.

At the center of the stories, quietly commanding the screen, is young French/English actress Stacy Martin in her acting debut. She has a fresh face and placid features, hesitant innocence and starving desires swirling underneath her smooth skin and big eyes. It’s a marvelous performance, tricky and demanding physically and emotionally. She’s convincing, whether sweetly asking her father (Christian Slater) to tell her one more time her childhood stories, or propositioning a reluctant man on a train (Simon Böer). Composed, she plays slow-burn infatuation with the boss at her first job (Shia LaBeouf) with appealing earnest yearning. She also plays quiet mortification in the film’s biggest and best comedy sequence when her apartment is invaded by her current lover’s wife (Uma Thurman, in a remarkable scene-stealing performance) who confronts them, three towheaded youngsters in tow.

After each of these varied and compelling anecdotal flashbacks, we cut back to the narrator sipping her tea in the present. She seems to be testing her audience, looking at the patient, kind, inquisitive man from over her mug as if to say, “have I shocked you yet? Are you disgusted with me?” So too does Von Trier seem to be goading his audience, right from the assaultive heavy metal that blasts apart aching silence in the opening scene. Throughout the film, by turns explicit and oblique, he varies the presentation. There are shifting aspect ratios and color, sometimes flat, over-lit digital video glow, other times stretching across the wide screen with vivid colors and marvelous grungy grain. One anecdote, a harrowing hospital stay for a supporting character, is filmed in textured black and white, the better to make blood and excrement the same harrowing darkness on pristine white sheets. Von Trier uses archival footage, gynecological diagrams, and wry charts and graphs, placing them over moments both innocuous and filthy. He creates a world that is flexible, and a vivid and playfully dirty dichotomy between education of the mind – books, statistics, research – and education of the body – biology in practice.

At the end, the film finds a fine stopping point, but not a conclusion. It’s tantalizing and thought-provoking – I haven’t really stopped turning it over in my head since I saw it – but naturally feels incomplete. Vol. I sets up a fascinating character study that I’m eager to see resolved. I could’ve sat through the next two hours of it right then and there. Both volumes are available on video on demand as I write this, but I’ll wait and catch the second half on the big screen as well. A film as cinematically vital as this one deserves to be seen that way if possible.

Nothing New Under the Sun: PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is the biggest hunk of indigestible, derivative fantasy-adaptation nonsense to hit the big screen since Eragon. That film played like a teenager got tired of having to watch both The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and decided to just mush them together. If you know anything about the creation of that aberration, then you know that that’s pretty much how it happened. Percy Jackson, on the other hand, is a blatant Harry Potter rip-off based on a book by Rick Riordan that’s slightly better than the movie would have you think. Instead of a young boy with special powers discovering a world of wizards and Hogwarts in Europe, here we have a boy with special powers discovering a world of Greek gods and Camp Half-Blood in America. I guess it makes a certain kind of twisted Hollywood sense that Chris Columbus, director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, got hired to direct this movie.

If nothing else, the existence of this movie confirms my suspicions that the first two Potter films succeed in spite of, not because of, their director. Take away the great source material, good scripts, excellent art direction, wonderful cinematography, and fun visual effects and there’s not a whole lot for a movie to stand on. Such is the case of Percy Jackson, although, to be fair, Harry Potter doesn’t have a montage set to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” You win some, you lose some.

Everything about this film seems priced at a lower level and pitched at the undiscerning. Sure, it doesn’t have great source material, but that’s no reason for Craig Titley’s script to contain dialogue that calls into question whether or not he’s actually heard human beings interact. With plenty of howlingly clunky lines, it often undermines the fairly impressive cast. In fact, it’s the cast that starts the movie on a good note. As the opening credits started, I had to smile seeing likable actor after likable actor listed. Once the movie proper started my smile slowly faded.

Logan Lerman is cast as Percy Jackson, a teenager who is unaware that his deadbeat dad is none other than Poseidon, god of the sea. Now, Lerman’s a promising young actor. He held his own on the screen with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in James Mangold’s very enjoyable 3:10 to Yuma remake a few years ago. But here, he’s not given much to do other than pose heroically or act as an audience for characters who are delivering exposition. But, at 18, he’s the youngest teenager in the cast, so he looks the part, at least. His fellow teenagers are a different story. As his sidekicks, Brandon T. Jackson (25, memorably seen as one of the hilarious cast of Tropic Thunder) and Alexandra Daddario (23, in her first major role) are capable but out-of-place playing the Ron and Hermione roles, respectively. It doesn’t help that they have the same lame dialogue as everyone else.

The script also does no favors to the adult cast performing as various mythical creatures and mythological characters. Pierce Brosnan is a centaur and head of Camp Half-Blood and he never fails to look ridiculous wearing half a CGI horse. Catherine Keener, fresh off of playing Max’s mother in the transcendent Where the Wild Things Are, puts in her time in the thankless role of Percy’s mother, wearing for the entirety of her screen time a look of desperation that only sets in when an actor’s paycheck vastly outweighs their understanding of ridiculous material. It’s nice to see Uma Thurman as Medusa, but the inspiration stops there. It’s also nice to Joe Pantoliano in two brief scenes, as Percy’s stepfather. He might have the most thankless role of the film, even including Sean Bean’s Zeus whose lines could be counted on your fingers.

Explaining the characters and actors in that manner might have seemed a little dull and clunky, but it’s a perfect emulation of the way the movie works, shuffling a character on screen just long enough for them to impact the plot, but just quickly enough so that no one character can leave much of an impact on the audience. This is the kind of movie that can barely keep its own plot straight and is therefore constantly informing us about what’s going on. The movie’s so generous with the exposition that nearly every character gets to spout some. I’m a little surprised there isn’t someone talking over the end credits, still explaining while the audience is out the door.

The movie sparks to life on occasion, like in a briefly enjoyable Vegas escape, but those moments are all too brief. Most of the movie is consumed with a tedious video game style of plot development wherein the characters repeatedly move to a new location, find a trinket, and battle something. There’s terrible dialogue and endless exposition around every corner, or, even worse, overly obvious music cues. Hey, our three protagonists are on their way to the underworld to confront Hades or to find something or other. Start up “Highway to Hell.”

Funnily enough, once they do reach the underworld, the movie reaches its greatest portion of sustained inspiration. The effects and design are fairly striking, as are the performances from Steve Coogan and Rosario Dawson, as Hades and Persephone, who play their gods as glam-rock egoists while pronouncing every line with just the right amount of bemusement. This good will carries into a modestly likable airborne swordfight amidst the rooftops of New York that brings a much needed energy boost. But even this late save doesn’t stop the thoroughly mediocre nature of the movie. It’s clunky, episodic, and lame. It goes by fast enough with a nice enough cast, but pacing and casting can only carry a movie so far before the production needs to keep up its end of the bargain.

Percy Jackson isn’t exactly disappointing because it’s not very good. It’s mostly disappointing because it’s subpar in entirely uninteresting and unsurprising ways. The biggest surprise of the movie is that it’s actually not terrible, just frustratingly mediocre and fatally confused.