Film Is a Battleground #10: I Only Have Two Nice Things To Say About Mike Nichols (Closer, Coffee and Cigarettes, and more)
CLOSER (in theaters)
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (on DVD)
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (on HBO)
ELF (on DVD)
SUPER SIZE ME (on DVD)
ENVY (on DVD)
CLOSER (Mike Nichols, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)
1) I have great respect for Nichols and May both for the quality of their work as writer-performers and the unequivocally pervasive influence their work had on comedy.
2) He is excellent in David Hare’s film of Wallace Shawn’s THE DESIGNATED MOURNER.
Thus concludes the complimentary portion of Film Is a Battleground #10.
For his first film following the uneven television adaptation of ANGELS IN AMERICA, Nichols chose to direct material so thin that there would be no chance to repeat the disappointment of ANGELS IN AMERICA. Kushner’s ambitious vision suffered under Nichols’ pedestrian direction. When Nichols tried to express the play’s imagery via visual grammar, the results were embarrassing and undermined rather than elevated the text. Thankfully, Nichols is not an especially ambitious director. His generic, anonymous work allowed ANGELS IN AMERICA to contain plenty of fine scenes buoyed simply by the quality of the writing and acting. Patrick Marber’s script for CLOSER demonstrates no ambition whatsoever. It’s a perfect collaboration.
CLOSER consists of pre- and post-coital scenes between various combinations of four actors (Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman, and Julia Roberts). Sadly, none of the actors have a character to play. They are simply four people who are emotionally distant, selfish, and immature. The film takes place over the course of four years, but the audience is only witness to the most contrived, shoutingest exchanges of the fluid couplings.
Unfortunately, the physical relationships remain strictly heterosexual, because the film only comes briefly alive in the two scenes between Jude Law and Clive Owen. In their exchanges, the macho, confidant doctor played by Owen and the weak, unsuccessful novelist played by Law verge on making a point about the nature of masculinity before reverting to treating and being treated badly by women.
CLOSER (both the play and the film) has been compared to Neil LaBute and I think that, having seen CLOSER, I better understand the experience of those who find LaBute a meaningless misanthrope. Marber’s characters, like LaBute’s, are unpleasant, but Marber lacks LaBute’s moral vision. LaBute denies his characters obvious redemption, but he strips them of the illusion that they are without sin. Marber and Nichols simply traffic in chic emptiness, reinforcing the disaffected amorality that LaBute attacks.
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (Jim Jarmusch, 2004)
*** (A must-see)
An admittedly minor Jarmusch film, but one that restricts itself to the key concern of all of Jarmusch’s films: the interaction between culturally different and/or distinctly eccentric individuals. As well it should. Its individual segments shot over the last seventeen years, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, like MYSTERY TRAIN and NIGHT ON EARTH before it, draws its meaning from the juxtaposition of thematically similar short films.
Just as DOWN BY LAW seemed to be inspired by Jarmusch’s desire to put John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni together in a confined space, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES bases most of its characters’ eccentricities on the actors playing them. Jarmusch combines DEAD MAN’s exploration of identity and art with YEAR OF THE HORSE’s exploration of work and celebrity.
The film is essentially a pop riff on the great tension of DEAD MAN, between the European-educated American Indian “Nobody” (Gary Farmer) and the American accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp). Nobody, cast out of Europe when his novelty wore off because he became too much like his hosts, believed Blake, who may or may not be dead, to be the spirit of the artist William Blake. Blake’s ignorance of William Blake’s work and the incongruity of a Caucasian Western hero being tutored, both in the native ways of the West and the ways of Western Culture by an American Indian allowed Jarmusch to simultaneously explore varied spiritual visions, American cultural and economic history, the Western genre, and the basis of art in life.
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES peaks when artists, whose talents have been turned into a commodity by the entertainment industry, attempt to interact free of the burdens of celebrity. Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, the RZA, the GZA, and Bill Murray, Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni all meet for coffee and cigarettes in the hopes of forming some sort of connection grounded in reality. They reveal hidden interests yet shy away from revealing vulnerabilities. They attempt to see the other person as a person rather than a celebrity image. None of the exchanges succeed profoundly, but the attempt redeems those involved.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (Stephen Hopkins, 2004)
* (Has a redeeming facet)
Functioning as little more than an excuse for an entertaining and impressive star turn for Geoffrey Rush, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS fails to provide more than broad explanations for either Sellers’ genius as a performer or his failure as a husband and father.
The talented actors surrounding Rush are all overqualified for their roles. Though John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci are credited as playing Blake Edwards and Stanley Kubrick respectively, they do little other than appear and announce their identity before bearing witness to Sellers displaying either his genius in front of the camera or his immaturity off-camera.
Similarly both Emily Watson and Charlize Theron are called upon to be little more than observers for the swings between complete inaccessibility and uncontrollable rage that seems to have characterized his marriages.
The entire film ticks off the supposedly humanizing assumed psychological underpinnings of an artist’s work: overbearing stage mother, weak father, childhood privations fueling the inability to deny the physical pleasures offered upon the advent of one’s fame, material success suffocating creative drive, self-indulgent excess resulting in concrete evidence of one’s mortality, the desire to reclaim the artistic integrity squandered, regrets, and death.
Rush plays almost all the other characters in the film at some point as something like the manifestation of Peter Sellers’ interior monologue from beyond the grave. This conceit elevates the virtuosity of Rush’s performance, but reinforces the film’s lack of context. Better filmmakers than Hopkins (Michael Mann and Julie Taymor most recently) have attempted to overcome the limitations of the biopic form without succeeding either.
ELF (Jon Favreau, 2003)
* (Has a redeeming facet)
Until succumbing to a supposedly heart-warming display of (secular) Christmas spirit, ELF offers some sprightly entertainment. Will Ferrell’s performance in ANCHORMAN put me in mind of Fred Willard, but his performance here, as a human raised by elves at Santa’s workshop recalls Jerry Lewis.
Ferrell’s elfish man-child lacks the maudlin neediness which undermined Lewis’s otherwise brilliant performances. The muted ambitions of this year’s ANCHORMAN suggest that Ferrell may attempt to bring a distinct comic vision to the screen. With Jim Carrey seemingly uninterested in taking complete creative control of a film even as modest as THE BELLBOY or THE ERRAND BOY (it would be unfair to expect anything as ambitious as THE LADIES’ MAN or THE NUTTY PROFESSOR) Ferrell may be our best hope for reclaiming the ground potential writer-director-performers have (with the possible exceptions of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) ceded to Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, and the Farrelly Brothers.
SUPER SIZE ME (Morgan Spurlock, 2004)
* (Has a redeeming facet)
SUPER SIZE ME is perfectly watchable and director-host Morgan Spurlock a pleasant tour guide, but like FAHRENHEIT 9/11 it merely offers a light gloss on old news. I guess that there are potential viewers who aren’t hip to the dangerous cynicism of this particular corporate culture and that they may be moved to read Fast Food Nation for a more in-depth study of the topic. That would be useful. Barring that, however, the film exists as little more than a brief diversion.
ENVY (Barry Levinson, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)
ENVY sat on the shelf for over a year, seeing the light of day only following the box-office success of SCHOOL OF ROCK. As an admirer of supposed failures JIMMY HOLLYWOOD and BANDITS, I generally give Barry Levinson the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his smaller film projects. ENVY may make me reconsider that policy.
The film appears to have suffered either a fair amount of re-cuts or a problematic production. It has the unfortunate distinction of appearing to be a would-be dark fable made on the cheap, more flimsily tacky than magically subversive. There is no hint as to what compelled Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, Christopher Walken, and Barry Levinson to become involved though Executive Producer Larry David is rumored to have uncredited involvement with the script which is plausible considering its surfeit of flaws.
Click here to read the full post with comments
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (on DVD)
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (on HBO)
ELF (on DVD)
SUPER SIZE ME (on DVD)
ENVY (on DVD)
CLOSER (Mike Nichols, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)
1) I have great respect for Nichols and May both for the quality of their work as writer-performers and the unequivocally pervasive influence their work had on comedy.
2) He is excellent in David Hare’s film of Wallace Shawn’s THE DESIGNATED MOURNER.
Thus concludes the complimentary portion of Film Is a Battleground #10.
For his first film following the uneven television adaptation of ANGELS IN AMERICA, Nichols chose to direct material so thin that there would be no chance to repeat the disappointment of ANGELS IN AMERICA. Kushner’s ambitious vision suffered under Nichols’ pedestrian direction. When Nichols tried to express the play’s imagery via visual grammar, the results were embarrassing and undermined rather than elevated the text. Thankfully, Nichols is not an especially ambitious director. His generic, anonymous work allowed ANGELS IN AMERICA to contain plenty of fine scenes buoyed simply by the quality of the writing and acting. Patrick Marber’s script for CLOSER demonstrates no ambition whatsoever. It’s a perfect collaboration.
CLOSER consists of pre- and post-coital scenes between various combinations of four actors (Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman, and Julia Roberts). Sadly, none of the actors have a character to play. They are simply four people who are emotionally distant, selfish, and immature. The film takes place over the course of four years, but the audience is only witness to the most contrived, shoutingest exchanges of the fluid couplings.
Unfortunately, the physical relationships remain strictly heterosexual, because the film only comes briefly alive in the two scenes between Jude Law and Clive Owen. In their exchanges, the macho, confidant doctor played by Owen and the weak, unsuccessful novelist played by Law verge on making a point about the nature of masculinity before reverting to treating and being treated badly by women.
CLOSER (both the play and the film) has been compared to Neil LaBute and I think that, having seen CLOSER, I better understand the experience of those who find LaBute a meaningless misanthrope. Marber’s characters, like LaBute’s, are unpleasant, but Marber lacks LaBute’s moral vision. LaBute denies his characters obvious redemption, but he strips them of the illusion that they are without sin. Marber and Nichols simply traffic in chic emptiness, reinforcing the disaffected amorality that LaBute attacks.
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (Jim Jarmusch, 2004)
*** (A must-see)
An admittedly minor Jarmusch film, but one that restricts itself to the key concern of all of Jarmusch’s films: the interaction between culturally different and/or distinctly eccentric individuals. As well it should. Its individual segments shot over the last seventeen years, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES, like MYSTERY TRAIN and NIGHT ON EARTH before it, draws its meaning from the juxtaposition of thematically similar short films.
Just as DOWN BY LAW seemed to be inspired by Jarmusch’s desire to put John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni together in a confined space, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES bases most of its characters’ eccentricities on the actors playing them. Jarmusch combines DEAD MAN’s exploration of identity and art with YEAR OF THE HORSE’s exploration of work and celebrity.
The film is essentially a pop riff on the great tension of DEAD MAN, between the European-educated American Indian “Nobody” (Gary Farmer) and the American accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp). Nobody, cast out of Europe when his novelty wore off because he became too much like his hosts, believed Blake, who may or may not be dead, to be the spirit of the artist William Blake. Blake’s ignorance of William Blake’s work and the incongruity of a Caucasian Western hero being tutored, both in the native ways of the West and the ways of Western Culture by an American Indian allowed Jarmusch to simultaneously explore varied spiritual visions, American cultural and economic history, the Western genre, and the basis of art in life.
COFFEE AND CIGARETTES peaks when artists, whose talents have been turned into a commodity by the entertainment industry, attempt to interact free of the burdens of celebrity. Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, the RZA, the GZA, and Bill Murray, Steven Wright and Roberto Benigni all meet for coffee and cigarettes in the hopes of forming some sort of connection grounded in reality. They reveal hidden interests yet shy away from revealing vulnerabilities. They attempt to see the other person as a person rather than a celebrity image. None of the exchanges succeed profoundly, but the attempt redeems those involved.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (Stephen Hopkins, 2004)
* (Has a redeeming facet)
Functioning as little more than an excuse for an entertaining and impressive star turn for Geoffrey Rush, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS fails to provide more than broad explanations for either Sellers’ genius as a performer or his failure as a husband and father.
The talented actors surrounding Rush are all overqualified for their roles. Though John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci are credited as playing Blake Edwards and Stanley Kubrick respectively, they do little other than appear and announce their identity before bearing witness to Sellers displaying either his genius in front of the camera or his immaturity off-camera.
Similarly both Emily Watson and Charlize Theron are called upon to be little more than observers for the swings between complete inaccessibility and uncontrollable rage that seems to have characterized his marriages.
The entire film ticks off the supposedly humanizing assumed psychological underpinnings of an artist’s work: overbearing stage mother, weak father, childhood privations fueling the inability to deny the physical pleasures offered upon the advent of one’s fame, material success suffocating creative drive, self-indulgent excess resulting in concrete evidence of one’s mortality, the desire to reclaim the artistic integrity squandered, regrets, and death.
Rush plays almost all the other characters in the film at some point as something like the manifestation of Peter Sellers’ interior monologue from beyond the grave. This conceit elevates the virtuosity of Rush’s performance, but reinforces the film’s lack of context. Better filmmakers than Hopkins (Michael Mann and Julie Taymor most recently) have attempted to overcome the limitations of the biopic form without succeeding either.
ELF (Jon Favreau, 2003)
* (Has a redeeming facet)
Until succumbing to a supposedly heart-warming display of (secular) Christmas spirit, ELF offers some sprightly entertainment. Will Ferrell’s performance in ANCHORMAN put me in mind of Fred Willard, but his performance here, as a human raised by elves at Santa’s workshop recalls Jerry Lewis.
Ferrell’s elfish man-child lacks the maudlin neediness which undermined Lewis’s otherwise brilliant performances. The muted ambitions of this year’s ANCHORMAN suggest that Ferrell may attempt to bring a distinct comic vision to the screen. With Jim Carrey seemingly uninterested in taking complete creative control of a film even as modest as THE BELLBOY or THE ERRAND BOY (it would be unfair to expect anything as ambitious as THE LADIES’ MAN or THE NUTTY PROFESSOR) Ferrell may be our best hope for reclaiming the ground potential writer-director-performers have (with the possible exceptions of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) ceded to Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, and the Farrelly Brothers.
SUPER SIZE ME (Morgan Spurlock, 2004)
* (Has a redeeming facet)
SUPER SIZE ME is perfectly watchable and director-host Morgan Spurlock a pleasant tour guide, but like FAHRENHEIT 9/11 it merely offers a light gloss on old news. I guess that there are potential viewers who aren’t hip to the dangerous cynicism of this particular corporate culture and that they may be moved to read Fast Food Nation for a more in-depth study of the topic. That would be useful. Barring that, however, the film exists as little more than a brief diversion.
ENVY (Barry Levinson, 2004)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)
ENVY sat on the shelf for over a year, seeing the light of day only following the box-office success of SCHOOL OF ROCK. As an admirer of supposed failures JIMMY HOLLYWOOD and BANDITS, I generally give Barry Levinson the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his smaller film projects. ENVY may make me reconsider that policy.
The film appears to have suffered either a fair amount of re-cuts or a problematic production. It has the unfortunate distinction of appearing to be a would-be dark fable made on the cheap, more flimsily tacky than magically subversive. There is no hint as to what compelled Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, Christopher Walken, and Barry Levinson to become involved though Executive Producer Larry David is rumored to have uncredited involvement with the script which is plausible considering its surfeit of flaws.
Labels: barry levinson, closer, coffee and cigarettes, documentary, elf, envy, jim jarmusch, jon favreau, mike nichols, morgan spurlock, stephen hopkins, super size me, the life and death of peter sellers
Click here to read the full post with comments
posted by Bret LaGree at 13:58
0 comments
