Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Film Is a Battleground #20 (Capote, Broken Flowers, Kings and Queen)

CAPOTE (in theaters)
BROKEN FLOWERS (on DVD)
KINGS AND QUEEN (on DVD)

CAPOTE (Bennett Miller, 2005)
* (Has redeeming facet)

There is no apparent reason for this film to exist other than the opportunity for Philip Seymour Hoffman to play Truman Capote. Hoffman’s excellent performance makes the film watchable but it’s not enough to make the film compelling.

The film, which focuses on the creation of Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, doesn’t lack for incident as it features four murders, two executions, several hearings, a trial, much bad behavior by Capote, the usurpation of his fame by his former assistant Harper Lee, and excerpts from the text of the resultant non-fiction novel itself.

Apparently, the reputation of In Cold Blood has diminished over the years. Capote’s reputation certainly has, in general, as he never completed another major work. (The film dutifully informs us of this in a closing title. I think the fact is intended to be revelatory, but as we’ve seen nothing of Capote’s writing process outside of the creation of In Cold Blood, the information has no particular emotional impact. Was it the difficulty of writing this book that finished him as a writer? His guilt over his exploitation of his subjects? Alcoholism?) We prefer having our major works come from major artists. Capote’s childhood friend Harper Lee has, in her reticence, avoided some of the condescension the author of one great success receives, but still, there are those who argue that Capote actually wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, presumably in an attempt to conflate two major books into a single major career.

In Cold Blood scared the hell out of my when I read it years ago. I never feared monsters or spirits, the ineffably unseen. I feared random violence by human hands. The aimless sociopaths Dick Hickock and Perry Smith provided a concrete example of my imagined danger. In Cold Blood derives its power from the author’s empathy for the unhappy children who became the men who murdered the Clutter family. Capote demonstrates his empathy not by diminishing the senseless horror of the murders through explanation or excuse, but by unrelentingly documenting the empty aimlessness of Dick and Perry in their adult lives both before and after the murders.

CAPOTE needn’t have risen to the level of In Cold Blood to succeed. With In Cold Blood, Capote achieved his intention to write a new kind of book. I rather suspect the last context in which someone will make a new kind of film is in the dignified, Oscar-worthy branch of American cinema. The film falls apart because it attempts to focus on Capote’s exploitative treatment of Dick and Perry, especially his actions toward the latter. I don’t think it’s an indefensible choice to present the murders through the perspective of Capote acquiring the information via Perry’s self-serving description of the events. I do think that the film lacks the complexity to dramatize both Capote and Perry as unhappy children turned selfish, manipulative adults. The filmmakers may understand this failure of theirs, having inserted an otherwise superfluous scene of Capote visiting Perry’s sister wherein she warns Capote about Perry. In the very next seen, however, the filmmakers choose to represent Perry Smith simply as a patsy, a victim of Capote’s ambition.

BROKEN FLOWERS (Jim Jarmusch, 2005)
** (Worth seeing)

Unlike INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, wherein the Coen brothers made a film that managed to be simultaneously impersonal and derivative of their own body of work, BROKEN FLOWERS is an honest, personal disappointment. It is unlikely that any film promising Bill Murray and Julie Delpy as lovers and Jeffrey Wright as Murray’s next door neighbor and best friend could live up to my fevered anticipation.

Jim Jarmusch’s body of work attempts to reveal the sublime through the companionship of particular people trying to connect while conversing elliptically and at cross-purposes. Unfortunately, the conversations between Murray’s character and the former lovers (Sharon Stone, Francis Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton) he seeks out fail to match the felicitous interplay established between John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni in DOWN BY LAW, the denizens of and visitors to Memphis in MYSTERY TRAIN, Benigni and Paolo Bonacelli in NIGHT ON EARTH, or the best episodes of COFFEE AND CIGARETTES. It’s only in the film’s final two-handed scene between Murray and Mark Webber that things begin to spark, teasing multiple, elastic meanings from the dialogue.

The film seems especially minor by insisting, far less successfully than Jarmusch’s masterpiece DEAD MAN and its thematic coda, GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI, that attempting to unravel or attempting to ignore the interconnectedness (explicitly categorized as clues by Wright’s character in this film) that produces both tragedy and serendipity in life is a fool’s errand which precludes enlightenment.


KINGS & QUEEN (Arnaud Desplechin, 2005)
** (Worth seeing)

Half a version of a 1950s Hollywood melodrama and half a highly-verbal male comedy in the manner of WC Fields or early Bill Murray, KINGS & QUEEN only occasionally overcomes its meta-cinematic inspiration. Partially Sirk-inspired rather than slavishly derivative of Sirk in the manner of Todd Haynes’s dreadful FAR FROM HEAVEN, this film manages to engage its characters as people rather than archetypes (an achievement greatly aided by the fine cast lead by Desplechin regulars Emanuelle Devos and Matheiu Amalric as well as the brilliant cinematographer Eric Gautier). When Desplechin succeeds, his characters’ emotional experiences gain weight from the film’s intellectual and artistic preoccupations.

Nowhere near the achievement of his masterpiece MY SEX LIFE (OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT) (the original French title quite accurately reversed the parenthetical clauses), Desplechin remains capable of achieving a rare, personal sublimity best exemplified in this film by its epilogue where Amalric takes his ex-wife’s son to a natural history museum in order to give the boy a rambling lesson on the meaning of life.

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