Film Is a Battleground #19 (Good Night, and Good Luck, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind)
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (in theaters)
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (on DVD)
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (on DVD)
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (George Clooney, 2005)
*** (A must-see)
Despite being a docudrama in the full, compound sense of the word, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK demonstrates the same ability to transcend a dutiful representation of the facts as well as a love of filmmaking as Clooney’s fantasy-driven, Charlie Kaufman scripted debut, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND. In addition to continuing to demonstrate a fondness for in-camera effects, Clooney makes frequent use of overlapping dialogue, in the manner pioneered by Altman in the ‘70s, to ground the film’s action in the camaraderie of work. Unlike M*A*S*H, however, the tossed-off, dark humor of the comrades in this film is neither anachronistic nor strenuously anarchic. The wit of the chatter always serves to underline the pleasure and reward of working hard with people one enjoys and respects at a task that has value and import. The outstanding ensemble of actors gathered for the film (that the cast members are largely over-qualified for their roles, coupled with their obvious pleasure in their work, provides a meta-textual example of one of the film’s theses): Clooney, Robert Downey, Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Ray Wise, Reed Diamond, Matt Ross, Alex Borstein, Rose Abdoo, and Tate Donovan all ably support David Strathairn’s commanding performance as Edward R. Murrow.
Though much has been made of the clear parallels Clooney and co-writer and producer Grant Heslov draw between the mainstream media’s passivity in the face of McCarthyism and the recent willingness to leave unexamined the various reasons articulated for first invading then occupying Iraq, the unabashed celebration of work is decidedly old-fashioned. Clooney and Heslov manage both to explicate lessons from the past which may be of value today and undermine any self-deluding notions of the exceptionalism of contemporary perfidy. Furthermore, Clooney and Heslov suggest that what we currently lack is not only a journalist of Murrow’s import and celebrity to question authority but also a demagogue as self-destructive as Senator McCarthy. It is not only those on the side of truth who draw lessons from the past.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Tim Burton, 2005)
** (Worth seeing)
Tim Burton is the most personal studio-financed, genre filmmaker to come along since DePalma. Though he lacks DePalma’s genius, Burton never fails to make the design and conception of his films compelling and emotionally immediate through a similar focus on artist surrogates alienated from establishment society.
DePalma places his surrogates in opposition to the corporate, political establishment whereas Burton (even in the weakly allegorical PLANET OF THE APES, the gently satirical MARS ATTACKS!, or when considering Christopher Walken’s evil magnate in BATMAN RETURNS) examines the limiting power of social and cultural pressures toward propriety.
At his best (in BATMAN RETURNS, SLEEPY HOLLOW, ED WOOD, and BIG FISH), a Burton hero, through experience, discovers a moral and intellectually satisfying synthesis between imagination and reason. CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY’s second-handedness (both from the book and the not very good 1971 film adaptation) keeps it from generating the power of Burton’s best films even though it demonstrates his talent for designing films felicitous to both the eye and the mind.
Most interestingly in the context of Burton’s body of work, is the addition of a backstory for Willie Wonka featuring a strict father who denies pleasure (candy) for rational reasons (healthy teeth and gums). This addition confirms Wonka rather than Charlie (whose nascent creativity and fascination with the older Wonka develops into a mentor-student relationship would fit with previous eponymous Burton heroes like Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood) as Burton’s artist surrogate. The backstory also excuses/encourages a highly mannered performance from Johnny Depp.
Depp’s performance has drawn criticism, especially in comparison to Gene Wilder’s performance in the 1971 film, but the criticism primarily derives from considering Depp’s performance in terms of extratextual preconceptions rather than in the context of the film. It’s odd that Burton, who cast the fantastic Freddie Highmore who more than holds his own alongside Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Noah Taylor, and David Kelly, restores the original title while maintaining the earlier adaptation’s focus on Wonka (which made perfect sense considering the talent gulf between Wilder and that film’s Charlie).
Burton’s greatest achievement in this film is to maintain Dahl’s focus on the importance of adult authority figures (usually parents, sometimes parent surrogates) on a child’s development. Many of Dahl’s child protagonists must escape from the limitations adults wish to place on them. Charlie, in contrast, draws strength from a family that remains supportive and loving despite their poverty. Wonka, in the film, runs away from home, rejecting his childhood. He then reinvents himself to erase his past. In Burton, Depp, and screenwriter John August’s conception Wonka is as artificial a creation as his candies and it’s only after he reconciles with his own father that he transforms from a stultifying adult authority figure for Charlie into a mentor and collaborator.
Unfortunately, the film as a whole is a more mixed bag. As impressively staged as each child’s (and by proxy each parent’s) comeuppance and the resultant Oompa Loompa production numbers are, they fail to engage to the degree that Depp and Highmore do.
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (George Clooney, 2002)
*** (A must-see)
Like Julie Taymor’s FRIDA, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND fuels its narrative by dramatizing its subject’s creative imagination. Unlike, Frida Kahlo, Chuck Barros didn’t use his imagination to create great art but it’s because Barris created TV game shows and wrote the bizarre “unauthorized biography” on which Charlie Kaufman bases his screenplay that we don’t hold him or his life in awe as we do Frida Kahlo’s. By chronicling a life far less significant than Frida Kahlo’s, Clooney and Kaufman create a far superior film.
It’s Kahlo’s greatness as an artist and the vitality and importance of her life that limit the audience’s response to Taymor’s film which functions as a celebration of its subject. Despite the obvious technical triumphs through which Taymor celebrates her subject’s life there’s little room for interpretation. Kahlo’s art (and Taymor’s) engages the viewer immediately, but Taymor’s celebration of the art strands the audience in a state of passive admiration.
It’s impossible to admire Barris. The best feeling he could hope to engender from an audience is empathy. Thus, the audience remains alienated from Barris, both the man and the character. Rather than celebrate what he did (which would be groundless), Clooney and Kaufman examine why the adult Barris, the multi-millionaire celebrity he’d always dreamed of becoming, wrote a fantastical mea culpa. Clooney and Kaufman demonstrate the maturity both to treat Barris’s cartoonish fantasies as cartoonish fantasies and to treat his need to create these fantasies seriously. In doing so, they are able to present both the absurd humor of the fantasies and the sorrow from which the fantasies spring. Their greatest triumph is in doing the latter. It’s in Rutger Hauer’s melancholy rumination on why assassins do what they do and the film’s final shot of the real Chuck Barris’s face breaking into a smile that the film fully elevates itself above its source material.
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CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (on DVD)
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (on DVD)
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (George Clooney, 2005)
*** (A must-see)
Despite being a docudrama in the full, compound sense of the word, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK demonstrates the same ability to transcend a dutiful representation of the facts as well as a love of filmmaking as Clooney’s fantasy-driven, Charlie Kaufman scripted debut, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND. In addition to continuing to demonstrate a fondness for in-camera effects, Clooney makes frequent use of overlapping dialogue, in the manner pioneered by Altman in the ‘70s, to ground the film’s action in the camaraderie of work. Unlike M*A*S*H, however, the tossed-off, dark humor of the comrades in this film is neither anachronistic nor strenuously anarchic. The wit of the chatter always serves to underline the pleasure and reward of working hard with people one enjoys and respects at a task that has value and import. The outstanding ensemble of actors gathered for the film (that the cast members are largely over-qualified for their roles, coupled with their obvious pleasure in their work, provides a meta-textual example of one of the film’s theses): Clooney, Robert Downey, Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Ray Wise, Reed Diamond, Matt Ross, Alex Borstein, Rose Abdoo, and Tate Donovan all ably support David Strathairn’s commanding performance as Edward R. Murrow.
Though much has been made of the clear parallels Clooney and co-writer and producer Grant Heslov draw between the mainstream media’s passivity in the face of McCarthyism and the recent willingness to leave unexamined the various reasons articulated for first invading then occupying Iraq, the unabashed celebration of work is decidedly old-fashioned. Clooney and Heslov manage both to explicate lessons from the past which may be of value today and undermine any self-deluding notions of the exceptionalism of contemporary perfidy. Furthermore, Clooney and Heslov suggest that what we currently lack is not only a journalist of Murrow’s import and celebrity to question authority but also a demagogue as self-destructive as Senator McCarthy. It is not only those on the side of truth who draw lessons from the past.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (Tim Burton, 2005)
** (Worth seeing)
Tim Burton is the most personal studio-financed, genre filmmaker to come along since DePalma. Though he lacks DePalma’s genius, Burton never fails to make the design and conception of his films compelling and emotionally immediate through a similar focus on artist surrogates alienated from establishment society.
DePalma places his surrogates in opposition to the corporate, political establishment whereas Burton (even in the weakly allegorical PLANET OF THE APES, the gently satirical MARS ATTACKS!, or when considering Christopher Walken’s evil magnate in BATMAN RETURNS) examines the limiting power of social and cultural pressures toward propriety.
At his best (in BATMAN RETURNS, SLEEPY HOLLOW, ED WOOD, and BIG FISH), a Burton hero, through experience, discovers a moral and intellectually satisfying synthesis between imagination and reason. CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY’s second-handedness (both from the book and the not very good 1971 film adaptation) keeps it from generating the power of Burton’s best films even though it demonstrates his talent for designing films felicitous to both the eye and the mind.
Most interestingly in the context of Burton’s body of work, is the addition of a backstory for Willie Wonka featuring a strict father who denies pleasure (candy) for rational reasons (healthy teeth and gums). This addition confirms Wonka rather than Charlie (whose nascent creativity and fascination with the older Wonka develops into a mentor-student relationship would fit with previous eponymous Burton heroes like Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood) as Burton’s artist surrogate. The backstory also excuses/encourages a highly mannered performance from Johnny Depp.
Depp’s performance has drawn criticism, especially in comparison to Gene Wilder’s performance in the 1971 film, but the criticism primarily derives from considering Depp’s performance in terms of extratextual preconceptions rather than in the context of the film. It’s odd that Burton, who cast the fantastic Freddie Highmore who more than holds his own alongside Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Noah Taylor, and David Kelly, restores the original title while maintaining the earlier adaptation’s focus on Wonka (which made perfect sense considering the talent gulf between Wilder and that film’s Charlie).
Burton’s greatest achievement in this film is to maintain Dahl’s focus on the importance of adult authority figures (usually parents, sometimes parent surrogates) on a child’s development. Many of Dahl’s child protagonists must escape from the limitations adults wish to place on them. Charlie, in contrast, draws strength from a family that remains supportive and loving despite their poverty. Wonka, in the film, runs away from home, rejecting his childhood. He then reinvents himself to erase his past. In Burton, Depp, and screenwriter John August’s conception Wonka is as artificial a creation as his candies and it’s only after he reconciles with his own father that he transforms from a stultifying adult authority figure for Charlie into a mentor and collaborator.
Unfortunately, the film as a whole is a more mixed bag. As impressively staged as each child’s (and by proxy each parent’s) comeuppance and the resultant Oompa Loompa production numbers are, they fail to engage to the degree that Depp and Highmore do.
CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (George Clooney, 2002)
*** (A must-see)
Like Julie Taymor’s FRIDA, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND fuels its narrative by dramatizing its subject’s creative imagination. Unlike, Frida Kahlo, Chuck Barros didn’t use his imagination to create great art but it’s because Barris created TV game shows and wrote the bizarre “unauthorized biography” on which Charlie Kaufman bases his screenplay that we don’t hold him or his life in awe as we do Frida Kahlo’s. By chronicling a life far less significant than Frida Kahlo’s, Clooney and Kaufman create a far superior film.
It’s Kahlo’s greatness as an artist and the vitality and importance of her life that limit the audience’s response to Taymor’s film which functions as a celebration of its subject. Despite the obvious technical triumphs through which Taymor celebrates her subject’s life there’s little room for interpretation. Kahlo’s art (and Taymor’s) engages the viewer immediately, but Taymor’s celebration of the art strands the audience in a state of passive admiration.
It’s impossible to admire Barris. The best feeling he could hope to engender from an audience is empathy. Thus, the audience remains alienated from Barris, both the man and the character. Rather than celebrate what he did (which would be groundless), Clooney and Kaufman examine why the adult Barris, the multi-millionaire celebrity he’d always dreamed of becoming, wrote a fantastical mea culpa. Clooney and Kaufman demonstrate the maturity both to treat Barris’s cartoonish fantasies as cartoonish fantasies and to treat his need to create these fantasies seriously. In doing so, they are able to present both the absurd humor of the fantasies and the sorrow from which the fantasies spring. Their greatest triumph is in doing the latter. It’s in Rutger Hauer’s melancholy rumination on why assassins do what they do and the film’s final shot of the real Chuck Barris’s face breaking into a smile that the film fully elevates itself above its source material.
Labels: charlie and the chocolate factory, charlie kaufman, confessions of a dangerous mind, frida, george clooney, good night and good luck, johnny depp, tim burton
Click here to read the full post with comments
posted by Bret LaGree at 13:36
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