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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Film Is a Battleground #3 (Son Frere, Starsky and Hutch, Buffalo Soldiers)

originally published August 6, 2004

SON FRERE (on DVD)
STARSKY AND HUTCH (on DVD)
BUFFALO SOLDIERS (on DVD and cable)

SON FRERE (Patrice Chereau, 2004)
**** (Masterpiece)

Following the dark sprawl of THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN, Patrice Chereau attempted to make a similarly penetrating film on a smaller scale. The resultant effort, INTIMACY, wasn’t a bad film. It featured brave performances by Mark Rylance, Kerry Fox, and Timothy Spall and, because it was in English and dealt with heterosexual relationships, it got shown in more theaters than any of Chereau’s films, save QUEEN MARGOT.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting the largest possible audience to see your film as long as that desire doesn’t dictate what film you make. Despite my auteurist tendencies, I understand the amount of compromise (with producers, cast, and crew) inherent in so collaborative an art form. I don’t wish to speculate as to Chereau’s motives for making INTIMACY. He has no reason to answer to me. However, Chereau has made four films in the last ten years. Two of those films, the royal period piece QUEEN MARGOT and the explicitly heterosexual INTIMACY have received theatrical distribution and home video promotion. The other two films, THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN and SON FRERE, were released to one screen combined, and, though they are available on DVD, have not been promoted in such a way that one might stumble upon them. Which is a serious shame as they are two of the best films made anywhere in the world in the last ten years.

SON FRERE concerns two brothers, one of whom is dying. Chereau shows the events of their re-connection, not necessarily their reconciliation, achronologically. The sequence of events, skipping back and forth over the course of a few months, flows emotionally from peak to valley. Witnessing the moments of bickering, impatience, and half-remembered slights is never jarring or enervating as in 21 GRAMS. Chereau jumbles the chronology to prevent the story’s melodramatic elements from dominating the proceedings. He’s not interested in making a weepie, though he may make the viewer weep. He withholds moments and information (the dying brother’s disease is never named) not as sleight-of-hand but as part of an insistence that both his characters and his audience understand that death is a universal element of humanity. Death and disease impacts all lives: gay brother, straight brother, mother, father, doctor, nurses, and lovers both male and female. To limit the exploration of death to this man or these causes would drain the film of its power.

It’s suggested that the brothers’ denial of the reality of death has played a key role in their dislocation from their family, colleagues, and lovers and that, by accepting the fixed parameters of life they create first a filial bond based on this understanding, which grows to envelope those they earlier only purported to love. This grace-like quality sneaks up on the viewer, only revealing itself when uninvolved outsiders ask questions regarding both brothers’ behavior at the time of one’s death.

Chereau and his DP Eric Gautier made wonderful use of the dark, wet settings and endless supply of key characters in THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN. The shots in SON FRERE set mostly in light, sterile places are more specific, yet the frame remains open and accommodating to the supporting characters that fill out and enrich the brothers’ world. This visual style, specific, yet open suggests Minelli’s mise-en-scene re-imagined in the modern terms of zoom lenses and a hand-held camera.

SON FRERE provides an antidote for the disappointment of HBO’s production of ANGELS IN AMERICA. Well acted though it was, the film required a greater talent than Mike Nichols to complete the transition from both stage to screen and from the last decade of the 20th Century to first decade of the 21st Century. ANGELS seemed simultaneously timeless and dated. This lack of specificity limited its scope and dampened its emotional impact. SON FRERE, despite its short running time and small cast of characters, offers the bracing immediacy of the original, stage version of ANGELS IN AMERICA. It makes a specific, queer story universal.

STARSKY AND HUTCH (Todd Phillips, 2004)
* (Has redeeming facet)

Though it never scales the comedic heights of OLD SCHOOL’s best moments, STARSKY AND HUTCH does a better job of integrating its comic set pieces within a structured plot. The cast’s relaxed performances keep the film buoyed despite this excess of professionalism.

OLD SCHOOL was a mess, but it was really funny. STARKSY AND HUTCH suffers from being too faithful to its source material. Its plot could be lifted directly from an old episode. I don’t think many people watched the TV show for its story. Its appeal rested almost entirely on violence and banter. There’s certainly plenty of the later between Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller and to a lesser extent between villain Vince Vaughn and his sidekick, Jason Bateman.

Like THE BIG BOUNCE, George Armitage’s Elmore Leonard adaptation which also starred Owen Wilson, STARKSY AND HUTCH creates the atmosphere of a cool, tossed-off film but fails to deliver the goods. It’s just diverting enough to make one disappointed that it isn’t very good.

BUFFALO SOLDIERS (Gregor Jordan, 2003)
0 stars (No redeeming facet)

Its release delayed for almost two years as the U.S. Army resumed operations as an active military force, BUFFALO SOLDIERS, is just now making it to pay cable. The film proves not be a victim of corporate timidity but rather a cynical, small-minded film that flatters itself as a military satire. Made up entirely of bits lifted from CATCH-22, M*A*S*H, and STRIPES, the film offers little humor and no insight into military life. It denies even its putative heroes any humanity. Dullards and simpletons are exploited and manipulated by selfish individualists. It’s the worldview of an incurious teenager who mistakes his narcissism for wisdom. At least the talented cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Anna Paquin, Ed Harris, and Scott Glenn) escapes with their dignity intact.

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