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 #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.

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