Author Archives: 4 Star Films

Unknown's avatar

About 4 Star Films

I am a film critic and historian preserving a love of good movies. Check out my blog, 4 Star Films, and follow me on Twitter @FourStarFilmFan or Letterboxd. Thank you for reading!

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

Posted on by
1

From watching one of director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s interviews, it’s made clear he started Evil Does Not Exist by using the music of Eiko Ishibashi as inspiration. There’s a swelling breadth to it augmenting everything it touches. At times doleful and then evolving into a plinking intensity looking for release.

It plays against a backdrop of austere forests, trickling streams, and fresh dustings of snow outside the prying eyes of the Tokyo metropolis. The score becomes a viable metaphor for the movie itself.

The film’s relationship with its characters is also distinct. There’s something Bressonian about it. Because the famed French director famously envisioned his actors as models and often cast non-professionals. He wasn’t looking for performances in the conventional sense.

I don’t know Hamaguchi’s filmography all that well, but it doesn’t feel like he has a stock company. Rather he likes to use different actors for what they offer in each distinct context. We spend the opening minutes watching this man named Takumi (crew member Hitoshi Omika) exist and act, though not in the way we normally think of it in film.

It is slow cinema in the sense that we watch him in the paces of his life from collecting stream water to chopping wood. This tells us more about him than any amount of dialogue might, but it also signals to us what kind of movie we’re in for.

Hamaguchi is prepared to steady your heart rate, and I could use much more of this amid the daily grind. However, it is a tightrope because it’s so easy to lose your audience as they grow potentially disillusioned by the pacing and elongated editing schemes. Seeing as Drive My Car was over 3 hours and Happy Hour over 5 hours, there’s something about Evil Does Not Exist that feels, if not economical, at least more contained.

Takumi’s relationship with his quizzical daughter is rather reminiscent of Leave No Trace (2018). So much of their affection and relationship is facilitated through their shared love of nature with the father passing down his knowledge to his girl.

The movie’s dramatic conflict comes with an impending land development. A Tokyo-based talent agency has plans to install a Glamping site, which ostensibly is little more than a ploy to get a coveted tax subsidy.

Like any conscientious Japanese company, they do their due diligence by holding an open forum for the locals to voice their concerns. The subsequent extended community scene is trademark Hamaguchi with a sprawling dialogue exchange. While it’s not a Park and Rec episode, maybe it’s the Japanese alternative.

There’s something tight-knit about this small community rubbing up against the wary encroachment of the Tokyo firm. Their concerns are well-founded and measured. They see through everything with a clarity that no formal Japanese double-speak can totally obfuscate.

Their opposition, if you will, are the archetypes of a veteran salaryman and his deferential associate who hasn’t quite detached from her empathy. The audience I sat with was mostly quiet if attentive, but there was more than one occasion I found myself chuckling to myself, either from a line of Japanese dialogue or an interaction.

I found this section of the movie especially rich with behavioral humor. There’s a youthful rebel in baggy pants who tramples over the typical decorum and has to be held back. The ritualistic bowing is met with contempt and even Takumi is brusque. They want to try to recruit him as an advisor for their glamping endeavor. He has no business card to give them as is customary, nor does he want their token gifts or pleasantries.

These might be subtle, but it’s a pleasure to watch how these locals eschew what feels like traditional norms. Because so much of Japanese life feels like a tug of war between exterior and interior identity. We say don’t judge a book by its cover and here it holds true on more than one occasion. Many of these characters seem perceptive and ultimately nuanced.

One of the other surprises is how Hamaguchi turns the “enemy” into real people over an extended car ride back to the countryside. They know they’re not dealing with idiots, but their superior encourages them to return and ensure they stay on schedule. It feels like an untenable mission. Having seen both sides, we feel for them. Their hearts aren’t in it.

They trade their hopes, aspirations, and dating prospects in a way that you rarely see in Japanese work culture without alcohol as a social lubricant. Despite the modest scope, I’m not sure if others are aware of how radical this feels.

Takumi takes his guests out into the natural world and allows them to walk alongside him in his daily tasks. Later that same evening his daughter disappears and darkness is closing in. There’s something dismal and inevitable about it as the entire population mobilizes to try and find her.

Without drawing it out too much, they do discover the girl as well as a fawn and doe who feel like semiotic creatures. It’s no coincidence there was a movie called The Deer Hunter. He lives on the fringes of the frame here with his bullets flying in a game of offscreen roulette.

The willfully oblique ending is inexplicable, but I could not look away. You can take it one of two ways: either with mystified displeasure or a contentment in not understanding everything. I fit in the latter category. It was like staring at a mesmerizing spell.

Somehow it feels like a pleasure and a privilege to get these moments in time slowed down for us — sequences that are purposefully meditative. I couldn’t help thinking how much of a backward society we live in that it takes a screen in the dark projecting images in front of us to draw a person out of the hubbub and back into nature. Are we so removed that moving pictures are one of the last vestiges of the natural world in the urban jungle? Because it’s not the real thing.

I would find it instructive for the director to expound on his themes at length — that’s what I want — and yet the movie leaves the results up to us. Still, if nothing else, Hamaguchi gives us a reminder of our imperative ties to the natural world lest we forget where we originate. As much as we try, life cannot always be domesticated comfort. There’s wild beauty out there we would do well to remember.

I think we share an appreciation of the natural world. Maybe it’s semantics or a mere positive affirmation, but if evil does not exist, we could also conjecture, like The Deer Hunter, that interpersonal discord, war, and death are natural in a chaotic world. 

However, I would not say that humans nor beasts are inherently good. For the time being, we live in a broken, fallen world and this is just a reality. Our world is full of entropy, but this is not meant to be our resting state.

It’s all the more reason to do our utmost to look after our environments, be kind to our neighbors, and work toward human flourishing. Of course, that’s easier said than done, but like Thomas Aquinas posited I would like to believe that good can exist even without evil. We’re not there yet, but I’m still hopeful.

3.5/5 Stars

Wildcat (2024)

Posted on by
Reply

A version of this article was published in Film Inquiry.

“I am always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it is very shocking to the system.” – Flannery O’Connor

As someone fascinated by story structure the biopic form is often a tough nut to crack. Cradle-to-grave entries in covering the breadth of a life, can either feel like rushed simulacrums or stodgy overlong hagiographies nailed to the floor.

The very best movies of this ilk inevitably evoke the spirit of their protagonist with the very sinews and bones of their structure. Hence a movie on Mishima that’s wild with heavily striking mise en scene. A Brian Wilson story that is empathetic, hallucinatory, and musical to the nth degree.

Director Ethan Hawke and his co-writer Shelby Gaines have found their own way to do service to famed southern Catholic author Flannery O’Connor. Because her life was famously banal — she lived in her Georgia town with her mother writing before her death at 39 — they tackle her formative years through the vivid imagination of her own literary works.

It’s important to note while this movie is full of fanciful and often humorous and grotesque portraits of humanity, it never feels like the escapism the author abhorred (One can imagine she would have choice words for a hothouse melodrama abruptly featured at the outset). O’Connor always was concerned with depicting the life she knew by unorthodox and often startling means. There was nothing conventional about it.

A Good Man is Hard to Find is case and point, one of her startling works where a self-righteous old hag ends up being shot to death by a wanted fugitive and in this precise moment she becomes a gracious person for the first time in her life. In the film when the gun shot goes off, we watch a young O’Connor (played by the director’s daughter Maya Hawke) go flailing backward from behind her typewriter. She feels her stories so profusely.

We watch her life during her early years as a young woman. There are stints at the illustrious Iowa Writer’s Workshop under the tutelage of Cal Lowell (Philip Ettinger). She pays a visit to a publisher who tries to tactfully give her feedback on her first novel Wise Blood. She’s quick to retort that she’s “amenable” to criticism but only if it does not attempt to neutralize her artistic vision.

There are segments of her returning to live with her mother Regina (Laura Linney) in a society where people want her to be the next Margaret Mitchell, penning the next Southern nostalgia lost cause classic like Gone With The Wind. Meanwhile, Flannery seems antithetical to this entire idea.

It’s evident she is a singular mind who will not settle when it comes to her writing. She tells the truth as spiny and ugly as it might be. This is my own experience with her work. I rarely enjoy it. I feel scandalized and assailed by it at every turn.

It’s difficult going and then she turns a story around and uses her characters and the bizarre scenarios to ambush me. Ironically, the saving grace of her stories are how they all revolve around the scandal of grace — our need to recognize and accept it in our own lives.

The threads of the movie’s narrative are tied together with earnest excerpts from her prayer journal and many of her most notable short stories. One that was my introduction to Flannery was “Revelation” where a self-righteous southern woman gets tackled in a waiting room by an indignant girl named Mary Grace. This comes only after a dream where Jesus comes to her and says she can only enter heaven as a negro or white trash. Perish the thought…

The other is “Parker’s Back” where a profligate covered in tattoos marries a devout woman and gets the image of Christ tattooed on his back to please only for his wife to beat him. He’s tossed out of the house, bloody and bruised, brought to the lowest point imaginable. Is this idolatry or as we watch the picture of Christ being bloodied in front of us, what are we to do with it exactly? It feels uncanny and uncomfortable, a perfect evocation of O’Connor’s sensibilities.

Delving into their conversations, it’s apparent Maya and Ethan Hawke have an abiding appreciation for this woman and her writing. There would be no other reason to make a movie like this with so much tender loving care. And so any mild criticism feels like putting kindred spirits under the chopping block. It need not be so. They feel like dear friends.

John Huston’s adaptation of Wise Blood has an intuitive handle on the Southern milieu and the absurd humor found in O’Connor’s work. She’s darkly funny. It seems to thrive while still getting to the perplexing themes at the core of a story that feels scandalizing as she tears through the Southern mentality with her incisive quill.

What Wildcat has is something so often absent from both film and art these days. It’s not squeamish about the tough conversations nor does it skirt over the most prickly issues, not only of America’s legacy but the very essence of the human experience.

There’s a weight and a gravity to it that’s felt in almost every frame. The only reprieves come from O’Connor’s own wit. This is all in service to its subject because Flannery was a young woman sincerely struggling to balance her aspirations to be a great writer and a devout person of faith in communion with God.

So often we are told these creatives and religious life are mutually exclusive. Which of course feels preposterous to O’Connor in the face of her Creator-God. It’s easy to be moved when she sits among her cohort at the writer’s workshop in Iowa — a midwestern institution that nevertheless maintains a reputation for the literati — and she says religion is not an electric blanket; it’s the cross.

It’s so difficult to take stories that live in our mind’s eye and bring them to the screen because then they are tangible and concrete. Endless possibilities of imagination are distilled down to distinct creative choices. Hawke’s film tailors its palette to a tempest-like existence that roils O’Connor’s soul as she seems to battle for life and death with her typewriter as her only weapon.

Is this a bit much? Perhaps and yet anyone who does write and cares about art or has suffered and struggled, recognizes that it doesn’t feel like hyperbole. It feels real and affecting — like something we understand intimately. In O’Connor, we see reflections of our own struggles in our creative endeavors.

Because we believe our words mean something and that life matters and questions of death and religion are not ancillary topics for dinner parties. They are the crux of our entire existence.

Cal, Flannery’s pen pal and hinted love interest, gives her Thomas Merton, and in this reference and watching her tumultuous struggle depicted on film, it’s difficult not to draw lines between Hawke’s performance and her father’s protagonist in First Reformed (Ettinger who plays Cal also had a crucial role in that film).

For that matter, one of the other integral scenes involves a priest played by Liam Neeson. It feels almost like a reprieve after his apostasy in Silence. He pays Flannery a visit as she’s bedridden, stricken with the lupus that killed her father, and currently unable to write.

Here he enters in to provide Flannery comfort and in all her internal struggles remind her of grace and grace abundantly — something given to her through the death and resurrection of the Jesus they believe in. There is immense power in this scene, even in its simplicity.

Because the storm outside her bedroom widow or even the lupus that’s ravaging her body almost feel like outward manifestations of the real struggle going on. Why does hardship often make us more aware of grace and our need for it in our lives whether we want to accept it or not. Pain is not easy. Happy, warm, affable stories are a lot more palatable.

O’Connor would never dare to be so disingenuous about her faith or her storytelling. And judging from her life and premature death, she was more than acquainted with troubles. She had an intimate relationship with them. Certainly this was not the life she had envisioned for herself.

Still, she ran the race of life even if it was on crutches. Perhaps not dissimilar to that hapless chicken walking backward. What’s more, she blessed all of us with her stories — signposts to help us along our own paths — shocking us back to reality.

I couldn’t get the image out of my head — first as Flannery picks up her new peacock from the train station and then the remarkable moment where its tail feathers fan out behind her in a glorious display. If other people saw her as that measly chicken, in the eyes of her Creator she really was that glorious peacock. What a gift it is.

4/5 Stars

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Posted on by
Reply

A version of this article was published in Film Inquiry. 

If Spider-Man was the template for what the modern superhero movie would become, its sequel feels like the standard bearer all future successors were asked to eclipse. I had never seen the movie before as I was young during its initial run, but the aura of Spider-Man was always around.

Sitting in a packed theater there was a sense of buzzing anticipation when the opening credits rolled, backed by Danny Elfman’s almost otherworldly score that hints at more eccentric inclinations. The Marvel monolith had yet to be fully consolidated and turned into a factory. For the time being, it feels like director Sam Raimi had free reign for fun.

Because we already have some context for the character carrying over from the first movie, the film’s instincts are correct in reintroducing us to Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) with an opening gambit laced with levity.

We watch him racing to keep his job as a pizza delivery boy only to switch into the spider suit to beat mid-day traffic. There’s an extended bit with a closet full of mops that had the audience in stiches as he drops off the order sheepishly with the front desk.

I’m so oblivious but it does seem like Tobey Maguire has become a walking meme and a lasting internet celebrity based mostly on his Spider-Man persona. There’s something about his delivery that’s so awkward — maybe something about his quivering upper lip — or how he almost lisps out his lines of dialogue. But it’s also endearing.

And for every time the audience laughed, it was never out and out derision. They love this guy. He is their hero and they hold him aloft so when he goes slinging webs and rises again across the skyline, people ring out in audible cheers.

The same goes with the dialogue. Some of it might be inadvertently funny and yet so much of it is in on the joke. Raimi is wonderful in allowing for these incubated moments of a visual gag or an insert with a cameo part that has a reaction or a bit that’s good for a laugh. It can be about a stolen pizza in the opening minutes or even a terribly ordinary Peter stumbling away from a crash scene after he can’t catch his fall and proceeds to set off a car alarm.

This hints at part of the dramatic question at the center of this film. What makes Spider-Man mythology so popular is the nature of his superherodom as initially conceived by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

His story arc is grounded in relationships on all sides however rudimentary they might be. An aunt and uncle, his crush, and the alienation that forms between he and his best friend. What’s more, Peter is faced with the universal conundrum of what he wants versus what is sacrificial in the name of his city. With great power, comes great responsibility. But the words get muddier when it comes to specifics.

And the villainy is equally relatable. Albert Molina is sympathetic but also carries a gravitas with his physique and stage presence that wears the role of Dr. Octavius well. He becomes first a mentor and then an adversary for Peter — a perfect foil for what he represents.

His life’s work — creating a fusion power source for Oscorps — gets out of control during a public showcase.  In the aftermath, his mental faculties get overridden by his new mechanical arms driven by AI. He knows not what he does and becomes a public menace who wants to rebuild his reputation, and avenge the loss of his beloved wife.

Due to the strains of his Spider-Man mantle, Peter’s grades are suffering in college and he’s absent in the lives of the people he cares about most. Aunt May is about to go through an eviction and MJ’s been making a name for herself as a theater actress and model. She feels like Peter has rebuffed her and it hurts.

Peter decides to relinquish his Spider-Man suit because he doesn’t want to keep secrets from anyone; he doesn’t want to break his promises anymore. He steps back into he shadows and lives a normal life even as the crime rate begins to rise in the city

There is the real sense that there is no longer a protective hedge against crime and other antagonistic forces. He must make a decision, and at the same time his powers begin to atrophy for inexplicable reasons.

I never thought I’d get T.S. Eliot or Joel McHale in this movie, but sure enough both are featured. Peter pulls out Eliot in a NYC laundromat as he tries to wash his Spidey suit and find new ways to woo MJ. Girls supposedly dig poetry. It feels like a small Easter egg that one of my favorite high school bands had a song featured on the U.K. soundtrack inspired by Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.”

Meanwhile, McHale shows up as a teller in the bank who sheepishly tells Aunt May she’s not eligible for a loan. It’s one of any number of injustices that make Peter feel powerless to help the ones he loves.

From a dramatic standpoint, the gala where he’s called upon to take pictures feels like the nadir of his story so far. An inebriated (James Franco) smacks him around in a very public setting, and then Peter learns MJ is getting married to someone else; she’s not waiting on him any longer.

These are only the personal stakes, but so many subsequent superheroes have lost this reality and gotten muddled because they dealt in expositions and nebulous things that we have little to no concern for. Here it’s simple yet effective.

The action is wonderful and the visual representation of Doc Ock with his mechanical arms has a real menace that rarely takes a false step in disrupting our suspension of disbelief. In fact, the whole film holds ups though there are a few obligatory final shots that feel like gratuitous eye candy

Aside from this, each confrontation between Peter and Octavius plays like an extraordinary piece of narrative drama that goes beyond surface level pyrotechnics. It’s meant for Saturday matinees as they duel it out inside the bank, scaling sides of buildings with Aunt May in the balance, or even battling over a railcar in a chase that evokes The French Connection while still applying a Spidey twist.

What a wonderful and mysterious thing is it for Spider-Man to lose his mask, and far from castigating him or just wanting a piece of his celebrity, the people he has just saved acknowledge his youth, and vow to keep his secret. There is a neighborliness and a desire for the communal good that feels like wind under our sails.

Because while other installments about superheroes explore characters’ isolation, anonymity, and identity as vigilantes, there is a sense that this Peter Parker does not have to worry. These people are protective of him, grateful for what he has done, and he deserves their care. He deserves grace. After all, he’s only a teenager.

What’s more he has a girl who will stick by him as he looks after the city. There is a precise moment of truth where Peter is able to allow his girl know his true, full self. It’s a supreme gift for the character.

Looking back now 20 years on, Spider-Man 2 is an early 21st century depiction about the dangers of AI, but at its core it’s about the choice. Every great hero must decide what to do in the name of self-satisfaction or personal sacrifice.

The movie would also maintain the more dubious tradition of franchises outstaying their welcome. I’ve been told Spider-Man 3 jumped the shark, and yet I imagine even now there is a nostalgic patina hanging over this trilogy.

Spider Man 2 is a wonderful delight, and it’s a pleasure to see it with an audience who care about the movie so profoundly. It means something to them even after all these years. They may be older, but they come to this movie with the same reservoir’s of affection. It’s the effulgent joy of any little kid who’s ever had dreams of being a superhero.

I’ve never been into ardent superhero fandom, but now finally getting around to Spider-Man 2 after the fact gives me a newfound appreciation for my peers. I see the hype. I’m still hoping the Marvel fad has finally begun to abate for more eclectic forms of entertainment, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate where these films came from.

4/5 Stars

Spider-Man (2002)

Posted on by
Reply

The modern superhero genre as we know it began with Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) starring Christopher Reeve. Then, there were subsequent releases like Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) with Michael Keaton or even Wesley Snipes’s Blade (1998). Also, the first X-Men in 2000 has seen many subsequent additions throughout the 21st century.

I’m no superhero cinema historian so there is plenty of room to quibble, but Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man feels like a portent of what was to come for a whole generation of superhero movies from Marvel and DC that have dominated the cineplexes since.

What I appreciate about the movie is how it’s not just a superhero movie, but a comic book movie. I mean this by how it conceives of itself. We have drama, but it’s not overly dark and oppressive; there’s room for humor and an acknowledgement that this is meant to be light and a genuine good time.

There’s an energy reminiscent of the teen movies of the 90s-2000s like Can’t Hardly Wait or She’s All That. Peter Parker’s in high school. He’s a bit of a dweeb with his nerd glasses and a nebbish persona, harboring a crush on Mary Jane Watson (red-headed Kirsten Dunst), the literal girl-next-door who doesn’t even know he exists.

Whatever people’s opinions of Tobey Maguire, I think all the ardent faithful hold him close to their hearts because of what he represents at the center of this film. He’s really the first Spider-Man in the modern era in a franchise that has now spawned so many progeny. And perhaps this is a gross generalization of the audience, but those who rally around him probably see Peter Parker as one of their own. They see themselves in him. Even if Tobey was a little old be playing a high schooler. 

The movie willfully pulls out all these dorky bits of contrivance: Peter living next to MJ, though they’ve never seemed to talk before. Likewise, his best friend (a brooding James Franco) just happens to be the son of the man who effectively becomes Peter’s arch nemesis. But we forgive these things because aside from being bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter feels like a grounded human being in all other departments.

Willem Dafoe’s turn as The Green Goblin has a Gollumesque duality to it. It escapes me which film came first, but we see both his sympathetic father figure and the cunning conscience that comes alive in him as he hopes to make Oscorps into a success. He wants to prove all the corporate suits and military officials wrong. Even 20 years on, Dafoe’s always the kind of actor who gives the material its due and people admire and respect him for it. There’s no distinction between high and low art, whatever that even means. 

Meanwhile, J.K. Simmons dives into the cartoonish nature of newspaperman J. Jonah Jameson without any hesitancy whatsoever. From his hair to his over-the-top demeanor and constant vilification of Spider-Man, he’s good for a few laughs.

But we want this broader larger-than-life quality because it fits with a world that in some ways mimics ours. Simultaneously, it’s meant to be fanciful and push us into a narrative of heightened imagination, romance, heroes, and villains.

What’s most refreshing about the film is how the drama has not yet been stricken with bathos — something that seems so en vogue now. It’s as if contemporary films need everyone to know they’re in on the joke and having a sardonic laugh at the expense of the stories and tropes themselves. We must undercut any genuine moment for fear of something being too soppy.

In Spider-Man the moments of sincerity are still there. The most evident are carried by Cliff Robertson, a revered stage actor and personality from the bygone era of Classic Hollywood. He utters the famed line “With great power comes great responsibility.” Sure we’ve heard these words so many times, they can feel like a cliché, but as he sits across from Tobey Maguire, the candor and simpatico between them is unmistakable.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the special effects of the film; they’re not always pristine and still they never pull us out of the movie completely. Raimi does a wonderful job giving us at least a few images to grab hold of. The most telling has to be the upside-down kiss between Spider-Man and MJ.

It’s the kind of visual iconography that by now feels emblematic of the film itself even as it gave a fresh face to movie romance. The key is how all involved do not scorn the moment; they still believe in the magic of the movies.

From the running time to the scope of the story, it feels almost quaint watching Spider-Man, and while there were no doubt sequels in the pipeline, it feels like it can function as a standalone movie. There’s not a lot of added dross either, but we still get a gripping story to take in and enjoy.

My final thought is only this. Principal photography for the film officially began in January 2001, and 9/11 not only changed New York’s skyline over the course of filming, it changed the film. But Spider-Man feels like one of those startling post-9/11 films. 

We often think of stories where the material is inexplicably tied to those horrible events that stay with anyone who ever lived through them. However, I can’t help seeing movies like Spider-Man or even Elf, from the following year, in light of those events. Because their themes and heart unwittingly gave the audience laughter, thrills, and soaring spectacle in the face of terror.

These are not spoken sentiments, and yet they are baked into the very fabric of what these films are. They are wish-fulfillment and fantastical fairy tales in a world that often feels so harsh and foreboding. That’s why we still flock to stories like these even today. That’s part of why people still turn out to see Spider-Man. We like to look for the heroes.

4/5 Stars

La Piscine (1969): Alain Delon & Romy Schneider

Posted on by
Reply

On a superficial even subliminal level, La Piscine (The Swimming Pool in English) shares some nominal similarities with The Swimmer and The Graduate. Certainly, drawing the connections isn’t too difficult.

It’s a mood and a feeling as much as it is subject matter. We open on a rural villa in the French countryside with a veranda and a swimming pool. Perfect for lounging. There we find France’s great Adonis-turned-action hero Alain Delon.

He already gave his audience a taste in glimmering fare like Purple Noon, but he’s the personification of disaffected cool, and it’s little different in Jacques Deray’s film.

What’s developed in the first idle moments of the movie is this splendorous sun-soaked aesthetic. It’s akin to Benjamin Braddock floating in his parent’s pool or Burt Lancaster in his short cutoffs journeying from pool to pool in East Coast WASP country.

Jean-Paul (Delon) is at the tranquil getaway with his current lover Marianne (Romy Schneider), and it’s apparent they are in the frisky honeymoon stage full of delirium and amour. Viewed from the outside, the two stars feel like a European “It” couple though they hadn’t been officially together since the beginning of the decade.

Their auras are too big not to still associate their scintillating stardom. The movie relies on it heavily, and it’s quite effective. Because they are effective as the definition of intercontinental movie stars. You’d be hard-pressed to find two more photogenic people than Delon and Schneider.

Within the film, there’s no sense of how they came to own this property, but it’s a non-factor in the story. We come to accept their idleness, the fact that their housekeeper brings them breakfast on trays, and they have the complete freedom of the place be it sleeping in, languishing in the noonday sun, and really doing whatever they please. It’s a state of mind for the movie.

In such a space it becomes a question of what can happen and what will upend and break through the reverie. Our first signs of life come in the form of an old friend named Harry (Maurice Ronet) who makes an auspicious entrance.

He’s a bit of a ne’er-do-well, likable, but roguish, and difficult to pin down. He hardly seems the domestic type, and there’s a sense that he’s always on the run, chasing after the next adventure and fling.  Maintaining his personal freedom at whatever the cost. What’s the most surprising is he’s brought his aloof teenage daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin) along.

As someone always trying to hang onto the capriciousness of youth, he’s not the kind of person you expect to have a child; there’s some mention of her mother being a British girl he had relations with, but he’s not so much a parental influence as he is a companion. Mostly he just seems proud that she’s beautiful, and it’s fun to brag to his friends about her.

Critical to the film, he also had a past relationship with Marianne. How could he not, but then again, that was many years ago, and she’s now in love with Jean-Paul. It doesn’t take radar to recognize what might conceivably happen since it’s the ’60s and beautiful people are involved. It’s no coincidence Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice came out the same year.

True to form, Harry is the life of the party, and he always races off in his Maserati and comes back whenever he pleases; one night he comes with a gang of young bohemians in tow. He terms them his “bosom buddies,” and they dance the night away.

It becomes a point of friction watching who everyone spends most of the night with.  We see potential trouble from a mile away as they link up and an inkling of jealousy begins to seethe under the surface.

What a strange little family they make. One evening they sit down for a dinner of Chinese food of all things. Marianne and Harry went to town together — a perfectly romantic getaway — and Jean-Paul took Pen away to the sea.

Whether or not it’s an act of retaliation or not, it’s easy to perceive it as such. They sit around working their chopsticks, fidgeting, and trading glances. If the movie is about something it would be this. The elephant in the room as it were.

However, there is a lack of an interior when you break the film open and that’s part of what puts it below its contemporaries, at least in my estimation. There are gorgeous exteriors with gorgeous people, fabulous sartorial style, and not much else.

It’s a testament to the performers and their innate charisma because they make it compelling. But it lacks the kind of commentary or wit of The Graduate or even the fabular qualities of The Swimmer.

The final act of La Piscine takes it into the territory of a true thriller. For the first time, something happens that might have its place in a Henri-Georges Clouzot picture or even Jean-Pierre Melville. Until this dramatic inflection point, it’s a work of latent psychology and desire. I’m not sure if the shift is warranted or not.

However, there is something else worth noting. As of 2024, Alain Delon was still with us, but all his primary scene partners are all gone. Birkin died most recently in 2023, and both his friends, Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet, were lost to us too soon.

This realization adds a different kind of knowing austerity to the proceedings, though it’s hardly required. Even without this insider information, we leave the film mostly empty, and it’s difficult to know whether this is a statement or merely a formalistic reality.

3.5/5 Stars

Note: This review was written before Alain Delon’s passing on August 18, 2024. 

Three O’Clock High (1987)

Posted on by
Reply

The introduction of the main character Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko ) feels fairly standard and in line with Ferris Bueller, Say Anything, or any of its brethren from the ’80s. Late for school. Dirty shirts strewn about. Simultaneously zapping pop tarts and wet clothes in the microwave. Flat tires and your kid sister hands you a diet Coke to gargle the toothpaste you just finished brushing with. It’s quirky enough to give us some sense of who we’ll be following for the next hour and a half without straying too far from genre convention.

Still, all of this handy exposition feels a bit like a misdirect or at least suggests up-and-coming director Phil Joanou started out with one movie in mind and came up with something else along the way. More on that momentarily.

Jerry is a likable, if innocuous, dweeb we can probably imprint ourselves on and his high school, located in Odgen, Utah definitely doesn’t have the Hollywood glam. It lends itself to a different kind of visual milieu we can appreciate. All the adults in the movie for the most part are only totems to hang necessary impressions and sentiments on.

Jefferey Tambor is the closest to an actual character as a teacher who entrusts Jerry to run the student store and marvels at what a profitable business he’s managed. Otherwise, most of the authority figures and even government agents (how they always have time for teenagers is beyond me) feel like caricatures without too much premeditation.

Despite some promising introductions, most of the friends and female characters feel fairly empty no fault of their own. Jerry’s sister Brei has a chatty wit about her but essentially disappears from the movie popping up only when required.

There’s his thoughtful if slightly ethereal girlfriend (Annie Ryan) whose eyes grow luminous as she speaks candidly about spirit animals and her spirit “guide” Ethan. Don’t ask me to explain. And because Franny’s the brunette (yes, her name’s Franny), there’s also the untouchable blonde goddess Karen (Liza Morrow) who exists as a figment rather than a full-bodied character. She’s always ready to induce traffic accidents and seismic heart palpitations in our fearless hero.

Although it is Jerry’s story, it almost feels like it’s too much about Jerry and his inner psychology. He’s not the most intriguing part of the picture though we do need him as a conduit. Perhaps more could have been built out of his relationship and even his alienation from others. But it’s also necessary to take a moment to consider the movie’s tone and inspiration.

I’m not sure how to parse the fact from the fiction (this oral history is the best resource available) but supposedly this is one of the films Steven Spielberg requested to have his name taken off as an executive producer. It probably comes down to how dark it becomes though even this might lack the ring of truth.

Although it’s easy to label Three O’Clock High as a high school rendition of High Noon, it actually stands more in line with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours from a couple years prior. Given this comparison, Spielberg’s purported surprise would make more sense because this premise has all the potential hallmarks of a traditional ’80s teen movie.

Like its predecessor, I find it drags in the middle using time a bit like After Hours to give in to its most absurd and surrealist tendencies as Jerry’s world dissolves and slowly closes in around him.

One could easily say Soho in the prior film has been distilled down to the school corridors and classrooms Jerry is tied to as he sweats the hours ’til his inevitable annihilation. It does make it feel like Gary Cooper’s Will Kane when evoking the limiting factor of ticking clocks.

However, a venture to the principal’s office features the décor and camera angles fit for The Bates Motel. Later Jerry’s chased down by a security guard in the parking lot. Wasn’t the man in After Hours pursued by an angry ice cream truck? Otherwise, there’s a ghoulish school assembly accentuated by Tangerine Dream’s quintessential ’80s synths and any number of preliminary bouts laying the groundwork for his dreaded showdown.

We have yet to mention the movie’s primary villain whose psychotic reputation more than proceeds him, whispered throughout the halls and steps of the school as it is. The only reason there’s even a movie stems from Jerry’s position at the school newspaper. He’s given the unenviable assignment to profile Buddy Reveill (Richard Tyson) and one urinal encounter makes them mortal enemies for life. Nothing he can do can put off the unavoidable.

The ending does deliver on some of its payoffs by casting off any sense of moralism for a good old-fashioned bloody smackdown between good and evil without a ton of didactic consequences. Law and order are thrust aside as the adolescent masses cheer and rage sensing the brass-knuckled fury in the air. I did begin to wonder if in 80s-era America this hulking villain was a stand-in for fascist or authoritarian regimes. It’s of little importance.

Because this is only an afterthought as Jerry faces Goliath and is subsequently saved by the student body in a deus ex machina a la It’s a Wonderful Life. The lesson: It pays to stand up against tyranny and oppression in the school parking lot. More important still, boyish fantasy is kindled and nothing else exists beyond this singular moment in time. It is a kind of wish fulfillment for young males of a certain age.

Whether it was Joanou’s inspiration, screenwriters Richard Christian Matheson & Thomas Szollosi, or more likely a confluence of everything, Three O’Clock High feels more like a cult curio than an unadulterated classic. That’s not meant to be a slight, nor a total dismissal. It’s not Scorsese (it’s not even Speilberg). But it shouldn’t have to be. It deserves to be taken or left on its own terms as another addendum to the ’80s teen movie canon.

3/5 Stars

La Bamba (1987)

Posted on by
Reply

I must have learned about Ritchie Valens through Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Because there was a time when I was fascinated by all the musical references that seemed so oblique to my young mind. Eventually, the songwriter’s ode leads you to “The Day The Music Died” and if you know about Buddy Holly, you soon learn about The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

The song “La Bamba” feels like a definitive track of a certain rock n roll era, and only now does it become easier to realize what an important cultural milestone it represents. The Mexican language went mainstream blending the rock craze with folk traditions of a people who felt well nigh invisible if no less important in the ’50s.

I do not know much about Luis Valdez, but as an emblematic figure in the Chicano movement of the ’60s and ’70s, he also gave us two of the most noteworthy Chicano movies of the 1980s. He turned his own play into Zoot Suit with Edward James Olmos, a film I was never able to fully connect with, but La Bamba feels like a more straight down-the-line biopic. He effectively brings to life one of the great Chicano heroes of the second half of the 20th century.

Lou Diamond Phillip’s vibrant performance glows with undeniable warmth and vitality. There’s not a disingenuous bone in his body, and he’s able to evoke the joy behind the microphone and the quiet fortitude that comes with his humble migrant background.

This is one of the most moving things about Valdez’s film because even almost 40 years on, these slices of life are still not always prevalent on the big screen. To see them in a period piece seems even more fitting because it’s a way of capturing the cultural moment for us lest we forget.

We see the plight and humble living conditions of migrant workers, there’s instability and broken families, but also the unbreakable bonds of extended families and communities looking out for one another.

La Bamba also has many of the beats of the biopic and since I don’t know the life of Valens intimately, I can only give conjecture on what’s fact and fiction. Part of the story involves his older half-brother (Esai Morales), who exists as the black sheep of the family opposite Ritchie. There’s the blooming of young love with the new girl in class, Donna (Danielle von Zerneck). His family and high school lives run in tandem with his meteoric rise after a record producer, Bob Keane (Joe Pantoliano), agrees to record some of his tracks.

Valens fear of flying, after a midair collision over his school, which killed his childhood friend and left him with recurring nightmares, has the ring of truth stranger than fiction. In keeping with this, the opening interlude of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” feels apropos to represent the general mood of the era. What follows is a bit of a dream even as other moments sting with harsh realism.

There are so many narratives that could happen. There’s a bit of a Romeo and Juliet romance as Donna’s father tries to rebuff Ritchie’s sincere advances. Still, Donna remains devoted throughout the picture, and what a lovely thing is to see their euphoric joy together. The images suggest you don’t have to look like one another to fall in love. The fact the movie draws up this star-crossed romance between a 17-year-old and his 15-year-old beau feels of small consideration. It is a movie.

His brother knows how to make an entrance rolling up on his motorcycle, sunglasses on, cigarette between his lips. Or maybe this is only how we imagine him. Still, Bob’s demons could have been their own movie making him into a perturbing, abusive, drunken figure at the movie’s volatile center.

He’s effectively cast as Cain, never good enough or able to find favor in comparison to his thriving little brother. He spends the whole movie self-destructing and coming to terms with his brother’s burgeoning success. Later in life, it seems his real counterpart was able to resurrect his life and became a beloved member of his community.

Likewise, Bob Keane shows up in Ritchie’s life. We don’t really know how he got there or what all his motives are; still, there’s nothing too sinister in it. He helps Ritchie get big by recording and promoting him, and Valens is on top of the world.

It’s easy to see how all of these dynamics might have been either simplified or drawn up in such a way as to streamline the story or punctuate the dramatics. And yet I never begrudge the movie its choices, because it does feel like such a bountiful cultural artifact. The fact Los Lobos provided much of the soundtrack and even show up in a musical cameo is another notable distinction.

And the gutting, sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs signals the dream cannot last. This talent taking the world by storm and rocking out with Eddie Cochran and Jackie Wilson will be snuffed out far too soon. So if everything else gets resolved in a Hollywood manner, our star is still going to be taken from us in the final reel. There’s no way to get around it.

McLean’s song mourned over it as “The Day The Music Died.” Thankfully, he was wrong. Yes, we no doubt lost out on years of musical output from Holly and Valens. Their young talents were undeniable, and yet their contributions to rock ‘n roll are far from dead. For their relatively short time in the public eye, they’ve cast very large shadows indeed. “La Bamba,” “Come on, Let’s Go,” and “Donna” feel like genre standards by now.

In his own way Valdez has guaranteed Valens won’t be totally disregarded (it was added to the National Film Registry in 2017), and Lou Diamond Phillips, bless his heart, made Valens far more than a hagiography of a deceased icon. He’s a young man with a warm, beating heart, a love for his family’s culture, and a love for rock ‘n roll. I can’t think of a better testament to Ritchie Valens than that.

4/5 Stars

Mystery Train (1989)

Posted on by
Reply

I hold an immediate affinity for the images at the core of Mystery Train: A Japanese couple (Youki Kudo and Masatoshi Nagase) riding a train. This is the ’80s so they’ve got a walkman with an audiocassette tape, and it’s blaring Elvis! It becomes apparent they are making a pilgrimage to Graceland so famously immortalized by Paul Simon. The song “Mystery Train” becomes an apropos and uncanny way to enter the story while paying homage to the King.

Jim Jarmusch always strikes me as such an open-minded and curious filmmaker. Modern society speaks in terms of diversity and inclusion, but the beauty of watching a Jarmusch picture, it’s the fact he’s not looking for these things in order to meet some quota. He seems generally interested by the stories and perspectives a whole host of characters can provide him, and his films benefit greatly from this enduring proclivity.

Regardless of where the funding came from, who else would consider making a film about two Japanese youth in search of Elvis Presley in the 1980s? They spend the first several minutes speaking a language that the primary audience probably does not understand. They likewise are bewildered by a upbeat yet motormouthed docent at Sun Records. Still, somehow shared passions for Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison et al., draw them together in inextricable ways.

There’s something perfectly fated about the whole thing with Screaming Jay Hawkins as a rather flamboyant hotel clerk aided by a youthful bellhop (Cinque Lee). I don’t know how to describe it but Hawkins has a command or a sway over the picture rather like Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti. His presence is felt and becomes so indelible in accentuating an aura. He comes to represent a certain era and a place in human form.

Jarmusch’s characters of choice often feel like sojourners, strangers in a strange land and Memphis is such a place. It is a film that features degradation — cracked pavements, garish neon lights, and portions of the world that are not perfectly manicured. What a concept. It’s almost like Jarmusch is giving us the real world albeit composed through his own cinematic lens. It’s no coincidence it has this kind of baked-in glow of Paris, Texas another film of geographical Americana captured so exquisitely by Robby Muller

It’s only a personal observation but my level enjoyment slightly decreased with each descending story. As someone who journeyed in Japan and went to one of the greatest concerts of my life in Yokohama, I feel this kind of kinship with these Japanese youths in their pilgrimage to Elvis and Carl Perkins. Also, on another level, this is a point of view we just don’t often see in movies of the 1980s or even today. Jarmusch is not using them as some kind of stereotypical punchline. He’s genuinely interested in their story and allowing it to play out in front of us.

Then, there’s Nicoletta Braschi in part two. She’s told a ghost story by a dubious stranger and gives him a tip to be left alone. She too seeks asylum for the night at the same hotel and gains a chatty roommate (Elizabeth Bracco) who is linked to our final vignette.

This last interlude with Steve Buscemi feels like it exists in the time capsule moment of a certain era where Tarrantino, the Coens, and others were making these stylized, often grotesque comedies. Elvis (Joe Strummer) gained his nickname inexplicably, but he’s also started to become unhinged because his girlfriend went up and left him. The cocktail of booze and firearms make his buddies Charlie (Buscemi) and Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) uneasy. Although it feels more like an absurd episode of The Twilight Zone than Lost in Space.

Regardless of my own preferences, Jarmusch still gives his world a sense of purposefulness. Again, it’s this serendipitous quality reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s fated films where lives cross paths and intersect in deeply poignant ways.

There’s something somehow elegant about the structure. It’s certainly premeditated and Jarmusch purportedly was inspired by classical literary styles in constructing his triptych, but it’s also a genuine pleasure to watch it unfurl.

The movie revolves on the axis of a few shared moments and places: A hotel, a radio DJ (Tom Waits) playing “Blue Moon,” and a gunshot. But it’s not like they’re all building to some kind of collective crescendo; it’s more so just a passing indication of how lives, whether they mean to be or not, are often interrelated.

Characters orbit each other and interact in these preordained ways that reflect the mind of the maker, in this case, Jarmusch. There’s something oddly compelling and comic about it, but there’s simultaneously a sense of comfort. We have order and a kind of narrative symmetry leading back out from whence we came.

Jarmusch is calling on the poetry of the ages and so in a movie that seems to have a free and laissez-faire attitude, there’s still a very clear order behind it, three distinct threads end-to-end and yet still interwoven into a tapestry that we can appreciate. Mystery Train represents the best in cinematic storytelling — with purposeful composition and aesthetics — but also a sense of aura and inscrutability.

It’s funny and yet when it’s over there’s also satisfaction and a hint of wistfulness. I wish there were more of its ilk today. The movie that’s come the closest is Paterson — another modern jewel from Jim Jarmusch. I see that film in a new light as a much older, wiser, and more forthcoming Masatoshi Nagase sits down on a bench with Adam Driver.

Again, it is a story about the human journey, how we are all travelers in some sense, and what a beautiful thing it is to relish the road because it can lead us to so many beguiling places if we take the time.

4/5 Stars

The Intruder (1962)

Posted on by
1

Before he became a caricature of his former self, even before the days of Captain Kirk and pop culture canonization, The Intruder is a reminder of something else in William Shatner. He still feels ripe and almost dangerous with a charisma that has yet to be calcified or even corroded by time.

The same could be said of Roger Corman at least if you only have a perfunctory understanding of his career like me. He is the master of fast and cheap entertainment turned out for profit at a rapid rate. Surely, The Intruder doesn’t fit into the patchwork of his career.

Before we blandly christen him the “King of Schlock,” a more nuanced observation seems to be in order, considering both his talents and his ambitions. Others must speak to this more knowledgeably. All I can say is that this specific film totally obliterates any preconceived notions of what we are getting.

Shatner stars as Adam Cramer, a self-described social reformer with a skeevy look in his eye to go with a cool disposition. He’s headed out on the latest bus to help the locals fight the government implementation of integration in the town’s high school. Under the guise of the freedom-loving Patrick Henry Society, he’s ready to stir up some action. Give me Liberty or Give me Death (though mostly death). In other words, a real creep.

He sets up shop at the local hotel — it bleeds with crusty southern hospitality — feeling like a stronghold for a racist status quo. He’s put up by a sweet ol’ lady while his next-door neighbors, a gregarious salesman (Leo Penn), and his flirtatious wife (Jeanne Cooper) don’t leave much to the imagination. We know what they’re doing and they don’t much care who knows it. It’s a good thing because the walls are especially thin in a place such as this.

Although the film is primarily white-centric, for a white audience, there are some black characters playing crucial roles on the periphery. One is the local minister, a man of faith who takes his calling seriously. He exhorts the youngest members of his congregation in meekness and prays over these 10 lambs from his flock. He’s well aware they are about to enter the valley of the shadow, a space no young person should have to be subjected to. Still, the letter of the law in some ways falls on their side in the face of threat and injury.

One evening on a grand old southern estate Cramer holds a rally to rile up the townspeople, spewing all sorts of epithets, and appealing to their spirit of discontentment.  The NAACP is a communist front, headed by a Jew. It’s all a sham. The government can’t be trusted and The Patrick Henry Society is tasked with preaching the truth — at least his version of it.

As we watch the masses be swayed and he skillfully plays them like a marionette with public opinion in his palm, the deviousness comes into full color. He’s a Lonesome Rhodes-type figure who uses his own magnetism to get what he wants.

When the whites, armed with their newfound ammunition, take to the streets ready to victimize a black family driving home the movie becomes too real. It’s almost like the film was overly cognizant of its time with an incisiveness toward the hot-button issues of the age. Even today it feels gutting to watch whether fiction or not. The images strike too close.

Shatner riding in a hooded caravan with a gang toting a cross through the black community is horrifying. There’s a faceless dynamiting of a church with the faithful minister left for dead. The only other time I recall something comparable in mainstream Hollywood was the mobbish vitriol in Phenix City Story a few years earlier. To Kill a Mockingbird is wistfully nostalgic in comparison. Right or wrong, The Intruder has no such illusions.

Cramer is a man who happily takes a prison sentence telling a wealthy backer (Robert Emhardt) to never underestimate a jail sentence — remember Socrates, Lenin, Hitler… How you can conflate all these men says so much about you. And of course, there’s no mention of Dr. King. This is not the kind of man to dignify a fellow reformer on the other team with an acknowledgment.

The most curious figure (aside from Cramer) is Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell). He’s a southern man. He’s been inculcated with the prevailing sentiments of the South, but he also seems to have a higher standard. It’s partially because he’s the herald of the local news — he has journalistic standards — but there’s something else we have to spend time with him to figure out. His wife disagrees. Grandpa wants to disown him. His daughter (Beverly Lunsford) is probably still trying to make sense of it all. Regardless, he believes the law must be carried out.

I don’t know if we ever get a clear indication of why. Although he’s not the only one we can say this about. I’m not sure if we ever get a precise reason for Cramer’s actions either. He’s not a Southerner and there’s never a clear indication he’s truly aligned with the white community, at least not when it gets right down to it. He’s not a Southerner. But he knows he can manipulate them for his purposes.

My fear is that the film is still too much the pipe dream of well-meaning moviemakers where southern guilt all of sudden turns a few solitary individuals into men and women of conscience. Maybe this is historically true. I don’t know, but for all the stories that ended like this with a life saved and a wolf in sheep’s clothing defrocked, we know that history was not always so forgiving. It is strewn with the names of men and women who were degraded, intimidated, and often killed.

That’s why part of me rumbles with a deep sentiment that must be acknowledged. It wants to cry out and warn folks not to see this movie. The inclination begins when they threaten to flip a black family’s car and reverberates again when a young white woman gets coerced into crying rape against a fellow black student named Joey (Charles Barnes).

There’s almost something indecent and profane about it as it echoes things that really came to pass. It’s this fine line I don’t know quite how to reconcile. Because I’ve rarely seen a movie this fierce and unflinching for the era, and yet in the same breath is this what is required then or now? It’s an open-ended rhetorical question. I don’t know the answer.

If the box office receipts are testament enough, the movie didn’t make much of a dent but for entirely different reasons. Roger Corman seems to have made his own implicit response. He never made another such picture again instead relegating his talents to Vincent Price Poe dramas and other such fare blessing the film world in another way. Yes, it was cheap entertainment, but also a breeding ground for some of the up-and-coming stars of the New Hollywood generation.

He did in fact make his own diagnosis of the film’s lack of success, which might be telling if not altogether definitive:

“I think it failed for two reasons. One: the audience at that time, the early sixties, simply didn’t want to see a picture about racial integration. Two: it was more of a lecture. From that moment on I thought my films should be entertainment on the surface and I should deliver any theme or idea or concept beneath the surface.”

Still, with a man’s face buried in the grass, a man fallen from grace head first, The Intruder totally reframes my perceptions of the now chubby anachronism of Shatner’s persona. I won’t say it redeems it so much as it augments it with a kind of duplicitous venom. It’s a new astounding contour to his career.

I’m still not sure if that’s a hearty recommendation or not. This is a very triggering film and a deeply onerous watch. The discerning viewer should make their own judgments. Because for some this kind of burden might be necessary. For others, it might be too heavy to bear.

4/5 Stars

 

Note: This review was written before Roger Corman’s passing on May 9, 2024

David & Lisa (1962)

Posted on by
4

Keir Dullea is an actor who will always be most prominently remembered for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He’s Dave of pod door fame. However, part of me wants to promote him as the lead in David and Lisa because this film from Frank Perry, in its quiet empathy and emerging relationships, feels more deeply like his film.

It relies heavily on his turn as a grim young man with OCD-like symptoms. As his mother drops him off at a psychiatric center for a brief stint, he immediately carries himself as a youth too smart for such an establishment. He’s an aloof loner with cold temples and the most severe eyes. Surely, this is a story about David’s transformation.

But the ampersand in the title reminds us that he only works in tandem with another life. Likewise, Dullea’s performance gains more meaning when he is put up next to Janet Margolin in her screen debut. She causes him to change and shift even as he elicits something out of Lisa.

Since I got my first introduction to Margolin in Take The Money and Run and became instantly smitten, it’s fabulous to see her in another role that plays so exquisitely off her inherent human charms. Lisa is a young teenager with a penchant for rhyme. If we want to diagnose her, she has schizophrenia, but the beauty of the film is watching people reach out to each other, instead of categorizing each other dismissively.

Even someone like Howard Da Silva is a pleasant surprise. In the old days, he mostly played conniving heavies in film noir; here he settles into the role of benevolent authority quite easily, and it’s a fine look for him. He wears it well. David is so quick to distrust him and what he stands for. Over time, the authenticity is so apparent that even he is won over. He comes to appreciate the place as home. It’s a space to belong.

However, if I’m honest, David and Lisa is the kind of film that feels like it might be frowned upon today if we know nothing about it. Still, there’s a tenderness in the love story that I can’t quite shake. It’s disarming and totally flies in the face of expectations.

I realized that whatever way you take it, there are these kinds of overt metaphors to the film. People who are different than the society around them somehow find solace in this shared sense of otherness. He meets her with rhyming and she meets him in a way by not reaching out with human touch. The things that ostracize them also have the inertia to draw them together.

If these are idiosyncrasies, then they respect them and respect each other enough to take their predilections seriously. Meanwhile, “normal” well-adjusted people at the local train station castigate them as weirdos better resigned to the funny farm.

But even when David makes a brief return home, the perceived distance at the dinner table and the manifold hangups of his own parents, make it apparent we do not live in a society of the well-balance and the imbalanced. Those in the former category either do a better job at hiding it or they have enough money to smooth it over. Success and status can cover a multitude of social sins, at least on the surface.

There’s one particularly crucial moment where I became mesmerized with Margolin watching her sway with the metronome although it precipitates a kind of demonstrative ending that doesn’t do the story much service. In one moment of annoyance, David lashes out at Lisa only to work tirelessly to win her back. Their chemistry is so fragile, held together by wisps of gossamer thread, but that makes it all the more vital to maintain.

When Dullea scampers up the Philadelphia steps, and they share a moment so much unspoken emotion is carried with them in the scene. It’s only the two of them. She no longer rhymes. She’s fully herself. “Me,” she says.

He reciprocates by doing the bravest most vulnerable thing he can, asking her to reach out and touch him. I remember a line of prose by C.S. Lewis about love being vulnerable and this lasting image is a testament to this truth. Here the pain and transparency brim with sympathy.

David and Lisa can be characterized as a romance, although it is one where the leads never kiss, never embrace and only touch in the final frame. Somehow it’s packed with more import than many other films claiming the same genre conventions. Because what some other films forget is that love and affection, romance, they all require so much more than physical touch. It’s about warmth and stillness. Willing to open yourself up and be hurt by other people even as you stretch yourself as a human being.

For a film about psychological disorders from so many years ago, there’s a gentle subtlety to David & Lisa; it’s quite extraordinary, and Dullea and Margolin make a wonderful pair together. It’s only a shame they were not both allotted even more high-profile vehicles commensurate with their talents.

3.5/5 Stars