Category Archives: Drama

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Martin Scorsese, and Robbie Robertson

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We just lost Robbie Robertson and being an avid fan of The Band, I was genuinely affected by the loss. The relationship between Martin Scorsese and Robertson is hardly a secret from The Last Waltz to their many film score collaborations, but Robertson also has Native American heritage through his mother.

He’s not Osage — his mother was Cayuga and Mohawk — and yet there is a sense he’s as close to this material as anything his friend has ever made. The film is instigated by oil gushing out of the Osage land instantly making them the wealthiest people per capita in 1920s America. Robertson’s composition punctuates the moment taking center stage with a driving blues riff. It announces the introduction of the movie onto the scene and Robertson’s influence is felt over the entire picture.

The Osage murders have never been a focal point of history, but thanks to David Grann’s book and Martin Scorsese’s subsequent film hopefully more people become aware of this searing chapter of American history.

I heard Scorsese talking about coming at the story from the inside out, and I think what he means by this is finding the core of the story. He was not interested in an FBI procedural from the point of view of the good guys, although Jesse Plemons shows up about 2 hours in to help rectify the miscarriage of justice.

There’s something more fundamental here. You see it in many of Scorsese’s movies from Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street, or any of his gangster pictures showing the traditional villains in an intimate if not entirely sympathetic light. He always seems to return to this because this was his childhood — he grew up in a neighborhood with these sorts. By the world’s standard are they corrupt? Yes, but they aren’t personified evil. They act as complicated characters full of charisma, humor, and whatever else.

It feels like this is his gift as a filmmaker. Because we don’t always like these people, but he was never interested in a black hat and white hat morality. Perhaps that’s why he did not make Killers a more traditional Western because this would not be true to the ethos he’s had since the very beginning.

We meet Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he comes to live with his uncle (Robert De Niro) who encourages him to get close and marry into an indigenous family so he might gain access to their oil head rights. Soon after Burkhart develops genuine feelings for the local Osage Mollie (Lily Gladstone). It’s this weird dance — this strange tension — between a traditional love story and people who seem to be taking advantage of a situation, whether it be a paternal influence or just a twisted, morally bankrupt constitution.

Also, I was considering how the movie does become a kind of woman-in-peril movie like we used to see in Old Hollywood albeit with a slight wrinkle. Because of course, the dramatic question revolves around how all of Mollie’s family members become sick or die under dubious circumstances.

There is nothing to stop the onslaught, and there’s an inclination that Ernest is bringing her downfall even as he seems to want to insulate his wife from harm. He also has no qualms about admitting his weakness for money or further capitulating to his uncle’s bidding whenever he’s called upon. If that sounds needlessly ominous, that’s because it is.

Watching DiCaprio is an experience. I was trying to figure out if he was chewing up the scenery, and yet he makes up for any moment that feels like acting through his utter lack of vanity. He could have played the white knight Texas Ranger, and yet here he is as this money-grubbing ignoramus who fumbles his way through criminal activities while still resolutely loving his wife in his sad and dismal way.

Certainly, it’s richer with subtext, but it requires someone prepared to eschew glamour and Hollywood masculinity. Ironically DiCaprio represents all these things and still manages to upend them so we forget them even momentarily. His hair frames his head like Alfalfa and his lips are almost permanently in a downward pout. We don’t know what WWI did to him only that he has a busted gut, and he’s looking to his uncle for work.

De Niro is such an unsettling figure with his insidious brand of charity-turned-malevolence. King is one of those individuals who claims to love these people and is set up in their community doing nice things for them while simultaneously taking advantage of them at every turn.

He’s not purposefully evil; instead, he feels a God-given justification to acquire their wealth because he is spiritually and racially superior — at least this is what he’s deluded to believe. It’s not spoken so much as felt with every undertone of his being.

It strikes me that Scorsese had Joe Pesci in The Irishman go softer and quieter and he thus became menacing in an altogether new light after years of being mercurial and bellicose. Here De Niro does much the same, toning down his usual fire or even the anger of his and Marty’s youth into something more subtle and still equally effective. It’s a role for an actor who is fully confident in his instrument and his abilities.

It’s this kind of villainy that’s so unsettling because it feels so real and present. It lives in the ambiguity, and it does feel like Scorsese has made a wise film for the 21st century. However, don’t think for a minute that I’m saying that this evil is ambiguous. Much of what we witness is abhorrent, and yet how these people in the same breath can commit murders and somehow live in community becomes the queasy soil we must contend with. There are the active transgressions that feel the most egregious, but there’s something equally pernicious about complicity, sins of omission, if you will.

Lily Gladstone is such a powerful emotive force in this movie because if Leo’s performance is one way, she is his perfect scene partner by maintaining such a calm equilibrium; there’s a regality to her that’s not easy to break and yet she’s not an unknowable stoic. She loves deeply and with Ernest and her family, we see both her affection and her deep sorrow when they are ripped away from her one by one. The movie requires her strength to hold it together and instill it with resonance.

On a side note, there’s a scene early on where Mollie shares a moment talking with her sisters — they’re laughing and observing her man Ernest from a distance. She affectionately nicknames him a “coyote,” but through the whole scene, they laugh and chitchat in their native tongue. There’s something so meaningful about it.

Oddly enough, it reminded me of how John Ford hired the Navajo as extras in The Searchers — a film with an incisive and controversial reputation. I have no way of corroborating this, but apparently, they cursed and made jokes in their native language on camera. Of course, the primary audience in 1950s America wouldn’t know this. Killers of the Flower Moon is a very different sort of movie, and here the Native actors are brought closer to the center (if not entirely) so we all can be in on the joke.

There is an uneasy joke of a different kind when the film’s epilogue is summed up by an old-timey stage production out of the age of serialized radio shows. Normally we see these moments played out in stunted lines of courier text over black, and yet Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth make them visual and somehow native to the film’s world.

Until this moment we’re still invested in the story, and it’s difficult to recognize what Scorsese is doing, but he uses the meta moment to comment implicitly on framing such tragedy as entertainment. Isn’t that what he’s doing after all in so many words? If you wanted to be pragmatic, you could make the case he’s created a $200 million project to sell tickets.

However, it becomes more than a technique or an intellectual treatise when he steps out on the stage in the flesh. It’s not merely a cameo, but a cornerstone of the picture as Scorsese himself utters its final lines. There he stands in all sincerity letting the studio audience and all of us know that Molly died in 1937 and no mention of the murders was ever made. They were effectively erased from historical memory by the dominating culture. We’re so good at doing this.

The final shot feels like a Busby Berkeley aerial, but it focuses on the Native Americans pounding their drums in an emphatic ceremony. It’s a drum for Robbie Robertson. A drum for Mollie. And a drum for all the Osages who lost their lives in utter anonymity without justice. I will miss Robbie Robertson dearly, but it’s a fitting film for him to take a bow on. He receives a remembrance in the credits.

If Killers of The Flower Moon is not Scorsese best then it is still a film rich with emotion and deeply important stakes. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a story put to screen like this on this kind of scale. In his hands, you can sense the care and this means a lot. Somehow he always finds this imperceptible line between the profane, violence, and some core truth. The first two repulse me, and yet in his films, their depiction often leads to an inherent awareness of our broken natures as human beings.

He never asks easy questions and I believe that comes with honesty, and it’s part of the reason he’s still one of our premier filmmakers. He’s still curious and the questions he asks with his films are ones he’s still wrestling with now 80 years on. They’re universal.

4/5 Stars.

Vincente Minnelli Films (1958-62)

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Gigi (1958)

Lerner & Loewe’s adaptation of Colette’s Gigi is a picture accentuating the France of Hollywood’s most opulent dreams and confections frequented by the consummate French people of the movies: Maurice Chevalier, Leslie Caron, and Louis Jordan.

Whether it’s Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder or Vicente Minnelli, Chevalier doesn’t change much. He’s convivial with the audience existing just on the other side of the camera. He gives off his usual cheeky, harmless charm that doesn’t always play the best seeing as his first tune is about the litters of girls who will grow up to be married and unmarried young women in the future.

Gigi (Caron) is one of their ilk, a carefree gamine who lives under the auspices of her Grandmama’s house, a startling domicile touched by Minnelli’s charmed palette of deep red.

In some manner, Gigi seems to represent the worst of Minnelli. Yes, it was wildly popular in its day, but all of its manicured embellishment and immaculate set dressings feel mostly fatuous and merely for their own sake. While one can easily appreciate the pure spectacle of the thing, the director’s best pictures show a deep affection for characters.

Here all manner of songs and tête-à-têtes are cheery and bright, while never amounting to something more substantive. It’s easy to suggest the movie revels in its own frivolity. Gaston (Jordan) is a ridiculously wealthy young man and Eva Gabor is his companion, though the gossips get ahold of them. They’re not in love.

Another primary reservation with the picture is how Leslie Caron is summarily stripped of most of her powers. At times, dubbing feels like an accepted evil of these studio-era musicals or a stylistic choice of European maestros. However, in Caron’s case, not only is she not allowed to sing, she can’t talk for herself either (dubbed by the cutesy Betty Wand). I might be missing something, but this seems like a grave misfortune.

You can add to this fact the further grievance she never really has a traditional dance routine, and there’s nothing that can be appreciated about the picture in comparison to the crowning achievements of An American in Paris. All that’s left is to admire is her posture and how she traipses across the canvasses Minnelli has devised for the picture. This alone is hers to control, and she just about makes it enough.

My favorite scene was relatively simple. Gigi and Gaston are at the table playing cards, and they exude a free-and-easy camaraderie. If it’s love, then it’s more like brother and sister or fast friends who like to tease one another. It isn’t yet treacly with romance. Instead, they break out into a rousing rendition of “The Night They Invented Champagne,” which distills its point through an exuberant melody.

The lingering power of the film is how it does its work and grows on me over time. It considers this not totally original idea of trying to become who you are not in order to please others. Gigi must learn the breeding and the etiquette, acquire the clothes, and in short, turn herself inside out in order to fit into rarefied society.

Gaston doesn’t want her to be like that, attempting to replace all the elements of her character that make her who she is. This is what he likes about her. If it never turns to eros, then at the very least, it’s shared affection. Caron and Jordan make their auspicious entrance at Maxim’s and, it feels like a precursor to Audrey Hepburn’s introduction in My Fair Lady. It’s not a bad comparison since most of the film is filtered through speak-singing.

Does it have a happy ending? In a word, yes, but Chevalier singing about little girls doesn’t make me any less squeamish the second go around. Thankfully, Minnelli is no less of a technical master with Gigi. Still, film was not meant to live on formalistic techniques alone.

3/5 Stars

Bells Are Ringing (1960)

The title credits are so gay and cheery with so many admirable names flashing by on the screen, it almost negates the sorry realization that this is the last go-around for the famed Arthur Freed Unit at MGM. Pick out any of the names and there’s a history.

Say Adolph Green or Betty Comden for instance; they were the architects of some of the era’s finest. Anyone for Singin’ in the Rain or The Band Wagon? The movie spells the end of the era, though there would be a few later holdouts.

Like It’s Always Fair Weather, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, or Pillow Talk, Bells Are Ringing is well aware of its cultural moment, and so it reminds us about the necessity of telephone answering services. Actually, one in particular called Susanswerphone.

It’s easy to love Judy Holliday from the outset as she’s playing crazy gymnastics on the telephone lines because automation hasn’t been created yet. Originally, she was a comedienne best remembered for a squeaky voice and a ditsy brain. Bells Are Ringing, which she originated on the stage, allows us to see a different contour of her movie personality, one that might as well hewn closer to the real person.

She does her work ably only to suffer through a dinner date from hell (with her real-life boyfriend Gerry Mulligan). However, we couldn’t have a movie without a dramatic situation.

The staff are forewarned never to cross the line to “service” their clients. But she breaks the cardinal rule, overstepping the bounds of a passive telephone operator and becoming invested in the lives of those people she communicates with over the wires. Not least among them, one Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin).

She’s just about lovesick over his voice. It’s no mistake that she puts on her lipstick before ringing him up to remind him about a pressing engagement, as if he can take in her appearance intravenously. Alexander Graham Bell never quite figured out the science behind that.

It’s not much of a mystery to us what Moss looks like. Because if you read the marquee, you know it’s Dino. But she doesn’t know that and scampers up to his room to save him. Surely there’s a Greek tragedy trapped in here somewhere. If it’s not about falling in love with a reflection or her own work of art, then it’s about the sound of a man’s voice. She wants to help him gain confidence in his own abilities as a writer.

But first please allow me one self-indulgent aside. Dean Martin had a point in unhitching himself from Jerry Lewis. Sure, Lewis had a groundbreaking career as an actor-director, but Dino was so much more than The Rat Pack and his TV program.

The string of movies he took on throughout the 50s and 60s never ceases to intrigue me. He could go from The Young Lions, Some Came Running, and Rio Bravo to pictures like Bells Are Ringing and Kiss Me Stupid. For someone with such a distinct professional image, he managed a steady array of parts.

The number “Just in Time” in the park is made by Holliday in striking red and Dino crooning through the night air. There’s a goofy brand of showmanship between them that we were lucky to see in many of the old MGM pictures. It’s their own rendition to complement Astaire and Charisse from Band Wagon showcasing Minnelli at his best and brightest as we are brought into a moment of fluid inspiration where all facets of the production look to be working on high cylinders.

At the nearby party, Holliday becomes overwhelmed by the Hollywood glamour scene, as all the folks jump out of the woodwork and start smooching as Martin descends down a spiral staircase. This only happens in the movies, and yet it’s a summation of her blatant otherness. She doesn’t fit in this crowd where everyone is on first name basis with the biggest names in the business (“Drop That Name”). It seems like their worlds are slowly drifting apart as her secret life is about to totally unravel.

However, Martin joins forces with a musical dentist and Mr. impressionist himself, Frank Gorshin, who puts on his best Brando impression as they bring the movie to a striking conclusion. The same woman has changed all their lives for the better. Now they want tot return the favor. Moral of the story, get yourself an answering service, especially one with someone who cares like Judy Holliday.

3.5/5 Stars

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

It might play as unwanted hyperbole, but when I look at Two Weeks in Another Town, it almost feels like a generational predecessor to Heaven’s Gate. Although Vincente Minnelli’s picture is well aware of the old hat and the emerging trends of cinema, it’s raging against the dying of the light, as it were. He subsequently bombed at the box office, and we witnessed the cinematic death knell of an era.

The director makes the transition from b&w to color well enough as you would expect nothing less from him. Kirk Douglas has what feels like a standard-issue role seething with rage thanks to a career hitting the skids. He’s bailed out of his sanitarium by a collaborator from the old days and shipped on-location to Rome.

There we get our first taste of a demonstrative Edward G. Robinson playing the tyrannical old cuss Maurice Kruger. He’s right off the set of the latest Cinecitta Studios big screen epic with George Hamilton, an Italian screen goddess, and Vito Scotti working the action.

But Two Weeks in Another Country is just as much about what is going on behind the scenes of the production. Robinson and Claire Trevor together again have a far from congenial reunion after Key Largo generations before. They’re part of Hollywood’s fading classes, though they’re far from relics.

Minnelli takes the personal nature of the material a step further. In a screening room watching The Bad and The Beautiful, the self-reflexivity has come full tilt as Douglas wrestles with his image onscreen from a decade before.

Meanwhile, Cyd Charisse makes her entrance on a jam-packed road flaunting herself in the traffic. She’s charged with playing Carlotta — Jack’s former wife — she’s bad and if her turn in Singin’ in the Rain is any indication, she’s fairly accomplished in this department. It’s almost a novelty role because she’s rarely the focus of the drama, only a sordid accent.

The pieces are there for a truly enrapturing experience as only the olden days of Hollywood can offer. I’m thinking of the days of Roman Holiday, sword and sandal epics, and La Dolce Vita. The movie is a reaction to all of them in the flourishing TV age with its glossy romance in beautiful cars, glorious rotundas, and luscious beaches.

It’s not bad per se, and yet it seems to reflect the very generational chasm it’s readily trying to comment on. George Hamilton utters the movie’s title and it’s all right there — utterly temporal and disposable in nature.

These moments and themes feel mostly empty and, again, while this might be precisely the point, it goes against our human desires. Either that or the movie is begging the audience to connect the dots. We want the critique wedded with entertainment. Because most of us are not trained to watch movies from a objective distance. Our mental wiring does not work like that especially when it comes to epics.

Jack is taken by a young starlet (Dalia Lavi) he meets by chance, thanks to her proximity to the troubled production. His and Veronica’s relationship becomes one of the focal points and one of the few deeply human connections in the picture.

Later, Jack’s bellicose benefactor, Maurice, falls ill. The added melodrama is to be expected along with raucous slap fights and the scramble to get the picture in under budget before the foreign backers try and pull out. The old has-been comes alive again — momentarily he has a purpose and companionship — until he’s besieged by new pressures.

Although it was purportedly edited down, it’s not too difficult to observe Minnelli doing his own version of Fellini’s earlier movie from 1960 with the dazed-out remnants of an orgy and a young Leslie Uggams singing her torch songs.

The apogee of the entire picture has to be Douglas and Charisse tearing through Rome in a mad fury. It’s the craziest, most chaotic car ride that can only be conceived in Hollywood; it’s so undisciplined and wrenched free of any of the constraints of realism. The back projections up to this point are totally expressionistic.

And as the car lurches and jerks around we realize we are seeing the film crossover: What we see behind the scenes and on the screen are one and the same, merely facades, and little more. It’s the kind of unbridled moment that could easily earn derisive laughter or genuine disbelief. There’s no way to eclipse the moment.

Instead, what follows is a cheery denouement out of a goofball comedy. Jack resolves to put his life back on track opting to leave behind his young leading man on the tarmac with a girl until they meet again. Hollywood, as is, was not totally dead — there was still some light in the tunnel — but if the box office receipts are any indication, tastes were changing.

3/5 Stars

Tea and Sympathy (1956): Are You Masculine?

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The 1950s saw director Vincente Minnelli continually evolving from mostly musicals — a pleasing genre he never totally forsook — into a period of his career ripe with luscious Metrocolor dramas.

Movies such as Tea and Sympathy, Some Came Running, and Home from the Hill, don’t get too much coverage in broader circles, especially compared to Oscar darlings like An American in Paris or Gigi. However, in many ways, they’re equally interesting, if not more so.

As the story opens on a  prep school green, it proves the world still had class reunions generations before and if the content was different, the people aren’t all that dissimilar. Tom (John Kerr) is someone we get to know quite well over the next two hours.

However, we are only introduced to him because Minnelli’s camera cycles to him as he traverses his former stomping grounds. While not prototypically Hollywood handsome like John Saxon or George Hamilton, Kerr is incessantly interesting and easier to project our own insecurities onto. He’s a bit severe, more awkward, but able to imply a certain sensitivity.

He ventures into his old dorm and all the memories come flooding back. Minnelli doesn’t go with a dissolve or a fade-out, but he moves his camera through the window down to the grass below as if we are entering into an entirely different world, and in a sense we are.

The space is the same but the years have gone and faded back into the past for us. Deborah Kerr works away cultivating her garden as John Kerr (no relation) eagerly looks to offer her any assistance. It’s plainly apparent he has a major crush on the teacher’s wife.

Those unfamiliar with the play might think they already have an inkling of what this picture is about, young unrequited love, adolescence blooming into adulthood. There are elements of this, but Tea and Sympathy becomes far more groundbreaking and pressing in turns.

Because Tom Robinson Lee is totally ill at ease around girls; he can’t dance, and he’s slated to wear a dress in his school’s latest stage production. Don’t try and explain to his peers what the Greeks and Japanese used to do on stage. He’s a sorry excuse for a man; that’s what he is.

It’s an equally awkward situation when he makes fast friends with the faculty wives — Mrs. Reynolds among them — and she tries to be gentle and kind to him. Because he’s really a decent boy. He gladly shares among this company that he can sew and cook showing them his skills with a needle and thread.

The jocular Mrs. Sears (Jacqueline DeWitt) jokes, “You’ll make some girl a good wife.” These are all tiny barbs of cinematic emasculation that cannot go totally unnoticed. It’s difficult for them not to have a cumulative effect.

Sure enough, he’s found out when some of the boys playing football along the beach see him, and he’s quickly in danger of being labeled. Because Tea and Sympathy is a movie totally immersed in the mores of the 1950s. These are issues of masculinity and gender roles altogether intensified by the furnace of contemporary societal pressure.

Because further down the shoreline, the boys toss around a football, roughhouse, and read off questions in an “Are You Masculine” quiz led by Mrs. Reynolds’s he-man husband (Leif Erickson). The news of Tom spreads like wildfire, and he earns his ignominious name “Sister Boy.” It’s the kind of reputation that does not die easily. His bedroom door is marked and he’s roughed up all in the testosterone-induced fun of boys both raucous and cruel.

You would think he could regain some respect out on the tennis court the following day, routing his opponent, but even this is hardly enough to burnish his reputation. It’s made more awkward by a visit from his dad, who can sense that the “regular guys” are against him. Of course, “regular” becomes code for being complicit in this debilitating sense of peer pressure ruling the school and its generational legacies.

Edward Andrews has a kind of easy southern charm both somehow outwardly genial and still riddled with so much dysfunction. He chides Tom that you’re known by the company you keep. He should get a crewcut and take part in the pajama fights which are like a rite of passage. There’s something to be said for conformity — becoming one of the boys as it were.

Still, the town has changed since he was a boy. They sit at the counter of the local watering hole as the long-suffering waitress Ellie is kidded and harassed incessantly as she tries to work the tables. His dad feels some amount of vicarious humiliation seeing how much of a social pariah his son seems to be. It makes him uneasy.

It’s a bit of a visual cheat, but it’s also one of the most effective set-ups in the movie as Mrs. Reynolds goes in to grab the drinks in the kitchen, and she hears the conversation coming quite freely through the window as the two men talk about the young men. Mr. Lee and Mr. Reynolds were mates in the old days and they aren’t above speaking plainly about him — how different he is. It’s obvious their words burden Laura’s heart; we see the empathy building over her face because the men don’t understand.

If it’s not apparent already, the whole system they are devoted to is broken to its core. For this boy sewing is his sin. In retaliation his peers take a stance. Since he’s not one of them, one of their tribe, he must become the scapegoat to reaffirm their shaky position.

Keeping in line with this, faculty wives are supposed to remain bystanders providing only a little tea and sympathy. A giant pyre is lit in the middle of the commons setting the stage for a pajama fight — something that has been passed from generation to generation.

From a cinematic standpoint, there’s this underlining tension to the event reminiscent of the Chickie Run from Rebel Without a Cause. It suggests something fated and inevitable about what they do — what they subject themselves to. Isn’t it in the earlier film where one boy says, “You‘ve gotta do something. Don’t you?” Here it’s institutionalized.

For a time, Al (Daryl Hickman) is Tom’s roommate and his only advocate. Mrs. Reynolds speaks to Al in admiration; he showcases physical vs. moral courage, and yet it’s lonely pushing against the social currents. Even his father admonishes him. He must be a nail hammered back into place — a place of conformity.

Mrs. Reynolds acknowledges to her husband that they don’t seem to touch anymore. There’s a distance between them, and it only grows darker and colder as the picture progresses. As we find out, her first husband died during The War: “In trying to prove himself a man, he died a boy.”

Tom is stricken by the same path. He vows to meet up with Ellie, the town’s tramp to prove his mettle as a misogynistic boy’s boy. Surely this is the only way he can prove himself and meet their standards — the standards of his own father. It’s not worth documenting the whole sorry affair. It’s garish, unseemly, and pitiful. Production Codes or not, Tom wants real love and affection. This isn’t it.

His father shows up again puffed up with pride for the first time in a long while. Because his boy has gone and got himself expelled for being off-campus with an undesirable woman. It’s like a badge of honor — being out of bounds — and showing off the extent of his masculinity, whether real or imagined. It doesn’t matter to Mr. Lee as long as he can imagine his boy being made in his own contorted image.

However, the picture suddenly does something remarkable. It seeks refuge resorting to its only comfort.  The scene where Laura comes upon Tom kicked back, lounging in the forest leaves the scholastic world behind altogether for the ethereal and the sublime.

It loses any semblance of ’50s hothouse and forsakes the visible emotions of Metrocolor for something intimate and serene. Laura’s final charge to the boy is plain — be kind.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about Tea and Sympathy as it dissolved back into the present. Of course, the way the film was structured, it was necessary, and yet it seemed like the import was already made evident in an embrace between two people. What more did we possibly need?

But as Tom finds the letter and reads its contents, what looks to totally ruin the movie with moralism is augmented by two aspects. Minnelli’s camera begins to move, capturing the wind rustling through the trees and floating through the open spaces giving them a sense of pensive reverie of a different kind.

Deborah Kerr’s line reading is spot on. No one else could deliver it in such a way making it bear all the warmth and truth in a manner that feels entirely genuine.

Her character reframes everything we have seen and instead of simply placating the production codes, it feels like she is delivering some sagacious bit of nuance Tom might only understand with the passage of time.

She is so important to this picture, and she blesses it with her usual poise and grace helping to fill the void in a movie lacking a great deal of goodness. She becomes its primary beacon even as she looks for goodness for herself.

Given its themes, it would be easy for the film to become a totally salacious, opportunistic bit of illicit love. But in part thanks to Kerr and Minnelli’s care, it never becomes relegated to such status. It represents something much more.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea of moral courage. Tea and Sympathy somehow exhibits how one goes about it. It’s not simply about being counter-cultural or going against the tides of the times or being progressive. There is such a thing as goodness, as kindness, as gentleness — fruit we can see in our lives.

It has nothing to do with signaling our virtues, how positively or negatively others will perceive us, or the identity we look to embody. My hope is that even while our society evolves, growing further enlightened, fickle, and oppressive in various turns, we might learn what it is to have unwavering moral courage.

It’s a struggle, but it’s simply the best way to love others well, providing something more than merely tea and sympathy. Because this is not a healthy formula to help assuage the world’s ills. We require something far better.

4/5 Stars

Lust for Life (1956) and Van Gogh’s Starry Night

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“I don’t care about being respected. I’m trying to live as a true Christian.” – Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh

It seems the world over has remained transfixed by the life of Vincent Van Gogh, which is rather ironic since he failed to gain much traction in his own lifetime. For many, he remains one of the obvious prototypes of the tragic artist — the man who cut off his ear — driven to personal and psychological anguish.

I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of his work in Japan charting one of his most unlikely sources of inspiration. The documentary Loving Vincent committed to his style completely to tell his story in the most visually honoring way possible. Don McLean penned a stirring ballad for him on his American Pie record. Van Gogh even garnered his own Doctor Who episode with a very poignant appearance by BIll Nighy. Lust for Life can be added to the varied lineage of cultural artifacts looking to make sense of his career.

I’m always looking for individual ways in which to enrich the staid biopic with something vibrant and singular. Lust for Life starts off promising by hardly acknowledging Van Gogh’s art at all. Instead, he’s a failed minister eventually sent off to help the unfortunate mining classes because it’s the only vocation worthy of him. It’s dreadful work, both dirty and unimaginably dangerous. What makes it worse is the many children forced to labor in the underground mining shafts.

He’s soon inspected by two pompous “God-fearing” men who are scandalized by the life he’s keeping. His impoverished, unkept lifestyle degrades the reputation of the church and lacks a sense of decency in their eyes. They fail to see he takes the claims of Jesus profoundly serious by loving the orphans and widows.

On a later occasion his brother Theo (James Donald) comes to check on him and reason with him. He’s also a well-respected man, but there’s a difference here. They share a deep bond of brotherhood and every time they talk, Theo, who’s so soft-spoken in nature, shows how deeply he cares for his brother.

Eventually, Vincent is persuaded to return to his parents’ home. While it’s a positive progression, he still feels like an unkept out-of-touch outsider on so many levels.

It’s a far fiercer portrait of spiritual conflict and crisis than I was expecting because Kirk Douglas makes Van Gogh burn with something — it’s not just some mundane sense of art and ideas — this is his entire being pushing back against a Christian society and clergymen who don’t understand what they preach.

They live by propriety and rules rather than the authentic humanity that they have been blessed with. However, in the same breath, Van Gogh’s a deeply flawed hero, and though he means well, he struggles with all sorts of ills.

At the same time he’s wildly passionate about love, desperately yearning for someone even when the other person is not drawn to him. It’s painful to witness. He also still kicks against the goads of societal convention. Because those around him deem Christian ministry to be a higher vocation than the common laborer or any tradesman or artist.

He takes a radical philosophy: There are many ways to serve, one man from the pulpit and another from a book or a painting. This is his vision, but he needs guidance and a benevolent mentor advises Van Gogh, “You need skill as well as heart.” About now Malcolm Gladwell might mention the great master gaining his 10,000 hours.

However, he’s still a deeply compassionate creature finding another soul at rock bottom and for a time they comfort one another though bitterness and disillusionment slowly finds their relationship souring. There are other crucial events in his life. The Impressionists Exhibition not only shakes up the art world, it flips his own paradigm upside down.

He lodges with Theo in Paris and brings his usual strife to bear. Later, he makes the acquaintance of Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn), an outsider of another kind. This and other inspirations lead to a frenzied output thereafter. One of the noted moments has Van Gogh slumped on a table with a mostly empty bottle. The camera pulls back and we see one of his most famous images before us: The Night Cafe.

I realized that although it serves Minnelli’s tendencies well, there is a literalism in the set design that is at once a simple way for recognition and also leaves little space for the colors inside of the painter himself to bleed into the world.

And yet by the same token, I recognize you could easily make the case that there is some form of empathy in all of this. Whether we realize it or not, perhaps Minnelli has colored the world as Van Gogh sees it and not the other way around. We are seeing his surroundings precisely as the painter does (or Minnelli as well).

I may be wrong, but if I have any conception of the man, it was not that he painted the world as it was in a physical sense. He saw the world like no one else with this fire and passion — this lust — and it was made wholly manifest in his paintings. Not just realism or impression but something more, alive with what only he could offer.

Although the picture begins with intriguing themes of religious faith and the struggles of uncompromised artistic vision, it does seem to boil over into a more simplified narrative of the troubled artist with psychological duress. It’s never able to consider all of its various strands as we watch Van Gogh capitulate.

Douglas’s performance is made by his usual tenacity — this innate weightiness he provides — whether entirely real or partially imagined. At its very best it matches our sense of Van Gogh and his art, not that this is realism or mere mimicry (though Douglas looks pretty convincing); it comes down to this very basic ability to exude passion. I’m not sure it is enough and most of the picture’s other characters are flat in comparison.

However, this too could very easily be by design. Theo is as good and decent a man as they come. Everyone else seems unable to understand Vincent. They can’t cope or appreciate his ardent vitality. Gauguin is closer and even their camaraderie turns into a feud. They come to represent a dichotomy between the artist bankrolled by his brother and the artist who must support himself to keep up with his work.

There’s too much spirit in Lust for Life to get totally hung up on any of its inadequacies as yet another Hollywood-style biopic. It moved me more than might be expected, and it’s easy to see Minnelli’s kinship with Van Gogh, both in their devotion to evocative mood and color and their personal vision as creative minds.

No one dashes splotches of color on a canvas like Van Gogh. It almost feels hurried and unkempt, but there is an unbridled ferocity and energy to them even as paint swirls around and the perspectives unnerve us.

Minnelli seems far more straightforward, and yet there are very few directors with such a prominent eye for all manner of tone and texture. When it comes to the canvas of cinema, he was a luminary in his own right.

I only wish we had gotten a bit more of the famed painter’s existential struggle, but then again, maybe the fact that we don’t know speaks volumes in itself. Because I am fascinated by what the artist Mako Fujimura christens the “mearcastapa.” These are the border-walkers of Beowulf, and he argues artists function much the same way in cultures.

Van Gogh was a man born into a Christian society, sincere in his pursuits, and yet never completely welcomed into the inner ring. Likewise, in the art world, his works along with those of Gauguin and Monet were scoffed at — tantamount to scandalous finger painting compared to the great masters of old.

But if Lust for Life doesn’t answer all the myriad of existential doubts floating around in Van Gogh’s legacy, it’s only necessary to look at his work for further elucidation. Fujimura pointed out something fascinating I had never fully considered. “Starry Night” is one of Van Gogh’s most prominent works, where the world and the terrestrial beings above seem to be untethered and totally erratic, and yet at the center of it all like a lightning rod to ground the whole painting is the spire of a church. It’s not about the building but what it comes to represent.

The painting moves me even more so because there’s this inherent sense that while Van Gogh lived within the chaos — of his own demons and personal struggles — he still had a manner of making sense of the world. It seems to me that this is the calling of artists regardless of color or creed. We seek out beauty and ask questions but we also try and find some semblance of order out of the entropy. Lust for life must be mediated by something greater than ourselves.

4/5 Stars

Vincente Minnelli’s Films (1946-1955)

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Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent hardly holds a substantial place in any noir conversations partially because Vincente Minnelli’s reputation in part seems antithetical to the dark style born out of chiaroscuro and German Expressionism. His background was squarely in luscious art design and stage productions.

Likewise, the combo of Katharine Hepburn and the two Roberts: Taylor and Mitchum, is not one that quickly springs to mind. However, there are some merits to it simply for the sake of it being different; not dramatically, these types of psychological women’s pictures were very much en vogue during the ’40s.

It’s the pieces assembled that feel unique if somewhat ill-suited. Still, the curious hybrid of tones and talents certainly is a historical curio more than intriguing to the invested party.

I almost have trouble buying Hepburn as a reticent, uncomfortable outsider among the D.C. elite her new husband Alan (Taylor) knows, a woman holding drinks in hand just waiting for someone to talk to. But if I don’t completely believe it, she does earn my empathy.

Mitchum, the legendary mule of RKO was simultaneously earmarked for 3 or 4 pictures at the time, and so he doesn’t show up in Undercurrent until much later. Still, he has the benefit of casting a Rebecca-like influence over the picture.

After an hour of building him up, we finally get sight of Mitchum, and we know where this story is going. Because he’s a real human being and fairly innocuous to the eye. As the presence of Mitchum begins to exert itself on the picture, the marital bliss of newlyweds grows more and more harrowing by the minute. We have a picture in the same vein as Suspicion and House on Telegraph Hill.

Despite choosing the part, the constraints of the role don’t feel totally in line with Hepburn’s talents. She isn’t a shrinking violet or the kind of timorous beauty befitting Joan Fontaine or even Ingrid Bergman. Robert Taylor is mostly adequate in the vengeful husband part. He flip-flops efficiently between these stints of gracious charm — a perfect husband and lover — then, becomes clouded by these perverse streaks of jealousy and rage.

3/5 Stars

The Pirate (1948)

It’s plain that The Pirate is born out of the traditions of the 1940s Hollywood lineage like Blood and Sand or Black Swan, even Gene Kelly’s own Three Musketeers. However, between the bright evocative staging of Vicente Minnelli and the instant performance-driven rapport of Garland and Kelly, it works quite splendidly with what it has to offer.

Today it doesn’t hold much of a reputation, and I would stop short of saying it’s a minor masterpiece. What we do have is a picture banking on the charisma of its leads and a certain pictorial opulence supplied by its primary mastermind.

Kelly, taking all the niñas of the town by storm, is full of allure and his usual magnetism as he twirls, leaps, and bounds between all the pretty girls. It’s all about the patter between the stars as he plays the foxy street performer, and Garland is the put-upon maiden who is betrothed to another man. His vocation gives the director license to use these elements of theatricality and faux drama to tell the story.

What do I mean? It could be a story of tragic, unrequited love. It might just as well be a tale of marauding pirates, and yet somehow, between the song and dance, it becomes a kind of tongue-in-cheek comedy of two lovers perfectly suited for one another being thrown together.

There are moments where Garland and Kelly seem to be playing in a separate movie, or at least they are in on the joke with the rest of us, even as they mess with each other. Trashing his apartment feels like the highest form of romantic tension only for the drama to become slightly heady again: Kelly is set to be hung as the dreaded pirate Macoco. Is it a first to have a musical number performed under a hangman’s noose? I’m not sure.

Thankfully, he gets some stellar support. While I’ll be the first to admit “Be a Clown” feels like a less funny prototype for “Make em Laugh,” if you’ve never seen the Nicholas Brothers, it’s a small recompense to see them join Gene Kelly and get some commendation in the spotlight as his momentary equals. It feels like a flawed but heartfelt apex to a picture that could be described in much the same terms.

3/5 Stars

Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary is the kind of trenchant literary work the Production Codes would go to all costs to declaw. In one manner, it’s somewhat remedied by James Mason’s framing by providing a mostly blase narrative device to enter the story.

Even as something leaner in budgeted black & white (one could hardly confuse The Pirate with Madame Bovary), it’s still the same Minnelli. The ball sequence spelling the ascension of Emma (Jennifer Jones) as a society darling, while somewhat compact, exudes an impressive opulence.

The director makes sure to follow Jones’s incandescent form as she prances and waltzes her way across the dance floor with great distinction. Her gown alone is enough to make the upper classes stand up and take note. The dashing Louis Jourdan is certainly more than aware of her. It’s totally taken up by the kind of swirling euphoria also holding a place in the oeuvre of Marcel Ophuls — Letter from an Unknown Woman and Earrings of Madame De…spring instantly to mind.

It becomes more and more of a gothic drama as things progress, overtaken by gales of wind, thunder, lightning, and an incessant downpour of rains to go with the equally tumultuous score of Miklos Roza.

However, more importantly, Emma becomes possessed by all of her own ambitions and preoccupations. She is emotionally distant from her husband (Van Heflin), absent from her child, and totally involved with other men. She entreats them to take her away from such a dreary life, constantly prone to these histrionic gestures of love and loss at the hands of her suitors and husband. They hardly know how to respond to her.

If the terminology was present at the time, she is cut out of the cloth of some kind of femme fatale, albeit born out of the annals of classic literature. Moreover, she is a woman who never seems to know what she truly wants. She sends out an array of mixed signals — living a life made up of so many contours and emotions — and never settling on anything honest.

It’s as if she’s fashioned a kind of fantasy life for herself woven out of her own personal whims though she remains self-destructive to the very last iota of her being. There’s something unnerving about her and Jones plays her as such; it’s easy to understand how society was scandalized by her because she does not live by societal norms. Mason’s concessions for her character aren’t enough to totally wipe out the harrowing impact of the performance.

3.5/5 Stars

The Cobweb (1955)

“What happens if you go into town to the movies? You start screaming or something? They’d think you’re a critic, that’s all.” – John Kerr as Steven

If it’s true you can make a screwball comedy like Easy Living (1937) about a fur coat falling from the sky, then it’s equally possible to make a portrait of psychological horror about drapes. The Cobweb busies itself with the vast array of interpersonal relationships taking place on the grounds of a psych ward. Richard Widmark does his best to aid his patients in their recoveries as he juggles familial and boardroom responsibilities. It’s no easy balancing act.

For a film that is mostly disregarded, it’s easy to clump it together with something like Executive Suite (also produced by John Houseman) with one of the most phenomenal assortments of players one could hope to cobble together during the golden era of Hollywood.

Lilian Gish is at her most ornery but lest we forget, she truly is the queen of the movies. Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall are equally crucial touchstones of film history, playing two respective love interests as Widmark struggles to connect with his wife, Gloria Grahame. Even ’30s scream queen, Fay Wray, has a brief appearance in a picture that boasts Oscar Levant and then the up-and-coming talents of John Kerr and Susan Strasberg.

In one scene with all the various folks blocked throughout the room, it’s almost difficult to distinguish who’s a patient and who’s not, but if we are to appreciate this drama, it doesn’t half matter. Widmark falls for another woman. Grahame flaunts her charms and goes looking for love from Boyer, who is now mentally compromised. Gish is incensed about having her opinions disregarded. Some of them are petty and others are stricken with loneliness and actual psychoses.

The palette becomes such an evocative way to color the emotional undercurrent and elements of suburban life, not unlike some of Nicholas Ray‘s work or something like Strangers When We Meet. The visual world is beautiful; still, it lets loose an environment full of pain and inner turmoil. Although Minnelli handles his characters deftly, there’s no place for the film to go but toward a hysterical fever pitch.

3.5/5 Stars

Hallelujah (1929): Daniel L. Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney

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Hallelujah (1929) is one of those films that takes some leg work in order to grapple with what it fully represents. But like some of King Vidor’s broadest, most humane portraits, it has moments pregnant with all sorts of residual meaning.

We begin with iconography that feels troublesome even as it feigns authenticity. Happy-go-lucky Blacks sing a joyful chorus of “Swanee River” as they labor in the cotton fields. We are still on the cusp of the sharecropping generation — Blacks who lived resolutely poor — where Jim Crow regulations prolonged the Antebellum-era oppression.

Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes) is a stout-hearted man with broad shoulders, who exudes a jovial spirit. Life is hard, but his family is close-knit, and they find ways to glean contentment out of every day. This is Vidor’s glorified nostalgia for the cotton fields and spirituals from his childhood.

It brings to mind an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography that frames these images quite differently. He says the following:

“I have often been utterly astonished since coming to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are unhappy. The songs of the slaves represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”

Later, Zeke is confronted with human urges; in one solitary moment, he’s overtaken by the devil, kissing a young Black woman as she plays the wedding march for the ceremony right outside. Far from simply being a warning peal of drama, it suggests an inherent predilection toward lust in the man’s heart. It has nothing to do with race, but the insinuations are clear.

Now it’s easy to cast King Vidor as another southern boy in the mold of D.W. Griffith and though Hallelujah feels a fair bit more palatable and life-giving than Birth of a Nation (that’s not too difficult), there’s no doubt it still caters to an archaic and paternalistic view of Black culture.

There is a Mammy character, and she sings the children to sleep, rocking away, after a long, hard day in the fields. Then, she gives her oldest grandchild a playful smack on the rear. He’s too big to be cradled in her arms.

The world is saturated, even inculcated by prayer and song because these are the sinews that keep families together in a harsh life of daily toil and systemic oppression. And yet the movie remains as an almost one-of-a-kind relic chock full of the kind of recorded history we can imbibe no other way. At the very least, Vidor’s intentions seem sincere.

However, we must also acknowledge Nina Mae McKinney, who became one of the pioneering Black film stars of the 1920s no matter how brief her time in the spotlight was. Her Chick is frisky and full of joy in the dance hall, but she’s also in cahoots with a gangster, duping drunks out of their hard-earned cash.

McKinney, a mere teenager during filming, lights up the screen in a way that feels incandescent, acting as a precursor to other musical talents like Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge — women who were only allowed a small amount of cultural currency in Hollywood’s landscape.

As she seduces Zeke, we come to realize, that it is from her role we get other saucy street tramps like Georgia Brown and Carmen Jones. Again, we must reckon with archetypes being propagated in front of us that were simultaneously groundbreaking and injurious.

With Zeke caught in a war over his soul and the casting off of his lusts, he gravitates back toward the church, devoting his life to becoming a preacher, and we are reminded of what a seminal force the Black Church and gospel music was and still remain.

When Zeke rides a donkey into a town for a religious revival, only to be accosted by two very familiar figures, the biblical imagery is not lost. No matter how besmirched he was in the past, his zealous transformation sculpts him into a Christ-like figure mocked by the sinners in his stead.

The latter half of the picture is enveloped by these scenes of euphoric, clamoring, overwhelming spiritual revival. What’s striking about them is how they don’t feel done up in a Hollywood fashion. They feel raw and real, where the music is organic and not merely a musical aside to spruce up a broader narrative. Otherwise, Hallelujah finds itself wallowing in morally inflected melodrama punctuated with quite the surprising chase scene through the muck and mire of a swamp.

Of course, it must settle back into its contented status quo brought about through the continued power of song and the lasting stability of the family. It is a happy ending, although for Blacks living and working in 1929, on the eve of the depression, you wonder if such a thing was even possible.

It’s not meant to be a judgment on anyone, but I do find it intriguing that for all the lasting stereotypes and any of the elements that might ruffle modern sensibilities, there’s something stirring about seeing these performers burgeoning with joy and emotion.

Mind you, it’s not something found in the construction of the plot. These are the made-up faux realities that stink with the stereotypes of the time. But when we’re able to get away from that, even momentarily, it feels like there’s still something lasting about Hallelujah because suddenly it becomes about irrepressible humanity — people, resolute and proud — and it’s not something foisted upon them for the sake of an audience.

There are moments in Vidor’s picture where his performers get to be vessels of dignity before sinking back into the dated rhythms of the narrative. For better and for worse, this film would beget many progeny and be one of the foremost purveyors of Black representation moving forward.

For that, it is a landmark and that’s not an entirely auspicious distinction. Movies like Green Pastures (1936) and Cabin in the Sky (1943) are built right out of this tradition making Black culture a sometimes overly simplistic amalgamation of religiosity and fervent song.

There seems no better place to end than with the words of the film’s mostly-forgotten star Daniel L. Haynes: “I cannot say what our race owes King Vidor and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — there are not words forceful enough for that. Hallelujah will, as Moses led his people from the wilderness, lead ours from the wilderness of misunderstanding and apathy.”

These words feel simultaneously deeply optimistic and effusive in their praise while underlining some of the lasting issues endemic to the film and the historical moment. We must deal with it all in kind.

3.5/5 Stars

Afire (2023): A German Summer Movie a la Rohmer

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Christian Petzold is a filmmaker I was introduced to over a decade ago, and I would consider myself a passionate fan. I’ve seen every one of his films since then, and I would gladly share him with anyone who might listen. There’s some pleasure in championing a director who’s not as much of a household name as one might hope. 

The other wonderful thing about Petzold is what an ardent cinephile he is, but he’s also quite loquacious and charismatic. Obviously, English is not his first language, but he always does wonderfully candid and thoughtful interviews all across the festival circuit. I can imagine he would be quite the person to grab a coffee with. He’s shared on multiple occasions how he crossed paths with Abbas Kiarostami in New York City under such circumstances. 

Forgive me for burying the lede, but I appreciated Afire because, like many of the director’s earlier films, it does feel like it’s deep in conversation with the vast annals of cinema. 

This one in particular feels like a paler, pudgier version of an Eric Rohmer movie. Something in the vein of La Collectionneuse, Pauline at the Beach, or even A Summer’s Tale. I felt vindicated hearing that Petzold was in fact consuming some Rohmer films during the pandemic, but that was only part of his inspiration. 

Reading an interview he cited a significant reference point for his latest effort in People on Sunday. It’s not a film I would have considered in a million years because it’s well, almost 100 years old. But in regard to this allusion, he makes a fascinating observation. 

Unlike Hollywood, Germany doesn’t have a lineage of summer movies about the last day of school or hanging out at the beach with no adult supervision. There’s also no Summer with Monica or Eric Rohmer. 

With men like Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak — all creative collaborators in People on Sunday, they were forced to leave Germany. And when they moved to Hollywood in the wake of the Nazi scourge, their work got harsher with the likes of Detour, Lost Weekend, and more film noir.

The summer had vanished not only from their filmographies but from Germany as a whole. The nation rarely got this opportunity with the ascension of the Nazis and this historical backdrop gave rise to many of the specters which have haunted most of Petzold’s oeuvre.

If you wanted to make a case, Afire is actually Petzold’s most comedic film to date and his closest to romantic comedy. Leon (Thomas Schubert) is staying at his friend Felix’s idyllic summer home out in the forest near the Baltic Sea. They think it’ll be a great place to get away: Leon needs to finish a manuscript and Felix (Langston Uibel) has an art portfolio to complete though he seems far more at ease and prepared to make the most of the tranquil surroundings. 

It starts out as the vacation from hell we might all be familiar with to different degrees. First, their car breaks down, they get lost taking a shortcut, and it looks like Leon might be stranded out at night in the forest with no cell signal. Felix goes off to make his way to the family cabin. 

Eventually, they get there. Except it turns out they won’t be alone. A co-worker’s daughter has set up shop; we don’t know for how long or why. We just know Leon’s plan for an uninterrupted getaway is catastrophically ruined. Strike two. 

The walls are thin and you can hear everything…It makes sleeping very hard and Leon’s even grouchier than he was before. The incessant bugs and the impending fires don’t do much to lighten the mood. 

Leon also seems genetically predisposed to be a moody, pretentious misanthrope of the first degree. Felix is good-natured and thoughtful. He would never think to impose himself on others or make a stink. It comes naturally to Leon. 

The camera takes on his surreptitious gaze which makes me uncomfortable as he spies on their housemate out in the yard before ever officially meeting her. Still, nothing he does can negate Paula Beer. In her work with Petzold, she always comes off as such a charming and intelligent performer who gives so much to the camera. 

Between her last film Undine where she played a modern-day mermaid, and Afire with its landscape ablaze, there’s this pervasive sense of the classical elements permeating the collaboration. It’s this lovely amalgamation of the deeply modern with the primordial. It makes one wonder where Petzold and Beer might go next. 

In the previous film, she was a docent focused on Berlin’s history of urban planning. Here Nadja works at an ice cream stand doling out flavors of “Smurf” sherbet. She’s disarmingly straightforward, cutting through any pretense. It makes her immediately attractive as a personality.

Whereas Leon’s a perpetual excuse machine. He never swims or takes anyone up on anything. He’s the kind of person you try to be nice to by inviting them to stuff even if you don’t want to, and then they decline so many times, you feel exasperated. They’re too blind to recognize you’re trying to do them a favor.  

Leon should be a lost cause, and yet even if we don’t particularly like him, we can empathize with him, and I think all his acquaintances in the movie make us appreciate him a little more. 

Later, at an open-air dinner, he lashes out at the rescue swimmer Devod. He feels like a stereotypical beefcake, and yet belies the image making Leon all the more uncomfortable. Because their new acquaintance was sleeping with Nadja, but he seems like a genuinely nice guy. These don’t have to be mutually exclusive. 

At first, Leon’s defensive about sharing his work; I recognize what a private and vulnerable thing it can be, and still, I wouldn’t give him that much credit. After Nadja asks to read Club Sandwich, he eventually relents. One suspects it becomes a mechanism to try and get closer to her and into her good graces — a way of covering his growing insecurities.

Leon’s also made a big deal of setting up time with his bespectacled editor (Matthias Brandt) to review his new work. He’s an older veteran, not unkind, but extremely busy. It turns out the full weekend they were meant to have together has been whittled down to one full day and some change. After Nadja invites Helmut to dinner, Leon grows jealous when it seems like everyone else gets a piece of him too. 

He takes great interest in Felix’s art portfolio – the one that Leon either didn’t get or totally disregarded. Then, Helmut trades poetry with Nadja; she recites her favorite poem, “The Asra.” It comes out she is working on a Ph.D. in Literature on Heinrich von Kleist’s The Earthquake in Chile (What she terms the “quake of representation”). 

Leon’s pettiness feels like a symptom of his own making. He knows Club Sandwich is crap. Nadja was honest enough to tell him as much. But he tried to dismiss her criticism; she’s only an ice cream seller. 

He never thought to ask her about what she might be studying. And now with the recognition that not only is this girl better looking than him but also perhaps smarter as well, it’s more than his fragile ego can take. 

Everyone else seems casual and comfortable, enjoying the throes of what summer has to offer. He’s the only one in obvious crisis, slowly imploding until the world around him joins in. 

The fire which was always hinted at continues to rage ever closer. Ash falls over their world like a ruinous dusting of snow. The boys go to tow their car with a tractor. Helmut starts to convulse on the lawn and Nadja takes charge to rush him to the hospital.

I noticed one particular jump cut in the editing involving Leon. He realizes he’s made a huge mistake; he’s been selfish and incapable of doing almost anything. What’s more, what will Nadja think of him? 

The raging conflagration brings with it human tragedy that strips away any remnant of sun-soaked vibes and focuses our story on its purest elements. As we should expect, it goes darker, but there’s another turn in the story. Our perspective changes subtly.

Nadja and Leon are called into the hospital again. There’s pensive voiceover narration to go with the images, and we realize intuitively even as the actions happen in front of us, somewhere in the present or future Leon is writing a new novel. 

I’m led to question if it’s still callous that he seems to be writing the story as the events seem to be happening or is it the most authentic thing he’s ever done? I’m not sure.

Later, he sees Nadja again from a distance. Some time has passed. We’d like to think he’s changed, and we know he’s wracked with guilt. Their eyes lock in recognition. Petzold cuts before there’s anything else, and it feels like the quintessential ending. We can fill in the rest with whatever we want.  

I’m still trying to get my feelings in order, but it delivered like Petzold always seems to. It’s deeply observed and engaging with its perceptive vision of humanity and interpersonal relationships. But what makes it richer comes with how the writer-director takes a simple premise and simultaneously imbues it with all this intertextual meaning. 

His references are not always overt, but couched within his stories are the echoes of his nation’s films as well as literature and mythologies – many of his projects over the years have been adaptations of much older work. In our current age of cursory knowledge and vapid fads, he’s a refreshingly thoughtful filmmaker. I’m still holding out for that coffee someday, preferably at Berlinale. 

4/5 Stars

Past Lives (2023)

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A version of this review was published on Film Inquiry.

I’ll admit that in our modern world and hyperactive lifestyles full of constant distractions and competing spectacles, I’m thankful I was able to watch Past Lives the old-fashioned way. I sat there in the dark with other strangers uninterrupted by the chaos of the day. It was an uneventful weekday after work with no baggage or preconceptions. And I sat there prepared to imbibe what it had to offer.

The movie is the epitome of contemplative, meditative cinema. In a different context, under different circumstances, I can see the spell of the movie being neutralized and the surrounding chaos. As is, I was met head-on by what it had to offer.

The opening scene almost feels like a mini Godfather moment a la Gordon Willis. The golden hue of the lighting, the camera slowly moving toward a subject in the foreground as voices offscreen speak so we can hear them. It’s a brilliant device to set up the scenario. A male and a female voice chat back and forth. They’re people watching from the opposite side of a bar as a Korean man, a Korean woman, and another white man sit together in quiet conversation. What a strange trio they make.

It’s true that in such moments there are so many stories you could draw up to try and justify the scenario. Celine Song takes an entire movie to explain it to us. The heart of her story opens with two young kids in South Korea. They’re competitive when it comes to their grades, always dueling between being 1st and 2nd in their class. Hae Sung makes Na Young cry by beating her out one day, but regardless, they always walk from school together. They haven’t quite figured out what romance is, but there’s a closeness between them. They’re fast friends.

However, when her dad decides to immigrate overseas, “Nora” must relinquish this friendship for whatever the future holds. In camera, we watch their diverging paths as they trudge their separate ways. She will go first to Canada, and then America to seek out her dream of winning the Nobel Prize. He will stay behind in Korea.

Song’s use of time is self-assured and brazen. She’s loose and elastic with it bravely allowing her story to cut 24 years into the past before fast-forwarding 12 years and then 12 years again. But these jumps in time feel subtle and right with the perfectly applied sense of space and context. We never feel like we’re being rushed. The elliptical nature of a single cut is imbued with so much power.

They reconnect by chance 12 years later, thanks to Facebook, and rekindle a friendship over Skype. This specific moment in time feels intentional. Long-distance friendships or even relationships are hampered by the shoddy technology. What we have now cannot totally replace in-person interaction — we all know that — but it’s lightyears ahead of what we had even 10 years ago.

Nora’s life is taking her into the literature circles of New York including a writer’s retreat for up-and-coming talent. He is attending a good school in Korea. They’re amazed to see each other: they’re changed and yet nothing has changed. If you’ve ever had a similar experience you know this paradox to be true.

Song conjures up this idea of In-Yun or destiny which infuses Korean culture and implies something between people in their past lives together. In modernity, it might only be utilized as a pickup line, but for sincere, starry-eyed lovers it might just carry some weight and lend a sense of comfort. Any interpersonal connection may apply.

There is a sense that Hae Sung and Nora are in their very specific orbits and they are not prepared to fight the inertia around them. Nora takes the first step and asks to stop their online rendezvous. It’s too painful to live in the uncertainty with little hope of change. She takes a leap of faith in her career meeting fellow writers with similar ambitions. One of them is named Arthur (John Magaro). Their orbits are leading them in the same direction and so eventually they get married.

Lying in bed together having one of those late-night conversations on the edge of consciousness Arthur asks her one of those what-if questions about where she ended up. She responds matter-of-factly, “This is my life.” She seems satisfied with that. Her husband admits something else to her. Sometimes he hears her talk in Korean while she’s sleeping. It’s heartbreaking to hear him admit that she dreams in a language he can’t understand…It’s not wrong nor does it mean they can’t make their way together, but it matters to him. Because he wants to know her intimately. It’s important to him.

I have issues with Lost in Translation, but there is something about that film that sticks with me — the loneliness and malaise — as much as the Tokyo streets I dearly love. As best as I can describe it Past Lives, is born out of this same tradition. There’s a delicacy and dignity to these people. It could bend so many directions — choose so many roads — and in the end, somehow it chooses the bravest one.

In another film, in another world, maybe in a past life, there could be a passionate love affair between two people who seemed to be destined to be together. These are the stories our culture seems to eat up because they make us feel good and vindicate our desires to live out our best lives — the lives that make us feel the most validated regardless of others. Or it could be a sordid melodrama where the Korean couple cross time and space and the white spouse is cast off like the cultural patriarchy readily pulling them apart. The movie wryly acknowledges this narrative trope. Of course, none of this is true.

Past Lives foregoes all of these ideas while simultaneously tapping into the longings many of us have deep in our hearts and still allowing them to play out in meaningful reality. It feels true and right, like things are meant to be. We can see this story occurring naturally with genuine people. And the emotions engendered feel beautiful.

Of course, 12 years after they broke off their internet relationship Hae Sung finally comes to the U.S. — to New York. Ostensibly it’s for some rest and relaxation, but everyone knows his only reason for being there is to see Na Young again. Their reunion is pregnant with all sorts of import, and they visit the Statue of Liberty together surrounded by a sea of couples. Just imagine how it is when he finally meets the man Greta ended up marrying. Uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe it. There’s so much more here.

I could write a whole exploration of code-switching and cross-cultural communication, international dialogue, and subtitles in film. However, I will only say Past Lives replicates the joys and genuine struggles of existing in this world in-between cultures and languages.

Greta Lee is such a phenomenal conduit of this drama, and she takes every scene with a self-assured composure full of warmth and feeling. Teo Yoo has a forthright candor morphing from a boyish heartthrob to a man still grappling with unresolved feelings.

John Magaro could easily be a whiny-voiced annoyance — the white evil of the movie — and yet it’s a credit to his humanity that we like him and even empathize with him (especially if we don’t speak Korean like this viewer). It’s almost like we’re there sitting at the bar in what feels like a private conversation that we don’t understand. It feels a bit awkward, but there can also be a connection there. If you will, it’s in-yun.

Nora cries at the end of the movie. Her husband takes her in his arms as they walk back up the steps to their apartment. The perceptiveness of this moment cannot be simply attributed or articulated. I don’t have the capacity to totally explain what emotions have come to the fore. All I know is that they are there. It’s perplexing, but in the way I like my movies to be.

In Lost in Translation, I’ll never know what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johannson. Here we’ll never know what could have happened or why she’s crying exactly. Maybe she doesn’t even know herself. But living out that ambiguity feels key and ultimately true to the human experience.

We’re always looking to discern what our future will be. Religious people question God’s plan for their lives. And often we have the nagging thoughts of what-ifs and how things could have been. Perhaps I’m the only one who thinks like this. But Past Lives seems to suggest this is not the case. I’m still mulling over the movie, but I’m glad I saw it. Hopefully, you will be too.

4.5/5 Stars

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Nevers, and Casablanca

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“Like you I know what it is to forget.”

Recently I’ve been meditating a lot on the impact of the atomic bombs in part because of the resurgence of the life and work of Robert Oppenheimer; he will be inextricably tied to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for posterity’s sake. Thanks to Alain Resnais’s film, Hiroshima and Nevers will always have a connection in the minds of cinephiles everywhere. 

Although I have walked the streets of Nagasaki and been to the memorial museum there, most of what I know of Hiroshima is gleaned from John Hersey’s journalistic account. The documentary footage from this film never ceases to scald my senses. I have to avert my gaze when the images grow harsher than any horror film imaginable. 

Hiroshima, Mon Amour gets much of its thematic resonance out of filming in Hiroshima itself because it comes with an abundance of inbred meaning; it will be ground zero of devastation and a beacon of peace for perpetuity now, ever since that day on August 6, 1945. 

This lays the groundwork for the film’s first half as we consider Hiroshima – the images primarily being juxtaposed with two bear bodies of a couple intertwined. 

It slaloms so effortlessly through time and space like few films before or after. Although as it progresses, the way the film and its characters are set adrift by the editing is increasingly unnerving. This in itself feels honest to where our characters find themselves. 

There’s something rhythmic, repetitive, and still poetic about their questions and responses conjured up by the voiceover penned by Marguerite Duras. It builds this contrast between the French actress filming an international movie in Hiroshima and the Japanese Architect that she’s having an affair with on-location. They only have one day together before time and space will pull them apart, potentially forever. 

In truth, once you know a little bit more about Resnais, it gets harder and harder to separate his film from this kind of relativism of the age where truth seems to be subjective and everything we seemed to take for granted before, from absolute truths to morals, seem to have totally eroded around us. 

Even with this perplexing development denoted by Resnais’s fairly oblique style, brought to even greater fruition in Last Year at Marienbad, it’s hard to discount the swaths of beauty in his film. And if it is mostly an agnostic film, one cannot totally dismiss this point of view in a world coming to terms with carnage and the brutality of the atomic bomb. Because this disillusionment does have an amount of warrant, arguably more than any other time in modern history. 

The movie becomes this roving portrait involving a want of intimacy and closeness in a world ravaged by so much pain and suffering. Is it any wonder that in the post-war years plagued with the atomic threat, the world hit its baby boom. Couples coming together to start their nuclear families as a balm to the hysteria in the world at home and abroad. 

They both say they are a happily married man and a happily married woman, but even this I read almost ironically seeing the connection they form. If they are culturally worlds apart, somehow they share in the same traumas of a post-war, post-atomic generation coming to terms with all that entails. 

He has the specter of Hiroshima to contend with and she was castigated for loving the enemy during wartime: imprisoned, her head shaved, while also seeing her lover die in her arms. They’re different experiences and still share something endemic to both their realities. Thus, they gladly share a real-world romance on the edge of the apocalypse as time is slipping away from them. For now, they have tangible passion and meaning that they can caress in their arms. 

There is a passage in the movie that felt reminiscent of the jaded pessimism of the ancient wisdom literature of Ecclesiastes: 

He: Maybe it’s possible for you to stay.
She: You know it’s not. Still more impossible than to leave.
He: A week
She: No.
He: Three days.
She: Time enough for what? To live from it? To die from it?
He: Time enough to know which.
She: That doesn’t exist. Neither time enough to live from it. Nor time enough to die from it. So I don’t give a damn.

There’s a fluidity to the night and their relationship as the clock ticks and they know they will be pulled apart. Eventually, they make their way to a late-night cafe called Casablanca. The name carries with it all these connotations: Rick & Illsa, “As Times Goes By,” “La Marseillaise,” and even bits of your favorite dialogue.

Of course, one of the finest remembrances is “We’ll always have Paris.” Nothing can strip these memories away from the Casablanca couple regardless of sacrifice. Somehow there’s something honest about Hiroshima, Mon Amour in that it recognizes all these things are transient – these memories of love will pass away. They are already dissipating, and not as eternal as we would like to believe. 

More and more I see the shared vision of Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte and Hiroshima, Mon Amour – finding their form as part documentary, part romantic treatise. It’s the blending of the two giving them body and making them sublime. 

Here the performers also work wonders. Emmanuelle Riva has the most vibrant eyes in the cinema. They are a delight to look at in the light of the camera both glassy and at times equally melancholy. It’s her film debut and you would never know it. She’s youthful and lithe, yes, but there is so much depth to her. Call it self-confidence with the prerequisite vulnerability. 

Eiji Okada seems ruggedly handsome, but not without the capacity for gentleness. It feels as if he’s experienced an entire lifetime during the war years which in part was true. The only reason he foregoes the horrors of Hiroshima is that he was off fighting in the war with the Imperial Army. 

I read that all his French dialogue was memorized phonetically and if that is the case, although I don’t always have an ear, it came together splendidly, never pulling me out of the story. It felt real and believable to have these two people relate in such a way. 

What’s more, as someone who grew up in a culturally mixed environment, Hiroshima, Mon Amour stands as a groundbreaking depiction of a couple who plow through the societal conventions of the times.

When I watch this film it’s about so much more than the bomb. On the surface, it’s about an illicit affair that cannot be, it’s about two people coping with the fallout of war, and one woman’s struggle to hold onto her memories and cling to the love that’s still there in her life before it evaporates before her. How she cannot forget this man in Hiroshima or that man in Nevers because they are tied to emotions and specific moments in time – times when she felt something.  

Somehow it parallels what the film itself represents. Because it is a document as much as a piece of art. It came out about 14 years after the bombs were dropped. Somehow still fresh and a minor lifetime away from the fallout. These people have living memories to contend with. 

Someone like me does not and so the film is as much about these character’s memories as it is the visual representation of the film itself so we might never forget what those places represent in the cry for universal peace. 

Watching it in a theater I could sense a level of perplexity in the air. It’s not an easy film. Not everything makes sense, and there’s some troubling conclusions that you can come to. Also, one earth-shattering slap in a cafe is hard to deal with. Still, in the wake of all of this, it’s hard to reject the moments of beauty present here. I don’t think this is a mere justification. 

Rather I watch a movie like Hiroshima, Mon Amour where not everything is summed up or painted in full. We must leave with the impressions, the maddening anti-literalism of the piece that has no point-for-point attributions we can easily plug in. Nothing comes out in a nice bow nor do we get a true emotional resolution. It just kind of hangs in the air for us to consider in full.

But sometimes this hard work when something is perplexing feels all the more worthwhile because it provides something worth going back to so we might cull for something new. I’m never going to understand every grain of this film, and that’s okay. 

The distinction is having something to fall back on. When memories fade and we forget and the world seems to be fragmenting around us, it helps to have some standard or reference point outside ourselves to mediate the chaos. 

Otherwise, what’s the point if there’s no time to live and no time to die? What hope is left in such a debilitating landscape? On top of that, there’s a bomb that might just easily blow us all to smithereens. We require something more. 

4.5/5 Stars

Oppenheimer (2023)

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Being a history aficionado I pored over American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, which provided the inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s latest film on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

So many ideas were swirling around my brain when I entered the theater, but the first is obvious and it’s where Nolan begins: In Greek mythology, Prometheus took fire from Zeus, gifted it to humanity, and then was castigated for it.

Obviously, it’s easy to cast Oppenheimer as one of the most important figures of the 20th century since he was the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” but he was also one of its greatest tragedies. There’s a scale and scope to this narrative woven right into the very fabric of history.

My other thought is a far more intimate detail but equally telling. Although he spent much of his time teaching at Berkeley and Cal Tech, Robert had a deep abiding love for the wide-open New Mexico territory where he kept a ranch and often went horseback riding. It was the first time I realized that Los Alamos and the outpost for the Manhattan Project was not some arbitrary place chosen by the government. It held such deep ties to who he was as a human being and what he held dear.

American Prometheus is a vivid and fascinating historical tome, but one can imagine the difficulties in adapting such a massive work. Nolan comes at it ferociously turning the historical details laid out before him, into something unequivocally cinematic.

A whole movie could be borne on Cillian Murphy’s face and it is. Between his vivid eyes, gaunt contour, the porkpie hat, and pipe, there’s something instantly iconic about him. He’s haunted and profound even before he says or does much of anything.

It’s dizzying watching Nolan develop the rich world around Oppenheimer packed with substance — a real world of real people and events we get to experience firsthand. This immediacy is key and although I’ve read the book, I don’t think you’re required to keep it in your back pocket.

The movie creates a complex constellation of relationships. These include important people in his life personally like Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and his future wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) or his intellectual heroes such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) living before us. I appreciated how we are thrown into his existence without true introductions or pretense.

He also punctuates the drama with mid to minor cameo parts taken on by notable actors like Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman, and Rami Malek. This punch of celebrity does yeoman’s work in creating recognition in his audience regardless of historical knowledge.

Oppenheimer’s early life comes whizzing by us with so many stimuli and swirling jumps in location and setting that it feels like the cross between a globetrotting action movie and the roaming panoramas of late-period Terrence Malick. Nolan trusts the audience and expects them to pick up the pieces.

What differentiates Nolan’s work from his source material partially comes down to the visual flourishes at his disposal but also the ingrained structure he uses to mold it to his own vision. He effectively creates a narrative tension between fusion and fission as denoted by the alternating scenes of color and black & white framed by the two contrasting hearings.

The director has noted Amadeus (1984) among his reference points for his latest project because it is a character study functioning in a kind of duality. Mozart’s exasperating genius is framed by the point of view of his rival Salieri. Albeit our “Mozart” feels far more sympathetic, and our “Salieri,” well, you must make up your own mind.

Nolan does something narratively brilliant by providing us Strauss’s perspective juxtaposed with our protagonist. Lewis Strauss was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s government clearance being stripped in 1954.

I read the book and despised Strauss as well as the prosecutor Robb (Jason Clarke) because of what they had done to Oppenheimer. But Nolan for a time strings me along even with this pre-existing knowledge so I begin to empathize and even get inside the interior life of this man. The doubts set in. Perhaps I misconstrued the facts as I remember them. He’s not all bad.

And yet when the vindictive pettiness that was there the whole time comes out again, it was somehow a shock and also an affirmation of everything I thought this man to be. Still, Nolan was able to encapsulate and still obfuscate this strange dynamic between these two men.

Robert Downey Jr. also must be given credit in a role that relies on his acting chops more than his wry charisma. I’m not always a fan of actors aging into roles like this, but I’m sure he’s going to surprise more than a few folks in the audience.

As the movie hurtles toward the apex of the Trinity test with the race against the Nazis at full tilt and Oppenheimer shouldering this massive project alongside General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), we all know innately where we are going. These moments speak for themselves. I wouldn’t dream of trying to distill this suspended moment in time with a few inadequate lines. You must contend with it yourself.

However, with all that happens in Oppenheimer, I’m still trying to figure out if the structure works exactly because we spike with the Trinity test and still must witness the hearings and Oppenheimer’s gradual martyrdom.

It certainly maintains a breakneck pace that kind of overwhelms you in a way that’s never boring. The lengths of scenes, the cross-cutting, and the non-linear jumps through time and space are probably the writer-directors greatest attributes.

Ultimately the meeting between Einstein and Oppenheimer that Strauss only caught the tail-end of becomes a kind of lynchpin moment plucked out of time. In some ways, it does feel like a continuation of Dunkirk and Nolan’s deep commitment to the manipulation of time. Chronologically this is relatively early in the story and yet he somehow builds it to be the beginning of the end exploding into our current modernity.

There they stand on Princeton’s campus together meeting again. Oppenheimer reminds his elder of his biggest fear: That the construction of the bomb would conceivably set off a chain reaction destroying the world.

“What of it?” Einstein asks.

Oppenheimer responds, “I believe we did.”

It’s a sobering ending as nuclear imagery engulfs the screen once more. Because as an audience in the 21st century, we must reckon with a changed future imparted to us by Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Although the atomic bomb didn’t actually blow up the world as some feared, it birthed a reality in the wake of The Cold War and McCarthyism hysteria we are still coming to terms with today.

The film feels more grotesque and shocking than I’m accustomed to in Nolan’s oeuvre or perhaps I just blocked out the grimmer corners of his work. He’s certainly not squeamish about the darkness.

When “Oppie” is beset by a gymnasium full of cheering people and the horrors building up around him or he faces interrogation and his intimate trysts with Jean Tatlock merge and all but play out for everyone to see, I was perplexed, even disturbed. I didn’t want this and I go so far as to say I didn’t need the explicit nature, though Nolan probably has his reasons.

I’m not sure if it can be hailed as his magnum opus, but in some ways, Nolan has done the unthinkable by making a potentially stodgy historical piece into a gripping blockbuster. In the age of superhero movies, studios have mostly assumed historical genres are dead. Likewise, by shaking up a prosaic biopic form, the director alights on something that’s narratively audacious even when it falters.

That’s why he’s remained one of our most beloved filmmakers over the last decades. He makes big movies for thinking people, and if nothing else, I hope Oppenheimer acts as a clarion call for more thoughtful tentpoles in the industry. The audience seems to be more than rewarding his efforts.

4/5 Stars