 1) It's relatively easy to come up with a plausible scenario for a movie. We're great at complicating things. It's much much harder to create an ending to match. The list of movies that concoct a fascinating scenario in the first hour but flame out in the last forty-five minutes is very very long.
2) Child actors are like poetry. Some are just watchable, most are boring, but when they're good, they're often incredible. 3) Justine Triet's French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall does two things many movies struggle to do. One, it builds a complex, riveting plot and follows through with an ending to match, and two, it delivers that ending via a superb performance from a child actor, Milo Machado-Graner. The movie does, of course, also lean on excellent lead actors, notably Sandra Hüller, as well as crisp directing from Triet, and even an extended instrumental version of 50 Cent's P.I.M.P., but props to both the scriptwriters and to the exceptionalism of Machado-Graner, without which the movie, however lofty and tense the setup, doesn't land.
0 Comments
 I was well into my thirties by the time I truly discovered the horror and impact of World War I. A pointless conflict catalyzed by royal feuding and overconfident generals, it in no way deserves the moniker “The Great War”, and definitely shouldn’t be reduced to a footnote in the leadup to its more illustrious brother. But, like the Civil War, once you get hooked, you’re hooked. Accompanying the best of the history books (Barbara Tuchman’s superb The Guns of August was my entry point) was Pat Barker’s fictional Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995). Sometimes when I read or watch a movie about war, the glorification of it compels me to think, Sign me up!, and I know that if a book or movie makes me want to go to war, then the book or movie probably wasn’t realistic enough (like Band of Brothers, both the book and the miniseries). After reading Pat Barker, however, my thoughts were more, Thank goodness I haven’t had to be a part of something like that, a testament to the realism of the trauma that Barker depicts. Much of her other work is worth checking out too.
 "Of all meditations, death is the greatest." Supposedly the Buddha said this. Whether or not that's true, we can still work with the statement. I turned forty this year, and it wasn't without self-reckoning. The expected lifespan of an American male in 2023 was 75.6 years. If I'm lucky enough to reach that figure, I'm already a little past the halfway point of my life. What's (potentially) left? So much. What's already passed? For one, the idea of a future with no borders. Confronting the finiteness of a life is a task far too expansive and deep to fit into a blog post (or anywhere), but that's not the point of writing this. The point of writing this is to commend Paolo Sorrentino's 2015 gem Youth, which, through the assured and measured performances of Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, and the appropriately experimental cinematic brushstrokes from Sorrentino, explores the loss of what one has lived for, which is the same as dying, even if you're still alive. Sorrentino is no stranger to death and variations of, both in his personal life (he became an orphan at 16) and in his art (he directed The Great Beauty), but even if he was, Caine and Keitel, both well into their 70s at the time of shooting, bring the gravitas necessary to make this kind of film work (Caine's and Keitel's characters seemed to have lived mostly for women and art at the expense of much else, but still). It's the kind of movie I would've yawned my way through at 25, when I assumed the future was wide enough for everything I wanted to do with it, but the kind of movie I can't wait to rewatch at 40, when the movie's meditations on death, both subtle and overt, ring with that bittersweet chord of letting go.
 As a big fan of hefty, minutely-detailed, well-researched biographies, I approach fictional portrayals of historical figures with skepticism. It’s very difficult, or so I think, to realistically fictionalize real people whose real life stories we know by heart. (I get the idea of “humanizing” our heroes, but our heroes are our heroes because they were somehow more than human. Or maybe I just want to keep seeing them that way.) Some directors rightfully don’t even try. Props to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, for instance, for not making Michael Jordan a character in Air; they only briefly showed the back of his head. Props also to the right director/actor combo, who can sometimes nail it (Denzel Washington as Malcolm X) or get close enough (Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace). But most of the time talented actors playing everyday legends make us cringe. Michael Douglass as Franklin, Paul Giamatti as John Adams, Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, or any movie about the Civil War, to name just a few. Even Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln came up short, hence my skepticism when I picked up Gore Vidal’s literary attempt to turn our 16th president into a character. And yet, kudos, Mr. Vidal. I felt the same feelings reading the novel that I get when I follow Lincoln's life in a factual biography, the sense that, wow, here's a real person and this actually happened. Vidal relied almost exclusively on primary sources to craft his story, including dialogue, and it shows. Reading his book was like watching an exclusive behind-the-scenes documentary, and everyone’s there: Lincoln, his family, his secretaries, his cabinet, Wilkes Booth and his conspirators, the Spragues, even that rascal Roscoe Conkling. Hail to the chief, and hail to one of the greatest historical fiction writers ever.
 Although I like to think I can appreciate good writing wherever I may find it, I tend to shy away from fantasy, and I similarly have trouble with child protagonists. But then I’ll read something like Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky, which features two child protagonists talking to animals and casting witchy spells. The first hundred or so pages were magical, in that the reader felt their head in the clouds but their feet still firmly rooted in the earth, and a third of the way in I found myself wondering if this might not be one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. Then Part II began, however, and the child protagonists have grown into adults, and the plot turns into a readable sort of chaos, with global wars and big metaphors and lots of world-building, and although Anders does an okay job keeping her ducks in a row, the literary magic is lost, and the book becomes a book that you keep reading to find out how it ends. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still a solid book. I just wish she would’ve kept it contained.
 One summer afternoon, I took a walk around Richmond’s VMFA. I lingered in the Impressionist gallery and read up on Renoir’s Day Dreaming, which was supposedly a big deal at the time because Renoir deliberately painted the model facing away from the viewer. Renoir, in other words, sought a reaction. I consequently wondered what “reactionary” means today, because today, it feels like, an artist can do pretty much anything they want. Just a few hours after visiting the VMFA, however, I watched Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, and I had an answer. The film does a lot that other films do too - realistic characters; dramatic plot points suggested but not followed; lots of the best kind of subtlety; no wasted scenes; moments that wrenched the heart without needing to be overt about it; and incredible acting, including from a first-time child actor. Wells names her influences (Margaret Tait), but I’ve never seen a movie quite like it. She stirred a new kind of reaction in me. Aftersun offers an intangible “feel”, raw yet contained, notably by using unorthodox shots that in the wrong hands could go very wrong. Although she freely uses golden hour lighting, not every shot is meant to be pretty, at least not conventionally so. Many shots hit the screen jagged and broken, but they flow into the tone of the film, and the overall output will shake you up.
 E.M. Forster first entered my consciousness when I heard Jonathan Franzen recommend him at a book festival, and I continue to appreciate the nudge. Perhaps no author writes with such a powerful combination of astuteness and restraint. His worlds and words endure. Anytime I meet someone with the last name Moore, for instance, I think of the group of Indians outside the courthouse chanting “ess missus Moore, ess missus Moore”, as they do in his all-time classic A Passage to India. A Room With A View and Howard's End also hold up as masterpieces. It’s an impossible task, but should someone force a selection, I would hear arguments as to why E.M. Forster is the greatest English-language novelist of all time.
 Literary people love to talk about an author’s “voice”. I get what they’re saying; sometimes you pick up a book and read a few pages and you know without looking at the cover who’s written it. But I don’t always think certain authors’ voices are as distinctive as we like to make them out to be. With a nod to the true originals, authors are more alike than we like to admit. Exceptions still exist, of course, including, now, Miranda July. I’ve read a lot of books, and Miranda July’s voice is one of one. It’s not her sentence construction that sets her apart; many authors write the same succinct, tight prose, but rather the angles in which she approaches her content. She first demonstrated this via her debut, a short story collection called Nobody Belongs Here More Than You, and she worked out the kinks in her underwhelming first novel, The First Bad Man, and it all comes together with July’s second and most recent novel, All Fours. In it, she covers aging, desire, and creativity, nothing new, but we encounter those subjects as if given a special pair of glasses we’ve never worn before. Or, maybe we all keep a pair of those glasses in a secret drawer; we’re just hesitant to wear them. Thankfully, July isn’t, and in All Fours she shows us what we’d see if we did.
|
More, pleaseYou create what you consume. Find here a collection of thoughts on the books and movies that shape me. Archives
October 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed