Charlie Wilson's War & I Am Legend

Charlie Wilson's War is how Aaron Sorkin would like America to see itself. Me, I just don't know—history feels too complicated for an hour and a half. (For an interesting alternative take, see here.) As mythology by which to understand our goals, however, America could do a lot worse. At least Sorkin does it better than Oliver Stone. Wilson's War has a lot of talent behind it, and it's entertaining and, I suppose, somewhat thought provoking. Let's kill some Reds!

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I Am Legend is how I like my religion—from the gut. Legend is apocalyptic in the biblical tradition. It turns out we're all going to be saved by the blood of a Christ-like Will Smith. (Jesus is Black!) Legend has more in common with M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, another genre bender religious product, than with a film like 28 Days Later, which was both more self-conscious and more aware of the limitations and potential of a genre that edges so close to farce. Nevertheless, Legend gets the job done with something close to economy and precision.

Atonement

The best of Hollywood studio product, and what's wrong with that? Atonement knows all the postmodern tricks: how to play with time, cinema within cinema, how to toy with narrative conventions and audience expectations, etc. These techniques aren't so new anymore, but here they click together well. The mixed ending, screenplay based on a book, and tricky camera work taste a little like watered down Stanley Kubrick, but Joe Wright's Atonement never has the bite of a Kubrick film, and it's never as good as good Kubrick. We can hope for more. People almost always gain money very easily in most Hollywood cinema, but Atonement departs from this in its extreme consciousness of class. James McAvoy looks good as the poor boy Robbie Turner, especially when he wears a little makeup, but I think I preferred him as the more scrappy Dr. Nicholas Garrigan in The Last King of Scotland. Kiera Knightly has never been better, nor more boyish. Surprisingly so-so as a date movie, though my girlfriend did hold my hand when I teared up.

My Favorite Trick of Cinema

Ahh .. The Castro Theatre. (Heart!) I like your movie palace style. I had an absolutely wonderful time with you when you showed a series of Charlie Chaplin films over the past few weeks. Let's do PFA at the Castro again soon. Love, Jesse.

Seeing Chaplin's films I'm always struck by the way he moves. It's telling that Edmund Wilson wrote a ballet for Chaplin (Chaplin declined, stating he only performed his own material), for few scenes in cinema history are more balletic than a bowler hatted Tramp skating backwards figure 8s inches away from a deadly fall off a precipice, but completely unaware of the danger, because he is blindfolded. Then, once the blindfold comes off and the Tramp sees the danger he is in, he becomes comically unable to skate, but Chaplin's inability to skate also looks like a kind of ballet. That scene comes from Modern Times, but a similar effect can be seen in Gold Rush, where the Tramp dances with forks stuck in potatoes to mimic feet. The Tramp could be an icon of pure performance. Though it is a little strange to call it art when Chaplin smiles and bats his eyes like an ingenue, such is cinema.

Physical comedy isn't wholly absent from modern cinema, but it is now typically linked to dialogue. The most direct examples I can think of are Steve Martin in The Jerk and John Belushi in Blues Brothers. Both dress funny and move funny, but while also talking funny. Chaplin did make dialogue films, mostly political satires that are never as consistently lyrical as the best of his silents, though many of them are important. In particular, The Great Dictator with its sometimes funny, sometimes deeply disturbing mélange of slapstick and fascism, is a white knight, a gesture against fascism and demagoguery that still affected the audience I saw it with.

Chaplin wasn't solely a kinesthetic genius (though plotting was never his strong point). He had a remarkable ability to delay a punch-line just long enough. Tragedy sometimes infused his work, allowing a glimpse into the underpinnings of his comedy. In Gold Rush, there's a memorable shot of the Tramp, forgotten by romance, outside in the cold snow, looking in at a New Years Party, literally and metaphorically an outsider. Chaplin could also be crass, like in Modern Times when the Tramp snorts cocaine, or, anticipating the work of Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, when the Tramp and a preacher's wife sit in a waiting room, both farting, in distress, and pretending not to notice anything amiss. Contrastingly, the Tramp was also a character who sought grace and elegance in an ugly world. In the short film Payday, the Tramp, late for work, hands his brutish forman a beautiful lily, as if that is all the explanation or justification his tardiness needs.

But the greatest thing Chaplin ever did was to allow artifice to push past itself. (This is my favorite trick of cinema.) That what's left mirrors our best desires doesn't diminish anything. In The Kid, the Tramp and the kid look out at the audience, their expressions wide-eyed and identical. In City Lights, virtue and kindness earn affection. The two wandering souls in Modern Times live by their wits, one step ahead of The Man, and, in the end, they have only each other.

No Country for Old Men & Margot at the Wedding

Not Joel and Ethan Coens' best film, but far from their worst, No Country for Old Men retreads the old noir ground. The Coen brothers have a strong sense of shot sequence rhythm, and they have the ear to leave some of Cormac McCarthy's dialogue intact. I hope Javier Bardem wins an Oscar for his performance as Anton Chigurh, the semi-immortal avatar of Death. No Country is most like a portrait of a desiccated landscape. This didn't seem to bother the couple who sat behind me—I know because they spent much of the film explaining the relatively simple plot to each other. The inevitability and randomness of death (or Chigurh as Death) and the alien ethics of sociopaths are displayed or mentioned again and again. These aren't exactly new themes for films rooted in noir. Blade Runner, for example—though that time the killing machine (hah!) was excellently played by Rutger Hauer, and the sociopath was Dr. Eldon Tyrell. Also, maybe, the sociopath was future society? Come to think of it, just like No Country, Blade Runner also had a taste for the nihilistic and an unresolved ending! No Country doesn't make many mistakes, and its self-conscious apocalyptic tone is somewhat fresh, but the Coen brothers are more innovative when they are more playful.

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Baumbach has made another film about problematic family dynamics. Margot at the Wedding is well acted: Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh are always good, and Jack Black draws authenticity and charm out of his role as a big baby who always wants to fuck his fiancé. Some moments in Margot are well scripted and well shot, but overall the film falls short. Just displaying a collection of flawed characters can't substitute for beauty of language, either spoken or visual.

The Idea

The Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson has never before been more surefooted in his technique than in The Darjeeling Limited. When appropriate, shots are long and smooth, and, when appropriate, the rhythm of images is staccato. Anderson's intricate, playful staging remains pleasantly over-stimulating. A long sequence with rooms as train cars, each traveling across the screen, is especially nice. But craft alone cannot create great art. If Darjeeling had come before Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, everyone would be calling Darjeeling the work of a brilliant new auteur. Because it came after those two well-loved films, most expected more.

Basically, Darjeeling needed more plot and more jokes. Sparsity in a film is not intrinsically weak, but I liked Rushmore and Tenenbaums because they were funny and they admirably accomplished fairly complicated plots; I just don't get the same feeling from Darjeeling. So very much happens in Rushmore and Tenenbaums, Darjeeling feels sort of decaffeinated. I suppose we must acknowledge the likely strong influence of Owen Wilson on the scripts of Rushmore and Tenenbaums, and I suspect Wilson of a few of the rare clever, darkly funny lines in Darjeeling. Let's hope Wilson can overcome his very public tribulations and co-write another film with Anderson, because Anderson doesn't seem to be able to productively co-write with every writer. His vision is distinctive enough that this is hardly surprising. Anderson plus Noah Baumbach (whose most successful movies are based heavily on personal experience and have little of the extended fantasy I associate with Anderson) led to the lifeless The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson plus Roman Coppola plus Jason Schwartzman doesn't seem to add up either. Interestingly, for such a distinctive filmmaker, Anderson's dependence on co-scriptwriters indicates that a description of Anderson as an auteur in the manner of Woody Allen or Ingmar Bergman is not precise. We should probably not demand that those who want to be great directors write their own scripts. A movie is a very big project, and I fail to see how collaboration necessarily lessens artistic value.

It's always so apparent to critics why films work and why they don't. A familiar critique of Anderson's filmmaking could be termed the Dollhouse Criticism—that Anderson can't escape his own intricate little world. But, much of what propels Darjeeling is self-conscious cinematic artifice, and dislike of artifice is dislike of Anderson (and many other filmmakers). To discourage Anderson in this regard is to warn him away from one of his great strengths as a filmmaker. Another common criticism is that of obvious metaphors—bandages for emotional damage, luggage for emotional luggage, train travel for travel through life, etc. But, everything just seems too beautifully shot for the obviousness of these metaphors to be detractory. Jonah Weiner claims that Anderson's movies frequently mishandle race (http://www.slate.com/id/2174828/). I always feel like I'm in on quicksand in any discussion of race, but I would say that Inez in Bottle Rocket, Henry Sherman in Tenenbaums (who, in the end, gets the girl), and Rita in Darjeeling all seem like the most rational characters in their respective films, the only people with their heads on straight, and I don't see them as negative (or even stereotypical) representations of a racial group. I would prefer a critical attack on the, to my view, racist Gone with the Wind, which was number four on AFI's 1998 list of the hundred best American movies. Where are all the exciting young non-white or non-male American filmmakers? Examples are relatively sparse.

An Indian child dies suddenly in Darjeeling. It happens, I think, the way such things actually happen—all of a sudden, and just after something wrong has been said. I found this portion of the film moving. I'm one of three brothers, which may explain part of my response. Or, in my cynical mode, I might view Darjeeling as designed to push certain socio-cultural buttons on me. Darjeeling has the right kind of music, the right look, the right kind of humor, the right actors, etc., all adding up to what a SF slacker in his mid-20's would like. In other words, as a member of what is almost certainly the films target audience, I'm not sure how objective I am in my pleasurable response to Darjeeling, and to Anderson in general. No less a critic than Pauline Kael makes a similar claim about youth who view The Graduate as Art in Trash, Art, and the Movies (collected in Going Steady, on pg. 127). I take this point. But, if I only wanted to do objective analysis, I'd still be studying Mathematics. If I'm going to write about films, I can only do the film writing I would do. Nothing else is worth anyone's time.