Month: January 2008

On DVD.

No one knows quite what to do with the Western these days. Maybe the genre has just gone out of fashion, maybe it became too riddled with clichés, maybe movie-goers love CGI too much to appreciate a nineteenth-century action flick, but I suspect the core problem is that the classic Western is a fairy tale: the violent, lawless wilderness breached by the noble forces of civilization. Those stark black-and-white morals—conveyed literally with the iconic black and white hats—seem archaic now, not necessarily because of the rigid ethical dichotomy but because this particular metaphor is obsolete. We’re uncomfortable demonizing the American Indian (as we should be), we tend to romanticize the untamed wilderness, and we know too much about how the West was won to celebrate that victory without some reservation.

The romance of the Western can be charming, yes, but it’s a musty charm, even in most contemporary examples of the genre, and 3:10 to Yuma is one of that majority. Despite the fresh acting, smooth direction, and Deadwood-esque profanities, it still feels very much like what it is: a remake of a fifty-year-old movie, a lovingly preserved museum piece.

In theaters.

I have loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies for years. I admire the cinematic artistry and the gorgeous thematic arcs and the finely drawn characters, but what I love most is the profoundly empathetic quality of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love. Anderson has a remarkable ability to take characters we might otherwise dismiss with a sneer—a dim-witted porn star, a drug-addled but repentant gold digger, a painfully shy man with anger management issues—and create clear-eyed but exquisitely human portraits, quietly insisting that we see shades of ourselves in them. There is nothing cynical or cruel about the stories Anderson tells. The honesty, patience, and tenderness of his films move me each time I see them.

So I don’t know quite what to do with There Will Be Blood, Anderson’s latest. It has all those great aesthetic and artistic qualities: long dramatic tracking shots, brilliant lighting, striking use of music. The arc of the movie, with Daniel Day-Lewis’s intense performance in the central role, is beautifully wrought, not a simple rise-and-fall storyline but something more interesting and muddy. But There Will Be Blood is also much colder than I expect from Anderson, and that saddens me. Without the warmth of his previous films, Blood left me impressed and intrigued but unmoved.

In theaters.

Watching the movie, I felt unsettled, crushed, dismayed, stung, battered—and completely bewildered that it was not a horror flick but an ostensibly life-affirming film that was so brutally wringing me dry. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is absolutely beautiful to see, an astonishing cinematographic vision of light and color and breathtaking imagery, but that artistry is in service to an emotional bludgeon of a movie.

In theaters.

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel/memoir of growing up in revolutionary Iran is interesting in its contradictions. Part of the appeal, for Western readers, is how identifiable young Marjane is, with her love of Bruce Lee and Iron Maiden and other icons of American pop culture. She’s a normal, impish little kid. We feel we know her. Yet a central theme of the memoir, particularly the second volume, is how Marjane herself doesn’t feel as integrated in our culture as we imagine her. Attending school in Europe, she feels isolated, the classic stranger in a strange land. She detests our tendency to see her as “exotic.” She resists our inclination to adopt her. Marjane’s coming-of-age story is largely about coming to terms with her identity as someone apart from us.

The film adaptation of Satrapi’s memoir (written and directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Satrapi herself) preserves that conflicted push-pull quality and virtually everything else about the acclaimed work, from Marjane’s distinct voice to the episodic storytelling to the almost cartoonishly simple black-and-white aesthetic. The result is idiosyncratic but powerful, a reminder of just how versatile and compelling animation can be.

In theaters.

The score of Atonement haunts me. Its theme—romantic but foreboding, emotional but restrained—is undergirded throughout by the percussive beat of a typewriter: keys clicking, typebars striking paper, carriage shuttling home. At first, the effect might seem mannered, even over-literal, but it sets a mood of disquiet, and as the film unfolds, its meaning becomes apparent.

That orchestration is beautifully characteristic of the movie’s artistry. The aesthetic choices often call attention to themselves—we notice the painterly framing, the slippery sense of perspective, the evocative set pieces—but none of those choices is arbitrary, existing solely for its own sake. Rather, each lends itself to the storytelling to create a strikingly cinematic realization of novelist Ian McEwan’s literary prowess.