Month: March 2009

In repertory at Film Forum through March 31.

Z is forty years old, but it could have been made yesterday, assuming the filmmakers could acquire financing for their bitingly leftist, disillusioned, yet gripping thriller. The direction—briskly paced and versatile, shifting between documentary-like realism and more subjective flashbacks and ramping up toward its climax with rhythmic drive—feels effortlessly contemporary. But even more than the aesthetics, the subject matter of Z resonates all too well with the present day.

Based on a novel that dramatizes the 1963 assassination of a Greek anti-war leader, the movie could have relied simply on paranoia and knee-jerk cynicism to fuel suspense, but it’s smarter and more thoughtful than that. We see, from the outset, who kills the Deputy—there’s no mystery there—so the tension comes from the way the film gradually pulls back to reveal the infinitely more interesting hows and whys and then whats. With blistering insights into the psychology of cover-ups, the manipulation of political foot soldiers, the dangers and limitations of ideology, and the moral compromises of political action on both left and right, Z easily transcends the 1960s. It’s not a museum piece; it’s timeless.

In theaters.

Spotting movies that completely abandon their source material is easy. The characters have different attributes, different motivations, different personalities; the plot veers wildly off course; and the ending bears no resemblance to the original. Trickier, though, are those movies that carefully hold to characterization and plot and yet feel somehow … off.

Watchmen is the latter. The adaptation hews so closely to the landmark graphic novel that much dialogue has been lifted directly from the source and some scenes appear to have used the novel’s illustrations as a storyboard. Aside from a few elisions and a minor modification of the climax (which, frankly, is an effective choice), director Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is scrupulously faithful. And yet, I have misgivings about the adaptation. I wish I could point to something concrete—distorted characters, mangled plots—but nothing so obvious is wrong. The problems are in tone and attitude, elements so amorphous that you could argue that the difference is merely one of interpretation—and you would be right. But with a layered, complex work such as Watchmen, interpretation is all that matters, and if that twists the wrong way, faithful adherence to raw plot points is almost beside the point.

In repertory at Film Forum through March 12.

As femmes fatales go, Ellen Berent is rather pitiful. She’s charming and seductive and ultimately murderous, yes, but she has the foresight and impulse control of a six-year-old. Her extreme immaturity gives a different spin to a familiar archetype (aren’t such femmes usually coolly calculating and shrewd?), but it also dooms Leave Her to Heaven to giggle-inducing melodrama (with the notable exception of one genuinely chilling scene). Ellen is simply too childish and incompetent to take seriously as a villain, and by extension, those taken in by her transparent scheming and infantile tantrums are also impossible to take seriously. The histrionics are fun in a campy sort of way—particularly the bizarre climactic court scene, in which Vincent Price chews the scenery to a fine pulp—but the movie still feels rather slight. Over-the-top Electra complexes are less interesting than you might think.