Not knowing a lot about Buck before I walked into the theater, I sat down assuming I was about to witness the inspirational tale of a “horse whisperer.” The story of Buck Brannaman is one that lends itself to such Hollywood sensationalism, ripe for reimagining as a feel-good family flick. But this spin isn’t something I imagine Buck himself endorsing. A staid-but-pleasant stand-up guy, Buck isn’t here to make magic, and you’re not going to catch any symphonic swell when he mounts a horse. His job is to show people how they’re failing to communicate with their animals. While that may sound pragmatic enough, Buck finds a grandeur of its own in its reflections on growth, connection, and redemption. By rethinking the way we approach animal training, we are forced to confront the ways in which we, too, have been “trained”– and the choices we can still make in the wake of our conditioning.
Director Cindy Meehl and editor Toby Shimin make Buck essentially the cinematic incarnation of Brannaman himself. Spending 90 minutes in the theater with this documentary feels a whole lot like a day at the ranch, which is a novel experience indeed for the average art house moviegoer. The film can be lovely, humane, unassuming, and occasionally a bit dull– all traits of the man in question. Meehl effectively strikes a balance between the transcendent and the mundane to evoke the spirit of life in the country, and specifically life with horses. The animals are photographed beautifully: sweat shimmering on hides, muscles surging, dust kicked up amidst crisp sunlight and grasses. But most of the time we’re just following Brannaman, whether he’s dispensing revelatory advice to a crowd or logging hours in the truck between towns.
Oh Simple Thing Dir. Stephen J. Anderson, Don Hall 2011
The advertising campaign for Disney's new Winnie the Pooh film is genius. I am convinced it was devised by a pack of hip interns-- who else would think it was a good idea to use the melancholy soft-rock of Keane in a trailer for a children's film? But as the chords of "Somewhere Only We Know" start to pound over the image of Pooh and Friends marching across a bridge, it hits you right in the gut-- or at least it's supposed to. "Admit it," we are beckoned by the television spots (in Helvetica, no less!). "You miss them." Oh, how you know us, hip Disney interns! Winnie the Pooh knows it will not be able to grab today's ADHD children in a twenty second commercial, with its soft coloring and mild manners. No, instead it aims upward, at literate young parents desperate to instill a sense of taste in their children, children buffeted every day by the frenzied snark of sugar cereal ads. "Oh simple thing, where have you gone," goes the song, played over glimpses of the Hundred Acre Wood. "I'm getting old and I need something to rely on."
While this Winnie the Pooh seems to be something of a "reboot" of the series, it's not as if the bear has been on hiatus. We may associate Pooh's pop culture presence with the Disney films of the sixties and seventies, but he has also had a syndicated series through the nineties, several theatrical and DVD releases in the last decade, and untold volumes of merchandise hawked in Disney's parks. Pooh, as an idea, never really went away. But as the franchise edged closer to irrelevance, it seemed to get more desperate-- the characters became ever more bright and plastic, culminating in the sacrilege of a computer-animated series on Playhouse Disney made to ape the likes of "Dora the Explorer." In this light, Winnie the Pooh functions as a reclaiming of the series, a decided stand against the hyper devolution of children's entertainment.
Start Something Written and Directed by Mike Mills 2011
"You don't know me. I like that." So says the She of Beginners to the He, on one of those floating walks that fill up the start of a relationship. She's teasing him, but we know it's more than a bit of banter-- it's an attitude that can easily turn into a way of life. Beginners is at once an ode to this sentiment and a critique of it, equally at home in the giggles and piggyback rides of early love and in the unbearable looks at a person you know you are supposed to understand but do not. The film takes us inside that curious rush of hope and mystery that comes with a beginning, but it follows those firsts shoots further into maturity than most romances would dare.
The title of this film makes it easy to pre-judge it: oh, look, another cute indie drama where people fumble into relationships and find out life is sad and beautiful and complicated, because, you know, we are all beginners, etc., etc. And that assessment isn't entirely off-- Beginners is indeed a stylized relationship drama that adheres to the 21st century aesthetic of quirk. But writer/director Mike Mills' strength is in his sense of arrangement, of context. He elevates what could be trite hipster sentimentality into a fully-realized human portrait by giving us a life in patchwork, sewing together sharp little bits of past and present. This is not a film about beginners as people who are "just waking up," people whose lives prior to the film's plot must have been an unimaginably dull morass (Garden State, anyone?). The beginners of Mill's film have been at the business of life for a while. The circumstances that befall them in Beginners are not earth-shattering. They simply push the characters to look at themselves and this moment within the narrative of their lives, and to say, yes, this is important, and yes, I'm going to start something.
(This review originally published at Filmwell, a blog of The Other Journal.)
La Belle Époque Written and Directed by Woody Allen 2011 (Spoilers Aplenty!)
Midnight in Paris: the title slides in one ear and out the other, the words worn down to wisps of meaning. Juxtaposing them is almost a joke-- for what two words have borne the weight of greater romantic cliché? But wouldn't you know that Woody Allen's newest film brings both "midnight" and "Paris" back to glittering life, the images repossessed of the magic they once evoked. Midnight in Paris is a film with its brain on and its heart wide open, self-aware and swoony at once. Amid the sprightly proceedings, Allen reveals a shocking optimism that dares us to find the charm inside our lives, with just a sprinkling of experience to give it savor.
Hollywood screenwriter Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is in Paris, which is just about heaven by his standards. His well-bred fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), has different tastes, her sights set on a life of massages and social climbing in Malibu. The two are tagging along on her father's business trip, and while Inez is intent on spending time brunching, wedding-planning, and entertaining the company of a smug fellow vacationer, Gil is trying to refine the manuscript of his novel. For Gil, Paris is the antidote to soul-sucking Hollywood, an emblem of romance and culture and everything writerly. Inez tells him he's in love with a fantasy, and we might be inclined to believe her-- until that very fantasy springs to life before our eyes.
Job in Suburbia Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen Writ. Joel and Ethan Coen 2009
“When the truth is found to be lies And all the hope inside you dies Don't you want somebody to love?…”
This strain of jangling 60’s rock from Jefferson Airplane echoes through “A Serious Man” like a witch’s prophesy, its simple rhyme rattling in the turntable, an omen of unrest and desperation. Its foil, a lonely, mellifluous Hebrew hymn, provides the sole other musical backdrop in the Coen brothers’ achingly uncomfortable ode to Jewish manhood. The one is raucous, the other meditative; together they express the alternating tantrum and resignation of a man coming face to ugly face with life.
Larry Gopnik, the “serious man” in question, is just trying to live a virtuous life. He has actively averted a midlife crisis and is about to be rewarded with tenure as a physics professor. That’s not to say his life is perfect—his children whine constantly, his brother bums in his living room, and his wife cites marriage problems—but there is nothing grave enough to upset the essential balance of his 1960’s Jewish-American middle class home. Until there is. One by one, crises rear their heads in Larry’s placid life: his student is trying to bribe him. Someone is lodging complaints against him to the tenure committee. His wife wants a ritual divorce. What begins with a simple bad Monday evolves into a bona fide series of calamities that bring Larry to the brink, forcing him finally to seek answers from the rabbis in his synagogue.
Title slides divide the film into three acts, named for each of the rabbis that Larry visits on his quest for understanding. With each visit, Larry confronts further disillusionment with the world that is unfolding before him, and diminishing resources to help him cope. Hoping to tap into a wealth of ancient wisdom, he meets with inane platitudes that do nothing to scratch his philosophical itch. “If there are no answers, then why does God give us the questions?” As the film delves deeper and deeper into a well of unanswered pain, the depiction is by turns absurdist and disturbingly realistic. It’s an ode to and apology for modern Jewish-nihilist angst, a dark comedy with strong emphasis on the adjective.
It’s not that it isn’t funny; there are brilliant (but mostly subtle) jokes, especially with regard to Sy Ableman, who is like John Cusack’s nemesis from “High Fidelity” shot through with an incredibly grating sense of shalom. But the humor is dried by the arid sun of the setting and cinematography. Hazy suburban hell is nothing new to film (Donnie Darko, American Beauty), but the Coens marry style to philosophical substance particularly well. And they’ve got more cinematic tricks than that up their sleeves. The frequent dream scenes manage accomplish several goals that evade most filmmakers: a) they evoke actual dreaming, b) they illustrate moral and psychological issues without force-feeding, and c) they genuinely trick us. The same goes for the point-of-view camerawork. While often a gimmick, the directors use shifting perspectives to get the audience inside the heads of characters that we might otherwise dismiss as simply pitiful. The murky marijuana camera filter could be annoying, but instead, it feels accurate, even necessary; we feel the same need to numb and escape as the characters do. The construction of the film, the beams that support it, are masterful and spare. The dialogue is genuine and short, distinctly Jewish without caricature, revealing without excess cleverness. Our protagonist is a kind of everyman, but Michael Stuhlbarg’s performance is quite personal, with a touch of idiosyncrasy. His face elicits immediate sympathy, dynamic and quiet at once. The characters that surround the hero are not psychologically developed, but they need not be. They are not people, per se; they are figures in the tableaus of the Coens’ amorality play, and as such, they function beautifully, each a unique cog in the undoing of Larry Gopnik. While almost like theater, at least in concept, the execution is intensely filmic, filled with mundane details of wind through trees, pencils on paper, static on a record. These moments constantly ground the film in reality, rather than indulging the tendency to see the story as a tragic fantasy.
Though the Coens would identify themselves as mere storytellers and not philosophers, the heart of the film and the hero is philosophical. In a scene in his office, Larry confronts a student whom he suspects of leaving a monetary bribe on his desk. “Actions have consequences,” he intones. The student replies, “Yes. Often.” Larry is visibly upset: “Always! Actions always have consequences!” Larry’s disgruntled reaction reflects the tragic flaw that the Coens have given him: the belief that the world operates in a just system of cause and effect. When his wife asks him for a divorce, Larry’s shock betrays his worldview: “What have I done?” His wife finds his response simplistic. “Don’t be a child. You haven’t ‘done’ anything.” The film follows Larry’s evolving perspective on righteousness, “seriousness,” and how worthwhile it is to lead a moral life.
After having seen the film and reading this review, you might be inclined to think I give it too much credit. So much of it is mundane, even grotesque, the dialogue too blunt, the story dull and bleak. But Joel and Ethan Coen have always made intentional films, and “A Serious Man” takes craft very seriously. Perhaps wanting to ensure audiences that their film is a serious one, the Coens begin the film with a dark, fantastical scene, seemingly a Russian-Jewish folk tale. The scene is never referenced again, but it casts a moody pall over what is to come. Most importantly, it tells the audience to pay attention to the spiritual themes ahead. What does death mean? Are any of the characters dead? Will any of them die? They set us up to spend the film intrigued and suspicious, on the lookout for ghosts and answers. And I hope it will not spoil the film for you to tell you that we never get assurance about either of these phenomena; Larry’s lecture about Schrödinger’s cat is a canny reminder that God, Hashem, does not give us a lot of ground on which to stand. At one point, a character shouts to Larry, “Accept mystery!” But it’s hard. And it doesn’t satisfy. “A Serious Man” is an unsettling film about a man’s sincere search for the meaning of life. As we watch, we wonder if we would be able to give Larry any better answers than his rambling rabbis. And if we can’t, God help us.Myth:
a) The quest for wisdom and knowledge, especially as received from sages, is a common folk and religious tale, especially in Eastern cultures. Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and those familiar with Greek philosophy will find this construction familiar. Humans have always sought answers from those “on the hill” who purport to have wisdom or answers. This practice is somewhat archaic compared to the postmodern sensibilities of finding the answers inside oneself, or creating one’s own meaning (existentialism). But even the moderns and postmoderns seek wisdom from the sage; they just do it on the therapist’s couch.
b) The Jewish setting of the film invokes the Hebraic tale of Job, beloved of God. God allowed Satan to test Job’s faith with innumerable trials that caused Job to cry out in despair. God answered him with a declaration of his sovereignty, his creative and administrative acts, and the fact that he need not explain or excuse himself to man. Job repents of his human conception of justice and acknowledges that God knows what he is doing. “A Serious Man” is an interesting modern response to the same situation.
Moral:
“A Serious Man” is a blatantly moral film (though certainly not moralistic). It directly addresses modern generic concepts of righteousness, and especially Jewish righteousness. It challenges the frequently uttered platitude that the meaning of life (or our best stab at it) is “helping others.” It asks why we decide to act morally, and whether it matters. I won’t expound upon all the conclusions it does or doesn’t come to.
Zeitgeist Factor:
The film, set in the 1960’s, does not make an effort to be especially edgy or contemporary; Joel and Ethan wrote it based on some of their childhood experiences. But the problem of evil doesn’t go away, and the sense of myth that pervades the film provides timelessness. The idea that the meaning of life is altruism is perhaps more prevalent than ever in the age of optimistic, activistic Generation Y, and it is rare that helping others or saving the environment is actually challenged as an ultimately meaningful pursuit.
I have always felt something of a distance from action, war, and legal movies. That's a pretty big cliché for me, a young female critic. And of course, there is something to be said for the fact that many of these movies are designed for men, and maybe that creates a natural distance. But it's not that I can't follow the story, or that they’re just about "man things". I simply find myself much more involved with a film if it includes female characters to whom I can relate. Now, you may say that that makes me a dumb blonde who needs women characters around who can explain things to me (and, yeah, that can be helpful).
But put yourself in my shoes, menfolk: you don’t enjoy the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, do you? And why not? Well, for starts, because there are no male characters that are not romantic objects for the girls. There is no guy you can relate to on his own terms, rather than from the perspective of women. Flip this around, and this is the case with dozens of films released each year. As my boyfriend will attest, I’ve always carried a “girl rule” with me to the movies. “Okay, but there has to be a girl in it. And she can’t be just eye candy or a sex object. And she has to talk.” On one hand, you could regard that request as shallow and even sexist—I can’t even connect to a movie without a gender representative? But on the other, if you think about it for even a bit, it’s a pretty simple request, and one that would reflect reality a lot better than the glamorous babes that pollute action flicks just so they can make the poster look better. It really handicaps your audience to not create a character that half of your audience can relate to on one of the most basic levels, gender solidarity. I’m not asking for some kind of affirmative action; if it makes no sense to have a woman character, don’t put one in for me. But there is something that draws me in when there is a woman in there, someone who, at least on some level, thinks the way I do. If you need more persuasion, ask yourself if, as a man, you would enjoy a film with all women characters, no matter the plot. There’s simply a barrier, a difficulty breaking in.
For a good example of the Girl Rule followed in a “man’s genre,” take “The Silence of the Lambs.” Of course, Jodi Foster is now kind of a dyke-feminist poster girl, but at the time she was just a young actress who happened to the protagonist of a crime thriller. The film acknowledged her femininity and its unusual presence, but the movie managed to not be about that. It was about solving a crime, and Jodi just happened to be the one with the smarts and guts to do it. The rest of the movie was populated with men, and without Jodi in the lead it would have been a typically male film. But allowing her to have the role of a woman who was more than a romantic interest opened up the film’s accessibility immensely; I believe that undercurrents of gender issues in the film contributed to its success.
All this is to say that I’ve always thought I was being a pain in the ass for longing for the Girl Rule to be fulfilled. When, lo and behold, I discover the Bechdel Test, which was created by some awesome feminists who have the same problem as me with movies created by men, for men, with no real “in” for half the population. It’s a simple formula: there have to be at least two female characters in the film, they have to talk to each other, and the conversation cannot dwell exclusively on men. Obviously, there are great films that fail this test, and I do not believe art should be subject to tests and quotas. However, it’s a great tool for awareness, because it shows how simply filmmakers could make their films richer, more realistic, and more accessible, and how often they fail to do so.
