Happy Go Lucky

Wow. I love this film. Sally Hawkins gives a spectacular, miraculous performance as Poppy, a 30 year old woman who is always cheerful. She is always smiling, always finding everything hilarious, always trying to connect with people in a breezy, spontaneous way. Some people may interpret her bubbliness as unwelcome weirdness, or a desperate need for attention, but the good thing is, she doesn't care. She is a genuinely upbeat, joyful person, a bit on the childish side, but not an innocent.
There isn't one single moment in which her character is saddled with comic clichés. Director Mike Leigh is a wise and deeply empathetic observer of character and I feel that this movie is actually more subversive than it seems. For starters, who is writing movies with a strong female character like this? No one.
Poppy forces you to look at yourself through the prism of her character. While you and me and probably everyone else would be throwing a fit of anger over our stolen bike, Poppy is like "Dang! We never got to say a proper goodbye". And just like that, she brushes it off. A surly bookstore clerk is rude to her, she brushes it off, neutralizing him with a wink and a smile. She seems genuinely incapable of anger. It makes one wonder what is it like to live without anger. What is it like to truly love your life. For some people, anger and kvetching are like oxygen, their absence is inconceivable. But even lower back pain can't make Poppy's spirit flag. She laughs through the ordeal...
The miracle in the performance is that she is totally believable. Hawkins inhabits her from the inside. This woman has a lot of inner light and it shines through all the time. Her fashion sense is also incredible. It's so refreshing to see a paradigm of brilliant acting that is not dependent on the tearing out of hair and the crying of rivers. I wonder if Hawkins' feat is not so much more difficult than the dramatic emoting that usually garners actors awards. It seems impossible to fake happiness such as hers. Pure, sincere joy is not an easy feeling to sustain all the time for humans, let alone for an actor, and true empathy, true sincerity, all of Poppy's core virtues feel right and true. She is very funny and quirky and though she is not malicious, she is not dumb, she likes to provoke gently. What a concept: she is truly happy with her life. The brilliance of this film is that it is not calculated to be cute (like for instance Amelie, a movie I loathe). Leigh is a much more serious artist than that. He consistently defies our expectations of what constitutes comedy and even drama. The movie is totally fresh and original and devoid of clichés and it has the flow of life.
Of course, one wonders how can you chirp around in a world with so much darkness? But Poppy does not turn a blind eye, nor does she live in a fantasy world. She sees hurt and pain and tries to do something about it. She is deeply empathetic. There is a scene in which she wanders at night into a blighted, desolate area and she runs into a crazy homeless guy. We brace for horror and violence but the scene turns out to be something out of Beckett. It seems deliberately theatrical. The guy mumbles almost incoherently about "she" and "he" and "them" and Poppy listens and understands exactly what he means. And you know she is not faking, as most of us would do to try to get out of harm's way. She means it. She is also cognizant of the risks she is taking. She knows where she is, but it seems like she can't help connecting. She does naturally the opposite of what we also do naturally, which is to turn away and disconnect.
The core of the film are Poppy's encounters with Scott, her driving teacher, in an equally incredible performance by Eddie Marsan, who is exactly her diametrical opposite. This is a man that has forbidden joy to enter his life. He is an angry, bitter, upset guy, a misanthrope with absurd rules, conspiracy theories and prejudices. For him to come into contact with Poppy is a shock to his system. As Abbas Kiarostami has said, a car is the smallest intimate space where you can have the maximum of conflict between two people. Here you have it in a nutshell, two completely different ways of looking at life clashing over the steering wheel. Their driving lesson scenes are a hoot. Scott tries to quash Poppy's bubbliness with his exaggerated concerns for safety. He is deeply offended by her insistence on wearing high heel boots in the car. A classic control freak. She laughs it off, but she never relents. She may be happy, but she is no pushover. Poppy is like an extreme version of killing with kindness.
What transpires, with enormous grace and subtlety, is that Scott is somehow attracted to Poppy very much despite himself, a lovely and intelligent example of "opposites attract". He cannot bring himself to admit it, much less communicate it, and Poppy is slow to realize it. The entire film one waits for something horrible to shock Poppy out of her happiness, and her confrontation with Scott is it. But she is much stronger than him, his hate is a mark of weakness, whereas her compassion is a shield of strength.
Some people, when confronted with Poppy's happiness, mistake it as an accusation or as some sort of rubbing it in, or even as cruel flirtation. It doesn't seem possible to them that she would be so quirky and happy without an agenda. These instances of misinterpretation cause her deep hurt, because it would never cross her mind to wield her joy to hurt someone. It's heartbreaking that people should misunderstand joy as a ploy. But it is so rare, who can blame them?
Leigh gives his actors time to develop their themes and the scenes have a beautiful rhythm to them. The movie meanders with a sweet, gentle flow. Leigh is a master at creating extraordinary intimacy between people. He gives actors plenty of space to be totally human and they take it. It must be the highest blessing for an actor to work with him.
It is incredibly moving to come across a good character who is not self-conscious or preachy about her decency, who just is. And she is happy to be.

NY Film Festival: The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler is a classic fighter movie and it is a conventional melodrama full of clichés. However, there is something so painfully vibrant about it, that it transcends its very conventional story in ways that particularly resonate today.I see it as a metaphor of the decline of the American empire, no less. It is very telling that even a classic movie like this could not get funding in its own country. (The French had to come to the rescue. Increasingly, it looks to me that the French are the only people interested in keeping movies -- not Hollywood product -- alive today. They may be the real superheroes saving cinema for us. Merci!)
The Wrestler tells the story of Randy the Ram, played gloriously and with utter guts by Mickey Rourke, in an astonishing performance. Randy is a has-been wrestler, traveling a humble wrestling circuit in New Jersey (the WWF, this ain't). He is plagued by the injuries sustained during years of being smashed and battered in the ring. He lives alone in a mobile home, or in his truck, when he can't pay the rent. He wears his hair long and dyed peroxide blond. He also wears an earpiece. For all the fakery of the spectacle, the damage to his body is real. He is Christlike in the amount of stigmata he bears, and I guess it is no coincidence he is the Ram and not the Boar or the Bull (sacrificial lamb, anyone?). He is the all-American hero of the crazy spectacle of wrestling, with its theatrical, prearranged victories. But now he is old, battered and broke and heartbreakingly sad. He is also a magnificent, royal fuck-up. It is a beautiful character; a sweet natured person lost in total loss. The loss of his body, the loss of an income, the loss of a family. As a metaphor for our state of being today, we can include the loss of his powers, of his prodigious reputation, of his pride, of his standing in the world.
Now, the meta factor in the casting of Mickey Rourke makes this movie even more devastating. There isn't any other actor who could have played this part. To look at Rourke's destroyed face is heartbreaking. I can't get over it. His face is so swollen and bizarre that one can barely see his eyes, and still through the mask of surgeries and crushed bones, the character comes alive, and Rourke is killer. There will be an Oscar nomination for him. There should be.
As the Magnificent Arepa notes, The Wrestler doesn't tell you anything that Raging Bull, for instance, has not said better, but the choice of the goofy, weird, almost transcendent universe of wrestling, with its simplistic pageantry of good vs. evil, is what makes this movie unique.
I also loved the fact that this movie takes place in the underground of American life, at the bottom of the barrel, which is fast becoming the norm: the world of Americans without money, without education, without options. Everybody in this movie is struggling, nobody is remotely middle class (the highest status person is a snotty supermarket manager who likes feeling superior to Randy, who works there to supplement his meager income). The main characters are pulling themselves by the bootstraps to be wrestlers or strippers, and of course they are barely making it. The fabled American prosperity is not in evidence anywhere in this film.
Talking about strippers, let us all now praise Marisa Tomei. She plays Pam, a mercurial stripper the Ram is in love with. Number one, this woman looks better than the $700 billion bailout. Her body, to quote that awful song, is a wonderland, but her face has not been ravaged yet by the epidemic of plastic surgery in vogue in Hollywood (or if it has, she has a really good surgeon). Tomei owns her age and bless her for it. I defy any pole dancer in reality to be as stunningly erotic as this woman.
Number 2, to Tomei's immense credit, she is not the stripper with the heart of gold, but rather with the heart of rust. She, like the Ram, is trying hard to make a living and she is afraid of mixing business with love. Tomei's face registers different feelings faster than a car that goes from 0 to 60. She is sexy, fake, genuinely concerned and cold as ice in less that it takes me to write this sentence. Total Oscar bait.
The storyline of the movie is a tearjerker (wrestler loves stripper, stripper rebuffs him; wrestler looks for long lost daughter who hates him, etc). I have to say that the worn melodrama made my enthusiasm flag a couple of times. There is a subplot involving Randy's long lost daughter (the annoyingly overestimated Evan Rachel Wood) that seems right out of Mildred Pierce, but Aronofsky's love and curiosity for the world of z-rate wrestling is so compelling that he almost saves the movie from total maudlin corn.
There is sweet humor in the film, and to be given a pass to the backstage camaraderie of wrestlers is touching and delightful. The movie is openhearted and generous, but Aronofsky balances it with a healthy dose of brutal reality. The humiliations of the Ram are legion and they are lovingly detailed. The movie has a great vitality, thanks no doubt to the excellent cinematography by Maryse Alberti; a lot of handheld camera, the fight scenes shot from very up close, the daylight gray and wintry and the interiors bright and tawdry. Oscar for her too!
As befits our new reality, The Wrestler ain't no song of triumph over adversity a la Rocky. Quite the contrary, it seems that adversity has trumped triumph. This is a story of relentless, useless sacrifice. And so it seems with America today. Those who are sacrificing find it is all for nought, for the wrong values and the wrong outcomes.
The Ram's dogged pursuit of everything that eludes him has a certain valiant, misguided nobility to it, but beleaguered and alone, his pride hurt, he loses his instinct for self-preservation and there is no happy ending.

NY Film Festival: Bullet in the Head

That is what watching this movie felt like, you were pining for a bullet in the head to get you out of your misery. I have never seen so many people decamp at a screening. I had an extra ticket that went unclaimed by several friends and I was thanking the Gods of Cinema I didn't have to put any of my friends through this ordeal. I stayed on, mostly because I had nothing better to do. I was waiting for the Q&A to see if Jaime Rosales, the director, could elucidate what in the name of God was he thinking. The Q&A was very helpful. It helped me to understand that there was a huge gap between what the director wanted to achieve in his mind and the actual results.
Call me a philistine, but when directors mention that their influences are Godard, Antonioni, Passolini, Tarkovksy and Ozu, it's time to run for the hills. To me, this shorthand means that the director, who probably does not possess the same amount of talent of his heroes, is a pretentious bore.
In the case of Jaime Rosales, the movie is a great concept for a short. Had it taken 15 minutes, it would have been a masterpiece. Basically, it is a movie where people talk all the time, but you can't hear them. You can hear all the noises around them, curiously enough, traffic, cutlery, the hubbub of modern city life, but you can't hear a word they are saying. In small doses, this can create a disquieting feeling of somebody being spied on (see Michael Haneke's excellent film Cache). If it happens for more than an hour, though, it can make you want to tear your hair out, especially if all you see people doing is chatting at cafés and drinking beers with friends, and going to the park. Not much happens.
But then there is one violent action that immediately reveals who these banal, normal looking people are. They are Basque terrorists. Believe me, this is an instance where you may thank me for the spoiler. If you see the movie, you will want to wait for the eternity it takes to get to this part. It may make it more exciting.
Rosales was saying that he wanted to strip the movie of the ideology surrounding terrorism, so that dealing with it could change the terms in the real world. I think ideology is not the right word; discourse is more like it. Because there seems to be an ideology at work in presenting terrorists as normal people who live in the same world we do. This does not justify them, but it is an ideology. However, Rosales has stripped the movie of the discourse we are used to when dealing with this topic, that of the terrorists being crazy, extreme people who live apart from us, as well as the dramatic discourse we expect from cinema. There is no language in this film but the language of passive observation and even this is artificial. You know it is not meant to be an instance of point of view, in which the camera is acting as another character, because the camera's placement is totally artificial. It does not behave like a human observer. I felt manipulated, subjected to an experiment in which the director wants to conduct an intellectual exercise and cares little for the audience's suffering. He makes us feel that our pining for conventional drama or dialogue is an aesthetic weakness. I hate movies that feel superior to their audiences (Haneke's Funny Games is a good example). And if you are going to play around with the conventions of cinematic language, which is totally valid, then the end result should be as bracing as that impulse for experimentation, not a pompous bore.
Everything Rosales said after the film made sense, but the problem is the movie should work without the lengthy explanation. Rosales contradicted himself, at one point saying that there was a fierce political controversy in Spain over the movie, and that he was surprised because it is only a movie. But you can't say in the same breath that you want to change the world through films and then say it's only a movie. Which one is it?

The NY Film Festival: Gomorrah

This is the movie I most wanted to see in the NY Film Festival. It is a mafia movie based on the book by Roberto Saviano about the Camorra, the powerful mafia syndicates in Naples.
If you think you are going to sit through an epic parade of endearing glorified goons like those Italian-American mafiosi we're so fond of in the States, you are in for a surprise. Gomorrah is almost documentary-like in its realism. The people in it make Tony Soprano look like a cross between Winston Churchill and Florence Nightingale.
For starters, you see a side of Italy that you never see, nor would you wish to, mainly horrid housing projects where the camorra rules, dispensing drugs, arms, and paying people off for their compliance and complicity. The movie is claustrophobic; it never leaves the dreary places where the camorra operates. The police only show up after someone's been shot. There are no police heroes trying to stop these people. They seem to operate unimpeded. The basest corruption spreads like an incurable disease. Only a few regular people with a smattering of conscience try to live in it without soiling themselves. It is virtually impossible. Everything is ruined and wasted by the mob. These people taint and pollute and turn to refuse everything they touch, not only in Italy, but all over the world.
The movie builds its case slowly by following different characters who are all interconnected. This episodic structure, which has proven so forced and inorganic in movies like Syriana or Babel, really works here, allowing it to show with plenty of detail and sharp observation how the mafia controls and co-opts absolutely every single aspect of life.
Don Ciro, for instance, is the guy who makes the payoffs at the projects, handing money to families to keep them in line. A mousy man, he looks like an accountant, the opposite of a rent collector. Quite mistakenly, he believes he is somehow not connected to the money he hands out or the people who employ him.
All the young kids work for the different gangs. Nobody seems to go to school. Toto, a beautiful child of about 12, gets enlisted, like all the kids his age, to become part of a faction. Kids are used as sentries, drug runners and betrayers. His mother is trying to keep him honest, but she is powerless. Toto is loyal to the thugs. Very subtly you see his transformation from a normal child to a kid with the arrogant swagger of a criminal. His story is heartbreaking.
There are two young morons who like to imitate Al Pacino in Scarface and who think they can take on the syndicates by stealing a cache of arms and stealing drugs from some Africans. They are beyond stupid, uneducated brutes, enamored of a myth of power and violence that is reinforced by movies, and surrounds them much more crudely, in reality. Older adults have no problem wasting them, even knowing that they are mostly harmless. It's an animal world of very base instincts and sheer revenge.
Pasquale is a gifted tailor, employed by a mafia guy to make haute couture knockoffs. Some Chinese entrepeneurs, who for some reason have a factory in Naples, pay him good money secretly to teach them how to make gorgeous dresses. Pasquale has a crumbling atelier with a handful of seamstresses. The Chinese have a gleaming factory, with respectful workers that admire him. There are many subtle ironies like this, which show how none of this illicit business actually helps anybody progress. Pasquale forges a friendship with his Chinese counterpart, but it doesn't matter because one knows it's all going to come down to destruction. He symbolizes the corruption of the soul of Italy, of its best people.
And then there is the toxic waste dumping, which would be funny if it weren't so dreadful. An affable man in an elegant linen suit, looking the part of a legitimate business man, arranges to dump the most poisonous toxic waste in quarries near Naples. It's huge business. What goes on in this episode is almost surreal in the absolute lack of conscience or responsibility. It will make your jaw drop in astonishment.
The response of this elegant mafia don to the complaint of his protegé, who finally balks at the most shameless malfeasance, is "this is how things are". This is how it works. The apex of cynicism.
At the end of the film a title says that the amount of barrels of toxic waste dumped in Sicily is twice as high as Mount Everest and that cancer has increased exponentially in the area. Not that the camorra would give a shit.
Gomorrah has many wonderfully observed details that add up to a sustained outrage. It is about the particularities of the Italian mob, but it is also about the total devastation caused by human corruption. It gains in impact the more you think about it.

Religulous

I am happy to report that the Angelika had this film going on three screens at the same time. Good.
I am also happy to report that yesterday, as I took some out-of-towners on a tour of Manhattan, I saw a booth of the NY City Atheists in front of the Time Warner Center. I had no time to stop and chat, but I was happy to see them conversing with a curious young man. They even have literature now, they are evangelizing. Weird, but whatever works.
Anyway, in my fantasy world, even though it seems that this country is going to the gods (Bush, Palin, people who don't believe in evolution, etc), at the same time there seems to be a healthy counter-reaction to all this nonsense. Bill Maher, bless him, is one guy who really has a hair up his ass about religion and has decided to do something about it. Good for him.
I was looking forward to this movie like some people expect the Second Coming of Christ. I am sorry to say I was underwhelmed.
The movie is funny, but I think it is intellectually dishonest. I know it's supposed to be comic and that is why Maher skewers the silliest, most outrageous representatives of some of the religions. He finds mostly easy targets. I think you can make a point about some of the most ridiculous aspects of organized religion without going to the most extreme nutcases. For instance, he interviews this ultra-ultraorthodox putz rabbi who is against the existence of the State of Israel. Yes, the one who wears the Palestinian flag on his lapel and who is best friends with Ahmadinejad. The one who went to Iran for the Holocaust denial conference. That one. This guy and the three idiots who follow him are really the fringe lunatics of the lunatic fringe. I can understand that he is a good example of how faith can distort everything to extremes, but I like much better Maher's visit to the place in Israel where they invent contraptions so that Jews can dial a phone on the Sabbath. That is also as loony, but it is much more mainstream. Religion needs to be challenged in what is commonplace, not in the fringe.
But my main beef with Maher's point of view is that it is very simplistic. He ridicules faith as being illogical and impossible and absurd, which is exactly what it is. Faith is by nature the opposite of fact or science. Theologians know it. Nobody denies it. That is it's raison d'etre, to believe in something more powerful, more miraculous, more ineffable than what reason or the eye can see. The nature of faith is precisely a belief not grounded on evidence, but on belief itself. Making fun of faith is useless. There is nothing wrong with having faith, as long as you don't confuse it with fact.
Maher makes fun of the Bible and the Koran, and he does not allow himself to think that there is anything of value in these books. I strongly disagree. I think the Old Testament is a fundamentally civilizing book, let alone a major work of literature, law and ethics. I'm sure there is plenty of that in the Koran as well. There may be a lot in these books that does not make sense in this day and age, and a lot that is the product of ancient mindsets, but I think that it behooves Maher to separate the merit of the books from the people who interpret them literally. It is not Genesis' fault that people like Sarah Palin think the world was made in seven days. Genesis is an amazing interpretation of the origins and the nature of man, it's not just a story about a snake that talks, like Maher puts it. Not acknowledging the symbolic, ethical, literary power of the Bible seems unfair and limited to me. Even worse is his comparing the tenets of Scientology to the Bible. Scientology is a cult. Nothing in it has anything of literary, cultural or ethical merit or value. It's like a ponzi scheme. To compare the ridiculousness of Scientology myths to that of the Bible is a gross oversimplification and it is spurious.
Maher tries to prove to evangelical Christians that the story of Jesus is not original. There are many prophetic myths in ancient cultures that resemble the Jesus myth. There is nothing wrong with recognizing that many creation myths echo across cultures, and the fact that the Egyptian god Horus is a forerunner of Jesus doesn't make faith in Jesus any less relevant to those who believe in him. So what?
As for Islam, it is really the weakest part of the film. I heard a member of the audience, one who I assume by her accent may have been Muslim, complaining that Maher's portrayal of Islam as a violent religion is totally unfair. Again, I don't know enough about Islam to agree or disagree, but I do know that not all Muslims can be equated with fundamentalist Muslims, as not all Jews are ultra-orthodox.
Where I do agree with Maher is on the abuse of religion by the people who rule it and even by those who follow it. Had he made a clear distinction between organized religion and faith, he'd have made a more convincing argument for our need to separate religion from politics and from public life. Faith and religion should be deeply private choices that nobody should try to impose on other people, much less through political coercion.
The best parts of the movie are those in which he bemoans what is happening in America today. Mainly, that the religious right is dangerously dumbing down this country. He reminds us that many of the Founding Fathers (John Adams, Jefferson, Ben Franklin) were fiercely anti-religious. He says that 16% of Americans are not affiliated with any religion. I think the number is much higher if you include secular catholics, protestants and Jews; people who are in touch with their religious background but don't really practice religion. I agree with Maher that it is time that Americans demand total separation of church and state.
But if you are going to fight religion, you need better arguments.