American Pastoral

I find Ewan McGregor utterly charming and I was rooting for his first directing foray, of American Pastoral, based on the novel by Philip Roth. Alas, pretty much everything goes awry: bad casting, a stiff script, and an equally stiff directorial job.
McGregor plays Seymour "The Swede" Levov, a Jewish Wunderman: a legendary athlete, blond, and blue-eyed all-American Jew in the fifties. He marries a non-Jewish beauty queen (Jennifer Connelly) and seems to have an idyllic life. His daughter Merry (a very good Dakota Fanning) has a stutter and soon reveals a subversive streak. As her therapist intimates in the movie, being the spawn of perfection (athlete + beauty queen) must be hard. She is a teenager in the late 60s, outraged by the war in Vietnam and seduced by revolutionaries. She bombs a post office and destroys her parents' lives.
It's a great story, but in the translation to film much has been lost, mainly sharpness of observation, and other details that make the characters complicated. Philip Roth revels in human contradiction, to say the least, but this movie is too prim.
As with Natalie Portman's directorial debut and other movies by actors, being a good actor has nothing to do with being a good director. Directors bring scripts to life and make them look real and authentic. This is very hard to do. The scenes in American Pastoral feel lifeless, even though the actors are all doing their utmost. The pace is not glacial; there's no pace. It's dispiriting since it is obviously a serious effort.
People of color complain of whitewashing in movies. I think Jews can be added to the mix. You don't necessarily have to be Jewish to play a Jew, but it adds authenticity. McGregor is a good actor but he ain't Jewish or from Newark, no matter how blond his hair or blue his eyes. Liev Schreiber could be a better fit for the role. David Strathairn is too virtuous for the role of Nathan Zuckerman, narrator and Roth's alter ego. Except for the great Peter Riegert as The Swede's dad, the whole thing feels ersatz. Stories where people age dramatically are tricky, and the makeup job here is unconvincing. There's a scene at the beginning of the movie between Strathairn and an actor who is obviously a much younger man caked with old man makeup. It's hard to get invested in the story with such distractions.
However, one scene packs a punch. A young, arrogant revolutionary brat called Rita Cohen (Valorie Curry) tells Levov that she knows where Merry is hiding. Rita screams at Seymour all the terrible things she assumes he is: a bourgeois pig, an all-star bully, his wife a vapid beauty queen; his family of glove makers, exploiters of the workers. None of it is remotely true. The ease with which ideology paints people with a wide brush comes alive in this exchange. It's good shorthand for the awful combination of youthful arrogance and dogmatism, for the simplistic zeal of revolutionaries, and for a chasm of incomprehension between generations that has not been as keenly felt at any other time in American history as it was in that turbulent period.
American Pastoral, is, among other things, about the tension between the desire to be generic (Jews who yearned to assimilate seamlessly into the American dream when that dream erupted in flames) and their impossibility to be generic. This film version is a generic movie that defeats its own purpose.

The Handmaiden

Sumptuous, perverse and exquisite, The Handmaiden, by Korean auteur Chan-wook Park (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance), is one of my favorite movies this year -- a big, bold tale, the story of an epic swindle, a Chinese box of plot twists and a refreshingly compelling erotic story with a feminist streak.  

Holding such disparate strands together is an heroic if not an impossible task, but director Park tells the intricate story with humor, suspense, feeling, and finesse. 

The excellent screenplay is by Park and Seo-Kyung Chung, based on a novel by Sarah Waters, which has been transposed from Victorian England to Japan-occupied Korea. 

In 1930's Korea, a con man pretends to be a Japanese count in order to woo a beautiful, rich Japanese woman into marriage and then abscond with her money. For that purpose, he plants a young swindler to be the lady's servant and convince her fall for him. That nothing goes as planned is an understatement. As the story unspools amid ravishing beauty, we learn that nothing is what it seems. 

This is the story of a major con, told in three parts, from the point of view of each of the main characters. The second chapter is a retelling of the first but from the point of view of a different character. Watching the same scenes from a different point of view adds enormous richness and amusement to our understanding of the story.

But it is also the story of strong women controlled by a male-dominated system. Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim) is the niece of a cruel and perverse man who is obsessed with books (it turns out that his obsession is not as healthy as it seems), and her handmaiden Tamako is also controlled by a crook. The women seem to be pawns in the designs of these men, but they are strong and willful and they can see which way the wind blows. They are the main characters and they imagine a different narrative for their destinies. 

What makes the movie delicious are the revelations that Park keeps coming at the audience, which for the most part, are truly surprising. At almost two hours and a half, the film is enormously entertaining and holds you in its spell. The entire movie is an elaborate tease. I usually have no patience for movies that tease the audience, but The Handmaiden is as much about keeping the audience on our toes as it is about revealing deeper insights. What is more precious than money? What is true knowledge? Can you really control someone else? Best laid plans can be crushed by the unpredictable forces of love and desire. At the same time, I am grateful for a film that does not have a moral agenda or an important message to impart, but for the satisfying delight of a good yarn, well told. 

Nowadays, it's rare to find a decent film that has a powerful erotic element. But in The Handmaiden the sex works. In contrast to a movie like Blue Is The Warmest Color, where the sex scenes became porno tableaus disembodied from the rest of the story, here the lovers bring their characters to the erotic action. What we know about them helps make the scenes a necessary part of the story, casting light or shadows on the characters, depending on whose point of view we are looking at. 

Park is known for his notoriously violent movies like Oldboy, and he can't restrain himself from showing a bit of grisly torture towards the end. However, he has a prodigious visual imagination and the movie is not only gorgeous in its cinematography and production design, but in how confidently Park tells the story with images. 

Southwest Of Salem

Here's an article I wrote for Fusion.net on this excellent documentary about four Latinas from San Antonio, Texas who were falsely accused of sexually abusing children. The film is playing at Cinema Village in New York.

A Tale Of Love And Darkness

Actress Natalie Portman has adapted and directed Amos Oz's beautifully written memoir of the same name for the screen. Bravely, she shot the movie in Hebrew, which is her native tongue, to honor Oz's gorgeous language, which is apparent even in the English subtitles. The novel is remarkable because it is not only the story of a childhood spent as the State of Israel came into being, but as the "tale" in its title implies, it is also a book about how our lives are filled with stories, and how these stories heard at home, gleaned around the neighborhood, experienced or caught on the fly, inspire some people to become writers like Amos Oz.
The screenplay employs a voiceover narration (by the wonderful Moni Moshonov) that effectively conveys Oz's voice. But it is noticeably the work of an inexperienced screenwriter. Portman gets the emotional tenor of embattled immigrants arriving in a desertic, embattled land well, but her script ignores the basic rules of cinematic storytelling. Scenes start late and end too soon, or start too early and continue way past their ending; characters start actions that are never resolved, so there is no sense of forward momentum to the story.  The plot has been rendered in impressionistic vignettes, presumably to evoke the texture of memory. However, Oz's reminiscences are immediate and concrete. He brings the past to life in extraordinarily detailed dimension. The earthy source material, full of rich anecdote and observation, is the opposite of a tone poem.
Adapting this impressive book is an ambitious effort, but this is a good example of how a bad script and rookie direction can ruin a film even if the source material is brilliant.
Portman plays Fania, Oz's mother, a recent immigrant to Jerusalem fresh from pre-war Europe, who has trouble integrating to this new country, also menaced by war. Portman is fine, as she tends to be good at portraying emotionally intense women, and she plays a strong-willed, yet fragile woman who is most alive when she escapes into her imagination and tells young Amos fantastic stories, but ends up withdrawn, a silent bundle of depression.
The rest of the cast is underwhelming. In Room, young Jacob Tremblay carried the movie and made the story believable with his poise and alertness, but Amir Kessler, who plays young Amos, seems to recede into the background. Except for Moshonov's gorgeous narration, none of the character actors make any impression. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak does his best to make the movie look good, and the editors piece the story together as best they can. A Tale Of Love And Darkness is reduced to a sketch in this film version.

Indignation

Adapting Philip Roth novels to the movies is a Sisyphean task and one that has encountered failure almost every time it has been attempted. I can understand why writers welcome the challenge. They are seduced by Roth's plots and incident, historical context, and indelible characters with clearly dramatic arcs, and by the devastating precision of his writing. But when it comes to bringing Roth's brilliant incisiveness to the screen, all that remains is incident, devoid of the lucid sharpness of the author's voice. The movies are either leaden, humorless, miscast, or dead in the water. I'm thinking of The Human Stain, with Anthony Hopkins as a light-skinned Black man, the forgettable Elegy, and the sharp but sloppy The Humbling, which at least has Al Pacino and the comic touch of Barry Levinson.
James Schamus' adaptation of Indignation is the best one so far because, at the risk of a stately pace, Schamus gives a starring role to language. This movie is not so much about acting, but about thinking, and arguing, and there are a lot of wonderful sentences in it.  The story is drawn out and depressing, a dark coming of age tale, but the movie is riveting.
Logan Lerman plays Marcus Messner, a young Jewish man from Newark who transfers to a Christian college in Ohio in order to avoid getting drafted into the Korean war. His father (Danny Burstein) is a kosher butcher, and the great Linda Emond plays his mother, Esther. Marcus is an only child of prodigious intelligence, and he is swathed in youthful arrogance. He is impatient with his dad's small town mores and his overwhelming anxiety about letting Marcus blossom into a man. As in many a Rothian tale, Indignation is about the tension between the old world and the new. Too many of his son's classmates are finding death in Korea, but if it's not Korea, it's Ohio, and if it's not Ohio, it's Marcus going out with friends in Newark. When we first encounter him, Marcus is coming home late at night as his mother waits for him stoically in the living room. His father is frantically looking for him all over town. America and its promise beckon, and Marcus does not want to remain in the mental shtetl his father still lives in.
On a personal note, I was blown away by Roth when I read Portnoy's Complaint as a freshman in college. I swore he must have met my mother, whose need to investigate my bowel movements inspired him to create Portnoy's mom; Jewish mothers being to deciphering their children's turds as Holmes and Watson are to solving crimes. Furthermore, my dad used to make my mother wait for me when I went out, just like Mr. Messner. I have since decided that Philip Roth knows everything, and I love him for laying bare (and how!) the deepest and most anxious reaches of Jewish identity.
Marcus arrives in Winesburg College, a genteel school that puts him in a dorm room with two other Jews, and makes them all attend chapel services with the polite but firm prejudice of America in the fifties.
An overly serious law student, Marcus gets derailed by a beautiful blonde Wasp, Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon), who is also different from all the squares. For such a young girl, she has already been through terrible emotional turmoil. The two outsiders hit it off. This is enough to spark a quiet yet combustible chain of actions that lead to tragedy.
The centerpiece of the movie is a 16-minute conversation between Marcus and the dean of the school, a condescending but avuncular midwesterner played with extraordinary acuity by Tracy Letts, who deserves every best supporting actor award in perpetuity for his performance.
It's a beautifully written piece of dramatic writing. The dean summons Marcus to inquire as to why he moved to another room (a crummy attic all to himself). He pretends to want to help while he gleefully unnerves the young man. He gets a rise out of Marcus, singling out his Jewishness and questioning whether Marcus is ashamed of it (he denies it, but I think Marcus walks a private tightrope between pride and shame, as many do). The indignant Marcus pushes the Dean's buttons by affirming his atheism and his intellectual superiority. But as the discussion heats up and the unflappable dean pries into Marcus' private life, Marcus hyperventilates to the point of nausea.
He lands in the hospital.  His mother comes to see him. She takes one look at sweet, fragile Olivia, and confirms she's the worst kind of trouble. Not because she's not Jewish, which is what everyone expects her to say, but because with people like Olivia "their weakness is their strength", one of the smartest things I've ever heard said about damaged people.
Emond also deserves every award in the land. It turns out that Esther, as frumpy as she looks, is much more ahead of the times than both her husband and her son, but as a woman in the fifties she is their subordinate, which is probably the reason why she has a freer mind. When you are an afterthought, you have more room to think.
This is a world of men who fight wars and call all the shots, whether they're the dean, or the son of a butcher, or the rich father of a lost soul. In this world, women are peripheral. They use their brains and their hearts as best they can to make a dent.
Indignation is a movie in which complicated things happen. People are not stock characters, they have unpredictable dimensions. The ironies they suffer are thick and bitter. Marcus' ire is ultimately useless, and few things are more tragic than futile indignation.