Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

At the conclusion of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the first thing I did was ask myself what the eff I had just seen.

A few too many plot intricacies and characters for a clear image to form  for a first-time viewer, especially one who hadn’t read the John le Carré book on which this adaptation is based. I have something of a handicap when it comes to complex plots anyway (YEAH, I LIKE MOODY, ATMOSPHERIC CHARACTER PIECES THAT GO NOWHERE, SO WHAT), so this was always going to be a problem for me. It’s like certain math problems. I know I’m capable of solving them if I just go about them in an orderly fashion. But in an effort to psych myself up and convince myself that I can, indeed, follow along the thread of the narrative and work out what is happening and why, I manage to, well, completely over-psych myself and sometimes I fail to recognize even the most rudimentary of facts. Here, I don’t mean that I couldn’t figure out who the spy is or that I got confused by some deliberate obfuscations — of course you’re not supposed to really know, or if you have an idea there’s still a lot to see in the hows of the unraveling.

No, the questions I ask myself when watching thrillers like this are: “Wait, who is that? Have we seen him before? Didn’t he die? Is this a flashback? Oh, and he died? When did he die? How did he die? What? What was his name? Was that a code name? Have these two characters seen each other before? Does he know that the other guy knows that thing? What was that significant look about? Are the things they are saying right now literally true? What, in the name of all that is holy, is GOING THE HELL ON RIGHT NOW?” And I ask these questions of things that transpired five minutes previously. “KEEP UP NOW, GODDAMN IT, KEEP UP,” I chastise myself harshly, and then I fall even farther behind.

I got the impression from a few blurbs I read that I’m not the only one who had these difficulties with Spy, though, which I found affirming. Also, it doesn’t help that stuffy middle-aged English white men all look alike, and that’s like, 99% of the characters in this movie!!

The plot in a nutshell: George Smiley (Gary Oldman) has recently (and wrongly) been dismissed as intelligence agent at MI6. He’s brought back in secret to investigate a claim that a mole for the Russians has infiltrated British Intelligence and holds a high rank. He interviews recently dismissed members of the agency along with the help of a trusted ally (Benedict Cumberbatch) who has access to the agents in question (including Colin Firth). Doubts are raised as to whether the mole even exists. WHO WILL WIN THIS GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE? AND OTHER MOUSE? AND MANY, MANY OTHER MOUSES BESIDES THE FIRST MOUSE???(????)

But even if it was a bit too complicated, I still thought it <i>was</i> a fun challenge to untangle and incorporate each new layer and revelation into the overall mystery. I read somewhere that channels of communication was supposed to be a big theme in this movie, and certainly figuring out who knows what and who’s been on the horn to whom and even simply deciphering the look on Smiley — our protagonist’s — face as he puzzles this out is a big part of the appeal of this movie. Also well-handled were all the little details, the inner workings of how information flows through parts of MI6 and how it communicates with other parts of the state: there was a very curious tube carrying documents through the floors of the intelligence headquarters; the layers of security and the clever ways they’re breached to gain information; telegrams sent in numeric code; archival footage rewound and scrutinized again and again for clues in the form of simple gestures.

A lot of this movie is the jargon and minutiae of an investigation in the intelligence service, and that itself is engaging, but there are many fascinating moments where we settle down into the private lives of former agents and see how their work has bled into and changed their lives, pretty much always for the worse. Smiley’s sporadically-present wife has left him again, and small scenes of Smiley sitting alone watching TV in their darkish mausoleum of a home inspire sympathy and an increased respect for the buttoned-up way he goes about his business. Then, when the investigation becomes ever more precarious, Guillam, the agent he enlists to help him conduct his investigation, is forced to break things off with his live-in partner who can’t know the reasons behind it. Then there’s the close friendship between two other central players within the intelligence service that is fractured under the weight of all the secrets and betrayals.  These moments are short and sweet but subtle, and add a richer backdrop for the movie’s central action.

But let’s get to the part that I really care about, which is my boy, Gary Oldman. Sign #547 that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t know shit: this is the first movie that my dear Gary ever received an acting nomination for. And you know what! He’s great. When is he ever not great? But as I’m sure was pointed out dozens, DOZENS of times when it was actually irrelevant, it’s just so funny that this was the movie he finally got a nomination for. He’s polished, intelligent, dignified, blah blah.

What the hell do I know about acting and what really stretches an actor? Not a damn thing. But I think it would’ve been great for ole Gaz to get a nod for a role that was maybe more quintessentially Gary or maybe, like, just a little more interesting. Like. Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Dude is funny, poignant, sweet, and a bunch of other things besides. And of course dear Gary has made quite a name for himself playing oddly charming batshit crazy guy in a variety of movies. Virtually everything I’ve ever seen Sir Oldman (has he been knighted? who cares) in has just a little more going for the performance than this movie. I mean, it’s just that type of character and that type of movie. Am I making sense? Have I been appropiately slavish of Gary Oldman?

Why don’t I just include a damn clip of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. You know, because.

In summation, Gary Oldman can do anything. And I give Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy three out of five Crazy Gary Oldmans. Or like 3.4. Whatever, I liked it!

I Married a Witch (1942)

René Clair’s sort-of screwball 1942 comedy I Married a Witch offers up the timeless axiom, “Love is stronger than witchcraft.” As you can no doubt guess from its charmingly straightforward title, the film features a marriage to…a witch! Yes, Veronica Lake plays the 271-year-old Jennifer, who has finally been returned to a corporeal self after being imprisoned within a tree at the site of her execution in Puritanical New England. Vowing revenge on the descendants of the family who accused her of witchcraft, she sets her sights upon Wallace Wooley (Fredric March), a gubernatorial candidate on the eve of his election and marriage. What could possibly go wrong? Could anything possibly go right?!

Jennifer, aided in part by her father (Cecil Kellaway), uses both her witchly and feminine wiles to make Wooley fall in love with her, all in the service of wrecking his relationship and his campaign, which naturally is riding heavily on contributions from his future father-in-law and the heavily PR-underwritten wedding that is to occur the day before the election. But after Jennifer accidentally drinks a love potion intended to expedite the seduction, she finds herself pursuing Wooley out of personal affection instead of revenge. Daddy Witch is most displeased, because fraternizing with the humans never leads anywhere good.

In nearly every way, Witch is a straightforward romantic comedy, but the supernatural aspect dullens the impact of the horrible things that happen in it. For instance, there’s the problem of Wallace’s fiancee; this is a standard-issue obstacle of the genre, and of course he has the standard-issue bitch fiancee so that we, the audience, will sympathize more when his choices lead him away from her and towards Jennifer. Witch goes one step further by simply removing much of Wallace’s choice, making him subject to witchcraft. More remarkable — and amusing — is that he later allows Jennifer to steal the election to prove that she is a witch. (Conjuring a fire from nowhere would presumably not have been enough.) Obviously this is a movie that is not meant to be taken seriously, and the magic only makes it more enjoyably goofy.

Just look at this crazy witch.

 

Veronica Lake is especially good as the rather impish Jennifer; she makes a delightful appearance somewhat late in the first part of the film when she conjures a fire and first lures Wallace to her. (For the first fifteen or twenty minutes, she and her father are seen and heard only as two disembodied, slightly conspicuous puffs of smoke, who occasionally hide in bottles to escape detection from humans — a rather bizarre but fun touch itself.) Other good comic moments include Wooley’s ill-fated wedding ceremony, Jennifer’s predilection for knocking down portraits of Wooley’s ancestors, and the quippiness that pervades the whole movie. Here’s a one-liner from Jennifer’s father: “Every man who gets married marries the wrong woman.” Hey-ohhhhhhh!

I Married a Witch is trifling, effervescent, and all that good stuff; I give it 4/5 puffs of witchly smoke.

In bloggish news: I changed the title of my blog from “Sarah reads stuff” to “Sarah watches stuff” to more accurately reflect what I do here. I mean, when I do it. I do hope to update more regularly about what I’m watching and yes, even reading. Contrary to appearances, I do support literacy.

Heckler (2007)

Mike Addis’ documentary Heckler is a twenty-minute film about hecklers. The next sixty minutes padding out its running time are a jumbled conflation of hecklers with critics, critics with schmucks with blogs*, and schmucks with blogs with assholes who totally don’t know what they’re talking about and they should just shut up already because they’re hurting Jamie Kennedy’s feelings. Addis’ premise, put another way, is that critics are heckling jerks. (*Like me!)

For the twenty minutes when the movie lives up to its name, it’s a promising glimpse into the backstage world of comedy and how comics deal with the usually delusional, drunken upstarts who try to hijack their act. Then the switcheroo happens with the innocent question posed in a subtitle, “What’s the difference between hecklers and critics?” Not much, the film concludes. But no one in this movie is really interested in talking about criticism beyond the level of quips: that nobody grows up wanting to be a critic. Critics are simply failed artists. You can’t criticize what you haven’t experienced firsthand. And critics thoughtlessly dismiss what others have worked so hard to share with the world.

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

I don’t exactly watch a lot of silent movies, so it was a nice surprise to watch a movie that defied all of my well-founded expectations of a movie era about which I know nothing. Actually, it was kind of an interesting experience after thinking about The Artist and Singin’ in the Rain over the last week. In both of those movies, a young aspiring actress criticizes her contemporary actors for perpetuating a “bunch of dumb show”, mugging for the camera. Based on the few silent movies I’ve seen, I expected this same kind of wild-eyed, overly dramatic gesticulating and a style reminiscent of the overall demeanor of a cokehead.

The actress in G. W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl, Louise Brooks, is nothing like that. She is very expressive — this is lovingly captured by the movie’s fondness for closeups of her face — but still is restrained, and never once looks like a cackling demon from the third circle in the inferno. She is the standout of the movie by far. I spent a while reading about Lost Girl after the fact, and notably, the vast majority of the praise I read was for her performance, all of which was warranted.

The only thing that disappoints me a little is how few people in their review or remembrance had much to say about the movie itself. Roger Ebert’s review is unabashedly about the actress for about two-thirds of its length before he gets to the movie itself, while Dennis Schwartz at Ozus World Movie Reviews said if it weren’t for Brooks, the movie would’ve been a forgettable soap opera. While more explicit than other reviewers, he voiced a common undercurrent in today’s reception of the movie. I think that’s pretty uncharitable. For the record, the life of Brooks’ character — Thymian — is marred by dramatic setbacks, aptly characterized by timeout.com as “an elegant narrative of moral musical chairs.” But it’s rendered with more care and imbued with more social commentary than virtually any soap opera. First, though, is a spoiler-containing synopsis for this 83-year-old movie:

Thymian is raped and impregnated by her father’s employee. When Thymian refuses to marry the man, her child is sent to a midwife and Thymian to a cruel girls’ reform school. She escapes with one of the girls, Erika, and left with few options she eventually joins Erika as a high-class prostitute. She is never properly reunited with her family. When her father dies, Thymian inherits all of his money but gives it to her newly poor stepmother, so that her young half-siblings won’t turn out like Thymian. This news prompts Thymian’s fiance, a disgraced count, to commit suicide, as he had counted on that money to get back on his feet. The count’s grieving uncle feels guilty about this  and decides to take Thymian in. She’s invited to joins a charitable organization and ends up on the board of the sadistic school she was once sent to. On a visit there she encounters her old friend Erika, who’s been sent back. Thymian must choose whether to reveal her past by helping Erika and simultaneously exposing the school, or let the board pass judgment on Erika and maintain the status quo. She defiantly lashes out at the board and the schoolmaster for all the misery that the school has wrought, and marches out of the room with Erika. The count follows after them, delivering the film’s moral, that “with a little more love in this world, no one would be lost.”

It’s a melodrama, to be sure. But to casually dismiss it as a “forgettable soap opera” is, I think, missing the point of both soap operas and this movie. Soap operas juggle a lot of plots and exist largely to titillate or provide wish fulfillment. (This isn’t highly distinguishable from many movies, actually.) But when someone like Schwartz calls it a soap I assume they’re conflating “a lot of dramatic things happen” with the hackneyed twists of soap plotting. The choices facing Thymian as a rape victim and as a single mother are realistically grim, and while the pile-up of maladies onto her might straddle the line of excess, there’s purpose behind all of it. It’s not subtle, but it’s there to show you the ways Thymian is being failed — by her bourgeois family and her father in particular, by charitable institutions — and how she rises above it regardless. This denunciation of bourgeois hypocrisy is one of the more interesting things the movie does. I was surprised, too, by the frankness with which the movie’s events were depicted. I don’t know whether that’s a function of its being a German movie (those Germans!) or having been produced in a time before movie censorship really took off, or both. Either way, the movie was made with a conscience and a kind of honesty that are enough to make it more memorable than a mere soap.

I really enjoyed this movie, and look forward to watching Brooks’ and Pabst first, more famous collaboration in Pandora’s Box. In the meantime, I give Diary of a Lost Girl four out of five fashionably severe Louise Brooks bobs.

THE GREAT MASTER LIST OF 2013

Or rather an all-encompassing list of movies seen. And other stuff.

Bernie (2011)
Brick (2005)
Through a Glass Darkly (1961)
(A)sexual (2011)
The Queen of Versailles (2012)
Winter Light (1962)
The Artist (2011)
In the Mood for Love (2001)
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
The Evil Dead (1981)
Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011)
Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Mean Girls (2004)
Heckler (2007)
The Woodmans (2011)
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Bill Cunningham New York (2011)
The Silence (1963)
I Married a Witch (1942)

Finished watching all of: 30 Rock, Slings and Arrows
Started watching: Frasier

Books in progress: Lords of the Harvest (Daniel Charles, 2001)
North for the Harvest (Jim Norris, 2009)

All books I read this year must have the word “Harvest” in the title.

Might be recipes in this space to come, too. Things I have tried:
innumerable Indian gravies (more like three or four)
Chana masala
A couple bread recipes

In the Mood for Love (2001)

Well, holy shit. Is “heartbreaking” the right word? It’s kind of like having your chest opened and being punched in the heart several times. In that sense, it’s more akin to your heart being muddled and then stirred into a cocktail of pain.

Let’s see if I can qualify those statements in a moderately spoiler-laden space below.

The Artist (2011)

The Oscar nominations came out the other day. Yesterday? Technically that was just a few minutes ago in my world, so — the day before yesterday? Eh, who cares. The point is, a) I have my finger on the pulse of American, nay, GLOBAL cinema, and b) in spite of (A) I have managed not to see any of the nominees for Best Picture, but I have decided to correct that. So, just yesterday I watched one of the noms… … …from last year’s Oscars. In fact, it was the one that won the whole shebang. It was Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist.

I don’t have much to say. I liked it? No, I can be more forceful than that. I liked it! Watch out for spoilers below, if you care.

The Queen of Versailles (2012)

Schadenfreude: The Movie (official title: The Queen of Versailles) made me wish I were a member of a film club so we could all get together to screen and then have a rap session about the movie. I know the ensuing conversation, fueled by whiskey and a resurgence of the fringe politics we thought we’d left behind in college, would be belligerent and rollicking. I guess in theory any movie, even the dumbest one, could be a stepping stone to deeper things. But more than most movies I’ve seen recently, Versailles is like a Rorschach test, asking you to draw your own conclusions about the Siegels, the American dream, wealth, marriage, and other piddly stuff.

The Queen of Versailles is Lauren Greenfield’s documentary chronicling David and Jackie Siegel’s construction of their audacious 97,000-square foot dream home in swampy Florida. (It is modeled after the real Versailles, but aside from ostentation, the two Versailles have little in common.) Filmed just in time for the Great Recession, the film’s focus takes a detour as the economy — and David’s time-share company, Westgate Resorts — begin to tank. Suddenly in debt, David puts the half-finished Versailles on the market while the family finds itself in the middle of an economic and existential crisis.

Truthfully, I feel some of the schadenfreude that a lot of the audience no doubt experienced. But more than anything I’m just saddened by the Siegels’ story. Not because the fate of their tacky mansion once hung in the balance; or because they had to fire so much of the help that they could no longer keep up with the tide of dog poop; or because they were forced to hire a rental car on a trip, then were surprised to learn it didn’t come with a driver; or because they had to shop at Walmart to get discounts on heaps of redundant Christmas presents their children would likely forget not long after they’d been unwrapped. No, I feel bad because they seem like intensely unhappy people, living hollow lives, and they don’t know how to fix it.

I see the same ambivalent empathy in a lot of the viewer reaction, be it from my ad hoc, one-way, virtual film club (i.e. me perusing IMDB user reactions) or from my homeboy, Roger Ebert. Most of them take a little delight in seeing the tables turned on the Siegels. (Some of them take a lot of delight.) Many of them are outraged. A few of them are a little more contrarian, casting the Siegels in a rosier light: they seem like nice people; they just got a little carried away, and nuts to those of us watching as we clutch our “Eat the rich” bumper stickers.  (Disclaimer: I don’t own such a bumper sticker  nor do I believe in eating the rich. And yet it felt like those contrarians were speaking to me. I should mention too that I find very odd the idea that only people who have knee-jerk, allergic reactions to wealth itself would find anything troubling about the Siegels. Come on, contrarian IMDB posters.)

I think this movie is supposed to be a mirror for all of us. It’s as much an invitation to examine our own lives and values as it is a portrait of a very particular kind of privilege. What I disagreed with in many of those reviews was the congratulatory tone: these people are awful, good for me for not being them. Granted, it’s impossible not to make some kind of judgment when you’re watching this movie. For an overwhelming majority of us, aspects of the Siegels’  existence — the sheer magnitude of stuff, power, and places they have access to — are completely foreign. But to my mind the biggest difference between the Siegels and the 99-percenters is more a question of scale than anything. The Siegels waste time, buy crap they don’t need, fill up houses with it, get a bigger house or a car or a boob job to show off to someone else. The things people feel such hostility towards them for are the same things all of us have been guilty of at some point or another, sometimes rarely, sometimes constantly. How many of us are living lives that are as wasteful, only commensurate with our income bracket? Is it okay because we see ourselves as benign figures, because we probably don’t make a livelihood on hawking effing timeshares to people who can’t really afford them, or because we’ve never had the notion to give our kids their own movie theater or indoor skating rink?

(Would it be wrong to indulge our children like that if we had the means? Once upon a time, kids had to shuck corn til the cows came home, and then the very next day they might have to leave home to go get married and start popping out babies. Then modern agriculture came along and child labor laws and all of a sudden kids were allowed to be kids, and on top of that they were awarded several extra years to experience the newly-minted adolescence, during which time they were free to do nothing but mope, cry, lollygag, and neck at Inspiration Point. Now that’s pretty indulgent if you ask me. But at long last, society could afford it!!!!)

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself with that humorous and 100% historically accurate aside. I’m not trying to say that this is strictly a glass houses issue, that we can’t judge the Siegels because we, the audience, suck in many of the same ways. I guess all I’m really saying is if we judge the Siegels, we better not stop there. There’s a scene where the very frank David Siegel sums up his financial situation: he’s in it up to here because the banks used to make it easy for him to get cheap money. Without that, he doesn’t have the same business, couldn’t really afford the accoutrements of his life, didn’t even have savings for the kids to go to school. He may recognize shades of himself in the bank’s predatory actions — his bread and butter is selling people crap they probably can’t afford — but if he does, he doesn’t put it explicitly. Possibly he doesn’t see himself in the vicious cycle at all. In another scene, Jackie very intriguingly throws her financial lot in with the “regular” people, decrying bank bailouts seemingly without recognizing anything special about her own financial position.

For me, that’s the most damning thing about the Siegels: the lack of awareness, self- and otherwise. That should be one of the big takeaways of this movie. And that means we should do our best not to be swept away by the same wave of irony that kept preventing the Siegels from reaching deeper levels of introspection.

So that’s one side of the coin: seeing how the bad in the Siegels resides in us, too. The other side is seeing the humanity in them. Many viewers may not care to extend any to them, but I thought it was on display in the movie’s best domestic scenes — an awkward Christmas party, an awkward gift exchange, an awkward birthday dinner, an awkward squabble over why the lizard is dead and whose fault it is. The Siegels, through their own words, damn themselves more than any crude propagandist ever could. But the movie paints a richer portrait than you’d think. Jackie in particular comes across as warm, a little ditzy (not dumb), fairly pleasant. She covets things as well as children (though admits she wouldn’t have had so many if she didn’t think she could get help raising them). As the recession drags on, the relationship between David and Jackie visibly sours as he becomes more engrossed in their financial crisis and she tries, with varying success, to cut back.  It’s especially interesting to listen to the commentary of the eldest daughter and the niece that live with the Siegels; they are open with their thoughts about growing up wealthy and about the nature of the relationship between David and Jackie (she’s a trophy wife, says the daughter). Jackie, still buoyed by the film’s end, seems all the more committed to her family and marriage now that their lives are entering a (comparatively) more difficult time. David offers his own colossal “meh,” barricading himself more and more in his den with its growing mountain of papers and big screen TV. He talks about how, as long as he’s got these money problems hanging over his head, it will consume him. The director asks him something like, at times like this, do you ever receive strength or solace from his marriage? David answers with an unequivocal no, and it’s hard not to feel a little sad about this imbalance.

Versailles reminded me of one of my favorite documentaries, 2006’s Jesus Camp, which looked at a charismatic church and its annual summer camp for children. They both do pretty much the same thing: show us people you’d think you wouldn’t have a lot in common with, whose ideas and behavior may be infuriating, and it makes us understand a little more about where they’re coming from by just letting them do most of the talking and showing us moments that remind us that, holy shit, they’re people too. Amazing. So, based on that strength, I give Versailles five out of five Hertz rental cars.

Brick (2005)

Brick features Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan, a high school loner who gets a crack at playing hard-boiled detective as he independently tries to solve the murder of his former girlfriend, Emily. Over the course of several days he immerses himself in the complicated social strata of his high school (where school itself is, at best, a distraction; I don’t think any actual classroom time is logged in this movie). From there, Brendan delivers and receives numerous beatings, is stuffed into a trunk of a muscle car, plants evidence, deciphers codes, and conducts ad-hoc interviews of witnesses. Like any good noir, there’s much intrigue, many twists, shady dealings, ambiguous motivations, and, of course, the murder at the heart of it.

I really enjoyed Brick. Gordon-Levitt in particular is great, and most of the other characters who round out the cast are really solid, too. My biggest complaint is that I wish the movie had been slightly more judicious with the period dialogue and, in general, with trying to squeeze some noir into every element of high school life. Virtually every line sounds like it’s ripped from a pulpy forties detective story. That’s great fun and all, but I did find it wearing after a while when you had to pretty much bend your ear so that you could re-process every word of slang, every idiom. Normally your ear and brain working together can do marvelous things where, if you miss a few words of dialogue, your brain can fill in the gaps; that didn’t really work here. Moreover, the fact that this is all coming from the mouths of teenagers begs a little too much disbelief sometimes. You could argue that about the whole story, but the fun of it is the novel setting. If the players don’t act a little bit more like high school students, then there’s not much point in having set a murder mystery there to begin with.

Examples of fun/frustrating dialogue:

Brendan: No, bulls would gum it. They’d flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. But they’d trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes, and if we’re doing this I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit.

and

Brendan: Uh-huh. And he wants cash on the nail. He’s a pot-skulled reef worm with more hop in his head than blood. Why pay for dirt you can’t believe?

The slick composure displayed by virtually every character is a little bothersome, too. For most of the movie, Brendan remains surprisingly implacable for a guy who finds the corpse of and then must investigate the death of the girl he loves. I believe it was the AV Club reviewer who made the point that choosing to set a noir story, a genre usually marked by pessimistic outooks, in a high school, with its inherently pessimistic outlook, actually makes a lot of sense. In that way, a lot of the cynical dialogue and the way these kids interact in such world-weary ways doesn’t seem totally far-fetched. But again, as with the argot, it’s more a question of degree: I would have welcomed seeing just a little more teenage behavior seep into the characters.

Still, the way the noir elements are fit into a high school setting is pretty fun. Brendan has apparently informed on an enemy to his vice principal before the film’s opening, and the scene that plays out between him and the VP is more like that between a disgruntled cop and his chief. Costume parties and school plays provide amusing excuses for our femme fatales to be a little more easily identified as such (one girl is dressed as a lounge singer and plays a little mood music for the party she throws where Brendan first goes to gather clues on Emily; another wears a geisha costume during Brendan’s confrontation with her and, naturally, declines to give him any information he needs).

Occasionally the movie reminds you that we are, in fact, still dealing with high school students. These scenes don’t really gel with the overall tone of the rest of the movie; however, I’m glad they’re there because they provide a pretty great juxtaposition where you go from a scene where Brendan is threatened in the basement of a drug kingpin to being shepherded up to the kingpin’s kitchen where the kingpin’s mother obliviously offers her son’s guests cereal and juice.

As with virtually every noir film I’ve ever seen, I would probably need to rewatch this one to make perfect sense of the who’s and why’s of everything, but while it could be complicated at times, it was’t so needlessly convoluted that it detracted from the story. Overall, I give Brick four out of five badly-cut bricks of heroin.

Wilby Wonderful (2004) and Bernie (2011)

This week I saw two movies that were quite different in structure and tone, but they shared one important theme — small-town life. The first movie is 2004’s Wilby Wonderful, produced by our friendly Canadian brethren; the second was 2011’s Bernie. Wilby Wonderful was pretty bad. Bernie was pretty good. I think a key to their ultimate fates lies in their treatment of the small town setting, but more about that later. Beware spoilers if you care about that crap.

Let me start with Wilby Wonderful, because I love me some complaining. It’s not awful, but it is aggressively mediocre, and sometimes that’s worse. At least movies that are spectacular failures tend to be distinctly, uniquely, memorably awful, and oftentimes have the courage of their convictions — their awful, awful convictions — to stand as a testament that someone, somewhere, was trying. But Wilby is just kind of boring and safe. It’s one of those movies about a disparate cast of characters whose lives and fates converge over the course of one day. I’ve got nothing against this format per se, but I can’t really think of a lot of movies other than Magnolia where I actually liked the result.

Wilby is the movie’s titular town. It’s a small island community in Nova Scotia that’s a-rumble with whispers of a scandal whose participants’ names are soon to be published. The nature of the scandal is broadly hinted at but never explicitly named during the course of the movie, but basically it sounds like gay men around the community had been using a local spot as a place to hook up, and Wilby is one such small town where this is a damn big deal. One of the men in question is one of the film’s main players, and the threat of his outing and the ostracizing he already receives from townies who perceive him as different has him fixing to kill himself at the movie’s outset. Other main players include a well-meaning handyman who’s taken an interest in the suicidal man, a type-A real estate agent who ain’t from around these parts, her world-weary cop husband, the down-on-her-luck single mother and cafe owner the cop is having an affair with, the cafe owner’s teenage daughter, and the corrupt, good ole boy mayor.

There isn’t much else to these characters besides the broad strokes I’ve described above. I guess if you were feeling charitable you could say this is intentional on the part of the movie and it’s supposed to mimic a common reality of small-town life: the feeling that your fate is fixed and immutable. I’m not that charitable, though. This reality isn’t an excuse for flat characters, especially when their flatness is paired with clunky dialogue, odd pacing, a manipulative soundtrack, and a completely uninspired setting. For all the movie’s supposed quirkiness (I believe Netflix recommended it to me under its indie genre, and the word “quirky” appeared in the synopsis), everything about the movie is rote and predictable. Within a few minutes of each character’s introduction, it’s fairly obvious how their story is going to play out:

– The teenager isn’t going to lose her virginity to her obviously terrible boyfriend; she’s going to come to her senses at the last minute
– The single mother cafe owner and the cop are going to end their obviously dead-end fling, and the cop and the real estate agent are going to look closer at themselves and their marriage
– The single mother is going to find a new lease on her business and her relationship with her daughter
– The real estate agent is going to have a spectacular breakdown, crumpling her exaggeratedly polished exterior
– The gay man isn’t going to succeed in killing himself, and is in fact going to experience a resurgence of hope in the form of a potential romantic interest

How the movie reaches these conclusions isn’t particularly interesting, except perhaps for the tonal inconsistencies it hits as it does so. Take the suicidal gay man. His suicide attempts become sources of dopey humor throughout the film, because people keep awkwardly walking in on him at just the wrong moment, so that he quickly has to climb down from the bridge he’s going to jump off of (getting his foot entangled, lol), pretend he was merely testing the shower curtain rod (it falls down, lol), and take his head out of the oven (now the house, which is for sale and needs to be shown soon, reeks of gas — LOLOLOLOLOL). (By the way, for a movie in which failed suicide attempts actually succeed at being darkly hilarious, see Delicatessen.) In Wilby the only entertainment from these scenes derives from asking yourself, is this supposed to be funny? Sad? A perfect bittersweet medley of the two? Because none of that really bleeds through.

Wilby is supposed to be a wonderful place. (It’s right there in the title, which is itself the jumbled version of the name of the town’s annual festival.) People say so in the movie. And a lot of them also think it’s a prison, a damaging place. And they also say so. In fact, that’s the problem: people in this movie talk a lot about what they’re feeling, why they’re sad, what they think is wrong with the town, with their relationships, with life in general. “What do you see when you look at me?” the brooding cop broodily asks his wife at one point. “Why don’t you paint anymore?” is one of the broodingly loaded questions he poses to her in the beginning of the movie. In another scene, he broodingly describes the disintegration of his relationship with his wife — mirror that with the town — to his coworker as they’re broodingly investigating the site of the town scandal.

This is what the movie does over and over again. It trades in actual feeling and subtlety for explicit telling, so that the result of all the tribulations, as life-affirming as it’s supposed to be, falls flat because you knew it was coming all along. It was predestined and then loudly telegraphed throughout the whole movie as each character wore their soul-searching on their sleeve. And so in that respect, the people feel inauthentic, and so too does the town.

But there’s more to it than that; Wilby, as presented on film, just kind of looks flat, doesn’t really feel lived-in, and that’s a shame in a movie where the setting and the characters’ relationship with it are crucial. I don’t know if it’s just cheap production values — and they looked pretty cheap, let me tell you; TV movie cheap — but the movie would have benefited from establishing a better sense of place. Instead we got to hang out in the generic cafe where the single mom is trying to make it, and the generic hotel cafe that’s putting them out of business; we got the generic motel where the suicidal man now lives, and where the two teens almost have sex; and we spend most of the rest of the time in generic houses and offices, and inside the empty home the real estate agent is trying to sell, perhaps standing in for the movie’s empty, lifeless presence.

It’s a frustrating movie. I have spent most of my life in small towns and smaller cities but can also appreciate them from an outsider’s perspective, too; I am fascinated by the rural/urban divide and any media that examines this and similar themes, as well as the idea of belonging in general. But only if it’s done thoughtfully, and this wasn’t really that. All in all, I give this movie two out of five botched suicide attempts.

Oh, crap, I spent over a thousand words talking about this stupid movie. Impromptu New Year’s resolution: spend less time talking about why I hated a movie and more time talking about the ones I liked.

So that’s Wilby. Bernie was a lot more fun. It has a much more distinct point of view and livelier characters. That may seem like a given considering it’s based on a true story and even features real people from the town where the event in question took place, but the truth of a story doesn’t automatically translate to a compelling movie. There are plenty of crappy biopics out there with people and places that feel half-formed, despite the fact that they really exist. But Bernie avoids that and it’s delightful.

Bernie is the true story of a mortician named Bernie Tiede who befriends and then murders a wealthy widow. It’s also the story of small town, Carthage, TX, that almost unanimously unites behind Bernie after the murder based on the strength of his personality and the good he’s done for Carthage. Indeed, he’s a man with a lot to offer. In the funeral parlor, he does everything from making the departed look their best (he warns a group of mortuary students in the great opening scene that people always apply too much blush to the dead: it never makes them look less dead); to forming a tender rapport with the bereaved; to slyly upselling them on better and more expensive caskets, a skill which thrills his boss. The film walks a fine line between portraying Bernie as something of a huckster and as a man who’s truly convinced that his ministrations in funeral preparations are really a higher calling.

Jack Black plays Bernie in what is by far the best performance I’ve seen him give. What’s great about it is that there are clear hints of the shtick that he’s so well-known for — he’s got the same kind of naivete and optimism of the overgrown kids he normally plays — but here, he plays it straight and it’s to great effect. Why, he even sings and it’s not crazy at all. Meanwhile, Sissi Spacek is good as Marjorie Newman, the acerbic widow Bernie ends up killing, though there isn’t quite as much meat to her character.

The first third or so of the movie features Carthage residents and the mortician he worked with extolling Bernie’s virtues as a worker and citizen. These interviews showcase the charm and eccentricities of Carthage without making a mockery of it. I bitched about how Wilby doesn’t really feel like a real town, while Carthage can’t help but feel real. I think a big part of that comes not just from the real people but the attention to detail in each of the movie’s environments: the crosses that begin to multiply at the funeral home once Bernie begins working there, the mood lighting he adds to make it feel less like a business and more a spiritual place; Marjorie’s home is an imposing behemoth of a shrine to dead game with some nice classy old lady touches thrown in for good measure. Even just getting a sense of who the people of Carthage are — interviewing them in their backyard gardens, on a picnic table by the river drinking their favorite beer — gives a great sense of place and time while utilizing small details. Of course, this wouldn’t work so well if there weren’t a complicated weirdo at the heart of the story to bolster this feeling, but luckily, there is.

Once Bernie meets Marjorie at her husband’s funeral, an initially tenuous connection forged over Bernie’s desire to see to the wellbeing of newly-bereaved widows quickly warms into a strange friendship: they begin lunching together, seeing plays, going on day trips, and eventually even begin taking international trips together. (According to some rumors, Bernie is Marjorie’s lover; according to others, he’s actually gay or celibate or both or all or none of the above). Whatever the nature of the relationship, the film shows a genuine warmth on both parts. Marjorie, who’s estranged from her family (she’s even been sued by two of her grandchildren), writes them out of her will and makes Bernie her sole beneficiary instead. In spite of this apparent sign of trust, though, Marjorie eventually turns colder towards Bernie, becoming jealous and controlling of him and his time. Piece by piece, he’s stripped away of his freedoms, called upon by Marjorie to attend to her every need, until he’s forced to work part-time at the funeral home he loves so much. One day Bernie snaps and shoots Marjorie four times in the back with a gun intended to shoot stray armadillos rooting up the garden. Then things take a turn for the morbid. Or, well, the more morbid, because shooting someone within an armadillo gun is definitely somewhere in morbid bounds.

Marjorie’s body disappears. Bernie tells the outside world she’s had a stroke and is recuperating in a nursing home, then later in her own home, where she declines to see anybody. (She’s famously antisocial, after all, and few miss her.) Meanwhile, be begins spending Marjorie’s money on gifts to the community: church donations, money to whoever needs it, even a backyard play-set for the children of a parishioner. But eventually his tale unravels when Marjorie’s accountant becomes suspicious of her absence and obtains a warrant to search her house, and Marjorie’s body is found hidden under a layer of frozen goods in the garage freezer.

The murder, to which Bernie confesses when caught, rocks the town, but they quickly jump to his defense — so much so, as a matter of fact, that Bernie’s prosecutor (played somewhat slimily but delightfully by Matthew McConaughey, who took me a minute or two to recognize) has the trial moved to a town fifty miles away, convincing the judge it won’t be a fair trial otherwise. Basically, he’s Chief Wiggum in Homer the Vigilante, during Wiggum’s one moment of clarity as police chief:

Wiggum: Oh, sorry folks. Gee, I really hate to spoil this little love-in, but Mr. Malloy broke the law. And when you break the law, you gotta go to jail.

Bernie is so charming that the residents of Carthage are almost as hoodwinked by him as Springfield is by Malloy. It’s sobering to think that the events of this movie are real, that a seemingly sweet and compassionate man could hide on top of his murder for nine months, but the film — and Jack Black — do a great job of convincing you why this is so, and how he managed to touch the residents of Carthage. It’s a surprisingly amiable little movie given its dark subject matter. Perhaps it only seems that way because it gives Bernie too big of a pass (this according to the real life prosecutor, although Marjorie Newman’s nephew apparently saw the film and said that the film’s events were portrayed pretty accurately). Still, it’s a fascinating and funny glimpse into how a town becomes its own exclusive world that exalts and celebrates what it would probably condemn elsewhere. I give it four out of five armadillos.