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.

A Separation (2011)

I missed out on the opportunity to see Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation back in March or April of 2011. This was unfortunate, because it’s a stellar movie. But I was also buying myself another year of freedom from its ocean of pain! So there’s that.

After a largely self-induced Netflix delay of many months, A Separation is finally here and I have watched all one hundred and twenty-three heartbreaking minutes of it. It’s a drama focused on the conflict between two families in Tehran following the separation of one of the couples, Simin and Nader. Simin, the wife, wants to leave Iran because she doesn’t see a future for her family there, particularly for her daughter. The husband, Nader, doesn’t want to leave because he feels compelled to look after his elderly, Alzheimer’s-stricken father. Though they still care for one another and want to stay married, the couple has reached an impasse and agrees to a divorce as a matter of necessity.

Razieh, the wife in the second couple, comes into the picture then to care for Nader’s father while he’s gone at work. The arrangement lasts a scant few days before Nader and his daughter return home to find his father tied to his bed, the house abandoned, money missing. The old man is unconscious. Nader is understandably furious and confronts Razieh when she returns, telling her she must leave because she’s endangered his father and stolen from him on top of it. Razieh is apologetic but denies being a thief, saying she wouldn’t have returned if she were, and adds that it was necessary for her to leave that afternoon but won’t explain why. She refuses to go until she’s cleared her name and been paid for her work that day, but Nader shoves her out his door. The precise action isn’t quite clear, but the next we see, Razieh is being helped to her feet by some neighbors a few steps down from Nader’s door. Later that evening, Nader learns that Razieh is in the hospital, having suffered a miscarriage; her baby has died from a blow.

The truth of what transpires in this first act of the movie is unclear, and as it is teased out it only reveals the complexities of the people and relationships at the heart of the conflict without quite elucidating the conflict itself. It brings into relief Simin’s feelings of responsibility for her family’s situation as both Nader and their 10-year-old daughter, Termeh, accuse her of being the one who essentially got the ball rolling by leaving in the first place. The accident also introduces tension between Nader and Termeh, who suspects her father may have known Razieh was pregnant when he pushed her; she isn’t afraid to act as her father’s conscience and probes him multiple times on the truth of the situation. And on top of the loss itself, Razieh’s miscarriage puts additional strain on Razieh and her unemployed, unstable husband, Hodjat. Razieh especially is subject to moral pangs as she questions her own actions in the eyes of God.

This is a film that necessarily deals with the ins and outs of the legal system. It opens on Nader and Simin pleading a judge to be granted a divorce, and later shows the hearings of numerous witnesses in the case for murder that is eventually brought against Nader. The movie draws a lot of its power by examining these personal tragedies through the lens of bureaucratic proceedings. What becomes clearer and clearer is how intractable these conflicts are, and how ill-equipped the law is to fully resolve them. As viewers, we have access to many of the facts that the characters do not when it comes to motivation and culpability (hint: everyone in this movie is guilty in some way). It heightens the tragedy to see these incomplete versions of reality overlap between characters as they grapple with their own truths and guilt, seldom saying things that need to be said to the person who needs to hear them, and leaving it to the inadequacy of the law to sort out the mess. Even when our characters are left to their own devices to deal with their problems, without the intercession of the law, there’s a frequent sense of helplessness and of opportunity already lost – narrowly, but lost all the same.

The movie closes like a tragic, Iranian version of The Graduate as the credits play over Nader and Simin as they wait on opposite sides of the hallway back in court. This time, they are waiting for their daughter to emerge from the courtroom to reveal which parent she’s decided to live with. It’s easy to imagine that they are contemplating what has become of their fourteen-year union, but the separation between them is now complete.

This is a really fantastic movie, if that wasn’t clear already. The actors are fantastic, and I was particularly impressed by the actress playing Termeh, the young daughter. This empathetic portrait paints a rich, dignified portrait of everyone involved, and also leaves no one unscathed.

(Like the viewer.)

Brief update

I watched Atlas Shrugged: Part I on Saturday.

My preliminary review:

This is a bad movie. S-

Other movies I have seen since in the last few months but never talked about include the following:

Orlando (A-)

Heathers (B+)

The Virgin Spring (A!)

Wild Strawberries (A+!)

In a Better World (B!)

Drive (A+!!!!!!!!!)

Melancholia (B+)

The Gift (B+)

Metropolis (A+)
Wow, I have stellar taste in movies!

I read, like, three books, too! Someday I’ll talk about them. Unfortunately, my taste in books is not as good.

The Bicycle Thief

This fine Italian movie was made in 1948 by Vittorio De Sica. Don’t read this is you want to avoid 63-year-old spoilers.

The Bicycle Thief is an incredibly humane, sad movie that sticks because the particulars of its story are simple and yet resonant for almost anyone. We meet our protagonist Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) in post-war Rome. Ricci has a growing family to support, and he’s been waiting for a job so long at a time when openings are rare (more than one in five people were unemployed at the time). The film’s open, which features Ricci among a crowd of impatient  men at an employment office hoping to hear their names called, resembles a lottery drawing more than a job search. But today is at last Ricci’s turn, and his assignment to hang posters around the city means so much to him and his little son, Bruno, that the boy accompanies his father partway on the first day of the new commute, and is anxiously awaiting Ricci’s return at the end of the long workday.

Of course, the first day is when it all goes wrong for Ricci: right as he’s carefully hanging up his first poster (featuring Rita Hayworth off on the more carefree side of the globe), his bike is stolen right out from under his nose. He gives chase, but the thief is swallowed up into the throngs of Rome. For Ricci, everything depended on that bike. Without it, he won’t be able to get to work, and Ricci’s post will be given to someone else. What’s more is the bike came dearly enough to the Ricci family: they couldn’t even afford to buy this bike; rather, Ricci’s wife pawned their wedding linens for it.

Just as the arrival of the job was a blessing, its seeming loss is an incalculable blow to Ricci. He can’t even immediately face his wife that night, and he sends his forlorn son home alone while he goes to a friend for help in retrieving the bike. Together, they plan to search straight away the next morning in a busy market where bikes are brought, disassembled, and sold.

The ensuing search never brings Ricci to his bike, but it brings him face-to-face with a Rome still reeling from the aftershocks of the war. The flurry of activity in the market highlights the hopelessness of his pursuit: amidst hundred of bike parts — bells, tires, pumps — Ricci, his friends, and family search for signs of the one bike that belonged to Ricci. Ricci eventually accuses one of the men at the market of the theft, but the serial number on the bike he is working on doesn’t match Ricci’s. The man is incensed: like Ricci, he’s just trying to make an honest living for himself. Later, Ricci and Bruno spy an old man talking with another man who resembles Ricci’s thief; they are able to follow the old man to a church where the destitute are given a free meal by society ladies (only after the poor are subjected to a good grooming and a little dose of religion in the form of mass, though). Like the accused man in the market, the old man purports his innocence and only wants to be left alone so that he can get his free meal. He, too, is only looking out for himself.

Hopelessness drives Ricci to give in and treat his son to a meal at a restaurant, an outing that is evidently a rare treat for the family. It seems to bolster Ricci’s spirits for a short while to drink and eat well, but as he notices the silent stare-off occurring between his son and a young boy from a better-off family, he muses bitterly about how much it would take to regularly indulge in this kind of thing. Completely demoralized by now, he finds himself turning to the very same “wise woman” that he’d belittled his wife for seeing earlier in the film. At the house of the fortune teller, he cuts to the front of a line of other desperate people awaiting counsel, and asks what’s to be done about his bike. The advice of the wise woman isn’t much different from that of the policeman Ricci originally complains to: Look for the bike. Find it today, or you won’t find it at all. This is the kind of harsh truth you don’t really need counsel — legal, spiritual, psychic, or otherwise — to receive, but it’s solid, and Ricci sadly pays up for the pleasure of having his dreams stomped on a little bit more.

Towards the end of this labyrnthine day, Ricci and Bruno again spy the thief and give chase. Ricci confronts him in front of a crowd of neighbors angry at Ricci for breaking into their midst and giving one of their own a hard time; when a policeman arrives on the scene, he is yet another runner in the long, sad relay to impress upon Ricci the hopelessness of his situation: even if the man is a thief, the policeman says, he probably won’t be convicted. Not a trace of the bike can be found in the man’s apartment. He has neighbors and family to back him up while Ricci doesn’t have the name of a single eyewitness to the theft. Ricci is confronted by an even angrier mob.

Through the movie, a couple fake-outs occur. (Or maybe, now that I think of it, they’re only fakeouts if you fall into the trap of thinking that every movie is a Hollywood movie.) My first fakeout was when Ricci’s wife went to repay the fortune teller and Ricci eventually followed, leaving his newly-acquired bike to the watchful surveillance of children playing a game in the street. You think: a-yup, this is when the bike’s going to get stolen. Obviously, it isn’t. Later on, during the confrontation with the thief’s neighbors, I was expecting a dramatic clash and for Ricci to be hurt or even killed. (I’d heard it was a sad movie, and thought something of a violent and spectacular nature might happen.)

But what happens instead is far more real and ultimately not a surprise after the steady erosion of hope throughout the course of the movie. It already began with a deficit, mind: Ricci was not even standing among the crowd of unemployed men in the first scene, so accustomed he was to its being another day where his name wasn’t called. Even the news that he’d been given a job was but a brief flash in the pan, because it was followed immediately by the news that he needed a bike — a bike that, as it turned out, he’d already pawned before the movie opened. And when the wife devises to pawn their sheets for the bike, she intially seems quite upset to do so, whether she’s actually attached to their things or whether she’s simply worn down from reducing themselves to such a point simply to be able to keep their heads above water. She quickly comes around, though, and the whole family is elated. To finally be given an opportunity, then, and to have it snatched away almost as quickly is an untenably cruel twist of fate for the family.

At every turn in Ricci’s desperate search for the bike, he’s surrounded by what essentially are ghosts that he never really seems to see. That is to say, scene after scene presents the poverty and struggle of weary people living what must seem a shadowy existence in post-war Rome. Here, Ricci may well be an anonymous member of a crowd, all of whose members are rushing around trying to claim a piece for themselves, whether it’s the sale of a secondhand bicycle or a seat on the trolley. It may be natural as a viewer to think that the people who took Ricci’s bike, who blackened his circumstances, are the bad people, and that Ricci is good — he’s a deliberately broad everyman, the guy in Gil Scot Heron’s song who just wants a “a wife and a children and some food to feed them every night.” But while the focus on his particular sad tale may isolate him for a while, as the disaster of the bike closes in around him it becomes clear that Ricci’s is not a struggle separate from the thieves’, but rather the same struggle, just in an earlier stage.

So when Ricci spots a lone bicycle leaning up against the wall, we’ve arrived back at the beginning of the same mean cycle that drove someone else to take Ricci’s bicycle. Ricci’s fear and desire are palpble, but sure enough, the latter wins out, and he goes for the bike. He is almost immediately caught but the bike’s owner decides not to have him arrested, apparently out of mixed disgust for Ricci and sympathy for Bruno, who was witnessed the whole incident.

I don’t for a minute believe that the movie is purporting that Ricci is blameless in the matter or that his actions are inevitable. I do, however, think it is simply trying to paint the tableau of circumstances that precede bad acts, to show just how heavy the weight of poverty and failing institutions can be. (This is another interesting aspect of the movie: whether it’s the slow meting-out of jobs in whatever the system is that places men like Ricci, or the police who can’t help him recover his bike or arrest the thief, or the society ladies and their charities that try to look after both the souls and stomachs of poor men, the movie offers a glimpse of good-intentioned institutions that clearly help somewhat but are powerless to reverse — or maybe even put a dent in — all of the circumstances weighing against the Riccis of the world. If this sounds like a paen that will end in a Randian rant about how individuals have to look after themselves, it was not intended. A harmful manifestation of this kind of thinking is, of course, While self-preservation is understandable, it’s unsustainable for society as a whole. The only answer appears to be that there aren’t any — not easy ones, anyway.)

The most devastating moment of the movie is when Bruno and Ricci confront one another after Ricci’s aborted theft. Ricci is ashamed, Bruno is shocked, and both are visibly shattered; all that happens is that Bruno takes his father’s hand as they are shuffled off into the crowd yet again. And that’s it, movie’s over. Have fun, kids.

A random note that I haven’t included until now: All of the actors in this movie — who weren’t professional actors — were really wonderful.

Subtle pickiness that is still important because it’s the name of the movie, after all: The Italian title of this movie translates literally to “Bicycle Thieves,” a title which was restored in the Criterion release of the film back in 2007. The decision to rename the movie The Bicycle Thief — singular, with the definite article — in the original English release has been controversial, and many are doubtless happy that the Criterion title is faithful to the Italian. But I think “The Bicycle Thief” is better as a title by far. I’ve seen some criticisms along the lines that this movie isn’t really about Ricci, and so the use of the definite article is misleading in suggesting it’s some kind of character study, which it clearly isn’t. Ricci’s struggle is the struggle of desperate people writ large. But the title “The Bicycle Thief” doesn’t imply that it’s about Ricci, specifically. Initially, rather, it makes you ask who, in a prosaic way, the thief is; you’re more concerned with whether Ricci et al. will catch up to him. When you watch a movie about the bicycle thief and only in the last few minutes you realize who the thief really is — or, more accurately, the thief who is really important for our purposes, and how one can become him — then the movie’s wallop is greater. Basically, “The Bicycle Thief” subverts your expectations in a way that “Bicycle Thieves” doesn’t. In a good and devastating way.

The Trip

Last night I watched two, count ‘em, two movies.

First was The Trip (2010) with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. It may not have been the best choice of movie to fly completely blind into: I only learned afterwards — or, okay, during the movie, as I was simultaneously watching and browsing Wikipedia for information about the movie so that I could adjust my minute-by-minute perception of it based on new bits of trivia — that The Trip is a follow-up to A Cock and Bull Story, which stars the same people, playing the same loose versions of themselves. I didn’t feel hindered not having seen that first, but I’m sure I might have appreciated The Trip more if I had. Furthermore, this follow-up is also the culled-down film version of a BBC miniseries; the series seems to have the better reputation and be regarded as more complete.

In spite of all this, I largely enjoyed the movie. It’s the somewhat aimless chronicle of two not-quite-friends who are traveling through northern England to discover hidden gastronomic gems. It’s a trip that Steve had originally planned to take with his foodie girlfriend (a fact he is weary of being reminded of by his assistant, parents, and others). But when the girlfriend splits the scene and several other friends decline the offer to accompany him, Steve turns to Rob, who seems no less enthusiastic to join him despite being so low on the totem pole of preferred travel companions. So, the duo’s dynamic is established in this first scene of the movie as Rob displays unfailing good humor in the face of the moody Steve.

And Steve has a lot to be moody about: he’s not getting the acting jobs he wants, his son’s acting out, his estranged girlfriend is giving him a cold shoulder whose glacial chill be felt from fully 4,000 miles away. Even his flings with a hotel employee and a photographer sent to cover the roadtrip don’t seem to lift Steve’s spirits, and on top of it all, Rob just won’t stop doing his Michael Caine impression.

The movie’s at its best when Steve and Rob are riffing off of one another and the focus is a little more banal. In fact, the first Michael Caine-off is when the movie began to win me over as Steve and Rob, over their first meal, begin to take apart the cadence of Caine’s speech, and the depth, nasality, and evolution of his voice, which gives rise to a host of other impressions. These are the scenes where you can see Steve’s enjoyment of his friend in spite of himself, although this could be the amusement of the “real” Steve Coogan breaking through (I understand this movie was heavily improvised). In another scene, Rob analyzes an ABBA song and the oddly compelling power it gained via its backstory: Björn Ulvaeus wrote about his divorce from what he imagined to be his ex’s (Agnetha Fältskog’s) perspective, and then made her sing the lead on the song. Definitely healthy! Steve and Rob then sing a stirring duet of “The Winner Takes it All” and have an argument over what an octave is and who can sing more of them. Watching the two bond over their mutual talents and dip into the unexpected poignancy of 70s pop music trivia is more compelling than the ostensible dramatic moments of the movie, possibly because Coogan and Brydon have a great dynamic together, and these scenes as a whole feel fresher.

Even in these moments of levity, the film is heavily punctuated with Major Life Issues as seen from a decidedly middle-aged perspective. This was a more problematic part of the movie. The seriousness unfolds in such a hamfisted way that it’s hard to tell if it’s actually being played quite straight and thus, to be really invested in it. For instance, each time Steve goes to call his girlfriend, the same sad, tinkly piano music plays in the background, and the girlfriend hits all the rote notes of indifference-turned-hostility in the bitchy ex-girlfriend catalogue. When we cut back to Steve in these dialogues, he’ll be standing someplace remote — in one instance, even atop a giant hill on a sleety night — utterly dwarfed against the desolate landscape. It’s like a metaphor for his life!! Awww. By the the time the movie’s winding down and we’re cutting back and forth between scenes of the nuclear idyll that is Rob’s life and the sterile, ultra-modern apartment where Steve is alone, watching videos of himself and his ex-girlfriend on his phone, the whole thing seems overwrought with pathos. I think this is an instance where it might have been fine to tell a little more than to show. Because what’s shown is stilted, and what’s told in this movie — through the great scenes between the two leads — tends to be more affecting. I suppose what I’m imagining is a more comedic, Michael Caine-impression-laden My Dinner with Andre. But why not, it sounds like a pretty good movie to me.

Other things I enjoyed about this movie:
- In general, I like watching actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves.
- “She was only sixteen.”
- Visually the film is really a treat. They’ve mostly just got English landscape porn: there’s babbling brooks, fog-swept moors, and sheer, imposing cliffs.
- It was also fun to see the intricate food preparation, particularly the scene at L’Enclume. This is the most experimental, modern dining establishment the pair visit, the film’s feature foodie oasis, where the leads consume course after course of quirkily-presented food. This scene also stood out for me as being one of the more amusing, as the eclectic dishes prompt increasingly skeptical attitudes from Steve and Rob, who nevertheless utter the most enthusiastic (if perfunctory) “Thanks” and “Looks great” they can muster whenever the host appears with a new course.
- Another favorite scene: Steve trying to get away from a fellow tourist, a boring older gent desperate to impart his knowledge of the limestone cliff on which they’re standing.

The next movie I watched was The Bicycle Thief, which was about — well, I don’t want to spoil it. I’ll write about that tomorrow.