JULY 2004
The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Before Sunset
Before Sunrise
The Door in the Floor
Los Olvidados
Nazarin
Control Room

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)—7/31/04
Jonathan Demme's version of this wonderful 1962 film is a perfectly respectable political thriller, but nothing more. It lacks the inspiration and occasional flashes of genius of the original, and try as I did to put the older film out of my mind while watching the new one, I could not do it. There was nothing to send the film soaring as the garden party/brainwashing sequence at the start of John Frankenheimer's masterpiece, and as a result the film just sort of stumbles on its way. Every time Demme reworked a scene from Frankenheimer, or simply lifted one, or left one out, I flinched. Example: in the original, Raymond, in his "controlled" state, murders the liberal senator and the senator's daughter, the woman Raymond loves. The senator is in his kitchen, in pajamas and bathrobe, hunting up a midnight snack; he holds a milk carton in his left hand, in front of his chest. Raymond fires a silenced shot into the milk carton, and on into the senator's heart; what we see pouring forth is not blood, but—from the carton—the milk of human kindness we expect in a liberal's veins. Then his daughter comes running down the stairs and Raymond drops her without thinking about it. The whole scene is over in seconds, done with extraordinary economy and wit. Demme turns this into a long double murder by drowning with many underwater shots. It's distended, and loses all the punch. Example: in Demme, the trigger for initiating "control" of a subject is calling them by name in a special way, three times, and slowly. In Frankenheimer: the brilliant queen of diamonds playing card. Again, a rather clumsy device replaces one of perfect concision.
Something Demme couldn't help is the change in political atmosphere. I saw the Frankenheimer just after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and believe me, the paranoia was like Los Angeles smog, coming in with every breath. As much as we may fear and despise Halliburton and its many counterparts, the notion that they're going to take over the country will probably never have the urgency of fear of the Soviets, even if it should. (Besides, as was pointed out to me, Halliburton doesn't need to implant a mind control chip in a politician when it already has a vice president on the payroll.) It is sometimes complained that Frankenheimer's film was a little heavy on caricature, but it was about politics, which is of course all caricature: listen to the country, the people, the society, the government described by anyone in either political convention and tell me, does that resemble any country you know?
The one thing the films share is first-rate playing. Although Denzel Washington is all wrong for this role, and should never have been turned into a mind control subject, the other parts are first rate. Meryl Streep appears to be having the time of her life in a terrific part; Jon Voight plays the liberal senator with such conviction that it never occurs to you that he could play anything else; Bruno Ganz as a sort of mad scientist is straight out of a Wim Wenders film; and Liev Schreiber is, as always, phenomenal (why don't we see more of this guy in movies?). But then Frankenheimer was blessed with a cast that, each and every one, gave career performances: Lansbury, Sinatra, Leigh, even Laurence Harvey (Harvey was one of the most annoying actors ever to stand in front of a camera, but in this role, annoying was what it was all about).
P.S. The British Film Institute publishes a paperback series of 20,000-word, heavily illustrated essays called "Film Classics." The one on The original Manchurian Candidate is by pop culture critic extraordinaire Greil Marcus, and film writing doesn't get much better.
Afterthought: Somebody told me that Angela Lansbury apparently saw the remake and, among other things, praised Meryl Streep's work in the role Lansbury created. But Lansbury was also quoted as saying that she didn't understand why anyone would want to do a new version when the original was "perfect." I hauled out the DVD of Frankenheimer's film and watched it, yet again, and of course she's right. Wouldn't change a frame. Demme's film looked even paler beside it.

Before Sunrise (1995)—7/24/2004
Before Sunset (2004)—7/25/2004
When Before Sunrise passed through nine years ago, I must have been look under the bed for a lost sock, because it passed right over me. Even if I had noticed and then dismissed it, I would have remembered its appearance when the sequel showed up this summer. The trailer for Sunset sold me—all right, it was Paris, but what the hell—so I had Netflix dig up Sunrise so I could watch these things in proper sequence. I'm glad I did, very glad, and I urge you to do the same. The pairing greatly enhances both films, and Sunset grows considerably from having seen Sunrise first.
In the first, Jesse (American, played by Ethan Hawke [b. 1970]) and Céline (French, played by Julie Delpy [b. 1969]) meet on a train going to Vienna. They are mid-twenties, she speaks perfect idiomatic English, they start walking around the city; she has a train to catch the next morning, but otherwise they don't know anyone in Vienna or have anything to do. The picture is entirely the two of them walking and talking, talking and walking—it's a sort of hymn to Steadicam—with only the flimsiest of distractions by locals, and that may sound like My Dinner with André Beside the Blue Danube, but give it a chance. First of all, director Richard Linklater and collaborator Kim Krizan have given them an intelligent, fluent, funny script that allows them to explore themselves as much as one another and Vienna, and Linklater gives the two performers plenty of room to find themselves. I had not known Delpy's work before, and with the exception of Training Day (2001) had not developed much interest in Hawke's. (Hawke was born in Austin, TX, where Krizan lives and works; Linklater is a Houston native.) But they shine here, two very young people who show their enthusiasm, naïveté, vulnerability, needs, and demonstrate also that they have learned how to play a scene with another performer. In many respects, the film is Delpy's. She has the more expressive, effusive character, and she can do more with her face and eyes, while Hawke doesn't as get as far beyond looking enchanted as she does. There are some familiar glimpses of the city, but this is not calendar art, and there's nothing obvious, except perhaps the visit to the Prater amusement park and a trip on the big wheel (ghosts of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten—fortunately Sunrise restrains itself from anything but this visual reference). You can feel the sexual pull developing momentum as the film proceeds, and it finally takes over (discreetly) in a park. But sunrise washes out the stars, and they must go to the train station, where they agree to meet, right there, in six months. When they part, and the camera revisits the places they have walked, now empty, like their own lives so suddenly after a few hours of intense companionship and intimacy, we know that meeting won't occur.
Before Sunset begins with the same device, but with a twist: the camera visits all the places the reunited Céline and Jesse will walk in Paris, but empty now and waiting to be filled by their presence. It's a hint that they may do more than simply meet again, although a hint that dangles tantalizingly for eighty minutes. Jesse has written a novel about that meeting in Vienna and is on a book tour that's winding up in Paris. (He's talking to a small group, mostly reporters, at Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookstore that used to be located off the Place de l'Odéon, where Sylvia Beach set up a lending library for American ex-pats, and James Joyce hung out, cadging a few francs for drinks off Beach. It's now on the Quai St.-Michel, facing the Ile de la Cité.) Céline shows up, having read his book and seen posters at the bookstore about his tour, and though he has a plane to catch in a short time, they go out for coffee and then (surprise) a walk. And they talk. Gloriously.
Jesse has now come into his own: an author, mid-thirties, a fair amount of living etched into his somewhat gaunt face, he has a better idea of what he knows and doesn't know, he has the confidence to tease Céline a fair amount, and he's not afraid to be honest. She asks him, right off the bat, if he went to Vienna to make that appointment; before answering, he asks if she went, and she says she didn't—her beloved grandmother had died and she had to be there for the funeral instead. But did he? No, he says, he didn't. She chews on that for a second, then starts to get agitated: why didn't he? She had a perfectly good reason, the death of the relative she loved most of all, but what was his excuse? He says nothing, looks like it isn't a good idea to answer, looks very sad, and she gets it: he did show up. They were young and foolish and didn't exchange telephone numbers or addresses nine years earlier, so she couldn't get in touch with him to say she'd be a day or two late. He hung around, pasted his hotel number at the terminal, and flew home after two days.
Immediately, we're alerted to the fact that Jesse not only wanted to keep things going nine years earlier, he tried at first now to cover that up (perhaps to keep from making Céline feel bad, perhaps to disguise his own feelings. But she catches on fast—this is one extremely smart woman, herself also leaner and perhaps a little wiser with age, as though it's illusions along with baby fat she's shed—and immediately resorts to her own disguises. Yes, she agrees, it was a nice time, that night. But when he brings up the subject, she recalls that they did not have sex—absolutely, definitely, they did not. He persists, offering to tell her the brand name of the condoms they used (twice). She finally breaks down, but then she's off again on this or that tangent. Céline has a mildly convincing act of a ditzy blonde she puts on to screen off her real feelings—in this case, he rediscovered and threateningly strong feelings for Jesse—but you know, as Jesse knows, this is no ditz. Listen to her talk about her work, listen to her talk about her relationship with a photojournalist: she knows who she is and what she doesn't have, but she's afraid to admit it.
Jesse strings out the conversation—as wonderful as in Sunrise, but more mature, with an even greater sense of spontaneity, the characters even better filled out (Hawke and Delpy, when approached by Linklater about a sequel, persuaded him to let them work on the script). When it's time for him to go, the driver provided for him meets them in the limo with his bags, but he insists on giving her a ride home: plenty of time, he insists. When they arrive at her apartment, there's a courtyard party in full swing; she has to join in, bring down a dish she's made. But he makes her promise to sing a song for him, since she's mentioned that she's learned to play the guitar and has written a few songs. She makes tea, talks, finally gets out her guitar. There are only three songs in English she has written, and she describes two of them in a way that makes it inevitable Jesse will chose the third. Naturally, it (like his novel) is about their night together, and even includes his name. Then she lapses back into disguise, but before she can disappear, he goes to her CD player and puts on Nina Simone. Right choice. Céline has been to a couple of Simone concerts and starts vamping her style, doing her voice, her gestures, her slink. There are only about sixty seconds of Sunset left here, but they are—without reservation—perfect.
The Brits at Sight and Sound ran a piece on the film claiming that it represents the new American wave of preference for romance over sex (I haven't noticed that wave, or it just hasn't splashed on me). What a crock. The film is oozing with sex; within minutes of meeting, Céline tells Jesse that she's been getting horny a lot, and it isn't long before he's telling her his marriage has turned into a sexless desert. There's a massive amount of flirting—sometimes concealed, sometimes not—but woven through memory, need expressed or only nodded at, and chances missed. Not only in Vienna. It turns out that Céline and Jesse both lived in New York for a few years without knowing it or running into one another. But on the day when Jesse was getting married, being driven to the church by his best man, he was looking out the car window, thinking about Céline, and then certain he saw her enter a deli at 13th and Broadway. She blinks at this story. "I lived at 11th and Broadway," she says. It's the most painful moment of the film, and one that leads us precisely where the film needs to go.
Right now, Before Sunset qualifies as one of the best films of the year, certainly among American entries, and I urge you to see it—in tandem with its predecesor. This is really a double feature, and each enlarges the experience of the other.

The Door in the Floor (2004)—7/22/04
Haunted-by-past-tragedy stories are reasonably common; where it is a relationship, usually a marriage, that is haunted, the customary practice is for the story to dangle the tragedy before us though it occurred in the past, let us watch the relationship deteriorate under the continuing impact of it, and although we know the relationship is doomed, try to keep us sufficiently interested as we watch it collapse—as, of course, it must. (If it doesn't, then it's not a haunted-by-past-tragedy story, it's a miracle story. In literature and film, people don't believably overcome these things.)
As a result, The Door in the Floor is fairly standard stuff. It is said that second-time director Tod Williams convinced John Irving to sell him the rights to the story for a dollar, which suggests that Williams has some persuasive powers he might consider bottling instead of making movies. The story is roughly the first one-fourth of A Widow for One Year (1998), a novel I read with considerable pleasure, although most of that pleasure attached to the last three-fourths of the book, precisely the moment after the movie ends. I am in no position to gainsay Irving's decision. In a legal sense, it is his story, and he can do with it what he wants, including giving it away. (Irving is no naïf in the movie business. This is, I believe, the fourth film made from one of his novels. His book, My Movie Business [1999], an account of the adaptation and making of The Cider House Rules [novel, 1985; movie, 1999] is easily the best account I have read by an author undergoing adaptation of what the process is like.) But in another sense, he gave the story to all of us, and I'm a little annoyed that he agreed to have it remade so that what I value most is lost. The recovery, growth, and later history of Marion, Ruth, and Eddy, and the detective story in Amsterdam, will never be able to stand on its own; so go read the novel.
It's not really a bad film, it's just a not very good film. It takes a very shopworn idea (haunted-etc.) and tries to deepen it with "touches." For the most part, these take the shape of very brief scenes in the European manner of perhaps twenty to thirty years ago, six- to eight-second takes which are meant to establish a mood with a quick glimpse in the way that Monet gave us a bird with a squiggle of a brushstroke. Alas, Tod is not Claude. Consequently, we feel prodded—feel this, feel that, don't you see what they're going through?—and the manipulation is overbearing. Then there is the fact that the haunted-etc. story is stitched onto a coming-of-age story, in this case coming-of-age-sexually. Teenage boy, middle-aged woman. We know what's going to happen to them, just as we know what's going to happen to the marriage. So the cues to react this way and that way are doubly annoying. Irving avoids many of these problems in the novel, by the way, exactly in having the body of the story follow this standard opening. It doesn't have to bear the weight, because it can't.
The acting has come in for a great deal of approbation from the mainstream critics, mostly that of Jeff Bridges. I must admit to a certain Jeff Bridges problem, apparently not shared by most film lovers. Bridges seems to me one of those actors who, while patently serious about his craft, can't seem to hide how hard he works at it. There are actors who are acting, we know, but we don't think about it much as we watch them: early De Niro and Gabin, Ian Holm, Thomas Mitchell, James Stewart, and Marcello Mastroianni are the first half dozen names that come to mind. Bridges has always seemed to me one of those actors whose work shows all the seams and joins, who lets you hear the ball joints grinding in the sockets. Sometimes this doesn't matter; his Dude in The Big Lebowski (1998) was delightful. In Door, it matters. When Bridges, as children's book author Ted Cole, does effortless charm, you can practically smell the flop sweat. He's supposedly a slave to his vast ego, but you never believe him when he's letting it dominate. He pushes the big effects when he should be holding them back, making us look inside him to see them at work. No, with Bridges it's all on the surface, and way to big and loud.
It's a pity, because he can do small, intimate, quiet, and very well. When, inevitably, he tells the story of the tragedy at the end, it's effective, and when he says goodbye to his departing wife (with a couple of women he's brought home to seduce waiting on the porch), it's more than effective: it's touching, and sad, a man who realizes he's failed and lost something immensely valuable. Still, all the quiet scenes and inner work really belong to Kim Basinger, an actress who has made something of a career as a babe but who knows how to create a character—by making the audience come after it, feeding out hints and pieces, the way most of us do to the people around us, even the people we love. Bridges could have learned more from her.
The sad part of the cast is Jon Foster, who is sixteen, and plays the boy who comes of age. He's probably supposed to be a little younger in the story (I vaguely remember him as fourteen from the book, but that might be wrong), but in any case he's a cipher. Until the last five or ten minutes of the film, Foster has two basic expressions in moments of stress, of which his character experiences many: (1) the wariest possible suspicion, and (2) desperation to escape from the moment, preferably up his most accommodating bodily orifice. It's hard to believe this film is going to do much to advance his career, although between the money and the fact that he got to do some nude sex scenes with Basinger, you have to figure he came out ahead of the game.

Nazarin (1958)
Los Olvidados (1950)—7/10/04
Luis Buñuel is by common consent one of the great talents ever to lend himself to the writing and direction of films. Yet, in large part because of his distinctive temperament—artistically, politically, psychologically—he had a hard time getting backing for films until very late in his career. Born in Aragon, mixing with avant-garde artistic type in Madrid in the 1920s, he inevitably made his way to France. Un Chien Andalou (1929) made him famous, L'Age d'Or (1930) made him infamous, the Spanish Civil War (begun in 1936 ) meant not many films were being made at home; that left the US, where he worked—in a basically menial capacity for both the Museum of Modern Art, dubbing films, at in Hollywood. After the war, he moved to Mexico, where he started making films again.
Los Olvidados is an utterly uncompromising look at children of poverty, street kids in Mexico City with little or no home life, no money, no possibilities, and nobody giving a damn (the title translates as something like "The Forgotten"). It's dressed up as a plea for compassion with a little opening narration, but in fact it's a story of complete hopelessness: of young boys fated to be destroyed by a society which essentially condemns them to death. The few sympathetic adults are powerless, and know it. Most are indifferent (like Pedro's mother and Ojito's deserting father) and some are completely punitive: kill all the vermin. Destruction is the fate even of those who try to pull themselves out of the lower depths, and the two who make that attempt in the film end up victims—like everyone else. It sounds depressing, but it's actually terrifying: these kids, and the lives they lead, will frighten your socks off, none more than their senior delinquent, Jaibo. As played by Roberto Cobo, twenty years old when the film was made, and destined for a career of numerous films and television appearances (he died in 2002), Cobo was authentic beyond authenticity: every time he came on the screen, I could feel my blood pressure go up. This is the kind of thing Buñuel did extremely well: looking at an ugly situation without flinching, saying, This is how it is, period. No way out, no saving graces, no reason whatsoever for hope. Terrifying, as I say, but bracing it is way, and with a severe beauty.
Nazarin is something else entirely, a comedy satirizing pure Christianity. (Buñuel's anticlerical appetite was unappeasable, and his imagination rich.) Nazarin is a priest—warm, kindly, full of love, sympathy, and entirely selfless. He will give his last stick of firewood to anyone in need, or who just asks for it, and trusts to God's love. He wants nothing for himself but the opportunity to serve God and his parishioners, who are of course selfish, greedy, duplicitous, superstitious, and hypocritical. Nazarin keeps taking the rap for their misdeeds, and when he hides a woman for a night, and she responds by burning down his apartment building to destroy any traces of her perfume, he is defrocked. (His superior, Padre Angel, says, "If you did fall into the devil's trap, it wouldn't be with a hideous looking creature like her." The more Father Nazarin is debased and humiliated by people, the more he refuses to resist—and of course the more he is exploited. At the end, framed once again by others, he is being marched off to jail—a long walk under the care of a single soldier. They pass an old woman with a cart full of produce. She takes pity on him and hands him a pineapple. He refuses it, starts off, then stops, goes back, and takes it. Did he realize that he had let his pride cancel out an act of Christian charity? Or had he become so disillusioned that he could not believe an act of selfless generosity when he saw one? Either way, Buñuel has us where he wants us.

Control Room (2004)—7/8/04
A neighbor listened to my groan about not much worth seeing this summer and suggested Control Room, which turned out to be a good idea. This documentary about the Arab news channel, Al-Jazeera, is also a documentary about America’s invasion of Iraq, and therein resides the fundamental problem of the movie. Which one is the real subject? You can make the two work together, but only up to a point. Director Jehane Noujaim, who also shot much of the film, seems either of two minds or convinced she could make the fusion. But even though you become conscious of a while of watching a hydra-headed movie, Control Room is ultimately justified by its content.
It has three main “characters,” if you will: Hassan Ibrahim, and English-speaking Arab correspondent for the station; the station manager, whose name I didn’t write down; and a US Army press officer, Lieutenant Josh Rushing. Ibrahim understands the Americans reasonably well and can see the arguments they’re trying to make; it’s just that he doesn’t buy the semantic trickery (or just plain duplicitousness) that underlies it. Rushing tells him “we” are not occupying Baghdad, when of course we are. Ibrahim calls him on it, and Rushing is forced to say that “we’re there,” but not “occupying” the city. The station manager shows us—not in exposition but by allowing himself to be followed around with a camera—how things work. Yes, of course, there is sympathy in the broadest sense for the Arabs; it’s an audience of forty million Arabs which allows Al-Jazeera to exist. If Canada invaded Washington State, wouldn’t CBS news share the outrage of the Washingtonians? But we also see his energetic efforts to keep coverage fair, and balanced. Do they show explicit pictures of dead and (horribly) wounded? “I call that journalism,” says the manager. Hard to disagree. His conclusion that the US bombing of Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad headquarters, resulting in the death of a correspondent, and justified because the Army insisted it was taking fire from the building: the station was being “punished” for its reports. After all the footage of Rumsfeld describing what Al-Jazeera was doing, again it’s hard to disagree with the station manager’s assessment. Watch these people at work and ask yourself if they would pick up a gun.
In many ways, Lieut. Rushing is the most touching figure in the film. He starts out as an amiable hard-liner, then with extensive contact learns to see and even feel the Arab point of view. He would be angry if he were an Arab, he says, and it’s a big step, a courageous step. Alas, when it comes to describing the American position, he does not—and probably cannot—stray one syllable from the American line (of the moment: WMD, democracy, regime change, take your pick). This is America, we are right, and doing the right thing. Sigh.