Archive for year: 2009

Love, fashion – and, oh, a lot of cigarette-smoking by our heroine – is about all there was in this ultimately tiresome period biopic. The story of how Gabrielle (Coco) maneuvered into society had some zip, but it was subsumed in the story of how her forays into personal expression fomented a fashion revolution, which was never convincing. If the movie had left Coco before Chanel, I might have liked it better.

Francis Ford Coppola channels Almodovar, but doesn’t quite capture the magic. The setting in La Boca in Buenos Aires is wonderful, as is the Penelope Cruz stand-in, Maribel Verdu. In fact, the black-and-white triangle of Verdu, the young Bennie, and the overly intense Vincent Gallo is the movie’s Pinteresque strength. The flashbacks in contrasting color are less satisfactory: they tease us with partial disclosures, in a way that makes no sense, unless you grant Coppola a magic realism license because of his film’s locale. By the end, the movie had dragged on too long, and traded in its early, eerie power for sitcom-level melodrama.

As far as the movie goes, it was a lot of buildup, not much payoff. The comparison that came to mind is Man on Wire – assembling the team, figuring out equipment, evading detection, etc. – but there the climax was moments of pure exhilaration and triumph, here it was a scene not too different from what had come before. Maybe the dolphin slaughter film that resulted was too distressing to show us, but the footage that Ric O’Barry carried around on his chest-TV monitor didn’t seem all that compelling, to us or to the millions of Japanese pedestrians who streamed by without stopping.

Why is the dolphin slaughter in Japan morally worse than the slaughter of cows in America (not that the Japanese don’t slaughter cows as well), a question the Japanese raise in the film, and a question that particularly resonates after one has just seen Food, Inc. If it is because dolphins are more intelligent than cows – which seems to be the movie’s response – then where do we draw the line? And how do we judge the “intelligence” of pigs, swordfish and other creatures we routinely devour? I can’t imagine shooting a moose, but I have many fewer qualms about deer hunting. Is rarity the test, or sustainability of the population, or whether the animal appears cute or charming to us humans? Obviously, we shouldn’t be feeding mercury-contaminated dolphin meat to our schoolchildren, but that is a side issue for the crusaders of The Cove. Just as obviously, we shouldn’t tolerate lying to justify killing whales, or bribery to buy votes at the IWC. But are we morally justified in condemning the Japanese for simply killing dolphins because they are such appealing animals?

This is a one-trick movie, and once you see that it is a dirty trick being played on the viewer, the modest respect I had for the Hawaiian scenery and Steve Zahn’s character flew out the window. There are “red snappers” – I mean, herrings – galore, but the switcheroo is not of that ilk. Nothing that occurs, or is said, in the first two-thirds of the movie makes any sense or has any integrity once the final third comes around. And that final third, on its own terms, is pretty absurd, too. Where was the “screenplay-writer”?