Archive for year: 2011

One take is that the entire movie is the coma-induced imaginings of Joao, an abandoned bastard longing to know his real parents. That would explain the fancy balls, the imprisoned duchess, the Dickensian coincidences and the consistent world view of nobles flirting, seducing and changing identities. Another take: let’s make a movie that animates all those 18th-century paintings from Goya to fetes galantes and just imagine what those peoples’ lives were like. More accurately, this was a six-episode made-for-TV soap opera that was never meant to hang together as a 4.5-hour movie. If once a week another character tells us his/her story, there is a regular accretion that fills out the picture; jammed together, however, the repetition is risible, the plot expands instead of coming together, and for where we end up, we feel we could have done without the last two hours of exposition. The many shots borrowed from artworks are beautiful, and the exposure to the Portuguese cinema of Raul Ruiz is not without charm.

A tableau vivant in which ‘reality’ is a painting – specifically, Pieter Breugel’s “Road to Cavalry.” The movie obscures Jesus’s crucifixion amid 16th-century Flemish peasants and red-tunicked Spanish soldiers, just as Breugel did in his metaphor-filled canvas. With minimal soundtrack and even less dialogue, watching this film becomes an intense experience, and trying to piece together the action furthers one’s concentration. The movie could have done without identifiable stars Michael York and Charlotte Rampling, but perhaps director Lech Majewski felt they were needed to get this Polish feature into the few arthouses where it will be shown. We accept the more anonymous characters as real, although we are shown they are actors, they are filmed before a painted backdrop, and we see Breugel in the foreground, imagining them. What, then, is this saying about the story of Jesus?

A deft amalgam of rowdy humor and murderous criminality, this dramedy rode the broad back of Brendan Gleeson to a wistful conclusion that made you mourn the end of the story, and perhaps the character. Unfortunately, both were let down by Don Cheadle’s unbelievable American counterpart, more Stepin Fetchit than crime-stopper. What a lone FBI agent was doing in Ireland in the first place was as much a mystery as why director McDonagh would think such a foil was needed for Gleeson to run away with the show.

A rare old-fashioned well-made film, with good guys, bad guys, a plot, fine acting, a bit of history, local color and a satisfying ending. This is sure-fire Oscar bait, although with so many deserving actresses – in order, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone and Jessica Chastain – it’s hard to know who will get the nominations and in which category. The only false note for me was Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly Holbrook, too extreme for belief. The blogosphere has objected to the movie’s one-sided picture of the South in 1963 – glossing over civil rights campaigners and the fact that nice woman mistreated their servants, too – but any film only has to tell its one story, and this story was a good one.

One wonders how good a movie this could have been with a real actor instead of Steve Carrell in the lead role, but since he was the movie’s executive producer that wasn’t going to happen. As a result, you had Julianne Moore going through a kaleidoscope of facial expressions, showing real hurt, confusion, and longing, while Carrell, playing opposite her, responded with his single doofus look. Even the kids made Carrell look plastic. As a result the movie, despite some funny lines, never came to mean anything, and there was no emotional payoff, except maybe for the teenage babysitter.