Archive for category: Reviews

Most interesting as a history lesson in the lives and characters of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, so I hope the screenwriters did their research. Top billing, however, went to Keira Knightley, who certainly did a lot of acting, although I could have done with less jaw-jutting as a sign of repressed tension. Fassbender, Mortenson and Cassel were all exquisite as pioneer psychologists; their own personal hangups and foibles left one as unclear as ever as to the merits of psychoanalysis. The movie itself was such a total talkie that its origin as a stage play was obvious. As a play it might even have been better.

A sumptuously beautiful film, but a beauty that had nothing to do with nature and everything to do with the hermetic world of the cinema. I suspect a true cinephile would have recognized an allusion in every character, every shot of Martin Scorsese’s homage to George Melies, silent film, and the French cinema. For the moderately interested, like me, Hugo commanded respect and admiration, but neither love nor rapture. It was a gorgeous and clever pastiche, but when it was over there was relief in exiting the claustrophobic world of Hugo and Ben Kingsley’s train station and breathing the real air outside.

I barely noticed Jennifer Chastain in Tree of Life and scarcely recognized her in The Help, but by the time I caught on to her in Take Shelter I was blown away by her acting skills, by the empathy she communicated. Michael Shannon’s may be the more bravura performance – I have no idea how realistic his descent into paranoid schizophrenia in one week was – but for me Chastain was the anchor of the story, the piece that kept it from swirling away like the murmuration of starlings we saw in the Texas sky.

A most pleasant walk, with beautiful scenery and some interesting characters, especially (for me) Joni Mitchell-lookalike Deborah Kara Unger. Martin Sheen is always good company, too, and the searching for his son in a movie directed by his real-life son Emilio Estevez added poignancy. While there were a number of unlikely melodramatic incidents to keep the plot moving, none was overdone to the point of spoiling the lowkey mood of the piece. In short, the entire walk was enjoyable, and a good substitute for doing it myself. If I give it a low grade, it is mainly due to the film’s own low ambitions.

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.