The Masterpiece Test: Nashville

Year of Release  1975

Country  USA

Length  160 min.

Director  Robert Altman

Screenwriter  Joan Tewkesbery

Cinematographer  Paul Lohmann

Editors  Dennis Hill, Sidney Levin

Sound  Chris McLaughlin, William A. Sawyer

Original Music  Robert Altman, Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Richard Baskin, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson, Juan Grizzle, Allan F. Nichols, Dave Peel, Ben Raleigh, Joe Raposo, Lily Tomlin

Cast  David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert Doqui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan F. Nichols, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Keenan Wynn, voice of Thomas Hal Phillips

Beauty  Though it’s widely regarded as a classic today, Nashville was a somewhat controversial film in 1975.  Many real-life Nashville musicians found the film to be an inaccurate portrayal of the city’s music scene, and felt that the songs used in the film (most of which were written or co-written by the actors singing them) were inferior to the songs actually being produced in the city at that time.  This ignores the fact that many of the songs used in the film aren’t necessarily supposed to be good, and one of the chief pleasures of Nashville is that it provides a wide variety of music that is being performed by characters of convincingly varied skill levels.  The tone is set early on, as the film keeps editing back and forth between an old populist hack (Henry Gibson) singing a hilariously overwrought Bicentennial tribute and a passionate gospel group that is belting out a sincerely soulful tune.  Musical performances take up at least an hour of the film’s 160 minutes, and they run the gamut from the old-fashioned country of a psychologically troubled starlet (Ronee Blakley) to the slick post-hippie folk rock of a noted womanizer (Keith Carradine) to the unskilled shower singing of a waitress (Gwen Welles).  In each case, the music feels appropriate for the character performing it, which is an impressive feat considering the variety of genres on display.

Strangeness  Taken individually, the stories of Nashville’s twenty-four main characters would not be that interesting.  For the most part, they are each fairly one-note and would probably come off as fairly banal clichés if they weren’t played by such an excellent ensemble cast.  But the strength of Nashville, and what makes it such a distinctive and unique film, is that it brings the clichés of different types of music-industry stories and brings them into contact with each other in every conceivable combination, producing genuinely exciting and odd results.  Broad, cartoonish parodies of red-state mentalities (Gibson) rub up against tragic tales of damaged stars (Blakley), while an assassin out of a psychological thriller (David Hayward) shares scenes with a wide-eyed groupie (Shelley Duvall) from an exploitation movie.  It’s as if Robert Altman had considered every generic way to make a movie about this subject matter, and then threw them all into a blender to produce a stranger, more exciting result.

Unity of Form and Subject Matter  The mosaic structure of the film’s various plotlines is reflected in Chris McLaughlin and William A. Sawyer’s innovative sound work, which uses extensive multi-tracking for overlapping dialogue.  Altman had been working on various methods of creating the aural equivalent of deep focus cinematography since at least McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), but Nashville undoubtedly represents his most sophisticated and masterful orchestration of audio cacophony.  The sound work is a perfect fit for a movie that criss-crosses genres and storylines so freely.

Tradition  The granddaddy of large ensemble films is Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), a film that clearly had a strong impact on Altman’s trademark style.  The rule-breaking dissections of the French New Wave also served as an inspiration, with Jacques Rivette’s genre cross-pollination serving as a general forbearer to Nashville’s aesthetic, while the famous traffic jam sequence from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) seems to have directly inspired a similar scene in the first half hour of Altman’s film.  Large ensemble works without a central character seem to have proliferated since Altman’s ‘70s glory days, with examples ranging from Paul Thomas Anderson’s early films through Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000) taking inspiration from Nashville.  Altman himself tried several times to repeat the formula of Nashville, in films such as A Wedding (1978) and Short Cuts (1993), though often with diminishing returns.  Large ensemble storytelling has ultimately found a home on serialized cable television, where ambitious shows like Deadwood and Treme have enough time to fully flesh out their many characters and give a 360-degree view of their settings in a way that movies can barely approach.

Repeatability  There is enough going on in Nashville for it to remain compelling on multiple viewings, and the overlapping stories and dialogue bits make it possible to experience the movie in different ways at different times. 

Viewer Engagement  Since Nashville doesn’t have a main character or central identification figure, it is largely up to the viewer to determine how they experience the film.    Different bits of dialogue and storylines may pop out at different viewers on different screenings, and the cacophony of the dialogue and the flexibility of the script allow the audience many opportunities to choose what to focus on.  Unfortunately, the film is occasionally weighed down by a cold and distant cynicism that seems at odds with its spirited aesthetic, and the wild shifts in tone can make Nashville a somewhat baffling, if exciting, experience.

Morality  A large part of what makes Nashville such an interesting and vital film is its refusal to settle on any one style or point of view, as it is constantly reshuffling characters and putting them in contexts that challenge the viewer’s perception of the film’s milieu.  The free-form, non-hand holding approach does make the film somewhat uneven in both tone and the quality of its individual scenes (in addition to giving a number of its characters short thrift), but that is forgivable considering the impressive ambition of its approach.  Sadly, Altman drops the ball with a heavy-handed finale revolving around an assassination at a political fundraiser, ending with some sledgehammer visual symbolism as storm clouds hover over a giant American flag.  In fairness, this final scene is reasonably well-executed in its own right, but it seems to belong to a different, simpler film.  Altman should’ve left the political sloganeering to the sleazy political vultures, corrupt managers, and careerist musicians that Nashville spends so much time making fun of.

Nashville fails the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  A much smaller-scale look at the art world, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (The Castle of Cagliostro)

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has a reputation as one of the finest filmmakers working today.  Miyazaki’s creative leadership of Studio Ghibli, the animation studio that he co-founded with director Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, has led many to dub Miyazaki as the “Japanese Walt Disney.”  But whatever whimsy and sentimentality crop up in Miyazaki’s work is offset by a deeply weird, surrealist sensibility that doesn’t lend itself easily to toy deals or happy meal promotional tie-ins.  Miyazaki doesn’t shy away from using populist humor or cute, family friendly creatures in his movies, but his is clearly a deeply personal, singular sensibility, and he isn’t afraid to challenge, frighten or even confound his audience.

I was certainly baffled both times I saw Spirited Away (2001) on DVD and the one time I caught Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) in a now-defunct West Bend movie theatre.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – great works of art are always inherently difficult to process on some level, and the avant-garde at its best is able to tap into some fundamental yet hard-to-describe truths on a level that traditional, straightforward works can’t approach.  And although I would have a hard time giving a plot synopsis or even giving any sort of coherent thematic analysis of Spirited Away (and not just because I haven’t seen it in a few years), I still found it so ravishingly beautiful that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it one of the finest animated films I’ve ever seen, and perhaps one of the best films of the past decade.  But I’m of two minds about Howl’s Moving Castle, which I found stunning visually but couldn’t connect with on any other level. 

My experience with Howl’s Moving Castle discouraged me from exploring the rest of Miyazaki’s oeuvre.  Whatever curiosity I’ve had about his work has always been offset by a fear that I would be completely perplexed by his oddball vision.  It’s not that I have an aversion to oddity in art – I would actually go as far as to say that strangeness is a prerequisite for greatness, and most of my favorite filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, etc.) made highly idiosyncratic works that are difficult to categorize and that can’t be fully unpacked even after many viewings.  I could blame my failure to connect with Howl’s Moving Castle on a bias against children’s films, since it’s true that I’m rarely the first in line to see anything that appears to be aimed at anyone under the age of ten, but I would have to ignore the fact some recent computer animated work by Pixar and some hand-drawn films by Sylvain Chomet and Michel Ocelot are among the most enchanting things I’ve seen in the past decade.  (Besides, even a novice like me can see that Miyazaki’s films are not necessarily aimed at children - or at least not just at children).  And while it’s true that I don’t have a very firm grasp of the history of anime, or its stylistic conventions – aside from genre landmarks like Akira (1988) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988), I really haven’t seen much – that can’t be the reason that I’ve been so thrown off by Miyazaki’s style, since he is clearly following his own muse rather than adhering to an inscrutable foreign tradition. 

I have to admit that the reason that I’ve remained ignorant of the work of Miyazaki for so long is probably simply that I’m afraid that I won’t “get it,” and I hate to be that guy who is so thrown off by a work of art that I can’t properly appreciate or evaluate it.  Miyazaki’s work is very difficult to compartmentalize, both because he shifts so quickly between different tones and because it’s hard (for me) to identify when he’s playing off of certain Japanese cultural tropes and when he’s simply making stuff up.  The English voiceovers added to the Disney-distributed editions Miyazaki’s films are also an obstacle to my enjoyment; while they nicely free up my eyes to pay closer attention to the astonishing visuals rather than subtitles, they also tend to feature distracting (and frankly pointless) appearances by celebrity actors rather than trained voice performers.  Miyazaki’s deal with Disney prevents them from drastically altering his films (part of the reason that Studio Ghibli was founded in the mid-80s was so that Miyazaki could retain creative control over the international versions of his films), but I do wonder if, for example, Billy Crystal’s goofy vaudeville-style voiceover as one of the comic relief characters in Howl’s Moving Castle may have given his scenes a tone that Miyazaki did not intend.  The DVDs helpfully include the option to view the film’s with either subtitles or the English dubs, but it’s hard to decide which version is preferable, especially as I imagine it may vary from film to film.

Thankfully, few of these concerns apply to Miyazaki’s first feature length film (he’d previously worked on several anime television series), The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), which is about as easy an introduction to the work of a filmmaker that I can imagine.  A narratively streamlined adventure film with a breathless pace, a goofy sense of humor, and iconic, easy-to-grasp characters, Cagliostro is presumably the furthest from the avant-garde that Miyazaki will be in his career as a filmmaker.  But even when making a crowd-pleasing blockbuster in what appears to be a sort of “house style,” Miyazaki brings enough personality to the proceedings to set his film apart from the pack.  Cagliostro isn’t an original Miyazaki creation – he and co-screenwriter Haruya Yamazaki were tasked with making the second film in the Lupin the III series, spun-off from a popular television series that was based on a manga series created by Monkey Punch (who based his creation on a series of French adventure novels by Maurice Leblanc) – but the film doesn’t bend under the weight of his complicated creative lineage, and it’s an easy-to-follow and engaging story that doesn’t require any prior knowledge of its source material.

Lupin the III is a master thief with a carefree attitude and a playful spirit.  He works alongside a sarcastic, laidback marksman named Daisuke Jigen and a focused master samurai named Goemon.  In the midst of apparently randomly cruising around Europe looking for adventure, Lupin and Jigen get in the middle of a wild car chase involving a mysterious woman and a band of thugs tailing her.  Despite knowing nothing about the situation, Lupin decides to rescue the woman, who promptly disappears but leaves him a distinctive and mysterious ring.  Lupin eventually comes to learn that the woman, Clarisse, is the princess of Cagliostro and is soon to be married to a villainous Count, who needs Clarisse’s ring to perform a ritual that will allow him to uncover the fabled Cagliostro treasure, which will add to the fortune that he’s made from his counterfeit bill empire.  In order to enter the Count’s heavily guarded castle, Lupin tips off his longtime rival, easily-agitated Interpol agent Zenigata, to his whereabouts, using the subsequent distraction to sneak his way past the Count’s guards and remote-controlled lasers.  Gradually Lupin and Zenigata are forced to join forces to rescue the princess and bring down the Count’s illegal operation, though complications arise when Lupin’s rival thief (and sometime lover) Fujiko turns out to already be attempting to swipe the counterfeit cash.

The characters are all fairly basic archetypes; even if the viewer isn’t familiar with the long-running Lupin series (as I wasn’t), they will be able to quickly identify each character’s basic function within the series’ universe, and there aren’t any unexpected twists in their personalities along the way.  There is no hint of moral ambiguity in the Count, and Clarisse is about as complicated as Princess Peach from the Super Mario Bros. video games.  Also, a few of the supporting characters have practically nothing to do in Cagliostro, and seem to only have been included in the script because fans of the series would expect them to show up at some point (samurai Goemon, who appears maybe five times in the whole film and does nothing of note, feels particularly shoehorned in).

These very simple characterizations may prevent Cagliostro from being a particularly sophisticated or original film, but the basic plotting allows the film to focus its full attention on its wonderful visuals and its many dazzling action scenes.  The film opens in the chaotic aftermath of a bank heist, and quickly establishes its tone when Lupin and Jigen decide to throw the cash out the window (it engulfs a bunch of passing cars, but magically doesn’t seem to cause any accidents), apparently more concerned with the excitement of the heist itself than any potential profits.  Miyazaki moves at the same jazzy pace as his heroes, flitting quickly between thrilling sequences like the aforementioned car chase, Lupin’s underwater stealth entrance into the castle, an out-of-control helicopter versus turret skirmish, and an awesome one-on-one battle in and out of a huge clock tower.  The animation team brings a real sense of dynamic momentum to these action scenes, and Miyazaki oversees a lot of vividly eccentric details, such as when a flash grenade tossed by Lupin causes one scene to play out on an entirely yellow background, with the characters appearing as black silhouettes.  There may not be a real sense of stakes in the by-the-numbers story – when one of the heroes is shot down in a helicopter, there’s no question of whether he’s going to get back up again – but Miyazaki’s incredibly visceral action scenes make Cagliostro even more exciting than the best James Bond or Indiana Jones adventures, and he gives the Count a surprisingly brutal death scene.  Even the scenes of comic relief or exposition have a sense of fun to them that is largely missing from contemporary action blockbusters.  The Castle of Cagliostro may not be complex or unique enough to mark reveal Hayao Miyazaki as a genius, but it is too damned entertaining for anyone to deny him his place as one of the world’s premier action directors.

UP NEXT  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

TV on DVD: The Shield (Season Four, Disc One)

Episodes covered:  The Cure, Grave, Bang, Doghouse

I’m not very familiar with Glenn Close.  I’ve seen fewer than ten of the sixty-four projects she’s credited with appearing in on IMDB, and out of those, the only one of her roles that I remember fairly clearly is her crazed stalker in the terrible thriller Fatal Attraction.  And I haven’t seen a single episode of Damages, the FX (and now DirecTV) series that was so heavily built around its star that its working title was Glenn Close TV Project.

But I no longer feel like I need to have seen The Big Chill or Reversal of Fortune to understand why Close is such a highly respected actress.  Close’s work on the fourth season of The Shield is strong enough to justify any praise that she’s received in her career – a claim I feel comfortable making even after only seeing the first third of the season.  The veteran actress plays Monica Rawling, the new Captain of the Barn (Aceveda has finally moved on to the City Council position that it seemed like he would’ve already been in at the start of season three).  Though Monica is a character who’s never been mentioned in previous seasons of the show, and who (apparently) won’t be around after this season is over, she feels like a fully realized and fleshed out character the second she steps on screen in “The Cure.”  Rawling radiates the decisiveness and toughness that a person in her position needs to have in order to be in charge of institutional bullies like Vic.  Her years as a Farmington beat cop would be evident even if they weren’t spelled out by the dialogue, and her desire to make her district a safer place seems both sincere and well-informed, even if her zero-tolerance methods for reducing crime are highly dubious.  Basically, Monica feels like a real person instead of a character that this season needs to drive its storyline, and Close’s grounded portrayal is largely responsible.

Of course, the writing staff deserves some of the credit for making Rawling such a fascinating presence, and for integrating her into all of the other characters’ lives in a way that the many new characters introduced in the previous season weren’t.  Her relationship with Aceveda is unsurprisingly somewhat hostile, as she quickly establishes herself as a very different type of leader that isn’t afraid to do things that make the department look bad as long as the ends justify the means.  Rawling’s no nonsense attitude and her policy of putting as many bodies as she can spare on major cases endears her to Danni, who has been trying to get off of basic foot patrol since season one.  The new Captain’s policy of giving everyone something useful to do doesn’t extend to Dutch and Claudette, as the latter’s righteous quest to expose wrongful arrests has continued to alienate her and her partner from the rest of the police department – and the District Attorney’s office, who refuse to cooperate with any case where Claudette is the primary investigator.  Rawling seems to recognize that Dutch and Claudette are skilled detectives, but is refusing to take them off the sidelines until the latter apologizes to the D.A. – something that is obviously a major source of frustration for the ever-ambitious Dutch, who has gotten off on the wrong foot with the new Captain on a personal and professional level. 

Of course, Rawling’s most prominent tentative relationship on the show is with Vic.  After the events of last season, Vic’s Strike Team has been disbanded, with Shane heading off to a different precinct’s vice squad, Lem working for a juvenile detention center, and Vic and Ronnie doing menial surveillance work at the Barn.  Encouraged by Vic’s impressive arrest rate, Rawling puts the corrupt cop in charge of a new anti-gang task force.  Though she cautions Vic against using methods that will draw the suspicion of Internal Affairs, Rawling seems disturbingly undaunted by Vic’s “anything to get the job done” approach, and it will be interesting to see which lines she’s willing to cross as the season goes on.  Some of her methods may actually be more damaging than Vic’s, as suggested by her controversial “asset forfeiture” policy, in which she and the officers in her command take away any property purchased by drug money – even if it means throwing innocent children out in the street, as happens when she and Vic seize a home bought for a crack dealer’s mother and young siblings in the episode “Bang.”

That sense of the toll that rough and/or corrupt law enforcement takes on the underprivileged people that the law is supposed to protect is something that was largely missing from the first three seasons of The Shield, but it seems like it will be a major concern of the show’s fourth year.  Since the events of the show have always been depicted from the point of view of the police, even the most prominent criminal characters from the show’s past have tended to seem like thematic abstractions at best, and unambiguous villains at worst.  The Shield has featured frequent scenes of police brutality at its worst, but because the criminals have been so poorly defined in comparison to the law enforcement characters, the show has sometimes undercut its own points by making the guys on the wrong side of the law seem like nameless, faceless thugs.  The writers seem to have recognized that this was a problem, as they’ve structured most of this season’s early plotlines around the various ways that the Barn has failed Farmington, whether they are literally beating the puke out of a gang member in “Grave” or giving serious jail time to a man with a few pot plants in “Doghouse.”

These failures of justice open the door for truly savvy criminals like Antwan Mitchell (Anthony Anderson, in a riveting performance that far outpaces any of his other work I’ve seen), the ex-con leader of the One-Niners, who is able to gain the support of his community in a way that the police won’t ever be able to.  Since returning from a decade-plus prison stint, Antwan has rebranded himself as a compassionate community leader, more interested in providing support for his fellow citizens than in making a profit off of their misery.  Antwan is hands down the most intriguing criminal character seen on The Shield to this point, because it’s genuinely difficult to parse how seriously he takes his black pride rhetoric and how much he’s simply using it as a smokescreen for his drug dealing operation.

Antwan can’t be too noble a person, because he’s got an under the table deal going on with Shane.  It isn’t exactly clear what the terms of Antwan and Shane’s deal are, but we’ve already seen Shane cover up a murder committed by Antwan’s crew (in “The Cure”) and we’ve seen both men give each other compromising information about their respective organizations.  Shane collaborating with Farmington’s most prominent gang leader while Vic is running an anti-gang task force is clearly going to be a great source of drama going forward, especially since neither Vic nor Shane can really afford to turn the other in, given all of the dirt they have on one another, from the Terry Crowley murder to the Armenian Money Heist.  The Shield seemed to be losing some steam in season three, but season four is shaping up to be its most intense and dynamic collection of episodes to date.

Quick Thoughts:

-  Nice cameo by Katey Sagal as Gilroy’s widow in “Grave.”  Few actresses are better at instantly projecting the scars of their characters’ hard lives, and Sagal does it here in just two scenes.  Sagal is the wife of that episode’s writer, Kurt Sutter, and she currently stars in her husband’s terrific (if uneven) series Sons of Anarchy.

- Shane’s new partner Armando “Army” Renta (Michael Pena) hasn’t played a big role so far, but it will be interesting to see how far he’s willing to follow Shane down his flamboyantly corrupt path.

-  Julien is the only one of the major characters without a clear, compelling storyline so far this year.  I hope that the writers find something for him to do, as Michael Jace still provides one of the show’s most intriguing screen presences.

- I didn’t really get around to addressing the continuing fallout from Aceveda’s third season rape, but his newfound passion for extremely rough sex has provided some reminders that The Shield’s extreme content can still provide some genuinely shocking moments even after forty-odd episodes.  How long before his predilections put his political career at risk?

The Masterpiece Test: Yi Yi

Year of Release  2000

Country  Taiwan

Length  173 min.

Director  Edward Yang

Screenwriter  Edward Yang

Cinematographer  Yang Wei-han

Editor  Chen Bo-Wen

Cast  Wu Nien-jen, Jonathan Cheng, Chen Hsi-Cheng, Ko Su-Yun, Elaine Jin, Pang Chang Yu, Issei Ogata

Beauty  Yi Yi starts off so casually and so modestly that Edward Yang’s masterful direction isn’t immediately apparent.  Great care has been taken to ensure that Yi Yi’s events are grounded in contemporary reality, but Yang and cinematographer Yang Wei-han manage to subtly build up to a number of striking, unforgettable images.  One particularly beautiful expression of the film’s “everything is connected” theme involves a woman (Elaine Jin) standing in front of a window reflecting a busy highway, a red traffic light blinking in such a position that it looks like it could stand in for her beating heart.  Another memorable image finds the object of child photographer Yang Yang’s (Jonathan Cheng) affection framed against a projected film of a thunderstorm. 

Strangeness  Yi Yi is explicitly concerned with viewing realistic events from angles that aren’t normally available to human beings.  A major part of the story has to do with Yang Yang’s desire to show people the things that they can’t see.  This appears to be Edward Yang’s modus operandi as well.

Unity of Form and Subject Matter  The director follows Yang Yang’s lead by showing virtually all of the film’s events either from odd angles, from great distances, or refracted through mirrors or windows.  In doing so, Yang manages to show different sides of his characters’ personalities while also giving hints of the enormous, busy world going on outside of the frame of the story.  It’s impossible to forget that the film’s story isn’t simply about whoever happens to be onscreen in any given scene, but an extended family representing the modern social anxieties of an entire nation.  The script and the camera are perfectly in sync throughout Yi Yi.

Tradition  With its casual connecting of the dots between the members of its sprawling cast of characters, Yi Yi belongs to a tradition of large ensemble pieces first perfected by Jean Renoir in The Rules of the Game (1939).  Yang’s film sets itself apart from recent clumsy examples of the genre (such as 2006’s Babel) by smartly structuring its cast of characters around one central family, thereby giving the characters organic reasons to interact, and by varying the characters’ plotlines enough to give the film a dynamic, multilayered tone that justifies its surface ambitions.  Dense stories about large groups of people have largely migrated away from cinema and toward television in recent years, meaning that Yi Yi may possibly be the last great film of its kind. 

Repeatability  Any film with this much going on at once is going to benefit from multiple viewings, whether the viewer is discovering new connections between the characters or paying close attention to the subtly impressive shot compositions.

Viewer Engagement  Yi Yi is a quiet film that doesn’t go out of its way to impress its audience, but its calm demeanor has the effect of slowly drawing the viewer to the screen.  The full scope and ambition of the film gradually becomes apparent as the story unfolds, which makes it seem like the film is constantly improving, building from an unremarkable early scene at a wedding to a powerfully fragile conclusion at a funeral.  The three hour length is absolutely necessary to do justice to the many different storylines, all of which are given just as much (or as little) time as needed to reach their logical points of stasis.

Morality  Yi Yi doesn’t provide easy answers to any of the questions it raises about the place of honesty and integrity in business, the role of the individual in a family group, or the instability of romantic relationships.  It also doesn’t condemn any of its characters for making wrong or questionable decisions in several instances.  The script is built around various members of the central family visiting their comatose, dying matriarch’s bedside and venting the feelings that they have a hard time expressing to the people they’re closest to, so it’s easy to identify with any of the characters even as they are being shown from unflattering angles outside of their own limited perspectives.  In doing so, it reminds the viewer to seriously consider the things that they can’t see.

Yi Yi passes the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  A film with an even larger ensemble cast, Robert Altman’s Nashville.

Understanding Auteurs: The Coen Brothers (True Grit)

Having spent 26 years making cartoonish genre pastiches, Joel and Ethan Coen finally deliver a relatively straightforward example of classical filmmaking with their fifteenth feature film, True Grit (2010).  The second bigscreen adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel – the first was a 1969 John Wayne vehicle – True Grit follows the adventures of fourteen-year-old Hailee Steinfeld, who is trying to locate and bring to justice the man (Josh Brolin) who killed her father.  Steinfeld enlists the help of U.S. Marshall Jeff Bridges, an expert on the rough territory where the killer is suspected to be hiding, and Texas Ranger Matt Damon, a man who has been tracking Brolin for a separate crime.  The motley trio eventually catches up to Brolin, but the film is less about the Steinfeld-Brolin conflict than it is about the young girl’s relationship with the two lawmen, who essentially serve as two possible father figures.

The Coen Brothers seem to be paying tribute to some of their own filmic father figures with the largely traditional aesthetic they are utilizing here.  Repeated use of the hymnal “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” calls to mind similar use of spirituals in Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown(1950), while a Bridges-Damon shooting contest is similar to several such scenes in Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950).  The gorgeous widescreen shot compositions call to mind a number of films by John Ford; in fact, one of the most iconic shots from The Searchers (1956) is replicated toward the end of True Grit.  In past films, the Coens used references to past films and filmic styles in a cynical, postmodern fashion, often mocking the same traditions that their own films were built around.  Think, for example, of their clumsy misuse of the aesthetics of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Frank Capra in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994).  At this point in their careers, the Coens are comfortable enough to work in an old-fashioned style (the western) without having to pretend that they are above it.  Where the Coens used to rely on sarcastic pastiche to drive their films forward, they can now tell their stories simply and with a technical mastery that makes them peers rather than imitators of the great filmmakers mentioned above.

The Coens had a strong grip on the technical nuts and bolts of filmmaking ever since their first film, Blood Simple (1984), but their skills have gradually improved over the years.  True Grit might be their most impressive film from a purely technical standpoint.  Cinematographer Roger Deakins has outdone himself again, doing for color cinematography what he did for black and white in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001).  Every shot is iconic and beautiful.  The editing – credited, as usual, to Coen pseudonym Roderick Jaynes – is dazzling, with the film’s stoic classicism being frequently punctuated by vividly brutal moments of violence.  Virtually all of the brothers’ films have contained at least one wild action setpiece, and True Grit has several particularly good ones.  My favorite is probably the horseback shootout that features one man falling and cracking his skull on a boulder, but a tense skirmish between Damon and a group of outlaws (seen largely from the distant vantage point of Bridges and Steinfeld) is a close runner up.  With the possible exception of No Country for Old Men (2007), True Grit is the most purely visceral and exciting of the Coens’ films.  Some of the action movie excitement is undercut by the abruptness of Steinfeld’s climactic showdown with Brolin, but at least the sense of anticlimax appears to be intentional and purposeful.

Steinfeld does manage to get her revenge on Brolin by shooting him and knocking him off of a cliff, but she (and the audience, who witness Brolin’s death from her viewpoint) doesn’t get to enjoy it for long.  The unexpected force of the gunshot knocks Steinfeld back into a cave where she is trapped in a vine and bitten by a snake.  Bridges, in his one truly heroic act in the entire film, manages to cut Steinfeld loose and get her to a doctor, but he has to kill her beloved horse to get there.  An epilogue set many years after the film’s events shows that our now one-armed heroine's preoccupation with revenge has left her a bitter, friendless spinster.  Her two father figures are also gone; Bridges has apparently died of natural causes while Damon has simply disappeared from Steinfeld’s life.  Though the characters’ religious convictions are presented with a straight face, True Grit is a movie set in an unstable, uncertain world, and haunted by brutal and apparently meaningless deaths.  In that sense, it’s actually a fairly logical follow-up to A Serious Man (2009), though hardly an obvious one.

Unlike A Serious Man, True Grit’s excellent cast is filled largely with big names.  Bridges’ performance is nearly as funny as his turn in The Big Lebowski (1998), and he manages to find some real pathos in between his blustery, mush-mouthed speeches and drunken stumbling.  Damon has rarely been as good as he is here, as a prima donna whose vanity makes an effective contrast to Bridges’ more rustic brand of braggadocio.  Brolin takes great advantage of his limited screen time, as does Barry Pepper, who has a vivid bit part as the leader of a gang that Brolin falls in with.  But the film really belongs to the previously unknown Steinfeld, who manages to make her character convincingly wise beyond her years without resorting to easy cuteness, while still never allowing the viewer to forget that her character is essentially a child trapped in a horrible situation.  The character work throughout the film is fantastic, and a good display of how far the Coens have come from the mocking stereotypes of their early films (and some recent ones, such as 2008’s Burn After Reading).  Who would’ve thought that a film as grown up as True Grit or A Serious Man could come from the guys who debuted with Blood Simple?

Having now seen all of the Coens’ features in chronological order, I still feel a bit on the fence about their work overall.  I generally find more things to like than dislike in their oeuvre.  Their versatility is impressive, as is their sheer technical ability (and that of their recurring collaborators).  The Coens’ films look and sound like little else in theatres, even when they are self-consciously aping other filmmakers and genres, and they almost always attract excellent casts.  On the other hand, most of their films present a condescending attitude toward their characters, an attitude that usually seems to be mitigated solely by the nuanced work of actors like Jeff Bridges or Billy Bob Thornton.  And while the brothers have an undeniable knack for creating oddball surfaces for their films, the social attitudes they express are often as banal as those of the average sitcom. 

But the good news is that the Coens seem to have largely evolved beyond the flaws of their earlier work.  A Serious Man and True Grit are their best films to date, the most narratively tight, all-around well performed, humane, and grown up movies that the Coens have made in their lengthy and prolific career.  (The recent No Country for Old Men is nearly on that same level, while The Big Lebowski is probably the best of the Coens’ pre-2000s work).  After 26 years, the Coen Brothers have finally become the excellent filmmakers that some critics claimed they were way back when they released Blood Simple.

FINAL GRADES FOR THE COEN BROTHERS

Blood Simple (1984) = C

Raising Arizona (1987) = B-

Miller’s Crossing (1990) = C

Barton Fink (1991) = B

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) = C

Fargo (1996) = B

The Big Lebowski (1998) = B+

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) = B-

The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) = B

Intolerable Cruelty (2003) = D+

The Ladykillers (2004) = C

No Country for Old Men (2007) = B+

Burn After Reading (2008) = C

A Serious Man (2009) = A-

True Grit (2010) = B+

Book Report: Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt

Though best known for his stand-up comedy, Patton Oswalt has been successfully bringing his distinctive sensibility to a variety of mediums for years.  Because so much of Oswalt’s comedy revolves around his encyclopedic knowledge of and appreciation for high and low art, his appearances in films (ranging from Ratatouille to the underappreciated Big Fan) and television shows (including an extended cameo in Dollhouse and a recurring role on United States of Tara) are like stamps of quality.  Given Oswalt’s enviable versatility, it’s unsurprising to see him branching into the world of literature with the part-autobiography, part-comedy book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland.  And considering the high quality of the projects that Oswalt normally associates himself with, fans have every reason to have high hopes for his full-length print debut.

They won’t be let down, though the book is marred by its lack of a consistent throughline and by the unevenness inherent to essayistic literature by stand-ups.  Oswalt scores early with a grippingly detailed, hilariously worded, and movingly bittersweet chapter chronicling his misspent years as a directionless movie theatre usher whose cultured tastes (R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction was his soundtrack to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) provide a contrast to his depressingly inert social life.   Oswalt displays a real talent for prose, and his voice makes an easy jump to the page.  But the less autobiographical chapters tend to seem like rough drafts of stand-up routines, minus the crucial vocal delivery that would sell the jokes.  A chapter about made up hobo folk songs might be hilarious if Oswalt were actually belting out the ridiculous lyrics onstage, but the jokes are only vaguely amusing in the context of the book.  And some of the more silly material would’ve been much more interesting and insightful if Oswalt would’ve drawn from real life rather than making up joke scenarios.  Surely the veteran script doctor has some amusing anecdotes about movies he’s been tangentially involved in, but the only allusion to this aspect of his career is an overlong note on improvements for a hypothetical romantic comedy script. 

Fortunately, the chapters tend to be short enough that even the less successful parts breeze by, while the more intriguing bits are infectiously re-readable.  A chapter about Dungeons & Dragons manages to make the game sound surprisingly fun without downplaying its essential nerdishness, while the titular chapter’s analysis of the three types of stories that young fiction writers tend to gravitate toward is simultaneously biting and touching.  Even the inevitable “shitty clubs I played when I was a struggling young comedian” chapter is full of trenchant social observations and vivid accounts of strip mall sleaze.  At only 189 pages, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland could be called slight, but its finest moments will leave readers restarting at page one and clamoring for a followup.

Understanding Auteurs: The Coen Brothers (A Serious Man)

To my mind, the first really successful Coen Brothers film was Barton Fink (1991), the duo’s Palme d’Or-winning take on the psychodrama.  In the years since that milestone in their oeuvre, the Coens have had many creative ups and downs while working in a variety of genres, often following up strong works such as No Country for Old Men (2007) with fairly mediocre misfires like Burn After Reading (2008).  While the brothers have a roughly equal hit and miss ratio with comedies, noirs, and action movies, they have had consistent success with the psychodrama (a genre they returned to winningly for 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There).  The psychodrama plays to the Coens’ strengths (mood building, flashy stylistic touches, quirky dialogue, mannered performances) while allowing them to sidestep their weaknesses (lack of narrative momentum, sitcomish social messages, unconvincing depictions of eras past, a condescending attitude toward their characters).  A Serious Man (2009) is the Coens’ best application of the psychodrama, and their best film to date, because it manages to actually overcome many of their persistent flaws rather than merely covering them up.  The film shows the brothers actually growing in artistic maturity rather than simply tightening up their always solid craftsmanship.

Psychodramas don’t really require a believable or “realistic” depiction of their setting, since these films are usually told almost entirely from the highly subjective perspective of their main characters.  This is ideal for the Coens, whose recreations of past eras have often been marred by glaring anachronisms and by the general feeling that the brothers’ knowledge of (and interest in) their settings doesn’t extend beyond the way that they’ve been depicted by popular culture.  This persistent failure is more of a liability in movies like Miller’s Crossing (1990) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) than it is in psychodramas like Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn’t There, since, again, the latter two are basically set in their main characters’ heads.  Still, while it doesn’t really matter that Barton Fink isn’t convincingly set in the ‘40s and The Man Who Wasn’t There doesn’t really have anything to say about the ‘50s, the feeling of pastiche does hurt the viewer’s immersion into those films’ worlds.  Barton often feels like a mashup of Lynch and Polanski, while The Man seems to be set in a James M. Cain novel rather than Billy Bob Thornton’s head.

There are no such obvious precedents for the style or setting of A Serious Man, whose tragicomic world feels like a logical and organic extension of the anxieties of Michael Stuhlbarg’s uptight mathematics professor, who tries to maintain his sanity as every aspect of his quiet suburban life seems to unravel at once.  Stuhlbarg’s wife (Sari Lennick) announces that she’s leaving him for ultra-smug community pillar Fred Melamed, while his kids (Aaron Wolff and Jessica McManus) steal money from him and complain about the TV reception, and his intellectually brilliant yet socially retarded brother (Richard Kind) lays on the couch and complains for hours on end about his hardships.  The professor tries to deal with these problems through his faith, and the film is structured around his visits to three rabbis, each of whom is less helpful than the last.

The Coens do, unsurprisingly, make a lot of jokes at the expense of the Jewish religion specifically, and at the search for a “meaning” in the universe in general.  At the same time, and uncharacteristically, they show a genuine sympathy and understanding for those who do seek meaning.  Perhaps the Coens don’t reduce the world of A Serious Man to shallow, cynical mockery because they know its world so well.  Amongst other things, the film is about the awkwardness of being Jewish in the American Midwest, something that they experienced firsthand growing up in Minnesota.  Stuhlbarg’s character is reportedly based partially on the Coens’ father (who also worked in education), and it’s easy to imagine that many of the other characters are based on people that they remember from their childhood (and the perpetually stoned Wolff might be a stand-in for the filmmakers themselves).  It certainly helps that Stuhlbarg gives such a rich, nuanced performance, bringing real pathos to his character’s quest for meaning while still getting a lot of laughs out of his ever-mounting frustration.  The supporting cast is very strong as well, with the velvet-voiced Melamed in particular providing some hilariously deadpan line readings.  Aside from a brief misstep involving Stuhlbarg’s fantasy (?) about an intimidating neighborhood shiksa (Amy Landecker), there are no moments where the Coens seem to be looking down on their characters with contempt.

A Serious Man is not just a triumph for its cast, but for its writer-producer-directors as well.  The hyper-specificity of the Coens’ dialogue receives its fullest expression to date, the esoteric Jewish terminology playing out both more musically and more plausibly than the Midwestern hick speak in Fargo (1996).  While the film doesn’t have as much conventional “action” as most of the Coens’ other films, the hilarious visits to the rabbis more than fill the “outrageous setpiece” void. The use of music is typically strong.  Though Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” is a far more obvious music cue for this film’s late ‘60s setting than “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In” or “A Man of Constant Sorrow” were for The Big Lebowski (1998) or O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), it is played at such a volume and used in such constrained contexts that it feels as liberating (and scary) as it presumably did in 1967.  The setting is heightened enough to be funny and slightly surreal, but for the first time in their careers, the Coens have made something that seems fully grounded in the real world, something relevant to the shifting social codes of the era that it’s set in, and something that speaks honestly to the human condition.

UP NEXT  True Grit