Coping with Plan B

It is fun to see a movie that is enjoyably simple and quite straightforward in its narrative, yet holds enough layers in story and characters that there are many ways to read it. Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach with a screenplay by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, the movie’s main star, is one of those movies. It is a pleasure to watch and even more fun to write about.

The basic story is as simple and as old as the dream-catcher city in which it develops: a young woman follows her dreams of becoming an artist to New York, establishes relationships with other young dreamers, but is surely enough confronted with the reality of life... or its statistics, like how few of the millions who aspire to be artists actually make it.

Lucky for us, both Baumbach and Gerwig are among those few.

The layers are there from the start. To begin with this is a comedy, not a drama, though it plays as both throughout the film. Frances Halliday, the character played by Gerwig, comes from what seems to be a secure and happy enough rambler-house middle class back in California. She’s gone to college in the east and there has met the person with whom she develops the strongest relationship of the film, her friend Sophie, a writer aspiring to become an editor, and someone from a higher income class than Frances. We catch them in New York at the beginning of the film, both in their late twenties, slowly coming off their college high, paving the way to their brilliant futures, or so they hope.  Frances apprentices for a dance company but doesn’t really have the talent to be a great dancer, but she’s happy because she and Sophie “are the same person”.  We, the spectators, know right from the beginning that they are not, thanks to the great and very subtle acting by Gerwig and Mickey Sumner, who plays Sophie.

Mickey Sumner and Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha

Theirs is no ordinary friendship, or at least this is what Frances thinks. And Frances is no ordinary person, or rather, she is ordinary in the sense that she is like all of us, all who are not part of an elite in the world. She’s like us in our youth, people with bigger dreams than possibilities; people who believe that relationships can be that self-less, strong and wonderful; that everyone is (or should be) the same in terms of opportunities to succeed.

We are taken through the diminishing of Frances’s and Sophie’s dreams, each for very different reasons.  But the freshness in this story, besides the comedic perspective and Gerwig’s acting, is how Frances copes with the changes in her circumstances (and addresses).  There is a scene in the film where Frances does this rather slap-stick fall while running to get cash from an ATM; she picks herself up and keeps running. It's without a doubt a metaphor. Curiously enough, it seems that Frances, the one who isn’t from the elite, is the one who is able to keep 'running', and this makes everything fit. I won’t go much further into the story, not because it would give anything away but because there really isn’t anything extraordinary about what happens; so like life.

 Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg) has not really directed an original with Frances Ha since he does quite some borrowing. The film is in black and white and of course Woody Allen’s Manhattan comes to mind, because this is New York and many of Frances’s friends are elitist hipsters with apartments in Tribeca, Paris or cute $4,000 “holes” in Manhattan itself, living a sort of existential or quarter-life crisis.The coloring works because it focuses on the people (Frances) more than the city, through Sam Levy’s good camera work. The score borrows from Georges Delerue’s King of Hearts, and so on. Yet, again, Gerwig’s roller coaster acting through almost every emotion possible makes it its own movie, as does the more up to date dialogue.

I believe there probably are different interpretations to Frances and her hipster friends. Some might find her annoying and extremely naïve; others fresh and sweet; some even truly “undateable”; which only proves, in any case,  that the movie has layers. In my read of the movie, the underdog (all of us) finds a way to cope with plan B and, in the end, has the last laugh.

 

 

 

Killing the Dead all Over Again

As far as zombie movies go, World War Z is a good watch. I must now confess that this is a sentence I never thought I’d write in this blog, given that zombie movies aren’t something I’m prone to watch. The horror movie genre is not at the top of my list of preferred genres and the zombie movie sub-genre tends to be at the bottom of that short one. This week, however, thanks to my daughters and to my favorite movie critics, I actually saw two zombie films: Warm Bodies and World War Z.

World War Z, directed by Marc Forster, is in the vein of Danny Boyle’s 28 days Later or Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend, where the suspense and action supersedes the gore and bad makeup of many zombie movies; hence, they are fun to watch. The plot has its similarities to those movies as well, in particular in constituting a caution against meddling and altering viral and bacterial genomes, something it seems we humans are increasingly prone to do.

Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later

In 28 Days Later, a mysterious virus called “Rage”, which stemmed from chimpanzees being used for medical research, spreads to humans  in the UK and basically turns most everyone but a handful of survivors into rabid zombies.  In I am Legend, a genetically-engineered variant of the measles virus is created as a cure for cancer, but mutates into a lethal strain killing almost everyone or turning others into vampire-zombie-like predators.  In World War Z no explanation as to the origin of the virus is given, although many “clues” are spread throughout, linking it to rabies, animal flus and genetic experimentation; this time the virus spreads faster than the Rage virus –about 12 seconds- and the zombies transmit it by biting their victims. Oh, and it is also world-wide.

Will Smith in I am Legend

In the American movies, World War Z and I am Legend, the hero who works towards finding a “cure” is endowed with very particular survival skills. Will Smith is Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville in I am Legend, a military virologist and apparently the last survivor in New York City. Brad Pitt is Gerry Lane in World War Z, a former United Nations employee involved in high risk missions. Both are family men and predisposed to martyrdom. In 28 Days Later, the heroes are refreshingly women, though Jim, played by Dark Knight’s Scarecrow Cillian Murphy, the lone survivor rescued, is still the central figure in the movie.

Brad Pitt and Will Smith - Family Men with a mission

I think this is why I enjoyed Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies all the more. This is a zombie movie with a twist: it is a romantic comedy.  There are human-flesh-eating zombies, there are still a bunch of military guys determined to shoot at zombies (I never get that: if they are dead, how is shooting bullets at zombies going to make a difference? You’d think an amphibious rifle or flamethrowers would be more effective at slowing them down), but the zombies in this movie have a comedic voice over by actor Nicholas Hoult which really brings them to life (pun intended). What’s more, Warm Bodies is actually a sort of zombie Romeo and Juliet (“R” and “Julie” in the movie), with a balcony sequence and all! As corny as it sounds, it is love that “warms” the zombies and starts their hearts beating again. It is caring human beings and not guns that actually “exhume” the world; it is tearing down the walls built to keep the zombies out that serves to create a new world; if only the Israeli’s in World War Z had known that!

Teresa Palmer and Nicholas Hoult in Warm Bodies

Maybe Warm Bodies is part of a shift in young audience’s attitude and attraction towards the undead, also present in the Twilight vampire series. Throughout the years, because of the fear of our own mortality, the stories about those who refused to die were cautionary ones, ones of terror, in fact, of the monsters and creatures that refuse death becoming predatory vampires and zombies; like scientific tinkering with mortality that gave rise to Frankenstein or such monsters. This fascination has led good directors and actors into the horror movie genre, producing great films, which I hope to write more about in this blog.

Zombies and monsters aren’t what they used to be, it seems.  And that’s a good thing too.  Again I am in gratitude to my young daughter who had me see Warm Bodies, and who actually took me to see the monster movie that I most enjoyed this week: Disney’s Monsters University!

Mike Wizowski (Billy Crystal) in Monsters University

Filling in the Blanks

Culture influences how we see a film. I know this basic tenet and yet I have been deceived by my beliefs more than once into thinking a movie was saying one thing when the director actually meant the opposite. Recently, this occurred with Fill the Void (Lemale et ha'halal), the Israeli movie by first time director Rama Burshtein. I won’t define my culture (it is, like all cultures, too complex to even try), but I will say that I embrace values of equality, especially among sexes, as I think has been made pretty evident in many of my posts. I therefore saw Fill the Void as a movie that denounced arranged marriages. In Fill the Void those marriages are imposed upon women by a closed religious group, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community in modern day Tel Aviv.

The movie tells the story of Shira, a devout 18-year-old girl who is pressured to marry Yochay, the husband of her late sister.  Shira and the other non-married women in the movie (those that can still expose their hair), are basically engrossed in finding a spouse. Shira’s hope is to marry someone her age that has never been married. The movie makes it clear that women who don’t marry are pitied by the community.  Shira’s mother and the unmarried aunt present the conflict: will Shira be allowed an iota of choice in the matter or will she follow the mother’s wishes and, ultimately, those of religious law, and the absolute word of the rabbi? In my perception, when Shira finally gives in to the community, it is with anxiety and sorrow.

Fill the Void

This is not, it seems, what Rama Burshtein, who also wrote the screen play, wanted to show. In interviews I have read since, this director indicates she was actually praising arranged marriages, something she is looking forward to do for her own children. While she does admit that she did show the complexity of Shira’s feelings about marrying her sister’s husband, ultimately she was just showing us the world she is a part of and the passion that can arise even within the boundaries of strict religious tradition.

I find this fascinating. It also reminds me of how culture is such a complex and difficult thing when we address the issue of women’s equality. When confronted with traditional cultures –religious or not- many within and without the culture feel that in order for it to survive, it must retain very ancient mores, upholding, among other things, practices that diminish and discriminate against half the members of the culture: the women.  And many times, like with Ms. Burshtein, it is the women themselves that are the strongest proponents of maintaining the traditions that bind them.

For presenting this complexity and for many other reasons I recommend the movie. It is an amazing first movie for any director. It is an authentic portrait of this Orthodox Hasidic community. Ms. Burshtein’s camera is intimate, delicate in capturing feelings and expressions.  And, yes, it seems that Shira was expressing sorrow and anxiety, just for different reasons than those that I believed. The acting is subtle yet powerful.  This is, most certainly, a film worth seeing.

There are many movies that do denounce the practice of arranged or forced marriages (however one wishes to call them), many from different cultures other than the western American one, where we view these types of marriages as a thing of the past. Movies like Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (China), about the fourth wife of an elderly landlord, a college student who is married off by her stepmother; a woman who had hoped to broaden her horizons thanks to her education, but is now trapped behind her luxurious surroundings, reduced to a life of being at the beck and call of her husband.

Raise the Red Lantern

There is Deepa Metah’s Water (India) which tells the story of Chuyia, a child forced into marriage that becomes a widow. By tradition, she is left at an impoverished widows' ashram, where she meets a follower of Gandhi, who falls in love with her. Jane Campion presented the issue in The Piano (New Zealand), about a mute woman who arrives with her daughter for an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner.  I am just mentioning a few. There are many others.

Water



Fill the Void is a work of art and, like all art, once it leaves the author’s hands it is exposed to interpretations and different readings. Rama Burshtein has opened a window onto a culture so very different from many and so her movie will be subject to many elucidations.  Interestingly, she mentions in one of her interviews that her rabbi has never seen a film in his life and will most likely not see hers; in fact, most of her community members won’t see her movie in theatres.  This is, in a way, a shame.  It would be interesting to know what the women members of her community would see when looking upon this film that shows and says so much about them.

 

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The Life and Times

A movie biography (biopic) can be a wondrous thing. Or it can be little more than a TV soap opera, cardboard all the way.  Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s feature film swan song, despite having been in competition for the Palme D’Or at the Cannes film festival, falls into the soap opera type. The Palme D’Or, by the way, went to another film that deals with a same-sex relationship, Blue is the Warmest Color , and we hope that one lives up to its hype.

It is unfortunate that Steven Soderbergh didn’t do more with the rich material and actors he had. Above all the material; Behind the Candelabra is about the five-year relationship between the pearl and diamond-studded pianist Liberace and Scott Thorson.  Sounds simple enough, until you get “hints” from the movie about what some of the more complex issues at hand were that could have made for an amazing biopic. Scott Thorson was 16 when he met Liberace, he was already seeing older gay men (the one who introduced him to the pianist) and was living in foster homes. Liberace was extremely successful, a closeted gay man and 58 years old when he began this relationship with Scott.  Just up to there is a complex biopic: the millionaire, ultra eccentric entertainer –he walked around in a Norwegian blue shadow fox cape with a 16-foot-long train and rode in a mirrored Rolls-Royce-  with tremendous mommy issues, and the 16 year old gay foster boy. And right there Soderbergh goes at it wrong casting 43 year old Matt Damon to play the 16 year old in this relationship. Damon may have boyish good looks, and his acting is actually the best thing in the movie, but he does not begin to convey the strangeness in a sexual relationship between a 58 year old man and a 16 year old boy.

Matt Damon and Michael Douglas

But that’s not all the story in this relationship, the five years that Thorson lived with Liberace completely transformed the life -we could even dare to say destroyed- of this man who now, in his early fifties, is a recovering drug addict in jail. The pianist had Scott undergo plastic surgery so he would look like him and was drawing up papers to adopt this young man he was having sex with. It’s like a plot straight out of an Almodovar film (o.k., maybe a tad less that The Skin I Live in, but this is real life!).  It was going through this physical transformation that Thorson was also introduced into drugs by the plastic surgeon that worked for Liberace, played by an alien-looking Rob Lowe in this movie.

This entire plot is ho-hummly skimmed over in the film. Liberace, who was into all kinds of sex excesses, ultimately and pretty quickly grew tired of Thorson and discarded him. Thorson sued and settled. The 22 year old young man received $75,000 from a man whose fortune, by the 1970’s, was estimated at $115 million.

Liberace, played well enough by Michael Douglas, died of AIDS and did call Thorson back to his death bed. There is so little feeling in this movie, that even this scene is heartless. Did Liberace ever have regrets? The man who, when Thorson asks him how he feels after his mother dies, responds “free”, probably did not. Did Thorson? Most likely too many. Does Soderbergh?

It could have been a contender.

Biographies in movies can be fascinating, especially with such material to work from. The list of wondrous biopics is long. Martin Scorcese, one of my favorite directors, has excelled in them with movies like Raging Bull about the boxer Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro gained around 50 pounds to play La Motta), The Aviator, about Howard Huges or Goodfellas.  In fact, many biopics have been Oscar winners for the movie, the director or the actors: Steven Spielberg’s Shcindler’s List about Oscar Schindler, Richard Attenborough‘s Gandhi, both won Best Picture Academy Awards; Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Gus Van Sant’s Milk about Harvey Milk, for which Sean Penn won the Academy Award, Bennett Miller’s Capote for which Philip Seymour-Hoffman won, Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot for which Daniel Day-Lewis got one of his…I  most certainly could go on. The point is made. The opportunity lost.