The Lives of Others

For over two decades Berlin was a city divided, its populace fractured not by ethnicity or religion but political ideology. It was a microcosm of the Cold War where the boundary between East and West was, quite literally, concrete, but still rather tenuous. In The Lives of Others, the remarkable debut film from writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, we see only East Berlin, but the existence of the other side is something of which we are always acutely aware.

The film begins in the mid 1980’s, and ends after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We witness the efforts of the East German secret police, or the Stasi, as they attempt to monitor their citizens for any sign of dissent or disloyalty. Initially the primary face of the Stasi is Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), an intelligent, efficient, and perceptive man who is well-trained in the art of interrogation and whose suspicions are seemingly always aroused. With the permission of one of his superiors (and former classmate), he begins surveillance of a popular playwright, George Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), who is suspected by Wiesler of harboring Western sympathies. In reality Dreyman is supportive of the regime though he dislikes their harsh treatment of dissidents, such as his friend, a fellow writer, who has been blacklisted. He lives with his girlfriend Christa Maria (the beautiful Martina Gedick) whom is suspected by some of being a double agent, though this is a thought Dreyman himself cannot entertain. When his blacklisted friend commits suicide Dreyman decides to anonymously publish criticism of the regime’s methods in a Western paper, a decision that puts his literary career in jeoprady. Though he acts very cautiously, he never believes himself to be under surveillance, but much of the film takes place with Captain Wiesler listening to the events of Dreyman’s life. His loyalty to the regime comes into conflict with his inherent good nature. He begins to secretly display sympathy for Dreyman, which leads him down a potentially dangerous path.

Florian von Donnersmarck has crafted a film that is not only taut, suspenseful, and thoughtful, but also beautiful in every respect. From the photography to the well-paced narrative, to the moving score by Gabriel Yared, every part of the film contributes towards the excellence of the whole, but even if isolated and viewed separately each component manages to impress with its artfulness and craftsmanship. With The Lives of Others, von Donnersmarck has made, arguably, one of the best films of the past year and revealed himself to be a true talent. He has taken what on the surface could be a very traditional political thriller, and turned it into an engaging look at the divisions that lie in the heart. Many people in the film are wrestling with questions of ethics, but the consequences for doing the right thing are dire.

There is a piece of sheet music and a book that appear in the film that both bear the title Sonata for a Good Man. That could also function as a title for the film, since Wiesler and Dreyman are both good men. Everyone is tempted towards betrayal and disloyalty, but one form of subversion appears to be moral while the other does not. How does one differentiate between them? What is the impetus to do the right thing when that conviction may cost you everything?

Wiesler’s surveillance starts out detached, as state sanctioned voyeurism, but the inherent intimacy of the situation produces a conflicted conscience in the good man. One of the most profound things I think one can take away from this film is that, once you become involved in the lives of others, a funny thing happens. You start to care.

The Darjeeling Limited

The central focus and also the enduring obsession of nearly everything written about Wes Anderson and his films may be summarized in a four word phrase most commonly associated with E.B. White: the elements of style. While White’s slender volume was an impressive distillation of grammatical and compositional lucidity, personal profiles of Wes and critical reviews of his work are usually distillations themselves: accurate, if predictable, summaries of the Wes Anderson aesthetic, highly attentive to slow motion sequences, meticulous set design, French New Wave homage, and repeated use of British Invasion rock, to mention only a few of his most commented on techniques. Perhaps no director, at least no American director since Woody Allen, has been so identified with a particular style (though I would add that Woody’s stylistic versatility is often overlooked: who can honestly say that Stardust Memories or Match Point are cut from the same cloth as Annie Hall?) That style has, for an admittedly nominal audience, become as ubiquitous as the films themselves. For some, the quirky and peculiar seeds that began to blossom with Rushmore, and reached full-flowering in The Royal Tenenbaums, started to wilt once they appeared to be a permanent fixture rather than a temporary, though charming, calling card. So, with the messy, somewhat emotionally stilted, cartoonish, and childishly ornate Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou left to drift in the backwater, what does The Darjeeling Limited offer to Wes Anderson fans: a turn towards a different direction, or more of the same? The answer turns out to be: a bit of both.

Though sometimes described as a tale of three brothers on a spiritual quest in India, the film does not have the meditative quality that India might induce in a more mystically minded director (a la Terrence Malick). Even though the three brothers, Francis, Peter, and Jack, (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, and Jason Schwartzman respectively) are surrounded by holy shrines and temples, they quickly begin to bicker, initiating an air of frivolity and suspicion that lasts for most of the film. This is not to its detriment though: indeed, it results in most of the laughs. The humor is sharp and about as dry as an Indian summer, and carries, in typical Wes Anderson fashion, an undercurrent of melancholy and absurdity. In one early scene, Francis, Peter, and Jack sit in the dining car, traveling through an ancient land, seeking (at least in Francis’ eyes) a spiritual experience, but resort to trying each others controlled substances, as if they were filling up at a pharmaceutical buffet. The effect is comic, ironic, and more than a little sad: they begin to appear simultaneously as patently spoiled upper-crust basket cases and lovable fools.

Essentially, the The Darjeeling Limited plays out with a trio of alienated, fractured, but minimally hopeful and likeable western tourists trekking across a tropical landscape seeking some sort of reconciliation, however transitory it may be. The script has more life to it than did The Life Aquatic (an odd flop since Noah Baumbach was Wes’ co-writer) and each of the brothers, especially Francis and Peter, exhibit enough pathos to keep everything on track in the film’s awkward, and yes, predictable moments. Describing those moments in detail is unnecessary: anyone remotely familiar with his past work will spot them immediately. The difference here is that they punctuate, rather than define, the film.

The effect that the location has on the film may be debatable. For me, India is a canvass that very nearly paints itself, and here Anderson is armed with a dizzying array of spectacle, color, and sound with which to make his signature flourishes. There is usually something exotic or exaggerated about a Wes Anderson set, but the crucial difference here is that India is a naturally exotic environment, in contrast to the artificial though lavishly imagined interiors of the Tenenbaum house or Zissou’s ship. It is true that the train on which the brothers ride is impeccably and atypically stylish. Yet even if it is fantastic, it is not much more so than many of the natural locations. The inherent pageantry of India, though possibly romanticized through the western tourist’s eyes, tempers Anderson’s sometimes almost overwhelming stylishness. Perhaps for the first time since Rushmore, his characters appear to populate an actual environment.

Death (or is it life?) as a journey is an obvious though restrained theme throughout, and if this is a comedy it still harbors plenty of wounds. In a scene near the end of the film, Francis removes his bandages as he stares into a bathroom mirror. In that moment any semblance of a joke is also stripped away, and in a sense every kind of artifice is also removed, as the unveiled face of Owen Wilson manages to appear stark and somehow very real. It is a dangerous and beautiful moment, and yet it eschews tragedy and finds a way to live with its wounds. Like much of Hotel Chevalier, the short which precedes the film, this moment makes one ask: what would happen if Wes Anderson made an entire film in this manner? Watching The Darjeeling Limited one is tempted to draw parallels between Wes Anderson and his three protagonists. Both venture into new territory, unable to entirely leave the past behind, but manage, if only momentarily, to let go of some of the baggage.

Update! There Will Be Blood

Although its' release date is two months away, PT Anderson's latest film is generating a lot of critical attention complete with all of its' ensuing hyperbole. Are reactions to the film that reference John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, Citizen Kane and its legendary performance by the venerable Orson Welles justified? Is this film, as one early reviewer described it, really the cinematic eqivalent of heroin? There's no way to know, but my hunch is we're in for a real treat. Oh, and did I mention that Mr. Johnny Greenwood, Radiohead guitarist, ondes martenot master, and BBC Composer in Residence, has written the score? Be still my heart.

Hot Fuzz

Despite my recent post on Bergman’s passing, my attitude towards the current state of film is not completely hopeless, though the decline in philosophically rigorous filmmaking is a bit troubling. And though I make no apologies for appreciating films that are artful and thought provoking, I am not immune to less serious fare as long as it is good. For example, who could not love Wedding Crashers, and the outrageous spectacle of hilarity that was Will Ferrell at the film’s end? Lately such well-crafted films have been absent but a recent viewing of Hot Fuzz engendered an unexpected amount of enthusiasm for the life it injects into the parody genre and served as an introduction to the sizeable talents of director/writer Edgar Wright and writer/actor Simon Pegg.

These are the creators of the fantastically witty zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead, who now turn their eye on the often preposterous though always taut genre of the buddy cop film. The quiet village of Sandford serves as the backdrop where Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), an extremely dedicated and professional police officer fresh from London, uncovers a conspiracy of ridiculous proportions, and attempts to persuade the local police force that the grisly accidents that keep occurring are actually murders. He is teamed with the portly officer Frank Butterman (Nick Frost), a naïve but loyal sort who fantasizes about acting out scenes from Bad Boys and other police thrillers.

Hot Fuzz mercilessly lampoons all of the outrageous elements of the buddy-cop genre but with a lot of heart and enthusiasm. This isn’t an ironic exercise guided by detachment and condescension but an all-out, tongue-in-cheek, barrage of satire that has plenty of sincerity lurking about. In fact, the genius behind this film (and for that matter Shaun of the Dead) is that the material could be played as easily for drama as it could for laughs, and sometimes the distinction between the two is razor thin. This uncommon layering of comedy and drama makes the film a double-threat and a double-treat for anyone who misses well-crafted entertainment.

So, if it wasn’t enough that the Brits gave us Monty Python, Are You Being Served?, Terry Gilliam comedic fantasies, and The Office, we find ourselves treated to another gifted comedy-team from across the pond. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost have that uncanny chemistry and talent that knows how to craft a laugh. Heck, they even created a hilarious (though all-too brief) role for Office/Extras star Stephen Merchant as the concerned owner of a missing swan. It’s small touches like that which should remind us that subtlety and nuance are not merely the tools of the art-house, and that when properly applied, they can make a genre parody not only entertaining, but also remarkably satisfying.

A Belated Farewell

What words can one add to the mountain of praise that has been bestowed upon Ingmar Bergman shortly after his death? What is one more stranger’s elegy? Several of these pieces have extolled the uncompromising seriousness and artfulness of the great director’s work but have also mentioned how his status has been diminished as his work has fallen out of favor. This I can only regard with complete bewilderment. How, if one is a true lover of the medium, could one possibly disregard a talent so prodigious and an artist of such exactitude and depth as that of Ingmar Bergman? Dismissing his significance by applying to him the title “the prime purveyor of Nordic gloom” seems almost juvenile. Is Dostoyevsky a less significant novelist because his work is of such a “serious” nature? At the risk of sounding too judgmental is it possible that perhaps Bergman’s falling out of favor with the younger generation is in direct correlation to the ascension of celebrated directors of a different sort: purveyors of glibness, irony, and sensationalism of every stripe? The passing of Bergman and (on the same day) Antonioni doesn’t to my mind mark the passing of a cinematic era, for that happened some time ago when both men’s work ceased to have the mass relevance they once possessed. But if you look around at the meager citizenry that subscribes to cinema as art you can’t help but feel that their passing does (no pun intended) put another couple of nails in the proverbial coffin.

Inland Empire

While perusing the movie listings of the local paper, often disheartened by the innocuous and inconsequential fare that they advertise, it is helpful to remember that there are those directors whose most recent feature films are a genuine event, a significant and all too infrequent glimpse into the tantalizing and profound power and beauty of the medium. David Lynch is most certainly a member of this group even though his work has never attracted the mainstream popularity of, say, Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese. Given the idiosyncratic and experimental nature of his output it would be surprising indeed if Lynch transcended his status as a cult figure, yet even if his audience is smaller, his vision less entrenched in the collective cinematic psyche, it makes the arrival of a new film from him no less momentous than those of more celebrated auteurs. Six years have passed since Mulholland Drive seduced and bewildered us, leaving in its wake near unanimous critical praise and an impressive distillation of all things Lynch. Now we have Inland Empire, a dark, mind-bending collage of movie actors, directors, 19th century Poland, prostitutes galore, and a throwback sitcom of giant rabbits complete with laugh-track. While not a radical departure from previous films (there are some of the usual Lynch trademarks such as red curtains, women in distress, ominous and atmospheric sound, ect.) Inland Empire, with its rather dark and sometimes grainy digital veneer is a new and almost alien creation. Even those well-versed in the visual lexicon of the “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” may well concede that, once viewed, Lynch’s latest work will most surely deserve that often misused phrase “it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

The tagline on the movie poster reads “A woman in trouble.” That deceptively simple sentence actually turns out to be the best synopsis one can provide when attempting to describe the film. Laura Dern, in two or possibly three roles, plays an actress whose latest film turns out to be cursed, and finds her inner mental states beginning to deteriorate until it is difficult if not downright impossible to separate her identity from her onscreen self as well as that of her alternate reality self. I think. There is no linear progression though the film is not plot-less, as some critics seem to think. According to Lynch the creative process involved the filming of seemingly disconnected ideas that revealed a hidden unity after their completion, resulting in (his own words) “a story.” The difficulty of interpretation is that we often rely on narrative methods more suited for a stage play. Lynch came to film through painting, and Inland Empire is perhaps his best realization of the concept of “a moving painting”, a concept which guided him towards film in the first place. So although a story of some sort does exist within its frame perhaps it is useful to understand this film at least in part as an experience and interpretation of a series of reoccurring symbols and metaphors that visually tell a story. It is not wholly visual nor wholly dialogue: the narrative is not dispensable but neither is it primary. For David Lynch atmosphere is everything, and Inland Empire is its own world, a dark and brooding realm where subconscious struggles are visually signified in an almost hallucinatory way.

Ostensibly, the film appears concerned with the female psyche and its continual degradation and abuse at the hands of men who fetishize it for their own satisfaction and oppress it in order to reinforce their own dominance. The inner state in which Laura Dern wanders is dark but not exactly a wasteland. In it the recovery of identity becomes the key that will ultimately unlock the door to liberation. At times Inland Empire plays out like a surrealist exploitation flick with a gun wielding Laura Dern attempting to set things right, while at other times turning into a sophisticated horror film, where an almost palpable sense of psychological dread and grotesqueness permeates every square inch of available screen space. The nimble balancing act of the oddly beautiful with the darkness of the mind’s harsh lairs, the slow stirring of anticipation, the inimitable critique of Hollywood fantasy are all noteworthy achievements, but most impressive is Lynch’s ability to weave these dream-like deconstructive bits into an enigmatic but alluring whole. This is ambitious work but it will probably meet with a mixed reception due to its darker, more experimental elements. Where Mulholland Drive possessed a certain flair that one critic described as being akin to “the pop of a whore’s lip gloss”, Inland Empire is a darker, grittier affair where in extreme close ups faces are almost stretched in the manner of a fun-house mirror and the surrealism never ceases. Perhaps it is destined for a fate similar to that of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, another lengthy, technically significant excursion whose other merits are not immediately evident. Walking out of the theater my mind was reeling: time had been in some sense altered and my senses had not been assaulted but probed. This was a new experience: the light of cinema cast on a mysterious and inner land where the rays cannot penetrate but only dimly and beautifully reflect the strange manifestations that inhabit this realm.

Pan's Labyrinth

What a joy it is to find a film that captures the true nature of a fairy tale. All too often films with a fantastical dimension resort to cuteness and sentimentality in order to become more palatable to children or extreme darkness and gore to court the older viewer. Yet director Guillermo del Toro manages to strike that delicate balance of innocence and evil and by doing so acknowledges a duality that exists in all good fairy tales: beauty and cruelty. Pan’s Labyrinth has both of these qualities; it is hauntingly beautiful and yet savagely cruel. The story centers on Ofelia, a young girl who accompanies her pregnant mother to the country to stay with her new stepfather, Captain Vidal, a fascist who is fighting the rebels in post-civil war Spain. The Captain is the father of the unborn child but upon their arrival Ofelia finds she dislikes him and later insists “he is not my father.”

Immediately after arriving in a countryside brutally ravaged by the last throws of the civil war, Ofelia, a lover of books and fairy tales, begins to find signs of enchantment in the form of a flying insect that she recognizes as a fairy. Sure enough, the creature is able to morph its winged, slender, stick-like shape into a flying sprite that eventually leads her through a stone maze, or labyrinth, and into the underworld where she meets a faun (presumably a version of Pan though del Toro says that Pan and the faun are not one and the same) who informs her that she is the princess of this realm. Long ago she left it for the world of light and forgot her father and his kingdom, but her spirit has returned in the form of Ofelia. She is given three tasks to perform to prove herself as the princess, and meets a pair of fantastical monsters along the way. The first is a giant toad that lives underground beneath a tree, and the second is the Pale man, a towering, white, nearly androgynous creature whose eyes are in his hands rather than on his face. It must be said that the special effects and visual style of the film are astonishing, not because they create something we have never conceived, but because the fantastic creations onscreen are so organic. Every thing in Pan’s Labyrinth is so visceral and tangible that it seems to have sprouted from the earth.

This film may be compared to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Spirited Away, and Alice in Wonderland. It may have many striking similarities with C.S. Lewis’ creation, and the young female protagonist alone in a strange and enchanted world is a trait common to them all. Another is originality. Though Pan’s Labyrinth is said to have borrowed from classical mythology, fairy tales, the classic Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive, and Borges, it takes its inspiration from these rich sources and creates its own distinctive world and populates it with creatures of a most relatable sort. Some are noble and virtuous, others despicable and horrific, but none are mere archetypes and this is its brilliance. It may be impossible to sympathize with Captain Vidal, but his unwavering discipline and commitment to his military cause reveals a man of intense though ultimately inhuman devotion. A quick study of history or even perusing One Hundred Years of Solitude will give you similar characters. Undoubtedly, del Toro’s film is ripe with political symbolism though my ignorance of this era and its conflict leaves me with only the basest of interpretations. Still, some of them are very hard not to see or at least dimly perceive, and it is the issue of perception that reverberates most loudly throughout Pan’s Labyrinth. Which is the real world and which the imaginative? Or are they one and the same? Which is more real, the Pale man or Captain Vidal? Which is more terrifying? The wonderful ambiguity that results from attempting to distinguish reality from fantasy is wonderfully articulated by New York Times critic A.O. Scott when he says “Pan’s Labyrinth is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Does the moral structure of the children’s story – with its clearly marked poles of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and vindication – illuminate the nature of authoritarian rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible fairy tale brought to life?” Perhaps the film leaves us somewhere in-between: remembering a beautiful, enchanting dream, but seeming to exist, in the words of A.O. Scott, “in the hard blue twilight of a world beyond the reach of fantasy.”