Taking Woodstock

Ang Lee says of this film:

After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy – and one without cynicism. It’s also a story of liberation, honesty, and tolerance – and of a “naïve spirit” that we cannot and must not lose.

Taking Woodstock is the story of Elliot Tiber, a young, gay Jewish man, who has repressed his sexuality and given up his creative and spiritual freedom in a seemingly hopeless attempt to save his parents’ failing, derelict, and debt-ridden motel in upstate New York. When the venue originally selected by the organizers of the 1969 Woodstock music festival rejects their proposal, Elliot steps in and offers the farm of a neighbour instead, hoping that the expected influx of visitors will transform his parents’ business. His expectations, along with the estimated number of festival-goers are exceeded beyond measure.

Elliot’s relationship with his parents, survivors of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Soviet Union, is difficult. His mother is paranoid, angry, and rigid; his father is frustratingly passive. The loving and peaceful vibes of the festival, overwhelming at first as thousands of sexually liberated and uninhibited young people show up more or less on a weekend, transform both Elliot and his parents.  

Taking Woodstock is perhaps the exception to the rule that has governed Ang Lee films since Sense and Sensibility; it is characterized more by the director’s handling of familiar themes – repression and family relationships – than by radical innovation and risk-taking. As always, however, his obsessive attention to detail and his empathy for and psychological probing of characters on the fringe or in distress encourage more than a single viewing of the film.

Life of Pi

Following the relative safety of Taking Woodstock, Lee again ventured into dangerous territory. In The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of The Screen, Whitney Crothers Dilley points out the many challenges Lee faced in turning Canadian author Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker-Prize-winning novel into a movie:

… long stretches during which nothing happens, as well as the fact that the book is open to many interpretations, literal and metaphorical. In addition, Lee chose to work with 3D technology for the first time, also using CGI, which had plagued him during Hulk. The story is also complex in the telling, involving Indian, French, Japanese, Taiwanese, Mexican, and Canadian cultural elements – the narrative concerns national identity as well as personal identity. Finally, there was the author Yann Martel’s own assertion that the book was “unfilmable.”

Piscine Molitor Patel, named after a Paris swimming pool, is an Indian boy living in the former French city, Pondicherry. Teased by his classmates because his name sounds like “pissing,” the boy shortens it to Pi, effectively ending the teasing by impressing both his peers and his teachers when he writes out the full value of the mathematical pi on several blackboards at school. Pi is fascinated with religion and adopts Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam simultaneously. The boy’s parents own and operate a zoo on city property, and Pi is fascinated with the Bengal tiger, Richard Parker, desiring to befriend the animal by making it an offering of fresh meat. His father, who believes only in science, attempts to show him the real nature of animals of prey by tying a young goat to the tiger’s cage in front of the boy and forcing Pi to watch as Richard Parker kills the goat and drags it away to be eaten.

Pi’s father decides to move the family to Canada and to transport the animals with them to be sold in the West. On the voyage their ship is sunk by a storm and the family, along with most of the animals, is lost at sea. The only survivors are Pi, a wounded zebra, a female orangutan named Orange Juice, a hyena, and Richard Parker. The zebra and the orangutan are killed by the hyena, which is in turned killed and eaten by the tiger, leaving Pi and Richard Parker to face each other off on the lifeboat.

Pi is an intelligent, thoughtful, and resourceful young man. Not only must he survive on a lifeboat adrift in the Pacific Ocean, but he also must deal with a ravenous, 450-lb. tiger with whom he shares the craft. He uses the resources at hand as well as cleverness to feed himself and Richard Parker, ultimately mastering his fear and training the animal to respect him. The two companions are no match, however, for the wrath of nature and come close to death on the boat before landing on a strange island inhabited with millions of meerkats and offering plentiful food for Pi and Richard Parker. Pi believes that he can spend the rest of his life on the island until he realizes that it is as dangerous as it is idyllic. He and the tiger set out on the boat again and they finally reach Mexico. Richard Parker jumps off the boat and walks into the jungle without looking back. Pi is rescued.

Lee says, “In some ways movie-making is the way I live my life, and many people – in this case, thousands of people – they spend nearly four years in an endeavour to tell a story they believe in. So it’s a big responsibility. We work very hard, day and night, soulfully. We take a leap of faith…. It’s a new movie, so it’s gotta be different from everything else I’ve done. I’ve never ventured so much: we got kids, animals, water, 3D – all the most difficult part of filmmaking.”

And the leap is four years long. It includes one year of pre-production just to sell the idea of the film, involving the development of a script from the novel, with the difficulty of translating the multiple layers of the story; of filming a boy alone on the ocean and showing what his thoughts are in the process of surviving; of making a book about ideas cinematic.” It includes using inspirational artwork, a photo essay of India, and a forty-minute animated “previs” to sell the idea to the studio. And employing “an army of agents” over a four-to-five-month period to screen 3000 to 4000 boys in the process of casting an unknown, inexperienced, undisciplined young actor to play the role of Pi. Taking over an abandoned airport in Taiwan and spending millions on sound stage, indoor pool, wave pool (overcoming the challenge of creating realistic swells found in the middle of the ocean). Taking on the challenge of making realistic animals, especially 450-lb tiger with CG; editor Tim Squyres says, “Our animals had to look absolutely, positively real, at a level that no one had ever done before, and I don’t know if anybody really was sure that it was going to get pulled off.” And there was even greater challenge in animating these creatures in 3G, with some shots taking six months to complete. There was the actual filming: shooting in water is difficult, and shooting in 3D is difficult, so Lee could not do what he usually does: take a huge number of shots and then edit down. “So we relied on very concisely managed master shots. That’s a risk. It takes experience to design exactly what you want to do. You don’t have safety. Whatever is there that will make ti into the film – you have to make sure that works.”

Lee’s great leap of faith landed him and his film in a field of clover. Life of Pi was a technical, artistic, and box-office triumph, winning four Academy Awards, including best director, best cinematography, best original score, and best visual effects, and earning a box office of over $600 million on a budget of $120 million.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX2HBsHbNZM

***

Life of Pi is perhaps the richest jewel in Ang Lee’s crown of cinematic achievement. It is the avatar of his abiding view of filmmaking, that it is a process of learning through risk-taking. “I see movies as a way of learning about the world, about myself, and learning about my relationship with people and art.” But for Lee, making movies is also a way of learning about making movies. Pi’s production designer, David Gropman: “Ang is the ultimate professor, mentor, and student. He’s like the student trying to master the class. At the same time he’s teaching you and bringing you along the way and it’s wonderful combination, incredibly inspiring to work for a director like that.”

Screenwriter David Magee offers the finest assessment of the director’s philosophy of making films: “Ang talks about what it’s like to conquer a film essentially, to go on a great journey and finally get to a point where you have reached a moment where the story you’re trying to tell, in your heart and in your mind, and what comes out on the screen seem to coincide. That point of mastery is something that is beyond you and it reaches for something greater.”

Amen.

Image Credits

“Taking Woodstock Poster” Wikipedia. Fair Use

“Life of Pi Poster” Wikipedia. Fair Use

Hulk

In this 2003 film, Lee’s first big-budget Hollywood project, the director attempts to add psychological sophistication and philosophical depth to a comic-book story. The result is a critical and commercial disappointment, but Hulk shows once again the director’s penchant for risk-taking and his refusal to engage in formulaic movie-making.

Hulk is the story of a young genetic scientist, Bruce Banner, who unbeknownst to him, is the son of another researcher who conducted unauthorized experiments with disastrous results, landing himself in prison. David Banner also experimented on his son. Bruce is in a relationship with fellow researcher Betty Ross, who complains of his emotional unavailability. Bruce also suffers from nightmares that are clues to his hidden past. A lab accident unleashes a terrible rage that causes Bruce to be transformed into a giant green hulk that wreaks havoc on people and property. Meanwhile David is somehow freed and seeks to take advantage of his son’s genetic mutation, and the military officer responsible for David’s incarceration just happens to be Betty Father and the general in charge of stopping the rampaging Hulk.

In her study of Ang Lee’s work, The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen, critic Whitney Crothers Dilley compares Hulk with the comic-book-turned-action-feature that preceded it: Spiderman:

In some ways it can be argued, however, that the Hulk film is rendered more imaginatively and takes more daring risks. For example, the structure of the plot in Spider-Man is a straightforward hero-versus-nemesis theme, while Hulk explores family drama in several directions: Bruce versus his own father, Bruce’s mother versus his father (in flashback), Betty versus her father, and finally, Betty versus Bruce. In addition, the presentation of the Hulk is unique in its use of comic book conventions from the written page. For example, in the opening of the film, the Green Marvel font of the main titles pays cultural homage to the original comic books. In addition, during certain action sequences Lee splits the screen into multiple comic panels that dramatize the original comic strip format of the Hulk narrative. Moreover, Lee comments that the film has a complex philosophical subtext involving change and transformation embodied by lichen growing on rocks and mutation at a cellular and molecular level; images representing this idea occur throughout the movie.

Ultimately, Ang Lee’s Hulk is about taking risks and attempting to transform the genre of hero-action movies in the same way the director has experimented with the conventions of genre in his past films. In stretching to create a unique vision, the filmmakers worked hard to bring a depth to the film that is surprising in its sophistication.

The critics, and audiences, were not kind to Lee’s effort, however. New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott writes: “[Hulk] might be described … as incredible, but only in a negative sense: incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid. As for the grumpy green giant himself, I’m sorry to say that he is not very credible at all.”

Dilley says, “The thinking man’s action movie about Man’s inner demons did not hold broad appeal. While some critics praised Lee’s daring departure from the conventional treatment of the comic book drama, the film was pummeled by most viewers who criticized the effort to turn Hulk into Hamlet with art-house visual effects.”

The film did end up enjoying moderate success at the box office though: on a budget of $120 million, Hulk brought in $254.4 million in revenue.

 Brokeback Mountain

For Lee, the making of Hulk was an exhausting and ultimately demoralizing enterprise; he even contemplated no longer making movies, or at least taking a very long rest. But when presented with the challenge of making Brokeback Mountain, Lee could not resist. As he told Charlie Rose, “The material is just as challenging [as that of Hulk], if not more, for obvious reasons, but I like that kind of work. I need to work instead of sitting at home feeling bad for myself. I need something; I need a direction.” For Lee, making Brokeback Mountain was “a healing process.”

When asked in an interview to articulate the essence of his filmmaking, Lee replied, “Repression, the struggle between how you want to behave as a social animal and the desire to be honest with your free will.” The theme of repression looms large indeed in Brokeback Mountain, most particularly in the character Ennis Del Mar; thus the essential coherence of Ang Lee’s films continues. Once again, nevertheless, the director has chosen a cinematic path others dared not or could not take. The screenplay for the movie, based on Annie Proulx’s short story and written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, had been written several years before the movie was actually produced and became known as “the greatest un-producible screenplay ever written.” The material was just too sensitive at the time. Director Gus Van Sant wanted to make the film, but was unable to cast Ennis; his first choice for the role, Matt Damon, reportedly told him, “Gus, I did a gay movie (The Talented Mr. Ripley), then a cowboy movie (All The Pretty Horses). I can’t follow it up with a gay-cowboy movie!”

When Lee first read the story and the script, before he made Hulk, he didn’t think anyone would make it or see it. But as with other projects, the story haunted him, so he decided to make the film despite the obstacles.

The result was an artistic masterpiece and a box-office hit.

Please read my review of this film here.

Lust, Caution

In 1938, in the early years of the military occupation of China by the Japanese, a young female student at Lingnan University, Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei), is persuaded by a handsome and charismatic fellow student (Kuang Yumin, played by the pop star Wang Leehom) to assume a role in a patriotic play that he and his friends and classmates are producing. The play provokes a passionate response from the audience and Wang is immediately seduced by the thrill of performance. When Kuang suggests that the group move from theatrical activism to the dangerous reality of political assassination, Wang, naïve in her enthusiasm, eagerly pledges her commitment to the plot

The plan is to insinuate the group, but most specifically Wang, into the privileged but secret life of notorious collaborator Mr. Yee, who works for the Japanese occupation forces in Hong Kong, arresting and torturing members of the resistance. Wang is to adopt the role of the wealthy Mai Taitai (Mrs. Mai), becoming a player in games of mah-jong with Yee’s wife and escorting her on shopping trips. The naïve student soon takes to the role of elegant and sophisticated matron, and when she first meets Mr. Yee as she plays mah-jong with his wife and her friends, there is a spark between them. The fantasy soon explodes into brutal reality, however, when a friend of Kuang who has discovered the group’s plans and attempts to blackmail them is murdered by her co-conspirators in a most gruesome fashion before her eyes. Although she continues to play her part in the plot, the conspiracy collapses when Yee is suddenly transferred to Shanghai.

Four years later Wang finds herself in Shanghai attending college and living with an aunt. She is reunited with Kuang, who has been keeping her under surveillance, and he introduces her to Old Woo, who is the head of the resistance in the area. Wang recommits herself to the assassination plan and is soon once again intimately involved with the Yee family. She and Mr. Yee begin a clandestine affair that is at once thrilling and terrifying for Wang. The couple engages in violent and wanton lovemaking (which is somewhat graphically depicted in the film), and their emotional engagement deepens as the affair progresses. As a consequence of his infatuation with Wang, Yee leaves himself vulnerable to the assassination plot, but on the day that the deed is to take place, Wang gives Yee a warning and he escapes. The plotters, including Wang, are caught and summarily executed in a quarry near the city.

Lust, Caution is based on a short story by the beloved Chinese writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing). Again, it is a story that haunted Lee and drove him to engage in yet another risky cinematic enterprise. The anti-Japanese resistance, which strengthened the fledgling Chinese Communist Party by gaining the support of the masses and perfecting the techniques of guerilla warfare that ultimately led Mao Zedong’s forces to victory over the Nationalist army in the civil war that followed the defeat of the Japanese, is an icon of Chinese patriotism to this day. For Lee to prick this icon through having his heroine betray the cause by falling in love with a collaborator and foiling a plot to bring him to justice risks provoking the ire of the Chinese government, always sensitive, which has exploited anti-Japanese sentiment and the role of the Communist Party in vanquishing the occupiers as a pillar of its popular support for many decades. In fact, in the scene in which Wang says to Yee, “Go now,” thus betraying her cause, the dialogue was changed for Chinese audiences to “Let’s go.” It is difficult to imagine such a suggestion triggering Yee’s sudden flight.

There was risk also involved in including the three scenes of graphic sex. The filmmakers knew that Lust, Caution would be given an NC-17 rating, the most restrictive prohibition handed out by censors, but Lee refused to delete any of the footage (although the scenes were altered for Mainland Chinese audiences) and the rating was applied.

Finally, as with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee faced the challenge of appealing to both Asian and Western audiences with this movie. While there was criticism from both sides (for example, Chinese audiences found it too fast-paced; Western audiences thought it was too slow), the film generally received positive reviews from Western and Chinese critics. Lust, Caution won the 2007 Golden Lion International Venice Film Festival Award and seven Golden Horse awards at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. On a budget of $15 million, Lust, Caution grossed over $67 million at the box office worldwide and has generated more than $24 million in DVD sales and rentals in the U.S. alone.

Image Credits

“Hulk Poster” Wikipedia. Fair Use

“Brokeback Mountain Poster” Wikipedia. Fair Use

“Lust, Caution Poster” Wikipedia. Fair Use

A Late Quartet Poster

The Fugue Quartet has been playing music together successfully for twenty-five years, but from the early scenes of A Late Quartet, it is clear that the emotional and musical cohesion of the group is breaking down, and the quartet soon appears to be in danger of breaking up.

The quartet’s leader, cellist Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken), lost his wife a year ago and has just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He declares that the Fugue’s first concert of the season will be his last and asks the group to begin looking for a replacement for him. Violist Juliette (“Jules”) Gelbart (Catherine Keener) is married to second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman), but the marriage is clearly devoid of bliss. First violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir) is obsessed with musical precision, marking up every score with copious notes and directions. Lerner is single but had an affair with Jules before she married Robert; he falls in love with the Gelbarts’ daughter Alexandra, also a violinist.

The imminent changes to the group’s dynamics bring some old resentments and conflicts to the surface. Robert declares that he no longer wishes to play “second fiddle” to Lerner, demanding that the roles of first and second violin alternate between the two players. This suggestion is rejected out of hand by Lerner and Jules agrees with the first violinist, setting Robert off on an offended and jealous rage, which leads to a one-night stand with a flamenco dancer with whom he regularly jogs. The affair results in Jules asking Robert to move out. When Jules discovers that Alex is sleeping with Lerner, an explosion of pent-up daughter-mother resentment ends with Jules slapping Alex hard across the face and fleeing Alex’s apartment. Robert’s discovery of Lerner’s affair with his daughter leads to fisticuffs between him and the first violinist in Peter Mitchell’s house, resulting in Mitchell kicking them all out in disgust. Alex breaks up with Lerner.

These events appear as if they are essential ingredients in a cheesy afternoon soap opera, but A Late Quartet is decidedly not gratuitous melodrama. The humanity and devotion to musical artistry of the characters (and the marvellous performances of the actors who portray them) elevate this film to a work of rare beauty.

Peter Mitchell is a man of compassion, sensitivity, and sophistication. He is devoted, with quiet passion, to his late wife, an opera singer, to the quartet, and to each of its members. He is a skilled and patient teacher of young musicians. And he greets the end of his performing career and the approach of the devastation of Parkinson’s with a sublime grace. Christopher Walken, not known for the depth and range of his acting skills, is a delightful surprise here.

Robert Gelbart is a man of many facets – a brilliant musician who longs to take risks in his playing (but is frustrated by the cautious, controlled playing of Lerner), a loving husband and father, a volatile and formidable opponent in any dispute, an impulsive adolescent. As usual, Hoffman, like the great Meryl Streep, completely inhabits his character, bringing nuance to Robert that renders him utterly believable. Hoffman’s performance exemplifies the difference between craftsman and artist.

Jules is a complex person. She adores Peter, as if she is in need of a loving father, and her love and need blind her to the reality that Peter can no longer perform publicly with the quartet. For Jules, the music is everything; she cannot understand her daughter’s resentment of the long absences of her parents during the group’s many concert tours while she was growing up. She rejects her husband’s amorous advances as well as his suggestion that he share the first violin role with Lerner. Yet, in her way, she loves both Robert and her daughter.

Lerner’s almost neurotic need for precision – in his playing, in his search for the perfect bow, in the elaborate marking of each score – masks a passion, a desire to love and to be loved that is released in his affair with Alex. When she ultimately rejects him, he retreats to the stern and cold technician that is his comfort zone.

This film is about change and growth and new beginnings. The crisis precipitated by Peter’s illness and the relational conflicts that it engenders cause each of the members of the Fugue to examine himself or herself and to make the necessary personal adjustments that restore harmony to the quartet. It is a credit to the makers of this film and to the actors that bring it to life that these changes are not forced or false; rather, they appear to arise naturally from the circumstances and character of each member of the group.

Image Credit

“A Late Quartet Poster.” Wikipedia (free use policy)

Prince of Tides

A couple of years ago, thanks to the suggestion of Life As A Human’s Dan L. Hays, I gorged on Pat Conroy novels – The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, Beach Music, The Prince of Tides. Reading Conroy’s fiction is like partaking in a great literary feast: sumptuous language, meaty characters, savoury settings, and always, it seems, plenty of delicious food. The concoctions are so compelling that you read them like a kid, devouring the pages long past bedtime.

The Prince of Tides is the story of the South Carolina childhood of sensitive Tom Wingo and his siblings, twin sister Savannah and older brother Luke, a childhood twisted into an endless nightmare by a violent dreamer of a father and a scheming, ambitious mother. Tom and Savannah have been severely traumatized by their upbringing and their trauma is carried into their adult lives; both are ultimately helped, in different ways, by a New York psychiatrist named Susan Lowenstein.

While the novel paints the childhood years of the Wingo siblings in considerable detail, the film, directed by and starring Barbra Streisand, focuses more on the recovery, especially Tom’s.

Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) remained in the South and is married to a successful doctor, with whom he is raising three daughters. The marriage is an unhappy one, though, as Tom is unemployed and drifting away from his wife (Blythe Danner) as a result of his feelings of inadequacy. Savannah, a poet who moved to New York, is suicidal and has recently made another, nearly successful, attempt on her life. Her psychiatrist, Lowenstein (Barbra Streisand), needs to unlock the secrets of her patient’s past in order to save her; as Savannah is more or less in a catatonic state, so Tom is summoned to New York to do the job.

What follows is an exquisitely choreographed portrayal of the process of transformation for Tom and of liberation for Lowenstein. Susan Lowenstein is a successful psychiatrist and a passionate advocate for Savannah, who is a poet of skill and sensitivity. Lowenstein (as Tom, who resists her efforts to unlock family secrets and is at the same time attracted to her, likes to call her) is in a dysfunctional relationship herself: she is married to a famous violinist, who is an arrogant, controlling philanderer. Their son (played by the real-life son of Streisand and actor Elliott Gould) longs to play football but his dream has been stifled by his father, who only sees him as a clone of himself. Despite her personal issues, the psychiatrist’s skill and passion succeed ultimately in convincing Tom to reveal the traumatic events of his and Savannah’s childhood, including a vicious sexual assault perpetrated by three escaped inmates, which Tom’s mother forced her children to cover up.

In one of the most beautifully rendered scenes I have experienced in watching films, Tom is transformed from an angry, cynical, wisecracking shell of a man to a deeply wounded child sobbing in the arms of Susan Lowenstein. Nolte is nothing less than magnificent here. Once the bottled-up – and tightly sealed, under pressure – emotion of Tom’s horror show of a childhood has been released, the sexual attraction toward Lowenstein that he has been experiencing is transformed into love. And after he becomes aware that he can love – SPOILER ALERT! – Lowenstein is forced to release him so that he may return to his wife and family.

Watching this movie (on at least two occasions), I did not at any time feel compelled to compare it to the novel. In my view, Streisand’s film stands successfully on its own as a moving tale of two wounded souls destined to meet in a brief but intense encounter in order to fulfill a profound need for healing and redemption.

Wonderfully acted by Streisand, Nolte, and Danner.

Image Credit

“Princeoftides.jpg.” Wikipedia. Reproduced under Fair Use law.

Life Is Good in L.A.

L.A. Confidential is a cop film that operates on several levels – it is at once a crackling great mystery, a nuanced study of three multi-dimensional characters, and a hard-nosed look into the problems of police and political corruption in America’s large urban centres. It is one of the great noir movies of the modern cinematic era.

The notorious L.A. crime syndicate boss Mickey Cohen has been sent away for ten years for tax evasion, and his empire is up for grabs, apparently to the party who bids the highest number of corpses. The LAPD seems to be unable to stem the toll taken by the war of succession and its already dubious image is suffering a daily decline. An incident in which several Hispanic prisoners are brutally beaten while in custody by several officers in apparent retaliation for assaults on two of their own deals another blow to the department’s reputation. Heads roll and deals are made.

Bud White (Russell Crowe) is a tough bruiser of a cop who has a soft spot for abused women and who maintains a stubborn loyalty to even his moronic slob of a partner. Early in the film we see him rough up and threaten a parolee who is abusing his wife and, shortly after, manhandles the ex-cop who is bodyguard and driver to an apparent pimp whom he suspects has broken the nose of one of his prostitutes. White, who as a child watched his father beat his mother to death with a tire iron, is selected by his captain as a kind of enforcer, charged with muscling out-of-town thugs contending for parts of Mickey Cohen’s territory into leaving the city. Bud just wants to work on real cases as a homicide detective.

White falls for a prostitute who is connected to an investigation he is involved in and who is a Veronica Lake look-alike. The hooker tells White’s partner, “I see Bud because he can’t hide the good inside of him.”

Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a slick narc who spends much of his time hobnobbing with movie stars as the technical advisor to a TV cop series that looks very much like Dragnet. He maintains a business arrangement with tabloid reporter Sid Hudgens (Danny deVito), making busts of high-profile individuals while Hudgens and his crew get the scoop on the arrest, for a payoff, of course.

Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is the highly intelligent son of an LAPD officer who was killed by a small-time criminal who “got away clean.” Exley is conflicted in that he wants to honour his father by being a good cop while harbouring near-naked ambition to rise quickly in the force. Exley quickly shows himself to be an outsider by wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, refusing to take dirty money or operate outside the law to bring justice to criminal suspects, and testifying against fellow officers. He pays the price in ridicule and isolation, but he remains defiantly non-conformist.

There is animosity – at times violent – between these men, but events occur that cause them to question their own motives and methods and to ultimately join forces in bringing about a surprising resolution to a major case; one of them loses his life in the process.

Every frame of L.A. Confidential, which was adapted by director Curtis Hanson and screenwriter Brian Helgeland from the novel by James Ellroy, is riveting. The complex plot is interesting and intriguing rather than confusing, and the denouement, which does not come until very near the end of the film, is entirely satisfying because it has been beautifully set up. The 1950s costumes, props, and sets are believable; the cinematography lends the film a kind of delicious “nouveau noir” sensibility; the violence, both actual as well as implied and potential is in no way gratuitous but rather constitutes a vital element driving the plot.

The acting is consistently good. Crowe, an often underrated actor, plays tough and vulnerable, angry and wounded perfectly here. Spacey, as usual, melts into his role. His final scene with Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) is a masterpiece of acting. Kim Basinger, who plays Lynn Bracken, the Veronica Lake look-alike, is marvellous: wise and tender and completely self-aware, a small-town girl in the big city doing what she has to do. Basinger garnered a best-supporting-actress Oscar for her portrayal of the high-class prostitute.

L.A. Confidential is a movie that engenders unconditional love in the attentive viewer. There are no slips, no gimmicks, no cringe-inducing lives of dialogue; there is just a whole lot of fine film-making.

Image Credit

“Cavalier Hotel Pool Los Angeles CA,” by 1950sUnlimited. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

 Benton, along with a sterling cast, was more than up to the challenge.

 Workaholic Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) arrives home high with the excitement of landing a major client at the advertising agency where he works, only to discover that his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) is all packed and unshakeably ready to leave him and their young son Billy. When it becomes clear that Joanna is not coming back, Ted finds himself in an increasingly complex dilemma. The new client is high maintenance and, according to Ted’s boss, requires one hundred percent of their time and focus; at the same time, Ted, now a single parent, realizes that the care of a six-year-old child is also a full-time job. These two demands soon begin to compete, and in the heat of this competition Kramer undergoes a profound transformation.

 Simply by being who he is, Billy causes Ted to discover fatherhood – parenthood – in all of its dimensions. Billy’s needs are greater than a ride to school, clean hair, and three square meals; he needs love – tough love, tender love, patient love, understanding love; he needs to be paid attention to, to be listened to, and to be “beed with,” as the old song goes. In this process of discovery, Ted opens up slowly, like a flower in early spring, revealing to himself and to the world a tenderness, a capacity to love that had been buried for a long time. He also realizes that the balance of work and home must always be tipped in favour of home, not only because home is the greater responsibility but also because it is the source of the greatest happiness.

 By the time Joanna re-enters the picture, demanding custody of Billy, father and son are intimately and inextricably connected, sharing a bond that makes the custody battle – which we know in our hearts Ted is going to lose – all the more painful, both for Ted and Billy and for us, the audience.

 I have never seen Dustin Hoffman display more range and subtlety in a role than he offers here as Ted Kramer; Ted is a complex character who is experiencing a profound awakening, and Hoffman draws us into that experience and never lets us go. The film was terribly personal for Hoffman as he was going through his own divorce at the time Kramer vs. Kramer was made.

 A significant contributing factor to the success of this film is the chemistry that is constantly working between Hoffman and his precocious co-star, seven-year-old Justin Henry; the two actors are in such a high level of emotional sync that every scene they play – and there are many father-son scenes in this film – is unaffected and utterly believable. And while she only appears for a total of fifteen minutes in the film, the young Meryl Streep is already showing signs of the acting greatness she is very soon to achieve.

 Kramer vs. Kramer is yet another example of the “small story” that, if handled well, does not just succeed in holding our attention and entertaining us for two hours, but reveals profound truths about humanity and about life. Ted and Joanna Kramer are two ordinary New Yorkers, married and raising a small child, living in an ordinary apartment, experiencing a less-than-extraordinary relationship crisis. Yet Ted Kramer’s transformation arising from the crisis is a revelation to every one of us who is stuck in an emotional rut, a revelation that points the way – and it is not necessarily an easy way – to what truly matters in life and to what will ultimately make us happy: being who we really are.

Image Credit

“Kramer vs. Kramer Poster.” Wikipedia

A courtroom is an ideal setting for the dramatic playing out of conflict between two sides of an issue, the heart of all compelling stories. Brilliant and eloquent attorneys, each cleverly manipulating the facts and circumstances of the case to advance his or her argument; hostile, vulnerable, or cunning witnesses adding to the mystery or stunning the court – and the audience – with surprise testimony; a stern, witty, or biased judge who maintains the balance of the scales of justice or tips them in one direction or the other – these elements and more, percolating in a closed room, combine to make the courtroom drama one of the most exciting genres on the big screen.

 Who can forget Atticus Finch’s passionate plea to a bigoted jury for justice for Tom Robinson in To Kill A Mockingbird. Or the explosive courtroom exchange between naval lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee and Marine Colonel Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men (This film is a masterful piece of writing by the inimitable Aaron Sorkin and it is well directed by Rob Reiner; it would have appeared on my top-five list, but, unfortunately, I did not find either of the leads, Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, to be credible in their roles). Or Captain Queeg’s unforgettable breakdown, brilliantly rendered by Humphrey Bogart, under the interrogation of Navy defense lawyer Lt. Barney Greenwald (José Ferrer) in The Caine Mutiny.

And while it was not set in a courtroom and there was no judge and no prosecutor or defense attorney present, the struggles and confrontations of the twelve men in the jury room made Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men a memorable “courtroom drama.”

 Here are five of my favourite classic films in this genre.

#5 – Witness for the Prosecution. (Directed by Billy Wilder, starring Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, and Charles Laughton, 1957). This is a finely rendered cinematic version of the Agatha Christie short story and play, in which the performances of Dietrich and Laughton shine brightly. Laughton is a barrister under sentence of death by heart failure if he does not refuse all criminal cases and rest under the care of the overbearing and tirelessly loquacious Nurse Plimsoll (played by the delightful Elsa Lanchester). But he cannot refuse the tantalizing case of Leonard Vole, who is accused of murdering a wealthy widow. Lots of twists and turns and exciting courtroom fireworks keep this rather light-weight film moving along. My favourite scene is Laughton’s cross-examination of Vole’s wife, played by Dietrich, in which he asks her, in his inimitable voice, “…and are you not in fact a chronic and habitual LIAR!”

 #4 – Reversal of Fortune. (Directed by Barbet Schroeder, starring Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, and Ron Silver, 1990). There is very little interesting courtroom “action” in this film; the drama occurs outside the ring, in the events and family dynamics leading to the charges against Claus Von Bülow, the decision of idealistic law professor Alan Dershowitz to take the case, the relationship between Von Bülow and his lawyer (and thus between truth and lies, between idealism and ego), and the preparation of the case. Ron Silver is brilliant as Dershowitz; Jeremy Irons is in fine form as the cool and enigmatic Von Bülow.

#3 – Inherit The Wind. (Directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly, 1960). The names have been changed, but this is clearly a dramatization of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a young Tennessee teacher is accused of breaking the state law that prohibits the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution. March plays the prosecuting attorney Matthew Harrison Brady (aka three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan), a bible-thumping but brilliant orator; Tracy is defense attorney Henry Drummond (aka Clarence Darrow). The meat of the film is the passionate conflict, enacted in the courtroom of a small Southern town, between literal belief in the Bible and scientific rationalism, a conflict played out against a background of ignorance and bigotry. March and Tracy are the entire movie here; their electrifying performances stand in contrast to the 1950s Hollywood-plastic crowd scenes in the town, along with the wooden portrayals of the secondary characters (except for Gene Kelly, who is excellent as a cynical Baltimore newspaper man).

 #2 – Twelve Angry Men. Please see my Life As A Human review of this film.

 #1 – Judgment at Nuremberg. (Directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Maximilian Schell, and Montgomery Clift, 1961). This film is outstanding in every aspect. It is 1948. The Nazi leaders have taken their own lives, fled, or been tried and executed; only minor officials who collaborated with those leaders or perpetrated atrocities remain to be dealt with. The American people are tired of the war and public as well as official attention is now being drawn toward the dawning Cold War, a conflict in which German support is seen as crucial. It is in this environment that the trial of four German judges, including the distinguished Ernst Janning (Lancaster), takes place in the infamous city of Nuremberg. The excellent screenplay, written by Abby Mann, is sensitive in its handling of several questions: Were the German people as a whole responsible for the crimes carried out by the Third Reich? Do duty and loyalty to one’s country excuse one from guilt for offenses committed against individuals and groups considered “dangerous” to the state? Do political exigencies trump the notion of justice?

 There are some marvellous performances in the movie: Maximilian Schell as the lawyer appointed to defend the four judges, brilliantly and subtly personifying some of the important themes of the movie; Lancaster as Janning, maintaining great dignity while admitting terrible guilt; and Montgomery Clift as Rudolf Petersen, the slow-witted son of a communist railroad worker, who was sterilized under Janning’s order. Tracy is perfect as the lower-court American judge appointed to oversee the trial and pass judgment on the defendants; he is at once humble and self-assured, compassionate and damning, all the while maintaining an air of countrified simplicity.

 At over three hours, this movie is riveting from beginning to end.

~

In each of these films, it is the legal case that is the centre of the drama; naturally, as legal cases – at least those that are worthy of being made into films – involve people, these are human dramas as well. Honourable mentions in this category include A Cry in the Dark, Anatomy of a Murder, Erin Brockavich, The Verdict, and Philadelphia.

In other films, such as To Kill A Mockingbird, mentioned above, the legal issues and courtroom drama do not play a central role; they exist for the purpose of supporting the expression of a larger theme.

I am certain that there are many good films in this genre that I have failed to mention and that others have opinions regarding which courtroom dramas should be included in a “top five” list. I am happy to give all of these films and all of these critics their day in court.

Image Credits

“Witness for the Prosecution Poster” Wikipedia

“Reversal of Fortune Poster” Wikipedia

“Inherit the Wind Poster” Wikipedia

“Judgment at Nuremberg Poster” Wikipedia

Frank Galvin (Paul Newman, outstanding) is a lawyer by profession but as the film opens we learn that he is a drunk and an ambulance-chaser by avocation. He has handled few cases in recent years and those he has managed to scare up he has lost. He now resorts to handing out his cards at funeral services pretending to be a friend of the deceased. Galvin hits his lowest point when he is thrown out of a funeral home; he gets drunk and trashes his office.

It is at this point that his only friend and supporter (the always compelling Jack Warden) offers him a case that is going to restore his reputation and make him rich: a young woman was put into a vegetative state by two doctors in a Catholic hospital who incorrectly administered the anaesthetic in the operating room. The case is ripe for a large out-of-court settlement with the archdiocese and the doctors. Galvin stands to make an easy fortune.

Against all expectations and advice, our protagonist decides to reject the offered settlement and take the case to court. He finds himself more than outclassed, however, by the high-powered and ruthless law firm hired by the defendants; his star witness leaves town, another potential witness refuses to testify, and when the case finally comes to court, the judge is clearly antipathetic to Galvin’s cause. In the end, however, Galvin manages to find a witness who can give credible testimony to the plaintiff’s claim of negligence, only to see it disallowed on a technicality. Galvin delivers an impassioned if brief summation and the case goes to the jury, which decides in favour of the plaintiff and asks the judge if it is possible to award more than was demanded in the suit.

The Verdict certainly fits the McKee model of a well structured film. Galvin does indeed change over the course of trying this case: in the face of powerful – perhaps we should say overwhelming – opposition, he is increasingly motivated, strong, courageous, and passionate. By the end of the movie we believe that his reputation will be restored, he will go easy on the booze, and he will get – and win – lots of high-profile cases.

And the story is compelling. As the tension is ratcheted up each time Galvin meets an new obstacle and our hopes for his redemption are disappointed once again, we both gain greater sympathy for this protagonist and become more invested in the outcome.

But a story must be believable in every detail in order for the audience to leave the theatre satisfied that their money has been well spent. And I do feel that a certain lack of credibility weakens what could have been a powerful film.

First, we do not really know why Frank Galvin decides to take this case to court rather than settling for what turns out to be an offer of $210,000 (a great deal of money in 1982, the year The Verdict was released). Does he feel sorry for the victim and his family? Does he believe they need justice? (They actually just want the money.) Does he think winning this case will restore his career or redeem his lost soul? All of these possible motivations are hinted at but in the end we just aren’t sure. If a real-life Frank Galvin told us he really didn’t know why he took this case to court, we’d be okay with that because he won the case. But this is the movies, Folks, so we need more.

Second, the judge was far too much of a caricature, too cozy with the big-shot defense lawyer (well played by James Mason), and too antagonistic to Galvin to be believable.

And finally, the verdict itself: while the jury clearly knew that negligence had caused the virtual death of the plaintiff, there was no allowable evidence to conclusively prove that negligence had occurred; the verdict would certainly have been overturned in an appeal.

The screenplay for The Verdict was written by the eminent playwright and screenwriter David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag the Dog, The Winslow Boy) and the film was directed by the great Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network). Aaron Sorkin was only twenty-one when The Verdict was made, so he might not have been experienced enough to lend a hand on this film but The Verdict surely could have used a dose of Sorkin’s trademark realism.

Image Credit

“The Verdict Poster.” Wikipedia

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), two “ranch stiffs,” are hired to summer a large herd of sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Not long after their arrival on Brokeback, a frigid night and a snoot full of whiskey has them together in a pup tent and some rough sex ensues. Before long the roughness makes space for a little tenderness and Ennis and Jack fall in a clumsy kind of cowboy love. Their ungentle idyll is soon ended as the boss orders them to bring the sheep off the mountain in the middle of August, one month ahead of the originally scheduled descent. The two men return to their homes, carrying longing and a new loneliness away from Brokeback Mountain.

 After they say goodbye and Jack drives off in his beat-up GMC pickup, Ennis is overwhelmed with grief, a grief expressed in dry heaves and a fist pounded into the wall in a dark alleyway.

 Off the mountain and away from each other, Ennis and Jack set about being what they are expected to be: husbands, fathers, heads of family, wage earners. Ennis loves Alma (Michele Williams), whom he fucks doggy style, and he loves their two girls, who never seem to stop crying. And Jack loves Lureen (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of a wealthy farm equipment dealer, a man who treats Jack like a servant. But the flame is on low in these relationships; it only gets turned up when the two men reconnect after four years and spend the night in a cheap motel near Ennis’s place. And here is where their trouble really begins.

 The sweetness and the rightness of their reunion cause Jack and Ennis to acknowledge the excruciating fact that they cannot live without each other. Jack is all for the two of them starting a little ranch and living together on it, but Ennis will have no part of such a plan; he is too conservative, too afraid of the potential consequences if they are found out. His motto is “If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.” Even after Alma divorces him and he becomes a “free man,” Ennis cannot let go of the reins. Jack, meanwhile, unable to control his longing and frustration, begins seeking encounters in dangerous places, with tragic results.

 Director Ang Lee contrasts the wild and spectacular beauty of the settings in which Ennis and Jack are free to give full expression to their love with the dry and dusty environments in which they exist when they are apart. The love scenes themselves reflect the nature of the men, of the times, and of the place; the lovemaking is rough, tender, furtive, tentative – and heart-wrenching.

In his December 2005 review of the film, New York Times film critic Stephen Holden described Ledger’s Ennis as “so taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts.” Gyllenhaal as Jack is boyish, naïve, tender, and reckless, a perfect foil for the repressed Ennis.

 When I first saw Brokeback Mountain, which is based upon the exquisite Annie Proulx story of the same name, I marvelled that Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, Hulk), a man from a culture as far away from 1960s Wyoming as the moon, could render the time and the place and the characters with such uncanny naturalism and fidelity. But after some reflection, I recognize now the universality of the story: two outcasts falling in love in a world that hates who they are and causes them to hate themselves. Ennis and Jack could be two Muslim men piloting a semi through the desert or two Amish women teaching in a community school.

 But with this particular story – its unique setting and characters, its particular time and place and society – Ang Lee has created a masterpiece.

Image Credit

“Brokeback Mountain Poster” Wikipedia

 I have been a “fan” of mythologist Joseph Campbell for a few years now. Campbell’s idea of “the hero’s journey,” which is the story not just of great mythical or legendary figures throughout time but is a metaphor for the journey that each of us is invited – by the universe, by God, by life – to take. If we are to experience life fully, and therefore if we are to be happy, we must accept the call and the adventure that proceeds from our acceptance.

 Campbell, who taught at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly 40 years, wrote numerous books and articles on world mythology, and participated in high-level academic conferences and gave lectures throughout the world during his career, only became known to the larger public in the last two years of his life through a series of interviews with journalist Bill Moyers broadcast on PBS as The Power of Myth. The interviews took place for the most part on the ranch of director George Lucas, whose Star Wars films, it turns out, were based on Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey.

Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, first published in 1949, was The Hero with a Thousand Faces, an enormously rich and difficult study of the hero’s journey in world mythology and in Jungian psychology. I have attempted to get through this work on a few occasions but have so far only made it about half way. Other Campbell books include A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, and the three-volume series The Masks of God.

 Filmmaker Patrick Takaya Solomon has taken the messages to the world inherent in Joseph Campbell’s lifetime of work and presented them in a film that is both highly personal and wonderfully accessible to a general audience. Through a series of delightful but meaningful vignettes, as well movie clips and interviews with contemporary philosophers, writers, psychologists, sports figures – and Robert Walter, the funky and plain-spoken president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation – Solomon brings down to earth Campbell’s key concepts, which the Master often presented in complex mythological stories or in language difficult for the ordinary seeker of enlightenment to comprehend.

 A charming feature of this film is the director’s employment of children (including his son as the main actor) to act out, usually in contemporary urban settings that we are all familiar with, scenes and mythological vignettes that illustrate aspects of the hero’s journey. In one such story, several children are dressed as sheep while one is dressed as a tiger cub. The tiger cub thinks he is also a sheep and acts accordingly until a real tiger comes along and asks him what on earth he thinks he is doing; the little tiger can only bleat in response. The big tiger grabs him and takes him to the water’s edge so that he might see that he is indeed not a sheep but a tiger, then forces him to eat a slab of raw lamb (which in the film is actually a page from a book called TRUTH). The young tiger manages to swallow the meat/truth, thereby gaining tiger-like energy. Soon he becomes the creature he was born to be.

 Robert Walter: “I think the moral here is self-evident: if you’re a tiger and you’re living among sheep, you’re a pretty poor specimen of a tiger. And we are all tigers living among sheep. We are all individuals with a self that we don’t even begin to understand. And unfortunately – you can open the metaphor out – the food we get from the culture around us is maybe food for sheep; it’s not food for tigers.”

 The film illustrates the point that most of us fail to recognize the call to embark on our journey because we have been immobilized or hypnotized or distracted by the “shoulds” and “should nots” imposed upon us by parents, teachers, the corporate world. We do not recognize the fact that these imperatives – to make money and to consume, to get good grades and achieve – are part of a grand illusion and not reality at all.

 Robert Walter: “I tend to think that people wake up to the fact that they are the hero of their own life when they get tired of being the victim of their own life. At the point that you say, ‘Enough. I don’t want to listen to my parents any more, I’ve had it with my boss, I’m really having problems with the sermon I’m being taught, you can either surrender to victimhood – and a lot of people do – or you can surrender to a fundamentalism – you can basically give your responsibility to someone else and say, ‘Tell me what to do and I’ll do it’ – or you can say, ‘I have a choice here and I’m responsible’. Now what does it mean to be the hero of your own life? It means to be responsible for your own adventure.”

 One of the key aspects of the hero’s journey, which the film clearly illustrates, is the hero’s willingness to die so that the new life can begin, to put aside the old in order to embrace the new – the metaphor, found in many myths, of death and resurrection. Tai Ji master Chungliang Al Huang: “If you want to have new birth, new revelation, new insight into life as you grow as a human being, you will learn to keep dying.”

 Another important feature of the journey is the necessity of choosing a path that has not yet been trodden, to enter the forest at its darkest point, which is simply a metaphor for discovering who we really are. Philosopher Brian Johnson: “The hero’s journey for me is having the courage to look within yourself and say, ‘What am I here to do? What am I most passionate about in my life? What are my greatest gifts? How do I give them to the world?’ And Joseph Campbell captured it with the phrase ‘Follow your bliss.’” This is “the essence of the hero’s journey” and each of us is capable of letting go of preconceived notions and following our own bliss.

 The points made in the film that resonated most with me were about fear and courage. Brian Johnson: “Why do most people not follow their bliss? One word: fear.” We fear the reactions of others when we decide to break out of the mould; we fear the danger involved in slaying the dragon of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” We need to summon the courage to confront these fears. The interviewees recommend that we develop our “courage muscles” by regularly doing the things that scare us.

 Writer Allen Cohen: “There’s always a gift in battling demons and overcoming them because that’s what a soul’s journey is about; it’s about facing fear and growing beyond it. And as we overcome our fears we gain power.”

 The final message of this profound film is that our journey is only complete when we return and share the story of that journey with the world. This sharing is the gift that Finding Joe offers us; it is a gift that can be appreciated and used for a lifetime.

Image Credit

“Joseph Campbell circa 1982” Wikipedia