Film Review #191: Giving Voice
2009
Director: Mišo Suchý
Cast: Syracuse Community Choir

You’d need a heart of stone not to love this movie on the night it premiered at Art Rage in late January. Consider the event itself a kind of triple whammy. First the packed, enthusiastic crowd itself, which included many members and friends of the Community Choir. The audience lining the walls easily doubled those in the folded chairs filling the center of the room. The Community Choir’s 20th anniversary concert three years ago is the subject of Giving Voice, Mišo Suchý’s half-hour documentary.

Then, the gallery walls themselves held the exhibition Voices of Diversity, more than 100 of Lida Suchý’s black-and-white photos of Choir members. These are arresting and powerful, some large format single shots and some arranged in grids of up to twelve images. For a project whose subject is inclusive community-building, these simple and straight-on portraits are at first mildly disconcerting. They utterly lack the quality of "social grease" and over-amped affect that often marks the glib, ad-like visual style of such efforts. Instead, these are images of individual choir members at rest, both embraced and given space by the photographer’s patient attention. They are in every sense "stills" in whose presence you turn down your own volume in order to return that attention – and that ripens you for the film, which then sends you back to the stills.

The Suchýs now live and teach here in Syracuse – she at Onondaga Community College and he in Transmedia at Syracuse University. They met in Eastern Europe around the same time Karen Mihalyi was dreaming up the Community Choir. Lida was an American art-exchange student seeking the Ukrainian village in the Carpathian Mountains that her parents left when the Soviets took over. A native of the city of Bratislava – then part of pre-partition Czechoslovakia – Mišo was exploring the Eastern Slovakia region from which his father had come. Each has seen their own work published, exhibited and screened widely here and abroad. But from the start they also photographed together. Much of their work is collaboration and that often combines still and moving images. Their projects often focus on identity and the immigrant’s search for home and belonging, themes that certainly echo concerns of the Community Choir.

Sometimes these projects appear in print in magazines (for example, National Geographic and Life) or book format (Mišo’s 1997 When I Was and Was Not at Home gathers some of his earlier photo series and includes an illuminating afterword by the Slovakian photo critic Václav Macek, who runs the annual summer international Month of Photography festival in Bratislava). Some are film documentaries like his About Dogs and People (1999) or Home Movie: A diary for my American-born son (2003), which Suchý says chronicles how he became a Syracusan. The award-winning Pictograph (2007), available on DVD from Anthology Film Archives, offers both film and still gallery components with Lida’s images and drawings of a Ukrainian woman artist from the village of Kryvorivnya. They hope to mount movie-photo events like the Art Rage premiere again at film festivals and other galleries and eventually offer in a form that would publish the photos and include the film.

I’ve watched Giving Voice several times now since January – an earlier version screened last February at the Eastwood Palace along with Pictograph – and each time there’s something fresh to appreciate. These affectionate and immensely telling moments are often brief. In one of his favorite parts (and mine too), Mišo Suchý follows the passing of a collection basket among seated Choir members during a pause in a rehearsal. Elsewhere, a glorious spotlight finale cuts abruptly to the same performer (Colleen Kattau) industriously vacuuming in the background after rehearsal. A blind singer is excited by some new Braille lyrics and, running her fingers over the raised dots, she breathes, "Oh, this has ‘deep blue sea’ in it!" Over and over, people quietly make time and room for each other and Suchý’s camera finds them.

The DVD also has a five-minute short on the children’s section and a 16-minute interview with Mihalyi. The Community Choir’s back story is well known in Central New York and there’s not much of it in the film itself, so – while the film holds up without it – this material is valuable.

Mihalyi went to Nicaragua in 1984 and travelled widely in the villages there, witnessing efforts to use the arts to build community. By then, Mihalyi had spent a decade working in the Women’s Movement, a founder of Women’s Info – still the longest continuously operating independent women’s community resource center in the country – as well as the fondly-remembered annual summer gathering called Women’s Harvest. Such projects struggled with diversity of age, race, sexual preference, class and a spectrum of disabilities, as well as evolving peace, justice and green issues. The next year, after Mihalyi returned from Nicaragua, she decided to start a no-audition choir which anyone – really anyone – could join. In the early years of the Choir, she told Syracuse University researcher Bob Bogdan that the idea "just came to me." Later in the same interview, commenting on the effort that including everybody really takes, Mihalyi added wryly that the Choir had "singing disabled" members who needed extra help too.

Giving Voice devotes considerable space to this "making room at the table." And the DVD’s Mihalyi interview adds the dimension of nearly a quarter century’s perspective. Now 58, Mihalyi recalls how, before Nicaragua and the Women’s Movement, she’d grown up in a small town in northern New York and she had wanted to recreate in the Choir the same sense of knowing people all their lives.

"We’ve seen babies grow up and we’ve lost people too," she tells the filmmaker.

Though anyone watching this film will grasp that, locals will know its specifics. For example, there on-screen is the gracious, white-haired Quaker social worker Dick Mundy – Suchý has since filmed his memorial service in Hendricks Chapel – or the once-little Gabe, all grown up now and joining singer Colleen Kattau on-stage. These two women lead the choir rousingly in Jolie Rickman’s Emma Goldman song (you may know the chorus) –

You show up and you smile for no reason
It’s all so simple and clear
Like we’re the hope of a hundred generations
Like you and I have no fear.
Rocking in the soul of Emma Goldman…

This sequence, along with Kattau’s recollection of the singer-songwriter – lost to cancer before the film was made – is among the high points. In another musical segment, Sukosh Fearon’s rollicking piano drives another jubilant Choir favorite, "When All God’s Children Get Together."

Such sequences are built on cuts back and forth between a month's worth of rehearsal sessions and the Choir's 20th anniversary concert and they are among the best concert movie footage I have seen anywhere. In compressing performance in this way from the standard musical film play-list format, they depend on split-second timing that Suchý attributes to his former student, filmmaker and musician Ryan Tebo, who edited much of the film. Suchý – who joked recently that his early films were longer because "I was a young genius" – is clear this film is intentionally the story of how that concert came together and not yet the story of the Choir itself. But he applied recently for a grant that would expand this film into that one.

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A shorter version of this article appears in the March 19th print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. The Voices of Diversity photo exhibition came down in mid-February, but the new film Giving Voice is available on DVD exclusively at Art Rage: The Norton Putter Gallery, at 505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse, 315.559.5387 or http://www.artragegallery.org/.

Film Review #190: Brick Lane
2007/DVD 2009
Director: Sarah Gavron
Cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson

“Why do you like me?” asks Nazneen (Bengali actress Tannishtha Chatterjee) one day of her younger lover, the hip, hunky, London-reared Karim (Christopher Simpson).

“Who says I like you?” he answers, suddenly shy. But when pressed into emotional territory Nazneen has never entered with her older husband, Karim says she’s unlike the modern girls with their mini-skirts or the religious girls, always arguing. He says she’s “the real thing” – a girl from a village in their homeland of Bangladesh.

It’s this exchange that a friend of mine recalled most vividly from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Brick Lane, an exchange that made it into director Sarah Gavron’s 2007 film version of the same title. But equally charged is a later scene between Nazneen and her husband Chanu (Bombay-based director and occasional actor Satish Kaushik), when he admits he’s never become the “big man” he felt he must before he could return home.

“What is this ‘big man’?” she says, grasping his shoulders. “Do you think that’s why I love you?”

In Nazneen’s world such choices have a steeper price than you might think. Except for flashbacks to Nazneen’s childhood, the film compresses the novel’s longer time-span to the year 2001. Having been sent from her village in the 80s to London at 17 to marry Chanu, Nazneen has lost an infant son and is raising two daughters. (As the elder, Shahana, Naeema Begum delivers a small gem of performance as a rebellious teen whose turmoil penetrates her mother.)

For those long years in chilly London, Nazneen has imagined love at second hand, mostly through intermittent, well-embroidered letters from her beloved younger sister Hasina. Around her affair with Karim and against growing backlash to the World Trade Center attacks, a series of criss-crossing reversals and decisions occur. Dutiful and retiring, Nazneen comes to see London, her husband and herself differently. Karim morphs from street entrepreneur to more observant Muslim community activist. And Chanu, admirer of novelists Thackeray and Proust and the philosopher David Hume, decides he cannot stay in the West, though for years he’s ignored Nazneen’s pleas to visit home.

The East London neighborhood called Brick Lane has always been what the Irish actor who plays Karim calls a “place of diaspora.” In the 1700s French Huguenots settled there, later Methodists, and then it became a Jewish enclave. The racial harassment portrayed in Brick Lane – Karim’s participation in the cultural group called the Bengal Tigers occurs partly in defense against a gang of harassing right-wing thugs who go by the name Lion Hearts – builds on a history of real attacks against the London Bangladeshis alone that dates from the 1950s, when they were a considerably smaller community.

By 2001, the Bangladeshi concentrated there numbered about 300,000, the vast majority Sunni Muslims from Bangladesh’s northwest Sylhet district. Many lived in the shabby, hulking, public housing high-rises the British call “estates.” The largest wave arrived in the 1970s following their war of independence from Pakistan, during which 3 million Bangladeshi died. This is slaughter that Chanu cites in his pivotal speech in the film, when he attends one of the Bengal Tigers’ community meetings – partly a challenge to Karim and partly an elder’s warning to the young – after which Nazneen, in simply taking his hand, shifts everything between them.

By last year, another shift had occurred. Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi population had nearly doubled from 2001 levels, making it one of the UK’s largest, youngest and fastest growing immigrant groups. And in the summer of 2006, when Gavron filmed her movie, Brick Lane’s ethnic shops and restaurants had also become tourist destinations.

Gavron has emphasized the support given the production by that community, and she credits assistant director Rahul Amin, himself a Brick Lane resident and filmmaker, with being able to finally make the film at all. Young men from the neighborhood met with Simpson as he prepared to play Karim, and Brick Lane women with Chatterjee. But some Brick Lane merchants objected so strenuously to the novel – saying it portrayed their community as “uneducated, illiterate and unclean” – that Gavron had to move even exterior shooting elsewhere.

But such complaints seem disingenuous. Chanu is devoted to learning and for years Nazneen’s tie to dreams beyond her own arranged life lies in the power of letters with her sister. And it’s another independent countrywoman, her Westernized friend Razia (Harvey Virdi) – who smokes cigarettes and has cut her hair (“all that brushing and brushing!”) – who offers Nazneen a job sewing if she decides to stay, a perhaps troubling example of encouragement.

Some commentators see objections to the novel and ensuing film as having more to do with Nazneen’s own journey, her creator’s telling tales – Ali was born in Bangledesh though reared mostly in England – and the similar reception other Muslim women artists have received from conservative elements in some European immigrant communities.

Paradoxically much of Brick Lane’s strength as a story stems from these cultural clashes. It’s not just that Nazneen is a woman imprisoned by convention (A.O. Scott says she echoes Emma Bovary.) It’s no coincidence that Chanu favors 19th century novels. This traditional, conservative man shares sensibilities with an era in which adultery mattered in plots and communities in ways it may not now. In a review of Ali’s novel – published pointedly on 9/11/03 in The New Republic – James Wood suggests the “ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty and pressures of propriety” found in the some immigrant groups reinvigorate and clarify our Western stories precisely because they hark back to the themes and concerns and oppressions that helped generate the Western novel to begin with.

The Brick Lane DVD’s extensive commentaries – out since March 10th – are well worth seeking out. But Community Folk Art Center screens the film this Saturday afternoon with a talk afterward from Bangladesh-born Dr. Farhana Sultana of Syracuse University, who lived and taught in London during the film’s 2006 production controversy.

*******
Screening of Brick Lane on March 14 at 2:00 PM, Community Folk Art Center, 805 E. Genesee St. A shorter version of this review appears in the 3/12/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.

Film Review #189: Wendy and Lucy
2008
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Michelle Willliams, Walter Dalton, Larry Fessenden

Not too far into Kelly Reichardt’s latest road trip film, Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams), the slight, dark-haired drifter in cut-offs and hoodie, has been dragged into the manager’s office at Jack’s Market for stealing a roll and a can of I AM’s dog food. You can tell the manager would like to let this go.

"Well," he says with a sigh to his zealous clerk, "what are we talking here?"

But Andy (John Robinson), the blond teen-ager who’s "watched the whole thing," his face red and blotchy with indignation, the gold cross at his throat flashing, insists it’s not the money, it’s about setting an example.

"I’m not from around here," says Wendy quickly, sensing an opening that diffident apologies had not provided. "I can’t be an example."

The part about not being "from around here" is a line Wendy uses often, until it comes to resemble a song’s refrain. She’d used it the night before, chatting with another woman who asked her where the local store was, when searching for her dog Lucy led her to the campfire of some "gutter punks" by the railroad. (These are homeless teens who travel by hopping trains; the extras for this scene were hired from a camp near Portland’s rail-yards.) She’d used it that morning when the Walgreen’s security guard (Walter Dalton) wakes her up and says she can’t sleep in the parking lot and must move her car. It echoes as "just passing through" when she pays her shop-lifting fine and again when she gives her sister in Muncie’s address at the dog pound. Later Bill the car mechanic (Will Patton) will bounce the line back to her – "You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?" – and the security guard will sympathetically lament that "you can’t get a job without an address – it’s all fixed!"

Wendy and Lucy covers roughly three days during which Wendy Carroll’s already frayed and tattered life comes apart. Having set out in an ’88 Honda Accord from Great Bend, Indiana, she lands in Wilsonville, Oregon, an equally frayed and tattered former mill town just outside Portland along the railroad north. With $525 left, she’s heading for Alaska and a job in the fish canneries. In Salt Lake City, a guy had told her the car’s serpentine belt was going, but now the head gasket goes too. While occupied with the receiving end of setting an example for local scoff-laws, Wendy loses Lucy to the dog-catcher.

In the end, though Wendy finds Lucy lazing happily in the yard of a "foster" volunteer from the pound, she goes on alone, hopping a train into the chilly twilight. I have watched this film three times now since the awards season screener arrived in my mailbox in late November; knowing the end doesn’t prevent seeing it freshly each time. This time through, though it’s been called "serene" and is considerably softer than Michael Haneke’s 2003 Time of the Wolf, I couldn’t help thinking of his train rumbling through another ominous landscape.

After its premier last May at Cannes followed by some other top fests, Wendy and Lucy screened theatrically on the two coasts in December just long enough to qualify for Oscar nominations, and didn’t make it, despite other critical praise and some top ten lists. Regular theatrical release, starting in January, is now steadily underway, with bookings through the end of May.

Reichardt, who lives most of the year in Queens with Lucy, made this film in August 2007 for about $300,000. Michelle Williams worked for free and refrained from showers for the length of the 18-day shoot. Reichardt co-wrote the script with Portland author Jon Raymond, based on his story "Train Choir." Reichardt and Raymond got the idea from public discussion after Hurricane Katrina and the question of what we owe one another, but this theme is no less ingrained in the Pacific Northwest. While Lucy is still lost, Wendy sits in a diner making flyers to post as the camera pans past another patron reading Ken Kesey's saga of the Stamper logging family's fight against the unions, Sometimes a Great Notion.

Recently interviewed on NPR’s "Fresh Air," Reichardt said she used trains in place of music –"the sounds of commerce as a score" – except for the tune that Wendy hums (echoed in the closing credits and written by musician-actor Will Oldham, who plays the gutter punk Icky). This use of train sound climaxes in one brief terrifying night scene when Wendy crosses paths with a man in the woods (Larry Fessenden, in one of the film’s many performance gems).

Reichardt and Raymond worked together on Old Joy (2006) and have another feature underway with the working title Meek’s Cut-off, a Western "from a feminine perspective" set in 1845 Oregon, making a trilogy that Reichardt says explores the American dream. Most strangers Wendy encounters are decent, courteous folk. Some are generous – inch by inch, the security guard befriends her and this mechanic plays against type – but it only takes one Andy.

*******
This review appears in the March 5 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. See Wendy and Lucy at Manlius Cinema for one week starting March 6. Watch the trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vgjLIdcNxw. Wendy and Lucy opens in 17 other cities, including Ithaca, this week, and comes out on DVD in May. To read Nancy’s review of Old Joy on this site, click on 2007 in Archives and go to May.

Film Review #188: Hunger
2008
Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham
Midway through this film about Bobby Sands, the first of ten Irish nationalist prisoners to die in the 1981 hunger strike in the North of Ireland in a bid to reclaim P.O.W. status from their British jailers, Sands (Michael Fassbender) tells a priest about a trip he took as a boy.

Sands was a cross-country runner in school – Father Moran (Liam Cunningham) says this explains a lot – and at 12 crossed the border to lush, green Donegal, a chance to run against boys from the Irish Republic “and Protestants too.” Immersed in countryside unlike industrialized Belfast – listening, you feel this was his first naked contact with his own land – he’d gone for a warm-up jog in nearby woods along a stream. There Sands encountered “five boys from Cork, deliberating what to do” about a foal that had snapped its leg between some rocks in the water. Knowing he’d somehow get blamed for this mishap anyway and seeing the animal’s pain, Sands drowned the foal.

Sands recalls an irate priest dragged him back through those woods and tells Moran, “I could take the punishment for everyone and I had the respect of the other boys. I knew I did right by that foal.” A pause. “I’m clear on the repercussions.”

This scene – really the second of three acts in playwright Enda Walsh’s stylized script – comprises a 17-minute, single-take exchange between Sands and Moran shot nearly in silhouette, until the first lit close-up when Sands relates that Donegal incident. Between small talk about Moran’s younger brother – also a priest, a “pushy little twerp” – getting the parish assignment Moran wanted and Sands’ dry jokes about using Bible pages only from the Book of Lamentations to roll cigarettes, Moran tries every argument to dissuade Sands from the impending strike.

Much of the scene’s dramatic strength pivots finally on Sands’ recourse to resonant image. (When Sands later nears death, he first sees his 12-year-old self beside the infirmary bed, then returns to that now-foggy path in the woods.) Though itself a fiction, this scene with Moran seems faithful to Sands’ considerably well-developed poetic side – his vivid prison writings are available in paperback – and clarifies the approach to history taken by Walsh and director Steve McQueen, the son of West Indian immigrants and a British Turner Prize-winning visual artist.

Though punctuated with two chilling voice-over sound clips from British PM Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, this is not the literal historic treatment many wanted – not regarding Ireland’s ancient tradition of hunger strike as means of complaint (dating from pre-Christian times), its closer tie to Ireland’s early 20th century independence, civil war and partition (notably the 1920 death of Cork’s mayor, Terrence MacSwiney, which Gerry Adams says directly inspired Gandhi’s 17 hunger strikes) or even surrounding events in Long Kesh (McQueen’s scrolling text uses the British name, “Maze Prison”).

In the first act, which opens with guard Robert Lohan (Stuart Graham) washing his hands Pilate-like, depicts a pair of cell-mates living with the daily grind of monotony, filth and sudden brutality, and includes a boyish, helmeted riot trooper who flinches before naked prisoners as he strikes his plastic shield with his baton and bellows, Sands emerges only gradually. In the third act, instead of recounting the trips of high-level emissaries to Sands’ bedside (European Parliament members and the Pope’s secretary among them) or Sands’ in-absentia election to British Parliament (over 30,000 votes), McQueen and Walsh meditate on Sands’ excruciating wasting. As tenderly as some medical staff treat him, a beefy aide with “UDA” tattooed on his knuckles (for the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defense Association) lets Sands collapse naked on the floor and carries him, Pieta-like, back to bed. The accumulating visual imagery here is frank. When Sands opens his eyes one day, his vision deteriorating, to make out his mother dozing off, your mind goes straight to the apostles sleeping in Gethsemane.

Once specializing in short, often silent, gallery video installations, McQueen moved to feature-length cinema with his own west London boyhood recollections of TV bulletins that counted out Sands’ last 66 days and Goya’s war-time paintings as his model. He says Britain’s Channel 4 Film approached him with this project over five years ago, before Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo exposés. Although the Wall Street Journal (1/16) included Hunger among new European films that risk glorifying terrorism, McQueen and Walsh seem more intent on accounting for the enduring depth of response to Sands and the cost on all sides. (One of the most breath-stopping moments is built upon the guard Robert Lohan's sudden death in his invalid, unseeing mother's lap).

Hunger took the Camera d’Or for best first film at Cannes last year (with similar prizes in Sydney, Toronto and elsewhere, and spots on several annual Best lists). But it arrives here late, not opening theatrically in the US until March 20th in limited release. It screens locally next week, the finale in the Central New York Irish-American Cultural Institute’s annual film fest. Curator Jim MacKillop has provided a thread and some background by starting off with two films covering independence, civil war and partition, George Morrison’s seldom-seen 1961 documentary Saoirse?/Freedom? and Ken Loach’s 2006 drama – like Hunger, another Cannes-disrupter – The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

*******
A shorter version of this review appears in the 2/12/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the column “Make it Snappy.” Hunger screens next Tuesday, 2/17, 7:00 PM, Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church, 5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt (opposite Manlius Pebble Hill School), with discussion afterward. Thanks to Jim MacKillop for letting me preview this film. See 2007 entries on this site for my review of Loach's Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Film Review #187: The Wackness
2008
Director: Jonathan Levine
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby

You might remember Robert De Niro as the drill instructor in Men of Honor, bellowing that line, willing Cuba Gooding, Jr. to his feet, “Stand up, Navy diver!”

George Tilman, Jr., hasn’t directed a film since 2000, when his Men of Honor portrayed the struggles of Carl Brashear, the first African American to successfully enter the ranks of deep sea Navy divers. So there’s plenty of anticipation now that his new film is about to open in wide release this Friday. That film is another biopic, Notorious, which relates the saga of Christopher Wallace – better known as The Notorious B.I.G. – and promises to vividly reanimate some aspects of the mid-90s Hip-Hop era. Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down in a rapper feud in 1997 at the age of 24, but in the summer of 1994 he was just exploding onto the New York City music scene and by that September had released his debut album, Ready to Die.

As a companion to Tilman’s Notorious, there’s a weird little movie just out on DVD January 6th that offers its own view of that sweltering New York City summer and the pervasive reach of B.I.G.’s music and Hip-Hop culture in general. The Wackness, writer-director Jonathan Levine’s second feature, opened theatrically last July to mixed reviews. Tellingly, the soundtrack CD release preceded the film in June - a classic compilation of tracks from B.I.G. himself plus Method Man (who has a minor part as a Jamaican drug dealer in the film), Faith Evans, Craig Mack, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, KRS-One, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Raekwon, R. Kelly, Biz Markie and Wu-Tang Clan. The soundtrack CD leaves out the juke-box version of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” that figures as background in one bar scene of the film, but that may be just as well.

Such star power as The Wackness has derives from Ben Kingsley – not in his trademark shaved head but with flowing locks – as Dr. Jeffrey Squires, a private psychiatrist who barters therapy sessions for the product that marijuana dealer Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) sells out of the shave-ice freezer cart he amiably pushes around Manhattan. Squires has a weekend house on Fire Island too, which figures prominently in Luke’s education as the summer of ’94 progresses.

The film spans the months between Luke’s high school graduation and his departure for his “safety school” – the college application seniors fall back on when their first and second choice schools don’t come through. Over these heat-soaked several months, Luke and Squires become friends of sorts, rambling around night-time Manhattan, getting stoned together, talking about life – this runs to Squires’ urgent advise to live in the moment – getting arrested at one point, and looking for girls. (Ben Kinsley making out with a blond dread-locked Mary-Kate Olsen in a bar’s phone booth is one of the creepier May-December screen duos within memory).

Both their lives undergo quiet but seismic shifts. In a scary economic climate reminiscent of today’s, Luke’s father losses his investments and the family’s eviction from the upper West Side rudely catapults them across the river to bunk in with Luke’s New Jersey grandmother. Shapiro and his wife Kristin (Famke Janssen) mutually decide to divorce after an excruciating get-away weekend. Then there is Squires’ step-daughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), the lovely, self-possessed girl who never noticed Luke all through high school and now has the summer on her hands. This starts hopefully enough – she’s gentle with his inexperience – but you needn’t be world-weary to soon know how it ends. He watches her run through the Fire Island surf, practices how he’ll inflect “I love you” over and over and, when he tells her, she retorts, “Grow up.”

It’s Ben Kingsley’s best line here when Squires, understanding that sting, tells Luke afterward, “How lucky she would have been.”

Modest as teen-age heroes go, Luke has the makings of a genuinely nice man. The Wackness is best appreciated as a modest film. Not the tell-all Hip-Hop movie, it still catches how open the moment was - and how varied the audience - for this music’s arrival. Quirkily but not brilliantly shot, it illustrates how a certain dark tone and its high contrasts might lead a filmmaker a few steps more into graphic novel land. Not in the running for any performance awards, The Wackness still presents in Peck and Thirlby two young actors whose work will be worth following the next time out.

*******
This review appeared in the January 15, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column reviewing current releases as well as DVDs both new and enduring. This review was the 100th edition of “Make it Snappy,” which began running in 2006.

Film Review #186: Gran Torino
2008
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang, Christopher Carley

It’s not what you expect after the trailer, which ran all through the holidays at Carousel Mall Regal Cinemas and on TV too, promising “vintage” Clint Eastwood, with him cocking his thumb Dirty Harry-style and, later, ordering gangbangers off his lawn with an M-1 rifle. No, at the end of Gran Torino, I found myself thinking that this sometimes violent movie is about the ways men still find to be tender with each another. And just then, as if answering my girly thoughts, the credits roll and with them the soft jazz title song by Eastwood’s son Kyle, who did the score, that starts out, “So tenderly the story ….”

Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, which he also directed, is retired autoworker Walt Kowalski, still living in his “old neighborhood” of Highland Park in 2008, where Henry Ford established his flagship Model-T factory almost exactly a century ago. Nearly engulfed by the larger Detroit, Highland Park was once the fastest growing city in the US, with the best schools and the highest average income. Now – after a slide that really started in the 1940s, accelerated with Ford’s relocation in the late 1950s and Detroit’s 1967 race riots – it’s the most impoverished city in North America. And by 1972, the year Kowalski rolled his prized green Gran Torino off the assembly line, Highland Park’s prosperity was well in decline.

Now, under the stars and stripes on his front porch, Kowalski polishes his car, fertilizes his tiny front yard, drinks his Pabst, nurses a growing dislike for his two sons and their ditzy off-spring, and glares at the Hmong family that moves in next door on the day of his wife Dorothy’s funeral. The names he relentlessly and casually calls them and others, including his Italian barber, his apple-cheeked young pastor and his Irish construction foreman buddy, would make your eyes water. A little while later, after Kowalski’s rescued her from punks, the Hmong family’s stalwart teen-aged daughter Sue (Ahney Her) answers his demand to know what they’re doing there.

“It’s the Vietnam thing,” she says matter-of-factly. “We fought on your side, so when the Americans quit, we had to come here.”

“You’re alright,” Kowalski tells her after that, as if she’s passed some test. In his basement there’s a trunk where he keeps his Silver Star and other Korean War memorabilia, and on the trunk’s inside lid, a decal of the modern US Calvary’s motto, “Live the legend.”

There’s been so much attention on this maybe being Eastwood’s last acting role and how much it summarizes his career that the motto works just as well as wry comment on being Clint Eastwood. At least since Unforgiven (1992), when his retired gunslinger tells his wannabe fan he can’t remember his exploits because he was drunk most of the time, Eastwood has been revising that legend. By 2003, Mystic River’s trio of wives was such a collective rebuke to macho violence that a friend mused to me that Eastwood was apologizing for his younger films. Now, Eastwood offers an intriguing echo of the Old West in modern urban ruins – not with the heavy-handed panoramas some filmmakers might use, of abandoned factories and apartment buildings and vacant lots going back to woods that Detroit’s becoming known for – but in a single recurring city block that Thao takes home. Brush grows up through the chain link fence along the broken sidewalk and tufts of grass split the pavement here. On this a desolate stretch of today’s urban frontier his cousin’s gang repeatedly waylays him.

On its surface, Gran Torino is what the PR says: about how Kowalski grudgingly becomes the protector of the fatherless Hmong family next door. The trigger for this is Sue’s younger brother Thao (Bee Vang), a shy teen whose volatile cousin tries to bully him into joining an Asian gang. Eastwood doesn’t traffic much in fancy effects like flashbacks, but later on we learn what Kowalski is taken back to under the swinging light in his dark garage, hearing the faintest military drumbeat, when he catches Thao trying to steal the Gran Torino, and how close he comes a second time to shooting a boy in the face who was trying to surrender.

There are half a dozen other cliff-hangers like this. But Gran Torino’s hidden treasure is something else, a dance of intrepid and tender approach through hostile territory that occurs between characters willing to learn and enter each other’s world.

One of those is his young priest (a fine Christopher Carley), who mistakenly assumes that wearing a collar automatically grants him the familiarity of speaking to Kowalski on a first name basis. Father Janovich persists through several withering rounds of correction on this and an array of other generational discourtesies until – seemingly much less chubby and apple-cheeked – he finally earns a soft, “Call me Walt.” Gran Torino in fact is book-ended by the priest’s sermons at two funerals, the first full of certainty and the second a sharing of how much he’s figured out he doesn’t know.

But this exchange of learning plays out most richly between Kowalski and the two Hmong teens, in contrast to is own grandchildren. By painstaking inches, Kowalski allows Sue and Thao to teach him how to behave, what would insult their mother or their shaman, how to accept things ranging from neighborly barbeque to help moving a freezer to simple thanks.

As the quintessential second-generation American-born go-between, Sue is adept at explaining her people to Walt, sometimes in comically dead-pan terms (“Hmong girls tend to do better than the boys. The girls go to college and the boys go to prison.”). These comments shade on the one hand into gentle mockery (“I told you we don’t like to eat dog. We eat cats.”) and on the other reveal a canny survivor’s understanding of what really makes Walt tick. Sue’s got his number once she figures out that the quickest way to gain his agreement is to tag any suggestion with the phrase, “It would be an insult not to.”

Eastwood makes room for Kowalski to spend a perhaps inordinate amount of time on-screen getting Thao ready for that job the boy wants so he can go to school. There are more of these clean, short, often understated scenes between two reticent men about their tools and tool belts – think of it as detail work, maybe – than any straight action film depending on forward momentum really requires. Some of this provides the film’s unexpected lighter moments. There is a wonderful scene where – under cover of “manning Thao up” – they rehearse “how real men talk” with Kowalski’s barber so that Thao can pass that test with a construction boss. (He does pass too, trading expletive-laden horror stories about head gaskets, trannies and thieving car mechanics.) But when Thao admits he could use the loan of a roofing hammer after the gang steals his tools and Kowalski says, “Good. Go ahead and get it from my workshop,” that “Good” tells us they’ve gotten over some larger hurdle than whether the older man trusts Thao with the run of his workshop. A good Estwing roofing hammer costs almost fifty bucks these days. This and similar scenes methodically get us ready for the startling depth of Thao’s outburst near the end of the film, when Kowalski locks him in the cellar to keep him safe.

And Kowalski is thinking about what lesson he’s teaching Sue and Thao in the end too, in grown-up ways Dirty Harry never dreamed.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the 1/8/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing current releases as well as DVDs both new and enduring. Gran Torino opened in Syracuse on January 9th. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

Film Review #185: White Dog
1982/2008
Director: Sam Fuller
Cast: Paul Winfield, Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives

Early in last fall’s Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee’s much under-rated homage to the all-Black 92nd Infantry’s role in the Allied Italian campaign of 1944, a group of Black US troops wades across a freezing Tuscan river at dawn while the Fascists on the other side broadcast a personalized message over loudspeakers. Through the fog, a woman’s heavily inflected voice taunts them about their choice to risk privation and death for a nation that still allowed segregation and worse, and urges their defection.

Lee’s long-standing feud with Clint Eastwood about screen portrayals of race issues generally and Black participation in past US wars in particular notwithstanding – I await the next volley since Gran Torino opens here in Syracuse next week – a strikingly similar but smaller-scale scene occurred decades earlier in Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1951).

The first US movie set in the Korean War, shot and rushed into theaters well before that conflict ended, The Steel Helmet was hardly your usual war-time propaganda flick. Instead, a captured North Korean Communist officer first taunts the Black American medic Thompson (James Edwards), in perfect English, about riding in the back of the bus back home, then moves on to remind Sgt. Tanaka (Richard Loo) about World War II-era West Coast internment camps for Japanese-Americans. These conversations occur beneath the inscrutable gaze of a giant gold Buddha in the temple where the US troops have taken refuge, a statue behind which they literally take cover when the shooting starts.

For Fuller, who earned a Purple Heart for infantry service during World War II, the Korean War was pivotal for portraying US race relations because it could dramatize the shift from segregated units to an integrated US Army, especially for “re-treads” like The Steel Helmet’s Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans’ first screen role) – World War II vets who went back for another hitch and then grappled painfully with changed comrade demographics.

A dozen years later and into the New Frontier, Fuller set Shock Corridor (1963) in a locked mental ward populated with casualties of mid-century American life. A Korean War vet, now believing he’s Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, confides in a lucid moment that his Southern upbringing derailed him more than combat (“My parents fed me bigotry for breakfast – it was a cancer they put in me.”) But Shock Corridor’s real bravura performance belongs to Hari Rhodes as Trent, the delusional Black man who proclaims he founded the Ku Klux Klan and, pillowcase-clad, provokes a violent attack on the ward’s elderly Black janitor “before he marries my daughter.”

Among the juiciest of B-movie-makers, Fuller began as a tabloid crime reporter and pulp fiction novelist. He wrote and directed 29 movies of his own between 1949-89, as the studio system waned and its loosening allowed for the first indie projects. Fuller made full and bracing use of film noir’s lurid, sensational, free-wheeling style to portray social ills in confrontational ways. He took on war, crime, prostitution and, repeatedly, racism.

None of Fuller’s films was more controversial than the 1983 feature White Dog, in which the kindly old grandfather of two golden-ringletted little girls with ice cream cones trains man’s best friend to attack Black people and is terrifically proud of it – all to the melodramatic, spaghetti-Western-like strains of an Ennio Morricone score.

Here, former child star Kristy McNichol plays the itinerant actress Julie, whose car hits the white German shepherd late one night on a mountain road above L.A., takes him to a vet, and bonds with him after the dog intercepts an intruder. Paul Winfield is the trainer Keys, who attempts to de-program the animal (now named Mr. Hyde) at a down-at-the-heels animal park run by a crotchety Burl Ives. Mr. Hyde escapes, strays into a Black neighborhood and gruesomely kills a nattily-dressed man who seeks refuge inside a church against a backdrop that echoes The Steel Helmet’s Buddha, a stained-glass depiction of St. Francis and the beasts. Keys and Julie take the dog in one more time anyway, for a cliff-hanging final training session that evokes Shock Corridor’s lesson that racism – not just a matter of opinion and anything but natural – provokes madness.

Fuller’s script adapted French diplomat-novelist Romain Gary’s memoir White Dog, about his wife’s related experience. Curiously, the project made some Hollywoood rounds before landing with Fuller, who had discussed the Southern custom of training dogs to chase and attack runaway slaves – and its surviving modern permutations – with his old friend Gary when the writer was first at work on the story.

After many advance rumors, Criterion released White Dog on DVD in December, when it made NPR’s list of ten best DVDs of 2008. White Dog resurfaces again years after its brief, belated State-side premiere in 1991, when the still-jittery Paramount Pictures continued to cave to bizarre pressure that the film promoted racism. In any case, Fuller moved to France after Paramount locked up White Dog in 1983, never again making a movie here. Young French filmmakers – who saw White Dog and his other films in Europe – embraced him.

If Sam Fuller isn’t a cinematic taste you’ve acquired, dip in this year.

*******
This review appears in the January 1, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing films in current release plus DVDs both new and enduring. Find White Dog on DVD at Netflix, which has a decent selection of Sam Fuller’s other films. Fuller’s 2002 autobiography, A Third Face, is still in print and available at amazon.com, as is Lisa Dombrowski’s 2008 study of Fuller’s films. And you'll be able to catch Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna on DVD on February 10.

Film Review #184: Doubt
2008
Director: John Patrick Shanley
Cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Viola Davis

How do you know what you think you know? For much of John Patrick Shanley’s film Doubt, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) evades answering that.

“I have my certainty,” she snaps at one point and “I know people!” at another, when asked for evidence that Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) is molesting Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the first Black student admitted to St. Nicholas, an old Irish Catholic parish school in the Bronx – something she’s had in mind would happen well before this particular boy returns from the priest’s office to history class “in an unsettled state” with alcohol on his breath.

It’s 1964, just before Christmas, and a year since JKF’s assassination – as Father Flynn reminds the parish in the sermon that opens the film, about the ways doubt binds us together as strongly as faith. It’s also a couple years into Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II, whose liberal reformist winds of change at first seem personified both by the film’s frequent gale-force storms and Father Flynn’s conviction that “the Church needs to be friendlier – people need to feel we are part of their family.”

“But we are not part of their family,” counters Sister Aloysius matter-of-factly in a meeting ostensibly about the Christmas pageant. She also dismisses Father Flynn’s suggestion to include “Frosty the Snowman,” arguing the song promotes a pagan belief in magic. On the other hand, as the school’s battle-ax principal, she likes students to believe she has eyes in the back of her head. She later tells Sister James (Amy Adams), “That’s how it works,” when the young nun protests, “The children are all uniformly terrified of you!”

The story moves along as a series of escalating clashes between Sister Aloysius and others in her campaign to thwart and banish this priest – with Flynn himself, with the earnest, gentle Sister James and, in one brief powerhouse scene, with Donald’s mother (Viola Davis, my vote this Oscar season for best supporting actress).

Doubt also works on the growing contradiction between two psychological trajectories. The first is our own emerging discovery that Father Flynn – profoundly self-deluded, armed with a new era’s persuasive vocabulary and an ancient entitlement – was likely headed right where Sister Aloysius discerned him to be going; the second, that fighting fire with fire has its own cost. As our certainty rises, hers eventually – tragically is a workable word here – crumbles.

These trajectories cross when Mrs. Miller explains that she took Donald out of public school because she was afraid the boys there might actually kill him for “his nature – for the way God sent him” – which his father has beaten him for too – a report that seems inspired in part by Sister Aloysius’ own confidence – the single bit of personal history she shares with anyone – that she was once a married woman herself, widowed by World War II.

Shanley’s original play, Doubt: A Parable, opened in New York in 2004, a couple years after this country’s explosive exposes of childhood sexual abuse by some Catholic priests. Winning both a Pulitzer and four Tonies, among other prizes, the play then toured extensively. Shanley wrote and directed the screen version, returning to his own boyhood parish in the Bronx for exterior shots.

It’s Shanley’s first film in eighteen years and such problems as the film has seem rooted in translating stage to screen. Still, these are distracting. There are more symbolic wind storms than any movie set in the Bronx really needs. And even though the great Roger Deakins shot the film, which is frequently lovely, too often the camera swoops around at great heights for no obvious reason, except that – freed from live performance’s earth-bound lines of sight – it can.

Such distractions sometimes overshadow Shanley’s more subtle use of his settings to mirror other issues his story explores, such as the tension between the Church’s twin duties in providing both sanctuary and vigilance. While a great deal of these characters’ attention goes to enforcing rules and to watch-dogging each other’s often ostentatious adherence to procedures, the contrary tradition of offering refuge to law-breakers is equally strong. And by making the range of such “law-breaking” quite broad in this film, Shanley suggests the issue is anything but isolated and occasional. Here, the impulse to shelter another is more likely to undermine obedience to authority than anything else.

Clearly Mrs. Miller sees Catholic school as a sanctuary for her son from informally but sometimes violently enforced mainstream mores. For Father Flynn to claim he was protecting Donald from punishment for filching altar wine means he understands the strength of this strain of Catholicism. The priest’s appeal to Sister James that she guard her own compassion is really an appeal that she apply it to him. And Sister Aloysius actively shields another nun, the elderly Sister Veronica, frankly enlisting Sister James in the deception, because Father Flynn will make Veronica leave if he learns she is going blind - even though this might be for her own good and, to press that point, she has quite a bloody close call because she can't see. Shanley sets most scenes addressing this tension in either the principal’s office or the Church garden. A vivid exception has Sister Aloysius and Donald’s mother leave the grounds of St. Nicholas entirely and continue their conversation out in the world, where it will matter most to Donald in the end, while walking to Mrs. Miller’s job.

Anyway, there is a final showdown. Here, Father Flynn wrings from Sister Aloysius the specifics of her first suspicion. She’d watched him through a window as he grabbed the wrist of another boy, that boy had pulled away, and that scrap carried the force of revelation. But Shanley’s parable invites us to recognize that art works in much the same way. By the time this scene arrives, a series of similar brief flashes have also prepared us for the priest’s sudden agreement to request a transfer. And when Flynn tries pleading with her – has she never sinned herself? – and she falters, derailed for a beat by some remembered anguish, I know my mind leaped back to that other scrap of history, that small detail about her own marriage once. Was there a deeply-regretted war-time affair, guilt over her young husband’s death – had Sister Aloysius herself entered the convent for sanctuary, or for atonement?

There’s plenty more in this deeply satisfying film, which really is a gift. I’m just shaking the package for you.

*******
Doubt premiered on December 12 and should reach Syracuse any minute. A version of this review appears in the 12/18/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the column, “Make it Snappy,” which regularly reviews both DVDs and current theatrical releases. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

Film Review #183: Cadillac Records
2008
Director: Darnell Martin
Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Beyoncé Knowles, Adrian Brody

About half way through Darnell Martin’s Cadillac Records, there’s enough of a lull that you wonder suddenly, where is Beyoncé Knowles anyway? We’ve met Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Little Walter the teen-age mouth-harp prodigy (Columbus Short), Howlin’ Wolf (riveting British actor Eamonn Walker) and Chuck Berry (Mos Def). So where’s Beyoncé? After all, she’s one of the movie’s major draws as legendary platinum blond blues singer Etta James in her early days on Chicago’s Chess Records label. One of the most enduring discoveries of Chess’ founder, Polish immigrant Leonard Chess (Adrian Brody), multiple Grammy-winner James, spectacularly troubled then, has survived most of the film’s other characters. She released her most recent album, All the Way, in 2006, and her signature rendition of the torch song “At Last” graces more than twenty film and television sound-tracks.

So it’s one of the film’s pleasures – and its story-telling accomplishments – that just as you wonder where a character is, just when the story has unfolded in such a way as to demand her appearance, there she is.

In this richly ambiguous, compact scene, Chess – who scoured the South for Black talent during his label’s run from 1950-69 – meets James because she’s brought to his hotel room for an impromptu audition by his brother Phil (the only appearance in the film of Chess’ actual business partner, but more about that script decision below). The film is narrated by Chess Records’ major songwriter Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), who says as the hotel room door swings open - by way of transition from the last scene and setting up the double meanings about talent and sex and tenderness and money and resentment and gratitude and who’s in charge that thread through all the future interactions between James and Chess – that Leonard Chess “was looking for women too...”

Helping herself to a seat on his bed, James asks if “we’re gonna do it right now?” Yes, says Chess, he’s leaving town in the morning. Well, it’s hard, counters James, “when you’re not in the mood.” “She’s not in the mood!” mutters an exasperated Chess. Then James strolls into the bathroom and from there starts singing, shyly at first. Of course there are two revelations here – what the Chess brothers heard, and Beyoncé herself. Then Willie Dixon finishes his sentence: “… he was looking for a woman to go up against his men.”

This film might have unfolded in another, more expected way. Martin has said that Columbia Pictures wanted a standard Leonard Chess biopic. In that scenario, the doomed romance rumored between Chess and James would have taken center stage early, leaving little room for the four male musicians on whom Martin spends the first half of her film, and little sense of what going “up against them” might actually mean for James as a musician. James would hardly be a musician at all in that scenario, but instead – you know the type - a naïve, unschooled, rawly talented force of nature.

Instead of that standard biopic, Martin set out to portray the music and the musicians coming out of the great mid-century migration north (we meet Muddy Waters in 1941, share-cropping in Mississippi, listening to Alan Lomax’s quavery recording of himself, saying “I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time,” before he lights out for Chicago), how R & B became “popular” and “crossed over” (besides appealing to white bobby-soxers, Chuck Berry successfully sued the Beach Boys for stealing his “Sweet Little 16” and passing it off as their own in the hit “Surfin’ USA”), how the music overlapped with and influenced the Civil Rights movement (Howlin’ Wolf immediately sets Chess straight about who gives orders to his band members and Little Walter’s response to white cops personifies a tidal shift). Since Martin makes room for these characters up front instead of using them as background – and they are all superbly played – when they find Chess is looting their royalties, that betrayal has real bite because you know them as well as you know him.

And by removing Phil Chess, Martin replaces the standard two-white-brothers narrative – a huge space occupier – with a very different “story of two men,” as Willie Dixon calls it at the start. By using alternating scenes to introduce and follow Chess in his pre-impresario days – junkyard owner dreaming of buying a bar – and Mississippi share-cropper Muddy Waters, Martin structurally underscores the parallel importance of their stories. And that’s only the beginning of dramatic parallels between them – for example, each has a decent and long-suffering wife, and brief but personal, nuanced exchanges of the sort that occur, when you think about it, between equals. Now some reviewers don’t like this movie, I suspect because it so disrupts expectations of what – and who – it “should” have been about. So you better see it quick. Like Bryan Barber’s Idlewild – remember how that film, so steeped in a wonderful fluency with its screen musical forebears, was dismissed by critics as “derivative”? – it might only be here for a minute.

*******
This review appeared in the 12/11/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Darnell Martin wrote and directed two previous features, I Like it Like That (1994) and Prison Song (2001), and directed Suzan-Lori Parks’ script for Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005). All three are available on DVD.

Filmmaker Interview at FilmSlash

To see my interview with Lance Hammer, whose film Ballast I reviewed here on November 7, go to www.FilmSlashmagazine.com.

Film Review #182: Other People’s Pictures
2004/2007
Directors: Lorca Shepperd & Cabot Philbrick
Documentary

When Syracuse native Lorca Shepperd and her husband/collaborator Cabot Philbrick set out to make Other People’s Pictures, they expected their documentary would focus on the trade in vernacular snapshots and albums that goes on at flea markets, auctions, antique and second-hand shops.

“We thought it would be about the economics and mechanics of that market,” she said by phone recently from New York City, where the couple both work in television documentary. “But the emotions that collectors had about these photographs were really the whole point. We realized that after we started – that this film transcends the niche.”

A casual, sometime collector of the odd “snap” herself, Shepperd was sent to Manhattan’s Chelsea Flea Market by a friend. There she discovered multiple dealers with bins and tables full of cast-off snapshots and regular, sometimes impassioned customers. She was struck by seeming contradictions – that people fleeing sudden disasters like fires can emerge with little more than pets and family albums, yet there’s a flood of recycled snapshots for sale.

Their buyers in turn wonder aloud about their hobby in un-hobby-like terms that recall early superstitions about photography’s eerie capacity to capture frozen likenesses. Are they stealing a stranger’s past? wonders one, while another – speaking to the power of a rapid, unexpected attachment – says she’s the “foster parent of ghosts.”

Shot on week-ends between November 2001 and the summer of 2004, Other People’s Pictures had a brief theatrical run that brought the filmmakers National Public Radio coverage and good reviews. It’s done well at festivals and won some awards. At 53 minutes – really sized for television – the film has screened on the Documentary Channel. Now it’s available on DVD, which may bring it the wider film audience it deserves, even though its commercial distributor, Cinema Guild, seems not to have been particularly energetic about getting it out there to some obvious outlets like Netflix.

Other People’s Pictures comprises overlapping interviews with snapshot collectors and dealers, along with interludes of stills drawn from particular sub-categories of images that people collect. One of the film’s many charms is that Shepperd and Philbrick seem to be equally fond of these quirky, compelling, largely anonymous images and the people who seek and cherish them. Largely filmed at the Chelsea Flea Market, Other People’s Pictures also takes us inside a few of these collectors’ homes.

We might call such collectors “vernacular curators” and each has evolved a specialty. Lisa, who says she can’t afford “real photographs” but second-hand snaps are within her price range, favors early 20th century images of “women with attitude,” often the proud early drivers behind the wheels of cars. The gallery drawn from her collection alone makes this film worth seeing. Japanese-American Don, transplanted to New York, collects images from his native Hawaii. Dan frames and hangs what he calls “banality of evil” photos – snaps of Nazis at weddings, in family groups and relaxing. Leslie collects what he calls the hidden history of male affection. And there’s Fern and Peter and Ken and Leonie, plus several dealers who expound on the virtues of their chosen display method – single images loose in bins, offered by category in boxes or albums, and that’s not counting the fierce debate over whether to break up intact family albums.

For all the flea market chaos, considerable selection is involved here. Shepperd says they scanned over 1,500 images during filming, then used about 300 in the feast that is the final cut. They also survey the range of sub-categories enthusiasts seek: pictures taken at beaches, pictures with flash “shadows,” train wrecks, blurred images of people in motion, photo booth snaps, Down Syndrome children, joke photos or visual puns, mutilated photos with a face cut or scratched out, even people eating watermelon.

That last actually comes from the DVD extras, which add almost double the material of the original documentary. Profiles of two dealers detail how far and seriously they search for wares. And there are several more collectors, including a travel writer, an artist who uses the notations on the backs of snaps in her exhibitions and – though identified here only as “Marty” for her collection of snaps of women with cameras – the photographer Martha Cooper, who pioneered photographic records of early Hip-Hop graffiti and more recently the related global phenomenon of B*Girlz dance battles.

Shepperd says she and Philbrick are “just tossing around ideas” for another film at this point. Meanwhile, Other People’s Pictures ranks as a Genuine Find.

*******
Other People’s Pictures is available online for personal purchase at http://www.other-peoples-pictures.com/, which includes galleries of film stills & print resources on vernacular photography as well as a link to Cinema Guild for commericial purchases. This review will appear in the 12/4/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.

Film Review #181: Apaharan/Kidnap
2005
Director: Prakash Jha
Cast: Ajay Devgan, Nana Patekar, Mohan Agashe

For starters, imagine a dark, Jason Bourne-type thriller about political corruption and double-dealing set in India. In place of professional assassin Bourne’s amnesia – emblematic perhaps of the West’s fatal weakness with regard to history – Ajay Shastri (the magnetic Ajay Devgan) struggles first to escape his revered reformist father’s too-looming shadow through allegiance with an alternative father figure, the corrupt power-broker Tabrez Alam (Nana Patekar), and then to find his way home.

Billed as a story of the brisk trade in kidnapping for ransom in the state of Bihar, located on India’s northern border with Nepal, veteran filmmaker Prakash Jha’s 2005 study of justice and violence premiered just as public revulsion there with such corruption led to the ouster of Bihar’s long-time ruling party. In following the younger Shastri’s winding path, Jha’s film astutely explores how extremism and assassination might come to seem viable even to unlikely men.

By the time Ajay has come full circle, reconciled with his father, given his own confession, and meets a last time with Tabrez Alam, the film’s plot has methodically laid out the corruption of nearly every character occupying an official office and built its suspense on how – over and over, at the last minute – the law alone is powerless to halt their steady advance. Ajay may even think he has his father’s blessing to dispatch Tabrez Alam as the last resort; during their reconciliation Professor Shastri (Mohan Agashe) urges his tearful son not to apologize but to “atone.”

Apaharan begins with the patrician scholar holding a press conference in his family’s courtyard about political kidnappings. Young Ajay slips out the side door. Woefully unsuccessful as a vendor of natural remedies, Ajay tells his girlfriend Megha (Bipasha Basu) of his new plan – he’ll enter the police force, even if it takes paying a bribe. Though brave – early on he’s seriously injured, dragged by a car as he tries to stop a kidnapping – this bribe starts Ajay’s descent down a slippery slope into crime. Soon he’s kidnapping, shooting his main rival Gaya Singh (Yashpal Sharma), and running other gangs out of town. Clearly Ajay’s self-deluded in his new-found power and success. After all, his base of operation is a local cell-block, the only safe retreat.

Just as clearly Tabrez Alam, hardly devout himself, plays on the resentments of his followers, mainly poor Muslim laborers. A minority in Bihar – where over 80 per cent are Hindu – Muslims still suffer discrimination, poverty and lingering resentment over the violent 12th century Islamic invasion. Tabrez Alam provides a powerful portrait of the cynical manipulation of this beleaguered community. In contrast, it’s another Muslim, quiet police officer Anwar Khan (Mukesh Tiwari), who alone stands by Ajay once he decides to bring Tabrez down. We see too few screen stories that treat this particular tension in our own or other nations with anything approaching such nuance.

And we’ve seen almost nothing in US media about the killer floods in Bihar that began August 18th and displaced over 3 million people. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Brad Pitt went to work on innovative emergency housing. And now, some 5,000 Bihar flood refugees live at Punarwaas, an NGO refugee camp with school, hospital, and both temple and mosque that Bihar native Prakash Jha set up and administrates with support from other major Bollywood figures, including several of this film’s lead cast. The Punarwaas project expects to run, and need continued support, well into next spring when these residents might begin going home.

You can support Punarwaas and see Apaharan tomorrow night on a big screen here in Syracuse thanks to Tula Goenka, associate professor of television, radio and film at SU’s Newhouse School, who arranged the screening as a fund-raiser. Goenka directs SU’s annual Human Rights Film Festival each fall, has screened Jha’s films locally before and has written about his work as an example of how Indian cinema includes dramatic storytelling beyond the lavish musical romances with which many US audiences associate “Bollywood.”

Last May, Goenka took 11 Newhouse students to India for the first four-week summer internship in film there for US university students – a timely move, as it turned out, since in late June Steven Spielberg and David Geffen signed a multimillion-dollar partnership and production deal with India’s Reliance Entertainment.

Waiting to see if Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire makes it to Syracuse? Meanwhile, whether you’re a Bollywood fan or a new-comer, Apaharan is a good way to spend Friday night.

*******
This review appears in the 11/13/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Apaharan screens tomorrow night at 7:00 PM, 11/14, in Newhouse 3, Room 141 (Waverly Ave. entrance) at a special fund-raiser to support filmmaker Prakash Jha’s Punarwaas project. Also see www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gEqJLVGLOo. “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not have a theatrical opening in CNY and older films of enduring worth.

Film Review #180: Ballast
2008
Director: Lance Hammer
Cast: JimMyron Ross, Michael Smith, Jr., Tarra Riggs

Like Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, another first feature film that took honors home from this year’s Sundance festival, Lance Hammer’s Ballast tells the story of a near-the-edge family just before Christmas whose hard-scrabble lives occur against a masterfully shot, austere and sweeping landscape – in Hunt’s film, the frozen St. Lawrence River of northern New York and in Hammer’s, the Mississippi Delta.

Hammer opens his film with what amounts to a visual prayer. Twelve-year-old James (JimMyron Ross), a slight boy in a big parka, crosses a rolling open field, hurrying toward thousands of geese that start up suddenly from the frozen stubble, flying across the vast magic-hour horizon. It’s crucial this occurs first because what comes next – before the barest possibility that James’ hopes might turn out - is almost unremittingly difficult.

Ballast opened in New York City on October 1st and has theatrical bookings across the U.S. through the end of February. Unlike Frozen River, which recently did so well here in Central New York at Manlius Cinema that Nat Tobin held it over twice, Ballast will screen here just once – next Tuesday at 8:00 PM at the Westcott.

You should do whatever it takes so you can see it there on the big screen.

Ballast is one of those films in which it seems like not much happens – Hammer says he hopes the narrative “has remained minimal and unobtrusive” – until you try writing a plot summary and realize that the characters’ intertwined histories and ties look a lot like the ancient, vine-covered tree by the road that James’ eyes rest on when his gaze comes back to earth after that first shot.

Down that road lives Lawrence Baptiste (Michael Smith, Jr.), introduced in wordless grief before a buzzing TV set. His twin brother Darius lies in the next room, having gotten in bed and intentionally overdosed. When a neighbor checks – the brothers haven’t opened their convenience store in several days – Lawrence shoots himself. While he’s in the hospital, James breaks in, steals his pistol and, once he’s home, begins robbing Lawrence, immediately because James’ mother, Marlee Sykes, (Tarra Riggs, whose hare-trigger performance deserves notice at year’s end) can’t keep food in their tiny trailer; also because Darius was James’ father.

Some of the best scenes occur when Lawrence allows James to order him around at gun-point. Suicidally depressed anyway, the massive older man could easily disarm this jittery boy (later he does, in a quiet, deft move that proves the point but doesn’t detour into drama). Meanwhile, in the stillness between them, attention and curiosity start to flicker. After an unglamorous, frightening brush with some thuggish older boys – the pistol merely enrages them – James and Marlee move into Darius’ little house next door to Lawrence. Marlee re-opens the store and, one inch at a time, the three start over. This is nearly de-railed any number of times, none more wrenching than the night, while they share dish-washing, that Lawrence tries to embrace Marlee and she pulls away, furious, misunderstanding, sure “this is all you were after.” Watching, James holds his breath – and we’re right there with him.

Hammer filmed Ballast in nine Mississippi Delta townships with a cast of mostly indigenous non-professionals, using available light, no music and a script evolving over two months of rehearsal. Trained as an architect, Hammer has an evident expressive ease with space that amplifies his characters’ sparse dialogue and low-key affect. Against the expansive landscape outside, inside scenes are sometimes filmed in silhouette, or characters occupy cramped rectangles of light in one corner of the screen – the view through a door or down a hallway. Or, for example, when seeking gang approval, James wheels his scooter down a narrow, garbage-strewn ally, you can see this path will be a wrong turn for him.

Both Frozen River and Ballast come from white filmmakers who portray communities of color. Hunt’s film vividly manifests the tensions between Akwesasne Mohawks and outsiders in the complicated, edgy bond between the two mothers. Hammer refrains from this, choosing a different emphasis. So Lawrence’s white neighbor John Dixon (Johnny McPhail) stops by because he’s worried, looks out for Lawrence’s dog and finally coaxes Lawrence out of the house to share a steak. But this means Hammer’s film has the space to dwell more deeply on Black characters’ relationships with one another.

Ballast comes here courtesy of Dropped Frames, a film society based in Syracuse University’s Transmedia department that also hosted the second annual Upstate New York Film Festival in late September, a one-night showcase of short films and videos by regional artists. The L.A.-based Hammer, who wrote, produced, directed and edited Ballast, will speak on campus Tuesday afternoon and again after the screening Tuesday night. He is Dropped Frames’ third visiting artist this fall. In September Emily Hubley brought her animation feature, The Toe Tactic, and last month Ronnie Bronstein was here with Frownland.

*******
A version of this review appeared in the 11/6/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. See Ballast on Tuesday, 11/11 at 8:00PM at the new Westcott Performing Arts Center on Westcott Street, Syracuse. Q&A afterward with Lance Hammer. Check out Dropped Frames at dropped-frames.blogspot.com. Frownland and Ballast are already listed at Netflix for saving.

Film Review #179: Throne of Blood
1957
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Minoru Chiahi, Isuzu Yamada

A couple years ago, Redhouse Arts Center screened Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) as part of a special Master Directors Film Festival, six classics spread over a couple weeks that the daily paper declined to give much coverage because they were “just some old movies.” Attendance was uneven, yet a sizable number of the audience for Rashomon said during the talk-back session afterward that while they’d seen the movie before on DVD, they had braved dreadful weather at the last minute for the rare joy of seeing it on a big screen.

This movie gives us the ready shorthand term “Rashomon-like.” It hardly seems possible to imagine our culture’s understanding of point-of-view without this film’s presence, even though many people now actually haven’t seen it on any screen. In ancient Japan, a woman is raped in the forest and her husband killed. At the trial, four witnesses – we quickly see they’re defendants – give four accounts, each revealing a little more detail. These jostling flashbacks form the film’s narrative.

A big screen amplifies Kurosawa’s deep blacks and creamy whites, his astonishingly lovely screen compositions and masterful shots. One of the better known – film students diagram this – is the single-take, long, unbroken, pristine tracking shot that follows the man and his wife through the foliage, for which Kurosawa built a looping rail through the forest that would carry a swiveling camera to allow filming the couple’s progress without cuts. In a story about the difficulty of knowing the truth – indeed the depth of our yearning for truth – this single virtuoso scene packs enormous emotional wallop.

In 1957, Kurosawa is back in the woods, with another complicated tale of violence set in feudal Japan. Throne of Blood is Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth (in 1985 he returned to political tragedy with Ran, his take on Shakespeare’s King Lear). Throne of Blood is the classic, enduring tale of a once-honorable warrior who loses his way in familiar woods, perhaps befogged by a lust for power, and – egged on by a calculating and ambitious woman – betrays his friends and principles, achieving the throne but briefly before his downfall. And by the way it’s scary as hell.

There have been so many screen versions of Macbeth – just since 2001, the UK, Australia, Germany and India have each released new ones – that there’s not much point in worrying about plot spoilers. Anyway, two warriors on their way back to the Cobweb Castle after defeating some rebels lose their way in Cobweb Woods. Washizu is played by the great Toshirô Mifune, Kurosawa’s frequent lead actor, accompanied by fellow warrior and friend Miki (Minoru Chiahi).

In the foggy, rain-soaked woods, they come upon a ghostly old woman with a spinning wheel (Chieko Naniwa), who – counterpart to Shakespeare’s three witches –predicts Washizu will take over the throne but Miki’s sons will occupy it later. She also predicts nothing will harm Washizu until the Cobweb Woods move to the walls of the castle. Pretty much following Macbeth in bare outline, Washizu and Miki’s return to the castle brings about Washizu’s murder of his king – pushed forward by his wife, the Lady Asaji Washizu (Isuzu Yamada) – followed by his murder of Miki, his wife’s madness and an advancing army’s siege, during which they cut down the surrounding forest and use the tree branches as camouflage to approach the walls.

Throne of Blood is not justly famous for its translation of Shakespearean language. The DVD version that I watched with two friends Sunday night – even Laurinda willingly watched gore in honor of Halloween – carried subtitles so ham-fisted they had us cracking up at times. When flocks of crows invade Washizu’s throne room during the final siege, one character supposedly wails, “The birds are badly crying.”

But Kurosawa achieves his eloquent dread visually and with few monsters other than the manifestations of our own inner demons. So Washizu may be feudal, superstitious, but right along with him we are overtaken by this sight of misplaced black birds, a viscerally terrifying sign of doom. More than the conventional visitation of the ghosts of his victims, there are the trees oddly rustling across the foggy night plain. Or Washizu’s grisly end, shot down by his own archers for bringing this fate upon their castle.

Or right from the start, back to that early scene in the woods, when Washizu and Miki have lost their bearings and can’t believe it. Over and over – twelve times Kursawa varies this shot – they try galloping confidently into the trees, hoping the way home will appear and open to them. Everything unfolds from this.

*******
This review appears in the 10/30/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Netflix currently has four Kurosawa titles available to “save,” suggesting a wavelet of re-release ten years after his death. “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not opening theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.

Film Review #178: Caribbean Film Festival at Syracuse Community Folk Art Center October 23-26

Early in Guttaperc, Barbadian filmmaker Andrew Millington’s first feature film, the 10-year-old Eric’s grandfather wordlessly throws down a copy of George Lamming’s classic novel of Black West Indian identity and coming of age, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), for the boy to read. Audiences might take the hint too.

A reluctant summer visitor at his grandparents’ drowsy seaside village while his parents vacation in New York, Eric (Richard Weekes) is bored. His grandfather (Clairmont Taite), proprietor of a small cement factory, considers Eric spoiled and despises the Euro-slanted education Eric’s getting, which omits vast stretches of Barbados’ own political and intellectual history. He sets about filling in the gaps for his grandson. Meanwhile, elderly Sister Pam (the great Jamaican actress Leonie Forbes, a casting coup for Millington) – whom Eric first encounters when she forcefully thwarts his attempt to steal candles from her religious alter – also decides he might just be worth educating in African folk ways still preserved in the countryside.

Eric’s story, narrated in voice-over by an older Eric, unfolds just as his grandfather becomes embroiled in labor unrest over a scheme to displace the village with resort development. The title comes from a sling-shot given to Eric by a village boy. This simple, rough implement, both toy and weapon, provides a ready image of the characters’ fork-in-the-road choices as well as the mental acceleration available when events converge – if we aim our attention properly.

Reminiscent of the deceptively leisurely pace of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and filmed with the same tender eye, Millington’s 1998 film opens this fall’s four-day Caribbean-themed film festival at Community Folk Art Center this Thursday evening. Andrew Millington will be present and on hand Friday too for a screening of a rough-cut of his new film, Zora’s Dream, which also uses a grandparent-grandchild relationship, this time set in South Carolina’s Sea Islands.

Astutely curated by Qiana Williams, CFAC’s new education director, this film festival offers an engaging collection of recent indie features, award-level animation shorts and documentary. Williams’ thoughtful choices speak well for Caribbean film-making both in terms of its cinematic accomplishment – these are admirably well-made movies – and its success in blending art with political comment.

The Caribbean produces some of the best animation in the world – I am fond of Juan Padrón’s Vampires in Havana myself – and the seven-year-old Animae Caribe, under the umbrella of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, attracts some of the best short animation submissions from around the world and is building a regional network that now includes Cuban filmmakers. On Saturday, CFAC brings Animae Caribe founder Camille Abrahams to present eight award-nominated shorts from this year’s festival, just held in September. As a bonus for kids, artist Yvonne Buchanan conducts an animation workshop after the midday screening.

Ghanaian-born filmmaker Yao Ramesar, who now lives and teaches and makes movies in Trinidad, says that he first met the Black woman who told him the world would be destroyed in a fiery “Apocalypso” twenty years ago in a dream. His 2006 Sistagod, which screens Saturday night, is the first of a projected trilogy exploring that subject. Like Guttaperc, this film has a now-grown narrator looking back. Mari/Sistagod (Indigo Minerve plays the child and Evelyn Caesar Munroe the adult) explains her father was a white US Marine sniper – “one of 467 wounded in Desert Storm” – who married his Trinidadian rehab nurse (Nicole Minerve) but left her when their too-dark daughter ignited his distrust. Mari endures her mother’s grief-struck madness, her grandmother’s loss and, when the spirit enters her at 18, an exorcism by “our aspiring televangelist, Father Divine” (Michael Cherrie). World destruction arises from the fevered dances of costumed revelers in the annual Carneval, led by the blue devils. Edmund Attong’s cinematography and editing are especially worth watching here.

The fest winds up Sunday afternoon with ¡Yo Soy Boricua, Pa’ Que Tu Lo Sepas!/I Am Boricua, Just So You Know! (2005). Noted Puerto Rican actress Rosie Perez enlisted the able documentary team of Liz Garbus and Rory Kennedy to assist her first directing effort, a highly interactive, rollicking cultural road trip she takes with her sister Carmen and her cousin Sixto Ramos, framed by New York City’s annual April Puerto Rican Day Parade. They return to the family village of Aguadilla, consider the 4000-year-old indigenous Taino culture that Columbus encountered in 1493, meet Miami cousins and Nuyorican poets, examine 1950s migration to the mainland, sterilization campaigns, Pedro Albizu Campos’ nationalist movement and the rise of the Young Lords of the 1960s. Infectious and sophisticated, Yo Soy Boricua packs its 85 minutes full.

Such first-rate programming by Williams bodes well for CFAC’s year ahead.

*******
This review appeared in the 10/23/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column usually reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.

Film Review #177: Where the Money Is
2000/2000
Director: Marek Kanievska
Cast: Paul Newman, Linda Fiorentino, Dermot Mulroney

In this unheralded but sometimes delicious little heist film, cop cars’ lights whirl outside the cabin in the night woods and a bull-horn warns, “Put your hands above your heads! You’re surrounded!”

Seemingly nonchalant, Paul Newman’s Henry Manning turns to Linda Fiorentino’s Carol Ann MacKay and makes a proposal directly from his outlaw heart to hers: “You haven’t lived until someone has said those words to you!”

Fittingly, since a first-rate chase ensues, I was in my car somewhere on East Genesee Street late Saturday afternoon when I heard on NPR that Newman died Friday night. Somewhere in the middle of commentator Bob Mondello’s appreciation of Newman’s long career – over 80 roles in 56 years, not counting stage work – I re-routed myself down Erie Blvd. East to Emerald City Video. They were looking over their inventory to make a Newman section up front. They don’t have The Color of Money anymore, Scorsese’s 1984 sequel to Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), which won Newman an Oscar for reprising pool player Fast Eddie Felson. Mondello mentioned Fast Eddie, as did lots of writers in the Sunday papers. And I already had Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition (2002) at home – one of my top ten favorite movies – in which Newman plays the Irish gangster John Rooney to Tom Hanks’ hit man.

Despite his legendary younger roles, Newman played older men well – as in Rooney’s sorrowful but thoroughly corrupt mobster-father or, as early as 1982, the deeply world-weary lawyer Frank Galvin in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. Who can forget the wallop in that long, long shot of Newman striding up the street and – not a single skid mark – slapping Charlotte Rampling full across the face?

Where the Money Is (2000) hasn’t made the memorial lists but it’s got one of Newman’s best old men. This old bathrobe of a movie is just fine on DVD on a rainy fall night, though it didn’t do very well in theaters. Three weeks’ wide release, three more on drastically fewer screens, and it was gone – on to 20 other countries or so and DVD, largely, safe to say, on Newman’s name. I saw Where the Money Is in a theater the first time and called someone afterward to say what a pleasure it was to watch Newman work.

Ostensibly set in a lush but scraggly part of rural Oregon, filmed in Montreal, and directed by England’s Marek Kanievska, Where the Money Is regards Newman’s bank-robber Manning, who we learn - along with Carol Ann - had eluded police for 30 years until a power outage trapped him overnight in a bank vault. The film’s title and aura play on 1930s-era real-life bank-robber Willie Sutton, who escaped incarceration often and explained that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.”

After learning mail-order Tantric yoga to fake a stroke that gets him transferred from prison to a nursing home, instead of picking up his stashed millions and fading north to Canada, Manning crosses paths with Carol Ann MacKay. While it’s hard to swallow that ex-prom queen-turned-nurse Carol Ann has never been out of this town – this is not long after Fiorentino’s steamy role in John Dahl’s The Last Seduction – it’s easy to see where her first suspicions about her stroke patient's fakery will go. An impromptu lap dance in the nursing home fails to startle Manning out of his repose, so she takes him on a picnic. After warning “Last chance!” she grandly shoves his wheelchair off the dock into a lake. Well, let us just say that soon Carol Ann and Manning team up to rob an armored payroll truck. Carol Ann’s husband, ex-prom king Wayne (Brian Mulroney) – credibly jealous after he watches Manning dance with Carol Ann in a roadhouse – insists on coming along and so furnishes both stupid moves and betrayal.

There’s much in this minor key movie that’s both sweet and deftly managed. A wry, affectionate use of music includes the likes of the Cars’ My Best Friend’s Girl and Stephen Lang’s Sexy. Manning’s revenge on the sleazy orderly who steals his watch and hits on Carol Ann satisfies, as does Wayne’s well-deserved undoing. On the other hand, the elderly nursing home residents provide comic turns that move the plot along, but there’s not a cheap shot anywhere about getting old. Henry Manning has achieved that with considerable, ingenious grace. The best parts come when Manning emerges from quiet into the moment’s chaos to deliver some under-stated line to Carol Ann – they’re well-matched as the two most alert characters in the movie – for example, when she rescues him, without any plan except the wild driving she loves, from the van taking him back to prison.

“That’s my girl,” he growls, opening one eye as she frees him. “What took you so long?”

*******
This review appears in the 10/2/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.

Film Review #176: Jellyfish
2007/2008
Director: Etgar Keret
Screenwriter: Shira Geffen
Cast: Sarah Adler, Nikol Leidman, Ma-nenita De Latorre

You could not say that best-selling Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s work is exactly new to film. Over 40 of his short stories have been adapted to the screen – most recently in Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99, a stop-motion animation premiering earlier this month at Toronto’s film fest that Entertainment Weekly calls “utterly beguiling.” He made his own first short film a dozen years ago. And he teaches film at Tel Aviv University. Nevertheless when Jellyfish, which Keret directed, won the Camera d’Or at last year’s Cannes Festival, you could not miss the enthusiasm for a first feature’s good fortune – especially one Keret undertook only after a depressingly long list of other directors rejected the project, prompting him to reassure his wife that they could make this film together.

The Jellyfish script comes from poet and playwright Shira Geffen. She and Keret have been partners for a decade. She calls their film and their son Lev “twins” since the boy’s birth and the shoot’s last day coincided. And in retrospect, she said in a late February phone interview, Keret was the perfect choice anyway, exactly understanding the fable-like trio of entwined stories that in heavier, more literal hands could have fallen flat as a cake taken too soon from the oven.

One of this film’s great accomplishments lies is its gentle persuasion that we suspend our usual demands for a sensible plot just a little while longer. Geffen’s script springs from her own unpublished story of eight or nine years ago in which a five-year-old girl, taken to the Tel Aviv beach, floats out to sea on a plastic swim tube as her patents bicker obliviously on shore about her father’s mistresses. Jellyfish picks up her fate and elaborates the ready seaside images – the title’s creatures swept along by waves and tides, the wistfulness of boats in bottles and the ever-present ocean seeping in, say, through a leaky ceiling.

One thread concerns Batya (Sarah Adler), a disheveled, probably clinically depressed young woman who loses her boyfriend as the film opens and her demeaning job as a wedding reception waitress soon after. Sitting in the sand one day, Batya sees this child (Nikol Leidman) emerge from the sea, unspeaking, clad mainly in her plastic swim tube and, as a taxi driver later remarks, with Batya’s eyes. As it’s a Friday afternoon, Batya’s attempt to turn the child over to authorities fails. Having evidently got little nurturing from her politician mother or her distant father – each too concerned with their caring for others – Batya is soon doing her clumsy best with this mysterious, capricious child who begins hiding and shortly runs away. Of course the girl from the sea is a younger Batya. So disconnected is Batya that she doesn’t recognize herself – thus freeing us for a good while too from dealing with such symbolism. Geffen has said, “I think the connection between mother and daughter is maybe the most difficult and complex connection. All the stories have some mother, some child.”

Jellyfish may work so well because its other stories echo Batya’s. Russian émigré Michael (Gera Sandler) and his sabra bride Keren (Noa Knoller), sidelined by her broken ankle from their dream Caribbean honeymoon, sit trapped in a tacky beachfront hotel where they cannot see the ocean. A suicidal stranger provokes Keren’s insecurities and predicts their future disappointments. A Filipino domestic worker named Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre) pines for her small son back home and somehow cracks the frosty reserve of her elderly charge, a woman in turn deeply estranged from her own daughter.

Keret’s readers are accustomed to his compact, seemingly casual mixture of whim and anguish. The US release of Jellyfish in April occurred as part of a cascade of events – press screenings in February with Keret along for interviews; the March DVD release of Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), adapted from a Keret story with Tom Waits as the undercover angel in an afterlife populated by suicides; Keret’s new book, The Girl on the Fridge later in April – all culminating in media attention Israel’s mid-May 60th birthday with Keret touted as the new generation’s artist in high profile spots on National Public Radio and the New York Times Book Review.

Meanwhile, Jellyfish is just ending its US theatrical run this week after almost seven months. And as of last spring, Geffen had begun a new screenplay – not something she wished then to say much about except that it involved two women, one Israeli and the other Palestinian. Catch the wave early.

*******
Jellyfish releases on DVD on September 30th. This review appeared in the 9/25/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Nancy interviewed both Etgar Keret & Shira Geffen by phone in February 2008 in preparation for a pre-recorded interview with Geffen intended for WBAI Pacifica’s 2008 International Women’s Day special programming in March.