The Rake Magazine

I've fallen in love with plenty of imperfect movies. There was Donnie Darko, a film whose haphazard, cross-genre narrative I forgave because it cut right to the core of how weird and perilous it feels to be a depressed teenager. And Benny & Joon, a sweet, just-shy-of-precious story that was redeemed by genuine filial warmth and Johnny Depp's knockout Charlie Chaplin impersonation — good enough (I like to imagine) that the Little Tramp was probably up in heaven cheering wildly as they filmed.

John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes is just such a flawed but decent flick. Set in working-class Queens, it's that age-old tale about midlife misbehavior and its resounding effects. John Updike's Rabbit series, American Beauty, Married With Children — the zeitgeist is replete with examples. But there's reason to make room for one more. Because Turturro's Nick Murder (played by James Gandolfini) bares his soul in a way other anti-heros have not.

What's his beef? Not entrapment or tedium or the chains binding him to a dead-end job. No, Murder is simply LONELY. Or more precisely — and in a human way, I think — he's afraid of being alone. And in a scene very near the beginning of this odd music-smattered film, the stubbly bridge worker lets himself out of his squalorous, smoke fume-filled house to serenade the neighborhood with his sorry state: "Lonely is a man without love."

Of course, he isn't without love. He's merely stuck in the thirty-year slump of a long and encumbered marriage. And his wife, Kitty — Susan Sarandon, who is as lovely and foul-mouthed as she was 16 years ago in Thelma and Louise — is onto him. She's a devout Catholic who uses the word "twat" as easily as she says the rosary. She knows her husband is fooling around. And chances are, she also knows why.

Egged on by his know-it-all friend, played by Steve Buscemi, Murder not only has an affair with a trampy, British lingerie saleswoman (Kate Winslet) who eats chicken in bed and invites him to "open her back door," he gets circumcised for her. And this is where the magic of Turturro comes in. Because he alone has put forth one fact of life that at least fifty percent of the population never understood: Grown men in long-term relationships still obsess over their oddly-shaped penises. . . .the same way women fret over their flappy post-pregnancy stomachs and widening hips.

Romance & Cigarettes is one extended explication of the male mind: Murder imagines his girlfriend dressed in red and shimmying through a burning house while firemen below wield their out-of-control "hose" like a powerful snaky phallus. He leaves the raising of his three daughters -- creatures around the same age as his mistress who clearly bewilder him -- to his wife. And he cowers in the presence of his mother, whose dominance is so emasculating it makes circumcision entirely beside the point.

The movie is very uneven. Its plot takes turns that are not only unexpected, they don't, in truth, make much sense. This, likely, is why Romance & Cigarettes bounced around Hollywood for two years after MGM was bought out by Sony and wrote the film off.

I sympathize with the naysayers. This movie is raggedly written and refuses to stay put in one category: drama, comedy, muscial, or indie-style slice-of-life. Yet it's saved not only by Turturro's brash revelations about the male psyche, but also by a supporting cast that includes Mary Louise Parker, Christopher Walken, and the superb dowager Elaine Stritch.

In perhaps the most inconceivable "twist" on the story of this film, Adam Sandler intervened with studio executives and asked that his friend Turturro's film be given a limited distribution. Thus, on the power of the mighty Wedding Singer, it was.

And I'm glad for that. Because thanks to Romance & Cigarettes, I may finally understand what's going on in men's heads.

Opening December 7th at the Landmark Edina Cinema.

There is a peculiar poignancy in watching I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ film based upon the life of Bob Dylan, in Minnesota. This is the home Dylan repudiated, along with his name, his family, and his faith. It’s long been a sore point for many here: that one of the greatest songwriters of our era has shrugged off this place, making it nothing but a minor footnote in his life. Perhaps now, the wound will close. Because I’m Not There makes the argument that Dylan belongs nowhere and to no people or religion. He is anchored neither to place nor time.

Haynes accomplishes this by using six different actors, ranging from a young African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) to a woman (Cate Blanchett) to a virile, robust young man (Heath Ledger), in the role of the film’s central figure. [The other Dylan avatars: Ben Winshaw, Christian Bale, and Richard Gere.] None but Blanchett — ironically, the most convincing — makes an effort to look or speak like Dylan. And each has a different name in the film, as if they are splintered personalities whose ownership of one musician’s body overlap. In a way, they are.

These characters appear in merry-go-round fashion, representing the apprentice, the poet, the philosopher, the activist, the family man, the star, the preacher, and the wanderer. Some events from Dylan’s life, such as his offensive speech to the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in 1963, are enacted authentically. Others, such as the visit he actually made to a dying Woody Guthrie as an adult, which is depicted in the film as a fleeting, traumatic childhood event, clearly have been revised. And his stint as a born-again Christian becomes here the end of one alter's story, rather than one more rock in the bumpy road of an erratic life.

This is not an easy movie to watch. Just as the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Laura Equivel demands of the reader both absolute trust and hard work, I'm Not There asks viewers to suspend all expectations about linear narrative coherence. "Let it wash over you," producer Christine Vachon (of Killer Films) instructed the audience -- utterly without irony -- at the Walker Art Center's premiere in early November.

That Vachon was paraphrasing William Hurt's drug-addled character in The Big Chill seemed unintentional. The advice is pretty good: you must relax and give in if you are to understand how sturdy little Marcus Carl Franklin, the boy told to "sing about [his] own time" becomes, ultimately, the wifty, slender, long-nailed and alabster white Cate Blanchett, railing against the fans storming her/his car and smoking with a mad, suckling greed.

It is interesting, however, that for all his experimental strategies, Haynes begins and ends I'm Not There in the most traditional of American ways -- with the hero riding on a train, pondering first his future and then his past. And each thread of the film is rendered startlingly in the style of a great director: Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Peckinpah (for whose Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Dylan actually wrote "Knockin' on Heaven's Door.") Some are more successful than others: the Godard sequence in particular, saturated with color and starring a brilliant, luminous Charlotte Gainsbourg, is a joy to watch. There is logic in this chaotic swirl of scenes and the way to find it probably, perversely, is to be both relaxed and alert -- accepting and ready to reach for connections that aren't in evidence. The film is a kaleidoscope that likely speaks to each of us in a different way.

Ultimately, it seems to me, I'm Not There isn’t about Bob Dylan at all. He appears, in person, only in one brief, closeup harmonica sequence at the very end. Rather, this is a film about reinvention and resurrection, about disillusionment with one's own choices, about looking for answers and finding they are always just around the next bend. Nothing new here -- it's all just that messy business of being human. But Haynes has given us a unique lens through which to view the experience. And he's chosen one man -- one of us, in fact -- to be the literal emblem of this odd, swiftly changing life that's sometimes so difficult to understand.

“Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all in one room,” says Richard Gere playing Billy, the sixth and final Dylan alter-ego to appear on screen. And for a moment, in that darkened theater, they are.

I'm Not There opens at the Uptown Theater on November 21.

WARNING: Plot points revealed below--

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Don't shoot heroin.

Don't screw your brother's wife.

Don't steal from your parents.

If you do, make sure they won't be there.

 

Don't embezzle from your company.

Don't squander your child support on cheap booze.

Don't whine, especially if you're a guy.

Pay some attention to the company you keep.

 

Have great sex in Rio, but remember it's just vacation.

Don't expect it to last forever.

Don't kill your mother, your brother's friend's brother-in-law, or your heroin dealer when you get back.

 

Remember the IRS is watching.

Don't pay former employees and pocket their checks.

Never trust your brother.

Watch out when your father has a pillow in his hands.

 

These are just a few of the lessons I learned watching Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, in which a shallow, fucked-up, heroin-and-cocaine addicated real estate accountant (Philip Seymour Hoffman) hatches a plot with his spectacularly dumb little brother (played to a T by Ethan Hawke) to rob their parents' suburan jewelry store.

Why? Well, there are drugs to buy. Lots of them -- dispensed by a gender-indeterminate waif in an apartment with modern furnishings and a view of the Empire State Building. Also, the accountant has a hot wife -- Marisa Tomei, who spends a good half the movie topless and jiggling with a pertness that belies her age. Their last great sex was in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro and he's got it in his head that all he needs to do in order to repeat the doggie-style feat of manliness is return.

The cypher, on the other hand, begins boffing his brother's wife once everyone's reassembled in New York -- though what she sees in him is anyone's guess. He also has a jaggedly bitchy ex-wife to serve and a spoiled daughter who wants to see The Lion King on Broadway, but tickets are $130 a pop.

Everyone needs money. No one seems to want to work.

This is not simply a dysfunctional family, it's one in which blood flows like a rancorous, rotting, murderous stream. The mother is killed; her husband, the always fantastic Albert Finney, finds out. The brothers disintegrate in predictably biblical style. And justice is meted out: from the hands of the father, a punishment worthy of the crime.

Sidney Lumet has made some startling, wonderful, tense films in his time, and this one is no exception. It is, however, lacking the fundamental humanity of a movie like Dog Day Afternoon. The latest Lumet begins with an epigraph: "May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead." In the case of these people, however, I'm sure the devil won't be fooled when they die. He's been waiting.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is playing at the Edina Cinema.

 

The Pedro Infante film festival at the Parkway Theater. Beginning November 16 and running through the 29th.

Who is Pedro Infante and why should we care? Why should we brave cold November nights and wander through the city streets to an old theater and watch these Mexican melodramas? For the same old reason we see movies in theaters: to be touched, mesmerized, to laugh and perhaps cry, and to share these complex experiences with other strangers in the dark. And, in this case, to see something entirely new to American audiences. In this case, a series of strange and wonderful musical dramas starring Mexican crooner Pedro Infante.

You won't get better than this. This is melodrama, sir, chest-thumping and tear-jerking stories originally meant to give you a pause from a life of endless toil. In the 1940s and 1950s, great waves of rural Mexicans emigrated into Mexico City to find work. The story's the same everywhere: these lovely bumpkins found only crushing poverty and a society that was indifferent to their needs. Once living in the wide-open spaces, they were suddenly crushed on top of one another by the thousands. And so, director Ismael Rodríguez and singer Infante found inspiration there, and made a series of films about the poor and oppressed that have the scope and detail of Balzac mixed with the grace and affection of Rouben Mamoulian. In the process they made some movies that could make people look at the slums around them and think "Maybe I can sing, too."

Look at Nosotros Los Pobres, the first of a trilogy of movies featuring Infante as the carpenter Pepe the Bull. Here, the widower Pepe, a carpenter, is trying to raise his single daughter and fall in love again--something the daughter doesn't want in the least. Poor Pepe! In the course of this film he'll lose his girl, essentially lose his daughter, nearly ruin his hand (essential for his work), be accused of robbery and murder, lose his mother and sister, and still manage to sing a song or two. Pedro Almodovar couldn't make this story any hotter.

There is no room for happiness in Nostros Los Pobres. Pepe tries to be affable, tries to maintain some pride in the squalor, raising his daughter to be a good and kind and hard-working. At first, it's not even the wealthy who get to Pepe--the poor in Nostros are a strange bunch, an admixture of hard working, diligent people and drunken, disorderly louses eager to gossip and sell you down the river for a peso or a slug of cheap booze. Nostros, made in 1948, is free from the American restraints of the Hays' Code--here are drunks and drug addicts, whores and consumptives, love in the streets, widows clinging to tombstones. Toothless biddies speak of drinking, gossip viciously, and hunger to fuck Pepe. The film is bizarre and beautiful: the girl washing clothes, praying to St. Dimas for the thieves. A shot of Pepe's mom, confined to a wheelchair and mute, tormented by the gossipy drunks, is as bizarre and funny as anything David Lynch has conjured up.

Infante was called the Mexican Sinatra, no doubt by clueless gringos who barely paid attention to life south of the border. He was a master singer, and a very good actor, who brought his dashing good looks to these rough stories and yet never shone too brightly, never distracted us from his supporting actors, or from the pain and pleasure witnessed on screen. He sang, told jokes, made comedies and dramas, and could entertain a billionaire or a bum.

He did not live long, though he left a wealth of movies and music. A fan of aviation, Pedro Infante flew his Consolidated X B-24-D plane from Mérida, Yucatán and crashed it five minutes later. He died instantly at age 39.

No Country for Old Men opens with a series of shots of a dry, desolate Texas, a place that seems unkind to both man and beast. Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) begins to speak in voice-over, ruminating on his life, on his being a sheriff, admiring the men who served before him, and lamenting the way that crime has spun out of control these days.

His words come straight from Cormac McCarthy's source novel, but if the scene looks familiar, it's because the Coen Brothers have used it before. Shot by shot, this scene is cribbed from their debut picture Blood Simple. There, the sleazy detective, played by the great character actor M. Emmett Walsh, delivered lines that were so much more potent that McCarthy's overwrought sermon. Walsh muses on the Russians, and how Communists are theoretically supposed to help each other out in life. Not in his backyard. "What I know is Texas," he says. "And down here... you're on your own."

The Coens have been known for borrowing from other movies, which is no crime except in the fact that, as I pointed out in November's Rake, it seems as though they're more concerned with winking at their sly references than actually developing character or building tight plots. Oddly enough, No Country continues that trend, except that the Coens have taken to devouring their own tails: this movie references their own films repeatedly, with shots that mimic Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing and Fargo. Once again, with No Country for Old Men, they've made a slick, entertaining film utterly devoid of emotional resonance and meaning. It's as empty as a toy gun.

By now, we all know the story: Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out antelope hunting in the Texas plains when he comes across a drug deal gone bad. A number of dead bodies are rotting in the sun, inexplicably left untouched by the desert animals (this is noted later and then casually dismissed in that "coyotes don't eat Mexicans".) Moss discovers a truck bed full of bags of some illicit drugs, investigates further and finds a satchel containing two million dollars. Of course, people will be after that two million bucks, including Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem.)

We've been introduced to Chigurh earlier--he was arrested and then strangled a sheriff's deputy with a pair of handcuffs. This maniac wanders around Texas with a slaughterhouse stun gun, murdering or toying with the ever-polite townsfolk of rural Texas, caricatures that have stepped right off the set of Fargo. Chigurh is not a real human being, but a force of nature. He is hired to go after the money, but for whatever reason doesn't really seem to care about the money. In fact, he kills the men who hired him, has no regard for the police who pursue him, and basically wrecks everything in his path. He goes after bumpkins at truck stops, old chicken farmers, blows up automobiles, shoots up small towns, walks into high-rises to blast businessmen, kills other hit men, hotel desk clerks, you name it. No one can stop the man. If he is a man.

Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Bell serves as our moral guide, and is the utterly ineffective arm of the law who is chasing Moss in the hopes of saving him from Chigurh. In the course of the film, he will ruminate at length about the decline of Western Civilization, usually over a cup of coffee. He will do little else.

Ah, but there's more--the men who were involved in the drug deal, a number of faceless Mexicans who are easily dispatched and their white counterparts. The Mexicans don’t talk, don't get any screen time except to die easily, while the white guys are given time to wonder about the phenomenon that is Anton Chigurh. One of these is the bounty hunter Carson Wells, who compares Chigurh to the bubonic plague. Hint, hint, our killing machine is a random act of the God of the Old Testament, just like plague, just like floods, just like locusts. In case you didn't get it, the lesson will be repeated throughout.

No Country for Old Men is exciting in much the same way as John Carpenter's original Halloween, except that it's long, talky, and its characters nothing more than props on which Cormac McCarthy can drape his endless moralizing. Tommy Lee Jones, looking wearied from the lawlessness and chaos spinning out of his control, gives us one of his few weak performances. There is little reason for his inability to deal with the changing society--if it is changing (one fellow officer blames their woes on piercings and tattoos, as if that's what's prompted Chigurh to roam about blasting people.) Jones had a similar role, that he bit into with relish, in the superior In the Valley of Elah. There he was a vet who saw the same thing: values challenged in a modern society that seems in a state of flux. Here he stares and speaks, a man without urgency, who seems more interested in sipping coffee and figuring out what the killings mean than actually solving anything.

This is clearly the Coens most "serious" film. And yet, it is full of references to their other movies, ones that didn't think quite as highly of themselves, and at times it's hard not to laugh at the similarities. Like when Llewelyn hurls his bag of money over the fence at the U.S.-Mexican border and into the reeds, hoping it will suffice as a hiding spot. This is right out of Fargo, when Steve Buscemi digs a hole in the snow with an ice scraper, hoping to hide his loot. Or Chigurh slowing down in his car, leaning over with his gun and shooting at a hawk, just to indicate what a bad-ass he is. Shot by shot it's the same as the one in Raising Arizona, when Randall "Tex" Cobb, the demon motorcyclist, blows rabbits away from his motorcycle while Nick Cage narrates, "He was especially cruel to little things," a line that would be a good fit here.

As usual in a Coen film, the "small" people in No Country for Old Men are dolts with goofy accents, people who wouldn't give second thought to giving a man a smile and directions into town even if he were holding a bloody axe and covered in chunks of flesh. The Coens seem unwilling to trust their actors to bring more to their small roles than the lines they read--great films allow the small parts to shine, to enrich the overall plot. Here, they're dead, empty. And Kelly McDonald, playing Llewelyn's wife Carla Jean, is simply awful, with a grating accent to match her mother's. Javier Bardem is very good, with what he has to work with. His Anton Chigurh is chilling. But more so than any other horror villain? Bardem seems to have taken a cue from Sir Anthony Hopkins--this'll probably win him his Oscar.

There are moments of genuine suspense here, and the Coens are crack filmmakers when it comes to shooting scenes of chase and gunplay. They have an eye for detail that remains impressive, like sweating milk bottles, scuff marks on a tile floor (from the strangling of the first sheriff's deputy), dust swirling through the light of a hole where a lock used to be as Chigurh waits for another victim.

If only they would devote as much attention to their characters and their plots. What are the motivations of these people? Llewelyn takes the money, but never talks about what it would mean to him. Chigurh never addresses why he's intent on killing people, any people. At times the gunplay gets so out of hand you wonder where all the rest of the world has gone--how the hell do you shoot up a Main Street in a small town and not have the cops arrive or other folks darting about for their lives?

Worst of all, the fate of Llewelyn Moss indicates a cavalier or contemptuous attitude from both Cormac McCarthy and the Coens. The climax of this film happens offscreen, merely an afterthought, to allow the Meaning of the Story to be hammered into our brains, just in case we didn't get it in the first two hours. All Moss' work, all his pain and suffering, all the multitude of death that he's seen, merely drifts away so that Sheriff Bell can drink coffee and philosophize in not one but two lengthy scenes. Imagine this in, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Halloween--law enforcement officers stopping from chasing these teen-killers to stop at a diner to mutter things like "the crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure." Well, it's hard to take its measure because it's not real. Chigurh isn't any more a reflection of the modern criminal than Freddie or Mike Myers. But that this ostensibly probing dialogue comes at the expense of understanding Moss' plight is a disgrace.

The act is getting old. No Country for Old Men was no great shakes of a novel, and now it is an overpraised thriller, impressed with itself, all technique and no heart. I'll take Blood Simple, as it was brief and funny in spots, or, even better, cheap 70s fare like Charley Varrick or the great modern noir One False Move, both heartfelt, moving thrillers. I want to see movies about people. No Country for Old Men is a story about men struggling in a waste land of conflicting moralities, but the real waste land is the filmmakers' attitude towards their characters. Maybe someday the Coens will abandon their props, look around, and see the human beings that live and breathe around them.