I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Marcus Carl Franklin, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere in I'm Not There

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson (voice), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Bob Dylan. 

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

 

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Ben Kingsley (voice). Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Hanan Townshend.

Two films kept coming to mind as I watched Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). Fellini's film because the journey of Malick's protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), through the decadence of Hollywood and Las Vegas echoes that of Marcello's (Marchello Mastroianni) explorations of Rome. Tarkovsky's because Malick's exploration of Rick's life exhibits a similar steadfast refusal to adhere to a strict linear narrative. Most of us go to movies to have stories told to us. Our lives are a web of stories, told to us by history and religion and science and society, and most explicitly by art. We tend to prefer the old linear progression of storytelling: beginning, middle, end, or the familiar five-act structure of situation, complication, crisis, struggle, and resolution. But artists tend to get weary of the straightforward approach; they like to mix things up, to find new ways of storytelling. The modernist novelists like Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner eschewed linearity, and filmmakers have tried to take a similar course. They have the advantage of working with images as well as words. So Malick, like Tarkovsky and Fellini and others, experiments with editing and montage to meld images with language and gesture to probe the psychological depths of human character and experience. The problem with experimentation is that experiments fail more often than they succeed. Some think that Knight of Cups is a successful experiment, but most critics and much of the film's audience seem to disagree, to judge from, for example, a 5.6 rating on IMDb. Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production and there are four credited film editors, which suggests that Malick over-reached himself. For me, what was lost in the process of making the film was a clarity of vision. Granted, the lives of human beings are messy, loose-ended things, but what do we depend on artists to do but try to make sense of them. I think Malick lost sight of his protagonist, Rick, in trying to interpret his life and loves through the film's odd amalgamation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Major Arcana of the tarot pack and then overlaying it with a collage of images provided by Emmanuel Lubezki's camera. We glimpse Rick through filters, grasping for moments that will resolve into something substantial about him, his problems with his family and with women. And for all the casting of fine actors like Bale and Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the production negates their attempts to create characters. In fact, their starriness works against them: Instead of being drawn into the character of Rick or Nancy or Elizabeth, we're removed from them by the familiarity of the actor playing them. I understand what admirers of the film like Matt Zoller Seitz are saying when they proclaim, "The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore." But I wonder if that's enough to make an experiment successful. I came away from Knight of Cups knowing nothing more about its characters than I did before I met them.

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Alan Doyle, Douglas Hodge, Léa Seydoux. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: Arthur Max. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Marc Streitenfeld.

Did the world really need another Robin Hood movie? From the lack of interest at the box office, it would seem not. At least Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland tried to give us something slightly different: a prequel, in which Robin finds his identity and mission and only at the very end goes off into Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men, presumably to rob from the rich and give to the poor. We've had a sequel before in Richard Lester's 1976 Robin and Marian, in which the aging couple find an end to their adventures. (Interestingly, the Robin Hood of Lester's film, Sean Connery, was 46 when it was made, the same age that Russell Crowe was when he made Scott's. Lester's Marian, Audrey Hepburn, was 47, and Scott's, Cate Blanchett, was 41.) Unfortunately, the prequel doesn't give us much that's new or revealing about the characters: The villains, King John (Oscar Isaac) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen), remain the same, with an additional twist that they're being duped by another villain named Godfrey (Mark Strong), a supporter of the French King Philip, who is plotting an invasion now that the English army is still straggling back from the Crusades. Robin is a soldier of fortune named Robin Longstride, who has been to the Crusades and is making it back with the crown of the fallen Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as well as a sword he promised the dying Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) he would return to his father, Sir Walter (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham.  When he does, Robin meets Marian, no longer a maid but the widow of Sir Robert. On the way, he has gathered a retinue comprising Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Allan A'Dayle (Alan Doyle), and in Nottingham he will add Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) to the not terribly merry company. They'll take part in repelling the French invasion, which Scott makes into a kind of small scale D-Day, to the extent of borrowing unabashedly from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), including some landing craft whose historical existence has been questioned (along with much else of the movie's history). Robin and his fellow soldiers, including Marian, who arrives disguised in chain mail, save the day, but their hopes for a new charter of rights that has been promised them by King John are dashed when he proclaims Robin an outlaw. So everything seems to be set up for a sequel that will culminate at Runnymede and the signing of Magna Carta, but the film's flop at the box office put paid to that. Robin Hood certainly has some good performances, which you might expect from its cast packed with Oscar-winners and -contenders, but it feels routine and a little tired. It also resorts to filming much of the action with the now too common "gloomycam," in which fight scenes always seem to be taking place at night, so you can't tell who's killing whom.

Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)

Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo in Thor: Ragnarok

Thor: Chris Hemsworth
Loki: Tom Hiddleston
Hela: Cate Blanchett
Heimdall: Idris Elba
Grandmaster: Jeff Goldblum
Valkyrie: Tessa Thompson
Skurge: Karl Urban
Bruce Banner / Hulk: Mark Ruffalo
Odin: Anthony Hopkins
Doctor Strange: Benedict Cumberbatch
Korg (voice): Taika Waititi
Topaz: Rachel House
Actor Thor: Luke Hemsworth
Actor Odin: Sam Neill
Actor Loki: Matt Damon

Director: Taika Waititi
Screenplay: Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost
Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe
Production design: Dan Hennah, Ra Vincent
Film editing: Zene Baker, Joel Negron
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh

Much fun, thanks to director Taika Waititi's irreverence toward the material he was given to bring to the screen: yet another superhero comic book adventure. But the Marvel people have learned a lot about their audience, something it seems the DC people haven't fully apprised, given the failure of some of their Superman and Batman movies to capture audiences. (The blissful exception, of course, is Patty Jenkins's Wonder Woman, which vies with Thor: Ragnarok as 2017's best comic book movie.) The trick is to take nothing too seriously and to load your films with the best performers you can find. From the start, Chris Hemsworth was an ideal Thor: a gorgeous god, to be sure, but also a bit of a goof, easily outwitted by his clever brother Loki but able to survive in the end through sheer affability. If there's a flaw to Thor: Ragnarok it's that the stakes don't really seem that high: Asgard is a nice place, but none of us is ever going to visit there, so its destruction doesn't feel so much like a threat as the ones to Earth in the other Marvel adventures. The compensation is that unlike a lot of films with prestigious actors of the caliber of Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hiddleston -- people who could be off doing Shakespeare somewhere -- nobody involved seems to be going through the paces just for the paycheck. Everyone seems to be having fun, thanks to Waititi and other cutups like Hemsworth and Jeff Goldblum. It's not Hamlet, to be sure, although there's a play within a play with Chris's brother Luke, Sam Neill, and Matt Damon spoofing the "real" Thor, Odin, and Loki. Marvel has gone the jokey road before with the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies (James Gunn, 2014 and 2017), but those were exposition-heavy and overburdened with effects in comparison to Waititi's lighter, larkier approach.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)

Jude Law and Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley

Tom Ripley: Matt Damon
Marge Sherwood: Gwyneth Paltrow
Dickie Greenleaf: Jude Law
Meredith Logue: Cate Blanchett
Freddie Miles: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Peter Smith-Kingsley: Jack Davenport
Herbert Greenleaf: James Rebhorn
Inspector Roverini: Sergio Rubini
Alvin MacCarron: Philip Baker Hall
Aunt Joan: Celia Weston

Director: Anthony Minghella
Screenplay: Anthony Minghella
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: John Seale
Production design: Roy Walker
Film editing: Walter Murch
Music: Gabriel Yared

This second film version of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley suffers from a miscast lead and an over-detailed screenplay. That it suffers by comparison to the earlier version, René Clément's Purple Noon (1960), is only incidental -- comparisons, as people have been saying since the 15th century or longer, are odious. More to the point is that Matt Damon was, at this point in his career, not up to the role of Highsmith's charming demon, Tom Ripley. Damon has since become a major star and a very good actor, but The Talented Mr. Ripley appeared only two years after his breakthrough role in Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting -- a part tailor-made for the young Damon, and not just because he co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay. Still in his twenties when he played Tom Ripley, Damon hadn't quite grown into his face: He seems all teeth and youthful mannerisms, not at all the kind of person to attract the friendship of a Dickie Greenleaf. His transformation from the poor but upwardly mobile Ripley to masquerading as the wealthy, cosmopolitan Greenleaf feels spurred by the urgency of the moment and not by any innate corruption of the soul, which should be the essence of Ripley. Damon's Ripley could never grow into the killer con-artist that carried Highsmith's books into four sequels. But again with the comparisons: Damon is following in the footsteps of Alain Delon, whose spectacularly handsome Ripley in Purple Noon is the embodiment of Shakespeare's dictum that "sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds." It also doesn't help that Damon's Ripley is matched with Jude Law's Dickie. More people than I have wished that Law had been cast as Ripley instead. Even Leonardo DiCaprio, originally sought for the role, might have made a more convincing Ripley than Damon. But the fault also lies in Anthony Minghella's screenplay, which stretches and pads the story into a 139-minute run time, giving us more of Ripley's backstory -- how he met Dickie's father and got the commission to bring Dickie home, and how he first pretended to be Dickie when he met Meredith Logue on the trip to Europe -- than is absolutely necessary. Again, Purple Noon began in medias res, with Ripley out sailing with Greenleaf and Marge, and the backstory only gradually emerges. Minghella has fallen into a common error of American filmmakers: the desire to explain too much to the audience. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a handsome film, and there are some fine performances: Seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman in movies always gives me a pang of loss, and his Freddie Miles is a superbly snotty, wicked creation. It's the one point in the movie when we actually root for Ripley to kill someone. Cate Blanchett's Meredith is a small role, but Blanchett makes us wish there were more of it. And I think I prefer the ending of Minghella's film to that of Purple Noon. Both leave Ripley on the brink of being found out, but Minghella gives us a better tease: His Ripley faces a dilemma he has resolved before, that of disposing of a body.

Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, 2003)

Cast: Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joseph Rigano, Vinny Vella, Vinny Vella Jr., Renee French, E.J. Rodriguez, Alex Descas, Isaach De Bankolé, Cate Blanchett, Michael Hogan, Jack White, Meg White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Katy Hansz, The GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, William Rice, Taylor Mead

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Tom DiCillo, Frederick Elmes, Ellen Kuras, Robby Müller
Production design: Dan Bishop, Mark Friedberg, Tom Jarmusch

For Jarmusch fans only. Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of 11 black-and-white short films in which people sit at tables and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, began as semi-improvisatory shorts spun off from Jarmusch's features by their crew and cast members and friends. Starting with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright essentially winging it in "Strange to Meet You," the collection evolved from a series of shaggy-dog sketches into more structured narratives with a few motifs echoing throughout. The most structured is certainly "Cousins," in which Cate Blanchett plays two roles: the soigné movie star Cate and her blowsier cousin Shelly, who resents Cate's privileged life. They meet in the coffee shop of a luxury hotel, where Cate patiently endures Shelly's sniping until she's called away for an interview. Shelly has been smoking throughout their conversation, but when she lights up after Cate leaves, a waiter tells her that smoking is forbidden there. The episode "Cousins?" is a parallel story in which Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, two British actors trying to make it in the States, meet for coffee, during which Molina reveals to a very unimpressed Coogan that he has done genealogical research which proves they are distant relations. After an excited fan asks for his autograph, Coogan becomes more and more condescending toward Molina. Then Molina receives a call on his cell phone from Spike Jonze, instantly deflating Coogan's ego to the point that Molina leaves him to pay the check. Amusing as these vignettes are, they don't rise much beyond the level of anecdotes, and some of the other episodes, such as the ones in which Jack White demonstrates his Tesla coil or Renee French fends off a too-attentive waiter, fall flat. Still, if you don't expect too much, there's an evanescent charm to the whole project.

Watched on Showtime

Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)

With her Mamie Eisenhower bangs and heart-shaped face, Rooney Mara in Carol becomes the reincarnation of such '50s icons as Audrey Hepburn, Jean Simmons, and Maggie McNamara -- particularly the McNamara of The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953), that once-scandalous play and movie about a young woman who defies convention by talking openly about sex while retaining her virginity. It's just coincidence that Carol is set at the end of 1952 and into 1953, the year of the release of The Moon Is Blue, but the juxtaposition of McNamara's Patty O'Neill and Mara's Therese Belivet seems to me appropriate because the 1950s have become such a touchstone for examining our attitudes toward sex. Director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, adapting a novel by Patricia Highsmith, have done an exemplary job in Carol of not tilting the emphasis toward Grease-style caricature or Mad Men-style satire of the era, or exploiting the same-sex relationship in the film for sensationalism or statement-making. Carol is a story about people in relationships, clear-sightedly viewed in a way that Therese herself would endorse. After asking her boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy) if he's ever been in love with a boy and receiving a shocked reply that he's only "heard of people like that," Therese replies, "I don't mean people like that. I just mean two people who fall in love with each other." It's this matter-of-factness that the film tries to maintain throughout its story of Therese and Carol (Cate Blanchett), the well-to-do wife in a failing marriage. That the film is set in the 1950s, when cracks were showing in the conventional attitudes toward both marriage and homosexuality, gives piquancy to their relationship, but it doesn't limit it. The story could be (and probably is) playing itself out today in various combinations of sexual identity. The film works in large part because of the steadiness of Haynes at the helm, with two extraordinary actresses at the center and beautiful support from Sarah Paulson as Abby, Carol's ex-lover, and Kyle Chandler (one of those largely unsung actors like the late Bill Paxton who make almost everything they appear in better) as Carol's husband, the hard-edged Harge Aird. The sonic texture of the 1950s is splendidly provided by Carter Burwell's score and a selection of classic popular music by artists like Woody Herman, Georgia Gibbs, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, Jo Stafford, and Billie Holiday.

Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006)

I want to watch a movie about the calamity that befalls a Moroccan family when they acquire a rifle to shoot the jackals that prey on their herd of goats. Or a movie about a nanny for a well-to-do San Diego couple who unwisely decides to take her employers' small children with her when she goes to her son's wedding in Mexico. Or a movie about a deaf Japanese teenager who suffers from sexual confusion in the aftermath of her mother's suicide. But I don't want to watch them all at once, which is what Babel forces us to do. It's a terrifically ambitious film, with some stunning location work in four widespread countries, and it has some great performances, particularly by Oscar nominees Adriana Barraza as the nanny and Rinko Kikuchi as the teenager. It probably deserved the nominations for best picture and for González Iñárritu's direction, too. (It won for Gustavo Santaolalla's score.) But intercutting the three stories mentioned above and centering them on the plight of the San Diego couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) severely reduces their dramatic force and interest. Why, I wonder, were Pitt's and Blanchett's characters on a bus tour of Morocco with a bunch of rather unpleasant Brits? If, as the movie seems to suggest, it's to work on their relationship after their loss of a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, it's a very odd choice indeed. Their movie-star presence also skews the film away from the performances of the less well-known international stars. Structurally, the Japanese story seems poorly integrated: Its only link to the other stories is that the rifle that turns up in Morocco was originally owned by the Japanese girl's father. What struck me as strongest about the movie was its subtext: the bureaucratic paralysis of the American superpower in the wake of 9/11. Pitt and Blanchett are unable to get the help they need in Morocco because of the paranoia about Islamic terrorism that forces an unwanted and unnecessary caution on the U.S. State Department. American immigration policy also prevents a sensible resolution to the problem of the nanny and the children. Babel is certainly not without its rewards, but a scaling-back of its ambitions might have produced a better movie -- or maybe three or four of them.