The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan, 2018)

Kit Harington and Chris Zylka in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

Cast: Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jacob Tremblay, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Ben Schnetzer, Thandie Newton, Jared Keeso, Chris Zylka, Amara Karan, Emily Hampshire, Michael Gambon. Screenplay: Xavier Dolan, Jacob Tierney. Cinematography: André Turpin. Production design: Anne Pritchard, Colombe Raby. Film editing: Mathieu Denis, Xavier Dolan. Music: Gabriel Yared.

I had read some of the reviews, noted the abysmal 21% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, and knew that The Death & Life of John F. Donovan had barely been released in the United States. But how bad could a movie that featured three best actress Oscar winners as well as such celebrated performers as Thandie Newton and Michael Gambon really be? Maybe this was a case of a film that simply went over people's heads and will be rediscovered in a few years to become a cult film. Well, no. This is not an unappreciated gem. It's a mess of a movie about the perils of celebrity, with an embarrassingly off-the-mark treatment of life in the closet, and some uncomfortable echoes of real celebrity secret lives that only add queasiness to the mix. The denouement of the film is sheer hackery: There are two Big Speeches, one by Kathy Bates and the other by Gambon (in a kind of wise old man ex machina appearance), that are supposed somehow to resolve the film's theme, but are only anti-climactic. Is it well-acted? Yes. Kit Harington hasn't quite escaped the aura of Jon Snow in the film, partly because the title role calls on him to be a hugely successful TV star, but he has a looseness and natural delivery that he was never allowed in the fantasy confines of Game of Thrones. Jacob Tremblay, as the young, starstruck fan who becomes a pen pal with Donovan, shows that he really is the capable child actor that Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015) suggested he was. Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon do what they can with badly written roles. It's said that writer-director Xavier Dolan's original cut of the film was four hours long, and that the trimming to the current two-hour length involved jettisoning the work of yet another major actress, Jessica Chastain, so it's possible that some of the incoherence of the film stems from desperate editing. But nothing about the movie really makes me want to watch the director's original cut.

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.

The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996)

The "prestige motion picture" is a familiar genre: It's typically a movie derived from a distinguished literary source or a biopic about a distinguished historic figure, with a cast full of major actors, but designed not so much to advance the art of film as to attract critical raves and awards -- particularly Oscars. There are plenty of examples among the best-picture Oscar winners: A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982), Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984), Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985), and The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987). (The 1980s seemed to be particularly dominated by prestige-seekers.) The trouble is that once the initial attraction of these films has faded, few people seem to remember them fondly or want to watch them again. I'd rather watch The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) today than sit through A Man for All Seasons, and I would say the same for Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1981), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Starman (John Carpenter, 1984), Prizzi's Honor (John Huston, 1985), and Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987) when put in competition with the prestige best-picture winners of their respective years. So I watched The English Patient last night to test my theory that prestige movies don't hold up over time. It fits the category precisely: It's based on a Booker Prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje; it has a distinguished cast, three of whom were nominated for acting Oscars, including Juliette Binoche, who won; it earned raves from The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Roger Ebert; it raked in 12 Oscar nominations and won nine of them -- picture, supporting actress, director Anthony Minghella, cinematographer John Seale, art direction, costumes, sound, film editor Walter Murch (who also shared in the Oscar for sound), and composer Gabriel Yared. And sure enough, there are films from 1996 that I'd rather watch again than The English Patient, including  Fargo (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen), Lone Star (John Sayles), and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle). But I also have to say that of all the "prestige" best picture winners, The English Patient makes the best case for the genre. It's a good movie, with a mostly well-crafted screenplay by Minghella from a book many thought unfilmable, though it still tries to carry over too much from the novel, such as the character of David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), whose function in the film, to provoke Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) into uncovering his story, could have been served equally well by Hana (Binoche). But the performances still seem fresh and committed. Binoche, though designated a supporting actress, carries the film by turning Hana into a kind of central consciousness. I was surprised at how much heat is generated by Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine, considering that they are both usually rather icy performers. There are some beautifully staged scenes, like the one in which Kip (Naveen Andrews) "flies" Hana so she can view the frescoes high in a church. And Murch's sound editing gives the film a marvelous sonic texture, starting with the mysterious clinking sounds at the film's beginning, which are then revealed to be the bottles carried by an Arab vendor of potions. Murch's ear and Seale's eye make the film an enduring audiovisual treat.

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)

Amid the almost universal acclaim, including a best foreign-language film Oscar, for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, there were some complaints from residents of the former East Germany that the writer-director was not as hard on his Stasi snoop, Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), as he should have been. This is my second viewing of the film -- I saw it when it first appeared on DVD -- and I tend to agree. The movie as a whole is chilling -- well-plotted and well-acted -- but I'm not entirely convinced this time around by Wiesler's change of heart regarding the people he's surveiling: the playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his lover, the actress Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck). At the start of the film, when we first see Wiesler teaching a class to Stasi-spy hopefuls, he's the perfect cold gray participant in a monstrous system of internal domestic espionage. But later, as he learns not only that the motive for spying on Dreyman and Sieland is not merely political but also sexual -- the minister of culture, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Theime) wants Dreyman eliminated so he can have Sieland all to himself -- he begins to be disillusioned with his work. And after a friend of Dreyman's, the blacklisted theater director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), commits suicide and Dreyman sits down at the piano to play a piece of music -- composed for the film by Gabriel Yared -- called Sonata for a Good Man that Jerska had given him, Wiesler betrays the first real emotion we see from him in the film: A tear rolls down his cold gray face. Donnersmarck has said that he was inspired by Lenin's statement -- referred to in one point in the film -- that he had to give up listening to music like Beethoven's "Appassionata" sonata because it humanized him, distracting him from the task of revolution. On the other hand, we have all heard the stories of Nazi concentration camp commandants who read Schiller and Goethe and listened to Mozart and Schubert and were never deterred from their horrendous work by it. The flaw in Donnersmarck's film, I think, is that despite Mühe's brilliant performance as Wiesler, we never get enough of his backstory to suggest why he should be suddenly so vulnerable to sentiment. How could he have risen in the ranks of the Stasi to the point that he became not only a trusted agent but also an instructor of future agents if he has this key weakness? On the other hand, it's not a crippling flaw, thanks to exceptional performances and well-handled suspense.