Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Steve Coogan, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Marianne Faithfull, Jamie Dornan, Aurore Clément, Tom Hardy. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola. Cinematography: Lance Acord. Production design: K.K. Barrett. Film editing: Sarah Flack. Costume design: Milena Canonero. Music: Dustin O'Halloran.

I fear that Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite (2018) has spoiled the historical costume drama for me, even the ones that like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette take an irreverent, somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach to the material. Lanthimos deconstructed the genre in his film, while Coppola merely mocks it behind its back, lavishing the resources of costume and setting while setting up a few cognitive dissonances by using contemporary pop music in the background. Her courtiers sometimes behave more like spoiled rich kids than like 18th-century aristocrats, which is very much to the point she's making. I just wish she'd had the nerve to take it further, the way Lanthimos did. Still, it's full of grand eye candy with its luxurious scenes set at Versailles, and Kirsten Dunst is a charming performer. It's slightly overlong, even though it crams the fall of the aristos into a scant quarter of the film, never letting us glimpse a tumbril or a guillotine but instead mostly having the news of the revolution brought to us by messengers and summed up in a final shot of Marie's ruined bedroom après le déluge.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange

Alex: Malcolm McDowell
Dim: Warren Clarke
Georgie: James Marcus
Pete: Michael Tarn
Mr. Alexander: Patrick Magee
Mrs. Alexander: Adrienne Corri
Deltoid: Aubrey Morris
Catlady: Miriam Karlin
Minister: Anthony Sharp

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick
Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess
Cinematography: John Alcott
Production design: John Barry
Costume design: Milena Canonero
Film editing: Bill Butler

Any movie that was panned by Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert can't be all bad, can it? A Clockwork Orange remains one of Stanley Kubrick's most popular films, with an 8.4 rating on IMDb and a 90% fresh rating (93% audience score) on Rotten Tomatoes.  I think it's a tribute to Kubrick that the movie can elicit such widely divergent responses. I can see what Kael, Sarris, and Ebert are complaining about while at the same time admitting that the film is undeniably entertaining in a "horrorshow" way: that being both novelist Anthony Burgess's Nadsat coinage from the Russian word "khorosho," meaning "good," and the English literal sense. For it is a kind of horror movie, with Alex as the monster spawned by modern society -- implacable, controlled only by the most drastic and abhorrent means, in this case a kind of behavioral conditioning. Watching it this time I was struck by how much the aversion therapy to which Alex is subjected reminds me of the attempts to convert gay people to heterosexuality. Which is not to say that Kubrick's film isn't exploitative in the extreme, relying on images of violence and sexuality that almost justify Kael's suggestion that Kubrick is a kind of failed pornographer. It is not the kind of movie that should go without what today are called "trigger warnings." What's good about A Clockwork Orange is certainly Malcolm McDowell's performance as Alex, one of the few really complex human beings in Kubrick's caricature-infested films. Some of his most memorable scenes in the movie were partly improvised, as when he sings "Singin' in the Rain" during his attack on the Alexanders, and when he opens his mouth like a bird when the minister of the interior is feeding him. Kubrick received three Oscar nominations, as producer, director, and screenwriter, and film editor Bill Butler was also nominated, but the movie won none, losing in all four categories to The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). It deserved nominations not only for McDowell, but also for John Alcott's cinematography and John Barry's production design.

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

From the rather uninvolved performance he gives here, it's a little hard to realize that Ryan O'Neal was once a major movie star. Scenes are stolen from him right and left by such skilled character actors as Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff, Murray Melvin, Leonard Rossiter, and Leon Vitale. But this detachment of the titular character seems to be part of Kubrick's plan to de-emphasize the story's drama: He even provides a narrator (Michael Hordern) who gives away the plot before it develops on the screen. When actions and emotions erupt in the story, they do so with a kind of jolt, the audience having been lulled by the stately pace of the film and by the undeniably gorgeous visuals: Ken Adam's production design, Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero's costumes, and John Alcott's cinematography all won Oscars, as did Leonard Rosenman's orchestration of themes from Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Handel. It is undeniably one of the most visually beautiful films ever made, its images intentionally echoing works by Hogarth, Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, and other 18th-century artists. Alcott used specially designed lenses, created for NASA to allow low-light filming, to allow many scenes to be filmed by candlelight. But it's also a painfully slow movie, stretching to more than three hours. I don't have anything against slowness: One of my favorite movies, Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953), is often criticized for slowness. But the slowness of Ozu's film is in service of characters we come to know and care about. Kubrick gives us no one to care about very much, and O'Neal's Barry never registers as a developed character.