Dark and Stormy Nights
Fifteen minutes into The
Gingerbread Man , the Robert Altman thriller based on a story by John
Grisham, I found myself scribbling in my notebook, "Robert Altman is God!!"
Here, amid the seemingly aimless hubbub, the muddy narrative, the loose
framing, and the faraway characters, a sense of place--Savannah--had begun to
emerge, and also a free-floating anxiety: No one knows what's under the surface
of these people; no one knows anything . The scary side of the city
featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has never been
captured with such brusque poetry, and Altman seems to pull the portrait out of
his hat.
At the
precise moment that I was declaring (really revisiting) my reverence for the
great director, the elderly couple sitting next to me was grumbling:
"I can't understand a word
they're saying. Can you understand a word they're saying?""I don't know what's
going on.""Stupid movie." "What's going on?" "Do you want to go?"
I stifled
an urge to whisper, "If you leave now, you can catch the Matlock
rerun"--which would have been snotty but not completely off the point.
Matlock is what they expected, and what they got was Altman's
Matlock : the same sort of sub-noir story line but with the camera moved
back a clinical distance and the soundtrack rendered clangorous, disharmonic.
The Gingerbread Man is to Matlock what The Rite of Spring
is to the Rockettes.
It's also, to be honest, only a fair-to-middling mystery. I
guessed the ending--not just the major revelations, but who would live and who
would die--in the first half-hour, and I'm no Matlock. But the movie is still a
delight, a fascinatingly strange and chaotic ballet set to familiar noir
motifs. Altman had me hooked from the credits, in which the camera cruises high
above an eerie topography--both parched and veined with swamps--while the
composer, Mark Isham, serves up off-the-beat thumps and hollow brass gongs, and
fragments of cell-phone conversations remain just on the far side of
audibility. Altman makes you work to pick up dialogue, to follow the threads,
to figure out--always after the fact--just what people's motivations were. His
framing is the least insistent of any major director, which is especially
radical in a genre where audiences are accustomed to having their gaze
directed. The actors seem caught on the fly; they give performances that don't
seem like performances, and are the richer for it.
Kenneth
Branagh has never been finer, and that's saying something. As Rick Magruder, a
Savannah defense attorney famed for keeping scum bags out of prison, he's a
strutting cock, a chain-smoking hothead who thinks with his pecker. The
character stays remote and self-involved and a bit of a fool, and because
Branagh never asks for sympathy, I found myself giving him plenty, much as I've
given my sympathy to another Southern peckerhead with spotty morals who's been
in the news of late. Anyway, it's hard to tsk-tsk the man when his chief
motivation is bedding Embeth Davidtz (as Mallory Doss), a dark-eyed,
neurasthenic enigma with the South's most willowy gams. Seemingly terrorized by
her hooting-mad, derelict father (Robert Duvall, in a hilarious cameo), Doss
doffs her duds at the first opportunity and promptly has the hapless attorney
on a very tight retainer. The brilliant cinematographer, Changwei Gu,
shoots her nude through a doorway of hanging beads, and in close-up through a
fogged, rain-drizzled windshield; he keeps her simultaneously naked and veiled,
and the effect is both alluring and unnerving.
Actors are reborn in Altman movies. That's
Daryl Hannah as Branagh's associate, sporting dark hair, thick glasses, and a
sensibly reticent demeanor. In one stroke, this underrated actress takes
herself out of the blond-airhead class. As a dissolute, party-hearty private
investigator, Robert Downey Jr. seizes his drug-addled image--and dances with
it. He's wonderful and he's worrisome. A lot of big-deal movie stars could walk
into an open manhole and our lives would not be appreciably poorer. But
whatever must be done to keep this man alive and working--regularly scheduled
rehabs, full-time minders, a religious conversion--should be done, and done
now .
Altman
exploits Downey's image like the cold SOB he probably is. There's something
arrogant about this director's refusal to pander--but it's a splendid
arrogance. An Altman film is like a box of chocolates: You never know what
you're gonna get--nougat or arsenic. So you stay braced, alert. Unlike most
contemporary cinema, you don't leave an Altman movie feeling dumber than when
you went in.
Where Altman keeps you at a distance, the Mexican-born
director Alfonso Cuarón ( A Little Princess ) pulls you deep inside his
characters' heads. Already, Cuarón is one of the most accomplished subjective
filmmakers alive. Through his camera, the external world becomes transfigured
by emotion, so that everything--even what might not be literally true--seems
real . What better director to film a Dickens novel? Cuarón's Great
Expectations , which has been updated to Gulf Coast Florida and the New York
art world of the '80s and given a rock 'n' roll backbeat, is fluid and lyrical
and thoroughly transporting. I've read the Dickens original over and over and
seen all the previous adaptations, yet I didn't for an instant yearn for
19 th -century London--at least, not until the movie had ended, when I
was scratching my head over why it finally seemed so un-Dickensianly
miniature.
The good
stuff first. The hero is no longer Pip but Finn, who is frolicking in the waves
among the gulls when a shackled and bloodied escaped killer (Robert De Niro)
erupts from the water and forces him to bring food and drink and a tool for
cutting chains. When Finn returns, the scene has an eye-popping storybook
terror, with its cocked frames, its sharp reeds standing out from the deep
black night sky, and with De Niro giving the young boy that patented
sour-stomach-bogeyman grimace.
After the convict overture, we learn that
Finn--who has a gift for drawing and painting--lives with his sister Maggie
(Kim Dickens) and brother-in-law Joe (Chris Cooper) in a ramshackle house by
the gulf. Joe catches fish and Maggie gets laid by other guys--and splits. What
happens then is an enchanting blend of old and new, as Finn is summoned to the
manse of Nora Dinsmoor (Anne Bancroft), a filthy-rich ex-socialite driven mad
by her abandonment, decades earlier, by a wayward fiance. But it's Dinsmoor's
niece, Estella, who becomes the focus of Finn's fantasy life--and art.
The
little blonde is pretty but no enchantress--she's too glum and snooty. Growing
up to be Gwyneth Paltrow makes her more bewitching but no less blank. Paltrow,
as ever, is inhumanly gorgeous, like some Close Encounters of the Third
Kind creature, with that elongated neck and those stringy limbs, that big
face with its faintly mocking beatitude. I can't decide if the woman is an
actress, since she's able to get by so easily without doing all that much.
Paltrow certainly doesn't appear to have suffered for her art: Unlike other
screen beauties--Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Madeleine Stowe--she doesn't
seem to have any interesting neuroses to ply. In Great Expectations , she
never makes the leap from erotic object to flesh-and-blood human, and that's
not just the fault of the script and director. We're told of Estella's inner
struggle--of the tug of war between the punishing cock-tease that her aunt has
engineered her to be and her inherent decency--but the conflict isn't palpable
in Paltrow's paltry performance.
Nor does the grown-up Finn (Ethan Hawke) develop much
stature. When an anonymous benefactor provides him with the means to travel to
New York and show his paintings at a SoHo gallery, he goes somewhat mulishly.
He never becomes absorbed into the art world and its black-clad poseurs, always
remaining a glassy-eyed outsider. Finn's awkwardness keeps him inoffensive, but
it thoroughly obviates the dramatic arc that's the whole point of Dickens'
novel: If success doesn't change Finn for the worse, then his rejection of the
high life doesn't entail the same kind of sacrifices--or come as a consequence
of some harrowing epiphany. And so the movie, after a miniclimax or two, just
comes to an end, suddenly smaller than the sum of its parts.
Great
Expectations is magical anyway--just this side of surreal. Finn tells us
that Dinsmoor's room "smelled like dead flowers and cat piss," and I mean no
disrespect when I say that Bancroft's performance evokes those same aromas.
Those dreading a standard-issue, musty Miss Havisham will be delighted by this
flamboyantly posturing, pantsuit-clad crone with her face cream and
"chica-boom" slang. Bancroft is so spectacularly abrasive that it's scandalous
that she doesn't get the incendiary comeuppance of Dickens' novel--that
objective-correlative finale in which the seething, dried-out harridan
spontaneously combusts.
Hong Kong action fans hoping for spontaneous
combustion from the American debut of superstar Chow Yun-Fat might want to turn
their weapons on the producers. On the evidence of The Replacement
Killers , they seem bent on turning the most galvanic figure of Hong Kong
action cinema into a pallid family man--domesticating him in all senses. Chow,
for those who haven't caught his act in any number of John Woo and Ringo Lam
shoot-'em-ups, is one of those poker-faced, can't-catch-me, artillery-wielding
supermarksmen who can blow away 50 bad guys without removing his sunglasses or
the toothpick from his mouth. He strikes poses reminiscent of Steve McQueen and
Clint Eastwood, but his tiny smile lets you know he's having a blast, and he
seems more human than all his American action models put together.
In The Replacement
Killers , he's a decent fellow, devoted to his mother and sister, forced by
an underworld kingpin (Kenneth Tsang) to travel to the United States to
assassinate people. The saintly assassin draws the line at shooting a little
boy, however, so the kingpin, along with Jürgen Prochnow and other killers with
scarred-in-hell faces, comes after him with Uzis, rocket-launchers, and so on.
The director, Antoine Fuqua, a veteran of Coolio music videos, does a passable
slow-motion Woo imitation (Woo is one of the executive producers), but the plot
and dialogue are Brand X, and Chow--by turns courtly, worried, and earnest--has
nothing of the rock 'n' roll bad boy that put him on the map. He's likable, but
he only comes alive with a gun in each hand, spinning round and round, firing
front and back, the tails of his jacket flapping.
The movie's chief pleasure
is Mira Sorvino as a wise-ass passport forger who can detonate an insult with
throaty, Bacall-like precision and then leap into gun battles with
hell-for-leather abandon. Her part makes no sense, but watching those long
limbs flying through the air, I never felt like complaining. Davidtz, Paltrow,
Sorvino--it's a banner month for leg men.
