Opening Weekend: 'The Lovely Bones,' 'High Life,' White Ribbon
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - 2 Comments
Saoirse Ronan stars as a slain teen in 'The Lovely Bones'
This weekend offers a trio of movies for every taste—an overripe blockbuster (Lovely Bones), a gritty Canadian gem (High Life), and an austere German masterwork (The White Ribbon). Of the three, Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last May, stands out as the most important and accomplished work. It has swept the critics awards in the foreign-language film category, and is emerging as a leading Oscar contender. High Life, by Winnipeg writer-director Gary Yates, is inconsequential, but it’s a blast. Witty, well-acted and full of surprises, its a Canadian answer to the Coen brothers, with a Tarantino kick. And The Lovely Bones, a keenly anticipated drama from Peter Jackson, is a colossal disappointment.
The Lovely Bones
Following up his triumph with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, New Zealand director Peter Jackson—who I’ll always remember as the Hobbit-like creature who conducted LORT interviews in his bare feet in a Manhattan hotel room—scales more mature dramatic terrain with this adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel. While it’s a less ambitious project than mobilizing the massed armies of Middle Earth for Armageddon, The Lovely Bones still presents a steep challenge, and despite a couple of strong performances, the film painfully underscores Jackson’s limits as a filmmaker. Set in the 1970s, the story is a murder mystery in which the audience knows the identity of the killer from the outset. The victim, 14-year-old Susie Salmon, tries to influence events from the grave, or more precisely, from the threshold of heaven, as her family remains haunted by the unsolved crime, unable to bury the past.
Saoirse Ronan, who was so effective as the young heroine of Atonement, is best thing about the movie: she has compelling radiance as as the murdered girl. And Stanley Tucci, who is unrecognizable in the role of her killer, George Harvey, is sufficiently creepy as the psychopath next door with a fetish for building doll houses. But the movie never finds a consistent tone. Jackson hurls himself into creating computer-graphic vistas of paradise, as we follow Susie through wedding-cake layers of the afterlife, as if the director himself would much rather spend his time chasing digital rainbows of pure fantasy than grapple with the finicky nuances of human psychology. The narrative back on earth—involving the bereaved Salmon family and her father’s dogged, half-crazed search for the killer—is pedestrian, clunky and contrived. Continue…
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Huppert hands Haneke the Palme d'Or
By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 11:04 PM - 0 Comments
A scene from Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon'
The verdict is in. The White Ribbon won the Palme d’Or and jury president Isabelle Huppert handed the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke personally. That’s not usually done. In the odd rigmarole of the Cannes awards ceremony, the jury president usually announces the decision, but the award gets handed out by an attending celebrity. Apparently Huppert wanted to break tradition and give it Haneke directly, which seems to underscore the fact that she may have had a certain bias towards him in the jury’s deliberations: she was, after all, the star of Haneke’s 2001 film, The Piano Teacher. Set on the eve of the First World War, The White Ribbon is the story of German village beset by a contagion of mysterious crimes. Shot in black-and-white, it’s a strong drama, though not my favorite of the festival. (For my thoughts on it, go to a previous BDJ Unscreened entry, The German Question.) By awarding the Palme to The White Ribbon, the jury chose an uncommercial film with high-art ambition and moral gravity, relegating the most critically acclaimed film of the festival, A Prophet, the second-place Grand Jury Prize. It was handicapped, no doubt, by the fact that it’s a genre movie, a prison drama. Huppert’s jury certainly saw fit to award some of the most trangressive films in the competition. Best Director went to Brillante Mendoza for Kinatay, which features a graphic real-time rape and dismemberment of a woman named Madonna. Inexplicably, best screenplay went to Spring Fever, Chinese director Lou Ye’s soggy, underwritten drama about a long-suffering woman whose husband betrays her for a gay lover. And best actress went to Charlotte Gainsbourg for expanding the frontiers of brutal torture in Lars Von Trier’s outrageous Antichrist. Personally I would have given that prize to Katie Jarvis, the 17-year-old British newcomer who starred in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, which was my favorite film of the festival, and received a minor nod with an ex-aqueo jury prize, whatever that is. No one, however, could dispute the decison to award Best Actor to Christoph Waltz for his trilingual tour-de-force as a Nazi “Jew Hunter” in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Continue…
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The German Question
By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 8:26 PM - 0 Comments
A scene from Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon'
Playing catch-up, I’m posting a bunch of blogs today, most written on the flight home. The festival officially ends with the awards Sunday, but by now it’s effectively over, as all 20 features in competition have screened. Among the more high-minded entries, one of the favorites is The White Ribbon by Austrian director Michael Haneke. Set in a Protestant village in northern Germany on the eve of the First World War—and shot in forbidding black-and-white—it has the austere look and moral gravity of an Ingmar Bergman film. The village has become cursed by a contagion of strange and violent acts, beginning with the local doctor being thrown from his horse by a wire strung between two trees. A field of cabbage is chopped to bits. A retarded child is viciously mutilated. But there’s also systemic abuse in this corrupt domain. Children are beaten, a daughter is molested, a midwife abused. So we assume the mysterious crimes are acts of punishment. Various patriarchs—a baron, a steward, a pastor, and the doctor—emerge like suspects in a Germanic game of Clue. As with Haneke’s previous film, Caché (2007), this is a whodunit that’s never clearly resolved. But with the children somehow implicated in a cycle of abuse and retribution, Haneke appears to hinting that these are the future architects of the Third Reich.
Quentin Tarantino’s, Inglourious Basterds (sic) is radically different from The White Ribbon, but it’s another picture that doesn’t exactly make one predisposed to love Germans. Tarantino concocts a Jewish revenge fantasy that rewrites history, immolating Nazis in an eye-for-an-eye conflagration, a mini-Holocaust. At the film’s press conference, pulp filmmaker Eli Roth (Hostel), who plays one of the Tarantino’s avenging “basterds,” gleefully called it “kosher porn.” Although Tarantino’s fantasia exists in a world quite divorced from history, it makes flamboyantly explicit what is darkly implied in Haneke’s film—that the Nazis’ crimes are rooted in some sort of original sin.
