starring Clint Eastwood and Bee Vang
written by Nick Schenk & directed by Clint Eastwood
Rated R for language throughout, and some violence.
84%

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is the last of a dying breed: a retired factory worker, recent widower, and veteran of the Korean War who is the lone white holdout in in a ghetto neighborhood now populated by Hmong immigrants. Walt is a cranky, unapologetic racist who values patriotism, responsibility, self-sufficiency, and an idea of manhood that has been out of fashion for decades. However, much to his disgust, he finds himself reluctantly involved in the lives of Thao (Vang) and Sue (Ahney Her), teenage siblings  who live next-door, after Thao attempts to steal his vintage Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. However, as Walt slowly develops a friendship with the pair and comes to grudgingly acknowledge that (some) non-whites are people too, it becomes clear that drastic measures may be required to convince the other gang members to leave the neighborhood in peace.

Gran Torino has one of the strongest opening acts of any film I have seen in the last year. In establishing its characters and their circumstances, it appears to have something very profound and meaningful to say about the things, large and small, that divide us as human beings and as inhabitants of a nation which claims unity as one of its defining characteristics. Certainly Walt is at times a very thinly-drawn, one-note character (though, for the purposes of the story, this isn’t nearly as significant as you might think), but this goes deeper than the bigotry of the film’s protagonist. Walt talks a big game, but when push comes to shove his personal morality proves to be more than skin deep (more on speech versus action in a moment).

Eastwood’s performance, although it does occasionally seem to rely overmuch on growls and grimaces, is a very good fit here. Vang’s performance is merely competent, but Ahney Her, as his sister, stands out as a strong presence, and more than a match for Walt’s grumpy posturing. Also worth noting is Brian Haley as Walt’s oldest son Mitch, struggles with his father for a number of reasons, but is unwilling to abandon the relationship completely.

What initially sucked me into the fabric of this movie, and ultimately left me deeply disappointed, was not Walt’s racist-with-a-heart-of-gold shtick, but his relationship with his own family. Rarely is the gap between generations illustrated with such heartbreaking bleakness. Walt’s cranky banter may be milked for laughs, but there is nothing funny about the way Walt and Mitch talk past each other even when they are obviously trying their hardest to reach out to one another. Similarly, while Walt’s prejudice towards everyone around him hogs center-stage, the more poignant elephant in the room is the needless division that exists all around him, both between ethnicities, i.e. whites and blacks, blacks and Hispanics, Hispanics and Asians, and within them, as with Thao, his family, and the Hmong teenagers in the local gang.

Unfortunately, this sort of insightful commentary never gets the attention that it should, and all too soon it is shuffled into the background. Meanwhile, the relationship between Walt and Thao drifts from mildly interesting into lazy cliche before settling on boringly predictable and, worst of all, maudlin. It is a criminal misuse of narrative potential and a shocking disservice to characters who deserved better. The dialogue soon suffers from this laziness as well, or perhaps I simply became unwilling to grant it the benefit of the doubt. In either case, it was laughably bad as often as it was intentionally humorous.

The film’s treatment of faith follows the same arc from fascinating to fizzled. One of the few “outside” figures is the local Catholic priest, Father Janovich (Christopher Carley). In fulfillment of a promise to Walt’s recently-deceased wife, Janovich pays regular visits to the house (much to the annoyance of Walt, who calls him “an overeducated 27-year old virgin”). Walt has very little use for God, and even less for the priest’s insistence that he attend confession. Their conversations add a valuable dimension to the story’s development, and once or twice seem to sneak to within a hairsbreadth of something genuinely explosive, but ultimately they come to nothing at all. Father Janovich is completely impotent when it comes to dealing with the problems that Walt and his neighbors face, and he fails to engineer a reconciliation between Walt and his sons, even when he is handed the key.

And this brings me to the question of how to treat Walt himself. Clearly we are meant to sympathize with him and approve of the change as he slowly comes to care for and respect his neighbors as friends and as people. I found myself disturbed, however, by the shallowness of the change and the movie’s apparent attitude towards Walt’s flaws. Even though he becomes friends with Thao and Sue, he never stops referring to them or others with racially-charged language. The slurs merely take on a more affectionate tone, as though he has become someone whose decent actions render his hateful speech irrelevant. This idea of “harmless” or “benign” racism strikes me as both foolish and subversive.

Gran Torino ends conventionally, with an overdone (though not unwelcome or untrue) message about violence that Eastwood delivered with greater artistry and power nearly two decades ago in Unforgiven. Most distressingly, the final scene (in which Eastwood sings a song he wrote himself) is such a spectacular misjudgment that it threatened to evaporate my remaining goodwill. It is not an awful film by any means, but it certainly fails to realize both the potential of that first half-hour, and of Eastwood’s obvious skill as both an actor and a director.

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starring David Strathairn, Ian Somerhalder, and Daniel Gillies
written & directed by Aaron J. Wiederspahn
Rated R for some language.
95%

Following the devastation of a personal tragedy, Finn (Strathairn), a mild English teacher, leaves his job and his family and begins peddling a set of encyclopedias door-to-door around town as he struggles to sort things out. “Life has become my second language,” he tells a friend sadly. Along the way he encounters several other broken people, including a single mother and a brooding young man. As the audience slowly learns about the event that led Finn and his various acquaintances to their present condition, he draws closer to the possibility of healing, both for himself and for his fellow sufferers.

The Sensation of Sight is an intense production that quietly commands undivided attention from its opening moments. It begins precisely as the title might lead one to expect, with a beautifully-framed, static shot that is held for about five minutes of near-silence while we take in every single detail of the scene. It is an invitation to the audience to exercise its own sensation of sight, in preparation for what is to follow. What is going on here? What are we meant to see? These questions are eventually answered, but as the characters reveal themselves these simple queries are replaced by much bigger questions about suffering and loss. These are difficult questions, and it is to this movie’s credit that it explores them without trying to supply them with easy answers.

Although the main story ostensibly revolve around Finn’s quest for meaning, the filmmakers clearly understand that in real life, every minor character in one story has a central role in another. In this case, that translates into several subplots populated by a wide variety of characters whose importance to Finn’s journey at any given moment is incidental to our interest in their personal stories. Certainly, everything comes together in the end, but organically and naturally, rather than in a neat or contrived way.

All of these “secondary” characters are hurting and isolated within their small pockets of grief, unable to really connect with the larger world and even seemingly unaware of each other. The performers who bring all of these characters to life are amazing here. Strathairn in particular has created (or perhaps I should say “inhabited”) an iconic character (with his eccentric outfit and mannerisms, and his little red wagon loaded with encyclopedias) who is somehow still a bit of an Everyman; a person who is flawed and broken but still searching for answers. Really, though, it is only his prominent role that leads me to single his work out from that of, for instance, Jane Adams or Scott Wilson: low-profile actors who do excellent work and are always a pleasure to watch.

There is a very strong unity of purpose powering this story. That sounds like an obvious sort of thing to say about a film, but in actual practice it is rare enough to be worthy of comment. The writing is firm and focused. The performances are nuanced and spot-on. The camera-work is simultaneously full of ethereal beauty and a concrete connection to place that is completely immersive. This internal harmony is key to the movie’s spiritual dimension, which is pervasive but not overt. I am hesitant to delve too deeply into this aspect of the film, despite my great appreciation of it, because it is so intimately connected with important second- and third-act plot revelations. Suffice to say that the film’s examination of sorrow, loss, and the search for answers should prove rewarding for any discerning viewer, whether or not they have ever experienced such pain themselves.

The Sensation of Sight is the sort of film that demands to be seen more than once; not because it didn’t make sense the first time, but because the experience becomes even richer and more meaningful with each successive viewing. Most movies diminish considerably with repeated viewings, and it is always a great pleasure to discover a film with the opposite quality.

Posted in Reviews

starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman
written by Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood, Richard Flanagan, and Baz Luhrmann & directed by Baz Luhrmann
Rated PG-13 for some violence, a scene of sensuality, and brief strong language.
62%

On the eve of World War II, Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman), a squeamish British society woman, travels to Darwin, Australia to command her absent husband to sell Faraway Downs, the struggling cattle operation he has been running there. She arrives just in time to find him murdered and the ranch threatened by the encroaching near-monopoly of King Carney (Bryan Brown). The machinations of Carney’s evil henchman, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), provoke Sarah into stubbornly determining to drive the cattle to Darwin and break Carney’s stranglehold on the army beef contract. To succeed, she must enlist the services of the aptly-named Drover (Jackman), a cattle drover who is Faraway Downs’ only hope of survival and a probable source of impending romance, and combat overwhelming prejudice against women and aborigines, as well as wartime hardships and looming air attacks by the Japanese.

Australia is a museum piece of a movie, showcasing a sort of filmmaking that had largely died out decades ago. Undeniably, this sort of filmmaking produced some of the great classics of American cinema, movies that we still watch and enjoy today. However, just as undeniably (at least in the case of Australia) employing that style today is jarringly outmoded. The real problem here is that Luhrmann has made a sprawling Hollywood epic not unlike, say, Gone With the Wind without seeming to know what makes that movie work. It isn’t the exotic beauty of the setting (largely played out in front of cardboard backdrops on a studio backlot), or even the pathos of the story (which is more frequently melodramatic than not), but the depth and personality of the characters.

The movie is sometimes uneven in the worst way, with some of the most jarring and confused cross-cutting I have ever witnessed. The entire introductory fifteen minutes or so are an increasingly cluttered jumble of frenetic activities, not unlike what Luhrmann did in Moulin Rouge. However, where that film’s bizarre and rapid-fire flirtation with sentiment and silliness somehow worked despite itself, the result here is just the opposite. Australia stumbles along a knife’s edge, operating just below the level of “passable” as often as not, and leaning on the use of dramatic slow-motion to exorbitant excess.

The most distracting problem is undoubtedly the use of obviously phony backdrops, which are so ubiquitous that one almost wonders if the film’s stars did any work on location. Rare indeed is the close-up that does not take place in front of a screen, and only the establishing long shots seem to integrate genuine Australian scenery. It’s not that so much of the setting of Australia is a construct, it’s that it is so obviously a construct, just like the painted backdrops of Tara which Vivian Leigh emoted in front of back in 1939.

The story is built around two standard-issue movie tropes: an easy condemnation of racial prejudice and a paint-by-numbers love story complicated by historical conflict. Race, in particular, is handled rather oddly by the film. The aboriginal characters possess the most depth of anyone, and the abuse they experience at the hands of the Australian whites is systematically exposed and condemned. How unfortunate, then, to find a stereotype as glaring as “Sing Song,” the cardboard cut-out China-man who (of course) drives the outfit’s chuck-wagon.  Seriously, what is with that name?

Furthermore, the way Australia fawns on goofy tribal mysticism is positively embarrassing. The bushman witch doctor King George is a ubiquitous presence in the movie, stalking the characters so closely that barely five minutes can go by without a shot of him standing solemnly on one leg and watching over the action from atop some handy bit of high ground or chanting as he dances around an enormous bonfire. His contributions, though, are almost entirely limited to magically appearing and disappearing at will and casting significant looks about when something important is happening miles away.

What, then, of the love story? It is conventional, yes, and predictable, but that need not matter overmuch if the stars at least have chemistry together. And, to some extent, they do. Unfortunately, they don’t have a great deal of material to work with. Jackman’s character is so thinly drawn that he is named after his occupation, and he plays out the tired arc of the independent, loner cowboy who is reluctant to be tied to be tied down. Kidman’s character is a bit better off, but the transformation she undergoes, from high-strung, prissy aristocrat to rough-riding, hard-drinking range-rider is more than a little clunky.

Still, these two look positively complex next to the other white characters. There’s the slovenly, alcoholic accountant with the heart of gold, the corrupt, complacent lawman, the snooty, racist local society woman (lots of these), and the noble, upright military officer. Worst of all, though, is David Wenham’s villainous Fletcher, a thoroughly odious monster who can always be counted on to hit upon the most deplorable course of action imaginable. His crimes run the gamut from theft and sabotage to arson and murder. This paper-thin display of over-the-top evil is all the more unfortunate because it is unnecessary. The movie lets slip one or two details about Fletcher’s past which, if properly handled (or handled at all), might have transformed him into a genuine character.

Hard as it may be to believe, Australia is not entirely without charm or appeal. The beating heart that brings this lumbering beast of a film to life is Nullah, played brilliantly by 11-year old Brandon Walters in his debut performance. Nullah is the charismatic (if occasionally superfluous) narrator, bastard son of Neil Fletcher and grandson of King George. Half-aborigine and half-white, Nullah is caught between two worlds and he feels that he cannot truly belong to either. He quickly latches onto Lady Ashley (“Mrs. Boss”) when she arrives, unaware of the boy’s status as a persecuted outcast in Australian society. The mother-son bond that develops between the two is so clearly the emotional center of the movie, it makes the romance almost unnecessary. Walters is so charming, talented, and uplifting in the role that he essentially saved the film for me.

Australia‘s subtle attempts to evoke the sweeping enormity of epics like Gone With the Wind are joined by far less subtle invocations of another beloved film from 1939: The Wizard of Oz. Australians, of course, affectionately associate their homeland with the magical world of created by L. Frank Baum. The connection is reinforced unremittingly throughout the movie, most notably with repeated renditions of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (which actually somewhat relieve the audience from the intrusive melodrama of the score). Despite a noble struggle to associate itself with avowed classics, Australia falls a bit flat in nearly every way that matters, landing far short of the sort of timelessness that continues to draw new viewers to the films that it references some seventy years after they were made.

Posted in Reviews