If Upstream Color were the
future of independent cinema, as some have suggested, then the American art house would be doomed indeed. For starters, the movie is both too ambitious
and incoherent. An interpretive
sci-fi romance about a young woman (Amy Seimetz) who gets preyed upon by a botanist-conman-hypnotist (Thiago Martins) and then falls in love with a lonely divorcee (played
by director Shane Carruth), the film’s two storylines never exactly sync-up—at
least not satisfactorily. There’s also an evil pig farmer lurking about controlling everybody, in case you were
wondering. I ascertained that much
from a single viewing. A second
might uncover more, though that would mean sitting through Upstream Color again! No thank you. I’ll admit, however, that the first thirty minutes are nearly
good enough to justify it. Straightaway,
the aforementioned huckster breeds mind control larva, then kidnaps the
heroine, temporarily lobotomizes her, and orders she sign over her life savings. The director dispels traditional dialogue
or exposition and instead allows the crime’s peculiar details to tell the story. The thief convinces his victim that she
must earn sips of water (“The greatest thing you’ve ever tasted”). The parasites grow and slither beneath
her flesh. Both disturbing and
creative, the setup is fascinating and the promise of coming explanations keeps
you in suspense. Don’t hold your
breath.
In film school they say: the
second act is where your movie goes to die. And that’s precisely where Upstream Color settles in for its
long and laborious death rattle. While
recovering from her amnesic episode, the woman, Kris, is approached by nice-guy
Jeff, who rides the same train. Although
it’s difficult to believe this movie actually had a script (I imagine there
were actors and a camera crew, but little planning beyond notes on napkins),
the director does provide some characterization. Kris lays her history of mental illness out on the table, literally
showcasing her assortment of prescriptions. Jeff, in reply, talks candidly about his divorce due to
substance abuse (somehow his wife didn’t realize she’d married a junkie). The relationship develops sweetly and
listlessly and the movie never seems interested in connecting back to its
prologue. To shroud the narrative
weaknesses, there’s plenty of vacuous “style”. The cinematography is wan and naturalistic with perpetual
soft-focus suitable perhaps for Kris’s initial delirium, though hardly for the
lovers’ romantic melancholy. The
editing is staccato pseudo-impressionism, like falling dominoes of match cuts,
jump cuts, and geographical ellipses.
While I often applaud audio-visual experimentation, and can usually
forgive leaps in rhyme or reason, it’s the film’s shallow pretention and
self-consciousness that bugged me.
Then of course, there’s the diabolical pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig). Nicknamed the Sampler, due to his obsession with Foley recording, the farmer, we suspect, was the puppet master behind Kris’s abduction. Part abstract entity and part Peeping Tom, the Sampler acts as omnipresent observer, watching human beings like they’re livestock worthy of study and dissection. Sometimes he’s imperceptible, notably in a tangential subplot where a troubled married couple argues while he snoops from the corner. The film makes frequent juxtapositions between pigs and people, mostly through associative editing and symbolism. Are the two rebellious porkers in the pen supposed to be Kris and Jeff? Who knows? Who cares? Carruth clearly has something to say about the nature of man and beast. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what that is. The parallel stories of the Sampler and the lovers eventually intersect. I won’t explain how or why (even if I could), but I will say that by the time they finally dovetail, the director can’t scramble the shards into anything adequately cohesive or satisfying. For the record, Upstream Color’s greatest asset, I believe, besides its squandered beginning, is the lead performance. With a face like young Jennifer Jason Leigh and a delicate voice like Natalie Portman, the auspicious Seimetz could be worth revisiting. The rest is slop for the hogs.
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Speaking of slop. Writer/director Terrence Malick indulges
his worst appetites in To the Wonder.
Our most patient filmmaker-philosopher-poet, Malick once waited twenty
years between projects (1978’s Days of Heaven and 1998’s The Thin Red Line). To the Wonder arrives a comparatively
meager two years after his groundbreaking opus, The Tree of Life, and although
similar in tone and style, the former feels as premature as the latter felt
millennially evolved. Malick’s
drama is about one man’s erratic relationships with two beautiful women. It shares elements with his previous
works—gorgeous cinematography, minimalist story, whispered narration (now in
French and Spanish!) and excessive metaphysical pondering—but none of their (ahem) wonder. His prior pieces each utilized strong dramatic/historical
foundations (mass murder, turn-of-the-century labor, war, the discovery of
America, and the Big Bang) to anchor all the ontological meditating. Set in the present and not around
a momentous event, To the Wonder has little ballast for its freeform meandering. The film premiered to cold reception at
Cannes last year, and while I echo the disappointment, I can’t call To the
Wonder completely dull. Malick’s loose
companion to The Tree of Life may be a chore to watch yet it’s still spottily
profound.
In France, love grows
between Neil (Ben Affleck), an American tourist, and Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a
lovely Parisian. The country’s
stony architecture and overcast skies offer Malick the slick, monochromatic
surfaces that his camera adores. The
transition from Europe’s gothic facades and cobblestones to Oklahoma’s
sagebrush plains occurs in a single cut.
Neil brings Marina and her daughter home with him as souvenirs. “Everything is beautiful here,” muses the
child when discovering the cereal aisle at Costco. The honeymoon optimism fades and from the darkness emerge
colder feelings of resentment and misery.
The community priest (Javier Bardem)—a wandering sage who frequents
ramshackle neighborhoods—offers his guidance. Christianity is the connective tissue of Old and New World
values. For reasons I shouldn’t
divulge, Neil rekindles an old flame (Rachel McAdams), the down-home country-girl
to Marina’s exotic outsider. Throughout
To the Wonder, the filmmaker’s usually transcendent and instinctual lyricism comes
deprived of poetic power. All his
tried-and-true strategies—collage editing, observant dolly moves, and enough
nature photography to provide a decade’s worth of calendar art—seldom achieve
the emotional and spiritual vastness that distinguishes his finest pictures. To the Wonder often plays like
imitative I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Malick!
Still, the director manages to expand on his favorite ideas anyhow (God’s presence/absence, humanity’s place in the natural world, lost innocence, etc.). On further reflection, I recalled that Kurylenko’s performance evoked a doe, some other graceful creature, or the spiritual sister of both Jessica Chastain’s ethereal mother in The Tree of Life and Q’orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas in The New World. In addition, casting Hollywood’s flattest leading man and then asking that he play even flatter must be part of Malick’s grand design. I believe Neil is intentionally stolid and banal. As portrayed by the tall and handsome but stiff and expressionless Affleck, Neil isn’t a man, but the director’s symbolic Man. Considering that he’s a construction surveyor who reshapes America’s frontier splendor into highways, stoplights, supermarkets, and drive-thru restaurants, it’s clear the central, vacillating romance is actually meant to express the ongoing incompatibility of God’s gentle grace and humanity’s destructive nature, a continuation of concepts investigated heavily in The Tree of Life. Were the movie intended as captivating drama, it would certainly fail miserably. Yet Malick’s failure is still a kind of success, for To the Wonder is really about the folly of Man.
- - - -
In contrast, The Place
Beyond The Pines succeeds often as entertainment yet rarely as intellectual
exercise. From sophomore director
Derek Cianfrance, Beyond The Pines is closely associated in both construction
and theme with his inaugural drama, Blue Valentine. That movie’s bold experiment was to crosscut a couple’s courtship
and divorce and exclude the marriage.
While novel, the conceit ultimately left an important element frustratingly
nebulous. Beyond The Pines is segmented
also, into three separate but correlated stories about fathers and sons. As in the earlier work, the movie depicts
young families and explores the tragedies that arise from their failure and
dysfunction. Personally, I
appreciate Cianfrance’s humanism more than his narrative gimmickry. After attempting trisections, I wonder
if he’ll quadrisect his next picture?
Beyond The Pines sometimes overreaches, falling into Alejandro Gonzalo
Inarritu’s (Babel, 21 Grams) phony universe of structural vanity, far-fetched plotting,
and easy epiphanies. The movie is
also long and uneven. The first
part starring Ryan Gosling is undoubtedly best. Even so, I was impressed with Cianfrance’s compassionate
direction and his desire to dismantle the masculine armor that commonly
alienates fathers from sons.
Fittingly, the movie opens
with a demonstration of foolhardy bravado. The Globe of Death highlights the traveling carnival where
daredevil Luke Glanton (Gosling) plies his trade. An attraction featuring motorcyclists enclosed in a metal
sphere who crisscross at high speed, the stunt is a nail-biting spectacle. It’s obvious, though, that the hotdog
heroics mask the character’s loneliness and despair. Introduced via extended tracking shot, he’s something of a
smalltime celebrity who genially scribbles autographs between cigarette
drags. In Drive, Gosling mostly
glowered through Steve McQueen’s toothpick, yet here, dyed platinum blond with
tattoos doodled on his arms and face, his performance shows nuance in its
mixture of vulnerability and hubris.
After discovering an infant son, Glanton turns motorcycle bandit to
support him. The film understands
the morally ambiguous reality that sometimes men do wicked things for honest
reasons. Additionally, Cianfrance
makes us painfully aware of the futility, even if Glanton is not. The child’s mother (Eva Mendes) has
long since moved on to another man.
As his world becomes a different sort of spherical deathtrap, it’s
devastating knowing that Glanton’s crimes are expressions of love for a child
who’s no longer his.
The story abruptly switches protagonists on two occasions. After Glanton, we meet the young father Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper). A patrolman, his recent fieldwork earns him many accolades, but also leaves him haunted by the associated violence. Once the king of romcom douche-bags, Cooper has proven to be a great dramatic actor as well. In one scene, Cross reluctantly confronts his PTSD, and Cooper, framed in tight close-up, intimates all the encompassing fear and guilt. Under the thumb of a Machiavellian patriarch (Harris Yulin), he becomes a political pawn within his department’s shady bureaucracy. When the movie transitions again to a couple of parentally misguided teenagers (Dane Dehaan and Emory Cohen), it becomes clear that, in this case, three narratives are one too many. If Dehaan effectively recalls the angry adolescent he played in Chronicle, Cohen evokes a refugee from The Jersey Shore. Alas, the concluding chapter lacks the excitement and complexity of its predecessors. Definitely over-ambitious, The Place Beyond The Pines is an emotionally charged drama that’s weakened by its wobbly structure. Still, the picture tenderly observes that decent men often become victims of uncontrollable circumstances. What’s most moving is how the director never withholds sympathy from his characters, be they fathers or sons.
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