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Speaking of Movies - Richard Figge

Hugo

Out in time for the holidays is Martin Scorsese's wonderful and charming Hugo, based on Brian Selznick's hybrid graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, winner of both the Newberry and Caldecott Awards in 2008.

This is the first of Scorsese's films to be described as a movie for children-a big leap for a distinguished director whose films include such dark fare as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. It is also his first venture into 3-D.

Above all, it is an affectionate celebration of the film medium itself and one of its earliest creative pioneers. Don't let the label of children's film fool you: this is every bit as much a film for grownups who, like Scorsese himself, have maintained the capacity for wonder and enchantment that was their gift in childhood.

The Hugo of the title is a boy (played by Asa Butterfield) who lives in the hidden rooms above the Montparnasse train station in Paris in 1931, where he maintains the station's many and elaborate clocks. The boy's father (Jude Law), a watchmaker and mechanical wizard, was working on the restoration of a beautiful automaton retrieved from the oblivion of a museum attic. When the father dies, the boy is rescued from the prospect of an orphanage by his uncle (Ray Winstone) and placed among the clockworks of the train station. After the uncle disappears, Hugo continues the work on both the clocks and the automaton, keeping a low profile and avoiding the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), who seems to revel in sending strays to the orphanage.

Hugo's work brings an encounter with an old and forgotten film pioneer, Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), who is now reduced to running a toy and candy stall in the station. Hugo makes the acquaintance of Méliès's goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Moretz), and the two begin to make discoveries about the reticent and embittered old man's past. With the help of René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), a film historian who had assumed that Méliès was no longer alive, they begin a hopeful journey toward the rediscovery of a creative genius.

Much of the story of Méliès recounted here is true, and in a flashback we get to learn a great deal about his early work and production methods. The Tabard character was invented for the film and is based on film director René Clair and Paul Gilson, who rediscovered Méliès and helped bring about the recognition and honor he enjoyed during the last years of his life.

Oddly, some reviewers have complained that the film is divided between two stories, as if this were an oversight on someone's part. It starts out, we are told, as the story of Hugo and then becomes more and more the story of Méliès. But the two characters-the old man and the boy-are tied by numerous themes and motifs throughout the film. The boy has lost his father and is in quest for that lost and unresolved connection; the childless Méliès has been abandoned and forgotten by the medium to which he helped give birth. Both figures share a fascination with mechanical devices and their mysterious possibilities for an inventive and creative spirit.

The old man and the boy both feel incomplete, and slowly and through a difficult process they will discover their need, the one of the other. If both tend to see the world in terms of the mechanical, it is no surprise that machines provide their metaphors. In the air were the Machine Age esthetics of the early 20th century before they came to suggest dehumanization. At one point Hugo, searching for his purpose in life, says to Isabelle, "I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason."

Likewise, dreams provide a motif running through the film. Each in his own way, Hugo and Méliès are dreamers, and the movies themselves are described as a kind of dream.

Scorsese, who, with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, was part of the first generation of American filmmakers who grew up with the movies and went to film school, is steeped in the history of movies, and his love of early movies is reflected here in the worked-in clips from such films as the Lumière Brothers' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, Harold Lloyd's Safety Last, and Buster Keaton's The General that will also be paralleled in the action of the film. In a sense, Scorsese is himself the boy, in love with the magic, the craft, even the mechanics of making movies. This is his Cinema Paradiso, his love letter to the movies, going back to its beginnings, to Méliès and the overflowing of play and creative imagination that gave birth to the movies.

In a charming moment in the midst of this movie that knows about movies, Méliès says, "Happy endings exist only in films," and we have a sense that Scorsese is telling us with a kind smile, "Don't worry: remember, you're watching a movie."

Scorsese the director clearly loves all his various characters, and the actors help him capture his vision. Ben Kingsley is superb as Méliès, both as a young and an old man. Likewise, Helen McCrory is captivating as his still-beautiful wife, whom we also see as the young woman who appeared in so many of his films. Asa Butterfield, whom you may remember from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, was the perfect choice for Hugo, a rich mixture of innocence, pain, hope, and resourcefulness. Since I didn't see Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Hugo was my introduction to Chlöe Moretz, who was 13 when she made this film. Her Isabelle is smart, curious, adventurous, someone you would have wanted for a close and trusted friend when you were that age. Remember her name: she is already a lovely screen presence and a talent to follow.

Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Brüno) is comical with an underlying sadness as the Clouseau-esque Station Inspector who has his own sad history. Emily Mortimer is gentle and kind as the lovely flower girl he shyly loves. Christopher Lee, who is himself a big piece of movie history as the veteran of some 270 films, has a charming supporting role as Monsieur Labisse, a bookseller and friend of Isabelle. Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays René Tabard, president of the French Film Academy, makes his character a film historian after Scorsese's own heart and has even endowed him with Scorsese's heavy eyebrows in tribute to the director. Look, by the way, for Scorsese himself in a cameo part as an early 20th century photographer.

The film has been released in both 3-D and 2-D. See the 3-D version, by all means. The lighting and cinematography by Robert Richardson, assisted by 3-D stereographer Demetri Portelli and visual effects supervisor Rob Legato, create an unforgettable physical and emotional presence for the story that even includes the shimmering dust in the train station air.

Finally, watch carefully the footage from Méliès's Trip to the Moon, seen here with the original hand-colored frames and yet seen as it never has been before. A note of amazed gratitude to the genius at Lobster Films who realized the possibility offered by the fact that, beginning in 1902, Méliès shot his films with two cameras placed side by side-one for the European negative, one for distribution in America. The cameras were roughly the same distance apart as modern 3-D cameras, and by tracking down both negatives, it was possible to combine them into 3-D for the first time. Méliès would have been delighted.

12/19/20

rfigge@wooster.edu

The Ides of March, Albert Nobbs

In the opening scene of George Clooney's political thriller The Ides of March, a man sits down before a camera crew setting up to record a political statement. In flat tones, he recites the text of a stump speech, and gradually we realize he is a stand-in for the real candidate, who will appear in due time. Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) is a member of candidate Mike Morris's election team, helping develop strategies and dealing with the press. Complimented at one point on his huge talent, he says he would do anything for a cause so long as he really believed in it.

George Clooney, who directed and co-scripted, also plays the candidate in an Ohio presidential primary campaign. The film is not about the political issues, nor does it focus on conflicting party ideologies. As the title, taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, suggests, it is about background maneuvering and betrayals of ideals, colleagues, and self.

That political campaigning is a corrosively cynical business, inevitably involving compromise of principles, will come as no surprise to most, but the film, based on Beau Willimon's play Farragut North, is sharp, literate, and nicely plotted. Even more to the point, it features an A-list of outstanding performers that make it a compelling story. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Paul Zara, Stephen's boss, a cynical veteran of many political campaigns for whom loyalty is one of the few remaining values. Paul Giamatti shines in the dark as Tom Duffy, Zara's counterpart on the opposing team, a Machiavellian operator who tries to persuade the gifted Stephen to switch camps.

The fourth estate is not strongly represented in this film, but Marisa Tomei makes every line count as Ida Horowicz, a predatory reporter for the New York Times who frequently uses the word "friend" to label the tenuous status of someone who will supply her with confidential information; when a friend proves reluctant, her next step is blackmail. For Ida, it is all just a game anyway, so why take up moral attitudes? When Stephen tells her that he really believes in Mike Morris and what he stands for, she looks at him in disbelief and says, "Wow, you've really drunk the Kool-Aid, haven't you?"

A critical moment comes when it is learned that Senator Thompson of North Carolina (Jeffrey Wright), an early presidential aspirant who has now dropped out, can deliver a block of delegates that will put either candidate over the top to win the nomination. Thompson, whom Morris despises, is prepared to deliver them to whichever candidate promises him the office of Secretary of State.

In the fast-paced, adrenaline-charged atmosphere of a campaign, caution and good judgment can go astray, and Stephen becomes involved with a staff volunteer (Evan Rachel Wood) and by chance picks up information that could sink Morris's campaign.

Morris may be the candidate (and Clooney endows him with wit and charisma), but this is Stephen's story, and his choices and interactions with the other characters provide the chief dramatic arc of the film. As demonstrated in his other current film Drive, Gosling has the capacity to suggest dangerous, explosive power under a placid surface.

The final shot of the film is a variation of the first. After the harrowing experiences of the later sequences, Stephen once again takes a seat before the cameras. He looks straight into the camera for an uncomfortably long moment before the final fade, leaving us to conjecture what the actual conclusion and costs of his story will be.

Heads-up: I had the good fortune while in California this month to attend the opening of the Mill Valley Film Festival. The first film shown was Rodrigo García's Albert Nobbs. If you have read anything about it, I won't be giving anything away when I tell you it is the story of a woman who passes herself off as a man in order to serve as a waiter in a posh Dublin hotel in the late 19th century.

The film is based on a story by the Irish writer George Moore. The stage version by Gordon Steel became a triumph for Glenn Close in the title role in 1982. The present production is the culmination of fifteen years' work to bring it to the screen. Glenn Close is producer and co-author of the screenplay, and her performance is already being talked about in connection with this year's Oscars.

Bizarre as the premise of the story may sound, it is firmly grounded in the society of its time. A woman in that time and place had no rights whatever, and if she wasn't a wife or a servant, she might end up in the street or the poorhouse.

After a series of traumatic events in her early teens, Albert, in desperation, hits upon the idea of dressing as a man and seeking employment as a waiter. The choice of waiter is ideal for Albert, at least for the purposes of the story. In the society of that day, servants were meant to be essentially invisible, and Albert all but disappears.

In a telling scene during a fancy dress ball at the hotel, Dr. Holloran (Brendon Gleeson) asks Nobbs, "Why aren't you in fancy dress?" Nobbs replies, "I am a waiter," and Holloran observes, "And I am a doctor. We are both disguised as ourselves."

Everyone, it seems, is playing a role, and to some extent gets lost behind the mask. The repressed Alfred is a fine waiter, but really has no idea who she is. She has no idea about love or intimacy or connectedness. But a series of events begins to change this, and the film becomes the story of a kind of awakening of this frightened, withdrawn person, who begins to dream of another kind of life, one beyond the isolation of her present, that could be shared and fulfilling.

Glenn Close's performance in this leisurely paced, closely observed story is at once understated and deeply moving. The capacity audience at the festival paid it the tribute of quiet, rapt attention. There are also moments of hilarity and fun in the interactions of the characters in a cast that includes the talents of Brendon Gleeson, Mia Wasikowska as a housemaid, Aaron Johnson as her lover Joe, Pauline Collins as Mrs. Baker, the hotel's proprietor, and a vibrant turn by Janet McTeer as a painter with secrets of her own.

The performances are beautifully enhanced by the art direction of Susie Cullen and cinematography by the versatile Michael McDonough (Winter's Bone, Higher Ground) that contribute to the meticulously evoked period atmosphere. The film should be in release late this year and is worth noting in your calendar. I look forward to seeing it again.

10/21/11

rfigge@wooster.edu

* * *

Higher Ground
Richard Figge

Vera Farmiga, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance in 2009's Up in the Air, makes her directorial debut with Higher Ground. She also plays the lead role. The film, written by Carolyn Briggs and Tim Metcalfe based on Briggs's memoir This Dark World, follows the faith journey of Corinne Walker, a woman who grows up in a conservative church community and comes to struggle with doubt, belief, and authority. She comes from a chaotic family with a troubled and tartish mother, a sometimes violent father, and a boy-obsessed older sister.

The film opens with a group of children in a summer vacation bible school as the pastor asks them to close their eyes and raise their hand if they are willing to commit themselves to Jesus. Corinne (nicely played as a girl by McKenzie Turner) is one of about three who do so, and she is told this is the most important day of her life.

A quiet and bookish teenager (played by Farmiga's younger sister Taissa), Corinne falls in love with Ethan, an aspiring and not very talented rock musician. It is the early 1960s, and when Corinne becomes pregnant, they marry. Seeking order and stability in their lives, Corinne and her husband Ethan (Josh Leonard) fully commit to an evangelical church when it appears that their infant child has miraculously been saved from drowning. Corinne is joyous in her faith and in her faith community. Her best friend in this church is the vibrantly alive and sensuous Annika (Dagmara Dominczyk), with whom she comfortably shares talk about everything from faith to sex.

Among Corinne's gifts is a restless intelligence that seeks answers beyond the comforting teachings she is offered. She reads widely and thoughtfully, and while her husband becomes more and more devout, she grows increasingly uncomfortable as she watches other members of her community simply repeating easy interpretations of events.

When Corinne, wrestling with her doubts and ideas about faith, speaks honestly and openly at a gathering, she becomes an embarrassment to the others and is later taken aside by the pastor's wife to be told that women shouldn't be preaching-that is the domain of men.

Accepted doctrine substitutes for intelligent discussion, and when Corinne experiences difficulties in her marriage and despair over her friend Annika's life-threatening illness, a counselor tells her that she is being tempted by the devil and there are only two possibilities: being a faithful member of her church or "being outside with the dogs."

What price should Corinne be willing to pay to belong to this loving and supportive community?

She never simply abandons her faith. Indeed, she envies the convictions of her fellow congregants, and she calls on God to reveal himself to her, praying, "Draw near to me, Lord. Come on, where are you?"

It is easy enough to look here for a critique of fundamentalist churches. To the filmmakers' credit, the characters are presented not as caricatures and not without understanding (even if the Christian marriage counselor is a pretty chilling piece of work). The members of this church are at pains to do the right thing and to love one another; they are simply unwilling or unable to embrace doubt as a part of faith or to veer from a narrow and highly literal interpretation of Scripture. At no point does director Farmiga make them figures of fun or ridicule.

At the same time, the film can be seen as a reflection on the workings and demands of any exclusive community and the ways it can feel threatened by insistent questioning. At what point does "tradition" mean a willingness not to ask questions?

Corinne's unwillingness to accept the unquestioning faith of her community, her insistence on wrestling with her doubts, puts her on the outs with a sometimes fearful and inward-turning evangelical community, but her honesty and integrity are presented here with sympathy and admiration. Vera Farmiga has said, "Doubt is the middle position between knowledge and ignorance. It encompasses cynicism but also genuine questioning." Affirming the role of doubt, theologian Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking, puts it both humorously and memorably: "Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving."

At a time when the loudest public voices on religion seem to come from complacent atheists and rock-ribbed fundamentalists, each group defined largely by its scorn for the other, this film about a believer's doubt is most welcome. With compassion for all, Farmiga follows Corinne's difficult, unfinished faith journey with honesty beyond neat resolutions. Hollywood seldom makes so thoughtful or nuanced an effort when dealing with religion as we see here. Vera Farmiga, as actor and director, is a talent to rejoice in.

9/2011

rfigge@wooster.edu

The Films We Saw Last Summer
Richard Figge

I generally welcome the editor's summer hiatus. It's a season of blockbusters that don't much appeal to me: spectacular and violent computer-generated action films, movies and their sequels derived from comic books and video games. The studios are cashing in on school summer vacations and a young audience with plenty of time to fill. Films with a chance at Academy Award nominations tend to be held until late in the year.

It was a pleasant surprise this summer, then, to see a handful of films that were memorable and engaging. Let's look briefly at three of them.

Kathryn Stockett's bestselling 2009 novel The Help has been made into a movie directed by her friend Tate Taylor. The two co-authored the script. It wouldn't surprise me to see a couple of Oscar nominations for the acting in this film.

In the film, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan (Emma Stone), a young woman from a privileged background with ambitions to become a writer, has just graduated from college and returned to her home town of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. Angling to catch the attention of a New York editor, Skeeter hits upon a theme for a book that will tap into current experience and issues. Why not do a series of interviews with black maids working for wealthy white families, asking them to speak candidly of their experiences?

This scheme, initially undertaken to further Skeeter's career, asks a great deal of her subjects. The immediate background is reflected by the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Jackson in June of 1963, and the maids in this film live in a climate of fear.

But it is unfair to dismiss Skeeter as the confident white woman who sets out to use the black maids' stories to build her career. This is also a story of Skeeter's liberation from the deeply ingrained values of her family, class, and social circle. What started as a career move opens her eyes to conflicts she had always been trained to ignore.

With the promise of anonymity, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), the maid of one of Skeeter's close friends (Anna O'Reilly), is the first to consent to an interview, and soon she is joined by others in telling their stories. Aibileen, still grieving for the loss of her own son, has spent years as a nanny. We see her devotion to a white child largely ignored by the little girl's mother. Aibileen has given genuine love to the white children under her care, but she observes that these children, raised with so much love, still have a tendency to turn into their mothers when they grow up. As Skeeter learns from the maids' stories of humiliation and backbreaking work, she becomes increasingly angry and alienated from the complacent circle of her wealthy friends and their brittle gentility. She will also pursue the hidden reasons for her mother Charlotte's (Allison Janney) dismissal of Skeeter's beloved Nanny Constantine (Cicely Tyson).

The publication of the book occasions outrage, laughter, and a shifting of relationships, including a transforming confrontation between Skeeter and her mother.

As written, this may be Skeeter's story, and Emma Stone does a fine job in this pivotal role, but for me the film is memorable chiefly for the luminous performances of Viola Davis as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson, the feisty maid whose frankness gets her fired by the vicious, smiling Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), on whom Minny will take delicious revenge in the end. Davis and Spencer are deeply moving in performances whose gravity and warmth counter the script's occasional glibness and strain for uplift and resolution.

Cindy Meehl's Buck is a documentary about Buck Brannaman, the extraordinary horse trainer who was the inspiration for Nicholas Sparks's novel The Horse Whisperer and who served as consultant on the 1998 Robert Redford film version. I urge you to see it, whether you have any interest in horses or not, for the humanity it captures and celebrates. It is perhaps the best film on teaching I have ever seen, and I have recommended it to young teachers I know.

Brannaman was raised by an abusive, brutal father who trained him and his brother Bill to be trick rope artists, often performing blindfolded. They were regularly beaten, sometimes when they hadn't practiced enough, sometimes apparently for exercise. An unforgettable image comes from a clip from a television show where we see the father pushing the boys toward the camera, his right hand fiercely clamped on Buck's shoulder.

When a high school coach saw the welts on Buck's back and legs, the boy was taken from his father and placed in a foster home, where he had the good fortune to experience the unconditional love of a foster mother.

As a young cowboy, Buck saw legendary horse trainer Ray Hunt at work. Hunt and Tom Dorrance pioneered an approach to horse training that featured gentleness and empathy rather than force and intimidation. Buck saw exactly what had been missing in his own early upbringing, and it was a defining experience for him.

Buck developed a profound empathy for horses and an understanding of the ways in which horses "read" human gestures. This became the basis for his four-day horse training workshops that take him across the country. For Buck, the problems with horses are really the problems of the owners who are training them. "I'm not so much helping people with horse problems," he says, "as I am helping horses with people problems."

No horseman I, I was astonished to see the ease with which he calms nervous animals and gains their trust. They soon follow his lead, which is communicated in ways I could hardly see. On the other hand, even experienced horse owners seem to share that reaction.

In a world where we see so much childhood abuse replay itself in the next generation, it is inspiring to spend time with a man who transcended it and became a wise teacher and role model.

Woody Allen's wry and lovely Midnight in Paris begins with an affectionate visual celebration of Paris, accompanied by the plaintive clarinet of Sidney Bechet. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a successful Hollywood writer who churns out screenplays that he despises despite the fact that they earn him a great deal of money. In Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her tiresome, moneyed parents, Gil is enchanted by the city and dreams of producing a novel that will place him in the company of his literary idols of the 1920s. Inez would much rather be shopping at expensive Paris stores.

Walking alone through Paris at night, Gil is surprised when an antique sedan full of happy revelers pulls up and Gil is invited to join them. They take him to a nightspot where everyone is wearing evening clothes and having a grand time. It slowly dawns on him that a couple named Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are not just a coincidence but the real thing, and that really is Cole Porter at the piano playing "Let's Fall in Love." In the course of the evening he will meet young Ernest Hemingway (a fine turn by Corey Stoll) who talks to him about writing and recommends that Gil show his manuscript (about a man who runs a nostalgia shop) to Gertrude Stein. And the next night the car picks him up again and he is taken to the salon of Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), where he also meets and falls for a lovely young woman named Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Walking on a 1920s Paris street with Adriana, he is surprised to learn that she finds this Paris boring, nothing like the gay days of the Belle Époque 1890s. The present, it seems, is never so generous, joyful, or fulfilling as some previous age that we long for but haven't experienced for ourselves.

Owen Wilson plays Gil with a sweetness and sincerity that we fear will be lost if he yields to the expectations of his increasingly frosty fiancée and her parents. He may be deluded in his longing for the Paris of the Lost Generation, but Woody Allen, as director and screenwriter, treats him with affection and takes us along on a very loving recreation of that time and place. (What fun Allen must have had in writing such dialogue for Hemingway as the following: "Yes. It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that's what war does to men. And there's nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it's not only noble but brave." Hemingway as Gil would surely have imagined him.)

The story, beautifully photographed by Darius Kondzhi, has an open, generous resolution. Woody Allen is always surprising and presents here one of his most charming and satisfying films.

8/20/11

rfigge@wooster.edu

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