"Duplicity" Remixes Business with Pleasure

Duplicity *** 1/2

The latest entry in the double-crossing cons-in-love sweepstakes opens perfectly. An altercation between two corporate titans (Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson) unfolds in ultra-slow motion and in silence; their mano-a-mano fight sets up the film’s action deftly without any exposition and without even telling us who the combatants are.

It hardly matters. These bitter business rivals are the reason our stars (Julia Roberts and Clive Owen) are running their tangled schemes. Owen—whose suave sexuality should have made him the current James Bond in place of that charmless Vladimir Putin lookalike Daniel Craig—and Roberts play corporate spies who may or may not be in love with one another and may or may not be playing on the same team.

The justly praised script (by writer/director Tony Gilroy) is handled with skill by Owen and Roberts, who sparred just as nimbly but much more viciously in Closer. Here, they show off their comic chops and generate some heat during their intermittent encounters in sumptuous hotel rooms in Dubai London, Rome, and Miami.

The atmosphere—in and out of the bedroom—is all about who’s conning who, and the plot twists are fresh and fun.

However, our current real-life flurry of corporate bad behavior makes it difficult to summon much sympathy for either side in the corporate war. And when we finally learn the secret they’re fighting over, it’s hard not to wish that something more socially important was at stake. But this is no Michael Clayton.

Viewers who insist on knowing precisely why the double-crosses are coming thick and fast, or on following each curve of the plot’s many twists and turns, may leave frustrated.

But for those for whom an invigorating ride is enough, Duplicity is honest entertainment.

JAM TO NOWHERE

UMPHREY’S McGEE
Mantis
Sci Fidelty 1117

Everybody wants to jump on the Grateful Dead “jam band” wagon, but the term is losing coherence. It used to mean spontaneous freeform jazz-like explorations of melodic themes; now it’s slapped onto any meandering musical breakout of indeterminate shape. The latest case in point is Mantis. Umphrey’s McGee can astonish, particularly with chirpy harmonies drenched in instrumental atmosphere evocative of The Beatles. Check out “Made to Measure” and “Cemetery Walk.” But then there’s stuff like “1348 in which the band assumes a Black Sabbath-like metal band persona. Fair enough, but the attempt to merge the two is a force fit. One of my students found the twelve-minute title track “epic,” but to my ears it’s more like three different songs, not so much of a suite as a smashed musical plate in need of thematic glue. Mantis has fabulous moments, but there’s too much jam and not enough bready structure to contain it.

"Wendy and Lucy": A Woman and Her Dog, or Just a Dog?

Wendy and Lucy **
For a film whose tag line is “On the long road, friendship is everything,” there’s precious little friendship on offer in Wendy and Lucy. Friendship, to the best of my recollection, involves emotion, and interaction, and, um, people.

Michelle Williams stars as Wendy, a young woman on the road to Alaska in search of work. And stars is definitely the right word, as she’s practically the only human in the film with a speaking role. The other lead is Lucy, her beloved mutt. But because much of the film revolves around what happens when the two get separated, Williams must carry the entire movie on her own narrow shoulders.

Williams was brave and moving in Brokeback Mountain, conveying volumes with a few words and glances. Too bad she doesn’t have the same impact here, when the camera is on her nearly every moment of the film. She ultimately draws our sympathy, but not our interest

The problem isn’t Williams’ performance really, it’s the plot. Too little happens in this film, and it happens much too slowly. Maybe a director who knows how to embrace minimalism (Jim Jarmusch comes to mind) could have made this riveting, but director Kelly Reichart (who also cowrote the screenplay) doesn’t have his touch. The glacially-paced “action” covers several days of Wendy’s life, and seems to unspool in real time.

To make matters worse, there is little dialogue and even fewer clues to who Wendy is and why she’s on the road (Is she a drifter by choice? running away from trouble? desperate for work?) So without information, dialogue, or even a voiceover to ground the what action there is, we really don’t care as much as we should whether Wendy’s beat-up Honda Accord gets fixed, whether she is reunited with Lucy, or whether she ever gets to Alaska. And that indifference turns out to be a good thing, since the film ends abruptly with many basic questions still unanswered.

Despite a nomination for best feature from the Independent Spirit Awards, Wendy and Lucy turns out not only to be the story of a woman and her dog, but also something of a “dog”
itself.—P.B.

HARD EDGED BEAUTY

David Mallett is a lot like Maine, his home and muse—a force that can astonish you with a hard-edged beauty. Call it sentiment without sentimentality. As Mallett demonstrated before a half full house at the Iron Horse Music Hall on Sunday night, he knows that life deals as many hard knocks as nostrums.

At age 58 there are a lot of miles on Mallett’s voice but it’s still as warm and inviting as a wood fire on a cold night, even if it can’t always scale every peak and valley. Mallett’s guitar work was filled with dazzling cross picking and the timing between he and stand-up bass player Michael Burd was impeccable. The latter comments are all the more remarkable considering that just a month ago Mallett was still in rehab for rotator cuff surgery and couldn’t lift his arm above his waist.

Mallett sang 25 songs, mostly from his backlist, though a few less familiar songs unfurled, including one written for his daughter; “North Meets South,” his take on President Obama’s inauguration; and a spoken word reading from The Fable True, stories from Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods. If you never thought a description of trout could be beautiful, listen and learn.

David Mallett has earned his reputation as one of the finest songwriters of his generation. “Fire,” which he played just before his double encore, is a veritable template on how to transform a small tragedy into an epic, and “Inches and Miles”—the evening’s closing song—tells you all you need to know about a doomed relationship in three finely crafted verses. Along the way Mallett spun a host of other bittersweet tales—“Living on the Edge” cast a harsh light on the Ship of State by spotlighting a small town’s human fodder for battles from the Civil War on; “The Road Goes on Forever” raised the ghost of the youthful lover whose memory lingers; and “My Old Man” did the same for his departed father.

In “Phil Brown,” a personal favorite, Mallett told the tale of a down-at-the-heels painter who was a boyhood inspiration. He sang, “He was never much for roses/He’d sooner paint the thorns/’Cause he found a keener beauty there/That no one else could see.” It’s tempting to think that David Mallett has become Phil Brown.—L.V.

And Now for Something Completely Different

SA DINGDING
Alive
Wrase Records

Looking for something really different? Alive may not be the best pop album of last year, but it’s got to be the coolest. Twenty-five-year-old Sa Dingding of China brings Sanskrit, Mandarin, Mongolian, and Tibetan song into the age of electronica and sweaty dance floors. It’s the sort of album where high-pitched vocals slice through synthesizers, bamboo flutes battle electric bass, Asian gongs and Zildjian cymbals crash, and Chinese lutes sound as if Jimi Hendrix visited Beijing. Dingding often uses controlled quavers, chants, and voice modulation as counterpoint amidst the instrumental storm. Her unhurried pacing and penchant for building drama humbles lesser Western pop stars. The very idea of making Sanskrit prayer into pop is so audacious that some reviewers have compared Dingding to Bjork, but her goal is to build global bridges not push creative envelops. She’s also been dubbed a “psychedelic Bodhisattva,” a handle that fits much better.

Note to Obama: Just Say No to the Massachusetts Health Care Model

A short story: I need what should be a minor medical procedure, except that I have an HMO and I live in Massachusetts. The details aren’t important, but the gist is that I could have a simple 20-minute operation done in my doctor’s office at minimal risk of side effects. My HMO, Tufts—a company whose perfidy deserves to be named—will authorize the surgery, but they won’t reimburse my doctor for rental of the equipment he needs. They will, however, allow him to perform a more invasive surgery with a much higher risk of infection in a hospital setting using antiquated equipment. And here’s the kicker—the old procedure is not only riskier, it’s more expensive.

Enough woe is me. Anyone with an IQ above that of a potted fern knows that the American health care system is broken. President Obama certainly knows this, but he’s gazing in the wrong direction for Rx. The Massachusetts health care system—which requires all residents to purchase private insurance—has been touted as a fix for America’s health care woes. What a farce! If you’ve not noticed that Massachusetts leads the nation in improved health care or driving down costs it’s because it hasn’t happened. And it won’t because the problem is the “private” part of the equation.

Can we please grow up and stop pretending? Health care will not be fixed by private insurers—ever. All of them are just like Tufts—they tout wellness programs and low-cost premium care, but private health insurers don’t give a sqwanker’s farley about making you better or preventing illness. They are for-profit companies who invest your insurance premiums in the stock market. Now that the market has tanked, their focus has shifted to doing what Tufts did: trying to dissuade policy holders from using their benefits. It’s not that Tufts wants me to have one procedure over another; they want me to have none at all. In their ideal world I’ll get so angry that when my employer’s fiscal year ends I’ll dump them and let their competitor Blue Cross, which does pay for the procedure, pick up the tab. (The only good thing about MA law is that Blue Cross can’t refuse me.)

That’s probably what will happen; on July 1 I’ll become a Blue Cross member. But this solves nothing. At some point in the future the wheel will turn and I’ll be mad at Blue Cross and bolt back to Tufts. And someday I’ll be on Medicare, probably with a plethora of unfixed ailments that—like a building suffering from deferred maintenance—have deteriorated from cheap, easy-to-fix problems to expensive, complicated ones.

We could parse medical care until Haley’s Comet fizzles out, but it comes back to the same thing. If all we care about is enriching private insurers, end the sturm und drang of health care debate and leave everything exactly as it is. If we really want to fix health care, all of the private insurers must go: Tufts, Blue Cross, Aetna, Kaiser… the whole lot of them. Enough nonsense—breathe deeply and repeat this mantra: single-payer health care, single-payer health care, single payer health care …. And while we’re at it, mandatory lobotomies for all the idiots who try to scare you into opposing single-payer health care. They are Bernie Madoffs in medical drag.--LV

Who's at the Head of “The Class”?

The classroom—it’s a place we all know intimately from our own school days, but how little most of us see of it once we graduate. The new French docudrama The Class, based on real-life teacher François Bégaudeau’s novel, takes us inside a multiracial classroom in Paris throughout one academic year. Bégaudeau, who wrote the screenplay, also stars, along with Parisian teens. And despite the title, the film’s focus is really all about the teacher, not the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in his care.

One of the veteran teachers runs down François’ class roster, noting after each student's name, “Good. Not good. Very good. Oh, not good at all…” And the teacher is similarly mercurial.

This isn’t the first time François has been at the head of his inner-city class, but he still hasn’t figured out how to control the students. They’re not only high-spirited and rowdy, they’re downright insolent to him and vicious with one another. They have his number, and they all know it.

François starts out well, encouraging responses, praising good work, and answering questions about the coursework and everything else with the patience of a saint. But inevitably the troublemakers surface and quickly sidetrack him from the joys of poetry or the imperfect subjunctive. Soon, they’re questioning his sexual preference, dissing one another’s racial and ethnic backgrounds, sullenly ignoring their homework, and even directly refusing to participate in class.

Is all this realistic? I haven’t been in a high-school classroom for more than thirty years, so I asked the lone teenager in the group with whom I viewed the film. He declared the classroom atmosphere “just like my old school,” one he assured me that he’d been happy to leave.

François tries many tricks to impose discipline and gain students’ trust, and he genuinely cares about his students and wants them to learn. He deals respectfully and tirelessly with parents from a variety of nations and kids with a wide range of motivation and intelligence. But he’s also only human, and when he finally blows his top, the repercussions aren’t pretty.

Unlike most previous classroom films—from To Sir, with Love and Up the Down Staircase to Stand and Deliver and Fast Times at Ridgemont High—the dialogue here feels genuine, and the students individuals, not just stock types. Director Laurent Cantet deserves high marks for balancing the kids’ and teacher’s points of view, and for capturing the nuances that reveal students’ inner selves behind their classroom façade.

The Class’s artistry brought it a slew of awards both here and in Europe. It was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar, and became the first French film since 1987 to take home the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival.

Experienced classroom teachers with whom I saw the film saw François as a well-meaning but failed instructor. One even said he should have been removed from the classroom for inappropriate behavior. Those who hadn’t taught themselves largely viewed François as struggling bravely and for the most part successfully in an almost impossibly tough situation. But although viewers were sharply divided over whether the teacher deserved a passing or failing grade, as filmmaking, The Class rates a solid “A.”—P.B.