Clouds of Sils Maria an Epic Fail

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014)

Directed by Olivier Assayas

CG Cinema/IFC Film (USA); 124 minutes, R (language, brief nudity, tedium)

* *

This film should have been about them!

Here’s what good about this German-French-Swiss production (in English): gorgeous views of the Swiss Alps and strong performances from Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. Here’s what’s bad: the script, the ham-handed metaphors, the (lack of) direction, any story line not involving Binoche and Stewart, and everything else about this numbingly obvious and boring film. This is a two-hour film that feels like a climb up the Matterhorn.

The setup is that glamorous actress Maria Enders (Binoche) is on her way to honor her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior. Twenty years earlier Wilhelm hurtled Maria to fame by casting her in Maloja Snake, a play and film in which a teenage girl named Sigrid fell in love with an older woman named Helena (who is eventually driven to suicide). Enders is now world-famous, though she’s a scattershot whose life is, by her choice, micromanaged by her devoted personal assistant Valentine (Stewart). As the two make their way toward Zurich to honor Melchior, word comes that he has died. There is also a rumor that Melchior wrote a sequel to Maloja Snake with Binoche in mind as Sigrid at age 40—the age at which Helena committed suicide. But, as it turns out, that’s not quite the case. Maria is told there were just “notes”—though we suspect that Melchior’s widow, Rosa, actually burned the script—and a hot young director named Klaus (Lars Eidinger) plans to direct a revival of the play with Enders this time playing Helena.

Thank me now, as I’ve just made more sense of the script than the film does. What follows is Maria’s retreat to Sils Maria, Melchior’s home deep in the Alps generously donated by Rosa, who wishes to flee Wilhelm’s memory. There, Maria and Val hole up so she can have an existential crisis over aging and decide whether she wants to do the play. Sils Maria is stunning and, as we learn, the Maloja Snake is a cloud formation that slithers through an Alpine valley and entombs the region in wispy shrouds. It is one of the film’s obvious metaphors, representing the inexorable sweep of time, Maria’s clouded judgment, and Maria’s inability to see the potential for another kind of beauty when the postcard panoramas (her youthful visage) fade. Even more, she cannot see that Val is deeply in love with her. Get it? The play within the play…. Nor can she appreciate Val’s attempts to bring her up to date; Maria finds social media, tabloid sensationalism, and new concepts in how to present plays and movies to be shallow. She’s absolutely oblivious to the charms of Jo Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz), whom Klaus wishes to cast as the new Sigrid. What Val sees as freshness and intensity, Maria sees as a boorish bad girl who confuses F-bombs with complexity. (Ironically, that’s right—Moretz is only minimally competent in the film and has all the appeal of Lindsay Lohan in her train wreck phase.) Needless to say, Maria and Jo Ann will have a parting of the ways. Ooohhh—how profound! A play within a play within a play….  

If this sounds like a one-trick pony, it is. The film’s various subplots—Maria’s disdain for another actor, Jo Ann’s scandalous affair with a married man, Klaus’ attempt to articulate his “vision”—have less weight than the Sils Maria clouds. It’s hard to care about anything in this film except Maria/Val dynamic and, frankly, this film would have been much better as a lesbian love story rather than what it is: a series of rambles across the Alps that always end just short of the hike’s stated destination. I suppose it’s also intended to make us muse upon culture and the gap between sheen and substance, but by attempting to make that point through nothing but gauzy surfaces, Clouds of Sils Maria manages to fail on still another level. –Rob Weir

The Wailin' Jennys: Beauty Beyond Measure

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THE WAILIN' JENNYS

Bright Morning Star

Red House 234

* * * * *

The Wailin' Jennys is a great name for a country/folk trio. It's also deceptive, as these three "Jennys" (Nicky Mehta, Ruth Moody, Heather Masse) are angels, not outlaws like Waylon Jennings. In fact, they put me in mind of the voices dubbed onto the Sirens in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and I do not lightly compare anyone to a power trio like Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Alison Krauss. The Jennys most recent album, Bright Morning Star, was released in 2009 in Canada, but not in the U.S. until 2011 and it still hasn't gotten half the attention it deserves. This isn't just a pretty album; it's drop-to-you-knees-and-cry-your-eyes-out gorgeous.

The Jennys do everything right on this album. There is, first and foremost, the blend of three tone-perfect voices: Moody's soprano, Mehta's mezzo, and Masse's alto. Second, there is the aural mastery of the production of Mark Howard and David Travers-Smith, who place the vocals front and center and use instrumentation to generate atmosphere á la Daniel Lanois. They also do unusual things such as pairing acoustic guitar and flugel horn ("Across the Sea") or opening a song ("Storm Coming") with soulful vocals that become even more so when an electric organ rolls over the mix. They also effectively use drums in unexpected ways—mixed with banjo ("Bird Song")  or added as a  poignant punctuation mark to a breakup song ("All the Stars"). Need more convincing that this record is special? How about some fine writing? On "What Has Been Done," Mehta takes on alternative views of that theme: "Have your holy, I'll have mine/soil and birch and open sky/All our stories some day go/dust from air and earth from bone." Now add musical variation: an a capella take on an honest-to-goodness traditional (title track), a splash of Appalachia-meets-gospel ("Bird Song"), a song that comes off like something the Andrews Sisters might have done if dabbling in hula music ("Cherry Blossom Love"), and an album so thoughtful that it opens with a heart-wrenching regret song ("Swing Low Sail High") and ends on hopeful note ("Last Goodbye"). Call Bright Morning Star a shimmering mix of pop hooks, country sweetness, and harmonic perfection.  Rob Weir

Those within driving distance of Northampton, MA can catch the Jenny's in concert at the Calvin Theater on May 1. Call 800-THE-TICK or check www.nbotickets.com

Filth Fails as Black Comedy Despite McAvoy's Superb Peformance

FILTH  (2014)

Directed by Jon S. Baird

Lionsgate, 97 minutes, NR (crude humor, rough language, degradation)

* *

Don't believe the box hype!

Of all movie genres, black comedy is the hardest to get right. Err on the first half of the equation and the film is too dark for the humor to ring true; err on the second half and it's hard to muster the requisite seriousness. The Scottish film Filth flunks part one–its bleakness is so dark that even occasional sharp humor cuts like a murder knife.

The film is set in Edinburgh, but not the parts that tourists see. The film opens with the fatal gang stomping of a Japanese man in an underground station. There is a witness. Cut to the local precinct, which is staffed by a band of detectives themselves just one step—make it a half step—removed from thuggery. The station is ineptly commanded by Detective Chief Inspector Gus Bain (John Sessions), a bumbling fool who longs to write film screenplays and is just riding out his days until retirement by delegating everything. Luckily for Bain, his precinct is filled with Detective Sergeants (DS) angling for promotion to Detective Inspector  (DI). Enter our anti-hero, DS Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy). "Robbie" is easily the best cop of the lot–when he's in the zone, which was years ago. Bain hands Robbie the murder case—just about as bad a decision as he could make, as Roberston embodies the filth of the movie's title. He has, to use an American expression, lost it—his wife, his kid, a younger brother, and his sanity. He is seriously bipolar, a boozer, a cokehead, a sex addict, and an amoral lowlife. The only thing that keeps him going is his intellect, which he directs toward "the games," a perverted plan to undermine his half dozen rivals for the DI position by feigning friendship and bringing them down to his level. Along the way he also seeks to humiliate an influential and wealthy Mason lodge brother, Clifford Blades (Eddie Marsan), and his wife, Bunty (Shirley Henderson). And this is just the tip of the iceberg of Robbie's secret problems.

Filth has some genuinely funny moments and searing lines. Alas, it's only McAvoy's superb performance that keeps the film from sinking under its namesake slime. McAvoy is a gifted actor—the sort who commands us to watch even when he's disgusting. But, in the end, it just boils down to whether even McAvoy can carry us past endless scenes of vomiting, male chauvinism, self-destruction, hooliganism, objectification, and generalized inhumanity. Nope–the film is too black to carry the comedy. We get a zany cameo from James Broadbent as Dr. Rossi, Robbie's drug-dispensing doctor, but his cartoony interludes feel as if someone just switched the channel to a random Dr. Who episode. These radical shifts of tone serve mainly to highlight Robbie's misanthropy to the point where we don't believe the occasional glimmers of decency we're supposed to see. Enter Mary (Joanne Froggart, Anna from Downton Abbey) as a bereaved widow who thinks Robbie might be a kind man. She's sweet, but her screen time is just another unconvincing tonal shift.

I watched this film to the end mostly because I was mesmerized by just how good McAvoy was in such a bad film. I truly admired his performance, though it wasn't in the service of much. Looking for laughs or redeeming social value? Don't look here.

 -- Rob Weir

Millennial Zeitgeist Novels

I like to read “period” novels whenever I teach a U.S. history survey course. I unshelf  Howells and Twain when I teach the Gilded Age, dust off Steinbeck for the 1930s, and dive into Angelou and Walker to get an African-American perspective. With the semester winding down, I’ve been reading about the 1990s.

Recent novels are tricky. Books only evolve from “noteworthy” to “classic” in retrospect; lots of heralded works come off as shopworn or silly a decade later. Even good books take on meanings that eluded the first batch of readers. The latter has certainly happened to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and The Corrections (2001). Both were received in their initial runs­ as if they were sociology as well as literature. So they were, but now each also seems an indictment of Baby Boomers and Generation X excesses. Such generational labels are, of course, media inventions. As a historian, I don’t hold much stock in generational interpretations of the past, so I’ll just call these zeitgeist novels.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was and is a genre-defying work that obliterates the line between fiction and autobiography. Its narrator, Dave Eggers, is both author and principal character. It tells of the travails of the Eggers clan. Paterfamilias John, a nasty drunk, died in 1991, followed the next year by the cancer death of the family rock: Heidi. Her death threw the Eggers children upon their own devices. Eldest son William was already living an independent life in Los Angeles, and soon the remaining children–Beth, Dave, and Christopher–depart Illinois for San Francisco. Challenges arose immediately, as youngest child, “Toph,” was just nine and his primary caretakers were Beth (24) and Dave (22). Both cared deeply for Toph, but neither was prepared to be a parent. (Beth played a larger role than assigned in the book, but she had demons of her own and committed suicide in 2001.)

Anyone who has been to San Francisco knows that it’s a tough town in which to be poor. Dave and Toph eek out a living from their inheritance, Social Security, and whatever work Dave can drum up, but he’s more of a slacker/hipster-wannabe than breadwinner. The book purports to recount his on-the-job-training lessons in responsibility and parenthood, but in retrospect it reads like Eggers’ thinly veiled anger at being robbed of his adolescence. He and Toph trash one cheap rental after  another, as neither is very good at adult basics such as wiping up messes, taking out the garbage, or housekeeping. Dave lands a job, but with a magazine that never made a dime; his real talents include prowess at tossing Frisbees and imagining himself in the sack with sexologist Sari Locker.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius remains a very good read, though a title meant to be ironic now feels solipsistic. Like works such as Running with Scissors, it  has a “look at me” quality whose true irony lies in how badly Gen X mangled attempts to emulate what it lampooned. That is to say, for all the Gen X contempt for Baby Boomers, many of them tried to become hippies and simply weren’t very good at it. Blame the “Dream,” or blame Gen X-fueled MTV, hipster mags, and reality TV. Or, as I prefer to do, read Eggers to gain insight into what confused twenty-somethings were thinking in the 1990s.

Jonathan Franzen’s National Book Award-winning The Corrections is the superior novel. Today it seems the ultimate pre-apocalyptic novel as it ends with the Stock Market “correction” of 1999, and was published just months before 9/11/01. The novel tracks the highly dysfunctional Lambert family. Parents Alfred and Enid still live in the prototypical Midwestern town of St. Jude, but their adult children have bolted to the East. Alfred is a retired railroad engineer/inventor who, in his prime, was a tyrant. Parkinson’s and advancing dementia have transformed him from being difficult to being impossible. Enid, his wife of 50 years, realizes time is short, tries to rally Alfred for a few last hurrahs, and harbors the dream of a final family Christmas in St. Jude.

Good luck with that! The kids are to busy making of hash of their lives. Eldest son Gary is a Philadelphia banker obsessed with the Stock Market, all things material, and few things emotional. He has a postcard family, but Gary is either bullied by his equally selfish wife, or is clinically depressed–depending on whose point of view you believe. Middle child Chip, the family intellectual, is a college professor hurtling toward self-destruction by violating the school’s sexual conduct code that he helped write. That avenue leads him to New York, where he fails as a playwright, and to post-Cold War Lithuania, where he falls in with oligarchs. Diane escapes a bad marriage and reinvents herself as a celebrity chef, only to jeopardize it all by having simultaneous affairs with her boss and his wife. Different problems, but each is too mired in imagine a warm-and-fuzzy Christmas in St. Jude.

Franzen’s novel crosses generations—Depression era parents, a Baby Boomer-turned Yuppie eldest son, an idealist-gone-egoist “tweener” middle child, and a Gen X youngest daughter. Each is a metaphor for the hope and greed of the Clinton years. The first brick fell when the dot.com bubble popped in 1999, Nasdaq lost 78% of its value, and its 457 IPOs shrank to just 76 in 18 months. Looming on the horizon: the falling masonry of September 11. Looking back now, The Corrections feels like the warning siren in advance of the tornado.  Rob Weir

Ernest and Celestine a Treat for Kids and Grown-Ups

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ERNEST and CELESTINE (2012 in France; 2014 USA)

Directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, et. al.

La Patri Productions, 80 minutes, G (Dubbed in English)

* * * *

I don’t recall which of my friends recommended the delightful animated film Ernest and Celestine, but if it was anyone reading this review, thank you, thank you, thank you! It is sweet, sentimental, and cute–in all the good ways.

As animated films often do, this one builds an alternative world, one in which bears live above ground and mice below the surface. As everyone knows, bears and mice hate each other—even if they don’t know why. That’s just the way it is. It would take two special beings to break through the walls of prejudice, which is what happens. Ernest is a jazz musician, but he’s really a slacker bear who mooches off others and is too scatter-brained and disorganized to do anything as mundane as planning. Naturally, when he awakes from his winter sleep his bear pantry is bare and because of his shabby musician appearance, he has no luck begging for spare change from the bourgeois bears of the town. Driven by hunger, he impulsively burgles a sweet shop window and consumes everything in sight, which makes him a bear on the run.

The mouse Celestine is a dreamer in her own way, but she’s as assertive as she is idealistic. Her troubles begin when her studies don’t go well. It seems that mice have an underground industry in dentistry! After all, what’s a mouse to do if he or she loses a few incisors? Starve to death? Nope. You go to a dentist’s office for an implant and it’s the job of trainees such as Celestine to secure a supply of replacement teeth. As fortune would have it, castoff bear teeth are the gold standard, as they can be whittled down to make lots of mouse incisors. This, of course, means mice must make risky journeys above ground—a trip that could lead to death by stomping or chomping.

You pretty much know the rest. Through a set of bizarre circumstances Ernest and Celestine are thrown together in an animated riff on It Happened One Night. They eventually become good friends, and find themselves outcasts in their respective worlds (both of which are imaginative and visually appealing). More wacky circumstances lead to direct engagements between the two worlds and confrontations with illogic, bigotry, and rigidity. There will be a happy ending.

If all of this sounds gag-me sweet to you, I can assure you that I shared those reservations. Me? Watch a children’s cartoon made in France? Quelle horreur! Yet I found cynicism impossible to sustain amidst this film’s charms. Ernest is simply a lovable goof and Celestine is an Everywoman underdog. (Okay, undermouse.) Go ahead. Raise your cynical hackles. At some point in this film you’ll find yourself saying, “Awww….” To be sure, it’s a kids’ moral lesson about the value of friendship and the dangers of preconceived prejudice, but the animation, jibes, and spirit of this film will also appeal to discerning adults.

The English-language release of this film features Forest Whitaker’s tone-perfect exclamations for Ernest, as well as cameo voice work from luminaries such as Lauren Bacall, Paul Giamatti, and Jeffrey Wright. Give it a try and be prepared to be awwwwed. 

Rob Weir

New April Verch Mines Early Old-Timey Recording Industry

APRIL VERCH

The Newpart

No Depression Music

* * *

The title track of April Verch's new album—her tenth–refers to the family room her parents added in the 1970s, a place where she played music with her father, honed her fiddle skills, danced, and held house parties. It, and a few other tunes such as "Belle Election," are rooted in the rural traditions of the Ontario countryside where she grew up, but this album's true "new part" is that most of the material is more Tin Pan Alley, Appalachian, and Austin than Ottawa Valley. Verch band mates Hayes Griffin (guitar) and Cody Walters (banjo/acoustic bass) have mined early- and mid-20^th century American music for an album that places Griffin's flat-picking on equal par with Verch's fiddling, vocals, and step dancing. Inevitably, a female traditional fiddler who bows less and sings more is going to draw comparisons to Alison Krauss. Fear not; this collection is more Bob Wills than Alison Krauss. That is to say, it's swingier and its tunes are as open as the prairies, though Verch opts for a spare feel rather than the slickness of either Krauss or Wills. For example, she takes a 1925 song, "If You Hadn't Gone Away," and reworks in waltz time to give it a simple, but brighter feel. Texan jazz pianist Seger Ellis popularized another from the same period, "Montana Call," but Verch's controlled theatrical take makes it sound like Cole Porter gone cowboy. She even swings a gospel song, "Dry Bones," and slows and quiets "Cruel Willie," a tune much favored by fretted instrument players, so that Walters' banjo sounds straight out of Stephen Foster. The overall feel is so thoroughly retro her usual material, a Swedish polksa, and step dance interludes seem more out of place more than change of pace. In a similar vein, as much as I thrill to watch Ms. Verch dance in her live shows, recorded solo percussive feet often lack the intended dramatic impact. In my view, this is a good record, but not a great one. Her love of these old songs and tunes is laudable, but I suspect I'm not alone among longtime April Verch fans in longing for more from her traditions than a trip through the early recording industry. Rob Weir

Girl on the Train Overhyped, but a Good Read

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2015)

Paula Hawkins

Riverhead Books, 366 pages, ISBN: 978-1594633669

* * *

There are funny drunks, nasty drunks, and pathetic drunks. File Rachel in the third group. Five years earlier she almost had it all–a job she liked, a nice home, and Tom, a doting husband. The only thing missing was a baby, but when that didn't happen, Rachel started hitting the bottle. Move the clock forward and Tom is still in the dream home, but with his new wife, Anna, and their infant daughter. Rachel has sunk deep into alcohol dependency and it's not a pretty picture. She leaves bitter messages on Tom's phone, stalks him and Anna, gulps gin and tonics as the train clacks past her former home, and wallows in bitterness–when she's not either blacked out or imagining things. Piece by piece her former life falls away: her friends, her job, her looks, her self-confidence, and her dignity. She's become such a loser that about all she has left is fantasy. A trackside pile of crumbled clothing sends her into paroxysms of grief as she imagines a dead child and can't shake the image. Her only solace is "Jess" and "Jason," and they don't exist. They are the invented personae of a couple she observes from the train window–Jess and Jason being a classic transference of the love and suburban idyll she has lost.

Paula Hawkins' debut novel, The Girl on the Train, has drawn comparisons to Gone Girl, though the two are alike mostly in their unreliable narrator structure. Girl on the Train is a murder-mystery whodunit whose drama is sustained by probing Rachel's fragile psyche. Jess and Jason turn out to be Megan and Scott–neighbors of Tom and Anna–and all is not well in Fantasy Land, as Rachel learns when she sees Megan planting a passionate kiss on another man. (And as readers discover in intercalary chapters from Megan's point of view. Later we get a few from Anna as well.) Even worse, Megan disappears on a night in which Rachel has been stalking her ex, gets blind drunk, and has no memory of how she got a nasty bump on her head or blood all over her hands. What's blocking her memory: guilt, terror, or just too much booze? For all she can recall, she might not have even been in the vicinity the night Megan disappeared, but she doesn't help matters by interjecting herself into the effort to unravel the mystery. Drunks, ethics, and police investigations simply aren't good matches.

Hawkins does a superb job in crafting Rachel's character. She is, by turns, pitiful, sympathetic, and skin crawling creepy. As readers, we don't trust her any more than the police looking for Megan. Hawkins has fashioned a good old-fashioned page-turner, though I'd stop short of heaping hyperbolic praise on this book. Though Rachel and Megan are vivid characters, the same cannot be said for several of the secondary characters. Both Scott and Kemal (Megan's therapist) are more paste-up than fleshed out, and much of the book's dramatic tension is adapted from Hitchcock's Rear Window. Hawkins' writing style is also reminiscent of Hitchcock in that the cinematic tone tries to obscure implausible twists one would question if not so caught up in the story. She didn't fool me; I ferreted out the villain long before the culprit was revealed–largely, in my view, because it was too easy to identify the red herrings. I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but mainly because it was a diverting, non-taxing read. I'm not willing to rank it with Gone Girl (or Rear Window). T'is a gripping story, but one hopes Hawkins will take a few more chances in her next book and give us more characters with Rachel's depth. Rob Weir

PS: This book has been optioned, but Hawkins' story should not be confused with either a 2013 film of the same name directed by Larry Brand, or the 2013 French film La fille du RER which is often translated as The Girl on the Train. To complicate matters more, there's also a 1982 adaptation of an Agatha Christie story titled The Girl in the Train! DreamWorks will create the film version of Hawkins' book, but it's not yet in production.