Morris Dickstein

Going to the Movies: The Light Fantastic

It’s a pleasure to report that the little surge of beautifully crafted, offbeat films that made 1999 such a good moviegoing year has been sustained since last summer, even as Hollywood blockbusters continue to draw a record audience. There is no single pattern that describes these small new movies. They range from the fantastic to the minutely realistic. One of last summer’s best films was a brooding supernatural thriller with Nicole Kidman, The Others, set on the island of Jersey in 1945 and directed in English by a twenty-nine-year-old Spanish director, Alejandro Amenábar. Another, Ghost World, was based on an adult comic book by Daniel Clowes and directed by Terry Zwigoff, whose previous work was a brilliant documentary about the cartoonist R. Crumb. The Others, seemingly about a mother fiercely protecting her children, does some ingenious turns on the kind of darkly atmospheric ghost story that goes back to The Turn of the Screw, The Shining, and The Sixth Sense. It’s hard to imagine that anything more could be done with a haunted house, an isolated island, vaguely menacing servants, and vulnerable children, but The Others, powered by superb performances by the underrated Kidman and the great Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan, is more meditative than scary. It is so grounded in mood, character, and setting that even its trick ending feels satisfying.

Ghost World, which had no ghosts in sight, was a more daring, less commercial venture. It begins with a tongue-in-cheek version of a high school graduation, as observed with sardonic amusement by two friends, Enid (Thora Birch) and Becky (Scarlett Johannson). The girls are in league against the jocks, extroverts, retards, and pseudo-bohemians that surround them–against all the staples of the Hollywood teen movie. Enid’s pathetically belated punk sensibility, her disgust with the conventional world around her, carries the movie. With straight black hair framing her round face and dark-framed glasses that make her look like the cartoon character, Enid exudes a bright eighteen-year-old’s worldweariness and irony, as filtered through the countercultural sensibility of two middle-aging men, Clowes and Zwigoff. Like the graphic novel on which it is based, the movie is tender toward outcasts and losers, and relentlessly sarcastic about anything earnest or "normal," especially any kind of naive enthusiasm. But when Enid meets Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a dorky forty-ish record collector and social misfit, her world begins to change. Hopeless with women, uneasy in his rumpled body, comfortable only with his sad passion for vintage blues, Seymour’s vulnerability unwittingly teaches Enid something about genuine feeling. As his life goes to pieces, thanks to her efforts to manage it for him, she lets her guard down and the movie becomes a lesson in the limits of irony.

Like several of the best American films of 2001, Ghost World has a completely distinctive deadpan tone that owes much to the flourishing independent cinema of the 1990s. Driven not by action but by look and atmosphere, and by a outsider’s point of view that mocks the pieties of middle-class life, the film makes little concession to mainstream moviemaking. It derides sports, good looks, ambition, romance, and personal responsibility. It satirizes progressive parenthood in Enid’s too-tolerant father (Bob Balaban) and bohemian artspeak, lethally, in her aging-hippie teacher (Illeana Douglas). But Enid’s friendship with the slightly creepy Seymour takes the film to another level. Steve Buscemi inhabits the part with a shambling, perpetually defeated sense of awkwardness and embarrassment. As Enid comes to appreciate him, the movie takes us beyond punk detachment toward an unforced, unsentimental empathy.

The best American movies at the 39th New York Film Festival in the early fall picked up from the dreamy terrain where Ghost World left off. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life were quirky one-of-a-kind movies by directors who had cut their teeth in the indie cinema of the eighties and nineties. Lynch, once a painter, made his reputation with a low-budget midnight movie, Eraserhead, more than twenty years ago and solidified it with the surpassingly strange Blue Velvet and the Twin Peaks TV series in the late eighties. His movies oscillate between hyper-real scenes of ordinary life and dreamlike images of the decadence and corruption just beneath the surface. With the help of noir-ish cinematography and the mesmerizing music of Angelo Badalementi, he is able to create a spellbinding mood that substitutes teasing portent and mystery for any clear narrative logic. Mulholland Drive may be the best movie about Hollywood since Robert Altman’s The Player, combining all these features of Lynch’s work into one enigmatic yet riveting film.

Beginning with a near-murder that’s interrupted by a fatal auto accident and featuring a beautiful raven-haired woman with a bag full of money who is suffering from amnesia, Mulholland Drive plays inventively on the conventions of film noir. Searching for her identity, she is joined by a perky blonde, newly arrived in Hollywood, who is trying to break into movies. For more than an hour and a half we follow the odyssey of these two women though a landscape of Hollywood grotesques as they try to unravel the mystery. This no doubt is the part of the movie that was conceived and then rejected as the pilot for a TV series, a Southern California version of Twin Peaks. At this point, both the characters and the movie as a whole morph into something more grim and puzzling, which makes us guess that the first part of the film was only imagined by one of the women in the desperate hours between the time she puts out a hit on the other woman and takes her own life. Or so it seems, for nothing is quite certain in this curiously compelling world that is never as mordant as Ghost World but never straightforward either. Mulholland Drive makes much more sense on a second viewing, but Lynch’s imagination is so distinctive that the film keeps our interest even when it stymies and tantalizes our understanding.

The most eagerly awaited film of the festival, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums was as stylized as Ghost World and Mulholland Drive but its storybook mannerisms and rigid framing squeezed the life out of its characters. Anderson is best known for his 1998 comedy Rushmore, which pitted Jason Schwartzman as a super-bright high school student against his dour mentor, an eccentric tycoon played by the incomparable Bill Murray. The first half of the film was so exuberantly inventive, so fresh and quirky, that it was astonishing to see it disintegrate into an unbearably cute shaggy-dog story as it went on. In a long interview with Rick Lyman in the New York Times (January 11, 2002), Anderson claimed an affinity with Francois Truffaut, whose work with children and adolescents always felt so effortlessly spontaneous. But the three unhappy Tenenbaum siblings, thwarted geniuses all, resemble nothing so much as Salinger’s Glass family, prodigies whose lives have been damaged by their scapegrace father, Royal (Gene Hackman), and by the curse of their own gifts. Returning to his family after abandoning them twenty years earlier, Hackman plays the irresponsible but fun-loving paterfamilias with a con man’s zest and an infectious appetite for life. He is incapable of being embarrassed by his own misdeeds, and his larky buoyancy makes the other characters feel pinched and two-dimensional, above all his three children, played by Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Luke Wilson, who have made stereotypical messes of their adult experiences. As with the Glass family, their deepest feelings are reserved for their siblings. Their incestuous emotional lives make it difficult for them to fulfill their talents, pursue normal lives, and really connect with anyone outside the family. Hackman’s performance, like Bill Murray’s in Rushmore, gives some of the movie a bracing vitality, but Anderson’s self-absorbed fascination with the gifted young and his mannered mise en scène are leading him down a dead end.

If there was one film at the festival that fully justified its own quirkiness, it was Richard Linklater’s dazzling animated film Waking Life. Like Linklater’s first movie, Slacker (1991), set in the academic environs of Austin, Texas, Waking Life is an almost plotless series of linked conversations. The unnamed protagonist, played by Wiley Wiggins, arrives in town and talks to everyone he meets, from cab drivers and professors to coffeehouse intellectuals, mostly quizzing them about dreams, about life itself as a sequence of dreams, about movies as dream states. Each exchange itself is a kind of dream, but when he tries to wake up, or at least to determine whether he is dreaming, he finds himself catapulted into yet another dreamlike state, with yet another voluble interlocutor. At moments the drone of talk becomes unbearable, but even before this happens it’s difficult to know how seriously to take these earnest exchanges, which sometimes feel like a send-up of pretentious pseudo-intellectuality but can also be quite probing and brilliant. The protagonist, who evidently has never quite gotten past the profundity of his dorm-room and classroom dialogues, is on a restless quest to understand more about life, and he treats everyone he meets as a font of personal wisdom.

This sounds sophomoric, and occasionally it is. What makes it special is the animation, which is as engaging as the visual design and atmosphere of Ghost World and Mulholland Drive. I’m no great fan of animated films directed at adults, which inevitably reduce their subjects to pastel-like simplicity. But Waking Life was filmed in digital video with live actors, then transformed by some thirty animators on desktop computers into fluid, shimmering graphic images which are like painted versions of the original action. Since each episode was done by a different animator, each has a different palette, a strikingly different look, though all have a dreamlike quality that both counterpoints and illustrates the high-flown conversation. Where Ghost World humanizes its comic-book characters while embracing their artificial origins, Waking Life stylizes its living actors as it endows their talking heads with an expressive variety as a visual complement to what they are saying. For all its occasional callowness, Waking Life at its best is both beautiful and thoughtful, holding out the hope that the undergraduate quest for knowledge can go on forever. It’s a movie that only a college town like Austin could produce.

As usual, the New York Film Festival offered many other pleasures and mishaps besides these American films. The opening night movie, Va Savoir, was the work of Jacques Rivette, one of the great veterans of the New Wave. As an Italian acting company performs a Pirandello play before a Paris audience, the leading actress, who is French, and her Italian director, who is her current lover, get caught up in an intricate round-robin of relationships, all handled by Rivette with surpassing delicacy. As a backstage drama about life and artifice, reality and performance, Va Savoir can bear comparison with the masterpiece that inspired it, Renoir’s The Golden Coach, which featured Anna Magnani in one of her great film roles. A less colorful yet very impressive film by a younger French director was Laurent Cantet’s eerie Time Out, the quietly unforgettable story of a man who loses his job but doesn’t tell his family, continuing instead to go "to work" until his whole life becomes a fictional construction, an immense vacancy in which he takes a strange kind of pleasure. In the real-life story on which the film was loosely based, the man eventually killed his family and his parents and was tried in a celebrated court case. Time Out erases this lurid, melodramatic turn, focusing instead on the daily round of a man who improvises a double life for himself, including a made-up world that becomes more real to him than his conventionally happy home life.

One of the mishaps, the feel-bad movie of the festival, was an Argentine film by Lucrecia Martel, La Ciénaga, that was surprisingly well received by critics but made audiences thoroughly miserable. A study in middle-class decadence, it centers on two families sweltering in almost insufferable summer heat, like languid rejects from a Tennessee Williams play. We see one couple, too alcoholic and indifferent to be predatory, through the eyes of a curious, innocent, neglected child, whose accidental but all-too-predictable death will sum up the director’s disgust with the people whose story she is trying to tell. At the opposite end of the spectrum was a crowd-pleasing Mexican film, Y Tu Mamá También, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, in which the corruption of the upper middle class is cast in relief by the raging hormones of two teenage boys who take off on a trip with an unhappy older woman, a Spaniard played by Maribel Verdú, whose self-absorbed writer husband is stepping out on her. Almost a take-off on an American-style teen movie centering on horny adolescent males, Y Tu Mamá También deftly gives this woman the upper hand, allowing her to take the boys not only through deeper sexual territory but into a sobering encounter with life and death. Despite its somber conclusion, in which the boys themselves drift apart, the movie is bawdy, daring, and great fun, something almost anathema to the faded art film market.

Films like these demonstrate anew the important role that the New York Film Festival continues to play on the cultural scene. Once almost entirely a venue for foreign films, most of them with little commercial appeal, it has now become a premier showcase for an interesting mix of imported and American independent films, and especially those with the kind of oblique, stylized narrative that the indie aesthetic has contributed to the diverse new mainstream. And because films like Time Out and Y Tu Mamá También were not released commercially until the spring, the festival served not only as a prologue to the serious film season but as a gift that keeps giving, a preview that proves instrumental in getting these films released and reviewed. This doesn’t mean that every serious independent work arrives in New York by way of the festival. Two superb movies that rounded out the calendar year, first-time director Todd Field’s In the Bedroom and the seventy-six-year-old veteran Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, came out in the November-December crush, when the critics’ organizations were giving their awards and critics were overwhelmed by a torrent of new releases. Yet each found a devoted, though not huge, audience. Field’s movie was an intimately realistic drama about a couple whose life comes apart when their son is murdered by his girlfriend’s violent, estranged husband. Altman’s film was, of all things, a lighthearted English country-house mystery with an immense cast, both upstairs and downstairs, that combined an Agatha Christie whodunit with the social comedy and elegiac class-consciousness of Renoir’s Rules of the Game. Different as they were, both movies were powered by terrific acting, precise, sensitive direction, and a meticulously realized milieu. The restrained, understated performances by Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, and Marisa Tomei in Field’s film were matched by the showy, bravura acting of Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Charles Dance, and Kristin Scott Thomas among Altman’s icy aristocrats and Derek Jacobi, Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Richard E. Grant, and Eileen Atkins as their watchful retainers. Only Altman could have put the cream of the British stage into below-stairs service.

These are exhilarating movies but both have their flaws. As their son’s killer seems, rather incredibly, to be getting off the hook, Wilkinson’s and Spacek’s grief turns toward revenge, and while this brings out the tensions in their own marriage, it shifts the movie, with its troubling and problematic ending, closer to a genre film. Gosford Park, on the other hand, makes only a nod towards genre with its casual murder plot, followed by comically inept detective work by Stephen Fry. In the end, the movie, for all its delicious pleasures, is not quite able to take itself seriously except as a showcase for the ensemble work of its stellar cast and the light-fingered orchestration of its gifted director, who seemed to be on holiday as he was making it. If In the Bedroom is a film about feeling, and how feeling, when sufficiently restrained, can explode into violence, Gosford Park is a film about acting, but also about how such role-playing once sustained the elaborate and cruel edifice of the class system. The film is set in 1932, and its key roles include an American producer, played by Bob Balaban, who observes the elegant manners and predatory behavior from the outside, and his friend Ivor Novello, a British matinee idol of the period, played by Jeremy Northam, who sings for his supper as another kind of loyal retainer. As Balaban looks on quizzically at the fantastic country-house world around him, Novello props it up by tossing off Coward-like songs that, like the movies, lend it charm and romance.