JonathanRosenbaum.com

Rock N’ Roll Fantasies

From the Chicago Reader (September 22, 2000). — J.R.

Almost Famous

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed and written by Cameron Crowe

With Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Zooey Deschanel.

Duets

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Bruce Paltrow

Written by John Byrum

With Maria Bello, Andre Braugher, Paul Giamatti, Huey Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scott Speedman, Kiersten Warren, and Angie Dickinson.

Cameron Crowe’s first feature as writer-director, Say Anything… (1989), lost money, which broke my heart. His third feature, Jerry Maguire (1996), cleaned up, which broke my spirit. (In between was another romantic comedy, the 1992 Singles, which I barely remember.) You might conclude that I was out of step with the audiences that passed on Say Anything… – though I was hardly the only reviewer who fell for it — and with those who went to Jerry Maguire in droves. I prefer to believe that I was out of step with the publicity for each movie. Say Anything… didn’t get much. But Jerry Maguire was pushed hard, as a Tom Cruise movie rather than anything created by a mere writer-director, and much of it struck me as transparent Oscar mongering — with the film’s “Show me the money!” mantra brandished as shamelessly as Paul Newman’s line about Fast Eddie being back in The Color of Money. To a large extent, the movie came across as a collection of sound bites with added filler.

Almost Famous is more directly autobiographical than Crowe’s earlier features — charting the adventures of a precocious 15-year-old rock journalist named Willie Miller (Patrick Fugit) as he travels cross-country with a band in 1973, trying to write an article about the tour for Rolling Stone – and it finds a middle ground between the raw feelings of Say Anything… and the calculated showboating of Jerry Maguire. Its focus is again on teenage experience — as was Crowe’s book on which Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) was based — and that’s probably what makes it seem like he’s getting back to his roots and what he does best. But it’s also about the subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations between being a journalist and being a groupie, which gives it some passing relation to the fascinating (if poorly edited and organized) interview book Crowe recently did with Billy Wilder, Conversations With Wilder.

Almost Famous doesn’t offer an infallible feeling for the period; it captures the 70s sensibility mainly in flashes and occasionally flubs it. (If anyone ever said the “F word” for “fuck” back then, I never heard it.) The movie’s best evocation of a period flavor is a simple yet eloquent succession of album covers in the 1969 prologue, when 11-year-old Willie thumbs through the records bequeathed to him by his older sister Anita (Zooey Deschanel), who’s fled their strict college-professor mother (Frances McDormand) to become a stewardess, using a cut from one of the albums to explain why she decided to go.

Yet the movie does capture how it feels to be a teenager in any period. One particularly sweet touch is the way Willie lowers his voice about an octave every time he speaks on the phone to a Rolling Stone editor — a riff on the way he and Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), a groupie who’s following the same band, Stillwater, admit to each other that they’re really not 18, but 17…16…(gulp) 15.

Technically speaking, Penny Lane isn’t a groupie but a “band aid” — which, according to her, means that she has sex with musicians not because they’re famous but because she likes their music. The distinction may seem small, but Crowe treats it with so much respect that it’s obvious he feels implicated in its nuances, which are largely what this movie’s about. (Like Willie, he started out as a rock journalist at 15 and joined the staff of Rolling Stone only a year later.) Semiautobiographical Willie links up with the fictional Stillwater because real-life rock critic Lester Bangs (Crowe’s mentor as well as Willie’s, beautifully and hilariously played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) assigns him a piece for Creem about the real-life band Black Sabbath. Dutifully arriving at a Black Sabbath concert, Willie heads backstage before the music starts and gets turned away by a bouncer; he’s then befriended by Penny Lane, who’s waiting for the arrival of Russell (Billy Crudup) — lead guitar for Stillwater, the opening band — and who eventually sneaks Willie in with her own teenybopper entourage.

The moral education that follows is fairly predictable — rock musicians are nice guys, except when they aren’t — but Crowe follows its contours with a sharp eye for detail and genuine sympathy for the pathos of some of the delusions involved. (Not surprisingly, he’s especially good when it comes to the music, and if I were more of a rock aficionado I’d probably like this movie better.) He’s also pretty funny when it comes to the pretensions of the rock publications, which are made to seem scarcely less self-infatuated and glib than the rock stars.

Duets, another comedy that opened last week, also focuses on cross-country pop-music events, in this case karaoke competitions. It seems to have fewer commercial calling cards at its disposal; the main one seems to be Gwyneth Paltrow, whose presence is partly accounted for by her father, Bruce, being the director. Apart from Huey Lewis, Andre Braugher, and Angie Dickinson in a cameo, most of the other cast members — a lively bunch — are unfamiliar, which suits the characters they’re playing. But the name in the credits that really sparks my interest is screenwriter John Byrum, who wrote and directed Inserts (1976), Heart Beat (1980), and The Razor’s Edge (1984) but hasn’t been heard from in movies for some time. (His first play, with the intriguing title Preston Sturges Died Here, premiered in Los Angeles six years ago.)

Duets is the first feature about karaoke I’ve seen, and Byrum uses it as a suggestive metaphor for the dreams of three sets of characters who’ve lost their way in terms of their personal and family identities: a karaoke hustler (Huey Lewis) who meets his daughter — a Vegas showgirl played by Paltrow — for the first time at the funeral of her mother; a traveling salesman (Paul Giamatti) who flips his lid after flying to Houston instead of Orlando and then going home to an indifferent wife and kids, and who eventually splits and hooks up with an ex-con (Andre Braugher); and a young cabdriver (Scott Speedman) who reluctantly agrees to drive a waitress and part-time hooker (Maria Bello) out west. The salesman story has the most weight and substance, evoking one of the middle-period novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. about all-American burnout, and it’s helped immeasurably by warm and nuanced performances of Giamatti and Braugher.

The rough edges of the three stories — which are intercut until they converge at a karaoke contest in Omaha, Nebraska — are smoothed over by the karaoke sessions, which often expose musical narcissism as enjoyably as Almost Famous does. In fact, the musical moments help one forget the absurdity of some of the plot ideas, such as the very notion of a karaoke hustler. Byrum is evidently borrowing from The Hustler and its portrait of pool-table narcissism by Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie — which gave way 25 years later to Tom Cruise’s narcissism as Eddie’s protege in The Color of Money (for which Newman was allowed to collect the Oscar he deserved for The Hustler). A decade after that Cruise played another kind of narcissistic hustler, the sports agent in Jerry Maguire.

Come to think of it, being a groupie (or “band aid”) and singing in a karaoke bar may not be all that different. Both involve disenfranchised people –  wounded narcissists basking in a kind of reflected glory — and both these comedies are preternaturally attentive to and touching about the ways these second-class citizens learn to take care of one another, dressing one another’s wounds before they return to the fray.

Human Resources

In Laurent Cantet’s 1999 French feature, written with Gilles Marchand, a student at a Paris business school returns home to Normandy to intern at the factory where his father has worked for 30 years. When the son and other workers go on strike and the antiunion father is let go, the son and father find themselves on opposite sides of the fence. This sharp, convincing, and utterly contemporary political film calls to mind some of Ken Loach’s work, full of passion as well as precision. Fine Arts.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum

Crime + Punishment In Suburbia

By now we’ve been sated with Pulp Fiction spin-offs. This is perhaps the first of the American Beauty spin-offs, and though I fear it won’t be the last, let’s hope it turns out to be the crudest; it’s so crude that even the sensitive teenage photographer/rebel/outcast is a lout like the others. As a believable and/or meaningful story, it gets worse by the minute, and despite the title and an opening quote, it has nothing to do with Dostoyevsky. The cast includes Vincent Kartheiser, Monica Keena, Ellen Barkin, Jeffrey Wright, Michael Ironside, and James DeBello; Rob Schmidt directed the Larry Gross screenplay. 100 min. (JR)

Critic With A Camera

From the Chicago Reader (September 15, 2000). It’s delightful to report that this film is now available in the U.S. from Icarus Films. — J.R.

One Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed and written by Chris Marker.

Industry flacks claim that Hollywood movies have been dumbed down out of commercial necessity — they’re just giving audiences what they want. I don’t buy it. Audiences aren’t being offered intelligent movies, or at least those aren’t the ones getting multimillion-dollar ad budgets. This was especially the case during the past summer, though as usual, most of the press tolerantly excused the fare as standard silly-season stuff — as if we and not the industry and their advertisers were responsible. The flacks may love to shift the blame by telling us how dumb we all are, but their contempt finally may be causing a minor counterreaction.

Difficult, demanding, and incorrigibly serious art movies have been becoming more popular — though that may be less the result of a backlash against Hollywood than of a growing awareness that the makers of art movies are more respectful of the seriousness, intelligence, and spirituality of moviegoers. The first solid indication of this trend I noticed was the nationwide success of the Robert Bresson retrospective, which came to the Film Center in the spring of 1999 and drew enough crowds to warrant a partial revival of the series a few months later. Another was that, according to Stephen Holden in the New York Times, the belated New York theatrical premiere of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-part, ten-hour Decalogue (1988) this past summer earned $247,711 during its eight-week run at the Lincoln Plaza, occasioning a repeat engagement downtown that’s still going. And Brian Andreotti, who books films at the Music Box, recently told me that the reason Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us won’t arrive in Chicago until December 8 — well over a year after it opened in Tokyo and Paris, and two months after its premiere in Buenos Aires — is that it’s been doing so well in New York that he wanted it to play here for at least three weeks, which wouldn’t be possible until the Christmas season. (Decalogue will be playing then on the Music Box’s other screen.) Kiarostami’s poetic comedy has more offscreen than on-screen characters, and whole sections of the plot are left up to the viewer’s imagination, which has led some critics who generally operate as Hollywood apologists to chide Kiarostami for being self-indulgent — though he’s simply refusing to create the kind of trash they’re used to reviewing. The best way to make poetry more attractive in any culture may be to suppress it; this hasn’t happened here in any literal way, but the industry’s and the media’s assumption that we’re all unpoetic lunkheads who only want to see movies such as X-Men was bound eventually to drive us back to poetic work.

Here’s another example of that shift. According to Martin Rubin, who joined the Film Center last February as its new associate director, the biggest crowds he’s seen there since he arrived have been at the Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective in July. Since almost all of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre is available on video — I believe the major exception is his 1983 feature Nostalghia – the people who went to see these works could have seen them on their own, but they turned out instead for the big-screen communal event.

I didn’t make it to any of the screenings, though if I’d been going to movies strictly for pleasure, I probably would have attended most of them. I’ve seen all seven of Tarkovsky’s features, some of them several times, but I’ve never felt anywhere close to exhausting them. I haven’t seen Andrei Rublev (1966) for a good quarter of a century, and The Mirror (1974) struck me as almost completely opaque the single time I saw it. I also have to confess that most of Stalker (1979), now my favorite, infuriated me when I first saw it in the early 80s. With the possible exception of My Name Is Ivan (aka Ivan’s Childhood, 1962), Tarkovsky’s first feature, all of his movies qualify to some degree as head scratchers. The same goes for the best films of Kieslowski and Kiarostami. As Chris Marker puts it, some filmmakers deliver sermons, but “the greats leave us with our freedom.”

If we emerge from Tarkovsky’s films somewhat puzzled, this is only the first of the special gifts they have to offer, for ultimately they aren’t so much mysteries to be solved as experiences to be interpreted, learned from, and assimilated. Marker notes that human levitation figures in at least three Tarkovsky films — Solaris (1972), The Mirror, and The Sacrifice (1986) — but has a narrative justification only in the first, when the characters are in free-fall in a space station. This doesn’t make Solaris an easier film to understand than the other two, because the narrative justification winds up clouding more issues than it clarifies; Tarkovsky himself once suggested as much by implying that Solaris was compromised by its relation to science fiction. I should add that it was mainly my generic expectations of Stalker, his other so-called science fiction film, that initially infuriated me. Tarkovsky once avowed that the only genre that truly interested him was film itself. “The true cinema image is built upon the destruction of genre, upon conflict with it,” he wrote in his book Sculpting in Time, adding that filmmakers such as Bresson, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Buñuel, and even Chaplin created their own genres and that “the very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb.”

Marker’s 55-minute video One Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich – showing this Friday at Columbia College and on Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers — was made last year for the excellent French TV series “Cinema de notre temps” (”Film in Our Time”). It’s the best single piece of Tarkovsky criticism I know of, clarifying the overall coherence of his oeuvre while leaving all the principal mysteries in the films intact. It becomes clear early on that Marker was an intimate friend of Tarkovsky and his family, and was shooting home-video footage of some of Tarkovsky’s final days in the mid-1980s, when he was dying of cancer, for Tarkovsky and his family’s use as well as his own. But this is handled throughout with exquisite tact and restraint and is never allowed to intrude on the poetic analysis of the features. In fact, the video interweaves biography and autobiography with poetic and political insight in a manner that seldom works as well as it does here, perhaps because personal affection and poetic analysis are rarely as compatible as Marker makes them.

Marker tapes Tarkovsky’s wife Larissa commenting on a downpour she’s been caught in, amusedly comparing it to the rain in Stalker, and then he has his narrator remark, over an appropriate selection of Tarkovsky clips, “It rains a lot in Tarkovsky’s films, as in Kurosawa’s — one of the signs, no doubt, of the Japanese sensibility he mentioned so often. And like the Japanese, a physical relationship to nature. There’s nothing more earthy, more carnal than the work of this reputed mystical filmmaker — maybe because Russian mysticism is not that of Catholics terrified by nature and body. Among the Orthodox, nature is respected, the Creator is revered through his creation, and in counterpoint to the characters, each film knits a plot between the four elements — sometimes treated separately, sometimes in pairs. In The Mirror, a simple camera movement brings together water and fire…the opposite path in Solaris.”

Discussing the work of any filmmaker in relation to the four elements sounds like a facile activity; I recall, for instance, a rather absurd monograph published in England in the 60s or 70s that enumerated earth, air, fire, and water images in the films of Martin Ritt. But Marker persuades me that it’s a wholly functional means of getting at what Tarkovsky’s films are doing and at the relationship they have to one another. With a similar clinching simplicity, Marker compares what he calls the archetypal camera angle of Hollywood (slightly low, framing people against the sky) with the archetypal camera angle of Tarkovsky (slightly high, framing people against the ground), then lets all the metaphysical implications of this difference sink in.

Marker’s criticism is on video rather than on film or in print — including The Last Bolshevik (1993), his portrait of the late Alexander Medvedkin, another Russian filmmaker friend — which seems to justify a claim Godard made to me in a 1996 interview, that criticism “is the only thing video can be and should be.” Unfortunately, Godard’s own supreme effort in this realm — the eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinema, completed a couple of years ago — remains unseen in the U.S. because its distributor, Gaumont, has cleared the rights to the film clips and artwork it uses only in France. (As partial compensation — apparently the rights to film sound tracks and musical samplings don’t need the same kind of clearance — ECM has issued the complete sound track on CD in an expensive boxed set, along with books reproducing most of the spoken and written texts in three languages.)

Perhaps for similar reasons, most of the programs in “Cinema de notre temps” are rarely available outside of France. Yet we’re getting to see Marker’s comparatively straightforward and fully accessible masterpiece fairly promptly, maybe because he had to get clearance for clips from only a few films and for a video record of Tarkovsky’s London staging of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. It may also be relevant that Marker is bilingual — he has issued graceful French and English versions of most of his major films and videos since Sans soleil in 1982 — and that he’s a compulsive globe-trotter, even though he keeps a low profile.

Characteristically, the first-person narration in One Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich, written by Marker, is delivered by Alexandra Stewart, the Canadian-born, Paris-based actress who performed the same function in the English version of Sans soleil (similarly, Michael Pennington, not Marker, was the first-person narrator in The Last Bolshevik). And characteristically he has refused to assign himself — or anyone else — a directorial credit, modestly crediting himself with “video footage,” “narration,” and “editing.”

The title plainly alludes to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about life in a Stalinist labor camp. Marker recounts that Tarkovsky experienced “20 years of harassment of every sort” from the Soviet authorities, though he wasn’t a political dissident but merely a Russian mystic and an unconventional filmmaker. That harassment eventually drove him into exile in Europe, and when his son and mother wanted to join him they were denied visas for five years. (Practically the first thing we see in the video is Marker’s footage of Larissa tearfully greeting the two at the airport.) Charting Marker’s continuing disillusionment with Soviet communism, the implicit subject of The Last Bolshevik, this companion piece also evokes what might be described as his philosophical wanderlust in other respects — as evidenced, for example, by his passing gibe at “Catholics terrified by nature and body.”

Attempting to explain an artist’s life through his work and vice versa is perilous, yet Marker has adopted this method throughout One Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich. I think he gets away with it because his essayistic manner demonstrates that his acquaintance with both Tarkovsky and his films is sufficiently deep to trace the connections without making too much of them. The only possible exception is when he cuts between the title character of Stalker in bed describing his despair about humanity and Tarkovsky in his own sickbed, though it’s hard to dismiss the autobiographical undertones of the Stalker’s monologue.

More generally, Marker is content to leave ambiguities hanging. But how he leaves them hanging is of utmost importance — and is the source of his greatness as a writer and video artist. He wittily recounts a seance Tarkovsky once attended at which Boris Pasternak allegedly informed him, correctly, that he would make only seven films — “but good ones.” (Jacques Tati made only six, all good as well.) Even more ambiguously, Marker points out that the first scene of Tarkovsky’s first film shows a child standing by a young tree whereas the last scene of his last film shows a child lying at the foot of a dead tree. This implies that Tarkovsky had a remarkable singularity of purpose — Marker adds that when Tarkovsky shot the later scene he didn’t even know he was ill — but the viewer is left to decide what it means.

Marker isn’t just interested in such symmetries; he’s equally concerned with bits of whimsy, such as Tarkovsky adapting Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” in one of his early student films — occasioning some interesting rhymes with Robert Siodmak’s 1947 noir version — and Tarkovsky’s cameo appearance in the same film, whistling “Lullaby of Birdland.” Lives are made up of relevancies and irrelevancies alike, and Marker has the good sense to be attentive to both.

At one point he takes off from the premise that the house in The Sacrifice is a character, noting that in other films Tarkovsky was building an “imaginary” and “unique” house “where all the rooms open into one another and all lead to the same corridor. Opening a door by chance, the actors of The Mirror could cross paths with those from Nostalghia.” This eventually drifts into a discussion of the literal houses Tarkovsky lived in, but I think Marker is alluding mainly to the house he himself is building — a kind of meeting place for Tarkovsky’s various films that also contains several passageways between life and work. It’s the kind of utopian space that has particular resonance in the work of Marker, so it seems only fitting that he should find parts of the cumulative wisdom of his own life reflected in the ecstatic visions of his Russian friend.

Bad Blood

One festival brochure describes this 1986 feature as a “dazzling film noir thriller,” yet the distinctive talents of French director Leos Carax have relatively little to do with storytelling. The vaguely paranoid plot concerns a couple of thieves (Michel Piccoli, Hans Meyer) hiring the son (Denis Lavant) of a recently deceased partner to help them steal a cure to an AIDS-like virus, but the noir and SF trappings are so feeble that they function at best as a framing device, a means for Carax to tighten his canvas. The real meat of this movie is his total absorption in the wonderful leads, Lavant and Juliette Binoche, which comes to fruition during the former’s lengthy attempt to seduce the latter, an extended nocturnal encounter that the various genre elements serve only to hold in place. The true source of Carax’s style is neither Truffaut nor Godard but the silent cinema, with its melancholy, its innocence, its poetics of close-up, gesture, and the mysteries of personality. Bad Blood uses color with a sense of discovery similar to that found in the morbidly beautiful black and white of Carax’s Boy Meets Girl, and its naked emotion and romantic feeling are comparably intense. Critics tend to link Carax with the much older Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva) and the much callower Luc Besson (Subway), but as Carax points out, Bad Blood is “a film which loves the cinema, but which doesn’t love the cinema of today.” From the standpoint of a Beineix or a Besson, Bad Blood might seem jerry-built and self-indulgent; from a cinematic standpoint, it blows them both out of the water. 119 min. A 35-millimeter print will be shown. Gene Siskel Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Chicago, Friday, September 15, 6:00; Saturday, September 16, 8:00; and Sunday, September 17, 5:00; 312-443-3737.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum