For many years in the dark ages before the internet, I self-published a film review newsletter that I called "The View From the Front Row" -- the front row not only being my favorite seat back then (I'm too old for the front now these days), but also I thought a fairly decent metaphor for the oblique angle I tried to bring to my reviews, at least relative to mainstream critics. Children and work made it impossible for me to get the last issue out, but even this many years later, people still ask me where it is and when I'm going to start it up again.
Having found more time to see movies again, I faced a new problem -- in order to gain the proper perspective with which to review films, one really has to see much if not all the serious releases, from Hollywood, independents, and other countries. And frankly, the fare out there just was not worth the effort. Whenever my wife and I would get a date night and try to choose a movie, we couldn't find anything interesting to see -- even if it had been a month since we last saw something!
Things haven't changed in movieland, quality-wise, but I'm now going to make the effort anyway, and use the magic of cyberspace to bring "The View From the Front Row" back to life. To kick things off, here are a few of the few holiday releases I have been able to catch so far.
This Monster Got Too Much Ink
Monster, the third movie to examine the curious case of Aileen Wuornos, widely considered the first true female serial killer, is an interesting film on two levels. It attempts to provide insight into the morbid curiosity of what would make a woman into a serial killer (no one doubts that men can do it, but women?), and it represents Charlize Theron's attempt at stepping her career up to that of serious lead actor after nearly a decade of being a successful supporting babe. The movie has gotten a ton of good ink and Theron is being showered with awards and nominations, but first-time director Patty Jenkins has missed her mark by a wide margin despite Theron's heroic efforts.
Lee Wuornos was not the first female to commit mass murder, but she was the first to fit the FBI profile that differentiates between mass murderers who kill many people at one time or within one social circle, and those who kill individuals serially (usually randomly) over an extended period of time. Women can just as easily as men fall into the former category when committing crimes of passion, but serial killing characteristically implies something deeper and more disturbing, a pattern of evil rarely seen in women.
Unfortunately, Monster cannot give us the insight we crave because it omits so many contributory factors in the Wuornos case -- which is a shame, because there is ample running time wasted on repetitive scenes dramatizing Lee's abusive past and her seemingly sudden turn toward a lesbian relationship that could've been better used to give us a broader, more ambiguous, and most importantly more truthful picture of who she was and why she killed: a criminal history left completely unmentioned, a bisexual past, a golddigging marriage to a wealthy man, a possible history of mental illness, and even a lifelong best friend, a fact that counters the image of Lee being (tragically) all alone in the world.
The film even fudges the two areas it focuses on. Most egregiously, the portrayal of Lee's lover as a shy lovelorn closeted lesbian is as far a cry from her real-life partner as her fictitious name (though Christina Ricci is marvelous, luminous even, in creating that portrayal). Indeed, in the climax of the movie, Lee confesses her crimes to make sure her lover (whom we believe cannot possibly have been complicit in the murders) is let completely off the hook -- in real life, no one can be certain, given her history and character, that she was really that innocent. Plus. there is little evidence in reality that the john who set Lee off on her killing spree raped and abused her (her original story made no mention of it -- she added those embellishments later on).
We had a hard time recalling what else Theron has been in. The only appearance I could recall for certain was the one that first brought her to my attention (and how!) as well as Hollywood's attention -- a supporting role in Trial and Error, a movie vehicle for none other than Kramer of Seinfeld, Michael Richards, in which she plays an extremely fetching biker babe. Beyond that, she has co-starred alongside some of filmdom's hunkiest actors and has played supporting roles for Woody Allen and with Robert De Niro.
Theron's performance in Monster is as phenomenal as her transformation from screen siren to streetwalker. She gained thirty pounds (always an impressive feat for Academy voters), ruined her hair and complexion, and adopted the tone and attitude of a white trash loser to perfection. It's a two-note performance -- the ingratiating fast-talking Lee Wuornos who wants so desperately to be accepted and loved, and the enraged foul-mouthed Lee Wournos capable of killing in a heartbeat and rationalizing it in an even shorter span of time -- but those are the only two notes her subject left her to work with, so it's more a triumph than a limitation. Only the two-note script in what was really a more complex scenario holds her back, making her portrayal grow monotonous (duotonous?) as the film drags on in a manner that is hardly entertaining, even if you like it.
The Demons Within
My biggest problem with Monster is that I'm not really interested in why people kill, not even when they have a life as hard as Lee Wuornos had. I'm far more interested in how people who live in trying circumstances find ways to cope, sometimes even finding ways to be happy. That's why The Station Agent is a far more interesting movie, even though it is slow as molasses. Its characters are at least as damaged as Wuornos, suffering pain, rejection, loss, and loneliness to the depth of their being (rure, they're fictional, but so is the Lee Wuornos of Monster to a great degree). But they find each other and find a way to make a life for themselves.
The central figure in The Station Agent is more of a monster within the world around him than Wuornos -- a dwarf, as he calls himself. Rarely if ever has a little person ever been given this much of chance to play a regular person. Peter Dinklage, who has made a living playing little people leading normal lives, most memorably in Elf, is very appealing in this central role. He is a handsome man with a deep reassuring voice, playing a train afficianado who inherits an abandoned train station in the appropriately named Newfoundland, New Jersey (an oasis of watershed wilderness in suburban Morris County, a real place -- a friend of mine used to work on the now-defunct tourist railroad that lends the film its prime location).
Wanting only to be alone in his self-imposed exile from a human race that cannot accept him for what he is, he is hounded by the outgoing Cuban hot dog vendor who parks his truck next door every morning and wants desperately to be his friend, and by a local artist who has lost her son and separated from her husband (Bobby Cannavale and Patricia Clarkson both turn in winning performances in these roles). There are other misfits, castoffs, and generally insecure people populating his new world, and he is pulled into it despite his attempts to remain aloof. The pace of this minimalist story is slow, the climax less than gratifying, the outcome a bit too facile, as friendship helps everyone overcome their inner damage, but it sure is more interesting than the half-told story of an uneducated, grating, ingratiating prostitute turning to serial murder.
Director Thomas McCarthy, a minor film and TV actor, almost all in bit parts, makes his directorial debut in this indie production, just like Monster's Patty Jenkins, but with much more promise, at least as far as I'm concerned.
We Already Gave at the Office
Jack Nicholson, fresh from seeing Kathy Bates in the buff in About Schmidt, steps up in class in Something's Gotta Give, getting a good glimpse, full frontal, of a quite fit and trim Diane Keaton, wrinkles notwithstanding. Nicholson is mastering the art of examining the aging process in men, here flipping the paradigm of About Schmidt from repressed widower trying to find a way to come out of his shell to celebrated lifelong bachelor learning to love for the first time.
Nicholson is more in character as the supremely confident man about town who will only date younger women -- until he is felled first by a heart attack and then by the care of his girlfriend's mother, played by Keaton. Though the results here are a pleasant diversion, they are no more than that, this film lacking the depth of About Schmidt, in which Nicholson was far more effective playing against type as the shy retiring retiree in the title role.
And don't you think he really should have died in the end? (Oops! Did I give something away?)
Cashing in a Paycheck
Some directors I have just had to swear off, so infuriating are they despite their inflated reputations among the cognoscenti. Pedro Almodovar is at the head of the list -- sorry, but his oevre is just self-indulgent crap I cannot ever force myself to sit through again, even on the off chance I might miss something special. John Woo is another -- just how many hyperkinetic car chases and Mexican stand-offs can one stand when a plot really needs to be moved along in something resembling logic and reality, and just how many can one director do without becoming a parody of himself? (The TV series Alias got it right, playing out many of its action sequences quickly, with no artificial suspense when we are assured of the outcome from the start, and letting its characters get on with more important business, their personal lives.)
Nevertheless, I made an exception for Woo's latest, Paycheck, because it was derived from the highly imaginative work of celebrated science fiction author Philip K. Dick, best known for writing the original Blade Runner. And lo -- it works, for me at least. Woo finally did put somewhat of a lid on his worst tendencies in order to make sure the story got told properly. Sure, there are the requisite chases and explosions, and even his trademark Mexican stand-off (maybe even two).
It helps that I am forever intrigued by stories that play around with the concept of time. In Paycheck, Ben Affleck plays a computer engineer in the near future who reverse-engineers the technology of competitors for his employers, and then has his memory wiped at the end of each job so that he cannot be tempted to re-sell what he knows to other competitors. His biggest job is a three-year effort that pays him nearly a hundred million, but when he goes to cash in his paycheck, he discovers that he has given up the payoff in exchange for a manila envelope full of junk, and he neither remembers why he did it nor what the junk in the envelope is.
Turns out the junk is a series of clues he has left himself, knowing his memory would be wiped, in order to help him survive his near-future (and still collect his fat paycheck). What we end up with is a Hitchcockian double chase -- the protagonist is chasing the solution to the mystery while he himself is being chased by the bad guys who want what he is seeking. The twist (and it's not a new one, but remains perhaps the ultimate in double-chase gimmicks) is that the McGuffin is the protagonist himself -- in the past, amnesia made people "chase" themselves, but amnesia having become so cliche, a new rationale is needed, Woo finding it in the speculative musings of Dick.
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