Finalist: The Village Voice, by Stephanie Zacharek
For film criticism that combines the pleasure of intellectual exuberance, the perspective of experience and the transporting power of good writing.
Nominated Work
July 2, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
Let's get the obvious bit over with: The early days of the Beatles, as reflected in Richard Lester's ebullient shout of freedom A Hard Day's Night, were all about the optimism of the early 1960s, a thrilling and energizing time when young people, and even some older ones, truly believed that the future held great promise. By the late '60s, disillusionment had set in, and the Beatles broke up.
There. Now let's talk about joy, and about wistfulness, because one so often trails the other, and both are woven into the DNA of A Hard Day's Night. To read it as a movie that the future proved wrong—a movie that's somehow "about" our collective, historic innocence, a set of hopes that were dashed by Vietnam, or by Nixon's betrayal, or by anything—is to miss the glorious reality that A Hard Day's Night lives so fully in its particular present. At the end, as the band takes the stage for a televised appearance, the faces of the girls (and a few boys) in the audience complete the story that John, Paul, George, and Ringo set in motion at the beginning. If the audience looks incomprehensibly young, the Beatles themselves aren't that much older— there's still hopefulness in them, too. (During the filming, George, after all, met his first wife.) No wonder these kids are lost in the moment and totally of a piece with it, beside themselves with elation shot through with longing. Their future is before them, and before them: Everything they want out of life is up on that stage, both out of reach and theirs for the taking.
That's the beauty of A Hard Day's Night, and the source of its eternal freshness. For a 50-year-old movie, it still looks impossibly youthful, especially in this restored version: In all its satiny black-and-white splendor, it feels more like today than yesterday. I can't imagine what it must be like to be watching, in 2014, A Hard Day's Night for the first time. I didn't catch it during its original theatrical release—I was a bit too tiny for that—but I saw it not so long afterward on television, an event that occasioned much jumping around and faux fainting on the living room couch. I have watched it many times since, each time seeing new things. But this is the first time I've viewed it knowing that there's more of my life behind me than ahead of me, and now more than ever, I understand the faces of those girls.
Even through the mystical blur of my affection for it, I can see that A Hard Day's Night is one of the world's perfect films. Lester, who'd previously directed a trad jazz caper called Ring-A-Ding Rhythm!, knew just what to do with the material (written by Alun Owen) and with the stars, who were already on their way to being (almost) bigger than Jesus. This is a stylized day-in-the-life picture, and while this particular day does look extremely exciting to us average people, we can also see that it's not much of a life: The movie opens with a chase scene, in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo barely outrun a blur of screaming girls in their Balmacaans and parkas, their plaid skirts and skimmers—they're a schoolgirl pride on the hunt. The boys are on their way to make a television appearance in Liverpool, which, thanks to a series of mishaps, barely comes together: Ringo, feeling unloved and underappreciated, goes AWOL, disguising himself in an oversized, secondhand coat and shuffling through an unfamiliar city looking both irrevocably lost and finally possessed of profound inner peace. And Paul's "very clean" grandfather (the magnificently pinched sour patch Wilfrid Brambell), who has been entrusted to his grandson's care, keeps wandering off to gamble (at the casino) and gambol (with a series of comely cuties, all less than half his age).
Lester must have worked some magic, conscious or otherwise, to bring the personality of each Beatle to the fore so distinctly. George is the lover of off-kilter visual puns: He gives the band's road manager, Shake (John Junkin), a shaving lesson by spritzing foam on a bathroom mirror, neatly outlining the image of Shake's jaw and then swiping the shaver along the surface of the glass. John favors an even more oblique visual gag, daintily blocking off one nostril as he takes an imaginary snort from a Coke bottle. Paul is dutiful in looking after his grandfather, but he's also easily exasperated—he plays by the rules so honorably that he can't abide anyone else's breaking them. And Ringo is the language mangler who says exactly what he means, usually inadvertently—though sometimes his eyes, good-natured but also ringed with dark circles that suggest excessive worry, say more: On a train, he passes a glass-windowed compartment where a stunning young woman sits, stroking a furry cat that rests suggestively in her lap. She sees him, smiles, and crooks her finger; he does a double take—that cat!—and then demurs, half-shocked, half-flattered, and having no idea what to do.
The mischievous, semi-surreal jokes of A Hard Day's Night—like George's response to the journalist who asks what he calls that hairstyle he's wearing—have become legends unto themselves. (George calls his hairdo "Arthur.") There was a brief time when everyone loved the Beatles, finding them agreeable and charming and cheekily nonthreatening. But there's real danger, all right, in their music, and the numbers in A Hard Day's Night—filmed by the watchful, clever cinematographer Gilbert Taylor—are the most gently seductive ever put on film. The boys captivate the young schoolgirl played by Patti Boyd—later to become Mrs. George Harrison—with a magically impromptu performance of "I Should Have Known Better" in a train carriage, the song's myriad boy-meets-girl questions wedged between the hands of a card game. But it's in the final cluster of songs, an artful melding of "Tell Me Why," "If I Fell," and "I Should Have Known Better," where Lester truly tips his hand. He knows what this movie is about, and he knows who it's for. And if the Beatles have never looked as beautiful as they do in this performance sequence—beautiful even, or especially, dusted with the faintest dew of sweat, visible in Taylor's tight close-ups—they're at least matched by the plaintive, surrendering beauty of the girls screaming and crying over them.
One of those girls, a blonde with a round, heartbreakingly readable face, touched Lester deeply. He would later refer to her as the "white rabbit," and the camera finds its way back to her over and over, because it just can't stay away. Her face is tear streaked; she can't believe what she's seeing, she can't stand it even just one more moment, but she wouldn't be anywhere else in the world. She mouths George's name, a mute prayer.
I know nothing about this girl, who, I presume and hope, grew up to be a woman. But I can't help superimposing her experience of this moment, of this band, onto mine. Did we get the life the Beatles promised us—at no small cost to themselves—of love and despair, heartbreak and elation, disappointment and exuberance? I want to ask her, as I ask myself, now on the far side of the beginning of everything, Was it all you hoped it would be? No. Absolutely not. And yes, a thousand times over.
December 10, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
Whatever it is New Yorkers want out of life — and it's not even something we can precisely define ourselves — it was nowhere in evidence on December 3, when a grand jury failed to indict the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner in July. We all know we live in a fractured city; none of us wants to think of it as a truly broken one, though as it turns out, our country seems genuinely broken too. We live in a place where the name "Ferguson" has come to stand for a million brutal inequities that can seem impossible to change or correct.
Chris Rock couldn't have planned it this way, but his exuberant and wondrous comedy Top Five, opening at just the right time, is like an airdrop of candy over the city, if not the country. That's not to say Rock glosses over serious issues, or, for that matter, that he hits them hard. But somehow Top Five has its finger on the pulse of right now, not just in terms of race in America — the movie is less about race than about just plain people — but in terms of how we're all trying to do the best we can, with no money, no jobs, a buttload of creeps in Congress, and dashed hopes of anything coming close to equality or fairness. The story of a hugely successful comedian and actor — played by Rock himself — who turns away from comedy because he just doesn't "feel funny anymore," Top Five is a reminder that as often as comedy fails us, sometimes it's our best hope for resuscitation. Seeing it at the end of a crap week, I suddenly felt I could breathe again.
Rock's Andre Allen has made a ton of money, and risen to great fame, playing a crime-fighting furball known as Hammy the Bear. But something in his life is cracked, and comedy doesn't fill the gaps anymore. He's just released a more-serious-than-thou historical drama about the Haitian Revolution (it's called Uprize), and he's about to tie the knot with a reality-TV star, Gabrielle Union's Erica, a woman he seemingly loves, though he's not quite comfortable with the fact that she's turning their wedding into a media circus. On his movie's opening day, he's set to be interviewed by a New York Times reporter, Rosario Dawson's Chelsea Brown. The two wander the city, walking and talking, laughing and bickering, trying to suss out which elements of their conversation are typical star-vs.-journalist BS and which might actually be some kind of truth.
Andre and Chelsea swing by to see some of Andre's old friends and relatives, among them Leslie Jones's combative — and hilarious — Lisa, who has her doubts about the direction Andre's personal life is taking, and Tracy Morgan's crazy-marvelous Fred, who appears to have been beamed from Planet Zontar just to sprawl on a couch and make totally out-there observations about Andre's prosperous present and his rougher, rowdier past in the 'hood. As Andre and Chelsea pass a public housing project, Andre makes a surprise reconnection with another figure from his past (Ben Vereen) — the sequence ends with both a wisp of bitterness and a wistful curlicue, the sort of complicated moment that even a more seasoned star-director-writer might not be able to pull off.
Top Five moves fast and almost never lets up. It's both lighter on its feet and more piercing than either of the two movies Rock has previously directed, the clumsy 2003 black-president fantasy Head of State and the more graceful 2007 I Think I Love My Wife (a sort-of remake of Eric Rohmer's Love in the Afternoon). Its jokes unfold in complex layers: They're rarely just race-related, or political, or connected to the universal needs and wants of human beings — often they're all three at once, and catching every nuance can be a challenge. Rock has packed the movie not so much with "black" humor as with humor, period, though you might enjoy the madness more if you can instantly recognize, say, DMX, just one of the constellation of superb cameos. (Then again, even if you don't, you'll still get a charge out of his heartfelt rendition of "Smile," from behind the bars of a jail cell, no less.) And one of the high points of my moviegoing month, if not my year, was hearing Cedric the Entertainer's magnificent pronunciation of duvet — he stretches out the first syllable, ensuring that the word sounds like something at once both deeply luxurious and dirty as hell.
There's a smattering of crude humor in Top Five, most of it extremely funny and good-natured. (One homophobic gag hits a sour note.) But its greatest joy comes from watching Dawson and Rock together, mapping out the city on foot and by hired car, claiming it, block by block, as their own. As shot by Manuel Alberto Claro, modern New York — a place where the small mom'n'pop stores and restaurants we love seem to be closing by the day — looks strangely and comfortingly timeless. At one point Andre's bodyguard, played by the delightful J.B. Smoove, warns him sternly about the dangers of the streets even as they stand at Sixth and Greenwich, one of the prettiest, liveliest, and whitest intersections of the city.
Dawson and Rock, the central figures in this wily wonderland, are a terrific match: Dawson, her eyes as large and expressive as a doe's, is a screwball Nefertiti. And Rock has barely aged a whit in the past 10 years. He still has the goofy gangliness of a teenager, though his jokes are purely adult in their sharpness. At one point, Andre and his pals wonder aloud if Tupac, had he lived, would be a senator today. Andre offers the suggestion that he might just be "playing the bad, dark-skinned boyfriend in a Tyler Perry movie."
In the world we live in — sometimes remarkable, sometimes so depressing we wonder if it's even worth it to get out of bed — either is possible. Rock knows the truth of that as well as anyone. There are two scenes in Top Five in which Andre is grabbed and beaten by cops — these are brief, fleeting sequences, edited to be fast and funny, and though you may not believe it until you see them, they actually are. Their honesty is cutting. This is Rock saying, "Here's the reality of being a black man in America." These two scenes, wedged casually into a comedy, are more effective than any earnest, straight-faced statement Rock could make. That his movie is mostly a work of joy makes them even more potent. Sometimes there's no choice but to laugh till it hurts.
August 20, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
You could be forgiven, after watching the opening minutes of Ira Sachs's fine-grained and flinty Love Is Strange, for thinking it's going to be a movie about Gay Marriage, with all the import those initial caps imply. We see two older men, clearly a couple, roll out of bed in what is immediately identifiable as a Manhattan apartment. But in movie-signpost terms, it's not the kind of New York digs we're used to seeing: This isn't an air- and light-filled Tribeca loft, or one of those costly Brooklyn brownstones where allegedly "average" families live. In fact, its major features — artwork and books and a piano — render it as vaguely anonymous but also, in a stroke of pure New York shorthand, pinpoint it as a place where two intellectually and culturally curious people of average means have lived forever, because there's no way they could afford it otherwise.
The pair begins to dress for what is clearly not an average day. Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) put on suits that square perfectly with who they are, even though we don't yet know who they are: Ben's pale, gently rumpled poplin and George's more dapper (and more sober) brown three-piece jibe with the way they walk, and with their past–middle-aged shapes — the clothes are as used to their bodies as these two are used to one another. They leave the apartment and immediately begin to bicker and debate, right on the street, in the most New York of ways: "We're going to be late." "We'll be fine." "I knew we should have hired a car." "Don't run, I don't want to get all sweaty." This is how marriages begin between partners who have known each other forever. Mazel tov!
Love Is Strange is partly a movie about gay marriage: The guests radiate genuine happiness that their friends are finally able to legally marry. But really, Sachs — who co-wrote the script with Mauricio Zacharias, also the co-writer of his last film, 2012's Keep the Lights On — has made a movie that's both more broadly and more specifically about love, New York, and real estate, perhaps not even in that order: For those who live here, it's hard to know how to index those things, they're so inextricably bound. That's the mercurial beauty of Love Is Strange: It's about things that actually matter in life and in a partnership, including the debit column in the checkbook.
Ben and George's wedding is a happy occasion for everybody, even for them, once they put their bickering on pause. But as it turns out, the wedding day is only the beginning of new troubles: George teaches music at a Catholic school, but he's dismissed for having defied the fossilized tenets of the Church. Ben is an underemployed painter, which means the pair's finances aren't exactly robust, and they need to downsize. They decide to sell their apartment — a flat that must have looked average in the mid-1980s, when they moved in, but now seems like a marvelous, cozy palace, given Manhattan real estate costs — and move into something smaller. But even with the proceeds of that sale, finding an affordable "something smaller" proves difficult. For practical reasons, they split temporarily until they can find a new home: Ben goes to live with his nephew, filmmaker Elliott (Darren E. Burrows), who's married to novelist Kate (Marisa Tomei, giving a prickly, appealing performance). The two have a shy teenage son, Joey (Charlie Tahan), who's at that stage universally known as awkward. The family's apartment is sleeker and more upscale than the old one Ben shared with George, but it's still none too large — he folds himself to fit the bottom tier of Joey's bunk bed, but there's no way he can make himself invisible.
George has problems of his own in his temporary digs: He has moved in with younger friends (played by Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez), a couple who happen to be cops, and whose lively nighttime socializing extends long past George's normal bedtime. These are all people who care about one another deeply, yet everyone feels cramped. Ben calls George in a fit of homesickness: "It's just that when you live with people, you know them better than you care to."
It's hard enough for kids in their 20s to spend a month or so on a friend's couch. But for adults who have lived on their own for years, it's a special kind of humiliation. Ben and George trudge out dutifully to apply for moderate-income housing that they don't have a chance of getting. George searches, fruitlessly, for a new job. Ben tries to paint in his temporary quarters, but the family raises a collective eyebrow when he enlists one of Joey's friends (Eric Tabach) as a model. These are people who pride themselves on their liberalism yet have very strong opinions about what's "appropriate," unable to make allowances for the reality that older people — painters, certainly — often love to look at younger people.
Ben and George don't fight about money, but money — or, rather, the lack of it — has torn a hole in their lives. It's through their separation that Sachs captures the texture of their partnership, and Molina and Lithgow, in performances that rank among the best of their careers, fill in all the colors and shadows. Molina's George is both more practical and more retreating — he doesn't fight back when he loses his job, as it's simply not in his nature to push that hard. He's not a chump, though: As Molina plays him, we see an inexhaustible well of kindness in his eyes. But we also see his frequent frustration — with his partner, with their situation, with everything — and thank God it's there: Exasperation can be a survival tactic, and Ben and George need, above all, to survive. Lithgow's Ben is crabbier, flightier, more stubborn but also, perhaps, more generous. He picks at George but only to a point. When he stops himself, his affection pours out, as if it were something only thinly (and badly) disguised by his grouchiness. His loyalty comes with barbs attached, but the barbs are what make it stick.
At one point, Ben and George dress up and go out on a date: First, there's a concert at Merkin Hall. Then they pull up to the bar at a place a friend identified for me as Julius, in the West Village. In the course of this evening, they argue mildly over the interpretation of the music they've just heard; they have a disarmingly direct and tender conversation about infidelity, unlike anything I've ever heard in a movie. Then they part ways, each going off to their temporary digs, at the West 4th Street subway station, right outside the beckoning neon of the Waverly Restaurant.
These are the landmarks of their lives, marking landmarks in their lives. Sachs and his performers know that the perfect marriage is a thing of phantom beauty — it doesn't exist, yet we persist in believing that someone out there must have it. The great tragedy, and the wonder, of the tragic, wonderful institution of marriage is that sometimes it is perfect but only for minutes at a time. If you insist on looking for perfection, it was last spotted on the corner of Waverly and Sixth.
October 29, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
There’s so much space in Christopher Nolan’s nearly three-hour intergalactic extravaganza Interstellar that there’s almost no room for people. This is a gigantosaurus movie entertainment, set partly in outer space and partly in a futuristic dustbowl America where humans are in danger of dying out, and Nolan -- who co-wrote the script with his brother, Jonathan -- has front-loaded it with big themes and even bigger visuals. Interstellar is supposedly all about what it means to be human, but it's supersized in case we really are so out of touch that we need to have everything blown up IMAX-big. “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” says Matthew McConaughey’s farmer-astronaut-dreamer in one of his many, many proclamations about life, family, and the cosmos. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” But even the dirt in Interstellar looks spectacularly art-directed. Nolan may be invoking Walker Evans, but Interstellar is really just Jethro Bodine–sized.
This is all the wonder money can buy, and then some. Nolan opens the movie with faux-documentary commentary from old folks settin’ a spell and reflecting on their youth in a dying, dust-choked world. One woman -- recognizable as Ellen Burstyn -- says that her father was a farmer, “like everybody else back then.” In the world of this woman’s childhood, there’s a surfeit of engineers and not enough people to grow food. Which means that men of science have been forced into the more menial (though not less important) job of coaxing life out of dry dirt.
McConaughey’s Cooper is one of these guys, though he can never disavow his science-geek roots. One of his two kids (played by Timothée Chalamet as a youngster, but he’ll grow up to be Casey Affleck) isn’t doing well in school; he’ll be placed as a farmer, instead of being one of the lucky few to advance to engineering school. But Cooper’s daughter, 12-year-old Murph (Mackenzie Foy, who will eventually morph into a petulant, one-note Jessica Chastain), soaks up her dad’s sciencey musings. She gets into trouble at school for showing off one of her father’s old books about the Apollo 11 lunar landing, which the asshole autocrats of the future have deemed propaganda, just a bit of fakery pulled off by the United States to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
Cooper will end up leaving Murph, and Earth: A seemingly random -- but not really -- chain of events leads him to a secret space station where an old professor of his, Michael Caine’s Dr. Brand, is planning a mission. Though NASA was dismantled long ago -- space travel for exploration’s sake was long ago deemed frivolous by the government -- Dr. Brand and his team, chief among them his daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), believe that the only hope for mankind lies in the stars. Luckily, Brand has located a wormhole leading to another galaxy, which may contain at least one inhabitable planet. And so Cooper, along with Amelia and two other crew members (played by Wes Bentley and David Gyasi), head into space in search of dust-free air and unspoiled water.
Cooper and his colleagues encounter frozen worlds and watery ones, and the dangers they face are both existential and specific. The universe Nolan has invented for them, drawn from both science (the movie is partly inspired by the work of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne) and movie dreams (paging Stanley Kubrick), is vast, awe-inspiring, and terrifying. In an early scene, the crew chatter and pick at one another inside the cabin, but thanks to crackerjack cutting, camerawork, and sound design, we can float on the outside, where it’s deafeningly quiet -- the planes of the ship hang delicately in the breach of nothingness. This vessel is so gorgeously alone; for a moment, Nolan captures the idea of space as a source of both wonder and despair.
But even the grandest visuals aren’t enough to carry Interstellar. A chief complaint filed against Alfonso Cuarón’s joy-and-anguish-in-space symphony Gravity was that the dialogue was sentimental, and there was too much of it. But in Interstellar, Cooper, a man of science, soaks up plenty of oxygen with his bromides about the importance of family. Other characters follow suit, apparently never having heard the song telling us that we’re people who need people. Nolan gives John Lithgow, as Cooper’s salt-of-the-earth father-in-law, healthy heaps of cornpone dialogue like, “They’re saying this is the last harvest for okra. Forever.”
There’s more: As a coda to a complicated explanation of the black hole, Bentley’s character adds helpfully that it’s “a literal heart of darkness.” Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is quoted at least three times, in case we don’t grasp its significance the first two. At one point, three crew members leave the mothership to explore a possibly life-sustaining planet. The catch, poignant in its implications, is that seven Earth years will pass for each hour they spend on this threateningly foreign soil. Gyasi’s character -- he’s the token black guy, but at least the movie has one -- stays behind, and when McConaughey and company return, not only is he visibly aged, but he’s wearing a plaid Redd Foxx bathrobe.
Look, maybe there’s science to back this up: For all we know, it’s possible astronauts do wear flannel in space. I know I’m supposed to be moved and amazed by Interstellar’s many pronouncements about how important it is to feel connected to our families and our fellow human beings, in addition to being awed by Nolan’s elaborate vision of pioneers bravely striking out into space, a/k/a the final frontier. And the special effects in Interstellar are, well, stellar: It earns the adjective “handsome,” which is great as far as that takes you. You sure get a big bang for your buck.
If Nolan is so godlike, you’d think he’d be better with actors. They don’t stand a shooting star’s chance in Interstellar. (Hans Zimmer’s droney, churchy organ score, the worst kind of Zimmermusik, doesn’t help.) Lithgow is a terrific actor -- he’s already given one of the finest performances of the year, in Ira Sachs’s Love Is Strange. Can’t Nolan do better than cast him as pops in a cardigan, spewing lines cribbed from the Farmers’ Almanac? Hathaway’s big moment -- her only moment, really -- is a quavery speech about true love; she emotes like gangbusters as her eyes pool with Fantine-like tears. In the past few years, McConaughey has reinvented himself into a marvel of spark and fire and subtlety. What he does here isn’t acting; it’s superacting. There’s no other way to stand up to the manmade-monument quality of this material. In what should be McConaughey’s most moving scene -- he faces the reality that his children have aged by 23 years, while he’s only a few hours older -- Nolan trains the camera on the actor’s face so we can take the measure of his free-falling tears. The tears themselves aren’t the issue -- it’s wholly believable that Cooper would cry. But we can see McConaughey working the strings. He’s like the Magic Mike version of male vulnerability, turning it all on for show. If he were to work with Nolan all the time, he’d be in grave danger of becoming a neck-tendon actor: He tightens his jaw every time he has to say something of great import, which here is way too often.
Nolan does have a seemingly inexhaustible store of extravagant ideas. As in Inception, with that dream vision of Paris folding in on itself -- a wonderful, inventive image that stands out against the rest of that movie’s bland trickery -- he comes up with one extraordinary visual idea in Interstellar: Cooper finds himself in a corrugated passageway whose walls appear to be made of strands of light -- or are they books on a shelf? The metaphor is lovely, a suggestion that books -- all paper, glue, ink, and string, so old-fashioned and so touchingly fragile -- still hold incomparable power. Their rays reach out to us like sunbeams.
But that’s about as subtle as Interstellar gets. Whatever his strengths may be, Nolan lacks the human touch. His movies are numbingly sexless, and by that I don’t mean they need sex scenes or nudity -- those things are rarely really about sex anyway. But in all of Nolan’s films, human connection is such a noble idea that it’s beyond the grasp of flesh-and-blood people. Nothing in Interstellar is ever ragged or raw or dirty (though there is, admittedly, a lot of dust). Characters gabble on about taking risks, about needing one another, but they never leap toward anything so dangerous as intimacy. “Rage against the dying of the light!” Nolan urges us, and he himself burns through a great deal of electricity and gas to keep his spectacle glowing for as long as possible. He has so much invested in showing us. He just doesn’t want to get close enough to touch us. Space suits him just fine.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified David Gyasi. He is correctly identified in this version.
October 28, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
This essay contains a spoiler or two for John Wick.
There's too much violence in movies today -- too much of the wrong kind, though if you asked me what the "right" kind is, I would only be able to tell you that I know it when I see it. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's John Wick -- in which Keanu Reeves plays a former hit man lured back to his old life by a savage murder -- is brutal as hell, a panoply of stabbings and shootings, stranglings and clubbings, that you almost certainly wouldn't want to take your mother to see, provided she isn't Ma Barker. But John Wick has stuck with me in ways I didn't expect, and it's rekindled my faith in violent action movies. It isn't perfect, but it's a flying leap in the right direction, and the key to it -- or at least one key -- is that it was made not by some guy who's most comfortable when fixated on a video monitor, but by people who actually know how to move.
Stahelski, the movie's director, and Leitch, its producer, are veteran stuntmen who in recent years have been devising fight choreography for movies like The Bourne Legacy, Expendables 3, and the Hunger Games series. But even well-choreographed action sequences aren't always shot and edited as clearly as they ought to be. That's not necessarily out of ineptitude on the part of directors and editors; it could be a skewed conception of what they think audiences now expect. We've been conditioned to believe action is more exciting when it's diced to bits and presented to us in a choppy mosaic. When I've complained about this, action-movie fans have often taken that "Listen here, little lady" tone with me: "Well, that's what a fight or a car chase is like when you're right inside it." The so-called immersive experience has come to mean more than visual logic. If the event being depicted is chaotic, the filmmaking has to be, too.
That's not the way Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino, or John Woo would think of it, but their ways of seeing seem to be outmoded. Incoherent action has become so commonplace that I doubt many filmgoers even notice it anymore. What John Wick brings back to action movies is the sense of violence as a barbarous ballet deserving a long take -- who wants to watch a grand pas that's gone through the visual woodchipper? Even in its most savage moments, John Wick revels in the glory of human movement. I wouldn't call the action sequences precise -- that's the wrong word when you're talking about the way joints and muscles and nerves work in tandem, beautiful in their very imperfection -- but I would call it specific, planned and executed in a way that the camera can easily follow. Every lunge, every rapid-fire spin, every kick to the ribs, every last-ditch swerve to dodge a bullet has a reason for existing -- each is a small event, leading to another and yet another, with perhaps just a few ticks of a second in between. It's always possible to tell who's coming from where, even if you can't see the specific "who" in question: In one gruesomely witty sequence, set in a men's spa, we see a victim-to-be blithely grooming himself in a mirror, even as another guy, reflected in another mirror, meets his maker. The movie takes visible pride in its own craftsmanship. It's a look-at-me picture that actually gives us something to look at.
And there's obvious joy in the way Stahelski and Leitch -- and cinematographer Jonathan Sela and editor Elisabet Ronaldsdottir -- showcase Reeves. Over the years, critics -- people who are often afraid of looking foolish, and more's the pity -- have been quick to identify Reeves as a "bad" actor (in just about everything except the Matrix movies), as if doing so were a way to advertise their good taste. Reeves isn't flashy, but there's a calming gravity in his presence -- when it looks as if he's doing nothing, he's often just riding the moment. Maybe that's why he makes such a marvelous action hero: He's a man of action who appears to have already thought everything through. He moves decisively and with innate elegance, like a '30s movie star who's taken tons of fencing lessons. Even when kicking ass, there's a courtliness about him, as if the sweet gallantry of old Bill & Ted lines like "Our girlfriends are most chaste!" had seeped into his bones.
Reeves is a quiet, economical actor. His feelings always simmer just beneath the surface, and that undercurrent of raw awareness makes one scene in John Wick nearly unbearable to watch. Early on, we learn that Wick's wife has died from some unspecified illness. We see him get through the funeral, in the usual blur of grief, but at home that evening, he's left alone with his sorrow. The doorbell rings: Before she died, his wife (played by Bridget Moynihan and seen only on a cellphone screen and in dreamlike shards of flashback) arranged for a beagle puppy to be delivered to him, as a way of easing his loneliness. The dog has come with a tag emblazoned with her name, Daisy. When she arrives, Wick eyes her with slight skepticism, sizing her up in all her wiggly-waggly adorableness. The next morning, with nothing to feed her, he pours her a bowl of cornflakes with a splash of milk. She snuffles them right down, her tag jingling against the bowl.
But because Wick, through no fault of his own, has gotten on the bad side of some Russian mobsters, Daisy very soon thereafter meets a bad end. The murder happens swiftly, early in the picture (there's no sadistic, making-us-wait game going on here), and you don't see it. And it's what happens afterward that's most wrenching: The camera follows a trail of bloody smudges to the spot where Wick is just waking up; the puppy had used the last bit of her strength to crawl close to him. I groaned as I watched this. I'm extremely wary of animal death as a dramatic device: It can be done well, but it can also be used as a blunt tool against the audience, and I wasn't immediately sure how I felt about it this time.
But the puppy death in John Wick isn't a throwaway, not in the way it's treated by the filmmakers, and not in the context of Reeves's performance. Daisy's death leaves a hole in the movie, and that's as it should be. Even after I went home, the memory of her kept me up most of the night. I was haunted by her even though, as a person who sees hundreds of movies a year, I'm well aware of the tricks and techniques filmmakers use to get to us.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Reeves was haunting me too -- Wick's grief over not just his wife but this small, completely charming creature is muted but intense, like a radioactive ray, something you can feel more than see. His rage over the Russian thugs' cruelty sets the movie in motion, and then there's no stopping it. The lead baddie, Iosef -- played with villainous efficiency by Alfie Allen -- values no life beyond his own, dog's or man's. With every fiber of my being, I wanted Wick to smoke that creep -- the movie is designed to make you feel that way. But the heartsickness at the core of Reeves's performance keeps the vicarious revenge impulse in check. It's satisfying when Iosef finally bites the dust, but Daisy is still gone. Thankfully, the filmmakers offer a balm for that wound in the end -- partly because the audience needs it, but more because they just know what's right.
John Wick isn't perfect. It could actually stand to be funnier, more cartoonish, though I laughed grimly and perhaps embarrassingly often. And I admit that I did watch some of this blood spurting and bone cracking, bullets piercing sternums, and so forth, through what my friend and colleague David Edelstein calls Fingervision. What's more, at the screening I attended, which was a mix of media types and regular citizens, someone had brought a small child, who began crying halfway through. That distressed me. John Wick isn't a movie for kids.
But it's dangerous, for the health and vitality of the adult culture at large, to decry violent movies out of fear that the wrong people will see them. And it would be hypocritical for me to do so, given how much I love action-movie violence when it's done well. Why do I love it so much? Because it can be cathartic? Because, when a filmmaker knows what he or she is doing, it can be like dance? Because, seemingly paradoxically, the best violent movies are so full of life that they make me feel more alive? Or am I really just kind of twisted, the way millions of us seem to be?
John Wick, a mainstream entertainment that's heavily flawed and remarkable at once, answers none of those questions definitively for me. But even if the human heart is a beautiful, wonderful, sensitive thing -- capable of responding to Beatrix Potter, walks in the park, beautiful sunsets, Mozart, Bicycle Thieves, spring flowers, and autumn leaves -- it's also a muscle, a multitasker capable of handling feelings we don't fully understand. It's the Swiss army knife of the human condition. There are so many, many ways to use it.
March 5, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
If you were to survey people who pay attention to movies -- to go door-to-door with a clipboard, a sharpened No. 2 pencil, and a sheaf of forms with the word SURVEY printed in clean block letters across the top, later to be tabulated on a vintage Underwood adding machine -- you might find that the number who want to love Wes Anderson's work is greater than the number of those who actually do. Unlike so many movies today, all of Anderson's, including his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, feel touched by human hands. His ascent in pop culture has coincided roughly with the renewed popularity of hand-knitting as a hobby; like a grandma-made sweater, Anderson's pictures are put together stitch by meticulous stitch; they're all knobbly with love.
When we're feeling blockbuster-superheroed out, a Wes Anderson movie promises something that's less and yet more: a retreat into a world of phonographs and nearly worn-out Stones LPs, a place where people dress for dinner, a house or a boat or a fox warren where everyone has a job to do and some feelings to feel. If you feel stressed out by the impersonal nature of modern life, Anderson is, in theory, the easiest filmmaker in the world to love.
So why can't I, a person who loves many of the same things Anderson loves, love Wes Anderson? To be even more specific, why do I love only the stop-motion animation marvel Fantastic Mr. Fox, commonly known as "the Wes Anderson movie for people who hate Wes Anderson movies"? Anderson makes some moviegoers swoon and others groan; discounting the Venn diagram center of Fantastic Mr. Fox, there's no wishy-washy in-between. And that in itself makes him fascinating: Wrestling with what you don't love in a filmmaker can be more illuminating than singing the praises of one you do.
I find it easy enough to accept the heartfelt nature of Anderson's 2012 Moonrise Kingdom, in which two little New Englandy misfits, a boy and a girl, run away together and stage their own version (sans sex) of The Blue Lagoon: The bigger world, the world of grown-ups, can't understand them, but maybe nature can. Why not pack up the old Thermos bottle and escape, hand-in-hand? Anderson does seem to work from the heart. Several of his films are set in motion by an irrevocable loss: In both Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited, a parent has died, and a child -- or a trio of children -- just can't get over it. Even when loss isn't a grand motivating factor in Anderson land, it can still be a shadowy, potent force: Ben Stiller's surly financier in The Royal Tenenbaums has lost his wife and doesn't know how to grieve. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Bill Murray's Jacques Cousteau–like sea explorer has lost his best friend and colleague (Seymour Cassel), and vows revenge on the shark that killed him. As overly precious as his movies may be, Anderson is hardly blind to overwhelming human emotions. Grief freezes us, and to live, we've got to crack through that numbness.
Anderson's latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, deals with loss in a more general, overarching way. The movie opens in the present, as an elderly writer (Tom Wilkinson) reflects on his youth, recalling his 1968 stay at a once-glorious hotel located in the fictional Central European Republic of Zubrowka ("once the seat of an empire," a title card tells us). The younger version of that writer, played by Jude Law, meets a mysterious hotel guest (or might he be the owner?) played by F. Murray Abraham, who regales him with stories of the hotel's prewar glory days. Before the fascist forces of evil rose to power and ruined everything -- Anderson's faux Nazis are paranoia-inducing thugs whose symbol is a double-zigzag instead of a swastika -- life at the hotel was filled with glamour, excitement, and good manners, all personified by its suave concierge and in-house gigolo, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes). This genteel but exciting world was too good to last, and its great symbol, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has also fallen into a state of careworn shabbiness dusted with nostalgia.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is the most elegiac of all Anderson's movies, and the most exquisitely detailed -- this is a world of filigreed archways and medallion-patterned carpets, of train compartments paneled in rich woods and little cakes iced with the colors of springtime. Technically, the movie is probably the crowning achievement in Anderson's HO-scale world, a mass of painstaking details that whisper a sigh of sadness for the loss of the old ways.
But can you mourn a lost world if you can't even breathe? Some people may feel cozy and coddled while they're watching a Wes Anderson movie, but I always feel that I've entered the airless interior of a panorama egg, and someone has closed the latch from the outside. That's especially true of The Grand Budapest Hotel, its visual splendor notwithstanding. One of the chief characters, a junior hotel employee played by a young actor named Tony Revolori, wears a cap embroidered with the words "LOBBY BOY" in slightly wonky letters. It's the slight wobbliness of the stitching that's so annoying, a homespun touch that was clearly intentional, an adorable little curlicue of self-conscious Andersonian quaintness. That character's love interest, a baker played by Saoirse Ronan, bears a birthmark in the shape of Mexico on her cheek. There's no hidden meaning there -- that purplish splotch is just a cute, random shape, a bit of whimsy designed to make us say, "Aha!" or perhaps "Oho!" Anderson fans may find that degree of calculation delightful. The rest of us are left whacking our palms against our foreheads, wondering how on Earth he gets away with it.
Stylization is one of the great tools of moviemaking -- its broadness can capture nuances that naturalism omits. But what's the tipping point between "stylized" and "mannered"? Is a mannered movie simply a stylized one you don't like? Anderson is notorious for controlling every detail on the set, and even for those of us who don't much like his movies, the level of old-school care he puts into his work counts for something. But is it possible to care too much about craft, at the expense of risk? Until very recently, seemingly 95 percent of movies, both big-studio films and independents, suffered from overuse of handheld cameras. It's a trend that's abating, thankfully, but Anderson never fell for it, which should be admirable. But even though Anderson's films -- as shot by his go-to cinematographer, Robert Yeoman -- are beautiful to look at, he could stand to move the camera around a little more: His images are static to the point of passivity. He stares through the lens so intently that we see only what he sees -- he so thoroughly subjects us to his imagination that we barely have to use our own.
Characters in live-action Wes Anderson movies have adventures, yet there's no sense of adventure in them. It's not just that everything we see on-screen has unfolded according to a rigid plan -- Hitchcock, among the most methodical of filmmakers, worked from storyboards, and you can't get much more rigid than that. But Hitchcock's pictures move like panthers, not like machines. Anderson, on the other hand, can't achieve, and perhaps doesn't care about, the illusion of fluidity. Like him, I love tiny things, small things made carefully, and he recognizes that the unapologetic artificiality of a scale model can be more believable than its full-size (or CGI) counterpart.
Perhaps that helps explain my devotion to Fantastic Mr. Fox, the most technically obsessive film Anderson has ever made. It is, after all, a movie in which fur-covered puppets on wire armatures have been manipulated to do his bidding, shot by obsessive shot. George Clooney is the voice of Mr. Fox, a poultry thief and family man (or should that be family fox?) who tries to quit his life of crime but just can't manage it. With the help of a group of woodland associates, he breaks into the stores of three greedy farmers. All of Anderson's movies are about community, about being part of some makeshift or real family, but Fantastic Mr. Fox is the warmest and richest. When I find my annoyance with Anderson reaching peak levels, I think of the scene in which two little fox cousins who do not get along (voiced by Eric Anderson and Jason Schwartzman) creep from the beds in their cramped, shared bedroom -- they've been bickering and can't get to sleep -- and turn on a tabletop model train. They watch together in silence as it clickety-clacks around its track in the darkness, their annoyance with each other momentarily forgotten. There's no dialogue; the moment doesn't need any.
With Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson put his trademark precision in the service of a story that ultimately feels wild and free. I have no idea how he pulled it off. Some have posited that Anderson is better when he's adapting other people's work, in this case, that of the rambunctious Roald Dahl. I've sometimes wondered if puppets aren't Anderson's ideal actors: They're easier to bend, literally and figuratively, than real-live people.
But in some ways, he has less control of them: Human actors are capable of listening to and translating a director's ideas, and their tools -- voice inflections, subtle changes of expression, shifts in posture -- have infinite gradations. Plus, they're often eager to please the guy they're working for. While puppets can be designed to exact specifications, and posed and moved quite precisely, they're empty vessels. They have no personal experience to draw from, no genetically inherited grace or clumsiness, no acting training or style of their own to fall back on. In that sense, they're the ultimate rebels; they have nothing to lose. Is it possible that Fantastic Mr. Fox allowed Anderson to edge closer to human feelings -- his own or universal ones -- because puppets, stubborn constructions that they are, made him work that much harder to figure out how human feelings should look?
How, for example, do you decide which direction the fur on a fox's face should whorl to indicate that he's stressed out or confused? What should his eyes look like when he thinks he's about to lose everything? Of course, in animation, the actors' voices go a long way in shaping individual characters. But those two silent little foxes, their eyes following that train as it goes round and round? Without words, they capture a specific but fleeting nuance of childhood joy and fragility. Anderson surely cares about every character he creates, but in Fantastic Mr. Fox, he shows true tenderness, divorced from gimmickry, for the first time. It's a kind of earthbound magic.
No matter how little I care for Anderson's other films, the unexpected miracle that is Fantastic Mr. Fox means I'll never be able to turn away from him completely. Though when I said earlier that Fantastic Mr. Fox is the only Wes Anderson film I love unequivocally, I was exaggerating. His 2007 short, Hotel Chevalier, a companion piece to The Darjeeling Limited, is pretty close to perfect. In it, a nameless character played by Jason Schwartzman has set up camp in a Paris hotel room. In the short's early minutes, he rings up room service and places an order in stilted, comic-book French, pausing to ask (in English) how to say "grilled cheese." No sooner has he hung up the phone than it rings, and the husky voice he hears through the receiver -- it belongs to Natalie Portman -- thrills and terrifies him. She's near the hotel; she's coming to see him. We have no idea what the deal is with these two. We wait to see whether they'll fall into each other's arms or tear each other apart. Or both.
Hotel Chevalier is only 13 minutes long, but it's as rich as a novel. The atmosphere is controlled -- practically the whole thing takes place in a hotel room and its adjoining balcony -- but Anderson lets danger and mystery in, more so than in any of his other movies. Hotel Chevalier is less a pure Wes Anderson film than a zephyr of Truffaut being channeled through Anderson; Schwartzman is his Antoine Doinel, a bundle of nerves in search of love in spite of himself. Anyone who can make a Hotel Chevalier must still have some surprises up his sleeve. Someday Wes Anderson might use his technical mastery, his sense of total control, to make a live-action movie that shows how little in life any of us can really control. It will be an adventure; it will be dangerous. And it will breathe.
December 17, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
If you’ve ever loved a terrible person, Mike Leigh’s quietly sensational Mr. Turner — a biopic, of sorts, covering the last 25 years of the life of the great 19th-century British painter J.M.W. Turner — is the movie for you.
In his seascapes and landscapes, Turner found the perfect visual language for every possible combination of weather atmospherics, from soft swirls of ochre sunlight to the powdery whites and grays of treacherous ocean storms.
Human beings don’t figure largely in Turner’s work, particularly in the later years of his career; when they appear at all, they’re often small, blurred figures at the mercy of the sky above and the sea below. You can read that as a lack of interest in human nature, or as a kind of personal humility in the face of the vast range of colors and textures — and, by extension, sounds and smells and feelings — that make up the world around us.
As a person, Turner tended toward eccentricity and solitude. And as played in Mr. Turner by Timothy Spall, he isn’t the sort you’d necessarily want to cuddle up to. Only occasionally does he use actual words to communicate. More often, he makes his feelings known using a vast vocabulary of grunts and growls that emerge from the depths of his throat. Presented with a visitor he doesn’t wish tosee, Turner makes the sound of a bear snuffling through garbage and finding nothing of worth; admiring the thousands of shades of brown and gray in a piece of driftwood, he’s like a contented pig who has discovered a particularly
tasty truffle in the forest.
Turner appears, especially at first, to care little for human beings except on those rare occasions when he needs them: His housekeeper Hannah (played, with guarded tenderness, by the British stage and theater actress Dorothy Atkinson) welcomes his gruff sexual advances, even though he treats her thoughtlessly. A mysterious and rather angry woman (Ruth Sheen, quivering with indignation) appears at his door with her two daughters — who, it turns out, are also his daughters — to show him his first grandchild. He grunts at the little cherub in her white bonnet, wanting nothing to do with her.
But only at first: A few minutes later, he comes around to admire the infant in all her powder-pink glory, albeit in a rather businesslike way. Yet it’s the first moment in when we realize that maybe we’re not as expert at reading this man’s heart as we think. He’s intractable, uncommunicative, dismissive. But he is also, as Spall and Leigh show us, capable of delicate gradations of emotion. This is less your standard-issue biopic than a foray into the mystery of human feeling.
Mr. Turner, majestic in its stubbornness, may be Leigh’s finest picture, or, at the very least, a picture different from any other he’s made. Leigh, Spall, and cinematographer Dick Pope — who borrows lots of lighting tricks from Vermeer and Ingres and even Turner himself, to glorious effect — have gently atomized Turner’s character, breaking it into small, potent fragments that affect us in ways we don’t see coming. We see how he reserves his affection only for a worthy few: for his father (played, wonderfully, by Paul Jesson), a gregarious and generous man who has somehow failed to pass those qualities on to his son; and for a widow he meets late in life, Mrs. Booth (the marvelous Marion Bailey) — when she first meets the already famous painter, she doesn’t even know who he is, though despite his surly demeanor, she takes to him immediately. Leigh favors a quasi-improvisational approach to filmmaking, and he defines the chief relationships in Turner’s life without writing them into convenient little boxes.
The younger Turner addresses the elder as “daddy,” with such off-handed tenderness that it throws you off guard a little each time you hear it. On the day Turner and Mrs. Booth meet — she has rented him a room in his favorite painting retreat, the seaside town of Margate — she sets dinner on the table, apologizing in advance if it’s too salty. His grumbly-flirtatious response probably comes as more of a surprise to us than it does to her. She giggles with delight, shooing him off and scuttling away. Her enjoyment of this little game is an unfettered embrace of life, the kind of thing we don’t think 19th-century English people would be capable of.
But of course they were — and in the movies, as well as life, they should be allowed that joy and freedom. That’s where Leigh’s gifts as a grouchy humanist come in. He’s not one for what the Victorians would call sentiment; he prefers all-out feeling, even when it’s wrapped in tender protective layers of tissue. Spall, so often a key player in Leigh’s ensemble films, is his dazzling treasure here. He has always been a terrific actor, but this is the performance of his career, wholly without vanity: As Turner, he has a chin that doesn’t know where his neck begins; he carries his somewhat portly frame like he’s more preoccupied with light and color than with grace of movement. This Mr. Turner is no one we’d go out of our way to know; he may be historically significant, but he’s anti-charismatic, a walking negative charge. And yet somehow, we come to love a man we don’t even like. As Mrs. Booth says of him, with perceptiveness that has nothing to do with flattery or even with mere kindness, “I believe you to be a man of great spirit and fine feeling.” She’s heard the heartbeat beneath the growl.
March 19, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
A friend of mine, who's in his fifties, is getting an MFA in nonfiction writing. Many of the other students in his program are in their twenties, and most have no interest in writing any kind of nonfiction other than memoir. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell, and more than that, a belief that the greater world is interested in that story, even when it's being told by a person who has barely lived.
In that context, The Missing Picture, a disarmingly subtle documentary-memoir hybrid by Cambodian-born director Rithy Panh, comes off as a work of extreme humility. Panh does have a story to tell: In 1975, when he was 13 years old and living a normal life with his family in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, invaded the city and drove its inhabitants into the countryside, decreeing that they leave everything, including family photographs and mementos, behind. There, they were forced to work as field laborers; the goal was to create a pure, agrarian-based Communist society. Anyone with too much education — any education — was considered untrustworthy. Eyeglasses, seen as a symbol of learning, were forbidden among the masses. Perceived enemies of the state were tortured and executed. Children were encouraged to inform against their parents. Workers of all ages were subject to inhumane conditions, and when famine struck, people died by the thousands.
Panh escaped to Thailand in 1979, eventually settling in Paris to make documentary films, but the rest of his family did not survive. With The Missing Picture, he tells the story of his childhood before and during the Khmer Rouge occupation, but here's the clincher: Because so little documentary footage of the period exists, Panh tells his story mostly through the use of carved clay figures that represent himself, his family, and his fellow citizens.
Using dolls to tell the story of genocide may sound tragically misguided. I went into the film cold at Cannes last year, and once it began and I realized what I was in for, I dolefully began counting the number of people I'd have to climb over to reach the exit. But I stayed, and found myself captivated: The Missing Picture, which won the festival's Un Certain Regard prize and was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, is unlike anything I've ever seen, a strange and beautiful work that comes off as both haunted and charmed. The horror of Panh's boyhood past is real, but the poetry he makes from it is just as tangible.
In their startling innocence, the dioramas Panh has created — of riotous, colorful pre-1975 family get-togethers, of gaunt workers toiling in the fields, of soldiers executing blindfolded prisoners — resemble children's playthings, though they also have a talismanic power. Because Panh has no photographic remembrances of his family, these displays serve as handcrafted home movies: They're motionless, but not lifeless.
Early on, we see a close-up of hands at work carving a man in a neat white suit. From the voiceover narration, written by Panh and read by Randal Douc, we learn that this man is Panh's father. "I want to hold him close," Panh says, an admission that's searing in its directness. The figures change along with the narrative: Their clothes are painted black to reflect the uniform dictated by the Khmer Rouge. Human anguish, measured first in months and then in years, shows in these figures' faces and bodies as they're whittled down to angular hollows. The figure of Panh becomes thin and pinched, too, though his shirt, instead of black, is spotted with vivid red polka dots. That shirt is a cry of defiance, a reminder of the inner self he refuses to relinquish. "To hang on," he says, "you must hide within yourself a strength, a memory, an idea no one can take from you. For if a picture can be stolen, a thought can't."
The historical footage Panh weaves into his story is spare and carefully chosen, including bits from Khmer Rouge propaganda films, revealing in their very stiffness, and snippets of better days, like the clip showing Cambodian teenagers of the '60s twisting and shouting to a cover of Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour" performed in their native tongue. The language may sound strange to English-speakers, but the music and the movement of the dancers tell us all we need to know about youth and freedom. In another sequence, a group of clay figures gaze, rapt, at a dancer in a golden costume, another relic of a happier time. She's real, destined to live forever in a film clip; the figures, frozen in their joy, are just clay ghosts. Or are they? The Missing Picture is so immediate, so vital, it practically breathes. Not all memoirs need to exist. But the gentle urgency of Panh's story is right there in the filmmaking. This is a story that had to be told. Even in its stillness, it moves.
April 2, 2014
By Stephanie Zacharek
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer's alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn't disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like an upside-down heart. But her nakedness is the opposite of a sleazy thrill. As Glazer presents it to us, an Eadweard Muybridge nude miraculously come to life, it's so unadorned and purely human that it's entrancing on a whole other level. That Johansson's character is not human at all only adds to the pathos, and the terror, of it all. She is, as we learn early on, a killer from another world masquerading in womankind's touch-me skin. In her nakedness, she hides everything and nothing; she's treachery and softness rolled into one.
You could say the same of Under the Skin itself, a science-fiction rhapsody laced with thorns. Adapted — though maybe "morphed" is a better word — from Michel Faber's 2000 novel of the same name, this is the story of a girl who fell to Earth, or who was, perhaps, put here to do a job. The exact motivation of Johansson's character is never made clear, though she seems to be harvesting male flesh for either herself or her race. Really, very little in Under the Skin is clear at all. Its secrets unspool in mysterious, supple ribbons, but that's part of its allure, and its great beauty. This picture is often mesmerizing and sometimes almost unforgivably cruel: The image of an infant crying on a cold, savage beach appears onscreen for just a few seconds, though it takes much longer to shake it off. But if Glazer is only just resurfacing with his first movie in 10 years (the last was the 2004 arty-elegant reincarnation romance Birth), at least he's coming back with a great one. Along with his actors, cinematographer Daniel Landin, and composer Mica Levi, he's made a work of quiet audaciousness, half-soothing, half-jolting. This is a dream-state movie that's always fully awake and alive.
Johansson's character has no name, and though she speaks in a reasonably proper English accent, she seems to have come from nowhere. This enigmatic creature, with her short crop of dark curls and mischievous half-moon of a smile, drives around Scotland's bramble-gray countryside and its chattery, bustling cities, using her sexual magnetism to lure men to their doom. She wears everyday mall clothes — skinny jeans, a faux-fur jacket — and banters casually with her marks to determine how much they'll be missed by anyone at home, or if they'll be missed at all. They're all regular guys, sporting jerseys of their favorite football teams, some of them rabbiting on in such thick Scots that they may as well be speaking the language of another planet. Our alien beauty leans in close to hear what they're saying, to determine if they'll suit her purposes. Some of them immediately remark on how pretty she is; others seem to avoid even looking at her, before stumbling to tell her they find her attractive.
What Johansson is working here is "glamour" in the original and ancient sense of the word, not the Hollywood one, a point brought home by Glazer's working methods. Most, though not all, of the men in the film are non-actors, unaware that they're being chatted up by a bona fide movie star, the proceedings captured by a small hidden camera. On the surface, at least, it's an approach that invites some moral queasiness: Even though all of these "performers" were clued in after the fact, and signed the required release forms, it doesn't seem right to make human beings the unwitting pawns of movie artistry. But I think the way Glazer uses these performers is ultimately respectful. We're on their side — we can't blame them for falling for this not-quite-Scarlett Johansson, because we've fallen, too. Watching them respond to alien Scarlett is fascinating; some of them are so shy they seem reluctant to look at her directly. But watching her coax them into her net is the real wonder here. When she's being observed only by us, the character's stare is simultaneously hungry and blank. When she's working her wiles, her eyes are bright and reflective: "I'm far more interested in you than I am in myself," they seem to say, and weirdly, tragically (for the alien's quarry), she's not even lying.
There are dozens of mysteries in Under the Skin that don't cohere in any logical way but work like gangbusters on the imaginative subconscious. Where, exactly, does alien Scarlett lead her victims? Who knows? But we do see them, following her lead, stripping themselves naked as they stride deeper and deeper into a pool of what looks like inky black oil. They sink, while she pads across the surface with a panther's muscular grace. What happens to them after that is the stuff of Francis Bacon paintings, a loss of self that Glazer captures with disturbingly hypnotic imagery. And Levi's score is a small, weird miracle in itself. The opening sequence, in which an orb of light is used as a kind of visual shorthand to fill us in on some otherwise incomprehensible alien backstory, is accompanied by a chorus of anxious violins like 1,000 obsessive crickets. This is the music of unease, the sound our neurons might make if we could listen in on their workday.
Alien Scarlett goes through one man after another, until one of them, a young man with a facial disfiguration (played by Adam Pearson), touches a seemingly human nerve in her. She never voices the thought, but we can see her wondering: Could she ever live as a human? Could she feel desire, and make real love with a man instead of destroying him? This particular pick-up, thinking he's hit the jackpot by finding a woman who's sexually interested in him, pinches himself to make sure it's all real. "Dreaming," he says numbly as he follows in her deadly footsteps; he can barely bring himself to articulate the question mark. In her molten honey voice, alien Scarlett answers the half-asked question: "Yes. Yes, we are."
At this point, which is also, incidentally, the moment Johansson finally strips bare, Under the Skin becomes less sinister and more about some unnameable longing. Alien Scarlett seems annoyed by Earthlings at first — they're a necessary inconvenience — but the longer she wears the skin of a human, the more she yearns to become one. She doesn't have penis envy; she has soul envy. Even in her not-human state, she wants what we all want, and just like us, she has no idea how to name it. Maybe the key is to just keep walking toward it. Dreaming. Yes, we are.
To the judges:
The ten articles I am submitting to you demonstrate the breadth, wit, intelligence, and feistiness of Stephanie Zacharek's film criticism. Week after week, as the chief film critic at the Village Voice, Zacharek treats her readers to learned yet approachable considerations of the films that seem to her that week's most urgent. She does so with a rare attentiveness to the actual experience of watching the films: To read Zacharek's evocations of a film's feeling and texture, its performances and design, is to feel as if you're already there in the theater. Zacharek can mount a sharp argument about aesthetics even as her writing proves to be an aesthetic event itself.
Zacharek will champion a deserving blockbuster, a curious indie, a challenging documentary, the playing-on-one-screen-only revival. While her elbows can be sharp, and her pans illuminating, most of the reviews I've included in this nomination are of films that, as Pauline Kael might have put it, turned her on. Never cynical, always open-minded, Zacharek is courageous in her willingness to love the movies she writes about. Her celebration of Top Five, Chris Rock's comeback comedy, acknowledges the film's imperfections while also toasting everything in it that moved and cheered her during what had been an especially hard week in New York City. The piece is stirring, deeply connected to the cultural moment. In it, Zacharek richens her readers' own encounter with the art.
Our readers have come to expect to be stirred by Zacharek's reviews. Perhaps the most potent of this year's pieces is her re-appraisal of A Hard Day's Night on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. As always, Zacharek paints the film's look, feel, and craft, but she also writes movingly of the spell that it has held over her for the better part of her life – and of what its youthful madness now means to someone with, as she writes, “knowing that there's more of my life behind me than ahead of me.” The review is standout criticism as well as a wise and vital treatise on aging and memory.
That enthusiasm and that urge to take art personally also stamps Zacharek's reviews of Love Is Strange, in which she wrestles with the grim realities of New York real estate, or of The Missing Picture, a Khmer Rouge documentary built around puppets. Reviewing Under the Skin, she amusingly commiserates with the men seduced by the film's sexy, flesh-harvesting alien: “We're on their side — we can't blame them for falling for this not-quite-Scarlett Johansson, because we've fallen, too.”
That review, and others here (The Immigrant, Mr. Turner), suggests that Zacharek is very much a sensualist. But she doesn't just evoke the powers of the movies. She also digs deep into just how the movies summon up that power. I have included in this submission her penetrating essay about the joyousness of the violence in the little-seen John Wick. She opens with the admission that there's too much violence in the movies, in general, before getting to the root of what makes the shootouts and fisticuffs in this movie a grand exception.
Another essay here showcases another uncommon attribute of Zacharek's: humility. In “I'm Trying to Love Wes Anderson, That Miniaturist Puppet-Master” Zacharek examines the film of a widely admired director she has never admired much herself. Rather than dismiss the work of Wes Anderson, Zacharek examines what it is in the films that she does not respond to. She demonstrates here – as she does every week in print, on our website, and the podcast she co-hosts – that the critic has a responsibility to address her audience not as if she's some singular authority. Instead, she as an engaged, honest, informed individual, restless in her drive to share what matters to her most.
I hope that you enjoy these pieces as much as I enjoyed editing them.
Sincerely,
Alan Scherstuhl
Film Editor, Village Voice
Biography
Stephanie Zacharek is the chief film critic for the Village Voice.
Winners
Prize Winner in Criticism in 2015:
Mary McNamara
For savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider's view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television.
Criticism
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Criticism in 2015:
Manohla Dargis
For film criticism that rises from a sweeping breadth of knowledge – social, cultural, cinematic – while always keeping the viewer front and center.
The Jury
The Jury
Gail Caldwell(Chair )*
author
Eric Banks
director
Michael Phillips
film critic
Connie Schultz*
columnist
Bill Wyman
author and cultural critic
Winners in Criticism
Inga Saffron
For her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise.
Philip Kennicott
For his eloquent and passionate essays on art and the social forces that underlie it, a critic who always strives to make his topics and targets relevant to readers.
Wesley Morris
For his smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and the big-screen box office.
Sebastian Smee
For his vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.