Where the Wild Things Are

To a certain extent, great movies defy explanation. They pop up in the least expected place, ignoring conventional rules and expectations - they defy relevance (a quality I've just finished celebrating in another review) in the name of a deeper resonance. These films can often be ungainly, hard to swallow - they strike us at odd angles and approach us on their own grounds, not on ours. I think Where the Wild Things Are may very well be a great movie. It's certainly a visionary piece of work, highly original and unique, unlike anything else I saw in 2009. In this sense of difference, of vision, of effectiveness on its own terms, it reminds me of two (of course) very different movies: Inglourious Basterds and Antichrist. Together, they form a trilogy of challenging, rich, rewarding movies, all of which I had numerous problems with. Yet I could eventually and only embrace as examples of artistic accomplishment - among the most singular of this epoch.

Wild Things exists both as an aesthetic experience and a meditation on resonant themes: a combination most great narrative films employ. The screenplay, by Jonze and novelist David Eggers, sensitively "updates" Maurice Sendak's classic - respecting the power of the original while setting out on its own ground, and thus avoiding both of the traps most high-profile 00s adaptations have fallen prey to. At its core is a simple, eternal story: that of a child watching his innocence and exuberance slowly dissolve into the melancholy mists of pre-adolesence. He stomps around in his wolf suit, engages in goofy dances to make his mother laugh, acts more childish than his age should probably allow, but it's clear these are nostalgic gestures rather than unconscious actions, a display of imaginative naivitee to conceal the pain inside.

The movie creates several correspondences between the real-world opening and the surreal dreamscape of the Wild Things - a fort is crushed just like Max's snow igloo; a female monster runs off with her friends after the fashion of Max's sister; in climactic moments, tokens of affection are broken in both worlds - less as an act of hostility towards the original recipient of said tokens, than as a masochistic slaying of whatever was tender and guileless in the giver. Brilliantly, the movies does not spell out its central theme, the most important correspondence in the movie: between Max's relationship to Carol, a brooding, sensitive, sometimes brutal beast, and Max's connection to his absent father. The only sign of that missing paternal presence is a globe in Max's bedroom, which reads, "To Max, Owner of this World, love Dad." We never meet the man, but feel we get to know him through Carol (who spends the film yearning for a female friend grown distant; with a power that would dwarf a grown man, he lashes out in a childlike rage). The sense of displacement and repression only adds to the resonance.

Carol is a brilliant creation, a collaboration between James Gandolfini's sad, tentative, yet authoritative vocals and the expert mimicry of Jim Henson's Creature Shop (and, presumably, some digital enhancement to enhance the facial expressiveness). It's one of the great performances of the year; indeed all of the monsters are wonders to behold, fully realized characters crafted from singular traits and yet basted in larger-than-life warmth. By comparison, some of the human performances are a tad weak: Max Records is everything he needs to be as the star, but Catherine Keener's delivery is sometimes stilted (though her sensitive features work wonders in close-ups), and a classroom lecture about the end of the solar system feels forced and awkward.

The film skates just this side of mawkish cutesiness, going whole-hog for the childlike indie mood of current hip culture, with its Karen O vocals, earnestly Peter Pan-like nostalgia, and quirky sense of humor. It works, in part, because of the purity of its vision and because of Gandolfini's weighty presence - at times the actor's voice reminds us of another narcissistic boy-man who loomed large over the cultural zeitgeist, one prone to romanticism but hardly a sentimentalist. In his bruised self-pity and ferocious violence, Gandolfini makes the stretches of desert, wood, and beach on this magical island seem not so very far from the New Jersey Expressway. This aura of brooding darkness gives the film just the edge it needs to prevent it from sliding into the cozily blinkered worldview that has characterized creative youth culture in the past decade.

In the era of CGI, when Avatar's splashy debut is intriguing but frustratingly distancing spectacle, Spike Jonze has crafted a work with actual texture. While the film incorporates computer animation, it as an element in the overall design, a touch, not a template. Above all, the movie conveys the quality of being handcrafted - it has soul, and the soul is embodied on the very surface of the movie. This is not to suggest I fell into the movie's bear hug right away. Jonze initially employs a dizzying, off-centered compositional strategy - in the nighttime forest scenes, it's very hard to follow the action with all the whip-pans and blurred shapes moving through dark palettes. But when the camera moves out into the sun-speckled deserts and windswept beaches, it settles down somewhat and we can immerse ourselves in this world, which an IMDb commentator quite simply and effectively tags "a child's kingdom."

It's a kingdom made of sand, and the movie is content to watch, sadly but wisely, as the last granules of the sand castle are swept out to sea with Max's little wooden boat, away from the shore of dreams and into the wide world from whence he escaped, momentarily. Earlier in the movie, Carol takes Max to a secret hiding place, a cave in which he's built a miniature world (the scene plays as a tribute to Jonze's fellow music video auteur, the childlike genius Michel Gondry). "It's gonna be a place," he tells the boy wistfully, "where all the things you wanted to have happen...would happen." Jonze and Eggers are wise enough to flirt with but not indulge this fantasy wish. They allow us to visit a magical world, all the while reminding us of its fragility. Meanwhile reality to bangs at the door like a jackhammer, finally blowing into our sequestered little room, and sucking us back outside. But we remember what we've seen, treasuring the crumbs that we were able to grasp as if they were keys. Keys not only to a place of escape, but a pathway into something deeper than the everyday, where the roots of our vague stirrings and longings are planted. And that's art.

And the winner was...

After recovering (barely) from an excruciatingly embarrassing opening number (of which we need not say any more), the Academy Awards ceremony proceeded with few surprises last night, but nonetheless proved a satisfying experience. As hosts, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin managed to pull off a surprising amount of the clunkers they were handed (this was one of the worst-written telecasts in the show's history, which is saying something). More importantly, at least within the parameters the nominations set, many of the winners were deserving. Apologists and naysayers alike could agree on the merits of Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges was by consensus the "his-time-has-come" victor for Crazy Heart, and while I'd probably suggest Quentin Tarantino was the "best director" of his bunch, I'm much, much happier to see Kathryn Bigelow win.

Bigelow's victory was the high point of the night, and is sure to be seen as such in the Oscar coverage (at least the coverage unhindered by early deadlines). She was of course the first woman ever to win in this category, a victory only slightly hampered by the fact that every man onstage seemed to be groping her. James Cameron took his ex-wife's victory in stride; and while he never made it to the stage, Avatar swept plenty of awards - except for the top one. I was glad Hurt Locker pulled off its predicted success; while I don't think it was the best picture of the year (Antichrist probably deserves that honor) or even necessarily of the nominees (the often frustrating Inglourious Basterds just may look that way in retrospect, though I'm more comfortable calling Tarantino the "best director" than the movie the "best picture") - but it's the right Best Picture for its time. The greatest movies don't need Oscars, anyway.

Nor, for that matter, do the greatest personages, though it's nice to see them receive the recognition eventually (and belatedly). Which brings us to the biggest blemish on last night's broadcast (and I'm not talking about the this-is-my-first-appearance-in-a-school-play of the Twilight tots nor the intervention-staging of the Best Actor/Actress presentations). Where were the honorary awards? We know, of course. We were told, very briefly and superficially, that the reception of these awards happened off-screen and that Roger Corman, Gordon Willis, and Lauren Bacall, among others, were honored. We even got to see brief snippets of the ceremony, which the show's producers seemed to think was enough, returning us quickly to the more important matters of who's wearing what, stale repartee, and interpretive dances of The Hurt Locker (question: was that guy supposed to represent the Bomb Disposal outfit or a walking IED?).

An institution which ignores its own history deserves only scorn. I'm sure Willis and Corman, as a behind-the-scenes craftsman and B movie auteur, respectively, don't expect to be openly celebrated in the limelight beside vapid celebrities and the like. But Bacall? Couldn't Hollywood have honored one of its leading lights, a woman who stole scenes from Bogie, openly and prominently? What must it have felt like to be the first star to be palmed off in this manner? That she didn't put her lips together and blow the Academy a raspberry is to her credit, and an indication of the grace and gravitas the industry's public face was once capable of.

For those who missed it, I rounded up all my reviews of Oscar-nominated films (as well as the reviews of several others) on Wonders in the Dark this weekend. Including a couple recent reviews of Bright Star and Inglourious Basterds.

Stromboli

(Though already written before I was aware of the series, I am now submitting this as an entry in the For the Love of Films: Film Preservation Blog-a-Thon of Ferdy on Films & Self-Styled Siren. A full-fledged entry will be appearing on the Dancing Image on Sunday, the last day of the blog-a-thon. Stay tuned.)

Despite seeing many of his films, I've never really responded to Rossellini the way many cinephiles do. His holy simplicity has occasionally struck me as, well, just plain simple. Flowers of St. Francis (a blind buy on my part, and a satisfying one) is charming and Voyage in Italy compelling - though I wonder if Antonioni didn't eventually pick up Rossellini's ball and run further with it a few years later. Europa 51 I found embarrassing and remain rather mystified as to how its obviousness is supposed to be transcendent. Open City and Germany Year Zero are effective and absorbing but they're films I respected without being enthralled by. Neither one seemed to capture the lingering, simple, pure power of Bicycle Thieves (though both are overripe for revisiting, especially in the wake of the recent Criterion releases). Paisan was compelling in the abstract but I found its actuality too messy. Unlike Rossellini's acolytes (one recalls the zealous cineaste in Before the Revolution who admonishes the protagonist, "Remember, Rossellini is a god!") I was always unable to take the raggedness of his work in stride, to embrace it as not just a necessary evil but somehow fundamental to the work's appeal.

All of which is preface to my enthusiastic viewing of Stromboli. Rossellini's first film with his new (and newly controversial) wife Ingrid Bergman, it's bursting with energy, invention, and showmanship. The film ripples with rich tensions, between its desire to simply document village life and its allegorical overtones, between frustration with Bergman's spoiled character and sympathy with her own frustrations, between the melodramatic extremes (heightened by the literally incessant music which at one point pounded consistently for about half an hour!) and documentary naturalism. Certainly between Bergman's professionalism and glamor and the untrained "performances" of the nonactors in the movie - a healthy balance is struck here, with the real people convincingly inhabiting their characters and a terrific Bergman dialing down her polish while turning up her acting chops. The provincial folks and the Hollywood goddess gel remarkably well.

The centerpiece of the film perfectly demonstrates the subtle synthesis of Rossellini's artistry with his method of understated observation. A squad of fishermen are out at sea, as they are every day, but this time Bergman's character is out there with them to observe their activity. Slowly, as they pull in their nets, shapes begin to emerge beneath the watery surface, and then a chaotic explosion of whitewater and flailing fins. I had experienced this scene years ago, excerpted in Martin Scorsese's "My Voyage to Italy" and been blown away. Oddly enough, I couldn't quite remember why anymore. Now it came flooding back - these fish are gigantic! Their capture and seizure is brutal, violent, beautiful; the set piece is so strong that it overpowers everything else. Allegorical readings are possible but unnecessary - the forcefulness of the scene empowers the rest of the film rather than vice versa. The way a note will shift the "meaning" of a piece of music without our being able to articulate exactly why, so this sequence prepares the way for Bergman's journey across the volcano in the film's climax.

The ending is very abrupt, but of a piece with the movie's ragged, punchy, honestly intense and intensely honest effect. This is that rare and satisfying discovery - when an auteur's appeal becomes apparent not in a mitigation of their usual approaches but in taking these approaches to their extreme and making you see, in the burning light of their purity, what they were up to all along. The film is like its titular volcano, not exactly dormant, not exactly active, but rumbling, quaking, occasionally erupting in spurts - in short, living but limned in by all the limitations which usually encumber life though they need not extinguish its flame.

It occurs to me that, in speaking in abstract and vague terms about the movie's appeal, I may be doing it a disservice. Perhaps a better approach would be to tackle it in clear, precise, yet pungent language, language which mirrors the film's own aesthetic. This may be the case, yet having seen it about a month ago, I'm trying to recollect its fragments, like lava rocks in the wake of an explosion.

Anyway, see it if you can.

Donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Is Indie Dead?

Recognize the cover? It is of course, a riff on the famous "Is God Dead?" TIME Magazine cover of the mid-60s. It perfectly fits its subject in a number of ways: the entrenched, self-conscious irony of "indie"; the essential triviliaty of same (from asking about God to asking about indie in forty years); and perhaps even a nascent self-loathing (ever notice how the most vociferous critics of hipsterdom have themselves a wide streak of hipsterism?). The article itself is compelling; you can read it here. It's timely, at least for me, because I was going to post a similar inquiry on the Examiner a while back, where I myself had been designated "Indie Movie Examiner."

That's the first time I've used that full title myself, and there's a reason for it. I just don't like that word. Jim Jarmusch famously said, paraphrasing Goebbels (by way of Godard, most likely): "When I hear the word 'independent', I reach for my revolver." I don't have too much of a problem with that word - politically in particular I think it has a strong, potent ring to it. While it's accrued some negative connotations in the film world - smallness, marginalization, unpalatability to wider audiences - it still strikes me as an appropriate term for films made outside the box, whether that box is financial or conceptual. But "indie" is another matter. Its twee, quirky shortening smacks of a marketing moniker, and the very fact that it shrinks the term "independent" only highlights those inherent drawbacks of the term I mentioned above (except perhaps for the unpalatability, as "indie" has proved quite popular in recent years).

The Paste article focuses almost entirely on the term as it applies to music. So did a commentator on the Examiner, when I panned (500) Days of Summer while noting a redeeming quality: that it seemed to be waving goodbye to the "indie" aesthetic even as it embodied it. One Chaddy wrote (before moving on to declare I had "no soul" and was "obviously not a Smiths fan" - ?!), "Blahhh. Indie expresses an affinity for a particular music style, not necessarily an aesthetic." In my response, which unfortunately went unheeded, I wrote, "And much, much more. To most people, 'indie' can apply to films as well as music, and there are all sorts of aesthetic signifiers which have clustered around the world in the past 10 years." (I described much of this phenomenon in the review itself.)

Of course there's overlap between the indie music phenomenon and the indie film movement. Not so much at first, as in the 90s "indie movies" connoted dialogue-heavy low-budget features without much of an aesthetic at all. But the turning point probably came with 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums; Wes Anderson's childlike, referential, playful, and precocious style had a monumental influence on rapid growth of the quirky, "indie" aspects of the zeitgeist (particularly title and poster design). I actually think it's an exceptional film, despite its malign influence - it captured an elusive mood and sensibility which had never quite been articulated to this full extent, a fact which explains its persistent impact on pop culture (which is probably only matched in independent movie terms by Tarantino's roughly 10 years earlier). While according to "Indie is Dead?" the term is so indefinable and hard-to-pin-down that it's essentially meaningless, I'd submit that, like pornography, you know it when you see it.

Still, as the article points out, if the term is no longer defined by the very conditions which birthed it (i.e. actual independence from the industry, be it music or film) isn't it time to retire it, or at least radically redefine it? This seems to be what they're after with their title question - has "indie" become so ubiquitous, achieving an erasure of the original need for itself in the process, that it might as well declare "mission accomplished" and "game over"? This isn't what I meant to investigage with my own indie-is-dead article: for one thing, I think there may be the first stirrings of a movement away from the 00s form of "indie"; for another I think the phenomenon which the word applies to is still severely limited, despite its ubiquity. As I said to JAFB beneath a recent post:

I'd welcome a renewed underground but also a fresh cultural approach which neither eschews the mainstream nor cowtows to it, but rather redefines it the way the 60s counterculture did. Marginalization and fragmentation, imposed and self-willed, have lasted too long.

And finally...death to the word "indie" itself! I was actually going to write an Examiner piece about this, pending a name change from "Indie Movie Examiner" to "Independent Movie Examiner." The word indie is so self-consciously quirky, twerpy, and wimpy. It reminds me of those aesthetically unappealing, stamp-size ads which used to bug me when I was a kid, eagerly flipping through the pages of the Boston Globe looking at the big posters for Jurassic Park or The Fugitive or (next summer) The Mask. Granted, many of these ads were for movies which actually turned out to be quite good (often better than the big-budget flicks I drooled over) but if my taste has changed, I still wish independent cinema wasn't so acquiescent in its marginalization. Think big, this is cinema! True, the dirt-cheap talkfests of the 90s are over but the overly stylized subculture movies of the 00s still haven't quite broken out of the ghetto.

Ultimately, the notion of independence - from both industrial and cultural norms - will have to transcend its own limitations, cast off the dead weight of the slight, cutesy term "indie", and prove itself not merely a watered-down or even reflexively contrarian "alternative" to the mainstream but a transcendence of it. The 60s counterculture became the dominant culture for a reason (demographics aside) - because it was unapologetic, stronger, more diverse, richer than the increasingly thin gruel of "adult" pop culture. Any similar achievements of the DIY scene and the offbeat ethos will have to achieve the same. With technology increasingly accessible, the kindling is there. The coming decade will see if the true fire of independence begins to blaze in full force, or if we're only able to warm ourselves by the increasingly pathetic flames flaring up here and there.

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Just as Howard Zinn, the famed Boston University professor and historian who wrote The People's History of the United States, felt it was impossible to be "neutral" and undesirable to be "objective" about human history, so it's been near-impossible for anyone to be neutral about Zinn himself. The Left adored him; the Right loathed him. The historical community seemed split between those who felt he added a stirring chorus of voices to the historical choir (helping to popularize history amongst a general readership in the process) and those who rankled at his methods and tone, feeling that he was not playing by the proper rules of the game. When Zinn passed away a few weeks ago, of course, the emphasis was on the positive and the same is true of this documentary which was released around 2003, a time when Zinn's call for dissidence seemed more relevant than ever.

Much as I enjoy elaborating and extrapolating, sometimes a simple blurb says it best. (Not that I'm going to keep it short myself here; in my defense, neither would Zinn - A People's History runs 682 pages!) In this case the blurb is J. Hoberman's. The Village Voice critic (himself of a definite leftward tilt, though not of the populist variety) wrote of the film, "Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fond portrait, less documentary than infomercial, is unrelentingly and in the end self-defeatingly positive -- albeit effective in showcasing Zinn's charismatic personality." That about sums it up - though I'd add that the doc is also hindered by an amateurish and rather ineffective style. Still, it's primary purpose is to provide a snapshot of Zinn's life and personality, and it does achieve this, particulary when it comes to the professor's early and middle years.

As a rightward-leaning high school student (partly the contrarian in me, as most of my peers seemed to be liberals, and knee-jerk ones at that) I often found Zinn's work irritating. Contrary to the notion that Zinn's radical re-evaluation of history remains anathema in hidebound American education, A People's History was assigned reading in several of my classes. Open-minded despite my skepticism towards the left, and genuinely curious as to where they were coming from, I would dig into a fresh chapter eager for a bracing subversion of American mythology. But by the end of each I found myself wearied by the monotony of Zinn's focus on exploitation and victimization, the contrary stubbornness of Zinn's refusal to grant quarter to any American leader as anything other than an dictator in disguise, and mostly by the lack of an intellectual tension or complexity in the work, something I relished even then. Though I still appreciate this quality above all others, in history, in art, in just about anything, I'm much more open to Zinn's approach now.

Re-reading A People's History in the wake of Zinn's death (I'm about 150 pages in at the moment) I no longer find it wearying but completely absorbing. The focus on the economic imbalance and abuse of those with less power seems more like a provocative and openly admitted bias, one which gives the narrative drive and clarity though it certainly works better in some passages than in others. (The colonial years are convincingly rendered via one long cry of moral outrage, directed at the barbarism of a greedy and ruthless culture whose cruelty was only matched by its hypocritical arrogance. However, when it comes to Revolutionary times, the author has trouble portraying Jefferson as essentially an elitist, one whose intellectual adventurousness and passion for liberty were basically beside the point. Even as Zinn struggles to demystify the words of the Declaration of Independence, the quoted passages remain stirring.)

I mention this as a segue back into Zinn's character. Underpinning the seeming one-sidedness of his focus are two qualities which are often missing on the intellectual left: a personal complexity in terms of his relation to the country he's criticizing, and, conversely, a simplicity and moral straightforwardness which is in the best tradition of American radicalism. On the first note, Howard Zinn was an antiwar activist who had fought and killed in war, a fierce critic of air bombardment who had himself been a bombardier in World War II. His positions were not so much contradicted by his history, as necessitated by them; it's quite possible that if he could have re-lived his life he would not have served, but his story is far more compelling in the fashion it occurred: it gives him a moral authority which stems from humility, humanity, and experience. He is not hovering above what he condemns, pointing the finger from a place of purity (like some of the college kids who jeered at soldiers without ever having been in their shoes, either literally or conceptually).

Likewise, Zinn was not an academic theorizing about the working classes after receiving a healthy dollop of Marxism, he was a slum kid who worked menial labor for years before attending college on the G.I. Bill (while struggling to support his growing family). Hence his championing of the underdog was not merely a self-loathing nose-thumbing at the bourgeoisie, as it seemed to be with so many sixties intellectuals. This may also explain his much-noted good cheer and patience with opposing views, at least according to those who experienced him as a teacher. His revisionism was bucked up by a history of patriotic service (however much he questioned it later), and - despite his unwavering criticism of those in power - a relative deficiency of personal bitterness (in the sense that Zinn tended to see almost everyone as tangled in the web, even to a certain extent the spinners). This leads to one of the film's most compelling moments (though it bungles the delivery, it can't really taint the fascination of the anecdote). In North Vietnam to receive some POWs whom the Communists have agreed to release, the representatives of the peace movement (including Father Berringer and Tom Hayden) are invited to sing, as is the tradition at Vietnamese gatherings. Zinn stands up and sings "America the Beautiful."

The later years, following Zinn's involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements, are not as compelling when presented in the documentary. Zinn's feud with BU president John Silber is a potential source of drama, but it's defused instantly when, after beginning to develop the conflict, the filmmakers tie the story up quickly with a rather rambling response by Zinn in a lecture hall. In this and a later speech, Zinn dismisses his critics through guilt-by-association (talking about a historian who criticized his work, he haltingly begins to engage the historian's criticism and then falls back on, "He supported Nixon" and the film leaves it at that). This was the favored tactic of Zinn's more right-wing enemies ("he's a Marxist" or "he's a radical leftist" therefore his arguments must be wrong) and it's no more satisfying coming from Zinn than from them. Indeed, as the filmmakers document Zinn's dogged dedication to dissidence, they ironically display the American left's descent into something of an ideological rut.

Contrary to the teeming mass of freshly radicalized students we see in newsreel footage from the civil rights and Vietnam era, the crowds at the Iraq rallies and book presentations which close the film give the impression of having made up their mind long ago. Asked what she thought of Zinn's talk, one young woman says she liked it because "it basically confirmed everything I already thought." This is a far cry from Zinn's earlier intention to rattle the public's complacency and turn the way students and historians approached the past - and the present - on its ear. To be fair, Zinn himself did not want to preach to the converted; he's shown at one point inquiring, "Are there lots of people there who haven't made up their minds yet? 'Cause those are the people we need, the ones we want to reach." He's assured this is the case, yet in the crowds we see it looks like the usual suspects, clothed in the garb and speaking the language of the self-enclosed guardians of the flame. The heirs of the New Left are no longer new, and their world has become as sterile and fixed as that their progenitors rebelled against.

Anyway, to the end Zinn remains a charismatic presence - and the film, narrated by Matt Damon (who famously name-dropped his Cambridge neighbor in Good Will Hunting), is most successful at giving that presence a channel through which to communicate. Whatever his flaws, the left today could use a healthy dollop of Zinn's good humor, moral clarity, and most importantly and suprisingly, his all-Americanness. Zinn's ideal Left was less one which thrived in a brooding marginalization and alienated sense of "difference" than one which sought to demolish senses of difference, to establish an underlying humanity, and to reclaim the United States for "the people". A mere Marxist catchphrase for many (their particular misanthropy belying their vague anti-elitist rhetoric) the notion of "the people" seemed to have real meaning for Zinn. At his best - which is what I'd like to focus on here, given his recent passing and my renewed appreciation of his work - he can remind even those skeptics among us of radicalism's moral foundations, and constructive potential.

Bed and Sofa

Husband and wife are lying in bed, early in the Moscow morning. Kolia (Nikolai Batalov), the husband, is up first, groggy but awakened by the couple's energetic pet cat, who's leapt onto the bed. Mischievously, he grabs ahold of the kitty and shoves it in his sleeping wife's face. Liuda (Lyudmila Semyonova) reacts as any interrupted sleeper would, batting it away and jerking up from her comfortable recline. Rubbing her eyes, smoothing down her bobbed hair and bangs, she glances at the grinning man-boy in bed next to her with a mixture of amusement and irritation. He laughs, but he's playing with fire by provoking her so. Before the day's over, he'll have introduced a creature much more threatening into the marital bed, even if old Red Army buddy Volodia (Vladimir Fogel), visiting from out of town, is initially relegated to the sofa.

Silent films and early talkies are often more provocative than the movies which followed (due to state censorship in Germany and Russia, the Production Code in America). Still, how many silents can you remember which stage their climax in an abortion clinic? Bed and Sofa, a 1927 sex comedy/drama (even its genre is not clearly delineated) engages most of the taboos: abortion, adultery, divorce, free love, menage a trois - all that's missing is homosexuality (though this certainly comes to mind amidst a long kiss on the lips, during which Volodia, embracing Kolia, thinks he's kissing Liuda; the conclusion, which finds the two men alone in the room, deciding who'll sleep where, also hints at this subtext). Indeed, this is a film where the wife's affair is revealed halfway through the movie - in most melodramas it would lead to a climactic fight; here it only begins the roundelay which finds both men passing in and out of the woman's affections and between her bedsheets.

Unlike with Jules and Jim, it is not the woman whose fickleness is made to seem crazy, but the men whose bullheaded pushiness makes us sympathize with Liuda. Embodying both Jazz Age and Slavic ideals, with her modish Louise Brooks hairdo topping a stockier, more boxy build, Liuda is torn between her attraction to the two workers who claim her affections - to the comforts of Kolia and the novelty of Volodia - and her frustrations with both of them. Meanwhile, an ominous portrait of Stalin - who had only just taken power in '27 - hangs on the wall alongside a calendar. Initially this seems like a necessary political gesture on the filmmaker's part, but eventually it leads one to tease out allegorical resonance in the onscreen threesome. Could Liuda be like the young Soviet Union, volleyed back and forth between different leaders who claimed her loyalty? Just as Stalin would eventually erase deviant Bolsheviks from Party history (he was already beginning to do this with Trotsky), Liuda replaces Kolia's portraits with Volodia's all around the room (Stalin, of course, stays put).

Whether or not all the picture-swapping is supposed to have political ramifications, it pays off dramatically in the end. Liuda rushes home to an empty apartment from the abortion clinic (where she went, not out of her own desire to end the pregnancy, but at the behest of her beaux, who jealously regard the incipient infant as the other man's). There she writes a goodbye note and takes her own picture out of its frame, at once liberating both her image and her body from the home where her initially adventurous sexual experiments came to be one more form of imprisonment. The movie concludes with the two male saps, one on the bed, one on the sofa (they've been switching back and forth throughout the movie) wondering what to do next. Meanwhile, Liuda leans out the train window, breathing the fresh air and rushing out of town just as we saw Valodia arriving in the beginning (his train bears him into Moscow, to borrow Churchill's characterization of Lenin's similar journey in 1917, "like a plague bacillus").

The film is composed of concrete units, a series of two-shots, close-ups, and inserts of important objects (or cats). The camera punches in and out of different elements within the scene, and switches angles without any movement. Not as reliant on the abrasive qualities of montage as were Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, director Abram Room utilizes editing to create a sense of space and drama, and divisions within both. Scrolling through the images on Netflix (where the film is available for instant viewing) I was surprised to discover that there are almost no shots featuring all three protagonists together - it's usually Liuda with Kolia, or Liuda with Valodia, or the two men with each other.

This subtly heightens the sense of claustrophobia, visualizes the trio's inability to accomodate one another, and highlights the film's assembly through relational cutting rather than juxtapositional montage or single, wide shots. Likewise, the movie is dialectical but not as aggressively or obviously as Eisenstein's works. Aside from the dichotemy of the title, Bed and Sofa opens and closes with the rushing train, features an airplane ride above - but significantly not out of - Moscow in the middle, and punctuates its narrative with comical and often symbolic feline interludes. The film is almost entirely enclosed in the apartment and various workplaces, but is bookended with outdoor sequences.

Ultimately, the portrait of Stalin is telling. Bed and Sofa seems to have its ear to the ground, and it buries both its style and even to a certain extent its message (both quite modern) beneath the cover of conventional storytelling. Soviet films would have to just that to survive in the years to come, yet even this subterfuge would not be enough. Liuda's quite fortunate in the end, to be escaping from the scene of her entrapment...her country, and its cinema, would not be so lucky.

Two Things We Know About Pictures

____

"Pour faire un film,
il vous faut obligatoirement
une fille
et un pistolet"

"All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun."
-Jean-Luc Godard

Captured screens

These screen-grabs have been on my computer for a while now - many were intended to crown blog posts that never materialized. Others were going to be entered in the "Guess the Pic" challenge on Wonders in the Dark, before that contest died a long, painful death at the hands of Philip Johnston. One was supposed to be a DVD menu for a disc that never got burned, and at least one was taken just because it looked good. So here they are, apropos of nothing. Click on the pictures if you want to see 'em full-size:













And this one, a composite:



Sources: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Made in USA (I think - actually, later in the day, I'm pretty sure it's Pierrot le fou), Michel Gondry's music videos, the Quay Brothers' short films, Sans Soleil, The End of St. Petersburg, The Big Lebowski, and Hail Mary.

The Lost Weekend

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Don Birnam (Ray Milland) is a writer - in theory - and an alcoholic - in indisputable fact. Coming off a bender, telling himself he's finally going to write that big novel, Don's itch to drink is palpable as his brother (Phillip Terry) helps him pack up for a restful long weekend in the country. Instead, drawn to booze with the stubbornness of a boomerang, Don ditches his brother and his long-suffering girlfriend (Jane Wymann) to gulp down several shots of whiskey at the local establishment. Don, who was uptight and irritable in the first scene, loosens up, waxes eloquent on the wonders of whiskey, and flirts with a sassy hooker who picks up johns in the bar. It's a clear and effective depiction of why drinking appeals to this insecure artist - and it will be the last such moment. Having presented the magical deliverance of the ennui-quenching rye, writer/director Billy Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett proceed to display, in merciless detail, all the drawbacks of the addiction. Don becomes a kind of 40s Dante in reverse, descending from brief intoxicated Paradise, through a purgatorial search for satiation, and finally into the depths of DT Hell. Only his longtime lover can hope to rescue him from the depths of his own self-hatred, of which the hard drinking is both partial cause and persistent symptom.

Compulsively watchable, with its strong performances (especially from Milland, who manages to be both pleasingly theatrical and harrowingly natural), juicy dialogues and monologues, and its de facto structure. The use of a single weekend as a framework (although the filmmakers cheat a bit by using flashbacks) focuses the action and makes Don's decline from sobriety through every stage of drunkenness to suicidal withdrawal all the more effective. The Lost Weekend is a very good movie, but it isn't great - and it's one of those films which can be frustrating to watch at times, because you can sense greatness within its grasp. Though the flashbacks are effective in laying out Don's pathology and explaining his mysterious relationship to Helen (whose affection for him and patience with him initially seems unwarranted), one wishes a less artificial construct could have been found. The film is sharpest when it stays on its one-weekend timeline, and when it unfolds by keeping pace with its hero's descent. Even the flashback photography is not as precise and focused as the images of the "present" - as if Wilder and fantastic cinematographer John F. Seitz were aware that their explanatory history wasn't as strong as their demonstrative real-time. There's also an overemphasis on explaining the addiction, which is after all as much chemical as anything else, but one is tempted to forgive the frequent psychological self-analysis, as it's so artfully written.

The film was marked as "realist" at the time of its release, when it won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1945. However, "realism" is not the same as "reality" and part of the film's appeal lies in the friction between the pleasures of Hollywood style (despite its location shooting, the films falls safely within the framework of studio filmmaking) and the darkness of the subject matter. The classicism gives us an familiar frame within which to view the grim reality of alcoholism, and The Lost Weekend is all the more effective for it. Like many thematically ambitious films, it dates more than movies which may have seemed less "edgy" and "relevant" at the time - when it lectures, explains, or at times overdramatizes Don's drunkenness it can seem out of touch. Mostly, however, the movie is still stirring, evocative, and engaging. The bat in that infamous scene does look embarrassingly fake, but the set piece has a great, grisly finish which still sickens. An excellent movie, flawed but a classic.

(Incidentally, many will adjust the balance more in favor of the latter than the former - take Tony d'Ambra, curator of filmsnoir.net, with his marvellous and celebratory write-up on the movie; you should absolutely follow the link for a more in-depth view of the movie.)

The Lost Son of Havana

(Originally published on the Examiner in July 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Thirty years after the chants of "Lou-eee, Lou-eee!" have faded from Fenway, six miles from the spot of a very important and long-awaited 1975 reunion, the National Amusements Showcase Cinemas in Revere screened The Lost Son of Havana in Theater 1 at 7:35 pm; one of four daily screenings for at least the remainder of the week (if it is not held over any longer). The name of the movie was left out of the "Now Playing" flyers adorning the lobby, and there weren't any placards emblazoned with large quotes from Entertainment Weekly or video installments running trailers in loops. When asked for a ticket to the film, one of the theater's employees warned, "You do know it's a documentary, right?" Apparently, this disclaimer was necessary: some customers have been complaining. No one complained on this particular night, though - the four other people in the near-empty theater seemed perfectly content with their choice of entertainment.

If you do know it's a documentary, and you don't mind, please go out and catch this moving and very enjoyable picture, which observes beloved Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant's career, family life, and return trip to Cuba after 46 years in exile from the impoverished Communist island on which he was born and raised. Tiant's upright dignity is colored by a wry humor and pride, and also by a looming melancholy, and his charisma carries you along for the hour and forty-five minute running length. The filmmakers (director Jonathan Hock, backed by the Farrelly brothers, of all people) get out of their subject's way - the style is not flashy (though occasionally grainy film stock punctuates the video footage to represent Tiant's subjective impressions; it's a nice and subtle effect). The structure is the by now traditional call-and-response of the present (Tiant's visit to Cuba) and the past (his dogged up-and-down career in the majors); there is a narrator (the ever-dignified Chris Cooper) but he only steps in to introduce photos and footage from the 60s and 70s, tending to efface himself when the now elderly Tiant is onscreen.

Tiant is a man who has not had one athletic career, but several. First there are the years in Cuba, building up his skill, while his father - once a player in the American Negro leagues (the narration lyrically describes "seventeen summers on the backroads of America"), and a genuinely great one at that, considered by some a greater pitcher than Satchel Paige - hides in the bus roundabout across the street, watching his son play in the park despite his own disapproval of the boy's dreams. Then Tiant goes to the U.S. - and stays there when Cuba clamps down the door on ballplayers, insisting they either give up their dreams of a professional career and come home, or else abandon Cuba for a U.S. career. Tiant, with his parents' approval, chooses the latter path, and while this ensures all that is to come, to this day he seems to feel he must make excuses, and occasionally he voices mournful shame over what happened.

At any rate, success is by no means immediate. For a while he follows his father's path, playing across the Jim Crow South, and though civil rights breakthroughs were on the horizon, Tiant recalls the virulent racism of the time - another reminder that the trading-family-for-freedom narrative is not so simple as that. When he breaks in to the big leagues, he breaks in big time, pitching no-hitters, developing not one but two signature pitching styles, rising and falling between the majors and the minors, becoming a star, becoming a nobody, and becoming a star all over again...for those who are unfamiliar with the story, I will say no more, and let the movie work its magic on you. While many of Tiant's accomplishments would be at home in a feel-good sports flick, there are constant reminders that reality is messier: a powerful moment before the World Series followed by disappointment; ultimately, an inevitable fading from the scene despite comebacks; most importantly, a muted fatalism and sadness detected in Tiant's countenance.

All of this only makes the miracles that much more amazing, and the movie climaxes as Tiant's family life, the political relations of the U.S. and Cuba, and the baseball fortunes of the Red Sox converge in the autumn of '75, in a formulation that no fictional screenplay could get away with. Meanwhile, of course, the film cuts back to Tiant as a much older man, quietly surveying the baseball aficionados in Havana who, asked about the greatest Cuban exile ballplayer, come up with many other names before they remember his. His reunions and reconnections with old family and friends are emotional, but more in a quietly sad key than with a celebratory tone.

Early passages in the movie are informed by a firmly anti-Castro tone, a bit overbearing in Cooper's narration and in some of the bleak footage, but politics are neither the filmmakers' nor Tiant's concern; frustration and anger with the Castro regime's imprisonment of Cubans on their island (and in a decaying version of the past, a kind of national arrested development which foreigners seem to find romantic, but which many Cubans themselves appear frustrated by) give way to simple observation, with the emphasis on endurance and empathy, but in surprisingly uncloying ways. Repeatedly, the film eschews sentimentalism: though Tiant's family welcomes him with admiration and love, some old neighbors scold him with tears in their eyes for abandoning them - meanwhile, elderly aunts feebly remember the years lost and, in some sense, wasted, while younger cousins flat-out ask Tiant for money. Looking at their severely decayed surroundings, we do not wonder at it (and neither does he, providing the bills they require).

This is in keeping with the spirit of the man, whose determination is laced with regret, whose withheld feelings slip out from behind his reflective shades and can be glimpsed beneath his drooping gray mustache. In one scene, Tiant's narration informs us that he does not believe in an afterlife, even as the camera pans to a crucifix in his car; in this man's life, God exists to help one make it through, but there is no reward waiting on the other side. All that you have is what you make, what you've lost can never be regained, and yet one cannot linger over regrets for that very reason. That a few viewers have wandered out of the theater, apparently dismayed that they weren't seeing Transformers 2, is probably something Tiant could handle; he's been through much worse. The fact that his story is onscreen at all is triumph enough - and the experience is not to be missed.

The Leopard

(Originally published on the Examiner in August 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

If Italian films from the forties and fifties were dominated by a hard-bitten look at the present, with a transforming Italy moving from fascism and war through poverty and ruin to the cautious construction of a modern postwar world, then Italian cinema of the sixties can be seen as one long, mournful elegy for the lost past, in a variety of different keys. At the dawn of the decade, neorealism had already been relegated to the past, but that movement's overarching social critique and devotion to intense observation of daily life continued to inform works crafted by the best Italian directors. These qualities were put to work in a series of wildly different yet equally powerful films, which together paint a coherent picture of a nation caught in the whirlwind, its people having severed their roots once and for all, yet unable to establish connections to the new world being born around them.

Ermanno Olmi, in Il Posto, tracked an upwardly mobile member of the working class as he moved into a professional job, finding the financial security that his family lacked. Yet in order to gain tenuous ground in an uncertain future, he was leaving the familiarity of a more traditional world behind. The fiery Pier Paolo Pasolini's characters had far less opportunities, but were no less driven - often into self-destruction. In his Mamma Roma, it is not the world which is fluid and unstable, but the people in it, represented by the cut from the wild grieving of a heartbroken woman to the static cityscape out her window. Solid and implacable, the vista may mock her ferocious energy and ambition, may even defeat it, but such energy could not be negated - Italians were on the move, whether or not Italy itself was ready or open to such movement. (This sensation was also evoked earlier in the film, as an adolescent roamed through a hilly landscape dotted with looming stone monoliths, their weirdly erratic stability contrasted with his - and the camera's - restlessness. The tense, plangent classical score on the soundtrack echoed his own inner stirrings.)

Of course there was Michelangelo Antonioni, whose highly formalist portraits of alienation also juxtaposed humans to landscapes, though in this case they seemed to cower, uncertain in the face of looming reality. Not content to let these implications speak for themselves, the writer/director of L'Avventura stated his intention baldly and boldly: "And today a new man is being born, fraught with all the fears, terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation." Even the fantasist - and (hence?) most popular of the Italians - Federico Fellini - focused his two crucial early sixties works, La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, on anxiety caught in the cross-hairs between past and present, desire and responsibility. Meanwhile a younger generation, even less situated in Italy's past than its elders, regarded the last holdovers of an old society with a mixture of bitterness and nostalgia. The bitter was best represented by Marco Bellochio with his scathing debut Fists in the Pocket - a brutally funny, and frightening, screed against the nuclear family in which the rebellious and murderous outbursts of our protagonist, initially seeming free-spirited, were eventually revealed as the self-realization of a fascist.

And then there's the nostalgia. Two directors, one very young, one middle-aged, looked longingly upon the trappings and conventions of civilized life, even as they ambivalently touted the revolution. Ironically, it was the younger of the two directors - Bernardo Bertolucci, who was about 23 when he shot Before the Revolution - who clings most fervently to the old ways. Bertolucci's hero, a young Communist, is unable to break his bonds to the comforts of the upper class and "the sweetness of life before the revolution." (Bertolucci is still exploring the tensions between his sensual, poetic sensibilities and his political radicalism - the recent film The Dreamers was a meditation on that very ambivalence.) The older director - Luchino Visconti - sees change as inevitable, but is just as ambivalent as Bertolucci about its desirability. Unlike the work of the younger sensual Marxist, Visconti's period picture The Leopard (based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa) is not set before the revolution, but after. Hence the world being mourned is experienced only in its dying gasp, like a life flashing before one's eyes at the moment of death.

It is worth noting that The Leopard does not open after the aristocratic ruling class of Sicily has fallen (to the unifying revolution of Garabaldi and, more importantly, the bourgeoisie). Instead it opens with the beginning of the end, albeit with a hint of the complete destruction that awaits its upper-class characters. The credits unfold over images of empty courtyards, seemingly abandoned towers displayed in their crumbling glory. We're not sure yet if we're in the nineteenth century or the twentieth; these shots could just as easily belong to a documentary about Sicilian landmarks as to a feature which takes place when those landmarks were still in use. Finally, as the titles end, the camera begins to move, and with its movement we are swept into the past: a pan along the exterior of an old mansion, accompanied by muffled Latin prayers and shouting in the distance, eventually reveals an open window through which we can see the Salina family kneeling for an informal Mass - only to be interrupted by a growing clamor outside: a dead soldier has been found in the courtyard.

Like the detached ear in Blue Velvet, the dead soldier represents an incursion of the strange and threatening into the enclosed, comfortable world of the protagonists; but the Salinas are already aware of what the soldier represents, and know that he is just the first drop in the bucket. Indeed, as they "celebrate" Mass with their affable yet comical and ineffective priest, they are all costumed entirely in black; while this is most likely their common Sabbath dress, the image undoubtedly calls to mind a funeral. Thus the very first time we see the family they are grieving for the loss, not of a specific person, but of their own way of life. Although Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (a justly celebrated Burt Lancaster, dubbed into Italian for this print) spends the entire film maneuvering to preserve his family's status, even as its actual power slips away, there is a sense that a line has been crossed and with time, the new Italy will completely shake off the privileges of the aristocracy. (When the Salinas are warmly welcomed to their secluded vacation home, they step out of the carriage covered head to toe in dust; as the camera pans over the family sitting in church all that redeems their ridiculous appearance - and the irrelevance it suggests - is their self-contained dignity.)

Some aristocrats are able to ride the wave of change into the heart of the new society - Tancredi Falconari (Alain Delon), the Prince's charismatic but entirely opportunistic young nephew, even fights alongside Garabaldi before joining the new state's army and marrying Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale), the gorgeous daughter of the shrewd but gauche bourgeois official Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa). On the surface, the Prince seems to be one of those malleable nobles, making public gestures toward the the nation-state, courteously suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous manners when entertaining the new elite, even setting up the marriage between Tancredi and Angelica (whom he seems to be a bit in love with himself; her dazzling looks and inadvertently awkward social skills perfectly embody the enticing yet rude new world of the bourgeoisie).

Yet despite all these gestures, the Prince knows that his time is running out. When offered a position in the Italian senate, he politely declines and offers a fatalistic viewpoint on Sicily, speculating that it is impervious to change, that its people will never warm up to progress even if it's in their best interests. His feelings do seem reflected by the harsh landscape and backward society around him, but it's also clear that the grim sentiments are more an expression of his own self-view than that of his people: he has accepted his own decline gracefully, even wistfully, and the final sequence - a grand ball which consumes the entire last act of the epic story - seems to show him recognizing, completely and directly, what it is he has lost.

Keep in mind that despite the movie's running time and grand sets, the film focuses mostly on scenes of dialogue, of customs and interactions, backroom deal-making and diplomatic maneuvers. There is one battle scene, which at times feels too orchestrated, and one of the conversations is held on a hillside overlooking the broad expanse of the Sicilian town, but for the most part the epic qualities are relegated to theme and character - and to the grandeur of the interiors - rather than to expensive set pieces or expansive narrative developments. The exception is that final ball, not only because a cast of tens of thousands pours into the ballroom and banquet, but because the Prince had made all the arrangements for the future and is now face-to-face with his irrelevance and mortality for the first time.

Something hangs in the air, barely articulated, yet it is felt deeply, and is displayed as the Prince dances a final dance with Angelica, as he sits alone in a room pondering the deathbed in a painting, and as he silently broods in the early dawn, disappearing into the shadows of a back alley, when several shots ring out. A small band of soldiers, who had deserted to rejoin Garabaldi's forces, have been executed - this is not yet their time; meanwhile the Prince's has already passed. And so the Prince himself disappears, dying a spiritual if not corporeal death, into a new world which also, in time, will come to pass (see those films set one hundred years later). Which reminds us that all of society exists in a state of impermanence and that, one day, the Prince's fate will be our own too - the only question is with how much dignity and stoicism one faces the cold dawn.

Ivan the Terrible

(Originally published on the Examiner in October 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Over the course of two films, released fourteen years apart due to Soviet censorship, legendary director Sergei Eisenstein chronicles the infamous Russian tsar's ascension to and assertion of power. Ivan (Nikolai Cherkasov) begins as a handsome young prince, crowned at the opening of Part I while the corrupt nobles whisper conspiracies under his very nose. By the end of Part II, Ivan is a wizened, shrewd tyrant, foiling an assassination plot by using a simple-minded relative as bait. In between, he leads troops into battle, throws decadent parties, loses a wife to poison, and is betrayed repeatedly until his paranoia makes him wise beyond his years - and authoritarian beyond his foes' wildest expectations.

The film is a masterpiece - the above plot description guides the action, but the essence of the movie is in the extreme close-ups Eisenstein lavishes upon the bizarre faces of his players, the lavish yet cleverly designed set pieces (dinners with huge white, and later black, swan statues; a diplomatic detente in which the figures are placed on the checkered floor like chess-pieces), and the magnificent score contributed by Prokofiev. One should not expect a historically accurate recreation, a politically correct manifesto, nor even an especially straightforward narrative; to enjoy the movie one has to appreciate the campy effects Eisenstein employs and recognize that their campiness is not really unintentional. Even Ivan the Terrible seems in on the joke, half-flirting with an effeminate usurper just to get his way, wickedly grinning as he poses for Eisenstein's flamboyant camera. Part II is even better than Part I, if only because it further abandons the dutiful rollout of Ivan's rise to power for the immersion in his decadent, paranoid, baroque milieu.

Eisenstein had been one of the signature pioneers of Soviet silent film, when his films focused on the power of "montage" - rapidly cut sequences which often employed visual metaphors and rhyming images. Ivan the Terrible employs a wider variety of tricks, but the execution is still tight, controlled, and rhythmic - not in a cold fashion, but bursting with enthusiastic passion. As Stalin clamped his iron fist down on the Marxist state and narrowed the range of the arts, preferring drab socialist realism to inventive avant-garde agitprop, it was hard to see where Eisenstein fit in this totalitarian vision. He was freed up to create Alexander Nevsky, a heroic history film and his first collaboration with Prokofiev, in the late 30s. But the film's anti-German slant became a mark against it with Stalin's ever-shifting political line and it was a good five years before Eisenstein was cautiously given permission to proceed with Ivan, seen as a tribute to the latter-day despot. How times change! Suddenly ostentatious monarchism, nationalistic xenophobia, and subservience of the masses to the rule of one man were celebrated in the name of the Leninist revolution. Apparently, Stalin approved of Part I, was dismayed by Part II (whose release was delayed until after his death), and canceled Part III. Eisenstein's career was over, he died in captivity, and the Soviet cinema entered its deepest deep freeze, only to be alleviated with Joseph the Terrible's own demise. Today, some see Ivan the Terrible as a Stalinist apologia, while others find in it a subversive attack on the dictator. Perhaps both viewpoints are correct, which only adds to the attraction of this warped classic.

(500) Days of Summer

(Originally published on the Examiner in July 2009, this review has been moved here in its entirety.)

Punningly, the title is a winking reference to Tom Hansen’s (Joseph Gordon Levitt) girlfriend, rather ludicrously named Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). Appropriately then - and look elsewhere if you don't want the ending spoiled - the film’s own seasonal mood is rather autumnal, focusing as it does on the decline and expiration of a “quirky” romance. The movie also anticipates and tacitly acknowledges the death of the very hip/quirky/indie aesthetic that its own contemporary success would seem to vindicate. Just as “indie” trendiness hits saturation point in the media, the movie whispers to anyone who’s listening that the show is over and the queen is dead – the movie is an allegory for its own demise (and that of its audience) and even more surprisingly, an apologia for such.

Only after seeing the film does this become clear; after all, the marketing campaign won’t tell you a thing about the story or the message – not even a high-concept hook to get you in theaters. Instead there are constant pictures of Zooey & Joseph making googly eyes at each other, Smiths-saturated TV spots, and self-conscious affectations in the titles and graphics (normally indulged in those ubiquitous crayon/pencil-drawn titles, here reserved for the songlike parenthesis around “500”).

In other words, the ads focus purely on “the look” and (500) Days of Summer comes to seem like nothing more than a culmination of the past decade’s “indie” development – a move away from actual independence (like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine, this film is thoroughly enmeshed in Hollywood casting and financing) towards signifiers of "indieness." All that remain for public consumption are the soundtrack, Zooey’s adorable hair ribbon, Joseph’s hip messenger bag and especially his big black headphones (admittedly a relief after those twerpy white earbuds) – all of which quirky outsiders-cum-insiders in the audience are supposed to identify and identify with.

But the movie is more intriguing, if ultimately unsuccessful, than its empty viral promotions would suggest – even contradictory of the adverts. One has to see the whole film through to arrive at this moment of truth, and one has to ignore the various flaws and shortcomings along the way to recognize what the movie is actually offering, but once discerned an at least grudging admiration emerges for the anti-romantic aspects of the story. The narrative flashes back and forth among the 500 days of Summer and Tom’s romance, during which it becomes clear that Tom is a romantic and Summer is non-committal, something she admits and he chooses to ignore. Ultimately, she dumps him and he comes to accept that their wispy, whimsical, and trendy “connection” existed almost exclusively in his own mind.

That the film is superficial, “sensitive” without any penetrating insight, and stylistically dressed up with no real place to go ultimately becomes a case of form imitating content (presumably unintentional, but compelling nonetheless): just like the couple it presents, the movie is flat and limp beneath its quirky, ethereal surface. That the actual film recognizes, condemns, and moves beyond the very scene its success is reliant upon is promising (if hypocritical); however, the film can’t capitalize on this maturity as it is too enmeshed in the quirky trappings it sets out to subvert, and its writing and style are too mediocre to truly deliver – either the “indie” goods or the subversion thereof.

This is in spite of some nice touches, like a party conducted in split-screen, the left side showing Tom’s supposedly reasonable explanations of a rapprochement with Summer, while the right displays the disappointing, and ultimately crushing, reality. However, even here the idea remains mostly on the page, as the actual execution does not notably expand on the above description. Contrast with Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) – the obvious inspiration for the films’ beginning/end back-forth structure – in which clever ideas also become hilarious, and occasionally moving, scenes (think the subtitled conversation on the rooftop, or the split-screen analysis sessions).

Director Mark Webb has difficulty moving beyond the conceptual toward the textural; the film’s conceits remain just that. The structure does not reveal any telling juxtapositions in beginning and end (it merely exploits a few jarring contrasts within the same location); the set pieces begin with an idea (a musical number after Tom gets laid) but leave it there (TV commercials have done this sort of thing before, and more stylishly - even when the intention was anti-style). The filmmaking is not bad; it's just mediocre.

Meanwhile, the screenwriters (Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) pile on half-delivered clichés ripped from earlier offbeat hits like The Royal Tenenbaums (a narrator who pops up haphazardly and offers a pale imitation of Alec Baldwin’s rich voiceover in the opening minutes of Wes Anderson’s classic) and Juno (a precocious girl-guru, in this case closer to six than sixteen). Elsewhere the screenplay indulges in the most tired cliches, worn-out parodies of parodies vis a vis European art cinema (a mime carrying a balloon, yet another spoof of The Seventh Seal) - where, ironically, many of this movie's own watered-down stylistic tics originated. The film seems genuinely uncomfortable with the offbeat vibe it initially cultivates.

Furthermore, but on that same note, the movie has a surprising but telling alternative to the strained and already half-square quirkiness of its characters (consistently placed in front of corporate logos culminating in a “playful” visit to Ikea, in a scene which is either not as subversive as it intends to be or more discordant than it knows). When Summer marries an offscreen beau and Tom combs his hair and puts on a suit, images speak louder than words: though she's supposedly found true love, and he's ostensibly pursuing his dream job as an architect, the visuals recall standard images of Hollywood success: glossy, upscale, any quirks finally slicked over. The movie can't imagine any other viable alternative to the (thankfully exposed) limitations of earnest quirkiness: genuine rebellion or even detachment from the expectations of the characters' generation and media image don't even enter the picture.

Still, connotations of selling out aside, the conclusion at least brings maturity to the film’s characters, a sense that they've outgrown the cutesy perpetual adolesence which Garden State, among others, wallows in (until the last twenty minutes of the film, Tom and Summer's looks and behavior have conformed to a junior high student’s conception of the young adult world). A scene at another couple’s wedding has a nice rueful and elegiac tone, and Deschanel strikes a rare moment of truth when reuniting with Tom on a park bench: a flicker in her expression suggests to the viewer that there may be a parallel film going on here, and a more interesting one at that - her side of the story, perhaps wiser and deeper than Tom’s. A brief clip of The Graduate comes off nicely though it inevitably makes one long for the earlier film. (500) Days' statement that Tom grossly misread the ending of the 1967 classic is just about the best bit of characterization in the movie, for better or worse.

In the end, despite its overall weakness, the movie lingers - there's something at work here, even if the film itself doesn't really work (audiences seem smitten with it, but it's hard to see how the infatuation withstands closer and more long-term scrutiny; again, parallels with the subject onhand). And one can’t fault (500) Days for acknowledging that Nick and Norah's playlist won't bring them together, nor will listening to the Shins change your life (in this case, it’s the Smiths, admittedly a better band but surprisingly under-used given the constant name-dropping). As the "indie" movement hits saturation point in the mainstream, (500) Days arrives, perhaps inadvertently, to bury rather than praise the milieu; to sound a death knell for a certain type of cultural artifact.

Even if (500) Days’ buzz inspires a cluster of knock-offs (sprouting up from Hollywood studios’ faux-indie arms like the multiple Zooeys in one of the film’s ads), we’ve clearly reached saturation point with this particular manifestation of the zeitgeist. Trendspotters must start to look elsewhere for the new and edgy – perhaps even something with real edge, necessary now that the bubble (which fostered quirk culture, along with other manifestations of the ostrich-head-in-the-sand Bush years) has burst.

Summer’s over; bring on the fall.