Glenn Heath Jr.
Over at Gone Cinema Poaching, I consider Agnes Varda’s new personal essay film The Beaches of Agnes. It’s a strange, sad, but ultimately beautiful film with many contradictions at its core. Also, GCP will be beginning their own Best of the Decade series to which I will also be contributing lengthy pieces, some choices that overlap here at Match Cuts.
With A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers plow fresh ground and operate on a new subtextual level. The filmmakers loosen their noose soaked in dark humor and seriously contemplate a singular incarnation of loneliness, lobbing thematic molotov cocktails at characters consumed by small contradictions and compromises. The duality between man and faith rests front and center in the retrained evolving tragedy of Physics professor Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his crumbling suburban life circa 1960’s Minnesota. The Coens even preface this modern story with a Jewish fable of sorts, jaunting back hundreds of years in a daring sequence of self-righteousness and damnation. The two pieces of this expansive puzzle make for something supernatural, a collision of faith and practicality not seen in the Coen’s work before.
After the wacky irreverence of Burn After Reading, the pristine visuals, slow pacing, and somber underbelly of A Serious Man are welcome. The Coens create an entire community from the ground up, meticulously re-constructing their childhood digs and memories with a certain weighted texture, the intricate details of suburbia pinning down the desire for growth. Larry is helpless in almost every respect, but it’s his indecision that continues to box him in. The Coens focus on disputed property lines, antennas, couches, chalkboards, and wires to illuminate the crisscrossing patterns that spell Larry’s emotional and intellectual destruction, all while framing a community at peace with its inanity.
In the brilliant final moments, A Serious Man turns from a potent character study to a full blown masterpiece of menace and comeuppance, refreshing the idea that good and evil, kindness and selfishness reside side by side in the smallest of actions, be it the change of a grade or the snap judgement of another person. No foreshadowing is necessary in A Serious Man, since the very fabric of everyday existence is steeped in the scripture of despair, and time period has nothing to do with it.
A tragic comedy without laughs, Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! purposefully poses as a genre film to shroud the multi-faceted character study hiding at its core. But what genre exactly is indeed a tough question to answer. Lead chameleon Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a scientist/VP for a giant corporation now turned whistle-blower, fuels this battle between surface and subtext, perception and reality with his relentlessly shifting personality. This is best represented by a stream of consciousness voice over vitalizing the sense of random purpose inherent to the man’s personal self-worth. For Whitacre, playing coy and deceiving is his equivalent to James Bond’s lethal PP7.
The rise and fall arc never achieves a grandiose sense of emotion, and it’s not supposed to. Soderbergh deliberately manipulates the viewer throughout with fascinating asides, overemphasized scenes of dialogue, and cunning moments of action, allowing Damon’s layered performance to reveal itself slowly and surely. He frames the entire film within a blinding yellow haze of a world, a purgatory of sorts between the economic hell of one decade and the expansive globalization of the next.
The Informant! is a deceptively poignant film, tough to pin down in many respects as it peels away the personality of man protected by a thick wall of lies and compromises. Even if the extremely ambitious story structure and critique of big business are not always successful, Soderbergh’s strange and hypnotic film is about as audacious as Hollywood comes, challenging the viewer at every turn to unravel an anti-mystery worth solving and contemplate what kind of man and system would allow such folly to exist.
In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sublime new film Still Walking, the often mentioned but deceased Junbei remains the only character defined by selfless action, a decision that killed him a dozen years ago. Junbei perished saving a young boy from drowning in the sea, and Kore-eda finds his small immediate family gathering for the annual memorial. Prodigal younger brother reluctantly returns home with a new wife and step-son, while older sister and mother banter about plans for a move back home, and elder statesmen father, once a proud doctor, now sits alone in his study aching toward an uncertain and pointless future. Junbei’s picture occasionally haunts the frame like a small phantasm briefly reminding each character of their own slow motion dive into old age.
Supposedly celebrating Junbei’s life, the family incessantly focuses on his death – what could have been, “why did he have to save this boy who wasn’t even his son? – reflecting the guilt and doubt of a family long concerned with hierarchical tradition, role, and legacy. But Kore-eda enlivens familiar tensions (father vs. son) and scenarios by circling the small, vibrant moments of a family attempting to move on. As they slowly languish in the afternoon sun, walk slowly through a lush cemetery, and sit quietly while naive grandchildren rambunctiously play, these characters evolve without a word. Kore-eda gives his scenes and actors plenty of room to breath and time to percolate, trimming action with a memory or word, bringing each relationship into focus.
At times Still Walking is so reserved we almost give Kore-eda too much credit for eliciting emotion from the subtle nuances of this family. Unlike Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, an obvious kindred spirit to Kore-eda’s story, Still Walking ends with a sly and conservative repetition of generational ideologies. Son replaces father, daughter replaces mother, and the family continues on under similar circumstances, still deeply complex characters but ultimately overwhelmed with duty to their ancestors. Assayas’ film dares to revolutionize its family dynamics by allowing for rejuvenation and change in the younger generations, while Kore-eda paints all children as either inevitable or eager heirs to replicating their fathers and mother’s influences, following in footsteps and filling empty shoes.
But Still Walking is remarkably successful at illuminating the sadness in every composition, lining both exteriors and interiors with a texture of melancholy paralleling Kore-eda’s cyclical sense of family. The film feels like an answer/solution to the director’s devastating Nobody Knows, where a group of children are shoved into oblivion by an absent mother. Even when jaded by a tragic twist of fate, the father and mother of Still Walking are strong enough to trust the process of life, giving their children more than a puncher’s chance at understanding the complexities of death.
Filed under: 2009 Releases
Dead Snow gleefully resurrects the guilt and trauma of Nazism still haunting the European psyche, soaking blood into snowy mountainsides, shoving entrails into the frozen hands of its victims, ripping to shreds the present with the lifeless limbs of the past. The familiar conventions of the horror film at first confound the notion of originality, melting away as the Nazi-zombies reveal themselves from the shadows. They quickly turn from unseen monsters to absurd and deadly evocations of incomplete history books and newsreel footage.
Despite early signs to the contrary, we begin to care about this particular group of breathing post-collegiate cliches, a lucky joyous few on vacation in the snow and ice hoping for casual sex, beer, and movie trivia. Innocent to a fault, these characters commit one mortal sin – ignorance of their nation’s past. Does the punishment meet the crime? Perhaps not, but Dead Snow puts on a bloody show nonetheless.
The dynamic action scenes propel each victim into different directions and the film into hilariously absurd tangents, forcing retaliation against both mental disbelief and physical harm. The inherent joy in dispensing Nazi after Nazi quickly turns to the realization there might be too many hidden waves of evil to survive.
Unlike most Horror films of this ilk, the details of death in Dead Snow make an impact. Each cut, slash, and slice, purposeful and mistaken, both relinquish and reinforce fear in the characters. The process of mythmaking also comes into play, giving strength to common folk much like the propaganda machine of any country would achieve. Dead Snow claims loudly that like it or not, we are linked to the past deeds of our countrymen, and now more than ever the ground seems to be swelling with horrific reminders. The question is, will we listen.
Zombieland treats the undead apocalypse like a series of bumpy carnival rides, continuously pumping the same adrenaline-packed entertainment into slightly different blood-drenched packages. All shapes and sizes are game for mutilation and frenzied feeding, even those cute girl scouts and innocent brides to be. Chaos reigns, but under a mushroom cloud of irony.
The film cleverly uses voice over as Jesse Eisenberg’s nerdy Columbus introduces his rules of survival while proving their importance in a battle for his life. Zombies have long taken over the world, and in this stunning and hilarious opening sequence, the audience gets a taste of the sense of humor needed to survive.
Only the strong have survived, or at least the reclusive and cunning. Columbus, who seemingly missed the rise of the undead because he was too busy shut in playing video games, meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a knife throwing, shotgun wielding badass with a special knack for dispatching zombies. The two form an unlikely alliance and the thin narrative goes from there in all the obvious directions, but with a specific flare for horror iconography and film history.
But despite the 81 minute running time, Zombieland suffers from overkill, both on the comedy and horror side. It’s fitting the film ends in a Disneyland-esque amusement park, the artificial setting for a massive showdown between the film’s surviving heroes (which now include sisters played by Emma Stone and Abagail Breslin) and legions of excited zombies. After much repetition (aside from the great cameo by Bill Murray) and excess, these final kills remind us of the energy on display in the opening moments.
Zombieland aims to please, touring the terrain of previous films with pinpoint accuracy and wit. Just don’t expect a lasting meal. Beyond the absurd facade, it lacks the character depth of Shaun of the Dead and the social weight of Romero’s Dead films. But then again it aims pretty low on purpose, enjoying the small things in life. For Zombieland, there’s no one left to enjoy the subtext.
