Juno

2007 //  USA // Jason Reitman // December 26, 2007 // Theatrical Print

A - What to make of Juno? The second comedy this year about unplanned pregnancy, Juno aims for a far trickier target than does its fratboy cousin, Knocked Up. Judd Apatow's film was elevated by its perceptive and sensitive script, even as it coaxed forth conventional belly-laughs. Director Jason Reitman takes a riskier and altogether different track with Juno, plunging headfirst into a screenplay so densely packed with verbal acrobatics and hipster lingo that it risks unintentional self-parody. It might have, that is, if Diablo Cody's script hadn't also delivered such startling sucker-punches of genuine humanity, if the actors weren't one of the best comedic ensemble casts I've seen in years, and if Reitman hadn't brought it all together with such graceful efficiency and engrossing whimsy.

The comedy in Juno is of an unusual breed, more likely to elicit guffaws and gape-mouthed smiles of disbelief than hearty laughter. The dialogue comes very fast and brimming with puns and slang, forgoing realism for pure linguistic spectacle. To dub it "quirky" seems a woeful understatement and an abuse of the term. Juno's characters have neither the sedate quality of Wes Anderson's playthings nor the gawky nerd-chic of Napoleon Dynamite and its imitators. They are closer kin to Ghost World's Enid, although unlike Clowes' heroine, Juno MacGuff fortunately has a circle of friends and relatives who appreciate her and share her wry outlook. While Juno's dialogue is undeniably amusing to absorb, such self-aware, brainy cuteness might have grown irritating after an hour and a half. Fortunately, Juno has so much going for it that its sins of excess on this count recede, becoming just another facet of its remarkable personality.

In her biographical details, sixteen-year-old Juno MacGuff is an improbable, even fantastical, creature. She possesses the intellect, wit, and tastes of a woman twice her age, declaring her adoration for the music of Patti Smith and the films of Dario Argento. She wields a hefty dose of prickly wit, but as a character she is ultimately so good-natured and industrious that it's a hard not to fall in love with her. Following a bored Saturday night that culminates in sex with her best friend, Paulie, Juno finds herself pregnant. Turned off by an impersonal, grubby abortion clinic, she elects to give the impending baby to a childless couple. Despite her fierce mind, Juno is still emotionally immature and woefully naive. She imagines handing over the child after nine months, and everything returning to normal afterwards.

Of course, nothing turns out as predicted, for Juno or the audience. It's so easy to get lost in the razzle-dazzle of Cody's dialogue that her original, moving take on this well-tread melodrama sneaks up on you. Indeed, she may be counting on this. For all its Vaudeville punchiness, the joys of Juno lie in the unconventional and powerful places its characters take us. Juno's parents are middle-class, middle-aged goofballs, but their family crisis reveals strength of character and experiential wisdom that Juno never anticipated. Vanessa and Mark, the wealthy couple that Juno chooses to parent her offspring, are initially utilized for humor—her via her yuppie perfectionism, him via his man-child misery. Yet perhaps more than any other characters, they travel along unexpected trajectories as the story unfolds. With the adoptive parents in the wings, the forthcoming infant is not a catastrophe for Juno and Paulie, but the fact of the pregnancy sets their relationship on a tipping point.

Reitman exhibits a smart, limber direction; as an example of comedic storytelling, Juno is essentially perfect. Nothing feels out of place, and every scene serves to move the narrative along at pace that feels simultaneously measured and completely natural. This is all too rare a thing in modern comedies, which often unwisely stretch the half-hour sitcom blueprint into a feature length film. Reitman employs a production design that is intensely textured and one degree off from naturalistic. There is enough realism to convince, but enough odd detail to captivate. Juno's home, for example, has a cluttered, lived-in quality, with minutiae that unobtrusively match her family's history and Midwestern character.

Much of Juno's appeal lies in its uniformly strong cast. Ellen Page, liberated from the moral thorns that studded Hard Candy, shines with playfulness and geek-girl sexuality as Juno. Given that she does it so well, Page could have confined her performance to ninety minutes of smirking sarcasm. Instead she infuses Juno with lively sparks and vulnerable teen angst that, while familiar, are utterly believable. As Paulie, Michael Cera brings the same sublime, muttering discomfort he showcased in Superbad, but with a bit more sweetness. Cera is skilled at conjuring the awkwardness and beauty of adolescence, but I'm nevertheless eager to see him develop further as a comedic actor. The list of engaging performances goes on an on: Olivia Thirlby as Juno's enthusiastic, loyal friend Leah; J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney as the bewildered, protective father and stepmother; Jason Bateman as Mark, striking notes of childish aimlessness, college-boyfriend charm, and unseemly attraction; and a completely astonishing Jennifer Garner as Vanessa, who enters the film as a Stepford kill-joy and evolves into its most sympathetic character.

To me, it seems that the widespread critical fascination with Juno's quips and eccentric turns of phrase misses the mark. The snap and crackle of its funky wit is its most noticeable feature, but also its most trifling. Like the bountiful crop of freckles on the beautiful girl next door, Juno's sardonic sensibility might be distracting to some suitors. Good riddance, I say. Juno perfectly executes the parameters of a family comedy for the twenty-first century, and then transcends them. She's sweet, soft, and smart, and she'll still be your best friend in the morning.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2007 // USA - UK // Tim Burton // December 21, 2007 // Theatrical Print

B - Two disclaimers: First, I had never seen Steven Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on the stage, although the story was familiar to me. Second, I am not generally a fan of musicals, whether live or on film. With these facts in mind, I found Tim Burton's film adaptation of Sondheim's musical to be the director's most thoughtful, magnetic work since his superb 1990 gothic-suburban fable Edwards Scissorhands. Whether Burton deserves the credit for the achievement of this new Sweeney Todd is debatable. The wide adoration lavished upon Sondheim's musical—from undiscriminating Broadway tourists and devotees of American music history alike—suggests that much of the film's depth is a product of the source material. What Burton doubtlessly brings to the tale is his studied eye for sumptuous, gloomy detail and the bittersweet poignancy he coaxes from his performers. Sweeney Todd is, admittedly, heavy on the bitter, and mostly bereft of sweet. It serves up a vision of human behavior that is easily the most brutal and bleak that Burton has ever dabbled in.

The story is now familiar territory in the American cultural landscape. What Burton and screenwriter John Logan bring to the tale is a repulsive intimacy that would be extremely challenging to achieve on the stage. Burton keeps the focus on Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett, although he tugs the dreams and desires of all the principal characters into a knot of grimy despair. There is no chorus in the film, and the populace of its Dickensian England is more of a setting than a cast. The stifling, sooty, (barely) exaggerated horror of Sweeney's London renders the gruesome violence of the tale all the more believable. The lush Hammer Horror set pieces that lent Sleepy Hollow its patina of moldering nightmare have been toned down half a notch here, to masterful effect. For the first time in a long time, Burton achieves a remarkable resonance between story and setting.

It's hard for me to judge musical numbers, given that I find the whole notion of singing actors to be distracting in film. It takes me about ten minutes for me to settle in and accept the affected reality of musicals, where characters readily burst into song. Perhaps due to Burton's familiar visual style—for which I have deep admiration and affection, if not always for its application—I found this transition easier to achieve in Sweeney Todd. The film has moments of positively operatic ferocity, but most of the music is relatively reserved. Some numbers are sung in solitude, plaintive declarations directed at the greasy London sky. Some songs are murmurings or matter-of-fact commentary directed to other characters, who are alternately oblivious or sprinkling in their own wordplay. I wouldn't characterize any of the music as remarkably infectious, but it has a magnificent personality all its own. Sondheim's lyrics are works of undeniable wit and density, with whiffs of Lewis Carroll and Tom Stoppard. For his part, Burton's staging of the numbers is often quite memorable, particularly for "The Worst Pies in London," "Epiphany," "A Little Priest," and "By the Sea".

It's tempting to describe Sweeney Todd's characters as one-note, although static might be more apt. There's no development or evolution here. Judge Turpin's act of nearly satanic malevolence sets the characters on a collision course with one another, and the result cannot be anything but tragic. The story's complexity arises from the manner in which the characters' desires intersect, conflict, and pass each other by. Given this approach, the casting of Johnny Depp as Todd strikes me as a wise move. Depp's good looks, charisma, and familiarity amid such slightly askew period trappings serve to lend Todd some sympathy, when he is actually due very little. Depp plays Todd as a man filled to overflowing with rage and remorse and nothing else. He's bloodthirsty and assured when planning and perpetrating his murders, but stoop-shoulder and dead-eyed the rest of the time.

Helena Bonham Carter isn't getting nearly enough attention for what I believe is the best performance in the film. Carter is too often cast for her distinctive looks, which are an admittedly compelling gestalt of chiseled, cherubic, and sinister. Her strongest performances—Fight Club and now Sweeney Todd—have both had a cocksure amorality, bedraggled and fiercely feminine. While Marla Singer was raw nihilism with a glimmer of romanticism, Mrs. Lovett is a far more convoluted and fascinating woman, at least in Burton's film. That she is a monster is no doubt, but like all the characters in Sweeney Todd, she has her own strain of naïveté. Incidentally, both Depp and Carter sing in the film, and they both do fine.

Up until now I've stood outside the Sweeney Todd phenomenon, but it's easy to see why the musical is regarded as a compelling milestone in American theater. In bringing it to film, Burton emphasizes not just the tangible horror of cannibalism and spouting jugulars, but the underlying horror of humanity's depraved potential and fallibility. The music is not, strangely enough, front and center in the film, but neither does it feel obligatory. The filmmakers seem to recognize that the story is powerful in its own right, but that it also benefits immeasurably from the telling via Sondheim's music. I can't think of a better antidote to the cloying taste of the Christmas season than this gruesome, blood-drenched morsel, realized by a director who seems born to do so.

The Golden Compass

2007 // USA - UK // Chris Weitz // December 9, 2007 // Theatrical Print

C - I'm hesitant to describe The Golden Compass as "epic fantasy," given that the film clocks in at under two hours. This adaptation of the first novel in Philip Pullman's engrossing His Dark Materials trilogy has a structural breeziness that does not complement the dense story it is striving to tell. It hits the right notes for an adolescent fantasy, but the methodical haste it insists upon—and the occasionally silly dialogue from writer and director Chris Weitz—does the rich source material a disservice. It's still a pleasurable arctic romp, with some rare scenes of dramatic complexity from its captivating female leads. Nonetheless, as someone who adored Pullman's novel, I find it tempting and all too easy to envision a more substantial adaptation, perhaps one where the filmmakers weren't so dispassionately determined to get their franchise off and running.

The Golden Compass takes place in a sort of fantasy steampunk parallel universe, where Jules Verne wonders and magical creatures exist side-by-side. Human souls have a physical reality in this world, taking the form of talking animal companions called daemons, one for each living person. One of the subtle pleasures of the film is observing the daemons as they perch on and slink around their masters. It is a credit to The Golden Compass' production design that Pullman's world is so faithfully recreated, often exactly as I had imagined it. The scenes of greater London are a bit unconvincing, like paint-by-numbers landscapes, but the arctic locales—the trading port of Trollesund, the polar bear stronghold Svalbard, and the evil laboratory Bolvangar—possess vitality and an unearthly eeriness. Pullman's world is impressively realized, but Weitz unfortunately engages in gee-whiz gaping at the sweep of it all, the sort of sin that is expected of George Lucas, and also of Peter Jackson in his more indulgent moments.

Dakota Blue Richards, one of the most charismatic young actors I've seen in a Hollywood film in some time, plays the film's heroine, Lyra Belacqua. An unapologetic liar and troublemaker, Lyra possesses fierce streaks of loyalty and courage, as well as a sixth sense for adult twaddle. She's a memorable and instantly likable child protagonist, and it is a credit to Richards' portrayal that this shines through the computer gimmickry that surrounds her. The other scene-stealer is Nicole Kidman as the glamorous, vicious Mrs. Coulter, a woman that both attracts and repulses Lyra. Despite a couple of eye-rolling lines, Kidman pulls off the tricky character marvelously, stitching together equal parts Gilded Age Bond villain and Joan Crawford by way of Faye Dunaway.

The rest of the cast looks good decked out in sumptuous, vaguely Victorian fantasy garb, but they don't have much to do beyond rushed exposition that ranges from the necessary to the preposterous. Sam Elliott is precisely the man I envisioned as Texan aeronaut Lee Scoresby when reading the novel, and he's obviously having fun with the role. Yet Scoresby seems included mainly for the sake of color, and the antihero texture of his character is barely touched upon. As Lyra's explorer uncle Asriel, Daniel Craig is provided with an essentially pointless action sequence before he disappears from the film entirely. Asriel is a presence that hovers over Lyra's journey in the novel, and most of his development takes place offscreen. It seems wasteful and misguided to cast an actor of steely humanity like Craig in such a phantom role. Eva Green as the witch Serafina Pekkala is a pleasing sight, as are a host of British character actors including Derek Jacobi and an obligatory Christopher Lee, but everyone other than Richards and Kidman seems to be doing a full dress rehearsal of an abridged script.

The harried feel to The Golden Compass is at the expense of the novel's peculiar drama. Pullman lets his imaginary setting unfurl at a languid pace, permitting the reader to puzzle out the crucial details of Lyra's world. Pullman's diligence in building a convincing reality makes for some nail-biting tension in scenes that have no corollary in our world—such as when one character seizes Lyra's daemon. The film rarely achieves this sort of challenging feat, and then only due to some heavy lifting from the actors.

If my assessment of The Golden Compass seems lukewarm, it is partly because the bar has been set relatively high within recent memory. In no small part due to New Line's relentless promotion, The Golden Compass invites comparisons to other more successful epic fantasy franchises, particularly The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the appeal of these trilogies lies not just in their visceral thrills, but also in the manner in which the filmmakers realize the underlying mythos. Pirates in particular makes for an instructive contrast, for while the pace of the Disney films is as relentless as that in The Golden Compass, their speed serves to exhilarate and tickle. Yet Pirates is anything but truncated—the entire trilogy runs 461 minutes—and every moment brims with details that suggest the density of its droll, seventeenth century cartoon reality. (The intricacy of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's script and the elaborate mythology it has spawned is one of the series' underappreciated merits.) To its detriment, The Golden Compass seems to be striving for the opposite: an uninspired, economic adaptation of a vivid, meticulous source.

Nonetheless, The Golden Compass is serviceable Hollywood fare, and better than most adventure films aimed at the preteen set. Its polished production of Pullman's world will be sufficient to satisfy many fans of the novel. Try as he might, Weitz can't drain the inherent appeal from Lyra, from the evocative production design, or from the story's subversive themes. For these reasons alone, The Golden Compass is worthwhile entertainment. Yet as a fan of the novel, and as a filmgoer who has witnessed far more gratifying fantasy spectacles even in the past five years, I suspect that it could have been something more successful. Good starting points might have been a three-hour running time and a director whose understanding of the novel penetrates beyond surface details.

Into the Wild

2007 // USA // Sean Penn // December 6, 2007 // Theatrical Print

C - Shortly after graduating from Emory University in 1990, an upper-middle class straight-A student named Chris McCandless made a resolute and perhaps rash choice to disappear into America. Without confiding in his family, McCandless destroyed his identification, signed his remaining college fund over to charity, abandoned his car in the desert, and burned what was left of his pocket money. Two years later, McCandless' remains were discovered in the Alaskan wilderness, where he had been sheltering in the abandoned shell of a bus and eventually died of starvation. Jon Krakauer meticulously reconstructed McCandless' journey in his book Into the Wild. Sean Penn has now adapted Krakauer's work into a film that is fitful, even clumsy at times. Fortunately, Penn's palpable passion for McCandless' story, and the penetrating, mythical structure he lends it, more than make up for his occasional directorial missteps.

First the bad. This is the first of Penn's films that I've seen. Into the Wild demonstrates that he is an eager storyteller at heart, but perhaps not a natural within the medium of film. Experience will change this, I suspect, and it will be fascinating to see what sort of filmmaker Penn becomes as he hones his skills and sheds his more indulgent impulses. Into the Wild exhibits every stylistic flourish imaginable: slow-motion, voice-over narration, grainy flashbacks, extreme close-ups, stuttering edits, brightly superimposed text, and on and on. It's a flashy, shotgun approach to filmmaking. Intense artifice can be gratifying when it serves a story, but Penn applies these techniques sporadically and arbitrarily, such that they become distracting.

There are touches of brilliance in Penn's script, such as early scenes that adeptly and believably convey the bourgeois tension in McCandless' family life, but overall it tends towards the clunky. The narration by Jena Malone as McCandless' sister rambles in a lyrical sort of way, but it's far easier to swallow than certain suspect lines of dialog. When Emile Hirsch as McCandless urgently intones an Oprah-ready platitude such as, "If you see something you want, you have to reach out and take it," I found myself uncertain of Penn's intentions. If this line is meant as a straightforward statement of the film's ethos, then it's painfully insipid. More generously, Penn may be counting on the viewer's lukewarm reaction to this ridiculous line in order to expose McCandless' inch-deep worldview. It's hard to say.

These sorts of stumbles might have left another film in shambles, but Penn manages to overcome his own ungainly presentation, perhaps stunningly so. The bedrock of Into the Wild is its story, and it is an undeniably compelling tale whatever one may think of McCandless' morals or common sense. What American—especially a college-educated young man—doesn't dream of discarding the obligations and injustices of modern society and returning to a simpler existence? It is telling that Penn patiently waited ten years for the McCandless family to warm to the notion of this film.

Penn's spirited, cunning stroke is to stage Into the Wild not as a sweeping biopic, or even a cut-and-dried dramatization, but as a kind of Hero's Journey. It is the rare film in which the "Inspired by True Events" tag seems perfectly appropriate, given the legendary quality to Penn's approach. The film cuts between two timelines, one beginning at McCandless' graduation just before his break with his old life, the other a year and a half into his journey just as he sets into the Alaskan wilderness alone. Unlike some of the film's more gratuitous touches, these interwoven timelines are crucial. Penn seems to recognize the tedium and despair that would drag down the second half of the film were it told chronologically. As McCandless' efforts to sustain himself in the wilds unravel, the story of how he came to this fate unfolds on a parallel track. Just as McCandless dwells on the memories of his journey and the lessons they offer, the viewer is offered context and insight.

McCandless romanticizes his withdrawal from society as an intensely private endeavor in the tradition of Henry Thoreau or Jack London. Penn ingeniously approaches McCandless' journey—and its consequences—as a moral lesson for public consumption. I find it inexplicable that some viewers have found the portrayal of McCandless as ambiguous, or even hagiographic. If the ham-fisted bits of dialogue are frustrating, it is only because the message is blazingly clear for most of the film. McCandless' death could have been portrayed as a martyrdom, but Penn aims for something more pointed. He is recovering the young man's belated revelations for those of us who still languish in civilization, and these revelations indict the very impulses that drove McCandless north.

As McCandless ambles towards his fate, he meets a succession of challenges and fellow travelers. Penn is not building a story around half-baked Joseph Campbell principles, but striving to understand a distinctly American tragedy through a timeless framework. Tellingly, title cards introduce the pre-Alaska phases of McCandless' quest as life stages. The traveler meets a pair of aging hippies (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), a gregarious wheat farmer (Vince Vaughn), a crusty widower (Hal Holbrook), and other assorted characters. Each offers some wisdom, receives insight from McCandless in turn, and highlights the fundamental paradox of him. McCandless talks condescendingly of the morality of solitude, but he seems most content in the company of others. He is confronted with monsters—ranger patrols, railroad bulls, raging rivers, grizzly bears—but the final demon is, of course, the demon within.

Some of the strong reaction to Into the Wild seems to stem from the viewer's assessment of McCandless himself. Was he a noble dreamer or a feckless nitwit? Such questions were first raised in Krakauer's book, and a stale dramatization might have courted faux controversy by rehashing them. Yet given Penn's wholly original approach, criticism of the sympathetic treatment of McCandless seems misguided. The film is hardly a canonization, as his foolishness, self-absorption, and lack of preparation are not glossed. And still he is somewhat sympathetic, for although he was not a hero, he is this story's Hero. Emile Hirsch plays McCandless with genuine warmth and a touch of dimwitted arrogance, but generally keeps the performance inscrutable. Hirsch and Penn seem to recognize that he must be something of a cipher. As in all legends, he is a proxy for the viewer.

Penn deserves criticism for engaging in the slapdash glitz one might expect in a student's first film, not the fourth feature from a veteran actor. Yet Penn also deserves credit for crafting a stirring and imaginative work from a tragedy that might have otherwise have been senseless. For me, the latter overcame the former.

No Country For Old Men

2007 // USA // Joel and Ethan Coen // November 29, 2007 // Theatrical Print

A - What can a good man do in a world where he is confronted with evil so foul he can barely comprehend it? This is the question at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, a film that that is quite unlike anything I have seen this year. On the surface, it is a masterfully constructed thriller, brimming with images that smolder and words that reverberate. If this were all that the Coens had achieved with No Country, it would still be a worthy film. There are deeper currents, however, beneath the "dismal tide," as one character describes the onslaught of bullets, blood, and madness that is slouching towards Texas border country. The Coens employ fear, despair, and a dash of their trademark absurdism to probe the nature of morality in a post-faith world. I have never read the novel by Cormac McCarthy, but most reviews of the original work cite these themes. The Coens are a somewhat diagonal choice for the translation of an existential contemporary-Western novel, but they prove more than up to the task.

The exact dimensions of the plot are murky in places—and deliberately so, I think—but the central conflict is timeless. In the West Texas desert of 1980, Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss stumbles across a drug deal gone bad while hunting antelope. Moss absconds from the scene with $2 million in a satchel, setting into motion a chase between himself, county sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and an enigmatic psychopath named Anton Chigurh ("Sugar?," Moss asks quizzically.) To describe the film's events in more detail would not only invite spoilers, but would be beside the point. What happens, and to whom, and when, is secondary to the implications of this drama for the moral order of the universe. Crucially, Moss is the protagonist, but Bell is the narrator. Moss' level-headed, practical resourcefulness, and his ragged, trailer-park life, invite us to root for him. However, the events of the film unfold through the reactions of Bell the aging lawman—although not necessarily through his eyes. The Coens signal in Bell's opening narration that the story has ensnared him, even implicated him, just as it will the viewer:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it... You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

There is so much that No Country gets right, it's hard to know where to begin. I'll start with the acting, which is pitch-perfect across the board. Josh Brolin plays Moss with a dusty, squinty canniness, coaxing the viewer to gradually admire him and fear for his fate. Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald disappears entirely into Moss' anxious wife, Carla Jean, who despairs over her husband's schemes but retains a furtive confidence in him. In one moving scene near the end, she proudly describes Moss: "Llewelyn can take care of hisself... He can take all comers." Much has been made of Spanish actor Javier Bardem's portrayal of Chigurh, a relentless killer who wields a pneumatic cattle stun gun and enormous, silenced shotgun. Chigurh's presence in this story is never entirely explained, but Bardem is less interested in what specifically motivates him than in conveying the sense of a perfectly motivated man. Or thing, perhaps, for Chigurh seems less a man than an amoral murdering machine from some near-future dystopia. No such luck. Chigurh is unmistakably flesh and blood, and wandering the dark streets of small-town Texas with death on his mind. The future, it seems, is here, and God help us all.

The real standout in No Country, however, is Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell. The crags and sags that characterize Jones' lived-in features have become iconographic in their own right, a sort of shorthand for the weariness and ragged ideals of modern America. Jones' occasional typecasting for his looks and accent make is easy to forget how extraordinary he is as an actor. He is one of the few modern American performers who can energize a scene by toning it down. Instead of ratcheting up a solitary emotion until it is bleeding from his pores, Jones layers emotion on top of emotion with nothing more than the flicking of his eyes and the inflection in his voice.

No Country is the most perfectly realized work of art from Joel and Ethan Coen since their harrowing 1990 gangster-noir epic, Miller's Crossing. (I will leave it for another time whether the deliriously funny The Big Lebowski should be considered a worthy intermediary, given its status as the greatest late-blooming comedy of the past two decades.) The Coens have always exhibited a meticulous, off-center character in their direction. This sensibility is not unique to the brothers, but they seem to be among the few directors who employ it in consistently original ways, even while aping familiar genre conventions. The film noir elements in No Country have appeared previously in their filmography and in purer form, but rarely with such naked intensity.

No Country is a technically superb film, but I barely noticed. The story produces such a relentless vortex that I could only appreciate the skill on display during a second viewing. The Coens excel at conjuring menace from the familiar. Their frequent cinematographer Roger Deakins, fresh from the visual mastery he exhibits in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, discovers the tension within another kind of Western landscape. He captures the remorseless character of hardscrabble desert soil, indigo pre-dawn skies, and an endless succession of dim, seedy, suffocating hotel rooms. Seldom have such banal surroundings seemed to conceal such peril. Remarkably, No Country has virtually no music. It wasn't until my second viewing that I noted the low, nearly subliminal ambient tones that underlie one extremely tense scene.

The critical reception to No Country seems to fall into three camps. There are those who laud it as an essentially perfect film; those who regard it as remarkable but flawed; and a handful who revile it as misguided or ineffectual or monstrous... or something. I fall on the positive end of this spectrum, although some lines of dialogue have nagged me as unnecessarily cryptic. In what is otherwise a modern masterpiece, these missteps are all the more noticeable.

No Country is, I will concede, a challenging film. Its narrative is not difficult to comprehend, but the questions it poses, and the potential answers it offers, are disquieting. I can appreciate that when such a perfectly rendered thriller takes several unusual turns in its final scenes, it can be bewildering or even infuriating. However, No Country is an intentional jolt to this sort of cinematic complacency, and the power of the film's ethos lies within its unconventional resolution. Suffice to say that I found the conclusion both satisfying and haunting, something that few films achieve.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2007 // France - USA // Julian Schnabel // November 18, 2007 // Theatrical Print

B - Melodramas about infirmity or disability have never struck me as appealing entertainment in the same escapist vein as, say, action films or romantic comedies. Why on earth would anyone want to lose themselves in a tale of human physical frailty, even if said tale is awkwardly molded into an uplifting parable? Perhaps illness, however it is fictionalized, still cuts closer to the bone for me than glossed violence or passion. Regardless, the disease film subgenre is now so common in television film that its typical narrative arc—Struggle Against Adversity Leads to Revelation Just Before Death—has been thoroughly desiccated of emotional heft.

For me, a film in this tradition needs to provide an original reworking or toppling of the formula, or at the very least an unusual level of artistry, for it to command two hours of my attention, let alone a recommendation to others. Happily, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is both novel and beautiful, and all the more remarkable for being a true story. Based on the memoir of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Diving Bell lacks the sort of tidy plotting that might have rendered it stale and unconvincing. This is fortunate, given that its high-concept outline seems improbably cinematic at first blush. Bauby, a lusty Parisian urbanite and editor at ELLE magazine, suffered a stroke in 1995, at the age of forty-three. The event afflicted him with an extraordinarily rare condition known as "locked-in" syndrome. He was aware and lucid, but found that he was paralyzed save for his left eye.

Schnabel adapts Bauby's memoir—from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood—as a dreamy glimpse into the author's post-stroke life, drifting through scenes that are alternately terrifying, absurd, and affecting. The earlier parts of the film are told from Bauby's perspective. Diving Bell opens with the stricken man awakening in the hospital. We are privy to his thoughts as he struggles in bewildered horror to move, or when he responds to his doctors with pissy, silent retorts. Once the oppressive, confining nature of Bauby's condition is established, Schnabel moves the camera to capture Bauby from without, often in flashback. I was impressed with how this transition happens naturally and unnoticeably, after the point-of-view conceit has evolved from flashy to discomforting to forgotten.

Diving Bell is a vivid film, suffused with generous touches of visual dazzle. Occasionally, it veers into uninspired carnival tricks that didn't quite work for me. A gruesome sequence where Bauby's unblinking right eye is stitched up is toe-curlingly effective, but this sort of crude horror seems out of place. Schnabel's periodic use of archival footage for metaphorical or comic effect—a disintegrating ice shelf, a young Marlon Brando—comes across as disorienting. Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a longtime Stephen Spielberg collaborator, are at their best when they are discovering aching beauty in the little things: the way a dress drapes over a sitting woman's thighs; a concrete balcony that stretches out towards a gray, windswept beach; the red pulse of light from a plastic Madonna in a shop window. The film effortlessly persuades us to savor these mundane visual minutiae, mirroring the manner in which Bauby treasures his senses and memories.

While Diving Bell is a striking work of visual art, it is also a wrenching self-portrait of a human being in extraordinary—incomprehensible, really—circumstances. Admittedly, this is due in some part to the astonishing details of Bauby's life once he became imprisoned within his own body (the titular "diving bell"). Slipping through predictable but entirely understandable bouts of confusion, fear, rage, and self-pity, Bauby eventually grasps holds of a purpose. He will author a memoir of his wholly unique experience, capitalizing on a book deal previously intended for a novel. Bauby's astute, compassionate speech therapist devises an ingenious but laborious method of communication. She reads off the letters of the French alphabet, in order of descending usage, and Bauby blinks when she reaches the correct letter. She jots it down. She starts reciting again. Blink. Jot. Recite. Blink. Jot. In this manner, Bauby dictates his book, one letter at a time, to an infinitely patient assistant sent from his publisher. The wonder of this act of creation is dizzying to reflect upon. We are hearing a man's thoughts, spoken in a film, adapted from a book, decoded from the flicking of that man's eye.

While Bauby's story is intriguing in its facts, it is Harwood's script and Schnabel's direction that make it a compelling story. Far too many films aspire to create "complexity" by dropping a reprehensible character into a sympathetic situation, or, worse, by fallaciously juxtaposing moral monstrosity with cultural refinement. (He's a Nazi... but he loves the violin! He's complex!) Bauby, both in his own bracingly honest words and as portrayed by the filmmakers, comes across as naturalistically complex. Prior to his stroke, he is sort of an asshole, but isn't it reasonable that a wealthy, handsome, merchant of chic like Bauby would be sort of an asshole? He misses his three children, and the woman who mothered them, and relishes his all-to-brief visits with them, but he has no maudlin revelations about the importance of family. In a flashback sequence, Bauby visits his homebound elderly father at his flat and gives him a shave. (Max Van Sydow, at once magisterial and wounded as the elder Bauby, is an unexpected pleasure.) There are some verbal barbs, some jokes, some muttered words of warmth. We get the sense of two mature, intelligent Parisian men, full of deep, familial love. In a lesser film, this scene would be manipulated for tragic irony. There would be some festering emotional wounds, or a vital revelation left unspoken... Until It Was Too Late! Instead, when the father later calls the paralyzed son on his speakerphone at the hospital, the filmmakers trust their actors convey the profound agony that the characters feel.

Mathieu Amalric deserves special praise for portraying Bauby with just enough strokes to claim the character, while allowing the man's real-world persona to shine through. Amalric is a French actor of some renown, but I know him only from Munich, where his mercenary intelligence agent provided one of that film's more memorable characters.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the sort of film that should not be my sort of film. Owing to the astounding source material, the thoughtful, humanistic approach to its adaptation, and the sparkle of its visual design, I discovered a deep fondness for it.