Ashes of Time Redux

To Everything, Turn, Turn, Turn

2008 // Hong Kong - China // Wong Kar-wai // November 2, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Excess suffuses Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux, but not the bombastic sort one might expect in a film that owes most of its narrative elements and a slice of style to the wuxia tradition. No, Ashes is an elliptical meditation first and foremost, a serious-minded discourse on love and loss, replete with swelling strings (just in case you forget for a moment how serious). Wong puts a glowing burnish on this tangled tale of swordsmanship and longing set against impossibly bright desert sands, relying on a lyrical four-part structure that admittedly gets its talons into you. The director's preference for lingering shots and meandering dialogue, while not objectionable on its face, lends Ashes a musty odor of pretension, if only because it highlights the unevenness of his storytelling technique. One wonders at Wong's choices: on the one hand he offers several minutes of a woman caressing a horse--an exquisitely poetic sequence--while elsewhere his transitions are so ambiguous and edits so jarring that the story becomes baffling.

So what of the story? Much of it unrolls from the perspective of Oyaung Feng (Leslie Cheung), who lurks in a crumbling house outside a village on the edge of a vast desert. Feng is a fixer: villagers and outsiders approach him with their problems, and he solves them, typically by retaining a down-and-out swordsman to hack through said problems. Divided into four acts that explicitly evoke the passing of the seasons, Ashes is told through Feng's voice-over narration. Supplicants and mercenaries come and go: Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a rogue who drinks a memory-wiping wine; Hong Qigong (Jacky Cheung), a cocky peasant-swordsman; a grim warrior who is slowly going blind (Tony Leung Chiu Wai); a cross-dressing warlord princess with a double identity (Brigitte Lin); and a poor farmer's daughter (Charlie Yeung) who stands outside Feng's house for months with only her mule and a basket of eggs.

Everyone's problems seem to revolve around murder and love, the latter usually of the unrequited or forbidden quality. Feng dwells outside his clients' woes, a middle-man with a honed cynical eye. The other characters rush headlong into their fates, while he muses on the perils and absurdities of the human condition. He seems to be the sort of man who harbors no sentimentality, but we soon learn that his past holds its own doomed romance, one involving a cold beauty (Maggie Cheung) now married to his brother. All of these tales run together and entwine. The swaggering Huang Yaoshi has enraptured the princess, he's a former lover of the blind swordman's wife (I think), and he also seems to know Feng's old flame. No one is headed for an entirely happy ending, but even the tragic conclusions seem appropriate. Nothing stays the same, muses Feng. The sun sets, the winds shift, and the peach trees will bloom again.

All of this is conveyed with monumental artiness and plenty of moist pondering. Character glide and laze through the Ashes, all of them (even Feng) practically drowning in their lusts and longings. The story flows like molasses at times and then jerks forward with a snap, often leaving the viewer at sea. Wong asks for our patience, but for every moment of gentle beauty Ashes discovers, it spends far too much time fiddling around as though haziness were a storytelling virtue. The wuxia action is sparing, and when it arrives it is usually muddled or perfunctory. However, there are some gems. Wong achieves an outstanding scene of thrilling terror when the blind swordsman faces down an endless army of bandits. The sequence is shot in a blurry, lurching style that captures the confusion of battle, but watch for how Wong highlights the appearance of a menacing left-handed warrior amid the whirl of blades, or how he pauses for half a beat on the breath-sucking sight of saffron-yellow sand grains shifting in the wind. Motifs recur, and this is where Wong exhibits a rich cinematic talent, striking a taut balance between window dressing and metaphor that remains powerful throughout the film. Rugged ridges, dishes of water, pack animals, and bird cages: we register them and they infect our thinking of the film, but they don't devolve into fetishes.

There is no narrative reward to be had in Ashes, in the sense that most viewers might expect. While this makes the film's haphazard style all the more exasperating, it also strongly suggests that Ashes is best approached as a rumination, or at best a package of parables, rather than as a tidy story complete with ribbon. It's challenging cinema, and not always worth the effort, but Wong's original touches lend Ashes an energy and visual allure that ultimately redeem it. The director's refusal to glamorize his setting or his characters—even as he summons a legendary aura—makes the film's tragedies both familiar and potent. Wong's medieval China is one of dusty hills, scrub, and trees like gnarled hands; no pagodas or peony gardens here. It's a land where the people fidget, belch, sulk, grope, and sigh. They do foolish things in the name of love, hate, and glory. The narrator Feng smirks, but he's the one checking the almanac every day to determine how the winds of fortune are blowing. Wong posits that we all have our cages, and that they always shatter eventually, whether we've escaped in time or not.

Rachel Getting Married

You Are Cordially Invited

2008 // USA // Jonathan Demme // October 28, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Part discomfiting soap opera, part deliciously nasty glimpse of upper class twittery, and above all a sneaky, naturalistic celebration of music and milestones, Johnathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married is a work as far from the director's The Silence of the Lambs as one could envision. Roiling with familial angst and earnest realism, it's not a concoction that will appeal to everyone. Rachel juggles both ridiculous scenes of ugly misbehavior and helplessly sweet (and often equally ridiculous) sequences of distilled joy. That both of these elements can comfortably coexist in the same film reflects the central theme of Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet (yes, daughter of that Lumet): that families are both fundamentally miserable institutions and also refuges of grace and happiness. Often, as in Rachel Getting Married, in the same weekend.

Kym (Anne Hathaway) is the younger sister, a recovering drug addict released from rehab to attend her sibling Rachel's wedding. Demme sticks close to Hathaway throughout Rachel Getting Married, unspooling his tale from her caustic perspective. Hathaway is as riveting as she has ever been here, conveying Kym's interior world through her dark eyes, ragdoll neck, and a quick, snarky tongue that scuttles through the film's crawlspaces. Kym's family is a white, wealthy, liberal New England clan, full of long-ago divorces and eclectic cultural tastes. If Hathaway feels a little out of place amongst her kin and their friends, it's less because she has nothing in common with them—the Best Man, she learns, is in her Narcotics Anonymous group—than because there is an ancient bitterness at work, the source and full extent of which is only gradually revealed.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), in contrast, is the angel of the family, an aspiring doctor of psychology who has met the man of her dreams in Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), a barrel-chested black guy with coke-bottle glasses and a broad grin. Warm and adoring, they seem to be the most well-adjusted couple in the film. Throughout the weekend, the father of the bride, Paul (Bill Irwin), is more attentive and anxious towards Hathaway than the daughter he is marrying off. The gently aloof mother, Abby (Debra Winger), lurks around the periphery of the film, appearing late and leaving early. We meet step-parents, distant cousins, fun-loving friends, and a woolly black standard poodle with a tennis ball perpetually in its jaws. Most charmingly, a folk group wanders in and out of the frame, ostensibly the live music for the wedding, but also serving as a kind of dramatic chorus for the film. Their violins, lutes, and drums weave an omnipresent soundtrack that drifts through the windows and doorways.

Lumet's script is dense with creamy tension and unraveled, upper-class hysteria. In scenes such as Hathaway's rambling, self-absorbed toast, or Winger's clenched departure from the wedding, Lumet exhibits a fine balance between authenticity and sharp drama. The story gets a little out of hand when she and Demme attempt more lurid pyrotechnics, as in a brutal and awkwardly presented confrontation between Hathaway and Winger. It's these more cartoonish moments that vex Rachel Getting Married most significantly, and at times threaten to topple it under a burden of daytime television tawdriness. Yet one can't help but marvel at Demme's ability to treat his protagonist with such sympathy and sensitivity, while never forgiving her fundamentally unsympathetic qualities. Consider a scene where Hathaway attends a mandatory NA meeting. Nearly everything Demme has presented up to this point has highlighted her distraction and cynicism, down to her outburst of profanity as she stumbles in the door. Then he shows us snippets of members confessing their troubles and trials, and we watch Hathaway's reactions go from agitated to sorrowful. Eventually, she tearfully nods at the words of her fellow addicts, as though at a religious revival. It's a small thing, but indicative of Demme's skill: an unexpected character trait—the significant stock Kym places in the Twelves Steps—revealed in a superb manner.

Demme often backgrounds the family drama to soak in the pleasure of the spontaneous and joyous moments, and it's in these sequences that the home video look to his camera work creates the impression of a real-life wedding (fortunately minus most of the dreary banality). The director and all of his performers rally with such ease and enthusiasm around the rituals, games, and music that it's hard not to get caught up in the pleasure of it all. I dare you not to crack a smile during an ad hoc dishwasher-loading competition between father and future son-in-low—never mind how bluntly it comes to a halt—or the heartfelt toasts and songs offered up during the rehearsal dinner. Indeed, it's the film's music where Demme displays his most effusive tendencies, and reveals his pedigree in creating acclaimed concert films (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young: Heart of Gold). Although Rachel's naturalism calls to mind John Carney's Once from last year, Demme isn't concerned with creation, but with music's rapturous qualities for the listener, and the way it scores the lives of true aficionados. The families of Rachel have music in their bones, perhaps professionally, and the wedding features folk, rock, soul, hip-hop, and an entire samba band (no kidding). It's the kind of outrageous, diverse, exultant celebration that only happens in the movies, but is no less tempting for all that. Admittedly, some of the musical sequences might wear on for a bit, but it's not because they are dull, but because we're frustrated that we can't leap in and cut loose ourselves.

It's tempting to paint Rachel Getting Married as two films—a screechy soap opera on one hand, and a hangout musical on the other—but this isn't quite accurate. It's not really a schizophrenic film, any more than a family that offers both venom and love could be described in such a way. Rather, Demme lets his gaze shift slightly, finding separate vantage points from which to view the same eventful weekend. His focus on the squabbling and closeted skeletons is his concession to Hathaway's eye-of-the-storm view. His more unabashedly adoring approach to the wedding's pleasures represents a shift to an amused, omniscient observer, marveling at how such miserable people can put it all aside in a moment to drink, dance, and laugh.

Religulous

Shooting Loaves and Fishes in a Barrel

2008 // USA // Larry Charles // October 8, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Odds are, you already know whether you will appreciate Larry Charles's Religulous. If you find Bill Maher funny, then Religulous will tickle you. If the notion of Maher confronting the essential horseshit of religious belief via a series of globetrotting interviews sounds engaging to you, then Religulous will spin your dreidel, so to speak. More accessible and yet possessing a narrower, humdrum aim than Charles' sublimely crackpot social critique-slash-Jackass stunt, Borat, Religulous doesn't break any new ground theologically or cinematically. Maher, who has evolved from a Christmas-Easter Catholic to a doubter to a forthright critic of faith, clearly yearns to play the part of the acerbic foil, eager to "go there" and call religious leaders frauds and fabulists to their faces. If you've ever wandered into a watercooler—or Internet forum—discussion about religion, you know the arguments, just as you know that neither Maher nor his hapless subjects will walk away swayed by the other. While the enterprise is a little creaky—"Hey, did you know that there are fundamentalist nutjobs in America?!"—Maher and Charles surprise with an approach both more personal and more forceful than one might expect.

Sticking primarily to the Big Three monotheistic faiths familiar to most Americans—with some Mormonism and Scientology thrown in for bonus crazy—Maher travels to holy sites around the world and talks with prominent religious leaders as well as folks-on-the-street. Some of these conversations veer close to Michael Moore-style (or affiliate news show) ambushes, and one suspects that Maher sometimes concealed his intentions in the hopes of backing his subjects into a corner. Of course, as with The Daily Show, one wonders: Have these people never seen Maher before? Do they not understand his outlook and biases? Or are they just hoping that a little national face time, regardless of the interviewer, will allow them to set the record straight? Maher mostly refrains from bullying or humiliating his subjects, but he does adopt a ruthless, pressing tone that demands intellectual consistency.

There's no devastating insights to be had in Religulous that you won't find in much more erudite and exhaustive best-sellers such as Dawkins' The God Delusion or Hitchens' God Is Not Great. The film's ambitions are actually pretty modest, and its format unfortunately tedious: Maher asks people why they believe ludicrous things absent any evidence, they shrug and hand-wave, and Maher looks at the camera as if to say, "Can you believe this crap?" It's not exactly bleeding-edge social commentary. Yet Maher makes it fairly engaging, I think, because he really is perplexed that so many of his fellow human beings enthusiastically embrace delusions. It's hard to imagine, say, the late George Carlin—a less patient, less haughty, more cynical comedian—ever engaging in this sort of faithless odyssey, much less permitting a film-maker to tag along. Maher has the right combination of self-satisfied intellect and low tolerance for baloney to present himself as a credible foe of faith, but he also maintains enough dim hope in humanity that Religulous doesn't feel like a mean-spirited farce. Vitally, Charles opens the film with Maher's reminisces about his family's early religious life, including an interview with his mother and sister. Thus, while the director engages in some freakshow goggling at religious extremists, the film's angle is not that of a curious outsider peering into an alien world, but an escapee urging his cell-mates to leap the fence.

Maher is funniest when playing the part of the aggressive debater, or when engaging Charles' camera in acidic conversation during their roadtrips. These stances play to Maher's strengths as a stand-up comedian and a fearless moderator. In contrast, his "Professor Maher" shtick—reciting scripted commentary on location at religious locales—comes off as dry and awkward. The Discovery Channel look to these sequences just doesn't mesh well with Maher's asshole glee for upsetting apple carts or with Charles' passion for guerrilla film-making. Indeed, when Charles veers too close to a self-amused, sneering tone—such as his liberal use of video clips to mock his subjects or to slather on heaping helpings of irony—Religulous starts to feel like a half-assed effort in the already stale documentary subgenre of smug liberal polemic.

Fortunately, Charles exhibits a fine talent for crafting the raw material of Maher's combative encounters into neatly edited and annotated comedy. Most engagingly, the director appreciates the value of his film's genuinely unexpected and sobering moments, even if they are outnumbered by the pauses for snickering. When Maher visits an ex-gay Christian ministry, the laughs are pretty much there for the plucking. More memorable are scenes such as Maher suddenly walking out in disgust on an "anti-Zionist" Orthodox rabbi, or when the comedian is unable to coax even moderate, Westernized Muslims to say that the murder of Theo van Gogh was, you know, wrong.

Unlike most polemics, Religulous doesn't claim to be The Film That Every American Must See. Maher clearly declares that his target audience consists of the 16% of Americans who are atheistic, agnostic, irreligious, or just indifferent to matters of faith. The goal, if Religulous could be said to have a raison d'etre beyond knocking comedy softballs over the wall, is to spur that silent minority into action. Maher wants them to openly declare their opposition to fairy tales and challenge the often unexamined Bronze Age superstitions of the majority. If you're a member of that majority, sitting through Religulous may be a tall order, even if Maher does make you chuckle. I enjoyed it, but, then again, I agree with him.

Trouble the Water

You and Me, We Sweat and Strain

2008 // USA // Tia Lessin and Carl Deal // September 28, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have achieved a triumph in documentary film-making with Trouble the Water, a phenomenal, searing portrait of American survival and spirit. The directors deserve a bow for offering veterans such as Errol Morris and Werner Herzog stiff competition for the best documentary feature of 2008. However, the soul and vision of Trouble the Water's protagonist, one Kimberly Rivers Roberts, so suffuses—one might say possesses—the film, that any fair assessment must regard it as her film, at least in part. Indeed, Trouble the Water recalls Herzog's own Grizzly Man in its near-surrender of its form and content to the sizzling force of its fascinating subject. Admittedly, Lessin and Deal's stance towards Roberts is far warmer, more admiring, and more credulous than that of the German master towards Timothy Treadwell. There is a temptation to regard Trouble the Waters at least partly as "found art," given that Roberts' own amateur footage of the Lower Ninth Ward under Katrina's lash serves as the film's foundation. However, from this small seed springs a work so undeniably powerful that one can only praise the directors for revealing Trouble the Water's glittering treasures for all the world to see.

The film begins at a Red Cross shelter in September 2005, where Kimberly and Scott Roberts introduce themselves to the directors as New Orleans natives and survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Kim reveals, enthusiastically and with knowing showmanship, that she has roughly half an hour of rare, first-hand footage of the storm's devastation, captured on a handheld camcorder. Trouble the Water weaves Kim's astonishing, grainy glimpses of a drowning city with Lessin and Deal's own footage as they follow the Roberts' journey back to the Lower Ninth, then to relatives in Memphis, and then back again to New Orleans to try to rebuild their lives. The simplicity of the story is the film's appeal and also its grand illusion, for Trouble the Water deals with both the ugly reality of Katrina and the hopefulness that defies that reality. The indictment it presents is unambiguous: America's leaders left hundreds of thousands of poor citizens to die like Dark Age peasants in the face of a natural disaster. However, this scathing (yet persuasive) critique is not the heart of the film, but merely the starting point for Kim and Scott's tale of remarkable fortitude.

Kim is an inescapable presence in the film, perpetually behind the camera or in front of it. An aspiring hip-hop artist and a bit of a hustler, Kim serves as a tuning fork for Trouble the Water. She vibrates to her own pitch, and the film can only follow along and find the harmony. To say that the strength of the film lies in her authenticity—her blackness? femininity? poverty?—is woefully off the mark. It is obvious from the moment we meet her that the Kim is not a pristine anthropological specimen meant to embody the Big Easy's plight. She is shamelessly, joyously, fiercely involved in the film. At different points throughout Trouble the Water, she serves as an interviewer, interpreter, guide, narrator, journalist, performer, cinematographer, and counselor, not to mention a proxy for our own shame and frustrations.

I asked myself, "Where did they find this woman?" before I remembered that, no, she found them. Scrappy, graceful self-promoter that she is, Kim evinces a compelling appreciation for the drama of her own story even as it is unfolding, a drama that runs deeper than mere gaping at disaster. She wanders through her neighborhood prior to landfall and interrogates friends and strangers about their plans for riding out the storm. She breathlessly repeats the date and that dread name—"Katrina"—well before the extent of the hurricane's calamitous reach is apparent, as if she knows that the storm will be talked about for generations to come. She speaks earnestly and awestruck about the strength of her community and how hardships bring people together. She sculpts the sorrows of New Orleans into her own life story, rapping to the camera over a track about her unlikely survival and boundless strength.

Rippling through Trouble the Water is the seductive and emotionally overwhelming notion that Kimberly Roberts is the quintessential face of twenty-first century America. Here is a woman who is powerful, courageous, scarred, dauntless, spiritual, sentimental, media-savvy, and self-aware. She is a woman longing to simultaneously start over and find her way home. This, not Trouble the Water's peppering of justifiable liberal rage, is what makes it so engaging. Which isn't to say the the film's gestures towards the indignant polemic sub-genre are ineffective. Lessin has served as a producer for a sizable slice of Michael Moore's output, but his influence is only apparent in the film's bemused, profoundly bitter awareness of the apathy infecting America's ruling class. In contrast to Moore's winking camera-hunger, here the directors only rarely intrude on Trouble the Water in any overt manner.

Lessin and Deal largely permit Kim and Scott to tell their tale, resisting the urge to editorialize or file down the serrated edges of their protagonists. The directors coax out the couple's complexity—a fabulous, human complexity, absent any sort of haughty exceptionalism—so smoothly, with such alert eyes and ears, that it seems effortless. (The bits of ironic news footage spliced in here and there suggest a clumsier hand.) Indeed, while the narrative thrust is unmistakably Kim's, Lessin and Deal leave their mark on the film, often in the way they cunningly convey revealing details. The cherubic Scott carries a deep scar on his left cheek, and I idly wondered: Would its origin ever be explained? Then, near the film's conclusion, Kim explains her husband's wound in her own way, dropping an oblique line into one of her songs that sheds fresh light on the couple's relationship. That moment, and the confessional character to it, is Kim's, but its placement in the film is a testament to Lessin and Deal's marvelous storytelling instincts.

Rarely do socially conscious documentaries about recent events rise above the shackles of outrage, and rarely do they have a purpose beyond motivating already sympathetic viewers to political action. Trouble the Water will persist, I believe, as a work of documentary art that transcends its proximal subject matter. It stands as an essential primary and secondary source in the history of American life, and also as an affecting glimpse of human resilience, one that is both uncommonly noble and strangely familiar. Kim and Scott, despite all the mistakes and tribulations in their lives, represent what we aspire to be, the kind of people we were always told America was made of: the people who start swimming when the waters start rising.

I Served the King of England

Service With Distraction

2006 // Czech Republic - Slovakia // Jirí Menzel // September 23, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Jirí Menzel's I Served the King of England boasts an undeniably mischievous, gloriously giddy tone. Flashes of the grotesque and wearisome melodrama lurk in its corners, but on the whole it is a winsome film, and eagerly so. Its genre-tripping acrobatic feats—twists and twirls of fable, slapstick, satire, tragedy, and World War II epic—certainly set it apart from any other film I've seen this year. What elevates Served above an amusing novelty for its own sake is Menzel's ambition to craft both an engaging character study of lingering adolescence and a penetrating allegory about twentieth-century Europe (and you don't need to be a critic or a historian to discern how these are related.) This ambition lurks just beneath the film's pleasurable, often schizophrenic surface, defying the instinct to dismiss Served as a quirky diversion. To be sure, the film holds shortcomings that cannot be dismissed, particularly the trite, manipulative turns in the story and some woefully dull patches in a work otherwise so filled with motion and delight. However, these are small potatoes alongside the film's sensual joys, its unexpected thoughtfulness, and the lead performance by Ivan Barnev, who guides us on a rapturous and insightful comic journey.

Served begins with the release of diminutive Jan Díte (Oldrich Kaiser) from a Communist prison in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Paroled to build gravel roads in the Bohemian wilds, Jan reminisces about the meandering path his life has taken, in between pining for the young, flirtatious Marcela (Zuzana Fialová), another ex-convict released to work for the state. In flashback, we witness Jan's life spent serving at the feet of the wealthy, as well as his unquenchable passion to one day be a millionaire himself. In the pubs, brothels, and four-star hotels of 1920s and 30s Prague, a young Jan (Barnev) waits on the Czech elite, always walking a tightrope between ambition and monkey business. Crisp perfection establishes his reputation, but it is his impish character that wins him friends and allies. He is fascinated by the power that money has over people, and he marvels at the childlike happiness of the supremely wealthy. He tosses handfuls of coins to watch Czech tycoons scramble for them, and, following the example of genial meat-slicer salesman Mr. Walden (Marián Labuda), he meticulously lays out his paper currency and basks in it. Women hold a comparable wonder for Jan, and he pursues them with zeal and adoration.

Jan is not so much swept along by history as he deftly rides it like a keen-eyed surfer, always on the lookout for trouble and openings. The rise of National Socialism complicates his endeavors, as his fellow Czechs shun and scorn the ethnic Germans in their midst. This includes Líza (Julia Jentsch), a Rhineland beauty as deficient in stature as Jan. Despite her disturbing fetishism for der Fuehrer, something about her undisguised devotion to Jan—as a partner, rather than an object of pity or sport—sparks real love in the little waiter. Then the march of the Nazi war machine turns the tables in Prague, and the Czechs are suddenly second-class citizens. Jan attempts the delicate waltz expected of pliant Slavic subjects of the Reich, all the while working towards his dreamy future as a wealthy hotelier.

Menzel leaps back and forth between these flashbacks and Jan's reflections in the gray post-war present, a time enlivened only by the prospects of an erotic tumble with Marcela. In theory, the use of these twin storylines makes sense, structurally speaking, but Menzel loses his way somewhat in the latter-day sequences, getting bogged down in rambling musings and alleged tensions far less intriguing than those of Jan's past adventures. Still, Kaiser's handsome Czech countenance and the combined mirth and sadness in his eyes command our attention, while the dreary, almost medieval quality to Communist Czechoslovakia serves its purpose in contrasting with the glittering opulence of the pre-war era. In truth, Menzel positively revels in the decadence of a vanished Prague, luxuriating in its food, drink, women, and aristocratic excess. At times, Served takes on the surreal, tableau qualities of a Gilliam feature, as when Jan serves milk to a gaggle of nude Teutonic beauties at a Reich "breeding facility," or when pudgy Czech diplomats dance is ecstasy while dining on roasted camel.

There is a cartoonish quality to the characters that populate Served, and especially to Jan himself, that lends them a vividness and also an unfortunate distance. The film's preference for caricature over authentic characterization curtails the possibilities for empathy and for a sense of true peril. When events turn tragic, the effect is ultimately coercive or even outright cheap. Fortunately, Menzel finds ways to charm us with his players and convey the striking qualities of their various social plights. Barnev in particular holds much of the film's weight on his slim shoulders, discovering Jan's inner tribulations with clarity and affection. A curious hobgoblin winding his way through an epoch of possibility and ruin, Jan nurtures his obsessions, even as the tumultuous events around him reveal flashes of his hidden compassion, vulnerability, and bitterness. Gleeful and grasping, Jan is easily dazzled and not above blockhead risks. He is painfully aware of his place in the order of things, but also oddly oblivious to the more abstract motives of others. Rarely has the phrase "man-child" seemed more appropriate.

Menzel also gracefully conveys a symbolic dimension to Jan's character, one reflective of a forgotten stripe of twentieth century European life. Not so much opportunistic as naive and diligent, Jane rides out the blackest years of human history on fortitude, canniness, and sheer luck. Despite the stigma of Nazism in Prague during the early years of the war, he aligns himself with its trappings out of affection for Líza. Under occupation, he reaps the benefits of this early loyalty, but he doesn't seem pleased or ashamed with himself, just bewildered. For all of Served's cartoon silliness, the director exhibits little patience for Good Guy / Bad Guy dualities. Nearly every character that Jan stumbles across reveals a capacity for both brutality and gentleness, honor and cravenness, vanity and selflessness. Menzel's achievement lies in the way that this ambiguity never seems contrived. Through a lens of comic book folly, he shows us that ambiguity is always there, the ugly secret of a history too often writ as stark morality play. Most pointedly, Served suggests that time is rarely kind to either aspirants or survivors in the end, and that escaping with one's skin is often the best that one can hope for in a world battered by shifting and violent ideologies.

Burn After Reading

Intelligence Failures

2008 // USA - UK - France // Ethan and Joel Coen // September 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Ethan and Joel Coen are likely the most self-consciously clever of American auteurs, although rarely insufferably so, and certainly the most disposed to genre-hopping. Given that No Country For Old Men was last year's unqualified triumph in English-language cinema, it's perhaps inevitable then that their next feature would prove to be a lesser film, if only by deliberate design. "Give us an Oscar will you, Hollywood Establishment? This'll show 'em." That's not to say that Burn After Reading is a bad film, or even a mediocre one. It is pure Coen, and therefore a rich cinematic meal to savor and absorb, rife with cartoon heartbreak and bleak absurdism. It also may be the darkest, cruelest film the brothers have ever made, and considering that they gave us Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn't There, that's saying something. Contra the film's promotion, Burn After Reading is not, strictly speaking, a satire of the spy thriller genre. There are spies in it, sure, but the film is essentially a tragic farce about how venal, deceitful, and just plain stupid humanity can be. It therefore may not qualify as everyone's idea of "entertainment."

The plot is labyrinthine, but it hinges on a CD-ROM containing "secret shit," as personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) succinctly puts it. The CD has turned up on the locker room floor of Hardbodies, a D.C. gym where the enthusiastic Chad and glum co-worker Linda (Frances McDormand) are employed under anxious manager Ted (Richard Jenkins). The mysterious disc appears to contain classified U.S. intelligence files, and Pitt and McDormand mull over ways to turn this discovery to their financial advantage. Specifically, McDormand is thinking of the cosmetic surgery that she has been coveting, surgery not covered by her health plan. ("I've taken this body as far as I can!" she laments.) The pair track down the apparent owner of the disc, a tense, alcoholic, foul-mouthed CIA analyst named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), but their negotiations end badly. Who else would want to buy secret intelligence shit? The Russians, of course! Clearly, Pitt and McDormand are not only greedy, but woefully behind the times in terms of their geopolitical awareness.

It turns out that Malkovich has recently resigned from the CIA rather than accept a demotion, and he is laboring on a vengeful memoir about his years in the U.S. intelligence service. He is married to a pediatrician, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who just might be the coldest, most waspish person ever to choose a profession dealing with children. Swinton is having an affair with neurotic Treasury Department agent Harry (George Clooney), while quietly meeting with lawyers to initiate divorce proceedings against her husband. In addition to his regular flings with Swinton, Clooney routinely steps out on his wife with women he meets on the Internet. It's worth pointing out here that Harry is probably the most gleefully repulsive role that Clooney has ever played: a vain, waffling, sex-addicted, paranoid, compulsive liar. Clooney meets McDormand through a dating service, which closes the loop on the character flowchart, and sets up this tangle of relationships to tighten around everyone in a cascade of coincidences, stupid decisions, and tragic mistakes.

While all the performers do a fine job, most of them--McDormand, Malkovich, Swinton, Jenkins--are essentially playing their standard role. That is, if you enjoy watching McDormand doing that thing that she does, you'll appreciate her in Burn. Admittedly and a little unexpectedly, Malkovich is a welcome addition, as his distracted, theatrical style adds some refreshing rattle to the standard clockwork hum of the Coen script. However, the truly pleasurable performances belong to Pitt and Clooney. Pitt exhibits astonishing comedic chops in a character that is a bit off the beaten path for him: a hopelessly uncool and witless dope, completely unaware of his own limits. Some of the most ludicrously funny moments in Burn involve Pitt's baffling attempts to approximate an espionage tough, by narrowing his eyes and affecting a guttural growl. Clooney, meanwhile, has a less amusing role, but one that's a more substantial depature. Not only is Clooney thoroughly unlikeable in Burn, but he exploits his normal charismatic currency—his swagger and ten-grand smile—to convey a sense of creepy phoniness. Eventually, when he breaks down into wild-eyed paranoid hysterics by the film's end, Clooney pulls off an elegant trick, coaxing us to both fear him and fear for him.

Burn After Reading features a host of morally bankrupt characters, but it's not a morally bankrupt film. Granted, it doesn't really seem to have an ethos, in the way that one expects of most art films, even black comedies. Its aim is simply to shine a glaring light on the essential stupidity of humankind. It's tempting to deride the Coens for selecting this softest of targets for their morbid wit. However, they savage humanity's plight without the vengeful tone of most satire, and with such mirthful abandon that the film comes off as flabbergasted and bemused rather than scolding. It's no coincidence that Burn opens with a long zoom from high orbit above the Earth to the halls of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Mimicking the eye of a spy satellite—the God the Father of the post-faith twenty-first century, tallying our sins from its heavenly vantage point—this shot hints that we should see the events of the film from a deity's chilly distance. We are free to laugh or weep, as warranted, at the idiocy of its characters.

Given this removed quality to its approach, Burn may not be the sort of comedy that will satisfy viewers looking for an escapist chuckle. It's outrageously funny, but it's ugly funny: relationships disintegrate, careers crumble, and at least two people die brutally. Even devoted Coen fans may be uneasy laughing at such things. This is particularly the case given that Burn, unlike the directors' other comedies, doesn't offer much in the way of redemption or a moral. What's troublesome is the sense of puffed philosophical pandering at work in Burn, one that's too sweeping and definitive to sit comfortably with the brothers' usual taste for ambiguity. That people are stupid and life can be a sick joke are hardly original sentiments, and it's not clear why the Coens deserve credit for advancing them. Regardless of the coarseness of its aims, however, Burn After Reading is utterly, sickly funny, in a way that sets it apart from... well, every other film not directed by the Coens, I suppose.