Watchmen

Ordinary's Just Not Good Enough Today

2009 // USA // Zack Snyder // March 11, 2009 // IMAX Theatrical Print

B - Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen is a dizzying feat of world-building, among the densest and most bewildering I've ever seen. It's a sprawling, exhausting work, one that perpetually threatens to burst from the director's control, and on occasion succeeds in effecting just such an escape. The story Snyder is attempting to tell is simply too vast, too intricate, too discomfiting, too pensive, and too nasty for its nearly-three-hour running time to accommodate. It is, in other words, a glorious mess of a film, offering novel, absorbing sights and themes but also unfortunately susceptible to off-key indulgences and the wearying effect of an undisciplined structure. That said, Watchmen is a fascinating mess, one that calls out to be scrutinized, explored, and savored, like a cinematic collage. It is the not the ur-superhero film that fans might have hoped, but no matter. It will rattle and mystify many viewers, I suspect, especially those who have never paused to contemplate the implications of a world of caped crusaders.

Over two decades ago, writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons collaborated to create Watchmen the comic, now held up as one of the most vital and revolutionary works in the medium. Accordingly, anticipation (and trepidation) regarding the film adaptation has been intense, but—and I say this as a great admirer of the book—I don't want to spend too much time comparing comic to film, or dithering over what was or was not a judicious decision in the adaptation process. Snyder's film should stand on its own, and it's from that perspective that I approach it (for the most part).

The world of Watchmen is one of staggering bulk, an alternate history that begins with the supposition that costumed vigilantes emerged in the early twentieth century to tackle crime. These "masks" were not super-beings, but merely men and women of exceptional physical and mental ability. In a mesmerizing credit sequence, Snyder explicates the details of this Other America, where superheroes hobnob with the century's cultural icons and leave their messy fingerprints all over its seminal events. The nation's first super-group, the Minutemen, eventually collapses as its members are retired, slain, or stricken. Where the Watchmen timeline diverges acutely from our own is in the appearance of a true super-powered hero. Disintegrated in a nuclear accident, research physicist John Osterman (Billy Crudup) reassembles himself by sheer will, emerging as a quantum superman with electric-blue skin and godlike omnipotence. Now dubbed Dr. Manhattan, he joins a new super-group, the Watchmen, alongside a slate of decidedly mundane masked avengers. The alliance doesn't last, however, and the film picks up the tale in 1985, when costumed vigilantism is banned by federal law and Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term as President.

Only one mask fought under the banners of both the Minutemen and Watchmen: the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a violent, misogynistic thug with a blackly humorous streak a mile wide. In the film's opening sequence, the Comedian—67 years old but still in phenomenal shape—is attacked in his apartment and tossed out the window by a shadowy assailant. The mystery of the retired superhero's murder crouches over the film, one of several noir tropes woven into the grand tapestry of Watchmen. Indeed, Snyder has created one of the most tonally ambitious films in recent memory, all the more potent for its general success in uniting elements and moods from disparate genres into an ironic epic. Fundamentally, Watchmen engages in a perilous endeavor: a deconstruction of the superhero, and most specifically an assault on the coherence of a genre that would dare to paint costumed vigilantes and science-fiction godlings as "heroes" at all. Moore and Gibbon's comic has seeped into the pop landscape for more than twenty years (often quite subtly), and therefore Watchmen's animating principles may not be as culturally audacious as they once seemed. Still, Snyder's film is so ruthlessly enamored with its own fractured countenance, and presents it with such sweeping indifference for audience uneasiness, that one can't help but stand in awe of the thing. It is a sprawling, unconventional, difficult film, probably one of the most difficult Hollywood blockbusters of the decade.

Superhero films with a vast cast of characters seem to start with superpowers that are visually or conceptually impressive and then tack on character traits that read as either ridiculously tidy or just completely arbitrary. (I'm looking at you, X-Men.) With the exception of Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen's vigilantes are normal people, and thus their personalities are essential to both the film's narrative and its thematic aims. The costumes, gadgets, and methods of the masks reflect their values and flaws, rather than the other way around. Thus, we have the likes of Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), a nebbishy tinkerer who is literally impotent without his cowl and cape. Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) took over her mother's superhero identity out of obligation, and now seethes with regrets and resentments. The bloodthirsty Comedian moonlights as a government killer. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) parlayed his fame into a corporate empire, complete with an action figure line. And then there's Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a sociopath whose twisted code of street justice draws from Travis Bickle, Ayn Rand, and Timothy McVeigh. Dr. Manhattan stands outside this rogue's gallery of all-too-human neuroses, but he has his own problems. His omnipotence and omniscience set him apart from humankind's concerns, and the vibrations of quarks hold his attention more than an incipient nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviets.

Watchmen utilizes Rorschach's investigation of the Comedian's murder as the entry point into a convoluted tale of politics, crime, war, finance, sex, disease, and genocide. Describing the story's intricacies would be daunting, and beside the point. Watchmen's plot is a vehicle for a series of discomfiting set pieces and dialogues that erode and deform the viewer's conceptions of what a superhero film looks like. Watchmen presents itself as both a finger-wagging adjustment to the genre—"This is what a superhero film should look like, if it was remotely honest."—but also as a rejection of the genre's entire form and function. In other words, it's not just a bold gamble, it's twice as bold as it needs to be. Vast, digressive, and shot through with rot and filigree in equal proportions, the film is constantly shifting beneath the viewer's feet. It indulges in camp excess, gee-whiz action, stone-faced satire, unsettling nihilism, and meditative musings, often at the same time. Slathered on top of this tonal hodgepodge are visual and aural witticisms that range from the exceedingly sly to the groan-inducing. The film is not confusing, but it does sometimes seem utterly out-of-control, with Snyder flitting so often between viewpoints and flashbacks, often clumsily, that the films risks toppling over. Both the richness of the underlying source material and the director's determination to convey a comparable depth in the film—however haphazard the result might seem at times—salvage Watchmen from the schematic character that often dooms reverent adaptations. It may be a flawed and frustrating film in some respects, but Watchmen is anything but lifeless.

Snyder has come to Watchmen by way of his damn scary but politically inert remake of Dawn of the Dead and the loud, crude, gorgeous adaptation of Frank Miller's Hellenic gorefest, 300. With those films, the director demonstrated his facility for slick red-meat entertainment and little else. Here Snyder reaches much higher, evincing an unabashed adoration for the complexity of Moore's story, even as he resists the world-builder's penchant for creative thumb-twiddling (*cough* George Lucas *cough*). Watchmen is a hopelessly dense film, in terms of design, story, and themes, but its density serves it well, evoking a coherent and believable stage for its tragedies to play out. In other words, Snyder’s approach strikes me as the correct one for a filmic Watchmen in the same way that Moore and Gibbons' approach was correct for the comic. Unfortunately, Snyder fails to approach his medium with discipline. Watchmen feels comfortable at its current running-time, but it could just as easily be an hour shorter or an hour longer. This suggests a dramatic flabbiness and directorial capriciousness that is at odds with the film's meticulous design. Synder just doesn't seem to put much (or any) value on artistic precision, preferring to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. While that isn't a death knell for a film like Watchmen, which plays out like a disjointed soul-searching of our cultural consciousness, it necessarily renders the film a less than satisfying cinematic experience and lends it a whiff of contempt for the audience.

Equally distressing is Snyder's ongoing affection for gruesome slow-motion action sequences, which suited 300's pornographic blood-letting much better than Watchmen's epic meanderings. While visually mesmerizing and a refreshing antidote to the jarring, hyper-edited scenes that afflict most action features, these sequences don't evoke tension or advance the film's themes. They're pure, gratuitous spectacle, and Snyder would do well to grow out of them. In Watchmen, they actively undermine the film at times. Apologists will inevitably insist that Snyder is demonstrating the horrid consequences of violence, where previous superhero films have veiled it. One of the film's prominent theses, after all, is that superheroes are deeply sick people who enjoy brutality. Perhaps, but the gleeful tone of Snyder's action scenes betray at least a partial intent to pander to adolescent bloodlust.

While Snyder's unrestrained id can be blamed for most of Watchmen's failings, it is also responsible for the film's curious appeal. There's nothing relaxed or delicate about Watchmen. It asks us to contemplate aspects of our pop cultural landscape and (allegedly) shared values that resist scrutiny. With a gleeful middle finger, it rejects reflexive awe for a swath of America's hallowed institutions and idols: knowledge, technology, family, wealth, justice, media, patriotism. Perhaps most uncomfortably, it strips away the alleged harmlessness of our childhood fantasies and exposes them as monstrous expressions of our most self-centered and dysfunctional impulses.

Coraline

You're Lost, Little Girl

2009 // USA // Henry Selick // March 8, 2009 // Real 3D Theatrical Print

A - When Henry Selick delivered the ambitious, whimsically prickly The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1995, I doubt that he had any inkling that his little fable--rendered via the exhausting, old-school technique of stop motion animation--would become a cultural touchstone for a generation of nostalgic goths and wannabe goths, who grooved on the film's mashup of Jules Bass Christmas specials and Tim Burton's droopy sensibilities. (Not that I'm speaking from personal experience of anything. *Cough.*) In the years that followed, Selick made a blander stop motion follow-up and a rather notorious flop, but with his new film, Coraline, the director has come blazing back to the front lines of both feature animation and "mature" children's storytelling. Here is a film that dares the viewer to resist its enchantments and terrors, boasting some of the most dazzling design since, well, The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, Coraline decisively surpasses Selick's previous milestone in both a technical and artistic sense, setting a high-water mark for the sort of intricate, captivating animated stories that seem in short supply these days. And the story! The sooty fingerprints of modern myth-spinner Neil Gaiman are all over this wondrous tale, which borrows equally from Victorian nursery literature, kid-savvy afternoon TV fare, and a Hero's Journey that would make Joseph Campbell do a double-take.

So, the story: Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), a blue-haired pixie whose primary talent seems to be sneering, has moved to drizzly Oregon with her cold, horribly un-fun parents, gardening authors who, paradoxically, detest the outdoors. Coraline--friendless, bored, and irritated at her parents' joyless inattention--sets about exploring her surroundings. Her new home, a sprawling, improbably pink Victorian house divided into apartments, shelters a plethora of colorful neighbors: a Russian acrobat in the attic; a pair of moldy theater divas in the basement; and the absent landlord's lurking grandson, Wybie, an awkward, dreadlocked little twerp with an affinity for the odd and the gross. These characters are insufficient to maintain Coraline's attention, however, and eventually her explorations yield a tiny door concealed behind the apartment's wallpaper. Curiosity ushers her through the portal, along a silken tunnel, and into a parallel world. There, she discovers a doppelganger of her new home, where her "Other Parents" are warm and attentive to her every need and whim. Indeed, the Other House is like a pleasuredrome constructed for Coraline's private enjoyment. Every turn reveals new delights: sumptuous feats, clockwork wonders, glowing gardens, mouse circuses, and high-wire acrobatics. Only one detail suggests that things aren't quite right: everyone in the Other House has buttons instead of eyes. Just like a ragdoll that Wybie gave to Coraline, as a matter of fact...

That's really all I need to say about the story--the sly, gradual manner in which the film unspools is exquisite--but it will quickly become apparent that Coraline is a horror film, not in the slasher-film sense, but in the sense in which all fairy tales are fundamentally horror stories. That is, it features a transition from the familiar to the fantastical, with the fantastical at first appearing sweet but eventually revealing itself as monstrous and twisted. Gaiman's original novella might hew to this template, but Selick not only preserves it in his screenplay, but expands on it through a gorgeous, fun-house aesthetic of breathtaking density. Here is where Coraline represents a world-building feat that leaps far beyond Nightmare's achievements. For while the latter film's look was giddy, gothic fun, it remained a kind of spookshow diorama, one that dovetailed neatly with Tim Burton's long affinity for puppetry's otherworldly, self-conscious fakery. Not so with Coraline, where Selick conjures a marvelously realized universe that feels complete, inhabited, and oddly real. Offering a wondrous rejoinder to the notion that design is a factor disconnected from cinema's artistic voice, Coraline lays the groundwork for its chilling terrors and rousing heroics with jaw-dropping sensory detail. Although the film brims with whimsical caricatures and supernatural hoodoo, its pleasures are remarkably immediate and visceral. Selick is ruthlessly and joyously committed to his story's status as a harrowing adventure, and the incredible texture of Coraline's world evokes boredom, glee, and peril with equal credibility. The triumph of this approach is manifest in the narrative potency of the film's thrilling third act, which plays out like a frightening monomyth epic for the Cartoon Network set.

Gaiman's involvement should be telling, but it bears emphasizing that Coraline is on the decidedly intense end of the scale among animated children's features. Frightening imagery and themes abound, and a drizzling of adult humor only adds to the sense that the film is aimed at an older cohort of kids and their parents. Which is perhaps for the best, as Coraline offers a sophisticated and emotionally resonant examination of child-parent relationships that will likely challenge and provoke young viewers. While Coraline's folks fit the mold of the disinterested, unpleasant guardians that are endemic to this class of fable, the girl herself is hardly a shining hero. Whiny and antagonistic, Coraline has no patience for the pursuits of others, preferring that the world focus on coddling and satisfying her. In short, she is seflish, and her journey into the Other House and back serves as a path to awaken a sensitivity to those around her. The Other Mother, as we eventually learn, is not truly a reflection of Coraline's mom, but of the girl herself and her craving for love. That Coraline's real mother meets her halfway on the return journey from nightmare to normalcy is a reflection of Selick's determination to craft a story with a more intricate emotional life than most other fare for young viewers, animated or not. The central theme in Coraline's sweet-and-sour heart is a touching and magnificent one, never hammered but gently revealed: the maturation of the love between parent and child from simplistic dependency to a respect that is both humane and intensely personal. I can't imagine a more worthwhile and fulfilling journey for the young and young in spirit.

Two Lovers

Betty or Veronica?​

2009 // USA // James Gray // February 24, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B- - Two Lovers reaffirms director James Gray's solemnly precocious talent for telling discreetly compelling stories that should, by all rights, be outright stifling in their familiarity. In We Own the Night, Gray lent both a Shakespearean howl and a profoundly personal coloring to the tale of a man tugged by competing loyalties until tragedy pushes him over a threshold. Now Gray, returning with Joaquin Phoenix to the marvelously sagging Brooklyn landscape, provides his spin on a creaky romantic trope: a man's choice between a stable brunette and a free-spirited blonde. The sensory pleasures on display elevate Two Lovers, as do Gray's infusions of thematic and metaphorical texture, rescuing it from the sheer unpleasantness of its characters and a gnawing sense that we've heard this song before. The quiet, observant qualities to Two Lovers stand in contrast to the alleged seriousness of clumsy, oh-so-serious contemporary pap such as Frost/Nixon and The Reader, but the sheer willfulness of the film's sedate "adultness" results in an unfortunate aura of dreariness and obsequious modesty. It's an easy film to enjoy and even admire, but will anyone remember it in three months, let alone three years?

Phoenix has always excelled at man-child roles with a bit of worldly tinting at the edges. Perhaps it's the naked moistness in those eyes, ringed with permanent charcoal-dust, and the way they play off his self-conscious, doughy smile. Even in his most outwardly confident personas—Max California, Merrill Hess—Phoenix conveys a lingering shyness, dribbled with thinly concealed doubts about his character's abilities and station. Never has this been used for finer effect than in Two Lovers, where Gray capitalizes on the actor;s affinity for wounded bewilderment and uneasy masculinity. Phoenix's Leonard Kraditor, the thirty-something son of Jewish dry cleaners, finds himself in a kind of sad-sack secondary adolescence in the wake of a scuttled engagement and sketchy psychological tribulations. The film opens with a half-hearted suicide attempt, and from there we migrate to Leonard's bedroom in his parents' apartment, still furnished as a teenage boy's might be and littered with the detritus of his obsessions and distractions: photographic prints, DVDs, and a portrait of his absent fiancé. Gray has an eye for spaces that are somewhat resistant to contemporary gloss, and his ragged Brighton Beach is rife with them, in contrast to the film's gleaming glimpses of Manhattan. Just as worthy of attention is Gray's striking sound design, which revels in low ambient tones and the rasp of winter winds on rooftops.

Leonard's mother, Ruth, is a sour-faced, protective matron, cursed with an epic nosy streak. Perhaps because she is portrayed by Isabella Rossellini—jowly but still magnetic—Ruth doesn't seem to harbor any poisonous purpose, but we can feel Leonard's suffocation just the same. Improbably, two beautiful young women enter Leonard's troubled life nearly simultaneously. The Sensible Girl is Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of another dry cleaning entrepreneur who is on the cusp of buying out Leonard's family. Sandra represents everything Leonard should want (by his parents' estimation): a pretty Jewess who is thoroughly smitten with him, and an access point for a slight upgrade in his family's prospects. (The usual euphemism is a "smart match.") Sandra's comfort around him and her reserved sexiness put a glint in Leonard's eyes, but he betrays a bit of restlessness about their rapid courtship. Enter Michelle (Gwenyth Paltrow), a willowy wild girl who has recently moved into an apartment across the courtyard. Dim and narcissistic, but effortlessly desirable, Michelle is the sort of woman who seems to inhabit a separate cosmos from Leonard. Yet here she is, following Leonard on a tour of his parents' knick-knacks and curiously disposed to his vulnerable charms. There's the little matter of Michelle's older (married) boyfriend, but for Leonard, hope springs eternal, as it does for all emotionally stunted and morally negligent Nice Guys.

Gray is following a recognizable melodramatic template, but even as he compresses his story down into a questionably dense time frame, he slathers on ambitious and engaging subtexts. The performances are uniformly excellent and credible, and as a result the characters never degenerate into ludicrous metaphors. Yet the dichotomies in Leonard's dilemma are stark. Sandra embodies a submission to others' expectations, an acceptance of ethnic and religious identity, and an extension of the Oedipal unease the ripples through Leonard's home life. (Sandra's well-intentioned reassurance, "I want to take care of you," seems an ill omen to the stifled Leonard.) The emotionally troubled and thoroughly WASP-y Michelle, meanwhile, represents contravention of social obligations, wide-open possibilities, and empathy with (rather than sympathy for) Leonard's own inner anguishes. Gray's direction and his screenplay with co-writer Ric Menello register these aspects of the story without feeling the need to brazenly state them, delivering abundant, whispered drama.

Two Lovers' fundamental problem is not that it courts flippant dismissal from the viewer, which is what I expected. (Two gorgeous women? These are the problems you want to have.) Gray paints Leonard as a broken man who is wincingly susceptible to confusion about his desires, and thereby prevents the story from descending into a soapy, vacuous tale of deception and betrayal. Yet while the viewer might understand Leonard, his hopeless immaturity precludes the possibility that they will grow to like him or trust him. That's a serious deficit in a film that spends nearly every minute of its running time following his interpersonal gambits and fumbles, and asks—with a kind of muted desperation—that we feel his pain, and deeply. More troubling, the film never challenges Leonard to confront the anxieties that drive his indecisiveness, or asks him to suffer tangible consequences for his ill-advised tightrope act on the Sandra-Michelle dilemma. Annoyingly, the narrative provides an escape hatch at the last minute which protects the innocent from heartbreak, sidestepping anything approaching a reckoning for Leonard's cravenness and emotional recklessness. It's a dismal and consequence-free conclusion to a visually rich and emotionally authentic work. In other words, Gray sort of breaks your heart.

The film's mood is also problematic, for while Gray astutely avoid matching emotional highs with aesthetic histrionics, he veers a bit too much in the direction of inertness. The result is a film that palpably wants to be admired for its low-key approach while maintaining the viewer's focus on performance and theme. It's all so decisively and soporifically tasteful that one can't shake the feeling of a bait-and-switch: mere competent, intriguing drama masquerading as audacity and vigor. Call it a respectful artistic oppressiveness, one that generates sufficient discomfort with the film's aims that the viewer can't ever truly fall in love with it. A pity, as Gray's cinematic sensibilities are otherwise generally outstanding, indicative of a commanding visual fluency and a sophisticated appreciation for the intricacies of motive and loyalty.

Sita Sings the Blues

First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified

2008 // USA // Nina Paley // February 14, 2009 // Theatrical Print

[Sita Sings the Blues was featured in a limited engagement on February 13-15, 2009 as a part of the Multicultural Film Series at the Webster University Film Series.]

A - Nina Paley's magnificent Sita Sings the Blues is an endlessly appealing treasure that weds animation's myriad visual possibilities to a witty, painfully personal howl of frustration and liberation. Recalling Yellow Submarine in its delirious blending of storytelling, music, and design, Sita proudly admits to its own conceptual simplicity. It presents a familiar story—one of the oldest, really—of love weakened by crisis and shattered on the shoals of mistrust and betrayal. But, oh how it tells that story!: With wondrous Flash-style animation whose captivating design can only be described as "Game Boy Bollywood." With pop art-inspired compositions and low-key chuckles that echo the Children Television's Workshop in its finest moments. With whorls and bursts of pure color. With ingeniously re-imagined jazz ditties that elicit sighs of delight. Paley offers that rarest of animated works: one that thrives on its own dazzle. Sita's unexpected luster extends to every crevice of its intricate yet natty form. Its joys emerge from the accumulation of a multitude of stylistic embellishments united by the vision of a passionate and furiously inventive auteur.

Sita boasts two narratives and at least four animation styles, although the narratives consciously reflect one another, and the styles blend together and intrude at their edges. The film's rotten-apple heart is Paley's autobiographical tale of her marriage's traumatic disintegration, told in a self-effacing Squigglevision style. While Paley's pain and loneliness shine through in these personal episodes—and also in a rotoscoped interlude that blooms with rainbow-hued fire—the film devotes the bulk of its attention to the story of Sita, wife of King Rama in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. In this manner, Paley admits to the universality of her crisis, transplanting us from its anguished, scrawled particulars to a wider, timeless world of feminine tribulations. Paley discovers comfort within the Ramayana, but Sita Sings the Blues functions as a work more aggressive and joyous than the mere acknowledgment of connection between past and present. The act of making the film was manifestly cathartic for Paley, not just as a means to examine her husband's sins and her own missteps, but also as a celebration of her own aesthetic values. In other words, Sita is a giddy act of creation that has clearly emboldened Paley's post-breakup sense of identity. In an intimate gesture, the director warmly invites us to groove on her playlist, seeking validation not only for the Ramayana as a meaningful text, but also for the hipness of her own style. It's intrinsically personal film-making, with all the limitations that entails, but it nonetheless offers curiously infectious charms and sensory thrills beyond anything in recent memory.

This isn't to say that Sita wholly neglects the cerebral for the visceral. The film indulges three separate approaches to the Ramayana, evincing a dog-eared and sophisticated understanding of storytelling's possibilities and pitfalls. Paley first offers a trio of Indonesian shadow puppets who provide a witty narration and commentary on the Ramayana. They stumble over half-remembered details, giggle at the story's implausibilities, and hold forth on their discomfort with its more problematic themes. Second, the film presents animated Rajput paintings that illustrate the major events of the epic, complete with voice acting that freely indulges in anachronisms. Third—and most stimulating—are the film's distinctive musical sequences, which combine vector animation with songs from jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, lip-synced by a wide-eyed and rolling-hipped Sita. These scenes represent a breathtaking formal achievement, a step beyond the recent "jukebox musical" phenomenon. Consider that Paley had to reconcile a rough outline of the Ramayana on one hand and Hanshaw's library of songs on the other. That she pulled it off at all is fairly impressive, but that she discovers a way to stage, say, "Who's That Knocking at My Door" during Rama's gruesome battle against the demon Ravana—well, that's nothing short of marvelous.

The stylistic delineation of Sita's sequences serves to break up the epic into digestible morsels, and also to orient the viewer in light of the frequent—yet cyclical—shifts in tone. (In this, Sita echoes, to a lesser degree, the elegant coding of Mishima's narrative streams via color and design.) For all of Sita's undeniable first-order appeal—and it is most essentially a lusciously, toe-tappingly good time—what emerges from its whimsical fiddling is a gentle feminist critique of the Ramayana and the contemporary social and interpersonal sicknesses that mirror it. In perhaps the film's most unexpected and naughty moment, the characters that previously inhabited the candy-colored realm of Hanshaw's tunes suddenly burst into an original, up-tempo chant about Rama's supposed virtues, remarking (with a dash of mockery): "Duty first, Sita last." That line gives voice to the rumblings in the film's belly, a gnawing sense of injustice born from the fact that Sita's (read: Paley's and women's) devotion and sacrifices are so routinely rewarded with mistreatment. Still, while Paley permits heartbreak and self-loathing to intrude on Sita's autobiographical sequences, the film doesn't have much time for rage. Ultimately, a mood of liberation and enlightenment triumphs as Sita washes her hands of her husband—and her old life—with a song.

Sita Sings the Blues is unlikely to show up in a theater near you. Asinine copyright restrictions on the Hanshaw recordings have created an enormous barrier to distribution, and so the film's appearances have been limited to film festivals and other isolated screenings. Yet word-of-mouth praise has been mounting for this astonishing film. There may still be hope for a distributor yet. At the very least, allow me to add one more nugget of praise for Sita, raising anticipation for a future DVD release and Paley's next animated wonderwork.

Che

Revolutions, Glorious and Otherwise

2008 // Spain - France - USA // Steven Soderbergh // January 31, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A - It's unlikely that Steven Soderbergh's meticulous, two-part marathon Che will ever end up a beloved film, to be devoured over and over. It's simply too sprawling, and especially too heedless of the tactful cloak of "mere entertainment" that so many other biopics don. Not to say that Che disregards entertainment, as the four-plus-hour Roadshow Edition is unmistakably fashioned in the image of the 70mm epics of old": a Marxist Lawrence of Arabia complete with overture, intermission, and printed program. Che will be, I think, a work to be studied with deep fascination and awe, a case study in film-making that is both uncompromising and fiercely focused. Whatever Che lacks in humanity or grace, it is an exhaustive, gritty, and intricate cinematic dissertation on revolution as a social, political, and military process. The result is one of Soderbergh's finest films since his debut, sex, lies, and videotape, although Che far surpasses that work in its ambitions.

Over the course of its 250+ minutes, the Roadshow Edition of Che offers two feature-length films. Che: Part One, also known as "The Argentine", depicts Ernersto "Che" Guevara's role in the 1958-59 Cuban Revolution, while Che: Part Two, "The Guerilla" focuses on Che's participation in the failed 1967 Bolivian revolution. It's perhaps misleading to label Che a biopic or even a character study, for as appropriately magnetic as Benecio Del Toro might be in the title role, the film isn't that invested in Guevara's inner life. Consequently, its approach to the man is less psychological than phenomenological, although it sketches Guevara's personality boldly and with a grand attention to consistency. Che eschews the usual tactic of following its protagonist through a personal evolution; Guevara leaves the film much the same as entered it, his values unmoved and his ideals intact. However, neither does Che take a complementary approach: the world around Guevara doesn't change, either, strictly speaking. What Soderbergh delivers isn't so much a story as a two-act study, a compare-and-contrast exercise that offers a slightly melancholy view of history, at once breathless and oddly ambivalent. If Che has a thesis, it's that slight changes in time, place, and luck can make all the difference in a revolution.

Based on that description alone, you likely already have some notion as to whether Che is your cup of tea. On paper, the plot would sound fairly... well, dull. "The Argentine" follows Guevara through the Cuban revolution, from his first meeting with Fidel Castro through the flight of ousted U.S.-backed president Fulgencio Batista. Similarly, "The Guerilla" tracks Guevara from his vanishing from public life through his execution in Bolivia for his attempts to foment armed rebellion there. That's essentially the plot of Che: a successful revolution followed by a failed revolution. Soderbergh's approach is at once rigorously straightforward and sharply organic. Che reflects the director's absorption with the fine details of these two journeys, tracking precisely how Guevara traveled from Point A to Point B and accounting for all the myriad factors that contributed to his fate.

It's an unusual way to make a film—Che's drama is almost incidental to its academic and artistic posture—but both its novelty and its execution are fairly breathtaking. Certainly, Soderbergh's ambition to capture every jot of the process of the Cuban and Bolivian revolutions, at least as Guevara saw them, both explains the film's titanic running time and neatly sidesteps the possible pitfalls of such a scale. For despite Che's length, it rarely, if ever, feels bloated. There aren't any hefty swathes of the film that seem extraneous, which is kind of remarkable given its length. It's an exhausting work of art to take in, to be sure, but it also carries an aura of unexpected discipline. Soderbergh eschews melodramatic dithering for clear statements of political grievance and vast, gorgeous, textured depictions of events. Che occasionally evokes Terrence Malick in its methods, but Soderbergh's film is as scientific as that director's works are poetic. What Che offers is a painstaking characterization of revolution as an essentially circumstance-driven process. For all of Soderbergh's apparent sympathy for leftist values and Marxist ideology, the film emerges as a smooth rejoinder to the aura of inevitability that communist propaganda so often peddles.

A political critique of Che would likely zero in on the film's essentially positive depiction of Guevara, and the oh-so-convenient way its two mega-act structure papers over the Cuban revolution's human rights horrors. To be sure, Che seems to be counting on an audience sympathetic to the notion of military resistance as an essential component of the struggle for political and economic justice. It doesn't so much shed a tear or bat an eye the first time Cuban guerrillas rip into Batista's army with machine guns. (Whether the viewer will believe the communists were unprovoked or not will likely depend on his or her own political tendencies). That said, there is something to be said for the distinction between a positive portrayal and a romantic portrayal. While the former is a prominent component of Che's character, it rarely indulges in the latter. The film establishes balance and credibility not by shoehorning in awkward scenes of character development, but by letting Guevar's temperament emerge delicately from the revolutionary events that surround him. The man is shown to be generous, courageous, honorable, and compassionate, but also callous, bigoted, arrogant, and more than a little bloodthirsty. Che is not a complex portrait—it's not that complex, and not really a portrait—so much as it is silent on the question of the man's ultimate benevolence or malevolence in the broader tapestry of modern history. If nothing else, Che depicts revolution as anything but fun, and dismisses that its outcomes are in any way fated, even in the face of monstrous oppression.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Man From the Fourth Dimension

2008 // USA // David Fincher // January 23, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cleaves to the form and tone of an epic fairy tale, albeit one infused with a densely melancholy aura. On the heels of Zodiac, Fincher's masterful police-procedural deconstruction / treatise on existential dissatisfaction, Button perhaps inevitably reads as a lesser work, but it's still a remarkably rich and affecting film, given its gimmicky premise. Certainly, it prominently exhibits the director's fascination with the way significant moments swarm through the human experience. Screenwriter Eric Roth, who penned that satirical-schmaltzy Boomer behemoth, Forrest Gump, has mostly shed his inelegant urge for directionless nostalgia and unwarranted pathos. Roth has more than atoned for Gump with the likes of The Insider and Munich, and Button at least confirms that he can now return to a familiar well with far more intricate and interesting results. Granted, there are ghosts of Gump's grating Hallmark trappings in Button, chiefly a half-hearted noodling with a limp buzzphrase ("You never know what's coming for you"? Meh.) and a determination to march with downcast eyes through a filmic museum of twentieth-century America. However, the comparison also highlights Button's superior qualities: its deft and light approach to the aforementioned historical tour; its fresh-yet-familiar variation on Fincher's dazzling mise-en-scène and tenebrous visual signatures; and chiefly its unexpectedly pointed rejoinder to the hoary notion that youth is wasted on the young.

Fincher spins Benjamin's weird tale—in the pulp magazine sense—within a framing story about a venerable, ailing woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett, subsumed beneath makeup and digital tweaking). Wasting away in a New Orleans hospice as Hurricane Katrina lashes the city, she urges her adult daughter Caroline (Julia Ormand) to read aloud from a worn diary, which reveals a fantastical secret that runs through Daisy's life. That secret is Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), born as a decrepit old man and fated to age in reverse throughout his long and eventful life. Benjamin is abandoned by his wealthy father (Jason Flemyng) and raised—conveniently enough—by a caretaker at a nursing home (Taraji P. Henson), where he first meets and is thoroughly thunderstruck by the scarlet-tressed Daisy, grand-daughter of an elderly tenant. Despite their opposite biological trajectories, Benjamin proves to be a constant in Daisy's life: an accepting friend, reluctant object of affection, heartsick suitor, and much more. Fincher and Roth unambiguously stake out their approach: Benjamin Button is a wistful, epic examination of two lives, a progression of snapshots cataloging their intersections and divergences. The credibility of the film's central romance rests almost entirely on Fincher's slow accumulation of a modest affection for his protagonists, rather than the depth of their personalities, which are thinly sketched. Pitt and Blanchett do some of the lifting, particularly when they "meet in the middle" and half a lifetime of thwarted longings and missed opportunities simmer over with visible heat. Mostly, however, the film-makers unfortunately rely on characterization by anecdote, which suits Button's structural aims but proves to be weak tea for the evocation of human texture.

For all its limpness of character and occasional indulgence of pat narrative elements--the sentimentalization of black Southern culture within patently white stories is officially Played Out--Button settles on a consistent mood of wondering sorrow that is remarkably endearing. If the film's occasional moments of inauthenticity elicit recoil, they are more than overcome by the potency of Button's unexpected thematic sophistication. Fincher employs Benjamin's reverse aging cunningly, lending it the character of a tall tale gimmick at the outset, but also permitting his audience the breathing room to ruminate on what such an improbable conceit might reveal. As Button slips across the decades from the Great War to the twenty-first century, Fincher's greasy-gothic fingerprints fade to reveal a cooler, more natural visual design, mirroring the film's transition from idle fantasy speculation to a starker examination of the nature of the fundamental human tragedy. By Button's epilogue, Fincher has rejected the glib notion that Benjamin is more blessed or cursed than the rest of humanity. The lesson scrawled in Benjamin's diary is a painful revelation, one that should be obvious, but proves to be deeply resonant nonetheless: the awful beauty of life lies within its transitory nature, not its direction. It's a theme that emerges gradually from the film's melodramatic fits and starts, from its breath-catching moments of visual splendor, and even from its digressions. Indeed, Button echoes Anderson's Magnolia in its appealing penchant for stylistic and narrative asides that share a thematic kinship with its main storyline. Witness Daisy's tale of a clock that runs backwards, built by a blind craftsman who yearned to rewind the Great War and thereby resurrect his son and legions of other slain young men. Fincher offers the mesmerizing image of a battlefield where violently slain corpses spring up as hale and hearty youths. He thereby poses a discomfiting question: Would Death-Then-Life be a blessed miracle, or a thing just as horrible and senseless as Life-Then-Death?

Button's occasional clumsiness contrasts with the precision that Fincher exhibited in Zodiac. The director missteps structurally by cutting back to the framing story far too frequently, for no apparent purpose other than to confirm that "Old" Blanchett and Ormond are indeed still in the film. When Hurricane Katrina finally arrives at the end of Daisy's story—which, strictly speaking, is mostly Benjamin's story—the effect is underwhelming and the intent hazy, except perhaps to close out the film's recurring water motif by co-opting a recent national tragedy. In contrast to the phenomenal pacing of most of Fincher's works, Button seems somewhat aimless, and its significant length would be less glaring if the film-maker had exhibited some narrative and emotional discipline. None of this detracts from Button's cinematic marvels, which, in keeping with the film's interest in the voodoo of the moment, rest on a foundation of striking, fleeting images and impressions, elegantly woven into the fabric of the narrative. It's these moments that persist, just as they do for Benjamin: the hellish gleam and deafening pop of tracer fire from a German U-boat; a dance of seduction from a radiant twenty-something Daisy, scarlet-clad, barefoot, and framed in moonlight; dead flies in a honey jar, glimpsed in the kitchen of a musty Moscow hotel. Far from suggesting that Benjamin's experiences are a product of his backwards existence, Fincher calls attention to their universality. We all cling to memories of terror, bliss, and banality, flickers of recalled light and sound that collectively make up the infinitely fine grain of life. These moments occur and then vanish, but the sensations and the consequences linger, for such is the miracle and the curse of damnable time.